Brandenburg (32 page)

She thought about this for a while then asked him for a cigarette.

‘I thought you didn’t smoke.’

She ignored him and puffed the smoke amateurishly from the side of her mouth. He smiled, but she ignored him. ‘If I let you give them my name I will have to leave Leipzig. I need to stay here. This is where our struggle is. This is where we will fight Honecker and the Stasi. Rainer’s right: this is our moment. This is where the struggle between good and evil is taking place.’

‘But there is another contest between good and evil and that is the modern one between terrorism and the free society that you yearn to build here. You acknowledge this yourself because you were responsible for telling the West about Abu Jamal.’ She stubbed out the cigarette, shaking her head. ‘And what happens if they start shooting? I was in Normannenstrasse last week. I looked into the eyes of the beast. Mielke will do anything to keep his power. The Party won’t hesitate to follow the Chinese.’

‘They can’t do it in the middle of Europe.’

‘We might as well be in Albania for all the contact we have with the West. Where are the foreign camera crews? Mielke can do what he likes.’

She stared at her wine for a while. Minutes passed. Rosenharte got up and stretched, then sat down again and studied her. On the surface she was like so many single women trapped in the country’s grinding bureaucracy, apparently finding their only fulfilment in a church that everyone knew was full of informers. But deep down she was brave and cunning and original. He admired the way she kept herself so hidden.

‘The British have a theory that you’re the person assigned to look after the Arab. Is that true?’

‘Partly, yes.’ She paused. ‘But I have a collaborator. If I allow you to use my name, I will endanger that person too.’

‘But you’re the person who has most contact with Abu Jamal?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who gave you that assignment?’

‘No one. He picked me. We had some contact two or three years ago. I told you, I speak Arabic and I know some of the places he goes to in the Middle East. I can talk to him. He likes me.’

‘And finds you attractive.’

‘Naturally, that was part of it. But he’s a very sick man now. His kidney problems may have been cured, but there’s nothing that can be done for his liver - he has cirrhosis from drinking. I believe these attacks he’s planning are his goodbye. The last throw of the dice.’

‘When is he due here?’

‘After the anniversary. They don’t want him anywhere near the GDR when all the other leaders are here. He will be here from Tuesday - the tenth of October.’

‘In the villa?’

‘Maybe. I will know by the end of next week.’ She sprang from her chair to scoop up the dishes and plates. ‘Let’s go for a walk. I need some air.’

‘I’d better find somewhere to stay,’ he said, looking at his watch then his rucksack.

‘Don’t be an idiot. You’re staying here.’

She shrugged on a blue duffel-coat and from the pocket took a black woolly hat which she pulled down tightly over her ears.

They walked for about fifteen minutes through the deserted suburbs to the Voelkerschlachtdenkmal - the Battle of Nations memorial marking the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig - and passed in silence by the oblong reservoir that mirrors the memorial in the daytime. Rosenharte had never seen it before, and was surprised by its scale. In photographs it resembled the stump of an old tree, but now standing directly beneath its vitrified black mass, the memorial reminded him of the core of an extinct volcano.

‘It was built in 1913,’ Ulrike said, ‘a year before the First World War, to commemorate the victory of a century before against Napoleon. There’s a kind of dire eloquence about it, don’t you think? They had death on their minds, those people. All the disasters of twentieth-century German history are written in this stone.’ She stopped and looked at him. Her eyes were watering in the cold. ‘Is this your Germany, Rudi?’

‘No.’ He looked into the shadow of her face. ‘This is not my Germany, nor my brother’s.’

‘Are you sure this fatalism has not become part of your soul?’

He could feel her gaze in the dark waiting for his response. ‘What a question. I think I’ll need time to think about it.’

‘People know one way or the other. Tell me which way it is with you.’

‘No, I’m not prepared to give a glib answer just to please you.’ He paused and looked up at the monument. ‘You’d find it difficult if I started asking you searching questions about your religion.’

‘Not at all,’ she said, suddenly taking off down the steps. ‘Ask me anything you like.’

‘When did you become a believer?’

She stopped and called back, ‘When I realized I always had been.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that it was always in me, but that I didn’t know it.’

‘You make it sound like diabetes.’

‘That’s beneath you,’ she said. ‘It’s simple. I always believed, but didn’t exactly know what I believed in. Then last year I started going to church because of the peace movement and I began to feel better - happier, more coherent. But it is no big thing.’

‘In some ways I envy you,’ he said.

They walked back to the house through mounds of damp leaves in untroubled silence. There she gave him mint tea and showed him to a bed that lay behind a thick green curtain in the passageway between the sitting room and her bedroom. At either end of the narrow iron bed were bookshelves crammed with paperbacks in Arabic, French and German. He glanced over their titles, hardly able to keep his eyes open. Within a minute or two of her leaving he had washed, undressed and was falling asleep to the sound of branches scratching at a window somewhere.

He woke at four to find Ulrike had curled into the contours of his body with one leg lying over his, apparently asleep. Her hair touched his cheek and he smelt her quiet, soft scent. For an hour or so he remained awake, feeling her breath on his neck. At some stage she got under the covers and cuddled up to him, but only for a short time. Then, without warning, she hopped from the bed. As her feet touched the ground, tiny snakes of static swarmed inside her nylon shift so that her entire body was revealed in silhouette beneath the material. For a split second before the lights died, her chin and neck were illuminated by the glow. She giggled, then bent down and kissed him on the forehead before leaving for her own bed.

Lone middle-aged men arriving early at the Nikolaikirche, dressed better than the average citizen, were treated wearily by the two young helpers at the main entrance. ‘Welcome,’ said one with a sparse little beard and a gift for quick appraisal. ‘First time? Yes . . . good. We’re pleased to have you with us. Sit anywhere you like.’

Rosenharte went to the upper of two galleries that surrounded the church and chose a place in the front row so he would have a clear view of the congregation and the altar where the service would be conducted. He leaned over the edge and looked down on the men scattered around the pews, all of them studiously ignoring each other, then buried himself in a copy of the prayer book and read contentedly, recalling his long hours in a small Catholic church beside Marie Theresa.

By five the church was filling. A woman with a shopping bag and a harassed air bustled past him, explaining that there would be a rush at any moment because a crowd from Dresden had just been allowed to leave the station. The Vopos were herding them like cattle through Karl-Marx-Platz. Some had already been arrested and taken away. As he listened, his gaze skated across the church, noting the youth of the congregation and the hope on people’s faces. A gentle, nervous hubbub rose from the main body of the church, then someone switched on a light, which played across the surface of the six fluted columns and the plaster palm fronds that sprouted from their capitals.

In his mind he ran over the brief conversation he’d had with Harland early that morning on a phone in the institute where Ulrike worked. Harland told him that he planned to move Konrad’s family to the Czech border early on Wednesday.

‘I’ll meet your representative at the place we agreed before,’ Rosenharte said.

‘Can you give us the name?’ Harland asked.

‘Of course,’ replied Rosenharte without a qualm. ‘Everything is in order. I have a new means of taking delivery of the Berlin package next week.’

Harland seemed to understand what this meant and he had hung up without saying any more.

A few moments before the service began, he saw Ulrike appear with two young men and pick her way through the people sitting cross-legged in the main aisle to a place at the front.

Then the pastor, a man named Christian Führer, walked to the altar table and a hush fell on the congregation. He introduced himself and explained that the service took the form of prayers, followed by an open discussion on matters that were relevant to the themes of peace and freedom. At this, the Party hacks - easily distinguished by their age and more conservative dress - shifted in the pews and stared about sullenly.

Someone began to read from St Matthew: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven . . . Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’

The Beatitudes had not run their course before Rosenharte’s eyes came to rest on a familiar profile on the other side of the aisle from him. Biermeier was there. Three rows behind him was a man he had seen on the plane from Ljubljana. Rosenharte sank low and watched them both from beneath his brow. Biermeier had made concessions to the event and was wearing a light blouson jacket and an open-necked shirt; moreover he seemed to know when to make the proper responses. The second man was less familiar with it all, but was not acting in the way of some of his colleagues and the cadre of Party members.

What the hell was Biermeier doing there?

He had hardly had time to speculate when he realized that tucked in behind a column on his side of the church, sitting as still and impassive as a piece of alabaster, was Colonel Zank. This really shook him. He listened to the remaining prayers and the beginning of the discussion. Only when he followed Zank’s gaze did he see that Ulrike had risen to her feet and was in the process of upbraiding a man who wished to leave the GDR. ‘This is not simply about
your
freedom,’ she said, swivelling round to appeal to the whole congregation. ‘We’re fighting for a new relationship between the state and the people which guarantees
everyone
’s basic civil liberties. The people who are running away now undermine our case. No matter how you look at it, their actions are selfish.’

A man stood up and respectfully waited for her to repeat the point in several different ways. Then he spoke haltingly. It was, he confessed, the first time he had ever addressed a public meeting. ‘No man searching for the personal fulfilment that has been denied him all his life and
will
be denied to his children, can be accused of being selfish. It’s part of the Lord’s message that an individual should seek to make the most of all his talents, as well as to perform His work and take part in the ministry. How can a man like me - a person with no influence or contacts; with nothing to show for his life except a loving family - hope to have any effect on the Party?’

Ulrike shot to her feet again. ‘By staying here and adding to the numbers that greet us outside this church every week; by calling on his friends and family to come to the Nikolaikirche and to stand in peaceful defiance of the state. We’re not asking you to break the law, sir, merely to assert your right to demand change here in the GDR. Stay with us. Stay here.’

The discussion came to an end, and after the pastor had made an appeal for peaceful behaviour and said a final prayer, the congregation began to make a move towards the main doors. Rosenharte jumped up from his seat, but by the time he reached the stairway leading down from the gallery, it was packed with people who were clearly in no hurry to leave the sanctuary of the church. He pushed his way through them, mumbling apologies, but when he got to the bottom of the stairway he found that most of the congregation had left the main space. He cast around for Ulrike among the few stragglers, then squeezed through the doors to catch a glimpse of her black hat disappearing into a wheeling mass of people on the Nikolaikirchhof, the square beside the church.

Over the next few minutes he saw her several times, before losing her completely and becoming stalled in a group trying to light candles. He worked his way round to the outer limit of the square, where the Vopos stood two or three deep to prevent the demonstration from sprawling into the city. People were keeping their distance from the area immediately in front of their lines, because the police were making random snatches from the throng.

At the centre of the square, the crowd was in a state of heady disbelief, and it was clear in the expressions around him that each person had involuntarily given over some part of himself to the crowd. They couldn’t stop grinning at the novelty of the experience. Chants of ‘We’re staying here!’ and ‘We are the people!’ rippled through the mass; and when the light from a single camera came on, cheers, catcalls and applause filled the air.

Rosenharte glanced up at the windows around the square and saw astonished faces looking down.

He struggled to the eastern end of the church and decided that the only way to spot Ulrike was to raise himself above the sea of heads. He placed a foot on the moulding of the church’s apse and, clasping a bough of the tree, managed to raise himself up to scan the crowd. He reckoned Ulrike must have moved to the flow on Ritterstrasse, which was acting as a safety valve for the Nikolaikirchhof, feeding people towards the open plain of Karl-Marx-Platz. He dropped down and made for the part of the street where the current seemed to be moving quickest.

It was then that he saw Biermeier and his sidekick moving with a steady purpose up Ritterstrasse. He crouched down, waited for them to pass ahead, and slipped in behind them. They had to be following Ulrike too. There was no other explanation.

He lost them almost immediately they reached Karl-Marx-Platz, where a vast number of people were milling about, filling the pedestrian areas and spilling into the roads. A tram bound for Klemmstrasse had been stopped in its tracks. Someone took a photograph of the driver, who was glumly leaning on his controls, while his passengers were cheered and bidden to join in. Way off in the distance, police cars and trucks were parked at random with their lights still on. Night was falling and some kind of operation to muster the forces of the state was underway. Yet everyone seemed oblivious. A loosely defined free territory had been established in the heart of the crowd where it was possible to make an impromptu speech, brandish a slogan that would have been unthinkable a few weeks before. No doubt the undercover Stasi officers were there also, but they were powerless to do anything because of the number of people, and there was nothing in the behaviour of the demonstrators that they could possibly term rowdyism. It was clear that the crowd was trying to get the measure of its own power, probing the defences of the police even if that meant sacrificing people on the fringes.