Puzzle People (9781613280126) (22 page)

“This one is actually pretty good,” Herr Baker said, grinning. “It’s almost a shame to whitewash over it.”

Elsa wondered if Herr Baker was just trying to impress her with his good humor—a contrast to the humorless socialists with whom she had become so familiar.

They continued walking.

“I presume you will meet your end of the bargain,” he said.

She thought about the new job designing clothes, and she thought about what they were asking her to do. She held the two in balance in her mind.

“Yes,” she said. It really wasn’t all that difficult to agree. If she didn’t agree to his terms, who knew what might happen to her? Besides, she had no love for the West. Ever since she arrived in West Berlin—only two weeks ago, but it seemed like forever—she had lost her fiancé, and she felt utterly alone. If that was freedom, then she wasn’t sure she wanted it.

“Good, good. We’ll be in touch then. Here is the information about your employment.” He handed her a slip of paper and then shook her hand. “Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Krauss.”

“Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Baker.”

Elsa wished she was ten years old again. Things were not so complicated then. Even the horrors of life, like the threat of nuclear war, had an element of play. She remembered playing with Peter when they were children and creating their own bomb shelter—just a little gouge in the side of a hill that they dug one beautiful spring day. Sometimes, they would practice running to their bomb shelter, pretending that the imperialist Americans had just fired off a missile. They would throw themselves into the hole and break down into a fit of laughing. One time, when they hurled themselves into the shelter, they rolled into each other and held on to each other for a few minutes, and then Peter gave Elsa her first kiss. She wished she could go back to that moment and freeze it in time. She wished she had a bomb shelter today, a hole she could crawl into, curl up in, and blot out the world.

She backtracked the way she had come, pausing again in front of the painted car smashing through the Wall. She stood in front of it for a few minutes, as if willing it to become a real car, as if daring it to run her down.

That wouldn’t be so bad,
she thought.

East Berlin

Stefan thought the room was taking off like a rocket. He sensed movement, a dizzying rush upward into darkness. He had been trapped in darkness for who knew how long, and he thought he was beginning to lose his mind. How long had it been? Two days? Two weeks? Two months? Or two hours? He was sprawled out on the floor, hugging the cold concrete to control the rising sensation in his body. He was going crazy. His mind was flying apart, carrying him upward through darkness. It had to be all in his head, because he knew that a room couldn’t really fly. Could it?

Maybe it would have been better if he had died that day in the cemetery. He could still remember what happened, although he wasn’t sure what was reality and what was imagination at this point. When he had regained consciousness after being shot, he found himself in a hospital. He would survive, the doctors told him. The two bullets had entered his side but missed the vital organs.

But would you call this surviving?

Stefan was in the black room at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the Stasi prison. After his recovery, he went straight from the hospital to the prison, where political prisoners were kept in isolation. When the guards wanted to move a prisoner from one location to another, they triggered a red light on the ceiling, alerting other guards so they wouldn’t move other prisoners at the same time. They didn’t want prisoners to even pass each other in the hallway, for that would be too much human contact. Such isolation was awful enough. But when Stefan vowed to not cooperate with the Stasi, they took him farther into hell. They put him in the black room—a room without light, without sound. A room painted completely black, a room so devoid of light that there was no such thing as eyes adjusting to the dark.

He had not seen any part of his body since he was shoved into the darkness. He couldn’t see his fingers even if he held them two inches from his face.

When they first dumped him inside this grave, he went to sleep. And when he woke up, he had no idea if it was day or night, if he had slept for ten minutes or ten hours. The loss of time consciousness was terrifying. Stefan tried to maintain a hold on his sanity by doing physical exercises. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Running in place. He also did mental exercises, naming all the people he had ever known in life and then describing them in detail out loud. He told stories to himself and jokes he had memorized.

Then came the hallucinations, both auditory and visual. His body, starved for stimulation, created its own. He felt mosquitoes all around his face. Then he thought he could hear his eyelids blink. Then came the faces, floating all around him like grinning, luminous jellyfish. When he closed his eyes, he heard his eyelids shut—and he still saw the faces.

He began pacing the room, back and forth and back and forth, and that drove away the hallucinations for a time. Then he pressed up against the wall of the room, just to be sure there was a reality beyond the darkness—a firmness, a wall. He laughed out loud at the irony that this was one wall he could embrace. He made a complete circle of the room, feeling the wall as he went along, pressing his cheek against the cool surface.

When the guards finally opened the door to the black room, the light nearly blinded him. But he lapped up the colors like a person dying of thirst who had stumbled across a pond and immersed his head in the water. He immersed his eyes in shapes and colors and edges and textures and sensations.

Stefan couldn’t lose these colors again. So when the Stasi interrogator threatened to drop him back in the black room if he didn’t cooperate, he decided to say anything and do everything they asked.

The next week, he was released from prison. He had become an informer once again.

32

Berlin
August 2003

Trapped, Annie scanned the room, her eyes drawn to the closet in the corner. Acting on adrenaline, she shot across the room, slipped inside, and pulled the door most of the way closed. She didn’t dare close it all the way, or its metallic click would sound across the room.

Someone else had entered Herr Adler’s office. The footsteps sounded heavy, like a man’s. Had Herr Adler returned from lunch already? Perhaps he had just forgotten something, and maybe he would pick up what he needed and go.

The footsteps moved in her direction, shoes on tile, heading toward the closet. Holding her breath, Annie took two small shuffle steps back, away from the slice of light pouring in through the slightly open door. Then a hand latched on to the closet door and swung it wide open, and light poured in.

“Annie O’Shea!”

It was Kurt. He stared at her in utter disbelief.

She was relieved—but embarrassed.

“I’m sorry, I can explain.”

“I thought I saw you entering Herr Adler’s office, but I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“I have a good reason. I’m looking for—”

“We have to get out of here. How did you even get inside?”

As he took her by the arm and gently escorted her toward the door, she pulled free. “Kurt, just stop and listen! I remembered where I had seen the woman who was with Herr Adler the other day. She was in one of the photos. I think she’s Elsa Krauss.”

He reached for her arm again, but then stopped and stared. “That can’t be. Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

“You
think
so. That doesn’t sound so sure.”

“That’s why I’m here. I need to check the photo to confirm. I sent it to Herr Adler a week ago.”

Kurt surveyed the room with its paper skyscrapers lined up like the skyline of an American city. “Good luck finding it. Besides, I’m sure Herr Adler has forwarded the photo by now.”

“Maybe not. Maybe he was holding on to it.”

“For what reason?”

“Blackmail.”

Annie let the word sink in.

“You think he’s blackmailing former informers?”

“It would explain a lot.”

Kurt looked around again at the stacks of material. “Even if what you say is true, what you’re doing is too dangerous. He could come back any moment.”

“You know Herr Adler. He takes his time when he’s out for lunch.”

“I don’t like this, Annie. We’re snooping. And—”

They both froze. They heard noises in the hallway. Their eyes moved to the closet simultaneously, but before they could act, the footsteps passed and faded down the hall.

“If you’re going to insist on this, let me at least be the one to take the risk,” Kurt said. “One of us should keep watch, so why don’t you?”

He was just trying to be gallant, but Annie couldn’t let him take the risk.

“No. This is my idea. You keep watch.”

“But—”

“I’m not going to have you do something you don’t even believe in. Please. For my sake, keep watch.”

“I can’t let you do this.”

“I’m not leaving here.”

He stared at her long and hard, most likely sizing up her level of determination, and finally threw up his hands. “Fine. If I see Herr Adler approaching, I’ll call your cell phone. Be sure to answer.”

“Thanks.”

“Promise you’ll get out of here if I call?”

“Yes, yes, now go stand guard.”

He gave her a quick kiss on the lips, and she hoped this was a sign that their brief cold war had thawed. While he slipped out of the room, she started in on one of Herr Adler’s skyscrapers. The files were marked clearly, and she began flipping through them wildly.

Kurt felt some relief just being out of Herr Adler’s office, but not complete release. That wouldn’t come until he and Annie were back in their own office.

He had no faith in Annie’s memory. He wasn’t confident in any person’s memory, for he knew how easy it was for the mind to make false connections and generate artificial memories. Annie was risking too much for a suspicion based on a three-second glimpse of a woman on a crowded street.

He positioned himself on the sidewalk in front of their office, feeling awkward. This wasn’t normal behavior. He would never loiter in front of the office, so he walked to the end of the block and then turned around—like some odd pantomime of a guard, pacing back and forth.

When he spotted a coworker turn the corner onto Dorotheenstrasse and come toward him, back from lunch, he kept walking toward her, passing her with a nod of the head.

“Heading out for a late lunch, Herr Hilst?” asked the coworker, Frau Lauder.

“Just stretching the legs.”

Frau Lauder smiled and hustled into the office. Two more coworkers followed shortly after, and he felt more awkward by the minute. The two women made no comment about his stroll up and down the sidewalk, just nodded their heads and said, “Guten Tag.”

To avoid suspicion, he wandered up Schadowstrasse, past a stack of drain tiles and other construction materials. And as he stopped and turned at one of the construction barriers, his world stopped. He spotted Herr Adler, Frau Holtzmann, and Frau Steinweg coming down Dorotheenstrasse, moving at a quick clip and making their way to the office entrance.

He jammed his hand into his pocket and fished out his cell phone.
Please, Annie, get out of the office when I call. No more games.
His finger, poised to punch the keys, stopped in midair. He gasped out loud.

His cell phone was dead. So was Annie.

33

East Berlin
January 28, 1985

Over twenty years had passed since Stefan nearly died in a cemetery, so he couldn’t believe he was risking it all again in another graveyard. This time, however, he wasn’t looking for escape. He had decided to witness a crime.

He made his way up Ackerstrasse and then slipped into the tree-clustered cemetery of St. Elizabeth’s, which ran along the Bernauer Strasse dividing line, just on the eastern side of the Wall. Although this wasn’t the same cemetery where he nearly died, if he wasn’t careful, it might very well become his own personal death strip.

The day was grim and gray. He stayed low, moving swiftly through the cemetery, feeling the crunch of frozen grass beneath his feet. He was drawn to this place, for he had to see firsthand what they were doing to the Church of Reconciliation. Authorities had already obliterated the church’s nave six days ago. But the steeple of the old neo-Gothic church still stood, amputated from the portion that was once filled with worshippers—before the Wall.

Stefan couldn’t explain it, but he always felt a bond with this particular church, even though he had never stepped foot inside. Many people felt the same connection. The church was trapped, just as they were. The Church of Reconciliation sat in the death strip, hemmed in by the inner and outer walls. No one had access here, except for the guards patrolling the death strip. No sermons had been preached from its pulpit since the Wall went up, but its very presence spoke volumes. The East German government was tired of the symbol it had become to the world: a church trapped between two walls. It didn’t help that the church’s name was Church of
Reconciliation.
It couldn’t get more ironic for a country so desperate for healing.

Hearing movement, Stefan crouched behind a large gray gravestone. Two Vopos moved through the graveyard, side by side like green-clad ghosts. They talked and laughed, and he waited for the sound of their crunching boots to fade. When their voices faded away, he ventured a peek over the top of the gravestone, and he came face-to-face with an angel. The small statue of a boyish angel—a cherub—was perched on the very top of the gravestone, like a bird that had come to rest on the vertical stone marker. The small cherub rested his chin on his right hand and appeared to be daydreaming. Small stone wings sprung from his back.

Stefan leaned over the gravestone to check for signs of any other Vopos; and as he did, he twisted his body and felt a jab of pain in his side where the two bullets had entered over twenty years earlier. The doctors had retrieved both bullets, and he had narrowly avoided winding up on the otherworldly side of a cemetery, eight feet down. But the pain constantly reminded him of how close he had come to dying. After the horrors of prison, he had returned to his old duties as an IM, an unofficial collaborator. He eventually married, but it lasted less than three years. She left him for another man.

He still thought about Elsa. He could have made it work with her. He was sure of it, but she was a Wessi now, a Westerner, probably an old married woman.

Through the trees, he kept his eyes on the steeple—still standing tall. The church’s nave was a mound of rocks at the steeple’s feet, a warning to all of the churches of the GDR, where free-speech movements were sprouting up: “This could happen to you. We will reduce you to rubble.”

Stefan rose to his feet and kept his eyes on the steeple. Multiple explosions suddenly rent the air, and the sky became gray with dust and dirt and debris. The steeple began to sink. Its feet had been knocked out from under it by the detonations, and the steeple collapsed into itself. Then the weight of the structure threw it forward, onto its face, and it tumbled like a falling giant. Stefan spotted a piece of it flying through the air—a steel cross flung through the sky like a discarded battle sword. The steeple vanished from sight, but he could see the steel cross hurtling in his direction, almost as if someone had thrown it directly at him. He panicked and got up to run, but before he could take a step, he heard crashing and snapping as the cross broke through the tops of the trees and slammed into the cemetery soil about forty feet from him.

Slowly, tentatively, he approached the cross; and as he did, he felt the dust falling down on him like gray volcanic ash, a gentle spattering of minute stone particles, disintegrated parts of the church, a baptism of pulverized particles. He kept an eye out for the border guards, figuring that they would be here soon to find out where this part of the church had landed. But he was drawn to the steel cross, which was much larger than he imagined—twelve feet long or more, with decorative flourishes where the crossbeam met the upright. The impact had twisted the cross, bending the end upward. Hearing approaching voices, Stefan turned and ran, and he felt his anger build.

The GDR intended to suppress speech with this demonstration of power. But for Stefan, it had the opposite effect. He was resolved, and he made a vow as he hurried away. He would tell the truth. He would tell
everything.
He would not bury his story beneath the ground in a cemetery of silence.

He made his decision—one that would make Katarina proud—and he made the choice in an instant. He would travel to Leipzig. He would speak out.

West Berlin

Peter hadn’t seen Elsa for about twenty years, and he was nervous. He had occasionally seen her face in the newspaper—usually a tidbit about her designs. But he had seen her in person only once or twice after he broke off their engagement, and those contacts were brief and buried in the past.

He entered the crowded restaurant and scanned the tables for any sign of her familiar face, aged twenty years. When his eyes landed on her, seated at a table in the corner, he almost couldn’t believe it. She still looked so young, even at forty-four. Her youthfulness looked fresh and natural—not even a hint of the plastic look of bad cosmetic surgery. Her hair wasn’t the straight blonde of her youth, but it had gone “big”—like so many ’80s hairstyles.

A week ago, she had phoned him out of the blue and asked to get together. She even said he could bring along Katarina, his wife, just to assure him that she had no ulterior motive. But Katarina wasn’t about to join them. Much too awkward. However, Katarina had assured him that it was all right for him to see Elsa—in a very public place, that is.

Now his eyes met Elsa’s, and she lit up.

“Elsa, so nice to see you,” he said. Elsa rose to her feet, and she offered him her cheek, on which he planted a quick peck. “You’re looking wonderful.”

“You are too, Peter.”

He wondered if the extra weight around his waist was noticeable beneath his suit coat. He taught American literature at Free University, and it didn’t allow him much time for exercise, although he and Katarina still bicycled.

He settled into his seat and fumbled with his menu. “I’ve seen you in the newspaper every now and again. You appear to be doing very well.”

“I am. I’m very proud of the life I’ve made in the West.”

She gave him a brief rundown of her designing work in Berlin, and then he told her about his years of teaching. It wasn’t until their histories were brought up to date that she suddenly changed the trajectory of the conversation.

“There’s a reason why I wanted to see you again.”

“Oh?”

She touched his hand, just a brush of contact. “I’m long overdue to thank you—for bringing me to the West. I don’t think I ever thanked you properly . . . in light of . . .”

She didn’t finish her sentence, so he did it for her. “In light of what I did to you? I can understand. You had every right to be furious with me back then.”

“It took me twenty-three years to properly thank you, but I guess it’s better late than never.”

“It really wasn’t necessary,” he said. “And I completely understand your reluctance. I didn’t treat you honorably, and I’m sorry.”

She laughed lightly—probably just a sign of awkwardness, but it struck him as odd coming after his serious apology.

“Give your wife my thanks as well,” she said. “She obviously played a big role in my escape.”

“I will.”

She kept flattening her napkin on the table as she talked. Then she flipped open her menu and buried herself in the choices.

“I’m so glad you adjusted to the West,” Peter said, breaking the brief silence.

She looked at him over the top of her menu. “It took awhile, to be honest. But I’m happy with my life.”

“Your family is well?”

“Oh yes. I have two boys and a girl, ages ten through fourteen. And you?”

“Two girls. I’m surrounded by women.”

“So nothing ever changes,” she said with another light laugh.

Peter wondered if that was a sly reference to his being surrounded by two women back in the early ’60s—Katarina in the West and Elsa in the East.

After the waitress took their orders, they covered more lost ground. He talked about his teaching and his two daughters, while she told him how she met Hans, her husband of nearly fifteen years. He was a banker, and with her work, they did very well, indeed. She was able to live in the manner that her mother’s side of the family had once been accustomed.

“I’m sorry to hear about your father,” she said.

Peter’s father had died in a freak explosion at the Trabant plant. Killed by the Eastern technology that he once thought was the pinnacle of modernity.

“At least I was able to go to the funeral.”

“That had to be hard.”

“It was,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate. His mother was convinced that his father had died the day Peter went across the border. She still would not speak to him. So many divisions.

“Have you seen your parents?” he asked.

“Several times. They’re divorced now, which was very hard for me to take. My father blamed me and my escape to the West for what happened.”

“That is unfair. I’m sorry.”

He had heard rumors that she had seen the inside of a psychiatric facility, and he wondered if it had anything to do with the severed relationship with her father—once the most important man in her life. But he wasn’t about to tread on that territory.

“Have you or Katarina ever heard from Stefan Hansel?” she suddenly asked out of nowhere.

“Funny you should mention it. Katarina received a phone call just recently. Have you heard from him?”

“He called me in the early ’70s, not long after they started permitting phone contact between East and West Berlin again. But once I told him that I was happily married, he disappeared from my life—until two weeks ago. Strangest thing.”

“Katarina talked to him. It sounded like he had undergone some religious conversion.”

“Yes, exactly.”

Peter chuckled. “Maybe he saw a bright light on the road to Berlin.” He had promised Katarina he wouldn’t joke about such things, for she too had become devout as the years passed. She was constantly pushing him to go to church, but he had too much of his father’s stubborn streak in him. He only hit the holidays—as if God was just a distant relative whom he saw a few days a year.

“I’m a little worried about him,” Elsa said. “He said some strange things. Did he . . . did he say anything to Katarina that struck you as odd?”

Peter knew exactly what she was driving at. Stefan had told Katarina that he didn’t bring the Vopos to the cemetery that day in ’62. He confessed to Katarina that he had been an informer, which wasn’t news to her. But he was adamant that he hadn’t brought the authorities.

But Peter decided not to say anything about cemeteries and Vopos. “He talked to Katarina about the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. He was pretty excited about the prospect for more openness. He thinks it’s going to spread to the GDR.”

“Stefan never was very realistic. East Germany is governed by old men, and old men don’t change their ways.”

“You may be right.”

Elsa tapped away at the table with her right forefinger. She moved from one nervous habit to another. “You sure he didn’t say anything odd? Something about that day in the cemetery?”

He pretended to give it some thought, but he really didn’t want to give any details. “Let me ask Katarina. Maybe I’m just forgetting.”

“That’s not necessary. It’s really not that important,” she said, an obvious lie. She smiled broadly and touched his hand again, but just for an instant. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Yes, I’m so glad you called.”

He was good at lying too.