by David Young
The Wartburg finally reached the northern edge of the Thuringian forest at Ohrdruf. As she braked at the town limits, the fumes from the exhaust through the open window stung the back of her throat. Farty Hans – the model’s nickname – was living up to its moniker.
Ohrdruf had featured heavily in her school anti-fascist lessons: the concentration camp had been one of the first to be liberated. Thankfully, so her schoolteacher had told the class, the area was one which the Americans had handed over to Soviet forces. The Republic’s Soviet friends would ensure no similar atrocities happened in the future.
When Ohrdruf shrank into a speck in the rear-view mirror, the road began to twist and turn, winding through the thick blanket of spruce and pines, broken only occasionally by meadowland. Müller took one hand off the wheel to wipe the sweat from her brow.
This journey south to visit her family had also given her an excuse to stall Emil Wollenburg. The news that the doctor had transferred temporarily to Ha-Neu wasn’t really a surprise: he’d implied as much in Berlin. His explanation was that there was a shortage of hospital doctors in Ha-Neu. It seemed suspiciously convenient, and now he wanted to take her out on a date. Müller wasn’t sure she was ready for it. Yes, Gottfried – her ex-husband – was in the past, teaching in the Federal Republic as far as she knew. And other than that initial, typewritten letter a few days after he’d arrived she hadn’t heard from him. There was no way back for their relationship. But it still seemed far too early to be thinking of beginning a new one.
As the forest finally thinned out, she got her first glimpse of the jagged shards of the Interhotel Panorama, which had now become the most famous landmark of her home village. The glass in its windows sparkled in the summer sun, but its strange ski-jump-shaped roof looked incongruous at this time of the year. Not until the winter snows came in December would it blend in better with the rest of Oberhof. Now it was like two parts of a sunken, disintegrating ocean liner, breaking through the surface of the sea. But the sea here wasn’t water, it was the mountain grass and surrounding forest.
Müller pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car and soaked up the view. She’d seen this vista many times before: in childhood, adolescence, and when returning home from the police training college near the Hauptstadt, although the modernistic Panorama itself had only dominated it since the end of the 1960s. It was a view which always triggered a memory. The second memory that had prompted her to finally make the decision to confront her mother: the day, some twenty-five years ago, when she’d last spoken to her childhood best friend. Müller felt the moisture gather in her eyes. She wiped her hand slowly across her face as the images danced on her brain.
24
November 1951
Oberhof, Thuringia
‘You’re not doing it right. You need to lie back. Watch me.’
The gangly boy, his height out of proportion to the rest of his appearance, lay flat on his back on the metal tray, using his hands and the heels of his boots to launch himself down the rain-slicked grass slope. The girl – several years younger, an oddly matched playmate – put her hand to her brow below her blond fringe, peering through the mist to where the shape had disappeared.
‘Johannes. Where are you? I can’t see you. I’m frightened.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ the boy shouted back through the murk. ‘It levels out at the bottom here. You won’t crash. Just grip hard to the edges of the tray and push yourself off.’
The girl settled her five-year-old frame back against the cold metal tray. She could feel her lips quivering as she wondered if she should do it. If she was brave enough to follow.
‘Come on, slowcoach.’ The shout echoed up the slope and across the valley, as though scores of Young Pioneers were urging her on. This was it. The World Championships of the Luge. Inside her head – her five-year-old head – she was East Germany’s finest female winter athlete, about to take on the world’s best.
The girl flexed her legs, and pushed herself off.
Damp late autumn air roared past her ears. Time slowed. She felt every bump of the meadow under her, jolting her back, cracking her head against the tray. On and on it went, as though it would never end. Like a dream. A nightmare.
And then . . . nothing. Quiet, peace. Just the panting of a boy, running towards her.
‘Wow! That was amazing. You must have gone fifty metres further than me. I was worried you would go over the next slope.’
The girl got to her feet gingerly, her legs wobbling like jelly. She felt her face redden with pride at the boy’s compliments.
He hugged her to him.
The girl decided at that moment that Johannes was the boy for her. That when she was older they would be married. She peered up into his eyes as he towered over her, eyes covered by wire-framed glasses. Even at her tender age, she knew Johannes wasn’t a good-looking boy. That he got teased and bullied by his classmates. That he was often left in tears by their meanness. That was how they’d become friends, despite the five-year age difference. When she’d found him crying on the corner by the village sweet shop, and had tried to comfort him.
They both turned towards the village as they heard the sounds. Motors, shouting, screaming. The girl felt the boy tense up. The November mist had cleared. They could see all the way down to the village, to Oberhof, the country’s leading winter sports resort.
The girl grabbed the boy’s hand, sensing his alarm.
‘What is it, Johannes?’
‘Soldiers.’
‘Soldiers? Fascist soldiers?’
She watched the boy shake his head.
‘No. Our soldiers.’
But the alarm didn’t leave his voice, and the girl struggled to understand.
‘That’s all right then, isn’t it?’
He shook his head. Then squinted in concentration.
‘I’ve got to get back down there.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
Johannes’s reply was a fast sprint down the sloping meadow. The girl tried to keep up at first, but her shorter legs were no match. When she caught her foot in a cow’s hoof print and tumbled to the ground, the tears that came were not caused by the hurt in her leg. They were tears of confusion: of feeling abandoned by her friend. The fear that Farmer Bonz would come and tell her off, and report her to her parents for playing in, and messing up, his field.
*
The soldiers stood like giants in a line, blocking the way to Mutti, Papa and new baby sister Sara, not that the girl wanted to see her again. The baby was all that Mutti and Papa seemed to talk about these days. That was why the girl spent so much of her time with Johannes in the meadow, pretending they were luge champions. But she was hungry, and frightened. A soldier was shouting at her.
‘Halt there, girl.’ He looked important, with more stars on his shoulders than the others. He was ticking names off a list. ‘What’s your name?’
Instead of answering, the child spied a gap through the legs of the line of grey giants. She made a run for it and squeezed through before the soldiers realised what was happening. Home. That’s where she had to get to. There was more shouting, but she just ignored it, and ran and ran, splashing through the puddles in the street even though she knew Mutti would be angry that she was now wet, as well as muddy from the meadow.
Her mother was standing, glowering in the doorway of Bergpension Hanneli, brandishing a wooden spoon.
‘Where on earth have you been, young lady? Just look at the state of you. That dress is ruined. And your shoes. Whatever have you been doing?’
The girl tried to run past into the guest house, but her mother grabbed her arm.
‘Oh, no, you don’t. I’m not having you mess up the house. That boy’s been leading you astray again, hasn’t he?’
‘He’s my friend.’
‘You should find a friend your own age, young lady. It’s not right you playing around with a boy so much older than yourself. Anyway, we won’t be having any trouble from h
im anymore. Now wait here in the porch till I get you cleaned up.’
‘Why are the soldiers here? They tried to capture me.’
Her mother’s grip tightened. ‘That’s none of your business.’
The child tried to wriggle free as baby Sara began crying because of all the noise. What did Mutti mean? We won’t be having any trouble from him anymore.
‘Mannfred!’ her mother shouted. ‘Come and deal with little Miss Bossyboots here, while I feed the baby. She’s covered in mud and has ruined her clothes.’ Then she knelt down and whispered to the girl: ‘Your father will give you a good hiding now, madam, just you watch. And you’ll have –’
The girl didn’t wait for the end of the warning. She yanked her arm from her mother’s grip and ran, and ran, as fast as she could. Back towards the shouting. Back towards the line of grey giants. Back towards Johannes’s house.
She arrived there just in time to see Johannes’s parents being pushed onto the back of an open troop truck. His mother’s eyes red-rimmed from tears. And then Johannes himself being led out of Pension Edelweiss – his family’s hotel – looking confused, upset. Somewhere he’d lost his characteristic spectacles, and the girl watched his head swivelling from side to side, looking, searching, but unseeing – the world an unfocussed blur.
‘Johannes! Johannes!’ the girl shouted out. ‘What’s wrong? Where are they taking you? I want to go with you.’
His head turned in the direction of her call. He seemed to be about to answer back as his eyes desperately tried to focus through a myopic haze, but as he opened his mouth a soldier clasped his hand across it, forced his arm up behind his back, and pushed him into the truck along with his parents.
Then the giant chief soldier, the one with the stars on his shoulder, was back, his huge face peering into the girl’s.
‘What’s your name, girl?’ he thundered, his breath warm and foul-smelling, flecks of spittle flying in her face.
The girl didn’t pull back. Didn’t flinch. And didn’t answer, but instead asked a question of her own.
‘Where are you taking my friend?’
‘They are not your friends, little girl. They are profiteers, racketeers. Undermining our socialist republic.’ The long words meant nothing to the girl, but she understood the message. Johannes was being taken away. And she wasn’t going with him. ‘Now, I will ask you just once more.’ The girl wiped the spit away from her eyes. ‘What is your name?’
The girl spoke clearly, bravely, without fear, staring directly into the mean big chief soldier’s eyes, challenging him, matching his stern expression with one of her own. ‘My name is Karin Müller. And you are a very nasty man. I will never forgive you for taking away my best friend.’
25
July 1975
Oberhof, Bezirk Suhl
Bergpension Hanneli – the Müller family home – looked much as it always had, almost as though it was constructed with oversized plastic Pebe bricks, the toy building blocks that Müller had since learned were copied from the Danish originals. The thick log cladding of the ground floor exterior was still coated in blood-red gloss, so shiny that Müller was forced to shield her eyes from the reflected mountain sunlight. The vibrant colour was such a contrast to Ha-Neu’s predominant concrete grey. Above it, the guest rooms in the sharply sloping eaves of the nineteenth-century villa were covered in dark grey slate, the pointed central gable above the master suite giving the whole the look of a fairytale witch’s cottage.
Müller went to the back door, wiping her shoes on the mat before entering, her eyes drawn to the window boxes full of golden hyacinths. The gold, red and near-black of the roof was striking – an almost perfect representation of the colours of the German flag, both the East’s and the West’s. She opened the kitchen door softly, and then coughed to attract Sara’s attention.
She attempted a smile as her sister looked up from the piles of potatoes she was preparing. There was surprise in Sara’s facial expression, but no warmth, and her hands still busied themselves with peeling.
‘So you’ve finally found the way from Berlin, Karin. It’s been a long time. Mum misses you.’
Müller stood for a moment on the threshold of the kitchen and looked her younger sister up and down. She wanted to go over and hug Sara, but the look on her face, her tone of voice, and her ever-busy hands seemed designed to ward her off. As sisters, they were so different, and they both knew it. Karin with her looks that the boys always seemed attracted to, and a confidence that had helped her climb the rungs to head her own murder squad in the People’s Police. Sara had the ruddy complexion and swarthy figure of a mountain housewife, reddy-brown curls tumbling chaotically from her head, and eyes the colour of pond water. All contrasting with Müller’s own Scandinavian or Slavic ice-blue-eyed blondness.
‘It’s the job, Sara. You know that.’
Her younger sister finally put the potato peeler to one side and moved towards Müller for a lukewarm embrace. ‘Is it, though? You didn’t even come back at Christmas. It’s a lot of work just for Mum and me.’
Müller felt a tug of guilt, but knew it wasn’t enough to ever draw her back any more regularly from Berlin to this country village. She grimaced slightly as the pressure of Sara’s hands and arms made the pain in her back and neck flare once more. But she held the hug, and squeezed her sister more tightly.
Sara pulled back and stared straight into Müller’s eyes, furrowing her brow. ‘You look older, Karin. Tired.’
Müller laughed gently. ‘I am older. I am tired.’
‘You’re sure there’s nothing else? Why the unannounced visit? Are you sure there isn’t something bothering you? Is it to do with Gottfried?’
Müller felt her stomach tighten at Sara’s question. The name of her ex-husband – the man with whom she’d shared a surname even before their marriage, prompting several feeble jokes from him about the two Müllers, or ‘millers’, joining forces – still had the power to unnerve her, months after their divorce. Even though what was really troubling her was her sense of alienation from her own birth family.
‘It’s over.’
Sara gasped. ‘What’s over?’
‘The marriage. My marriage. Gottfried was given permission to move to the Federal Republic. The last I heard from him, he was trying to get a teaching job near Heidelberg.’
‘Oh Karin. I’m so sorry.’ Sara’s face had softened, her frown of disapproval replaced by one of concern. ‘If there’s anything I, Mutti or Roland can do . . . you know we’d always help you.’ Müller was touched by the genuineness of Sara’s sentiment. She just didn’t believe, though, that this sentiment was shared by her mother.
Müller pulled her sister into the hallway of the little hotel and stood beside her, staring into the gilt-framed mirror. ‘Look at us. We’re so different.’
Sara snorted with laughter. ‘Well, I am prettier.’
‘Of course,’ smiled Müller.
Müller’s sister stood behind her, looking over her shoulder into the reflective glass. ‘All right. I give up. You’re the pretty one. You always were.’ Then she traced the dark semi-circles under the detective’s eyes with her finger. ‘But you have aged, Karin.’ Müller knew she should be offended. Yet Sara’s concern appeared heartfelt. ‘I don’t think this job’s good for you. How can it be? Dealing with dead bodies, horrible murders. I don’t know how you do it.’
Müller switched her gaze from the reflection of her sister to the image of her own face. In the last couple of weeks she’d been looking healthier, but now the hallmarks of tiredness and worry were back. The result, no doubt, of the train attack – but she didn’t want to worry her sister further by talking about that.
Müller moved away from the mirror. ‘Where’s Mama? I’d been hoping to surprise her.’
‘She’s at her flower-arranging class. You should know that.’ The gentle admonishment was clear in Sara’s tone and words. You should know that. If you took more interest in the life of your own f
amily. The last sentence didn’t leave Sara’s lips, but Müller knew it was implied. ‘But she’ll be back soon.’
‘And Roland?’
‘At football. You know that too. Whatever you get up to in Berlin, Karin, life just goes on here. Day after day after day.’ They’d moved back into the kitchen, and Sara picked up the potato peeler, rapidly removing the skin from each tuber, then picking up another. Almost as though she were an actual machine on a production line.
Müller moved back out to the hall. Her welcome party was clearly over. She started to climb the stairs to the guest quarters on the first floor, and then a second, narrower step of stairs, right into the eaves. To her bedroom. The one her mother always kept for her, virtually untouched since her teenage years.
*
The room was tiny, with just a single-width dormer window. Now she was fully grown, two thirds of the floor space was inaccessible without crouching. This had been her haven, and it had been frozen – almost as though in a time capsule – since she’d left Oberhof for her police training in Potsdam some twelve years earlier. It was the room of an early 1960s teenage girl: a poster of a fresh-faced Fab Four still just about stuck to the wall, with one corner curled. The Beatles. One of the few Western pop groups to – at that time – escape the scrutiny of Party bosses. Müller laughed gently to herself. It hadn’t lasted long. Only two years later, Walter Ulbricht, the then Party general secretary, had questioned – if it really was a question – why East Germany had to copy every ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ that came from the West.
She reached up to the top of the wardrobe, scraping her hand through the dust, searching for her ‘secret’ key: she’d used the same system years later in the Schönhauser Allee flat. Finally, she located it and brought it down to unlock the desk drawer and pull out her diary. The one she’d kept, almost religiously, since the age of five. Not every day. Not even every month. But each year there were at least a few entries. And that first year had filled nearly a third of the notebook, fuelled by the excitement of learning to write, and later by the realisation that – just like at home in the Bergpension Hanneli – somehow she didn’t fit.