At night, the campers would toast bread over an open fire, and eat it with honey that would scorch their lips and tongues. Nothing could match the sensation of burnt honey mixed with sand that got into their bread and even into their knapsacks, and the August moon doing crazy things to the black and yellow cliffs of Saxon Switzerland as they sat at the mouth of a pit they’d spent the summer excavating.
So yes, she brought the Junior Excavator trophy to college. She also brought her sewing machine, a graduation gift from Leonora. It fit into its own suitcase. She sewed her own clothes. She would have mended other people’s clothes if they’d bothered to ask her. No one asked her. That was the sort of girl she was, at least until Hans Klemmer kissed her.
In 1984, Judit would be using that same machine in the apartment she and Hans had purchased after they’d moved to Dresden. The place was new, and still felt raw and strange, not fully furnished, not their own. When Hans conducted, she liked to stay in her little sewing room, the one they’d hoped to make into a nursery. That’s where she was, in her robe, at nine o’clock when the doorbell rang.
It couldn’t have been Hans. She sat at the machine for a moment, running a seam down the edge of Hans’s new dress shirt. Then she got up and pulled her robe a little tighter. She walked to the door. It was already open. The agent stood there, in his brown hat, with his mild face. He just looked at her. That’s when she knew.
Judit had always suspected that the Stasi agent had been Hans’s bodyguard and he’d been delegated to her case as a perverse demotion. She could never see him again without reliving that night. Thus, when Mrs. Cohen said, “That man’s in the sitting room,” they exchanged a look of resigned complicity that made Judit grateful, yet again, that she lived in the dormitory, particularly when Mrs. Cohen added, “Don’t let him go too long. It’s common space, after all. The other girls don’t like it.”
The sitting room was another artifact. It was supposed to be for gentleman callers. Its big glass partition faced the hallway, and it contained a square modernist chair and two uncomfortable couches. The Stasi agent sat on one of those couches. At some point in the past three years, he’d stopped wearing the hat. Rising, he began, as ever, “Just a courtesy visit.” Then he said, “How are you, Mrs. Klemmer? You look tired.”
“It’s the lighting in here,” Judit said. “It makes everyone look tired.”
The agent motioned for her to sit in the chair. She kept on standing. She looked at her watch. She’d found that if she stood and looked at her watch, he’d usually leave sooner, but sometimes he would just say, as he did that day, “Please sit down.”
Then she would have no choice. She’d sit down as he went through his litany of questions about her schedule, her route home, and any changes in her routine.
The agent shook his head. “It’s not just the lighting. You’re worn out. I believe you’re under pressure at work and it’s interfering with your health.”
There was a probing quality to this conversation. “I always look like this,” Judit said. “You sound like my mother.”
The agent allowed himself a small, wry smile. “I’m flattered.”
“She’d love a visit from you,” Judit said. “It would impress the neighbors.”
He laughed. “I’m sure the neighbors are already impressed with Mrs. Ginsberg. Returning to the point at hand, if you’re running into trouble in the archive, we could help. I’ve said all along, we have access to resources that would make your job far easier.” The agent did say that. All the time. The fact that his laughter was rueful and disarming did not make Judit like him any better.
She said, “I work best independently.”
“You’ve made that clear,” the agent said. “But you should understand that your mother and I are alike in putting your welfare first.” Now he did something so quickly that she didn’t have time to stop him. He took her hand, turned it over, and checked her pulse. “When is the last time you saw a doctor?”
“Surely you have access to that information,” Judit said.
“We’ve told you many times that we don’t interfere, or pursue trivial questions. Yet there is a question that isn’t trivial. In fact, it’s a very interesting question.”
He gave Judit a look, half-tender, half-diagnostic, and he hadn’t yet released her hand. His fingers pressed in gently. Then, without warning, his gaze hardened and focused in a way that cut through to the bone. Judit had been under that particular microscope before, and the degree of intensity never ceased to startle her. She said, “What question?”
“The question of why you won’t let us help you. Is there any other question, Mrs. Klemmer? Is there something else you want to tell me?” And this whole time, the note was on her. Why hadn’t she destroyed it? He could smell it. There was nothing about her that this agent didn’t know. He didn’t pursue it, though. He was no fool. That was the trouble.
He released her wrist and handed her his card. It was the same card that he gave her every month. She had a stack of them in her room. Somehow, they never made it to the wastebasket. There were times when she wondered if, by keeping those cards, she compromised herself. The fact was, she was used to those visits, and if she was going to be honest, had grown to depend on them. Leaving aside that ghost, the agent had become the only man in her life.
“Get some sleep,” he said. “And don’t hesitate to contact me. For any reason. We can help you get a new room. You know, this dormitory is slated for demolition next year.”
7
THE Ministry of State Security knew everything. Judit had grown up hearing stories of heroic Stasi agents who neutralized Nazi bandits in the ’50s through a network of informers and helped secure the borders in the years before the Protective Rampart. When Leonora learned the Stasi would look in on Judit, she’d been so relieved, she cried. Still, if the Stasi were so all-knowing and all-powerful, Hans would still be alive.
Judit’s dormitory room had a narrow bed and a pressed-wood desk and chair, and she sat at that desk for a while with the note spread out in front of her. The print was faint and growing fainter by the hour. She switched on the desk lamp, but the glare made things worse.
Maybe she wasn’t at the trial, but she couldn’t help hearing about the spectacle. Arno Durmersheimer was arrested with half a dozen others—all men in their sixties. They were members of some ridiculous Saxon folk-dancing club. Durmersheimer played the accordion. With his overalls and close-cropped red hair, he was the kind of Saxon you see everywhere and never see at all.
Durmersheimer had been one of those Rathen snipers who’d terrorized Judenstaat until he’d been deported to the West. He had been unapologetic. “I have nothing against Jews unless they’re Reds or Cosmopolitans. I wish I’d gotten more of them. Now, I guess, Jews hunt me.”
How did he re-cross the border? It was a question that must have been answered at the trial. The bullet had come from Durmersheimer’s gun. Hans Klemmer’s name was on a list of so-called collaborators found on Durmersheimer’s person. Durmersheimer seemed bewildered by the trial itself, never denied the charges. He kept repeating: “What’s a Saxon to you? Just shoot him in the head if he gets in the way, or let the Reds do your shooting for you.”
There was more—she was sure—about the other suspects, the folk-dancing, the list of collaborators. There must be a transcript somewhere. She could certainly request files to be transferred to the archive. Yet if she took that step, it would raise questions that felt—against all logic—private. This was not state business. Whoever broke into her archive had risked something to get to her.