I nodded. After a pause, the agent remarked, “As for Herr Ninoshvili, I think you must certainly know him much better than I do. After all, he’s a guest in your house. You see him every day.”
“Of course.”
“Is there anything in his conduct, then, that gives you cause for concern?”
Here we were. Now it came to the crunch. I thought feverishly. The evidence I had to bring against Ninoshvili was far from constituting proof. The photo of the blonde woman was hidden in his case, and I could hardly invite Herr Hochgeschurz to my house for him to open the locks with his pocket knife and convince himself that she was identical to the murder victim. And perhaps Ninoshvili had taken the photograph with him on today’s outing, or even destroyed it. After all, the crime was committed now.
What I had to say would have been no more than simple denunciation, and I shrank from that after all. I shook my head. “No. No. Nothing worth mentioning.” I stood up, shook the agent’s hand and thanked him.
“You’re welcome. My regards to your wife.” He smiled. “That is, of course, only if you’re telling her about our conversation. Otherwise of course it remains between us.”
Chapter 32
Julia and Ninoshvili didn’t get back from Frankfurt until nine thirty yesterday evening. When Ralf asked, at around seven, what there was to eat, I improvised a meal for him and myself: rösti from the freezer, fried eggs and salad. He seemed pleasantly surprised, even said, “Great!” and ate with a hearty appetite. However, he didn’t fulfil my hope that this rapprochement might lead to a conversation between us.
He remained monosyllabic during the meal, and seemed to be brooding over something. He did clear the dishes away, unasked, but then disappeared, announcing that he was going round to see Achim, one of his friends.
My wife and our guest had already eaten on the way back. The journey seems to have been worthwhile for Ninoshvili; he said that the two publishers, who had given him and his manuscripts a very friendly reception, were going to come to a decision within the week. To celebrate this success, and because the weather was so tempting—perhaps the last fine autumn day—Julia took her time over the journey back, and did not drive our guest along the motorway but took him, at their leisure, through the Rhine valley. Ninoshvili was enthusiastic about its beauty; he had read a lot about it, he said, but had not imagined it quite so beautiful, “so uplifting”.
I felt no inclination at all to hear how they had seen the Niederwald Memorial, and had not failed to visit the picturesque Drosselgasse in Rüdesheim. All I needed was for the Georgian to praise “the delicious wine” and recite that patriotic anthem of the nineteenth century ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, “Dear country, hear these words of mine; Firmly stands the watch on the Rhine”, and whatever other feeble-minded stuff he may have picked up about the great German river. I interrupted him by quoting Karl Simrock’s contrary sentiments of 1839: “Go not to the Rhine, go not to the Rhine, dear son of mine, go not to the Rhine!”
He looked at me in surprise. “What’s that?” I said it was another German poem, and recited the last verse:
Bewitched by sound, bemused by show,
Hymning the Rhine, the river Rhine,
On to your doom I see you go,
On to your death, dear son of mine.
He laughed. I don’t know if he didn’t get the message or didn’t want to, but anyway he was not to be deterred from telling me how they had passed the Loreley. “If you know Heine, and I do know him a little, you might think you saw the maiden sitting up there combing her golden hair and singing her song ‘with its powerful, wondrous melody’. You know those lines, my friend, and that wonderful folk legend.” I said it wasn’t in fact a folk legend, but a work of literature, and Clemens Brentano very likely made up the Loreley.
Even that couldn’t discourage him. He went on with his description of the reverent awe he had felt when they crossed the River Lahn. “Do you know that Goethe went along that river in a skiff from Wetzlar to far down the Rhine? But yes, of course you know that, my friend, you know it much better than I do!”
I said yes, I had heard of it, only as I was sure he also knew that was not so much a pleasure trip as a fight; things had become rather too hot in Wetzlar for the young poet, who was paying marked attention to his friend’s wife the lovely Lotte. Still, I added, he had shown more sense than Werther, the hero of his novel. Goethe definitely did not kill himself at midnight by blowing out his brains, while wearing his boots and a blue tailcoat with a yellow waistcoat, but instead made for safety and new love affairs.
My guest seemed much struck for the first time, and shook his head. “Can one really be so down to earth about Goethe, even of his literary masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther?” I said well, yes, one could, and left it at that.
Julia asked me, as we were going to bed, whether I’d had a difficult day at school. I said no. After a while, she asked, “Surely you aren’t jealous, are you?” I asked her what made her think that. She shrugged, and said no more.
I had taken Brentano’s Folk Tales of the Rhine up with me for bedtime reading, leafed through them a little, and came on the place where Black Hans, the miller Radlof’s pet starling, suddenly begins to speak, but from that time on will no longer eat and drink, so that Radlof, who loves the bird dearly, goes to the trouble of cheering him up with a quatrain. I laughed to myself, and then said, “And here’s another pretty poem.”
Julia turned to me. “And how does it go?” I recited, with much expression:
Eat and drink just as you please,
Whistle a tune, my honey.
I’ll let you have the money.
Julia turned away and looked at her own book. After a while she said, “You’re not being fair.” I did not reply.
I feel wretched. If Hochgeschurz is having the Georgian watched, then he knows about Julia going around with our guest as well. It won’t have stopped at that sighting of the two of them together at the courthouse, and then perhaps sharing lunch. It could be that my imagination is running away with me again, but the agent may also have gained information, one way or another, about their trip to Frankfurt. In fact that would actually be among his official duties if he really did have instructions to check up on Ninoshvili’s contacts in the Federal Republic. Perhaps he’s had my telephone tapped so that he can keep up to date with the Georgian’s arrangements.
If so, he could have found out some connection between Ninoshvili and the woman in the hotel even before I visited him. Or no, that’s not conclusive. If she was indeed the supposed editor who called Ninoshvili at my house, maybe she didn’t give the name of her hotel. Their meeting could have been arranged in advance. And if Ninoshvili was really the man who called her at the hotel, he would not have conducted that conversation from my house. Say he called her from a phone kiosk. And before visiting the hotel to murder her, he shook off the observer sent by Hochgeschurz to shadow him.
He didn’t necessarily have to take such precautions on the journey to Frankfurt. Perhaps he was even glad to be shadowed. After all, he was going about his business as a representative of the Georgian Ministry of Culture, all above board.
The man watching him, a lanky young fellow in jeans and parka, sits in the car provided by Internal Security, yawning, outside the building containing the publisher’s office into which Ninoshvili has disappeared for his second appointment that morning. He sits up straight when he sees Julia’s car stop outside the building. He sees the Georgian come out of the front entrance. Ninoshvili waves triumphantly to Julia, gets into the car with her and kisses her on the cheek. The two of them talk for a while; Ninoshvili describes his meeting with many gestures. Julia gives him a kiss on the cheek. She starts the engine and drives away with her cheerful companion.
The lanky observer follows them along the road into the valley of the Rhine.
He mingles with the Japanese, American and British tourists climbing the broad steps to the Niederwald Memorial, following Julia
and Ninoshvili at a little distance. He wonders what the hell the two of them are doing up there. The monument means nothing to him. No one taught him at school what the figure of Germania means, that mighty, regal female twelve and a half metres high, with her majestic dignity and the magnificent curves of her proud breasts. He doesn’t know that this amazing statue of 1871 was erected in memory of Germany’s defeat of her old enemy France. Perhaps it would leave him cold to hear that the sly Frenchmen had wanted to get their hands on the free German river Rhine, but were forcefully repelled by the Germans, united at last.
The lanky observer knows nothing about that, but he does know his job. He follows Julia and Ninoshvili to the Drosselgasse and the restaurant. When they have ordered their meal, he sees Ninoshvili drink to his companion, take an appreciative sip, and then put his arm around her shoulders. He gazes deeply into her eyes and kisses her on the lips. The lanky observer has a chance to see a long kiss, nothing unusual in the Drosselgasse.
The idea of Hochgeschurz hearing a detailed account of what my wife and the Georgian got up to together on their trip makes me feel miserable. I can still hear the agent’s tone of voice when he sent Julia his regards. I’m almost sure there was a touch of malice in it. He knew that I wouldn’t tell Julia about my visit to him anyway.
What torments me most is the terrible feeling that I myself have opened a doorway into my private life, my marriage, my house to that snooper. Of course I would be happy to see Ninoshvili revealed as a KGB agent, possibly a murderer, and thus removed from my house and my life. But after the hints I so freely supplied to Herr Hochgeschurz, he’ll be all the keener to find out about the relationship between Dr Kestner from Halle and Herr Ninoshvili from Tbilisi. And I have done a great deal to lead my wife into this trap.
Herr Hochgeschurz won’t let go. He noticed something at once when I asked him for more information about Ninoshvili, and he took his precautions. None of the phone calls which he’d said he was waiting to take in his office arrived while I was with him. But Dr Schmidt came in, as if by chance, and took a good look at me: Dr Kestner’s husband who allegedly just wanted to know more about Ninoshvili’s outpourings in the summer house, but who eagerly responds to mention of the KGB and suddenly begins talking about the hotel murder case.
Chapter 33
Raphael Lohmüller, the five-year-old next door, kicked his football over the garden fence at noon today. I heard the ball bounce on the terrace, went to the window and looked out. Raphael was slowly approaching the fence, stopped when he reached it and looked anxiously for his ball. I went out, picked up the ball and took it over to Raphael. He said, “Thank you, Herr Kestner,” like a good boy.
Ninoshvili, who had been sitting in front of the TV set, appeared in the doorway to the terrace and waved to Raphael, smiling. The boy looked at him in silence. Ninoshvili moved away. Raphael asked, “Is that man living with you now?”
I replied, “Why do you want to know?” Raphael picked his nose for a moment and then asked, “Is it true that he’s Turkish?”
“No,” I said. “He comes from Timbuktu.”
Raphael thought about this for a while, and then said, “I don’t know where that is.”
“Never mind,” I told him. “Even your parents don’t know.”
Frau Birgit Lohmüller, flaxen-haired and red-cheeked, opened a window on the first floor of her house and leaned out. “Raffy, what are you doing there?” she called. “Has he been making a nuisance of himself, Herr Kestner?”
No, he has not been making a nuisance of himself. But you’d do better to mind your own business, my dear neighbour. For instance, you could get that dandified husband of yours to mow the lawn again. Your garden does not look at all the way a German family’s should.
Frau Lohmüller called, “That’s enough football, Raffy! Come on in now.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Raffy,” I said.
Chapter 34
Something absolutely outrageous has happened at school, and in my drama group too. I thought I’d picked the best pupils this school has to offer for that group.
I had fixed a rehearsal for yesterday afternoon using the stage set designed by Christa Frowein and Dirk Papenhoff, a small work of art: two partitions, one showing the wall of Capulet’s garden with luxuriant vegetation behind it, the other a part of his house, modelled on the Veronese style of architecture, and Juliet’s window in it about two metres up. When Günsel Özcan got up on the bench behind the partition to appear at the window, the partition began to rock. “Wait a moment, Günsel!” I called. “Are you steady on that bench?”
I jumped up on stage to look at the scenery. Christa Frowein came out of the wings and took hold of my arm. “It won’t be any problem, Herr Kestner, we’ll fix it after the rehearsal!”
I said, “I believe you, but I’d like to take a look myself.”
Christa barred my way, smiling at me and placing both hands on my chest. “Now, do be honest! You don’t trust me, do you? Oh, I’m so disappointed.” I thought this banter was one of the rather obvious advances she can’t seem to help making from time to time. Once, when she was following me down the corridor, she even tickled the back of my neck.
“None of that nonsense, Christa,” I said, removing her hands from my chest, and I put her aside and went round behind the partition.
Günsel was standing on the bench looking sheepish, her head bent. I wondered what that meant, but then I saw the slogan on the back of the partition. Someone had scrawled over the hessian, with bright red spray paint, SHEVARDNADZE IS A TRAITOR LIKE BRANDT AND WEHNER—REVENGE! And underneath it was a bright-red swastika.
President Eduard Shevardnadze humbled himself before the Russians on Friday. Finding that the Abkhazians and Zviadists were successfully maintaining their offensive, he boarded a plane to Moscow, asked for military support there, and said that his government was prepared to incorporate Georgia into the Commonwealth of Independent States. Ninoshvili’s comment on this news was inscrutable; he confined himself in essentials to what I had hear him say before: “Bad situation, very bad situation.” I don’t doubt it for a moment.
But I would never have dreamed that this “bad situation” could provoke such a disgraceful reaction in my drama group. I interrupted the rehearsal at once, called everyone together on stage and took up my position in front of them.
I was moved to see them standing around me looking so downcast, Günsel and Jürgen Dahlmann already in costume, and Christian Berkhan had put Mercutio’s cap on, just for fun. Now he had forgotten that he was still wearing it. They had been going to settle the problem by themselves; probably Christa and Dirk would have set about painting over the sprayed slogan that very evening.
But I was too worked up. I was determined to make an example. When I had let the deathly silence that was spreading take effect for a while, I said I assumed that the graffiti artist would own up of his own accord, here and now. And if he was so much of a coward that he couldn’t even summon up enough decent feeling for that, then I trusted that none of the others would think of shielding him. They had been my pupils long enough to know what a swastika means: it is the emblem of terror and inhumanity. And if this matter was not cleared up, I would cancel the whole performance and resign from directing the drama group.
I stopped and let my gaze move around them. No one stepped forwards. After a long pause, Micky Rautenstrauch cleared his throat. He said, “Herr Kestner, I don’t think it was any of us.”
Christa nodded. “No one in the drama group would do a horrible thing like that. Everyone here knows how long Dirk and I have been working on the scenery.”
Oh, indeed? So how had this unknown person gained access to the stage set, I asked, how had anyone got into the room where it was kept under lock and key?
Manni Wallmeroth, playing Benvolio, put up his hand. “Maybe he nicked the key. Or made a duplicate key. I mean, it’s been known to happen.”
I asked him to be good enough not to indulg
e in fantasy. Jürgen Dahlmann asked, “What do you mean, fantasy? Last year someone got the door to the chemistry labs open, and he was never found either.”
I said I was not about to engage in this kind of discussion. I thought I had expressed myself clearly enough, I said, and I hoped everyone knew what to do now. If the perpetrator really couldn’t summon up the courage to admit what he had done, I would give him one last chance: he could phone me at home or come to see me. And that was a course of action open to anyone who was now, perhaps, keeping silent from some mistaken idea of solidarity, without stopping to think that this meant all the work we had done together would come to nothing. I left them there, standing on stage and looking miserable, and went home.
In the evening the phone rang. When I answered it, no one spoke; all I could hear for a while was thudding music in the background. Then someone said, in a whisper, “It was Manni Wallmeroth,” and hung up.
This morning I told Herr Trabert, the principal, about the incident and asked for a meeting of those of us on the staff who taught in the upper school. I told him I had already received anonymous information about the graffiti artist, but I wanted to test it out first. I had thought long and hard overnight whether to bring him into it, I said, but there was no keeping the scandal within bounds any more. Of course some member of the drama group or another was bound to spread the sensational news, hot off the press.
Brauckmann promptly approached me in the corridor when I was off to the staff room at break. He asked, grinning, “Well, on the trail of your little Nazi yet?” I said, “That was no little Nazi, it was some vandal of the kind we can’t tolerate at this school.”
Brauckmann raised his eyebrows. “Oh, come on, aren’t you going a little too far? You’re usually so understanding.
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