*
Cem and Petra lived in an elegant turn-of-the-century building. On the way up to the flat, Aaron stopped in front of one of the wide double front doors. The frame was painted white, with two barely detectable indentions at eye height, about a finger-width apart. Aaron ran his hand across them. Filled-in nail holes, from two nails that had been driven into the wood at a slight diagonal. There was only one object that left these kinds of holes in this kind of position: a mezuzah – the short, slender wooden or metal case containing a scroll with a blessing for the house. Aaron did not consider himself religious – he ate prawns and bacon butties, but it pleased him that he recognised these faint traces, already covered by layers of paint, invisible to most of the people who passed. A few more years, and they would disappear entirely.
As a boy, Aaron had spent enough time in Sunday school to remember the ancient debate over the ideal position for a mezuzah. One Talmudic sage argued that it should be vertical, another that it should be horizontal, and in a compromise, everyone agreed on diagonal. Equally important was the scroll. Every so often you were supposed to take it to an expert, have it checked for smudges or other damage, to ensure that the blessing for your house was still beautiful and intact. If it was beyond repair, you had to find a scribe to replace the scroll or buy a new mezuzah in a specialist shop. An entire mini-economy would have existed around these barely visible nail holes, and it had vanished just as the mezuzah had vanished.
Aaron’s grandmother had asked him to go to the Berlin Zoo for her, because as a child she had lived near the zoo. Every weekend her parents had taken her to see the monkeys and feed them peanuts. Aaron had done as he was told, visited the zoo several times in fact, took pictures and sent them to his grandmother. Now when they spoke on the phone they always spoke about the zoo. She did not ask any other questions about Berlin, not about her old neighbourhood, not about her old school, only about the zoo; she wanted to know, for example, if it was still permitted to feed the monkeys there. In the end, the unsaid was as important as the said.
Aaron knew he would not tell his grandmother about the holes from the mezuzah, because there was nothing to say about it other than what she knew already – that something had been here and was now no longer here.
*
The kitchen smelled of wine and fish. There was a black pot of mussels in broth on the hob.
‘Help yourself!’ Petra called from the bedroom. ‘We’ve already eaten.’
‘Thank you, but I’m allergic to shellfish.’
She came out of the bedroom, wearing what looked like a brown monk’s habit and a necklace made from a slashed bicycle tyre.
‘There’s bread and cheese, as well.’
‘Thanks. That’s really kind. I’ll cook tomorrow.’ He was impatient to get to his own room and look at the scraps, but Petra was clearly feeling chatty.
‘We’ve got a super-difficult client right now.’ She picked a mussel from the bowl and cracked it open. ‘Super-difficult. Cem is in such a mood.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘What are you going to cook?’
‘I’ll have to think about it.’ He cut himself a slice of bread and put it on a plate.
‘That all you going to have?’ She fished out another mussel.
‘I’m not hungry.’ He hated being rude. ‘I’m sorry, but I think I’ll have to eat at my desk, as it were. So much work.’
‘Jesus, they’re really beasting you, aren’t they? And I bet you’re not even paid.’
‘Hmm.’ He gave her a little wave. ‘Catch up later, OK?’
*
He was good at this by now. You had to start with the corners and fill in the rest, just like with a jigsaw puzzle. And he knew a bit about Regine Valentin; he knew her general circumstances. That made it easier. He considered calling Ella and asking her if she wanted to be part of this. But no, that would only slow him down. And also, if he was honest, he wanted to do this. He wanted to do it properly, as Frau Schild had said; he wanted to finish the job.
The more he came to know the Valentins, the faster he was able to work. Batch by batch the shreds left the archive. The little piles on the desk in his bedroom grew. He spread them out on the wooden floor, tiptoeing between the little islands of text.
A family emerged. Jochen, Regine and their three children. A grandmother was mentioned, and a grandfather. A cousin. Some family friends, a painter. A bohemian crowd, that was how he pictured them, drifting around Prenzlauer Berg. Gallery openings, public readings, grant applications, book reviews. There were plenty of scraps in the bag from this aspect of Regine Valentin’s life – newspaper clippings, seminar programmes. He set them aside for later, because this was not really what Ella was after.
Then there were the reports. He placed these apart, too. They formed the backbone of the file. He had the bottom of a preliminary report explaining why the family should be placed under surveillance, but could not find the rest. There was IM Erna, the potential Doppelzüngler, and various other informants. It would take him a while to fight his way through this thicket, because reports were not as standardised as lists or even interrogations. You had to work a bit more subtly, tease out the stylistic quirks of the individual informants and guess their relationship to the family, decide who’d written the one about the faculty meeting where Regine Valentin appeared to have made some unwise remarks, and who’d been standing at the corner, watching who went in and out of her home. Another job for later.
There were photographs in the bag, photographs of three children, each pinned to a form. He read their names, Ella, Tobias and Heiko, and another name scribbled in the margins. All this would be very significant to Ella, he was certain of that, and so he fixed the forms first, the forms for the three Valentin children.
Again he thought of texting Ella. But now he was deep in the file, and wouldn’t it make more sense to show her the forms along with the rest? Who would want to read about their past in serialised form, gagging for the next instalment? Nobody.
Next, another easy triumph. A letter, printed on heavy, embossed paper, that had been carelessly ripped in two. It was signed by Mielke, and he paused for a moment. Had some Stasi underling deliberately failed to destroy this one properly, hoping to sling a bit of mud at his boss? Impossible to tell. Maybe it had just not seemed particularly damaging. Just another Mielke document, like that menu with the rolls and the boiled egg.
Dear Comrade Minister!
Please allow me, dear Comrade Minister, to thank you and the relevant branches of your ministry for the valuable support you offered the Ministry of State Security following our request for measures concerning the GDR citizens VALENTIN, Regine and Jochen.
It was only through your effective co-operation that the first suspect and her three children were apprehended and extradited from Hungary to the GDR.
Allow me also to express my condolences, dear Comrade Minister, for the attack on your border guard. I commend his brave and decisive response and wish him a swift recovery.
With socialist greetings
Mielke
Huh. Interesting. He could roughly see what had happened, how the bohemian Valentins had walked into disaster. What surprised him, though, was the high-level treatment of the case, the formal letter between two countries. This one he’d need to think about. He placed the letter in a far corner, next to the yucca plant, thus designating it the Corner of International Affairs.
After the letter and the forms, he moved on to the interrogations. Here he had a key: the one page from the reading room that had already been fished out of some pile and repaired.
He used that page to prime his eyes for the visual aspects of the text. The shape of the letters, the way the words were arranged on the page. From there it was not hard to go through all the scraps and separate the ones that looked about right.
Night after night he worked until his eyes ached, a dry, itchy soreness. In the mornings he dragged himself back to the archive, did hi
s best there, counted the hours until he could be back home with the Valentins. When he finished the bulk of the interrogations, he felt a rush of pride.
QUESTION: You seem more co-operative now.
ANSWER: I didn’t do anything wrong. All I did was go on holiday to Hungary.
QUESTION: Are you saying our state harasses innocent people? Agitation against the state, that’s punishable by up to five years. Frankly, we are very tired of your lies and stubbornness. An official was attacked in a Socialist brother country, that’s a serious offence.
ANSWER: I don’t know why you’re asking me all these questions when you know everything already.
QUESTION: We found a map in one of your bags. Who gave you that map?
Gradually the scattered paper islands on his floor merged into small continents. From a thousand tiny glimpses of the Valentins, he’d created a meaningful overview. Here by the door was their life before Hungary, the book reviews, the admittedly still somewhat incomplete reports. Then the forms and protocols from the arrest. Over by the yucca plant, the international angle. Then the interrogation, and the other documents that went with that.
In the centre were the scraps that remained a mystery to him. A handwritten note in Hungarian, which unfortunately he could not read. A list of artworks, with a scathing assessment of their artistic merit. And a torn piece of paper:
The child Ella Valentin, b. 4.2.1979
It did not belong to one of the forms, that was the strange thing. It was written in the same type as IM Erna’s reports, the surveillance reports, and he was pretty sure that it was part of that dossier. But this confused him because it was rare to see children mentioned in surveillance reports. Not unheard-of, but rare. What could you really say about a child? She went to school, she came back, she picked her nose. Maybe he would ask Ella about it; then again, he did not want to alarm her.
That night, Aaron fell asleep with black ink on his fingers.
QUESTION: Whose idea was it to flee the Republic, yours or your husband’s?
ANSWER: I can’t remember.
QUESTION: We have evidence that it was your idea, and that you were helped by a former GDR citizen who is now resident in West Berlin. How did he contact you?
ANSWER: Who told you that? Did you spy on us? Who told you all these things?
STATEMENT: Answer the question.
ANSWER: I don’t know, I can’t remember, I don’t know.
QUESTION: We will come back to this later. Your neighbours describe you as a very loving mother. Do you agree with that?
ANSWER: Of course I love my children.
QUESTION: And you want nothing but the best for them?
ANSWER: Is that a threat?
QUESTION: Are you accusing us of threatening you?
ANSWER: Whatever you do, please don’t punish my children. Please.
QUESTION: You punished them yourself when you decided to break the law of the Republic. It’s up to you how soon you will see them again. We always reward those who co-operate, and there are many ways of co-operating with us. Are you ready to co-operate?
II
Wall Power
She gave us everything
Sun and wind and she never deprived us.
And where she was, was life,
And what we are, we are because of her.
She never abandoned us,
When the world froze to death, we were warm.
We were led by the mother of the masses,
Carried by her powerful arm.
The Party, the Party is always right!
Comrades, that’s how it is;
Because whoever fights for our rights
Is always right,
Against exploitation and lies.
‘The Song of the Party’; party song of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Composer: Louis Fürnberg, 1949
19
Ella
An Open Door
Berlin 2010
I WAS SITTING IN my room at the artists’ residence. From the kitchen came the sound of laughter and chatter, mostly in Spanish. Someone was playing the guitar and singing:
Solo le pido a Dios
Que el dolor no me sea indiferente…
There was a knock on my door.
‘Yes?’
The door opened a crack and a woman peeked in, holding a bowl of stew in her hands. Her hair was wrapped in a yellow scarf printed with red boats. ‘Would you like some dinner?’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘It’s vegan. With chickpeas and chard.’
I took the bowl from her, touched. ‘I should really have it in the kitchen with you guys. It’s just…’
‘No, no, we respect the need for solitude.’ She held up her flat hand, as if to cast a spell against the demons of social pressure. I liked her already, with her chickpeas and her kindness. We chatted for a bit. She came from Argentina and was working on a topography of concrete in Berlin.
‘And you?’ She looked around my room.
‘Me?’ Oh, I’m just in Berlin to look for my lost brother and consult my mother’s Stasi file. Yes, there’s a whole file on her; I was surprised, too. ‘I’m working on a topography of…’ I tried to think of something. ‘Of memory. I’m working on a topography of memory.’ It wasn’t even a lie, and it seemed to satisfy her. We talked a bit more before she went back to her party.
*
The next day I took the S-Bahn back to Frankfurter Allee, then walked to the Stasi archive in the eastern neighbourhood of Lichtenberg. The archive was in a vast, grey compound, large enough to house thousands of Stasi employees, surrounded by equally vast, grey tower blocks. I remembered Katia’s comment about the former guards who still lived close to the prison. Presumably the Stasi spies had also stayed in their flats, and were sitting on the balconies above me, or walking past me with their shopping bags.
There was a small exhibition in the foyer about daily life in the GDR. I walked past display cases full of beige housecoats, magazines with travel tips for the Soviet Union, vats for homemade Russian kvass, a lawnmower made from old car parts, a rocking horse made from a chair. Physical, durable proof of our inventiveness and improvisation skills, and of the fact that we and our world were now a mere curiosity. In the last display case they had reconstructed an old GDR kitchen, complete with a bathtub under the counter. I felt tempted to pull it out and lie down in it.
I asked the receptionist for Dr Licht. She scratched her chin.
‘He’s been changing offices a lot recently. Let me check.’ She tapped away at her computer. ‘He’s a bit like those migrating salmon, you know, every now and then he becomes restless. OK, got him.’
She gave me directions to an annexe a couple of courtyards away. I left the building, crossed the courtyards, looked for the entrance to Licht’s unit, and must then have taken a wrong turn. I found myself in a deserted part of the compound that seemed to go on forever, a city within a city. This whole place seemed designed to baffle and disorient. How had the Stasi officers ever found their way back from the bathroom? Through the windows I could see office interiors that looked like they had been left untouched since the 1990s, and long empty corridors where the teenagers of Berlin had been practising their graffiti skills. A group of squatters in torn T-shirts and military boots occupied one of the floors. They told me that the archive was at the other end of the compound, no one ever came here.
‘Only the ghosts,’ one said in a broad Berliner drawl, picking at his teeth with his fingernail. ‘And us.’
‘I’m looking for Dr Licht,’ I said, because anything seemed possible at that point, and maybe he liked the solitude and had chosen to perch up here with the squatters and the ghosts.
‘The only doctor I know is the one who sells me my pills,’ the squatter said. He had dyed his hair black and shaved one side off completely, and I hadn’t seen that particular hairstyle in such a long time that it made me nostalgic. This was how I pictured my old friend Sandy, I realised that now. I alwa
ys imagined that she’d grown up to be a hardcore, alternative activist of some sort.
‘Just randomly, do you know someone called Sandy?’ I asked my new friend with the asymmetrical hairstyle. He laughed, and the others joined in.
‘What am I, the phone book?’ But he said it in a friendly way, and in any case, the phone book reference was so quaint and curiously old-fashioned, like the haircut, that I realised we must be about the same age. I was quite sure that they were East Berliners, certainly the one I was talking to, with his broad accent. I wanted to reach out to them somehow, to express this feeling that we were from the same batch, that we’d all read about Soldier Heinz at school, and added up tanks on one page and apples on another, and maybe even all had that one teacher who was a bit different and asked us to do things like close our eyes and paint while she played a piece of music.
The one with the haircut, I was sure of it, would have had a horrible time at school. Our country had been no country for people with funny hair.
Because I did not know how to say these things, and because I had an appointment with Dr Licht, I just thanked them for their time, gave them some beer money and walked away feeling vaguely regretful.
*
I had to walk all the way back to the receptionist, listen more carefully this time and cross the two courtyards again. It ended up taking me ten, fifteen minutes, which made me anxious because lateness was never a good thing here, and when I finally arrived at Licht’s office, his office door was open. I took this as a silent form of reproach and, instead of taking a seat in the waiting area, went right in.
Confession with Blue Horses Page 14