The Neruda Case (24 page)

“If you arrived here in 1969, you obviously couldn’t have met the person I’m looking for,” he grumbled, returning from his musings in a bad mood.

“That’s right,” Valentina admitted as she wiped the drop from her chest with the edge of a napkin.

“In that case, why don’t you take me to meet your colleagues who have been here longer?”

As they crossed the plaza, on their way to the administrative office, they ran into a young woman with a pale face and light-colored hair, dressed in a long smock that drew attention to her hips. Her name was Margaretchen Siebold, and she hugged a stack of thick-covered books to her chest with a certain theatricality. She asked them what they were doing, and Cayetano explained.

“I don’t remember anyone by that name. But I’ll walk with you. I also need to speak with Käthe.”

The office was on the top floor of a building on a hill overlooking the edifices clustered around the plaza. It housed the library, the auditorium, classrooms, and the school’s administrative office. Valentina walked through a door and left Cayetano with Margaretchen in the hall.

“Historischer und Dialektischer Materialismus, Grundlagen der Kapitalistichen Wirtschaft, Geschichte der KpdSU,”
Cayetano read aloud from the spines of the books the young woman carried. “Is that what you teach here?”

“I don’t teach. I translate for Latin Americans. You have to keep up with your subject matter.”

“So that’s why you speak perfect Spanish.”

“If you say so.”

“It’s a shame that nobody remembers your colleague anymore. We spend our lives thinking we’re essential, and then, when we die, we’re lucky if our own children bring us flowers on the Day of the Dead. Then nobody remembers us anymore. And to think how urgently I need to find Beatriz!” He shook his head, a burdened man.

“They won’t tell you anything here,” the translator whispered. “They never disclose information about their employees. Nobody has a name or face here. Didn’t you know?”

“I knew, but they’re going to help me because I’m backed by the Chilean embassy. That makes for a convincing argument.”

“Really?”

“Of course. I have a good godfather. And relations between Allende and Honecker are optimal,” Cayetano answered, put out by the woman’s dubious tone.

“Your chances will only improve with the Stasi’s support,” she said.

“I’m not playing around. The Chilean who sent me has a great deal of influence.”

“Don’t be naive.” She adjusted her hair around her shoulders. “Here no one will tell you anything. Much less about Beatriz.”

“So you know her?”

“Who is this influential Chilean who wants to see her?”

He would not tell her. She could be a Stasi agent, he thought, charged with finding out the reason for his visit. Through the window, he gazed at a bronze, life-size statue that gleamed in the central plaza. It showed a row of children holding hands and leaping happily on the lawn.

“I understand your distrust,” she said. The hall stretched out before them, polished, empty, with gray doors on one side and clean windows on the other. “If you’d like to keep talking, you can find me
tomorrow, at eight o’clock, in the Zum Weissen Hirsch. Come see me if they don’t give you anything.”

She walked away the moment Valentina opened the door, accompanied by an old woman with pink skin and blue eyes who resembled a Lladró porcelain statue.

“Come on in, Cayetano,” Valentina said. “My comrade Käthe here will fill you in on everything you need to know.”

34

T
he Zum Weissen Hirsch was on Eberswalder Strasse 37, in Bernau, near a highway lined with apple trees that led to the industrial city of Eberswalde. Its old walls were covered in vines, which occasionally thinned to reveal bricks poking out from the worn stucco like rotted teeth. When Cayetano walked in, he was met with smoke and the thick stench of beer. He walked through the dimness, through which the husky, unmistakable voice of Karat sidled, singing “Schwanenkönig.” It took him a moment to find Margaretchen, who was smoking at a table by the window, with a pilsner and a small glass of
Doppelkorn
in front of her.

“I warned you. They never reveal anything about their people,” she said. Cayetano was struck once again by her pale face, the dark circles around her eyes, and the metallic brilliance of her gaze.

“You were right.” Cayetano settled in across from Margaretchen. “Neither Valentina nor Käthe knew a thing about Beatriz.”

The radio now played a ballad crooned by Karel Gott, the golden voice of Prague, reminiscent of Elvis Presley and Lucho Gatica. In a corner, behind an umbrella stand, an older couple dined; just past them, some long-haired customers in flowered shirts sat at a table, and beyond that the tables were packed with boisterous customers.
Cayetano and Margaretchen ordered onion and Klösse soup with potatoes, and a bottle of Stierblut, a Bulgarian wine that, according to the translator, wasn’t half bad.

“So you know Beatriz?” Cayetano pressed.

“I knew a woman at the school who was called Beatriz.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “She may be the woman you’re looking for. She came from Mexico, and her last name was Schall. Beatriz Schall.”

“Schall? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“But people use false names at the JHSWP.”

“The foreign students do. But the staff and the German students use their real names. My name is real.”

Cayetano took the photograph of Beatriz out of the pocket of his guayabera, the one from the Mexican newspaper, and held it in the lamplight. Margaretchen examined it closely.

“She looks a lot like her,” she said, lowering her eyelids sensually, mysteriously.

“Is it her or not?”

“Beatriz Schall was more heavyset. And she was a resolute woman.”

“But she was only twenty in the photograph. People change over time. When did you say you knew her?”

“In her last year at the JHSWP. She was leaving, I was just arriving. I couldn’t say that in front of Valentina. She’s an apparatchik of fear. Don’t trust her.”

Cayetano stroked the tip of his mustache and gazed at the older couple, who were paying their check and preparing to leave. “Forgive my asking,” he said as the old man helped his wife into her raincoat. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven,” she said as she drained her glass of schnapps.

“If Valentina, who’s been there for seven years, never met Beatriz,
then you would much less have had the chance—unless you started working at sixteen.”

“The thing is, I met Beatriz as a student at Wilhelm Pieck,” she said. She gestured to the waiter for another glass. “I met her in 1963, ten years ago.”

“If we’re talking about the same woman, she would have been forty then.”

“That’s exactly how old she seemed.”

He was disconcerted by the change in Beatriz’s last name. From Lederer in Havana to Schall in East Berlin. What was her real name in Mexico City? Fichte, had the poet said? In the files at the Four Roses Institute she was known as “de Bracamonte.” He put the photograph away and lit a Cuban Populares, which emitted a penetrating odor of dry grass. He inhaled the smoke, worried.

“Tell me, what did she look like?”

“She had light hair and green eyes. White skin. A German woman with Slavic features.”

“And what did she do at the school?” He let smoke out through his nose, feeling like a humble dragon in the great Prussian grasslands.

“She translated for the courses on Marxism and Leninism for Latin Americans. Just like I do now. It’s enjoyable work, and well compensated. You get to meet people from different countries.”

“Did you ever know of her having a lover?”

“If she did, it was outside the school. She rented an apartment in front of the Verdugo tower, near the city’s medieval wall. I also recall that Beatriz had a daughter. Tina was her name, I think.”

“How old was Tina?” The facts were coming together, he thought, perking up.

“Around twenty. I saw her two or three times, at school functions. For the first of May and the seventh of October, when we celebrate the founding of East Germany.”

Cayetano myopically took in the dirty afternoon glare that
leaked in through the windows. Things seemed to be falling into place: Beatriz was of German origin, which was why she had taught German at the institute in Mexico City, and why she’d come to East Germany. But was this Beatriz Schall the same Beatriz Lederer from Cuba and the same Beatriz from Mexico whom he was looking for? Assuming it was the same person, why had she left Mexico City, and later left revolutionary Cuba, to hole up in some isolated ideological school in East Berlin? If she’d arrived in East Germany soon after the Wall was built, she had to be a woman of leftist convictions. Why did she change her name? Who was she hiding from? He wondered whether she might have been involved in the death of her husband, an older man. Had she inherited money from him?

The barman placed the bottle of Stierblut on the table, opened it with a brusque gesture, filled the glasses to their brims without giving his customers a chance to taste the wine, and slipped back into the shadows of Zum Weissen Hirsch.

“Why do you trust me?” he asked the woman as he crushed his cigarette butt in the ashtray. A tune by the Puhdys now sang of the yearning to live as long as trees, which made him think of Neruda. “I’m a foreigner, the JHSWP trains revolutionaries, and you’re giving me information about one of its former employees. I believe that could be called a form of treason.”

Margaretchen sipped her Stierblut slowly, as if searching for her answer in the red wine, then said, “I trust you, quite simply, because I like you.”

“That’s a rather naive answer for someone who works with undercover agents.”

“You’re the one who’s mistrustful.”

“And you could be a Stasi agent …”

“In that case, to the health of the Mata Hari of Bernau,” she said mockingly, with a gleam in her eyes. She took another drink. “The Bulgarians have pretty good wine,” she said, gazing at him steadily.

Now Demis Roussos was singing “Forever and Ever,” suffusing the place with Mediterranean melancholy. Cayetano began to feel suspicious of Margaretchen’s ingenuousness. Was it all an act? Was this beautiful woman a Stasi agent or not? At the very least, she worked at a key political institution. He thought that he could be bungling everything even by speaking with her. He saw the poet in his armchair in Valparaíso, trusting Cayetano to devote twenty-four hours a day to the mission with which he’d been entrusted. And here he was, flirting, in the remote town of Bernau, with a German woman who could easily be an East German informant. He thought of Ángela, who at that moment could be crawling through swamps, climbing rope ladders, or taking apart AK-47s in the Cuban mountains, wearing an olive-green uniform covered in dirt and sweat.

“Why are you doing all of this, Margaretchen?” he pressed. “You don’t know who you’re getting involved with. This could bring you trouble. You could face punishment at the school.”

“Do you know why I went to Wilhelm Pieck yesterday?” She quickly drained her glass.

“I imagine it was to speak with Käthe and pick up textbooks from the library.”

“To clear out my office,” she said slowly. She paused, holding his gaze. “It was my last day.”

“What?”

“They fired me,” she said, and bit her lip. The waiter poured another
Doppelkorn
in her glass. “My career is over.”

“But why?”

“Political conduct inappropriate for work,” she said, imitating an official tone. “They found out that, years ago, I’d had a Western lover. Someone told on me. But let’s forget about that now. You only wanted to know why I’m helping you, right?”

“Maybe this isn’t the best time to talk about that.”

“On the contrary. It comforts me to change the subject. My colleagues
have already started to avoid me. I’m going to have to leave my apartment and move back in with my mother in Magdeburg. In any case,” she said, wiping two crumbs from the tablecloth with her knife, “I’m helping you because I think you must have a good reason to search for Beatriz. I admired her very much. In those days, I believed in all of this. She was a true revolutionary, someone who had done things in the Third World, one of those crucial people Brecht talks about. Not like us, here, who are like extras in a film, just numbers or statistics, people condemned to imagine the world from behind the Wall.”