Hartmut’s definitely taken some color. He got up early with Siegfried and helped him with the day’s work. His cheeks are red and he swallows down his food greedily. Gisela keeps glancing over at him, but doesn’t say anything. The children are winding Lukas up and talking incessantly. We’re not used to such chitter-chatter at the table. Alfred’s eyes scan the room grumpily, then his gaze rests on me. I stare into my wineglass, sweating.
Out of the blue, Hartmut asks whether we are going to take a look at our Stasi files when the time comes, if they haven’t all been destroyed by then. Siegfried laughs and says he doesn’t need to; he already knows what’s in his and who supplied the information. Then he turns to me and says, “The only one around this table who has an unblemished record—if she has one at all—is Maria.” That comment made me want to fling my supper in his face. I mean, I was at the first demonstration in P., chanting “We are the people!” along with the rest of them. Okay, I admit we weren’t there just because of the demonstration; our plan was to go to the ice cream parlor afterward, my friend Katja and I. But Siegfried doesn’t stop his teasing. “Maria,” he says with a grave expression, his arms crossed, “went to Pioneer Camp. Top marks for your file, that. It’s where they groomed our future elite. Isn’t that right, Maria?” I’m close to tears. What does he know about Pioneer Camp? Gisela looks nonplussed, so I have to explain, keeping an eye on Siegfried the whole time. He does actually shut up, and by the end he’s even turned a little pale.
I was twelve, top of the class, and deputy chair of the friendship council at Erich Weinert Secondary School in R. One day Mom and I were called in to see the headmistress. She told us that I had been chosen from our district to go to the Wilhelm Pieck Pioneer Camp. For six weeks. In schooltime. It was an honor you didn’t turn down. And so, in February 1986, I went by train to Berlin with lots of other children from various districts and a group of Pioneer leaders. From there we were bused to the camp on the shore of Lake Werbellin. The first day was a disaster. I didn’t have a Pioneer’s cap, I used a Scout’s knot to tie the red neckerchief rather than a Pioneer one, and I didn’t have a badge on the arm of my white blouse. I’d never had a blouse with the badge. My mother always let me wear cardigans on top and nobody had minded. At the first major flag parade I had to stand at one end of the back row, then in the middle of the square formation, where I was reprimanded for showing insufficient respect for the Pioneer organization, and by extension the German Democratic Republic. Later I was called into the office of the duty Pioneer leader. A message was sent to my mother via the council offices in our village. That same day she sent a package with the items I was missing. And three days later I looked like all the other girls: dark blue skirt, white Pioneer blouse, neckerchief tied with the proper knot, and a blue cap on my head.
There was no end to the rules and regulations: how you were supposed to arrange your clothes over the chair every evening when you undressed, the neckerchief always on top; how to make your bed with military precision; when you had to get up for early morning exercises, barked at by loudspeakers, which were in every block and throughout the camp grounds. A marching song accompanied our exercises; I can only remember the chorus:
Pioneers to the fore, onward with a spring!
Pioneers to the core, wave the banner as we sing!
We march toward the morning sun, proud Pioneers
all and one!
This was followed by a long day in the classroom, including extra Russian tuition and citizenship lessons. We ate our meals in a large hall where cockroaches scuttled under the tables. I’d never seen a cockroach before and thought they were really disgusting. We had flag parade three times a day, and each one began with the announcement “Thälmann Pioneers, be prepared!” and ended with the answer “Always prepared!” In the evenings we watched the news bulletin and sometimes Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler’s political propaganda program. On one of them they featured a West German fruit and vegetable stall with beautiful shiny produce. But then the reporter turned over a few pieces of fruit and pointed to brown spots and mold. We shuddered. “As you can see, all that glistens is not gold,” the Pioneer leader said triumphantly. In the next scene we saw a homeless man holding out a dirty hand, begging. We were shocked.
We all wrote diaries; they told us to, and it wasn’t long before we discovered why. One morning a supervisor came and collected all the diaries. The following day our entries were displayed for all to see in the foyers of the dormitory blocks. Our thoughts became public property. Here nothing belonged to any one individual, or, to put it another way, everything belonged to everybody.
Objects or toys that clearly came from foreign, imperialist countries were confiscated. Among my belongings were a pencil case with a small British flag and a nightie printed with an American cartoon character. I’d been sent the occasional parcel of secondhand clothes from one of Mom’s distant relatives in the West.
My dormitory comrades had no offensive items in their possession.
The letters I sent home were returned to me opened, and then I was summoned to the Pioneer leaders’ office. There were three people sitting there, and one of them read out my letters. After the first I already had trouble concentrating, and I tried to work out whether the person walking along the path outside was Silke, the only friend I’d made up till then. It was hard to tell, she was wearing the same as the rest of us. At that point they ordered me to listen, but I knew the words by heart—they were always the same: “Dear Mama, the camp is like a prison. Please come take me home. I can’t stay here. I’m so unhappy and I cry all the time, especially at night. Love, Maria.” They told me that if I wrote anything like that again there’d be serious trouble for me and my parents, more serious than I could possibly imagine.
After that I wasn’t frightened anymore. It couldn’t get any worse, I thought. And in fact, it didn’t. My mother never got the letters, and nobody came to take me home. But halfway through the six weeks I no longer wanted to leave. There had been a torchlight procession. All of us, hundreds of children, had marched through a sea of fire that surged left and right, singing “The Little Trumpeter” and “Peat Bog Soldiers.” The torches showed us the way across the camp to a large parade square, where the procession stopped. To finish we sang the last verse of “Peat Bog Soldiers.”
That was my turning point, something snapped inside me, my resistance dissolved. I felt at one with the others, strong and invincible. It was an uplifting moment, indescribable, and at the same time one of the most unsettling aspects of my entire stay.
When Gisela asks to hear the song again and I launch into “Peat Bog Soldiers”—with a certain frisson of excitement—it’s not long before Siegfried, Hartmut, Marianne, Alfred, and Frieda join in, in that very order.
Far and wide as the eye can wander,
Heath and bog are everywhere.
Not a bird sings out to cheer us,
Oaks are standing gaunt and bare.
We are the peat bog soldiers.
We’re marching with our spades to the bog.
Marianne hums the tune in her clear voice, because she doesn’t know the words, and when we get to the final verse—“But for us there is no complaining, / Winter will in time be past. / One day we shall cry rejoicing, ‘Homeland dear you’re mine at last!’”—there’s no stopping Siegfried. He belts out the words so loudly that the rest of us fall silent, and Gisela grips her chair with both hands. None of us says a word and I feel a bit embarrassed for Siegfried. We’re all thinking our own thoughts, and when the silence goes on for too long I embark on the conclusion to my story. When, after six weeks, I came home and sang Russian war songs at the dinner table, my mother, in tears, asked me, “What on earth have they done to you?” I cried and missed my friends. It took me a while to get used to being at home again, and my yearning for camp life eventually turned into a rejection of everything collective.
Siegfried had no idea that it had been like that. Now he looks at me rather sympath
etically. Gisela finds it all “barbaric,” like under the Nazis; Hartmut agrees with her, even though he’s been singing along heartily, too. “Bastards!” he says repeatedly. “Miserable bastards! They broke children in those camps.” Then Frieda brings in the dessert. Tiramisu. We’ve never had it before. Even the name sounds exciting. Gisela made it; she brought the ingredients with her. I wonder whether Hartmut is right, whether they really broke me, but on balance I think he’s exaggerating.
None of us noticed Johannes taking photographs of us while we were singing. Tonight, when he develops them, I’ll be able to see how Alfred was looking at me. We go to bed late, very late, and Johannes holds me gently in his arms.
In the other room is my bag and another note from Henner. I’m saving it for tomorrow.
9
I’ve been neglecting The Brothers Karamazov. I left it at the point where something dreadful happened. Fyodor Karamazov is dead, murdered, and all the evidence suggests his son, Dmitry, is the culprit. But in the midst of the greatest adversity, and when he no longer cares about anything, Grushenka shows him her love. There are times when love saves everything.
Before I start the next chapter, I take out Henner’s note and read it. “Come stay with me, just for a day . . .” Every time I read his words it’s as if the ground has fallen away beneath me, and every time I feel like running away and leaving it all behind, even Johannes. But I don’t. I harbor the same sense of foreboding Zossima had when he bowed down before Dmitry. I have no idea what it might be, Henner’s future suffering, but I fear it may have something to do with me.
Downstairs they’re sitting all together at the breakfast table. The children have been absorbed by the farm. They romp about in the animal sheds and in the meadows, and only appear at mealtimes. I don’t feel like eating. I’m completely full; Henner doesn’t leave room for much else. Johannes is telling them how he met me: at that first demonstration in P. Thousands of people were there; the march was so long we couldn’t see where it began or ended. Carried by the throng, we surged past the big department store and then headed for the marketplace. “We are the people! We are the people!” the masses shouted, and it felt the same as it had when I was in Pioneer Camp, except that there the feeling had been even stronger, perhaps because of the torches and songs.
Katja and I were exhausted from all the chanting and were about to slip away to the ice cream parlor when suddenly we noticed a water cannon just a few meters away. People started screaming, others kept chanting “We are the people!” and somehow I lost Katja and she lost me. A woman was pushing a pram alongside me. Police with machine guns were everywhere. Aiming at us. Then came the jet of water. The woman with the baby stumbled, the pram shot off sideways and rolled into the crowd. A man stopped it and took out the child. The baby was screaming its head off, the woman was on the ground, howling and howling, and when the man pulled her up, the baby almost slipped from his grasp. I put my hands in front of my face and didn’t move. Everyone was running all over the place, but nobody ran away. They’re going to shoot, I thought. They’re just going to take aim and whoever’s at the front is going to get it. I was at the front. Katja hadn’t reappeared. But now Johannes was beside me—we’d known each other since kindergarten—and he wrenched me away, through the crowd, then into a side street. We ran and ran, without knowing where we were going, and behind us there was a huge commotion. Something had happened, but we couldn’t see anything anymore. He dragged me into a doorway, pushed the door open, and shoved me inside. And there he kissed me for the first time. It was October 1989. It felt as if we’d escaped with our lives, even though in hindsight it turned out that nothing serious had happened.
Gisela is staring in astonishment, and also in slight disbelief, as if Johannes were recounting a fairy tale. She must think he’s been exaggerating. But she’s wrong. Johannes tends to play things down; he hasn’t even really captured the drama of the story. But it’s obviously enough for Gisela. Seeing how shocked she is by this makes me wonder whether Hartmut actually told her the truth about prison. Does she know that they left him for three days with a high temperature and pneumonia before fetching a doctor? That’s what he told Siegfried, who told Marianne, who told Johannes, and now I know, too. But I’m not sure about Gisela. Has Hartmut kept that from her? And if so, why?
But then I think about my own secret and realize that there are things that can be said straightaway, others that need time, and some things that cannot be told at all.
Of course there was more to this story. At some point we began our long journey home and found Katja at the station. When she saw us she burst into tears and threw her arms around me. We took the forty-five-minute train journey back and she walked back to the village. I went on with Johannes to the Brendels’, to the barn, where we spent hours kissing in the hay. Katja was given the task of telling my mother.
A few days later we were summoned to the headmistress’s office, each of us in turn. I had to explain where I had been on the day of the demonstration, and ultimately what my reasons were for being there. I still don’t know who betrayed us, but Katja spent less time in the office than I did.
It was a time when I often stood out from the crowd. I had decided not to take part in the state initiation ceremony and got confirmed instead, putting a stain on my otherwise spotless CV. Siegfried was wrong when he said I had an unblemished record.
There were several reasons for my refusal to attend the initiation ceremony along with everyone else from my class. Back then I was a regular at the parsonage. One of the pastor’s sons, David, came to our house quite often, too. He used to climb over the fence and bring me presents. The pastor’s family had frequent visitors from the West, and David was well supplied with things like chocolate, gummy bears, posters of rock stars, and sometimes records. We’d sit in my mother’s bedroom and listen to banned music. I was madly in love with him. I’d have supper with his family every few days, and when we said grace before dinner—“Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest; and bless what you have bestowed”—I uttered the words more fervently even than the pastor’s children. None of them was in the Pioneers, nor in the Free German Youth; they talked about subjects that were new to me, and they were smarter than anybody else in our village. My admiration for them was boundless.
And then—this was still long before the Wall came down—the whole of Class 8 were given the initiation pledge to learn at home. We were supposed to prepare ourselves for the forthcoming ceremony; the text began with the following words:
Dear young friends!
If, as young citizens of our German Democratic Republic, you are loyal to the constitution and ready to work and fight together with us for the great and noble cause of Socialism, and honor the revolutionary legacy of the people, then answer:
Yes, this we do pledge!
David told me I couldn’t say that in all seriousness, and that I ought to think about what I would actually say. He also claimed there were people who just disappeared because they were hostile to the state. He’d heard this from his father, and his father would never lie. And around that time, one of my mother’s brothers had come to visit and told us of a friend who had been arrested two years previously for the possession and distribution of imperialist literature, including the works of some foreign philosophers. He was imprisoned in Bautzen, released a year later, and died shortly afterward of a particularly rapid and aggressive cancer. He was twenty-nine and the father of two children. There was lots of whispering between Mom and her brother, and from what I could make out they believed it had something to do with the prison—they’d made him ill while he was inside. I couldn’t get this man out of my head, and now I did find the words great and noble cause of Socialism unutterable. The postwoman’s son disappeared, too, after he’d clambered blind drunk up a flagpole in the village, yelling “Fucking country!” over and over. Anton was his name, and we never saw him again. David said I couldn’t ignore the signs.
There were more parts to the pledg
e, the final one being:
If, as a true patriot, you are ready to strengthen our firm friendship with the Soviet Union, consolidate the fraternal bond between the Socialist countries, fight in the spirit of proletarian internationalism, protect peace and defend Socialism against all imperialist attacks, then answer:
Yes, this we do pledge!
I had a problem that was purely personal with this part of the pledge. I had no desire to strengthen our friendship with the Soviet Union for the simple reason that my father had left us for a Soviet woman. He’d vanished into the heart of Soviet territory, having already spent most of the year at the gas pipeline. So I had my very own animosity toward the USSR. I absolutely loathed it, and I hated the language, too, even though it came in handy; I could read the letters Mom kept finding in my father’s pockets, and found out what he was up to in the Soviet Union.
In any case, my longing for the color and diversity of the West was by now immense. I wanted to have all those things, too. I didn’t want to fight against them—I wanted to own them. But the greatest reason of all was my first love, David, for whose sake I would have done almost anything.
So my mind was made up. Mom cried a lot and said I was as stubborn as my father, if not more so. I knew the trouble in store for me, but in the end it wasn’t as bad as all that. I was determined and started learning by heart catechisms, verses from the Bible, and the Nicene Creed—for God, as David’s father liked to say, was greater than Socialism.
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