by Nina Berry
Shouldn’t, he had said. Not wouldn’t. But she would have gone even if he’d said it was dangerous. She needed to question Frau Nagel again, and Devin and Thomas were up to something.
“What about Thomas?” she asked. “If the leaders of the Party killed his father, he could be in danger. It could be a trap for him.”
“Thomas is the least of Walter Ulbricht’s concerns right now,” Devin said. “Ulbricht’s focus is on President Kennedy. And you’d be surprised. Thomas can take care of himself.”
They ate in silence, until she said, “I’m going to find out what’s really going on, you know.”
He looked at her thoughtfully and didn’t appear alarmed by what she’d said, even though it was the closest she’d come to telling him she knew that he was more than he seemed.
“I know,” he said. “That’s one of the things I like most about you.”
She blushed but didn’t look away. He smiled. The silence between them was oddly comfortable, as if they both knew where they stood at last.
“I spoke to Thomas,” he said, in a more businesslike tone. “He’s assuming he can pick you up around three-thirty this afternoon.”
She sighed and threw down the soggy French fry she was holding.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “A boring bunch of elderly government officials out drinking in the woods shouldn’t be too much for me to handle.”
“It’s a garden party,” Devin said, his voice light and mocking. “What could happen?”
She was perfumed, coifed, and outfitted in her recently cleaned chocolate-brown Dior suit dress by the time Thomas rolled up in the long black limousine Pagan had been using since the beginning of her stay. Her brief foray around East Berlin in bright colors the day before had been the deciding factor in her choice of clothing, but also, after last night, she needed to feel confident and graceful.
Thomas was driving, with no sign of the usual chauffeur. He popped out and opened the front passenger door for her. “Do you like my borrowed car?” he asked, helping her inside. “Devin let me borrow it. Better not bring the sports car or chauffeur, or all the partygoers will think I’ve been contaminated with capitalism.”
“As long as it doesn’t change into a pumpkin, we’ll be fine,” she said.
Thomas climbed into the driver’s seat and closed the heavy side door with a whump. He was in his shirtsleeves, no tie, summer-weight wool trousers and shiny oxblood shoes. His suit jacket lay on the seat between them. He looked as wholesomely handsome as a young ranger in a park brochure.
He stepped on the accelerator and they cruised away from the hotel, east toward the Brandenburg Gate. “You’re a lifesaver for me today. The Party Secretary’s assistant told me he was looking forward to meeting you, and as a faithful citizen of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, I’m relieved not to disappoint him.”
“Walter Ulbricht wants to meet me?” She wrinkled her nose. “This should be interesting.”
“And my mother’s making a lovely strudel for us to try when we stop by after,” he said. “Not that we’ll need it after the party really, but mother couldn’t let you come by without offering you something.”
A thin ivory scrim of cloud veiled the sky. It kept the summer temperature down to a lovely seventy-five degrees. Pagan’s spirits lifted as she gazed out at the pale blue heavens. She might not have a movie to work on, but she’d attended an A.A. meeting without wanting to bolt and was headed to East Germany to find out more about her family after this weird little political gathering.
The signs about leaving the British sector flashed past, then the volkspolizei were waving them through the gate.
“That’s new,” Pagan said against the sudden tension in her throat. A large camouflaged tank stood parked half a block down a side street. Its large main gun was pointed toward them.
She spotted another tank through the trees, sitting on the pedestrian walkway down the middle of the street. Soldiers in dark green uniforms stood smoking in shady spots, rifles glinting. “So’s that.”
Thomas’s hands were clamped hard on the steering wheel. “Always some military maneuver or another going on,” he said.
“They’re wearing different uniforms than the men at the gate,” she said. “Are they not volkspolizei?”
“Not vopos,” he said. “Grentztruppen. Border police. Different uniforms, but they all think the same.”
“One city at war with itself.” Pagan pushed down the urge to tell Thomas to turn the car around, to run back to the hotel and make sure Devin knew about the tanks. “Like a person with a split personality.”
“Sometimes I feel I’m like that—at war with myself,” Thomas said. “There are things about me…if I could kill them off, I would.”
“Me, too.” She looked at his profile, strong and handsome as a Norse god, wondering what he could mean. “But you can’t kill only the things you don’t like. It’s all or nothing.”
“And death is very final,” he said. “It’s better to stay alive, even if you are at war.”
They continued down the Unter den Linden, past Friedrich Strasse and two tour buses from the West. Things couldn’t be that bad if they were still allowing tourists across, she told herself. It was just another Saturday.
They passed over the blue-gray River Spree again, which curved through the city at many points.
“The Nazis blew up the original bridge that was here in 1945, trying to stop the Soviet advance,” Thomas said. “We rebuilt it later, but we’re still rebuilding the street.”
She had thought the Unter den Linden looked forsaken, but the wide street that curved slightly north from it, Liebknecht Strasse, was barren of anything but bombed-out buildings, a few lots cleared of rubble, and a lone bicyclist pedaling his way somewhere else. Under an endless faded sky, the street stretched on and on, vacant and ruined. Only a few brave trees were pushing their way through the rock-strewn dirt.
“My father was injured in Germany when he was serving in the army,” Pagan said. “I wonder if he saw this place after the bombing.”
“My father was at the front most of the war, too,” Thomas said. “While my mother and I tried not to starve in Moscow.”
“My dad never talked about it.”
“No one wants to talk about their scars,” Thomas said. “We just want to forget.”
In ten minutes they were driving through a forest, shaded by pine trees. Pagan rolled down the windows and breathed in the sweet scent. It reminded her of summer in Maine with her grandmother, and gave her strength to finally give Thomas the news.
“Bennie fired me last night,” she said.
Thomas’s head whipped around, his eyes wide. “But why? That can’t be true!”
“I’ve been trying to think how to tell you,” she said. “That’s why I ran off like that at the end. I’m sorry, because it’s going to affect you, too. It’s all my fault.” She gave him an abbreviated version of the events from the night before, omitting the part where Devin had slammed Nicky into a wall.
“We must prevail upon Bennie to change his mind,” Thomas said. “Anyone can make a mistake, and he knows you are excellent in this role.”
“He told me if I had one drink I’d be off the movie,” she said. “I don’t blame him. I should’ve known better.”
“You had a bad night,” Thomas said. “Well, other than when you were dancing with me.” He flashed her a mischievous smile. “Bennie should fire Jimmy for bringing Nicky to meet you so unexpectedly. He wanted to make you feel bad.”
“The old goat enjoyed seeing me squirm,” Pagan said. “But I need to learn to deal with jerks like him, and with surprises like running into Nicky and his wife.” The word wife stuck in her throat.
“It will get easier with time,” Thomas said. “You are strong and intelligent. You will learn.”<
br />
Pagan leaned against the door of the car, gazing at him with a smile. “Have I told you lately how great you are, Thomas? No matter what happens with me on the movie, I hope it does great things for you, because you deserve them.”
“Danke,” he said. “But if I remain in East Germany, I fear this movie may only hurt me.”
“Move West,” she said. “I know your mother is a member of the Communist party and all…”
“I know I can trust you not to tell anyone else this…” He shot her a sideways glance and a smile. “But we have a plan for me to bring mother and Karin to the West after the movie is done. We may even go all the way to America.”
“That would be great!” She sat up straighter. “You should come to Hollywood. They’d eat you up there, you’re so handsome.”
He flushed, smiling. “You’re too kind. I’ve wanted to move for a while now. So much has happened to change how I feel about the Party. Mother, too.”
He was probably thinking about his father’s suspicious accident. There was no delicate way to bring that up, so she didn’t.
“Yet here we go off to a garden party being thrown by the leader of the Party,” she said.
“Secretary Ulbricht is not someone you can refuse,” Thomas said. “Believe me, if I didn’t have to go to this, I wouldn’t. And I’m grateful you’re bearing it with me.”
They’d broken free of the city and were driving through true countryside now. Trees grew more tightly spaced, interrupted every now and then by a small brick house or an old church with a tiny graveyard beside it. They slowed as they wound through a village where some kids were playing soccer in the public square with a ball that looked too small. A few fields surrounded the town, dotted with cows, then the trees closed in again, and they wound through some low hills.
“Not far now,” Thomas said as he turned onto a smaller road and slowed to a stop by a guardhouse manned by five armed men in brownish-gray uniforms bearing dark red flag insignias she hadn’t seen before.
“Hallo,” Thomas said in a subdued tone, and handed over his ID and a paper invitation that bore Ulbricht’s name and the name of the estate, Haus der Birken. The House of the Birches. Beyond the guardhouse the pine forest did indeed give way to groves of white-barked birches sequined with the dark green leaves of midsummer.
The soldier did not reply but examined the documents and Thomas closely. Pagan startled as another soldier, rifle in both hands, peered at her through her half-open window. She glimpsed the black script on his shoulder insignia: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Ministry for State Security, which meant they weren’t regular army, but special troops for an arm of the government.
She smiled at the soldier. He didn’t smile back. If the man examining Thomas’s papers recognized him, he did not show it.
“Pagan Jones?” the man by Thomas’s door asked, eyes sweeping over her Dior suit and down her stockinged legs to her shiny heels.
“Ja,” she said, adding brightly in German, “That’s me.”
The guard took his time assessing her, blank-faced, then with an abrupt motion, handed Thomas his papers and pointed up the tree-lined drive. “You may go.”
Thomas rolled up his window and stepped slowly on the gas. When they were well away, he said in a low voice, “Those are the guards from Feliz Dzerzhisnky regiment. The enforcers for the Stasi.”
“Oh.” Pagan resisted the urge to turn around and look back at the men at the guard post. She’d heard of the Stasi, the infamous intelligence service and secret police agency in East Germany known to be even more ruthless and effective than the KGB in the Soviet Union. It was said they had spies in every building and on every street in East Germany, making sure the citizens weren’t trying to undermine the state. But like the CIA and the KGB, they also operated internationally, spying on rival states and friendly ones alike.
“Look,” she said, pointing at six more men in the same uniforms marching between the trees. She spotted movement on the other side of the road. “And more over there.”
“They’re everywhere,” Thomas said as they passed another clutch of soldiers lined up along the road. “It must be to guard the First Secretary and his ministers.”
“I’m glad we’re not trying to sneak in,” she said. “Or out.”
They pulled into the sweeping half circle of a drive leading up to a series of buildings next to an open front lawn. Just beyond, a lake lay flat and gray blue in the dim late-afternoon sunshine. Long fingers of shadow cast by the birch trees reached across the aggressively trimmed lawn and cut dark lines in the rigidly carved hedges.
“This used to be where Hermann Göring’s huntsman lived,” Thomas said. “You know—one of Hitler’s chief ministers and founder of the Gestapo. Göring burned down his own house nearby, but this one remained. Our own leaders built the two adjacent buildings.”
Pagan unrolled her window to crane her neck out and get a look. The central three-story building with its sloping red roof did look older than the two complementary ones that winged it. The rows of windows on the lower floor were tall and narrow, almost like French doors, with ivy crowding in between. Even on a warm summer day like this, every window was closed and curtained.
The side buildings were done in a more subdued gray-white stone, but their roofs sloped in a similar steep manner. Cars, mostly Trabants, Mercedes-Benzes, and Volkswagens, were parked on the lawn.
“It’s lovely,” said Pagan. And that was almost true. The place would have had a quiet, gracious air of a bygone era if not for the armed guards and curtained windows. At least it was different from the stern, pragmatic style of East Berlin’s new buildings.
By Pagan’s watch it was just coming on five o’clock. “And we’re exactly on time.”
“Wouldn’t be a good idea to come late to your leader’s garden party,” he said. “Not if you want to keep acting in his terrible state-sponsored films.”
She laughed, and he pulled the car to a stop in front of the central building’s front door. A male servant in gray trotted down the steps to open her door as Thomas got out and tossed him the keys.
“It’s not my car,” he told the man in German. “So be kind to it.”
The man didn’t crack a smile, but bowed sharply at the waist as she stepped out and gestured toward the door. “The Secretary is expecting you, Herr Kruger,” he said. “Please go in.”
Pagan straightened her skirt as Thomas came around to let her take his arm. His usual smooth walk was jumpier than usual, his grip on her hand tense.
“I think I’m actually a bit nervous,” she said, so that he didn’t feel he was the only one. “It’s not every day you meet a Communist leader surrounded by armed troops.”
“Just imagine them all naked,” he said with a grin, and she laughed as they walked up the stairs past flanking bronze statues of rams to the half-open white door.
“Thomas Kruger!” The door jerked open all the way to reveal a balding man of medium height with a crisply trimmed graying goatee. Pagan recognized him from the oversize poster she’d seen hanging next to Stalin’s portrait. “You have done as I asked, I see.”
Walter Ulbricht had such a prim, self-righteous face that he would’ve looked at home wearing a big black hat with a buckle on the front, the kind worn by men who burned witches. His permanently disapproving expression had carved deep marionette lines from nose to mouth. Even in happy greeting he didn’t smile, just quirked the outer corners of his mouth up, lips closed. His drab, nearly round glasses magnified the dark gray furrows under his restless pale blue eyes—eyes that were fixed on Pagan.
“Guten Tag, Comrade Secretary,” Thomas said, ushering Pagan to go before him. In English, he continued, “May I introduce you to Pagan Jones, from Hollywood in the United States. Fraulein Jones, this is Walter Ulbricht, General Secretary of the Central Committee of t
he Socialist Unity Party.”
The dark foyer was a study in dictator clichés, beset with stuffed deer heads, mounted guns, and heavy red drapery. What was it about oppression that was so incompatible with chic?
Pagan suppressed a desire to fling open all the windows and gave the leader of East Germany a demure smile as she held out her hand.
“But this is excellent, Thomas, well done,” he said in German, switching to English as he ignored Pagan’s hand and took her by the elbow, leading her with a rushed, stiff-legged walk past wood-paneled walls toward a hallway. “Welcome, Miss Jones. My daughter is eager to meet you.”
“Thank you for inviting me,” she said, also in English, a little alarmed at how quickly he was hustling her toward some lace-curtained glass doors. Thomas trailed behind. “Your estate is lovely.”
Ulbricht opened the French doors and put one meaty hand on her back impersonally to push her outward. “Beate!” he shouted.
The doors opened onto a large cement patio dotted with tables draped in white cloths. A plump girl with dark blond hair turned from talking to two older women in large flowered dresses.
What should have been an idyllic scene was instead sad and creepy. Armed soldiers marched by the sparkling lake. Closer by, squinting in the golden light of late afternoon, several dozen grim-faced, middle-aged men slouched by the laden food tables, smoking and downing tiny tumblers of clear liquid that was probably vodka.
One thing the Communists had plenty of was her favorite alcohol. She pulled her eyes away and made herself smile at East Germany’s leader.
But Walter Ulbricht wasn’t looking at her. He was motioning impatiently to the blonde girl. “My daughter heard you were in Berlin, Fraulein Jones. And she asked me especially if she could meet you. Beate! Come, please.”
So that’s why Pagan was here. Not just as Thomas’s date, but because Walter Ulbricht had a daughter who was a fan. Beate, for that must be her name, clapped her hands together at the sight of Pagan.