“So . . . roughly two hundred and ninety years,” said Herr Hilst.
Annie was stunned by the enormity of the project. It all seemed so futile, but she knew how important these papers were to the German people.
“Sixteen thousand sacks?” she said.
“It sounds like a lot, but it’s only about 5 percent of the files that the Stasi collected on their citizens,” Herr Adler pointed out.
Stasi: the East German secret police. Even the name sounded harsh and intimidating every time Annie heard it. The word cut the air like a two-syllable hatchet. Nazi. Stasi. The similarity between the two brutal words was eerie.
“I saw one of the shredders that the Stasi used when the Wall was coming down in ’89,” Annie said. “It was an industrial monster with a wide open mouth. Almost like a wood chipper.”
She even remembered what they called those machines—a reisswolf, or “rip grinder.”
“Yes, but the industrial shredders were not enough,” said Herr Hilst. “Stasi agents brought in armies of smaller office shredders, burning out hundreds of machines.”
“Many agents even resorted to ripping up documents by hand, and those documents should be easier for you to reassemble,” Herr Adler added. “It’s not easy tearing documents by hand, so they weren’t ripped into nearly as many pieces as when they were shredded mechanically.”
“But how do I know that all of the pieces of a single document are even in this one sack?” Annie asked. “What if the pieces are spread all over the place?”
“Ah, good question,” Herr Adler said, grinning. “The Stasi made your job much easier than it could’ve been. When they were destroying files, they were in a panic, and no one thought of spreading out the documents among the different sacks. No one stopped to think that it might be unwise to stuff the shredded remains of individual documents in the same sack.”
“That’s because no one thought anyone would be crazy enough to piece the documents back together again. They figured that the secrets died when a document went through the shredder,” Herr Hilst said. “They were wrong.”
“They should’ve just burned them all if they wanted to destroy the evidence,” she said.
“The Stasi were doing just that in outlying offices, but people started noticing the smoke and getting suspicious and angry, even stopping them. In Berlin, they tried to be more discreet,” said Herr Adler.
Annie stared at her sack of shredded paper. Sixteen thousand sacks comprised only 5 percent of the files that the Stasi collected on its own people? It was mind-boggling. But she supposed that forty years of snooping on your citizens would create mountains of paper. Stacks of files, a bureaucratic Alps. And when a good chunk of this paper was jammed into shredders, it created a blizzard of secrets. Now these documents had to be reassembled, piece by piece, fragment by fragment, secret by secret.
“So . . . you are American?” said Herr Hilst after Herr Adler had left the room, leaving Annie to begin her work.
“Actually, I have dual citizenship because my mother is German, and she registered me for citizenship when I was a child. But I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and I’ve spent most of my life in America.”
Herr Hilst arched his eyebrows and smiled. “Arizona? I have always wanted to visit your West.”
Annie smiled back. She had noticed his lamp, which had a base resembling a stagecoach. On the bookshelf was the statue of a cowboy on a bucking horse, while a framed movie poster for a German Western hung on the wall.
“I noticed your Western decor. Very nice.”
Herr Hilst laughed uneasily. “It probably looks a little foolish. A grown man infatuated with cowboys. There weren’t many German cowboys in real life.”
“I don’t think it’s foolish in the least. Americans have a similar passion for medieval knights, even though there weren’t any American knights. I just think . . . I suppose every culture is looking for something that it’s missing.”
Although Annie’s mother was German, her father was Irish through and through, making for an interesting mix of precision and poetry. She explained that her parents moved to Germany when she was five years old, and that she lived there until she was eleven.
“So I’m well aware of the mystique that the Wild West holds throughout the country.”
Smiling, Herr Hilst picked up his mug. “Care for a cup of coffee?”
“No, but thanks.” Annie’s vice wasn’t coffee; it was another c-word—cola. She regularly vowed that she would cut back on Pepsi, and one time she had gone a month without a single can. But she always found some excuse to return to its sweet comfort.
With a nod, Herr Hilst left the office, and Annie gave him a smile, relieved that he liked to chat. Some German workers were all business and did not like easy banter during work, but Herr Hilst didn’t seem to fit this mold.
Annie looked down at her sack and sighed. Ten pages per day. That sounded like a lot of puzzles, and she hoped she could meet the average. She untied the rope that sealed her first sack of documents, and then she reached in and grabbed a handful of pieces and started spreading them across her desk. People, places, times, and dates—the past leaped out at her from every fragment. But she would never forget the first name that caught her eye. That name would change her life.
It was Stefan Hansel.
3
East Berlin
December 1961
Erich Mielke stared down at Stefan Hansel from the framed photograph on the wall. Mielke, the minister of state security, had formed and shaped the Stasi; and in the photo, he looked irritated about something, as if he had just gazed into someone’s file and discovered all of the person’s most unpleasant secrets. Mielke’s eyes were small and accusing, his ears a little on the large side—all the better to listen to your secrets, my dear. His hair retreated from his forehead, and he had a tuft of gray perched above either ear. If Mielke in the photograph could speak, he would say, “Comrades, we must know everything.”
This intimidating photo was the only adornment in the plain white interrogation room. The interrogator sat behind an uncluttered blonde-wood desk, with only a phone and a call button device. Stefan was precariously perched in front of him on a squat brown stool with one short leg, so it seemed as if the tottering stool was continuously trying to buck him off.
“So you’d like me to believe that you did not know your own girlfriend was planning to escape. Is that correct, comrade?” the interrogator asked. The interrogator was Stefan’s Stasi case officer, a man who called himself Hans Wolf—surely not his real name. He was a big, beefy man, but not what you would call fat. He had large rough hands and sausage-thick fingers that hinted at manual labor in the past.
“I didn’t know she was planning such a thing.” Stefan tried to pour sincerity into his words. “She didn’t say anything to me about it.”
Stefan had an intensity about him, and you could see it in his eyes. He was an attractive man in his twenties with the kind of look that turned the heads of women. Narrow lips, striking blue eyes, thick eyebrows. He wore his thick dark hair slicked back—a Mediterranean look. He was fidgety, nervous, and wished he had a cigarette.
Stefan was telling the truth when he said Katarina left him in the dark. He had been perplexed when she never answered any of his phone calls, never answered any knocks on her door. He knew nothing of her fate until Wolf informed him that she had escaped to West Berlin in a borrowed car. Drove right through Checkpoint Charlie, dodging bullets.
“What does that say about you?” Wolf asked. “Your job is to keep an eye on students, and you can’t even keep track of your own girlfriend!”
Stefan looked away. “I’m sorry.”
He still couldn’t believe that Katarina had deserted him for the West. After so many girls in his life, he thought Katarina could be the one. And now this! How could she put him in such a precarious position? She had made him the boyfriend of a defector.
Wolf continued to stare at Stefan, rapping his large fi
ngers on the tabletop.
Stefan broke the silence. “Katarina was . . . she is, I mean . . . she’s a mystery. I suppose that was the attraction.”
Stefan was well aware that Katarina did not buy into the East German system, for she often said things that were completely outrageous—and dangerous. She loved to make jokes at the GDR’s expense, and he remembered several of them—but he wouldn’t dare repeat them.
East German leader Walter Ulbricht and the head of the secret police, Erich Mielke, are talking about their hobbies.
Ulbricht: I collect all the jokes about me that are in circulation.
Mielke: Then we have almost the same hobby. I collect the people who bring the jokes into circulation.
Stefan kept Katarina’s most damning statements out of his regular reports as an informer. If he hadn’t, she would have landed in prison long ago.
“Katarina had help from her West German cousin,” Wolf said. “Can you think of anyone in the Eastern zone who might have assisted her in this escape?”
Stefan knew what he was driving at. Wolf thought he had assisted her. He saw the suspicion in the man’s eyes. Stefan had to give him some names, so he tossed out the names of a few of Katarina’s closest friends. Knowing Katarina, however, she probably acted alone. She was gregarious and beautiful, so she had more than her share of friends. But she had even more secrets than friends, and she probably concealed her escape plans from everyone.
A few times, when she had said something particularly reckless about the GDR, Stefan considered breaking up with her, thinking it might be safer to distance himself from her. But she was fun to be around, and he couldn’t resist her striking good looks and the stares she attracted when they were together. Some people thought he had Audrey Hepburn on his arm. Besides, Wolf encouraged the relationship, thinking that Stefan could use her as a way to penetrate the circle of student dissenters at Humboldt University.
“You know, we ensured that you got into the law program,” said Wolf. “You didn’t have the academic performance to qualify on your own power.”
“I’m grateful for that.”
“Don’t be.” Wolf dismissed Stefan’s gratitude with the flick of his hand. “You are not in the program any longer.”
Stefan nearly toppled from the stool as it lurched forward on its uneven legs. Law school was his dream. He loved the law. He loved the structure of it, the certainty.
“I’ll do better,” he said, pleading.
Wolf leaned back in his chair, still staring at Stefan. Stefan looked away but found himself eye to eye with Erich Mielke in the photograph. So he turned back to Wolf, then moved his eyes to the floor. At least there weren’t any eyes staring back at him from the tile.
“Don’t worry, we still plan to use you,” said Wolf, finally breaking the silence. “Perhaps if you improve your performance—perhaps then you can still study law.”
“Thank you, Herr Wolf. What must I do?”
“Students at Free University are helping our students escape. We know that for a fact. But we need to know the how, when, and where.”
Stefan nodded uneasily.
“We also need to know the who.”
Peter’s father, Herr Hermann, scared Elsa. He always had. But especially today.
“Did you say anything that would have caused Peter to flee the Republic?” Herr Hermann asked calmly, tapping off the ash from his cigarette.
Coughing in the fog of smoke that filled her small apartment, Elsa shrank back in the couch. “No. Nothing was wrong between us.” She didn’t mention the small tiff as Peter was boarding the train. Or the big blowup when she told him she had posted subversive leaflets.
“I cannot believe that my son would do such a thing, unless he was driven to it.”
Herr Hermann rose from the chair and walked to the window. He lit up another cigarette—his fourth since arriving. He was in his fifties, a handsome man—impeccably groomed, cleanshaven, with every hair on his head neatly combed in place. He made the trip from his home in Zwickau to Berlin as soon as possible after Stasi agents had appeared at his door asking questions about Peter. He exhaled a cloud of unfiltered smoke and stared out the window.
“Do you know what it’s like to have the government, my government, come to my door asking if I knew anything about my own son’s plot to escape to West Berlin?”
Elsa didn’t answer. She stared at her hands.
“Do you?”
“No, sir.”
“It is humiliating. I am a loyal citizen. Peter has also been a loyal citizen. He always has been. Only an outside influence could have driven him to do such a thing.”
Elsa knew what he was getting at. Only she could have driven Peter away.
She still could not believe that Peter had given her up for the West. She had sensed a hardening in his attitude toward her over the past year, a gray coldness. But she didn’t think he would ever leave her. She had thought about asking if he wanted to put off their wedding, wondering if that might bring back the Peter she had known most of her life. Was he just feeling trapped?
In her heart, she believed that Peter was fleeing the authoritative rule of his father, but she would not dare voice such an idea. Herr Hermann had pressured his son into engineering because of his own passion for technology and science. Herr Hermann saw the East as dominant in all things technological; the Soviet Sputnik program was proof of that. The socialist workers’ paradise would be efficient, clean, reliable, and modern; and his son would be a part of this brave new world, whether he liked it or not.
The irony, Elsa thought, was that Herr Hermann worked at the Trabant factory in Zwickau. The Trabant—or Trabi as most called it—was a compact communist-made car that belched smoke; in fact, the car was an even heavier smoker than Herr Hermann. It took twenty-one seconds to go from zero to sixty-two miles per hour, and its top speed was seventy. Some joked that the best way to double the value of a Trabi was to fill up the tank. Was this the GDR’s idea of socialist dominance in technology?
“Tell me what happened between you and Peter!” Herr Hermann suddenly burst out. “Did you argue?” He wheeled around from the window and stabbed a finger in Elsa’s face. “I want to know what you did to drive Peter to the West! Tell me!”
Elsa knew this outburst was inevitable, but it shocked her anyway. She flinched at his finger, then dissolved into tears. “I don’t know why he left. He loved me.”
“He could not have loved you. He had it good here, so why else would he leave unless he wanted to be rid of you!”
Elsa wouldn’t look Herr Hermann in the face. When she dared look up, she kept her eyes on his large hands, afraid of them, as if they were autonomous and very dangerous creatures. She was well aware of how much he relied on the back of his hand when Peter was growing up. Elsa eyed the door, wondering if she could reach it before Herr Hermann could grab her. He must have noticed the direction of her gaze, because he stepped between her and the door.
“You’re telling me you never fought? All couples fight. What did you fight about?”
“I don’t know. We hardly fought at all. He loved me.”
In truth, she wasn’t sure if he loved her, but she wasn’t about to admit that to his father. Finally fed up, Herr Hermann stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door on the way out and rattling a vase from a shelf. It crashed to pieces on the floor.
For almost a half hour, Elsa sat on her couch, shaking. She made herself a cup of tea but let it go cold before taking even one sip. She had classes to attend that afternoon, but she spent it in bed with the drapes drawn.
She didn’t think things could get any worse. But they could, and they did. One night later, the Stasi came for her.
4
Berlin
March 2003
Annie was pleased. On her fourth day among the puzzle people, she reconstructed twelve documents—two ahead of the average. She was quickly learning the tricks of the trade. First, she looked for similarities in paper type, grou
ping the paper by color. Then she looked for similarities in text. Was it handwritten? Typed? Did the type match? Was there numbering? She also examined the edges, separating jagged fragments from cleanly sliced pieces. Once she had separated the pieces into various categories, she worked away like she would on a normal jigsaw puzzle. Assemble the edges first and then work your way to the middle. Her speed all depended on the number of pieces that a document had been ripped or shredded into—a number ranging anywhere from four to twenty.
“Herr Adler is impressed with your output,” said Herr Hilst, entering the office with a coffee in one hand and a can of Pepsi in the other. “Keep this up and you’re going to put us all to shame.”
“I had a lot of practice with puzzles all my life,” Annie told him. “It was all I had to do growing up as an only child in a strange country.” She realized that her words didn’t come out quite right. “By strange, I didn’t mean strange country. I meant foreign.”
Herr Hilst laughed as he handed her the Pepsi. “I know what you mean. Besides, we Germans are a strange people, aren’t we? Where else in the world was there a wall to keep people in—and a secret police second to none?”
“Second to none? Is that true?”
“In East Germany, we had more secret police and informers per citizen than any other country in the history of the world. We had no secrets.”
“From the look of these files, I can believe it.” Annie poured her Pepsi into a glass of clinking ice, waiting for the foam to subside before pouring in some more of the cola. Once again, she was pleasantly surprised and grateful that her office partner did not insist on a curtain of silence while working. She always let him set the level of personal disclosure, and he seemed more than willing to go beyond the surface chatter. But she treaded carefully. They talked primarily in German because Annie’s skills were rusty and she wanted to get back up to speed; but sometimes they also talked in English, which Herr Hilst spoke fluently. When she commented on his fluency, he explained that he had studied foreign languages in school and had once worked as a translator.
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