Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

  ‘That I don’t believe.’ He looked at Macy Harp. ‘And are these people to help with my brother?’

  Harland nodded. ‘We think a team of three: a driver and two men to make the pick-up. Have you any more information on his state of health?’

  ‘No, but I think he’s weak.’

  ‘And you say you can supply the passes and the collection docket for the date. What’s our story - a transfer?’

  ‘A request for Konrad to be interviewed by the KGB at their Karlshorst headquarters for a twenty-four-hour period.’

  ‘Is this likely? I mean, is this the sort of thing they do?’

  ‘It’s rare, but it does happen. When Konrad was in prison last time round, they talked to one of his fellow prisoners twice.’

  ‘And these passes - where are you getting them from?’

  ‘That’s my secret. But they’re the real thing.’

  Harland drew him away and pulled a small bottle of brandy from his coat pocket, flipped the lid and handed it to him, looking through the smoke of his breath.

  ‘You realize that this whole thing is about to come off. We’re about to beat the bastards.’

  Rosenharte handed the bottle back, feeling the warmth in his stomach. ‘Getting Konrad to the West is my definition of victory. I don’t care one way or the other about the Arab.’

  ‘What are you going to do after tomorrow? You know you will have to lie low whatever Ulrike decides to do. You could do worse than come here. We’ll pack up tomorrow morning and leave. It’s all yours.’

  ‘What?’

  Harland swept the beam of a torch over a squat single-storey farm building, which Rosenharte had had no sense of. ‘The beauty of it is that it is totally surrounded by trees, it’s got about three ways in and out. And you can see for miles around. We’ve used it before and never had any problems. We’ll leave the food for you and some other supplies.’

  ‘I don’t know where we are.’

  ‘I’ll show you a map. That reminds me to tell you where we want to pick you up on Saturday morning as well.’

  They went to one of the cars and Macy Harp showed him their position by putting his finger on a spot about twenty kilometres north of Altenberg, the airbase where Rosenharte was convinced they had landed on the way back from Italy. Then he got out a large-scale map of East Berlin, found the place he was looking for and folded it to a manageable size. ‘You see the church just off Köpenickerstrasse?’ Rosenharte shook his head and Harp handed him his reading glasses. ‘You have to be there from six thirty onwards at the back of the church. You got that? Saturday at six thirty,’ he said emphatically. ‘And no passengers. Okay?’

  ‘How will we leave the GDR?’

  ‘We’d prefer to keep that to ourselves,’ said Harland quickly. ‘What about the passes? How are you going to get them to us?’

  Rosenharte thought. ‘There’s a train - the Dresden to Berlin service. It stops at six o’clock at Berlin-Schönefeld. That Friday evening I will board the first carriage, carrying a plain white plastic bag, which will contain the passes. At ten past six I’ll go to the toilet. I will leave the bag in the towel disposal bin, covered with some newspaper.’

  Harland and Harp nodded. ‘We need a back-up plan. Trains are cancelled and delayed. There’s quite a bit of surveillance at stations - people being asked for their identity cards, and so forth.’

  ‘The newsstand at the Ostbahnhof. I will be there at seven thirty if there is a problem with the train. I will have a copy of Neues Deutschland. The passes will be in that. We will have to contrive to make a swap.’

  Harland nodded. ‘So, let’s talk about tomorrow and how you’re going to get Kafka out of the villa.’

  25

  Oratorio

  He scaled the wall with help from two BND officers and slipped into the shadows of an overgrown garden that was bordered on three sides by shrubs and clumps of bamboo. He could make out the sliding door at the rear of the villa which led onto a small area of unweeded gravel where there was some garden furniture. If surveillance reports from the previous days were anything to go by, Ulrike would rise early, shower, make a light breakfast and read for about an hour before the Arab stirred from his room and began the painfully slow business of his own toilet. At some stage before he appeared she usually went out onto the patio area. That would be Rosenharte’s only chance to speak to her. At eight thirty a nurse arrived to take his temperature, blood pressure and remove a urine sample. Then his doctor looked in and generally stayed for half an hour or so. After that Abu Jamal made one or two phone calls and waited for a Stasi messenger to deliver Arabic newspapers. Lunch was brought to the villa at which point more serious contacts began to drop by. The BND’s mini camera in the garden had recorded a number of interesting faces that would come in useful if the West decided to show the extent to which the GDR was involved with one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. Hermann Wuthe, a senior diplomat with several Middle East postings behind him, had been spotted on Saturday afternoon.

  He remained for an hour crouching in the bushes with his joints aching, nicotine withdrawal and anxiety nipping at his insides. A glimmer of dawn showed in the east and began to fill the garden with a greyish light. He noticed a movement behind a curtain on the first floor, then Ulrike’s face appeared at the window. She was pulling her fingers up through her hair. A few minutes later, wearing jeans and a big mauve sweater, she crossed his line of sight into the kitchen and began to make breakfast for herself. He hesitated, not knowing whether to throw a pebble at the window or wait. But then the sliding door was drawn open with the noise of someone clearing their throat, and she came out. He smelt fresh coffee. When she had reached the furthest extent of the gravel about twenty feet from him, he called out to her softly. She seemed not to hear him, but stepped on to the grass and walked towards him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she hissed without looking down. ‘You must go now!’

  He didn’t move. ‘They’re going to take him today, as soon as the villa is clear. You have to leave.’

  ‘Go!’ she said. ‘You’re risking everything.’

  She moved a few steps closer, glanced back at the house, then sank down beside him.

  ‘Go back to them now. Tell them this is my operation. I’m not leaving until I’m ready.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop them. Please, Ulrike, come now.’

  ‘The Arab isn’t even here. He went for treatment at the hospital last night. He won’t be back until late morning or early afternoon.’

  Rosenharte wondered what else the surveillance team had missed.

  ‘Is this garden patrolled?’

  ‘If he’s outside, they sometimes put a man with him. But no, not usually.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you have to wait for him to return. It’s Monday. It would be natural for you to go to work.’

  ‘I’m waiting for information. A contact of mine will visit this afternoon and we’ll know whether they plan to use violence tonight. That’s much more important than this.’

  Rosenharte shifted his weight and looked down at her cup. ‘May I have some of that?’

  She handed him the cup and watched him while he sipped the delicious black coffee, a supply of which he had no doubt was brought by the Arab for the duration of his visit.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, returning the cup. ‘Look, Ulrike, forget your contact. We already know they’re going to use force. Read the newspapers. There’re army trucks everywhere. Paratroopers have been deployed with live ammunition. Everyone knows it. Blood supplies have been increased at the hospital.’

  ‘Don’t lecture me about what’s going on in this city,’ she said fiercely. ‘This is my city. Your British friends are jeopardizing everything. Now go.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Ulrike, this is an international operation and you’re responsible for it. You wanted to stop Abu Jamal. You worked for this intervention and now you can’t complain that they have acted on your wo
rd.’

  She looked away. ‘Did you give them my name?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Answer me.’

  ‘Of course. I had to. You know what matters to me is getting my brother out of Hohenschönhausen and sending Else to the West. That was the deal. Remember that you put him there before you get sanctimonious with me.’

  She turned to him, her expression furious. Rosenharte wondered why he’d found her attractive. ‘You go back and tell them that they move only when I say so. Today is the day. Everything will be won or lost today. Nothing else matters. They must not interfere.’ She paused, looked away, then softened her tone. ‘Rudi, you and I both know that your brother was put in Hohenschönhausen by the Stasi. That’s what we’re fighting: imprisonment without trial. The breaking of people’s spirits. Taking families from their beds.’

  He ignored this. ‘I must be able to explain to them why this contact is so important.’

  She glanced towards the house. Nothing was moving. ‘At the institute where I work there’s a professor. He has a relationship with one of the highest members of the Party - Egon Krenz, the man who they say will succeed Honecker. They’re close. The professor is driving to Berlin at this very moment to argue that military force will be counterproductive.’

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t be naïve. If the Party wants to make an example in Leipzig, the views of a provincial academic are not going to overrule Erich Mielke and 80,000 Stasi. He could do it with his own men, if he wanted.’

  She put her hand to his knee. ‘Listen, the professor has proposed an alternative plan to the Central Committee, which makes concessions. Krenz will pay attention to what he has to say because both men have been involved in youth programmes for so much of their professional lives. They know what they’re talking about. And the professor appreciates the level of resistance here.’

  ‘Which will all crumble in the first volley of gunfire. Anyway, what’s to stop you learning this information by phone?’

  ‘Here? On this phone? Don’t be stupid. My contact must come here in person under an arranged pretext. Thousands and thousands of people depend on this information, though they don’t know it. So I repeat, I instigated this operation and I will decide when they move on the Arab.’

  He shrugged. ‘How will you let us know?’

  ‘I’ll leave a white towel on the back of the chair. They can move then and only then. Is that understood?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And then Rudi, I will meet you at the church door. There will be places for us. Now go.’

  She looked at him for a few seconds then straightened and walked back to the open window, where she shook the dew from her shoes and went inside.

  He waited a little while, then crawled back into the shrubs and, using the trunk of a lilac tree, climbed the fence and jumped down.

  As he rose to his feet he looked up. Dawn had broken over Leipzig on Monday 9 October. There was moderate cloud cover and a slightly warmer temperature than was usual for the time of year. An ordinary beginning to an ordinary autumn day in the GDR. Leipzigers were starting out for work; smoke was already rising from one or two chimneys and, as he stole across the park, the clank and screech of the trams reached his ears in the still, slightly sulphurous air.

  After debriefing Rosenharte, Robert Harland returned to the back of the truck to sit with one member of the BND team. Macy Harp and another West German sat in the front wearing overalls and smoking. They communicated with Harland through a hole punched in the back of the cabin, but mostly they waited in silence listening to the watchers call in from their positions around the park and on the far side of the villa. The enormous police and military build-up going on around the city made it difficult for them to stay in one place. Harland was worried that the city would be sealed off completely in the event of widespread violence and that it would be impossible for them to leave with Abu Jamal.

  By three in the afternoon there was still no sign of him and they began to fear that he would remain in hospital overnight. Harland used the scrambled satellite phone to convey his worries in a call that was patched through Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham to the German desk of the Secret Intelligence Service in London. On the other end were Mike Costelloe and a man called Apsley from SIS’s Middle East Directorate. Both men urged him to sit tight.

  ‘You’ve gone all the way to the river and you haven’t put up your rod yet,’ said Apsley.

  This brought a snarled comment from Macy Harp up front. ‘There’s a view in Century House that there’s nothing in the world that doesn’t benefit from the application of a fishing metaphor.’

  The two BND men simply shook their heads.

  At four the watchers reported that the villa received a visitor, a young woman in a headscarf and a dark raincoat who approached the two Stasi men at the front and offered her identity card. Harland knew it must be Kafka’s contact.

  ‘Kafka’s got some bloody balls doing it right under their noses in a Stasi safe house.’

  The woman hurried away shortly afterwards. Through the window, Kafka was observed picking up the phone, speaking for a few seconds and replacing the receiver. She then put on her coat and turned off the lights. A minute or two later she was seen on the street outside hurrying towards the centre of Leipzig.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ said Macy Harp. ‘No white towel; no bleedin’ Arab. We might as well go and join their effin’ peace demo.’

  A second hurried conversation ensued with London, during which it was decided that the only course was to wait. Mike Costelloe said they had separate reports that hospital beds were being emptied in the city to cope with a large number of casualties. This could mean that Abu Jamal would be required to give up his bed.

  Harland hung up. It was 4.20 p.m.

  The middle part of Rosenharte’s day was spent talking to Kurt Blast and smoking too much for his own good. At noon, after they’d had several beers, Kurt leapt up and started rifling through his record collection. He selected a boxed set of J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and showed it to Rosenharte.

  ‘This is appropriate for two reasons,’ he said, holding the record sleeve in his long, slender fingers as though it was a dish of food. ‘First of all, it’s two hundred and fifty-five years since it was first performed here in Leipzig. Second - and this is the most important reason - Bach did not favour either of the two big churches: he composed the Oratorio for both of them. The first part was played on Christmas morning in the Nikolaikirche, with a performance at the Thomaskirche in the afternoon. The second part opened in the morning of the twenty-sixth of December in the Thomaskirche and was repeated in the afternoon in the Nikolaikirche.’

  ‘Impressive,’ said Rosenharte, wondering anew at the extraordinary man he found himself with.

  ‘Bach alternated between the two churches until January the sixth, the feast of the Epiphany, when the last part was played in the Nikolaikirche.’ He darted a look at Rosenharte and his eyes danced with pleasure. ‘I see Bach hurrying between the two churches with his assistants in the dead of winter - snow on the ground, choirboys sliding along in their surplices, musicians and singers clutching their wigs with their instruments borne along by servants in gaiters.’

  He stopped, put the first disc on the turntable and bent down to blow some fluff from the needle. ‘The Nikolaikirche was really the centre of it all because of course it’s the church of Christmas. You know, Saint Nicholas?’

  He had a tendency to lecture his audience, which Rosenharte recognized in himself. ‘You know a lot about it all,’ he said.

  ‘A little. But you see the relevance now! The two churches are to be united this evening. In fact, all the main churches are going to be open so as many people as possible can attend the peace prayers.’ He placed the needle on the record and the Oratorio opened with the chorus: Jauchzet frohlocket, auf, preiset die Tage - Christians be joyful, praise these days.

  They listened to the first two sides before le
aving the house and walking briskly to a bus stop. On the way, Rosenharte spotted a phone box and dialled Vladimir’s number in Dresden. A Russian answered but it wasn’t Vladimir. Without waiting to be put through he said, ‘This is Rudi. It’s all happening in Leipzig this evening. You understand?’ and hung up.

  They took the bus and arrived outside the hospital on the south-east of the city at 3.30 and headed for the Georgi Ring, the road that encircled the heart of Leipzig. Kurt had done his best to tone down his appearance with a black overcoat that covered the tops of his boots. He had also cut a bleached inch from his Mohican and removed some of the rings from his ears. Yet still he drew some odd looks as they went and it was plain that some of the young soldiers forming up in the side streets wanted to teach him a thing or two about order and self-discipline. Rosenharte suggested they wait until after four o’ clock before crossing the ring road and making for the church. They stood at a street corner, where they were joined by a man who had a small transistor radio pressed to his ear. He lowered the set so that they could hear the hourly news bulletin. A declaration had been made by some of the Party’s cultural figures, such as the director of the Gewandhaus orchestra, Kurt Masur and a cabaret artist named Bernd Lutz Lange, both of whom it seemed carried weight with Kurt Blast. The presenter read out the joint appeal twice with studied neutrality. ‘We are full of concern about the developments in our city, and we are looking for a solution. A free exchange of opinion about the continuation of socialism in our country is needed. This is why the undersigned promise everyone to use all their power and authority to ensure that this dialogue is held in Leipzig and with our government. We urgently call upon you to be careful and thoughtful so that this dialogue can take place.’

  It seemed to Rosenharte an awkward statement, hanging with respectful reticence midway between support and the condemnation of Kampfgruppenhundertschaft - the armed units of the working class that had called for violent suppression in one of the newspapers. Still, it was astonishing that such a thing was being read out on state-controlled radio; unthinkable a few weeks before. He wondered aloud whether the Party had approached the liberal and well-respected Masur, or if it had been his idea. Kurt Blast said it had to be Masur’s suggestion: the Party was too stupid to think of it.