Herr Bohnsack looks around him. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘I was always a regular. I had my spot at the bar. I have lived around the corner for thirty-eight years. Before 1989 I was always just Günter—hello how’s it going. People didn’t know what I did, but of course they had their suspicions. Sometimes I’d come straight from work in a tie and a stylish overcoat with a briefcase and there’d be a rumble through the pub of “doesn’t he look fine”.’ They would have a sniff as much as to say something’s not quite right here—’
He pinches his nose between forefinger and thumb. ‘The Wall fell on the ninth of November 1989. The first time I came in here afterwards, I think it was the fifteenth.’ He pauses, takes a drink, and a breath. ‘A drunken man was at the front bar and when he saw me he swivelled around slowly, pointed at me and screamed, “Stasi out!” Everyone shut up and turned to have a look at me. They all thought the same as he, or at least half of them. I couldn’t move. I said to the publican, “What do they want from me?” I said, “I can’t stand here before you all and undo it, take it all back.” After that I sat down. I drank a beer and I just sat there.’ He draws his lips into a line and holds his hands out as if to say, ‘what could I do?’
Herr Bohnsack kept coming back. It took nearly three years until noone was aggressive any more. ‘But there were no hangings or attempts or anything. In fact I was relieved, really, that the people reacted so sensibly.’
But the drinkers were not the only public. Herr Bohnsack got wind that a magazine,
Die Linke
, had managed to obtain a disk containing the names of the top-paid 20,000 Stasi employees and was about to publish it. He knew everyone would read it, find his name and address on the list and feel whatever they would feel—contempt, hatred, or self-righteousness. He knew there was only one thing for him to do. ‘I would out myself before I was outed.’
He called
Der Spiegel
, the famous West German news magazine, and arranged to tell them everything. ‘I really pulled my pants down, as they say,’ he says. ‘When I got the edition in my hand I felt sick. There was a photo and everything. I mean, when you are silent and you lie for twenty-six years and then all of a sudden you see yourself in a magazine, it was really…’ He pauses again. ‘I have to say it was a bit strange for me here,’ he pats his heart.
Hardly any of his former colleagues will talk about what they used to do. It is almost a sort of
omerta
, a code of honour that rules them. He tells me that they still meet in groups according to rank, or at birthdays and funerals. A general who remains on speaking terms with him told him that at a recent seventieth birthday, proceedings were run like a divisional meeting from the old days. There was an agenda and the men went through it item by item. It consisted mainly of passing around clippings or reporting on television programs against the Stasi. It was as if the old Stasi leaders have now found a new enemy: the media.
And Herr Bohnsack is a traitor because he went to them with his story. After he outed himself he got death threats over the phone. ‘You arsehole, how low can you go,’ and these sorts of things, he says. The calls were anonymous, but sometimes he recognised the voice. A general rang him up from a pub. ‘He said, “You motherfucker, that’s enough, your time will come.” Then he started screaming “Stop it! Stop it!” until people took him away from the phone.’
The calls have stopped now. ‘I was never frightened,’ Bohnsack says. ‘I mean I used to check my car to see if it had been tampered with, but there’s not much point doing that because if they’re any good they do it so as you can’t tell.’
I ask him who his friends are now.
‘Well, I have none,’ he says, nodding to the publican for more. He looks at me with shiny, anaesthetised eyes. ‘I’ve fallen between two stools, you might say.’
At 3 am there’s a phone call. This time it’s not Klaus. It’s home. They have found four tumours in my young mother’s head, secondaries from a cancer we had all dared to hope was gone. She says on the phone, ‘
Je suis foutu, je suis foutu
.’ Later what they did to her affected, for a time, her speech—and she a woman of such elegant and slicing language. But at that moment only the French would do, and she knew she was
foutu
.
Uwe is, unsurprisingly, all kindness. He helps me pack at the apartment, gathering up books and tapes and stray socks covered in dust. I am grateful for his sympathy, and more for the way he ignores, at the right moments, my distress. ‘We’ll take you to the airport if you like,’ he says.
‘Thank you.’ All my reactions feel unreal, slow and underwater. ‘We?’
‘Frederica and me. You know Frederica. From the Spanish translation section.’
‘Yes,’ I lie.
I call Miriam, but I know that it’s a formality. I’m not even hoping that I’ll get a live voice on the line. ‘Hi Miriam. I hope you’re well—we seem to be missing each other a lot! My time here is up, and I’m going home.’ It strikes me, suddenly, as obscene to be saying that
my
time is up. I think of saying ‘I’ll be back’ but that might be the last thing she wants to hear. The tape is rolling—it will stretch my silence to an embarrassing length. I’d like to say something casual and ironic to cover things here, but my German doesn’t reliably stretch to irony. I am forced to say things in a much more direct and heartfelt manner than I would in English. ‘Miriam, look after yourself,’ I say, ‘and good luck.’
The morning I leave I try again and the phone rings out. The answering machine isn’t even connected any more.
When they come to collect me I do recognise Frederica—she is a beautiful Venezuelan with a mole at the corner of her mouth and together she and Uwe are electric. He drives calmly to Tegel, solicitous of a world that has, finally, looked after him.
It took nine months for my mother to die, and each day except for the last three she was conscious. Conscious that the days were, as they say, numbered, and that the number was not a big one. And the feeling of being robbed of all the things you were going to do in the future, but seeing at the same time that they were not important, it was simply the future itself, a bigger number, that was.
After she died, grief came down on me like a cage. It was another eighteen months before I could focus on anything outside an immediate small area of sadness, or could imagine myself into anyone else’s life. All up it was nearly three years before I came back to Berlin.
Berlin is green, a perfumed city. I realise I have never been here in full spring. Even from my old nightly flying television excursions into summer, I could never have imagined this. The trees are huge and lush, light green. Sunlight filters through them, soft and scented over the pavements and parks, squares and schools and cemeteries. Outside my windows, the chestnuts are magical. They bear white flowers in upright stacks—candelabra produced by a trick of nature. Their heady sweetness floats in the air like the memory of kinder times.
I contacted the rental agency. In a piece of freaky good luck my old apartment had, suddenly, become available. It was about to be renovated, so the students had left. ‘Because of its pre-renovation condition,’ the agency wrote, ‘we make no assurances that the apartment is suitable, or, indeed, liveable.’ I’ll take my chances, I thought. I bought stationery, bed linen and a coffee maker, and moved in.
I walk through it now, folding and unfolding a copy of the letter. I sent it from Australia to her old address.
Dear Miriam,
It is some time ago now, but you might remember we spent an afternoon and evening together. Afterwards, I tried to write your story, but found I needed to explain other things around it, so the work took a course of its own. I wrote about the GDR and about the Stasi, and then I spoke with other people—some who had been followed by the Stasi, and some who had worked for them. I was trying, I think, to get a perspective on this lost world, and the kinds of courage in it.
I’m coming back to Berlin, and was wondering if we might meet again. I’d like to ask you whether you have got any further with the DA in Dresden, and whether the puzzle women in Nuremberg have discovered any news about Charlie. I want to make sure, too, that I have everything right.
I am sorry I have been such a long time coming back to you. I have been working on this only on and off.
I’m looking forward to summer in Berlin, and, perhaps, to visiting Leipzig…
No reply came, but the letter didn’t return to me either. Before I left, I emailed Julia too. She wrote back in English:
Hi Anna
Good to hear from you! I am in San Francisco—I left Berlin 8 months ago for the States. I was just living with too many things from my past that could come find me there.
I am ‘doing great’ as they say here. I am working in a feminist bookshop near Berkeley, and have made some friends. We went on a ‘Reclaim the Night’ march recently, something that made me feel real positive, and far away from Thüringen and everything that happened here. They honour their victims here—really, everyone seems to have a story of something that happened to them. I’m sure it could go too far, but for me, now, it is a good thing.
I am foreign here and speak with an accent but am much more at home than in my own country! Funny, no?
If you’re ever through San Fran, please let me know.
Julia :)
The apartment is not much changed. Such a rock-bottom flat, it would have been hard to denude it further. In fact, it is the additions that are most noticeable. There is a line of postcards pinned up on the wall and over the ceiling of the living room. They suggest travel, but are souvenirs only of pub crawls through the city—they are the free ones with advertising on them. In the kitchen there is a jar of scrawny but cheery dried lavender. And in the bedroom a large drawing of a mushroom in magic marker has appeared on the wall. The mushroom has two cross-hatched windows on its cap for eyes, and a door in the stem. It also has a wide smile on its face (the door is a big tooth), because this mushroom head is also a penis, and it is coming all up the bedroom wall.
The first morning I get up and take my coffee across the road to the park. It’s very early but light already, an exquisite day. The sky is blue-white, the air still and new and the streets are hushed. The park is a sweeping curve of green up to the café, shuttered over like eyelids. At the bottom lies the pond, which I knew before as a black and dead thing. Now, waterlilies float in it, opening up to touch the sun. Somewhere near, a small band of frogs ushers in the day.
I sit on one of the benches and look up at the statue of Heine. I never spent time here before; the seats seemed always to be occupied. Instead of a poet’s hands, the East German sculptor has given Heine big workman’s paddles. The quote reads:
We don’t catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.
Heine, the free-thinking poet, would be turning in his grave to see the sort of enslaving and forcing and fighting that has gone on here, under his cold black nose and pigeon-shit shoulders.
Shapes catch my eye behind the statue. Two men are shuffling in, one from up the hill and one from the corner below, in suits and slippers with tins of beer in their pockets. Another three appear and take their places on the benches. A couple of them carry cloth shopping bags full of cans; one is wearing a medal on a ribbon around his neck like a lord mayor. Once everyone is settled (am I in someone’s place?—they are leaving a whole bench for me) there are polite greetings and handshakes all round, and nods to me. It is as if we were in someone’s living room.
One old fellow kneels on his bench to face over the park. He takes out two slices of white bread and breaks them, with shaky hands, into even-sized pieces. Instead of throwing them, he lays out a pattern in crumbs on the concrete rampart behind the seat, each piece equidistant from the others. Some kind of madness, some kind of generosity.
A man jogs past in yellow shorts and a bandana. The drunks greet him in chorus. ‘
Morgen!
’
‘
Morgen!
’ he puffs back.
These park men are the gatekeepers here, suited and tracksuited sphinxes.
Sparrows and pigeons start to fly in for the bread and suddenly I understand my companion’s ceremonial care. We are now the central focus of the park: nature comes to us in small-winged genuflections at this altar of bread and beer.
A latecomer walks up to the group in black training pants. His legs are stilts inside the synthetic material. He’s slightly younger than the others, his hair dark and slicked back. He carries a sports bag full of beer.
‘Harry! Mate! Long time no see,’ says the man with the medal. The medal rests on his bare belly. He is wearing a suitcoat with no shirt and red braces over his skin to hold his pants up.
‘I been away.’
‘Where you been?’
‘On holiday.’
‘You been on holiday?
Mensch!
I need a holiday. Where d’you go?’
‘Mexico.’
I feel a laugh forming, but the others are nodding solemnly.
‘What you been doing over there then?’
‘Huntin’.’
‘Ahha,’ the lord mayor nods. ‘Good huntin’ in Mexico?’
‘The best.’
‘What d’you hunt then, in Mexico?’
‘Elephants.’
No-one bats an eye. ‘Any luck?’
‘Naah…’ Harry shakes his head, sits down and zips open his bag to get into the day’s drinking. Perhaps this is really a society of poets and priests where all stories are metaphorical. Or perhaps reality has been so strange here that anything else is welcome to take its place.
The man with the medal turns to me and raises his can. ‘Cheers,’ he says.
‘Cheers.’ I lift my mug.
‘Healthier than beer,’ he grins. He is missing two front teeth.