Puzzle People (9781613280126) (2 page)

The border guard waved her toward the two-lane inspection bay. All cars had to be checked thoroughly because people had tried smuggling human cargo in their trunks. So Katarina started to pull toward the inspection bay. The guard, clearly bored by the routine, looked away for just a moment, and that’s when she made her move. Flooring the accelerator, she swung the steering wheel hard to the left, and the Austin-Healey Sprite took off with a squeal that jolted the guard out of his stupor.

“Halt!”

Katarina took a quick glance at the startled guard in her rearview mirror and saw him point a gun in her direction. She ducked a split second before the guard fired a shot, but she didn’t hear the bullet find a target and figured that it must have gone flying by, into the night. Straightening back up, she headed directly for the first of a series of barriers—four-foot-high walls designed to slow down cars by forcing them to weave around the barriers.

Katarina had no intention of slowing down.

Peter stared out the train window into the darkness. The window was speckled with raindrops, and he examined his reflection in the darkened glass, noticing the facial features that he shared with his father. The thin lips, the thick hair, the ski-jump nose. Peter knew he should be more patient with Elsa, but he couldn’t help himself. She wasn’t the same girl he had begun dating three years ago. Elsa was two years younger than him—but in his mind, their age difference seemed to be growing. She almost seemed
younger
than the year before. She had followed him to Humboldt University, where he studied engineering; but her world seemed so narrow and trivial. Posting those leaflets was probably her way of trying to be more serious about life, but she went about it with such a childlike naiveté that it irritated him. It was oddly fitting that she had used a child’s crayon to create the fliers.

Still, he should try to control his anger, he vowed.

Peter wanted to go to sleep, but he knew the train would be reaching the Albrechtshof station shortly. So he listened to the middle-aged woman in the seat in front of him blather on to her husband about their daughter, who was dating a boy that did not meet with her approval. People didn’t talk much on East German trains, for fear of government ears; there were snoops everywhere. But that didn’t deter this woman.

“Young people,” she scoffed. “They never listen to their elders. Not like the old days.”

Peter was tempted to tap her on the shoulder and correct her. He was living proof that young people did
exactly
what their father—and their Fatherland—demanded.

Peter and Elsa were to be married the next summer. Everyone expected it. They had known each other since they were children, and even then, people talked about how “adorable” they were together. Peter was all about duty, so he would marry Elsa. Out of duty to his father, he had also entered the university’s engineering program, even though his first love was literature. He did what was expected of him. Nothing more, nothing less. He was a prisoner of his commitments, trapped on all fronts. Peter was only twenty-two, and already he felt weary, like an old man.

Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe Elsa isn’t too young for me. Maybe I’m prematurely old. Maybe I’m turning gray from the inside out.

“You should talk to Agathe,” the woman in front of him was instructing her husband. “Talk some sense into her.”

“Me?” The husband’s tone was a mixture of shock and inevitable defeat.

Peter leaned back, closed his eyes, and tried to create a mental dam to block the woman’s stream of complaints. But with his eyes closed and no visual stimulation to distract him, her words magnified in his mind.

“Shouldn’t we be approaching the station?” the woman suddenly said, loud enough for everyone to hear. Peter’s eyes popped open, and he sighed.

“What now?” said her husband.

“The train. It’s picking up speed.”

Peter looked around and realized she was right. The train did seem to be building speed, but how could this woman know they should be slowing down? She wasn’t the conductor.

Still, the woman sounded confident. “We should be slowing down. I’m sure of it, Harry.”

“Do you think so, dear?” There was a note of resignation in Harry’s voice, as if it was no use to doubt her.

Peter noticed that the man across the aisle—the one with the newspaper—had become fidgety. He looked up from his crossword puzzle, raised himself slightly from his seat, and peered around the train. Then he let his newspaper drop from his lap, leaned over, and looked out the window.

At that moment, the conductor entered the car and bellowed, “Albrechtshof! Next stop: Albrechtshof!”

“But we’re not slowing down,” the woman said to the conductor, even more loudly.

“What’s that?”

“We’re picking up speed.”

The conductor leaned over and stared out one of the windows. Shadows of telephone poles whipped by in the dark.

“I think you’re right,” the conductor said. Suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch, the tension level in the train went up. The car was filled with about twenty passengers, and many of them started peering out the windows.

The train hurtled into the night, gaining even more speed.

“What’s happening here?” the crossword-puzzle man demanded as he leaped to his feet.

“I don’t know, comrade.” The conductor yanked on the emergency cord, but nothing happened. He glanced out the window and then looked at his watch. Something was terribly wrong. Streaks of light flew by the window at increasing speeds.

Peter stood to his feet and noticed that a family in the corner of the car had their heads bowed. Were they praying? The baby in the mother’s arms began to cry, and she tried to shush him. By this time, it was obvious to everyone that the train was not going to stop in Albrechtshof—the last station before the border, the last station before West Berlin.

Suddenly, a young couple with a three-year-old boy threw themselves to the floor, and several other passengers followed in quick succession, as if their actions had been finely coordinated. This left Peter and others, including the conductor and crossword-puzzle man, staring at them in bewilderment. Half of the people in the car seemed to know something that they didn’t.

It suddenly dawned on Peter what was about to happen, and he too hurled himself to the floor of the train. Just in time. Seconds later, the windows shattered like ice.

Katarina heard another gunshot as she made a screeching turn around the first barrier. This time she heard the bullet pass, a tearing sound, as if the air was being ripped like paper.

Sharply turning right, she shot around the back of the first barrier, getting ready for the next turn. The maze of barriers allowed room for only one car, so her greatest fear—besides the bullets—was encountering another car coming toward her from the West. If that happened, she wouldn’t make it.

Taking a left around the next barrier, she nearly lost control of the car as the back end skidded on the slick pavement and missed hitting the barrier by inches. Another gunshot rang out, but the barriers provided cover. She took a hard right, and this time the back end of the Sprite clipped the barrier as it fishtailed. She brought the car under control and then swerved wildly around the final barrier, tires screeching, engine roaring.

Beyond the barriers was a large, heavy horizontal bar—a boom, like a gate at a train crossing, only stronger. Katarina prayed that the Austin-Healey Sprite was low enough to do this. Accelerating, she kept her eyes fixed on the bar, waiting for just the right moment. She had to time this precisely. If she ducked too late, she would be decapitated. The car rushed toward the bar, picking up speed. There was no stopping.

Now! Katarina ducked a split second before the car raced beneath the bar, clearing it by only a few inches. Popping her head right back up, she found that she was veering too far to the left, straight for a concrete wall. She jerked the wheel right, barely missing the wall, and then headed for the concrete conduit leading into West Berlin. Only one problem: The opening had room for only one car, and another car was heading straight for her, about to enter the passageway from the western side.

Leaning on her horn, Katarina raced through the opening, forcing the other car, which hadn’t yet entered the conduit, to swerve right and spin out of control. Katarina came shooting out of the gap, into the West, and roared into the American sector of Berlin. It was all a blur, but she thought that an American GI at Checkpoint Charlie gave her a thumbs-up.

Katarina had done it. She had found a small hole in the Wall and had threaded the needle. She was free.

Gunfire shattered the train’s windows, spraying glass fragments onto Peter’s back as he crouched on the floor, arms covering his head. The Volkspolizei (Vopos), the People’s Police, had fired from the platform when it became obvious that the train was not stopping in Albrechtshof. Since most people in the car had dropped to the floor, the bullets that penetrated the windows failed to find a human target. The baby, cradled in her mother’s arms, continued to wail.

Then a stunning jolt knocked those still standing onto the floor and sent Peter sprawling forward. It sounded as though the train was being ripped apart, and he realized it was the sound of the locomotive barreling through the barriers placed on the tracks. The train screeched as its steel wheels strained to keep the locomotive on the rails. Flat on the floor, Peter watched glass fragments dance and vibrate at eye level as the train steadily came under control and began to slow down.

He pushed himself up from the floor and kept his eyes on the crossword-puzzle man, who was also getting back to his feet, his mouth agape and his forehead bleeding. The crossword-puzzle man staggered over to one of the men lying on the floor—the father of the family that had been praying only moments before.

“How did you know to drop to the floor?” he demanded.

The father sat up and brushed the glass powder from his jacket. “I could tell the train wasn’t stopping. I knew that meant trouble.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. I had no part in this.
Anyone
could’ve figured out what was going on.”

Peter got back to his feet and walked to his seat, shoes crunching on fragments of glass. The mother and the father did not look surprised by what had happened, and neither did a handful of others in this car. The train continued to slow down, and by the time the locomotive came squealing to a stop, all the passengers started shuffling toward the door. The mother had finally calmed her baby.

Peter stood aside to let an older woman pass, and he thought she was trying to suppress a smile, as if she knew this was going to happen. When Peter piled out of the train with all of the others, he felt as if he had disembarked in another world. This was West Berlin, and there was something different in the way people looked and moved: less tension, less vigilance. He had been in West Berlin before the borders closed, but it felt strange being in the West on this day, knowing that crossing the border was now forbidden. Peter was not used to breaking rules.

He walked along the platform in a daze—like someone staggering away from a wreck. He passed by the conductor, who was shouting in the engineer’s face. “What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you stop?”