Free 1989 by Peter Millar Page A

Helga. If Erdmute was the fusspot, Helga was the honeypot: the ‘cleaner’. Helga was a dark-haired, dark-eyed, slender beauty of maybe thirty – a couple of years older than I was – divorced with two young children. She, like Erdmute, was officially employed by the DLA state organisation, in the role of cleaner and general housemaid. But the role she had played throughout most of the tenure of my predecessor had been that of mistress.
    ‘ Wir lebten zusammen, wie Mann und Frau ,’ (We lived together like man and wife), she told me one day, at the door to the bedroom, her big brown eyes staring pointedly into mine.
    Helga had for the previous few weeks become something of a pal. It was hardly a bad thing to have an attractive woman, the nearest person to my own age I had come across, to show me what there was to a fun side of East Berlin. We went for a drink in a couple of bars together, we even went to a disco of sorts once where youngish East Berliners drank heavily – the East Germans thought booze rather than religion an allowable opium for the masses – and indulged in fairly dirty dancing – think John Travolta without the white suit – to domestically produced pop music or, more rarely, an officiallysanctioned Western hit. And Helga could writhe with the best of them.
    We even went swimming together once, along with her children, at one of the many lakes of the Brandenburg countryside to which East Berliners, unlike the hemmed-in West Berliners, had unrestricted access. But all along, I was wondering just what game Helga was playing. For she was undoubtedly playing a game, as became clear when she spilled the beans about her sexual relationship with my predecessor in a way that clearly suggested that if I was interested , the privilege went with the job.
    The man I had taken the place of in the office, if not the bedroom, had little in common with me physically – apart from a relatively diminutive stature – and even less in personality, being a ruthlessly ambitious career journalist with his eyes already set on a high executive position he eventually achieved. It seemed unlikely to me, therefore, that Helga found us both equally attractive. That left only two other possible solutions, both of which were equally credible, and may even have intermingled: first, that she was merely a young divorcee looking for a man who had easier access to the finer (i.e. Western) things in life than most of her compatriots, or, secondly, that she was an employee of the Staatssicherheitsdienst , the state security service, the infamous Stasi.
    The likelihood that both these possibilities co-existed is the one that I found most plausible at the time, and continue to do so today. The greatest – and in the end most frightening – element of the Stasi’s control of the East German population was not through direct monitoring (though there was enough of that, as I was to find out) but through a vast network of IMs, an acronym that stood for Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter , ‘informal collaborators’. These were people recruited either because they volunteered, occasionally for ideological reasons but more usually for personal advancement, or who had themselves been compromised, or had simply been told that the job they were in required such ‘active collaboration’. There were tens of thousands of them in a population of just seventeen million, and IM ‘skeletons’ keep turning up in the cupboards of prominent people, including politicians and show business figures, even today in a Germany reunited for nearly twenty years. Everyone knew of theexistence of the IM network, but nobody admitted being one. But as I was to find out, the result was that everyone watched what they said in the company of strangers. And often even friends.
    So was Helga Stasi? Or at least an IM? I don’t know for sure, but from records I have seen since, I suspect the answer is as complicated as the question. It was impossible that anyone working for