Excerpt from In The Devil's Territory

by Kyle Minor

East Berlin, September 1961

The first time they took her father, they came in the middle of the night, and when he returned three of his fingers were broken and taped, and he would not speak of what had been done to him.

The second time, they came in the middle of the day, commanded him to stand from the aluminum workbench where he was repairing die of his own making for casting the handles of baby strollers, and made him take the long walk with them past the rows of men he worked alongside. He was gone for four days, and when he returned, his arm was cast and slung in brown nylon, and the right side of his face was swollen blue and purple from chin to forehead. She asked what they had done to him, and this time his silence did not seem willful. It seemed, instead, that the ability to respond had been beaten from him.

The third time, the family had just sat down to dinner. Her father saw the Stasi through the window, and he rose from his chair without saying a word, and walked past her, and past his wife and his wife’s sister, who lived with them, and past what pictures remained of the son and daughter he had already lost, and he opened the front door and met the men at the bottom of the steps that he himself had re-poured and leveled after the war ended and they had returned to Berlin. He shook their hands and turned them away from the house and his family and one of the men opened the rear door to the black sedan, and her father slid into the back seat. She watched him go away, watched the back of his head, because he did not turn his head to look back at them.

“Vielleicht kommt er dieses Mal nicht wieder zurück,” her mother said. Perhaps this time he will not return to us. Her mother’s sister reached across the table and took her mother’s hand, and said, “Gerte, der Herr Gott wird ihn beschützen.” God will protect him, Gerte.

She—Else Richter—looked at her mother and her aunt. They had lost so much weight, as had her father, and none of them were very big people to begin with.

What was it she felt stirring in her spirit in that moment? Certainly she felt as though she had heard before from the supernatural, though she was not a person to trumpet such things. She was the only person in the house who was not elderly or frail. When her students swam their daily fifty laps, she swam all fifty alongside them, even though she had already risen at four to swim her two hundred before walking the half mile from pool to school.

She had a vision, then, of a place she knew near Humboldthafen, where a canal branched westward off the River Spree toward the west city, and if one could swim unseen past the railway bridge that constituted the border, past the Grepos and their spotlights and rifles, and if one could avoid the patrol boats . . .

Eight days passed. Her father returned wearing the suit he had been wearing when he was taken. It had been cleaned, and he smelled of soap, and his hair was combed. He walked up the steps, past Else and her aunt and mother, and up toward his bedroom without looking at any of them or saying a word. They could hear the sound of the door closing and the latch clicking, and then the sounds of weeping.

It was the sound of her father weeping that cemented the decision for her. They must go. She had never heard him weep before. Not when they reunited after the war. Not at the funeral of his mother. Not when the Jew Hilda sat at their dinner table on her way from London to Tel Aviv and told them she had come to know that God must surely be dead the day she watched an SS officer lift her infant niece into the air by the feet, and then swing her headfirst into a stone column again and again, until all that was left of her was blood, bone, and meat.

Her first thought was to wait until some time had passed. She could come home after her teaching day was over and make stews from the beef stock she knew how to get, despite the shortages. She could kill their two chickens and prepare them and make him eat as much of the flesh as he could, and make soups from the bones and fatten her mother and her aunt on the lards. The vegetables were coming in now, in her small garden plot, and she would not cook out any of the nutrients. She would chop them finely, instead, so that the three of them could eat the vegetables raw without doing damage to their gums or their false teeth.

These thoughts were reasonable to her until she considered how a single night so often brought grave changes no one could have anticipated. Already the barbed wire fencing that had gone up around the city overnight a few weeks ago, was being fortified in stretches of block and mortar. Certainly the Stasi could come for her father again, and each detainment, now, brought with it the possibility that she might never see him again in this lifetime.

Tonight her father was weak, but tonight no one would be watching him. Surely they expected him to spend his evening weeping and sleepless with fear and fatigue beyond fatigue.

She went to bed at eight, as was her custom, but determined that she would wake at midnight, and spend an hour praying for the protection they would certainly need, and then wake her mother first, then her aunt, then her father. They could take nothing with them but the clothes on their back. Anything they took would be ruined with wet, anyway, and she worried that any extra weight would sink them. She would dress them in their bathing suits, then proper street clothing, though there would be no way to avoid rousing suspicion. She could not think of a good answer to give anyone who might see her walking the streets in the middle of the night with three frail old people. She was reminded of the eighth chapter of John, where Christ and his disciples walked miraculously unseen through the crowd that was preparing to stone them to death, and could any such thing be made possible in Berlin?

She lay still for an hour, but she could not sleep. The apartment was not tidy. The apartment must be tidied. She rose and put on her light green house gown and went down into the kitchen. She could hear her father tossing above her, snoring and waking but certainly not to consciousness, tossing and crying out, his cries like the braying of a donkey.

She took a dishcloth from the cabinet above the sink and ran it under the water, then wrung it out. Sleep was necessary. She needed the strength, but what if she went back to sleep and then overslept, and what would people say if she left the apartment untidy? They would blame it on her father. They would use it against the people who used to meet in this house and dine together and read the scriptures. Other people would be taken from their houses and beaten and made unable, one way or the other, to speak to their own families.

Yes, this was why she took the wet dishcloth in her hands and knelt and ran it along the baseboards. But oh the pleasure she took, even now, in wiping the bits of dirt and dust from where they lay in secret, and from the blackening of the dishcloth, and then the rinsing of the dishcloth, and the soap in the dishcloth, and the lightening of the black under the water, and then in wiping down the front room, the stairwell, the closet where they kept the linens. She so often wanted for pleasure, only to find that it could be found in these small acts of tidying. With scorn she thought of the untidy students in her class, the ones she was forced to daily badger, to publicly humiliate if necessary, and wasn’t this an act of love, to teach a child that their lives need not be cluttered with dross as surely were their parents lives?

On hands and knees she scrubbed the bathtub, the toilet, the sinks. She polished and scrubbed and did not forget the doorknobs or the sills above the door framings. In the dark she made the windows to shine, and she looked through them from various angles, to see that the streetlights were in no way obscured by smear or smudge.

When she was done, she heated the water and set the tea to steeping. Her mother came down the stairs and said, “Else, how will you rise in the morning?”

Her mother’s eyes were red-rimmed. Her face sagged, and she no longer kept her posture. It had not been so many years since they would pass an older person on the street, and her mother would say, “Look at how she slouches. She will die of it.” Else thought of saying something to her mother, but did not because her mother’s slouch did not seem a failure of will. Instead, it seemed to Else that she was weighed down by burdens like lead ballast strapped to each of her shoulders and hanging from the front of her.

Else took two tea cups from the cabinet above the sink and poured tea into the cups and gave one to her mother and took a sip of her own. “I wish you to sleep,” she said. “I have things to tell you, but they must wait a few hours, and I want you to gather your strength.”

Her father used to talk this way to her mother. She could feel her father receding and herself expanding. Her mother and her aunt needed someone to tell them what to do, and it would be her, now, not her father, who could do it for them.

Her mother sipped her tea, which must have been too hot for her mouth, because she smacked her lips and tongue together and puffed air from her mouth in short bursts. Then she leaned forward in her chair and fixed Else’s eyes with her own, with a forcefulness Else had not seen in her mother in many years. “All of us are going to die, Else,” she said. “I am not afraid to die. I am only afraid for you.”

“I will need you to calm and comfort father,” Else said.

Her mother leaned back and blew across the surface of the tea in the cup, then took another sip. “It is not in your nature to accept terrible things,” she said.

They finished their tea and put the teacups in the sink, and the teapot, and washed and rinsed and dried them and put them away in the cabinet for the last time, and straightened the dishes in all the cabinets, and the silverware in the drawers, and the pots and the pans beneath the sink. They took the photographs of her dead brother and sister from the walls and took them from their frames, and hid them behind the false wall at the back of the cupboard, where they kept the marks, and her mother reached for the marks. “Leave them,” Else commanded, because they could not take them safely across the river, and her mother made an astonished face, but left the marks undisturbed behind the false wall without questioning her.

There was work yet to do. There were no papers left to burn—her father long ago had foresight enough to leave nothing of importance where the Stasi might search and find it—and the passports and identity papers they could leave behind as well, because the West recognized only one Germany, not two, so they were German citizens already, and it was known that they would find help and welcome on the other side of the city, if only they could make it safely there. But there were closets and drawers of clothes to be straightened, and bedside change drawers to be tidied, and she wanted once more to touch everything in the house, and inhale the smell of each room, and run her fingers over the bills and feathers and feet of the ducks her mother had so carefully and skillfully embroidered on the bedsheets.

Her mother laid out her father’s brown suit, and his bathing trunks, and his brown socks and brown dress shoes, to which she applied one last brown polish. Else paused to watch and admire her mother. Even now, as she applied the polish, her old frame straightened, and Else imagined what thoughts the work of her hands brought to bear. When was the first time her mother had applied polish to her father’s shoes? Would he have been sleeping as her mother worked the polish into the leather, or was he standing behind her, watching her, perhaps guiding her hands, or with his hands on her shoulders? Who were those young people polishing shoes, who did not yet know her, the child they would make who would survive to live an adulthood alongside them, in this place? Perhaps then they were standing somewhere near to where she was now standing, in the stone house that preceded this concrete apartment building, a room or two rooms away from her father’s own parents, Else’s grandparents, who had lived in that house even as they built it with their hands, and watched it take shape around them.

She went into her room and knelt beside her bed and began to pray, and found that she had no words to say, and was comforted, then, that she could fall back upon the words as Luther laid them: Unser Vater im Himmel, dein Name werde geheiligt—Our father who art in heaven . . . —the familiar formulation, and the familiar cadences, and then Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me . . . She made the words with her lips, but soundlessly, and then her mother was beside her, and she did not have to open her eyes and look at her mother to know that her mother was making the shapes of the words with her lips as well. She tried not to think that these daily comforts might be taken from her this very evening, but she did think it, how could I not think it?, and lowered herself again into the repetition of the twenty-third Psalm, to the sounds of the German language and the length and flexibility of its sentences and syntax, the comfort of all they could contain within them, and even as her mouth made the shape of Luther’s words, she considered the care that had entered into their crafting as they passed from the ancient languages to her own, and she wished to reach across the city with this news, as she often wished to reach across her own classroom with this same news, that beautiful things stood on the other side of rigor and discipline, and though she could not say it aloud for fear she would be misunderstood, she had come to believe that all of it was the language of heaven.

They passed an hour this way, and then it was eleven-thirty, still too early, and she asked her mother to lie down, and her mother said, “Who could sleep now?” and wanted to continue in prayer, but Else was beginning to feel weary in her knees, and the prayer was not restful to her mind, either, not in the way that the cleaning had been, so she left her mother there to pray alone and went into the dark of the front room and looked out onto the stillness and the quiet of the street, and tried to slow her breathing and quiet her mind, and knew that she could, because she was practiced.

In stillness, then, she rehearsed the walk through the city, the four of them arm-in-arm, surely, and smiling with unforced pleasure—the pleasure must be unforced, certainly—and she imagined the four of them walking in the middle of the night through the city, someone calling out to them, and she, giddily, yes, waving to them fondly, as though their calling out was not a challenge but rather a kind greeting, a manner of approval, even, of the freedom of spirit that could take a family of four adults out onto the street at night, arm in arm, and who in these grim times could issue a second challenge when the reply to the first was so completely an affirmation of life?

Immediately she began to make a list of people from her daily life who would challenge her a second time with their voices, and then a third time by calling out, and all of them so close to the false border and the river and the guards with their rifles, and the list was not short, nor was it populated with policemen or Party officials or brainwashed children, but rather with grocers, with restaurant workers, with schoolteachers, with factory workers, with tool-and-die makers.

Again she pushed the thoughts away by patterning her breathing, and raised herself to her full seated height. She fixed upon the stretch of lighted land that led to the river, and caused herself to believe that they would make it safely to the river, and caused herself to believe that she would swim them across.

When it was time, she went upstairs and roused her mother from where she was praying, and her mother went into her father’s bedroom and quieted him and helped him into his bathing trunks and his brown suit, and Else went into the room her mother shared with her aunt, and roused her aunt, and whispered to her that the time had come to leave, and her aunt said nothing, just nodded and took off her night clothes and stepped into her bathing suit and put her arms into the straps and slipped her black dress over her head.

Her mother brought her father into the living room, and Else took his chin in her hand and put her face very close to his, and she said, fiercely, “You look very handsome in your suit, father,” and she pressed her other palm to his cheek and leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. A light came into his eyes like she had not seen since before he became a target of the Stasi, and he spoke, and he said, “We will join our hands now and pray,” and they made a circle—Else, her father, her mother, her aunt—and her father moved his lips but did not make sounds with them, and after he said Amen, they went out through the front door and closed it behind them and did not lock it. Else put her arm through his left arm, and her mother put her arm through his right, and her aunt through her mother’s right.

The street was quiet. They began to walk down it, and in two blocks they passed a young father standing in front of his apartment building, bouncing his crying infant, and he did not look up at them as they passed, and Else did not want to allow herself to believe that the miracle she had sought was coming to pass as they walked.

Three more blocks, and they were passed by a black sedan with dark tinted windows, and it did not stop or slow as it passed, nor did it turn around to pass again, but instead continued down the street until it had traveled far enough that she could no longer hear it going by.

Her mother began to laugh, then, not loudly, but with a voice of joy, and then her aunt, too, and though Else did not laugh, she felt her face brighten as though she had been laughing, and the ache in her cheeks. They turned a corner and after another three city blocks, the women still laughing, they passed a policeman on foot patrol, and he looked up at them, and Else’s aunt waved at him and Else smiled at him, and she could feel from within herself a warmth toward him, and he smiled and waved back at them. It seemed to Else that he was surprised at himself, smiling and waving at them, and that he did not, then, know what to do with his hands. He put them behind his back and wandered off in a direction that seemed unnatural, and it worried her, a little, the scene they had made. But he had not stopped them to question them, which is the thing anyone in his position would have done.

In this way, they made their path through the city toward Humboldthafen, and as they made their way toward the lights, they could see the Grepos in the distance, pacing by the makeshift sections of wall and the barbed wire. They were children, Else thought, young men not but nine or ten years removed from a classroom like her own. She watched them, their swagger, and reminded herself that it surely masked a fear deeper and abiding than her own fear, which she felt now as a flushing in her face and a growing emptiness in her belly.

They made their way through a clearing and into a thicket of trees from which they could watch, and they waited. She spied the place where they would cross the barbed wire, and then the shallow place by the water, in the dark triangle the two swiveling searchlights did not cover. She would have to leave two of them there vulnerable, her aunt and her mother, while she took the weakest, her father, across first. She worried his body would not bear the shock of the cold water, and what of her own, three times back and forth?

It was not too late to turn back. They could walk back through the city, the way they had come, and it would be less dangerous, heading away from the wall and the river and toward their home. If they were stopped, she could tell them about the pleasure of the late evening walk, and how they had been almost to Humboldthafen, where her father had proposed to her mother on a late night like this one—a lie, but a harmless one—and her mother would know enough to hold to her father’s arm more tightly and look up at him adoringly, and then they would be told to be on their way, perhaps told gruffly, and they would make their way back to the apartment and go to their beds shaken but, yes, alive.

Else put the thought out of her mind. Soon the Stasi would come for her father and he would not return to them. Soon her mother would die of grief. Soon they would say to Else that she was not fit to teach children, on account of her father and whatever wrong thinking she might have absorbed as his daughter, and they would send her to work in a factory somewhere in the hinterlands, and separate her from her aunt, and cause her to live in a place without proper heat, without books, without pen or paper or a radio with which she could listen to broadcasts from the West and keep her hope alive.

Something happened. The Grepos began to run toward the harbor, carrying their rifles in front of them. She did not wait to see why they were running, though she was sure they meant to bring an end to someone attempting escape, as they were. “Quickly,” she said, and the four of them began to walk briskly toward the barbed wire. Her father took off his coat and threw it over the wire, and she helped her mother over first, then her aunt, then her father, and then she climbed over. She retrieved her father’s coat, and they made their way toward the dark and shallow place, unseen.

They took off their outer layer of clothes and laid them at the wet bottom of the shallow, and she instructed her mother and aunt to crouch down upon them in the wet and the cold. She waded into the muck with her father, and out into the water. He was heavy against her back, and immediately she began to go under. She pushed away from him and helped him to float and hissed at him: “Be buoyant. You know how.”

She took him on her back again, and began to swim across the river, toward the canal, a hundred meters away. There was not much weight to him, but what there was nearly took her under when she hit the channel current, and she willed herself not to swim against it, but to let it carry her even as she swam them out of it.

She swam them to the other side, and then into the canal. The railway bridge above—the border—was coming into sight, and she could see the outlines of two patrols sweeping it. “Hold your breath, father,” she said, and took them under the cold water. She pushed him off her back under the water, and reached out for his hand, and knew that he was kicking because he was moving forward with her. She opened her eyes under the water to look back at him, but all was black.

She waited until she thought he would no longer be able to hold his breath. She hoped they had put enough distance between themselves and the railway bridge. She pulled on his hand, and they raised up. He came out coughing. She breathed in the cold air. She was shaking with the cold, and she could feel the tremor in his hand. She hoped his coughing would be muted against the sound of the wind.

She pulled him toward the bank of the canal and struggled to push him up onto the marshy grass, and then she pulled herself up after him.

He lay on his side, with his knees pulled up against his bare chest. His teeth were chattering, as were hers, but his body tremored in spasms to match his jaws. She looked around for something to cover him, but there was nothing but the mud and the wet grass. She glanced back at the bridge, but there was no indication that anyone had seen them there, another miracle.

She needed to get back to the other side, to her aunt and mother who were no doubt catching their death in the damp shallows, but she worried, now, that she would be leaving her father to his death here.

She crawled on top of him, then, covered him with her body, covered his back with her front, and put her arms around his abdomen, and her hands over his chest. She could feel the cold of him, not just in the places where his skin touched her skin, but also through the front of her bathing suit. She put her face against his neck, put her mouth to his neck and blew warmth onto it.

His tremors slowed. His teeth were still chattering, but less violently now. They no longer clicked together in the alarming way they had. She breathed on him again. She turned him over, onto his back, and climbed on top of him, and wrapped her arms and legs around him, and she said, “It’s all right, father. All is well, father.”

She worried that he would be angry with her for entwining her body with his in this way. She thought that she would die in the river and that this would be his last memory of his daughter, her climbing on top of him and wrapping her arms and legs around him, and putting her mouth on his neck and face and breathing moist warmth into his skin.

His body was regulating itself. She could feel the warmth their bodies had trapped between them. She hoped it would be enough to sustain him.

She climbed off him and had him curl around himself in the fetal position again. She leaned down once more to look at his face. He locked onto her eyes, and he said, “Else,” and she was moved at the sound of her name on his lips and she could ill afford to be moved.

“Walk west when you are able,” she said. She turned away from him and lowered herself into the canal again, and recoiled at the cold, and steeled herself for another dive under the water, and then she dove.

She took a breath as she surfaced, and saw a patrol boat coming down the river. It slowed as she saw it. Had they seen her? She went under but stayed where she was in the water. The bridge was behind her and the patrol boat ahead. Had they seen her aunt and her mother in the shallows?

When she could not hold her breath any longer, she came up again. The patrol boat was drifting slowly, nearly directly ahead of her.

She went under again. She could feel the cold working its way to her lungs, a feeling not unlike the early workings of the pneumonia that had put her months in bed after the war when she was still young. Something lightened in her, and she felt the urge to give in to it, and some part of her imagined it would be better to give in now, before the hail of bullets that were sure to follow her sighting of the patrol boat.

The part of her that she believed to be her true self pushed back against the thought. She surfaced again. The patrol boat was downriver and moving away. She did not look back toward the railway bridge. She tried to keep her head low in the water. She was swimming freestyle now, strongly, the way she was not able to swim when she crossed with her father on her back.

The searchlights were crisscrossing the water again, now, and she timed the pattern of their rotations and went under again, and swam under the water toward the shallows until the bottom rose up to meet her.

She surfaced with caution, only five feet from where her mother and aunt were huddled low in their bathing suits on her father’s suit coat and the saturated clothes. Their eyes widened when they saw her, and she could see the fear in them. She avoided their eyes in response, knowing by instinct that the fear might be contagious, and that fear was not far from her, anyway.

It occurred to her that she had not been praying throughout the ordeal, and she dashed off a Lord, forgive me it, then pushed it away. She could feel her strength ebbing and did not dare wait for a second wind, which she thought would not come, anyway, on account of the cold and the stopping and the starting.

But the second wind did come a moment back into the river, her aunt on her back, and with it came a boldness, and a strength should could not have predicted. She focused her attention on the canal and then the other shore, and perhaps she let her attention wander too far toward the end, at the expense of the awareness she needed in the moment.

The railway bridge was in sight. She wanted to wait until the last possible moment to take her aunt under. She waited too long. With terrible speed she found herself staring into the eyes of the man—the boy, really—on the bridge. She felt her aunt tense above her, and for a moment she thought her aunt would push her under before they could be shot, but then her aunt returned to herself and relaxed her body again, and all the while—now she was treading water—the boy looked at them, and she hoped she was not mistaken in believing that what his face reported was abject fear, rather than vigilance.

But at that moment, the boy turned and ran toward the other man and jumped at him playfully, and raised his fists in invitation to a mock fight.

Else did not take her aunt under. She was faintly aware, anyway, that she had lost the strength for it. Instead, she swam them forward, taking care not to make any splash, as the men on the bridge yelled and shouted as boys at play will yell and shout.

When they reached the canal bank and got themselves up and out, she looked for her father, but he was gone, and hope began to rise in her. “Warm yourself by walking briskly,” she told her aunt, and lifted her to her feet, and pushed her in the direction her father must have gone.

There was no convergence of coincidences in the world that could possibly account for the things she had now done and seen and witnessed. Surely, she thought, the hand of God had reached down and pressed gentle fingers here and there against the unseen fabric of the universe for the sake of her and her family.

It was then she knew that she and her mother would be safe. She lowered herself again into the canal and toward the river and the east city beyond, and swam long, strong strokes across the water, and went under against the turning of the searchlights, and surfaced again near her mother, in the shallows.

Her mother was shrunken and shivering in the wet and the cold. “Leave me here,” she said. “I won’t make it across.”

“I won’t leave you,” she said, and she knew, as she put her mother on her back and pushed off into the river for the third time, that they would make it to the other side alive.

Her arms and legs were burning with fatigue. As they reached the channel, she knew she had lost the ability to navigate the current as she had before, and they were pulled farther with the rushing of the waters than she had been pulled when she was carrying her aunt or her father.

Her mother grew heavier against her, now, as she struggled back nearer the bank, swimming against the direction of the river. Yet she pushed, strong in the knowledge that she was being protected. She had fixed in her mind the vision of three angels swimming just above her, where the water met the open air.

They made it to the canal, and she swam them inside. She knew she did not have it in her to anymore go under the water. With vigor, now, she moved them forward, the end in sight. She saw no one up on the railway crossing, and she swam under it knowing that freedom was on the other side, that the patrols could not fire upon them there, because the other side of the bridge was beyond their jurisdiction.

There was shouting from behind them as they emerged from the shadow of the bridge, to the waters belonging to the west. A voice commanded: “You! Stop right there!”

She felt her mother let go of her and push away. Gunfire erupted from behind them. She swam hard for the other bank. Men in uniforms waited there, and some of them began to return fire on the bridge. She felt something sear the top of her head, a great heat, but no pain. She made it to the bank, and hands reached down to pull her up.

A hand was pressing something to her head, and she tried to push it away. She was screaming, “My mother! My mother!” When she looked out onto the water, all she could see was the black. Men were rushing out onto the bridge, now, and the men on her side were pushing her away from the shore, spiriting her away.

She put her hand to her face and it came away bloody. One of the men picked her up and began carrying her, and kept one hand clamped to the top of her head. “Where is my mother?” she said.

“Your father and your aunt are safe,” he said. Now he was running, and as the water receded into the distance, she saw a body surface, face down.

“Where is my mother?” she said.

About the Author: Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil’s Territory, a collection of short fiction. His recent work appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2008, Random House Presents Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and The Southern Review. He teaches at the University of Toledo.

In The Devil's Territory can be purchased at Amazon.com.