Anne emerged from the Turkish shop across the street carrying a string bag with food for dinner. It was not yet dark; the winter sun was a pale orange ball dying on the horizon. She gazed, enchanted by the natural beauty. For a moment she daydreamed, letting a pleasant thought carry her to a calm place. When she saw the galleon cloud drift across the winter sky, she imagined riding it like a magic carpet to some imaginary kingdom.
A mother’s cry from a window broke her reverie and her eyes searched for the truant child. She felt something ineffable—the urge to look back gripped her and she glanced over her shoulder, spotting a woman across the street who was watching her. She was a petite, narrow-shouldered woman with short, black hair and an intense stare that was fixed on Anne. Primitive terror went down Anne’s spine. She turned suddenly and crossed the street to her lobby. She fumbled with the keys as the woman approached.
“What was it like to be one of Rudolf Kruger’s victims?”
Anne flinched when she heard the word—geschädigte. Her keys slipped from her fingers and she stooped to pick them up, glancing at the woman. She remembered her face and her aggressive, confrontational demeanor. She was the ARD television reporter who’d shouted questions at Praeger on the steps of police headquarters, and the one who’d reported Stefan’s drowning. Anne hesitated, reluctant to speak, but also curious what brought the reporter back to the story.
In the first minute of conversation, it came out that the reporter had a few facts, remembered the bizarre circumstances of Stefan’s first death, and she was trying to make sense of how a man could die twice. She smelled a story. “I’m using my free time to research a human-interest piece for my editor.”
Anne listened skeptically. The reporter had no story, but she had a reporter’s instinct, persistence, and dubious charm. Kruger’s notoriety and his reclusiveness, she said, had excited wide interest among West Germans who were getting their first view inside closed East German society. Unlikely stories about life in the East were becoming contemporary legends that filled newspapers and magazines. The reporter repeated the rumor she’d heard—Stefan had been one of Kruger’s Romeos planted in Berlin.
“Is it true?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said, trying to end the conversation. She waved off the reporter.
“Where is Kruger? Do you know? Has he gone to Moscow? Lisbon? What do the Americans want with him?”
“Excuse me,” Anne said, “I don’t know anything. I really don’t.”
Anne didn’t know what to make of the reporter’s interest, but it was also something that she couldn’t ignore, so when the reporter presented her business card, she took it to be polite, and not because she had any intention of speaking with the woman again.
Anne double-locked her apartment door and set down her string bag. She poured herself a whiskey. She glanced at the wall clock and was relieved that the time hadn’t been changed and the pictures on the wall hadn’t been switched. Sipping her drink, she moved to the closed venetian blinds, lifting one corner, and peeked out. She stood back so as not to be seen, and looked across the street. An apartment light was on but there was no one in the window.
The phone rang.
Anne turned and stared. It was a rebellious act against the world that kept her from answering the phone. It rang a third time and then a fourth time. She hesitated, steeling herself against the thought that this was another harassing call from a former Stasi who’d gotten her number. There had been several. The first one came without warning. The man threatened her if she cooperated with the BND and identified Kruger. She’d hung up and happened to see a figure standing in the window across the street. The man was silhouetted holding a telephone.
She knew what to expect if she answered, but she also knew that if she didn’t answer the calls would continue. It was always the same man speaking crude German.
“Hallo.”
“Anne? Is that you?”
A woman’s voice. “Who is this?”
“It’s me, Petra.”
Anne hesitated. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”
“I’ve been thinking of you. I want to thank you for the money you sent. It was kind of you. Can we meet before you leave Berlin?”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Oh, I heard…”
“What?”
“You identified a body in the canal. You were leaving.”
“Who said that?”
“Dr. Knappe. In exchange for fleischkuechle he gives me news.”
Nothing was funny to Anne anymore, not even the thought of a bespectacled man in an obvious hairpiece peddling rumors for dinner. That was the old Berlin from after the War and now it was the new Berlin after the collapse. Rumors everywhere and shortages—a better cut of meat bartered for information on a missing relative. She had met this kind of black marketeer among the refugees processed through JAROC—Poles, Hungarians, and Latvians who claimed that the Mossad or MI6 would pay dearly for their information if the Americans weren’t willing to meet a price. Everything for sale. The worst of the refugees with the most outrageous demands would boast they could deliver a lock of Hitler’s hair.
“Good of you to feed him.”
“He lost his job. Everyone is out of work. Everyone is poor. Things were terrible before. Now they’re terrible in a different way. How are you?”
They avoided the obvious topic, but Petra was happy to explain how life in East Berlin had changed. It was different. Confusing.
“I walk outside and I have to remind myself not to look behind. I know there is no one following, but it’s a habit. It’s time to make new habits.”
Anne walked as she talked, the telephone cord trailing behind. She asked questions, but mostly she listened. Part of her wanted to be friends with Petra and talk openly about Stefan, and part of her was jealous that Petra had borne his son. Lover, mother, first wife. Anne was still uncomfortable thinking of herself as the other woman. The full text of her relationship with Stefan was written and whatever could be said had already been said. She tried to remember everything he confessed that night in the car, but now the words flew from her mind. She had thought she’d known him as well as anyone could know another person, but now she thought she hadn’t known him at all. They had shared intimate moments, but even those were contaminated by surveillance.
“Carlota disappeared,” Petra said.
Anne hadn’t been listening. “Who?”
“My neighbor. She informed on you.”
“She’s dead. They pulled her from the canal. Her hair was cut off.”
Petra came to the point of her call. “Come with me to Stasi Headquarters. It was ransacked. Everyone is going there to read their files. I want to go, but I won’t go alone. Will you come with me next Tuesday? Your file will also be there.”
Anne found it difficult to sleep in her bedroom those days. She lay in bed at night calculating her future and trying to bury the past. She had removed his clothing and shoes from the apartment, but she couldn’t expunge him from her dreams. She would wake and think he was beside her in bed, watching her, whispering something that she couldn’t understand. No matter how many pillows she put on her head, his voice was in her ears and his face in her mind. Sometimes, she wondered which pillow he would have used to suffocate her.
One night, Anne dragged the mattress into the living room. She told Chrystal that she was cold and needed to be closer to the portable electric heater. Chrystal pointed out that it would be easier to move the heater into the bedroom than the mattress into the living room, and having made that remark, and sensing some disturbance in Anne, Chrystal added, “But that wouldn’t solve the problem, would it?”
Unable to sleep, even in the living room, Anne meditated. Disturbing thoughts kept entering her mind. She came to Berlin reluctantly with her then-husband, and now she didn’t have the strength to leave.
Television helped. She sat cross-legged and watched terrible late-night German television. A program called “PEEP” was the sort of mindless programming that numbed her. Housewives were interviewed about their sex fantasies by a handsome male moderator who asked embarrassing questions. What if your husband brought home a male friend and wanted to watch you with him? There were props too that the moderator presented and asked how the housewife would use them to give her husband pleasure.
Late-night horror-erotic programs kept Anne’s mind off her life and it kept her from thinking about the man across the street.
Months later, when she thought about those first weeks after Stefan’s death, she realized how disturbed she had been. The idea that she should move the mattress to the living room seemed normal at the time. But after everything from that dark period ended and she was able to look back with a clear head, she realized her actions had been those of a woman barely able to hold on to her sanity.