TEN
“Josef … ?” I whispered.
“So now you know my name,” he said drily, eyes cutting through the darkness and meeting mine head-on.
I stood there, stunned into silence, studying his face, trying to equate it to an eight-year-old boy I hadn’t seen in almost forty years. If anything of that child remained in this man’s features, it was lost to me. Still, I had no doubt that it was my brother standing in front of me—something more than a face tells you that. And if I did have doubts, they would’ve been erased by the recollection of a black-and-white photograph that hung on the wall by my mother’s bedside, an image of a smiling soldier. The Colonel was the spitting image of our father.
Josef turned away, looking toward the stone that marked her grave. “I haven’t been here in some time,” he said quietly. “I came several times after the war, but then…” He trailed off. “It wasn’t a conscious decision, I just stopped coming.”
We stood silently over her resting place, thinking about what came next. A thousand questions flew through my mind, but this wasn’t the place for them.
“Come,” he finally said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “We’d better have a drink or two before we leap blindly into the past.”
A mist hung in the air as the driver pulled over to the side of a dark road and killed the engine. The dank smell of crumbling bricks mixed with the unmistakable scent of cat piss wafted into the backseat as he opened the door and approached what looked like a deserted building across the street. It was a desolate area, even by East Berlin standards. The shell of a house stood precariously on the corner of the block, rising out of the debris of its own wreckage. It was as though the bombs had fallen yesterday, not twenty years earlier.
The driver rang the bell several times until the lights on the ground floor finally came up. A man appeared in one of the windows, pulling a lace curtain aside and peering warily out into the night. Once he spotted the car, he hurried to the entrance, where we were enthusiastically beckoned inside.
It was a small rectangular room with faded gray walls. A plain wooden counter ran along its length, behind which shelves were stocked with copious amounts, if not a wide selection, of alcohol. Half a dozen round tables were lined up on the opposite side of the bar, chairs turned up on them so the cracked tiles on the floor could be washed down. The only decorations were three faded prints depicting turn-of-the-century Berlin and some sad-looking red Christmas tinsel taped precariously to the ceiling.
The proprietor, a short middle-aged man with several gaps in his nervous smile and a mop of dirty brown hair, nodded respectfully to Josef as he removed the chairs from atop a table in the back. I got the impression that this was not the first time my brother had called on our host in the off-hours and that the barman obliged with equal measures of pride and fear.
We sat down with a bottle of schnapps and two good-size glasses between us. Josef poured two healthy shots, we saluted each other and tossed the drinks back. He dug a pack of smokes out of his pocket and placed them on the table while I refilled our glasses.
“Why did you change your name?” I began.
“Becher is the name of the man that married our aunt,” he said impassively. “It was a few years after you left. Four or five.” I nodded, left him space to say more if he wanted to. He extracted a cigarette from the pack and gestured for me to help myself, but I decided to hold off for the moment.
“He was the postman,” Josef continued, a cloud of smoke forming between us as he lit up. “At first she wanted nothing to do with him, but he persisted. Each morning he knocked on our door and refused to leave until he put the letters directly into her hand. At first she humored him, but every day he stayed a little longer until one day he didn’t leave at all.”
I wanted to ask what had happened to our aunt—she would’ve been in her late sixties now—but I said something innocuous like I was glad she’d found somebody and I hoped they’d been happy together.
“He treated her well enough,” Josef shrugged. “And he paid for my education. But in the end, he was a Fascist.”
“There was a lot of that going around,” I said, trying to be sensitive for a change, but Josef threw me a look that I took for disdain. My brother was a realist who saw the world as a bitter pill and he wasn’t interested in the sugarcoating.
“I came to hate him,” he said matter-of-factly. “He poisoned her mind. She—” He stopped himself, concentrated on flicking an ash onto the floor. “She was better than that.”
“Do you remember our mother?” I asked. He shifted in his chair and frowned. I wondered if I’d been too abrupt.
“I was young,” he said. “And you? Do you have a clear memory of her?”
I wanted to be able to give him something, maybe a moment that might spark his memory, something he could take away with him. But all I could come up with was: “I don’t go into the past very often.”
There was a beat of uncomfortable silence. I think we both knew that whatever was going to happen, this would be our one night to rake through the past, and we were trying to find a way into it. It was difficult, almost painful. Not so much the memories themselves, but getting at them after they’d been tucked away for so many years.
Josef finally broke the silence. “We lived not too far from here,” he said. “Just a few blocks.”
I shook my head in disbelief. The drink was starting to kick in and I was feeling softer. “What happened to the house?”
“Gone. Part of the rubble.” He tossed his cigarette onto the floor and crushed it with his foot.
“That’s a shame,” I said weakly. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head and waved it off. I wondered if that answered my question about our aunt’s fate, but I was still reluctant to ask. In a funny way, it felt like it was none of my business, like it was nothing to do with me. The proprietor approached the table with an ashtray, but beat a hasty retreat when Josef looked up at him. I don’t think he meant to scare the man off—it just came naturally.
“Do you remember the toy soldiers?” I asked, getting a blank look. “The ones I bribed you with?”
“Ah, yes,” he finally said. “They bought my silence. I wonder what happened to them.”
“Lost in the past,” I said as I poured us each another schnapps. “Like so much else.”
I thought about the cold December day when our mother took me to the toy shop and how I fell in love with those painted soldiers. I remembered my feeling of misery as we left the shop, knowing she would never allow war toys into the house, and my delight when I found a package under the Christmas tree that contained two infantrymen, one blue and one red. I thought about telling Josef the story, but there was no point. I raised my glass.
“To my younger brother, the STASI colonel,” I toasted. “I don’t know whether to be proud of you or to shoot you.”
He laughed—I think it was the first unguarded moment I’d seen in him—and we downed our drinks. He lowered his glass to the table, narrowed his eyes, and leaned forward. “Why did you quit?” he asked, his eyes searching mine. “Did you lose your faith?”
I laughed. “I don’t know too many spooks who are motivated by faith.”
“I disagree,” he said, leaning back. “It’s essential to have faith in our business. How else can we justify the things we do? We do them in the name of a future we believe in, to bring about a greater good.” He paused for my reaction, but I didn’t have one, so I avoided his look and bowed to the inevitable by helping myself to one of his cigarettes. I knew about the “greater good” theory, I just didn’t buy it anymore.
He offered me a light. “I still believe that I’m on the right side of history. Do you?”
I took a long, sickening drag off the cigarette. “I’m not on anybody’s side.”
“You used to be,” he persisted. I wanted to get off the subject, poured us a third schnapps.
“How long have you known about me?” I asked.
“Since Teheran.”
“Ten years,” I said, and he shrugged. “Were you saving me for a rainy day?”
He shook his head slowly. “I didn’t expect we would ever meet.” He paused, wanting to expand on the answer. “I thought it best that neither side became aware of our relationship, so I kept it to myself. They would have tried to use it.”
“Like now?”
“I wouldn’t have involved you if there had been another way,” he said, sounding almost sincere enough to believe. I felt my brother was playing me.
“I hope you don’t think that because we’re brothers, you can trust me,” I said.
“I trust only that our interests have converged at this particular moment,” he said, then paused and smiled caustically. “I must confess, though, that I was curious … curious to see who you had become. … Did you never wonder about your brother?”
I would have liked to give him an honest answer, but, in truth, I hadn’t wondered about him in a very long time. “Sure,” I said, “I’ve wondered. … But—”
Nothing came.
“Perhaps you presumed I was dead,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been an unreasonable supposition.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe somewhere along the line I had given him up for dead. Or maybe it’d just been easier to pack him away into that dark vault of childhood memories that was buried in some obscure comer of my brain. Whatever the case, I felt it was better to get off the subject.
“You really want to know why I quit?” I asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“One of the reasons was that I was tired of hearing people justify the evil shit they do by saying it’s for the greater good and it’s okay because they’re on the right side of history.” I stubbed my cigarette out. “Everybody thinks they’re on the right side of history.”
“Not everybody can be wrong. One side or the other will win.”
“Or we could all lose,” I said. “The truth is that you guys need each other more than anybody else needs you. You justify what you do by saying the other guy’s doing it, too. It’s a vicious circle and it’s got nothing to do with the ‘greater good.’”
“What’s the other reason?”
“What?”
“You implied there was another reason you quit. What is it?”
“Why do you care?”
“Curiosity,” he said with half a smile. “That’s all.”
“Okay,” I said, leaning forward. “The other reason I quit is because I believe that one sunny day I’m gonna look up into a clear blue sky and I’m gonna see a big flash of light. The one we’ve all been waiting for. And in the few seconds I’ll have before the wall of fire hits, I’m gonna be pretty damn sure that it was some spook’s demented notion of ‘a good idea’ that took us down. I quit so I’ll be able to say to myself in that final moment, ‘Hey, it wasn’t me.’”
Josef stared at me and shifted uneasily in his seat. “That would make you feel better?”
“Maybe,” I smiled. “Although I admit it wouldn’t last for very long.”
He shook his head incredulously. “Why don’t you save the world instead?”
“It’s been tried. Never works out.”
Josef glanced over his shoulder, leaned in, and whispered across the table. “What do you think would happen if the world believed the president of the United States had been assassinated by a Soviet agent while visiting Berlin?”
“Are you saying—”
“I’m not saying he would be assassinated by a Soviet agent, I’m saying what if it looked that way to the world? What would be the reaction under those circumstances?”
I didn’t have to think about it.
“It would be seen as an act of war. … There’d be demands for retaliation—air strikes on military targets, possibly an invasion of Cuba. The Soviets would respond by rolling into West Berlin, things would spin out of control… Europe at war … the missiles fly….”
He gave me a long, serious look. “Yes,” he said, locking his hands together. “I think you are right.”
“And if I am,” I said defiantly, “what the hell am I supposed to do about it?”
He leaned back in his chair, lit another cigarette, and eyed me cagily for a long moment, a slow smile creeping across his face.
“’I’m doomed,’ cried the mouse!” Josef sprang to life. “’There is a wall to the left of me and a wall to the right, but if I go forward I’ll run into the trap!’… ‘But you have only to turn around and run in the other direction,’ said the cat that was chasing him.”
“Inspiring,” I said. “Is there a point?”
“The point is that it’s better to be the cat.”
“I guess that makes me the mouse.”
He cocked his head thoughtfully and exhaled smoke through his nose. “No. Not at all. You, my good brother … you are the trap.”