Brandenburg (62 page)

‘What are they going to do?’ asked Ulrike as they waited for Harland at the entrance to the hotel. ‘How are they going to make this work?’

‘Not our problem,’ said Rosenharte. ‘Not today. And anyway, for the moment it’s enough that this has happened.’

As they drove south-east to Wannsee, Harland told them that the first sections of the Wall had been winched out of place at Potsdamerplatz to make a new crossing and that the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovic had played for the crowds streaming through another opening. He also mentioned there were rumours that in the GDR the Stasi was already beginning to destroy its most sensitive files, burning them and pulping them in machines designed to make animal feed.

Rosenharte murmured interest in these bits of news, but said little as they went.

They had reached Königstrasse, the long, straight drive that cuts across Wannsee and ends at the Glienicke Bridge. They could hardly believe the clarity of that afternoon: the sunlight streaming through the trees, the steady shower of golden birch and beech leaves. Ulrike clasped his right hand between hers and once or twice lifted it to her lips.

They parked about a hundred yards from the bridge and all got out. ‘Why here?’ she asked.

‘This is the only crossing point controlled by the Russians,’ said Harland. ‘Maybe Vladimir is making some kind of point.’

‘Vladimir is the KGB spy from Dresden?’ Ulrike asked Rosenharte.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking across the bridge. ‘Major Vladimir Ilyich Ussayamov.’

‘His name isn’t Ussayamov,’ said Harland. ‘It’s Putin. Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Vladimiric Putin.’

Rosenharte shrugged.

‘Do you want me to come?’ Ulrike asked him.

He shook his head, turned and began to walk towards the old iron bridge over the Havel Lake that marked the border between the city of Berlin and the state of Brandenburg, between the territories of West and East. He walked with his gaze fastened on the Soviet flag on the far side of the bridge and to distract himself, tried to remember the name of the Russian spy who had been swapped on the bridge for the U2 pilot Gary Powers nearly three decades before. Of course. Colonel Rudolf Abel was the name of the Soviet spy and they passed each other on the bridge without saying a word.

He reached the bridge and moved to a stone parapet on the right where there were fewer people. No one, least of all Rosenharte in his rather uncertain state of mind, could fail to be moved by the scene. Westerners stood clapping as each little Trabant car passed over the line at the centre of the bridge. Pedestrians hugged and kissed with a total lack of reserve. Red roses were flung at the cars and pedestrians and once or twice the women from the East stooped to pick them from the road and pressed them to their hearts.

Harland had followed and now passed him on the other side of the bridge. They nodded to each other. Rosenharte watched him with mild interest as he moved along the Southern walkway and came to a halt by a figure who was leaning over the railings, looking down on the evenly rippled, sparkling waters of the Havel. The figure straightened, controlled a wisp of blond hair and they shook hands. It was Vladimir. Harland gestured in Rosenharte’s direction. Vladimir stepped into the centre of the road, put his hand to his forehead and then held it high above him in a kind of salute. Rosenharte returned the wave but didn’t move from his spot.

Then a dark-green helicopter with US markings, a Huey polished like a limousine, came to hover over his side of the bridge, so low that Rosenharte could make out the faces of the men clinging to the straps in the open door. He assumed that they were watching the crowds stream over the bridge, but then he saw Alan Griswald’s face appear at the door for a fleeting second. The helicopter had come to observe the conversation between Harland and Vladimir, presumably with their knowledge. The intelligence business never rested.

The Huey remained there for several minutes, the throb of the rotor drowning the applause and cheers, yet also adding a compelling pulse to the reunion of two peoples. Then the note of its engine changed. It began to rise, sending a powerful downdraft onto the bridge, which tore at people’s clothes and flattened their hair and caused them to cry out with the sudden artless gaiety of people at a funfair. For a split second each person’s defences fell away and they looked around and caught each other’s eyes and glimpsed each other’s souls.

It was in the afterglow of this moment that Rosenharte spotted Leszek Grycko on the other side of the road. The tall young Pole saw him and waved back with a broad grin, but a van came to a halt between them and they both bobbed up and down, waving. The van moved forward. Beside Leszek stood an elderly woman in a well-cut woollen suit who was looking at him with intense curiosity. She brushed away a strand of dark-grey hair that had come loose from her bun, nodded, then seemed to smile at him. Until that moment, Rosenharte had had all sorts of complicated doubts and explanations why this couldn’t be true, but now he was absolutely certain. For his entire life he had seen precisely the same expression of clever, restrained interest in Konrad’s face. Here it was again in Urszula Kusimiak - his natural mother.

She waited for him to cross. Then, as he approached, she held out both her hands. He took them and she absorbed the face of the child she had lost exactly fifty years before.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t bring Konnie with me.’ She nodded and shook her head and the corners of her mouth trembled with emotion. But her eyes remained composed, watching him with growing love. ‘I wish he could have met you.’ He suddenly thought of
Sublime No. 2
, the film Else had shown him. ‘But I’m sure he knew instinctively of your existence. I believe he was aware of you in some deep part of himself.’

She put her head to one side. In precise and deliberate German she said: ‘We’ve both lost so much these past years. But now this long hiatus has ended. I have found you and I’ve gained two grandchildren. That is more than I expected; more than I could have ever hoped for.’

‘You speak German. I was thinking it would be the final irony if we weren’t able to communicate.’

‘I learned in the camps in order to survive. I knew also that I would need it to find you after the war.’ She stopped. ‘And now I have.’

From the corner of his eye, he saw Ulrike approach. He turned. ‘This is my friend Ulrike - the woman I hope to make my wife.’ He was aware that he was blushing.

Ulrike was shaking her head and pointing towards the bridge. They all turned. Standing in the middle of the Glienicke Bridge, oblivious of the traffic and of Harland and Vladimir, was Colonel Zank. Rosenharte’s hand moved automatically to the pocket where he kept the gun that he’d meant to dispose of on the way.

Ulrike put her hand up. ‘He’s not coming; he’s watching, Rudi. Leave him.’

Urszula Kusimiak seemed to know exactly what was going on. ‘I suspect he is one of the few people who cannot cross the Glienicke Bridge today.’

‘You’re right,’ said Rosenharte, noticing that Harland had left Vladimir and approached Zank from behind. Now he was saying something and patting his own pocket to indicate that Zank shouldn’t try anything. Zank looked away.

Then Urszula Kusimiak took her lost son’s arm and they turned to walk the gentle incline away from the bridge, leaving Colonel Zank trapped behind the forcefield that was once the Iron Curtain.

Author’s Note

East Germany was the only member of the communist bloc to disappear as a state. A decade and a half after the Wall came down and the process of German unification began, most people would be hard pressed to trace the border between East and West Germany on a map. The very idea of two Germanies, of an Iron Curtain slicing across Europe, seems astonishing today, especially to those born after 1975. And nothing was more bizarre during that era of division than the arrangements in West Berlin, a free enclave 100 miles inside communist territory, unswervingly guaranteed by the Western allies but surrounded by the watchtowers, barbed wire and concrete of the Berlin Wall.

We have forgotten East Germany’s baleful presence at the centre of Europe, the tragic power of the Wall and also perhaps what it meant when on Thursday 9 November 1989 East Germans massed at the border crossings and West Germans climbed onto the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate to demand its destruction. Few who were there will ever again experience the surge of joy and optimism of those hours. Or the incredulity. For even after one million East Germans demonstrated against their government in Alexanderplatz, no one would have dared to predict that within a week those same people would be shopping in West Berlin.

It seemed a miracle then but it’s easy today to see how events combined to destroy the GDR and spark the fall of communism across Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of the policies of
Glasnost
(freedom of expression) and
Perestroika
(restructuring) came with a new realism about the failure of the Marxist economies. Put simply, they were broke. East Germany, which unlike West Germany had little coal or steel of its own, survived into the eighties on cheap oil from the USSR and by exporting agricultural and industrial machinery at bargain-basement prices to the West. But Russia could no longer afford to subsidize the GDR, and the emerging Tigers of south-east Asia were producing far better machinery at even lower prices. Erich Honecker’s East German government seemed incapable of responding to the mounting crisis other than by resisting the reforms of the Soviet Union. To the old men in Berlin the unthinkable had happened: the mother ship of Marxism had veered wildly off course, leaving them to continue the socialist struggle.

There were other straws in the wind. In Hungary a new regime had removed the barbed-wire border with Austria in May of that year and in September the Hungarian foreign minister announced that East German tourists would not be prevented from crossing to the West. At the same time the communist government of Czechoslovakia seemed powerless to halt the flood of East Germans coming over the border and claiming asylum at the West German Embassy in Prague. Much the same was happening in Poland. Those not intent on fleeing the country were bent on change. ‘
Wir sind hier
,’ they shouted through September and October - we’re staying here. Diverse groups - punks and skinheads, greens, peace campaigners and those who simply desired political reform, free expression and unrestricted travel - came together around the thriving evangelical churches of the East, particularly the Nikolai Church in Leipzig. As the Monday evening demonstrations swelled with crowds chanting the simple but unprecedented self-assertion,
Wir sind das Volk
- we are the people - Honecker seemed incapable of acting. It’s interesting to speculate what might have been if a younger generation of hardliners had succeeded at the beginning of the decade. Honecker was seventy-four and had undergone an operation that summer, Willi Stoph, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was seventy-five, Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, was eighty-one. The other members of the Politburo were mostly over sixty-five. In the face of such orderly and disciplined defiance of the state they simply froze.

Yet it is also true that China and Russia had been ruled for long periods by ruthless old men and in China that summer between 800 and 1,200 demonstrators had been killed in Tiananmen Square. So it is important to understand that while the conditions seem favourable to us today, the German uprising was not ordained to succeed. The reality was that the protesters who met outside the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig every Monday evening might have been crushed by the Stasi at any step along the way, just like the students in Beijing. It’s still largely a mystery why the orders to suppress the demonstrations with all necessary force on 9 October were never carried out, though of course former leaders and members of the security forces have since tried to take credit for defying the high command in Berlin.

We have also forgotten the curious nature of the East German state. Besides its fanatical pursuit of sporting glory, the obsessive militarism and religious faith in science and technology, the GDR possessed the most formidable intelligence services the world has ever seen. A population of just over 17,000,000 was served - if that’s the right word - by 81,000 intelligence officers belonging to the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit - or Stasi for short. There was very little in a person’s life that the Stasi could not reach. Some estimates put the number of informers at 1,500,000, which meant that every sixth or seventh adult was working for the Stasi by making regular reports on colleagues, friends and sometimes even lovers and relations.

Run from a vast complex in Normannenstrasse, Berlin, the Stasi was a state within a state. It had its own football team, prisons, special shops selling foreign luxuries, holiday resorts, hospitals, sports centres and every sort of surveillance facility. Large and well-equipped regional offices were in every city. In Leipzig, where part of my story is set, thousands of pieces of mail were opened every day, over 1,000 telephones were tapped, and 2,000 officers were charged with penetrating and monitoring every possible group and organization. Their efforts were augmented by as many as 5,000 IMs
-
Inoffizielle Mitarbeiters, or unofficial collaborators - who were debriefed by Stasi controllers in some seventy safe houses around the city. In numbers this effort in Leipzig far exceeded the joint operations of Britain’s Security Service (MI5) and Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

The dismal paranoia of Erich Mielke’s organization is hard to imagine today. Suffice to say that even school children’s essays were examined for signs of political dissent at home, and in museums in Leipzig and Berlin you can still view the sealed preserving jars containing cloth impregnated with the personal smells of targeted dissidents. It has never been clear what use this archive was put to, but there is no better symbol of the Stasi’s powers of intrusion and absurdist obsession. The special equipment they made for themselves has a comic ingenuity about it: the cameras hidden in briefcases, petrol cans or the headlight of a Trabant car; a bugged watering can, which lay unregarded in one of the garden allotments outside Leipzig to catch anyone being disloyal as they tended their vegetables. The Stasi officers took delight in these gadgets and were in love with the shoddy business of spying on ordinary human beings who represented no threat to the state whatsoever. The breaking of spirits in Hohenschönhausen interrogation centre and at Bautzen prison, the persecution by rumour and lie, the destruction of relationships and careers, the crushing of individual creativity and talent, the tireless search for ‘hostile negative elements’ were all done in the name of security. East Germany was a truly dreadful place to live if you objected to the regime, or showed anything but craven loyalty to the state. Looking at the relatively crude surveillance apparatus sixteen years on, one wonders what the Stasi would have done with today’s technology - our tiny radio tracking devices, biometric identification, number recognition systems and the rapid processing power of surveillance computers. One thing’s for certain: the reformers in Leipzig would have had a much harder time of it.