The small woman gazed, unseeing, past him, through him.
‘I’ve come with a young lady who wishes to meet with Jorg Brandt, your nephew.’
‘He’s not here, the idiot is not here.’
‘Will he be back soon?’
A whistle sang in the voice, through mucus. ‘Nobody wants to see the idiot. Why do you come to see him?’
Josh said softly, ‘It’s about what happened a long time ago.’
The voice reeded from the chair by the window in contempt. ‘He’s not here, the idiot goes each morning to feed rabbits.’
‘When, sir, wifi he return?’
‘Perhaps he is an hour, perhaps less than an hour. How long does it take for a grown man to feed rabbits?’
‘May we wait for your nephew?’
The old man sat at a grimed window, in a threadbare chair. His life, handicapped, would revolve around what he saw from the window. The old woman saw nothing.
The smell of the room hit Josh and he choked. ‘We’ll wait outside for him. We don’t wish to disturb you. We’ll wait by the elevator...’
‘He does not use the elevator.’ The voice of the old man cackled in derision. ‘The idiot is afraid of the elevator. The idiot is afraid of the stairs, but less afraid of the stairs than the elevator. The idiot is afraid of everything except the rabbits.’
Josh leaned against the wall in the hallway. He thought of what the pastor had said. The woman shuffled from the door back into the room. The pastor had spoken of the dignity and integrity of a man sentenced to a prison cell. Tracy squatted down on to the dirt of the floor, back against the wall.
‘Are you OK?’
She looked up at him. ‘Of course I’m OK.’
They waited.
He was parking his car when the local news bulletin began.
Albert Perkins eased into the space. The rain had started and perhaps there would be sleet or snow later. . . The owners of the shipyard voiced concern at its future profitability...
He had made his telephone calls. His wife had complained that the man who did the garden was hiking his prices. Basil in his repair yard had babbled that Fulham had won 2—0, a goal in each half . . . The mayor of Rostock feared that further redundancies were necessary among the city’s employees, already slashed to a third of what they had been...
He had eaten a good breakfast, and driven south on the autobahn from Rostock Sud to this bleak and functional collection of shoebox offices. Down the road, beyond the trees, was the new prison. The old fence remained around the shoebox offices. The administration centre of the Stasi had moved here as AugustBebel Strasse had become too cramped.. . Two muggings on the S-Bahn the previous night on the line between Rostock-Bramow and Evershagen...
Near to him a bus had parked and he saw the schoolchildren jump from the bus and run to escape the rain . . . An elderly couple, a retired pastor and his wife, travelling from Rerik on the Wismar road had collided with a lorry, both dead...
He switched off his radio.
He followed the schoolchildren towards the nearest of the shoebox offices. The files of the Staatssicherheitsdienst of Rostock were kept here in the care of the federal authority. He hurried against the spitting rain towards the doorway. He told the guards that he was a research academic from Britain and needed to find the curator of the archive. He was directed upstairs, the third floor. The children were ahead of him, babbling, as if the shoebox was a place of fun. He gave his name to a secretary on the third floor and was told that the curator would not be available for several minutes. Would he care to inspect the museum while he waited? He joined the schoolchildren as they clustered round a guide. The museum was only three rooms, a token, but the walls were closely covered with mounted and photocopied Stasi documents and the rooms were edged with glass-top cabinets displaying Stasi equipment. ‘Go on, sir,’ Perkins murmured, ‘show the little beggars what it was all about.’
The guide told the schoolchildren, ‘We have here what we believe to be the most shocking case of informing in the Stasi time at Rostock. A young woman from a Party family, so she would have been brought up without religion, but she enrolled as a theology student at a college in the city. She went to the college with the express intention of informing on the other students, on the lecturers and pastors, on their families. She was given the codename of Gisela. During the 1980s she submitted more than three thousand pages of reports to her Stasi handler. The betrayal was for money. She was paid five hundred eastMarks each month by the Stasi, nearly as much as a skilled worker in the Neptun yard, and after her graduation she was paid by the Church. She was dedicated, motivated solely by greed, and because of her avarice there were many who were sent to gaol. But after 1990, after her actions were revealed, it was decided by the Federal government that such people were not criminals and we were not authorized to release even her name. She still lives in Rostock...’
The guide moved on. The class teacher, an earnest young woman with her hair tied loosely in a ponytail, shepherded the schoolchildren to the next room. Some wrote copious notes, some merely jotted headlines, and one gazed out of the window in blatant boredom. She was a pretty girl, tall and athletic, haughty-faced. Perkins was close to her and saw that the paper on her notepad was blank.
The Stasi office in Rostock was the biggest Bezirksverwaltung in the old DDR. Because of the long state border of the Baltic coast there were many who attempted to escape into the international sea lanes. It was extremely difficult for them to gain access to proper boats, most took to the water at night on rafts they had made or on children’s inflatable sunbeds. In their search for freedom they paid a heavy price. We know of at least seventy- seven persons who were drowned in the attempt to flee the oppression of the DDR. Their bodies were washed up on these shores, on those of the Federal Republic, on Danish beaches. We believe there were many more whose bodies were never found. There were more persons drowned, many of them young, a few of them as young as yourselves, than were shot on the Wall in Berlin or the inner-German border fences. Your generation should remember their courage — they were a witness to the bankruptcy of the state and its Stasi servants...’
‘Doktor Perkins...?’
‘That’s me.’
‘I am the curator, the director. I understand you are from England and interested in research. .
He was leaning against the wall. Tracy, on the floor, sat close to his feet. He heard the reedy voice of the uncle through the open door, ‘He is coming, the idiot is coming back from feeding his rabbits.’
Josh started away from the wall. In his mind he had rehearsed the questions. He heard the groan of the window being opened. The wind came through and caught a newspaper on the table, battering it out through the opened door until it wrapped against Josh’s leg. He heard the shout.
‘Brandt, there are people here to see you. Hurry, idiot.’
He heard the cackled laughter from through the open door. Josh thought that only the old knew how to be truly cruel.
Tracy looked up at him. ‘What do we do?’
Klaus Hoffmann heard the shout.
He pressed the button to open the misted window on the front passenger door. He leaned forward and saw the tight, smirking face at the high window. He looked in the mirror. A man came towards his car, hesitant, hugging against the walls of the block as if they were safety, reliant on the support of a stick. It was what he had come for. He saw the man’s anguish as he struggled to cross the empty road. They would have come in at the back. It was what Klaus Hoffmann had waited for. He felt the bile rising in his throat.
‘What do we do? Well, we don’t take him inside there, we don’t talk to him in front of that vicious bastard. Go and meet him, take him somewhere. Have you a better idea?’
He heard the clatter, far below, of elevator doors opening.
She shrugged. ‘That’s OK.’
He heard the rumble of the doors closing. The sound echoed up to him. Josh led down the flights of stairs, taking them tw
o at a time. The strategy was to go gently, go slowly with the poor devil because he was sick. They were on the third flight from the ground when the elevator climbed past them. He thought Brandt would have managed three flights by now. He ran down the last flights and burst into the ground-floor hallway. The elevator moaned high above him. The fear caught at him. He looked out through the doors, into the road and saw the back of the man as he reached his car. The car’s windows were misted and the engine spurted exhaust fumes. The man turned and leaned his elbows on the roof of the car. God Almighty. Josh recognized the man he had pushed down on to the rocks.
He looked at the elevator doors and above, the numbers of the floors. The light came on for the seventh floor, then the eighth. He didn’t tell her, didn’t try to. The sense, disorganized in his mind, was of catastrophe. A woman with shopping bags was pressing, in irritation, at the call button of the elevator.
He bullocked past Tracy and launched himself at the stairs. He charged up the first flight. She was coming after him. He heaved for breath. At the seventh-floor landing, running past the elevator doors, he saw the light slip from the tenth floor to the eleventh. His legs were leaden. She was coming after him, easily. The light had gone from the eleventh, the last light was for the roof. He fell. His feet slipped back and hit the edge of a step, caught the bone of his shin. The pain shimmered through Josh’s body, and he struggled up the last flight of stairs. The elevator door was open, the elevator empty. The door for the low shed structure housing the elevator shaft and the stairwell hung free and rapped in the wind.
Josh stepped, panting, on to the roof of the block, and saw Jorg Brandt out on the roof, away from the shed structure. He stood as if marooned on the puddled asphalt.
He saw the terror on his face.
His coat billowed in the wind and the force of the wind seemed to drag him further from Josh. Brandt edged backwards as if the control over his legs was gone, lost.
There was no rail at the edge of the roof and no wall. Josh saw, behind the man, the town of Warnemunde laid out as a model would have been, the shipyards, the beach, the sea stretched limitless to the cloud horizon. The man dropped his stick, as if the hand which held it was lifeless.
Josh pushed away from the door. He thought Tracy was behind him and moved forward.
‘You have nothing to fear from me, Herr Brandt. I’ve come to help you...’
The man who had been a schoolteacher edged a pace back.
‘Please, Herr Brandt, just come to me. If you cannot come to me just sit down, let me reach you. Please. . . They cannot get to you, Herr Brandt. When you are with me then they cannot harm you, I promise.’
The man who had been denounced as a paedophile wavered and lurched back.
Josh shouted into the wind, ‘I have come, Herr Brandt, to free you from them. They have no power over you. Their ability to hurt is gone, believe me.’
The man who had been rejected by his family, evicted, destroyed, was at the edge of the asphalt roof.
‘They are finished, Herr Brandt. They are gone, they are history.’
Josh’s voice died. He saw the slow smile settle on the man’s face, as if from turmoil a last peace had been found. Josh crouched and had no more words. The smile was calm. Josh wanted to close his eyes and could not.
The man, Jorg Brandt, turned. It was so quick, two paces, as he stepped off the roof of the block.
Josh stared at the space where Brandt had been. There was no scream. He shook, and wished he could have wept. Tracy walked past him to where the stick lay and kicked it hard and it rolled and teetered close to the edge of the roof.
She faced him. ‘Are you going to stay here all day or are you going to shift?’
He felt so small and so weak and so much a failure. He wanted her comfort.
‘I couldn’t reach him...’
Tracy said, brutal, ‘You were never going to reach him. He would never have let you. The bastard was too yellow ever to have let you reach him.’
She was gone. When they reached the ground floor she did not hesitate. She did not go to see the body, or to join the small knot of a crowd that gathered. He watched the car with the misted windows pull away. They went out into the back, into the inner garden of the square.
She said, without looking at him, ‘You don’t have to blame yourself. It’s him that’s to blame. He was a coward.’
His fist clenched. He could have hit her. They reached the car and he threw her the car keys. They were already on the road when the ambulance passed them, siren wailing.
He had the section and he had the name.
Even by the standards of Albert Perkins, a quality practitioner, heavy flannel bullshit had been needed to win the interest of the curator of the archive — an international affairs research unit, funded by a Cambridge college, a centre of excellence, an acknowledgement that the Rostock archive at DummerstorfWaldeck was the most helpful in all the former DDR. He had the section that dealt with surveillance filming, and now the name of the former Oberstleutnant who had headed the section in the late 1980s. He left a note of thanks, on the desk they had offered him, for the curator. He slipped away down the corridor. The tour of the schoolchildren continued. He saw the earnest teacher and the youngsters who took notes, and the one girl who did not care to hide her disinterest.
‘Those who collaborated with the Stasi have built a great lie. These weak and manipulated people tell the lie now that it was not possible to refuse the Stasi. They try to explain their betrayal of friends and family by spreading the lie. There were enough who refused to kill the lie. It should never be sufficient again in Germany for a man or woman to claim that he or she merely obeyed orders...’
She came to the door. She had already laid out her daughter’s kit on the bed, laundered and ironed.
Christina was lying on the bed in her tennis costume. She had the phones of her stereo in her ears.
‘You’re resting. .
‘Trying to.’
‘What sort of day did you have?’
‘Boring.’
‘What was boring?’
‘It was compulsory, because of the new teacher. We had to go to Dummerstorf-Waldeck, to a boring museum.’
‘What museum?’
‘The Stasi museum. The new teacher is from Hamburg. She says we have to know about the past. The past is boring. I missed tennis practice. The past is gone, why do we have to know the past?’
‘What were you told about the Stasi?’
‘We were told what they’d done. It was boring, it has no relevance to today. I’m not to blame for what happened before. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t have any guilt. The new teacher asked us whether any of our parents had been victims of the Stasi.’
‘What did you tell her, Christina?’
‘That I didn’t know. That I’d never heard you or Poppa talk of the Stasi. The man who took us round the museum, he said the Stasi suffocated under the paper they made. They spent all their time writing reports, so they had no time to read their reports, all they did was write them. That was why they did not know the revolution was coming until it was too late. They sounded to me to be stupid and boring. Momma. . . I need to rest.’
His car took him from the Kremlin gate.
The minister had told the cabinet meeting that the armed forces were short of funds to the extent of one hundred trillion roubles — Pyotr Rykov had given him the figure, and made the exchange calculation for his minister — twenty billion American dollars. The minister had told the politicians that a minimum of 100,000 troops lived in sub-human conditions of poverty — Pyotr Rykov had provided him with the statistic and the fact that soldiers sold their equipment into the black market so that they should not starve.
He always sat in the front passenger seat, beside the driver.
He would trust his driver with his life, with his secrets, with his future. He had clung to his driver because the grizzled elder man, long past the date of retirement, had been a true friend from
the second tour in Afghanistan and through the German posting, and during the years at Siberia Military District. He had brought him to Moscow. Pyotr Rykov had always shared his inner thoughts, confidences, with his stoic quiet driver. ‘It’s the funding, or it is mutinies. .
A frown slowly gouged at the forehead of his driver.
‘Either the funds are provided or the Army disintegrates . .
The driver squinted from the wet, icy road ahead up to his mirror.
‘We cannot, will not, tolerate the destruction of the Army.’
It was the fourth time the driver had checked the mirror, and in response he had slowed for a kilometre, then speeded for a kilometre, and repeated the process.
‘Without the strength of the Army, if the Army is neutered, then the Motherland collapses.’
The driver gave no warning but swung the wheel from the main highway and cut into a side street that was half filled with the stalls of a vegetable market, scattering men and women.
‘Either they make the funding available or the Army, to save itself, must take decisive action. .
The driver pulled out of the side street and accelerated into a two-lane road. His eyes flickered again towards his mirror and his frown deepened.
‘There is money for the politicians and for their elections, there is money for bribery and corruption, there is money for schemes to win votes to keep the pigs at the trough...’
The car crawled. Pyotr Rykov glanced at his driver, and finally noticed the anxiety. He swung round in his seat, stretching the belt taut, and saw the car that followed them. Two men in the front of the car, a man in the back.
‘How long?’
The driver said, grimly, ‘The whole of the journey.’
‘All of the way?’
‘Fast when we go fast, slow when we are slow.’
‘Not before today?’
‘I would have told you, Colonel.’
‘Who are they, the shit fuckers?’
He regarded his driver as a mine of information. His driver sat each day at a centre of learning, as he many times had joked, in the car parks of the ministry or the Kremlin, the foreign embassies or the city’s major military barracks, talking with the other drivers. They were the men who knew the pulse and movement of Moscow. They were the men who recognized first the shifting motions of power.
The Waiting Time Page 24