The Berlin Crossing (31 page)

She eased herself into a sitting position on the sofa. She could just make out the clock on the old sideboard: ten past one.
So she’d slept a while, despite the throbbing pain, the smashed fingers. And she’d woken, despite the sleeping tablet.

‘Painkillers,’ Johannes had told the doctor. ‘And something to help her sleep.’

The doctor’s fear had been evident.
What kind of workplace accident left a hand shattered like this
?
And brought an elderly cancer patient to your private apartment after hours
? The old man had been insistent, as though his own mortal illness had lent him authority.
So the doctor had cleaned the wound, injected the mangled flesh, handed over aspirin and a couple of sleeping tablets, dressed
and strapped the useless fingers. Only the thumb and the index finger of the left hand had escaped the alleged ‘workplace
accident’; the other digits would be crippled for life. He’d caught his wife at the study door, saw the alarm on her thin
features and shooed her away. Better not to know some things. And he wanted neither thanks nor payment: just get this doomed
old man and this wounded young creature out of his home so he could get on with his life of not knowing things that were best
not known.

She was dressed when she heard Johannes stirring in the bedroom. He padded into the living room and switched on a small lamp.
The bedroom slippers and the striped dressing gown made him look older, closer to death.

‘It’s late.’ His voice seemed hoarse. ‘You don’t have to leave, Petra.’

‘I have to go somewhere, Johannes.’

‘You’re not going to your apartment?’

‘No.’

‘It’s after one o’clock in the morning, Petra. It’s not good to be out.’

‘I know.’
He needs a blanket, food
.

‘Maybe you should wait until morning.’

‘The dark is better.’
And I need him
.

Johannes’ pale, rheumy eyes met hers. He smiled.

‘Do what you have to do.’ He hadn’t asked about what had happened in the basement. ‘Just be careful.’

‘I need some things, Johannes, a blanket—’

‘Don’t.’ He raised a hand. ‘You’re welcome to take whatever you need, Petra, but it’s better to tell me nothing.’

‘A blanket, some food, tea.’

‘Whatever you need, just take it.’

‘And I’d like to come back here, I don’t want to go back to my apartment yet.’

‘You know you can stay as long as you like.’ Another ghostly smile, his face like faded paper in the half-light. ‘I’ll put
the kettle on for the tea.’

He made the tea while she rolled a thin blanket up tight enough to fit into her rucksack. He added sugar and a little milk,
poured it into a thick bottle and plugged it with a strong cork. He handed her a second container, of metal, sealed with a
screw-on cap.

‘Maybe this will help. I heated some soup.’

‘I’ve taken some of your bread and cheese.’

Johannes smiled his wan smile. ‘Whatever I have is yours.’

‘I’m putting you in danger, I think.’

‘What’s danger to me, Petra?’

He eased the straps of the rucksack over her wounded hand, settled the rucksack on her back.

‘I can come with you if you like.’

‘No, Johannes, I have to do this alone.’

‘Yes, some things must be done alone.’

He turned the light off before he eased the door of the flat open. He checked the dark corridor before motioning for her to
go.

‘Be careful. Come back safe.’

She felt his fingers on her hair as she stepped past him and tiptoed down the stairs and out into the night.

A night still starless, the sky heavy with low-hanging clouds. Afterwards, when it was all over, when she was almost alone
again, her trek along the path and through the trees would seem to her like a dimly remembered magical odyssey. She made no
conscious attempt at caution yet she seemed to glide silently along the dirt track. No twig cracked underfoot. No branch
snapped against her. The cloudy night lent her a cloak of blackness. Her own eager heart lent her speed. Snatches of music
hummed in her head: Beethoven’s
Romance
, Mendelssohn’s
Wedding March
. Petra knew, instinctively, that she would never trip a bridal progress along any church aisle but, in some strange way,
this journey along a wooded path was her own wedding march, the only one she would ever have. The organ played in her head,
the choir sang in the night branches.

She tiptoed across the wooden footbridge. The disused allotment sheds looked like abandoned kayaks upturned on a desolate
shore. Her own breathing sounded loud in the silent night. She tapped lightly on the door of the shed, whispered his name.

When the door creaked open, they stared at each other. He drank in the turquoise eyes, the blond hair, the bandaged hand.
She saw the gauntness of him, the hunted look behind the unshaven face.

They whispered names and she stepped inside the shed and Roland pushed the door shut and they clung to each other. They parted
and he lifted her hand gently, and she led him deeper into the shed, down the ladder. She saw the strip of carpet spread on
the bed, the emptiness of the dungeon-like space, and she shushed him.

‘Eat,’ she said, opening the container of soup, ‘eat, you look famished.’

He sipped it first, still hot from the can, and then he drank it down in noisy mouthfuls. The can was almost empty when he
saw the spoon in her hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘My mother would kill me for eating like that.’

‘You’re not to do it again,’ she said with mock sternness.

‘Only when I’m starving,’ he told her. ‘And only when I haven’t seen you for an eternity.’

‘You have to go.’ Her eyes filled up. ‘You have to try to get out, Roland.’

He took her hand, lightly kissed the bandaged fingers. Tell me what happened.’

She left out the worst of it but he seemed to feel it anyway: in the flat in Prenzlauer Berg he had seen and felt for himself
the fury of the man with the yellow eyes. The fellow had a name now:
Major Fuchs
. He shivered, imagining the so-called ‘lie-detector test’.

‘You must go,’ she said again. ‘I can’t trust myself the next time.’

‘There shouldn’t be a next time. We should go together.’

‘How could we go? I’m being watched.’ She leaned into him. ‘Hold me, Roland.’ Her voice was muffled against his chest.

She raised her head to be kissed. Their hunger took them. Hours of loneliness and years of waiting fell on the floor with
their discarded clothing. Under Johannes Vos’s blanket, they found in each other a respite from the nightmare into which they
had stumbled together. He told her he loved her; she told him that she loved him, too. She held him tight and he held her
tighter. It was a time out of time, a place beyond the world, beyond the allotment shed, beyond all frontiers, where neither
Wall nor passport control existed.

When they were done, they lay beside each other and he drew the thin blanket closer around their naked bodies.

‘I’ll come back for you,’ he whispered. ‘Maybe they’ll let you out to get married.’

‘Who?’ She kissed him on the nose. ‘Who am I going to marry?’

He made a face. ‘On the other hand, my mother and father might not approve of a daughter-in-law from East Germany.’

She slapped him on the rump. ‘A workers’ paradise and don’t you forget it.’

They went on teasing each other, touching each other. For a little while, they could keep the world beyond their underground
bed at bay, they could hold back the sunrise.

But only for a while.

‘I should go,’ she said. ‘I need to get into Johannes’ flat before light.’

They loved each other again, fiercely, hurriedly. In the end you knew that tomorrow was coming anyway.

In the darkness he panicked, wondered how long they’d slept, if light was already fingering its way across the eastern land.

He heard her shallow breathing, felt her hair like lace on his face, the heat of her buttocks nestled against his groin. Desire
trembled in him.

Move
. They might be at her door now. Fuchs or the frog fellow, hammers at the ready, voices raised in the icy air of morning.
Send her away, save her from yourself, from your doomed love.

Move: she doesn’t need to be doomed
.

He eased himself away from her, shivered with the winter air on his skin when he lifted the thin grey blanket she’d brought
from Johannes’ apartment. He folded the grey stuff around her pale shoulder, watched it rise and fall with her breathing.

Move
. The cheap watch that Ingham had given him said three forty-five, so they’d slept only for a few minutes, a few breaths shared
under the scratchy blanket on the narrow platform.

Petra stirred, muttered something in her sleep.

In the half-lit gloom he watched her waken to the world, to the dawn. Watched her body turn, her arm stretch out from under
the blanket. She turned her head and in her fabulous waking eyes he saw the tears glisten, knew that – even in her brief sleep
– she had wept.

‘I’m sorry.’ He remembered his roughness, the urgency. ‘I hurt you – I didn’t mean to—’

Her finger stopped his lip. ‘Nothing you could say or do could hurt me, Roland.’ Her fingers played on his mouth. ‘It’s this.’
Her other hand, bandaged, was raised a little. ‘I guess the painkillers are wearing off.’

He took her wounded hand in his own, bent to kiss the wrist above the bandage.

‘Your violin,’ Roland said, ‘your playing . . .’

She shook her head. ‘Maybe some things are not meant to be.’ He felt himself drawn into the turquoise pool of her eyes. ‘And
maybe some things
are.
’ She drew him down to her, kissed him on the mouth.

‘But it’s something you loved.’ His voice was a whisper.

‘Sometimes you have to give up what you love, Roland.’

In her words he heard the echoes of a world not his: a world of war, of fathers lost, of invasion, a world hidden behind a
prison wall.

And he had strayed into this world where you gave up what you loved
.

‘I will love you always,’ he said, ‘no matter what happens.’

‘What could happen?’ Petra laughed. ‘We’re here in the lap of luxury in our very own country estate.’

He loved her laughing face, her dancing eyes. Forced himself to laugh with her.

Maybe she knows, maybe she, too, is putting on a brave front
.

‘
Ich liebe dich,
’ he said again.

‘
Ich auch.
’

Move
, Roland reminded himself.

‘It’s almost light,’ he whispered. ‘We
must
move.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s not so bad, is it?’ Her glance took in the dark cellar, the flickering candle, the shadows dancing
on the
walls. ‘Even here I could be happy with you.’

He bent to kiss her. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

In the candlelight they dressed quickly. From a small compartment of her rucksack she took a folded map of East Germany and
opened it out on the bed.

‘It’s Johannes’, he doesn’t know I tore it from his atlas.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘He’s like the rest of us, better off not
knowing things.’

They were kneeling side by side on the floor, bent over the map.

‘We’re so small we’re not even on the map but we’re close to here.’ Her finger rested beside the town of Furstenwalde. ‘Berlin
is here.’ Pointing again. ‘It’s safer, I think, if you go east, through Furstenwalde, on to Frankfurt-an-Oder and then take
a train south, to Karl-Marx-Stadt and Leipzig. I don’t know how, but try to make your way to the border from there. Maybe
this is stupid, I just think they might not be watching so closely for you down there. Maybe they don’t even know about you.’

‘It’s not a bad plan.’
But I’ll have no part of it: it leaves you exposed here for too long, while I traipse across half of East Germany
.

‘I’ll try to see Pastor Bruck tomorrow,’ Petra said. ‘Maybe he knows somebody in Leipzig who can help you.’

He didn’t answer, just leaned across and kissed her hair.

‘I’m scared, Roland.’ Her voice edged with tears.

‘It’ll be OK.’
If they have me, they’ll leave you alone
.

‘If Pastor Bruck can help, I’ll get here somehow in the afternoon. Your best bet is to take the train after four o’clock,
when the early shifts from the sanatorium leave. You won’t be so noticeable then.’

‘And you? You can’t work with your hand.’

‘It doesn’t hurt so much when I’m with you.’ She smiled as he lifted her bandaged hand, laid it against his cheek. ‘But it’s
better
if I go into the Institute and get the nurse to look at it – she’ll send me home and then I’ll be free to help.’

‘You’ve done too much already.’

‘I’ve never loved anyone before.’

‘You didn’t know me when you got into the car with me.’

‘A girl like me knows what she wants.’ She tried to smile but her eyes were filling up. ‘Even if all she wants is an unshaven
fellow who needs a bath.’

‘My God.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘I suppose I stink.’

‘Like rotten fish.’

‘That’s a nice thing to say to your future husband.’

‘Future wives are allowed to say what they like.’ She was weeping now. ‘Just you wait till we’re married, see what I’ll say
to you then.’

He couldn’t answer her, his own heart was too full. He wiped her tears with his hand. Got to his feet and drew her up alongside
him. The flickering light from the candle stub on the floor threw their shadows on to the wooden ceiling, dark, even menacing.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘It’ll be light soon.’

‘Wait.’ She opened her rucksack, took out her purse. ‘You’ll need this for the trains.’ She gave him a handful of folded notes.

‘They gave me some money.’
They
. Ingham and his accomplices, creatures now even more insubstantial than the shadowy images on the ceiling.

‘You’ll need it.’ She folded his hand around the money. ‘God knows how long it’ll be before you get home.’

‘You
must
go, Petra.’ He picked up her rucksack and started to zip it shut. The small notebook inside the bag stared up at him. He
took the notebook out, looked at Petra.