“What about all the printing stuff?” asked Willi, and Sabine shushed him. She waited a moment while a doctor hurried by, his white smock rustling.
“It’s still safe down in the bunker, if we need it again.”
“What?” Willi leaned closer to hear.
“I said — ”
A hospital orderly gave them a curious look as he walked by pushing a laundry cart. Sabine recognized him, one of her brother Erich’s friends. Dietrich, wasn’t it? He smiled at them. But after a quick nod, she turned away so he wouldn’t hear her response to Willi.
“Listen,” she said as she pulled him back into a corner stacked high with white sheets and thin blue hospital blankets. “We have to come up with a better plan.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “That was a little too close last — ”
“Hey, there you are!” Erich walked up and ruffled Sabine’s hair. She’d tried to duck but was too late.
“What do the doctors say about Oma?” she asked, not sure she wanted the real answer.
Erich’s shoulders fell a bit.
“You see her, same as the doctors. She’s getting a little worse each day. But she’s hanging on — ”
Sabine nodded. She kept hoping the news would change for the better.
“Can you do me a favor?” he asked. “I need you to carry a message home for me.”
Sabine couldn’t help yawning as she nodded.
“Late night, huh? Well, just tell Mutti that I have to work a bit late, but I should be home by seven. Can you remember that?”
“By seven,” she repeated. Late again?
Dietrich came back down the hall, this time with his arms full of blankets.
“Hey, back to work!” he teased, a smile breaking through his long face. “Or have we gone on strike today?”
“That’s it!” Sabine snapped her fingers and grabbed Willi’s arm. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it!”
“Did I say something?” Dietrich asked them.
“Gotta go,” Sabine said. She tugged on Willi’s sleeve and started toward the exit. She stopped only long enough to wave to Erich and the puzzled orderly.
“Already I don’t like it,” Willi protested, following her. He tried to put on the brakes when they got to the street, but Sabine had set her course and had no intention of slowing down.
“You can’t not like it. You haven’t even heard my idea.”
“I don’t need to hear it. I just know that it’s going to get us in trouble, like we were in last night.”
“Oh, come on. Remember our pact? This is foolproof. Now, here’s the plan — ”
A half hour later, Sabine repeated the steps in her head as they neared their first target. They’d find plenty of people, probably cranky in the summer heat, standing in lines this time of day. For eggs, one line. For meat, another line. For carrots, yet another line. Working people, on their way home. Perfect. But could she convince Willi?
“You really think everybody’s just going to agree? ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea, we hate the wall too.’ Why would they go along with this — ”
“This brilliant idea?” she finished. She stepped aside as an older woman hurried out a shop door, bells tinkling. “Of course they’ll go along with it. Everyone hates the way we live in this half of Berlin. Everyone hates these lines. And everyone hates the wall. All they need is someone to tell them what to do.”
“Baa.” Willi did his sheep imitation just under his breath, and Sabine elbowed him as they entered the shop. But he knew what to do, and like a good soldier, he shuffled into one of the lines. Sabine took her place in the other.
At the front of Sabine’s line, a squat, frowning man studied his tiny piece of sausage. The butcher hadn’t given him enough meat to feed a toy poodle. And so Sabine made her first move, planting one of her crutches far enough into the aisle to trip the retreating customer.
“Entschuldige!” she whispered, afraid to look up. “Excuse me. But did you hear about the strike tomorrow? No one is going to work. To protest the . . . wall.”
What else could she say? The man’s worn leather shoes paused for a moment next to her crutch then stepped carefully around and continued out the door. When she finally looked up, Willi shrugged and gave her an “oh, well” look. His turn came as a middle-aged woman approached from the head of his line.
“We’re having a strike,” he blurted out, way too loudly. A couple of people turned, eyebrows raised, and his cheeks flamed red — as if he’d just belched, or worse. “That is, I mean — ”
The woman breezed by him. But an older woman ahead of him crossed her arms and turned to face him. She seemed almost as wide as she was tall.
“What are you babbling about, boy?”
He glanced at Sabine before taking a deep breath to answer.
“A strike. You know. No working. To protest . . . lousy food. And the w-w-wall.”
The woman just glared at him for a long moment, then she harrumphed and turned her back on him.
And so it went: at the metzgerladen that had little meat, at the bäckerei that offered little bread, at the milchladen that had almost no milk. When Sabine and Willi got kicked out of one shop, they tried another. And another. But in the end, it didn’t seem to matter. Sabine grew more and more discouraged as everyone responded like sheep, sheep, sheep.
“What is wrong with these people?” she demanded. After an hour, even Sabine had to admit that her plan wouldn’t work.
“I don’t know.” Willi shook his head and started counting on his fingers. “I had about a dozen people walk by like I didn’t exist, even more who just growled or gave me what I can only guess were dirty looks, and at least eight who threatened to call the police.”
“And you did better than I did.” Sabine batted a chunk of concrete from the sidewalk with her crutch, sending it skittering into the strasse like a hockey puck. “But at least we didn’t get thrown in jail.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, Sabine, but I’m done.” He turned off at his corner. “Pact or no pact. Maybe I’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow.”
She nodded and let her shoes drag on the sidewalk, even though her mother always told her not to. It scuffed the sides and the toes. Maybe she would just end up like Anne Frank — captured by the soldiers in the end. As she rounded the corner of her floor’s hallway, she froze at the sight of two men in dark leather coats leaving Frau Finkenkrug’s apartment.
Stasi! One of them slammed the door shut.
“Republikflucht,” muttered the other one, a tall man with a goatee just like Comrade Ulbricht’s. They obviously hadn’t noticed Sabine — yet. So she backed up as quickly as she dared. Before she backed around the corner, she silently watched the men apply an official-looking red seal to the wood just above the doorknob. It was obviously meant to keep anyone from opening the apartment again soon. As if Frau Finkenkrug had come down with some kind of terrible sickness, like smallpox or black death.
But Sabine knew better. She liked the sound of that word: Republikflucht. Flight from the Republic. The frau had escaped! And it would sound even better if people would say it of her and her mother.
“Come on,” she heard one of the men say.
“We’re going to be here all night if we don’t get these interviews done soon.”
She heard the men rap sharply on Herr Gruhn’s door, hardly waiting for the old man to answer before they pushed their way inside. Sabine knew the pattern: the Stasi would search each apartment, looking until they found something they could use as an excuse to arrest someone, to blame that person for helping the frau escape. A radio tuned to the wrong station? A piece of forbidden Westliteratur, like a magazine from the other side of the border? That would be enough. Sabine shivered. When she heard Herr Gruhn’s door close, she hurried past it to her door.
“Mama!” she whispered as she pushed inside. “Your fashion magazines! They’re coming!”
Frau Becker dropped her spoon in the soup kettle and ran to snatch up the forbidden literature. Sabine could think of nothing more silly than hiding magazines from the Stasi. She hardly had time to grab two magazines off the table and replace them with a couple of Communist brochures — the kind Uncle Heinz brought home from his tractor factory — before the familiar sharp knock on the door made her jump.
“Um Himmels willen!” Aunt Gertrud declared, stumbling out of the front room. She looked as if she’d just rolled out of bed. “Heavens! Who is making all that noise?”
She froze in horror when the two Stasi pushed the door open.
“Aack!” She grabbed at her hair and spun around to scurry through the doorway.
“Excuse me,” Frau Becker said, “but that door was closed.”
“We knocked,” said the man with the goatee. He barged into the kitchen and inspected the Communist brochures. Hmm, that made a good first impression, but maybe not good enough. Sabine gripped her mother’s magazines behind her back and leaned against the wall. Had one of these men stopped Willi last night?
Too bad Uncle Heinz was out with his friends at the pub.
“My husband and I are loyal party members,” stated Aunt Gertrud as she returned to the room, her hair swept into a hasty bun. But they only waved her off as they yanked several books from the bookshelf and let them drop to the floor.
“If you’re looking for something — ” Sabine’s mother didn’t have any better luck talking to the men. Finally the taller man straightened up and stared straight at Sabine.
“You knew the woman down the hall, didn’t you? Finkenkrug?”
Sabine felt her mouth go dry, but she managed to nod.
“Then you knew she was planning to defect.” The statement sounded like an accusation.
“No, she didn’t,” her mother responded. “How would a child know such things?”
He dropped another pile of books to the floor, never taking his eyes off Sabine.
“Your older brother, the intern. Where is he? He’s not at the hospital.”
“What do you know about my son?” But the question only brought a frown from the Stasi interrogator.
“You tell him we will be back to speak with him. We have a few questions for him.”
“My husband can help,” offered Aunt Gertrud, but the men ignored her. They turned together to leave, as if pulled by the same leash. The tall one neatly stepped over a pile of books on his way to the door.
“You tell him,” he repeated, pausing only long enough to see Frau Becker’s white-faced nod.
And that’s when Sabine knew — more than ever — that they could not stay in this place.