“Why?” He looked at her sharply. “What do you know about her?”
Rita licked her suddenly dry lips. “She’s one of the, the world-walkers.”
“Right.” Kurt nodded. No attempt at dissembling: You knew, she thought. “The FBI came calling when you were eight. You don’t remember, of course; they are not idiots to arrest small children.”
“But you, aren’t you—”
“Appalled? That she’s one of the people who blowed—blew—up the White House? Rita, she was a runaway! A refusenik. One who walked away, taking her daughter. You might as well blame me for the shootings at the Berlin Wall.” Kurt sat up straighter. “You listen to me, girl: you must not be ashamed of her. All groups have dissidents. All groups have those who reject them, change their names—just like me, your grandfather Douglas: a good American name, no? I change my name because even after I come over here I do not want to make it easy for the GDR embassy to write to me. Now you … tell me. What do the DHS really want with you?”
“I—” Rita froze. “I’m not supposed to tell you. I’m supposed to spin a story about how they were following up records and ran across my, my birth mother. And offered me an office job where they can keep an eye on me in case the world-walkers come looking for me.”
Kurt nodded encouragement. “Yes?”
“Well, I—” She licked her lips again, then abruptly took a mouthful of beer and put her stein down on the coffee table. “The world-walkers came looking. Kidnapped me and stuffed me in my car trunk. Luckily the DHS were there, and—” Kurt was shaking his head. “What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“I’m not a world-walker,” she said, crossing her arms defensively. “But they said the world-walkers appear to think…” She trailed off.
“Rita.” Kurt peered at his stein, then shook his head: “They always lie to you. Always. It’s the first law of Staatssicherheit. The American Heimatschutzministerium is no different from the Stasi in the old days, except they have more money.”
“If you think it’s so bad, why did you come here?” she demanded, hating her words the moment she heard them.
“Because”—for a moment he looked every one of his seventy-seven years—“we knew our government was lying to us about our glorious socialist system: so we thought they were lying about the evils of capitalism, too! Also, everything here was good at first. It was only later”—he looked wistful, or frustrated, or both—“it was only after the failure of actually existing socialism to deliver the goods that we learned they’d been telling the truth some of the time. Whenever it was convenient for them. And that the other side had been lying too, whenever it was convenient for them. The best kind of lie is one that is a selective version of the truth, leaving out the messy, sticky, embarrassing bits. They all lie—the difficult part is telling when they aren’t. And even so, many things are still better here.”
He looked round, miming confusion, at the shag pile carpet and the 72-inch TV. “Big houses, big cars, big steaks, big government. It’s true: capitalism delivers the goods. It also delivers big police, the Internet Rasterfahndung…” He sighed. “They don’t talk about that, though, any more than the Communists liked to admit that their less-unequal society was also poorer. For people so obsessed with freedom, they have a surprising number of police. But this is my home now, and I am too old to start over, and besides, Germany is not so different today. Unless you are a woman of a certain type, of course, in which case perhaps Germany is more welcoming.”
He gave Rita a knowing look, then picked up his stein and took another mouthful. (Chugging the German import wheat beers in one gulp was inadvisable, as Rita had discovered the hard way some years ago.) “Remember this, Granddaughter: they lie to you, but you can learn the truth if you look for the silence between the lies.” He paused for a moment. “If you were useless to them, they would ignore you. If you were a threat to them, they would put you in prison. So they must think you are useful to them.”
“I told you, the world-walkers tried to—”
He cut her off with a gesture. “This happened right after the DHS spoke to you? How convenient!”
“But they tried to kidnap me—”
“Did you see them world-walk? No? Then how do you know they were world-walkers?”
“But one of them was shot by the police! I saw it happen!”
“So?” Kurt snorted. “A local lowlife is hired to abduct a woman—who cares what happens to him?”
“You’re saying the DHS kidnapped me? And told me it was world-walkers? Why?” She was mustering her objections one by one, and Kurt was knocking them down, just as she’d been afraid he would.
He shrugged. “I don’t know that that happened. And you don’t know that it didn’t, do you? It could be a way of making you say ‘yes’ to their job offer, couldn’t it? Like the beer in that bar in Dresden that time, and the promises of adventure to a young man. Do you know why they want you?”
Rita shook her head, acutely aware as she did so of a growing sense of self-betrayal. “I have no idea,” she lied, for in truth she did know: but she couldn’t tell Kurt They plan to make a world-walker of me in a room that might be wired. “I need to find out, though, don’t I?”
“Yes, you do. They will of course have told you not to discuss this matter with anyone. Especially your grandfather. So we have not had this conversation!” Kurt announced to the room. He emptied his stein. “Well, that’s it for me for this evening,” he said thoughtfully.
Rita set her own tankard down. It was still a quarter full. “I’d better get back home.”
“You do that.” Was that disappointment in his voice? Or just her guilty imagination?
“I’ll see myself out,” she said.
“Of course.” As she walked to the door, he added, “if you ever decide to tell me the rest of your story, I’ll be here. I’ll trade you for more about your third grandmother.”
He wasn’t disappointed: he was amused. But of course, he could read her like a book. Rita slammed the door on her way out and stomped back to her parents’ house in a foul mood. They, at least, seemed to believe what she told them. But then, they’d never played footsie with the Stasi. Whereas Grandpa Kurt—
—had taught her everything she knew.