Lime's Photograph

by Leif Davidsen

  I hadn’t thought about it since, but sitting in the taxi next to Clara with my arm round her, I remembered that time, and told her about it. She would have taken her car, but I suggested a taxi. We sat close and I felt calm, composed and light-hearted. I didn’t want to drink. All I wanted was what I was doing: to sit close to Clara and talk, the memory of our lovemaking fresh in my mind.

  “I was in the kitchen ironing when my husband said I should come and look at the television,” she said, taking my free hand and caressing it. “I can’t remember ever having been so moved by pictures as I was by the sight of all those people standing on the Wall, dancing. I remember one thing in particular. A young man was sitting on top of the Wall, holding up an umbrella as protection against the water cannons which the Vopos had trained on him to get him down. It was fantastic in itself, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget his smile. When the water stopped, he lowered his umbrella, and when they turned the jets on him again, he just raised his black umbrella and smiled. That little, wry grin sums up the moment for me. One frail human being, smiling in the face of impotent authority.”

  “It’s history,” I said. “Young people today think the GDR is kitsch, just like that restaurant we went to in Copenhagen.”

  “Yes. And that’s the beauty of it,” she said. “Europe came through that period without what would have been a devastating conflict. That young people see it as the distant past is actually a miracle. And it’s not very easy to try to explain to them what the GDR was, why the partition of Europe had lasted so long and why we didn’t do anything – but also that it was the people themselves who sent their regime packing. We did nothing because we were afraid of jeopardising our stability. And we’ve been trying to forget about it ever since.”

  “But the GDR and the Stasi existed. And we’re on our way to bear witness to that fact,” I answered.

  “Yes. That’s the strange thing about these totalitarian regimes. Whether they were Nazis or communists, they were so convinced of their infallibility that they kept records of everything. They were convinced of the justice of their cause and of our approaching destruction, that everything had to be written down. They did so because they were completely paranoid – that peculiar mixture of megalomania and an inferiority complex. You never knew what the next purge might entail, so it was best to write everything down, cover every eventuality. The most criminal regimes in the history of the world have had the most conscientious clerks and administrators.”

  She turned towards me and I leant over and kissed her soft lips and suddenly I wasn’t afraid of the future. I felt wonderful, in a taxi stuck in a tailback in a Berlin streaked with rain, the morning already shrouded in a grey hue that announced the onset of northern Europe’s grim December darkness which devoured the light, making your soul dreary. But nothing could lower my spirits as I sat next to Clara on the way to discover that part of my past catalogued by meticulous servants of the defunct GDR.

  The Stasi had occupied an enormous building in the Normannenstrasse complex in East Berlin. Today, part of it is a museum where you can see the office of the last director, Mielke, with all his telephones, so typical of the communist regimes, arrayed on his glossy desk of that dark wood favoured by leaders from Vladivostok to Berlin. Telephones for secret conversations, for top-secret conversations, for ultra-secret conversations. Direct lines to the armed forces, the Politburo and the KGB out in Karlhorst. Other parts of the building are now used for normal activities. In the museum, medals, busts of Lenin and red flags bear silent witness to the demise of an epoch. And then there is the reading room, where people can study their files. There’s no lack of reading material. Every third citizen of the GDR was registered. How did that tie in with the fact that every third citizen was also an informer? Grasses endlessly grassed on one another. It’s a monument to human perversity, a time when every trace of trust vanished from a society.

  The taxi stopped in Ruscherstrasse, on the edge of the complex, and waited while Clara explained the ropes to me. It looked like an ordinary street in an eastern Berlin neighbourhood. Advertisements for Sony and Ritter Sport. A supermarket and pedestrians hurrying past without giving the sombre buildings a second thought.

  “You have to ask for a Herr Weber,” said Clara.

  “Aren’t you coming in with me?”

  “No. I’ll go back to the hotel. Go for a walk. Read. What’s your German like?”

  “I can get by,” I said. “But come in with me, please.”

  She put her hand on my neck and gave me a quick kiss.

  “You have the authorisation. It’s your file. Take all the time you need, but come back soon. Out you get!”

  I stood watching the taxi drive off. Clara didn’t turn round, just gave a little wave. I went into Haus No. 7 and asked for Herr Weber at the reception desk. The floor and the lighting appeared to be new, but the place still had that particular lignite and low-octane fuel smell that encapsulated the essence of communist regimes. It was quiet in the building, but you could still imagine the long corridors, the hushed, dusty rooms with their millions of documents, the mute screams and the large rotary files spinning round and spitting out dossiers. Files which had been kept by diligent clerks so that the State and the Party could monitor each individual citizen’s activities, invading their souls to discover their innermost thoughts.

  Herr Weber was a small, stocky man with an expressionless face, but he smiled pleasantly when I gave him my name and his grey eyes were friendly and full of life.

  “Ah, Herr Leica,” he said with a look that momentarily made me think he was flirting.

  “Leica?” I asked.

  “Yes, Herr Lime. That’s your code name in the Stasi archive. In there you’re known as Herr Leica and it is under that name that I have scrutinised you. I think that I know you, just as I know others with whom my duties bring me into contact via the harsh memoranda of the past.”

  “Scrutinised me?”

  “Sit down for a moment, and I’ll explain the regulations before taking you to the reading room.”

  We sat at a little table in two uncomfortable, nondescript muddy-green armchairs. There was an ashtray, and I was told that I was welcome to smoke. He ran through the procedures as if he was a teacher repeating a syllabus for the umpteenth time. But he was also animated, as though the task of overseeing the passing on of the secret records of a dead nation was a calling to be discharged with responsibility and precise solicitude. The building had once housed a ministry of fear more diabolical than Orwell could have imagined. Now it was the world’s most impeccable ministry of truth where people could examine the recent past and discover who had grassed on whom. Husbands and wives, friends, brothers, sisters, parents, colleagues. A large proportion of a population deployed as informers. Billions of words that had once spelt imprisonment or freedom. Words contrived and written down by individuals, and therefore unreliable and subjective, but of vital significance to other’s lives. Words written in secrecy and seclusion and thus not open to appeal. A regime’s inventory of a nation where no one trusted anyone an inch.

  Herr Weber spoke, in his slow and clear German.

  “Herr Lime. Our operations are based on a law which defines certain guidelines. It follows special legislation passed by the Federal Diet of reunified Germany in 1991. It regulates admission. Your request for access to documents has been processed and approved. Your documents have been located. I have read your file and, in accordance with the rules, blanked out names with no specific connection to you, in order to avoid innocent victims of the Stasi being harmed. The archive houses great tragedies. With my own eyes, I have seen people break down when they discover that a beloved husband could go for a Sunday walk with the family and then on Monday make a report to his handler. But everything of relevance to your case is of course available for inspection. You can request photocopies, but the original material is not to be removed. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” I said.

  What I
understood was that it all seemed absurd and somehow very German. First the Stasi spends years collecting and cataloguing the most intimate and personal details of people’s lives, and then new administrators take over and start re-cataloguing the mountains of material, with new classification numbers and new secrets, in an endless ritual that would continue for as long as there was someone who wanted to look at the material.

  “Good,” said Herr Weber, brushing a non-existent speck of dust from the sleeve of his tweed jacket. “Your file is not thick, Herr Leica. Just a few pages in a ring binder actually. Not like the 40,000 pages we’ve got on the singer Wolf Biermann or the 300 ring binders the author Jürgen Fuchs can come and study. You didn’t work very much in the former GDR. You didn’t let yourself be recruited, you didn’t inform, so the material, I’m afraid to say, is not extensive. I apologise.”

  “You apologise? As if having a thick file is a status symbol?” I said.

  Herr Weber gave a brief, dry chuckle.

  “The human being is a strange creature, sir. Some break down when they see what is written about them. Others break down when they find out that they were never of enough interest to get into the archive. Today we can speak of a kind of archive-envy. There are those who have had to seek the assistance of a psychologist due to this new ailment, induced by reunification. For example, we have no body odour samples from you.”

  “Body odour samples?” I said. At first I thought I must have misunderstood his slow, precise German officialese, but then I realised that it was part of his presentation for foreigners. He took a jar from his briefcase and put it on the table between us. It was marked with a number and the lid was tightly screwed on as if it contained pickled gherkins. There was a piece of dirty yellow cotton-wool at the bottom of the jar. And nothing else. I picked it up, inspected it and put it down again looking at Herr Weber expectantly.

  “The Stasi operations manual refers to bottled smells,” said Weber, unable to suppress a smile. “There are thousands of jars like this one. Samples of people’s body odours. We all smell different, sir. And by keeping samples of a person’s body odour, sniffer dogs could be quickly and efficiently sent in pursuit of the relevant party, should he or she attempt, for example, to flee the republic.”

  I started to laugh. I simply couldn’t help it, even though I could see that Herr Weber found it inappropriate.

  “Perhaps one should laugh. It would have been a comedy, had it not been a tragedy,” he said.

  “Herr Weber. You have an interesting job. May I take the liberty of asking what you did before the Berlin Wall came down?”

  He gave another of his tiny, ironic smiles.

  “You may. For many years I looked after the monkeys in the Zoo. Before that I taught German literature, but after a particular lecture about Goethe, and certain private remarks found unsuitable by the Party, I lost my job and became that singular creature whom, on this side of the Iron Curtain, we called a non-person. Officially I did not exist. I was the living dead. But the monkeys were splendid company.”

  “And who informed against you? A student?”

  “No, Herr Lime. My wife.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It was a comic tragedy and a misery that wouldn’t disappear until two or three generations had passed, and children and grandchildren could look back on the insanity of the 20th century and attempt to understand how it had been possible to get people to do what they had done.

  “I’m very sorry, Herr Weber,” was all I could say.

  He nodded.

  “Shall we go in?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “You don’t have to thank me, Herr Lime. Or Leica. Not many of those who go through that door come out again in a happier frame of mind. Quite the contrary.”

  21

  Herr Weber placed a pink cardboard folder on the brown, laminated square table. A number of similar tables were arranged side by side in a high-ceilinged room with pale, yellow walls and a worn lino floor. It looked like an exam room. You sat next to other people and yet on your own, unable to look over your neighbour’s shoulder. We weren’t sitting looking at exam papers, but at secrets. Most of the tables were occupied by people poring over documents, black and white photographs and microfilm, a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands who had looked in their brown case files, made of imitation leather or dingy cardboard. The covers of the files were of the same poor quality as their contents. Small, sturdy women wearing plastic sandals fetched and carried documents, placing them on the tables in front of the visitors. Each sat on their little island reading their life story. The grey November light glimmered faintly through the high windows, but was no competition for the cold glare of the fluorescent tubes. I could see from the heavy drops streaming down the window that it was raining again. The fluorescent lighting made a humming sound, but I could hear the rain pounding against the double glazing.

  The cover bore a series of numbers and a code, OPK-Akte. MfS. XX, 1347/76–81. HVA/1249, which looked as if they had been printed on the cover with an old-fashioned rubber stamp. Below the numbers and codes a diligent clerk had written, in a well-formed, meticulous hand, Leica. I studied the cover. MfS stood for Ministry of State Security, Stasi. HVA was an abbreviation for espionage abroad. The letters stood for Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, directly translated as “Main Division of Information”. But information about what and from whom? The HVA was under the direction of Markus Wolf and didn’t have quite such dark connotations as the Stasi, but it had still been part of the operation. It didn’t take much to guess that 76–81 were the relevant years, and the other numbers just part of an indexing system.

  I opened the folder, and saw a picture of me as a young man. It had been taken somewhere in Spain, from the background I thought it was the old bullfighting arena in Valladolid. It was a good, amateur photograph. But it had been taken with a cheap camera, and both the foreground and the background had that slightly blurred focus that looks sharp but isn’t, because the lens wasn’t good enough. A political rally of some sort is underway. There are red flags in front of the archway into the arena, and two Guardia Civil Landrovers are visible. I’m in my 20s and I’m looking straight at the camera, a cigarette jammed in my mouth and my hair blowing round my face. My Nikon and faithful Leica, which I took with me everywhere, are hanging on my shoulder. I’m wearing a light-coloured, short-sleeved shirt, jeans with a wide belt and the Spanish boots that I loved so much at the time, with high heels and pointed toes. I look like exactly what I was – a cocky, arrogant photojournalist on an assignment.

  I could see where this was heading, but I stayed calm and started to read the smooth, new photocopies that Herr Weber had taken from the original, old and undoubtedly by now yellowing reports. They were marked for the attention of a Lieutenant Colonel Schadenfelt who was head of II/9, a division that must have had the task of countering Western intelligence services through the infiltration and recruitment of agents.

  The reports were a mixture of truth and falsehoods. There was a short description of me, my date of birth, my background, my rootless nature. I was described as progressive, but not a member of any party. I had the potential to be an unofficial informer at first, and then later became a proper source, once I had been made aware of the importance of the struggle against imperialism and American militarism. I had voiced criticism of the American war in Vietnam and, seemingly, when I had been covering one of the euphoric rallies for the Spanish Communist Party, I had said that if I were Spanish I would have been a communist. The subjunctive suppleness of the German words leapt at me off the closely written pages. There were trivial, but obviously significant, descriptions of my preferred style of clothing, the authors I read – Hemingway and the Danish writer Rifbjerg – my girlfriends, my work assignments. My various addresses were recorded. Periodically it stated simply that I was travelling and not under observation. There was a note recommending a visa for Moscow. There were ongoing evaluations of my political views. They became slo
wly less progressive and no increase in my awareness had been observed.

  Each page was littered with numbers and codes and aliases and cross-references. My commentator described how we started as colleagues and later became friends. He described how I drank too much and had difficulty in establishing a steady relationship with the opposite sex, preferring casual liaisons and affairs. There were descriptions of meetings and conversations, of trips and articles, of attitudes and views. As the years between the first report on me in 1976 and the last one in 1981 passed, my commentator made it clear that I wasn’t as progressive as first presumed. I was open to right-wing propaganda and the enjoyment of a bourgeois lifestyle, and I had no great admiration for the results being achieved by the Soviet bloc, but increasingly expressed criticism of this implementation of socialism. In 1981 I had expressed divergent opinions on the Polish counterrevolution and even went so far as to announce that I was going to Warsaw to follow and support the counter-revolutionary, CIA-financed, Solidarity movement. It was then that I was abandoned as a prospective agent. My bourgeois consciousness was too fixed and I was, wrote the commentator, uncompromising. Even though my lifestyle couldn’t be considered proper in the normal bourgeois sense, I didn’t care about my reputation and therefore couldn’t be coerced. A work visa for the Polish Republic was not to be recommended.