‘And that was it?’ Otto asked, startled by the sudden venom. ‘That’s where you’ve been ever since? Making life miserable for the people of Berlin?’
‘Exactly,’ Dagmar replied. ‘I couldn’t have turned back even if I’d wanted to. By the time the West began to prosper I was in too deep and I knew too much. I’d made my bed, Otto. They don’t let you leave the Stasi. If you try, they kill you.’
‘So you’re trapped.’
‘I suppose so. But don’t feel sorry for me, Otto. My life is good – better than yours in Britain, I think. As a Stasi girl I have the best food and the best wine. Caviar if I want it. We party people keep all the luxuries for ourselves, you know. I still live in Pauly’s flat with my fashion magazines and any books I want and Western music too, all the stuff we deny to everybody else we keep for ourselves. I wonder what dear Silke would have made of that? Of the shitty corrupt little world her beloved Stalin made? And best of all, I still get to persecute the good citizens of East Berlin. The ones who let Hitler steal my life. The ones who looked away. The ones who stood in a circle around me and my parents and shouted that we should be made to lick the street.’
‘Dagmar, you can’t hate for ever.’
‘Can’t I? Try and stop me. I will hate for every second I’m on this earth. And when I’m gone and my body turns to dust, then each molecule of what was once me will still be hating.’
It was getting dark now. Young couples had replaced the children on the path through the gardens.
The story was almost over.
Otto had all of his answers now but one.
‘And me, Dagmar, when did I re-enter the picture?’
‘Oh, they’ve had their eye on you all along. Right from 1946.’
‘Me?’ Otto asked, very surprised.
‘Don’t be flattered. They watch all the Germans who work for the Allies. Big and small. They study their pasts, looking for ways to force them to work for us. They connected me to you via Silke’s marriage to Pauly. I’m her, don’t forget, and my married name is Stengel. It didn’t take them long to spot the Jew Stone in the British Foreign Office who had once been a Stengel and to work out that his sister-in-law worked for them.’ Otto actually laughed.
‘Do you realize,’ he said, ‘you’re talking about the Saturday Club? Paulus, Silke, you, me. Still connected, still a gang. Could anyone looking at us back at the beginning ever have imagined?’
‘Every German story took a wrong turn in 1933, Otts. We’re not so special.’
‘I guess so. So they still don’t know who you really are, then?’
‘I don’t
think
they do. You can never be sure. They love secrets and they bide their time. They certainly did with you. Once they’d made the connection between us they put me on notice that one day they’d require me to bring you to Germany. I think they were waiting for you to rise in your profession a bit.’
‘No luck there, I’m afraid,’ Otto said. ‘I’ve not been much of a success at the FO at all. Or anywhere else for that matter. Same grade I started in.’
‘We noticed,’ Dagmar observed dryly. ‘Anyway, a few months ago my bosses must have decided that now was as good a time as any to try and make use of you, and I was instructed to find a way to lure you over. I knew what that was all right.’
‘Yes,’ Otto murmured, ‘you certainly did.’
‘I told them the surest way to get to you was for me to assume the identity of a dead Jewess whom you had loved.’
‘So that’s you pretending to be Silke pretending to be you. Quite a labyrinth, Dags.’
‘That’s the way we like things in the Stasi. The more shadows and lies the better. So we re-established the Dagmar identity, made it official in case MI6 were watching.’
‘Which by the way they were.’
‘And here you are, Otto. It isn’t all so very complicated really.’
‘Maybe not for you, Dagmar. But it seems pretty bloody tortuous to me. I’m not the clever Stengel twin, remember.’
Dagmar looked at him and her eyes softened a little.
‘You were clever enough to come to me and save my life in 1938, Ottsy. I’d have burned to death.’
She put her hand on his and squeezed it a little.
‘But despite that, Dagmar,’ Otto said, removing her hand, ‘it seems you’ve been quite happy to entrap me.’
‘Otto. I work for them. They don’t give you a choice in these things. If I hadn’t done it they’d have just pretended to be me.’
‘Pretended to be you, pretending to be Silke, pretending to be you,’ Otto corrected.
‘Yes, that’s right. Besides –’ and she gave him a little smile, a smile he hadn’t seen since the days of the pink bedroom – ‘I wanted to see you. I thought you’d want to see me.’
‘I did, Dags. You damn well know that. But the question is, what happens now?’
‘They’ll try to persuade you to spy for them inside the British Foreign Office. They’re waiting for you over there.’
Dagmar nodded towards a bench situated beyond Snow White, which had been empty moments before but on which were now sitting two solid-looking men in the Homburg hats.
Otto stared across at them.
‘The uniform doesn’t change then? Different totalitarian ideology, same hats.’
‘Yes, just the same.’
Otto sighed and lit a cigarette.
‘One last fag, eh?’ he said. ‘The thing is, Dagmar, I can’t help them.’
‘They can be very persuasive.’
‘No. I mean really. I really can’t. You see, they want a spy in the Foreign Office, but in fact I won’t be working for the Foreign Office when I get back.’
‘Really? When was this decided?’
‘Today. Here in the People’s Park. I’m going to resign. And I won’t be studying for any law degrees that I don’t have the brains to get any more either.’
‘You’ve been studying law, Ottsy?’ Dagmar asked, very surprised.
‘Trying to. Since 1947. You see, I’ve been trying to live the life Pauly lost. Isn’t that silly? Ever since you caused him to give me his name and his prospects I’ve felt responsible. I’ve been trying to be him. For his sake and for Mum’s – she did so love what she thought he’d become. But I’m going to stop now because it’s obviously ridiculous. Suddenly I understand that. I can’t be him and he wouldn’t want me to. I’ve been Paul Stone for seventeen years but when I get back I’m going to start being Otto Stengel again. I don’t know how I’ll do it or what I’ll do – sweep roads probably – but one thing’s for sure. Whatever I do become, it’ll be more fun than what I’ve been trying to be. And I’m afraid it won’t be any use to the Stasi. Unless they want a spy in a woodwork class and an amateur jazz band, because I’ll certainly be joining those.’
Dagmar smiled.
‘Is there a girl?’
Otto thought about that for a moment. Then he remembered something and felt in the breast pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a paper tissue with a lipstick imprint on it. The one Billie had put there on the first morning he had been summoned to MI6. Something to remember her by, she’d said.
‘Yes, actually,’ he said quietly, ‘I think there is a girl.’
‘Ha!’ Dagmar replied, looking at the red lips printed on the tissue. ‘So you
did
love somebody besides me after all.’
‘I didn’t think I could allow myself to, Dagmar,’ Otto replied. ‘But now I know I can.’
Girl on a Pavement
London and Berlin, 1989 and 2003
IN 1989 OTTO Stengel heard the news of the collapse of the Berlin Wall while listening to BBC Radio 4 in the kitchen of the north London home he shared with his wife Billie.
The last of their four children had long since flown the nest and Billie was rushing off to her job as a fashion buyer at Marks and Spencer. Therefore Otto, who was a semi-retired cabinet maker, had the day to himself. He spent it in his garden workshop, listening to the unfolding saga of the people power revolution taking place in the city of his birth. Sometimes he paused over his saws and his wood planes to sip a little scotch, smoke a Lucky Strike and wonder what it might all mean for the East German official with whom he had last had contact in the Märchenbrunnen, thirty-three years before.
That same morning in Berlin, the retired Stasi officer known as Silke Stengel disappeared, leaving behind the flat she had lived in since the Second World War and no trace of where she’d gone.
Shortly thereafter Dagmar Fischer, a Jewish woman believed to have been dead for nearly half a century, reappeared in West Berlin. Her story of a life spent in the East was vague and confusing but her identity was clear. She had documentary proof taken from Stasi records filed in 1956, and subsequent DNA testing put the matter beyond legal doubt.
Thus established, Dagmar Fischer began a courtroom battle to gain compensation for assets lost under the Nazis and in particular to regain control of her father’s department store on the Kurfürstendamm. This had been largely destroyed during the war and subsequently leased by the West German authorities to various retail chains.
Dagmar Fischer was successful in her efforts and the Fischer department store was restored to its former glory, reopening its doors in 1992. For the remaining eleven years of her life, Miss Fischer arrived in a limousine outside the store every morning shortly before eight thirty, in order personally to open the magnificent front doors of the shop on the exact stroke of the half-hour.
She was in the process of performing this self-appointed task on the morning she died, suffering a heart attack as she stepped out of her car. Falling to her knees on the pavement, she slumped slowly forward until her face was on the stones, her mouth open and her tongue lolling out. A concerned crowd quickly gathered round and a young man stooped down to ask if he could help her.
‘You’re too late,’ Dagmar whispered to the paving stones as the breath of life left her body. ‘Seventy years too late.’
Afterword
Biographical Reflections
THIS STORY IS entirely a work of fiction, but it is inspired in part by a circumstance of my family history.
My father was a Hitler refugee. He was born Ludwig Ehrenberg in Germany into a secular family of Jewish descent. He came to Britain via Czechoslovakia in 1939 with his parents Eva and Victor and his older brother Gottfried. The great kindness of various individuals in Britain ensured the family’s survival, as did the help of a small charity established in 1933 by British academics and scientists. The charity, now called the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA), still exists today.
Gottfried enlisted in the British Army in 1943, when, like the Stengel brother in my story, he was advised to anglicize his name in case of capture by the Germans. He became Geoffrey Elton and my father followed suit, changing his name to Lewis Elton. My grandparents remained Ehrenbergs until their deaths in London in the seventies.
Gottfried and Ludwig had a cousin, Heinz. Like the brother in my story, Heinz was adopted and, to use the Nazis’ own term, of pure ‘Aryan’ blood. When his parents Paul and Clara Ehrenberg escaped Germany, Heinz elected to stay in order to farm the land his parents had acquired for him.
Heinz was soon drafted into the Wehrmacht and, like the Stengel brother in my story, was part of the army stationed on the Channel coast in 1940 in preparation for Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain. Heinz also served in Italy; after the war, the family discovered that he and Geoffrey had come quite close to each other while fighting there on opposite sides.
Like the fictitious Paulus and Otto, my father and uncle experienced the segregation of school classrooms. They, too, were insulted by Nazi teachers and witnessed the confusion of the so-called
Mischling
. My father’s best friend was half Jewish and, on being given a choice, bravely elected to sit with the Jews.
In the story, Paulus and Otto’s grandfather had won an Iron Cross in the First World War. My grandfather Victor also served in the Kaiser’s army and won the Iron cross in 1914. He fought in the trenches throughout the war, and my children have the piece of shrapnel that was dug from his leg in 1917. Like the fictitious Taubers, my grandparents loved the country of their birth very much and saw themselves as both Germans and Jews. When the family emigrated to England, my grandfather secretly brought his Iron Cross with him. On discovering this in 1940, my grandmother buried it in the back garden of the lodging house in which they were staying, where it has no doubt long since rusted away.
Like the Stengel boy in my story, my Uncle Geoffrey ended up with the Army Intelligence Corps as an interpreter. Geoffrey achieved the rank of Sergeant and throughout his life retained a deep affection for the British army. Indeed, it was said in the family that the army truly made him an Englishman. In 1989, when
Blackadder Goes Forth
was broadcast, Uncle Geoffrey was at first most unhappy at what he considered to be an insulting portrayal of the army; he later took the view that the satire was drawn with great respect.
Although my father’s family were more fortunate than some in terms of the number of members who were able to escape the Holocaust, many of course did not. Lisbeth, my grandmother’s beloved sister, for instance, died like the fictitious Frieda, having volunteered to accompany a group of Jewish children being transported east. Lisbeth was shot along with her young charges immediately on arrival in Lithuania in 1941.