“No, Mom. I don’t. Fat-free or half-and-half?”
“I’m on fat-free again. I’m sorry. I thought you were better off out of it, not knowing. It wasn’t your fault. I can’t believe your birth mother had anything to do with it—or her mother, for that matter. I honestly thought it was all in the past and there was nothing to worry about anymore … until they came and started asking us questions about you a couple of months ago.”
“Mom? Here’s your coffee.” Rita tried to conceal her disquiet: of course they’d have visited Emily and Franz as part of her background check. Why wouldn’t they?
“Thank you, dear.” With a visible shudder, Emily pulled herself together. “Then I need to go shopping. Come with me and you can catch up on all the gossip.”
*
That evening, after an exhausting family dinner—almost a mini-Thanksgiving, with a distinct subtext of gratitude for Rita’s delivery from whatever durance vile she had been consigned to by the DHS—Rita walked home with her grandfather Kurt. It wasn’t much of a walk, but it put some distance between Rita and Emily’s hand wringing, Franz’s quiet concern, and River’s brattish teenage-brother act. “Come in, come in,” Kurt mumbled as he held the front door open for her. “Out of the heat.”
It was hot in Kurt’s abode too: he kept the upper floor closed off, sleeping in the downstairs den next to the living room and venturing up top only to shower. But it was cooler than the desert evening outside, and it was quiet, with only her usually taciturn grandfather for company.
“You must tell me the truth,” Kurt said, “Over a beer.” It came out like an order, a throwback to his youth.
“I’d rather not.”
Kurt snorted, then pulled out his phone. He placed it inside a fleecy bedroom slipper on the boot rack by the front door, raised an eyebrow, and offered the other slipper to Rita. After a moment’s hesitation, she copied him.
Kurt led her through the front hall to the kitchen and closed the connecting door. The refrigerator was well-stocked with imports that reminded Kurt of home—Sch?fferhofer, Weihenstephaner, Maisel’s Weisse—and a six-pack of Miller Ice for visitors. He ate most evenings with Franz and Emily; after Greta had died, he’d retreated into quiet introspection, his son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren the focus of his remaining social life. Rita had been worried by his withdrawal, but the news that he’d taken a volunteer job sounded hopeful.
Kurt pulled two bottles from the fridge, popped their caps, and carefully poured them into a pair of ceramic steins. “Drink,” he told her. “I know you didn’t tell your parents everything. Nobody ever does. Come into the living room and unwind. I’ll tell you a story.”
“What do you mean?” Rita followed Kurt into the living room. It was furnished mostly in shades of brown and orange leavened by outbreaks of ancient black leather, like a washed-up seventies bachelor pad, and it smelt faintly of stale cigarettes. Kurt had been giving up tobacco for as long as she could remember. He walked stiffly, wincing slightly: his hips were hurting again.
“When I was a young man, fresh out of the Volksarmee, let me tell you, it was a different world. There were seventeen million of us in East Germany, and over a hundred thousand secret police in the Stasi. Think of it—two and a half times as many secret police per person as there are ordinary cops in America! And ordinary VoPo—Volkspolizei—on top! But that’s not all. The Stasi used informers, half a million of them. Maybe two million irregular informers. One in eight people were snitches. You couldn’t drink at a bar without drinking with a snitch. So we drank at home. Prost.”
He raised his stein. Hesitantly, Rita raised hers in return. They’d been doing this since she was fourteen, although he’d had the sense to start her on the alkoholfrei. This wasn’t Germany, after all.
“Of course, these days they don’t need informers—your phone does it for you. So no need for nice Herr Staatssicherheit to buy you a beer, make you feel good, and offer you the life of adventure and secrecy and free goodies in return for playing spy-on-my-neighbor.” Her grandfather raised an eyebrow at her. “That’s not what happened to you, is it?” She shook her head. “Good. When they asked me to spy for them—I was your age—I was young and foolish, but not that foolish. I was listening to Feindsender and reading stuff I really shouldn’t be caught with when I was in the factory. So maybe they thought, ach, I was a young tearaway but not so crazy I didn’t fit in during my time in the Army, so they could use me: tell me to go to music clubs and listen to people who talk too much to people they really should not trust. And you know, in those days, if you do as they tell you and tell stories, you maybe get ahead, get promoted faster? That sort of thing.”
“They asked you?” Rita goggled at him.
“Yes, the Stasi asked me.” Kurt’s face crinkled into a grin. “Them, asking me, made me ask some questions of myself, I can tell you. I didn’t much like the answers. But as we used to say, the opposite of ‘well done’ is ‘well meant.’ I devised a way out, and the next evening I went to my local bar and got drunk. I told anybody who listened how the Stasi asked me to spy for them. And they never asked me again.” He took a gulp of wheat beer and sighed happily.
“I’m not an informer,” Rita said hesitantly. “But they made me a job offer. I wasn’t allowed to refuse it.” So far so good. “I think they want to keep an eye on me. A close eye.”
“They can arrest you,” Kurt said dismissively. “Why do you think they want you?”
Rita sat down on the edge of the sofa, opposite Kurt’s recliner. “Tell me about my, my birth mother…”
“I never met her.” Kurt sniffed. “Her mother, though, I knew her kind. An illegal, living under a false identity. I guessed she was on the run, had been involved with the Weather Underground or something like that. Wanted by the FBI. Anyway, she did not fit in on her own. Turned up in Boston and hooked up with a Jewish bookstore clerk, man called Beckstein. That was in ’72…’73? I met her later, in ’91, through your grandmother. She was with a group of counterculture dissidents, optimists who didn’t believe it was just the same shit on either side of the Wall. Anyway, in ’94 her daughter gets in trouble at med school. Has to choose, career or Kinder. And Mrs. Beckstein asks me, your fine daughter-in-law and her fertility problem, does she still want a baby?”
Rita licked her lips. “Mom’s problem was that early?” “Problem” was the family euphemism for uterine cancer. The ob-gyn had spotted it soon enough that the surgery was a complete success, but it had put an end to Emily’s baby-making plans before she even got started.
“Yes.” Kurt nodded. “So we talk it over, Mrs. Beckstein and your mother and me and your father, and we agree to work it out. Which is where you come from.”
“Tell me about Mrs. Beckstein…?”