“They told me. Everything. You’re still planning on leaving through the tunnel.” Lena’s nose began to run and she wished she had a tissue. Wiping her face with the back of her hand seemed like the wrong thing to do in front of Max. She tried sniffling, but it made an awful sound and didn’t solve the problem.
“That’s what I’ve been telling Bem. He asks me nearly every day. He must be reporting it all to them.”
Lena studied Max’s wind-reddened cheeks, his dark eyes. She could smell the beer on his breath. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”
“Günter’s contact is bringing our documents tomorrow. Ask him. We’re meeting with him to discuss everything around noon. Is that okay? Can you come? I was going to suggest meeting at your apartment, but—”
“No. They were sitting outside my building all afternoon. They saw you leave.” Herr Schulmann wouldn’t lie, that much Lena knew. “Why isn’t he coming himself?”
“They’ve been following him, and he just did a day trip. He doesn’t want to take any chances. How about we meet at the pub?”
“Sure.” Lena sighed. “If they haven’t arrested me by then. They want me to give them all the details. When you’re planning to go, with whom.”
Max picked at the crumbling building. “Then you’ll tell them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell them I’m going on Thursday night with Bem and Dieter. They’ll be watching the tunnel at Bernauer Strasse. Meanwhile we’ll be at the train station with the bearded lady, a lion tamer, and a bunch of tiny gymnasts, on our way to Bucharest.” He cupped her face with his hands. “You are going to come, aren’t you? You must.”
It was happening too fast. Lena needed a moment, a week, a lifetime, to catch up. “I don’t know. I can’t decide. Please don’t push me.”
“I’m not pushing you, but time is running out and you don’t exactly have options. You need to save yourself. Isn’t that what your uncle would have wanted?”
Lena stared at the broken bakery sign. It said kerei. It was missing the Bäc at the beginning. It didn’t make sense without it. Erich must have been in a position similar to hers right before they’d taken him. He’d had crucial information; he might even have had proof. But he hadn’t been planning to run off to the West with it. Maybe because his life wouldn’t have made sense over there. Maybe because it wouldn’t have made sense without her. Was that too much to hope for?
What would he have wanted for Lena? For her to be happy, sure, but also for her to feel at home, to have a place that was as familiar as worn slippers or a favorite chipped mug. That place had been Magdeburg, with her parents, but it was gone. Erich had been home for her after that. And now—where was home? Was it with Max? She thought of her bedroom, with the subversive pictures, and the courtyard with its persistent willow tree, and Auntie in her home perm making the cold-egg face. Oma and Opa had passed away years ago. Auntie was the only family she had left. If Lena went to the West, she would never be able to come back again, not even as a tourist.
“I need to go home,” she said.
Max held her for a long time. “Are you going to be all right?”
She nodded, though she wasn’t sure it was true. They walked back to the theater and Max kissed her with the taste of beer in his mouth and said he would see her tomorrow at the pub. By then her mind would have to be made up.
*
She tried her best to enter the apartment quietly, but one, two turns of the lock, and there was Auntie standing in the hallway in her housecoat and slippers, a book in her hand as if she’d been waiting up.
“I had a telephone call,” she said.
The phone had rung? Lena would have liked to be there to hear it. Had it been loud? Had it startled the baby next door?
“It was an agent from Stasi headquarters, telling me you were no longer employed there. Is this true?”
Lena took off her coat and hung it up. “Yes.” There was no reason to pretend anymore. “I’m sorry, Auntie. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“Did you shirk your duties? I haven’t raised you to be a shirker. The fellow wouldn’t tell me what had happened.”
“I looked at the papers.” It was the most straightforward of explanations, and the truest.
“You looked at the papers.”
“In the agents’ drawers.”
“In House 1, at Stasi headquarters, where the most important men in the country work.”
Auntie took off her reading glasses and clutched them so tightly Lena was afraid she might crush them. “Didn’t you know you weren’t supposed to do that? Haven’t I told you a thousand times?”
“Uncle Erich is dead.”
Auntie’s glasses fell to the floor. She ran a hand through her permed hair and blinked several times. Lena took two steps toward her and Auntie took her in her arms.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“I saw the preliminary death report,” Lena said.
“How?”
“It was sitting on the—”
“No,” Auntie said. “How did he die?”
Lena wiped her eyes on Auntie’s housecoat. “The report said natural causes. The man—” How should she refer to him? Herr Drechsler? Comrade Dreck? The terrible man who’d made her do terrible things? She would not use his fancy military title. “He said Uncle had lung cancer.”
Auntie frowned. “He’d never mentioned it. Did you know?”
Lena shook her head. “It isn’t true.”
“You don’t know that.” Auntie bent to pick up her glasses. The slow, awkward way she folded herself to the floor and back up again made her seem old and fragile. “All that time he’d spent in the mines—and his smoking. He might have wanted to spare us. He cared for you very much, you know.”
“Mama and Papa didn’t work in a freight car factory. They were making ammunition. The State was planning a takeover of West Berlin. The explosion wasn’t an accident. It—”
Auntie’s hand came flying out to cover Lena’s mouth. “Hush.” Her eyes were wide. “You’re getting hysterical. I’ll make you some warm milk and you’ll feel better.” She took her hand away.
“I don’t want warm milk,” Lena said.
“Yes, you do.”
She led Lena to the kitchen, sat her down, and turned on the radio, her mouth pressed into a firm line. When she pointed at the walls, Lena knew what she meant. You could hear everything through those walls, and everything could hear you.
The radio played loud marching music. “You’ll wake the baby next door,” Lena said.
Auntie fixed Lena with a strange look. She took out a pot and a large spoon and banged away until three, two, one, there he was, screaming his head off. Then she sat close to Lena.
“You mustn’t talk like that. No matter what you found out, and not even if it’s true. They came here tonight. They want to send you back to the hospital. They asked me to sign some forms, but I refused. You must straighten up, Lena, please. For your own good. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold them off this time.”
Lena held her aunt’s formidable arm. It was like holding a sturdy tree branch. “I can’t go back there,” she said.
Auntie put a firm hand over Lena’s. “Drink your milk, and go to bed.”
Lena stood up, went to the table in the corner of the sitting room where Helmut lived, and lit the candle. She looked up. She looked left.
“Auntie? We need to talk.”
— 29 —
a new coat
Auntie invited the two men up for coffee, real West German coffee, which put them in a good mood, even the man with inky hands. It was late the following afternoon. They’d been sitting in the Lada all day.
“Lena has something to tell you,” Auntie said.
Lena sat with her hands in her lap, twisting them as i
f they were soaked with water and she was trying to wring it all out. Earlier that afternoon she’d snuck away and met with Max and Günter Schulmann’s friend in the pub. The barman had waved and smiled and asked how she was. That had been strange enough. But the strangest part of the meeting had been seeing her face on a Western passport. Günter had used the photograph she’d left in the mailbox for the false documents. He had connections to intelligence, which meant access to the printers that the government used for regular passports. The right ink. The right paper.
They would use forged East German papers to get to Romania, in case their names were on a watch list. In Bucharest, they would trade their documents for Western ones and board an airplane for Munich. Lena’s were hidden beneath her mattress. She was terrified the papers would somehow reveal themselves that afternoon, give off a bad smell, or start beeping.
Don’t think about the passports. “Max is planning to leave on Thursday,” she said to the men.
“Tell them the plan.” Auntie stirred her coffee vigorously. “Tell them everything.”
And Lena did.
*
“That’s good, Lena,” the plump bald man said when she had finished. “You’ve done the right thing. We’re arranging for a new place of employment for you. There are openings in the Clara Zetkin rayon factory in Elsterberg—”
“No!” Lena took a breath to settle herself. “I mean, I’d like to stay here in Berlin, with my aunt.”
The two men glanced at each other. Auntie went into the kitchen and came out with the entire package of Western coffee, pressing it into the bald man’s hands. His hands were small, like a woman’s. They would probably be damp. He nodded and said, “We’ll look into it, won’t we, Kurt?”
The inky man shrugged, as though Lena’s future was the thing he cared least about in the world.
“There must be other cleaning jobs in Berlin,” Auntie said. “Ones that don’t require security clearance.”
“I imagine so.” The plump bald man closed his notepad and tucked away his pen. “We’ll be in touch.”
Lena watched from the window as the men got into their Lada and drove away.
“I’m sorry you had to do that,” Auntie said loudly. “It’s a terrible thing to break a friend’s confidence, but rules are rules and he should have known better.”
Max wasn’t just a friend. He was her boyfriend, maybe even her One True Love, though it’s better not to think that way. Lena wanted to shout, It was me in the foyer, kissing him. That girl you called a Monika, it was me. But she needed Auntie on her side.
She and Auntie had supper together, and then Lena went to bed. She listened as the crashing started in the bathroom, and then stopped. She waited until she heard Auntie’s bedroom door click shut. Then she slid the documents out from under her mattress.
Herr Schulmann’s friend had done a top-notch job. There was Lena’s face next to a different name, a different place of birth. It was odd to think of another life waiting for her, something she could slip into as if it were a new coat: the winter coat you’ve always wanted from the magazine.
“You are not to see each other between now and Thursday,” Herr Schulmann’s friend had advised Lena and Max that afternoon. “No matter how much you might like to. It’s important, do you understand?”
Lena understood. But it didn’t stop her from crying herself to sleep.
*
The next couple of days were busy. Arrangements were made for Lena to take a cleaning job at one of the train stations. She would start the following week. Peter was packing for military service, and kept showing up at her door at odd hours to make sure she had his address, and the recyclables box, and this, and that. Once he arrived with a small bag. In it was the swanky purple shirt.
“Will you take care of it for me? My mother—she’ll clean while I’m away. She’ll find it for sure, and she’ll feel obliged to show it to Father. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Of course Lena would take it. Peter leaned in to hug her, and she let him.
On Thursday afternoon, she went to the courtyard with Auntie to check on the tree. Auntie had gotten hold of some fertilizer, and she and Lena mixed it into the soil.
“I believe it’s taken root,” Auntie said. “It doesn’t look quite so sad anymore.”
Lena thought the tree was maybe the saddest thing she’d ever seen in her life. She touched its branches and whispered goodbye.
— 30 —
the great sleeping girl
It turned out palm trees were a real thing, not something that only appeared on cakes. Coconuts grew from them. Ukuleles were also real. People in Hawaii knew how to play them. Lena lay completely still, listening to the wind rustle the branches of the palm trees, listening to the surf, and the plink-plink of the miniature guitars that sounded like toys.
There would be drinks coming, with tiny paper umbrellas and slices of pineapple. There would be sand between her toes and in her hair and under her fingernails. There was no Herr Dreck in Hawaii.
Max lay beside her in the sun, holding her hand. By now she knew the shape of every one of his fingers. If ever she were to go blind, she would be able to identify him by his hands. His conscription haircut had grown out, but that section in the front still refused to behave. He would always have a bit of Prenzlauer Berg in him.
“Here we are, Lena. Here’s a little something to settle you down.”
Lena stuck out her hand for the pill. The little something calmed her nerves, but it also dulled every sharp edge in her mind and muffled her instincts.
“Here’s your juice,” said the nurse. In a plastic cup. So much of the Better Germany was made of plastic. All it would take was one really hot day and the entire country would melt.
“Where’s the umbrella?” Lena asked.
“What do you need an umbrella for?”
“In the cup,” Lena said. “With the pineapple.”
“Honestly,” the nurse said with a huff. “How do you expect to fit an umbrella into that cup?”
Silly girl, what are you thinking? This was the real world, where umbrellas were for rain, and orange was a wild animal, and you could play with colored noodles all afternoon if you wanted to.
Lena shared a room with a girl who saw people that weren’t there. When they appeared, she screamed at them. And you complained about the baby next door. Twice a week Auntie came to visit. She tried numerous times to give Lena’s roommate a talking to. Soon the girl hid under her covers whenever Auntie showed up.
On her first visit, Sausage Auntie had brought a postcard from Munich. Two words were written on the back: Thank you. Lena knew it was from Max. He’d made it; he was out. Her heart ached as she thought of the documents that were probably still hidden beneath her mattress. She could have gone with him. Those Stasi agents had been convinced she was telling them the truth when she’d given them the details about the escape through the Bernauer Strasse tunnel. Even Auntie had said she should go with Max and the circus, that night when Lena had told her everything. But Lena couldn’t do it. She had trusted Auntie with her biggest secrets, and Auntie hadn’t betrayed her. Auntie had done such a good acting job, she could have been the star of Factory: A Love Story.
Thursday night on Bernauer Strasse, there must have been a pack of agents waiting to swoop down on the three boys. All they would have found was their informer, Bem, probably sweaty and confused—checking his watch, the moon, his shoelaces. “They said they were coming,” he would have told the agents. But Max had warned Dieter not to go. That night he would have been doing his best to blend in with the circus troupe, possibly carrying the bearded lady’s suitcase, or the lion tamer’s chair.
Lena had spent a long time imagining Max’s anxiety at the train station. Imagining him waiting for her, watching each train that arrived, hoping she would show up—while she sat on her bed, an overnight ba
g beside her, Auntie pacing in the kitchen. Auntie had marched over and opened Lena’s door without knocking. “If you’re going, you need to leave.” The way she’d stood in the doorway not knowing what to do with her arms, then rushed in and hugged Lena harder than she ever had before—Lena knew it was her way of saying, “Go, you can go.” But also, “Please don’t, because my life is nothing without you in it.”
Maybe Lena had been foolish not to take the opportunity to escape. At the meeting with Herr Schulmann’s friend, she’d promised she would be at the station; she had to be sure Max would go. But in the end, she couldn’t do it. Auntie was gruff sometimes, and stern, but she needed Lena, and it felt good to be needed.
Erich wouldn’t have left. He didn’t leave. And Lena didn’t either. Even though when the clock chimed eight and she pictured Max’s train pulling away from the station, the scaffolding that had been holding her up came crashing down.
When the men from the Stasi realized that Lena had lied and Max was gone, they’d been livid. The new job was off. As they stomped up the stairs to Auntie’s floor, Auntie held Lena’s hand and said she was proud to have a niece who was so brave. They stormed into the apartment and, despite Auntie’s loud protests, took Lena away. Lucky she’d already packed her bag.
And now here she was, imagining Hawaii. Imagining hard, because it was the only way she could keep the wasps from flying into her ears and building a nest right in her head. No, that was not the clatter of a metal door. No, that was not the jingle of keys on a nurse’s belt. Those weren’t cries, and that wasn’t music without words. Lena was in the place so pretty it belonged on top of a cake. The land of icing, where the maps were made of chocolate.
How had Erich survived his time in Hohenschönhausen? What picture in his mind had kept him going? Lena thought about the time she had spent with him every Sunday, the questions he would ask about her schrullig world, how he’d brighten whenever her answers made it grow. Those were the happiest times they’d shared.
What if she were to tell her story? Write it down. Not there, in the hospital, but one day, maybe—if she ever got out. She would sit by her window with a small table and a typewriter. She had a story the world needed to hear.
The House of One Thousand Eyes Page 27