He started taking the U-Bahn out to Normannenstraße and mingling with the protesters at the Stasi compound, collecting rumors. The Stasi was said to be shredding and burning documents around the clock. It was said to be hauling them by the truckload to Moscow and Romania. He tried to imagine the scenario in which his own file was destroyed or deported, but the Stasi was undoubtedly being methodically German and working from the top down, attending first to the documents that compromised its own officers and spies, and there were surely enough of those to fill the shredders and furnaces and trucks for months.
When the weather was decent, larger crowds of concerned citizens gathered outside the compound. On ugly afternoons only the hard core showed up, always the same faces, men and women who’d been interrogated and imprisoned for bad reasons and bore adamantine grudges against the ministry. The one Andreas liked best was a guy his own age who’d been spirited off the street in his late teens, after he’d defended a female classmate from the sexual advances of a Stasi commander’s son. He’d been warned once, and he’d ignored the warning. For this, he’d spent six years in two prisons. He retold his story incessantly, to anyone who would listen, and it never failed to move Andreas. He wondered what had become of the girl.
And then one evening in early December, returning to the church, he opened his door and saw, sitting on his bed, calmly reading the Berliner Zeitung, his mother.
His breathing stopped. He just stood in the doorway and looked at her. She was perilously thin but smartly dressed and generally well put together. She folded the newspaper and stood up. “I was curious about where you’ve been living.”
She was still diabolically lovely. Her hair the same unbelievable red. Her features sharper but her skin unwrinkled.
“You have books I’d like to borrow,” she said, moving to his shelves. “It does my heart good to see how many of them are English.” She pulled a title off a shelf. “Do you admire Iris Murdoch as much as I do?”
He found his breath and said, “What brings you here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Desire to see my only child, after nine years? Is that so strange?”
“I wish you would leave.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I wish you would leave.”
“No, don’t say that,” she said, reshelving the book. “Let’s sit and talk a little bit. Nothing bad can happen to us now. You of all people should be aware of that.”
She was violating the room, violating him, and yet some traitorous part of him was overjoyed to see her. Had spent nine years pining for her. Had looked for her in fifty-three girls without finding her. It was terrible how much he loved her.
“Sit with me,” she said, “and tell me how you are. You look wonderful.” She smiled warmly as her gaze moved up and down him. “My beautiful strong son.”
“I’m not your son.”
“Don’t be silly. We’ve had some hard years, but that’s all behind us now.” The warmth left her smile. “Forty years of living with the swine who drove my father to suicide—that’s all behind us. Forty years of appeasing the stupidest, boringest, meanest, ugliest, most stink-cowardly self-satisfied philistines the world has ever seen. All behind us. Poof!”
Her stream of pejoratives ought to have counted as refreshing honesty, but the self-regard that impelled them was unchanged, and so to him they only deepened her offense. In the old days, she’d been similarly gaily vicious about the U.S. government. He thought he might have to strangle her, to stop her from emitting her toxic self-regard, to save his life. The second murder was always easier than the first.
“So let’s sit and talk,” she said.
“No.”
“Andreas,” she said lullingly. “It’s over. It’s been terribly hard for your father, obviously. The one man in this country with real intelligence and integrity. The one person truly trying to serve his country and not himself. He’s inconsolable. I wish you’d come and see him.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Can you not understand and forgive him? You put him in a terrible position. It seems so silly now, but it wasn’t silly then. He could either serve his country or be the father of a state-subverting poet.”
“Not a difficult choice, given that I’m not even his son.”
She sighed. “I wish you’d stop with that.”
He saw that she was right: it didn’t matter. He no longer cared who his father was, couldn’t begin to connect with the younger self to whom it had mattered. Maybe it had to do with his having crushed a man’s skull with a shovel, but his old anger was gone. All that was left were the more basic emotions of love and loathing.
“We’ll be fine,” Katya said. “Even your father. These are just difficult days for him. He’s known for at least five years that the end was coming, but it’s killing him to watch it happen. The new cabinet wants to keep him, but he’s planning to resign at the end of the year. We’ll be fine—he has a brilliant mind, he’s not too old to teach.”
“All’s well that ends well.”
“He didn’t do anything wrong. There were murderers and thieves in the government, but he wasn’t one of them.”
“Although he did abet them for forty years.”
She pulled herself up straight. “I still believe in socialism—it’s working in France and Sweden. If you want to blame someone, blame the Soviet swine. Your father and I did our best with what we had. I’ll never apologize for that.”
Politics, collective guilt, collaboration—the whole subject bored him more than ever.
“Anyway,” Katya said, “I thought you might want to come home. You can have your old room back, it’s certainly more comfortable than this … room. I imagine you’ll be going back to school, and you can stay with us rent-free. We can start over as a family.”
“That sounds good to you?”
“Honestly, yes. You could stay in the dacha instead if you’d prefer, but that’s a long train ride. There’s also a chance that we’ll be selling it.”
“What?”
“I know, it’s hard to believe, but Wessi speculators are already sniffing all over the city. One of them was out at the Müggelsee, talking to our neighbors, promising hard currency.”
“You’d sell the dacha,” he said dully.
“Well, it’s ugly. Your father doesn’t think so, but that’s just sentimentality. The speculator was talking about bulldozing all the lakefront houses for a golf course. The Wessis aren’t so sentimental.”
Beyond his dread at the thought of bulldozers, he felt betrayed by the Republic. Everything it touched turned to shit. It couldn’t even defend itself against Wessi speculators. He’d known all along how ridiculously inept it was, but its ineptitude wasn’t funny now.
“What are you thinking?” Katya said with a note of coyness.
There was only one thing to be done. He stepped all the way into the room and closed the door behind him. “You want me to come home,” he said.
“It would mean the world to me. It’s time for you to thrive again. With the mind you have, you could have a doctorate in three years.”
“Thriving would be nice, I agree. But you have to do something for me first.”
She pouted. “I’m not sure I like it when you bargain with me.”
“It’s not what you think. I don’t care what you’ve done. Truly I don’t. What I have in mind is something else entirely.”
He watched as a strange thing happened in her face, a subtle but crazy-looking modulation of expressions, some interior struggle made visible—her fantasy of being a loving mother, her resentment at the bother of it. He almost felt sorry for her. She wanted things to be easy for her and had no strength or patience when they weren’t.
“I’ll come home,” he said, “but first I need something from State Security. I need everything they have on me. Every file. I need it in my hands.”
She frowned. “What do they have?”
“Some bad things, possibly. Things that would make
it hard for me to thrive. Things that would embarrass you.”
“What did you do? Did you do something?”
He was greatly relieved to hear her ask. Evidently, the Stasi had suspended its investigation on its own initiative, without informing his parents.
“You don’t need to know,” he said. “You just need to get me the files. I’ll take care of it from there.”
“Everybody wants their file now. All over the country, collaborators are quaking in their hideous shoes, and the Stasi knows it. Those files are its insurance policy.”
“Yeah, but I’m guessing that members of the Central Committee are not so afraid. At this point, a request for my files would almost be routine.”
She searched his face with frightened eyes. “What did you do?”
“Nothing you wouldn’t be proud of, if you knew the facts. But the rest of the world might see it differently.”
“I can ask your father,” she said. “But he’s barely recovered from your last transgression. This might not be the best time to mention a new one.”
“Don’t you love me, Mother?”
Cornered by the question, she agreed to try to help him. Before she left the church, it seemed necessary to both of them that they embrace, and what an odd embrace it was, what a sick transaction. She, who wasn’t capable of real love, pretended to love him while he, who really did love her, exploited her pretended love. He took refuge in the chamber of his mind where his purer love of Annagret was locked away.
A week went by, and then another week. Christmas came and went, and still he heard nothing from his mother. Was it possible she’d already gotten the files and read them? Was she rethinking whether she wanted him in her life again? She’d already decided once before that she could live without him.
He finally called her on the day before New Year’s.
“It’s your father’s last day of work,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m a little worried about that,” he said. “His lack of leverage as a private citizen.”
She didn’t reply.
“Mother? Should I be worried?”
“I’m feeling somewhat bullied, Andreas. I feel as if you’re taking advantage of my wish for reconciliation.”
“Did you ask him or didn’t you?”
“I’ve been waiting for the right moment. He’s terribly discouraged. It might be better if you came and asked him yourself.”
“You mean, now that it’s too late?”
“Why don’t you just tell me what you think is in the files. I’m sure it’s not so bad.”
“I can’t believe you let three weeks go by!”
“Please don’t shout at me. You’re forgetting who your relatives are.”
“Markus has nothing to do with domestic operations.”
“His name carries weight. Your family is still royalty in this pigsty. And your father is still on the Central Committee.”
“Well, then, please ask him.”
“First I’d like to know what it is you’re hiding.”
If he’d thought it would help him, he would happily have told her the story, but his instincts told him not to do it—specifically, not to refer in any way to Annagret’s existence. And so he said, instead, “I’m going to be famous, Mother.” This hadn’t occurred to him until this moment, but he recognized the truth of it immediately: he had it in him to be famous. “I’m going to thrive and be famous, and you’re going to be very glad to be my parent. But if you don’t get me the files, I’m going to be famous in a different way. A way you won’t like.”
Two further weeks of waiting followed. Now even on dark days the crowd on Normannenstraße was large, and then suddenly, one miserable raw afternoon, it was enormous. Near the main gate of the compound, Andreas stepped up onto the bumper of a truck to gauge it. People were massed as far as he could see. Thousands of them. Banners, pickets, chanting, TV crews.
Stasi RAUS. Stasi RAUS. Stasi RAUS …
People were pushing on the plate-metal gate, scaling it by the handle and hinges, shouting at the guards within. And then, inexplicably, and to his horror, the gate swung inward.
He was still standing on the bumper of the truck, many layers of body away from the gate. He jumped down and joined the crowd pressing forward, keeping his hand on a leather jacket ahead of him, preserving some space in case of a crush from behind.
A young woman to his left spoke to him affectionately. “Hey, you.”
Her face was sweet but only vaguely familiar, maybe not familiar at all. “Hello,” he said.
“My God,” she said. “You don’t even remember me.”
“Sure I do.”
“Yeah.” She smiled, not nicely. “Sure you do.”
He hung back long enough for another forward-pushing body to replace her at his side. The voices around him were subdued, maybe with reverence, maybe out of old habit of submission, but after he’d squeezed through the gate and entered the courtyard he could hear rowdy shouting in the building ahead of him. By the time he made it inside, there was already broken glass on the floor and spray paint on the walls. The trend of the crowd was up the central stairs, up to the floors where the offices of Mielke and other senior officers were said to be. Papers were falling from above, the single sheets floating lazily, the bunched ones plummeting. When he reached the stairs, he turned back and looked at the faces coming at him, faces so vivid they seemed to be moving in slow motion, faces red or gray with cold, faces of wonder, triumph, curiosity. Near the front door, uniformed guards were observing with stony indifference. He bucked the flow and approached one. “Where are the archives?” he said.
The guard raised his hands and spread them, palms up.
“Oh come on,” Andreas said. “Do you think you’re going to undo what’s happening here?”
The guard shrugged again with his hands.
Outside again, in the courtyard, through which citizens were continuing to pour like pilgrims, he considered what was happening. To appease the crowd, someone had made the decision to open the main administration building, which had presumably been cleansed of anything compromising. The entire action was symbolic, ritual, maybe even scripted. There were at least a dozen other buildings in the compound, and nobody was trying to get into them.
“The archives!” he shouted. “Let’s find the archives!”
Some heads in the crowd turned to him, but everyone kept moving forward, intent on the symbolic penetration of the inner sanctum. In the light of TV cameras and photo flashes, papers were drifting down from broken windows. Andreas went to the fence at the south end of the courtyard and looked at the largest and darkest of the other buildings. Even if he could somehow lead a charge into the archives, his chances of locating his files on his own were close to nil. They were in there somewhere, but the opening of the gate hadn’t helped him in the slightest. It had only weakened his friend, the Stasi.
Twenty minutes later, he was pressing a button in the vestibule of his parents’ building. The voice that crackled over the intercom was his father’s.
“It’s me,” Andreas said. “Your son.”
When he got to the top floor, an old man in a cardigan was standing at the open door of his parents’ flat. Andreas was shocked by the change in him. He was shorter, frailer, stooped, with hollows on his cheeks and throat. He extended a hand to shake, but Andreas put his arms around him. After a moment, his father returned the embrace.
“Your mother is at a lecture tonight,” he said, ushering Andreas inside. “I was just eating a blood sausage. I can boil you one if you’re hungry.”
“I’m fine. Just a glass of water.”
The new decor in the flat was leather and chrome, with overly bright older-person lighting. A purplish pool of sausage matter was congealing on a lonely plate. His father’s hands trembled as he poured from a bottle of mineral water and handed him a glass.
“You should eat your sausage while it’s warm,” Andreas said, sitting down at the table.
Hi
s father pushed his plate aside. “I can boil another later if I’m hungry.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m physically well. Older, as you see.”
“You look great.”
His father sat down at the table and said nothing. He’d never been an eye-contact kind of man.
“I take it you’re not watching the news,” Andreas said.
“I lost my appetite for news some months ago.”
“They’re storming Stasi headquarters as we speak. Thousands of people. They’re in the main building.”
His father merely nodded, as if in assent.
“You’re a good man,” Andreas said. “I’m sorry I’ve made life harder for you. My problem was never with you.”
“Every society has rules,” his father said. “A person either follows them or he doesn’t.”
“I respect that you followed them. I’m not here to accuse you. I’m here to ask a favor.”
His father nodded again. Down on Karl-Marx-Allee, cars were honking in what sounded like celebration.
“Did Mother tell you that I need a favor?”
His father’s face became sad. “Your mother had a lengthy file of her own,” he said.
Andreas was so startled by the non sequitur that he didn’t know what to say.
“Over the years,” his father continued, “she has had repeated episodes during which she behaved irresponsibly. She’s a committed socialist and a loyal citizen, but there have been embarrassments. Quite a number of them. I suspect that you’re aware of this.”
“It does me good to hear it from you.”
His father made a demurring gesture with his fingers. “We have had, for some years, issues of command and control with the Ministry for State Security. I’ve been fortunate in my dealings with it, thanks to my cousin and to my oversight of its budget. But the ministry has considerable autonomy, and a relationship is a two-way street. I’ve asked many favors of it, over the years, and I now have very little to offer it in return. I’m afraid that such goodwill as I still had was exhausted when I obtained your mother’s file for her. She still has many years of professional life ahead of her, and it was important to her, going forward, that no record of her past behavior come to light.”