The Leipzig Affair

by Fiona Rintoul

  “She got her copy of Socialism – Your World,” Magda told me afterwards. “And she pledged to deepen friendship with the Soviet Union and fight in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. It’s such rubbish. But she believes every word of it – just as I did at her age.”

  Then preparations began for the May Day demonstrations – “We’re obliged to ‘freely’ demonstrate,” Dieter said with a shrug – and for the elections that were due shortly afterwards. The city was festooned with placards: APPROVE THE SOCIALIST UNITY PARTY CANDIDATES!

  But on 26th April something happened that took people’s minds off all of that. A nuclear reactor exploded at Chernobyl.

  In the East, the incident was played down. Neues Deutschland published a small story on an inside page saying that two people had died, and the situation had quickly been brought under control. But people had West TV, and the place was buzzing with rumours. In West Germany, they were closing children’s playgrounds, handing out iodine tablets and withdrawing fruit and vegetables from the shops. My mum wrote to ask me if I was coming home. The BBC had said 2,000 people were dead and no one knew how far the radioactive cloud would spread.

  The more the international outcry grew, the shriller the denials in the East German press became. Western Panic-Mongering Designed to Deflect Attention from Peace Initiative, ran one headline in Neues Deutschland.

  “It’s sickening,” said Magda. “They’re lying to people with no thought as to the consequences.”

  She had friends in the environmental movement. They believed the accident was a catastrophe and that their government’s attempt to play it down was endangering people’s health. Some of them had been detained to shut them up.

  May Day came, and the demonstrations went ahead as if Chernobyl hadn’t happened. The following day, we went to a satirical cabaret at The Sharp Corner. “Everything’s so wonderful!” the comedienne exclaimed. “Isn’t it wonderful that’s it’s all so wonderful?” Magda gave a hollow laugh that I didn’t entirely like.

  Later, we went for a meal in a pub in a suburb near the end of the tram line, a depressing place decorated with greasy plastic plants. The landlord, a sullen man in his late fifties, slammed our drinks down on the counter, while the straggle of patrons at the bar stared into their glasses as if looking for salvation.

  “Let’s go away,” Magda said when we’d finished our meal of fatty chicken and soggy cabbage. “You have a reading week coming up, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but you’re not off, are you?”

  She shrugged. “No, but I don’t care. Let’s go away.”

  “But won’t it look bad if you miss class?”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” she snapped. “I need to get away. I’ve had enough of this place. If you don’t want to come with me, I’ll go on my own.”

  She stared at her plate, her face hard and closed. She’d been tetchy all evening. She hadn’t wanted to come to this place. She’d wanted to go to a Cuban restaurant near the Clara Zetkin Park, where decent food could be had for a higher price. It was me who had insisted on going somewhere out-of-the-way. I had John Bull-Halifax in my head: no western contacts. But she didn’t seem to care. I put it down to her disgust at the patently false denials from the East German authorities about the accident at Chernobyl.

  When she looked up, her expression had softened. “I thought maybe we could go to Prague.”

  “Prague?”

  She nodded. “Have you ever been there?” She knew I hadn’t.

  “Oh, well, it’s wonderful. You’ll love it. It’s so beautiful. Let’s go to Prague where it’s beautiful. I’m sick of this place.”

  I should have said no. I’d promised my mum that I’d come home for the reading week. I hadn’t gone home at Christmas and I knew she’d been disappointed. My dad hadn’t been too well. I couldn’t remember a time when he had been well, but this time my mum’s reassurances that it was nothing serious, just a bit of heart trouble, didn’t ring true. I knew I ought to see for myself. Everything was arranged. I’d cleared it with Hencke and been to the police to get my visas.

  But I said yes. Of course I did. Prague was an exotic destination to me then, but that was only a small part of the attraction. I had grasped that there was something going on between Magda and Marek that went beyond friendship, even if I didn’t fully understand what it was. Back then I dismissed most of what I picked up on the basis that Marek was gay. All the same, I was jealous of him. This was my moment of triumph. She wanted to go away with me, not with him. He was the past; I was the future.

  Later that evening, I phoned my mum from the central post office. As usual I got a line out much more quickly than all the other people in the queue, who were waiting to call relatives in West Germany. They glared at me as I went into the booth. They might wait three hours for a connection, longer if they were calling West Berlin.

  I swallowed hard and told my mum I wasn’t going to be able to come home for the holidays after all. I said I had too much work.

  “Oh well, these things can’t be helped,” she said, concealing her disappointment, as I’d known she would. “Your studies come first. Your dad will understand.”

  “Should I have a word with him?”

  “He’s upstairs having a wee snooze. It’s probably best to leave it. I’ll tell him you rang.”

  “How is he? Has he been feeling any better?”

  “Oh, he’s fine.”

  “And how are you?” I continued, benevolent now in my relief that I wasn’t going to have to speak to my dad, wanting to keep her on the phone a little longer to salve my conscience. “How are you managing?”

  “Me? I’m fine. We’re managing fine.”

  “I’m sorry about the holiday. It’s just that – ”

  “This must be costing you a fortune,” she interrupted. “I’d better let you go. Shona’s well, by the way. She passed all her exams with flying colours.”

  “Good,” I muttered. My sister was training to be an accountant, an occupation perfectly suited to her dull personality. “I’m sorry,” I said again, but she wasn’t listening.

  “I’ll let you go, dear. I’ll tell your dad you were asking for him. We’ll hear from you soon.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  You go to Prague on the night train. The westerner pays for a couchette, and you have it to yourselves. As the train leaves the station you say, “Now’s our chance.” You know they’ll check the tickets after Dresden. Then there will be the border guards.

  He makes love to you slowly and tenderly on the bottom bunk. When he comes, he buries his head against your shoulder. Afterwards, you curl up together, and he falls asleep. You lie awake and think about the last time you made this journey. You were with Kerstin, and you told her about Hencke for the first time. Her face clouded, then she shrugged and said, “You have to do what you have to do.”

  At Dresden, the train screeches to a halt. You hear doors bang, and people shouting compartment numbers to one another. As the train is pulling back out of the station, the ticket collector yanks your compartment door open. The westerner wakes up and gives him the tickets. “Please,” the guard says, handing them back to him as you pull aside the curtain and watch Dresden’s palaces slide past.

  As the train moves beyond the city, you let the curtain fall back. “Have you been to Dresden?” you ask.

  “Yeah. Kevin and I tagged along on one of those excursions Hencke organises for foreign students. He took us to the Memorial to the Victims of the Fascist-Imperialist Anglo-American Bomb Attacks – or something like that. He gave a long talk, pure propaganda, and at the end he said, ‘Are there any questions?’ Guess what Kevin said? ‘Yes, have you ever been to Coventry?’”

  “You can’t compare Dresden with Coventry,” you say, unable to stop yourself, though you resolved months ago never to argue with the westerner about the Second World War. “Thirty-five thousand people died in the Dresden fire-bombing.”

  He frowns. “I don’t think it
was as many as that, was it? Not that it matters. It was terrible. I’m not trying to say it wasn’t. But you have to remember that – ”

  “It was completely unnecessary,” you interrupt. “The war was nearly over. It was a war crime.”

  “Well,” he says carefully, “I don’t know about a war crime. It was obviously a terrible thing for the people on the ground. But then it was total war. And we didn’t know that the war would be over in a few weeks. It didn’t look like Hitler would surrender. We had to find a way to bring the war to an end.”

  We. Twenty million Russians died fighting the Nazis, but the westerner thinks the British won the war. “Let’s try to get some more sleep,” you say, though you know that won’t be possible.

  A little later, the train grinds to a halt again. A German border guard raps on the compartment door then throws it open. When he sees you both in the bottom bunk, he tells the westerner to move up to the middle bunk.

  “Above!” he shouts, tapping the middle bunk with his pen. Then he beckons to the westerner to hand over his passport: “Passport control!”

  The guard fingers the westerner’s passport with something like love. You could touch it that way too. The passport irritates you. The prancing lion and unicorn on the shield are pompous and stupid. The wording is ridiculous. Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Requests and requires … But the passport also seduces you. You don’t have a passport. Even if you did, it wouldn’t be like this one; it wouldn’t allow you to go pretty much wherever you please. The guard gestures to you for your papers. There’s a flicker of surprise when you hand over your identity card. He takes out a notebook and writes something down. If he only knew. He’ll be playing right into your hands if he reports this trip.

  “He wasn’t very friendly,” the westerner says, getting back into the bottom bunk. You put the light out and join him under the blanket. “No.”

  A moment later, there’s another rap at the door. The Czechoslovak guard. “Above!” he says to the westerner when he’s checked your papers.

  “I’ll go,” you say. “I like the top bunk.” You climb up past the middle bunk to the top, lie down and smile at the guard, who is young and handsome. He scowls, knowing he’s being mocked.

  “Good nacht,” he says, mixing languages.

  “Dobrou noc, kamarád,” you say, as he slams the compartment door shut.

  Prague Central Station smells of perfume, pastries and petrol. The sun is up, and you jump down from the train in high spirits. You’d forgotten how much you love it here. You take the westerner’s hand and steer him towards a café where you know you can get breakfast.

  You push through the doors into a large room lit by dusty chandeliers and find a table that looks on to a dirty little square where pigeons peck round a waterless fountain. Against one wall is a long bar, where waiters with starched cloths over their arms lounge, ignoring the customers, who are mainly construction workers enjoying their first beers of the day.

  Eventually, a waiter ambles across and cocks an eyebrow at you. This is his way of asking what you want. They don’t much like Germans here in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, least of all East Germans. West Germans at least bring Deutschmarks. You order fried eggs with bread and coffee for two.

  “The coffee is very good here,” you tell the westerner, who can’t find coffee he likes in Leipzig.

  The waiter comes back and sets the table with exaggerated care. He’s working you out. It’s the westerner he’s interested in. The westerner is speaking German and has a copy of the local Leipzig newspaper on the table in front of him, but the waiter has him pegged. He leans across, flicks away an imaginary crumb and says, “Change money?”

  The westerner looks confused. “No,” you say. The waiter looks at the westerner. “No,” you repeat, and that’s when you hear a rasping sound behind you. You turn round. The sound is coming from a heavily made-up old woman in a fur coat at a table in the middle of the room. She’s pointing at you and muttering something under her breath. Her voice gets louder and louder, and eventually you catch what she’s saying.

  “Nacisté!” she shouts across the restaurant.

  The workmen look up then quickly away. Perhaps they know her. The old woman heaves herself out of her seat and hobbles towards you, balancing on a walking stick. At your table, she steadies herself, lifts the stick and waves it in the westerner’s face.

  “Nacisté!” she shouts. She stinks – a mixture of sweat, stale face powder and urine. Everyone in the café is watching now, and the room has fallen silent. The westerner tries a casual laugh.

  “She’s calling me a Nazi, right? Listen,” he says in English, “I’m not even German. I’m from Scotland. Skotsko, yes?”

  The old woman pulls her ratty fur coat tighter round her billiard-ball body and glares at the westerner. “Pah!” she says, spitting on the ground. Then she wheels round and points at you. “Nacisté!” she hisses.

  The westerner jumps up. “That’s enough,” he says. The old woman sticks her chin out, looks down her nose at him, and screams, “Nacisté!”

  The westerner’s face darkens. “Why don’t you just fuck off you disgusting old bag?” he shouts, poking her on the shoulder. “Eh? Fuck off! Go on!”

  You jump up and pull him away. “Sit down,” you say. Then you take the old woman’s hand and speak to her in Czech. “Mother,” you say, stroking the back of her hand, “calm down. Be at peace, mother.”

  You take some coins from your pocket, put them in the palm of her hand and press her fingers around them. The westerner is standing over you, glowering at the old woman as you give her the coins: Deutschmarks. Maybe he’ll ask about this later. The old woman harrumphs but takes the money and shoves it in her coat pocket. Then she shuffles back to her table, muttering under her breath. The room relaxes, and the clatter of crockery and the hum of conversation start up again.

  “Silly old bitch,” the westerner mutters, sitting down at last. Then he meets your eye and says, “John Bull-Halifax said your Russian was good, but I didn’t realise you were so fluent.”

  “Russian?” you laugh. “I was speaking Czech.”

  “Czech? You didn’t tell me you could speak Czech.” His voice is sharp. He’s angry because he let a confused old lady rattle him.

  “Well, I can. Russian!” you laugh. “And you the great linguist.” You look into his eyes. “That’s what John Bull-Halifax says anyway.”

  He smiles warily, but he’s pleased. That’s how it is with him. He doesn’t believe in himself, and so it’s easy to flatter him.

  “So, how come you speak Czech?” he asks.

  “My aunt taught me. She came from here. After my parents got divorced I used to go to her house every Saturday afternoon for lessons.”

  “Magda?” he says and for a moment you think he’s going to ask you about the Deutschmarks, but he just smiles and says, “Where should we stay?”

  You lean across and point to the convent hospital on his map. “This is a good area to look,” you say. “I stayed round there the last time I came here with Kerstin.

  “Okay,” he says. “Shall we go and have a look?”

  In bed that afternoon in a pension on a side street near the convent hospital, you hear screams. You’d forgotten that the convent hospital is a mental hospital. You get up and look out of the window at the nuns scuttling past in their long black habits and white wimples. What do they do to the patients to make them scream like that?

  “So tell me about your aunt,” the westerner says, sitting up in bed. “Is she still alive?” His voice is sharp. He’s asking this question instead of others.

  “Very much so.” You think of Aunt Vladka’s colourful clothes, hennaed hair and big, throaty laugh.

  “Does she live here? Can we visit her?”

  “No, she lives in Berlin.”

  “But she’s Czech?”

  “Yes. She was married to my father’s older brother, b
ut he’s dead now. She met him during the war. She was a nurse, and he was a German soldier.”

  “Did she bring you here, then, when you were a kid?”

  You pull on some clothes and light a cigarette. “No. She hasn’t been back to Czechoslovakia since 1968.”

  “But you seem to know this place like the back of your hand.” He jumps out of bed and starts to get dressed too. He’s very different from Marek. Square and strong with pale freckled skin. You like the way he is.

  “Yes, well, I lived here for a while … a few years ago.”

  “Oh yeah? What were you doing here?”

  “I came here to get away. It was – ” You have to stop. You’re welling up – just like that night at Shakespeare Street after the concert.

  “Sweetheart,” he says, “what’s the matter?”

  And there’s that simple concern in his voice again that pulls at your heart. Suddenly – perhaps because you know he’ll be shocked – you want to tell him what the matter is. What harm can it do?

  You sit down on the bed. “You remember I told you my brother had an accident?”

  He nods. “Yeah, John Bull-Halifax told me that too before I even met you.”

  “Well, here’s the part John Bull-Halifax doesn’t know. It wasn’t really an accident. Jürgen was an athlete. He threw the javelin. One day he had a seizure at the training ground. He collapsed and had to be rushed to hospital. He was in a coma, and we thought he was going to die. He didn’t die, but something almost as bad happened. Part of his brain shut down. When he woke up, he couldn’t walk and he could barely speak.”

  “God, that must have been terrifying,” he says. “How long did it take him to get better?”

  Tears prick your eyes again. “That’s just it. He didn’t get better. The doctors still say they haven’t given up hope, but – ”

  “My God, that’s awful,” he says, sitting down beside you on the bed. “I’m really sorry. I had no idea it was as bad as that. What caused it? Was it like an embolism or something?”