The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

Some people became friendlier when Heike married Roland. Now they could see that she was perfectly serious; she wasn’t passing through the neighbourhood; she really did mean to stay.

  They became friendlier still when Heike announced her pregnancy.

  Whilst they became friendlier, Melissa began to cool. It wasn’t an overnight thing, but it did become noticeable to Heike that the relationship was under strain for some unknown reason. At first, Heike put it down to jealousy: marriage, a baby on the way. Melissa was feeling left out. The cheery smile wasn’t so evident, the exaggerated wave across the crowded room was replaced by a nod in acknowledgement; and when they did get together, the talk was distant and quite forced.

  ‘I’m sure that you could find someone like Roland. There are plenty of eligible men—’

  ‘What makes you think I’m in need of a man?’

  ‘I… just thought…’

  ‘It’s good that you’re happy, it’s good that you’re expecting a baby, but it’s never been my goal. I don’t want to fall in love with anyone – men or babies. I am, for the most part, happy. I have my work, I have my friends – you included. But there are greater things in this world.’

  Having snapped she allowed herself a brief smile, but the old Melissa was missing, sadly missing, and whoever this was who’d replaced her was no fun at all.

  ‘What do you want out of life, Heike? Are you waiting for something to happen? Is there something that wants to make you reach out and achieve something?’

  ‘I wanted to be here in East Berlin, to leave my old life behind. And I’ve done that. Maybe that’s an achievement? Now I have my family and that’s an achievement. I won’t make the mistakes with my child that my mother made with me and my brother. Even if something happened to Roland, I wouldn’t compromise my child by taking up with someone who didn’t love them or love me. That’s what my mother did.’

  ‘Your mother was a girl in different times, Heike. People’s choices depended on their survival.’ Melissa’s irritability was pulling her away. ‘I’ve got to go. We’ll catch up some other time?’ Heike nodded. Melissa had never had to be “elsewhere” before. This was something new.

  *

  If Heike didn’t get a move on, Hanne would be back in England.

  •Pick up the handy,

  •switch off the lights,

  •place room key in handbag and

  •set the satnav.

  *

  All of a sudden Melissa was gone. For two weeks, there was no lunchtime rendezvous, no distant sighting across the courtyard, nothing. Enrica was a friend now because Enrica was also newly married and pregnant; Ute was a friend now because she’d been pregnant; and Sylvia was a friend, too. None of them knew Melissa other than by sight, and they certainly didn’t know where she lived or, in fact, anything about her.

  ‘Somebody must know her. She can’t just have vanished?’ Heike exclaimed over another Monday lunch.

  ‘She was stuck up.’

  ‘No! She was friendly!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Never said a single word to me.’

  ‘Or me.’

  ‘We talked about all sorts of things. She was very knowledgeable,’ Heike insisted.

  ‘I think she thought she was above us all. Such a madam, but I heard she hung out in some dark places.’

  ‘You think she was a prostitute?’

  ‘Why not? She could earn good money that one.’

  ‘No, I think she was just another Stasi plant. She’s gone because she’s done her job. Mission accomplished. She’ll be somewhere else now. She was friendly to you, Heike, because you’re the girl from the West. They’ll watch you; it’s only natural. Forget her. Put it down to experience. Providing you didn’t say anything to incriminate yourself, you’re safe. It’s just policy that keeps people safe.’

  ‘Why would I incriminate myself? I’ve nothing to hide.’

  ‘Of course not! It’s just routine, the way things are. The authorities are paranoid that the Americans will invade at any moment, so they’ll keep tabs on you because of where you came from.’

  No one shakes off their past – certainly not in East Berlin. Heike realised that.

  Probably, if she hadn’t been eight months pregnant, and not suffering the most debilitating back pain, Heike might have reacted very differently. Roland was late home, and the knock at the door was worrying for that reason alone. Nobody knocked in the evening – nobody.

  There, standing on the step like an orphan in need of shelter, was Melissa – anxious, impatient, drawing on yet another cigarette like a condemned woman about to face the gallows. For the briefest of moments Heike didn’t recognise her, such was the change in her demeanour.

  ‘Are you okay? I haven’t seen you in a while.’

  ‘I’m fine. Can we talk?’

  ‘Of course, come in.’

  ‘No. Come to my car. It’s there.’ She gestured toward a blue VW Beetle just beyond the gate.

  It crossed Heike’s mind that if Melissa was Stasi, then she might regret getting into the car, but an arrest would be much more official and high powered than this.

  Not without some difficulty, Heike manoeuvred into the passenger seat whilst Melissa fumbled in the glove compartment for some papers.

  ‘You know, we conceived in a car. Now I can’t even get in one!’ joked Heike. Melissa didn’t hear it and continued her search until she found what she was looking for – a map.

  ‘You see, I’ve been doing some research. That’s why you haven’t seen me. I’ve discovered something about my father. You remember me saying that he was an American GI like your father? Well, he was here at this base. Is this where your father worked?’

  Heike studied the improvised map of a US Army base somewhere in the American zone. ‘No. Joe was, and may well still be, at a base in Frankfurt. It’s a big place and it’s where I went to school as a boarder.’

  ‘I’ve discovered that my father was in the small arms wing at this base. He was an instructor. What about your father? What did he do? Would he have known my father? Could I contact your father? Could I say I know you? I’m so desperate to meet my father, Heike. I know he wants to see me, but it’s so difficult.’

  ‘They say you’re a Stasi informer.’

  ‘The Stasi watch me like they watch everyone else. Why do you think we’re talking out here in the car? I’m not in their pay, Heike. I just want to make that connection with my father before he’s too old. Would you help me?’

  Of course Heike would help. Without giving anything a second thought, she described in detail whilst sketching a rough map of the base at Frankfurt, listing names and places, departments and the entire layout of all the buildings she could remember. She didn’t stop to think about why a woman who needed to find her father needed such an elaborate map, but she wasn’t doing it so much for Melissa but for herself: confronting her past in an effort to try to lay some ghosts. And when it got too dark to see, they switched on the interior light and continued until such time as Roland made them jump out of their skins by tapping on the steamed-up window, by which point the map was as complete as could be.

  ‘Sorry! I was delayed. Shall we go in? I’m quite hungry.’ He never asked why they were sitting in a Beetle in the near dark drawing up maps. He was an East German and knew that it was better never to ask, even when your profession is all about asking questions.

  Melissa thanked Heike profusely and politely refused the offer of a meal, insisting that she better get home because her cat would be waiting for her. In reality, there was work to be done. She had all she needed.

  Strangely, the very day Johann Bruno arrived, weighing in at a very healthy and cuddly 3.5 kg, Neues Deutschland announced the capture of Melissa Engel, notorious terrorist member of the June 2nd terrorist movement. Her involvement in the audacious bomb attack on a U
S Army air base at Frankfurt had left one man dead and thirteen injured.

  It was in all the newspapers; there was no getting away from the headlines. For a week, Roland hid the news from his housebound wife, knowing that she had most likely played an unwitting part in detailing the camp for Melissa. She had not for a moment considered that Melissa was anything other than a lost soul looking for her real parent.

  She knew that feeling – the feeling that her real father was “out there somewhere”. Whenever the opportunity presented itself Heike would spot some middle-aged man in the crowd going about his business: Could that be him? Is he here? Does he know I’m alive? And each day she would shake herself out of such silly dreams. Don’t be stupid! Don’t be sentimental! Of course he’s not here! He’s Russian! Not German!

  Then with each new day she would look again, convinced that he was waiting to be found.

  One day, she followed a man across town for quite some distance. He was most definitely Russian because he had that look – the look that her brother had: a Slavic look. Everyone who had ever known Peter said that he had the look of a Slav.

  She followed the stranger in the way a Stasi agent would, jumping onto trams, hiding behind a newspaper; pretending to fiddle with her shoe if he gazed back in her direction. She only broke off the surveillance when he entered a tower block. It had to be him, of that she was sure.

  She waited for some time in the chill, damp, polluted air, smoking, coughing and blowing her dripping nose, but he didn’t re-emerge. She was no spy, but if the man had been aware of her presence he might well have suspected her.

  She never saw him again, but for several years she continued to haunt that particular neighbourhood armed with a packet of expensive Woodbines that Roland had picked up on the black market, her idea being that she would proffer the man a cigarette by way of an introduction. He would understand.

  Roland was right to protect Heike. He knew only too well that when she found out about Melissa it would break her heart. Not that she was so fond of Melissa, but the thought that her carefully sketched map had enabled a terrorist group to kill and injure innocent people would shock her to the core.

  The print news wasn’t difficult to hide. Heike barely glanced away from Johann for a moment. She watched over the child’s antics constantly, sleeping by his cot and often almost forgetting the fact that Roland was there too. And she adored Roland.

  Roland knew only too well that a day’s news is soon forgotten, but then there was the TV and the radio, both of which were always “on” in the newsroom. It was all over the media. Party officials interviewed on radio analysed the bombing for hours, talking about the perpetrators, the victims, the role of the US Army in Frankfurt.

  The TV was no better; and worse, there were the West Berlin channels with their own “experts” analysing every nuance of the outrageous attack. So-called experts and pundits speculated that the following week there would doubtless be another terrorist attack in the West and then another and another because the Red Army Faction was also beginning to leave its bloody signature along with that of the June 2nd movement.

  Roland was only too grateful that at home they had so far never invested in either a TV or a radio.

  His biggest fear was that the authorities would make a connection between Heike and Melissa, that at any time there would be a vicious thumping at the door and it would be the Stasi, but such a visit never came and for a time he relaxed. The Stasi were not interested in terrorist activities on the other side of the fence, maybe because they had a different interest in the outcome; maybe they colluded?

  A destabilised West was no bad thing for the East, and it was a possibility that the terrorists had popular support among the ordinary folk on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

  Eventually, Heike did find out. On her return to work, Ute, Sylvia and Enrica couldn’t wait to tell her all about the terrorist who’d been in their very midst.

  *

  Looking back over those years, the memory of that news sent a shiver through her. She was convinced that from that moment on, her time in purgatory had begun; that she and she alone was guilty of the death and the injuries sustained in that explosion. It was a heavy burden and one that she’d never spoken about to anyone other than her beloved Roland. Tonight, she would tell Hanne.

  *

  Kind Uncle Frederick

  Johann’s initial effect on his mother was that he strengthened the maternal bonds she felt for Kirsten. Up to now Heike’s life in East Berlin had been a selfish existence: all was fine, and often wonderful when the sun shone.

  Heike loved her mother; or rather, the good and considerate Heike loved her mother. There was another Heike whose burning resentment of GI Joe laid the blame firmly at her mother’s door. Kirsten had made it too easy for Joe; Heike’s self-imposed exile was the result and the punishment.

  But now there was a baby and Heike wanted to show him off to his grandmother. Why, Kirsten would be bound to sweep him up; adore him; coo and cuddle and cradle him till her arms ached with love. Arranging a visit seemed perfectly reasonable; but that was the Westerner in Heike’s thinking. She still hadn’t quite cottoned on to the fact that she wasn’t free to cross the border whenever she wanted to. The Wall wasn’t there to protect her from the fascists in the West; it was there to keep her amongst the communists in the East.

  She appealed to Uncle Frederick.

  ‘I need to find Mama, to make contact again. She doesn’t reply to my letters and I know she must feel so hurt by what I did… The baby’s old enough to travel now. What do you think? He wants to see his grandmother!’

  ‘My! What a clever boy he is! Only five months old and already he’s expressing an opinion. It really isn’t practical; it would be too emotional for all concerned. Better to stay put and avoid the hurt.’

  ‘Hurt? How would we be hurt? Is my mother okay?’

  Uncle didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m asking… Is she okay? Tell me please!’

  ‘Why do you ask, my dear? Don’t you know? The Americans will keep you if you try to go home. They’ll interrogate you and take the child and make your life a misery. They won’t even let you stay in Bavaria or Xanten or wherever you want to go.’

  ‘Xanten? Where is Xanten?’

  ‘It’s where your mother now resides. She left when she found out about your life here in East Berlin.’

  Uncle stood up and walked to the single-pane apartment window as if something outside had caught his attention, tapping a cigarette out of its packet, placing it to his thin, aristocratic lips before turning back to Heike.

  ‘They will arrest you, you know. You’re a traitor in their eyes. They’ll fly you to the US where you’ll be imprisoned; your child will be put into a foster home. And once they have you, they’ll never let you go. They would tie your name to that of your colleague – the terrorist who was arrested shortly after the Frankfurt bombing – Fräulein Engel. You’d never see Germany again. They might even slap a terrorism charge on you if they could connect you with the bombing. We could not guarantee your safety, you understand? We cannot help you if you leave.’

  Uncle was quite right and Heike knew it, but she wouldn’t accept it. This wasn’t a rational thing; she had to return home with the baby because there was something deep and primeval stirring her innermost thoughts – the need to return to her tribe. Heike the Westerner, born and brought up to be as free as a bird, free to do as she pleased whenever the mood took her. She was now a long, long way off understanding that those freedoms she’d once enjoyed had been left behind forever. That evening as they promenaded in the park she told Roland of her need to see her mother again. ‘She’d adore him! I have to go, Roland.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I understand now – I understand what being a mother means. Before Johann, I was living for myself.’

  ‘I see. Did I play a part?�
��

  ‘Of course you did! I wouldn’t go anywhere without you – you know I wouldn’t, my love.’ She grabbed his arm and pulled him close, burying her nose deep into his tweed jacket sleeve – sniffing back tears.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, my little Marxist? It’s not like you to be so emotional. Are you suggesting that we jump the Wall? Because these days, that’s impossible.’

  ‘No, I haven’t lost my senses – not yet at least. I thought maybe you might have a privilege as a journalist? You’ve worked for your newspaper a long time now and maybe your editor could see his way to sending you on a working holiday?’

  ‘To a neighbouring Eastern bloc country – yes. In the West our authorities would fear me defecting, or they’d insist that I spy for them. Everybody who goes to the West on business is ordered to spy, there is no choice, and if you do spy then they’ll ask you again and again – they never give up. So that’s not possible and may never be possible.’

  ‘Do you mean we’re stuck here forever?’

  ‘I am not stuck! I’ve always been here. You’re the one who used your democratic choice. Were you so naive as to think that they’d let you wander home again whenever the whim took you? My God! Heike, what were you thinking?’

  Heike took her face out of his sleeve, dropping the grip on his arm as she did so. ‘This stupid old tweed jacket of yours could do with a clean – it stinks!’

  ‘Don’t be angry with me! You’re scaring the baby. I was different then. I didn’t have Johann or you!’ He looked for a reprieve in her face, but found only stubborn determination.

  He tried to offer some hope at least: ‘There is talk of an accord being reached soon that would enable people to emigrate to the West officially, but it’s only a rumour. Much will have to be ironed out before anything is agreed.’

  ‘I don’t want to emigrate, Roland. I like it here – really. I just want to see my mother with Johann.’

  ‘I know you do, but it isn’t possible. Comrade Wendt is right – the Americans would detain you and take the baby. The only alternative is to bring your mother here.’