The Berlin Assignment (42 page)

F17 was a small room. There had only been some 50,000 foreigners deemed to be state enemies and by looking under BSAV Stobbe fished Hanbury out right away. It listed the dates and time he spent in East Berlin, the checkpoint he used, plus a registration of some kind – AFO (HAII) / HAIX-ABTXIV – and yet another number, C9LK8347. “I can't help you there,” Hanbury said.

“No need to, Canuck,”chuckled Stobbe. “This one I can figure out. “AFO means your file is in the category of foreign enemies,
Aktenfeindobjekt
. Cases like yours were the responsibility of
Hauptabteilung II
, or
HAII
. That's Main Branch II where your file material was processed. The slash before
HAIX
means a cross reference to
Hauptabteilung IX
– Main Branch IX, where they dealt with investigations into domestic criminal activity.
ABTXIV
is Division XIV, a part of Branch IX, which was responsible for interrogations of domestic prisoners. But why would you be linked to that? What did you do in East Berlin, Canuck? Initiate subversion? Were you detained?”

“I just went for a few walks,” he said. “No different than nowadays.”

“Well, they suspected you of something. AFO C9LK8347. That's your file identification number.”

They went back into the subterranean corridors. Stobbe opened a few doors to show the files, neatly kept in slots, from floor to ceiling, shelves and shelves, as far as the eye could see. Room AFO was inconspicuous. “East Germany's foreign enemies,” Stobbe said, generously stretching out his hand as if he had successfully pulled 50,000 rabbits out of one hat. “I often ask myself how many enemies were real and how many were imagined.” Hanbury's file, four or five centimetres thick, was located quickly.

“Well,” said Stobbe, handling the weighty paper, “That's more than a few tourist visits worth.” They went to a moulded plastic table and matching chairs in a corner. The file was tidy, the contents registered on
the front cover. Stobbe, sitting at the table, began to recite. His voice echoed through the foreign enemies chamber. “A description of your first visit – nine pages; a description of your second visit – seventeen pages; the transcript of an interrogation – later that same day. Observations made during lectures you attended at the Free University. A report on a search in your apartment near Savignyplatz. Reports obtained under a cooperation agreement with the KGB: San Francisco, Washington, Caracas, Kuala Lumpur. GDR Embassy reports: Ottawa and Cairo.” Hanbury sat stone faced. “Sound like you?” Stobbe asked with a vicious look.

“Christ yes,” Hanbury said. He was chilled. The early fascination had dried up. He wasn't even disoriented any more. Stobbe's recitation had put him into a free fall, a nightmare, where a pounding heart wakes the victim just before impact.

“Now you know what Ossis feel,” Stobbe said brutally.

“It's as if I'm looking at my own embalmed corpse.”

“We talked about Gundula Jahn. Well, she's got a hundred times the file you've got. If you got embalmed, she got mutilated.” The archivist began to flip through the consul's life. “I'm curious why they had that cross-reference to the interrogation section. Let's look at document seventeen.” Stobbe went through the papers with the practised fingers of a teller counting banknotes, in a blur. “My turn to be surprised! You're cross-referenced to Günther Rauch. That's good company you kept. No wonder they kept a watch on you through the ages.” Hanbury grabbed his file to see. “You want some time?” Stobbe asked. “I hope you don't find any letters from your mother which you never saw before. That's happened too. I'll be back in half an hour.”

“Thanks,” mumbled Hanbury.

Once alone, Hanbury experienced the sickening feeling people have after engaging in something deeply private and finding out they were observed. Petty details and innocent acts were treated as grotesquely
important. A lip reader must have been around during his walks with Günther Rauch, because he was liberally quoted. The note on an intrusion into the Savignyplatz apartment was surgically neat. The layout of the apartment, the furniture, the records, the posters on the walls, the clothes in the closet, the double bed. It read like a lab report. A tentative conclusion was formulated that he shared the space with a woman.
Unknown, pending more investigation
. An addendum described a second search of the apartment. In cruelly objective words it described that the stereo lay on the floor, smashed, with the many records also broken into pieces. No sign of the man; still no information on the woman. Then came a Russian component to the file, partially translated into German. In cities Hanbury lived without an East German diplomatic presence, the Soviets acted as their proxy. But when the GDR had an embassy, Cairo for example, and later Ottawa, the reports piled up. His job descriptions. His vacations. Names of people he had long forgotten.

Everything had been sucked into the voracious file. Too much to read. Hanbury flipped through the material; it was accurate, but irrelevant too. The file slowly began to affect him on a different level. It seemed to say that he was something sadly shallow. So, the stereo got smashed, he thought.

Kurt Stobbe returned. “I'll come again if you want more time,” he said gruffly.

“No thanks. I've seen enough. Nothing to learn here. It's insignificant but accurate. What throws me is the detail, year after year, meticulously kept.”

“A Stasi specialty. They lacked feed-back loops telling them they were on a wild goose chase. Once started, they couldn't stop.”

Hanbury's file was returned to its slot. Stobbe closed the door behind them; it sounded like an undertaker closing a coffin. Making their way out, Hanbury struggled with the idea that his mediocrity would be eternally on a shelf, that future generations viewing him through the
warped lens of the Stasi would have masses of material to mock him. The thought was so disturbing that he planned to talk to Gundula about it. It was a quandary she ought to write a columnabout, if not to make it more palatable, then at least more comprehensible. At the exit, Stobbe reminded him to come back any time. “Let your people know we can help them unmask surviving Nazis.”

“I'll make a point of it,” the consul said.

Sturm was walking purposefully around the courtyard. “Scientific investigation,” he explained. “I wanted to find out why prison exercise breaks only last 30 minutes. Now I know: if you walk in a circle any longer you get dizzy. I went around so often I thought my eyes were catching up to the back of my head.”

“I wonder if that happened to your Ossis,” the consul replied glumly, taking a seat in the Opel. “They must have had eyes front
and
back. And even with that they might not have known how much they were being spied on.”

This puzzled Sturm. Behind the steering wheel he thought it through. “Maybe they did know,” he said. “Let's take genes. Maybe they knew it was happening, but didn't let it bother them. Maybe they developed a Stasi-resistant gene.” He brought the Opel into motion.

Departing the complex, Hanbury thought about Gundula's recent columns. They were on the same subject. Stobbe understood what she was saying, but many others were outraged. Nobody was neutral. The paper was printing letters, strongly held opinions both ways, every day. Warfare on the editorial page. Hanbury had talked to von Helmholtz about it; he had shaken his wise head. “She's running down her journalistic capital too fast,” he warned. “I'm worried she's writing herself out of subject matter. Have you tried to interest her in international
relations? One day she may need it as an out.” I will, Hanbury had concluded then, but now he thought, not yet. First he wanted her to write a column expressing how
he
felt about having a file.

Hanbury admitted he was obsessed with Gundula's columns. He clipped them, slipped them into transparent sheaths, organized them in a binder, and generally treated them like valuable works. There were two Gundulas, he thought, and both enticed him. There was the irreverent, energy-packed dynamo that zapped him every time they were together. And there was the Gundula that came through in print – intelligent, thoughtful, absorbed. The second Gundula, the one he studied in the clippings, the unapproachable Gundula, had certain qualities – a moodiness and a world-weariness – which reminded him of the Sabine he once knew. It was too soon to generalize about today's Sabine, but he believed she might have changed. She seemed less dreamy, more realistic and adaptable. Two Gundulas to think about, but two Sabines also.

The columns causing the uproar were based on the contents of a journal, a diary Gundula claimed to have found. It spanned forty years and had been kept by someone called Gregor Donner Reich. Hanbury had suspicions about its authenticity. Gregor Reich's debut in her columns came soon after the evening in
Friedensdorf
. Was the journal's arrival on the scene linked to Günther Rauch? Gregor Reich's diary was complex, full of controversial musings, too many to absorb quickly. In the back seat, Hanbury had a sudden need to gather his thoughts, both about the Normannenstrasse complex he'd just seen, and the fascinating diary Gundula had found. He wanted to get away from Sturm's chattiness, to travel more slowly, to shut out the world.

“Let me out,” he instructed the chauffeur. Sturm stopped talking, but kept driving. “Stop please. Right here.” The consul's words were pronounced calmly but precisely.

“Here?” Sturm protested. “What for?” They were on Warschauerstrasse,
not far from the river, and it was nearly dark.

“I'll walk,” the consul said. “Fresh air. Clean out the lungs. It was stuffy there.”

Sturm was indignant. “Walk? It's fifteen kilometres to your place. It'll take three hours and the scenery is awful. Clapped-out warehouses along the river. Anyway, you don't have your walking shoes on, Herr Konsul.” The last objection was expressed as a logical
coup de grâce
.

“Doesn't bother me. The next corner. Stop.”

When the consul stood on the curb, Sturm gunned the engine and spun the wheels. The Opel swayed dangerously on some gravel, but he mastered the moment and was gone. Continuing on foot, Hanbury believed three hours would be too short. He needed more time than that – a week, a month – to digest the many pieces that constituted his Berlin assignment. They seemed somehow connected, but he couldn't see them ever adding up.

The Warschauerstrasse led to an amusing bridge with funny towers, perhaps inspired by the tales of
A Thousand and One Nights
. It had been entirely destroyed by the bombing and hadn't existed for fifty years, but it was being rebuilt. He admired it for a while before turning north. He walked past the East Side Gallery, a stretch of the Wall still up along the river now covered with pop art. One scene showed Brezhnev and Honecker in a tight embrace, passionately kissing on the mouth.

Holzmarktstrasse, Karl Liebknechtstrasse, Unter den Linden, Strasse des 17 Juni. Moving from East to West wasn't physically complicated, even if all else about it was. As Hanbury entered his bungalow and before he had decided whether to listen to music for the remainder of the evening, or reread Gundula's columns, the phone rang. It was Schwartz. “Am I disturbing you?” he asked calmly. Schwartz had an ability to send quiet reason down a wire, not by what he said, but by the inflection of his voice.

“Oh, hello. No. I was about to catch up on some reading.”

“I wanted to say how pleased I am that you and Sabine are becoming friends. It's doing her a world of good. After her father's funeral she was down for some time. Understandable, of course. But she's much improved.”

Hanbury replied he wasn't sure it had to do with him. “But I admit I feel better too. I owed her an explanation. It was time.”

“She told me that. I'm sure it's made the difference. We plan to have you over for dinner soon. We know your schedule is demanding.” Hanbury said he would cancel every conceivable official function to have dinner with them. “We can check dates out later,” Schwartz said. His voice developed an edge. “I also wanted to see if we could get together in the next days. There's something I want to ask you. You may be able to help with my research. I'm looking for a book.”

The consul's visits had become routine. On the day he was scheduled to appear the atmosphere in
Bücher Geissler
brightened. The store seemed to shrug off its air of sluggishness. There was anticipation, a sense that excitement would be coming in through the front door. It caused Geissler to be restless. He would pace between the back and the front all morning. As the hour loomed, he would take up a permanent position near the door. “
Sind Sie sicher?
” You are sure, Frau Schwartz? he would call, if he began to fear the consul might not show. It was no different today. All morning he hovered expectantly around Sabine.

The day was special for Geissler because he had found an old letter from his cousin, mailed from the Yukon, containing a description of a remote, grizzly-populated mountain range. The mountains, the cousin had written, would yield gold. The letter was written thirty-five years before, but in such remote regions, Geissler assumed, time stood still. No
one person could prospect such immense territories in a short time. The cousin would be at it still. To be sure, Geissler wanted the consul to confirm that nothing in the passing decades would have changed. He had the letter in his pocket.

The consul arrived early. A pleased Geissler grunted a greeting before the door bell stopped jangling and immediately thrust the letter at him. His eyes enlarging, he told the consul it was from his cousin. “Read it,” he commanded. Hanbury calmly accepted the letter and attempted to decipher the scrawl. He studied the paragraphs one after the other, first the front, then the back. He made out a few words –
Yukon, Gold, Grizzlies
– and also the signature,
Ferdinand Geissler
. “Fascinating,” the consul said. “Your cousin was quite a writer.”