The Waiting Time (25 page)

‘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.’