Tell Me Who I Am

by Julia Navarro

  I accepted his conditions, and wrote a document whose words he dictated, which I then signed.

  “For me, when a man gives his word, it should be guarantee enough, but life has sadly taught me that the code of conduct into which my father brought me up is no longer current.”

  When I looked at him I imagined him as Max von Schumann. Friedrich had the manners, the bearing, and the elegance that one would expect from an aristocrat. And he was an aristocrat, on both sides of his family, because his mother, Countess Ludovica von Waldheim, had also left her trace on him.

  “Of course, you inherited your father’s title, you are a baron, is that right?” I asked him out of interest.

  “Yes, that’s right, I inherited my mother’s and my father’s titles. I think that I’m the only survivor of both families. But titles mean nothing to me, absolutely nothing, remember that I grew up in a Communist country. It’s strange that anyone could call me ‘Baron.’ No, the title means nothing to me, nothing to me and nothing to my children.”

  It was almost four o’clock when Friedrich started to tell me what he remembered.

  I can still remember the cold when we landed in Berlin. But more than anything else, I remember the controls at the airport. The relations between the Russians and the rest of the Allies were very tense at that time, and even though the Wall was not yet built, there was a psychological wall in place. There were differences between the Berlin that the Soviets controlled and the sections controlled by the other powers. Our house was on the Soviet side, unfortunately, but close to the American zone. In fact, there was an invisible border there. We could see the American sector from our windows; we could almost touch it.

  It wasn’t the family’s best house, but a house that they had owned and had rented out before the war. When we got to our house and tried to open the door the key would not turn in the lock, someone had changed it. Amelia looked for the caretaker to get an explanation, but a neighbor told us that the woman didn’t live there anymore, that she had gone to live with her daughter in West Berlin, and that our house had been handed over to another family. The woman told us that the Soviets were taking stock of the apartments and of their owners, and that when they couldn’t find the owners they confiscated the apartments and handed them over to the people. You can imagine that in 1948 in Berlin there were many people who had nothing at all, who had lost everything in the bombardments. The Soviet authorities rehoused people whom they judged to be acceptable, members of what would become the Communist Party, in the best possible accommodations. Our apartment was occupied by a man who collaborated with the Soviets in local administration for this part of the city. He lived with his wife and children, who were not at home at that moment. All of our furniture, the neighbor said, not without a certain scorn, had been deposited in the basement, in a small room used by the inhabitants of the building for storage. Before the war, the doorman had kept his tools there, as well as the rubbish bins, the children kept their bicycles there, and it was where people stored old furniture that they had no immediate use for but did not want to throw away. You got down to the basement via some little stairs that were next to a landing that opened the door from the caretaker’s apartment, which was not immediately visible to anyone who came in through the door. The caretaker’s room was next to the elevator, and was a tiny little cubbyhole, which barely had room for two chairs and a table.

  I’m telling you all this because the neighbor told us that she had been informed that if we came back then we were to be allocated the caretaker’s apartment. She had the key.

  My father said nothing, he never showed any emotion in front of the neighbors, and Amelia acted as if this were the most natural thing in the world as well, as if my father were not the owner of the whole building. We took the key from our neighbor and went into the caretaker’s apartment without knowing what we might find.

  The apartment was empty, without a single stick of furniture, and no sign of its former occupants. Dust and dirt had built up on the floor and on the windows, which gave onto a little garden that led into the building itself.

  My father’s face showed his indignation.

  “We can’t stay here,” Max said.

  “We have to,” Amelia said.

  “No, we don’t have to. We’ll go to the Soviet authorities right now to get them to return to me what is mine. This building belongs to me, it is the only thing still standing that belongs to my family. I own it, I have the title deeds, they can’t throw me out of my own property.”

  “You don’t know what the Soviets are like, Max. They won’t give it back to you.”

  “We’ll go right now,” he insisted, though we were all tired from the journey.

  “Maybe we should speak to Albert James, perhaps the Americans can bring some pressure to bear.”

  “It is my house, Amelia, and they cannot take it away from me. If you won’t go with me, then maybe Friedrich will: He’s old enough to push a wheelchair.”

  I looked sadly at Amelia. I didn’t like it when they argued, I suffered, and I was scared that they would have a fight, but that didn’t happen. Amelia shrugged her shoulders and agreed to go to the Soviet General Staff office.

  Nobody appeared to know anything, just that houses that were still standing and contained empty apartments were to be placed at the disposition of all those who could prove that their houses had been destroyed, and who had no place to live. If we had left the apartment unoccupied for more than two years, it was because we did not need to live there, and so there was nothing that we could reclaim. And if we had another apartment in the same building, what was there to complain about? Was it that it didn’t seem worthy of us to live in the caretaker’s apartment? Did we think that we were better than the caretaker?

  My father said that he would file a written complaint, and that he wanted to speak to whoever had the authority to resolve this situation, but his protests were in vain.

  Amelia took control of the situation with a degree of resignation that shocked me. When we got home, she sent me to a nearby shop to buy cleaning products. While I went out on this errand, she headed down to the basement to see if our furniture really was there.

  The house was small, a single room, a kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and two bedrooms, so she got it cleaned up very quickly. What worried her most was how we were going to get the furniture up from the basement, but she soon had an idea.

  “Come out with me into the street, Friedrich, I’ve seen that there are some children who don’t have anything to do hanging around out there. If we give them some coins they’ll help us.”

  We couldn’t get everything up from the basement because some of the furniture was very heavy and others wouldn’t have fit, so we had to make do with only what was truly necessary. Night had fallen by the time Amelia had finished bringing all the furniture up. My father barely spoke, he was so upset.

  “At least we have money to stay here a while,” Amelia said.

  “We’re not staying here,” my father said listlessly.

  “We’ll stay while they sort things out, it won’t be too bad. Look, with the house clean and with our furniture in place, then it’s like a completely different place. I think we should paint it. I’ll do it with Friedrich’s help.”

  “We’re going to paint our own house?” I asked, shocked.

  “Why not? It will be fun.”

  My father protested. He said that we would have to keep the windows open and that it would be too cold. But she was not to be swayed. We would feel better with clean walls, painted in bright colors.

  I went with her to a warehouse, where we ended up buying wallpaper instead. The man who sold it to us assured us that we wouldn’t be able to put it up ourselves, but said that for a small fee he would be able to help us. Amelia accepted, but haggled with him over the price until she had beaten him down.

  Three days later the house looked entirely different, even my father had to acknowledge it.

  “You see? It was a go
od idea to paper it instead of painting it, it doesn’t smell of paint this way,” Amelia said.

  And this house became our home, the place where I lived until I married Ilse. I think that the house in some ways was our destiny, because lots of the things that happened to us would not have been possible if we had not lived there.

  The Soviets ran Berlin like they ran the rest of Germany that belonged to them, and the breach with the other zones of the city, the ones run by the Americans, the French, or the British, widened day by day. I don’t need to remind you about the crisis of 1948. The Americans and the British had created the Bizone in western and southern Germany, putting their occupied territories together, and France joined them, creating the so-called Trizone, to be governed by a constitutional assembly and a federal government. But this did not cause the crisis, rather it was the currency reform, which caused the Soviets great problems and led them to respond by enacting their own currency reform, and in turn led to the Berlin Blockade, which took place between June 1948 and May 1949. The Americans broke through the blockade by running an air bridge. The partition of Germany had begun long before this, at the Yalta Conference, and maybe even before that, at the Tehran Conference, when the Americans, the British, and the Soviets had decided to divide Germany into occupation zones. They had redrawn the map, changed the border with Poland, and all that had previously been central Germany became a part of the Soviet empire, and Berlin was like an island with four administrators, in a sea of territory entirely controlled by the Soviets.

  In the same way that the policy of appeasement with Hitler had been a disaster, the Western powers started to do the same with Stalin, allowing him to avoid fulfilling all the promises he had made at Yalta: for example, allowing free peoples to decide how they wished to be governed. Stalin did not allow any such choice. It was a promise he had no intention of keeping.

  Some newspapers argued that we had to understand that Stalin wanted “secure” borders, and that this obsession with security was what led him to enact particular policies.

  But I don’t want to distract you with political discussions. In our small house, it was difficult to avoid hearing long conversations, even some arguments, between Amelia and my father.

  Before they cut off communications between our Berlin and the Berlin of the Allies, Albert James used to visit us regularly.

  For me, Albert James was like an uncle, who appeared with bags of sweets and English and American toys that made me the envy of my friends.

  He would play chess with my father, they would talk about politics and discuss the future.

  On one of his visits, Albert said that he had a proposal for us. In fact the proposal was for Amelia.

  “We need to have eyes in this part of Berlin.”

  “Eyes? What for?” Amelia asked.

  “We would not have won the war without the help of the Soviets, but we mustn’t ignore the fact that we have different interests. Churchill has said that the Soviets are pulling shut an Iron Curtain across the zones of their influence, and he is right. We need to know what’s going on.”

  “So now the Russians are going to be your enemies.” My father’s voice was full of irony.

  “We have opposing interests. They could be a danger for us all... but we’ve talked about this before.”

  “What do you want, Albert?” Max asked directly.

  “I want you to work for American intelligence, the group we have here, I want you to join us.”

  “No, all that’s over,” he said bluntly.

  “I’d like you to think it over, at least.”

  “No, there’s nothing to think about,” Max said.

  “What would we have to do?” Amelia said, without looking at Max.

  “I’ll tell you that if you accept my proposal, and our British friends will not mind if you work for us, Amelia.”

  “I don’t belong to the British,” Amelia said, angrily.

  “I know, but they think that you are still their agent, even though you worked for us in Cairo. In any case, we have very good relations, we’re all in the same boat.”

  When Albert had left, Amelia and my father had an argument.

  “You like danger, don’t you? You can’t live like a normal person, you just have to walk along the edge of the abyss. In Cairo you told me that you were done with this kind of work.”

  “We have to be realists, Max. What are we going to live on when the money from Cairo runs out?”

  Max spent several days barely talking to Amelia. He only spoke to her in my presence and I suffered to see them suffer.

  I think that it was in May, before the Soviets cut off communications with occupied German territories entirely, that Albert James came back to visit us.

  Max greeted him coldly and claimed to have a headache in order to get out of the game of chess, but Amelia had made a decision.

  “I will work for you, but only under a number of conditions. I will not be an American agent; I will not be anyone’s agent. I will collaborate as much as I can, but I won’t feel obliged to do so if what you ask me is beyond my capacities or puts Max or Friedrich in danger. Also, a part of my salary will be sent to my family in Madrid. They don’t need to know where I am, or what I’m doing, but every now and then someone should go to my uncle and aunt’s house and give them an envelope with some money.”

  “Why don’t you want them to know where you are?” Albert James wanted to know.

  “Because I would only cause them pain and worry. No, I want to help them without causing them any more suffering. There is a third condition: If, for whatever cause, I decide to abandon this work, you have to allow me to do so without reproaches or problems.”

  Albert accepted Amelia’s conditions. Max said nothing: Once again, he felt like he had been defeated.

  A few days later, Amelia started to work as the assistant to a local functionary. Garin spoke Russian and had been able to show that he had been opposed to Hitler, and that he had been in the Socialist Party before the war, as well as having been a prisoner in a camp. This made him acceptable to the Soviets, who mistrusted all Germans, and not without good reason. The fact that Amelia could get by in Russian made it easier for Garin to convince his superiors that he needed someone who could help him. Amelia also introduced us to a new friend of hers, Iris, who worked as a typist in the municipal office.

  Garin had studied Russian literature before the war; he was dark-haired and tall, with dark eyes and a large moustache, and above all he was very friendly, he liked to laugh and eat and drink. Iris was blonde, with blue eyes, of a medium height and very thin.

  As opposed to Garin, she was always serious and preoccupied. She had been in a relationship with a young exiled Russian who had disappeared at the beginning of the war without saying goodbye. She was ironic about this, and said that at least the relationship had allowed her to learn a language.

  At this time, neither of the two of them was in any key position, but they were a part of the army of “eyes” that Albert had established in East Berlin.

  Amelia was happy with her new job, or at least this is what I thought. Apparently, Garin was in charge of a department that dealt with cultural activities in Berlin. In fact, there was neither money nor time available for such activities; Garin’s anti-fascist past meant that they trusted him.

  It was hard for Max to accept the new reality, but he ended up surrendering to the evidence he was offered, and I remember that I was impressed by a conversation I had heard one night when they thought I was asleep.

  “My life is already destroyed, but I will not allow you to put my son in danger. If anything happens to Friedrich because of you... I swear that I will kill you myself.”

  I cried to myself in silence. I adored my father, but I adored Amelia as well.

  Albert carried on visiting us, but not as often as before. Officially, he was a journalist who worked for an American press agency, and this was his justification for his comings and goings in Berlin.

&nbs
p; In October 1949, the German Democratic Republic came into being. We had our official government, but we belonged to the Soviets. A few days after the new government came into being, Amelia came back home in a highly excited state. They were going to transfer Garin to the Ministry of Culture. Iris was going to work in the Foreign Ministry, for a civil servant who worked for a department linked to the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

  In fact, the GDR was governed from the Soviet Embassy in Berlin.

  To begin with, my father refused to allow Grin and Iris to come to our house, he didn’t want to know them, but Amelia insisted so much that he eventually gave in.

  One day Garin came with flowers for Amelia and a book for my father, and Iris brought a cake that she had made herself.

  My father got on well with Garin; it was impossible for anyone not to do so, because he radiated vitality and was a very positive person, as people say nowadays. Iris was more discreet, less talkative, but she seemed to get on with Amelia.

  “Is it worth it for you to risk your lives?” my father asked them.

  “I think it is, we can’t just sit on the fence and watch what they’re doing to our country. The Soviets treat us like we belong to them.”

  “The people responsible for this are the Allies, they handed us over to the Russians, and now... now they want us to defend their interests against the Russians,” Max complained.

  “Yes, you’re right, politicians are capable of these things, but we can’t let the Russians turn our country into their backyard, Max. Don’t you see that we’re their servants now? We don’t have any autonomy, we don’t do anything that Moscow doesn’t order us to do. No, we didn’t want to get rid of the Third Reich for this,” Garin replied.

  “And you, Iris, why do you do it? Why do you work for the Americans?”