Necessary Lies (33 page)

“Why can't you forgive him, Anna?”

This is really too much, Anna thinks. She doesn't have to sit here and take Ursula's fatuous comments. She doesn't need to be preached at.

“And what makes you think I haven't forgiven him?” Anna says.

It must be the abruptness of Anna's movements that gives her away, for Ursula extends her hand as if she wanted to stop Anna from leaving. “Because you haven't,” she says. “That's not hard to see.”

But Anna has already dug into her purse extracting the plastic bag with Ursula's letters. She is so clumsy. Her wallet and a packet of tissues fall out. She bends to pick them up from the floor.

“Here, take them,” she says standing up and puts the letters on the table, next to the empty tray. “They are yours.”

She puts a ten-mark note on the table to pay for the wine and rushes out of the café into the street.

“No! Wait,... Anna!” She can hear Ursula's voice, trailing after her. “Don't run away like that!”

Only when she is around the corner, Anna slows down and takes a deep breath. She does not go back to the hotel, but walks along the Berlin streets watching her reflection in the shop windows, transparent, ethereal, disappearing when the window ends, reappearing in another one. The walk calms her down, the cool wind soothes her cheeks. It's done, she tells
herself. It's over. I can go home, now. I have seen her, and now I can go home.

Back in her hotel room she takes a long, warm shower and runs her hands over her naked body. Her skin is still smooth, still supple, and she no longer wants to be alone. She wants to be stroked, kissed. She wants to feel a man's hot tongue on her thighs, making its way up, leaving a wet trail on her skin.
A man
, she thinks, crouched in the cooling bathtub, her arms over her breasts, and the word soothes her with its vagueness.

“You are not the whole world, William,” she murmurs. “You can be replaced.”

When the phone rings, she does not move. The phone keeps ringing again and again until it stops at half-ring, like a choke.

Next morning, Anna is out of breath when she reaches the American Express office. The woman behind the counter is trying to help. “Tomorrow is not possible. But I can get you on the one-thirty flight on Saturday. Unless there is a cancellation. Would you like me to call you if there is?”

“Yes,” Anna says. “Please.”

She has already packed all her things, folded her dresses and skirts, cleared her things out of the bathroom.

“Is it an emergency? Are you all right?” The travel agent has a smudge of lipstick on her teeth, and she is truly concerned. “Do you need any help?”

“I'm fine,” Anna says, suddenly embarrassed by the desperation in her voice for which she really has no reason. “No, please, I can wait a few more days. It's not a problem.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I'm sure.”

She does leave the name and the phone number of her hotel, just in case there is a cancellation, and walks back there to change. All she needs is some loose clothes and a pair of walking shoes. In a small kiosk she buys an English language guidebook to Berlin's sights and a newspaper.

“Too fast,” she thinks, forcing herself to slow down. This agitated rush is irrational, she is trying to convince herself. She
can stay in Berlin for a few days. It won't change anything, for God's sake. Stop. Take a deep breath, calm down. Another one, she orders herself. The city air carries the whiff of exhaust fumes. She has read somewhere that the first smell here after the Wall came down was the stink of the cheap, leaded gas of East German
Trabbis.

In a small, outdoor café round the corner from the hotel, Anna sits down to read the morning paper. The
International Herald Tribune
speculates on the content of the Stasi files. Only a year ago the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin were stormed by protesters and rumours abound. The secret police files are so thick that if they were all stacked up they would reach well over a hundred miles. What experts they were! How busy! The Stasi kept an eye on trash dumps and lending libraries; they tapped the booths of Catholic confessionals and monitored public toilets. For years the army of handlers, with their courses in human psychology and their Marxist-Leninist training, was spying on six million East Germans, half the adult population.

Everything was recorded, Anna reads, the size of your shoes, the smell of your underwear, invaluable in sniffing out the author of a pamphlet found in the street. In your file, if you have one, you might find the exact words you whispered to your lover, the colour of the socks you had on when you last took the garbage out. Every graffiti was photographed, every rumour or joke written down.

Soon, she reads, the files will be opened to public scrutiny. Every German citizen will be able to ask for a copy. A hard decision, the commentator writes since, from what is known already, these files contain bitter revelations. A prominent German dissident has just discovered that among a thousand people who informed on her, the most thorough and damaging were the reports of her own husband who had transcribed their daily conversations. Even the most mundane ones, about the kids, the cat, the laundry.

Marie admitted to her once how she thought life behind the Iron Curtain made people's lives richer. “At least you had bonds that didn't easily break,” she said. What would she say now?

Germany will have to brace herself for such revelations, Anna reads. Fathers, sons, lovers, no one is above suspicion. All over East Germany with its scaffolding and construction cranes, wives, husbands, and lovers will have to confront each other, asking the same old question. “How could you have done it?”

“They've won the war. I've told you.” An insistent whisper from another table catches her attention. A middle-aged American couple talks of the fortunes being made in construction here. The man is wearing an impeccable grey suit, the woman has shoulder-length grey hair. “Shhhh ...” the woman says. “Someone might hear you.”

Anna folds the newspaper and takes a sip of coffee. It has grown cold and she pushes it away.

There is a note for her at the Pension. The waiter, the one with a short dark moustache, delivers it to her room, on a tray, when she is changing. He smiles at Anna as he extends his hand; she has drawn the attention of the staff and they all fuss over her as if she were not an ordinary guest. It all started with the first of Ursula's messages. With Herr Müller's bow and a telling look.

Ursula's handwriting hasn't changed; it is still hard to decipher. I'
ve tried to call you, but you were out. I'll come by in the afternoon. I really want to talk to you.

Anna doesn't wait. She has transformed herself into a tourist, in beige pants and a T-shirt. She slips her guidebook into a canvas bag and leaves.

In 1991 East Berlin looks like a deserted city, its wide streets empty; the giant, pompous buildings along
Unter den Linden
seem abandoned. Grey walls are covered with graffiti:
Stasi murderers. Ausländer raus. German workplaces were taken by foreign workers.

With the Wall gone, the subway trains criss-cross the city freely. The eastern ones are grey and shabby, with wide plastic-covered seats. The western ones arrive like rare birds, with their red exteriors and seats that are black and sleek. When she leaves the subway station, Anna rushes past the wide stretches of streets, past empty spaces awaiting construction.

She slows down at the sight of the Brandenburg Gate, with its six rows of columns and a stone chariot perched on top. This is no time to hurry. In the past when she came here from the other, Eastern side, she craned her neck for a glimpse of the West. Through the columns she saw some vast, empty space and a few blurry trees in the distance. Nowhere else was the West so close, so tantalisingly close, so very much within reach, but the Wall, crowned with coils of barbed wire, with pieces of broken glass lining its concrete edge, looked unmoveable. On
her
side there was none of the jazzy graffiti, the defiant blues, reds, and yellows, no curses or signs of peace. The Wall was guarded by ramrod straight men, their hands resting on polished guns. It was a line that separated all that was ugly from all that was beautiful. On
her
side there was nothing she wanted to keep, and beyond it, everything was worth having. How she longed to cross this line! How overwhelming the thought was, how it surfaced when she would least expect it!

Frantic surges of hope and envy erupted in her every time she heard of someone who scaled the Wall or got smuggled in a car trunk. “They made it,” she heard. “Escaped.” There was never an official confirmation of success, but all the failed attempts to cross the border were described in the most minute details. For days, the Polish papers glowed over secrets betrayed by best friends, the slip of a hand clinging to a rope, a child's frightened whimper coming from a car trunk. Now, the graves of those who tried and failed are covered with fresh flowers.
Murdered by the Guards
, the inscriptions say.

Anna wishes she were here when the Wall fell, hacking the concrete to pieces and then rolling these pieces in her hands, releasing even the smallest of pebbles inside. Instead she saw it on television, the jubilant crowds, the tears and flowers. “Quick,” she called to William, “Hurry up,” and they stood in the living room, leaning over the screen, to see better. He took her hand in his, and handed her a Kleenex for she was crying from joy, tears gathering against the rims of her glasses. It was William who drew her attention to the cello player, his chair propped against the Wall, his eyes closed, the hand holding the bow raising and falling gently, like a crest of a wave.

Ursula was here, then. I
know that it won't last, this jubilation
, she wrote to William, in the letter that Anna remembers only too well.
I know that we will soon get tired and cynical about it, shrug our shoulders and ask each other if this, indeed, was such a big deal. That we will throw our hands up in despair at the people from there, in their jean shirts, jackets, caps, people from these dark, shabby, lethargic lands. But tonight there is dancing on the rubble, there are tears. No one is talking about the bills that will start coming in. What will we unearth now? What new stories of greed, deception, and blind obedience?

The stories keep flowing. Berlin is getting ready for the trials of the guards who shot at the last two escapees from East Germany; one of them, Chris Gueffroy, newspaper headlines remind, was the last man killed at the Wall.
They say they were following orders
, Anna has read in the
International Herald Tribune
, in the chilling echo of the Nuremberg trials.

Among the pictures that Ursula had sent William there was a whole package of the shots of the Wall.
These I have taken specially for you
, she scribbled on the back of one of the pictures.
The grass on the Death Strip is no longer pristine! Weeds and rubble have overrun it, as they have taken over the marble steps of the Zeppelin Field tribune in Nuremberg. By the Reichstag only a lone watchtower, its roof discarded, has survived. The lamps that since 1961 have lit the concrete belt have vanished; empty light poles point into the sky Did you know, darling, that kilometres of this concrete have been crushed into gravel that now paves East German roads?

The uniforms and insignia of the guards, their medals, badges and lapels are sold at wooden stalls at Checkpoint Charlie. For a few dollars Anna can have an East German party badge, a Soviet star, a medal for the conquest of Berlin. The young man who sells these treasures is American, a hippie type with long blond hair, a jean vest. He stoops a bit as he approaches her with a big smile.

“Ain't it something?” he says. Among the uniforms displayed in the back Anna spots full regalia of a Soviet general, a green coat, stars on epaulets, a stiff cap.

“Where have you got: it from?” she asks, pointing at the uniform.

“From the General himself,” the man smiles. “A bit hard on cash these days. Nice guy, though. Would sell me his nuclear missile if I had enough dough.”

“Oh, come on,” he says when Anna hesitates. “Buy some of this shit. Anything you want.” Pieces of the wall are encased in plastic and have a certificate of authenticity attached. Anna buys a chunk of the wall with a piece of graffiti on it, red, yellow and black lines, mangled, crossing.

“American?” he asks her.

“No,” she says, “Canadian.”

“Visiting, eh?” He laughs softly as he says it.

“Sure,” she smiles, and puts the piece of the Wall into her purse.

As Anna walks slowly toward the Brandenburg Gate, she tries to make out the shapes of the stone sculptures on the top, a horse rushing forward, a robed figure in a chariot. The Gate, her guidebook informs, was designed by a Breslau architect, Carl Gotthard Langhans. It may no longer seem imposing, yet as Anna walks between the stone columns she is moved. For a long while, there is nothing else she wants to do. She just walks underneath the Gate back and forth, unsure if these few steps signify a triumph or just an act of belated defiance.

The thought of Frau Strauss, Käthe's old friend, comes at the last moment; Anna has nothing but a telephone number and a name. But when she calls the apartment, and introduces herself, Frau Strauss's daughter insists that she is delighted and that Anna must come over to visit. “Just for tea,” she says, “nothing elaborate. We would so very much like to meet you.”

The woman who opens the white door on the fourth floor of Wildestrasse 24, is slim and petite. She must be in her early fifties, the wrinkles around her mouth cut deep into the skin, but she is still attractive. There is a halo of warmth around her, the warmth of pastel colours and red, parted lips. Her long curly hair is kept in place with two wooden combs.

“Come in, come in.
Bitte, bitte
,” Monika waves off Anna's attempt to take off her sandals.