They came to a bungalow, small and humble, facing the water and the peninsula and the wall of trees. It was newly painted. An old woman, grey-haired and small, was sweeping the path. Josh smiled at her and gave the name that he had been told. She was so helpful, so keen to please. Her husband, the retired pastor, was at the dentist in Bad Doberan and would return in two hours. He thanked her. The sun shone on the small bungalow. He felt foul: he blasted his way, her way, into a place of peace, where the past was forgotten.
He said briskly, ‘We’ve two hours to lose.’
Tracy gazed into his face. ‘You don’t believe it, do you? It’s like you don’t believe it happened.’
Josh said, ‘People go to old battlefields — Waterloo or the Somme, Sedgemoor or Culloden. They see farms and fields and woods. Yes, it’s hard to believe what happened.’
There was the hardness on her face, as if she thought him weak.
‘You were here?’
‘I was here, if you can believe it.’
‘Where? In the car? In a lay-by? Down the road by the shore where he launched from?’
She faced out and gazed on the inner sea, the Salzhaff. Short piers jutted into the water against which small fishing boats were tied. The light sparkled on the water and swans cruised.
‘No, I was in those bloody trees, if you can believe it.’ She jabbed her finger towards the line of poplars beside the road, and the bramble undergrowth between them. ‘I saw him taken from the water and brought back here, and I saw him fight from them and run. I didn’t see him again . . . I didn’t see him after he ran. I had to go to the car, drive to Berlin, drop the car, go through the checkpoint before midnight. I had to get out of this shit hole, if you can believe it.’
She took his arm and propelled him away from the piers, and the peace that denied the history. The spring sun was warm on Josh’s face. They went to lose two hours, went towards the gate of the base and the fence of rusted wire that straddled the narrow point of the peninsula.
‘It was sex. It was physical sex. I did not have to be an expert to learn what it was. Not love, I do not think it was anything more than a lust for the physical business of sex. It was not necessary for her to tell me, she wore it like the clothes on her. The desire for sex with the Russian was in her eyes and her hands.’
The sunlight came through the window, filtered by the dirt on the glass, and fell on the floor, which was filthy, and on the table, which had not been cleared from his morning meal, and struggled through the smoke of his cigarettes. Albert Perkins paced the small room without comment. He let the American sit and talk.
‘When she first came it was to regular classes in the evenings. Her husband handled me — that’s how she would have known about me. No, she did not know that I informed to her husband. He would have sent her, and it started out as the regular classes, English literature. But she was a busy woman, and it soon had gotten that she couldn’t make all the classes, she had meetings half the night, half the evenings of the week, something with the FDGB down in the shipyard. She asked if she could come here, fit in one-to-one classes when she didn’t have meetings. She paid. She was working, her husband was a top cat, she wasn’t short of money. She paid me and she came here. About a month after she’d started coming here, because of the way her talk was, liberated, I went to another officer who had handled me when Krause was away, sort of signed up for him with a different code- name and a different life, and talked about her to him. It wasn’t a big deal, at least I didn’t think so.’
Perkins wore his coat. The bar on the fire was not lit. The grimed dirt in the apartment seemed worse when the sunlight splayed on it than it had the evening before. Probably it was good that the wretched little man smoked because the cigarettes were strong enough to wipe out more pungent smells.
‘You said what you would do for me. It was South Carolina where I was raised, near to Summerville, up the river from Charleston. It was a crappy little place. You know, where we lived half the community turned out to see me head off on the bus to Charleston and the military, and half of that half wouldn’t have known where Germany was. I hated that place for its ignorance. My father had a bronchitis problem, he won’t have lasted. I think my mother would still be there. There were two sisters I had, younger than me, and I think they’d still be there because people from that sort of place don’t go far. It would have been about the day after the Wall came down that I stopped hating that place. What could I do? I could get on a train to Berlin, and another train to Bonn, and I could walk into the embassy and tell the marine guard that I was AWOL, that I was a deserter. You said you’d speak for me. Did you mean that? You’d speak to Immigration and Defense and the FBI, would you?’
Perkins nodded gravely, with sincerity. His wife, Helen, said he was as trustworthy as a second-hand dealer in Ford cars.
‘It came out when we were talking English literature. I’d gotten her on to D. H. Lawrence. Well, she was a spiky woman. We’d gone through Women in Love, then Sons and Lovers. She was sort of giggly about it. I sent her home one evening, she’d good enough English, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Krause was away. She came back the next evening. Shit, her clothes were a mess, crumpled like she’d been roffing, creased like they’d been on the floor. She might have reckoned I was some sort of monk, or maybe I was a eunuch to her, maybe she reckoned me one of those castrated creatures she could spill it all out to. What I gathered, she and her guy had screwed all afternoon trying to do what Lawrence described. The next time she came I was at the window. She was dropped off from a Soviet military jeep and she wanted to know if Lady Chatterley was in Russian. How the hell would I know? I said it was in German, but that wasn’t any good — sort of slipped out that the guy didn’t read German. It became confidential. She’d talk to me like I was her goddamn shrink.’
Perkins paused by the window and considered the wording of the letters that would be sent to Immigration and Defense and the FBI. He thought, after they had read his letters, that Immigration and Defense and the FBI would shred them and leave the wretch where he was, to rot in a damp, cold room.
‘He was a major, commanded a small outfit down the coast, west, an unimportant little place. You said that you wanted me to make you laugh — the Major was rated by her husband as his best friend. Does that make you laugh? I told you it wasn’t love, or even romance. It was about sex and flicking. She told me the size of him and how often he managed it and how long he did it. I didn’t feel bad about the telling of it, what I said to the handler, but I didn’t feel good that they’d gotten to film it. They had a department that did covert filming . . . You’ll write those letters, I’ve your promise? I’m washed up here, I’m old and I want to go home. You gave your promise.’
He nodded again. He might not even send the letters that Immigration and Defense and the FBI would shred. He thought it would be harsher punishment for the wretch to sit inside the walls of the apartment with the dirt and the damp until the end of his days, suffering betrayal at first hand.
‘Does that make you laugh, Mr Perkins, knowing that Lady Chatterley was squashing down daisies with the gamekeeper who was Krause’s best friend? The gamekeeper was called Rykov, Pyotr Rykov.’
The guide was a small man, perky, enjoying the reciting of history.
‘It was built as a school for recruits to learn the use of the air-defence guns. The base was opened straight after Hitler had taken power. It was the principal Flakartillerieschule in all Germany.’
It was a desolate, quiet place. They had come through the outer gate with the guide, who escorted half a dozen of the first tourists of the year. Mantle had been told that it was possible to enter the base only with the guide. The trees grew wild with bramble thorns and long grass.
Tracy said, ‘It was so bloody important to get in here that they didn’t care a shit if Hansie was killed. Now it’s just for tourists to have a laugh at. He waited till it was dark — he’d brought a little inflatable in the car, the sort that kids us
e on the lakes in Berlin, with a little bloody wooden paddle. He didn’t know what defences there were, whether they had infra-red. He went off the beach back there. I saw him go into the sea, I blew him a kiss and waved until I couldn’t see him any more. There wasn’t a man about, not a dog. He was going to go three hundred yards out and then paddle for a mile, it was a right foul night. The planes came over, then there was the first shot, then there were the flares.’
‘Sixty years ago, on the twenty-sixth of September nineteen thirty-seven, Adolf Hitler came to the Flakartillerieschule and was accompanied by the Duce, Benito Mussolini. They inspected an honour guard and they watched a display of the firing of the air-defence guns.’
They walked behind the guide and his small party, and slowly separated themselves from the group. Every window in every building was smashed. All around was the wreckage of cannibalized trucks rusted from the weather off the sea. The trees grew around a watch-tower where a sentry, that night, would have peered out into the spitting wind. She pointed, for him, towards the low-set concrete bunker where the radar dishes that controlled the missiles had been, and beyond the bunker was the brightness of the Baltic sea. It was criminal, he thought, to have sent the boy, as criminal as his murder.
‘On the second of May nineteen forty-five, the base at Wustrow
was occupied by the troops of the Roten Armee. There were two
and a half thousand men here with air-defence capabffity, also a
small naval force, also aircraft, also a tank unit. .
Tracy said, ‘Can you imagine it, what it was like for him? He was blocked from the dinghy and bloody running. Flares going up, shooting, sirens going. Couldn’t go back towards the open sea, had to cross the base. Blundering through the base and troops spilling out from the barracks huts. They had dogs, I heard them. He was running blind.’
They walked on the potholed tarmac of the roads through the base. Cats followed them, hissing and snarling and running on their bellies, the cats of the Soviet troops that had been abandoned so many years before and that now ran wild. He thought of the work he had done in I Corps, checking hazy telephoto pictures and satellite images, poring over Red Army magazines, all useless work when set against the chance to put Humlnt into the heart of a base with radar, missiles and tanks. They had played God, those who had sent him.
‘In the last days of the occupation of Wustrow by the Soviet troops, the people in Rerik brought them warm clothes and food. The position of the Soviets was desperate as their government collapsed in confusion. We saw little of those troops, but they were not regarded as an occupying force. They were seen as protectors. At the end there was a great sympathy for them.’
Tracy said, ‘God, and he must have been so bloody frightened. He was alone. In front of him was just this bloody great space of water. There wasn’t another way for him but into the water. He could have seen the lights of the town. It was the only chance he had, to go into the water. They didn’t care, back in Berlin. Afterwards it was like a stray dog in Brigade had been run over, no bugger cared.’
There was a small drill area, weeded up and covered with the autumn leaves, and round the area were figures, life size, showing how to march, how to salute, how to stand at attention. Paint had peeled off, leaving them grotesque and amputated. There was a board for aircraft-recognition classes, silhouettes in all profiles of British and American attack aircraft, Harriers and F-16s, Tornadoes and F-15s, Jaguars and the A-b tank busters. It was all rotten, dead, decayed history.
‘Before they left, the Soviet troops tried to take from Wustrow everything that was of value. They stripped electric fittings from the barracks rooms, they took the stoves from the sleeping quarters, they removed the concrete slabs from the pavements, and they even tried to lift the street lights in the base from the concrete by helicopters.’
Tracy said, ‘Those buildings, over there. It’s where the senior officers were. And just there, past the big house, he’d have gone into the water. Look, damn you, look — how far he had to swim. Did anyone care then? Does anyone care now? If it had happened to someone you loved, wouldn’t you, damn you, want to see the bastard responsible smashed?’
Josh gazed out over the water. They stood near to the commanding officer’s house where a door hung loose and flapping. Between the birch trees, beyond the beach, the water in sunlight stretched across to the small homes of Rerik and he could see the church tower beyond the roofs. He shuddered. He was pleased that she had brought him to the deserted base: it was as if she shared with him. The tour was finished.
‘It is dangerous to go off the hard roads in the base. We have found unexploded mortar bombs and tank shells. There is the possibility that chemical weapons were stored here and not removed. The place is now a nature reserve and we have seen the sea eagles here and know they nest and make young.’
They walked behind the group and the guide back towards the gate.
It closed behind them, shutting them out from history.
The sun warmed them. He was thinking of the young man and the terror. His commitment was made.
She breezed into his office.
He stood. Fleming always stood when Mrs Olive Harris came visiting — most of the other desk heads did. She was junior to him, only the deputy on Soviet Desk. He did not stand out of any sense of antiquated courtesy — there were women in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the modern ones, who took offence if a man stood aside for them in a doorway, in a corridor, at the elevator. He stood because she made him, like many others, nervous.
No preliminaries: there never were with Olive Harris.
‘We’re working up a paper on Russian military morale. Interesting stuff. Reports of small-scale mutinies because of critical shortages, seen as Government’s attempts to subvert military power. Stories of malnutrition, poor discipline, morale on the floor, funding suppressed, had it before but it’s in greater detail. You know, up in the Arctic some units are said to be starving. That means there’s a right dog fight between Government and the armed forces. The Federal Intelligence Service, of course, sides with Government against the military, and that’s a choice little spat.’
There was a husband somewhere, rumoured to be a lecturer at University College — he probably stood up when Mrs Olive Harris came into the room — and there were rumours of children .
never could imagine her on her back with her legs wide. A few, from the dark recesses of memory, claimed to have seen her smile. She was small and had grey-white hair tied at the back with an elastic band. She wore, each day, a plain, laundered blouse, a straight skirt and flat black shoes. She was an institution with the Service, part of the fabric of each building it occupied.
‘We’ve a lazy bastard on the desk in Moscow, not for much longer — spends too much time hoovering crumbs from under the Americans’ table. The latest crumb . . . The minister at Defence rang an FIS general threatening that Special Forces would be sent to liberate an Army officer if the FIS didn’t free him soonest. The said officer is a close friend of Colonel Pyotr Rykov, the minister’s eminence. You’re into Rykov, aren’t you? You’ve things running along the rails with Rykov and his Stasi friend, haven’t you? That reptile Perkins is in Germany, isn’t he? You can call up the full text on your screen, reference RYKOV 497/23. Know how to work it, do you?’
Actually, he had been on a residential course, two weeks, and had attended evening classes to learn mastery of the damn thing.
‘Marry it up. See if there’s useful progeny.’
She was gone to the door. Fleming stood.
He would have been a brave man, the lecturer, when he had served Mrs Olive Harris, and it would have been in the dark and he wouldn’t have been thanked for the sweat.
When the door closed after her he sat.
‘I have nothing to tell you.’
‘You know what happened to them.’
They had waited in the road for him. He came back to the small bungalow with his old face swollen from the dentist’s drill. T
hey had let him park and lock the spotless, polished, ten-year- old scarlet red Wartburg car. Mantle had intercepted the pastor at the low front gate to his handkerchief garden and had explained, curt and brusque, from where they had travelled and why.
‘It is a liberty that you make, to come, to bully.’
‘You know the community, you know what happened to the witnesses.’
‘It is finished. There is no benefit in the resurrection of the past.’
‘The present is only cleaned of the past if there is punishment.’
As the sun had dipped so the cloud had gathered from the north and the wind had grown. They stood inside the gate. Tracy was close behind him and Josh blocked him from going up the path to his door and safety.
‘Do you think of me as a coward?’
‘It is not for me to make that judgment. What I want—’
‘You want to dredge what is in the past.’
‘There were four witnesses. They were sent out of Rerik. I want to know where they went.’
The face of the wife was at the window. She had waved to them when she had first seen them. Anxiety now lined her face. She would have seen the hostility of the young woman’s expression and the way that the older man blocked her husband from his door, and she would have seen the way her husband stabbed his finger into the man’s chest for emphasis.
‘And you require us to feel a shame for what happened that night.’
‘Where they were sent. There was murder done that night and it should be punished.’
The Waiting Time Page 21