Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [67]
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