Puzzle People (9781613280126) (23 page)

34

Berlin
August 2003

Annie hadn’t found a thing. She had rifled through every desk drawer and all of Herr Adler’s stacks of paper. Nothing. In her frantic rush, it would have been easy to miss a single file devoted to documents gathered on Elsa Krauss. But perhaps Kurt was right. Maybe Herr Adler had already forwarded the material. Or maybe she was completely wrong about him. It wouldn’t be the first time she misjudged someone.

Panic was building as she realized she was pushing the time limit. But she pressed on, knowing that Kurt would call if Herr Adler was on his way into the building. She rummaged through the desk drawers again since there was a good chance she missed things on her first search.

This is ridiculous. So much paper. So many files. What are the odds?

After the second search of the desk drawers, she decided to give up. She was shocked that Kurt hadn’t called already, and she had a sneaking suspicion that something had gone wrong. But as she made the move to go, she realized that another source of information had been staring her straight in the face all along. Herr Adler’s planner.

His daily planner sat right on top of his desk, peeking out from under a yellow notepad. She dug it out and flipped wildly through the pages until she landed on yesterday’s date. She ran her finger down the list of names until she came to the lunch hour.

“E. F.” That was all it said, followed by a telephone number. She remembered, from her computer search, that Elsa’s married named was
Fleischer.
E. F. Elsa Fleischer? It had to be.

There was one way to find out for sure. Not trusting her memory, Annie rushed back to the desk and dug out a pen. She tried to write the phone number on the palm of her hand, but the pen was dry. She tried another, but it turned up dry as well. Leave it to Herr Adler to stock his top drawer with spent pens. Finally, she found one with ink, and in her panic, she accidentally stabbed the palm of her hand as she began to write.

She hadn’t even written out the full number before she heard sounds in the hall. Voices. Multiple voices. Men’s voices. Annie’s chest tightened, and she started breathing hard, and she wondered if she was suffering a heart attack.

As she hurried back to the desk to put away Herr Adler’s planner, the room began to spin, and she stumbled, knocking a small stack of papers to the floor. Trying to steady her breathing, she set the planner on the desk and tried to put it back just the way she remembered, tucked below the yellow notepad.

When she bent down to pick up the papers that she had spilled, she nearly blacked out. The voices outside the door were becoming louder, and she thought for sure that one of the voices was that of Herr Adler. She stared at her cell phone in confusion. There was no indication that Kurt had even attempted to call and warn her.

35

Leipzig, Germany
October 9, 1989

The communists had come to church.

When Stefan arrived at St. Nicholas at 4:00 p.m., an hour before the service was scheduled to start, he was shocked to find that the main floor of the Leipzig church was already beyond capacity. But he was even more shocked to see that many prominent members of the Communist Party, the SED, had taken up seats. This didn’t bode well for the night’s protest.

His friend Lora met him at the door, hooked him by the arm, and led him up the steps to the balcony. With the main floor of the church already overflowing, the only remaining seats were in the balcony. Stefan had been meeting Lora at the Monday prayer meetings at St. Nicholas every week for the past six months. They had shared a lot over this stretch of time, both being detained overnight for questioning after one of the September demonstrations. Just two nights ago, they had been there when the police clubbed and arrested demonstrators with abandon. But Lora was not discouraged; over the months, she had become even more passionate, and so had Stefan. On this night, she wore a light jacket that carried an emblem on the back depicting a muscular man wielding a hammer and beating his sword into the shape of a plow. Encircling the image were the words
Schwerter zu pflug-scharen.
“Swords into plowshares.”

“Can you believe it?” she said, gazing down on the clutch of communists.

“What are they doing here?” Stefan asked.

“They’re not here to pray, if that’s what you mean. Intimidation is their holy sacrament.”

The balcony was already filling up fast, and Stefan continued to stare down at the sanctuary floor, where the pews were packed solid and people had filled the wings by standing in the aisles. Many sat on the floor in the main aisle.

“Party members everywhere,” he said. Rows of serious men, sitting side by side, formed a human wall of somber expressions and shuffling newspapers. Many of them were reading the
Neues Deutschland.
The church was charged with tension.

“They had a party meeting today and decided to stage this sit-in,” Lora said. “There are hundreds of them.”

St. Nicholas and the city of Leipzig, close to one hundred miles south of Berlin, was the center of the protest movement in East Germany. What had started with a handful of people at a prayer meeting every Monday in the early 1980s had attracted thousands by 1989, and it was spreading across Leipzig and across East Germany to other churches in Dresden and Berlin. Every week, the area surrounding St. Nicholas became a military encampment. Police everywhere. Dogs. Guns. Water cannons. The works.

Stefan, like everyone, feared the “Chinese solution.” Earlier in the year, June 4, the Chinese military opened fire on the peaceful protestors on Tiananmen Square. Wherever you looked, the communist record was ominous and predictable. The 1953 uprising in East Germany: suppressed by Soviet tanks. The 1956 revolution in Hungary: suppressed by Soviet tanks. The 1968 Prague Spring uprising in Czechoslovakia: suppressed by Soviet tanks. Stefan hadn’t seen any tanks this night, but the military and the police were heavily armed and wearing riot gear. He had also heard that Leipzig hospitals were stocking up on blood. When he looked around the church, he noticed that there were no children in sight. Everyone knew better than to bring children into what could become a death trap.

Lora leaned so far over the balcony that Stefan feared she would tumble over, so he took her by the shoulders and eased her back. She turned and smiled. She was petite and had very blue eyes and pale skin, and her right ear poked out from behind her shoulder-length chestnut hair. For such a short woman, her laugh and her voice were surprisingly husky. Normally, she went light on the makeup, but tonight he noticed that her lips were unusually red. At this point, they were just friends, fellow adventurers who had stumbled across each other in St. Nicholas Church. He had told her everything about his past, and she accepted him. She said he had made
Die Wende—the
change, or the turn.
Die Wende
was also the phrase being used to describe what was happening throughout the country. Changes were sweeping the East. The world was reversing on its axis.

When the church reached its capacity—overflowed its capacity, actually—the doors were closed. People outside began to pound on the door, like people pounding on the doors of the sealed ark. But St. Nicholas could hold no more.

Stefan loved this ancient church—one of the most beautiful he had ever seen, painted in pastels of pink and green. He particularly loved the columns, which rose up from the floor like typical Romanesque columns. But where the columns met the ceiling, the stone rigidity blossomed out into sculptured greenery, as if the columns were living things holding up the roof, as if real plants sprouted from the tops of the columns and grew across the ceiling. Stefan didn’t know what the architect intended, but he took it to mean that there was real life in this stone structure—the church was a living organism.

Down below, the pastor began to speak—a minister with the improbable name of Christian Führer. Lora leaned over again, and this time Stefan joined her, side by side. The packed church went silent as Pastor Führer welcomed everyone to the service. He made a point of staring into the crowd of Party members when he stressed that
everyone
was welcome in St. Nicholas.

“Pastor Führer knows an opportunity when he sees one,” Lora whispered. “It isn’t every day you get to preach to several hundred hard-core communists.”

And preach he did. There were also prayers for the people who had been arrested during the demonstrations, as well as for the people who had been beaten just two days earlier. Then one of the congregants came to the front and began to read the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Throughout the entire service, Stefan kept his eyes on the Communist Party men. Most had put away their newspapers, and many were even bowing their heads when asked to do so.

During the moments of prayer, he could hear the chants of the crowd outside—a storm raging outside the walls. He could also hear the squawk of loudspeakers. But most of all, he could hear the shrill whistling of the crowd outside—a piercing, eerie sound, like a million insects, that would rise and fall in intensity. The police were probably trying to disperse the crowd, but their pleas were being drowned out by incessant whistling. Were the crowds beginning to battle the police? If the demonstrators got violent, if there were any signs of rowdiness, the police would use it as an excuse to attack, and the extra blood being collected by hospitals would be put to good use. But Stefan heard no gunfire. Just whistling. More whistling. Occasionally, people would pound again on the doors.

Blessed are the peacemakers . . .

At six o’clock, the doors opened, and two and a half thousand people began to file out of the church.

“This is it,” Lora said, gripping Stefan by the arm. He was afraid of what they might see outside the church doors. Would they walk out into a battlefield?

The church emptied in solemn silence. When they reached the church floor, Stefan and Lora exited side by side with one of the men carrying a newspaper. An obvious Party member. He kept on a stony expression, eyes forward.

The sight that greeted them outside, in the night, took Stefan’s breath away. They walked into an ocean of humanity, a sea that parted to let the congregants exit the church. People everywhere, as far as he could see—and no signs of violence. There had to be thousands upon thousands. Many were holding candles, creating constellations of light on Karl Marx Square. The crowd was so large that it spilled onto side streets. People were chanting.

“We are the people!”

“Allow New Forum!”

“Gorby help us!”

Stefan took Lora’s hand—more out of a need to keep them from being separated by the crowd than anything else. The police were dressed in riot gear, armed to the teeth. But if they started firing, Stefan and Lora would more likely be killed in a stampede than by bullets.

Slowly, the crowd began to move forward as one, a single organism. They moved north up Ring Boulevard past the opera house and headed toward the massive train station. On every other Monday night, this was where the police had stopped the demonstrators. This was where it could get violent. This was where the Chinese solution could begin.

A small group of men started shouting, “Stasi out!” It was the kind of provocative chant that could trigger an incident. But the crowd swamped these chants with shouts of, “No violence! No violence! No violence!”

The crowd moved on, past the train station. The soldiers and the police did not make a move to stop them as the people rounded the Ring Boulevard bend and made the turn to the west. Over loudspeakers, Stefan could hear the Appeal of the Six being broadcast—an appeal for peace by six of the demonstration leaders.

Suddenly, the slow procession came to a halt.

“What’s happening?” Lora asked, hopping up and down, trying to see down the road.

No sound of gunfire. But a palpable tension shuddered through the crowd. They were hemmed in on all sides by a wall of humanity. They were caught in a hive, and the whistling began again. It was almost deafening.

“They stopped us by the footbridge!” one man shouted, barely audible above the whistling. “They’ve cordoned off the boulevard!”

But the crowd surged forward again. Still no gunfire. No water cannons. No tear gas. They turned south on Ring Boulevard, but up ahead lay the greatest test of all—Round Corner. Stasi headquarters. True to its name, the Stasi’s stone headquarters was rounded on the front as the road made a slight jog to the left.

Stefan knew the Round Corner building well. He had been brought there for questioning numerous times and had faced multiple threats. When he first came to Leipzig several years ago, he tried to foreswear his job as an informer. They ordered him to infiltrate the church, and he resisted at first, but they took away his job as a printer and threatened him with prison, so he relented and returned to snooping. He infiltrated the peace groups in St. Nicholas Church, and as Providence would have it, this assignment became his redemption. He entered the church as Judas, but he renounced that role at the end of 1988. He threw his thirty pieces of silver in the face of his handler, losing his printing job once again. But the church took him on as a maintenance man and provided him some protection from the authorities. He got by.

As the crowd flowed past Stasi headquarters, some shouted insults at the darkened building. Others placed their candles on the steps leading into the Round Corner headquarters. Some knelt and prayed.

By this time, amazement had spread through the crowd, a surge of joy. They had made it around the inner city without incident. Genuine smiles replaced taut expressions. The chant picked up volume: “We are the people! We are the people!” Stefan and Lora joined in, walking side by side, close together with an arm wrapped around each other’s shoulders. The chant became a roar as the massive crowd made the turn and began a second lap around the inner city. Stefan and Lora stopped only once, as they reached the train station for a second time. They stopped to embrace and kiss, and Stefan suddenly realized that their relationship had taken a turn, every bit as dramatic as their country’s turn.

Die Wende.
The Turn. Stefan’s life had made a compete reversal, and he knew, with certainty, on October 9, that he would rather die than ever go back to being an informer.