“Do you understand this stipulation?” the officer asks her. “I have been told to clarify this, to be sure you fully understand the conditions of your release. This man—this Peter Brenner—will be instantly arrested and sentenced to five to ten years’ labor at the SDAG Wismut uranium mines in the Ore Mountains. He will disappear; do you understand? And you will be the one responsible. We have him under surveillance already.”
She cannot look the man in the face. There is a metallic taste in her mouth.
“You have a choice,” he continues. “Will you protect him and leave the country, or will you stay in the DDR? What will you choose?”
She’d like to drag her fingernails across his face, take his throat in her hands, and press her thumbs through the skin. She’d like to scream for mercy, but she knows it will achieve nothing. She rocks back and forth on the chair. The officer hands her a fountain pen so that she can sign away her life, and when she has regained control of herself, that is what she does.
A wooden placard in front of the guardhouse warns citizens in four languages that they are leaving the Russian sector and entering the Allied zone, which has long since reverted to West German control. Behind her a gaggle of women are arguing, and two construction workers have their heads bent toward each other in deep discussion. There is tension in the curt movements and scattered looks of the small crowd. Bettina is accompanied by yet another soldier; this one—a machine gun hanging from his shoulder—grips her upper arm and pushes her ahead of him.
The border guard grabs for her papers without taking his eyes from her.
“Can you hurry up?” a woman in line behind her asks sharply.
The soldier continues to stare at Bettina, as though trying to remember if he has seen her before. She resists the urge to wipe the sweat from her chin. When he returns her documents, she walks past the interrogation rooms, the black-and-gray German shepherd, and a group of workers waiting to be allowed through. Her strides are halting, as though she is an old woman. Her mind is filled with one image, with one word that ricochets around blindly: Annaliese, Annaliese, Annaliese!
The air smells of car exhaust and dust.
Her daughter will grow up without her. Bettina will live without her child.
PART FOUR
40
Chicago, 1965
Eleven years earlier, her sister sent her money for a plane ticket, and Bettina embarked on a flight leaving Tempelhof Airport. The next morning she stepped out into an alien world.
“You’ll be a prisoner in your own land,” Clara had insisted over and over again. “Here at least you’ll have a chance at being free of him. There’s nothing you can do there, Betty. Come, come to America, and you can rebuild! Then you’ll be fighting from a position of strength, not weakness.”
Was it the right decision? She had finally decided, almost instinctively, to head to the only place on earth where she thought she might find a bit of tenderness, something that might keep her alive. In those deadening months she’d been in West Berlin, she had twice come close to attempting reentry into the East, only to stop at the last minute when she considered that it was also Peter’s life that was in her hands; she could not only think of herself.
Once, after she made an appointment with a state-employed lawyer, a man bumped into her so brazenly in the streets that she was knocked to the ground, and she was convinced that she was being followed. There was no crossing the border, sneaking back in. She became obsessed with the idea that death would be a release—that being so close and yet so far from the child she’d abandoned was a torment too terrible to bear—and that’s when she began to seriously consider her sister’s proposition to join her in America.
But those early months in Chicago had presented their own set of problems, which could not easily be overcome. Herbert’s doleful eyes flicked over her endlessly, seeking comfort of some kind; they were two broken people desperate for something undefinable. His growing infatuation repelled yet also ensnared her. In the railway apartment that she, Herbert, and Clara shared, he would touch her shoulder lightly as they passed each other, and she’d feel sick. This was not desire, she knew; it was a misplaced yearning for human warmth, and yet she could not control her longing for it. She badly wanted to abandon all reason and lose herself, but nothing—not getting drunk or being kissed—helped her find a numbing resting place. Herbert secured her a job in a metal fabrication shop sweeping floors and cleaning up the grease from the lathes, and for weeks at a stretch she managed to avoid being alone with him. Her weight plummeted, and Clara started to fret. “Eat, eat,” she’d urge, the lines between her brows like scars. “You’re going to disappear.”
In the spring of 1955, barely six months after Bettina arrived, a friend of Herbert’s asked him to move to Milwaukee to manage a warehouse that sold copper pipes. “You must go; it will be good for you,” Bettina told her sister. Clara and Herbert had begun bickering viciously, and they needed an excuse to start anew. “And anyway, I want my independence.” This was only a half truth, but Bettina knew it to be critical: they could not go on living together. It was a relief when Herbert decided he and Clara should give it a try. Neither of them protested when Bettina insisted that she stay behind. With that, she found herself alone again.
She spoke little English, and each weekend she trekked west across the city by bus to the Immigrants Protective League offices at Hull House. There she took a language class along with Czechs, Ukrainians, Poles, Bulgarians, and Italians. The ladies at the office stuffed into their wool and cashmere coats gave them a warm meal at lunchtime. Occasionally Bettina helped serve the food, and eventually they began paying her a little something to work into the evenings. It was through the IPL that she met an older man from Swiebodzin, Poland (a former dentist), who’d found his way into the labor union and told her about the job cleaning the Tribune offices. It was a relief to no longer be inhaling fine metal dust all day, particles that scratched her throat and stained her handkerchiefs when she coughed.
Night work meant she had the freedom to walk the streets during the early mornings when the unusual quality of the light made the ordinary pulse with fragile but discernible energy. She began to roam endlessly through the neighborhoods. Because she could not sit still. She could not sleep. Walking was the only way to still her spinning mind.
For three years she worked with the lawyers at the league to petition the government of the DDR to reinstate her parental rights and allow her to be reunited with Annaliese. But she didn’t have her marriage license or her daughter’s birth certificate, and she was in a foreign country. She had little money and no knowledge of the law.
“It’s a totalitarian regime,” they told her with kind eyes as she wept in their offices. “There’s little we can do.”
Bettina dreamed of her child constantly. Sometimes they ran and played, enjoyed a picnic of quark and apples on the beach. Sometimes Annaliese was drowning in the waves (like Peter’s wife’s little boy, Thomas), and her mother was helpless to save her. In all those dreams Bettina’s child was frozen as she had been in the fall of 1953: an almost one-year-old with thistle hair and a mouth that babbled only nonsense. This child never grew up. She could not talk and tell her mother if she was happy and loved. She laughed and cried, her green eyes lit up with delight or frustration, but her limbs never lengthened; her face never thinned out.
In those early months, thoughts of her own death gave Bettina some comfort; after all, she had the option to hasten it. There was not a day when she did not consider this. It wasn’t just that there seemed no point in eating and defecating and sleeping and talking—participating in the endless cycle of a pointless life—it was having to live with the pain of her self-recriminations. She’d had so many chances to live her life differently, and yet because of her choices, her child was doomed to grow up without a mother. Bettina would walk along the shores of Lake Michigan and imagine stepping off the edge into the frigid waters. Drowning would not be such a bad death. She h
ad thought about it that afternoon with her sister in Binz, and now it seemed to her that it would be a gift.
But she could not do it. As long as her child was alive, she, too, must keep living.
It was not long after this that she took her camera with her as she went to explore the shuttered factories and caught sight of the mother and child—the day that showed her that it was possible after all to lose herself again in the act of taking pictures, and that doing so gave her a reason to keep going. That in a small way she could, perhaps, help others.
Bettina continued to try to find a way to get her child back. The United States government did not acknowledge that the Soviet zone had become a separate country. There was no chief of mission for the eastern section, since technically the country did not even exist. Newspapers rarely reported on what was happening there, and when Bettina could get her hands on a German paper at the library, it was invariably out of date and never contained any information that was of use to her.
She stumbled on a group called the International Commission of Jurists, German lawyers who’d started investigating human rights abuses by the Soviets after partition. A couple of years earlier, in 1953, the ICJ’s president was abducted by East German intelligence agents and executed in Moscow. But even though the West German consulate managed to get hold of the West German government report for Bettina, it had no bearing on her small-scale problems. It seemed no one could help her.
Still she managed to breathe in and out, to survive. After finding her studio apartment, she moved out of the boardinghouse she’d been in for three months, bought a few houseplants, and tried to sleep through the night without waking in a sweat. She cleaned the Tribune offices, skirting her duster around ashtrays filled with crushed Kent cigarettes and desktops littered with cans of RC Cola. She bought two plastic beads, then, as February came and went, another one, and began the ritual of imagining the life of her child without her.
The shadow of Peter’s love dogged her during her waking hours. On the streets she would turn suddenly, aware of eyes burning through the back of her dress, certain that he was right behind her, certain even that she had caught a whiff of his unique smell. Day after day Bettina tromped along the streets, and whenever she glanced up, she was astonished that the unending sky was the very same as the one over Rügen. Should she have stayed in Germany, risking prison and hoping that when she was released, she would be reunited with her child? But it hadn’t seemed right to consign Peter to imprisonment because she could not face leaving Annaliese.
Had Werner kept his promise and allowed Peter his freedom? Sometimes when she was on a bus or on the L, the steady drone of the motor sent her into a sort of stupor from which she would emerge bewildered and angry. In her imagination she’d be lurking in an alternate life, one where her family was made up of her, Peter, and Annaliese and where guilt was a thing of the past. She could feel so viscerally the sense of purpose and unity: They would make a home together, something simple, small, but with some paint and a few nails, they would make it beautiful. They would have a yard for Annaliese. Maybe water nearby, maybe not. Their faces would be creased from laughter, the skin coarse from being outside. They would have more children; it was not yet too late. But when she woke from her reverie and saw only the drawn faces of the other passengers, and the dim memory of disappointment sharpened again, she would bite her lip and look hard at the shining foreign city outside the windows and wonder what her life meant now that everything she loved had been stripped away.
41
At the Tribune, she got into the habit of picking up the previous day’s paper when her shift was over. She’d sit at one of the journalists’ metal desks in the newsroom, a lamp switched on against the darkness of the night hours, a well-thumbed dictionary and a piece of paper at her side. She looked up every word she didn’t know and wrote it down, and before long she had a ream of papers that she would study later, before falling asleep. Those days, she barely spoke with anyone except the lawyers, and after a while even those conversations dried up. When she did have a chance to speak, her voice was raw and unsteady. Whenever John, the photo editor, and George, the head of the news division, came in early to cover a story, they’d find her poring over the paper, and they soon got in the habit of chatting with her while drinking vending machine coffee or taking a cigarette break. They both had an avid interest in politics and asked her all about her country, especially keen to hear about the experience of being a German after losing the war.
The two men were endlessly interested in things she’d never thought about much. Eventually John started quizzing her from her painstaking notes, and they shared a laugh at her accent. Once he leaned forward and kissed her unexpectedly, and she was so taken by surprise that she pulled away; it wasn’t possible for her to be intimate with a stranger. It was hard to believe an American man could want someone like her: a broken woman who had left behind a complicated life. But then, no one knew her story. They knew her as the young woman who lurked in the shadows cleaning, the serious one with the heavy accent who rarely laughed.
Yet these men saw her as a human being, a person with ideas, and so she began to see herself this way too. And when she had the Rollei with her, people allowed her to slip briefly into their lives without even realizing they were doing so. She would gaze directly at them with the camera at heart height and snap picture after picture, and although they knew she was documenting them, no one seemed to mind.
Once, she caught sight of a group of black boys playing in a broken fire hydrant on a summer evening when the heat hit ninety-eight degrees and the humidity was so high that the air they breathed seemed as heavy as wet wool. Their glistening skin and shrieks of joy, the incredible beauty of their physicality and playfulness—it all drew her in. They ranged in age from about five to fifteen, with long skinny bones and splayed bare feet. She spent well over an hour taking pictures, and they not only let her but came over and began peppering her with questions. They found her accent hilarious. They wanted to know where she came from, what she missed about living next to the ocean. Why did the camera have two circles in front? Why was she taking pictures of them? This perplexed and delighted them, to be the center of her attention.
Those were the photos that prompted John to offer her use of the Tribune darkroom. She had saved some money and was having film developed at a cheap place downtown, and he caught sight of the pictures pasted in her notebook as she was studying her words one morning.
“Man,” he said. “These are good. You know these are good, right?”
Her cheeks went hot. “I thought they would be better.” It came out as “zay” instead of “they,” so she repeated her sentence slowly, correctly, making John laugh.
“That’s because they’ve been developed badly,” he explained. “You know how to use a darkroom?”
She nodded; her father had taught her at a friend’s house before the war began, when supplies were still readily available. For months she’d been dreaming about asking if she could ever use it on a slow news day. Now she had her chance. From then on she developed all her film there, learning to manipulate the intensity of shadow, the brightness of light. How to sharpen a feature and mute a distracting detail. It wasn’t long before George started asking her to take photos of people at certain events and paid her for each picture that he published.
Being invisible had become the norm for her, and she’d enjoyed being able to disappear. It was fitting; who was she to have a voice, to live a full life? Wasn’t this a kind of atonement for her actions: first, betraying a man she’d promised to be loyal to, and second, choosing to leave her only child behind so that she could have her freedom? When she had the camera in her hand, it lessened the burden of her self-loathing in a way that did not feel entirely selfish.
Now, Herbert helped her try to uncover information about Werner Nietz. His mother went to the town hall in Saargen and made friends with the clerk, who started talking freely after being offered a schnapps one day a
fter work. It turned out that Werner had been sent to Normannenstraße in Berlin nine years earlier to work at the headquarters of the MfS, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. As far as the woman knew, he had been remarried for a while. She had heard nothing about any kind of illness, and there was no documentation in the files.
Against her better judgment, the clerk also looked up Peter Brenner. His father, Pfarrer Brenner, had died six years earlier, in 1959, and there was still no pastor attached to the Bobbin church. Religious services were restricted all over the DDR now. Also, Peter no longer worked at the Bobbin school; in fact, there was no trace of him anywhere. Herbert’s mother called a few of the other local schools: Binz, Sellin, Bergen, Göhren, Baabe. Nothing. She tried Stralsund on the mainland, but none of the school districts could locate any information, or they were not willing to share it with her. It was possible that he had left the island or even the country.
It was also possible that Peter was in prison.
Bettina went to the German consulate in Chicago and spoke with a supervisor. They advised that she try calling the consulate in New York, but that was a dead end. She told the Immigrants Protective League that she wanted to travel to Berlin. “Well, yes. It’s possible, once you’re on site, that you might convince someone to talk,” said an elderly man wearing a waistcoat and bow tie. “You might be able to get into East Berlin and petition them to tell you something.”
Werner had warned her what would happen if she returned—but did that warning still stand all these years later?
The day was fading, and the downtown streets were trash strewed, crowded with people leaving work. She was headed home, walking under the rumbling L, past the homeless men in dirty tartan jackets, the stream of businessmen in hats and sharply cut overcoats. She tilted her face upward briefly, and a flash of silver caught her eye: a glass door ahead had been opened and shut, catching the light on its oversize hinges.
This Terrible Beauty: A Novel Page 25