And we visited Tiergarten, then as now. Fifteen years old then, fifty-five now. It seemed to me that the park was more or less unchanged. I decided that life was short, and said as much to Castor at regular intervals. Life is short, a dog’s life even shorter. We sat on a park bench and ate a curry wurst. What shall we do with the time we have left? I asked my dog. Eat more German sausages was his suggestion — I could see that just by looking at him, and it seemed to me that I was now seeing the world as it really was. For the first time. I burst out laughing: it soon passed, but that was a moment when the sun came out from behind a cloud and I started laughing, there on a bench in Tiergarten.
The first decision I made was not to go back to Sweden. Going back to a familiar environment, making up some kind of story about Martin having disappeared, directing my sorrowful steps back to the Monkeyhouse. . No, that felt like an utter impossibility, and I didn’t spend many minutes thinking about it.
The second decision was just as straightforward: we would not continue to Morocco. I had never set foot in that country, there was nobody and nothing awaiting us there, and I had no illusions about the prospects of a solitary woman with a dog being able to establish a foothold there.
So what was the alternative? The alternative was to find a suitable place in Europe in which to spend the winter. A suitable country. It was distinctly possible of course that I might have a nervous breakdown, I was the first to acknowledge that. Everything could very easily go to hell, but while waiting for that day and that moment to arrive I couldn’t simply sit on a park bench in Tiergarten and eat sausages. Sorry, Castor.
And so there were a number of practical details to be attended to. It was vital that I didn’t leave behind any traces that could be followed up. I mustn’t allow use of my credit card and mobile telephone to betray routes and stopping places. In case somebody came looking for us — the police, or a husband who had somehow managed to find a way out of the bunker.
During the days spent in Berlin I became increasingly unsure of how I judged the latter possibility. I had no clear idea of how long a person can survive without food and water, but I assumed his worst enemy would be the cold. I recalled having read that some people had survived for more than a fortnight without water, perhaps as long as a month, but they had been isolated in temperate conditions. What was the temperature in the bunker? Hardly more than seven or eight degrees, I estimated, and of course it would get much colder at night.
I tried to refrain from thinking about what role the rats might play — but surely they must have had some way of getting in and out? Or did they use the apertures facing the sea? I was sure they were too small for a grown adult, but of course they were big enough for a rat.
Anyway, what were the realistic chances of a man being able to get out?
How likely was it that some walker would come past and hear somebody crying for help?
And how likely was the other scenario — that the police would start looking for Castor and me? If somebody found a dead body in a bunker on the Polish Baltic coast, how would they go about discovering who it was?
No identification documents. No mobile. Did Martin have anything in his pockets that could indicate Sweden? I didn’t know. But in any case the fifty-year-old literary colossus Martin Holinek from Sweden had not been reported missing, and his fingerprints and DNA were not in any register. Unless of course the police had taken his prints that day when he was being interrogated on suspicion of rape. I didn’t know. How could I? Would some kind of suspicion crop up in the head of Professor Soblewski if he read in his local newspaper about a macabre discovery on a remote beach? There was surely no reason to fear that it would. Or was there?
Good questions, perhaps. But as early as my third day in Berlin I decided to regard them as irrelevant. The answers had nothing to do with my strategies for the future, and I needed to plan and act as if everything was under control. Whatever happened outside my horizons did not affect our circumstances — Castor’s and my circumstances, that is. Make the best of the situation, that was all that mattered, and keep plugging away.
I realized quite quickly that I had a cool, logical brain, and concluded that it was largely because I wasn’t in a hurry. Despite everything, I wasn’t being hounded, wasn’t under stress. There was time to analyse and ponder upon every step and every measure, and if I were to decide that I needed more time there was nothing to prevent me from extending our stay at the hotel for a few days. In any case, Berlin would be the last place where I left any trace of my presence, I made my mind up about that. The last place where I used any of our credit cards, and the place where I finally switched off our mobile phones. All the newfangled inventions that were so easy to track down.
The fact that I would have to keep on using our car was possibly a complication, but stealing another car or trying to change the registration plates seemed to be quite simply out of the question. If I had murdered a president or a prime minister I would probably have considered such actions, but I wasn’t guilty of such crimes after all.
For the foreseeable future nobody with conventional resources was going to be able to find us: that was the basic fact that I had to grasp and adhere to.
And I did so.
*
When we left the Albrechtshof early in the morning of the twenty-eighth of October, I had succeeded in withdrawing from various banks and ATMs a total of 45,000 euros, which together with the 10,000 US dollars and the 12,000 euros we already had in our travelling funds ought to be sufficient ready money to keep our heads above water for at least six months. And if we lived frugally, for considerably longer.
And during the misty morning hours on the motorway between Berlin and Magdeburg, I decided on England. I had toyed with the idea of both Spain and Provence — and Italy and Greece as well, to be honest — but in the end what really mattered was not the climate. I wanted Castor and myself to withdraw to a country where I could speak the language reasonably well, could read a daily newspaper without any problems and follow the news broadcasts on the radio and television. I’m not absolutely clear why those factors felt so essential — but God knows, that was not the only thing I was not absolutely clear about.
The following night we stayed in a small hotel in Münster, literally in the shadow of the big cathedral. When we checked in I explained that both my credit cards and passport had been stolen, and asked to pay in advance in cash. No problem. It is a distinct advantage to be a respectable-looking fifty-five-year-old woman: people tend to believe you, whatever you say.
Nor were there any problems when it came to getting Castor across the English Channel — but there would have been if I hadn’t bluffed my way through customs. I only became aware of the British regulations regarding the movement of animals when I got to the tunnel terminal in Calais, and after thinking things over carefully I decided to take a chance. I adjusted all my luggage to make room for Castor, and covered him over with a blanket: I prayed to God that nobody would discover him, and my prayers were answered. I had to present my own passport, of course, but as far as I could see it wasn’t scanned — and so I’m not sure whether my arrival in the UK was registered at all.