The Waiting Time (28 page)

‘We watch the backs and we watch the sides. It’s where the bastards know we have to come.’

‘I worked that much out.’

‘I do the talking...’

‘I’d have been here, come here, whether you’d been with me or not. I’d have done the talking.’

‘I really think it’s better, Tracy, if you leave the talking to me.’

She shrugged.

The estate stretched away to the right of them, and beyond the estate was the main road, the obvious route into Lichtenhagen. It was hard for Josh to accept that he didn’t matter, that his experience didn’t count, and that the streetwise craft of a lifetime was unimportant to her. He was frightened, he didn’t know what they would find. He carried no weapon, not a screwdriver, not a hammer. He felt, the truth of it, so bloody, God Almighty, involved.

He drove into the estate. . . Of course, they would be watching. He had planned the route in so that when he reached Lichtenhagen, he would not be going slow and looking for the block as any stranger might have been. He didn’t know how the man, Brandt, would be. He could be hostile, could be servile, could be co-operative. He looked for a man, or two men, sitting in a car. There were old Audis and Volvos and Renaults parked up outside the block, and there were older Trabants and Wartburgs. He looked for a car with steamed windows, for an engine spiralling exhaust fumes.

‘When we go out, go fast, direct.’

‘Back at it again — yes, “sir”.’

‘For Christ’s sake...’

‘Listen, I’m not your bloody corporal.’

She was out of the car and walking away towards a darkened alley at the corner of the block. He didn’t lock the car, thought it sensible not to. He hurried to catch her in the dirty, paintdaubed alley. It was where the graffiti smearers worked and over grotesque faces had been sprayed the slogans.
Nazis Raus. Stoppt Den Nazi-Terror.
The inner garden of the square was strewn with wind-whipped paper. It seemed to Josh, and he knew Slough and a dozen barracks towns, a place without hope. He had caught up with her. He took her arm as if to propel her forward, faster, across the garden square, and she shrugged his hand off. He went to the back entrance, where the communal rubbish bins, stinking, were stored. There was a hallway, and an elevator. He pointed to the stairs. After six flights Josh stopped. Tracy strode on ahead of him and waited for him on the landing. He went past her and paused by the door. He breathed hard and then hammered on the door.

‘I talk,’ he hissed at Tracy.

He looked around him. He looked for discarded chewing-gum wrappers and for a little heap of cigarette ends stamped out on the concrete floor in front of the door, left by men who watched and waited. He heard the scrape of slippers behind the door and the turning of a key. The door opened. He saw a small woman, bent with age, dress hanging loose on her body under a heavy wool cardigan. He saw the opaque glaze of her eyes. He saw, past her low shoulder, an old man hunched in a chair by the window.

Josh said, gently, ‘My name is Josh Mantle. I’ve come from England. I’ve come to see Jorg Brandt...’

The small woman gazed, unseeing, past him, through him.

‘I’ve come with a young lady who wishes to meet with Jorg Brandt, your nephew.’

‘He’s not here, the idiot is not here.’

‘Will he be back soon?’

A whistle sang in the voice, through mucus. ‘Nobody wants to see the idiot. Why do you come to see him?’

Josh said softly, ‘It’s about what happened a long time ago.’

The voice reeded from the chair by the window in contempt. ‘He’s not here, the idiot goes each morning to feed rabbits.’

‘When, sir, wifi he return?’

‘Perhaps he is an hour, perhaps less than an hour. How long does it take for a grown man to feed rabbits?’

‘May we wait for your nephew?’

The old man sat at a grimed window, in a threadbare chair. His life, handicapped, would revolve around what he saw from the window. The old woman saw nothing.

The smell of the room hit Josh and he choked. ‘We’ll wait outside for him. We don’t wish to disturb you. We’ll wait by the elevator...’

‘He does not use the elevator.’ The voice of the old man cackled in derision. ‘The idiot is afraid of the elevator. The idiot is afraid of the stairs, but less afraid of the stairs than the elevator. The idiot is afraid of everything except the rabbits.’

Josh leaned against the wall in the hallway. He thought of what the pastor had said. The woman shuffled from the door back into the room. The pastor had spoken of the dignity and integrity of a man sentenced to a prison cell. Tracy squatted down on to the dirt of the floor, back against the wall.

‘Are you OK?’

She looked up at him. ‘Of course I’m OK.’

They waited.

He was parking his car when the local news bulletin began.

Albert Perkins eased into the space. The rain had started and perhaps there would be sleet or snow later. . . The owners of the shipyard voiced concern at its future profitability...

He had made his telephone calls. His wife had complained that the man who did the garden was hiking his prices. Basil in his repair yard had babbled that Fulham had won 2—0, a goal in each half . . . The mayor of Rostock feared that further redundancies were necessary among the city’s employees, already slashed to a third of what they had been...

He had eaten a good breakfast, and driven south on the autobahn from Rostock Sud to this bleak and functional collection of shoebox offices. Down the road, beyond the trees, was the new prison. The old fence remained around the shoebox offices. The administration centre of the Stasi had moved here as AugustBebel Strasse had become too cramped.. . Two muggings on the S-Bahn the previous night on the line between Rostock-Bramow and Evershagen...

Near to him a bus had parked and he saw the schoolchildren jump from the bus and run to escape the rain . . . An elderly couple, a retired pastor and his wife, travelling from Rerik on the Wismar road had collided with a lorry, both dead...

He switched off his radio.

He followed the schoolchildren towards the nearest of the shoebox offices. The files of the Staatssicherheitsdienst of Rostock were kept here in the care of the federal authority. He hurried against the spitting rain towards the doorway. He told the guards that he was a research academic from Britain and needed to find the curator of the archive. He was directed upstairs, the third floor. The children were ahead of him, babbling, as if the shoebox was a place of fun. He gave his name to a secretary on the third floor and was told that the curator would not be available for several minutes. Would he care to inspect the museum while he waited? He joined the schoolchildren as they clustered round a guide. The museum was only three rooms, a token, but the walls were closely covered with mounted and photocopied Stasi documents and the rooms were edged with glass-top cabinets displaying Stasi equipment. ‘Go on, sir,’ Perkins murmured, ‘show the little beggars what it was all about.’

The guide told the schoolchildren, ‘We have here what we believe to be the most shocking case of informing in the Stasi time at Rostock. A young woman from a Party family, so she would have been brought up without religion, but she enrolled as a theology student at a college in the city. She went to the college with the express intention of informing on the other students, on the lecturers and pastors, on their families. She was given the codename of Gisela. During the 1980s she submitted more than three thousand pages of reports to her Stasi handler. The betrayal was for money. She was paid five hundred eastMarks each month by the Stasi, nearly as much as a skilled worker in the Neptun yard, and after her graduation she was paid by the Church. She was dedicated, motivated solely by greed, and because of her avarice there were many who were sent to gaol. But after 1990, after her actions were revealed, it was decided by the Federal government that such people were not criminals and we were not authorized to release even her name. She still lives in Rostock...’

The guide moved on. The class teacher, an earnest young woman with her hair tied loosely in a ponytail, shepherded the schoolchildren to the next room. Some wrote copious notes, some merely jotted headlines, and one gazed out of the window in blatant boredom. She was a pretty girl, tall and athletic, haughty-faced. Perkins was close to her and saw that the paper on her notepad was blank.

The Stasi office in Rostock was the biggest Bezirksverwaltung in the old DDR. Because of the long state border of the Baltic coast there were many who attempted to escape into the international sea lanes. It was extremely difficult for them to gain access to proper boats, most took to the water at night on rafts they had made or on children’s inflatable sunbeds. In their search for freedom they paid a heavy price. We know of at least seventy- seven persons who were drowned in the attempt to flee the oppression of the DDR. Their bodies were washed up on these shores, on those of the Federal Republic, on Danish beaches. We believe there were many more whose bodies were never found. There were more persons drowned, many of them young, a few of them as young as yourselves, than were shot on the Wall in Berlin or the inner-German border fences. Your generation should remember their courage — they were a witness to the bankruptcy of the state and its Stasi servants...’

‘Doktor Perkins...?’

‘That’s me.’

‘I am the curator, the director. I understand you are from England and interested in research. .

He was leaning against the wall. Tracy, on the floor, sat close to his feet. He heard the reedy voice of the uncle through the open door, ‘He is coming, the idiot is coming back from feeding his rabbits.’

Josh started away from the wall. In his mind he had rehearsed the questions. He heard the groan of the window being opened. The wind came through and caught a newspaper on the table, battering it out through the opened door until it wrapped against Josh’s leg. He heard the shout.

‘Brandt, there are people here to see you. Hurry, idiot.’

He heard the cackled laughter from through the open door. Josh thought that only the old knew how to be truly cruel.

Tracy looked up at him. ‘What do we do?’

Klaus Hoffmann heard the shout.

He pressed the button to open the misted window on the front passenger door. He leaned forward and saw the tight, smirking face at the high window. He looked in the mirror. A man came towards his car, hesitant, hugging against the walls of the block as if they were safety, reliant on the support of a stick. It was what he had come for. He saw the man’s anguish as he struggled to cross the empty road. They would have come in at the back. It was what Klaus Hoffmann had waited for. He felt the bile rising in his throat.

‘What do we do? Well, we don’t take him inside there, we don’t talk to him in front of that vicious bastard. Go and meet him, take him somewhere. Have you a better idea?’

He heard the clatter, far below, of elevator doors opening.

She shrugged. ‘That’s OK.’

He heard the rumble of the doors closing. The sound echoed up to him. Josh led down the flights of stairs, taking them two at a time. The strategy was to go gently, go slowly with the poor devil because he was sick. They were on the third flight from the ground when the elevator climbed past them. He thought Brandt would have managed three flights by now. He ran down the last flights and burst into the ground-floor hallway. The elevator moaned high above him. The fear caught at him. He looked out through the doors, into the road and saw the back of the man as he reached his car. The car’s windows were misted and the engine spurted exhaust fumes. The man turned and leaned his elbows on the roof of the car. God Almighty. Josh recognized the man he had pushed down on to the rocks.

He looked at the elevator doors and above, the numbers of the floors. The light came on for the seventh floor, then the eighth. He didn’t tell her, didn’t try to. The sense, disorganized in his mind, was of catastrophe. A woman with shopping bags was pressing, in irritation, at the call button of the elevator.

He bullocked past Tracy and launched himself at the stairs. He charged up the first flight. She was coming after him. He heaved for breath. At the seventh-floor landing, running past the elevator doors, he saw the light slip from the tenth floor to the eleventh. His legs were leaden. She was coming after him, easily. The light had gone from the eleventh, the last light was for the roof. He fell. His feet slipped back and hit the edge of a step, caught the bone of his shin. The pain shimmered through Josh’s body, and he struggled up the last flight of stairs. The elevator door was open, the elevator empty. The door for the low shed structure housing the elevator shaft and the stairwell hung free and rapped in the wind.

Josh stepped, panting, on to the roof of the block, and saw Jorg Brandt out on the roof, away from the shed structure. He stood as if marooned on the puddled asphalt.

He saw the terror on his face.

His coat billowed in the wind and the force of the wind seemed to drag him further from Josh. Brandt edged backwards as if the control over his legs was gone, lost.

There was no rail at the edge of the roof and no wall. Josh saw, behind the man, the town of Warnemunde laid out as a model would have been, the shipyards, the beach, the sea stretched limitless to the cloud horizon. The man dropped his stick, as if the hand which held it was lifeless.