Stasi Child (25 page)

As soon as the three of them arrived back in Bergen auf Rügen and the People’s Police office, Müller knew something was wrong. Two uniformed officers were waiting for them, and escorted them directly to Drescher’s office.

The People’s Police colonel failed to stand as they entered the room, and didn’t ask them to sit. He looked up from the documents on his desk with a stern face, and addressed Müller.

‘I’m afraid you three will have to go back to Berlin immediately. I have been given instructions by the Ministry of the Interior.’

Müller started to protest. ‘We just need to telephone –’

Drescher held up his hand. ‘I don’t think you understand, Comrade
Oberleutnant
. This isn’t a request, it’s an order. You have –’ Drescher glanced down and read from the document on his desk ‘– “exceeded the terms of your inquiry” .’ He looked up and held her gaze. ‘And I have been instructed to provide two officers to accompany you on the train journey back to the Hauptstadt, to make sure you go directly to the People’s Police administration building there.’

‘Are we under arrest?’ asked Tilsner.

‘Not at this stage,’ replied Drescher. ‘But you will be if you don’t comply.’

33

Eight months earlier (June 1974).

At sea.

My temporary joy at feeling the swell of the sea in harbour soon gives way to terror. In effect, I am trapped in little more than a makeshift coffin, and so too – presumably – are Beate and Mathias. Panicking will not help. But Beate is more fragile. I have no way of communicating with her even if, as I hope, she’s on board like me.

After perhaps a couple of hours of machinery noise – I assume this is the ship being loaded – the background sounds and motion change. A low hum begins, and the box vibrates. The motion of gentle rocking becomes ferocious lurching. My only comfort is that this must be the open sea. I feel as though the chipboard panels enclosing me could break at any moment, so violent is the motion. The airflow is minimal from the holes punched in the cardboard with the pen. All I can smell is my own sweat, and the sharp sweetness of urine where I’ve wet myself. Beate and I had deliberately cut our food and liquid intake in the days before the escape attempt to the bare minimum, but the body’s functions cannot be completely stopped. At least Beate and Mathias had their smuggled bottle of cola and chocolate bar; nothing to eat or drink for me.

As each wave crashes into the boat, as the vessel slams into the next trough, I feel a corresponding spasm of nausea. Saliva pools in the insides of my cheeks. I manage to swallow the first retch down, but then bile erupts from my mouth. I fight to spit it out. To breathe. I’m choking. Finally the attack subsides, but the stench is worse.

I don’t dare break out of the cardboard tomb, not until we’ve reached port on the other side of the Ostsee and the waves have subsided. As hour follows hour, that possibility diminishes. I have no guarantee that we are even heading for Sweden. Or the West. What if this ship is taking a consignment to the Soviet Union? I feel sure I would be dead long before we reached there. Through thirst, suffocation or choking on my own vomit. Why did I ever take any notice of those markings in the book from Herr Müller?

At some point the weather changes, because it becomes calmer. A gentle rocking, only slightly more pronounced that when we’d been in harbour. The blackness inside the cardboard box heightens my awareness. Every noise, every creak of the boat, is amplified and dances around my head. Every hair on my body detects the tiniest movement.

Sleep comes in fits and starts, but I try to fight it because that moment between sleep and wakefulness is so terrifying. Not knowing where I am, not knowing what will happen: a deafening uncertainty.

Something, though, has gone wrong in my calculations. I have no watch. I have no clock. But this journey was supposed to take just a few hours. I’d managed to glean that information from the
Jugendwerkhof
library. We have already been at sea for more than a day. My mind can’t be playing that many tricks.

All of a sudden, the rocking of the boat calms completely. The motion now is barely perceptible above the vibrations and hum of the motor. We must have reached Sweden at last. Hope courses through me once more. We’ve made it!

I push at the end of the box above my head, hearing the packing tape tear off. A dim light enters. I want to try to squeeze out before unloading begins, in case this isn’t Sweden, in case it isn’t even the West. I brace my arms and legs against the veneered chipboard panels that form the box walls, and push, sliding forward centimetre by centimetre. I get my head out, my shoulders. By a stroke of good fortune my pallet seems to be at the end of a row, with my head by the open side. I can only imagine what it would have been like if I’d been trapped in the middle of the pile of boxes. It’s another stupid flaw in the plan, I realise, of which Mathias and Beate could be the victims. Trapped, suffocated and starved – all thanks to me.

I push again and get my arms far enough out that I can cling onto the edges of the box. I try to force my head round to see how high up I am in the pile of boxes. More good luck. Just one box away from the bottom of the pile. I wriggle out further and stretch one hand down to the steel floor of the boat’s hold, to support myself as I struggle to free the rest of my body. A thud. Pain in my head from where it hits the floor. But I’m out.

I slowly move myself to a standing position. I have to grab onto the sides of the boxes because my legs feel like jelly. And the smell. I don’t want to think about the smell and my damp clothing.

And then I hear a voice – barely more than a whisper – calling for Beate. It’s Mathias. I see him coming down the gap between the pallets, towards me. I want to cry with joy, I want to hug him, but he pushes me away.

‘I’m worried,’ he says. ‘I can’t find Beate. I’m not sure she’s even here.’

‘She must be. We’ve both made it. Why would her box have been split off from the rest?’

‘You’re right. Let’s look again.’

We split up and check the piles of boxes methodically. The rows go on and on. I realise how lucky we’ve been. This is several days’ output from the
Jugendwerkhof
that must have been stored out in the yard, or at Sassnitz harbour, before being shipped. That could have been us waiting in a holding area, and slowly starving to death; instead, our boxes were loaded within hours, in less then a day. But what if Beate’s hasn’t been?

I start on another row, whispering Beate’s name, still without any luck. I daren’t raise my voice in case we alert the crew, and in case we’re not in the West after all. I notice the engine motors are still running. There is a very faint rocking motion. For some reason we are still moving.

‘Beate, Beate,’ I whisper up and down the boxes of yet another row. Then I hear something from the top of a pile. ‘Irma, Irma.’ An answering cry. I call back as loudly as I dare: ‘Beate, don’t worry. We’ll have you out in a moment. Just stay calm.’

I run to the edge of the row to try to see Mathias. I hiss at him and gesture. Finally he sees me, and comes running. His breath is as foul as mine, panting in my face. ‘Up there,’ I say, pointing to the top of the pile of boxes. ‘Right at the very top, I think. That’s what it sounds like.’

He finds energy that I know I no longer have, and clambers like a monkey up the side of the boxes. Around twenty of them, stacked in a criss-cross pattern to strengthen the pile. I see him scrabbling with the topmost boxes, trying to move them to one side.

‘She’s under here . . . a couple of boxes down,’ he calls to me. ‘But I can’t lift them on my own. You’ll have to come up and help me.’

I try to follow the same route he used, surprised at my own strength, the urge to save my friend driving me on.

‘Hurry up,’ he whispers, stretching his arm to help pull me the last metre or so. ‘Her voice sounds very weak.’

We crouch on top of the pile. Mathias counts to three and then we both lift the top box, and move it over. Beate’s voice is louder now, and we realise this is her box, the second one down. Mathias rips the cardboard end, flinging the pieces to the floor. After a nerve-wracking wait, Beate’s head slowly appears. But there is no way to get down. No way to get out without falling. She has been face down in her box, whereas I’d been on my back.

‘Stay there,’ shouts Mathias. ‘Don’t try to get out any further. You’ll fall.’ He moves to the neighbouring box, and starts to tear off the cardboard from the top of Beate’s. Together, we lift the headboard and then, centimetre by centimetre, pull Beate out. She slumps into his arms, exhausted. He’s kissing her, cuddling her, telling her he loves her, and I feel an intense stab of jealousy. She’s my friend, it was my plan, and yet he’s making out he’s her saviour. Mathias, the boy who was quite happy to steal my rightful place. I begin to hate him.

Once we’ve slowly helped her down to ground level, I do get my hug from her. I do get my congratulations. And strangely, it makes me feel slightly better that Beate stinks as badly as I do, that she looks a complete mess.

‘Oh Irma,’ she says. ‘I cannot thank you enough. It was horrible, horrible in there. I thought we would never get out alive.’

I stroke her sick-covered hair. ‘I’m sorry I put you through it.’

‘No, no,’ she says. ‘Never be sorry. I will always be grateful to you, Irma, always. You don’t know what they did to me in that place. You don’t want to know, I promise you.’ She begins to sob.

‘Shhh,’ I hush her. ‘Shhh. It’s OK now. It’s OK.’

But as I’m stroking her hair, I realise the motors are still running. We still haven’t reached our destination.

‘Where do you think we are?’ I ask Mathias.

‘I
know
where we are,’ he says. ‘At least I think I do. There’s an exit from the hold there.’ He points to a red sliding door. ‘I’ve already been up to take a look.’

‘Well, tell us where we are then. It’s not Sweden, is it?’

But he won’t say. He grabs Beate by the hand, like the star-crossed lover he is, and urges me to follow. As we run through the door, I can see daylight coming down the stairwell. We huddle round the first porthole and look out. The daylight blinds my eyes for an instant, and then I adjust. The glass is smeared and dirty and at first I can’t make much out, except that we seem to be travelling up a river or something, because I can see cars and buildings on the bank side. Then I see a factory sign. In German. My heart sinks.

‘We’re not still in the Republic, are we?’ I ask.

‘No, no,’ he shouts over the din of engine noise. ‘Look at the cars.’

I stare. I’m not sure of all the makes. I see Volkswagen Beetles. Bigger luxury cars. But not a Trabant, not a Wartburg in sight.

Then road signs. Rendsburg, Kiel, Hamburg.

The West!

I feel the rush of joy through my whole body.

We have reached the West. Never to see
Jugendwerkhof
Prora Ost again. No more Richter. No more Neumann.

I turn to Beate and hug her to me. Her smile is as wide as mine. I know we are best friends for life.

34

February 1975. Day Thirteen.

East Berlin.

On their return to the Hauptstadt, Müller had expected to be immediately summoned to either the Stasi or the People’s Police headquarters – but instead the three officers were split up, and Müller was escorted back to her apartment and told to stay there overnight, and not to try to contact anyone. She knew better than to disobey, after her requests to speak to Jäger were met with silence. When she asked to see Gottfried, she received a similar response.

Now she and Tilsner were sitting in two chairs, next to each other, opposite a table in a large room at the Keibelstrasse police headquarters. Schmidt had no doubt been allowed to return to the forensic lab, safe in the knowledge that – if there had been wrongdoing – he was simply following her orders. Behind the table, arranged in a line, sat five male officers who, from their differing shades of grey-green and olive-green uniforms, looked to Müller to be a mixture of Stasi and People’s Police. They introduced themselves but Müller found her concentration wavering. The only one she knew was the one she recognised: her police superior,
Oberst
Reiniger, and even he seemed to have a more serious expression than usual. He refused to meet Müller’s eyes.

After the introductions, the middle officer of the five, a grey-haired man in his late fifties with black-rimmed spectacles, was the first to speak. ‘We’ve summoned you here to make it clear to you that you are both being removed from the missing person’s inquiry into the girl found dead in St Elisabeth’s cemetery.
Oberst
Reiniger –’ the officer gestured to his left, towards the end of the table, ‘– fully approves of this decision.’ Reiniger gave a small nod, as the more senior officer continued. ‘That means you are to make no further inquiries about the girl. You have in any case already exceeded the agreed remit, putting the People’s Police and Ministry for State Security in a position of some embarrassment. This is a serious matter, and will be investigated, and the outcome will be made known to you in due course. In the meantime,
Unterleutnant
Tilsner, as you were acting under the authority of
Oberleutnant
Müller here, you may return to your official duties and await further instructions.
Oberleutnant
, for the moment you will remain here.’

Müller looked across at her deputy. He’d made no move to stand, and instead cleared his throat, and looked to be about to launch into a speech in their defence. Reiniger pulled him up short.

‘That means now, Comrade Tilsner.’

‘But Comrade
Oberst
, we were given the authority to do what we did by –’

‘
Now
, Tilsner,’ barked Reiniger, his face turning red.

Tilsner scraped his chair back, gave an apologetic shrug towards Müller, and then marched out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Müller ignored Reiniger’s warning look. ‘What
Unterleutnant
Tilsner was about to say was that we were given the authority to ask the questions we did, and go where we did, by Ministry for State Security
Oberstleutnant
Klaus Jäger.’