Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  ‘Jochen?’ she tried again. The boys slipped from her arms. Tobi stirred. We were only steps away from the barbed wire.

  My mother paid no attention to the barbed wire, to me, to the boys. She was walking back towards my father, as if in a trance, and then she broke into a run.

  *

  My father was lying in the meadow. The border guard stood next to him. When he saw us, he switched off the torch. It was darker than before. My mother kneeled down next to my father and touched his head, his face, his chest. The air smelled metallic. The guard was talking to us in his foreign tongue. My mother screamed in German: ‘Call for help! Call for help right now! We need a doctor!’

  ‘He fight,’ the border guard replied in broken German. ‘He fight, what can I do, he fight me.’ He switched on the torch again. He was a young man, milk-faced, with a wispy moustache, like one of the teenagers who hung around Prenzlauer Berg on their mopeds. His eyes were wide with fear.

  I kneeled down next to my mother and touched my father’s chest. It was wet. I withdrew my hand.

  Dark shapes were moving across the meadow towards us. My mother held my father in her arms and whispered something in his ear.

  The border guard pressed the ball of his hand against his eyes. He seemed about to cry, he seemed terribly afraid, and I was terribly afraid, and my mother kept whispering words I could not hear.

  My brothers must have woken up, because in the darkness of the forest, amid the angry voices of the guards who were now gathering around us, I could hear them crying.

  17

  MY MOTHER, MY BROTHERS and I flew back to Berlin. The plane was full of other detained East Germans, each handcuffed to a handler. We were handcuffed, too. I looked around to see if I could spot my father somewhere. As if she had read my thoughts, my mother leaned over and whispered that Papa was in hospital. Her handler yanked at the handcuffs and told her to shut up.

  A woman sat down next to me. She asked me questions that I could not answer because I was suddenly struck with a stutter. I tried very hard to answer properly, fearing she might punish me if I did not. It was impossible. The harder I tried, the stronger the stutter.

  When we got off the plane, I reached for my mother’s hand, but a uniformed woman picked me up and carried me towards a car. I saw two men taking my mother’s arms on either side. They shoved her into the back of a van, not a prison van but an ordinary bakery van with pictures of rolls and loaves on the side. The back door swung open. There were metal cages inside. Our car swerved and I lost sight of the van and my mother.

  *

  I was taken to a room that was bare but for a desk and a green metal locker. Another uniformed woman brought me juice and a ham sandwich, but I was not hungry. I asked where my parents were and was told to be a good girl and wait.

  The linoleum floor was wet. Someone had mopped it in wide circles. The floor was shiny where it had been mopped. It was matte where the mop had missed bits. When I pointed my feet, the tips of my shoes only just touched the floor. I flexed them. Pointed them. The water dried, the shiny bits disappeared. Now the whole floor was matte. First wet, now dry. I wondered what my punishment would be. Sandy’s father sometimes beat her with a slipper. It was a secret; she had told me and I had sworn not to tell anyone else. Sometimes our mother slapped us. Grown-ups were stupid, they slapped children and then told them not to hit each other. As soon as my father was well again, we would all be back in our flat. Oma would give us a good telling-off. I would never do anything naughty again, and neither would my parents. If I held my breath for thirty counts, Papa would be well again.

  The door opened.

  ‘Oma!’

  ‘Ellachen.’

  She opened her arms wide. I ran to her, pressed myself against her big, soft belly, felt her arms close around me. She had put on her best beige skirt suit and a brown blouse. Her arms smelled of perfume, not our special perfume from the West but the usual stuff that smelled like a mopped floor. She loosened her arms just enough to let in another refugee who slipped into the dark fold and pressed himself against me, wet, sniffling, trembling.

  It was Tobi.

  ‘Where is Heiko?’ I asked, muffled by Oma’s suit jacket.

  ‘Not now, Ellachen,’ Oma said and squeezed us tight. ‘Let’s take you home.’

  18

  Aaron

  Berlin 2010

  THE BAR WAS NEAR Rosenthaler Platz and crammed with Pornobrillenträger: porn-glasses-wearers, men with large tortoiseshell glasses perched prominently on their noses, like producers of adult movies lounging around a 1970s swimming pool. A female porn-glasses-wearer was mixing cocktails behind the bar. Her black hair was shorn to a stubble on one side, and braided on the other. To Aaron’s knowledge there existed no particular Berliner word for a side braid, but there was one for the lower-back tattoo peeking out of the woman’s waistband. Two ink-black branches curled up towards her kidneys, like a mighty pair of antlers, and that was precisely what this kind of tattoo was called: Arschgeweih, or arse antlers.

  Bernd had organised a night out for the interns, a nice gesture. They were sipping cocktails from chipped white teacups with a pattern of pink flowers.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Bernd sidled up to him, teacup in hand. He looked faintly ridiculous with his big fingers around the dainty handle, but of course they all looked ridiculous, extras from a scene with the Mad Hatter. Aaron raised his own cup.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘Not too ground down by the shelves?’

  ‘You know, when Machiavelli was exiled from Florence, he would put on his finest garments every night, sit down at his desk, spread out his philosophy books, and settle down for an evening with the greatest minds of the past.’ He took a sip. ‘Just like me and Frau Schild.’

  ‘You weren’t exiled.’

  ‘What I mean is, there’s a way of making the best out of every situation.’ The caipirinha must be stronger than he’d thought. It was not in Aaron’s nature to challenge and complain. Yet here he was, challenging and complaining, and Bernd seemed not to mind, seemed to find it amusing even.

  ‘We thought it would be good for you to spend some time in the stacks. There are people who spend years there before they ever get to have a go at reconstruction.’

  ‘And indeed people who live there, like Frau Schild.’

  ‘I knew you’d find her interesting.’

  ‘She likes her coffee strong. That’s about the only thing I’ve found out about her. I have a feeling it’ll stay that way.’

  ‘She’s one of the best. You’ll find it extremely useful to have her ear once you’re back with us.’

  Back with us! Aaron felt giddy at the thought of being up there again in his office with the view over the tower blocks, a promising tray of paper scraps in front of him.

  ‘I’ve been forgiven?’ he asked.

  ‘If that’s how you want to put it. Licht really liked your work on those evacuated offices. He might even show your pages in an exhibition he’s planning, about the last days of the Stasi.’

  ‘Stasi: The Endgame.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  They were back to their easy banter and it seemed impossible to imagine that Bernd had once shouted at him, had lost his temper, had banished him to the shelves. Emboldened by this thawing of relations, Aaron asked: ‘Out of interest, say if you have an exhibition like that and you want to find files on a specific subject, is there any way of searching the bags without going through them? Like, instead of putting random pieces together and finding out they’re about Office Erfurt, could I have had any way of looking specifically for files about Office Erfurt?’

  Someone had turned up the music, and a few people started to dance. Aaron feared he had said the wrong thing again, and anyway, it was hard to shout over the noise. He should have just used the opportunity to have a good time with Bernd.

  ‘Not really,’ Bernd said. ‘Well, yes and no. We do have some inventories, databases, that sort of
thing. Hey, I’ll just get myself another drink.’

  And with that, Bernd disappeared towards the bar. It was only after Aaron had stood there for some time, his almost-empty cup in his hand, that he realised he’d been discreetly shaken off.

  *

  It took a few more days for him to be fully rehabilitated. Then he was finally back in the calm white room, with Bernd’s machines whirring next door. He tried not to think too much about how Frau Schild must feel, barred forever from this kind of work. Maybe it was just for the outside world, because no matter how much they trusted her, it would look strange to employ a former Stasi worker in reconstruction. Then again, it looked strange to employ one in the shelves, too. He would never understand this place.

  The pieces in front of him were an attendance list, some gathering of metal workers. Before meeting Ella Valentin, this would have excited him, just like he’d been extremely excited about the office evacuation reports. But now his mind kept drifting back to their secret conversation by the stacks. He’d photocopied the one page in her mother’s file, so he’d have a reference for the kind of font and format he’d be looking for. Only he had no idea where to start. There were indeed some inventories and databases, just like Bernd had said, but searching them had yielded next to nothing. A Regine Valentin was mentioned in a list of inmates transferred from one prison to another. Her name also came up in various reports about authors and publishers. Some of her books were praised, others heavily criticised. He made photocopies of these brief passages, thinking that Ella Valentin might be interested in them. But of the file as such, with its personal surveillance reports and interrogations – there was no sign of that at all.

  Ella Valentin would never find her brother this way, Aaron was sure. But it would be nice to be able to help her even just a little – to offer her a few more pages, a tiny bit more clarity. Already he had pictured the rest of the mother’s interrogation, as he did with all his fragments. She was an educated and to some extent influential woman, an art historian, an academic. In his mind he tried to reconstruct her voice. How she might have behaved under pressure.

  Here it was, the familiar compulsion to fill in the gaps. It was stronger than curiosity even, this urge to reconstruct the missing side. Though of course curiosity was there, too: the desire to know, and to know completely.

  In the Stasi dictionary, curiosity – Neugier in German, ‘new-greed’ – was defined as something to avoid:

  Curiosity as an emotionally motivated greed for concealed news and novelty can sabotage the process of gathering information. The handler must ensure at all times that surveillance is carried out dispassionately and without any emotional attachment to the outcome of the operation.

  Aaron decided that the Stasi knew nothing about what really motivated humans.

  Bernd had told him that the dad, the one betrayed by his son, had never shown up to see his file. He’d phoned on the day of the appointment and said he’d changed his mind.

  *

  By lunchtime he’d barely fiddled together half a page. And he suspected that he’d put the wrong pieces together. The names of the metal workers did not quite match up. He slipped out of the office and down into the courtyard, avoiding the canteen, avoiding Bernd’s cheerful requests for updates. It was a chilly day. A woman was sitting on a bench by a flower bed, eating a rye sandwich out of an aluminium foil wrapper. As he walked closer, he realised it was Annemarie Schild.

  Aaron sat down next to her and unwrapped his own sandwich.

  ‘Hallo, Frau Schild.’ He gave her a friendly nod. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘I’m on my break.’ She looked at her watch. ‘For another twenty minutes. Come to my office later.’

  He did not even know she had an office. He’d just assumed she worked in the stacks. Well, this was awkward. And he could hardly rewrap his sandwich and leave now, either.

  ‘Do you mind if I have my lunch here?’

  ‘You can have your lunch wherever you like. It’s a free country.’ Her voice was not hostile though, just neutral, and he decided to interpret it as an invitation. He started eating his sandwich.

  ‘Hmmm. Gouda and gherkin. What’s on yours?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Salami.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  He tried to think of a way to keep the chat going. So, what was it like, working for the Stasi? Maybe not.

  ‘It’s warm today,’ he said.

  She let out a sigh, wriggled her fingers. ‘I’m always cold. Poor circulation.’

  ‘Have you tried those fingerless mittens?’

  ‘I’ve tried everything. The only thing that works is a scalding bath with rosemary oil, but it has to be really scalding.’

  ‘My grandmother rubs her joints with pine-needle oil.’

  ‘Pine-needle oil.’ She took an apple from her bag and polished it with her sleeve. ‘That’s your Berliner grandmother, yes?’

  ‘That’s the one. She also uses sage, but I think that’s as a tea.’

  And there his knowledge of herbal remedies ended. But even this modest contribution had made a difference. Frau Schild, who’d been sitting with her back ever so slightly turned to him, was now visibly more relaxed. She shifted a little, facing him as they jointly contemplated her health issues.

  ‘You said you had a question?’ she eventually asked.

  ‘It’s a bit of a personal favour, really.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’m looking for a person’s file. I’ve tried all the usual lists and things. It would have been from the 1980s.’

  ‘You can put in a special request with Dr Licht, he’ll pass it on to us.’

  ‘Thank you, but that would take ages.’ He wished he could offer her a discreet but emotionally significant bribe, a handwarmer, a bottle of rosemary oil. All he had was a half-eaten gouda sandwich.

  ‘I’m only here this summer,’ he continued. ‘It would mean a lot to me to find it.’

  ‘This file, it belongs to a friend of yours?’

  ‘It’s about her mother. She really needs to see it. And I’d like to help someone, you know, not just sit here and glue lists back together and then leave.’

  ‘You want to do things properly,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You want to finish what you started.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That’s a good attitude. We should all finish what we started.’ She dropped the apple core into the bin next to them and wiped her hands on a paper towel. ‘Give me the name. I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘That’s really kind of you. If I can ask one thing – do you mind not telling Dr Licht?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she repeated. She looked at him. ‘And maybe one day, when the time comes, you’ll remember that I helped you.’

  She was asking him to make a commitment of some sort – a pledge, a promise. A promise to do what? He had no idea, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to promise anything. But he said:

  ‘I will, Frau Schild. I will remember.’

  *

  A week went by. No word from Frau Schild. At the weekend, he went to a party with Cem and Petra, and drank enough to feel worry-free for the first time in ages. He texted Ella about the bits and pieces he’d found – the book reports, the list of prisoners. It’s not much, he wrote, but it might be all I can find for you.

  On Monday, he returned to his desk. The metal workers were still far from complete. The abandoned shreds stared at him accusingly. He sat down, and his feet pushed against something soft. He looked: under his desk, a brown paper bag. About half full.

  He got up, carefully closed his office door and moved a chair in front of it.

  Then he got down on his knees, crawled close to the bag under his desk, and with the gentlest of movements, scooped out a tangle of paper.

  *

  All the scraps were typewritten.

  INFORMATION

  The following h
as come to our knowledge through IM Erna:

  allow me, dear Comrade Minister, to thank you and t

  ANSWER: I don’t know why you’re asking me all these questions when you know everything already.

  Aaron looked at the pieces, white and off-white, tried to find differences and sort them according to the differences.

  Someone had scribbled in the margins of that first scrap, right next to the codename IM Erna: ‘IM Erna – Doppelzüngler?’

  He’d seen that before somewhere. A ‘double-tonguer’, a liar, was that it? There it was again, on another scrap of paper, just a couple of lines:

  This information may have to be treated with some caution due to separate claims that IM Erna has shown herself to be a Doppelzüngler.

  He reached for his Stasi dictionary, worn and well-thumbed by now.

  Double-tonguer. Dishonest persons who convey different opinions on one and the same subject towards two or more other persons. D.s present a special danger as they can disorient the operative work and bring other citizens into disrepute through invented or false accusations.

  It was not for Aaron to judge these documents, to evaluate them, to form hypotheses and conclusions. But already he was looking at IM Erna’s account with some scepticism, was in fact looking at the whole scattered lot in front of him with some scepticism, because if IM Erna was a liar, and all these shreds were lies, then what was the point of putting them together?

  He glanced at the door. This was foolish. Bernd could come in any minute and kick him right back to Siberia. He carefully lifted the tangle, like moving a bird’s nest, and placed it at the back of the desk. Then, working as quickly and lightly as he could, he freed strand after strand, smoothed them out a little and placed them in his satchel. It was roomy, with sturdy walls; he could safely carry them home in there without damaging them. But what about the rest? He could hardly smuggle the whole bag past the receptionist!

  Aaron stayed late that night and used the quiet evening hours to free a few more strands. It might take a few days to get the contents of the whole bag home. He would do it in batches, hoping no one checked his satchel on the way out. Yes, that could work. He picked up his bag and made his way downstairs. The receptionist had already left. A night porter wished him a safe journey home. This was not theft, he told himself. He’d make photocopies, work on them quietly at home, restore the shreds to the bag. Nothing would change, nothing at all.