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Every evening once supper is eaten, his homework is done and his younger siblings are put to bed, Anthony Bridgerton prises open the loose floorboard under his bed and takes out the communication radio that he very much should not have.
He had swiped it not long after his family had first come to West Germany . His father, an Allied serviceman, had been given a defective radio and traded in this broken thing for a new working one and Anthony had taken it without anyone spotting him.
He told himself it was so he could take it apart, find out how it worked, maybe even fix it, but he knows this is only half the truth. The other half is that he feels sorry for the broken radio.
It is not an easy fix. Anthony knows his way around circuit boards and transistors. It should not be a difficult fix and yet he scours empty radio waves in vain for weeks.
Until he hears a girl’s voice.
“Hello? Is anyone there? Over.”
“Hello. I am here. Over.”
She is in East Berlin. She could live as little as a few miles away but the other side of the Berlin Wall may as well be on the other side of the universe. She is risking her life by having a contraband communication radio, she is risking everything by making illegal contact with a boy in West Berlin. He should re-break his radio, never again talk to the girl on the other side of the wall.
He does no such thing. She’s lonely and so is he.
He’s careful to not reveal too much about himself. This girl could be anyone and even if she’s someone safe, the radio channel is open, anyone could be listening. It’s best to proceed as if everyone is.
Her name is Kate. Anthony figures it’s safe enough for her to say, even if it is her real name. There must be any number of Kates and Katies and Catherines and Katherines and Katheryns on both sides of the wall.
He tells her his name is Ant.
“Ant? Like an insect? Have you got six legs? Do you carry a single leaf on your back all day?”
She is giggling the whole time. It’s a rather sweet sound.
They’re about the same age, although they don’t state it explicitly. He talks about his parent’s wishes for him to go to university and his own wishes for something else. Kate says she’s been on the waiting list for a car ever since she got her driving licence.
“But fuel is so expensive. I’m not sure it’ll even be worth it.”
“Is it that bad in East Berlin? Is it true you have no food?”
She snorts. The speaker of his radio crackles.
“Been gorging yourself on government propaganda, fascist?”
Anthony’s cheeks burn red in the darkness of his room.
“I’m not a fascist!”
“You are west of the wall, are you not?”
“That does not make me a fascist!”
No voice comes through the radio. Anthony panics that he’s offended her, scared her off, that this friendship is over before it’s even begun but then-
“It is not as bad as all that. There is food. I am never hungry.”
“Don’t you have to queue for ages in the snow for just a loaf of bread?”
She snorts again but he thinks it’s an amused snort.
“It is June, so no, I do not queue in the snow. I know how to get bread. Perhaps you are thinking of Moscow.”
—
It’s little things like that.
Anthony too knows how to get bread, you go to the bakers or to a market and buy it. The way Kate says she ‘knows how to get bread’ makes it sound like it’s not a simple feat, as though there are layers of complexity that she has not noticed, like a frog in slowly warming water.
There are other strange things she says too. Like when she says “Ugh, power’s out again,” or when she laments the difficulty of getting good coffee and the impossibility of any chai. Anthony is drinking coffee as she says this and he almost drops his mug in horror.
“What do you mean you can’t get good coffee?”
“Exactly what I mean, Ant. No chocolate either. But of course-” and here her voice changes in the strangest way, suddenly more well-spoken, more monotone, as though a string has been pulled out of her back and released causing her to say, “-it is not all bad. We get everything we need.”
“But what about what you want?” Anthony says softly.
She does not answer.
—
Anthony talks to her more and more. She is the first voice he hears when he wakes and the last he hears before he sleeps. He saves stories for her, funny anecdotes about his day, and delights in her laughter, dreams about it at night.
He does not talk about what brought his family to Germany although he thinks she might have picked up how his accent is not entirely perfect, how he sometimes says “That’s a good book” rather than “That book is good for me.” He is careful not to speak about the size of his family, the one thing that truly will reveal who he is to anyone listening. Instead he talks about his ‘sister’ and his ‘brother’ without revealing how many he has of each.
“Did I tell you about the time my brother drowned my sister’s favourite doll in the river?
“No! Tell me, this sounds hilarious.”
“He got a bad mark in a maths test and said the doll was secretly a witch that put a spell on him. When my sister said this was obviously ridiculous, my brother conceded this was possible and the only way to be sure was to see if the doll floated or not.”
His radio speaker wheezes with Kate’s laughter. She can barely speak coherently and the joy he feels from this makes him roll over in bed and kick his feet like a teenage girl in a John Hughes movie.
“I got in trouble last week down by the river. My stepmother was furious with me.”
He knows she’s deliberately baiting him, like a fish he bites anyway.
“Really? What did you do?”
He thinks he can hear her smile in her voice.
“Took off my shoes and went paddling in the Spree. That’s it, that’s my great crime. Apparently it’s dangerous.”
He can definitely hear her eyes roll but he chuckles over the radio anyway, lets her know he enjoys hearing about her life.
“I just wanted to make friends with the turtles.”
“There are no turtles in the Spree, Kate!” he splutters. It is his turn to be incandescent with laughter, Kate joining in.
—
Not all their conversations are so joyous. One evening, Anthony sits on the windowsill in his room, forehead against glass, watching lightning fork across the sky. He loves storms, can't explain why, but maybe it has something to do with the sheer force of nature, how no matter what humans get up to on the ground, they are no match for the mechanisms of the universe.
But then a sad, small, scared voice crackles through the radio.
“Ant? Are you there? Over.”
“Hello Kate. I'm here. Are you alright? Over.”
It's the storm. Even as Anthony is in wonder that the same storm thunders over both of them on both sides of the wall, Kate is under her bedsheets, hugging her radio, terrified of the storm outside.
“I have always been afraid of storms. I’m not sure why, I've been trying to just grow out of it but I can't.”
“It's alright,” says Anthony soothingly, “Everyone is afraid of something. What can I do to help you?“
“Just- just talk to me. Tell me a story or something.”
He's not sure why but he tells her the story of how his parents met. How his father had gone to a Beatles concert with his sisters and met a girl who had been in love with Ringo Starr right up until the moment she laid eyes on Edmund Bridgerton. They’d stayed in touch until they were old enough to marry. The wedding photo of Violet and a long-haired Edmund had adorned a mantlepiece in every home they'd ever lived.
Anthony leaves parts of the story out. He doesn't say that Violet and Edmund had eight children in fifteen years because that would give him away to anyone listening. He doesn't say his mother had died when his youngest sister was only a baby because… well he doesn't really want to examine why. He doesn't say that not long after her death, his father had received a posting for West Berlin and, given their motherless status, moved the whole family to only a few yards away from the Berlin Wall.
Anthony promises himself he’ll tell her one day. If he and Kate ever meet, if they ever have a conversation where they hear the words out of each others' mouths rather than out of a crackling radio speaker, he'll tell her.
“How are you doing, Kate? Over.”
Her voice is much calmer now, a bit sleepier.
“Much better. You've really helped. Thank you.”
He smiles at the radio even though she can't see.
“Good. I'm glad.”
—
Anthony asks his father about visiting East Berlin. Edmund lowers his paper, regards Anthony over the top in puzzlement.
“East Berlin? Why? You don’t know anybody there.”
He almost tells him. Almost tells his father about the radio, about Kate, about everything.
He doesn’t, of course.
“Just to see what it’s like,” Anthony says, hoping his shrug is as nonchalant as he thinks it is, “Broaden my horizons. See how people live.”
“It is not the nicest place,” says Edmund slowly, “The people there have to watch their backs constantly. The buildings are in terrible disrepair. It is no wonder so many of them are trying to defect. Why on earth would you want to go there?”
“I think it’s important for me to see,” says Anthony. Then he plays his trump card, “I have lived in a rather privileged bubble. I know you took us out of Eton and moved here so we could experience somewhere new. I’d like to see another way of life, especially before I go to university.”
Edmund says nothing for several moments and Anthony wonders if he’s laid it on too thick. But then his father folds up his newspaper and says, “Very well. I’ll see about getting you a permit.”
—
Anthony only gets a day permit, but that’s good enough. He has no idea how he’ll find Kate, given he has no idea what she looks like or where exactly she lives but he thinks that maybe if he walks around enough, he’ll magically feel her in the air, be drawn to her like a magnet. He doesn’t tell her he’s coming, doesn’t dare. If anyone is listening, he doesn’t want them to think he’s trying to smuggle something to Kate or trying to smuggle her out.
Still, he’s excited when he arrives at Checkpoint Charlie, trying not to bounce up and down on his toes as the unfriendly East German patrol guard searches his belongings, checks he’s not taking any money with him through the wall. Then he stops.
“Actually, no. You will not be crossing the wall today.”
Anthony stops mid-bounce.
“But I have a permit.”
“I do not care.”
“Why?” this question he almost does not dare ask. In case the guard has discovered something illegal. In case somehow he knows about the radio.
“I do not have to give a reason,” the guard spits, “Go home, boy.”
Anthony runs.
At home he throws himself face down on the pillow. When Kate’s voice crackles through the radio some hours later, he tells her he’s very tired and cannot speak to her tonight. The disappointment in her quiet “oh” pulls on his heartstrings and he hurries to tell her that he’ll talk to her in the morning.
“Actually, maybe you can just talk now? If you don't mind me not replying much? It'll be nice to hear your voice as I fall asleep.”
Kate doesn't answer for several long moments and he worries that he's pushed too far. But then she says ‘alright’ in a voice softer than his pillows and duvet and tells him the story of how her mother and father met. Not her stepmother who scolded her for paddling in the river but her birth mother, who lived on the other side of the country from her father and exchanged letters with him through a penpal programme. They fell in love through their letters long before they met each other for the first time.
Anthony thinks she might be leaving some details out, in case anyone other than him is listening. She mentions her home country but does not elaborate on where that is if it’s not Germany. She talks about both her parents in the past tense- although he supposes he could have worked that out for himself regarding her mother. She never mentions what either of her parents did for a living.
Anthony tries to keep his eyes and ears open as long as possible but it’s no use, sleep covers him like a heavy blanket. He just about manages to hear Kate whisper, “Goodnight, Ant.”
He answers her in his dreams.
—
There comes an evening where Kate is on the airwaves before he is, asking “Come in, Ant. Over,” crackling with excitement- or is that the static?
One of her school friends has managed to get a magazine smuggled through the wall. Kate is fascinated, and tells Anthony about safety pins and piercings and leather jackets and extreme hairstyles only achievable with copious amounts of hairspray.
“I haven’t seen hairspray for ages,” she says, having yet to give him a chance to get a word in edgeways, “My stepmother says you used to be able to get it pretty easily. She says it’s the thing she misses most now. And we missed the leather jacket shipment last year. My wool coat is a little small now but it’s alright. I can manage.”
“Can you?” he says softly.
“Yes,” she says firmly, and he doesn’t question her further.
She continues talking about the magazine, how fascinated she is by the punk fashion, by the interviews with the music stars inside. Supposedly there is a punk scene in East Berlin but she has no idea how to find them or if it’s even safe to. The Stasi take a dim view of those that are a bit different.
Anthony knows the magazine she means, his brother Ben gets it sometimes. When the new issue comes out he buys it himself and reads it to Kate over the radio.
They discuss the music, the fashion. Anthony’s never been one for more ‘out there’ fashion, his tastes skewing more conservative, but through Kate’s eyes he begins to appreciate the creativity, the yearning for freedom from oppression, the commitment to self expression that punks unapologetically strive for.
He goes to the music store with Ben and buys cassettes, plays them in his Sony Walkman and holds the headphone speaker up to the radio microphone. He and Kate talk about the music for hours, analysing the lyrics, discussing their favourite parts of the melodies, the pros and cons of each genre.
Their tastes differ to some extent. She loves the Sex Pistols, Social Distortion and Wuntanfall. He prefers Depeche Mode, The Human League and Genesis. Both of them love David Bowie and Kate all but screams down the radio when he tells her that Bowie is going to be part of a three-day show called ‘A Concert for Berlin’ right next to the wall.
They talk about the upcoming concert for weeks. Kate is excited when she finds out a popular radio station is going to broadcast the entire concert and even more excited when she tells him that she’s actually not going to listen on the radio, she's going with a group of her friends to the wall itself and listen to the sounds of the concert over the wall.
“Can you even imagine Ant? Bowie performing in West Berlin and so many of us listening here in East Berlin! It’ll be like we’re there!”
The joy in Kate’s voice is no match for the dread in Anthony’s gut.
“Kate- are you sure it’s safe?”
“You sound like my stepmother,” says Kate, joy gone, angry with him, “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I can’t not go. I can’t not be a part of this. There is literally a wall around my whole life, I can’t let it be around my mind too!”
Anthony doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know what to say, how to tell Kate that’s scared for her, how to tell her why, the true depth of his feelings for her, this girl he’s never met.
—
The concert is incredible. Anthony and some of his older siblings go to all three days, singing at the tops of their voices, dancing with each other, with strangers. As much as he can, he projects his voice in the direction of the Berlin wall, over the wall, as though Kate might be able to hear him. It’s an intoxicating thought, he has no idea where exactly in East Berlin she lives, but at least right now they may only be a few feet apart. Her voice might be one of the cheers that comes over the wall.
When Bowie sings ‘Heroes’ on the second day, Anthony sing-shouts the lyrics at the wall, not caring about poise or decorum or key. He thinks his siblings are taken aback but he doesn’t care, only wants Kate to hear, to feel somehow that he’s thinking of her, that he’s always thinking of her, that although the wall divides them, nothing else does.
“I-I can remember
Standing by the wall
And the guns shot over our heads
And we kissed as though nothing could fall.”
—
After the concert, the newspapers are full of the riots in East Berlin. Image of the police attacking and arresting concert-goers as though they are dangerous, as though they’ve done anything wrong by simply wanting to listen to a concert that they couldn’t even see.
The air is different in the weeks and months after. Anti-wall sentiment is at fever-pitch, Reagan himself visits West Berlin and demands the wall to be torn down. The Bridgertons read newspapers ravenously, are glued to the news in both German and English, watching as gaps appear in the Iron Curtain, as refugees defect out of East Berlin, as western powers put pressure on the GDPR to tear down the wall.
Anthony is not doing well.
Every night he listens in vain for Kate’s voice to crackle through the radio. He has not heard from her since before the concert. He does not know if she is safe, if she is alive, if she’s forgotten about him, if she’s defected somewhere out of reach. He scours the news, looking at pictures of crowds but it’s pointless. He does not know what she looks like.
—
"Come in, Kate. Over."
—
"Kate, it's Ant. Are you there? Over."
—
"...Kate?"
—
On the night of the ninth of November 1989, there is a great clamorous racket from beyond the wall. If Anthony sticks his head out of his bedroom window, he can see officials walking along the wall, going in and out at checkpoints, the nervous tension in their shoulders deepening as the shouts get louder.
His father joins him at the window, looking at the wall with the beginnings of hope in his eyes.
“Schabowski’s made a right mess of things,” Edmund says, “This is it. This is the beginning of the end.”
–
Edmund’s right. Before long the top of the wall is teaming with citizens of East Berlin shouting and cheering. The streets are lined with citizens of West Berlin cheering back.
Anthony, Benedict and Colin gather whatever tools they can carry- hammers, chisels, an axe- and they start pecking at the wall. They, along with other West Berliners, are there all night cheering every time they cut a hole in the Iron Curtain. Over the next few weeks people from all over the western world join them, bringing their own tools, borrowing from them, and piece by piece the wall is taken apart- although this happens much quicker once the bulldozers arrive.
Every day Anthony stands out in the streets watching everyone that comes through the checkpoints or steps over the fallen wall. He has no idea if he’ll see her, no idea if he's already seen her, no idea if she even wants to see him but he has to try.
Everything is against him. She may cross the wall on the other side of the city. She may have defected already.
More than anything, he does not know what she looks like.
Still he keeps looking.
Finally one day near Christmas, he sees her, a girl about his age, beautiful and brown skinned, curly black hair growing high out of her head. She's wearing ripped jeans, work boots, safety pins everywhere, including several in her ears.
She looks so unfathomably cool that Anthony’s almost intimidated, except he can't shake a feeling of recognition, of familiarity, of the sudden conviction that this strange girl is incredibly important to him.
He instinctively steps towards her and the movement must catch her eye because suddenly she's looking at him, eyes large and kind, slowly filling with that same recognition that he can feel in every vein of his body.
When he's closer to her, he sees she's holding a communication radio in her hands.
“Kate?” he breathes, not quite believing it's her, begging the universe for it to be so.
“Yes,” she says, with a wide smile, “You must be Ant? You haven't got as many legs as I imagined."
Anthony throws his arms and legs out, making Kate laugh delightedly and the sound makes him feel like the funniest man in the world.
“Ah well. Turns out I'm not a real ant. It's actually short for Anthony.”
“Kate's short for Kathani,” she says, “But I didn't dare use it on the radio.”
Anthony nods, suddenly serious. He knows why.
“I'm sorry you have not heard from me for so long,” Kathani says, her words all coming out in a rush, “My radio died. I have been trying to get it fixed this whole time.”
Anthony covers her hand with his. Touching her for the first time.
“I can fix it for you.”
There is a pause. As the world around them is changing, ushering in a new decade of peace and hope, Kate and Anthony stand there, not moving, not talking, skin finally in contact with skin.
Then Kate removes her hand from under Anthony's. He thinks he's ruined everything, misjudged the situation entirely, pushed too far but then Kate lifts her hand towards Anthony's face and cups his cheek.
Then she leans forward and brushes his lips with hers. It's a brief caress but it still counts as a kiss and Anthony's joy makes him feel like he's flying.
“I know you can fix it,” Kate says, “But you don't have to. Do you?”