‘In the last days of the occupation of Wustrow by the Soviet troops, the people in Rerik brought them warm clothes and food. The position of the Soviets was desperate as their government collapsed in confusion. We saw little of those troops, but they were not regarded as an occupying force. They were seen as protectors. At the end there was a great sympathy for them.’
Tracy said, ‘God, and he must have been so bloody frightened. He was alone. In front of him was just this bloody great space of water. There wasn’t another way for him but into the water. He could have seen the lights of the town. It was the only chance he had, to go into the water. They didn’t care, back in Berlin. Afterwards it was like a stray dog in Brigade had been run over, no bugger cared.’
There was a small drill area, weeded up and covered with the autumn leaves, and round the area were figures, life size, showing how to march, how to salute, how to stand at attention. Paint had peeled off, leaving them grotesque and amputated. There was a board for aircraft-recognition classes, silhouettes in all profiles of British and American attack aircraft, Harriers and F-16s, Tornadoes and F-15s, Jaguars and the A-b tank busters. It was all rotten, dead, decayed history.
‘Before they left, the Soviet troops tried to take from Wustrow everything that was of value. They stripped electric fittings from the barracks rooms, they took the stoves from the sleeping quarters, they removed the concrete slabs from the pavements, and they even tried to lift the street lights in the base from the concrete by helicopters.’
Tracy said, ‘Those buildings, over there. It’s where the senior officers were. And just there, past the big house, he’d have gone into the water. Look, damn you, look – how far he had to swim. Did anyone care then? Does anyone care now? If it had happened to someone you loved, wouldn’t you, damn you, want to see the bastard responsible smashed?’
Josh gazed out over the water. They stood near to the commanding officer’s house where a door hung loose and flapping. Between the birch trees, beyond the beach, the water in sunlight stretched across to the small homes of Rerik and he could see the church tower beyond the roofs. He shuddered. He was pleased that she had brought him to the deserted base: it was as if she shared with him. The tour was finished.
‘It is dangerous to go off the hard roads in the base. We have found unexploded mortar bombs and tank shells. There is the possibility that chemical weapons were stored here and not removed. The place is now a nature reserve and we have seen the sea eagles here and know they nest and make young.’
They walked behind the group and the guide back towards the gate.
It closed behind them, shutting them out from history.
The sun warmed them. He was thinking of the young man and the terror. His commitment was made.
She breezed into his office.
He stood. Fleming always stood when Mrs Olive Harris came visiting – most of the other desk heads did. She was junior to him, only the deputy on Soviet Desk. He did not stand out of any sense of antiquated courtesy – there were women in Vauxhall Bridge Cross, the modern ones, who took offence if a man stood aside for them in a doorway, in a corridor, at the elevator. He stood because she made him, like many others, nervous.
No preliminaries: there never were with Olive Harris.
‘We’re working up a paper on Russian military morale. Interesting stuff. Reports of small-scale mutinies because of critical shortages, seen as Government’s attempts to subvert military power. Stories of malnutrition, poor discipline, morale on the floor, funding suppressed, had it before but it’s in greater detail. You know, up in the Arctic some units are said to be starving. That means there’s a right dog fight between Government and the armed forces. The Federal Intelligence Service, of course, sides with Government against the military, and that’s a choice little spat.’
There was a husband somewhere, rumoured to be a lecturer at University College – he probably stood up when Mrs Olive Harris came into the room – and there were rumours of children. never could imagine her on her back with her legs wide. A few, from the dark recesses of memory, claimed to have seen her smile. She was small and had grey-white hair tied at the back with an elastic band. She wore, each day, a plain, laundered blouse, a straight skirt and flat black shoes. She was an institution with the Service, part of the fabric of each building it occupied.
‘We’ve a lazy bastard on the desk in Moscow, not for much longer – spends too much time hoovering crumbs from under the Americans’ table. The latest crumb… The minister at Defence rang an FIS general threatening that Special Forces would be sent to liberate an Army officer if the FIS didn’t free him soonest. The said officer is a close friend of Colonel Pyotr Rykov, the minister’s eminence. You’re into Rykov, aren’t you? You’ve things running along the rails with Rykov and his Stasi friend, haven’t you? That reptile Perkins is in Germany, isn’t he? You can call up the full text on your screen, reference RYKOV 497/23. Know how to work it, do you?’
Actually, he had been on a residential course, two weeks, and had attended evening classes to learn mastery of the damn thing.
‘Marry it up. See if there’s useful progeny.’
She was gone to the door. Fleming stood.
He would have been a brave man, the lecturer, when he had served Mrs Olive Harris, and it would have been in the dark and he wouldn’t have been thanked for the sweat.
When the door closed after her he sat.
‘I have nothing to tell you.’
‘You know what happened to them.’
They had waited in the road for him. He came back to the small bungalow with his old face swollen from the dentist’s drill. They had let him park and lock the spotless, polished, ten-year- old scarlet red Wartburg car. Mantle had intercepted the pastor at the low front gate to his handkerchief garden and had explained, curt and brusque, from where they had travelled and why.
‘It is a liberty that you make, to come, to bully.’
‘You know the community, you know what happened to the witnesses.’
‘It is finished. There is no benefit in the resurrection of the past.’
‘The present is only cleaned of the past if there is punishment.’
As the sun had dipped so the cloud had gathered from the north and the wind had grown. They stood inside the gate. Tracy was close behind him and Josh blocked him from going up the path to his door and safety.
‘Do you think of me as a coward?’
‘It is not for me to make that judgment. What I want-’
‘You want to dredge what is in the past.’
‘There were four witnesses. They were sent out of Rerik. I want to know where they went.’
The face of the wife was at the window. She had waved to them when she had first seen them. Anxiety now lined her face. She would have seen the hostility of the young woman’s expression and the way that the older man blocked her husband from his door, and she would have seen the way her husband stabbed his finger into the man’s chest for emphasis.
‘And you require us to feel a shame for what happened that night.’
‘Where they were sent. There was murder done that night and it should be punished.’
The growing wind flailed the pastor’s scarf, dislodged his cap. He was a small man, litfie flesh on a pale face, and poorly dressed. Josh knew about interrogation and disorientation, knew about building the stress. He had forbidden Tracy to speak and told her he was the expert.
‘You judge our morality, our shame and our fear. We are a people that learned compromise. Better to know nothing and hear nothing. Do you understand, Herr Mantle, the psychology of fear? We were born into fear, we were children in fear, and, as adults, we are old in fear-’