An hour passed in five minutes. Frau Military Papa had begun preparing dinner (intense applause), and was making the kind of kitchen noises that were code for it’s time for Lena to go home. Peter shut off the radio reluctantly and they made their way down the hall.
“Did you like it?” he asked, sidling close to her for the first time that afternoon. He had the face of a small child who’d brought home his first finger painting.
“I loved it,” she said.
His shoulders sagged with relief. “Want me to teach you Morse code next time?”
Lena slipped on her shoes. “Sure.” Careful. Don’t encourage him too much.
“Does Lena have clearance to learn Morse code?” Military Papa called from the table.
“We’ll get permission through the youth group,” Peter said. “I’ll arrange it.”
“She shouldn’t be operating that radio at all,” Military Papa said in his deep voice. “I’m not sure I approve of this arrangement. You should have come to me first.”
Peter gave Lena a strained smile and she left, feeling as if she were making an escape. It was amazing how much you could understand about a person by spending an hour at their house. She needed fresh air so she went downstairs and stood in the courtyard near the formation of shrubs.
“Fall in,” she whispered to them. “Groups of six.”
They’d come from Military Papa. They knew how to follow orders.
*
It was midnight, and Lena was wide awake. Auntie didn’t like it when she stayed up late and wandered around the apartment. “Like a thief in the silverware,” as she put it, though who would want to steal a bunch of crooked forks? It was difficult for Lena to turn her nights back to sleeping after a week of staying up for work. There was no point tossing around in bed. She switched on her lamp and unpinned the photograph of her parents.
Her mother had been a good swimmer; an Olympic hopeful. She’d gone to a special school where she trained in the pool twice a day and was given vitamins to make her stronger. Well, Mama had called the pills vitamins, but Lena had overheard her once talking to a nurse about the headaches and skin problems they were causing. And there had been the miscarriages—several before Lena had been born, and several afterward. Mama said Lena was her miracle baby.
The photograph of her parents had been taken before her father had gotten sad. Papa was making his silly face, the one with his eyes wide open as if everything in the world was shockingly funny. When Lena was little he’d made up stories for her, using a different voice for each character and making sure every story ended with the Sandman coming to put her to sleep. But that had stopped when he’d gotten sad, which had happened around the time he and Mama had started working in the freight car factory, the one Herr Schulmann claimed had not produced a single freight car.
Lena hadn’t put together the timing until that moment. But it made sense—if her parents had been troubled by their job, and especially troubled that they couldn’t tell anyone about it. When they went to work, they made ammunition. When they came home, they talked about trains. All of it had been a lie.
And yet—this was secret ammunition. Why?
If only Erich had confided in her. Had he not trusted her enough? No, Mausi, he didn’t want to get you in trouble. The more you know, the more trouble you’ll be in.
She probably knew too much already. But if she wanted to save her uncle, she’d have to know everything.
— 22 —
the beginning of a path
At last it was Monday, which was supposed to mean the best cuts of meat at the butcher shop, but there was only rump roast. The unused theater ticket was still in Lena’s coat pocket, jumping with impatience to take her there. Lena didn’t know when she would see Max again. She was tempted to skip her photography class that afternoon and go to the theater instead, to check if he was rehearsing, but Auntie had already pounced on the day.
“There are more paving tiles coming,” she announced before she left for work. And maybe wood, if Hans’s connections came through. They were going to make a garden in one corner of the courtyard. “It should be ready in time for spring planting,” Auntie said. It made Lena think of Mama’s allotment garden.
In Magdeburg Lena and her family had lived in an old building with no hot water. She used to trudge down to the basement with Papa for charcoal to heat the stove. But, like many people, they also rented garden space outside the city. Mama had loved their garden, even with all the rules about how high to grow the hedge and how often to mow the grass. The garden had been the main source of their fresh vegetables when they couldn’t count on carrots and cucumbers being available in the shops.
Auntie had never seemed like the gardening type, but she was so excited by the prospect of fresh vegetables she had made a drawing of the perfect courtyard, with arrows and measurements indicating the garden in the corner and fully grown trees that hadn’t been planted yet.
“Where will we get soil?” Lena hadn’t meant to ask the question out loud. She didn’t want to damage Auntie’s morale.
“One thing at a time,” Auntie said. “Peter and Danika are busy today. Hans will be counting on you, so make sure you get right down there this morning.”
Hans had also lived in Magdeburg before coming to Berlin. He hadn’t known Lena’s parents, but he knew the city—its choking brown-coal air, its factories, its cathedral with the stone virgins that stood at the northern gate. Sometimes Lena liked to hear him talk about the city; at other times, it produced a sadness in her so deep she feared she might drown in it.
But sadness was also their connection. Hans knew what it was like to lose important people. Lena could see where his eyes were pinched by loneliness. He didn’t even have a cat. Once he’d told Lena he liked to leave the television on so he could hear someone in the next room talking.
“You watch Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler?” Lena had asked. The Black Channel.
Hans had laughed. “No. Even in my apartment, his name is Karl-Eduard von Schni.”
After Auntie left, Lena took her time getting ready. She knew Hans wouldn’t get an early start, no matter how many paving tiles his friend was bringing.
Three, as it turned out. Three tiles, in the wrong color, and another child-size box of sand. Lena spread the sand with a shovel while Hans and his friend carried the tiles over from the truck.
“Do you think your aunt wants them set in a straight line,” Hans asked, “or should we do something more artistic?” He threw out his hand and did a pirouette that Auntie would have called homosexual.
Lena would have loved to put Hans in charge of designing the courtyard, but Auntie had drawn her perfect courtyard with a ruler. “I think you’d better lay them straight.”
Five tiles were better than two. It now looked more like the beginning of a path than the end of an idea. Hans raised his mug: coffee, with a dash of “blue strangler” vodka. He’d offered to fetch some for Lena but she had declined. “Here’s to the Yellow Brick Road, Lena. We’re off to see the wizard.”
The wizard of the German Democratic Republic. The small man behind the big machine. It had to be one of the Erichs.
Hans’s friend had also brought a spindly willow sapling. “One day,” the friend said, “in about fifteen to twenty years, this will be a grand tree. A real beauty.”
This was the tree Lena had imagined climbing—standing at the very top, taking flight. She held the sapling in both hands like a sacred object, imagining birds in its branches, cool shade beneath, the way the leaves would sound in a breeze: like the ruffling of thousands of feathers. “Let’s plant it in the center of the courtyard,” she said.
Hans narrowed his eyes. “Will it survive in all this muck?”
His friend seemed anxious to leave. “Plant it, Hansy. You’ll find out.”
Lena spent a long time determining where the exact center
of the courtyard was. Then she dug a hole and planted the tree. Grandeur had seemed possible when she’d held the sapling in her hands. Planted, it was dwarfed by everything around it—not just the buildings, but also Military Papa’s shrubs, and the benches, and the lack of sunlight.
“It’s so small,” she said. “How will it survive?”
“We’ll need to put markers around it or someone might step on it,” Hans said. They gathered sticks and rocks and made a fence.
Fifteen to twenty years: it sounded like a prison sentence.
They sat down on one of the benches he’d built and Hans stroked its smooth wood as if it were a favorite horse.
“Where did you work in Magdeburg?” she asked him.
“I was in construction.” He held up thick, calloused fingers. “Factories, mostly. Making sure the damn things didn’t fall down.”
It didn’t seem like he worked much anymore, but that wasn’t Lena’s business, and anyway there was no unemployment in the Better Germany so he must have a job.
“Did you know about the freight car factory?”
He put down his cup. “The place that blew up. Where your parents worked.”
Lena nodded. She had spoken to him about her parents before. Hans was a good person to talk to when she was sad. He knew how to listen without trying to fix her.
“It wasn’t really a freight car factory, was it?” she asked.
He looked at her. “How old are you now, Lena?”
“Seventeen.”
“Old enough, then. I knew about that factory, yes. I’d been inside it many times, probably walked right past your parents. How was I to know I would one day be such good friends with their daughter?”
A shiver went up Lena’s arms. How strange life was.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re right; it wasn’t a freight car factory. The people who worked there were sworn to absolute secrecy by the State. So was I. But if you don’t mind my saying, fuck the State. You deserve to know.” He took a long drink from his mug.
So—Herr Schulmann hadn’t been mistaken, and Erich had been onto something.
“We all signed forms that came from the big mucky-mucks in Berlin. You had to be approved to go into that building, even to fix a pipe or work in the canteen.” He let out a laugh. “Me. They trusted me. Well.”
“They were making ammunition,” Lena said. “Right?”
“You have heard. Good. I didn’t like working in that place even for the short time I did. It was exceptionally dangerous and the conditions in that factory were—well, they were not top-notch. The lighting was substandard, the machinery kept breaking down. The whole thing was an accident waiting to happen. Naturally there were Stasi agents working there as well, making sure nothing ever went public, but still. For a country that was planning a big takeover, all I can say is, they should have equipped their factories with better machines.”
“A big takeover? Of what?”
Hans stared into his mug.
“They were my parents. I deserve to know.”
“I’m not the right person to tell you. I only heard rumors, and I could be wrong. Not even the people who worked in that factory knew why they were making so much ammunition. There was talk of many things, but there was only one thing that made sense.”
Lena perched so close to the edge of the bench she was in danger of falling off. “Please.”
“A takeover of West Berlin—the island of Western decadence, as they call it. The last corner of class-enemy territory in the GDR. The authorities have always hated West Berlin. Its existence is an insult to them. Ever since the end of the war, the Soviets have believed they should have control of the whole city. But that’s only my opinion. I don’t have proof.”
“What if someone had found proof?” Lena asked. “What if they planned to write about it for a Western publication?”
“Proof that the GDR was preparing its army to take over West Berlin? Mein Gott, Lena. We wouldn’t have a Cold War anymore; we’d have a hot one. The Americans would get involved, and the Soviets. It could turn into a disaster you wouldn’t even want to think about. In the last war they didn’t have nuclear weapons.” Hans took a long drink. “You don’t know of someone who’s planning to do that, do you? Write about that factory?”
Lena chewed on her bottom lip, gazing at the mismatched paving tiles, the unfinished path that led to mud, the tiny tree that could not possibly grow into a grand willow, no matter how many years it was sentenced to. Didn’t Erich realize how much trouble he’d get into? But maybe his manuscript was intended to stop the conflict before it got started. Remember the way he closed the curtains that afternoon—the last time you saw him? He’d understood the danger. He must have thought it was worth the risk.
“That boy who came to see you,” Hans said. “It’s him, isn’t it? The one with the military haircut.”
Lena laughed. “No, not him.” He’s just planning to escape through a tunnel. Lena didn’t want to think about that. Would he really go, and so soon? You could go with him. No, she couldn’t.
“I’m serious. If you have a friend who’s thinking about taking this on, you must discourage them in the strongest possible way. If the Stasi ever got wind of that, they’d come down hard. As hard as they can.”
“They’d make the person disappear,” Lena said—more to herself than to Hans.
But he must have heard. “Oh yes. They would.”
There was another thing, though. “What did you hear about that accident?”
Hans shrugged. “Nothing. The place blew up. It was full of ammunition. It wouldn’t have taken much for that to happen. As I said, the State should have taken better care. Whenever I had to work there, I got in and out as fast as I could. Pitied anyone who had to show up there every day. It’s a damned shame, and I’m sorry for what happened to your parents. And to you.”
“Thank you.” Lena stood. “Are you sure it was an accident?”
Hans tilted his head and studied Lena. “Accidents happen. What else could it have been?”
Yes, that was what accidents were best at: happening. Except when they weren’t accidents.
*
In the mental hospital, they took away her belt, her shoelaces. She ate with a plastic spoon. The artwork was all soft pastel landscapes—no glass in the frames. The cups were plastic, every corner rounded. Even the pencils were blunt.
One day a boy down the hall had an outburst and had to be placed in the quiet room. Quiet once the door was shut, because the room was padded. By then Lena had been to the quiet room several times, screaming until there was no scream left in her.
She refused to go to group therapy. She wouldn’t take her medication unless she was forced to. She refused to play the noodle game, which involved sorting different-shaped noodles into piles. Sometimes the noodles were colored, and then there were arguments. Colors or shapes—which was more important? Lena sat to the side with her arms crossed. “You idiots,” she said. “Who cares?”
When she finally got out, her friends had already made the important decisions about their lives. Thankfully Lena only had to endure a few awkward moments of silence over coffee with them, a few of their appraising looks (is she all right?), before Auntie had whisked her away to Berlin where she knew no one but Erich. No amount of begging to live with him had made any difference. Auntie was the one who’d gotten her out. She was filling out the progress reports. She was the one who would conquer Lena’s inner pig-dog, one way or another.
— 23 —
everything in its place
At last it was time for work. Lena had never looked forward to her walk to the compound so much. She didn’t know how she would get into Herr Dreck’s office to search for evidence about her uncle, but with any luck Bruno Drechsler would go home before all his squeaky children were in bed.
But Erich was one
thing; clearly there was more. An attack on West Berlin had to be bigger than Bruno Drechsler and his little fiefdom of Prenzlauer Berg. The plans for that attack had to be in the Comrade General’s office. Lena must have missed them, but she hadn’t known what she was looking for. There was no choice but to risk searching his office again.
Jutta was in the ashtray room, smoking and staring at her beloved copy of Sibylle. The room smelled of garlic and onions, probably from her supper. “What are you so happy about?” she said through a stream of smoke. “It’s Monday, for God’s sake.”
You see? That’s why you’re no good at card games. “I’m not, really,” Lena said. It was always best to deny such things. “Though we did get more paving tiles for our courtyard.”
“There’s a reason to dance a polka. I once waited a year for paving tiles from the building store, and when they finally came they were the wrong color.”
Lena sat at the table. “These were the wrong color too, but I don’t think anyone cares.” She leaned forward and smiled. You might as well tell her one thing. “I met a boy.”
Jutta’s face broke into a genuine grin. “Well, well. What’s his name?”
“Max. He’s an actor. He has a dimple.” It was exciting to talk about him.
“I’ve always been a sucker for a good dimple. They’re Slavic, you know, dimples.”
“No, they’re not.”
“What do you know? You’re just a pipsqueak. I’ve been around dimples longer than you’ve been alive.”
They got dressed and set out for House 1. Lena made her two trips up the stairs to the second floor while Jutta took the elevator. Light from one office shone into the corridor as usual. He didn’t give up easily, Herr Drechsler. Jutta began vacuuming the hallway while Lena hid in another office. She couldn’t bear to see him, even in passing.
Crash went Jutta’s Purimix into every possible wall. Was she vacuuming with her eyes closed? She didn’t do this on her floors; Lena would have heard it. Maybe this was her plan: if she bothered Herr Dreck enough, he would leave on time. They wouldn’t fire Jutta; she’d been a member of the club for too long.
The House of One Thousand Eyes Page 21