Here in Berlin

by Cristina Garcia

  My father had a jewelry kiosk near the Hauptbahnhof, which, except for selling cheap wedding rings to soldiers leaving for the front, was going out of business. Vati grew increasingly morose and paranoid. Some days it took all his effort to get out of bed, even with his Pervitin, to which he became severely addicted. Then he visited a hypnotist, who advised him to drink water with rose syrup (an unheard-of luxury at the time), but Vati went bankrupt just the same. Though he wasn’t old, his lungs were weak from childhood asthma, and he succumbed to pneumonia in the winter of ’44.

  My life, and Mutti’s, got a lot harder. We took turns queuing up at the water pump and stepped over the growing number of corpses in Hermannplatz. One happy day, we feasted on a tinned ham we’d found in a bombed-out flat. In the cellar where we hid when the bombs dropped, the jokes grew grimmer. Better a Russki on the belly than an Ami on the head. Everyone wrung their hands, preparing for the worst. The anxious strain drove many to kill themselves rather than wait for the end. As Berlin fell, the weather turned warm and beautiful. Führer weather, people used to say. The lilacs were defiantly in bloom. Dragonflies darted through the air with a blue magic. Since when does nature stop for war?

  When it was over—how disoriented we were by the sudden quiet—new troubles began. Around us the city lay in ruins, like the photographs of archaeological sites I’d seen in history books. We had the complexion of corpses ourselves from living underground. I saw buildings split in two, cross sections of their interiors visible. Twisted pipes jutted every which way from the rubble.

  Dear Visitor, the world we knew was over. There were only two religions: hunger, and the relief thereof. Of course, one could also mail twenty marks to a soothsayer in Bavaria to divine the future, but of what use was that? The Brandenburg Gate became ground zero for the black market: fur coats, diamonds, antiques, binoculars, watches. Anything and everything. I saw babies given away more than once. The principal currencies, however, remained constant: cigarettes and sex.

  The Russians went after the fat women first, which meant the wives of Nazi Party men—the Frau Sowiesos with their noses in the air. But no female, young or old, was safe. Frau komm! Every woman dreaded those words. Mothers pointed out other girls’ hiding places to protect their own. Imagine, if you will, the moment before enemy soldiers rape your daughter. Women asked each other: How many times? Then they turned away.

  It was a Russian officer who took Mutti and me under his wing. Ptiska, he called me, Little Bird, as he caressed my torn woolen sweater. I was barely fourteen. Frightful, I know, but I was luckier than most. For the price of an irregular, temporal domesticity, that lieutenant saved our lives with butter, bacon, and bread.

  When the Americans arrived that summer, a few of us took up with the black GIs. They flashed their hands in double V’s and softened our names on their tongues. Later, the babies came, a bumper crop of Besatzungskinder. I was lucky I didn’t get pregnant.

  

  What can I tell you after decades defending my clients? The irony, Dear Visitor, is that the victims had a much harder time proving their innocence than did the guilty, who frequently escaped prosecution with a well-paid “witness” or two. I’m retired now, drawing a pension, but the denunciations against me don’t stop. Stimmt. I’ve been accused of sheltering murderers with legal jargon and technicalities. But what would’ve happened if we’d permitted our society to unravel? Every family afflicted, pinned to the past like insects. How could we have built a new future like that?

  Believe me, Dear Visitor, it would’ve been much easier for me, for anyone, to defend the victims. But the perpetrators? Who wanted to look in the mirror, at that beckoning finger, and see the possibility in themselves?

  Rudi Krause

  Spy

  Be sure to change my name and all identifying details, got that? I don’t want anyone recognizing me. By the time this sees the light of day—if it sees the light of day—I’ll be dead. I’d be lucky to last another month in this hole. Not too many people know about it. How’d you find it, anyway? That’s right, my friend, they should rename it the Erich Mielke Nursing Home for Ex-Stasi. It used to be our cathouse, but you probably know that already.

  In the old days I would’ve known your game by now. Espionage, blackmail, you name it—we were the best. So good that our citizens did most of the work for us. That’s how afraid we had them. But who admits to having worked for Die Firma nowadays? To hear people talk, nobody was an informant. Nobody got his hands dirty. Hell, nobody in this whole fucking country ever took so much as a dump! I see you’ve done your homework. Good for you, my friend, good for you. Yes, I did train Cuban agents for a time—entrapment, extortion, anything embarrassing, as if you people could be embarrassed by anything.

  Richtig. It was a Cuban who nailed me. Hércules was his name. How could I make this shit up? As good-looking and seductive as his name. I wasn’t bad-looking myself in those days, but this guy was in a league by himself. He wooed men and women with equal ease. A real player. Never looked back either. You won’t believe me but I’m telling you that I was a happily married man with four teenaged sons at the time. What I didn’t know? That I was being set up.

  Why? Because the motherfuckers had nothing on me. You’ve got to understand that agents like me were constantly being tested with bribes, liquor, hustlers, drugs. Some of us were addicted to Valium, painkillers, other crap. But here’s the rub: you only got promoted when they had you by the balls. That’s how they ensured your loyalty on the way up. Except, stupidly, I didn’t think it could ever happen to me.

  My boss invited me into his office to watch the video they’d taken. Sadistic bastard. I never sweated so much in my life. He offered me a deal: go to jail, or I, family man and loyal Stasi agent, could “choose” to become a homosexual decoy, recruiting foreign informants. I’d travel abroad, get a generous raise, screw the men (and a few women) I was told to screw, and obtain the necessary information. The luxuries I’d bring home from these trips would make life more bearable for my wife and the boys.

  Eleven years I did this. Until the Wall came down. Like an idiot, I fell for another Cuban, a colonel who’d been on assignment in Angola—no names!—but trust me, I screwed him over just the same. Call it payback. My sons went to university and moved on to white-collar jobs. My wife never found out. Condoms? How could I have explained that to her? She died of cervical cancer in 1991, probably from some disease I gave her. Bertha died thinking I’d been the perfect husband—faithful, hardworking, an upstanding Communist. All the while, I was screwing men on three continents.

  How did I do it? The way most people do despicable things: by not thinking about it, separating it from the rest of my life. That’s right, compartmentalizing. I was good at my job. I’ve always been competitive. What the fuck! Are you crazy? Why the hell would I have kept photographs? I destroyed everything when the time came. Look, you better not use my real name, or you’ll regret it. I may be old and sick, but I still have friends I can call on. Remember, you used to be the enemy. Truth was the enemy. But no longer, my friend, no longer.

  Christine Meckel

  Nurse

  To dying soldiers night comes beckoning . . .

  ——Georg Trakl

  My real name is Christine Meckel and I was a young, inexperienced nurse when I arrived in V—, in the conquered Soviet territories. I’d graduated from an accelerated nursing program that provided medical support to our soldiers on the Eastern front. The Führer hailed it as an opportunity to participate in the grand expansion of the Reich, a solution to what he called our status as a Volk ohne Raum.

  I grew up the second youngest in a large Catholic family in Berlin. When I got pregnant at sixteen—by a friend of my father’s, a married man with a daughter my own age—the disgrace was unbearable. My parents shipped me off to a convent in the countryside that took in unwed mothers. Th
ere was no question that I’d have to give up the baby for adoption. I caught only a glimpse of my boy before he was taken away from me. Then I was put to work at the same Catholic hospital, emptying bedpans and scrubbing floors.

  The war was in full swing. The Führer spoke of restoring Germany to its former glory, before the Great War had brought the country to its knees. It was this humiliation that Germans had trouble swallowing. Our pride, Liebe, is both our best asset and worst trait. When I learned that I could serve the Reich as a nurse and move far away, I jumped at the chance. Not for political reasons, please understand, but for personal ones. My nerves were steady and I didn’t flinch at the sight of blood. Besides, I’d already committed a mortal sin. What more did I have to fear?

  It took eight days of interrupted train travel to reach the remote town of V—, where I joined a reserve of nurses under our supervisor, Lotte Raeber. I lived in barracks, slept on a cot, stored my belongings in a metal locker. Nurse Raeber kept us to a punishing schedule. Days began with predawn rounds and frequently ended past midnight. If we were awake, we were working. Two buildings made up the clinic—one for our soldiers; the other for ethnic German civilians. No Jews were permitted in either, nor were Slavs. Both were considered “subhumans” and “useless eaters,” Untermenschen who must be put to work, or to death.

  As a nurse recruit, I quickly learned that our mission was less to heal life than to dispense with it. In V—, the sick were considered a burden, as were the old, the mentally incompetent, and the whining orphans—all problems with a single solution. No case, Nurse Raeber instructed us, was too insubstantial to “resolve.” She filled our aprons with syringes of morphine and barbiturates and took extra pleasure in dispatching the complainers. We were so busy that I barely had time to reflect on what was becoming routine. I know how that sounds, Liebe, but the truth was that I steeled myself daily to do my job and not question it.

  My worst memory? Bitte, allow me to close my eyes for a moment. This is difficult for me, like swallowing fishhooks. Ja, I remember a pair of teenagers I helped pry apart so that Nurse Raeber could inject them with deadly doses of morphine. They clung to each other frantically, vowing their undying love. How the winter winds blew when Nurse Raeber and I disposed of their stiffening bodies on the frozen pile of corpses outside. I was accustomed to the bitter cold in Berlin, but it was nothing compared to the depths of winter in Russia. So this was to be our new Lebensraum, I asked myself, our Garden of Eden?

  Wounded soldiers, in their delirium, often mistook me for an angel and asked me for blessings, or forgiveness. What jolted their nerves most? The killing of children, typically by smashing their skulls against tree trunks. Other soldiers begged me for a kiss, or my hand in marriage, or to peer under their bandages and inventory the losses: eyes, abdomen, manhood, feet. I did my best to soothe them, to hold their mangled hands, to listen to their deathbed confessions. A few anguished ones pleaded for mirrors, but this was strictly forbidden. I reassured them with our unvarying script: that they’d fought valiantly for the Fatherland; that their suffering hadn’t been in vain; that they’d soon return home to their sweethearts and families, who’d love them all the more for their sacrifices.

  Of course these were lies, but what choice did I have? Whom or what would I be serving by telling them the truth? I’d venture to say that these lies—or rather, the relief these lies brought—probably saved me from losing my mind altogether.

  

  After barely a year in V—, the Russians forced us into a chaotic retreat. Nurse Raeber called a staff meeting and required us to take an oath of secrecy. Then she issued new orders. Our blind, mutilated, brain-damaged soldiers were to be “relieved” of their misery. There were euphemisms for everything in those days—so much fancy language for unfancy murder. The edict, Nurse Raeber emphasized, had come from the “highest level,” which meant Himmler, or even the Führer himself. There would be no trains to take our soldiers home, no hospitals to care for them any longer. In war, only the able-bodied could survive.

  I know, Liebe, I know. You won’t find evidence of this in any history books, but I’m telling you, it happened.

  None of the nurses kept in touch after the war. This wasn’t advisable, particularly once the investigations began. Sometimes I wonder what happened to Winfried L., the timid girl from Wiesbaden, who read Russian novels by flashlight, or the cheerful Heike P., who baked us strudels plump with summer berries, despite the shortage of flour. The only nurse I heard about later was the least trustworthy—Irmtraud K., who’d been mistress to the district commissar, ever preening in his mustard yellow uniform. In the 1960s, Irmtraud was summoned before a war crimes court and quoted in the newspapers as saying she couldn’t remember whether she and the commissar had shot at deer, or fleeing Jews, in the woods. By then Irmtraud had become a social worker. I believe this was what saved her. Such “good” professions often mitigated the accused’s original crimes.

  My return to Berlin? I promise to continue the tale on your next visit, Liebe. I’m too weary now from telling you this much. Did I mention that the center of my vision is worsening? As I look at your face, your features are missing. All I can discern are your hair and a bit of your jawline, a sliver of your sunburnt neck. As we gaze out at these gardens, only the edges of the flowerbeds are visible. Na ja, the world is vanishing around me.

  My eye doctor says that macular degeneration is common at my age. Sadly, reading is an impossibility. Like Winfried, I used to enjoy Russian novels, though I remain partial to the British ones—A Passage to India, and so on. Now I’m reduced to listening to the evening news on television, though I don’t set store by anything I hear. This weekend we’ll be celebrating the hundredth birthday of a resident down the hall. Yesterday the gentleman addressed me formally in Russian. How did he know I would understand him?

  The nursing home staffers cheerfully lie to us about everything, vital or not. Their lies are well-meaning, but they are lies nonetheless. No, Liebe, I don’t begrudge them their lies. I suppose it’s not the worst thing in the world to be treated as a child. After all, only children tell the truth—for a brief time, anyway—and people like me, who have nothing left to lose.

  Every morning, I look in the mirror and see darkness where my face should be. Is there any greater freedom than that?

  Horst Galbrech

  Dance Craze

  Years ago as a minor official in the Ministry of Culture, I was ordered to come up with a dance craze to rival those convulsing the West—the twist, the pony, the baffling mashed potato. Because I’d once halfheartedly waltzed at a ministry holiday party, I was put in charge of this project. My superiors expected me to produce a miracle in three months, or, they intimated, heads would roll. I suspected a trick. After a generation of Soviet domination, East Germans were hardly renowned for being footloose. Marching in parade formation? Yes. Lining up for endless queues and shuffling forward? Absolutely. Suffering the requisite dances with elderly relatives at weddings? Awkwardly, but yes.

  But to ask us to move our bodies, to shake and shimmy with abandon, to pop our joints and swing our fatty hips until all semblance of rectitude was gone? Mein Gott! The prospect was an unmitigated horror. It might’ve been the sixties everywhere else, but in the GDR, we were cultural hostages to the Cold War. Our country was woefully behind on all fronts, not the least of which was the radicalization of our disaffected youth. My superiors were determined to give the West a (managed) run for its money. To make my task all the more daunting, the new dance was to be free of suggestive movements—ignoring that eroticism was something of a national pastime. The Party was one thing; the people another. Yet anything remotely lascivious, my boss warned, would be deemed harmful to the morals of East German youth and exceedingly hazardous to my career. Ach, I lost many nights of sleep over this nonsense!

  My wife, kind soul that she was, offered to help. Before long, it
seemed that Sigrid had been waiting our entire married lives for the chance to undulate half-naked before me, provocations that flushed me pink to the tips of my ears. Who knew that she was capable of such indecency? My Sigrid enjoyed herself so thoroughly that her wrigglings led us to unprecedented bouts of amorousness. I began to think that my superiors had been correct when they’d cautioned me about the perils of unfettered dancing. After many infertile years, Sigrid and I conceived our first child on one frolicsome night. At the advanced age of forty-four, my wife gave birth to our beloved Hänschen.

  But I digress—do forgive me, Dear Visitor.

  

  So there I was, entrusted to invent a dance craze out of thin air, while keeping our young Communists pure of mind and body. I had to come up with a catchy name for it, too. Up until then I’d been considered a bright, if flickering, light in the Ministry of Culture (my proposal on personal grooming workshops for Young Pioneers had been dismissed as perilously bourgeois). My reputation, meager as it was, rested on devising programs to keep our youth out of trouble and gainfully occupied—learning marksmanship, wood carving, and decorative egg painting, to name just a few. This dance business, I feared, could sabotage what remained of my dully graying career.

  I consulted, discreetly, individuals in the demimonde of East Berlin (overrun by Stasi agents, I quickly learned), as well as foreign students, and emissaries from countries known for their tropical sensuality: Brazil, Cuba, and a few left-leaning African nations. One striking diplomat from Havana, a double agent known as Tania Tania, was sympathetic to my plight and agreed to privately demonstrate an unexpurgated mambo. Dear Visitor, I nearly fainted watching her gyrations.

  “Can you do that without moving your hips?” I stammered, gasping for breath.