“There’s no question about it. I’m sure he did,” Hannes said. “I imagine he tried that on every one of them.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“Was there any particular reward for being cooperative or was it purely idealistic?” Elinborg asked. “Spying on your neighbours?”
“There were systems to reward those who wanted to impress. Sometimes a bad student who was loyal to the party line and politically sound would get a bigger grant than a brilliant student who had much higher grades but was not politically active. The system worked like that. When an undesirable student was expelled, like I was in the end, it was important for the other students to show what they thought by siding with the party apparatchiks. Students could gain kudos by denouncing the offender to show loyalty to the general line, as it was called. The Freie Deutsche Jugend was in charge of discipline. It was the only student organisation that was allowed and it had a lot of power. Not belonging to it was frowned upon. As was not attending their talks.”
“You said there were dissident cells,” Erlendur said.
“I don’t even know if you could call them dissident cells,” Hannes said. “Mainly they were young people who got together and listened to western radio stations and talked about Bill Haley and West Berlin, where many of them had been, or even religion, which the officials didn’t think highly of. Then there were other proper dissident groups that wanted to fight for reforms to the political structure, real democracy, freedom of speech and the press. They were crushed.”
“You said Lothar Weiser “for one” had asked you to spy. Do you mean there were others like him?” Erlendur asked.
“Yes, of course,” Hannes said. “Society was strictly controlled, both the university and the public at large. And people feared surveillance. Orthodox communists took part in it wholeheartedly, the sceptics tried to avoid it and come to terms with living under it, but I think most people found it at odds with everything socialism stands for.”
“Did you know any Icelandic student who may have worked for Lothar?”
“Why do you want to know that?” Hannes asked.
“We need to know whether he was in contact with any Icelanders when he was here as a trade attache in the 1960s,” Erlendur said. “It’s a perfectly normal check. We’re not trying to spy on people, just gathering information because of the skeleton we found.”
Hannes looked at them.
“I don’t know of any Icelander who paid any attention to that system, except Emil maybe,” he said. “I think he was acting under cover. I told Tomas that once when he asked me the same question. Much later, in fact. He came to see me and asked exactly the same question.”
“Tomas?” Erlendur said. He remembered the name from the list of students in East Germany. “Do you keep in touch with Leipzig alumni?”
“No, I don’t have much contact with them and never have,” Hannes said. “But Tomas and I had one thing in common: we were both expelled. Like me, he came back home before he finished his course. He was ordered to leave. He looked me up when he got back to Iceland and told me about his girlfriend, a Hungarian girl called Ilona. I knew her vaguely. She wasn’t the type to toe the party line, to put it mildly. Her background was rather different. The climate was more liberal in Hungary then. Young people were starting to say what they thought about the Soviet hegemony that covered the whole of Eastern Europe.”
“Why did he tell you about her?” Elinborg asked.
“He was a broken man when he came to see me,” Hannes said. “A shadow of his former self. I remembered him when he was happy and confident and full of socialist ideals. He fought for them. Came from a solid working-class family.”
“Why was he a broken man?”
“Because she disappeared,” Hannes said. “Ilona was arrested in Leipzig and never seen again. He was totally destroyed by it. He told me Ilona was pregnant when she went missing. Told me with tears in his eyes.”
“And he came to see you again later?” Erlendur asked.
“That was quite strange actually. Him coming after all those years to reminisce. I’d forgotten the whole business really, but it was obvious that Tomas had forgotten nothing. He remembered it all. Every detail, as if it had happened yesterday.”
“What did he want?” Elinborg said.
“He was asking me about Emil,” Hannes said. “If he’d worked for Lothar. If they’d been in close contact. I don’t know why he wanted to know, but I told him I had proof that Emil needed to get into Lothar’s good books.”
“What kind of proof?” Elinborg asked.
“Emil was a hopeless student. He didn’t really belong at university, but he was a good socialist. Everything we said went straight to Lothar, and Lothar made sure that Emil received a good grant and good marks. Tomas and Emil were good friends.”
“What proof did you have?” Elinborg repeated.
“My engineering professor told me when I said goodbye to him. After I was expelled. He was hurt that I wasn’t allowed to finish the course. All the teaching staff talked about it, he said. The teachers disliked students like Emil, but couldn’t do a thing. They didn’t all like Lothar and his ilk, either. The professor said that Emil must have been valuable to Lothar, because there was hardly a worse student around, but Lothar ordered the university authorities not to fail him. The FDJ sanctioned the move and Lothar was behind it.”
Hannes paused.
“Emil was the staunchest of us all,” he said after a while. “A hardline communist and Stalinist.”
“Why…” Erlendur began, but Hannes continued as if his mind were elsewhere.
“It was all such a shock,” he said, staring ahead. “The whole system. We witnessed absolute dictatorship by the party, fear and repression. Some tried to tell the party members here about it when they got back, but made no headway. I always felt that the socialism they practised in East Germany was a kind of sequel to Nazism. This time they were under the Russian heel, of course, but I pretty quickly got the feeling that socialism in East Germany was essentially just another kind of Nazism.”
30
Hannes cleared his throat and looked at them. They could both tell that he found it difficult to talk about his student days. He did not appear to be in the habit of recalling his Leipzig years. Erlendur had forced him to sit down and open up.
“Is there anything else you need to know?” Hannes asked.
“So Tomas turns up years after he left Leipzig and asks you about Emil and Lothar, and you tell him you have proof that they were operating together,” Erlendur said. “Emil performed for him the important task of monitoring and informing on the students.”
“Yes,” Hannes said.
“Why was Tomas asking about Emil, and who is Emil?”
“He didn’t tell me why and I know very little about Emil. The last I heard, he was living abroad. I think he did ever since we studied in Germany. He never moved back as far as I know. I met one of the students from Leipzig a few years ago, Karl. We were both travelling in Skaftafell and we started talking about the old days, and he said he thought Emil had decided to settle abroad after university. He hadn’t seen or heard of him since.”
“But Tomas, do you know anything about him?” Erlendur asked.
“Not really. He did engineering at Leipzig but I’m not aware that he worked in the field. He was expelled. I only met him once when he got back from Germany, that one time he came to ask about Emil.”
“Tell us about it,” Elinborg said.
“There’s not much to tell. He dropped in and we reminisced about the old days.”
“Why was he interested in Emil?” Erlendur asked.