Puzzle People (9781613280126)

by Peterson, Doug

  He made his way up Ackerstrasse and then slipped into the tree-clustered cemetery of St. Elizabeth’s, which ran along the Bernauer Strasse dividing line, just on the eastern side of the Wall. Although this wasn’t the same cemetery where he nearly died, if he wasn’t careful, it might very well become his own personal death strip.

  The day was grim and gray. He stayed low, moving swiftly through the cemetery, feeling the crunch of frozen grass beneath his feet. He was drawn to this place, for he had to see firsthand what they were doing to the Church of Reconciliation. Authorities had already obliterated the church’s nave six days ago. But the steeple of the old neo-Gothic church still stood, amputated from the portion that was once filled with worshippers—before the Wall.

  Stefan couldn’t explain it, but he always felt a bond with this particular church, even though he had never stepped foot inside. Many people felt the same connection. The church was trapped, just as they were. The Church of Reconciliation sat in the death strip, hemmed in by the inner and outer walls. No one had access here, except for the guards patrolling the death strip. No sermons had been preached from its pulpit since the Wall went up, but its very presence spoke volumes. The East German government was tired of the symbol it had become to the world: a church trapped between two walls. It didn’t help that the church’s name was Church of Reconciliation. It couldn’t get more ironic for a country so desperate for healing.

  Hearing movement, Stefan crouched behind a large gray gravestone. Two Vopos moved through the graveyard, side by side like green-clad ghosts. They talked and laughed, and he waited for the sound of their crunching boots to fade. When their voices faded away, he ventured a peek over the top of the gravestone, and he came face-to-face with an angel. The small statue of a boyish angel—a cherub—was perched on the very top of the gravestone, like a bird that had come to rest on the vertical stone marker. The small cherub rested his chin on his right hand and appeared to be daydreaming. Small stone wings sprung from his back.

  Stefan leaned over the gravestone to check for signs of any other Vopos; and as he did, he twisted his body and felt a jab of pain in his side where the two bullets had entered over twenty years earlier. The doctors had retrieved both bullets, and he had narrowly avoided winding up on the otherworldly side of a cemetery, eight feet down. But the pain constantly reminded him of how close he had come to dying. After the horrors of prison, he had returned to his old duties as an IM, an unofficial collaborator. He eventually married, but it lasted less than three years. She left him for another man.

  He still thought about Elsa. He could have made it work with her. He was sure of it, but she was a Wessi now, a Westerner, probably an old married woman.

  Through the trees, he kept his eyes on the steeple—still standing tall. The church’s nave was a mound of rocks at the steeple’s feet, a warning to all of the churches of the GDR, where free-speech movements were sprouting up: “This could happen to you. We will reduce you to rubble.”

  Stefan rose to his feet and kept his eyes on the steeple. Multiple explosions suddenly rent the air, and the sky became gray with dust and dirt and debris. The steeple began to sink. Its feet had been knocked out from under it by the detonations, and the steeple collapsed into itself. Then the weight of the structure threw it forward, onto its face, and it tumbled like a falling giant. Stefan spotted a piece of it flying through the air—a steel cross flung through the sky like a discarded battle sword. The steeple vanished from sight, but he could see the steel cross hurtling in his direction, almost as if someone had thrown it directly at him. He panicked and got up to run, but before he could take a step, he heard crashing and snapping as the cross broke through the tops of the trees and slammed into the cemetery soil about forty feet from him.

  Slowly, tentatively, he approached the cross; and as he did, he felt the dust falling down on him like gray volcanic ash, a gentle spattering of minute stone particles, disintegrated parts of the church, a baptism of pulverized particles. He kept an eye out for the border guards, figuring that they would be here soon to find out where this part of the church had landed. But he was drawn to the steel cross, which was much larger than he imagined—twelve feet long or more, with decorative flourishes where the crossbeam met the upright. The impact had twisted the cross, bending the end upward. Hearing approaching voices, Stefan turned and ran, and he felt his anger build.

  The GDR intended to suppress speech with this demonstration of power. But for Stefan, it had the opposite effect. He was resolved, and he made a vow as he hurried away. He would tell the truth. He would tell everything. He would not bury his story beneath the ground in a cemetery of silence.

  He made his decision—one that would make Katarina proud—and he made the choice in an instant. He would travel to Leipzig. He would speak out.

  West Berlin

  Peter hadn’t seen Elsa for about twenty years, and he was nervous. He had occasionally seen her face in the newspaper—usually a tidbit about her designs. But he had seen her in person only once or twice after he broke off their engagement, and those contacts were brief and buried in the past.

  He entered the crowded restaurant and scanned the tables for any sign of her familiar face, aged twenty years. When his eyes landed on her, seated at a table in the corner, he almost couldn’t believe it. She still looked so young, even at forty-four. Her youthfulness looked fresh and natural—not even a hint of the plastic look of bad cosmetic surgery. Her hair wasn’t the straight blonde of her youth, but it had gone “big”—like so many ’80s hairstyles.

  A week ago, she had phoned him out of the blue and asked to get together. She even said he could bring along Katarina, his wife, just to assure him that she had no ulterior motive. But Katarina wasn’t about to join them. Much too awkward. However, Katarina had assured him that it was all right for him to see Elsa—in a very public place, that is.

  Now his eyes met Elsa’s, and she lit up.

  “Elsa, so nice to see you,” he said. Elsa rose to her feet, and she offered him her cheek, on which he planted a quick peck. “You’re looking wonderful.”

  “You are too, Peter.”

  He wondered if the extra weight around his waist was noticeable beneath his suit coat. He taught American literature at Free University, and it didn’t allow him much time for exercise, although he and Katarina still bicycled.

  He settled into his seat and fumbled with his menu. “I’ve seen you in the newspaper every now and again. You appear to be doing very well.”

  “I am. I’m very proud of the life I’ve made in the West.”

  She gave him a brief rundown of her designing work in Berlin, and then he told her about his years of teaching. It wasn’t until their histories were brought up to date that she suddenly changed the trajectory of the conversation.

  “There’s a reason why I wanted to see you again.”

  “Oh?”

  She touched his hand, just a brush of contact. “I’m long overdue to thank you—for bringing me to the West. I don’t think I ever thanked you properly . . . in light of . . .”

  She didn’t finish her sentence, so he did it for her. “In light of what I did to you? I can understand. You had every right to be furious with me back then.”

  “It took me twenty-three years to properly thank you, but I guess it’s better late than never.”

  “It really wasn’t necessary,” he said. “And I completely understand your reluctance. I didn’t treat you honorably, and I’m sorry.”

  She laughed lightly—probably just a sign of awkwardness, but it struck him as odd coming after his serious apology.

  “Give your wife my thanks as well,” she said. “She obviously played a big role in my escape.”

  “I will.”

  She kept flattening her napkin on the table as she talked. Then she flipped open her menu and buried herself in the choices.

  “I’m so glad you adjusted to the West,” Peter said, breaking the brief silence.

  She looked at hi
m over the top of her menu. “It took awhile, to be honest. But I’m happy with my life.”

  “Your family is well?”

  “Oh yes. I have two boys and a girl, ages ten through fourteen. And you?”

  “Two girls. I’m surrounded by women.”

  “So nothing ever changes,” she said with another light laugh.

  Peter wondered if that was a sly reference to his being surrounded by two women back in the early ’60s—Katarina in the West and Elsa in the East.

  After the waitress took their orders, they covered more lost ground. He talked about his teaching and his two daughters, while she told him how she met Hans, her husband of nearly fifteen years. He was a banker, and with her work, they did very well, indeed. She was able to live in the manner that her mother’s side of the family had once been accustomed.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your father,” she said.

  Peter’s father had died in a freak explosion at the Trabant plant. Killed by the Eastern technology that he once thought was the pinnacle of modernity.

  “At least I was able to go to the funeral.”

  “That had to be hard.”

  “It was,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate. His mother was convinced that his father had died the day Peter went across the border. She still would not speak to him. So many divisions.

  “Have you seen your parents?” he asked.

  “Several times. They’re divorced now, which was very hard for me to take. My father blamed me and my escape to the West for what happened.”

  “That is unfair. I’m sorry.”

  He had heard rumors that she had seen the inside of a psychiatric facility, and he wondered if it had anything to do with the severed relationship with her father—once the most important man in her life. But he wasn’t about to tread on that territory.

  “Have you or Katarina ever heard from Stefan Hansel?” she suddenly asked out of nowhere.

  “Funny you should mention it. Katarina received a phone call just recently. Have you heard from him?”

  “He called me in the early ’70s, not long after they started permitting phone contact between East and West Berlin again. But once I told him that I was happily married, he disappeared from my life—until two weeks ago. Strangest thing.”

  “Katarina talked to him. It sounded like he had undergone some religious conversion.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Peter chuckled. “Maybe he saw a bright light on the road to Berlin.” He had promised Katarina he wouldn’t joke about such things, for she too had become devout as the years passed. She was constantly pushing him to go to church, but he had too much of his father’s stubborn streak in him. He only hit the holidays—as if God was just a distant relative whom he saw a few days a year.

  “I’m a little worried about him,” Elsa said. “He said some strange things. Did he . . . did he say anything to Katarina that struck you as odd?”

  Peter knew exactly what she was driving at. Stefan had told Katarina that he didn’t bring the Vopos to the cemetery that day in ’62. He confessed to Katarina that he had been an informer, which wasn’t news to her. But he was adamant that he hadn’t brought the authorities.

  But Peter decided not to say anything about cemeteries and Vopos. “He talked to Katarina about the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. He was pretty excited about the prospect for more openness. He thinks it’s going to spread to the GDR.”

  “Stefan never was very realistic. East Germany is governed by old men, and old men don’t change their ways.”

  “You may be right.”

  Elsa tapped away at the table with her right forefinger. She moved from one nervous habit to another. “You sure he didn’t say anything odd? Something about that day in the cemetery?”

  He pretended to give it some thought, but he really didn’t want to give any details. “Let me ask Katarina. Maybe I’m just forgetting.”

  “That’s not necessary. It’s really not that important,” she said, an obvious lie. She smiled broadly and touched his hand again, but just for an instant. “It’s so good to see you.”

  “Yes, I’m so glad you called.”

  He was good at lying too.

  34

  Berlin

  August 2003

  Annie hadn’t found a thing. She had rifled through every desk drawer and all of Herr Adler’s stacks of paper. Nothing. In her frantic rush, it would have been easy to miss a single file devoted to documents gathered on Elsa Krauss. But perhaps Kurt was right. Maybe Herr Adler had already forwarded the material. Or maybe she was completely wrong about him. It wouldn’t be the first time she misjudged someone.

  Panic was building as she realized she was pushing the time limit. But she pressed on, knowing that Kurt would call if Herr Adler was on his way into the building. She rummaged through the desk drawers again since there was a good chance she missed things on her first search.

  This is ridiculous. So much paper. So many files. What are the odds?

  After the second search of the desk drawers, she decided to give up. She was shocked that Kurt hadn’t called already, and she had a sneaking suspicion that something had gone wrong. But as she made the move to go, she realized that another source of information had been staring her straight in the face all along. Herr Adler’s planner.

  His daily planner sat right on top of his desk, peeking out from under a yellow notepad. She dug it out and flipped wildly through the pages until she landed on yesterday’s date. She ran her finger down the list of names until she came to the lunch hour.

  “E. F.” That was all it said, followed by a telephone number. She remembered, from her computer search, that Elsa’s married named was Fleischer. E. F. Elsa Fleischer? It had to be.

  There was one way to find out for sure. Not trusting her memory, Annie rushed back to the desk and dug out a pen. She tried to write the phone number on the palm of her hand, but the pen was dry. She tried another, but it turned up dry as well. Leave it to Herr Adler to stock his top drawer with spent pens. Finally, she found one with ink, and in her panic, she accidentally stabbed the palm of her hand as she began to write.

  She hadn’t even written out the full number before she heard sounds in the hall. Voices. Multiple voices. Men’s voices. Annie’s chest tightened, and she started breathing hard, and she wondered if she was suffering a heart attack.

  As she hurried back to the desk to put away Herr Adler’s planner, the room began to spin, and she stumbled, knocking a small stack of papers to the floor. Trying to steady her breathing, she set the planner on the desk and tried to put it back just the way she remembered, tucked below the yellow notepad.

  When she bent down to pick up the papers that she had spilled, she nearly blacked out. The voices outside the door were becoming louder, and she thought for sure that one of the voices was that of Herr Adler. She stared at her cell phone in confusion. There was no indication that Kurt had even attempted to call and warn her.

  35

  Leipzig, Germany

  October 9, 1989

  The communists had come to church.

  When Stefan arrived at St. Nicholas at 4:00 p.m., an hour before the service was scheduled to start, he was shocked to find that the main floor of the Leipzig church was already beyond capacity. But he was even more shocked to see that many prominent members of the Communist Party, the SED, had taken up seats. This didn’t bode well for the night’s protest.

  His friend Lora met him at the door, hooked him by the arm, and led him up the steps to the balcony. With the main floor of the church already overflowing, the only remaining seats were in the balcony. Stefan had been meeting Lora at the Monday prayer meetings at St. Nicholas every week for the past six months. They had shared a lot over this stretch of time, both being detained overnight for questioning after one of the September demonstrations. Just two nights ago, they had been there when the police clubbed and arrested demonstrators with abandon. But Lora was not discouraged; over the months, she had
become even more passionate, and so had Stefan. On this night, she wore a light jacket that carried an emblem on the back depicting a muscular man wielding a hammer and beating his sword into the shape of a plow. Encircling the image were the words Schwerter zu pflug-scharen. “Swords into plowshares.”

  “Can you believe it?” she said, gazing down on the clutch of communists.

  “What are they doing here?” Stefan asked.

  “They’re not here to pray, if that’s what you mean. Intimidation is their holy sacrament.”

  The balcony was already filling up fast, and Stefan continued to stare down at the sanctuary floor, where the pews were packed solid and people had filled the wings by standing in the aisles. Many sat on the floor in the main aisle.

  “Party members everywhere,” he said. Rows of serious men, sitting side by side, formed a human wall of somber expressions and shuffling newspapers. Many of them were reading the Neues Deutschland. The church was charged with tension.

  “They had a party meeting today and decided to stage this sit-in,” Lora said. “There are hundreds of them.”

  St. Nicholas and the city of Leipzig, close to one hundred miles south of Berlin, was the center of the protest movement in East Germany. What had started with a handful of people at a prayer meeting every Monday in the early 1980s had attracted thousands by 1989, and it was spreading across Leipzig and across East Germany to other churches in Dresden and Berlin. Every week, the area surrounding St. Nicholas became a military encampment. Police everywhere. Dogs. Guns. Water cannons. The works.

  Stefan, like everyone, feared the “Chinese solution.” Earlier in the year, June 4, the Chinese military opened fire on the peaceful protestors on Tiananmen Square. Wherever you looked, the communist record was ominous and predictable. The 1953 uprising in East Germany: suppressed by Soviet tanks. The 1956 revolution in Hungary: suppressed by Soviet tanks. The 1968 Prague Spring uprising in Czechoslovakia: suppressed by Soviet tanks. Stefan hadn’t seen any tanks this night, but the military and the police were heavily armed and wearing riot gear. He had also heard that Leipzig hospitals were stocking up on blood. When he looked around the church, he noticed that there were no children in sight. Everyone knew better than to bring children into what could become a death trap.