Kruso

by Lutz Seiler

  I felt vaguely relieved for a while. I was happy to have been welcomed and treated so pleasantly by the Danes, all of whom seemed to speak German, despite my bleary-eyed, rumpled appearance. I was just a random stranger, but was still the first East German to come to the ‘Teilum’ and show interest in the corpses of his countrymen, as Sørensen noted, ‘Countrymen — can one even use that term now, probably not, right, Mr Bendler?’

  I have to admit that Sørensen impressed me. His agile manner, his tanned complexion — today, I would probably feel differently, but back then Sørensen was a man from another world, another (better) life, light-years away from where I came from. I was almost ashamed of the stained photograph, but I still took it out of my folder and pushed it across the desk like a final request. I felt shabby. Sørensen just glanced briefly at the photograph (as at a misunderstanding) and didn’t touch it, so I soon took it back, quickly and with embarrassment.

  Nonetheless, I must say that the circumstances of my visit were met with great helpfulness, including an offer of a tour through the ‘Teilum’. Perhaps because he found it difficult to send me away empty-handed (considering the distance I had travelled to get there), perhaps also because I came from the East and my humble demeanour gave the impression I was interested in everything.

  Here they spoke of death more openly, Sørensen explained as he lead me through the rooms. I had put on a white coat and was trailing behind him.

  One distinct memory has stayed with me. It is of the department’s utensils, probably because they looked so familiar to me — knives, spoons, ladles. Organs were removed in groups, first the heart and lungs, then the stomach, intestines, and liver, and last the kidneys, bladder, genitals. They were washed and weighed separately, and most had specimens removed. ‘These small plastic containers, for example, are ready for the evidence.’ I picked up one of these little cups. It held a white powder. ‘Sodium fluoride,’ Sørensen explained, ‘it stops decomposition.’ He took the cup. I dutifully pulled out my notebook, which led the forensic pathologist to comment on my ‘unusual interest’, as he put it. He went on, ‘drowned corpses are putrefied corpses and have a particular odour that is essentially unbearable. You sit in your car on the way home, stuck in traffic, and suddenly: the smell. It sticks to your skin, to your hair, to everything. Fresh corpses are much preferable.’ Sørensen laughed and immediately apologised. That was all irrelevant. Most important was curiosity, a certain and perhaps exaggerated curiosity, one must never lose that curiosity.

  As I was leaving, Dr Sørensen said a few words to the secretaries. I must have looked distraught. At any rate, the older woman walked me to the exit. In front of the elevator, she stepped closer to me and then she said it: if I wanted to grieve, that is, if I were looking for the proper place to take leave of my girlfriend (those were her words), then I should go to the municipal cemetery, to the grave of the unknown. She pressed a note into my hand: Bispebjerg Kirkegård, Frederiksborgvej 125, Nørrebro.

  I don’t remember much about the rest of the day. In a daze, I followed the usual tourist route and ended up in the port. I came to with a start — surprised at how small the little mermaid (Den lille Havfrue) really was. In the guidebook, I read that someone had sawed off her head in 1964 and her right arm in 1984, but there were no scars, no traces to be seen. She looked immeasurably sad — pitiful and worthy of great pity. That was the moment I decided to go to Bispebjerg, that I do remember. On the way, I tried to imagine the little mermaid without a head or arm; she did not turn into sea spray, did not become a spirit of air, no, her decaying body lay between the stones, recently washed up, but no one did anything. Then police, forensics, post-mortem, protocol. Still, she had a name; every Dane recognised her even without her head.

  What was unusual about the Bispebjerg cemetery is that you could drive in it. There was a large, well-paved oval, similar to a racetrack, and a few smaller side streets. All the roads were lined with poplars or pine trees. I parked first next to the crematorium and oriented myself with the map. Various sections were arranged around the racetrack, signed like highway exits — Swedish, Russian, Muslim, Catholic exits, and on the other end of the grounds, past the southern curve, the tyske grave: the German plots. I climbed into my Shiguli and drove there, about three kilometres.

  The tyske grave was an enclosure with three stone crosses, three oak trees, and a large bronze memorial plaque. One row further on, the dead were listed alphabetically, with dates of birth and death, on smaller plaques. The list concluded with a mention of ‘seventeen unidentified German refugees’.

  I don’t recall what I felt at that moment. I know I had trouble sleeping in the cemetery even though I felt safe in the Shiguli. And I know that at midnight I crawled out of the car again and went to the stone. In the dark, everything looked different, warmer. I set the crumpled photograph on the grass and kept watch. It was quiet. No wind in the trees, no rustling, nothing happened. No sign. I thought of Kruso, of Sonya, and also of G. I fulfilled a promise as if I’d made it to myself.

  ‘Then you won’t leave me, Sonya?’

  ‘No, no, never. I will follow you.’

  Barely twenty years later, I saw a man gesture towards a vast emptiness and heard him say: ‘There are dead buried everywhere here.’ It was a film from the North German Broadcasting System about refugees who had fled over the Baltic Sea. I’d been working until just before midnight and had turned on the television. I’d drunk some wine, half a bottle. It was all chance. I had just wanted to make myself tired enough to sleep — bed-heavy, as my mother called it — and there was no better way.

  The camera lens panned slowly (grieving) over the field and finally stopped (prayerfully) in the branches of an old beech tree that was keeping vigil. Field and tree, nothing else. The cemetery was called Bispebjerg Kirkegård, but didn’t look anything like the place I’d been two decades earlier, for an evening and a night, to take my leave, as the secretary in the forensics department had suggested. The young Dane in front of the camera wore a half-length coat, his hair was blond and hung down to his shoulders. Behind him, there was nothing but grass, and here and there, in the distance, small islands of flowers.

  Promises made. It wasn’t that I was at the wrong grave and perhaps was taken for a fool. It had nothing to do with being outraged, no: I’d been careless. I had been content too soon and with too little, basically with nothing at all.

  In the following weeks, I read everything on the topic I could get my hands on. I didn’t find all that much: two books with careful research and analysis, a few articles, a travelling exhibit. One statistic showed over 5,600 refugees, 913 of them successful, 4,522 arrests, and at least 174 fatalities since 1961, washed ashore between Fehmarn, Rügen, and Denmark. The most successful refugee stories had been filmed, not big movies, but good documentaries for regional broadcasting: two surfers who made it from Hiddensee to Møn one November day (on homemade windsurfers); two young doctors in a dinghy, picked up by a Danish cutter; one man who swam forty-eight kilometres in twenty-four hours, from Kühlungsborn to Fehmarn, with five bars of chocolate as provisions. Stories were made of these escapes, and the refugees were made into heroes, people who had risked everything and survived. ‘We made it’ or ‘We reached our goal’, repeated over and over, like an incantation.

  There was also material on many unsuccessful attempts, but I found nothing about the nameless dead, nothing anywhere. No location, no date, no grave, just a vague reference to a burial in Copenhagen. Strangely, the number fifteen cropped up here and there, fifteen unidentified victims, it was reported, washed up on the coast of Denmark. I asked myself how they could have arrived at that number. Irrespective of the often-cited estimated number of deaths — though one can assume the actual number was many times greater — these particular victims were identified as East Germans. Someone had to have seen the bodies and determined: they came from there. ‘When our fishermen pull in their dragnets between Møn and R�
�gen, sometimes they find bodies among the fish. I can remember twelve dead bodies. We brought them to land and handed them over to the Forensics Institute in Copenhagen.’

  That was certainly an abridgement of the matter, a restriction to the essential, as is an old harbourmaster’s wont, without mention of the police, the forensic pathologists, the district attorney, and the entire thanatocratic apparatus. The bodies had to end up somewhere. There had to be files, post-mortem reports, and a grave that can be located. Maybe not a museum, but something.

  First, I wrote to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Copenhagen, Retspatologisk Afdeling, the colourful mortuary. The answer came back right away. The incidents described in my letter were ‘interesting and disturbing’, but unfortunately they were not in a position to help me. All post-mortems were done by order of the police, and only they had rights to the reports. They had, therefore, to refer me to the police office of South Zealand and Lolland-Falster, Parkvej 50, Næstved. The letter was signed by Professor Hans Petter Hougen, State Pathologist, not by Sørensen, who had probably retired.

  A Danish-speaking friend helped me formulate as exact a response as possible, and again an answer came right away. Allan Lappenborg from the administrative office of the South Zealand and Lolland-Falster Police Department explained that there were no cases that fit my descriptions on file in the area of his jurisdiction, an area that covered two-thirds of Denmark’s southern coast. With his answer, he included the information provided by the police department’s archivist, Kurt Hansen Loï, who wrote: ‘I asked older colleagues who were employed here during the relevant time period. The police apparently did not pursue this matter, and probably no deaths were reported. This would confirm the harbourmaster’s claim that the death reports were filed with the Forensics Institute. In any case, the police archives in Vordingborg have no death reports from the time of the GDR.’

  Although the police archivist’s information was more than astonishing, I decided not to write to Professor Hougen again. Instead, I wrote to various administrative offices, basically blindly, with the assumption (the hope) that there would be someone at one or more of these addresses who knew the whereabouts of the unknown dead from a vanished country, at least of the fifteen who were always included on the lists of victims.

  I wrote to the German church Sankt Petri in Copenhagen, to the IEDF, the association representing the interests of former refugees from the GDR, to the Stasi Records Agency in Rostock, and to the Berlin Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, as well as to the operators of certain websites that referred to the dead refugees, some of them gave the number fifteen, without date or year, just this final absence. Inevitably, I had begun to think about their presence, as if such a thing were possible. I had paintings by Géricault in mind, that is, I thought of the dead as physical beings, as if everything still existed in their remains: desire and need, loneliness and despair.

  ‘The dead are waiting for us, Ed, did you know?’

  ‘But no one ever comes. No one. Not ever.’

  All in all, the conclusion was sobering. No one really knew, and the contradictions were piling up. The website operators didn’t answer my questions, which I had painstakingly typed into their schoolboyish boxes under ‘Contact’. The German Senior Pastor of Copenhagen had just been appointed, and promised to ask his elders in the church council. ‘Where the dead are buried is something you should ask the Danish coast guard,’ was the IEDF’s answer. Dr Volker Höffer of the Stasi Records Agency auxiliary office in Rostock offered his support. About the fifteen unidentified dead, however, he had no information. The number fifteen was probably based on statements of Danish experts in their interior ministry’s defence department, but unfortunately he no longer had a contact there. From the Berlin Wall Museum, Alexandra Hildebrandt wrote an email: her institution was also trying to track down the names of the victims buried in Bispebjerg. ‘According to my research, we have no records in our St Petri Church concerning refugees from the GDR,’ wrote Wulf D. Wätjen of the St Petri Church council. Dr Wolfgang Mayer also wrote on behalf of the IEDF and suggested I enquire with the German embassy in Copenhagen.

  Coast guard, ministry, or embassy?

  The answer from the German embassy was sent by Olaf Iversen, who was on staff in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: ‘I contacted the cemetery administration in Bispebjerg today. Unfortunately, they could not give me any information about the anonymous East German refugees.’ Iversen had been in the cemetery office one day after he received my enquiry. Once again, the St Petri Church council member Wätjen wrote to me. He, too, had enquired at Bispebjerg Kirkegård — there was no documentation of the burials, no entries in the registry. One thing seemed certain: it wasn’t just me, but also the young Dane in the film, who was mistaken — the unknown dead were not buried in Bispebjerg, neither beneath the bronze plaque in the military cemetery, nor in the pleasant field next to it.

  The embassy secretary offered to get in touch with Jesper Clemmensen, a Danish television journalist who had written about escapes across the Baltic Sea and had made a few films on the topic. Two hours later, he sent notification: ‘Jesper C. has written that he speaks fluent German and would be happy to speak with you directly.’ I had Iversen’s completely unrestricted helpfulness to thank for this important contact.

  I wanted Jesper Clemmensen to take me for a serious person, not some lunatic with an idée fixe. The risk of this would remain as long as I made calls around the world and sent emails asking about the dead without any institutional support or official assignment. So I said nothing about Sonya or Kruso, but formulated my quest more generally — as a matter that almost explained itself and seemed more than justified. The sentences were ready at hand, as if engraved in a memorial plaque: to give the victims back their identities, to overcome the anonymity of statistics, to redeem the forgotten from their tragic fate and so on. This was sufficiently weighty and could not be a lie. (All you’re doing is looking for Sonya, and fundamentally you’re searching for G. because you will never, ever be done with this in your lifetime — because of a promise.) (Longing for the dead, you even called it that once, didn’t you?)

  Whether or not Jesper believed my explanation, I can’t say. Likely not. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), I had great luck with him, I couldn’t have found anyone better. He was on site, he knew ‘a few people’, he had connections, and he knew whom to call. He knew how to investigate. He spoke of ‘sources’ (‘my source said’) and ‘useful information’, whereas I, with the best of will, couldn’t make any progress. I don’t like speaking on the telephone, but with Jesper it was easy. Two months passed, during which he ploughed through his country’s law enforcement and archival landscapes, including the Forensic Department and the coroner’s office as well as the German national archives, before calling me on the afternoon of 23 September to tell me he knew where to find the ‘Museum of the Drowned’. The only question was whether I would be admitted without a research contract or proof of kinship.

  ‘The dead are waiting for us, Ed. What do you say to that?’ Kruso had asked.

  ‘They don’t release the corpses,’ Kruso had said.

  My flight landed in Copenhagen in the early afternoon. My hotel was just a three-minute walk from the station. Through a large opening in the station forecourt, you could see into an underground tunnel with tracks running north. A few bicycles lay on the macadam. Someone had dropped them into the pit (overboard). The track bed was strewn with garbage and offered a squalid view compared to the square’s surroundings, as if trains now rarely ran on those tracks or as if the tracks led to another, subterranean Denmark to which no one wanted to travel.

  Our meeting was scheduled for that afternoon. Jesper had set it up with his source. It was cold and there was a light, almost invisible rain in the air. A few men dressed as American Indians were playing music on the town-hall square. The chieftain’s feather headdress hung down to his feet. He
wore red gloves and a fleece jacket. I tried to let myself drift with the crowd, but didn’t have the patience. I turned into a side street, where I could walk at my own pace. The road soon opened onto a square. At random, I chose a restaurant called Café Scandi. The lunch buffet cost sixty-nine krone. The Café Scandi was tolerable, but something didn’t fit. The ceiling was covered with wavy metal bands that reflected everything going on below. On the tables, lanterns shone like navigation lights in heavy, wine-red glasses. I sat at the window so I could look outside. The sky hung low, and it was too dark for the time of day. My navigation light started flickering — some draft blew from somewhere — and when I looked around, I knew: behind me, the shaft of a dumb waiter had opened. I moved to the opposite side of the table and looked fixedly at the two hatches. The waiter snapped them shut with a flourish and sent the dumb waiter back down. Over the shaft were the words Persontransport Forbud.

  I thought of my last day on the island. I had drained the black water from the Klausner’s heating system and closed the shutters. I’d turned off the gas from the beer pump, unhooked the tap from the CO2, and cleaned everything again. When I pulled the door to the terrace closed behind me, I could hear Viola — West German radio. I didn’t feel like I was leaving someone behind. The feeling was more serious, more final.

  The address where we were to meet was Polititorvet 14, 1780 Copenhagen V, headquarters of the Rigspolitiet, the national police force of the Kingdom of Denmark, also called the Politigården, located to the south-west of the city centre. Because I entered the square from the opposite side, I had to walk all the way around the building.