We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 112
AUTUMN 2008
FICTION
Jennifer Lane - Paper Walls
When I was five a boy two doors down gave me the ring from a beer can and asked me to marry him. In primary the smallest kid in the class wrote me a poem and picked his nose next to me for a week. I had a few boyfriends in high school but the one I remember most lived on the other side of the world. He gave me a chunk of concrete that changed the way I thought about everything.
It started as a joke. Lucy’s revenge on me for telling Mick about her and Shane.
‘I’ll get you for this,’ Lucy said and she gave me that look. The same look that made me wet my pants in kindy.
She got the idea for her revenge when we were making collages in art. It was last period on a Friday and the room was thick with the smell of cheap glue and plans for the weekend. We envied the glamorous people in the magazines we were cutting up; imagined ourselves in thousand-dollar dresses that night, walking straight past the bouncers into Selina’s Niteclub. I must’ve been too busy admiring the ‘World’s Top 20 Hunkiest Men’ to notice Lucy ripping out the ‘Pen Pals Wanted’ page.
I never found out what Lucy wrote in that first letter to Karston Stadt in Germany. Or why she picked him over the other pen pals. But she wrote the letter from me and gave my return address. She told me that much after I rang to tell her about the letter that had turned up out of the blue. I wondered what her letter had said about me. Did she blab about the New Year’s eve I snorted Cold Power and ended up in hospital? Or about me losing my virginity on a school excursion to Parliament House?
I begged Lucy to tell me but she gave nothing away.
‘Jeesus, Jess! It was ages ago,’ she cried when I pinned her against the science lab door. ‘How’m I s’posed to remember?’
One thing we had in common was stubbornness. Lucy’d had to sort out Mick. This problem was mine.
Battered envelope with a foreign address on the back of it – Gefangwhatsit, somewhere in Berlin. The letter inside was sticky with sweat and grease. Four pages crammed with tiny neat writing like my Mum’s. Even her shopping lists looked like they carried profound messages. I tried hard to forget about my new pen-friend. I buried his words under ‘Makings of the Modern World’ and cleaned my desk around them. I vacuumed and Spray’n’Wiped my room and went through my wardrobe dividing it into summer, winter and St Vinnies. I shocked Mrs Brians by handing in an essay on time. I toyed with my maths homework. If the letter was just one page I could’ve binned it without conscience. But it was four. In science Lucy spelt ‘genes’ like a pair of Levis. The poor guy was German – reading Lucy’s letter with all her bad spelling would’ve taken forever.
‘Jess, I see nothing from where I write. There is much behind but nothing in front. Wherever I go there are walls. The Berlin wall is 150 kilometres in length and divides this city in two. Can you believe? I wait for the day it crashes down and people are free. I will be free then and will see my family. Can you believe? For three years already I am stuck in the East.’
The letter surprised me. There was no gossip. No complaints about how boring school is. Karston wrote about his city. About life. About a wall that from here would reach halfway to Canberra.
‘It is not possible for me to get through it,’ he wrote.
His letter made getting busted smoking under the school chapel seem like no big deal. Karston was surrounded by men with pistols. He didn’t get out much. I got to know the mother, father and two brothers he was missing. I knew that they lived in a tiny apartment in West Berlin. Karston was stuck on the other side. It made me realise that Sydney wasn’t such a bad place. The Lucky Country, that wasn’t complete bullshit. I’d never seen a gun that wasn’t safely tucked away in a holster on a policemen’s belt.
Though still not sure who Lucy made me out to be, I eventually scrawled out a letter on the smallest piece of writing paper I could find.
‘Wow! Berlin sounds wild.... I live in Coogee with my parents and older sister, Anna. Everyone likes her because she’s tall and blonde. But she’s thick as two bricks! For company I prefer Mopsy, our Persian...’
The size of my writing gradually got larger as I ran out of things to say.
‘Nothing exciting happens in Sydney... I can’t see much out my window at the moment either. There’s no wall like yours but the sheets on our clothes line are blocking my view of next-door’s pool. It’s an in-ground pool!’
The man at the post office told me my letter would take a week to reach Germany. I worried that Karston would figure out it was all a joke and hate me. Lucy was still being a stubborn cow. She didn’t give in, even when she and Mick got back together. Finally exam time came and I forgot about the German boy behind the wall.I passed English with flying colours but couldn’t tell my parents what I got for maths. I’d never got below 30% before. Even the dumb people beat me. Mr Brixton couldn’t look me in the eye. I was shunted
down to the bottom class. My parents heard I was put down to F. Anna’s big mouth.
‘They aren’t graded,’ I lied to avoid being grounded. ‘Someone from F left our school so I moved across.’
A fat lady turned up on our doorstep one afternoon and told me she was my maths tutor. The TV was banned on school nights. I wasn’t allowed to see Lucy on weekends.
‘But she’s in D for maths,’ I protested.
‘Oh, is that good?’ Dad asked while washing the dishes. ‘I thought it wasn’t graded.’
When another letter arrived from Karston, I felt light-headed. I took it into my room and lay on my bed. By the time I’d finished reading it, my head was spinning.
This time the envelope looked handmade and the wad of paper inside had been ripped from a notebook.
‘Hello Jess,’ he began. ‘I am fine. Your life sounds happy. I thank you for writing it to me.’
‘Your sister, Anna, you wrote me about, thick like two bricks. She is very fat? You and your sister Mopsy are very fat too? Who is this Selina?’
He told me about his brothers and the places they used to go when they were young. Easter in Hamburg, Christmas in Osnabaruk or somewhere with dots over its u.
‘Jess,’ he wrote at the end of his letter. ‘I read your letter many times. Every word is special to me because you give me your time.’
I couldn’t imagine what he liked so much about my letter but it made me want to read his letter again and again too.
‘With you there is no wall,’ I underlined.
I tucked Karston’s letter into my homework diary and took it to school to show Lucy. She struggled with it for a few minutes before handing it back. She was in F for English with all the deadheads but I still couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel compelled to read it.
‘He’s a poet, Luce, d’you think? With you there is no wall. Wow!’
‘Jesus, you’re sick,’ she replied, lighting a cigarette.
I had to write an incredible letter back. Think of things in Australia that would interest Karston.
‘You can go wherever you like in Sydney,’ I scribbled in my first draft. ‘I have cousins in Penrith. When they want to come to the beach with us, they just get a bus.’
‘Our policemen carry guns,’ I wrote in my second draft. ‘But they’re just for show.’
That letter took less than a week to perfect. I then dug through my shoe box of photos and found one of me good enough to send. Taken by Dad on a wharf somewhere. In it I wore a purple shirt with the top button done up. I held my head on an angle and the look on my face was intense. Funny how being worried as hell that Dad’d see the hickey on my neck resulted in such a sophisticated pose.
I made a tape of Midnight Oil songs and instructed Karston to listen closely to the lyrics.
‘They say a lot about our country,’ I explained on the fourth page of my letter. ‘There are no love songs on this tape.’
Then I sprayed my letter with the Christian Dior perfume in the bathroom until it smelt like my sister. She was never short of boyfriends.
I folded the letter around the photo and tape, squeezed them into a Postpack and paid Mr Eddings at the post office $7 to send the package to Germany.
Three weeks later I got a reply. There was a passport photo of Karston. He had blue eyes and cheek bones like the guy from Bauhaus. I knew it was a few years old because 1984 was scrawled on the back. I figured he must’ve wanted me to think he was my age, but I didn’t mind. I liked being able to imagine his face when he received my letters.
For the next six months we wrote constantly.
‘You are lucky to have much sunshine every day,’ he wrote. ‘For the sun to shine here I must draw it on the wall.’
‘It has rained since Sunday,’ I replied. ‘Do you use crayons or paint?’At Paddington markets I bought a shirt for Karston. It was the colour of the Sydney sky and made from rayon. Floating in the neighbour’s pool in the dark, I imagined him wearing it. The nights were hot
and sticky and I couldn’t sleep.
I let two weeks drag past before checking the letterbox obsessively.
Then I calculated that it’d take Karston at least a couple of days to write a letter as long as the one I sent him. Considered maybe he wanted to buy me something too. Another seven days crawled by. Eight days. Nine. Nothing. I rang Mr Eddings. He couldn’t recall what package I was talking about but said Australia Post had a good reputation internationally.
‘Though,’ he added and I could hear him chewing in the mouthpiece, ‘there’s always a chance it was misplaced at the other end.’
The thought of my package being opened by some fat old lady with a moustache added thirty degrees to the already steaming day. The shirt! I had photocopies of the letter. But I couldn’t send it again in case Karston had already got it. I bought a postcard from the mall.
‘Guten Tag!’ I wrote on the back. ‘This is Sydney at night... Where it looks like my pen’s leaking is where I live... PS: Did you receive my package (with the shirt)? Australia Post can be unreliable at times.’
I placed the postcard on the counter picture-side-up so Mr Eddings couldn’t read it.
‘Is there another stamp?’ I asked. ‘A special stamp I can stick next to the airmail sticker to guarantee that it gets there?’
I noticed how many more grey hairs Mr Eddings had since I met him a few months before.
‘Look,’ he pointed to the postcard, there were grey hairs on his arms too, ‘chances of this getting misplaced as well are very small.’
‘Unless,’ he paused, obviously enjoying my discomfort. ‘There’s a problem with the German postal service. But it’d be really bad luck.’
I looked familiar to bad luck.
‘Have you thought that maybe your friend went on holidays or moved?’ Mr Eddings offered. It was obvious he thought this was the sensible thing for someone to do if they were expecting to hear from me.
That was it then. I’d done all I could do. I decided to forget about Karston and the package and the postcard for a while. To get on with my life.
I enrolled in a German language course at Sydney University. I caught up on my school work and was awarded a merit for my story on factors contributing to World War II. I made a tape of my all-time favourite songs (leaving out the embarrassing ones). I designed personalised letterhead and flew my own version of the Australian flag in the margin. I studied my new German dictionary. I planned to surprise Karston and write a whole letter in German. I traced his photo and painted him in art.
With my birthday money I bought a coat on special, a thick blend of wool and cashmere. I bought a pair of black leather boots made in Italy and collected interesting scarves and gloves from second-hand shops in Newtown. It was humid in Sydney that summer but I imagined the snow was falling thick in Europe. I practised signing my name Jessica Stadt. Weeks shuffled by. Nothing came.
My coat and scarves took on the smell of mothballs. When Mum threw half-finished drafts of letters in the bin, I didn’t mind. I didn’t object when she tore down the German word labels I had sticky-taped on objects all over the house.
I stared at the TV and willed it to take me to other places. Anywhere.
That was how I found out. Watching TV. I was thinner then with a deep smoker’s cough that betrayed my age. I was wearing an old T-shirt I’d grabbed from my St Vinnies pile. It hung frumpily over last season’s jeans. That curly-headed ABC guy introduced the news before I had a chance to change the channel.
‘History was made last night in Germany as the borders between the East and West were relaxed. An announcement by East German Politburo member Gunter Schabowski saw thousands of East Berliners lining up for their first taste of freedom in twenty-eight years... At 11 pm the gates were opened and people streamed through the wall that divided the nation’s capital city...’
I stubbed out my Winfield and crawled to the TV. Close-ups of faces (mine pressed to the screen). Mouths wide open (mine too). Tears. Screams. Crowd shots. Hugging. Running. Climbing. Grown-ups dancing on the wall and bowing like children. Champagne fountains. Guy riding his bike along the top of the wall. Banners. The wall must fall! School kids madly attacking the wall, guard clapping them on. Chaos. Freedom!
I ran out the front door and down the road. At the hotel I turned left and fled up the hill. I ran down the other side and up the next hill.
The following Friday there was a knock on the door.
‘Delivery,’ a familiar voice answered wearily when I called out from the shower.
Mr Eddings looked pale. He shifted nervously on his feet and swung his arms in relief when he off-loaded the heavy package. He declined an offer of a Milo and walked down the path shaking his head. Wrapped in brown paper and covered in German stamps, it was heavier than a brick and shaped like a rock. There was no letter inside and no return address on the back. It was a big chunk of wall.
I went to Selina’s Niteclub that night with Lucy, Mick and Dan.
‘He got out then,’ Lucy said when I told her about the delivery.
‘Out?’
‘Of that gobbledy-gook-whatever prison.’
‘Ay? I didn’t – prison?’
‘Who’s in prison?’ Dan asked from behind his schooner.
Lucy screamed with laughter, ‘Jesus! You didn’t realise you were lusting over a crim?’
‘He – you. Shit! He was – nice – why? What for?’
‘Who was nice, Jess?’ Dan demanded.
‘Jesus! His pen pal thingy said he’d got done for tryin’ to get over that wall,’ Lucy slurred, slurping the last of her Cooler. ‘Wanted someone to write to for company while he was stuck inside. Thought you’s’d be well matched. Drink?’
I never found out whether Karston got my package. Or whether someone else wandered around Berlin in a blue rayon shirt. Stuffed in a box somewhere in my old room in Coogee with the ring from the beer can and primary school poem, are the twelve letters he sent me.
But his last message – the chunk of wall – goes wherever I do. It went with me to Uni; stopped me from dropping out after I failed philosophy. Encouraged me to stay on another year to do honours. And when I moved back to Sydney, it helped me get my first real job. It has a place on my bookshelf. Whenever I feel pissed off I take the heavy chunk in my hand like a shot-put. I imagine throwing it through the walls in my flat. It’d smash straight through the plaster. I know that without trying.
In my world the walls are like paper. There’s nothing to hold me back.
JENNIFER LANE originally hails from the south coast of NSW but now lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She writes fiction when she’s not chasing after her two-year-old daughter. An extract from her novel-in-progress was published in New Zealand Book Month’s 2007 Six Pack anthology.
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