Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

Planet Halina

Nicolaus sat in his cell, in the basement of the Stasi headquarters on Normannenstrasse, contemplating his crime against the State of pleasuring another man. The moist concrete floors, walls, and ceiling, covered in random cultures of black, gray, and brown mold, recalled those final days in the Bunker. Perhaps one escapes those circumstances only once per lifetime.

But letting Nicolaus die was not what the Stasi, under supervision of the NKVD, had in mind. The State was not going to waste the talents of a good-looking polyglot who, with a bit of training in spy craft, could become a powerful tool in this Cold War with the decadent West. In fact, what Nicolaus would learn for himself when he was granted access to Stasi records, was that his arrest at the men’s theater had been a trap. The man with whom Nicolaus had attempted the brief tryst, had also be recruited by the Stasi in the same way, in the same theater.

With that bit of entrapment, Nicolaus traded his career in public theater for the surreptitious theater of undercover agents. The standards for acting were as high, but the consequences of a bad performance were greater than a bad review. Encores were not showered with applause flowers, but with another document stolen, another individual compromised.

Yet, this indiscretion was not the calamity it might have been on the other side of the River Spree that divided East and West Berlin. Where East Berlin had purged all the penal codes enacted under the Reich as part of de-Nazification with a wire brush auto-de-fé, the West quietly retained Section 175 in which two men found kissing or holding hands were considered offenders of the State and could be executed. In Russia, the consequence for such acts was five years of mandatory hard labor.

Pyotr may have been better at sport, possessed of a photographic memory, and polymathic abilities, Nicolaus was the musician, linguist, and thespian of the family. The act of spying and acting were identical until the curtain fell en scene. The former was expected to appear at encore to be applauded, the latter expected to evaporate unsung, only to appear on another staged on a different day. A spy who became famous was doing it wrong and would soon be a corpse. Nicolaus could ad-lib on the boards and footlights with an adversary so convincingly, more than once had quick thinking kept him alive.

Within two years of learning and practicing his role, Nicolaus was administratively superior to the Stasi men who had arrested him in that theater two years prior; this was a bit of leverage he chose to withhold rather than exploit. He preferred the sensibility of former ally, the Japanese who counseled that “he who uses power, loses power.” His reputation for “getting the girl” grew, as it were, which usually meant swapping a briefcase or a document, and taking the occasional photo “in flagrante,” with and without “delicto.” He had grown addicted to the adrenaline and endorphin cocktail that came with spying, and his first love was abduction—a scientist here, a defector there—and in some cases, getting the girl meant getting an actual girl, requiring not just a little bit of acting on his part. He managed to earn himself his own office in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin with a view of the River Spree, something of an upgrade from the cell in the basement a few blocks away that he inhabited two years before.

Though almost always on the trail of someone or something, somewhere in the so-called Free World, Nicolaus always managed to attend the annual birthday rendezvous with Halina at their favorite Hofbräuhaus. He found himself charmed, as indeed everyone else who knew her, by the inner six-year-old surviving in her somehow, despite the very adult episodes of her life visiting her daily. She was completely oblivious to her limp and leg brace, such that if one were to inquire about her infirmity, she would be puzzled, her hands would go still, and drop to her sides, as if unaware of what on Earth the person might be referring.

On planet Halina, herself being its sole resident, one side of her brain was always creating, or, in her words, ‘making.’ During pauses in conversation, her hands would busy themselves to fold animals out of napkins, or miniature structures out of sticks, or flowers out of anything else within reach. She had a mind for how things connected, or rather, it was in her mind where natural or mechanical connections were visualized, with her eyes closed, often accompanied with hand and arm motions as if dancing by herself.

On one occasion, Nicolaus showed her a watch he had acquired on one of his trips to the West. It had a clear face that showed the gears rotating as they measured off the heartbeat of time, with a back that could be opened with a click to expose the greebling inside. Halina, being Halina, had to touch the components in motion, as if taking the watch’s pulse, a reversal of a watch’s traditional usage. The synergism of delicate cogs and springs formed a tapestry that she could reproduce in exact detail with only brief study, the overlapping and interlocking pieces somehow talking to her in a process she called ‘rozmowa21.’ Her ability to visualize complex interactions mentally was enhanced when she could close her eyes, imagine the interrelationships, moving her arms and body in what resembled modern dance.

As they departed, slightly inebriated, from this, their May 1st birthday recognition of 1963, neither could know that the events in the next few hours would, among other consequences, make these the last alcoholic beverages Halina would consume till their next birthday fete.

Zersetzung

Ulf began drinking the vodka the Volkspolizei sometimes left for him as they periodically searched apartments, moving vases, and turning baskets upside down. It was a type of psychological warfare that they had perfected into an art, giving it its own name, Zersetzung22. On one occasion, they left