Confession with Blue Horses

by Sophie Hardach

  ‘Frau Valentin?’ A large man with a beard and round glasses stood up behind his desk and came towards me. ‘How good to see you. I’d offer you a coffee but the machine is broken.’

  I was about to close the door behind me, but he reached past me and gently steadied it so it remained slightly ajar.

  ‘You’ve seen your mother’s file?’ he asked. ‘Britta told me you came to the reading room.’

  ‘Only what’s left of it. She said it might take – well, it might take forever to find it.’

  ‘Oh, she was being too cautious there. I’ve taken a look at one of the old inventories and I think we should be able to locate it within a reasonable amount of time. It was in a part of the building that wasn’t too aggressively ransacked, and while I obviously can’t give any guarantees, I’d say your chances are pretty good.’

  ‘Can we look at it now?’ I asked, and only then remembered Aaron. What if he’d already found the shreds?

  ‘I’m afraid that would be against our protocol,’ said Licht.

  I was beginning to understand the frustration my mother must have felt during her search. It was all very nice and clean in here, all these orderly files and long white shelves, all these brisk researchers walking up and down the corridor in their corduroys and cardigans; the visitors politely waiting their turn to enter the reading room. How well behaved we all were; but one mistake, one carelessly redacted file, and we’d all be at each other’s throats.

  ‘I’m not really interested in the file as such,’ I continued. ‘I just need to see if there’s anything about my brother. I don’t know if my mother mentioned him…’

  He nodded. ‘That’s why she came here. It’s terrible what happened to your family, it’s absolutely terrible.’

  Then why won’t you help us? I wanted to ask, and my face must have shown my impatience. Licht turned up his palms in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘We talked for a long time, your mother and I. We even ended up going for lunch together, which is not what I usually do, but we came from a similar sort of background, I suppose. She was very frank with me, strikingly frank.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m not sure how to explain this, Frau Valentin. When you work in a place like this, you have to be very disciplined with yourself. You can’t allow yourself to speculate, if you know what I’m saying, because otherwise you’d quickly lose your hold on reality. But that’s what your mother wanted me to do, she wanted me to help her look into all sorts of speculative scenarios, and that was… that was difficult for me.’

  ‘What sort of scenarios?’

  ‘Oh, she had the same concerns as everyone else who comes here – not just about your brother, but the more usual fare, as it were. Whether someone had betrayed her to the Stasi, and if so, who, and when, and why. Apparently, her interrogator brought up certain details about the trip, about her life – details she hadn’t told him. She said your flat must have been bugged.’

  ‘Why?’ I tried to smile. ‘To find out the latest news on Cubism?’

  ‘Well, there would have been an incident of some sort, a report by someone perhaps, or an observation of some suspicious activity, and that would have triggered an official surveillance operation.’

  ‘Did she suspect anyone in particular?’

  He shook his head. ‘It was sort of the other way round. She kept asking me what I had seen in our records, or what remained of them. Had there been any names, any codenames, any reports, any agreements to co-operate… She was very insistent.’

  ‘You could check, couldn’t you?’ I asked. ‘Even if the file was destroyed, you could check if there are any Stasi wires behind the walls of our old flat.’

  He laughed, then quickly turned serious when he saw my face. ‘You’re right, in all probability the wires are still there, behind some new wallpaper perhaps. That is, if there were any wires in the first place. But we’re an archive, we don’t walk into people’s flats and start chiselling off plasterwork.’

  Plasterwork. They would have installed the wires while we were out. In the morning, when our neighbours were at work and the students still asleep. Behind the skirting board, possibly: that would have been easy enough, take it off and screw it back on. Inside the curtain rails. Behind the wallpaper, somehow. A few discreet holes drilled into the wall.

  ‘I found some white dust under my bed once,’ I said slowly. ‘Before we went to Hungary, I happened to crawl under my bed one day and I saw someone had done something to the wall there, scratched it or something like that.’

  Now it was his turn to look doubtful. ‘It could have been from someone installing a surveillance system, yes, that’s a theoretical possibility. They were very careful though, they always made sure no one was in, and they cleaned up after themselves.’

  ‘It could have been them, though.’

  ‘Frau Valentin…’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, there’s no use speculating.’ Again I felt my frustration take over. ‘If you were in my situation, you’d understand.’

  ‘I have been in your situation,’ he said softly, looking at his hands. ‘And I do understand.’

  ‘Oh.’ I sat back. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was in the shower, the door rang, and there they were. And I’ll never know who told them. No one’s ever found a trace of my file, and believe me, we’ve looked. One of our older staff members said it was part of a batch that was shipped off and burnt. See, you’re in a better situation than many of us. Eventually, you’ll get your answers. Whereas in my case…’ He raised his hands. ‘That’s it.’

  How ignorant I was. Meeting Katia should have prepared me; I should have known that the world I was entering was full of people like us. All these years I had avoided going back to Berlin, thinking our stigma would be all the more obvious here, when actually the opposite was the case. I felt far less of a freak here than in London. Give me another week, I thought, and I’ll be surprised if someone isn’t a former prisoner.

  I stood up and thanked Licht for his time. He accompanied me out into the corridor.

  ‘Your mother and I had quite a few things in common.’ He looked back through the open office door. ‘I don’t feel all that comfortable in closed rooms, you see, so I always keep my door open. She appreciated that.’

  *

  On my way out, I stopped to text Tobi.

  Met archive director. Might be able to help us. Talk later. x

  I wasn’t sure how much to tell him. Tobi was always so protective. If I mentioned Licht’s comments about the bugging and all that, he would only start worrying. The big courtyard was empty now, the last tourists had moved on. I shivered, drew my jacket around me and walked towards the main road.

  ‘Ella?’ A hand tapped my shoulder. Startled, I turned around.

  ‘Aaron!’ I was surprised by how happy I was to see him, to find a familiar face and voice here, a steady force amid the chaos.

  ‘Do you mind if we go somewhere else?’ He looked much more nervous than the last time we had talked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Would Mitte be OK? I don’t trust any of the places in this neighbourhood.’

  ‘Right. Of course. The entire neighbourhood…’ I made a cutting gesture with my hand. ‘Totally contaminated. Toxic, Stasified for good.’

  He laughed. ‘OK, maybe it’s not quite like that, but I live in Mitte and know a Kneipe there that’s always empty. Sorry if I sound paranoid.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with being paranoid – it reminds me of home.’

  He smiled. ‘Mitte, then?’

  ‘Whatever you say.’ I was tired of making decisions.

  ‘And then I can give you your file.’

  I jumped. ‘You have it?’

  ‘Can we go, please? My boss could show up here any minute.’

  ‘You took it from the archive?’

  ‘I made a photocopy.’ He was walking very fast, and I did my best to keep up. ‘I didn’t mean to steal it or anything, I just started making copie
s because I wanted to work on it from home.’

  ‘That’s very noble of you.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  I did mind, a bit. It would have been nice if he’d asked me. Still, he was risking his job for this, and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful.

  He glanced at me. ‘How was it with Licht?’

  ‘More helpful than I’d expected. Maybe because he’d been in prison as well.’

  ‘Licht was in prison?’ Aaron stopped. ‘How do you know all these things?’

  ‘I keep my ears open, don’t I?’ I tapped my ear, my open ear.

  Aaron hesitated. ‘I just wanted to say, I’m really sorry about what happened to your dad.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was a little taken aback. ‘So you know everything that happened? It’s all in the file?’

  ‘Not everything,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’

  *

  We did not talk on the train to Mitte. I could not help looking at Aaron’s bag, a cracked leather satchel that could have done with a bit of love. That cardboard edge peeking out, was that the file? What if someone stole the bag now? Aaron seemed to sense my nervousness. He put the bag on his lap and closed his arms around it, almost with a kind of tenderness.

  In Mitte he took me to a dark, old-fashioned, wood-panelled boozer that had resisted the tide of hipster bars. The men at the bar looked like they had been there since Honecker kissed Brezhnev. Grey moustaches, beer bellies, shot glasses next to their beers. The place reminded me of Sven somehow, poor Sven who had not lived long enough to enjoy life in the West. I could see him here, with his beer and his fag, getting into arguments about art and politics.

  We ordered two beers and carried them to a table in a quiet corner. Aaron glanced over his shoulder again. He was dressed in jeans and a hoodie and looked rather like a hacker, partly because of the combination of sportswear and glasses, partly because of his secretive tics.

  ‘If you keep doing that, people will think you have something to hide,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t help it, it’s become a habit.’

  ‘Because of your work?’

  ‘Possibly.’ A smile, an apologetic shrug. ‘It does make you feel a bit watched. I guess it’s like reading about lice and starting to feel itchy.’

  ‘Thank you for doing this.’ I smiled. ‘How come you’re interning at that archive, anyway?’

  ‘I thought it would be fun to spend a summer in Berlin.’ He grimaced. ‘Did that sound flippant? It’s obviously a great privilege…’

  ‘Summer in Berlin sounds great. Better than having a Stasi fetish.’

  ‘That actually exists, you know.’

  ‘What, Stasi fetishists? Two people call each other and a third listens in?’

  ‘No, seriously, we get tons of requests from people who want to have a party in Mielke’s office.’

  He placed his satchel on the chair between us. We both stared at it for a moment.

  ‘I hope I’m not getting you into trouble,’ I said, and knew it was a bit late for that. We were very contagious, we Valentins; we came up with half-baked plans and dragged the rest of the world into them. I should not have asked him for help at all, really, and yet I also knew that I would do it again, of course I would.

  ‘It’s fine.’ He shifted a little in his chair. ‘This does have to stay between us though, OK?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Great. So…’ He pulled three thick cardboard folders out of his bag, each wrapped with a thick yellow rubber band. ‘This is it. Some pages are still missing, but this is most of it. I made a note where I wasn’t exactly sure if I’d put them together in the right order.’

  ‘You actually glued all of these pages together yourself?’

  ‘It gets faster over time, once you’re familiar with the material. And the pieces were pretty big.’

  ‘Still – I didn’t realise – I thought, you know, you’d just found the file.’

  ‘I told you, that’s why I had to take them home, to work on them.’

  ‘I just thought…’ I’d thought nothing at all. I’d spent not a single thought on how exactly Aaron was going to retrieve the file, what he would do with the pieces, which rules he might be breaking. I felt ashamed of my selfishness, my mad focus.

  ‘It’s incredibly kind of you to do this,’ was the best I could offer.

  ‘I did have my doubts. But, I don’t know, I felt that if I didn’t help you…’ He cleared his throat. ‘I felt it would be one of those things I’d regret all my life.’

  I did not know what to say, and so said nothing. It moved me that this stranger had spent his time puzzling together our story.

  ‘Look.’ Another glance over his shoulder, then he opened the top folder. ‘I’ve made it as accessible as possible. The interrogations are under the blue tabs, red is for the prison records, and the surveillance reports are under…’ He looked up. ‘This isn’t too weird for you?’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  And it was. Talking to Katia and Licht had felt like a mutual confession, intimate and slightly shameful, but this was completely different, easier somehow and almost weightless, detached from any emotional anchors.

  It must be because we’re talking in English, I thought. The words ‘interrogation’, ‘prison’ and ‘surveillance’ were just tabs in a folder; they referred to objects and experiences without actually evoking them. They had no power over me, they were lifeless. Whereas the German equivalents, especially the terms that would have been used in East Germany – Vernehmung, Haft, Überwachung – grabbed me by the throat. I heard them, or even thought them, and was in a damp cellar, barbed wire hanging over my head, an unseen thing crouching in the corner. Darkness, rustling leaves, the sound of my own breath, and then a sudden light.

  I turned the pages. ‘And the green section?’

  ‘That’s about your brother.’

  I looked up. ‘So you know what happened to him.’

  ‘It only says that he was adopted.’

  ‘What? Where?’ I frantically flicked through the dense transcripts until I saw the photo.

  Heiko Valentin.

  Our Heiko, our baby. Registered, photographed, catalogued. Our pouty, chubby-cheeked darling. For years, for decades we had searched for him, and here he was. That little face, alone on a cold piece of paper. Big eyes, such big, big eyes.

  Oh, I could not look at it, I could not look at the photo at all. I pushed it away and the whole folder would have fallen off the table had Aaron not caught it. I wanted to scream. Heiko lying in a cold bed in some children’s home, face red with tears, ‘Mama! Papa! Mama! Papa!’ No, it was too much. It broke me, it was physically unbearable, just like it had been all those years ago. It had been unbearable back then, and I had found a solution to make it bearable, but here – that photo!

  Heikolein, Liebling, kleiner Süßer, Bärchen. Mein frecher Affe, mein kleiner Schatz.

  They had taken him away, and we had let them. We had let them! That was the truth of it, we had let them, we had let them, we had let them. Our fat little boy, throwing porridge at the wall. Smearing carrot mush into my hair. Running towards me when I walked into the room, arms outstretched, face shining:

  Eyya! Eyya!

  Say Ella.

  Eyya.

  I started to cry. My body gave way, I slumped against Aaron. Sobbing, I told him about our return from Hungary. And Heiko? Where is Heiko? The empty cot, his little spoons in the kitchen drawer, a pair of socks still drying on the radiator. He had always lost his socks. His little brown Heiko-socks.

  ‘But you know all that.’ I took a deep breath. ‘You read it all in the file.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ Aaron gently rubbed my back. ‘The file just says he was adopted. It doesn’t say anything about… spoons. And socks.’

  ‘Sorry, of course not. I mean, they’re not important.’ I blew my nose.

  ‘On the contrary, socks are really important,’ he
said, and I thought how strange and lovely it was that he understood.

  20

  THERE WAS A BIG party at the residence, with people dancing in the kitchen and stumbling in and out of the studios. I slipped into my room and spread the folders out on my desk.

  I felt calmer now, more in control. Aaron and I had agreed that I would read everything at my own pace, then call him if I had any questions. The trick was to distance myself from the transcripts and reports, to read them as if they concerned another family, otherwise I would never get through it all. And I had to get through it, because I had to find Heiko. It was that simple. No more of this: oh, but what if he doesn’t want to be found, oh, but privacy, oh, but the passage of time. Fuck the passage of time. That photo! He was our boy, our little boy. It did not matter how old he was now. It did not matter if he was a drug dealer now or a skinhead, a happy family man or an equally happy brainwashed Stasi apologist – inside he would always be our little boy, that little boy in the picture. That had happened. That little boy had been kidnapped. And it was no use crumpling in my chair or refusing to look at the file or weeping over my loss. I was his older sister. I had to bring him back.

  My phone beeped. Three missed calls from Tobi, and a message:

  You there???

  I started composing a reply, but it was too difficult. I did not want to tell Tobi about the file until I knew what was in it. The phone rang again, and I stuffed it under my pillow.

  *

  My grandmother’s favourite writer, Christa Wolf, described in her final book how she consulted her Stasi files after the fall of the wall. She had been a literary star in East Germany; the archivist carted out more than forty-two big folders on her, plus phone transcripts, all stored in a large green wooden box that Wolf came to call the ‘seaman’s crate’. Day after day a friendly assistant fished the files from the seaman’s crate and laid them out for Wolf, who immersed herself in them and learned exactly which of her editors, mentors and friends had betrayed her over the decades. She thought what a relief it would be to make a big bonfire and burn all this paper. Reading her file destroyed the past and poisoned the present. It was the Stasi’s language that did this. It distorted reality as she remembered it and covered it in dirt until she herself felt dirtied. Then came the last day in the Stasi archive. She had worked her way through it all, she had discovered the names of the traitors and forced herself to forget them again. It was finally over. The friendly assistant hesitated a little and said without looking at Wolf: