Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  ‘But under the Soviets!’ The man thumped the floor again. ‘This part wasn’t used by the Stasi at all, this was only used by the Soviets!’

  ‘Would you perhaps like to guide the tour yourself?’ The guide offered him her red umbrella. He snatched it from her hands.

  ‘I would, I absolutely would! The people deserve to hear…’

  ‘… the truth.’ The guide took back her umbrella. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, just to restore some order here, what you’re seeing is something we deal with quite regularly, which is that the old guard, the sympathisers…’

  ‘That’s defamation!’

  ‘… come here to infiltrate and frankly sabotage our tours.’

  ‘Ah, I’m a saboteur now? Did you all hear what she just said? A saboteur! This one has no idea what she’s talking about!’

  The guide crossed her arms. ‘As it happens, I do know what I’m talking about. I was an inmate in this prison. Seven months and thirteen days.’

  The rest of the group watched the row in awestruck silence. We were certainly getting our money’s worth. The old man muttered something about free speech and historical truth, but the guide ignored him and went on with the tour as if nothing had happened.

  We walked in and out of concrete cells, looked at small objects that inmates had crafted out of wood and mud, took the stairs up to the more modern part of the building where people like my mother had been held. We visited an interrogation room with a desk, a green metal locker and two chairs; a cell with a steel cot; a canteen for the guards.

  The more I saw, the less I could relate it to my mother. The reason was, I think, that it felt wrong to be here without my mother. If she had taken me here, if she had shown me her cell and told me that this was where they had questioned her and this was what they had said and this was how she had felt, then maybe I would have understood her better and been closer to her. Or maybe not. The fact was that she had chosen not to. My visit was an intrusion, a trespass.

  The tour ended, the group dispersed. Our guide leaned against the glass bricks that let in some filtered light. She looked exhausted. I walked up to her.

  ‘I’m sorry…’

  She gave a start.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My mother was an inmate here. I wonder if you knew her.’

  ‘We weren’t allowed any contact with the other inmates.’ She wiped her forehead with a tissue.

  ‘Of course. I was thinking, maybe after your release…’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Regine Valentin.’

  She shook her head and tossed the tissue into a bin. ‘No. But I can ask around. I guess she came to the reunion. I’m Katia, by the way.’

  ‘Reunion?’

  ‘We had a reunion here a couple of years ago, didn’t your mother tell you? All the former inmates got together and compared notes, so to speak.’

  My mother had mentioned a school reunion around the time of her last trip to Berlin, yes, I remembered that. Only it had not been a school reunion at all. Had she even called it a school reunion? Or had she just said: ‘I’m going to a reunion,’ and I had not been interested in the details? That’s what would have happened. ‘I’m going to Berlin, to a reunion,’ she said, then waited for Tobi and me to ask her about it. Which we never did, of course.

  ‘Yes, I think she went to that reunion,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t remember meeting her, but to be honest, I didn’t socialise much, I was busy fighting with one of the old guards. I’ll ask the others, though.’

  ‘A guard came to the reunion?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Not that she was invited, but she somehow found out about it and showed up. Everyone argued with her.’

  ‘You don’t happen to remember her name?’

  ‘Yep. Jankowitz. She lives just round the corner from here. Sometimes comes on our tours, thinks we don’t recognise her. Like that guy who was here earlier. It’s their little game, they still like to keep an eye on us.’

  ‘Can’t you throw them out?’

  For the first time since we started talking, Katia looked shocked. ‘Throw them out?’

  ‘Like, tell them they’re not welcome. Ban them from the site.’

  She took a step back. ‘No, no, that’s never occurred to me. You have to understand, it’s all very… complicated. It’s not like they did anything illegal, right? They just happened to work here. This is their neighbourhood, this is where they’ve lived all their lives, the guards, the commander, everyone. And if we didn’t let them come here and bother us every now and then, they’d harass us in other ways.’

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘Oh, they’re creative. Anonymous phone calls, deliveries of things you didn’t order, just all sorts of little reminders that they’re there and thinking of you.’

  I thought of the months after Tobi and I came back from Hungary, and the strange things that happened in our flat that winter.

  ‘Why would they do something like that?’ Oma had asked. ‘I gave them everything, why would they do this to us?’

  Opa had replied: ‘To make sure. Just to make sure.’

  Katia studied my face. ‘You don’t live here, do you?’

  ‘We moved to England right after the wall came down.’

  ‘Yes, I thought there was a bit of an accent.’

  I wasn’t sure how much to tell her. But she was a former inmate, too. Surely she wouldn’t judge us too harshly. ‘I’m here to look for my brother. He was taken from us when they arrested my mother.’

  Katia nodded. ‘Sounds familiar.’

  *

  As we continued walking down the corridor, she told me her story.

  Back in the GDR, Katia had been a single mother working for a bottle manufacturer. Her five-year-old son had attended a Wochenkrippe, an overnight nursery where he lived from Monday to Friday while she did her shifts. Every Sunday they’d both cry over dinner, and he’d beg her to let him stay with her, and she’d explain that it wasn’t possible because of work.

  Then a friend told her about a West German acquaintance who took people over to the other side by car. All they had to do was hide in a little crawl space between the back seat and the boot.

  ‘I was naive,’ she said. ‘I was only twenty-three, all I’d ever known was school and then the factory, and this seemed so easy, one short drive and then we’d be over on the other side. I had this idea that in the West everything would be different and we’d have an amazing life together and have dinner together every night. I know, it sounds so stupid. I was such a child, that’s all I can say, such a child.’

  Katia had inherited some silverware from an aunt, just enough to pay off the smuggler. He suggested they go in turn, the boy first, then the mother.

  The crawl space smelled of fuel. Her son cried when she pushed him into it.

  ‘So I told him off.’ She took out another tissue and blew her nose. ‘I told him off.’

  She positioned herself near the border crossing to watch the car. A couple of guards checked the paperwork and the back seat, then the boot. They closed the boot again, she exhaled with relief, but then more guards arrived. They dragged the driver from his seat, reopened the boot, ripped out the concealing partition and pulled her son from the crawl space. She saw her little boy look around him, frantically searching the street with his eyes, as if he hoped she’d come to save him.

  ‘But I didn’t.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘I watched and watched and didn’t do anything. Why? That’s what I’ve never stopped asking myself. I knew it was all over anyway, I knew I’d be arrested later, so why didn’t I just run over there? Why didn’t I show my boy that he wasn’t alone? But I didn’t. Maybe I thought it would make everything worse, or that they’d start shooting. I don’t know. I went back to my flat and sat there and cried and cried until they came and took me away.’

  ‘Did you ever see him again?’

  She nodded. ‘I tracked him down in 1998. The third of March 1998. He’d just turned sixteen. I trie
d to hug him and he flinched.’

  ‘And now?’ I asked cautiously. ‘Are you still in touch?’

  ‘Sort of. He doesn’t…’ She cast around for the right words. ‘He doesn’t like me very much, if you know what I mean? And I can’t blame him. I’m the woman who sent him away every Monday morning and then, one day, I shoved him into a stinking car and told him to shut up and keep his head down. That’s what he remembers me for, and there’s nothing I can do about it now.’

  We stepped out into the rain. In the middle of the courtyard was a flower bed of red roses. They looked tragic against the concrete.

  ‘How old was your brother, then?’ she asked without looking at me.

  ‘Younger than your son.’

  ‘Want my advice?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Make sure he actually wants to be found.’

  ‘There’s no way of knowing that until I actually meet him though, is there?’

  ‘There is, if you’re really honest with yourself. I wish I’d thought more about his side of the story, you know? Rather than just wanting to find him for my own sake.’

  ‘It might be different for me. I’m his sister, not his mother,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So… I’m not responsible for what happened.’ I regretted this immediately. Katia looked pained.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said, and tried to smile.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it came out.’

  ‘Why? It was my responsibility, you’re right. I screwed up.’

  ‘Have you told your son why you wanted to smuggle him across?’

  ‘Oh, many times. “I did it for you, I did it so you could grow up in a free society, I did it so you’d have a better life,” over and over.’

  I thought about this for a bit.

  ‘I was angry with my parents, too,’ I said.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Less so.’

  We stood in the concrete courtyard together, in the light drizzle that first settled on our hair, then slowly trickled down our necks. Katia opened her umbrella and held it over us.

  ‘Interesting,’ she eventually said. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘That guard you mentioned…’ I tried to remember her name.

  ‘Jankowitz.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know how I might get in touch with her?’

  ‘She lives in one of those houses over there.’ She pointed beyond the prison wall, towards the street with the tour buses. ‘That little side street with the green buildings? Her flat is in, hmm, the third or fourth on the right. You’ll have to look at the names by the doorbells.’

  ‘It might be better to give her a call first, no?’

  ‘She’ll be in the phone book. These people really don’t bother to hide.’

  A few people were gathering by the roses and waiting for the next tour to start. One or two glanced at Katia’s red umbrella. She looked at her watch.

  ‘Sorry, I’d better get started. We can continue talking some other time, if you like.’

  We swapped numbers, I thanked her, and she ushered her group towards the basement door.

  ‘Is anyone here claustrophobic?’ I heard her ask. ‘Asthma? Any allergies?’

  *

  It rained harder and I ducked into the bookshop, a bright modern space with a glass front and white walls. There was an extraordinary amount of glass in this remodelled part of the prison, which also housed a research centre and what looked like seminar rooms or classrooms, as if what the architect really wanted to do was to tear down the whole prison and replace it with a terrarium. I assumed the design brief had included words like ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’, though the effect was somewhat offset by the rows and rows of books in the shop, which went all the way up to the ceiling and covered much of the glass.

  So many books about the Stasi! I leafed through a memoir by a spied-upon pole vaulter, read about informants in the gay and lesbian communities, and found our own little corner of Berlin represented too, in several books in fact, from a large coffee-table volume about secret, private art galleries in Prenzlauer Berg to a densely printed, serious work on academics in the GDR. Several of these books included transcripts from the Stasi archive, which were often reproduced as photographs of dog-eared, machine-typed documents, as if to lend the author added credibility: look, this truly happened, here is material evidence. Already I regretted how I had behaved in the archive. This often happened to me: as soon as a conversation ended I began to rescript it, as if by using a different wording here and there I could have changed its entire direction and achieved a better outcome for myself. Now I saw with some clarity that I had been too eager in my hushed exchange with Aaron, that I should have subtly planted my dilemma in his mind and left it there to grow instead of trying to pressurise him into helping me. He seemed the type who resisted such pressure, who would say yes, yes, just to escape the situation, and then quietly hope that by doing nothing, he could make the whole thing go away.

  I put back the book about the pole vaulter. There would be plenty of time for regret and self-recrimination later; for now, I had to solve some practical problems. By the till I found what I’d been looking for, a selection of maps of Berlin from different eras, starting with the pre-war period. I had to go through a couple of them before I found one that matched my memory, where each street name was as I had known it. The spot where I was standing right now, this prison and this neighbourhood, appeared as a white shape on the map, a blank space in the upper right corner surrounded by colourful streets, buildings, parks and waterways, though the publishers had tried to mask the blankness a little by printing Berliner Stadtplan across it in a chirpy font. The bits to the west of the wall were blank, too, but that was not particularly noticeable because most of West Berlin was off the page, anyway. This was the Berlin of my childhood, with Friedrichshain at the centre, and Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg at the margins.

  I could not deny that I found it a great relief to see the city properly recentred and all the streets and landmarks aligned with the pictures in my mind. Only the streets close to the wall looked different. Sandy’s street for example had been left out altogether. This puzzled me for a moment, because I could not imagine that our cartographers would have produced sloppy work, and then I realised this was deliberate, of course, to prevent people from using this map to plot their escape. Everything circled back to the wall, always, and this felt strange because the wall had not been all that important to me as a child. If it hadn’t been for Sandy and her stories, perhaps I would not have noticed it much at all, or no more than children in borderlands everywhere notice guards and searchlights. Or at least I would not have been disturbed by it. Yes, that was a more accurate word than ‘notice’. I would not have been disturbed by it, no more than the average child is disturbed by burglar alarms, policemen, airport security – all of which are there, after all, to protect us.

  In no time at all I found my old home on this map. Here was our closest U-Bahn stop, Dimitroffstraße. Over there was a square named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, and this street right here to the left was named after my grandmother’s great idol and role model, the Communist Lena Fabelhaft. I moved my finger to our own street, which had been Dunckerstraße back then and was still Dunckerstraße now. And there, that little box the size of half a fingernail, that was our old house, and if I could have enlarged the map I would have seen a little girl walking up the stairs, backwards and then forwards and then backwards, all the way up to the fifth floor where a little kitchen was waiting for her with a bathtub under the counter.

  I bought this map and one from 2005, which said nothing to me, did not stir gentle memories of staircases and the smell of floor polish, but was very useful because it had all the new names, or rather, the restored names from the pre-division days. So Dimitroffstraße was Eberswalder Straße again, Fabelhaftstraße was Schlesische Straße, and so on. My mind easily added these little footnotes to its own map, just as – I though
t – my mother might have done, standing here, or in some other bookshop, lining up two maps. For she would have been irritated and confused by the different street names, too, and just like me, she would have hated the idea of asking strangers to show her around her own city.

  The bookseller told me that Dimitroff had been a Bulgarian Communist, which surprised me, because it was a large and busy road; you would have thought they’d have given it to a Russian.

  In the research centre next door I found a recently published encyclopedia of painters in the GDR, with colour plates of farm equipment in oil on canvas, and a couple of surprisingly lovely sketches of women with strong, sturdy, naked legs. In one of them they were fixing nets by the Baltic sea, in another, hanging up laundry in a courtyard. The entry for ‘Neo-Expressionists’ was very short and included only a handful of names, and there, with one of those electric memory-shocks, I found Sven Hartwig, a neo-Expressionist painter who escaped to the West in 1987, then settled in Dortmund where he lived until his death of lung cancer the following year. (So he did not even see the end of the GDR, I thought. If only he had sat it out. If only we had sat it out! But how could we have known?)

  According to the encyclopedia, Sven’s most successful paintings had been Worker and Farmer and Cat by the Lake; there was a small picture of the latter, the cat a rich, rusty red, the lake bright blue. Like most paintings by East German artists, they were no longer shown in museums. Too closely associated with the vanished regime. Sven, I learned, had at one point been much favoured by our rulers, and been awarded all sorts of Socialist prizes. As Oma would say: Today’s wine is tomorrow’s vinegar.

  I pulled the photo of the blue horses out of my pocket and placed it next to the open page. My father had ridiculed Sven and his fable-like style, but I disagreed with Papa on that one. I liked the horses, I liked the cat by the lake, I had liked the tiger, too. I smiled. Perhaps Mama had also looked up Sven, either in this research centre or in a bookshop or library. The encyclopedia would have pleased her; it was just as she’d hoped: people could see that it hadn’t all been tractors, factories and The Polytechnical Classroom. We had produced red tigers and blue horses, too.