Brandenburg by Henry Porter

any quantity. They wanted him to know there was nothing they could not find in their files. They told him plainly that they were even acquainted with his sexual preferences. Rosenharte smiled at this. ‘By preferences you mean that I prefer women to men.’
    ‘You know what we mean,’ snapped Richter. ‘What you like to do in bed.’
    ‘I like to fool around a bit, talk, drink, make love and go to sleep. What about you? Perhaps you can suggest more interesting activities, Richter. Boys, poodles, leather-tell me.’
    ‘You’re being frivolous, Rosenharte.’
    ‘I didn’t raise the subject of relationships. You did. Anyway, I would like to know what these women reported my preferences to be. What else did they say? Does the Stasi have a rating system of sexual prowess? Perhaps you’ve developed a secret scale of performance? Did you talk to my ex-wife, Helga? Well, of course you would hardly get the most flattering portrait of me from her.’ She had been a bleakly beautiful woman: tall, fine-boned and in some ways like a Flemish Madonna with her white skin and tranquillity, which he had mistaken for a kind of inner grace. But after a year or so there was never any real conversation and the sex had faded. What she liked to do most was to clean and sweep wearing a pressed pinafore with the strings tied tightly around her waist. She watched television incessantly without comment or the slightest particle of curiosity. Why on earth had he married her? Well, she’d seduced him and he had been blinded by her extraordinary lovemaking. And of course he loved to see her in the flesh, rising in the morning, drying herself after a shower. She was exquisite and he wanted her as his. What a damned fool he had been.
    ‘It is understood that she left you because of your unreasonable demands and habitual intoxication.’
    In a way they were right. After a period trying to find out what was wrong he gave up and spent his evenings with friends or reading and drinking in any bar that stayed open late enough. A year into their marriage, Konrad gently asked that she should not be brought out to the farmhouse where he lived with Else. One of the group of people who met there had good reason to believe that she had reported what he had said to the Stasi. Nothing was ever proved but this was the beginning of the end. Rosenharte almost wondered whether she had been instructed to marry him to keep an eye on Konrad’s circle.
    The survey of his life moved to Marie Theresa Rosenharte’s death of untreatable cancer three years before. It was said, by Richter’s nameless sources, that Rosenharte had shown the poor woman not the slightest help or support. He laughed at them because the lie was so preposterous. He and Konnie had not left her bedside for three weeks and they had been devastated when she died.
    Richter implied that on the occasions Rosenharte did help Else, when Konrad was in Bautzen prison, he had an ulterior motive: to seduce her.
    He let them see that he was troubled and hurt by these accusations, but all the time he watched them with a grim detachment, recognizing that when used during the full Stasi custody, in which a prisoner was skilfully disorientated from the outset, the technique would become very corrosive indeed. Konnie had told him that they had repeatedly said that Else had been unfaithful to him, an allegation that ironically allowed him to cling to his sanity because he knew it to be untrue. The lie had been his saviour.
    What Rosenharte was seeing now was an overture to the methodical dismantling of his personality that would take place if he made a mistake. Konnie had also told him what they did in Bautzen to consolidate the work done in Hohenschönhausen - the beatings and confinement in a space measuring twelve by fourteen inches, the back-breaking labour, the stomach and chest infections that spread like pollen in summer through the place they called the ‘Yellow Misery’.
    But why threaten him now? If