Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [103]
In August 1964 the Rührdanzes were bought free for 40,000 western marks. But instead of being released into the west to be with their baby, they were dumped on the street in East Berlin with no papers. Frau Paul puts this down to their refusal of Dr Vogel as lawyer. Of the estimated 34,000 people bought free between 1963 and 1989 there are at this stage only nine documented cases of such cruelty, where the west paid hard currency and the east did not deliver the people whose freedom had been purchased.
Torsten was still living in the Westend Hospital. On 9 April 1965 when he was four years old Frau Paul had news of him from Sister Gisela, one of the nurses.
We all wish you and your husband a very healthy and happy Easter. Torsten has painted you an Easter picture, all by himself—brown Easter bunnies and a nest with colourful eggs. He said, ‘That is for my mummy, she’ll like that!’ Yesterday we received your lovely card, and we thank you on behalf of Torsten. He was so happy, we had to read it out to him straight away. He never lets it out of his little hands, and keeps looking at the Sandman on it…
My dear Mrs Rührdanz, Torsten is really coming along now. It is such a shame that you can’t be here to enjoy his progress. It could drive one to despair, this drama between parts of a single city!! But I don’t want to write about that.
Better some more news of Torsten. He weighs 9450g now and is 84cm tall. He speaks and understands everything like a six year old. He doesn’t miss a trick! He told me I should write you that he’s coming home soon to Kaulsdorf. Torsten can walk 5 m by himself! Apart from that he wheels around all afternoon about the station. Dear Mrs Rührdanz, every best wish from us and one thousand kisses from Torsten—for his Daddy too.
They waited another eight months before Torsten was well enough to be released from the Westend Hospital. When he came home to East Germany he was nearly five, small and bent and very polite.
‘Of course he didn’t recognise me as his mother,’ Frau Paul says. ‘He didn’t know what a mother was. He only knew the sterile atmosphere of the hospital and the staff there, the doctors, the sisters and the other personnel. Even though they all dealt very lovingly with him and they tried’—she’s crying now, hard—‘tried to create for him in whatever ways they could something like a family atmosphere, it just wasn’t his home. He was frightened. And when I…’ She has to stop because she can’t get the words out. ‘And when I took him in my arms for the first time and held him to me he must have thought, “What does this old lady want with me? She says she is my mother, but what is that, a mother?” He addressed us with the formal “Sie”. He would say, “Mother, would you kindly be able to make me a sandwich, I’m hungry,” or “Father, would you mind lifting me onto the chair, I can’t manage,” and this, this terrible distance. They made our boy a stranger to us.’ She lowers her voice. ‘And it was then I fought with myself the most: did I decide right in the interrogation when I refused to be used as bait for a kidnapping? Or should I have come to my son?’ She is weeping and weeping.
I’m upset too. It’s the small things that make you cry. The idea of nurses and doctors in West Berlin trying to tell a little boy what a family was, to prepare him for one. The idea that in justifying her decision of more than thirty years ago to me here today, there is no peace for Frau Paul. I am scrabbling for tissues which seem to exist only in various embarrassing degrees of decay in the bottom of my backpack. I don’t even think about Torsten.
The doorbell sounds, and Frau Paul gets up to answer it. She comes back into the room with a man whose age is hard to tell, but I know immediately it’s him. When I stand up to shake hands I tower over him and his hand fits inside mine. His body is small and hunched and his arms and legs seem crooked, spidery. His head