The Waiting Time (24 page)

‘I expect you were quite a celebrity in the common room at the university — an American, gave the department a little international status, they’d have hung on your words. And you had the ideology, you believed in the rotten little neo-state. Natural step, wasn’t it, to inform on your academic colleagues? Not for money, not for privilege, not for power, but because you believed, in sincerity, in the need to protect the state from Fascist renewal. You’d have informed on anyone idiot enough to trust you, from the head of department to junior staff, from full-time students to part-time students. You had your codenames and your contact men in August-Bebel Strasse and the safe houses where you’d go, once a week or once a month, for the debriefs. Eva Krause, wife of Hauptman Dieter Krause, Stasi officer, was a part-time student.’

The big head jerked up and the stinking smoke from the cigarette billowed into Albert Perkins’s face.

‘Never bank on permanence, eh, that’s what I say, fatal to believe anything lasts for ever. The Wall came tumbling down. The wonderful little state ended in the gutter. Files were opened and identities were matched to codenames. You would have been slung out on your ear. Big job, big status, down the tube. What do you do? A bit of translation work if you can get it? You’re sixty years old, on the scrapheap because you backed the wrong horse, miserable mean little pension. Not much thanks for dishing the dirt on a part-time student — Eva Krause. What’s keeping you here? Let me list what you resent, shall I?’

Albert Perkins smiled, icily. It was not in his nature to feel pity. A man made his bed, he must lie on it. He stood in the American’s damp room and his presence emphasized the man’s failure.

‘You resent the new unemployment — two in five Rostock males, from the
Rathaus
statistics, out of work or being trained for work that does not exist. You resent the new poverty — the city is the poorest, as measured in
per capita
income statistics, in Germany. You resent the dumping of immigrants — gypsies, foreigners — in hostels in housing estates like this crap place. You resent the new crime — muggings, beatings, thievings, pick- pocketing, prostitution, protection racketeering. You resent the new drug culture — cannabis available and Ecstasy, crime syndicates bringing in the heroin and cocaine. You resent the new men in town — the
Wessis
come to take over the
Rathaus,
the police, the schools, business. Most of all, what you resent is the big message — everything you did in forty years was second rate, was rubbish, should be replaced. I think, my friend, that you should go home. Where is it? Is there an old mother there who’s never had a letter? You need me, my friend, because I can speak on your behalf to my American colleagues. I trade, life for me is a market-place. You talk to me about Eva Krause, and I talk to colleagues about forgetting the dumb stupidity of a twenty-year-old signals kid forty years ago.’

Albert Perkins believed the screw should be turned tightly, but always slowly. The maximum pain, the greatest hurt, was in the slow turning of the screw. He would come back the next day for his answer. A discussion on Eva Krause in exchange for letters being written to Immigration, Defense and the FBI. The American would brood on it overnight. He would be washed in sick sentimental memories of his mother and white bloody fences and apple bloody pies. The room was darkening. There was the glow of the single bar of an electric fire.

‘I’ll see myself out. You shouldn’t think of me as an enemy, was once but not now. You should think of me as your last best chance. There’s nothing left for you here. I’m trading that chance for the dirt, what’ll make me laugh, on the wife of Hauptman Krause. Have a good evening.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He said he would drive us.’

‘Yes, he said that.’

‘Where the hell is he?’

‘You do not, Christina, have to use foul language.’

‘He said he would drive us and he isn’t here: He said he would watch every match I played and he was late last night and went early. He said he would bring me a racquet from London and there was no racquet.’

Eva said flatly, ‘Your father is very busy.’

‘What does that mean, “busy”? Why does he lie?’

‘You should not speak of your father like that. Are you ready?’

The girl, her daughter, with her ugly, snarling face, flounced up the stairs. Eva Krause stood by the front door and put on her coat. He had said there was a problem that could lose them everything. She checked in her handbag for the car keys. He had touched the sleeve of her coat and the gold bracelet on her wrist, as if they, too, could be lost. She waited and ificked her fingers in impatience.

Christina stamped down the stairs, her bag scraping against the paintwork of the wall, and she carried an armful of racquets. When Eva Krause had been a girl of fourteen years old, her sports kit would have gone into a big paper bag and she would have been proud to own one racquet.

‘You have everything? You have checked?’

‘I have everything except my father, who has lied to me.’ Eva Krause locked the door behind her.

Through the late afternoon, through the evening, the five men searched the city and watched the roads out of Rostock. Two at any one time on the exit roads to the south and west that could lead to Bad Doberan and Kropelin and on to Rerik, three at any one time cruising the central city streets. Easier for them to watch and search now because all of them knew the face of the young woman. For Krause, the time for the tennis match, second round, came and went. They watched the exit roads, they idled in their cars in the old city and the new city of Rostock. Each yearned to see her, recognize her, to have the second chance to finish with the problem.

* * *

He knocked. He gave his name quietly.

There was loud music and shouting and laughter from the floor above and the floor below. Seamen filled all the rooms of the
pension
except those on their floor. He thought the crew big enough to have brought a bulk carrier or a container ship to Rostock but he did not know whether their language was Swedish, Finnish or Norwegian.

Josh knocked, gave his name, unlocked the door.

He had, in the Army vernacular, torn a strip off her. He had put her in the car, swerved off down the road, come close to crashing a lorry because the tension was still eating into him, driven back to the
pension,
and marched her up the stairs as if she were a foul little brat spoiling a family outing. He had taken her to her room, given her his tongue, and locked her in. He had sat in his own room, cold and damp, on the bed, gripped his hands to contain the trembling, and failed.

He turned the key and carried in the food boxes and the beer cans, his bedding, the mattress and a pifiow.

He dropped the bedding and the mattress, used his heel to close the door behind him. He groped for the light switch. She was in bed, where he had told her to be. She had found more blankets from the shelf at the top of the wardrobe. Her clothes were scattered on the floor, her underwear, jeans, sweater and walking shoes. Only the shoulders of the pyjamas showed above the sheet and the blankets. He had made, again, a child of her. She hadn’t spoken to him in the car, hadn’t bloody thanked him, or apologized to him for rubbishing his advice. He had gone out only when the night closed on the city. She looked up from the pillows.

‘Have to eat — have to eat something, damned if you deserve anything.’

He was stern because he had been frightened fit to crap and angry because he had been frightened fit to piss. The big eyes gazed at him from the pale face, from the pillows.

He put the food boxes on the bed. She sat up for him and he rearranged the pillows behind her back, as he would have done for a sick child. The burgers would have cooled and the sauces would have congealed. He opened the boxes. She wore thin cotton pyjamas and he could see the shape of her beneath the material. He gave her the coat from the floor and she hooked it round her shoulders. Her face was filled with the burger and chips. He pulled the ring on a beer can, passed it to her, and she lifted her knees, gripped the can between them, against the blankets. He sat on the end of the bed.

Her mouth was full. She pointed with a chip at the bedclothes behind him, and the mattress.

‘What’s that for?’

He flushed. ‘I am sleeping in here.’

Her eyebrows arched, as if the life returned to her, the mischief. ‘Please yourself.’

He said, as if it was another speech, ‘You are not alone again, you are not out of my sight again.’

She ate, she thawed, she drank.

Through a full mouth, swallowing, ‘What do you do with yourself, when you’re not working?’

‘Don’t seem to have much time.’

‘I was only asking.’

‘I read a bit, in the evening, if I’ve the time.’

‘What do you read?’

‘Military history, and my law books — work for the morning.’

‘Is your work good?’

‘It’s dismal, but it’s what I have.’

‘What’s important to you?’

‘Important to me, Tracy, is to be my own man.’

She grinned, first time. ‘That matters?’

‘Some people, not many, say it does.’

‘Is that why you came here, to be “my own man”?’

‘Have you finished?’

She nodded. The last of the sauce from the last of the burger dripped onto her blankets. She reached for another can and he passed it her. He took the boxes, squashed them small and shoved them into the room rubbish bin. She watched him. He laid his mattress across the doorway. He came close to her, her eyes following him, and he bent and switched off the light. It took him moments to accustom himself to the light in the room, faint through the curtains. He sat on the end of her bed and pulled off his shoes and socks, his shirt and trousers. He folded each item and placed them next to his pillow, with his shoes. He stripped to his vest and underpants. He crawled into the cold of the bed, hugged himself for warmth. Her arm hung from below her blankets, near h head.

‘Josh. . .‘ A w
h
isper.

‘Yes?’

‘You didn’t tell me. Is it why you came here, to be your own man?’

‘I’m pretty tired. Keep it till the morning.’

He heard the rhythm of her breathing.

‘Josh . .

‘Yes?’

‘What sort of team do we make?’

‘Pretty bloody awful.’

‘Josh . .

‘For God’s sake.’

‘A good enough team to break the bastards?’

‘Maybe.’

He rolled over from his back to his side, away from her and her hanging hand. He shivered.

‘Josh . .

‘I’m trying to get to sleep.’

‘Josh . . . If anyone ever called you a chatty old bugger, they lied.’

‘Goodnight, Tracy.’

He heard her finish the second can. She threw it away over the floor of the room. It clattered against the wall by the window. He pulled the blankets tighter on his shoulders.

‘I can’t help you. You have travelled from England? A great journey. I have been here for three years only. I was a church youth leader in Schwerin.’

He was a pleasant-faced young man. He shrugged. He stood at the gate across the road from the church. By the side of the house his wife hung washing on a line. There was a good wind off the sea and sunshine. Small children played at the woman’s feet.

‘I can’t help you because I have never heard such a business spoken of in Rerik. I know the names of those who come to my church and they are the few in this town, the majority do not care to come. Those who worship with me have not talked of it.’

Josh sensed that, beside him, she sagged.

She had needed the help so that she would not have to bang on doors and traipse from road to road. They had talked about it in the car, the long drive on the small roads to the south, past the lone farms and the cranes pecking in the fields, the need to find the pastor because he would be able to unlock the doors.

‘I have to tell you, the past here, and everywhere through the East, is a closed book. You will not find people who wish to talk of the past. They were dark times and there are few who want light thrown on those times.’

He looked at her.

She was turning away. Her chin jutted in determination. It was a small community in a half-moon around the inner sea, bordered to the north by the peninsula. They had laid too great a weight on the pastor, at the heart of the community, opening doors that would otherwise be locked to them. She was walking away. He nodded to the young man, thanked him, for nothing, and there was pain on the young face that recognized the failure to help. Josh grimaced. He followed Tracy.

The voice called from behind him.

‘I came here three years ago when my predecessor died. There is somebody else who could perhaps be of assistance to you. There was a pastor who came to Rerik when my predecessor was away, he lives here now. He came every year to Rerik for twenty years. I cannot say that he would wish to talk of this matter.’

She was rooted still. Her head turned. She demanded and was given the name, the address, the direction.

‘People do not talk of the past, there is nothing of pride in the past.’

They left him frowning and walked by the old red-brick church with the steep tower where there was a nest box for kestrels. An elderly woman in a formal coat sat on a bench in the sunshine in the graveyard past the church. They walked on the small main street and a shop-keeper was sweeping hard at the snow on the pavement. A woman was pushing up the shutters from the front window of a craft shop. A workman from the council shovelled rubbish from the gutter into his wheeled bin. Josh could not sense the past here. Neat small homes and precious tidy shops. He could not sense that this was a place of murder in cold blood. They walked by the fenced gardens and the little wired compounds for chickens, and the sheds where a single pig was kept or a ewe or geese. It seemed to him to be a place of peace, but when he looked across the water, to the peninsula, he saw the faint shape of buildings among the trees.

They came to a bungalow, small and humble, facing the water and the peninsula and the wall of trees. It was newly painted. An old woman, grey-haired and small, was sweeping the path. Josh smiled at her and gave the name that he had been told. She was so helpful, so keen to please. Her husband, the retired pastor, was at the dentist in Bad Doberan and would return in two hours. He thanked her. The sun shone on the small bungalow. He felt foul: he blasted his way, her way, into a place of peace, where the past was forgotten.

He said briskly, ‘We’ve two hours to lose.’

Tracy gazed into his face. ‘You don’t believe it, do you? It’s like you don’t believe it happened.’

Josh said, ‘People go to old battlefields — Waterloo or the Somme, Sedgemoor or Culloden. They see farms and fields and woods. Yes, it’s hard to believe what happened.’

There was the hardness on her face, as if she thought him weak.

‘You were here?’

‘I was here, if you can believe it.’

‘Where? In the car? In a lay-by? Down the road by the shore where he launched from?’

She faced out and gazed on the inner sea, the Salzhaff. Short piers jutted into the water against which small fishing boats were tied. The light sparkled on the water and swans cruised.

‘No, I was in those bloody trees, if you can believe it.’ She jabbed her finger towards the line of poplars beside the road, and the bramble undergrowth between them. ‘I saw him taken from the water and brought back here, and I saw him fight from them and run. I didn’t see him again . . . I didn’t see him after he ran. I had to go to the car, drive to Berlin, drop the car, go through the checkpoint before midnight. I had to get out of this shit hole, if you can believe it.’

She took his arm and propelled him away from the piers, and the peace that denied the history. The spring sun was warm on Josh’s face. They went to lose two hours, went towards the gate of the base and the fence of rusted wire that straddled the narrow point of the peninsula.

‘It was sex. It was physical sex. I did not have to be an expert to learn what it was. Not love, I do not think it was anything more than a lust for the physical business of sex. It was not necessary for her to tell me, she wore it like the clothes on her. The desire for sex with the Russian was in her eyes and her hands.’

The sunlight came through the window, filtered by the dirt on the glass, and fell on the floor, which was filthy, and on the table, which had not been cleared from his morning meal, and struggled through the smoke of his cigarettes. Albert Perkins paced the small room without comment. He let the American sit and talk.

‘When she first came it was to regular classes in the evenings. Her husband handled me — that’s how she would have known about me. No, she did not know that I informed to her husband. He would have sent her, and it started out as the regular classes, English literature. But she was a busy woman, and it soon had gotten that she couldn’t make all the classes, she had meetings half the night, half the evenings of the week, something with the FDGB down in the shipyard. She asked if she could come here, fit in one-to-one classes when she didn’t have meetings. She paid. She was working, her husband was a top cat, she wasn’t short of money. She paid me and she came here. About a month after she’d started coming here, because of the way her talk was, liberated, I went to another officer who had handled me when Krause was away, sort of signed up for him with a different code- name and a different
lif
e, and talked about her to him. It wasn’t a big deal, at least I didn’t think so.’

Perkins wore his coat. The bar on the fire was not lit. The grimed dirt in the apartment seemed worse when the sunlight splayed on it than it had the evening before. Probably it was good that the wretched little man smoked because the cigarettes were strong enough to wipe out more pungent smells.

‘You said what you would do for me. It was South Carolina where I was raised, near to Summerville, up the river from Charleston. It was a crappy little place. You know, where we lived half the community turned out to see me head off on the bus to Charleston and the military, and half of that half wouldn’t have known where Germany was. I hated that place for its ignorance. My father had a bronchitis problem, he won’t have lasted. I think my mother would still be there. There were two sisters I had, younger than me, and I think they’d still be there because people from that sort of place don’t go far. It would have been about the day after the Wall came down that I stopped hating that place. What could I do? I could get on a train to Berlin, and another train to Bonn, and I could walk into the embassy and tell the marine guard that I was AWOL, that I was a deserter. You said you’d speak for me. Did you mean that? You’d speak to Immigration and Defense and the FBI, would you?’

Perkins nodded gravely, with sincerity. His wife, Helen, said he was as trustworthy as a second-hand dealer in Ford cars.

‘It came out when we were talking English literature. I’d gotten her on to D. H. Lawrence. Well, she was a spiky woman. We’d gone through
Women in Love,
then
Sons and Lovers.
She was sort of giggly about it. I sent her home one evening, she’d good enough English, with
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Krause was away. She came back the next evening. Shit, her clothes were a mess, crumpled like she’d been roffing, creased like they’d been on the floor. She might have reckoned I was some sort of monk, or maybe I was a eunuch to her, maybe she reckoned me one of those castrated creatures she could spill it all out to. What I gathered, she and her guy had screwed all afternoon trying to do what Lawrence described. The next time she came I was at the window. She was dropped off from a Soviet military jeep and she wanted to know if
Lady Chatterley
was in Russian. How the hell would I know? I said it was in German, but that wasn’t any good — sort of slipped out that the guy didn’t read German. It became confidential. She’d talk to me like I was her goddamn shrink.’

Perkins paused by the window and considered the wording of the letters that would be sent to Immigration and Defense and the FBI. He thought, after they had read his letters, that Immigration and Defense and the FBI would shred them and leave the wretch where he was, to rot in a damp, cold room.

‘He was a major, commanded a small outfit down the coast, west, an unimportant little place. You said that you wanted me to make you laugh — the Major was rated by her husband as his best friend. Does that make you laugh? I told you it wasn’t love, or even romance. It was about sex and flicking. She told me the size of him and how often he managed it and how long he did it. I didn’t feel bad about the telling of it, what I said to the handler, but I didn’t feel good that they’d gotten to film it. They had a department that did covert filming . . . You’ll write those letters, I’ve your promise? I’m washed up here, I’m old and I want to go home. You gave your promise.’

He nodded again. He might not even send the letters that Immigration and Defense and the FBI would shred. He thought it would be harsher punishment for the wretch to sit inside the walls of the apartment with the dirt and the damp until the end of his days, suffering betrayal at first hand.

‘Does that make you laugh, Mr Perkins, knowing that Lady Chatterley was squashing down daisies with the gamekeeper who was Krause’s best friend? The gamekeeper was called Rykov, Pyotr Rykov.’

The guide was a small man, perky, enjoying the reciting of history.

‘It was built as a school for recruits to learn the use of the air-defence guns. The base was opened straight after Hitler had taken power. It was the principal
Flakartillerieschule
in all Germany.’

It was a desolate, quiet place. They had come through the outer gate with the guide, who escorted half a dozen of the first tourists of the year. Mantle had been told that it was possible to enter the base only with the guide. The trees grew wild with bramble thorns and long grass.

Tracy said, ‘It was so bloody important to get in here that they didn’t care a shit if Hansie was killed. Now it’s just for tourists to have a laugh at. He waited till it was dark — he’d brought a little inflatable in the car, the sort that kids use on the lakes in Berlin, with a little bloody wooden paddle. He didn’t know what defences there were, whether they had infra-red. He went off the beach back there. I saw him go into the sea, I blew him a kiss and waved until I couldn’t see him any more. There wasn’t a man about, not a dog. He was going to go three hundred yards out and then paddle for a mile, it was a right foul night. The planes came over, then there was the first shot, then there were the flares.’

‘Sixty years ago, on the twenty-sixth of September nineteen thirty-seven, Adolf Hitler came to the
Flakartillerieschule
and was accompanied by the
Duce,
Benito Mussolini. They inspected an honour guard and they watched a display of the firing of the air-defence guns.’

They walked behind the guide and his small party, and slowly separated themselves from the group. Every window in every building was smashed. All around was the wreckage of cannibalized trucks rusted from the weather off the sea. The trees grew around a watch-tower where a sentry, that night, would have peered out into the spitting wind. She pointed, for him, towards the low-set concrete bunker where the radar dishes that controlled the missiles had been, and beyond the bunker was the brightness of the Baltic sea. It was criminal, he thought, to have sent the boy, as criminal as his murder.

‘On the second of May nineteen forty-five, the base at Wustrow

was occupied by the troops of the
Roten Armee.
There were two

and a half thousand men here with air-defence capabffity, also a

small naval force, also aircraft, also a tank unit. .

Tracy said, ‘Can you imagine it, what it was like for him? He was blocked from the dinghy and bloody running. Flares going up, shooting, sirens going. Couldn’t go back towards the open sea, had to cross the base. Blundering through the base and troops spilling out from the barracks huts. They had dogs, I heard them. He was running blind.’

They walked on the potholed tarmac of the roads through the base. Cats followed them, hissing and snarling and running on their bellies, the cats of the Soviet troops that had been abandoned so many years before and that now ran wild. He thought of the work he had done in I Corps, checking hazy telephoto pictures and satellite images, poring over Red Army magazines, all useless work when set against the chance to put Humlnt into the heart of a base with radar, missiles and tanks. They had played God, those who had sent him.