He said, as if it was another speech, ‘You are not alone again, you are not out of my sight again.’
She ate, she thawed, she drank.
Through a full mouth, swallowing, ‘What do you do with yourself, when you’re not working?’
‘Don’t seem to have much time.’
‘I was only asking.’
‘I read a bit, in the evening, if I’ve the time.’
‘What do you read?’
‘Military history, and my law books – work for the morning.’
‘Is your work good?’
‘It’s dismal, but it’s what I have.’
‘What’s important to you?’
‘Important to me, Tracy, is to be my own man.’
She grinned, first time. ‘That matters?’
‘Some people, not many, say it does.’
‘Is that why you came here, to be “my own man”?’
‘Have you finished?’
She nodded. The last of the sauce from the last of the burger dripped onto her blankets. She reached for another can and he passed it her. He took the boxes, squashed them small and shoved them into the room rubbish bin. She watched him. He laid his mattress across the doorway. He came close to her, her eyes following him, and he bent and switched off the light. It took him moments to accustom himself to the light in the room, faint through the curtains. He sat on the end of her bed and pulled off his shoes and socks, his shirt and trousers. He folded each item and placed them next to his pillow, with his shoes. He stripped to his vest and underpants. He crawled into the cold of the bed, hugged himself for warmth. Her arm hung from below her blankets, near h head.
‘Josh…‘ A whisper.
‘Yes?’
‘You didn’t tell me. Is it why you came here, to be your own man?’
‘I’m pretty tired. Keep it till the morning.’
He heard the rhythm of her breathing.
‘Josh..
‘Yes?’
‘What sort of team do we make?’
‘Pretty bloody awful.’
‘Josh..
‘For God’s sake.’
‘A good enough team to break the bastards?’
‘Maybe.’
He rolled over from his back to his side, away from her and her hanging hand. He shivered.
‘Josh..
‘I’m trying to get to sleep.’
‘Josh… If anyone ever called you a chatty old bugger, they lied.’
‘Goodnight, Tracy.’
He heard her finish the second can. She threw it away over the floor of the room. It clattered against the wall by the window. He pulled the blankets tighter on his shoulders.
Chapter Ten
‘I can’t help you. You have travelled from England? A great journey. I have been here for three years only. I was a church youth leader in Schwerin.’
He was a pleasant-faced young man. He shrugged. He stood at the gate across the road from the church. By the side of the house his wife hung washing on a line. There was a good wind off the sea and sunshine. Small children played at the woman’s feet.
‘I can’t help you because I have never heard such a business spoken of in Rerik. I know the names of those who come to my church and they are the few in this town, the majority do not care to come. Those who worship with me have not talked of it.’
Josh sensed that, beside him, she sagged.
She had needed the help so that she would not have to bang on doors and traipse from road to road. They had talked about it in the car, the long drive on the small roads to the south, past the lone farms and the cranes pecking in the fields, the need to find the pastor because he would be able to unlock the doors.
‘I have to tell you, the past here, and everywhere through the East, is a closed book. You will not find people who wish to talk of the past. They were dark times and there are few who want light thrown on those times.’
He looked at her.
She was turning away. Her chin jutted in determination. It was a small community in a half-moon around the inner sea, bordered to the north by the peninsula. They had laid too great a weight on the pastor, at the heart of the community, opening doors that would otherwise be locked to them. She was walking away. He nodded to the young man, thanked him, for nothing, and there was pain on the young face that recognized the failure to help. Josh grimaced. He followed Tracy.
The voice called from behind him.
‘I came here three years ago when my predecessor died. There is somebody else who could perhaps be of assistance to you. There was a pastor who came to Rerik when my predecessor was away, he lives here now. He came every year to Rerik for twenty years. I cannot say that he would wish to talk of this matter.’
She was rooted still. Her head turned. She demanded and was given the name, the address, the direction.
‘People do not talk of the past, there is nothing of pride in the past.’
They left him frowning and walked by the old red-brick church with the steep tower where there was a nest box for kestrels. An elderly woman in a formal coat sat on a bench in the sunshine in the graveyard past the church. They walked on the small main street and a shop-keeper was sweeping hard at the snow on the pavement. A woman was pushing up the shutters from the front window of a craft shop. A workman from the council shovelled rubbish from the gutter into his wheeled bin. Josh could not sense the past here. Neat small homes and precious tidy shops. He could not sense that this was a place of murder in cold blood. They walked by the fenced gardens and the little wired compounds for chickens, and the sheds where a single pig was kept or a ewe or geese. It seemed to him to be a place of peace, but when he looked across the water, to the peninsula, he saw the faint shape of buildings among the trees.
They came to a bungalow, small and humble, facing the water and the peninsula and the wall of trees. It was newly painted. An old woman, grey-haired and small, was sweeping the path. Josh smiled at her and gave the name that he had been told. She was so helpful, so keen to please. Her husband, the retired pastor, was at the dentist in Bad Doberan and would return in two hours. He thanked her. The sun shone on the small bungalow. He felt fouclass="underline" he blasted his way, her way, into a place of peace, where the past was forgotten.
He said briskly, ‘We’ve two hours to lose.’
Tracy gazed into his face. ‘You don’t believe it, do you? It’s like you don’t believe it happened.’
Josh said, ‘People go to old battlefields – Waterloo or the Somme, Sedgemoor or Culloden. They see farms and fields and woods. Yes, it’s hard to believe what happened.’
There was the hardness on her face, as if she thought him weak.
‘You were here?’
‘I was here, if you can believe it.’
‘Where? In the car? In a lay-by? Down the road by the shore where he launched from?’
She faced out and gazed on the inner sea, the Salzhaff. Short piers jutted into the water against which small fishing boats were tied. The light sparkled on the water and swans cruised.
‘No, I was in those bloody trees, if you can believe it.’ She jabbed her finger towards the line of poplars beside the road, and the bramble undergrowth between them. ‘I saw him taken from the water and brought back here, and I saw him fight from them and run. I didn’t see him again… I didn’t see him after he ran. I had to go to the car, drive to Berlin, drop the car, go through the checkpoint before midnight. I had to get out of this shit hole, if you can believe it.’
She took his arm and propelled him away from the piers, and the peace that denied the history. The spring sun was warm on Josh’s face. They went to lose two hours, went towards the gate of the base and the fence of rusted wire that straddled the narrow point of the peninsula.
‘It was sex. It was physical sex. I did not have to be an expert to learn what it was. Not love, I do not think it was anything more than a lust for the physical business of sex. It was not necessary for her to tell me, she wore it like the clothes on her. The desire for sex with the Russian was in her eyes and her hands.’
The sunlight came through the window, filtered by the dirt on the glass, and fell on the floor, which was filthy, and on the table, which had not been cleared from his morning meal, and struggled through the smoke of his cigarettes. Albert Perkins paced the small room without comment. He let the American sit and talk.