The Linden Tree

by Hester Rowan

  ‘Are we going to Tempelhof?’ I asked, trying to sound calm.

  ‘No, that’s a civil airport. We’ll put down at the RAF airfield at Gatow.’

  ‘But that’s also in Berlin,’ I persisted.

  Nicolas smiled at me and commandeered my hand as the aircraft touched down with a bump and a squeal from tortured tyres. ‘West Berlin,’ he agreed. ‘There’s a big British Forces community there. It’s a fascinating city, you’ll love it.’

  I refused to be deflected. ‘And that’s where Elisabeth’s grandmother lives – in West Berlin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My mind was racing inexorably to a conclusion that I would very much prefer to avoid. ‘So Elisabeth has to travel to Berlin to visit her grandmother? And where is she staying now, West – or East Berlin?’

  The shake of his head was almost imperceptible, but he gave my fingers a painful, warning squeeze. I snatched my hand away and sat apprehensively while tired children stumbled out of the aircraft with their mothers to finish the journey to Army married quarters by road.

  I hardly needed to be told any more. I could work it out for myself.

  As a child, I had lived in a village on the extreme western fringe of the Thuringian forest. Thuringia proper was in East Germany. If Elisabeth came from Thuringia, she was almost certainly an East German – and that meant that the only part of Berlin she could be staying in now was East Berlin.

  And now it was all clear to me, clearer and even more frightening than I’d suspected when I first boarded the aircraft and found that Elisabeth spoke German.

  Elisabeth couldn’t visit her grandmother in the normal way because free movement between East and West Germany and East and West Berlin is forbidden by the East German government. Presumably she had been able to obtain permission for two very brief visits; she could make a longer stay in West Berlin only if someone went to East Berlin to cover her absence.

  Someone who looked like her.

  Me.

  Nicolas had promised that what he was asking me to do was not dishonest, and in moral terms he was right. Of course there was nothing dishonest about Elisabeth’s intention to go from East to West Berlin to spend twenty-four hours with her sick grandmother, nothing crooked, nothing even slightly bent.

  It was, quite simply, in East German terms, strictly illegal.

  Chapter Seven

  I didn’t even notice the take-off. I sat with my arms folded, as though by hugging myself I could keep the flutters of panic in my chest from rising to my throat. I was wretchedly conscious that Nicolas was watching me, dispassionately assessing my reactions.

  This, I knew instinctively, was the point of no return. I’d already told him that I would co-operate, but that was before I realized the danger inherent in what he wanted me to do. Now that I’d guessed what was involved, I had the right to think again and make up my mind once and for all.

  There was, after all, no way in which he could force me to change places with Elisabeth. It was entirely up to me to decide. Even my lack of money for the return fare no longer mattered – I could ask for help from the RAF authorities at the airfield where we landed. If I said No now, that would be the end of it.

  There would be no need even to argue with Nicolas. All I had to do was to let my self-control go, to let fear take over and the tears flow, and he would, I knew, release me from our bargain. Not out of kindness or consideration for me, but simply because a girl who cried would be unreliable, a danger to Elisabeth and others as well as to herself.

  I glanced at him as he sat coolly waiting for me to make up my mind and I knew immediately that his good opinion mattered to me too much to allow me to back out. If I failed him now, that would be the end of our relationship.

  What I needed was courage. I very much wanted him to take my hand again, so that I could feel the warmth and strength and reassurance of his touch, but I was glad that he didn’t because I would only clutch at him, revealing my fears. I looked down, letting my hands fall on my lap and clenching them together, welcoming the pain as my nails dug into my palms, trying to give myself the courage that I didn’t naturally possess.

  My hair had swung forward across my face. Nicolas bent his head towards me so that he could speak softly without fear of being overheard, and his breath stirred my hair. He lifted a strand of it and smoothed it gently back behind my ear as he whispered: ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Alison, truly. Do you think I’d let you do it if it were likely to be dangerous? It’s absurdly simple – you’ll realize that, just as soon as I can get a chance to tell you the details.’

  I managed a wan smile. I couldn’t trust myself to speak.

  ‘It’s still a lot to ask of you, I know that,’ he went on, ‘but look at it this way. By now, Elisabeth will have a message that everything is arranged and she’ll be relying on you to do your part. It’s nerve-racking for her, too, you know, and she’s in a much worse position than you are. After all, it’s not in the least illegal for you to visit East Berlin – they welcome tourists. She’s the one who’s at risk, not you.’

  That wasn’t entirely true, and I knew it. Once she was in West Berlin, Elisabeth would be in no danger at all. But although the East Germans might welcome tourists, I wasn’t going in as a tourist. I was going in for the purpose of helping Elisabeth to evade the East German laws, and that would make me, as long as I was on their territory, a criminal. There were a good many Westerners in East German jails to prove the point. I was sure that I had read newspaper reports of an English girl currently serving a five-year sentence for helping her East German boy-friend in an attempt to escape to the West.

  My face felt cold as the blood suddenly drained from it at the thought. ‘Elisabeth’s not –’ I whispered back ‘– she’s not trying to escape, is she?’

  The lines at the outer corners of his eyes creased with silent laughter. He slipped one hand comfortingly under my arm and gave me a reassuring squeeze. ‘Of course not, silly! She doesn’t want to, she’s happy enough where she is. Besides, if she did, that’d leave you stuck over there! You don’t imagine I’d do that to you, do you?’

  I had to admit that it seemed unlikely, but there was another point that I wanted cleared up before I committed myself.

  ‘There’s something else behind this, though, isn’t there, Nicolas?’ I whispered. ‘I mean, you’re not doing all this just to help her spend a little longer with her grandmother?’

  He hesitated a moment before replying: ‘Yes, of course there’s something else. I didn’t expect you to believe that there isn’t.’

  ‘So this is just a cover?’

  He shrugged, but his eyes held a look of warning. Obviously he was not prepared to discuss it with me. Certainly not here, and probably not ever.

  I drew a deep breath. ‘All right, I won’t pester you with questions. But I have to know this: do you promise me that what you’ve told me so far is true? That Elisabeth really is going to visit her grandmother? Because if this is just something that you’ve made up to get me here, another confidence trick like the one you played me on the cliffs, I’ll – I simply can’t go through with it!’

  Nicolas stretched out his hand, placed one finger on my chin and turned my face towards him. His own was serious, his green-flecked eyes behind the maddeningly long lashes unsmiling. Absurdly, irrelevantly, I noticed that he needed a shave.

  ‘What I’ve told you about Elisabeth is absolutely true,’ he said quietly, taking away his hand. ‘Her grandmother brought her up in Thuringia, because her mother died when Elisabeth was still a baby. Most of their relatives lived in West Berlin, and as soon as the old lady reached pensionable age she came to the West to join them. As you probably know, the East German government insists on keeping its working-age population inside its own frontiers, or the economy of the country would collapse – but there’s no objection if old people want to leave. But now the old lady is dying and Elisabeth is virtually alone because her father is in a psychiatric hospital. So you
can see how desperately anxious she is to spend as long as she can with her grandmother. Just spare her one day out of your life, Alison, and then we’ll have you safely back home, I promise.’

  We looked at each other seriously for a few moments and then he smiled, first with his eyes and then with his lips; and I knew that I was irrevocably committed.

  The approach to the airfield was extraordinarily rural. Nicolas had told me that Gatow was on the extreme western fringe of West Berlin, but I had hardly expected that our descent would be made over a wide flat landscape of forests and lakes, the largest of which lay between the airfield and the city.

  We were taken to a transit hotel provided at the base for civilian visitors. Nicolas gave me an hour to rest, shower and change, and then he collected me in a hired dark blue Volkswagen Beetle. Within a few minutes of leaving the gates of the airfield we were driving along a quiet residential road. On one side were dignified late Victorian stucco-fronted villas, set in gardens brilliant with rhododendrons and azaleas, and on the other were the spreading waters of the Havel, Berlin’s largest lake, as wide as Windermere.

  When I was a child and we lived in our quiet German village, I had often heard my father mention the plight of the city of West Berlin. It was, he said, a political island, a piece of West German territory set, by accident of war, in the middle of Communist East Germany.

  I had felt sorry for the West Berliners. I loved the open air, and because I imagined that any city must be entirely built up, it seemed to me cruelly wrong that the inhabitants of West Berlin should be kept cooped up among bricks and mortar, unable to obtain free acces to the surrounding country-side.

  Now I realized that, deplorable as their political isolation might be, the West Berliners had no need to go short of fresh air. It was late afternoon but the sun was still hot and the Havel was busy with sailing boats, their brilliant spinnakers hoisted to catch every puff of the light breeze.

  Presently we drove through woodland and came to the sandy shore of a bay. It formed an ideal lakeside family resort, with a restaurant, open-air cafés, paddling and boating pools for children. The beach was littered with sunbathers, and beyond them the rippling green waves bobbed with the disembodied heads of swimmers.

  Nicolas pulled into a car park, grinning at my surprise.

  ‘Not quite what you’d expect to find in Berlin, is it? What I’d really like to do now, of course, is to relax – but unfortunately we’re here on business. We need to talk in private, and it’s a pity to waste the sun by sitting in the car, so let’s take a boat out.’

  We skirted the bathing beach and approached a jetty. ‘Can you handle a sailing boat?’ he asked, his face lighting with pleasure at the sight of some of the dinghles rocking at their moorings.

  I shook my head regretfully. ‘My uncle was going to teach me. He kept a dinghy at Blakeney, but Aunt Madge sold it after he died.’

  ‘I know – as a matter of fact, she sold it to my father. I got the boat as a twenty-first birthday present, and I’ve had years of pleasure out of her. I never seem to get much chance to sail now, though. Would you …?’

  He sobered suddenly. ‘No, we’d better not waste time. I want to go out on the lake because it’s the most private place to talk, but it’ll be more sensible to take one of the power boats.’

  He hired one and we zoomed away from the jetty and the resort, skimming the glistening waves as we dodged the other boats on the lake. It was fun, a brief open-air holiday, and the speed and the spray and the sunshine helped me to relax. Nicolas still wore his nondescript suit, but he had taken off his jacket and tie. He had changed his shirt, I noticed, for one that looked from the cut of its collar and sleeves as thought it had been bought in Germany.

  He steered towards a small wooded island, closing the throttle as we approached, so that we drifted in quietly. There were notices proclaiming that it was a bird sanctuary and forbidding landing. Nicolas cut the engine and tied up to a convenient willow branch that leaned across the dark green water, and then stretched out his long legs as comfortably as possible in the cramped cockpit.

  We said nothing for several minutes. The sounds of the lake were all about us, the soft plash of diving birds and leaping fish, the ripple and slap of the waves on the hull of the boat, the song of the birds from their island sanctuary. The boat rocked gently and the wispy fronds of willow teased the sunlight, making dancing patterns on our faces, our hands, our bodies.

  Our closeness seemed suddenly intolerable. I was aware of him with every nerve, aware of his wind-roughened hair, the sound of his breathing, the shape of his face, the fact that he had shaved, the fact that his hand on the seat was no more than two inches away from mine.

  It seemed difficult for me to breathe at all, impossible to move a muscle without making contact with him and betraying the other fact, that I wanted to touch him. Slowly, very slowly, I raised my eyes to look at his face. Our eyes met, in momentary acknowledgement that the attraction was mutual.

  And then a background hum grew to a steady roar and rose to a screaming crescendo as a passenger jet flew low overhead, and the tension was broken. We both stirred, laughed a little self-consciously and rearranged ourselves.

  ‘I was going to describe the place as idyllic,’ he said, ‘but unfortunately we seem to be right under the Tempelhof flight-path.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful lake, though,’ I agreed, as the noise of the jet died away. ‘I was going to say, “Lucky West Berliners”, but then I remembered the Wall. How far are we from that?’

  Nicolas pointed away to the east, where I could see nothing but trees.

  ‘The Wall separating West from East Berlin is – oh – say about ten miles in that direction,’ he said. ‘It’s a big city. But we’re right on the edge of West Berlin here, and only about five hundred yards from the East German border. Look.’

  He was pointing towards the south-western end of the lake where it began to narrow sharply. The sun was coming from that direction and it was difficult to see clearly, but there appeared to be a glittering line stretching from shore to shore just above water level.

  ‘Wire,’ Nicolas said succinctly. ‘There isn’t just the dividing Wall across the centre of the city – the East Germans have put a hundred-mile wire and concrete girdle round the whole of West Berlin, to stop the people on their side from getting in. That end of the lake is in East German territory, and there’s a net of steel mesh in the water to stop either boats or swimmers from coming through. They’ve got high-speed armed patrol boats on their part of the lake too, to stop anyone from coming near enough to make a break for it.’

  I shivered and he gave my hand a brief friendly pat. ‘Oh, don’t worry. You’re going through one of the legitimate crossing points in the Wall, and you’ll be chauffeur-driven and escorted there and back by a trusted East German government official – wrongly trusted by them, as it happens, but thoroughly trusted by us. Now listen carefully and I’ll tell you the plan. We’d better speak in German, though, from now on, just to get you in practice.’

  I sat looking out across the water as he talked, so that I could concentrate on what he was telling me without being disturbed and distracted by his presence. His German was infinitely better than mine, fluent and idiomatic but elegant as well. He had, I remembered hearing from my aunt, read modern languages at university. At first, when I asked questions, I was almost ashamed to demonstrate my own earthy Thuringian, but he gave no sign of noticing its oddities and I gradually felt my childhood fluency and confidence returning.

  ‘Why is the East German government prepared to let Elisabeth across the border at all?’ I asked when he’d told me the plan in detail. ‘I didn’t think they allowed any visits to the West.’

  ‘They didn’t, until a year or two ago. Now they’ve agreed to a treaty which allows Westerners to visit the East, and also allows East Germans to make compassionate visits to close West German relatives. I doubt if it was easy for Elisabeth to get permission even so, but Kurt
Braun, the official who’s escorting her, has obviously pulled a lot of strings. I understand that she’s a good East German citizen, so they’ve no reason to mistrust her.’

  ‘But if she’s a good East German citizen, why is she prepared to deceive them by letting me take her place? Why is one day here so much more important for her than two short visits?’

  Nicolas smiled distantly. ‘There are good reasons.’

  ‘Which you’re not prepared to tell me?’

  ‘Which I have no intention of telling you. In our department, we work on what we call a “need to know” basis. What you don’t know, you can’t talk about.’

  ‘You mean – if I’m caught?’

  He put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a sharp, affectionate shake. ‘You won’t be caught, Alison. Especially not with Braun looking after you. And now that you know the plan, you must admit that your job’s not in the least difficult.’

  It wasn’t difficult, that was true. Nicolas wasn’t, as I’d feared, asking me to do anything in East Berlin – simply to be there. It sounded extraordinarily simple, almost fireproof.

  ‘Do you know this man Braun well?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve never actually met, as it happens. But we’ve worked in co-operation for several years and I feel as though I know him very well indeed. Obviously I can’t say whether you’ll like him, but I do know that you can trust him. Look, you’re getting chilly out here. Let’s go and find some coffee.’

  He started the engine, turned out into the lake without making too much noise and disturbing the birds, and then opened the throttle and headed back for the shore, slapping breezily over the waves. A passenger steamer cruised past us, the occupants waving and laughing as we bounced across their wake, and I waved back. I was certainly happier about the exchange, now that I knew exactly what was going to happen; if only Nicolas had been going to stay with me all the time, I felt that I could almost enjoy the adventure.