An old woman approached him and invited him to buy some flowers. With a smile, he bought a small posy.
Shortly afterwards he went where his thoughts had so often returned. He was pleased to see that the house was still standing. It had been partly refurbished and there was a light in the window. Much as he longed to, he did not dare peek inside, but he had the impression that a family lived there. A television set gave off a flickering light from what had been the living room of the old landlady who had lost her family in the war. Everything inside would be different now, of course. Perhaps the eldest child was sleeping in their old room.
He kissed the posy of flowers, placed it at the door and made the sign of the cross over it.
A few years earlier he had flown to Budapest and met Ilona’s elderly mother and two brothers. Her father was dead by then, never having discovered his daughter’s fate.
He spent all day sitting with Ilona’s mother, who showed him photographs of Ilona from when she was a baby through to her student years. The brothers, who like him were beginning to age, told him what he already knew: nothing had come of their search for answers about Ilona. He could sense their bitterness, the resignation that had taken root in them long ago.
The day after he arrived in Leipzig he went to the old security police headquarters, which were still in the same building on Dittrichring 24. Instead of police at the reception desk in the foyer, there was now a young woman who smiled as she handed him a brochure. Still able to speak passable German, he introduced himself as a visitor to the city and asked to look around. Other people had entered the building for the same purpose, and walked in and out through open and unlocked doors, free to go where they pleased. When she heard his accent the young woman asked where he was from. Then she told him that an archive was being set up in the old Stasi offices. He was welcome to listen to a talk that was about to begin, then tour the building. She showed him to the corridor leading to where chairs had been arranged, every one of them occupied. Some of the audience were standing up against the walls. The talk was about the imprisonment of dissident writers in the 1970s.
After the talk he went to the office in the alcove where Lothar and the man with the thick moustache had interrogated him. The cell next door was open and he went inside. He thought again that Ilona might have been there. There were graffiti and scratches all over the walls, made with spoons, he imagined.
He had put in a formal application to look at the files when the Stasi archive opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its purpose was to help people delve into the fate of loved ones who had gone missing, or find information about themselves that had been collected by neighbours, colleagues, friends and family, under the system of interactive surveillance. Journalists, academics and people who suspected they had been documented in the files could apply for access, which he had done by letter and telephone from Iceland. Applicants had to explain in detail why they needed to study the files and what they were looking for. He knew there were thousands of large brown paper bags full of files that had been shredded in the last days of the East German regime; a huge team was employed on taping them back together. The scale of the records was incredible.
His trip to East Germany produced nothing. No matter how he searched, he could not find a scrap of information about Ilona. Her file had probably been destroyed, he was told. Possibly she had been sent to a labour camp or gulag in the old Soviet Union, so there was a slim chance that he could find some record of her in Moscow. It was also conceivable that she had died in police custody in Leipzig or in Berlin if she had been sent there.
Nor did he find any information in the Stasi files about whichever traitor had turned his beloved girlfriend over to the security police.
He sat and waited for the police to call. He had done that all summer; now it was autumn and nothing had happened yet. Certain that the police would knock on his door sooner or later, he sometimes wondered how he would react. Would he act nonchalantly, deny the accusations and feign surprise? It would depend on what evidence they had. He had no idea what this might be, but imagined that it would be substantial, if they had managed to trace a lead to him in the first place.
He stared into space and drifted back once again to his years in Leipzig.
Four words from his last encounter with Lothar had remained etched into his mind right up to the present day and would remain there for ever. Four words that said it all.
Take a closer look.
29
Erlendur and Elinborg arrived unannounced, knowing very little about the man they were going to see, except that his name was Hannes and he had once studied in Leipzig. He ran a guest house in Selfoss and grew tomatoes as a sideline. They knew where he lived, so they drove straight there and parked outside a bungalow identical to all the others in the little town, apart from not having been painted for a long time and having a concreted space in front of it where a garage was perhaps supposed to stand. The garden around the house was well kept, with hedges and flowers and a small birdhouse.
In the garden was a man they took to be in his seventies struggling with a lawnmower. The motor would not catch and he was clearly out of breath from tugging at the starting cord, which as soon as he released it darted back into its hole again like a snake. He did not notice them until they were standing right next to him.
“A heap of old junk, is it?” Erlendur asked as he looked down at the lawnmower and inhaled smoke from his cigarette. He had lit up the moment he got out of the car. Elinborg had forbidden him to smoke on the way. His car was awful enough anyway.
The man looked up and stared at them, two strangers in his garden. He had a grey beard and grey hair that was starting to thin, a tall and intelligent forehead, thick eyebrows and alert brown eyes. On his nose sat a pair of glasses that might have been in fashion a quarter of a century before.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Is your name Hannes?” Elinborg asked back.
The man said yes and gave them a probing look.
“Do you want some tomatoes?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Erlendur said. “Are they any good? Elinborg here is an expert.”
“Didn’t you study in Leipzig in the 1950s?” Elinborg said.
The man regarded her blankly. It was almost as if he did not understand the question, and certainly not the reason it was being asked. Elinborg repeated it.
“What’s going on?” the man said. “Who are you? Why are you asking me about Leipzig?”
“You first went there in 1952, didn’t you?” Elinborg said.
“That’s right,” he said in surprise. “So what?”
Elinborg explained to him that the investigation into the skeleton found in Kleifarvatn in the spring had led to Icelandic students in East Germany. This was merely one of many questions raised in connection with the case, she told him, without mentioning the Russian spying device.
“I… what… I mean…” Hannes stuttered. “What does that have to do with those of us who were in Germany?”
“Leipzig, to be absolutely precise,” Erlendur said. “We’re enquiring in particular about a man called Lothar. Does that name ring a bell? A German. Lothar Weiser.”
Hannes stared at them in astonishment, as if he had just seen a ghost. He looked at Erlendur, then back at Elinborg.
“I can’t help you,” he said.