“What the Stasi did to me was disgusting.”
“Maybe they had a file on me – from the Günther Rauch days.” He hoped to provoke flippancy in Gundula, to bring her out of her distant mood, but she didn’t budge. Where was the Gundula with whom he danced to Harlem Soul?
“You’re better off not knowing,” was all she cried back.
The noise level dropped when Gundula left the autobahn and made her way through Wedding towards Prenzlauerberg. “If I had a file I might understand how you feel,” he said.
“Why?”
Hanbury glanced sideways. She wore a black suede jacket with the collar turned up and tight white jeans. Someone should be painting her, he thought. “Ever heard of a Dr. Stobbe?” he asked casually, still trying to conquer her distance.
“Why?”
“Maybe you met him researching your columns. He’s in charge of the Stasi files.”
“I’m sure he leaves a trail of breadcrumbs whenever he goes in to find the way back out. Those files reach to the moon and back.”
Once Trabi was parked amongst his peers, she took him to a building with a double wooden door which creaked. Behind was a cobble-stoned passage leading to a courtyard where socialist cars of various types, all of them beat up and stripped, lay about in a composition of anarchistic art. A hand painted sign read Friedensdorf. There was a distant rumble of many voices.
“Something left over from the old days?” Hanbury asked.
“A hot bed of dissent.”
“Against what?”
Gundula didn’t answer. She continued down some steps and went in. Peace Village might be its name, but there was no restraint in its assault on the senses. The noise level was higher than Trabi’s engine at top speed. Beer glasses were in heavy motion, and with the crowd sucking neurotically on cigarettes the smoke hung thick. Tattooed arms were standard and every nose seemed pierced with metal rings. Artists? Intellectuals? Skinheads? A new political elite? Gundula and Hanbury moved through. Entschuldigung, the consul kept saying, excusing himself with every squeeze.
How do you find someone you knew twenty-five years earlier when you’re searching in a place so full the view is limited to six inches? Gundula pushed on. They were coming to the back where there were side rooms, leftover bomb shelters from the war, also full of smoking and drinking figures.
As things turned out, it was Günther Rauch who did the discovering. “Das ist nicht wahr!” It’s not true! The booming voice was like a detonation. Günther Rauch was coming forward fast with outspread arms. “Ich glaube es nicht!” I don’t believe it! he thundered. Hanbury only had time for a glimpse and saw that Günther Rauch was almost twice as wide as he once was, with a paunch big enough to hide a football; red hair turning grey stuck out in all directions making the head enormous; the face was wider with eye sockets deeper and the beard longer. But that’s all Hanbury saw because a bear hug smothered him. When he emerged, he tried to regain composure. “Günther,” he said calmly. “How are you? I’ve been hoping to run into you.” “Mein Kamerad!” Günther Rauch replied, laughing, but on the verge of tears. He kissed Hanbury on both cheeks. “My best traitor. Twice you came to see me. Then nothing. I was ten weeks in solitary on account of you. Did anyone tell you?”
“I hear you gave it back to them with interest not long ago,” the consul said.
“You heard that? How far did the news travel? Across the ocean?”
“Gundula here told me.”
No one after a lifetime in a police state shakes the habit of suspicion. Günther Rauch looked Gundula over. He asked some questions. She stood her ground, asking the same questions back.
“She’s fine,” Hanbury said. “She’s got a Stasi file too.”
“Everybody has one,” grumbled the world authority on Stasi files. “The Stasi were so addicted to shit they ate from their own asshole.” But suspicion drained away. “The Stasi may be history,” he said to explain, “but they left a space behind and we all know nature abhors a vacuum. Today’s version, thank God, is hopeless.” He addressed Gundula. “Thanks for bringing this traitor around.”
“Anything to please a consul,” Gundula shot back.
“Cowboy,” said Hanbury quickly. “My best friends call me cowboy.”
“Consul!” Günther Rauch exclaimed with loud delight. Some villagers looked up. “Here? In Berlin? Fantastic! A great career!”
The consul shrugged. “It’s a job.”
“Ah! We must celebrate. Sit down. You too,” he ordered Gundula. “Heinz!” Günther Rauch roared. “Pils! For everybody.”
An elated Günther Rauch squeezed Hanbury’s cheek, touched his hand, put an arm around his shoulders. “We could have been friends,” he kept saying. “But you didn’t come. I thought you were dead.” Hanbury, needing to atone for twenty-five years of silence began to fill them in. He described his travels. Günther Rauch listened. No one can do that much travelling, his shaking head seemed to be saying, and manage to come through alive.
“What I have to tell you is meagre,” Günther Rauch admitted when Hanbury insisted it was his turn. “I tried, as you know, but did not succeed in becoming a public nuisance. I wanted to be subversive; they told me I was a joke. I always hoped they would sell me to the West. “Now if I’d had some help…if my views had been smuggled out by a friend and published in Western papers, I might have seen more of the world too.” He took Hanbury by the ears and playfully shook his head. Gundula watched a one-way love affair between two grown men.
“Eventually they said I would be a street cleaner,” Günther Rauch continued. “So I swept East Berlin for more than twenty years. The same round, over and over again, an endless repetition. I had a good look at the proletariat at ground level, I can tell you, and I learned they were confused. No wonder. The Communist party was Fascist more than Marxist. So when the chance came to throw it out…” Günther Rauch faltered, dropped his great head onto his chest. He closed his eyes. “I lived and breathed the revolution,” he murmured. “Those months in eighty-nine were the finest.”
Hanbury raised his glass. “To revolution,” he said cheerfully. Beer mugs clashed. Günther Rauch again told Gundula she had done well to bring the traitor by. “Everybody says you’re a hero,” Hanbury claimed. “How did you do that?”
“By chance. Pure luck. How else? For years, I cleaned the streets near Stasi headquarters. I knew their habits. After the Wall opened I could tell something was going on.” Günther Rauch, thoughtful beer-hall commentator, described the day when he was sweeping as usual and keeping a close watch on the Stasi complex.
First, he noticed signs of torn paper blowing about in little eddies underneath a delivery ramp. A strange event for a bureaucracy which treated every scrap of paper like gold. And smoke was rising from a chimney which had not smoked before, not even in the dead of winter. It didn’t smell of brown coal either. Bits of matter in the smoke glowed. Paper being burned! Günther Rauch quickly knocked on a few reliable doors behind which the regime’s overthrow was always the first prayer in the morning and the last incantation at night. His citizen’s committee assembled before the Normannenstrasse complex.
At the gate, Günther Rauch in a reverberating voice demanded to see a ranking officer, but none was left. As the smoke continued to rise, so did the indignation of the citizen’s committee. The Stasi had been stealing pieces of their lives for as long as they remembered and, watching the chimney emissions, they knew it was their files, their lives going up in smoke. With resounding authority Günther Rauch announced he had been invested with the Will of the People and had come to take control. Five minutes remained before the People would act.
The gate slid open and confusion set in. The news had spread that the Stasi were being overthrown. Citizens arrived from all over. No one in the complex knew who might be Stasi, who was citizen’s committee and who was there to hunt for souvenirs.
Günther Rauch’s first act was to stop the burning. Workers in coveralls were told to
support his cause. They said, as always, they would follow orders. File destruction was stopped. Incinerators were shut off. Bags of torn-up files were counted, recorded and sealed. Doors were locked, keys signed for. All in all, an exemplary neo-Prussian changing of the guard. Looting had started, but was stopped. Time to clear the building. Souvenir hunters were seen running off with life-sized portraits of Honecker. Better to have my picture stolen, than to have my corpse strung up, cried someone, mimicking the high pitched, scratchy voice of the former dictator.
“Us Ossis can’t stop reading them,” Günther Rauch said with bitterness, referring to the files. He asked Gundula if that wasn’t true and yelled at Heinz to bring another round. “They called it a socialist paradise, but all the regime was really good at was snooping.”
Günther Rauch and Gundula began to compare notes on how their files became so thick. Who generated the information? For Günther Rauch the relevant people included a student friend with whom he spent three summer vacations and whose wedding he attended. Also there was Franz, a placid, middle-aged man whom he often met for a chat on a bench in the neighbourhood park and, later, a street cleaner like himself. For Gundula they included an aunt, a school teacher and a neighbour across the street, a nice lady who kept a garden and regularly invited Gundula for tea.
When Gundula described the people who informed on her, Günther Rauch nodded and looked burdened. They described the other disappointments, other sequences in their life stories – thoughts, attitudes, feelings – things that can’t be put into a file. Günther Rauch sat back in his chair, a beer mug in one fist, the other knocking the wooden table in harmony with the cadence of his voice. He was treating Gundula like a pupil. He encouraged her, corrected her, agreed and disagreed with her. But Hanbury saw she was quicker and cleverer. She left him behind in exposing the underlying weaknesses of a society of double standards, duplicity and lies. Only bombast made the difference. Bombast, Hanbury saw, kept Günther Rauch in charge.
As for the final outcome of the revolution, Günther Rauch admitted he and the citizen’s committee soon lost control. It didn’t work out as they wanted. The proletariat is always unpredictable, he confided. You could hardly say, once the regime had been kicked out, that a new and improved solidarity set in. Everything was suddenly ruled by markets – labour markets, financial markets, global markets. To get something, to go anywhere, to achieve, you had to wheel and deal and race around and compete.
Gundula was saying less and less and Hanbury wondered whether Friedensdorf was opening up old wounds. But Günther Rauch, he could see, was gathering momentum for a monologue. Villagers sensed it too. They leaned forwards on their chairs, straining to catch his words.
The West set about colonizing the East, Günther Rauch postulated with a firm knock on the table. A whole society – factories, farms, parks, clubs, kindergartens – was decreed to have had no value. Now only money talked. And labour, the highest good in the world after only the human reproductive act itself, had been reduced to nothing more than a cost input, an entry on a ledger. Imagine being told you can no longer make love because economists say it’s too expensive, said Günther Rauch to disciples roaring with laughter. Even I have been affected, thundered Günther Rauch. Hand-pushed eastern brooms are out. Too slow. Too costly. Imagine me! Günther Rauch. A luxury item! A roll of palms drumming on the tables reached down Friedensdorf. Hanbury saw Gundula was becoming pensive.
“What we need,” Günther Rauch declared, “is a new party. An Ossi party. To fight colonization.” Villagers cheered. “Marx-based. Pure Marx. Stalin’s corruptions not allowed. And we’ll achieve power through the ballot box.” Some cheers, some whistles. Günther Rauch turned to Hanbury. “What do you say old friend? Will you visit me once I’m respectable. Or do you take as dim a view of parliamentarians as you do of Marx?”
“From broompusher to lawmaker,” someone yelled.
“From Friedensdorf into the Bundestag!”
“I propose a toast to Karl,” roared Günther Rauch. More and more villagers were leaning around the corner of the alcove.
“We’ll need money,” a realist proclaimed.
“Can you make a contribution, Herr Konsul?” Günther Rauch demanded loudly. “My friends. This man is a diplomat. He’ll help us.” Günther Rauch clamped a fist on Hanbury’s shoulder. “You have international connections. We need their support.”
“No problem,” the consul smiled wryly. “A few phone calls and you’ll all be in power.”
Günther Rauch started laughing. He laughed so hard he nearly wept.
Hanbury and Gundula walked back to Trabi in silence.
“I can take a taxi,” Hanbury said. “It’s out of your way.”
“No,” Gundula said coldly.
She drove a few blocks. Without warning, on Kollwitzplatz, she pulled over and cut the engine. “There’s something I have to say.”
Hanbury glanced at Gundula. She was nearly hidden inside her jacket collar.
“Tonight was good,” she said. She had her hands on the steering wheel and looked through the windscreen at the square’s feeble lights. “You handled him well. From what I’ve heard, Günther Rauch doesn’t warm up to people. But you told him things and asked him questions and got him going. Well done.”
“Not me. It was you. You two did all the talking.”
“He wouldn’t have tolerated me for thirty seconds if it hadn’t been for you. He toyed with me, but he wanted to impress you.”
“I don’t think so, Gundula.”
“But now what? Will you see him again?”
“Well, yes. Occasionally. Of course the air in Friedensdorf is bad. And, well, you noticed too. He does go on.”
“Occasionally, you say. You’ll go see him occasionally. Not too often. When you consider it suitable, then you’ll go see Günther Rauch?”
“I imagine so. Gundula, what is this?”
“I ask because it seems to be your general approach.”
Hanbury said nothing. He also fixed his eyes on the emptiness of Kollwitzplatz. In the little park, he knew, stood a statue of Käthe Kollwitz. He had seen it on his walks. She sat on a pedestal, calm, stripped of illusions. Some minutes passed in silence. He tried to come to grips with an inner agitation. Finally he asked, “What are you driving at?”
“Look at you. You make an attempt to find Günther Rauch. You let him know you’ve gone to some trouble. You get him going. He falls in love with you all over again. I imagine that’s what happened twenty-five years ago. What will happen next? Because the air in Friedensdorf is irritating, you may not bother to see him again until you’re both seventy. I want to know if that, generally, is how you treat people.”
“Günther Rauch in love with me? That’s absurd.”
“I don’t think it’s far off. He called you his best traitor. It sounded like he was joking, but he wasn’t. He missed you all those years.”
Hanbury thought about this. “I don’t think that’s fair. And it has nothing to do with you.”
“No? Another question then. Why did you take me to the ball?”
Hanbury’s confusion deepened. “I thought it would be fun. I don’t know many women.”
“But you know some.”
“I suppose, yes.”
“Then why me?”
“Gundula. This is odd.” He felt as if she was forcing him to cross a river covered with broken ice: one misstep would send him under.
She pressed on. “You could have taken others, but decided on me. Why?”
Hanbury shifted his weight in the narrow confines of the Trabi. “I invited you because I like you,” he admitted glumly.
“You like me?”
“Yes.”
“But you want to keep it a secret.” Hanbury sighed, but held his tongue. “Well then, what do you like about me?”
“Gundula, for heaven’s sake!”
“Tell me. We need to get to the bottom of something.”
“Bottom of what?”
“First tell me why you like me.” She still gripped the steering wheel, but was turning slowly towards him as if she was giving in to a terrible anger.
Trabi, in the cold fog on Kollwitzplatz, was not a warm place. Yet Hanbury was sweating. He took a deep breath to keep his voice from trembling. “I like your eyes when they flash.”
“That’s all?”
In the middle of the perilous river Hanbury had no choice but to go forward. “I like it when you tease…I like it when you teach me how to dance…” He was close to faltering. “I don’t understand. What does this have to do with Günther Rauch?”
“Nothing. It has to do with me. When you asked me to the ball, it meant something. It was a lovely evening. But how did it end? First, you insist on going back to Marzahn. I want to take you home, you said. I hear you saying it. When we got there, you instruct the taxi to wait. You shake my hand. Very professional. Why? A sign that the consul’s duties are done? Proof of a well-tempered diplomat?”
“No!” he cried. “The ball had nothing to do with my duties. You’re wrong about that. We could have gone to a pub to drink beer. I would have enjoyed it more. I’m not much of a dancer.”
“A cosy beer? Like tonight? You put on a professional performance? Think of how you treated Günther Rauch. Asking, probing, smiling, nodding. Your interest appeared genuine. Perfect diplomacy. Well done, Herr Konsul!”
“You’re reading too much into nothing,” Hanbury protested blandly. “I was tired after the ball. I scarcely recall what happened. I fell asleep in the taxi on the way home.” The view into Kollwitzplatz was disappearing because the windscreen was fogging up. “What should I have done?” he asked, resigned.
“You could have sent the taxi away. You could have tried to stay the night.” Gundula’s voice was subtly changing, away from the volleys of accusation. “I don’t know whether I would have asked you up. Probably not. But there would have been no harm in trying. What I want to say is, don’t treat me like a professional contact.”
Gundula started Trabi’s motor. They drove off in silence.
The Berlin Assignment Page 29