The Waiting Time (35 page)

He opened the door of the car, had to force it open because it was buckled from the scraped impact against the trunk of the poplar tree. She folded her arms across her chest, stared straight ahead.

‘They won’t listen.’

Josh bent at the open door. ‘It’s their job to listen. Hear me .

This is a democratic country. It has laws and a constitution. It’s not Iraq or some other shit hole. Tracy, I’m sorry but I’m out of my depth. I’m sinking.’

She didn’t look at him. ‘They won’t listen.’

He stood straight. ‘They have to.’

He walked towards the door of the old brick police station that served the town of Ribnitz-Damgarten. He turned at the door. He watched her get out of the car, cross the road and go into a pizza bar.

He pushed open the door and went to the reception desk. A policeman folded away his newspaper, pushed aside his coffee mug and smiled a welcome as he had been taught to. The mud weighted Josh’s shoes, caked his trousers, spattered his coat, flecked his shirt and was smeared on his face.

‘I would like to talk, please, with a detective.’

‘Good, they brought you coffee. I apologize for the delay. I have tried to make a judgement on the accusation you have made, Herr Mantle. I hope the coffee was satisfactory.’

He had been taken to an interview room. The detective was young, fresh-faced, and dressed neatly but casually. He had sat across the bare table from him and written notes as Josh had blurted an accusation of criminal conspiracy and murder. He had not interrupted, not passed comment, and Josh had stumbled through a brief, chaotic version of the deaths. The detective would have registered the filth on his clothes and the exhaustion on his face. He had then been left in the interview room for five minutes short of an hour, alone in the bare room with the whitewashed walls and the wood table and the hard chairs and the concrete floor and the electric fire. He knew that he had wasted their time and his own. He had heard the voice, away behind the closed door, of the detective on the telephone.

Finally the detective eased into the chair opposite him.

‘You have mentioned, Herr Mantle, three situations. I have only a short digest of the facts involving the first two of those matters, but the third is more clear.’

The detective spoke slowly and was careful with his pronunciation, as if he believed that he spoke to an idiot who needed patient calming.

‘I have spoken with Rostock. You are correct, a man fell to his death, but the man, unfortunately, had a previous history of mental disturbance. I have to tell you, Herr Mantle, there are many sad people in our Eastern German society who have been severely traumatized by the pressures of “reassociation”. They have seen the pillars of their lives removed, cradle to grave dependency on the state, and are unable to adapt. It is unfortunate.’

The detective turned the page of his notebook.

‘I have also spoken with Wolgast, where the police deal with matters affecting Peenemunde. Again, you are correct, a man hanged himself. For my generation, Herr Mantle, there are only advantages and opportunities to be taken from “reassociation” and a higher standard of living. Older people, I regret, find the self-reliance of the new society most stressful. That generation has no knowledge of pensions, social-security payments, the new costs of a capitalist society. This individual, we understand, had allowed himself to fall heavily into debt. For that reason he took his life. Many gain from the modern greater Germany, but there are casualties.’

The detective closed his notebook.

‘And you have referred to a death two years ago on a farm at Starkow. I have spoken to the relevant local authorities. The deceased, it seems, was an elderly agricultural worker who chose to live in a conversion of a cowshed. He did not know how to look after himself, he had poor habits of personal hygiene. The conditions he chose to exist in were, to be very frank, similar to those of the animals he cared for. He died of pneumonia. There was a full investigation at the time by the health specialists, and it was found that no one, other than himself, could be blamed for his premature death. I cannot tell you why he made that choice, to live in
fil
th and cold, but I can say that many of the older generation in the East have suffered from mental collapse. It is tragic, but..

Josh stood. He knew that she would laugh at him.

‘I have to tell you that there have been three deaths, but that there is absolutely no evidence of murder.’

He turned towards the door. She would laugh in his face.

‘You spoke of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. I am afraid that I did not understand you. There is no Stasi now in Germany. The Stasi was dismantled in nineteen ninety, it does not now exist.’

He walked out of the room.

‘Please, Herr Mantle, how does a foreigner become interested in these matters?’

He went down the corridor towards the light and the street. By the reception desk, he saw the grin as the policeman looked up from his newspaper. The officer would have heard that a foreigner, dirty as a vagrant, talked of the Stasi and murder. He blinked, the sun shone on the street.

He looked for her.

Dieter Krause rode in the cab of the recovery truck.

He had used his telephone, sitting against the trunk of a poplar tree, and had waited. When the recovery truck had come, he had supervised the hooking of the cable rope to the chassis fender of his BMW, giving orders as he used to give them. The mechanics had said that they thought the car might be serviceable, that they would need to lift it onto the ramp at their garage for checking.

The car had been his pride. The car was, to Dieter Krause, the symbol that he had reached the new stature. The car told him, shouted at him, that he was accepted by the people in Cologne. He could have, perhaps should have, abandoned it. If he had abandoned the new car then he would, also, have abandoned the symbol of the new life. The sides were scraped and dented, the paint had been torn away. The river water had poured from the engine when the cable had dragged the car clear. The engine had started — coughed, choked, belched — started, and then died. The men had said that maybe his car could be rescued from the breaker’s yard, and maybe not. There was always, they’d said, the possibility of electrical failure and fire after a car’s engine had been in the water.

If he had not brought the car back to Rostock, Dieter Krause would have accepted failure, defeat . . . He had seen her face when he had rammed the tail of her car, and as he had accelerated past her to drive her off the road. He had seen the strength and determination in her face and there had been the moment, so short, that she had turned to him and seemed to laugh.

He sat in the cab of the recovery vehicle as it trundled towards Rostock. By his feet was the coat she had thrown across his windscreen.

He had walked up the street and couldn’t find her.

The car was where she had parked it, near the police station, but empty and locked.

The panic swirled in him. He had turned again to retrace his steps, and he saw her.

She was on a bench, a filthy, mud-encrusted urchin in the sunlight. He must have passed her when he had gone up the street, and she had not called out to him. She had let him walk, search, and let the panic rise in him. She was grinning. The sun fell on her face and on her hair. He stamped towards her.

His voice was shrill. ‘Don’t say it. Don’t, please, give the smug “1 told you”, just don’t. It seems the new Germany is stuffed to the nose with mental disturbance, with debt, with good old decent tragedy. Didn’t you know it? Trauma caused a man to jump off a roof, debt caused a man to hang himself, tragedy caused a man to live in cow-shit and catch pneumonia. Of course, no one is to blame. Isn’t that sad? And, surprise, there is no Stasi. I’m at the end...’

She pushed herself up. He did not know whether she despised or pitied him.

Josh was turning away. He saw the man, half view, at the edge of his vision. The man stood near to the side of the bench. He had not noticed him before, only seen Tracy on the bench with the sunlight on her. The man had his back to them. The man wore smart jeans, was heavy-built, wore a full leather jacket. It was the uniform, what they’d worn on the breakwater, and worn going to the steamed car on the Lichtenhagen estate. The man was a dozen paces away and his back was to them.

Josh hissed, ‘How long has he been...?’

‘Who?’

He shook. ‘That bastard. How long...?’

‘No idea.’ She didn’t seem to care.

They were all around. They watched him, played with him. He was exhausted and panicked. The aggression drove him forward, they’d no fear of him, anger fuelled him. One arm straightening to turn the bastard, one fist drawn back and clenched to punch the bastard, and if he went down there was the mud-caked shoe to kick him. He caught the shoulder of the leather jacket and spun the man. He saw the shock. He saw the baby the man held. The man cringed away. Josh loosed the hold on the leather jacket, and reeled away, mouthing apologies.

He stumbled back down the street towards the car. He would say it, did not know when he would dare to say it to her. He was at the end...

‘I dislike him because he is coarse and vulgar, and he is arrogant, but not because of what he did in the past. I dislike him because I do not believe he is properly a German as you and I are Germans, not because he shot an agent of the British. I have my job, I must do my job, I must suffer in his company.’

Ernst Raub packed his suitcase and his wife passed him, from the wardrobe and the chest, the clothes he would take. The plan that was now discarded by the senior official of the BfV had been for him to meet the man he disliked in Frankfurt for the ifight to Washington. He was directed now to go to Rostock, and there were precise instructions as to what was expected of him in the Baltic city before escorting Krause to Berlin and the connecting ffight to Frankfurt for the link to Washington. He packed carefully.

‘It is unimportant to me, what he did in the past. Julius, my little comrade, he sees Krause as the incarnation of the Gestapo, detests him. Little Julius wraps himself in the past, so self- righteous, so sickening. Not me . . . There are too many who seek to blame us for the past. In the old past, my grandfather, a policeman in Munich, would have helped with the round-up of Jews, gypsies, Communists. He would have been on the detail that took them with their bags to the railway station. Does that mean I do not love the memory of my grandfather, that I wi
ll
not permit our children to go to his grave, when we travel to Munich, and lay flowers on it? I heard it said that there were gypsies, men, women and children, once at Munich who tried to break away and flee from the platform as they were driven towards the rail trucks, and the police shot them. I have no idea whether my grandfather was there, whether he fired, because in his life I never asked him. We cannot, should not, any more be required to carry the burden of the old past.’

He folded his dinner jacket into the suitcase, and she passed him his dress shirt. He smoothed it carefully. It was for the dinner at the Pentagon, and the following evening they would be the guests of the Rand Corporation. And then she gave him his preknotted black tie.

‘What did your grandfather do in the old past? He was at Krupp in the Ruhr, he had a good position in management. At Krupp, the production was maintained, in the last eighteen months, by slave labour. Did your grandfather take responsibility for the slave labour? You did not decline to send him an invitation to our wedding. By us he was treated like any other grandfather, given our love and our welcome on the day of our marriage, because the past should be forgotten...’

They would eat together that night as a family. The excursion with the children, the next day, on the river, was cancelled. He would be gone early, while the children slept.

‘If I do not accept the guilt of your grandfather and my grandfather in the old past, then I cannot accept the guilt of Dieter Krause for what he did in the new past. He shot a young man — it is not confirmed to me but I believe it — shot an agent in cold blood. I believe, but it is not confirmed to me, that my grandfather fired on gypsy children at the railway station in Munich and that your grandfather used slave labour to maintain the armaments output from Krupp. If I do not have to carry the burden of guilt from the old past then I don’t carry that burden from the new past.’

He closed the suitcase, pressed it shut, fastened the small padlock to the central leather strap.

‘It is my job to disregard the past. It is policy that I protect him from guilt. . . and he is, forgive me, my dear, a total piece of shit.’

***
*

They were close to Rostock.

Ahead of them was the junction, Rostock-Ost, for the
Autobahn
to Berlin, anywhere. If she drove under the
Autobahn,
it was the road north to Warnemunde and the fishing harbour. He had to dare to say it to her. He searched for the courage.

She drove, didn’t look at him. It had been an agony to Josh, with him all the way from the police station at Ribnitz
-
Damgarten.

‘Tracy...’

‘Come alive, have you?’

‘I have to say it...’

‘Say what you’ve got to say, spit it out.’

‘Tracy, I cannot live, not any more, with the responsibility.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We should go to Berlin. If we hadn’t come those men would be alive. That is responsibility, and it crushes me. We should go to Berlin, the airport, and take the next ffight out. The alternative is too much for me.’

Her lip curled. ‘If you forgot, he murdered my Hansie in cold blood.’

‘It is men’s lives, and I can’t carry that weight, Tracy, not any more. There is a man at Warnemunde, like he’s waiting for us, Tracy, and we are bringing him his death, bloody wrapped up in ribbons and shiny paper.’

‘Quit, if that’s what you want. I’m staying.’

He had no power over her. He was familiar with issuing an order, and that order being obeyed.

‘We should go to the airport, to Berlin. Believe me — for God’s sake,
listen
to me. Listen, forget about the poor bloody wretches that you and I have intruded upon and hammered and broken. Think about yourself, Tracy. We can be in London tonight. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You did what you could. You tried. You cared when nobody else cared. You lost and you can be proud, you can walk tall with yourself. You stay, and you carry the responsibility. What will that have done to you, Tracy? If you win,
if.
have you thought how it will leave you? That responsibility, those lives taken, it will leave you old