‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Why was it a mistake? They questioned him for two years. At the end they found he still knew more about them than they knew about him. He held all the secrets. Their secrets, secrets they didn’t even know about their own political leaders. Don’t forget, for nearly thirty years Schmidtke was at the heart of East Germany’s infiltration of West German politics, banking and business. He knew it all. I’m amazed he wasn’t killed in prison, actually. There were plenty of people who would have appreciated him more if he were in the grave. But he had very powerful allies. And still has. After two years of interrogation, the Germans let him go, under their surveillance, into a quiet, paid retirement in a village called Tegernsee in southern Germany.’
Finn rolls over on the sofa and puts his hands on my knees and seems to study them as they stroke my skin.
‘Tegernsee,’ he says, lost in the movement of his hand. ‘It’s a charming little place on a lake, you’d love it, Rabbit. And it’s very convenient for the Swiss border. The town has a number of interesting residents, in fact, as well as Schmidtke.’
Finn’s hand moves around the inside of my knee.
I take it and move it away. ‘Go on.’
Finn pauses and sighs and drinks from the brandy glass until it’s empty. Nana hobbles to the sideboard and brings the bottle over to refill it. Finn thanks her by blowing a kiss. He’s half sitting up. It’s as if he’s pretending to be drunk. And then he lies back again, sliding his hand across my stomach, and continues.
‘The German intelligence service, the BND, put a watch on Schmidtke’s apartment in Tegernsee from a field across the river at the back. It was a good spot with a clear view. In winter, that is, when they set it up. In the spring, however, a wall of leaves sprang up from the trees that grew up on the riverbank, and all their beautiful Zeiss lenses were met with this thick green wall that cut off Schmidtke’s apartment completely. Famed German intelligence. Vorsprung durch kockup.’
‘But the British, they…you’d already got something out of him, hadn’t you?’ I say. ‘You knew the secrets the Germans wanted to find?’
‘He told us only a little of what he told the Germans,’ Finn corrects me. ‘It was plenty, believe me, and they knew we knew. We waited for them to act on it, but they didn’t. It was too costly for them, of course. Schmidtke was starting to unravel thirty years of KGB successes in West Germany right up to the highest level, so they put the lid on everything he told them and eventually they didn’t want to hear any more.’
‘Did the British tell the Germans everything Schmidtke told them?’ I ask.
‘We share all our intelligence,’ Finn replies straight-faced.
I laugh. ‘But not in this case.’
‘No. Not in this case,’ Finn says and smiles. ‘Or not as far as I know.’
He finally unrolls himself from the sofa and throws the two remaining logs from the basket on to the fire. He begins to put on a coat and hat, and the white felt boots Nana had brought back for him from a tourist trip she’d made to Nizhny Novgorod. Then he picks up the log basket. He looks at me and I get up from the rug to get dressed for the cold too.
We walk into the forest far away from where we keep the logs at the back of the dacha. It’s pitch dark, the first hour of the New Year, the new century, the new millennium. The snow is falling weakly inside the wood, like the last of the seed dribbling from the bottom of a packet, but when we emerge into the clearings beside the pond, it is robust, the big flakes driving down unimpeded with an apparent urgency to bury everything deeply and for ever.
Finn chats nervously. He tells me about a Vietnamese refugee he and some friends had sponsored when they were at university. The boy had arrived at a military airbase in Scotland in mid-winter and three days after he’d arrived he’d woken up to see the landscape white with snow. He’d called Finn in a panic, believing there’d been a nuclear attack.
‘Perception is sometimes a traitor,’ Finn says to me after he’s finished this story. ‘And sometimes it’s the truth. How do you distinguish when it’s one or the other?’
‘Instinct maybe,’ I reply. ‘That’s all we have, isn’t it?’
‘But we’re afraid to use it most of the time. For most of us, truth is merely facts. That’s where we feel safest.’
We walk further into the forest and stand by a pond which is seamlessly coated with snow so that it has become one with the surrounding land.
‘What do your instincts tell you now?’ he asks me.
‘About what?’
‘About where we’re going, you and I. Us.’
‘I don’t think about it. I don’t think about you much when we’re not together,’ I say, and it’s true. ‘I have my survival to think about.’
He holds my hand through our thick gloves.
‘And what if you did think about us, Rabbit, about where we both want to go?’
‘I can’t think about it,’ I say.
‘Or won’t,’ he says.
I am silent.
‘Let me tell you, then. My instincts say we should get out of all this. Retire, if you like. Remove the obstacles, our work, these forces around us, everything that conspires and will continue to conspire against our future. Let go of everything that restricts us from being true together. My instinct says we should reduce us to just you, me and the spirit that joins us.’
I consider what he’s saying. I fear the treason he’s suggesting. His to me, or mine to my country? I don’t know. And if Finn is true, what might it do to me, this treason? And I have other fears too. But these fears are of the wrong things; they are fears of a change in my life so massive I can barely imagine it. My fear is of leaving everything familiar to me, everything in my life up to this point, in exchange for Finn and uncertainty. It is a base and useless fear. I know that what I should be afraid of is the opposite. I should be afraid of not leaving everything familiar to me. I should fear not changing.
We walk around the trees now, there’s no path, and step over broken branches with a coating of snow that bulges over them like baggy trousers and dwarfs the things it settles on.
‘It’s the flexibility of snow that pleases me most,’ Finn says. ‘The way it joins the most uneven surfaces together in beautiful, soft curves. It unites the whole landscape. It seems to heal the earth.’
But I’m not really listening. I coldly assess the thought that Finn has put into my head, the thought of him and me, with nothing to disturb us. Then I look for the familiar and bring us cruelly back to the present.
‘Who is Vladimir Putin?’ I ask. ‘I want to know what you think.’
Finn looks at me, to give me the opportunity to reconsider, perhaps.
‘That’s the question,’ he replies at last, and a shadow crosses his face; a shadow of grief, maybe, that a moment devoted to us and us alone has lost a rare opportunity.
He picks up a stick and dusts off the snow to reveal fungi still clinging to its rottenness.
‘History is a broken toy,’ he says, carefully handling the stick. ‘It breaks and gets fixed and breaks again. Bits fall off and are replaced. It breaks over and over again and everything is replaced and everything remains the same. History is like the axe that has its handle replaced over and over. Is it still the same axe? It functions in the same way. History is just a toy in the sense that people want it to function in the same way, and it does. It still breaks and is still mended in just the same ways.
‘What happened with KoKo in 1961 in East Germany sowed the seeds of a plan and the Plan grew and grew in ambition but it was always interrupted, thwarted by events and forces. When the Wall came down in 1989, we in the West thought it was all over. The Cold War was won. That’s how it seemed. The end of history, some idiot called it. But like so much in history our thoughts were coloured by our hopes- and our ill-conceived perceptions. You see, the past wouldn’t go away. The Plan only lay dormant. Yeltsin, he was the real hope. But he himself and events around him conspired against a truly new Russia. In the nineties, you know this, Anna, Yeltsin could have got rid of the KGB for good, stuck a knife through its heart. But there was so much turmoil in the country that he didn’t quite make it. He didn’t have the time, or the will to make the final push. Perhaps he didn’t dare. Whatever. And now? Well, now the KGB is back and it will be stronger than it’s ever been. Putin’s Russia will be the KGB’s Russia, just as it’s been for the past seventy years. But it will be so with a major difference. This time, economic chaos will be replaced by economic abundance. The KGB will be richer than any organisation on earth, richer than the CIA. And the Plan will rise from its bed, nourished by the new men of power.’