Oma put the parcel on the kitchen table and said she had to tell us something.
‘It’s good news, really,’ she said slowly. ‘Well, it’s good and not-so-good. The good news is that your mother is no longer in prison.’
I gripped the table to prevent myself from sliding off my seat. ‘She’s coming here?’ I frantically thought of things we could do to make the flat more welcoming: put up paper chains, tidy our room, bake a cake. I could not help picturing both of them bursting through the door, Mama and Papa, laughing at us because we had thought Papa was never coming back.
‘No.’ My grandmother smoothed the table cloth. ‘No. She’s been bought out by the West.’
‘The West bought her?’ Tobi asked.
‘Well, yes. They paid money to our government and flew her over to West Berlin.’
This was a shock. I had heard of spies being exchanged on the bridges between East and West Berlin, but I could not imagine my mother being that important.
‘Is she going to spy for them?’ I whispered.
‘No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just what they do sometimes – they pay our government for prisoners that our government does not want.’ And she looked at the table as she said that. It hurt me to hear my mother spoken of in such a way, as a person who was not wanted. I wanted her. Tobi wanted her. Why had no one asked us?
‘And so this parcel here,’ my grandmother continued, ‘this parcel, I think, is from Regine.’
‘But if she’s over there, we’ll never see her again!’
‘Can she at least come and visit us?’ Tobi asked anxiously.
Oma took a deep breath. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think they’d let her in. So that’s the not-so-good news. But she – she can ask our government to let you two go and join her over there.’ Another deep breath. ‘It’ll take a while, but I suppose that’s what’ll eventually happen.’
My head was spinning. Ever since that day in Hungary, the only certainty I had had was that Tobi and I were still here, in our flat, in our neighbourhood. This was the kitchen table where my father had read his books, and where, in my imagination, he was still reading his books. Stuck to the fridge was a rhyming shopping list in my father’s handwriting that no one dared remove. Sour cream was on it, chicken and potatoes: the ingredients for his extra-special Painter’s Potatoes. Here was the table where my mother used to paint her face for her evenings out. There in the living room, they had received friends, put on music and knocked back shots. In the bedroom, Papa used to whistle as he ironed his shirts, and joke that he was good at ironing because he had been a bachelor for so long before he married my mother. In my drawer was a brush that smelled of my father’s hair; he had used it for his beard. And anyway, what about Heiko? Was my mother asking the government to let him go, too?
‘Don’t think about it too much, my darling,’ my grandmother said and stroked my hair. ‘As I said, it’ll take a while anyway. The important thing is that she’s not in prison anymore. Now shall we open the parcel?’
Inside were children’s clothes: a yellow T-shirt and a pair of jeans for me, and a red T-shirt and a pair of jeans for Tobi. They were fantastic clothes. The jeans in particular looked very fashionable and West German. But they were too small for me. My mother had miscalculated my size. I tried them on and could barely get the jeans over my knees. The T-shirt stretched tightly over my belly, exposing a hand-width of flesh. Tobi’s clothes were too small as well. I gave him my set. His clothes, I thought, would fit Heiko.
There was a letter in the parcel. My mother wrote that she was in West Berlin. She was still finding her feet, but as soon as she had a job, she wanted to rent a flat in Wedding. Wedding was right next to Prenzlauer Berg, on the other side of the Bösebrücke. She would look for a flat on the top floor, with a window facing east, and every night she would flash a torch three times in the dark. That would be our sign. We might not see the light as such, since there was a wide strip of train tracks and no-man’s-land between Prenzlauer Berg and Wedding, and anyway, we would not know which window to look at. But she would do it anyway, and hoped that we liked the idea and found it comforting.
*
From then on, I often looked out of the window at night, hoping to see three flashes of light. I knew that my mother was right, I would never be able to see them; our street wasn’t close enough to the wall. But she had also been right in thinking that I would find the idea itself comforting. Three flashes in the dark, one for each of us children.
25
Aaron
Berlin 2010
IN THE BARE, WHITE room, on the bare, white desk, a dozen or so photocopied pages lay in a row. Taped tears and creases ran through them like scars. Aaron was done. Not that Regine Valentin’s file was complete. Some pages were still missing and would probably always be missing. But he had finished piecing together what scraps were available.
This, he thought, made sense. But it left him with a rather big problem. He should never have agreed to help Ella. He felt like those people in movies who accidentally kill someone and hide the body, but the neighbour finds the body, so they have to kill the neighbour, and then the postman finds the neighbour’s body and the first body, so they have to kill the postman. Twenty minutes into the movie, they are serial killers and they don’t even know what happened.
Aaron got up to wander down to the secret coffee machine. He took the stairs, walked slowly, made his espresso with care. This was a tricky situation, a very tricky situation. His phone rang.
‘Ella!’
‘Is this a good time?’
‘Yeah, no worries. I’m on my lunch break. Well, coffee break.’
‘What are you working on?’
‘The metal workers’ meeting, still.’
‘I told you, I think that’s going to turn out to be really interesting. You’ll be surprised. They’ll be plotting an illegal strike or something.’
‘Three cheers for your natural optimism.’ He smiled. ‘Hey, they’re going to display one of my reports in an exhibition; well, not my report, the one about the offices.’
‘See? Interesting!’
He could hear the attempt at cheerfulness in her voice, at normalcy. As if this was something people did, call each other to pass the time of day and chat about the surveillance state. Even after reading her mother’s file she’d been like that. They’d met for drinks and he’d expected her to be in pieces, as she had been when she first saw her brother’s photo, but she’d walked into the bar looking completely unshaken. He wanted to tell her that she did not have to do this, that she could put her misery on full show if she wanted to, but maybe that would be patronising. Or maybe she simply did not know how to be any other way.
‘I got in touch with one of my old friends the other day, you know,’ she said. ‘A girl called Sandy. I had high hopes for her, really high hopes. She was one of those kids who was kind of everywhere and heard everything.’
‘And?’
‘And, nothing. She lives in an ashram in India. We Skyped. She said she remembered me, of course she remembered me, but that she wasn’t actually at our school for very long.’
‘Was she the one who lived by the wall?’
‘That’s her! She was my best friend. She mattered so, so much to me. But when we spoke, the way she told it, it was like we’d maybe passed each other in the playground once. At which point I obviously started to doubt myself, so I checked. I did check. I asked her about specific things that happened, like that stupid thing we did where we stuck out our tongues – anyway, I ran it all past her, and she said, yes, it was all true, all of that had happened. And then she said something like, yes, we were really close that summer. Something like that. Yeah, we were thick as thieves that summer. But it all sounded so – as if that’s something children do, they’re thick as thieves, and then time passes, and they forget, and it’s not important. But to me it was so important! It’s still so important!’
‘She probably just felt bad abou
t what happened to your family.’
‘That, too. You’re right. I think she felt bad about it.’ Ella sounded quite calm, quite matter-of-fact. ‘She blanked me after we came back from Hungary, I remember that pretty well; she just ignored me. But I wouldn’t still hold that against her, after so many years.’
Ah, but you would, Aaron thought. And she knows that you would. And she holds it against herself, too. He felt a bit sorry for this Sandy in her ashram, who would be sitting there right now, cross-legged probably, trying hard not to think about the summer of 1987.
‘I told her that I knew she had her own stuff to deal with. Her mum went over to the West, you know. But she didn’t want to go into any of that.’ She paused. ‘Hey, I thought she’d at least offer me a discount on her next meditation workshop. Or a free yoga mat.’
‘I bet she’s posting that mat right now.’
‘She shouldn’t feel guilty. I didn’t call her for an apology, I called her because I thought she might be able to help, or even just to reconnect in some way. Oh well. She’s meditated it all out of her mind. Anyway, I just wanted to check how you were, and I’ve ended up talking about myself again.’
‘I’m fine. Nothing new here. Just matching white with white.’
‘Things OK with your boss?’
‘I think so. He hasn’t shouted at me recently.’ Aaron glanced towards the door. ‘Listen, I’d better go. But let’s meet up – I don’t know – this weekend?’
When he hung up, he realised that he was looking forward to seeing her. He whistled to himself as he walked back to his office. There on his desk was the problematic page. He placed it on a high shelf, and tried to focus on sheet metal production targets.
‘Lunch?’ Bernd was standing in the doorway.
‘Sure.’ God, was he knackered.
‘Everything OK?’ Bernd in caring mode was somehow even worse than Bernd in bullying mode. Then again, he was good at his job, Aaron had to grant him that; he was a conscientious researcher and very sharp. If only there was a way of asking for his advice without the risk of detonating him again.
‘I was just thinking,’ Aaron started cautiously. ‘Were the Stasi always right? Not in the sense of being morally right, obviously. I mean, in the sense of being factually right. Were they always factually accurate? Like, if someone read those transcripts and took them to be an actual record of things, just as an example, would that be accurate, or would it be better to doubt it? But then again, some of them seem to be verbatim transcripts and actual descriptions of events, so…’
‘Excellent question.’ Bernd peered at Aaron’s desk, at the sheet metal reports. ‘Anything specific you’re wondering about?’
‘Not really.’ Aaron tried to look innocent. ‘Just as a general thing.’
‘It really depends. Spies are just people, and people are unreliable. The Stasi had a word for them…’
‘Doppelzüngler,’ Aaron said.
‘Very good!’ Bernd smiled. ‘It’s amazing how much your German has come along.’
My German is FINE, Aaron wanted to yell, IT IS FINE, but he needed Bernd now and so he just said: ‘Thanks.’
‘But then again, if you think about it, it would have been very risky to make things up. You’d have been accused of being a double agent, probably.’ He moved dangerously close to the high shelf. ‘So, within reason, yes, we can assume that these people here really were discussing how much sheet metal they could roll out despite the coal shortage. That probably happened.’
‘OK, that’s useful. Thanks.’
‘It would help if you told me what this is all about.’
‘It’s about my eternal quest to be a better intern.’ Aaron picked up his bag. ‘What do you say, time for another race? My pages are really picking up speed.’
They walked down the corridor. Aaron could tell he hadn’t fooled Bernd, of course not. Bernd spent his life cross-examining Stasi records; he knew when something was fishy. Still, Bernd did not question him any further, not over their lunch of spinach dumplings with cheese, not over their clandestine coffee after.
They carried their little cups and saucers up to their offices, past the reading room.
‘When I started here, I thought I was going to help people. I thought I was going to do all these amazing things and everyone would be grateful,’ Aaron said.
‘We do help people.’
‘And yet that dad never wanted to see his file in the end.’
‘But we gave him the choice.’
‘Maybe he guessed that his son was somehow implicated.’ They were in Bernd’s office now. It was always very warm in here, because of the heat the softly humming machines gave off. Suddenly Aaron thought, sod it, so what if I offend him? So what if he sends me back to the stacks? There was only so long you could tiptoe around someone.
‘If I had a surveillance file, I wouldn’t want it to be in an archive,’ Aaron said. ‘It’s a private document, if you think about it. It’s about one person, and maybe their family, and it’s nobody else’s business.’
‘It’s also everybody’s business, unfortunately.’ Bernd moved a mouse, and a black screen sprang back to life. ‘But I know what you mean.’
*
The zoo was almost empty, not surprising on a weekday afternoon. It had become one of Aaron’s favourite places in Berlin, despite being tinged with guilt because of the animal rights aspect. He tried to ignore the signs of distress through captivity, the weaving from leg to leg, the repetitive head-shaking and paw-gnawing, the low, hopeless moaning and grunting. Still, despite that occasional pang of fellow-feeling, it was a good place to go for some quiet time. Green and tranquil, with various oriental-looking pleasure domes that housed giraffes and elephants. Aaron especially liked watching the penguins. How human they looked, whizzing down their plastic slide and splashing into the water.
He put his hand into his pocket and felt the folded paper in there.
He knew now who had betrayed the Valentins, and he wished he didn’t. That old man in the reading room, the one who read through half his file, abruptly stood up and left without even looking at the rest: Aaron finally understood him.
The penguins queued for the slide, flapping their wings with great self-importance. Aaron watched them for a while longer, then moved on to the polar bears.
26
Ella
The Laundry Woman
Berlin 2010
‘WHAT I DON’T LIKE is the phrase “psychological torture”,’ said Frau Jankowitz, pouring me another coffee. ‘For me, torture means pulling someone’s nails out.’
I had indeed found Frau Jankowitz in the phone book. We were sitting in her living room, which was decorated with dozens of dangling succulents in macramé baskets. Photos of children and grandchildren lined the walls, of colleagues at some Socialist event, of Frau Jankowitz in uniform. She had worked at Hohenschönhausen from 1985 until 1989. In fact, she had been one of my mother’s jailers. Not an interrogator like the perfumed Hauptmann Kuboweit, just the kind of person who locked and unlocked steel doors, who nudged the prisoners towards the interrogation room and dragged them back to their cells afterwards. I did not know the etiquette for this kind of meeting.
On the phone Frau Jankowitz had sounded cautious, but now, in person, in her own home, she was growing more confident. She had dressed up for this: a blue skirt, a lilac blouse, an amber necklace. Her face was carefully made up with pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. A scent of sugary violets hung in the air. She had laid the low table very carefully with blue-and-white cups, saucers, plates and a matching tall coffee pot, little tea spoons and cake forks, and a large white porcelain platter with homemade jam biscuits. They were very classic German biscuits, quite fiddly to make, with the red cherry jam shining through a heart-shaped hole in the top layer.
‘Pulling someone’s nails out is not the only form of torture,’ I said carefully.
‘However you define it, we never tortured any prisoners. The very idea is r
idiculous.’ She straightened the table cloth and brushed some crumbs into a palm. ‘But I suppose people can say anything they like about us these days. As long as it’s nasty enough, the public will believe it.’
I took my mother’s notebook from my bag and opened it.
‘What about this?’ I turned it over so Frau Jankowitz could see the passage I had highlighted.
The guards handcuffed me to a shower and turned on the water. It was winter and the water was very cold. They left me there for many hours and afterwards they asked me again to sign the form to release my son for adoption. I refused. They took me into a stone cell in the basement and shut the door. I was still wondering how long they would leave me there when I heard a hissing sound. I looked down and saw that there were little holes in the walls just above the floor, and there was water rushing in. Slowly it filled the bottom of the cell, and then it rose.
I thought they were going to drown me. But when the water reached about knee height, or maybe it was a little lower than that, it stopped.
Later, they took me outside and again asked me to sign.
Frau Jankowitz read the passage slowly and carefully, then handed the notebook back to me.
‘That would have been at another institution, not at ours. Your mother would have only been with us until she confessed, you see.’ She looked satisfied, pleased to be able to correct my error.
‘But I saw it for myself,’ I said. ‘At Hohenschönhausen, I saw a black rubber cell without any windows.’
‘That was, as you say, a rubber cell. We sometimes used that to protect prisoners from harming themselves. What your mother describes here is something quite different, it’s what was known as a water cell, but we didn’t have any water cells at Hohenschönhausen.’
I was glad we were not in a court room; this was what it must feel like to watch a trial fall apart.
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