Samson 05 - Hope, page 19
The streets of Allenstein bei Magdeburg were dark and silent. I left the Trabbie out of sight in the alley behind the primary school rather than park it where it would be noticed by passersby. As I got out of the car I saw all round me a landscape etched with frost, and heard the crackle of ice under my feet. My nose and ears were stung painfully by the chilly wind that moaned through the overhead wires. Perhaps some member of the Forster family had heard the clatter of my Trabbie’s two-stroke engine, for a woman came down and opened the main door of the apartment block before I rang the bell.
Once inside, the biting cold with its ever-present odor of brown coal was exchanged for warm stale air upon which rested the faint smells of recently cooked food. I took off my trilby hat and unbuttoned my coat. One of the few compensations of living in the DDR was having a warm home. It was a part of the tacit compact that the self-serving communist masters had struck with the inhabitants of this sad and deprived police state; warm rooms and crime-free streets were offered as compensation for everything inflicted upon them.
‘Hello, Bernd,’ said the woman. ‘I knew you’d come.’
‘Good,’ I said. She hadn’t known I was coming of course; it was a way of saying that she only saw me when trout de was in the offing. At first I thought it was Theo’s mother-in-law who had answered the door, but she’d died two years before. It was Theo’s wife; poor little Bettina, she’d aged so much and was wearing her mother-in-law’s red spotted dress. I hadn’t recognized her. Now I leaned forward and kissed her on both cheeks.
‘I thought, they’d send you, Bernd,’ she said without enthusiasm.
‘Yes,’ I said, and followed her into the gloomy living room where two children were sprawled on a threadbare oriental carpet, constructing angel’s wings from colored paper. It was the sort of gesture to religion that the regime discouraged, but Theo Forster had never been an ardent believer; his churchgoing was only done to please his wife. There were many such lukewarm worshippers in the networks that London had formed and coordinated, but streetwise cynics like Theo were needed in the mix.
‘Theo,’ she announced. ‘It’s Bernd come to see you.’
Theo was propped up in a bed in the comer in the living room. It was not a good sign, for he had never been strong. The walls of the apartment were thin and from the next room there came the sounds of conversation and Bing Crosby singing. There must have been a dozen people in that tiny apartment; talking without being overheard was difficult.
‘I knew you’d come, Bernd. I told Betti you would. This is Uncle Bernd,’ Theo called out to the children, who looked up, nodded at me politely and went back to their wings.
Theo Forster, number four of the DELIUS group, had been at school with me. He’d been a boisterous young teenager in those days, the classroom clown with a pointed nose, a gnomish face and remarkable facility for advanced mathematics. Theo’s father had been good at mathematics too. He’d been an artillery sergeant who’d served under an artful old war hero named Rolf Mauser, and was with him at Vinnitsa on the Bug that fateful day in 1944 when Mauser earned his Knight’s Cross. In postwar Berlin, Rolf Mauser did secret tasks for my father. Inevitably young Theo came to know what I did for a living. We’d kept in touch from time to time. Now so many years later, when the DELIUS network went on the blink, he was the most obvious person for me to contact. I loved him dearly, but Theo would never make a good field agent; he was too principled, too honest, too sensitive.
‘How are you feeling, Theo?’
‘I’ll be all right by Christmas, Bernd.’
It was disconcerting to deal with any of these Church groups. They’d been organized, and encouraged, during my wife’s pretended defection to the DDR. Such people weren’t at all like field agents or trained spies. Such well-meaning amateurs were armed and equipped to fight the good fight against sin and the devil, rather than against a pitiless communist regime. Many of them were brave beyond measure, but it was difficult to make them see the dangers they faced. They were in every respect a Volkssturm a ‘Dad’s Army’ and had to be treated like those well-meaning civilian soldiers.
‘Take off your coat, Bernd.’ The room was dimly lit, but as my eyes became accustomed to it I could see Theo’s waxy face beaming at me. His pale complexion and sparse eyebrows gave emphasis to those dark staring sorrowful eyes. Looking around I recognized the heavy Biedermeier wardrobe and armchair that had come from his parents’ Berlin apartment. They looked out of place here amid the cheap unpainted wooden chairs and table that were the standard products of DDR factories.
‘The doctor says I’ll be out of bed in time for Christmas Eve,’ he said as briskly as he could manage. ‘I get these attacks from time to time. I might look like death but I will soon be back at the factory.’ He grinned, his face impish, looking very like the teenager I remembered.
‘That’s great, Theo,’ I said. I’d often passed the Stern bicycle factory where Theo worked as an electrician. The blackened brick buildings on the railway siding dated back to the Kaiser’s days. But the newer prefabricated sheds where Theo worked were cold and draughty, so that in winter the workers wrapped up in coats and sweaters. There was a constant haze of dirt in the air for miles around, while into the nearby river the factory poured a filthy torrent of brown pollution. It was no place for a sick man.
‘Is this official?’ He asked anxiously.
‘No, not official. I was passing. I brought you a packet of coffee,’ I said. ‘Are you allowed coffee?’
‘Now and again. Betti loves it. She’s a wonderful woman, Bernd.’ He looked at his watch, looked at me and then at his watch again.
‘I know she is,’ I said.
‘I do a good deal of thinking when I’m dozing here and Betti is at work. I was remembering you the other day. What was the name of that teacher who always gave you such a rough time?’
‘I forget.’ It seemed as if whenever I met someone I’d been at school with, they wanted to commiserate with me about that bad-tempered bastard.
‘He never gave you a minute’s peace, Bernd.’
‘His brother, or his best buddy or someone, had been killed in Normandy,’ I said.
‘His son,’ supplied Theo. ‘Shot dead while trying to surrender; that’s what someone told me. Do you think it was true?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. He was a Nazi. Remember when he looked in your desk and found your collection of Nazi badges and medals? He took them away to look at them, then he gave them back and never reported you.’
‘You hated him.’
‘At the time I did,’ I conceded. ‘But when I thought about it afterwards I saw that it was his endless bullying that made me do so well at lessons. Being top of the class was the only way I could get back at him.’
‘And he was the reason why you were so popular,’ said Theo.
‘He was? How do you make that out?’
‘Didn’t you ever see that, Bernd? The more he bullied you, the more the rest of us kids wanted to be decent to you.’
‘And I thought it was my English charm.’
‘And your charm, yes.’ He managed to produce a laugh.
‘Why are you looking at your watch? Are you expecting a visitor?’
‘No,’ said Theo.
I moved a tray containing a soup bowl and a plate with some dry biscuits, so that I could sit down at the little chair at his bedside.
Theo said, ‘Remember that morning he came into the classroom with the wooden pencils?’
‘No.’
‘One by one he snapped them in half and gave the pieces out to us. Pencils are like earthworms, he said. Break one in half and it becomes two pencils.’
‘There weren’t enough pencils for us to have one each.’
I know, but it was a good joke,’ said Theo.
‘Tell me about the DELIUS net,’ I said.
He looked at the children and said, ‘Go and have your supper. Opa is in the other room waiting for you.’ As the kids departed, a skinny cat went slinking after them. Theo said, ‘You say this visit’s not official?’ I shook my head. ‘Better if your people stay out of this,’ he said. ‘It’s a local matter for us to solve our own way. That damned pastor is “an unofficial collaborator.”
An unofficial collaborator was the Stasi description for people the rest of the world called secret informants or snitches. ‘Surely not,’ I said.
‘It’s the only explanation.’
‘I was with him after a job I did in Magdeburg. The pastor sheltered me after a shooting fiasco in the KGB compound. He knew Fiona when she was in Berlin; he knew she was working for London.’
‘Did he tell you that?’ said Theo mildly.
‘Yes, when I was here before he told me that.’
‘He’s clever isn’t he?’
‘It was some sort, of trap for me?’
‘He never knew Fiona was working for London. It’s what he’s been told since she escaped. I doubt if he ever met her.’
‘He knew I was working for London.’
‘But the Stasi are not going to blow the cover of a wonderful source like him in order to collar a minnow like you, Bernard.’
‘Ouch, that hurt, Theo.’
I was sitting at his bedside, and now he reached out and clutched my sleeve. ‘It’s true, Bernd, he’s one of them, believe me. Maybe I can’t prove it, but we all know it. We know it in our bones.’
‘You’ve got to do better than bones, Theo. It’s a serious accusation.’
‘He snoops around everywhere. The Church has given him some sort, of roving commission-standing in for clergy who are sick or on leave. He goes to Berlin. He goes to Dresden. He goes to Zwickau …’
‘Zwickau? He was never a part of the Zwickau network.’
‘On Sundays. He was conducting services in the church and assisting the pastor there.’
‘When?’
‘Two years ago. Over the busy Christmas period.’
‘You saw him there?’
‘Of course I did. It was his idea to put the antenna in the spire. The network had had radio trouble but getting the antenna really high solved it overnight.’
‘I see.’
Theo persisted: ‘The following year the whole Zwickau group went into the bag didn’t they?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ I said, not wanting to break security. ‘The last I heard they were still going strong.’
‘I must have got it wrong,’ said Theo in a voice that clearly told me that he knew he had it right. ‘I suppose a rumor like that would be bad for morale, wouldn’t it?’
‘It’s need-to-know, Theo,’ I said. ‘We shouldn’t be discussing other groups.’
‘You’re a cold fish, Bernd. Did anyone ever tell you that?’
‘Only my very close friends.’
‘My oldest brother Willi was one of the Zwickau net. They took him away in the middle of the night, and that was the last we heard of him. His wife has written to everyone she can think of First Secretary Honecker even and all she gets back is a printed form. They can’t even be bothered to type a letter for her.’
‘He may be all right,’ I said. ‘They hold people longer nowadays … Yes, I remember Willi. I forgot that he was your brother; but don’t jump to conclusions about the pastor. We can’t move against him just because you feel it in your bones, Theo. Carry on with everything as normal. As you say, if he’s reporting to the Stasi they will keep your network safe and intact indefinitely. Maybe the only reason you’ve been safe so long is because they don’t want to reveal that he is an informer for them.’
‘If London sent you to give us the pep-talk, forget it. I know the old bastard betrayed my brother. He’s a rattlesnake. We will settle it ourselves.’
‘That’s stupid talk, Theo. We don’t do it like that. No one does.’
‘And you swear this is not official? Why tonight, Bernd?’
‘I just arrived. No one knows I’m here. I wanted to come and see for myself’
‘Get out of here, Bernd. Go now. See no one else. Leave it to us to sort out.’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. ‘If the network breaks up now and he is an informer they’ll take you all into custody and toss you into a Stasi prison. They will have nothing to lose. The Stasi have independent powers of arrest and detention. They don’t have to provide evidence to an examining magistrate or anything like that.’
He gave me a weary smile. It was like explaining the Christmas menu to a fattened turkey. To him such facts of life were obvious, but sometimes people like Theo have to be reminded of them. ‘I know you mean well, Bernd. And I’m grateful.’
‘Then do as I say.’
‘Will you promise to go away and not contact him?’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘Please, Bernd. Please leave us alone. Give us a week. After that if we’ve failed we’ll do it your way.’
‘I doubt if your network could manage to operate without him.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Bernd. Of course we could. We’ve discussed it.’
I wondered how to reassure Theo. ‘I’ll vet him personally and if necessary London will neutralize him.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘We’ll get rid of him. But it has to be done in some way that won’t make all the alarm bells ring. London will probably arrange that he is sent to some other job in some other place by the Church authorities. Somewhere he can’t do any mischief.’
‘Pass me that glass of water and the red pills. I have to take two of them every four hours.’
‘It’s the only way, believe me,’ I said, passing him his medicine.
‘I hate him.’ He gulped his pills and drank some water. ‘You may have got it wrong, Theo. Keep it all going until we know what’s really happening.’
‘Are you going to talk to him?’
‘I wanted to see you, Theo, to see how you were. Now I’ll go back to Berlin. Forget I came here. Tell Betti the same.’
‘She won’t say anything, Bernd. Her family were high-ranking Nazis her uncle was the Politische Kreisleiter. She grew up keeping her mouth shut.’
‘Good.’
‘When will I see you again?’
‘Get your network people together,’ I said without answering his question. ‘Make sure they visit you here while you’re sick. It’s a perfect cover. Don’t tell the pastor what you are doing.’
‘No.’ In his worried face I could see a thousand questions trying to get out, but he didn’t ask me anything more. On his bedside table there were photographs of his wife and a portrait photo of their married son Bruno, who worked for the Schnell-Bahn, the elevated railway that was owned by the East and went through both parts of Berlin.
‘Is Bruno well?’ I asked politely.
‘We haven’t seen him for a long time,’ said Theo. ‘It’s just as well; we don’t see eye to eye about the regime.’
‘He’s trusted,’ I said. ‘He has to be careful what he says.’
‘Yes, he’s trusted,’ said Theo, for his son was one of the carefully selected railway personnel whose daily duties took them into the West.
I got up and reached for my hat. ‘Good luck, Bernd,’ said Theo. ‘Thanks for coming, and for the packet of coffee. I think a lot about the old days. I must have been crazy to stay here in the East. That damned Wall. I could see what was coming.’
‘How could you be certain?’ I said. ‘Half the kids in the class had homes or family connections in the East.’
‘But most of them knew when to get out. It didn’t seem so important then, did it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It didn’t seem so important.’
I didn’t keep my promise to Theo. He was sick and I didn’t want to alarm him, but coming all this way without talking to the turbulent priest would have been absurd. So I went to his ‘church’ and waited until the last of the worshippers had left. The service had been held in a meeting hall that was a part of the crypt, all that remained of a church destroyed by wartime bombing. At the bottom of the steps, when I stepped into the light, the pastor looked up and smiled. He recognized me. It was only a few weeks before that I’d sheltered here with him. I was with the kid, Robin, and on the run from a grim half-hour in nearby Magdeburg. Now the pastor came forward and shook hands, gripping my arm with his free hand, like they do in Hollywood. He beamed. His rosy face was that of an elderly cherub.
‘Good evening, young man,’ he said. ‘Have you come specially to see me?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He indicated that I should follow him into a small side room where the smell of incense failed to cloak the stronger one of tobacco smoke. He closed the door and pulled out a chair for me, one of three hard little chairs arranged around a rickety table upon which I put my hat. Adorning the wall there were half a dozen hand-colored photos of previous pastors and an engraving of the church as it had been a hundred years ago. The pastor opened a metal locker in which he kept his street clothes and took his time as he divested himself of his clerical garments and put on an old gray suit. He then removed his steel-rimmed glasses and polished them with that dedication that is sometimes the sign of thoroughness, and sometimes a device for delay.
