Edge of Eternity Read online

He nodded.

  She went on: "Your spouse tears a note up small and flushes the shreds down the toilet. At the weekend he's called to an unexpected meeting. In the evening he spends two hours writing something he won't show you."

  "Oh, dear," said Bernd sadly. "You're talking about Hans."

  "He's got a lover, hasn't he?" She put down her sandwich: she had no appetite. "Tell me honestly what you think."

  "I'm so sorry."

  Bernd had kissed her once, four months ago, on the last day of the autumn term. They had been saying good-bye, and wishing one another a happy Christmas, and he had lightly grasped her arm, and bent his head, and kissed her lips. She had asked him not to do it again, ever, and said she would still like to be his friend; and when they had returned to school in January both had pretended it had never happened. He had even told her, a few weeks later, that he had a date with a widow his own age.

  Rebecca did not want to encourage hopeless aspirations, but Bernd was the only person she could talk to, except for her family, and she did not want to worry them, not yet. "I was so sure that Hans loved me," she said, and tears came to her eyes. "And I love him."

  "Perhaps he does love you. Some men just can't resist temptation."

  Rebecca did not know whether Hans found their sex life satisfactory. He never complained, but they made love only about once a week, which she believed to be infrequent for newlyweds. "All I want is a family of my own, just like my mother's, in which everyone is loved and supported and protected," she said. "I thought I could have that with Hans."

  "Perhaps you still can," said Bernd. "An affair isn't necessarily the end of the marriage."

  "In the first year?"

  "It's bad, I agree."

  "What should I do?"

  "You must ask him about it. He may admit it, he may deny it; but he'll know that you know."

  "And then what?"

  "What do you want? Would you divorce him?"

  She shook her head. "I would never leave. Marriage is a promise. You can't keep a promise only when it suits you. You have to keep it against your inclination. That's what it means."

  "I did the opposite. You must disapprove of me."

  "I don't judge you or anyone else. I'm just talking about myself. I love my husband and I want him to be faithful."

  Bernd's smile was admiring but regretful. "I hope you get your wish."

  "You're a good friend."

  The bell rang for the first lesson of the afternoon. Rebecca stood up and put her sandwich back in its paper wrapping. She was not going to eat it, now or later, but she had a horror of throwing food away, like most people who had lived through the war. She touched her damp eyes with a handkerchief. "Thank you for listening," she said.

  "I wasn't much comfort."

  "Yes, you were." She went out.

  As she approached the classroom for the English lesson, she realized she had not worked out the lyrics to "The Twist." However, she had been a teacher long enough to improvise. "Who's heard a record called 'The Twist'?" she asked loudly as she walked through the door.

  They all had.

  She went to the blackboard and picked up a stub of chalk. "What are the words?"

  They all began to shout at once.

  On the board she wrote: "Come on, baby, let's do the Twist." Then she said: "What's that in German?"

  For a while she forgot about her troubles.

  She found the letter in her pigeonhole at the midafternoon break. She carried it with her into the staff room and made a cup of instant coffee before opening it. When she read it she dropped her coffee.

  The single sheet of paper was headed: "Ministry for State Security." This was the official name for the secret police: the unofficial name was the Stasi. The letter came from a Sergeant Scholz, and it ordered her to present herself at his headquarters office for questioning.

  Rebecca mopped up her spilled drink, apologized to her colleagues, pretended nothing was wrong, and went to the ladies' room, where she locked herself in a cubicle. She needed to think before confiding in anyone.

  Everyone in East Germany knew about these letters, and everyone dreaded receiving one. It meant she had done something wrong--perhaps something trivial, but it had come to the attention of the watchers. She knew, from what other people said, that there was no point protesting innocence. The police attitude would be that she must be guilty of something, or why would they be questioning her? To suggest they might have made a mistake was to insult their competence, which was another crime.

  Looking again, she saw that her appointment was for five this afternoon.

  What had she done? Her family was deeply suspect, of course. Her father, Werner, was a capitalist, with a factory that the East German government could not touch because it was in West Berlin. Her mother, Carla, was a well-known Social Democrat. Her grandmother, Maud, was the sister of an English earl.

  However, the authorities had not bothered the family for a couple of years, and Rebecca had imagined that her marriage to an official in the Justice Ministry might have gained them a ticket of respectability. Obviously not.

  Had she committed any crimes? She owned a copy of George Orwell's anti-Communist allegory Animal Farm, which was illegal. Her kid brother, Walli, who was fifteen, played the guitar and sang American protest songs such as "This Land Is Your Land." Rebecca sometimes went to West Berlin to see exhibitions of abstract painting. Communists were as conservative about art as Victorian matrons.

  Washing her hands, she glanced in the mirror. She did not look scared. She had a straight nose and a strong chin and intense brown eyes. Her unruly dark hair was sharply pulled back. She was tall and statuesque, and some people found her intimidating. She could face a classroom full of boisterous eighteen-year-olds and silence them with a word.

  But she was scared. What frightened her was the knowledge that the Stasi could do anything. There were no real restraints on them: complaining about them was a crime in itself. And that reminded her of the Red Army at the end of the war. The Soviet soldiers had been free to rob, rape, and murder Germans, and they had used their freedom in an orgy of unspeakable barbarism.

  Rebecca's last class of the day was on the construction of the passive voice in Russian grammar, and it was a shambles, easily the worst lesson she had given since she qualified as a teacher. The pupils could not fail to know that something was wrong and, touchingly, they gave her an easy ride, even making helpful suggestions when she found herself lost for the right word. With their indulgence she got through it.

  When school ended, Bernd was closeted in the head's office with officials from the Education Ministry, presumably discussing how to keep the school open with half the staff gone. Rebecca did not want to go to Stasi headquarters without telling anyone, just in case they decided to keep her there, so she wrote him a note telling him of the summons.

  Then she caught a bus through the wet streets to Normannen Strasse in the suburb of Lichtenberg.

  The Stasi headquarters there was an ugly new office block. It was not finished, and there were bulldozers in the car park and scaffolding at one end. It showed a grim face in the rain, and would not look much more cheerful in sunshine.

  When she went through the door she wondered if she would ever come out.

  She crossed the vast atrium, presented her letter at a reception desk, and was escorted upstairs in an elevator. Her fear rose with the lift. She emerged into a corridor painted a nightmarish shade of mustard yellow. She was shown into a small bare room with a plastic-topped table and two uncomfortable chairs made of metal tubing. There was a pungent smell of paint. Her escort left.

  She sat alone for five minutes, shaking. She wished she smoked: it might steady her. She struggled not to cry.

  Sergeant Scholz came in. He was a little younger than Rebecca--about twenty-five, she guessed. He carried a thin file. He sat down, cleared his throat, opened the file, and frowned. Rebecca thought he was trying to seem important, and she wondered whether this was
his first interrogation.

  "You are a teacher at Friedrich Engels Polytechnic Secondary School," he said.

  "Yes."

  "Where do you live?"

  She answered him, but she was puzzled. Did the secret police not know her address? That might explain why the letter had come to her at school rather than at home.

  She had to give the names and ages of her parents and grandparents. "You're lying to me!" Scholz said triumphantly. "You say your mother is thirty-nine and you are twenty-nine. How could she have given birth to you when she was ten years old?"

  "I'm adopted," Rebecca said, relieved to be able to give an innocent explanation. "My real parents were killed at the end of the war, when our house suffered a direct hit." She had been thirteen. Red Army shells were falling and the city was in ruins and she was alone, bewildered, terrified. A plump adolescent, she had been singled out for rape by a group of soldiers. She had been saved by Carla, who had offered herself instead. Nevertheless that terrifying experience had left Rebecca hesitant and nervous about sex. If Hans was dissatisfied, she felt sure it must be her fault.

  She shuddered and tried to put the memory away. "Carla Franck saved me from . . ." Just in time, Rebecca stopped herself. The Communists denied that Red Army soldiers had committed rape, even though every woman who had been in East Germany in 1945 knew the horrible truth. "Carla saved me," she said, skipping the contentious details. "Later, she and Werner legally adopted me."

  Scholz was writing everything down. There could not be much in that file, Rebecca thought. But there must be something. If he knew little about her family, what was it that had attracted his interest?

  "You are an English teacher," he said.

  "No, I'm not. I teach Russian."

  "You are lying again."

  "I'm not lying, and I have not lied previously," she said crisply. She was surprised to find herself speaking to him in this challenging way. She was no longer as frightened as she had been. Perhaps this was foolhardy. He may be young and inexperienced, she told herself, but he still has the power to ruin my life. "My degree is in Russian language and literature," she went on, and she tried a friendly smile. "I'm head of the department of Russian at my school. But half our teachers have gone to the West, and we have to improvise. So, in the past week, I have given two English lessons."

  "So, I was right! And in your lessons you poison the children's minds with American propaganda."

  "Oh, hell," she groaned. "Is this about the advice to American soldiers?"

  He read from a sheet of notes. "It says here: 'Bear in mind that there is no freedom of speech in East Germany.' Is that not American propaganda?"

  "I explained to the pupils that Americans have a naive pre-Marxist concept of freedom," she said. "I suppose your informant failed to mention that." She wondered who the snitch was. It must be a pupil, or perhaps a parent who had been told about the lesson. The Stasi had more spies than the Nazis.

  "It also says: 'When in East Berlin, do not ask police officers for directions. Unlike American policemen, they are not there to help you.' What do you say to that?"

  "Isn't it true?" Rebecca said. "When you were a teenager, did you ever ask a Vopo to tell you the way to a U-Bahn station?" The Vopos were the Volkspolizei, the East German police.

  "Couldn't you find something more appropriate for teaching children?"

  "Why don't you come to our school and give an English lesson?"

  "I don't speak English!"

  "Nor do I!" Rebecca shouted. She immediately regretted raising her voice. But Scholz was not angry. In fact he seemed a little cowed. He was definitely inexperienced. But she should not get careless. "Nor do I," she said more quietly. "So I'm making it up as I go along, and using whatever English-language materials come to hand." It was time for some phony humility, she thought. "I've obviously made a mistake, and I'm very sorry, Sergeant."

  "You seem like an intelligent woman," he said.

  She narrowed her eyes. Was this a trap? "Thank you for the compliment," she said neutrally.

  "We need intelligent people, especially women."

  Rebecca was mystified. "What for?"

  "To keep their eyes open, see what's happening, let us know when things are going wrong."

  Rebecca was flabbergasted. After a moment she said incredulously: "Are you asking me to be a Stasi informant?"

  "It's important, public-spirited work," he said. "And vital in schools, where young people's attitudes are formed."

  "I see that." What Rebecca saw was that this young secret policeman had blundered. He had checked her out at her place of work, but he knew nothing about her notorious family. If Scholz had looked into Rebecca's background he would never have approached her.

  She could imagine how it had happened. "Hoffmann" was one of the commonest surnames, and "Rebecca" was not unusual. A raw beginner could easily make the mistake of investigating the wrong Rebecca Hoffmann.

  He went on: "But the people who do this work must be completely honest and trustworthy."

  That was so paradoxical that she almost laughed. "Honest and trustworthy?" she repeated. "To spy on your friends?"

  "Absolutely." He seemed unaware of the irony. "And there are advantages." He lowered his voice. "You would become one of us."

  "I don't know what to say."

  "You don't have to decide now. Go home and think about it. But don't discuss it with anyone. It must be secret, obviously."

  "Obviously." She was beginning to feel relieved. Scholz would soon find out that she was unsuitable for his purpose, and he would withdraw his proposal. But at that point he could hardly go back to pretending that she was a propagandist for capitalist imperialism. Perhaps she might come out of this unscathed.

  Scholz stood up, and Rebecca followed suit. Was it possible that her visit to Stasi headquarters could end so well? It seemed too good to be true.

  He held the door for her politely, then escorted her along the yellow corridor. A group of five or six Stasi men stood near the elevator doors, talking animatedly. One was startlingly familiar: a tall, broad-shouldered man with a slight stoop, wearing a light-gray flannel suit that Rebecca knew well. She stared at him uncomprehendingly as she walked up to the elevator.

  It was her husband, Hans.

  Why was he here? Her first frightened thought was that he, too, was under interrogation. But a moment later she realized, from the way they were all standing, that he was not being treated as a suspect.

  What, then? Her heart pounded with fear, but what was she afraid of?

  Perhaps his job at the Ministry of Justice brought him here from time to time, she thought. Then she heard one of the other men say to him: "But, with all due respect, Lieutenant . . ." She did not hear the rest of the sentence. Lieutenant? Civil servants did not hold military ranks--unless they were in the police . . .

  Then Hans saw Rebecca.

  She watched the emotions cross his face: men were easy to read. At first he had the baffled frown of one who sees a familiar sight in an alien context, such as a turnip in a library. Then his eyes widened in shock as he accepted the reality of what he was seeing, and his mouth opened a fraction. But it was the next expression that struck her hardest: his cheeks darkened with shame and his eyes shifted away from her in an unmistakable look of guilt.

  Rebecca was silent for a long moment, trying to take this in. Still not understanding what she was seeing, she said: "Good afternoon, Lieutenant Hoffmann."

  Scholz looked puzzled and scared. "Do you know the lieutenant?"

  "Quite well," she said, struggling to keep her composure as a dreadful suspicion began to dawn on her. "I'm beginning to wonder whether he has had me under surveillance for some time." But it was not possible--was it?

  "Really?" said Scholz, stupidly.

  Rebecca stared hard at Hans, watching for his reaction to her surmise, hoping he would laugh it off and immediately come out with the true, innocent explanation. His mouth was open, as if he were about to spea
k, but she could see that he was not intending to tell the truth: instead, she thought, he had the look of a man desperately trying to think of a story and failing to come up with something that would meet all the facts.

  Scholz was on the brink of tears. "I didn't know!"

  Still watching Hans, Rebecca said: "I am Hans's wife."

  Hans's face changed again, and as guilt turned to anger his face became a mask of fury. He spoke at last, but not to Rebecca. "Shut your mouth, Scholz," he said.

  Then she knew, and her world crashed around her.

  Scholz was too astonished to heed Hans's warning. He said to Rebecca: "You're that Frau Hoffmann?"

  Hans moved with the speed of rage. He lashed out with a meaty right fist and punched Scholz in the face. The young man staggered back, lips bleeding. "You fucking fool," Hans said. "You've just undone two years of painstaking undercover work."

  Rebecca muttered to herself: "The funny phone calls, the sudden meetings, the ripped-up notes . . ." Hans did not have a lover.

  It was worse than that.

  She was in a daze, but she knew this was the moment to find out the truth, while everyone was off balance, before they began to tell lies and concoct cover stories. With an effort she stayed focused. She said coolly: "Did you marry me just to spy on me, Hans?"

  He stared at her without answering.

  Scholz turned and staggered away along the corridor. Hans said: "Go after him." The elevator came and Rebecca stepped in just as Hans called out: "Arrest the fool and throw him in a cell." He turned to speak to Rebecca, but the elevator doors closed and she pressed the button for the ground floor.

  She could hardly see through her tears as she crossed the atrium. No one spoke to her: doubtless it was commonplace to see people weeping here. She found her way across the rain-swept car park to the bus stop.

  Her marriage was a sham. She could hardly take it in. She had slept with Hans, loved him, and married him, and all the time he had been deceiving her. Infidelity might be considered a temporary lapse, but Hans had been false to her from the start. He must have begun dating her in order to spy on her.

  No doubt he had never intended actually to marry her. Originally, he had probably intended no more than a flirtation as a way of getting inside the house. The deception had worked too well. It must have come as a shock to him when she proposed marriage. Maybe he had been forced to make a decision: refuse her, and abandon the surveillance, or marry her and continue it. His bosses might even have ordered him to accept her. How could she have been so completely deceived?