Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  They buried her in the old cemetery behind the theatre, not far from where Brecht lay. There were over a hundred people at the grave-side, which was festooned with flowers and two red flags. Helge, you and I stood in a row shaking hands as we bade farewell to Gertrude’s friends.

  Most of the faces were familiar. There were present old comrades, veterans of the pre-war German party who had returned with Gertrude from Moscow after the war. These included Walter Ulbricht’s widow, who kissed me. Did she realize who she was kissing? A few of my colleagues from Humboldt had turned up with black armbands. But who were the strangers? There were about two dozen men and women I had never seen before. They were dressed in civilian clothes, but their bearing indicated the organs of state security. The Stasi and Foreign Intelligence units appeared to be well represented. Amongst them was Winter, now an old man in his seventies. His shock of white hair distinguished him from the others, but he was also dressed differently. Gertrude told me he was the curator of the art museum where she worked.

  He walked towards us, and introduced himself to Helge. ‘Klaus Winter. I was one of Gertrude’s colleagues. We go back a very long way. Please accept my condolences. Perhaps one day you and I can meet for a coffee, Professor Meyer?’

  ‘That would be very nice, Herr Winter. Did you work with my mother at the museum?’

  He smiled and nodded.

  ‘We will talk about all that when we meet.’

  As he walked away Helge tightened her grip on my arm. ‘I don’t trust him, Vlady. Did you notice his eyes?’

  ‘Not really. Why?’

  ‘A killer’s eyes.’

  ‘Helge! Your instincts are really going crazy this time. You’re becoming like your patients!’

  Before she could reply, you took charge of us and prodded your parents gently towards the exit. Do you remember what you said? ‘Please, both of you. Let Grandma rest in peace. Wait till you get home before you start an argument.’

  I hugged and kissed you on both cheeks. You looked embarrassed, as a fourteen-year-old boy would, but I think that deep down my public show of love pleased you.

  A meeting of our underground group had been scheduled for the evening of the funeral. Helge wanted to cancel the event, but I insisted that Gertrude would have hated a political meeting being cancelled on her account. The apartment was crowded; over forty activists were present.

  ‘Comrades,’ I told them, ‘we have messages of support from Wolf Biermann and Rudolf Bahro, messages they want us to print and distribute in the DDR. I will pass them around and at the end of the meeting, when all of you have read them, we can vote. OK? Good. Now Gerhard has the floor.’

  Gerhard, who had been seated on the floor, stood up, took off his spectacles and began to speak. He informed the gathering that they had received an invitation to participate in the Friedensdekade, the ten days for peace initiated by the Samariter Parish, and to help with the Berlin Appeal to transform ‘swords to ploughshares’. This was the beginning of our peace movement, which annoyed East and West alike.

  ‘Stephan Krawczyk, Stefan Heym and Rolf Schneider have signed the appeal and…’

  ‘Just a minute, Gerhard,’ Gisela interrupted. ‘Before you carry on we must clarify our attitude to the Church. Are we going to work with them? I mean, us? We’re all non-Party socialists or Marxists. To link up with the Church at this stage is morally unjustifiable!’

  ‘Why?’ I asked her.

  ‘Because the Church hierarchy is complicit with the regime. They made their peace a long time ago with the bureaucrats.’

  ‘Gisela!’ said Gerhard. ‘The Samariter Parish people have the same relationship to the Church as we do to the Party: they’re dissidents in search of a critical space. They want freedom, humaneness and tolerance. I know. I know what you’re going to say. Of course we want much more, but we also want what they demand, do we not? We will never win this battle on our own.’

  The debate raged for nearly three hours. Finally when the vote was taken even Gisela did not vote against, but simply abstained. A letter was drafted supporting the Berlin Appeal.

  ‘Gertrude would have fought you all the way on this question,’ Gisela shouted after they had voted. Everyone laughed. Then Gerhard stood up and proposed a toast.

  ‘To Gertrude, who is no longer with us, but from whom we learnt a great deal and in more ways than she ever realized.’

  The apartment echoed to her name.

  ‘Gertrude!’

  Later that night, not wanting to wake your mother or worry you, I wept softly to myself. Helge was not asleep. She stroked my head and encouraged me to talk.

  ‘I was thinking of her. Trying to remember what she was like when I was a child. I can’t remember a single occasion when we laughed together. I mean on our own. She laughed with friends, but never with me. Why?’

  Helge sighed and held me close. ‘I never got to like her, Vlady. I’m sorry. I always felt she had a terrible secret. Something in her past of which she was so ashamed that she repressed everything, including your birth and childhood.’

  ‘But she was a very strong woman,’ I argued back. ‘You know that well. She could transcend most problems that were served up to her by life, by history…’

  ‘Yes, but her strength lay precisely in her artfulness, her capacity to deceive herself and you and others. She was always keeping something back, not even telling you everything to your face and often parrying your questions with a light-heartedness that was so fake it must have hurt her inside.’

  Helge was right. I confessed my own worries to her.

  ‘I always felt she lied about my father, except this last time. She knew she was dying. When we discussed the matter she almost convinced me that it was Ludwik.’

  ‘More likely she convinced herself, Vlady.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  A fortnight after Gertrude’s death, I received a phone call from Klaus Winter, the man with white hair who had introduced himself at the funeral. We agreed to meet outside the museum where Gertrude had worked. Winter did not invite me to his office. Instead we went down a side street and entered an unmarked apartment block, a post-war confection built in the Stalino-classical style. He smiled at me, but did not say a word till we had come out of the lift on the tenth floor, walked down a carpeted corridor and entered his apartment.

  I was amazed. The place was packed with antiques and paintings and comfortably furnished.

  ‘Not bad, eh?’

  There was one large canvas – it must have been eight feet by six feet – that caught my attention. It was a modern canvas, an interesting copy of the old socialist-realist style, but with a remarkable twist. It brought together an interesting group of men.

  Seated around a table from left to right, in a manner of speaking, were a uniformed Cromwell, Robespierre in his powder-green jacket, Trotsky in a tunic, with his stretched arm poised over the telephone waiting for the call which never came, Danton in seventh heaven after draining his glass of claret. The claret bottle is labelled Chateau Bastille 1791. Lenin was sitting on an armchair at a slight distance from the table, making notes.

  On the wall behind this motley collection were portraits of Marx and Milton, while a bust of Voltaire rests on a nearby shelf. Sitting on the floor was a late-twentieth-century intellectual in blue denims, a black leather jacket, gold-rimmed spectacles, his two hands clutching his head as if he were trying to make sense of the old Revolutions. The unsigned painting is titled History.

  ‘Where did you find this? Who painted it? I’ve never seen Trotsky in a socialist-realist painting…’

  ‘Nor had the painter,’ replied Winter. ‘That’s why she started the work. She lives in Moscow. A friend saw the painting at her flat and bought it immediately. I made him an offer in dollars. Gertrude liked it a great deal. Do you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Take it away. It’s yours.’

  I was surprised by the casual generosity, but declined his offer. ‘Very kind, but, alas, it is
too big for our apartment.’

  He smiled and said nothing for a few minutes. Then he spoke in a slow and measured drawl. ‘Your mother and I used to look at it often and talk about old times. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Coffee would be fine.’

  While Winter was in the kitchen, I inspected the room, starting with the bookshelves. It was a thirties’ library, to which a great deal had been added, not dissimilar to Gertrude’s collection at home. Winter returned and saw me looking at the books.

  ‘Here, let me show you what was our bible in the thirties.’ He took out the first Russian-language edition of A Short Course History of the Soviet Union by J. V. Stalin and handed it to me.

  ‘The devil’s own work?’

  ‘Don’t be so naïve. It was written by a committee of people, Soviet historians who had sold their soul to the devil.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Something happened to us after we had defeated the Whites in the civil war. Lenin’s death, Trotsky’s incompetence in the face of Stalin’s manoeuvres … you must understand one thing. Stalin was a very able organizer of the Party. He took some of Lenin’s less attractive ideas to their ultimate logic. He understood that to secure power he had to secure the Party and he did so with a ruthlessness that brooked no opposition. The people who made the Revolution were either dead or exhausted. What happened to us was like the melting down of our very being. We were lashed with the devil’s whip. We lost control of our senses. Stalinism gave us insights into ourselves and other human beings. We plumbed the lower depths of our souls and the brand marks are still there – a sign of our collective shame.’

  ‘Not everyone fell. What about the political prisoners in Vorkuta who went on strike against Stalin? What about Ludwik? He had the courage to resist.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I do not deny that there were some who preferred suicide. The decision we took was to remain alive, and in order to remain alive we had to surrender our dignity, our self-respect.’

  ‘Was it a price worth paying, Herr Winter? Look at the Soviet Union today or the DDR. Some of us are trying to fight for a new beginning.’

  ‘No more Herr Winter, please. My name is Klaus. To speak of new beginnings is very noble, but we must learn to be dispassionate. I cannot succumb to the false pathos and believe that if people like you were in control, everything would suddenly became great and glorious and good and we would be transformed overnight by wonderful circumstances into becoming wonderful human beings.’

  ‘Your cynicism is corrosive.’

  ‘Cynicism? Remember those who succumbed to similar illusions in 1917 only to become the monsters who scared us so badly twenty years later? That form of self-intoxication is impermissible.’

  ‘The world is bad, human nature is governed by selfish genes, we are all inherently evil. So, according to your logic, we should just sit back and cultivate our own minds. I disagree.’

  ‘That is your privilege, but please don’t distort my views. All I am advising you against is any sense of triumphalism. If I believed that human nature was static, incapable of change, I would not be a Communist today. But I must tell you that there is something in our psyche, probably something related to our biology, that allows our animal instincts to override, to jam the transmissions from our braincells. We humans have done more mischief to each other than the entire species from which we claim our descent. Do you agree?’

  I was beginning to get annoyed, Karl, and I rose as if to leave. ‘I’ve heard some of these arguments before, but despite everything I still believe –’

  ‘Belief! That was always a big problem. Marxism as a surrogate religion with its prophets and popes. Look where it has got us. You believe? You have no right to believe. You must not believe … Why are you standing up? I did not call you in for a discussion on philosophy. Please, sit down.’

  I did as he asked me, but I felt I was being manipulated. Who in hell was Winter?

  ‘Who are you, Klaus?’

  ‘One of your mother’s oldest comrades.’

  ‘But you’re somewhat younger than Gertrude. She would have been eighty-four this year.’

  ‘True. I’ll be seventy-nine this October. We were in Moscow together during the war. We worked in the same building. I remember you as a little boy.’

  ‘So you worked for Soviet military intelligence as well? And you went to see her in Norfolk before the war. What were you doing then?’

  For the first time that afternoon his face paled and he lost his composure, but only for a few seconds. ‘Yes,’ he replied in a slightly choked voice. ‘I did meet her in England. It was work. What did she tell you?’

  It was my turn to smile. ‘Everything,’ I lied.

  ‘Now listen to me, Vladimir. Gertrude told me everything too. I know about the KDD and your political work. I’m very impressed. I circulated some of your pamphlets inside the Party. At the highest levels.’

  I was stunned. I shouted at him. ‘You did what, you crazy old man? How dare you? You had no right and she was wrong to tell you. She promised us that … Who the hell are you, Winter? Tell me!’

  ‘Why does it matter?’

  ‘Because I’m beginning to feel nervous.’

  ‘Did you ever ask your mother who she was?’

  ‘She was my mother.’

  ‘Listen, Vladimir. Your mother and I worked together. In the Soviet Union and in the DDR.’

  I was beginning to understand, but still could not believe Winter’s insinuations. ‘Gertrude worked at the museum. Did you?’

  Winter smiled, but did not speak.

  ‘Well?’ I asked in a tone that was becoming more aggressive.

  Winter shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Look, Herr Winter. You invited me here. You wanted to talk. I want to leave because there is nothing more I want to say to you, but what are you trying to say about my mother?’

  Winter’s eyes narrowed as he looked at me. Helge was right, I remember thinking at the time. This man has blood on his hands.

  ‘Vladimir, either you were very naïve or your subconscious instructed you to maintain the pretence. Did you not know that once you work for the intelligence you can never break free?’

  ‘I knew she had worked for the Soviet Union, but…’

  ‘You mean you really have illusions about the DDR? If Moscow leaves we will collapse overnight. We were Moscow’s German extension and, naturally, those of us who had worked for them elsewhere in Europe were now sent home. Neither Gertrude nor I ever left. You’re trembling, Vlady.’

  ‘Are you telling me that my mother worked for the Stasi?’

  ‘No! She worked for me, and I head a special section. We act as a liaison between the Foreign Intelligence, the Stasi and various undercover operations inside both these organizations. We report first to Moscow, then to Berlin.’

  I felt nauseous. I rushed to the bathroom and vomited. My eyes filled with tears. I tried to recover myself and returned to Winter’s study.

  ‘Have a drink, Vlady, if I may call you that now. I think you need one.’

  ‘I’m fine. I drank some water.’

  ‘You hate her now? You think she betrayed the KDD?’

  ‘What I feel about her is between me and my memories of her. But what do you want of me?’

  ‘Nothing much. I just feel we should meet once a month. I am not asking you to become a spy, Vlady. There’s no need. We have a complete file on the KDD, its membership, its documents and much more detailed minutes of its meeting than you ever see. In short, Vlady, we know everything. We have a few dozen informers inside your group who are paid to write detailed and regular reports. Do you want to see them?’

  I wanted to strangle him and burn his flat. I’m serious, Karl. It was the only time in my life that I felt really violent. Nobody knew I was there. If I killed him and destroyed all the papers, who would ever have found out? But it was a momentary madness, which scared me. I was now desperate to know the names of the informers. I said so to him.<
br />
  Winter walked to a desk, picked up a file from which he removed two single sheets of paper and handed them to me. I devoured them like a man possessed. I was shaken to my very core. What I had read was a totally accurate account of a meeting that had been held two nights ago. I slumped in the chair, speechless.

  ‘Sometimes we get contradictory reports. Gertrude would then clear up the problem. Now she is gone. By the way, I’m very pleased you’ve established close links with the Pastors. Some of them, as you would expect, are working for us. Your lot are different, they want the DDR to disband its standing army. Their simplicity is dangerous. It threatens our state.’

  I was speechless, overwhelmed with shock, rage, despair. They knew. They could arrest us all any minute. I thought of you, Karl, and what would happen if both Helge and I were locked up. A state orphanage for you? The very thought made me scream.

  ‘What do you want of me? I do not wish to see you every month or ever again. I will tell you nothing. Are you going to give me the names of the informers in our group?’

  ‘No. Listen to me, Vlady. I happen to agree with your aims. If I were not working for the state I would be a member of the KDD. I think we do need to democratize, have elections, free the press and everything else, provided that in the last analysis the present state remains in control, just like in the Western countries which your friends admire so much. Our counterparts in Bonn, Paris and London are every bit as ruthless as we are. The difference is they have hundreds of years of experience.’

  I agreed with him, but refused to give him the slightest satisfaction. ‘I still don’t wish to see you again.’

  ‘But who else would tell you that a big debate is taking place within the Soviet politburo along lines not unlike some of the demands in your pamphlets?’

  ‘You mean that there is…?’

  ‘A reformer in the Kremlin? Not yet, but soon. Very soon. My equivalent in Moscow, the late Yuri Andropov, decided that reform was the only way.’