Fortune Smiles: Stories

by Adam Johnson

  She had a big heart for the underdog and was not the type to give any thought to the difficult, thankless decisions authorities have to make in order to keep a society functioning properly. I had a duty to the larger picture. To her stories, I always pointed out the hard truths those leftie articles conveniently omitted.

  At a certain point in the evening, when we had made it through another day, there’d be no more need for talk. I’d prepare her last drink of the night, a large icy vodka with a wedge of grapefruit. It would be just the two of us—gone would be her tales of American intervention, gone would be the ghosts of my aging former inmates. As she quietly drank, I’d watch her lips embrace the rim, her throat lifting as she swallowed.

  When only ice remained, I’d take her upstairs and help her to bed, where she would recline in total peace, and there would be no strife in the world—gone would be her regret at having married the warden of a Stasi prison, gone would be the guilt she carried over her past affairs. Even the war would recede, and all she’d endured as a girl in its aftermath.

  “The embers,” she’d say at the edge of sleep. “Cup the embers.”

  Her eyes would grow heavy, her lips mumbling words that belonged to the first flashes of a dream, and I’d ask her, “What are these embers you always speak of, where do you find them, can you feel their warmth?” But the liquor would have transported her already. I’d stroke her hair and run my hand along her shoulder. I believed she could perceive these gestures, that they reached the faraway place where the embers still glowed, even if her words and sentiments couldn’t bridge the passage back. That’s why, when her faint snoring came, I’d open her robe and slowly, tenderly begin making love to her.

  Prinz sniffs something on the lawn. Looking closer, I see it is a small package wrapped in brown paper and twine. I halt. Narrowing my eyes, I pan the neighborhood, sweeping for a trace of the culprit who leaves them for me. This is the third package. I look up to the guard towers of Hohenschönhausen Prison. If only the prison were still open, if only I could check the surveillance footage from the perimeter wall, I might be able to identify the subversive who leaves me these gifts. But the cameras are gone, the facility long shut down.

  The package I will deal with later.

  With my boot, I scrape up a pile of leaves until it can no longer be seen.

  Prinz and I walk down Lössauerstrasse. St. Martin’s lanterns hang from people’s balconies. Pumpkins line winterized walkways. All these homes were built for prison staff, including my own. While most of the guards have moved, some remain, and there’s a nice mix of old families and new. There were rumors after Reunification, after East Germany was no more, that we should give up our housing, that we were the evil apparatus of a country on the wrong side of history and didn’t deserve nice apartments in Berlin.

  That was the rumor. No person ever said such a thing to my face.

  Prinz and I turn the corner onto Genslerstrasse and stroll along the prison’s outer wall. Above are barbed wire and the ceramic insulators where electric wires once hung. Neighbors used to throw books over the wall at night, perhaps hoping that inmates would find them. It shows you how little people around here understood the nature of the facility. These books, together with objects that were confiscated from incoming inmates, constituted our “lost and found” box, which I regularly brought home to Gitte. In this way, in even the most repressive days of the GDR, she read 1984 and listened to cassettes of the Rolling Stones.

  She once danced to this music and then, in a jaded, smoky voice, said, “Mick Jagger understands me. He gets who I am.”

  I laughed. “Yes, you and the singer are practically friends.”

  “Jagger and I have history,” she said. “We’ve shed the same tear.” She smiled and tossed her head—the signal for me to fix her next drink. “But you’re wrong,” she added. “It’s Orwell. He’s the one I’m friends with.”

  Ahead, school buses are already lining up, their doors swinging open to release throngs of bored teenagers. You see, my prison, which was once the terror of every agitator and seditious traitor in the GDR, is now a memorial to which every angsty teen in Germany must be dragged once in his high school career. Here, they are taught about tyranny, totalitarianism and the terror of the Stasi’s central torture prison. The tour guides forget to mention the fact that not a single inmate was ever abused here, let alone tortured. That is because, and here I am not joking despite the grand absurdity of it: the tours are led by the criminals who used to be prisoners here.

  Prinz hops into a little planter by the prison’s main entrance. He begins to circle, left then right, which means a crap is imminent. He is cute even when he shits—after his circle dance, he squats, rolls back his marble-black eyes and shivers up and down. Even the tree wells are part of the propaganda: each one is dedicated to the memory of a former inmate. Any weepy grandkid in Germany can, for ten thousand euros, buy one of these markers that will instantly turn a subversive grandfather into a martyred saint.

  The plaque that Prinz squats over is for Klaus Wexler.

  A group of idle teens ambles by, and whom should I see directing them but the curator himself. He is youngish and handsome, a tall intellectual from the university who will soon be bald before his time. Though he and I catch sight of each other many mornings, we have never spoken. The curator sees me, does a double take and calls his group to a halt.

  He addresses the students: “And here is a commemoration to the playwright Klaus Wexler, who was imprisoned here for two years. After his release, he was a broken man and never wrote again.”

  The teens stare at Prinz as he strains his bowels. Then they look to me, wondering whether this man in the leather overcoat will clean up his dog’s waste. But they do not know Hans, a man who believes in order and stability, who knows firsthand that without rules, everything descends into chaos.

  As if on cue, Prinz makes his contribution to the memorial.

  I remove a dog-waste bag from my pocket. It is biodegradable.

  As I collect the dog crap, I speak to Prinz. “Did you hear that?” I ask him. “This tree is a reminder of the life of the playwright Klaus Wexler.” Then I pretend Prinz is talking to me. I cup my ear. “What’s that you ask, little doggie? Who is Klaus Wexler, and why would a fine writer be in prison?”

  The teens look at me like I’m crazy.

  But I continue, answering Prinz’s question. “He was a fine playwright, that can’t be disputed, my little doggie. But as I recall, far from being a persecuted playwright, Herr Wexler was a pervert and a drug addict who embezzled money from the Deutscher Bühnenbund to print pornographic flyers inviting women to dress up like Secretary Honecker, so he could photograph himself having sexual intercourse with our nation’s leader for the purposes of ‘art.’ ”

  The curator smiles. “That is an amusing story,” he says. “I hope sex and art were legal in the GDR. Or was there a special prison for the pursuit of pleasure? And if Klaus Wexler’s crime was embezzlement, why did he not go through the criminal courts? Why did the Stasi bring him here, to a secret interrogation prison?”

  Prinz gets frisky when he finishes his business. He scratches in the dirt and barks a sharp, taunting bark. This interests the empty-eyed students more than our conversation. “What your tour guide here doesn’t mention,” I say to them, “is that I used to be in charge of this prison. So Klaus Wexler was more than a brass plaque to me. He was a real person, and when he confessed his true crime, I was there to hear it. Note that your tour guide didn’t dispute that the playwright was a sexual deviant, a drug addict and a thief. But what Klaus Wexler confessed to was much worse. It is something your tour guide probably doesn’t want you to hear.”

  “On the contrary,” the curator says. “This is a rare opportunity for us.”

  “This time of year was confession season,” I say. “It starts when the first frost arrives. The cold takes up residence in the concrete walls and steel doors, and everyone knows that it is here to
stay. Many inmates were arrested in summer demonstrations, and over their first few months, as they come to understand the true meaning of the word solitude, these new inmates regret the foolish ways they have transgressed against the state and they begin wanting to confess. But plotting against your country and its people, that is no small thing. When an inmate signals he is ready to confess, that is when he would be sent down to the bottom of the prison, to the part they called the U-boat, for a good long while.”

  There is a young woman with stereo speakers in her ears—I cannot tell if she is listening to me or to popular music. I try to look into her eyes, but she holds up a cellular phone, pointing it at me like it will protect her from the truth I have to say.

  “So the criminal feels like confessing,” I tell her. “So what. He does not get to choose, like it is a favor. He must long for it. He must harvest a single-minded desire to do nothing on earth but reveal, everything, and this moment comes with no coronation. No, the criminal must place this confession on a tin plate, along with his hopes and sorrows and some cold potato peels, and this he must send through the muck-tray slot in his cell door like the rest of them.”

  Behind the phone, the girl’s eyes go wide.

  “The playwright,” the curator says.

  “Yes, the playwright,” I say. “I went down to the U-boat personally. There Klaus Wexler admitted he had plotted to escape East Germany, that he had copied his manuscripts, and at a performance of his latest play in Austria, he intended to flee. Personally, I think it was wrong for the GDR to restrict the movements of its citizens. It was a good country, a free country, and if people wished to leave, they should have been allowed to. But those weren’t the rules, and it wasn’t for us to decide. A pilot must obey the laws of aerodynamics, a doctor the protocols of medicine.”

  Steam rises from the dog-waste bag. I twist its neck into a knot and point at the curator. “Here is what the playwright confessed to: weeping, he told the interrogators that he had made no provisions for his elderly parents, that they were poor and weak and had no one, that he was going to abandon them, cold and alone, to their hastened deaths. With my own ears, I heard him say he was lucky to have been reported and caught. That is the truth of your beloved playwright. And in this way we saved Wexler from the bigger crime: condemning his parents to a slow, isolated death of hunger and infirmity.”

  The curator asks me, “Did Herr Wexler make this confession in the water cell?”

  “I was not Stasi, I was not an interrogator. I was a civil servant, a prison administrator, but there was no torture here, if that’s what you’re implying,” I tell him. “Not one person can show a single scar or bruise or wound from his time here. Not a single photograph can be produced to prove that an inmate was injured in my prison.”

  “Was Klaus Wexler naked when he made this confession?” the curator asks. “And had he been in total darkness, standing in ice water, as he later claimed?”

  “The water was collected from the rain gutters,” I tell them and point toward the roof of the remand center. “It was stored in that tank. In the summer, the water was warm, and in the winter, it was cold. That was the only method to its temperature.”

  The students raise their heads to the roof, their breath visible in the November air.

  Here I lift my little dog and hold him. “Neither officers nor lawyers nor judges make the laws,” I say. “Still they must be followed.”

  The curator offers a slight bow and says, “Thank you for the educational discussion,” before moving the high schoolers toward the museum’s gift shop.

  —

  Prinz and I spend the afternoon creating a surveillance device. I rummage the garage until I find our old Polaroid camera and a spool of fishing line for the trip wire. Prinz is a loyal assistant. He sits on a stool beside me, and as long as he gets a goldfish cracker every few minutes, he follows everything I do with great interest.

  But how to get the pull of a wire to depress a shutter button?

  I try various mechanisms—the flange of a toilet handle, the scissor arm of a garlic press and the lever of a paper punch. None works. It gives you a lot of respect for the Stasi, who were the masters at such things. They made cameras out of cuckoo clocks, bow ties and tree stumps. Yes, the Stasi may have turned the lower levels of my prison into an all-night spook show. But you have to admit—they were ingenious.

  Finally, I use a brake caliper from my daughter’s old bicycle. This I attach to the camera’s plastic frame with two small screws. Did I mention I have a daughter? She’s wonderful, grown already and married. I see her every summer and every Christmas, like clockwork. I point the camera at Prinz and give the fishing line a test pull, causing the brake arm to rotate. When the lever depresses—flash!

  “Now we will catch our mysterious package leaver,” I tell Prinz.

  Even though his tongue is bright orange, I reward his loyalty with a bonus goldfish.

  But the square of film the old camera spits out must have been trapped in there for years. Prinz and I watch it develop: slowly, a grainy image of my wife appears. She is reclined against a white sheet, and she is without clothing. Her eyes appear seductive, her face is not softened by liquor, and I know right away that I did not take this picture.

  When it’s dark, I sneak outside and set up the camera, hiding it behind a pumpkin and stringing the trip wire through a scattering of leaves. Prinz contributes his urine. Then I return with the package and place it on the dining table with the others.

  When the first package appeared a month ago, I assumed it was a mistake, that it had been left at the wrong address. It sat unopened as I waited for its rightful owner to claim it. But when the next package appeared, I knew it was no error. I opened the first one right away. Inside were the keys I’d worn on my hip for sixteen years. It was the prison’s master set. How had they left my possession? Who had sent them to me and why? I clipped them to my belt, where they belonged.

  The next package deepened the mystery. Inside was an ashtray. It was heavy and made of lens-quality glass. It was a souvenir Gitte brought me from a state-sponsored photography conference she attended in Dresden. When light struck the ashtray, it glowed eerily, making the inmates nervous as they sat before my desk. One day, after it had sat on my desk for ten years, it vanished. We tore the prison apart, scouring every inch, the prisoners not resting for weeks. Broken, the ashtray could become a terrible weapon—heavy and sharp, it could gash the necks of a dozen guards. We searched the latrines, the rain gutters, the ashes in the furnace. We dumped cauldrons of mess-hall stew. Inmates hand-sifted thirty thousand shovels of snow. Frozen corpses in the morgue were stripped, and the plaster casts were broken off everyone in the prison infirmary. The ashtray was never seen again—until it appeared, hand-wrapped, on my lawn. I could almost smell the f6 cigarettes I used to smoke.

  The latest package I unwrap slowly. The twine is tied tight, the paper crisply folded. The clear tape that secures the corners is tinged a bureaucratic yellow. Inside I discover a silver bracelet that I bought for Gitte on our twentieth wedding anniversary. Because of what happened to her parents, because we’ll never know how long they might have stayed married, Gitte and I always said we’d be married fifty years. So I had the bracelet inscribed:

  “Hans & Brigitte ~ Only Thirty More to Go.”

  It was too heavy for her wrist, she said. She wore it only to official functions.

  I don’t know why, but holding the bracelet, I start to weep.

  Prinz leaps onto the table to lick my tears.

  —

  Later that night, Prinz and I curl on the couch—from here I’ll be able to see the flash of the Polaroid if our mysterious package leaver returns. A wind shuttles up the chimney’s hollow throat. There is a dry crackle in the leaves outside. A flat white light enters through laced curtains, casting a web over the dog peeking from behind my knees. It is in this patterned light that I regard the Polaroid of my wife. Her body is no longer youthful, but she is bea
utiful. The photographer, I believe, agrees. He has captured the elegance of how her hair falls, the way her breasts roll sweetly to the side. She is prepared for him. Her legs are slightly parted, her eyes curious and wry. It hurts to know that as soon as he pushes the button that captures this image, she will beckon him. It hurts to know that he will not have to heave wide the deadweight of her thighs. She will do that for him. Still, he would know nothing of her secret embers.

  It’s late when my daughter calls. We’re not due to speak until mid-December, when we make our Weihnachten plans.

  “Papa,” she says. “There is a video of you on the Internet.”

  “This is not possible,” I tell her. “I give no interviews. Please tell me—how is your mother? Does she speak of me?”

  “The video is crazy,” she says. “You are insulting a famous writer. You are waving a bag of dog shit around.”

  “Is she there?” I ask. “Is she in the house with you?”

  “Papa, you must listen to me. There is a film of your dog shitting on the memorial of Klaus Wexler, and you’re talking to the dog and acting like the dog can talk to you. Papa, this man won the Georg-Büchner Literaturpreis. You call him a deviant and an addict. You admit he was stripped and frozen and made to weep for his lost parents in your prison.”

  “I have done nothing wrong,” I say to her. “I have hurt no one. Will you tell your mother that for me? That I never did anything to hurt her, that I followed all the rules, that I was the one who looked the other way when bad things happened in our marriage.”