“I’ve been thinking, Willi.” Sabine leaned against the wall, near the empty nurses’ station.
“That’s scary.”
“No, really. I think I know how the last war happened.”
“Let’s hear it for the world-famous Sabine.” He raised his voice like a circus announcer. “The girl who’s unlocked the key to world peace.”
“You’re making jokes. I’m serious.” She checked to make sure no one was listening.
“Oh, you want a good joke? How about this one: When does a Trabi reach top speed?”
“Willi, I don’t think — ”
“Come on; it’s just a car joke. When does it go the fastest?”
She sighed. “I give up.”
“When it’s being towed away.”
He cackled as if his joke about the clunky East German car were the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but he stopped when he saw Sabine’s halfhearted grin.
“Sorry. You were telling me about world peace. Go ahead.”
“Listen — ” Sabine held up her finger like an Einstein who had just come up with the Big Answer, maybe a cure for cancer. “It wasn’t that there weren’t enough good people. The problem was that they were all too afraid to speak up.”
“That’s it?” Willi raised his eyebrows at her.
“Right.” She nodded. “And the same thing’s happening today. Everybody’s too scared to say anything about the wall. But if we all worked together, we could stop it.”
“We could, huh? How?”
She scratched her head.
“I haven’t figured that part out yet. But I do know how we can bring people together. Right now they’re just standing around watching the wall go up, acting like a bunch of sheep.”
“Baa.”
“Would you quit it?” She punched him on the shoulder. “Do you want to stop the wall, or don’t you?”
“You know I don’t like it any more than you do.” He sighed. “We used to visit my cousins in the American sector and my grandparents. Everybody’s over there, and we’re stuck over here for the rest of our lives.”
Sabine told him her plan, but he didn’t seem convinced.
“What if somebody finds out?” he asked. “Do you know how much trouble we’d be in?”
“First of all, nobody’s ever going to find it down in the bunker. And second of all, if Anne Frank could do it, so can we!”
“Who’s Anne Frank? Somebody you know?”
“You’re kidding me. You didn’t read that book?”
He shrugged. And for a moment, she wondered if boys had half a brain.
“It’s this diary, see, and — ”
“I’m not into girls’ diaries. Boys write journals.”
“Would you stop? I’m trying to explain. Anne Frank was Jewish, and she had to hide in someone’s attic the whole war, and she was really brave, and she wrote a diary, which they turned into a book. Got it now?”
“Got it. So we write a journal.”
“No. I’m just saying she was brave, even when people were out to get her.”
“Oh.” Willi scratched his head. “Okay.”
“So tomorrow night we meet in the bunker, and we don’t tell anybody else.”
He raised his right hand. “On my honor as a Junge Pioniere.”
“Ohhh.” She rolled her eyes. “Anything but that.”
“Scout’s honor, then.”
“You’re not a Scout. How do you know what they do?”
“They have them in England. And America. They go camping. I read it somewhere.”
“I thought you didn’t read.”
“I do too. Just not girls’ diaries.”
“All right. But forget the Pioneer honor.” She held out her hand for him to shake. “We have to make a pact.”
“Sounds serious.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. “What kind of pact?”
“To do whatever we can, for as long as we can. For freedom.”
Willi rubbed his chin and thought for a moment, then nodded and shook her hand. “For freedom,” he said, echoing her words. Time to get down to business.
“So how much money do you have?” she asked him. “We’re going to need it to make this plan work.”
And the plan would work just fine, as long as Uncle Heinz didn’t hear her leave the apartment.
“Who’s that?” he mumbled from his dark corner.
Sabine quietly pulled her little backpack on, glad no one had turned on the light.
“Just Sabine,” she whispered. “I’m going down the hall.”
Which was true, and nighttime visits to the washroom at the end of the hall weren’t unusual. She waited a moment at the door, wondering if her uncle would respond. He just grunted and launched back into his snoring. Good. Now she just had to get out of the building and down the street without anybody else stopping her.
“You’d better be there, Willi Stumpff,” she whispered as she slipped onto the dark street. The stairs didn’t stop her, though she had to admit it took her a little longer to take them one at a time. But now she didn’t stop long enough to let goose bumps climb the back of her neck. She just might turn around and scurry back to bed rather than make her way to the bombed-out apartment building on Bergstrasse.
What was that? Someone coming down the street? Sabine dived into the shadows, crutches and all. A dog barked, and a door slammed.
But no one came toward her.
After a minute, she breathed again and picked up her backpack. Keep going. There it is. She slipped through the crumbled entry and felt her way into the maze of rooms.
“Willi?” she whispered. Losing her concentration for a moment, she tripped over a loose brick but caught herself before falling on her face. When she looked up, she could make out a flickering light up ahead.
“So I finally get to see this car of yours,” Willi announced from the shadows. Light from his candle glittered and reflected off his glasses, casting weird shapes on the broken walls around them.
“There you are,” she greeted him. “I was afraid you weren’t going to show.”
“Didn’t I say I would be here?”
“Yeah, but — ”
“Or did you think I was too blind to find my way around the neighborhood?”
“You said it, not me.”
He just smiled and pulled a little round compass out of his pocket, holding it up to the light.
“I don’t get too lost. But where’s your car?”
“All right, Mr. Boy Scout.” She led the way to the trapdoor. Five minutes later, Willi walked all around the Volkswagen, leaning closer with the candle for a better look.
“Whoa.” He whistled. “Too bad it doesn’t have an engine, or wheels, or a windshield, or . . . let’s see. What does it have?”
“It has seats. But now you’ve seen it. Did you bring the stuff?”
“Patience. I brought it.” He unloaded his own small backpack. “One hundred eighty-seven sheets of paper. That’s all I could find in my father’s office. And the ink. What about you?”
Sabine pulled out her box.
“It has three different sizes of letters, and they snap together like this, see?” She showed him how the printing kit worked, the one she’d bought with Willi’s money at the Schreibwarenhandlung. The stationery store owner had even shown her how to work it. “First, you arrange all the little rubber letters into words. Next, you ink the letters up with the roller, then you press it against the paper like so.”
“An underground printing press.”
“Just like in this book I read about the Danish underground movement,” she told him as she started sorting letters. “They did this kind of thing during World War Two.”
“Another book, huh?” He picked up one of the novels she’d left in the car before tossing it back. “Let’s just figure out what we’re going to say and get out of here.”
“How about Liebe Freiheit, Keine Mauer?” Sabine asked.
“ ‘Up with Freedom, Down with the Wall!’ Yeah, I like it.”
Sabine set up the headline while Willi worked on the rest.
“Done yet?” she asked him five minutes later.
“Come on. You just have four words. I have forty.”
“You can do it.”
“Didn’t say I couldn’t. How about this: ‘We must protest until the wall comes back down.’ Does that sound — ”
“Perfect.” And for the next hour, they printed sheet after sheet of their protest papers.
“Hey, we’re getting pretty good at this,” Willi told her as they worked their way through the paper supply.
Well, sort of. Some looked smudged, others crooked, but they kept working. Roll ink on the letters, press against the paper, peel it off . . . paper after paper.
Willi brought his hand up to meet a yawn, and Sabine giggled. Even in the candlelight, she could see the inky fingerprints on his cheek.
“We’re done,” Sabine announced as she pulled the last paper off. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Don’t know; don’t want to know.” Willi gathered a handful of papers. “Let’s just get this over with. But — ” He hesitated. “What about that guy, Wolfgang, who’s always watching you from his apartment window?”
“What about him? Most of the time he’s there; sometimes he’s not.”
“Have you actually ever met him?”
“You don’t want to know, Willi.” She pushed away the memory of Wolfgang waiting for her at the foot of the stairs.
“Well, maybe he’s asleep.”
And maybe not. Sabine just followed Willi up the stairway and back to her neighborhood. She held her breath, but Wolfgang’s window looked dark; nothing moved.
“Up there?” Willi followed her gaze, and she nodded. If Wolfgang were watching, well . . . Sabine squared her shoulders and prayed he wasn’t. They still had work to do.
Their first stop: the townhouse apartments down her street. Sabine felt a tingle as she slipped the first few leaflets under the doors. What would people think when they read them?
Willi had crossed to the other side of the street, working his way toward Sabine’s apartment at twice her speed.
Willi! She wanted to scream but could only freeze in terror and melt into a dark doorway. A Vopo policeman had rounded a corner, and Willi had stumbled right into his path. Though the boy wiggled and protested, the Vopo held him tightly. Sabine’s heart nearly beat out of her chest as she tried to think.
But Willi acted; he planted a good kick in one of the man’s shins — just enough to loosen his grip. In a heartbeat, Willi whirled free and sprinted down the sidewalk, leaving the policeman in a cloud of flying protest papers.
“Halt!” The Vopo drew his gun, but he was still hopping in pain. Willi had already darted around a corner.
Sabine stared in amazement. That kid could get around! He couldn’t see clearly ten feet in front of his own face, but he could run like the wind.
Sabine’s grin melted, and she nearly choked when the Vopo seemed to look straight at her, as if he could hear her heart beating.
Could he? She stood lamppost-still in the dark, not breathing, not blinking. She still clutched the “Up with Freedom, Down with the Wall!” papers that would send her straight to jail. She could only watch as the man lit a match and held it to a stack of their papers. When he seemed satisfied that they would burn, he tossed the whole lot in the gutter.
Sabine buried her face in the brick wall as a flickering light groped the shadows. Surely he would discover her. She waited silently, the blood pounding in her ears, the sound of the Vopo’s laugh echoing down the street. She could not fight and run, the way Willi had. But maybe if she screamed someone would help her. Maybe Mama would even hear her. Armed with a plan, she turned to face the Vopo —
Who had disappeared. She caught her breath and looked down the street.
No one. All he’d left behind were paper ashes and a few embers, flickering orange reminders of their protest. She walked over and poked the burned pile with her crutch. All that work —
Sadly, she straightened up and instinctively looked over her shoulder at Wolfgang’s window. Did the curtain move? She didn’t wait to check. She and Willi would just have to think of a better way to get people’s attention.
She just had to slip back into her apartment without waking anyone up. She couldn’t help yawning as she realized how long she’d been awake. This felt like the longest trip down the hall she’d ever made. As she quietly entered the apartment, she immediately knew something wasn’t right.
Aunt Gertrud’s voice hissed out of the darkness. “Where have you been all this time?”
Sabine squinted as the probing beam of a flashlight searched out her face. At least she’d slipped the leftover flyers into her backpack.
“Oh, it’s you.” Sabine yawned like Miss Innocent, ignoring her aunt’s question. “I was just going back to bed.”
“You most certainly were not down the hall all this — ” began Aunt Gertrud. Another sleepy voice interrupted.
“Sabine?” her mother asked. “What’s all the noise?”
“Sorry to wake you,” Sabine whispered as she used the chance to get into her bed. She pulled the sheets to her chin and decided she could take off her shoes later. Hugging her backpack under the sheets, she closed her eyes.
With a disgusted sigh, Aunt Gertrud switched off the flashlight and shuffled back to bed.
And Sabine did her best to keep from shaking.