ernd woke up to the sound of the vacuum cleaner. It was a high-pitched, almost screaming noise. He noticed the crack in the wall next to his side of the bed. It was a small slit, dark and straight. He would have to find a way to hide it from her.

The vacuum stopped for a moment and then started up again. It had a different pitch now, gurgling and rumbling as if choking. It stopped again. Bernd wondered whether she had sucked up a piece of cement. She hadn't complained yet about the mess he was making in the living room. That wall there was coming along fine, standing almost two feet tall and extending from one corner of the room diagonally to the other side. She always took care to step over it, hoisting the Rowenta Cannister vacuum over to the other side where most of the mortar powder and fragments of cement collected. When he worked on his wall, he worked on it on from the side where the light came in the little window.

He had his days free, most of them anyway, to stay at home to work on his wall. The Berliner Abendzeitung had assigned him to write an interest story on the Ossies' way of life before the wall came down two months ago, but the deadline he worked under was generous, so that he had most of his time free, and when he didn't write or work on his little wall, he watched his wife clean house.

She did that really well. But he would tell her not to worry about bumping the wall because it was solid. He always took the biggest and most solid, regular pieces that he could pry away from his favorite spot close to the Brandenburg gate. He would even fight the others who would show up with pneumatic tools, jackhammers and the occasional bulldozer, but he wasn't interested in souvenirs—to sell or to keep for himself—he just wanted to see to it that his wall was sturdy. Sturdy it was; too sturdy, as a matter of fact—or too heavy, at any rate. Its weight plus the angle, Bernd figured, of the apartment's construction had caused a foundation shift—thus the crack in the wall, the one in the bedroom.

And it worried him. He got out of bed to examine it closer. He thought about rubbing toothpaste into it. The Hausmeister didn't want anybody ramming holes into the walls to hang pictures, and he would really be disturbed over a gaping crack. Or maybe Bernd could hang a picture over it, for now. But he didn't have any pictures, at least none with frames. And if the crack kept spreading, he didn't know what he would do. It could, he thought, go all the way down into the Doerings' bedroom on the first floor.

Anka pushed the door open with the nuzzle of the vacuum. It still gurgled and wheezed its way through the job, and Anka sweated a little, mostly on her thin, browned forearms. He'd noticed how they got shiny when she worked, when they worked to push the vacuum, or hung the laundry in the cellar, or stirred cake batter.

"Are you getting up? I have your pants ready."

"Yes." This morning, he had to get used to her voice. She hadn't turned off the vacuum and spoke over it, over the vacuum and the church bells that broke in through the window.

"Are you going for more bricks? If you are, we're out of pepper."

"It's Sunday."

"Already?"

"Yes. And we have pepper. I saw it yesterday, when I looked for washrags."

"Bernd, I wish you wouldn't use our good rags for wiping your hands on. I can't get the mortar out. All the grains stay in, and it clogs the machine."

The bells were closer to him now, in a way, or he was closer to them. They were louder, at any rate, louder and richer, as if there was suddenly less air to dilute the sound.

Anka turned to vacuum the corners. Bernd stood at the window, looking at the Doerings' white Opel. He looked at the car, while waiting for them to leave, waiting for them to get in their car and drive wherever they drove every Sunday.

They did not go to church. It did not matter to him, because Sunday had come to be his best day for working on his wall.

Bernd sat in his kitchen at a fold-down card table, eating Haferflocken with milk. Before starting the wall, when there was still a dining table and chairs in the corner of the living room, he liked to eat in the living room, looking out the window at the steeple of the Kreuzkirche as he stirred milk into his food. But he liked looking at his wall better, and he never finished his food out of reverence for the budding wall, which prompted Anke to repeat a saying of her grandpa's, "Eat up, clean your plate, or the sun won't shine tomorrow."

Being in the kitchen made him feel closer to his food. Not only was he able to clean his plates, he now had expanded the scope of his morning meals. If he wanted cinnamon in his Flocken he could just reach around to the counter. It was all right there behind him. Kitchens, he'd discovered, were so much different than the other rooms. Without furniture, the other rooms looked pretty much the same. The only room more different than the kitchen was the bathroom, where Anka washed his bricks for him in the big porcelain tub.

The bricks made a mess otherwise. Before, he'd just drop them in the livingroom, raising dust clouds that settled on the beige sofa, the crystal candle holders and his computer. He had worried that the dust would interrupt the dataflow in his computer or garble messages. The Ossie story he worked on had taken shape around its title, "Missing Wall" and would be print ready soon. Bernd didn't want to risk any accidental deletions, and so now the bricks stayed in the bathtub, and he and Anka took "French baths" in the kitchen.

They washed together on week-mornings, taking turns leaning over the sink. She scrubbed his back with oatmeal soap, and he did the same for her, watching the dark tufts of hair under her arms curl with the moisture, then straighten as he ran clean water over her shoulders. He spooned the last part of his flocken into his mouth, and went back to the bedroom to look at the crack.

It looked like it had gotten bigger since he'd left it alone. It couldn't have, he knew. He hadn't added any bricks to the wall in the livingroom. Regardless, he didn't think toothpaste was going to do the job. He'd have to use something else. He pulled the nightstand over and pushed it up against the crack, but a little still showed. He moved the lamp to the left a bit. This would work, but then it occured to him that a moved nightstand would be more evidence of something wrong than the crack itself. And even if Anka thought nothing of the moved furniture, the light being on at night would illuminate the crack, perhaps curve the light in a telling way.

He moved the table back to its original position. He heard Anka in the kitchen, rattling the racks of plates and rows of cups as she moved and hung them back into their places on the counter after giving herself a bath this morning while he slept. Bernd knew the plates would go where she put her legs. Bernd looked again at the crack. He pushed the nozzle of the toothpaste tube against the crack and squeezed, running the length of it downwards. Then he took his finger and smeared the toothpaste into the crack. Stepping away from his work, he saw that the toothpaste was a couple of shades lighter than the wall. He hadn't figured on that. It seemed the same color when he brushed his teeth. Bernd pulled the table and lamp back again and hoped that between the toothpaste and the table, the damage would go unnoticed.

He went into the kitchen, where they had moved the television. Nothing would air today until about two or three in the afternoon. He turned the volume knob until the TV emitted a low, comfortable whine. He sat down to watch the static, which not only somehow reminded him of his wall, physically, but also tended to give him ideas of how to place the bricks. The ideas always came seconds before he'd get a headache just behind his eyeballs. Bernd would see it, like a small projection on the back of his skull—an arrangement of, say, six or so bricks, eight at the most. At that point, he'd get up and translate the vision, placing brick upon brick with the surety of an expert mountain climber.

"We're going to need to lose some weight," he said to Anka when she walked in, vacuuming around him a little as he sat figuring out where to put the next brick.

"What?" she said, clicking the machine to off.

"I mean, we need to get rid of some of the furniture, I think."

Earlier that week, they had moved two stuffed chairs, a coffee table, and a bookshelf with a few books on philosophy, cooking, and old Stern and Spiegel journals into the bedroom. Bernd had thought that moving the furniture would balance the stress the extra weight from the wall and the bricks in the bathtub had put on the foundation. He also wanted the living room as bare as possible. Somewhere he had miscalculated. Now that the wall was growing and possibly causing a foundationshift, he thought it would be a better strategy to simply get rid of excess weight.

"What's the heaviest piece of furniture we have?"

"I don't know." She thought a second. "The bed, I suppose. I haven't slept on a floor in a long time."

"It's good for your back!" Bernd found this to very comforting. He said it again, to make certain he meant it. "It's good for your back."

"Yes. Mrs. Doering's chiropractor said so."

"Mrs. Doering's chiropractor? How can they afford a chiropractor, with that car they drive?"

"I don't know." Anka switched the machine back on. "People afford a lot of things. This is grim, talking like this. We can talk about other things." She pulled the cord out of the wall with a little snap. The plug almost hit the wall, and Bernd would've said something if he'd been in a worse mood. As it was, he just sat with his mouth hung open a little, eyeing the vacuum, then Anka.

"We'll find another place for the bed," Anka said, and went back into the kitchen.    

Nearly one month later, Sunday, Bernd had almost finished his wall. It started in the living room and extended out into the hall up to the doorway of the bedroom, where it waited to be finished, so that it would extend to the other, the farthest, side of the bedroom. Bernd had his vision of it—the wall, and above it the window and a vista of the noble, high reaching steeple, a basic landscape he would take in from within his own home.

They had sold or given away most of the larger pieces of furniture. For a week, almost every day, there would be a customer at their front door asking to see the TV, the night stands, the computer table, the bookcases. Always, Bernd and Anka took the visitor into the bedroom where they had stored all the moveable furniture. They had one repeat customer, who bought the television—a small sacrifice for Bernd, although the wall was nearing completion—and, a day later, three books on photography.

"Is photography your hobby?" Bernd asked the man, when he had paid for the book and was about to leave.

"No," the man said, "I just like to look at perfect pictures."

They had also sold the only antique they owned, a tall and heavy grandfather clock—part of Anka's inheritance. The clock had gonged off the full hours, and at first, after it was gone, Bernd had trouble concentrating; he found himself looking at his wristwatch which did its work so subtly. One by one, people and pounds exited through the front door. The bathtub was left, with what Bernd figured to be the last tubfull of bricks.

He and Anka had, in the meantime, lost almost thirty-seven pounds between them. They were eating better, actually, than they had in a long time—they had more celebratory meals these days. Bernd had learned to make Greek, Moroccan, even some modified Vietnamese dishes. Tajine B'zeetoon, with Kalmata olives and preserved lemons, was his most successful dish. He used his fingertips to rub cilantro, cumin, salt, tumeric, ginger and garlic on the cool, pimply chicken flesh. Anka had taken a particular liking to American food—hotdogs with relish and spicy brown mustard were her favorite. Bernd got a great of exercise as well, hauling the bricks up to the apartment, up the flight of stairs.

The remaining matter was the crack. After the bed was gone, and after they had sold the night stands and the lamps, the bare wall seemed to showcase the crack, and the toothpaste, if anything, merely made a point of exposing the fault even more.    

A week passed during which Bernd didn't work much on his wall at all. He had surrendered to the apathy he sometimes felt when he approached the end of one of his projects, but that Sunday, he woke up refreshed. He pulled on his pants, opened the window, and gathered air into his lungs and into the nearly empty bedroom. The wall now marked the half-way mark between the door and the window, and sat suspended, like an arrow caught between here and there.

He and Anka had spent the past week doing things together. They had rented a rowboat at the Wannsee, drank iced coffee at one of the cafes on the Ku Damm, went to the market at the KaDeWe. They stopped by the Brandenburg Gate, where authenticated remants of the wall were being sold to tourists. The pavement was still wet with victory champagne and beer. Bernd showed Anke how to break stones from the diminishing wall, and she quickly chiseled off a shopping bag full of fairly smooth and graffiti-free stones. Afterward, she smiled at Bernd and stretched to relax her muscles. Bernd carried the shopping bag home. Anke had never been to the Deutsches Museum, so they went and looked at Egyptian mummies and stone tablets with inscriptions that spoke of ancient magic and rituals for the dead. Bernd wondered how the embalmers could extricate the brain through the nasal passages without damaging the dead person's face.

After Anka had gotten up (earlier than usual for a Sunday, Bernd thought) and began rummaging in the kitchen, he spent half the morning staring at the cracked wall. It sat there, heavy and still. Then, he scraped the toothpaste out of the crack. Working closely and carefully, he used a screwdriver and a toothbrush to pry little pieces of dried paste out of the crack, aware that any slip-up with the screwdriver could make the crack bigger. But he needed to get every last piece of paste out of there, to leave no evidence. The last thing he wanted was for the Hausmeister to find out that he'd tried to fix the crack himself. He had determined that that would be worse than the Hausmeister finding a crack that stretched from floor to ceiling.

He could not discern whether the crack had spread open wider and suddenly wished for a photo, a before-shot, to compare this reality, this crack, to. He stared into it while Anka ran the vacuum in the kitchen. The plates rattled and clinked against each other. What was she doing—vacuuming the plates? Pulling himself away from that thought, he looked again into the crack. Nothing really in there but darkness. He needed something to distract from it so that the eye would, for instance, be attracted to the window and its copper steeple instead of being seduced by the black fork of lightening.

Anka came down the hall. Bernd's stomach contracted. He used his body to shield the crack from view. Anka looked in and said, "You know, we need to do something about that."

"About what?"

"About that crack in the wall," she said, and turned around and left the room.

He followed her into the kitchen. "What crack do you mean?" he said, not knowing what else to talk about.

"The crack where the lamp and the table used to be. The toothpasted crack." she replied, and started drying the plates from this morning's breakfast.

Bernd caught up with himself.

"Yes. Did the toothpaste work, you think?"

"I don't think so. The color doesn't match."

Bernd went back to the bedroom to continue studying the crack. Anka walked down the hall. She went into the bathroom and he heard her shut the door. The sound of her peeing was soothing, like listening to rain. He looked back at the wall and took the toothbrush out of his back pocket. It was all coated grey with sheet rock dust. He worked a little more on making the crack look distinct and natural as it did before he'd tampered with it. He did a good job, he thought.

Anka walked back down the hall, maybe to go dust his wall. Bernd went into the bathroom to get a load of bricks to start working again. The stacks in the tub were diminishing happily. He took a Key West Florida beach towel and spread it out, nearly covering the entire floor with a screen print of a livid orange and pink sunset and an ultra-blue stylized ocean and waves. Anka's sister had given her that towel last summer, after she'd gone on vacation. Anka had a low opinion of Americans, and always talked about how her sister was turning into one herself. You can't live there long, she'd said, until you just turn into one. Bernd thought that he and Anka would go to the beach one day. But not Key West. They'd go to a nice European beach.

He bent over the towel as he picked bricks out of the tub and laid them onto the towel. When the sunset and ocean were nearly covered, he guessed he had enough. He hoisted the load up into his arms, cradling the rough corners against his chest.

Then he passed out.

The next thing Bernd saw was Anka, standing over him in one of his cotton undershirts. He could smell her. She'd just bathed. He could see the curly black hairs under her arms as she was reaching down to him, removing the four or five bricks that lay on his chest, stomach and groin. He reached up and pulled one of her underarm hairs, not knowing at the moment what else to do.

"Ow! Bernd!"

He sat up, the last brick falling with an affirmative thud between his legs. He pulled away the towel, and one of the bricks rolled onto Anka.

"Bernd!" she cried again. Then she knelt and started patting her knees violently. "I'm so sorry. I really am. I didn't know you would be in here this morning. I should've flushed the toilet, I shouldn't have left the cleaner in it, with those fumes and all...I'll get the blue colored stuff next time, really."

Bernd had stopped listening. He was okay. He had a cut on his side, a slight headache, and an idea. It was simple. He would be able to finish the wall and fix the crack at the same time, but he would have to wait a week, one week, one more Sunday. He kept his hand on his side as he let Anka help him up and began waiting.

Bernd and Anka sat on the floor of the bedroom. He leaned over to fill his hands with the bulk of two bricks, feeling the cut on his side part like two lips blowing a kiss. Dust had settled in the wound, first infecting it, and then making it itch. Bernd knew that the itch meant that the wound was healing, and indeed, it had begun scabbing in from the sides. Every time Bernd reached to scratch, he thought how Anka vacuumed his wall—their wall—how she ran the nozzle of the hose along the sides of it, carefully sucking small pieces of mortar and cement. Each day, the vacuum sounded more like an asthmatic dragon. They wouldn't be able to sell it at the completion of the project. Perhaps an Ossie would take it, thought Bernd. Ossies were likely to take anything.

All morning, they had been working on their wall, working mostly quietly, putting stone upon stone. Anka told Bernd to hand her the piece with the sloped edge, and he did. She weighed it in her hand, and then placed brick and hand on top of the wall, right against the crack. It was finished.

Outside, the copper steeple had just stopped clanging it annunciatory Easter bells. Bernd felt as if it chimed for him; the sound reverberated in his teeth, down his arms and into the tips of his fingers.

For a moment both suspected the wall, they themselves, the entire apartment might collapse—descend, really—under the weight of the noise. They looked at each other and were surprised at how they had this identical thought at the same time. But neither the wall, nor the apartment, nor anything that was in it fell. And neither Bernd nor Anka felt anything but ecstasy after that massage of bells.

© Claudia Grinnell