The Scharmützelsee, three weeks later
The two rivers Oder and Spree define a district in Brandenburg, eastern Germany. Within this district, one can find the Scharmützelsee, which is a narrow lake ten kilometres long. On its wooded western edge, not far from an abandoned campsite, there is a road whose concrete slabs make traffic go lub-dub, lub-dub as the driver heads south, parallel to the blue expanse. The sound is pure East Germany. Poland is less than thirty-five kilometres away. It is winter and the wind today comes from Russia.
The man is driving through the tunnels of colourless trees. Through occasional breaks in the woodland he sees the lake. He is thinking too much of Saskia Brandt. His thumb guides the steering wheel. His seat is fully pushed back. The radio, though German, plays American and English music almost exclusively, and he is singing along to a recent hit, Will Young’s Leave Right Now.
His long, black coat is folded on the passenger seat. On top of it, a map.
His throat is dry. He has not slept in eighteen hours. He has been driving since Calais.
There is still light in the sky behind him as he steps from the rental car and looks at the house, which is far back from the road. He has a hold-all. He swings it across his left shoulder and crosses the broken pavement to a high, chainwire gate. There is a postbox: once white, now peeling to steel. It has a tube underneath for newspapers. A board has been knocked out of the wooden fence, leaving a hole large enough for a child, but he has seen neither children nor adults nor life on the last stretch of this road since leaving Bad Saarow, the spa town on the northern shore of the lake.
He turns. The road is dark behind. No streetlights. Is a certain fear settling upon him, light as a bird on his shoulder? He has been alone in the car for too long. He smiles to himself. Will Young’s fault.
A yellow, laminated notice has been attached to the gate with luggage ties. It reads: ‘Betreten der Baustelle verboten! Eltern haften für ihre Kinder!’ He touches it with his knuckles, thinking that the sign is old and that it must mean ‘Keep out’.
Through the gate, he sees brown, winter-dead weeds. There is no hint of the paths that must once have crossed the garden. Some of the trees are more than thirty feet high. Their bottom halves are frondless, naked stakes. The house is boxy and pinkish. The roof is flat and the last, fading blue of the lake beyond makes him see it as a Greek villa. The thought cannot but fall, stone dead, in the freezing air. The weather is the kind that his mother would call ‘too cold for snow’. He shrugs to adjust the weight of his hold-all and wonders if this is the correct house. There are no lights. Pieces are missing from the arches of the veranda.
Then he sees a shadow cross the wall. It is a woman walking towards him. Just as he sees this, the remaining daylight fails and, suddenly, it is night. The woman has shortish hair and her steps through the weeds are deliberately placed. As he watches her, the garden seems to brighten. Part of him feels that the darkness itself has condensed to form this figure.
She stops at the gate. They look at each other through the links.
‘Saskia?’
‘Hello, Danny. Did you bring the things I asked?’
‘Yes, of course. Absolutely.’
The house, Saskia explained as she gave Danny the tour, used to be the dacha of a former Stasi Lieutenant-General who died in Croatia a few months prior to reunification. It was a blank space on the administrative landscape. And it was freezing. There was no electricity and no water. They spoke of nothing in particular. Saskia had erected a tent in the hallway and they entered this small, blue dome at midnight. Danny lay down first and Saskia second, behind him. She pulled a blanket across them. Her left arm rested on his shoulder.
‘Go to sleep,’ she said.
‘You are so very weird.’
He felt the silence. Was she smiling?
Then the cold tip of her nose was against his neck and the inconstant, troubled exhalations become regular and his tiredness overcame him and he slept, the pressure behind his eyes lessening, and he dreamed about her missing hand, wondering where it was right then.
For Saskia, the shelter of his body calmed her as though he were a cave into which she had crawled. She was transported to the night she and Jem had discussed an imminent rendezvous with Wolfgang, when Saskia had pulled on her gloves and rode all the power of her certainty. Now that certainty was cracked: when tested with a knock, its note was wrong. Saskia had wanted to tell Danny to sleep in the car, but she did not—he felt too good. She knew that something fundamental had split in the roots of her relationship with Jem. Saskia thought of the chessboard floor tiles of the dacha’s foyer and pictured the Stasi Lieutenant-General welcoming his guests one summer night. Despite this, despite her unhealed injuries, there was a wetness and engorgement within her more insistent than anything she had felt with Jem. She hated that.
Danny twitched. Her arm moved and a shiver of pain passed through her, but she took it as a cost of this intimacy, whose depth would forever be this moment. No deeper, ever.
The next morning, Danny found Saskia standing in a drawing room. She was a black island among icebergs of dust-sheeted furniture.
‘First things first,’ he said. ‘A diesel generator. Some lights. Blackout curtains. And food. You haven’t eaten, have you?’
She paused long enough to show that she did not want to answer that question. Then, softly, she said, ‘Danny, I need you to go to Argentina. Not yet. But soon.’
He opened his mouth to laugh at this, but the laughter did not come.
‘Argent-fucking-what-now?’
‘He’s there. He wants redemption.’
Suddenly Danny was angry. ‘And what do you want, Saskia?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
At length, she left the house and walked to the shore.
Saskia tried to think of Cory instead of Danny. Over the next three days, the house grew brighter and warmer. Danny installed a generator in the basement and gas heaters in every room. Saskia scrubbed the windows and floors as hard as her strength permitted, then sat and watched Danny paint. He wore a T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. He looked so English. He noticed her watching and grinned.
‘Like what you see?’
She tried to suppress her smile. Then it was raining again and she walked to the window and saw the darkening greyness of Scharmützelsee. The slow waves looked like the saw-tooth pattern on a Japanese sword. She felt, did not see, Danny’s concern. She ignored it. She thought of Cory again and wondered whether a bullet of smart matter would ding the window and put a coin-sized hole through her heart.