Berlin Letters, page 9
Oma continues and I don’t interrupt again because, through this story, she is telling me exactly what scares her and precisely what she fears I’ll find in Opa’s scrapbook.
My father.
Chapter 7
The letters consume me.
Oma offered little information over our coffee and oatmeal, and I didn’t push. Instead I ate and listened to her stories. Snippets really and most not at all flattering of my father. But they provided some of my first insights into Oma’s life as a young mom and my mom’s childhood. Oma’s pain was so obvious and the gulf between our worldviews and experiences so vast, I realized how little I’ve appreciated her perspective. Her weary eyes and pale coloring soon told me she’d been pushed to her limit in recalling such times—and I was faring only slightly better.
Now she clears our bowls and my mind turns to my bedroom. I’m anxious to return and find myself so focused on what awaits me that her kiss to my forehead surprises me. Without a word she then opens the back door and heads to her “garden.” Her raised beds of churned earth. She is determined. Her best friend, Mrs. Oltolf down the street, told her gardening had worked wonders for her after her husband died. And since she and Opa started one the spring before Opa passed away, Oma can’t conceive of other choices to manage her grief. Gardening, despite these momentary setbacks, will yield wonders for her too. She is sure of it.
Watching her go, I better understand and respect her dogged determination. A woman who cleared rubble from the streets for months on end and raised her girls in a bombed-out apartment for almost a decade with three other families, all while working at a manufacturing plant that had been stripped of its machinery, is not going to let a few mercurial seeds defeat her.
I, on the other hand, do not head to our small backyard as I often do to help, nor do I go to the garage to find a hammer to fix the back stairs. My hands wouldn’t be able to handle the work, regardless. I turn the other direction and head toward the living room.
The burned three pages held pictures of my grandfather as a child along with a small picture of his own parents. His parents stood in starched clothing with stiff expressions. How long did they stay still to create the image? The mark on the back of the photo, which once read November 1899, is burned away. The glue that secured the photographs to the pages is also gone, and the pictures lay loose from much of their mounting at odd angles, charred and partially melted. While I am sad Oma has ruined them, I suspect they are not the reason she tried to destroy this book. It holds something else.
I leave the pages and gingerly pick up the scrapbook with my right hand. My palm hurts as I flex my fingers to grip it. So rather than hold it there, I tuck the scrapbook beneath my left arm and head up the stairs to my room.
Resting both myself and the book on my bed, I carefully turn through it page by page. I’ve seen everything before. Pictures, mementos, articles. There is nothing new. Nothing surprising and certainly nothing dangerous. I finally flip to the last page, noting how it rises up from the back cover, and find the “something else.” Four unopened white envelopes, each with the small infinity symbol drawn in the upper-left corner, sit wedged into the book’s binding. I surmise Oma did this. She tucked the letters that kept coming into Opa’s book, as my father didn’t know he died.
I close my eyes. Why is nothing easy?
I carry the letters to my desk. As much as I want to read them, I suspect they’ll tell me more of the superficial nothings each of the other letters reveal on the surface. To find what I want to know, I need to decipher them. And to do that, I must continue like I always do—from the beginning without skipping a single step, or a single letter. I set the four new ones aside.
Oma pokes her head in hours later with a plate of cheese, crackers, and apple slices. “You didn’t come down for lunch. I thought you might be hungry.”
Her tone is soft and conciliatory. Two aspirin slide into my field of vision, and the throbbing heat within each hand reaches past my focus and seizes my attention again. I pick up the aspirin and take them with the glass of water Oma sets there as well.
“What do they say?”
I glance at her. She is not looking at the letters. She is studying my decryptions.
I slide them away from her, fully aware of the duplicitous role my job places me in. If I was really an accountant for the Labor Department, as both my grandparents have believed for years, then I would share these with my Oma. But as a CIA officer who knows these letters are somehow related to an ongoing assignment, I cannot. There are signed agreements forbidding that. There are signed agreements forbidding lots of stuff I’m doing right now.
“I’m sorry, Oma. But I don’t have the full picture yet.”
She nods and steps away, seemingly satisfied with my answer. She then notices the scrapbook on my bed. She steps over to it and sits on the edge again as she did earlier. I turn my chair sixty degrees to face her.
“I’m glad you stopped me.” She runs a finger over the book’s worn cover. “I would have regretted it, but it wasn’t the letters in the back. Not just the letters.” She presses her palm against the cover. “There may be other secrets in here. Secrets I’m not sure I want to face. I was angry. I still am. He lied to me. To both of us. We left that life and he carried it with us.”
She’s right. Opa’s scrapbook is full of newspaper clippings, lists, notes he tucked inside the book, and who knows what else. She’s right about Opa too. He lied to both of us for years.
“Why’d you put those four letters in the back? Why not throw them away?”
“They were important to him. I knew that much. It’s hard to discard anything someone we love valued.” She smiles and it’s not so sad this time. A little mischief lurks at the edges. “Until they make you mad enough.” She lifts her chin to my desk. “What does Haris say? Not your notes. I see you are working on something, but does he ever mention my daughter?”
“He does.” I reach for a letter. “This one is dated April 28, 1971, and he writes about how hearing birds chirp is his favorite sign of spring because it reminds him of Monica.”
“She loved birds. She used to stop walking or playing and lift her head with her eyes closed just to hear them better.”
I sit silent for a moment envisioning my mother. Young, blonde, blue-eyed, with her head tilted up listening to the birds in peace. It’s a lovely image, and I let it replace the one I’ve held since this morning, the one Oma gave me of her eyes so terrified they became lost and vacant that long-ago Sunday.
Oma stares at me and I know she wants more. I offer what I can. “He’s the one, by the way, who started the lie. He asked Opa to lie to me about his death. Not to you, specifically, but to me so I wouldn’t miss him or worry about him, I guess. But he also constantly writes about things he wants Opa to tell me. The birds, for instance. He wanted me to know how much my mom loved the birds so I would remember her when I heard them.” I set down the letter. “I’m sorry Opa didn’t. I would have liked to have known that growing up. I’m sorry he didn’t share it with you either.”
“Me too. Does Haris still write for the paper?”
“He’s a reporter?” It’s both a question and an answer. My father wrote about submissions and interviews, but he took for granted that his audience knew what he meant. Opa did, of course, but I did not.
“Haris was, maybe still is, the Party’s propaganda mouthpiece. He was the chief reporter for Neues Deutschland, the Party’s newspaper, before we left.” Oma’s derision seeps into her tone.
“I don’t get the impression that he’s left his job, but he doesn’t sound like he’s the top guy. He’s mentioned a man named Manfred once or twice, praising his stories and work. I get the sense this Manfred is the paper’s top guy. In fact, I thought my father was support staff or something.”
I fold my lips in, taking a pause to test my next words in my mind. I disregard the small voice telling me to stay quiet. “He changed, Oma. You should know that. The letters reveal that even if he started out as the Party’s mouthpiece, he wasn’t for long. He changed a great deal.”
“Haris?” Her eyes widen.
“Haris Voekler.”
She nods, digesting the information rather than agreeing with it. “I’ll leave you to it.” She crosses to the door and turns back. “Will you let me know?”
“If I can, yes.”
She shuts the door and I return to my letters.
* * *
I keep on. 1971. 1972. 1973 . . .
Each letter uses an acrostic cipher. That doesn’t change. Coders like what they like and stick to it. But my father does show remarkable dexterity within the acrostic format. He switches up his pattern by paragraph, and he selects such outlandish numbers no one could guess—who uses the twenty-seventh space after a period in a letter that only has five sentences that long in a three-page letter? And often he doesn’t signify the key letter at all until deep into the narrative. No censor in the Soviet Bloc countries could or would catch any of these codes in the time allowed to them. They had and still have to clear thousands of letters daily. He was clever. Too clever. Because I know the patterns he favors and deciphering them is still taking me an extraordinarily long time.
The content changes as well. His first letters after my mother’s death in 1964 are angry and questioning. He’s bereft and lost and starting to dip his toe into an alternate ideology. He’s afraid to commit and name or comment upon the injustices he sees around him. He’s slowly waking and constantly asks Opa to confirm or deny his new insights. I wish I had Opa’s side of the correspondence. I can’t imagine what he wrote in reply or the wisdom he offered.
Another couple years and my father is more confident. He and Opa have clearly drawn closer as well. The change in tone conveys a level of trust, camaraderie, and respect that has grown between them. The few jokes and gentle teasings I catch signal they might have even become friends.
By the midseventies my father’s questions, mourning, and loss morph into a passion and purpose. He’s angrier at the strictures he witnesses around him, the increased work quotas and security intrusions, and he starts to more openly share secrets and political maneuverings within the Soviet-backed Socialist Unity Party. He shares details that could get him arrested.
By the late seventies his letters go further. I find Honecker. Liar. Building Stasi. Total control buried in a letter after Erich Honecker ousted General Secretary Walther Ulbricht from office in 1976. After that, Honecker, along with Economic Secretary Günter Mittag and Stasi Chief Erich Mielke, pretty much ruled the country unfettered until—well, a few weeks ago.
There’s also one section in a letter about Ostpolitik that would certainly get him in trouble if decoded. He explains how Catholic Pope John XXIII’s sort of get-along-to-go-along approach to Catholic life behind the Iron Curtain proved an absolute failure for religious freedom and autonomy. Instead my father shares how it allowed a whole host of KGB and Stasi spies into the Church’s upper echelons, both across the Iron Curtain and within the Vatican itself. The Stasi, he writes, was thrilled with their stupendous success.
Throughout the entire day—mine measured in hours, his spanning years—I meet Haris Voekler. I laugh with him, cry for him, and even get really annoyed at some of his decisions. There was a trip in 1978 to a train station, the Tränenpalast, that he knew would cause problems. Yet he still went. The next day he got called to the main Stasi headquarters for questioning but was smart enough to twist the conversation and get himself out before the questioning landed him in deeper danger. It was a daring gambit as the Stasi are renowned, even on this side of the Iron Curtain, for ferreting out every secret and uncovering the smallest lie.
Then as I decipher a letter from 1982—one so dangerous I’m having trouble digesting it—I realize Oma is right. No matter the time or the place, some secrets can get you killed.
I set down my transcription of the 1982 letter and stare at it. Handing these letters to Andrew at the CIA is no longer a question; it’s a necessity. This is apocalyptic stuff. I take a deep breath. Should I go on? Can I go on?
After another sip of water and an apple slice, I convince myself I must. It’s not Monday yet and I am secure here. The information is secure and I am, technically, authorized to do this work.
Additionally, I will do the right thing at the first reasonable moment I can do it. Until then, I get to spend this time with my father, because after talking with my boss, I won’t be allowed to. These letters will be in the CIA’s hands—Carrie might be assigned to double-check my work—and I, as his daughter, will be deemed too close to the subject matter to be involved in any way. The debrief on this letter alone will be excruciating.
Every third time I tell myself this, I almost believe my own rationalizations to continue. Every second time, my conscience tells me to call Andrew Cademan at his home right now and ask for a meeting. But I can’t bring myself to lift the receiver off its base.
Yet I can bring myself to understand Oma’s feelings. If you believed everything the Socialist Unity Party did was wrong, the propaganda my father served up would be upsetting, not to mention deceptive and harmful. Several of his letters make me laugh at how easily he couches his true and evolving opinions beneath mounds of Party cheerleading. Cheerleading that flows so easily, it must have at one point been true. On the surface his early letters are love letters to Communism, the DDR—that’s what he calls the GDR—General Secretary Ulbricht, the Party, and even Stasi Chief Erich Mielke.
What my father accomplished in these letters is brilliant. By the late 1960s he is able to craft two letters on opposing ideological planes that exist seamlessly together. I can almost hear his voice. I certainly sense his charm and charisma as he waxes eloquent about all that is good and right in the DDR. Only the slant of his letters, the racing of the ink across the page, or the crash of his words into each other give a hint at the tenor of the subject matter I’ll find beneath. There his charisma and charm drop away. There he is all business. And the business is brutal.
But as the letters arrived nonstop for twenty-four years, it means the censors never glimpsed behind the curtain. The irony makes me smile. They must have loved him. Reading on the surface, he was—and perhaps still sounds like—a true “company man.” I glance to the new pile of four letters I’ve set aside, wanting to get to the end of the story. But I do not. I stay right where I am in the early 1980s.
During these years he befriends a young man named Manfred. Early on, almost reading between the lines, I sense my father was demoted because of my grandparents’ move to the American Sector and then, a year later, to America itself. Manfred gets hired in the late 1970s, and with close ties to the establishment, he gets all the best stories. At first my father is wary of Manfred, and although tasked to help him in any way possible, he keeps the young reporter at arm’s length. Then in the late 1970s, a friendship grows. There are a few comments to Opa, probably in answer to direct questions, that lead me to believe it becomes a warm and trusting relationship. But after the 1982 letter, I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I’ll never hear about Manfred again. It almost brings me to tears.
I meet my mother in the letters too, at least the woman my father loved and remembers. Oma said my mother didn’t really know what she was doing when she passed me over the Wall. She was full of fear, even terror. But my father describes it very differently. In a 1965 letter I find,
One might say she died the day she gave you Luisa. Yet in all her strength and fury, in all the sickness and waste that came after, she never regretted breaking her own heart. Or mine.
There was no code beneath those sentences. Just my father sharing my mother with Opa.
In other letters he described her as quick and kind, melancholy and haunted at times, but with a laugh that could light up a room. He talked about how her exterior persona of accommodating and friendly, while absolutely real, hid beneath it an armor stronger than steel. She’d been refined in a crucible so hot, she was impervious to bending toward evil or deception. He also wrote he could never take her for granted, as she was the better, stronger, and purer of the two of them and he knew it every day of their lives.
It takes me a few letters to recognize it, but when I do, it makes me smile. He never buries his thoughts of my mother within codes. In every passage dedicated to her, she stands on the page, in full view, as if she’s his most important subject. She shines alone.
She isn’t in every letter, though. In the sixties I find her in about every third. In the seventies every fourth or fifth. I’m in the eighties now, and she shows up more sporadically. Was it because these letters were his only place to truly mourn her at the beginning, or because she was the genesis of his conversion and now that it’s complete, he’s on to the work he must do? In the eighties I get the sense my father knows exactly who he is and what he’s about. And the horrific costs he’ll pay if caught.
Also—not in code—he asks about me. In 1965, barely a year after his initial appeal to lie to me about their deaths, he questions the wisdom of his request. But, still unsure of what he thinks or believes about it, he doesn’t recant until 1977. That’s when he begs Opa to tell me the truth and tell me how much he loves me, thinks of me, and dreams of the day he can hold me in his arms.
I have to pause then. The sense of loss and emptiness, unnecessary and unfathomable, swamps me. I feel heat rise within me, within my core and not merely my hands. I want to rage at Opa and the lies he kept while admonishing me that no lie should ever stand. I push the pain away. After all, it does me no good. Opa isn’t here to account for anything he did.
I work on, wondering if some comment from my father’s side of the conversation will shed light on Opa’s choices, but I find nothing on that point. Though I do find Opa shared my life with him. My father wrote, “My sense of balance was terrible as a kid. It took me three months to learn to ride a bicycle,” in reply when Opa must have told him how I stayed steady my first push down the street, and “I wish I could see that medal for math. Her mother was good with numbers. I am so proud of her,” after Opa wrote him that I won a math competition in the seventh grade.
