by David Thomas
I didn’t know what to say. I had no easy reply to the depth of feeling in her voice. So I did the English thing and as I put my hands on the back of her hips and drew her body closer to me, I deflected her emotion by self-deprecation.
‘No, not really, there were lots of people …’
‘But it was you who believed in me. You fought for me. You were my knight in shining armour.’
I smiled wryly as I shook my head. ‘No, I’m just your husband. That’s what I’m supposed to do. And anyway, I love you. I wanted to do it.’
Mariana reached up to stroke my face with the tips of her fingers, looking deep into my eyes as she asked: ‘Do you still love me? Can you love me – the madwoman, the killer?’
‘Of course.’
She frowned: ‘How can you say that, when you know what I have done? When you know the truth about me?’
‘It’s because I know, that’s the whole point. I thought I loved you before, but really I just loved an idea of you, a fantasy. Now, though, after everything that’s happened, you’re completely real to me. I know the very worst and the very best things about you. And it just makes my feelings even deeper and stronger.’
‘I know the truth about you too,’ she said, so quietly that it was almost a whisper. ‘And I love you more than you can ever know.’
We kissed again, a longer, deeper embrace, and then Mariana pulled away and said, ‘Enough of this. Time to go!’
I grabbed her again. ‘One more kiss?’
She slapped my chest playfully: ‘No, no, no!’ and I let go of her with an exaggerated look of despair on my face.
‘I must be getting on with my gardening,’ Mariana said, all brisk and businesslike now that her need for reassurance had been satisfied. ‘And you must start driving if you are going to get there in time for dinner. Vickie will be very cross if you are late for your big reconciliation.’
‘All right, all right, I know when I’m not wanted …’
‘Send her my regards, though I know she will not want them. And Pete …’ Mariana reached out and took my hand. ‘Drive safely. Come back to me safe and sound. I never want to be without you again.’
‘I will,’ I said and pulled my hand away. But she gripped me tighter.
‘There’s something I want you to know. I wrote to Doctor Reede. When I get out I am going to see him about my operation. I know it is very, very difficult. But if it is at all possible, I want to have it reversed.’
‘That’s … that’s wonderful,’ I stuttered, trying to control the surge of emotion her words had released in me: a joyous, exultant feeling of hope, combined with a dread that seemed like an echo of the pain that the discovery of Reede’s original letter had brought me.
‘Can I ask … I need to know … why did you do it? I mean, without telling me, or anything?’
Mariana looked at me with anguish in her eyes. ‘I don’t know. I wish I could give you a good explanation, but I didn’t even have one at the time. I think maybe I felt that I didn’t deserve children, though I didn’t know why. And there was a fear, too … this terrible black fear … I thought …’ She was suddenly on the verge of tears, ‘I thought I would do them harm – that they would not be safe with me. But I did not understand why …’
I took her in my arms again and she buried her head against my chest. ‘You understand now, though, don’t you?’ I asked. ‘And you know that it wasn’t your fault, that you were a victim.’
She nodded, her head still down. I felt her take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she raised her head and looked me straight in the eye.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I understand. And now I want us to have children.’
51
The churchyard that had been so bare and dead on the day we buried Andy was now filled with reminders of the constant renewal of life. The trees were all in leaf, the trim lawn between the gravestones had the lovely summer smell of new-mown grass and the air was filled with birdsong. The Norman church, which had seemed so bleak on the morning of the funeral, now exuded a comforting sense of permanence. Nine hundred or more years had passed since it was first built. Generation after generation had been baptized and married within its walls then laid to rest in its graveyard, and here it still stood and would stand for countless generations still to come, a place of peace in which to take one’s final rest.
I am not a religious man and I cannot believe in a God who knows and cares about me, or a soul that lives forever. But I like the rituals of church, the comforting reassurance of a hymn I have known since my earliest boyhood and that special church scent of dust and old wooden pews. So I went inside and knelt for a minute to gather my thoughts before I walked back out to the place where Andy was buried.
I stood for a moment and looked at his stone, then I got down on my haunches and placed some flowers in a vase at its base. I didn’t know what to do next. I felt shy, uncertain, almost embarrassed. But there was no one else in the churchyard and nothing to stop me talking. Alive or dead, he was still there and he was still my brother.
‘I know it’s been a while, but I had a lot to do,’ I said. ‘I was trying to make things better … well, as much better as they could be, anyway …
‘Oh Christ, I wish you were here with me now, mate. I wish we could go down to the pub, have that pint we were meant to have, you know, that night, and just have a laugh. All the way down in the car, I was wondering what to say, but now I’m here I don’t have a clue, except … I’m so sorry, Andy. I’m just so, so sorry …’
And then my shoulders heaved, my breath caught in my throat and for the very first time I wept for my poor, dead brother …
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Not surprisingly, this book could not have been written without the unfailing kindness, generosity and assistance of Germans: three in particular. The London-based consultant psychotherapist Bernd Leygraf was invaluable in explaining the mechanisms by which buried childhood pain can explode into adult violence, and the passing on of the burden of sin or suffering from one generation to another. In Berlin, Matthias Willenbrink, director of the AXOM Group of detective agencies, was a superb guide to the city and its recent history, a fount of great stories about detective work and an insightful observer of the way in which ex-Stasi operatives have transitioned into private detectives. Further thanks go to Jochen Meismann of the Condor detective agency, in particular for his description of German bureaucracy as it applies to birth certificates.
The scenes set in Hohenschönhausen were hugely influenced by the archived testimony of the following survivors of imprisonment by the Stasi: Sigrid Paul, Mario Röllig, Edda Schönherz, Matthias Bath, Horst Jänichen, Herbert Pfaff and Wolfgang Arndt. The account of the Hohenschönhausen tour (which takes place every day, guided by ex-prisoners) was entirely fictionalized, but the descriptions of the various offices, corridors and cells, and the hellish treatment meted out in them are, I hope, a true reflection of the prison and its terrible history.
Anna Funder’s book Stasiland was an enthralling, wonderfully readable, guide to the mindset of the East German state, its agents and its victims: I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
Many thanks, too, to Agatha Rogers of the Priory Hospital, Southampton, for her explanation of the rules governing patient confidentiality, and Marina Cantacuzino of The Forgiveness Project, whose advice about the ways in which we come to terms with loss was never far from my mind. Bob Colover, a lawyer with decades of experience as a barrister, stipendiary magistrate and lecturer in law, was immensely helpful in taking me through the various legal and procedural issues involved in cases of diminished responsibility. I have knowingly taken liberties with some aspects of what Bob told me. Any legal errors, therefore, are entirely my fault, not his.
I would also like to thank my father, David Churchill Thomas, for two things. In the first place, he explained how a man such as Rainer Wahrmann would signal his availability as an asset to Western intelligence (a much fuller accoun
t of his defection was written, but did not survive my editing process). And in the second, through a diplomatic career that took our family to Russia and Cuba, contrasted with three years in Washington DC, he unknowingly instilled in me a fascination for and loathing of totalitarian communism.
As I was writing this book, I mentioned to Dad that I’d been watching The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), Florian Henckel von Donnersmark’s Oscar-winning film about East Germany. Much of it is set in a Berlin apartment bugged by the Stasi. ‘You spent the first two years of your life in a flat just like that,’ he replied.
It turned out that the Moscow apartment block in which we lived between 1959–61 during my father’s posting to the British Embassy had been bugged by the KGB. The various international diplomats who lived there were forbidden from going into the attic on the grounds, they presumed, that the agents listening to them were working there. So my earliest years, like Mariana’s, were lived in the shadow of the secret police.
Perhaps all fiction turns out to be autobiography in the end.