by Hari Kunzru
It was the first time she’d seen him in uniform. He looked primmer than he did when he was roaming around the city in civilian clothes. He had placed his hat neatly on the desk, next to a pale pink file. He didn’t look up as the guards brought her in, pretending to read. Sit, he said, waving vaguely at a chair at the foot of the T. He pushed back a strand of his thick black hair, smoothed and patted it with a flattened palm. No, on your hands. Still he didn’t look up. She was confused, and he raised his voice. Put your hands under your buttocks, palms down. Sit on your hands. She did as she was told. He opened up a file and made some kind of note.
In front of him he had a telephone, a tape recorder, and another box with a row of buttons whose function was not obvious. In front of her was a microphone. Things were going to change, he said. From now on there would be no time for romantic games. She asked if she were under arrest. No, what made her think that? They were just going to have a little chat. The threat hidden in that bloodless phrase.
He pressed a button on the tape recorder and began. Factual questions. Names and places, information about the band, people she had met in other cities. I don’t know, she kept saying. I can’t remember. In that moment, she was telling the truth. She really couldn’t remember anything. It was something she was good at, practiced in. Partial self-erasure. She could live for long periods as if her memories were not hers, as if they were just images taken from films or books.
He oscillated between unctuous compassion and petulant threats. Had she given a single moment’s thought to her family, her friends? Take it from him, the consequences of these things were never limited to one person. She should imagine, he said, that she was throwing a stone into a pond. The ripples would spread out. Luckily for her he had a solution. To what, she wondered, other than the trouble he himself was causing. His solution was this: Together they would write out an agreement. She would confirm her loyalty to the German Democratic Republic and agree to work with the Ministry for State Security. A small thing. Most people would see it as their patriotic duty.
She didn’t want to provoke him—she had no sense of the limits of his power, what he could realistically do to her—but as he whined on, a bolus of disgust rose in her throat. All of it, the fake delivery truck, the cell, the blinding lights, just so a repressed little man could issue threats and shuffle papers at his desk. She had to concentrate to fight her nausea, and because speaking made it worse, she didn’t speak, didn’t say the things he wanted her to say. Again and again she swallowed the words and shook her head and eventually he seemed to run out of steam. With one more twist he could probably have broken her, but he didn’t see it. Instead he pressed his call button and ordered the guards to take her back to her cell.
As she sat and waited for whatever would happen next, she tried to divert her mind from the more frightening possibilities, but there was nothing else to dwell on, no way to distract herself. If it got really bad, could she escape? The light fixture would hold her weight. She still had the laces on her shoes. Then she heard the sound of keys and the door’s heavy bolt being drawn. The interrogator came in, and ordered her to stand. She caught the sour hormonal stink of her own sweat. He could smell it too. His face was a mask of disgust. Surely, she thought, the smell would be familiar to him, a normal part of his work. Look at you, he said. It’s obvious that you’re not mentally stable. He expanded this train of thought into a short lecture. It was well known that Creative Types were Susceptible to Psychiatric Illness. She displayed a lot of Typical Symptoms such as Negativity and Receptivity to Antisocial Influences.
I’m going to throw you back, he said, in a tone of professional regret. She thought she had misheard. Throw her back, like a fish. He stepped aside, making an irritated gesture at the open cell door. Could he offer one word of advice before she left? She ought to go straight home. She wouldn’t want people to start wondering where she’d been. That weaselly hint of concern. As if the two of them were complicit in something, a scheme or a love affair.
She was given back the borrowed shopping bag, still filled with the contents of her work locker, and escorted to the front gate. It closed behind her and she found herself on a residential street, facing a row of maisonettes. Behind her was a high wall and a watchtower. She didn’t have a way of telling the time, but from the light she guessed that it must have been late afternoon.
She chose a direction that seemed likely to lead to a main road, and began walking. Eventually she found a U-Bahn station, and arrived home at more or less the normal time, as if she’d just finished her day at the factory. As she came through the door, Elli was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. Everything OK, she asked distractedly, then squinted at Monika’s bag. You have records, she said, brightening up. What did you get? At first Monika didn’t understand. Then she felt sick. She’d forgotten about the interrogator’s “gifts.” Without thinking, she had brought a piece of him home. Mechanically, she dug the records out of her bag and handed them over. Seeing Elli reading the sleeves made her feel guilty, as if she were exposing her to a contagious disease. Her friend’s amazed, slightly envious expression told her that she’d made a problem for herself. The records were too good, too recently released to come without an explanation. I swapped them with Peter, she said, the first thing that came into her head, and then cursed herself because this Peter was a close friend, in and out of the apartment all the time. The lie could easily be found out. She had a sudden sense of threat, the springing of the trap set by the interrogator as she left the cell. Go straight home. You wouldn’t want people to start wondering where you’ve been. Why should she lie? What was the point? Because he put the idea into her head? But then again, how was she to tell the story without inviting suspicion? Every question would breed more questions. Why hadn’t she ever said anything before about talking to the Stasi? Were the records payment for some kind of service? She was exhausted and very hungry. She just wanted to forget about everything for a few hours. After she’d had some sleep, she would handle it. She ran into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and stood shivering under the thin trickle of the shower.
Her plan was to tell Katja first. She wanted to do it when the two of them were alone, but somehow she never found the right moment. There were always people in the apartment, or they were all out somewhere, watching a band or with a big group at a bar. As the days went by, a sort of skin or scab grew up over the memory of her arrest. Why pick away at it? Little by little she fell into a kind of magical thinking, as if the reality of what had happened to her depended on its being told, put into words. Instead she swallowed it, forced it down into the pit of her stomach and barred its way back out with the gate of her teeth.
Elli had a boyfriend, whose name was Kurt. Yet another musician, a bass player. One morning Monika was lying in bed when Kurt put his head round her door. Had she seen his notebook? He’d left it on the kitchen table. She propped herself up on her elbows and said no, she hadn’t, and just at that moment she spotted it, or rather they both spotted it simultaneously, lying on top of the beer crate where she kept her clothes. There was no reason for it to be there. They had all been at a party. She’d come in and gone straight to bed, just fallen in drunkenly through her door without even turning on the light.
Kurt was more quizzical than angry. If you want to read my secret thoughts, he said, you could just ask. But the notebook was just the beginning. Over the next few weeks, all sorts of small personal things went missing or were moved around in the apartment. Someone took 100 marks from the pocket of Elli’s leather jacket. Katja’s photos were left out on her bed. No one came out and made accusations, but these small crimes and clumsy invasions of privacy put everyone on edge. Who would leave a used sanitary towel by her bed? Or tear pages out of Elli’s books? A bad atmosphere grew up. Katja and Elli became conspiratorial, exclusive. Sometimes Monika thought she was going mad. Was she actually responsible, doing all these things withou
t knowing? Elli had begun to look at her sideways. Katja too. Deep down she knew there could only be one answer. The bastards could be blatant when they wanted, or so subtle that it was hard to decide if they’d been there at all. Each time she felt sure of what was happening, she came up against the simple fact of its absurdity. Why would they go to such trouble, just to play petty pranks? And yet it was the only plausible answer.
Then came the fight at the church. Even the old tchekists of the secret police only dared to go so far against the Lutherans, and some pastors made use of this latitude to do political things, such as letting punk bands play in their halls. The pastor of a church in Friedrichshain was a bearded young man who painted abstractions and believed in turning swords into ploughshares. In return for letting the band use his space, he asked the three girls to sit in on what he called a peace circle, a group that met every week to talk about current events. There were perhaps twenty others. An older woman, some kind of professor, gave a lecture on the horrors of nuclear war. Most of the members were older than the girls. Monika did not say anything in the discussion, just looked around the circle, trying to spot the informer.
On the night of the concert, there was a good atmosphere, at least at the beginning. Another band played before DGF, and the crowd was excited, whooping and cheering as they waited for them to come on. A few people had even crossed over from West Berlin for the show. Katja introduced her to an English guy who was dressed, for some reason, in a Weimar-era postman’s uniform. He’d brought some tapes of underground industrial music as a present. He said he wanted to take the three of them into a studio. Though he was obviously trying to score with Katja, the offer seemed to be genuine.
The church hall had a proper stage, and they were standing in the wings, waiting to go on, when some skinheads arrived. Not a few. Twenty or thirty. It was 88 Tommy’s birthday and they’d all been in a bar. Everyone knew 88 Tommy and his idiot friends but tonight there were more of them, a lot of faces she didn’t recognize. DGF went into their first song and right away the skins pushed their way to the front. They started spitting and making obscene gestures. From further back, someone threw a bottle. Monika was protected behind the kit, but at the front it was bad. Katja was jabbing at shirtless men with her mike stand, warning them to keep back. During the second song a couple of guys started Sieg-Heiling and one of them got onstage and pushed Elli down into the crowd and after that it was chaos. As if at a signal, the stage was full of skinheads throwing punches, kicking over the PA, beating people. She cowered behind her kit, unable to see what had happened to her friends. When she spotted an opening between the scuffling bodies, she ran for a side door.
Almost as soon as she got outside, she was grabbed by two men in bureaucratic raincoats who smelled of cigarettes and hustled her in the direction of a waiting car, talking loudly about how they were “here to protect” her and “get her to safety.” The street was full of people who had come outside to get away from the fight. The men made such a noise, raising their voices. They drew everybody’s attention.
Pastor Daniel was in the crowd, holding a handkerchief against a wound on his forehead. He frowned as he saw her go past. She tried to shake the men off, but one of them jabbed her in the small of her back with a fist or a stick, a quick discreet attack which caused a flash of intense pain. While she was incapacitated, they more or less picked her up and threw her onto the backseat of a car.
They drove her to a hairdresser, of all places, nearby in Lichtenberg. The lights were on in the shop even though it was almost midnight. She could do with a makeover, said one, laughing. Mousy little thing like her, she should have a little more pride in her appearance. They took her to the back of the shop where, of course, the roll neck man was waiting, natty in driving gloves and a new brown leather jacket. He was taking pride in his appearance, swiveling on a salon chair under a plastic dryer hood. Have a seat, he said. Don’t worry, you’re safe now.
She could have defied him. She could have said, pig, when did I ever ask you to keep me safe? She could have said, I know you don’t give a damn about me, so cut the shit and tell me what this is really about. Instead she flopped down onto a chair and almost in a whimper, the whimper of a frightened little girl, a beaten dog, she asked why he had to make it so obvious to her friends. And as she heard herself she understood what he’d done, how completely he’d won. He’d made his abuse into a shared secret, a cozy secret that had alienated her from her friends, and she was disgusted with him and with herself for falling for it and with the sordid world that made such a thing possible.
He was using his indoor voice, his forked tongue. He told her he admired her loyalty to her friends, however misguided. He made offers. Perhaps she needed money? He might be able to organize a stipend. She told him to do whatever he wanted. She was exhausted. She’d had enough. He pretended to be offended. He had, he said, a sworn duty to uphold the law. He took that seriously. Did she not take that seriously? Surely, after such a disgusting display of violence, it would be obvious even to someone as obtuse as her that negative decadent elements were at work in her little milieu.
She threw up her hands. So why the hell had he arrested her, instead of them? He claimed not to understand. Them? The skinheads. The ones who did the violence. She couldn’t believe how little he seemed to understand. Skinheads? Did he really not know what they were? He asked her to describe them. Ah yes, he said. Ah yes. So did these animals have names?
Tommy.
He smiled and took a little pad out of his pocket. Tommy. Very good. So what else did she know about this Tommy? A last name, perhaps? Where did he live? And then she saw what he was doing, getting her to give him information, reporting to him, and she had a feeling like looking into a pit. No, she said. Just that. No. He pretended to be surprised. Wasn’t this Tommy one of the real criminals, the ones she thought he ought to be focusing on? Well, then, surely she should be happy to assist. I’m not working with you, she told him. I’m not one of your creatures.
There was a rustle of plastic curtain beads. I know one thing about you, said a voice behind her. She swiveled on the chair and there he was, as if she’d magicked him into being. 88 Tommy the skin, a few spots of red near the collar of his white tee shirt. He grinned a doughy grin. He looked drunk. There was more blood on the leg of his jeans. I know one thing, he said. You’re a shit drummer. She was so confused that she just sat there with her mouth open. She could not put it all together. Roll Neck’s smirk. Tommy’s presence. His easy, casual air, leaning in the doorway, scuffing the sole of his boot against the floor.
Roll Neck let her take it all in for a minute. We have many people helping us, he said. In all sectors of society. So, it was late. Perhaps he ought to let Tommy drop her off? Someone should see her to her door.
You could come and meet the boys, said Tommy. Roll Neck thought that line was hilarious. Meet them? All of them? No, no Tommy, she wouldn’t like it. He grinned at her. Maybe she would like it. She seemed like the stuck-up type to him, but maybe he was wrong.
Maybe, said Roll Neck, they should play a game. If she agreed to work for him he’d give her a head start. She didn’t understand. He gestured to Tommy, and then to the door. Say yes and she would have five minutes before he unleashed the beast. Tommy looked angry at being called a beast, but he didn’t say anything. An expression crossed his face, a brief collapse of his drunken smirk. Maybe, she thought, Roll Neck had something on him too. She stood up, without speaking. She didn’t give him her promise. Then she turned and walked to the door.
Once outside, she started running, convinced Tommy was coming after her, but after a few blocks and a few turns she realized she was alone, and allowed herself to slow down. Eventually she had to stop and rest, propping her hands on her knees, coughing and spitting into the gutter.
When she got home she found the apartment full of people. The atmosphere was unfriendly. They squinted at her through a
haze of cigarette smoke. So who were her friends? She tried to explain as best as she could. Yes they were cops. Of course they were. They’d been harassing her. She’d never given them a thing. She’d found out that they were working with Tommy. That part of it people seemed to believe. Tommy with the pigs. But why hadn’t she said anything before? There was only so much of it she could take before it got to her. All the stress and fear. She told them all to fuck themselves and shut herself in her room. After a while, Katja followed her. I would be so sad, she said, to think that you could ever do something like that. Monika promised her it was nonsense. On my mother’s life. You don’t give a shit about your mother, Katja said.
The next day Elli came back from hospital. She’d broken her arm when they threw her offstage. Accusingly, she showed the cast to Monika. Was that supposed to be her fault too? When she next got Katja alone, Monika broke down. You know me. You know I would never. Can’t you make them see. Katja looked so beautiful. I would do anything to prove it to you, Monika slurred. I would follow you anywhere. To the grave. They’d both had a lot to drink.
Pastor Daniel had found out that Monika needed money and offered her some work as a gardener. When she turned up, you could tell that he was suspicious. There was a lot to be done in the church grounds, he said. He supposed he could use her. A couple of days later, she walked home after a day in the garden, dressed in old clothes, mud on her boots, to find everyone waiting for her in the living room, not just the band members but most of her close friends, people from other bands, the pastor himself. They had set up a sort of courtroom. They sat round the walls. One of the kitchen chairs had been pulled out for her and placed on the rug.
Elli went first. Monika had been with some policemen after the fight at the gig. She claimed they were harassing her, but many people in the room had seen pictures that told a different story. What pictures? From a folder (so formal, so like the people they were not supposed to be like) Elli produced a grainy black-and-white photograph of her talking to Roll Neck outside the electroplating factory. It must have been taken from far away. Who gave her that? She kept asking, but Elli carried on. There were a lot of reasons to be suspicious. Monika had just attached herself to their group. She had no friends, except the ones she met through them. Had she been ordered to worm her way in? Elli wasn’t afraid to give her opinion. Monika was a snitch. She should leave.