“I said in this country. I picked you up in West Berlin tonight, didn’t I? You know, you could easily have gone into the boot of the car.”
She looked into his eyes and knew he meant it. A chill raced through her body. The game was over and she was entering into the unknown.
He removed a cigarette case engraved with a rifle and flag commemorating twenty years of the Ministry for State Security. “Cigarette?”
“I hate smoke.”
Schmidt lit his cigarette anyway. “We’ll provide you with the necessary details on a need-to-know basis. This is neither the time nor the place.”
“I’m not working for the Stasi.” Faith pushed herself back from the table and stood. “It’s been interesting, Herr Schmidt. We’ll have to do this again sometime.”
He took a long drag from the cigarette and paused to hold the fumes in his lungs. He looked at her as if appraising the market value of her soul. “Need I remind you, you are in the GDR without a visa? You are aware of what we do with imperialist spies. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly.”
“You’re making a scene. Sit.” Schmidt smashed his cigarette into the ashtray. He stared at Faith.
She sat.
Outside, Herr Schmidt held the Mercedes’ door open for Faith, leaving Frau Schmidt standing in the drizzle. “After you.”
“I need a ride to West Berlin.” Her voice was flat.
“Not possible. Most of the border crossings are closed, anyway.”
“But some are open. You can rouse someone to open the others. And I suspect it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve dragged someone out of bed in the middle of the night.” And then made them disappear.
“I can take you anywhere you’d like here in democratic Berlin. I understand you keep your own safe houses.”
“Obviously not anymore. And they’re for storage.”
“Agree to work for me and I can arrange for you to get back to the West tonight. You can even have the multiple-entry visa.”
“Fuck you,” she said in English. She turned and walked away, pulling her silk jacket tightly around her.
“You have my card. Call me in the morning with your decision. You know, Frau Doktor, I almost think you could get to the West on your own. But remember…” Schmidt’s voice faded into the night.
Her jacket was useless against the heavy mist that seeped through her clothes. The colder she became, the less certain she was she had made the wiser choice.
The Mercedes pulled up beside her and paced her. She turned her head toward a shop window and hastened her tread. Heavy footsteps approached from behind as the mist thickened into rain.
“At least take my umbrella.” Schmidt trotted alongside, getting drenched as he held his umbrella over her head. “Frau Doktor, it’s one in the morning and I’m off work. Feier Abend. No more recruiting you tonight. Let me drive you home-to the flat in the Voigtstrasse. The rain’s cold and our streets aren’t as safe as they should be.”
Faith slowed her gait and paused for a moment, looking straight ahead. “That’s decent of you.”
The blackened façade of her East Berlin flat was a leper, slowly shedding essential body parts. She had never imagined sleeping here even one night; the apartment was intended as a secret warehouse. She hesitated before walking in, but then decided the day the Stasi had cornered her would be an appropriate one for the balcony to crash down upon her-most everything else had.
Peeling plaster and a few broken ceramic tile fragments desperately clung to the walls of the front corridor. Many had already been pried off and found their way to West Berlin flea markets. Faith hurried through the first building and into the courtyard, where a few blades of grass struggled up through the broken concrete. She recalled how, during the day, the wings of the building eclipsed the right side of the house, condemning all but the top floors to perpetual shadows.
Her flat was one of the damned.
For a moment she wondered if she could outlast Schmidt, living as his hostage in the dark apartment, waiting for him to issue her an exit visa or escort her to the West. She entered her wing of the building and punched the glowing light switch with her elbow. The stairs creaked, threatening to drop her into the coal bin. She wiggled the flimsy aluminum key in the lock to her flat and dared it to bend. The lights went out. She grappled for the automatic timer, and grime embedded itself deep under her fingernails. If the last try didn’t succeed, she would sprint down the road after Schmidt. The lock turned, but still she wanted to run after him. Stockholm syndrome so soon?
Years of cabbage soup had been steamed into the wallpaper. Her wet shoes nearly froze to the apartment’s icy floor. When she had first struck the bargain with Dieter to sublease his studio apartment while he was away in Mongolia, she had been excited about the place’s quaint tiled coal oven as a memorial to simpler days. Now she wished the coal bucket were sitting in a museum instead of her new bedroom. At the time she had ignored most of Dieter’s meticulous instructions because a warehouse didn’t require heat. Now his warning that the room would fill with black soot if she turned the damper the wrong direction haunted her.
Why didn’t she just go along with Schmidt? She could be at home in West Berlin right now, eating cold leftovers. Her desperate stomach growled as she unwrapped the electric space heater that was her rental payment for the flat. She plugged it in. A burlap curtain partitioned off the closet where Dieter had squeezed in a mattress, converting it into his sleeping hutch. Unable to bring herself to stick her head inside, she shoved the heater’s cardboard box into his chamber.
The tarnished mirror above the washbasin swallowed her reflection. How could Dieter live here without an indoor toilet, bathtub or shower? Who was she fooling? Outlast Schmidt? She’d never last a week bathing herself in a miniature basin like a condor in a birdbath.
The cold reached deeper and deeper into her body as she sat on the scratchy couch. Everything in this state was as stale as the air in the apartment. What did she need commie crap for anyway? There had to be a better way to make a living. Just as easily gone into the boot of the car?
Faith walked into the dark stairwell and felt her way down a half-flight of stairs to the communal water closet. Sitting on the toilet, she couldn’t concentrate enough to read the cartoons about bodily functions plastered on the walls. A few moments later, she yanked on the chain, but the commode didn’t stop running. The odor of overheated wiring wafted through the air. She rushed back into the apartment, jerked the heater’s plug from the wall and crept back down to the toilet. With one last tug, the water stopped.
She returned to the apartment. She had been a conscripted pawn in the Cold War with her mother for far too long to enlist on one side or the other. Her life was about beating the system, not becoming a part of it. Boot of the car? The walls came nearer and nearer until the dank wallpaper stuck to her skin. She cocooned herself in a musty sheet, put her arm over her eyes and fell into a restless sleep.
In the morning, Faith stared at Alexanderplatz. A concrete tower skewering a colossal silver ball sprouted from the surreal landscape and a metal clock also defied the cobblestone desert. Although it displayed the time in Addis Ababa, Hanoi and Ulan Bator, the exact minute on Venus or on Alpha Centuri seemed more fitting here, less than a kilometer east of the Berlin Wall. Faith usually adored how East Germany managed to embody all of the tawdry grandiosity of old low-budget sci-fi movies. Today she’d give anything for stale popcorn and Scotty to beam her up out of this hellhole.
After a frustrating hour scrounging for breakfast, she resigned herself to queuing up for limp fries. Rancid grease coated the crisp spring air as she edged forward in line. When it was her turn, she bounced an aluminum coin across the counter. She stood at an outdoor table and tried not to think about the fries she was force-feeding herself.