The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

  ‘Did he ask about me or your father?’

  ‘Yes, he knew you and Papa – what Papa did for work. He just wanted to make sure we were happy, that’s all.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Nothing. We’re happy, aren’t we? Is tea ready? Is Papa home or is he on assignment again?’

  The following morning Heike awoke from a deep sleep to hear Bruno making his way noisily along the corridor, stomping the length of the wooden floor with leaden, heavy feet, blowing his nose, making grotesque nasal noises to clear his sinuses that only his mother would tolerate – typically Bruno. Any other day, it wouldn’t have bothered her, but this morning was different. She would have shouted at him, but inside her head she heard a voice that wasn’t hers – a voice that said: ‘Cherish that sound.’

  Optimism today.

  Pessimism would have to take a back seat. Lightness had returned! Today she would find work – somewhere, anywhere.

  ‘Mama? What have you done with the bread?’ Bruno shouted across from the kitchen.

  ‘Bread? What’s wrong with the bread?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just different. I’ve never seen it like this before.’

  To her astonishment, there in the kitchen was Bruno examining a wrapped loaf of fresh bread of the kind they couldn’t get in East Berlin. It was most definitely a West Berlin loaf. She hadn’t seen a loaf wrapped in such a way since leaving the West seventeen years before.

  ‘Is this a new thing with bread? It’s even sliced! What happened to the bread I was cutting yesterday? Did you use it all up?’ asked Bruno as he held it up to the light, examining it every which way.

  She snatched it off him. ‘Hey! Mama!’ he protested.

  ‘No, I’ve never seen this bread.’ There had to be clues. Close examination proved useless: it didn’t even have the aroma of East Berlin bread.

  ‘Maybe Uncle Frederick left it for us. We must thank him,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Maybe he did. Yes, we’ll thank him when we see him.’

  Sipping coffee, Heike noticed other things that were not right. A framed picture that was askew and at least three others on the kitchen wall that looked as if they’d been deliberately knocked askew. Even the sugar bowl was full, yet she hadn’t refilled it in a week. She looked at Bruno but knew in her heart of hearts that he was no prankster. His head was full of many odd, juvenile things, but never pranks.

  ‘If someone offers you a lift this morning, Bruno, don’t accept. Be polite as always but don’t accept.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Heike got up and turned both taps on full blast. Bruno was aghast. This was new.

  ‘Not from strange Russians. Sssshhh!’ She put her finger to her mouth then to his lips and leant across the table where she could whisper. ‘You know to keep quiet – keep your thoughts to yourself and trust no one – especially Russians. You know what happened to your grandparents! The Russians would have killed them without a second thought.’

  ‘I’ll ride my bicycle. I’ll be fine!’ Again, she urged him to whisper. So he did.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mama. The Russian was asking me about what sort of work I wanted to do when I leave school. He was an inspector. It was all above board. That’s what he said.’

  ‘How good was his German?’

  ‘Very good for a Russian, but that’s why he’s inspecting German schools.’

  ‘Did he give you his name?’

  ‘No, but I think his name is Comrade Putinski? Putinskia? Putinscov? I’m sure I heard that from a teacher.’

  She turned off both taps. ‘Get your coat, I’m taking you to school.’

  ‘What do you think I am? A five-year-old?’

  ‘No, I’m going to see if I can get a job with your school. We need the money.’

  *

  The stubborn rabbit was determined not to move off the road, so rather than brake at speed Heike pulled on the wheel to avoid it, assuming the car would cope with the sudden demand on its ultra-modern suspension system, but it didn’t. Gravel at the side of the road on a slightly damp tarmac caused a spin that turned the car violently 180 degrees so that by the time it came to a stop she was facing back the way she had come. My God! What next?!

  Thankfully there were no other cars. She might have careered off the highway into the ditch on one side or over the embankment on the other side.

  The rabbit, unflustered, leapt off the tarmac into the verge and out of sight with not a patch of fur ruffled. Inside the car, slightly shaken, Heike reached for a tissue to blow her nose and took a moment to ponder whether this was a sign that she wasn’t supposed to meet up with Hanne again.

  She sniffed, threw the spent tissue to the floor and gazed upwards through the sunroof. ‘What do you want me to do, Angel? Head for home? Or are you really making sure that I will go and tell all this, eh?’

  Shaking, she turned the car around in an awkward five-point manoeuvre. From here, just a few more kilometres – another ten minutes behind the wheel at most. She’d come too far to turn back, and it was a personal thing with Heike, the girl who’d walked into East Berlin and made a life – never turn back.

  *

  We can keep you forever

  Roland was in a poor way. Alone, in a claustrophobic cell, he tried to make sense of what had happened. It made little sense: on leaving his newspaper office for home, a car had pulled up from which three large Stasi officers leapt out and charged towards him. He was their target for the day.

  Screeching tyres was just one of their hallmarks. He’d heard it before, he’d seen others pulled off the street, but in respect of his own misadventure he’d initially thought the car was braking for someone else or that it was a traffic accident.

  He hadn’t seen the men closing on him, so rapidly it was futile trying to run or dodge. He was their prey, the wildebeest succumbing to the hyenas. They appeared intent on killing him right there on the pavement.

  Instinctively, a somewhat last-ditch attempt, he swung his briefcase at them as if it were a medieval mace, but they were bigger men and well practised in the art of surprise and capture. In fact, the swing didn’t serve him at all because it simply provided his assailants with an arm to grab. They swung him around, put his arm behind his back and bent him painfully forwards, swiftly depriving him of any retaliation.

  ‘I’ll happily pull your arm out of your shoulder socket, so forget it!’ growled one of them. Swiftly and adroitly handcuffed, that was the end of any further resistance. Better to keep his mouth shut and say nothing.

  Pushed into the centre of the back seat with a stocky bastard either side of him, he felt their respective weights pushing down on his slim frame. This was all so typical. Every East Berliner had witnessed something like it; everyone looked away and carried on with their business. Nothing to see here, but the underlying message was always a warning to those witnessing: Don’t mess with the state!

  The journey seemed to take an age, the third man driving – driving that was frenetic and just plain mad, with his shoe to the floor, swinging the car around as if deliberately shifting the weight of his heavy colleagues to press against Roland’s chest, crushing him to the point of near suffocation. At this rate he would be dead by the time they reached HQ.

  If so, who would care? Another body? Put it in the morgue and fill out a form. Send flowers to the widow. The cemeteries had plenty of unmarked graves for dissenters like Roland. Who’d bother about another one?

  After what seemed an eternity, the mad driver pushed the brake pedal hard and in the same heavy manner that he’d abused the accelerator. The car came to such a rapid stop that the men in the back were almost ejected through the windscreen: ‘Damn it, Jaeger! You’ll kill us all!’

  A uniformed guard stomped up to the car and insisted on making a visual check of its occupants.

  ‘We have a delivery,’ ex
plained the driver, gesturing with his thumb in Roland’s direction. Satisfied, the guard ordered the barrier to be lifted. ‘Pedant!’ cursed the mad driver under his breath. ‘Every time we come here there’s a new boy on the gate just out of school and eager to show his NCO what a trustworthy little lad he is. I’d shoot ’em all!’

  The last few metres beyond the barrier opened out into a puddle-saturated quadrangle. Relieved of the two men pressing down on him, Roland gasped for breath.

  ‘Get out, scum!’

  With one hand, the larger of the two men grabbed hold of Roland’s jacket collar and hauled him off the back seat as if he were nothing more than a sack of potatoes picked up in the supermarket. Held tightly between them he was pushed face first through heavy steel doors into what seemed to him an endless, windowless corridor to a dimly lit reception desk manned by just one uniformed officer. His feet had barely touched the floor.

  From this inner reception, draughty corridors emanated outwards in all directions – a chamber designed to keep out sunlight and freedom of expression. Roland was about to be signed into purgatory.

  His body rammed hard against the high reception desk, he pleaded with his captors: ‘What charge? What have I done?’

  ‘Empty your pockets!’

  He dutifully emptied every pocket: handkerchiefs, a wallet with a small amount of cash that was counted immediately before being placed into a clear plastic bag. There was nothing on his person to incriminate him. Another uniformed officer arrived and took his jacket, tie, belt and shoelaces, noted down what he’d taken and placed them, too, in a bag, which he labelled.

  ‘Stick him in a cell.’

  Locked up in what was known as a “cage”, his only hope now was that the end was in sight for the GDR, but what he feared most of all was being sent deep into the Soviet Union – a fear eventually made all the more real by his jailer.

  ‘We can keep you as long as we have a mind to. We need never let you go. We can keep you forever.’

  There was plenty of time to think in the cage – plenty of time to reflect on recent events. Nothing to read – that was all part of the intimidation; nothing that might occupy his mind; just a bed, a stainless steel toilet and perpetual electric light. Once the physical shock exited his system, he could begin to think; and that was the worst part.

  Peter had to be behind this! Peter? Max? Whoever he was, whoever he’d become, he was the traitor – the Judas. It was all too coincidental.

  Heike must never know about the betrayal. The secret would die with him.

  There were moments between sleep where on waking he swore blind he could hear Peter’s voice at the far end of a corridor saying things like: ‘You got him? Good! This will teach him to screw with the state.’ Maybe it was an hallucination? He couldn’t be sure anymore.

  He was sure that he was the only prisoner in the building. Perhaps Zech and the others got away with it. Maybe he was the sacrificial lamb. After all, the place was as quiet as the grave, not even a damn clock ticking.

  He wondered whether this was what Heike went through. Brave girl! All this confinement and deprivation, and for what?

  He stared at the walls while imitating the sound of a ticking clock by tapping his foot on the floor, trying to keep a pace, seeing just how long he could keep it up. The only interaction was a plate of odious tripe passed through a hatch, with tepid water. The light was never turned off and there was no flex by which he could hang himself, no exposed element whereby he could have electrocuted himself – not that suicide was his thing; he had a wife and child to live for.

  Eventually, whether a day had passed or an interminable week he had no idea, he was summoned to explain himself. Again, his inquisitor introduced himself with that very same statement: ‘We can keep you… forever.’ For the second time it scared the hell out of him, but this time he rebelled: ‘Would you permit a book? Perhaps Alice Through the Looking Glass, as things here seem quite surreal.’

  This was not an intimate meeting: the interrogator sat at a distance from Roland behind a desk abutting another desk positioned lengthways on. The interrogator was well out of reach and so distant as to force Roland to lean forward to hear anything he might be accused of.

  The man wasn’t frightening: no uniform, no whip, no manacles at the ready, no heavies. This ordinary bureaucrat with the demeanour of a regular state official who might otherwise make decisions on city planning sat alone, the sort of middle manager that Roland had so often interviewed in the line of his work when visiting factories.

  Quite unremarkable.

  Cameras and tape recorders had to be working somewhere just out of sight, so Roland listened for an electric motor; glanced around the austere, grey room for a camera lens; not that either would make any difference to his case or liberty. This was a suspicion on Roland’s part because nothing was obvious, but then, it wouldn’t be.

  On the interrogator’s desk were a couple of files – one of which was Roland’s and had been in the making from the day he was born.

  He was not prepared for imprisonment. He wanted to be brave like his father and mother, but he couldn’t run as they had done. He couldn’t escape through the rubble and burning buildings; he couldn’t swim across the river or hide by night. He was being held to account by a regime and he’d upset them; and although they weren’t about to pull out his fingernails or shoot him – only because they didn’t need to – they could most certainly play with his mind.

  ‘Your wife, Heike, insists she doesn’t want to see you again…’

  The interrogator paused just long enough for the shock to enter Roland’s system. He then picked up a small, framed picture that had been lying on the desk. Affecting the manner of an impatient teacher having received overdue, unfinished homework, he shoved it across the lengths of both desks for Roland to examine. ‘She was here this morning. She gave me this and insisted you have it and keep it as a memento of your lives together.’

  The picture was Roland’s favourite image of Heike with Bruno as a toddler playing in the park. He’d snapped it using the Praktika brought home from the office for unofficial, family use. He would take it to the park to practise with different lenses and filters before developing the film in the bathroom.

  There was just something about the composition of the photo and the way it was so delightfully exposed. He loved the subjects and was proud of the way it had come out. Telephoto lens. Heike and Bruno in clear focus, her short, silky hair blowing across her elfin face, the background out of focus. In all, it was a good snap, through luck more than judgement on this occasion.

  He was, nonetheless, a very capable photographer making the most of limited equipment. He was a good developer, too, experimenting with f-stops, exposure time, film stocks and photographic paper. Although black and white, the photo captured Heike at her most beautiful with her gaze turned adoringly toward Bruno – mischievous as ever pulling against his harness, eager for the “off”.

  She would not have given it to anyone for she cherished it every bit as much as he did.

  ‘I don’t believe you. My wife would never give you that picture.’

  ‘You want proof? I have proof.’ The interrogator shoved across another picture, this time a large print of the lobby – a still from a security camera. This image, too, was perfectly clear – Roland could make out the uniformed figure of a guard and what looked to be Heike clearly meeting with a plain-clothes officer. It was certainly not a fake. He knew how to fake photographs; this was not one.

  Roland was now resigned to his fate. He’d brought this on; he alone had agreed to work with the group, no one had coerced him. His only hope lay in President Gorbachev. If he was the reformist that so many were beginning to believe in, then there was hope. Even if Honecker were to stand firm without material backing from the USSR, the GDR could not continue to hold out against the West.

  What concerned
him more was Heike. She was an ardent communist who refused to believe that her adopted state was anything other than perfect. ‘A land without fascists – what could be better?’ she would often say, as if in a constant state of euphoria. She meant every word. In her mind, American “fascists” had replaced Germany’s fascists, with their own corrupt officials spiriting away members of the Third Reich for the benefit of the US as it sought to replace the British Empire with its own – not an original idea but one influenced by her GI father; an idea that he espoused with pride.

  Heike firmly believed that the US had even assassinated President Kennedy with a view to starting World War 3 with the Russians, another belief planted in her mind by Joe and reaffirmed by Melissa who would tell her:

  ‘Every good American gets shot! Did you ever notice that?

  ‘JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King… and who pulls the trigger each time? The CIA; the FBI; the Mafia. Then they blame Khrushchev! It is the most dangerous country in the world and they will kill us all if we’re not careful.

  ‘The British and French are too much in their debt to raise so much as a finger in protest. Look at Vietnam! And when students protest they get beaten or shot – killed by their own policeman. And they call it peace? They actually call their country a democracy?

  ‘What difference your hand across your heart and your hand held high? No difference – no difference. Sweet Land of Liberty? Liberty unless you’re black, red, yellow or just plain poor!

  ‘In 1941, they didn’t want to fight Hitler. They had no intention until such time as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on them! They were forced into war. Hitler knew they hated the British more than they hated him. They’d have gone to war with the British Empire given the chance, but not Hitler and his National Socialists. And following the war they’ve interfered with virtually every state on the planet in an effort to build their own empire while closing down European empires.’

  Melissa’s words, Heike’s sentiments.