Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  ‘We left you some dinner,’ Petra said when Aaron arrived home from work on Friday night. ‘Cem cooked.’

  They were sitting on the balcony and smoking, Petra in a red bathrobe, Cem in a pair of grey linen pyjamas. Petra was the less consistent of the two. Night-time Petra was cool and formidable, and often dressed in complicated conceptual clothes with pleats and plastic sleeves. But during the day she liked to curl up in front of the TV in flannel pyjamas, her hair damp and tousled from a bath, her face gently creased, a hot water bottle at her feet. It touched Aaron that Petra made these concessions to comfort. Cem, on the other hand, looked sharp even when he had the flu. He shaved his beard with a cut-throat razor and styled his black hair using an intriguing substance from a tub of ‘Gentleman’s Grooming Resin’. Once a month Cem took the train down to Stuttgart to see his elderly father, who had come to Germany in the sixties as an Anatolian factory worker. That was the only time he slipped out of the grey shirts and into a red-and-blue jumper knitted for him by his grandmother back in Turkey.

  ‘Mushroom risotto,’ Cem said. ‘You like mushrooms?’

  ‘That’s very kind.’ Aaron helped himself to food and a glass of wine and joined them on the balcony.

  ‘We decided to take the day off.’ Petra put her foot in Aaron’s lap. As often, he wondered how on earth they made a living; how anyone in Berlin made a living. He recalled the conversation between two American expats he’d overheard in the U-Bahn the other day, one of them talking about a woman he was dating: ‘She’s ambitious and wants to do something with her life, which is a rare thing in this city.’

  ‘What are your plans for the weekend?’ The risotto was excellent, like everything Cem cooked.

  ‘We’ve got a few parties to go to…’ Cem let out a dutiful sigh, making it sound like a moral obligation. ‘And then, I don’t know. How about you?’

  ‘I’ve got work to do,’ Aaron said, and felt like the most boring man in town. Petra took her foot away and straightened her leg in a yoga stretch.

  ‘You have a real sense of purpose, don’t you?’ There was a note of admiration in Cem’s voice, and it touched Aaron. It was true, he did have a sense of purpose, or at least he liked to think that he did. But he was also beginning to wonder whether this was a good thing.

  ‘I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone? Anyway, I think I really pissed off my boss today.’

  ‘Oh, I do that all the time,’ Cem said and smiled at Petra.

  She smiled back. ‘I’m not your boss, I’m your business partner.’

  They cooed back and forth for a bit. Aaron wished he could talk to someone about everything, about the old man in the reading room, about the father and his son, about Bernd exploding over a single page from a decades-old file. He could call a friend back home, but they would just say that Bernd sounded like a psycho.

  ‘So what happened?’ Cem asked.

  ‘Did you unmask another vicar?’ Petra said and laughed.

  Aaron winced. He should not have told them about the vicar. He should not have told them about anything.

  ‘It wasn’t a vicar, it was a secretary,’ Cem said and turned to Aaron. ‘Right?’

  Petra interrupted him: ‘No, that was a totally different file. The secretary was the one who spied on the gay publisher, remember? Sorry, Aaron, go on.’

  ‘It was nothing.’ Aaron downed the rest of his wine. ‘I came back late from my lunch break, and my boss was angry at me for being late. That’s all it was, nothing.’

  He heard a noise, and looked around. A woman in a cotton kimono emerged from the bathroom. Her hair was dripping wet. She left a trail of little puddles across the white carpet.

  ‘Aaron, this is our friend…’ Petra reached for her hand and giggled. ‘Sorry, I forgot your name.’

  ‘Oh, we never got round to names,’ the woman said, sitting down and lighting a cigarette.

  *

  On Monday, Aaron was asked to re-stack some folders from the reading room. He would work with one of the older archivists, a short, sturdy, earnest woman called Annemarie Schild, who took one look at him, sighed, and said: ‘I guess we’ll need a ladder for the top shelves.’

  They made an efficient team, Aaron climbing up and down the ladder as Frau Schild handed him the folders. She reminded him a little of his grandmother, though she was a couple of decades younger, in her sixties perhaps. There was something about her faint Berliner twang, the bobbed grey hair, the no-nonsense attitude that took him back to those afternoons in Finchley when he’d sat in his grandmother’s overstuffed living room, eating Apfelkuchen and listening to elderly ladies discuss their health in thick German accents, with Chopin playing in the background. He’d rarely heard his grandmother speak German and yet had learned the language quite easily, as if it had always been there, half hidden in the wings.

  ‘And now a nice, hot coffee,’ Frau Schild said when they were done. ‘I made Mokka today, not that Blümchenkaffee you always get at the machine.’ Which was another phrase his grandmother used, ‘flower coffee’, so thin you could see the floral pattern at the bottom of the cup.

  Frau Schild poured out two mugs from a thermos. Aaron perched on the ladder. She sat down on a plastic stool. It was cosy there between the high shelves. All that was missing was a piece of Apfelkuchen, and someone lamenting the state of their gallbladder.

  ‘Your German is very good,’ Frau Schild said.

  ‘I’m doing a PhD in German history. And my grandmother was born in Charlottenburg.’

  ‘Ah. Charlottenburg.’ Frau Schild took a sip of coffee. ‘She moved to England?’

  ‘Yes, in the thirties. She was Jewish.’

  ‘I see.’ Frau Schild nodded. ‘Welcome back.’

  It was not what Aaron had expected her to say, but he quite liked it.

  ‘You’re enjoying your internship?’ she continued.

  ‘It’s definitely interesting.’ He paused. ‘Except for, I don’t know, sometimes it gets to you a bit, doesn’t it? Almost like a sort of archivist’s guilt. Maybe that’s just because it’s all still quite new to me. You must have seen thousands of files.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t work in reconstruction, I only do the shelves.’ Frau Schild finished her coffee, closed the thermos and carefully stored it away on her trolley. ‘Thank you for your help. It was very nice meeting you.’

  She disappeared down the corridor, towards the wing with the elephants, the archivists who had been here since the Stasi days.

  The elephants. Aaron felt a tingling at the back of his neck. No wonder she had made such a quick exit when he started straying into more personal territory. He pictured her in the old days, a young woman in a blouse with shoulder pads, listening to a man in uniform who told her where this and that file should go. Or maybe she had been the one in uniform, ordering others to stack the shelves.

  He leaned against the long, tall shelves, the shelves Frau Schild had navigated so expertly, not even needing to check the labels as she worked. They had walked along them at the end to make sure everything was correctly ordered, and it had been, and he had marvelled at how well she knew the place. As if – well, as if she’d been working there forever.

  *

  Over the next couple of weeks, Aaron spent every day stacking shelves with Annemarie Schild. Other interns carted brown paper bags past him on big luggage trolleys, like travellers in an airport, but he was not once asked to help. He told himself this was a coincidence. It was not possible that his one comment about gently tampering with someone’s file could have permanently condemned him to shelf work. That was one of the problems with working in the Stasi archive, it made you so bloody paranoid. Still, when you found yourself shovelling snow in Siberia, it was only natural to wonder how you’d managed to upset Moscow quite so much.

  He kept his interactions with Frau Schild to a friendly minimum, and she seemed to like it that way. They went on separate lunch breaks, and stuck to subjects like ladders versus stools for reaching the upper shelves
.

  One day, when he was rolling a trolley stacked high with books along the corridor, a woman came out of the reading room, looking rather lost. She was dressed in a threadbare grey jumper, jeans and a yellow jacket; a student perhaps. Aaron stopped.

  ‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’

  ‘Oh, das wäre nett.’ She smiled, relieved. ‘It’s just that I can’t quite make sense of this.’ She held up a thin grey cardboard file.

  ‘There’s usually an archivist in the reading room. She’s probably stepped out for lunch.’ He glanced at the file, the tight grip of her fingers. There was something odd about her. Of course: she was far too young to be a visitor, to have a file on her past. Curious now, he added: ‘If it’s about a particular word or something like that, I might be able to help.’

  She hesitated. ‘I just thought there would be more. There’s only one page, and I thought there would be more.’

  ‘Can I take a look?’

  They went back into the reading room and sat down at one of the tables. She was still holding the file. He considered for a moment whether talking to her was normal, or whether he was breaking another taboo. But he could hardly have left her standing there in the foyer. That would be his defence: I couldn’t leave her standing there in the foyer, could I? (This growing habit of scripting potential future accusations and replies: that was also new.)

  ‘Is this your file?’ He reached for it. She moved it away. They spoke at the same time. She said, ‘Sorry, you probably see this kind of stuff every day,’ and he said: ‘If it’s too personal…’ They stopped and laughed a bit awkwardly.

  ‘Ja, es ist schon persönlich. Die Akte ist von meiner Mutter,’ she said. And then, just like that, she switched to English, to a London-tinged accent that shocked him with its familiarity: ‘You’re British, right?’

  He was struck by her complete lack of surprise. She switched from one language to another as if it was normal to meet a Brit here, in this obscure Berliner archive. It was something he had noticed before in East Germans, in the ones who were children when the Berlin wall fell. Nothing surprised them. They seemed to have no expectation of the world being any particular way; they knew that anything could happen, and when it did, they simply adjusted to it. He found it a slightly unsettling but somehow admirable quality, this absence of surprise. It made you realise how naïve you were to take the current state of things for granted, to think you knew what might happen next, to be taken aback when things turned out differently.

  ‘I’m from London,’ he said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Same, sort of. From Berlin via London.’ She pushed the file towards him. ‘I came all the way to look at my mum’s file, but it’s only one page. Is that normal?’

  ‘Let’s see.’ He opened it.

  It was only a fragment, a torn half-page from a transcript.

  QUESTION: Why do you think you are here?

  ANSWER : I would like to request a lawyer.

  QUESTION : Where do you think we are, in America? Let me ask again: why do you think you are here?

  ANSWER : I don’t know.

  QUESTION : Don’t know what?

  ANSWER : [The accused refuses to answer.]

  QUESTION : You think silence is going to help you? Silence is very hard work.

  ANSWER : [The accused refuses to answer.]

  QUESTION: You’ll change your mind. Sooner or later, you’ll be begging us to listen to you. You’ll be begging us to be allowed to talk. You’ll tell us things we never even asked you about. And when we are done, there will be no part of your mind we won’t know. We will be completely at home in your mind, we will be there always.

  ‘Your mother was a dissident?’ he asked carefully.

  She looked distraught, and for a few moments seemed unable to answer. Then she said:‘No, no, she wasn’t political at all, not in that way. She was just an art historian.’ She laughed quietly, with a sudden air of helplessness that touched him.

  ‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’

  It was one of the staff archivists, who had materialised behind Aaron’s shoulder. He wanted to hear this woman’s story, find out why she had come here, what she was hoping for. But he was far away from his trolley and his shelves, and the archivist’s expression made it clear that he ought to get back there.

  ‘You’re in good hands,’ he said to the woman, as to a patient about to be wheeled into an operating theatre. ‘Good luck.’ Then he went back to stacking shelves with Frau Schild.

  *

  In her lunch break Frau Schild went out into the courtyard. Aaron patted the dust from his hands and contemplated going to the canteen. He might bump into Bernd. In fact, he should go upstairs, find Bernd and suggest lunch. It was not as if they’d had an official falling-out. He had proposed removing a page; Bernd had disagreed. That was all it was. He walked over to the lifts.

  ‘The archivist said it would take at least a year.’

  Her again. That yellow jacket, like a flashing light in the dour corridor. Instinctively he waved her into a darker corner by the shelves.

  ‘She said it would take at least a year,’ she repeated, ‘but that it was impossible to say, really.’

  ‘What would take a year?’

  ‘Finding the rest of the file.’ She sounded desperate. ‘It’s all gone, apparently. They think it might have been destroyed. It’ll be a matter of luck if they even manage to find it at all, that’s what she said, a matter of luck. Could be a year, could be ten years, could be never.’

  ‘That’s really disappointing,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What guts me most is not knowing. The pages could be right here, somewhere in this building, or they could be dust and ashes. It’s really just a total matter of luck.’

  She looked shaken, and Aaron felt a little cross with the archivist. This visitor had been in pretty good shape when he left the reading room, and look at her now. This was not how things should be handled. It made him think of Bernd, and the file about the father and his disloyal son. The idea that you just gave people the facts and left them to get on with it: he disagreed with that.

  ‘It’s not pure luck,’ he said, perhaps a little too forcefully. ‘She really should have explained that a bit better. It’s not quite as random. We have at least a rough idea where everything is.’

  She brightened up: ‘So you could help me find it?’

  ‘Someone could,’ Aaron said, in what he hoped was a subtle passing of the buck.

  ‘No, I mean, you could?’

  ‘I’m just an intern. Your best bet is to go back to the reading room and ask the archivist.’

  ‘She didn’t seem all that helpful. And I came all this way.’ There was an urgency in her voice, an intensity that was at odds with the blandness of their surroundings, the long shelves, the pale brown and pale green cardboard folders, the beige carpet, the rubber footstools, the office doors with the little printed name tags. This was an environment of ordered calm, of things being done slowly, methodically. A year meant nothing here. Ten years meant nothing here. After all, the beige carpet and the worn footstools had probably been here since Mielke ate his breakfast eggs upstairs. And it occurred to Aaron now that this slowness had nothing to do with inefficiency or bureaucratic inertia. It had to do with caution. The memories they were handling here were delicate, had so much power to damage and disrupt.

  Then again, if this woman wanted to see her mother’s file – and she clearly did, with an almost violent kind of despair – who were they to tell her to wait? Wasn’t this what they were here for, to help people?

  ‘I can ask my boss,’ he said. ‘If it’s a special case, they might prioritise it.’

  He heard the lift door open and people walk out, discussing promotions, grants, budget cuts in the way of office workers everywhere.

  ‘This isn’t really about my mum, you see,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It’s about my brother. My little brother, Heiko Valentin. He was taken from us. And that would be in her file, wouldn’t
it? All of that would be in her file.’

  She looked at him, anxious and trusting, certain he could fix this. But he could not! He was pretty sure that he could not.

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Sometimes files do contain that sort of information.’

  Her face relaxed a little. ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Aaron.’

  ‘Aaron. Look, Aaron, all I’m asking is… please keep an eye out for me. Maybe something will come up. Maybe there are some inventories or databases you could check. That’s all I’m asking.’ She wrote down a number, an email and her name: Ella Valentin.

  ‘I’ve got another appointment here,’ she said, handing him the piece of paper. ‘In a week or so. With someone called… Licht, I think?’

  ‘Oh, that’s our director.’ Aaron nodded with relief. ‘He’s really the best person to talk to about all of this, much better than me. He’ll be able to help.’

  She gazed at him, deep in thought. ‘You think so?’

  ‘I’m sure he will.’

  ‘Hmm. I think he’ll tell me not to hold my breath. To join the back of the queue. But we’ll see, won’t we?’ She smiled. ‘Anyway, I might see you then.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything,’ Aaron said and put the piece of paper in his pocket.

  ‘I’m not expecting you to.’ She zipped up her jacket. ‘Thank you.’

  *

  She left through the visitors’ entrance, handed back her pass, thanked the receptionist. Later he realised that he had not once said how sorry he was that her brother had been taken away, that her mother had been arrested, that her family had suffered such a terrible loss. He had been worried about someone spotting them, conspiring in a corner like that, but still, he later thought that he should have shown more sympathy. And this gnawed at him, and made him think that yes, perhaps he could at least go through a few lists and databases, and have a rummage around, even if it did not lead to anything. At least it would show that he’d tried.

  He stood by the lift for a long time, heard the ping and whirr of the door opening and closing, the chatter of people walking in and out, and thought about what he should do.