The Dossier
By Benno von Archimboldi
Staff Writer
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
Ernesto picked up the phone; he’d whispered to his companion the name of whom was calling him. “Who are you with?” inquired the familiar voice on the other side of the line; she signalled him to keep quiet—the universal shush with the index finger—to the man on the line, for his name was recognizable to many. “Don’t worry, I think I’ll still be able to see you soon. Bye”. It was bold of Ernesto to hang up on Erich, one of the Stasi’s bigwigs, particularly as he’d taken him as a protégé. Nevertheless, you could not take him out of the moment. It was a lively Thursday night in Karl-Liebknecht-Straße—unless your frame of reference happened to be West Berlin—, and Erich called again: “I’ll see you within the hour: stop blowing up my phone”. Ernesto responded, in a drastic departure from his usual tone to the eminently competent, intimidating bureaucrat. “I’ll have to go home soon, though, you know Friedrichstraße is a shitshow, and it’s getting pretty late”, she said. “Oh, it’s fine, I’ll walk you to the station”, Ernesto replied, with an air of disappointment. He must’ve hallucinated as they were on their way, as he believed to see an anachronistic graffiti on one of the walls on their way there, one belonging to the Humboldt University campus, los cagones no hacen historia (lit. shitters don’t make history), it read, with the slogan’s origins in Argentinian football culture being removed in place and time from their environment. As they neared the station, he raised the subject: “Remember when you asked me to compile the information we have on your group of dissidents in a dossier?” “Yes, why?” she replied. “Well,” he said, as he pulled a set of files from his briefcase, “this is what I have”.
Her light left her eyes, and the color in her face was amiss as she’d spend 10 minutes in a remote part of the Tränenpalast going through the dossier. Her access to this information came with a condition: “I’ll just need to keep the documents myself after you take a look at them since the information here doesn’t make anybody happy”. The recollections in them spared no detail; her dissident group were victims of a vast torture operation led by the Stasi. The centers known to be used to re-educate dissidents in the ideas of Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, and Luxembourg not only have atrocious living conditions but were spaces of state-sponsored killings and brutal torture. While her frightened brown eyes processed the content of the papers, Ernesto called Erich from a nearby payphone: “This is pretty much over here. I’m going to need you to come by the university campus soon”. “Why?” he responded in disbelief. “I can’t tell you now but it’s over. Look forward to talking to you when you’re here, it’s important”. With an awkward goodbye, she left, shattered, but her face signalled that she would not let him see her visibly emotional over these revelations.
The early fall night felt rather cold as Ernesto waited for Erich’s car to arrive. Upon arrival, he asked him to open his window before entering the car. “I have a lot to tell you, remember that dossier I showed you weeks ago?”, Ernesto asked. “I know what happened, get in the car”, said Erich, dryly.
As he opened the back door, he could not believe who he saw. Rosa, who used to run the most prominent of the aforementioned centers and had since moved to a cushy UN ambassadorship in New York City, was in the other backseat.
“Within the last 20 minutes, I lost all my connections with every single dissident, everywhere. You were just with one of them. And you find me in the country. So, tell us, what happened?” she asked, with a tinge of disbelief in her voice.
– “Erich, remember the dossier I showed you a few weeks ago over coffee?”, Ernesto asked, trying to find a way to explain himself.
— “I do remember you showing me a dossier that I did not want out there, I don’t remember all of its contents though,” responded the man from the front seat.
– “Oh, really? Well, the dossier has extensive accounts of the center you used to run, and where you had me as a fixer. Not just what we let out to the public, but what actually happened in there, the tortures, the killings…”
“What the fuck? Why would you do that? I know you have connections with some of the dissidents but I’m just getting fucked by this”, she said, exasperated.
– You know I’m not trying to fuck you over here.
“I know”, she interjected with actual belief in her voice.
– You could maybe blame it on your higher-ups, I don’t know, I’m completely willing to put you back in touch with the dissidents”.
— An incensed Erich finally chipped in: “You just fucked over her and now you wanna fuck me over? You have to take the fall”.
– “If I have to get thrown under the bus, so be it”, replied Ernesto, increasingly aware that the status quo was to change dramatically.
— Incredible how earlier tonight I had to defend you, Rosa, as a modernizer, from you know, our guy at the Party.
– Does anybody really believe his holier-than-thou shtick? Baffling to me that anybody would even come close. It’s obvious he’s just posturing to angle for your job.
She dismissed the potential threat: “I don’t think the people that matter see him as reformed in any actual sense”.
— “Why would you do this?”, the Stasi man asked later in the night.
– I wish I could give you a single, clear reason, but it feels as if it’s a combination of things.
— It has to be revenge; it’s the only way it would make sense.
– It’d be easy to say that, you know how easy that is to sell? You put your higher-ups in a tough position, and you take revenge against the dissidents for getting nowhere, turning around their whole world with a tightly packed dossier. It’d be the easy way out as an explanation, but unfortunately, I think that can’t explain the whole thing. At least the three of us know that it wasn’t to fuck Rosa over, because if I were trying to do that, there is no way the best path for that was to immolate myself like I just did. It’s just so difficult when you’re at a breaking point”.
They had arrived at the apartment complexes reserved for senior officials, where Rosa was to spend the night; she had words of courtesy for Erich’s chauffeur. She was not about to go down without a fight: “I very much think this is doable, but to recover, I need to get on the phone, working the dissidents, tonight, or else it might be too late”. Erich, another resident of the area, sought to comfort her: “Just anything that happens, I got your back.” he started dictating the number of a prominent dissident he knew, which she wrote down, “give it a bit to cool down, and call. I’m sure you’ll recover”. Ernesto also tried to take her out of the mess he had precipitated: “I’m sure the building has a fax machine. Just reach me on the line when you get to your apartment and tell me where to send it and I’ll send you the dossier. If you know exactly what’s in it, it’ll be easier to defend yourself”.
Arriving at Ernesto’s more pedestrian apartment complex—still remarkably nice for DDR standards, although well behind what its equivalent was on the other side of the wall—Erich and he stepped out of the car for a moment to get some privacy from the chauffeur. “When you’re the one who has to eat the shit sandwich every day, it gets to a point. It eats away at you; it starts killing you. I don’t expect you to agree with me, but please, understand me.” Emotion started to overflow Ernesto’s voice. Despite his unerasable anger at the situation, Erich seemed understanding for a moment before Ernesto returned to his apartment.
There, he got a surprise phone call. “Hey, I’m still shocked by what you showed me at the station. Please, can you fax me that dossier? I promise I will not run to our internal newspaper or try to make it a phenomenon for the masses by going public, I just need the people closest to me to see it so they can believe me about how devastating it is—I’m not sure if you know but you spend some time with one of them, he works at your bureau—please: I won’t be able to sleep tonight”, sounded a feminine voice on the other side of the line. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, he knew what he couldn’t do. “I’m so sorry but you remember what I told you earlier, don’t you? I can’t share it with you. I imagine how saddening it is and all the emotions you’re going through right now but there’s nothing I can do it about. At least tomorrow is a new day”. She continued to plead, but having already broken his obligations by sharing the dossier, there was no way in hell he’d dig himself into a deeper hole.
Friday night, the apparatchiks had their weekly dinner, a social event for a mostly male crowd followed by a much-discussed underground poker game. Erich ran it, and Ernesto was a regular. Still reeling from last night, the latter missed dinner and phoned Erich’s apartment to see if it was too late to join the game. A bad habit of Erich was that when he was displeased with somebody, he would not pick up their calls. Instead, he’d make whoever kept him company at the time answer the call for him. This time, it was Andreas, a mutual friend of theirs, on the phone with Ernesto.
Hey, I was wondering at what time does the poker game get going tonight. Couldn’t make it to the dinner, but you know how much I love these nights.
– Uhm, it’s starting soon. However, we’re having capacity issues, you know. A couple of regulars brought two new people with them, and since you’re not here yet, it might not work.
If I get on my way there now, do you think I’d make it?
– I don’t think so, I’m not sure.
Let me try a different question: would you think it’d be better for the poker night to develop without my presence?
– Yes, that’s the case.
Alright, thanks for letting me know.
The following morning, Erich called him. His instructions: keep an eye on Erich’s car, arriving at his apartment complex in 30 minutes, and bring a small suitcase with yourself. The stately black Volvo 264 awaited Ernesto, alongside Erich’s stocky driver. Despite exchanging small talk, neither of the parties asked or announced what the destination was; though, an hour into the trip, Ernesto recognized what awaited him, a stay at the same center he used to facilitate torture in.
By Monday, Ernesto remained at the center. Nonetheless, it seemed as his friends had his back by ensuring he was placed in its most peaceful wing—similar to what we’d nowadays consider a low-security prison—where he even had access to a phoneline. He decided to call Rosa, who would by now surely be back in America. She picked up the call.
Hey Rosa, just called you because I saw that Vietnam-DDR pin you always wear being worn by one of the inmates here.
– What a life, I can’t believe it. You have to be a senior official with Vietnamese ancestors to have one of those handed to you; I can’t imagine how one of us would end up at a place like that.
So, how are you doing? What was the aftermath of that Thursday night?
– Twenty-seven hours. Full recovery in twenty-seven hours. I knew I could pull it off.
And I haven’t heard of any dissidents since that same night. I must’ve eaten that bus like a champ, eh?
– I’m happy I could move past that, and good hearing from you too. Back here at the imperial core, you know I’ve never really cared about the ideological battle, but it’s a hell of a job to have.
Glad you’re enjoying yourself all the way over there.
As the sun set on the Eastern German plains, one of the facility’s underpaid workers knocked on his room and said, “there is a black car waiting for you outside, sir”. Erich’s chauffeur had the same stoic expression from Friday morning on the drive back home; Ernesto lived to see another day, a feat only made possible by the magnanimity of his friends.
– Deny everything, admit nothing. Deny, deny, deny. Never admit defeat[IZ1] …We still got it, eh?
Actually, you don’t wanna deny everything. You have to make it believable, so you have to admit to some shit to fight back on the bigger stuff. Like, if you’re apologizing, you have to admit to some of it before going, What? Me? No! Never!, as he said in an increasingly comedic tone.
— You would know about the apologizing, he joked.
They laughed together, though you could still sense some residual unease from a fateful September night. Yet, they’d gotten over the hump.
We’re all well-served by friends to quote from movie scenes with, while knowingly ignoring the media literate takeaway from the scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNhjUuwxsvo