Free 1989 by Peter Millar Page B

the DLA, given that they were employed exclusively in the service of foreign organisations, was not at the very least required to answer any questions that may be put to them as to their immediate employers ’ activities. It was also absolutely certain that among her friends would be at least several IMs. The same thing obviously applied to Erdmute, but if the Reuters correspondent was actually sleeping with the maid, it would be the easiest thing in the world to keep tabs on almost every other aspect of his life, both private as well as professional.
    I have to say here, however, that it was not on account of such professional scruples that I declined the apparently obvious invitation . Nor was it that I didn’t find Helga attractive: she was gorgeous, intelligent and apparently – insofar as appearance meant anything – honest. It was just that I was already spoken for. I was happily engaged and planning – albeit at a distance – my wedding to the woman I was intending to spend the rest of my life with. If Helga was bait, tasty bait she might be, but the fish wasn’t biting. A few months after my wife arrived, Helga was transferred elsewhere – she wouldn’t say where, and I have never seen her since. Her successor was a hatchet-faced little woman in her sixties.
    That we were spied on was a given. The extent of it was something I would discover only later. We simply assumed there were microphones in the walls. Everywhere. Even in the bedroom. If it felt uncomfortable at first, it surprisingly quickly became just something you lived with. It could be tempting to fall into what John Le Carré would call ‘tradecraft’: turning on the radio or the water taps and whispering if we had something to say we preferred not to share with the secret policemen. But at least in the early days when our circle of acquaintances among the native population was extremely limited, there was less of that than you might imagine. We weren’t spies. And although the regime was repressive, we weren’t itscitizens. East Germans under a similar level of surveillance might, we assumed, have felt obliged to watch every utterance. But I didn’t have to worry about what I said. My antipathy to the ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’ was something the minders took for granted. I represented , after all, ‘the class enemy’. I was a ‘tool of the imperialist powers’. If I felt like shouting ‘Erich Honecker is a wanker’ aloud in my own flat, I could. Although I would have been advised not to shout it out the window.
    I did undertake one minor act of sedition: on the occasion of the wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, a month before my own, I inflated and released a dozen ‘Charles and Di’ balloons from the window of the flat. Not because I was or am a committed monarchist, but just because they were there. My Reuters bosses would no doubt have sternly disapproved. There was a presumption of a sort of Star Trek ‘first directive’ on Reuters correspondents not to do anything to influence local conditions. My dozen balloons in any case hardly created a diplomatic incident; I noticed a couple lying burst in the gutter a few hours later. I would have liked to think a small child somewhere found one and was allowed to keep it. But I doubt it.
    In any case I had more important things on my plate: I still needed to learn to drive. I had bought myself an East German bicycle. In a country dedicated to sport as a means to cement its international reputation – and with ten-year waiting lists for cars – a bicycle was one of the few consumer commodities that was relatively easy to come by. The problem was that even though cars could be taken through Checkpoint Charlie, for some mysterious reason, bicycles could not. To cross to West Berlin, therefore, I was reduced to cycling to Checkpoint Charlie or to Friedrichstrasse station and then proceeding on foot. Friedrichstrasse station was where the overground S-Bahn