Stasi Child (12 page)

When we’re next to her, she lowers her voice so the others can’t hear.

‘Look, Irma, I like you but you’re making things difficult for me. Director Neumann and Frau Richter will be watching you closely, monitoring your output, and if you’re found to be slacking it will be back to the bunker, or worse.’

‘You’ve been in the bunker? Wow,’ says Mathias, as though I’ve done something hugely impressive.

‘She’s just got out, Mathias. So you can help her. Don’t start chatting to her or distracting her.’ She looks at him sternly, but there is a softness behind her frown. ‘And maybe if you get ahead of target, you could help Irma catch up?’

Mathias nods, and smiles at me. We go back to the packing bench.

‘You’re lucky I didn’t tell on you,’ he whispers, first making sure Schettler isn’t looking. ‘You owe me one.’

I don’t dare to read Herr Müller’s book in the dormitory. After the close shave in the packing room, I wait for a chance to go to the communal toilets before we’re locked up for the night. In the dorm, there is just a bucket to sit on, and the stench of piss and shit is ever-present, stinking out our dreams; but here in the washroom, the toilet cubicles do have doors. I take the book out as I lower my knickers, first examining the folds of my lower stomach. They sting from where the plastic cover has been rubbing against my skin. I’m still too fat, I know that, even though the food in the
Jugendwerkhof
is often so revolting. I know I have to do something about it, but Oma always used to feed me up, perhaps to make up for the fact that she felt Mutti didn’t pay me enough attention. And once you start eating too much, the habit’s hard to break. Even in somewhere like this.

I quickly skim through the book, knowing that Richter or someone will come knocking on the door if I spend too long in here. I turn each page carefully; I don’t want the rustling of paper to alert anyone. Much of the book’s content is familiar from school lessons in Sellin – the way the island has been under different rulers down the years. The West Slavic Rani. The Danish princes of Rügen. Swedish Pomerania. The unfinished, then abandoned, town of Gustavia, built by King Gustav IV of Sweden. And then this place, Prora – Hitler’s intended holiday camp in the Nazi era – now a concrete monstrosity filled with army construction workers at one end, and the
Jugendwerkhof
at the other.

All very fascinating, but, as Mathias said, I know all this already. I begin to close the book, and just as I do so I notice a pencil mark in the margin, highlighting the section about Gustavia. The word Sweden is underlined too. I flick through again, excited now, the pages fanning cool air on my face. I spot one more piece of highlighting in the margins, right near the end of the book, in the section on DDR local history. It’s about the construction of the new port at Sassnitz. Once again, a mark in the margin, and the word Sassnitz underlined. A third time I flick through, back to the front of the book. Checking there is nothing else. But those are the only two marks in the margin. The only two words underlined.
Sassnitz
. And
Sweden
. Herr Müller’s message to me.

I realise the book is dangerous. If I can understand the message, so would Richter or Neumann. I flush the toilet, rearrange my clothes and put the book back where it was in my underwear. As I exit the cubicle, I look left and right. No one else is here. I glance round the corners of the room, up to the light fitting. There’s nothing that looks like a camera. I quickly check the corridor. Empty. Then I go back to the washroom and over to the window, trying to prevent my footsteps being heard on the cold hard floor. It’s barred, but I can still open it. I take the book out and slide it along the ledge, out of sight. No one will be able to link it to me anymore. And as long as a gale doesn’t blow, it should just stay sitting on the ledge day after day, week after week, the rain slowly turning it back into pulp.

14

February 1975. Day Seven.

Schönhauser Allee, East Berlin.

Bright winter daylight filtered through the blinds of the apartment’s lounge windows, warming Karin Müller’s face, coaxing her awake. Müller yawned and stretched, rubbing the dull ache in her back, the result of sleeping scrunched up on the sofa. It had been the early hours of the morning when she’d finally got back to the apartment, and so she hadn’t wanted to wake Gottfried. She’d used her old People’s Police coat and the tablecloth as blankets. She couldn’t face another slanging match.

Her back spasmed as she rose from her makeshift bed. The flat was shrouded in near silence, the slow ticking of the mantelpiece clock and her own breathing the only sounds other than the usual traffic noise outside. Where was Gottfried? She assumed he’d be asleep in bed when she’d got in, but hadn’t checked. And now she saw the bedroom door was open, and the room itself empty. Was he trying to play her at her own game? Or was this something worse? She felt her heart rate increase, and returned to the living room. His coat, scarf and gloves had gone from the peg. Had he been here at all? Then, on the dining table, she spotted a torn-off piece of paper:

Karin. If you can’t be bothered to let me know where you are, then perhaps it’s best if you don’t know where I am either, but at some stage we’re going to need to talk. If it’s divorce you want, you’re going the right way about it.

The writing was not in Gottfried’s usual neat schoolmasterish script. Instead it looked like it had been scrawled quickly, angrily. What exactly was he up to? And where had he gone?

Müller returned to the bedroom, looking for clues there. The bed was unmade but had clearly been slept in. Her side still pristine; his with the covers thrown back and the pillow at an angle. She looked at the wedding photo on Gottfried’s bedside cabinet. The beaming smiles showed how happy they’d been. Where had it gone wrong? Were his suspicions about her and Tilsner the result of some sort of guilt on his part? Though she had to admit to herself they were perhaps justified given the way she’d acted so stupidly that night in Dircksenstrasse.

If he had anything to hide, where would he hide it? Probably not in the flat. But she opened his bedside drawer in any case. There were a few papers. She riffled through them. Most were to do with the school. She read the original official warning which had led to his ‘exile’ at the
Jugendwerkhof
in Rügen, a period that seemed to have changed him so much. He’d apparently supported a boy who had withdrawn from the communist youth movement, grown his hair and started a rock band. The boy had been referred to a youth court – there was nothing further about what had happened to him. But for Gottfried, the recommendation was that he should spend some time teaching within the Republic’s children’s-home system: that in participating in the re-education of youths into fully fledged socialist personalities, some of that re-education might actually rub off on the teacher himself.

Müller sighed and replaced the letter. Perhaps she hadn’t done enough to support him, but in playing the rebel – or at least the supporter of rebels – he’d put her own position at risk. She had another quick look through the papers. Nothing of interest, except a pamphlet about the meetings at Gethsemane Church.

Thankfully, though, there was no evidence of another woman. Frau Eisenberg had kept Silke’s letter from the West in the girl’s bedside drawer, but Gottfried, she knew, would be a lot cleverer than that.

She glanced around the room, her eyes drawn to the top of the wardrobe. She dragged the bedside chair towards it, then stood on the seat and stretched her hand up to reach along the top surface, hidden by the wooden profile above the doors. At first, she could just feel her fingers sliding through the dust and dirt, and then they clawed something. A small cardboard container, about four centimetres square. Müller lifted it down and examined it.
Mondos Luxos
spelt out in gold lettering, on a vivid purple background. Sweets? Pills? She frowned, and flipped the small packet over. Immediately, the instructions on the back ended her confusion. A condom packet.
Condoms?
He knows I can’t –

She stopped the thought, as realisation dawned. He didn’t need condoms for making love to her, but these obviously weren’t intended
for her
. Müller panicked, her heart racing. She climbed back onto the chair, and began scrabbling about the top of the wardrobe again. Maybe he
was
the guilty party all along. The guilty party deflecting the blame by attacking someone else, by making insinuations about her and Tilsner. It was one of the oldest tricks in the book: one of the first things she’d been taught in police college.

The college. The vile memories of
him
. She tried not to think of his name, tried to forget, but she couldn’t – he was with her day after day, and had been for the last fourteen years. Walter Pawlitzki, her lecturer at the People’s Police college. He’d been her mentor. She’d looked up to him. And then . . .

Scrabbling with her fingers, Müller suddenly remembered why she thought the top of the wardrobe was such a good hiding place. Because she’d used it herself before, to conceal a small object. Not cardboard, but metal. It didn’t take long for her to find it. She picked it up, stepped off the chair and opened the wardrobe door. It was something she shouldn’t do, she knew that. An addiction she tried to fight, but that, at times like this, she could not resist.

She jiggled the tiny key into the locked bottom drawer in her side of the wardrobe. Her drawer. And then she opened it.

There were two sets of clothes, neatly stacked, on the left and the right. The tiniest clothes possible. Baby blue and white on the left. Baby pink and white on the right. The male–female cliché. She resisted the temptation to take the clothes out and unfold them. That was only for when it got really bad. Instead, she contented herself with stroking the top of each pile of material, left and right, and wondered what might have been, if things had turned out differently.

Then she closed the drawer again and locked her memories away.

The Bäckerei Schäfer van was still there, although when Müller closed the apartment block front door, and lined her eyes on the street light on the opposite side of Schönhauser Allee, she realised it had moved a few metres. The vehicle no longer obscured the foot of the lamp post.

She set off at a fast walk towards the centre of the Hauptstadt, following her usual route towards Marx-Engels-Platz, then turning towards Alexanderplatz and the television tower. The bread van preyed on her mind: when she got back to the office she would ask Elke to look into it: how could a private bakery, which by definition was only permitted a handful of employees, afford to have a delivery van sitting mostly idle outside her apartment block? It didn’t make sense.

The police building on Keibelstrasse was a warren of small rooms and corridors. Having shown her pass, Müller set off to try to locate the forensics lab. She’d been here enough times before, but still usually managed to make at least one wrong turning. The corridors seemed to close in on her.

Müller finally located the correct door for the lab. She saw Tilsner hunched by Schmidt at his desk; evidently he’d only just arrived – and with shadows under his eyes, he looked as tired as she felt.

Schmidt was fiddling with his camera, squinting at the top. ‘I just want to make sure it’s wound through properly,’ he explained. ‘We don’t want any mishaps.’ Finally, he nodded in satisfaction, extracted the fully wound film roll, and then placed it in an envelope. ‘Come on then, you can both come into the darkroom and see what we’ve got.’

Müller glanced both ways to see if anyone might be listening. ‘Is it secure, Jonas? There won’t be any of your colleagues in there?’

‘It’s fine,’ replied Schmidt. ‘I’ve booked it out for the next couple of hours.’

After processing the negatives and hanging them up to dry, Schmidt started using the first of the celluloid strips to produce black-and-white prints, gently bathing the photographic paper in a shallow layer of developing agent as Müller and Tilsner watched. He moved the tray from side to side, taking care not to spill any of the liquid as it rippled over the paper.

As Schmidt swirled the liquid, the image of a tyre impression captured in the layer of building sand gradually started to appear. He worked his way through the photographs.

‘What do you think, Jonas?’ asked Müller, unable to handle the silence.

‘Well, I’ll have to check with a magnifying glass once the prints are dry. But look.’ He held up a photocopy of a tyre pattern he’d brought into the darkroom with him. ‘This is the Gislaved pattern, on this photocopy. Look at these angled grooves. Very distinctive. And then look at the photographs.’

Müller and Tilsner both craned their heads over the developing tray as Schmidt used tongs to move a print from one bath of agent to another.

‘Fixing agent,’ he explained. Müller pulled back slightly from the acidic, vinegary smell. But she could clearly see what Schmidt meant. There were none of the same distinctive patterns. Whatever make of tyres were on the cars in the government compound and service area in Lichtenberg, it didn’t appear as though it was Gislaved. If their small sample of three limousines represented the entire fleet – and since all three were the same they had no reason to believe it didn’t – none of these cars had been at St Elisabeth cemetery. They’d hit another dead end.

15

Day Seven.

Mitte, East Berlin.

Back in Marx-Engels-Platz, Tilsner and Müller sat opposite each other in her side office. Through the glazed window, Müller could see Elke talking into the phone, presumably checking up on the bakery.

Tilsner rested his elbows on the desk, and gave a slow sigh. ‘We don’t seem to be getting very far.’

‘Slow steps, Werner. You know that. I still think those tyre tracks are significant.’

‘At least we now know it doesn’t seem to have been a government car.’

Müller nodded, then frowned. ‘Which means the likeliest explanation is that it’s a car from West Berlin. No citizen in the East can afford a Volvo. By now, we should really have asked for the details of all vehicle movements at the crossing points.’