Evony
Find out what Volker’s doing in the West. He’s caught too many of our people since the Wall went up and he’ll continue to be a threat unless we stop him, permanently. Get him imprisoned and we’ll get you out.
I stare at the page of my book with unseeing eyes and go over and over what Peter told me this morning. He’s not asking much, is he? Just for me to topple the most ruthless man in East Berlin on behalf of a group I know nothing about. I wonder what the other members have to do to earn their passage. Almost with fondness I remember the dirty, cramped nights I spent digging the tunnel with Ana.
See if you can find anything incriminating in his apartment. Find out if he has any contact with Westerners. Volker’s arrogant enough to believe he can get away with treason, murder, anything.
I glance up at Reinhardt sitting on the sofa opposite, his long legs crossed and the firelight burnishing his handsome face. How sleekly cheerful he’s been today, and how irritating his mood has been. I keep reminding myself that I’m supposed to be letting him think he’s won, that he’s beaten me, but my instincts are to be difficult. When we returned to the apartment and he helped me out of my coat, he crooked a finger under my chin. I looked up at him in stony silence, but he just smiled.
“I’d kiss you but I think you’d sink your teeth into my lip.” Then he playfully tweaked my nose.
Peter said he needed twenty-four hours to organize things for me and then I’m to start following Volker at night. From dusk tomorrow there’ll be a Trabant parked two blocks away that I will use to follow him wherever he goes at night. But what if Reinhardt’s business in the West is perfectly legitimate as far as the Stasi’s concerned, and what if there’s nothing incriminating in the apartment? I could be risking my neck spying on the most dangerous man in East Berlin for nothing. There’s also the issue of getting out of the apartment and down to that car without his men seeing me, which is surely an impossible task. But I wasn’t thinking about that this morning when I told Peter I wanted in, I was only thinking that it couldn’t be for nothing that I’d given myself to Reinhardt. Given myself to him and enjoyed it, heaven help me.
All this back and forth is making me tense and I find myself glaring at Reinhardt as he reads, because all this is his fault. His, and some long-ago lost love. What has she even got to do with me? I’m not Jewish, there’s no war on. It all happened twenty years ago.
Throwing my book to one side I say, “Do I look like her? Is that it?”
Reinhardt glances up, surprised. Then his eyes drop back to his papers as he realizes who I mean by her. “Not particularly.”
I should hold my tongue and focus on the problem of spying on him, but I feel reckless. My fate is in the hands of Reinhardt and this unknown group but I wont be silenced. “I just feel like I should know more about her seeing as I’m her replacement. Should I style my hair a certain way? Wear a certain color?”
Eyes on his papers, he mutters, “It was a very long time ago. I hardly remember.”
Liar. A man like Reinhardt would remember every detail. “Were you cruel to her like you are to me? Did she look at you like she hated you, like I do? Is that what you enjoy so much?”
He makes a note on a report with his fountain pen, smiling. “Oh, but you didn’t hate me last night, did you? You quite enjoyed my attentions.” Looking up, he says, “If you would like to talk, we can talk. I find I am in a very good mood this evening.”
I’ll bet you are, I think sourly.
“Johanna looked at me with love, always. Very different from the way you look at me.”
I feel a lurch at hearing her name. Johanna. Suddenly she becomes more real to me, this Jewish girl who was in love with a German officer and hiding a deadly secret. I remember the picture of Reinhardt in his military uniform standing in front of the swastika flag, his youthful, open face alight with some strong emotion. I’d thought it was political fervor but perhaps it was love. Despite myself, I wonder what he was like back then, before death and grief and imprisonment hardened him into the man he is today. But perhaps he was born to mock and hunt and take what isn’t his.
My voice is husky and uncertain as I say, “So talk.”
“About Johanna?”
I flick a piece of lint off the arm of the sofa, pretending I’m not burning with curiosity. “If you want to.”
He’s silent for a long time, watching me, amused, as if he can see right through my nonchalance. He reaches for his cigarettes and lights one, gathering his thoughts. “I met her…it would have been in May of 1938. I was seventeen, she nearly so. We’d moved from Dresden to Berlin by then and I saw her one day as I was cycling home from a Hitler Youth parade.”
He sees my expression of disgust and explains, “Membership was mandatory for Aryans by then, but my father had signed me up before that. The day after my fourteenth birthday, in fact. We were a military family and I was destined to be an officer like he was before me, and my grandfather was before that.”
“No matter who you were fighting for?”
He takes a pull on his cigarette and exhales slowly. “I wasn’t raised to question those in power. Not like you.”
“You haven’t changed much, then.”
His eyes grow a shade chillier, but he goes on. “My father never accepted Germany’s defeat at the end of the Great War. Not a single enemy soldier sets foot on German soil but we roll over and take it? It wasn’t going to happen a second time. Germany was going to show the world what it was made of.”
Bitterness has crept into his voice and he’s silent for several moments, watching the smoke from his cigarette twist in the air. When he continues his voice is lighter. “So. I was cycling home, and I saw a girl on the other side of the street. A very beautiful girl. Dark hair. Dark eyes. And as I was wondering how to get a girl like that to talk to me, my front wheel hit a pothole and I was thrown over the handlebars. Broke my nose. Blood all down my uniform.” He rubs the side of his nose and for the first time I see there’s the slightest imperfection in its strong line. “She cleaned me up and talked to me, between laughing at me.”
I try and picture a Jewish girl going to the aid of a member of the Hitler Youth, the red and black swastika armband bright against his tan uniform. It seems impossible. “Wasn’t she afraid of you?”
He shakes his head. “Johanna didn’t know she was Jewish. She was adopted and her parents had raised her Catholic, like them. In a few weeks’ time I was eighteen and in the Wehrmacht and they could barely disguise their distaste at seeing their beautiful, Jewish daughter on the arm of a German army ensign. I just thought they didn’t think I was good enough for her. It was easy to believe, because I wasn’t.”
His eyes drop, and I can sense his good mood has evaporated. He talks on in a low voice, almost as if I’m not there. “I saw her every time I was home on leave in Berlin and I fell in love with her. Her parents finally told her she was Jewish when she told them we were engaged. They were worried about her adoption records surfacing if we requested a marriage certificate and urged her to break things off with me and flee. She refused.”
“How do you know this if she was…” I trail off. If she never told you she was Jewish and she was dead by the time you returned from the war.
“I tracked down Johanna’s mother after I’d been to Auschwitz. She was in a terrible way. She’d lost her husband in the bombing and her daughter in the camps. She spat at me, hit me. She blamed me for Johanna being killed.” His eyes are unfocused and fixed on a spot above my head. “When I think back I remember one of the last times Johanna and I were together, and I’m sure that she almost told me then but something stopped her. Maybe she was afraid for me. Or maybe it was my Nazi uniform. I don’t know. There was something worrying her but she said it was the war. The bombing. That I was fighting. The last time I saw her we were supposed to be married but she said she couldn’t find her birth certificate and there wasn’t time to request a copy. I was sent to North Africa to fight, and a few months later I got the letter saying that—” His lips press together. “Saying that she loved me and she couldn’t wait to be my wife. Then I was captured, and I never heard from her again.”
He’s silent a long time, and then he notices that his cigarette has burned down to his fingers and grinds it angrily into the ashtray. “Why do I tell you these things? I haven’t spoken this aloud in twenty years.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say something wounding. She didn’t trust you, that’s why she didn’t tell you she was Jewish. She can’t have really loved you. But it’s rare to see him so raw and open and despite everything, I feel for him. Or, I feel for the man he once was, the focused but blinkered young man who wore the uniform of those who killed the woman he loved. I see the same hatred of the Nazis in his eyes that I saw in my father’s for the Russians, their hearts both hardened with hate because they lost the women they loved. How quickly the political becomes personal when those you love are taken from you.
Reinhardt reaches for his uniform jacket which is slung over the back of the sofa and digs in one of the pockets. “Here.” He tosses a small cardboard box over to me and I catch it.
“What’s this?”
“Birth control.”
I’m still lost in his past and it takes me a moment to switch back to my present. I stare down at the box, feeling like a chair has been pulled out from beneath me. “Did you have to do it like that? Make me feel sorry for the things that happened to you and then throw this in my face?”
“I thought you’d be pleased. There are women in countries all over the world who are denied access to these pills.”
“Oh, yes, the women of East Germany are so lucky,” I fume. When did he get them, today? Or did he acquire them during these last weeks and has been keeping them aside for the cruelest possible moment?
But he just reaches for his reports and begins packing them back into their files. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Liebling. I landed on my feet after the war. I always will.”
“Yes, I have no doubt you’ll be fine. You get to do whatever you want, take whatever you like. Everything will always work out for you, while I—”
Faster than I can follow he’s crossed the space between us and is leaning over me, hands braced on the sofa either side of my body and his face close to mine. Eyes blazing, he speaks in a low, threatening voice.
“You think I’ve had a say in all the things that have happened to me? You think I would choose them? Yes, I took you, but it was the Fates who put you in my path twice in the same week and I knew then it would be this way between us. I have been patient, waiting for you to feel it too. And you do. You may hit me, swear at me, declare ten times a day that you hate me, but all it takes is one look, one kiss, and you will give me everything.”
His words burn through me like fire. I remember what I thought the very morning after I encountered Reinhardt in the street. The man I’ll fall in love with will be unlike any of the men I’ve known in my life. He’ll be remarkable.
“You were meant to be mine. And I will have everything.”
I don’t believe in fate, but he’s right about one thing. I do feel it, and it’s not just his physicality, his intensity. Chemistry, the Western magazines call it, that indefinable connection that two people have to each other on a frequency only they can hear.
But it doesn’t matter what I call it. We want each other. And we are going to tear each other apart.
He stays where he is a moment longer, just watching me, just breathing, content to wait. He’s thinks he’s got all the time in the world.
When he finally straightens I ease myself off the sofa, my face averted, letting him think that it’s shame or submission making me look at the ground, but really it’s because I don’t want him to see the anger burning in my eyes. I will bring this man down if it’s the last thing I do.
Later, as I’m hanging my skirt up in the closet something inside on the ceiling catches my eye. I’ve seen it dozens of times before without realizing what I’m looking at. I step inside to get a closer look, and reach my fingers up to touch it.
What a curious place to put such a thing, but I suppose it has to go somewhere. I stand in the semi-darkness of the little space for some time, just thinking, remembering something Frau Fischer told me.
Yes, it could work. It could work beautifully.
Brimming with excitement, I step back into my room and spy the box of birth control pills sitting on my dressing table. The smile is wiped from my face in an instant. My plan could work, but it will take time. Possibly weeks, and in the meantime I’ll be living under the same roof as Reinhardt.
My heart beating in my throat, I reach for the box and read the instructions. One every day at the same time… Inside the box the pills are arranged in a case that resembles a telephone dial and labelled one to twenty-four. Each one a tiny decision.
I can still feel his mouth whispering against mine. I remember how he looked in the semi-darkness, naked and implacable; the slide of his tongue against mine, against my sex. The memory makes me whimper because I’m no longer the indifferent, sexless creature I once was. He’s awoken a hunger in me that burns hotter than wildfire and I pray that it won’t consume me before I manage to get away from him.
I count back the days, reach for the eleventh pill and swallow it down with some water.