Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  All of this happened with the approval of the State in its quest to demonstrate the excellence of the Communist way of life over the decadence of the West, the paltry competition being a trivial song by four English bourgeoisie crowing about wanting to hold someone’s hand.

  How could Capitalism hope to compete with Prokofiev, Chekhov, or Tsiolkovsky when this was their best contribution to the arts, and exploding American rockets to the sciences? Every woman on Earth would now want to do more than just hold hands with Yuri Gagarin.

  In his Bunker days, Nicolaus learned how to wheedle extra slices of ham, and to play on the instincts of the SS guards or Schwesterkriegerine for extra ten minutes in the shower or in his cot. His natural ability with languages and attracted the attention of the State and qualifying him for the Extended Secondary School of East Germany, the EOS, where his placement among the top 3 of his class nominated him for the very few slots available at East German University.

  Nicolaus excelled at University in the arts, not so well in maths, and somewhere in between in a required sport, eventually being placed on the University’s 1,500 freestyle swim team.

  Nicolaus made a few friends at University, but the only female anyone could see in his life was Halina. Most people thought them siblings, with Nicolaus as the brother who inherited all of life’s beauty and intelligence, leaving none for his crippled, mute sister. The two would meet every few days at a beer hall within walking distance of her khrushchyovka after classes at her trade school. In the same way, they celebrated annually over pitchers of German bocks and pilsners, their adopted birthday, May 1st, the day Zerrissen had dragged them out of the Bunker.

  They would begin the ritual by sharing the experiences of the week, inquire after each other’s health, in gentile, but silent signing, at which both were now accomplished. They communicated in this way, safe from prying ears, of poetry, opera, lyrics of protest songs by denounced musicians, movies, hilarious off-color jokes making the rounds, erudite critiques of the incompetent East German government and Marxist system, at which point their conversations would become a flurry of hands, interrupting each other with a slap on the table, pointing, laughing aloud, mystifying and amusing the patrons in the surrounding booths, certain that the mute couple was talking about them, which, in fact, Halina and Nicolaus unabashedly often were.

  When the subject of Pyotr’s unresolved disappearance did arise, Nicolaus described a sensation he called his ‘phantom twin’ - the feeling that Pyotr was there, or nearby. Every few weeks, the feeling was so strong that his arm and neck hairs would stand up, which he described as the feeling of dandelion seeds blown on the back of his neck by a draft from nowhere. Nicolaus could not know that each of these phantom moments coincided with the Wermut capsule orbiting on the near side of the Moon during its closest approach with Earth every 27.32 days.

  The two became extensions of each other as real siblings do, and if Halina wanted the relationship to go further, she never gave any signal, to the relief of Nicolaus who was not inclined that way towards females in general and valued her more to fill the void left by Pyotr.

  Sometimes they would go to his student flat on campus and listen to recordings on tape and vinyl of Negro jazz and other forms of Amerikanische Musik contraband, possession of which could send them both to jail. Evidently, any classmates eavesdropping on these sessions refrained from dropping a dime on the pair, preferring instead to his dropping the phonograph needle on the delicious forbidden music.

  On day passes, the two would cross the Checkpoints to admire West Berlin merchandise, and watch movies, especially the affordable matinees from America - a venial middle finger to General Secretary Erich Honecker that was selectively overlooked by the State.

  Nicolaus’ absorbed these movies and related magazines, to feed his innate skill with languages. By the time of his graduation, he could speak English with the accent of an East London guttersnipe, or Oxford Lord, or a Texan oilman on vacation, with equal indifference. His plan was to be hired by an embassy or perhaps a Western company as a translator.

  But his choice in the matter, such as these things ever are when the State pays for your education, was taken away from him the night he celebrated his graduation for performing an unnatural act, a crime against the State, at a theater in East Berlin known to cater to boys and men interested in that sort of thing. Nicolaus was arrested by the State police while on his knees.

  ULF

  When informed by the local chapter of the East Berlin Central Committee that he was promoted from mere resident to superintendent of his apartment building, that day became the proudest of Ulf’s life. He was not an educated man, nor, by virtue of birthing complications, was he particularly bright. His mother’s husband, a corporal in the Wehrmacht, had been sent to Stalingrad to fight for the Reich and Fatherland. His platoon was marched directly from their railroad car into combat where he had just raised his rifle in the direction of the Russians when a sniper bullet penetrated his helmet through-and-through. He was dead before his corpse fell on a heap of countless others from both sides and was promptly replaced by another German infantryman just arriving out-of-breath from the train.

  A year later, surviving soldiers from the Soviet battalion defending Stalingrad was formed into a platoon and ordered to walk westward, not stopping until they hit Berlin, living off the land along the way. As they crossed the German border, they found themselves on a neglected truck farm, barely two chickens surviving, which Ulf’s mother struggled to maintain on her own.

  Still in their teens and knowing nothing but combat since the age of 13, the platoon deployed per their training in military fashion, hunched over in groups of two throughout the farm, using their rifles to turn over buckets and baskets, poking mounds of hay and leaves with bayonets, or tossing grenades where dark or blind corners presented a risk. These Soviet boys had learned the hard way to distrust nooks and crannies.

  Just such a precaution had one soldier drop an incendiary grenade down the farm’s one-hole latrine, setting everything below on fire, including significant portions of the shed that covered the hole. This did not matter to the platoon, which had been performing this morning ritual outdoors in ice-covered foxholes for half a decade. The search for deserters, combatants, and anything that could be construed as food or firewood, continued into sheds, barns, lean-tos, and anything resembling a structure.

  Finally, at the farmhouse proper, they burst through the front door, expecting a modicum of resistance, finding instead Ulf’s mother cowering in a corner, whimpering in a language they did not understand but recognized as German. What the soldiers did understand was their own hunger, and they helped themselves to the meager pantry of bread and canned beans. They left the baking powder and flour alone but were delighted to find a string of sausages and a tin of milk hidden in a cache under a rug that covered a trapdoor over the cellar. She watched helplessly from her corner as they went through everything she owned and had hoped would last her through this historically harsh winter, which, this month being January, promised to last at least another three.

  The platoon corporal leaned back in the available chair at the roughhewn table, picking his teeth with a chicken bone from one of the two surviving chickens, as he contemplated the platoons’ next move. He speculated that this hovel would be a good place as any to sleep in that night, though one eye would be kept on the woman and the collection of knives and cleavers hanging over the water pump stand.

  A young soldier, not yet growing whiskers but aged by combat, rifled through drawers and cabinets looking for loot that could make their journey to Berlin a bit more comfortable. As he held up items for the corporal to accept or reject, his eyes fell on the wind-up gramophone, easily the nicest piece of furniture in the house, itself from an anonymous Jewish family that was nowhere to be found these days, and so would not no longer have a need of it. Its wooden enclosure had been water strained by a leak through the roof thatching that no husband was around to repair, causing t
he veneer to warp and peel. While scheming how to turn the gramophone into an item of barter, or to cart back home to Russia, he noticed a picture frame on top holding a photograph of the woman’s husband, looking proud and confident in a Wehrmacht uniform of a corporal.

  The mood in the room changed tangibly as the photograph was passed around the men platoon who recognized the soldier’s regiment as one they had fought at Stalingrad, with no sympathy for the black ribbon wrapped around one corner of the frame indicating he died there, perhaps at their hands.

  The woman was raped by every soldier, in order of rank, until sunrise, at which point the combat footing part of the war resumed, and they left with all the food, the remaining chicken, a pig and a goat that had wandered in. As the outhouse was destroyed and out of service, the soldiers merely urinated and defecated on the few pieces of furniture in the house, furniture that had witnessed hard times since they were acquired by the Reich from the Jews that disappeared from the village some years ago, and redistributed to the families of soldiers, such as her husband’s. She would now need to burn them for heat.

  By the time Ulf was born eight months later, these and a million other Russian soldiers had similarly ransacked all of Germany, and Berlin was divided into sectors by the Allies. Ulf’s entry into the world was as troubled and painful as his existence within it. Writhing in unyielding pain, his mother pushed him out with the umbilical cord wrapped around his throat, depriving his brain of oxygen for a few minutes, until the attending midwife sorted things out.

  His mother, whose name Ulf never learned, was unable to receive the nutrients that the ripped portions of her body needed to repair itself, and no surgeon was available to stop the bleeding and infection. She died two years later, leaving Ulf behind as a ward of the state, which in turn, took possession of the farm and contents as payment. By 1965, Ulf’s primary school grades did not qualify him for advancement in the East Germany school system. However, the Workers’ Paradise offered full employment of course, and his ability with a mop and changing lightbulbs qualified him as the superintendent of one of the new apartment buildings made of prefabricated slabs of concrete in Berlin. His habit of leering at residents as they passed by, while leaning on his mop or changing a lightbulb, drew the attention of the Stasi. He learned that regularly reporting conversations, commute hours, and visitors, as well as radio stations listened to, comments made, and books read, earned respect from the Volkspolizei20.

  During one such briefing session, during which the State visitors took copious notes on all the residents, an item of furniture appeared on the front steps—a modular bookshelf known as a stenka, extremely popular for holding books, knick-knacks, and for those with privilege to attain one, a television. Ulf did not read, nor was there any chance of buying a television on his monthly stipend, but the status of owning a full-sized stenka made him proud.

  After two years of mopping, foyer sweeping, toilet unclogging, window patching, among other tasks, a GDR housing officer arrived to inform him of a promotion. As part of the promise of full employment, another German citizen would be assigned as his understudy. That day, a crippled girl named Halina arrived and took her place in her one-room flat. It was the first time in her life to have a door to close, and her own privacy. Her flat was on the top floor, six flights up, down the hall from a bathroom with indoor plumbing, and, very often, hot water.

  Ulf assigned her, with great pride, to what she seemed best suited, cleaning floors and windows. He would leave the door to his flat slightly ajar so he could watch her, on hands and knees, scrub the foyer floor imagining what was underneath her plain cotton frock, wishing he could find a way to show his interest in her. She walked with a limp, did not wear makeup, and made no attempt to coif her hair. She was not attractive, but the number of women willing to visit him in his flat was not large.

  He could not sign, and she could not, or would not speak, so her complete lack of feelings for him went unexpressed. He interpreted her frequent appearance on her hands and knees scrubbing the foyer floor as flirtation, instead of her acting on her natural instincts for fastidiousness, and a job well done.

  Planet Halina

  Nicolaus sat in his cell, in the basement of the Stasi headquarters on Normannenstrasse, contemplating his crime against the State of pleasuring another man. The moist concrete floors, walls, and ceiling, covered in random cultures of black, gray, and brown mold, recalled those final days in the Bunker. Perhaps one escapes those circumstances only once per lifetime.

  But letting Nicolaus die was not what the Stasi, under supervision of the NKVD, had in mind. The State was not going to waste the talents of a good-looking polyglot who, with a bit of training in spy craft, could become a powerful tool in this Cold War with the decadent West. In fact, what Nicolaus would learn for himself when he was granted access to Stasi records, was that his arrest at the men’s theater had been a trap. The man with whom Nicolaus had attempted the brief tryst, had also be recruited by the Stasi in the same way, in the same theater.

  With that bit of entrapment, Nicolaus traded his career in public theater for the surreptitious theater of undercover agents. The standards for acting were as high, but the consequences of a bad performance were greater than a bad review. Encores were not showered with applause flowers, but with another document stolen, another individual compromised.

  Yet, this indiscretion was not the calamity it might have been on the other side of the River Spree that divided East and West Berlin. Where East Berlin had purged all the penal codes enacted under the Reich as part of de-Nazification with a wire brush auto-de-fé, the West quietly retained Section 175 in which two men found kissing or holding hands were considered offenders of the State and could be executed. In Russia, the consequence for such acts was five years of mandatory hard labor.

  Pyotr may have been better at sport, possessed of a photographic memory, and polymathic abilities, Nicolaus was the musician, linguist, and thespian of the family. The act of spying and acting were identical until the curtain fell en scene. The former was expected to appear at encore to be applauded, the latter expected to evaporate unsung, only to appear on another staged on a different day. A spy who became famous was doing it wrong and would soon be a corpse. Nicolaus could ad-lib on the boards and footlights with an adversary so convincingly, more than once had quick thinking kept him alive.

  Within two years of learning and practicing his role, Nicolaus was administratively superior to the Stasi men who had arrested him in that theater two years prior; this was a bit of leverage he chose to withhold rather than exploit. He preferred the sensibility of former ally, the Japanese who counseled that “he who uses power, loses power.” His reputation for “getting the girl” grew, as it were, which usually meant swapping a briefcase or a document, and taking the occasional photo “in flagrante,” with and without “delicto.” He had grown addicted to the adrenaline and endorphin cocktail that came with spying, and his first love was abduction—a scientist here, a defector there—and in some cases, getting the girl meant getting an actual girl, requiring not just a little bit of acting on his part. He managed to earn himself his own office in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin with a view of the River Spree, something of an upgrade from the cell in the basement a few blocks away that he inhabited two years before.

  Though almost always on the trail of someone or something, somewhere in the so-called Free World, Nicolaus always managed to attend the annual birthday rendezvous with Halina at their favorite Hofbräuhaus. He found himself charmed, as indeed everyone else who knew her, by the inner six-year-old surviving in her somehow, despite the very adult episodes of her life visiting her daily. She was completely oblivious to her limp and leg brace, such that if one were to inquire about her infirmity, she would be puzzled, her hands would go still, and drop to her sides, as if unaware of what on Earth the person might be referring.

  On planet Halina, herself being its sole resident, one side of her brain was always creating, or, in her words,
‘making.’ During pauses in conversation, her hands would busy themselves to fold animals out of napkins, or miniature structures out of sticks, or flowers out of anything else within reach. She had a mind for how things connected, or rather, it was in her mind where natural or mechanical connections were visualized, with her eyes closed, often accompanied with hand and arm motions as if dancing by herself.

  On one occasion, Nicolaus showed her a watch he had acquired on one of his trips to the West. It had a clear face that showed the gears rotating as they measured off the heartbeat of time, with a back that could be opened with a click to expose the greebling inside. Halina, being Halina, had to touch the components in motion, as if taking the watch’s pulse, a reversal of a watch’s traditional usage. The synergism of delicate cogs and springs formed a tapestry that she could reproduce in exact detail with only brief study, the overlapping and interlocking pieces somehow talking to her in a process she called ‘rozmowa21.’ Her ability to visualize complex interactions mentally was enhanced when she could close her eyes, imagine the interrelationships, moving her arms and body in what resembled modern dance.

  As they departed, slightly inebriated, from this, their May 1st birthday recognition of 1963, neither could know that the events in the next few hours would, among other consequences, make these the last alcoholic beverages Halina would consume till their next birthday fete.

  Zersetzung

  Ulf began drinking the vodka the Volkspolizei sometimes left for him as they periodically searched apartments, moving vases, and turning baskets upside down. It was a type of psychological warfare that they had perfected into an art, giving it its own name, Zersetzung22. On one occasion, they left Ulf a black and white television, which was something he never dreamed he could own. The pride he felt over the television in its honored position on the stenka made his chest burst.