Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

  ‘Who will look after him? His wife is helping with inquiries.’

  The drab, brutal efficiency of it appalled him. ‘Okay,’ he said at length, ‘you win. If you return Else and the children to their home and give me an assurance that you will not abuse them any further, I will cooperate. Then we will talk about Konrad.’

  ‘You do not make deals with us,’ snapped Schwarzmeer. ‘As I have demonstrated by bringing you here to Schloss Clausnitz, your family owes the people of East Germany for their tolerance. The very least you can do in return is to act in the interests of the security of the state.’

  ‘But I have,’ replied Rosenharte. ‘You promised to release Konrad if I went to Trieste. I did what you wanted. Now . . .’ He stopped to control the sense of helplessness that rose in him. ‘You cannot do this thing without me, and don’t think I haven’t got an idea of what she has to offer. The security of the state is in your hands, not mine.’

  ‘I warn you, this—’

  ‘No, I warn you, General,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘If you don’t free Else and the children, Annalise will never help you. And before you interrupt me again, there is one other condition of my cooperation. In order to facilitate the next stage of this operation I must be free and allowed to move without surveillance wherever I choose.’ He knew that to be impossible, but he could see that Schwarzmeer was about to concede something. And behind that, Rosenharte reasoned, was the certainty that the first secretary and the head of the Stasi had already been told of what Annalise Schering could bring from Nato. Schwarzmeer had to get it for them.

  ‘Now,’ he said, moving his aching limbs towards the door. ‘I’d like to be taken back to Dresden. I’ve lost several days already. I have work to do.’

  Schwarzmeer blocked his way. ‘Trick me, Rosenharte, and I will see your Nazi brains crushed from your head in a vice.’

  Rosenharte smiled at the grotesque image and knew that Schwarzmeer regretted saying something so crude. ‘I just want to live in peace, General, and see my brother restored to health. That’s all I want. And if I can help you in the process, then I will feel I’ve done my duty. May I now return to my home?’

  ‘How will she contact you?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I know that she’s already made arrangements. She will contact me near the end of the month.’

  Schwarzmeer said nothing, but stepped out of the way. Rosenharte walked to the open French windows where he knew there was a flight of stone steps that splayed into the garden. There were three men waiting for him at the bottom.

  ‘We will be in touch,’ said Schwarzmeer.

  All Rosenharte heard was the birdsong coming from the great deserted garden that had been his childhood playground.

  7

  Dresden

  He was returned to Dresden in an unmarked delivery van late that Friday. Over the weekend he bought some food, slept a great deal and made one visit to a bar nearby, but had no contact with anyone he knew. Then, as the working week began, he set about making an unvarying routine for himself. Whereas before he’d taken any number of routes into the centre of the city, stopping off at different places for coffee on the way, he now stuck to the same road, arriving at precisely 8.50 a.m. each day in the Zwinger, the huge baroque palace that housed among other things the Gemäldegalerie’s collection of Old Masters. He ate his lunch on the same bench, looking across to the restored Semper Opera House, and then returned to his apartment near the Technical University at about 8.30 p.m., after a drink or two in the same bar.

  His purpose was to lull the Stasi surveillance teams as well as to get an idea of their strength. Very soon, he became used to the men and women around him touching their noses, changing folded newspapers from one hand to the other, sweeping off dark glasses and flourishing handkerchiefs. He saw two different men with what looked like the same metal camera case on consecutive mornings. This he knew contained a change of clothing - probably a hard hat, glasses, wig and false moustache, and boots with thick rubber soles to alter the individual’s height. He was aware of the watchers following him on both sides of the street, one almost parallel to him, another about thirty yards behind and a third about the same distance ahead of him. He understood how they changed positions and were replaced by other individuals in an endlessly adapting choreography. He noted the fixed observation posts on the way to work - the men loitering on street corners reading magazines, or looking at bus timetables. And he saw how the watchers slowed or changed direction when he unexpectedly stopped off to buy a packet of cigarettes; how the white or dark green Lada trailing him in the traffic would drift to the kerb.

  Had they forgotten that he’d received precisely the same training as they? Surely his file mentioned he’d taken surveillance and counter-surveillance courses, studied the use of dead letter drops, target pattern analysis, surveillance detection points and the use of disguise both to outwit surveillance and enhance it. They must know that their secret craft was also his: a bit rusty, maybe, but getting better by the day.

  At spy school he had not particularly excelled at the basics of his new trade, but this hadn’t been a deterrent to his eventual deployment abroad - the reason he’d agreed to join the Stasi in the first place. Misgivings about his height - he was several inches over the norm for a spy - his political dedication and what was termed his moral fibre were overcome by his skill at languages and his powers of reasoning. In truth, it hadn’t been difficult to shine in a class of dullards and thugs and he’d sailed through the selection board for the HVA.

  Rosenharte had much time to think and to see his city anew. The life he led in Dresden now seemed utterly cheerless and he felt ashamed at the threadbare world around him. With irritation he noticed the broken stones on a footpath that ran along his street. They’d been that way as long as he could remember, like the missing tiles from the roof of his building and the street light that had been knocked over by a truck a year or two before and was left at an angle of forty-five degrees. It was surely not beyond the city authorities to tidy up the place, yet even with the GDR’s fortieth anniversary celebrations a few weeks away it hadn’t occurred to them to try to live up to the slogans that proclaimed on every public building the wonders of living in a socialist state.

  There was almost a purpose to the drabness, he felt, as though it had been decided in principle that any improvements, any relief from the joylessness, would concede too much to the bourgeois values of the West. Compared to the carefree population of Trieste, his fellow citizens appeared scratchy, rude and disengaged from life. They were simply existing. After nine in the evening the streets were empty, the people too bored, broke or tired from work and the business of finding the essentials of life to do anything other than slump in front of the TV and watch life in the parallel universe of West Germany. What a very strange opiate that was for the popular masses of a communist state approaching its glorious anniversary!

  Of course there were those who still possessed surplus energy. He saw them out training for sports or throwing themselves into various activities organized by Party and factory. Others became obsessed with their damned correspondence courses, although the qualifications did little to improve their lives in the impersonal apartment blocks that rose around Dresden; the diplomas and certificates didn’t put food on the table or reduce the waiting list for a Trabant or allow them a foreign holiday or get them a phone or a new jacket. It was pointless work designed to keep people occupied and vaguely in the service of the state, the theory being that self-improvement added to the collective strength of the GDR.

  He knew that it was part of the accommodation people had to reach with the Party. They went through the motions of loyalty, making occasional acts of obeisance and paying lip service to the idea of socialist progress. Konrad had captured it in a script called The Sleep Walkers, which was his most overtly political work. It had come from a conversation they had had about the oddities of Rosenharte’s neighbours. There was fat Willi Ludz who dealt in auto spare
parts from an apartment where he kept bits of car engines wrapped in oily rags and catalogued like the precious finds of an archaeological dig. Old Klemm from Number Seventy-four spent most of his time in the library plumbing the mysteries of Marxism-Leninism and reading Neues Deutschland in a private quest to reconcile what he saw around him with the texts of the political faith. And in Number Twenty-two there was an unmarried mother named Letitia who Rosenharte had learned occasionally worked as a prostitute at the Bellevue Hotel to make ends meet.

  These characters were woven into a tale inspired by a book Konrad had read about a tribe living on the Amazon which believed that their waking hours were all a dream while their real lives were led when they slept. All that was significant in the stories of the characters based on Ludz, Klemm and Letitia occurred in the boundless and borderless freedom of their dream world. It was a rather moving idea and he wished his brother had been able to shoot more than a few minutes of The Sleep Walkers.

  He too moved as though in a trance and completed his rounds in the Gemäldegalerie with unusually leaden diligence, attending the daily meeting with the director Professor Lichtenberg, visiting the restoration department where he kept an eye on works by Titian, Parmigiano and Wouvermans and writing one of the endless reports about bringing high art to the people with a socialist message. The gallery was not free from the East German addiction to paperwork, the mountains of reports, commentaries and analyses - or Papierwulst - that clogged every office in the country. He knew no one would read it but this was simply a requirement of his job, a piece of protocol that he would have been foolish to neglect.

  On Wednesday 20 September he decided to take his first risk. He made a detour on his round through the galleries and arrived outside Lichtenberg’s office where he found the professor’s assistant, Sonja Weiss, alone. She was perched on the edge of a desk buffing her nails while reading an old Hungarian travel brochure. Sonja and he had once had a short, uncomplicated affair lasting six or seven months, which had ended without rancour when she found someone she preferred. Her attitude to sex and the manner of departure were equally straightforward. Two years later, they were still firm allies and, because the Stasi hadn’t named her during his interrogation a week before, he assumed she was not one of their informers.

  Sonja hopped off the desk, gave him a mischievous smile and popped a kiss on his cheek. She had a taste for cheap costume jewellery and jarring combinations of styles in her dress. She experimented uninhibitedly with different hair colours. At the moment it was jet black with blonde streaks. Vulgar perhaps, but nothing she did detracted from the natural prettiness which lay underneath and her neat, well-proportioned figure.

  They talked for a little while, then he cleared his throat. ‘Sonja, can I ask you a favour?’

  ‘And here I was getting all nostalgic. You want to use the phone in his office? Right? Go ahead. We think it’s clean. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that some man came looking for you when you were away. A weird guy - gawky. He didn’t leave a name, but said he’d be back.’

  ‘You don’t have any more information then?’

  ‘I think he was a foreigner, maybe Czech or Polish. But he spoke quite good German. The professor told me to get rid of him and wanted to find out how he had got in here.’

  ‘One of our friends?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, a country boy. You could see by his clothes.’

  ‘I suppose we’ll find out when he shows up again.’ He paused. ‘How’s Sebastian - that’s your man’s name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Good but busy.’ He thought he caught a significant raise of her eyebrows to emphasize the last word, indicating that Sebastian was involved in political agitation.

  ‘I see. Well . . . tell him to be careful. Now, you make yourself scarce for the next few minutes, okay?’

  He went into the office and closed the door, praying that the place wasn’t bugged. He dialled the number in East Berlin that he’d memorized in front of Harland and the American in Trieste and was put through to an answerphone which clicked on without a recorded message. ‘It’s Prince,’ he said, his eyes straying to a small landscape by Salomon van Ruysdael on the professor’s wall. ‘I need a delivery of material within the next week. Good material.’ He hung up and slipped out of the office.

  Sonja gave him a conspiratorial look in the corridor. ‘Good luck - and you be careful, my handsome Doktor.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I will.’

  At this time of year, Rosenharte would normally head out of the city on a Friday to spend a couple of days walking in the hills around Marienberg, near where he had been brought up and where Konnie and Else now lived. But with all the family in one sort of custody or another, he didn’t feel like it and, besides, he knew he should remain visible and available in the city. He spent Friday evening in his apartment, restlessly arranging books and fiddling with three tomato plants on the ledge outside his window.

  The place was not ideal - nothing ever was - but he still thanked his luck that he had managed to find it so soon after his divorce from Helga. He had left everything with her and the flat was still pretty sparse. Basically it was one long room, equally divided between sleeping and living areas by a thick red curtain. The bed was an old pre-war affair, with sagging springs and squeaking iron joints, from which Rosenharte could see out of the window across the roofs of the Technical University. Along the wall were a small bookcase and a wardrobe whose legs had been wedged to stop it toppling over on the uneven wooden floor. Over the years Rosenharte’s lovers had introduced touches of decoration and comfort to the living room - vases, the odd cushion, a rug and a reproduction of the battle of San Romagno by Paolo Uccello. When they moved on, the place quickly surrendered to his work. Books accumulated in neat columns and the old sixties typewriter, which he had such difficulty finding ribbons for, resumed its position at the centre of the table. There were a few framed black and white snapshots along the bookshelves: one of himself and Konnie on a cross-country skiing trip in 1972 and another of them standing either side of Marie Theresa after university graduation. The largest photograph was of Rosenharte in profile, taken by Sonja three years before. He kept it because it made him look young and reminded him of a spectacular walk in the frosted woods near a village called Cunnersdorf; but he had his doubts about the leather and steel photo frame, which Sonja had made for him.

  This picture was the only sign of vanity in Rosenharte’s home, which in its concentration on study and exercise - a corner was devoted to walking boots, rucksack, ski poles and climbing ropes - resembled a college student’s rooms. There was no television set, no record player - he did not have the money to replace the one Helga took with her - and only minimal cooking facilities. Like many a student, he was used to making the trip to another floor to take a bath, but he did have his own lavatory and a large old-fashioned basin with pre-war taps that occasionally sputtered hot water.

  He was ambivalent about the place. He liked the solitude it gave him but, after a prolonged occupation, he began to feel his life had somehow become suspended, which was why sometimes late at night he fled and went drinking, then brought a girl back.

  That Friday evening he remained in the apartment, cooked a meal and shared it with a cat that came across the roofs from a neighbour’s apartment, read the final draft of the lecture he was to give in Leipzig, despaired at the long-winded title - ‘The Evolutionary Purpose of Representational Art’ - then dropped it in favour of ‘The Bull in the Cave’.

  In the evening he began to notice tiny discrepancies between the way he’d left the apartment and its present state. He assumed as a matter of course that they’d searched it when he was picked up before going to Trieste. But also, it seemed, since he had been back. Three books habitually placed beside the typewriter, on top of each other and always opened at pages 102, 203 and 304, had been moved. The middle volume about Gothic art, which he never consulted, was now open at page 210. On the shelf, a matchbox containing a pen nib and
some paper clips placed exactly in front of the letters GEN of a book entitled Der Jugendstil now stood in front of the letters NDS. The shade of the table lamp was angled differently and some papers had been moved on the windowsill: beside them was a narrow band that was free of dust. He realized that the rooms must have been bugged and marvelled at the wasted effort. He had no phone, because he was on a list of thousands waiting to be connected, and it had been months since anyone else had been there with him. The only human voice heard in the apartment was the sound of him sleep-talking. He imagined some milk-faced technician up all night, straining to interpret the slightest murmur, and when he eventually got into bed at midnight he muttered a few incomprehensible sentences to the dark.

  Next day, he went out early to buy a packet of cigarettes at the local Konsum store, and immediately noticed that there were far fewer Stasi on his tail. He guessed that this was because there was so much talk of demonstrations and meetings. Sonja had mentioned it in a stage whisper as she skittered past him in the Dutch collection on Friday afternoon. And now, as he walked through the Technical University campus with the idea of putting in an appearance in the gallery, he was approached by an old acquaintance, a good sort named Heinz Kube who taught fluid mechanics and was now full of the burgeoning democratic movements that were challenging the state.

  Before Kube could go on about the manifesto released by the New Forum two weeks earlier, Rosenharte put both hands on his shoulders and cut him off in mid flow. ‘My friend, I think I’m being followed. I don’t want to get you into trouble. Just shake my hand and congratulate me on my lectures. When they ask you what passed between us, tell them that.’ Poor Kube, thought Rosenharte, they’ll have him in overnight and give him the third degree.