The Leipzig Affair

by Fiona Rintoul

  The highlight of the trial is your confession, which Pankowitcz reads to the court. It contains every detail of the Hungary plan – things you had forgotten yourself – and a dissertation on how you helped the westerner to sell his passport.

  You look at your defence lawyer, Herr Giesler, a small, dapper man with a goatee beard.

  “I didn’t write that,” you say.

  He laughs. “Come, come, my dear. Let’s not play the fool, shall we? Your signature is clear to see.”

  As he reads out his verdict, the People’s Judge looks beyond you to the corn and compass shield of the GDR on the back wall of the court.

  “We recall the words of Comrade General Secretary Honecker,” he says in summing up. “Both from the moral standpoint as well as in terms of the interests of the whole German nation, leaving the GDR is an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity. In the name of the People, I sentence you to a term of two years and eight months.”

  He bangs down his gavel. The trial is over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Calderhill was closing in on me like a storm. I had to get away. Chris was in Amalfi, his ancestral home. I’d had a postcard from him, saying that Joanna had gone home and he’d be back soon too. Briefly, I considered joining him in Italy for a day or two. But I wasn’t Chris. If I’d learnt one thing in my young life it was that. And I wasn’t really in the holiday mood. And so I decided to flee to my ancestral home: the Isle of Harris.

  The house in Geocrab had been sold when my grandma died, but there was still a shieling out on the west coast. I used to go there as a boy with my granda, chugging up the sea loch in his friend Norman’s boat. We’d spend days at the hut, fishing and fixing the place up in companionable silence – peaceful times away from the womenfolk. What better place to get away from it all and take stock? I assumed it was still there. Even if it wasn’t, what did it matter? Such was my mood.

  There was just one problem: money. I’d spent everything I had getting back from West Berlin. I found myself knocking on the O’Driscolls’ door.

  “Bobbie!” Mr O’Driscoll exclaimed, pumping my hand. “Back from your travels, eh? Come in.”

  He steered me into the living room. Mrs O’Driscoll appeared and kissed me on the cheek.

  “How’s your dad?” she asked, her brown eyes full of concern.

  “Oh, you know. Fine.”

  “You should have phoned us,” Mr O’Driscoll said. “We could have had you round for a meal. We’d love to hear all your tales. But maybe there’s still time? When are you going back?”

  I cleared my throat. I wanted to get this over as quickly as possible.

  “Well, yes, certainly,” Mr O’Driscoll said. “If it’s an emergency, then of course I can lend you some money, Robert.” He’d never called me Robert before. “How … how much are we, um, talking about?”

  Back at my parents’ house, I stashed the hundred quid in my money belt, and packed a rucksack ready for the off. I left the following morning. Shona had a summer job at an accountancy firm in Motherwell and my mum was at the shops. My dad was asleep, snoring noisily in his chair, as I closed the door softly behind me.

  On Harris, my plan was to take the post bus out to the furthest settlement on the west coast and then walk over the hill to the shore of the sea loch where the shieling was. Only as the bus turned off the main Stornoway road and laboured up the first hill, did I realise what an undertaking that was going to be, especially with all the provisions I’d bought when I got off the ferry at the terminal in Tarbert, which included several bottles of whisky.

  When I got out of the bus, I dumped my bags on the turf, lit a cigarette and wandered over to the beach. Two families were playing there, and one of the fathers waved to me. I’d played on this silver sand beach as a boy too, swum in the turquoise waters. Once I saw dolphins in the sound. My dad held the binoculars steady so I could watch them, and my mum, young and pretty in a blue spotted headscarf, laughed as the wind whipped the lettuce off our picnic plates.

  As I watched the children playing, I thought about turning back. What was I doing here? Surely, there must be a way out of the mess I was in, a way to get back with Magda and make everything all right again. I imagined bringing her to this beach. She’d love it. Then I remembered. Marek was dead. There was no fixing that.

  I stubbed my cigarette out and wandered down to the couple of houses by the jetty. How was I going to get to the shieling with all my stuff? A dinghy with an outboard motor was moored at the jetty. Perhaps it belonged to the people in one of the houses. Maybe I could get them to take me up the sea loch. But I didn’t want anyone to know where I’d gone. And, anyway, it looked like there was no one in the houses.

  Suddenly, I had an idea. Why not take the boat? I could putter round to the shieling in it no problem. I’d be there in less than an hour and I’d be able to take all my supplies. I knelt down by the boat and shook the tank. Half full. That would get me round to the shieling. It was stealing, of course. But I’d bring the boat back. I looked along the sound. The sea was calm.

  When the families had gone and night was falling, I loaded my supplies on to the boat. As I changed into my walking boots and waterproof trousers, the boat swayed in the swell and the whisky bottles clinked noisily. I glanced up at the houses. No sign of life. I lowered myself into the boat, unfastened the mooring, and pushed the boat away from the jetty with an oar. I turned the choke and yanked the starter cord, and the motor leapt into life with an angry rattle.

  I steered the boat out into the inky sound. A crescent moon cast a ripple of light on the water, and the stars were coming out. The sea was choppier away from the jetty, but the dinghy chugged along comfortably enough. I began to relax. Then, I came to a point with a small islet opposite. I took the boat round the islet’s eastern shore, which meant passing through a narrow channel. As I rounded the point, the boat was pushing against the current pulling through the channel, and the sea suddenly became much rougher. A massive wave lifted it clean out of the water and when it slapped back down, I was much nearer to the islet than I wanted. The motor stalled with a grinding sound. For one terrifying moment, I thought I’d had it. I let out a single sob. I saw Marek’s face then. And his lifeless body lying in the raked sand of the death strip, faraway in Germany. This was what I deserved. My just desserts.

  A moment later, another wave came and swept the boat back out into the channel. I grabbed the starter chord and restarted the motor. I cranked the throttle handle and clung to the gunwale until the boat was round the point. From there it was a straight run out to the more sheltered waters of the sea loch. I eased back on the engine and steered the boat into the mouth of the loch. The dinghy chugged along between the steep-sided hills towards the head of the loch and the shieling.

  *

  I’d been there nearly a week when Chris came to get me. That’s what he told me. I’d lost all track of time. I cracked open a bottle of Safeway’s whisky at the shieling, and that’s the last thing I remember. It was my first proper binge – the beginning of something.

  Although he was meant to be in Italy, I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see him striding across the bog towards me.

  “I killed him,” I shouted. “It’s all my fault.”

  He stumbled on a boggy tussock and swayed for a moment, the wind whipping his hair.

  “Be with you in a minute, wee man,” he shouted.

  I slumped to the ground and began to cry.

  Now someone else was dead. My dad. A third heart attack had killed him instantly. Chris had been brought home from Italy to fetch me back, my mum having worked out where I’d gone.

  We didn’t make it home in time for the funeral. My mum was very good about it.

  “You weren’t to know,” she said, though it had been obvious to anyone that my dad was on his last legs. I was just too self-absorbed to notice.

  She was more concerned to know what had gone so wrong in my life that I felt the need to run awa
y like that in the first place. But of course I couldn’t tell her. I mumbled some rubbish about ‘girlfriend troubles’.

  “You weren’t even at your own father’s funeral,” Shona hissed at me in the hall. “You’re a disgrace.”

  After the funeral, I went back to St Andrews with Chris. He was working on a research project on advanced polymers over the summer and had kept the flat on. It was a bleak time, and he saw me through it, cooking for me every night, making sure I didn’t drink too much. One evening, when we were eating spaghetti with meatballs at the dining table in the bay window overlooking the sea I told him about the interrogation with Sander.

  “It wasn’t you fault,” he said. “You stood up for your girl. That’s the main thing.”

  “But I betrayed him,” I said. Betrayal. It was an ugly word.

  “You were under a lot of pressure, wee man. I would have done the same.”

  That made me feel better, though I didn’t think it was true. Chris would have held out. Christ, he’d probably have charmed Sander into taking him on a sightseeing tour of Leipzig.

  Oddly enough, I got to quite like St Andrews that summer. I took a lot of long walks on the beaches. When Chris was off, we went for cycle rides round the East Neuk, taking sandwiches and a flask. These were the kinds of times I’d envisaged when I first accepted the place at St Andrews, but in term time they had never happened. At home, I sat in the bay window reading and listening to the sea crashing on the rocks.

  But I knew I’d have to leave when term started. Bramsden wrote me a flattering letter urging me to complete my DPhil at St Andrews. It seemed I was cut from the right cloth after all. But it was no use. Heinrich Heine was a closed book to me now. It was time to move on. And what was more I needed money. I’d been signing on over the summer, and I still owed Chris’s dad a hundred quid. Gerard Kelly from St Ignatius’ was by then working for Liebermann Brothers in London. He told me that the asset management arm was about to take on Europe and needed an investment writer with fluent German.

  “Liebermann Brothers is really going places in the City,” he gushed down the phone from London. “Investors really value that US style of money management. They want to work with people who are tough, you know, focussed.”

  I knew nothing about asset management and cared less, but the job paid well and sounded about as far away from Heinrich Heine and my previous life as you could get. I applied and I got it. None of the other candidates could match my language skills, apparently.

  I packed up my room at the flat in St Andrews. In Prague, Magda had bought me a small wooden box that I’d admired in a second hand shop. It was about half the size of a shoe box and locked with an Art Deco key. It was the only thing she’d ever given me. I put all my mementos of East Germany in it. The photos I had of Magda. My train ticket from Glasgow to Leipzig. My East German tourist guide with its beautiful line drawings of famous landmarks. The keys to Marek’s apartment in Berlin, which I’d forgotten to return after the party at Café North and which were now useless to anyone. I locked the box and stowed the key in a pocket inside my suitcase.

  Chris drove me to the train station at Leuchars. On the platform, we hugged.

  “Take it easy, wee man,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  In a sleepy mediaeval town in the furthest corner of the Valley of the Clueless lies Malschwitz, the Stasi’s secret prison. Like the remand prison in Berlin, it is not marked on the map.

  The female lieutenant in charge of the women’s section is waiting for you on the steps when you emerge blinking from the van into the glare of the searchlights. She is a woman of about fifty with a substantial bosom and thin, stick-like legs. The prisoners, you soon learn, call her the witch. “Take her to the medical room,” she says and stalks off.

  The guards hand you over to two female warders, who grab you and propel you upstairs. “The prisoner will undress and lie down on the table,” the doctor says, his face a blank behind his black-framed glasses. The warders stare as you remove your clothes and the cold-fingered doctor examines you. “Hmm,” he says when he’s done. “Remove the prisoner.”

  They take you to an office, where you’re fingerprinted and issued with a uniform: trousers with a yellow stripe running down the outside leg and a matching top. The female lieutenant comes into the office and stands back to look at you, one hand on her hip. “Not so pretty now,” she says. She leads you up the central iron staircase to your cell. You are to share with Margit, a woman in her forties with an apologetic manner.

  “Explain the rules, Prisoner Fahl,” the lieutenant says.

  “Yes, Madam Lieutenant,” Margit says. “You must always address the lieutenant as Madam Lieutenant and you must always address the warders as Madam Warder,” she tells you as the lieutenant slams your cell door shut and locks it. “Breakfast is at 5.00 and roll call is at 6.10. Work begins at 6.45.”

  The next day, a youngish woman called Gisela sidles up to you in the work room, where the women prisoners sew all day long. “Sharing with Margit?” she asks. “Watch out. Former colleague.”

  She means a former colleague from the Ministry for State Security. A proportion of the prisoners at Malschwitz are ex-Stasi men and women who broke the rules. Margit’s crime, you soon learn, was to get too close to a Stern journalist she was supposed to be watching in West Berlin. “Silly old bitch,” Gisela smirks.

  That evening, after a meal of potato stew, you are taken for the first time to the exercise yard for your allotted thirty minutes in the open air. As you pace up and down in the wedge-shaped enclosure, you try to work out how you’re going to get through this. Courage – that’s what you need. You must stay strong and hold on. On the outside is Marek. He must be working for your release. Perhaps he has already met up with Uncle Ivan. Perhaps Uncle Ivan will arrange for you to be bought free by the West German government. Perhaps you and Marek will soon both be in the West after all. You’ll go out to dinner with Uncle Ivan on the famous Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin to celebrate. Then you’ll begin a new life, just as planned.

  You look up at the sky. It’s windy and a cloud is scudding past. A moment later, the wind blows an oak leaf down into the exercise yard. You grab it and shove it in the waistband of your trousers. It’s from the world outside where Marek is. And Uncle Ivan. And Kerstin. All your friends who surely cannot have forgotten you.

  After one month, you are permitted a family visit. This is it, you think. Now I’ll find out what’s happening on the outside, what Marek is doing to get me out of here. A warder of about thirty-five nicknamed Blondie by the women takes you to the administration wing. Your mother is sitting at one end of a long table divided by a 25cm high barrier. When she sees you she stands up.

  “Stay in your seat,” says Blondie. “You may exchange a handshake with the prisoner at the end of the interview.”

  Your mother drops back into her chair, and Blondie positions herself in line with the barrier.

  “Hello,” your mother says, clutching at her white handbag. She’s brushed her hair and she smells of her old favourite perfume, Queen of the Night.

  “Hello, Mama.” A lump forms in your throat. She’s made such an effort. Travelled here all the way from Berlin. Tidied herself up.

  But the visit is a disappointment. Your mother hasn’t been in touch with Marek or Kerstin. She has nothing for you but some cigarettes and soap. Maybe that was to be expected. She’s not a reliable messenger. Perhaps they didn’t trust her. Perhaps that was wise. Nonetheless, your heart is heavy when Blondie tells you your time is up.

  At mealtime, Gisela asks you how the visit went. You run a piece of bread round your bowl to mop up the potato mush and shrug. “She didn’t have any information. I still don’t know what’s happening on the outside.”

  Gisela leans across the table as if to brush a crumb from your arm. “If you need to get a message out, I can show you how,” she says in an undertone.

  You’ve heard about these kinds of messages,
which the prisoners call ‘Kassiber’.

  On Sunday evenings, the women are allowed to watch TV. That Sunday, Gisela asks the warder on duty, a woman near retirement, if she can show you her books instead. Gisela has a couple of novels in her cell sent by relatives, which she has been allowed to keep.

  The warder nods. “Twenty minutes,” she says.

  As you look through the books, Gisela slips you a vial of invisible ink she keeps among her toiletries.

  “Write your message with this and let it dry. Then write your letter on top. Try to use a fine-tip pen. Find a way to let your mother know about the message underneath. For example, you can write a phrase that spells ‘use a match’ with the first letter of each word to let her know that she should run a match under the letter to bring out the secret message.”

  You compose your message to Marek and Kerstin in your head. When you are next issued with a sheet of paper on which to write your monthly letter home, you scribble the Kassiber down while Margit is in the TV room.

  Dear M & K, you write, please send news. Have you spoken to Uncle Ivan or taken other steps? I am well, but I need news. All my love, M.

  Weeks pass before the next letter from your mother arrives. It’s full of banalities, but you devour them. The weather has been cold, but it is improving. Aunt Vladka is well despite a bout of flu. Rosa, the cat, brought home a mouse.

  At mealtime, you tell Gisela about the letter. “I’ll distract Margit,” she says. “Don’t forget not to hold the match too close to the paper or it’ll catch fire.”

  Your hand shakes as you run the flame under the paper later that night. Back and forwards. Not too close. And it works. Hidden words come into view:

  Dear M, you read, I think about you every day –

  The cell door flies open. The witch stands in the doorway and behind her, smirking, are Gisela and Margit.

  Your punishment is twenty-one days in the isolation tract. You have passed the reinforced metal door with the words ‘Forbidden Zone’ written on it in black letters that leads to the isolation tract several times but have never seen the so-called tiger cages that lie behind it.