Jonathan de Shalit: Traitor

Marlene lived on the fifth floor of an enormous public housing project, seemingly infinite, put together with concrete and asbestos, one of the many built in keeping with the finest traditions of Stalinist architecture in Moscow and Leningrad, in Irkutsk and Tashkent, in Warsaw and Budapest, in East Berlin and Dresden, and in dozens, if not hundreds, of other cities throughout the Soviet Empire and its allies. Immense structures, eyesores, starkly uniform and utterly devoid of charm, but homes that were certainly habitable, that offered shelter, and in which one could live a complete and full life. Marlene loved her apartment, and she still recalled the intense excitement and deep sense of gratitude she had felt when the Workers’ Welfare Association had informed her that finally, after so many years of such dedicated service, she was entitled to an apartment. It wasn’t something to be taken for granted, certainly not in the case of a woman on her own, an unmarried woman, going on forty. Moreover, they had given her a state-of-the-art apartment, forty-five square meters that were hers alone, with a modern kitchenette and a small bedroom and a guest room and her own bathroom, just for her. For the first time, she could enjoy the luxuries offered by privacy and didn’t have to cram herself into a common bathroom at the far end of the long hall with all the neighbors. True, the apartment hadn’t been an act of kindness, not at all. It was given to her on merit, in recognition of her devoted and unconditional loyalty to the German Democratic Republic’s security services, which she had joined immediately following the war. After twelve years as a cipher clerk at the Regional Command Headquarters in Dresden, she was transferred in January 1957 to the Special Ops Archives, where she had worked for many long years, endlessly dedicated and loyal, arriving every day at five minutes to eight and leaving after dark, twelve to fourteen hours later, her eyes burning, her body spent, filled with a sweet and comforting sense of satisfaction.

Still today, as an elderly and ill woman, she maintained her small apartment in pristine condition. The clean and tidy residence reflected her character—meticulous, stringent, loyal. Resting on the dark wooden dresser in the guest room were small souvenirs from numerous places around the world. No, she, personally, had never left Germany, aside from just once. To this day, her heart skipped a beat each time she recalled the thrill of that trip to Moscow, where in a secret ceremony she had received a special token of appreciation for her contribution and devotion. The small souvenirs were from her boys, her sweet and wonderful boys from the Special Ops Division of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance. “Markus’s boys,” as she called them, never forgot Marlene, working there for them in a small office on the basement floor of the regional headquarters. Markus had been the one to insist, from the very beginning, that the division’s archives be based in the small kingdom he had established for himself in Dresden, and not at central headquarters in Berlin. He didn’t want everything concentrated in one location; he didn’t like the idea of having all the intelligence at the disposal of every novice political commissar with a cushy job in Berlin. And his boys, who risked their lives in the covert war they waged against the enemies of the state and party in every corner of the world, always knew there was someone loving and loyal to safeguard their secrets, their daring operations, as well as the agents they managed to recruit and handle for the sake of the revolution. They had brought her a small Eiffel Tower from Paris and a chubby Buddha from China and a frightening wooden mask from Mozambique, and she watched over those small mementos, those symbols of love, with a joyful heart and eyes that sometimes filled with tears. And in the dresser itself, she kept several bottles of selected alcoholic beverages. She wasn’t much of a drinker, and even less so a hostess, but she had a number of bottles of whisky from Scotland and also a few bottles of vodka, not only from Moscow but also from Helsinki and Stockholm, along with a bottle of Grand Marnier from France. The strong, sweet liqueur was her favorite of all; and from time to time, when the loneliness turned particularly acute, she would pour herself a small glass, taking comfort in the pleasant fire that spread down her throat.

Many years after starting out at the Special Ops Archives—more than twenty years down the line, to be precise—Markus summoned her to Berlin. “Marlene,” he had said to her at the time, “I want you by my side. The post of head secretary is opening up, and I need someone with whom I can be totally at ease and relaxed. Someone I can trust one thousand percent. Not some high-and-mighty young Humboldt University graduate who has been parachuted in by someone from the Politburo.” And Markus had offered an ironic description of the potential candidate—an ambitious young woman whom one politician or other was keeping on the side; after arranging a nice small apartment for her, he was now going to land her a prestigious job, too. And in return, Markus said in a tone that to her sounded wearily and angrily disdainful, “She will have to report back on the bureau’s activity and also do a few more things for him that you and I don’t even want to think about. No. I need a loyal warrior devoted only to me and the revolution. And not in that order, of course. But someone whose head is filled by nothing but work and who is driven by nothing other than the success of our operations and our ability to screw our adversaries in the West over and over again. Excuse me for speaking in such a manner, Marlene,” he had said to her back then, seemingly embarrassed. “But you know that when it comes to our operations, I can get very passionate.” Marlene kept her compliments to herself, and for a period of almost four years, she went to work for the division chief in his bureau. She didn’t vacate her lovely apartment in Dresden. She’d sleep during the week on a narrow camp bed in a small room behind the bureau, and she’d take the Deutsche Reichsbahn’s regional train on weekends back to Dresden, where she’d wrap herself in the quiet of the sleepy city and straighten up her already spotlessly clean apartment. If the weather was warm enough, she’d sit for hours on the bank of the river, watching the endless stream of life it carried—barges, waterfowl, fallen branches, small boats with young lovers.

A small cross—an olive-wood cross made in Nazareth—hung above her dresser. She had found it at a little store nearby the farmers’ market that sold souvenirs and religious books and artifacts. Marlene rediscovered the good Lord only in her old age, years after it had all come to an end, years after her retirement from the Stasi at the age of sixty-five. A modest yet moving ceremony was held in recognition of all the staff members who retired at the same time; but the ceremony couldn’t hide the fact that the retirement had been forced upon them, just a few months after the collapse of the DDR, the Deutsche Democratic Republic, after huge bulldozers were rushed there from West Germany to begin tearing down everything expendable and rebuilding it all anew.

Marlene closed her eyes and her thoughts drifted back to Gunther. Gunther, the legendary handler from the Special Ops Division of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance. He was best friends with Markus, the division chief, and Markus alone would sometimes address him by his real name—Werner. All the others, aside from Markus and herself, knew him and referred to him only by his field name, Gunther—until it seemed that even he had forgotten his real name and chose not to remember his mother whispering, Werner, Werner, as she caressed his feverishly hot forehead, when he came down as a child with winter’s bronchitis and the thin walls of their tiny apartment were as cold as ice and dripping with freezing damp. Marlene loved all her boys, and she could see their faces flashing by one by one when she closed her eyes. But her love for Gunther (she’d sometimes pluck up the courage to call him her Werner) was different. He was a few years younger than she was, and she knew him primarily through the reports he’d write that came to her for filing. There was something special about his reports, something that allowed even her—so far away from the field, from the meetings with the agents—to sense the agents themselves, to smell the sweat of their fear, to recognize their reckless drunken arrogance, to inhale the fumes of alcohol and coffee that accompanied their meetings. Above all, the reports confirmed that each agent in question, each miserable traitor, was firmly in Gunther’s clutches, was being propped up by him, purposefully and lovingly manipulated into doing the things Gunther wanted him to do. Through the reports, she could sense Gunther’s strength of character, his self-confidence, the scope of his compassion and empathy, which allowed him to thus take command of another individual and turn him into a secret weapon in the service of the revolution.