So Peter returned to the question. “We’d like to get married.”
Although he had never asked Martina, he couldn’t imagine that she would turn him down. Theirs was a quiet love, so quiet that he often questioned whether it really was even love, but whenever he watched her while she slept, all his doubts vanished.
“It would be good for you to settle down with a wife and, who knows, maybe a few rug rats. She’s a good girl.”
Sonnenberger had never met Martina, but Peter knew that they’d checked her. State Security didn’t let any of its employees marry without its approval, and that was what the major had just granted him.
Even in their first meeting, Peter had sensed that Sonnenberger had tremendous respect for him, and he used that now to press for permission to move in with Martina. In Prenzlauer Berg, he argued, he would be close to some of the dissident groups. Opposition to the state was often found among the workers, artists, and students. If he lived in the heart of their world, no one would suspect him, because everyone knew that State Security employees were secluded in their ghettos in Lichtenberg and Hohenschönhausen. Once he had painted the picture of himself as the department’s Trojan horse, Sonnenberger softened.
“We’ve never done this before, but I trust your judgment.”
The decision was, however, not up to Sonnenberger alone. In July he reported that Colonel Kreider had given his approval, and so in September Peter moved in with Martina. As a teacher, Martina was entitled to an apartment; the municipal administration had made the residence available to her the year before, when she was hired at the school in Pankow. The only things harder to obtain than an apartment were travel papers and a car, so she’d been happy.
When Peter moved in, the apartment was modestly furnished, since Martina’s salary didn’t allow for luxury living. One of his privileges as staff of State Security was that he had access to products that were unavailable to other citizens, and thanks to his good salary, Martina could furnish the apartment however she wished. So they outfitted the apartment in a modern style with a laminate shelving system for a Stern TV, a floral-patterned sofa, a Formica coffee table, brown floor lamps, and orange wall-to-wall carpets beneath it all. The portrait of Erich Honecker was hung in the living room on a nail hammered through the thick burlap. In the kitchen, the new coffee machine brewed silently, while Gisela May’s alluring voice emanated from the speakers of the Stern radio. Peter bought them a black Bakelite telephone with a rotary dial, but since their families didn’t have telephones, they didn’t have many people to call.
He noticed right away that Prenzlauer Berg was very different from Lichtenberg. The buildings were Altbau from the Wilhelm period, and the red brickwork was in a state of disrepair. The streets had holes on their knees and cuts on their elbows, and had only been patched in a few places. The electrical unit was overloaded, so if he turned on the stove and the coffee machine at the same time, the fuses blew. Even the people were different. In Lichtenberg people kept their heads up, but here, people shifted their gaze to the sidewalk to avoid making contact with others. Many of them looked exhausted. Then there were the artists, with their unkempt beards and tousled, greasy hair that fell past the collars of their denim jackets.
One evening after work, Peter sat at the dining table, wondering how to begin a report. He bit down on the end of a sharpened pencil and immediately felt tiny slivers in his mouth. He tried to catch them with his tongue. He could barely register Martina’s quiet singing in the kitchen as she cleaned up their dinner dishes.
Peter was supposed to write a comprehensive report about all the residents in his new building, and no detail was too inconsequential. He’d suggested the assignment to Sonnenberger himself, because the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. If every employee wrote up a report on their neighbors, the Ministry would have a great deal of information on people who might someday harm the country. Just as he’d done when he’d given Peter permission to move in with Martina, Sonnenberger had made an exception. Normally he would have informants carry out such an assignment, but Peter had insisted. Since he lived so close to these people, he might as well devote some time to analyzing them. Besides, there were people here who might eventually demand greater scrutiny.
He set to work systematically. He would start with the ground floor and move up through the building. He asked himself questions: Had anyone displayed any suspicious behavior? Had he heard anyone express critical views or in any way speak negatively about the party? Did anyone talk about fleeing to the West? Of course not, because no one talked about that kind of thing beyond the four walls of home. Since he knew them only superficially, he tried to imagine who might dare to conspire against the state. He quickly ruled out all the elderly residents.
Irene and Sven Krause lived on the first floor. They were only in their midfifties, but they acted like old people. Irene always supported Sven’s arm when they went out, and both ambled around with the slightly hunched gait of people getting on in years. On several occasions he’d watched the newspaper boy put the party’s official newspaper, Neues Deutschland, in their mail slot. Irene was always peering vigilantly out the window whenever Peter put the key in the main door, and every time she acted as though it was a coincidence. Whenever she disappeared behind the double curtains, Peter thought she was undoubtedly an informant for State Security.
Mr. and Mrs. Schnellhardt and their irritating dog also lived on the first floor. The little poodle always seemed to be freezing cold, and Mrs. Schnellhardt often carried it in her arms. The couple seemed arrogant, and he didn’t even know their given names since they weren’t etched on the brass doorplate. Despite their attempts to hide their origins, they were simple workers.
Jürgen and Margaret Floh on the third floor also belonged to the group of older residents. They were quiet, working-class people who kept to themselves. He also quickly ruled out Artur Polk on the first floor, a punctual man in his midthirties who left his apartment at the same time every day and returned precisely at quarter past five. Judging by his attire and demeanor, he was a clerk of some kind or perhaps even one of Peter’s colleagues. He carried a brown leather briefcase, and his slender hands didn’t show signs of manual labor. Peter had the impression that Polk had lost his wife, because he wore a wedding band on his ring finger.
It was then that Peter saw that he’d taken the wrong approach. It wasn’t his job to rule out anyone—it was the opposite. His job involved describing these people, their habits and comings and goings in the minutest detail. Then he would leave the rest to the experienced staffers in the evaluation department. If his report was comprehensive, they would be able to determine who required additional attention. He crumpled up his two pages and started over. Once again he began at the bottom and moved up through the building, but this time he imagined himself interrogating every resident in the building.
He began to write again: Bottom floor, first apartment . . . He left nothing out, including everything from the way Franz and Gudrun Colbach left their shoes on their “Welcome” mat to how Gisela Matuschyk’s thick perfume wafted from her door on the third floor every time she had gentleman visitors—which was quite often. Peter took an entire page to describe an encounter he’d had in the stairwell with Gregers Eichner that had convinced him that the man was an alcoholic. As he wrote he imagined Eichner’s two boys in the yard—their pants rolled up to just below their knees, the leather ball wet from splashing in puddles and echoing against the walls—and Irene Krause behind the glass, trying to puncture the ball with her gaze. Luckily, there were good people in the building, and not all of them were Bohemian types, unlike the people in the other blocks in the quarter.
He described an encounter with Greta Riemann-Müller, who lived across the hall from Peter and Martina with her family on the top floor of the building. Greta and Paul had never had children; Paul was married to books, and he’d become one of the country’s most treasured writers. The books he wrote reflected a long and industrious career, and
his works were read far and wide, from Karl Marx-Stadt to Rostock, from Magdeburg to Cottbus. He always seemed distracted, lost in thought, whenever Peter ran into him on the stairs. Greta would speak while Paul usually hummed some refrain or other that Peter didn’t recognize.
One day Peter ran into Greta on the landing, and she told him Paul’s story. The next book had been in the works for a long time, and tears formed in her eyes as she explained how the book would never be finished. Paul had written his last book; he just didn’t know it yet. Every day after his morning coffee, he sat down eagerly at his typewriter. He was practically bursting with ideas, and his rapid-fire typing didn’t ease up until around lunchtime. She would hear him humming in his office, something he only did when he was inspired. What he didn’t realize was that, although his imagination was thrumming with ideas, it was always the same idea. A blood clot in his brain had ruptured his memory, and every day he wrote the same six pages. Although his memory was no longer sharp, this one idea had become stuck, as if stenciled onto his cerebral cortex.
Early on, Greta had tried to show him the pages from the day before, but he was always adamant that they were quite different from his new idea. This new idea was better and more profound, he proclaimed. This pattern had continued every day now for three years.
Then she’d tried to explain to him that he suffered from memory loss. Occasionally, she said, it seemed as if he understood, but by the next day, he’d forgotten again and sat back down at his typewriter, enflamed with an urge to create. She no longer had the heart to try to dissuade him. Paul was happy, and he wrote and wrote.
“If there’s anything I can do . . .” Peter had said, shaken at the notion that a person could lose control over his own memory in such a way.
“No, thank you. You’ve enough to worry about,” Greta said as she let herself into her apartment. Peter heard humming inside.
One of the quarter’s many artists lived on the second floor. Like the Dutch painter with whom he shared a name, Jens Rembrandt was a painter. Peter often encountered him in the stairwell, dragging canvases and an easel, his woolen sweater stained in every color of the rainbow. He rarely shaved, and he wore his scarf in a nonchalant, indifferent way that irritated Peter. A cigarette was constantly in his mouth, like an extension of his lower lip, and it would bob up and down whenever he said hello. He only ever seemed to remove it when it had burned all the way down to the filter.
Peter didn’t like artists, who seemed to feel compelled to complain about the system—some loudly, others in more subtle ways, and those who didn’t speak out protested in their own way by their lack of critique. People like Wolf Biermann with his songs and Christa Wolf with her books were dangerous. Everyone could see that. Rembrandt may be an emerging Biermann, and Peter had the chance to stop him. Although Peter had never spoken to him, he devoted three whole pages to the young painter on the second floor.
Sonnenberger was very satisfied. Valuable material, he said about the report. Although Peter hadn’t spent much time in the building, he’d caught a glimpse into the lives of individual residents and their habits and quirks.
“That’s why you’re in this department,” Sonnenberger said, waving the extensive report.
In August, Veronika and Wolfgang were married. Peter’s father, Georg, had been soused and unpleasant at the wedding, causing Peter to recall an incident before Veronika met her new husband. The family was sitting at the dinner table, and Veronika was crying quietly, having just been dumped by some boyfriend. At that point she was not yet twenty, and she was inconsolable, despite her best attempts to stifle her tears. Though her mother tried to comfort her, Georg had sat at the end of the table, his penetrating eyes revealing his disgust. In his eyes she was a weakling. No one, man or woman, should indulge in such an emotional outburst; tears were only for children. He moistened his lips, sliding his tongue from one side of his mouth to the other, and let loose a torrent of rage that caused his temples to throb. Although he didn’t shout, his voice was sharp, and his tone was clear.
“I might as well just kill myself. Nobody wants me here anyway,” Veronika said, burying her face in her hands. Their mother watched in horror, not because of what she’d said but because she feared Georg’s response. To everyone’s surprise he stood without a word. They heard a clatter and a rustle in the bathroom. Then Georg returned to the kitchen, pausing next to Veronika.
“Here.” He slammed a bottle of pills down hard on the table. “If you want to kill yourself, you’ll have to ride your bike out to the woods, because you’re not doing it here.”
They finished their meal in silence. Not long after that, Veronika met Wolfgang.
14
ANDREAS
Berlin, October 2006
He walks in from the funeral and sees his backpack in the entranceway, packed and ready. He still hasn’t decided whether he’ll take the train home to Copenhagen or fly, and he hasn’t decided whether he should say good-bye to Bea. He feels obligated, and he would like to see her one last time, but that will also make his departure more difficult. He can’t lie to himself: he’s attracted to her.
He walks around the apartment. It’s his now, but he’s unsure what he should do with it. In a way he’s begun to like it, the old-fashioned furniture, the heavy blankets, and the woman’s voice on the cassette tapes. The apartment is steeped in the past, and it belonged to his father. He punches the button on the tape recorder. He takes his father’s conch shell off the shelf and sets it on the couch. As its ocean sounds whisper in his ear, the woman begins to sing.
He puts the conch back on the table. What would he go home to in Copenhagen? Nothingness. A vast, swampy marsh of superficial friendships and trying to score a kiss at a bar on a Friday night while crossing his fingers behind his back in the hopes that more would follow. No one is waiting for him now that he and Lisa have broken things off. She kept the apartment in Absalonsgade when they split up, and he’ll never feel at home in his little one-bedroom apartment. He can’t stand the street noise, the rickety buildings, the people. He knows he’ll never be finished with his thesis and that he has no more ambition, but that seems to be the only thing that people care about—setting goals, fighting, contributing to a community and society. So he plays along; he pretends he’s doing his part, just so he will be left in peace. Everyone asks whether he’ll move on soon, finish his studies, earn his degree, and get a job, but he doesn’t dare tell the truth: hell no!
That answer had been precisely why Lisa had left him. He’d never understood why she loved him and then he gave her a reason not to. When they used to walk together, he’d caught himself wondering whether passersby saw them as a mismatched couple: the beautiful young woman with the sparkling eyes and pouty lips beside the unkempt-looking Bohemian university student. It was hardly a surprise that she’d finally realized she deserved better. Lisa wanted more out of her life, and he could hardly blame her.
Andreas tries to picture Peter. He must have been ambitious. Wasn’t that pretty much a requirement in that kind of job? Andreas knows very little about Stasi or what Peter actually did for them. Maybe he was just a small cog in the wheel, some low-level employee or office mouse? Andreas realizes what he’s doing—judging, evaluating, categorizing—everything that he rejects. He hates it when people measure each other by their jobs, because what does a career actually say about a person? Don’t people only reveal their true selves in private?
Still, he can’t separate the man from his job, and he feels cheated in some vague way. He found his father only to lose him again. Were he to go home now, it would mean excising his entire existence, as if his father were a pernicious tumor that must be removed.
He recalls how people cried at the funeral. In a sense, it makes him happy to know that his father meant something to people. If Bea and Veronika and the others in the chapel that day thought he was worth loving, why can’t Andreas bring himself to do the same? Who was this man, who was both well liked and feared at the same
time? Andreas can remain in the city and try to find out, or he can go home. He feels uncertain and suddenly fearful. He’s standing on the rickety ledge of a decision. Should I stay or should I go? The woman on the tape sings that she’s falling to pieces, and he has the same feeling. How can he reconcile with a father he knows worked for Stasi? If he leaves and thereby rejects his father, he’ll never learn what kind of person Peter really was. On the other hand, if he stays and investigates his life thoroughly, he might discover that Peter had hurt other people, that he had been a bad person in the employ of the state.
But how can he go home without knowing who he was? Doesn’t he owe it to himself to resolve that question or to at least try? The tape player clicks when the tape ends, and he makes his decision.
The restaurant where they’re meeting Grigor Pamjanov is in Karlshorst. When he meets Bea near the station, Andreas notices that she has changed her clothes. As they hug, he absorbs the heat of her embrace. Though she is lanky, there’s a softness to her.
“I’m staying in Berlin.”
“How long?” she asks.
He shrugs. He doesn’t know, but he’ll stay as long as Thorkild continues to loan him money.
They cross a broad street. The slick tracks split the street in half, and the trams resemble yellow moving boxes as they glide past, filled with people using their sleeves to form peepholes on the steamed-up windows. The autumn air sends a cold blast down the street, causing the overhead wires to vibrate. Karlshorst looks like a typical German city, its streets lined with squat houses painted in pastel yellow, green, and blue—all almost too pale to actually be considered colors at all.
As they walk, Andreas tells Bea of the doubts that nearly sent him back to Copenhagen.
“I think I’ll stay a while and research Peter’s life, try to get a better sense of who he was.” He turns to Bea to gauge her reaction before continuing. “I’m hoping that you and your mom would be willing to help me. I might even try to talk Grigor Pamjanov some more.”
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