In the meantime, she slept.
*
She slept through 1984 and 1985, even when Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and taught the world two new words: glasnost and perestroika.
She slept through the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. West Germans were told not to eat mushrooms and berries, or drink milk, in case of contamination, but the citizens of the Better Germany could eat whatever they liked.
In 1987, Berlin turned 750 years old, and an outdoor concert was held in the West to celebrate. Westerners turned the loudspeakers eastward so people in the Better Germany could hear David Bowie sing—but it didn’t wake Lena. Protests occurred on the nights that followed, thousands of people shouting “Gorbi, Gorbi, down with the Wall!” And still, Lena slept.
She slept through the Bruce Springsteen concert in 1988. She slept through 29,000 letters of complaint that were sent to Erich Honecker. The State Council received tens of thousands more, but they didn’t wake Lena either.
In June 1989, when the GDR sided with China during the protests in Tiananmen Square, Lena slept. In September, Hungary broke with protocol and allowed citizens of the Better Germany to cross into the West from Hungarian territory. On Republic Day, demonstrators expressing support for Gorbachev were subdued with force. There were anti-government rallies in Leipzig every Monday night. Lena dozed right through them.
Then came the day an East German Politburo member made a big mistake. It was November 9, 1989, and Lena was asleep. A new travel law had been passed. Günter Schabowski announced that Easterners would henceforth be entitled to proper passports that would allow them to travel to the West whenever they wanted. “When does this take effect?” a journalist asked. Schabowski was unprepared for the question. He’d just come back from vacation. He stammered, glanced down at his notes, didn’t know what to say, and answered, “Immediately.”
That night Auntie burst into the hospital, shook Lena awake, and exclaimed, “The Wall! The Wall!”
“What?” said Lena. “What about it?”
Auntie took Lena’s hands in hers. “The Wall has come down.”
Lena’s room had not changed in six years. Her roommate still saw strangers in the corners. The pastel landscape still hung above Lena’s bed. She wanted to call the nurse to offer Auntie one of her pills. “Who’s the crazy one now?”
“No, I’m not crazy.” Although her home perm looked ready to spring off her head, and her eyes were huge. “There’s no more East and West. No more Lenin and Marx.” Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler and his Black Channel were gone. Erich Honecker and his big black glasses: gone. Erich Mielke and his hair tonic: gone. Herr Dreck with his hairy hands and hairy ears and pointed Lenin beard: gone.
The Better Germany had decided to stand on its head, and all the men in charge fell out of its pockets. Lena hoped it would stay upside down long enough for her to enjoy it.
“I’m getting you out of here,” Auntie said. “They can’t hold you anymore. There’s nothing wrong with you, Lena. There has never been anything wrong with you, other than the trauma you suffered at the death of your parents. You’re coming home.”
That was when Lena started to cry.
*
The paving tiles in the courtyard stretched from one end of the housing development to the other. Lena could walk all the way across without getting her feet wet. Hans had built three more benches. There were tables and chairs to sit at, and a second vegetable garden. The military bushes had grown and filled out, like teenage boys become men.
But what struck Lena most of all was the tree in the center. The last time she’d seen it, it had been a spindly sapling. Now it was four meters tall. Six years—it had spent the past six years growing, while all that time Lena had been shrinking.
It was almost wintertime, so the willow had lost its leaves.
“You should see it in spring,” Auntie said. “The birds love it.”
The nests that would have been sheltered by summer foliage now sat like upturned hats on the branches. Lena couldn’t wait to hear the tree chirping and full of life. She wrapped her arms around its trunk and pressed her face against it. It was rough, and cold, and sturdy.
Next to the building’s front entrance was the Golden House Number plaque. The housing development had won it in 1987. Lena remembered Auntie telling her about it then, though she hadn’t wanted to imagine any of it: the ceremony, the excitement, Auntie clacking across the paving tiles.
“They gave us money,” Auntie said. “Hans wanted to throw a party, but I made him wait. I wanted you to be here. We’ll have the party for you.”
Hans appeared in the courtyard with a mug. “You look skinny,” he said. “And pale. I prescribe sandwiches and sunshine, and maybe some ‘blue strangler’ vodka.”
She hugged him.
“You survived,” he said quietly. “That is a victory.”
Danika had already left for the West to find a job in the fashion industry, but Peter had come home to see Lena. She met him on the stairs up to the apartment. He seemed taller than she’d remembered, and his eczema was gone.
“I’ve got a job in radio,” he said.
They sat at the kitchen table and Peter showed her a photograph of his girlfriend. He didn’t live with Military Papa anymore. He had a life of his own. “When we take off our shoes at the door,” he said, “we leave them in a great pile. Nothing is lined up, not even our books.”
It was strange to see how people’s lives had progressed and things had changed during the six years Lena had spent sorting noodles into piles. Strange, and disconcerting.
After Peter left, Auntie handed her a letter. It was from Max.
“I wrote to him,” she said, “and told him you were coming home.”
Lena opened it carefully, as if the tiniest tear in the envelope would break the spell. My dear Lena. There’d been no point writing while the Stasi was still around, he said. The letters would never have reached her. He was in Munich. He would come to Berlin to see her on the weekend. He was looking forward to it.
The letter left so much unsaid. Was he back with Rita, or perhaps a new Rita? It didn’t seem reasonable that he had waited for Lena all this time. But what did it matter? She would see him. They would sit under the willow tree, even in the rain, and figure out how the years had pressed its fingers into them, how much damage had been done, and if there was any hope of repair.
“Why don’t you go to your room,” Auntie said. “There’s a surprise for you.”
With the letter still in her hand, Lena went into her bedroom. On the bookshelf were all of Erich’s books. She brought the letter to her mouth and stared. “Where did you get them?”
Auntie looked up, and she looked left. “I had some extra money. Your uncle’s work is popular in the West, so I went to a shop and ordered the books.”
Erich’s photograph hung on the wall alongside her parents, John Travolta, and the insect band. The other Erichs had been taken down, as well as Marx and Lenin. By the window was the small table and chair Lena had requested, along with a typewriter and a stack of paper.
“Your uncle would be proud of you.” Auntie put a hand on Lena’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you too.”
Lena went over to the typewriter and stroked it as if it were a cat. She pressed on a key, and it made a clack. She sat at the chair and gazed out the window. This was what Erich had done, every day, with his cigarettes and layabout hair.
When she closed her eyes, she could hear his voice in her head, saying, Tell me. Tell me about your world.
afterword
This is a work of fiction, but many aspects of the story are based in fact.
There was no munitions factory in Magdeburg that I am aware of, nor any documented explosion there. However, according to the military historian Winfried Heinemann, plans to attack West Ber
lin did indeed exist. The Washington Post has cited documents dating from the 1960s to the mid-1980s proving that this plan was far more developed than Western intelligence sources were aware of at the time. The details I’ve included about Day X come from a variety of credible sources.
The Stasi did imprison people and sometimes made them disappear. Hohenschönhausen is a real place—left blank on East German city maps—and people were picked up in bakery vans and flower-delivery vans and transported there in the middle of the night. Today it is possible to visit Hohenschönhausen and take a guided tour led by former prisoners.
The Stasi was a pervasive presence in every corner of East German society. To learn about its inner workings, you can visit the Stasi’s former headquarters—now a museum—in Berlin, or watch the excellent film The Lives of Others. There is also an interactive GDR Museum in Berlin that gives the visitor an authentic sense of what life would have been like there.
In the 1980s, the Stasi’s preferred strategy for dealing with opponents to the regime was called Zersetzen. It involved frightening dissidents into silence by, for example, spreading humiliating rumors about them or conspicuously following them. That said, the Stasi also employed more aggressive methods. Stasi documents from the 1980s confirm the intended murder of prominent political enemies of the regime, so Erich’s story is within the realm of the possible. In her wonderful nonfiction book Stasiland, Anna Funder describes a “disappearance” similar to Erich’s. In 1975, a popular band of musicians called Renft was not merely banned, but erased from existence.
While there were many good physicians in the psychiatric hospitals of the GDR, terrible stories have also emerged about clinics where unnecessary lobotomies were performed or patients were sterilized with extreme doses of X-rays. There were also Jugendwerkhöfe, state-run institutions where young people who didn’t fit societal norms were “re-educated.” My novel’s mental hospital is fictional, but it is drawn from this reality.
During the 1980s in the GDR, sexual abuse was not openly discussed and victims would not have received either support or counselling. Lena coped with her sexual abuse by compartmentalizing it, which was how many East Germans handled the gap they experienced between what they knew to be true, versus the Party’s version of events.
As of 1989, 91,000 people worked for the Ministry for State Security: one Stasi employee for every 180 residents of the GDR. These official employees were supported by 173,000 unofficial informers.
By 1989, 280,000 prison sentences had been handed down for political activity, 90,000 letters were being opened per day, 20,000 telephones had been tapped, and the Stasi’s files included 39,000,000 index cards. After the GDR came to an end, the Stasi busied itself with shredding files. When the electric shredders finally gave out, documents were shredded by hand. Still, an enormous number of documents remain in the archives today. The author Gary Bruce has calculated it would take one person almost 7,000 years to read all that material, and that’s if they read every minute of every day.
Only one in fifteen escape attempts from the GDR was successful. An estimated 250 people died at the Berlin Wall. Another 370 died along the border dividing East and West Germany, and 189 died trying to escape across the Baltic Sea. As many as 72,000 people were jailed for failed escape attempts.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to visit House 18 at the Stasi compound in Berlin, where Lena’s schrullig world actually existed. My information about the secret Western-style shops and facilities there comes from Stasiland as well as from Steffen Leide at the Stasi Museum. No reliable data exists about how House 1 was cleaned; my imagination was my guide in that respect. The hidden keys in the Stasi offices was something I extrapolated from the information I found about the general security measures at headquarters.
Bruno Drechsler is a fictional character. Erich Mielke is not. After the Wall came down, Mielke was arrested and served time in prison for two murders that had occurred in the 1930s. He was never prosecuted for his actions as the head of the Stasi.
Some of the German proverbs in this novel come courtesy of Jack Schmidt’s blog Oh God, My Wife Is German. The jokes about Erich Shitbucket, East German concrete, and the People’s Police all come from Oliver Fritz’s excellent memoir The Iron Curtain Kid. The excerpt from Erich Honecker’s speech to the Eighth Communist Party Conference in April 1971 appeared in Neues Deutschland newspaper and was cited in The Iron Curtain Kid. Fritz’s memoir was also the source for the Enthusiasm in Handicrafts award, October Club’s song “Tell Me Your Standpoint,” the rumor of lentils being used to turn East German chocolate brown, and the bee stamp on students’ homework.
The expression “the mark of the Western devil” comes from Mary Fulbrook’s nonfiction book The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. The idea of a wall forming in one’s mind originated with Peter Schneider’s novel The Wall Jumper, although it is used in a different manner there—as a barrier rather than as a form of self-protection.
acknowledgments
There are many people I must thank, people without whom this novel would not have been written. Thanks to my two trusted readers and great friends Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt and Nikki Vogel, who are patient, honest, and enthusiastic, and don’t let me get away with anything. To Penny Croucher, author of the blog Berlin Unwrapped as well as the guidebooks Berlin: An English Guide to Known and Unknown Treasures and Berlin Unwrapped: The Ultimate Guide to a Unique City. Not only did she read the manuscript for factual accuracy, she verified the tiniest details and, while in Berlin, double-checked my description of the Stasi’s headquarters. Any errors that remain are my own.
To my daughter, Madeleine, who endured long afternoons in Berlin museums while I took copious notes. To my cousin Fritz, who took time out of his busy schedule to draw the illustrations for this book. To my cousin Heide and her husband, Jürgen, for their generous hospitality, and for helping me appreciate what life was like in the GDR. To my mother, who escaped from the GDR in the 1950s: she is the reason for my interest in this history. To Steffen Leide at the Stasi Museum, who patiently answered my questions. To Wayne Yoshida, who taught me everything I needed to know about operating a ham radio.
To the people at Annick Press: Colleen MacMillan tracked me down, bought me coffee, and listened while I told her, and then Paula Ayer, about my idea for this novel. Their enthusiasm persuaded me this was a story worth telling. Lorissa Sengara, my patient and attentive editor, wanted to help me make this book as perfect as it could be. Chandra Wohleber, the copy editor, read the manuscript with an incredible attention to detail. Rivka Cranley and the rest of the team at Annick answered my endless questions promptly and with kindness. I couldn’t have wished for more.
Finally, to Dan, who has always supported and believed in me. My writing life is possible because of him.
© Michelle Barker (text)
Cover art/design by Emma Dolan
Edited by Lorissa Sengara
Designed by Emma Dolan
A special thank you to Fritz Luehmann for the illustrations of the Berlin Wall and the map of Germany and Berlin.
Brief quote from p. 120 from Stasiland by Anna Funder. Copyright © 2002 by Anna Funder. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. (US rights)
Excerpt from Stasiland © 2011 by Anna Funder. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. (Canadian rights)
Excerpt from “The Stasi Legacy” from Berlin Now: The City After the Wall by Peter Schneider, translated by Sophie Schlondorff. Translation copyright © 2014 by Sophie Schlondorff. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Cataloging in Publication
Barker, Michelle, 1964-, author
The house of one thousand eyes / Michelle Barker.
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Published in the U.S.A. by Annick Press (U.S.) Ltd.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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