Stasi Child

by David Young

  ‘There are no witnesses. Neither Vogel nor I would testify against her. Surely you cannot be so cruel as to send her back to that godforsaken place?’

  Jäger looked at her sternly. ‘Careful, Karin. I’ve already done a lot for you, made sure you aren’t facing any disciplinary charges. Why should I go out on a limb over this, and why do you care?’

  ‘It’s just those girls . . . they could . . . they could be –’

  ‘Your daughter? The one you aborted?’

  His words were like a stab to Müller’s heart. ‘How . . . How do you know about that?’

  ‘It’s the Ministry for State Security’s job to know about people. Especially those working for it. That’s one of the reasons you were chosen for this case. You had a very personal reason to make sure those involved were brought to justice. The other reason, of course, is that you’re young, inexperienced, slightly out of your depth.’ Müller knew she ought to feel anger at the slight, but she’d long suspected Jäger hadn’t recruited her on the basis of ability. ‘Your youth made you vulnerable, malleable. More willing to do what I required.’

  Müller slumped forward in her chair, trying to shut out what he was saying. She’d removed her sling the previous day when she’d gone down the mine, and hadn’t put it back on. But the wound in her arm still hurt as she held her head in her hands.

  A small smile played on Jäger’s face. He didn’t seem like the affable western newsreader now. ‘However, turning back to Irma Behrendt’s future, there may be another way,’ he said. ‘We might be prepared to let Irma stay with her grandmother at the campsite in Sellin. Her mother is due for release from jail shortly, isn’t she?’

  ‘I think that’s right.’ Müller no longer trusted anything Jäger said or did.

  ‘I will have to speak to Irma first,’ he said. ‘She will have to agree to certain conditions. But yes, it might be possible to meet both your wishes and our needs at the same time.’

  He rose from the chair. ‘I think that just about concludes things here. Why don’t I take you to see Tilsner?’

  59

  March 1975.

  East Berlin.

  As she looked through the window of the door into the intensive care unit, Müller was shocked by the number of tubes attached to her deputy. His face was partially covered with a breathing mask, and the surrounding flesh was horribly pale. She was about to push open the door when Jäger reached out his arm to stop her and gestured with his eyes to the side of the room.

  There sat Koletta – his wife – and his two children. They wouldn’t welcome her. Koletta would blame her for leading her husband into danger, even if she knew nothing of Müller and Tilsner’s intimacy. She backed away, and slumped on a seat in the corridor outside. Jäger sat down next to her.

  ‘He’s a good officer. For you . . . and for us,’ he said.

  Müller wasn’t sure how Jäger would expect her to react, whether he thought she would be surprised. But she wasn’t. She’d guessed some time ago, although she could not have guessed whether the arrangement was official. What Jäger was saying was simply confirmation. She shrugged, as though it didn’t matter to her.

  Jäger smiled. ‘Who do you think radioed to tip us off from the Brocken when you insisted on setting off on your lunatic mission with just two officers and two guns? If he hadn’t, you wouldn’t be standing here now, and I would be attending a double funeral.’

  ‘Was that what he was doing when he went off on his own in West Berlin?’ she asked.

  Jäger nodded. ‘He needed to pick up some documents for a little industrial espionage racket we were running.’

  She sighed. ‘He’s still a good man. He’s someone you’d want on your side rather than the enemy’s.’

  ‘A good man. I’d agree. And a good photographer.’

  Müller felt the blood drain from her face. She turned towards the Stasi Oberstleutnant, her brow furrowing. ‘But you said it was Pawlitzki and Ackermann who faked those pictures of Gottfried with the girl.’

  Jäger laughed. ‘That’s right. Tilsner’s interest was in photographing churches.’ Müller gasped, but Jäger wasn’t finished. ‘But why he provided pictures to the Ministry for State Security from his own apartment is more of a mystery. Perhaps he had a personal reason for wanting your marriage to come to an end?’

  It was the final straw for Müller. She grabbed Jäger by the lapels of his coat. ‘You bastard,’ she spat.

  He smiled, and loosened her fingers. ‘Careful, Karin. After all that’s happened it would be unfortunate if you found yourself on a disciplinary charge after all.’

  She got up, straightened her coat and stomped off down the corridor without a backward glance. The Arschloch! She’d gone along with his little games, done her best, but she wasn’t playing them anymore.

  When she reached her apartment block on Schönhauser Allee, she saw the Bäckerei Schäfer van had returned to its usual place. That was probably Jäger’s doing too. In the lobby, she stopped to pick up her mail: three letters – two official-looking ones and one with a West German postmark.

  Her legs weighed her down as she climbed the stairs to the apartment. Frau Ostermann’s door clicked open when she reached the landing. The infernal woman had probably been watching out for her.

  ‘Frau Müller,’ she said. ‘Is everything OK between you and your husband? I haven’t seen him around much recently.’

  Müller turned to the interfering woman. ‘Is that any business of yours, Citizen Ostermann? I don’t think it is, is it?’

  The woman snorted, and clicked her door shut again, retreating inside. Once the door closed, Müller shot her the Mittelfinger. She wasn’t in the mood.

  Müller entered the flat with a heavy heart. It would be quiet enough for Ostermann from now on. Because there was just her. On her own.

  She closed the apartment door and slumped on the sofa, the exhaustion of the last few days and weeks catching up with her. Placing the two official-looking letters on the coffee table, she tore open the West German postmarked one, half-suspecting who it was from. She could feel tears begin to prick her eyes, but tried to fight them back as she read the typewritten letter, dated from two days earlier:

  Heilbronn,

  Federal Republic of Germany

  Dear Karin

  I’m sorry it had to come to this, and I am sorry I didn’t get a chance to see you before I left. You’ll know by now that those photographs from the reform school were fakes. But apart from that, after what you told me about you and Tilsner, the deal they offered me to leave the Republic was too good to turn down.

  That does not mean that I do not think of you with affection. I still do. We had a lot of good times together. But I always felt there was something missing from your life – some big sadness – and I was never able to compensate for that fully. Perhaps you will manage to find someone else who will.

  Anyway, this is just a very quick note to say there are no hard feelings on my part. I would hope one day that I will be able to visit you and that we can remain friends at least, and that you will remember me fondly.

  I’m hoping that I may be able to land a job quite quickly, despite the poor unemployment situation in the West. Good maths teachers are in short supply, and there’s a position I’m going to see about tomorrow in Bad Wimpfen – a small town near here in a pretty spot on the River Neckar. It’s all quite exciting, if a little frightening.

  Don’t think badly of me.

  At the end of the typing, the only piece of handwriting: his name, Gottfried, and a single ‘X’ for a kiss.

  Karin ignored the other two letters. Instead, she went to the bedroom and reached up to the top of the wardrobe for the key. Then she sat on the end of the bed and turned the drawer lock.

  Sometimes just stroking the clothes would be enough to comfort her. But not today. She got out the two sets of baby clothes, one blue and one pink, and arranged them carefully side by side on the bed. She stroked them as the tear
s fell. Because Pawlitzki hadn’t been cheated of one son or daughter – he’d been cheated out of one of each: a boy and a girl. Twins that, if she’d continued with her unwanted pregnancy, would have put an end to her police career there and then.

  The twins that she knew she could never replace.

  Oberleutnant Karin Müller had lost her babies, lost her husband and didn’t know if her deputy would survive his injuries. But she had saved a young girl’s life. She hoped Irma Behrendt would now find happiness and make the best of her second chance.

  60

  March 1975.

  Ostseebad Sellin, Rügen, East Germany.

  I’m so excited. Over the past few years – years of utter misery – this is the day I’ve been waiting for, and I know Oma feels just the same. Our little gathering is quite small. Some people in the town still do not want to be seen with us. I suppose I can understand that. But those of us who are here have dressed in our best clothes, put on our finest make-up, even polished our shoes.

  In the last week, I’ve been helping Oma make the small campsite house look attractive once more. Repainting the front in brilliant white that sparkles in the spring sun. And then helping her bake the cakes and make the paper decorations. It won’t be long until Oma will open for the season, at Easter, and she has promised that if trade is good, I can have a job looking after the campsite, earning my own money at last. Not the pathetic pocket money at the Jugendwerkhof, but a proper wage, albeit a small one.

  The front doorbell rings. We shush each other and giggle, trying but failing to keep quiet. Laurenz – Frau Brinkerhoff’s son – gives me a look of encouragement, and a smile. I blush under his gaze. He’s asked me out next week, to the cinema in Göhren, up the road. My first proper date. I’m so nervous.

  The bell rings a second time. I can see the shadow of someone through the knobbly-glazed front door. Before I open it, I check my new hairstyle in the hall mirror and brush my fringe out of my eyes.

  As I pull the door open, and see her, I’m already speaking: ‘I’m sorry we don’t have any spaces free. We’re not open for the season yet.’

  I see her face crease in confusion.

  ‘I . . . I . . . haven’t come to camp here,’ she stutters. I know she’s wondering who this new girl is at the door. Finally, I see her look again at my red hair, at the colour of my eyes. She realises who I am, and that I’m joking.

  ‘Irma!’ she cries. ‘Is it really you?’ I just nod, and she hugs me – tighter than she’s ever hugged me before. I can’t speak because I know that then the tears will fall, and won’t stop. She breaks the hug, and pushes me back slightly to take another look. She strokes my face. ‘You’re so beautiful. What’s happened to you? My beautiful, beautiful girl.’ The tears are flowing down her face freely. She is thinner than I remember. She has more lines and wrinkles, probably more than she should at her age. The years in jail have taken their toll.

  But she is Mutti.

  My Mutti.

  She is home. And I know that in accepting Oberstleutnant Jäger’s arrangement, I have made the right choice.

  61

  March 1975.

  A forest near East Berlin.

  The Stasi officer was disorientated by all the deliberate false turns and stopping and starting inside the Barkas van; for the prisoner, it would be even worse. He would have little idea, if any, of their location. The officer knew they were somewhere on the outskirts of the Hauptstadt, but no more than that. He was fully aware of the job he had to do, but not how it fitted into the larger picture; he didn’t even know what the prisoner was guilty of. But for them to be here, for him to have been assigned this task, it would have to be something serious. It was usually espionage: undermining the Republic, helping the fascists and counter-revolutionaries in their attempts to destroy the socialist state of workers and peasants.

  He listened as the guards dragged the prisoner out of the van and tried in vain to shut out the noise of the screams, the protestations, the terror. Of course, very occasionally there would be a late intervention. Or the ritual would be followed to the very edge of the precipice, before it was suddenly aborted and the prisoner taken back to whichever jail he had come from. Usually a ‘he’. Not always, but usually. An extreme form of Zersetzung, of psychological terror: the last trick in the arsenal to try to break them, to get them to confess.

  This, though, was not Zersetzung.

  The moment was near. He shuffled his hands into the white gloves, which wouldn’t stay white for long.

  He picked up the case and – crouching – made his way out of the van.

  They were in a forest clearing, surrounded on all sides by spruce trees, the air fresh and crisp, a welcome contrast to the Hauptstadt’s pollution and smog.

  The officer adjusted the gloves, bent down and clicked open the aluminium case. The weapon was already prepared, checked, oiled. He’d done all that back at Hohenschönhausen.

  Kneeling in front of him on the forest floor, constrained in a straitjacket and held by a guard on each side, the prisoner was quieter now. No more screaming, no more protestations of innocence through the heavy fabric of the hood that covered his head.

  The officer loaded the gun, released the safety catch and then held the barrel against the back of the prisoner’s skull. The accused tried to flinch away, began shouting unintelligibly through the close-knit material. But it was too late now.

  The officer paused for a moment as a bird chattered overhead to allow the solemnity of the occasion to settle on the forest, to allow the condemned his last thoughts.

  Then he squeezed the trigger.

  EPILOGUE

  March 1975.

  The island of Rügen, East Germany.

  The woman’s eyes darted around the handful of people in the café, never resting for more than a moment, moving on before any return gaze could challenge her. Where was he? This was the correct meeting place, she had made sure she was on time, but none of the customers here carried the package that was the agreed signal. She glanced down at her watch. He was ten minutes late already. She resumed her surreptitious observation: watching, but not wanting to be watched.

  Were any of the others in the café informers? The waitress who’d just brought her coffee – the one with the painted-on, over-blacked eyebrows and a sour, Pomeranian farmer’s-wife demeanour. She looked like a loyal party type. Or the unshaven man in the grey fishing sweater, sitting in the corner nursing a beer even though it was not yet midday. He hadn’t drunk a drop of it. She’d noted that.

  The woman rubbed her hands together as though the chill of an Ostsee Easter had invaded the inside of the salon. In fact – under a portrait of a middle-aged man in horn-rimmed spectacles – an open fire crackled and spewed smoke, as though suffering indigestion from its meal of low-grade coal. She brought the coffee to her lips: the edge of the cup trembled against them, so that some of the liquid spilled. The woman smiled ruefully to herself. So careless.

  She checked her watch once more, and then looked up again at Comrade Honecker’s portrait. She had the sensation he was watching her too, from behind the glass of the frame. For the last few years he and his ilk had held her captive, like a bird in a cage. A chief jailer with a network of helpers, who she knew were carefully trained to spy on people like her.

  The woman was indeed being watched, but not by anyone in the café. Her observer was concealed by the shadow of a white wooden veranda on the opposite side of the resort’s main street. A slender figure, with an angular face barely visible inside a tightly drawn hood, seemingly busy sweeping the building’s entrance, but concentrating on watching the coffee shop, not the motion of the brush.

  The hooded figure’s gaze became more alert as a man in an overcoat and suit approached, carrying a bouquet of spring flowers. There was something distinctive about them. They were too early for Rügen island flowers. The blooms seemed to attract the woman’s attention. She rose from her seat, hurriedly threw a couple of marks on the ta
ble and then rushed to join the man outside. Her face lit up as they embraced. Almost a look of love, but the hooded figure didn’t think that was what it was.

  They moved off, walking up Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse, past piles of cleared snow from the unseasonal blizzard just days earlier, the stems of the flowers bending in the bitter wind. They strolled towards the sea and the cliff steps that would take them down to the Seebrücke, with its wooden legs stretching out through the ice-cold water.

  After a few moments, the figure on the veranda followed, keeping pace a few hundred metres behind the couple. The figure stopped at the telescope at the top of the cliff, the one used by children to watch passing ships in the summer. However, anyone checking the angle of the telescope would see it trained not out to sea, but to the end of the wooden pier. There the couple still talked, standing by a lamp post thickly iced with frozen sea spray. Winter’s grip clinging on until spring finally arrived.

  After a few moments, the figure moved to a yellow public call box, just a few metres away.

  A finger turned the dial, calling a Bergen auf Rügen number.

  In Bergen, the Ministry for State Security operator heard the caller ask for Hauptmann Gerd Steiger.

  ‘Can I ask who’s calling?’ asked the operator.

  In the call box, the figure drew back her hood and ran her fingers through her newly styled red hair.

  ‘Tell him it’s Wildcat. Tell him the subject has made contact.’

  The girl with the angular looks waited for Steiger. She wondered if she was doing the right thing, but she was sure she was. That was the price of her freedom; the payment to avoid being sent back to the Jugendwerkhof. To be allowed to live with her grandmother.

  To spy on her own mother.

  After all, that was what she was.