When she found the station again, Lotte’s heart leaped.
A different voice was talking now – male, slow, deep and loud.
‘We are a small team of workers,’ he said, ‘not all women, I might add. The Stasi left a paper legacy – thousands of sacks of shredded paper were found. It’s our job to put them back together, to give people answers to long-ago questions.’
The newsreader asked something, but Joann coughed and Lotte missed it. She slowly turned the other dial and this time the volume increased.
‘It’s like fitting together a giant puzzle,’ the man went on. ‘Sixteen thousand sacks full of paper – torn, shredded, you name it, they’re all but destroyed.’
‘But you can put them back together again?’ the newsreader asked as Joann pulled around the corner and Lotte saw her school come into view.
‘Yes. On average our workers can reconstruct ten pages each, every single day. That’s three hundred pages a day between them. But even as skilled as the workers are, it’ll take hundreds of years to reconstruct them all. It’s a long—’
‘You ready?’ Joann interrupted as she swung the car into the no-parking zone outside the school.
Lotte shook her head, still listening.
‘And what are in these files the Stasi tried to destroy?’
‘Well, it can be anything . . .’
Roo got out and shut the door. He was waiting outside her door when Joann touched Lotte’s arm to get her attention.
‘Lotte,’ she said. ‘Time for school.’
Lotte nodded, hoping her silence would make Joann silent too. She listened to the radio.
‘These documents shouldn’t be lost or left in sacks. They’re an important part of our history so they will be reconstructed. They account for individual lives and can help people make sense of their own past,’ the man’s voice said, his East German accent deepening.
‘I know we don’t know each other well,’ Joann said, ‘but I really would like to know you better. Your father and I—’
Lotte reached over and turned the radio up louder so she couldn’t hear Joann, who shook her head, hands on the steering wheel, tapping her long nails on the dashboard.
‘Serious stuff,’ the newscaster said. ‘So what do you do for fun, Herr Benedict?’
‘Well, I am partial to a puzzle of an evening,’ he said, as tinny laughter flooded the car.
‘Lotte,’ Joann said, turning the radio down just a fraction but enough to be heard, ‘your father said I wouldn’t have any trouble.’
‘That’s it from the old Stasi HQ. I’m Ramona Cusk reporting live in Zirndorf, Nuremberg. Back to the studio.’
Deadpan, the nasal newscaster continued, ‘And in other news . . .’
Joann turned the volume down until the radio clicked off. ‘Have a good day,’ she said.
Lotte remained motionless. Stasi HQ. Nuremberg.
‘You have to get out now,’ Joann prompted, leaning over and pulling the door handle so Lotte’s door clicked open. Her hair was strangely firm where it nudged Lotte on the chin, as if it were made of hairspray. ‘Have a good day,’ she said, staring straight ahead, the car’s engine purring gently.
Lotte held the paper bag in her hand, and beneath it was Joann’s purse. Nuremberg wasn’t Berlin, Nuremberg was far away and she would need money to get there. Neither she nor Roo had any money.
Lotte quickly tucked the turquoise purse out of sight under the paper bag and got out. It was a bad thing to do and Lotte wasn’t bad, but if she could get to Nuremberg, she and Roo could put the letter and notebook back together. Together.
‘I am more than my Down’s syndrome,’ she said.
‘What?’ Joann looked at her.
‘Nothing,’ Lotte said, and opened the back door to grab her bag from the seat.
Clutching the purse to her body, Lotte watched the Barbie-woman in the toy-blue car drive away.
‘The puzzle women can help us,’ she said to Roo when the car was out of sight and they were standing on the pavement.
‘What?’
‘They can put Mama’s letter back together.’
He looked at her. ‘Who can?’
‘The Stasi people in Nur-em-berg.’
‘What? No, Lotte, please. Listen to me. I’ll help you with the papers if you like. But it’s not safe to go to a place like that.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Please – I’ll explain everything later, but go to school now. I have to do something.’
‘Mama was dead for years and years, Roo. But the letter is from her to you and to me from today. You can help me. We can do it together.’
‘It can’t be from Mama,’ he said in a tired voice.
Was Roo tired of her?
‘Go to school,’ he said. ‘I promise we’ll talk tonight, okay? I’ll explain. I have to go now.’ And he walked in the wrong direction, as if he was going back home, leaving her alone with the precious shredded words from Mama.
RUNE
He walked back to the house after Joann had dropped them at school and collected his bike and his bag, thinking of the Stasi and of Mama. The official line was that Mama had been ‘disappeared’ by the Stasi.
But he remembered the truth.
Guilt slid under his skin, wet and cold, amphibian. He tried to hold the image of Mama behind his eyes, but she didn’t stay still; there was a smile and then it was gone. Her features glimmered and shimmered in the air, the glow of her eyes flickering in the sky, darkness eating away at the light. And he was angry at her memory for not staying still. For not helping him. For leaving.
He pedalled slowly at first, trying to morph the map on the back of his application letter into the city he knew, and enjoying the dreamlike effects of the oxy he’d taken, he felt slow and conscious of every breath. It was a good feeling.
He’d try and explain it all to Lotte later.
Finally, when he was sure he had found it, 404 Industriebahn Berlin, he locked his bike up outside an enormous red-brick industrial complex. The Berlin Art Institute.
He was unsure of what to do next.
He waited until his stomach started to rumble and a surge of people began to walk into the entrance to the building before taking his own first step over the threshold. Fearful that somehow he was in trouble.
‘Professor Obert cannot see you,’ the receptionist said, sitting behind a large desk with a great beige phone to her ear, a long earring dangling from her fingers. She thrust his letter back at him with only a cursory glance at it. ‘She’s busy teaching today. Your application was declined?’ He nodded as the receptionist resumed her conversation down the phone.
When the conversation ended, she replaced the phone and her earring and leaned over the desk. ‘One hour,’ she said. ‘Studio 4. You’ll catch her leaving class,’ and she gave him a wink.
Before he had turned away, the phone rang and she answered it, holding the receiver away from her ear slightly to remove her oversized dangly earring once more. She covered the mouthpiece and spoke after Rune – ‘Studio 4’ – and pointed with a long finger, tipped with a bright pink nail, to the corridor on his left.
He walked blindly up and down streets, not straying too far from the buildings, not wanting to get lost, until he found a café in Weißensee.