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.
On rare occasions, Gunther would show up at the Archives in person, hanging up his heavy coat at the door, a bearish and ungainly figure but exuding strength and inexplicable charm, his blond hair still full but starting to turn silver. And when she saw him, a strange yet delightful sensation that she dared not name—but knew nevertheless could be love—would flutter momentarily through her heart, like an elusive little minnow. A woman’s love for a man, different from the love she felt for all the other boys. They spoke sometimes, she and Gunther, though not much. Mostly he’d ask for files that he needed and she’d retrieve them for him, get him to sign the required papers, and say to him: “Tell me if you need anything else.” But sometimes he’d share a few words about something he was going through, the terrible train ride from Prague, or some inappropriate joke about his mother-in-law (and Marlene would wonder if he even had a mother-in-law at all). Now and then he’d show her a book he was reading, retrieving a crumpled copy from his jacket pocket and saying to her: “Read it, Marlene, read it, if your soul isn’t too delicate for this kind of material,” and he’d smile, wrinkles appearing next to his eyes, his good smell, the smell of a man returning from a long journey, would hit her, and she’d offer a smile in return and feel all flustered.
Later on, during the few years in which she served as head secretary in the bureau, she’d see him a little more often, always bursting in like a whirlwind, awe-inspiring, intimidating the young secretaries, joking back and forth with her flirtatiously, charmingly audacious, always in a hurry to see the division chief, his good friend. And she, who had learned to open her mouth a little—after all, you can’t manage such a bureau without being able to hold your own with important and arrogant individuals—knew how to respond to her Gunther and to give as good as she got, and it was only the truth itself, buried there in her heart, that she couldn’t speak. Marlene knew that the young secretaries gossiped about her behind her back, saying that she was desperately in love with Markus, and that there was a story going around that there was something between them, a long time ago, during the initial years after the war, and that thanks to that fleeting romance from the past, she, an old woman like her, almost sixty, had now landed the position of head secretary. What foolish young girls, she said to herself. Foolish and insubstantial. Yes, she admired Markus a great deal, adored him sometimes, and was willing to serve him loyally with all her heart. But love? Don’t be crazy! What nonsense, nonsense and a waste of time.
Everything happened quickly in early 1984. Markus suddenly lost his charm. He was too independent. The intelligence provided by his agents ruffled the feathers of senior officials once too often. The reports filed by the agents indicated a clear change in the West’s viewpoint vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and its allies. The image of a militarily powerful Warsaw Pact was now being accompanied by more and more talk of the economic frailty of the Soviet Union and its allies, of deterioration and a loss of control, of a fossilized and detached leadership, of centrifugal forces (Marlene remembered the fascinating and frightening term from the reports) that could end up tearing the Eastern bloc to shreds. That was how the West viewed the Soviet Union, and thus, too, the German Democratic Republic, her country. The agents of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance reported everything meticulously and precisely. Marlene remembered deliberating fiercely with herself while filing the reports in perfect order. Could there perhaps be a grain of truth in the things they were reporting? Could they be seeing things that Moscow and Berlin couldn’t see? Or didn’t want to see? In any event, it all turned more and more sour. And Markus managed to get himself into trouble, again, with one of his love affairs, and the rumors reached someone or other among the party leadership, and Markus in early 1984 found himself deposed from his position of significant power and appointed to the post of senior advisor on the Industrial Efficiency Council. Her eyes welled up with tears when she recalled the brief and formal farewell ceremony held in his honor—one of the heroes of the Democratic Republic who had done more for the revolution than all of the dry and stiff nobodies who made up the party leadership. But Marlene didn’t allow herself to think like that, a wrong word after all would slip out eventually, and then she’d also be thrown out of the Special Ops Archives in Dresden, to which she had returned, with all due respect, a few weeks later, after the new division chief had assembled his bureau staff to his liking. Still, she had said to herself, she had more than seven years to go before retirement.