Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [96]
I hunched my collar up high as I walked. I was watching the street numbers closely looking for number forty-five when I passed a shop and read its sign. I retraced my steps. I had read it right. The sign said: ‘Digging Equipment for Hire or Sale: Spring Diggers; Electrical Percussion Hammers, Augers, Hand-Borers, Pumps.’ Two young men walked past. They were tough, both of them wearing their jackets open in the cold. One’s T-shirt read, in English, ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’, and the other’s, in German, ‘Out of the Way—an Arsehole Is Coming’. They stared hard at me then at the shop, then back at me again, as if to figure out what I might find so fascinating about a pump-and-drill place.
Forty-five Brunnenstrasse is an ordinary five-storey apartment block. Nothing distinguishes it from any other building in the street. There are no plaques on it, no footpath inlay commemorating the tunnel. And, like so many buildings in the former east, it is being renovated. As I entered, two Turkish workmen were coming out carrying tools and pails of plaster dust. I nodded a greeting as if I knew what I was doing, and walked straight in. The cellar door was on the right. I stood there for a moment. Then I opened the door onto darkness, the smell of dust and damp. I started down the steps when I heard a call.
‘Excuse me! Excuse me! Can I help you?’ The foreman, also Turkish, stood at the top of the steps. I explained I was looking for a tunnel that had been accessible from the cellar of this building.
‘Wait here,’ he said. He fetched a torch on a long lead. We went down the steps. The cellar had a vaulted roof and wooden partitions for each apartment’s section. I don’t think either of us thought we’d find a tunnel. He swung the light along the dirt-floored passage right to the end. And there, in the wall, was a manhole-sized area where the bricks were newer than all the others. We shone the torch at it and stood there, and I thought of the twenty-nine people who left their country from here, and of Werner Coch and the others.
When he got to the building, Coch says, ‘I went to the door of the cellar in the hall, and I said the code words. They were, “Does Herr Lindemann live here?” There was no answer, so I repeated, “Does Herr Lindemann live here?” It was meant to be for the people—the helpers—behind the door. I was meant to wait for the reaction. I expected someone to appear with a torch, or perhaps to speak to me, and lead me out of there.’ Nothing happened. Nothing at all. ‘I thought: something’s not right here. Please God, just let me get out in one piece. I turned around and walked out of the building.
‘And that’s when they got me—Stasi in civilian clothes. I think there were three of them waiting on the street for me to come out again. I know now they had the building surrounded—there was one on the stairs inside too.’
They asked him what he was doing there, and he told them he was visiting Herr Lindemann. ‘There’s no Herr Lindemann here,’ they said. They took him away, first to the police station, then into custody at the Stasi headquarters in Berlin, and finally to prison at Hohenschönhausen.
‘Hartmut Rührdanz watched the whole thing from the other side of the street,’ Coch says, ‘then he went home, terrified.’ The Rührdanzes would stay in the east. They would wait till their baby was well enough to