The bartender slid the tray over to catch Friedrich’s ashes, and the man ordered another schnapps. The bartender again looked at Brodie to confirm he was sponsoring the freeloader. Brodie nodded and said, “Zwei.”
Friedrich finished his cigarette, stubbed out the butt, and lit another.
Brodie said, “I’m surprised you can still smoke in the bars here.”
Friedrich shrugged and looked around the room. “Only small places like this. City law.”
“Why small places?”
Friedrich thought about that as he enjoyed his cigarette. “It is kind of a thing such as… You make an agreement, a contract, in a little place like this. We all accept the smoke because we like it or because we don’t give a shit. Big place, you have all kinds of persons. Different things that you expect. This little smoky place? You know what you are accepting. We all understand that death is for certain.”
That sounded too existential for a municipal health statute, but this was Germany, after all. Brodie asked to bum a smoke to show his new friend that he too embraced death.
Friedrich gave him a cigarette and a matchbook. Brodie lit the unfiltered cigarette, took a drag, and coughed.
The German laughed. “Maybe you need an American menthol.”
“I’m good.”
The bartender set down two glasses of schnapps. Brodie finished his beer, then raised his schnapps and said, “Prost,” and they both drank.
Friedrich thought a moment, then said, “This American, this double agent. Why does he do it? Help the Stasi?”
“I’m still figuring that out. That’s why I’m here.”
Friedrich looked at him with his dark eyes. “What is here to find?”
“People who remember what it used to be like.”
Friedrich chuckled. “This is me, I think.” He slapped the top of the bar. “This, here, was the West.” He pointed his finger toward the door. “Three blocks that way, other side of the Wall, was my country. I worked twenty years in a lightbulb factory in Köpenick. One of the plant managers, he was a Stasi informant. Everyone knew it. What did this mean? Well, if you wantedto complain about something, about the government, about the job, you don’t do it in front of him. That was it. We joked about it. Not so dramatic, like your American movies.”
Brodie nodded. Interesting. But maybe not accurate. He asked, “But did you fear the Stasi?”
Friedrich waved a hand dismissively. “What was the point of this? We had enough things to worry about. Listen. For forty years people lived their lives in this place of the GDR, what you called East Germany. People loved and hated, they felt joy and pain, they fought, they fucked, they lived, they died. Just like everywhere else, okay? So, you Americans come—the reporters and the tourists—and want to talk about the Stasi. You want to talk about the Wall. But there was much more to it. Your life is not only this thing, the Stasi.”
Brodie ordered another round, then took a last drag and stubbed out his cigarette.
Friedrich took a long drag and blew out a trail of smoke. He was on a schnapps-fueled roll. “You say east and west. But no.Wewere Germany. The German Democratic Republic, the place where we rejected the fascists and made a place of justice. A place of national ideas and national unity. No one starved. No one slept in the street. Every citizen was taken care of. This so-called West Berlin, it was an island of occupation inside our country. The Wall was to protectusfromthem. And this so-called West Germany, it was a place for pigs. A place for Nazis who escaped what they had coming. And then…” He trailed off and shook his head.
“And then the West won,” said Brodie.
Friedrich pursed his lips. “Ja. The pigs won. And now it is a pigs’ world.”
The bartender brought two more glasses of schnapps, and rolled his eyes to show Brodie what he thought of Friedrich. Friedrich stared at his glass, his mind stuck in the good old days, which were actually not as good as he remembered. There was a term for this, which Brodie remembered from his trip back in 2000—Ostalgie. Nostalgia for the Ost—the East. A coping mechanism for salvaging something from the ashes of a vanished and vanquished world.
On some level, Brodie could see where Friedrich was coming from. You lived your life in a system, and the system kind of sucked, but it was your world. Nothing was debatable and it wasn’t changeable, so you focused onother things, like family, friends, working, socializing, and whether or not there would be fresh fruit at the state-run grocer on a given day. And you appreciated whatever good you could find in the system, like the fact that everyone had a roof over their head even if the roof leaked from crappy construction. And you carried on with your life. Most people don’t try to change what they can’t control; they don’t even think about it. And the few people who did, people like Anna’s father and other enemies of the state, or the hundred-plus people who tried and failed to escape over the Berlin Wall, ended up in body bags.
Friedrich kept drinking and talking, and spoke lovingly of his dead wife, then opined on the capitalist imperialists who had ruined Germany and betrayed the socialist republic, which was sounding more like utopia the more schnapps he drank. Brodie mostly listened and occasionally made up details about his own life, which was probably better than telling his new Communist friend that he was a U.S. Army criminal investigator.
After a few more shots, Friedrich began singing something that might have been the old East German national anthem. Two young German guys playing pool started making fun of him, though Friedrich didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Brodie was thinking about the best way to make an exit when his phone rang. It was a German number. He picked up. “Hello?”
“Scott. It’s Anna Albrecht.”
“One minute.” He left some cash on the bar and said good-bye to Friedrich, who was pumping his fist as he sang an ode to Deutschland and barely acknowledged his drink sponsor.
Brodie stepped outside, where the rain was still falling. The sky was dark, and the streetlights had come on. He put the phone to his ear. “What can I do for you?”
