The Leipzig Affair

by Fiona Rintoul

  “The committee opened an exhibition in the original Stasi rooms entitled ‘Stasi – Power and Banality’ in 1990,” Frau Martin said. “Many exhibits have been added since, and the exhibition has become permanent. You know what Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security, said? That he wanted to know everything about the East German people? This museum is a kind of monument to that paranoia.”

  We wandered from room to room. Smell samples. Listening devices. Fake stomachs with cameras concealed inside. Suspect school homework. It seemed there were no lengths, however ludicrous, to which Mielke’s ministry would go.

  “They were mad, weren’t they?” I said.

  Frau Martin laughed. “Yes and no. They were very efficient in their own way. You should go upstairs and see the archives. There are roomfuls of files. It makes you wonder what they could possibly do with all that information. The irony is that they had all this data, but they ended up knowing nothing. They didn’t see the end coming. And, you know, they were never as powerful as people thought. People used to say that every fourth person was an informer, but that wasn’t true. It was more like one in fifty. I sometimes think the Stasi started that rumour themselves to scare people. And people thought they’d suffer consequences if they refused to inform on someone. But that wasn’t really true either.”

  We were back at the entranceway. “You knew, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Knew what, Herr McPherson?”

  “That I’d feel better if I looked round the exhibition.”

  She smiled. “Maybe. In this job, you become a little bit like a counsellor.”

  “Back there in the reading room, I wished I hadn’t looked.” “People often feel like that.”

  A flash of pain in her eyes told me this was more than an abstract notion to her. “Did you – ?” I asked.

  “My husband.”

  “Christ. I’m sorry.” What kind of a man would betray a woman like Frau Martin, I wondered, with her pleasant curves and soft, olive skin.

  She gave me a brisk smile. “It was a shock. But it’s important to say that my case is unusual. In the main, family life survived unscathed. That’s something to be thankful for, isn’t it? So, what will you do now?”

  “I don’t know. My train back to Berlin doesn’t leave until tomorrow morning. Perhaps I’ll take a look round the town centre.”

  “You should. It’s changed so much. All the buildings have been renovated. But that’s not really what I meant. I was wondering what you’ll you do with the information from your files? Is there a next step?”

  Her gaze was penetrating but kind. She knows, I thought. She knows I’m in recovery. For a brief moment, I considered telling her the whole story. The weakness I’d displayed all those years ago in an interrogation room somewhere in this very building. My terrible, annihilating compulsion to drink. All the times I’d cried alone in my room because it hurt so much to carry on drinking but it hurt more to stop. Everything I’d lost: money, jobs, Annabel. The lies I’d told myself. I imagined asking her what she thought I should do next. But her expression of interest was no doubt just professional politeness. And so I smiled politely back and said, “I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “All right.” She handed me her card, which, to my surprise, listed both her office and home phone numbers. “If I can help you with anything just give me a call.”

  I wandered back towards the centre of town through Barfuß Alley. These days, it was crowded with pavement cafés, glittering with fairy lights. For a moment, I considered sitting down at one and ordering a soft drink, but I decided to head back to my hotel instead. Then, as I was walking across Karl Marx Platz, now Augustus Platz once more, I saw the number 11 at the tram stop. That was the tram Magda and I had taken when we went to the party at The Sharp Corner in the Südvorstadt the first night I’d met her. On impulse, I sprinted over to the tram stop and jumped aboard.

  As the tram swung off the ring road on to Karl Liebknecht Street, I saw that the renovations only reached so far. Here many of the buildings looked as dilapidated as they had done the first time I made this journey. And as I sat looking out on to the once familiar street that people still affectionately called “the Karli”, I realised that I wasn’t yet done with this place.

  Why had I come here? I’d come to find out if John’s hunch that Magda had nothing to do with the letter was right. Now I knew it was. But I also wanted to know what had happened to Magda. And I was none the wiser.

  I got off at the next stop and went into a café. I ordered a sparkling mineral water with lime and went downstairs to the pay phone. I thought about what Frau Martin had said. Is there a next step? she’d asked me. I knew now that there was.

  She answered on the third ring, sounding like she’d been expecting my call. “I have a question for you,” I said. “You remember the woman in my file codenamed ‘Coralie’? I know who she is. Her name is Magda Reinsch. I need to find her. Do you have any idea where she lives now?”

  “The names are blanked out for a reason, Herr McPherson,” she said.

  “I know, but – ” I stopped, unsure how to explain myself to her. “It’s important,” I said. “I came here to find her.” And as I said it, I realised it was true.

  There was a pause, then Frau Martin said, “I can’t give you any contact details from our records, Herr McPherson. That would be quite wrong. But I do happen to know that Frau Reinsch is a photographer, currently living in Berlin.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  It’s a chilly afternoon in early January. You’re in the workroom sorting through some photographs that you developed the previous day, when the phone goes. These days, the phone makes you even more tense than it used to. The pre-publicity for your exhibition at Torsten’s gallery has started to go out, and you worry that Pankowitcz will find out about the photographs you’ve been taking of him or that she will get in touch.

  She should be scared of you, but there is a big part of you that is scared of her. You’ll never forget what she said to you when you confronted her in the apartment on Shakespeare Street after you had seen your files. She knew you were going to Normannen Street. She’d tried to talk you out of it. She must have been sitting at home all day, preparing what she would say to you if your files gave her away.

  “Betrayal is just a word,” she said, meeting your gaze. “What does it really mean? We all had to survive those times, Magda, and that’s how I survived. I don’t think my activities necessarily hurt anyone.”

  “But I went to prison.”

  “Yes, and that’s when I said to them that enough was enough. You must realise that I didn’t know that would happen. When it did, I immediately started pushing for your release. In fact, I only continued to work for them so you would be released. You think your father organised it all, and he did play a role, but I’m pretty sure you’d have been in there a lot longer if it hadn’t been for me.”

  You try to know as little about her now as possible, but you do know some things. She lives in a villa in Charlottenburg and has an important job at the Pergamon Museum. She’s married to a West German lawyer and they have two children, a boy and girl.

  Pankowitcz should be scared of you too, but he’s not one little bit scared of you. That is one reason why you are creating this exhibition with Torsten.

  A couple of years ago, you published some of the photographs you took after you came out of prison in the culture supplement of a Sunday newspaper, alongside an article you helped to write about prison conditions in the former GDR. Pankowitcz saw the article and wrote you a long, vitriolic letter. You still don’t know how he got your address. You’re not in the phone book. The buzzer at Pflaster Street still says Dembowski, not Reinsch. All your photography work is handled by an agent.

  In his letter, Pankowitcz addressed you as 128. You clutched at your heart when you saw that number written on the page. Suddenly, you were back in the Stasi remand prison, exhausted and powerless. Pankowitcz said you had doctore
d the photographs. He said he could prove it. He said he was going to sue you for misrepresenting the past and misleading the public. The letter in your hand shook as you read on:

  You broke the law, 128. What should we have done with you? Every society is the same. Those who break the law must be punished and must accept their punishment. Now you try to make yourself feel better about your past crimes by accusing others of maltreatment. There was no maltreatment, and you know this very well. If it weren’t that so many journalists seem willing to lap up your sordid lies, these accusations would be a big joke, and we would all laugh long and hard.

  Pankowitcz cannot sue you. You know that. But when you read the letter, all you could hear in your head was the old man who presided at your trial, the People’s Judge, saying: In the name of the People, I sentence you …

  You tore up the letter and threw it in the bin. You tried to forget about Pankowitcz. But Pankowitcz did not forget about you. Another letter came, this time not from Pankowitcz himself, but from an organisation called the Society for Legal and Humanitarian Support: a support group for former members of the state security service of the GDR and other functionaries who believe they are discriminated against in the Federal Republic. The letter listed the names of men you had slept with, obtained from you by Pankowitcz under interrogation. We will be publishing this list on-line if you do not stop harassing Hauptmann Pankowitcz, our honest, decent and hard-working comrade, with immediate effect, the letter said.

  There were names on that list that you did not want people to see, but you tore that letter up too.

  However, Pankowitcz wasn’t done. One night, he came round to Pflaster Street. You’ll never forget the way your guts cramped when you heard him snarl his name into the intercom: “Don’t hang up, Prisoner 128,” he said. “Don’t make that mistake. We need to talk.”

  You whimpered, dropped the receiver and clung to the wall, feeling entirely helpless.

  “Release the door, 128,” Pankowitcz’s voice bleated from the dangling receiver. “Let me in.”

  You banged the receiver back in place, ran through to the living room to collect Kwan and charged upstairs to Gert’s apartment. He saved you from Pankowitcz, as he has saved you so many times. Afterwards, you laughed about it together. The look on Pankowitcz’s face when he saw Gert. The way Gert roared at him, and Pankowitcz drew back terrified, like a cartoon mouse. The squeal Pankowitcz let out when Gert pinioned him to the wall.

  But you didn’t publish any more photographs from that time after that and deep down you knew it was because you were afraid of Pankowitcz. And of her. That’s why you’ve decided to take the game to her and to Pankowitcz with the exhibition at Torsten’s gallery. Because you don’t want to be afraid any more. This is what you learnt at your brother’s funeral.

  And so you’ve been following Pankowitcz, just as his operatives once followed you. You’ve worked out his schedule. You know a lot about him. And all the while you’ve been taking photographs. Photographs of Pankowitcz and of his cronies from the Society for Legal and Humanitarian Support. Three weeks ago, you were there when Pankowitcz and a friend disrupted a talk given by a former Malschwitz prisoner.

  “I can’t get a job because of people like you spreading lies about me,” Pankowitcz yelled. “Who’s the victim here?”

  All the time you were wedged behind a pillar, snapping away. You caught the twist in his face, the righteous anger. Afterwards, you followed him home and got different pictures. Pankowitcz staring morosely into space on the U-Bahn platform at Alexanderplatz. Pankowitcz sliding a key into the front door of a bleak prefabricated apartment block near the former Stasi remand prison in Berlin, which is now a museum. He lives alone in his apartment these days, his wife having divorced him in 1995. He blames that on hostile elements too.

  But the phone call is not from her or from Pankowitcz. It’s from a certain Frau Martin at the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic in Leipzig. Someone is trying to get in touch with you. Someone from Great Britain. An old comrade.

  “What’s his name?” you ask.

  “John Bull-Halifax. He says he met you at a cultural exchange in the Soviet Union. He says he needs to talk to you about a mutual friend.”

  John Bull Halifax. It’s years since you were last in touch with him. He came to see you in Leipzig not long after your release from prison and took you to dinner at the Auerbachs Keller in the Mädler Arcade. You sat beneath the vaulted ceiling eating fried chicken and red cabbage and drinking a Romanian Pinot Noir, listening to him telling you that the westerner had received a letter saying Marek was dead.

  “Who told him that?” you asked.

  “The letter was from Kerstin. She said that she was writing it on your behalf.”

  You lit a cigarette and looked across the table at him. So handsome with his red-gold curls. So healthy and well-kept. Perfect teeth. Glowing complexion. Bright blue eyes. There was something in his tone that irritated you. He expected something from you, but you had only been out of a prison a couple of months and you had nothing to give. He thought he was quite the hero tracking you down and arranging to meet you in order to help his friend. That was clear from his manner. But what did he know? He had no idea what you had been through. The comrades from the West were all the same: naïve, condescending, and in the end really rather stupid.

  In Moscow, you were shocked by the poor standard of living. But John dismissed it as irrelevant.

  “Socialism is a process,” he said.

  It was a process that he didn’t have to live through in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In Moscow, he often suggested going to a hard-currency bar. He couldn’t understand why you didn’t want to go there even if he paid. “We’re building a vanguard for the revolution,” he used to joke, when you mocked the expensive hi-fi he’d brought with him from Britain and the gold-plated fountain pen he’d paid a black market trader far too much for on a visit to Leningrad. That evening in Leipzig those jokes weren’t funny any more.

  “Did you get Kerstin to send the letter?” he asked.

  “Is this an interrogation?” you snapped.

  “Of course not.

  You stubbed out your cigarette. “I don’t know who sent the fucking letter, but it wasn’t me.”

  “And is Marek dead?”

  You took a slug of red wine and thought for a moment. “Yes,” you said at last.

  Even today you cannot explain why you said that. Perhaps because he was becoming dead to you, even then. Perhaps because you thought it didn’t matter what you said. John Bull-Halifax was from another world and shortly he would return there.

  He sat back in his chair. “I see,” he said.

  Did he believe you? You don’t know. He didn’t pursue the topic. If he’d believed you, wouldn’t he have questioned you further? Instead, he reached across the table and took your hand.

  “I still have that photograph of you that you gave me in Moscow. It’s on my mantelpiece. What happened to the bright-eyed girl in that picture? You never used to be like this.”

  You pulled your hand away. “Well, I’m like this now,” you said.

  What would it be like to see John Bull-Halifax again now? He must know now that Marek is alive and well and living in New York with Vincent. He must have left the Party. It’s inconceivable that he’s still a Communist. You can’t imagine meeting him. You can’t imagine what you’d say to each other. And anyway, you’re very busy. You have the final triptych of your exhibition to design and mount, the one with the photographs of Pankowitcz, the one titled Ode to Fear.

  “I’d prefer not to see him,” you tell Frau Martin.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  It was a freezing cold day in the middle of January when I finally found Magda. John Bull-Halifax had rung the previous day to say that he’d exhausted all possible lines of enquiry and drawn a blank.

  “Maybe she likes to keep a low profile. May
be you should come home.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I’d been in Berlin for over a month by then, missing what my sister termed “a normal family Christmas” in Calderhill and bringing in the New Year by watching the fireworks exploding over the Brandenburg Gate from a park bench in the Tiergarten. I celebrated with a bottle of mineral water and a paper twist of roasted chestnuts.

  After I phoned Frau Martin in Leipzig, I cancelled my return flight to London, took the train back to Berlin and found a cheap short-stay apartment in the Friedrichshain area. I had no clear plan but I felt oddly elated as I hung my clothes in the wardrobe, put the wooden box from Prague on the bedside cabinet, and went to the local shop to stock up on milk, bread, butter, cheese and salami. I phoned John and told him what I’d found out.

  “It’s only half the story,” I said. “I want to know the rest, and the only person who can tell me is Magda.”

  My mission was clear – to find Magda. It was less clear how I would accomplish it. Nevertheless, it was a happy time. Between bursts of activity, I spent my days pottering about town, marvelling at how things had – or hadn’t – changed. Sometimes, I just sat in a café and read a book. It was a different kind of life from the one I’d had in London – more fulfilling in a way.

  Nonetheless, as I wandered up Schönhauser Allee that freezing afternoon, I’d pretty much decided it was time to go back to London. I was running out of money. And I was running out of ideas. John’s phone call to Frau Martin had been a last-ditch attempt to get in touch with Magda. It seemed she didn’t want to be in touch. Perhaps I just had to accept that.

  My goal that afternoon was to visit Kollwitz Platz. Having seen Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture Mother and Her Dead Son in the refurbished Neue Wache memorial to the victims of war, I wanted to see the sculpture of her by Gustav Seitz in the small park in the square that bore her name. I got a bit lost and turned into a side street to consult my map.