Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [87]
Of Cell 307 in Hohenschönhausen
I sing the blues in red
For one who can’t hear me
As a child in the dark
Sings a song to himself…
For this moment the song soars and nothing else exists; I have no body, and time stops passing. Klaus stretches in his chair. When it finishes he says, ‘You can’t let it eat you up, you know, make you bitter. You’ve got to laugh where you can.’ He’s right, of course. And to drink. By my reckoning, I am pacing him at about 1:3 but I am not so sure of my counting. He picks up a guitar and starts to stroke it absent-mindedly, lovingly across its curved wooden body. I see through the bottom of my glass—the table, the ashtray and the cans of beer. They look weirdly small and far away. I take my face out of the glass in a hurry and realise it’s the CD cover I’m looking at. But the table is covered in ashtrays and beer cans—the same scene in two different sizes. It’s time to go.
I don’t feel the cold, I don’t feel much. Rolling stone. Stone rolling home. The cobbles are wet, and the streetlamps make puddles of yellow light on the ground. I think of my friend in his room, singing himself happy.
20
Herr Bock of Golm
The phone calls keep coming.
‘Bock.’ A quiet voice, an old man’s heavy breath on the receiver. ‘In response to your notice.’
‘Ah. Yes. Herr Bock. Thank you for calling me.’ Before I can explain what I’m doing he says, ‘I can tell you all there is to know about the Ministry of State Security. Everything you need, young woman, I can give you, because I was a professor at the training academy of the ministry. In fact, I taught Spezialdisziplin.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Ja?’
‘Spezialdisziplin,’ he repeats. ‘Do you know what that means?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Spezialdisziplin is the science of recruiting informers. Spezialdisziplin is the art,’ he says, ‘of the handler.’ He pauses. ‘You should come to my house. It is directly opposite the academy at Golm. Do you know where that is?’
‘No, I don’t.’ He gives me train and bus directions.
The more prone to getting lost one is, the more one tries to compensate. My grandmother has a small spirex notepad bound discreetly to an undergarment as an aide memoire, and I have a lot of maps. I have a 1986 map of Potsdam in which the areas where there were Stasi buildings—anything from bunkers to multi-storey edifices to shooting ranges—are left blank. On another, a 1984 map of East Berlin, entire city blocks and streets in Stasi areas are simply not represented: they are pale orange gaps in the map. Out of curiosity I look up Golm, and find that it is a gap on the map, on the outskirts of Potsdam.
I follow Herr Bock’s instructions. I take the train from Berlin to the end of the line, and then I take two buses. His house is one in a street of identical semi-detached dwellings, each with a patch of lawn and a wire gate in front of it. It seems to be the only street that exists here, as though a town planner had an idea for a settlement that was begun before he thought better of it. The houses are covered in rough grey concrete, knobbly all over as if from cold. None of them, including Herr Bock’s, looks inhabited.
It is late afternoon. Herr Bock’s living room is, overwhelmingly, beige and brown: brown linoleum and dark veneer wall units, a brown couch and Herr Bock sitting camouflaged in it in a beige-and-brown diamond pattern acrylic cardigan. He has thick square glasses that give him underwater eyes, and an overbite. A moustache hangs on his upper lip. His voice is so soft I have to lean in to him.
‘You must not use my name,’ he says as an opener.
I agree.
He relaxes back into the couch and starts to hold forth. He says that the ministry was divided into two main sections: internal (called ‘Defence’) and external (‘Counter-espionage’). He taught a course for Stasi officers destined to work in Defence. This title is euphemistic. The internal service of the Stasi was designed to spy on and control the citizens of the GDR. The only way to make sense of its name is to understand the Stasi as defending the government