Edge of Eternity (2 page)

The boys greeted her politely, but she felt their yearning adolescent eyes on her figure as she splashed through the puddles in the school yard.

Rebecca came from a political family. Her grandfather had been a Social Democrat member of the Reichstag, the national parliament, until Hitler came to power. Her mother had been a city councillor, also for the Social Democrats, during East Berlin’s brief post-war period of democracy. But East Germany was a Communist tyranny now, and Rebecca saw no point in engaging in politics. So she channelled her idealism into teaching, and hoped that the next generation would be less dogmatic, more compassionate, smarter.

In the staff room she checked the emergency timetable on the noticeboard. Most of her classes were doubled today, two groups of pupils crammed into one room. Her subject was Russian, but she also had to teach an English class. She did not speak English, though she had picked up a smattering from her British grandmother, Maud, still feisty at seventy.

This was the second time Rebecca had been asked to teach an English class, and she began to think about a text. The first time, she had used a leaflet handed out to American soldiers, telling them how to get on with Germans: the pupils had found it hilarious, and they had learned a lot too. Today perhaps she would write on the blackboard the words of a song they knew, such as ‘The Twist’ – played all the time on American Forces Network radio – and get them to translate it into German. It would not be a conventional lesson, but it was the best she could do.

The school was desperately short of teachers because half the staff had emigrated to West Germany, where salaries were three hundred marks a month higher and people were free. The story was the same in most schools in East Germany. And it was not just teachers. Doctors could double their earnings by moving west. Rebecca’s mother, Carla, was head of nursing at a large East Berlin hospital, and she was tearing her hair out at the scarcity of both nurses and doctors. The story was the same in industry and even the armed forces. It was a national crisis.

As Rebecca was scribbling the lyrics of ‘The Twist’ in a notebook, trying to remember the line about ‘my little sis’, the deputy head came into the staff room. Bernd Held was probably Rebecca’s best friend outside her family. He was a slim, dark-haired man of forty, with a livid scar across his forehead where a shard of flying shrapnel had struck him while defending the Seelow Heights in the last days of the war. He taught physics, but he shared Rebecca’s interest in Russian literature, and they ate their lunchtime sandwiches together a couple of times a week. ‘Listen, everybody,’ Bernd said. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid. Anselm has left us.’

There was a murmur of surprise. Anselm Weber was the head teacher. He was a loyal Communist – heads had to be. But it seemed his principles had been overcome by the appeal of West German prosperity and liberty.

Bernd went on: ‘I will be taking his place until a new head can be appointed.’ Rebecca and every other teacher in the school knew that Bernd himself should have got the job, if ability had been what counted; but Bernd was ruled out because he would not join the Socialist Unity Party, the SED – the Communist Party in all but name.

For the same reason, Rebecca would never be a head teacher. Anselm had pleaded with her to join the party, but it was out of the question. For her it would be like checking herself into a lunatic asylum and pretending all the other inmates were sane.

As Bernd detailed the emergency arrangements, Rebecca wondered when the school would get its new head. A year from now? How long would this crisis go on? No one knew.

Before the first lesson she glanced into her pigeonhole, but it was empty. The mail had not yet arrived. Perhaps the postman had gone to West Germany, too.

The letter that would turn her life upside-down was still on its way.

She taught her first class, discussing the Russian poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’ with a large group of seventeen and eighteen year olds. This was a lesson she had given every year since she had started teaching. As always, she guided the pupils to the orthodox Soviet analysis, explaining that the conflict between personal interest and public duty was resolved, by Pushkin, in favour of the public.

At lunchtime she took her sandwich to the head’s office and sat down across the big desk from Bernd. She looked at the shelf of cheap pottery busts: Marx, Lenin and East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht. Bernd followed her gaze and smiled. ‘Anselm is a sly one,’ he said. ‘For years he pretended to be a true believer, and now – zoom, he’s off.’

‘Aren’t you tempted to leave?’ Rebecca asked Bernd. ‘You’re divorced, no children – you have no ties.’

He looked around, as if wondering whether someone might be listening; then he shrugged. ‘I’ve thought about it – who hasn’t?’ he said. ‘How about you? Your father works in West Berlin anyway, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes. He has a factory making television sets. But my mother is determined to stay in the East. She says we must solve our problems, not run away from them.’

‘I’ve met her. She’s a tiger.’

‘That’s the truth. And the house we live in has been in her family for generations.’

‘What about your husband?’

‘He’s dedicated to his job.’

‘So I don’t have to worry about losing you. Good.’

Rebecca said: ‘Bernd –’ Then she hesitated.

‘Spit it out.’

‘Can I ask you a personal question?’

‘Of course.’

‘You left your wife because she was having an affair.’

Bernd stiffened, but he answered: ‘That’s right.’

‘How did you find out?’

Bernd winced, as if at a sudden pain.

‘Do you mind me asking?’ Rebecca said anxiously. ‘Is it too personal?’

‘I don’t mind telling
you
,’ he said. ‘I confronted her, and she admitted it.’

‘But what made you suspicious?’

‘A lot of little things—’

Rebecca interrupted him. ‘The phone rings, you pick it up, there’s a silence for a few seconds, then the person at the other end hangs up.’

He nodded.

She went on: ‘Your spouse tears a note up small and flushes the shreds down the toilet. At the weekend he’s called to an unexpected meeting. In the evening he spends two hours writing something he won’t show you.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Bernd sadly. ‘You’re talking about Hans.’

‘He’s got a lover, hasn’t he?’ She put down her sandwich: she had no appetite. ‘Tell me honestly what you think.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

Bernd had kissed her once, four months ago, on the last day of the autumn term. They had been saying goodbye, and wishing one another a happy Christmas, and he had lightly grasped her arm, and bent his head, and kissed her lips. She had asked him not to do it again, ever, and said she would still like to be his friend; and when they had returned to school in January both had pretended it had never happened. He had even told her, a few weeks later, that he had a date with a widow his own age.

Rebecca did not want to encourage hopeless aspirations, but Bernd was the only person she could talk to, except for her family, and she did not want to worry them, not yet. ‘I was so sure that Hans loved me,’ she said, and tears came to her eyes. ‘And I love him.’

‘Perhaps he does love you. Some men just can’t resist temptation.’

Rebecca did not know whether Hans found their sex life satisfactory. He never complained, but they made love only about once a week, which she believed to be infrequent for newly-weds. ‘All I want is a family of my own, just like my mother’s, in which everyone is loved and supported and protected,’ she said. ‘I thought I could have that with Hans.’

‘Perhaps you still can,’ said Bernd. ‘An affair isn’t necessarily the end of the marriage.’

‘In the first year?’

‘It’s bad, I agree.’

‘What should I do?’

‘You must ask him about it. He may admit it, he may deny it; but he’ll know that you know.’

‘And then what?’

‘What do you want? Would you divorce him?’

She shook her head. ‘I would never leave. Marriage is a promise. You can’t keep a promise only when it suits you. You have to keep it against your inclination. That’s what it means.’

‘I did the opposite. You must disapprove of me.’

‘I don’t judge you or anyone else. I’m just talking about myself. I love my husband and I want him to be faithful.’

Bernd’s smile was admiring but regretful. ‘I hope you get your wish.’

‘You’re a good friend.’

The bell rang for the first lesson of the afternoon. Rebecca stood up and put her sandwich back in its paper wrapping. She was not going to eat it, now or later, but she had a horror of throwing food away, like most people who had lived through the war. She touched her damp eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Thank you for listening,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t much comfort.’

‘Yes, you were.’ She went out.

As she approached the classroom for the English lesson, she realized she had not worked out the lyrics to ‘The Twist’. However, she had been a teacher long enough to improvise. ‘Who’s heard a record called “The Twist”?’ she asked loudly as she walked through the door.

They all had.

She went to the blackboard and picked up a stub of chalk. ‘What are the words?’

They all began to shout at once.

On the board she wrote: ‘Come on baby, let’s do the Twist.’ Then she said: ‘What’s that in German?’

For a while she forgot about her troubles.

She found the letter in her pigeonhole at the mid-afternoon break. She carried it with her into the staff room and made a cup of instant coffee before opening it. When she read it she dropped her coffee.

The single sheet of paper was headed: ‘Ministry for State Security’. This was the official name for the secret police: the unofficial name was the Stasi. The letter came from a Sergeant Scholz, and it ordered her to present herself at his headquarters office for questioning.

Rebecca mopped up her spilled drink, apologized to her colleagues, pretended nothing was wrong, and went to the ladies’ room, where she locked herself in a cubicle. She needed to think before confiding in anyone.

Everyone in East Germany knew about these letters, and everyone dreaded receiving one. It meant that she had done something wrong – perhaps something trivial, but it had come to the attention of the watchers. She knew, from what other people said, that there was no point protesting innocence. The police attitude would be that she must be guilty of something, else why would they want to question her? To suggest they might have made a mistake was to insult their competence, which was another crime.

Looking again, she saw that her appointment was for five this afternoon.

What had she done? Her family was deeply suspect, of course. Her father, Werner, was a capitalist, with a factory that the East German government could not touch because it was in West Berlin. Her mother, Carla, was a well-known Social Democrat. Her grandmother, Maud, was the sister of an English earl.

However, the authorities had not bothered the family for a couple of years, and Rebecca had imagined that her marriage to an official in the Justice Ministry might have gained them a ticket of respectability. Obviously not.

Had she committed any crimes? She owned a copy of George Orwell’s anti-Communist allegory
Animal Farm
, which was illegal. Her kid brother, Walli, who was fifteen, played the guitar and sang American protest songs such as ‘This Land is Your Land’. Rebecca sometimes went to West Berlin to see exhibitions of abstract painting. Communists were as conservative about art as Victorian matrons.

Washing her hands, she glanced in the mirror. She did not
look
scared. She had a straight nose and a strong chin and intense brown eyes. Her unruly dark hair was sharply pulled back. She was tall and statuesque, and some people found her intimidating. She could face a classroom full of boisterous eighteen-year-olds and silence them with a word.

But she
was
scared. What frightened her was the knowledge that the Stasi could do anything. There were no real restraints on them: complaining about them was a crime in itself. And that reminded her of the Red Army at the end of the war. The Soviet soldiers had been free to rob, rape and murder Germans, and they had used their freedom in an orgy of unspeakable barbarism.

Rebecca’s last class of the day was on the construction of the passive voice in Russian grammar, and it was a shambles, easily the worst lesson she had given since she qualified as a teacher. The pupils could not fail to know that something was wrong and, touchingly, they gave her an easy ride, even making helpful suggestions when she found herself lost for the right word. With their indulgence she got through it.

When school ended, Bernd was closeted in the head’s office with officials from the Education Ministry, presumably discussing how to keep the school open with half the staff gone. Rebecca did not want to go to Stasi headquarters without telling anyone, just in case they decided to keep her there, so she wrote him a note telling him of the summons.

Then she caught a bus through the wet streets to Normannen Strasse in the suburb of Lichtenberg.

The Stasi headquarters there was an ugly new office block. It was not finished, and there were bulldozers in the car park and scaffolding at one end. It showed a grim face in the rain, and would not look much more cheerful in sunshine.

When she went through the door she wondered if she would ever come out.

She crossed the vast atrium, presented her letter at a reception desk, and was escorted upstairs in an elevator. Her fear rose with the lift. She emerged into a corridor painted a nightmarish shade of mustard yellow. She was shown into a small bare room with a plastic-topped table and two uncomfortable chairs made of metal tubing. There was a pungent smell of paint. Her escort left.

She sat alone for five minutes, shaking. She wished she smoked: it might steady her. She struggled not to cry.

Sergeant Scholz came in. He was a little younger than Rebecca – about twenty-five, she guessed. He carried a thin file. He sat down, cleared his throat, opened the file and frowned. Rebecca thought he was trying to seem important, and she wondered whether this was his first interrogation.