WE DREW UP TO A SMALL outbuilding beside the road, which seemed to be the guardhouse to the castle. I stepped out of the car with Ken, who was exhibiting the same confidence he had shown at the border. Anthony sat impassively in the car, staring straight ahead, his expression carved in stone so we didn’t give anything away.
“What do you want?” a young looking woman asked us from inside the hut. “What have you come for?”
“We have an appointment,” I said.
“Who have you come to see?”
Ken wasn’t saying a word. He replied with a silence, as if angry with the woman for even daring to challenge us, thrusting our British passports toward her as if that should explain everything.
“Oh, I know,” she said, apparently pleased with herself for being able to show off her efficiency and knowledge of the system, “it’s Frau Steglitz you want.”
“Yes,” Ken nodded curtly, as if he had been testing her and was impressed by her response. But he did not then smile politely, as he would have done in a normal, relaxed conversation in England. “That is correct.”
Without hesitating, the woman phoned some unseen authority behind the castle walls to inform them that three British people had arrived at the gates with an appointment to see Frau Steglitz. To our amazement she slammed down the telephone receiver with a curt, “Gut.” (“Good.”)
Ken waved to Anthony to leave the car and join us as the woman showed us through a small side door. I hardly dared breathe for fear of upsetting our good luck.
“‘What next?” I whispered into Ken’s ear once we were inside, but he said nothing.
Another stony-faced official was approaching us. She seemed perplexed, eyeing us up and down.
“Come with me, please,” she said.
The décor was grim and austere. What dark secrets did these plain walls hold? I wondered. The woman marched us into a room then turned to face us.
“My name is Frau Steglitz,” she said. “Now why have you come here?”
She seemed taken aback by our appearance from nowhere, and her attitude was confrontational and far from welcoming. Everything about her, from her short-cropped hair to the way she stood before us with her squared-up shoulders screamed hostility. It was obvious she thought we had ambushed her, had invaded her kingdom. No doubt during the long years of the Cold War she had been given as many reasons to fear the citizens of the West as we had been given to fear the East. And here we were, meeting, but with us having bypassed all the protocols she had been brought up to believe were essential.
“What is your business here?” she snapped.
Ken thrust our passports toward her again, determined not to be intimidated. She glanced at them but didn’t seem as impressed by them as the guard outside had been.
“I sent a letter,” I said, my voice sounding much less certain than Ken’s.
“Eve Haas,” Ken barked by way of an introduction, as if hoping that just mentioning my name should be enough to guarantee her cooperation. “We wrote to you from London.”
“Yes, I know,” she replied without a flicker of an expression. “Follow me.”
Frau Steglitz led us through to another very sparsely furnished room and nodded for us to sit on the rickety-looking wooden visitors’ chairs while she went behind her desk to assume her position of authority, looking like a high school principal who had summoned us to appear to answer for some misbehavior.
“So, you received my letter?” I asked nervously.
“Yes,” she nodded, still giving nothing away.
“What was your reply?” I ventured after a few awkward moments of silence.
“The reply is in the mail,” she said. “You will receive it when you get back to England.”
“We are here now,” I said emphatically, following Ken’s firm lead, feeling I had nothing to lose by pushing my luck. “I am looking for my great-great-grandmother. She had a liaison with Prince August of Prussia, and I want to look her up in the archives.”
“Oh, that is absolutely impossible,” she snapped. “Absolutely no one can enter our archives here. It is not permitted. We receive requests from eminent American professors all the time and we always refuse them. No one can come here from the West to research. It is not allowed.”
The very idea that we would have the nerve even to ask seemed to be beyond her comprehension. Since we were at least inside the castle walls and she didn’t appear to be about to call the guards to have us ejected or arrested, I decided to persevere.
“They lived together for many years and had a baby—”
The mention of the word “baby” seemed to infuriate her and she immediately started shouting.
“A baby?” she boomed, slapping her palms on the desk and making us all jump. “I don’t know why you people in the West are so impressed with babies. People have babies all the time, every minute and second of every day all over the world. Why should you worry about one baby? Just because you once had an empire you think you can study in our archive. Well, it is certainly not possible.”
“How could it be made possible?” Ken asked, apparently not intimidated by her sudden explosion of anger.
“You would have to get permission,” she told him, as if such a possibility were out of the question, and obviously hoping her tone was enough to end the whole stupid conversation. We were clearly annoying her almost beyond endurance.
“How would we get permission?” he asked.
“Oh,” she scoffed, “that would be at the ministry. Anyhow, permission would have to be given personally by the minister himself, and that cannot happen.”
“Where would that ministry be?” Ken asked calmly, like it was the most natural question in the world.
“In Potsdam!” she shouted triumphantly, certain it would finally end the conversation.
“Could you let us have the address, please?” Ken asked firmly.
“You are not allowed to go there. It is seventy kilometers away, and they close at four o’clock, so it will be a complete waste of time anyway.”
Then, as we sat there determined and resolute, Frau Steglitz paused for a second, as if weighing up in her mind whether giving us an address would be to her advantage. Perhaps by getting three troublesome foreigners out of her office she could pass us on for someone else to deal with. Whatever it was, something seemed to occur to her and without a word she stood up and strode from the room. Ken and I exchanged glances but dared not say a word. There was a terrible tension in the air. Had she gone to fetch the guards to have us dealt with? The minutes ticked by as we waited, not knowing what fate now lay in store for us. Ken glanced at his watch but said nothing. It was already two o’clock. It is surprising how the hours ebb away while you wait for permissions to do things.
To our astonishment, she returned five minutes later with an address typed on a very small sheet of paper. We curtly nodded our thanks and shook her hand, behaving as if we considered she had done no more than her duty. Frau Steglitz escorted us out of the building and we left quickly. I could hardly believe our luck. I was overcome with relief. We had taken a decisive step forward.
“Next stop Potsdam, then,” I announced as we climbed back into the car.
Ken was working it out. “Potsdam is seventy kilometers in the opposite direction from Checkpoint Charlie. Even if we manage to get there before the ministry closes, there’s a real chance we wouldn’t make it back in time to meet our deadline.”
But this was such a huge breakthrough I couldn’t bear the thought of turning around and going home, and risking that we would not be allowed back in later. We didn’t have permission from anyone to go there, but then the chances were that we wouldn’t be given permission to come back again either. It seemed like a risk we simply had to take. Taking them by surprise seemed to be working to our advantage so far.
“We’ve got to get there as quickly as possible,” I said before Ken could protest any more about how dangerous it was. “Let’s make a dash for it.”
He stared at me for a few seconds and then turned to Anthony.
“Okay,” he said grimly. “Let’s go to Potsdam.”