by Anne Emery
Brennan addressed her in German. “Fräulein Baumann, I am Father Brennan Burke. I am here from Canada, and I wondered if I might . . .”
“What do you want?”
“I knew your mother in Canada.”
What little expression the young woman had mustered died away; she was perfectly still.
“Would it be all right if I come inside?” Brennan continued to speak German.
“Only for a few minutes. I have someone coming here in a little while.” But she stepped aside and Brennan went in. She pointed to the soiled white sofa, but he chose a cleaner-looking hard-back wooden chair. She took the other wooden chair and sat facing him.
“Well?”
“I am a priest in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and your mother —”
“Oh! I hope you gave her a lovely icon of the Madonna and Child, the very emblem of her life.”
“I’m sorry to have to say this, Helga —”
“My name is Leni now. I never liked Helga. It was my grandmother’s name. As a child, I liked the name Leni. So, that is who I am now.”
“Yes, Leni. I am sorry to tell you that your mother died. She drowned.”
The news hit Leni like a blow to the heart. She didn’t speak. Brennan decided that this was not the time to unload more of the bad news on her, so he just sat quietly in the chair.
Then her demeanour changed. The tears came, followed by loud, uncontrollable sobs. After a couple of minutes, she put her hands to her face and tried furiously to scrub away the tears. “I am pathetic.”
“Leni, what is pathetic about crying over the death of your mother?”
“My mother who abandoned me? Left me here to my fate, while she went off to her successful and happy life in America? In Canada?”
“Please tell me,” he said, “so I’ll understand.”
“You don’t have time to hear such a long story.”
“I have time.”
Her eyes searched his face, as if wondering whether she could hope to find understanding there. Finally, she began. “I had just turned five years old. I remember with the clarity of a motion picture the day she left. The three of us were in our apartment: her, my father, and me. She sat me down across from her at the kitchen table and reached over and took my hand. ‘Little one, I am going away for a while.’ I asked her why she was going. She just said, ‘To play.’ So, of course I said I wanted to go, too. I wanted to go with her and we would play together. I didn’t know whether she meant play a game, like volleyball, or play music. I have no idea why she did not give me the details; maybe she reasoned that the more I knew about it, the more I would want to go with her. I remember her hand trembling. I, as children do, caught the mood and I got up and ran around the table and held my arms up. She stood and picked me up and clasped me to her.
“I said, ‘Mutti, why can’t I go with you?’ and she was crying, too, and then she put me down and turned away. She went into the sitting room, and my father went in after her. And do you know what she whispered to him? Thinking I couldn’t hear?”
Brennan shook his head no.
“She said, ‘Helga cannot make the journey with me because she does not have the talent.’” Her eyes blazed across at Brennan. “She could not take me with her — and we now know she was leaving me forever — because I had no talent!”
Leni was trembling with rage. Rage and grief. Brennan could not imagine what to say in the face of such pain.
“Then she came back in, picked me up, kissed me, and put me down again. She turned to my father, and I could not see whatever look she gave him. But I saw his face. He was staring at her, as if he had been struck by lightning. She had her travel bag by the door. She picked it up and walked out.”
“Leni, I had no idea. I am so sorry.”
“Oh, I believe you, that you had no idea. I think she never even mentioned to you or maybe to anyone else in her new life that she had a daughter left behind in the German Democratic Republic.” Brennan did not reveal to Leni the story her mother had told, that she had got her daughter out in that daring escape, and that the child died of illness before they could leave Europe. “That was the defining moment of my life. I was a no-talent child, abandoned by my mother for that very reason.”
“That is terrible, Leni. I wish there was something I could do for you.” He realized how inane that sounded; he just did not know what to say.
“Are you a time traveller, Father Burke? They say that a thousand ages in God’s sight are but an evening gone. You’re a man of God. You want to do something for me? Take me back to 1974 and make my mother stay with me. And wipe out those hateful words she said, that curse she left on me. Because it was not long before that judgment came to haunt me. When my mother did not come back, and did not come back still, my father saw the writing on the wall. She had fled, and he would be the one to pay the price. The state would take him as a hostage and hold him in prison until she returned. So, he worked fast, trying to get me into a good school. A school that concentrated on the arts and music, because he knew I loved music. Even though I had no talent! But I refused to cooperate, for that very reason. I wanted to go to that school. I used to see the other girls coming home with their flutes and violins in their cases. I had always wanted to go there, but now that I knew I could not possibly make the grade, that I would make a fool of myself at that school and be laughed at, I threw a tantrum and refused to go in and talk to the head of the school. I made such a fuss that he never got me in the door before the Stasi came for him.
“So, I became a ward of the state, and the state had a place for me. A children’s home, one of many in this country. There was nothing special about me or my suffering during my long years there. Thousands of us were humiliated, beaten, and abused. It was an education system — I mean, a re-education system — designed to achieve one of the most important goals of a totalitarian state: the destruction of the individual.”
Brennan sat there helpless, outraged at what had been done to a little girl left alone, left to the mercy of a merciless state.
“Any feelings we children might have had of self-worth, any little spark of personality, or any attempts to assert ourselves as free individuals were destroyed. We were to become automatons, merely products of and supporters of the socialist state. First we had a fascist state, then we had the anti-fascist state. Hard for their victims to tell the difference.”
“Leni, it’s unbearable hearing what you went through.”
“Me and thousands of others. And those of us who were considered ‘anti-social’ got the worst treatment of all. I gained a reputation as a troublemaker. One of my fellow inmates, someone I thought of as my friend, informed the director of the home that I had been writing and singing protest songs, satires about the home and the state. All dissent was to be crushed. So, they doubled their efforts to re-educate, reform, brainwash me from thinking for myself. One of the caretakers, though, was friendly to me. Paid special attention to me, even invited me to his home on a weekend.”
Brennan’s reply was a cautious “Oh?”
The look she gave him was enough; he knew the kind of thing that had probably happened to her on her weekend with the friendly caretaker.
“I tried to kill myself,” she said, as if saying she had tried to learn Greek. “I twisted up one of my shirts and used it to hang myself. But, as you can see, I failed. No talent even for suicide.” Brennan found the words for suicide interesting in German. Selbstmord, self-murder, was virtually identical to the Latin origin of “suicide.” What Leni said was Freitod, free death.
“You must think I am very selfish, Father Burke.”
“What? Of course not. Why would you say that, Leni?”
“Talking on and on about me, me, me. Poor little Leni with all her pains and sorrows.”
“You suffered immense pain and sorrow. Why wouldn’t you recount what you endured?”
“Ha! I must have ingested some of that anti-individualist groupthink after all, apologizing for talking about myself, thinking that my little life is of no importance.”
“Your life is of infinite importance, Leni.”
She looked away from him, and her body began shaking again. He did not know what to do. He wanted to embrace and comfort her, but the intimacy might be unwelcome, might bring back even more of the horrific memories of how she was treated. Brennan stayed where he was, irresolute.
Finally, he said, “You sent her a postcard.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You used the word ‘talent’ when writing to your mother.”
“Of course I did. I wrote that at least I had the talent to read. And in case that word had not stayed in her mind the way it had been burned into mine, I put in another word she would recognize. Schlingel.”
Brennan knew it meant a scallywag, a rascal, a scoundrel.
“She always called me that, in an affectionate way. Ah, the good old days, Father! Anyway, when she arrived here, I explained how I had tracked her down. I had been told that there was a story in the newspaper about her, living with a new name in Canada, and I read it and found her that way. I had already searched and found references to her in the records, the Stasi files, which are now available for people to examine.”
“And that’s why you sent her a card with a photo of the Stasi complex.”
“Exactly. So, she came to me here after I sent the card. She must have done some research, too, perhaps with her old contacts in the Stasi!”
“Your mother was a committed Communist, then, a true believer. Supporter of the East German regime.”
“No,” she said in a voice he could barely hear, “it was worse than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that from everything I learned about her — learned from family members, people who knew her — she wasn’t a supporter of the regime. She despised it.”
“But if she informed on people and was allowed to cross over . . .”
“She wasn’t a supporter. She did not have that excuse. But she did it anyway. She went along. Went along with something evil that she didn’t support, didn’t believe in. To me, that is worse.”
Yes. Brennan understood. It was one thing to act according to a deeply held conviction, however misguided. It was another thing altogether to willingly cooperate with a regime, or with an individual, that one despised.
“So,” he said to Leni, “she came to see you.”
“She arrived at my door. I opened it and it took a second for me to recognize her, and then there was no doubt. I knew it was her. She said, ‘I know you must hate me,’ and I said, ‘Oh, did you spend years studying psychology along with physics?’ Then, ‘Come into my home, see how the no-talent daughter lives.’
“And it was clear to me that she knew exactly what I meant. She started in right away, explaining what she had meant by the ‘no talent’ remark. What she said to my father was that she could not take me with her because she would have to tell a good many lies to convince the authorities that she was coming back. She did not know what kind of stories she might have to invent if she ran into any trouble with the authorities here, if someone questioned her permission to leave, or with East German spies operating on the other side of the wall. She was afraid of what I might say to blow her cover, so to speak. So, what she said to my father was that she could not take me because I ‘had no talent to deceive.’ And I heard only the first part of that — and had to live with it for the rest of my life. And she began to weep, my mother did. She told me, ‘I don’t know how I’ll be able to live with myself knowing . . .’
“‘You have lived very well all these years, knowing you deserted your only child, so you could have a good life for yourself. And you knew how things were here, and how they would be for me. A young girl left on her own to survive. Confined and abused in a state institution.’
“She was shaking by this time. And pleading with me to understand. She said her plan had always been to send for me, have me taken to the West. And I think my father was to come separately, afterwards. I’m not sure. But I laughed in her face. ‘How did you expect to do this? A defector asking the state to bundle up her little girl and bring her across the wall, please? A state that imprisoned people for merely talking about going to the West?!’ She said she had a friend here, a Lutheran church minister. He was a liberal, an opponent of the regime. And he had contacts on the other side of the wall. She said he had succeeded in getting a couple of people out. So, somehow she contacted him. And he said he would try to help her. But of course my father was shut up in prison, so in order to find out where I was, the minister had to ask questions. And I don’t know how it went, whether his questions raised suspicions about him, or whether the Stasi were listening to his conversations, or there was an informer. I don’t know, and I don’t think she knew either. But word came back to the minister: they told him I was dead. My mother repeated that to me: ‘They said you had died!’
“‘And you believed them,’ I said to her.
“And she looked even more miserable then, but I did not back off. I said to her, ‘Did you not suspect that maybe they lied to the minister, made up that story to punish you?’”
How dreadful for all of them, Brennan said to himself. He remembered then what Commodore Rendell had said. Rendell had heard that, during her first couple of years in Canada, Meika had never mentioned her daughter. Then, by the time Rendell had met her, she had begun telling the story of the harrowing escape from the checkpoint, mother and child hand in hand, and how the child had not survived long enough to make the journey to North America. Meika would have been devastated when she heard that her daughter had died after being left in the East. And then, in case word got out that there had been a daughter, she came up with the alternative version of reality, in which she portrayed herself as a heroic mother trying to get her child to safety, rather than a mother who had left her husband and child behind when she got herself out of East Germany.
Brennan sat there looking at Leni but could not for the life of him come up with an appropriate response.
“And then,” said Leni, “I told her, ‘Now I have to pick up my own daughter at her kindergarten.’ You will be interested to know, Father Burke, that it is run by a church here. Lutheran church. Not the same one my mother’s friend was at. I think that minister was arrested and imprisoned for anti-social conduct. Yet another person punished for having a conscience. Anyway, this other church operates the kindergarten, and my little girl loves attending it. My mother said she would love to meet her granddaughter. But I said no. I know I wounded her when I said that, because she knew there was no reason she could not have come with me to collect Imke. I was being cruel. We both knew it. Revenge, I suppose it was. So, I told her to leave. And my parting words were ‘I hope you will have a long, long life, Mutti, and that you will think of me every day of it.’”
They sat without speaking for several minutes. Then Brennan heard footsteps outside in the corridor. “I told you when you first arrived that someone is coming here soon. And she is here now. My daughter, from kindergarten. I take turns with another of the parents here, collecting our children at the end of the morning.” Leni got up and opened the door.
“Mutti! Look what I made today!”
“Hello, my little love!”
Brennan watched as Leni lifted a little girl into her arms and kissed her cheek. Leni was transformed; she looked like a different person altogether, her face animated and almost joyful. She thanked the person who brought Imke home and drew the child inside and closed the door. Imke was around three or four years old, petite, with bright blue eyes and blond hair in elaborate braids. When she caught sight of Brennan, her eyes grew wide and she moved closer to her mother.
“We have a visitor, Imke.”
Imke look
ed up at Leni and whispered, “Who is that?”
“This is Father Burke. He is here from way across the Atlantic Ocean, in Canada.”
“Hello, Imke,” Brennan said in his softest voice and pointed to a paper in her hand. He stayed seated so as not to tower over her. “What do you have there?”
“It’s a castle,” she said shyly. “I made it in kindergarten today. And see the letters I printed on it? That’s my name!” She thrust the crayoned picture of a castle up so he could admire it.
“That’s a beautiful castle. My first name is Brennan.”
“You are burning!”
He knew his name sounded like the German for the verb to burn. “You’ll have to ask my mother why she gave me such a name! You have a lovely name yourself, though.”
“Thank you. I like it!”
As she began to fill her mother in on all the activities she had enjoyed that day, her shyness eased. She recounted how one of the boys had to be spoken to because he had used a bad word, and another child had climbed up to the cabinet where the snacks were kept, and he wasn’t allowed to have one until tomorrow. Watching the young mother with her daughter, one would never suspect that Leni had endured such a horrendous past.
“I’m going into my room to do something. Don’t come in!”
“All right, we won’t.” Leni laughed as the child skipped into her room and shut the door behind her. “You can see that she is happy. I am planning to take Imke and leave this country. I know things are better here now, but for me there are too many reminders of my past. Wherever I walk here in Berlin, I wonder about every person I meet in the streets. Did he inform on someone, get the person imprisoned or tortured? Was he one of the guards at the prison where my father was kept until the end of his life? I want a new start for myself, and the sooner we go, the less of a painful break it will be for her. I am learning English, but I am not good enough yet to try to speak it with you. Imke is learning it, too; she knows it quite well. We may go to England, or America.”
His reaction was immediate. “Have you ever thought of Canada?”
