‘Where did he live?’
‘With his parents on Saarbrucker Strasse. The staff sergeant checked it to see that we weren’t being conned. Apartment nine, third floor, number twelve on Saarbrucker Strasse… She’s a lovely girl, very kind, very gentle, my children worshipped her. Who’s helped by opening the dirty side of history?’
Josh let himself out of the house and walked to his car.
She lay in the bed.
It was as she remembered it. It was narrow, made of heavy wood. She lay naked under the old blankets and she could hear his mother moving behind the thin wood partition. Once, a long time before, in Hansie’s bed, there had been no sound from the other two rooms of the apartment, the shop closed and his mother and father away at his uncle’s home in Erfurt. Her skin was warmed by the roughness of the sheets and by the weight of the blankets. She had loved Hansie in the darkness of alleyways, in the shadow of deep doorways, but once, when his mother and father were away, he had brought her to the apartment. Crawling on her, climbing above her, loving her. She stretched up her arms, as if she reached for him, as she had reached for him. She held the void, clasped it, sought again to find the love. She had brought the condoms from the lavatory (female) at Brigade
She had thought she gave him courage. They had left separately before daylight, walked on Saarbrucker Strasse in different directions and met at the Trabant car. They had gone in the car to Rostock…
She remembered the small chest. After they had made love in his bed, he had taken the dark clothes from the drawers of the chest, because she had told him he should wear deep browns, blacks and hard greys that night, and as he had dressed she had reached from the bed, naked, into her bag, which held the electronic monitoring equipment to check that she had the camouflage cream for his face and his hands, for the night.
She remembered the dressing gown, hanging on the back of the door, and protruding from under it, slung on the same hook, were his competition swimming goggles. He had a foot problem, right foot, needed a built-up shoe. He could run only with difficulty, was handicapped sufficiently to avoid military service, but he could swim well enough to believe that he could cross the wide water of the Salzhaff.
He had been the only boy into whose bed she had gone naked. She lay and reached for him, to hold him, to smell the sweet sweat of him, to feel him, and her fingers groped at nothing.
In the morning he had done the court, had sat alongside Mr Protheroe and fed him the relevant papers, like a loader at a shoot. He was necessary but unequal.
He had thought that ‘Sunray’, alone in his garden, would have crumpled under the weight of the responsibility that had won him his medal.
In the early evening, as the partners shrugged into their coats and locked the doors of their offices, he cleared his desk.
‘Goodnight, Mr Greatorex, I’ll see you the day after tomorrow, first thing.’
‘Why do you do this?’
She had come on the U-Bahn. At the top of the tunnel steps she had been met by the woman, Hildegard. A hesitation. The woman looked away, to the snow-brushed pavement, to the high lights and the flat roofs of the tower blocks.
She said, ‘You met my father. To you, a stranger, he would appear as any other older man. You came to our home and to you, a stranger, it would have seemed like any other home. He was a poet. He tried to write the poetry of satire, the target of his satire was the regime. Perhaps he was not sufficiently clever. He did not practise self-censorship with expertise. The writers met and discussed their work in the privacy of their homes. They were all friends and he did not believe he could be betrayed from inside the circle. My father complained to his friends, inside the circle, of the denial of his right to publication. You understand, not an angry complaint just grumbling. He was taken by the Stasi, brought here, interrogated, he was charged with “behaviour hostile to the state and characteristic of class warfare”. Do you understand that? He was sent to the prison at Cottbus for two years. When he came out it was impossible for him to find work other than as a road labourer, and he had been a teacher, an intellectual. My mother was dismissed from her job in a ministry. She took the work in a hospital of standing ten hours a day in an elevator and pressing the buttons for the elevator to go up or down. I had no chance of going to the university. The Wall came down. We were promised the new dawn. My father was in Lenin Allee. He told me that day it was raining. A car came past him and splashed the water over his legs, a big BMW. It was driven by the man who had interrogated him. My father is the loser, he is now in a ghetto of failure. He is too old to go back to teaching, too old to work as a labourer on the road, and the man who destroyed him is driving in the warmth of a BMW car.’
Tracy said, ‘Why are you doing this?’
The woman looked at Tracy Barnes through her thick spectacles, and her eyes were distorted by the lenses. ‘Because I loved him, because we worked together in the railyard, because he brought light and laughter to me, because his father says they killed him, because you have come to find the evidence.’
The woman gave Tracy a pair of narrow steel-rimmed spectacles, and a scarf to wear over her hair. She was handed a plastic-coated ID card, and she saw that the photograph on the card was that of a woman with dark hair and narrow steel- rimmed spectacles.
There was a policeman in the shadows, shivering and stamping his feet, and the woman called cheerfully to him. It was a modern fortress complex, great buildings around a wide central open space. They went down a ramp to a steel door, well lit and covered by a security camera, and the windows beside the door were protected by metal bars. The woman rang the bell and held up her card in front of the camera and Tracy copied her. She had memorized the name on the ID. Inside at a desk, behind plate glass, there were two guards. She did what the woman did, and showed the card, scrawled the name, the signature, the time, as the woman had. The woman had moved away from her, to the other end of the desk, and she talked animatedly with the guards, distracted them, then went fast towards the inner door of plate steel. Tracy followed. The door was opened from the desk.
In the corridor beyond, the door slid shut behind them.
‘We have six hours,’ the woman said briskly. ‘Maybe there are a hundred million sheets of paper, maybe there are ten million card indexes.’
They went down narrow concrete stairs, poorly lit.
‘Maybe there are a million photographs – I do not know how many kilometres of audio-tape. Everything was filed. They kept, believe me, in many thousands of sealed glass jars the smells of their victims, they stole their socks and their underwear and put them in jars so that later if dogs had to search for those people they would have their smells. Most of all, there is the paper. The dictatorship of today does not need to shoot people, or gas them, or hang them. They do not have blood on their hands, but ink.’
They were at the bottom floor. Ahead was a door of reinforced steel, set with additional bars, opened by a lever.
‘You must have names and dates and places. You have that? If you do not then we search for a coin on the ocean floor.’
Tracy said, ‘Hauptman Dieter Krause, counter-espionage at Rostock, killed Hans Becker at Rerik, near to the Soviet base at Wustrow, on the evening of the twenty-first of November nineteen eighty-eight.’
The woman wrenched down the lever. The cavern ran as far as Tracy could see. As far as she could see were the metal racks on which were stacked the files. Cardboard file covers neatly tied with string, bound with elastic, as far as she could see. The racks were from the floors to the ceilings, and they had come down two flights of stairs.