The Berlin Crossing (10 page)

They’d added a few things. The postcard rack behind the reception desk to the right. The display stand beside it, loud with
leaflets trumpeting the manifold tourist delights of Berlin.
You name it, we’ve got it, even a tamed and muzzled secret police service
.

The retirees from Hanover were oohing and aahing about the prison van on display near the foot of the staircase. Pale blue,
box-like, barred window at the rear, a sliding side door to get the prisoner into the back.

So tiny
, someone said.

But so dangerous
, someone laughed.

And poisonous
! from another.

Just like a Trabi
! And everyone laughed.

The grey, steel-legged chairs where Dieter –
where are you now, Dieter, friend of my Rostock days
?
–
and I had sat in a line against the wall where the prison van now stood. The uniformed officer behind the desk inside the
door had smiled at us – the black state car was outside the door, the peak-capped driver lounging beside it, and the ID shown
by Dieter’s father had produced a stiffening in the officer’s upright stance – but I had been nervous. It wasn’t every day
you were driven in an official ministry car to the MfS while your friend’s father delivered official (and presumably secret)
papers to the Director himself. And we’d seen the reaction when the Herr Direktor’s personal assistant had arrived in reception
to personally guide Dieter’s father upstairs.

I wondered how the widows of Hanover would react if they knew that I had sat there, unmolested, all those years ago, where
the prison van was now displayed.

Privileged
, they’d call us. Or worse.

And yet, in that hushed, vaguely menacing reception area we had both been nervous. Even Dieter. For him, too, it was a first
time inside Normannenstrasse. I coughed, cleared my throat as if to speak and the desk officer had looked at me inquiringly.
I looked away, caught Dieter’s sideways glance, the almost imperceptible shake of his head.

And then footsteps on the marble staircase, the sound of approaching voices and the desk officer on his feet, standing rigidly
to attention.

Dieter’s father smiled across at us as the group came to the bottom of the stairs. Tall, slope-shouldered and paunchy, Dieter’s
father seemed almost insignificant alongside the smaller man in uniform.

Erich Mielke
. In the flesh. In full MfS uniform, military ribbons emblazoned across his chest.

Alongside Dieter, I rose to my feet, hardly daring to breathe in the presence of this legend. The Director was of medium height
and portly; his round face was ruddy, his greying hair plastered sideways over the beginnings of baldness.

A picture of ordinariness.

And yet . . . and yet you could sense the power of the man: his drive, his belief.

He was shaking hands with Dieter. A soft, growly kind of voice, inquiring now about Dieter’s studies, his progress in economics.

‘A chip off the old block?’

Dieter’s father beamed at the compliment.

‘And you, young man? What are you up to in Rostock, apart from swilling beer and chasing girls?’

This to me, and I could stop neither the blushing on my face and neck nor the stammering in my voice as I attempted to answer.

Dieter came to my rescue.

‘Michael is a student of English, Herr Direktor – and a very good one.’

His father embellished it. ‘Michael is a member of the Party – my son assures me that he is a most active member of the Friendship
League for visiting students at the university.’

The Director knew what that meant. He studied me more closely now:
this one had already got Party approval, from somewhere
.

‘The Party needs young men like you.’ His hand on my upper arm, a smile lighting the round face.

‘Yes, Herr Direktor.’ Somehow, the words came out.

‘And where are you from, young man?’

‘Brandenburg, Herr Direktor.’ I stammered again. ‘Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, sir.’

‘Michael Ritter.’ My name on his lips told me: he knew my name, knew my seed and breed. It was his job: like the MfS itself,
he was the shield and sword of the Party.

‘Look to your studies, young man. I shall tell our director in Potsdam to keep an eye on your progress.’ Potsdam was the regional
MfS headquarters for my home area.

Abruptly, he shook hands with Dieter’s father, nodded to Dieter and myself, and turned back up the marble stairs, his uniformed
assistant trailing in his wake.

For a moment we stood watching their departure in silence.

Dieter broke the spell.

‘You’re made up, Michael!’ he whispered.

His father looked sternly at me. ‘I hope you appreciate the honour of this, the Direktor taking an interest in you.’ I nodded.
‘Direktor Mielke has a prodigious memory, Michael, he will not forget you. Work hard and you will do well.’

So here I was, doing well, half attached to a bunch of grey-haired
Wessies
, trying to ignore their chatter at this scene of my student triumph.

‘My uncle was locked up in this place,’ I heard. ‘Only a few days, but he was a nervous wreck afterwards, even when they sent
him across the Wall. He could never bring himself to tell us what they did to him here.’

Several voices cut in at once, excited, the whiff of sulphur in the crowded space. And then one voice dominant, shriller than
the rest: ‘You’re in the right place to find out – fill in the inquiry form, that’s what this place is for now, they’ll have
to tell you what happened to your uncle.’

My ears pricked up. This was why I had come here. I had my own questions to ask, about Roland Somebody and Johannes Vos and
Petra Ritter. And maybe even about Michael Ritter.

Another babble of voices. The tour guide waited for it to die down before speaking. She was tall and spare, schoolmistressy
in her calf-length, green loden overcoat.

‘Not so, not here.’ They quietened, schoolchildren again in the presence of teacher. ‘This is not the place for making such
inquiries and seeking such information. For that one must go to the Documentation Centre on Mauerstrasse.’

Four or five voices shouting
Ja
! together: everybody knew this wasn’t the place to make inquiries.

I hadn’t known. I gazed in dismay at the Hanover Heritage tourists and wondered what I was doing, lingering among them. I
should be gone, perhaps to Mauerstrasse. I had heard of the Documentation Centre, of course, but had not paid enough attention
to its purpose. But since I was here . . .

Impulsively, ignoring the ruffled looks, I made my way between the pensioners and, clutching a catalogue under my arm, made
my way up the staircase that Erich Mielke had ascended all those years ago. The
Wessies
didn’t own my personal history; I would walk these historic corridors alone, my ears safe from their babbling.

The displays in the first-floor rooms were a shock to me: surveillance technology, a Trabi door with concealed cameras, a
necktie with tiny lenses . . . More of the same: instruments for eavesdropping, watching, spying. The intestines of these machines
laid bare for our awed delight.

And the workings of our dismembered country likewise laid bare for the oohs and aahs of tourists.
From this we delivered them, from themselves
. Not a word about the necessity for a beleaguered
nation to defend itself by whatever means possible.
From the enemy without and the enemy within
.

I hurried up to the next floor. And paused at the door of the Minister’s personal office. Stepped tentatively into the sanctum
from which the Minister for State Security had organized his forces against those who would destroy us. He had failed in his
struggle,
we
had failed, and victor’s justice decreed a punishment of circus-like ridicule. Mielke’s desk, his phone, even the tray plan
of his spartan breakfast, all on display, to mock-scare, to scoff at, to remind us of the barbarian general paraded in chains
in a Roman Triumph.

Into the next room, panelled with pale wood like the Minister’s office, islands of coffee tables and easy chairs. Here, according
to the bland catalogue, the generals of the MfS took their coffee, chatted among themselves. The catalogue didn’t say if Erich
Mielke moved among them, sat with them, but I imagined he did. I could see him sitting there with his generals, cigarette
smoke trailing above the coffee tables, the air rich with gossip, the weekend, Dynamo’s chances in next Saturday’s game.

I bought a coffee from the tiny stand in the corner of the room –
you too can sip coffee where the Stasi spymasters plotted against their own people! –
and stood at the high window looking out across the city. Television dishes and aerials reached skywards and westwards for
messages from the promised land. The twin spires of a church clawed at the low clouds. From below in the building came the
murmur of the Hanover crocodile, winding its way through the bowels of my country’s past. Behind me, in the panelled room,
the ghosts of the generals inhaled on their cigarettes and talked about football.

And I knew, looking out on the unwalled, undivided streets of Berlin, that I was lost in no-man’s-land. My generals were gone,
their swords crushed in the
Wessie
dust beside their broken
shields. No faith warmed me, neither the messages from the soaring church spires nor the siren songs of the TV antennae. Standing
at that window in the general’s coffee room, I felt faithless, stateless.

And orphaned. Even that unknown father, that never-known name on my birth certificate – even Johannes Vos, it seemed, had
been taken from me. What remained was nebulous, a wisp of maybes and riddles. My mother’s dying words. Pastor Bruck’s broken
back. An
Ausländer
from god knows where. The whiff of betrayal. The scent of loss, of the might-have-been, the never-to-be-any-more. The touch
of plastic, sweaty and cold, taken from the earth in Bad Saarow.

In the corridor the Hanover pensioners fell silent and stood aside, as I stumbled past them, not caring what they saw, what
I looked like – and anyway there was nothing I could do about the tears streaming down my face. It was the first time I had
wept since my mother’s death.

No patrolling of the streets of Brandenburg that night. Instead, I clung to the security of the old flat opposite the railway
station. The familiar bits and pieces had never been so precious to me. Odds and sods that my mother had begged, borrowed
or liberated from god knows where. The framed print of ‘Starry Night’ on the wall by the window. The brass tongs and poker
beside the blocked-up fireplace. The dark, bow-legged sideboard that was a parade ground for a collection of framed photos
of my schoolboy self. A hand-painted, scalloped plate that my mother had claimed was once the property of a local prince.
I conducted my inventory of these acquisitions of an ordinary life as if I were the curator of the Heritage or the Prada.

The sense of abandonment that had overwhelmed me in the generals’ coffee room in Normannenstrasse had remained with me throughout
the day; it had sat beside me on the train home from Berlin and clung to me as I crossed the wide road and climbed the stairs
to my flat. To shake it off, banish it to the wintry darkness outside, I sensed that I must remind myself of who I was. And
so I numbered the objects of my youth, of my mother’s life, the chipped vase and the 1979 calendar with the mountain view
of Austria, and found myself again. The country I had believed in was lost but my past could not be stolen from me.
You are Michael Ritter, a resident of the city of Brandenburg, the only son
of Petra Ritter, a graduate of Rostock University, a teacher and scholar and storyteller
.

I knew what I was about to do. I sat in the old armchair by the window, letting my strength settle upon me, finding again
the identity that was mine. The familiar noises and sights told me who I was. The whoosh of traffic on the road beyond the
window. An impatient car horn. The whistle of trains. Frau Mertens moving around next door. The street lights brightening
as the darkness deepened. Silence settling as the city fell asleep, or whatever it did in the midnight hours. The street lights
blinked and died. Opposite, the railway station seemed to close its eyes, only the faint beam above the entrance lit to show
it was there. I closed the curtains and turned on the table lamp at my elbow. It was time to have a look at whatever it was
that had been sent to me from the grave by Roland Somebody.

The white plastic bag was overprinted with the green cross of a pharmacy: Apotheke Kotte, it said, with an address in Berlin.
Better if all it contained were a packet of paracetamol. But there was no turning back now. I had wiped the bag clean before
putting it away in the filing cabinet but a thin residue of grit still clung to its surface: tiny crumbs of clay fell soundlessly
to the floor as I opened the bag.

The paper bag inside was made of coarse, brown paper, so thick that it felt almost like cardboard; it had been folded and
pressed tightly together around a rectangular object: a book, I had guessed, from the moment it had been handed to me by Pastor
Bruck. For just a moment I hestitated. For months I had resolutely refused to look into this memento of my own past. I had
the sense that life was about to change, that the simple unfolding of this brown paper bag would alter my life in ways I could
not imagine.

The crackling of the unfolding paper bag was loud in the silent
flat. Whatever was inside did not slip out easily; I pushed it from the closed end of the bag, felt the paper shift and loosen,
like a door reluctantly opening.

And the book on my knees, my fingers gripping its edges. A thick book with firm, dark-green covers, padded, the leather soft,
unexpectedly warm after its long years in the clay. I turned the book over in my hands: nothing written on the covers, the
thick spine blank. A fat book, but I could tell, even before I opened it, that it was not the number of pages that lent it
bulk: it was the thickness of the pages themselves, heavy, handmade paper, the kind you might stick photographs on, the kind
that a teenage girl might use as her ‘secret’ diary.