Sometimes he spoke to Hannes at the university. Normally they ran into each other at the library or in the cafeteria in the main building. They became good friends in spite of everything, in spite of Hannes’s pessimism. He tried to talk Hannes round, but in vain. Hannes had lost interest. His only thoughts were about finishing his studies and going home.
One day he sat down beside Hannes in the cafeteria. It was snowing outside. He had been sent a warm overcoat from Iceland at Christmas. He had mentioned in one of his letters how cold it was in Leipzig. Hannes made a point of asking about the overcoat and he could detect a hint of jealousy in his voice.
What he did not know was that this would be the last time they would speak together in Leipzig.
“How’s Ilona?” Hannes asked.
“How do you know Ilona?” he replied.
“I don’t know her,” Hannes said, looking around the cafeteria as if to make sure that no one could hear them. “I just know that she’s from Hungary. And she’s your girlfriend. Isn’t she? Aren’t you going out?”
He sipped his turgid coffee without replying. There was a strange tone to Hannes’s voice. Tougher and more obstinate than usual.
“Does she ever talk to you about what’s going on in Hungary?” Hannes asked.
“Sometimes. We try not to talk much about…”
“You know what’s going on there?” Hannes interrupted. “The Soviets will use military force. I’m surprised they haven’t already. They can’t avoid it. If they allow what’s happening in Hungary to escalate, the rest of Eastern Europe will follow and there’ll be a full-scale revolt against Soviet authority. Doesn’t she ever talk about that?”
“We talk about Hungary,” he said. “We just don’t agree on it.”
“No, of course, you know more about what’s going on there than she, the Hungarian, does.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“So what are you saying?” Hannes said. “Have you ever wondered seriously about that? When the red glow has faded from your eyes?”
“What happened to you, Hannes? Why are you so angry? What happened after you came here? You were the Great Hope back in Iceland.”
“The Great Hope,” Hannes snorted. “I’m probably not that any more,” he said.
They fell silent.
“I just saw through all this crap,” Hannes said after a while in a low voice. “The whole fucking lie. We’ve been spoon-fed the workers” paradise, equality and brotherhood until we sing the Internationale like the needle’s stuck. One big hallelujah chorus without a word of criticism. Back home we go to campaign meetings. Here there’s nothing but eulogies. Where do you see debate? Long live the party and nothing else! Have you spoken to people who live here? Do you know what they’re thinking? Have you talked to a single ordinary person in this city? Did they want Walter Ulbricht and the Communist Party? Do they want a single party and a centralised economy? Did they want to ban freedom of speech and freedom of the press and real political parties? Did they want to be shot on the streets in the 1953 uprising? Back in Iceland, at least we can argue with our opponents and write articles in the newspapers. That’s banned here. There’s just one line, finito. Then, when people are herded up to vote for the only party that’s allowed to operate in the country, they call it elections! The locals think it’s a total farce. They know this is no democracy!”
Hannes paused. He was seething.
“People don’t dare say what they think because everything here is under surveillance. The whole fucking society. Everything you say and do can rebound on you and you’re called in, arrested, expelled. Talk to people. The phones are bugged. They spy on the citizens!”
They sat in silence.
He knew that Hannes and Ilona had a point. And he thought it was better for the party to come clean and admit that free elections and free discussion were for the time being impossible. They would come later, when the goal had been achieved: a socialist economy. They had sometimes made fun of the Germans for agreeing to every proposal at meetings and then saying the exact opposite in private. People were afraid to be straightforward, hardly dared to advance an independent view for fear that it would be interpreted as antisocialist and they would be punished.
“They’re dangerous men, Tomas,” Hannes said after a long silence. “They’re not playing games.”
“Why are you always talking about freedom of opinion?” he said angrily. “You and Ilona. Look at the witch hunt against communists in America. You can see how they drive people out of the country, out of their jobs. And what about the surveillance society there? Did you read about the cowards who informed on their comrades to the House Un-American Activities Committee? The communist party’s outlawed there. Only one opinion’s permitted there, too — the opinion of the capitalist cartels, the imperialists, the warmongers. They reject everything else. Everything.”
He stood up.
“You’re here at the invitation of the proletariat of this country,” he said angrily. “It pays for your education and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for talking like that. Ashamed of yourself! And you ought to fuck off back home!”
He stormed out of the cafeteria.
“Tomas,” Hannes called after him, but he did not answer.
He strode down the corridor away from the cafeteria and bumped into Lothar, who asked what the hurry was. Glancing back, he said it was nothing. They left the building together. Lothar offered to buy him a beer and he accepted. When they sat down in Baum next to Thomaskirche he told Lothar about the argument and how Hannes, for some reason, had turned completely against socialism and denigrated it. He told Lothar that he could not tolerate Hannes’s hypocrisy in arguing against the socialist system but reaping its benefits by studying there.
“I don’t understand it,” he said to Lothar. “I don’t understand how he can abuse his position like that. I could never do that,” he said. “Never.”
That evening he met Ilona and told her about the argument. He mentioned that Hannes sometimes gave the impression that he knew her, but she shook her head. She had never heard his name and never spoken to him.
“Do you agree with him?” he asked hesitantly.
“Yes,” she said after a long pause. “I agree with him. And not just me. There are many, many others. People of my age in Budapest. Young people here in Leipzig.”
“Why don’t they speak out?”
“We’re doing that in Budapest,” she said. “But we face huge opposition. It’s awesome. And there’s fear. Fear everywhere about what could happen.”
“The army?”
“Hungary is one of the Soviet Union’s trophies from the war. They won’t give it up without a fight. If we manage to break free from them, you couldn’t say what would happen in the rest of Eastern Europe. That’s the big question. The chain reaction.”
Two days later, without warning, Hannes was expelled from the university and ordered to leave the country.
He heard that a police guard had been stationed outside Hannes’s digs and that he had been escorted to the airport by two members of the security police. As he understood it, none of the courses that Hannes had taken would be recognised by any other university. It was as if Hannes had never been a student. He had been erased.