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The Berlin Wall: A Short Story

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I remember when the Berlin Wall was built during that bleak, brutal winter of 1961. I was woken up with a start in the middle of night by the rumbling of the trucks and the deafening cacophony of construction work outside my window like the blast of Gabriel’s horn. My mother, ever the pragmatist, said that it was simply a power play between the Russians and the Americans and that it would surely be gone by the summer. I believed her, too, until one evening when I put my ear against the paper-thin walls of my bedroom and heard her muffled sobs and the low, reassuring murmurings of my father as summer came and went.
Mother, who never cried as long as I had known her, cried almost every night that first year.
We children used to play games at the Berlin Wall all the time. It would inevitably be the base in tag, for instance, or the goal for the penalty kicks of our imaginary World Cup finals. Sometimes the border guards would shout down at us, but we’d childishly respond by hurling abuse back at them and petulantly sticking up our middle fingers, which was a gesture we’d picked up from the Westerners. When we felt especially naughty and rebellious, we’d gather up rocks from the street corner and lob them at the hapless …show more content…

We’ve all seen it: a grainy, unfocused photo of a man, balanced precariously on a wire stretched across no man’s land and high above the towering concrete mass of the Berlin Wall. The spotlights of the border patrol light him from below. His eyes bulge out of his skull like a blind man’s and yet seem to herald some divine visitation. With his arms spread wide to keep his balance, he is not unlike Christ on the way to Calvary. In the upper right hand corner of the photo you can just make out the glint of the rifles and the amazed, upturned faces of the armed guards. A small, thin man hanging precariously against the blackness of night. Nobody knew who he was. Ever later, after it was all over, nobody knew who he

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