by David Young
*
The two women – grandmother and granddaughter – traded smiles and tears in almost equal measure as they began to fill in the gaps in their lives, until Müller realised the thirty minutes Tilsner had allowed her was on the point of expiring.
‘Is there anything you can tell me about my father, Helga?’
The woman stared at Müller for a moment, delaying her answer. ‘Well, Karin. I don’t like to speak ill of him. I never knew him. At the time you must have been conceived, Jannika and I had been split up in the confusion that followed the war. But Jannika was always waiting for him to come back, and he didn’t.’
The woman continued to hold the detective’s eyes in her gaze, as though wondering whether to trust her.
Müller knew something of the post-war horrors. They were never spoken about publicly, never admitted. It was just known that some Germans – especially women – had been left horribly damaged. She hoped that wasn’t the real tragedy behind her mother’s abruptly shortened life.
She could tell Helga had noticed the look of fear that must have crossed her face. The woman held out her hand. ‘Come here. I’ve got something to give you.’
*
As Helga opened the top drawer in her bedroom dressing table, Müller was surprised to see her pull out an identical tin box to the one her adoptive mother had given her in Oberhof the previous summer. She handed it to Müller.
‘You ought to have this,’ she said. ‘You have more claim over it than I do. Though if you could do me a copy, I would appreciate it.’
Müller picked up the photograph and examined it. It was almost exactly the same shot as the one Rosamund Müller had given her. Only the changed expression on Jannika’s face – a broader smile – indicated that had been taken at a fractionally different time. Perhaps seconds later, or earlier, than the one already in Müller’s possession.
A flash of metal in the bottom of the rusting tin caught Müller’s eye.
‘What’s this?’
‘I don’t know for certain. It’s just something Jannika got from their first . . . meeting. The first meeting with your father. She kept it hidden. Look at the writing.’
Müller swivelled the octagonal metal disc in her fingers so that the inscription or stamp was facing her. Then realisation dawned. From her Russian lessons at school. It was Cyrillic. Müller slowly drew her finger across the indentations in the metal as she translated, her excitement growing in tandem with her fear. Litshnyi Znak – the two longest words. That loosely translated as identification tag. Then numbers and more letters. Second Company, 404 Battalion, soldier number 105.
She stared at her grandmother open-mouthed.
‘You said “meeting”. Is that really what you meant?’
Helga Nonnemacher lowered her eyes.
‘No!’ shouted Müller. ‘Don’t tell me she was ra—’
The woman clasped her hand to Müller’s mouth, and held her tightly. ‘Don’t say it, Karin. Don’t think about it. As I say, it wasn’t until a few months after the war that Jannika and I were reunited. By then, something had happened, he’d had to move away. But Jannika never gave me the impression that there was any element of coercion. I told you, she was heartbroken he didn’t come back for her.’
‘Did he know about me?’ asked Müller, balling her hands into fists, trying to fight back the tears.
‘I don’t think so, Karin. I don’t think so.’
65
After packing Emil’s car and safely strapping the twins inside, Müller requested that they drive over the Saale and along the Magistrale – to take one last look at the strange concrete city that had been her working home for the best part of a year. With spring now arrived, the atmosphere felt similar to Müller to when the case had started. Ha-Neu’s numerous fountains were now working again, their cleansing plumes almost literally washing away the smogs of winter. Mothers were out with their prams showing off their new offspring – just as they had been in July the previous year – and the tiled murals decorating the sides of the slab apartment blocks were illuminated by the sunlight. Mosaics of colour breaking up the otherwise monotonous drabness of cement and concrete grey.
‘I thought you were pleased to be getting back to Berlin,’ said Emil, ‘but you look almost wistful.’
Müller reached over and squeezed his thigh. ‘I am pleased. The Hauptstadt is my home.’ Then she glanced at the twins, sleeping peacefully on the back seat. Her time in this city had changed her life. She wasn’t sure if it represented the future, with its streets without names, its peculiar numbering system for addresses, and block after block of identical apartments. But with the arrival of spring, Ha-Neu – which had closed in on her during the dark winter nights – now had a much more benign feel. It was where her children had been born. The children she’d been told she’d never be able to have. And perhaps it would always hold a place in her heart.
EPILOGUE
Four months later: July 1976
Halle-Neustadt
The pretty policewoman’s words in court – the little speech the authorities tried to stop her giving – must have done some good, Dagna. I know you’d have done the same, spoken up for me like her. And what the doctor said, after her. That the accident had left me brain-damaged. I don’t agree with that. I feel fine. But if it saved my life, well . . .
Whenever I have these conversations with myself in my head, it’s you I’m thinking of, Dagna. It was always funny that you were two years younger than me, but so, so much more sensible. That’s what Mutti used to say. I still remember fondly us playing in the corrugated-metal mine hut. We had such fun. Even though that place, I suppose, should be a place of terror for me, it’s not. Because I remember our games there before the war, as young children. Not what happened that day the Red Army came.
I still have to attend the hospital regularly for tests, I still have to report to the police station. All those sorts of things I can put up with. But what I find hard to deal with is the fact that I’ll never see you again. So I’m sitting here, with the only photo I have of you on the desk, talking into this machine. It’s one Hansi used to have for his Ministry work. For some reason they didn’t take it away.
So I thought I’d record this last conversation with you, even though I don’t think you’ll ever hear it. All my attempts to find out about you, and where you are in the Federal Republic, come back with the answer ‘Whereabouts Unknown’. So maybe I won’t try to talk to you in my head anymore, just this last time into the machine.
You see I wanted to tell you something, something that only you would understand.
It was those eyes that did it. Those eyes and the epicanthal folds. It became obvious a few weeks after she came back from the hospital that she wasn’t Hansi’s. She was that Berlin barman’s. You see we didn’t just kiss and cuddle. I wasn’t really being completely honest then. I think I was lying to myself.
Oh, poor, poor Heike. They keep saying she was called Tanja, but she wasn’t. She was my Heike. And I couldn’t let Hansi find out. That’s why I had to do it. The poor little mite would have been disowned by him. I would have been too, and I don’t think I could have survived without Hansi. I’m not sure I can now.
You see, life is very fragile. I learned that soon after the war, when they took my baby away, before I’d even had a chance to give her a name. I couldn’t let that happen again. So I had to protect her in the only way I could, by helping her go to sleep.
I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me, Dagna. Hansi would have known. I’m sure he would.
It was her eyes.
GLOSSARY
Ampelmann
East German pedestrian traffic light symbol
Barkas
East German van model
Bezirk
District
Der schwarze Kanal
The Black Channel – East German weekly current affairs programme
Doppelkorn
Distilled alcoholic dri
nk, usually from rye
f6
East German cigarette brand
Freikörperkultur
Naturism
Ha-Neu
Short form for Halle-Neustadt
Hauptmann
Captain
Hauptstadt
Capital city (in this book, East Berlin)
Interhotel
East German chain of luxury hotels
Intershop
Chain of government-run stores selling luxury goods where only foreign hard currency was accepted
Jugendwerkhof
Reform school or youth workhouse
Kaufhalle
East German term for supermarket
Keibelstrasse
The People’s Police headquarters near Alexanderplatz – the East German equivalent of Scotland Yard
Kinder des Krieges
War children
Kriminalpolizei
Criminal Police or CID
Kriminaltechniker
Forensic officer
Kripo
CID (short form) – also known as the ‘K’
Liebling
Darling
Main Intelligence Directorate
The Stasi’s foreign arm – the East German equivalent of MI6
Ministry for State Security (MfS)
The East German secret police, abbreviated to MfS from the German initials, and colloquially known as the Stasi – a contraction of the German name
Mutti
Mum, or Mummy
Neues Deutschland
The official East German Communist Party newspaper
Oberleutnant
First Lieutenant
Oberliga
Top division of the East German football league
Oberst
Colonel
Oma
Grandma, granny
People’s Police
The regular East German state police (Volkspolizei in German)
Pioneers
Organisation for children operated by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and East Germany
Plattenbauten
Concrete slab apartment blocks
Räuchermännchen
Incense-burning figurine
Roter Ochse
Red Ox
S-bahn
Rapid transit railway
Scheisse
Shit
Sekt
German sparkling wine
Stasi
Colloquial term for the Ministry for State Security (see above)
Strandbad
Lido or bathing beach
U-bahn
Underground railway
Unterleutnant
Sub-lieutenant
Volkspolizei
See People’s Police above
Vopo
Short form of Volkspolizei, usually referring to uniformed police officers, as opposed to detectives
Wachtmeister
Police sergeant
Weihnachtsmann
Father Christmas
Wohnkomplex
Housing estate
Ypsilon Hochhaus
Y-section high-rise apartment block
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction, and although the socialist city of Halle-Neustadt existed – and still exists in the capitalist united Germany as part of neighbouring Halle – all the events that happened in this book are products of my imagination.
I have very loosely used a few true stories from real life East Germany as springboards for the plot. Halle-Neustadt was the scene of a horrific murder in the early 1980s, one of the most notorious in the former DDR. The so-called Crossword Puzzle Murder (the Kreuzworträtselmord) saw a young boy’s torso found in a suitcase dumped by a railway line. The case was eventually solved by the local Halle Kripo team under the leadership of Hauptmann Siegfried Schwarz (see the Acknowledgements which follow) – not by detectives brought in from Berlin. They cracked it thanks to handwriting in a crossword in the newspaper used to wrap the body – but only after an exhaustive check of hundreds of thousands of writing samples (it’s cited as the largest sampling of handwriting in history). The murder of seven-year-old Lars Bense is still raw in the Halle area – indeed in 2013 a case was reopened against the girlfriend of the youth convicted of the killing, although it was set aside a year later due to lack of evidence. In using some of the background to the Crossword Puzzle Murder in my fictional story, my intention is not to reopen old wounds or to use tragic events as the basis for entertainment, and I hope I haven’t crossed that line.
The plot line of babies going missing from a hospital was based on a story told to me by DDR crime expert Dr Remo Kroll about how the Stasi took over the investigation into infant murders in a Leipzig hospital – because they didn’t want the public to become alarmed. The Palace of the Republic in Berlin was completed in 1976, but as far as I know it wasn’t built near or on top of a former illegal abortion clinic – the latter is fictional.
Cases of foetal abduction anywhere in the world are incredibly rare, and on almost every occasion the mother-to-be does not survive being mutilated. As far as I’m aware, there has never been a foetal abduction within a hospital, and the one involving Karin is obviously fictitious.
Karin Müller’s ‘home village’, Oberhof, was the subject of a private guest house confiscation programme but in 1950, not 1951, as in the book, although the Müller and Traugott guest houses are fictional. A handful of the owners managed to get their property back a few years later, but most did not – at least in DDR times – and the episode remains controversial to this day. A similar but better-known nationalisation operation (Aktion Rose) was carried out on the island of Rügen in February 1953.
The geography I’ve used of Halle-Neustadt is reasonably accurate, although I’ve cheated a little for the sake of the plot. For example, as far as I know Wohnkomplex VI had not been completed by 1975 – although it appears on a 1977 street map. Similarly, the high-rise ‘Y’ blocks are not opposite the fire station. Fidel Castro did visit – but a few years earlier than in my fictional account, in 1972. I’ve ‘cheated’ in a few other places to help the plot, for example, Der schwarze Kanal, was – I think – broadcast on Mondays rather than Fridays, so please don’t write complaining about that one!
Although my prologue is fictional, a similar atrocity involving Red Army soldiers did happen in a mine in Halle-Bruckdorf at that time (I suspect a disused opencast mine – although a few underground brown coal mines do exist, they are the exception, and there are none I know of in the Halle area). The story was finally told in 2009 by the then eighty-three-year-old Ruth Schumacher. Ruth – then aged eighteen – was gang-raped by five Russian soldiers in the waterlogged Halle-Bruckdorf mine. But in communist East Germany, Ruth says she was forced to sign a statement denying the rapes ever happened, because the Soviets were regarded as ‘liberators’ and ‘friends’. The rapes left Ruth unable to have children – and in 2009 she was living alone as a widow in a cramped flat in Leipzig, having survived her former U-boat captain husband. They were married for forty-nine years, but she told American National Public Radio they didn’t marry out of love. Instead, recalls Ruth: ‘When I told him “I’m not pure and innocent anymore”, he didn’t walk away from me.’
Read on for a letter from the author and an exclusive chapter from the first book in the Karin Müller series, STASI CHILD
A message from David . . .
If you enjoyed STASI WOLF – why not join the DAVID YOUNG READER’S CLUB by emailing me at [email protected], or you can order the first book in the Karin Müller series now.
Hello,
First of all, I’d like to say a big thank you to you for deciding to read STASI WOLF, and I very much hope you enjoyed it. Although it’s part of a series, I’ve tried to make sure each novel has a discrete story within it, so that anyone starting here will not feel they’ve missed out by not reading STASI CHILD, or the books that will follow.
There’s no need to go back and read my debut novel – but I really hope you do, and if you enjoyed STASI WOLF, I’m sure you’ll enjoy that too. The main action is set just a few months earlier, in February 1975.
People often ask me why I’ve decided to set my series in East Germany. The idea came originally from a self-booked tour I arranged for my little indiepop group at the end of the noughties. I’d started the ‘band’ – really it was just a singer songwriter project (and I can’t sing, although some of the songs are ok) – as an escape valve for an increasingly unfulfilling day job as a news editor in the BBC’s international TV newsroom.
Someone at a party who was in a Ska band mentioned that German venues loved booking UK bands, no matter how good they were (or weren’t). So – in my fiftieth year – I had one of my many mid-life crises and decided to self-book a little tour. It was one of the best experiences of my life – a dream come true.