The Leipzig Affair

by Fiona Rintoul

  The street felt oddly familiar. I wandered down it, half looking at my map and half taking in the odd mix of prefabricated 1970s’ apartment blocks and stucco-fronted, turn-of-the-century tenements. At the far end of the street, the road forked and there was a small triangular park where some children were playing. I’d been here before. Suddenly, I was certain of that. As I marched towards the street sign to check the name, an engine revved. I turned to look. A red VW Polo pulling out of a tight parking space. A woman was at the wheel. High cheekbones. Shapely mouth. Wide slanting eyes. A beauty. She clashed the gears and bumped the car out on to the road. As she sped past, I jumped into a doorway to avoid getting run over.

  *

  After I’d found Magda, I began to watch her, to find out about her life. I didn’t plan it. It just kind of happened. The weather had taken a turn for the worse. It snowed almost every day, and the average temperature was minus five. I took to spending my days in the cosy café opposite the apartment building, where, I quickly learnt, she lived. It was Marek’s old building. The street was Pflaster Street. That was why it had seemed familiar.

  I told the people who ran the café that I was a writer. I said I was writing a memoir, which was almost true. The notes I made on the iBook I’d bought to launch City Savvy Translations amounted to something like a memoir. They treated me with a certain respect after that, asking if I had enough light and what I thought of this or that author. It was some time since I’d been accorded this kind of professional regard, and I have to admit that I lapped it up, although it was all a sham. Pretty soon, the waiting stuff knew that I liked my sparkling water with lime, not lemon, took my coffee black with two sugars and preferred my salad without vinaigrette.

  The first thing I learnt about Magda was that she had a son. An Asian-looking boy. She appeared with him early each morning and took him, I assumed, to school. The second thing I learnt was that she had changed in some absolutely fundamental way. I can’t really explain it. She was the same in so many ways. Still beautiful. Still graceful. Still marching down the street at top speed, even when taking her little black-haired son to school with his satchel on his back. There was, I suppose, a pall of melancholy over her that had not been there before. Perhaps motherhood has mellowed her, I thought. Single motherhood. There was no sign of a father. But I also remembered what Bull-Halifax had said about the time he met her in Leipzig: She was rather reserved. I think something had happened to her, but she wouldn’t crack a light.

  Apart from taking her son to school each morning, there was no fixed pattern to her days. Some days, she was gone all day, returning at 16:00 with her son. Other days she returned to the apartment after dropping him off and appeared to spend the rest of the day there. Several times, I saw her piling camera equipment into the red VW Polo before speeding off. I had to resist the temptation to rush out and help her.

  After a couple of weeks, I worked out that she had one other regular weekly appointment. On Thursdays, she always left her apartment building at 14.15 sharp. One Thursday, I decided to follow her. I had it all carefully planned. I’d paid the bill in advance and stowed my iBook in my rucksack. I was lingering over a cup of coffee when she appeared in the doorway of her building dressed in a tailored coat and black beret. I put down my coffee, jumped up and headed for the door.

  “Off early today?” asked the waiter, a big man with a mangled face and a tattoo of Tom of Finland on his powerful right forearm.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Meeting a friend.”

  Magda had set off down Pflaster Street at a clip, and I was just in time to see her turn left on to Schönhauser Allee. I sprinted after her, reaching the corner as she disappeared into the U-Bahn station entrance. I wove across the street against the traffic, getting honked at, and clattered down the steps. There I slowed my pace. She was standing at the far end of the southbound platform. I stayed where I was until the next train squealed to a stop. When I saw which carriage she was getting in, I loped along the platform and got in the one behind. I gazed at her through the scratched panes of glass that separated our carriages. This woman who had captured my imagination like no other. Who captured my imagination still. Who had turned my life upside down, even if she hadn’t intended to.

  She got off the train in the centre of town at Mohren Street, near Koch Street where Checkpoint Charlie had been. She set off in the direction of the cranes that crowded Potsdamer Platz, and I followed at a discreet distance. She turned left into Voß Street, and I nearly gave myself away by rounding the corner too quickly. She glanced in my direction, and I froze. But she looked straight through me like I was water, the way the Yah girls used to at St Andrews. I slipped across the road and watched as she stopped outside a modern apartment building and pressed a buzzer. A moment later, she pushed through the door and was gone. I nipped back across the street to examine the entry system. All the buzzers were for private residences apart from two, which were for ground-floor offices. Schmidt & Lerner Cleaning Services and Dr Juliane Kranold, therapist.

  The next morning, I skipped my vigil at the café and went to the local library in Friedrichshain. I looked up Dr Juliane Kranold in a directory of medical practitioners in the district of Berlin. She specialised in treating patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly former prisoners.

  That evening I phoned John Bull-Halifax and told him what I’d discovered.

  “Were you following her?” he asked. I’d so often lied in response to questions put in that tone. (Have you been drinking? Is there something you’re not telling me?) Perhaps because I was sick of lying, so utterly sick of it, I simply said, “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little unethical?”

  “Don’t talk to me about ethics, John,” I said, suddenly angry. “Was it ethical to help to prop up a system that put young women in prison for no reason because you thought it was cool to wear second-hand suits and call yourself a Communist?

  “Listen, I was as shocked as anyone else when I found about some stuff that went on. We didn’t know those kinds of things were happening.”

  “Didn’t you? Maybe that’s because you didn’t want to know. The first new German word I learnt when I arrived in Leipzig was ‘Stasi’. It was all very well for you, wasn’t it? With your cushy job at the university. None of it really affected you. You could pose around in your National Health specs with impunity and choose not to know about certain things.”

  “Well maybe I was a bit of a poser back then, Bob, but whatever you may think, I was also a convinced Communist. I was devastated when the end came. We all were. I still am a convinced Communist, if you want to know. Socialism has never been tried in the kinds of countries where it might work. Karl Marx did say that Russia wasn’t ready for Communism. And things aren’t exactly perfect now either, are they, here or there? I have friends in Russia whose lives were destroyed when the system collapsed. They hate Gorbachev.”

  I sighed. “What am I going to do, John? I feel like I’ve got to know the full story now, but I can’t keep spying on Magda like this. It’s not right.”

  “How should I know,” he said, a trace of anger in his voice. “What do you need to know the full story for anyway? Is there something you’ve not been telling me?”

  I held the receiver away from my head for a moment and looked at the floor. “Yeah,” I said at last. “I’m getting over a bit of a drink problem.”

  “Thought so,” he said. “All that sparkling mineral water. Why don’t you come home? We’ll meet up again and talk about it and see if we can find a way to persuade Magda to talk to you. Anyway, you shouldn’t think that talking to her will solve all your problems. If you have a drink problem, that’s a separate issue and you should probably deal with that first. ”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it. I’m running out of money anyway. I’ve been paying for my flat in London and the place here.”

  I put the phone down. I decided that the next day would be my last at the
café. John was right. In my head, I’d conflated what had happened to me in Leipzig with my drink problem. If I could solve the riddle of one, I’d be able to fix the other too. But that was rubbish. They had nothing to do with each other. I’d found out what I could. It was time to go home and get on with my life, but before I did so I wanted to see Magda one last time.

  Things didn’t start off as normal the next morning. Magda didn’t appear in the doorway with her son first thing. Perhaps it was a school holiday. I ordered rolls with butter and jam for breakfast and a pot of coffee, and got out my iBook as usual. I’d been tapping away for about two hours, keeping a weather eye on Magda’s building, when she appeared in the doorway alone. Instead of turning right, as she usually did, and heading for Schönhäuser Allee, she crossed the street, weaving past her red VW. Only the little triangular park separated her from the café, and with a stab of horror I realised that she was heading my way. Why had I not considered this possibility? This was, after all, her local café. I sat frozen to the spot as she pushed through the café door, praying she wouldn’t recognise me.

  But she didn’t even glance in my direction as she marched over to the bar, sat down on a stool and ordered an espresso from the waiter with the big mangled face. They chatted about the weather, as the waiter tamped the coffee into the filter basket, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Even if she did recognise me there was no law against being in a café. It could be a coincidence.

  I tried not to stare at her as she shook off her coat. She was wearing jeans and a V-neck jumper that offered a glimpse of the dusky hollow between her breasts. Then I heard what she was saying. She was talking to the waiter about preparations she was making for an exhibition of her work.

  “You should see my workroom,” she laughed. “It’s a total mess. All my old photographs are everywhere. And I’ve had to go through every page of my Stasi files. Let me tell you, it looks like Normannen Street after a bomb hit it in there.”

  “It’ll be worth it in the end,” the waiter said. “And now you have a few days off.”

  “Yes, thank goodness. Kwan is at his grandmother’s. I haven’t had a weekend without him since I don’t know when. The only problem is the plumber. He wasn’t able to come yesterday to fix the leak in my sink. Do you think you could let him in?”

  “Sure. What time?”

  “He said he’d come at 15.00 today.”

  I looked across as she fished in her pocket and produced a set of keys for the waiter. He walked along the bar to right behind where I was sitting and dropped them in a glass bowl.

  That’s when it clicked into place. I had a set of those keys too. They were in the wooden box from Prague on my bedside cabinet. The locks could have been changed, of course. But equally they might not have been. There was an intercom system on the apartment building now, but apart from that it hadn’t been renovated. The waiter had told me it was the subject of a court case. A Jewish man from New York named Ivan Süsskind was claiming ownership. I waited until Magda had gone, then I slipped my iBook in my rucksack, paid my bill and left.

  At 8pm that evening, I arrived at Magda’s building, carrying a large bunch of flowers. I’d observed that there was an elderly woman living in the apartment above Magda’s. I pressed the buzzer I reckoned was hers.

  After a time, the intercom crackled into life and an old woman’s voice said, “Yes?”

  “Delivery,” I chirruped.

  “Oh, but I didn’t order anything.”

  “I have a delivery for you, madam. Some beautiful flowers.” “I’m not expecting any flowers.”

  “Frau Vogelbein? Yes, they’re definitely for you.”

  Eventually, she buzzed me in. When I reached the landing, she was peering at me crossly through a narrow gap in the door spanned by a security chain, but when she saw the flowers her suspicions seemed to evaporate. “What beautiful flowers!” she exclaimed.

  “Aren’t they?”

  “But I wasn’t expecting any flowers.”

  “Someone must be thinking of you, madam,” I said as I shoved them into her hand.

  As she closed the door, I clomped back downstairs, whistling as I went. I opened the main door and shut it again, waited a few moments, then took my shoes off and padded back upstairs to Magda’s apartment. My heart pounded as I inserted the key in the lock. It fitted, but when I turned it, the lock didn’t move. I felt something like relief. This madcap scheme wasn’t going to work after all. Thank God! Then I tried the other way, turning the key anticlockwise and the lock clicked back. I pushed the door and walked into Magda’s apartment.

  The light from the street lamps cast an eerie glow in the hallway. The apartment was very changed but I recognised a lamp on the console table made from a zebra’s foot. Letters were piled next to it addressed to Frau Magdalena Reinsch. As I made my way down the hallway to the living room, I glanced at the framed photographs on the walls. Each had a scrawled black signature in the bottom right-hand corner: M.R. I pushed open the living room door. There in front of the bookcase was the battered tan sofa where Marek had sat smoking the morning after the night at Café North.

  He’d smiled when I walked into the room looking crumpled and hungover and rubbing my face. “Coffee’s in the kitchen. Help yourself.”

  Where was the workroom? Perhaps it was in the small room off the main bedroom. Magda and I had slept there the night after the party at Café North. We both knew what I’d seen and we made love in a frenzy of anger, lust and excitement.

  I pushed open the bedroom door. The blind was drawn and it was dark inside. I got out the pocket torch I’d brought with me and ran its beam round the room. Against the back wall was a double bed covered in a white quilt. The dressing table was crammed with make-up and jewellery. Beneath the window was a chest of drawers piled high with books. On it sat a couple of photographs. Magda’s son by a lake somewhere. A black and white portrait of young woman playing the cello. A snap of a boy in a tracksuit.

  The door to the anteroom was next to a large antique wardrobe. I pulled the door back and shone my torch round the room. The divan and the bookshelves were gone. Just as I’d thought, this was the workroom now, and it seemed to double as darkroom. There was a blackout blind and a red darkroom lamp. I pulled the blackout blind and turned the light on. The floor was strewn with papers, and the walls were stacked with empty frames with numbers taped to them.

  I was about to bend down to pick up one of the papers from the floor when I sensed a movement behind me. I swung round. The waiter from the café across the road was standing in the doorway.

  “Fuck!” I yelled, cursing myself for turning on the light. I looked around for a way out. But the man filled the doorway. There was no way past him.

  “Don’t look so worried,” he said. “I know who you are. I have a message for you from Magda.”

  And I remembered then where I’d seen him before. On the door at The Sharp Corner, the very first night I’d met Magda at Leipzig train station.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  It’s a bright cold day in late February. You stand at your apartment window, watching the westerner, as he has been watching you. He’s sitting at a window table in the café opposite, tapping on his iBook. He’s wearing a white shirt and a navy blue pullover and he has glasses on. Gert brings him a coffee, and he smiles in acknowledgement. From this distance, he looks little changed, but Gert says there are deep lines round his eyes and that his hands shake.

  You shoulder on your coat, wrap a scarf round your neck and head downstairs. The westerner stands up when he sees you in the doorway of the café.

  “Hello,” he says and shakes your hand, holding your gaze with those green eyes you remember so well.

  “Hello,” you say. He’s still the same in so many ways. Square and strong. But Gert is right. His face is lined and he looks much older.

  You smile at him, and he smiles back. Then you throw your arms round each other and embrace.

  “It’s so good to see you,�
� he says. “I actually can’t quite believe this is happening.”

  “It’s good to see you too.”

  Gert brings you coffee, and you chat for a while about the weather, the way people do when they haven’t seen each other for a long time and don’t know where to start. And when the westerner picks up his coffee cup, you see that Gert was right about his hands too. They shake. You stare out of the window for a moment. You told him so many lies. You hope he didn’t suffer too much because of those lies.

  He tells you then about his trip to the records office in Leipzig and about Dieter.

  “Can you believe it?”

  “People can surprise you. That’s one thing I’ve learnt since reunification. Did you know that he moved back to Frankfurt an der Oder and married a girl he was at school with? We all thought he’d head straight for Texas when the Wall came down, but no. Jana was the one who couldn’t wait to get to America. She’s a lecturer in American Studies now at Bochum University.”

  “God,” he says.

  “They’ve all done well for themselves. They got their education. That makes all the difference.”

  “You’ve done well for yourself too. You’ve got this exhibition coming up.”

  “Things are starting to come together now, but it hasn’t been easy. There’s been so much in the newspapers about the Stasi and what they did to people, but if you apply for a job no one stops to ask if the reason you don’t have a degree is because you were in prison or you weren’t allowed to study.”

  “And what about Hencke?” he asks, “what happened to him?”

  “I believe he became a financial adviser.”

  “No!” The westerner laughs.

  “Yes, some people are adaptable. Stasi informer today, insurance salesman tomorrow. With a BMW and a private pension plan. It’s because they don’t really believe in anything. You know, I met him once in Leipzig after I got out of prison. He was coming out of the international newsagents on Grimmaische Street. You remember it? You were shocked that the only British newspaper they had was the Morning Star. I saw him clock me and wonder what to do. He decided to brazen it out and came striding towards me. It was the summer and he was wearing shorts and sandals. I remember looking down at the black hairs curling on his toes and feeling sick. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t Miss Magdalena.’ I didn’t look up but when we drew level, I turned and spat in his face. It was a turning point for me. After that, I started to feel better about myself.”