Weak and fragile, like wood filed down thin, that’s how she felt as she stood in front of the church’s large wooden door, pulling it toward her, opening a gap just wide enough for her to press through, wrapped in her heavy coat. The church was empty. It looked larger from the inside than it did from the street. Patches of color cast by the stained-glass windows dotted the floor. A strong smell of wax filled the air, and she, whose sense of smell had sharpened the more her illness ate away at her, could also detect the fragrance of incense, which had survived somehow in the dim expanse since Sunday. Marlene made her way forward slowly, dragging her feet. Nearing the altar, she felt drained of strength. She sat down on the wooden pew closest to her and leaned back, feeling small and shriveled in her large coat. She rested her hands, in their woolen gloves, in her lap. The dull glow of copper implements flickered at the edge of her field of vision, and her head fell forward and rested on her chest.
She didn’t know how long she had dozed for when she shook herself out of her reverie and lifted her head. The patches of light on the floor were gone and Marlene saw the priest’s face close to hers, his hand resting on her shoulder. “Marlene,” he said to her softly, “Marlene. Are you okay? I haven’t seen you in quite a while.” She looked into the priest’s wrinkled eyes, felt his hand weighing heavily on her, and said, “I’m very ill, I couldn’t come. But I’ve come today, I have something to tell you.” The priest looked at her, his eyes reflecting sorrow and warmth, and asked her: “Would you like to talk, or perhaps make Confession? Both God and I will listen in any event. Whatever you like.” He smiled, a soft expression on his face. He sat beside her on the bench and took her hand. “No, there’s no need for Confession,” she said. “Like this is good.” She released her hand from the priest’s grip, removed the glove, and then took hold of his hand again, a large and warm hand. The priest could feel the brittleness of her bones, their fragility, and he knew she was right, that not only was she very ill, but she would be dead soon, in just a few days perhaps, certainly before Christmas Mass.
“You don’t really know me, Father Jacobs,” she said. “You only know that I’m an old and lonely woman who’s been coming to your church for the past few years, always alone, always alone. You know nothing about my past, about the things I did before everything changed…”
“Those were different times,” the priest said. “We’ve all been there, we all have a past. No one is judging us, neither you nor me. How can…”
“I want you to listen,” she said softly. “I want to tell you about a sin of mine, the sin of cowardice. About someone to whom I wasn’t able to say even a single personal word, a single word of intimacy, someone who I wasn’t able to show, or even hint of the fact, that my dry heart loved him.” She paused for a long silence. “I had a lot of boys,” she whispered, pulling herself together for a moment. “They were all my boys. But he, his name was Gunther, and Werner sometimes, too, he…”
And then she told him. Told him about the period of the war, and about the Red Army soldiers who had savagely raped her. But so many women were raped back then, so who was going to grieve about it? Who had the time? You survived, and that was the main thing. So many died. There wasn’t a single home that hadn’t lost someone. And of her recruitment into the Stasi she told him with unconcealed pride, certainly unapologetically, and although he didn’t say a word, Marlene adamantly said, “What’s there to be sorry for? After all, we built this country on the ruins of terrible destruction. We had to do so resolutely, without balking, without going astray. Everyone had to do his bit. I wish I had been able to give more.” And she told him about her boys, about their quests in faraway places, about the dangers and horrors they confronted. And about the general, Markus Hertz, who instructed her personally to set up the Special Ops Archives in Dresden, so that the cache of the big secrets wouldn’t be accessible to each and every political commissioner who happened to pass through headquarters in Berlin. Markus, Markus. She saw him so infrequently during her years at the Archives, but when he did come there, he always devoted some time to her, made a point of sitting down with her, drinking tea with her, and winking at her as he added a kick to both their cups of tea with a shot of alcohol, why not, couldn’t the two of them enjoy themselves a little? He then had her transferred to his bureau, and later came the big fall…
And then she spoke about Gunther, Gunther who took her breath away, who was their top field operations officer. There wasn’t a person out there whom he couldn’t recruit, turn into his best friend, turn into a secret soldier in the service of the revolution. Because as she saw things, it was and remained a revolution. No less. And she told him about Gunther’s murder, “Of course it was murder, who goes for a walk by the side of the highway on a dark rainy night, in the middle of nowhere? The big bosses from Moscow show up and take the Cobra dossiers just a few weeks earlier, and all of a sudden Gunther is dead. Just like that? He just happened to be killed? My sweet Gunther.”
“What do you know about Cobra?” the priest asked in a whisper, holding her dry burning-hot hand.
“Nothing, almost nothing,” she replied. “That was our system. Nobody knew the full picture. Only those who needed to. What did I know? I knew that Werner, Gunther that is, recruited him from nowhere. That his wonderful senses had led him to believe that Cobra was worth it. All the risks and effort. That he would go far. Thanks to agents like him, Markus and Gunther were able to walk tall even in Dzerzhinsky Square, at the KGB headquarters. I didn’t know his real name. I only knew he was from Israel, from the Holy City, from Jerusalem. A highly intelligent young man, an aide to a senior minister. Gunther used to say that he’d be a minister himself one day, or a very senior government official. I knew he was important enough for the Russians to take him for themselves and destroy everything that could expose him. We were already at a point of no return when they demanded that we hand him over. At some point, after all, we knew it was all over, right? But why did they have to kill him?” she asked, and her tears streamed silently down her cheeks and dripped onto the hand of the priest that was holding hers. “Why did he have to be killed? Gunther would never have betrayed Cobra. He may just as well have killed himself.” She sobbed softly, her breath catching now and then on a quiet whimper. “Why kill him like a dog on the side of a highway, in a dark field, with the rain pouring down on him incessantly, and his eyes staring up at nothing but black skies?” It was plain to see that she had pictured that horrific image in her mind on numerous occasions, and that it remained as distinct as ever. The priest clasped both his large hands around her bare fingers. He stroked her thin hair and said, “Marlene, Marlene, that’s enough now, it’s passed, it was a long time ago. And Gunther knew, I’m sure, Gunther knew you had feelings for him. Someone like him would surely have known. Only his work, his loyalty, the war he was waging stopped him from telling you that he knew, from telling you that he loved you, too. That’s how we were in those days, right? That’s just the way things were. Too often,” he whispered. He stroked Marlene’s head, trying to soothe and comfort her. We all carry a cross on our backs, he thought. A cross and a bag of sins alongside. Living a blemish-free life in those days was impossible. The truly good managed to keep some piece of their soul out of reach, untainted. But the truly good also had to survive, also had to give something in return for their lives. Father Jacobs wondered about the constant compromises, endless small humiliations, uncountable acts of betrayal that had allowed him to go on living, to continue leading his small congregation, small and ostracized, which found sanctuary in itself, comfort and a little warmth in those days, days that one couldn’t even term black. No, it was worse. They were days of dreariness, of obscurity, like opaque windows that had been smeared with brown paint and dirt that could never be scraped off.