The Wall Between

by Jesper Bugge Kold

  “Let me see if I understand this correctly, comrade Körber. You’ve spent the last year performing background checks?”

  Sonnenberger noted his response. Over the course of their conversation, he had referred to Peter’s time in the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment and his studies at Jugendhochschule Wilhelm Pieck, proof that the major knew everything about him even before this meeting.

  Uwe Sonnenberger stood, and Peter noticed that his body wasn’t as large as it seemed while seated. He squeezed Peter’s hand across the desk. “Congratulations on your appointment and your promotion, Sergeant Körber. Welcome to the operations department.”

  Afterward the major gave a brief, practiced speech about how State Security was the party’s sword and shield. It was their job to know everything, and nothing in the country was allowed to happen without their knowledge. That was the only way they could maintain peace. Since the state’s enemies were everywhere, they had to be everywhere, too. Fragments, complete sentences, and clauses were taken whole cloth from the speech Lieutenant Hufnagl had made when Peter was hired at one of the regional offices under Department XX/5 already a year ago now. As was often the case with new hires, the assignments involved performing background checks on potential informants. Candidates were always thoroughly screened before State Security made contact. The recon phase could take six to nine months, and no stone was left unturned.

  First they collected hard data, like school papers, work papers, and statements from employers and party membership, as well as documents pertaining to possible run-ins with the authorities and criminal records. Then came the soft data: personality, habits, opinions, and sexual behavior. Family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors were investigated; the regional offices’ archives were teeming with such reports, and Peter’s job was to weed out the unfit and ensure that only the best were chosen.

  A fatherly note suddenly resounded in the major’s voice. “And what about the apartment we’ve found you here in Lichtenberg? Have you settled in?” Sonnenberger himself lived in one of the large apartments there with his wife and two children.

  “Yes, thank you, comrade Sonnenberger.” Peter opened the door and was on his way out of the office.

  “Just a moment, comrade Körber.” The major put on his glasses, which dangled from his neck on a thin nylon string. Now they rested on the end of his nose, making him look old. Peter estimated him to be around fifteen years older than himself, but his glasses extended that age gap. Behind his glasses, his eyes were insistent without being pushy; the major didn’t seem like a man who ever expressed an ill-considered thought as he spoke in his slow and straightforward Thuringian dialect. The major pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, shifting his hair aside.

  “This department cares about one thing: results. If you can deliver, then you are welcome here, if not . . .” He aimed his index finger at the door in a gesture that was difficult to misinterpret. As if he suddenly regretted the uncompromising implication of the sentence, he changed his tone. “You’ll no doubt prove a valuable man for us.”

  Peter felt exhilarated as he walked through the open steel gate with surveillance cameras that captured everything, then past the sentry box that made it clear that all the blocks of concrete within were the headquarters of the Ministry for State Security and not an enormous residential neighborhood.

  On Frankfurter Allee, following the spring thaw, summer had settled over the city, and the heat hung in the streets like the exhaust fumes from the East German–made Trabants. The asphalt hummed, and car tires clung to the pavement, making a kind of compressed sound. On the sidewalk, two siblings stumbled under the weight of the schoolbags strapped tightly to their backs. The heavy books tugged them backward, while their short legs—barely visible over their knee-high socks—pulled them toward home. The younger of the two boys could hardly have been more than six, but he slogged on admirably—he was determined. This little boy with scars on his knees was the embodiment of the worker and the peasant state; stubborn and dutiful, he was the very personification of the country. Peter was watching a reflection of himself as a child. The boy had earned his upcoming summer vacation and ice cream cones from the booths in Kulturpark Plänterwald.

  Peter felt a sudden urge to walk, down the street, not toward home but downtown. First he would go through Lichtenberg and, afterward, through the neighborhood of Friedrichshain. At Frankfurter Tor, where the towers looked like observatories, the street turned into Karl Marx-Allee. Up until the June 17 uprising in 1953, it was called Stalinallee, but Joseph Stalin had been unable to witness his tanks brutally beating back the worker’s rebellion because the general secretary had died in March of that year. The street was peaceful now, only filling with the sound of boots, canons, tanks, and the noxious odor of oil during the annual parades on May 1.

  The striking workers of 1953 were long forgotten, but their work—the enormous, Soviet-inspired apartment blocks with their shiny slabs and Meissen porcelain—would stand forever. Every one of the city’s residents wanted to live in one of the high-ceilinged apartments behind the broad window frames. The pompous buildings embraced a green circle with a fountain, which lay untouched, like a neglected construction site. Extravagant in both size and stature, the splendid buildings filled his chest with pride.

  A queue had formed for the afternoon matinee in front of the boxlike Kino International; on the other side of the boulevard, Café Muskau was peddling everything from love to modern dance to artwork and coveted Russian black-market goods. The squat Kongresshalle made the Haus des Lehrers seem erect and dignified on its columns behind Alexanderplatz. An evidently reunited couple near the Worldtime Clock stood wrapped in an embrace. Beyond them, like a Sputnik on a pedestal, the television tower rose high in the air above the plaza. Everyone tilted their heads back to observe the tower with evident pride. It seemed to rise for half a mile, though everyone in the city knew the exact height was 1,197 feet; they all believed the assertion that the tower was taller than anything the capitalist world could manage. The Hotel Stadt Berlin soared up beside it, complementing the slender tower.

  He sat at an empty table beneath an umbrella at Espresso Milchbar and ordered coffee.

  “Sugar?”

  Peter glanced up at the middle-aged waitress, who stood expectantly before him with her hands in the apron’s deep pockets. Her face was slack and her skin mottled by the summer sun.

  “Yes, please.”

  He looked at the coffee she’d set in front of him on the table. A few drops had splashed over the edge and formed a ring on his saucer. He put his nose to the rim of the cup, and the aroma tickled his nostrils. He studied the black-brown surface.

  The waitress returned with a sugar bowl. He nodded politely and put two deliberate teaspoons of sugar into the steaming coffee. He stirred the teaspoon slowly, and it clicked lightly when he laid it on the saucer.

  Comrade Sonnenberger had praised him, saying that he possessed the professional and personal attributes they sought in the operations department. Sonnenberger was especially satisfied with his efforts at Jugendhochschule Wilhelm Pieck, where he’d reported diligently and in detail on his fellow students. Furthermore, the fact that he was lucky enough to recruit Ejner Madsen, a Dane who worked close to the naval station in Korsør and who was on his way up in Denmark’s Communist Party, showed that the department had found the right man. Peter had been selected based on the strength of his qualities, and he had no wish to disappoint his employers.

  Peter had been contacted by a man from the Ministry for State Security several years earlier, back when he served as a group leader in the Free German Youth, the socialist youth movement. The man hadn’t named his employer, naturally, but there was no doubt who it was. Peter was honored—his goal was to work as an informant—and a few days later he signed a letter of intent promising to work for State Security and pledging to keep it secret. During his service in the guard regiment, he’d reported on his soldier comrades, their political stances, pot
ential unhappiness, and the like to a commanding officer in one of the district departments.

  He still recalled a specific occurrence from his time in the Guards. One night they’d been on a training exercise near Gudow, a small city close to the border with West Germany. From within a dense forest, where he lay with Hagemann—one of the regiment’s most respected soldiers—they could watch the roughly half-mile-wide zone that had been cleared to create visibility around the border fence. As part of the exercise, they expected an attack from a company that, on this night, was pretending to be NATO soldiers.

  The two young men had watched a newspaper that the wind had carried toward them; it fluttered around, stopped, then continued its dance. One by one the pages turned, as if someone was riffling through it, right where it hung suspended in the air about six feet above the ground. Captivated by the enchanting sight of the moonlit paper, they had momentarily forgotten their mission. When it blew closer, Hagemann scooped it out of the air and began to read aloud, while Peter shushed him. It was Die Welt, one of Axel Springer’s populist newspapers from the other Germany.

  “Let it go,” Peter had said, but Hagemann folded the newspaper and thrust it under his uniform jacket. At the conclusion of the exercise, he neglected to turn it over to his superior officer, so Peter reported it, of course. Though Hagemann was the regiment’s best sharpshooter and could produce medals and diplomas for all his accomplishments, he was dismissed from the regiment the next day. Peter was amazed that such a capable soldier was unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. If everyone acted so carelessly, all would be chaos.

  Peter did not doubt his own commitment: As a soldier his duty was to eliminate the enemy, and as an informant his duty was the same. If Hagemann read Western newspapers, then he broke the rules, and if people like Peter didn’t report him, how would they maintain control?

  Peter watched as three girls exited the huge Centrum Warenhaus and crossed Alexanderplatz. The tallest looked like the blonde from ABBA. A couple of boys in the whitewashed denim clothes of stiff, East German make leaned against the fountain and crushed cigarette butts under the soles of their sneakers. They shouted at the girls, who drew closer and giggled. The ABBA girl turned her head, calling out to them and whirling her blond hair. They were too far away for Peter to make out what they were saying. The boys laughed and patted each other on the shoulder, evidently pleased with themselves.

  Conversations filled the air beneath the café’s umbrellas: about the weather, about the upstairs neighbor installing a telephone, about trips taken thanks to the trade union’s vacation service. At the neighboring table, two dark-skinned men sat speaking a peculiar language mixed with German phrases, the volume of their conversation expanding beyond the table. One moment words gushed from their lips, but in the next they came in jabbing thrusts, after which they flowed naturally once more until the two men shattered the rhythm again with another series of stammering unnatural sounds. This strange language fascinated him; it pounded like the surf against the beach. He assumed it was Turkish. Turkish men often visited this part of Berlin via Friedrichstrasse Station to get a cheap meal or to buy goods at affordable prices to bring back to Kreuzberg. They came, hoping to find a woman who would give them shelter for a pair of nylon panty hose or a pound of coffee and who might warm them up while they sent money home or reminisced about their family in Turkey. Many languages had descended upon the city from remote areas in recent years. Russians, Poles, and Hungarians had made their marks long ago, but contract workers from Vietnam, Cuba, and distant African countries like Angola and Mozambique had also found their way to the capital.

  Sitting alone at another table was a man in a light-blue Windbreaker. His eyes wandered from table to table, paused occasionally, then continued with the same deliberateness as before. Then stopped. The man pulled a small notebook from his pocket. Peter knew what that meant immediately: a colleague. The man in the Windbreaker wet his pencil’s tip on his tongue and began jotting a note while periodically glancing up to observe the subject of his writing. Peter followed his gaze.

  A man sat on a stairwell. His beard was filthy, his clothing wrinkled, and his shoes mismatched. He seemed agitated and talked loudly to himself. The three giggling girls once again appeared on the plaza. They strolled close to the boys and sat beside the fountain.

  The slovenly man stood and began chasing and kicking the nearby pigeons. He shouted that they were watching him. The birds flew off in unison toward a quieter corner of the plaza.

  Without warning it began to rain. Heavy drops pounded hollowly against the umbrellas. The man turned his face toward the sky and barked something about commanded rainfall and state-controlled weather, saying that even God worked for Stasi. His neck muscles bulged and rainwater rolled down his face. Spittle flew from his lips as he bellowed. Peter shook his head. What if everyone acted like that? What chaos there’d be in the streets.

  The man in the Windbreaker stood as a pair of well-meaning citizens tried to calm the man and pull him away. Just then a Barkas delivery van thundered across the plaza. Those who hadn’t already found shelter from the rain leaped to one side. The van braked to a halt, and the side door shot open with a loud clatter. Two men in civilian clothes hopped out, grabbed the confused man by his arms, and dragged him to the waiting van. Moments later, it disappeared down Alexanderstrasse, water spraying from the tires. The plaza, now nearly empty because of the rain, grew quiet again. The few who remained gazed at the rainbow that had appeared above the buildings, and people nodded at one another with satisfaction once they realized the rainbow was on their side of the wall.

  As quickly as the rain had started, it ceased. Peter breathed the aroma of rain. Summer rain was cleansing, and in a city like Berlin, the air needed to be cleansed now and then. As he drained his coffee cup, he could smell the wet asphalt. Then he started home.

  When he let himself into his apartment in Lichtenberg, the door shoved a letter to the side. He hung his coat on a hook in the entranceway and picked up the letter. When he saw the sender’s name, he swallowed a lump in his throat: Elisabeth Jeppesen.

  6

  ANDREAS

  Berlin, October 2006

  “I hate it out here.” Beatrice walks ahead of Andreas down the stairwell. “Did you take the train?”

  “Yes,” he replies.

  At the front door of the building, she turns to face him. “We can go downtown together.”

  Out on the street, he’s struck once again by the feeling that he’s being squeezed by the endless rows of gray buildings. The air is saturated and lethargic. It’s difficult to breathe being surrounded by so much concrete, and there’s no oxygen coming from the few trees jutting out of the pavement.

  “It’s a dreary place,” he says gloomily.

  She sighs. “There’s no color out here, just life in gray, and I grew up here,” she says wistfully, shifting her chewing gum to the other cheek. Without another word, she points at a playground, which someone in a municipal office had decided to squash between the concrete blocks. There are no children.

  They start toward the station. “Marzahn and Ahrensfelde were once places everyone wanted to live. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? A place reserved for the finest citizens,” she adds in a scornful tone. Then she continues. “Look at my mother. She lived well in the GDR, but she’s not doing so well in Germany, and she still lives in the same apartment.”

  He nods and tries not to make eye contact with a group of young men lounging on a street corner. A ghetto blaster, blaring a Rammstein song, vibrates on the asphalt around them. One of the youths, his face tattooed, whistles at Beatrice while seated on a moped; she ignores him as if such catcalling is a common occurrence.

  “Hard to believe the East Germans actually thought these prefabricated concrete apartments were the future.” She points at all the boxlike concrete blocks. “It’s exactly the opposite here now. The only people who live here now are drunk Russians, Vietnamese, and pe
ople from the Balkans.”

  She adds, “Along with East Germans who don’t have the means to move. Everyone else fled when they could.”

  “You know a lot about the GDR,” Andreas says. He wants to hear more.

  “Maybe it’s how I hold on to my social inheritance.” Her smile forces her cheeks upward.

  “Can’t Veronika move?”

  “She doesn’t want to. For her, Ahrensfelde is still the GDR.” She pauses and looks him in the eye. “Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not like she dreams of returning to the old days. All she wants is for things to be better again.”

  She starts to walk. “That won’t happen out here, but she’s happy as long as she has cigarettes, has coffee in her thermos, and can watch something good on television.”

  A drunken man calls out to them in some Slavic language. Beatrice pretends not to notice and just walks a little faster, as if she’s used to the area’s unpleasantness. Andreas is relieved to reach the station. Beatrice tells him that she visits her mother once a week to buy her groceries: prepackaged meals and cigarettes. Her mother doesn’t walk so well anymore; a janitorial job ruined her knees and hips.

  “Are you doing anything now?” Andreas asks. He doesn’t want to return to the apartment and sit alone among his father’s things.

  “Actually, no,” she says. She responds slowly, as if waiting to hear his suggestion.

  “Want to get a cup of coffee?”

  She hesitates.

  “You’re the only person I know in the city, Beatrice.”

  She laughs. “Don’t call me that. Only my mother calls me Beatrice. Call me Bea.” She smiles broadly.