‘How long are we staying here?’
‘Long enough to see who comes to and who goes from the farm.’
‘What about the taxi?’
‘Was it a taxi?’
‘Didn’t you see that? Of course it was a taxi. It had the sign on it for a taxi.’
He felt the cold. He huddled behind the trees. He stared at the farm buildings away across the open fields and tried to scrape the mud off his shoes.
He wondered if they had come to the farm too late. Nothing moved. There were dull lights in the windows of the farmhouse and in one of the barn buildings but he did not see the signs of man, woman or child.
‘We wait and we watch,’ he said. ‘We wait and watch until I am satisfied.’
He had wept the night that the mob had entered the building on August-Bebel Strasse. Ulf Fischer, the former Feidwebel who was now a taxi driver and the maker of orations at the funerals of old people, had stood on the far side of the street, on the fringe of the mob, and he had watched the clamouring, jeering crowd beat on the doors of the building and hammer at the shuttered windows. It was said, among the lowly ranks of the Stasi, that the Generalleutnant had forbidden the guards to use their weapons, that the senior officers had argued bitterly on whether they should open fire on the mob. The ‘realists’ had wanted to shoot and the ‘idealists’ had wished to capitulate. He had not, that night, seen Hauptman Krause. He had thought it the worst hour of his life.
He sat in his taxi outside the one small bar in the village of Starkow. Before he went back to the rank for taxis on Lange Strasse, he would need to hose off the farm mud from the wheels and bodywork of his Mercedes taxi. He had not felt guilt when he had pushed his boot down on the throat of the young man so that the Hauptman could have the easier shot at his head. He was with, then, the power of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. The power had protected him from guilt. Sitting in his taxi, going to the farm at Starkow, he had decided, with personal anguish, that he no longer believed in the protection. He would make one last action, and he had agonized on it in his taxi, in defence of the power. He could see, from where he was parked outside the bar, the hire car in which they had come. His last act, before he went back to Rostock and found a car wash at a garage and took his place on the taxi rank, would be to telephone the Hauptman and give him the make, colour and registration of the hire car. He had no more fear of the cells of the Moabit gaol. He held the telephone in his hand and the tears coursed down his cheeks, as they had done on August-Bebel Strasse when the mob had come in. Afterwards, he would go to the car wash and clean his taxi and take his place on the rank, and in the evening he would go home, as Leutnant Hoffmann had gone home and as Unterleutnant Siehl had gone home.
She said, ‘Do you chase the tail of the beast or do you chase its head?’
Dieter Krause sat in his chair in the living room of the new house.
She said, ‘You can forever cut the tail of the beast but you do not kill the beast until you cut the head.’
Dieter Krause sat in his chair and held the telephone. It had been ringing when Eva had come back to the house. She had been in the hallway when he had answered it. She stood in front of him, above him. The shopping bags were by her feet.
She said, ‘You have to cut the head of the beast or the beast is with us always, will take everything and break us.’
Dieter Krause looked up into her face. There was a hardness that he had not known before, a pitiless contempt that he had not seen before.
She said, ‘If you do not cut the head from the beast then it will be behind you for ever, and for ever you will look over your shoulder for the beast.’
Dieter Krause put the telephone into his inside pocket. The tail of the beast was the witnesses. The head of the beast was the man who had come from England and the young woman with the copper-gold hair who had kicked and scratched and bitten him. He tapped, a reflex movement, at his waist, and he felt the shape of the pistol lodged there by his belt. He picked up the car keys from the table beside the door.
She said, ‘You have to be there tonight, when she plays. . . First you must cut the head.’
The sleet storm swirled around the farm. He had seen no movement, but there were short times when the storm was so intense that the blizzard took from him the view of the farm buildings. He had heard, faint, a man’s shouting but he had not seen the man. He had heard the noise, distant, of a tractor engine starting up but he had not seen the tractor.
The sun came out abruptly, great pillars of light that fell on the fields and onto the buildings, as if a curtain was drawn back. The cold was gone, and the driving sweep of the sleet, but still Josh held his arms across his chest for warmth. Away to the right, from the forest block, a young deer with stubbed antlers came cautiously from the cover and tried to find food in the yellow weed grass. The light played on its back.
He took Tracy’s arm, squeezed it hard. He started to walk across the field towards the farm buildings, lit by the sun.
The mud clogged on their shoes and smeared their trousers. They walked, slow going, towards the buildings.
He could smell the farm, old hay and new manure, and hear the faint sound of a radio playing in the farmhouse and the bellowing of cattle as if they demanded attention. The farmhouse was at the side of a courtyard of buildings. It was a building, centuries old, that decayed. He thought the great armies passing this way would have seen that same farmhouse of brick and timber beams — the guards of Napoleon and the grenadiers of von Hindenberg and the panzer men of Mannstein and the artillery men of Zhukov. The radio played light music behind the heavy door. Water dripped on the step from broken guttering above. He rapped the knocker. He expected to hear a footstep, a grumbling complaint from a man or a woman that they were coming, but heard only the radio. They walked together, close to each other, around to the back of the farmhouse, past abandoned kids’ toys and a tricycle, past a small garden where winter cabbages grew in neat lines. The door at the back of the farmhouse was wide open.
He knocked with his fist on the opened door. There was food on the wide wood table and two mugs of steaming coffee. The pages of a newspaper were scattered on the table, as if discarded in haste. A cat slept in a chair and ignored his knocking. He called out, and the cat opened its eyes, scowled and closed them again. He called again, and only the bleat of the radio’s advertisements answered him.
In the courtyard of farm buildings, the outer door of the cattle shed was open. The animals shouted at them for their attention.
There was a light trailer of manure with a fork set in it, as if work had been interrupted. The sunlight came down into the courtyard and caught the old gold of the hay bales that had been moved from the open barn and left. A horse was wandering free in the courtyard with a halter on its head and a trailing rein.
She took his arm and pointed.
Josh followed the line she made with her arm.
A mud track led from the courtyard out over the yellow weed grass of the fields. He saw why she pointed.
They ran, slipping and slithering, along the track, between the deep ruts that the tractors had made.
The wind blew against them and the low sun was in their eyes.
The small, slow-moving procession edged towards them. A tractor pulled a trailer at the head coming steadily. He saw two men walking beside it, heads down. He saw four women, in pairs, walking alongside the trailer and none had coats against the wind and the cold. There was a tractor at the end of the procession and it dragged a muck-spreader through the ruts of the track.
He stepped into the mud of the field so that he should not impede the path of the procession. He slipped his hand into the bend of Tracy’s arm; she jerked it away from him.
The tractor at the head of the procession came past them. Mud clods were scattered from the big tyres and thrown against their bodies. He saw the lined, weathered faces of the man who drove the tractor and the men who walked beside the cab, who had left their cattle in the courtyard barns a
nd left the horse free. He saw the women who had come from the warmth of the kitchen.
He looked for the body on the trailer.
He looked for Artur Schwarz.
He saw on the trailer a small load of winter turnips.
He caught the sleeve of the coat of one of the men, and asked where was Artur Schwarz, where could he be found. He was told . . . Josh closed his eyes, so old and so bloody tired. He heard the grating voice of one of the women talking to Tracy, but could not distinguish the words against the roar of the tractor engines.
He let the procession move away from him, watched them go all the way to the old courtyard.
He stumbled across the open emptiness of the field and she was behind him. Her shadow danced ahead.
Tracy shouted, ‘Their shit-spreader’s broke. That’s what they all came out for. Dropped everything because the shit-spreader’s buggered. A bust shit-spreader is their definition of disaster. Did they tell you where we’d find Artur Schwarz?’
Albert Perkins so rarely lost his temper.
‘Is that what the bloody woman called us, me and them? Are you telling me, Mr Fleming, that the bloody woman said I, they, were a minor sideshow?’
He sat on the unmade bed. The wires for the equipment that made the call secure were tangled in his arms.
‘And Krause is an irrelevance? And our operation is demeaning? How, in God’s name, did you let her get away with that fucking talk? Don’t you understand, Mr Fleming, what is being played out here? Four eye-witnesses were evicted from Rerik in nineteen eighty-eight. I don’t know their names. What I do know, in the last several days two men, formerly from Rerik, have died. That’s what is being played out here, bloody cruel warfare — and that is a sideshow, a minor sideshow? I am listening to hourly news bulletins for more deaths, damn it. There are two left, I don’t know who they are or where they are. What should I do, Mr Fleming? Should I place an advertisement in the local newspaper calling on these unnamed, unlocated individuals to dig a bloody hole in the ground and sit in it, because it’s not worth them getting themselves killed for a minor sideshow? How’s that, Mr Fleming?’
He heard the chambermaid’s trolley in the corridor and the knock at the door. He held his hand over the telephone and shouted at her that she should come back later. His bitter temper brought the sweat to his forehead.
‘No, I am not coming home, Mr Fleming. In case you had forgotten, Mr Fleming, the matter of agreed policy is as important now as it was before Mrs bloody Olive bloody Harris inserted her unwanted nose into my mission. And I hope, Mr Fleming, that you will make my views known to the ADD with clarity, and tell him there is blood spilt here and that there will be more spilt before it’s over. Good day, Mr Fleming.’
Albert Perkins so rarely lost his temper. He had never before spoken with such vehemence to a man of seniority. If Corporal Barnes and Mantle did not succeed, he would be crucified for what he had said to his senior, and out on his arse from the front doors of Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He sat alone on his bed and the radio played jazz music. He sat quietly.
The wooden cross was at the back of the churchyard, where the grass was longest and the weeds thickest.
The legend had been written in black paint, flaked, across the arm of the cross: Artur Schwarz 1937—1995. It was the only grave in the cemetery over which there was no headstone. Josh thought the man had lived his last years alone and died alone and now rested alone. He stood by the cross.
‘Have you seen enough?’ she called.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s like he cheated us.’
‘Yes.’
The car was where he had been told it would be.
He had driven at the speed of a lunatic, taking the fast road out of Rostock, through Ribnitz-Damgarten, and the needle had showed that his speed had reached 180 kilometres per hour. He had gone on the grass to pass a lorry and had swerved savagely to avoid an oncoming van. He had gone on the paving to pass a pick-up puffing a trailerload of pigs.
They were walking to the car. He saw her. She was with an older man. He saw the mud that was smeared and spattered over her legs and across the front of her coat. He had no plan. The Makharov pistol was out of his belt under his thighs on the seat. Dieter Krause had reached the rank of Hauptman, and if the regime had survived, in another year, he would have expected promotion to the rank of major, it would have been expected of him that he could act without a plan.
He drove past them, braking.
The man led. He was a big man, a man older than himself, with a short, old-fashioned, military haircut, and the hair was dark but peppered with grey. The man’s head was down, as if despairing, and his clothes, too, were mud-smeared and spattered. He drove on up the main street of Swarkow, then turned in front of the village’s small school. He had a clear view of them. She seemed to him more substantial than he remembered her, but that would be because she wore the heavy coat.
She could destroy, with the man beside her, everything he had built. She could put him into the cells of the Moabit gaol. She could humiliate him. She could turn his Christina from him. She was, with the man, the head of the beast. He watched. There was only one way out of the village of Swarkow, and he could recall the detail of the road.
They were cleaning their shoes against the wheels of the car and the man tried to scrape the mud from his trousers. He reached into his pocket. Dieter Krause saw him toss the car keys to the young woman.
She sang as she drove. Josh sat and sulked.
The road was straight, fast, and she drove easily. He glanced at the vanity mirror in the sun visor and saw the big BMW closing on them.
Beside the road, straight ahead, against the fields of yellow weed grass, was the narrow ribbon of the river. Between the river and the road was the line of poplar trees. He touched her arm, gestured with his hand that she should slow, pointed to her mirror. She should slow to let the big BMW pass them. They had reached the line of the poplar trees. Beyond the trees were the steep, snow-flecked banks of the river of dark, listless, flowing water. She was slowing. He checked the mirror again. It was filled with the black shape of the BMW’s bonnet.
Suddenly, the scream of the impact behind them. He was jolted forward. The belt held him, but his head whipped towards the dash. He had his arms out in front of him, trying to cushion the blow. The small hire car was tossed ahead. Josh gasped. In the mirror, the BMW had slowed, slid back, now came again. There was nothing he could tell her. First rule of military command: a subordinate is given authority, a subordinate cannot be second- guessed, a subordinate must be left to sort the shit. She clung to the wheel. He saw the whiteness of her fists as she hung on to it and fought to keep them on the road.
He could not help her.
The BMW, again, filled the mirror. He braced. She was braking. The trunks of the high poplar trees were beside his window, then the darkness of the water, then the steepness of the banks . . . Christ, this was where it ended. She stamped on the accelerator a moment before the second collision, deflected the blow. He thought she’d lost control. The road was wetgreased. The trunks of the poplars were white where the sleet was frozen to them. He thought it was where it ended, going off a treacherous road and into the trunk of a poplar and into the dark water of a river.
She held the road.
The BMW came again for them.
It was alongside them, edging past. There was the tear of the metal of the BMW against the door of their car. He saw the face of Dieter Krause. There was no anger on it, no hatred, but the calmness of a man who follows an instruction. The weight of the BMW, shrieking against them, forced them towards the side of the road, towards the trunks of the poplars and the steepness of the river’s banks. She fought to hold the wheel steady. It was unequal. The weight and power of the BMW were driving them towards the line of trees, towards the river. He thought it was all for goddamn nothing, another road-accident statistic .
She seemed to stand in her seat as she drove down the brake pedal.
The BMW was past them.
‘Get your coat off.’
She drove behind him. Krause braked. She braked.
‘Get your bloody coat off.’
He struggled out of it. It was habit, but he stripped the contents from the pockets. She snatched it from him and wound down, furiously, her window.
He did not understand her. She went after the BMW.
She squeezed level with the big car, half on the road and half on the verge. The door beside Josh scraped a tree. The cars were locked together. She threw his coat from the window. The coat, ripped open by the wind, spread right across the windscreen of the BMW. He heard the squeal of the brakes. He could not see the face of Dieter Krause. He could imagine the panic of the darkness and the obliterated vision.
They were past. They were clear.
He turned.
He saw the BMW, going slowly, lurching under the power of the brakes, slide between the trunks of the poplar trees and topple without dignity down the steep bank of the river.
She drove on.
He was incoherent. ‘That was fantastic . . . fantastic and incredible . . . Christ, I thought . . . I didn’t believe . . . Dead, I thought we were dead. . . for nothing, all for nothing, I thought...’
‘We are going to Warnemunde, Josh. Not tomorrow, now.’
‘Ribnitz-Damgarten, that’s first. Go to Ribnitz-Damgarten, then go to Warnemunde. You were incredible.’
‘Will you tell your wife?’
He had thought she slept when he held her hand and kissed it, when he had talked of Libby. She laughed and there was the bright light on her face.
She came on the early flight from London. The documentation for her visa, to be inspected by the passport officials at Sheremetyevo-ll, described her as a publicity officer for the British Council. Mrs Olive Harris was known in Moscow, where it mattered, in the Lubyanka building, as a senior officer of the Secret Intelligence Service. The British Council cover was merely to see her without hindrance through tedious scrutiny at the passport desk. She was quite fond of the city. In the early 1970s, she had spent four years of her career in Moscow. She gazed from the window of the second secretary (consular)’s car at the first familiar landmark, the tank traps of rusted steel marking the furthest point of the panzer advance on the city, and they eased onto the St Petersburg Highway and went at speed towards the Circular Road. There were good memories for her.
The Waiting Time Page 29