The Leipzig Affair

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

Magda –

You’re sitting in a booth in the language laboratory with headphones on and Frau Aner’s voice in your ear.

“Übung macht den Meister,” she says.

Practice makes perfect. She thinks this is funny, and you see her smile to herself. Jana, the class snoop, laughs out loud and is rewarded with an approving look.

“State your names, comrades,” Frau Aner says. You hate the way her voice rasps, very close, like she’s in your head.

“Magda Maria Reinsch,” you say.

The laboratory for interpreters and translators studying languages from non-socialist countries is on the twenty-third floor of the university tower, a 1970s’ skyscraper that is meant to look like an open book but doesn’t. The tower’s one advantage is its view. From up here you can see all of Leipzig seeping out into the surrounding plain: the mediaeval city centre, the prefabricated apartment blocks, the flat spaces of the exhibition site that come alive every spring and autumn when foreign guests arrive for the Leipzig trade fairs. To the west lie the sumptuous villas that were once home to the bourgeoisie, crumbling now and interlaced with new buildings. The ugliest of these is a pebble-dash guest house for visitors from ‘the socialist abroad’.

But today the blinds are drawn and your only possible view is of Frau Aner, the language-lab leader, sitting up at the control console, sliding the black buttons back and forward. Frau Aner is a red-faced, cardigan-wearing woman in her mid-forties, who bounds about sniffing out ideological impurities like a dog on the scent of a rabbit. Her grasp of political ideology is loose to say the least, but that doesn’t stop her. She has the kind of nose for dissent that would make her a useful foot soldier in any regime. This, presumably, is why she has been put in charge of language-lab activities for the most dangerous language of all: English. It’s certainly not because of her language skills. She speaks English with a comedy German accent and machine-guns it with errors. They like that: the powers that be. They like to give people responsibilities they’re not quite competent to discharge.

A whirring in your ear tells you the tape is being rewound. “We are going to run through this scenario one more time,” says Frau Aner, “and this time I believe our efforts will be repaid.”

You wish you were out of here. You wish you were sitting at a window table in Café Grossmann smoking a cigarette and drinking a bitter black coffee. But you also don’t. Part of you is glad to be tucked away in the language-lab booth. You might meet someone you know in the café, someone from your old life, and that would be bad, because today you’re wearing their clothes and you don’t like to be seen like that.

Dressing for the new role you’ve adopted as a politically reliable and diligent student at the Karl Marx University Leipzig is the hardest part for you, the part you struggle with the most. It’s one thing to act like you want to conform, quite another to dress like it. Clothes are special to you. They’ve always been your escape, your rebellion. Everyone in the Workers’ and Farmers’ state has to have somewhere private to go, and this is where you go. It’s your very own version of internal emigration: you do not wear their clothes.

Correction: it’s where you went. You did not wear their clothes.

Unfortunately, your internal emigration was external. People could see it. That was dangerous, and so it had to stop. If people are to believe in the new you, to accept that your rebellious past is behind you, then every detail has to be right. Your rehabilitation, your resumed university career, your acceptance back into the Party and the Free German Youth: these things were only possible because your father pulled strings. Even then, it was touch and go. And so, to make it all work, you have to dress like them. (That’s how you see it: you and them; dressing like them.) It’s an essential part of your disguise. If you wear your own clothes it’s a risk, and you can’t afford risks. Marek has told you that a thousand times: it seems like a small thing, but it’s not.

“This isn’t just about you,” he said when you told him you didn’t think you could do it. And then you had to agree. Because he’s waited for you when he didn’t have to. He’s waited for you because of the special bond between you, which goes back such a long way, and because he knows better than anyone how bad things were for you after your brother’s accident.

But it’s a struggle. Last week, in the Konsument department store, you tried. You tried very hard. But in the end you could not bring yourself even to try on the Golden Fox jeans from the People’s Own Clothing Works in Zwickau or the badly cut blouses and tops made from Grisuten and other miracle fabrics.

Today, you’re wearing a pair of stiff trousers the colour of sick and a striped sweater that irritates your skin. You hate these clothes. You long for the moment when you’ll return to the hideaway you share with Kerstin on Shakespeare Street and rip them off. Worse still are the shoes. You drew the line this morning at the grey plastic loafers from Konsument. No one can see your feet in the language lab, and so, as a present to yourself, you’re wearing your favourite boots: knee-high brown lace-ups you bought two years ago in Prenzlauer Berg from a girl over on a day visa from Berlin (West).

You couldn’t take your eyes off the girl’s boots. Marek’s Uncle Ivan had been over the previous week on one of his periodic visits from New York and had given you a hundred Deutschmarks. The girl looked to have about the same size feet as you and so you offered her ten Marks for her boots.

She hesitated. “How about fifteen?” you said.

She smiled, this breezy, blonde-haired West German girl, and you thought she was going to say she didn’t want to sell them at any price. Instead she shrugged and said, “Ten is okay.”

She was doing you a favour. You didn’t like that but you took it anyway. “It’s a deal,” you said.

You tried the boots on in a back alley. They fitted perfectly. The girl put them back on, and you went into town on the tram together so she could buy some cheap shoes to wear on the train back to West Berlin.

“It’s good to have something to spend the money on,” she said as you headed towards the Centrum department store on Alexanderplatz. “It’s always hard to get rid of the compulsory exchange.”

But the canvas shoes she chose were cheap and didn’t use up much of her twenty-five East Marks.

“Shall we take a look on some of the other floors?” you asked.

She glanced around her. You knew how old-fashioned the wood and glass display counters must look to her, how rude the stony-faced assistants must seem.

“Let’s just go,” she said.

You took possession of the boots in the Centrum toilets and headed back out on the Alexanderplatz with her.

“Do you want the rest of the money?” the girl asked when you were standing by the Friendship Between Peoples fountain, saying your goodbyes. You gave her a hard look. You imagined her telling her friends in West Berlin how kind she’d been to a poor East German girl.

“I didn’t mean – ”

“Thank you,” you interrupted, taking the money and shoving it in your pocket.

The boots are beautiful. You love them. You’ve polished and nurtured them, and they look as good today as when you bought them. The boots were the beginning. You got them shortly after your brother Jürgen’s accident – difficult days. Soon, you stopped buying clothes from the shops altogether. It was your way of refusing, of showing you didn’t accept what had happened to your brother. It wasn’t easy, but you managed. You had your sources: hand-me-downs from Aunt Vladka, things you ran up yourself on your grandma’s old sewing machine, the odd skirt or blouse picked up in Prague or Budapest.

A hissing in your ear indicates that the tape is back at the beginning. Frau Aner fixes the class with one of her build-the-revolution looks.

“Commence!” she says, pressing the ‘play’ button with a dramatic flourish.

Frau Aner is wasted on university students. She’d be much better leading a troupe of Pioneers, sweet little baby communists in white shirts and red neckerchiefs. You can just see her standing in front of them, swinging her arms about like a human windmill, teaching them to love Honecker and sing Youth Awaken!

The voices start again. The scenario is this: Mr Green, a representative from the Greater London Council, is visiting Berlin where he is being shown around by Comrade Schwarz, a member of the Municipal Assembly of Berlin, Capital of the GDR. You are to interpret for them.

“My Goodness,” says Mr Green, “considering that Berlin, Capital of the GDR is such a big city, the air is very clean. How did you achieve this result?”

Frau Aner rarely listens in on your work. It upsets her because your English is so much better than hers. You take a chance.

“Scheisse,” you say, “wenn man –”

But you’ve miscalculated. There is a buzz in your ear. “No!” barks Frau Aner. “This is incorrect. Begin again.”

“Himmel,” you say, “wenn man –”

There is a long pause before Comrade Schwarz speaks again. “The answer is simple, Herr Green. In our Republic, state and society attach major importance to the rational use and protection of nature, mineral resources and raw materials. Measures to keep the water and the air clean, to protect the soil –”

It’s as bad as the ‘news’ in Neues Deutschland, the Party newspaper: The USSR and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic sign an agreement to deepen friendly co-operation. Comrade Erich Honecker, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and Chairman of the GDR Council of State, is greeted by cheering crowds in the model new town of Hoyerswerda. You buy Neues Deutschland every day now and hold it in front of your eyes on the tram but you never read it. You don’t believe anyone does. It’s unreadable.

“In keeping with the Environmental Policy Act of 1970,” Comrade Schwarz continues on the tape playing in your ears, “many elected deputies of local people’s assemblies are making broad efforts in the area of air quality and –”

It’s hard to concentrate on this rubbish. You know what the air is like in Berlin, Capital of the GDR – a mix of brown coal dust and two-stroke fumes that leaves a bleak ferrous after-taste. It was always the first thing you noticed when you returned to the city from your parents’ dacha as a child. And right now it’s harder than usual, because yesterday, Marek received a telegram from John Bull-Halifax in Edinburgh. It said (in code) that the Scottish research student who is arriving after the summer break will bring you four pairs of Levi 501s: one to keep and three to sell. Marek is to collect them from him. It’s safer that way.

Naturally, you can’t breathe a word of this to your fellow students of interpreting. The only person you can tell is Kerstin, and you’re burning to see her.

“Comrade Reinsch!” Frau Aner barks in your ear. “You have not translated the last sentence. Please apply yourself at once.”

“Yes, Frau Aner,” you reply, though you have no idea what Comrade Schwarz just said.

Soon you’ll be out of here. You’ll be at Shakespeare Street with Kerstin, pulling on your own clothes. Then you’ll drive off in her father’s much-repaired Trabant to spend the weekend at the hut that her parents rent by the lake to the south of the city. For now, you must concentrate. Everything, all your future plans, depends on your getting a place on the Study in the Non-Socialist Abroad Programme and travelling to Great Britain. And only the best students and the most politically reliable – the ones like Jana who don’t ask awkward questions about the air in Berlin or even think awkward thoughts about it – get places on that.