Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

  By four o’clock he was satisfied that no other vehicle had replaced the car in his mirror, and made directly for the hamlet beyond Marienberg, where Konrad had sought refuge to bring up his family. He reached Steinhübel, a village of a dozen bleak houses, and began the climb through the pine plantations to Holznau. The first house was Frau Haberl’s place on the right, and after passing two smaller houses on the left he let the Wartburg freewheel down a narrow track that glanced off into the pine trees. Within a few seconds he came to a wide, open meadow, which had escaped cultivation during the chaotic management of the district’s farms that followed collectivization in the fifties. It was a beautiful place, in summer full of wild flowers and insects. At the far end behind an apple orchard rose a large brick and timber barn with a sharply pitched black roof. To its southern flank a traditional black and white farm house had been added which Konrad had found for himself and Else after agreeing to pay for new windows and doing the repairs to the roof himself.

  As Rosenharte bumped down the track, he caught sight of Florian and Christoph with a football, and then, to his surprise, Idris wading carefully in the uncut hay crop, carrying something in the skirts of his robe. The boys stopped playing and looked anxiously at the unfamiliar mustard-coloured car, until Rosenharte shouted and waved from the wheel.

  He pulled up behind the barn so the car would not be visible across the fields from Frau Haberl’s house, and ran round the side to scoop the boys up in his arms. Their squeals of excitement brought Else to the door. Rosenharte saw her expression light up, her hands reach to her mouth, then her shoulders sag. She had thought he was Konrad. He set the boys down, absorbed her bruised, fearful expression and went to take her in his arms.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was his bag over your shoulder. You just looked so like him. For a moment I was sure he had come back to us.’

  ‘He will come back. It’s going to be all right,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  Idris came round the corner with several kilos of apples in his robe. He put one hand on Rosenharte’s shoulder and kissed him three times. This convulsed the boys with giggles.

  ‘What did he say in the letter?’ Else asked. ‘Can I see it?’

  Rosenharte hadn’t anticipated this. ‘Later, there’s much to discuss.’

  She shook her head. ‘Let me see it, Rudi. I want to read it.’

  ‘Later. Look, I know he’s doing well. I have contacts and I have seen him. I’m doing everything I can to bring him home to you.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ She was wringing her hands in her apron, fighting back the tears.

  Idris moved to her side and craned his neck to look into her face. ‘Konrad will come. I know this, Frau Rosenharte. Idris know this.’

  She smiled at him and said to Rosenharte, ‘Where did you find this wonderful man? He’s been so very kind to us.’

  Idris looked down at the boys. ‘One day Rudi finds me floating down the river and he picks me up and cleans me and gives me the name Idris and I am his friend for ever.’ The boys goggled at him and consulted each other on the likelihood of this being true.

  ‘Come on in,’ said Else, ‘supper is nearly ready.’

  Rosenharte lingered for a moment and watched the mist creep over the trees that bordered the meadow, and he prayed that the two British spies would find their way to the rendezvous by four the next morning.

  It was agreed that nothing would be mentioned until the boys were asleep. After beer and a risotto made with chicken stock, mushrooms and a mysterious shredded meat that Idris had provided, Else leaned forward and indicated that they should go to the barn so they could speak freely. She wasn’t sure whether the place had been bugged while she had been detained.

  In the barn she lit a hurricane lamp and they sat on broken chairs surrounded by old pieces of saddlery and the mustiness of centuries of hay. As Rosenharte began to explain the plan to take them across, Idris shook his head incredulously. ‘But you have not heard, Rudi? They close border. They close border today.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Else. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘How could I? I’ve been in the car all day. It has no radio.’ He stubbed out the cigarette on the brick floor. ‘I’d better find a phone.’

  ‘The only telephone round here is Frau Haberl’s.’

  ‘There’s no way I can let her hear this,’ he said.

  Else thought, then clapped her hands together. ‘It’s Tuesday night. The Haberls go to a Party meeting twenty kilometres away every week on a Tuesday. I suppose you could break in and make your call.’ She put her hands up to her mouth and looked over her fingertips.

  Ten minutes later Rosenharte parked near the house and walked round it, checking that there was no sign of life inside. Then he slipped his camping knife under two window locks, prised the window open with the blade and climbed inside. The house was very dark, but he groped his way to the front door where Else said the phone rested on a small table. He dialled the number and waited. Nothing happened. He tried three more times, understanding that, like many of the local exchanges, this one was unreliable about connecting outgoing calls. On the sixth time he heard the familiar clicks which prompted the code, and soon after that he was talking to the woman with the English accent. She put him through to Alan Griswald, who was apparently helping out in Harland’s absence.

  Rosenharte knew enough not to ask for explanations. ‘This is Prince. I can’t make the delivery as planned,’ he said.

  ‘We know there have been problems but it goes ahead anyway. I have a map reference for you. You’re to deliver the goods there by seven o’clock. Our mutual friend will meet you and provide transport.’

  ‘I don’t have a map with me,’ said Rosenharte, cursing himself, but also thanking his luck that Ulrike had lent him the car.

  ‘That’s okay. I have instructions.’ He gave Rosenharte the name of a village and told him to travel exactly seven kilometres along the road that hugged the winding border with Czechoslovakia. On the right there was a concrete bridge that would be marked in some way. A contact would be waiting nearby. If he was not there, Rosenharte should walk across the bridge and climb straight up the hill. On the other side he would find a small road. The contacts would be waiting there in a Volvo estate car with Austrian plates.

  He hung up and stole out of the house.

  In the barn he told Else of the new arrangements. Idris’s gaze rested on him as he shook a cigarette from the packet and offered it to Else.

  ‘Are you sure you still want to do this?’ he asked her.

  She bent down to his lighter, shielding it with one hand, then tilted her head backwards as she inhaled. ‘I love my home,’ she said simply. ‘We have found real happiness here, even without money or work for Konrad.’

  ‘I know,’ said Rosenharte. ‘I know this place means a lot to you both.’

  ‘But I can’t stay in a country that did that to my children. You know, they took them in the middle of the night to a place outside Marienberg. They didn’t explain why or where we were. Florian asked when they could see us, and the people at the home said they might never set eyes on us again. Can you believe that? “Your parents are criminals,” they said. “They deserve to be in prison for what they are doing against the state.” And they punished the boys for the slightest thing - for crying even. What state reprimands a child for crying because his parents have been taken away and illegally imprisoned?’

  Rosenharte shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘When you got us out, I knew that I could not let that happen again. My first duty is to the boys now.’ She stopped and watched her foot, which had been jigging as she talked. ‘You see. I’m a bundle of nerves.’

  ‘Where did they hold you?’

  ‘In Dresden for most of the time. They took me to Bautzen for eight days to scare the shit out of me, which it did. I was locked up with criminals - women that you could not believe, Rudi. Monsters, perverts, murderers. Women who are not women.’

&nbs
p; ‘You’ve done well to keep your sanity,’ said Rosenharte quietly. ‘You’re stronger than you think, Else. You’re a brave woman.’

  She grimaced to keep her composure. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Konnie would be proud of you.’ He put his hand on her knee and she looked up with her soft, grey eyes and he thought how lovely she was.

  ‘Show me his letter, Rudi.’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t. He wrote it when he was feeling very down. It will do you no good.’

  Her shoulders crumpled again. ‘But it’s the contact I need. I want to touch something he touched.’

  ‘I understand. Really, I do. You will have this letter, but let me try all I can to get him out, Else. Let me do that.’

  She nodded. She didn’t have the will to argue.

  ‘We’d better talk about tomorrow,’ he said briskly, ‘what you should wear and take with you. We may have to do some walking, so you should keep the luggage to a minimum.’

  She replied that she had got everything ready. The boys had a knapsack that they were used to carrying on hikes with Konnie and she was going to take a backpack and a grip with food and drink already packed. ‘And Idris has told you that he’s coming too?’ she said.

  Idris dipped his head apologetically. ‘I go to Sudan with the money you gave me, Rudi. I go see family and maybe find a wife. It’s good time for wife.’ Else smiled at his businesslike approach to romance.

  ‘Just like that! You’re just taking off?’

  ‘Maybe I come back.’

  Rosenharte considered this.

  ‘Let him come,’ said Else. ‘The boys will think it’s an adventure with Idris there. It’s important that they aren’t frightened tomorrow.’

  ‘What are you going to do when you get over the border?’ asked Rosenharte.

  ‘I am going to Prague and I am buying ticket in that city.’

  ‘You’d better take some more money. I will give you two hundred dollars to help with your expenses. Does Vladimir know about this?’

  Idris shook his head.

  ‘Besides,’ said Else, ‘we need someone to carry Konnie’s films.’ She got up and walked to an ancient barrel, pulled away some sacking and hefted out a sports bag. ‘They were buried in the woods,’ she said. ‘Idris helped me dig them out yesterday.’ She eased the bag to the ground. ‘This represents Konnie’s life’s work - all the films that have never been shown publicly.’

  Rosenharte got up and looked into the bag. ‘I assumed the Stasi had confiscated all this.’

  ‘No, everything is here, and the equipment too.’ She took the hurricane lamp to a dusty container once used for animal feed, and told them how Konrad had fitted it with a false bottom and a hidden drawer. She crouched down and, stretching to grasp both ends of the container, pulled hard. Eventually it gave and the drawer came away. Inside was a projector lying on its side, Konrad’s old Wollensak Eight camera, a length of cabling and some lenses in black string-pull bags.

  ‘We see film now,’ said Idris. ‘Yes? We see film now.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Rosenharte. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’

  Else shrugged. ‘Most of the canisters contain negatives. After a while he couldn’t persuade anyone to develop his stuff. But there’s one I could show you.’ She went to work running the cable to the electricity supply in the house, setting up the projector and unfurling a white cloth, which she hung on the wall of the barn. She chose a canister marked SUBLIME No. 2 and threaded the film through the projector. She spun the spools, unscrewed, checked and wiped the bulb, and turned the machine on.

  ‘There’s no soundtrack,’ she explained to Idris while adjusting the focus. ‘It’s a silent film which he wanted a friend to score music for. This never happened, sadly.’

  Sublime No. 2 began with the camera moving over a pedestrian concourse, lingering on patches of lichen that grew on the concrete and stone. People seen only from the waist down crossed the camera’s field at random, women with shopping bags half full, men with walking sticks, children with bruised knees. Back and forth they went, oblivious of being watched. Rosenharte realized that the subject of the film was not the people or their quaint, disembodied locomotion or the different pairs of legs, but the ground itself. The camera now moved as though sweeping it like a metal detector, probing what lay beneath the space where no shadows seemed to fall. For a few seconds it was diverted to track a dandelion seed bouncing over the concrete, and in the distance some buildings were glimpsed. They could have been in any town in Eastern Germany, but Rosenharte knew with absolute certainty that the film had been shot in Dresden’s Altmarkt.

  Dusk came and pools of light appeared on the ground. The film cut to a pair of old-fashioned women’s shoes and suddenly the washed-out palette of the daylight footage was replaced by luxuriant colour. The camera inched up the woman’s legs to a floral patterned dress, also pre-war, and then to a beautifully formed bodice and a head that was turned away. The whole image was lit from above by a streetlight. Behind the woman was a mass of yellow and brown chestnut leaves still clinging to the shoots at the bottom of a large tree. For a moment nothing happened. Then the woman turned to the camera and gazed into the lens. Her lips were very red and slightly parted; her hair was dark and worn curled and bunched in the style of the thirties. It took a few seconds for Rosenharte to see that it was a younger, much slimmer Else wearing a wig or with her hair dyed.

  She opened her arms and from each side of the frame a boy appeared and clutched at her legs and skirt. The dark Else smiled. The camera focused on her face. Then the image faded, bleached out by the intense white light that seemed to fall from the lamp above her.

  Else returned to the projector as the end of the film snapped round the spool. ‘Did you recognize me?’ she asked.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Rosenharte. ‘You looked very beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, most beautiful,’ chimed Idris, bringing his hands together with sincerity.

  ‘This was made before the boys were born. It’s as though he had a vision of our life.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s exactly what it’s about,’ said Rosenharte gently.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘They aren’t your children. And that isn’t you. You were playing the part of our natural mother and the boys are Konnie and me. The Square, or somewhere like it, is where he thinks she was killed and buried in the firestorm of 1945. Why is it called Sublime Number Two?’

  ‘I don’t know. He never explained.’

  The film fascinated Rosenharte because Konnie knew as well as he did that their mother was not at all a warm, beautiful figure. Perhaps he was making the point that in Else he had found a mother as well as a lover. He would ask him about that.

  She started packing away the equipment and then suddenly stopped and felt in the pocket of her long cardigan. ‘Oh, I almost forgot. The man who came here the other day - the one I told you about. He left this note. The film reminded me of it.’ She handed him a piece of lined paper. ‘It is addressed to Konnie, but it seems to concern both of you.’

  Rosenharte read.

  Dear Herr Rosenharte,

  For several weeks I and members of my family have been trying to contact you regarding a private matter. My uncle, Franciscek Grycko, was hoping to contact your brother, but died suddenly of a heart attack. I myself have made several attempts to speak with your brother, but have failed and now must return to my home in Poland. I leave my address and my telephone number at the base of this page with the hope that we will be in touch in the near future. It is important to both of us.

  Leszek Grycko

  Rosenharte read it again, then asked Else what it meant.

  ‘He would not tell me,’ she replied. ‘I thought he was the Stasi playing one of their games so I told him to leave. At first he refused and I became worried that he would do us some harm - it’s very remote here and we’re vulnerable. He told me that he saw you in Leipzig and that you’d run away from him. He said you didn’t respond
after he left a letter at the Gemäldegalerie.’

  ‘I haven’t received a letter,’ said Rosenharte. Sonja hadn’t mentioned anything to him about a letter. ‘Did he say how he found you?’

  She shook her head. ‘He had a car . . . I’m sorry, I should have asked him some questions, but I had just got back here and I was concentrating on the boys.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve got his number now. I’ll call him over the next few days.’ He folded the note and slipped it inside his jacket pocket.

  The Wartburg’s headlights forked through curls of mist that lay about the meadow as they set off down the track. Florian and Christoph had immediately fallen asleep either side of Idris in the back seat, despite the portable radio he held to his ear. Else sat in the front with the food bag on her lap, looking ahead and not speaking. He understood well enough what it meant to be leaving Konrad behind in the GDR and to be closing the door on the home she loved. Yet he thought he’d seen a new resolve in her eyes as they had taken a hasty breakfast in the kitchen. Far from being cowed by the Stasi, as he had initially suspected, she had decided to eliminate all considerations except her children’s needs. He touched her on the back of the hand as they reached the road and said, ‘So, your journey to freedom begins here.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ she said, without turning to him.

  The village of Herresbach lay about twenty-five miles to the south-east of Holznau, but it would take them the best part of an hour to reach it by the exceptionally tortuous road system in the Erzgebirge mountains. Rosenharte was thoroughly familiar with the area and thought he remembered a bridge at the point Griswald had described. As they went, Idris occasionally relayed news from the outside world, in particular from Czechoslovakia where trains were being prepared to take the people from the West German embassy in Prague to the Federal Republic.