A Shadow of Myself

‘The vodka that the Poles bring you,’ Liebl said, ‘costs less than half the stuff you put on the books. Everyone knows that.’

That was the way things were, George wanted to reply, but he knew by now that whatever was going on was also something to do with the way things were. The truth was that the canteen swindles had been going on before he arrived and they were a part of his everyday routine. He suspected that Liebl knew this already, and he probably knew that most of the products on George’s books ended up on the black market or in the kitchens of the production committee – two days earlier the manager himself had collected half a dozen bottles – but for some reason they had decided to throw him to Liebl.

‘They say you’re a good worker,’ Liebl continued, ‘and I don’t want to charge you with anything.’

So all this had merely been a preamble to his real purpose, a way of letting George know that he had to give Liebl what he wanted. The question which remained in his mind was why the man hadn’t simply asked for a few bottles. Werner had understood the limits. If his replacement was greedy it might cause problems.

‘What do you want?’ George asked.

‘We want you to do a job.’

Whatever it was, George thought, he wanted nothing to do with it.

‘I have a job,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want a transfer.’

‘We don’t want to transfer you.’

For the first time it occurred to George that Liebl wasn’t simply a security officer.

‘Who is we?’

‘Stasi.’

At last he understood. This was the way that state security operated, and he would have to do whatever it was they wanted.

At the beginning it was easier than he would ever have imagined. Liebl wanted to know about the black market, where the products came from, where they went and who handled them. Most of it he already knew. The rest he could have found out by observing what went on around the factory. George laid down ground rules. He refused to talk about his colleagues or about his mother and her job translating for Soviet officials.

‘I respect that,’ Liebl said. ‘We are only concerned with the vandals who are undermining the State.’

As time went on George never trusted Liebl any more than he had that first morning, but before long he felt at ease. Liebl, he understood, wrote exhaustive reports about everything he learnt, yet little or nothing seemed to change. He had half expected some of the traders he knew to disappear, perhaps a few transfers or arrests, but things at the factory went on much as they had always done. Liebl’s questions came to seem like a bit of a joke, a sort of monthly quota with which he filled his notebook. Improbably, Liebl turned out to be a boxing fan, with an encyclopaedic memory for lists of fighters from Poland, the Ukraine and Cuba. Somehow he had managed to see films of fighters like Muhammed Ali, and he revelled in describing every blow in famous matches like the Thriller in Manila. When he did this his arms flailed, his little eyes gleamed and he gasped for breath. After a while George realised that he actually liked the man, and it would have been hard for him to imagine the rage and contempt he would come to feel in Liebl’s presence.

On the other hand, as he told Valentin when they began talking about what to do with the Levitan, if you wanted to sell a painting of dubious origins and ownership, it wouldn’t be hard to find interested parties, but the problem was avoiding buyers who were police informers or simple thieves. If Liebl was well disposed he could send them to a buyer who was safe and would keep his mouth shut. Valentin’s response was to urge him to see Liebl.

‘So he was Stasi. That’s much better. He will have to be quiet.’

George shrugged. Up until the moment he mentioned Liebl he had had no intention of speaking to him ever again, but when he thought about his life behind the Wall it seemed to have taken place in another world. Perhaps it was the same for the Stasi. He could still recognise people who had been in the same trade as Liebl, and it was as if, from the moment of the Wende, they had begun to shrink, changing subtly into ordinary individuals. There were so many of them, in fact, that most of the time no one would guess. In any case Liebl had never forced him to do anything. He had simply opened the door to the maze. George’s wife Radka was the only person who knew every detail of the tasks he had performed for Liebl, but during one of the worst periods in their relationship she had accused him of using the fat man as a lightning rod for his own guilt. The remark had provoked his anger, partly because he already knew it to be true. Avoiding Liebl would make no more sense than avoiding the steps of the Gethsemanekirche in Berlin, which was where he had heard about the death of a woman he had loved.

‘Perhaps it is time I saw him again,’ he told Valentin after seeing the Levitan.

George hadn’t actually laid eyes on the man then for at least half a dozen years, but he knew where to find him. Liebl was still in the security business, and he was still based in the centre of Prenzlauer Berg, but now he ran a firm supplying bouncers to the nightclubs that littered the district. On the same afternoon that George saw Valentin’s painting he decided to take the leap, to try to lay at least one of his ghosts to rest by talking to Liebl.

He parked near the KulturBrauerei, the old Prenzlauer brewery which had hastily been converted into a cultural centre. The factory where he had worked with Liebl was only a stone’s throw away, but it was now deserted with a web of scaffolding covering the building while it was being converted into something else. This was how it was all over the east of the city. More than six years after the Wall came down the noise of drilling and hammering, the smell of paint, scaffolding and a kind of scattered bustle was inescapable, but somehow the changes only served to emphasise the familiar look of the place. Alongside the splashes of renovation was the scarred brick of the tenement blocks, and it was the same with the people. Under the short skirts and high heels, or the tight jeans and tailored jackets which had sprouted along the Schönhauser Allee, were the same scrawny bodies and sallow complexions. Everything here was slower too, as if the city itself moved to a different, more deliberate, Ossi beat. George had never noticed any of this before. Now he had to remind himself, with a little shiver of irritation, that he too was an Ossi. As a child his mother had brought him here to the rushing junction where Schönhauser Allee and Danziger Strasse met Kastanienallee and Ebenwalder Strasse. Beyond was the Wall which marked the border where he should never go, she said, but at the time, the warning had been unnecessary. The spot where they stood, it seemed, was like the centre of the world, a teeming and sophisticated metropolis.

He crossed the junction and passed between steel pillars into the shadow of the railway overhead. In a couple of minutes he was walking down the cobbled street where Liebl’s office was situated. Up ahead he could see the neon sign above a narrow shopfront – Experte Sicherheit.

He pushed open the door, which set off an electronic buzzer. The reception was a shallow room a few metres long. Against one wall was a polished wooden desk behind which sat a woman whose hair was an extravagantly pale yellow, swept back into a bun. She was wearing a turquoise suit over a tight black sweater with a low vee which showed a swelling cleavage. Her long fingernails were turquoise, matching the colour of the suit. In her left hand she held a kingsized cigarette in a stainless steel holder. With her right hand she pecked at the keyboard of the computer terminal in front of her. Against the wall opposite were two screens covered with photographs, one of them a large portrait of Liebl, his jowls arranged into a serious and responsible expression. The others looked like a series of scenes of his bodyguards surrounding important people or blocking the entrances to various venues. Between the desk and the screens was a door which George assumed led to an inner office and the stairs to the upper floors.

‘I want to see Herr Liebl,’ he told the receptionist.

‘You have an appointment?’

‘No. My name is George Coker. Tell him I want to see him.’

She looked him over coldly before making up her mind.

‘He’s not interviewing today, and we don’t employ foreigners. Write him a letter with a photograph, references from your former employers and proof of national status.’

‘I don’t want a job,’ George said patiently. ‘Tell him my name and tell him I want to speak with him.’

She had deep-set green eyes and a small mouth with pouting scarlet lips. The mouth twisted and the eyes fixed in a scornful glare.

‘What is your business?’

‘I’m an old friend,’ George told her. ‘From Lichtenberg.’

This was a measure of his irritation. Lichtenberg was where the Stasi headquarters had been situated, and he was guessing that whether or not the receptionist knew about Liebl’s past, the mere mention of the place would bring the conversation to an end.

She laid the cigarette in an ashtray, her eyes still fixed on him, then she got up, smoothed her turquoise skirt down carefully, walked over to the door, and went out, closing it behind her. George waited, his annoyance compounded by the delay. Suddenly the door opened and the receptionist emerged, hurrying a little.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Go in. Go in.’

She pointed to the corridor behind her. On the far side was another open door. George noted that her manner had changed. Now she remained standing, closer to him, and there was something apologetic about the way she waved him through.

Liebl was sitting in the centre of a room in a big red leather armchair. Opposite him was a huge television set, the largest that George had ever seen. On the screen was a recording of two fighters jabbing at each other under the Olympic logo. George had never seen the match but he recognised the boxer Liebl was watching. Theofilio Stevenson.

Liebl lifted his hand and the picture froze on Stevenson in a characteristic pose, his arms down, his head slightly inclined, an ironic twist to his smooth features, his unshakable confidence like an aura.

‘I was watching Stevenson and thinking of you,’ Liebl said. ‘You always reminded me of him.’

‘Thank you,’ George replied, ‘but I don’t think so.’

He sat on the leather sofa opposite Liebl. There was a table in the corner beside the long windows which looked out on to a small courtyard at the back. The walls were a pale green colour, dotted with more photographs of Liebl, bodyguards, and clubs. Some of the photos were signed portraits. George guessed they were foreign celebrities, but he didn’t recognise any of them.

‘The last time we spoke,’ Liebl said, ‘you threatened to kill me.’

‘You don’t need to worry. That was a long time ago.’

Liebl made a gasping sound which, George remembered, signalled his amusement.

‘If I had been worried you wouldn’t be here.’

Liebl hadn’t changed much, George thought, except that his head was now completely bald and he was a little thinner. It was clear also that he was making money out of whatever he was doing. At the factory he used to bulge out of the clothes he wore. Now his suit draped softly round him, giving him the well-tailored air of a pink-fleshed Wessi politician.

‘You’ve done well,’ George remarked.

Liebl took his eyes away from the TV screen and looked at him grinning as if he knew exactly what George was thinking.

After reunification a lot of people had half expected the Genossi, old comrades like Liebl, to disappear, or at least to be barred somehow from the new world. A few had been prosecuted, a few of the most prominent had committed suicide, but many of them were still flourishing, in precisely the same sort of occupation they had pursued under the patronage of the state. Often, they had managed the transition by banding in cliques, small groups the Ossis dubbed Seilschaften, after the teams which roped themselves together to climb steep rockfaces. Looking round Liebl’s office, George was willing to bet that among the members of his Seilschaft there were men who owned nightclubs and promoted pop concerts.

‘It wasn’t so difficult to adjust,’ Liebl said. He shifted his balance in the chair so that he could look into George’s face. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I need a name.’

Liebl raised his eyebrows, the two bushy clumps of hair giving the impression of crawling upwards towards his naked scalp. Without pausing George went on to explain that he had a valuable object which had to be sold discreetly, to someone who would have the ready cash.

‘How much?’ Liebl interrupted.

George plucked a figure out of the air.

‘Ten, maybe fifteen thousand marks.’

‘Show it to me.’

‘No.’

George had replied without thinking. Now that he was talking to Liebl he felt none of the boiling rage which he had associated with him for so long, and he had the odd feeling that the man in front of him was somehow different, an impostor who had been substituted for the person he had known. At the same time he knew that he could never do business with the man.

‘Why do you come to me?’

‘Because you can tell me what I want to know.’

‘I know this,’ Liebl said seriously, ‘but why should I help you?’

A memory flashed through George’s mind. It was a touch, the soft smooth feel of hair, black and glossy like a bird’s wing. At the back of his mind was the crazy thought that perhaps Liebl might want to atone somehow, to make up for the things he’d done. The other thing was that they’d almost been friends at one point, and if Liebl hadn’t been what he was, perhaps they would have.

‘The same reason I used to help you,’ George replied. ‘Call it payback.’

‘You can’t threaten me,’ Liebl told him. ‘Everyone’s read the files.’

This wasn’t true and they both knew it. At the moment that the students were hacking at the Wall many of the files were burning in the courtyards of the complex in Frankfurter Allee.

‘So call it business,’ George told him.

‘Ten per cent,’ Liebl said.

Later that evening Liebl telephoned with the name of a dealer he said was reliable. He owned a shop off the Dresdenstrasse which sold antiques and memorabilia. It wasn’t far from where Valentin lived and they went there the next day.

The place was tiny, sandwiched in between a dingy pizza parlour and a video market. When the door opened it set off an electronic chiming somewhere inside, but it was difficult to tell the source of the sound, because the shop was crammed with objects, old furniture stacked up the walls, stuffed birds mounted in transparent bells, heaps of uniforms in neat piles, a giant bear skin, and a line of glass cases displaying coins and jewellery. Standing motionless behind them was a small man wearing a beard and a black Armani suit, and for a moment George had the feeling that this was another exhibit.

‘Gunther?’

The man nodded.

‘We spoke. On the telephone,’ George said.

The dealer nodded again, then came from behind the counter, squeezed past George and locked the door.

‘You have something to show me?’

Valentin was carrying the painting wrapped in a copy of the Tagespiegel, and he tore the pages away carefully before propping it up on the counter. The dealer studied it without expression. After half a minute he touched the signature with his finger, grunted softly, and went back to looking at the painting. Valentin raised his eyebrows at George, who ignored him. The shop seemed to be holding its breath.

‘Wieviel?’ Valentin said suddenly, losing patience.

The dealer didn’t answer, and he didn’t move.

‘How much? How much?’ Valentin repeated.

The dealer looked at him, smiling.

‘Russian?’

Valentin stared back at him, unsettled by the question. In this city the Russians had no friends, and it must have been obvious what he was.

‘I am Russian,’ he said irritably. ‘The painting is Russian. How much?’

The dealer smiled again.

‘Five thousand marks.’

‘That is shit,’ George told him. ‘This is by Levitan, a great painting of the nineteenth century.’ He had determined to refuse the first offer in any case, but he also guessed that if the painting was genuine, this was a derisory sum. The dealer shrugged.

‘A minor work, probably very early, or a fake. His best work is in Moscow or the museum at Plyos. But he was a great painter. You are right. So take it to a gallery, then. Go to Dahlem.’

He laughed, and for a moment George felt like hitting him in the middle of the tuft on his chin. Dahlem was where the big galleries were, but a black man who showed up trying to sell a painting which had no documentation would be looking for trouble. As the thought crossed his mind, it struck him that the dealer was needling them, subtly and deliberately. After all this was only the start of what might turn out to be an extended negotiation. Losing his temper would simply hand the initiative to the other man. The realisation was like a dash of cold water, and he forced himself to smile.

‘It’s genuine,’ he repeated.

Half an hour later they had struck the bargain. Gunther upped his offer by another two thousand marks, and as if to sweeten the deal he told them, as he counted out the money, that he would take as many of the paintings as George could deliver. If they had a regular pipeline and once the market had been locked up he could pay five, maybe ten times as much. Valentin voiced no objections but, once outside the shop, he looked at George and made a face of alarm. It would be, he said, a difficult business to locate the other paintings and bring them out.

‘I should have guessed,’ George said. ‘You’re full of shit.’

At this point they were walking side by side up the Dresdenstrasse towards the bustle of the Oranienstrasse. Valentin stopped abruptly, and when George looked back he was standing in the middle of the pavement, glaring, his face crimson under the yellow hair which, in the last few days had begun to sprout in a peak over his forehead. George gestured, on the verge of apologising, but his cousin, instead of responding, spat out one word – ‘mershavets’. George had a dim memory of having heard the word before, but he wasn’t sure what it meant and while he was working out that his cousin had called him a bastard Valentin turned his back and walked the other way.

It was another fortnight before George laid eyes on him again. During that time he had to withstand Katya’s anxious enquiries about what had happened to Valentin, why he hadn’t been to visit. Under pressure he went to the room in East Kreuzberg half a dozen times without catching sight of his cousin. None of the other tenants knew anything or would even admit to having seen him, and eventually George gave up. Perhaps, he told Katya, ignoring the hurt look in her eyes, her dear nephew had seen enough of Berlin and had gone back to Moscow.

It was shortly after this that Valentin turned up. It was like a replay of the first time, Katya hovering by the dining room table, while the Russian sat grinning and stuffing his face. He greeted George like a long lost brother, making no reference to their last meeting, and while he ate and drank and smacked his lips, he found time to tell George that the business which prompted his trip back to Russia had been successful.

They left the apartment together, Katya clucking like a mother hen and pretending to scold Valentin for disappearing without a word. In the street he told George that he had returned with a deal which would make them rich men. It was simple: cars for pictures. Germany was full of cars for which there were Russian buyers. Instead of money they would receive a stream of pictures which were worth many times the price of the average luxury car.

‘I’ve heard about these good deals before,’ George told him. ‘You can’t lose. Next thing you know you’re wearing handcuffs like they were a new fashion accessory.’

Valentin laughed, seemingly unworried by the prospect. He threw his arm around George’s shoulders. ‘You’ll change your mind when I tell you.’

George listened, sceptical at first, then seized by a mounting excitement as his cousin told him the story.

Valentin had been offered the first picture from a former comrade in his regiment of paratroopers, with instructions to sell it in the West. He assumed it had been stolen, but when he returned with a fistful of foreign currency, his friend Victor revealed that he was sitting on a bonanza which would make them rich men. Its source, he said, went back several years to the crumbling of the Union at the beginning of the decade.

At the time Victor’s company had been led by a distant relative of Colonel General Rodionov, commander of the TransCaucasus military region. Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, Rodionov had been engaged in brushfire operations in places like Armenia and Azerbaijan, not to mention the running sore of Abhazian attempts to secede from Georgia. Whenever there was trouble he sent for the paratroopers from Moscow to beef up the local speznatz. Victor had found himself in quick succession serving in all of these places, cracking heads, carrying sandbags to shore up riverbanks, distributing food and medical supplies. It had started after the Armenian earthquake in ’88. Victor was in the ruins of Spitak, running after the sniffer dogs as they scrabbled in the rubble, pulling aside blocks of masonry with his bare hands, his throat dry and aching, his head ringing with the cries of children. Some time in the afternoon he looked up and saw Gorbachev walking towards him. At first he thought it was some kind of hallucination, then he saw the Colonel General, whom he recognised from parades, followed by an entourage of photographers, snapping the party of dignitaries. As they came abreast of him, Gorbachev paused, took off his hat, pulled out a snow-white handkerchief and wiped the tears from his eyes.

Victor was nineteen years old and something changed at that moment. Up to that time the scene which surrounded him, the agonising sight of crushed and broken limbs, the squelching mud, the smell of rotting bodies, all this had been part of the daily fare which as a soldier he was proud to withstand. Suddenly, like the flickering shade cast by a passing cloud, a kind of sorrow touched his soul.

When the unit pulled out from Yerevan the boys took everything they could lay their hands on, but one of the trucks was loaded by Victor and a couple of comrades, supervised by the company commander himself. It contained pictures and sculptures which the commander had been collecting from museums and houses which had been flattened by the earthquake. Most of the time there was no one left alive to claim these objects and the soldiers had simply picked them up and walked off without interference. After the journey back Victor drove the truck west along the Moskva to a dacha young Rodionov had bought at the far end of a village on the banks of the Setun. He made the trip a few more times during the next four years, content with the assurance that when the time came he would receive a fair share of the profits. Sometimes he got to keep some of the loot – gold bangles and rings or silverware which couldn’t be traced. During that period a small group within the company had evolved into a sort of unofficial bodyguard who travelled everywhere with the commander: Yerevan, the Black Sea, Tbilisi. Chechnya was to be Victor’s last mission, and he was sitting in front of Grozny in an armoured personnel carrier along with the other veterans when they were hit by a hail of armour-piercing grenades which the partisans had bought from a Russian conscript the previous week. Young Rodionov died instantly, and Victor found himself wandering in the wreckage of the armoured column, the only remaining member of the ‘bodyguard’.

Back in Moscow he lost no time in visiting the dacha. The treasure was stored in a cabin near the house, and working feverishly over the space of four nights he removed everything he found there. He piled them up in the attic of the old house in Uglich on the Volga, where his aged parents still lived. Over the next few years he sold the least valuable objects piece by piece. Eventually he ran into Valentin by accident, as they were both standing in a queue for changing currency in a booth at the end of Ulitsa Vavarka. They had first met in what seemed like another lifetime, during the week before the advance on Grozny, and they began talking, hesitantly at first, then with increasing passion and nostalgia. Victor talked about the explosion and the shock of waking up to find all his closest comrades dead or maimed. Valentin told about how they had taken Grozny, then scoured the countryside, alternately frozen with the cold and sweating with fear, nothing but kasha porridge and bread in their stomachs, wincing from the anticipated sting of snipers’ bullets, torn apart with anger at the pointlessness of it all.

By this time they were standing in front of a stall on the site of the old market place near Arbatskaya Metro, clinking their glasses together and toasting their chief tormentors. ‘Yeltsin – alkash. Grachev – doorak.’ These were their ironic salutes to the old boozer and the moron who had sent them to hell without the slightest idea of what they were doing.

A dam had burst. Valentin talked about his mother’s death and his imminent departure for Berlin, and Victor was struck by the idea that here was the perfect conduit, a comrade he could trust to do business for him in the West.

The following evening, they met again at the apartment in the block near Belorussia Station where Valentin’s mother had lived. Victor had brought the picture in the back of his van, covered with sheets of newspaper tied on with string, and, once upstairs, he propped it up against the wall on a chair and tore the paper off.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘isn’t it beautiful?’

When his cousin got to this part of the story George nodded his head, his imagination replaying the entire scene.

‘Yes,’ he muttered, almost as if he was talking to himself. ‘It’s beautiful.’

That was how it had begun.

On that first day George had asked the obvious question. Why bother with stealing cars?

‘It’s a cover,’ Valentin explained patiently. Victor could run a more or less legitimate business dealing in taxis, cars, and car parts. No one would ask questions about his money.

‘But they’re stolen cars,’ George protested.

Valentin shrugged.

‘Who cares?’

On the morning that Valentin stole the Jaguar they had been in business for nearly two years and there was still no sign of the supply of paintings drying up. The cars were no problem. Valentin had become an expert in choosing the right models – BMWs, Jaguars, Porsches, the occasional top-of-the-range Volkswagen. The streets seemed to flow with the rich, hot scent of their shining metal, sweetened by luxurious spicy touches of leather and rubber; and there was practically no risk apart from the actual moment of opening a door. When Valentin climbed into a motor in the morning he knew that by nightfall it would have travelled a distance of more than a thousand kilometres and across several borders. This was his only regret, he told George. Sometimes the pleasure he experienced when he sat in front of the wheel of a beautiful car was almost as good as sex, and when he drove it into one of the garages they used he would feel the insane desire to keep it, to remain wrapped in the clinging embrace of soft warm leather, if only for a little while longer.

‘Verrückt,’ George had muttered. ‘You’re crazy.’ But, at the same time, he reflected that it was just as well. Their zones of responsibility had divided themselves, as it seemed, quite naturally. George’s job was to sell the paintings. Valentin boosted the cars. Since their first experience with the dealer, Gunther, George had set out to inform himself about the art objects he was handling. He read catalogues and visited galleries, museums and auction rooms, checking the prices carefully, matching his estimates with them. He read about Feofan Grek, and Rublyov and Ushakov, and then leaving icons behind he read about the Wanderers group, the Peredvizhniki, Surikov and Repin, and then Mikhail Vrubel and Diaghilev. Before he had progressed very far, however, he had realised that Levitan, whose painting he had sold to Gunther for a few thousand marks, was a classic example of the nineteenth century Peredvizhniki. The landscapes were famous and highly valued, and he learnt also that there were collectors not far away who would have given him ten or twenty times the amount without a single question. ‘Idiot,’ he muttered to himself from time to time, as he turned the illustrated pages or sat at the back of an auction watching the bidding. ‘Idiot.’

It was a new world in which George immersed himself. At first his wife Radka was puzzled, then delighted at his new-found interest. When he resigned as manager of one of the rent-a-car firms at the airport, the job he’d held down for five years, she had almost panicked, convinced that he was about to return to his old ways. But he’d surprised her with the amount he earnt buying and selling antiques, as he called them. Later on, as the stream of money swelled into something like a flood she began to worry again. But, for a while, George’s happiness with his end of the bargain was complete. Valentin’s adventures didn’t tempt him at all. He had gone boosting with the Russian a couple of times and he hated it all, the rush of excitement as they approached the car, the sucking dread of a humiliating arrest, the stupid babbling euphoria of the escape. George was content to leave that side of the business to his cousin, and when Valentin ran off at the mouth about cars, as he usually did, he merely listened patiently, an ironic smile curling on his lips.