They had their compartment to themselves, which was good. They needed the time alone to balance their love and their decision with the demands of business. They spoke of many things and left the most remarkable unsaid. The entire world seemed new, yet unchanged. Their conversation was casual, yet eternally serious, since now it was part of a lifetime they had agreed to spend together.
Jeffrey sat alongside Katya and watched her and spoke with her, and all the while he marveled at the fact that she was to be his wife. His wife. He could not help but smile. The word alone boggled the mind.
“Why are you smiling?”
He shook his head, unable to voice his thoughts just then. Instead he said, “Would you mind if I asked you how you came to faith?”
Katya looked at him a long moment, then asked in return, “Is that what you and Mama talked about?”
“Partly,” he said, and felt an ease between them, a fluidity that could not be contained. His wife.
She sat beside him, very prim and proper in a dark-gray suit of softest wool. From time to time, however, one stockinged toe would emerge from her pumps to caress his ankle. There was a casualness to her motion that spoke of rightful intimacy. “It was probably very sad.”
“It was.”
“I don’t want to hear about it right now, okay? But please tell me some other time.”
“Whenever you like.”
“My faith.” She brought up one of his hands to give it a closer inspection. “I don’t feel as if it’s mine at all. It is a gift from the Father that I hold in trust.”
“That’s beautiful,” he said softly.
“Mama was always strong in her faith, and I was raised to simply accept it as a part of life. As young as I was, I could see how much it meant to her in those tough times after my father left.”
“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
“It’s all right. For me, growth in faith has always meant realizing that there’s a lot I don’t know, and probably even more that I don’t have right. This keeps me from ever being too dogmatic about things, remembering times in the past when I thought I had it all perfect, only to discover later that it wasn’t nearly as correct or complete as I imagined.”
He moved back far enough to be able to see her face. “You sound so wise when you talk like this, Katya.” He searched for some way to explain how he felt. “It humbles me.”
She rewarded him with a brief kiss before returning to her story. “A few years after my father left us, we moved to England. As I grew older I kept looking for a healing faith in all the wrong places. I was sure I was going to find it in a church or in a person. Somebody who was going to sit me down and draw out this path and tell me where to put my feet and say, go from A to B to C and then you’re home. But faith doesn’t work like that.
“I think what I really wanted was somebody who would be my new daddy. Somebody who would be there when I needed him, who wouldn’t leave me. It took a long time before I finally accepted that I really wasn’t getting to know God at all, just another man—a preacher or a deacon or somebody in the church. They were substitutes, and sooner or later I was going to have to start looking for myself. Studying the Bible by myself. Praying by myself. Making contact directly with Christ, by myself. Making the relationship a personal one.
“When you grow up in the church, you know all the right answers. But that doesn’t mean Christ is in your life. There are a lot of people who call themselves Christians and who hide from God when He manifests himself. In Genesis, it is not God who runs from people, but people who flee from God. Some things never change.”
Katya bent over his fingers, sliding a feather-light caress around each in turn. “This lesson wasn’t fully learned until I went for a semester as an exchange student to Warsaw. I went primarily to improve my Polish, but I also studied what they called History of Political and Legal Doctrines.”
“Sounds positively riveting.”
She settled his hand in her lap. “It wasn’t so bad, really. And it gave me some incredible lessons in keeping my temper.”
“I’m all for that,” Jeffrey said.
“The class was taught by a staunch Party member. I mean a real flag waver. I was the only Westerner in the class, and he kept saying these things as though hoping I was going to explode. I never did, though. There wasn’t anything to be gained by giving him the pleasure of seeing me lose it.”
“What was the class about?”
“It was an exhaustive coverage of obscure Soviet bureaucratic Communist thinkers. Not Polish. Soviet.”
“And the Polish students didn’t complain?”
“Not in class. Not in hearing range of the professor. If a Pole made it as far as university, he had already learned to keep his mouth shut around Party members, especially when it came to complaining about the Soviets.” Katya’s eyes were frosty. “The Soviet theory of history is linear. That is, all events represent a class struggle and lead inevitably to socialism. This phrase is repeated ad infinitum—the inevitability of socialism. So all the studies concentrated on events that supported this perspective. Everything else was virtually ignored.
“History studies revolved around uprisings, strikes, workers’ actions, and the cruelest possible examples of capitalist exploitation of workers. The thrust, the key, was always the ownership of production. Their basic principle was that until workers owned all land and all resources and all factories and all stores—through the central government, of course—these uprisings would continue. It was inevitable. Events so obscure they did not even deserve mention in a Western encyclopedia or textbook were treated as turning points on the path to Communism.”
He made a face. “How could you put up with that stuff?”
“It was hard,” she admitted. “But these are the lies that shaped Poland for over forty years. I kept reminding myself of that, and I studied the Bible harder than I ever had in my life. There, at least, I knew I could remember what truth really was. And when I finally returned home I knew that one reward of the journey, something I would treasure for all my days, was this coming to know a personal relationship with my Savior. Beyond the confines of any church or doctrine or earthly activity. He was my Lord, and He was my friend.”
* * *
At the last stop before crossing the former border, the gray-suited West German train conductors gave way to a pudgy man with one wandering eye and a rail-thin girl with spiked blond hair. They wore uniforms of electric blue, replete with broad leather belts and shiny brass medals. They barked a demand for tickets, inspected them minutely. Katya asked them a polite question, received a smirk and several short words in reply.
“The conductors are much more imposing here,” she said when they departed. “Less discreet than the West German officials.”
“I noticed,” Jeffrey replied. “What did you ask them?”
“When we would arrive at the old border crossing. They said to watch out for the tank barriers.”
Rolling hills gave way to a broad, flat expanse, a plateau that afforded a clear view in every direction of a frozen, silent winterscape. Soon enough the fields began growing a tragic crop of watchtowers and giant lights and crossed railings dug into metal-lined trenches. Although the barbed wire had been removed, the former dead man’s zone remained marked by row after row after row of ten-foot-high concrete pillars. They stretched out to both horizons, endless lines of slender tombstones.
“Before the Wall fell, borders like this were a lot noisier,” Katya told him, her voice subdued. “The dogs had vicious-sounding barks, especially at night. And the guards were always shouting, never just speaking.”
Standing in the middle of the field was a single abandoned building, a vast multistoried structure washed to unpainted grayness by passing seasons.
“It must have been a prewar factory,” Katya guessed. “It was in the fire zone; see the stands where they had the spotlights and the machine-gun placements?”
“I see,” J
effrey replied quietly.
“Look at the building; you can see how all the windows and doors on the first two floors are bricked up. It was probably too close to the Western border to let even the guards use; they might have tried to escape.”
Their train swung around a bend, and the roadway border appeared. Tall stone and mortar guardhouses loomed over a point just prior to where the road diminished from four well-paved and brightly marked lanes to a narrow, rutted passage. The towers showed bare walls toward the east; all windows and gun emplacements and entrenched vigilance faced the other way.
Once beyond the border, barbed wire sprouted and grew everywhere. Everything was fenced—roads, train tracks, nearby houses, footpaths. The train slowed for another bend, and slowed, and slowed, and remained slow. The track became increasingly bumpy, the surroundings ever more grim.
“It’s like another world,” Jeffrey said.
“We’ve passed through a fifty-year time warp,” Katya replied. “The price of Communism. One of them, anyway.”
The houses were immediately older. Instead of Western double-paned windows, there were warped squares of hand-drawn glass set in flaking wooden panels. Shutters and doors and walls shed paint like old snow, if they were painted at all. Bricks stood exposed through shattered plaster, timbers bared ancient cracks. Bowed walls were supported by tree trunks stripped and replanted at an angle. Weeds grew waist high through cracked pavement. Cars turned tiny and plastic and sputtered smoky spumes.
At the first station after the border, the train ejected a steady stream of people. Most carried boxes and bales and bags and pushed strollers that contained not babies, but more boxes and bags. The people looked very tired. Exhausted.
“Shoppers,” Katya explained. “There is still greater variety in the West, and the people trust the stores there more than they do the ones here.”
Signs of renovation and new construction dotted the landscape like flecks of bright new paint on an old scarred canvas. Flashing lights and yellow construction trucks signaled roadworks almost every time a highway came into view. New, unfinished factories rose alongside structures built more from rust than steel. But despite the evident signs of change, the predominant color remained gray, the main impression one of deep fatigue. Bone tiredness of both the people and the land. That, and cold.
They arrived in Erfurt two hours late. Night had fallen hard on the city, engulfing it in almost total darkness. Occasional streetlights poured tiny islands of light into a sea of black. Here and there, apartment windows glowed in yellow solitude against the night. But the dominant feeling was of darkness.
Their hotel, the Erfurter Hof, was located just across a cement and asphalt square from the main train station. The centuries-old building had been redecorated in a bland Communist style, all hard edges and overly bright colors and charmless prints of big-muscled men and women in determined parade. They were joined at the check-in counter by a large group of weary businesspeople in rumpled suits and dresses, all off the same train from the West as themselves.
Jeffrey collected their keys, joined the elevator’s silent throng, walked Katya down to her room. He saw his own weariness mirrored in her face. “I don’t understand how I could grow so tired just sitting down all day.”
“Travel does that,” she agreed. She offered her face up for a kiss. “I hope you sleep as well as I intend to.”
His room was high-ceilinged and furnished with light-wood beds and chairs and low tables screwed into the floor. Jeffrey drew his drapes against the train station’s constant rumble and gave in to his rising fatigue.
CHAPTER 15
Erika paused on the Schwerin office building stairs to catch her breath and go over Ferret’s instructions. It still rankled, this working at the beck and call of a half-finished man. He sat downstairs in her car, waiting for her to walk up and talk and go down and report. Then she had to smile. At least he had let her drive.
A taxi ride with Ferret was the most harrowing experience of a passenger’s lifetime. Fear was an ever-present companion from the moment Ferret nodded his acceptance of the address and leveled his nose as close to the windshield as the steering wheel permitted. Ferret’s vision was so poor he could scarcely make out other cars, especially at night, which was the only time he drove. He tended to stick to quieter ways and hope he would not meet anyone at crossroads. Traffic lights were seldom seen until the last possible moment. This meant he had the choice of standing on the brakes or shooting the intersection at blinding speeds. Either way, his passengers lost years.
Erika sighed, a sound she was making more and more these days, and walked down the hall. At least this work required a few of the talents she had garnered over the years. And though she did not understand what they were doing, it afforded her a small hope of moving on, of escaping this place where life as she knew it had disappeared.
For most Ossies, the nation of East Germany had been a prison, a landlocked cell without doors or hope of release. The slightest glimpse toward the outside world had been both forbidden and frightfully dangerous. If a child had happened to mention at school that his family watched Wessie programs intentionally beamed over the Wall, the entire family—children included—had faced arrest, interrogation, and a loss of job and hearth and home.
Ossies had responded by turning inward, especially in the smaller communities. Villages had become islands, struggling to provide barriers against a world that was beyond their control or understanding. Automatic suspicion of newcomers had kept Stasi infiltration to a minimum. Choosing brides and husbands from local stock had preserved local solidarity, even if communities were so small as to require inbreeding. Anything had been deemed better than letting in the dangers of the unknown, the outside, the secret, the hidden.
But for the keepers like Erika, the former system had provided security, sufficient wealth, and the thrill of life-and-death power over the masses. For them, the Wall’s collapse had been the unthinkable brought to life, the subsequent investigations and trials beyond belief. Across the former country, worried conversations began and ended with the argument voiced by every defendant brought into court: We served our country as we were trained and ordered to serve. How can another country come in and fire us and put us on trial and accuse us under a different country’s laws? How is this possible? Show us where we broke the laws of our own country! Show us!
Erika watched the unfolding drama from the relative safety of a new identity in a strange town and wished only to be away. Questions of guilt left her tired. As far as she was concerned, the difference between Stasi tactics and those of the West—such as the headline-grabbing 1982 alliance between Pope John Paul II and President Reagan to keep Solidarity alive after Poland declared martial law—was that the West had won the undeclared war. Safety did not rest in reason. These days, safety was possible only for those who could come up with enough cash to buy a new life.
Erika rapped sharply on the door, then pushed it open at the sound of a woman’s voice from within. She entered a cramped office overflowing with books and ledgers, looked down on a middle-aged woman whose dark hair spilled over her face as she continued to peruse legal documents. Without looking up, the woman raised a nicotine-stained finger toward the chair across from her desk. Erika remained standing, waiting with patience born of a lifetime’s experience.
The silence extended through another minute, then the woman slammed the tome shut and reached with a practiced gesture for her cigarette pack. It was only then that she raised her eyes and focused on Erika. With that first glance, her motions ceased.
Erika felt the faintest thrill of pleasure and a fleeting memory of a former world, when it had rarely been necessary even to show her badge to get total and unswerving attention. Badges had been superfluous for one accustomed to holding Stasi power. People had looked and seen and understood. Their freedom had depended upon diligent attention and absolute obedience.
Then the woman forced herself to relax, a conscious effort that cost
her dearly. The shaking fingers that plucked out the cigarette told of her difficulty in casting aside the lessons of a lifetime. She lit the cigarette, dragged deeply, said with the smoke, “Yes?”
Erika felt the bitter disappointment of one robbed of her rightful place, and it grated into her voice. “Frau Reining?”
The woman nodded. “You are the woman who called for an appointment, Frau.” She leaned forward, glanced at her calendar, said with evident skepticism, “Frau Schmidt?”
“Yes.” Erika swallowed her bitterness. To stoop to such nonsense. Yet she knew how to follow orders, that much she still carried with her. She spoke as Ferret had instructed. “I represent a seller of an antique who wishes to contact a Western dealer. One who knows his business and can be trusted to offer a fair price.”
“I see.” Frau Reining took in almost a quarter of her cigarette in one drag. “And why come to me?”
“You are involved with several court cases involving compensation for stolen antiques. We had hoped you were in touch with people within the Western markets. Trusted people,” she continued by rote from Ferret’s own words, “who respect our need for confidentiality.”
“We?” Frau Reining asked. “You are agent for the seller?”
“We will be pleased to pay a fee for this introduction,” Erika evaded. “In hopes that it will help us avoid a costly mistake.”
The woman showed no reaction to the offer, just as Ferret had predicted. And as he had said she would, Frau Reining asked, “It is a German piece?”
“No,” Erika answered, more sure of her footing now that Ferret’s strange-sounding predictions were proving accurate. An honest woman, Ferret had described Frau Reining. A freak of nature. One who couldn’t be bought. Erika stifled a vague wish that things were still as they once had been, when she could have tested this ridiculous claim.
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