The Draining Lake de-6

by Arnaldur Indridason

  “I don’t even know if you could call them dissident cells,” Hannes said. “Mainly they were young people who got together and listened to western radio stations and talked about Bill Haley and West Berlin, where many of them had been, or even religion, which the officials didn’t think highly of. Then there were other proper dissident groups that wanted to fight for reforms to the political structure, real democracy, freedom of speech and the press. They were crushed.”

  “You said Lothar Weiser “for one” had asked you to spy. Do you mean there were others like him?” Erlendur asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Hannes said. “Society was strictly controlled, both the university and the public at large. And people feared surveillance. Orthodox communists took part in it wholeheartedly, the sceptics tried to avoid it and come to terms with living under it, but I think most people found it at odds with everything socialism stands for.”

  “Did you know any Icelandic student who may have worked for Lothar?”

  “Why do you want to know that?” Hannes asked.

  “We need to know whether he was in contact with any Icelanders when he was here as a trade attache in the 1960s,” Erlendur said. “It’s a perfectly normal check. We’re not trying to spy on people, just gathering information because of the skeleton we found.”

  Hannes looked at them.

  “I don’t know of any Icelander who paid any attention to that system, except Emil maybe,” he said. “I think he was acting under cover. I told Tomas that once when he asked me the same question. Much later, in fact. He came to see me and asked exactly the same question.”

  “Tomas?” Erlendur said. He remembered the name from the list of students in East Germany. “Do you keep in touch with Leipzig alumni?”

  “No, I don’t have much contact with them and never have,” Hannes said. “But Tomas and I had one thing in common: we were both expelled. Like me, he came back home before he finished his course. He was ordered to leave. He looked me up when he got back to Iceland and told me about his girlfriend, a Hungarian girl called Ilona. I knew her vaguely. She wasn’t the type to toe the party line, to put it mildly. Her background was rather different. The climate was more liberal in Hungary then. Young people were starting to say what they thought about the Soviet hegemony that covered the whole of Eastern Europe.”

  “Why did he tell you about her?” Elinborg asked.

  “He was a broken man when he came to see me,” Hannes said. “A shadow of his former self. I remembered him when he was happy and confident and full of socialist ideals. He fought for them. Came from a solid working-class family.”

  “Why was he a broken man?”

  “Because she disappeared,” Hannes said. “Ilona was arrested in Leipzig and never seen again. He was totally destroyed by it. He told me Ilona was pregnant when she went missing. Told me with tears in his eyes.”

  “And he came to see you again later?” Erlendur asked.

  “That was quite strange actually. Him coming after all those years to reminisce. I’d forgotten the whole business really, but it was obvious that Tomas had forgotten nothing. He remembered it all. Every detail, as if it had happened yesterday.”

  “What did he want?” Elinborg said.

  “He was asking me about Emil,” Hannes said. “If he’d worked for Lothar. If they’d been in close contact. I don’t know why he wanted to know, but I told him I had proof that Emil needed to get into Lothar’s good books.”

  “What kind of proof?” Elinborg asked.

  “Emil was a hopeless student. He didn’t really belong at university, but he was a good socialist. Everything we said went straight to Lothar, and Lothar made sure that Emil received a good grant and good marks. Tomas and Emil were good friends.”

  “What proof did you have?” Elinborg repeated.

  “My engineering professor told me when I said goodbye to him. After I was expelled. He was hurt that I wasn’t allowed to finish the course. All the teaching staff talked about it, he said. The teachers disliked students like Emil, but couldn’t do a thing. They didn’t all like Lothar and his ilk, either. The professor said that Emil must have been valuable to Lothar, because there was hardly a worse student around, but Lothar ordered the university authorities not to fail him. The FDJ sanctioned the move and Lothar was behind it.”

  Hannes paused.

  “Emil was the staunchest of us all,” he said after a while. “A hardline communist and Stalinist.”

  “Why…” Erlendur began, but Hannes continued as if his mind were elsewhere.

  “It was all such a shock,” he said, staring ahead. “The whole system. We witnessed absolute dictatorship by the party, fear and repression. Some tried to tell the party members here about it when they got back, but made no headway. I always felt that the socialism they practised in East Germany was a kind of sequel to Nazism. This time they were under the Russian heel, of course, but I pretty quickly got the feeling that socialism in East Germany was essentially just another kind of Nazism.”

  30

  Hannes cleared his throat and looked at them. They could both tell that he found it difficult to talk about his student days. He did not appear to be in the habit of recalling his Leipzig years. Erlendur had forced him to sit down and open up.

  “Is there anything else you need to know?” Hannes asked.

  “So Tomas turns up years after he left Leipzig and asks you about Emil and Lothar, and you tell him you have proof that they were operating together,” Erlendur said. “Emil performed for him the important task of monitoring and informing on the students.”

  “Yes,” Hannes said.

  “Why was Tomas asking about Emil, and who is Emil?”

  “He didn’t tell me why and I know very little about Emil. The last I heard, he was living abroad. I think he did ever since we studied in Germany. He never moved back as far as I know. I met one of the students from Leipzig a few years ago, Karl. We were both travelling in Skaftafell and we started talking about the old days, and he said he thought Emil had decided to settle abroad after university. He hadn’t seen or heard of him since.”

  “But Tomas, do you know anything about him?” Erlendur asked.

  “Not really. He did engineering at Leipzig but I’m not aware that he worked in the field. He was expelled. I only met him once when he got back from Germany, that one time he came to ask about Emil.”

  “Tell us about it,” Elinborg said.

  “There’s not much to tell. He dropped in and we reminisced about the old days.”

  “Why was he interested in Emil?” Erlendur asked.

  Hannes looked at them again.

  “I should make some more coffee,” he said and stood up.

  Hannes told them how he had been living in a new townhouse in the Vogar district of Reykjavik at the time. One evening the doorbell rang. When he opened it Tomas was standing on the steps. It was autumn and the weather was rough, the wind shook the trees in the garden and sheets of rain lashed against the house. Hannes did not recognise the visitor at first and was taken aback when he realised it was Tomas. He was so astonished that it did not occur to him at first to invite him in out of the rain.

  “Sorry to disturb you like this,” Tomas said.

  “No, it’s fine,” Hannes said. Then he realised: “What awful weather. Come on in, come on.”

  Tomas took off his coat and greeted Hannes’s wife; their children came out to look at the guest and he smiled at them. Hannes had a small study in the basement and when they had finished their coffee and chatted about the weather he invited Tomas down. He sensed that Tomas was ill at ease, that something was preying on him. He was jumpy and a little awkward about having called on people he really did not know at all. They had not been friends in Leipzig. Hannes’s wife had never heard Tomas’s name mentioned.

  When they had settled down in the basement they reminisced about their Leipzig years for a while; between them they knew where some of the students were now, but not others. Hannes sensed h
ow Tomas was inching towards the purpose of his visit, and he thought to himself that he would have liked him if he’d known him better. He remembered the first time he saw him at the university library. Recalled the impression of polite bashfulness that he gave.

  Well aware of Ilona’s disappearance, he remembered the previous time Tomas had visited him, just back from East Germany and a changed man, to tell him what had happened. He felt nothing but pity for Tomas. He had sent him a message written in a moment of anger, blaming him for his expulsion from Leipzig. But when his rage had died down and he was back in Iceland he realised that it was not Tomas’s fault, but as much his own for defying the system. Tomas mentioned the note and said it was preying on his mind. He told him to forget it, that it had been written in a fit of pique and did not represent the truth. They were fully reconciled. Tomas told him he had contacted the party leaders about Ilona and they had promised to make inquiries in East Germany. He was severely reproached for being expelled, for abusing his position and the trust he had been shown. Tomas had admitted to it all, he said, and repented. He told them whatever they wanted to hear. His sole aim was to help Ilona. It was all in vain.

  Tomas mentioned the rumour that Ilona and Hannes had been going out together at one time and that Ilona wanted to marry in order to leave the country. Hannes said that was news to him. He had been to a few meetings and seen Ilona there, then given up all involvement in politics.

  And now Tomas was sitting there again, in his home. It was twelve years since they had last faced each other. He had begun talking about Lothar and finally seemed to be getting to the point.

  “I wanted to ask you about Emil,” Tomas said. “You know we were good friends in Germany.”

  “Yes, I knew,” he said.

  “Could Emil have, say, had a special connection with Lothar?”

  He nodded. Although he disliked maligning people, he was no friend of Emil’s and felt he understood what sort of character he was. Hannes repeated the professor’s words about Emil and Lothar. How it confirmed his suspicions. That Emil had been actively engaged in interactive surveillance and had benefited from his loyalty to the student organisation and the party.

  “Do you ever wonder if Emil played a part in your expulsion?” Tomas asked.

  “That’s impossible to say. Anyone could have grassed on me to the FDJ — more than one person, more than two. I blamed you, as you remember. I wrote you that note. It gets so complicated talking to people when you don’t know what you’re allowed to say. But I haven’t been dwelling on it. It’s over and done with long ago. Buried and forgotten.”

  “Did you know that Lothar is in Iceland?” Tomas suddenly asked.

  “Lothar? In Iceland? No, I didn’t.”

  “He’s involved with the East German embassy, some kind of official there. I met him by chance — actually I didn’t meet him, I saw him. He was on his way to the embassy. I was walking down Aegisida. I live in the west of town. He didn’t notice me. I was some way off but it was him, large as life. I accused him back in Leipzig of being involved in Ilona’s disappearance and he said to me: “Take a closer look.” But I didn’t understand what he meant. I think I understand now.”

  They stopped talking.

  He looked at Tomas and could tell how helpless and alone in the world his former fellow student was, and wanted to do something for him.

  “If I can help you with… you know, if I can do anything for you…”

  “Did the professor say that Emil was operating with Lothar and gained from it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what became of Emil?”

  “Isn’t he living abroad? I don’t think he came back when he graduated.”

  They fell silent again for a while.

  “That story about me and Ilona, who told you it?” Hannes asked.

  “Lothar,” Tomas said.

  Hannes was unsure how to proceed.

  “I don’t know whether I should tell you this,” he said eventually, “but I heard something else just before I left. You were so upset when you got back from Germany and I didn’t want to spread gossip. There’s plenty of that anyway. But I was told Emil had been trying to get off with Ilona before you started going out together.”

  Tomas stared at him.

  “That’s what I heard,” Hannes said, seeing Tomas turn pale at the news. “There’s not necessarily any truth in it.”

  “Are you saying they went out together before I…?”

  “No, more that he was trying. He used to snoop around her, did voluntary work with her and…”

  “Emil and Ilona?” Tomas groaned in disbelief, as if unable to grasp the idea.

  “He was only trying, that was all I heard,” Hannes hurried to say, immediately regretting his words. He could tell from Tomas’s expression that he should never have mentioned it.

  “Who told you this?” Tomas asked.

  “I don’t remember and it needn’t be true.”

  “Emil and Ilona? She didn’t fancy him?”

  “Not at all,” Hannes said. “That was what I heard. She wasn’t interested in him. But Emil was hurt.”

  They paused.

  “Ilona never mentioned this to you?”

  “No,” Tomas said. “She never did.”

  “Then he left,” Hannes said, looking at Erlendur and Elinborg. “I haven’t seen him since and actually I have no idea whether he’s dead or alive.”

  “That must have been a nasty experience for you in Leipzig,” Erlendur said.

  “The worst things were being spied on and the endless suspicion. But it was a good place to be in many ways. Maybe we weren’t all happy to see the glorious face of socialism up close but most of us tried to live with the drawbacks. Some of us found it easier than others. In terms of education it was a model institution. The overwhelming majority of students were the children of farmers and workers. Has that happened anywhere before or since?”

  “Why did Tomas turn up after all those years and ask you about Emil?” Elinborg said. “Do you think he went on to meet Emil again?”

  “I don’t know,” Hannes said. “He never told me.”

  “This girl Ilona,” Erlendur said, “is anything known about her?”

  “I don’t think so. Times were strange because of Hungary, where everything later erupted. They weren’t going to let that happen in other communist countries. There was no leeway for exchanging views, for criticism or debate. I don’t think anyone knows what became of Ilona. Tomas never found out. I don’t think so anyway, although it’s not really anything to do with me. Nor is that period in my life. I put it behind me a long while ago and I don’t like talking about it. They were awful times. Awful.”

  “Who told you about Emil and Ilona?” Elinborg asked.

  “His name’s Karl,” Hannes said.

  “Karl?” Elinborg said.

  “Yes,” Hannes said.

  “Was he in Leipzig too?” she asked.

  Hannes nodded.

  “Do you know of any Icelanders who could have been in possession of such a thing as a Russian listening device in the 1960s?” Erlendur asked. “Who could have been dabbling in espionage?”

  “A Russian listening device?”

  “Yes, I can’t go into details but does anyone occur to you?”

  “Well, if Lothar was an attache to the embassy he would be a candidate,” Hannes said. “I can’t imagine that… are you… you’re not talking about an Icelandic spy, are you?”

  “No, I think that would be bizarre,” Erlendur said.

  “Like I say, I’m just not in the picture. I’ve hardly had any contact with the group from Leipzig. I don’t know anything about Russian spying.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a photograph of Lothar Weiser, would you?” Erlendur asked.

  “No,” Hannes said. “I don’t have many mementoes from those years.”

  “Emil seems to have been a secretive character,” Elinborg said.

  “That may
well be. As I told you, I think he’s lived abroad all his life. Actually I… the last time I saw him… was after Tomas paid me that weird visit. I saw Emil in the centre of Reykjavik. I hadn’t seen him since Leipzig and I only caught a glimpse, but I’m sure it was Emil. But as I say, I don’t know anything else about the man.”

  “So you didn’t talk to him?” Elinborg asked.

  “Talk to him? No, I couldn’t. He got into a car and drove away. I only saw him for a split second, but it was definitely him. I remember it because of the shock of suddenly recognising him.”

  “Do you remember what kind of car it was?” Erlendur asked.

  “What kind?”

  “The model, colour?”

  “It was black,” Hannes said. “I don’t know anything about cars. But I remember it was black.”

  “Could it have been a Ford?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A Ford Falcon?”

  “Like I said, I only remember it being black.”

  31

  He put the pen down on the desk. In his account of the events in Leipzig and later in Iceland, he had tried to be as clear and succinct as possible. It ran to more than seventy carefully written pages which had taken him several days to produce, and he had still not finished the conclusion. He had made up his mind. He was reconciled to what he was going to do.

  He had reached the point in his narrative where he was walking along Aegisida and saw Lothar Weiser approach one of the houses. Although he had not seen Lothar for years, he recognised him at once. With age Lothar had put on weight and now walked with more of a plod; he did not notice the onlooker. Tomas had stopped dead and stared at Lothar in astonishment. Once the surprise wore off, his first reaction was to keep out of sight, so he half-turned away and very slowly retraced his steps. He watched Lothar go through the gate, shut it carefully behind him and disappear behind the house. He presumed that the German had gone in through the back door. He noticed a sign saying “The Trade Delegation of the German Democratic Republic’.