Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  Behind them, Anna Schweinle saw the kiss and smiled to herself. Doris Röder missed it. She was talking animatedly to Anna about how she and her fiancé, Klaus, were going to furnish the home they were building high up the mountain, above the vineyards, on the Roter Berg at Plochingen. The bathroom was to have mixer taps. Anna was only half-listening. Her father worked in a butcher’s shop, her mother was a part-time office cleaner. The world of mixer taps would forever remain closed to her.

  At Café Harre, dancing was in the cellar. Hermann Schaffner led the group down to a round table, one of twenty spaced out around the rectangular dance floor. Himmelfahrt sat next to Margarethe Heer; he felt pretty sure Margarethe wanted that.

  Doris and Anna ordered soft drinks, Margarethe white wine and everyone else had beer, John and Himmelfahrt opting for the bigger Halbe. John, Himmelfahrt and Naomi also ordered food. They had been teaching and had not eaten for seven hours. John chose a pair of Bratwurst and a roll. Naomi and Himmelfahrt ordered Russian Eggs, the most expensive item on the small menu. Himmelfahrt was disappointed the menu had only snacks on it, he was famished.

  When the ordering was done, Himmelfahrt noticed that their table had a telephone on it. It was ringing. He peered round vaguely, pushing his glasses up his nose. Other tables had telephones on them, too. Men were on the phone, talking to women at other tables. The telephone on their table, unnoticed by Himmelfahrt, had been ringing ever since the group had sat down but everybody had ignored it while they were ordering.

  Now Hermann Schaffner smiled a thick-lipped smile. ‘Who’s going to answer it?’ he said. His jowls were blue in the subdued light.

  ‘We don’t know who it’s for,’ said Margarethe Heer, innocently.

  ‘It might be for John,’ said Himmelfahrt, attempting a tease.

  Anna Schweinle was gazing round the room. She knew at least a dozen men at other tables. She regretted covering up so much — not realising they would be going dancing she was wearing a black crew-neck pullover and fawn slacks. She had also been carrying Margarthe and Doris’s books in her duffel bag, as well as her own, and that made her feel like a carthorse.

  She wrinkled her nose at Margarethe’s cleavage and expanse of thigh. Doris, who could look sexy in anything, looked sexy in her ribbed, high-necked purple sweater, with bare arms and a tube white skirt. Anna was not used to being outshone by other women. She decided to seduce one of the men at her table. And by now she had decided which one she wanted.

  The food and drinks arrived; the food wolfed down by the hungry teachers. Not surprisingly, given the bevy of beauty at the table, the phone was ringing incessantly. Finally, Doris Röder, smilingly game for a laugh, shrugged her narrow shoulders and picked up the receiver.

  She said ‘Ja?’ into the phone in the same breathless, sexy voice she had used when she sportingly played along with Himmelfahrt’s mock lesson.

  Everyone at the table watched her. Her lovely slanting eyes opened wide as she looked at Anna and then Margarethe. She said ‘Ja’, again, into the receiver, normally this time. Then she shook her raven head in puzzlement.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said.

  And handed the phone to Himmelfahrt. There was a roar of laughter round the table.

  Himmelfahrt took the phone. ‘What do I do?’ he said to John in panic. (As he spoke he realised he had ignored John all evening, until he needed him.)

  John was laughing, shaking his round head, which made his ginger hair flop about. ‘She’ll tell you her table number. Then go over and ask her to dance,’ he said.

  ‘Grüss Gott,’ said Himmelfahrt into the phone. ‘My name is Mark.’ Even this drew an appreciative laugh from the receptive audience round the table.

  ‘I invite you to dance,’ said a female voice down the phone. ‘Table thirteen.’

  Himmelfahrt looked at table thirteen, where a group of young women sat. She waved. She was blonde. She was wearing a red sequinned evening dress with little straps over her bare shoulders. She was gorgeous.

  Without hesitation, Himmelfahrt jumped up. What a night! Discover proof of parallel worlds and the possibility of redemption, gently kiss one of the loveliest women on the planet and now get asked to dance in front of everybody. Himmelfahrt charged towards table thirteen.

  18

  At the very second he surged forward between the tables, a woman as attractive as the one in the red evening dress, perhaps even more attractive, was sitting on Himmelfahrt’s bed in his room in Ludwigsburg-Ossweil, thinking about him. Her name was Dorothea Stoll, and she was not happy.

  *

  The road to Himmelfahrt’s bed had started for Dorothea Stoll in Bautzen, east of Dresden, deep in East Germany, a place known mainly for having one of the cruellest prisons in the world. Dorothea Stoll was thirteen when she first realised she was better than the people around her. She could do everything. In this she was at the opposite pole of attainment to the person whose bed she was sitting on, Marcus Himmelfahrt, who, with some justification, felt he could do nothing at all. At least nothing practical.

  Himmelfahrt could not do any of the following: cook (anything, not even an omelette); sing as much as one note in tune (he was usually flat); ride a bicycle; draw; dance (except for jerking around to rock music); come to terms with any object with a moving part more complex than, say, a door; sew; play a musical instrument; mend anything; find his way round any habitation with more than three streets; do any but the most rudimentary mathematical calculation; fight, either physically or verbally; speak clearly; ride a horse; sail a boat; understand the opposite sex; understand his own sex; do gymnastics; appreciate classical music; decorate a room … There was probably more.

  Dorothea Stoll, by contrast, used to take clocks apart and put them back together again when she was eight, just for the hell of it. In her early teens she helped her older brothers repair their motorbikes, quickly becoming better at it than them and almost as quickly learning to hide her superior ability from them.

  The way to the top was obviously through the Party and the top was the only place to be. Dorothea’s mother was the Party informant for their block of flats. Little Dorothea helped her gather information about their neighbours, quickly outdoing Mama in ferreting out whatever the Party wanted.

  At fifteen, Dorothea passed details of a suspected illegal gathering directly to the local Party Chief, without telling Mama. She had the first of many bolts of luck she considered her due. The gathering itself turned out to be harmless, but one of the guests investigated had an unauthorised banda machine. Dorothea, by no means for the last time, got maximum credit with the Party for her efforts.

  At seventeen, she replaced her mother as local informant. On appointment, she slept with the Party boss, Martin Hein; a routine requirement for women subordinates in Communist countries. Dorothea accepted it as her right that she was attractive enough to sleep her way upwards, when she needed to. Within five years she was the third most senior party member in Bautzen, running the secret service (SSD) section at the concrete block which housed Party headquarters, in Krupskayaplatz.

  Her big break came in May 1971, when a shake-up of the SSD at their Berlin headquarters at Normannenstrasse created a new department, the ZOS (Zentrale Operations-Stab). Dorothea was 25 by then. She got Martin Hein to recommend her to the ZOS within an hour of hearing of its existence.

  She knew when she arrived in Berlin that she had to make a big splash immediately. As ever, it was easy. Most of the ZOS, like the rest of the SSD, were men over 50. She slept with her chief, Heinrich Damerau, aged 55, the night she arrived in Berlin. A week later she devised and executed a plan to get sent to the west.

  The plan centred on the Baader-Meinhof gang. The SSD had high hopes for Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and the rest of them, thanks to one of the gang’s supporters, the lawyer Horst Mahler, making Marxist pronouncements to justify their murders, kidnappings and destruction of property. The gang were viewed not as a messy rabble of vicious petty crooks, but as a pol
itical tool to lever up the tender plant of West German democracy.

  Dorothea Stoll had combed the files on the gang on day one in Berlin. She was among the first to spot that the guiding brain was not the eponymous Meinhof (even if she was a talented journalist ) and certainly not the dim thug Andreas Baader. It was Baader’s girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin.

  Dorothea volunteered to go to Swabia to find Gudrun, who was born in Bartholomä and was thought to be somewhere near Tübingen, where she had studied. The SSD were setting up a cell in Ludwigsburg, not far from Tübingen or Bartholomä, so Dorothea was sent there in October 1971.

  And what did she find? The boss was a woman, so she had an unexpectedly early night on her first night in Ludwigsburg. This woman boss turned out to be a superannuated old bat who didn’t know spying from brown herrings. There was also a brainless tailor’s dummy, presumably the muscle, with a twerp Saxon accent. And that was it. No files, no organisation … And it got worse. The superannuated old bat, Lieselotte Quednau by name, wouldn’t let her find Ensslin until she had checked out a possible British spy. Some minor league mule or intelligence gatherer with two names. Du lieber Gott! Dorothea Stoll was born for better things than that.

  There was a row. The old bat had threatened to report her, have her returned to Berlin in disgrace. Dorothea had backed down. For now. But she was out to get Lieselotte Quednau. She would get the old sow retired, imprisoned or shot. Then she would build up the Ludwigsburg station to something decent and move it to Stuttgart, or even Munich. And she would get rid of Kai-Uwe Prengel, the tailor’s dummy, too. After she’d taken him to bed.

  Dorothea Stoll was dressed attractively, as if for an evening out, but in an outfit that allowed ease of movement: white blouse, black trousers, black swagger coat. She had a shoulder bag with her, as big as she could carry without attracting attention. Tonight, Tuesday, Herr and Frau Biedermeier went to her parents for dinner. They would be out for a couple of hours yet.

  *

  At eight o’clock, Dorothea Stoll had strolled boldly up to the Biedermeiers’ house, smiling sweetly for the benefit of neighbours. She rang the bell. She then flicked a Dietrich, a pick-lock cum pass key, at the lock and let herself into the house. If the Biedermeiers had left the door on a chain it wouldn’t have detained her for long, but they hadn’t.

  She eased up the stairs to the room of this supposed British spy Himmelfahrt, also known as Hill. Once in his claustrophobic rat-trap of a room, though, it got more interesting: this Himmelfahrt-Hill was not even pretending to live here. The drawers were empty, the shelves in the wardrobe were bare. There wasn’t even a book or a personal possession on the bedside table. Nothing. There was a space under the eaves which revealed only half a decaying hamburger. He was registered at this address, but where was this Himmelfahrt actually living?

  At the bottom of the wardrobe there was a backpack with a few screwed up clothes in it. It looked as if Himmelfahrt was preparing to get out in a hurry. Why? And where was he going?

  He had made one mistake, though. Under the pile of clothes in the backpack there was a towel, screwed into a tight ball. Dorothea opened it out on the bed. The middle was stained yellow. It had no doubt been wrapped round a lemon-based invisible ink — old fashioned, but then he was British. It would be effective enough, though.

  Sitting there on the bed, Dorothea picked the towel up and sniffed it. Whew! It was pungent. So … a burning agent combined with the lemon, used on special paper … She opened her bag; took out a pair of tweezers. Carefully, she teased out enough fibres from the centre of the towel to send back to the ZOS in Berlin for analysis. She took an evidence envelope from her bag and carefully dropped the fibres into it, sealed it and dropped it back into her bag.

  She padded softly down the stairs. On the hall table, there was a letter addressed to the spy, care of the Biedermeiers. Dorothea Stoll turned it over to look at the sender address. No sender address on the back! Wasn’t that just typical of the sloppy British! Too bloody lazy to write a sender address! Dorothea Stoll neatly opened the letter and read it quickly:

  Minnie and Gershon Himmelfahrt

  128 Graylands Crescent

  Chingford

  London E4

  Dear Marcus, I am writing this with a heavy heart. It’s time to tell your father the truth. You’ve emigrated for good, haven’t you? You’re never coming back. We will never see you again.

  Your father must be told. We gave you everything. We did our best for you and this is what we get for it. I’m brokenhearted, Marcus. Not that you care.

  Mrs Driscoll from over the road’s son Peter has had his writing published in the Gas Gazette. I thought you might like to know. She said she was very proud of her son. I didn’t say anything, Marcus. What could I say?

  Your broken-hearted mother,

  Mother

  Some sort of code, obviously, based on this Gas Gazette as the source-book. Dorothea Stoll memorised the letter at one reading. She then replaced it in the envelope and wrote ‘Opened by Customs’ on it. Selecting a stamp with an eagle and the word Zoll from her bag, she stamped the envelope with it.

  Then she let herself out of the Biedermeiers’ house. She would immediately add the names of Minnie and Gershon Himmelfahrt, with their address, to the Central Card File of the East German Secret Service. They were to be thoroughly investigated, as probable British agents. Dorothea Stoll was content with her evening’s work.

  19

  Just as Dorothea Stoll let herself out of the Biedermeiers’ house, Hermann Laichle (Hermann the Gardener) was striding along Neckarstrasse, at one with earth and stars. The dance place wasn’t for him, so he had slipped away quietly.

  Most people would have found a night walk to Poppenweiler daunting. It was a good 15 kilometres; the end stretch, past the farms, would be in total darkness. But Hermann loved it, moving out there under stars whose patterns he had understood since boyhood. He anticipated the smell of the cow dung on the narrow humped streets of Poppenweiler as you entered the village past the Göller farm. He hurried forward to it.

  Hermann Laichle knew neither the name nor the concept of pantheism, but that is what he was — a pantheist. He went to church because of unacknowledged certainties in his soul: the certainty that ritual is soothing: the certainty that all must come together. But what he worshipped in his heart was the stars and the earth and the farm animals and the flowers. Above all the flowers, his flowers, the flowers he grew on the allotment where he lived alone; the flowers (chrysanthemums) which provided his living and his life. So he had no thought of a God as he started to pray, there in the street; his prayer was more a projected wish of goodwill.

  A scream in the darkness distracted him. It came from a run-down cottage on the edge of Neckarweihingen and was made by Elvira Plutznick. Her father, Julius Plutznick, had just found her cache of mail-order books and was slapping her round the face.

  Hermann the Gardener composed his thoughts again. He resumed praying. He wished the strangers in their midst well. They were visitors, sojourners in his land — he meant Swabia, not the Federal Republic of Germany. He blessed their time in his land. He proffered special prayers for one of the strangers, who unsettled him greatly. There was something out of joint in the being of this stranger. Hermann felt it, like a cold wind inside him and it disturbed him profoundly. He did not know what the stain was, exactly, but there was something horribly awry with the soul of John de Launay.

  *

  Back at the Café Harre, Himmelfahrt ran hectically to table thirteen, pushing past other young men. As he neared the table he realised these other men were also heading there. He thought there were about ten blokes fighting their way towards the girl with the red evening dress, all summoned to her by telephone. Himmelfahrt was breathless, desperate, pushing his way past resentful would-be swains.

  Christl Göller (the girl in the red dress) boasted to her girlfriends at every telephone dance that she could spot the would-be ladykillers, the Romeo types, at
each table — and then make fools of them. And she had been proved right.

  Christl was milking it. ‘Oh, who shall I choose?’ she purred to a girlfriend, as she was surrounded by eight men. Two good-looking, well-dressed youths were bending over her, both imploring her to dance.

  ‘I’m English,’ called out Himmelfahrt in English from the back of the pack, playing to his strength. ‘I’m from London.’ And I know the Queen and the Beatles. Oh God, the shame of it!

  Christl Göller turned to look at him, smiled, looked away again. She accepted one of the handsome youths next to her who had not said too much. He led her through the rapidly dispersing crowd of suitors to the dance floor.

  Rejected, emotionally wounded, Himmelfahrt made his way back to his table, a white fog in his head. He had done it again. Made a prat of himself. Humiliated himself. His eyes were fixed to the ground, sure they would all be roaring with laughter at him. But his table was nearly empty. Only Hermann Schaffner and Margarethe Heer were still sitting where he had left them, absorbed in conversation.

  Where was everybody else? Naomi had gone, which was a shame. There was also no sign of Hermann the Gardener. John was dancing with Anna. They were smiling and talking as they danced close in a corner of the dance floor. They were speaking English. Anna was well aware of how cute she sounded in English. Doris was dancing with Dieter Sinjen, whose face was tense with desire as she chattered away nonstop to him. Perhaps they hadn’t seen his humiliation?

  Margarethe turned to him as soon as he sat down, breaking off her conversation with Hermann Schaffner. ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said brightly, as if he’d come back from the Gents, or something. ‘Don’t you want to ask me to dance?’

  Tears came to Himmelfahrt’s eyes. She was pretending she hadn’t seen his humiliation by the girl in the red dress, but she had. She was offering herself as balm for his wounded pride. She was a good person.