by Henry Porter
‘You’re not angry?’
‘In some ways, yes. But remember I was able to leave the Stasi and devote my life to the study of art. Where would I be now without your spy games?’
40
The Bridge
On Saturday 11 November, some thirty-six hours after the Wall fell, Rosenharte got up early in the hotel, showered and dressed with more than usual care, putting on a tie and the trousers of a dark-grey suit that he’d bought with Ulrike the day before on the Kurfurstendamm. Then he sat at the desk overlooking the Tiergarten, made some calls and read the notes he’d made while on the phone to Leszek Grycko late the previous evening. After about an hour Ulrike came in from the adjoining bedroom, still wearing the hotel bathrobe.
‘How’re you feeling?’ he asked.
‘Not great. It’s unnatural to sleep for twelve hours.’
‘You’ve woken from a long hibernation,’ he said and touched the faint crease made on her cheek by the pillow. ‘We all have.’ He paused and gazed at her. ‘You know the problem with a love like this?’
‘No.’
‘It renders me speechless. I can’t begin to express what I feel.’
‘You’re doing just fine,’ she said, nuzzling him. ‘Just fine. Have you talked to Kurt?’
‘Yes, he says he’ll have the cast on for five or six weeks. The ribs are going to have to heal themselves. He’ll be out tomorrow or the next day.’
‘And Else?’
‘They’ll all be here by early evening.’
‘Explain this to me,’ she said, pointing at the crude family tree he had made while she slept.
He placed his finger by the name of Dr Michal Kusimiak. ‘This is my father. He was a graduate of the Cieszyn Business School and a protégé of a man named Dr L. Fabanczyk. He left the school in thirty-six and went to teach politics at the University of Krakow where he became a committed Marxist. There he met my mother, Urszula Solanka, who was a nineteen-year-old student of literature. They were married almost immediately and on 5 July 1938 she gave birth to me and Konrad. We were named Ryszard and Konstantyn after our grandfathers.
‘Come the war my parents went into hiding at the Kusimiak family estates near the city of Bochia. They were hunted down. My father was summarily executed on 7 November at the age of thirty-one; Urszula was sent to Ravensbrück then Auschwitz. We were taken to Lodz, then very soon afterwards to the von Huths at Schloss Clausnitz. We were there by the first Christmas of the war. The only things we had from our previous life were the first letters of our names. That apparently was common practice and allowed some of the stolen children to be traced after the war.’
He moved his finger to the name Luiza Solanka. ‘This is my mother’s older sister. She married a man named Grycko at the age of eighteen and had one son, Franciscek, who was born in 1930. She and her husband both perished in the camps, but their boy somehow survived and emerged at the end of the war, a hardened adult aged about fifteen. This was the man who died in my arms in Trieste.’
‘Your first cousin!’
He shuddered. ‘That’s one of the things that I can’t really absorb. The fact that he came so close to telling me all this.’ He paused and remembered the man on Molo IV in Trieste and his own disgust. ‘After university and military service Franciscek joined the Polish Foreign Intelligence Service. He rose quickly and in due course began to make representations through his government and the Red Cross about the lost Kusimiak children. But it was useless. You see, about two hundred thousand Polish children were kidnapped in the Germanization programme. Only thirty thousand were ever found and returned to their natural parents. By the time Grycko got into any position of influence the child tracing operation in Heidelberg had long been terminated. It seems that Franciscek couldn’t let go of this thing, and when he retired from the service because of ill health he devoted all his energies to tracking us. It was he who made the breakthrough by finding a contact in Schwarzmeer’s office. When he died, his son Leszek seemed to have inherited the cause. He was the man who followed me to Leipzig that day when we first met, and then he went all the way out to Konrad’s home.’
‘The Russian said he was in the service too. Is that right?’
‘He’s a technical officer with little field experience.’
She rose from the arm of his chair, yawned luxuriously and went to fill her cup from the pot on the room-service trolley. ‘Who told you he had a contact in Schwarzmeer’s office?’
‘The Russian.’
‘Both the Gryckos were certainly well uinformed. For one to find you in Trieste and the other to run you to ground in Leipzig indicates a huge amount of advanced knowledge.’
‘I see what you mean, but I guess the Stasi were always watching me and Konrad, so it was just a matter of tapping into that source of information.’
She returned to him and kissed the top of his head. ‘How odd this must feel to you - seeing a life that was yours but that you haven’t lived.’
‘You could argue that if we hadn’t been taken by the Nazis there would be no life at all. We might have died with the others in the camps.’ He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from her.
‘You have to give that up, what with my bronchitis and your advanced age.’ She smiled impishly and pecked him on the cheek. ‘Still, I suppose you won’t have to go through the usual pain of becoming fifty because you did that last year.’
‘I’m sticking to my old birthday,’ he said testily. ‘Look, shouldn’t you be getting ready? Harland will be here soon.’
‘Are you nervous?’ she said, leaving him for the bathroom.
‘Yes . . . and no. I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I should feel.’
She hesitated by the door. ‘Kusimiak - I like that sound. It’s vaguely Russian or Cossack. Will you change your name?’
‘I have no idea.’ Then he said: ‘Probably not. I owe something to the Rosenhartes, and actually I like being German. I feel German and I don’t want to be anything else.’
It was a glorious autumn day, brilliant and animated with joy in every quarter of the free enclave of West Berlin. Upwards of a million came from the East that morning to receive their welcome money from the West German government and to spend it on clothes, books and every sort of cheap appliance. It was striking to Rosenharte how much food was bought that day, particularly Südfrüchte - the bananas and oranges and mangos that were commonplace in the West and so rare in the GDR. The rush of joy of the first hours had now been replaced by huge questions and a sense of unbridgeable inequality. It was not that the Easterners wanted to reverse the events of the last two days, but seeing the wealth of the West and the goods in the stores for themselves was a different order of experience to watching them illicitly on West German TV from behind the impenetrable barrier of the Berlin Wall.
‘What are they going to do?’ asked Ulrike as they waited for Harland at the entrance to the hotel. ‘How are they going to make this work?’
‘Not our problem,’ said Rosenharte. ‘Not today. And anyway, for the moment it’s enough that this has happened.’
As they drove south-east to Wannsee, Harland told them that the first sections of the Wall had been winched out of place at Potsdamerplatz to make a new crossing and that the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovic had played for the crowds streaming through another opening. He also mentioned there were rumours that in the GDR the Stasi was already beginning to destroy its most sensitive files, burning them and pulping them in machines designed to make animal feed.
Rosenharte murmured interest in these bits of news, but said little as they went.
They had reached Königstrasse, the long, straight drive that cuts across Wannsee and ends at the Glienicke Bridge. They could hardly believe the clarity of that afternoon: the sunlight streaming through the trees, the steady shower of golden birch and beech leaves. Ulrike clasped his right hand between hers and once or twice lifted it to her lips.
They parked about a hundred yards from
the bridge and all got out. ‘Why here?’ she asked.
‘This is the only crossing point controlled by the Russians,’ said Harland. ‘Maybe Vladimir is making some kind of point.’
‘Vladimir is the KGB spy from Dresden?’ Ulrike asked Rosenharte.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking across the bridge. ‘Major Vladimir Ilyich Ussayamov.’
‘His name isn’t Ussayamov,’ said Harland. ‘It’s Putin. Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Vladimiric Putin.’
Rosenharte shrugged.
‘Do you want me to come?’ Ulrike asked him.
He shook his head, turned and began to walk towards the old iron bridge over the Havel Lake that marked the border between the city of Berlin and the state of Brandenburg, between the territories of West and East. He walked with his gaze fastened on the Soviet flag on the far side of the bridge and to distract himself, tried to remember the name of the Russian spy who had been swapped on the bridge for the U2 pilot Gary Powers nearly three decades before. Of course. Colonel Rudolf Abel was the name of the Soviet spy and they passed each other on the bridge without saying a word.
He reached the bridge and moved to a stone parapet on the right where there were fewer people. No one, least of all Rosenharte in his rather uncertain state of mind, could fail to be moved by the scene. Westerners stood clapping as each little Trabant car passed over the line at the centre of the bridge. Pedestrians hugged and kissed with a total lack of reserve. Red roses were flung at the cars and pedestrians and once or twice the women from the East stooped to pick them from the road and pressed them to their hearts.
Harland had followed and now passed him on the other side of the bridge. They nodded to each other. Rosenharte watched him with mild interest as he moved along the Southern walkway and came to a halt by a figure who was leaning over the railings, looking down on the evenly rippled, sparkling waters of the Havel. The figure straightened, controlled a wisp of blond hair and they shook hands. It was Vladimir. Harland gestured in Rosenharte’s direction. Vladimir stepped into the centre of the road, put his hand to his forehead and then held it high above him in a kind of salute. Rosenharte returned the wave but didn’t move from his spot.
Then a dark-green helicopter with US markings, a Huey polished like a limousine, came to hover over his side of the bridge, so low that Rosenharte could make out the faces of the men clinging to the straps in the open door. He assumed that they were watching the crowds stream over the bridge, but then he saw Alan Griswald’s face appear at the door for a fleeting second. The helicopter had come to observe the conversation between Harland and Vladimir, presumably with their knowledge. The intelligence business never rested.
The Huey remained there for several minutes, the throb of the rotor drowning the applause and cheers, yet also adding a compelling pulse to the reunion of two peoples. Then the note of its engine changed. It began to rise, sending a powerful downdraft onto the bridge, which tore at people’s clothes and flattened their hair and caused them to cry out with the sudden artless gaiety of people at a funfair. For a split second each person’s defences fell away and they looked around and caught each other’s eyes and glimpsed each other’s souls.
It was in the afterglow of this moment that Rosenharte spotted Leszek Grycko on the other side of the road. The tall young Pole saw him and waved back with a broad grin, but a van came to a halt between them and they both bobbed up and down, waving. The van moved forward. Beside Leszek stood an elderly woman in a well-cut woollen suit who was looking at him with intense curiosity. She brushed away a strand of dark-grey hair that had come loose from her bun, nodded, then seemed to smile at him. Until that moment, Rosenharte had had all sorts of complicated doubts and explanations why this couldn’t be true, but now he was absolutely certain. For his entire life he had seen precisely the same expression of clever, restrained interest in Konrad’s face. Here it was again in Urszula Kusimiak - his natural mother.
She waited for him to cross. Then, as he approached, she held out both her hands. He took them and she absorbed the face of the child she had lost exactly fifty years before.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t bring Konnie with me.’ She nodded and shook her head and the corners of her mouth trembled with emotion. But her eyes remained composed, watching him with growing love. ‘I wish he could have met you.’ He suddenly thought of Sublime No. 2, the film Else had shown him. ‘But I’m sure he knew instinctively of your existence. I believe he was aware of you in some deep part of himself.’
She put her head to one side. In precise and deliberate German she said: ‘We’ve both lost so much these past years. But now this long hiatus has ended. I have found you and I’ve gained two grandchildren. That is more than I expected; more than I could have ever hoped for.’
‘You speak German. I was thinking it would be the final irony if we weren’t able to communicate.’
‘I learned in the camps in order to survive. I knew also that I would need it to find you after the war.’ She stopped. ‘And now I have.’
From the corner of his eye, he saw Ulrike approach. He turned. ‘This is my friend Ulrike - the woman I hope to make my wife.’ He was aware that he was blushing.
Ulrike was shaking her head and pointing towards the bridge. They all turned. Standing in the middle of the Glienicke Bridge, oblivious of the traffic and of Harland and Vladimir, was Colonel Zank. Rosenharte’s hand moved automatically to the pocket where he kept the gun that he’d meant to dispose of on the way.
Ulrike put her hand up. ‘He’s not coming; he’s watching, Rudi. Leave him.’
Urszula Kusimiak seemed to know exactly what was going on. ‘I suspect he is one of the few people who cannot cross the Glienicke Bridge today.’
‘You’re right,’ said Rosenharte, noticing that Harland had left Vladimir and approached Zank from behind. Now he was saying something and patting his own pocket to indicate that Zank shouldn’t try anything. Zank looked away.
Then Urszula Kusimiak took her lost son’s arm and they turned to walk the gentle incline away from the bridge, leaving Colonel Zank trapped behind the forcefield that was once the Iron Curtain.
Author’s Note
East Germany was the only member of the communist bloc to disappear as a state. A decade and a half after the Wall came down and the process of German unification began, most people would be hard pressed to trace the border between East and West Germany on a map. The very idea of two Germanies, of an Iron Curtain slicing across Europe, seems astonishing today, especially to those born after 1975. And nothing was more bizarre during that era of division than the arrangements in West Berlin, a free enclave 100 miles inside communist territory, unswervingly guaranteed by the Western allies but surrounded by the watchtowers, barbed wire and concrete of the Berlin Wall.
We have forgotten East Germany’s baleful presence at the centre of Europe, the tragic power of the Wall and also perhaps what it meant when on Thursday 9 November 1989 East Germans massed at the border crossings and West Germans climbed onto the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate to demand its destruction. Few who were there will ever again experience the surge of joy and optimism of those hours. Or the incredulity. For even after one million East Germans demonstrated against their government in Alexanderplatz, no one would have dared to predict that within a week those same people would be shopping in West Berlin.
It seemed a miracle then but it’s easy today to see how events combined to destroy the GDR and spark the fall of communism across Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of the policies of Glasnost (freedom of expression) and Perestroika (restructuring) came with a new realism about the failure of the Marxist economies. Put simply, they were broke. East Germany, which unlike West Germany had little coal or steel of its own, survived into the eighties on cheap oil from the USSR and by exporting agricultural and industrial machinery at bargain-basement prices to the West. But Russia could no longer afford to subsidize the GDR, and the emergin
g Tigers of south-east Asia were producing far better machinery at even lower prices. Erich Honecker’s East German government seemed incapable of responding to the mounting crisis other than by resisting the reforms of the Soviet Union. To the old men in Berlin the unthinkable had happened: the mother ship of Marxism had veered wildly off course, leaving them to continue the socialist struggle.
There were other straws in the wind. In Hungary a new regime had removed the barbed-wire border with Austria in May of that year and in September the Hungarian foreign minister announced that East German tourists would not be prevented from crossing to the West. At the same time the communist government of Czechoslovakia seemed powerless to halt the flood of East Germans coming over the border and claiming asylum at the West German Embassy in Prague. Much the same was happening in Poland. Those not intent on fleeing the country were bent on change. ‘Wir sind hier,’ they shouted through September and October - we’re staying here. Diverse groups - punks and skinheads, greens, peace campaigners and those who simply desired political reform, free expression and unrestricted travel - came together around the thriving evangelical churches of the East, particularly the Nikolai Church in Leipzig. As the Monday evening demonstrations swelled with crowds chanting the simple but unprecedented self-assertion, Wir sind das Volk - we are the people - Honecker seemed incapable of acting. It’s interesting to speculate what might have been if a younger generation of hardliners had succeeded at the beginning of the decade. Honecker was seventy-four and had undergone an operation that summer, Willi Stoph, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was seventy-five, Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, was eighty-one. The other members of the Politburo were mostly over sixty-five. In the face of such orderly and disciplined defiance of the state they simply froze.