The Wall

Like a monstrous guillotine, the wall has slashed the arteries and nerves of Ber lin. It cuts through sewers and subways, severs bridges and thoroughfares. It bisects a cemetery, shears off churches and dwellings. Beside a green canal it becomes an ugly spaghetti-swarm of barbed wire. Along a quiet suburban street, its spine glints with jagged glass. The wall has separated sons from mothers, wives from husbands, friends from friends.

East and West have begun to live with the monstrosity of the wall. Berliners on both sides are permitted in spots to approach the wall to chat, even exchange foodstuffs and newspapers, if the Vopo guard feels indulgent. But anger remains. Sunny weekend weather brought a crowd of West Berlin youths to the border at Markgrafenstrasse. Some began throwing small paving stones at a Vopo water-cannon truck. The Vopos retaliated by firing a battering stream of water at the assailants--until a U.S. tank rumbled to the wall. The Vopo cannon's squirt quickly subsided into an embarrassed dribble.

Too Late. For Berliners, the wall measured itself out in forbidding miles of personal tragedy. They gathered in little groups on both sides of the wall to wave handkerchiefs or shout cautiously worded greetings, sometimes climbing trees for a better look. ''My wife's over there with our little boy," explained one young Berliner looking east from Gartenstrasse. "We lived over there, but we knew we had to get out, so I rented a room over here and started bringing our things over a little at a time. They stayed there to cover up until the day we could all leave for good. Then it was too late."

Some 30 refugees a day are still managing to vault the wall to reach freedom in the West, including in the last three weeks no fewer than 65 Vopos. But a young East German worker, put to felling trees along the Teltow Canal, leaped into the water to try to swim to freedom, was ruthlessly riddled with machine pistol fire--the second refugee to be killed trying to swim to freedom. Next day, despite a hail of bullets, a third swimmer made it. The Vopos promptly strung a double row of barbed wire along the canal.

Last Leap. The Communists have carefully blocked other loopholes. The entrance to the Church of the Reconcilia tion, which faces on West Berlin, was bricked up. Apartments fronting on the border have been bricked and boarded up on the first floors, and their tenants relocated. The upper floors still offer an uncertain access to freedom. On the side walk of No. 48 Bernauerstrasse, a wreath and tin can of flowers mark the place where a woman leaped to her death trying to escape. But last week a young student knocked on the door of a second-floor apartment on Luckauerstrasse. When it was opened, he raced through it, leaped safely out the window into West Berlin's Kruezberg district.

Last week, with nearly every loophole closed, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht led a gaggle of East German commissars and Soviet officers to the Bran denburg Gate. Atop the gate, once the principal gateway between East and West Berlin and now the capstone of Ulbricht's wall, a new flagpole had been hastily erected. As the East German hammer and compass flag was run up to celebrate his macabre triumph, Ulbricht watched happily.

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