Lime's Photograph (37 page)

“I’m glad you made the first move. I don’t know if I’d have dared.”

“I’m sure you would have. Anyway, I was sure you lusted after me. I remembered seeing it in your eyes this summer. I could see you wanted me. And standing in the room next to yours I suddenly thought ‘I’m mid-way through life, and I’ve already seen people my age dying. There’s no reason to waste time. All that can happen if you take a chance is that you get your wings singed again. But the first burn is always the worst.’”

I got up, walked over to her and kissed her tenderly, my hands gently caressing her breasts.

“I’m glad you did it,” I said again.

She pulled away gently and pointed at the bathroom door.

“Don’t you think you should make yourself a bit respectable before room service arrives?”

We ate as if we hadn’t seen food for days. And although I usually get full rather quickly, now I ate until there was nothing left.

“You haven’t told me why you changed job,” I said to her when we had finished.

“When there’s awkward business in Denmark, someone always ends up carrying the can, otherwise it won’t go away. It was my turn this time.”

“Because of me?”

“Yes. Because of you, Peter.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well. Don’t be. Give me a cigarette – although I’ve stopped smoking,” she continued. “I needed to get out of the NSS. And it’s Denmark, after all, so they don’t fire you. They find you another job, further down the ladder. A blot on your record, same pay, but a sign in neon lights that your career is no longer running according to plan. Denmark doesn’t like to see blood spilt, but we cleanse just as clinically as everyone else does. Only we do it without leaving too much blood on the carpet.”

She was smoking furiously and I could tell she was angry and hurt.

“I was angry, Clara,” I said. “Angry and ashamed and hurt and drunk.”

“I’ve told you not to give it a thought. I quite understand. It’s just that …”

“What?”

“I’m in the fraud division, in a junior position. I get all sorts, asset-strippers, tax evaders, the sort of fiddles that are virtually impossible to convict people for. And it doesn’t look good, does it? What does that Hoffmann woman actually do? She’s not securing too many convictions. We’d better give her something else, something even less consequential, to do. Still, this time I carried the can, but I’d probably have been given the elbow anyway. Lime or no Lime.”

“What do you mean?”

“The service is under the spotlight after the recent revelations. The politicians have realised that while every other intelligence service has cut back since the end of the cold war, the NSS has increased its staff by 60 per cent. And what the hell are they all doing now the war’s over? There’ll be cuts, no doubt about that. So maybe I got out just in time.”

“You sound bitter.”

“I am bitter, Peter. About a lot of things. A lot of things in my life. It didn’t turn out as I’d expected. I’m halfway through it. I’ve got a job I don’t like, and in which I see no future. I’m on my own. I’ve got a large, pleasantly decorated, empty flat, where I talk to the pot plants. Maybe I should get a cat? I’m on my own, and it scares me.”

I took her face carefully in my hands and kissed her. Now it was Clara’s turn to have tears in her eyes. I kissed her and held her tenderly.

“Make love to me again, Peter,” she said.

We went to bed and made love, this time slowly and gently. Afterwards she lay on her side with her back to me and I remember feeling happy and sad at the same time as I listened to her slow breathing and felt her heart beating through her soft skin against the palm of my hand. I thought about how banal love is, and yet how different and new it is for every single person who is lucky enough to experience it. And, for the first time in a very long while, I slept without waking and without being able to recall my dreams.

Even so, I woke early, and could tell from the sound of the traffic that it had stopped raining. It was strange to wake up next to someone again. For a second, between sleep and consciousness, I thought it was Amelia’s naked, soft belly that my hand was resting on, that I was breathing onto her neck, but then the morning came into focus and I was momentarily torn between shame and pride that Clara was lying beside me.

When I came back from the bathroom, she was sitting up in bed.

“What an early riser” she said, looking at me with no hint of shyness.

“Sleep,” I said.

“No. No,” she said, swinging her legs out of the bed. “Go down to breakfast. I’ll join you in a minute. You’ve got an appointment with the past.”

“So soon?”

“Ten o’clock in the old block on Normannenstrasse. They’re very busy. Lots of people would like to forget the past, but first they want to re-examine it. I had you squeezed into the queue. I forgot to tell you last night,” she said, smiling at me. “I had other things to think about. But now we must get down to business.”

We took a taxi to the eastern part of Berlin. It was a cold, clear day, with a pale November sun shining through the forest of cranes, their long arms swinging whole sections of buildings into place in what seemed like one gigantic construction site. It was hard to imagine that the city had once been divided, even though it was obvious from the change in the style of architecture as you crossed the now invisible border. In what had been East Berlin, concrete blocks were arranged like soldiers on parade, lined up in serried ranks, but the people wore the same kind of clothes and shivered with cold in just the same way as those in the west. You had to remind yourself that there was a mental boundary dividing the two Germanys. It was hard to imagine the astonishment and euphoria when, on 9 November 1989, the spokesman for the East German regime, Schabowski, told a press conference in an almost off-hand manner that the border crossings between East and West Berlin were now open. I had heard it in the afternoon on CNN in New York, and had jumped on the first available flight back to Europe, wanting to be there to see a new world being born. I had taken a whole series of photographs, but had never sold
any of them. They were good photographs, but mine were no different from those of my competitors. I had been elated, and returned to Madrid with adrenalin pumping, convinced that the world had changed fundamentally and would never be the same again. It was a miracle that I had never expected to witness in my lifetime – people all over East and Central Europe had changed the world, just as we had dreamt of doing in the late 1960s. Gloria had been elated too. Unable to stand still, she had paced back and forth, kept returning again and again to the incredible footage being shown on Spanish television. Oscar was bad-tempered, drunk and surly He kept repeating that it would soon all be forgotten, and the Ossies would rue the day that they had thrown themselves into the arms of West Germany. Gloria and I had danced round the room to the glorious music surging from the crowds, laughing at Oscar sat there looking like a crotchety old man. A year later, when the two Germanys were reunified, Oscar got drunk again. At first I thought it was from pleasure, but the evening ended in a violent quarrel between him and Gloria, in which I had to intervene. He accused her of having betrayed their youth. She accused him of living in a past that was irrevocably over. It all ended in the usual scene about their mutual infidelities, and I had to put Oscar to bed and then sit and listen to Gloria’s complaints. Oscar had a violent side to him, especially when he drank and took speed at the same time. Gloria was afraid that he was getting into it again. He had hit her in the past, after all. The next time I saw them they were stiff and polite with one another, but a month later they went to Hawaii and fell in love again.

I hadn’t thought about it since, but sitting in the taxi next to Clara with my arm round her, I remembered that time, and told her about it. She would have taken her car, but I suggested a taxi. We sat close and I felt calm, composed and light-hearted. I didn’t want to drink. All I wanted was what I was doing: to sit close to Clara and talk, the memory of our lovemaking fresh in my mind.

“I was in the kitchen ironing when my husband said I should come and look at the television,” she said, taking my free hand and caressing it. “I can’t remember ever having been so moved by pictures as I was by the sight of all those people standing on the Wall, dancing. I remember one thing in particular. A young man was sitting on top of the Wall, holding up an umbrella as protection against the water cannons which the Vopos had trained on him to get him down. It was fantastic in itself, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget his smile. When the water stopped, he lowered his umbrella, and when they turned the jets on him again, he just raised his black umbrella and smiled. That little, wry grin sums up the moment for me. One frail human being, smiling in the face of impotent authority.”

“It’s history,” I said. “Young people today think the GDR is kitsch, just like that restaurant we went to in Copenhagen.”

“Yes. And that’s the beauty of it,” she said. “Europe came through that period without what would have been a devastating conflict. That young people see it as the distant past is actually a miracle. And it’s not very easy to try to explain to them what the GDR was, why the partition of Europe had lasted so long and why we didn’t do anything – but also that it was the people themselves who sent their regime packing. We did nothing because we were afraid of jeopardising our stability. And we’ve been trying to forget about it ever since.”

“But the GDR and the Stasi existed. And we’re on our way to bear witness to that fact,” I answered.

“Yes. That’s the strange thing about these totalitarian regimes. Whether they were Nazis or communists, they were so convinced of their infallibility that they kept records of everything. They were convinced of the justice of their cause and of our approaching destruction, that everything had to be written down. They did so because they were completely paranoid – that peculiar mixture of megalomania and an inferiority complex. You never knew what the
next purge might entail, so it was best to write everything down, cover every eventuality. The most criminal regimes in the history of the world have had the most conscientious clerks and administrators.”

She turned towards me and I leant over and kissed her soft lips and suddenly I wasn’t afraid of the future. I felt wonderful, in a taxi stuck in a tailback in a Berlin streaked with rain, the morning already shrouded in a grey hue that announced the onset of northern Europe’s grim December darkness which devoured the light, making your soul dreary. But nothing could lower my spirits as I sat next to Clara on the way to discover that part of my past catalogued by meticulous servants of the defunct GDR.

The Stasi had occupied an enormous building in the Normannenstrasse complex in East Berlin. Today, part of it is a museum where you can see the office of the last director, Mielke, with all his telephones, so typical of the communist regimes, arrayed on his glossy desk of that dark wood favoured by leaders from Vladivostok to Berlin. Telephones for secret conversations, for top-secret conversations, for ultra-secret conversations. Direct lines to the armed forces, the Politburo and the KGB out in Karlhorst. Other parts of the building are now used for normal activities. In the museum, medals, busts of Lenin and red flags bear silent witness to the demise of an epoch. And then there is the reading room, where people can study their files. There’s no lack of reading material. Every third citizen of the GDR was registered. How did that tie in with the fact that every third citizen was also an informer? Grasses endlessly grassed on one another. It’s a monument to human perversity, a time when every trace of trust vanished from a society.

The taxi stopped in Ruscherstrasse, on the edge of the complex, and waited while Clara explained the ropes to me. It looked like an ordinary street in an eastern Berlin neighbourhood. Advertisements for Sony and Ritter Sport. A supermarket and pedestrians hurrying
past without giving the sombre buildings a second thought.

“You have to ask for a Herr Weber,” said Clara.

“Aren’t you coming in with me?”

“No. I’ll go back to the hotel. Go for a walk. Read. What’s your German like?”

“I can get by,” I said. “But come in with me, please.”

She put her hand on my neck and gave me a quick kiss.

“You have the authorisation. It’s your file. Take all the time you need, but come back soon. Out you get!”

I stood watching the taxi drive off. Clara didn’t turn round, just gave a little wave. I went into Haus No. 7 and asked for Herr Weber at the reception desk. The floor and the lighting appeared to be new, but the place still had that particular lignite and low-octane fuel smell that encapsulated the essence of communist regimes. It was quiet in the building, but you could still imagine the long corridors, the hushed, dusty rooms with their millions of documents, the mute screams and the large rotary files spinning round and spitting out dossiers. Files which had been kept by diligent clerks so that the State and the Party could monitor each individual citizen’s activities, invading their souls to discover their innermost thoughts.

Herr Weber was a small, stocky man with an expressionless face, but he smiled pleasantly when I gave him my name and his grey eyes were friendly and full of life.

“Ah, Herr Leica,” he said with a look that momentarily made me think he was flirting.

“Leica?” I asked.

“Yes, Herr Lime. That’s your code name in the Stasi archive. In there you’re known as Herr Leica and it is under that name that I have scrutinised you. I think that I know you, just as I know others with whom my duties bring me into contact via the harsh memoranda of the past.”

“Scrutinised me?”

“Sit down for a moment, and I’ll explain the regulations before taking you to the reading room.”

We sat at a little table in two uncomfortable, nondescript muddy-green armchairs. There was an ashtray, and I was told that I was welcome to smoke. He ran through the procedures as if he was a teacher repeating a syllabus for the umpteenth time. But he was also animated, as though the task of overseeing the passing on of the secret records of a dead nation was a calling to be discharged with responsibility and precise solicitude. The building had once housed a ministry of fear more diabolical than Orwell could have imagined. Now it was the world’s most impeccable ministry of truth where people could examine the recent past and discover who had grassed on whom. Husbands and wives, friends, brothers, sisters, parents, colleagues. A large proportion of a population deployed as informers. Billions of words that had once spelt imprisonment or freedom. Words contrived and written down by individuals, and therefore unreliable and subjective, but of vital significance to other’s lives. Words written in secrecy and seclusion and thus not open to appeal. A regime’s inventory of a nation where no one trusted anyone an inch.