by Adam Johnson
“In this way,” she says, “Dr. Werner actually aided interrogators by letting them know how much abuse inmates could clinically withstand.”
I cross my arms. Very calmly, I say, “It is time for reason to prevail. These lies must conclude.”
Berta ignores this and takes the students into the surgical theater. They gasp when they see its condition. Berta testifies to all her experiences in the hospital. She rolls up her sleeves to reveal the white ridges of her canine-bite wounds. The way she talks, everything starts to seem sinister—the lead vest hanging on a peg, the yellowed hoses of a vaporizer, the rusty mechanical arm of a ceiling-mounted light.
I ask her, “Did you not, of your own free will, jump a wall into a pit of guard dogs?”
She doesn’t respond. Instead, as if fleeing a monster, she shuttles the students into an empty pink-tiled room.
“Here,” Berta says, “I will describe the most diabolical of all Stasi devices. It no longer exists because the Stasi were too afraid that anyone should discover it. While they left intact their torture rooms and pain-inflicting devices, the only remaining evidence of what I’m about to describe is this—four bolt holes in the floor.”
The students circle around to view the holes.
“Mounted here was a machine to dose the inmates with radiation so they could be tracked with Geiger counters after their release.”
“You can’t be serious,” I say. “This room was a dispensary. You can’t fill their heads with such preposterous notions.”
“But isn’t it true?” Berta asks. “Do you deny that the Stasi marked suspects with radioactive dyes and tags?”
“It is difficult to discuss such a terrific lie,” I tell her. “Yes, the Stasi was guilty of such things elsewhere, but I would know if it happened here. Who would concoct such a machine?”
“Who would invent a water torture room?” Berta asks. “Who would dream up a zero-light, stress-position isolation room?”
“Those rooms were a necessary element of the normal process of inmate questioning,” I say. “Besides, no innocent person was ever subjected to it.”
“No innocent person?” She looks right at me. “Why did you spend a year shredding thousands of inmate files if they only contained necessary answers to the normal questioning of the guilty?”
“You know the answer,” I tell her. “In those files were sprinkled the names of the innocent—innocent interrogation officers, law-abiding field agents, patriotic informants and community collaborators.”
“Where is the radiation machine, then?” she asks. “Why is it missing?”
“Because it never existed.”
“Tell me, why did Rudolf Bahro, Jürgen Fuchs, Klaus Wexler and Gerulf Pannach all die of a rare blood cancer after being brought here?”
“When my daughter fell off her bicycle, I brought her here,” I tell Berta. “Dr. Werner set the bone. He was the one who wrapped her little arm in wet plaster. He was patient and tender. He signed her cast—all the Stasi officers did. So there was no radiation machine. What you propose can’t even be discussed. It is too outlandish.”
“Inmates have testified to being brought to this room,” Berta says. “They describe a device being pointed at their chests.”
I wave my hands. “That’s it,” I declare. “This tour is officially over.”
“No,” Berta says. “The U-boat remains.”
—
I have no desire to enter the U-boat just to demonstrate that this prison, however unsavory, was a necessary part of a functioning society. Plus, it is past the hour when Prinz and I usually share a sausage. It is nearly the time when he brings his lead to me. But I look at those four holes in the floor. Though I would rather end the video now and go about my day, the truth is that duty calls upon us to perform tasks we’d rather not.
I follow the students across the south yard and down the cellar stairs.
Underground, it is dark and smells of metal.
We see our breath by the light of bare bulbs.
The only sounds are the echoes of our footsteps as we pass zero-light chambers and padded rubber rooms. Berta is silent as she directs us, one by one, into a nearly black stress-position cell. You can barely make out the heavy wooden block of the contortion seat. I run my hands along its contours, the wood grain smooth and polished from human flesh.
One of the girls whispers a prayer.
Berta begins speaking as we move toward the water cells. “I’m not sure how long I was down here,” she says. “The water cells act like time machines. You stand naked in the dark, ankle-deep in cold water, for how long—how many days, a week, two? Because you cannot endure the moments as they tick by, you travel to faraway places in your mind.”
When Berta arrives at the end of the block, she swings a door wide to reveal a black interior. We are assaulted by the smell.
“This was the cell they put me in,” she says.
At the sight of the water chamber, one of the girls, alarmed, sings “Amazing Grace.”
Another girl, her voice high and clear, follows her in German with “Grosse Gnade.”
And then they are all singing, echoing each other in two languages:
How sweet the sound,
Wie süss der Klang,
That saved a wretch like me!
Die einen armen Sünder wie mich errettete!
I once was lost,
Ich war einst verloren,
But now am found,
aber nun bin ich gefunden,
Was blind but now I see.
War blind, aber nun sehe ich.
They inhale to start another round, and I call out, “Enough with the singing.”
Berta turns to me. “What is the proper response?” she asks. “How should they respond to torture?”
“Stop it with the metaphors,” I tell her. I unbutton my shirt cuffs. “You say you were in this very cell?”
The resolve in my voice changes the look on Berta’s face.
I glance upward, visualizing where the rooftop water tank is positioned four stories above. I follow the old pipes along the ceiling to the cells. Then I flip through my keys until I find the one that opens the valve locks.
“What are you doing?” Berta asks.
It takes some effort, but I manage to work the key into the old lock. Then, with both hands, I grab the valve handle and struggle to crack it open. When I do, a blast of rusty water sprays into the cell. I close it and begin unbuttoning my vest.
“Unpleasant, yes,” I say. “But I will show you this is not torture.”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Berta says. “But there’s no need for this. This place is a memorial now. Its capacity to do harm has been retired.”
“I have a question for you,” I say to Berta as I free the last button on my shirt.
I know by the students’ faces that my scars have become visible.
“Please stop doing whatever it is you’re about to do,” Berta says.
“Just tell me,” I say. “Was there nothing of value here? Was there not one good thing to come from your time in Hohenschönhausen?”
Berta studies me as I remove my shoes and socks and place them against the wall.
“There is one thing,” she says. “If I tell you, will you stop?”
I pause to listen to her.
“The prison did something to me,” she says. “It made something in me come to life. My husband and I, even though we were young, we could not manage to have children. We tried for years. Within a month of my release, however, I was pregnant. We have three kids now.”
I imagine these children as I remove my hat, my false hair and my glasses.
“Your honesty is appreciated,” I tell Berta. “Now I’m going to be honest with you. Your whole existence has become a little story that you tell to strangers. And I will show you how this story isn’t true.”
“My story? You mean my life, the thing I was living before the Stasi arrived? Or the story the interrogators
wanted me to confess to? Or the story I live now, where everyone tells me to forget the past and move on, yet every single thing leads back to this place?”
“You’re angry, I understand,” I say. “But these things you say about radiation and torture and the dead—they’re dangerous, they really hurt people. That’s why I must show you the truth.”
“And how will you do that?”
I remove my trousers and fold them neatly. Wearing only my undershorts, I step inside the cell.
“I’m going to close the door, and you’re going to bolt it,” I tell Berta. “Then you will open the valve.”
“Have you truly no memory of me?” she asks. “Have you forgotten your little nickname for me? Or what you did when you found out I was afraid of the dogs? Or the question I asked you countless times? My memory of you is so clear. I recall sitting in your office one afternoon. You made me wait while you spoke on the phone to your child. How horribly wrong it was, I thought, that you were able to have one.”
We gaze with strange wonder into each other’s eyes.
“Now, if you will,” I say.
When I pull the door shut, there is a new kind of dark.
“You will open the valve and leave it open,” I shout to Berta. “And I will call out when the depth of the water constitutes torture.”
I feel my heartbeat and the warmth of my breath in the tiny chamber.
The floor is wet, bracing with cold.
Through the door, I hear the muffled tones of a debate.
But I’m not concerned—I know what will happen. Running a prison teaches you a few things about human nature, and there’s no better feeling than being right about people.
“Please stop this,” she says through the door. “Please.”
She goes on imploring me like this.
It is funny, but through the metal and the rubber, her voice is different. It’s vulnerable. And that’s all it takes, the sound of fear and pleading through thick rubber, and it comes back to me. I recall. We once had a conversation through this very door.
“A ring,” I shout. “That’s what you wanted. A ring is what you kept asking me about.”
On the other side of the door is silence.
“Yes, a ring,” I call out. “I will tell you the truth of this ring. It was something I gave to the daughter of a coworker at a party. She had received perfect marks in school, and your ring happened to be in my pocket. There was a butterfly on it, am I right? That must have been the day of your arrival. It was perhaps gone from your very first day.”
There is silence on the other side of the door.
“Tell me,” I call, “what did it mean to you, this ring?”
One moment later, I hear the screech of the old valve as it starts to turn.
When the icy blast of rusted water strikes me, it does not surprise. The bits of iron in my chest sing with it. My skin hardens, my teeth bite. Yet it’s oddly not unexpected. I taste the zinc of metal rain gutters, breathe in the scent of fall leaves. Freezing bricks and cold mortar, that’s what the water feels like, yet it’s not necessarily bad, if such a thing is possible. It’s essential somehow, familiar, like the prison itself.
And I believe that Berta is right about one thing, that such endurance could cause you to travel far away in your mind. I think of Gitte’s journeys to a distant land where she need only cup a little ember to keep her warm. I suddenly feel it’s possible to go where she went. Perhaps we might finally share that space together. My body starts to go numb, the cold becoming something other than cold. When I can no longer feel at all, I will start my journey. I wait for that moment, tasting rain that fell long ago on a nation called East Germany.
Normally, I garden when night falls, when the urges come. But I was up most of the night writing an article titled “Is Your Pornography Watching You?” I just posted it—under a pseudonym, of course—to a fairly influential IT security website, and it’s going to get people talking. The article describes how a tracking beacon has made its way into child pornography files on the Web—every time a picture is copied, the beacon is copied, and every time the file is transferred, the beacon sends a signal. I’m the one who heard the signal.
I step from my small bungalow into the North Hollywood predawn dark. You can’t hear a peep from the Ventura Freeway, and the first 737 won’t lift from the Burbank airport for a little while yet. So I go to my roses, which line the chest-high fence around my yard.
The key to gardening at night is the headlamp. Don’t go for the xenon or halogen or LED models. The ideal beam should be soft and pale—by its glow, you should struggle to make out the true nature of something. The proper light can cast no shadow.
The neighborhood is a mix of aging Ukrainians and young Latinos, of spent porn actors and newly arrived hipsters. I turn on my headlamp and inspect the dusky crimson buds of my tall Othellos. Then I check on the Applejacks, the Chorales, the Blue Skies and the Bourbons—there’s a fascinating National Geographic article on the crossbreeding that produced the Bourbon. I spot a Marlowe on the cusp of perfection. Just before I touch it, someone approaches out of the darkness. In the faint glow of my lamp’s beam, I can see it’s Rhonza from down the street—she’s out walking at all kinds of crazy hours.
As she strides by, she says, “I got my eye on you, you spooky-eye motherfucker.”
A Marlowe is orange-red outside but opens pale pink. I clip the rose, trim its stem, then place it in a white bucket I’ve mounted to the fence. I leave roses for anyone in the neighborhood to take. I’ve got no great love of roses—the bushes were planted by the old lady who used to live here. “Missus Roses,” everybody called her. Without National Geographic, I wouldn’t have even figured out which rose varieties were which. But tending them is soothing. Besides, what kind of guy would I be if I let some old lady’s roses die?
I pause to enjoy a carton of milk, a half-pint, the kind kids drink at school. I know most early risers are brewing coffee, but it’s best to limit external stimulation. I toss a few more roses into the bucket, and here is where I see the Tiger’s Mom staggering down the street toward me. She lives in the apartment complex next door and has two daughters, a music blog and a committed relationship with alcohol. She’s out every night on the L.A. band scene, and it’s true that her blog is well regarded, that she’s famous for discovering breakout bands.
The Tiger’s Mom stops right in front of me, her drunken eyes fixed on the bucket of roses. In her attempt to select one, her hand floats like a conjurer’s, and though I’m standing right here, she seems not to see me. The Tiger’s Mom selects two roses, one for each daughter, I assume.
The first jet of the day rises out of Burbank above us. It’s five thirty A.M.
“You look like you could use a carton of milk,” I tell her.
“Mr. Roses,” she says. “Jesus, don’t creep up on people.”
She takes her roses and ambles toward her apartment’s stucco courtyard, trimmed with dwarf palms and painted Hotel California pink.
The Tiger is the older daughter, a sixth-grader responsible enough at twelve to take care of her little sister. I see the Tiger riding her bike to school. She is her school’s mascot—the tiger in question. Some mornings, she pedals past in her tiger costume, its oversize tiger head strapped to the rack on her bike. The Tiger doesn’t activate. The Cub is the younger sister, a ten-year-old. Sometimes she walks to school on her own. The Cub often stops to examine the flowers in my bucket, but she never pulls one out.
I don’t have a dungeon or an ankle monitor. I don’t follow ice-cream trucks. I don’t even have the Internet, which is God’s gift to child sexual exploitation. You have to understand that I have never hurt anyone in my life and that I am the one who gets wounded in this story.
But I’ll admit this now, because this is going to be a certain kind of story: the Cub activates.
—
In the morning, I take Laurel Canyon south to Studio City, where I partition a faulty array of servers—a
ll serving porn, of course. Then in Encino, I hack in to the laptop of an Armenian dude who claimed his daughter password-protected the thing and then forgot the code. For lunch, I stop for Salvadoran on Lankershim Boulevard. I eat outside, under a Los Angeles sky that is blizzard white. The pupusas are good, but I stop here because there is a permanent rainbow overhead, caused by the mist of a car wash next door. Don’t let anyone tell you there are no rainbows in L.A.
I used to eat next to my van to make sure it didn’t get jacked. Ten years ago, when I started my computer-repair business, my van was a crash cart of parts and diagnostic equipment, but these days I do mostly tech security, and a wallet of thumb drives is my only set of tools. Porn is a huge security issue, especially child porn. One employee downloading it can crash an entire network. Just glimpsing it can get you locked up, so nobody’s studying the stuff, which is racked with malware and sinister code. Nobody but me, it seems. Seems like I was the only one in the world when the beacon sent the signal.
In the afternoon, I’m circling the Valley, kicking a few firewalls and doing some general debugging, when I get a text for an old-fashioned repair job, and what the hell. In twenty minutes, I’m knocking on a door in Van Nuys.
The guy answers, but he stands there, staring at me.
I say, “Someone messaged me about a problem with a hard drive?”
“A guy I know said you were cool,” he tells me.
To the untrained eye, you’d think this was the type of guy you went to Northridge with, the kind whose baby fat, hipster beard and searing irony landed him in a crappy studio apartment like this. But I recognize his kind right away. There are those who are born, those who are made, and then there are ones like this guy, the kind who choose.
I can see the computer, a high-end desktop with a liquid-cooled multicore driving twin cinema displays. It’s a standard movie/animation editing setup.
“The thing suddenly stopped,” he says. “And it won’t turn on. I tried everything.”
