The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

  Talk of the bombing or the reasons behind it infuriated Roland. He was not entirely sure that he wanted a brother-in-law under his roof at that particular moment in time. He turned to shout at Peter, shout at him to get the hell out of their lives, but the boy had already disappeared from view.

  During the days that followed Peter’s arrival, Roland had to admit to himself that for the first time since Johann’s death Heike was finally gaining strength and was even animated again. She was now able to share their bed; and for that, he would always be profoundly grateful for the boy’s arrival. Hopefully, the days of talking to ghosts were behind them.

  Heike, the good citizen

  The Stasi were never far away from the couple. This was not unusual, of course, in a totalitarian state, but Roland and Heike Bermann were special cases – she being a defector from the West.

  Now, with Peter having defected as well, there was even more reason for those tasked to watch and listen as the little family tried to pull itself back from the brink of despair and back toward cold, grey reality with all its daily frustrations.

  Every so often they would hear shots being fired as someone tried to get through or over the Wall, but the Wall had grown so immense in height and breadth that only the very hardy and foolish attempted to actually cross it. Anyway, safe to say that apart from those occasional outbursts – shots followed by shouts – nothing remarkable happened in that apartment on Held Strasse to give the Stasi cause for concern.

  The apartment was bugged and had been from the beginning of their occupancy. Listening devices placed discreetly here and there. Even when the couple felt it was time to move to something larger and more rural, especially now that an additional family member was living with them and, most wonderfully, another baby was due, Uncle Frederick dutifully stepped in to convince them that the apartment was a far better environment in which to bring up a newborn; his argument being that should NATO forces invade, East Berliners would come under the immediate protection of the state, something those living in more rural areas were not afforded.

  Heike the good citizen never saw those who watched her, and they watched her daily. The bearded man across the street with the friendly dog, the old lady upstairs who always smiled and talked, the busy young woman who ran the laundrette and offered cigarettes, even teachers at the school and, most especially, me.

  We all watched her.

  You see, we watched because we had to, as someone was watching us.

  From the pages of German history came those professional spies who had forged their credentials as communists during the struggles of the ’30s. Others had been street fighters openly engaging the National Socialists of Hitler and Röhm with whatever they could bring to bear. They considered themselves “survivors” of a regime that had all but wiped out their comrades. Driven into the woods or neighbouring countries, these communists had been the first inmates of the concentration camps – the first to be worked to death, to be executed; the first to have no marked graves or memorial to their struggle for existence.

  The younger “watchers” fell into two distinct camps: those who fancied themselves as worthy citizens of the state (ironically, Heike might have considered that she belonged to this vanguard); they would do as they were told; individuality was, in their view, a dangerous thing and resulted in people getting killed. Then there was the second group of watchers. This group watched because the state had something on them. Work for us and we’ll reduce your son’s prison sentence or get him the comforts he needs. Work for us and we’ll turn a blind eye to that misdemeanour. Work for us and we’ll get your mother to the top of the waiting list; she’ll need that eye surgery; she needs a roof over her head. Work for us and you’ll get that promotion/house/holiday. We just need you to watch someone, make some notes, that sort of thing. We’ll look after you.

  Nobody asked Heike to watch anybody. She was the watched, but not the watcher. It never occurred to her. No suggestion of impropriety was ever made. This was an idyllic state, after all; and yes, she was still naive.

  In a godless society, there were no godfathers for children, but Uncle Frederick played his part in stretching his mighty wing of protection over Heike’s newborn – Bruno Johann. Should Heike be found to be an active spy and therefore imprisoned, the child would be accommodated and treated well. The papers and plans were drawn up and ready; all it needed was for Heike to put a foot wrong, then the allocation could proceed with due haste.

  As the years flew by, Bruno’s playground was the neighbourhood. He could go up to the Wall, but not too close; don’t cause anyone anxiety, and do what the guards tell you – always!

  School was fun but hard work. Children in the East were better, he was told; stronger, more capable than their cousins in the West. That was a particularly difficult concept: the idea that the people on the other side of the Wall were known as “cousins”.

  ‘Are you good citizens?’ the children were asked every morning. ‘Of course!’ came the reply. What other answer could there be?

  Bruno was unremarkable and unaware for the most part that he was something of a special case in the East Berlin educational community. His mother’s file flagged up the fact that she was a defector from the West and therefore under the close scrutiny of the authorities. Quite often, when Bruno’s name came under discussion by teachers, youth workers, or whoever, he would notice them conspire and glance at him for a moment or two.

  ‘Is that her boy?’

  ‘Yes, he’s a good boy, but just keep an eye out, would you? Make some notes if you have to. Talk to me first if he says something a little odd, you know the sort of thing.’

  Bruno never did oblige anyone with something a little odd or anything else. He was to all intents and purposes a very happy child, content in the narrow world in which he found himself.

  The Wall fascinated him. He found it endlessly interesting to watch the guards at work, marching, smoking, watching with their binoculars, shifting their machine guns from shoulder to shoulder. Binos would make a good birthday present because he and the gang could play at being guards and spies. Lengths of copper pipe were fashioned into toy machine guns that would annihilate those trying to “escape”. They would mimic goose-stepping and changing guard, and they were good mimics – barking orders at one another, swearing, checking papers. Any girl who wanted to play had to be a spy and would be searched and roughly pushed and cajoled. No one seemed to object to this game, although female interest soon waned.

  The first time Bruno was shouted at by a guard to stay well away it scared the hell out of him and hurt his sensitivities: ‘But I’m on your side!’ he shouted back. The incident simply fed his curiosity all the more. He told his mother and in turn she told him the story of how she and her cousin Heidemarie would visit the border post to talk to the nice guards when she was his age. She told him, too, about her English cousin and how they took her along one day and how deep in the Bavarian countryside it was so very different. Everyone was more relaxed and friendly, but here in the city tensions were always high and the guards were much more nervous as there was so much more at stake. Best to stay well clear.

  It concerned Heike that in Bruno’s short life he had never walked in the grass. Whereas she had grown up playing in the summer meadows, climbing hills, rolling down hills, climbing trees, falling out of trees and swimming in the river, Bruno’s playground was nothing more than Held Strasse and its surrounds.

  The nearby parks had weedy, short, patchy grass that a hundred thousand rubber soles turned to mud in winter; it could never be the expanse of rural Bavaria.

  For the most part, she spent much of her time picking Bruno up off the concrete and the dust, washing his wounds, disinfecting the bloody open gashes before sending him back out with a plaster. All too frequently he would fall on concrete, brick, rubble, timber pallets and planks with rusty nails.

  Every other week, every other year,
there would be some near catastrophe involving Bruno, yet the older he got the more robust he seemed to be and to all intents and purposes indestructible, which was a relief to his doting parents; but his neighbourhood was also his zoo.

  He liked school; he was a happy pioneer, and before too long he would be in the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend). Accidents apart, he didn’t give his mother serious cause for concern, for which she was extremely grateful.

  With each passing year, Heike considered herself content with her lot. Her “escape” from the West – her defection – seemed, in hindsight, to have been a beneficial move. Peter had long since moved out of their apartment having found work in the steel industry, again, under the directorial guidance of “Uncle” Frederick. Once employed, he distanced himself until there came a time where they no longer heard from him at all, much to Bruno’s chagrin, as he adored his uncle.

  *

  Twenty-first century car radios infuriated Heike. Pressing “Search” was nowhere near as easy as turning a dial. Why did everything have to be so complicated? Eventually, it settled on a station playing British hits from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Very apt considering she was on her way to see her British cousin and in her head she’d already made the journey back to the ’70s and ’80s.

  *

  Nordmende Minibox

  They had a nice apartment – a rare privilege in East Germany – and, most importantly, they were a family. Promotion eventually came Roland’s way and brought with it a car (another rare privilege). Even a lowly second-hand Trabant was a great asset for the family; and the apartment secured by Uncle Frederick was a gift indeed. Few East Berliners – the proletariat – lived in such spacious accommodation.

  By Western standards, it was nothing special, but on the Eastern side of the Wall such an abode suggested a citizen of rank. Roland was by no means a citizen of rank, merely a jobbing staff reporter – even after promotion to Chief Industrial Correspondent.

  Someone suggested there might be further career advancement if he learnt English, and who better than Heike to fill the role of Roland’s English teacher? He was a keen pupil, his belief being that if he could speak English he would get better assignments – be sent to international conferences even if only in the Eastern bloc, China, Vietnam, that sort of thing.

  Little by little she taught him, starting with the common similarities between German and English, and before long they were tuning their little used transistor radio into English language stations and digesting the news broadcasts and the music. It wasn’t always straightforward.

  ‘The idea is to listen to English being spoken, not music,’ she chastised him.

  ‘But, darling, I love Erik Satie’s music. My father loved Satie. Gnossienne. Don’t you just love that piano? Haunting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Creepy, in my opinion. Gives me the shivers. Come on, Roland! Let’s find the BBC or Voice of America or something.’

  Listening to foreign broadcasts was something that East Berliner Roland had never before considered because it had always been against government wishes. As a schoolboy and member of the FDJ, he’d been encouraged to “out” those he knew to be tuning in to Western broadcasts. Previous generations of FDJ youth had even been sanctioned to break the aerials of those who had set them to pick up “subversive transmissions”. The authorities actively blocked reception wherever possible, but the airwaves were a force of nature, and with advancements in broadcast stations and receivers the days of holding back the tide of Western influences were coming to an end. Now, under Heike’s influence, he was exposed to a new perspective coming in over the airwaves of the little Nordmende Minibox. It amazed him that people would argue in the West about all sorts of things – subjects that in East Germany were never open for debate.

  For every argument heard there was a counter argument and it fascinated him in much the same way as Bruno was fascinated by the Wall. Politicians even expressed their views to journalists who in turn seemed quite free to ask whatever they wished.

  Ironically, it was not Roland but Heike who was somewhat unsettled by the broadcasts that she initially translated for her husband. She had spent years convincing herself that East was best; that the West was not only corrupt but also fundamentally flawed in so many aspects. Now her ideals were being challenged: not by some government organisation but by the BBC.

  She didn’t really know anything about the BBC or Britain. All she knew was that her cousin and uncle lived in the far southwest of England, but beyond that she had no concept. This was due largely to the fact that Joe hated Britain and the British with a passion unmatched by anyone else she knew. For him, Britain was number one in his list of hated countries and yet he never explained just where his vehement reaction had its roots. He would cite the misdeeds of King George III in the Americas and tell the family how lucky they were to be dual nationality citizens with free choice and not subjects of “a mad king” like those damn Limeys.

  He wasn’t alone in his hatred of the British – she’d known other Americans who could be very derogatory of “the Limeys”, and the consensus seemed to be that if you were American you either hated Britain or at best didn’t give a fig about the skinny little island.

  She thought about censoring the programmes so that they only tuned in when a programme was unlikely to be broadcasting propaganda, for that’s what the political content had to be, she was sure. Roland, however, was eager to listen: ‘Come on, Heike! If I’m to speak this language, if I’m to understand the culture, then I need to listen – we need to listen – together!’

  Roland was not a communist in the sense of idealism, he simply saw himself as a hard-working East Berliner, essentially a German and nothing more than a citizen of a state that had erected a vast barrier supposedly for the protection of its own people; naively, that it wasn’t the Wall that held him captive but his own lack of ambition and ability.

  Some of Roland’s family had fled to the West in 1961 – those few from his mother’s family who had survived the war: a distant aunt, uncle and two cousins. He remembered that his parents had also been tempted into going before the Wall was constructed. ‘They were of two minds,’ he would tell Heike. ‘It was a very near thing. We were so close to making that move. We even started to pack, but caution prevailed. They had no one to go to, no job.’

  His father, Niklas, feared that if Khrushchev were to push the Western powers out of Berlin – and it would only take a half hour at most in his opinion – then those who’d gone to the West would be caught and punished. And so reluctantly they stayed.

  Listening to the radio – BBC World Service and very occasionally Voice of America – Roland and Heike grew increasingly aware of their own vulnerability. For the first time, it began to dawn on the couple that the East German state was actually watching them more than they’d ever dared to consider. This realisation was brought on not so much by a particular incident but by a discussion programme one evening where a former KGB agent in London was discussing how Moscow spied on all its citizens, but that that paled into insignificance when compared to East Germany.

  ‘The Stasi,’ according to the agent, ‘were masters of surveillance having inherited the skills and tools necessary from the Nazi state. Nobody is more paranoid than the East German state,’ he claimed.

  ‘Sounds like a treacherous defector to me,’ said Heike, ‘a man with scores to settle and money to be made from the West. They’ll pay him highly for having said that.’ But Roland wasn’t so sure.

  It wasn’t long after that programme that someone asked Roland how he was getting along learning his “new” language. This was unnerving. Who had been told? Had someone said something? Had Bruno talked at school? The boy came under suspicion for a while and a rift opened between father and son.

  Then, one night in May, Roland noticed that whenever the radio was on there was a background hum – quite faint, but audible nonetheless. The hu
m remained whatever station he tuned into, but would fade somewhat if he took the radio out of the living room and placed it elsewhere. Something electrical was interfering with the reception so he tried isolating various electrical appliances, from lights to the refrigerator, but none of these actions made any difference. So he wrapped the radio up, placed it in a box and took it out in the car.

  He drove out of the city for quite some distance until he reached open countryside north of Pankow. Worried that he’d been followed, fumbling inside the box like some guilty thief fearing that he might expose his illicit haul, he switched it on and, sure enough, there was no hum – just a clear signal.

  It’s probably something in the building, he thought. Something in the building interferes with the radio reception? Maybe it’s the local substation. How stupid! Driving all the way out here, drawing attention to himself, and for what? This is what paranoia does to people. Bloody hell!

  Uncle Frederick had not been shown the radio. Like naughty children hiding a guilty secret, Heike and Roland would hide it whenever Uncle visited. Silly, perhaps, as there wasn’t a law against owning a radio or a TV, but they didn’t want to talk about it so they put it out of sight in a linen cupboard. That’s what East German families tended to do – hide things; pretend they didn’t exist. Better not to have it or show it, especially as it was tuned to an English-speaking service; that way, nothing need be explained if anyone asked.

  It was Heike who didn’t want television and this was a reaction to her upbringing. GI Joe had brought the television into the family home sometime around 1962 and initially it was the most exciting thing ever. Neighbours from all around the district would drop in just to marvel at the picture set in that wonderful mahogany case. Nothing was allowed to be placed on its table-like top – no flowers, no photo frames. If it went wrong, he was able to fix it. It would pick up American programmes transmitted from a nearby base, and as bilingual children both she and Peter would translate the content to their friends, which, in the eyes of their peer group, made them geniuses. It was only later – some years later – that she realised that GI Joe used the television to demonstrate American culture and dominance.