Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  She acted tough, but Monika had been in fights. She was like a charging bull, unable to stop herself. It was over more or less immediately. One of the boys held her back. Elli was already on the ground, screaming about her broken arm. The kitchen chair was splintered. She could hear herself shouting, as if from very far away. Take that back, you bitch. Take it back.

  What hurt most was the way Katja looked at her. As if she were a bug or a spider. With a feeling like icy water Monika understood what her future would be. It was like being slapped awake from a beautiful dream. These people had picked her up and invited her in. Elli was right, without them she had no one. They had been her people. And now they were telling her to go.

  They didn’t even let her stay there that night. She was told she could come back for her things in the morning. She didn’t know where to go and it was late and the weather was warm, so she slept in a park. That was what she did for a couple of days, hung around in the park, until she was so tired and hungry that she fell asleep on a bench in the middle of the afternoon and woke up to find it dark and a couple of cops shaking her. They put her in a cell overnight, and told her she’d be charged with vagrancy. She really didn’t care. She didn’t see what difference it made.

  In the morning they let her out and Roll Neck was waiting on the street, looking like the cat that got the cream. I thought we’d lost you, he said. That would have been a shame. She let him put her in the car. She knew she smelled bad and she didn’t care. They drove to Prenzlauer Berg, through the streets of war-damaged prewar tenements, and as they got closer she could feel the horror creeping up. She realized where he was taking her. There was a line of police vans parked round the corner from their building. He drew up behind them. The thing is, he said, if you’d cooperated when I first asked you, all the people asleep in there would still be your friends. You’d be in there sleeping too, instead of out here. It wouldn’t have had much of an effect on your life. A chat every week or two. A cup of coffee. Things would have gone on much as normal. And instead all this has to happen. Why? Because you gave us no choice. Order must be kept. Now please watch. He gave a signal to a man who blew a whistle. In ones and twos, dozens of police officers jumped out of the vans and doubled round the corner.

  In the year or so since she’d been living at the band house, more people had moved in. The building had turned into a little community. Roll Neck got out of the car and opened the rear door. Come on, he said. She refused. He told her not to test his patience and began to stroll across the street. She followed him, her feet like lead. The police had herded the tenants down into the courtyard. They stood there, shivering in their night clothes, listening to the sound of their apartments being searched, bangs and crashes echoing in the stairwell. People she knew, Katja and Elli among them, stared open-mouthed as Roll Neck walked her in from the street. Surrounded by high gray walls, he stuck his hands in his pockets and began to whistle, a jaunty little tune to accompany him as he ambled about, exploring. She followed behind, because staying in the courtyard would have been even worse. He visited almost every occupied apartment in the building, blandly unconcerned by the destruction going on all around him. Monika watched policemen pull out drawers, tip books off shelves as Roll Neck peered around like a tourist in an old church. She was friends with a photographer who lived on the floor above them. They had poured chemicals on his negatives and smashed his developing equipment. In the stairwell, policemen carried typewriters and boxes of documents, the materials the environmentalists across the hall used to make their newsletter. Finally, he pushed open the door of Katja and Elli’s place. She saw the pile of kindling that had been their living room furniture, their clothes ground underfoot. The basin and toilet had been smashed, and water was pooling on the bathroom floor, which was covered in unsleeved records, grimy with boot prints. She looked out of the window. From the other side of the courtyard, she heard the sound of glass breaking, someone crying.

  * * *

  —

  AT THIS POINT, Monika found it impossible to go on, and went outside to smoke a cigarette. She was gone for so long that I thought she might have left, and went out to find her. We carried on talking standing in the cold, between a pair of large ceramic dragons.

  As she stood in the apartment that had been her home, Monika felt completely dissociated, as if she no longer occupied her body. It was self-protective, she supposed. A way of distancing herself from what was happening to her. How could I understand what it was like? To be looked at with such hatred by the people in the courtyard, people she cared about? To feel that you had betrayed them so thoroughly. Roll Neck walked her down the stairs, half-supporting her. And when she broke down in the car afterwards, when she began shaking and screaming, he spoke kindly to her, rubbing her back and offering her a handkerchief. He knew it was unpleasant, but he had to make her see how things were. This was how the world worked. He would have liked her to be useful in Berlin but there were other places too. He would find her somewhere else to live, give her a new start. He made her feel grateful to him. Then he took her to an office where she wrote out a document, a declaration that she was loyal to the GDR, and was cooperating with the State Security service of her own free will. And so it was done. She belonged to him.

  Up until then Monika had been very thorough in the way she told her story, never missing a step, filling in details in response to my questions. Now she became vague, skipping over large parts of her life, describing things in the most impressionistic way. She was tired, I think. She had been talking for hours, and the staff of the Chinese restaurant had long since started folding napkins and cleaning silverware, making the place ready for the next day’s service. But there was something else, a reticence that I identified as shame.

  She moved out of Berlin. The Stasi used her in other cities, where she wasn’t known. She was taken to places where the band had played and told to get back in touch with people she’d met when she still belonged to herself, when she was, as she put it, “still a person.” In a few cases the contacts had heard rumors about the police raid and wanted nothing to do with her. But others welcomed her, gave her a meal or somewhere to stay, and she paid them back by making reports, reports that caused trouble for them, opened up the possibility of harassment, or prison. She hung out in coffee bars and parties in Karl-Marx-Stadt, in Dresden, in Weimar. She tried all sorts of tactics to keep her sense of her own decency alive. She tried to give as little information to her handlers as she could, to keep the things she said neutral, just gossip, tidbits that sounded useful but wouldn’t harm anyone. She soon found out that this was futile. Harm was everywhere. It spilled out as soon as she opened her mouth.

  Roll Neck would meet her in hotel rooms or private apartments. There was always somewhere to which he had the key. He usually brought a bottle and would badger her to drink with him. She usually refused, until one evening she was sent to a poetry reading at a private apartment in Leipzig. The poets were good people and she felt shitty enough about reporting on them that when Roll Neck was debriefing her she said yes to the offer of a glass. Later on, when everything was blurry, she let him take her to the bedroom and do what he wanted. She was aware, from a great distance, of Roll Neck’s white body, his grinding and whimpering, his ragged breathing next to her on the pillow after he came. She felt almost tenderly towards him. After all, he was the only one. The only one who knew her, who listened to her, who cared if she lived or died.

  By this point, she said, she felt she had no inside. She was a sort of hall or public gallery that people could walk about in as they pleased. Gradually Roll Neck found her less useful. The targets she was supposed to observe became suspicious. They could tell something about her was wrong. She was drinking more and more and one night she got into a fight at a bar and used a heavy ashtray on another woman, who was badly hurt. A broken nose, a cracked skull. She was arrested and charged with assault. Roll Neck did nothing to help. He told her
that the situation was her own fault. She hadn’t been trying. He washed his hands of her. She was sentenced to eighteen months in the women’s prison at Hoheneck, a grim red-brick fortress on a hill above a Saxon market town. It had a bad reputation and the reality was worse. Sleeping in a dormitory. Up at five for labor, sewing tablecloths and bed linens under signs extolling order and cleanliness. There was never a moment when she was unobserved. She couldn’t sleep. She stopped getting her period. Her hair fell out. The prisoners used to make lipstick out of spit and matchheads. They smeared the paste on their mouths so they could feel less like sickly ghosts.

  After she got out, she moved to Potsdam and eventually found work in a factory canteen. She served and swept and scrubbed and tried her best, as far as possible, never to speak to another living soul. Then one day she arrived to find the canteen workers gathered round a radio, listening as if their lives depended on what the announcer was saying. Hadn’t she heard? The borders were open in Hungary. She didn’t believe it. She thought it must be a ruse, a way to entrap traitors. From then on things moved very fast. In Leipzig the demonstrations got so big that the police had to stand aside and let the people pass. Every day the end was closer. The GDR began to collapse. People were packing and leaving for the West. Not her. She wasn’t fooled.

  It was impossible to believe that the whole system would fold just like that. And besides, they were still watching her. She was not sure who it was in particular, whether it was a coworker, a neighbor, or one of the people who stared at her in the line at the bread shop. When the minister announced that all travel restrictions had been lifted, she hurried back to her room. It seemed unwise to be on the street. She sat on the bed and listened to the radio, as the country she had grown up in vanished like a conjurer’s illusion.

  Everything happened without her. The dancing on the wall, the champagne, the banners hanging in the stairwells of the occupied Stasi buildings. She didn’t even visit the West until almost a year after the change. A day walking around the other side of the city, looking in the windows of the shops. She went into the KaDeWe, the big department store, and rode the glass elevator up and down. When she came to the food hall, the luxurious displays of chocolate and fruit and delicatessen goods, she couldn’t take it anymore and hurried away. She did not belong in such a place.

  Soon enough, the secrets started to come out. Researchers were looking through the Stasi files, trying to reconstruct documents that had been hastily shredded or burned. Victims wanted to talk about who had done what. There were ugly scenes on the TV, media denunciations. Friends found out the truth about friends. Heroes turned out to have feet of clay. Maybe it was a sign of her naïveté, or her isolation, but it didn’t occur to Monika that any of that would touch her. After all, who was she? Nothing. Nobody.

  She didn’t recognize the man who came to the door, until he reminded her that he used to write a fanzine. Then she remembered him, one of the Köpenick boys. He used to wear a dog collar and an army shirt. Turned out he’d done well in the new Germany, learned the tricks. He was now a journalist for a big weekly news magazine. Out of his writing he’d squeezed a watch and a fancy tape recorder and a little VW Golf parked on the street outside. He wanted to put certain questions to her, accusations of an unpleasant nature. Documents showed that she had been an informer. She’d put people in prison. Go away, she said. She had nothing to say to him.

  You can tell them to go away, but they don’t. Though she never read what he wrote, her neighbors did. They began to spit on the ground when she walked past and let their dogs do their business outside her door. Someone pushed a note through the letter box, calling her terrible names. By that time she had another job, quite a nice one, serving lunch to children at a Kindergarten. One day one of the teachers told her that “someone like her” had no business near children. They didn’t fire her. They didn’t have to. She packed her things and never went back.

  Through all this, she had doubts. Everyone said that the Stasi were gone, but was it really true? For her they’d simply sunk underground, into the walls and the floorboards, the fabric of things. Objects still moved around in her apartment. She’d find the tea in the coffee jar, her books in different orders on her shelves. There were unexplained setbacks. A stolen bike, lost parcels at the post office. All of it was suspicious. The texture of her reality was soft, spongy. She couldn’t trust that it would take her weight. She often wondered what had happened to Roll Neck. Sometimes it was as if he were still with her. At any time he might walk in, smirking and carrying a bottle of cheap booze. And then quite unexpectedly she saw him, standing in the cold selling pickles at a street market. He was wearing a cap with ear flaps, and his breath was spilling out in a frosty plume, and somehow the sight of him, wrapped in his hat and scarf, offering samples to the shoppers, was pathetic. It was like a balloon bursting. Finally she could believe that it was gone, the thing whose face he had been. She hurried away before he could spot her. That night she cried as she hadn’t done in years.

  Little by little, she made a life for herself. One with small dimensions, but safe and sustainable. Objects stopped moving around. No one hid in the doorways or followed her when she was on the street. Sometimes at weekends she packed a little picnic and went to the lake, or took a bus out to the countryside. Then came the revelations about Katja, and everything was difficult again. Naturally, with the fall of the wall, Katja had become an important person. It was inevitable, a woman with her charisma. After her days in the band, she’d been part of the movement for democracy. She’d written poetry and made speeches and chanted slogans. At the reunification ceremony she’d even been invited to sing a song at the Brandenburg Gate. She was an artist, an activist, a victim of the Stasi, a national symbol of resilience in the face of oppression. She’d just published a memoir when they found her file, and for Monika it felt like the night of the skinhead attack all over again, when she’d turned round to find Tommy standing in the doorway. The shock was just as great. The feeling of disorientation.

  Looking back it now seemed to Monika that her best memories of Katja were actually invented. She was usually kind, but it was the sort of kindness that cost nothing. She’d always won so effortlessly, and no one had ever thought to question how she did it. Now it seemed so obvious, the ease with which she could get hold of things, make things happen. Monika could barely process what was in the articles, couldn’t draw it into the circle of her imagination, so she made an appointment at the office which handled the Stasi archives. She was only allowed to read the material that pertained to her, but that was enough. Katja had been recruited by the Ministry for State Security at high school. She was described as “highly motivated,” and “committed to the cause of socialism.” She had reported everything, worked as hard as she could to undermine the influence of the decadent West. Most of Roll Neck’s cruelties—the way he’d pressured her, the guilt he’d made her feel—served no useful purpose at all, because Katja had already been telling them everything. It was even more perverse than she’d imagined. In a secret ceremony, during the time that they were in the band, the MfS had awarded Katja a medal and the rank of captain. Finally Monika understood the purpose of parading her in front of her friends on the day of the raid. It had been to protect Katja, to divert suspicion from their real asset.

  So what was left, after all that? She had nothing of her own. All her intimacies were on file in numbered paragraphs, all the movements of her soul. There were things she’d forgotten, or blocked out. A report dated soon after Roll Neck started poisoning her life, when the others had begun to be suspicious: Monika E claimed not to be a coworker with the MfS. She was intoxicated and revealed homosexual impulses…She had been drunk, that was true. And she’d wanted to make Katja believe her, believe that she would never ever betray her trust. When she’d tried to kiss her, Katja had gently pushed her away.

  This time she read the newspapers. A tabloid printed a picture of K
atja holding up a hand to ward off a photographer. There were other pictures, interviews with people they had known in Berlin, all saying how shocked they were to discover the truth about their famous friend. Everyone was shocked about Katja. Her, not so much. There was a brief revival of interest in DGF, the three-piece band with two informers. Monika moved again, though that didn’t stop a journalist finding her and following her down the street to ask about her Stasi “colleague.” After a month or two things died down again.

  And that, she said, was more or less that. She did a lot of drinking and got sentimental tattoos and tried to work out what she would say to her friend if she ever saw her again. Ten years after reunification, someone found Katja in a small South German town and persuaded her to give an interview for a TV documentary. Monika barely recognized her. She’d got fat, and her hair was badly dyed. The bohemian disorder of her youth had become an ugly jumble. She was breeding dogs, or rabbits or something. Animals for pet shops. She said she didn’t regret what she’d done. She’d followed her heart. So what if things had changed around her? She’d turned out not to be right about the world. That was true of many young people. Who could see into the future? A few months later, Monika saw Katja’s face again, in a newspaper obituary. She had gone out to the Wannsee and walked into the water. She had taken a lot of sleeping tablets and filled a backpack with rocks.