My mother nodded, but then made a suggestion that shocked me. Henrietta, however, stopped crying.
Two days later, on Saturday, Henrietta went to the beauty salon, put on her long dark blue dress, adorning it with a gold chain that had been her mother’s, made coffee, and set the sawed-off table for two. Next to one setting she laid an envelope with five hundred marks and a folder with copies of documents. She lit a candle before an icon that had come into her possession a year before. From the record player came Russian choral music. Then Henrietta rang family X’s doorbell and invited Frau X upstairs. When both women were seated across from each other, Henrietta apologized for the cropped table. Before she handed over the five hundred marks, however, she did have one more question. She would like to know why Frau X had written reports about her, Henrietta, and her family.
Frau X smiled and asked how Henrietta dared spread such slander. Henrietta shoved the folder across to her.
Frau X opened the folder, paged through it, paged and paged, her thumbing growing more and more hectic. “This can’t be, this simply can’t be,” Frau X whispered. She had, she now exclaimed, written only a very few reports about Henrietta. Neighbor Y, Herr Y from the side entrance, he was responsible for this, and what she had passed on couldn’t even be compared to what Herr Y or for that matter Frau Z had done. “It was Frau Z who wrote the most reports.”
That was perfectly possible, Henrietta said, but her reports were the ones found in the file, after all, and nothing by Frau Z or Herr Y.
“A drink,” Frau X whispered, jumping to her feet. “I need some schnapps.” She tried to embrace Henrietta, begging her not to think too badly of her. She had been forced to write this stuff. “I didn’t do it voluntarily,” she cried. “I didn’t do anyone any harm.”
Frau X downed the vodka with a grimace, tears welling in her eyes. She heaved a sob and ran out. Henrietta poured herself a shot of vodka, picked up the envelope with the five hundred marks, and rang our doorbell.
Although my mother had not expected any other outcome, she found it remarkable that until now Frau X had evidently lived in the belief that we were still in the dark.
I admitted that I had already written off the five hundred marks my mother had provided. “I would’ve bet my life on it with someone like X.”
“No!” my mother exclaimed. “I’ve always believed that justice prevails in the end.”
A few weeks later I wrote up this story, intending to use it in place of a newspaper article I’d agreed to. Up till then, however, I’d never written a story based on real events. So that I found my plan a little eerie.
“I’ve written about you and Henrietta,” I told my mother on the phone. Maybe, I said, the story would work better than rambling explanations to demonstrate how the defunct system’s coordinates and behavioral patterns still shimmer through all our lives.
“Listen up,” my mother interrupted. “There’s more to it.”
“Has X turned up again?”
“Oh, this is a totally different story.”
Henrietta had moved out and been living in a high-rise in the center of Dresden for two weeks. For the move she treated herself to a new dressing table. In order to spare herself a delivery charge, she struggled her way home with the boxed item herself. Just short of her front door a young man offered her assistance, shouldered the heavy carton, maneuvered it onto the elevator, and up he went. Henrietta took the other elevator. When she got off on her floor she found neither her table nor the young man. She waited, returned to the ground floor, then back up again, and now ran up and down the stairs, calling out several times in the stairwell that her dressing table belonged on the eighth floor.
“What are you shouting about?” an astonished elderly lady inquired. Henrietta asked her if she’d seen a man with a big box, and told her tale of woe.
The woman gave Henrietta the once-over. Not to worry, she said at last, sent Henrietta back to her apartment, and took the elevator to the top floor, where she rang at a particular door and stepped inside. Two young men were busy assembling a dressing table. Go ahead and finish the job, the elderly lady said. Stealing from the mother-in-law of a mafioso, having his bodyguards show up, risking an ear or two — and all for a cheap piece of furniture. “Have fun!”
Ten minutes later Henrietta and her helpful neighbor unloaded the now assembled dressing table from the elevator. The glass tabletop had a few scratches, which Henrietta magnanimously overlooked.
I wrote the rest of my story just as my mother had told it to me. Of course neither Henrietta nor my mother knew what the neighbor lady had actually said, but the line of argument sounded credible.
I intended to end my story with the punch line that until 1990 a sign had stood atop the high-rise where Henrietta now lived, proclaiming: Socialism Triumphs!
“Are you going to show Henrietta the story?” my mother asked.
“Why should I?” Her name would be changed. And there was no chance Henrietta would ever read the newspaper for which the article was intended.
The next time I visited Dresden, I brought along the newspaper containing Henrietta’s story. My mother collected such things.
To be honest, I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic when my mother suggested I accompany her to see her former neighbor. Henrietta had just returned from Kiev; she’d been on a pilgrimage.
“Ultimately it’s her you have to thank for your story,” my mother said.
It wasn’t until we were in the car that she confessed that Henrietta beheld the hand of God in our visit. Henrietta felt she had been charged to play missionary to Germany. A man named Misha, a former officer in Afghanistan who was later assigned to the GDR, had convinced her of this. He had announced to Henrietta that she would have to contribute four thousand dollars to the church he worked for. If she did not, within six months Henrietta would be standing in her kitchen, go “Oy!”—and fall over dead.
The building’s entry and tiny elevator were filled with graffiti, top to bottom. Henrietta hugged and kissed me as well and gave us a tour of her two and a half rooms. We admired her dressing table — gilded frame, dark glass top — and gazed from her balcony to the slopes of Loschwitz above the Elbe.
The icon in her wall unit was flanked by a whole host of images of saints. In front of these lay, like a deck of cards, more gaudy portraits, each with an appropriate prayer on the back.
“If I do something right in life, then going to monastery,” Henrietta cried. She was wearing a brown dress with a plunging neckline and low-cut back adorned with the fastener of her pink bra.
Henrietta had stayed in Kiev with Mother Maria, a miracle worker who could heal crushed hands and swollen legs by channeling heavenly energy. After hours-long sessions, people had departed from her free of pain and crutches. Had she not seen it with her own eyes — and at this point Henrietta fixed her gaze on us — she wouldn’t have believed it herself.
With Maria, Misha, and other Kievites, she had traveled to Pochaev monastery in western Ukraine. Their small group had gathered at four in the morning to wait at the church door. This was followed by a kind of footrace, because each person wanted to touch the altar fence. I didn’t know what Henrietta meant by “altar fence,” but I didn’t want to interrupt her story and forgot to ask later.
A monk, tall and with dark eyes, had admonished the believers: No matter what might be happening around them, they were not to worry, but to stay right where they were and trust in God.