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 phoney 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-grey 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 speak, 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 focussed. 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 turned to the other men and 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 rainswept 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?