What happened next was even less cultured than his mother feared. In the afternoon of the following day he was escorted to the gym where the boxers were sparring, skipping and punching a bag. In one corner the director of physical education was supervising two shadow boxers, calling out instructions as they punched and shuffled. ‘Left – left – right – move your feet.’
George waited, standing to attention, wondering how they would punish him. He had been in the gym many times before, and a couple of years earlier he had been put through a couple of perfunctory lessons along with the rest of his class, more for the purposes of assessment than anything else. This was different. The boys in the room were veterans of countless competitions with other polytechnics. Some of them had been in teams which fought abroad, in places as distant as Krakow or Tbilisi, even Moscow, and it was rumoured that Kruger, the sixteen-year-old star of the school, would qualify for the Olympic trials the following year.
George rolled his eyes around, hoping to catch sight of Kruger, but in a moment the teacher turned away from his corner with his arm outstretched, the finger pointing. His eyes, a brilliant blue, seemed to be sighting along a gun barrel aimed directly at the boy. It was a typical pose. The teacher, Wolf Hauser, had been a champion middleweight in the army and he still possessed the mannerisms of a soldier, awesome and overpowering to the smaller boys. George stared back, frozen to the spot.
‘You,’ Hauser said. ‘I hear you have a good punch. Come and show me.’
Later on, remembering the event, George had come to the conclusion that the colour of his skin had more to do with his recruitment to the boxing squad than the power of his punching. The only blacks Hauser had ever encountered were the American and African boxers he had faced in the ring. Sooner or later he would have thought of recruiting the school’s solitary black pupil. If George had been older he might have refused Hauser’s offer, but by the time he understood more about himself and the people around him the drill of training and fighting in competition had become a part of life. When he was conscripted his exploits in the ring were already in his file, part of the official record, and one or two members of his training unit had seen him fighting as a schoolboy in Berlin. Being known as a top sportsman saved him from the extremes of harassment and bullying, and he served out his time in one of the better tank regiments, exercising up and down Thuringia or trundling across Hungary in joint operations. During these years he began to nourish the dream of joining the Olympic squad. This wasn’t a matter of love for the sport. It was as if, by some wonderful accident, his fists had given him the chance of a future which would otherwise be denied to him. He had no serious connections in the Party, and he didn’t possess even a drop of German blood, but if he could fight his way into the Olympic team and survive a few rounds all the doors would open. A nice flat in Berlin, a decent car, a coaching job, and trips abroad. He could have had it all, except for what happened in his last fight, which was against an ageing middleweight from Torun, whose face must have been sculpted from stone. George had put him down eventually, but the shooting pains in his right hand told him something was wrong, and the X-rays confirmed that he had broken a bone. It was several months before he could train again, and by then his chance had gone.
His mother had never quite understood. Perhaps that was why he felt so much resentment at the fact that when Valentin turned up she was wild with happiness to embrace one of her own blood again, and they stayed up, night after night, long past her bedtime, drinking and talking together in Russian, too fluent for George to join in. He had suppressed his anger and the next day, for her sake, he had taken the man out to bars and found him somewhere to stay, steering him gently away from districts like the Savignyplatz where a loud-mouthed Russian could wind up with his face smashed.
It was then, on their second meeting, that Valentin had made his proposition. A friend back home, he said, somewhere in Belarus, he was vague about this, possessed a store of valuable objects, paintings and statues, that he wished to sell. George’s immediate reaction was to laugh. He had heard all this before. Russians sold everything, like hucksters at a market, even the boots off their feet.
The trade in icons was an old story. Back at the beginning of the decade there were genuine icons to be had, but in the last half-dozen years, Russians, along with entrepreneurs from every other ethnic group in the former Union, had been distributing crudely painted bits of wood, some of them barely dry.
‘You can’t sell those things any more,’ George said curtly. ‘Nowadays the collectors go to Moscow or Petersburg and arrange their own fakes.’
Valentin shook his head impatiently.
‘These are not icons, and they’re real. I can show you an example.’ He mentioned a name George had never heard of. ‘An artist of the Peredvizhniki.’ George had a vague idea that the Peredvizhniki were landscape painters.
‘You brought one here? To Katya’s apartment? A stolen painting?’
Valentin looked round and made a shushing sound.
‘It’s not stolen.’
His friend, Valentin said, had been given the paintings by some dead relative who perhaps had stolen them, or had been given them by someone who had. No one knew. But there it was, a collection of priceless works of art about which he could tell no one or sell in Russia.
George had been sceptical, until Valentin took him back to the room he had rented above a Turkish café off the Oranienstrasse in East Kreuzberg, and showed him the picture, a rectangle, about three feet by two, which was a landscape – in the foreground a field of waving corn, in the distance tucked into the bottom corner a house with a windmill beside it. It was a beautiful picture, full of detail, painted some time in the nineteenth century, George guessed, although he really knew nothing about it. In the corner scrawled below the house was the signature – Levitan.
In the end it had been surprisingly easy to find a buyer. Later on it struck him that it had been much too easy, but by then it was too late and the damage was already done.
The problem was where he’d started. Thomas Liebl. George had promised himself, when he moved across Berlin after the Wall, never to have anything more to do with some of the people who had previously been a part of his life. But when he began wondering how to dispose of Valentin’s painting, Liebl’s huge body lurched into his head, and although he racked his brains trying to think of an alternative, he knew all the time that he would go back. It wasn’t an appealing prospect. There had been moments in his life when he pictured ripping a knife across the man’s bloated belly, and although that was now a long time in the past, he still couldn’t think of Liebl without a shadow of the rage and fear he used to feel then. The odd thing was that at their first meeting he’d felt nothing but amusement at seeing the man. Liebl had looked like a cartoon character, a huge version of a crudely carved wooden doll, an ovoid shape with short legs and a bulging round gut tapering upwards to a balding head over which a few strands of greasy black hair were carefully pasted.
At the time, George was managing the workers’ canteen at a food processing factory in Prenzlauer Berg. In the early eighties it was a place of factories, workers’ tenements, hole-in-the-wall cafés and hostels, a district where he could arrive and depart more or less unnoticed. The catering job was the sort of position he had held since he left the army; in George’s mind it represented a period of waiting, a time during which he would decide what to do with himself. The problem was that he had been preparing for a career in sport since he was about fourteen, and when the door closed on that prospect he had been left with no idea what to do and practically no incentive to pursue other prospects.
On the morning that Liebl walked into his office that first time George had long outgrown his dreams of sporting stardom, but he retained the habit of weighing up other men for their potential in the boxing ring. Sometimes he would find himself gazing at someone taller than himself and wondering with which hand he would lead or how fast he was on his feet. It took only one glance to se
e that Liebl would be a hopeless case. One punch and he’d be down. George smiled, thinking about it, and Liebl’s big moonface split in reply.
‘What can I do for you?’ George asked.
Liebl collapsed slowly on to one of the rusty steel chairs. George’s office was also a storeroom where tins of cabbage and beetroot stood piled on the floor next to the bottles of schnapps and vodka. His desk was a sturdy pine table, marked by the scratchings of generations. In one corner a carved swastika had been converted into a crude hammer and sickle. With the addition of three chairs, there was just enough space left to walk around the table and out of the door.
George laid down the sheaf of receipts he had been totting up, and faced Liebl with his arms folded, realising now that the man must have some official function.
‘Thomas Liebl,’ the man grunted. ‘Sicherheit.’
The word startled George.
‘Security? What about Werner?’
On the previous morning he had spoken with the head of security, Werner, an easy-going veteran who had served in George’s unit ten years before.
‘Werner has been transferred. I’m here now.’
George’s heart skipped a beat. He was certain that Werner had not known about his own transfer, and if everything had been as normal he would have toured the place saying goodbye. The answer must be that they had brought him up in front of the factory’s conflict committee in the afternoon and then kicked him out of the gates. Right now his friend would be cleaning up some filthy dump, or shovelling medical waste and body parts. Even worse, he might have been arrested. The entire affair would have had to have taken less than twenty-four hours. Flabbergasted, George was about to ask what had happened when he realised that it might be unwise to show too much interest.
‘You were friends?’
Liebl was smiling again.
‘We talked,’ George said cautiously, ‘about the army.’
He could hardly deny it.
‘Did you talk about the vodka?’
This time George’s stomach lurched. He had been selling cases of the stuff on the black market for over a year. It wasn’t the sort of transgression which interested Werner as long as he got his regular supplies. George had always assumed that he was taking a cut from every hustle which went on in the factory. Everyone had some kind of scam working for them, and it was easy to forget that it was a crime until you were caught.
‘Vodka?’
He was playing for time, but he knew he had been caught, and looking at Liebl he noticed that the curve of his fat lips wasn’t a smile at all, merely a reflex expressing some kind of pain or stress. Realising this, he understood that the man was playing with him, the eyes gleaming through the folds of flesh as cruel as a cat.
‘The vodka that the Poles bring you,’ Liebl said, ‘costs less than half the stuff you put on the books. Everyone knows that.’
That was the way things were, George wanted to reply, but he knew by now that whatever was going on was also something to do with the way things were. The truth was that the canteen swindles had been going on before he arrived and they were a part of his everyday routine. He suspected that Liebl knew this already, and he probably knew that most of the products on George’s books ended up on the black market or in the kitchens of the production committee – two days earlier the manager himself had collected half a dozen bottles – but for some reason they had decided to throw him to Liebl.
‘They say you’re a good worker,’ Liebl continued, ‘and I don’t want to charge you with anything.’
So all this had merely been a preamble to his real purpose, a way of letting George know that he had to give Liebl what he wanted. The question which remained in his mind was why the man hadn’t simply asked for a few bottles. Werner had understood the limits. If his replacement was greedy it might cause problems.
‘What do you want?’ George asked.
‘We want you to do a job.’
Whatever it was, George thought, he wanted nothing to do with it.
‘I have a job,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want a transfer.’
‘We don’t want to transfer you.’
For the first time it occurred to George that Liebl wasn’t simply a security officer.
‘Who is we?’
‘Stasi.’
At last he understood. This was the way that state security operated, and he would have to do whatever it was they wanted.
At the beginning it was easier than he would ever have imagined. Liebl wanted to know about the black market, where the products came from, where they went and who handled them. Most of it he already knew. The rest he could have found out by observing what went on around the factory. George laid down ground rules. He refused to talk about his colleagues or about his mother and her job translating for Soviet officials.
‘I respect that,’ Liebl said. ‘We are only concerned with the vandals who are undermining the State.’
As time went on George never trusted Liebl any more than he had that first morning, but before long he felt at ease. Liebl, he understood, wrote exhaustive reports about everything he learnt, yet little or nothing seemed to change. He had half expected some of the traders he knew to disappear, perhaps a few transfers or arrests, but things at the factory went on much as they had always done. Liebl’s questions came to seem like a bit of a joke, a sort of monthly quota with which he filled his notebook. Improbably, Liebl turned out to be a boxing fan, with an encyclopaedic memory for lists of fighters from Poland, the Ukraine and Cuba. Somehow he had managed to see films of fighters like Muhammed Ali, and he revelled in describing every blow in famous matches like the Thriller in Manila. When he did this his arms flailed, his little eyes gleamed and he gasped for breath. After a while George realised that he actually liked the man, and it would have been hard for him to imagine the rage and contempt he would come to feel in Liebl’s presence.
On the other hand, as he told Valentin when they began talking about what to do with the Levitan, if you wanted to sell a painting of dubious origins and ownership, it wouldn’t be hard to find interested parties, but the problem was avoiding buyers who were police informers or simple thieves. If Liebl was well disposed he could send them to a buyer who was safe and would keep his mouth shut. Valentin’s response was to urge him to see Liebl.
‘So he was Stasi. That’s much better. He will have to be quiet.’
George shrugged. Up until the moment he mentioned Liebl he had had no intention of speaking to him ever again, but when he thought about his life behind the Wall it seemed to have taken place in another world. Perhaps it was the same for the Stasi. He could still recognise people who had been in the same trade as Liebl, and it was as if, from the moment of the Wende, they had begun to shrink, changing subtly into ordinary individuals. There were so many of them, in fact, that most of the time no one would guess. In any case Liebl had never forced him to do anything. He had simply opened the door to the maze. George’s wife Radka was the only person who knew every detail of the tasks he had performed for Liebl, but during one of the worst periods in their relationship she had accused him of using the fat man as a lightning rod for his own guilt. The remark had provoked his anger, partly because he already knew it to be true. Avoiding Liebl would make no more sense than avoiding the steps of the Gethsemanekirche in Berlin, which was where he had heard about the death of a woman he had loved.
‘Perhaps it is time I saw him again,’ he told Valentin after seeing the Levitan.
George hadn’t actually laid eyes on the man then for at least half a dozen years, but he knew where to find him. Liebl was still in the security business, and he was still based in the centre of Prenzlauer Berg, but now he ran a firm supplying bouncers to the nightclubs that littered the district. On the same afternoon that George saw Valentin’s painting he decided to take the leap, to try to lay at least one of his ghosts to rest by talking to Liebl.
He parked near the KulturBrauerei, the old Prenzlauer brewery which had hastily been c
onverted into a cultural centre. The factory where he had worked with Liebl was only a stone’s throw away, but it was now deserted with a web of scaffolding covering the building while it was being converted into something else. This was how it was all over the east of the city. More than six years after the Wall came down the noise of drilling and hammering, the smell of paint, scaffolding and a kind of scattered bustle was inescapable, but somehow the changes only served to emphasise the familiar look of the place. Alongside the splashes of renovation was the scarred brick of the tenement blocks, and it was the same with the people. Under the short skirts and high heels, or the tight jeans and tailored jackets which had sprouted along the Schönhauser Allee, were the same scrawny bodies and sallow complexions. Everything here was slower too, as if the city itself moved to a different, more deliberate, Ossi beat. George had never noticed any of this before. Now he had to remind himself, with a little shiver of irritation, that he too was an Ossi. As a child his mother had brought him here to the rushing junction where Schönhauser Allee and Danziger Strasse met Kastanienallee and Ebenwalder Strasse. Beyond was the Wall which marked the border where he should never go, she said, but at the time, the warning had been unnecessary. The spot where they stood, it seemed, was like the centre of the world, a teeming and sophisticated metropolis.
He crossed the junction and passed between steel pillars into the shadow of the railway overhead. In a couple of minutes he was walking down the cobbled street where Liebl’s office was situated. Up ahead he could see the neon sign above a narrow shopfront – Experte Sicherheit.
He pushed open the door, which set off an electronic buzzer. The reception was a shallow room a few metres long. Against one wall was a polished wooden desk behind which sat a woman whose hair was an extravagantly pale yellow, swept back into a bun. She was wearing a turquoise suit over a tight black sweater with a low vee which showed a swelling cleavage. Her long fingernails were turquoise, matching the colour of the suit. In her left hand she held a kingsized cigarette in a stainless steel holder. With her right hand she pecked at the keyboard of the computer terminal in front of her. Against the wall opposite were two screens covered with photographs, one of them a large portrait of Liebl, his jowls arranged into a serious and responsible expression. The others looked like a series of scenes of his bodyguards surrounding important people or blocking the entrances to various venues. Between the desk and the screens was a door which George assumed led to an inner office and the stairs to the upper floors.
A Shadow of Myself Page 2