Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

  At this, the Bird appeared from a queue at the hotel information desk and started towards Jessie. Macy Harp walked from the entrance to a washroom, while Tudor Williams moved rapidly into position behind the two men who had just entered the terminal building.

  Jessie pushed on apparently oblivious, yet seemed drawn to Griswald’s bulk. Griswald took the hint and swivelled round to face her. He was still on the phone, but all his body language indicated that he wanted to end the call and approach the woman that he had just noticed moving in his direction. Not for the first time, Harland briefly noted his friend’s acting skills. Griswald dropped his newspaper, fumbled with the phone then opened his arms.

  ‘Wait.’ Harland spat out the word and, without missing a beat, the Bird, Macy Harp and Tudor Williams dispersed, two of them losing themselves in a tour group that had just exited customs, the members of which were all swapping telephone numbers and saying their goodbyes.

  ‘Hey there,’ Griswald cried. He had lowered the phone and was simulating disbelief and pleasure. ‘For Chrissake, what are you doing here? Jesus, Annalise. I’ll be damned.’

  Jessie looked taken aback, but smiled bravely and approached to offer him her hand. Griswald bent down and planted a kiss on both her cheeks. ‘Jesus, I thought you were living in Canada, sweetheart. What the hell brings you to Berlin? You’ll have dinner with me. Promise.’

  These were the last words that Harland heard before he too plunged into the crowd and started calling out, ‘Car for Neumann, car for Herr Neumann.’ He reached the other side of the mêlée and turned to see the man in the grey suit standing about twenty feet from Griswald. The young tough in the leather jacket had walked over to the car hire desk and was watching Griswald and Jessie with open interest. The other two men had disappeared.

  He turned and spoke into the microphone. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  ‘I’m outside,’ said the Bird. ‘They’ve definitely got a team here, but they’re not going to try anything while she’s talking to Alan. Tudor’s gone to get one of the cars in case we need to pursue.’

  ‘Tudor,’ hissed Harland, ‘make sure you pick up the black Merc and park it right outside entrance C. Then go in and make as though you’re Griswald’s driver. Leave the rest to him. Now get a bloody move on. Cuth, stick by their car in case anything goes wrong. You’re responsible for her safety. Do anything you need to protect her.’ Harland slunk away, briefly registering that the Stasi’s effort to mount one of the first abductions in Berlin for many years meant that while they had doubts about Annalise’s story, they were still genuinely interested in what she might have. If it had all been a put-up job, as Griswald suggested, they wouldn’t be risking a snatch in the view of Tempelhof’s new CCTV system.

  By now Griswald had put an arm round Jessie and was steering her gently towards the exit. He couldn’t know that Tudor would be outside when he got there, but at least he and Jessie were working a good double act. Even from where Harland stood, he could see she was protesting and at one stage pulled the bag from Griswald’s chivalrous grasp. He lifted his lapel and spoke. ‘Everyone except Tudor back off. Macy and Cuth, you get the other car and follow Tudor. He’ll drive to the Avalon Hotel on Emser Strasse. Macy, find a phone and book a room for two nights in the name of Annalise Schering. Tell Markus on the front desk that we won’t be using the room and that I will sort things out later. We want them to see her going to the hotel and having a drink with Griswald. Convey all this to Griswald, Tudor.’

  ‘Then what?’ This came from Macy Harp.

  ‘We’re going to have to improvise things from the Avalon, but I’m working on the assumption that they’re here because they really are interested. That means the betting is on Rosenharte coming over. We’re just going to have to keep her out of their clutches until then.’

  ‘But what then?’ Macy Harp again. ‘They’re not going to give up tomorrow just because Rosenharte is in the West. In fact the likelihood is that they’ll try harder.’

  ‘Later, Macy. We’ll cross that bridge when—’ He stopped. Griswald had come to a halt at exit C and was gesturing outside. Jessie shook her head. Harland thought they were both overdoing it a bit, and for one moment it looked as though the East Germans were going to intervene, but Tudor came through the door and spoke to Griswald.

  ‘What the hell are they doing?’ asked the Bird, who could see everything from the car.

  ‘Quiet! I’m trying to listen to Tudor’s mike,’ said Harland. He heard Griswald say, ‘Well, my car’s outside, Annalise. At least let me give you a ride to the hotel. Maybe we can have a drink at the Avalon - it’s my favourite bar in Berlin.’

  She replied: ‘We’ll have a drink, then I really must have an early night.’ She allowed Tudor to take her bag and was ushered through the door by Griswald. It was then that Harland understood. Griswald was playing himself, an inquisitive CIA officer who had happened upon someone working at Nato with no obvious reason to be in Berlin. He was giving Jessie the once over and in so doing, providing her a story for the following day. And Jessie, being no slouch in these matters, had grasped the tactic immediately and was responding with a combination of reluctance and guilty compliance that the Stasi could not mistake.

  This might just work, thought Harland.

  In the early hours of Tuesday 26 September, as Rosenharte lay on the narrow iron bed, one leg on the cell floor, an arm folded over his eyes against the light, it occurred to him that the Stasi headquarters possessed a kind of organic life of its own. The walls sweated condensation; the smell he’d found so unsettling in the minister’s suite was just as present on the lower floors although it included new elements which he approximated to disinfectant and decay; and there was a queer noise - a distant clicking followed by a long sigh, which suggested an enormous ventilator keeping the place filled with just the amount of oxygen necessary to sustain life. In his half-dreaming state, he remembered Konrad talking about the earth’s largest living organism, a giant underground fungus, which had spread over hundreds of years through a forest in Michigan. Konrad had gone on and on about it, explaining that the DNA of the fungus taken from one end of the forest was exactly the same as at the other end, which proved that it was the same organism. Trees had lived and died, but the fungus continued silently occupying the forest inch by inch, either as a parasite or saprophyte - he wasn’t sure which. Rosenharte had asked him what the difference was. ‘The first draws life from the living, the second from death and decay,’ he replied, giving his brother a meaningful glance over the top of his round spectacle frames. ‘I suspect this is parasitic, which is why I would like to make a film about that giant fungus in Michigan.’ It was a few moments before Rosenharte realized Konrad saw the fungus in the forest as a metaphor for the Stasi and the GDR.

  He smiled to himself. At times Konrad could be slightly priggish and superior yet he also had a mind so oblique, so gentle in its dissent that it was truly surprising that his work had ever offended the authorities. He often said the Stasi had only persecuted him because although they didn’t understand his work they suspected criticism lurked in it. That was why the charges at his secret trial in Rostock had been vague and the prosecution case so blustering and inept. They didn’t possess the sophistication to pin anything on him, and so had relied on the catch-all charge of anti-state propaganda, which no court official felt it necessary to substantiate before sentencing him to three years’ hard labour in Bautzen.

  Rosenharte also knew, and reminded himself as a matter of course every once in a while, that his failure to return from Brussels in 1975 had first prompted the Stasi to investigate Konrad, who until that moment had lived his life pretty well below the parapet. They had become interested in him and later investigated his work for hidden meanings, an investigation that ended with his trial. Konrad had never even so much as hinted at his brother’s responsibility and always took pains to blame the totalitarian state, but then he understood that Rosenharte had joined the HVA primarily to get out o
f East Germany and organize Konrad’s escape so that they could both live in the West. It was an irony - or something worse - that the delayed return had resulted in Konrad’s detention.

  And now they were both behind bars in Stasi cells.

  He swung his other leg to the floor and rested there with his head in his hands for a few seconds before springing up, taking a leak and washing his face in the basin. He would neither sit nor lie any longer because it indicated submission - an acceptance that locking him up was reasonable.

  A few hours passed. He prowled his cell until the daylight began to show on the reflection in the lino beyond the bars. Then sounds of the workforce entering the Stasi citadel came to him as though he was hearing the footsteps and the slamming doors from one end of a long tube. A uniformed orderly arrived and placed some bread and tea on a small flat surface outside the cell, then worked the lever so the bed slammed up to the vertical position. Rosenharte was told to stand back as a small table together with a fixed stool were swung into the cell by means of a kind of turnstile. He did not move. ‘Take it away,’ he said quietly. ‘I won’t eat until I’m let out of here.’

  The man shrugged, revolved the table out of the cell and walked off down the passage carrying the tin tray. Another hour passed.

  He knew the deliberation that would decide his and Konnie’s fate was still going on and he had now given up all idea of predicting which way the decision would fall. He distracted himself by trying to remember the thirty paintings by Giorgione in order of their likely execution, then the thirty-five works by Johannes Vermeer with similarly demanding conditions. He daydreamed about a visit to the Mauritshaus in The Hague where three of his favourite Vermeers hung. There was much to see and much to do in his life yet.

  Then three men came, unlocked the door, pulled him from the cell and frogmarched him along the empty corridor, down a flight of stairs to a loading bay where a white van waited. Three steps led up to an open door in the side. Rosenharte saw the tiny compartments and a row of key hooks by the door. He demanded to be told where he was being taken, but they said nothing, forced him up the steps and into the nearest cubicle and slammed the door. There was a ledge, which for a smaller man could act as a seat, a steel bar that ran from floor to ceiling and a ring at his feet. At least he hadn’t been manacled to the bar, which was the way that he guessed most prisoners travelled.

  Someone banged the side of the truck and shouted, and it moved out of the bay into the open. Soon he could hear the light morning traffic around them. He sensed that they were going north but after a few minutes gave up trying to keep track. There was no point, and - frankly - his terror had got the better of him. Konrad had told him about these vans, and how the Stasi took suspects on long journeys before depositing them at an interrogation centre or prison having achieved the first requirement of dominance and control over a subject - disorientation. It had been weeks before Konrad knew that he was in Berlin, not Karl-Marx-Stadt. And only the brief sighting of an arrowhead of migrating geese had told him he had been taken to Rostock for his trial. There were tales of men being driven for days, manacled to bars in the cubicles so that they could not sit, stand, or move to keep themselves warm in winter.

  Rosenharte’s journey lasted just twenty minutes. After a series of abrupt turns the truck slowed and entered another enclosed space where the engine was shut off. There was silence for a few seconds: no shouting, no banging. The door to his cubicle was opened and he was beckoned into the gloom of a large garage, where an identical white lorry stood. A little way from the bottom of the steps, Colonel Zank stood with his hands clasped behind his back. He glanced down as he screwed a cigarette butt into the ground with his shoe, then looked up with a grin. Perhaps Zank knew Rosenharte was out of cigarettes.

  ‘Never say that we do not keep our word,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Hohenschönhausen.’

  13

  Konrad

  A metal door rolled back with a low rumble. Zank gestured Rosenharte out into a large courtyard at the centre of which there was a square of grass and one or two shrubs. Three sides were occupied by uniform blocks rising five storeys high. Nowhere in the GDR was there a building more expressive of the state’s ponderous brutality.

  ‘This is our main facility,’ said Zank. ‘We have every convenience here.’

  Rosenharte looked around at the barred windows - hundreds of them, behind which he knew lay identical cells and interrogation rooms. ‘Every convenience?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Zank, lighting a cigarette. ‘We can take pride in the work that’s done here. Without Hohenschönhausen where would we be? The hostile negative forces would have overrun the state years ago. It’s important to remember such things during this fortieth anniversary year.’

  They turned right to walk away from the interrogation blocks along a stretch of the perimeter wall. Zank threw out an arm to a long, low, red brick building to his left. ‘This was constructed by the Nazis as a kitchen and feeding station. The Soviets used it to detain objectors to the de-Nazification programme in the years after the war. There were cells in the basement, named the U-boats by prisoners. Perhaps you’ve heard of them?’

  Rosenharte nodded. Hunched over Marie Theresa’s hearth and a bottle of Goldbrand, Konrad had whispered the secrets of the U-boats, the warren of cells, flooded with freezing cold water, where men were left to rot in the dark. He hinted at unspeakable tortures practised by people who proclaimed liberation from Nazi barbarity yet employed the Gestapo’s methods. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of martyrs had been destroyed in the U-boats, their spirits broken and robbed in the underground hell.

  ‘Of course we have no need for this place now,’ said Zank, as though talking of some distant historic curiosity. ‘Our methods today, well, let us say they are more humane and sophisticated. We work with our subjects to show them how their actions have jeopardized the collective security of the state. Naturally, inquiries into criminal activities are still the basis of the work at Hohenschönhausen, but we all understand that punishment and reform are the twin pillars of the judicial system.’ On the word reform he had raised his index finger in the air.

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Rosenharte leadenly. He wondered whether Zank was in fact with Department XIV which ran the Stasi’s chain of penal and interrogation institutions. Hohenschönhausen was in his jurisdiction; Konrad was his prisoner.

  They took a left turn and came to the main entrance where there were two electronically operated gates for vehicles, a small gatehouse and a side entrance for pedestrians. Except for the men in the watchtowers at each corner of the compound, and three men visible in the gatehouse at the front, no one was about. That was the striking thing about Zank’s ‘facility’. It was past eight thirty, but they had seen less than a dozen people since their arrival. There was a monastic hush about the place, a profound, internalized concentration, which signified to Rosenharte that the business of crushing and breaking souls began at an early hour each day.

  ‘And over here, beyond the reception centre, we have the prison hospital. Oh yes, we have a hospital here, too.’

  Was this genuine pride, or Zank’s idea of humour? Rosenharte felt dread in his stomach. He understood that the journey in the prison truck from Normannenstrasse and Zank’s little tour had been designed to intimidate him, but this was nothing compared to the news that Konrad was in the hospital. It would take a genuine medical emergency for the interrogators to relinquish one of their subjects to the dubious care of the Hohenschönhausen medical staff. Konrad had often told him that most sickness here and at Bautzen was regarded as malingering.

  They reached a door at the centre of a long, narrow building with a tiled roof, which Zank informed him was the oldest in the compound. He pressed a bell and a tall, cadaverous attendant in a white coat appeared behind the glass, drew several bolts and turned a key.

  ‘Security, security!’ Zank said, with mock dismay. ‘Still, we can never be too careful, can we? After you, please.’


  The man Rosenharte had taken for an attendant turned out to be a Dr Streffer, a Stasi officer with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He led them along a corridor, which stank in equal parts of urine and a coarse cleaning fluid he remembered from his school days. They reached a glazed door that was covered with an iron mesh. The glass was grimy and there were smears of dirt on the doorframe and along the skirting board on either side. Rosenharte tried, but could see nothing through the glass.

  Streffer turned and, avoiding Rosenharte’s eyes, fixed his gaze to a spot over his shoulder. ‘It is forbidden to have physical contact with the prisoner. It is forbidden to exchange articles with the prisoner. It is forbidden to give information to the prisoner that is not strictly of a personal nature. It is forbidden to talk of release dates or any part of the legal security process that has brought him here. You may not refer to the inquiries that he is subject to or the conditions of this facility. These are state secrets. Is that understood?’

  Rosenharte nodded.

  ‘If any of these conditions are not met, the interview will be terminated immediately. Prisoner 122 is—’

  ‘Konrad!’ said Rosenharte fiercely. ‘His name is Konrad Rosenharte.’

  ‘Prisoner 122 is a very sick man and he will tire easily. You would be well-advised not to place any further strain on his heart.’

  He turned the handle and pushed the door open. Konrad was seated at a table in filthy pyjamas. His hands were crossed in front of him and his head was drooping. It was clear he had no idea what was going on. When he looked up, his expression remained blank, as though he was struggling with some kind of delusion.

  ‘Konnie. It’s me - Rudi.’

  A smile began to shine in his eyes as he took in Rosenharte’s features. ‘Is it really you?’ he asked. ‘Good Lord, it is you, Rudi. How did you get in here? They don’t allow visitors.’ His voice was lifeless; every word was an effort. ‘Am I going to die? Is that why they let you in?’