Fritzi sat with her feet dangling over the edge of the concrete quay along the Spree River next to the Berlin cathedral, across from the tour boat loading ramp.
“You could have found a more comfortable place to sit,” she heard Schultzi complain behind her.
She turned and started to get up. “There’s a bench over…”
“Stay, stay,” the white-haired professor said, and lowered himself.
Schultzi’s boyish spirit rarely recognized the limits of his body. She watched the rotund figure warily, hoping he wouldn’t topple into the murky canal.
How had he guessed, she needed to talk?
She didn’t know where to start, but he was patient. They waved to the children on a passing tour boat, then sat in silence for several minutes.
“It’s nice to have friend from back home,” he said, finally.
“He’s a spy,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed.
Surprised, she turned and looked at him. “You know?”
His smile was chagrined. “I’ve lived most of my life in a police state. You get kind of a sixth sense about people. CIA?”
She shrugged. “He was vague.”
More silence, then Fritzi picked up a lone pebble from the well-swept quay and flung it into the water. “I suck at picking friends.”
“Hey. You picked me. I’m your friend, aren’t I?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“You could look at little happier. Show some gratitude?”
She grinned. “Yes. Sorry. Thank you. You’re a good friend, Schultzi.”
“Besides, I believe your new friend chose you, didn’t he?”
She picked at an imaginary spot on her slacks and nodded.
“Whatever he is, Fritzi, there’s a big difference between American spies and our Stasi.” He looked at the canal and the museum buildings that had once been the heart of communist East Germany. “Americans are idealists,” he said. “They really do want to make the world better.”
“Do they?” Fritzi asked, not surprised at how Schultzi saw Americans even twenty years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Old ways of thinking were often harder to knock down than concrete.
“People here in East Berlin could turn on their televisions and see something was terribly wrong with how we ran our economy. The Stasi was created by corrupt political leaders, people without souls or imagination, growing more and more desperate to hold onto power.
“If you could have heard the things I heard…Party officials talking with Czech and Hungarian colleagues about ‘das Problem der Devisen.’ Our currency was worthless and still falling, yet the only plan these brilliant bureaucrats could come up with to forestall impending economic collapse was making ‘tourists’ pay more fees. ‘Tourists’ would be West Germans wanting to visit their grandmother or to attend a great uncle’s funeral here in the east.
“The need for international currency was so urgent that someone bringing in a funeral wreath of real, live flowers would drive the party bureaucrats crazy because it meant a western family wouldn’t be buying the overpriced paper wreaths our planned-economy factory managers foisted on us. Border guards seized the fresh flowers and forced westerners to pay for the ugly paper flowers one-to-one with West-Marks, even though our currency was worth just pennies on official currency exchanges. They disrespected the people, those bureaucrats, even as their ‘comrades’ were buried.” His face grew dark, remembering. “And our East German economy was the healthiest in the East Bloc.”
Fritzi listened without interrupting. The West wasn’t perfect either, but Schultzi couldn’t know about people like Usher. Was it just that almost universal German love of all things American that let him delude himself into thinking that everything America did was good? Or was he being a good friend, telling her what she needed to hear?
“Fritzi, your grandmother is from Silesia, isn’t she?”
She nodded.
“And she’s never gone back there?”
“She won’t go alone. Mom’s too busy and lives in Wyoming now, and I…I don’t know…When I was in high school back in the States, my American History teacher refused to believe me when I told him that Germans and Italians living in America during WWII were interned along with the Japanese.”
She waved hello to more tourists on another canal boat. “Those interned American-Germans had it good compared to my grandmother, my Oma, and my mother over here. Americans, not soldiers of course, but ordinary American civilians, don’t understand what war is…Well maybe a few do. There was a writer…Kurt Vonnegut. He survived the firebombing of Dresden. But he was a soldier too. I never even tried to tell anyone at school about my Oma. I was too afraid they would say I was lying. Like with the American internment camps.
“But it did happen.”
She shrugged. “Oma’s gotten over it, Mom hardly remembers, and I only know about it from Oma’s stories.”
“But your new friend isn’t asking you to go there to dredge up the past, I’m sure. Why are you so reluctant?”
“To spy?” Fritzi finished his question. “What he wants me to do…It’s over, Schultzi. Just as over as my grandmother’s stories. Why dredge it up?”
“Yes, why indeed? That is the historian’s biggest dilemma. Let the world live a comfortable lie, or rub people’s noses in the truth.”
“He’s making promises he won’t be able to keep, but I can’t keep myself from hoping.”
“It must be important for the Americans to ask for your help.” Schultzi watched the tourists on the opposite shore descend the quay steps and board the next tour boat. “Did you ever convince your history teacher?”
“I gave him a book by Art Jacobs, a German kid from New York who was interned with the Japanese in Texas.”
“Did that change his mind?”
“Yes. He made it a class project. One of my friends heard from his little sister that he later told his classes, ‘and in spite of what it says in your textbook, Fritzi Jordan would want you to know that Germans and Italians were also interned.’ He then sends them to Art Jacobs’ YouTube channel to watch an American government film shot at Crystal City while Art was interned there as a child.”
“Are you afraid of what you will find when you go to Poland.”
“Terrified.” She couldn’t tell Schultzi why.
He waved at a street vendor to bring two beers. “Zum Wohl. To your health,” he said, clinking bottles one-handedly as he gave her one.
“Historians need courage to look at the facts,” he said, drinking deeply. “Even your high school teacher. Seeing the truth can be painful.”
She stared at the swirling muddy water. Her ouster from NSA, her exile from Washington had been painful. Still was. But losing her memories of Jan, having to acknowledge what he was really like would hurt more. In her memories Jan was only a bad boy, not truly evil. Even that Swedish fighter hadn’t been able to prove Jan was involved.
She would never be stupid enough to fall for him again, but he had been charming, warm and funny, and she didn’t want Bliss to take away those golden Washington days filled with beautiful Polish mathematics.
“Are you afraid?”
She chugged beer. Yes, afraid of losing dearly held prejudices about a former lover who’d gone from fixing fights to hijacking trains filled with plutonium. The Americans must be desperate to ask for her help.
Schultzi concentrated on his beer before speaking again. “For a mathematician books and papers are good enough, Fritzi, but for a math historian, it is a fine, fine thing to see the places where our mathematical concepts came into being. And,” he winked at her, “It is an even finer thing to have a young friend, even a spy, to see them with.” He smiled and leaned back on his elbows. “Ah, to walk the streets, to sit in the lecture halls and cafés…if they haven’t all been bombed…No one has ever done it.
“You must take a camera, Fritzi. You can find old, pre-war, black and white photographs in the Prussian State Archives,” he poin
ted at the building down in the bend of the canal, “But color photos of what the places look like now would be much better. I understand much has been rebuilt for the tourists. You must photograph the Hanseatic warehouses with their winches hanging out over the harbors; and the storage lofts filled with wooden barrels, burlap sacks, and bolts of lace to show how keeping a tally led to our ‘+’ plus and ‘–‘ minus notations.”
Schultzi flagged another vendor. A currywurst seller, this time. Did she want a sausage?
She nodded.
“It will be a most attractive dissertation. I could see myself buying a copy at Schindler’s, even if you hadn’t already paid me the honour of asking me to be your Doktorvater,” he said, and handed her a sausage. “Bon appétit.”
He paid the woman and bit into his own sausage. “You will make a fine, fine historian, Fritzi.”
She chewed in silence.
“But you are really a mathematician.” He gave her a rueful smile. “You were born to be one, and I fear you still are one, and you should be one again; a brilliant mathematician.”
She stared at him. What was he saying?
“Don’t look at me like that. And don’t even think about taking a PhD in history out of loyalty to your old friend, Professor Schultzi. We only live once, Mädchen.
“Each of us faces obstacles in pursuing our passions. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I spent forty years of my life living in a dictatorship. Almost every day of my professional life was a delicate maneuver, a dance through a political minefield.”
The thought of the overweight maladroit professor dancing through a minefield almost made her smile.
He gave his tummy a contented pat. “That was a good sausage, wasn’t it?” he asked, and polished off his beer. “As I was saying, there were many hurdles for historians in our old East Germany, but here I am, still pursuing my passion. The Genossen, the comrades, who tried to tell me what to study and what to write, are gone. Forced to crawl back into their holes and hide from the bright light of intellectual freedom.”
“I do like history.”
“Of course you do, and like I said, you will make a fine historian. But will you be following your true passion? Or just trying to please your history professor? You must take me out of the equation, Mädchen, and go east. I won’t be disappointed if you come back without a dissertation.”
“But I…”
“Since the first day I met you, I’ve sensed a cloud hovering over you, Fritzi. Something in your past made you leave America and your mathematics far behind, and now that the Americans want you and need you again, this could be your chance to get rid of that cloud.
She almost started to explain, but he stopped her. “I don’t need to know the details.” He looked around at who might be watching. “I have this feeling inside this big, fat belly, that this is your first step in finding your way back to your real passion.”
How, Fritzi wondered dejectedly? The real source of her own problems was Michael Usher, and he was safely ensconced behind a Washington desk, surrounded by layers and layers of policy makers none of whom would believe what she had seen on that flash drive unless by some miracle she held it in her own hands again. That was about as likely as convincing Jan Pawlowski to return a hijacked train filled with plutonium.
“While you are off helping the Americans to save the world, Fritzi, I’m going to have a talk with my friend Professor Doctor Hans Thielmann. He’s in quantum physics at the Max Planck Institute out in Potsdam. ‘The effect of airflow over mountain ranges on ocean currents’, or some such thing. He’s having trouble finding someone to do the mathematics for the computer modelling.”
The old professor smiled, pleased with the solution he had found for the rest of her life. “Who knows, Fritzi? Maybe you’ll become the world’s next Lise Meitner. Wouldn’t that be something?” He chuckled.
13 Berlin