His voice was shrill. ‘Don’t say it. Don’t, please, give the smug “1 told you”, just don’t. It seems the new Germany is stuffed to the nose with mental disturbance, with debt, with good old decent tragedy. Didn’t you know it? Trauma caused a man to jump off a roof, debt caused a man to hang himself, tragedy caused a man to live in cow-shit and catch pneumonia. Of course, no one is to blame. Isn’t that sad? And, surprise, there is no Stasi. I’m at the end…’
She pushed herself up. He did not know whether she despised or pitied him.
Josh was turning away. He saw the man, half view, at the edge of his vision. The man stood near to the side of the bench. He had not noticed him before, only seen Tracy on the bench with the sunlight on her. The man had his back to them. The man wore smart jeans, was heavy-built, wore a full leather jacket. It was the uniform, what they’d worn on the breakwater, and worn going to the steamed car on the Lichtenhagen estate. The man was a dozen paces away and his back was to them.
Josh hissed, ‘How long has he been…?’
‘Who?’
He shook. ‘That bastard. How long…?’
‘No idea.’ She didn’t seem to care.
They were all around. They watched him, played with him. He was exhausted and panicked. The aggression drove him forward, they’d no fear of him, anger fuelled him. One arm straightening to turn the bastard, one fist drawn back and clenched to punch the bastard, and if he went down there was the mud-caked shoe to kick him. He caught the shoulder of the leather jacket and spun the man. He saw the shock. He saw the baby the man held. The man cringed away. Josh loosed the hold on the leather jacket, and reeled away, mouthing apologies.
He stumbled back down the street towards the car. He would say it, did not know when he would dare to say it to her. He was at the end…
‘I dislike him because he is coarse and vulgar, and he is arrogant, but not because of what he did in the past. I dislike him because I do not believe he is properly a German as you and I are Germans, not because he shot an agent of the British. I have my job, I must do my job, I must suffer in his company.’
Ernst Raub packed his suitcase and his wife passed him, from the wardrobe and the chest, the clothes he would take. The plan that was now discarded by the senior official of the BfV had been for him to meet the man he disliked in Frankfurt for the ifight to Washington. He was directed now to go to Rostock, and there were precise instructions as to what was expected of him in the Baltic city before escorting Krause to Berlin and the connecting ffight to Frankfurt for the link to Washington. He packed carefully.
‘It is unimportant to me, what he did in the past. Julius, my little comrade, he sees Krause as the incarnation of the Gestapo, detests him. Little Julius wraps himself in the past, so selfrighteous, so sickening. Not me… There are too many who seek to blame us for the past. In the old past, my grandfather, a policeman in Munich, would have helped with the round-up of Jews, gypsies, Communists. He would have been on the detail that took them with their bags to the railway station. Does that mean I do not love the memory of my grandfather, that I will not permit our children to go to his grave, when we travel to Munich, and lay flowers on it? I heard it said that there were gypsies, men, women and children, once at Munich who tried to break away and flee from the platform as they were driven towards the rail trucks, and the police shot them. I have no idea whether my grandfather was there, whether he fired, because in his life I never asked him. We cannot, should not, any more be required to carry the burden of the old past.’
He folded his dinner jacket into the suitcase, and she passed him his dress shirt. He smoothed it carefully. It was for the dinner at the Pentagon, and the following evening they would be the guests of the Rand Corporation. And then she gave him his preknotted black tie.
‘What did your grandfather do in the old past? He was at Krupp in the Ruhr, he had a good position in management. At Krupp, the production was maintained, in the last eighteen months, by slave labour. Did your grandfather take responsibility for the slave labour? You did not decline to send him an invitation to our wedding. By us he was treated like any other grandfather, given our love and our welcome on the day of our marriage, because the past should be forgotten…’
They would eat together that night as a family. The excursion with the children, the next day, on the river, was cancelled. He would be gone early, while the children slept.
‘If I do not accept the guilt of your grandfather and my grandfather in the old past, then I cannot accept the guilt of Dieter Krause for what he did in the new past. He shot a young man – it is not confirmed to me but I believe it – shot an agent in cold blood. I believe, but it is not confirmed to me, that my grandfather fired on gypsy children at the railway station in Munich and that your grandfather used slave labour to maintain the armaments output from Krupp. If I do not have to carry the burden of guilt from the old past then I don’t carry that burden from the new past.’
He closed the suitcase, pressed it shut, fastened the small padlock to the central leather strap.
‘It is my job to disregard the past. It is policy that I protect him from guilt… and he is, forgive me, my dear, a total piece of shit.’
They were close to Rostock.
Ahead of them was the junction, Rostock-Ost, for the Autobahn to Berlin, anywhere. If she drove under the Autobahn, it was the road north to Warnemunde and the fishing harbour. He had to dare to say it to her. He searched for the courage.
She drove, didn’t look at him. It had been an agony to Josh, with him all the way from the police station at Ribnitz-Damgarten.
‘Tracy…’
‘Come alive, have you?’
‘I have to say it…’
‘Say what you’ve got to say, spit it out.’
‘Tracy, I cannot live, not any more, with the responsibility.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘We should go to Berlin. If we hadn’t come those men would be alive. That is responsibility, and it crushes me. We should go to Berlin, the airport, and take the next ffight out. The alternative is too much for me.’
Her lip curled. ‘If you forgot, he murdered my Hansie in cold blood.’
‘It is men’s lives, and I can’t carry that weight, Tracy, not any more. There is a man at Warnemunde, like he’s waiting for us, Tracy, and we are bringing him his death, bloody wrapped up in ribbons and shiny paper.’
‘Quit, if that’s what you want. I’m staying.’
He had no power over her. He was familiar with issuing an order, and that order being obeyed.
‘We should go to the airport, to Berlin. Believe me – for God’s sake, listen to me. Listen, forget about the poor bloody wretches that you and I have intruded upon and hammered and broken. Think about yourself, Tracy. We can be in London tonight. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You did what you could. You tried. You cared when nobody else cared. You lost and you can be proud, you can walk tall with yourself. You stay, and you carry the responsibility. What will that have done to you, Tracy? If you win, if. have you thought how it will leave you? That responsibility, those lives taken, it will leave you old and crabbed and bowed. Accept failure, accept you’re beaten, accept that you have humanity, and begin to live again. Your way, staying, killing another man, taking that responsibility, is to turn your back on everything precious. Love is precious, and fun and happiness – God, Tracy, they are worth reaching for – it’s what your Hansie would have wanted. Me, I’m bloody well finished, won’t ever be love again in my life, but, listen, you have youth. I plead with you to listen. Don’t let what happened destroy you. You can be in London this evening and maybe you will have given a man his life.’
She pulled up onto the hard shoulder. Ahead the road split between the slip-road for the autobahn and Berlin and the route straight ahead, under the bridge carrying the autobahn, to Rostock and Warnemunde.