Bea keeps talking, but Andreas is no longer listening. He’s busy thinking of what he’s going to say next. He interrupts her.
“I don’t think your mother wanted to tell me what Peter did for a living.” Andreas looks at Bea as if he’d asked a question. Her face glows, and Andreas notices that even when she doesn’t smile, her dimples appear as pronounced, tiny divots in her cheeks.
“Did you ask her?” she says, without looking at him.
“I asked her yesterday.”
“And?” Bea peers over the rim of her cup, which she holds to her mouth with both hands. Her eyes are fastened to his, and he nearly forgets what he wants to know.
“Then you came in the door.” He clears his throat. “Will you tell me?”
He sees how suddenly uneasy she has become on the otherwise comfortable couch. It’s clear that Bea would prefer not to discuss it. No one wants to tell him; it’s as if his father’s job was a disgrace, and it slowly dawns on him what he might discover.
He’s wrong about Bea. She looks directly at him, and there’s something courageous in that gesture. She dares to say what Veronika wished to keep silent.
“Prepare yourself to learn something that you probably don’t want to hear.”
“Okay,” he hurries to say, trying to brace himself.
She drains her coffee cup, then takes a deep breath and holds it a moment. There’s determination in her eyes, and her pupils contract.
“You don’t know what your father did for a living?”
He shakes his head.
“After reunification, Peter worked as a security guard.” She looks down. “Before reunification, he worked for Stasi.”
The truth has been emerging slowly ever since Andreas came to the city, and what he’d feared has now become a reality. Deep down he’d known it. Something in Veronika’s evasive response to his question about what Peter did for a living said it all, and yet the truth still shocks him, still hurts. In Andreas’s childhood fantasies, Peter had been a revolutionary who’d bravely fought the East German state. Instead he’d helped the state that brutally subjugated its own people. He’d been a henchman for a horrific ideology. Andreas has several questions and has had them ever since meeting Veronika, but it’s not the right time. He won’t ask, because he doesn’t want to hear the answers just yet. It’s as if he’s been drained of himself. His entire existence is suddenly cast in doubt. The world that he’d imagined for his father snaps apart when he hears the word Stasi.
Bea studies him. Without even noticing she’s doing it, she bites her nails and awaits his reaction.
He sighs, then shrugs. What can he say? “Jesus, this is all so strange.”
They say nothing for some time. He’s suddenly irritable. His fantasies of his father and himself, which had been strong these past few days, have disintegrated. He hears his stepfather, Thorkild, telling him about Stasi when he was thirteen, and the words ring hollowly in his head as he recalls his emotions back then: a thirteen-year-old boy who got a bellyache worrying about what would happen to his father if he was arrested by Stasi. He couldn’t have imagined that the opposite was true, that Peter himself worked for Stasi. His worldview suddenly flips its axis, and the truth feels almost like a kind of pain. Couldn’t Peter have just been a postman? A factory worker? A bookkeeper? Bea shouldn’t have told him. He didn’t need to know. She should have shielded him from the truth.
He stands abruptly and grabs the funeral director’s brochure off the dining table. “Let’s get this over with.” He tries to sound determined, but it doesn’t come out that way.
Bea clarifies all the words in the brochure that he doesn’t understand. His German is good, one might call it sensible—if language could be described that way—but things go faster with her help, and right now he wants to be quick about it.
He feels frustrated. “Burial or cremation?”
“Your father didn’t believe in anything. Well, except for the State, once.” She tries to make it sound like a joke.
Andreas shoots her a slightly irritated look. “So, burial.” He makes a sloppy X in the box.
Up until a few minutes ago, he’d wished to learn everything he could about Peter—to research his life, leave no stone unturned, and gather all the details he could about the man responsible for bringing him into the world. Now it no longer means anything. It doesn’t matter. Peter worked for Stasi, and he needs to be laid to rest as quickly as possible so Andreas can return to Copenhagen. It’s all been a misunderstanding, Veronika, Bea—all of it. Peter’s death has whacked Andreas’s life off-kilter, and now he must go home to restore his equilibrium, but there is no balance, not here and not at home.
As they complete the form, Andreas grows increasingly angry. His disappointment is vast and turns to frustration, which he now takes out on Bea. He’d like to stop himself, but he can’t control it. It’s so unlike him; he doesn’t act like this normally. Suddenly everything has been flipped on its head.
“I’ve got to admit that I’m getting a little annoyed with you,” she says suddenly and loudly. “You can’t judge Peter if you didn’t know him. How can you? And how can you judge us for liking Peter?”
He’s so surprised at her outburst that he’s left speechless. Neither of them says a word. He’s hurt. Something else too, something larger, something worse. He feels powerless. All his dreams of his father have been crushed, ruined, obliterated. Before today he could imagine his father to be anyone at all, but no longer, and there’s a finality to that realization.
“I think you should go.”
She laughs hesitantly. “Do you mean that?”
He doesn’t look at her directly, but senses her gaze on him. The moment lasts too long and transforms into something else, something unrecognizable. His silence is his answer.
She stands up and says softly, “Okay.”
He hears her grab the crash helmet from the hook.
10
PETER
East Berlin, July 1976
Elisabeth frequently appeared unannounced in his thoughts, as did Andreas, but his thoughts about the child were vague. Since he couldn’t imagine himself as a father, he pictured Elisabeth with the little one instead. She’s nursing the child clutching at her breast, who is as aromatic as a newly washed article of clothing. Once he received her letter, he saw pregnant women everywhere: with prams or scabby-kneed boys or walking hand in hand with pigtailed girls. He hadn’t ever noticed them before, but now it was as if every female in Berlin were pregnant.
He started recalling his childhood. As a child, Peter had been taught to believe in a society in which everyone was equal. The family history didn’t begin until 1949; his parents never discussed anything that happened before that time. It was like West Berlin on the East German map: a black stain, nonexistent. All that mattered was the future.
In his youth, his father, Georg, had been a tremendous cyclist who’d won medals for the GDR. Peter had spent hours in cold velodromes waiting for his father with his sister, Veronika. He’d never taken them to a horse race in Hoppegarten, a football match, or the track-and-field stadium. For Georg, life was all about cycling: man’s struggle to propel the bike forward in a race against time or his opponents. Before the children were born, cycling had brought him to tracks in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, and he had always returned home with medals around his neck. Later, he became a sportsman without a sport. He still wore the bike club’s blue training suit as if always about to head off to a race; it had been custom made for his body, but had since grown too tight. Peter recalled how the boys in the street would laugh at his father each morning when he rode off to the factory, his racing bike groaning under him. Whenever the bike tires struck a pothole, his entire body would heave above the creaking bike frame, and his belly would touch the crossbar as he stretched toward the handlebars. The bike was designed to travel at high speeds, but not with Georg Körber in the saddle. On the day his father sold his bike, Peter an
d the bike were both relieved, but even without his bike, Georg visited the club every single day.
Peter recalled when the Wall was built. Back then it was all very strange, but he’d grown used to it after a while, and it had become just another building like all the others. It was constructed in the middle of the night. On August 13, 1961, at 2:00 a.m., it had sliced the city right down the middle. The city was already been divided, but that night it was torn irrevocably in half. Nine-year-old Peter and his family lived a few miles from the border with West Berlin, and they’d been startled awake by the noise. His father had turned on Radio GDR 1. Music played quietly until the press statement was read aloud. Gazing out the apartment’s windows, they could see that the broadcaster was telling the truth: trucks, tractors, cranes, and troops were rolling through Friedrichshain, and Russian T-34 tanks were a menacing presence at all the main thoroughfares. Drum after drum of barbed wire fence was emptied, and by the time the sun set the following day, the border had been secured, sewn shut like stiches used in an operation. Almost every crossing between the two halves of the city had been closed; 192 streets and roads were sealed off and train lines and telephone lines cut right down the middle. West Berlin was locked in, or rather, locked out.
Georg had welcomed the Wall. He’d been furious when the well-educated fled in droves from the country that had provided them with their education. The Wall, he said, would create stability in the country and secure the future.
Eleven days later Günter Litfin was shot while trying to swim across the border in Humboldt Harbor. Some officers from the transport police who were responsible for the train stations and railways had discovered the twenty-four-year old Litfin in the water, and they’d killed the young man by firing a bullet into his neck. One of the girls at Peter’s school was Litfin’s cousin, but she hadn’t heard the news. A boy knew the story from Western media, and when he told her, she’d started sobbing. The girl was allowed to go home, and the teacher reported to State Security that the boy’s parents watched Western TV.
Back then, Peter had felt bad for the girl, but now he saw it differently. Maybe children are softer and more lenient? After Litfin, others, such as Peter Fechter, Heinz Sokolowski, and most recently Herbert Kiebler—all men who held twisted views of life in GDR—had, in a fit of insanity, overcome their fear of death to try to reach West Berlin. Some were secretly hailed as heroes, which only people who didn’t know any better would do.
Department XX was assigned to fight these types of people. The department was divided into several subdepartments. Department 5, to which Peter was assigned, monitored political dissenters, underground groups, and other possible dissidents; another department kept watch on the church, one watched Free German Youth and other youth organizations, and one scrutinized media and cultural life. Many had their own specialties. Some people questioned the methods the departments used, but Peter didn’t see anything wrong with them. The formula was in fact very simple: all people would commit some kind of crime at some point in their lives, and it was the department’s job to help them. It was up to him to persuade those who didn’t want help that they needed it, and those he couldn’t persuade had to be gotten rid of, because they would hinder the progress of the state. Luckily, many wanted the project to succeed.
State Security used a number of informants, and the state’s job was easier when the broader population wanted to assist them. Some offered their apartments for secret meetings, some reported on their neighbors and colleagues, and others were active in infiltrating enemy circles. In every shop, factory, apartment building—even in the military and in every field of study—there were watchful eyes and ears. All informants provided small or large bits of information, and when they were added together, the bits formed a whole that portrayed an image of the enemy.
On the table in front of Peter lay yet another operative investigation. Service location: Berlin. Service unit: XX/5, Operative Investigation, Reg. nr. XX 1436/76. He opened the file. The purpose of an investigation was to confirm or remove suspicion from a person regarding activity harmful to the state. If such activity was confirmed, an operation—that is, an active investigation—was set in motion. It was very simple: One checked to learn of any harmful intentions, and then one investigated in order to prove those harmful intentions. If everyone followed the rules, his role was superfluous, but his job was necessary. That the department continued to grow was proof enough of that for Peter.
In the file was a black-and-white photograph of a well-dressed man. His facial skin was so smooth that it appeared nearly polished. His hair was cut short and precisely. Only his nose marred his otherwise attractive face; it was cracked down the middle as if made of two disparate parts or as if the man were a former boxer, but he wasn’t—because if that were the case, it would be noted in the file. The man was from a good laborer family and was a former sergeant in Free German Youth, a member of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship, a party member, and apparently a loyal supporter, and yet, he and his family had applied for a travel permit. The Declaration of Helsinki in 1975 had raised many people’s expectations, and many had submitted similar applications. Did they really believe that a better life awaited them in the West? Why did it seem so alluring? Was it true that one only desired what one could not have? Naturally, the application had been rejected, and his attempt to flee—even if it had been legal—would have consequences. First he would be dismissed from the municipal office where he worked, and then his wife would be dismissed from her job. The couple’s willingness to cooperate with the state would determine what happened after that.
This kind of assignment excited him. There was something intoxicating about this power, this control, and something honorable about protecting the state. In time he hoped to become an operative outside the office, to get assignments out in the city and use the technological equipment his colleagues talked about: video surveillance, listening devices, invisible ink, and smell tests. He only needed to be patient. Sonnenberger trusted him, and if he continued to be so meticulous with his assignments, another promotion would surely follow.
In the evenings, when he left work and returned to the apartment in Lichtenberg, he often sat alone at the table and ate. State Security men in other apartments on the street would be seated at their own supper tables, some with wives, some with children. He had a child himself, Andreas, and yet he sat there alone. He tried to suppress the thought. What good was it to have a son if he could never see him? It was best not to think of him.
Peter and Martina were meeting Veronika and her new boyfriend, Wolfgang, at Kino International tonight. He felt a growing irritation as he walked over to the cinema. Until she’d met Wolfgang, Veronika had always been punctual, but now she and Wolfgang were always late. That’s not how Peter and Veronika had been raised.
Martina was already waiting at the entrance. He watched her from a distance. He liked to observe her while she waited for him. This tension, followed by a thrill that could be released only by him, made him feel loved. She glowed in the summer’s evening light. Her short, slightly boyish hair was tousled along the sides and pulled back in a little pigtail. She wore a turtleneck underneath red overalls, and her suspenders were pressed tightly against her breasts. He let her wait a bit. She watched for him patiently. He enjoyed this moment, and then he enjoyed seeing her light up when he finally went to her. She kissed his earlobe, embarrassing him.
“Not here.”
They waited in the wood-paneled lobby, where they had a view of Café Moscow across the street through the large glass façade. The theater was impressive—with lavish décor, an enormous hall, and floor-to-ceiling wood paneling—but he couldn’t enjoy the architecture tonight, because Veronika and Wolfgang were late. Peter had bought four tickets to Nelken in Aspik. They could hear the film and the music starting up in the theater. The film would begin any minute, and they would miss it.
He looked at his watch for the third or fourth time. At least he could enjoy the placeme
nt of the lamps on the ceiling. As a child he’d discovered that he liked finding patterns in things. Disorder made him irritable. Symmetry created harmony, just like his own name. His first and last name had the same number of letters. First name, pause, breath, last name. A symmetrical perfection.
When they finally arrived, Peter glared at his sister, but Martina laid a calming hand on his forearm. Veronika shrugged as if the delay meant nothing, and the two women greeted each other warmly. Wolfgang, who still had crumbs in his beard following dinner, shook Peter’s hand and patted his pockets.
“I don’t have my wallet,” he said, a hint of an apology in his voice. “Can I pay you back?”
How could Wolfgang invite Veronika to the movies without bringing any money? Peter could say no. He could say that he wouldn’t pay for them. The volume increased in the theater.
Peter patted his shoulder. “Of course.”
11
ANDREAS
Berlin, October 2006
The cemetery is a tunnel of green and gold. It resembles Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen except the signs are in German and there’s a botanical garden for the deceased. The gardener himself is buried there, and no one has assumed his duties. The graves and paths are covered with a thick layer of fiery maple leaves, as if the autumn wants to call attention to itself. Everything is untended in a lush and pleasant way. There are no tailored suits or Hermès ties in this graveyard; it’s a place where it’s okay to leave your shirt untucked or let your shoes go unpolished.
Andreas goes by himself, and it feels wrong. He and Bea haven’t spoken since he asked her to leave. The chapel is empty except for the rows of chairs and a palm tree that’s taller than he is. The bark is ribbed, and its leaves are too green. The tree is too fresh for this place and is jarring next to the dull coffin. He chose the cheapest casket, and now he regrets that. A shiny black box would have put the palm tree in its place, but instead this bland wooden coffin looks like a form of defeat, but isn’t death always defeat? A few clay pellets have fallen out of the flowerpot and now lie on the floor in their own brown dust. A wooden cross hangs on the far wall, illuminated from within. The rest of the room seems clinical, like a dentist’s office waiting room, just without the racks full of old magazines.
The Wall Between Page 7