“I’ll give you a boost,” Peter said, holding out his interlaced fingers and raising Katarina, then Hilde, up and onto the Wall. Jubilant strangers on top of the Wall took their hands and lifted them up while Peter raised them from below. Then the men extended a hand for Peter, and suddenly they were all together, standing on top of the world, it seemed.
They looked out across the plaza in front of the Brandenburg Gate. The upper half of the gate was illuminated, and the statue of a horse-drawn chariot, perched on top, stood out starkly against the dark sky. The plaza was empty and glistening with moisture, and a line of East German guards stood at attention, just staring into the darkness. They had to be confused and astonished. There was a party taking place on their wall! Right in front of their eyes, and they could not do anything to stop it.
Then two young West German men did the unthinkable. They jumped down from the Wall, onto the eastern side, and began striding across the open plaza toward the Brandenburg Gate, toward the guards. They strolled east nonchalantly, as if they were on an evening walk, one of them carrying a satchel under his right arm. Thousands of eyes were on them as they reached the Brandenburg Gate and talked briefly with three border guards—who waved them through! The two men walked through the Brandenburg Gate and into the East. A roar went up from the crowd on the Wall.
This emboldened the Western crowd, and people began to trickle down from the Wall. First, three people, then a group of four. All eyes were now on the line of border guards, armed to the teeth. Would they do anything? Would they stop the crowd? Would they shoot?
“Let’s go!” said Katarina, and she was already climbing off the Wall, onto the eastern side, before Hilde or Peter could put up any protest. “Come on down,” she said.
“I’ll break my neck,” said Hilde.
“I’ll help you down,” said Peter.
He gave Hilde a steadying hand as she crouched and then dangled her legs from the Wall before dropping down. Katarina caught her from below and kept her from staggering over. Two seconds later, Peter was on the ground with them, and he slapped an arm around each of their shoulders.
“Well, ladies, shall we go for a walk?”
“We shall,” said Katarina.
Together, they walked east. Together, they crossed the border, and their world turned.
November 12, 1989
Peter was exhausted. It seemed as if he had been partying now for three days straight—not an easy thing to do for a man who had just turned fifty years old. Katarina and their two girls—Hannah, twenty-one, and Salina, twenty-three—were still at the Wall having the time of their lives. Katarina was pushing fifty as well, but she had as much energy as the two girls, running on pure adrenaline. Tonight she was taking them to Gethsemane Church, the locus of protest in East Berlin; it was Berlin’s counterpart to St. Nicholas in Leipzig. They were attending an event being held by New Forum, the protest group in the East that had just been legalized.
Peter had to hand it to the churches. They had been marginalized throughout the forty-year history of the German Democratic Republic—not exterminated, but made insignificant. But in the end, during the very month that the GDR was celebrating its fortieth birthday, they played a key role in bringing the entire edifice crumbling down. It was almost enough to make him believe in Providence. Almost. Katarina had given up on getting him to go to church, although she had succeeded with one of the girls. The oldest was too obsessed with boys to give God a passing thought.
Peter took a seat in his favorite recliner and nursed his drink. He often fell asleep in the recliner after a hard day of grading papers, but today he was still too wound up. Yesterday, they had witnessed something extraordinary—an impromptu concert by Mstislav Rostropovich, the Soviet cellist, perhaps the greatest cellist of the century. He had been an outspoken critic of the Soviets, a man who sheltered the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his home. Dressed in a dark blue suit coat and seated in a chair in front of a slice of the Wall, the small bald bespectacled man played a Bach suite. Directly behind him, on the graffiti-splattered Wall, was the incongruous image of Mickey Mouse and the greeting “Welcome to East Berlin” with the word East scratched out.
Peter retrieved an album of Bach, St. Matthew’s Passion, and placed it carefully on the turntable. Then he closed his eyes, hoping for sleep. Bach had been a cantor at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, and he had performed at St. Nicholas, so he would have been amazed by the role those churches played this past year. Peter closed his eyes and let the strings and the voices carry him off to the cathedral in his head.
In tears of grief, dear Lord, we leave Thee.
Hearts cry to Thee, O Savior dear.
Lie Thou softly, softly here.
Rest Thy worn and bruised body.
At the grave, O Jesus blest,
May the sinner, worn with weeping
Comfort find in Thy dear keeping,
And the weary soul find rest.
Sleep in peace, sleep Thou in the Father’s breast.
Peter shot forward in his chair at the ringing of the phone. Disoriented, he looked around at the darkened apartment. The album had reached the end, and it made a soft thumping sound as it continued to spin with the needle going nowhere. He looked at the clock. It was nine thirty, which meant he had slept only about a half hour, but he was so groggy that it felt like it was the dead of night, and the phone seemed very loud. He was tempted to let the recorder take the call, but it might be Katarina, might be one of the girls. So he groaned his way out of the chair, crossed the room, and picked up the receiver.
“Hermann,” he said.
“Herr Hermann?” came the voice. A man’s voice.
“Yes.”
“Is Katarina there?”
“Who is speaking?”
“This is Stefan Hansel.”
Dead silence. The name woke Peter up—a splash of water in the face.
“My wife is not home at the moment.”
“Oh.”
Another stretch of silence. Peter began to wonder if they had lost connection.
“Well . . . this message is as much for you, Herr Hermann, as for Katarina,” said Stefan. “I wanted to know if I could meet with both of you.”
“After all these years, do you think that’s wise?”
“I don’t know if it’s wise or not, but it’s necessary. I need to talk, I need to confess.”
Peter rolled his eyes. He knew the type: Spend most of your life stabbing people in the back, and then look for quick and easy forgiveness in the end. Peter did not give out forgiveness so freely, especially not to Stasi informers. He had been pressured to inform an eternity ago, when Elsa had been imprisoned, and he had almost given in that day in the Free University library—so he understood the temptation on one level. But he had ultimately said no. Of course, he had been living in the West at the time, where denying the Stasi was easier.
“Maybe it’s best to leave the past buried,” he said. “The last time you and Katarina had any contact, you betrayed her. I’m not sure she’d like to see you.”
“And I wouldn’t blame her.”
“After the foiled escape attempt, she was not allowed to work with the Kappel Group again. They didn’t trust her. They didn’t trust her link to you. And that devastated her.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” Stefan said. “But even though I have much to atone for, bringing the Vopos to the cemetery that day isn’t one of them.”
“I know. I’ve heard your claims before. But I don’t believe them.”
“I’m not asking you to. I just want to tell Katarina I’m so sorry.”
“It’s easy to say you’re sorry. It’s just a word.”
“But it’s not easy to mean it. Could we meet? Tomorrow? Let me show you I’m sincere.”
“So this meeting is more for your sake than for Katarina’s? It’s always about you, isn’t it?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Don’t you think Katarina would want to know how I fe
el? Could we meet at Café Mauer on Lehrter Strasse? I need to talk to her—to both of you.”
“I don’t know . . . it’s been an exhausting few days.”
“Talk to Katarina. I will be at Café Mauer at eight o’clock tomorrow night. Would you please give her this message? I think she’d like to know.”
“So you’ve seen the light after all these years? Pretty convenient now that the Wall is coming down.”
“This isn’t a decision I made in the past week. I’ve been paying the price for my decision to deny the Stasi for more than a year now. It wasn’t convenient, and it wasn’t easy.”
Peter rubbed his eyes. He was still half-asleep and in no mood for fools. He knew he wasn’t being fair, but he didn’t feel like empathizing. “I’ll give Katarina the message.” That was as far as he would go in reaching out to a rat.
“Thank you, Herr Hermann. Tomorrow evening. Eight o’clock at Café Mauer.”
“I will tell her. Gute Nacht.”
“Gute—”
Peter hung up the phone. He hated the idea of Stefan Hansel intruding into their lives after all these years, and he hated him for what he had done to Katarina. After the incident in the cemetery, Katarina had lost a lot of her zest. She slowly regained it over the years, and it had returned with the fall of the Wall. And now Stefan wanted to reenter their lives?
He had a lot of nerve.
Elsa stared at the television news in shock. Everything was about the Wall. Images of people dancing on the Wall flickered and flashed around the world. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans poured into West Berlin. West Berliners lined the sides of the streets and waved as Easterners in their Trabants drove across the border, honking their horns and leaning out of windows and waving back. It was a Trabi parade. A television broadcaster, perched on the Wall, leaned down and talked to the row of green-clad border guards lined up on Pariser Platz on the eastern side.
“Your government seems to be changing every day,” the television man said to them. “Where do you think it’s going?”
One of the border guards, a deadly serious look on his face, licked his lips and stepped out of the line. “That’s the government’s problem,” he said, and his stony look suddenly cracked into a wide smile. As the West Germans perched atop the Wall applauded, he strolled back to the line, smiling all the way. A few days ago, such a statement would have landed the border guard in jail.
Cut to an interview with a studious-looking young German man. “If there’s someone who was asleep for eight weeks, and he woke up and you told him what happened here, he’d think you are crazy,” the man told the broadcaster.
Cut to clips of the American actor David Hasselhoff standing on top of the Wall singing to a mass of partygoers. His leather jacket was draped in lights that flickered on and off like a Las Vegas sign, and he was singing, “I’m looking for freedom!”
Everyone was cheering, everyone was smiling, everyone was hugging one another. But for Elsa, this week had become a nightmare. She had been in the West since 1962, and she had seen the Wall as a protective barrier, keeping out the East. All her secrets were safely locked away in the East, but with the Wall down, those secrets were unleashed. People who knew things about her would be free to speak. People like Stefan Hansel.
With the television news still blaring, she walked over to her telephone message recorder and pushed the Play button. This was the fourth time she listened to the message. Stefan’s voice crackled over the line.
“Elsa. This is Stefan Hansel. I know you must be shocked to hear my voice, but I would like to meet with you. I have things to tell you. Important things. If you hear this message, please come to Café Mauer on Lehrter Strasse at eight o’clock tomorrow night. The truth shall set us free.”
The truth shall set us free.
Elsa felt cold, so she went to the couch and lay down on her side, pulling a blanket over her shoulders. She brought her knees tightly to her chest and stared at the television, without really watching the events unfolding. The screen was just dancing pixels, nothing more. She wanted to sleep but couldn’t. A pain settled in the pit of her stomach, and she began to sweat and shake.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?”
She raised her head from the couch and looked toward the hallway, where her husband, Hans, stood in the shadows.
“Please, turn off the television and come to bed.”
“Soon,” she said.
She heard the click of the television set going dark, and then she felt her husband lifting her, bringing her to her feet, and then gently leading her to the bedroom. She passed by the rooms of her three children, and she felt terror. Her entire world was in peril. All because a wall had come down.
Elsa lay down in bed, and Hans was soon asleep, judging by his breathing. She closed her eyes, but she didn’t sleep for hours. She was trapped in yet another waking nightmare.
38
Berlin
September 2003
Annie was getting so good at puzzling that she seriously considered entering another jigsaw competition. By now, she could pick up on the slightest difference in paper and ink and typewriter. Every typewriter had its own personality, leaving its own unique signature—a broken serif on the letter t or an a that smudged so badly that it filled in with ink. She could spot these differences in an instant as she separated pieces into piles of related fragments.
“Once Upon a Time in the West is my favorite, hands down,” Kurt said.
To while away the time, Annie had made a game out of ranking Kurt’s favorite movies, favorite books, favorite foods, and so on. He would write down his top five, and then she tried to predict his rankings. Today’s topic: favorite Westerns.
“The opening scene alone makes it a masterpiece,” he said. “Not a word spoken for I don’t know how long. Just the sounds of insects and squeaking metal in the wind. Yet Sergio Leone still managed to ratchet up the tension. Brilliant.”
“I saw it long ago and can only vaguely remember it.”
In truth, all that Annie remembered was that she saw it with Jack at her side. Her husband loved action movies, and he had insisted she see at least one per month; she agreed, as long he saw one romantic comedy per month.
Office life with Kurt had improved dramatically, and things were almost back to the way they were before their argument over spying. They could talk naturally again, although they stayed only near the emotional surface. Annie was afraid that if they went too deep, Kurt might bring up the words he had blurted—“I love you too much.” She couldn’t deal with that.
Earlier in the day, they had taken a stroll at lunch, which was the only time that they would dare discuss the files and the mystery of Herr Adler and Elsa Fleischer. If Herr Adler really was running some sort of blackmail operation, Kurt worried that the office might be bugged.
Annie told Kurt she had confirmed that the woman in Herr Adler’s daily planner was Elsa. She had called the phone number scrawled across her hand, and a woman had picked up.
“Frau Fleischer?” Annie had said, assuming that E. F. stood for Elsa Fleischer.
Silence on the other end of the line. Then: “Yes?”
“Is this Elsa Fleischer? Elsa Krauss?”
“Who is this please?”
At that point, Annie hung up. But she had her answer. The woman that Herr Adler had met for lunch was the woman from her files.
Now, back in the office, back in front of their puzzle pieces, they didn’t dare speak a word about Elsa Fleischer or Herr Adler. With mechanical precision, Annie pieced together some deadly dull reports on one family’s daily habits. They had to have been one of the most boring families in East Berlin, and why they warranted surveillance was beyond her. The reports went into excruciating detail about their daily routines. It was so monotonous that Annie wondered if the informer keeping watch on this family intentionally tried to irritate the Stasi handlers who had to slog through the reports.
“You haven’t forgotten about tomorrow, hav
e you?” Kurt asked.
“How could I forget? I’m really looking forward to it.”
He had invited her to his apartment for another dinner. She was afraid he would use the occasion to discuss his feelings for her, but she didn’t think her apprehension showed through.
It was a dreary day—cold and drizzly with gusts of wind spattering the window and rattling the pane, as if the wind was trying to get in just so it could wreak havoc, scattering their piles of paper in all directions. As the day wore on, the sky cleared and midafternoon drowsiness came over Annie like a chloroform cloud, and she found herself drifting away and then jolting awake. She was afraid that her sleep-filled head would suddenly hit her desk with a clunk. Once again, she had vowed to cut back on Pepsi, but she broke her vow in the name of alertness, hoping that a jolt of caffeine would keep her vertical.
All at once, her senses came alive, but it had nothing to do with the caffeine in her bloodstream.
Annie stared at the slip of paper in her hand—a piece that had been obviously ripped by hand. It was a good-sized piece, about four inches wide, and she gently sorted through her sack for anything that remotely resembled the same kind of paper, the same type. It didn’t take her long to dig up two more pieces that obviously came from the same document. The pieces fit together perfectly. She was wide awake now, sliding to the edge of her seat.
“Sleeping Beauty has awakened,” Kurt said, looking up from his work. He seemed amused by her sudden infusion of energy. “What have you found?”
She put a finger to her mouth, and her glare said it all: Keep quiet. He got the message. He didn’t say another word. He just stared as she went back to the sack and pulled out two more large hand-torn pieces. There was an urgency, a frenzy to her motions. Another piece fit, and she leaned back in her chair, stroked her chin, and just stared at the paper. Then she dug out a small notebook in her desk and flipped madly through the pages. Finally landing on the right page, she held it up against the fragments she had just fished out of the sack. Her eyes flitted from the notebook back to the fragments, comparing the numbers. She couldn’t believe it.
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