Lime's Photograph (38 page)

Herr Weber spoke, in his slow and clear German.

“Herr Lime. Our operations are based on a law which defines certain guidelines. It follows special legislation passed by the Federal Diet of reunified Germany in 1991. It regulates admission. Your request for access to documents has been processed and approved. Your documents have been located. I have read your file and, in accordance with the rules, blanked out names with no specific connection to you, in order to avoid innocent victims of the Stasi being harmed. The archive houses great tragedies. With my own eyes, I have seen people break down when they discover that a beloved husband could go for a Sunday walk with the family and then on Monday make a
report to his handler. But everything of relevance to your case is of course available for inspection. You can request photocopies, but the original material is not to be removed. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I said.

What I understood was that it all seemed absurd and somehow very German. First the Stasi spends years collecting and cataloguing the most intimate and personal details of people’s lives, and then new administrators take over and start re-cataloguing the mountains of material, with new classification numbers and new secrets, in an endless ritual that would continue for as long as there was someone who wanted to look at the material.

“Good,” said Herr Weber, brushing a non-existent speck of dust from the sleeve of his tweed jacket. “Your file is not thick, Herr Leica. Just a few pages in a ring binder actually. Not like the 40,000 pages we’ve got on the singer Wolf Biermann or the 300 ring binders the author Jürgen Fuchs can come and study. You didn’t work very much in the former GDR. You didn’t let yourself be recruited, you didn’t inform, so the material, I’m afraid to say, is not extensive. I apologise.”

“You apologise? As if having a thick file is a status symbol?” I said.

Herr Weber gave a brief, dry chuckle.

“The human being is a strange creature, sir. Some break down when they see what is written about them. Others break down when they find out that they were never of enough interest to get into the archive. Today we can speak of a kind of archive-envy. There are those who have had to seek the assistance of a psychologist due to this new ailment, induced by reunification. For example, we have no body odour samples from you.”

“Body odour samples?” I said. At first I thought I must have misunderstood his slow, precise German officialese, but then I realised that it was part of his presentation for foreigners. He took a jar from his briefcase and put it on the table between us. It was marked with a
number and the lid was tightly screwed on as if it contained pickled gherkins. There was a piece of dirty yellow cotton-wool at the bottom of the jar. And nothing else. I picked it up, inspected it and put it down again looking at Herr Weber expectantly.

“The Stasi operations manual refers to bottled smells,” said Weber, unable to suppress a smile. “There are thousands of jars like this one. Samples of people’s body odours. We all smell different, sir. And by keeping samples of a person’s body odour, sniffer dogs could be quickly and efficiently sent in pursuit of the relevant party, should he or she attempt, for example, to flee the republic.”

I started to laugh. I simply couldn’t help it, even though I could see that Herr Weber found it inappropriate.

“Perhaps one should laugh. It would have been a comedy, had it not been a tragedy,” he said.

“Herr Weber. You have an interesting job. May I take the liberty of asking what you did before the Berlin Wall came down?”

He gave another of his tiny, ironic smiles.

“You may. For many years I looked after the monkeys in the Zoo. Before that I taught German literature, but after a particular lecture about Goethe, and certain private remarks found unsuitable by the Party, I lost my job and became that singular creature whom, on this side of the Iron Curtain, we called a non-person. Officially I did not exist. I was the living dead. But the monkeys were splendid company.”

“And who informed against you? A student?”

“No, Herr Lime. My wife.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was a comic tragedy and a misery that wouldn’t disappear until two or three generations had passed, and children and grandchildren could look back on the insanity of the 20th century and attempt to understand how it had been possible to get people to do what they had done.

“I’m very sorry, Herr Weber,” was all I could say.

He nodded.

“Shall we go in?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Herr Lime. Or Leica. Not many of those who go through that door come out again in a happier frame of mind. Quite the contrary.”

Herr Weber placed a pink cardboard folder on the brown, laminated square table. A number of similar tables were arranged side by side in a high-ceilinged room with pale, yellow walls and a worn lino floor. It looked like an exam room. You sat next to other people and yet on your own, unable to look over your neighbour’s shoulder. We weren’t sitting looking at exam papers, but at secrets. Most of the tables were occupied by people poring over documents, black and white photographs and microfilm, a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands who had looked in their brown case files, made of imitation leather or dingy cardboard. The covers of the files were of the same poor quality as their contents. Small, sturdy women wearing plastic sandals fetched and carried documents, placing them on the tables in front of the visitors. Each sat on their little island reading their life story. The grey November light glimmered faintly through the high windows, but was no competition for the cold glare of the fluorescent tubes. I could see from the heavy drops streaming down the window that it was raining again. The fluorescent lighting made a humming sound, but I could hear the rain pounding against the double glazing.

The cover bore a series of numbers and a code, OPK-Akte. MfS. XX, 1347/76–81. HVA/1249, which looked as if they had been printed on the cover with an old-fashioned rubber stamp. Below the numbers and
codes a diligent clerk had written, in a well-formed, meticulous hand,
Leica
. I studied the cover. MfS stood for Ministry of State Security, Stasi. HVA was an abbreviation for espionage abroad. The letters stood for Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, directly translated as “Main Division of Information”. But information about what and from whom? The HVA was under the direction of Markus Wolf and didn’t have quite such dark connotations as the Stasi, but it had still been part of the operation. It didn’t take much to guess that 76–81 were the relevant years, and the other numbers just part of an indexing system.

I opened the folder, and saw a picture of me as a young man. It had been taken somewhere in Spain, from the background I thought it was the old bullfighting arena in Valladolid. It was a good, amateur photograph. But it had been taken with a cheap camera, and both the foreground and the background had that slightly blurred focus that looks sharp but isn’t, because the lens wasn’t good enough. A political rally of some sort is underway. There are red flags in front of the archway into the arena, and two Guardia Civil Landrovers are visible. I’m in my 20s and I’m looking straight at the camera, a cigarette jammed in my mouth and my hair blowing round my face. My Nikon and faithful Leica, which I took with me everywhere, are hanging on my shoulder. I’m wearing a light-coloured, short-sleeved shirt, jeans with a wide belt and the Spanish boots that I loved so much at the time, with high heels and pointed toes. I look like exactly what I was – a cocky, arrogant photojournalist on an assignment.

I could see where this was heading, but I stayed calm and started to read the smooth, new photocopies that Herr Weber had taken from the original, old and undoubtedly by now yellowing reports. They were marked for the attention of a Lieutenant Colonel Schadenfelt who was head of II/9, a division that must have had the task of countering Western intelligence services through the infiltration and recruitment of agents.

The reports were a mixture of truth and falsehoods. There was a short description of me, my date of birth, my background, my rootless nature. I was described as progressive, but not a member of any party. I had the potential to be an unofficial informer at first, and then later became a proper source, once I had been made aware of the importance of the struggle against imperialism and American militarism. I had voiced criticism of the American war in Vietnam and, seemingly, when I had been covering one of the euphoric rallies for the Spanish Communist Party, I had said that if I were Spanish I would have been a communist. The subjunctive suppleness of the German words leapt at me off the closely written pages. There were trivial, but obviously significant, descriptions of my preferred style of clothing, the authors I read – Hemingway and the Danish writer Rifbjerg – my girlfriends, my work assignments. My various addresses were recorded. Periodically it stated simply that I was travelling and not under observation. There was a note recommending a visa for Moscow. There were ongoing evaluations of my political views. They became slowly less progressive and no increase in my awareness had been observed.

Each page was littered with numbers and codes and aliases and cross-references. My commentator described how we started as colleagues and later became friends. He described how I drank too much and had difficulty in establishing a steady relationship with the opposite sex, preferring casual liaisons and affairs. There were descriptions of meetings and conversations, of trips and articles, of attitudes and views. As the years between the first report on me in 1976 and the last one in 1981 passed, my commentator made it clear that I wasn’t as progressive as first presumed. I was open to right-wing propaganda and the enjoyment of a bourgeois lifestyle, and I had no great admiration for the results being achieved by the Soviet bloc, but increasingly expressed criticism of this implementation of socialism.
In 1981 I had expressed divergent opinions on the Polish counterrevolution and even went so far as to announce that I was going to Warsaw to follow and support the counter-revolutionary, CIA-financed, Solidarity movement. It was then that I was abandoned as a prospective agent. My bourgeois consciousness was too fixed and I was, wrote the commentator, uncompromising. Even though my lifestyle couldn’t be considered proper in the normal bourgeois sense, I didn’t care about my reputation and therefore couldn’t be coerced. A work visa for the Polish Republic was not to be recommended.

So that was why I never got to the war tribunal.

Leica was not cut out to be an East German agent. File closed. File placed in the archives. A completely inconsequential case file which only a paranoid system would have bothered to keep at all, and which I could have forgotten, had it not been for the fact that the pen had been wielded by Oscar. That wasn’t the name used. That was the name I knew him by. When Oscar had written to Lieutenant Colonel Helmut Schadenfelt, he signed himself Karl Heinrich Müller. First he was Lieutenant, then Captain and finally Major in the HVA, reporting directly to Schadenfelt and Misha Wolf. I had known as soon as I saw the photograph and immediately remembered the first trip Oscar and I had taken together. We had gone to cover the communists’ rally in the bullfighting arena in Valladolid where Carillo was to make a speech, and I had translated Oscar’s questions for him and our ostensible friendship had begun. He had never been a great writer – neither as a journalist nor in his reports to his ultimate masters in the Stasi – but he had been my friend for 20 years and all the time he had been playing with his cards face down.

There wasn’t much on me. It didn’t take long to read, even with my German, but I think I sat for another hour just staring into space, not really thinking, as if my surroundings no longer existed. My thoughts went round and round in circles. Oscar. Karl Heinrich Müller. Amelia.
Maria Luisa. And a photograph showing a young woman together with German terrorists somewhere in Denmark, a photograph Oscar had seen and which somehow had become a catalyst.

I felt horribly nauseous and went to find a toilet where I threw up violently and painfully. I splashed water on my face and sat on another toilet and smoked a cigarette. Then I went back to the reception and asked for Herr Weber. He appeared 15 minutes later, with his briefcase in his hand and several of his infamous folders under his other arm.

“Yes, Herr Lime? How can I be of service?”

“Can I see the file on Karl Heinrich Müller?”

Herr Weber studied me with his intelligent, friendly eyes.

“You look rather pale, Herr Lime. Do you need a doctor?”

“A drink and the file on Karl Heinrich Müller.”

“I can’t help with the drink, but if you would be so kind as to return to your seat, I’ll see what I can do about Karl Heinrich.”

I had a throbbing headache and my hands were trembling. I only had to wait for another 15 minutes. A younger woman was weeping silently. A stream of tears poured down her cheeks, as she seemed to read the same sentence over and over again. But no one took any notice of her. In the Stasi’s reading room everyone minded their own business. You were all alone with information you had wanted, but which you would perhaps rather have done without when you got it.

Herr Weber placed a couple of sheets of paper and a photograph on my table.

“Thank you. That was quick,” I said.

“There isn’t much. His file was one of those shredded when they tried to remove the evidence just after
die Wende
. The Ministry’s largest shredders were on overdrive. We are trying to reconstruct some of the documents, but it will take years. Perhaps a never-ending job.”

“OK.”

Herr Weber hesitated.

“Others have benefited from talking with a handler. Most of them live where they’ve always lived. Some will talk. Others won’t.”

“Thank you, Herr Weber.”

“Not at all, Herr Lime. Not at all.”

He was right. There was hardly any information about Oscar. Just that Karl Heinrich Müller was put on the service’s permanent staff in 1967, when he was recruited via the border troops where he was doing his military service. He had been an unofficial Stasi informer ever since he was 14. As a 19-year-old he had been smuggled to West Germany with a new identity and life story. He had worked as a journalist on several small magazines partially financed by the GDR or Moscow. There was a photograph attached to the documents. It showed a young, clean-shaven Oscar wearing the Vopo’s ugly uniform. He has a crew cut and is looking straight at the camera with his unwavering eyes. Part of the Wall can be seen in the background. I read it all through twice, but there was no mention of his ever having left the service. All it said was that his last rank was that of Major and that he was recommended for the Order of Lenin for exemplary and long-standing service. The recommendation for an Order of Lenin had been made in October 1989 in conjunction with the GDR’s 40th anniversary. A month before the Berlin Wall came down. Hadn’t these people had any idea what was about to hit them?