old Jewish cemetery. It belonged to her aunt, who was never at home during the afternoon. For a few months we shared everything: experiences, confidences, worries, fantasies and dreams. Our love grew like a wild rose. We would walk to the park and sit on the grass, holding hands and kissing like nervous adolescents. Just when I was thinking seriously of telling your mother, the affair died suddenly. What had pruned it out of existence? On my side, I guess, it was the knife of reason. One afternoon I couldn’t take her. She was mocking and cynical.
‘My stock is clearly going down and yours is refusing to rise. I think we’ve exhausted each other. Time to move on. You look surprised, Vlady. You’re not bad-looking for your age. I was into you because of your acid tongue. You were different from the other robots at Humboldt. You used to make me laugh. I never intended a long stay at your station, you old fool. Anyway your signals need repairing and you need a more experienced engineer than me.’
I thought then that she was driven by pure ambition. Her overriding need to change lovers was determined by which of them could help further her career. I had introduced her to a film-director acquaintance and had seen her at work on him. I had no doubt that he would replace me. He did.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps she had simply outgrown me, moving to a different phase of her life. I had spent a lot of time on her compositions, making critical notes and compelling her to rewrite and rewrite till I thought she could do no better. It was I who had read her short stories and poems. It was I who had noted she had a good ear for dialogue and pushed her in the direction of writing film scripts.
A few days after we had ended our affair, I saw her on the street with the film director. I behaved badly. I disrupted their talk and dragged her away. Her reaction indicated that it really was all over. She poured scorn on me. Hatred flowed out of her like molten lava. She threatened to ring Helge. Then she walked away. I was embittered. I felt I had been exploited. I wanted to confront her once again, but she had disappeared. She and the film director had fled to the West. One of her friends told me she had settled in Heidelberg.
It seemed pointless to tell your mother anything. It was over. But someone had recorded the episode. Unknown to me or Evelyne our summer trysts in the park had attracted the attention of Leyla, a Turkish painter from Kreuzberg who had been commissioned to paint a set of East Berlin landscapes. Her portrait of us had a surrealist flavour. We were buried deep in an illicit embrace in the park. She had entitled her painting Stolen Kisses.
Many months passed. Evelyne was happily ensconced in my unconscious. One day there was a rainstorm. Your mother, desperate for shelter, entered an art gallery. A coincidence, of course, but what wretched luck. She saw the painting, pierced through the surrealist mask, recognized me and questioned Leyla with some intensity.
Helge could not afford to buy the painting, but Leyla, observing her distress, gave it to her. When the exhibition was over, Helge brought the painting back to our apartment. A hurricane swept through our relationship. I am shuddering as I write this, Karl. It was a horrible day. Our relationship was probably doomed, but Stolen Kisses sealed its fate. She took the painting with her when she left, informing me that though the subject made her nauseous she really liked the composition and had become good friends with Leyla.
There are times in life when a single setback encourages another, like a small, dislodged rock triggers an avalanche. A month later I met Klaus Winter for lunch and he informed me that the State Security was getting regular and detailed reports from the leadership meetings of our Forum for German Democracy. He repeated verbatim remarks that had been attributed to me. His report was completely accurate. That was when Winter told me that he was a senior figure in Foreign Intelligence and that Gertrude, your grandmother, and he had both worked for Soviet Military Intelligence since the late twenties. After the Second World War they had been assigned to the DDR intelligence services.
I was thunderstruck, Karl. I had no idea that Gertrude was still involved in all that stuff. She had left no trace of it in her papers. I did not let Winter see the effect of the blow he had dealt me. Gertrude had encouraged the formation of our Forum. She had actually helped me write our founding document. She had attended some of our meetings. I had discussed our innermost secrets with her, including a plan to steal documents from the Politburo, since one of our supporters worked in that building.
As I walked away from Winter’s apartment, I wondered how much Gertrude had told Winter. Everything? Nothing? A few bits and pieces? In which case why had they not arrested us and disbanded the Forum? They could have done it very easily. Perhaps they had reported directly to Moscow and the men around Gorbachev had counselled them to let us grow.
I wanted answers, but before I was ready to confront Winter I had to discover the real Gertrude and the ghosts that had possessed her. She was dead. I had to piece together the disparate strands that had made up her life. How had it interrelated with that of Ludwik? When did she first meet Winter and where? And who was she in the first place? Her life was now beginning to haunt me.
I remember, not long before she died, you asking her whether she had any photographs of her family. I used to ask her that when I was a child and she would shake her head quickly and change the subject. When you asked her, she began to cry. Do you remember? Do you know why, Karl? Because she had left home in such a state that all relations between her and the family were broken.
Gertrude’s parents were third-generation German Jews. Her grandfather, who had done well in the tea and caviar trade, had built a large mansion in Schwaben, then a fashionable Munich suburb. Most of those old houses have long since been destroyed. Not by the war, but by developers.
Gertrude’s father was a greatly respected physician. Her mother led a life of leisure. Neither of them was religious. If anything, young Gertie and her brother Heinrich learned about religion from their cook and the two maids, all of whom were good Catholics.
Her childhood was happy. She would talk sometimes of the big garden at the end of which was a little gate that led to a small forest where she and Heinrich used to pick wild strawberries every summer. There was an old cedar tree and a swing. She used to delight in pushing Heinrich higher and higher till he was screaming, half in fear and half delight. The maid would rush from the house and rescue the little boy.
They were brought up like any other Germans of their class and generation. At the gymnasium she was punished for her insolence for refusing to accept the casual anti-Semitism of her history teacher. The head of the gymnasium wrote a strong letter to her father. Dr Meyer refused to take the matter seriously.
‘They are ignorant, Gertie,’ her father would tell her. ‘To show anger is to come down to their level. You must learn to control yourself.’
‘If he is ignorant,’ she responded, ‘why is he permitted to teach us history?’
Her father would smile and finger his beard, but could not reply. When she recalled all this her eyes would light up. It was the first time she had won an argument.
‘I have no answer to your question, Gertie. May I simply recommend that you learn what they teach, pass your exams and prepare to enter the university. Do you think I could have become a physician if I had responded to every insult or curse? Anti-Semitism is strongly rooted in their culture. They imbibed it with Christianity. Luther made that side of it only worse, but it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing at all.’
Gertie did pass her exams, but during her very first year at the University of Munich she fell in love with a fellow-student with the name of David Stein. There is a photograph of them as students, which I found as I was going through her papers a few months ago.
He was of medium height, with a shock of dark red hair and twinkling eyes. The son of a railway worker, he was a rarity at the university and the object of a great
