Evony
The sound of an engine. The heat from the sun, bathing me in its warm glow. I rise upwards into consciousness through deep, cold waters and I’m chasing toward awareness—and then I remember. A whimper, a pained, despairing sound escapes me. I don’t want to open my eyes because I know what I’ll see. West Berlin. I’ll finally be on the other side of the Wall and I’ll hate it even more for who it separates me from.
Someone touches my hand and I jerk away. It will be a stranger ready to welcome me to the West with a smile. They’ll tell me I’m one of the lucky ones who managed to get out.
“Evony.”
It’s a man, maybe a doctor, and they’ll be kind and professional and ask if they can call anyone on my behalf. Maybe Dad’s already here, waiting behind a door or a curtain to call me Schätzen and pretend everything’s all right. I don’t want a doctor, or Dad, or anyone else in the world. I only want Reinhardt, the man I love.
I feel the chair I’m sitting in rock from side to side. I’m moving, sitting in a leather seat. I finally drag my eyes open and see the world is rushing past the window. The road ahead is an empty, lined sparsely with trees. There are fields beyond, some empty, some dotted with cows. I frown, because this isn’t West Berlin. This isn’t even East Berlin.
The dashboard, the black hood of the car is familiar. It’s Reinhardt’s Mercedes. With a cry I turn to my left. And he’s there, impossibly, beautifully there, in a crisp white shirt rolled back to his elbows and his large, strong hands on the wheel. He’s smiling, the sun falling over the lower half of his face, making his eyes very bright and blue.
“If you didn’t open your eyes in another ten minutes, Dornröschen, I would have tried kissing you awake.”
Dornröschen. Sleeping Beauty. I reach out and touch him and he’s solid and warm. I stare out the windscreen at the unfamiliar landscape and then back at him. The chloroform must have muddled my brain as it’s taking longer than usual to kick into gear.
Then all my questions gather and come out in a bewildered rush. “What’s happening? Where are we? What time is it? Is this West Germany? Why aren’t we being processed as immigrants?
He reaches out and takes my hand and I wrap both of mine around his, clinging tightly to the man I thought I’d never see again. How is he here? Where even are we?
“We are in Poland. You have been unconscious for about—” he glances at his watch “—fifteen hours. I had to hide us until the early hours of the morning but we are, as you see, driving, and I have no intention of us being processed as anything if I can help it.”
This information only makes my confusion worse. Poland is in the East, even further from West than East Berlin. “Poland? Fifteen hours?”
“Ja. Oh, and we are married.”
He touches a gold band that’s glinting on my ring finger, and I see there’s one on his as well. I stare at our rings for a long time, watching the way the sunlight gleams on their shiny surfaces. My husband. There can’t have been a ceremony but he must have forged or obtained the papers somehow.
This is all too much for me to take in. “Pull the car over.”
“Why?” His tone is light but there’s a hard look in his eyes. He’s already made up his mind about this, whatever this is.
“Reinhardt, pull the car over.”
He frowns, but a moment later he reluctantly turns the car off the road and alongside a farm fence. I sense him readying himself to grab me if I try to hurl myself out the door. As soon as he’s put on the handbrake and cut the engine I throw myself at him, locking my arms around his neck and pressing myself as close to him as I can get. The steering wheel digs into my hip. He gathers me close so that my legs are across his thigh and I’m cradled against him, shuddering with fury and relief.
“You bastard. I thought I’d never see you again.”
His large hand strokes through my hair. “Shh, Liebling, it’s all right now.”
I look up at him, tears running weakly down my face though I’m not actually crying. I still don’t understand what’s happening but all I care about is that we’re together. “I thought you were going to smuggle me across the border to the West and leave me there. I thought you were going to let them kill you. Why did you have to do it like that? I was so frightened.”
He wipes the tears from my face, his expression rueful. “I intended to do just that.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“Because when I came down to it I couldn’t let you go.”
He kisses me softly, and as if I really am Sleeping Beauty awakening from a long sleep my mind clears. He couldn’t let me go. We’ve left East Berlin behind us. We’re together.
“I had the plan all laid out. I was going to take you someplace safe until it got dark and then drive you across the border. But when I gathered you into my arms to take you to the car I just couldn’t do it. So I injected you with Veronal and I put my escape plan into action.”
There’s a plaster at the bend of my elbow and I run my finger over it. So it wasn’t just the chloroform that knocked me out. I had no idea that he had an escape plan, let alone hypodermics and powerful drugs in the house. “What plan?”
“A way to disappear if there’s an invasion or a revolution and it’s suddenly dangerous for me to be in East Berlin. Weeks ago I saw to it that you were part of that plan, too.”
I look up at him angrily. “Then why didn’t you tell me about this plan last night? Why didn’t we even discuss this as a possibility?”
“Because it’s a last resort, only to be used if there are no other choices. This plan is dangerous. You would be far safer in West Berlin.”
Frustrating man. How like him to consider something and then dismiss it out of turn without even telling me about it. “What is this plan?”
“Look in the glove box.”
I open it and take out two East German passports, both ordinary citizens’ passports, one with his picture and the name Franz Bauer, and one with mine and the name Alisz Bauer.
“We are two East German tourists on holiday,” he explains.
“In a Mercedes-Benz?” It doesn’t seem wise to try and fly under the radar in such a conspicuous car.
He smiles. “All will become clear, meine Liebe. How are you feeling? I’m sorry, I had to give you a lot of Veronal. I wanted to make sure you were asleep when we went across the border into Poland. It was four in the morning and the guards assumed you were asleep.”
I picture us at the border, me posed in the front seat as if sleeping, Reinhardt whispering to the guards as he hands our papers over, asking them not to wake his sleeping wife. He’d know just what to say to them to put them at their ease; perhaps share that he doesn’t have much time off so we’re driving through the night and that he never needed much sleep anyway. Perhaps he offered them a cigarette and asked them about their shifts, commiserating with them about the boredom of working an East German–Polish border. He’d strike just the right balance of courteousness and unconcern.
“I could have pretended to be Alisz Bauer just fine,” I say, feeling stubborn and annoyed about being out of it for so long.
“Ah, but then I couldn’t have looked fondly at my sleeping young wife and made them all think of their own girlfriends and wives and the holidays they wished they were setting out on.”
I’m having trouble taking all this in. Yesterday I was a Stasi secretary desperate to find my father and escape to West Berlin. Now I’m posing as a young married woman with my fugitive lover. There are so many questions crowding on my tongue but I ask the one that seems the most important. “Where are we going?”
He hesitates. “You may not like it. You may wish I’d left you in West Berlin.”
I sit up straighter. “Just tell me.”
“We’re not going to the West. We’re going further into the Eastern Bloc. To Bulgaria.”
“Bulgaria? But that’s a thousand miles away—that’s the other side of Europe. I don’t even speak Bulgarian. Wait, you do, don’t you?” I remember coming into his office that time and hearing him speaking in a foreign language to the Bulgarian delegation. How I’d served them coffee and Reinhardt had looked at me as if he was wondering how I tasted, and I’d flushed because I was starting to imagine what it would be like if I let him find out.
“Ja.” And then he speaks a sentence of something unintelligible and clearly not German.
“Pardon?”
He smiles. “I said that once we reach Bulgaria we’re going to become Alexsandr and Lina Lyubomir, and you are my East German wife. I can pass as a Bulgarian who’s been living in East Germany.”
“But why Bulgaria?”
“It was the first place I thought of, and the only place I considered. The only place I could see us being…” He hesitates. “My grandmother was Bulgarian and I spent every summer with her and my grandfather in their little seaside village. I was happy there.” He grimaces as if he can’t quite believe he’s made such a sentimental decision.
But to me it’s everything, because he chose Bulgaria as he thinks we could be happy there. He wants us to be happy, and he wants us to be together.
“Reinhardt,” I moan in relief, burying my face in his chest. “Do you know how frightened I was? I thought I’d never see you again.”
His arms tighten around me and he murmurs into my hair. “I know, Liebling. I know. I’m sorry I did that to you. I didn’t think there was any other way to keep you safe.”
I look up, beseeching him, “Promise me you’ll never do anything like that again.” When he hesitates I hold up my hand and show him the wedding ring. “I’m your wife now, remember?”
“I promise never to drug you in East Berlin in order to smuggle you—”
But I’m not going through that again, sliding into unconsciousness without any control over what’s happening to me. To us. “No. We both decide our lives from now on. We’re in this together, to the end, no matter what. I can’t face losing you again.”
He looks at me for a long time, as if he doesn’t dare hope that I feel this way. “Do you really mean that, Liebling?”
I reach up and touch his cheek, roughened by morning stubble. “I’m not your prisoner anymore. I’m your partner, your equal. This will only work if we both decide our fates, not just you.”
“I’ll still fight for you, scheme for you, protect you.”
“We’ll protect each other,” I insist.
A smile touches his mouth. “All right, my Valkyrie. We’ll protect each other.”
I take a slow, deep breath, because for the first time it’s not us against each other, it’s us against everyone else. And between us, I feel we’re unstoppable. “I love you, Reinhardt.”
He kisses me, holding me tight against him as if he’s afraid I’ll slip through his fingers. “Ich liebe dich. Immer.” I love you. Always.
I think ahead to what’s in store for us on our journey there. It will be dangerous as the Stasi must be after us by now.
“What’s the name of this village?”
“Sozopol, on the Black Sea.” He smiles, a soft smile of remembrance. “It’s beautiful there. So much sunshine, little stone cottages. The sea is warm and there is always fresh fish. The stray cats sit on the dock waiting for the fishermen to come in at sunset and they are all sleek and well fed. It’s quiet. Peaceful. At least, that’s how I remember it. No doubt my memories are colored by nostalgia.”
Reinhardt, hardened as he is by life, is taking a chance on the place he loved as a boy. I cup his cheek, hoping that I’ll see him smile like that again soon.
He talks me through his plan to get us to Bulgaria, enumerating all the dangerous places that we’ll be passing through. There are multiple borders to traverse before we even get to Bulgaria and we can’t take the most direct route lest we give our final destination away.
“Right now we’re headed for Szczecin, a city on the route to the north coast of Poland. I want them to believe we’re intending to defect to the West via boat to Malmo or Copenhagen.” He’s silent for a moment, watching me. “We could do that, you know. I have enough dollars and West German marks to bribe a sea captain to take us to a Western port. You could see your father again.”
My father. I don’t know how to feel about what he did. Now that the initial shock over his betrayal has passed I find I’m not as angry as I expected to be. Mostly I feel confused and disappointed. What would I say to him if we were face to face right now? I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. I have no idea what I’d say.
Going east with Reinhardt means giving up not only my family, but any plans I had for my future there. I think about Ana and her dream to go to a Western university. I never wanted that for myself. All I’ve wanted is to be with the people I love. And now, that person is Reinhardt. “Could you be happy in the West?”
“I will be happy if I’m with you, Liebling.”
“Where would we be safest? Will we have peace in our lives if we make our home in Bulgaria?”
His hand strokes through my hair and he’s silent for a moment, thinking. “No matter where we go there is a risk. We could get into the West under our aliases but they will eventually find out who I am and they will coerce me into providing secrets about the Stasi in exchange for money and a place for us to live. I will have to accept because they will see to it that I am too notorious to find employment, and we’ll need their protection because the Stasi will send assassins to silence me.”
I stare at him in horror. I hadn’t thought of assassins. “And in the East? I suppose we risk being recognized as traitors and sent back to East Berlin.”
“Exakt.”
So there’s danger everywhere. It seems like an impossible dream that we’ll ever be happy. It will be a miracle if we have even our freedom at the end of this journey, but I want more than just existing. I want to love. I want peace for us.
I think of fishing boats bobbing on the sea. A small stone cottage and a garden. Peace that we can find only in a place far, far away from East Berlin or any other big city in the East or West.
“I want us to be together, and I want us to be happy,” I whisper. “I think Sozopol might be our best chance at both.”
He kisses me fiercely and I feel the full force of his love behind it. I breathe him into myself, my dark lover who became my heart’s song in a cold, gray world.
“I will get us there, meine Liebe. It won’t be easy, for they will be hunting us and if we are to make a home in the East then I will have to make us disappear. The things I will have to do may not be pleasant. Are you ready for that? Will you stay by my side, no matter what?”
He means we will be hunted like he once hunted me on the streets of East Berlin, and that he may have to hurt people. Kill people. I’ve seen with my own eyes how ruthless he can be when I’m threatened.
“I’m with you, my love. No matter what.”
∞ ∞ ∞
It’s strange and enthralling to see Reinhardt switch into his hunter mindset. We are the hunted now, but he’s thinking like a Stasi officer so that we can stay one step ahead of our enemies.
“They’ll all be looking for us, not just Heydrich. My Oberst is probably getting a dressing down from the Chairman himself for not knowing there was a traitor right under his nose,” Reinhardt says with a grim smile. “They won’t play fair, but neither will we.”
He almost seems like he relishes the challenge of having the whole of the East German secret police force after us. “What will happened if they catch us?”
He’s silent for a moment as he drives, his eyes on the road ahead and a grim cast to his profile. “They will take me back to East Berlin. My execution will be kept out of the papers but the whole of the Stasi and Party will know my fate.”
“And me?” I can see that he doesn’t want to answer, but I press him. “Just tell me. I need to know what could happen. What would you do to me in Heydrich’s place?”
He glances in the rearview mirror, and the tiniest flicker in his eyes lets me know that he is worried for me. Deeply worried. “It wouldn’t be worth putting you on trial. Too embarrassing for the Party. Your fate would be a bullet in the head and an unmarked grave.”
We drive north on our sham journey toward Szczecin. In a town called Myślibórz I watch him use a call box on the street, the door jammed open with his foot as he smokes a cigarette and talks. Beyond I can see the steep red tile roof of a cathedral rising into the blue sky. When he gets back into the car he’s got a small smile on his face, and we drive on.
There’s nothing to do but watch the road ahead through the windscreen and the road behind in the rear view mirror. And think. There’s been little time since the night of the bakery raid for me to consider all that has happened and what I want. Or rather, little opportunity to consider that I might have a say in my own future. But I’m choosing it now. I look at the gold ring on my finger. I’m married, in name if not in oath. Reinhardt. My husband.
I turn to him. “I want to stop taking the pill.” The birth control pill, the ones he thrust at me after telling me about Johanna.
He doesn’t say anything but I feel the tension in the car thicken. Finally, he asks, “You want children?”
Does he really dislike children so much? Indifference would be understandable, being the workaholic that he is. But seeing me with Frau Fischer’s grandson in my arms all those weeks ago seemed to provoke a visceral response. It was one of shock. Intense dislike. I can sense that same hostility now. “I want your children. I want us to have a family.”
“Let’s just get to Sozopol first.”
But I keep looking at him, trying to discern what he’s thinking. I’m not his captive anymore. I won’t be silenced. I’m sure there’s something he’s not telling me. Is he already a father, or did he lose a child? Was Johanna—
And then I remember what he said the night I first learned he had lost the woman he loved, after Ulrich nearly killed me. When the prisoners arrived at the camp an SS officer assessed each one, and either pointed recht and they were put to work, or links, and they were gassed immediately. She was sent to the left.
“Reinhardt,” I say softly. “At the camps, why was Johanna sent to the left?”
He flinches like I’ve struck him.
A memory from the schoolroom comes back to me. Something I read in our history textbook. “Prisoners were only sent to the left if they were too old or young or infirm to work.” I take a deep breath. “Or if they were carrying infants.”
I don’t want to push him about something so painful, so I sit silently, watching him as he drives. But my hands are clenched in my lap and I will him to speak. This isn’t going to work if he won’t confide in me.
Finally, after several miles he replies in a low voice. “The last letter I got from her in the prisoner of war camp… She got pregnant when I was on leave in Berlin, just before I was sent to Africa. The birth certificate, I think that was how she was found out. The registry office looked into her adoption records and discovered she was a Jew.”
So he knew she was carrying his child while he was a prisoner of war. His worry was for both of them, not knowing what was happening to his fiancé and his child on the other side of the world. Not knowing for years. Sending letter after letter but hearing nothing back. Imagining the worst fates for both of them. “Reinhardt, I’m so sorry.”
“When I started working for the Stasi I requested a copy of the child’s birth certificate. The father was listed as unknown. She must have realized she was going to be found out. I think she was protecting me.”
I open my mouth to say something but he cuts me off. “It was a long time ago. Let’s not talk about it.”
I don’t want to let it go. He hasn’t talked about this in twenty years and while I understand his pain he can’t go on letting his past haunt our lives. I see that his face is tight and closed so I let it go, for now.
Late in the afternoon we stop in a town a few miles south of Szczecin. He directs the car down a narrow, lonely laneway and I sit up a little in my seat, suddenly curious. He pulls in behind a neat little orange Skoda. I recognize the make, a Czechoslovakian car that I’ve seen occasionally on the streets of East Berlin. It has East German plates.
Reinhardt gets his handkerchief out and starts wiping down the steering wheel and the ignition. Catching on, I start to do the same on my side with the sleeve of my cardigan, removing my fingerprints from everything I’ve touched.
He gets out of the car and goes to the Skoda and removes a set of keys from the top of the front wheel. This must be the result of the phone call he made earlier, asking an agent to arrange this for him. Reinhardt puts a holdall of my clothes and a small case of his own into the trunk of the Skoda, and then gets to work with a screwdriver taking the plates off the Mercedes-Benz. Holding them with his fingers covered by his handkerchief he throws them far into the trees. Then he moves to get into the Skoda.
I stop him. “You didn’t do a very good job of wiping your prints—you closed the trunk with your bare hand. And they’ll find those plates. You should have buried them.”
He smiles at me and gathers me into his arms. “Well spotted. You would have made an excellent informant.” We kiss in the deep silence of the laneway, his mouth coaxing mine open and sending sparks through my body despite where we are and what we’re doing. Disappearing together. Running away.
I’m out of East Berlin, I remember with a fierce thrill. And I’m never going back.
Reinhardt breaks the kiss and strokes a forefinger down my nose. “As for the trunk and the plates, I know.”
He wants the car to be found. He wants the Stasi to know that we were in it and think that we were scared enough to not do a very good job of trying to conceal the fact. But I grab his hand as he goes to get into the Skoda again, another thought occurring to me. “The agent or informant or whoever arranged this car for us will hear about your betrayal. They’ll tell the Stasi what to look for.”
He smiles again. “Not everyone I know loves the Stasi, Liebling.”
I give him a pert look and I want to reply that he has an answer for everything, but it would be churlish to complain about this in the circumstances.
The orange Skoda isn’t as roomy as the Mercedes-Benz but it’s got a better engine than most Eastern Bloc cars and when we get back to the main road Reinhardt puts his foot down. A Trabant couldn’t reach half this speed, and neither could a Wartburg, which Dad and I drove in once to go to—
But thinking about summer trips and Dad makes my eyes fill with tears, so I lean forward and open the glove box and fish out a map.
We’re heading southeast now, towards Bulgaria. I trace the route with my forefinger along the network of roads, over rivers, through mountain ranges. The map is in Polish but I use the legend to work out the distance. A thousand miles.
Reinhardt notices what I’m doing. “We won’t take the most direct route through as there are too many borders to cross, which means too many opportunities to be recognized. I think we will head into Ukraine and then down into Romania, and then Bulgaria. It will take longer, but it will be safer for us.”
I consult the map and see that this will add several hundred miles onto our journey. I’m impatient to get to our destination, to see for myself what Sozopol is like, but I know it’s better to be safe.
The sun starts to lower in the sky and we drive into a town. Reinhardt turns in at a sign that reads hotelarski and parks the car.
He leans over and kisses me, and murmurs, “Herr und Frau Bauer, ja?”
I nod, repeating then names to myself several times as if they’re a protective incantation. My stomach starts to knot as we head inside and I keep my face as neutral as possible while Reinhardt converses in German with the hotel clerk, a bored-looking young woman who doesn’t even bother to read what he writes in the register before handing over our key. Living in East Berlin has made me oversensitive about these things. Your name, your papers, these are what define you and they must be scrutinized at every opportunity. Apparently in rural Poland they’re not so important.
It’s a small, old fashioned hotel that’s seen better days but it’s surprisingly cozy once we reach our room. The wallpaper has faded and the carpet doesn’t match, but there’s a fire laid in the grate and once it’s lit it’s quite cheerful in the small room. Reinhardt lays down on the bed with his feet hanging off the edge, not bothering to take his shoes off. He’s tired, I realize. I don’t think he’s slept since he smuggled us out of Germany.
I take a bath, as hot as I can bear, trying to blast the last of the Veronal grogginess out of my system. When I brush my teeth I see that Reinhardt has put my birth control pills into my washbag.
I chew my lip, looking at them. I haven’t taken today’s yet. Wrapping myself in a bath robe I take them into the bedroom. Reinhardt’s still fully clothed and lying on top of the blankets but when I sink down next to him he slides an arm around me and opens his eyes.
“What have you got there, meine kleiner Flüchtling?” My little fugitive.
“My pills.” It’s not that I want to cause him pain but I can’t let things go that are important to me.
He frowns up at me, a hard look in his eyes. “I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“You also said it was a long time ago. But I think it still haunts you, what happened to Johanna and your child. I saw your face when you saw me holding Frau Fischer’s grandchild. You’re having nightmares about it, aren’t you?”
He reaches up a hand to caress my cheek, looking at me for a long time. He’s not used to this, someone questioning him, pushing him, but I hold his gaze, and finally he gives me a tired smile. “You’re not my captive anymore, are you?”
“No. I’m not.”
He gives me a wry look, and then subsides into silence, thinking. When he speaks his voice is soft and far away. “I dream about her sometimes, on that train with our child, bound for the camps. It’s a nightmare but it really happened to her. Lately it’s not her face I see. It’s yours.” He pulls me down into his arms and rolls onto his side. We’re nose to nose, gazing at each other as the fire crackles and pops in the grate. “I would die for you, do you know that? I wouldn’t hesitate.”
I think of the firing squad back in East Berlin. “You were very nearly going to.” You still might.
He searches my face, and I can see the struggle going on behind his eyes. This is already a difficult undertaking for both of us and what I’m asking him will only increase his worries tenfold. Because I can see now that he doesn’t hate the idea of children at all. He loves it, but he’s afraid of that pain all over again.
“It will be dangerous enough, Liebling, even once we get to Sozopol. What if I can’t protect you both?”
Both of us. Me and his child. I don’t know how to answer that because I don’t know what lies ahead for us. We might find haven at Sozopol, or merely more fear and flight.
He takes the pills from me, examining the half-used blister packet, the foil glinting in the low light. “I took you in spite, in greed, in anger. I meant to possess you, consume you, bend you to my will. But I took the wrong girl if I wanted that. I took the girl who stared me down. Who talked back. Who defied me. Who scratched and plotted and fought. She was nothing like I expected and yet she is exactly what I needed.”
He looks at the pills again, and then sits up and throws them into the fire. Together we watch the blister pack bubble and curl in the flames, and then finally disintegrate into ashes. Lying back down he pulls me tightly against his chest. I can feel his heart thumping hard beneath my cheek.
“And she’s far more than I deserve. It’s not a second chance if we’re afraid. I will just have to learn to be as brave as you are, my Valkyrie.”