The Leipzig Affair

by Fiona Rintoul

  “I should leave you young people,” Frau Dannewitz says, grabbing her stick and pulling herself to her feet. “Perhaps you’ll come over tomorrow and help me to clear out my tiled stove, Magda.”

  “Of course.” Like this hideaway you share with Kerstin, Frau Dannewitz’s apartment is heated by an old tiled stove. In winter, you haul the brown coal briquettes that feed it up to her third-floor apartment for her. It’s been out all summer, but soon the weather will change and it will be time to light it again.

  “You should move, Frau Dannewitz,” says Kerstin. “You’d be much more comfortable in a modern apartment. We’d help you move, wouldn’t we, Magda?”

  You nod. “Absolutely. And we’d come to see you often. Think: you could have central heating and a private bathroom and perhaps a little balcony. Mimsie could sit out on the balcony and watch the birds.”

  Mimsie is Frau Dannewitz’ cat. The old lady shakes her head, as you knew she would. You’ve had this conversation a thousand times. As a Fighter Against Fascism, she could easily get a place in a new development, but she doesn’t want one. “Mimsie might run away,” she says. “And anyway, I like it here. I’m used to this place. I’ve lived here for forty years. I have my freedom here.”

  You know exactly what she means. You have your freedom too in this crumbling and forgotten attic apartment, still registered to Kerstin’s grandmother. You and Kerstin have made a cosy den for yourselves here with some old bits of furniture and a few colourful rugs and cushions. The shelves are stacked with precious, hard-to-obtain books and copies of the underground magazines you used to contribute to before you started playing your part. It’s your only home.

  You help Frau Dannewitz into her cardigan, and she gathers up her bag. On her way to the door, she says, “I like this photograph.” It’s one you took when you were visiting your mother in Berlin during the summer holidays. The previous week you developed it in the small dark room you’ve created in the hall cupboard here. It shows tourists watching the changing of the guard at the Neue Wache memorial to the victims of war and captures a rare moment of inattention from one of the goose-stepping soldiers, a hint of a smile.

  “Thank you. I’m pleased with it.”

  Frau Dannewitz takes your hand in hers and pats it. “Is it because of your photographs that you didn’t get a place to go to England, Magda?”

  The walls here are pinned with subversive photographs taken with the Zenit EM camera your brother brought back from the Moscow Olympics for you in 1980: soot-coated buildings, down-and-outs, funny moments like the one at the Neue Wache. But now you no longer publish them in underground magazines, you reckon it’s a harmless occupation.

  You smile at her. “No. It was just one of those things. There were other good candidates.”

  You want Frau Dannewitz to believe this. You don’t want the last shreds of her belief in a system she helped to create in good faith to be ripped from her.

  But she’s tut-tutting and shaking her head. “It’s not right,” she says. “You were the best.”

  When she’s gone, refusing any help with the stairs, Kerstin comes and hugs you.

  “Magda, I’m so sorry,” she says. “I just can’t believe it. Without Hencke, I might not have been surprised. But after everything you did – ”

  She breaks off. You press her to you. She has the strong, firm body of a gymnast. She used to compete at gymnastics for her local town when she was at school, but as she got older her parents dissuaded her from training. They didn’t want their daughter to be too good at sport. There was a time when you would have thought that was mad, but after what happened to your brother you know they did the right thing.

  “I picked up a telegram for you at the hall of residence,” Kerstin says. “It looks like it’s from Marek. That’s another reason I was sure you’d got the place. I thought you’d telegraphed him, and he was sending you his congratulations.”

  You rip the telegram open. He’s in Leipzig the following week and wants to meet you. He says he’ll be in Café Grossmann at 20.00.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was early evening when I first crossed the border into East Germany at Wolfsburg/Oebisfelde, and the light was starting to fade. Perhaps that’s why, when I think of it now, I see it in black and white – a monochrome blur of concrete, metal tracks and glaring searchlights. Or perhaps the many black and white photographs I’ve seen since have distorted my recollection of that first crossing.

  The train was quiet when I went over, but a few miles from the crossing at Braunschweig an elderly couple boarded and took the seats opposite me. They moved close together when the West German border guards got on at Wolfsburg, and the old man patted his wife’s knee reassuringly.

  “Couldn’t you find anywhere better to go?” the guard joked when he saw my entry visa with ‘permission to remain for one year’.

  “I wanted to go somewhere different,” I said.

  “Well, it’s certainly different over there,” he chuckled. “Isn’t that so?” he said to the old couple. They smiled but didn’t reply.

  The guards jumped out of the train, banging the doors behind them, and I saw them standing on the platform smoking and cracking jokes. As the train creaked back into life and edged forwards, the carriage fell still. The elderly man took his wife’s hand. The woman in the seat opposite put aside her knitting. A middle-aged man at the far end of the carriage, slid his copy of Der Spiegel inside his jerkin. We all peered out of the window for a moment, but when the border fortifications came into view the others stared into their laps. I alone kept watch, hoping for my first glimpse of a guard tower, a sniffer dog or a tumble of barbed wire.

  We juddered to a stop again at Oebisfelde, and East German border guards exploded on to the train. “Passport control!” they yelled as they pounded along the corridors, wedging open the carriage doors. A stony-faced guard checked our passports while another combed the carriage, training his torch behind light fittings and under ceiling panels. There was a long delay while a third guard made a meticulous search of the man in the jerkin’s suitcase and confiscated my copy of the Guardian. Then they were gone, slamming the doors in unison as they jumped on to the platform, and the train once again creaked into life.

  “They took your newspaper,” the old lady ventured once we were trundling through the fields of Saxony-Anhalt. “What a shame.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I smiled. “I’d finished with it anyway.” They were welcome to my newspaper. I was just relieved the guards had searched the man in the jerkin’s suitcase rather than mine. My bag had four brand new pairs of Levi’s in it that John Bull-Halifax had asked me to transport.

  “Make sure you have a plausible story ready for the border guards in case they search your luggage,” he’d told me when I collected them from him. “You’re allowed to import gifts up to the value of 200 East Marks, but people aren’t allowed to sell goods on.” But of course I didn’t have a story ready.

  “Are you British?” the old lady asked. I nodded, and she nudged her husband. “See, Vati. I told you. I took a peek at your passport when the guards were checking it,” she confided. “Are you on holiday here?” Her tone suggested this was a fantastical possibility. I told her my business in Leipzig, and her eyes widened. “I didn’t know such a thing was possible, did you, Vati?”

  The old man shook his head. “Nope. Never heard of such a thing.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

  “We’re going home,” the old lady said. “We’ve been visiting my sister in Braunschweig. I retired last month so now I can go where I like. Once you’re past sixty they don’t care what you do. You’re no longer economically useful.”

  “Shh, Mutti,” the old man said.

  “Ach, Gerhardt, what does it matter? At our age, nobody cares what you say. I hadn’t seen my sister for five years,” she said to me. “Imagine that.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to be quiet, Mutti,” Gerhardt said, patti
ng her hand.

  “Five years?” I said. “That’s a long time.”

  “It’s not so very long. After sixty-one we didn’t see my sister for twelve years, did we, Gerhardt?”

  “That’s when the border was fortified,” her husband said in an undertone.

  “Goodness. That must have been hard.”

  “It was,” said the old woman. “Very hard.” She told me how her older sister had moved to Braunschweig in 1956, seeking a better life. Initially, they visited each other often, but after 1961 that became impossible.

  “When she got married, we applied for permission to travel to the wedding, but it was refused, even though we were leaving our two children behind. What better guarantee could there be that we’d return?”

  Eventually, she told me, her sister’s family had been able to visit them in East Germany every second year. But her sister’s health had deteriorated in recent years and after her husband died she couldn’t face the journey alone. “We spoke on the phone, but it’s not the same. And we got a shock, didn’t we, Gerhardt, when we saw her? She’s aged so much. She’s an old woman now.”

  Her husband nodded. “I could have visited her two years ago when I retired, but I decided to wait for my wife. But when I saw her I thought that I should have taken the opportunity to visit her earlier.”

  “And how did you like Braunschweig?” I asked.

  “It was very nice,” the old lady said. “We had a lovely time. But there’s far too much of everything over there. Why do you need thirty different kinds of shampoo? Two or three is fine. And what – ”

  “Mutti, this is our stop.” Her husband got up and started to wrestle their bags down from the luggage rack.

  “Getting out so soon?” I asked. We’d only travelled a couple of kilometres.

  “It’s not far,” the old lady said.

  “Mutti, give me a hand here.” I jumped up to help the old man, and as I was heaving their plastic holdalls to the train door, the old lady asked my name.

  “Robert,” she repeated. “Well, good luck, Robert.” She patted my arm as her husband helped her down from the train. I handed the holdalls down to the old man. “Presents from my sister in there,” the old lady said. “Things we can’t get here.”

  “Come on, Mutti.” Her husband shook my hand and guided his wife away from the platform edge.

  I stared out of the window, as the train trundled on towards Leipzig. The landscape was alien. The huge fields of the collective farms. The tiny Toy Town cars with their dim headlights. The poster on a siding that read: 1ST MAY – THE FIGHTING HOLIDAY OF THE WORKING CLASS! It was another world – a world where you could wait more than twenty years for permission to travel a couple of kilometres.

  For a moment, I wished I hadn’t come. I wished I’d shopped Bramsden or stuck it out at St Andrews with the posh Yah girls who looked through me like water. What had I said to the West German Border guard? I wanted to go somewhere different. But that wasn’t true. I’d wanted to go to Düsseldorf.

  However, as the train creaked into Leipzig, my mood changed to one of anticipation. What would life be like behind the Iron Curtain? Would I like this city? Leipzig was a musical city, I’d read. A city of books and fashion. A spirited place.

  The station was crowded, but I spotted the man who was to be my minder straight away. Heinz Hencke was holding up a sign with the words WELCOME TO THE GDR, HERR ROBERT MCPHERSON! written on it. When he saw me, he set it down and started to wave like a maniac.

  “Welcome to Leipzisch!” he gushed in his lisping Saxon dialect as I approached.

  He was short with a little paunch nestling above his trouser belt. He wore beige cords – Levi’s – a patterned shirt and a grey jerkin. He looked exactly as I would have imagined an East German minder might, had I ever imagined such a thing – right down to his eyes, which receded alarmingly behind his thick glasses, and were flat and cold despite his smile.

  He grasped my hand and pumped it. “Pleased to meet you. How was your journey? Good, I hope. Yes, yes. Wonderful! Well, this is our GDR.” He gestured around him at the vast and dusty station concourse. “This is our little Republic. Tja, we hope you will like it here. We hope – ”

  “How did you know it was me?” I interrupted, only half joking.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Marek is sitting at a window table in a white vest top, drinking a beer. At the next table is a noisy group of students from the new intake, who keep looking over at him. His shoulder-length black hair and the gold stud in his right ear mean he stands out wherever he goes.

  “So boring,” he mouths, nodding in their direction. Then he stands to kiss you and says, “Goldener Krug?”

  Something in his manner tells you he already knows your news. You nod. The Goldener Krug is a dingy bar run by a suicide blonde called Ute with a weakness for black velvet hair bows. It’s two streets away and never full.

  Out on the street, Marek says, “I met Dieter on the tram. He told me you didn’t get a place.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t.”

  He sighs. “That’s terrible. I can’t believe it. But let’s not talk about it now. We’ll talk about it at The Goldener Krug.”

  “Well, well, I haven’t seen this young lady in a long while,” says Ute when you appear in her cavernous dive. She stubs her cigarette out and comes round the bar to give you a hug. This is Marek’s haunt really. You only ever come here with him. He can spend whole evenings propping up the bar and chewing the fat with Ute as her deadbeat customers drink themselves into oblivion.

  “This calls for a celebration,” Ute says. “I only have the Blue Strangler, but it’s on the house.”

  Marek lights a cigarette as she measures out three shots of cheap vodka from the familiar bottle with the blue snowflake label. You slide on to the bar stool next to him and take one of his cigarettes.

  “Cheers!” He knocks the harsh spirit back and slams his glass on the bar. “Two more, Ute, and a couple of beers as well. Let’s find a quiet table,” he says to you.

  The back room is empty, apart from two middle-aged men absorbed in a game of draughts. You sit down at a table in the corner, and Ute brings your drinks.

  “Such a handsome couple,” she says, ruffling your hair. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

  You haven’t been here in a long while. Marek was in Berlin all summer. Even during term time he wasn’t in Leipzig that much. In theory, he’s researching a doctoral thesis on religious motifs in post-war Polish literature at Leipzig University. But since the emergence of Solidarity and the closure of the border with Poland in 1981, there isn’t much he can write that will get past the censor. And so he writes nothing and hangs out at his place in Berlin and the huge apartment overlooking Clara Zetkin Park in Leipzig registered to him and his mother lies empty most of the time.

  “So what the hell happened?” Marek asks, when Ute has gone back to the bar.

  “I didn’t get a place is what happened.”

  “But how can that be?” He’s angry. You were afraid he’d be angry, and he is.

  “I don’t know. Hencke lied, I guess.”

  “Have you been careful? Did you do everything the way we agreed you should?”

  “Of course.”

  He slams his fist on the table, and the draughts players glance over. “Shit! This ruins everything. Look, Magda, are you absolutely sure that you didn’t give them any reason to doubt you? They’re not actually stupid, you know, the morons who run this country.”

  “I know,” you snap. “That’s why I was fucking Hencke, remember?”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “I went round to his place when I found out.”

  “And?”

  “It didn’t go well: We don’t get places on important study programmes through friendship and connections. We get them through hard work and application. I lost my temper and ran out. I was naïve to trust him. I can see that now. There’s no point in talking to him again. He was nev
er going to deliver.”

  You could tell him about Hencke’s offer to you. But you don’t. You don’t want to make him angrier than he already is. And you don’t want to curry favour: look what I did for you. He did enough for you in the time after your brother’s accident. That’s why you refused Hencke’s offer. He doesn’t have to do more.

  “Come here,” he says at last. You slide round to his side of the table and he slings his arm round your shoulders. He squeezes you and says, “I’m sorry.”

  For a long time you sit in silence, embracing, then he says, “We’ll find another way.”

  It’s what you want to hear. He could go without you. You’ve always known that. If he applied to leave the authorities would grant him permission immediately. A troublemaker. A half-Polish Jew. They’d be glad to be rid of him. He makes them uncomfortable. Maybe he’d take his elderly mother with him. She has a tell-tale tattoo on her forearm. That makes them uncomfortable too. His sister is already in West Berlin. For you it’s different. Your father’s star may have fallen in recent years, but he still has enough influence to block an exit visa for his only daughter.

  Marek lifts your face to him and kisses you on the lips. “We’ll find another way,” he repeats. “Let’s go back to my place. We haven’t been there in a long time.”

  It’s a warm summer evening. You make love on a mat on the balcony overlooking Clara Zetkin Park. The sky above the park is inky black and speckled with stars. You can hear the shouted laughter of late-night strollers in the park on their way home as he teases you with his tongue. You come over and over again, clinging to him as he moves inside you. It’s best with him. It’s always been best with him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Leizpig train station was built at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Saxon and Prussian rail companies. It has twenty-six tracks, thirteen for the Prussians and thirteen for the Saxons. It was forbidden to bring Prussian trains into the Saxon part of the station and vice versa. Everything was duplicated: two reception halls, two staircases, two waiting rooms. The result is a façade 270 metres long and a station much too big for the city.