The Leipzig Affair

by Fiona Rintoul

  FIONA RINTOUL

  Fiona Rintoul is a writer, journalist and translator who won the Virginia Prize for Fiction for her debut novel The Leipzig Affair.

  Fiona’s writing has previously appeared in anthologies and magazines, and she is a past winner of the Gillian Purvis New Writing Award and the Sceptre Prize.

  Outside Verdun, her new translation of Arnold Zweig’s first world war classic, Erziehung vor Verdun, was published in May 2014 by Freight Books.

  Fiona’s journalism concentrates on financial topics. As a journalist, she has received a State Street institutional press award and an IJP George Weidenfeld bursary for British and German journalists.

  Fiona lives in Glasgow. For more information about the author: www.weepress.co.uk

  THE LEIPZIG AFFAIR

  For Agnes

  Published in the UK by Aurora Metro Books in 2014.

  67 Grove Avenue, Twickenham TW1 4HX

  www.aurorametro.com info@aurorametro.com

  The Virginia Prize for Fiction is sponsored by ea Change Group: www.eacg.co.uk

  The Leipzig Affair © copyright 2014 Fiona Rintoul

  Cover Design: Paul Scott Mulvey

  Editor: Cheryl Robson

  Aurora Metro Books would like to thank Neil Gregory, Richard Turk, Suzanne Mooney, Emma Lee Fitzgerald, Hinesh Pravin, Chantelle Jagannath and Russell Manning.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  In accordance with Section 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the author asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of the above work.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed in the UK by Berforts Information Press.

  ISBN 978-1-906582-97-5

  eBook conversion by Swift ProSys.

  ISBN 978-1-906582-65-4

  THE LEIPZIG AFFAIR

  BY

  FIONA RINTOUL

  AURORA METRO BOOKS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to the Gillian Purvis Trust for a new writing award, which enabled me to travel to Germany to complete research for this book. Grateful thanks are also due to Sigrid Grünewald for talking to me about her imprisonment at Bautzen II and to the Gedenkstätte Bautzen for facilitating our meeting. Frau Grünewald and Jacqueline Braid were also kind enough to share extracts from their Stasi files with me.

  I am also grateful to Freight Books for permission to reprint chapters one, three and twenty-one, versions of which have appeared in Gutter magazine.

  I am indebted to my editor, Cheryl Robson, and to Felicity Parsons, Susan Kemp, Tamara Evans, Marianne Taylor and Mark Stanton for reading and commenting on previous drafts of this book. Last but not least, I would like to thank my husband, Peter Edwards, who has lived with this project for far longer than it was reasonable to expect and who is my constant inspiration.

  Oh the shark has pretty teeth dear,

  And he shows them pearly white

  Just a jack-knife has Macheath dear

  And he keeps it out of sight.

  The Ballad of Mack the Knife

  Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, 1928/

  English translation, Marc Blitzstein, 1954

  She lied to me with her body you see

  I lied to myself ’bout the chances I’d wasted.

  The Saturday Boy, Billy Bragg

  PROLOGUE

  The version of Marek’s death that Bob has played back to himself most frequently down the years is the one where Marek gets shot in the back. It goes like this:

  Marek is walking across the raked sand of the death strip. His stride is loose. His head is held high. He looks confident, like a man who knows where he’s going and what he’s going to do when he gets there. He’s wearing what he was wearing the night Bob first met him at the club in Leipzig: Levi’s and a white cotton shirt. It’s night time. The strip is floodlit. The sky is clear. A half moon casts an eerie glow over the dim-lit buildings of Berlin, Capital of the German Democratic Republic to the east and the lime trees of the Tiergarten to the west.

  A guard’s sudden cry cuts the air: “Halt!”

  Marek stops, but casually, almost as if he didn’t hear the shout. The beam from an overhead searchlight sweeps across the strip and finds him. He stands in a pool of ultra-bright light.

  “Hands up!” the guard screams.

  Slowly, Marek raises his arms. Then he leans his head back. His shoulder-length black hair shifts in the night breeze. He looks like Jesus Christ. For a moment, everything is still on the strip. Only the distant rumble of traffic disturbs the calm. Then Marek lets his arms drop and turns his head to look behind him.

  Gunfire cracks. A bullet rips towards him. The impact punches the air from his lungs. His legs buckle, and he falls down on to the sand with a thud. His head is turned to one side, and he is looking straight at Bob, his sightless eyes wide in surprise. A trickle of blood forms at his parted lips. A red stain seeps across the white cotton of his shirt. It is strangely beautiful, like an exotic flower.

  Bob knows, of course, that these imaginings are preposterous.

  – Who would attempt to sneak across the world’s most heavily fortified border in a white shirt?

  – Why does he see Marek in Berlin when he knows he was planning to cross the border in the Harz Mountains?

  – And how could Marek be looking at him when he wasn’t there?

  But that’s his vision of it. Marek in a crisp white cotton shirt. Marek walking across no man’s land with the easy grace of an athlete. Marek – beautiful, clever, bitchy Marek – mowed down by a single bullet fired into his back.

  It’s not hard to understand why this scenario provides him with the most exquisite torment. He never knew exactly how Marek died. But he did know that he was shot in the back. And he knew who pulled the trigger: it was him.

  He did it to save her. Or that’s what he told himself. But she ended up hating him. Or at least rejecting him.

  So ist ja eben das Leben. That’s Life.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Magda –

  You’re sitting in a booth in the language laboratory with headphones on and Frau Aner’s voice in your ear.

  “Übung macht den Meister,” she says.

  Practice makes perfect. She thinks this is funny, and you see her smile to herself. Jana, the class snoop, laughs out loud and is rewarded with an approving look.

  “State your names, comrades,” Frau Aner says. You hate the way her voice rasps, very close, like she’s in your head.

  “Magda Maria Reinsch,” you say.

  The laboratory for interpreters and translators studying languages from non-socialist countries is on the twenty-third floor of the university tower, a 1970s’ skyscraper that is meant to look like an open book but doesn’t. The tower’s one advantage is its view. From up here you can see all of Leipzig seeping out into the surrounding plain: the mediaeval city centre, the prefabricated apartment blocks, the flat spaces of the exhibition site that come alive every spring and autumn when foreign gue
sts arrive for the Leipzig trade fairs. To the west lie the sumptuous villas that were once home to the bourgeoisie, crumbling now and interlaced with new buildings. The ugliest of these is a pebble-dash guest house for visitors from ‘the socialist abroad’.

  But today the blinds are drawn and your only possible view is of Frau Aner, the language-lab leader, sitting up at the control console, sliding the black buttons back and forward. Frau Aner is a red-faced, cardigan-wearing woman in her mid-forties, who bounds about sniffing out ideological impurities like a dog on the scent of a rabbit. Her grasp of political ideology is loose to say the least, but that doesn’t stop her. She has the kind of nose for dissent that would make her a useful foot soldier in any regime. This, presumably, is why she has been put in charge of language-lab activities for the most dangerous language of all: English. It’s certainly not because of her language skills. She speaks English with a comedy German accent and machine-guns it with errors. They like that: the powers that be. They like to give people responsibilities they’re not quite competent to discharge.

  A whirring in your ear tells you the tape is being rewound. “We are going to run through this scenario one more time,” says Frau Aner, “and this time I believe our efforts will be repaid.”

  You wish you were out of here. You wish you were sitting at a window table in Café Grossmann smoking a cigarette and drinking a bitter black coffee. But you also don’t. Part of you is glad to be tucked away in the language-lab booth. You might meet someone you know in the café, someone from your old life, and that would be bad, because today you’re wearing their clothes and you don’t like to be seen like that.

  Dressing for the new role you’ve adopted as a politically reliable and diligent student at the Karl Marx University Leipzig is the hardest part for you, the part you struggle with the most. It’s one thing to act like you want to conform, quite another to dress like it. Clothes are special to you. They’ve always been your escape, your rebellion. Everyone in the Workers’ and Farmers’ state has to have somewhere private to go, and this is where you go. It’s your very own version of internal emigration: you do not wear their clothes.

  Correction: it’s where you went. You did not wear their clothes.

  Unfortunately, your internal emigration was external. People could see it. That was dangerous, and so it had to stop. If people are to believe in the new you, to accept that your rebellious past is behind you, then every detail has to be right. Your rehabilitation, your resumed university career, your acceptance back into the Party and the Free German Youth: these things were only possible because your father pulled strings. Even then, it was touch and go. And so, to make it all work, you have to dress like them. (That’s how you see it: you and them; dressing like them.) It’s an essential part of your disguise. If you wear your own clothes it’s a risk, and you can’t afford risks. Marek has told you that a thousand times: it seems like a small thing, but it’s not.

  “This isn’t just about you,” he said when you told him you didn’t think you could do it. And then you had to agree. Because he’s waited for you when he didn’t have to. He’s waited for you because of the special bond between you, which goes back such a long way, and because he knows better than anyone how bad things were for you after your brother’s accident.

  But it’s a struggle. Last week, in the Konsument department store, you tried. You tried very hard. But in the end you could not bring yourself even to try on the Golden Fox jeans from the People’s Own Clothing Works in Zwickau or the badly cut blouses and tops made from Grisuten and other miracle fabrics.

  Today, you’re wearing a pair of stiff trousers the colour of sick and a striped sweater that irritates your skin. You hate these clothes. You long for the moment when you’ll return to the hideaway you share with Kerstin on Shakespeare Street and rip them off. Worse still are the shoes. You drew the line this morning at the grey plastic loafers from Konsument. No one can see your feet in the language lab, and so, as a present to yourself, you’re wearing your favourite boots: knee-high brown lace-ups you bought two years ago in Prenzlauer Berg from a girl over on a day visa from Berlin (West).

  You couldn’t take your eyes off the girl’s boots. Marek’s Uncle Ivan had been over the previous week on one of his periodic visits from New York and had given you a hundred Deutschmarks. The girl looked to have about the same size feet as you and so you offered her ten Marks for her boots.

  She hesitated. “How about fifteen?” you said.

  She smiled, this breezy, blonde-haired West German girl, and you thought she was going to say she didn’t want to sell them at any price. Instead she shrugged and said, “Ten is okay.”

  She was doing you a favour. You didn’t like that but you took it anyway. “It’s a deal,” you said.

  You tried the boots on in a back alley. They fitted perfectly. The girl put them back on, and you went into town on the tram together so she could buy some cheap shoes to wear on the train back to West Berlin.

  “It’s good to have something to spend the money on,” she said as you headed towards the Centrum department store on Alexanderplatz. “It’s always hard to get rid of the compulsory exchange.”

  But the canvas shoes she chose were cheap and didn’t use up much of her twenty-five East Marks.

  “Shall we take a look on some of the other floors?” you asked.

  She glanced around her. You knew how old-fashioned the wood and glass display counters must look to her, how rude the stony-faced assistants must seem.

  “Let’s just go,” she said.

  You took possession of the boots in the Centrum toilets and headed back out on the Alexanderplatz with her.

  “Do you want the rest of the money?” the girl asked when you were standing by the Friendship Between Peoples fountain, saying your goodbyes. You gave her a hard look. You imagined her telling her friends in West Berlin how kind she’d been to a poor East German girl.

  “I didn’t mean – ”

  “Thank you,” you interrupted, taking the money and shoving it in your pocket.

  The boots are beautiful. You love them. You’ve polished and nurtured them, and they look as good today as when you bought them. The boots were the beginning. You got them shortly after your brother Jürgen’s accident – difficult days. Soon, you stopped buying clothes from the shops altogether. It was your way of refusing, of showing you didn’t accept what had happened to your brother. It wasn’t easy, but you managed. You had your sources: hand-me-downs from Aunt Vladka, things you ran up yourself on your grandma’s old sewing machine, the odd skirt or blouse picked up in Prague or Budapest.

  A hissing in your ear indicates that the tape is back at the beginning. Frau Aner fixes the class with one of her build-the-revolution looks.

  “Commence!” she says, pressing the ‘play’ button with a dramatic flourish.

  Frau Aner is wasted on university students. She’d be much better leading a troupe of Pioneers, sweet little baby communists in white shirts and red neckerchiefs. You can just see her standing in front of them, swinging her arms about like a human windmill, teaching them to love Honecker and sing Youth Awaken!

  The voices start again. The scenario is this: Mr Green, a representative from the Greater London Council, is visiting Berlin where he is being shown around by Comrade Schwarz, a member of the Municipal Assembly of Berlin, Capital of the GDR. You are to interpret for them.

  “My Goodness,” says Mr Green, “considering that Berlin, Capital of the GDR is such a big city, the air is very clean. How did you achieve this result?”

  Frau Aner rarely listens in on your work. It upsets her because your English is so much better than hers. You take a chance.

  “Scheisse,” you say, “wenn man –”

  But you’ve miscalculated. There is a buzz in your ear. “No!” barks Frau Aner. “This is incorrect. Begin again.”

  “Himmel,” you say, “wenn man –”

  There is a long pause before Comrade Schwarz speaks again. “The answ
er is simple, Herr Green. In our Republic, state and society attach major importance to the rational use and protection of nature, mineral resources and raw materials. Measures to keep the water and the air clean, to protect the soil –”

  It’s as bad as the ‘news’ in Neues Deutschland, the Party newspaper: The USSR and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic sign an agreement to deepen friendly co-operation. Comrade Erich Honecker, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and Chairman of the GDR Council of State, is greeted by cheering crowds in the model new town of Hoyerswerda. You buy Neues Deutschland every day now and hold it in front of your eyes on the tram but you never read it. You don’t believe anyone does. It’s unreadable.

  “In keeping with the Environmental Policy Act of 1970,” Comrade Schwarz continues on the tape playing in your ears, “many elected deputies of local people’s assemblies are making broad efforts in the area of air quality and –”

  It’s hard to concentrate on this rubbish. You know what the air is like in Berlin, Capital of the GDR – a mix of brown coal dust and two-stroke fumes that leaves a bleak ferrous after-taste. It was always the first thing you noticed when you returned to the city from your parents’ dacha as a child. And right now it’s harder than usual, because yesterday, Marek received a telegram from John Bull-Halifax in Edinburgh. It said (in code) that the Scottish research student who is arriving after the summer break will bring you four pairs of Levi 501s: one to keep and three to sell. Marek is to collect them from him. It’s safer that way.

  Naturally, you can’t breathe a word of this to your fellow students of interpreting. The only person you can tell is Kerstin, and you’re burning to see her.

  “Comrade Reinsch!” Frau Aner barks in your ear. “You have not translated the last sentence. Please apply yourself at once.”