Stasiland (20 page)
What am I doing here?
People are looking at me. I walk away, and see that the diving pool is utterly empty. I will obey. I won’t swim in the non-swimming time. I slip into the diving pool and sit in the corner. No-one can see me here, and there cannot be rules that I am breaking. What am I doing here?
My body is weightless and my legs out of perspective. They are both foreshortened, and far away. And then it comes. I’m making portraits of people, East Germans, of whom there will be none left in a generation. And I’m painting a picture of a city on the old fault-line of east and west. This is working against forgetting, and against time.
Another whistle sounds, very loud. I look up and the warden is standing over me, so close he could have whispered to get my attention. ‘This is a diving pool,’ he says. ‘It is only for diving.’ I’m speechless, so he adds for good measure, ‘You are not diving.’
He’s got me there. Then again, no-one else is diving either. But I can’t argue with a man armed with a whistle and prepared to use it, so I get out again.
In the changing room a rotund woman in some kind of uniform tells me my bathers are dripping on the floor.
‘That’s because they are wet,’ I say. She comes towards me, about to say something else, but I pick up my bag and go. Too many rules.
Several days pass in which my main activity seems to be feeding and emptying the heater. Now I’m rugged up and off to the station. Near the entrance there’s a photographer’s studio. I always look in the window at the prints on display to see the locals as they want to be seen. There are bald babies with ribbons around their heads; there’s a wedding shot with the bride on a motorbike like a package deal; there’s a young man with a mullet haircut holding proudly onto his girlfriend as if he just caught her. The photos change from time to time but today, as always, there is one of a woman of staggering beauty, beauty so fine I stare at it as if it were a puzzle, or an answer.
On the train another beautiful woman sits opposite me. She has a baby in a halter on her chest. I wonder whether others notice the loveliness of the women here, or are used to it. The Turkish man next to me is otherwise absorbed. He can see his own reflection in the window next to the woman, so he pulls a comb from his pocket and draws it lovingly through his moustache. The young mother is looking down at her baby and I can’t take my gaze away from them. When she raises her head I see she has a pierced nose and that her blue eyes are crossed, just slightly, drawn to the stud as to a magnet.
I stand at the edge of the carpark at Potsdam station. All the other passengers stream ahead past me, to cars and trams and places they know. When they’re gone I am alone, except for a man in jeans leaning on the bonnet of the biggest, blackest BMW I have ever seen. He waves at me. This is my lift. This is my latest Stasi man.
Herr Christian shakes my hand warmly. He has a big crooked smile. ‘I thought a tour would be a good idea,’ he says, his voice airy and smoky, ‘to show you some of the places we operated.’
‘Great.’
He opens the car door for me, springs around the other side and jumps in.
I look across. It’s quite a long way. Herr Christian is in his mid-forties, with a young flat face and a nose that has been broken several times. His hair is bunched in wiry blond curls close to his head, his eyes are small and blue and sparkly. He looks straight at me, smiling his lopsided smile like a gangster, or an angel.
‘Let’s go,’ he says and I notice he lisps. He puts his sunglasses on, and turns the ignition.
The machine coasts the roads like a cruiser. He handles it lightly, more like a boy with a toy than a man with a vast black asset. We drive through the streets of Potsdam, over cobbles we don’t feel and past grand buildings in various states of disrepair. The windows are dark and no-one can see us in here.
We pull up in front of a well-kept yellow mansion with white lintels and a hedge garden. ‘This,’ he says, ‘was the “Coding Villa”.’ Herr Christian used to work here, encoding transcripts of telephone conversations intercepted from carphones and police walkie-talkies in the west. ‘They’d come in by telex, and we’d turn them into code and send them on to Berlin.’ He chuckles. ‘We’d encode every last thing that was said, including
Ja
,
Guten Tag
and what they had for lunch. In Berlin, they had to know
everything
. Mind you, we did catch a lot of western politicians talking among themselves too.’
We depart from the kerb. The plane trees along the streets are bare, with mottled trunks and limbs ending in clotted stumps. They make spirit patterns of light and dark over the bonnet. Herr Christian is chatty and at ease. He has a sense of fun about what he did with the Stasi. He talks to me like a co-conspirator. ‘I was never very ideological,’ he says. We leave Potsdam city behind us, and sail down a freeway. We are gaining on a frog-green Trabi, with black-tinted windows and a smoking exhaust. Written across the boot in crinkle-cut neon-pink letters is the message, ‘I am your worst nightmare.’ We laugh as we pass it.
When Herr Christian was nineteen and doing his military service, he was summoned to a special room for an interview. ‘I wondered what I’d done wrong,’ he says. The man inside was wearing a suit and smoking western cigarettes, and he asked Herr Christian what he wanted to do with his life.
‘Box with the Club Dynamo,’ Herr Christian said. Dynamo was the sporting club of the armed forces, and the Stasi. The man got him to sign an undertaking to work for the Stasi. ‘It wasn’t a problem for me,’ he says. ‘I thought it might lead to a bit of adventure.’ A car accident later ended his boxing career, but he stayed with the Firm. ‘I’ve always had an acute sense of duty to obey the law,’ he says, ‘and I thought it was the right thing to do.’
We pull off the freeway, down a disused road. The forest on either side is tall dark pines, all the same height and planted in rows. The car dips up and over the road like a boat, until we reach a fence with a ‘Keep Out’ sign on it. Herr Christian drives straight in. We come to what looks like a mound of earth. There are outbuildings scattered around.
He turns to me and his leather jacket makes a sticky noise on the leather seats. ‘This was the bunker for the leading cadre of the Potsdam Stasi in the event of a nuclear catastrophe,’ he says. ‘I guarded it for a while. The entrance was in one of those buildings’—he points to a grey fibro-cement hut—‘and you walked down steps to a huge concrete complex under the ground. When they built it, they had to move tonnes and tonnes of earth in trucks disguised as animal transports, and dump it far away. The bunker had everything you can imagine inside it—food and medicine and sleeping quarters, communications equipment, table tennis, the lot.’ There were many bunkers in the GDR, for the Stasi to save themselves in and repopulate the earth—if they remembered to take any women with them.
A policeman in green uniform comes towards us. He is young and clean-shaven and has an alsatian dog on a lead. ‘What business do you have here?’ he asks.
Herr Christian tells him he used to guard this place when it was a Stasi bunker.
‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ he says. ‘This is federal property and I must ask you to leave.’
In the car Herr Christian asks, ‘I wonder what they are using it for now?’
Instead of going back the way we came to the freeway, he manoeuvres the car along a series of muddy tracks through the pines. At several points there’s a break in the trees and I see where the Wall used to be, a strip which is now a sandy gash in the forest with earth-moving equipment on it, and old guard towers covered in graffiti. I ask him what he does for a living these days.
‘I’m a, uh, private detective,’ he says self-consciously. ‘Yep. I’m pretty much doing the same job as I did back then. In this, my second life.’
‘How’s business?’
‘Not so great actually,’ he says. ‘The jobs don’t come in as regularly as I’d like, and many of them are the kinds of jobs,’ he coughs a little, ‘that I don’t take.’ He looks across at me under his eyebrows.
‘What kind is that?’
‘Marriage work,’ he says, turning back to the track. ‘I won’t touch it. Where one spouse suspects another of having an affair and wants them tailed.’ He lights a cigarette from a softpack of Stuyvesants and drags deeply. ‘When I was first with the Stasi I was married, but we weren’t happy, and I fell in love with one of my son’s teachers. We began an affair. I confided in my best friend, but he turned out to have what you might call an overdeveloped sense of loyalty—and he told them at work. They locked me up in solitary for three days. Then they demoted me to working on a building site for a year. My supervisor said, “Anyone can have an affair, but
everything
must be reported.”’
The Stasi could not bear it that one of their own had something in his life that they didn’t know about. But Herr Christian, it seems, has always known that some things are private. He exhales two streams of smoke from his nostrils into the blackness of the car. ‘I was scared, you know, when I worked on that building site. I knew so much from having been in the coding centre that I thought they’d come after me. I was scared I’d suffer some traffic accident or a mishap at work or that in some other way a sentence would be carried out.’ He shakes his head. ‘I just won’t do marriage work. It’s beneath my dignity.’
After his stint on the building site, and after he had married his new love, Herr Christian was accepted back into the fold and put on duty as a covert security officer on Stasi buildings. ‘Now we should be right near where I did most of my work,’ he says, ‘the Rest Stop Michendorf.’ We emerge from the neat sad forest, and travel along the freeway to an ordinary-looking truck stop. The main building is two storeys of grey concrete, with a café underneath. It was the last stop on the freeway before cars from the west entered West Berlin. It is still in use, the old bowsers standing bent-elbowed out the front, beside two new pink phone-boxes from Deutsche Telekom.
We get out and walk around on the gravel. Herr Christian pushes his glasses on top of his head and lights another cigarette. ‘In my day, we had this place completely under surveillance. That room over the top there,’ he says, pointing to some dark dormer windows, ‘was occupied day and night. And from it we had an overview of everything that happened here—of all the vehicles passing from east to west. It was top secret. The petrol-station attendants were mainly informers, but not even they knew what went on up there.
‘We always had at least two people in civilian clothes around, for observations on the ground. That was my job. I’d have a recording device in my pocket, or if I was in a car, it would have cameras in the headlights. We had eavesdropping equipment that could catch the conversations in the vehicles. There was a camera in that bowser there,’ he points to the petrol pump, ‘which I could operate remotely to get a close-up shot of someone if I was standing in the background. We had it pretty much covered.’
Herr Christian’s job here was to hunt out the cars which might have stowaway East Germans in them trying to escape. We walk around the rest stop to the other side. The sky is the same colour as the concrete; we are sandwiched in grey. The tip of my nose and my earlobes are starting to pulse with cold. ‘People-smuggling to the west was a business, run by criminals really—they’d take huge sums of money from the poor souls they were smuggling after they got them through, something like 20,000 westmarks. Or, they’d make them pay earlier, with family heirlooms or stamp collections. The western car would pull off at a spot along the transit route and the easterners would meet it, pay over and get in. I saw some terrible things. People would drug their children and put them in the boot. I opened a boot once and found a woman with her child inside. Because I was in civilian clothes they thought that I was with the smuggling organ-isation. I remember the joy on their faces for the instant they thought they were in freedom.’ He stubs out his cigarette and puts his hands in the pockets of his jacket, shoulders hunched against the grey air. ‘I have to say that was bitter, because I am a sensitive man. But I am also a stickler for the law, and I thought that what they were doing was wrong, and I’d been brought up to think that from my earliest kindergarten days.’
‘What would have happened to them?’
‘We took them to remand at Potsdam. Then they would have been convicted. They usually got one and a half to two years. That was the law.
‘There were parts of it that were fun though,’ he says, his breath like more smoke in this cold. ‘I think I had the only job in the world where I got to go into a warehouse each morning and decide, “Who will I be today?”’ He laughs. ‘I got to choose a disguise. Sometimes I’d be a park ranger—that was a green uniform, sometimes a garbage collector in overalls, or someone come to repair the wiring. I really liked being a western tourist because the clothes were much better quality—real leather gloves—and I got to drive a Mercedes, or at least a VW Golf.’
We walk back to the BMW and he clicks it awake. ‘But do you know what was best?’ he asks, turning to me. ‘Best of all’—he gives me a mock punch on the shoulder—‘was when I’d dress up as a blind man: I’d have the cane, the glasses, the armband with three dots. Sometimes I’d even get a girl as a guide on my arm. I’d have to remember to take my watch off though!’ He looks around this barren place, enjoying the memory of work well done. A car passes; we are just two small figures climbing into a large car at a petrol station. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘being a blind man is the best way to observe people.’ He chortles, pushes his dark glasses over his eyes and starts the engine of his huge black machine.
In August 1961, a fresh Stasi recruit named Hagen Koch walked the streets of Berlin with a tin of paint and a brush, and painted the line where the Wall would go. He was twenty-one years old, and he was Secretary-General Honecker’s personal cartographer. Unlike most heads of state, Honecker needed a personal cartographer, because he was redrawing the limits of the free world.
