“Bertram, you must let go,” Anna pleaded.  “That ridiculous envelope wears a hole in your pocket. Not to mention in your soul. You should never have looked into those State Security files.”

“But I did.”

Standing in the overflow vestibule of St Gertraude church in Jakobsdorf, Bertram Isaksen braced himself against the newly shellacked pine wall. He slipped a hand into his jacket pocket.  The ever-present, coarse waxed envelope both reassured and perturbed him. It contained several hundred East German Ostmarks in paper money and aluminum coins drawn on the now bankrupt German Democratic Republic. They, like the GDR, had no value since the currency exchange deadline of 1990, five years ago.

He had accepted that amount from his former mentor and father figure, Hans Weiler, to start his life with Anna almost thirty years earlier. Now, after the revelations in the files of the State Security, he never gave up his resolve to pay Hans back.

Anna Isaksen took Bertram’s hand and held it while they stood in the renovated church. This had been Anna’s home parish church and Hans Weiler had lived nearby before Berlin.  Maybe Bertram could finally clear the books. Shifting his weight, he felt in his other jacket pocket the familiar smoothness and heft of the large clasp knife with its metal handle. The knife had been among the few things remaining when they buried his father. Like Vati, it was not fancy, but it was sharp and clean, and had been used both to sustain and take life by a skillful farmer and soldier.   

His gaze was drawn to the newly installed stained glass windows and the timeless stories they told.  “Look, Anna, Adam and Eve in the Garden, but no Cain and Abel.”

Anna’s short brown hair framed her rounded face, accented by dark lipstick, rouge and mascara. The colors emphasized her almost child-like hopefulness in the spirit of this renewal. 

“Bertram, the church wants to avoid stories of brother against brother, like East and West Germany. It’s nineteen ninety-five, Germany’s united now.  Nothing is as whole as when it was once broken.”

Bertram came reluctantly with his wife, supposedly not to analyze the windows, but for the message of change and hope in the church’s re-dedication. Still, Bertram’s focus came to rest on the south eastern section of window where a bearded Old Testament Abraham held a knife poised over his son, Isaac.  Isaac stared out with vacant eyes while he lay on the altar. This image of the sacrifice of a loved one troubled Bertram. Had Isaac ever thought of revenge against his father as Bertram had toward Hans?   

“Look.”  Bertram persisted. “Look how Abraham grips his knife with both hands while he prepares to plunge it into his son’s, his own, flesh. Where is the delicacy, like holding the bow of a violin or the stem of a rose?  Violent.  Just like today.   As if reading his mind, Anna continued:  “Bertram, as a Christian, you know you have to forgive, even if you cannot forget what Hans did to you.”

“This is not just a matter of forgiving. Hans believed completely in the state, so why couldn’t he accept that bankrupt system’s promises? Why did he need me to go to prison so he could get a better apartment?” 

“Hans was a survivor.”  He felt Anna’s hand on his shoulder, but the anger in his breast persisted.

“Look,” she continued.  “Hans and his generation survived the conservatives and the Nazis and then the Communists.  He survived because he knew the answers to questions before they were asked.  And yes, he survived because he sacrificed young, naïve people in his charge.  But mere survival has not made him happy. Ingrid divorced him; his children never speak to him. He now has less than full pension rights. Your time of trial is over.  Take pity on him. Invite him to dinner. Show him you’re the better person. History has vindicated you. You have what he can never have.”

“I had twelve months in prison. In a six by six room, no window, no light.”

The pastor’s disembodied voice crackles through the distorted speaker. The voice reminds Bertram of where he is.. “This is the day the Lord has made”, the minister intones, “in a new spring dedicated, like this church, to renewal and reconciliation.”

Bertram shivered in the April breeze which wafted through the open doors of the crowded church. Voices and the sweetness of the lilacs flood his senses.  The spring smells mitigate the unpleasant closeness of people around him. Downcast eyes and fidgeting signaled disquiet and still lingering distrust from a former time, when even a glance could mean betrayal. He pulled his leather jacket closer around his chest. On an updraft through the open doors a single lark’s cheer welcomed the day as it competed with the mixed choir of voices.

Anna leaned in to him.. “What a difference the new windows, fresh paint, and refinished floors make. I wish my parents could have seen the changes.”

Bertram shrugged his wife’s hand from his shoulder. “Maybe the church is indeed a blessed island. But look at the misery still surrounding it, left by Mr. Honnecker and Mr. Gorbachev behind the Wende to democracy.”

“But aren’t the streets more alive now; isn’t there movement and life?” Anna arched her eyebrows over her gray eyes which brought animation to her whole body.

Bertram nodded..  But outside, the potholes made driving precarious, while the overgrown and broken sidewalks only faintly remembered their function. Soot from sulphurous coal and gasoline blackened the white walls and fences; the color of neglect, the stench of senseless decay; the rusting Trabis and Wartburg cars, once coveted by people with forbidden wanderlust, littered the sides of unkempt cinderblock apartment houses, whose broken windows formed crazy quilts of glass, boards and plywood. The smell and color of wild lilacs, hyacinths and daffodils attempted to camouflage individual and institutional disregard. Newer slogans and banners hailing the Aufbruch, the Velvet Revolution, shared space on lampposts with tattered Marxist-Leninist banners: ‘It’s easy to be patient when you’re sheep.’  ‘If you don’t move, you can’t feel your chains.’ ‘The truth will make you free.’

Bertram wondered if the truth would ever free him of the effects of the communist ideology that still lingered outside the church and festered in him. Would it free him to change, to survive?

The sun on his face promised an end to the cold and dark of this and many other long winters.  As he forced his gaze from the windows and their images his mind wandered back to one particular spring of his youth.  

Winter’s end came late in 1957 when an idealistic Bertram, supported by his parish priest, traveled by train from Berlin to Krakow and then hitch-hiked to the former concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only twelve years earlier the Red Army had liberated the inmates at the site where tens of thousands had been killed. Physically not much had changed.  They assigned him a former inmate’s bunk, provided eating utensils like those from before and pointed him toward an area to dig.  Through frozen earth, he dug into the unmarked mass graves.  Shoulder to shoulder with Jews, Communists, and other Christians, he removed and processed the remains for proper burial in various parts of the world.  The labor as well as the conversations with the other men was intense and fascinating. Hours on end he worked and talked with Henryk, himself a former inmate and Dutch Communist, who chain-smoked unfiltered Gauloise cigarettes. He was older than Bertram and he spoke excellent German. 

“How can you force yourself to return to this place?” Bertram’s hand swept the sodden fields and barracks.

“Part of us will never leave.”

“Don’t you want to get back at them for what they did to you?”  Bertram’s face reddened and his voice rose through clenched teeth.

“Of course.” Dietrich drew deeply on his cigarette. “The big Nazi fish must face justice.  But more importantly, this may never be allowed to happen again. To us or to anyone. Ever again.” 

“But you personally.” Bertram persisted.  “Don’t you ever crave your own justice?”

Dietrich exhaled a cloud of strong-smelling tobacco smoke, looked at him hard with distant ice-blue eyes under heavy dark brows, and shook his head. “My dear Bertram, revenge exacts too high a price. You will never be free if you’re not better than those who persecute you.”

Anna tugged at her husband’s sleeve.. “There is Walther Schulz, the American who sponsored this reconstruction.  This was his village before he left for America..”  

“Anna, it was Schulz’s American bomb factory that helped destroy the church..”  

“His money can be used now to mend such violence.”  Anna arched her eyebrows and lifted her chin defiantly toward him and all who denied her hope.  Where was Hans? Bertram scanned the faces of visitors and church-goers. Both men had lost contact when Bertram went to prison. But this spring and this church could not erase nearly thirty years of anger, only recently directed at Hans. The light through the window caught Abraham’s knife above Isaac and drew Bertram’s thoughts back to another season and the short ride in the official Skoda sedan to the Stasi headquarters in Normannenstrasse in Berlin.

“Cell number 16, sign this document and you are free to go to the West.”

It was 1968, the Berlin Wall was seven years old and Bertram’s career as a physicist was beginning. The Stasi man opposite him in the darkened room was more officious than unfriendly.. He possessed no individual personality. His was the new face of East Germany, Bertram mused. He was merely an official voice who mouthed the prescribed thoughts of a central authority.  Short and slender, about Bertram’s age, he had thinning brown hair and brown eyes. What did Bertram have in common with him, he wondered.

During the interrogation, Bertram found himself confronting his accusers and asserting his rights to religious expression.  “Tell me what law I have broken. What section of the constitution forbids me to practice religion?” 

The Stasi official ignored Bertram’s reasoning and simply demanded he leave the German Democratic workers’ and farmers’ Republic and with it family, friends, and work. 

“Why should I leave my country? My parents are here and their parents are buried here. My father served his country in the last war.” Bertram pressed his knuckles into the desktop, as he rose slightly.     

“You need only sign, Number 16, and you will avoid any unpleasantries. Are you aware of the detention facilities we inherited from the Soviets?”

The vacant face in the crisp uniform sitting opposite him continued the pre-packaged list of demands:  “Nobody denies there is religious freedom in our country, but if you wish to stay, Number 16, you must sign this document and never again meet with western subversives, nor will you invite them into our sector of Berlin.

The official’s voice rose and his face flushed slightly with the prescribed vocabulary of ‘subversive’ and ‘western’. This was familiar ground for a well-rehearsed rant. 

“Those are your terms, ‘western subversives’.”  Bertram’s voice also rose. “Yes, I had non-political discussions with theologians from the West—there was no espionage.  Vatican II has brought momentous changes in the Church. We Catholics want our voices to be heard—even from here.”

He knew his words meant nothing to this uniform. The decision was not his. Bertram’s innate stubbornness had forced him into an either-or situation: his way or their way. But he was a scientist and refused to change his positions arbitrarily. And it was clear that his friends at the Institute and in the Church were powerless to help him walk this tightrope..

Betram looked his accuser in the eye and asked:  “I am sure you’re aware that this same facility was used by the Gestapo during the Nazi time.”

“You will return to your cell, Number 16.”

This issue of religion had always been part of his mentor Hans’s warning:      

“Bertram, you know how fond I am of you, but it is unwise to be so involved in Church activities.  Your work at Auschwitz was commendable. But you could not atone for all that betrayal; it is much bigger than you. Build something new with us now.  Your career offers opportunities; take the preferred housing, a good car, travel, and the best restaurants.  You must view your religion in perspective.

     “Hans, we can have both.  The constitution guarantees our right to practice religion.”     

Hans had recruited and mentored the bright young physics student at Berlin’s Physics Institute in the sixties. He took a personal interest and invited Bertram to his apartment on Friedrichstrasse to meet his wife and children. In discussions about Bertram’s future his church activism subtly reappeared. Despite his misgivings, Hans held a place open in the lab during Bertram’s service in the People’s Army.  

The shock was genuine, though, for both Hans and Bertram when the Volkspolizei escorted Bertram in another Skoda from the physics lab to the infamous Stasi headquarters in Berlin’s Normannenstrasse..  

“This is not how it was supposed to be,” Hans had shouted as they led Bertram away.  His co-workers dropped their eyes and turned back to their work, in silent hope they would not be called. After several interrogations, they placed Bertram in custody to ‘protect’ him from corrupting influences from the West. Twelve months they protected him in solitary confinement. And no one stepped forward. Later, his career as a physicist and researcher was over with an exile to a minor lab in a small town on the Polish border.

Anna had come with Bertram to the Stasi archives as soon as they opened in 1992 after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Finally he would know who betrayed him.

“Bertram, don’t you realize how the information in these files will change you?” Anna wanted to know. “And it will not make you free.”

“Look what I am, Anna”, Bertram replied. “A technician, instead of a research scientist.  I have to know who caused my downfall and why.”

In the poorly-lit room, smelling of the mold of decades, Bertram waded through the piles of documents under his name.  He almost laughed out loud at the state security double-speak charges of ‘corruptive use of church functions’, and his designation as ‘Agent-Provocateur’. Toward the middle of the reams of poorly-maintained files, he stumbled across the name he was after: ‘Hans Weiler, unofficial Stasi co-worker’.           

“Good Lord, Anna, it was Hans.” He had to find a chair to sit on before he continued. His voice lost power, his hands sweated.  “And look what he got for informing on me. They didn’t even give him a free Wartburg; all I was worth was an earlier delivery date for it.  And here is a written guarantee to purchase a refrigerator for ‘information on a subversive’.. This notation is sad: a chit to buy a cognac at the café reserved exclusively for the party bosses. And ‘for significant information about corruptive influences of a state subversive’, his name was moved to the top of the list for a larger apartment. Imagine, all those years of petty gossip and deceits in order to make life tolerable in an intolerable society.”    

“Don’t forget, Bertram, he was your mentor, your second father, who was the only one of all your colleagues to come at great professional risk to our church wedding and toasted us.”    

“Yes, Anna, the same Judas who lent us the money I want to return

“Bertram, don’t you remember with what feeling he praised your work in Auschwitz; and how he mentioned the irony of our meeting at a Socialist youth organization dance while you were serving in the People’s Army.’

“Yes, and with such flowery language he described our glorious future in the strong young country we would help to build.”

“Like a father”, Anna mused

“A father doesn’t betray his son”, answered Bertram.

Abraham’s story had puzzled Bertram even as a child. How could one’s faith in such an objective uncertainty allow him to sacrifice his only son?  And what of Isaac’s thinking when he realized his father’s betrayal? The Stasi files had revealed his betrayer who had lost him his freedom. Had this truth made Bertram him any freer, he wondered?   From somewhere long forgotten Henryk’s words in Auschwitz so any years ago came to mind: “You will never be free if you’re not better than those who persecute you.”   

The sun’s rays rode low on the horizon and filled the crowded vestibule with light. Shading his eyes, Bertram’s view converged onto the knots in the newly varnished pine panels. He followed their pattern up to below the painted images in glass, where his eyes stopped at the bowed white head of a man leaning on a cane next to the other wall. Another late-comer.  A vague flash of recognition.         

“Hans! I knew he moved back here to retire”, whispered Bertram to himself.

The man in a cheap suit from former times stood not ten paces away.  Had he been there long? Would he still recognize Bertram?  His thick white hair was long around his ears, and his tall frame slightly bent. Bertram fought the urge to run to him.  Where were the words now to the practiced confrontation? What would he really do? He fingered the contents of both pockets: the worthless east money and the sharp clasp knife, each in its turn.

Nothing moved on Bertram’s body. His voice would not engage, nor would his legs.  Finally he pushed aside faceless shapes impeding his progress toward the white head and icy blue eyes. His eyes sought confirmation in the images in the window, but found only a complacent Isaac as he lay on the altar.  Was that his own voice above the choir and the birds’ songs, or merely the imprinted memory of the practiced speech? His hand rested again on the smooth casing of the forged steel in his pocket.

“Hans, Dr. Weiler, remember me, Isaksen, Bertram?  And what you did?  You were my mentor at the physics institute.  I have something for you..”

Bertram reached for a hold on the man’s arm, but caught only a sleeve. The older man jerked back but his watery eyes scanned through his own faded memory.  Finally, as if connecting frayed wires of people, places and years, a faint smile formed in his ice-blue eyes beneath his heavy, now white brows, and moved to his mouth.

“Of course.  Bertram.  Noble, idealistic Bertram.  What hope.  What promise.”   

Weiler’s once strong, confident baritone had faded.  Bertram loosed his grip on the man’s sleeve and looked again into his face.

“Why do you look puzzled, Bertram?  What is it you have for me?       

“You’ve changed, Hans.”

“Yes, the changes have not gone well for me. I was always a survivor. But surviving is more difficult now. And you? Have you accepted the changes, Bertram?”

“Changes. Yes, changes”, said Bertram, as he reached his hands into both jacket pockets.  He removed the envelope of worthless Ostmarks from his pocket and placed them in a nearby wastebasket. He reached for the old man’s hand to shake it, looked to the spring sun in the windows and moved slowly toward the warming breeze and the larch’s song through the open door.