Andreas can’t fully grasp or manage his love of Berlin, but another threatens as well, and it’s something he doesn’t want. It has come on slowly. Is it love when you think of another person more than you think of yourself? He thought he could control it, master his emotions, but he’s given up. Though he can never have Bea, he wonders whether maybe he loves her precisely because she’s unobtainable. He suppresses the emotion and tells himself he’s an idiot.
They’ve agreed to meet at Café Cinema before Bea starts work. He gets off at Alexanderplatz. Though the plaza has been decorated with synthetic Christmas ornaments, it somehow smells of spruce. Winking lights in the form of small, plum-shaped bulbs displace the afternoon’s growing darkness. There’s something oddly beautiful about these illuminated evenings, and Andreas imagines the lights on the Wall erasing the darkness in the same way when they flooded the sky. On the plaza in front of the large Galeria shopping center, hot dog vendors manage their entire operations under their orange umbrellas. They are out-shouted by salesmen hawking candied apples, pretzels, and Christmas cakes from wooden booths arranged around the plaza. Andreas walks by nativity scenes, men and women carrying shopping bags stuffed to bursting, and fathers with tired children drooping on their shoulders. He watches as the heat-seeking are sucked into Galeria, crossing those who’ve been spat out now that their money is spent. He hurries across the plaza at Hackescher Markt, where more street vendors shiver patiently in the cold.
The café is a Christmas-free zone where guests can enjoy a reprieve from the season’s all-embracing pseudo good cheer, says Bea, setting a beer down in front of Andreas. The Ramones’ “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight Tonight)” blares through the loudspeakers.
Bea has managed to track down a telephone number for Martina Dietzsch. She’s written it on a sheet of paper and places it proudly on the table. Martina still lives in the city, in Pankow. He wants to wait, but she convinces him to call her at once. Even though the crinkled paper in his hand is a breakthrough, he has begun to fear this kind of moment. What if she’ll talk to him? What if she won’t? Will she say things that may be best left unsaid? The questions run laps in his head.
Bea watches him in anticipation as the phone rings. When Martina picks up, Andreas introduces himself.
She’s quiet. The line buzzes faintly.
He asks if he can meet her in person.
“It’s been so many years.” Her voice is hesitant, weak.
“I just want to find out who my father was.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” She hangs up.
Andreas is disappointed as he heads home. That same evening he calls Grigor Pamjanov.
“Hello.” He’s clearly drunk. A woman laughs in the background, and Pamjanov sounds distracted. Andreas speaks up, and the Russian returns his focus to the conversation. Yes, yes, Grigor knows everything. For some reason he switches to English, maybe to impress the woman. Something makes Pamjanov sound naked, as if Andreas has caught them right in the middle of the act. He imagines the all-too-young wife, or maybe a prostitute, sitting astride the huge body spilling across the bed. She rides him slowly, while the Russian sweats on the telephone. As though to put an end to the conversation, Pamjanov mentions Ejner Madsen, a Dane Peter had once told him about. The last he’d heard, Ejner Madsen had settled in the GDR. Then he speaks to the woman, who lets out a long moan. Andreas hangs up.
21
STEFAN
East Berlin, April 1980
A fist hammered against the door. Nina was already sitting up in bed when Stefan opened his eyes. He put his hand on the nightstand and feverishly pawed for his watch: 6:22 a.m. Then he realized it was Saturday. Who the hell would wake them up on their day off? The insistent banging left a marked stillness in its wake, and in that stillness he now heard Petra beginning to stir in her crib.
He pulled on a pair of pants and went to the window. The street below was calm and impassive. A delivery van was parked in front of their building, a Barkas B1000, from Centrum Warenhaus. Fumes billowed from the exhaust pipes. A heavy fist pounded against the door again, making the mail slot vibrate. Petra’s wailing pierced the apartment.
“Open up. This is State Security.”
Their eyes met, and without a word, they said the same thing: it’s over, finished, good-bye. He took Nina in his arms so that he would remember the heat of her body. He knew that it would be a long time before he could hold her again. He buried his nose in her hair and inhaled deeply, filling his lungs until they ached. He must remember all of this: her touch, her aroma, her voice. Someone had reported them, but no one knew of their plans, so who could it have been? He didn’t know the answer, but it was clear that life as he’d known it was definitively over.
His shoulder grew moist from Nina’s tears. Together they went to the crib to gaze at their child. Petra had grown quiet now. Lying on her back, she was jerking her arms and legs. Stefan kissed his fingertips and touched them softly to Petra’s forehead. He kissed Nina’s wet cheek. Then he opened the door.
Four men dressed in civilian clothes rushed into the apartment, pushing and yelling, forcing Stefan and Nina back. A vase fell from a bureau and shattered, and the shards crunched under the soles of their shoes. Petra cried out. The men had evidently decided their roles ahead of time, as three men advanced on Stefan and one on Nina. The man who held Nina’s hands in an iron grip behind her back was panting audibly, as if he was hyperventilating or was sexually aroused.
Stefan’s blood surged through his body like a strong current. He glanced at his fists, and turned to the man closest to him and studied his jaw. He looked once more at his hands, then at Nina. He saw the tiny network of veins in her eyes. She had marks on her wrist from the man’s hard grasp.
He studied his hands again. They were great big mitts. They could break, flay, and crush. I am a man. I must defend you; I must defend Petra. They will hurt you. They will hurt us.
Though her mouth was closed, he heard her words resounding in his head: Don’t do it. I beg you. And they were her words, and in them he heard her love for him.
Two of the men clutched his shoulder, hard. The other man was clearly ready for the anticipated counterattack, but Stefan was like a declawed animal, tamed by his love for Nina. He wouldn’t fight back. It was pointless, and they already had Nina.
As he let himself be guided into the hallway, Nina was suddenly caught between being sensible and a surge of maternal helplessness.
“What about my baby?” she cried.
“We’ll take care of her.” A man they hadn’t noticed until now stood in the doorway. Though what he’d said was meant to be reassuring, it sounded false. Any defiance she had left in her subsided. All hope was lost. That was the actual meaning of the man’s words.
The man—who Stefan assumed was a kind of commanding officer for the operation—acted as if he knew what would happen next, as if he could foresee their future. Though he looked young, he had an air of authority. He gestured with his hand, and his subordinates went into motion.
They guided Stefan and Nina down the stairwell to the delivery van and its ticking engine. The inside of the van was parceled into small cells, and they were put in separate units. Stefan sat on a hard seat, next to a man who smelled of tobacco. His handcuffs tightened around his wrists. They drove for what seemed to him hours. Gentle brakes, sharp ninety-degree turns, U-turns, potholes. Outside he could hear the city: the roar of a busy street—probably Karl Marx-Allee, Dimitroffstrasse, or Prenzlauer Allee—and he recognized the sound of an Ikarus bus accelerating, then the rattle and whine of an S-train train moving over the worn, shiny tracks. The sounds of his city, the city he’d grown up in, and the city where an uncertain future awaited them. What would happen to Nina? What would happen to Petra? He was inconsequential; his girls were what mattered to him now, but he was the one who’d brought them all into this mess. Just him.
The sounds faded. The vehicle stopped. “Out.” The uniforms outside sh
outed at them.
Tobacco Breath shoved him in the back. “Get out.”
He turned to catch a glimpse of Nina, but they held her in the van until he was gone.
22
ANDREAS
Berlin, November 2006
It turns out there’s only one Ejner Madsen in all of Germany, and he lives in the village of Stralsund. Andreas rents an Opel Corsa, and Bea accompanies him. She enjoys a little “land air,” as she calls it. North of Berlin, they drive through huge tracts of forests, past lakes of all sizes, past fields and endless heaths. The landscape is flat here, as if a large rolling pin has leveled everything. It’s a long trip. They chat and listen to music on the scratchy car radio, which gets no help from the broken antennae.
He’s glad that Bea’s with him. She’s the exact opposite of Lisa, and her foreignness fascinates him. She was born in the GDR, her mouth is too broad, and she laughs too loud when she tells lewd jokes. Plus she’s not afraid to use dirty German invectives that make Andreas blush. Her clothes are threadbare, like the country she grew up in; she’s tall, lanky, and boyish in appearance. Her breasts are nearly imperceptible beneath her shirt, unlike Lisa’s, which were neither too large nor too small but filled her blouse in such a way that turned him on. Still, he’s attracted to Bea, and he knows that it’s much more than sexual attraction.
“I’m feeling kind of guilty, Andreas. I mean, I haven’t been much help to you since you came to Berlin.”
Andreas doesn’t know how to respond.
“You know, new lover and all that,” she says apologetically. She begins to hum.
He has a sudden urge to tell her what’s on his mind. No more secret desires or checking out her ass on the sly. He steals a glance, trying to determine what would happen if he told her. He feels he’s got to tell her. If he doesn’t do it now, he never will.
He looks back at the road. “I’m in love with you.”
“What did you say?” She stops humming.
He snaps on the turn signal and crosses into the passing lane. “I’m in love with you.”
“You don’t mean that.” Her voice is suddenly tense.
“Yes, I do.” For some reason he can’t explain, he smiles. He has said what he wanted to say, but he can’t gauge her response. Something in her tone of voice makes him uncertain. He looks down at her hands, which lie in her lap. She taps soundlessly against her thighs with her fingertips, and he figures that he’s made her uncomfortable. He senses her restlessness. She reaches in her purse for a piece of nicotine gum.
“What the hell, Andreas. Haven’t you figured it out yet?”
“Figured out what?’
“I’m a lesbian!”
He signals to the right and shifts the Corsa back to the inside lane. “No,” he says softly.
“My girlfriend’s name is Alice.”
He looks at her, and suddenly they sputter with laughter that seems to go on for minutes. Neither one of them can stop. Their glee fills the car, and they carry on until the car is drained of air.
“Why are we laughing?” Bea stammers.
Andreas shrugs, and that makes them laugh until tears roll down their cheeks. He’s relieved that he told her, and he feels a hint of pride, too. Though part of him, deep down, didn’t believe he could do it, he had done it. He was brave and told her how he felt. The result is far from what he’d hoped, but his sense of self has changed.
How had he overlooked all the signs? Or maybe he just refused to admit it? The way she often made remarks whenever she saw a beautiful woman; her love of Annie Lennox, Ani DiFranco, and Skunk Anansie; and her little asides and comments. He wishes she had told him outright. Then he could’ve saved himself the trouble of all these emotions. She tries to get his attention, but he stays focused on the white stripes vanishing beneath the car.
After almost three hours of driving, they reach the waterfront town of Stralsund. The harbor’s in disarray, and the enormous shipyard—once the pride of the GDR—is now in and out of bankruptcy.
Ejner’s neighborhood is a dilapidated patchwork of crumbling façades, pothole-riddled streets, and prefabricated concrete apartment blocks with roofs made of cheap asbestos cement sheets. The stairwell reeks of something indefinable—like a hamster cage, or maybe someone using it as a toilet. There’s a bent teaspoon on the stairs, along with a ball of tinfoil, and Andreas begins to regret the trip.
Ejner’s flannel shirt is unbuttoned underneath his leather vest, his beard is thick and unkempt, and his hair is long. He offers Andreas a pale, liver-spotted hand. Because of his enormous, ungainly body and the stench of the apartment, Andreas has no desire to enter, but he and Bea nonetheless follow the Dane inside.
They sit in the living room, and in a rusty voice, Ejner tells them he used to live in the Danish harbor town of Korsør; he worked down at the harbor and passed on information to the GDR about the naval station, NATO exercises—anything that might be of interest to Stasi, for whom he’d been working since 1975. In the mideighties, he decided he’d had enough. Because he was a member of the Danish Communist Party, he was monitored by the Danish secret service, and he started to fear that he’d be outed as a spy.
“I moved here when I got divorced.”
“Why Stralsund?” Andreas asks, suddenly realizing how long it has been since he’s spoken Danish.
“I could find work here. I’d stayed in contact with Peter, but he wouldn’t help me, even though he owed me. We were friends, and I’d always helped him, but he told me they had more use for me in Denmark, that they would lose an important contact if I left, but I had to get away, and the GDR was where I wanted to go. He kept pressuring me, telling me that I was too valuable and should stay in Korsør. They sent others to convince me to stay too, but I insisted, and that was it. I never heard from him again.” Ejner removes a pack of tobacco from his leather vest.
Andreas feels bad for him, but he’s mostly thinking of Bea. He never should have told her that he was in love with her. It’s best if he puts that episode behind him as quickly as possible. Otherwise it’ll ruin his relationship with her, and he doesn’t want that.
As they return to the car, Andreas glances up at the apartment. Ejner lives a lonely life in the middle of overcrowded apartment blocks. He is unemployed, with no future. His story is a sad one, and Peter was an accomplice in his decline.
Andreas can’t get comfortable in his seat. His seatbelt is cutting into him. Should he have helped Ejner? Should he have given him some of the money he’d borrowed from Thorkild?
Ejner stares out the window. He raises his hand to wave, and Andreas does the same. Then he turns the key in the ignition, and they head back to Berlin.
23
STEFAN
East Berlin, April 1980
“Remove your clothes.”
Stefan stood in his underwear before a uniformed man who sat behind a desk. Another stood next to the wall. A third was posted at the door. On the desk were an ink blotter, an ink pad, some papers, and a telephone with a blinking red light. The man behind the desk glanced up at Stefan in what looked like an attempt to appear friendly, but there was something false about his smile, which couldn’t hide the contempt in his eyes. He asked his first question with a sigh. Stefan answered mechanically—that one and all the questions that followed—and the man wrote the answers down on a form. Stefan’s mind was elsewhere. None of this had happened. Suddenly he saw himself from a bird’s-eye view, nearly naked, his dark body hair curling over his skin, on his back, on his chest as if to shield him from this humiliation. The soles of his bare feet pressed against the cold floor and brought him back to reality. This is the lowest a person can sink.
“Pull your underwear down.”
Stefan hesitated, and the order was repeated, more sharply this time.
He pulled his underwear down to his knees, slowly, a silent protest, and let them drop to his ankles. The sight of his white cotton underwear filled him with an overwhelming sadness. He had the mater
ial to make a white flag; all he needed was a pole to hang it on, then his surrender would be complete. He struggled to keep his tears in check. The man behind the desk glowered at his genitals, and smiled. They were here to bend him, break him, and humiliate him, and they were enjoying themselves. Stefan wondered how their food tasted when they came home from work. What did they say to their children when they told them about their day?
The man next to the wall stirred. “Bend over, and spread your cheeks.”
The man was so close that Stefan could smell his uniform, which mixed with the scent of the plastic gloves. The man bent Stefan over and shoved a hooked finger into his anus. He moved it in circles before pulling it out.
“Pull your foreskin back.” The man stood now in front of him, Stefan’s limp member in his gloved hand.
I’m not here. This is not happening.
“Are you listening, Mr. Lachner?”
Stefan hesitated. “I demand a lawyer.”
“This isn’t an American television series,” said the man behind the desk, laughing. Then his face became somber again. “Mr. Stefan Lachner.” He let the words hang in the air. “Forget your name. You will no longer need it. From now on, you’re prisoner number 243. Get dressed.” He pointed at a stack of clothes on a chair beside the door.
The cell was cramped. There was a cot made of dark wood beneath the barred window. It was raised a little on one end as if to help the prisoner know which direction to rest his head. His new home consisted of a mattress upholstered with faded floral fabric, a nearly flat pillow, a low desk, a footstool, a washbasin, and a toilet in the corner. The two-tone walls were white with a yellow-brown stripe right down the center, and the marbled floor was clammy and cold. When is a room large enough to call it a room? He sat down tentatively on the hard mattress and buried his head in his hands. Not this.
He thought of Petra. Her naturally sweet, perfumed scent; her toes that were like small, blond hazelnuts; her warmth that could envelope him, Nina, and the entire apartment. When would he see her again?
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