He was walking with his daughter when the mobile phone warbled. He let Magda’s hand go, reached into an inner pocket, saw the number and did not recognise it. Few people had his personal phone details, and the majority of those he worked with did not. It was a way to protect his privacy. Had the number been generally available his phone would have controlled his life. He answered.
‘Yes? Steffen…’ There was a pause. A wrong number? He spoke again. ‘This is Steffen.’
It annoyed him. He was a busy man, sometimes almost overwhelmed by the volume of work that his success and reputation brought him, and he valued the moments he spent with his daughter, who was seven. She had been talking about her day at school, the art lesson.
His own number was given by the caller, but not in German: the man spoke in the Farsi of his past. The caller waited.
He repeated, in German. ‘This is Steffen, yes.’
The caller persisted, again in Farsi. Was he not Soheil, the Star? Was his name not Soheil? He called himself Steffen. He was married to Lili, who had been a theatre nurse at the Universitatsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf. From the day of their wedding, he had cut his links with an old world and his history. Lili and her parents had expected it of him, and his patients did not wish to be treated – at a time of personal crisis – by a specialist who was obviously an Iranian immigrant. He had a pale complexion and his German was excellent; the habits and culture of the new identity had been easy to acquire. His wife was blonde and pretty, and his daughter was not obviously mixed-race. They had settled well into the prosperous society of the city they had chosen as their home. His daughter tugged at his arm, wanted his attention.
Again, was he not Soheil, the Star?
It was fourteen years since he had left Tehran. On the day he took the flight to Europe, he had recently qualified at the Tehran University medical school. His talents were such that he had been sent to the neuro-surgery wing of the UKHE to study under the tutelage of a Chefarzt. He had not gone home. He had married, changed his name, had believed he was forgotten – it was now four and a half years since the embassy in Berlin had last contacted him to make certain he was ‘happy and content’ and to tell him that his achievements were watched with pride by those who had provided him with the opportunity to go abroad. Magda tugged harder. He let go of her hand and she sagged back – he thought she might fall.
He could have cut the call. He could have switched off the phone, taken his daughter’s hand, walked on beside the Hansahafen and put the contact out of his mind. He was asked if it was convenient to talk. There was an edge to the voice.
His thoughts meandered: to speak in German or Farsi? To answer to Soheil or demand to be called Steffen?
‘The professor of oncology in Tehran, almost your foster-father, asked to be remembered to you. He is old now, and his wife is in poor health. Times at home are difficult, in what is their country and yours, Soheil. There is violence, and there are difficult people who exercise authority in some areas. The taint of treason is attached to those who befriend the few who distance themselves from the Islamic revolution. Is it convenient to talk?’
He asked for the identity of the caller, and was told he was just a humble functionary at the embassy in Berlin. Magda had gone to the edge of the quay, where there was a drop of three metres to the waterline. She was beside a gap between two traditional sailing boats. He could not shout at her because she might flinch and trip. He remembered the professor who had reared him from the age of nine after his parents, both doctors, had died in a forward medical post, under mortar attack during the battle to liberate Khorramshahr, when tending the wounded. The professor and his wife, childless, had taken the orphan into their home… He understood the nature of the threat to them. He did not contradict and give his German name… He had qualified with the highest marks, was the son of martyred parents and had practised for a year in a slum district of the capital. He had therefore been permitted to study abroad – but had not returned. He answered in his native language. His wife and daughter, his colleagues at the Klinik in Hamburg and the medical school in Lubeck, between which he split his time, understood no Farsi. His daughter reached into his overcoat pocket for the bread they always brought when they walked beside the harbour.
The blunt question: ‘You work in the field of brain tumours?’
‘I do.’
‘There is a procedure called “stereo-tactic”?’
‘It is in my field.’
‘There are cases where a condition is inoperable in conventional surgery, but where stereo-tactic is an alternative?’
‘There are.’
‘You have a high reputation, but you have not forgotten your family’s roots – your parents’ heroism, your foster-father’s sacrifices, the state’s generosity?’
‘What do you want of me?’ His daughter threw bread into the air. Gulls flew close to her, screaming. They had huge predatory beaks.
‘That you see a patient.’
‘For whom nothing can be done in Tehran?’
‘Nothing.’ It was a cold voice. He presumed the patient, terminally ill without a procedure that was always a last resort and fraught with complication, would be a senior man in the clerical or revolutionary hierarchy. ‘We are talking to you because nothing further is possible in Tehran.’
‘The patient would come here or to Hamburg?’ The bread was gone and the child was at his side, tugging his sleeve, and saying loudly that she wanted to go home. She started to pull him towards the Burgtorbrucke, and he let her take him.
‘It is intended the patient would travel.’
‘There are more experienced consultants in Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris and London, men better qualified than I.’
‘We would not have the discretion that we gain from you, the confidentiality. There will be no electronic messages, only brief telephone communication. I will come to visit you, Soheil, when the travel arrangements are complete. I am so glad that I can report your co-operation.’
The call ended. He understood. Discretion and confidentiality were the keys. Perhaps it was a prosecutor with blood on his hands, who now faced his God, would imminently be with Him, and was important enough to demand the full resources of the state to buy him a few more months, or a general in the Revolutionary Guard Corps, or an imam. He could not run from them. He held tight to the little girl’s hand as they crossed the bridge and headed for the fine villa that was their home.
His daughter – also perhaps vulnerable and a weapon to be used against him – sprinted ahead. He shouted at her to slow down, and she turned, wide-eyed, shocked by his anger. He accepted that even here, in his adopted town, he could not be free of them – ever.
He let himself into the office, closed the door behind him and locked it.
She was at her desk. Len Gibbons noted that, in his absence, she had turned her room and the one allocated to him into something that was as much a home as a workplace. She had arranged two small vases of flowers, one on his desk, which he could see through the open connecting door, and one on hers, and a tray for tea-making lay beside the electric kettle, with a biscuit tin. On a wall away from the photographs of bombs, the featureless picture of a target and the enlarged map of the marsh region between the confluence of the rivers and the frontier, she had hung a picture. He smiled as he dumped his bag down and shrugged off his coat. There was a big sky in which birds flew and a long meadow between forests, in which an elephant wandered, a scarlet parrot perched and a deer grazed. In the background, far down the meadow, a robed man led two naked – or near naked – figures.