“Do you want children?” the housekeeper asks me as I’m reading the label of the pickle jar to Thom.
I feel a pang of regret and loss. I did want children, but I can’t imagine what bizarre set of circumstances could result in me having children now. I feel like I have one foot in Hohenschönhausen everywhere I go. “Oh. Maybe.”
Frau Fischer adds sliced sausage to the pot. “Herr Oberstleutnant will make a wonderful father.”
I make faces at Thom and think to him, Your Oma thinks I’m going to marry her horrible boss and have his babies. Isn’t that funny?
The housekeeper suddenly stops stirring the pot and pricks an ear at the ceiling. “Did you hear something?” I listen, but I don’t hear anything.
“Rats,” she mutters darkly. “I can hear them scurrying around in the rafters when I’m lying in bed. All these attics are connected and they run up and down all night long.”
Now that she mentions it I have heard scuffling at night. “Rats, Thom. Yuck.” Thom stares at me and says “Ooo.”
“It’s those nasty people who lived in the top apartment next to mine. They were always leaving food out. Good thing they’re gone now.”
We’re so busy talking and I’m so preoccupied with making Thom giggle that we don’t hear the front door. There’s movement out of the corner of my eye and I look toward it, mid-laugh, Thom cuddled in my arms. It’s Volker, and he’s looking down at me and the baby with such naked displeasure that my happiness is vaporized as if shot by a laser.
A moment later Volker’s face closes and he starts going through the bundle of letters he’s holding in his hands, examining postmarks and addressers with exaggerated care. “Frau Fischer, if you’re in need of a babysitter so that you may perform your duties here perhaps you could go through a more suitable channel.”
Thom is whisked out of my arms by the red-faced housekeeper. I stand up and follow Volker into the living room as he continues to peruse his letters. He’s pretending nonchalance but his jaw is flexing in anger. Why, because I was happy for once in this miserable place? “She was only being nice. I was lonely. There’s nothing to do in this prison.” I wave my arm around at the living room.
Volker takes a letter opener from the desk in the corner and rips across the top of an envelope as if he’s disemboweling it. “Frau Fischer is here to do a job and you’re not to distract her from that.”
“Frau Fischer is doing her job. Thom has a babysitter but she brought him upstairs to make me feel better.” How dare he upset her like that? Everything she does is to make his life more comfortable.
Volker’s standing with his profile to me and looking down his long, straight nose at his letter, but I can tell he’s not seeing the words. “How self-righteous you are, Evony. It’s surprising, considering what you are.”
This change of tack catches me off-guard. “What do you mean, what I am?”
Folding the paper, he puts it back into its envelope and glances up. There’s a bright, nasty gleam in his eye. “What I say, what you are. A coward. A shirker. A traitor.”
Oh, so we’re going to play the who’s-a-worse-person game, are we? Drawing myself up to my full height of five-feet-five I practically spit at him, “If attempting to flee this regime makes me a traitor, then I’m a traitor and proud, and every good, decent person I’ve ever known is one, too. They’re ten times the people the Stasi are.”
Volker shakes his head, a withering look on his face. “I’m not speaking as a Stasi officer, I am speaking as a German. You’re a poor excuse for one, East or West. Everyone who flees is corrupt. Weak. Like a building infested with termites.” He looks at his next letter, inspecting it front and back. “One wonders how the West has not collapsed under the burden of you all.”
I’m being lectured on morality by a Stasi officer. I wish my father were around to hear this—he’d die of laughter. “You’d tell me how to be a good, moral German? You who terrorizes us and imprisons us in our own city?”
“Yes, I am a good German. I have fought for Germany, been imprisoned for Germany; I devote my life to East Germany. Every single thing I do is for this country. Since the war my every action has been to build a stronger Republic and I will continue to do this until the day I die.” He turns toward me, looming over me, making me feel like a kitten raising her hackles at a German Shepherd. In a cold, seething voice, he asks, “What have you ever done for something bigger than yourself, or can you not see beyond the tip of that pretty nose of yours?”
If this country expects my devotion then I should be able to demand something in return, shouldn’t I? Like freedom of thought and movement. If ever I was going to love East Germany that love was killed the day the Wall went up. “I have worked in the factories since I was sixteen. I’m not afraid of work.”
Volker laughs. “Oh, you worked? The bare minimum required of our citizens. Things are a little uncomfortable for you so you want to flee, taking all the time and money that East Germany has invested in you, keeping you clothed and fed and educated for twenty-three years, to the West, where they can exploit it for themselves. They will take you in and spit you out when you’re no longer useful, when instead you could be here, working to make this country great.”
Uncomfortable? He thinks this regime is uncomfortable? How would he even know, with his West German car and his French marmalade? Things are never uncomfortable for those in power. “Not everything you do is for the Republic. I’m not being kept here “for Germany” am I?”
Volker’s teeth grind together. “This is my home and I do not wish to return to a menagerie of women and babies after a long day. Now get out of my sight.”
I fold my arms, pleased I hit a nerve. “Gladly. Send me to prison, I’ll do time for Germany if it means I don’t ever have to look at you again.”
He laughs coldly. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Oh, and you do? I’m about to retort, but then I remember what he said. I was imprisoned for Germany. How could an officer in the Wehrmacht and an officer in the Stasi have been in prison and still hold the positions that he has and does? Does he mean he was imprisoned in East Germany, or Germany when it was one country?
Despite my bravado the idea of real prison is terrifying. Less than a week of slow evenings here and I’m climbing the walls. Ten years in Hohenschönhausen would send me mad. “No? I’ll happily learn.”
He must see the fear in my face as his body relaxes and he digs in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. “It’s a pleasing thought, driving you down to the prison and locking you in for a few nights until you learn some gratitude.”
He’d enjoy that wouldn’t he, collecting me penitent and cowed from prison. “Do it. I don’t care. I’ll never be grateful for you.”