Dieter Schmidt had known from his earliest years that his father worked for the government of the GDR. This meant the family was not poor – well, everyone was poor then in East Germany, but they were less poor than others. They lived in one of the Stalinist apartment blocks erected in their thousands in the 1950s. Theirs was a block for government officials but they had one more room than their neighbours. Dieter had attended a local primary school, then a Gymnasium¸ gradually learning from the mixture of apprehension and respect that his teachers showed towards him that his father worked not just for the government, but for its most feared part, the Stasi – East Germany’s lethal combination of intelligence service and secret police.
He never quite knew if this was why he was selected, but at the age of seventeen, as he prepared for his university entrance exams, two men came to visit the household. One of them wore a Homburg hat – he always remembered that – while his companion spoke German badly with an accent he later realised was Russian. His brothers and sisters had been sent outside, and his mother had withdrawn to the kitchen as they asked: Did he like school? Who was his closest friend? Did he have a girlfriend? Did he play football?
The two men had seemed almost bored by their own queries, until suddenly they became less banal. Was he good at languages? He was, as a matter of fact; he was top of his class in both Russian and English. Would he be interested in living abroad? Definitely – who in the grimness of East Germany wouldn’t be? And finally, could he keep a secret – a big secret? Wordlessly, he nodded.
The two men had gone away, without an explanation for their visit, and his parents, whatever they knew, told him nothing. He had almost forgotten about this strange interview when a few months later he was summoned to the Head’s office and found the man in the Homburg sitting there. ‘Sit down,’ the man said curtly, and nodded to the Head, who left the room. As Dieter listened with mounting incredulity, the visitor sketched out what the future was about to consist of.
And now, as he went into his house in Blankensee, calling out hello to Irma, Dieter reflected how accurate his forecast had proved.
He had been sent to Moscow immediately after his exams. There he had been schooled to an extraordinary degree in the details of what was to become his new identity. He felt like a man given a new shirt with instructions to memorise each and every stitch it contained. His name was changed immediately to Dieter Nimitz; thirty years later it took an effort of will to remember that he had been born ‘Schmidt’.
He had expected that he would be given intensive schooling in Russian, but in fact he was schooled intensively in Bavarian German, since, it was explained to him, that was what the young Dieter would have spoken at home. After six months, Dieter had been sent back to East Germany and, after a final emotional farewell with his family, he had left for West Germany. He had travelled with a teenage group sent West on a two-week exchange, but he was the one member of the group to stay behind. Ten days later he entered Hamburg University as a languages student, having apparently freshly graduated from a Gymnasium in Bavaria. He’d worked hard at university, graduating with distinction, and then, obeying instructions he received, he took a job with an import–export firm in Hamburg. There he acquired managerial skills and some business acumen. He stayed in that small family-owned firm for seven years, having no contact with his family in the East – and hearing nothing from his controllers. He had become convinced that they had forgotten about him, when suddenly he was told to apply to the European Commission in Brussels.
By then he had met and married Irma, a German schoolteacher whom he met through friends at a picnic on the banks of the Elbe. Irma was a formidable character, who knew what she wanted and usually got it. She made it clear she wanted Dieter, and he felt both amazed and helpless in the face of her determination; they were married within a year. His explanation for the absence of family on his side at the wedding ceremony was that he had been orphaned early in life and raised by a succession of foster parents.
Other than two sets of instructions as to his employment, Dieter heard nothing from the Russians. As far as he could tell, they had utterly and irrevocably changed his life for no apparent purpose. Yet he felt no anger or regret about this, even when the Berlin Wall fell, since he was confident that one day the Russians would need him for something – he didn’t know what, but he was certain of this. He also did not imagine his life would have been any happier had he stayed in Templin, and there was no prospect of going back there now – he learned of the deaths of his parents when browsing the online edition of the Templin local paper, and about his brothers and sisters, he knew nothing, and assumed they knew nothing of him.
He never revealed the truth about his real past to his wife; she seemed completely content with the version he had told her when they first met. He did sometimes think it strange that she never asked about his family, but they never talked much about their respective childhoods, so he knew very little about hers, either. It just was not something they ever discussed.
But from time to time, and more frequently as he got older, he thought of the man in the Homburg hat and the months in Moscow. At those times he felt certain that since a foreign power had gone to enormous pains to make him into something he was not, he would one day learn that there was a purpose to it all.
11
Dieter let himself into the house with his key. Pushing open the door, he stepped into the little entrance hall and called down the passage that led to the kitchen at the back of the house.
‘Irma. It’s me. I’m back.’
There was no reply, so he walked to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Irma,’ he called, more loudly this time. Again, silence. He was a little surprised, since she was almost always home by now. Even though she worked in her study most evenings, and on the weekends as well, Irma liked to be home when he returned from his week in Brussels.
She had done well in her career as a teacher, and was now Head of the Freitang school, a new Gymnasium for immigrant children – once they’d been mostly Afghans and Iraqis; now they’d been joined by Syrians fleeing that country’s never-ending spiral of violence. The Freitang did not discriminate between its pupils on grounds of race or national origin or religion, but it was nonetheless selective – all its students were of above average intelligence, and many of them were clearly gifted. Though most of them had survived extremely traumatic circumstances, they learned astonishingly fast – nearly all were fluent in German within a year, and soon after that were tackling the most difficult parts of the Gymnasium curriculum. The school was especially strong in IT, something that amused Dieter, since Irma was a self-confessed technophobe.
Leaving his case by the stairs, he went into the kitchen. There was no sign of Irma, and no note. He opened the fridge door, wondering what supper would be. Two pork chops sat on a plate and there was a bottle of Riesling, which he didn’t dare open, even though he would dearly like a drink. Irma rationed alcohol in the same way she rationed affection – as something enjoyed in strictly limited doses.
He went upstairs, dumped his bag on the bedroom floor and swapped his jacket for a jumper. At a bit of a loss what to do while he waited for Irma to come home, he went down the corridor and into the small room she used as a study. It looked out over their back garden and he peered through the window just in case she was out there, though he knew it was unlikely as it was he who was the gardener. There was no sign of her.