A short time later, a young family moved into a vacant attic apartment in the villa. Curious, we took a look.
The apartment opposite was also unoccupied. A huge apartment, the long corridor alone had ten doors. Chris’s sister was present at the viewing and said she would be happy to move into the apartment, provided we got it. The next day, the two women arrived, beaming with joy, with the move-in permit from the housing office.
They had been granted the apartment without any difficulties, even though they had not even applied for it. None of us had any idea that the apartment had long since been removed from the city’s rentable housing stock due to unacceptable damage.
At the time of our first cursory inspection, the apartment merely made a very worn-out impression because all the defects remained hidden in the glow of the bright summer sun. With zeal, the women began the cleanup, giving the apartment its first friendly look with paint and wallpaper.
The girls were happy, each had their own living area, only kitchen and toilet they had to share. However, their unexpected happiness was short-lived. On television and in the press, one could see and read almost daily that a huge gas deposit was being developed in northwestern Siberia.
Now the state-owned Soviet energy giant Gazprom was planning a natural gas pipeline across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to the western border of the GDR. All socialist states were to participate in the construction and share in the gas supplies according to their performance.
The media kept quiet about the fact that the lion’s share of the natural gas was intended primarily for the Federal Republic and other Western capitalist countries in exchange for foreign currency.
Instead, the huge project was presented with much propaganda hype as a socialist friendship and youth project and was given the epithet ‘Druzhba route’ – ‘route of friendship.’
I remembered the potato drive under waving blue FDJ flags at the beginning of my student days, although the potato furrows, which seemed endless to me at the time, could not be compared to the thousands of kilometers of natural gas pipeline.
Despite this memory, it would never have occurred to me that I would very soon be involved in this politically highly explosive project. The technical director of the combine management wished to speak to me. That was unusual.
A sympathetic type, as it turned out during the greeting. The director addressed me as ‘you’ and handed me a typewritten copy of several pages with the following instructions:
‘Read the letter carefully. Your task is to clarify what specific services our combine will have to provide in the construction of the natural gas pipeline. If you agree, I will immediately take you on in my engineering department, and you will report only to me. You will have a completely free hand in solving the task. When we have clarified what our combine has to do, we’ll see.’
I didn’t have the slightest idea what was in store for me and how difficult this unusual assignment would be, but I agreed without hesitation. A better opportunity would not present itself again to get rid of the Rote Hilde and her pseudo-communists, who were mouthing the ‘victory of socialism’ at every third sentence.
‘Well then, good luck!’ the director said delightedly, patted me on the shoulder and dismissed me. 𝓣𝓸 𝓑𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓾𝓮𝓭…
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