Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [79]
‘Yes, but did you believe it?’
‘I had it in writing!’ This is a man who believes in documents. ‘Oh, and another thing,’ he says, ‘they said to me: when you’ve got rid of this wife, this negative influence—then you can probably be promoted.
‘I was sitting in the prison. There was no-one to talk it over with. So I said, “Can I go into the cultural division then?” and he said “Yes.”’
I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped ‘Approved’: the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: ‘Five new and different ways to break a heart’?
When Koch came out of the lock-up he was deaf to everything but his distress. It clearly upsets him to be telling me. ‘I wanted nothing more to do with that woman,’ he says. ‘She thinks she can just leave me in the lurch like that! And then come back and be my wife?
‘We were divorced. Our boy Frank was five and he went to live with her.’
I try to think myself into his place. I think what I would most want to hear would be an explanation from my beloved that it was all a terrible mistake. I ask him why he didn’t ask—
‘Because I wouldn’t hear it! I wouldn’t hear it!’ He shouts, imitating how he cut off his wife. ‘How dare you tell me to listen after what you’ve done?’
But he did listen to his son. Months later, taking Frank for an ice-cream, the story came out. Frank had been in the apartment and heard the officers threaten to take him away. Koch spoke with his ex-wife. A year after his imprisonment and six months after their divorce, Mr and Mrs Koch remarried.
The Stasi subjected him to disciplinary proceedings on account of ‘inconstancy’, and in their files attributed the remarriage to ‘the repeated negative influence of Frau Koch’.
18
The Plate
In 1985 Heinz Koch died. His sister, who lived in Hamburg, West Germany, received permission to attend the funeral. Because she was coming, Hagen was forbidden to attend. This was more than he could take.
He applied to leave his regiment. He would have liked this to be a final small defiance, a little signal of ‘up yours’ at a time when no harm could come to his father, and he didn’t have much to lose. But it was merely a transfer out of the Stasi and into the regular army, under condition of maintaining Stasi secrecy. They were going to let him leave, and it made him feel empty.
He sat in his office. There are strange moments where the present already belongs to your past—your last day at work, for instance, when problems and politics there become a tale told in the third person. Koch looked around his office as if it belonged to someone else.
Everything in the room was to stay there. His replacement would come in, and no-one would know the difference. He was interchangeable with any other uniform and bad crewcut. It made him angry to think he would leave no mark here, and it made him angrier still that, even if he had his time again, he suspected he wouldn’t have had the guts.
The wall opposite him had an unhealthy sheen of old paint, and so did the plate pinned on it. It was an award for cultural work by his unit, third place. It shone like gold but it was made of plastic, covered in metallic paint like a cheap toy. It was not something he could say he himself had won. Nevertheless, Koch closed his office door, got up on his chair and slid the plate from its hooks. He was surprised how light it was. His briefcase wouldn’t close over it, so he took off his vest, draped it over the bag and held the handles together. He walked out of his office, said goodbye to the assistant and didn’t come back.
‘My little private revenge,’ he says. ‘That plate’—he looks straight at me—‘was all I had the courage for.’
Three weeks later, there was a knock at his apartment door. The head of Koch’s old Stasi section stood in the passageway. He was still being collegial. ‘The plate is