We met her while going door to door. If it even makes sense to call it that in Grünwalde. Mostly we were going from Türsprechanlage to Türsprechanlage, slouched down in front of intercom banks outside the front of monotonous, four-story, communist-built apartment buildings. When I was a new missionary, I would sometimes picture the Spirit reaching through the crackly microphone and pricking someone’s heart to let us in. By twenty months, experience had muted my imagination. I made peace with rejection by deciding that the Spirit mostly worked within the constraints of history.
There was more than enough of that here.
Some of the branch members had lived through four different currencies (Reichsmark, Ostmark, Deutschmark, Euro) and two failed utopias. I tried to remind Elder Garcia, who was still in the early hopeful phase, that we weren’t the first ones to pass through these streets with an offer. Door-to-door salesman and scam artists had poured in a decade ago, after the Wall fell. They’d taken advantage of the curiosity people had about the West and left a bitter wariness in its place. Germans called that time die Wende, the Change. In America, I’d been raised to think about it as a victory for freedom. People pouring through open checkpoints; the orchestra on TV playing Beethoven’s 9th symphony. People here remembered the bewilderment and betrayal that crept in after the violins faded away. The dizziness of seeing twenty different brands of toothpaste on a grocery store shelf for the first time and realizing that thousands of new, dumb little decisions were about to become an inescapable part of life. The resentment when a firm from Düsseldorf bought the one East German toothpaste factory and closed it before it could learn to compete. It made sense that people wanted to keep some doors shut.
When we did get let into a building, it was usually because someone expected a package and buzzed us up before we got a chance to explain who we were. Only once we climbed up four flights of stairs would they say, “I’m not interested,” “I don’t have time for that,” or occasionally—if they still had a soft spot for Karl Marx—“I am a Materialist.” I told Elder Garcia it was healthiest to treat rejection as baseline. No sense taking it in as a hundred different disappointments each block.
That’s why I was caught off guard when Frau K heard through the intercom that we were representatives of Jesus Christ with a message about how families can be together forever—and then buzzed us in. I was so used to getting hung up on, I almost missed my chance to grab the front door’s handle when the lock clicked open. She didn’t make us talk more at her apartment doorway, just waved us into the front room of her apartment, had us sit down, offered us chamomile tea. Not coffee or black tea or some mixed iced tea drink we’d have to awkwardly check ingredients on. If I’d thought more about it, I could’ve asked her right then why she let us in. But Elder Garcia was so excited to use the First Discussion script he’d memorized that the chance to get context passed us by.
It was fun to watch him teach. Despite the language barrier, he wasn’t afraid to launch into a conversation. He asked Frau K what she would think if she knew her marriage didn’t have to end when she died. She told him she wasn’t married. In his delightfully unselfconscious German, Elder Garcia said something that must’ve sounded like, “I also have not a wife yet, but maybe when I go home, I find her. Maybe you are still find someone, too?” That got Frau K, who looked to be in her late sixties, to crack a smile. She had a boyfriend, she said. It was nice to have someone to go on walks with.
Elder Garcia’s German was much better when he switched over to the First Discussion lines, which he was really close to having down. I let him take the lead on the lesson and he did really well. Whenever it took him a second to remember what to say next, he’d just use “I love it” as a filler: “I love it that we are all children of God,” “I love it that our Heavenly Father wants us to understand his plan of salvation,” “I love it that Joseph Smith went into the woods. And I love it that he prayed.”
Through all this, Frau K was fairly quiet. Sometimes, I’d see her studying Elder Garcia’s face, as if trying to weigh the messenger along with the message. She took Joseph Smith’s story in stride. When we asked her to pray, she shook her head and said she wasn’t ready. But she accepted a Book of Mormon, promised to read the passages we bookmarked, and made an appointment for a few days later. Since she was retired, she was happy to meet with us in the morning hours. (That was technically good news; the mission wanted us to spend evenings on “finding” activities, since there were fewer people at home mornings to turn us away.)
“Wow,” Elder Garcia said as soon as we left. “Is it just me or was she, like, a golden investigator?”
I shrugged. It’s hard to untemper expectations. “I’m not sure yet what she wants from us,” I said. Some people just got lonely and liked to have guests to talk to. I didn’t want to make Elder Garcia jaded, but it was my job to train him. “It’s not always the gospel,” I pointed out.
“It’s something, though, right?” Elder Garcia gushed. “You can just tell.”
That was true. It felt like there was something she wanted to ask us or tell us. She just wasn’t sure how. I thought about people I’d taught who had grown up learning in schools that there was no God, then been transfixed the first time they saw someone pray. I admired their hunger. Then again, a guy last week looked like he really wanted something—and it turned out to be showing us his stamp collection. All through the next block, I kept hoping that what Frau K wanted matched what we had to offer. Or, at a minimum, that she wouldn’t stand us up. People changed their minds or flaked out all the time. But I found myself wishing to shield Elder Garcia this once.
She came through. For the second discussion, she even made cake. And Kinderkaffee. Elder Garcia hesitated when he saw the coffee cup, but he followed my lead when I drank. I made a mental note to explain later that it was made from barley or something. Members made it all the time. For now, I just put the sugar and cream near him. It took a while for most missionaries to start drinking their Kinderkaffee black like I did, savoring the contrast between the drink’s bitter and a cake’s subtle sweet.
Frau K had done her Book of Mormon reading, which was encouraging. But it was hard to get her to talk about it much. If people actually read the book, they often had opinions. Some felt like it spoke to them. Others were skeptical or bored. Frau K treated it more like homework. Just a task she had to do to keep meeting with us. We moved on to the discussion.
This time, our subject was the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Early on, I tried to ask a little about her background. She told me that she wasn’t raised religious. She said she was a Heidin, a heathen, meaning that she had never been baptized as a baby. But she said she’d known some Christians (not a given here). She knew a little about Jesus. She wondered about it all.
She listened politely as we talked about how Jesus was the Son of God, the ultimate example, and how he’d overcome death. “I love it that he rose on the third day,” Elder Garcia said. But she leaned forward when I got to the part about forgiveness.
And there it was. Unmistakable. The Spirit of God.
Elder Garcia was right: this meant something to her. Her eyes seemed to be asking me, “Do you really believe that?” And so I tried to answer the question she hadn’t asked. I told her I knew the feeling of divine forgiveness. I said Jesus already understood how we’d fallen and only wanted to help us back up.
At the risk of losing Elder Garcia, I left the discussion script next. I was supposed to tell Frau K we need to be clean to get back to God. I was supposed to ignore German cultural norms and immediately invite her to be baptized. But instead, I found myself talking about the sacrament. I told her how each week we broke bread that reminded us of Christ’s body. In the quiet of our little meeting rooms, people thought back over their sins and mistakes. And then, remembering Jesus, they let them go. They trusted, I said, in forgiveness. That’s what it means to have faith in Christ.
She smiled, a little sadly. “That sounds beautiful.”
I asked her if we could help her pray. And this time, she agreed. Her words were simple, halting. But sincere. She thanked God for sending us to her at this time in her life.
I asked her to come visit our sacrament meeting on Sunday. She hesitated.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” she told me.
“It doesn’t hurt to try,” I said.
She looked away. “I don’t know about that.”
But she made another appointment with us.
Outside, I caught up Elder Garcia on what we’d talked about. While waiting near the next few intercom banks for someone to tell us they weren’t interested, we played a round of “identify the concern.” The missionary instruction manual said that the way to reach people was to find out what held them back. A person who wavered about reading the Book of Mormon, for example, might distrust scripture outside the Bible—or they might not know how to read. Those two problems required different responses. To help a person who was investigating the Church, missionaries needed to be able to sleuth out the real concern.
Frau K hadn’t said that she didn’t want to come to church. She said it might not be a good idea.
“Maybe Church sounds too early?” Elder Garcia said. “Gotta get some weekend rest.”
Elder Garcia was smart to start with an obvious, practical concern. No need to look for some deep psychological or theological barrier when things like “sounds early” and “sounds boring” would do. But the tone of Frau K’s voice hadn’t sounded flippant. “I don’t know,” I said. “She seemed almost…scared?”
Elder Garcia chewed on the inside of his cheek. His thinking face. “Maybe she thinks we’re part of a cult,” he suggested. “And, like, she’s not sure what kind of weird rituals to expect.”
I nodded. “Could be. Plenty of people here think Methodists are a cult.” Even Catholics and Lutherans were not entirely beyond suspicion.
Elder Garcia laughed. “Can you imagine the members in our branch doing some crazy cultic ritual?” He paused to press another intercom button and waited a few seconds. No answer. “I mean, I guess they could be witches. You know, they’re everyone’s grandma on Sundays, but it’s all fun and games until they curse you.”
He had a point. We got the cult label when the Church was young. It was kind of funny it still stuck in Grünwalde. All the young people had left for Berlin or the West, and the remaining members’ average age was in in the seventies.
I thought about Sister Woltereit, who’d fed us dinner that Sunday. She’d made herself read the whole Book of Mormon before her baptism, she’s told us once, but had skipped the war chapters on every read since because they made her too sad. The most demanding thing I’d seen her do was insist we take leftovers home with us, because she couldn’t bear to see food go to waste. She made me think of a flower growing up through the cracks in a sidewalk—a tender soul in a tough world. Not exactly the cultist zealot stereotype.
Sister Sobek, the Relief Society President, had a fierce streak. The side eye she could give in branch council was withering. And I’d seen her stare people down. That hard edge had served her well. During the communist years, when people waited ages for a phone or washing machine, she arranged elaborate swaps to get people the things they needed. People still came by the meetinghouse sometimes looking for help, not from the Church but from her. Well, you couldn’t be a fixer like that if you were always letting people off the hook. I suppose Sister Sobek could have set up some dark sacrifice if she had a compelling reason. But then Sister Matz would probably come in, tell Sister Sobek to sit down for a rest, and clean the whole thing up before it started.
And in the branch, anything major would go through Sister Matz sooner or later. President Richter and Sister Sobek were officially in charge. But President Richter was scattered and spacey. He and his wife, former hippies and recent transplants from the West, looked like cult leaders from a mockumentary. With the possible exception of Sister Sobek, branch members accepted the Richters well. But it was clear that longtime members’ reflex was still to look to each other. And especially to Sister Matz.
Sister Matz was a stalwart in the old days. She was in her teens when the war ended; her family stayed and anchored the Grünwalde branch after the Soviets came. She’d been questioned, watched, and pressured, but always kept the faith. Her husband was branch president for years before he passed away. He was a legend. Everyone talked about the piercing conviction with which he spoke. The comfort of his hands in blessing on their heads. Sister Woltereit told us once that she’d seen him, in a dream or vision, stop by to check on the branch about a month after he died. Sister Sobek had told us how much she appreciated his example of quiet dignity. In the more informal culture after the Change, she missed the way the after-meeting chatter used to give way to a respectful quiet each week when people saw the reverence with which he picked up and cleared away the sacrament trays. He’d had an authority beyond his office.
And, in that typically Mormon way, people assumed that a great male leader was the product of a steady wife. She was a good person to go to for advice in her own right, but she had an extra shine in their memories as the woman who made the man.
To be honest, that aura of authority did have a touch of the extraordinary. Maybe years ago it would’ve been easier to envision the branch as a cult. To feel drawn to and apprehensive of that charisma.
For a long time, of course, the branch was legitimately subversive. When the state tells you what to believe, faith becomes a form of rebellion. East German members didn’t back down when career tracks were closed to them. One time when I was on an exchange in Berlin, a brother told me the story of how Sister Matz’s son was baptized. He turned eight while the government was cracking down hard on the Church, so she and her husband had invited the storyteller and another brother over for the weekend. A little after midnight, Brother and Sister Matz woke everyone up and went for a drive—with the headlights off. In the countryside, they’d pulled off the road and driven on a dirt track through some woods down to the side of a silent lake. Father and son waded out into the water; Sister Matz flipped the headlights on just long enough for their two guests to witness the ordinance. Sacred. And secret.
That was all years ago. After the Change, when the branch went to rent new meeting rooms, they’d gotten a good deal because their prospective landlord asked a friend who’d worked in the Stasi what he knew about the Mormons. The secret police had been spying on the Saints for years. “You’ll be lucky if you can get them,” the former Stasi officer said. “They’ll keep the place clean, they’re nice to a fault, and they’ll always pay the rent on time.”
Maybe we should find that Stasi guy, I thought. See if he could drop by Frau K’s and tell her there was nothing to worry about.
A few days after the second discussion with Frau K, we stopped by to see Michael. He lived close to Sister Woltereit, in a neighborhood where every street had two names. Officially, there were named for stars in the socialist canon: Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse, Feuerbachstrasse. But people actually called them Danzigerstrasse, Königsbergerstrasse—nicknames that referred to cities that refugee residents had arrived from after their homes were handed over to Poles and Russians as reparations at the end of the war. It had remained a poorer part of town.
Michael was happy to see us. Anja—his girlfriend—didn’t join us; she was pregnant and feeling sick. But he had a new friend there, a guy named Luca. We were sitting on the couch by Michael, and Luca was sitting on a chair off to the side, at an angle that happened to put the calendar with a photo of a naked woman right behind him.
We asked Michael how things were going with his goal to keep the Word of Wisdom. He said the job at the grocery store really helped. He didn’t get so bored anymore. Quitting drinking was still good, but Anja didn’t like how wound up he’d get craving cigarettes. He’d reminded her it would be better for the baby if he didn’t smoke. She said it would be easier for her if he did. So they compromised, he said. No cigarettes; he was only smoking marijuana.
“That’s great that you’ve haven’t been drinking or smoking cigarettes,” I said. “Your Heavenly Father is proud of you. He wants you to be a good dad.” My eyes flicked for a moment to the burn scar on Michael’s arm, from when his mom had hit him with a hot pan when he was young. “I know it must be hard for Anja when you get tense. Maybe we can work on some things that can help you relax.”
We talked about saying a prayer. Singing. Going for a walk. Closing his eyes and imagining those woods where Joseph Smith went in the story he liked so much. I figured we’d talk to Anja before we specifically challenged him to try quitting marijuana again. In the meantime, I hoped this would help.
Luca started asking questions. You don’t drink? You’ve never had a drink? That sort of thing. Elder Garcia helped answer them. His eyes kept flicking behind Luca, then fixing back on Luca’s face.
He turned to Michael. “There is another thing. To be a good dad,” he said.
And then he launched straight into poorly memorized lines from the Fourth Discussion. The sacred power of procreation. Chastity. Pure thoughts. No sex before marriage.
“Oh yeah,” said Luca. “What country is it where they do that?”
“There are a lot of places where people value chastity,” I said.
“No, no,” said Luca. “I saw it in a documentary. There’s a country where they don’t have sex before marriage…but I can’t remember where.”
I turned to Michael. “What Elder Garcia is saying,” I told him, “is that being a good dad means being a good husband. For one thing, you don’t cheat on Anja.” The German word I knew for this was betrügen. Which also meant to deceive. Don’t deceive her, I prayed. You have such a good heart—and such a hard life. Please, somehow manage to become some part of what you are trying to be. I glanced at Elder Garcia and took the next step forward. “Another thing you can try,” I said, “is to avoid pornography. Is it OK if we take down your calendar?”
Michael gave me the same lopsided smile as when we’d asked to pour his alcohol down the drain. Kind of bemused, kind of dreamy. Like this stuff had never occurred to him but was a fascinating fantasy. He got up to take it down himself. “OK,” he said. “Why not?”
“Come on,” Luca said to me. “You really don’t know the country? Aren’t you from there?”
A little later, we left Michael to his acts of faith and Luca to his continuing disbelief.
Elder Garcia was chipper again. It was nice the pornography hadn’t been too distracting; he was going to see more in living rooms and on streetside posters over the next two years. “Can you imagine meetings if everyone we’re teaching gets baptized?” he asked me. “Michael passing the sacrament. Frau K leading the music. The Schillers teaching Sunday school.”
I asked the Lord to help my unbelief.
We decided to swing down Königsbergerstrass to Sister Woltereit’s place. She was always happy to say a prayer with us for our investigators. We told her about Michael and how well he was doing. She told us she was praying for Anja and excited for the baby. “Every one of them brings a little light into the world, don’t you think?” she said.
“Yes, yes,” Elder Garcia said. Then he got serious. “We have another investigator who is fear to come to Church,” he said. “Why do you think she is fear? What should we say to her?”
Sister Woltereit nodded sympathetically. “I was afraid for a very long time,” she said. “But with the gospel, I don’t feel so scared anymore.”
I felt a sudden, terrible fierceness of loyalty to these women. For the hope they gave me. And for the ruins they found Christ inside.
We had an appointment the next day with the Schillers. Between Frau K, Michael, and the Schillers, it was shaping into quite a week. It was good to be teaching so many people, even though I felt in over my head with half of them. I was proud of Michael, but his streak of resolve didn’t feel like it could last. And the Schillers? They were the first Jehovah’s Witnesses I had really taught. I didn’t know what to expect.
Neither of them had been raised religious. They’d been such committed Socialist Unity Party members, actually, that Frau Schiller had a breakdown after the Change. It wasn’t just the promises that never came true: that her generation would achieve true communism. That the decadent West would collapse under its own weight. She’d been a mid-level Party leader. The worst part was finding out how many colleagues had been cheating the system the whole time.
The Witnesses had given her something else to believe in. Herr Schiller was just happy to see her engaging with anything again. He started meeting with the Witnesses, too, and slowly swapped out the rhythms of one ideology for another. For several years, they were really happy in that faith. It held their world together nicely, until their daughter became a Goth and moved in with her boyfriend. At the Kingdom Hall, she got disfellowshipped. For Jehovah’s Witnesses, that apparently affected more than religious responsibilities and ordinances; they were supposed to cut ties. Even as parents, the Schillers were advised to limit interactions down to the necessary. “I’m her mother,” Frau Schiller told the Elder who gave her the instruction. “It’s all necessary.” He hadn’t pressed the issue. But it bothered her.
We’d met with the daughter and her boyfriend a few weeks earlier, when they were visiting from Berlin. The boyfriend was a really nice guy. We didn’t do a formal missionary lesson, mostly talked about museums they liked. Mentioned in passing that we had a different way of thinking about Jesus. Before we left, we asked the daughter if she would pray for us. She said yes. It was the first time in a long time she’d prayed out loud.
This week, when we followed up with Frau and Herr Schiller about their reading in the Book of Mormon, Frau Schiller gushed. She was loving it. She said she felt close to God when she read. Her whole day seemed to go better.
“That’s the Holy Ghost, telling you it’s true,” Elder Garcia said.
“Is it?’ Herr Schiller asked. “Or is she just remembering what it was like when we first started reading the Bible?”
“Ask for yourself,” I suggested. “Pray for an answer.”
Herr Schiller shook his head. He looked at his wife. He seemed tired. “We already have a place,” he said, his tone a little put out and a little pleading. We talked a little more but didn’t make any progress.
In another situation, Frau Schiller might convert. But she probably wouldn’t do it alone. And Herr Schiller seemed so uncomfortable. The Witnesses had helped his family at a dark time. Praying about the truth of another religion didn’t seem to strike him as an experiment so much as an infidelity. And he’d already been through so many changes.
On the other hand, Elder Garcia was getting to me and I couldn’t help but imagine the Schillers as members. I thought about Sister Woltereit and Sister Matz asking after their daughter. Sister Sobek swinging by, hanging out with her, and the two of them turning into snarky friends.
People had so many reasons to say no to what we asked them. And only these unseen hopes as reasons to say yes. Where was the line between respecting their agency, and nudging them toward the leap of faith?
The next time we saw Frau K, we prayed for her heart to be open. We taught about the Restoration—how God had taken something broken and put it back together a long time later, at the far end of history. And then, working from Elder Garcia’s guesses, we worked to address her maybe-concerns. We didn’t come right out and say that we’re not a cult, because that makes you sound like you are. Rumor’s logic is perverse like that. Once you’re stuck in one story, any attempt to explain just digs you in. Instead, we talked in detail about what Sunday meetings look like. We described sacrament meeting talks and the hymns. Told her about Sunday school and the funny story Sister Sobek had shared just last week. We mentioned Relief Society meetings, where she’d be with other women and talk about life. We gave her starting times for each meeting. Mentioned that sometimes, people tried coming to just one.
Frau K shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
Elder Garcia looked over at me. It was time to be bold. But I didn’t know how. Something felt off.
Garcia saw me waver and dived in. “When we talked about how the truth is broken, you felt something?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I felt sad.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “All those people. Waiting all that time.”
“But happy at the end,” Elder Garcia said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “It’s a nice idea. Everything restored.”
“You’ll come to Church with us this Sunday?” he said. “Come and see?”
Her eyes darted to me. Hope seemed to be wrestling panic. “You should ask them first,” she said.
“Ask who?” said Elder Garcia.
“The people at your church,” said Frau K. “Ask them if it’s all right.”
Then she got out her calendar and asked when we could come again.
Outside, Elder Garcia turned to me. “Is she weirdly polite?” he asked. “Or shy? Do people here usually want members’ permission to come to church?”
I shook my head. “First time someone’s ever said something like that to me.”
We made our way toward the next block of apartment buildings. I braced myself for the coming hours of muffled-intercom conversations.
“What should we do about Frau K?” Elder Garcia asked me as we walked.
I thought about it. “We take her at her word,” I suggested. “We ask at branch council if they want her to come, and then we go back and tell her that of course they do.”
It was windy that afternoon, with just a little sharpness to the cold. Members would say yes, right? What reason would they have not to?
The more I thought about it, the more the question bugged me.
Elder Garcia was apparently thinking about Frau K, too, as he shivered on the street. “I could use some fake coffee right now,” he said. “You think Frau K would mind if we went back and asked for an extra cup for the road?”
I laughed. Then felt a stab of embarrassment, remembering a guy I taught in Zwickau. He’d been friendly, interested at least in us, and maybe also in the Church. And then we swung by to say hi on a holiday and it was like we’d crossed a line. Went from friendly to smothering, exotic to cultish, in a single conversation through the intercom. “We should probably wait,” I said. “Besides, she might offer us real coffee this time, and then we’d have to explain the whole Word of Wisdom. No offense, Elder, but I’d rather have her meet some normal people who live it first.”
He didn’t laugh. “I don’t think the Word of Wisdom will be a problem for her,” he mused. “If she had a big issue with anything, she probably would have offered it to us by now. Maybe she’s one of those people who’s already like halfway Mormon.”
And that’s when it hit me. We’d asked her to come to Church. We’d never asked if she had been before. Had we? I thought back over our visits. Maybe it wasn’t information about the gospel she wanted from us. Just the fresh contact.
What if she didn’t want to come because she had already left?
I thought about the Schillers. We didn’t cut people off like Jehovah Witnesses did, but our religion was intense enough that people might feel like they had to burn some bridges to really get away. Or maybe there’d been some falling out. Maybe she’d tangled with Sister Sobek. Or: at some point, Mormon niceness must wear out. Maybe if you pushed enough, Sister Woltereit pushed back. And what would President Matz have done back in the day if someone betrayed a member or broke a major commandment?
I was getting ahead of myself. Just because someone served us Kinderkaffee didn’t make them secretly Mormon. Maybe Frau K was just generally anxious. Maybe she’d had a hard time in the war years, like Sister Woltereit, and had been left insecure enough that nothing would feel safe at first. But the branch would turn out to be a safe place for her. Hopefully. Probably. Surely. A place she could gather with sisters her age who understood what she’d been through.
On Sunday morning, at branch council, we talked through our investigators. We got through the miracles in Michael’s life and the bracketed question of marijuana. Went over Herr Schiller and the difficulty of change. And then we mentioned that we had a new investigator. Frau K.
When I mentioned Frau K, Sister Sobek stopped doodling in her notebook.
“She asked us if the members would be OK with her coming here,” I said.
“Of course,” President Richter said. “It says right on the door that visitors are welcome.” He gave me a puzzled look. “You don’t have to ask us that, Elders,” he said slowly.
I tried not to be annoyed by his tone. Like the people who let us in because we were foreigners, and wanted to make…sure…we…could…understand. I wasn’t the one who’d come up with the question.
As we talked through items on the agenda—meals for a sick sister and an upcoming activity—Sister Sobek kept looking over at me. Sharp, assessing glances. I couldn’t help but think about people who’d come by looking for her in the few months I’d been serving here. And I couldn’t help wondering if my question wasn’t so stupid after all.
She walked beside me as we headed into sacrament meeting. “There’s a very specific reason she would ask,” she said.
“Which is?”
Sister Sobek seemed to weigh me for a moment, then shook her head. “That’s all you need to know.” And before I could respond, she walked off to play the prelude music.
My goodness, I thought. Because missionaries aren’t supposed to swear.
A very specific reason. I took my place in the shallow hallway, shaking members’ hands as they arrived at the meeting rooms. Everyone we taught had a history. But Frau K had a history here. With one or more people in this building.
It wasn’t the Richters. He hadn’t recognized Frau K’s name. And they belonged to a different world, haunted by totally different ghosts, as if the Wall still ran through the Spirit World. It must be someone from the East. This wound was old and deep enough to have left a gnarled scar.
Why was Sister Sobek holding out on me? She was usually so blunt.
Was she covering for someone? Someone gentle, vulnerable. I thought back to a couple I’d taught in Erfurt. Such warm people—former athletic organizers, used to building international relationships and hosting all kinds of guests. I remembered the day they rushed us in to comfort us over an American space shuttle disaster we hadn’t even heard about. And I remembered the evening the wife broke down in tears after a visit to the state archives. Apparently, the government had recently decided that people had a right to learn what was had been said about them in the old Stasi files—and who said it. In her file, she’d learned that close friends, people who shared their table for monthly dinners for years, had been informing on them.
Yes. Sister Woltereit could have secrets. Sister Matz could have secrets. Anyone could have a hundred different reasons not to trust Frau K.
I slipped into the back row as the meeting started. No visitors this week. Just us, and the branch, and Jesus’ wounded body, tucked beneath a white sheet.
But when Sister Sobek started playing the sacrament hymn, I remembered Frau K leaning forward as I talked about forgiveness. Her tearing up about how truth was splintered into pieces and broken for years, until God called a young man to put the pieces back together.
By the time sacrament meeting ended, I was feeling determined. I pulled Sister Sobek aside before Sunday school. Elder Garcia looked at me uneasily, torn between the pull of the classroom and that invisible string of obligation to stay with one’s companion in sight.
“We didn’t ask if there was a reason,” I said to Sister Sobek. “We asked if it’s OK for Frau K to come to Church.”
There was fire in her eyes. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Then tell me,” I insisted. “Help me understand what’s going on.”
“Elder,” she said. “I’ve been here a long time. You’re here for a very short time. You’re never really going to understand.”
She was right. But that also wasn’t enough. “We owe her an answer,” I said. “You weren’t there to see her ask. You haven’t heard her pray. There’s something she wants to know.”
“I’m sure there is,” Sister Sobek snapped. Then she paused. Searched my face again. Weighing me? Or, through me, trying to weigh her? “She prayed?” she asked.
I nodded.
The fire in her started to fade. She looked tired without it. Older. “It’s not my story to tell,” Sister Sobek said. She met my eyes again. “Don’t say anything about Frau K now…but this week, go visit with Sister Matz.”
I didn’t know if we were seeing Sister Matz for an explanation or as the arbiter of last resort. The one to decide whether the branch should accept or avoid whatever situation we’d stumbled into. Maybe it wasn’t our place to know. Just to make the appeal.
We had an appointment with Frau K on Wednesday morning, so we visited Sister Matz on Tuesday night. She lived on Judengasse, Jews’ alley, where no Jews had lived for almost sixty years. But where even the stones remembered their footsteps.
We made our way up the stairs and she welcomed us in. Sat us down at the table with peppermint tea. Her tone was kind. Grandmotherly. She poured encouragement onto Elder Garcia. His face brightened. I remembered that feeling, back when I was new. The prayers of women like this had carried me through my mission. For a moment, I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask anything. Sister Sobek was right. I wouldn’t be here long.
“We’re teaching Frau K,” I said anyway.
“Oh,” said Sister Matz. Her voice caught. Slight enough I might not have noticed if I wasn’t already on edge. “How is that going?”
“We invited her to Church. She said she wasn’t sure that was a good idea. She said to ask first.”
Sister Matz was quiet for a moment. “Do you think she’s serious about it?” she asked.
Elder Garcia chimed in. “She reads everything we ask in the Book of Mormon,” he said. “She prays. We think she should come. Of course.”
Sister Matz took a deep breath. “It’s natural that would be next,” she said.
My hands felt cold. “It seemed to mean a lot to her when we talked about Jesus,” I said. For a moment, I let the thought hang between us. Then I tested my way forward. “She told us she knew some Christians once.”
Pain started to play across Sister Matz’s face. A part of me thought I should stop.
But I didn’t. “Sister Sobek said to talk to you,” I said. “Did you and Frau K know each other somehow?”
“That was years ago.” Sister Matz looked off into the distance. “I used to babysit for her, when our children were young. We were friends. Back then, you needed friends to depend on.” She looked at Elder Garcia. “And I liked her. She had such poise. But when we were together, she was so open. I felt like I could see into her heart.”
It was hard for me to picture. The Frau K I knew was so cautious, reserved. Though we’d seen flashes of humor. Of vulnerability. That was, I supposed, what had brought us here.
“Her son was six and her daughter was four when I noticed that she was expecting another child. She didn’t say anything about it, but I could tell. I started to knit a pair of yellow baby shoes.” Her voice slowed. “I couldn’t believe it when her husband left her. While she was pregnant? How did he dare?”
Sister Matz swallowed. “And then it all came out. Her husband wasn’t the father.” She shifted in her chair. “Sometimes while I was watching her children, she was with my husband. The baby was his.”
I thought of Frau K, hearing our voice through the intercom. Deciding to buzz us in.
“She gave him up for adoption. The child. I never gave him those shoes.” She absently bit her lip. “He contacted my children a year ago, after the old adoption files opened up. He grew up in Jena. Had a nice life. My children were happy to get to know him but hurt to find out about their father. We’d only lost him a few years before, and to lose a part of their idea of him, too? It was hard. I couldn’t blame them. It broke me at first.” The words still seemed to cost her something. After all this time. “I almost left, like Frau K’s husband had. I understand how they would feel deceived.”
Her eyes met mine. “But repentance made him the man he was. I wish they knew that. Before, he was different. Everything that happened—it woke him up somehow. I decided to stay. I decided to see who he could be. Who we could be together.” She took a handkerchief and patted at the corners of her eyes. “And he was better. Braver.”
She took a breath. Then she leaned forward and grabbed my hand. Firmly. “Tell her to come,” Sister Matz said. “Tell her I wouldn’t want to stand in her way.”
When we told Frau K, her chest started to shake, wracked with silent sobs. Then she straightened, regained composure. Thanked us.
She said she would come to church.
That Sunday, Sister Matz kept turning to glance at the door. Was she worried? Hopeful? Resigned? Elder Garcia kept looking, too.
Watching them watch was plenty. I quit looking behind my back.
She never showed.
That afternoon, we went by Frau K’s apartment. But when we pressed the Türsprechanlage, a male voice answered. “She doesn’t need you to come by anymore,” the man said. He hung up.
We debated but decided to come back on Wednesday at our usual time. There wasn’t anyone else there this time. Frau K buzzed us in. On Sunday, she said, her boyfriend saw her walking away in a dress and asked where she was headed. He had ideas about us, about churches. They’d fought about it a little. She wanted to come. But she didn’t want to lose him.
We told her that choice is a gift from God. It was up to her.
She did not make another appointment with us.
“That’s it?” Elder Garcia asked afterward.
“Probably,” I said. At least until some other missionaries rang her bell again.
We visited Michael next. Anja dragged herself down to the couch this time to talk for a few minutes. She was still feeling miserable. Irritable. I wished that people could put their lives on pause long enough to take in our message. It didn’t feel fair that they had to make up their minds about what to do with this life while they were so much in the middle of it. The next week, Sister Matz asked us if Frau K was still coming. We told her the story. She seemed sad at first. Then kind of annoyed. “Her boyfriend said no?” She shook her head. “All these years later—my goodness, I’m about to become a great-grandmother—and that’s how she’s looking for happiness?”
We shrugged. That’s missionary work, I thought. Watching people take a few stumbling steps, then fall down. Maybe for God it’s like watching a toddler learn to walk. But we don’t see if they ever get up again. So for us, it feels more like half a game of peek-a-boo, just watching people disappear.
Maybe we planted a seed. Missionaries like to think that. Or maybe, this time around, getting Frau K to Church was never the point. Maybe two women just needed the chance to face forgiveness. Try it on for size.
Elder Garcia was pretty down about the whole thing. “Do you think she ever really wanted to come?” he asked as we hit the streets. “Or did she only let us in to begin with so she could find out what Sister Matz would say?” He kicked a pebble down the road. “I feel used.”
I watched the pebble roll to a stop. “I don’t think Frau K knew what she wanted.” I looked out across the block, full of human soul shrouded under concrete walls. “What we’re really looking for? Whether we’re being totally honest with ourselves? That’s always a bit of a mystery.”
But we walked up to the next intercom bank anyway. And we pressed a button.
— & —
James Goldberg is hopelessly devoted to Mormon literature. He has won Association for Mormon Letters annual awards in Drama, Novel, and Creative Nonfiction and is a recipient of the Orson F. Whitney Outstanding Achievement Award from Storymakers. He is a founding editor of the Mormon Lit Blitz microliterature contest. His book-length works include The Five Books of Jesus, Let Me Drown with Moses, and Tales of the Chelm First Ward. By day, he writes for the Church History Department.
