Stealing the Future (3 page)

The other items in the envelope didn’t look particularly interesting. There was no diary, only a few scraps of paper that looked like shopping lists. Except one, which had a date, the 25
th
September, along with the time 14:00, and a name: Alex. Looking at the note, I pulled out the crumpled leaflet that Karo the punk had given me the night before:
For a sensible energy policy—in East and West: Alexanderplatz, Saturday 25
th
September, 14:00.
I stared at both pieces of paper for a while. Why would Maier be interested in a demo here in Berlin? True, he’d been involved in the mining business, but that was before the revolution, three years ago, before he’d got involved in politics and the business of Silesian devolution.

I shovelled the bits of paper back into the envelope and tossed it on to the pile that I called my in-tray. Time for some proper work. But before that I had an appointment to confirm with the Russians.

15:12

Fortunately my meeting with the Russian liaison officer was in Berlin-Karlshorst. It could have been worse—I might have had to go all the way to the Soviet Army headquarters in Wünsdorf, about thirty kilometres south of the city. I’d got here with the office Trabant, parking it near the S‑Bahn station, and wandering through Karlshorst to arrive at the grey steel gate sporting a red star. One of the guards posted in front checked my pass and ushered me in, the gate clashing shut behind me. I was in a small paved yard, Soviet soldiers in dress uniform and fatigues hastened between the main building and various side wings. No-one paid any attention to me, and not quite sure where to go I just headed in through the main entrance.

Behind the tall wooden doors the hall was both large and high, with expansive bay windows at the back, and a wide staircase to my right. Soldiers bustled around here too, looking both purposeful and efficient, clacking over the polished parquet. Not even sure who to ask for, I stood just inside the doorway, and flicked through the file Frau Demnitz had given me. It contained nothing but the addresses and telephone numbers of the headquarters for each of the Four Powers, each on a separate sheet. When I looked up I noticed that a soldier, wearing fatigues and a cap, was standing right next to me. He spoke in Russian, and although I tried to work out what he was saying, I really hadn’t a clue. He held his hand out, pointing at some chairs just to the side of the stairs, before he too moved purposefully off. I watched him march away, and as he went past an open doorway another soldier caught my attention. It was the eye patch that did it—a very noticeable fashion accessory. And now I looked more closely at this second soldier, I noticed the blue flashes on the collar and the blue stripe on his shoulder boards: KGB. Now that I was looking at him I could see that he too was mustering me with his only eye. A curt flick of his head, acknowledging my existence, then he moved further back into the room, beyond my line of sight.

I hadn’t quite got to the chairs when someone else spoke to me, this time in German.

“Lieutenant Grobe! Very pleased to meet you. I am Major Mikhail Vassilovich Sokolovski. No relation.”

I didn’t understand who he might not be related to, and didn’t like to ask for fear of causing offence. But the major in front of me had a smooth and clear way of speaking German, which was also a good way to describe his appearance. Dress uniform, red flashes, very neat. Several rows of medals did his chest proud, indeed the medals would have looked cramped on a narrower chest. He held his hand out for me to take, a huge paw of a hand that could easily crush mine, but thankfully didn’t. The major pointed the way upstairs, arms gesticulating the whole while, underscoring the small talk he was using to show off his flawless German. I was far too busy looking around me to pay much attention to what he was saying, something about a cultural event at the embassy.

I’d never been in a Russian military base before, and it was not at all how I’d imagined it. Outside rigidly controlled ‘cultural events’ the population of the GDR had been kept well away from the Russian brothers. To us, the Russians were different, alien, scary—and even after nearly three years of revolution I found it hard to believe that I was standing here in the Soviet Military Berlin HQ. But it all felt rather informal, I could see through open doors how soldiers and uniformed secretaries were shouting down phones, taking down dictation, typing away at noisy old typewriters, and all the while the endless stream of people moving around, carrying papers, boxes, radio sets, furniture—anything you could imagine. Nobody bothered to salute the major as we went past.

We reached an office at the back of the building, overlooking a large parade ground surrounded by flag poles. The major gestured that I should take a seat while he closed the door. Turning to a filing cabinet he took two glasses and a bottle of vodka from the top drawer. He set the glasses up on his desk and filled them to the brim before handing me one.

“Before we start, a toast. I propose we drink to the architect and inspiration of the colossal historic victories of the Soviet people; the banner, pride, and hope of all progressive humanity. To the great leader and the teacher of my country and yours:
da zdravstvuyet
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin!”

My glass tipped in shock as I listened to his words, recognising the style from a time not too long past. The major laughed loudly at my reaction.

“No, my friend, times are different now! A small joke is allowed between friends, no? But perhaps you had better make the toast?”

Still not quite sure what to make of this man who looked so formal, yet started our first meeting with a joke about Stalin, I stood up, glass (adequately replenished by the major) in right hand, looked him in the eye, and tried my best:

“In these uncertain times let us drink to continued and fraternal co-operation between our people!”

Again, the loud laugh, and Sokolovski tipped back his glass, swallowing the vodka in one go. I nervously followed his example.

“Good, very good,
tovarishch
.” he said. “My colleagues might at this point recharge the glasses, and make another toast. They find it amusing that you Germans, so very exact and proper in all you do, are unable to get beyond even the tenth toast without falling over. And I? I consider myself open to the civilising influences of your culture, so instead I give you the bottle, and we shall meet again. We shall talk about whatever it is we need to talk about, and have many more toasts.”

He shook my hand, opened the door and ushered me back out into the busy chaos beyond.

This was pretty perplexing, but I considered that I had made contact and that, at least so far, I had neither questions nor reports for my Russian liaison. All in all, the major was probably right: we were finished for now. At least it meant I could go back to the office and get on with writing up that report.

I wandered out of the building and to the gate, the sentries merely nodding as they let me back out into the street. Arriving back at the car I looked down at the bottle of vodka in my hand. That’s enough vodka for one day—I opened up the bonnet, took the cap off the petrol tank and poured the Russian alcohol in.

Moscow:
For the first time since the crisis began, large numbers of KGB forces have been seen on the streets of Moscow. The KGB issued a statement saying that they have mobilised troops to assist militia and internal forces in their efforts to keep public order in the Soviet capital. It remains unclear whether or not they support President Gorbachev who remains under house arrest in the Crimea.

08:11

A nice short morning meeting today—that suited me, I was getting anxious about the backlog of work that was building up on my desk. We all had ongoing projects we were already working on, and there was no need to divvy up any further work. The others thought it unfair that I had been ticked off by Frau Demnitz, which made me feel a bit better, and they were surprised about the liaison task I had been given.

“She asked you to do liaison by yourself, or did she mean we should take on that task jointly?” Erika asked.

“Just me. But as far as I’m concerned we can share it. Sounds boring, really. Anyway, I’ve already been to see my Russian counterpart, it was quite strange. He toasted Stalin, then laughed at me and threw me out!” My description garnered a chuckle from my colleagues but I could see that they thought I was exaggerating. The meeting moved on to more general matters before we ended.

There had been nothing to decide today, but even when there was we very rarely voted. Most decisions in the
Republikschutz
departments were taken in the small teams that were working on any particular topic, but if we thought a case might have an impact on any other team we would check in with them first. Here in RS2 we generally talked any issues through until we found a way forward that worked for everyone involved. It used to be quite a frustrating process, but with time, as we got to know each other, to understand how our colleagues ticked, it all became both easier and quicker. Knowing each others’ quirks and interests—along with Laura’s help in making sure that we didn’t talk for hours about something that didn’t matter—meant that we’d become quite efficient in our decision making.

I was just making a start on a report about my visit to Karlshorst when the phone rang. It was the Minister’s secretary informing me that a meeting had been set up with Major Clarie at the British Army offices in the Olympic Stadium for this afternoon, at 4 o’clock. It looked like the Minister wanted me kept busy for the next few days.

After the phone call I found it hard to concentrate on writing the report. And if I was to be in Westberlin this afternoon then I didn’t really have enough time to get involved in any of the other pieces of work waiting for me. I found myself looking again at the stuff the Saxon police had sent me, I was particularly intrigued by the slip of paper with tomorrow’s date on it. Alex, 14.00—it just had to be the Energy Demo. Or, at least that seemed the most likely. It could just be that Maier had been planning to meet someone called Alex on Saturday afternoon. But I wasn’t convinced.

Thinking about it—the demo, with its focus on brown coal; the site where the body was found; Maier’s own past in the brown coal mining industry—I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there were too many coincidences. I shook my head, trying to rid it of questions. I wasn’t the one investigating the murder. Not only did I not have any part to play in the investigation, but I had already been warned off by Frau Demnitz. And I’d agreed with my own colleagues not to pursue the case.

10:47

I caught the tram heading down to Rummelsburg, finding a seat as we creaked round the corner and under the railway tracks. Brown coal was a seam running through this case, and even if I wasn’t actually involved, well, I asked myself, why shouldn’t I express an interest in a matter that clearly had the potential to become a security issue for our Republic?

I could see the twin chimneys of the Rummelsburg coal power station beckoning from way down the road; but they were much further away than they had seemed—it was several stops before the tram finally arrived at the main gates.

I showed my pass to the works guard and asked to speak to the director. A short wait, then I was met by a guy in a suit who took me to a high Art Deco building made of slim, reddish-brown bricks. Everything about it was narrow, it was huge, but its ten storeys made it look tall and lean, the same as the windows, stretching virtually from marble covered floors to the soaring ceilings. We clacked our way across the marble to the stairs. On the first floor the walls were covered in glassy green tiles, the floors with well polished red lino. I was ushered into an office, where another suit sat behind a dark antique desk. The suit rose and took my hand, beckoning me to sit down.

“How can I help you?”

Good question. I’d come on a whim, unprepared: I wasn’t too sure myself what I was doing here. Curiosity perhaps? A desire to see with my own eyes at least one part of the workings of the brown coal industry? A hope that mere proximity would help my brain make some connections? But mere curiosity, a desire to follow up on a hunch—those weren’t really the things I could admit to.

“The
Republikschutz
is interested in the impacts that the West Silesian crisis might have on the electricity supply in the Republic,” I ad libbed.

“It’s already having an effect,” the director sat back, crossing his hands over his expansive belly. It was clearly a favourite topic of his. “Most of the power produced in the Silesian Boxberg power station is used in the south of the Republic: Saxony, Thuringia. Up here we get coal from the mines south of Spremberg, mostly from West Silesia. They’ve been dropping hints about setting a ‘market price’ for the coal that they send up to us. As I’ve already informed the Ministry for Coal and Energy, in the case of West Silesia seceding from the GDR we would lose over half of our national coal reserves, and half of our generating capacity to boot. We are already importing some coal from Poland, but that would have to increase—the Welzow field doesn’t have enough capacity to feed the Schwarze Pumpe power station, and the West-Elbe fields are still supplying Espenhain and the chemical industry,” the director continued, his mellifluous voice outlining technical details and statistics that were far beyond my ability to understand, never mind remember. The gist of it was that most of our coal reserves and a huge amount of electricity generating capacity were in West Silesia, and therefore at risk.

After a few minutes of this shop talk I interrupted: “But if West Silesia became independent then they’d have too much generating capacity for their own use—surely they’d be happy to sell it on to us?”

“You’d think so, but there is talk of an extra-high voltage transmission line running from West Silesia to Westgermany, presumably in order to export the electricity to the Western markets.”

Westgermany wasn’t suffering from any shortfall in energy supply, so why would they be interested in importing power from West Silesia? Except, of course, to make life difficult for us.

12:33

Deciding not to go back to the office I went home. Arriving at the flat I could see a note on the door, just like the old days before I had a phone. A neighbour had taken a call for me, and left a message on the notepad hanging from the door frame. “Katrin called, please phone back”.

I turned the key in the door and opened up. Going in, I crossed a beam of sunlight, making the floating dust dance in my wake. Putting the still warm bread rolls I’d just bought on the table, I went to the stove to boil some water for coffee. Standing in the kitchen, looking out of the window and enjoying the warm, yeasty smell of the rolls I watched a local S‑Bahn train squeal around the curved tracks below. Its dull red and grey paintwork swallowed the low sunlight, the passengers behind the smeared windows barely visible, a shadow puppet show. The train passed, and the weeds between the tracks waved their goodbyes. Turning around I stared at the telephone that had just started ringing.

“Grobe.”

“Papa! It’s me.”

“Hi Katrin, what’s up?”

“Oh nothing much, just got a cancelled lecture, thought it would be good to see you. Besides, I’ve got something to talk to you about. Have you got the day off?”

“I’ve got a few hours free. Why?”

“Listen, do you want to come out here? I’ll buy you coffee.”

I really wanted to go to bed for a short nap before I had to meet the British major, but I knew I would probably lie there staring at the ceiling, thinking. And even if I did manage to nod off then I wouldn’t sleep tonight and would be grumpy all day tomorrow. No, better to get out and about, enjoy a bit of time off. I turned off the stove and headed back out the door. I hadn’t seen Katrin for a couple of weeks, and I was heading over to Westberlin anyway: the Olympia complex, where I was to meet the British liaison officer, was in the British sector.

I walked as far as Ostkreuz before catching the train, hoping the stroll would wake me up a bit. I didn’t go to the western part of the city very often, there wasn’t much for me there. The heady days after the Wall was opened had long gone, we knew what bananas looked like now, and we knew we couldn’t afford them. We knew that the people who populated the other half of our city were mostly better fed, better dressed and better housed, but they weren’t as happy as we were. Looking around at my fellow Eastberliners you could be forgiven for disagreeing—we were a dour bunch. But we had something the people in the West had never had. They had experienced dictators, as we had, and they now had a stable democracy—which we had never had. But they scrawled a cross on a piece of paper every few years, and let the politicians do what they wanted. Their bodies had never surged with the adrenalin and endorphins that come from the power of revolution. We may be the poor cousins on this side of the Wall, but when it came to living life, we were rich.

Changing trains at Friedrichsstrasse station was nothing like it used to be. Nowadays it was as simple as changing platforms. Not so long ago—so recently we could still measure the time in months—the short distance to the trains to the West couldn’t be bridged by a few steps down a corridor and up some stairs to the platform. In those days it took years to get the piece of paper that allowed you to pass the border controls. Years of tears, and usually a one way ticket. In those days most of those who left on the westbound train would never return.

As the S-Bahn whined along the viaduct I looked down at the Wall that still drew the boundaries of this double city. The barbed wire and fences were gone, and the first line of the Wall—whitewashed concrete slabs marking the eastern edge of the border defences—was being dismantled. Behind that there were rows of potatoes, beans and other vegetables growing around the watchtowers and fence posts. The outer wall, facing West, was being maintained while the nation debated what to do with it. It was permeable now, people could pass through a number of new border crossings, but trucks and vans from the West weren’t welcome. After the Wall opened up in November ’89, Westberliners started coming over to the East, buying up subsidised products and taking them back to sell on the street markets. This quickly led to shortages in the capital, some claimed it was a deliberate attempt by Westgermany to destabilise the GDR further—as if that were possible in those days when the communist state was already teetering, pushed by a population hungry for change.

So for the time being the Wall stayed, an economic barrier that gave us space to breathe and grow into the country we wanted to be, whatever we might turn out to be.

A few stops later I got off the train, and following the instructions Katrin had given me on the phone, I made my way to the café.

Tables and chairs were set out on the pavement, all populated by young people in their young clothes, wearing their young faces. Katrin was inside. We hugged. This was a new thing, at home people mostly just shook hands when they met up, but Katrin had started hugging me after she moved to the West. I sat down at her table, and she pushed a cassette tape across the wooden surface. I put my hand over it and drew it towards me.

“What’s with all these cassettes? I mean, it’s not that I don’t appreciate them, in fact I’m rather enjoying them. But, well, why?”

Katrin was sipping a hot chocolate, I nursed a black coffee, no sugar. I could see how my daughter had noticed that I’d deliberately sat with my back to the tray of pastries on the counter, and I think she knew that I was having to try hard to ignore their sweet, sticky call. I couldn’t afford one, nevertheless I hoped that Katrin wouldn’t offer to buy me one either.

“Promise you won’t go off on one?” Katrin, nervous, looked at me. I wondered what was coming as I constructed a lopsided smile (the one Katrin called my Zen-face), and nodded.

“It’s just, after mum… well you had your hands full. With me, queuing for food, cooking, working in the factory. And after all that you’d go out, some meeting in some crypt, some church hall, or your friends would come round, and you’d turn the radio on loud and hold your whispered conversations around the kitchen table. But you weren’t listening to the music. You never had time for music, even though I knew you loved music. West music, East music, the lot.”

This made me think.
The old days
. Strangely, life was simple and straightforward, then. A tug of nostalgia coming from somewhere deep in my chest set my thoughts off on a tangent:
did I miss those days?
I think I’ve still got my Zen smile stapled to the front of my face, but just by looking at Katrin I could see that it had slipped a little.

“I had the blues: Engerling, Cäsar, Bodag… it’s just, after that Udo Ludendorff guy did that song about the train to Pankow, and why can’t he do a gig in our Workers’ and Peasants’ State… it was so unreal. Patronising.
Westmusik.
”

“Lindenberg.”

The smile must have gone by now, the Zen-face turned into a question-mark.

“Udo Lindenberg. That was the guy’s name. And he just didn’t get it. How could he, a Wessi? But that’s just it. You listened to the Westberlin radio station RIAS, and heard the shit stuff. Anyway, Lindenberg responded to Freya Klier’s appeal for help in ’88.”