‘How long are we staying here?’
‘Long enough to see who comes to and who goes from the farm.’
‘What about the taxi?’
‘Was it a taxi?’
‘Didn’t you see that? Of course it was a taxi. It had the sign on it for a taxi.’
He felt the cold. He huddled behind the trees. He stared at the farm buildings away across the open fields and tried to scrape the mud off his shoes.
He wondered if they had come to the farm too late. Nothing moved. There were dull lights in the windows of the farmhouse and in one of the barn buildings but he did not see the signs of man, woman or child.
‘We wait and we watch,’ he said. ‘We wait and watch until I am satisfied.’
He had wept the night that the mob had entered the building on August-Bebel Strasse. Ulf Fischer, the former Feidwebel who was now a taxi driver and the maker of orations at the funerals of old people, had stood on the far side of the street, on the fringe of the mob, and he had watched the clamouring, jeering crowd beat on the doors of the building and hammer at the shuttered windows. It was said, among the lowly ranks of the Stasi, that the Generalleutnant had forbidden the guards to use their weapons, that the senior officers had argued bitterly on whether they should open fire on the mob. The ‘realists’ had wanted to shoot and the ‘idealists’ had wished to capitulate. He had not, that night, seen Hauptman Krause. He had thought it the worst hour of his life.
He sat in his taxi outside the one small bar in the village of Starkow. Before he went back to the rank for taxis on Lange Strasse, he would need to hose off the farm mud from the wheels and bodywork of his Mercedes taxi. He had not felt guilt when he had pushed his boot down on the throat of the young man so that the Hauptman could have the easier shot at his head. He was with, then, the power of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. The power had protected him from guilt. Sitting in his taxi, going to the farm at Starkow, he had decided, with personal anguish, that he no longer believed in the protection. He would make one last action, and he had agonized on it in his taxi, in defence of the power. He could see, from where he was parked outside the bar, the hire car in which they had come. His last act, before he went back to Rostock and found a car wash at a garage and took his place on the taxi rank, would be to telephone the Hauptman and give him the make, colour and registration of the hire car. He had no more fear of the cells of the Moabit gaol. He held the telephone in his hand and the tears coursed down his cheeks, as they had done on August-Bebel Strasse when the mob had come in. Afterwards, he would go to the car wash and clean his taxi and take his place on the rank, and in the evening he would go home, as Leutnant Hoffmann had gone home and as Unterleutnant Siehl had gone home.
She said, ‘Do you chase the tail of the beast or do you chase its head?’
Dieter Krause sat in his chair in the living room of the new house.
She said, ‘You can forever cut the tail of the beast but you do not kill the beast until you cut the head.’
Dieter Krause sat in his chair and held the telephone. It had been ringing when Eva had come back to the house. She had been in the hallway when he had answered it. She stood in front of him, above him. The shopping bags were by her feet.
She said, ‘You have to cut the head of the beast or the beast is with us always, will take everything and break us.’
Dieter Krause looked up into her face. There was a hardness that he had not known before, a pitiless contempt that he had not seen before.
She said, ‘If you do not cut the head from the beast then it will be behind you for ever, and for ever you will look over your shoulder for the beast.’
Dieter Krause put the telephone into his inside pocket. The tail of the beast was the witnesses. The head of the beast was the man who had come from England and the young woman with the copper-gold hair who had kicked and scratched and bitten him. He tapped, a reflex movement, at his waist, and he felt the shape of the pistol lodged there by his belt. He picked up the car keys from the table beside the door.
She said, ‘You have to be there tonight, when she plays… First you must cut the head.’
The sleet storm swirled around the farm. He had seen no movement, but there were short times when the storm was so intense that the blizzard took from him the view of the farm buildings. He had heard, faint, a man’s shouting but he had not seen the man. He had heard the noise, distant, of a tractor engine starting up but he had not seen the tractor.
The sun came out abruptly, great pillars of light that fell on the fields and onto the buildings, as if a curtain was drawn back. The cold was gone, and the driving sweep of the sleet, but still Josh held his arms across his chest for warmth. Away to the right, from the forest block, a young deer with stubbed antlers came cautiously from the cover and tried to find food in the yellow weed grass. The light played on its back.
He took Tracy’s arm, squeezed it hard. He started to walk across the field towards the farm buildings, lit by the sun.
The mud clogged on their shoes and smeared their trousers. They walked, slow going, towards the buildings.
He could smell the farm, old hay and new manure, and hear the faint sound of a radio playing in the farmhouse and the bellowing of cattle as if they demanded attention. The farmhouse was at the side of a courtyard of buildings. It was a building, centuries old, that decayed. He thought the great armies passing this way would have seen that same farmhouse of brick and timber beams – the guards of Napoleon and the grenadiers of von Hindenberg and the panzer men of Mannstein and the artillery men of Zhukov. The radio played light music behind the heavy door. Water dripped on the step from broken guttering above. He rapped the knocker. He expected to hear a footstep, a grumbling complaint from a man or a woman that they were coming, but heard only the radio. They walked together, close to each other, around to the back of the farmhouse, past abandoned kids’ toys and a tricycle, past a small garden where winter cabbages grew in neat lines. The door at the back of the farmhouse was wide open.
He knocked with his fist on the opened door. There was food on the wide wood table and two mugs of steaming coffee. The pages of a newspaper were scattered on the table, as if discarded in haste. A cat slept in a chair and ignored his knocking. He called out, and the cat opened its eyes, scowled and closed them again. He called again, and only the bleat of the radio’s advertisements answered him.
In the courtyard of farm buildings, the outer door of the cattle shed was open. The animals shouted at them for their attention.
There was a light trailer of manure with a fork set in it, as if work had been interrupted. The sunlight came down into the courtyard and caught the old gold of the hay bales that had been moved from the open barn and left. A horse was wandering free in the courtyard with a halter on its head and a trailing rein.
She took his arm and pointed.
Josh followed the line she made with her arm.
A mud track led from the courtyard out over the yellow weed grass of the fields. He saw why she pointed.
They ran, slipping and slithering, along the track, between the deep ruts that the tractors had made.
The wind blew against them and the low sun was in their eyes.
The small, slow-moving procession edged towards them. A tractor pulled a trailer at the head coming steadily. He saw two men walking beside it, heads down. He saw four women, in pairs, walking alongside the trailer and none had coats against the wind and the cold. There was a tractor at the end of the procession and it dragged a muck-spreader through the ruts of the track.