Sektion 20 (13 page)

Alex imagined him and Sophie, there on the other side, making plans to travel to London or Los Angeles or New York or anywhere they wanted. Somewhere where you wouldn’t get called a class traitor and locked up for wanting to travel. They were so close, there by the window, he could almost taste what it was like to be free.

His train of thought was interrupted by the sound of boots running on a marble floor. Alex looked up to see two security guards hurtling towards him, guns in their hands. He stood up and wondered why they felt the need to draw their guns. Both of the men were heavily overweight and they could barely speak by the time they got to him.

‘Against the wall,’ gasped one of them as they frisked him down.

‘What’s the problem?’ said Sophie, who had decided boldness was the best approach. ‘He’s helping me out.’

‘You’re out of a job here, Fräulein,’ said one of the men sharply. ‘You’re both coming down to the police station.’

Ten minutes later they had been locked in separate cells and Alex cursed himself for not thinking up a cover story. He thought of his father’s words:
You in your invincible youth! You think nothing can touch you and nothing can go wrong.
Alex was beginning to realise that Frank was right some of the time.

They kept him in there for an hour before manhandling him into a small concrete room with a desk and two chairs. The desk held a tape recorder and desk lamp. Behind it sat a lean, unsmiling, middle-aged man who looked at him with open hostility.

The interrogation was more brutal than Alex had expected. The cops had been relatively civil with them when they brought them in. But now he was being questioned by this hard-faced brute who told him that Sophie had confessed he had bullied her into getting him into the building. Threatened to beat her if she did not let him.

‘What sort of
Arschloch
threatens to beat his own girlfriend?’ said the man.

Alex didn’t believe that, but it did make him wonder what she had really said.

‘Why were you at the House of Ministries, Alex Ostermann?’

‘I was helping my girlfriend out with her cleaning job. Her parents don’t like me and we’re never allowed to spend any time together.’

The man looked at his file. ‘Don’t . . . like . . . you,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m not surprised.’ He stood up holding a page from the file and read from it as he walked behind Alex. ‘ “Asocial”, “lacking political-moral maturity”, “holding false opinions”, “corrupting upstanding socialist youth”, “making malicious propaganda against the State” . . .’ He yanked Alex’s hair hard. Alex let out a yell, more out of surprise than fear. ‘I don’t like you either.’

The man continued to walk around Alex, uncomfortably close to him. Then he stood right behind him. Alex grew increasingly tense. He thought the man was going to hit him.

Instead he put his face close to Alex’s ear.

‘We think you’re a spy, Alex Ostermann,’ he said quietly, then returned to the other side of the desk. ‘Gathering intelligence at government offices.’

‘Do you know what happens to spies?’ he said as he sat down and made his hand into the shape of a gun. He put it to his temple and said, ‘
PK-KOW
’, jolting his head to mimic the impact of the bullet. Alex wondered if he had actually shot someone like that.

‘We’re going to keep you here for a while,’ he said. ‘See what else your girlfriend tells us.’

Alex was returned to solitary confinement. He was feeling deeply confused. Did they believe his story? Why did they think he was a spy? Then there was the ‘making malicious propaganda against the State’. What the hell was
that
all about? Did they mean his band? How would
they
know about
that
? No one had accused him of planning to escape. That was the most obvious thing, but they hadn’t even mentioned it.

They didn’t keep him there a while at all. After a night in his cell he was taken by car to Hohenschönhausen detention centre in the east of the city.

Chapter 17

The smell of the place hit him as soon as he arrived. A sharp high whiff of disinfectant and then a lower stale note – the sickly miasma of sweat and human waste. Alex knew that smell well enough from last summer, from the old people’s nursing home. But all the residents in this particular wing of the prison were youths.

Then there was the noise. A sort of muffled clamour, like a crowded swimming pool. The clang of steel doors, the crack of boots on concrete floors, echoing around with the shouts and murmurs of the inmates.

The guards took him to a room with blank whitewashed walls and a tiny barred window set close to the ceiling. A concrete recess in the wall made do for a bed. No mattress. No chair. Nothing, apart from a bucket on the floor.

After half an hour – at least he assumed it was half an hour, it could have been ten minutes – he started to imagine people whispering to him, or the walls moving a little, throbbing in the harsh light of the fluorescent strip in the ceiling.

Alex fretted. His stomach shrank to a tight little knot. Eventually they came to get him. ‘Break any of the prison rules and you go back in there for a week. Try to hit one of us and it’s a month,’ said the guard.

They issued him with a prison uniform with
254
stencilled on the back. It was slightly too big for him, felt scratchy and smelled of stale sweat. Then they marched him off without a word, before he could even turn back the sleeves.

The next stop was the prison barber and Alex began to struggle and shouted when he realised what was coming. So they threw him into a solitary cell. This one was worse than the one he had just been in. Rubber-padded, complete sound insulation, no chair, no bed, pitch black, with the all-pervasive tang of disinfectant. After an hour Alex thought he could hear someone or something breathing in the cell and he had to fight really hard to keep his panic at bay. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he told himself. ‘This is just a cell. There was nothing else here when you came in and there’s nothing come in since. Breathe deeply. Keep calm. Don’t let them win. This is a prison. It’s not a horror film.’

When his breathing returned to normal, he began to feel an extraordinary tiredness. The events of the last couple of days caught up with him. He lay down on the hard cold floor and drifted into dreamless sleep.

Alex was disconcerted to wake up and discover he was still there and there was no difference between having his eyes open and having them closed. A cold draught was coming from somewhere. At least the cell had some ventilation. That was good because there was an awful stench of rubber there.

Alex needed to pee. He remembered seeing the outline of a bucket in the corner before the door slammed and he reached for it on his hands and knees, carefully feeling his way in the darkness. When his fingers made contact with cold tin, he peed as carefully as he could and put the bucket in the far corner – somewhere where he was unlikely to knock it over.

Now he was beginning to feel uneasy. He had no idea how long they had kept him in there. An hour – all morning?

There was a rattle and the door swung open. The light blinded him and he instinctively cringed, expecting to be hit.

‘Out,’ barked a guard. There were two of them. Young men in their twenties. They looked on him with cold, hard faces, grabbed him either side and frogmarched him away.

‘What’s happening?’ said Alex. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Prisoner 254, no talking,’ said one, gripping Alex’s arm so tightly he could feel it going numb.

Alex shut up. He was in quite enough trouble already.

They took him to the barber and left him on his own. The barber was big enough to take care of himself. Alex expected him to be just as curt, but he surprised him by being nice. Well, not nice exactly, but like a kindly parent who was explaining to a naughty child why they had been punished. Alex began to feel tearful.

‘Prison rules,’ explained the barber. ‘“No prisoner shall be permitted to wear hair longer than accepted military length,”’ he rattled off, in the slightly mocking way people use to quote official regulations they don’t really agree with.

‘If you’re an enemy of the State, we should try to change you,’ he said and ruffled Alex’s hair. ‘You’re here to be reformed, not just punished. So first we will try to make you look like a defender of the State. After all, in a couple of years’ time you will be expected to join our armed forces and protect your country.’

Alex didn’t know what to make of this. The man was gentle with him and had a slightly camp manner – like one of those TV presenters on variety programmes that all the old ladies loved. He noticed his own hair gathering in wispy clumps around his feet and fought back his tears.

‘Chin up, lad,’ said the barber. Then he leaned closer, pressed something into Alex’s hand and whispered, ‘Couple of sweets for later. Give one of them to someone you like the look of. It’s useful to have a friend in here.’

Fortunately there were no mirrors in the prison so Alex did not have to worry about what he looked like. And when he was marched back to the ordinary cells no one looked at him twice. Actually, Alex admitted to himself, having his hair cut was a blessing. Now the other prisoners would not know at once that he had just arrived.

Except they would. The ones who had been here for a while had a pale, pasty look about them – like white bread left out in the sun that was starting to curl at the edges. Alex was too brown – too healthy-looking.

Before they got to his cell a bell went and the other boys hurried down to the canteen to eat.

‘Go with them,’ said the guard. ‘We’ll sort you out afterwards.’

Alex watched the others and copied them exactly. He grabbed a tray and picked up a spoon and lined up in the queue for the serving counter. There were no knives or forks here. It was too easy to imagine them being used as a weapon. Alex looked at his spoon and thought you could still do a good job poking someone’s eye out with the handle.

He felt a jabbing in his back. He turned round to see a wiry, ratty-looking boy about his age and size. ‘You look like a soft egg,’ the boy said in a low voice. ‘Ripe for a beating.’

There were two others with this boy, both grinning and snickering. Alex wondered what he was supposed to do. Did you ignore these taunts or did you react immediately? If he hit him, he’d be in serious trouble again.

‘Shut up, Maier,’ shouted a prison guard. ‘If I catch you talking in the canteen queue again, you’re off to solitary.’

‘Yes, sir,’ barked the ratty boy and stood to attention. It was difficult to know whether he was mocking the guard or genuinely frightened of him.

The wait in the queue was interminable. All the while they whispered ‘soft egg’ and ‘creep’ at Alex. He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore them. The food looked awful. Some sort of gristly pinkish mince with vegetables that had been boiled to a pulp. He spotted a single chair at the end of a table and went to sit down. The other boys there totally ignored him – which was preferable.

Despite the vileness of the food Alex was hungry and he ate quickly. After he’d drunk his third glass of water he began to worry about where he was going next. A bell went – so loud and piercing it made his ears hurt – and the boys all got up and placed their trays and plates in racks. Alex made sure he kept well away from the ones who had taunted him in the queue. Please, please, he implored a nebulous deity, don’t put me in a cell with them.

They filed out back to the holding room and one of the guards caught Alex by the arm and dragged him out of the human stream. ‘Wait here,’ he said.

As he stood at the side, one of the ratty boy’s friends could not resist a final insult. ‘Creep,’ he said as he passed, punching Alex on the arm, just as the guard returned.

The guard dragged the boy out. ‘You are going to solitary,’ Alex heard him say.

He felt sick. Now they would have even more reason to persecute him.

The prisoners marched to their cell doors and waited outside, leaving Alex to stand there alone. He was feeling very conspicuous and could sense them all looking at him.

A guard called them to attention and there was a headcount and roll-call.

When the guard called out ‘Fiedler’, another guard called ‘Detention’.

That must be the boy’s name. The one who had hit him. Alex was alarmed to hear a mutinous murmur from the other boys. He could not make out what it meant. Were they sorry for Fiedler or glad he would be out of the way for a while?

A guard came and took Alex down a long marble corridor with a highly polished floor. ‘In here, 254,’ said the guard and ushered him into a cell. Alex took a deep breath and entered.

Chapter 18

Alex’s heart was thumping hard in his chest. He was trying his best to hide his fear. As the door swung open he peered in. There were two bunk beds, a chair and table, and a portable toilet. That was why the whole place smelled so bad. The cells all had their own portable toilets. So far he could not see anyone else in there.

‘Hartmann, say
Guten Tag
to your cellmate,’ said the guard.