Archive and Repertoire
Tamas Dobozy

Shortly after the funeral, I received a letter from Daniel Weiss that convinced me to fly to Magdeburg and resume my search for László Erdész. When my relatives heard about this, they were skeptical, as if I were using Erdész to run from my father's death. “He died of a stroke,” my mother argued with them, trying to change their minds, but there was no mistaking the looks I received at the funeral and reception, the eyes of aunts and uncles and cousins jerking away whenever I glanced at them, as if by averting their gaze they could hide the fact that they, too, were remembering how often I'd fought with my father.
    But it wasn’t just our fights that bothered me—how ever much I was haunted by the times I'd exposed his weaknesses, both privately and in front of others—but also the numbness. The duration of my father’s illness, the complications involving his estate and preparations for the funeral hadn't left me five minutes in which to sort out my feelings, and after the last dinner was served, the last guest departed, and the last notices placed, I could no longer distract myself from what I should have been feeling.
     I sat at my desk and went through the mail I had received, and not answered, during the period of my father's sickness and death. Among these was a message from Daniel Weiss—whom I'd contacted months back—saying that he did “indeed” share my interest in László Erdész, but that he’d “run up against Katarina Sielemann” at the Landesarchiv Magdeburg. He too was a history professor working on a book about Erdész. As for Katarina, she was the archivist in charge of holdings for the period 1918-1939, and for some reason she was keeping him from accessing the necessary material. Of course, he couldn’t prove a thing, Weiss admitted, neither that there was material, nor that Katarina was hiding it, though his research had led him to believe Erdész had not only been an important photographer during the Nazi period, but an important figure, which meant there had to be more on him than some photographs and civic documents. In fact, he continued, the things I’d turned up—Erdész's expatriation to Germany in the late 1890s, his service in the Kaiser's army during the Great War, his subsequent career as a photographer, and his death during the Allied bombing raid known as "Operation Thunderclap"—had corroborated Weiss's own research, and so he was inviting me to come to Magdeburg and help discover what Katarina was hiding.
    At first, I read the letter with embarrassment, remembering the state I’d been in when I contacted Weiss—guilty, sleepless, isolated—and how my letter had rambled on, saying I was prevented from coming to Magdeburg because of my father’s condition. Though I didn’t tell Weiss about the solitude of the nights I spent with the books and manuscripts related to Erdész, it must have been evident in the things I didn’t mention: the wife and children and friends who should have been providing me solace. “Because I can't leave my father at this time,” I wrote, “I would appreciate your sending me any extra material. With the steady deterioration of his condition, it's all I can do to distract myself with work.”
    At the time, I had no way of knowing how much my interest in Erdész was linked to my father's suffering, and that once the old man died, and I received Weiss's letter, it would be the enigma of Katarina Sielemann, not Erdész, that would interest me. The truth is I was desperate for any kind of escape.

Given that I'd responded to Weiss's invitation only a day before my departure, I wasn't expecting him to be waiting for me at the airport, or in the lobby of the Intercity Hotel, when I finally got to Magdeburg. I was surprised, however, to find that he hadn't even replied to my email, much less left a phone message or note with the concierge. Once I’d showered and unpacked, I tried calling his office at the Otto Von Guericke Universität, only to discover that the number he’d given me was false, that there was no listing for him anywhere on campus, and that there were far too many Daniel Weiss's in the phone book for me to dial them all. Likewise, when I hired a cab the next morning to take me to the return address on his letter, the driver looked puzzled when I mentioned the street, and then, when I insisted, took out a map (muttering that he’d never had to do this in all the years he’d been driving), and informed me that it did not exist.

I waited a day, then went to the Landesarchiv, thinking that if I could find Katarina I might also find Weiss.
   As it turned out, I would have met her anyhow, since I had to make an appointment with the appropriate archivist to have my plan of research approved before I was allowed into the archive, and Katarina’s specialty was exactly the era in which Erdész had produced his photographs. “The approval process is meant to save you time, and us money,” Katarina said, her English almost perfect. “There’s no point in your using up archival resources if we have nothing for you.”
     In fact, there was nothing for me, she said. I wasn’t the first person to come looking for information on Erdész, “But, you see, most of our holdings on him were destroyed.” And here, in a speech that seemed very well rehearsed, she recalled how, in the waning days of the GDR, Erich Mielke, the head of the East German secret police—the Stasi—had sent agents into the Landesarchiv with orders to destroy some 30,000 files. She recounted how Mielke’s people had crawled through the archives for weeks, rooting out every vestige of an incriminating past, forcing so much paper through the Soviet shredding machines that they were jammed within hours. But this breakdown had not deterred the Stasi, who had continued by hand, tearing each page into four equal squares that, by the end of their labors, were enough to fill 16,000 sacks. The plan had been to transport these to the edge of the city and incinerate them in giant bonfires, but due to the speed of events the Stasi had never gotten around to this; and when the sacks were found after reunification they were handed over to a team of civil servants charged with piecing everything back together. Even now, Katarina said, specialists were trying to match up dates and form fields and samples of handwriting, all those scraps of paper, like the pieces of a demented jigsaw puzzle. “In eight years,” she said, “they’ve reconstructed 300 sacks. Which means they won’t be finished for another 450 years!
     “So if you're willing to come back then, maybe we could help.”
   Normally, I would have given up and spent my time visiting the museums and restaurants Magdeburg had to offer, but the length of her response made me suspicious. There was something vulnerable about her: the blond dye hiding the premature grey of hair, the lines of worry creasing otherwise flawless skin, the sarcasm that seemed too forced to be anything but camouflage for her desperation and sweetness. “I don’t see why the Stasi would be interested in Erdész,” I said. “He died before they existed!”
    Here Katarina paused. Then, recovering herself, she shrugged and said the Stasi, who were a bit rushed for time, had proceeded with the logic of carpet bombing—destroying everything that fell in their path. If they happened upon incriminating files, she said, they would shred the adjacent documents as well, as if the evidence against them were viral, capable of infecting other innocent pages. “We’ve turned up so little on Erdész,” she said, “that I’m convinced his documents were among those destroyed.”
    As a result, Katarina felt there were many criminals—some of them not even connected to the communists—who had escaped prosecution inadvertently, with Mielke’s people erasing their records. Perhaps many heroes had been lost as well, men and women whose testament had been those documents, the only record of how they’d spoken up, resisted, or disappeared—now all shredded. “Of course,” she said, with the air of someone making a final statement, “given the events of the last century, to have been hero in Germany was often to have been a criminal, so maybe these people were lucky as well.” And then she stamped my paperwork with what appeared to be a big red “refusal of entry.”

But I was wrong about that. Two days later I was sitting in the lobby, wondering whether to attend an opera or ask Katarina to come for dinner, when the concierge handed me an envelope containing a pass for the archive, and instructions, poorly translated into English, on how to access its holdings.
   As Katarina said, the Landesarchiv contained almost nothing on Erdész. There were fifteen photographs, and some documents witnessing the times and locations of his birth, marriage, divorce, places of residence, and death. The photos were black and white, mostly of the street children Erdész had befriended as part of his plan to document the German underclass during the 1920s and 30s, and though I had seen all of them in reproduction before, they had never before been so clear that I could make out even the badges the children wore, each bearing a symbol of the edelweiss flower. Still, these documents weren’t enough to revive my interest in Erdész, and I spent most of my time in the archive looking for Katarina.
     Not that she was especially interested in me. She'd slip past whenever we met in the corridors, until one day I blocked her passage and asked why she'd given me access to the archive when she knew it contained nothing useful. “Well,” she began, “you look like the type who isn't easily discouraged, so I thought you should see for yourself." Then she pushed me aside, saying, "Now excuse me, please. I’m very busy." Her rejection was so absolute I felt disgusted with myself for lingering in the archive, pathetically hoping for attention, and for a short while I stopped going altogether.
     Instead, I would wander the Elbuferprommenade, through the Stadtpark, up along the Elbe, though the sights did nothing to dull my thoughts of Katarina, which by then had become constant.
It was on one of those walks that I finally met Daniel Weiss. I was in the Stadtpark, wondering which way to walk next, when a tall man, aged sixty or so, approached me, gently shook my hand, and said, “I am Daniel Weiss, and I’m sorry for being late.” He let go of my hand then, and appraised me for a minute. “Well, now that we’ve gotten to know one another,” he continued, “I have some things you would like to see, yes?” And he jerked his thumb awkwardly over his shoulder, though there was nothing in that direction other than trees and fields and sky; and for a moment I was frightened by this gesture, not because of where it was directing me, but because it didn’t seem to be directing me anywhere, not toward Magdeburg but toward some place that corresponded with the abandonment on his face.
     I stepped back from Weiss. “You’re more than late,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for two weeks!”
     “I wanted you to meet Katarina first,” he said. “I wanted you to form your own impression.”
     “I didn’t come here to spy on anyone.”
     “Please,” he said. “I will show it to you.”
     As he said this, still jerking his thumb over his shoulder, my fright faded as quickly as it had arrived. The gesture was no longer sinister but pathetic somehow, the repetitions of an obsessive, as if this thing with Katarina was all he had in life. And I felt sorry for Weiss then, not because I knew that no one, myself included, had ever gone where he wanted, but because as much as he tried to indicate this place as if he were out of it, it was clear he never would be, and that the motion of his hand was only an act, a reflex, though perhaps once, long ago, it had been hopeful. In the end, Weiss’s only power was to lead you away from him, repelling you with a loneliness so extreme that to be around him for any length of time was to risk being swallowed up, losing yourself in the vastness of his need. I turned and left him there.

So Weiss began secretly following me through Magdeburg. At first, I had no idea he was watching me. But soon after the meeting in the Stadtpark I found a photograph in my pocket. At first, I thought it was something I’d put there long ago and forgotten, but soon enough, whenever I retrieved my jacket from a museum coat-check, or lifted it off a chair in a restaurant, I would find something new inside—another photograph, a letter, a geneological chart, a photocopy of an old newspaper. They were obviously being planted there, and every day I'd add another few items to the pile accumulating on my hotel desk.
     But instead of examining these, I spent most of my time looking over my shoulder, trying to catch Weiss in the act. I didn’t feel threatened or annoyed, but rather entertained, as if it were a game. I even fantasized about the things I could do to thwart him: hiring actors to impersonate me so Weiss wouldn't know who to follow; stuffing my pockets full of the things he’d already planted, leaving no room for anything else; even ordering a suit without a single pocket in which to cram his bits of evidence.
     In the end, Weiss’s behavior completely distracted me from my depression over my father’s death, as if his determination to reveal his abandonment delivered me from my own. One day, tired of wandering the city, I sat down, sorted through the papers he'd put in my pocket, and came upon the story of Ada.

The letters were the most difficult to make out, not only because my German was weak, but because they were so marred by grammatical and spelling errors, and bad handwriting, that even a native speaker would have had trouble with them. Dated between 1942 and 1944, they had been written by a boy called Rudi to a girl called Ada. At first, I just scanned them, reading through the usual teenage endearments, but when I came upon the name László Erdész I began to pay attention. Rudi referred to him as a “protector,” the man who was “hiding” Ada. He also wrote of Ada’s pregnancy, and, near the end, of a baby, expressing concern over how long the war would last, and what would happen when the Red Army, moving relentlessly toward Berlin, finally arrived. The very last letter, dated January 12, 1944, mentioned names for the baby—Lorraine, Johanna, Ida, if it happened to be a girl; Walter, Aldous, Daniel, if it happened to be a boy—and then went on about what it was like to be a fugitive, not to be there for Ada, and finally the names of friends—Bartholomäus, Günther, Gustav, Johann, Franz, Adolf—who were “murdered last November.” Rudi wrote that he would need to “disappear” for a while, and then, without the bad handwriting faltering a bit, he signed the letter, “Love, László Erdész.” From what I could tell, he never wrote to Ada again.
     The photographs were less revealing than the letters, most of them bearing the faces of youths, and shot in dim places—alleyways, abandoned buildings, bars—though a few showed meadows, parks, and mountains. Despite the children’s tattered clothing and the impoverishment of the settings, they were almost always smiling, and wearing the edelweiss badges I’d seen earlier in the archives. Only one photo showed anyone over the age of 18. In it, a much older man leaned against the doorway of what was clearly a darkroom. Beside him stood a number of developing trays on a work bench, and overhead hung recently developed prints from a series of crisscrossing strings. This, I guessed, was Erdész. Judging from his appearance, and that of the room, the photo must have been taken during the last year of his life, when he was holed up in his cellar, taking shelter from the bombing raids. In the picture, he was cradling a baby.
     Finally, I looked through the genealogical charts and newspaper clippings, copied from originals so yellowed that they were almost illegible. The genealogies, or what appeared to be genealogies, were grouped by city—Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Duisberg, Essen, Dortmund, Oberhausen, Köln—and by gang affiliation rather than blood, with groups and sub-groups—Meuten, Swingjugend, Edelweißpiraten—designating who belonged with whom. There were dotted lines suggesting friendships and loyalties that crossed gang boundaries. Judging from the birth dates beside the names, the girls and boys had all been between the ages of twelve and seventeen. In some cases, the names of older boys—those who had turned eighteen too soon, making them eligible for conscription—were crossed off, accompanied by the places where they had fallen in battle. In others, more disturbingly, there was only the date on which they had died, and the disquieting fact that they were not yet eighteen, such as those Rudi had mentioned in his letter, who, as I would later learn, had been publicly hanged in Cologne in November of 1944. And lastly, there was the lingering mystery of Weiss’s notes, here and there, pointing out which boys had changed their names to László Erdész at the end of the war, and then disappeared.
    While I could have drawn all sorts of conclusions from this, I focused instead on the newspaper clippings, where I found examples of Erdész's commissioned photography, though most were so grainy I needed a magnifying glass to make out the details. The articles themselves, none of which were written by Erdész, detailed conditions in the trenches of World War One, the social upheavals resulting from the Treaty of Versaille, and the street-life of Weimar. All the clippings were dated 1933 or before.

Over the next few days it was the genealogies I returned to, especially those for the girls, whose lives had been easier for Weiss to map out than those of the boys. And it wasn’t long before I came across the information he'd wanted me to note: the fate of Ada, who was imprisoned after the war, and then resurfaced at the Landesarchiv, where she worked until her place was taken by Katarina Sielemann in 1987.
     With this discovery I stopped being entertained by Weiss and began to lose sleep, poring over the materials late into the night, then heading into the streets in the hopes of forcing a confrontation. But it would be another week before I caught sight of him again—or was allowed to catch sight of him—by which time I also noticed he’d failed to enter the name of Ada’s child, the one she’d had with Rudi, in his charts. But of course I already knew who the child was.

I returned to the Landesarchiv and for the first time since my arrival began searching for information in a rigorous way. I was no longer looking for Erdész but for Ada, though the end result was the same, since the holdings on her amounted to a handful of press photos: Ada in a crowd as the archives are officially reopened; Ada being interviewed about the arrest of three archivists accused of conspiring against the state; Ada receiving a medal from Mielke in a retrospective article published on the eve of the old man's death. What ultimately claimed my attention was another shot of Mielke from the same article, taken on the day in 1989 when he'd stepped up to the podium for the last time, and where—after years of hunting the enemies of the regime; and amassing his “cadre files” on everyone from common criminals right up to Erich Honecker; and engaging in surveillance so pervasive it was said there wasn’t a household he couldn’t walk through blindfolded—he still had the moral blindness to declare, “But I love, I love all people. . .” In the absence of information on Ada, it was this photo I looked at the longest, trying to determine, from the expression on Mielke’s face, how he’d spoken the word "love" without it curdling in his mouth.
    And yet, it was also easy to imagine Mielke standing by the podium and dreaming of the people who'd depended on him—their complicity, their nakedness, their willingness to whisper every secret—for these are the things every lover desires, as if the difference between wanting to enter another life and wanting to enter millions of other lives was only one of degree, or resources. And all that was needed to call it “love” was consent—their willingness to open up before you, which, in the end, Mielke must have felt he'd received. For he had belonged to a regime that had always known what everyone really wanted, repeating it over and over and over for the benefit of those who'd been too stubborn to admit it.
    This, of all the realizations I made that fall, was the most frightening of all: that when Mielke mounted that podium in 1989, and declared his love for all people, he had been telling the truth.
When I had exhausted the archives twice over—when it became clear that what little there was on Ada had been left on purpose, as it had for Erdész, to make sure their pasts never became notable for lack of evidence—I finally had another reason to speak with Katarina, which had been my hope all along. But I always seemed to arrive after she’d just left. “Oh, she was here a minute ago,” the attendants said. “If you run you will catch her.” And when I tried to make an appointment, the attendants either said I’d already seen all the holdings on Erdész, or told me Katarina had called in sick, or was on vacation, but they’d be sure to pass my message along. By this point, I was sure she was involved in the disappearance of the files.

When Katarina called, ten days later, I acted like a sixteen-year-old, pretending to be totally disinterested.
     “In all my years in the archive," she said, "I have only met one other person interested in Erdész.” And when I began to speak of the things Weiss had left in my pockets, and what they said about Erdész and Ada, Katarina’s voice became so dreamy I had to press my ear into the receiver to catch what she said.
    “You know,” she began, and without pausing for my response she described what it was like to watch the materials build up year after year in the archive, sedimenting on the shelves with the weight of time. “And yet," she said, "not once have I ever felt, inside there, as if I were in the midst of history.”
     “Katarina,” I said, “Weiss isn't searching for Erdész. He’s searching for you.”
     There was a pause as what I’d said sunk in, and then she lowered her voice even further, making it impossible to hear the emotion behind her words. She spoke of systems of classification, theories of sorting, of Achim Schluter and Benno Krieger and Dietmar Shapira, the team of archivists arrested on Mielke’s orders in 1972 for arguing that archives were an obscuring of the past by the present. For in determining the material to be archived—what deserved to be saved and what not—and the categories under which it was to be found—the subjects it did and did not pertain to—the past was never what happened, but what happened to it, according to whatever passed, at the moment, for the best way of organizing its traces. So Schluter, Krieger and Shapira had gazed backwards and reported seeing nothing but what they’d been told to see, and then they were quietly disappeared by a regime that had always insisted on its own historical inevitability, on the truth of the past as it had preserved it.
     She spoke, too, of those who’d come seeking information, the places in which they’d failed to find it, and how, years afterwards, she would come upon what they’d been looking for, filed in a location they’d never thought of searching. She spoke of their faces as unforgettable, distorted with hopelessness as they combed through the stacks of documentation—searching for lost ancestors, departed family, vanished children—much as Katarina would comb, after she’d found what they'd been after, through the lists of those who'd visited the archives, hoping that one of the names would click with the faces she remembered. But it was already too late, they were beyond caring for what they’d so desperately sought, and the careful records she kept in case they returned—directions to what they’d missed the first time—were useless, like so many maps to imaginary lands. And, finally, Katarina spoke of how she hated the archives, how she would leave the building, trying to lose herself in crowds. For they were the true archive, she said, the men and women on the street, with the stories they silently carried, all of which you would have to include, with the many inconsistencies they entailed, before you could be faithful to what had happened.
     Then, so quietly I couldn’t hear it, Katarina hung up the telephone.

To this day, I do not know what network, if any, Weiss was plugged into, but he seemed sensitive to how much I'd uncovered on Erdész, the archive, and Katarina. He showed up the afternoon of my phone call with her, sidling up to me on the sidewalk and asking whether I’d found out what she was hiding.
     When I didn't answer, Weiss led me along HegelStraße, past commuters and trees and shops and hotels, straight through the doors of the Landesarchiv. I let Weiss pull me along not because he no longer seemed comical to me, but because he'd become sad. You see, I knew what he was looking for now, and I couldn’t help being sympathetic to that, both of us trailing the ghosts of our vanished parents.
     He wasn't so much pulling as hanging onto me, the way a child might in a toy store too large to navigate alone. For over an hour, he guided me between rooms, shelves, and cabinets, fetching a page here, a file there, some photographs, a pamphlet, all from what seemed a hodgepodge of sections—municipal records on housing, statistics for national migration, Stasi informants, Soviet-era celebrity magazines.
     Weiss finally let go of my hand when we sat down. Then he carefully traced out for me the strand of history he’d spent all his life researching.
     He told me of the Edelweiss Pirates, the orphans and runaways of the cities of the Rhine—how these children had banded together, the songs they'd sung, their pride in fighting the Hitler Youth. He told me of their graffiti, the rocks tossed through the windows of factories, the sugar poured into Gestapo gas tanks, the leaflets distributed for the Allies near the end of the war, and even about some of their more targeted activities—explosions, sabotage, assassinations—though these were less frequent. He told me they were branded criminals by the Nazis, hunted down, sent to concentration camps, executed. Most tragic of all, Weiss said, was that most of them remained criminals in the eyes of the German governments that came after the war, who not only refused to recognize what they’d done as resistance, but even to discuss it, as if it were all just the usual vandalism by the usual delinquents.
     “I think Erdész saw himself as these children's protector," he said. "He helped them. I don’t know how, but he managed to get a lot of them—the boys, anyhow—papers under his own name.” He pointed to the indices for the issuance of identity papers between 1943 and 1945, picking out every instance where documents had been drawn up for yet another László Erdész. “It was an incredible risk,” he whistled.
     I looked at the documents in amazement. Weiss cross-referenced some of the photographs on the Gestapo’s wanted lists with the photographs that went into the passports. “My God,” I said.
     “Fear,” said Weiss, gazing into the archive. I knew he meant Katarina then, all those for whom fear has become automatic, every decision already made, an urge for protection so intense it becomes its own threat, as if the best way to keep your identity from being discovered is to destroy it once and for all. Most of those boys, as the years wore on, must have forgotten their own vanishing, their real selves lost in files and registers, having so totally become Erdész they were left with not the threat of discovery but the practice of fear, carried on so faithfully it was no longer a question of choice but of personality.
     “Of course, some of these children, especially the girls, couldn’t make it out,” Weiss said, grabbing my sleeve. “So they found other ways to survive.”
     For the first time, Weiss seemed not so much enigmatic as incoherent, as if speaking of himself was a skill he'd either avoided learning or been made to unlearn. He spoke of places he’d lived in—none of them, from what he said, for more than a few months—as if reaching for something else, the language of home, so that his descriptions were both alien and intimate. Closing my eyes, I could feel Weiss leading me through rooms, along corridors and stairwells, past apartments and homes that were not only locked but barricaded, sealed off from the outside, as if the worst threat of all were a knock on the door.
     From what Weiss said, this had been his work for as long as he could remember—moving from place to place as directed, sending back the information he’d gathered. But there was no way to determine when this job began, and when or if it had ended, since his story veered crazily through time—now describing events from the eyes of a child, now an adult, now a teenager, now an adolescent—as if he'd lost all sense of progression, or was picking through shards in the dark, emerging with whatever came to hand.
     He wasn’t sure if there were others like him, Weiss said, other “lost children," but when he wasn’t dreaming of Ada he was watching for signs of dispossession in those he passed on the street, stood beside on streetcars, observed in lobbies—anything that would identify another like him, an orphan of the war, children too numerous for people like Erdész to save. But there was so much dispossession then—so much removed, reapportioned—that it was impossible to tell the difference between those who’d lost possessions and prestige, and those like him who’d lost what could never be regained.
     It was only at night, exhausted from repeating what he’d seen and heard during the day, that Weiss saw them—the children of farmers, Nazi officials, soldiers—too young to recall the circumstances that separated them from their parents and left them in orphanages, adopted by the wrong people, put to work in service of the larger Soviet "family." He saw them on a map, points radiating in all directions, isolated men and women who might have formed a network, a web, a nation, if they'd only reached out. Then Weiss would open his eyes and the dream would fade, replaced by a nightmare far worse: the “lost children” did not exist, only one “lost child.” And he would think of his mother, reduced by then to an idea, a sound, “Ada,” which she must have whispered to him over and over during the last hours, hoping to imprint something of herself before leaving him in the care of those he would be safer with—or so she'd thought.
     “Ada was put to work in the archive by the party,” said Weiss. "There were many who received such favor. Those who had no training. Those who accepted because they were afraid to say no, or because they were already crazy.” Weiss looked at his hands. He didn’t need to say any more about men like Gábor Péter or Lavrenty Beria—a tailor and a peasant—who found themselves heading two of the most sophisticated police organizations of the twentieth century, with no expertise other than a lifetime of want, the inheritance of humiliation and insecurity and rage that they brought to the job.
     After that, Weiss looked up accusingly, as if I had tricked him into digressing. “I was separated from my mother too young to remember her,” he said. He had only her name, and a desire for information that sent him out searching, only to dispense with whatever he found because it was never the one thing he wanted. The men in the Stasi were endlessly impressed by Weiss’ work, knowing that because he would never find what he needed he would always be out there, rooting through whatever he was pointed towards like a perfect machine. And when, after the wall came down, he stumbled across the Pirates, and the image of Erdész cradling a baby, and Rudi's letters to a girl named Ada, he realized it had been kept from him. He realized, too, that because he could no longer pass this information along to the Stasi, he had no way of confirming its reality. For that is what they'd always done: taking what he'd overheard, or seen from the corner of his eye, or read between the lines, and transformed it into evidence and verdicts and truth—rewriting history to accord with what he'd delivered. It was what the quest for Ada had left in its wake—bits and pieces that were irrelevant to him but which had gone into a thousand indictments, the invention of the real. And now, when he needed it the most, there was no one to corroborate his findings, except me.
     “What if I don’t believe you?” I said. “What if I decide that your interest isn’t in finding Ada, but in exposing Katarina? What if your whole story is bullshit?”
     Weiss smiled, and for the first time he looked like an adult to me, revealing a barely contained cynicism. I could only wonder at the deprivation he’d endured, a lack so total that even the faintest of hope, such as finding his mother, must have been blinding in its brilliance, not because it threw off much light, but because his darkness was so total. “This isn’t a spy thriller,” he said. “It’s a melodrama. And the players are an orphan, a librarian, and a professor.”
     “But why choose me?” I asked. “Of all people?”
    “Why not?” he spat. “The rest . . .” he shrugged, “there weren’t many. When I told them what I’d gathered on Erdész they decided it wasn’t worth the trip.” He looked at me. “Please don’t think there’s anything special about you,” he added, biting at the words as they left his mouth. “I’ve seen it thousands of times: you could only feel close to your father when you hurt him. It is the proof of intimacy: to be able to show another just where his weaknesses are. And it was terrible—no?—realizing what your relationship was. I read it all in your letter," he said, waving his hand. "Not openly perhaps, but I’m good at subtext.” Weiss looked at me with a rage so overpowering I flinched. “Intimacy is power,” he continued, “but you're free to call it love if you like. It will help you tell Katarina everything.” He smiled. “You will be at the heart of her weakness.” Then Weiss jammed his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and walked away.
I don't know how long I stayed there, sitting by the high windows in the fading light, but by the end of it I'd convinced myself that Weiss really was crazy, and that Katarina needed to be warned about him. It took me a long time, I remember, not because it was especially hard to think of Weiss, but because of the other question his words had raised, which kept recurring to me no matter how I dismissed it: What did my “protection” of Katarina really amount to? After the security guard informed me the archive was closing, I went out onto the sidewalk and from there watched the light in Katarina's office.
     When she finally left, she was moving fast, and soon eluded me around Magdeburg's buildings. This had less to do with Katarina's speed than my own, since I was hanging back, uncertain about whether I was following for her sake, or because it was what Weiss wanted me to do. When she turned up again, grabbing my arm from behind and forcing me along, I knew Weiss was right: there was nothing special about me. I was only tripping from one accident to another along a map they'd planned well in advance.
    Katarina hustled me across Magdeburg, holding on as if we were a couple, even walking slightly behind as if I were in charge, and meanwhile pressing her fingers deep into my arm whenever she wanted me to turn, or speed up, or slow down. When we arrived at her building, it was disconcertingly quiet, the stairs taking our feet without a creak, the old banister so smooth there wasn’t a sound as our hands slid up it to the landing, where Katarina opened a door and together we stepped across the threshold.
     “How is Daniel?” she whispered, speaking for the first time all night.
     “Why did you destroy the files on Erdész?”
    “Ada did that,” she replied, walking over to a standing lamp and clicking it on. “I just made sure no one found out.” She stood before me. “The problem is, destruction always leaves its own record—a trace, an absence, of what should be there. Daniel has been very good at filling that emptiness with his imagination.” She smiled. “Ada was my friend,” she said. “Someone I helped.”
     From the way she spoke I didn't need to mention the Pirates. Katarina knew more about them than I ever would. Besides, it was no longer a question of what I asked, but of what she decided to tell me.
     “Ada was more loyal to Daniel than he will ever understand,” she said. Then Katarina listed off the many things Ada had done for the Stasi in the archives—the decades of information she’d hidden, shredded, or unearthed at opportune moments. In every way, her role had been the opposite of Daniel's. Unlike so many Germans, Ada had come through the war with her memory intact, never forgetting what her son looked like, or in whose care Erdész left him. She'd survived both the prison sentence handed to her for the acts of "vandalism" she'd engaged in with the Pirates, as well as her subsequent "rehabilitation" at the hands of her comrades in the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, who suggested she leave her "youthful foolishness" behind, and "serve the state" by helping restore the Landesarchiv. At first, it seemed to her an arbitrary decision—another job randomly handed out by the SED—though for one whole day, November 17th of 1954, it seemed like fate, or justice, as she finally accessed the files that told her where Daniel's guardians now lived. It was why she'd accepted the job in the archives to begin with—tracking her son down—and why she hadn't, in keeping with her instincts, refused to join the party.
     Like Daniel, she'd had only a name to go on—Weiss—given to her by Erdész on that winter night in 1944 when she said goodbye to her son and left for the place Erdész had arranged, where she would be protected both from bombing raids and the attentions of the Gestapo. He'd tried to find somewhere for both of them, but it was safer this way, and Ada agreed, knowing Daniel was more likely to be overlooked if he wasn't found with her. After all, he'd been born in Erdész's cellar, so his existence was unknown to the state. "You will be together when the war is over," Erdész had promised, because it would be over—very soon—of that he was sure. But of course it ended for Erdész sooner than that, with what fell straight from the belly of a Lancaster, reducing his home to rubble, and he never saw how accurate his prediction had been. Nor would he see how Ada's relief on learning that he'd entrusted Daniel to Etta and Franz Weiss—communists from the old days who'd survived the Nazi witch hunt of the 1930s—would turn to alarm when it became clear that the new regime in East Germany would differ from the previous in philosophy rather than practice. After all, the Weiss's allegiance had never been to Erdész or Ada, but to the Party, and when they were given starring roles in the new government, Daniel's history became property of the Stasi.
     And so, on the morning of November 18, 1954, a bland bureaucrat knocked on Ada's door and asked to be invited in for tea. He pointed out that she kept the sugar in the left cupboard, beneath the shelf where she'd stacked the information on Etta and Franz Weiss, which she'd discovered in the archive just yesterday. "But what your comrades really want to see," he said, stirring his tea, "is what you might find for us on László Erdész and the friends of your youth." Then, without once mentioning Daniel by name, he told her where her son was living, the sorts of grades he'd attained, and the type of scholarship that enabled him to study in Moscow, whistling at the time and money the state had invested in "that boy's future." The tone in which he uttered this last word, "future," with such finality that he cancelled its promise, indicated to Ada why she'd been released from jail and installed in the archives. They'd known what she wanted, and had made sure she got it, watching her scrounge among the paperwork with a passion that had nothing to do with helping the state. "We have names," he continued, "but, sadly, no faces. That's where you come in," he winked. "You were there, and you can match it all up." And in return for his refusal to even allude to Daniel ever again, Ada began to deliver the information she would have done anything—anything other than compromise her son—to keep hidden. It began with Erdész—who he'd been, what he'd done, how often he'd given away his identity—though she knew it would end with Rudi.
    It went on year after year, Katarina said, Ada handing over ledgers and census tracts, files and photographs, knowing it would be pored over, and noted, the people found, and then all of it—everything—would be shredded, and burned, and wiped away. She did what she could to make it last, giving it up in dribs and drabs, despite the impatience with which they greeted each small delivery. The last to go, the one Ada held out on for decades, for as long as she could, dreaming the wall might come down before she betrayed him: Rudi, arrested in the Spring of 1971, hauled outside while whispering the names of his children—the ones he'd had after Daniel—hoping the steam from his mouth would carry the words upward like a prayer. But the names went down, recorded by the Stasi in a notebook that eventually became property of the archive, and which Katarina burned one night, fulfilling Ada's last wish. "Because you see," said Katarina, "Ada went from hoping Daniel would find her to hoping he never would. So I shredded the record of her confessions to make her impossible to trace. Ada begged the Stasi not to tell Daniel about her," Katarina continued. "To stop him from discovering the person she'd become. That she'd killed his father." She preferred to stay a phantom, turned into something better by Daniel's imagination.
   "Nobody wanted the Pirates revealed," Katarina said, "not here, not in the west.” For the communists, it was important that the Nazis remain a select group, a cabal who'd hidden the truth. It was inconceivable that the working class would have lent themselves to fascism unless they’d been deceived, tricked into false consciousness. In the west the Pirates were troublesome because they reminded everyone of how little the Nazis had concealed, how nakedly they’d projected their goals, how much support they’d received. If the common excuse was that the regime had been too overpowering, that it exercised a brutality and fear too encompassing for resistance, then what about the children? If they could say “No,” why not everyone else? Unless, of course, no one else had wanted to say no. Unless they were too busy applauding.
     “Maybe it was easy for the pirates because they were too young to know the consequences.”
     “Well, that’s worse, isn’t it?” she said. “The only ones innocent enough to act were children.”
    I shrugged, unwilling to argue, and was suddenly overcome with a tiredness so extreme my legs buckled under me, forcing me to sit on a chair.
    “Ada was in over her head,” she said, indifferent to me. “By the time the wall came down she'd done too much not to be implicated.”
     “Daniel's a child, Katarina, a lost child.”
     “But a clever one, no? He knows what I did for Ada, the promise I made to keep her secret, to make sure Daniel never found her." Katarina came and stood above me. "What's really surprising," she said, "is that he knows you so well. Knows you will justify invading my life by telling yourself you're helping. Knows how I hate working at the archive, so you will be able to convince yourself you did me a favor by exposing what I've done there. And in that way you'll be able to avoid thinking of why you really watched and followed and pried into my past. Did you think that if I gave you my secret I'd be somehow dependent on you, the only person I had left? Or were you not really thinking that far ahead?
    "But of course none of this is what he's after," she said. And then, as I reached for her, Katarina pushed my hands away, returning to the far side of the room. "You realize that, I hope. All he really wants is to make me feel the way Ada felt," she said, holding back just enough of her voice to keep from snarling. "That's your real job here: to make me feel what it's like to live without my secrets being safe."
     And when I shook my head, as if by doing so I could convince both of us that she was wrong, on all counts, Katarina laughed. "You think Daniel needs you to find out for him what he already knows?" She smiled, "He's not getting his mother back. And I'm sure he's delighted that there's finally another couple of people suffering with his story." Here Katarina's laughter faded away. "Welcome to our Germany, Tamas."
     With that, her expression faded as well, and for one long moment I recalled the day in the park when I had rejected Daniel's plea, and those that came after, when he had pursued me through Magdeburg and I had led him on, all in preparation for the moment when he would tell me his story, and watch me greedily swallowing it, hoping it would bring me closer to Katarina. It never occurred to me that Daniel had wanted to remind me of this feeling—the way self-gratification hides behind ethics, the way desire makes its own law—one that Katarina, for entirely different reasons, would also count on. It's where I'd been all along, thinking I was helping the two of them, knowing what was best, when really they were at the heart of my weakness, playing on my need for closeness, for redemption. For Katarina knew I would relieve her of her promise to Ada while also allowing her to keep it—too ashamed to repeat what I'd heard, either to Weiss, or to anyone else. And when, after a silence, I finally rose to leave, I was ashamed—for her, for Weiss, for my father—for all those I had forced myself up against, trying to increase intimacy with violence, secrets with exposure, love with every betrayal.