Finally, she got off the train and walked as quickly as she dared until she reached Erich’s corner. She peered around, watching the movement on the street: a young woman pushing a stroller, an old couple walking together as if each was afraid the other might fall. Cars passing, and cars parked. Some of the Trabis had defiant scraps of fabric attached to their antennas. A white scrap meant the person had formally applied to leave the Better Germany, but these pieces were black—which meant the applications had been rejected. If the People’s Police saw them, they would make the drivers remove them.
There were also Ladas parked on the road, but from where Lena stood it was impossible to tell if the man with the newspaper was still there.
You don’t know there’s a man with a newspaper. How could you? You weren’t there, remember? She was just a girl coming to visit her uncle on a Tuesday afternoon. You don’t visit Erich on Tuesday afternoons. But this was a special Tuesday. It was . . . it was almost the Republic’s birthday and they had to make plans for attending the parade. There would be banners to paint, flags to organize. When in doubt, mention a national holiday.
Walk naturally. Don’t look inside the parked cars. Only nervous people did that. Find the building. Go inside and ring the bell. Erich would answer. He was home, because all he’d done on Sunday was spend the night at a friend’s. Maybe he had a girlfriend, a One True Love he hadn’t mentioned to Lena.
She climbed the stairs to the third floor and rang the bell. The door opened. A man Erich’s age stood scowling at her in a stained undershirt, his belly hanging over the top of his pants. “Can I help you?”
Who was this? “I’m looking for my uncle. Is he home?”
“You’ve got the wrong apartment. There’s no one here but me.”
How silly she could be. “I’m sorry,” she said, and went back downstairs.
This time she counted floors and made absolutely sure she was on the right one when she stood in front of the door. But when she checked the name beside the bell, it wasn’t Erich’s. It was Friedrich So-and-So.
Was she in the right building? She ran downstairs and went outside to check the address. Yes, this was the right one. Erich was playing a trick on her, that was all. By the time she’d climbed the third flight of stairs, she had the whole story worked out and was laughing to herself at how clever her uncle was. He’d always been a Spassmacher, a joker. Mama used to call him a noodle-head. On New Year’s Eve when he came to visit and they ate doughnuts filled with jam, Erich would secretly fill one with mustard and laugh like crazy when the poor person who bit into it made a sour-mustard face.
Lena rang the bell. “Come out, Noodle-Head, I know you’re in there. It’s Lena.”
Footsteps sounded across the floor and then there was the man in the undershirt, Friedrich So-and-So. “You again. What do you want?”
Lena closed her eyes. Opened them. “Where is my uncle?”
“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your uncle doesn’t live here.”
She peered behind him into the apartment. None of the furniture was Erich’s. Or almost none—the table by the window was there, but instead of Erich’s typewriter there was a radio on it. A small black cat wound itself around the man’s legs and mewed. Erich was allergic to cats.
“When did you move in?” she asked. “This morning? Yesterday afternoon?”
“What do you mean? I’ve lived here for five years.”
“That’s not possible.” She held on to the door frame. Something was welling up from the bottom of her belly. She wasn’t sure if it was tears, or panic, or the bowl of soup she’d eaten earlier.
“If you’re going to be a nuisance about this,” the man said, “I will telephone the police.”
Lena wrinkled her forehead. “Erich doesn’t have a telephone.” How did this man have one? People waited up to twenty-five years for a telephone.
“Who is Erich?” the man said.
“My uncle.”
The man let out a huff that smelled like onions. “Fräulein, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
But—
“I’m closing the door now. If your fingers are in the way, you will get hurt.”
But—
“Don’t come back. Do you understand? If you come back, I’ll call the police.”
He shut the door. Lena stood there, staring at it. It was faded, and tired, like her. You’re asleep, Mausi. This is a dream. She pinched herself on the arm. No, she was definitely awake. It took her a minute to gather herself before she trusted she could make it down the stairs without falling. She went all the way down and sat on the bottom step.
Think. Think what to do.
Sausage Auntie said she wasn’t much good at thinking, but that hadn’t always been true. Lena had been a good student when she’d lived in Magdeburg, when she’d had parents, and teachers, and homework. “You have a knack for figuring things out,” her father used to say. Uncle Erich always said she had a good imagination and could think sideways instead of up and down like everyone else.
Think.
She’d seen the men two nights ago taking Erich’s things away. She’d seen the man reading a newspaper in his Lada. Maybe Erich had been arrested. Was that it? You know it is. You saw a man make signals from the window. You saw a flower-delivery van drive away. Do you think it was only full of flowers? The typewriter. The notebooks. Steffi! She would know what was going on.
Lena climbed the stairs, rang the bell, and braced herself. Steffi was never happy to see her.
She waited, rang again. But nobody came.
Had there ever been a man with a newspaper?
She went back downstairs to Erich’s mailbox. The sticker on it said Friedrich So-and-So. She struggled to peel it back, wishing for Peter’s long fingernails. Auntie was always saying that Lena should quit biting hers. Erich’s name would be there, like the humming-underneath sound, some confirmation that she wasn’t losing her mind. But beneath Friedrich So-and-So there was only a blank space.
She opened the door to the storage area where Erich kept his bicycle. It wasn’t there. Her heart lifted. He’s run away. Erich had always been so clever. He’d known this was coming—remember how nervous he was—and he’d taken his bicycle and was hiding somewhere. He would find a way to contact her. She must be patient.
She decided she’d spent enough time in the entryway of the building. Auntie would be home soon. Lena would say she’d been to the swimming pool but hadn’t gone swimming because it was closed for repairs—which was almost always true. She hauled open the heavy front door, squinting at the sudden light. It took a second for her vision to adjust, and then she saw: the Lada. Right in front of the building. The man with the newspaper was staring straight at her.
She looked away, make yourself small, checked her watch, put your head down, walk. Don’t look back. Don’t look up. Get to the S-Bahn station and find something to read. A train schedule, a banner. She hurried past billboards proclaiming, The state is me . . . is us . . . She passed the merchants with their goods for sale and took the steps up to the platform two at a time. But everyone in the Better Germany knew how things were organized. If one man was here, another would be there. Get busy, stay busy.
There weren’t many people at the station. Older folks were giving her the look that said work-shy. Class enemy—an enemy of the revolution. She wished she had worn her Free German Youth shirt. She wished the punk rockers would arrive; they liked hanging around Erich’s neighborhood. Then at least the older people wouldn’t stare at her anymore—although everyone was too afraid of the punk rockers to stare at them for long. They had rooster hairdos and wore makeup and safety pins, which they could take out and stick you with if they felt like it. The Transport Police were watching for anyone who stood out. Don’t call attention to yourself.
Men in suits; there were two of them. One was
reading a magazine; the other was checking the train schedule. Both carried briefcases. But it was the man on the bench who made Lena most uneasy. His armband and dark glasses marked him as blind, but the way he looked at things gave Lena the odd feeling he could see. She was certain he was one of them.
You’ve been listening to too many of Erich’s stories. It’s making you see things. Up went the Wall in her mind, and she scrambled to be on the right side of it, wishing she could believe that she would have her Sunday visit with Erich and he’d be fine.
When she arrived home, Auntie was preparing goulash, a much fancier supper than usual. The baby next door was crying, but Auntie didn’t grumble about it, didn’t even bang on the wall, which was usually how she tried to get the baby to stop, although it never worked.
She asked about Lena’s afternoon.
“I went to the pool, but it was closed for repairs.” Scheiss Osten, she added in her head, because it felt good to say it.
“Again,” Auntie said. “We should complain, you know.”
Complaining was encouraged in the Better Germany. You could complain about the pool being closed, especially if you mentioned that you wanted to remain physically fit to be a good team member, to keep up morale at work. You could complain about the quality of the coffee, or the housing shortage, or that there wasn’t any ketchup for sale. You’d form a group of concerned citizens, and bring a petition to the authorities—even to General Secretary Honecker himself—and they would listen and do something about it, if something could be done. One couldn’t make ketchup appear out of thin air, after all.
While Lena set the table, Auntie talked. Her new students were so well behaved; the drainage trench was already making a difference; maybe it was time to buy Lena a camera so she could practice taking photographs between classes. So many young people were getting involved with photography these days, she said—and, “Isn’t it wonderful for young people to have an appropriate creative outlet?” She flitted from one topic to the next like a bird surrounded by too many flowers.
Lena stared at her, but Auntie didn’t seem to notice. They sat at the table and ate their goulash, though it seemed as if Auntie didn’t want to look at her. When Lena stood up to clear her dishes, Auntie whisked them out of her hands and told her to go rest up before her long night of work.
What?
Lena went into her room and pulled down a boy-meets-tractor book, as Erich referred to most of the accepted literature in the Better Germany. But she got stuck on one paragraph, seeing the words but not reading them. She took out the small hand mirror from her drawer. Auntie said if she gazed too long in a mirror, hair would sprout from her ears, which was what had happened to Herr Dreck and so many of the other men at House 1. Lena’s hair seemed straighter than usual. “We’ll straighten you out in no time,” Auntie had said when she’d brought Lena home from the mental hospital. And look, even her hair had cooperated. The doctors would be pleased.
It was when she put the mirror back that she realized something was wrong. Her brush and hair clips were not in the right place. Someone had been in here. As soon as the thought formed, she saw evidence of it everywhere. The books were not quite in line, the pictures on the wall not quite straight, the orange quilt on her bed not tucked in the way she’d left it.
Had Auntie been snooping? It was possible, even though she was a firm believer in Lena keeping her own room in order. “Responsibility,” she’d say, and, “I don’t want you making extra work for me.” But if Auntie hadn’t been in here, then who had? It couldn’t have been the Stasi, could it? That sort of thing happened to other people—layabouts, class enemies, shirkers who spray-painted the word Freiheit (Freedom) on the outside of buildings.
She changed her clothes, pulling on her Better Germany jeans and buttoning her blouse, though it all felt dreamlike, as if another girl had taken her place in a life that resembled hers but in a mixed-up way. Someone had touched her things, maybe even the clothes she was putting on. It made her feel sticky and short of breath, the way she felt whenever a stranger on the train sat too close.
Before she left the bedroom, she went over to one of the Erich pictures: Honecker, with his brown television-screen glasses. She needed to see her uncle’s face behind it, just for reassurance. The important Erich, the one that mattered. But when she lifted Honecker’s face, the only thing behind it was flowered wallpaper. She stared at the wall, touched it with her hand. She set Honecker’s picture back in its place and raised the other, the one of Erich Mielke. There, too, was wall. Whoever had been here had taken away the photographs of her uncle. Had it been Auntie?
You can’t very well ask her. Auntie would be waiting for it. Aha! Photos behind photos, these were subversive techniques, they were one step away from Western decadence. Auntie had been married to a high-ranking Party functionary, which explained the telephone and special relationships and needlepointed slogans, but would not explain how she had become the Guardian of a Difficult Child who was still difficult. No, it just wouldn’t do.
Auntie was calling for her to hurry. Quickly Lena lifted the other pictures, just to see. Yes, there were her parents. There was John Travolta and the insect band. Only the photographs of her uncle were missing.
This would be a bad time to cry. Because sooner or later, sooner, right now, put the Marx picture back in place—here came Auntie who didn’t believe in knocking—and Lena stepped away from the wall.
“What on earth are you doing in here? Off you go—you’ll keep Jutta waiting.”
There was something nervous about Auntie, as if someone had wound her too tightly and the spring that kept her from flying into ten thousand pieces was about to let go. The way she hurried Lena into her coat. The way she pressed a bun into her hand in case she hadn’t had enough supper. The way she bustled behind her, practically shoving her out the door, when every other night it had been Lena’s responsibility to arrive on time—“If you don’t have the sense to be punctual for our Comrade General, then I can’t help you.” If Auntie had been younger, Lena might have wondered if she’d invited a man over.
Lena stepped out into the night and onto the wide street leading to Normannenstrasse and the Stasi headquarters. As she walked, she glanced back toward her apartment’s lit squares of windows, as if they knew what was going on and could offer her a clue. But they told her nothing.
Twice she heard footsteps behind her. She turned, but no one was there.
*
Lena barely noticed the sky darkening and the stars emerging. She didn’t smell the tang of wet autumn leaves, nor did she play her usual game of peering into windows and guessing people’s lives. Someone had been in her bedroom. Someone had gone through her things and slipped her uncle into their pocket.
Yes, it happened in the Better Germany, though you had to be careful who you mentioned it to. You couldn’t tell who was on your side just by looking. There were many people who believed that the Stasi, and the Party, were doing what they must to create the ideal society. Sometimes that meant weeding out the bad influences. But when the bad influence was a member of your family, what then?
Lena was so preoccupied that when a man said “Good morning” to her, she was taken aback.
“What? Oh.” It was the security guard, Ernst. How had she already reached the compound gates? Her feet had done it to her again. “Good morning.” She forced a smile.
“Is everything all right, Comrade Lena?”
“Yes, yes.” She hurried past him and across the grounds toward House 24, into the tiny, stifling room where she and Jutta were supposed to bond as colleagues over cigarette smoke and burned pretend-coffee. A group of men and women wearing hard hats and operating heavy machinery was the inspirational subject of the one piece of art in the room.
Jutta always arrived before her. She sat at the card table staring at the fashionable magazine women in their winter coats.
�
��I’d like a winter coat like that.” Lena pointed to a dark green coat with fur at the collar.
Jutta looked up. “The world doesn’t owe you a winter coat.”
“I know. I’m just saying I want one. The magazines always make us want things we didn’t even realize we were missing.”
Jutta pointed the burned end of her cigarette toward Lena. “What does anyone really want?”
Here we go. This was another one, canned beets, the supper of we don’t know what we really want—but Lena knew. She wanted to know what had happened to her uncle. She wanted her life back, the before life. Before doctors with pudding voices. Before explosions and we’re so very sorry. Before an important Stasi man who made Lena feel like a dirty scrap of carpet.
What were they accusing Erich of? And anyway, being arrested didn’t explain the men emptying his apartment, or the new man, Friedrich So-and-So, whose name was now on the mailbox, whose cat was in Erich’s apartment. Who claimed he had lived there for five years.
“Am I okay in the head?” Lena blurted. “Jutta? Do you think I’m normal?” The doctors didn’t think so. Lena felt all right, usually—but wasn’t that the first sign? Crazy people never thought they were crazy—it was everyone else.
Jutta gave a phlegmy cough. “What is normal? Is anyone normal?”
Now you see? That was a mistake. Do not ask for Jutta’s opinion. You will only get another jar of pickles. Lena took the brooms and mops and Purimixes out of the cupboard, and the two buckets, already packed with the cleaning solutions and rags they would need for the night.
“My job on the farm was to take care of the chickens.” Jutta picked up her bucket. “We had a rooster. Damned nuisance. Nearly took out my eye.” She pointed to a thin scar the shape of a comma at the corner of her eye. “They named me Jutta, my new father and mother. I don’t even know what my real name is.”
The House of One Thousand Eyes Page 6