The House of One Thousand Eyes

by Michelle Barker

  “I know.” Lena tried hard to pick out the beautiful bits from Jutta’s dishwater eyes and wild hair that was barely contained by a kerchief. It was like trying to pick the last blackberries of the season, the ones hidden at the back of the bush, without getting scratched by thorns.

  Jutta stubbed out her cigarette and got to her feet, making it seem like the worst punishment in the world. “All I can say is that we don’t really know anyone. And we sure as hell don’t know where we come from. None of us.” Jutta kept conversations the way other people kept canned beans and peaches, jars and jars of the same thing on the shelf. I think I’ll open a jar of we don’t really know where we come from tonight. But Jutta, we had that last night. Yes, but it’s so tasty, don’t you think?

  “I know exactly where I come from.” Lena pulled on her work coveralls. “I’m from Magdeburg.” Where everything was brown because of the coal—the sky, the shops, the laundry hanging to dry. “I went to school there. One year I won an award for Enthusiasm in Handicrafts. I had a Western fountain pen.” Erich had gotten it for her so she didn’t have to struggle with the GDR version. Scheiss Osten. Her teacher had frowned at it, but Lena hadn’t been the only one with a Western pen.

  “I have photographs of my parents,” she added. “I know them.” Knew. A twinge. She gave her head a shake.

  They gathered mops and buckets, their Purimixes, rags, and cleaning solutions, and then walked over to House 1, which was only a minute away.

  Auntie had been so proud when Lena told her she used a Purimix at the Stasi headquarters. “Imagine,” Auntie had said. “You could grind coffee with it. Or meat. Or chop vegetables.” Which was true, if you had the right attachments. But their Purimixes only had the ones for vacuuming and waxing floors.

  They crossed the foyer of House 1, with its three red flags—the flag of the Better Germany, the flag of the Labor Movement (that means you, Mausi, stand proud), and “the Party is always right” flag of honor. Past the sculptures of Good morning, Herr Marx, good morning, Herr Dzerzhinsky, you’re looking very solid this morning/evening.

  Jutta stepped into one of the elevators, but Lena took the stairs. Even though it would have been infinitely easier, she refused to take the narrow brown elevators. Even though it meant making two trips with all her equipment. She didn’t care. The elevators made her feel closed in, the way she’d felt when the principal of the school had called her out of class to tell her about the explosion. Everything grew too dark and cluttered—the way her head got when there was too much noise.

  She set down her Purimix at one end of the long stuffy hallway. Jutta had a plan for cleaning the building that Lena had to follow. Hallways were vacuumed every night, as were Comrade Mielke’s rooms, and the main foyer was mopped. Individual offices were dusted or vacuumed or swept, depending on the day. Jutta had her floors; Lena had hers. Except for the third floor, Comrade Mielke’s, which they cleaned together for security reasons.

  Halfway down the hall on Lena’s floor, a door was ajar and a sliver of light crossed the corridor. Herr Dreck was working late—again. That wasn’t his real name, of course, but Lena preferred it. Dreck meant filth.

  Everyone who worked at Stasi headquarters had a military title—even Lena, who was a Junior Sergeant—but she refused to call Herr Dreck by his. She felt dirty just thinking about him. Her legs suddenly felt too heavy. She couldn’t walk down the hall. She couldn’t pass that sliver of light, and yet—there was no choice, even if it seemed like there was.

  She started the Purimix and began vacuuming the red carpet. Such an impractical choice of color, Jutta was always saying. Red showed every stain and footprint. But red carpets were for dignitaries and special people, and House 1 was where some of the highest-ranking men in the Stasi worked.

  She wished the vacuum didn’t make so much noise. He would know she was there. But he already did—he was waiting for her.

  Sure enough: “Is that you, Fräulein? Come in, come in.” He made it sound like the visit was her idea.

  It was strictly forbidden for her to enter the bureaucrats’ offices while they were working. “You are to be silent. Invisible.” Jutta had explained the rules for cleaning House 1 on the first day, and she reminded Lena of them often.

  Lena stepped into Herr Dreck’s office.

  “I have a treat for you.” That was how it began every time. “Shut the door.” He beckoned Lena to where he sat behind his large wooden desk. Her knees shook beneath her coveralls.

  The heavy curtains were drawn. The filing cabinets and drawers were closed. No one could see. No one would tell. Lena barely heard her own footsteps on the carpet, though she realized she had dragged the Purimix into the office and was holding on to it.

  The chocolate sat in the middle of the desk, wrapped in gold foil and waiting for her, and Herr Dreck sat behind it like a mountain troll—also waiting. Black hair sprouted from his nose, his ears, his chin. He had a pointed beard like Lenin’s. There was even hair on his knuckles, wiry like a pig’s.

  “Put down the vacuum,” he said.

  She tried to set the handle of the Purimix carefully against the desk, but it slid away from her and landed on the carpet with a thunk.

  Herr Dreck scowled and brought a finger to his rubbery lips. “Quiet, now. Quiet as a mouse.” One hairy hand grasped her hip, pinning her in case she had the notion that she was free to leave. The other undid her coveralls. First it made its way up her blouse and under her bra. Then it traveled down. Don’t think about it. Don’t feel anything.

  Just say no. Wasn’t that the slogan the Americans had come up with for their war on drugs? Lena had heard about it on a Western television channel at Danika’s apartment. No was an American word. You could say it and the sky would still be above your head and the floor would still be beneath your feet. In the Better Germany, no was not the end of anything. It was only the beginning.

  Herr Dreck undid his belt buckle and unfastened his trousers. He took Lena’s hand and guided it inside his undershorts. “That’s it,” he said in a husky voice while she rubbed him. “That’s the way.” It isn’t happening. Someone else is doing it, not you.

  He had a handkerchief ready for when he ejaculated, so there would be no mess. Even so, all Lena wanted to do afterward was wash her hand. She would have washed her whole body if she could have, in a solution of lye, to remove the layer of skin he had touched. But the toilets in House 1 were for men only; so few women worked there they didn’t need their own bathroom, and rushing back to the toilets near the ashtray room would mean risking a confrontation with Jutta. Lena would have to settle for dousing her hand in cleaning solution at the first opportunity.

  Herr Dreck made her eat the chocolate in front of him. Lena ate it quickly, with the clean hand, conscious of the brown smears forming at the edges of her lips and how her mouth stuck together. Had she been alone she would have savored each moment of sweetness, but not with him watching, in that strange hungry way he had. It seemed like he would devour not only the chocolate but also her hand, her arm.

  As soon as she finished eating, his large forehead wrinkled with surprise, as if he had no idea what she was doing there. He reached for the key he kept beneath the telephone on his desk and unlocked one of the drawers.

  “Out you go.” He shooed her the way Auntie did when she was fed up to here. Lena blinked, and the Wall in her mind went up. She had wandered into his office by mistake while he was still in there: Careless girl, don’t you know the rules? She hurried out with a mumbled apology, dragging the Purimix behind her and turning it on right away to vacuum the corridor and drown out the wasps.

  She cleaned her hand.

  It wasn’t so easy to convince her body to forget the pokes and prods, though. Herr Dreck’s fingers left imprints, as if she were dough, which meant the Wall needed to be higher. If she could see over the top, she would remember, and if she remembered, she could
not go on. It would make her want to tell someone, and who could she tell? Auntie would say she was crazy: anyone who worked for the betterment of the State must be respectable. “Should I put it in your progress report?” she’d ask. “Would you like to explain it to the doctors?”

  Head down, focus on the carpet, make it cleaner. The Wall in her mind grew taller and taller until whatever had happened was on the other side and Lena was safe.

  When Herr Dreck passed her in the hallway on his way home, she barely saw him.

  He always stayed late. Or rather, he worked as late as it took for Lena to show up. Once she’d tried saving that hallway for last, but no matter the hour, his light was on, his door ajar. Afterward she’d gotten into trouble with Jutta for not doing things in the right order.

  “Does he ever call you into his office?” she’d asked Jutta once.

  Jutta had frowned and shaken her large square head. “Are you trying to get me into trouble, is that what this is?”

  It would have been nice to know Lena wasn’t the only one. Plus it would have made her more sure of things. On one side of the Wall it happened every night. On the other side, it had never happened.

  Mostly, Lena liked working nights while the rest of the city slept. Night shift meant the world was upside down and she was walking on the ceiling. She was sure it was why so many babies were born at night, and why the eyes of owls were so big. Shadows lengthened; secrets stepped out. It was when people talked about the things that were never to be spoken of: life in the West, the possibility of flight. Use unemployment in a sentence, Mausi. Or prostitution.

  The slow, rhythmic motion of vacuuming settled her and helped her think. We don’t really know anyone. Lena thought she’d known her uncle. She knew so many things about him—his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate), the way his eyes closed when he took the first drag of a cigarette, the pattern of his pajamas (blue stripes). But maybe Erich had a secret, a big one, and it was like being pregnant. At a certain point, you couldn’t hide it anymore.

  It was quiet in the large building, in the world, in her head. Only her footsteps existed, and the swish of the broom on the floor, and the drip of the mop in her bucket. At midnight, she and Jutta met to clean Comrade General Mielke’s floor, starting at opposite sides of each room and working their way into the middle.

  Jutta liked to talk while she worked. Tonight she talked about her previous job, a favorite subject. “The houses aren’t so posh, you know, in Wandlitz.” Jutta had been a housekeeper in the residential compound where the Politburo members lived before she’d come to work at Normannenstrasse. Wandlitz was another place that apparently wasn’t on any city map. The streets didn’t even have names. The neighborhood was surrounded by a high wall eight kilometers long, with guard towers. Usually Jutta referred to it as Volvograd because of all the Volvos and the chauffeurs that drove the bigwigs around. “The best thing about the houses, really, is the gardens. Each of them has one. They’re huge.” Jutta spent all her spring and summer weekends working in her allotment. Gardening was her special thing.

  “Mmhmm,” Lena said at regular intervals. She preferred silence, or humming. Sometimes while she worked she hummed the songs her mother had sung to her, but she had to be careful with those. Memories had sharp edges. Her head got noisy after those songs.

  Most often she liked to hum the Sandman’s song, the one he sang on television every night, with his yarn goatee and pointed cap, to send the children to sleep. The Sandman’s song reset the day, put it to rights again after books had been knocked off shelves and milk had been spilled. When she hummed that song, she could tell herself nothing was wrong: she would visit her uncle and the Sandman would already have brought back all his notebooks and suitcases, even the typewriter—everything in its place, as before.

  After Mielke’s rooms were done, Lena returned to her floors. She knocked carefully at each office door before she entered, even though everyone had long since gone home. But she was not to disturb, never to disturb. The men in House 1 made big decisions about complicated issues of security that a girl like Lena could not possibly understand.

  When she entered an office, she worked quickly and carefully: dust, sweep or vacuum, mop, get out. She had perfected a method of looking and not looking at the items on any given desk, so that she could tell you how many children Comrade So-and-So had in the family photograph, and whether he had a miniature Lenin bust on his desk (so many of them did), but she could not say which important documents it might be holding in place. You don’t know anything.

  Most of the papers were locked away, and all of the files. There were occasional security checks after hours to make sure none of the drawers or cabinets had been left unlocked. It was silly, really, since so many of the men tucked their keys beneath the Lenin bust. Lena lifted everything to dust. She knew.

  Not that it mattered. She was not to touch any top-secret material; Jutta had made that clear. “If they catch you touching things, you will lose this job.” And Sausage Auntie couldn’t promise her another. Helmut or not, connections and promises were fragile things.

  Some of the building’s windows were smudged, so she cleaned them with newsprint and vinegar, making squeaking noises that echoed in the night’s silence. Thankfully, there weren’t a thousand windows in House 1. The ministry compound as a whole, though—the compound was huge. It was a rabbit warren of buildings, with windows like eyes everywhere. She’d never counted, but a thousand sounded right—maybe more. Whenever she crossed the grounds, the eyes watched her, the way cats watched. Pretending not to care, when in fact they were getting ready to pounce.

  As the sun rose and agents began to arrive at the Stasi headquarters with their clip clip heels and morning smells of hair tonic and tobacco, Lena and Jutta put away their cleaning things. That was when they were granted entry into the schrullig world. Lena had described this world to Erich as if it was made up, but in fact it did exist, in the unlikeliest place—inside Stasi headquarters. The entrance was in the basement of House 18, but only people who worked for State Security were allowed in, and they weren’t supposed to talk about it with strangers. It was meant to be a reward for service to the State. Lena had been tempted to tell Erich the truth so many times that she’d finally devised her make-believe world as a safe way of saying it out loud.

  Nothing in the schrullig world was real; everything in it was real. There was no such place, but here was Lena, going inside.

  Lena liked to spend time there before she went home. There were so many colors and smells; it was overwhelming. The rich aroma of Western coffee. The extravagance of yellow bananas. Oranges as bright as the sun. Smoked eel, spiced plum jam. Ridiculous items, all of them.

  Lena passed the travel office, and a cinema, and a place to get one’s hair done, where afterward you could sit under one of the orange domes and pretend you were going into space. Mostly the chairs were occupied by men who’d had their brush cuts done. Often in the morning there would be a row of them sitting under the dryers, reading and smoking. That morning, when Lena walked past the orange space helmets she saw Herr Dreck, but he did not wave at her, or smile, or even raise an eyebrow, because they didn’t know each other.

  She wandered through the grocery store pretending she needed something and couldn’t decide, but in fact she simply liked the kaleidoscope of colors on the shelves. One of the women who worked there scowled at her and asked if there was something she wanted, so she said yes and paid for an orange, and sat at a table and ate it.

  When she was done, she left through the portal and returned to the regular rain-gray world, repeating Mausi’s instructions to herself: You didn’t see anything. You don’t know anything. You don’t say anything. Imagine, such choices in a grocery store—and everything was there every single day, so there was no need to stock up. Imagine, a bookstore filled with books you’d want to read. Erich was right; it was pure silliness. The things in the
schrullig world did not exist in the Better Germany; that was what made it so exciting to visit.

  Lena walked across the compound grounds in the cool morning air until she reached the barricade leading onto Normannenstrasse. She peeked at who was on security that morning. Was it still Ernst? If so, the good morning/good night joke, a wave, a smile—but no, it was that jowly fat fellow whose eyes disappeared beneath his forehead and who was humorless no matter what Lena tried, so no wave, just show your identity card and keep walking.

  At home there was a boiled egg waiting for her in a chicken-shaped eggcup, a mug of Melange coffee, and some honey for her bread—a luxury, but Auntie was a good citizen, and goodness was rewarded.

  Badness, however, got you a one-way ticket to smartening up, which was why Lena had to find a way to get to Erich’s apartment without getting caught. He would be sitting at his desk, smoking and staring out the window, staring, staring, and then it would happen in a burst, he would start to type, and he would type and type until all the birds flocked to his window thinking it was a cavalcade of nuts dropping from the trees. Because the typewriter was there. It had always been there. And so was he.

  She would sit in the stained armchair drinking her Vita Cola and reading the Western magazine. When he was finished working, she would make him tell her what was really going on.

  There was only one problem, and it bothered her more than anything. That Wall she’d built to protect herself—it had grown so high she couldn’t be sure she had seen anything.

  — 5 —

  friedrich so-and-so

  Lena ate breakfast, then slept—but not for long. When her alarm rang in the early afternoon, she pulled on her sweater and laced up her Zehas.

  She was convinced the trains were slower, the stops longer; first the short trip on the U-Bahn, then the interminable ride on the S-Bahn. There were announcements to get off on the left, get off on the right. Erich. Erich. As usual, the trains were grimy and smelled like sweat. A round-faced woman with a tooth missing stared at Lena with the why aren’t you doing something productive look on her face. Lena knew that look. Sausage Auntie had invented it and then taught it to all the older women in Berlin.