The Reunion

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The Reunion Page 32

by Geoff Pridmore


  Heavy men would pull him off the street shouting obscenities at him and twisting his arms before forcing him into a car that was too small.

  He would awake to a black depression. Looking across the bed at Heike, she might realise in a moment that he was carrying a secret. He wasn’t about to let that happen. How would she react if she realised that he was working to bring down the state? That he was in cahoots with Peter, but that the brother she’d known was dead? A man called Max Konczak had taken his place.

  *

  Do you know, Hanne, that I was such a bloody-minded little communist that my own husband couldn’t confide in me? That’s the sort of cousin you have!

  Some thoughts had to be blurted out loud. Not much further now.

  *

  It was the unexpected arrival one evening of Uncle wearing an unfashionable trilby hat, his old suit covered by an equally outdated belted raincoat, and to all intents and purposes quite alone – no lackeys this time.

  Cautiously glancing out of the only street-facing window, as so few people called, she’d seen Uncle Frederick only once in the past four years. She’d always hoped that one day he would call again as of late he’d been such a stranger.

  Politely standing on the step, he’d aged quite noticeably, she thought, much more frail, more bent. Perhaps that wasn’t so surprising as she imagined he had to be well over eighty. He stood patiently as the bitter east wind blew the trim sides of his white hair, while holding his hat as if ready to doff it to her upon the door being opened; but his icy, grey, rigid demeanour suggested trouble of some kind.

  She glanced back at the kitchen wall clock. Roland had not arrived home and he was often home by 7 pm, yet in his place here was Uncle with a mission he clearly had to complete.

  Her heart missed a beat; she suspected something had gone wrong, something involving Roland. She greeted the old man cautiously, like an errant child who had failed to maintain close links with her “family”. His demeanour was so entirely different, as if he were someone else entirely. Maybe it was just the cold and the onset of age being so cruel? Maybe she was just being paranoid?

  ‘I need to come inside. They’ve arrested Roland. It might be an idea if you tell me what you know.’

  His entrance, when it came, was actually quite abrupt, pushing past her and into the living room. He’d never behaved so brusquely before. This time he was here as a state official, an inquisitor, not a sympathetic family member or friend. He had been rehearsing this scenario for all the many years since being assigned as Heike’s “mentor”. The time had come, as so many of his colleagues had expected. She must have “turned” Roland, though there was no evidence to substantiate this idea.

  He removed his hat but held on to it firmly. She noticed that the white hair had not totally obliterated his once blond hair. It was a strange observation while she waited for him to deliver his news.

  ‘I have to admit,’ he began, ‘you had me fooled.’

  ‘Fooled? Why would I fool you?’

  ‘You have no interest in the GDR, Heike. Your father was an American. He was CIA. Your education was CIA. It wasn’t your fault, child. You were an innocent, they manipulated you; but you’ve done your job well.’

  ‘Job? What job? My father wasn’t CIA! He was many things that I didn’t care for, but never CIA!’

  ‘Oh, please, don’t underestimate your father or the CIA. They are clever people. They take their time – time is on their side.’

  ‘I told you – I told them! All those years ago when I first came here I told them everything they needed to know. I left nothing out. You know I didn’t.’

  ‘I couldn’t quite figure out your role, Heike. I knew you had been sent with a mission to accomplish, I just wasn’t sure what it might be. We have evidence, you know.’

  ‘Evidence? What evidence?’

  ‘You have been listening in to foreign broadcasts – teaching Roland English. You have a radio, no?’

  ‘People have radios and TVs – made here in the GDR. I was teaching Roland English so that he could go on foreign assignments for his newspaper. That was all.’

  ‘Is this how you treat the people who took you in?’

  ‘Is this how the GDR treats its citizens, Uncle?’

  ‘They could take your boy into care if you’re put in prison. Do you understand?’ he whispered, as if afraid that Bruno might hear.

  ‘I am already a prisoner.’

  Irritated, Uncle looked to the front door, donned his trilby and strode out into the darkness, leaving Heike to close the heavy oak door after him. She collapsed against the wall, dropping to the floor.

  The “honeymoon” was over, that was clear. Her adopted tribe were not so much turning against her, but admitting that they had never accepted her in the first place. In their view, she was, and would always be, American – worse, a CIA mole and sleeper. Ironic, considering she hated America, hated the CIA.

  This was worse than being locked up. She could survive imprisonment. Her beloved “uncle” thought she was a traitor and that she had let everyone down; their trust, their belief in her as a good communist. What had Roland done? What on earth had he done?

  She would phone his editor immediately. No, of course not. What would he say? “I don’t know anything – sorry!”

  Why didn’t Uncle arrest her? Little point in doing so maybe – she wasn’t going anywhere. They had her where they wanted her – under house arrest. It was their apartment, their building; they could do what the hell they liked. How naive to think they’d welcomed her, made provision for her. How bloody stupid! They simply put her into a cage and closed the door.

  Uncle had known about the radio and particularly Roland’s English lessons, and no one outside the family had any inkling. The apartment was clearly bugged and Uncle had orchestrated it. He’d controlled everything.

  Heike’s immediate response was to pull the place apart, but what was the point? The damage was done – the state listened and watched, and pulling out wires now would only bring the Stasi to the door with an arrest warrant and an eviction notice.

  If they insisted on listening for the truth, they should have the truth.

  ‘I’m a stupid bitch!’ she ranted at wherever she suspected the hidden mics to be secreted – the ceiling, the light fittings, wall sockets.

  ‘All I ever wanted to be was a good communist and a good German. I’m not a fascist and I’m not American. He probably wasn’t even my father! The CIA didn’t teach us. Mrs Moran taught us; Mr Abrahms taught us; Mr Coleman, Miss Taylor, Mrs Albright. Do you want me to go on? They weren’t CIA. We learned American history, we learned to speak and write English, we learned math and lots of things, but what I learned most of all was to hate the capitalist system!

  ‘All these years you’ve been listening – to what? My husband and I eating? Making love? Our son crying – laughing? All you’ve done is waste your time and spent God knows how much money in the process.

  ‘Are you crazy? Did you really think I was a spy or some sort of CIA agent waiting for an opportunity to bring you all crashing down? You’re crazy! You know that? CRAZY!’

  The very next morning, as soon as Bruno was safely in school, Heike set out in search of Roland, or what had become of Roland. First a bus and then a train to the Ministry for State Security in Berlin-Lichtenberg, Ruschestrasse 103, House No. 1. She knew it well enough.

  She had lost all fear of any reprisals, as matters could not be any worse than they already were. Always in the back of her mind was a story told by a woman in Bavaria whom she’d known as a child and who had remained a good friend right up to the time Heike had left the village.

  The woman, Frau Julia Groebel, had told Heike of the time her husband had been arrested by the Gestapo and taken to a prison in Frankfurt. Against the wishes of her parents, Julia boarded a train for Frankfurt with the aim of con
fronting the Gestapo. Without a second thought to her own safety, she walked boldly through the prison door and demanded to speak to the commandant, like a latter-day Christian confronting the lion keeper.

  Once inside, she insisted that she be informed as to why they’d arrested her patriotic husband. The commandant, an unremarkable man of slight stature called Scher, who looked to her as if his true vacation was that of a café patron, duly received Julia in his office and listened intently to what she had to say. His easy demeanour caused her to relax immediately – to think that there just may be some hope. Despite her initial hysteria, she had the floor; he seemed sympathetic and appeared to be no monster. If anything, she thought he seemed somewhat embarrassed, that this tirade of hers was really not necessary as it was all a perfectly understandable mistake and this was a wonderful place.

  When her long rehearsed plea for her husband’s clemency was complete, Scher simply nodded. He did not reply to her questions or enter into any conversation but instead summoned the guards to bring the boyfriend to his office immediately so that she could see him. It looked hopeful.

  Then came the noise: the sickening sounds of something heavy being dragged as if it were furniture; someone moaning as if struggling to carry the weight. A sickening sound accompanied by a vile smell now pervaded Scher’s office.

  The guards were dragging along the stone-tiled floor the beaten body of her bloodied and heavily bruised husband. They dropped him to the floor at her feet, where they commenced to kick him in the trunk, groin and face until his groans fell silent.

  Julia fled from the building not daring to look back. By the time she reached home two days later the house was empty and ransacked: her parents had been arrested and transported to a labour camp.

  Heike too would demand to know what they had done with her husband, insist that someone in authority speak to her. She would even speak to Erich Mielke himself if it got Roland released.

  Her blood turned to ice at the thought of what she was doing, but the idea that Roland’s battered and bleeding body could be dragged before her was a thought too far. She was still certain that this was modern Berlin. Such things didn’t happen anymore.

  Did they?

  It was audacious! The idea that this little hausfrau from the suburbs could storm into Stasi HQ and demand her husband’s release! But of course she was audacious. Aged nineteen she’d walked into East Berlin from the West of her own volition. Naive and innocent she’d stared communist hardliners in the face and not flinched. Convinced of her idealistic motives in seeking “shelter” from the wicked West, the weeks she’d spent incarcerated and interrogated had convinced her that she was a true child of the state who had been welcomed and certified fit for citizenship.

  Why, she was Erich Honecker’s model citizen.

  Of course, Julia had been an ardent National Socialist, as had her husband, yet their politics and commitment to the Party did not save them. There would not be a sanctuary for those who kissed the feet of the dictator. Such devotion was utterly pointless. Heike repressed the idea that the state would turn on her as the Nazis had often turned on their own followers.

  Standing outside looking in, confused by the vast complex of modern high-rise block buildings, Heike had come too far to be put off her grand entrance: but how to get in? Berliners did not walk in of their own free will. This was not an information bureau for citizens to use and access; to the contrary, it was a city within a city that existed to control them, not inform their curiosity.

  The buildings might – in the eyes of the naive – also have been a hotel or office complex. There was nothing particularly military or penal in their structure or design, and Heike suspected that it was somewhere here that she had been brought the day she approached the border guard with her plea for defection.

  She remembered the inner place but not the outer as, like her friend Julia, she’d not looked over her shoulder.

  ‘Please, my husband has been arrested. I need to talk to someone. Can you help?’ she asked a bemused guard who’d been watching her.

  ‘Give me your papers,’ he grunted, proffering the palm of his hand as if awaiting a gratuity. She dutifully handed over her ID card but could offer no official letter inviting her attendance.

  ‘I need to see something more than this, fräulein.’

  ‘I’m a friend of Herr Frederick Wendt. He is a leading Party official. You can call him. He will vouch for me.’

  ‘You’d better come with me, fräulein.’

  Comrade Inspector Bertrand Froi eventually received her, but only after several hours of her sitting patiently, sitting on hands, rehearsing words. He was a solidly built, plain-clothes officer still young enough to be idealistic and ambitious who immediately disarmed her with his gentle approach and proffered consideration for her wait. She had not expected such a “gentlemanly” reception, but there would be no private audience, no invite to an office in the inner sanctum. As colleagues came and went through reception doors, Froi had no intention of being detained a moment longer than he had to be.

  The cold, hard facts were this: ‘Your husband has been arrested and is currently being interrogated because of his membership of a group that is attempting to destabilise the state. This is criminal activity of the most severe order.’

  ‘He has not. That’s ridiculous! He’s a working journalist. He works for the state.’

  ‘It was fortunate that we were able to infiltrate the group before any real damage could be done.’

  Then it dawned on Heike: the extra-long hours; his excuses of having to stay late for training in new technology was the most likely cover for group meetings. For two months he’d been attending “training courses” and catching up on work at home. He hadn’t been honest with her.

  ‘So what do I do?’ she asked. ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘There was a time when you too would have been arrested along with your husband, but we don’t consider that necessary. You have friends in high places.’

  ‘What will happen to him?’

  ‘Your husband is facing a lengthy prison sentence. If he co-operates, he will find that the system is lenient.’

  ‘Who will pay the rent? I have a son at school.’

  ‘Then you’d better find some work.’

  There was little more that could be said.

  This time when she stood, she trembled. The bluster was gone. Froi had won an easy victory. Well done, Roland!

  Only the exit doors remained.

  No. It didn’t have to be complete victory to Froi. She turned defiantly. ‘How big is this group?’ He didn’t answer, so she continued: ‘I am saying that if this group was so big that most of the population of East Berlin – the GDR even – was a part of it, what could you do, Comrade Froi? Can you answer me that?’

  Froi didn’t answer.

  ‘Good day, Frau Bermann.’

  Oddly, as Froi walked away from her towards the long corridor from which he’d emerged, Heike felt a calm settle over her. Peace. Someone was touching her, holding both her shoulders, calming her. In asking that last question, she’d released something – a burden lifted. All would be fine; there was a reassuring feeling of lightness. Roland would be fine. They would be fine. The end was in sight, though quite what that “ending” was she didn’t know.

  The feeling of lightness didn’t last long.

  At journey’s end, later that evening, she discovered to her horror that there was something of a parallel with Julia’s story. Someone had been to the apartment in her absence. The front door was unlocked – she was sure she’d locked it. Inside the entrance hall the mat was at an angle. She never left it like that; even this morning of all mornings when she was angry and frustrated and nervous, she wouldn’t have left the mat like this and the door unlocked. And inside the study Roland’s typewriter had a fresh page of A4 paper wound into its rollers with one word typed
on it: “Correction”.

  It had to be Bruno, yet he was nowhere to be seen. She called out his name again and again, upstairs, downstairs, outside.

  No answer.

  By 6.30 pm he could not be found. There was nothing to indicate he’d even come home and gone out again to play. Heike was often infuriated by her son’s tardiness, but this was unusual. He had been brought up to understand that providing he did what his school and his parents required of him, he was free to play in the streets. Mealtime was sacrosanct – a definite appointment for 6.30 pm every evening. Failure to attend was not an option and he knew it. He was normally in the apartment by 4.30 pm on school days and in general was a boy of habit. Tonight, of all nights, there was no sign of him.

  Panic quickly overcame her. She recalled Uncle Frederick’s words: what were they? “The boy would be taken and put in care…” or something like that.

  Roland was a grown man, much as she loved him, but the thought of her child being taken by the state would be too much to bear. She must find him. Shaking, she grabbed her coat, opened the door and recited a quick, uncommunistic prayer.

  In answer to that prayer, there, revealed immediately on the street just metres away, was Bruno cheerfully emerging from a car.

  Thank God! Maybe a teacher is dropping him home.

  She greeted him sternly: ‘Where have you been? Whose car was that?’

  ‘He’s a Russian man who visited the school and told my teacher that he would be picking me up as you were busy tonight. Was that alright, Mama? I’m not late, am I?’

  ‘You’re not late. They shouldn’t have kept you. Was the man an official?’

  ‘I think so. He was an inspector. He wanted to talk to me after school and I answered his questions.’

  ‘What sort of questions, Bruno?’

  ‘Family questions. He was interested in my welfare. He wanted to know if I was eating enough at home, if I had a bicycle to use, were we happy as a family.’

 

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