Karin is greyer, Jutta notes, but she carries it with her intrinsic style, the skill she had in nipping and tucking at her clothes to create something special. She has it still. Her face is lean but healthy, her hair short, and her eyes bright and alive. All Jutta’s worries of her sister being trampled and ground by a system intent on equalising everyone are unfounded. It’s Karin, uniquely, right there in front of her.
It takes seconds to claw away the disbelief before they walk forward and touch, fingers first, hands clasping and cheeks kissed and fondled, soon wet. Hugs so tight that for a second the two can barely breathe.
‘Karin,’ is all Jutta can think to whisper in her sister’s ear.
‘Ja-Ja. My Ja-Ja. Is it you at last?’
They draw away, look at each other fully, and it’s then they both feel it: a twisting, a tightening in each core, a firm tug, fibres testing their strength again. Behind them, the two men are embracing for the first time as if they have been brothers all along. In that eddy of emotion, beyond the tears and the wounds that will need careful healing, Karin and Jutta are certain of one thing: their thread, made tenuous and frayed over the years, is intact. Stronger than wire, concrete or bullets, it has more endurance than any Wall.
And as the bricks tumble, the thread will weave and knit, and thrive again.
EPILOGUE
After – A United Germany
January 1993, Stasi Records Agency, Berlin
They sit side by side at a table in a large room, waiting for the files to be brought, fingers entwined under the wood. Since 1992, two years after the Stasi was formally disbanded, Germans from both sides of the divide have been able to access their secret files – notes on six million people, 125 miles of lives on paper, clandestine secrets and dull, day-to-day activities. The Stasi, as they so proudly pledged, wanted to know everything. And now, the former Voigt sisters want to know what they knew.
‘Are you ready?’ Jutta asks when a man approaches with several files. Brown, obviously.
‘I think so,’ Karin says. ‘After all, it’s my life.’ She smiles. ‘Though maybe they knew more about me than I did.’
Karin’s file is inevitably larger, details kept since the Wall went up, and they open this one first. It dates from August 1961 and her time at the Charité, and includes a copy of every application for contact from her family – Jutta recognises her own writing on several, and the faded red stamp: ‘REFUSED’. The reason is finally confirmed, scrawled in a margin alongside: ‘Niece to Oskar Zelle. See file: Zelle. Caution. No access. Mail denied.’
The sisters look at each other; even now, they can’t be angry at their uncle, for Gerda and Hugo’s sake. It’s just how it was. They finger the copious letters Karin wrote home over the years, each opened, a red line scored through the address: ‘NO Delivery’, and the same for those Jutta sent in vain to the Charité.
The entries in Karin’s file become fewer as it’s documented that she settled in to her job at the hospital, sponsored by Walter. A single line comments: ‘Noted seen with ministry worker Otto Kruger. Intermittent observation’, then later: ‘No cause for concern. Block informer to observe.’
‘Good old Frau Lupke,’ Karin laughs. ‘She must have been bursting out of her corsets with that responsibility. I wonder what she’s doing now with no one to spy on?’
What’s surprising – pleasantly so – is that the Stasi seemed to have no inkling of meetings between the two sisters after Jutta began to ghost through the divide. They suspected nothing, it seems, until the last days. The rest is a painstaking diary of Karin’s time under interrogation, and she shies away from reading its contents; Jutta can tell it’s still too raw, almost thirty years on.
The bulk of the file Karin already knows: a blow-by-blow account of her and Otto’s life after they were freed, for several years under intense surveillance, the very least they expected after Otto’s call on favours narrowly saved them from the worst fate of imprisonment. Their penance was to have every aspect of their marriage scrutinised, the births of Astrid and Sabine, and Karin’s work as a seamstress and part-time designer, Otto’s work in Leipzig constantly examined. The detail tailed off only as the years moved on and they proved their worth as good workers and non-traitors, with the files closing finally in 1979.
‘That’s when we started to breathe again,’ Karin says. ‘Not hearing the click on the end of the phone, or spying someone hovering outside the house. To live our lives in full.’
They switch then to Jutta’s file, slimmer and created only a day or so before her arrest. Copies of her endless formal requests to visit Karin have been pinned in retrospect, notes linking her to Oskar’s file. Her shadowing only began in earnest on that last day of meeting Karin; pictures of their meeting in the park, travelling to the Presse Café, shots inside of her talking to the boy Vopo, and then a grainy image of the van with his body partially seen on the pavement. Jutta’s eyes spring with tears at the memory, made more vivid by his lifeless face. Alongside, in the narrative, it says: ‘Erich Meixner, killed in the line of duty’. Christ, they even told lies to themselves.
Without access to his file, they might never discover if the Stasi knew of his yearning to flee the East. Jutta feels in her heart that Erich was only ever Otto’s observer and never the GDR’s informant, as there’s no mention of his name in any of the surveillance on either sister. Likely, he was simply looking out for Karin, and Jutta by default. And in that final, fatal moment he was their guardian, though his incentive died with him on the pavement. She resolves to find his mother and contact her if she can, explain his protection and bravery at the last. That his loyalty to humanity was firm.
And then the thing Jutta really wants to know, what kept her awake and nearly drove her mad in the three long days she was kept in Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen Stasi Prison, interrogated by the still anonymous Herr Brown: who betrayed her? Who knew when she was ghosting through on that day? At the time, her near insanity led her to believe it might have been one of the family: Hugo, Gerda or even her own mother. But it’s here in black and white, faded but certain: not Axel, the most obvious suspect, but someone close to him. Bibi. Skinny, shadowy, peripheral Bibi, the girlfriend who hung onto Axel’s every word, not through adoration, but a motivation that doubtless included Stasi money too.
On reading, it seems Axel did not bleed certain information in their pillow talk – the location of the Harzer Strasse portal isn’t mentioned until after Jutta’s escape with Danny – so Bibi must have known when Jutta planned to make that final trip, just not where. A secret rabbit hole to the very end. Jutta discovered soon after their getaway that the house and garage had been demolished within days, the void becoming part of the wide and ugly death strip that characterised the Wall in the 70s and 80s. But for a time it was their secret cavity – theirs alone.
Then, after the escape, a warning that makes Jutta relieved to have fled across an entire ocean with Danny: scribbled Stasi instructions to ‘lift and detain’ her at the earliest opportunity, payback for her and Danny’s brazen exodus. Back then, she had been wracked with guilt at leaving Mama, but now it’s proven to have been the most sensible, and safest, decision.
She and Karin spend several hours with the files, at times laughing, intermittently crying, and sometimes just mystified as to why one body of citizens would want to spy so intently on the very people they professed to value as their own.
‘Why?’ Karin says, again and again. ‘Because in the end, we’re proof, aren’t we? This whole country is – that you can’t control people’s thoughts. What goes on in their heads. Or their hearts.’
Jutta nods and squeezes her sister’s hand. They close the files and, with it, a chapter of history never to be forgotten, but one which no longer has the power to shape, contain or inhibit their lives or loves.
‘Come on,’ says Karin. ‘Where shall we go for coffee?’
‘Anywhere we like,’ Jutta comes back. ‘Anywhere we damn well please.’
Acknowledgements
Shaping this book and its time period would have been impossible without the ‘third eye’ of my brilliant editor, Molly Walker-Sharp, who keeps tabs on my indulgent ramblings and offers great alternatives, plus the crack teams at Avon books and HarperCollins, who champion me worldwide, book after book. So, too, my agent Broo Doherty at DHH Literary Agency, for her email chats and constant support in this unstable platform of pandemic writing. Also, to this book’s copy editor, Rhian McKay, and proofreader, Anne Rieley – thank you and sorry for my appalling grammar.
On the end of Zoom, email and the phone are my writing pals Loraine Fergusson (LP Fergusson to her readers), and Lorna Cook; we will meet and drink wine in the same room soon, but in the meantime, thank you for your support.
I couldn’t do any of this writing malarkey without the help of so many, especially in the very odd time that this book was researched and written. Writing is a singular occupation, but this author needs life, soul and conversation to function, alongside a good deal of coffee, of course. I am lucky to have a brilliant group of hardy walkers, coffee-slurpers and their associated dogs as my friends and sanity-aids: Gez, Micki, Hayley, Sarah, Kirsty, Jo, Marion, Annie and Heidi, and fellow scribes Sarah Steele and Mel Golding. Without them I would have lost my mind and be the size of an elephant. So too, the mutts: Erik, Hester, Ted, Indi, Diggory and Ziggy. And, of course, my own darling furry-boy, Basil.
Providing coffee are the ever-present brilliant baristas at Coffee #1 in Stroud, and Felt Café in the Brimscombe; I would have crumbled without regular visits for chat, cheer and caffeine.
Lastly, thanks go to Berlin and Berliners; I managed a swift research trip between lockdowns, and the amazing legacy you have created, in the Wall museums and monuments, helps outsiders like myself understand the oppression suffered and the sheer scale of its reach. I am in awe of the spirit of Berliners to overcome and emerge as a welcoming city.
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About the Author
Mandy Robotham saw herself as an aspiring author since the age of nine, but was waylaid by journalism and later enticed by birth. She’s now a former midwife, who writes about birth, death, love and anything else in between. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University. This is her fourth novel – her first three, The German Midwife, The Secret Messenger and The Berlin Girl, have all been Globe and Mail, USA Today and Kindle Top 100 bestsellers.
By the same author:
A Woman of War (published as The German Midwife in North America, Australia and New Zealand)
The Secret Messenger
The Berlin Girl
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