Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [69]
Herr Christian’s job here was to hunt out the cars which might have stowaway East Germans in them trying to escape. We walk around the rest stop to the other side. The sky is the same colour as the concrete; we are sandwiched in grey. The tip of my nose and my earlobes are starting to pulse with cold. ‘People-smuggling to the west was a business, run by criminals really—they’d take huge sums of money from the poor souls they were smuggling after they got them through, something like 20,000 westmarks. Or, they’d make them pay earlier, with family heirlooms or stamp collections. The western car would pull off at a spot along the transit route and the easterners would meet it, pay over and get in. I saw some terrible things. People would drug their children and put them in the boot. I opened a boot once and found a woman with her child inside. Because I was in civilian clothes they thought that I was with the smuggling organ-isation. I remember the joy on their faces for the instant they thought they were in freedom.’ He stubs out his cigarette and puts his hands in the pockets of his jacket, shoulders hunched against the grey air. ‘I have to say that was bitter, because I am a sensitive man. But I am also a stickler for the law, and I thought that what they were doing was wrong, and I’d been brought up to think that from my earliest kindergarten days.’
‘What would have happened to them?’
‘We took them to remand at Potsdam. Then they would have been convicted. They usually got one and a half to two years. That was the law.
‘There were parts of it that were fun though,’ he says, his breath like more smoke in this cold. ‘I think I had the only job in the world where I got to go into a warehouse each morning and decide, “Who will I be today?”’ He laughs. ‘I got to choose a disguise. Sometimes I’d be a park ranger—that was a green uniform, sometimes a garbage collector in overalls, or someone come to repair the wiring. I really liked being a western tourist because the clothes were much better quality—real leather gloves—and I got to drive a Mercedes, or at least a VW Golf.’
We walk back to the BMW and he clicks it awake. ‘But do you know what was best?’ he asks, turning to me. ‘Best of all’—he gives me a mock punch on the shoulder—‘was when I’d dress up as a blind man: I’d have the cane, the glasses, the armband with three dots. Sometimes I’d even get a girl as a guide on my arm. I’d have to remember to take my watch off though!’ He looks around this barren place, enjoying the memory of work well done. A car passes; we are just two small figures climbing into a large car at a petrol station. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘being a blind man is the best way to observe people.’ He chortles, pushes his dark glasses over his eyes and starts the engine of his huge black machine.
16
Socialist Man
In August 1961, a fresh Stasi recruit named Hagen Koch walked the streets of Berlin with a tin of paint and a brush, and painted the line where the Wall would go. He was twenty-one years old, and he was Secretary-General Honecker’s personal cartographer. Unlike most heads of state, Honecker needed a personal cartographer, because he was redrawing the limits of the free world.
Koch’s apartment is a cell in a honeycomb of high-rises where a lot of other former Stasi officers and their families lived before the Wall fell, and live still. The balconies have all been painted a pinkish colour. On some of them sun umbrellas are furled in hibernation.
The man who opens the door has a sort of glow about him—a bright face, receding hair and soft brown eyes. Koch smiles broadly, and shakes my hand. He gestures around himself exuberantly, like a ringmaster.