A Patriot in Berlin

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘So take your time, big boy,’ said the blonde, ‘take your time.’

  He lay back on the bed like a patient in a hospital, and like nurses the girls removed his clothes. They then took off their own, careful not to crease the blouses and skirts, and climbed back onto the bed in their exotic Western underclothes and started kissing and nibbling his skin. Like eager young actresses, they did what they had seen on the videos but inexpertly confused the roles of tooth and tongue. Typical Russian whores, thought Gerasimov as he flinched at the pain. They even get a blow job wrong.

  THREE

  The young American art historian, Francesca McDermott, had slept little when crossing the Atlantic from Boston to Frankfurt and so dozed off on the connecting flight to Berlin. She awoke only as the plane approached Tegel, now one of the two airports serving Berlin. She looked down out of the window. It was September. The trees of the Spandau Forest were already losing their leaves. The pale sun reflected off the water of the Tegeler See. The plane turned to make its approach: Francesca could make out the Radio Tower and the Olympic Stadium.

  Ten years before, when Francesca had last been to Berlin, Tegel had been in the French sector of the city. Now that Germany and Berlin were reunited, there was little sign of occupation by the Western powers beyond the fact that Lufthansa was not yet permitted to fly from Frankfurt to Berlin: the line carrying Francesca was Air France. Everything else about the airport was German, West German – the cleanliness, the efficiency, the brisk courtesy of the airport personnel. Since it was now classified as an internal flight, there was no passport check; but no one curious about Francesca’s nationality would have had to see her passport to know that she was a citizen of the United States. She was tall, healthy and handsome, pert Irish features on a body that had been fed steak, not potatoes, and now jogged every morning and played squash at weekends. She walked towards the baggage claim rondel with the assurance of a well-educated, well-dressed and well-paid professional woman from the land of the free; a competitive glint in the eye; an elegance that is composed rather than seductive; and a similar sexual allure – healthy rather than luxuriant, proclaiming that a woman is a woman, not just the plaything of a man.

  Ten years before, Francesca McDermott had looked different – not quite a hippie, because she was already a graduate student, but rarely out of jeans, and with the hair, now so well cut at such great cost, then gathered in a ponytail by an elastic band. For this reason, when she came to the gate, the woman she recognized as Sophie Diederich did not recognize her. And that was just as well. Francesca’s face betrayed the shock she felt at the sight of Sophie – not simply because Sophie, who was anyway five years older than Francesca, now looked a good ten years older than that, but because in all other ways she was so entirely unchanged – her hair in greasy wisps, her clothes the same dungarees worn in dissident circles back in the 1980s.

  All sorts of reasons for Sophie’s wretched appearance passed through Francesca’s mind – stress, diet, persecution, not least the month she had spent in prison in the old DDR: but even so, she thought, a woman can make the best of herself or at least appear to try, and a look of sisterly determination crossed Francesca’s face as she pushed the baggage trolley towards her friend.

  Sophie Diederich, who had not had the advantage of recognizing Francesca in advance, could not hide an expression of slight confusion as she realized that the tall, elegant woman in a beige suit and red silk scarf held at her throat by an antique brooch was the same Francesca that she had known ten years before; and when she did, although her face broke into a smile of unreserved delight, she checked the impulse to hug her as if it might now be somehow inappropriate. Francesca, both more composed and more controlled, pushed the trolley aside and with a cry of ‘Sophie, I can’t believe it!’ embraced and kissed the small woman in dungarees.

  They went to the car park where Francesca was again a little taken aback by the sight of Sophie Diederich’s car, an East German Wartburg with a two-stroke engine that puttered like an overworked sewing machine as they set off down the motorway towards the Stadtring. Surely the wife of the new Prussian Minister of Culture should be driving a BMW or, at worst, a Volkswagen?

  ‘We’ll go down the Ku’damm,’ said Sophie cheerfully, ‘so you can see how it’s all changed …’

  She drove haphazardly, as if realizing that the shiny Western cars would give her old Wartburg a wide berth. She chattered in German as she drove; Francesca, her German now rusty, sometimes found it hard to follow. ‘Dearest Francesca, it is so wonderful that you are here – there is so much to tell you – and you, you are a professor? No, a lecturer … but Dr … Dr McDermott … and from that thesis that you were working on here on the Bauhaus, yes?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And it was just like fate when they said we must get an expert from America, perhaps even Francesca McDermott, because then the Americans will be more likely to lend their paintings, and Stefan agreed and so, even, in the end, did the Russian, and it never occurred to me that this was you, our Francesca, but then Stefi said it was you and that he had invited you over because now Stefi – you know he’s a minister? – he can decide these things, and he has only to flick his fingers and there is the money because all the parties want the New Grouping – that’s Stefi’s party – to support them in a coalition, and they know that Stefi can influence them one way or another.’

  ‘Is he the leader?’

  ‘You know, the group has no leader. We had too much of leaders before with Ulbricht and Honecker. And it’s not a party, as such, only a group, because we had too much, much too much, of the word party …’

  ‘I can believe it.’

  ‘But Stefi really is a first among equals. The candlelit vigils – you must have read about them or seen them on the TV? – he was among the first to organize them when it was still dangerous, very dangerous … No one imagined – no one even dreamed – that the whole thing would collapse so quickly.’

  ‘It was incredible.’

  ‘Incredible, yes. And if it wasn’t for Gorbachev and Shevardnadze there would have been no change from Communism to democracy. The wall would still be standing. And thank God for Yeltsin, too, but he is unfair to Gorbachev, I think … At any rate, for us Germans Gorby is a hero, a big hero, but there also had to be little heroes, and Stefi was a little hero … He organized the vigils, and he was on the citizens’ committee that took control of the Stasi headquarters here in Berlin.’

  ‘With all those files?’

  ‘The files! God help us. Six million of them! They started to burn them, you know, because they thought the Stasi would be back; but then they realised that they were burning the records of the spies themselves – the IMs, the “unofficial collaborators” – but Francesca, if you knew … Our friends, our dearest and closest friends in the Evangelical Church, the Peace Now movement, and the Ecological Group – Stasi spies! All along! Spies and provocateurs!’

  ‘I read about it, Sophie. It must have been terrible … As bad as anything that went before.’

  ‘In a way it was worse … Ah, look, here we are in the Ku’damm. You remember? You had a room near the Savignyplatz, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. On Schlüterstrasse.’

  ‘It is so nice around there, so lively. And then, we could only imagine it.’

  ‘You haven’t moved West?’

  ‘No. God forbid. That’s what they expect. A house in Charlottenburg! A Mercedes! But Stefi won’t hear of it. We are where we always were. You’ll see. Nothing has changed.’

  Francesca looked out at the shops and cafés on the Kurfürstendamm – not so very different, now, from what she remembered from ten years before. ‘And have you seen your Stasi file?’ she asked Sophie, to get back to the subject they had touched on before.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you going to?’

  Sophie sighed. ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. Stefi’s against it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He
says the wounds will never heal if we keep reopening them, and that he would rather not know if some of our friends were Stasi spies. He prefers to give them all the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘You see, when the Wall came down we were all so deliriously happy we could not believe it, but now, only three years later, we see the problems …’

  The two women in the Wartburg had now passed the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at the foot of the Kurfürstendamm – its ruins preserved as a memorial to World War II – and now turned towards the Tiergarten. ‘There are so many practical problems.’ Sophie went on. ‘The sewers, the electricity … Did you know that the grid supplying East Berlin was controlled from Kiev? There are the industrial and economic problems … Politically, we are now one country, but economically the two halves of Germany are half a century apart … There is also the moral problem, the lack in the provinces of the old DDR of any positive values, any values at all … Look, here’s the Goddess of Victory on top of her column, and there’s the Brandenburg Gate.’

  Francesca looked out at these landmarks through the windows of the Wartburg. ‘But no more checkpoints?’

  ‘No more checkpoints, just traffic jams. There still aren’t that many places where you can cross from one half of the city to the other.’ She jerked the car forward. ‘I’ll try by the Invalidenstrasse … We can see Unter den Linden some other time.’

  ‘There’s no hurry …’

  ‘Does that mean you’ll stay?’

  ‘I would certainly like to,’ said Francesca, ‘if it can be arranged.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sophie with a laugh, ‘they don’t understand anything about contracts or salaries or anything like that. You can ask for anything you like.’

  Francesca blushed. She had not so much been thinking of remuneration – her salary on sabbatical would pay the mortgage on her apartment in Boston – but rather of status and authority … But that would come later. Now, while she was alone with Sophie, she wanted to catch up on her personal life.

  ‘Sophie,’ she said quietly. ‘What happened to Paul?’

  ‘Ah, Paul …’

  ‘I mean, not just to him, but between you and him, because when I was here …’

  ‘We were married. I know.’

  ‘And you seemed so happy …’

  For the first time since Francesca’s arrival, Sophie Diederich appeared almost subdued. ‘Paul …’ she began; then she hesitated and said: ‘Poor Paul.’ And then added: ‘You know, after the Communists were thrown out, he was made mayor of his village?’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘North of Berlin. Bechtling. Not far from Dierberg.’

  ‘Does he live there?’

  ‘He is the pastor.’

  ‘Wasn’t that kind of quiet, after his position here in Berlin?’

  ‘Of course but, you see, he was ill, very ill. He was in a sanatorium. He simply couldn’t cope …’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘His work. His position. The expectations people had of him.’ She became agitated as she spoke. ‘You see, now we are finding out what terrible things they did to men like Paul …’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Stasi. They had a word – Zersetzung …’

  ‘Subversion?’

  ‘Obliteration. They planned to undermine, crush, destroy anyone who opposed them in any way, and Paul, beccause he was first the chaplain to the Protestant students, and then a dissident …’

  ‘But Stefi was a dissident too.’

  ‘Of course. But Stefi was stronger because he could be humorous about everything whereas Paul was always so earnest. You know, it was enough to worry about the Stasi but he was also always anxious about God and the devil …’

  ‘So what happened? Did he have a nervous breakdown?’

  ‘Yes. He really went almost mad, and it was terrible for him but also for me and the children. Thank God Stefi was there … He was really wonderful to Paul and to me, when Paul could no longer cope with anything … with his work, but also with me and with his family. You see, when he left the sanatorium, he would not come home. He went back to his parents in Bechtling. He would not see me. He would not talk to me. It was then that Stefi took me on.’

  ‘I guess Stefi loved you a little as well?’ suggested Francesca.

  Sophie brightened up. ‘Do you think so? Do you remember that?’

  Francesca looked out of the window. ‘He was always one for the girls.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sophie sweetly. ‘He was one for the girls, and yet he chose me.’

  As she said this, they crossed the railway bridge on the Invalidenstrasse and reached the band of raked earth which had been the free-fire zone on the eastern side of the Wall. Once in East Berlin, Francesca was astonished by how little had changed, not just since the reunification of the city, but in the ten years that had passed since she had last been there. The buildings were uniform, drab and poorly maintained – mile upon mile of apartment blocks with only the occasional shop or café.

  When they reached Friedrichshain, Sophie turned into the Wedekindstrasse and stopped the car outside the pre-war block of flats that Francesca remembered so vividly from ten years before. Here again, nothing appeared to have changed. The vestibule was dark and shabby, and all at once Francesca felt extraordinarily conspicuous in her Burberry raincoat and beige suit. She was embarrassed by the size of the smart suitcase that Sophie now heaved out of the back of the Wartburg. Francesca tried to take it from her. ‘No, no,’ Sophie insisted. ‘We’re used to hard labour.’ And, as she lugged it up the two flights of dank stairs, she added: ‘There were no deliveries under socialism. We had to carry our furniture, fridge, everything, up these dreadful stairs.’

  She opened the door to her flat and went in. Francesca stood on the threshold, remembering the conspiratorial visits she had paid to this same apartment either to attend the readings of the dissidents’ unpublished works, or simply to spend an evening with Sophie and Paul. Then, it had been furnished with old pieces of furniture given to Paul by his father, including a piano at which Paul had accompanied Sophie singing Schubert Lieder, his earnest features gradually relaxing as the music calmed his mind, his eyes looking gently up at Sophie whose thin little voice had them all enchanted.

  Now Paul had gone and the appearance of the apartment had completely changed. Gone were the carpets and rugs, the oil paintings and photographs of Paul’s parents and grandparents – everything, in fact, that had given the apartment a flavour of Germany before the war. Now the floors were sanded, and the furniture was Scandinavian in style – a squat white sofa, two beanbags, one black, the other red. In the place of the piano there was a large television, and there were now contemporary prints and paintings on the wall – of a mediocrity, Francesca decided with her professional eye, that could only be found in Eastern Europe.

  ‘My, it’s changed, Sophie,’ said Francesca as she came in.

  Sophie took this as a compliment. ‘The hi-fi comes from before reunification, and the records. They were cheap in the DDR.’

  ‘So were the books, I guess,’ said Francesca, looking at the shelves which on two of the walls went from floor to ceiling.

  ‘And there was not much else to do but read,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Well, they do furnish a room.’

  ‘Cheaper than wallpaper, even if one could get it.’

  ‘And the paintings?’

  ‘That’s by Brigitte Schönemann, a friend. That’s by a Czech friend, Jaroslav Zermak … In fact, they’re all by friends.’

  Francesca crossed the room to study the paintings – the Schönemann, a drab pastiche of 1960s abstractionism, and the one by the Czech, a daub like a squashed cockroach except that the real thing would have been more impressive.

  ‘Of course, you’re an art critic now,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Not an art critic, no, an art historian. I know very little about anything outside my field …’

  ‘Russ
ian art?’

  ‘Experimental Russian Art: 1863 to 1922.’ She rattled this off: it had been the title of her thesis.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Sophie.

  Francesca turned and smiled. ‘Well, it’s a happy coincidence if that’s what Stefi wants to know about.’

  Sophie almost jumped up and down with excitement. ‘Listen, we mustn’t talk about it now. Wait until Stefi gets back this evening. Now, we’ll have some coffee and cake.’ She patted her stomach over the dungarees as she made for the kitchen. ‘I’m so fat that I don’t normally touch them, but in your honour, Francesca …’

  ‘And what about me?’

  Sophie looked back. ‘You’re thin as a rake, and anyway, you can afford to get a little fat, you’re so tall. Now come into the kitchen while I boil the water and tell me about your life.’

  What each woman wanted to know about the other was the state of their affections, but, as Francesca had already discovered, the story of Sophie’s divorce from Paul was clearly a painful one to remember; and Francesca, while she had many friends in the United States who were divorced, could not get over a sense of sadness and perplexity that Sophie was now married to the quick-witted and devious Stefi, and not the gentle, heroic Paul. She was therefore quite willing to wait until she and Sophie had re-established the intimacy that had existed ten years before, and be the first to unload the secret details of her life that in any case were not so secret since Francesca had nothing to hide. Her parents were fine, still in Ann Arbor; her father was now retired and they travelled a lot; her brother worked for NASA in Cape Canaveral; her sister was an associate editor on See the World magazine in New York City. Francesca herself lectured on Russian art at Boston University: her book on the Russian constructivists had come out two years before and had been well received. She had a nice apartment in Boston with a view of the Charles River which she had shared for a while with a friend who taught at MIT but now lived in alone.

  ‘You aren’t married?’ asked Sophie.