Tell Me Who I Am by Julia Navarro
“We might be getting ahead of ourselves, they can’t have anything against Walter, he’s just a little boy.”
“An orphan, whom they’ll lock up in a state institution and treat as the son of a traitor. Can you imagine what that means? It’s not what Iris would have wanted, and you know that very well. If it’s a problem for you, try to get him out of your house this evening and we’ll sort it out.” Garin spoke bluntly.
“You know how much I love Walter! I love Iris as well, I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“In that case, hide him until I tell you what to do. When I’ve worked out how to get him out of Berlin, I’ll tell you. At least we’re lucky and they won’t miss him at school, because it’s the winter holiday.”
“But the police will be looking for him, and they’ll be going to all the houses of Iris’s friends.”
“Yes, it’s possible that we’ll be getting a visit, or some of us in any case. You know that we’re trying to be discreet and not let them see us together, but it’s inevitable that someone has seen us, so we have to be prepared for everything. You too.”
“I haven’t seen Iris for a long time...”
“I know, but that won’t stop the police from searching your house. Where are you going to hide him?”
“I can hide him in the basement. Friedrich found what used to be an old coalhole. I think they won’t find him there.”
“Try to act naturally, carry on with your normal life. I’ll get in touch with you when I know how to get Walter out.”
“He could jump over the Wall, you know it goes just in front of my house.”
“Don’t try to do anything. Wait until I tell you what to do.”
My father asked us to put his wheelchair by the window so that he could keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary.
Walter barely left my room. I tried to be with him as much as possible, but Amelia insisted that I go out and spend time with my friends. She didn’t want them to miss me and for someone to come to my house looking for me. She went to work punctually every day, impatient for Garin to tell her what she had to do. She asked him every day, but he didn’t yet have the answer.
Sometimes Ivan Vasiliev would surprise us by coming to the house unannounced. He used to explain his presence by saying that he was just passing by, and that he had decided to come and pay us a visit. My father always made him welcome; he liked playing chess with him and sharing a glass of cognac from a bottle that Ivan Vasiliev had brought him. And Ivan never came to visit emptyhanded. The special shops where the upper echelons of the party were allowed to buy produce were well stocked with Western goods, so it wasn’t strange for him to come with Dutch butter, Spanish wine, Italian oil, or French cheese. These were luxuries we could not afford, and we were sincerely grateful for them. I think that we were the closest thing that he had to a family.
But in those days, Ivan Vasiliev was the person from whom we would least like to receive a visit.
We were shocked by the doorbell. Amelia was making dinner and Walter was laying the table. I pushed Walter into my room; there was no time to hide him in the basement.
Ivan Vasiliev gave me the bottles he was carrying with a smile.
“Ah, Friedrich, I couldn’t resist the temptation to come by and give you this little present for Amelia!”
They were two bottles of Spanish olive oil, and Amelia was truly grateful.
“Will you stay and have dinner with us? I’m making a tortilla, and now with this oil... Well, you’ll see, the flavor will be much better.”
“Thank you for having mercy on this poor bachelor,” Ivan Vasiliev replied as he sat down and made himself comfortable next to Max.
Amelia seemed comfortable, as if this were just any normal night, but my father and I were nervous, and it was difficult for us to hide it. I still remember how nervous I was that Walter would make some noise that would give him away, and I wondered what would happen then. Would Ivan have us arrested?
“Max, my dear friend, you look very worried. And you too, Friedrich. Is anything wrong?”
“Nothing important, but you know what parents are like about their children and their children’s future. Friedrich wants to become a general practitioner, and Max says he should be more ambitious.”
“Well, I think your father is right. You are a brilliant student, and you could aim to be more than just a family doctor. A good surgeon, a neurologist, a specialist of some kind... Something with a bit more heft to it.”
“Why? I want to do what I like doing, and I want to be like my father,” I replied, following Amelia’s lead.
“He won’t listen to me,” Max complained.
“Maybe I’ve come at a bad moment...”
“Of course not! The argument can’t carry on while you are here, so we can have a peaceful dinner,” Amelia said, smiling at him with apparent innocence.
The tortilla was excellent, and Ivan Vasiliev promised Amelia that he would get more bottles of Spanish oil on the condition that she would invite him to share whatever she cooked with it. Then he played a game of chess with my father, but Max was distracted and couldn’t concentrate, so Ivan didn’t insist on giving him a chance to get his revenge.
“I’ll come back soon, my dear friends. And look after yourself, Amelia.”
“Of course I will.”
When Ivan Vasiliev had left, we wondered why he had said this last phrase. My father suggested that this had not been a casual visit, and that Ivan’s last words had not been merely accidental either. But Amelia wouldn’t let us speculate too much.
Poor Walter had not had any supper, and he had to make do with a mug of milk and a bun.
“We have to be more alert. Today it was Ivan Vasiliev who caught us unaware, but what if it had been the Stasi?” my father said.
“Our house is over the basement, so maybe we could make a hole and connect the two,” I suggested.
“You’re crazy! The whole neighborhood will hear if we start to bash on the floor to try to make a hole through to the cellar, and also, we don’t know how solid it is, or what we will find,” my father objected.
“I think that Friedrich is right,” Amelia said, unconvinced by Max’s objections. “If someone turns up unannounced then there won’t be time to get Walter out of here. And we can’t keep him in the cellar the whole time. Let’s knock a hole through to the basement, we can do it ourselves if we’re careful, trying not to make too much noise. If the neighbors ask, we can say that we’re doing a little bit of work because the house is falling to pieces.”
“When shall we start?” I was pleased that Amelia had accepted my proposal.
“Right now, but we’ll make the hole from the basement upwards. That way we’ll know if you can hear the noise from up here.”
Walter and I went down into the basement with a flashlight and worked out where we thought the kitchen was. We started to hack away at the roof of the basement. Amelia came down after a few minutes to tell us that you couldn’t hear all that much noise, but we should still be careful. We wrapped the tools in cloth to lessen the noise of the blows, and worked for a while until Amelia sent us to bed.
After a couple of days we had managed to make the hole. We could have finished it on the night that we started, but Amelia wouldn’t let us. She preferred for us to work slowly so as not to attract attention. The hole into the kitchen came up into a little cupboard where Amelia kept the dustpan and brush and the iron, and other household utensils. We hid the hole as best we could, but first of all we checked that Walter fit through it, and we put an old mattress in the basement so that when he slipped through the hole he didn’t break a leg. I almost wanted Ivan Vasiliev to come back so that I could see how effective my idea was.
Garin told Amelia that Albert was on top of the situation, and that he had promised to take charge of Walter.
One afternoon, Amelia took the bus back home and a strange man sat down next to her. He looked like a factory worker. Gray-haired, with a moustach
“Don’t speak or move.”
It was difficult for Amelia not to do either. She recognized Albert James’s voice coming from this unknown man.
“We’ve checked that no one is watching your house. You haven’t seen Iris for a long time, and it might be because of that, or else because they wouldn’t dare watch the house of anyone who was a friend of KGB colonel Ivan Vasiliev.”
“I asked Garin to tell you that Vasiliev had turned up.”
“And he did. I remember Moscow well, but you said that he was a coward back then, a scared shadow of a man. And now he’s a colonel, with a medal that he won at the front for bravery. And he’s one of the most dangerous men there is. We know that he’s got moles in strategic points in the West, but we don’t know where they are. But there is some very sensitive information that’s getting into his hands. He’s a friend of yours, and so maybe you can help us.”
“Help you to betray him? No, I’m not going to do that.”
“It’s strange, you didn’t care about betraying Max, and you have scruples about doing so with Colonel Vasiliev.”
“I know that the line between lying and betrayal is very fine, but I never felt that I was betraying Max. I knew that we wanted the same thing, to finish with Hitler. But I’m not going to argue about this with you. I don’t work for you. I thought we were here to get Walter out of Berlin.”
“Yes, I’m here for that, but also to ask you to help us to find a mole that Vasiliev has managed to infiltrate somewhere. We don’t know where, but he has access to American and British information.”
“So you still share everything with the British.”
“Of course, they’re like our cousins.”
“I’ve already told you I’m not going to work with you anymore.”
“Think about it. I’ll come for Walter tonight.”
“How are you going to get him out?”
“You’ll have to allow me to refuse to tell you that.”
When Amelia got home, she asked Walter to get ready.
“You’re going tonight.”
“I... I want to stay here, with you.”
“That’s impossible, and you know it. You’ll be fine, don’t you worry, and you’ll be doing what your mother wanted you to do. You’re going to have a great life, I promise you.”
But Walter burst into tears, he couldn’t hold back the tears that he had repressed so often since his mother’s death.
Max watched the street and didn’t see any suspicious cars or people. But suddenly he thought he saw a shadow coming to the garden that led to the building.
“It might be Albert. I hope so, because the watchmen are going to turn their searchlights on in two minutes.”
My father had recorded how long the searchlights were trained on our area at night, and how long it took the patrols to pass by.
Amelia went out to the porch and opened the door. She hoped that it was Albert and she waited for him in the darkness.
It was him. He came quickly into our house. Just as had happened with Amelia, it was hard for us to recognize him.
Walter had hidden in the cupboard and had the trapdoor open, in case he had to jump quickly into the basement.
“Most ingenious,” Albert said when we showed him what we had done.
Amelia explained that we were the only ones who had the key to the basement and that we had found a little hole where someone could hide.
“There’s air, but we don’t know where it comes from.”
“Will you let me take a flashlight and have a look?” Albert asked.
“Yes, of course, but isn’t it a bit late?” Amelia asked, worried that time was passing and that it would only get more difficult to get Walter out of there.
I went down to the basement with Albert, slipping through the hole that we had made in the floor. I helped him to examine the space that there was in the floor of the basement. He lit a match to see where the air came from, and we found a crack in the wall.
“It’s a thin wall that leads somewhere, maybe even... I don’t know, but I can hear noise, as if... Perhaps there’s a tunnel for the underground trains that runs near here.”
“It could be the sewers, there’s a drain cover in the garden, hidden under the plants. You can’t lift the cover; I tried a lot when I was smaller, when I liked to play at treasure hunting, and thought it would be a real adventure to go down into the sewers. But I never managed to lift it.”
We climbed back into our house, and Albert asked how many meters we were from the Wall.
“Two meters away from the fence and twenty from the Wall itself, but if you’re right and the air in that hidey-hole comes from the drains, then you should know that they’ve covered all the gates that lead to the other side of the city, and that the sewers are constantly patrolled. I imagine that if Friedrich is right and there is a way down to the sewers in the garden, then it must be watched even more closely, because we’re so close to the Wall,” my father said.
“I’d like to come back and have a look around. I’ll see if I can get a map of how the sewers were in Berlin before the war. If there were a way through... then maybe we could get people out of here.”
“I’ve told you, I do not work for you anymore,” Amelia said in a voice that was low but furious.
“You refuse to save lives? Because sometimes that’s what it boils down to, saving someone’s life. You can’t imagine how difficult it is to get people out of here, and it’s getting more difficult all the time. We’ve used all our wit to work out ways, but no more than the Russians or the Stasi. Don’t you read the papers? A fortnight ago another man died trying to jump over the Wall. How many more do you think are going to die?”
“It’s getting late,” my father interrupted.
“Yes, you’re right. Thank you for looking after Walter.”
“Don’t thank me, we love him,” Amelia said.
They left the house and were lost in the shadows. I don’t know if Amelia ever found out how they got him out of Berlin. And if she did, then she never told us.
The possibility that our basement was somehow connected to the sewers sunk its hooks into Amelia. So much so that when she could she went down to the basement herself and tried to make a hole in the wall, to see where the air was coming from. I helped her, in spite of my father’s protests: He told us we should leave things as they were. It wasn’t hard to make a little hole, but it gave onto absolute darkness, so we stuck a flashlight through the gap and lit up the darkness, worried what we might find. We heard running water and could see through the hole that the coal cellar led to another space, which in its turn must lead onto the sewers.
“You can’t hear anything from up there, so let’s make the hole a little bigger and I’ll go through it with a flashlight, I want to see where it leads to,” Amelia said.
“You heard my father, the soldiers patrol the sewers and they’re even more vigilant the closer you get to the Wall. It’s dangerous.”
“Yes, I know, but while I’m out there, I think about how we’re going to hide the hole. If the soldiers come past, I don’t think they’ll go into this little space that leads onto our basement, but even so, we should hide it as well as we can.”
“But why do you want to do this?” I asked, nervously.
“I don’t know, we may need it some day.”
“Let me come with you, there may be rats.”
“No, I’ll go alone. It’s not the first time I’ve been in these sewers. I know what they smell like and what I might find here.”
We took the bricks out carefully, until Amelia could go through to the other side. I saw how she disappeared into the Berlin underworld with only a beam of light accompanying her. She was away for almost an hour and I got scared, because I thought that I heard footsteps and voices in the distance. I didn’t breathe easily until I saw her coming back. She smelled of filth, her hands were grazed and
“Did you think of a way to hide the hole?”
“Yes, we’ll make a block with the bricks we’ve taken out, then we’ll put it back in, like a piece of a puzzle, so that it will be easy for us to remove it the next time. But tell me, what happened? I heard voices.”
“Me too, I nearly died of fright. I had to turn off the flashlight. It was a patrol, five or six people, talking to each other, they came close to me but they didn’t see me. I stayed quiet until I heard them leave.”
“So my father was right, and there are soldiers patrolling the sewers...”
“Yes. Now let’s go home, and tomorrow I’ll come down again.”
“Why?”
“Who knows, maybe we’ll find a way to get across to the other side...”
“It’s impossible, my father said that they shut all the sluices.”
“Yes, but there is water flowing there...”
“You’re not going to get into that water!” I said in horror.
“We’ll see, we’ll see...”
A few days later, while Amelia was in the archive organizing some files, Garin came up to her. They were a long way away from the rest of the department, so they could talk freely.
“Walter got through alright, I just wanted you to know.”
“Thank God!”
“Albert took a lot of risks for him.”
“How did they get him out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Garin!”
“What Albert did tell me is that he will be coming to see you. Apparently you have a very interesting basement.”
“I told him to forget about me.”
Garin smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and walked out of the archive.
Neither my father nor my mother knew that I belonged to a group of students that met regularly with Konrad. We spoke about politics and organized activities at the university in which, very carefully, we tried to get various things past the censor.