The Berlin Letters, page 7
And not just with material things. You never steal answers, ideas, credit, or acclaim. You do your job and your duty and that is enough. He would never be part of something secret. He would never lie. And peeking at one letter will prove it.
Tapping the letter against my palm, I recognize one and only one truth: if I’m wrong and Opa was involved somehow and I have to hand my grandfather over to Andrew Cademan and the CIA, I need to know why.
So any way I look at it, I am opening these letters.
I drop the one clutched in my hand atop the others, then pick up the box and cross the room to my desk. I sift through the stack in search of the earliest postmark. It’s what I would do at work. I would work from the earliest and from the outside in, assessing all available information in the order it’s presented.
October 20, 1964, is the earliest postmark I find. I open the stiff envelope, sliding my finger along the back seam line. Time and humidity have resealed it. I expect the letter inside to be equally stiff, as if read only once, but the page is worn and soft. Stains—the edge of a coffee ring?—darken one corner. The letter was thoroughly handled and, perhaps, returned to the envelope only when the review of its contents was exhausted.
October 19, 1964
Dear Walther,
While you made it clear you never want to hear from me, you need to know Monica passed away on October 8th. I am sorry I did not write immediately. No matter what you’ve done, you deserve to know. I was upset. I was lost. I was angry. That’s the truth of it. I am still upset. I am still lost. I am still angry.
These past years have been hard, and the last few months unendurable. Monica was always fragile, but it was clear to me, that first night after she passed Luisa to you, she gave up. Past ghosts, terrors, whatever you want to call them, stole her away, from me and from life. Then you took our daughter to America. I am not sure you understood the joy Monica experienced seeing Luisa daily, even if from a distance and across the wall. Once you moved away and that daily lifeline was gone, nothing was left for her here. I was not enough and, in many ways, I became the enemy.
She grew weaker. I know you noticed that beginning even before you moved to America. She left your letters on the kitchen table sometimes. Even from two blocks away, across the wall, you noted she was growing thin and you were worried. If true, then why didn’t you stay? Why didn’t you keep our daughter here? Was earning more money so important to you?
I’m sorry. It’s too late for that now, and it does no good. Monica stopped eating much after you moved away and caught cold after cold. About a month ago, her bronchitis turned to pneumonia and she could not beat it.
There is enough blame and pain to leap over this wall and span the ocean. I’m not writing for that. I’m writing to tell you of my wife’s passing. Despite what you think, I loved her. I always will. As I love my daughter.
I don’t want Luisa to imagine me here as I am now. I don’t want her to know I couldn’t get across the wall, that I couldn’t get her mother to her despite trying desperately. I don’t want her to know how I’ve destroyed our little family.
Please let us both be dead. I don’t mind what you tell her. I simply ask that you free Luisa from your anger toward me and tell her both her parents died. I cannot imagine Gertrude has ever been able to say my name without disdain and disgust, and I can no longer blame her for that. I am not what I was, and even I don’t regard my former self with equanimity.
Also, please call Luisa Mäuschen occasionally. It was my nickname for her, and in that name, I can pretend she will hear me say “I love you always” and know that it is true.
One more thing . . . Before Monica died, she told me an interesting story that Alice shared with her during one of their long afternoons together. It lifted a veil and answered many questions. Give me a chance. Time has changed me, Walther. Pain has changed me. Write back to me as only you can. And if I can read your words, I ask you to accept my replies.
Your son,
Haris
Mäuschen. “Little Mouse.”
I drop the letter and push up from the chair, sending it toppling backward onto the floor. The noise feels deafening in the silence of the house and in the blank that’s invaded my mind. Without picking up the chair, I drop onto the edge of my bed, eyes still glued to the pages resting on my desk.
Haris is my father’s name. But my father is dead. He and my mother died in a car accident in 1962. That was the impetus for the move to America. There was nothing left for my grieving grandparents in West Germany. They wanted a better life for their remaining daughter, Alice, and their granddaughter. They couldn’t take the pain of years of war, destruction, rubble in the streets, decay all around them, and the deaths of two more of their beloved. That’s what Oma said. That’s what they told me. That’s what they’ve always told me.
Mäuschen was Opa’s nickname for me. He said he made it up. He told me it was his and only his. He said it so often and with such affection, Oma eventually adopted it around the time I was ten.
I believed them. About all of it. I mourned my parents with them. I am—was, until a moment ago—still mourning them. I quit asking questions so as not to remind my grandparents and cause them pain. I quit asking, Did my mom have long, pale blonde hair before I did? Was it curly too, or was her hair straight? Were her eyes just as blue? Did she like olives and chocolate and cloud-filled rainy days? Is my chin from my dad? Which movies did he like? Where did he work? What did he do? What did she do? How did they meet?
I stopped so that maybe for a moment, a minute, or a month, my grandparents might forget how much they lost and how much they hurt.
It was all a lie.
A breeze blows through the open window. The air has grown beyond cool to cold. Too cold. I shut the window and pull on a thick sweater and take comfort in its instant warmth. I then set the chair right again and drop into it. I stare at my fingers. My nails are blue. Is it shock, or is it truly that cold? I can’t tell. I can’t think. I stare at the letter. I stare at one word. Haris. I run my finger over his signature as if it, across time and space, can form a connection between us. Haris Voekler. My father.
My dad? I taste the word in my mouth. I chew on it. I’ve never thought of him that way because I never knew him and couldn’t know him. He was right—or is he still alive and that means he is right? My Oma never could say his name without a tinge of disapproval. That was another reason I quit asking about him. I didn’t want to know what he’d done wrong or why he wasn’t loved. Because that could mean if I was too much like him, I might not be loved too.
“Before Monica died, she told me an interesting story that Alice shared with her during one of their long afternoons together. It lifted a veil and answered many questions. Give me a chance.”
What chance? What did my mom share?
As the questions billow up, I realize I am staring at the answers. Opa did write back. Obviously. He gave my father—I test the word dad again and find myself pulling back as I don’t know him yet. But Opa did. Opa gave him that chance and they corresponded. And by the number of letters resting atop my desk, they wrote each other for years.
I page through the envelopes again, this time sorting every postmark into chronological order. My fingers move fast, my brain faster, as if there’s a ticking clock over my shoulder.
There most definitely is.
Oma will awake in the morning, and there are words to say and questions to ask. Monday will come quickly, and depending on what is within these letters, I will have to talk with my boss about them. There’s no denying that identical infinity mark on each and every envelope.
Once the envelopes are in order, I stack them carefully in the box and pull out the next one.
January 4, 1965
Dear Walther,
I’m ashamed at how long it took me. Before, I thought I was smart. Everything takes longer now. Granted, it’s hard to stay positive and keep up with work each day. I am overly tired. Nothing feels the same without Monica.
Haris
Five sentences only?
I read on. The next letter. And the next. After that emotional first letter, the subjects become mundane—the weather, his walks to work, his musings on plants, bugs, and all the construction going on around East Berlin. He writes about his wife. He writes about me.
I soon notice my father writes of nothing significant and of no one in particular—other than those of us gone. He rarely mentions his friends, anything significant about work, or what he truly thinks about the world around him. If anything, he sounds like a cheerleader for the GDR. Maybe he was. Maybe he is. But he can’t write.
I always got the impression from Oma and Opa that he worked in words somehow. Oma even let slip he went to University, which I gather was a big deal. Not everyone in the GDR is given that opportunity. You don’t just apply. You’re vetted, selected, and funneled into certain courses and a state-mandated curriculum. But my father’s field must have had nothing to do with actual writing because his sentences are simple, stilted, and his punctuation is all over the place. He makes sense, but barely. The letter about weeding his garden is particularly odd.
And Ive grasped top hold.
What does that even mean? Is he talking about weeds? Carrots? It verges on nonsense. With no apostrophe. Or is it existential brilliance?
After about the fiftieth letter, I drop my head to my desk. Why hide nothing? Why lie to me all these years? Because it was a lie. In a letter from 1979, he asks Opa to tell me the truth—that he is alive, that he loves me and thinks of me every day, and that what he’s about to do he does for me.
That’s when my heart’s pace picks up and beats so loud I can physically hear it. I read on and on, eagerly searching for what he was about to do, what he did do, but other than odd sentences that were clear answers to queries from Opa, nothing strikes me. There is no change in the randomness of his subject matter or in his tone. The only curious thing is a change in his handwriting. In some letters it’s fast and frantic, as if my father is rushing. In others it’s slow, straight up and down, and methodical, as if telling about his walk or his cup of coffee is the most vital information he can convey within his lifetime and it takes time and care to pen the experience properly. The only consistent elements of the letters are two things—their randomness and their persistent questions about me. In every letter Opa is peppered for details and I am showered with love.
I think back to Carrie’s missive. The sentence structure of her letter was different. The subject matters were more relevant to, well, anything. Her Berlin Letter spy was more creative, complete somehow. He was adept, skilled. He is not this man. He is not Haris Voekler. But the symbol? Is it possible her letters and mine are unrelated?
I want to believe that. As hard as it is to believe Opa and Oma lied about my father all these years, at least the lies might end there. Maybe they thought they were protecting me. Maybe they thought they were in too deep with the lie and they’d lose my love, my faith, and my trust if they shared the truth. I don’t know. I can ask Oma tomorrow, and while that will help, I’ll never get the answers I want. Because I want them from Opa. I want to know why he lied to me. Why he didn’t trust me enough with the truth. Or maybe he did and that’s why the letters are hidden here, in a place I might find them.
With a long, soul-depleting sigh, I give up. It’s past two o’clock, and if I’m going to get any sleep before Oma wakes at six, I need to try now. Never a good sleeper—actually I’ve been a horrific sleeper my whole life—I might snag an hour or two if I’m lucky.
Gathering the scattered letters from across my desk, I carefully stack those I’ve opened in chronological order. They may not be interesting or revelatory, but they are from my father. I set down the pile and reach for the last envelope. Like turning to the last page of a book, I want at least one answer to close my night.
Is he still alive?
The letter is dated December 3, 1988, and I expect it arrived just before Opa passed away. It’s the same, nothing new and nothing surprising, other than my father caught a cold on the S-Bahn. A woman sneezed on his fingers, he wrote. Again, strange. And that’s the end.
In the morning I’ll read them all, then figure out how I can get an address for a man behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin who didn’t have the foresight to put it on his envelopes. I should at least let him know Opa passed away, that I’ve read his letters, and that—even though we’ve not seen each other in over twenty-seven years—I love him too.
I run my fingers through the stack, glancing at each page, ready to call it a night when I notice it. An inconsistency or perhaps a consistency. A tiny dot appears above the third letter after the first comma in the second paragraph. It looks like an ink skip—like the one I saw on Carrie’s page.
I can’t breathe.
I sift through the letters again, looking not at the words but at the ancillary marks. They are tiny, but they are present, never above an i or a j, never above an o or another vowel that requires a diacritical mark. And in German there are lots of those. But the dots aren’t there. They are centered over consonants or spaces. They are precise and they are the size of a pinhead. One random dot per paragraph or per letter, and not necessarily on the same counted letter or space each time. It varies. As does the page. In some I find marks on the first page, some on the second or the third. One is on a fourth page of a letter filled with nonsense.
I open my desk drawer and paw through the childhood chaos inside. Beneath a couple of filled spiral notebooks, I find an old and empty one with a drawing of Holly Hobbie on the cover. The page lines are super wide, and I suspect it’s from elementary school. I tear out the only used page, on which I scribbled my 1969 New Year’s resolutions, number one being Talk to Billy Boswell, and place a blank page before me. Dang, that boy was cute. I forgot about him, and I never did smile at him, much less talk to him.
I go back to the first letter—the first letter after my father asks Opa to give him a chance.
January 4, 1965
Dear Walther,
I’m ashamed at how long it took me. Before, I thought I was smart. Everything takes longer now. Granted, it’s hard to stay positive and keep up with work each day. I am overly tired. Nothing feels the same without Monica.
Haris
It’s basic, but the message is there.
I B E G I N
I next find the line that bothered me a few minutes ago. “And Ive grasped top hold” has a tiny signifier, a dot above the d. It’s the third letter at the beginning of a sentence. At work I’d start my count there—and so I do. Nothing. I count spaces as well as letters in my next attempt and realize the code exists within one sentence rather than across, which is why it’s so odd.
D E A T H
Two variations on acrostic ciphers. And just like Carrie’s Berlin Letters, a quick perusal reveals he’s using several patterns within each letter.
My mind reels. To write a cipher—any cipher—that actually makes sense in its original form is challenging. It’s why substitutions are more often used. They can be complex and that is their beauty. But it’s also obvious to anyone who sees one that there’s a message encoded. But a sophisticated and changing acrostic is . . . extraordinary.
I cast back to one of my first questions, one I thought I’d already answered: Could my father be Carrie’s Berlin Letters spy?
As quickly as I ask, I dismiss it. Carrie’s first missive to the CIA was in 1945. The last was dated summer of 1961. While my father could’ve written the ’61 text, as he would have been twenty-nine at the time, I doubt he was penning anything so sophisticated in 1945 at the age of fourteen. Not only that, Opa wouldn’t have had to teach him anything. The “I begin” would have been nonsensical. Did Opa train him to do this? “Write back to me . . . And if I can read your words, I ask you to accept my replies.”
I page through the letters again, certain that each one contains a hidden message within. Some letters are several pages long. I can’t even fathom what opinions or intelligence might be embedded.
I lunge from the chair and dash out of my room, down the hallway, and into the bathroom. Losing my dinner is one way to deal with this. I slump against the wall and stare up at the little flowers that dot our bathroom wallpaper. They’re so little, so pretty, so simple. Just how life felt only a few hours ago.
I push myself up, brush my teeth, and head back to my room.
There will be no sleep tonight.
Chapter 6
Saturday, November 4, 1989
I’m slashed. I’m pulled apart. I’m bleeding. I’m—
“Wake, Mäuschen. Wake up.”
I hear Oma from a great distance, but I’m falling. The earth is shaking, lights flickering.
“Now. Wake up. You are screaming again.”
I open my eyes. My neck hurts and won’t straighten. I reach up to rub the base of it with stiff fingers. I lift my head from my desk and take in the light, the letters, my room, and Oma’s pinched face.
“You are clammy.” She presses a dry, cold hand to my forehead. “Why are you sitting here?”
I shift away as if slashed again. The chair scrapes against the floorboards, catches, and almost sends me tipping over.
“What’s wrong?” Oma looks back at my desk. She studies it before sifting through the pages with the same hand that was just measuring my temperature. Every instinct cries out to snatch the pages away. I don’t. I sit and I watch her face, not her hands.
“What is this?” Her face is open and curious.
“You tell me.” Heat rises within me, and it takes me a heartbeat to recognize it as anger. I wasn’t raised to be angry. I’m not an angry person. I’m practical, pragmatic, but not angry. It’s unfamiliar, yet warm and emboldening. “You lied to me. You and Opa lied to me. All my life.” I point to the letters.
She is no longer touching them. She has stepped back. Her arms now wrap around her body. Her brow furrows in question.
