The Moscow Sleepers

11

Dieter let himself into the house with his key. Pushing open the door, he stepped into the little entrance hall and called down the passage that led to the kitchen at the back of the house.

‘Irma. It’s me. I’m back.’

There was no reply, so he walked to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Irma,’ he called, more loudly this time. Again, silence. He was a little surprised, since she was almost always home by now. Even though she worked in her study most evenings, and on the weekends as well, Irma liked to be home when he returned from his week in Brussels.

She had done well in her career as a teacher, and was now Head of the Freitang school, a new Gymnasium for immigrant children – once they’d been mostly Afghans and Iraqis; now they’d been joined by Syrians fleeing that country’s never-ending spiral of violence. The Freitang did not discriminate between its pupils on grounds of race or national origin or religion, but it was nonetheless selective – all its students were of above average intelligence, and many of them were clearly gifted. Though most of them had survived extremely traumatic circumstances, they learned astonishingly fast – nearly all were fluent in German within a year, and soon after that were tackling the most difficult parts of the Gymnasium curriculum. The school was especially strong in IT, something that amused Dieter, since Irma was a self-confessed technophobe.

Leaving his case by the stairs, he went into the kitchen. There was no sign of Irma, and no note. He opened the fridge door, wondering what supper would be. Two pork chops sat on a plate and there was a bottle of Riesling, which he didn’t dare open, even though he would dearly like a drink. Irma rationed alcohol in the same way she rationed affection – as something enjoyed in strictly limited doses.

He went upstairs, dumped his bag on the bedroom floor and swapped his jacket for a jumper. At a bit of a loss what to do while he waited for Irma to come home, he went down the corridor and into the small room she used as a study. It looked out over their back garden and he peered through the window just in case she was out there, though he knew it was unlikely as it was he who was the gardener. There was no sign of her.

As he turned back to the door he noticed a piece of paper that had slipped down between the filing cabinet and Irma’s desk. He bent down and retrieved it, scanning it idly as he did so. It was a letter, addressed to Irma as Head of Freitang school, from the Director of the Lehrner Institute. He knew of the Institute; it was a local orphanage. In recent years, like similar institutions across Germany, it had been almost overwhelmed by the number of unaccompanied children who had arrived with the refugees flooding into Germany under Chancellor Merkel’s open-door policy. The Lehrner was unable to accommodate all of its quota of children, and had made a public appeal for private households to offer accommodation to some of the older children. The Institute retained responsibility for the children’s welfare but in many cases a close, almost fostering relationship developed between the children and their hosts. The brightest and most promising of the orphanage children were selected by the Freitang school for fast-track tuition, so Irma had many dealings with the orphanage as a result.

The opening sentence caught his eye, and piqued his curiosity. He read on:

Something niggled at Dieter as he finished reading. The letter was oddly phrased, more a personal appeal than a professional inquiry. Marthe Ritzenbach must be a very humane woman, he thought, to be so troubled by the family’s disquiet about this young man they had housed. But why had Irma not been more forthcoming? Surely there would be no harm in letting the Gravensteins know more about the young man.

He remembered now that a group of immigrant students from Freitang had gone to America the summer before. Had one of them stayed on for some reason? Why? And why had it been allowed? It seemed very odd, and when he heard the door opening downstairs and realised Irma had come home, he thought he would ask her about the letter. But he immediately thought better of it, envisaging her outrage that he had been ‘snooping’, and quickly put the letter back where he had found it, caught between the desk and the filing cabinet. When Irma came upstairs he was back in their bedroom, changing his clothes before they went downstairs to make supper.