Many years ago, Hanne had brought from England a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd especially for Heike. Hanne jokingly referred to the title as “Far from the Maddening Crowd”, the humour of which Heike had not initially understood. She understood now: this place was truly far from “the maddening crowd”.
For the second time since leaving their home in Berlin, she felt a sense of calm and well-being. It was clear to her that folk in the isolated, rural areas were so much more open and friendly. She’d always known this in her heart of hearts.
The slam of the neighbouring door jolted her out of a blissful reminisce. She turned to see a very different neighbour from the man who’d leaned out of the window just minutes before. Stern-faced and on a mission, here was a stocky, balding man dressed in the all too familiar uniform of a Volkspolizei officer.
‘You are lucky Hubert was at home today. If anyone can help you he will. Thank you, Hubert!’
There was little more that could be said. Always polite, Heike and Roland thanked Frau Kempelmann for her kindness in making them so welcome and giving them such a lovely breakfast.
Now it was time to accept their fate.
The game was up.
Roland would be sent to prison somewhere in the East for sure, with little chance of reprieve. Heike’s fate was uncertain. They could only hope that Bruno would be treated sympathetically, because he would be removed from their care without doubt. It had been a good try and they’d at least made a spirited go of it, but the eventual outcome was unlikely to be kind. Fortune had turned away again. At least this wasn’t going to end with a shooting, and that was at least a mercy. With heavy hearts they clambered into the small, unmarked car that was also the officer’s family transport.
‘You are lucky!’ he told them. ‘I wasn’t on duty this morning but I had a call from my neighbour, Comrade Kempelmann, whose frau you just met, telling me of an abandoned car – a Berlin-registered Trabant – and then you turned up next door. I assume you are the owners of the car?’
‘Yes,’ was all Roland would say, nodding.
‘Where are you taking us?’ asked Heike.
‘You are from Berlin?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are a long way from Berlin.’
‘We were on our vacation.’
‘Are you visitors from the West?’
Roland hesitated. ‘No.’
‘Did you happen to see from the wood down into the valley and the border fence?’
Neither Roland nor Heike were prepared to answer for fear of incriminating themselves. Bruno, however, had no such reticence. ‘Yes, we saw it. Didn’t we?’
Hubert reached across Roland to the glove compartment; their initial fear was that he might be reaching for a pistol; instead, he pulled out a packet of opened cigarettes, deftly extricating one with his free hand before pushing in the car’s cigar lighter.
‘That is where a man was shot in ’82 on that very steep bank you were looking at. He was only in his early thirties – young, fit – but our patrol had no choice – he gave them no choice.’
‘I was—’ Bruno was about to tell the officer about his own shooting, but Heike quickly stopped him by squeezing his knee and putting her forefinger to his mouth. ‘You still have some croissant on your lips, Bruno.’
She could see the cold, grey eyes of the officer glance at them in the rear-view mirror. Like all policemen he was suspicious and cared not one jot whether they were on holiday or not. He clearly knew the political situation and would be on high alert. She daren’t imagine what he might do with them.
For some inexplicable reason, the officer was driving deeper and deeper into the countryside where, in this intensely wooded area, it was difficult to get a bearing. If he were going to hand them over, then surely he’d head for the nearest town?
Perhaps he was under orders from someone in Berlin. It was possible that someone, somewhere was giving an order direct to him. The Stasi must have lost patience: Take them to the woods; make out they tried to run. Don’t worry, there’ll be no comeback. She is a CIA sleeper with known terrorist connections; he is a political agitator. Shame about the boy.
In the front seat, Roland was clearly worried. For a long time, the officer said nothing else – didn’t so much as sniff or clear his throat – then he asked matter-of-factly, ‘You have friends or relatives in Rudolphstein?’
‘Yes,’ said Roland, ‘friends and relatives.’
‘You don’t look of pensionable age,’ queried the officer.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Heike nervously.
‘Pensioners with a permit can cross. Didn’t you know that?’
‘No,’ said Roland.
‘You have the necessary permits and passports – yes?’
Roland simply shook his head.
‘You don’t know anything about Rudolphstein, do you?’
Neither Roland nor Heike answered for fear of incriminating themselves.
‘I thought not,’ said the officer. ‘Do you know that last year or even last week, you would not have got within 5 kilometres of here?’
Suddenly, he pulled into a lane that became narrower with every passing twist and turn. Roland turned to look back at Heike in an effort to somehow communicate his concern: Is he going to take the law into his own hands and shoot us here?
They could possibly overpower him. He was not a young man – not particularly big. If Heike grabbed him around the neck from the back seat and held tight, Roland could grab the officer’s pistol, at which point he’d have to surrender. That’s if they didn’t crash in the process. Worse, Bruno might panic and interfere. Of course, the alternative could be that he was taking them to meet other Polizei who just might be crooked and looking for a bribe.
The uneven tarmac surface of the lane became concrete, then broken concrete, then just a stony, uneven track. The car slowed to a snail’s pace as the surface disintegrated beneath its tyres. If they were going to jump him, now would be as good a time as any. Heike, anticipating her husband’s intentions, braced herself for action.
If ever there was a time for telepathy then this was it.
Rounding a sharp bend, slowly revealing itself, there ahead was a situation that beggared belief. To the side of the track, a row of cars parked up as if a festival or sporting event were about to take place with this as the gathering point. Some cars seemed abandoned, their boots and doors wide open; others had only just been parked, with their occupants milling around and preparing for something – Roland and Heike could not imagine what.
‘This is as far as I will take you,’ said the Polizei. ‘Good luck!’
Cautiously, they climbed out of the car, closing the doors, whereupon the officer immediately put it into reverse and accelerated backwards without so much as a second glance at them.
Bewildered, they stood for a moment watching the others – families and couples just like them putting on boots and making sure they had what they needed before climbing through a hedge. Before them was an open grass field, which in one direction seemed to stretch for as far as the eye could see. Ahead of them, at the top of a slight incline, was a small wire fence some 800 metres away.
People were walking and running across the field to the fence where there was an opening.
‘Come on, this is our chance!’ urged Roland. ‘That’s the Czech border. They’re opening up the border.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ said Heike. ‘The border is bigger than that silly little fence!’
‘Then ask these people,’ said Roland, gesturing to those who were already making their way across.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked of a woman who was tying the shoes of her young daughter.
‘Haven’t you heard? The Czechs have opened the border. We can cross to Hungary and then Austria. Grenz has ordered it.’
; ‘But that’s not the border.’
‘No, but beyond that fence the gates are open. There’s a crossing point.’
Heike turned to Roland and Bruno, smiling with relief: ‘We’d better go, then.’ Climbing through the gap in the hedge, they found themselves walking alongside some fifty other East Germans advancing in line toward the fence as if they were an army; and as they tramped through the wet grass their pace quickened somewhat, as if they feared the border might suddenly close. Halfway across their pace quickened again to a trot, as if an unofficial race were underway; even Bruno was keeping pace. Two-thirds now and the trot moved up a gear into a run. Still Bruno kept pace, and what’s more he was loving every step.
The end in sight at last, just metres to go, excited voices could be contained no longer. Faster and faster, ordinary folk running like demented athletes for the Gold medal position, cases and bags gripped, tiny tots grasped, sprinting like fury now because in their caged minds there was a man somewhere out of sight with a machine gun who might open fire at any second and fell the lot of them like ninepins.
What a hideous prank that would have been; but even as they reached their goal, climbing under or over the little wire fence, everyone suspected it. The unseen guard had to be ready; he must have them in his sights. This was the cruellest joke; this could not be true.
Easing back their frantic hurry, passing through the gates, Heike stared in disbelief at each and every border guard because they were looking as bewildered as she did. They seemed subdued, hopeless, as if all of a sudden the Cold War had been declared null and void, but at any second the joke would be called in.
She looked at one guard in particular. She thought she recognised him; that it was the guard she had met as a child with her cousins; the friendly guard who’d offered them chocolate and spoken to them so nicely. He even had a dog with him. But no! How could it be him? That was so long ago.
*
Someone tapped on the window; it was Hanne.
‘I’m so sorry! So sorry! I just had to pop out to get some wine and something to nibble on. I thought I could do it before you got here. The man in the shop said a woman was looking for me. I hurried straight back.’
‘Never mind, Hanne – you’re here now. What a wonderful place you have rented!’
That evening, Heike told her story in full. It was done, a weight lifted from her shoulders. The schnapps helped them to laugh and listen and exchange notes, but there was something Hanne had to ask of her cousin.
‘What of Roland? Are you both…?’
‘We are still married, but we’ve lived apart for many years now. That incident in the woods changed us both and I never felt quite the same way about him again.’
‘And Bruno?’
‘Bruno has his own place near me with Judith – his wife, you know. But our hearts are still in East Berlin. That city behind the Wall was our lives, our home, and for the most part we had no complaints. I would have stayed, as would Roland and Bruno. We’d be a family still – maybe.
‘Roland has gone back and lives not far from where we lived. I go to see him, we are friends and neither of us has taken up with anyone else. The memories draw me back and I’m still a communist you know, in my heart and mind, but I’m a true communist not a Leninist or Stalinist or Trotskyite.
‘Bruno’s generation will be the last of the East Germans. We were an entity unto ourselves and when our day is done we’ll take our experiences with us, just like Uncle Hugo’s generation were different. I hope there will never be anything quite like it again, but the world is always an unstable place.’
‘And what of Peter?’
‘Peter – where would I begin? Roland told me everything later. Peter was an enigma to everyone. Some have told me recently that he was in the employ of the Stasi, whilst others tell me that he was working for the Americans and the British just as he had claimed. I don’t know the truth and to this day I don’t know where he is. Maybe… maybe one day he’ll let me know, but for now I have lost him as a brother. Perhaps he no longer trusts anyone. Who can blame him? It was a society that didn’t trust itself.
‘You know, Roland and Bruno were in the crowds that smashed open the Stasi HQ in Berlin. That’s when Roland got his beloved camera back. It nearly killed someone when it fell out of its case and down the stairwell! Never mind! It didn’t hurt anybody, but it was close, you know. Anyway, once in there, Roland used his journalistic ability to root through papers, finding references to him, Bruno and Peter – and me, of course.
‘It took a while, but he found what he was looking for, as did many others who wanted to find – not the truth, I should say, but the “truth” according to the government and the Stasi.
‘Yes, everyone discovered “the truth” that day when they broke into the HQ. You see, Hanne, it turns out that Peter and I were willing stooges of the state. We walked right in and said, “Okay, here we are! Do with us as you please,” and that’s just what they did.’
‘Would Peter have betrayed his own family?’
‘I don’t know, Hanne, I really don’t. They had something on him, of course they did. He was an agitator in their eyes.
‘It’s occurred to me in recent years, as more information has come out, that maybe from the moment he followed me into East Berlin they used my name to trick him into being a spy and informer. That’s how so much of it worked, you know. We’ll look after your sister providing you’re a good boy and do some work for us. Or maybe he just fancied himself as a spy.
‘He was a pawn to begin with and who knows what pressure they put on him working in the steelworks? But he became a hero with regard to the school, and history just might remember him for that. Perhaps I wouldn’t be talking to you now without those schoolchildren that he inspired.’
‘I find it so hard to—’
‘Believe? I know, me too.’
‘Sounds like something out of a John le Carré novel.’
‘If we’d had a proper father, this might never have happened. We didn’t though – we had a drill sergeant for a father. And everything Peter and I did was to pay him back for the way he treated us and the way he treated Mama. But whatever the cause, we have to take responsibility and not blame those who were themselves “victims” of a sort.
‘You and I, Hanne – we’re the children of Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini, and their shadows stretch a long way. I look at Bruno’s little daughter and I say to her, “Not you, little one. For you it will be different.” And I believe it will be – I have to believe that.’
The cousins talked well into the small hours. The schnapps flowed, as did the wine – red wine. Music played in the background, music from some obscure station specialising in hits of yesteryear. Heike did most of the talking. She has since assured me that she recounted everything and left nothing out, and I believe her.
Me? Well, you must understand, I was no longer eavesdropping. I’d long since retired. I was out in the open and taking notes in the most ethical manner. I have been unemployed for many years now, but the compilation of notes is all that I know, so my “journalism skills” are all that I have.
I was Hugo’s “ghostwriter”, you know. His biography, though little more than a local memoir of a highly successful flower grower, I think, was one of my finer literary achievements. Of course, he got all the credit, quite rightly.
As for Heike, well, she is very bright and I suspect that deep down she realises that it was me – the ears of the state apparatus as it once was listening for endless hour after interminable day. It is a subject we’ve never broached and probably never will. To Heike, I am simply the feature writer who approached her with a story idea for a magazine – an exposé of how it used to be on the other side of the great divide. I thought hers was a particularly interesting story. Well, I would, wouldn’t I?
The reunion?
There are plans afoot for ano
ther family gathering, and if Hanne, Heike and Heidemarie have anything to do with it then it will continue for many years to come.
*
‘You won’t tell Heidemarie what I have told you, will you, Hanne?’
‘Not if you don’t want me to, but maybe one day you ought to tell her.’
‘She would not understand.’
‘You never know until you try. Maybe you’re… underestimating her?’
‘Maybe. Auf wiedersehen, Hanne!’
‘Auf wiedersehen, Heike!’
Chapter 6
Lookout
Before leaving for Frankfurt and home, Hanne had one last mission to accomplish – to walk one more time among the hills overlooking Oberwinkel and to the lookout tower she’d loved as a child.
She’d always hated leaving Bavaria to return home to dull routine and who knew what. Today was no exception. She wanted the holiday to continue. The accommodation was such a fine little house with its round tower, the weather was very amenable – neither too warm nor too cool – and even the hire car was much better than her own.
Germany always pulled her then held on to her when she was within its grasp. If it weren’t for the family at home, she’d happily stay for as long as she wanted. Silly, really, considering that the boys were grown men and that Sandy would be happy here, too, even though he didn’t speak German. Maybe they were her excuse for not staying longer.
Holidays did this to everyone – lulled you into a false sense of security. The belief that there would be no problems there, that it would be a long, long vacation for the rest of time.
It could never be. She dropped the key back into the caretaker and drove to a place on the high outskirts of Oberwinkel where she could leave the car and amble off on her walk to the deer lookout. Hopefully, it would still be there.
The Reunion Page 38