Picking a stray piece of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, Wolfgang smiled. “We all decided. You’ve blown two escape routes for us now. You’re a security risk.”
“I did not blow two escape routes.”
“Your boyfriend did.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Ah, yes. You’ve taken up with the blond one this week. Herr Hermann.”
Katarina bit her lips, stifling her rage. Wolfgang flinched, as if expecting another slap across the face.
“I did not betray our secrets.”
“So you say.”
“It’s the truth.”
“The truth as you see it.”
“There is only one truth. And the truth is that I did not provide any information to Stefan Hansel.”
“We spent a lot of time on that tunnel, only to have it compromised by your boyfriend. We can’t allow it to happen again. I’m sorry.”
Wolfgang made a move to go around her, but she put a hand on his chest. He looked down at her hand, waiting for her to remove it. She didn’t. She simply glared at him. A group of three students, two males and one female, strolled by slowly, watching the argument heat up. The men seemed especially amused by it.
Taking another puff on his cigarette, Wolfgang blew smoke in Katarina’s direction—not point-blank in her face, but close enough. She held her breath and stifled a cough.
“The decision is made,” he said. “Find another group of students who are leading escapes. You’re not with us any longer.”
Katarina didn’t know what to say. She was seething.
“I will take this up with Alexander and Maria.”
“Fine. Do that. They agreed as well that you had to go.”
That was the toughest blow. She thought she was their friend. Katarina could feel the tears welling up, but she wouldn’t let him see her cry. So she left him with a choice curse and stormed away, holding her emotions in until she was around the corner and down almost an entire block. Then she lost it. She sat down on a bench and buried her face in her hands.
Leading escapes had been her whole life, and now it was over. She had Wolfgang to blame—and Stefan.
Elsa walked along a stretch of the Wall, past one of the observation platforms where a group of West Berliners gawked over the border. It seemed strange to be on the western side of the Wall, separated from her father and sisters.
With every month that went by, the Wall’s fortifications became stronger. A death strip slowly took shape between the outer wall bordering the West and the hinterland wall, the inner wall being built in the East. The width of the death strip varied from location to location, bulging and narrowing as it snaked through the city. In between the two walls, maintenance men sprayed defoliants, killing the vegetation, for even plants were not safe in the death strip. The only things that seemed to grow were barbed wire, which spread like silver vines, and floodlights, which sprouted overnight on poles.
Elsa played a game as she walked along the Wall, hopping from West Berlin to East Berlin and back again, like a child playing hopscotch. She could do such a thing because a very narrow strip on the western side of the Wall, six to thirteen feet wide, was technically still part of East Berlin. This strip of land provided just enough room for the East’s maintenance men to work on the western side—without actually crossing the border. East German workers usually climbed over the Wall using ladders, but Elsa had heard there were also concealed doors that gave them access to the narrow strip on the western side.
She ran her hand against the Wall as she strolled along. Up ahead, she noticed three maintenance men at work, whitewashing the western side of the Wall, covering the riot of graffiti. But it was just another losing battle for the East. The graffiti would be back overnight. The western side of the Wall was the world’s longest canvas. It had rained earlier in the day, but the sun was out now, and Elsa carried her sweater over her left arm.
She knew her mother and father had to be taking her escape hard. She wasn’t especially close to her mother, a socialite who thrived on class distinctions despite being married to a midlevel bureaucrat in the Communist Party, but she must be devastated by what her daughter’s escape would do to her social calendar. It was bound to reduce the number of people who accepted invitations to her summer ball.
Leaving her father was harder. He doted on her, as he did with all three girls—but especially on Elsa, the youngest. She leaned her head against the Wall, as if she was standing at the Wailing Wall. She felt so lost. She couldn’t go back to the East, and she didn’t belong in the West. She yearned for her father, she yearned for Peter, and she yearned for sleep. Insomnia plagued her, and last night she got only about two or three hours of sleep. She wondered if she was going insane.
She really had no choice but to remain in West Berlin. She was so tired of it all. She closed her eyes and wished she could go to sleep and stay asleep until the Wall was gone.
“Frau Krauss, why so downhearted?”
Elsa stood up straight and turned to face the voice. It was Herr Baker, her contact. She was expecting him, and she tried her best to smile.
“Just tired, I suppose.”
“Come. Let’s walk.”
She fell into step beside the man. She felt sick to her stomach. She hadn’t eaten anything for breakfast, and her gut churned.
“Fine day,” said Herr Baker. He looked to be in his early forties, with a soft, smooth, almost-feminine face. He had an aquiline nose, thinning light brown hair, and the beginnings of a double chin. His smile revealed a bottom row of ridiculously crooked teeth. “I bring good news.”
“Oh?”
“We have found you a good position as a clothes designer in West Berlin.”
Elsa came to a stop. “You did what?”
“We know that’s always been your dream.”
Of course they knew. They knew everything about her. She must have a thick file by now, growing by the day. But this news sparked hope in her. She almost smiled.
“You start next week, and your boss will be Marianne Bergmann. Does that cheer you up?”
“It does.” She smiled, but it was forced.
They strolled past another explosion of graffiti and stopped in front of the image of a car—a Trabi—breaking through the Wall. The painting of the car was quite realistic, and it seemed to be coming toward them, smashing through the concrete.
“This one is actually pretty good,” Herr Baker said, grinning. “It’s almost a shame to whitewash over it.”
Elsa wondered if Herr Baker was just trying to impress her with his good humor—a contrast to the humorless socialists with whom she had become so familiar.
They continued walking.
“I presume you will meet your end of the bargain,” he said.
She thought about the new job designing clothes, and she thought about what they were asking her to do. She held the two in balance in her mind.
“Yes,” she said. It really wasn’t all that difficult to agree. If she didn’t agree to his terms, who knew what might happen to her? Besides, she had no love for the West. Ever since she arrived in West Berlin—only two weeks ago, but it seemed like forever—she had lost her fiancé, and she felt utterly alone. If that was freedom, then she wasn’t sure she wanted it.
“Good, good. We’ll be in touch then. Here is the information about your employment.” He handed her a slip of paper and then shook her hand. “Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Krauss.”
“Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Baker.”
Elsa wished she was ten years old again. Things were not so complicated then. Even the horrors of life, like the threat of nuclear war, had an element of play. She remembered playing with Peter when they were children and creating their own bomb shelter—just a little gouge in the side of a hill that they dug one beautiful spring day. Sometimes, they would practice running to their bomb shelter, pretending that the imperialist Americans had just fired off a missile. They would throw themselves into the hole and break down
into a fit of laughing. One time, when they hurled themselves into the shelter, they rolled into each other and held on to each other for a few minutes, and then Peter gave Elsa her first kiss. She wished she could go back to that moment and freeze it in time. She wished she had a bomb shelter today, a hole she could crawl into, curl up in, and blot out the world.
She backtracked the way she had come, pausing again in front of the painted car smashing through the Wall. She stood in front of it for a few minutes, as if willing it to become a real car, as if daring it to run her down.
That wouldn’t be so bad, she thought.
East Berlin
Stefan thought the room was taking off like a rocket. He sensed movement, a dizzying rush upward into darkness. He had been trapped in darkness for who knew how long, and he thought he was beginning to lose his mind. How long had it been? Two days? Two weeks? Two months? Or two hours? He was sprawled out on the floor, hugging the cold concrete to control the rising sensation in his body. He was going crazy. His mind was flying apart, carrying him upward through darkness. It had to be all in his head, because he knew that a room couldn’t really fly. Could it?
Maybe it would have been better if he had died that day in the cemetery. He could still remember what happened, although he wasn’t sure what was reality and what was imagination at this point. When he had regained consciousness after being shot, he found himself in a hospital. He would survive, the doctors told him. The two bullets had entered his side but missed the vital organs.
But would you call this surviving?
Stefan was in the black room at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the Stasi prison. After his recovery, he went straight from the hospital to the prison, where political prisoners were kept in isolation. When the guards wanted to move a prisoner from one location to another, they triggered a red light on the ceiling, alerting other guards so they wouldn’t move other prisoners at the same time. They didn’t want prisoners to even pass each other in the hallway, for that would be too much human contact. Such isolation was awful enough. But when Stefan vowed to not cooperate with the Stasi, they took him farther into hell. They put him in the black room—a room without light, without sound. A room painted completely black, a room so devoid of light that there was no such thing as eyes adjusting to the dark.
He had not seen any part of his body since he was shoved into the darkness. He couldn’t see his fingers even if he held them two inches from his face.
When they first dumped him inside this grave, he went to sleep. And when he woke up, he had no idea if it was day or night, if he had slept for ten minutes or ten hours. The loss of time consciousness was terrifying. Stefan tried to maintain a hold on his sanity by doing physical exercises. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Running in place. He also did mental exercises, naming all the people he had ever known in life and then describing them in detail out loud. He told stories to himself and jokes he had memorized.
Then came the hallucinations, both auditory and visual. His body, starved for stimulation, created its own. He felt mosquitoes all around his face. Then he thought he could hear his eyelids blink. Then came the faces, floating all around him like grinning, luminous jellyfish. When he closed his eyes, he heard his eyelids shut—and he still saw the faces.
He began pacing the room, back and forth and back and forth, and that drove away the hallucinations for a time. Then he pressed up against the wall of the room, just to be sure there was a reality beyond the darkness—a firmness, a wall. He laughed out loud at the irony that this was one wall he could embrace. He made a complete circle of the room, feeling the wall as he went along, pressing his cheek against the cool surface.
When the guards finally opened the door to the black room, the light nearly blinded him. But he lapped up the colors like a person dying of thirst who had stumbled across a pond and immersed his head in the water. He immersed his eyes in shapes and colors and edges and textures and sensations.
Stefan couldn’t lose these colors again. So when the Stasi interrogator threatened to drop him back in the black room if he didn’t cooperate, he decided to say anything and do everything they asked.
The next week, he was released from prison. He had become an informer once again.
32
Berlin
August 2003
Trapped, Annie scanned the room, her eyes drawn to the closet in the corner. Acting on adrenaline, she shot across the room, slipped inside, and pulled the door most of the way closed. She didn’t dare close it all the way, or its metallic click would sound across the room.
Someone else had entered Herr Adler’s office. The footsteps sounded heavy, like a man’s. Had Herr Adler returned from lunch already? Perhaps he had just forgotten something, and maybe he would pick up what he needed and go.
The footsteps moved in her direction, shoes on tile, heading toward the closet. Holding her breath, Annie took two small shuffle steps back, away from the slice of light pouring in through the slightly open door. Then a hand latched on to the closet door and swung it wide open, and light poured in.
“Annie O’Shea!”
It was Kurt. He stared at her in utter disbelief.
She was relieved—but embarrassed.
“I’m sorry, I can explain.”
“I thought I saw you entering Herr Adler’s office, but I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“I have a good reason. I’m looking for—”
“We have to get out of here. How did you even get inside?”
As he took her by the arm and gently escorted her toward the door, she pulled free. “Kurt, just stop and listen! I remembered where I had seen the woman who was with Herr Adler the other day. She was in one of the photos. I think she’s Elsa Krauss.”
He reached for her arm again, but then stopped and stared. “That can’t be. Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“You think so. That doesn’t sound so sure.”
“That’s why I’m here. I need to check the photo to confirm. I sent it to Herr Adler a week ago.”
Kurt surveyed the room with its paper skyscrapers lined up like the skyline of an American city. “Good luck finding it. Besides, I’m sure Herr Adler has forwarded the photo by now.”
“Maybe not. Maybe he was holding on to it.”
“For what reason?”
“Blackmail.”
Annie let the word sink in.
“You think he’s blackmailing former informers?”
“It would explain a lot.”
Kurt looked around again at the stacks of material. “Even if what you say is true, what you’re doing is too dangerous. He could come back any moment.”
“You know Herr Adler. He takes his time when he’s out for lunch.”
“I don’t like this, Annie. We’re snooping. And—”
They both froze. They heard noises in the hallway. Their eyes moved to the closet simultaneously, but before they could act, the footsteps passed and faded down the hall.
“If you’re going to insist on this, let me at least be the one to take the risk,” Kurt said. “One of us should keep watch, so why don’t you?”
He was just trying to be gallant, but Annie couldn’t let him take the risk.
“No. This is my idea. You keep watch.”
“But—”
“I’m not going to have you do something you don’t even believe in. Please. For my sake, keep watch.”
“I can’t let you do this.”
“I’m not leaving here.”
He stared at her long and hard, most likely sizing up her level of determination, and finally threw up his hands. “Fine. If I see Herr Adler approaching, I’ll call your cell phone. Be sure to answer.”
“Thanks.”
“Promise you’ll get out of here if I call?”
“Yes, yes, now go stand guard.”
He gave her a quick kiss on the lips, and she hoped this was a sign that their brief cold war had thawed. While he slipped out of the room, she started in on one of Herr A
dler’s skyscrapers. The files were marked clearly, and she began flipping through them wildly.
Kurt felt some relief just being out of Herr Adler’s office, but not complete release. That wouldn’t come until he and Annie were back in their own office.
He had no faith in Annie’s memory. He wasn’t confident in any person’s memory, for he knew how easy it was for the mind to make false connections and generate artificial memories. Annie was risking too much for a suspicion based on a three-second glimpse of a woman on a crowded street.
He positioned himself on the sidewalk in front of their office, feeling awkward. This wasn’t normal behavior. He would never loiter in front of the office, so he walked to the end of the block and then turned around—like some odd pantomime of a guard, pacing back and forth.
When he spotted a coworker turn the corner onto Dorotheenstrasse and come toward him, back from lunch, he kept walking toward her, passing her with a nod of the head.
“Heading out for a late lunch, Herr Hilst?” asked the coworker, Frau Lauder.
“Just stretching the legs.”
Frau Lauder smiled and hustled into the office. Two more coworkers followed shortly after, and he felt more awkward by the minute. The two women made no comment about his stroll up and down the sidewalk, just nodded their heads and said, “Guten Tag.”
To avoid suspicion, he wandered up Schadowstrasse, past a stack of drain tiles and other construction materials. And as he stopped and turned at one of the construction barriers, his world stopped. He spotted Herr Adler, Frau Holtzmann, and Frau Steinweg coming down Dorotheenstrasse, moving at a quick clip and making their way to the office entrance.
He jammed his hand into his pocket and fished out his cell phone. Please, Annie, get out of the office when I call. No more games. His finger, poised to punch the keys, stopped in midair. He gasped out loud.
His cell phone was dead. So was Annie.
33
East Berlin
January 28, 1985
Over twenty years had passed since Stefan nearly died in a cemetery, so he couldn’t believe he was risking it all again in another graveyard. This time, however, he wasn’t looking for escape. He had decided to witness a crime.
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