Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [98]
It was during one of these sessions that they offered Frau Paul the deal.
She was seated low on a backless stool, in the corner of the room. When the door opened, it concealed her. I think of Frau Paul’s ample body on that small stool, designed for indignity. The lieutenant interrogating her was behind a large desk. ‘I understand your son finds himself in enemy territory,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘From our information, it appears he is very ill.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Where was this going? Had something happened to Torsten that she didn’t know about? Surely they wouldn’t do anything to a tiny, sick baby?
‘Would you like to see your son?’
What sort of a question was that? ‘Yes, sir.’
‘That can be arranged.’
I imagine the huge hope in her then, swelling her heart as she sat on that stool. But she says, ‘That’s when I got suspicious. Here I was sitting in the slammer—I mean prison, sorry—and they were offering for me to go into enemy territory—that’s what the west was then. I couldn’t make any sense of it at all.’
‘How is that possible?’ she asked.
‘It is not at all complicated,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s a simple matter. If you would like to visit your son in enemy territory, we would ask only that, while you are there, you arrange to meet up with your young friend Michael Hinze. The two of you could go for a stroll. For instance, in the grounds of Charlottenburg Castle.’
She was confused. And then he said, ‘You can leave the rest to us.’
‘“You can leave the rest to us!”’ she cries. ‘Then he added, “One good turn deserves another.” “One good turn deserves another!”’ Her tone is a mixture of horror and triumph. I am clearly missing something here. I wonder whether in German there is a sticklebrick noun for this strange combined emotion.
‘At that moment,’ she explains, ‘Karl Wilhelm Fricke shot through my head. I had heard him years before on the radio from the west tell of his kidnapping and imprisonment, and I had never forgotten it. In a flash I knew: they were going to use me as bait in a trap to kidnap Michael.’
Karl Wilhelm Fricke is well known in Germany as a broadcaster and journalist, and as a phenomenon: ‘the case of Fricke.’ He has always been an agitator against the German Democratic Republic. On April Fools’ Day 1955, at a meeting in West Berlin, Stasi agents drugged his cognac and then shunted him, unconscious, over the sector border. He was convicted of ‘war and boycott instigation against the GDR’ and sentenced to four years in solitary confinement, which he served until the last day. There was nothing the west could do to get him out. When he was released into West Berlin, he immediately, and at some risk to himself, broadcast over the airwaves the story of his abduction. At the end of an afternoon spent with him he said to me, ‘Frau Paul—then Rührdanz—is a very brave woman.’
Frau Paul knew Michael would trust her to come to a meeting in the park, and when they came to bundle him into a vehicle she would have to turn her back and walk away. She doesn’t know whether the offer would have meant more than one visit to Torsten, or staying out of prison. She knew only that, if she accepted, they would have her then, her soul bought with a visit to her critically ill son. She would be theirs forever: a stool pigeon and a tame little rat.
‘Me—bait in a trap for Michael! And of course that was an absolute no. I couldn’t.’ Her back is straight, and her hands are clenched into fists on her thighs. ‘Karl Wilhelm Fricke,’ she says, ‘was my guardian angel.’ She starts to crumble and break. At this moment, she does