Oranges for Christmas

by Margarita Morris

  “Today we will be examining Marx’s theories of the class struggle – the conflict between an ownership class and a working class. Karl Marx,” - Herr Schmidt walks over to the portraits of the Communist leaders and thinkers on the classroom wall – “was a great man who understood the problems faced by the workers in an unjust, bourgeois society.”

  As Herr Schmidt drones on I switch my brain off and just scribble down everything he says, like an automaton. I fill two pages of my notebook and am about to turn over to a third page (Herr Schmidt has just started describing in minute detail Marx’s collaboration with Friedrich Engels) when the great orator splutters mid-sentence and comes to a stop.

  This is so unexpected that I look up to see what is happening. Herr Schmidt is standing at the front of the classroom, mouth hanging open and eyes bulging in indignation. I follow his gaze to the back of the room to see who or what he is looking at. Hans is sitting in the corner seat by the window. He has put his hand up to ask a question.

  “What is it?” snaps Herr Schmidt. No one ever interrupts Herr Schmidt.

  Hans’ lips curl at the corners in a faint smirk. I know he’s going to try and say something clever to rile Herr Schmidt. My heart sinks.

  When Hans speaks there’s a pretend naivety in his voice as if he were a child asking an innocent question of a loving parent. “We call ourselves the German Democratic Republic, but how can we be a democratic country when there is only one political party?”

  He might as well have launched a hand grenade at Herr Schmidt. That is the sort of question that can land you behind bars in a country like ours. I have to resist the urge to dive under the desk in anticipation of the fallout which such a question is likely to trigger. I’m sure no one is breathing.

  Herr Schmidt looks as if he might explode at any moment. The red blotches on his head have turned a nasty shade of purple. He makes more of the Sauerkraut-mixed-with-barbed-wire rasping noises in his throat.

  “The working class only needs one party to represent their interests and that party is the Communist Party. Therefore there is no need for free elections because the working class has no need of choice.”

  Hans pretends to consider this absurd argument for a moment. Matthias and Joachim are grinning in delight, enjoying every moment of this charade. I try to signal to Hans to stop before he lands himself in real trouble, but I’m too far away and he doesn’t see me grimacing at him.

  “But surely,” says Hans in a genial voice as if he and Herr Schmidt were enjoying a light-hearted discussion over a couple of beers, “a party needs to win an election where there is a choice in order to demonstrate that it has the support of the people.”

  Is Hans out of his mind? He could get expelled for this.

  Matthias and Joachim look in Hans’ direction and nod their heads in agreement. Astrid looks at me and rolls her eyes to the ceiling. I wish the bell would ring and we could all go home.

  All eyes are turned on Herr Schmidt now, waiting to see how he will respond to Hans’ argument.

  Herr Schmidt walks up to Hans, places both his hands down on the desk and leans forward. Hans flinches at the nearness of Herr Schmidt.

  “An ignorant and impudent young man like you,” says Herr Schmidt, spraying Hans with spittle, “cannot yet appreciate the values of our socialist society. But a stint of compulsory service in the National People’s Army will soon put that right.”

  The smirk slips from Hans’ face.

  Brrrrng! At the sound of the bell everyone jumps to their feet, not waiting to be dismissed.

  Astrid appears at my side. “Komm,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I hurriedly pack my things away, sling my bag over my shoulder and follow her out into the crush of students. She’s walking fast and it’s difficult to keep up with her.

  “Mein Gott,” says Astrid to me over her shoulder. “Can’t you knock some sense into that boyfriend of yours?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Well, whatever he is, tell him not to be so stupid. Does he think he’s going to single-handedly change the political system of the whole country?”

  “I don’t think he’s trying to do that.” But Astrid isn’t listening to me, and anyway, this is not the place to get into a discussion about political opposition, not with Stasi spies lurking around every corner. We’re almost at the end of the corridor when I suddenly remember that I’ve left my cardigan in the classroom.

  “Sorry,” I say to Astrid. “I have to go back. Won’t be a minute.”

  “I’ll wait here for you.” She leans against the wall. “Be quick.”

  I head back to the classroom, weaving my way through the tide of bodies flowing in the opposite direction. I open the classroom door and see my cardigan on the back of the chair where I left it. Herr Schmidt’s copy of Das Kapital, I notice, is also still on his desk. As I enter the room I become aware of a noise to my left. I turn and see Matthias and Joachim standing by the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Ulbricht. At the sight of me entering the room they practically jump out of their skins and run for the door without so much as an Auf Wiedersehen. In their rush to leave, one of them drops something on the floor. It lands with a clatter and rolls to its resting place by the leg of a nearby desk. How odd, I think, as I look towards the door which they have left swinging.

  I pick up my cardigan then I walk over to where they were standing to see what they dropped. There’s a black pen on the floor. I bend down to pick it up.

  Just then Herr Schmidt walks in. He goes to his desk and picks up Das Kapital. He looks up and sees me standing there, holding the black pen. Then his eyes dart to the pictures of the Communist leaders on the wall, then back to me. His face turns purple. He looks as if he would like to shoot me.

  I turn to the portraits on the wall to see what he was looking at and feel the blood draining from my face. The portraits have been defaced. Marx has donned a pair of black rimmed glasses; Engels has insects crawling around in his bushy beard; Lenin has sprouted horns which make him look even more like Mephistopheles and Ulbricht’s straggly, grey moustache has turned into a short, black, toothbrush moustache in the style of Adolf Hitler.

  I look at the pen in my hand and my legs start to shake. I’m in for it now. I can see Herr Schmidt weighing up the evidence. I might as well be holding a bloodied dagger beside a mutilated corpse. Guilt must be written all over my face even though I’m innocent.

  Herr Schmidt starts to walk towards me. I can imagine what is going through his mind. The glasses on Karl Marx and the insects in Engels’ beard are bad enough although they could possibly, just possibly, be excused as foolish teenage pranks. But, in this society which forbids political protest, the devil’s horns on Lenin and the Hitler moustache on Ulbricht are crimes of treason; the first as good as blasphemous, the second suggesting an uncomfortable parallel between the dictatorships of Communism and Fascism.

  “Give me the pen,” says Herr Schmidt. His voice is cold. I pass it to him. He holds it gingerly between his forefinger and thumb as if it is itself contaminated with treacherous ideology.

  “What is the meaning of this…this excrescence?” he hisses, leaning towards me. I recoil at the sourness of his breath.

  “It wasn’t me,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Who was it then?” he asks, fixing me with his weasel-like eyes.

  “I didn’t see, they had already gone by the time I came back,” I lie. “I only came back to get my cardigan.”

  “They?” he asks, his lips curling at the edges. “So there was more than one?”

  “I…I don’t know.” I blush to the roots of my hair. He knows I’m lying, I’m sure of it. I don’t want to snitch on my classmates but if I refuse to give their names then I’m as good as condoning their actions and therefore, in his eyes, just as guilty.

  He touches Ulbricht’s Hitler-style moustache with a nicotine-stained finger. The tip of his finger comes away black.

  “The ink isn�
�t yet dry,” he says, with a note of triumph in his voice. “The culprits, if it really wasn’t you as you claim,” his voice is full of scepticism, “can’t have been gone long. Are you sure you didn’t see them?”

  “Not properly,” I say. “I was over there,” I point to the front of the classroom, “collecting my cardigan, and someone rushed out. I don’t know who it was.”

  This is a ridiculous thing to say. It’s inconceivable that I wouldn’t recognise my own classmates who I’ve been at school with for years, even if I only saw them briefly from behind. But I’m determined not to back down now. For all I know he saw them leaving the room and knows exactly who they are. I can believe that he’s playing with me like this for the pure pleasure of tormenting me.

  “This,” he jabs a finger at the portraits, “is a very serious matter. You may go now but do not think you have heard the last of this.”

  I pick up my bag and walk out of the room. In the few minutes that I spent in there, everything has changed. I am not the same person I was five minutes ago. I am a marked person. I have become an Enemy of the State.

  Astrid is leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor. She looks at her watch as I approach.

  “What took you so long?”

  “Not here,” I say looking behind me.

  When we are outside and clear of the building I tell her about the portraits and how I stupidly picked up the pen and Herr Schmidt found me. I don’t tell her it was Matthias and Joachim who did it. Even though she’s my friend, I don’t want to be responsible for spreading gossip that could get the boys into trouble.

  “Don’t worry,” says Astrid putting her arm around me. “It won’t come to anything.”

  But I know she’s just saying that to make me feel better. The fact is, I’m scared. Very scared.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 4 - Stasi

  Sabine

  I was right to be scared yesterday.

  It’s Brigitta who notices the car at half past seven in the morning. Mother is at work. I told them last night what had happened at the end of Herr Schimdt’s lesson and warned them that the Stasi might want to question me about it. Still, it’s a nasty shock to realise they’ve come so soon.

  Brigitta is standing by the edge of the sitting room window, half hidden behind the curtain. She calls me over, her voice quivering with fear.

  “Look,” she whispers. There’s a pale green Wartburg parked outside our building. The large car, with its long sleek bonnet and gently curving roof is conspicuous. Hardly anyone around here owns a car and those that do all have box-like Trabis. There are two men sitting in the front of the car, looking up at the building. Stasi officers.

  The man in the passenger seat looks at his watch, then nods to the driver. They open the car doors and climb out. The man who gets out of the passenger side is tall, with square shoulders and steel grey, bristly hair. The driver is shorter and stockier. From this height I can see that he has a bald patch on the top of his head. Both men are wearing brown, anonymous raincoats. Civilian clothes.

  They slam the car doors and walk towards the building. I lose sight of them as they enter through the door. It will only be a matter of seconds now before they arrive at the apartment. For a moment I feel paralysed, unable even to think. I shake my head and pull myself together.

  “Quick,” I say to Brigitta. “Dieter’s letter is in my notebook in the chest of drawers. Burn it now.” I have no idea if the men will search the apartment, looking for more evidence that I am a traitor to the state, but Dieter’s note explaining his plans to dig a tunnel into East Berlin could put me behind bars for the rest of my life.

  Brigitta runs to the bedroom, retrieves the letter, runs back to the living room, and tosses it into the Kachelofen just as there’s a sharp rap on the door.

  I walk down the hall, my legs shaking with each step. I take a deep breath and open the door to the apartment. The two men are standing there. The tall, grey-haired one has a face etched with deep lines like cracks in a dry riverbed. He is standing in front of the driver who has stationed himself off to one side with his feet apart and arms crossed as if he expects me to make a run for it and is getting ready to tackle me. The tall one introduces himself matter-of-factly.

  “Herr Stein from the Staatssicherheitsdienst.” The State Secret Police. The Stasi.

  “Fräulein Neumann, we need to ask you a few questions about a matter of state security. You are required to come with us.” I note that he doesn’t ask if I am Fräulein Neumann. He already knows that.

  There’s no point pretending I don’t know what he’s talking about, so I nod my head deciding that it’s probably best to appear co-operative.

  “But first I must say goodbye to my sister.” Without waiting for them to object, I walk back to the sitting room, where Brigitta is curled up in her favourite reading chair, clutching her book of fairy tales to her chest. There’s a look of terror on her face.

  “Don’t worry,” I say giving her a hug. “Stay inside and don’t open the door to anyone.” She nods. “When Mother gets back from work, tell her what’s happened but tell her not to worry. I’ll be back soon.” I kiss her forehead. Then I return to the hallway where the two men are waiting for me.

  I follow Herr Stein down the stairs, the driver bringing up the rear. Just as I think things can’t get any worse, we encounter Frau Lange on her way back from the shop. She doesn’t say anything and I refuse to look in her direction, but I can imagine the smirk on her face.

  We step outside and I have a sudden urge to sprint as fast as I can down the street, but Herr Stein seems to anticipate my thoughts and before I know what is happening he opens the rear passenger door and pushes me into the car. The men get in the front. The inside of the car smells of cigarettes and men’s hair oil.

  The driver starts the engine and we pull away from the curb. I slump back, defeated. The familiar streets of Prenzlauer Berg slide past the window, but none of them seem real.

  To focus my mind and stop myself from panicking, I try to concentrate on where we are going. We seem to be heading in a south east direction towards the suburb of Lichtenberg. We take the Dimitroffstrasse, then the Frankfurter Allee, a rigidly straight Prussian road. Twenty minutes or so after we set off, the car turns into Normannenstrasse and then pulls into a vast, soulless square surrounded on all sides by enormous, inter-connected multi-storey blocks. We stop in front of a brown concrete building. I know, without needing to be told, that this is Stasi Headquarters and the surrounding buildings are where the Stasi machine operates from.

  The men jump out of the car and the driver opens my door. I climb out feeling small and helpless next to the megalithic architecture. Herr Stein steers me into the brown concrete building and into an ascending Paternoster lift. I stand well back from the edge for fear of falling out. On the second floor, he takes me by the arm and we jump out of the moving lift. He escorts me down the corridor to a small, square room.

  “In here,” he says.

  I walk into the room which is barely furnished with a gun-metal filing cabinet and a desk with two chairs, one on either side. The desk is empty save for a dun-coloured telephone with rows of extra buttons next to the handset and a large metal box with two reels of tape. I’ve never seen such a machine before, but I think it must be a tape recorder. This will be the start of the file that the Stasi keeps on me, if they haven’t got one already.

  Herr Stein indicates the nearest chair, the one with its back to the door.

  “Setzen Sie sich!” Sit down!

  There’s a cloth on the seat of the chair. I don’t know why it’s there. I think maybe one of the cleaners left it. I pick it up, intending to drop it on the floor, but Herr Stein shouts at me.

  “Leave it!”

  I look at him, startled.

  “You must sit on that,” he says.

  I don’t know why I need to sit on the cloth, but I don’t want to aggravate him any further so I smooth it flat and sit down, bolt up
right with my hands clasped in my lap. This is all so unnerving, I can feel myself trembling. I look from the telephone to the tape recorder, then back to the telephone. They’re only inanimate objects, but they’re making me nervous.

  I thought Herr Stein was going to question me, but he seems to be waiting for someone else. I know he’s still there, behind me, because I can hear his breathing. I sit and wait.

  Dieter

  “So what made you want to do this?” I’m on my way to the Technische Universität with Harry to help him recruit students to work on the digging. I know what is motivating Claudia and Werner, but I’ve never known what made Harry want to pursue this dangerous project.

  “Do what?” he asks with his usual casualness.

  “You know, organise an escape route for people in the East. You don’t have family over there do you? You’re not even from Berlin.” He’s already told us that his father was American and his mother was from Hamburg. He grew up in Boston and has dual American and West German nationality. He uses his American passport to get himself through Checkpoint Charlie, although the West German one would do the job just as well. He reckons letting an American through pisses the East German guards off more than letting a West German through. I’m still waiting for him to answer my question.

  “You’re right,” he says. “I don’t have family over there behind the Wall. But the thing is… my dad was killed in the war when his plane was shot down over Dresden. I was seven at the time. I spent the rest of my childhood desperate to come to Europe and see where he died. I came here in 1954 at the age of eighteen.” He pauses and stares straight ahead. When he speaks his voice is so low I have to lean in close to hear what he’s saying. “My dad died trying to free Europe from the tyranny of Hitler. Now I’m doing what I can to free people from the tyranny of Communism. Happy now?”

  I’ve never heard him speak so seriously before. I feel humbled. I’m doing what I’m doing because I want to get Sabine, Brigitta and Mother out of East Berlin. Would I be selfless enough to do this if I didn’t have family over there?