Blood Relative (24 page)

He told himself not to be so feeble. Today of all days he would be able to bluff his way out of any situation, no matter how compromising. He turned back to the third cabinet and forced it open. This time he struck gold. It contained the neatly alphabetized personal files of all the agents his control was running and the targets of their various blackmail, entrapment and subversion schemes. Three drawers down he found the letter ‘T’ and a decade’s worth of his data, filling four file-holders. That impressed him, he had to admit. Even better, one of the files was filled with strips of photo negatives, slipped into clear plastic holders, along with two flat boxes containing small reels of Super-8 film. A smile of profound satisfaction wreathed Tretow’s face, which was only temporarily dimmed by the realization that he had nothing in which to conceal the files from prying Stasi eyes. No sooner had the problem occurred to him than it was followed by the obvious solution: hide in plain sight. Who, after all, would question one more harassed individual scurrying through the building with another bunch of files?

And so it was that Hans-Peter Tretow seized control of the physical evidence of his life as a Stasi asset. There were, of course, still a few witnesses to deal with. But that was surely just a matter of time and careful planning.

37

WEDNESDAY

‘The guards were waiting for me,’ said Karin Martz, a plump, homely, unexceptional-looking woman in late middle age. ‘As soon as my feet touched the ground, they started shouting at me, giving me orders. They never used my name. Here a prisoner had no name, only a number. We were treated at all times as something less than human. We had to keep our eyes permanently lowered, so that we did not make contact with any other prisoner. We were not allowed to speak to anyone except for our interrogators. No one ever spoke to us. We did not exist. We were non-people.’

Frau Martz was guiding a party of a dozen or so people, of whom I seemed to be the only foreigner, through the Hohenschönhausen custody and interrogation centre on the north-east fringe of Berlin. For more than forty years it had been a blank, grey space on official East German maps, a dead zone whose purpose was never revealed to the mass of the population. The Stasi brought political prisoners and suspected enemies of the state to Hohenschönhausen and then questioned and tortured them until they confessed to their crimes. To many Berliners and most Germans, it was as much of a blank now as it had ever been. But Haller had wanted me to come here, and now I was beginning to understand why.

He’d called me first thing in the morning: ‘I am on the way to visit Frau König. She lives in Nuremberg now. So I am confident that I will be able to clear up much of the mystery today. I will be back this afternoon. Shall we meet at my office at seventeen hundred hours?’

‘Good idea. I can’t wait to hear what you’ve discovered.’

‘And what about you … are you following my suggestion?’

‘Yes, boss. I’m booked in for the early afternoon tour.’

‘Excellent! It will tell you a great deal about this city, this country … and, I think, about your wife.’

Hohenschönhausen’s grey prison walls and octagonal guard towers now stood amidst a sea of capitalist normality, flanked by a tree-lined street of semi-detached suburban houses on one side, and an automotive breakdown and tow-truck service on the other. Within the walls, the blandly unattractive brick buildings had the unmistakable stamp of state-funded mediocrity, little different from the worst kind of municipal architecture back home. We were standing now in a large unloading bay. Again, it could have been anywhere. But the apparent normality was as deceptive as that of the cattle trucks that took Jews to Auschwitz. This unloading bay was not intended to receive commercial goods, but people transported against their will and deprived of all their rights: people just like the guides at Hohenschönhausen, all of whom were former prisoners.

Martz led us indoors, along a corridor. A cord was strung along the wall at waist height. ‘That was for the guards,’ she explained. ‘As we walked along, they would pull the cable. This would turn on red lights, further along the way, so that people would know they were coming. Any other prisoners who were not in their cells would immediately be locked away and the other guards would remain out of sight. We were denied any human contact beyond the absolute minimum required to control and interrogate us.’

She paused and cast an eye at the group, four of whom were women. ‘When I first arrived here I was made to stand naked in front of a female guard. I was having my period, but she forced me to remove my tampon in front of her. Then she searched me, inside and out. It was a total physical violation. But she did not care in the slightest. Once you accept that a prisoner is a non-person, then it is irrelevant how you treat them.’

I thought about Mariana’s mother. Was she strip-searched as Martz had been? If so, as I was about to discover, that was the very least of her problems.

We came now to a corridor that was no different from any other bland, linoleum-floored workplace purgatory. Identical doors covered in cheap veneer opened onto indistinguishable offices with drab green metal cupboards and matching green curtains, their fabric too thin to keep out the daylight. Each office had a desk, with a fake leather office chair behind it and, somewhat incongruously, a stool on the side nearest the door.

‘I was interrogated in a room like this,’ Martz said. ‘The interrogations took place over a space of several months, always at night, although they sometimes continued into the following day. Twenty-two hours was the longest. I had to sit on a stool, like that one, always keeping upright, no matter how tired I became.’

‘Excuse me, but what had you done to be arrested?’ I asked, regretting it almost immediately as several pairs of eyes swivelled round to look at me.

‘Nothing,’ Martz replied. ‘I simply had a discussion one day with a friend about the idea of defecting to the West. I was not considering doing it, just talking about it. But that was enough.’

‘And was she the one who betrayed you?’

‘So many questions! Maybe you should have been in the Stasi!’

There was a ripple of nervous laughter from the other members of the tour party. While they went off to look at the interrogator’s office, Martz looked at me quizzically: ‘You are English?’

I’d been speaking in German, but my foreign accent and beginner’s grammar must have been obvious giveaways. ‘Yes.’

Now she was almost staring at me. ‘Your face looks familiar to me, as though I have seen it somewhere before. Have we ever met?’

‘I don’t think so. This is the first time I’ve been to Berlin. Maybe you’re thinking of someone else …’

She gave a sharp, decisive nod. ‘Yes, I have it now … A few weeks ago: a month, maybe two, there was another Englishman, very much like you. But now I look at you, I think he was younger, maybe, and not so tall.’

I realized she must be talking about Andy. Had he come here, following the same trail that I was on?

‘It might have been my brother. His name was Andrew Crookham … Andy for short.’

‘Ah yes, Andi … Like you, always asking questions … in German that was, I may say, even worse than yours.’ She gave a little laugh, then caught herself and asked: ‘You said “was”. Has anything happened to your brother?’

‘He died. Suddenly.’

‘Oh, I am so sorry. Please forgive me.’

‘It’s all right,’ I reassured her. ‘It’s actually nice to think of him being here. I’ll be able to imagine him as we go around.’

‘So now you follow in his footsteps … I hope it is a good journey. OK, let us continue …’

We went down some steps to a basement corridor. The floor was bare. Cables and pipes ran along the ceiling, from which single, bare lights were hung at roughly ten-metre intervals. Thick doors, painted in a pale duck-egg blue, each with a small spyhole cut at head height, lined the corridor on either side.

‘Welcome to the U-boat,’ said Martz. ‘It is called that because it feels like the inside of a submarine, no? So … let us start with a standard one-person cell …’

She opened the door onto a totally stark chamber, with bare concrete on the walls, floor and ceiling. It must have been a little over a metre wide and maybe two metres fifty long. High up on the far wall was a small window, made of glass blocks that let in light but were impossible to see through. Its sole contents were a bare wooden bed-frame and a galvanized steel bucket, with a lid. The doorway was too narrow to allow more than two people to peer in, so we stood in line and took it in turns.

When we had all finished, Martz said, ‘This is, in fact, the exact cell in which I spent six months in solitary confinement. During the day, I was obliged to sit on the edge of the bed, with my back straight, eyes wide open, not relaxing in any way, or lying down, or even leaning against the wall. Many days, I was completely exhausted, having spent all night being interrogated. Even so, I was not allowed any rest at all. Every five minutes, the peephole would slide open and a guard would check to make sure I was not disobeying these orders. The guards who watched me would never say anything, not a single word. The only people who ever spoke to me were my interrogators. Sometimes there were breaks in my questioning when days, even weeks, went by in total silence. It got to the point where I was desperate to be interrogated again, just for the human contact … Now, would anyone care to step inside the cell for a minute or two?’

We stood there sheepishly. As I tried to summon up the strength to accept Martz’s invitation I caught the eye of another one of the party, a younger guy. He grinned and gestured, ‘After you.’ So I took him up on the offer. ‘I’ll try it,’ I said. It didn’t seem like a big deal. After all, I’d spent a whole night locked up in York nick. I was used to the spyhole treatment. How hard could this be?

‘All right, then,’ said Martz. ‘Go in. Sit on the bed. Look directly at the door. Do not move. Understand?’

Her tone was harsh, uncompromising, frighteningly convincing. ‘Er, yes …’ I stammered.

I walked into the cell. Martz waited while I positioned myself on the bed. Then, without another word, or any acknowledgement at all, she slammed the door shut with a harsh, metallic clang.

It was nothing whatever like York. Somehow the unrelenting years of hostility, terror and pain had permeated the atmosphere and stained the concrete itself. The whole space seemed to be closing in on me, the walls squeezing me from the side, the ceiling lowering till it would crush me, the air emptying from the cell. I gripped the edge of the bed till my knuckles showed white beneath the skin, feeling sweaty, struggling for breath, light-headed. It took every ounce of self-control for me to keep from shouting out to be freed. Gradually the panic attack subsided. My pulse slowed. I sat there for what seemed like an age, time crawling by, and then the peephole slid open. I mustered as cheery a grin as I could manage and said, ‘Can I come out now …’

The peephole slid shut.

‘… please?’

Total silence descended upon the cell. More time went past, as slowly as before. I was starting to get angry now. This was getting beyond a joke. And yet I did not move from the bed. My rational mind told me that there was nothing anyone could do to force me to stay in this cell, let alone obey the prison rules, and yet some deeper, more fearful instinct kept me still until at last the door opened and Martz said, ‘Prisoner, leave the cell.’

When I came out I saw several faces among the group looking at me with expressions of surprise and concern: I must have looked even worse than I felt.

‘How long do you think you were in there?’ Martz said, less sternly now.

It had felt like an age, but there was surely a limit to the time anyone could keep a tour group waiting. ‘I don’t know,’ I finally said, desperately trying to sound relaxed about the whole thing: ‘Fifteen minutes?’

‘Five,’ said Martz.

‘Five?’

‘Ask your fellow visitors …’

I looked around to see nodding faces, some earnest, others smiling encouragingly.

‘God, I never would have believed it …’

‘And I was in there for six months. It was two months before I was allowed to wash, or brush my hair. I stopped menstruating completely. At the time I thought it was shock. Later I discovered that the Stasi put the contraceptive pill into our food, every day, with no breaks. The isolation was the same for everyone. I remember once, when I was being led to interrogation, I passed a male prisoner. This was very unusual. Someone must have made a mistake. Of course I was ordered not to raise my eyes to look at him but I managed to catch a glimpse. He had a ragged beard and matted hair like Robinson Crusoe on his island. I wished I could have talked with him, just for a moment. At that point, I had not exchanged a single word with any other human being for twenty-seven days. I feared that I had lost the power of speech. But my cell was like a queen’s boudoir compared to some of the others. Come …’

As we followed Martz down the corridor she hung back for a moment until I was level with her. ‘You are very like your brother,’ she said to me in a voice too low for anyone else to hear.

‘How do you mean?’

She smiled: ‘He too was the only one who went into the cell … You look surprised: why?’

‘I don’t know, really… I mean, I’m not surprised that Andy went in the cell. That was the kind of person he was. It’s more that you think we were alike …’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It is obvious that you were brothers. Perhaps you had more in common than you thought?’

38

Martz excused herself and went back to the head of the line. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘the rubber cell.’

In German the word she used was ‘
Gummizelle
’, which sounds childishly silly to an English-speaker, like a Gummy Bear. The cell, however, was stark, brutal and utterly horrifying.

‘As you can see, this cell is entirely lined in padded black rubber, making it pitch-black and soundproof. Prisoners would be given heavy doses of drugs to make them feel disorientated. For days, they would stumble to and fro, not knowing where they were, falling against the walls, losing track of day and night, up and down, any kind of reality at all until they cracked and began talking to themselves, screaming for mercy, losing control of their minds and bodies. Every single word they said was recorded, just in case there were useful pieces of information there, in amongst all the crazy rubbish. When prisoners were let out, the cells were washed down, to get rid of all the blood, the vomit and the shit. A crew of female prisoners did that, working in the early hours of the morning, like chambermaids getting a hotel room ready before the next guest arrives. And there was always, always another guest.’