Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(20)
They waited behind a busload of American tourists snapping pictures and for a moment, with her camera dangling from her neck, Jenny felt self-conscious. She wanted to differentiate herself from these people but wasn’t she just like them?
Lena entertained the crowd, spouting facts like a punk tour guide. “Here we have the Brandenburg Gate. It has been closed since the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961. It is here that your President Kennedy made his famous speech in front of thousands.” She cupped her hands to her mouth and made a cheering crowd noise. The tourists ate it up. “You can see there the statue on top, the chariot? The Goddess of Victory. She holds the reins of the four horses. They are cute. Everybody likes horses, ja? You probably ride one in Dallas, Dallas.”
Jenny laughed uncomfortably. “I’ve never been on a horse in my life.”
“How can this be? You are from Texas!”
The tourists were charmed. Some asked to take her picture and Lena obliged, sticking her tongue out or curling her upper lip into a snarl, playing the part of punk sideshow to the hilt. “This is my manager, Dallas. She takes all contributions—deutsche marks or dollars, whatever you have.”
Jenny put up her hands. “Oh, no, I don’t…”
“Don’t be shy, Dallas.” Lena slung her arm across Jenny’s shoulder as tourists handed her their spare change.
“Oh. Okay. Um. Thank you?” Jenny said, holding the coins and bills uncertainly.
Lena scooped them up and dropped them into her pocket. A handful of tourists came down the ladder. “Finally! I hate waiting.” She bounded up the metal risers, Jenny following.
From the top of the platform, Jenny could at last see over the wall, which had been heavily graffitied. The city beyond seemed quiet and gray and sad. In the distance, the fat-bellied spire of the Alexanderplatz TV Tower kept watch over the East. Jenny focused on what she could see through her lens, bringing it closer, feeling uneasy with each click.
“Facts about the wall. Attention, please,” Lena said in her commanding tour guide voice. “As you can see, the Berlin Wall is actually two walls—an east and a west. In the middle, you can see there is a strip of gravel. They call it der Todesstreifen: the death strip. One hundred fifty meters. That’s all that stands between us and them. Between oppression and freedom.”
Jenny trained her camera on the gravel strip lined with impenetrable rows of iron anti-tank barriers.
“More facts about the wall. There will be a test,” Lena said with forced cheerfulness. The tourists chuckled politely. “It is 3.66 meters—twelve feet—high and one hundred fifty-four kilometers long, forty-three of those kilometers here in Berlin. It is constructed of solid concrete, 1.2192 meters, or about four feet, thick, and reinforced with metal spikes and razor wire along the top. The number of watchtowers is three hundred and two. Land mines: fifty-five thousand. There are three thousand attack dogs sniffing out refugees at any time. The dogs are very good at their jobs. You see what the guards are doing now?”
A pair of guards were raking the pale gravel.
“They rake it every day,” Lena said.
“Why?” a round-faced American man in a Hawaiian shirt asked.
“Checking for anything unusual—footprints, maybe a tunnel for escape. More facts!” Lena said, leaning against the railing to face the crowd of tourists. “The first person to die trying to escape was a nurse, Ida Siekmann. She jumped from her third-floor window before the West Berliners could open up the bedsheet to catch her fall. There have been one hundred nineteen deaths so far—drowning, bludgeoning, suffocation, but mostly shootings. In 1962, Peter Fechter, eighteen years old, tried to climb over the wall and was shot. He fell back into the East Berlin side where he lay on the ground, screaming in pain for help. The East German guards let him lie there until he bled to death. There are some little white crosses to mark their deaths. Be sure to get a photo for back home!” Lena called.
A family of tourists lowered their Instamatic cameras. The mother frowned and guided her two children toward the stairs.
“Lena, I think you’re scaring them,” Jenny whispered.
“Why shouldn’t they be scared?” she snapped.
“Let’s just go.”
“But I thought you wanted to be a tourist?” Lena shrugged. “Enjoy your viewing, everyone! Try our cafés and our pilsner!”
Lena pushed her way down the stairs, Jenny following. Had she done something wrong? She was a tourist in Lena’s world. There was no helpful sign to warn her when she was stepping across a verboten line. But just as she was working herself into a lather, Lena suddenly brightened. “Hey! Want to see my favorite graffiti?”
Lena took Jenny to Bernauer Strasse where one side of the street was apartments and the other, the wall. Lena placed her small hand next to an inscription scrawled in black paint: Stirb nicht im Warteraum der Zukunft.
Jenny raised her camera. “What does that mean?”
“Don’t die in the waiting room of the future.”
Jenny stepped back and looked at the colorful graffiti, then up at the miles of barbed wire making escape impossible. She tried to imagine a wall down the center of Dallas. Tried to imagine being separated from friends by concrete, wire, and sniper guards.
“You don’t have walls like this back in Texas? No border crossings?”