This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  47

  For most of the morning, Werner sat with seven other men in a windowless conference room at MfS headquarters. The outside facade was pocked with the distinctive checkerboard pattern made by endless tiny rectangular windows, giving the building its nickname: the House of a Thousand Eyes. On the table in front of each of the men—directors of various regional Stasi units, as well as a few upper-level functionaries like Werner—sat a black phone and a pad of paper. These phones were high frequency and could not be tapped. Each man wore an almost-identical dark suit. They were discussing the new guidelines that had recently been issued by Mielke. Werner had already learned that these policy reviews could last for days on end. Today their task was to draft another new set of directives for the “operational control of persons,” also known as surveillance, and he became involved in a lengthy and dull disagreement with Herr Schmidt on the use of eavesdropping devices and camera surveillance in schools and the vast cost of all this equipment.

  The phone call came right in the middle of the meeting, and Werner was relieved to have an excuse to rise and stretch his aching legs. He had the call transferred into the hallway where Frau Kellermann sat, and he picked up her handset. She continued with her typing.

  “Hallo, Nietz hier,” Werner barked into the receiver. He motioned to the secretary to get him another coffee.

  “Kassendorf. We thought you’d like to know: we have been tracking some unusual activity, uh, around the border area, and—well, it seems to perhaps involve you . . .”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. A few days earlier, right after his meeting with Bettina, he’d submitted a photograph of her taken by a DDR operative at the Ratskeller. It had been an overcast day, intermittently pouring with rain, and the picture quality was not very good. His copy of her old government ID was a much better likeness but very outdated.

  “We successfully accompanied a subject—FJG, number 22392—who entered the DDR through the Bornholmer Straße crossing at 8:12 yesterday morning,” the man said. “A Frederika Gurlinsky, a reporter on assignment. It’s routine. She comes over all the time; she has an aunt here. There’s someone in her office who gives us the heads-up.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  “We had word—Nietz, you should see these notes with your own eyes. It’s personal—we recommend you read it immediately. Our department has sent over a copy of everything we have to your office.”

  “I see.” Werner accepted the coffee from the secretary and put it down on her desk. “I’ll attend to it immediately. Meanwhile, where is Gurlinsky now? Has she exited?”

  “Yes, and no further attempts to cross at this time,” Kassendorf answered. “Do you want to change directives? Pursue the subject?”

  “I’ll let you know when I’ve read the files.”

  He begged off the rest of the meeting and headed back to the fourth floor to his office. His enormous desk was bare except for a small crystal inkwell Irmgard had given him on their fifth anniversary, as well as a manila folder. After all these years, he still appreciated her levelheadedness, her natural instincts with the children, her extraordinary generosity in the bedroom. Seeing the inkwell as he worked was a reminder of all the positive things that had befallen him in the past decade—the way he had managed, against the odds, to remake his life into something worthwhile. Even though they had their troubles with little Kurt, the family worked well together. Werner’s position afforded them certain material comforts (a modern wheelchair, for example), and they spent most weekends walking together in the forest in Potsdam or boating on the Havel. Their apartment was in a grand building with high ceilings and large windows. They never wanted for fresh food and enjoyed a daily bread delivery, regardless of shortages elsewhere.

  It was a good life, this one they had cobbled together, even though he was too busy for his liking. The amount of paperwork he dealt with in his position was astounding. The Stasi workforce had grown exponentially since the inception of the Ministry. Werner was in charge of finances for not only OTS, which protected the government against saboteurs, dissidents, and intellectuals, but also Department N, communications security. These comprised six departments each, and each of these departments was established in every region of the country, which meant 180 discrete budgets were under his purview.

  And yet . . . and yet seeing Bettina had shaken him so badly that he’d barely slept since seeing her. There was something about that woman, a feeling that overtook him at unexpected moments. At the café he’d had a profound and disorienting realization that she was not in fact responsible for the feelings she aroused in him. What had she said? I’ve lost everything. Indeed she had, and because of him. She was an ordinary woman, yet he could not think of her without his heartbeat galloping. Now he was saddled with the niggling idea that this was not really her fault.

  The file in front of him now, from the Main Administration for the Struggle against Suspicious Persons, was crammed with photos and reports. Attached to the front with a paper clip was an index card with a black-and-white picture of a woman with cropped black hair and a sculpted face with pronounced cheekbones and direct eyes. For a second he thought it might be Bettina. He began flipping through the pages rapidly, but it was all the ordinary stuff: date of birth, crossings, articles filed for the AP and other outlets, personal details (school, marriage, habits), names of friendlies in her press office, and so on.

  He didn’t need to see the typed form at the back to begin to understand what was going on. He felt very, very stupid.

  A few typed pages, dated the previous day, had been added to the file. This woman had crossed the border yesterday, the second crossing this month, no red flags yet. There was a black-and-white photograph, taken from a distance, of her exiting a Mercedes and approaching a house. Her build was similar to Bettina’s. The hair was odd—cut to the chin, blunt, and very dark. The second photo showed her face more clearly: it was his former wife.

  He picked up the phone and requested Bettina’s file. And then he continued reading.

  She had been driven around Lichtenberg, Prenzlauer Berg, and Marzahn. The driver, Andreas Ottenfeld, filed a detailed report on their activities, including the fact that they ate Königsberger Klopse in his back garden and that she seemed overly focused on the wall (visible from their yard). Then Werner saw the problem: a familiar address on the list of sites, Rummelsburger Straße.

  He sucked on his lip, then pulled the chair closer to the desk and leaned with both elbows on the wood, reading. FJG #22392 requested that the driver stop opposite a school, the Lenin-Schule, in a spot where the car would not be visible to the students. She instructed him to “entertain himself” and proceeded to take multiple photographs of the building, the yard, and presumably the children. They stayed thirty-four minutes, during which time she became visibly distraught, including afterward when they toured the riverside briefly. She insisted they return to the school and continued to observe the playground. Then FJG #22392 approached a group of children approximately between the ages of six and twelve and spent fourteen minutes talking with them.

  One of those children was determined to be Annaliese Nietz, daughter of Werner Nietz, head of finances for OTS.

  Upon returning to the vehicle, FJG #22392 was distressed and asked Ottenfeld to follow two of the girls as they walked to Schottstraße, where she observed them for eight further minutes. The children were met outside the building by a few members of Director Nietz’s immediate family. During this time FJG made no effort to hide the fact that she was crying. Attempts at eliciting an explanation were met with silence.

  Damn. Damn! He’d allowed himself to become vulnerable. What a fool; he had underestimated Bettina’s nerve.

  He thought back to last night, when he returned home from work . . . Annaliese had seemed quite happy and normal. She’d chatted as usual about her day, telling them she’d come top of her class in a science test and completing her chores unperturbed. She did not mention meeting
a woman, did not seem upset or distracted. Right before bed she came to Werner in her long cotton nightdress with the flower pattern, her hair wet and smelling vaguely medicinal, and plopped herself onto his lap. She was too old for that sort of thing, but still she asked for a story, and he gave her one: it was about being a child of the sea.

  What should he do? he wondered. Despite his agitation, he could not help but imagine what Bettina must have felt, encountering her child again after such an eternity. And in spite of himself—in spite of the danger it presented to him—he felt some small pleasure that she had seen the girl, that she had witnessed for herself just how lovely she was, how perfect in almost every way.

  Many years earlier, Franz Josef Bieder had built up a file on Bettina Heilstrom Nietz . There were reams of typewritten notes, various administrative details, and the names of the surveillance officers assigned to her. Copies of Bettina’s birth certificate, their marriage license, and Anna’s birth certificate. There were a few letters that had been intercepted, when Bettina was still in Saargen, sent from her sister, Clara Lange, to an address in Bobbin, and a few reports typed up during the years of their marriage, including when she insinuated herself into that business with her coworker Christa Kellermann and began trekking to Bobbin constantly.

  Werner read, again, a detailed log of her comings and goings to various events, such as the Russian friendship performance at the middle school in Bobbin, where it was noted that she met with a teacher named Peter Brenner; Werner’s chest tightened at seeing this name written down again. She was also noted to have frequented the youth center when the place was ostensibly closed, and there was documentation on her interrogation in Berlin in 1953, along with a photograph of her in a room, signing the papers that secured her release.

  None of this was news to him.

  Werner picked up the phone again. He issued an order to assign three agents to go to the Insel Hotel in West Berlin instantly and not to let her out of their sight. Under no circumstances was she to be permitted reentry to East Germany. All Berlin borders were to be put on high alert. Should she attempt to cross the border again, his orders were to apprehend her immediately and contact him, day or night. He wanted the phones in her room tapped; she should not be speaking to anyone without their knowledge.

  They were going to have to figure out a way to get the photographs from her. She worked at a newspaper, she’d told him; this was very bad. He could not allow her to take photographs of the child back to America with her. She would make some kind of scene, dredge up the whole sordid story of their past in the media. Times were tense; he couldn’t be sure this kind of unwanted attention wouldn’t knock him off his spot at the agency. There was always someone in the wings, waiting for his chance in the limelight. Nothing was ever stable.

  Fanning the reports over his desk, he cast his eye one more time over the attachments and notations. There was a smaller piece of paper stapled to the very back of a report; he’d been distracted by that last photograph of her and hadn’t seen the attached note. The heading read Haftbefehl—“Order of Arrest.” And the name that came after that: Peter Ludwig Brenner.

  His skin went cold. So the Stasi had cross-referenced these two. It had been a long time since he’d bothered to look at their files, either of them. The man had been arrested—of course she must assume it was his doing.

  This time he called the records office to request Peter Brenner’s files be delivered to him immediately, but they were kept at Hohenschönhausen, not HQ. He decided it was time to call in a favor and dialed his friend Rataizick. After hanging up, he gathered together the papers, slipped the file into his briefcase, and grabbed his jacket. The cup of coffee from earlier sat on his desk, a caramel-colored film staining the upper edges, untouched. He locked the doors behind him and instructed his secretary that he would be gone for the rest of the day.

  A Russian ZiL with tinted windows took him to Genslerstraße, where the prison compound lurked behind a long perimeter wall topped with barbed wire, tucked in behind larger apartment blocks. First the car was allowed through a long boom gate. Beyond that were a series of squat concrete buildings and a few high-rises housing Stasi personnel. They passed through another high wall overlooked by octagonal guard towers.

  Werner entered the prison through a side door and flipped his pass out of his jacket pocket. The guard clicked his heels. “Afternoon, Comrade Nietz,” he barked, pressing a button behind the desk.

  “Here to see Siegfried Rataizick,” Werner said. “Section fourteen.”

  “Jawohl,” the guard answered.

  Werner nodded at another guard in a blue uniform. At the end of the hall, instead of mounting the stairs to Rataizick’s office, he descended two levels to the area known as the U-Boat. He was limping a little, his right leg radiating pain from the ankle to his hip bones. A boiling, greasy queasiness overtook him, and he paused, catching his breath, trying not to throw up. The cancer was spreading; he’d suspected it for months. Now it was a matter of ignoring the discomfort, of embracing the time he had left. The doctor had said it could be anywhere from two years to ten, and maybe this time he’d be lucky—who could predict?

  At the end of a long corridor, he came upon a door marked Vernehmungsraum, the interrogation room. Inside a small unlit control room was a windowpane that looked into an adjacent cell, where a single bulb was illuminated. On a wooden stool fastened to the floor sat a man whose long body was folded into itself like a piece of origami. His head hung down so that his chin was resting against the gray material of his prison uniform, his long legs crossed and tucked underneath him. His arms were fastened behind his back.

  A few minutes later, a guard delivered a file stuffed full of papers, marked PLB #7833082. Werner pulled a chair over to the window, sat down, and began leafing through Peter’s dossier. Werner had been so happy to move to Berlin, to be off the island where this man lived—happy to banish him from his thoughts once and for all. He’d kept his promise to Bettina: he’d never made use of the girl’s underpants he’d tucked under the man’s mattress that day, “just in case.” He hadn’t needed to. Bettina was gone, and he had a new woman in his life and a child, with more to come; it was better to leave the poor idiot to his own devices and let him hang himself if he insisted.

  But there had been years of surveillance, he saw now, continuing long after Bettina left. Copies of leaflets from the workers’ strike in 1953: Utopia Can Be a Reality! We Demand Transparency! Socialism Is Rooted in Truth! A small booklet, nicely printed with a pale-green cloth cover, with the name Peter L. Brenner printed on the front. Inside, poetry.

  A handwritten note:

  As for men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

  —Boris Pasternak

  Another small booklet titled Berliner Brautgang, by Wolf Biermann. A sheaf of mimeographed papers clipped together, labeled Pinocchio’s Original Tale: A Play in Three Acts. A notation in pencil scribbled on its front sheet: May 21, 1963. Then, clippings from a few West Berlin newspapers:

  An entirely fresh voice in Pan-German literature—Die Post.

  A romantic take that does not stint on the sobering realities

  of postwar life in East Germany—Neues Deutschland.

  A fearless exposé of the wrongheadedness of our country’s

  search for redemption—Die Welt.

  The man had written a novel, it seemed, published in the West and highly lauded. Werner had known Brenner was a teacher but hadn’t given much consideration to his subject matter. Since his move to Berlin he had been preoccupied with other things; he did not read modern novels and, embarrassingly, had not been aware of this book or the stir it had caused. It appeared that almost two years earlier Brenner had been apprehended; he’d been questioned for six months, had been moved to a facility in the suburbs, and was now in transit to a labor camp in the south.

  When Werner looked through the window again, Peter Brenner ha
d not moved. Both men remained still until Werner realized from the rhythmic rise and fall of the man’s shoulders that he was asleep. Werner banged his fist against the thick glass, making a clunking sound: Peter raised his head, throwing his shoulders back, alert now like a deer. His eyes in their deep, dark sockets scanned the room, but there was no one.

  48

  Bettina could not fall asleep even though in the past week she’d slept no more than fifteen hours in total. Again and again she came back to two images: the sisters from behind, walking down the street with their hands linked, and the small child in the wheelchair over whom Anna had hovered with such evident adoration. A limited slice of the child’s life that elicited in Bettina both pain and a sharp sting of joy. The pain of understanding that she played no role in this scene, that her presence in Anna’s life was not only unnecessary but could do her no real good. The joy of knowing that the girl was carefree, unburdened with complicated memories or confused feelings. What did a mother most want for her children? For them to be safe. To be happy. To feel loved.

  And yet she felt as though she’d been flayed.

  How badly she wanted to raise her daughter and teach her how to see the world. But what she should do—it seemed now that that might be entirely different than what she wanted. Perhaps what she should do, in fact, was absolutely nothing. Werner was ill, but was that enough of a reason to snatch this child from the only family she’d ever known? The girl had a mother. She had a sister and brothers. Her family was real. What Bettina wanted was not of much relevance here.