East Berlin
1962
Spring
“Augustin, wake up. You’re scaring me.”
Augustin struggled to reach through the enfolding, crushing darkness into consciousness. His heart was racing, and for an instant he was ready to shove back at whoever was touching his face, until he realized that it was Kat, that they were lying in bed. He was drenched with sweat, the edges of his vision still fuzzy, and his lungs burned.
“Here,” Kat reached over for a glass of water and offered it to him.
He drank off half, trying to control his breathing so that his heart would slow. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“Don’t apologize for having a nightmare.” She stroked his hair back from his forehead. “Your eyes were open, I was worried you were… Augustin, are you all right?”
“I am now,” he tried to sound reassuring. “I will be. I have these now and again. I never remember them, I just feel this… horror.”
Kat frowned, pressing her lips together. “You don’t remember?”
“There are a lot of things I don’t remember. I was quite close to an explosion, many years ago. My memory of that time and my recall of the years before it is imperfect. I suppose part of my mind does remember. At least, it remembers the fear.”
She seemed about to ask more questions, but then evidently thought better of it. He watched her from bed as she rose and went to the window, pulling aside the curtain to reveal a strip of blue, pre-dawn light. She pushed the window open slightly to allow a cool breeze to drift in, instantly chilling the sweat on his brow and neck.
He shivered as he stared at her, observing the way her hip was always slightly cocked, giving her a permanent slouch that he found desperately enticing. So much of her muscle composition was bent, twisted and shaped around that one infirmity in her right foot, never more noticeable than when she was naked like this. He let his eyes move up her swayed spine to her strong shoulder blades, her straight, upright neck. She looked at him over one shoulder, loose blonde curls sliding over her neck.
“You’re beautiful,” he told her, not for the first time. He could see the soft resentment in her eyes, knew she felt she was being patronized.
“You like the novelty,” she said finally, condescending to return to bed.
“It’s not a question of novelty. I’ve never been prone to conforming my definition of what is beautiful.”
“Because you’re so enlightened.”
“Because I witnessed world of progress before it was destroyed, and it matured me in ways I’m thankful for.”
She frowned. “How do you mean?”
“I’m tired, Kat,” he kissed her forehead. “Ask me at breakfast.”
“You’re not afraid of falling asleep?”
“I think I’ll be fine if you stay close.”
She shrugged, then fitted herself against his side. He sifted his hand through her hair, tempted to make an early morning of it, but exhaustion pulled at him.
During the remaining week of his lecture, Augustin had to struggle to keep his attention in class where it belonged. He couldn’t recall being so distracted. His eyes would wander up to the back of the lecture hall, searching for that shadowy figure with her cane. Kat’s form seemed to linger there even though she hadn’t returned since he’d rumbled her almost a month ago. He marvelled that he could be so greedy when she’d left her scent lingering on his pillows as recently as the night before. He felt giddy and teenagerish in a way that was becoming uncomfortable.
“Herr Professor…?”
He blinked, then smiled at the young woman in the front row. She was a round-faced young party member’s daughter, and she’d had her hand up for at least thirty seconds.
“Yes, Danica, I’m sorry.”
She dropped her hand and leaned forward with an hesitant, but earnest smile. “Herr Professor, you said last week that the study of Marx is a perpetual examination of his values. Does that mean we should study all his works?”
Augustin let out a breath. “Well, the completed works of Marx and Engels is so dense that you’d need to put aside several years for a single reading. That’s why it’s sole occupation of Marx scholars. It would probably serve you better to read texts in the context of several different thinkers, unless Marx scholarship is something you choose to make your profession, which would certainly be a service to the rest of us.”
A small ripple of laughter. It was a good group, one that understood his encouragements to study many sources as a suggestion to also read a diversity of materials. He’d warned them often and pointedly that certain dangerous texts must only be handled by professionals like himself, as though they were venomous snakes that only their professor could charm. He prided himself on his pedagogical talent for appealing to the stupid and communicating to the intelligent in the same breath, and trusted them to seek what he had gently forbidden without endangering themselves.
Sometimes, Augustin tried to pass along some of his own industry to them in the form of his deliberately incompetent works. It always pleased him when one or two of the students managed to find their way to the end of his maze. On paper, he confronted his cited “anti-social” sources with disdain while never actually addressing all of their key points. He tried to slip invisible question marks into every condemnation. He also tried to give the best argument he could muster for communism’s potential, using obscure quasi-socialist nations to stand in for the German Democratic Republic’s own squandering of the Marxist ideal.
He was most pleased whenever he received a paper in which a student had found themselves at the end of the chain, confused by the contractions between the communist ideal, and the reality — the system’s vulnerability to the power-addicted egos of its leaders. Anyone keen enough could follow the logic and arrive at the conclusion that Augustin’s was a more proximate criticism.
Then the wall had gone up, rendering all attempts at subtlety utterly superfluous. They all knew what it meant. They’d witnessed the barriers go up almost overnight. They’d seen their families sliced in half by this regime. They’d been approached, bullied and recruited by a punitive civil service that expected loyalty and eternal reportage on the actions of their peers, their parents, their siblings and their lovers. They’d all lost people in the darkness of the Stasi’s insatiable void.
“As long as you study human societies, your investigations will never end,” Augustin told them as he folded his worn leather portfolio. “Truth is sometimes observable. You know what you’ve seen. Trust your feelings.”
Kat was right, he thought as he watched them file out. They were the very last generation that had been taught they would lead a better life than their mothers and fathers, and were then asked to accept that this stagnant deprivation, this brazen deception, was in fact progress. They weren’t like the disappointed communists of his youth — they were aware that their elders had failed them. It gave him a bitter kind of hope.
As he gathered his notes and went to shut off the lights, he caught sight of an individual who had remained seated. As he stepped beyond the blinding illumination, he realized the suited young man was not one of his students. He felt a shiver run up his spine as he watched the figure ash a cigarette on the lecture hall steps, then rise languidly before taking another drag.
“I liked that,” he said, balancing the cigarette on lip as he shot his lapels like some cheap imitation of a Hollywood gangster. “Truth is sometimes observable. Precious.”
Augustin steeled himself as he made his way up the steps. “Is there something I can assist you with?”
Now that his eyes had adjusted, he had a better sense of the man. He had an ordinary, pleasant young face, his slicked back auburn hair making his cheekbones more defined, his mouth appear wider. His dark eyes glittered, illuminated by the cherry end of his smoke, which smelled expensive and foreign to Augustin’s untrained nose.
“It’s not what you’re thinking, Dr. Vann. I’m not here about you. No one at the firm much cares about you.”
Kat, he thought, drawing an anxious breath in through his nose, hoping the Stasi man would not perceive his nervousness. “In that case, you’ll have to be more specific, Herr—”
“That’s right.” He took a long drag that sucked down half the remaining cigarette, then exhaled smoke through his wide, unsettling smile. “I’m here about the bombshell.”
Augustin’s grip tightened on his briefcase. “Again—”
“She’s something, isn’t she? Let’s take a walk.”
His chest tightening, he followed the young man out. He didn’t want to be seen next to him out in the campus, and thought how he could avoid that exposure. As they entered the hall, he gestured to his briefcase. “I need to return some papers to my office. We can speak there.”
The man shrugged, tossed his cigarette down in the middle of the polished cement floor without bothering to snuff it out, then gestured for Augustin to lead on. Once in the office, he closed the door, hoping his secretary would assume he was meeting with a student.
He shifted some of the papers, set down his briefcase, and sat down behind his desk, for once preferring the image of authority in the hopes it would deter the younger man. This had no effect on him whatsoever. He drew out a zippo lighter and a pack of Benson and Hedges, offering a cigarette to Augustin.
“No, thank you. I’d prefer you didn’t smoke in my office.”
“I’d prefer a girlfriend with bigger tits and a smaller mouth, but we all make do.” He lit the cigarette and drew in a lungful of smoke, giving him another insolent smile.
Augustin sighed, and opened the window, turning back to face him, his patience running dry. “What do you want with Kat Bergmann?”
“Believe it or not, I’m actually here to give you a warning. Fraülein Bergmann is a very dangerous individual, and she doesn't mean you well.”
“I disagree,” Augustin gave his blandest smile. “Or at least, I wish you’d be clearer about what you really want from me.”
“It’s what she wants from you that interests me,” he said thoughtfully, then he turned on that strange, hungry smile. “I could of course detain you, incentivize your cooperation, interrogate you in some creative ways, but I could end up wading for weeks through all of the inane, meaningless bullshit of your confessions and still never answer the question of what specifically concerns her about you. She obviously has interrogative advantages I don’t.”
Augustin laced his fingers together to keep them from shaking. “If you believe she wants something of me you can’t get, it seems you’re putting yourself at cross-purposes by warning me against her.”
He shrugged. “I don’t see you pushing her out of bed any time soon, not a man your age, and not a woman with her particular aptitudes. But even if that did occur, it wouldn’t make you any safer from her.”
“Who the hell are you?” Augustin demanded, tired of this farce. “Either tell me what this is about, arrest me, or leave me the hell alone.”
The man showed his teeth as he leaned in. “I’m the man who’s going to keep you out of a very deep and crowded grave, Dr. Vann.”
