by Brianna Hale
Volker’s the one I need to be protected from but my arms are wrapped tightly around him and I don’t think I can ever let go. He glances toward Ulrich, who is handcuffed and supported by two policemen; the Volkspolizei have finally arrived. Ulrich’s looking with loathing at me in der Mitternachtsjäger’s arms. I turn away and bury my face in Volker’s shoulder.
“Liebling, I have to go.”
He’s the only thing keeping me afloat. I’ll drown without him. “No, please—”
“Sei ruhig. Hush. It’s all right.” He waves to Hans and the driver walks over to us. “Take Fräulein Dittmar to my apartment and fetch the woman in 12D to sit with her until I return.”
They help me toward a police car and I try to give Volker his coat back. “No, you keep it. Don’t get cold, and don’t let Frau Fischer give you any brandy. It’s not good for shock. Have her make you sweet tea.”
Before he turns away I grasp his arm. “Please don’t hurt him.”
Volker’s eyes grow dark and hooded. “You are not to think about him anymore. Now, go with Hans.” I notice how his gloved hands flex and a sick feeling spreads through my belly.
“Wait, Herr Oberstleutnant, please.”
He turns back to me, jaw tightening, expecting me to beg for Ulrich’s life. But instead I ask, “Where is my father?” If he’s dead I need to know. He can’t exist in limbo for me any longer. Volker presses his lips together and from the look of regret in his eyes I can tell he’s not going to hide the truth from me.
But it’s not the truth I was expecting.
“I’m sorry, Evony. I don’t know.”
Chapter Eleven
Volker
The route I take to Hohenschönhausen passes Bahnhof Lichtenberg train station and the sight of the steel tracks settles dismal clouds over my already low mood. I had the dream again last night. The dream on the train. The carriages were dark and oppressive and teeming with humanity. I was searching but I couldn’t find her among the tightly-packed bodies. Except this time it wasn’t Johanna I was searching for, it was Evony, and when I finally glimpsed her at the far end of a long carriage she couldn’t hear me shouting. The baby she held was Frau Fischer’s grandson, blond and curly-headed, his face streaked with tears. I pushed through the bodies, stepping over them, stepping on them, but she was always just out of reach. Finally Evony saw me and her eyes filled with cold loathing—and then the train lurched as it went over a set of points, throwing me to the ground. When I regained my footing she was gone. I searched and searched, growing more frantic with each passing second, knowing we were approaching the end of the line and there wasn’t much time. The train squealed to a halt and I awoke drenched in sweat, winded like I’d been running for my life.
The dream always ends this way. I never find her in time.
The dented but functional Mercedes-Benz is held up at a level crossing as an S-bahn train pulls into Bahnhof Lichtenberg, carriage after carriage flashing past in the dusky light. I see Evony as Weber strangled her, her face a ghastly mottled red, eyes bulging and glassy.
The road clears and I drive north-east. The high cinderblock walls and concrete watchtowers of the prison appear and I show my pass to the guards at the gate. The design of Hohenschönhausen echoes the Wall and its fortifications and I feel similarly about them. Unfortunate, but unfortunate necessities.
Ulrich Weber has been put into an interrogation room, a windowless cell empty of everything but a table and two chairs. I don’t sit. The prisoner is breathing hard, psyching himself up to resist whatever I’m about to do to him. I regard him in silence for several minutes. There’s information I could get out of him about the group. Maybe even about Heydrich. The little prick has files elsewhere, I’m certain of it.
But right now I don’t care.
I take out my pistol and point it at his head. No, too close. I don’t want to return to Evony covered in blood spray. Weber’s eyes widen at the sight of the gun. I take one step back, and the bullets fire cleanly, one-two, into his head. He rears back, blue eyes staring. Then he slumps forward, forehead hitting the table. Blood starts to pool and drip.
The guard rushes in as I’m holstering my gun. “Take him to the morgue. Herr Weber was shot attempting to flee from me on Frankfurter Allee. He is one of the traitors who escaped during the bakery raid.”
Chapter Twelve
Evony
Frau Fischer wants to put me to bed but I shake my head and point towards the sofas and she nods understandingly. “Of course. You’ll want to see Herr Oberstleutnant as soon as he comes in. A car accident and being attacked on top of that, you poor girl.”
It’s not seeing Volker that I want, but asking him what he’s done, what he’s doing at this very moment. He wouldn’t torture Ulrich, would he? I hear rumors about what goes on in the Stasi prison. Sleep deprivation, water torture, beatings. I imagine him looking on, smoking impassively while a guard breaks Ulrich’s fingers.
Once I’m tucked onto the sofa under a blanket, Frau Fischer gives me ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel to put over my swollen lip and examines my neck. “I was a nurse in the war,” she explains, putting a first-aid kit on the side table. “Though I don’t remember treating anyone for strangulation. Can you swallow?”
I can, though it’s painful. Remembering what Volker said, I croak, “Could I please have some sweet tea?”
The housekeeper tilts my chin up. “In a minute. You’re going to have some nasty bruises.” She rubs arnica cream on my neck, looks at my lip and informs me I’m going to need stitches. The needle is threaded before she tells me she doesn’t have any anesthetic. With the same persuasive tone she uses to get me to eat more breakfast in the mornings she coaxes me into allowing her to put two stitches in my lip as she did this “all the time during the war”. I want to tell her that there isn’t a war on and there are things such as doctors with anesthetic readily available, but she’s strangely overbearing in nursing mode and I find myself submitting without protest.
I realize after she’s put a mug of weak, sugary black tea in my hands and gone to prepare beef broth that I probably should have insisted she call a doctor because my mouth hurts even more now. These people who lived through the war. Do they all go about shooting people and sticking needles in them as if it’s nothing?
A wretched mood settles over me as I watch the fire crackle. For weeks I’ve imagined crossing paths with someone from my old life and fantasizing that they would help me. The moment I do find someone he jumps to the wrong conclusion and tries to kill me.
I drain my mug of tea, turning over the other unhappy thought in my mind. Neither Ulrich nor Volker knows where my father is. I don’t understand how this can be. Volker not tell me where my father is, because he likes to control and manipulate? Yes. Not know? Impossible. Or at least it should be. I think back to that first night when I asked him what became of Dad. His sly smile, and then, You mean you don’t know? So, he was bluffing. Pretending to be all-knowing to make me feel powerless. Or is he lying now?
I must doze off because I wake some time later to Volker taking the empty mug out of my hands. He’s crouching down next to me, his face close to mine, and his eyes are soft as he looks at the stitches in my lip.
“How are you feeling mein armes Mädchen?” My poor girl. I notice he’s taken off his uniform jacket. Did it get bloodied or is it because he knows I don’t like it?
“Where’s Ulrich?” I croak. I clear my throat and it hurts like tonsillitis.
He tucks the blankets around me. “Not now, Liebling. You’ve had a shock and—”
“No, now. Tell me.” But from the way his mouth compresses into a thin line and his eyes drop away I know that Ulrich’s dead. My face creases and I start to sob, my stitches pulling painfully. “How could you? I asked you not to hurt him.”
“Evony, he nearly killed you. Was I supposed to just—”
But I put my hands on his chest and try to push him away. “It wasn’t about me. He was a good person.
Now you know how much we hate you, that he saw me with you and thought the worst. He thought I betrayed everyone to you.”
Volker lets me cry for several minutes, not moving from where he is. My hands are still pressed against his chest and his thumbs rub over my knuckles. I pull away, hating that he’s the one comforting me. “You’re not even sorry, are you?”
“Nein,” he mutters. The weary look on his face is back. I suppose it takes a lot out of you, murdering.
“And Ana? Why did you have to kill her?”
A puzzled line appears between his brows. Of course. He doesn’t even know who she is. “Ana Friedman. She was there the night we tried to escape. She pointed a gun at you and you shot her. You didn’t even give her a chance to surrender.” My voice is rasping but I don’t care. I need to know how he can be so ruthless.
Recollection clears his brow. “A young woman about your age, ja? Blonde? She pointed a gun at me so I fired first.”
“But she wouldn’t have shot you! She was terrified of you. If you’d just told her to put the gun down you know she would have—”
He cuts across me with a shake of his head. “No, I do not know that. You may know because you were her friend, but I could not see inside her mind.”
“She was my friend,” I echo bleakly. Ana and Ulrich and my father, all gone. Dead, or just lost.
Volker regards me for several long moments, frustration and pity warring on his face. Then, briskly, as if he wants to put all this behind him, he says, “I have been a soldier for a long time. If my enemy points a gun at me then I shoot first. Your friend knew the risks when she tried to escape. She could have surrendered as the guards told her to do but she chose to attack.”
I shake my head over and over, too upset to speak. I can’t get the memory out of my head of him raising his gun to kill Ana. “East Berlin isn’t a battleground and we’re citizens, not your enemy.”
Volker’s eyes grow flinty, the firelight flashing in their depths. “It is a battleground. You have no idea what is at stake and how quickly things can change. Regimes rise and fall, fascists take hold. Invasions, genocide.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. The war was twenty years ago.”
He nods slowly. “Ja, Liebling, it was. You don’t remember it at all. You’ve seen pictures and heard stories but that can’t compare to seeing things for yourself.” Volker gets to his feet and goes to the whisky decanter, pouring a measure of amber fluid into a glass. “I went to Auschwitz after the surrender and I saw what they had done, and it haunts me. That is something to flee from. The Wall, what I do? It doesn’t compare.”
I don’t like him talking about the death camps and the war. I don’t see what they have to do with Ulrich and Ana.
He sits on the opposite sofa, resting his elbows on his knees and looking down into his glass. “You have seen only this Germany, this divided but stable Germany, and though I know it’s not perfect you think it is worthless. I do what I have to do to protect it and I sleep easily afterwards.”
But he doesn’t always sleep easily, does he? I can see the smudges beneath his eyes, the lines of fatigue on his face. I turn over what he’s just told me and something seems odd. “Why did you go to Auschwitz?”
He takes a mouthful of whiskey. “I just did.”
It sounds like him, this need to see things for himself. To discover what his beloved Germany had done while he’d been fighting. But there’s a strange look on his face and I feel like he must have gone there for a reason. And suddenly I realize what that reason might be.
“You were looking for someone.”
He turns the glass in his fingers. He doesn’t reply but he doesn’t say no either.
We learned about Auschwitz in school. It was one of the extermination camps, a place of highly efficient slaughter. The descriptions of the camp gave me nightmares and I suspect the awful answer before I ask the question. “Did you find them?”
Volker stares into his whisky for several long minutes. “You know, I suppose, how the camps worked?”
I give a non-committal nod. I read about it, so I know as much as I can from books.
“The prisoners arrived by train. When they alighted, an SS officer assessed each one, and either pointed recht—” he points to the right “—and they were put to work, or links, and they were gassed immediately. She was sent to the left.”
Just like that, as if sorting marbles or players for a game of football. Who was she? His mother, his sister? But from the bitter look on his face I think it must have been someone even more dear. Someone who must have been Jewish. If they were lovers or married she was probably the age I am now, or thereabouts. Is that why he took me, because he never got over what happened to her? This captivity, this manipulative facsimile of love, is this all he’s capable of now?
“She was my…”
But he doesn’t need to say it. I can see from his face that he was in love with her.
“She suffered and died while I was a prisoner of war, and I was powerless to stop it.” He puts his empty glass aside and gets to his feet. I see how tired he is, but also how conviction burns brightly in his eyes as he looks at me.
“But I’m not powerless now. So you see, Liebling, if anyone hurts you, and I’m able to, I will kill them.”
Chapter Thirteen
Evony
Volker insists I go to bed after that and asks Frau Fischer for a sleeping draft. He watches me drain the milky, benzodiazepine-laced glass of water as I sit on the edge of my bed, and then accepts the tumbler back.
“It will be better in the morning,” he tells me, watching me get under the covers and turn my back to him.
Liar. It won’t be better in the morning. Everything will be just the same.
He leaves me alone, shutting the door softly behind him. Within minutes the drug starts to work its numbing effects on me, and I’m grateful. I don’t know what to do with the things he’s told me. That he was once in love. That he holds Germany dear and believes he’s doing his part to keep the peace. That he feels no remorse about imprisoning and will kill anyone who tries to take me from him.
Am I like her, this girl the Nazis murdered? Does he see her when he looks at me?
Cotton wool finally encircles my brain, muffling my thoughts, and I sleep.
When I appear at the breakfast table the next morning, sluggish and gray-faced, Volker tells me to go back to bed. I shake my head and reach for the coffee pot.
“I’m fine,” I rasp. “I’d rather keep busy.” The last thing I want is to be in the apartment alone but under guard while the nightmare that was yesterday churns in my head. Volker has a righteous air about him as he examines the bruising on my face and neck, as if he’s congratulating himself for killing Ulrich.
It’s too painful to swallow anything solid so I just have coffee for breakfast. Frau Fischer ties a printed satin scarf around my neck in an effort to cover the bruises but it doesn’t work very well.
Hans must have taken the Mercedes-Benz to be repaired as we drive to Stasi HQ in a different car. When we arrive at the office Lenore’s eyes widen at the sight of me, but she waits until Volker closes his office door before she says, “What happened to you? Evony, your lip.”
I touch it carefully. It’s a little less swollen this morning but it looks terrible, all black and red, the stitches making me look like something out of a horror film. “Car accident after leaving the office yesterday. We hit a Trabi. I hit the back of Hans’ seat.”
Her eyes slide to the scarf. “Why do you sound funny?”
“I, um, ran into someone while Volker was talking to the Trabi driver. He wasn’t pleased to see me.” Lenore looks perplexed, but she recognizes my desire not to talk about it and we get to work.
I don’t know how to deal with Ulrich’s death or what to make of the things Volker told me last night, so I throw myself into typing. Now I know why Volker works so much. Working means you don’t have time to remember terrible things.
Lat
er in the morning both Volker and Lenore are in another part of the building and I’m alone at my desk when someone steps into the alcove.
“Is Volker in his office?”
I look up at the sound of the unfamiliar voice, and freeze. A Stasi officer is standing a few feet from my desk. He has a captain’s decorations on his uniform, meaning he’s a few ranks below Volker. It also means he shouldn’t be referring to the Oberstleutnant as just Volker, even to me. But that’s not what makes the bottom fall out of my stomach.
I know him. He was in the bakery the night of the raid, yelling orders to the border guards. He’s thirty or so, dark-haired with a thin moustache. I don’t like his eyes, which are an unsettling shade of ice blue. They seem to be looking at me speculatively and my heart starts to pound, wondering if he’s recognized me, before I remember he must be looking at my injuries.
“Nein, Herr Hauptmann. He’s out at the moment. Shall I let him know you wanted to see him?”
He says, with what I’m sure is artificial concern, “Oh, dear. What happened to you?”
I feel guilt flash over my face at the thought of Ulrich and my attempt to flee. “Nothing. Car accident.”
The Hauptmann tuts sympathetically and sits down on the edge of my desk. I have the urge to lean away from him but I hold myself still, looking up at the man with blank politeness. He hasn’t recognized you. He’s just being nosy, like all Stasi officers are.
“You’re living with Volker, aren’t you?”
I see his eyes stray to the bruises on my neck and I resist the urge to fidget with the scarf. “Yes. I’m—I’m from outside East Berlin. He’s a friend of my family’s so I’m staying with him.” Why are you saying this? Just shut up. No one expects you to volunteer this information.
Herr Hauptmann smiles down at me once more and I see the first honest expression in his eyes: one of vague recognition. “Have we met somewhere?”
