The Second Winter

East Berlin. August 1969
.

The bus window framed the image with the geometric clarity of a camera lens. Beyond the glass, on the ground floor of a faceless apartment block, a pigeon was trapped in the sooty mesh of a torn screen. The boulevard had narrowed into a single lane approaching the border into West Berlin, and traffic had slowed to a crawl. On board the tourist coach, only one passenger noticed the stricken bird. Its wings were spread wide. Its scrawny chest was thrust out. In the blur of the woman’s peripheral vision, for a brief instant the creature became a child — a girl, straining to free herself, her arms pinioned behind her back. Surprised by the violence of the image, the woman twisted in her seat to watch as long as she could. The pigeon’s feathers were snared on the jagged wire. Beneath its claws, dust rose from the concrete windowsill like smoke. Threads of down fluttered to the sidewalk.

The woman’s fingers slipped on the chrome handle on the seatback in front of her as the pigeon slid from view. It was a humid afternoon, and Angela Schmidt was suddenly aware of how sweaty her hands were. She barely smiled when she met the eyes of another passenger — the timpanist, Franck, wasn’t it? — then faced forward again, allowed her gaze to return to the grim façades of the buildings passing outside the filthy windows. The other members of the symphony had changed back into their casual clothes before boarding the two coaches hired by the orchestra for this tour. She was still wearing the same formal dress she had worn for the concert the evening before. In the dense air, the charcoal gown was becoming as heavy as a soggy blanket. The woman next to her — a short woman with hairy forearms and olive skin — shifted and tried to catch her attention, but Angela ignored her. What was taking them so long? How much farther before the checkpoint? She tried to forget the trapped bird, she tried to make herself comfortable in her seat, but couldn’t. Her stiff costume, she realized, stood out from her colleagues’ more colorful outfits like a stone dropped into a field of grass.

Fifteen minutes later, the brakes squealed, and the bus lurched then trundled over fractured pavement as it followed the other bus off the boulevard into a parking lot. The Berlin Wall loomed beyond a chain-link fence crowned with rusty barbed wire. Angela’s grip tightened on the chrome bar. She sat up to get a better view out the front, then instructed herself to relax. If she appeared too nervous, the border police would fasten on her. This wasn’t Angela’s first visit to East Berlin. She knew the drill. Usually, crossing back into the West, the inspections were cursory. Passport control was managed by a company representative. There were fifty people on this bus at least, half the symphony — too many to question. All
she had to do was remain calm. She was a violinist with the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester of Munich. She had been playing the violin since she was five. She had been with the orchestra for six years, since she was thirty-one years old. She was respected, married to an industrial designer. She and her husband paid their taxes, they lived in an apartment with a spare bedroom, drove a 1967 Mercedes-Benz 250 sedan. All she had to do was relax.
Relax
. She wiped her hands on her thighs, folded them deliberately in her lap, shook the tension from her shoulders.

The diesel engine settled into an unsteady idle, sputtered, then came to an abrupt stop. The hydraulic system hissed, the door swung open. A man dressed in a green uniform climbed the stairs. His eyes darted up the aisle. Angela looked down at her fingers. The cheap ring Lutz had bought her five years before, when they were finally married, caught the diffused sunlight like a small chunk of plastic. Lutz was having an affair. They had never spoken about his infidelity, but Lutz didn’t try to hide it. She didn’t want him to. It was worse to lie to each other, wasn’t it?
Relax, Angela, relax
. She reached for her throat, through the fabric of her dress touched a diamond and sapphire pendant dangling from a delicate platinum chain around her neck, made certain that it remained hidden beneath her collar.

When she dared to raise her eyes again, the border patrolman was three steps up the aisle, pacing slowly. Another soldier, shielded from view, was on board as well, speaking to the driver in German so guttural that he could have been choking. The patrolman’s uniform was perfectly pressed. There was something fastidious about him, something precise. He was wearing glasses an engineer would wear. Even from this distance, Angela could see how immaculate the
lenses were. His features were fine, his skin unshaven but smooth. The hair visible below the rim of his cap was clipped short, close to the scalp. When their eyes connected, Angela froze. She dropped her gaze, straightened the ring on her finger, forced herself to breathe.

Next to her, the olive-skinned woman ventured something in a whisper. The few words sent a wave of adrenaline through Angela’s chest. Her skin tingled. It took her a few beats to understand the woman’s question.
You don’t think they’ll go through the bags in the hold, do you?

Angela offered the woman a curt smile.

“That could take hours,” the woman said, “if they do it thoroughly.”

Angela had to stifle herself. She wanted to whisper
shhh!
so forcefully that her lips twitched. She was still on edge. The dark streets of East Berlin still haunted her. After the concert had ended the night before, she had stayed behind in the symphony hall when the rest of the orchestra boarded the buses for the hotel. She had locked herself in a stall in the women’s room until the voices receded and she was certain that the cleaning crew was finished with their work. Then — with the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony still replaying itself in her head — she had felt her way across the stage and out of the pitch-black concert hall. At midnight, East Berlin was deserted. She hugged the walls, found cover in the shadows. Certain that she was being followed, she ducked into a bar, then detoured down an alley in search of the address she had been given by her cousin in Munich. Now, the echo of her frantic footsteps rang in her ears.
For God’s sake, Angela, relax
. Her hands were squeezed into fists, and she told herself to loosen them.

Walking the length of the bus, the patrolman let his fingers brush over the top of the seatbacks. His footsteps paused.
Angela’s gaze traveled up his arm, across the stiff collar of his shirt, to his thin, bloodless lips, the chiseled beak of his chin. He had taken notice of a particularly large bag in the overhead rack, and he appeared to be reading the tag on the handle. His Adam’s apple ratcheted up and down, needle-sharp against the silk of his throat. “Amanda Christian,” he said.

Two seats forward, next to the window, a blond-haired woman straightened in her seat.

“This suitcase belongs to you?”

“The black one,” the woman said. “Yes.”

The patrolman pulled it from the rack. “It is a large bag for such a short trip.”

The woman shrugged. “I am a singer,” she said. “I don’t carry an instrument, I carry my costumes.”

The patrolman hesitated, then shoved the bag back. He focused instead upon another, smaller suitcase next to it. “To whom does this case belong?”

No one answered, and the patrolman yanked the rectangular, varnished case from the rack. When it dropped from the ledge, it twisted on its handle with a jolt. The patrolman’s arm flexed. He kept the case suspended above the row of passengers, dug out the name tag with his thumb. From her seat, Angela could see that the label was blank.

“Hmmm? Whose suitcase is this?”

Toward the front of the bus, a man looked over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “That’s mine. What’s the problem?”

“No problem,” the patrolman said. “I would like to open this case, that’s all.”

“It’s a horn,” the passenger said.

“Open it.”

“It’s a trumpet.”

“I only see a trumpet case,” the patrolman said.

“I’m a trumpet player.”

The patrolman propped the case on the edge of a seatback. When he tried to unsnap the clasps, they were locked.

“You have no right —” the trumpet player began.

“Get up,” the patrolman said.

“I —”

“Stand up.”

The trumpet player’s face reddened. Angela watched him pull himself to his feet, shuffle into the aisle. His jacket caught on the blue vinyl seatback. He pushed past the person seated next to him, unaware that he was knocking her knees sideways.

“Do you have a key?”

The trumpet player reached into his pocket. The key jangled against some change, then fell to the floor. Angela noticed how thin his auburn hair was as he bent to retrieve it. His mustache was much thicker.

“Here you are,” the trumpet player said.

“Open it yourself.”

From where she sat, Angela had a good view into the case. As the lid rose, the shadow inside fled, revealing the polished surface of a professional’s trumpet, snug against a worn velvet cushion. The smooth contours of the instrument glistened like molten gold. “You see,” the trumpet player said. “Nothing but my trumpet.” Nevertheless, the patrolman lifted the instrument from its cradle and searched the well underneath.