Sektion 20 (12 page)

As he went to unlock his bike Alex noticed the rear tyre was flat again. He got as far as taking the inner tube out and trying to find the puncture when he realised the valve had been tampered with. The tyre had been deliberately deflated. By the time he’d finished putting it back on the wheel and pumping it up, his shirt was stained with mud and oil and he had broken a fingernail. He cursed the whole way home.

Alex decided he was not going to tell his mother and father about the school’s decision to bar him from further education. He would go back to talk to Herr Roth. Try to get him to change his mind. They were just frightening him. Trying to get him to toe the line. And it had worked. He must change.

When Alex explained why it had taken him so long to get back from school, Geli looked perplexed. ‘Someone did that to my bike too,’ she said.

‘Well, aren’t you both the lucky ones!’ said Gretchen with a laugh. ‘Who have you been annoying recently?’ Alex and Geli looked at each other but they didn’t say anything until they were alone.

‘Maybe it’s just a coincidence?’ whispered Geli. She wasn’t convinced. Alex could hear it in her voice. ‘If it was just you, I’d think Nadel or that boy who was after Sophie was having a go at you, but the both of us . . . that’s bizarre.’

‘Maybe one of your old boyfriends is nursing a grudge?’ said Alex.

She shrugged. ‘I can’t imagine who.’

Then Alex told her what was really on his mind.

‘I think they’ve really got it in for me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been barred from vocational school or the
Erweiterte Oberschule
.’

Geli looked appalled. ‘WHAT?’ she shouted, and Alex had to hush her.

‘How am I going to tell Vati and Mutti?’

‘They’ll find out,’ said Geli. ‘Better tell them. Otherwise they’ll be twice as angry with you. Anyway, Vati might be able to have a word with the right people.’ Then she put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Alex, what are you going to do? You can’t spend your life working in the refuse department at the chemical works or sweeping the streets. It’ll drive you mad.’

Alex said he would talk to Herr Roth in a few days. Try to get him to change his mind. Then if that failed he would ask his father to have a quiet word. ‘Maybe I should join the Free German Youth again?’ he said with a horrible sinking feeling.

Geli snorted. ‘They might not have you!’ Then she said, ‘You know, I’ve got problems too. Fuhrmann – that new art teacher – is telling me my work isn’t up to scratch and I’m never going to be good enough to go to college. Herr Lang used to tell me I was the best in the school.’

Alex shook his head. ‘What shall we do?’

Geli shrugged. ‘Keep our heads down? I don’t know . . .’

Over the next week there were terrible rows in the house with Frank. He had decided, completely out of the blue, to forbid them all to watch Western television. He talked about ‘the corrupting influence of the capitalist lifestyle’ and ‘the false consciousness of our class enemy’ and even Gretchen told him he was beginning to sound like one of Honecker’s speeches.

‘But the Party says we’re allowed to,’ Geli and Alex both said.

Frank found it difficult to argue with them both at once. ‘I don’t care,’ he shouted. ‘It is still unpatriotic and it is bad for your reputation if you ever come to your senses and decide you want to join the Party.’

Stranger things were happening away from their apartment. Geli and Alex both found their bikes had been tampered with yet again – usually the tyres, but sometimes the seat or handlebars had been loosened. It was quite dangerous. But both of them decided they would carry on going out on their bikes. It was a matter of principle. Someone had it in for them and they were determined to show them they were not going to be intimidated. Now neither of them went out on their bike without a toolkit.

But one day in early June, when Alex took his bike to a nearby café and left it in view as he sat in the window with Sophie, he saw the culprit. After ten minutes a large, solid man of middle years came along and began to fiddle with the tyres. He made no pretence of seeing if anyone was watching him. He just crouched down and did it without even looking around.

Alex thought to go out and challenge him, but Sophie grabbed his hand. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘He’s obviously Stasi. And he looks pretty tough too. He’ll just beat you up. Don’t do it, Alex.’

Alex couldn’t believe what he was seeing. ‘Here we are, caught between the Yanks and the Ivans, we’re all a whisker away from being blown to pieces, and what does our glorious Republik spend its time doing? Harassing sixteen-year-old boys with long hair. What a crap country.’

People were staring now. Sophie hushed him.

The bike stuff was ridiculous, but Alex didn’t really care about it. What did upset him, and Geli too, was that most of their friends stopped talking to them. Kids in the school yard that Alex would hang out with at breaktime began to freeze him out when he went to sit with them. Heinz announced he was no longer available to play with the band. Anton still got together with him to play but even with him there was something missing. That easy camaraderie they had seemed to have evaporated.

‘Have they been on to you too?’ Alex asked Sophie, when they were talking about the behaviour of his former friends. ‘Asked you to spy on me?’

She looked him in the eye. ‘Don’t you think I would have told you?’ she chided.

‘We’ve got to get out of this place,’ he said.

Sophie smiled and sang the next line of the pop song they both knew from the West German radio.

He walked Sophie back to her apartment, which was in an old ivy-clad block.

‘Climb up in the night. I’ll leave a window open,’ she said, trying to cheer him up.

Alex loved the idea of secretly spending the night with Sophie, though he wasn’t sure he was up to scaling five storeys without falling off and breaking his neck.

He returned home to find his father in a black mood. Frank had drunk most of a bottle of schnapps and could barely move from his chair. Perhaps he had had a bad day at work. Alex went to bed early but could not sleep for thinking about what Sophie had said about escaping. Maybe he would go to the Ministries building and take a look. It made him feel sick with nerves just thinking about trying to escape. He definitely didn’t want them to be the next Holger and Effi.

What happened next was more sinister. On her Christmas visit last year, Gretchen’s Aunt Magdalene, who had married a Frenchman and lived in Lyon, surprised them by bringing the children each a set of cotton underwear. Seven pairs of underpants and knickers. She apologised for giving them such a dull gift but they were both delighted.

Geli had been the first to notice. ‘Someone’s stolen a pair of my knickers,’ she said. Alex laughed when she told him. A couple of summers back they’d had a strange young man coming round the block stealing underwear from washing lines. He’d been arrested and sent to prison.

‘I keep track of those knickers,’ she said. ‘Best ones I’ve got.’ Then she said, ‘One of your pervy friends hasn’t stolen them, has he?’

Alex was indignant. Anton had been round recently but he couldn’t imagine him doing anything like that.

Alex went back to his room. He looked under his bed in the place where he kept the Led Zeppelin record that Sophie had lent him. It was gone. He went straight back to Geli’s room. They had an irate whispered conversation where he accused her of taking it without asking him. Geli was livid with him for making such an accusation, but Alex returned to his room convinced she had lent it to her boyfriend, Jan-Carl, without asking him.

Then on laundry day Alex counted out his pants and there were six rather than seven. He felt a shiver of revulsion.

‘They’ve been in here, haven’t they?’ he said to Geli. ‘They’ve broken in to our apartment and stolen our underwear. It’s the sort of thing you expect some pervert to do, not your own government.’

They both felt sick about it. They’d heard rumours that the Stasi had a great collection of clothing belonging to people who were politically suspect. They kept the clothes in sealed jars in what was known as a ‘smell pantry’. If they were hunting a known subversive who had gone on the run, they would retrieve a jar from the smell pantry and wave its contents under the noses of the tracker dogs.

They wondered whether or not to tell their parents. Alex cautioned Geli not to. His father had been drinking solidly for the last few weeks. Every night he stumbled to bed in a fug of alcohol fumes. If he thought the Stasi had been breaking into their apartment because of Alex, he would be absolutely furious.

Erich Kohl was sifting through a cardboard box containing a small selection of items removed from the Ostermann’s apartment. He picked up the record sleeve with the picture of an old man carrying a bundle of sticks on the front.

‘Look at this,’ he told a colleague who was helping him catalogue the haul. ‘It belongs to the boy. I recognised it at once. Led Zeppelin. Remember that name. Devious nonsense from a bunch of shrieking monkeys. The name of the group is not even printed on the record sleeve. That has to be deliberate subterfuge.’ He took the vinyl record from the sleeve. ‘But look, they have printed it on the record itself. They’re not as clever as they think.’

He placed the record and its sleeve in a plastic evidence bag.

‘He’s sailing very close to the wind, this one,’ Kohl confided. ‘One more transgression and we’ll be bringing him in.’

Chapter 16

‘Come to the Ministries building with me,’ asked Sophie again. ‘I get bored. It’d be nice to have a bit of company. We can say you’re helping out, to cover one of the girls who’s sick.’

‘Won’t it be difficult to get in?’ said Alex. The idea excited and scared him in equal measure.

Sophie shook her head. ‘The guards on the door are a pretty thick lot.’

Alex thought it would be fun to go along. He could spend a bit more time with Sophie and it sounded like an adventure. So the next time she did a weekday evening at the House of Ministries he came along with her.

‘Ingeborg’s got the flu,’ Sophie said to the guard. ‘He’s come to help us out.’ He seemed to find that an acceptable reason to let Alex in without a pass.

‘Who’s Ingeborg?’ asked Alex as Sophie unlocked the storage cupboard where they kept the cleaning equipment.

‘She usually does the weekends,’ she whispered and tossed him over a broom. ‘Make yourself look useful with a bit of sweeping up.’

Alex swept the floors. Was this what the rest of his life was going to be like? He wondered again if it was too late to start toeing the line and behave like a good socialist youth. He had kept putting off his visit to plead with Herr Roth. His mum and dad were right. There were rules. You didn’t have to believe in them, but you had to stick to them. Do and say what they wanted you to do and say, but still carry on being yourself in your own apartment. He decided he would definitely go to talk to Roth on Monday. Try to set things right.

He looked over to see Sophie leaning forward to dust a window. Even in a pink overall she looked lovely.

After an hour they stopped to share a coffee she had brought in a flask.

‘Want to have a look at that window?’ she asked. ‘The one where you can see over the Wall.’

Alex grinned. It seemed like a wonderfully mischievous thing to do. He didn’t really think he and Sophie would be able to escape. He was only here for a laugh.

Ten minutes later she came up to him. ‘Coast is clear. Let’s have a look . . .’

They made their way as quickly and quietly as they could up a couple of flights of marble stairs. Sophie went ahead, pointed at a window on the corridor and said, ‘Ta-dah!’

Alex stared open-mouthed at the Western side. He could see cars – all different colours rather than just black or pastel blue or green. Some were even two colours at once. Imagine that! Also there on the other side was the Europahaus building – a 1930 high-rise that looked almost contemporary. Alex remembered seeing it in a textbook. It was a beautiful sight – elegant and distinctive and with no sign of the ugly war damage that still blighted many buildings in the East.

His attention was drawn back to the Wall, which was right under the window. He could see trenches and dog runs and barbed wire and lighting gantries and minefields and watchtowers – just as Sophie had said. He understood at once how fatal it would be to try to cross it. Like most East Berliners, Alex had never seen what lay behind the blank face of the Wall.

‘We could do it,’ said Sophie, as she placed her chin on his shoulder. They stared out of the window together. ‘We could get a rope and throw it over and slide down. We could!’

Alex wanted to mock her but he hated to dent her enthusiasm.

‘Here, comrade. Got any rope?’ he said, trying to let her down gently. ‘How are we going to find a rope long enough to do that?’

‘There are ladders – rope ladders – in a storeroom at the top of the building. I found them when I was cleaning up there. For if there’s a fire, I suppose.’

In both directions the Wall stretched as far as the eye could see. It was there: like the sky and the trees and night and day. What was so strange was seeing buildings with people in them on the other side. They were close enough to shout over to. But they were a completely different species:
Homo go-where-the-hell-you-want-iens
. Provided they had enough money, they could spin a globe, point to anywhere on it and take off. His countrymen couldn’t even go to the rest of their own capital city without a stamp of approval from the Stasi.