Something about the apartment tells him that his father was lonely. He’s not sure what it is, but the apartment seems unsettled and disheartened. His eyes wander around the room. He notices immediately that everything is symmetrical. If there’s a picture hanging to the right of the couch, so too is one on the left side. If there are books in the top right corner of the bookshelf, there are also books in the left corner. Everything has been arranged according to a system, with a careful exactness, like weights designed to create balance—as if anything else would bring chaos. At least he knows now that Peter was a symmetritian. He smiles. Is that a real word? Symmetritian? If not, it exists now.
There’s a conch shell on one of the shelves, a tape recorder on another, and beside that an orange plastic container containing cassette tapes. It’s fastened to a turntable. He spins it slowly around, and forgotten brands from his childhood suddenly spring to mind: BASF, Agfa, Maxell, TDK, and SKC. He’s reminded of the sensation he felt when yet another tape he’d spent hours mixing became a tangled-up mess. He inserts a blue BASF tape into the recorder and presses Play. After a few seconds, the needle in the old-fashioned VU meter starts dancing uncertainly up and down to the music. Holding the tape cover in his hands, he sits down in the narrow leather couch beside the bookshelf.
Today I passed you on the street
And my heart fell at your feet
I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you
It’s a woman’s voice, the dusty sound of the past. The band plays proudly behind her, keeping to the background with a gentleman’s discretion. A shabby tape head makes her sound like she has a lisp. The voice is untarnished, beautiful, and brutal. It is filled with longing, begging to be held, to be consoled, taken care of, and loved.
Somebody else stood by your side
And she looked so satisfied
I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you
A picture from the past came, slowly stealing . . .
He looks at the photograph, and suddenly he sees his own reflection in the shiny glass. For the first time ever, they make eye contact, he and his father, and he notes the line that connects them. The bond between them is visible, and this scares him. His childhood notions of Peter come alive, and he recognizes their meaning. His longing is intense. Had it not been for his murder, Andreas never would’ve entered this apartment; had it not been for his murderer, they never would’ve gotten so close. Someone had wanted his father to die, and that is an impressive decision, actually. To choose to kill. To choose to end another person’s life. To do something so definitive, becoming a murderer in order to exterminate another person. It occurs to him that his father’s murderer is somewhere in the city, a man or woman for whom life would be better if Peter no longer existed.
3
PETER
East Berlin, May 1975
The school was north of Berlin, in a forested area dotted by small blue lakes. From the air, the buildings resembled letters, an alphabet stretching across the landscape, as if the architect had wished to spell something in stone, and the message was clear; the ideology was spectacular, the surroundings pompous. The complex’s size was a testament to progress and greatness, and this was exactly what the students carried within them. They were part of a movement, a communist community of youth leagues that extended across latitudes and longitudes. They were part of a global political party.
Peter could see the fresh, green forest. It made its own particular crackling noise whenever a gust of wind caused the treetops to waver. A bird landed in the closest tree, some kind of sparrow, he guessed, and suddenly it annoyed him that he was unable to name other birds. This was the result of growing up in the city, where only sparrows, doves, and blackbirds had the courage to nest so far from their natural surroundings.
He now heard, beneath the window, the sound of one of the international groups on their way back from class. Totaling some five hundred students, they were divided into national and international classes, all of them facing ten months of training in communism’s four key subjects: Marxist-Leninist philosophy, political economy, scientific communism, and the history of the international worker and youth movements.
There was an informant in each class reporting to the Ministry for State Security, which is how it kept its eyes and ears on everything that happened at the school. Peter was the informant in his class. He enjoyed the assignment, devising charts and systems for every type of information, developing tiny symbols and categories that described the monitored subjects and their habits down to the minutest detail. The students were unaware of his role, though Peter could tell who, like him, quietly noted the goings-on of others. Not by the clothing they wore or their body language, but by their eyes, which were always observing, inquisitive, and appraising; when their gazes met, they would nod at one another briefly and approvingly, like a secret handshake.
Every other week, Peter met with a commanding officer, Captain Meinke, in the nearby city of Bernau. The meetings always took place in the first-floor apartment of a widow who had consented to help the state. Shrouded in the scent of fresh-baked pastries and ground coffee, she would leave the apartment to feed the birds in the park so the two men could talk in peace.
“Fine and precise work, comrade Körber,” Meinke always concluded, once Peter had presented yet another transcribed report.
He and his fellow students had spent more than eight months at Jugendhochschule Wilhelm Pieck. In a few months he was to begin working at the Ministry for State Security’s Department XX/5. He would probably start, as was customary, by performing background checks on people. He had mixed feelings whenever he thought that his education would soon be over. Of course he looked forward to starting in one of the department’s regional offices, but that meant he would never see Elisabeth again. Perhaps that was for the best. He needed to concentrate on the assignment, and thoughts of her distracted him. He always pictured her in her white bikini, her skin glistening from the lake water. Although he occasionally imagined her without her bikini, his fantasies would dissolve as soon as they began to ignite sparks. Only vulgar men had such thoughts about women.
Sometimes he tried to convince himself that he wasn’t in love but that it was just a passing fancy or simple desire. They’d only spoken a few times, after all, but on the day she accidentally touched his arm, all doubt had vanished. One evening one of the Norwegian girls tried to kiss him in the café. Honored by her interest, he had vacillated a moment, but she wasn’t Elisabeth, so he politely pushed her away. She’d fallen off her chair, and her soft, drunken body sprawled on the floor in a stupor.
Florian lay on the bed, his even breathing filling the room. For as long as Peter could remember, Florian had had the enviable ability to sleep through even the most impossible conditions, and today was no different. Peter was glad that Florian was at the school. He too was from a good family comprised of party members. He and Florian had grown up in the same apartment block in the Friedrichshain neighborhood. Together they had counted the bullet holes in the walls; they had gone to Kosmos and Kino International to watch the latest films from DEFA, the state-owned film studio; they’d gone to the flea market in front of the Treptower Park monument; and they’d biked to Friedrichsfelde to hand-feed the animals in Tierpark Berlin. They had worn the blue scarves as Youth Pioneers, red scarves as Thälmann Pioneers, and the blue shirts as Free German Youth. Now they were twenty-three. Although the mustache was new, Florian was otherwise still the same.
“There’s a good head on that boy,” Peter’s teachers had always said about him. They’d said the same thing in high school, and that’s how the officers had described him, too—except boy had been replaced with young man. He proudly and dutifully carried out every assignment he was given in the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment. He was a guard at the party members’ residences in Wandlitz and an honor guard at the gravesite when the country’s former head of state, Walter Ulbricht, was laid to rest at the central cemetery in Friedri
chsfelde.
Peter still recalled how he had felt when he was accepted into the guard regiment. He had originally planned to continue his studies after completing high school, probably at Humboldt University, but this offer wasn’t something to pass up. When Peter was accepted into the guard unit, he knew his parents would be proud. Only the best young men from fine families were offered a place in it, so this offer meant that his family was elite. Though his father had made little of the news, tears of joy rolled down his mother’s cheeks when he had informed them of his acceptance.
Georg Körber was a good worker, loyal party man, former medal-winning track cyclist, and now treasurer in the bicycle club.
On the day Peter was accepted, Georg had sat disinterestedly, as always, at the end of the dinner table, hunched over in that bicyclist sort of way, as if his vertebrae had become stuck in that particular position. Since the distance between the plate and his mouth was short, his posture didn’t appear to hinder him. Georg Körber was like a barren island, lonely and remote, a man with a compacted will. His voice was already thick with alcohol; he must have started drinking earlier in the day because he’d already reached the point that his wife no longer looked at him. All she saw was his training uniform spilling across the chair, and when she spoke to him, she did so without letting her gaze wander too close to him, in the same way that Peter regarded the sun, and when her eyes did fall on him, it was to cut him to pieces.
Normally, Peter’s mother was not the kind of woman who defied her husband, but on this day, the patriarch at the end of the table would not get to be in charge. Being accepted into the Guards called for a celebration. Peter heard her rummaging through the bureau in the living room, where she kept the table linens. Porcelain and tablecloths were pulled out, cutlery clinked, and though she said nothing, he could sense her growing frustration by the rising intensity of the noise. She had hidden a good bottle of champagne for a special occasion, like this, but it was no longer there.
Back in the kitchen, the tears of joy had turned into tears of disappointment. She had shot daggers at her husband with her reproachful glare, but he didn’t notice her anger, not until she asked about the champagne.
“Of course I drank it.” He faltered a moment, then got to his feet. Trying to gain control of the situation, he puffed out his chest, but his once-firm midriff spilled out under his belly button. “I’m going to the bike club.”
Peter went to the window and looked down. They came in groups, from Denmark, Norway, Finland, Spain, Greece, South America, Africa, nearly every corner of the globe. Some held lit cigarettes between their fingers, some ran to their rooms to grab swim trunks that were still wet from the day before, some looked around hopefully for someone to fall in love with, and others sighed over a lost love. In order not to be noticed, Peter leaned forward cautiously without dipping his head. He watched for Elisabeth, but Ejner saw him instead. He called up to Peter, inviting him to his birthday celebration that evening in the café. Behind Ejner’s broad back, he spotted her. She glanced up and waved.
From outside the café he heard the sound of voices, a birthday song in Danish. Peter smiled to himself: Danish words weren’t meant to be sung—they were too ungainly. Ejner had tried to teach him a few phrases—rødgrød med fløde—but everyone had laughed. He’d been at the center of their laughter. Though he knew it was all meant in good fun, he still had an unpleasant feeling, but he’d played along, stuttering out the words until the Danes found a new victim for their ugly language.
They had sung another song, straining their voices to the limit, but the Danes didn’t care. They were always loud, a self-assured and gregarious lot. A few of the men had beards, and they smoked a lot and spoke with great enthusiasm no matter the topic. They had names like Torben, Inger, Henrik, and Lisbeth, and they came from cities with names that were simultaneously short and long. Some of the girls were unhappy about the food. After the Christmas and Easter holidays, they returned, dragging shopping bags from home full of liver pâté, cheese, rye bread, and cans of mackerel. Though their coddled hunger dampened their revolutionary zeal, most of the Danes had the right socialist spirit.
He entered the café. Languages swirled around and above the music, with interpreters attempting to merge them into one. It wasn’t just the romance of the revolution in bloom; here, all nationalities melted together in hugs and kisses. The music was loud. The Argentine Ricardo had always been one to spin the records on the gramophone, but he’d returned home to Buenos Aires to start a revolution. Yoel from Havana, a short man with a strong sense of rhythm and with a face that was one broad smile, had taken his place.
As casually as possible, Peter scanned the room. Elisabeth sat at a table with the other Danes, a few of the Cubans, and Ejner. The tall Dane spotted him and raised his hand in greeting, then called out for Peter to join them. Several bottles of champagne stood on the table. The Cubans kept rhythm on their cheeks and thighs, and the girls laughed. Night after night, they conquered the injustices of the world. They discussed the Vietnam War, which was finally over; Angola, which, after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, was in the process of gaining independence; and the upcoming security conference in Helsinki. They spoke of the revolution as if they were planning a party. Tonight was yet another reason for a party, because Ejner was to be celebrated.
Peter sat down, and Ejner patted him on the shoulder. “Hard to believe, twenty-eight years.” He sighed and nodded at Peter, as if to emphasize aging’s slow encroachment in a young man’s life.
“Twenty-three,” Peter said above the music.
Ejner regarded him intently and followed his gaze across the table. “You’re looking at Elisabeth, aren’t you?”
Peter smiled cagily at him. Was Ejner a rival? Ejner was well liked by all, and he was close to Elisabeth.
Ejner seemed to read Peter’s mind. “She’s a pretty girl, but I’m happily married. We’re just friends.” He laughed and toasted with the others, who’d raised their glasses.
Peter liked Ejner, whose enthusiasm for the GDR was infectious. He called it a model country and hoped that Denmark would one day be similar. That’s why he and the others were at the school. Denmark’s future depended on them.
As the hour grew late, the guests began to head home, a few at a time. When the clock struck midnight, Ejner left too, leaving only Peter, Elisabeth, and a few others at the table.
Before Ejner left, he whispered in Peter’s ear. “She’s probably a little drunk, so now’s your chance.” He winked at Peter.
One of the Cubans asked Elisabeth to dance. She said no, but he was persistent and offered her his hand. Behind the gramophone, Yoel’s teeth glowed in the dim light. With a look of resignation, she drained her glass, accepted the outstretched hand, and followed him onto the dance floor. Like many of the other girls, she had learned salsa from the Latin Americans.
Peter watched her as they swayed across the floor. Her hips moved up and down, and her jeans fit snugly to her rear, which shimmied easily to the beat of the music. The last few guests stood up, leaving Peter alone at the table. The Cuban’s hands clung to Elisabeth. Feigning laughter, she shoved his hands away as they tried to sneak into her back pockets. What had been a pleasure only a few moments earlier—the sight of her dancing body, the way her breasts shifted beneath her blouse—had now become the opposite. The Cuban was trying to seduce her, and she would give in to him. Peter had noticed that the girls couldn’t resist the Latin Americans when they—in their halting English, with their jet-black sideburns crawling down their cheeks and their provocative dance moves—swiveled close to them. How could Elisabeth resist? He was tempted to get up and leave. To watch any longer would be masochism.
The Cuban gripped her, trying to hold on tight, but Elisabeth twisted free of his eager hands. He danced around her like a bullfighter as she tried to swat him away. She shoved his chest, and he was forced to step backward in order not to lose his balance. She used the opportunity to get away from h
im and hurried over to Peter. He straightened in his chair.
“You’re Peter, right?” She was out of breath.
He nodded.
There were other empty seats around the table, yet she sat right beside him. “You have to protect me. His hands are everywhere.”
She gestured to the Cuban with a tilt of her head. Then she put her arm through Peter’s and rested her head against his upper arm. He could feel the heat emanating from her. Her hair tickled his cheek when she turned to look at him.
“You’re a little strange, aren’t you?”
How does one answer that? he thought, and waited for her to speak again.
“You’re always just sitting there, watching, but what are you looking at?” She looked directly into his eyes, and then he watched her gaze travel down his body.
He gathered his courage. “You.”
Elisabeth laughed, then picked up a bottle of champagne from the table and handed it to him. He put it to his mouth and held it there for a few moments, without drinking. He never drank alcohol.
Then they talked about the school, about Ejner and the differences between the GDR and Denmark. He let her go on, simply enjoying the sound of her voice. Soon he sensed a restlessness in her talk and in the way she was sitting. Not long after that, she wrapped her arm around his neck, not hard but decisively, and turned his face to hers.
“Shall we go down to the lake?”
Peter nodded slowly. He knew what down to the lake meant. Was that what Elisabeth had meant? She pulled him to his feet. The Cuban approached when he saw them stand. She blew him a kiss and took Peter’s hand.
It was a hot evening, and they followed the little path that ran behind the dormitory. The path was dark, so they stumbled forward. The trees formed a dense, quivering darkness, and the green tree frogs sang in unison somewhere out there. Elisabeth arrived first. The moon reflected on the surface of the water, and the lake was still, but he hardly noticed. All he saw was her and her tight jeans, which tugged her panties down over her buttocks when she began to undress. Her skin glistened dully in the moonlight, and her back curved like a tenderly formed line. When all she wore was her bra, she turned toward him, grinning, and ran out into the lake. Half submerged in water, she tossed her bra onto the bank.
The Wall Between Page 2