Letters Across the Wall
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 1
March 13, 1978
West Berlin
Bureau of the American Dispatch
The newsroom droned with the lazy, habitual rhythm of a place that had forgotten excitement. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, their cold glow flattening every face into the same dull palette. Typewriters clacked without urgency, more from muscle memory than passion, as if the journalists manning them were factory workers assembling words on a conveyor belt.
Jonathan Harper sat at his desk near the back window, where the fog-stained glass looked out onto West Berlin’s colorless winter. The city stretched beneath him like a chipped stone mosaic—gray streets, gray buildings, gray sky. Even the people seemed gray from this height, bundled in thick coats that blurred into the concrete around them. The Wall lurked somewhere beyond the rooftops, out of sight but never out of mind, a quiet, concrete bruise on the landscape.
He drummed his fingers on the wooden edge of his desk, staring at the half-typed page in his typewriter. An upcoming “cultural exhibit” featuring moderately interesting local printmakers. A story so inconsequential it might as well have written itself. Hell, maybe it had. Jonathan wasn’t certain he hadn’t written the exact same piece six months ago—just swap the names, the quotes, the obligatory line about Berlin remaining a “thriving artistic hub despite political tensions.”
He leaned back, chair creaking in protest. Across the room, Dieter Eichel, the senior correspondent with thirty years of weary experience, sipped cold coffee and chuckled at the comics page as though it contained the secrets of the universe. Two younger staff writers stood by the editing desk arguing passionately—not about politics or reportage or anything remotely important—but about where to go for lunch. Someone suggested the place across the street that served watery currywurst. They all nodded as if this constituted meaningful debate.
It was this—this—that unsettled him most. The mediocrity. The contentment with mediocrity. The easy surrender to it.
Jonathan’s eyes traveled around the newsroom, taking in the predictable tableau: the paper stack perpetually leaning to the left, the chipped coffee mugs resting on yellowing files, the film canisters holding photos no one had bothered to develop because no one expected anything urgent anymore. West Berlin had become a staging ground—a place where American journalists waited for something dramatic to happen on the other side of the Wall, even though dramatic things rarely happened. And when they did, the wires from London or New York usually scooped them first.
His colleagues didn’t seem bothered. They looked comfortable. Settled. Even proud of their small victories—an interview with a local author, a tidy write-up of a diplomatic luncheon. They laughed easily, accepted assignments without complaint, and filed their stories with mechanical precision.
Jonathan couldn’t understand it. The world was split open just a few miles away, an entire society locked behind concrete and ideology, and yet here they were ... writing about cheese festivals and minor cultural exchanges. It felt obscene.
His gaze drifted to the corner bulletin board, where an old headline from a rival paper hung crookedly: DISPATCH MISSES BREAKING EAST CRISIS. He didn’t need to reread it. He’d already memorized every humiliating word. He had been here—right here—during that story, and he’d missed it. Missed the signs, missed the sources, missed the moment. It had carved a hollow place in him that never quite filled, even after a couple of years.
He exhaled slowly, long enough that he felt it in his bones.
At the front of the room, the bureau chief, Walter Price, emerged from his glass-walled office with a fresh sheaf of assignments. He slapped them on a reporter’s desk with the disinterest of a man distributing parking fines. Jonathan watched the interaction, unable to shake the sense that the whole bureau existed in a state of suspended animation.
How do they stand it? he wondered. How do they sit here day after day pretending this is the work? Pretending this is journalism?
Jonathan straightened his tie—a useless habit, since no one cared—and turned back to his typewriter. The metal keys looked up at him like a row of accusing eyes.
He wasn’t meant for this. He felt it in the tension that knotted his shoulders, in the restless tapping of his feet, in the way his mind wandered to the unseen world just beyond the Wall. A place where stories mattered. Where words had consequences. Where danger, real danger, lived in the margins.
Here, the only danger was falling asleep at his desk.
Jonathan sighed, placed his fingers on the keys, and forced himself to type the next line about the exhibit. But behind the mechanical rhythm of his thoughts, something was stirring—a vague, insistent dissatisfaction that whispered there had to be more than this. More than boredom, more than mediocrity, more than fading into the same gray as the city outside.
He paused his typing once again. The half-finished article stared back at him with its dull, obligatory language, but his mind drifted far from it, slipping back to the memory he tried not to revisit—the memory, the one that had lodged itself like shrapnel behind his ribs.
Outside the window, the fog had thickened into something almost tactile, blanketing the rooftops and softening the city’s edges. But in Jonathan’s mind, everything sharpened—too bright, too clear. He looked again at the headline on the corner bulletin board. He leaned back in his chair, hands folded behind his head, and let the scene unspool.
It had been two years earlier—1976. A day that began like any other. He was new to Berlin then, still eager, still forging contacts across both sides of the city. His German wasn’t flawless but good enough to navigate bars where people talked too loudly after a few drinks, good enough to catch threads of meaning in crowded rooms if he listened hard enough.
That night, he hadn’t listened.
He’d been in Kreuzberg, at a smoky cafe where activists and artists gathered. A Czech student—he couldn’t recall her name anymore, though he remembered her hands trembling around her cigarette—told him something important. Something urgent. Something like, “They’re going to move on the writers tomorrow. The ones printing the pamphlets.” She had looked at him with eyes brimming with fear. She needed someone to tell the world.
Jonathan had nodded politely, thinking she was exaggerating. Rumors were constant then—crackdowns, arrests, disappearances. False alarms came weekly. He’d grown numb to the panic. Too numb. He told her he’d look into it, promised to call someone in the morning. Then he’d walked her to the U-Bahn, watched her vanish into the underground station, and gone home.
He hadn’t made the calls. He’d dismissed her fear as overblown.
The next morning, news broke like a bomb. A coordinated sweep in Prague. Writers, poets, editors arrested. Printing presses seized. An entire circle of dissidents vanished overnight.
By the time Jonathan caught up to the story, every detail had been buried under layers of official denials and state propaganda. The student was never seen again. His editor had been furious, but not as furious as Jonathan had been with himself.
He missed the scoop—not because he lacked skill, but because he hadn’t trusted his instincts.
He had promised himself then ... Never again.
Never again dismiss a whisper. Never again ignore a fragile lead. Never again allow self-doubt or cynicism to quiet the internal alarm.
And yet here he was, two years later, covering exhibitions and cultural fluff while real stories slipped just beyond his reach.
Jonathan returned abruptly to the present as a typewriter jammed somewhere behind him with a sharp metallic clack. A muttered curse followed. The newsroom returned to its droning rhythm.
He rubbed his eyes. The memory felt raw, as if no time had passed at all.
His ambition was shaped in that moment—tempered by guilt, sharpened by failure. It was the forge that created this restless hunger, the one that made him scan every room for meaning, every overheard conversation for hidden notes, every person for what they weren’t saying.
But it had also created his self-doubt.
Every lead he chased now came with the ghost of that night whispering in his ear: Are you sure? Are you missing it again? Are you wasting your second chances?
He used to be confident. Not cocky—just certain he could spot stories, certain he had the instincts for it. After that night, something fractured. The certainty slipped through his fingers like water, leaving him with the uneasy sense that he was always one step behind the truth.
The missed story had become a shadow that walked ahead of him, blocking the light.
Was that why he hated this cultural assignment? Because it reminded him that he was still relegated to fluff, still untrusted with anything meaningful? Or because it proved that somewhere along the road from eagerness to disillusionment, he had stopped believing his instincts deserved to be trusted at all?
Jonathan exhaled sharply, running a hand through his hair. He looked around the bureau again—not with frustration this time, but with a simmering determination. The mediocrity around him pushed inward, pressing against the part of him that remembered who he once wanted to be.
Maybe the world across the Wall was quiet today. Maybe not. Maybe someone, somewhere, was preparing to whisper something important.
The phone on Jonathan’s desk rang with a flat, metallic trill—an uninspired sound perfectly suited to the assignments it usually brought. He stared at it for a moment, almost daring it to stop, as if refusing to answer might change whatever news waited on the other end. But the ring persisted with bureaucratic determination.
He picked it up.
“Harper.”
A familiar voice crackled through—a mixture of New York impatience and editorial detachment.
“Jonathan, it’s Miller. You got a minute?”
Jonathan closed his eyes. Miller. The section editor who had a knack for speaking as though deadlines were a natural weather phenomenon and journalism was a matter of filing tax forms rather than revealing truths.
“Of course,” Jonathan said, keeping his tone level. “What’s up?”
“Need you on a piece for the weekend edition,” Miller answered, papers rustling in the background. Jonathan imagined him hunched over his desk, tie loosened, juggling too many assignments with too little enthusiasm. “The cultural desk wants something on that new exhibit opening at the Altes Museum. Printmakers, I think.”
Jonathan stared at the half-typed page already in his typewriter. Hadn’t he—? No. That was the other exhibit. This was apparently a new flavor of forgettable.
Miller continued, “Should be straightforward. Just talk to a curator or two. Maybe get a quote from one of the artists if you can drag one out of a bar. You know the drill.”
Jonathan massaged the bridge of his nose. “Right.”
There was a pause on the other end, and Miller’s voice shifted—just slightly—into the register of someone attempting empathy but lacking practice.
“Look, I know it’s not thrilling. But cultural pieces keep the bureau visible. And God knows Berlin isn’t giving us much these days.”
Not giving them much. To Jonathan, Berlin felt like it was seething just beneath the surface. Stories flickered behind half-closed doors and whispered conversations. But the bureau never seemed willing to peel back the gray paint.
Jonathan forced his tone into something neutral. “I understand.”
“Good man.” Miller exhaled, relieved to avoid resistance. “Anyway, keep it clean and under a thousand words. And for the love of God, no editorializing. Just the facts, Harper. We don’t need another ‘atmospheric reflection on modern disillusionment.’”
Jonathan almost smiled despite himself. “Understood.”
“Deadline’s Thursday. I’ll look for your draft.”
The call ended with a soft click, leaving Jonathan holding the receiver for a moment longer before setting it down.
The newsroom seemed quieter than before, though nothing had actually changed. Dieter chuckled at another comic. The younger reporters argued now about who owed whom for lunch. A typewriter dinged weakly, as though apologizing for its own presence.
Jonathan shifted in his chair, staring at the blank portion of the page in his typewriter. The article he’d already started now felt like a prelude to yet another—one more contribution to the bureau’s growing museum of mediocrity. He felt like he was slowly drowning in small assignments, each one a paper weight pinned to his chest.
Printmakers, cultural desk, straightforward. No challenge. No urgency. No consequence.
He wondered—not for the first time—whether this was punishment for the story he’d missed years ago. Not an official reprimand, but a quiet relegation to the harmless corners of journalism. Places where he couldn’t cause trouble. Or try to redeem himself.
His ambition pressed against the walls of his ribcage, restless. He could feel the shape of something larger hovering just out of reach, like a voice on the wind that hadn’t yet found its way to him. Something important existed out there—someone with a story. He could sense it the way a sailor senses approaching weather.
But the phone calls from Miller, the assignments on art exhibits and diplomatic teas—they wrapped around him like a net, keeping him in place.
Jonathan inhaled deeply, letting the frustration settle just enough to function. Then, with stiff fingers, he began typing again, the keys striking the page with a muted defiance. He could write this piece. He could write a dozen more. But he would not stop listening, watching, waiting.
The moment something real appeared—some thread of truth—he would not miss it.
Not again.
Prague, Czechoslovakia
Prague woke slowly, as though reluctant to face another day under the same heavy sky. The city’s spires, once proud silhouettes, pierced the morning fog like half-forgotten memories. Tram lines hummed weakly to life, and the first wave of commuters spilled into the streets—coats buttoned up to their chins, eyes lowered, breaths forming small ghosts that disappeared into the gray.
Klara Novák stepped out of her apartment building and onto the uneven cobblestone sidewalk, pulling her wool scarf tighter around her neck. The air was damp and cold, clinging to her skin in a way that made her feel watched before she even saw the watchers.
Prague always watched.