The Forger

by Cay Rademacher

  He would get to the restaurant by the fishing harbour on time, with no need to rush, a completely new feeling. In Altona the roads down to the banks of the Elbe were steep. Stave even took time to get off the bike and push his new acquisition along. It meant there was no risk of him pulling the front brake and flying headfirst over the handlebars.

  It was quiet in the fishing harbour at midday. The boats came in late in the evening and sold their catch into the early hours of the morning. Now the last tired workers dressed in rubber aprons were throwing fish heads and guts into the gullies along the stone quays of the Elbe, surrounded by hungry cats.

  Stave rode up to the unprepossessing entrance of Sellmers Kellerwirtschaft. It was only then that it occurred to him that he had neither a padlock nor chain to keep his precious new acquisition safe. Not knowing what to do, he just glanced around him, then lifted the bicycle up on to his shoulders and carried it indoors.

  When a shocked waiter came up to him, he set the bike down gently, pulled out his ID card and said, ‘Police. Where can I put the bike?’

  The man was too taken aback to refuse such an absurd demand. ‘This way,’ he said, showing him into a gloomy hallway next to the kitchen. The chief inspector leant the bike against a wall flecked with damp specks, nodded graciously to the waiter as if he had helped him arrest a murderer and went back into the dining room.

  ‘You’re the first man I’ve known to use the cloakroom for a bicycle rather than a coat,’ Anna said by way of greeting.

  She was sitting at a small table at the end of the room by a grubby window looking out on to the Elbe. Her slim form was draped in a dress the colour of the river, and her dark hair was held back by an ivory-coloured cloth band, save for the few strands that fell over her forehead, which she played with nonchalantly. Stave had to suppress the urge to carefully brush them back from her face. A light-coloured coat lay over the back of the chair next to her, drops of water falling from the folds to form a little puddle on the floor. He sat down opposite her.

  ‘You’re looking good.’

  She smiled and his heart skipped a beat. ‘Thanks for the invitation. You know this restaurant?’

  ‘I’ve been here once before. With MacDonald,’ he added quickly so she wouldn’t think he had brought another woman here.

  ‘What do you recommend?’

  ‘The sole won’t kill you.’ He waved to a waiter and gave the order. Once again he used the ‘forgotten ration card’ trick. And why not? After all, he would have given up his new bicycle just to be sitting here with Anna. But at the same time he was anxious about what it was he had to discuss with her.

  ‘How did you come by the bicycle?’

  He told her the story, at greater length than necessary — happy to have the opportunity to delay mentioning the topic he would have to broach. Then the fish arrived. Overdone, just like it had been last time, the potatoes mushy, the ‘mayonnaise’ a whitish yoghurt-like stuff. They talked about the food, but eventually they had nothing but empty plates in front of them. The waiter came over and Stave ordered two cups of ersatz coffee.

  ‘So,’ Anna said, looking at him quizzically. ‘Just what is it that's on your mind?’

  Stave felt she’d seen through him all along. Just don’t start stuttering, he told himself. ‘I wanted to see you again.’

  ‘That's nice.’ She smiled again, and then turned serious. ‘I’m not going to claim I can see into the depths of your soul,’ she said quietly, ‘but we have...’ she searched for the right expression, ‘a history together. And you don’t look exactly like the man who used to be my lover. You look more like when we first got to know one another: a policeman carrying out an interrogation.’

  ‘I was already in love with you back then.’

  ‘But there was something you wanted to find out.’

  ‘All the time I’ve known you, there was one thing I wanted to find out. Are you free?’ Stave blurted out the words, then held his breath, as if he had just thrown a stone and was anxiously watching its trajectory. I can only hope I’m not going to break something, he prayed silently.

  Anna looked out of the window. The rain-filled sky was as grey as the river, the downpour so dense that the huge docks of Blohm&Voss on the other side of the Elbe looked like a washed-out watercolour. From somewhere in the distance came the drawn-out sound of a foghorn. Stave noticed the miserable smell of the restaurant: old fish, rancid fat and stale tobacco.

  ‘The problem is,’ she said, ‘that you’re determined to know my history. And I’m determined to forget it.’

  Stave found himself thinking of his wife who had been burned to death when their apartment was bombed, while he was elsewhere in the city on duty. Of the nightmares he had had, dominated by fire and heat. Of his son, Karl, who had thrown nothing but curses at him before signing up as a volunteer with the Wehrmacht, which was nearly the death of him. Of the endless time he had spent crawling the station platforms and through the indexes of missing persons in the search for his son. Of the joy and the shock when one day Karl had turned up on his doorstep. Of his helplessness ever since. ‘I don’t know whether or not you want to tell me your story,’ he replied cautiously, ‘but I know one thing for sure: no matter how much you want to forget your history, your history won’t forget you.’

  ‘I’m married,’ she said. Stave tried to read the expression on her face, to see if it was challenging or penitent. Maybe both at once. ‘But I assume you already know that. That's your job.’

  ‘Klaus von Gudow,’ he muttered. ‘A diplomat. I haven’t known for long, though. It was a coincidence.’

  ‘And I have this coincidence to thank for this lunch invitation?’

  ‘I have to know it all, now, or else I’m going to go mad,’ Stave admitted, realising how anguished his voice seemed. It was good that the restaurant was nearly empty.

  Then all of a sudden she leaned across the table and gave him a kiss on the cheek. ‘That, if I’ve understood it correctly, is the nicest compliment any man has ever made me.’ Anna fumbled around in her coat pocket, then produced a gold wedding ring and laid it on the table. ‘As you can see, my history hasn’t forgotten me.’ She looked out of the window again. ‘I was eighteen years old when I got married. Not even an adult yet. My husband is ten years older. We’d known we’d get married since we were children — and more importantly, as you can perhaps imagine, our families had known it too.’

  ‘But as a mere member of the middle class, I don’t need to pay attention to any dynastic inheritance questions when getting married?’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic. Because you didn’t have an enormous, ancient family with vast experience in exerting soft pressure on its members, the females in particular.’ She sighed. ‘I’m afraid I can’t even say I was particularly unhappy. My husband was a diplomat. We moved to Berlin. From the eastern provinces to the capital. Things could be worse for a young girl. We lived near Friedrichstrasse. I saw to setting up the apartment. Klaus concentrated on his career.’

  ‘A very brown career.’

  Anna gave him a serious, almost angry look. She pulled her arm tight against her breast, that protective gesture he knew so well. ‘It may sound absurd today, even pathetic, but I knew nothing about all that. My husband was a diplomat, a trained lawyer. I was proud of him and his title, but I knew nothing about what his work entailed. I just wasn’t interested. He went off to the ministry in the morning and came home in the evening, just like all our friends and neighbours.’

  Stave, who had never been a member of the NSDAP, and in 1933 had been shoved aside to an unimportant position in the CID, had watched on Kristallnacht as the synagogues burned. Later on he had stood guard over concentration camp inmates who had been sent to do clearance work among the ruins after severe bombing raids. Nor had he been able to prevent his own son enthusiastically signing up in the Hitler Youth. ‘There are a lot of people one can accuse of worse,’ he muttered.

  ‘In the autumn of 1943 I left Berlin,’
Anna continued. ‘Klaus insisted. The air raids had become more frequent. He thought I would be safer if he sent me back to the family estates.’ She looked at him sadly. ‘To escape the American bombers I almost ran into the arms of the Red Army. I only just escaped from the east, but you already know that part of my history.’

  ‘And your husband remained in Berlin?’ It occurred to Stave that his own son might have fought alongside Anna's husband.

  ‘To the bitter end. I thought he died in May 1945. At least, that's what a former colleague from the Foreign Office claimed. But to this day Klaus von Gudow is officially “missing in action”. No gravestone. Fate unknown.’

  ‘A tragic fate. Or a useful one, if you’d worked in the Jewish department of the Foreign Office and knew the Allies were looking for you and were keeping a spare spot for you on their gallows.’

  ‘Shortly after I arrived in Hamburg I was actually visited by an elderly English officer. Very polite, very tactful. Probably a comrade of your friend MacDonald. At first I thought he was looking for sought-after objects that had survived the war.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘But it was sought-after humans that had survived the war he was interested in. It was only through his questions that I learned what Klaus had been responsible for. I felt...’ she searched for the right word, ‘... dirty. Betrayed. Shamed. I stood there in front of this English officer, as if I was the wife of a thief. Worse than that. The wife of a mass murderer, and ridiculously naïve. To this day I still don’t know if the officer in question felt sympathy for me, or despised me for being so clueless. Whatever. He wanted to know where my husband was. I had considered myself a widow, and was surprised by the question. I had nothing to tell him. One way or another he never came back. I reverted to my maiden name and tried to forget the whole story: my husband, his work, our time in Berlin. All of it.’

  ‘But your history didn’t forget you.’

  Anna nodded, disturbed. ‘One day somebody pushed a piece of paper under the door of my apartment – not long after I’d found the place in Röperstrasse. I never discovered who it was. It was a letter from a monastery in Italy. From my husband. He was hiding there, waiting until he got passage on a freighter. To Argentina.’

  ‘How had he got from Berlin under siege to a monastery in Italy?’

  ‘He didn’t say in the letter. He referred only to sinister-sounding “helpers” — who would help me too if I wanted, who would smuggle me to Italy. Helpers who had booked passage on board a boat for a woman with papers in another name, with my photograph already on them.’

  Stave held his breath. ‘Are you going to go?’

  She laughed, shaking her head, and almost grabbed him by the hand. ‘I got that letter months ago, when I was already in love with another man. Another man whose history then caught up with him, too.’

  ‘A man who had tailed you like a spy and watched as you went into a pawnshop in the colonnades and bought back a wedding ring,’ he admitted.

  Anna turned the ring lying on the table, carefully, as if it might explode at any time. ‘I would never have fled to Argentina with Klaus. Even if I hadn’t met you. After everything I’ve found out about him since, I never want to see him again. Just the thought of him makes me shudder. When I got the letter I was afraid: I had told the British officer I thought Klaus was dead. I had reverted to my maiden name, and that was how everybody in Hamburg knew me. What if Klaus was caught on the ship, or somewhere in Argentina? What if he had left some traces in Hamburg? Traces that could lead to me?’

  Stave closed his eyes. ‘What an idiot I am,’ he whispered.

  Anna shook her head, wondering at herself. ‘I would have got rid of the wedding ring long ago. But the inside had his name engraved on it. And mine. And the date of our wedding. What would Lieutenant MacDonald have thought if he had accidentally come across the ring? Or Public Prosecutor Ehrlich? I got my money together and bought back the ring, erasing the traces.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just take the letter to the British? Or give it to me?’

  ‘You’re a policeman, too. I had fallen in love with you, but I hardly knew you. The more you wanted to know about me, the more under pressure I felt. We’d just become a couple. I was afraid to tell you I was still married. To a sought-after war criminal. You might just have walked out on me. Then your son came back from the prisoner-of-war camp and things between us got even more complicated. Too complicated. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with Klaus. I wanted to have nothing more to do with my past. I wanted to live here and now.’

  ‘Very naïve.’

  ‘As naïve as the life I led in Berlin. I wish I knew what to do.’

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Stave.

  Ten minutes later they were walking along between the sheds. The rain had turned into more of a damp mist, totally surrounding them. The stench of fish oozed from the brick walls of the buildings. Stave led Anna past the last of the sheds to the cobbled quayside. The cobblestones glinted, polished by the soles of thousands of dockers dragging fish from the boats into the warehouses every night. But now there was nobody about.

  ‘May I?’ he asked, cautiously reaching out his hand towards her.

  She hesitated for a long time, and then let the ring fall on to the open palm of his hand.

  Stave closed his hand into a fist – and before he had second thoughts, before he was overtaken by doubt, he relaxed it and hurled the ring away. A golden reflection in the grey waters of the Elbe, then a small circle on a wave, without a sound. Anna took a deep breath. He had half expected she might burst into tears or cling to him for support. But she just stood there, upright and silent.

  ‘Let's go,’ she said at last, and Stave was filled with such a sense of relief that it was he who almost needed a supporting hand.

  They walked silently along the bank of the Elbe until they came to dingy Röperstrasse. Anna was walking to his right, so Stave was wheeling his bike with his left hand. It was awkward and he was afraid of damaging it in a pothole, but he didn’t want anything but thin air between him and the woman by his side. Her basement apartment, her shabby front door. Anna struggled with the rusty lock, then finally unlocked the door.

  Suddenly filled with panic at the idea she might just disappear behind it, Stave grabbed her by the hand. ‘Will we see one another again?’

  Then Anna smiled and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Give me a couple of days, just to get used to my new history.’

  An afternoon off

  He was only due to meet up with MacDonald to visit Veit Harlan that evening. The chief inspector hung about in Röperstrasse for a long time, long enough for him to notice a curtain twitch in the window of a second floor apartment. Somebody was watching him. He rode off, confused, happy and aimless. Should he go back to CID headquarters? Wander down the long corridors, sit staring at files with no answers in them? Or just pass the hours sitting in his silent apartment?

  Without even noticing, he turned right on to Palmaille, then just a few minutes later – how quickly he could get around now – found himself on the Reeperbahn, grey, dull and abandoned in the rain. North over Heiligengeistfeld, past the imposing flak bunkers, black rather than the usual grey because the damp had saturated the concrete. Through Planten un Blomen park, its muddy pathways so deeply rutted that his handlebars wobbled from side to side. Dammtor station and beyond: the university.

  Stave was looking for an art historian who might be able to tell him something about Toni Weber. He didn’t admit to himself that he had an underlying motive for coming here, a hope so fragile that he didn’t want to spell it out too clearly for fear it proved illusory.

  On the lawn outside the university he had to get off his bike. Two elderly men were driving a pair of oxen pulling a heavy iron plough over the ground. ‘Potatoes for the student gentlemen,’ one of them called to him, noticing the astonished look on his face. The heavy aroma of freshly turned soil. When had he last breathed in such a rural smell? Once again he began to regret not having bou
ght a lock and chain. He hoisted the frame of the heavy Dutch bicycle on to his shoulders and climbed the first step up towards the main building of the university: a rococo pavilion with light-coloured stone columns against grey fluted concrete which he only noticed on second glance. A building from before the First World War, when concrete was made to look as if it were something much older. The chief inspector, who had never gone to university, felt small and unworthy.

  An inscription over the entrance portal declared: ‘To research, learning and teaching’. Once upon a time Stave would have considered that pompous, but now, with the oxen and plough below the steps, he found it immensely earnest.

  The interior was gloomy and draughty, and smelled of old books and concrete dust. He left the bike in the lodge despite the complaints of the porter. Students pushed past him while he looked around trying to get his bearings: boys and girls in patched cardigans and torn trousers, some of them with briefcases or exercise books, others with schoolbags. A remarkable number of them were missing an arm, a leg or an eye. Their conversation was subdued and serious. There was no laughter. It's a monastery, Stave thought to himself, populated by fanatically earnest monks.

  He had to ask around before someone pointed out to him the lecture theatre where Professor Christian Kitt was speaking. ‘Trends in the Applied Arts of the Twentieth Century’. The chief inspector crept in. At the lectern was an elderly, haggard man with dark hair, a grey beard and metal-rimmed glasses. In his lectures once upon a time he might have had large-scale reproductions or maybe slides projected on to the wall, but all he was left with nowadays, if he was lucky, were torn art catalogues to hold up. Stave couldn’t make out anything of the pictures, which didn’t matter as he understood nothing of the professor's lecture. The scholar was using terms he had never heard before. Even after fifteen minutes he hadn’t a clue what the lecture was actually about. But the two dozen or so students were eagerly scribbling down notes – many of them on the back of old paper receipts, or on the back of files because they didn’t have the money to buy notebooks. The chief inspector wondered if it was a good idea after all to question this professor.