‘Ella made it.’
8
THE LAST TIME I saw Sven was on another Sunday afternoon. Tobi and Heiko were downstairs with Opa Horst. I was polishing shoes in the corridor. Oma Trude was dragging the hoover around our flat, pointing the nozzle at the ceiling to vacuum up spiders and flies.
From the kitchen came the angry voices of Sven and my parents, and I moved closer so I could hear what they were saying.
Two men had visited Sven’s Datsche. They had inspected his paintings and decided they were not good enough for a member of the professional artists’ association. He would have to paint differently or lose his membership.
‘Paint differently?’ my mother asked him. ‘How? What did they say?’
‘What did they say? Come on, Regine, you can guess what they said!’ Sven switched to a Saxonian accent: ‘Comrade Painter, the real question here is, why paint blue horses? Why not paint a combine harvester instead? Horses are pre-revolutionary, horses are frankly feudal. There’s something downtrodden about a horse, if you think about it, something lacking in class consciousness, or indeed any consciousness. Has a horse ever led the workers into battle? Has a horse ever sabotaged a capitalist factory? Has a horse ever done a single thing for our state of workers and farmers? Who wrote Das Kapital, a man or a horse? “The horse is Tsarist by nature,” that was Lenin, write that down for future reference. In fact, who has ever seen a blue horse, comrade? Who has ever seen a red tiger? Why lose yourself in indulgent fantasies that ignore the reality of our society? Why chase romantic daydreams when you have the honour of living right among the great clashing forces of revolutionary change, not to mention the thrust and drive of modern collective farming?’
Sven threw his heavy body around the kitchen as he talked. He crashed into the table and the chairs, sent the wall calendar swinging back and forth, elbowed his painting of the blue horses.
‘Now hear me out, Comrade Painter, how about a portrait series of the men who make history? “The Frame-Manufacturing Brigade at Dawn”, “The Steel Workers at Dusk”… No, not dusk, dusk is defeatist.’
Sven gave a magnificent performance. He ranted and sneered and imitated the leaden, monotone drawl that even I recognised as typical of our leaders, and finally, returning to his own rich and rounded voice, spread his arms to declare that art was not – and would never be – a mere illustration of this miserable little half-country, this joke, this pseudo-state that took itself so seriously when it was really just a fart emitted by the Soviet empire, not even a powerful fart but a mere pffft after another hearty ladleful of Mother Moscow’s cabbage soup.
‘Now, now, Maestro,’ my father said and patted Sven’s shoulder. ‘Let’s not get carried away.’
My mother lowered her voice. ‘What if you don’t do what they say? What if you just go on painting quietly in your Datsche?’
‘And live off what? No more commissions, no more sales, no more exhibitions, no more money, no more food on the table, no more roof over my head. If I want to eat, I’ll have to do as I’m told.’ Sven turned to my father. ‘It’s what you always do, isn’t it, Jochen? You always do as you’re told.’
‘I have no idea what you mean.’ My father crossed his arms.
‘You write what they want you to write. Down with decadence, long live Socialist Realism. You might as well be taking dictation from Moscow.’
‘Sven, you asked for my advice, and I’ll give you my advice,’ my father said coolly. ‘If you want to be part of the association, you have to follow their guidelines.’
Waving the hoover’s nozzle, Oma cried: ‘And if you don’t, then go and get a real job!’
Everyone looked at her, shocked. Undeterred, she went on: ‘It’s true though! If you don’t want to paint properly, then get another job. I can’t see what all this fuss is about, it’s only a painting.’
‘You!’ Sven jabbed his finger at Oma. ‘You’re Stalin in a housecoat!’
‘And you, you’ve never known hardship! You’ve never known suffering! When I was in Buchenwald…’
‘Oh please, not Buchenwald again.’ Sven took a last swig and tossed the bottle in the bin.
‘Don’t talk to her like that,’ said my father in a surprising moment of solidarity with Oma.
Sven turned to my mother: ‘Regine, not a word in my defence?’
‘What can I say? Maybe you could paint tractors by day, and…’ My mother was searching for the right phrase, and settled on: ‘… and pursue the rest as a hobby?’
Sven stared at her with an expression of utter disgust. He pushed her away and stormed out of the flat. My mother looked as if she was about to run after him, but my father grabbed her arm.
‘Let him go, Regine.’
‘We shouldn’t have been so harsh.’
‘He’s crazy. He’ll get himself into trouble, and he’ll drag down everyone who knows him.’
My mother hesitated. I was afraid that she would walk out anyway, leaving us behind, because Sven painted as he pleased, Sven didn’t do as he was told, Sven was utterly reckless, and she liked him for that. But then my mother said: ‘It’s fine, Jochen. I’m not going anywhere. I’m as much of a coward as you are.’
That night, I heard my parents argue in low voices. It was all the painter’s fault. He had brought unhappiness and anger into our home. I hoped he would never show his face again.
9
FOR THE NEXT FEW weeks, no one mentioned Sven. Mama grew irritable and withdrawn. Papa told me to be nice to her. She was struggling at work, he said. Her book would not be published after all. It was tough, he said, but eventually she would come to terms with it, and then everything would be as it was before.
I felt a little remorseful for wishing Sven away. When my father was away at his seminars and retreats and conferences, Mama lay on their bed, fully clothed, a cigarette in her hand, and listened to songs by Wolf Biermann.
Du, laß dich nicht verhärten
In dieser harten Zeit…
‘Don’t let yourself be hardened / in these hard times…’
I brought her a cup of rosehip tea, because she seemed ill. Maybe she had the flu. Standing by her bed, I waited for her to sit up and talk to me, but she only mumbled, ‘Thanks, Ellachen,’ and closed her eyes. Oma came into the room and switched the music off.
‘What’s this? Biermann? You want to invite trouble into your home?’
Mama lazily reached out and switched the music back on.
‘You listen to your music,’ she said to Oma and lit a cigarette, ‘and I listen to mine.’
‘It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, Regine. Don’t you have any work to do?’
‘I’m sick. I’ve got a terrible flu. I’ve got the plague. Cough, cough. It’s very subversive, isn’t it? Bunking off work, being lazy, that’s our only revenge. What’s a worker’s state worth if its workers won’t work? Ha, what a tongue twister!’
‘Suit yourself.’ Oma picked up the full ash tray. ‘You’re not a worker anyway, you’re the Intelligenz. Unlikely as this may seem.’
‘Right. Of course. Have you heard the one about the parking ticket?’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘How many members of the Volkspolizei does it take to write out a parking ticket?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Three. One writes, the other two keep an eye on the Intelligenz.’
I laughed. My grandmother grabbed my hand.
‘Come, Ellachen. Mama is being silly.’
‘What, you think she’s too young for this? You think she doesn’t know? You think she hasn’t noticed that half of her friends haven’t come back from their holidays?’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Everyone with half a brain is leaving.’
‘Regine! Enough!’
My mother looked at me. ‘And do you know why they’re leaving, Ella? Because life is better over there. It’s that simple.’
Oma tried to talk over her: ‘Mama doesn’t
mean that, she’s just sulking over her book.’
‘Sulking? I’m about to lose my job! They want to sack me over one book, a modest little book praising the genius of the German avant-garde, just because I was hinting, merely hinting, that the avant-garde was better and bolder and more revolutionary, frankly, than anything we have now.’
My mother jumped out of bed and paced up and down, and I noticed how much she sounded like Sven. Or perhaps Sven sounded like her. No wonder they liked to paint together. She even jabbed her finger in the air, just like him.
‘One book! That’s it, that’s enough to piss them off. Now they want to replace me with a third-rate Marxist who thinks Klee and Kandinsky had some sort of eye disease.’
Oma pursed her lips. ‘It was all such a long time ago though, wasn’t it?’
‘What was a long time ago?’
‘The avant-garde! You can’t blame them for wanting something a bit more… current.’
Mama closed her eyes. ‘Mutti…’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘This is exactly the sort of thing that drives me mad, can’t you see that? I’m an art historian in a country that hates art. Yes, hates! My colleagues think the Soviets were right to lock away Malevich’s black canvas. Do you agree with that, Mutti? Do you think it’s right to lock away a painting, a mere piece of fabric with black paint on it?’
Oma sighed. ‘There’s no need to make a big conspiracy theory out of some painting that got lost.’
I knew it was better to stay quiet, but something made me say: ‘Why would someone paint a black picture? That’s just stupid.’
My mother looked at me with an expression I had never seen before. Surprise, dismay, but most strangely, a kind of fear. As if I were a stranger, an enemy.
‘See,’ she said to Oma. ‘In another generation they won’t even have to bother with censorship.’
*
When Papa came home that night, I gathered all my courage and asked him if we could go back to Sven’s Datsche. The sun was always out these days. The garden would be full of flowers. Mama could set up her easel and paint. It would give her something to look forward to.
My father sighed and put down his briefcase. He squatted down next to me and put his hands on my shoulders, his big hands that smelled of ink and leather. He told me that it was best to forget about the Datsche. Sven did not live there any more. He had gone over to the West, but this was something I must keep to myself. If anyone asked me about him, it was best to pretend that I didn’t know where he was, and then change the subject to something harmless, like the weather, or what I had for lunch.
10
Aaron
Berlin 2010
A ARON LIKED THE FEEL of shredded paper. Light, almost weightless; and soft, unless you pulled your hand out of the bag too quickly and cut yourself. There was a thin red line on his left hand and two more on his right from that. He wore these with pride: the scholar as warrior. From his desk he could hear the scanners humming next door, the abrupt silence when the paper jammed, then Bernd’s curses over yet another reboot.
He had lined up several rather pleasing stamps along the window sill, from the brief and satisfying ‘completed’ that he used to mark a finished stack, to the one with his employer’s enchantingly long name: ‘The Federal Office for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic’. Some shortened this to ‘the Office’, or ‘the Stasi Archive’, but to Aaron and his closest colleagues, it was always just the archive.
He was the only foreign intern there, which had initially made him the object of suspicion and scepticism. Occasionally a colleague openly wondered whether his German was good enough to deal with complex historical files. Every now and then, someone interrupted him to correct a case or a pronoun. But the fact that he was working on a PhD helped. Academic titles were currency here, people had a deep respect for them, and even mentioning your vague journey towards one could earn you better treatment. Perhaps more importantly, because his PhD was on archival reconstruction in post-reunification Germany, he had arrived in Berlin with a decent grasp of the Stasi’s vernacular, that mix of cryptic abbreviations, clunky compound nouns and euphemisms. His breakthrough in terms of social acceptance occurred when another intern jokingly asked him to come along zur Klärung eines Sachverhaltes, ‘to clear up a matter’, and he correctly identified this as a Stasi pun; it had been their stock phrase for arrests.
His foreignness now gave him a rather privileged position. He often ended up as an arbitrator in discussions between the older and younger archivists, the East and West Germans, the Berliners and provincials: ‘You as an Engländer, what do you think of…’ someone would say, or: ‘Aaron, as someone from the island, would you say that…’ before going into some argument over wolf-hunting or state-funded childcare or some other subject he would never have imagined being asked to adjudicate on.
Aaron gently fished a tangle of paper ribbons from the bag by his desk and laid them out on the white surface.
Current state of affairs in ma
How pleasing. Like the corner piece in a jigsaw, the beginning of a sentence made it much easier to assemble the rest, and there was a good chance that he’d have the whole document by lunchtime. The rest of the phrase would be something like ‘state of affairs in main offices’, or ‘state of affairs in major cities’.
In his early days the tangled paper strips had seemed like an impenetrable jumble of half-destroyed evidence, millions of jigsaw pieces irretrievably scattered across thousands of brown paper sacks, but now he could gradually make out a hidden order. You could scoop out a handful at random and be reasonably sure they came from the same document, a letter to a minister perhaps, a new recruit’s handwritten pledge of loyalty, or the transcript of an interrogation.
The archive was housed in the Stasi’s former headquarters, a Communist Mordor of brutalist office blocks and vast grey courtyards. The main section had been turned into a museum with all the old decor lovingly preserved, an interior designer’s dream of mid-century orange lamps, olive-green armchairs, white plastic telephones, brown glass chandeliers and dark wooden laminate. It all looked rather modest from a twenty-first-century perspective – plain and understated – nothing like the marble and gilded taps of other dictatorships. Even the stained breakfast menu for Stasi chief Mielke, typed up carefully by a busy secretary to remind herself of his preferences, spoke of precision and discipline rather than indulgence: two cups of coffee, one five-minute egg, two buttered bread rolls and a copy of Neues Deutschland.
Aaron’s own office was in another block, one that had been stripped of all vintage decor. Except for some old typewriters down in the basement, used to compare Stasi fonts and design the occasional exhibition poster, it was filled with new white furniture. Like a blank page, or, as his colleagues joked in the canteen, like a whitewash. A desk, a bookshelf, two chairs, a filing cabinet and a couple of open bags full of paper strips. Bernd’s office was to the right. To the left was the surprisingly humble office of the director of the archive, a heavy, plodding, always slightly harassed-looking man called Herr Dr Licht. It looked much like Aaron’s study back in London, small and cluttered, though he’d never actually seen Licht in there. He always seemed to be down in the stacks, or travelling, or at some ministry or other, asking for funding.
From his window he could see another courtyard, a busy road and the bleak tower blocks beyond. Aaron often thought of the Stasi man who had sat here and typed up reports, who had stared out of this window at the tower blocks, had perhaps dreamed of a secondment to Moscow or at least an off-site weekend in Bulgaria. And then, when protesters had stormed the compound and smashed their way into the entrance hall, the man in this office would have barricaded his door with a desk before stuffing file after file into a shredder. Or perhaps he had run down the corridor to ask his boss what to do, shouting over the sound of breaking glass. Or perhaps the shredders had overheated by then, and he had to rip up hi
s pages by hand, pack them into paper bags, ready for the incinerator. Only it was all too late: the protesters were already coming up the stairs, and the man in the office dropped everything and fled down the fire escape, leaving bags full of shredded documents for Aaron to piece together decades later.
Aaron rummaged through the strips until he found the next bit:
in regional offices.
‘Bingo!’ He lined up the two strips at the top of his desk and whistled happily to himself. The humming next door stopped again. Aaron could hear a fresh outburst of curses. They had a little race going on over who could reconstruct more pages in a day, Bernd next door with his scanners and algorithms, or Aaron with his eyes and hands. Things were looking good: here on his desk, the cut-up page was coming together rather quickly. Strip by strip the loose ball of shredded paper unfurled, the broken words and lines eased back into place, a tow- was reunited with an -ards, and the lower half of Karl-Marx-Stadt found its top. People and buildings rose from the pages, the swelling voices of a chanting crowd, the sound of footsteps running down a corridor and shattering glass and smashed-in doors. The clatter of typewriters as the spies documented their own demise:
7.12.1989
Current state of affairs in main regional offices:
Office Suhl: Staff given leave; urgently need 2–3 senior officers.
Office Erfurt: Demonstration with 40,000 participants moving towards the building; guards refusing to protect staff.
Office Karl-Marx-Stadt: Office’s leader reported sick. No replacement available.
Office Schwerin: Head of office relieved of his duties and placed under house arrest; no willing substitute available.
Office Leipzig: Office conquered.
‘Office conquered.’ Aaron sighed. There was something pitiful about the reports in which the Stasi had recorded its downfall. They were full of mistakes and skipped lines, and reeked of the frightened resignation of someone who knew it was all over and yet could not stop typing.
Confession with Blue Horses Page 6