Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [108]
Somehow, back in September, it became clear to Herr Bohnsack that the files would have to be destroyed. He told his boss he was going to start shredding. ‘It is not allowed!’ the boss said, ‘There is no order to do so!’ ‘But,’ Herr Bohnsack says, ‘I just drove my car into the yard and got the files out of the filing cabinets. There were metres and metres of them—agents’ key files, films, reports—and I drove to our garden one hundred kilometres away from Berlin.’ The family had an old baker’s oven on its holiday plot. And then, ‘totally privately and personally, without any permission and without any command,’ he says, ‘I destroyed everything, all day long.’ There was so much paper to burn the oven nearly collapsed. A cloud of black smoke hung over him in the sky. Herr Bohnsack stood there for three days, feeding the files into the fire.
The weak afternoon light is fading and the publican comes in to turn on some lamps. He is a man of Herr Bohnsack’s age, with a ravaged face, red hands and a tea towel tucked into his apron. ‘Everything all right here?’ he asks.
Herr Bohnsack orders another beer, another Korn and a coffee. I say I’m fine for the moment. Herr Bohnsack smiles gently at me. ‘You, no?’ he says. ‘You are utterly without need?’ I glimpse beneath the genial drinker a man who was the match of anyone east or west.
Herr Bohnsack wanted to stop his files getting into the wrong hands. They concerned the western agents he ran, West German citizens who did things for the Stasi. ‘In my section,’ he says, ‘they were all journalists. We used them to start scandals, or break open political cover-ups. We funded them, and we fed them scoops.’
The smoke attracted attention. Bohnsack’s neighbour in the country, he says, was a hopeless soak. ‘But of course even he had a suspicion about where I worked. We call it the Stallgeruch (the smell of the sty). He used to lean over the fence and slur abuse at me: “Old Shiny Bum” and “SED” and all kinds of insults. He was there again, drunk as usual while I was burning it all up. And as the smoke passed over his house he began singing the anthem of the citizens’ rights movement, “Wir Sind das Volk”. He knew exactly what I was doing. It was grotesque really,’ Bohnsack chuckles, ‘his aria to accompany my burning pyre.’
I look at Herr Bohnsack in all his clever dishevelment—a strand of his hair has left the rest and sticks out at an angle above his ear. He tilts his head back to drain his shot glass again. His neck is ringed and ridged, the Adam’s apple moving up and down like a mouse on a ladder.
Herr Bohnsack looks around him. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘I was always a regular. I had my spot at the bar. I have lived around the corner for thirty-eight years. Before 1989 I was always just Günter—hello how’s it going. People didn’t know what I did, but of course they had their suspicions. Sometimes I’d come straight from work in a tie and a stylish overcoat with a briefcase and there’d be a rumble through the pub of “doesn’t he look fine”.’ They would have a sniff as much as to say something’s not quite right here—’
He pinches his nose between forefinger and thumb. ‘The Wall fell on the ninth of November 1989. The first time I came in here afterwards, I think it was the fifteenth.’ He pauses, takes a drink, and a breath. ‘A drunken man was at the front bar and when he saw me he swivelled around slowly, pointed at me and screamed, “Stasi out!” Everyone shut up and turned to have a look at me. They all thought the same as he, or at least half of them. I couldn’t move. I said to the publican, “What do they want from me?” I said, “I can’t stand here before you all and undo it, take it all back.” After that I sat down. I drank a beer and I just sat there.’ He draws his lips into a line and holds his hands out as if to say,