by Adam Johnson
—
The next morning, I walk Prinz on the far side of the street, and I catch myself looking in people’s windows. I wonder whether their lawn decorations are sincere or props. The packages have me in a suspicious frame of mind. Even though the Stasi no longer gang-stalk their subjects, my gaze lingers on everyone. A man bends to tie his shoe. A woman in jogging clothes brushes her stomach. I see a gentleman my age, and I study him—will he touch his ear or, worse, clasp his hands behind his back? I can’t help but look for meaning in parked cars, in their colors and models. There was a day when you could spot the cars of those who were watching you. You knew what it meant when a blue Moskvitch curbed its wheels or a pair of white Trabants was working both sides of the street.
We stop across from 66 Genslerstrasse, where the prison’s main gates are located. A parade of kids files out of a bus, and you can tell they’re Wessis. The kids from the West have a sense of ownership, like East Berlin is a new toy they’re trying out. The Ossis, on the other hand, are wary and unsure, like they’re trespassing in their own neighborhood. They smoke twice as much and cut their eyes at everything.
And into this tableau appears the curator, walkie-talkie in hand as he connects the school group with a guide, a woman in her sixties. He practically bounces across the street when he spots me. “Guten tag, Herr Warden,” he says.
“I’m just Hans now,” I tell him.
He looks at my face. “You’ve seen the video?”
“I’m aware of it,” I say.
“You mustn’t be upset. The girl who recorded it, she is young. Just look at the other videos she posted. A boy falling off a bicycle, a toenail-painting party, a cat attacking a bowl of fruit.”
I nod.
“Please, Hans, join me for a coffee—my treat. I have something to discuss.”
We cross the street together, but at the prison gates I stop.
“Is it the dog?” the curator asks. “I assure you he is welcome. Many returnees bring psychological dogs to help with the ordeal.”
“What ordeal?”
The curator frowns. “Of returning.”
“Prinz is not a psychological dog.”
“Of course,” he says.
I stand at the threshold. He looks at me expectantly. “When were you last on the premises?” he asks.
“October third, 1990,” I say.
“Nineteen ninety? Yet you live a block away,” he says. He looks at my belt. “You still carry the keys to the prison. Come, Hans, I assure you that everyone is welcome here. The memorial is open to all people who wish to remember.”
He touches my shoulder and directs me into the yard. I pull Prinz close.
The yard is filled with jostling teenagers and Dutch tourists. Where the Stasi officers’ social club was once located, there is a bookstore. The south wall’s tiger cages have been turned into a café. We head there and, after ordering cappuccinos, sit in modern chairs behind large panels of aqua-tinted glass. The café walls are adorned with framed photographs, some of which once hung in my office, including one of me greeting Stasi head Erich Mielke during his inspection of the facility.
“There was a photograph in my office of me and my wife,” I tell the curator. “If it is possible, I would like it returned. When the prison closed, I thought there would be an extra day to retrieve my personal effects, but that was not so.”
“I know the image,” the curator says. “The archivists have actually just restored your office. They are amazing. You should see how they painstakingly document each cell. They record every letter scratched into the walls, they lift each fingerprint trapped in the coats of paint, all in an effort to determine the prisoners who were remanded here and when. As you know, all the records were destroyed.”
“I only ran the prison,” I tell him. “I was an administrator. I staffed the shifts, handled transfers, ordered toilet paper. Safety concerned me, not interrogation. What happened in those cells, I know nothing about. The head of the Stasi was Grünwald—he ran the interrogations. And I would say the Stasi command rather looked down on us administrators—the Stasi had their own dining room and club and sauna. It was they who decided to destroy the records.”
The curator says, “Meaning Grünwald told you to destroy the prisoner files, and your people did it.”
“It took almost a year, yes.”
A girl delivers our cappuccinos. She wears a white T-shirt with epaulettes silk-screened on the shoulders, along with a host of ridiculous medals on the chest and a name tag that reads “Stasi Prison Warden.”
The curator sees the horror on my face. “Yes, I know,” he says. “I wish it weren’t so. But this shirt is the gift shop’s biggest seller, and the memorial is losing money. We charge only modest entrance fees, and the tour guides, they are quite an expense. These people were damaged by their incarceration here, and we are their only means of support. Our plans are big—exhibits, archives—but for now it is about the bottom line, as they say.”
The cappuccino, when I sip, tastes like marzipan.
“Your financial problem is a simple one,” I say. “This is just an abandoned jailhouse. Who would pay to see that?”
“You do not give yourself credit,” the curator says. “This is no ordinary jail. But I take your point. How to get young people interested in the past, that’s the question. Just look at them.” He indicates all the students in the café with us. “Look at how they stare at these phones. That is our biggest competition. On the tours, half of them are updating their Facebook pages, texting their friends, tweeting and so on. Some YouTube the entire tour but never seem to experience it. To think what the Stasi went through to spy on us. Even they couldn’t dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on themselves, morning, noon and night.”
“All this information,” I say. “Yet the world is more mysterious than ever.”
The curator leans forward. “You find the world mysterious?”
There is a very satisfied look on his face.
I ask, “How can I help you today?”
“Yes, of course,” he says. “Here is my proposal. I think you are the philosophical type, Hans. I believe you are a man of opinions. I propose that you lead a tour of Hohenschönhausen, perhaps for a group of students. We would record this on video and save it as an important document. You could say whatever you like—share information, counter criticisms, shed light. Most important, you would tell the story of this place. When you and I are long gone, a story like this will keep speaking.”
I can’t help smiling. “And who would listen to this tale?”
“Students, scholars, historians. Without the records, stories are all we have.”
Prinz whimpers once, looking up to the biscotti on our saucers.
“You are wrong about me,” I say. “I am no philosopher. And I don’t know any stories.”
Even as I say this, my mind wanders to Gitte, wondering where she is right now and what she’s doing. Is she with her photographer friend? Do they climb mountains of A.A. talk and descend into dark valleys of sober sex?
Prinz whimpers once more.
“Actually, I have a question about dogs,” the curator says. He snaps off a piece of biscotti and holds it above Prinz. “May I?”
I nod. “Männchen machen, Prinz,” I say.
Prinz rears onto his hind legs, front paws held high.
The curator drops the treat.
Tongue out, Prinz eyes the falling biscotti and snaps it from the air.
“Prinz, is it?” the curator asks. “That’s a good name for a dog.”
“My wife named him. He was a farewell gift to me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Hear what?”
“That you and your wife parted.”
I look at little Prinz, oblivious to the problems of the world.
“It is only temporary,” I say.
The curator nods. “Concerning dogs,�
� he says. “A former inmate told me he found it difficult to sleep because of barking dogs. Yet there is no kennel. Did the prison employ the use of dogs, Hans?”
“The dogs came at night,” I tell him. “A dog handler named Günter, he would bring them in at sunset. He still lives in the neighborhood. Günter was a famous dog trainer at the Stasi academy in Golm. But one day a pack turned on him and attacked him—that’s how he was demoted to prison duty. There were terrible tooth marks on one side of his face, and the wound gave him a lisp. He tried to hide his injuries with a beard. I believe he lost a couple of fingers, too, because he always wore heavy leather gloves. He’d show up at sunset, that angry pack dragging him, and with those enormous gloves, he’d salute. ‘The dogs are quite aggwessive tonight,’ he’d announce. One night, perhaps hoping to rise in our esteem, Günter hid some meat in the tiger cages. There was still a prisoner exercising in the cage when Günter released the dogs, shouting—”
“Please, please,” the curator says. “You must save this story for the video.”
Someone tries to hail the curator on his walkie-talkie, but he mutes it.
“I could go anywhere in the prison?” I ask. “I could say whatever I wished?”
“You would have total freedom,” he says. “Of course, the video would have some contextual material. It would have to tell the viewer what kind of prison this was, what happened here, how many people died and so on. It’s very standard.”
“The death rate in Hohenschönhausen was no different than the national average.”
“I’m sorry, this is not accurate,” the curator says. “The numbers are much higher. They’ve been verified. They are not in dispute.”
I stand and tug on Prinz’s lead. “What took place here wasn’t torture. You have to let go of that. What happened here happened to people’s minds, not their bodies.”
A strange smile crosses the curator’s face. “Please,” he says. “Let’s not end on that note. Let us see if we can find that picture of yours.”
We take our cappuccinos and cross the courtyard, Prinz happy for the new adventure. Making our way to the Administration Complex, we must pass the ridiculous “Memorial Stone” placed in the middle of the exercise yard. The building we enter has metal filing cabinets lining its long corridors. There are hundreds of them, empty. Thousands of inmate dossiers, thousands of confessions, shredded. What did any of it mean, now that nothing remains?
We climb a staircase I’ve climbed countless times, yet I’m still surprised at where it delivers me: the warden’s office. The archivists have prepared it as an exhibit. On the door is a placard in German, English, French and Chinese. It reads: “Office of Warden Hans Bäcker, who for fifteen years ran the prison with exacting precision. Not once was an inmate ever late to a Stasi interrogation or torture session.”
I turn to regard the curator. He only returns my gaze.
I step inside, and a thought strikes me, one I’ve never had before: the room is the exact size and shape of an inmate’s cell. There are other placards, explaining the radios that communicated with the guard towers and the system of flashing lights that kept track of occupied interrogation rooms. The walls are nicotine-stained, except where the archivists have opened three holes in the plaster. Around these holes, they have drawn red circles, one near the radiator, one beside my desk and one on the ceiling. They are labeled Mic1, Mic2 and Mic3. A placard reads: “Not even Warden Bäcker was safe from Stasi surveillance. Three listening devices recorded him at all times.” I approach a microphone and touch it with a fingertip. My eyes trace its wire until it disappears, headed to wherever it was that Grünwald’s men listened in. My after-school phone calls to Nina. The times Gitte rang up, lonely and guilt-ridden, half sauced in the early afternoon as she confessed to infidelities I didn’t want to hear about.
I turn away. On my desk is the wooden “lost and found” box. Its label reads only: “Objects confiscated from inmates.” There are some pieces of jewelry, a rubber ball, a transistor radio, a miniature Bible and so on. I find a tattered copy of 1984. I open the book and read a little. Of course it is fiction, but the author gets a few things right—the control, the scrutiny, the feeling that nothing can be spontaneous, that the slightest move carries consequences for your future. It evokes a feeling I haven’t experienced in a long time, a sense that, even though you have a great job and house, there is no safe place to turn.
The curator closes the door, and here is the portrait: Brigitte and Hans on the Augustusbrücke in Dresden, the two of us tossing bread to swans on the Elbe. I hung it here so it couldn’t be seen when I had prison business, so that it was only when the door was closed, when I was alone, that I could spend time with the image of her. It’s the kind of picture a man hangs so he can be reminded that, no matter what happens in the cells around him, this is the woman who loves him, who awaits him, whom, after Günter finally arrives with his angry dogs, he will soon embrace.
I reach to take the photograph from the wall.
The curator stops me. “I’m sorry,” he says, and clasps his hands together. “This is now the property of the citizens of Germany.”
—
All afternoon, I walk Prinz. He doesn’t sniff from bush to bush like normal. He smells doorways and car tires and each seat in the bus shelter. I can tell he is searching for Gitte. Everywhere he sniffs for her, but there is no sign.
The wind is from the northwest. I turn up my collar. On the opposite side of the street, a man in an overcoat also strolls slowly along, and I have the illusion that he is pacing me. I let my mind drift to the churches where, at this time of day, Gitte meets with her fellow alkoholikers. She is probably working out her troubled history—surviving the bombing of Magdeburg, how her family lived like mice in the rubble as they faced the tanks, the typhus, the nuns and then the Soviets. Long ago, after we first met, she told a story of how her father, following the January bombing, went out with a wheelbarrow in search of something unburned—clothes or food or wood for a fire. He returned before dawn with an unexploded bomb that he wheeled into the abandoned depository where they’d sought shelter. She recalled in mythical terms how her father gathered the family around to watch him challenge the bomb to a fight.
Many times I tried to get her to explain the meaning of this. The topic was a delicate one, and I had to be careful—the sickness was to take her mother, a Soviet work camp her father and the orphanages her sisters. Hers was that kind of tale. Of the night her father fought the bomb, she would say only that it was a happy memory, that she didn’t remember being cold or hungry, that they were all together and that her father won the fight.
“He fought the bomb how?” I once asked her.
“He attacked it with a brick,” she answered.
I never suffered in the war the way Gitte did. After Rostock was bombed and I was injured, my mother fled to the safety of Schwerin, near where my father was stationed. Of the bomb that set this in motion, I remember little. I was five years old, standing on the street next to a team of fire horses, their coats steaming in the cold after they’d raced through the city center. I was struck by a wall of light. All at once there was wind and grit, and because the bomb had landed in a fabrication shop, in all directions went a hail of iron filings. The metal was like lightning—I could feel the electricity in each sliver.
When Gitte first saw me shirtless, she reached to touch these pocked scars, her eyes flashing to mine with a certain recognition, like she had finally found someone who’d been through what she’d been through, who could understand, without her having to say the words, the events that had formed her. And because I was already in love with her, because I’d already forgotten who I was without her, I allowed her to believe this lie. Over the years, however, when she needed someone who had these powers of understanding, I proved incapable.
Prinz and I pass an after-work local on Bahnhofstrasse, where couples share plates of Buletten and lift cups of Federweisser, cloudy as sea glass. Here Prinz stop
s. But he doesn’t eye the food. He stares across the street to the man in the overcoat.
Across the street, the man in the overcoat stops.
Facing us, he touches his nose, which is a Stasi hand signal for halt surveillance.
He crosses to us, and when he nears, I see it is Grünwald, and he is smiling. He still sports a Stasi colonel’s mustache, but his teeth, I notice, have been bleached.
“There you are, Hans. Have you been hiding from me?”
I see the newspaper under his arm. “How’s the job hunt?”
“One no longer uses the classifieds,” he informs me. “It’s all on the computer now, yet this new system conspires to keep us older people out of the market. Isn’t this new country supposed to be fair? Isn’t it supposed to value a person’s merits? Yet all we encounter is discrimination. For excellence in interrogation, Mielke personally pinned the Black Shield to my chest. But will anyone employ me? The Gewerkschaft der Polizei has three hundred interrogation specialists, but will they even look at my application?”
I ask, “Are you hitting me up for a letter of recommendation?”
Grünwald taps me with the newspaper. It’s as much affection as he’s capable of.
“Hans trying to be funny—this is a bad sign,” he says. “How are you holding up? Have you heard from her?”
“Soon, I believe. It has only been four months. She just needs to get herself cleaned up. There are some problems for her to work through. I only wish I knew where she was, how she’s spending her days.”
“You didn’t Facebook her, did you?”
“I don’t know how.”
“This is for the best, trust me,” he says. “You know, I have five thousand friends on this website, the maximum allowable. Can you guess our current topic of conversation, can you guess our new hero?”
“I suppose you mean the video?”
“Yes, it’s you, Hans! Our new leading man.”
Before I can admit that I was unable to locate the video on the Internet, he plays it for me on his phone. The video is short, and yes, the waving of the dog-shit bag produces an unfortunate effect. The interesting thing is that the girl has managed to write over the video with arrows and red lettering. For instance, an arrow points to my forehead, and the caption says, “Throbbing Vein.” Others read “Crazy Eyes” and “Spittle.” When I make my most salient point, the viewer cannot help but be drawn toward red wavy lines emanating from my mouth and the caption “Old Man Breath.”
