Free Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything by Daniela Krien, Jamie Bulloch Page B

well supplied with things like chocolate, gummy bears, posters of rock stars, and sometimes records. We’d sit in my mother’s bedroom and listen to banned music. I was madly in love with him. I’d have supper with his family every few days, and when we said grace before dinner—“Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest; and bless what you have bestowed”—I uttered the words more fervently even than the pastor’s children. None of them was in the Pioneers, nor in the Free German Youth; they talked about subjects that were new to me, and they were smarter than anybody else in our village. My admiration for them was boundless.
    And then—this was still long before the Wall came down—the whole of Class 8 were given the initiation pledge to learn at home. We were supposed to prepare ourselves for the forthcoming ceremony; the text began with the following words:
    Dear young friends!
    If, as young citizens of our German Democratic Republic, you are loyal to the constitution and ready to work and fight together with us for the great and noble cause of Socialism, and honor the revolutionary legacy of the people, then answer:
    Yes, this we do pledge!
    David told me I couldn’t say that in all seriousness, and that I ought to think about what I would actually say. He also claimed therewere people who just disappeared because they were hostile to the state. He’d heard this from his father, and his father would never lie. And around that time, one of my mother’s brothers had come to visit and told us of a friend who had been arrested two years previously for the possession and distribution of imperialist literature, including the works of some foreign philosophers. He was imprisoned in Bautzen, released a year later, and died shortly afterward of a particularly rapid and aggressive cancer. He was twenty-nine and the father of two children. There was lots of whispering between Mom and her brother, and from what I could make out they believed it had something to do with the prison—they’d made him ill while he was inside. I couldn’t get this man out of my head, and now I did find the words great and noble cause of Socialism unutterable. The postwoman’s son disappeared, too, after he’d clambered blind drunk up a flagpole in the village, yelling “Fucking country!” over and over. Anton was his name, and we never saw him again. David said I couldn’t ignore the signs.
    There were more parts to the pledge, the final one being:
    If, as a true patriot, you are ready to strengthen our firm friendship with the Soviet Union, consolidate the fraternal bond between the Socialist countries, fight in the spirit of proletarian internationalism, protect peace and defend Socialism against all imperialist attacks, then answer:
    Yes, this we do pledge!
    I had a problem that was purely personal with this part of the pledge. I had no desire to strengthen our friendship with the Soviet Union for the simple reason that my father had left us for a Soviet woman. He’d vanished into the heart of Soviet territory, having already spent most of the year at the gas pipeline. So I had my very own animosity toward the USSR. I absolutely loathed it, and I hatedthe language, too, even though it came in handy; I could read the letters Mom kept finding in my father’s pockets, and found out what he was up to in the Soviet Union.
    In any case, my longing for the color and diversity of the West was by now immense. I wanted to have all those things, too. I didn’t want to fight against them—I wanted to own them. But the greatest reason of all was my first love, David, for whose sake I would have done almost anything.
    So my mind was made up. Mom cried a lot and said I was as stubborn as my father, if not more so. I knew the trouble in store for me, but in the end it wasn’t as bad as all that. I was determined and started learning by heart catechisms, verses from the Bible, and the Nicene Creed—for God, as David’s father liked to say, was greater