Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [68]
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.