“How can I help you?”
Good question. I’d come on a whim, unprepared: I wasn’t too sure myself what I was doing here. Curiosity perhaps? A desire to see with my own eyes at least one part of the workings of the brown coal industry? A hope that mere proximity would help my brain make some connections? But mere curiosity, a desire to follow up on a hunch—those weren’t really the things I could admit to.
“The Republikschutz is interested in the impacts that the West Silesian crisis might have on the electricity supply in the Republic,” I ad libbed.
“It’s already having an effect,” the director sat back, crossing his hands over his expansive belly. It was clearly a favourite topic of his. “Most of the power produced in the Silesian Boxberg power station is used in the south of the Republic: Saxony, Thuringia. Up here we get coal from the mines south of Spremberg, mostly from West Silesia. They’ve been dropping hints about setting a ‘market price’ for the coal that they send up to us. As I’ve already informed the Ministry for Coal and Energy, in the case of West Silesia seceding from the GDR we would lose over half of our national coal reserves, and half of our generating capacity to boot. We are already importing some coal from Poland, but that would have to increase—the Welzow field doesn’t have enough capacity to feed the Schwarze Pumpe power station, and the West-Elbe fields are still supplying Espenhain and the chemical industry,” the director continued, his mellifluous voice outlining technical details and statistics that were far beyond my ability to understand, never mind remember. The gist of it was that most of our coal reserves and a huge amount of electricity generating capacity were in West Silesia, and therefore at risk.
After a few minutes of this shop talk I interrupted: “But if West Silesia became independent then they’d have too much generating capacity for their own use—surely they’d be happy to sell it on to us?”
“You’d think so, but there is talk of an extra-high voltage transmission line running from West Silesia to Westgermany, presumably in order to export the electricity to the Western markets.”
Westgermany wasn’t suffering from any shortfall in energy supply, so why would they be interested in importing power from West Silesia? Except, of course, to make life difficult for us.
12:33
Deciding not to go back to the office I went home. Arriving at the flat I could see a note on the door, just like the old days before I had a phone. A neighbour had taken a call for me, and left a message on the notepad hanging from the door frame. “Katrin called, please phone back”.
I turned the key in the door and opened up. Going in, I crossed a beam of sunlight, making the floating dust dance in my wake. Putting the still warm bread rolls I’d just bought on the table, I went to the stove to boil some water for coffee. Standing in the kitchen, looking out of the window and enjoying the warm, yeasty smell of the rolls I watched a local S‑Bahn train squeal around the curved tracks below. Its dull red and grey paintwork swallowed the low sunlight, the passengers behind the smeared windows barely visible, a shadow puppet show. The train passed, and the weeds between the tracks waved their goodbyes. Turning around I stared at the telephone that had just started ringing.
“Grobe.”
“Papa! It’s me.”
“Hi Katrin, what’s up?”
“Oh nothing much, just got a cancelled lecture, thought it would be good to see you. Besides, I’ve got something to talk to you about. Have you got the day off?”
“I’ve got a few hours free. Why?”
“Listen, do you want to come out here? I’ll buy you coffee.”
I really wanted to go to bed for a short nap before I had to meet the British major, but I knew I would probably lie there staring at the ceiling, thinking. And even if I did manage to nod off then I wouldn’t sleep tonight and would be grumpy all day tomorrow. No, better to get out and about, enjoy a bit of time off. I turned off the stove and headed back out the door. I hadn’t seen Katrin for a couple of weeks, and I was heading over to Westberlin anyway: the Olympia complex, where I was to meet the British liaison officer, was in the British sector.
I walked as far as Ostkreuz before catching the train, hoping the stroll would wake me up a bit. I didn’t go to the western part of the city very often, there wasn’t much for me there. The heady days after the Wall was opened had long gone, we knew what bananas looked like now, and we knew we couldn’t afford them. We knew that the people who populated the other half of our city were mostly better fed, better dressed and better housed, but they weren’t as happy as we were. Looking around at my fellow Eastberliners you could be forgiven for disagreeing—we were a dour bunch. But we had something the people in the West had never had. They had experienced dictators, as we had, and they now had a stable democracy—which we had never had. But they scrawled a cross on a piece of paper every few years, and let the politicians do what they wanted. Their bodies had never surged with the adrenalin and endorphins that come from the power of revolution. We may be the poor cousins on this side of the Wall, but when it came to living life, we were rich.
Changing trains at Friedrichsstrasse station was nothing like it used to be. Nowadays it was as simple as changing platforms. Not so long ago—so recently we could still measure the time in months—the short distance to the trains to the West couldn’t be bridged by a few steps down a corridor and up some stairs to the platform. In those days it took years to get the piece of paper that allowed you to pass the border controls. Years of tears, and usually a one way ticket. In those days most of those who left on the westbound train would never return.
As the S-Bahn whined along the viaduct I looked down at the Wall that still drew the boundaries of this double city. The barbed wire and fences were gone, and the first line of the Wall—whitewashed concrete slabs marking the eastern edge of the border defences—was being dismantled. Behind that there were rows of potatoes, beans and other vegetables growing around the watchtowers and fence posts. The outer wall, facing West, was being maintained while the nation debated what to do with it. It was permeable now, people could pass through a number of new border crossings, but trucks and vans from the West weren’t welcome. After the Wall opened up in November ’89, Westberliners started coming over to the East, buying up subsidised products and taking them back to sell on the street markets. This quickly led to shortages in the capital, some claimed it was a deliberate attempt by Westgermany to destabilise the GDR further—as if that were possible in those days when the communist state was already teetering, pushed by a population hungry for change.
So for the time being the Wall stayed, an economic barrier that gave us space to breathe and grow into the country we wanted to be, whatever we might turn out to be.
A few stops later I got off the train, and following the instructions Katrin had given me on the phone, I made my way to the café.
Tables and chairs were set out on the pavement, all populated by young people in their young clothes, wearing their young faces. Katrin was inside. We hugged. This was a new thing, at home people mostly just shook hands when they met up, but Katrin had started hugging me after she moved to the West. I sat down at her table, and she pushed a cassette tape across the wooden surface. I put my hand over it and drew it towards me.
“What’s with all these cassettes? I mean, it’s not that I don’t appreciate them, in fact I’m rather enjoying them. But, well, why?”
Katrin was sipping a hot chocolate, I nursed a black coffee, no sugar. I could see how my daughter had noticed that I’d deliberately sat with my back to the tray of pastries on the counter, and I think she knew that I was having to try hard to ignore their sweet, sticky call. I couldn’t afford one, nevertheless I hoped that Katrin wouldn’t offer to buy me one either.
“Promise you won’t go off on one?” Katrin, nervous, looked at me. I wondered what was coming as I constructed a lopsided smile (the one Katrin called my Zen-face), and nodded.
“It’s just, after mum… well you had your hands full. With me,
queuing for food, cooking, working in the factory. And after all that you’d go out, some meeting in some crypt, some church hall, or your friends would come round, and you’d turn the radio on loud and hold your whispered conversations around the kitchen table. But you weren’t listening to the music. You never had time for music, even though I knew you loved music. West music, East music, the lot.”
This made me think. The old days. Strangely, life was simple and straightforward, then. A tug of nostalgia coming from somewhere deep in my chest set my thoughts off on a tangent: did I miss those days? I think I’ve still got my Zen smile stapled to the front of my face, but just by looking at Katrin I could see that it had slipped a little.
“I had the blues: Engerling, Cäsar, Bodag… it’s just, after that Udo Ludendorff guy did that song about the train to Pankow, and why can’t he do a gig in our Workers’ and Peasants’ State… it was so unreal. Patronising. Westmusik.”
“Lindenberg.”
The smile must have gone by now, the Zen-face turned into a question-mark.
“Udo Lindenberg. That was the guy’s name. And he just didn’t get it. How could he, a Wessi? But that’s just it. You listened to the Westberlin radio station RIAS, and heard the shit stuff. Anyway, Lindenberg responded to Freya Klier’s appeal for help in ’88.”
I had to admit, that was true. When the singer-songwriter Stephan Krawczyk was arrested along with several others for trying to join a demonstration on Rosa Luxemburg day, his wife Freya Klier, who’d already been released, went on Western TV to appeal for support for him and the other interned activists. Lindenberg was one of those Westerners who put pressure on the Communist government to let them go.
“But the Puhdys?” Katrin would never let go of what she considered my poor musical choices. “Have you still got that album, Das Buch? God, it’s dire!” She pulled a face, then changed tack. “No, the point is. You were doing all that stuff for me, for us, for all of us here in the Republic, I mean, over there,” a gesture, through the window, vaguely eastwards, and I wonder whether this is the point to break in, defend the Puhdys, but I’m glad I didn’t, because:
“And here I am, I’m at uni, meeting all these people, finding out about all these things, hearing all this music. And I feel you missed out, and, yeah, I know, music isn’t such a big thing, but it kind of is too.” Another pause, then: “So, it’s my way of saying thanks.”
I wasn’t sure where to look. I’m not good at public emotion; too many years of not wanting to give the state a way into my life, not wanting to give the Stasi a clue to my weaknesses. But I could feel a tear begin in my right eye.
“Thank you too,” I manage, blinking rapidly and looking away from my daughter.
Katrin smiled. Genuine, not frustrated. A little nervous still, experience telling her to keep something back.
“But, is it your Republic, still?” I ask, without thinking. Now I’m sort of looking at my daughter. “I mean, there you are in Westberlin, with all your new friends, your new clothes, your new money. Your West student’s grant from the West government…” A pause, what I’ve just said sinking in. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. It came out wrong. Sorry. I meant, when are you coming home?”
But that, too, was the wrong thing to say.
“Papa, I’m just the other end of the city! You can come out here any time you want!” But, seeing my face, she stopped. It wasn’t about the physical distance. It was about the symbolism. The Wall is still there, no matter how many holes we’d punched in it. She was in the West, I was in the East. Same city, different countries.
“Papa,” she said slowly, “maybe I should have come back that winter. Things were changing, but all I could think about was that the system was breaking you. I didn’t want to go the same way. I wanted to study, but they wouldn’t let me. You know all this.”
Her face pointed at the table, but her eyes turned upwards, checking how I’d react. I think my face had gone hard, immobile—the calm look I’d been trying to keep up had definitely gone. Katrin was drawing circles with her fingertips on the dark wood, as if the Zen that had slipped off my face had landed on the table in front of us, a pool of viscosity that she could dab her fingers in. It was obvious to us both that we were each thinking of the day she left. The furtive goodbyes, nothing said aloud in case the Stasi were listening. The knowledge that once she crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, on the way to Hungary, and from there to the West, once that first frontier had been crossed there would be no return. We would probably never see each other again. I remembered the desperation, the claustrophobia that had driven her away. I remembered my feelings that day: crushed, hurt, betrayed. Don’t shed any tears for them they told us, ordered us, on the TV and radio. Don’t shed any tears for those who couldn’t stay in this stagnant land. But I still cry when I remember that awful day four years ago. And I know Katrin does, too.
“Do we have to do this every time, Papa? We always do it.”
I could hear the frustration, the pain, the anger in her words. And I could feel answering emotions rising up inside myself too. It was the state she was angry at, that old GDR, run by pensioners. Stalinists. But she was angry at me, too. The daughter of a known dissident had not been allowed to stay on at school after 16, not to do her exams at 18, nor go on to university. She’d never said it aloud, but that was my fault. It was my choice to do the things I’d done, and she had been made to pay for it.
Were families always like this, rubbing each other up the wrong way, accusing each other without words, the past a ghost that is always present? Having the same arguments again and again, hurting each other in the same places time after time? We always said, and left unsaid, the same things. Katrin was the only family I had left, I didn’t want this.
“It’s just, some of us are trying, Katrin. Some of us stayed,” there was an emphasis on the word stayed, as if I had pushed my emotions into those letters before forcing them out of my mouth. “We pushed the Bonzen out, we kept the West out, and we’re making a real, independent, democratic state. Probably the first in the world! You know this! You know we need people. Young people. We need people like you, Katrin! You can study at the Humboldt University in the East. We lost tens of thousands of young people that autumn. You should have stayed. We need you.”
I should have kept my mouth shut, I knew it as soon as I’d said the words, I knew it before I’d even said those words. At times like this, I feel like I’m my own angel, hovering overhead, watching, seeing everything, my own face, her face, hearing my own words. The angel could see how I took a bite out of my own daughter with each syllable. I see it, but I always seem powerless to stop the mess I’m making.
Stayed? Like you? And what are you doing now?” She was angry, her words sharp with barbs. “What’s your contribution to the glorious revolution? Get off your fucking high horse. You, you spy! That’s what you are, creeping around, look you even have a sad trenchcoat! A spy, no better than the fucking Stasi!”
This had to hurt. The angel watched my face become hard, my eyes glaze as I absorb the shock.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? They got rid of the Stasi, and they realised they still needed it, so they asked the sheep to put on the wolf’s clothing, didn’t they? The Minister of the Interior himself, good old Benno, he was the one who asked you! Didn’t he?”
“No! You know that’s not how it was. How it is. You know!”
“So if it’s not true, what exactly is it you do? I mean, I have no real idea what my own Papa does!”
“You do know, I’m with the RS.”
“Yeah, but I mean, it’s just another of those weird combinations of letters that could hide anything! Tell me, tell me what it is you do? What have you been working on this week, yesterday, today?”
I could have told her about the Russian major, made her laugh about the Stalin toast and my summary dismissal from his presence, but my mind seemed stuck on the Maier case. I
recalled that feeling of fear that I’d experienced on the way back from West Silesia. It was a fear that I hadn’t had to feel for a few years—I used to know it so well, this extra sense, almost anticipating it, welcoming it. An old friend. You knew where you were with that fear. It was from the days when we didn’t know whether the Stasi were listening, whether the Stasi were watching, whether the Stasi were coming to get us. It reminded me of why I was doing stuff, back then. Daring to disagree, to find out about stuff the state didn’t want us to know. But nowadays it just made me feel sick.
“It’s… It’s confidential. I can’t tell you. Sorry,” it sounded lame, even to me, even without my angel’s ears listening to my own words. But I couldn’t share this with Katrin. She was safe now. Here, in Westberlin.
“You know what, it’s all rubbish. All shit. You and your new society, based on trust and openness and honesty,” this last bit in a different voice, sarcastic. “And there you are, in your secret job, doing secret things for the secretaries in the secret ministry!”
I just sat there, head sagging, face inches from the table.
“Shit. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a lecture in half an hour.”
I didn’t look up as Katrin stood up, put her coat on, gestured to the waiter and paid. She looked at me, I could tell, even though I was still glaring at the table, shoulders hunched inside the trench coat. Without another word she turned, and left the café, swiftly negotiating the chairs and tables, away from where I was still slumped, fingertips just brushing the cassette on the table.
I nudged the cassette round so that I could read what was on the label. It said simply: Thanks, with a smiling acid face drawn next to the word. Sliding the tape off the table and into my pocket, I moved towards the door. Nowhere near as elegant as my daughter in completing this manoeuvre, bumping into tables and the backs of chairs, drawing questioning looks from the chattering students. I was no longer at home in a young persons’ café. When did that happen? Or was it my clothes, my hairstyle, my smell; identifying me as from the East? I made it to the door in one piece, and hoping to make an exit without causing any further scenes, I pulled the door open. Too hard: it slammed against the coat stand behind it, and I slid out, not looking back to see what the students thought of my awkward exit. There, to one side of the door, stood Katrin.
Stealing the Future Page 4