Josh snapped the interruption. ‘Where are the witnesses?’
‘The fear is like the clothes against your skin. The fear does not disappear because we now have fast food and big cars and Coca-Cola in tins. With the fear is the shame and the act of compromise.’
‘Your way, the guilty go unpunished.’
‘You make a big statement, but it is the statement of a bully. I tell you the first day that I learned to compromise. It was the day that my bishop told me that I was not of sufficient intellectual value to be worth the government in the West paying thirty thousand Deutschmarks to buy my freedom. The freedom of some was bought but they were of greater value than me. That is the day you learn to compromise. Do you accuse me of cowardice?’
Mantle thought he was losing. His voice rose. ‘You know the names.’
‘I know the names of each of the men who witnessed…’
‘And they have never returned.’
‘They have never come back to Rerik. I tell you when, again, I compromised. I wanted to come here to live the last years of my life. I informed. I supplied gossip on my church, my church leaders, on my church congregation. I was promised in return that I would have the permission to come to live here. The regime ended one year before my retirement and I did not need permission to come here. That is my personal punishment. I live here quietly in my shame and my fear. If it were known…’
Josh caught at the buttoned coat of the pastor. He was losing, he must savage him. ‘Tell me where they bloody went.’
‘If it were known here that I had informed, then we would be, my wife and myself, like refugees. We would be put out of our home, we would be friendless, we would be pariahs.’
The frustration welled. Josh shouted, ‘I’m giving you the chance to conquer the shame and the fear. Where are the witnesses?’
‘I tell you… A man came to my house. He put through my door an envelope. In the envelope was a photocopy of my Stasi file, the file of an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. If I should direct you to the witnesses..
Josh thought he had lost. The pastor smiled, grim and sad, as if he knew he had won.
Tracy said, small voice, ‘The boy who was killed, Hans Becker, was my lover.’
‘…the file would be sent to the church…’
Tracy said, quiet voice, ‘Hans Becker was the only boy I ever loved.’
‘…and to the town administration, and to my wife.’
Tracy said, with no passion in her voice, ‘I fucked Hans Becker because I loved him.’
The pastor rocked. The voice was behind him, soft and quiet and gentle. His shoulders, thin under his coat, shook. He turned to face her, turned to the wind that ripped at his scarf, and turned his cap.
‘My dear, you try to shock me. I am hard to shock. You try to make a volcano of my mind… I was conscripted into the Army in nineteen forty-five. I fought in the battle for Berlin. I know what it is to be shelled and bombed. I know what it is to hear my father has been killed. My mother was raped by the Red Army. I know more of shock than the vulgarity of the words you use. I know also the shock of the realization that I was frightened, that I would compromise. Come…’
As if his mind was turned… Josh recognized it, Tracy had turned the pastor’s mind. The pastor looked into her face that was simple, clean, without complication.
He ignored his wife at the window.
He led them back through the garden gate and out into the road. He walked with a good stride, as if a weight were lifted from his back, and Tracy skipped to be alongside him.
‘I know what happened. I saw it. I was not sufficiently close to recognize the faces of the men who killed your lover. Perhaps in the vulgarity of your words you have given me a small courage, and for that I should thank you. I said a prayer for him. I did not go out into the night and kneel beside him and make my prayer, I was too frightened of the consequences. I said my prayer in the secrecy of my home. There were four men and myself. We shared the fear, we did not have the courage to help him.’
They had walked along the shore path. Dark cloud hovered now above the trees on the peninsula across the water. The waves hammered onto the pebble and sand beach, flowed to the rotted seaweed and fell back. The pastor led Tracy past the pier, then turned inland onto a track through the bare poplar trees in which the wind sang. He stopped outside a brick-built house and the front door was flush to the road. Josh trailed behind, as if he were no longer relevant to their business.
‘Jorg Brandt, he was the eldest of them. He was a schoolteacher in Kropelin, a Party member, a respected man. When the boy had broken free of them on the pier he tried to find a house where he would have protection. At Jorg Brandt’s house the door was shut on him. He was denounced by colleagues at the school for the abuse of children. His wife left him, his community shunned him. He suffered psychological collapse. He went to live with old relatives in the Lichtenshagen district of Rostock where he was not known. He cannot return home because it is believed that he abused the children.’
The pastor spoke only to Tracy, ignored Josh. He went on up the road past the small gardens that were fenced, past the homes. He stopped in front of a house of dun concrete-rendered walls. There was a raised patio at the front, a low trellis fence and a window above the front door framed in modern plastic.
‘Heinz Gerber, he would now be fifty-seven years of age. He had the job of administrator in the town hail for the collection of refuse, and he worked also for the church in Rerik. It was the second house the boy went to, and he was losing strength and Gerber came to the window and saw him, and did not open the door. He was denounced by his brother as a thief of church funds, and as there was little money in our community, money was precious. He was thrown out by his family, he was disgraced. He went to work as a gardener at the base at Peenemunde, and is still there.’
Behind them, Josh, in his mind, could see the boy who was wounded and exhausted and running at the limit of his strength. It was the last house before the square, well-built with a good garden to the front of pruned roses.
‘Artur Schwarz was a senior engineer on the railway working from Bad Doberan and responsible for the line between Rostock and Wismar. His was the last house that the boy came to. Schwarz saw him from an upper window, drew the curtain and turned his back on him. The rumour was spread that he was an informer. His wife was beaten by the Stasi at a protest at the environmental damage caused by the chemical works at Neubokow. He was blamed for the beating of his wife. He works now as a common labourer on a farm near to Starkow, which is between Ribnitz-Damgarten and Stralsund.’
They were in the square. On three sides around them were low two-storey blocks of cheap-built homes. The grass was yellowed grey and sprinkled with the old leaves that the wind curled. They stood among the washing lines and the parked cars that scarred the grass to mud. Josh stood back from them. It came stark to him. They had walked the route of Hans Becker’s flight, and he had not seen a man or a woman or a child. Did they hide? Did they crawl behind closed doors? Did they not dare to look down from their windows? He felt the weight of the fear… The pastor stood and looked around him as if he stretched far into his memory and then he moved a single short pace to his left, to be exact.
‘Willi Muller was then just a boy. His father had a fishing boat. His father’s life was the fishing in the Ostsee. He took the trawler out for them, when they pulled the boy from the sea. He was with them when they killed the boy, here, at this place, where I stand. He took the trawler out again when they put the weighted body of the boy in the sea. All of the fishing people of Rerik know where the body was put into the Salzhaff, without charity and without decency, and they never run their nets there because they have the dread that they would bring up the body and the past. There was a family meeting. His father had been told that he would lose the boat if the son did not go away and swear to stay silent. He went to Warnemunde and took work as a deckhand on a herring boat. If he were to return he would have to confront his father’s bargain. He would be ashamed of his father and ashamed of himself. He has never returned, and never will.’