The growing wind flailed the pastor’s scarf, dislodged his cap. He was a small man, litfie flesh on a pale face, and poorly dressed. Josh knew about interrogation and disorientation, knew about building the stress. He had forbidden Tracy to speak and told her he was the expert.
‘You judge our morality, our shame and our fear. We are a people that learned compromise. Better to know nothing and hear nothing. Do you understand, Herr Mantle, the psychology of fear? We were born into fear, we were children in fear, and, as adults, we are old in fear—’
Josh snapped the interruption. ‘Where are the witnesses?’
‘The fear is like the clothes against your skin. The fear does not disappear because we now have fast food and big cars and Coca-Cola in tins. With the fear is the shame and the act of compromise.’
‘Your way, the guilty go unpunished.’
‘You make a big statement, but it is the statement of a bully. I tell you the first day that I learned to compromise. It was the day that my bishop told me that I was not of sufficient intellectual value to be worth the government in the West paying thirty thousand Deutschmarks to buy my freedom. The freedom of some was bought but they were of greater value than me. That is the day you learn to compromise. Do you accuse me of cowardice?’
Mantle thought he was losing. His voice rose. ‘You know the names.’
‘I know the names of each of the men who witnessed...’
‘And they have never returned.’
‘They have never come back to Rerik. I tell you when, again, I compromised. I wanted to come here to live the last years of my life. I informed. I supplied gossip on my church, my church leaders, on my church congregation. I was promised in return that I would have the permission to come to live here. The regime ended one year before my retirement and I did not need permission to come here. That is my personal punishment. I live here quietly in my shame and my fear. If it were known...’
Josh caught at the buttoned coat of the pastor. He was losing, he must savage him. ‘Tell me where they bloody went.’
‘If it were known here that I had informed, then we would be, my wife and myself, like refugees. We would be put out of our home, we would be friendless, we would be pariahs.’
The frustration welled. Josh shouted, ‘I’m giving you the chance to conquer the shame and the fear. Where are the witnesses?’
‘I tell you. . . A man came to my house. He put through my door an envelope. In the envelope was a photocopy of my Stasi file, the file of an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. If I should direct you to the witnesses . .
Josh thought he had lost. The pastor smiled, grim and sad, as if he knew he had won.
Tracy said, small voice, ‘The boy who was killed, Hans Becker, was my lover.’
‘...the file would be sent to the church...’
Tracy said, quiet voice, ‘Hans Becker was the only boy I ever loved.’
‘...and to the town administration, and to my wife.’
Tracy said, with no passion in her voice, ‘I fucked Hans Becker because I loved him.’
The pastor rocked. The voice was behind him, soft and quiet and gentle. His shoulders, thin under his coat, shook. He turned to face her, turned to the wind that ripped at his scarf, and turned his cap.
‘My dear, you try to shock me. I am hard to shock. You try to make a volcano of my mind. . . I was conscripted into the Army in nineteen forty-five. I fought in the battle for Berlin. I know what it is to be shelled and bombed. I know what it is to hear my father has been killed. My mother was raped by the Red Army. I know more of shock than the vulgarity of the words you use. I know also the shock of the realization that I was frightened, that I would compromise. Come...’
As if his mind was turned . . . Josh recognized it, Tracy had turned the pastor’s mind. The pastor looked into her face that was simple, clean, without complication.
He ignored his wife at the window.
He led them back through the garden gate and out into the road. He walked with a good stride, as if a weight were lifted from his back, and Tracy skipped to be alongside him.
‘I know what happened. I saw it. I was not sufficiently close to recognize the faces of the men who killed your lover. Perhaps in the vulgarity of your words you have given me a small courage, and for that I should thank you. I said a prayer for him. I did not go out into the night and kneel beside him and make my prayer, I was too frightened of the consequences. I said my prayer in the secrecy of my home. There were four men and myself. We shared the fear, we did not have the courage to help him.’
They had walked along the shore path. Dark cloud hovered now above the trees on the peninsula across the water. The waves hammered onto the pebble and sand beach, flowed to the rotted seaweed and fell back. The pastor led Tracy past the pier, then turned inland onto a track through the bare poplar trees in which the wind sang. He stopped outside a brick-built house and the front door was flush to the road. Josh trailed behind, as if he were no longer relevant to their business.
‘Jorg Brandt, he was the eldest of them. He was a schoolteacher in Kropelin, a Party member, a respected man. When the boy had broken free of them on the pier he tried to find a house where he would have protection. At Jorg Brandt’s house the door was shut on him. He was denounced by colleagues at the school for the abuse of children. His wife left him, his community shunned him. He suffered psychological collapse. He went to live with old relatives in the Lichtenshagen district of Rostock where he was not known. He cannot return home because it is believed that he abused the children.’
The pastor spoke only to Tracy, ignored Josh. He went on up the road past the small gardens that were fenced, past the homes. He stopped in front of a house of dun concrete-rendered walls. There was a raised patio at the front, a low trellis fence and a window above the front door framed in modern plastic.
‘Heinz Gerber, he would now be fifty-seven years of age. He had the job of administrator in the town hail for the collection of refuse, and he worked also for the church in Rerik. It was the second house the boy went to, and he was losing strength and Gerber came to the window and saw him, and did not open the door. He was denounced by his brother as a thief of church funds, and as there was little money in our community, money was precious. He was thrown out by his family, he was disgraced. He went to work as a gardener at the base at Peenemunde, and is still there.’
Behind them, Josh, in his mind, could see the boy who was wounded and exhausted and running at the limit of his strength. It was the last house before the square, well-built with a good garden to the front of pruned roses.
‘Artur Schwarz was a senior engineer on the railway working from Bad Doberan and responsible for the line between Rostock and Wismar. His was the last house that the boy came to. Schwarz saw him from an upper window, drew the curtain and turned his back on him. The rumour was spread that he was an informer. His wife was beaten by the Stasi at a protest at the environmental damage caused by the chemical works at Neubokow. He was blamed for the beating of his wife. He works now as a common labourer on a farm near to Starkow, which is between Ribnitz-Damgarten and Stralsund.’
They were in the square. On three sides around them were low two-storey blocks of cheap-built homes. The grass was yellowed grey and sprinkled with the old leaves that the wind curled. They stood among the washing lines and the parked cars that scarred the grass to mud. Josh stood back from them. It came stark to him. They had walked the route of Hans Becker’s flight, and he had not seen a man or a woman or a child. Did they hide? Did they crawl behind closed doors? Did they not dare to look down from their windows? He felt the weight of the fear. . . The pastor stood and looked around him as if he stretched far into his memory and then he moved a single short pace to his left, to be exact.
‘Willi Muller was then just a boy. His father had a fishing boat. His father’s life was the fishing in the Ostsee. He took the trawler out for them, when they pulled the boy from the sea. He was with them when they killed the boy, here, at
this place, where I stand. He took the trawler out again when they put the weighted body of the boy in the sea. All of the fishing people of Rerik know where the body was put into the Salzhaff, without charity and without decency, and they never run their nets there because they have the dread that they would bring up the body and the past. There was a family meeting. His father had been told that he would lose the boat if the son did not go away and swear to stay silent. He went to Warnemunde and took work as a deckhand on a herring boat. If he were to return he would have to confront his father’s bargain. He would be ashamed of his father and ashamed of himself. He has never returned, and never will.’
The pastor took Tracy’s hand and ducked his head, chin against his chest. His eyes were closed. The quiet was all around them.
Tracy let his hand fall free. ‘Thank you.’
‘Let me tell you, if a man is sentenced to death then he has an hour, a day, a week, to gather his integrity. If a man is sentenced to prison then he has a month, a year, to find a true dignity. Where is the integrity and true dignity of a man denounced as a paedophile, accused as a thief, rumoured as an informer against his wife, suffering shame for his father and himself? They were more intelligent than the Gestapo — they did not leave a trail of martyrs behind them. They destroyed but they did not permit their victims to hold the small light of dignity and integrity.’
Tracy stood her full height. She put her hand on the pastor’s shoulder and her lips brushed against his cold, lined cheek. Josh shook his limp hand, and said, ‘I wish you well.’
‘You should not take loosely the responsibility. There is little left for these men and the little left them is what you now hold in your hand. You should be careful with your responsibility. He was a brave boy. I saw his bravery.’
Mantle took Tracy’s arm. He led her away from the pastor and out of the deserted square. He understood. The wet blinked in his eyes.
They sat in the car and ate the sandwiches he had bought for both of them. He had gone as far down the coast as it was possible to drive, a kilometre beyond the last of Rerik’s houses. She gulped the bread slices, filled with sliced sausage and salad. He had parked the car so that it faced out over the Salzhaff and across to the trees masking the buildings on the peninsula.
Josh said what he felt he needed to say.
‘It’s where you were, yes, when the flares were going up, when you could see the tracers, when the trawler came in. I tell you, Tracy, when you couldn’t intervene, when you had to back out, that must have been worse than anything I can imagine. To leave him, to have to get back to Berlin for that bloody midnight curfew, that is a definition of hell.’
She choked. A piece of sausage fell to her lap. He thought it would help her to cry. She would never have cried before on a man’s shoulder.
‘To drive away from it, with the bastards after him, him running, for the bloody curfew. What was his car? A wretched little Trabant? Nothing you could have done for him. To have to drive back alone, not knowing. . . God...’
The tears streamed on her face, made rivers on her clean scrubbed cheeks. He groped in his pocket for his handkerchief.
‘I want to see him in court, Tracy, begging, and sentenced. It is more hideous than anything my imagination is capable of.’
He wiped her eyes and her cheeks. She stared straight ahead at the dark water. He gunned the engine.
‘Come on, girl. We’re going, together, to hack it.’
He swung the car off the grass, onto the road. He drove through the back lanes of the town, towards the myriad side roads that would keep them safe on the journey back to Rostock.
Clumsy, awkward, he had made his commitment. In the morning they would begin their search for the witnesses.
He came in the darkness into the town. It would have been good for him to have been in the town all through the day, but not possible. Dieter Krause did not possess the resources of manpower to have watched Rerik through the day and the early evening. The old goat would tell him if they had been to Rerik. The old goat would know who had come, who had asked, as he had always known, and would tell as always. He drove down the hill, the central road of the town, towards the sea. The road was deserted.
Not a soul alive on the road, not a car, no one walking the pavement, not a curtain undrawn or a door open. He could remember it and yet he could not place the image of the memory. He drove towards the shoreline, then swung left and drifted the car past the piers. He could see the roll of the fishing boats in his lights. He came to the small, darkened bungalow. Only the wind for him to hear, and the rustle of the sea on shingle and the flap of tossed paper.
He stepped from his car. He opened the gate and walked up the path. The street lamp threw enough light for him to see the paper that was nailed to the woodwork of the door. He snatched from the nail the pages of a file identifying an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. He ripped at the pages with fury. It was the first time that Dieter Krause had ever known the fear to be broken. He tossed the torn pages up into the wind and they scattered from the light to the darkness.
In his car, as he left the town, drove away from the sea and the pier where the trawlers were tied and the church, he placed the memory. That night, he remembered, after the chase and the shooting and the taking of the body out on to the Salzhaff, it was as though the town had emptied.
The policeman lit the cigarette for the lorry driver. There was no smell of alcohol on his breath but it would be tested. The lorry with the trailerload of steel construction girders being transported from Rostock to Wismar had been recently checked by a garage, but that would be verified. It was slewed onto the grass at the side of the road, but the radiator grille was barely marked. More policemen and men from the fire brigade were setting up lights around the wreckage of the car. The ambulance men sat in their parked vehicle, relaxed, because there was no need for their intervention. The policeman, newly posted to Rostock from Kassel in the West, went to the second vehicle involved in the accident. It was difficult to recognize it as a scarlet Wartburg car. It was mangled, concertinaed, crushed. He shone his torch into the interior. Their faces, extraordinarily, were unmarked. Their bodies, an old man’s and an old woman’s, were pressed back against two aged leather suitcases that had burst at the impact. The fire-brigade men were preparing the cutting equipment that would be necessary to recover the bodies. From reporting the registration of the scarlet Wartburg, from his radio, the policeman knew their names, that the man was a retired pastor of the Evangelical Church, that they were resident in Rerik on the coast. Tiredness, a heart attack, the glare of the oncoming lights of the lorry were equal possibilities, the shit engineering standards in the building of East German cars was most likely, but there was nothing of fact to tell the policeman why the Wartburg had come over the central white line of the road and into the path of a lorry carrying forty tonnes of steel girders.
‘You’re quiet, Josh.’
‘Just thinking.’
‘Thinking about what?’
‘What he said about responsibility, Tracy. About the responsibility we have to those four men.’
She snorted. ‘You think too much.’
‘For each of them we are a hand grenade rolled across the floor of a room, into their lives.’
‘That is crap.’
‘Tracy, listen, you have to know about the responsibility.’
‘You were better quiet, Josh.’
She never opened her eyes. Her head was against the back of the seat, as if responsibility was not important to her. He drove back into Rostock. The beginning ended that night. In the morning, the end would start. He did not know where it would lead and his mind tossed with the burden of his own responsibility.
Siehl listened.
‘We try to avoid the use of extreme measures. We aim not to use extreme measures.’ Dieter Krause rapped his knuckles on the table. ‘We employ extreme measures only if the alternative is the Moabit gaol.’ He stared each man in the face. ‘She has nothing without a state
ment from one of them. If it seems likely she will gain a statement then we must take extreme measures.’
Josef Siehi, now forty years of age, believed himself to be a victim, a casualty. He had supported the old regime and never doubted the legitimacy of the Party. He had accepted his orders, placed bugs, met the informers, interrogated men and women, followed targets in careful surveillance, had broken up the meetings of the environmentalists. He had only done what he was told to do. If he had been ordered to fire on the mobs in the last hours of the regime, then he would have done so, and he did not understand why the order had not been given. He lived now high in a block on the Hohenschonhausen complex of Berlin with the new filth around him. He had been driven from his apartment in Rostock by scum who did not realize that he had dedicated his life to their betterment through the socialist ideal. In Hohenschonhausen, he was surrounded by drugs and thieving and vandalism. He had been married twice before, divorced twice before, and the woman with whom he lived shared his aptitude for complaint. Each night, back from work, skinny and sallow, poor and bitter, he and the woman shared complaint about the new life, the new indiscipline, the new hardship. He worked as a security guard on a building site for the new Sony tower. He had been an Unterleutnant, he had twice in Rostock been personally commended by Generalleutnant Mittag, and now he was a security guard on a building site . . . He had been given, once a month, the duty of supervising the cell block at Rostock. Always correct, of course, but harsh in his administration of the prisoners. His nightmare, the role reversal, that he should be a prisoner in a cell block. On the night of 21 February 1988 he had been ordered from his desk by Hauptman Dieter Krause, he had driven one of the cars. He had dragged the body back to the trawler, he had roped the lobster pots to the body. He stood to live the nightmare, to be locked in a cell as a prisoner.
They left Krause. By dawn, Siehl would be in Peenemunde and Hoffmann would be in Lichtenshagen and Fischer would be on the road from Ribnitz-Damgarten to Stralsund and Peters would be in Warnemunde. They would all be in place at first light.
The Waiting Time Page 22