Edge of Eternity Read Free

was admiring but regretful. ‘I hope you get your wish.’
    ‘You’re a good friend.’
    The bell rang for the first lesson of the afternoon. Rebecca stood up and put her sandwich back in its paper wrapping. She was not going to eat it, now or later, but she had a horror of throwing food away, like most people who had lived through the war. She touched her damp eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Thank you for listening,’ she said.
    ‘I wasn’t much comfort.’
    ‘Yes, you were.’ She went out.
    As she approached the classroom for the English lesson, she realized she had not worked out the lyrics to ‘The Twist’. However, she had been a teacher long enough to improvise. ‘Who’s heard a record called “The Twist”?’ she asked loudly as she walked through the door.
    They all had.
    She went to the blackboard and picked up a stub of chalk. ‘What are the words?’
    They all began to shout at once.
    On the board she wrote: ‘Come on baby, let’s do the Twist.’ Then she said: ‘What’s that in German?’
    For a while she forgot about her troubles.
    She found the letter in her pigeonhole at the mid-afternoon break. She carried it with her into the staff room and made a cup of instant coffee before opening it. When she read it she dropped her coffee.
    The single sheet of paper was headed: ‘Ministry for State Security’. This was the official name for the secret police: the unofficial name was the Stasi. The letter came from a Sergeant Scholz, and it ordered her to present herself at his headquarters office for questioning.
    Rebecca mopped up her spilled drink, apologized to her colleagues, pretended nothing was wrong, and went to the ladies’ room, where she locked herself in a cubicle. She needed to think before confiding in anyone.
    Everyone in East Germany knew about these letters, and everyone dreaded receiving one. It meant that she had done something wrong – perhaps something trivial, but it had come to the attention of the watchers. She knew, from what other people said, that there was no point protesting innocence. The police attitude would be that she must be guilty of something, else why would they want to question her? To suggest they might have made a mistake was to insult their competence, which was another crime.
    Looking again, she saw that her appointment was for five this afternoon.
    What had she done? Her family was deeply suspect, of course. Her father, Werner, was a capitalist, with a factory that the East German government could not touch because it was in West Berlin. Her mother, Carla, was a well-known Social Democrat. Her grandmother, Maud, was the sister of an English earl.
    However, the authorities had not bothered the family for a couple of years, and Rebecca had imagined that her marriage to an official in the Justice Ministry might have gained them a ticket of respectability. Obviously not.
    Had she committed any crimes? She owned a copy of George Orwell’s anti-Communist allegory Animal Farm , which was illegal. Her kid brother, Walli, who was fifteen, played the guitar and sang American protest songs such as ‘This Land is Your Land’. Rebecca sometimes went to West Berlin to see exhibitions of abstract painting. Communists were as conservative about art as Victorian matrons.
    Washing her hands, she glanced in the mirror. She did not look scared. She had a straight nose and a strong chin and intense brown eyes. Her unruly dark hair was sharply pulled back. She was tall and statuesque, and some people found her intimidating. She could face a classroom full of boisterous eighteen-year-olds and silence them with a word.
    But she was scared. What frightened her was the knowledge that the Stasi could do anything. There were no real restraints on them: complaining about them was a crime in itself. And that reminded her of the Red Army at the end of the war. The Soviet soldiers had been free to rob, rape and murder Germans, and they had used their freedom in an orgy of unspeakable