The Waiting Time

Chapter Ten

‘I can’t help you. You have travelled from England? A great journey. I have been here for three years only. I was a church youth leader in Schwerin.’

He was a pleasant-faced young man. He shrugged. He stood at the gate across the road from the church. By the side of the house his wife hung washing on a line. There was a good wind off the sea and sunshine. Small children played at the woman’s feet.

‘I can’t help you because I have never heard such a business spoken of in Rerik. I know the names of those who come to my church and they are the few in this town, the majority do not care to come. Those who worship with me have not talked of it.’

Josh sensed that, beside him, she sagged.

She had needed the help so that she would not have to bang on doors and traipse from road to road. They had talked about it in the car, the long drive on the small roads to the south, past the lone farms and the cranes pecking in the fields, the need to find the pastor because he would be able to unlock the doors.

‘I have to tell you, the past here, and everywhere through the East, is a closed book. You will not find people who wish to talk of the past. They were dark times and there are few who want light thrown on those times.’

He looked at her.

She was turning away. Her chin jutted in determination. It was a small community in a half-moon around the inner sea, bordered to the north by the peninsula. They had laid too great a weight on the pastor, at the heart of the community, opening doors that would otherwise be locked to them. She was walking away. He nodded to the young man, thanked him, for nothing, and there was pain on the young face that recognized the failure to help. Josh grimaced. He followed Tracy.

The voice called from behind him.

‘I came here three years ago when my predecessor died. There is somebody else who could perhaps be of assistance to you. There was a pastor who came to Rerik when my predecessor was away, he lives here now. He came every year to Rerik for twenty years. I cannot say that he would wish to talk of this matter.’

She was rooted still. Her head turned. She demanded and was given the name, the address, the direction.

‘People do not talk of the past, there is nothing of pride in the past.’

They left him frowning and walked by the old red-brick church with the steep tower where there was a nest box for kestrels. An elderly woman in a formal coat sat on a bench in the sunshine in the graveyard past the church. They walked on the small main street and a shop-keeper was sweeping hard at the snow on the pavement. A woman was pushing up the shutters from the front window of a craft shop. A workman from the council shovelled rubbish from the gutter into his wheeled bin. Josh could not sense the past here. Neat small homes and precious tidy shops. He could not sense that this was a place of murder in cold blood. They walked by the fenced gardens and the little wired compounds for chickens, and the sheds where a single pig was kept or a ewe or geese. It seemed to him to be a place of peace, but when he looked across the water, to the peninsula, he saw the faint shape of buildings among the trees.

They came to a bungalow, small and humble, facing the water and the peninsula and the wall of trees. It was newly painted. An old woman, grey-haired and small, was sweeping the path. Josh smiled at her and gave the name that he had been told. She was so helpful, so keen to please. Her husband, the retired pastor, was at the dentist in Bad Doberan and would return in two hours. He thanked her. The sun shone on the small bungalow. He felt foul: he blasted his way, her way, into a place of peace, where the past was forgotten.

He said briskly, ‘We’ve two hours to lose.’

Tracy gazed into his face. ‘You don’t believe it, do you? It’s like you don’t believe it happened.’

Josh said, ‘People go to old battlefields – Waterloo or the Somme, Sedgemoor or Culloden. They see farms and fields and woods. Yes, it’s hard to believe what happened.’

There was the hardness on her face, as if she thought him weak.

‘You were here?’

‘I was here, if you can believe it.’

‘Where? In the car? In a lay-by? Down the road by the shore where he launched from?’

She faced out and gazed on the inner sea, the Salzhaff. Short piers jutted into the water against which small fishing boats were tied. The light sparkled on the water and swans cruised.

‘No, I was in those bloody trees, if you can believe it.’ She jabbed her finger towards the line of poplars beside the road, and the bramble undergrowth between them. ‘I saw him taken from the water and brought back here, and I saw him fight from them and run. I didn’t see him again… I didn’t see him after he ran. I had to go to the car, drive to Berlin, drop the car, go through the checkpoint before midnight. I had to get out of this shit hole, if you can believe it.’

She took his arm and propelled him away from the piers, and the peace that denied the history. The spring sun was warm on Josh’s face. They went to lose two hours, went towards the gate of the base and the fence of rusted wire that straddled the narrow point of the peninsula.

‘It was sex. It was physical sex. I did not have to be an expert to learn what it was. Not love, I do not think it was anything more than a lust for the physical business of sex. It was not necessary for her to tell me, she wore it like the clothes on her. The desire for sex with the Russian was in her eyes and her hands.’

The sunlight came through the window, filtered by the dirt on the glass, and fell on the floor, which was filthy, and on the table, which had not been cleared from his morning meal, and struggled through the smoke of his cigarettes. Albert Perkins paced the small room without comment. He let the American sit and talk.

‘When she first came it was to regular classes in the evenings. Her husband handled me – that’s how she would have known about me. No, she did not know that I informed to her husband. He would have sent her, and it started out as the regular classes, English literature. But she was a busy woman, and it soon had gotten that she couldn’t make all the classes, she had meetings half the night, half the evenings of the week, something with the FDGB down in the shipyard. She asked if she could come here, fit in one-to-one classes when she didn’t have meetings. She paid. She was working, her husband was a top cat, she wasn’t short of money. She paid me and she came here. About a month after she’d started coming here, because of the way her talk was, liberated, I went to another officer who had handled me when Krause was away, sort of signed up for him with a different code- name and a different life, and talked about her to him. It wasn’t a big deal, at least I didn’t think so.’

Perkins wore his coat. The bar on the fire was not lit. The grimed dirt in the apartment seemed worse when the sunlight splayed on it than it had the evening before. Probably it was good that the wretched little man smoked because the cigarettes were strong enough to wipe out more pungent smells.

‘You said what you would do for me. It was South Carolina where I was raised, near to Summerville, up the river from Charleston. It was a crappy little place. You know, where we lived half the community turned out to see me head off on the bus to Charleston and the military, and half of that half wouldn’t have known where Germany was. I hated that place for its ignorance. My father had a bronchitis problem, he won’t have lasted. I think my mother would still be there. There were two sisters I had, younger than me, and I think they’d still be there because people from that sort of place don’t go far. It would have been about the day after the Wall came down that I stopped hating that place. What could I do? I could get on a train to Berlin, and another train to Bonn, and I could walk into the embassy and tell the marine guard that I was AWOL, that I was a deserter. You said you’d speak for me. Did you mean that? You’d speak to Immigration and Defense and the FBI, would you?’

Perkins nodded gravely, with sincerity. His wife, Helen, said he was as trustworthy as a second-hand dealer in Ford cars.

‘It came out when we were talking English literature. I’d gotten her on to D. H. Lawrence. Well, she was a spiky woman. We’d gone through Women in Love, then Sons and Lovers. She was sort of giggly about it. I sent her home one evening, she’d good enough English, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Krause was away. She came back the next evening. Shit, her clothes were a mess, crumpled like she’d been roffing, creased like they’d been on the floor. She might have reckoned I was some sort of monk, or maybe I was a eunuch to her, maybe she reckoned me one of those castrated creatures she could spill it all out to. What I gathered, she and her guy had screwed all afternoon trying to do what Lawrence described. The next time she came I was at the window. She was dropped off from a Soviet military jeep and she wanted to know if Lady Chatterley was in Russian. How the hell would I know? I said it was in German, but that wasn’t any good – sort of slipped out that the guy didn’t read German. It became confidential. She’d talk to me like I was her goddamn shrink.’

Perkins paused by the window and considered the wording of the letters that would be sent to Immigration and Defense and the FBI. He thought, after they had read his letters, that Immigration and Defense and the FBI would shred them and leave the wretch where he was, to rot in a damp, cold room.

‘He was a major, commanded a small outfit down the coast, west, an unimportant little place. You said that you wanted me to make you laugh – the Major was rated by her husband as his best friend. Does that make you laugh? I told you it wasn’t love, or even romance. It was about sex and flicking. She told me the size of him and how often he managed it and how long he did it. I didn’t feel bad about the telling of it, what I said to the handler, but I didn’t feel good that they’d gotten to film it. They had a department that did covert filming… You’ll write those letters, I’ve your promise? I’m washed up here, I’m old and I want to go home. You gave your promise.’

He nodded again. He might not even send the letters that Immigration and Defense and the FBI would shred. He thought it would be harsher punishment for the wretch to sit inside the walls of the apartment with the dirt and the damp until the end of his days, suffering betrayal at first hand.

‘Does that make you laugh, Mr Perkins, knowing that Lady Chatterley was squashing down daisies with the gamekeeper who was Krause’s best friend? The gamekeeper was called Rykov, Pyotr Rykov.’

The guide was a small man, perky, enjoying the reciting of history.

‘It was built as a school for recruits to learn the use of the air-defence guns. The base was opened straight after Hitler had taken power. It was the principal Flakartillerieschule in all Germany.’

It was a desolate, quiet place. They had come through the outer gate with the guide, who escorted half a dozen of the first tourists of the year. Mantle had been told that it was possible to enter the base only with the guide. The trees grew wild with bramble thorns and long grass.

Tracy said, ‘It was so bloody important to get in here that they didn’t care a shit if Hansie was killed. Now it’s just for tourists to have a laugh at. He waited till it was dark – he’d brought a little inflatable in the car, the sort that kids use on the lakes in Berlin, with a little bloody wooden paddle. He didn’t know what defences there were, whether they had infra-red. He went off the beach back there. I saw him go into the sea, I blew him a kiss and waved until I couldn’t see him any more. There wasn’t a man about, not a dog. He was going to go three hundred yards out and then paddle for a mile, it was a right foul night. The planes came over, then there was the first shot, then there were the flares.’

‘Sixty years ago, on the twenty-sixth of September nineteen thirty-seven, Adolf Hitler came to the Flakartillerieschule and was accompanied by the Duce, Benito Mussolini. They inspected an honour guard and they watched a display of the firing of the air-defence guns.’

They walked behind the guide and his small party, and slowly separated themselves from the group. Every window in every building was smashed. All around was the wreckage of cannibalized trucks rusted from the weather off the sea. The trees grew around a watch-tower where a sentry, that night, would have peered out into the spitting wind. She pointed, for him, towards the low-set concrete bunker where the radar dishes that controlled the missiles had been, and beyond the bunker was the brightness of the Baltic sea. It was criminal, he thought, to have sent the boy, as criminal as his murder.

‘On the second of May nineteen forty-five, the base at Wustrow was occupied by the troops of the Roten Armee. There were two and a half thousand men here with air-defence capabffity, also a small naval force, also aircraft, also a tank unit..

Tracy said, ‘Can you imagine it, what it was like for him? He was blocked from the dinghy and bloody running. Flares going up, shooting, sirens going. Couldn’t go back towards the open sea, had to cross the base. Blundering through the base and troops spilling out from the barracks huts. They had dogs, I heard them. He was running blind.’

They walked on the potholed tarmac of the roads through the base. Cats followed them, hissing and snarling and running on their bellies, the cats of the Soviet troops that had been abandoned so many years before and that now ran wild. He thought of the work he had done in I Corps, checking hazy telephoto pictures and satellite images, poring over Red Army magazines, all useless work when set against the chance to put Humlnt into the heart of a base with radar, missiles and tanks. They had played God, those who had sent him.

‘In the last days of the occupation of Wustrow by the Soviet troops, the people in Rerik brought them warm clothes and food. The position of the Soviets was desperate as their government collapsed in confusion. We saw little of those troops, but they were not regarded as an occupying force. They were seen as protectors. At the end there was a great sympathy for them.’

Tracy said, ‘God, and he must have been so bloody frightened. He was alone. In front of him was just this bloody great space of water. There wasn’t another way for him but into the water. He could have seen the lights of the town. It was the only chance he had, to go into the water. They didn’t care, back in Berlin. Afterwards it was like a stray dog in Brigade had been run over, no bugger cared.’

There was a small drill area, weeded up and covered with the autumn leaves, and round the area were figures, life size, showing how to march, how to salute, how to stand at attention. Paint had peeled off, leaving them grotesque and amputated. There was a board for aircraft-recognition classes, silhouettes in all profiles of British and American attack aircraft, Harriers and F-16s, Tornadoes and F-15s, Jaguars and the A-b tank busters. It was all rotten, dead, decayed history.

‘Before they left, the Soviet troops tried to take from Wustrow everything that was of value. They stripped electric fittings from the barracks rooms, they took the stoves from the sleeping quarters, they removed the concrete slabs from the pavements, and they even tried to lift the street lights in the base from the concrete by helicopters.’

Tracy said, ‘Those buildings, over there. It’s where the senior officers were. And just there, past the big house, he’d have gone into the water. Look, damn you, look – how far he had to swim. Did anyone care then? Does anyone care now? If it had happened to someone you loved, wouldn’t you, damn you, want to see the bastard responsible smashed?’

Josh gazed out over the water. They stood near to the commanding officer’s house where a door hung loose and flapping. Between the birch trees, beyond the beach, the water in sunlight stretched across to the small homes of Rerik and he could see the church tower beyond the roofs. He shuddered. He was pleased that she had brought him to the deserted base: it was as if she shared with him. The tour was finished.

‘It is dangerous to go off the hard roads in the base. We have found unexploded mortar bombs and tank shells. There is the possibility that chemical weapons were stored here and not removed. The place is now a nature reserve and we have seen the sea eagles here and know they nest and make young.’

They walked behind the group and the guide back towards the gate.

It closed behind them, shutting them out from history.

The sun warmed them. He was thinking of the young man and the terror. His commitment was made.

She breezed into his office.

He stood. Fleming always stood when Mrs Olive Harris came visiting – most of the other desk heads did. She was junior to him, only the deputy on Soviet Desk. He did not stand out of any sense of antiquated courtesy – there were women in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the modern ones, who took offence if a man stood aside for them in a doorway, in a corridor, at the elevator. He stood because she made him, like many others, nervous.

No preliminaries: there never were with Olive Harris.

‘We’re working up a paper on Russian military morale. Interesting stuff. Reports of small-scale mutinies because of critical shortages, seen as Government’s attempts to subvert military power. Stories of malnutrition, poor discipline, morale on the floor, funding suppressed, had it before but it’s in greater detail. You know, up in the Arctic some units are said to be starving. That means there’s a right dog fight between Government and the armed forces. The Federal Intelligence Service, of course, sides with Government against the military, and that’s a choice little spat.’

There was a husband somewhere, rumoured to be a lecturer at University College – he probably stood up when Mrs Olive Harris came into the room – and there were rumours of children. never could imagine her on her back with her legs wide. A few, from the dark recesses of memory, claimed to have seen her smile. She was small and had grey-white hair tied at the back with an elastic band. She wore, each day, a plain, laundered blouse, a straight skirt and flat black shoes. She was an institution with the Service, part of the fabric of each building it occupied.

‘We’ve a lazy bastard on the desk in Moscow, not for much longer – spends too much time hoovering crumbs from under the Americans’ table. The latest crumb… The minister at Defence rang an FIS general threatening that Special Forces would be sent to liberate an Army officer if the FIS didn’t free him soonest. The said officer is a close friend of Colonel Pyotr Rykov, the minister’s eminence. You’re into Rykov, aren’t you? You’ve things running along the rails with Rykov and his Stasi friend, haven’t you? That reptile Perkins is in Germany, isn’t he? You can call up the full text on your screen, reference RYKOV 497/23. Know how to work it, do you?’

Actually, he had been on a residential course, two weeks, and had attended evening classes to learn mastery of the damn thing.

‘Marry it up. See if there’s useful progeny.’

She was gone to the door. Fleming stood.

He would have been a brave man, the lecturer, when he had served Mrs Olive Harris, and it would have been in the dark and he wouldn’t have been thanked for the sweat.

When the door closed after her he sat.

‘I have nothing to tell you.’

‘You know what happened to them.’

They had waited in the road for him. He came back to the small bungalow with his old face swollen from the dentist’s drill. They had let him park and lock the spotless, polished, ten-year- old scarlet red Wartburg car. Mantle had intercepted the pastor at the low front gate to his handkerchief garden and had explained, curt and brusque, from where they had travelled and why.

‘It is a liberty that you make, to come, to bully.’

‘You know the community, you know what happened to the witnesses.’

‘It is finished. There is no benefit in the resurrection of the past.’

‘The present is only cleaned of the past if there is punishment.’

As the sun had dipped so the cloud had gathered from the north and the wind had grown. They stood inside the gate. Tracy was close behind him and Josh blocked him from going up the path to his door and safety.

‘Do you think of me as a coward?’

‘It is not for me to make that judgment. What I want-’

‘You want to dredge what is in the past.’

‘There were four witnesses. They were sent out of Rerik. I want to know where they went.’

The face of the wife was at the window. She had waved to them when she had first seen them. Anxiety now lined her face. She would have seen the hostility of the young woman’s expression and the way that the older man blocked her husband from his door, and she would have seen the way her husband stabbed his finger into the man’s chest for emphasis.

‘And you require us to feel a shame for what happened that night.’

‘Where they were sent. There was murder done that night and it should be punished.’

The growing wind flailed the pastor’s scarf, dislodged his cap. He was a small man, litfie flesh on a pale face, and poorly dressed. Josh knew about interrogation and disorientation, knew about building the stress. He had forbidden Tracy to speak and told her he was the expert.

‘You judge our morality, our shame and our fear. We are a people that learned compromise. Better to know nothing and hear nothing. Do you understand, Herr Mantle, the psychology of fear? We were born into fear, we were children in fear, and, as adults, we are old in fear-’

Josh snapped the interruption. ‘Where are the witnesses?’

‘The fear is like the clothes against your skin. The fear does not disappear because we now have fast food and big cars and Coca-Cola in tins. With the fear is the shame and the act of compromise.’

‘Your way, the guilty go unpunished.’

‘You make a big statement, but it is the statement of a bully. I tell you the first day that I learned to compromise. It was the day that my bishop told me that I was not of sufficient intellectual value to be worth the government in the West paying thirty thousand Deutschmarks to buy my freedom. The freedom of some was bought but they were of greater value than me. That is the day you learn to compromise. Do you accuse me of cowardice?’

Mantle thought he was losing. His voice rose. ‘You know the names.’

‘I know the names of each of the men who witnessed…’

‘And they have never returned.’

‘They have never come back to Rerik. I tell you when, again, I compromised. I wanted to come here to live the last years of my life. I informed. I supplied gossip on my church, my church leaders, on my church congregation. I was promised in return that I would have the permission to come to live here. The regime ended one year before my retirement and I did not need permission to come here. That is my personal punishment. I live here quietly in my shame and my fear. If it were known…’

Josh caught at the buttoned coat of the pastor. He was losing, he must savage him. ‘Tell me where they bloody went.’

‘If it were known here that I had informed, then we would be, my wife and myself, like refugees. We would be put out of our home, we would be friendless, we would be pariahs.’

The frustration welled. Josh shouted, ‘I’m giving you the chance to conquer the shame and the fear. Where are the witnesses?’

‘I tell you… A man came to my house. He put through my door an envelope. In the envelope was a photocopy of my Stasi file, the file of an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. If I should direct you to the witnesses..

Josh thought he had lost. The pastor smiled, grim and sad, as if he knew he had won.

Tracy said, small voice, ‘The boy who was killed, Hans Becker, was my lover.’

‘…the file would be sent to the church…’

Tracy said, quiet voice, ‘Hans Becker was the only boy I ever loved.’

‘…and to the town administration, and to my wife.’

Tracy said, with no passion in her voice, ‘I fucked Hans Becker because I loved him.’

The pastor rocked. The voice was behind him, soft and quiet and gentle. His shoulders, thin under his coat, shook. He turned to face her, turned to the wind that ripped at his scarf, and turned his cap.

‘My dear, you try to shock me. I am hard to shock. You try to make a volcano of my mind… I was conscripted into the Army in nineteen forty-five. I fought in the battle for Berlin. I know what it is to be shelled and bombed. I know what it is to hear my father has been killed. My mother was raped by the Red Army. I know more of shock than the vulgarity of the words you use. I know also the shock of the realization that I was frightened, that I would compromise. Come…’

As if his mind was turned… Josh recognized it, Tracy had turned the pastor’s mind. The pastor looked into her face that was simple, clean, without complication.

He ignored his wife at the window.

He led them back through the garden gate and out into the road. He walked with a good stride, as if a weight were lifted from his back, and Tracy skipped to be alongside him.

‘I know what happened. I saw it. I was not sufficiently close to recognize the faces of the men who killed your lover. Perhaps in the vulgarity of your words you have given me a small courage, and for that I should thank you. I said a prayer for him. I did not go out into the night and kneel beside him and make my prayer, I was too frightened of the consequences. I said my prayer in the secrecy of my home. There were four men and myself. We shared the fear, we did not have the courage to help him.’

They had walked along the shore path. Dark cloud hovered now above the trees on the peninsula across the water. The waves hammered onto the pebble and sand beach, flowed to the rotted seaweed and fell back. The pastor led Tracy past the pier, then turned inland onto a track through the bare poplar trees in which the wind sang. He stopped outside a brick-built house and the front door was flush to the road. Josh trailed behind, as if he were no longer relevant to their business.

‘Jorg Brandt, he was the eldest of them. He was a schoolteacher in Kropelin, a Party member, a respected man. When the boy had broken free of them on the pier he tried to find a house where he would have protection. At Jorg Brandt’s house the door was shut on him. He was denounced by colleagues at the school for the abuse of children. His wife left him, his community shunned him. He suffered psychological collapse. He went to live with old relatives in the Lichtenshagen district of Rostock where he was not known. He cannot return home because it is believed that he abused the children.’

The pastor spoke only to Tracy, ignored Josh. He went on up the road past the small gardens that were fenced, past the homes. He stopped in front of a house of dun concrete-rendered walls. There was a raised patio at the front, a low trellis fence and a window above the front door framed in modern plastic.

‘Heinz Gerber, he would now be fifty-seven years of age. He had the job of administrator in the town hail for the collection of refuse, and he worked also for the church in Rerik. It was the second house the boy went to, and he was losing strength and Gerber came to the window and saw him, and did not open the door. He was denounced by his brother as a thief of church funds, and as there was little money in our community, money was precious. He was thrown out by his family, he was disgraced. He went to work as a gardener at the base at Peenemunde, and is still there.’

Behind them, Josh, in his mind, could see the boy who was wounded and exhausted and running at the limit of his strength. It was the last house before the square, well-built with a good garden to the front of pruned roses.

‘Artur Schwarz was a senior engineer on the railway working from Bad Doberan and responsible for the line between Rostock and Wismar. His was the last house that the boy came to. Schwarz saw him from an upper window, drew the curtain and turned his back on him. The rumour was spread that he was an informer. His wife was beaten by the Stasi at a protest at the environmental damage caused by the chemical works at Neubokow. He was blamed for the beating of his wife. He works now as a common labourer on a farm near to Starkow, which is between Ribnitz-Damgarten and Stralsund.’

They were in the square. On three sides around them were low two-storey blocks of cheap-built homes. The grass was yellowed grey and sprinkled with the old leaves that the wind curled. They stood among the washing lines and the parked cars that scarred the grass to mud. Josh stood back from them. It came stark to him. They had walked the route of Hans Becker’s flight, and he had not seen a man or a woman or a child. Did they hide? Did they crawl behind closed doors? Did they not dare to look down from their windows? He felt the weight of the fear… The pastor stood and looked around him as if he stretched far into his memory and then he moved a single short pace to his left, to be exact.

‘Willi Muller was then just a boy. His father had a fishing boat. His father’s life was the fishing in the Ostsee. He took the trawler out for them, when they pulled the boy from the sea. He was with them when they killed the boy, here, at this place, where I stand. He took the trawler out again when they put the weighted body of the boy in the sea. All of the fishing people of Rerik know where the body was put into the Salzhaff, without charity and without decency, and they never run their nets there because they have the dread that they would bring up the body and the past. There was a family meeting. His father had been told that he would lose the boat if the son did not go away and swear to stay silent. He went to Warnemunde and took work as a deckhand on a herring boat. If he were to return he would have to confront his father’s bargain. He would be ashamed of his father and ashamed of himself. He has never returned, and never will.’

The pastor took Tracy’s hand and ducked his head, chin against his chest. His eyes were closed. The quiet was all around them.

Tracy let his hand fall free. ‘Thank you.’

‘Let me tell you, if a man is sentenced to death then he has an hour, a day, a week, to gather his integrity. If a man is sentenced to prison then he has a month, a year, to find a true dignity. Where is the integrity and true dignity of a man denounced as a paedophile, accused as a thief, rumoured as an informer against his wife, suffering shame for his father and himself? They were more intelligent than the Gestapo – they did not leave a trail of martyrs behind them. They destroyed but they did not permit their victims to hold the small light of dignity and integrity.’

Tracy stood her full height. She put her hand on the pastor’s shoulder and her lips brushed against his cold, lined cheek. Josh shook his limp hand, and said, ‘I wish you well.’

‘You should not take loosely the responsibility. There is little left for these men and the little left them is what you now hold in your hand. You should be careful with your responsibility. He was a brave boy. I saw his bravery.’

Mantle took Tracy’s arm. He led her away from the pastor and out of the deserted square. He understood. The wet blinked in his eyes.

They sat in the car and ate the sandwiches he had bought for both of them. He had gone as far down the coast as it was possible to drive, a kilometre beyond the last of Rerik’s houses. She gulped the bread slices, filled with sliced sausage and salad. He had parked the car so that it faced out over the Salzhaff and across to the trees masking the buildings on the peninsula.

Josh said what he felt he needed to say.

‘It’s where you were, yes, when the flares were going up, when you could see the tracers, when the trawler came in. I tell you, Tracy, when you couldn’t intervene, when you had to back out, that must have been worse than anything I can imagine. To leave him, to have to get back to Berlin for that bloody midnight curfew, that is a definition of hell.’

She choked. A piece of sausage fell to her lap. He thought it would help her to cry. She would never have cried before on a man’s shoulder.

‘To drive away from it, with the bastards after him, him running, for the bloody curfew. What was his car? A wretched little Trabant? Nothing you could have done for him. To have to drive back alone, not knowing… God…’

The tears streamed on her face, made rivers on her clean scrubbed cheeks. He groped in his pocket for his handkerchief.

‘I want to see him in court, Tracy, begging, and sentenced. It is more hideous than anything my imagination is capable of.’

He wiped her eyes and her cheeks. She stared straight ahead at the dark water. He gunned the engine.

‘Come on, girl. We’re going, together, to hack it.’

He swung the car off the grass, onto the road. He drove through the back lanes of the town, towards the myriad side roads that would keep them safe on the journey back to Rostock.

Clumsy, awkward, he had made his commitment. In the morning they would begin their search for the witnesses.

He came in the darkness into the town. It would have been good for him to have been in the town all through the day, but not possible. Dieter Krause did not possess the resources of manpower to have watched Rerik through the day and the early evening. The old goat would tell him if they had been to Rerik. The old goat would know who had come, who had asked, as he had always known, and would tell as always. He drove down the hill, the central road of the town, towards the sea. The road was deserted.

Not a soul alive on the road, not a car, no one walking the pavement, not a curtain undrawn or a door open. He could remember it and yet he could not place the image of the memory. He drove towards the shoreline, then swung left and drifted the car past the piers. He could see the roll of the fishing boats in his lights. He came to the small, darkened bungalow. Only the wind for him to hear, and the rustle of the sea on shingle and the flap of tossed paper.

He stepped from his car. He opened the gate and walked up the path. The street lamp threw enough light for him to see the paper that was nailed to the woodwork of the door. He snatched from the nail the pages of a file identifying an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. He ripped at the pages with fury. It was the first time that Dieter Krause had ever known the fear to be broken. He tossed the torn pages up into the wind and they scattered from the light to the darkness.

In his car, as he left the town, drove away from the sea and the pier where the trawlers were tied and the church, he placed the memory. That night, he remembered, after the chase and the shooting and the taking of the body out on to the Salzhaff, it was as though the town had emptied.

The policeman lit the cigarette for the lorry driver. There was no smell of alcohol on his breath but it would be tested. The lorry with the trailerload of steel construction girders being transported from Rostock to Wismar had been recently checked by a garage, but that would be verified. It was slewed onto the grass at the side of the road, but the radiator grille was barely marked. More policemen and men from the fire brigade were setting up lights around the wreckage of the car. The ambulance men sat in their parked vehicle, relaxed, because there was no need for their intervention. The policeman, newly posted to Rostock from Kassel in the West, went to the second vehicle involved in the accident. It was difficult to recognize it as a scarlet Wartburg car. It was mangled, concertinaed, crushed. He shone his torch into the interior. Their faces, extraordinarily, were unmarked. Their bodies, an old man’s and an old woman’s, were pressed back against two aged leather suitcases that had burst at the impact. The fire-brigade men were preparing the cutting equipment that would be necessary to recover the bodies. From reporting the registration of the scarlet Wartburg, from his radio, the policeman knew their names, that the man was a retired pastor of the Evangelical Church, that they were resident in Rerik on the coast. Tiredness, a heart attack, the glare of the oncoming lights of the lorry were equal possibilities, the shit engineering standards in the building of East German cars was most likely, but there was nothing of fact to tell the policeman why the Wartburg had come over the central white line of the road and into the path of a lorry carrying forty tonnes of steel girders.

‘You’re quiet, Josh.’

‘Just thinking.’

‘Thinking about what?’

‘What he said about responsibility, Tracy. About the responsibility we have to those four men.’

She snorted. ‘You think too much.’

‘For each of them we are a hand grenade rolled across the floor of a room, into their lives.’

‘That is crap.’

‘Tracy, listen, you have to know about the responsibility.’

‘You were better quiet, Josh.’

She never opened her eyes. Her head was against the back of the seat, as if responsibility was not important to her. He drove back into Rostock. The beginning ended that night. In the morning, the end would start. He did not know where it would lead and his mind tossed with the burden of his own responsibility.

Siehl listened.

‘We try to avoid the use of extreme measures. We aim not to use extreme measures.’ Dieter Krause rapped his knuckles on the table. ‘We employ extreme measures only if the alternative is the Moabit gaol.’ He stared each man in the face. ‘She has nothing without a statement from one of them. If it seems likely she will gain a statement then we must take extreme measures.’

Josef Siehi, now forty years of age, believed himself to be a victim, a casualty. He had supported the old regime and never doubted the legitimacy of the Party. He had accepted his orders, placed bugs, met the informers, interrogated men and women, followed targets in careful surveillance, had broken up the meetings of the environmentalists. He had only done what he was told to do. If he had been ordered to fire on the mobs in the last hours of the regime, then he would have done so, and he did not understand why the order had not been given. He lived now high in a block on the Hohenschonhausen complex of Berlin with the new filth around him. He had been driven from his apartment in Rostock by scum who did not realize that he had dedicated his life to their betterment through the socialist ideal. In Hohenschonhausen, he was surrounded by drugs and thieving and vandalism. He had been married twice before, divorced twice before, and the woman with whom he lived shared his aptitude for complaint. Each night, back from work, skinny and sallow, poor and bitter, he and the woman shared complaint about the new life, the new indiscipline, the new hardship. He worked as a security guard on a building site for the new Sony tower. He had been an Unterleutnant, he had twice in Rostock been personally commended by Generalleutnant Mittag, and now he was a security guard on a building site… He had been given, once a month, the duty of supervising the cell block at Rostock. Always correct, of course, but harsh in his administration of the prisoners. His nightmare, the role reversal, that he should be a prisoner in a cell block. On the night of 21 February 1988 he had been ordered from his desk by Hauptman Dieter Krause, he had driven one of the cars. He had dragged the body back to the trawler, he had roped the lobster pots to the body. He stood to live the nightmare, to be locked in a cell as a prisoner.

They left Krause. By dawn, Siehl would be in Peenemunde and Hoffmann would be in Lichtenshagen and Fischer would be on the road from Ribnitz-Damgarten to Stralsund and Peters would be in Warnemunde. They would all be in place at first light.

It was the last point of the last match of the evening.

Eva Krause sat in her seat with her fists clenched. She was breathing hard. Her daughter served for the match… Ace. The opponent never moved. The service ball thudded from the court into the back netting. Her daughter stood proud on the base line with her arms, her racquet, raised. The opponent was a gawky, gangling girl, limbs too long for her body, and for a moment she hung her head, then trotted to the net, held out her hand and waited. She wore an old costume, handed down, and held a racquet that was reinforced with binding tape. Eva stood and clapped, forgot for the moment that the seat beside her was empty, and watched her daughter, who savoured the applause and took her time before advancing to the net. The handshake was cursory. Christina Krause did not even look at her opponent as she shook the hand offered to her but gazed around her as if to enjoy the triumph.

Eva gathered up her daughter’s tracksuit and the spare racquets. She was pushing them into a bag.

He came from behind her.

‘You are Frau Krause? It is your daughter that has defeated my daughter?’

She nodded.

He was tall, as his daughter was. He had sparse hair, prematurely grey, uncombed. He wore trousers without creases and old trainer shoes. The elbows of his coat had been ripped and were sewn, and the cuffs were frayed.

‘You should be very proud, Frau Krause, of your daughter’s ability. She looks to be well coached. It is a beautiful outfit she wears. There is great power in that racquet, yes, but expensive. I was here last night, Frau Krause, to see my Edelbert play and I stayed to see the girl who would be her next opponent. The man who came to join you, last night, that was your husband?’

He gazed at her. His eyes never left hers. She thought it was as if he had waited a very long time, as if he would not now be deflected.

‘Your husband, yes? The name of your daughter was announced on the loudspeaker and I saw her wave to you and you waved back, so I knew it was your daughter. The man, your husband, came and joined you, I saw that. I did not know that his name was Krause, but I knew his face. Do you have a good memory for faces, Frau Krause?’

The row of seats behind her ran to a wall. He stood between her and the aisle steps of the stand. He spoke with a soft, reasonable voice that was without menace, and the voice chilled her.

‘Eighteen years ago, I was a student at the university, my first year. My course should have led me to be a constructional engineer. You would say, Frau Krause, that I was stupid, but in my defence I would say that I was young. On a wall in August-Bebel Strasse, opposite the building they used, with my girl-friend, I painted the slogan “Old Fascists, New Fascists – Old Nazis, New Stasi”. It was scrubbed out by dawn the next morning, but I was very stupid and I returned the next night with my girl-friend and we painted the slogan again. We were caught and arrested. Your husband, Frau Krause, was in charge of the investigation. Did he ever tell you about the conditions in the cells at August-Bebel Strasse? Did he tell you what was done to those charged with being “politically negative”? I was sent to the prison at Cottbus for three years and my girl-friend was sent to the prison at Bautzen for one year and a half. That is why I remember so well the face of your husband. You should not be afraid of me, Frau Krause..

Her daughter, Christina, was waiting at the bottom of the aisle steps and waved peremptorily for her to come.

‘The day I was released from the prison at Cottbus, the day I met again with my girl-friend, our Edelbert was conceived. I did not have a university degree, nor did my girl-friend, but we could do the arithmetic, it was that day in 1983. For both of us, there was no possibility of returning to the university. Our futures were destroyed because we had painted on a wall. I swept the streets, my girl-friend scrubbed the floors at the offices of the Freie Deutsche Jugend. Our futures were destroyed because of the thoroughness of the investigation of your husband, Frau Krause. When the Wall came down, when your State was finished, I believed a fresh opportunity would come for me, for my family. But I had no qualifications. I have gained nothing from the new freedom. You should not be afraid, Frau Krause, I will not beat you as I was beaten in the cells at August-Bebel Strasse ..

Below her, her daughter had her fingers in her mouth and whistled piercingly for her to come.

‘I am pleased to see that you have done well from the new times, Frau Krause, and that your daughter wears a beautiful costume, that you can afford for her to be coached, that she has expensive racquets. Remember me to your husband – the name is Steiner, but perhaps he will not recall me. Frau Krause, believe me, I have to be very disciplined so that I do not put you on the floor and kick your face, as your husband kicked my face in the cells at August-Bebel Strasse. Will your good fortune last for ever, Frau Krause, or will the day come when you are destroyed as I was? Goodnight.’

He was gone. Her daughter whistled again. She saw the man go to his daughter near to where Christina stood, hands on hips and pouting, and put his arm around the girl, who kissed him, and they left arm in arm.

She felt so cold. She went down the steps.

‘Who was that old drone?’

Eva Krause said, ‘It was the father of your opponent.’

‘What did he want?’

She took her daughter’s bag, carried it for her. She said, wearied, ‘He came to me to congratulate you.’

‘She was useless, not coached. Did you see her gear? Rubbish. Where is my father?’