The Wall Between

by Jesper Bugge Kold

  Now he sat in a cover apartment in Weissensee, across from an unstable citizen by the name of Gisela Rahn. Mrs. Rahn had been careless, and her affair with a local baker had come to the department’s attention by way of an informant. In the beginning she had refused to cooperate, but one sentence had brought the gravity of the situation home to her: what if you lose your job at the hair salon? That same day, she signed a letter of intent, and she’d been a valuable informant ever since.

  Mrs. Rahn presented a detailed report on a case that immediately aroused Peter’s interest. A young woman by the name of Nina Lachner worked in same hair salon as Mrs. Rahn, and her husband, Stefan, often picked her up. The three of them often had a cup of coffee in the backroom after work, and Stefan had made known his unambiguous views about the State. Mrs. Rahn was a friend of the family, which explained why Stefan wasn’t afraid to talk. The workers were the foundation of the country; they were regarded as heroes, and not even God or film stars or rock musicians could match their status, but Stefan had miscalculated, and everything he said had reached State Security’s ears. Then Stefan had suddenly gone quiet. The informant at the chemical factory where he worked had nothing to report for several weeks, either. Another informant, Stefan’s friend, Ulf Kramer, explained that Stefan spent all his time with his brother, Alexander, and that they no longer wished to be around him.

  One day when there were no customers in the salon, Nina had confided in Gisela Rahn. Although she hadn’t said it directly, the message was clear: Stefan wanted to reach the other side, and she had made it obvious that she’d follow her husband wherever he went.

  Peter found all this suspicious, and, in an effort to make sense of what was behind the silence, he decided to begin monitoring Stefan Lachner himself. He wanted to know who the man was, what he looked like, and how he acted. He attempted to think like a dissident. If he could understand them, if he could understand their driving force and the rationality behind their actions, then he would be better at his job, but no matter how hard he strove to understand them, he couldn’t do it. How could they express views about something they didn’t understand? They didn’t know anything about political correlations or what made a country tick, and yet they somehow formed opinions—the opinions of the ignorant—and defied those who actually understood. Even Peter, who had additional insight based on the strength of his education, didn’t feel qualified to have any opinion on the subject. One had to trust those who possessed the knowledge.

  From another informant in the building where they lived, Peter knew that Stefan’s brother, Alexander Lachner, came and went from the couple’s apartment at odd hours of the day. When he pieced all the tiny scraps of information the informants had gathered together, it was clear that it was time to act. Sonnenberger agreed.

  A super in the building produced a key to the couple’s apartment. They had arranged for Nina to win a lottery among the city’s hairdressers. The prize: an all-expense paid weekend trip to Wernigerode. While the couple was away, microphones were installed throughout the apartment. They meticulously pried the covers from electrical outlets and affixed microphones within. Then they screwed the panels back in place once the technical units had completed their work. The entire operation took less than an hour, and that same day Peter paid Gisela Rahn fifty marks for a job well done.

  16

  ANDREAS

  Berlin, November 2006

  Andreas thinks of Peter so much that he begins to dream about him, with lifelike scenes of a father and a son. In them the city doesn’t appear like it does now; a sepia film covers it, like a filter from the past. They play soccer on a field, feed swans beside a lake, and bike along a canal. Peter doesn’t look like he does in the photos: he’s the man from Andreas’s childhood fantasies. With his masculine jaw, kind eyes, and upper lip that tugs into his mustache whenever he smiles, he shares a striking resemblance to Tom Selleck. Other people appear in his dreams as well. He’s certain that he knows them, but they have no faces.

  Andreas and Bea sit in her apartment in Kreuzberg. She’s told him all about the women in Peter’s life, the trips she’d taken with Veronika and Peter, and the people Peter knew. Not until she mentions her own father does he dare to ask about him.

  “Where is your father?” Andreas instantly regrets his question. It came out wrong, intrusive and thoughtless. Maybe it’s not something she wishes to discuss—maybe it’s even painful. Why did he ask? Does he have the right to know? How can he take it back? He can’t, but perhaps he can clarify. “I mean . . .” He doesn’t know what to say. “Do you have a father?”

  “I have a father. Wolfgang.” She pauses. “But I’ve never met him.”

  As she begins telling him about Wolfgang, he hears the pride in her voice. When she was little, she didn’t know anything about him, just that he’d fled to the West in 1980, the year she was born. Veronika never mentioned him, and Bea didn’t understand why, but as soon as the Wall fell, she grew more courageous and asked about him. All Veronika said was that he’d fled to the West and was now dead to them. Then she would follow that up with a strong embrace, which Bea always thought lasted unnecessarily long. Veronika squeezed the urge to ask more questions out of her, until her questions were gone. Gone too were the images of Wolfgang in their photo albums, along with every trace that he’d ever lived in the apartment.

  “How did he escape?” Andreas asks.

  “No one knows.”

  “Over the Wall?”

  “He must have. Or through one of the border crossings.” Holding her hands up to her mouth like a funnel, she whispers, “And I think Peter helped him.”

  “You’re kidding. That’s crazy.”

  The tiny dimples on her cheeks become visible.

  They sit in silence. Why has Andreas never met his father? Why has Bea never met hers? What kind of forces are in conflict within them? Why are blood relations so important? He notices her smiling dreamily. She’s thinking of him now, no doubt, the father she has never met. Right now she and her father are united in her thoughts, just as he’d often been with Peter during his childhood. Ever since the Wall fell, Andreas has dreamed that Peter would turn up one day at their garden gate. Parked on the street would be a Mercedes or some other car indicating how well he’d done for himself following reunification. The shiny metal would gleam in the sunlight, and so too would his smile beneath his mustache. He’d missed his son. From opposite ends of the sidewalk, they would run toward each other and fall into a never-ending embrace.

  “I wasn’t even born when he fled. Mom was pregnant with me,” Bea says, making it clear that she wants to discuss Wolfgang with him.

  “Did he know she was pregnant?”

  “That’s what she says.” Bea smiles. “But he writes to me.”

  Bea has thought about him quite a bit. What he looks like, what he does for a living, whether he’s married, whether she has any half brothers or half sisters somewhere in Germany. Every now and then, she gets a postcard from him, one to two each year, never sent from home but when he’s on trips, and never on birthdays.

  She fetches a box. The words “From Dad” are written on the lid. She opens it and shows him a postcard. Venice is divided into small squares. Andreas recognizes the Campanile di San Marco, the Bridge of Sighs, Piazza San Marco, Rialto Bridge, and a gondolier in a red-and-white striped shirt, then recalls how a gondolier once put his straw hat on Andreas’s head. His name was Giuseppe, Luigi, or Aldo, and Thorkild snapped photographs of him. That’s what Andreas remembers, the photos. Not the trip, not the Hessian hills, getting carsick, or watching the doves on Piazza San Marco. It was the photographs.

  “When I was growing up, people gave my mother funny looks because he had escaped. Just about everyone considered those who fled to be cowards. Had it not been for Peter, things would have been much worse for her. He protected her from the worst of it. They had a strong bond.” She pauses as if she this is the first time she’s ever considered this fact. “Maybe Georg, the
ir father, brought them closer during their childhood. He was tyrannical.” She seems surprised at her own observation about her grandfather. More than a minute passes before she continues.

  “I don’t have my father’s address or anything. I know his name, and I’ve researched all the central registers, but I doubt that he goes by Wolfgang Dewald anymore. It’s like he doesn’t want me to find him, which I don’t understand. He always writes how much he loves me. Always writes that we’ll meet someday.”

  Andreas doesn’t know what to say. When she talks about Wolfgang, she sounds like a little girl. He wonders what Wolfgang gets out of writing her. It seems a pathetic attempt to win her sympathy, and it doesn’t seem to do Bea much good. He seems to be using her to relieve his own guilt for having abandoned his family.

  Andreas nods, now seeing Peter in a different light. If he assisted Wolfgang in his escape, then he can’t be a horrible person, and he clearly looked after Veronika and Bea, taking them on vacations and such. At the realization that Peter sacrificed himself for his sister’s family and put himself in danger to aid his brother-in-law, Andreas feels the knot in his belly slowly unraveling.

  Andreas is captivated as Bea tells him more about the GDR. “Every aspect of life was controlled and marked by regulations, but if you learned how to wriggle in and out of the system, things went more smoothly. Paperwork simply needed the right signatures.” She paused, then continued. “In their spare time, people were interested in only three things: soccer, fishing, and photography. The East Germans were like the Japanese back then; they took photos of everything. Nothing remained undocumented, and every one of them was produced on yellowish-white ORWO paper.” Her voice sounds different when she talks about the country that was. It’s not longing, but different, heavier and more hopeless.

  In her telling, the country comes alive, and he tries to imagine Peter. Rule-bound, correct, dutiful—quite the opposite of Andreas himself, but Peter lived in another time, another country, another culture. The entire mindset behind Stasi is incomprehensible to him. Stasi was built entirely on manipulation and fear, with a complete disregard for human rights. The people were repressed by a state that claimed to be protecting those very same people. Despite his best efforts, he still can’t comprehend how Peter could have served as a henchman in such a repressive system.

  Bea knows next to nothing about Peter’s days at Stasi. “Stasi was a spiderweb of secrets. Even those on staff didn’t know what their colleagues in other departments were doing. All I know is that Peter worked quite a bit, but I have no idea what he did all day.” She stopped, as though trying to remember Peter back in those days. “Later, after the Wall fell, he worked for a security company called Sonnenberger Security. After work, as far as I know, he went to the bar, and then he went home to bed.”

  As Bea talks, they begin to organize the pieces of Peter’s life, and Andreas can create a complete picture of who his father was. As the stories come out, they make lists of people they can speak to, people who might know something about Peter. They jot down who was at the funeral, figuring that anyone who attended must have known him.

  They visit Veronika in her grim neighborhood, but she acts as if she suddenly knows nothing. Maybe it’s grief, or maybe she’s afraid that Andreas and Bea will learn something that will destroy her memories. Veronika is always guarded around Andreas, he can tell, and every time he asks about Peter, she dodges him with her standard response: “Peter never told me.”

  At one point Andreas asks Bea about the woman on the tapes, but she doesn’t know anything about them. They ask Veronika about them.

  “Look at the handwriting here on the case,” Andreas tells her. “It’s not a man’s handwriting. I’ve seen other documents with his handwriting. This can’t be Peter’s.”

  Veronika finally discloses something helpful: the tapes belonged to Kerstin. So Bea and Veronika tell him about Kerstin Hopp.

  It’s not important, Bea says, but Andreas has to know: who is the woman singing on the tapes? Bea’s friend works in a record shop in Kruezberg. Just ask for David, she says.

  Andreas heads down there one day while Bea’s at the university. Everything in the store is displayed according to an overwhelming floor-to-ceiling principle. There are plastic-wrapped records arranged on racks, scores of T-shirts on coat hooks, and one entire section dedicated to Doc Martens shoes and boots of all kinds.

  Andreas riffles disinterestedly through the records and recognizes no names. All the covers look like horror films. He edges past a shaved man with a bodybuilder’s physique. Like centipedes, his tattoos crawl from his hands and up under the sleeves of his black T-shirt. Andreas walks hesitantly around the store, and the man behind the counter asks if he can help him with anything. It turns out to be David. In the backroom David locates an old tape recorder. Someone left a cigarette on the speaker, and the plastic has melted there. The tape head is stuck tight and clicks loudly when David presses Play.

  Briefly David searches the archive in his mind, past the heavy drawers with punk, metal, and ska, and behind the band Joy Division he finds the answer: Patsy Cline. There’s no doubt about it. His mother always listened to her when she was cleaning.

  David looks her up on his computer: Patsy Cline, born Virginia Patterson Hensley in 1932 in Winchester, Virginia. Her biggest hits include “Walkin’ after Midnight,” “I Fall to Pieces,” and Willie Nelson’s “Crazy.” Died March 5, 1963, in a plane crash in Tennessee. Andreas thanks him. David tells him to say hello to Bea, and Andreas can’t help but wonder whether they were ever a couple. They seem to be each other’s type. Maybe Bea kissed his beard, and maybe David still imagines her naked?

  Bea’s in the apartment when he gets home. She let herself in. There are some papers on the dining table, an application that Bea printed out for him. As a relative, Andreas has the right to read his father’s case files at the Stasi Records Agency, the organization that safeguards Stasi archives.

  They fill out the application together. They must be patient, they read, because it could take months before they get a response of any kind. Fearing what he might found out, Andreas’s hand shakes as he signs his name, and the envelope lies on the table for three days before he summons the courage to mail it.

  17

  PETER

  East Berlin, April 1978

  How did one propose to a woman? As he saw it, there were only two possibilities: the romantic method or the practical one. The first required him to be romantic, of course. He tried to imagine a scenario, maybe on the bank of the Weissensee with the sun’s rays glistening on the sparkling water in the background. He could buy a bottle of wine and put on his finest clothes. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the practical variant—where the question sounded like a confirmation of the inevitable: “I think we should get married”—would make him less vulnerable. He couldn’t actually imagine her rejecting him though.

  He understood why he’d waited. It was because of his father. At Veronika and Wolfgang’s wedding, Georg had ruined the party. Intoxicated, he’d accidentally overturned the gift table, and his speech to the bridal couple had turned into a whiny ramble about his own wasted life. His bicycle career long forgotten, he was a nobody, just another cog in the state’s machine. During his dance with Veronika, he had tripped over his own wobbly legs. They had fallen heavily to the floor, and Veronika broke her hand, so the guests went home. Maybe Georg would drink himself to death before his and Martina’s wedding?

  Martina was stable and practical. Though he didn’t burn with desire for her, he would have a peaceful life with her, and she would allow him to concentrate on his work. She wasn’t passionate like Elisabeth, but he decided he loved her enough to marry her.

  He frequently asked himself what Elisabeth had seen in him back then. Why she had invited him to the lake? Why she had made love to him? And why she had kept the child when they were no longer together? He couldn’t find any explanations, but she’d created a lasting me
mory in him and a pent-up longing for a son he never would meet. Because he knew he would never see Andreas, he felt a keen desire to have children with Martina.

  One day he left work early intending to surprise Martina. On the way home, he bought a bouquet of flowers. When he walked into the building, he heard voices in the stairwell. There were footfalls on the stairs above him, followed by soft murmuring. Perfume wafted into his nose as he passed Gisela Matuschyk’s door. He came upon the artist Jens Rembrandt on the landing between the second and third floor, carrying a lamp. When he noticed Peter, he stopped; his cigarette fell from his lips and smoldered at his feet. He was unshaven, and he stared fearfully at Peter. Rembrandt hesitated a moment. Overcoming his sudden confusion, he took a few tentative steps down and refrained from saying hello as he sidled past. Peter paused to examine the burning cigarette, then kicked it down the stairwell with the toe of his shoe. Filth. A luminous streak trailed after it down the shaft of the stairwell like a comet. Rembrandt was practically running toward his door now, the cord clacking loudly against the lamp shade. Not until the man disappeared in his apartment did Peter realize that he knew that lamp: it was Martina’s.

  Confused, he continued up the stairs. Their apartment door was open, and someone was puttering around inside. In the entranceway he nearly tripped over a cardboard box. Martina was in the living room. The sofa was covered with clothes—her clothes—and the dining table was covered with stuffed bags.

  He closed the door slowly behind him, and she glanced up. He was immobile, paralyzed by a thought he’d never considered. She didn’t appear alarmed when their eyes met; rather, her expression was stubborn, determined. A long moment of silence followed. She would have to say something. She was the one who needed to explain herself. He waited, feeling empty and numb. He let go of the bouquet, and when the flowers struck the floor, the silk paper rustled.