The Waiting Time by Gerald Seymour

‘You’ll just have to look for them, Corporal. Look a bit harder.’
    The telephone was ringing . . . Barnes could have found RUSSIAN MILITARY/ARMOUR/STATISTICS, she would have laid her hands on the Voronezh notes, and made his coffee and known how much milk she should add, and picked up the bloody telephone and not let it ring.
    Johnson said, bitter, ‘If you cannot find the files we need then would you, please, Corporal, answer the telephone?’
    They did not know the filing system she used. God, they were blind without her. The corporal was back at the door, the call was for him. She should transfer it to his extension. What was his extension number? But there wasn’t an extension number written on his telephone, new security measures. What was his bloody number? Too flustered to remember it. He pushed past the corporal and into the cubbyhole space. He thought, he was nearly certain, that Christie’s bloody dog snarled at him and showed its bloody teeth. The dog had its jaws close to the door of the wall safe. She should have been there, should have been handing him the telephone and rolling her eyes to the edge of impertinence.
    The corporal said it was the Colonel who wanted him. She’d have pulled a damn cheeky face.
    ‘Yes, sir, good morning, sir . . . At the gate? . . . A solicitor? Christ. . . Quoting what?. . . Manual of Military Law? I wouldn’t have the faintest idea where there’s one. Yes, liaise with Mr Perkins.. . Straight away, sir...’
    There had been 97,000 full-time officers working for the Staatssicherheitsdienst at the Zentrale on Normannen Strasse in Berlin and at the fifteen Bezirksverwaltungen across the former German Democratic Republic. What they learned from their informers, their surveillance, their telephone taps, the confessions made in their special cells, they wrote down. What they wrote down, they filed. What they filed was sent to the Archive at the Zentrale.
    He had flown from Cologne. Julius Goldstein had been driven east through Berlin to Normannen Strasse. He was met at the heavy barred doors of the Archive, his visit cleared ahead by telephone from the senior official of the Bf\7. He had priority status.
    It was said that, over the forty-five-year life-span of the old regime, the files collected, if put spine to spine, would stretch over a distance of 180 kilometres. The betrayal of family, friend and work colleague by the 175,000 informers listed the names, habits, thoughts and actions of six million of the GDR’s population. There were card-index cross-references by the million, photographs by the million, recordings from microphones and telephone intercepts on magnetic tape measured in metres by the million. The several levels of the Archive floors in the subterranean chambers were shored up with coal-pit timbers to take the weight of the files. The Minister for State Security had not trusted the modern invention of the computer, had believed it possible for power cuts to wipe an electronic archive. Yellowed low-quality paper filled the files, tired and thin, and on the paper were the reports, typed through tired, thin, low-quality ribbons.
    He gave the name of Hauptman Dieter Krause, the service number, and date of entry into the MfS. He was offered the help of three assistants. When Krause had first come to them, had first arrived in Cologne, the files had been searched. He thought his answer, when he telephoned Raub that evening, would be the same answer as it had been then.
    The Chancellor of reunified Germany had said the files gave off a ‘nauseous smell from which nothing good can be gained’. There were, more often now, cries for them to be closed and destroyed. More frequently now, they were accused of ‘destroying reputations, wrecking marriages, breaking friendships, ruining careers’. Former President von Weizsacker accused the German media of ‘smearing’ politicians with the rumour that they figured in the files. The files were about guilt. Guilt was