This Terrible Beauty: A Novel

by Katrin Schumann

  “I might take issue with her being ‘yours.’ Do you think Bettina will ever belong to anyone, really?”

  Werner waved away the distinction. “So you have no family; is that right?”

  “I had a wife, a long time ago. She died. And a son, he—”

  “A child?” Werner wondered why he hadn’t noticed that in the files. “Where is he now?”

  “They both died. And he, the boy—his name was Thomas—he wasn’t mine biologically, but it didn’t matter. That never matters once you fall in love, and me, I fell in love with him the minute I set eyes on him.”

  Werner had to turn away in the face of Brenner’s palpable sorrow. So the man was an idealist, a dreamer. This was a trait Werner would have sneered at publicly but one he knew, privately, that he shared. An unsettling feeling almost like camaraderie prickled at him. “Your crime, then,” he said, “the reason you’re here? It’s because you wrote a book. Tell me, is it a love letter to my wife?”

  “That’s not how the authorities see it,” Peter said. “They say it’s a tirade, that I want to bring down the system. But I was simply asking questions that are important. We have to continue assessing, figuring out where we’re going wrong and what we’re doing right, don’t we? This attempt to silence us, it’s not sustainable. We’re individuals, all of us. Our culture won’t accept the suppression of art, of dialogue. Don’t you see that?”

  Werner did not feel inclined to argue this point. He saw little value in art. When Bettina had carried that old camera around with her everywhere, snapping photos, he’d never been able to think of it as anything more than a pointless hobby.

  “And they didn’t like the play I’d directed,” Peter continued. “Pinocchio. The old version—too much moral complexity, apparently. He’s a rogue; he’s beaten and executed. I thought that was interesting for the children to explore—what happens when you don’t behave; is the punishment commensurate with the crime?”

  “Ah yes, I can see where the problem lies,” Werner said, laughing lightly. “Moral complexity is most certainly frowned upon.”

  Peter turned to him. “But what do you think?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not in a position to have personal opinions about these sorts of things.” He thought of Bettina’s father’s books, how he enjoyed reading them even though they were out of favor. He motioned brusquely to one of the guards to come over. “I must go now. We’ve talked enough.”

  “But wait, wait,” Peter said. “What will happen to me? Where will I be sent?”

  “You should have thought about that before you smuggled your book out of the country.”

  “You’re not an evil man,” Peter said. They stared hard at one another as the guard trotted toward them.

  Werner frowned. He broke the gaze and tugged at his jacket sleeves. “Of course not.”

  “I’m glad you’re not the one who had me locked up. That you kept your promise to her.”

  The guard prodded Brenner, and they walked back toward the entrance to the cellblock. From some other part of the complex, a siren sounded, the notes high and lingering, a plaintive wail.

  Picking his way along the river, Werner studied the meandering barbed wire fence that split the waterway in two, one side east, the other west. Looking to his left, he traced with his eyes the outline of the fence as it emerged from the water and met up with the wall. Barbed wire, metal fences, and slapped-together bricks. He didn’t like it; it was all very well to make rules and enforce them, but keeping an entire nation captive seemed a sign of weakness, not strength. Because he had approved the budgets, he knew there were bombs buried in the water, dogs who patrolled no-man’s-land, sharpshooters in the towers. It would continue to grow and grow, this wall, reinforced with hundreds of tons of mortar.

  This part of the riverbank was highly industrial. He passed mounds of chemical waste and stretches of earth pounded by large freight movers heading to the loading docks. For a few minutes he rested on an upturned plastic tub and looked out over the water. The river was quite wide here, and a few rusty barges were tied up to the dock.

  Close by, a guard tower stood, and two soldiers leaned over the edge, smoking cigarettes. The tips of their guns poked over the railing. Werner waved, and one of the men nodded his head in response. He was thinking about the picture he’d glimpsed in Bettina’s file: her eyes had had no life to them; her face was drained of all color.

  Truth was, he loved her still.

  It galled him, and yet it was such a familiar feeling, like a friend he knew well and could count on. It was something true and immutable, something he would carry with him to his grave. Why this was so, he didn’t know. He wanted her to think of him as honorable. He yearned for her respect, her gratitude even.

  The car ferried him back north to Normannenstraße, and he sat himself down behind his desk. Embedded in Werner’s mind was a paragraph he had memorized long ago from page two of the directive Bieder gave him when he’d left Rügen: Hate is simultaneously a lasting and strongly motivating force in behavior. It must, therefore, consciously be used and made stronger in clandestine work as the driving force behind difficult operative assignments.

  Indeed. Hate made you loyal, and loyalty was the most respected trait in the DDR. It gave you energy and made you ruthless. But was that enough to ensure a good life? Of course it was not; he knew this. At home tonight he would sit at a large round table with Anna, Petra, Kurt in his special chair, and baby Henning on Irmgard’s lap. They would eat cold cuts, and he’d drink a beer or two. They might play a board game or cards, and later he’d crawl into bed—aching and tired—next to a woman he loved who seemed to love him back.

  Hate did nothing for them.

  Today had reminded him of this important fact: Werner was actually one of the lucky ones.

  50

  For the next few days, Bettina did not leave her hotel room. The Rollei was locked in the safe downstairs, behind the reception desk, and she did not answer the phone or report back to George about the photos she’d taken in East Berlin. She did not change out of her clothes and only got up from bed in order to go to the bathroom. On the second day she ordered herself some breakfast, but otherwise she lay on the nylon coverlet, trying to decide what to do.

  Before leaving, she had peeled the old photo of Anna in the metal tub from her wall, and now she stared at it until the image swam in front of her eyes and ceased to mean anything. Her fingers were sticky from the tape on the back. The picture had faded so much that it seemed not to represent someone real any longer, just the ghost of a person. There were two other pictures Bettina loved that she’d salvaged from the old rolls and brought along with her: one of Anna as an infant in her crib and another of her swaddled in ridiculously thick woolen clothing that barely allowed her to move. Bettina lay on the hotel bed looking at them for hours, but they aroused in her only confusion: This child was gone, and there was a stranger in her stead. Was it possible that Bettina would never get to know the real person, Annaliese Nietz, daughter of a mother both brave and fearful, a woman of contradictions?

  With a marker in hand, she reread Peter’s book, underlining sentences that spoke to her. She cried so violently that her throat ached with the effort, and it was not possible to cry any more.

  It was over. She knew she must stop fighting for Anna.

  Some part of her was relieved to have realized this, to be giving up. It would have to be all right. Anna would stay content and oblivious; it was what was best for her. If Werner was ill, the girl had a support system in place. But Bettina had not yet determined how this decision would affect the trajectory of her own life, let alone the near future. Reading Peter’s book again, it felt as though she were having a long argument with him about love and forgiveness, about hope and creativity and moving on. She imagined him as he wrote it, in his room at the Pfarrhaus or in the youth center, thinking of her. And now Peter was in jail. How could she try to heal from giving up all hope of Anna? How could she go back to Chica
go as though everything were normal, worrying about her “career” or even what she should photograph next?

  As she struggled with these doubts, the black shadows under her closed eyelids turned to bright yellow, a blinding flash of color, and she saw an image of herself in the rape fields, lying on a scratchy woolen blanket with a man who was not wearing his shirt, his skin reddened by the sun and blotchy with freckles. In this dream, Peter lifted his arm to reach out to a tiny child, a little girl with dark hair not yet one year old, revealing skin as pale as the underside of a fish. They were marooned in a sea of yellow, and whether they were really there or not, whether they were old or young or even alive, whether they were physically close or far away from each other, it seemed to her that as long as the spirit of their love continued to shift over the flower heads, they were still together on some plane of existence.

  She could not give up on him. She could not simply go back to her life.

  A large pad of paper embossed with the hotel insignia lay on a table by the window, and on the evening of the second day as the sun sank behind the grimy buildings of West Berlin, Bettina rose from the bed, found a pen, and began writing a letter to Werner. Her fingers were connected not to her brain but to her heart, she told herself; she must allow her heart to speak without censorship. The rule she made for herself was to write without stopping or rereading. She would write until she had written everything she had to say to him.

  She wrote about how she knew, the day of the bombing in Saargen, that Werner was a man with a good heart, but she should never have married him. He’d had a right to be happy, and she had not been the woman to make him happy. She wrote that she had not deserved to lose her child, that he had been needlessly cruel. Her anger spilled out, and she let it. The words she wrote became spiky and smaller and tighter as she unleashed her bitterness. She was lonely, and she hadn’t expected her life to turn out like this. She wrote about the life she had missed, the steep price she had paid.

  And yet—she was not thinking so much anymore of what she had lost, she told him. Seeing Annaliese had rocked her understanding of what the three of them deserved or didn’t deserve. She could see that their daughter was growing up to be an incredible young woman. Poised, alert. Thoughtful. She played music and was creative, had a family she clearly loved. If anyone deserved anything, it was this child. And what was it that was currently most vital to the girl, that fed her confidence and her imagination, that was helping to shape her into the woman she would one day be? Her family.

  Bettina thought they each deserved their hard-won happiness. Perhaps one day Werner and Irmgard would see fit to tell Annaliese the complicated story of her past, and the child could make up her own mind about whether to seek out her real mother or not. That would be up to them.

  As for the photos she had taken, they were precious, invaluable, and she would keep them to herself. Anna didn’t deserve to be drawn into an international story of intrigue and repression when she was so cheerfully forging ahead with her life, the ordinary life of a young girl still starry eyed and eager.

  But Bettina had one request.

  It was the only request she would ever make of him.

  Now she was begging—now she was on her knees, begging him to hear her out.

  Could he find it in his heart to give her this one gift: to find Peter Brenner and release him?

  In the lobby, hotel guests glanced at her sideways as she exited the elevator, feet bare on the cold tile, her dark hair tangled after days of neglect. Just as a clerk began to approach her, a concerned look on his face, Bettina slid behind a pillar and put one finger up. Give me just a second. Just one second.

  On a two-seater couch there sat a man wearing a black hat and a sports coat. Next to him was a woman in heels and a beige suit reading the newspaper. On a bench in the far corner, a boy of seven or so was playing with a small toy Bettina could not quite see. And then, close to him but not with him, there stood a young man, no older than twenty perhaps. He shifted weight from one foot to another, rubbed a finger over his wristwatch. He lifted one shoulder, then the other, looked behind him, checked the time.

  Moving quickly but with soft steps, Bettina picked her way across the lobby toward him. By the time he had stiffened in response, registering with alarm that she was acknowledging his presence, she was standing right in front of him.

  “Give this to Director Nietz immediately,” she said. She placed the envelope in his hands and held his eyes steadily. “Did you hear me? This is important. Go. Now.”

  As though it were possible to simply will people to do good, Bettina spent the next days thinking back to the early weeks of her married life. How she and Werner had yearned for simplicity and regularity, for safety. How they’d prayed for an armistice, for the chance to capitulate and rebuild. White sheets began floating from church windows; a hoisted scrap of white cloth hung over the town hall door. Each night as darkness fell, Werner and Bettina talked quietly in the house, waiting for soldiers to arrive, not knowing to which army they would belong. Would it be the Americans, who (they dared hope) might bring with them the faith of a people so new—their country barely 150 years old—that they were still motivated by the naive belief that people around the world would embrace their enlightened ideas on democracy and capitalism? Or perhaps it would be the French or British, those stodgy old colonialists, accustomed to the push and pull of peoples fighting against one another and against their conquerors. But it had been much worse. It turned out that on the mainland, below Stralsund, Rokossovsky’s armies were pushing north. It would be the Russians.

  Werner had returned one morning with the news that the Red Army was on the outskirts of Bergen. Though the bridge to Stralsund had been destroyed, this did not deter them. He and Bettina set about scouring the place for political artifacts from the last few years. They found some old pamphlets and two pins—one with a gold swastika and the other silver on a red enamel background—that Werner had been given at work. These items were taken into the garden, burned until they were unrecognizable, and then buried next to the bomb shelter, as deep down as the still-hard earth would allow.

  Tanks soon rolled into Saargen, accompanied by a constant low rumbling that echoed in the empty streets like an oncoming storm. A regiment of Russian soldiers marched in an uneasy formation in front, and vehicles filled with administrators followed close behind. There were no crowds to greet them. Old Hans Janslav took off a young Russian soldier’s head with his ancient hunting rifle before he was mobbed by exhausted soldiers. Bettina and Werner had already been crouching in the storage room next to their bedroom for eleven hours when the pounding on their door began. The air inside was thick with the smell of body odor. A small receptacle for waste was already full.

  During those long hours, Bettina held on to Werner, and they spoke only sporadically. In the dire reality of the fast-approaching end, this human body next to hers, the beating heart, the clenched jaw and kind eyes, meant everything. Looking at her husband’s crooked legs stretched out on the wooden floorboards, his barrel torso bent under the low, sloped roof, Bettina had been thankful for his presence. Waiting, waiting together for their future to begin. Waiting for an altered life, for what they thought would be freedom. They clutched each other, their bodies covered in sweat, and prayed to a god in whom they did not believe that the Russians would go away.

  But the Russians had not gone away. Not ever.

  Two days later there was a knock on the door of her hotel room. Freshly showered, her hair wet, Bettina opened the door to see the clerk standing in the hall.

  “You’ve been waiting for this, I believe,” he said, smiling.

  Her lips quivered as she tried to smile back at him. Before tearing open the envelope, she stood by the window, open to let in some air, and promised herself that no matter what was in the letter, she would be all right. He could not make or break her life, not anymore. Once, they had relied on each other, and now they had cobbled together their own separate destin
ies. But it was possible, not likely but possible, that he understood that she had loved him in her own way, and while she could not hope to fully understand him or forgive him, she would in so many ways be forever indebted to him, no matter what choices he now made.

  51

  The car idled at the curb in the early-morning hours, in a street so still that only the birds, dark gray against a gray sky, agitated the sleepy quiet. The river wound lazily just a few hundred meters from them, a black muscle slinking through the divided city. The banks here on the western slope fell steeply toward the water, overgrown by weeds that, in the morning darkness, looked impenetrable and unruly. Sitting in the back of an unmarked police vehicle, Bettina leaned her forehead against the window. No one spoke. There were two agents up front, occasionally straightening from their slump when the radio crackled, otherwise immobile and silent.

  SIX AM SHARP AT GLIENICKE BRÜCKE. NO PHOTOGRAPHS OR WE WILL ABORT. RELEASE CONDITIONAL ON COMPLIANCE: NO NEWS REPORTS OR PUBLICITY.

  There had been no names in the telex from Normannenstraße, no indication of why or how Werner had engineered this, and as the time ticked by, she felt this release was as precarious and unlikely as snow in June. Perhaps Werner just wanted to play games—raising and then dashing her hopes. Whether he was capable of that or not, she didn’t know.

  Six o’clock came, and the men in the front seat began checking their watches every few minutes.

  “Never punctual,” one of them murmured.

  “Do they ever pull out? The East Germans?” she asked. “Promise, and then not show up?”

  The men exchanged a glance, and one of them turned to her. “To be honest, it’s the first time for us,” he said. “We don’t really know what to expect. Let’s just keep waiting. We’ll stay till we hear something to the contrary.”