Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

it Nicolaus? I could never tell you two apart.”

“Nicolaus. We never found Pyotr.”

Zerrissen regretted stumbling into that bad subject. “Ah. So… this must be…?” He had truly forgotten her name.

“Yes. Halina,” Nicolaus volunteered on her behalf. “She doesn’t say much, as you might recall.”

She smiled at hearing her name, but then grew bored and left the men. She started exploring the shop that quite fascinated her, like everything in life did.

The crippled radio boomed kettle drums and horns, all the way from the concert hall in Moscow and into the shop; the worker supernumeraries must have triumphed over the evil landlord. Halina was poking among the piles of discarded car parts; this pile was apparently reserved for radiators.

Distracted by Halina’s wandering and poking, Zerrissen turned back to Nicolaus.

“The Red Cross would not tell me anything after absorbing you into their coven. Whatever they did to you, you look well cared for.” Indeed, the fully grown Nicolaus stood before Zerrissen like a character from Oscar Wilde, immune to aging. Was there a picture in someone’s attic expressing the suffering instead? Zerrissen, for comparison, caught his own reflection in a shiny hubcap on the bench, and realized that, were one to substitute this workshop for an attic, he himself could easily have been that famous picture of literature.

Sounds of metal against concrete floor from a remote corner of the shop forced Zerrissen to look away from Nicolaus. What is Halina was looking for?

Nicolaus offered no apology nor explanation as both men watched her dig through the discarded entrails of various assemblies from automobiles, washing machines, other appliances including a refrigerator with no door, de-fanged in effect, no longer a death trap for children, and latching refrigerator doors now banned, belatedly, by State law. Its resemblance to the trainer in the Iron Lung Lab no longer registered with either Nicolaus or Zerrissen.

Deciding that Halina was in no immediate danger, and that they had no control over her movements in any case, they turned their attention back to each other.

“So, how can I help you?” With that day he escaped the Bunker long behind him, the last twenty years of relative peace and inebriation, Zerrissen felt no urgency to put his life at risk, even if this life consisted of this simple day job, after which he could return unmolested to an apartment with a single electrical outlet, and a single bed, with a view of a factory through its single window.

“Do you ever think about leaving?” Nicolaus let the question float around in Zerrissen’s head.

“Leaving?”

“Yes. Leaving the East for the West.”

This question was a common trap by the toady informants among the East Berlin population, so Zerrissen was instinctively demurred. “What? And leave… all of this?” Zerrissen gestured to the greasy shop and the potholed street.

But while Nicolaus may have been an informant, he was no toady.

Nicolaus smiled. “Do you know how much they pay engineers of your talent in the West? In West Germany or even the United States? Or do you prefer fixing washing machines?”

“Automobiles. Very few washing machines, actually.”

Zerrissen contemplated the notion that he could return to the life of an engineer, a thought that needed a cigarette to metabolize, which Nicolaus, a non-smoker, produced from his tailored jacket along with a silver lighter that he carried for such ice-breaking occasions.

Gesturing at the expensive lighter, Zerrissen added, “You seem to have done very well for yourself.”

“Well, I have a job, yes.”

“Doing what? State salaries do not buy gaberdine suits.”

“At the Embassy. I’m a… cultural attaché.”

“A what?”

“I promote Marxist culture.”

Zerrissen pointed at the radio. “You mean like operas?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes sport. Sometimes ballet. But we were talking about you. And how you never think about leaving.”

This is not a subject one indulges in with Embassy staff. Zerrissen chose a safe, Party inspired response.

“Are things really that better in the West?”

“Probably not. But she will die if she stays in East Germany.”

“Is she sick? We have doctors here too. Or is this about her black eye because I had nothing to do with that.”

“It’s complicated, but yes, black eye. And we know who gave it to her.”

“So, leave.” It sounded harsher than he wanted.

“We can’t.”

“Sure, you can. Go shopping on a day pass across the river. Don’t come back. People do it all the time. You have nothing to lose.”

“On the contrary. We have everything to lose. All East Germans do, now.”

“Now? What is different about ‘now?’”

“What would you say if I told you that the Soviets are building a wall along the occupied sectors to keep people from crossing over to the West?”

“A wall?” Zerrissen asked on an exhale of smoke.

“Yes. West Berlin will be walled off, isolated as an island of Capitalism in a sea of Marxism. Only one way in or out.”

Zerrissen blew another puff of smoke in the air, trying to picture how such a wall could be built. It was a ridiculous idea.

“Like the Nazi ghettos for Jews?”

“Ghettos, Raynor? Please. This is a Workers’ Paradise. Don’t you read the news?”

“Why would the State build a wall instead of cars and washing machines?”

“One does not question the wisdom of the Central Committee. Either way, Halina will die if she stays here.”

“When does this so-called wall break ground?”

“It already has.”

Zerrissen raised an eyebrow of skepticism.

“Fences are begin put up on the few open border sections. The sections with fences are being replaced with barbed wire. Sections with barbed wire are being electrified. People are getting killed trying to cross, yet they keep trying. Minefields are being placed along all sections. The mines are killing people too, yet people are still trying.”

“Mines,” Zerrissen mocked. “Really? Wouldn’t someone stepping on a land mine be on the news?”

“You’re not listening to the right news.”

Zerrissen cast a glance over at his one-station radio. Nicolaus had a point.

“How do you know these things? It’s all a little hard to believe.”

“I told you. I work at the Embassy. As a translator.”

Zerrissen looked Nicolaus in the eye. “I thought you said, ‘cultural attaché?”

Nicolaus returned his stare, not