A Few Words for the Dead (22 page)

The whisky was foul but, conversely, one of the best drinks I’d ever had. Kurt, having now realised the potential upside to a reduction in camp numbers, was checking everyone else’s stuff, so I took another drink. It cleaned my mouth and I felt the heat of it sink all the way down to my impossible, intact belly where the burning sensation expanded. I can’t really tell you how reassuring that felt. To know that the part of me that had been destroyed was now whole again and filled with heat.

Kurt returned with an opened can of beer and a third of a bottle of vodka.

Part of me wanted to do no more than stay there and share the lot with him if he’d allow it. Hell, if not, I’d have suggested we go to the nearest off-licence and buy more. But, of course, I had something far more important to do. If you’re going to make a deal with the devil then you damn well need to make it count for something.

I got to my feet.

‘You going?’ he asked, not without a hint of hope.

‘Yeah,’ I replied, steadying myself against one of the trees for a moment, my legs quivering beneath me. Slowly I managed to get them moving. ‘I need to find my friend.’

‘We’ll be at home,’ the presence had said. I could only think of one place it could have meant. Lucas’s apartment. Why there? Time would have to tell.

I cut across to the closest path and headed straight out towards the road and civilisation. I didn’t know how much of a head-start Lucas had on me, but my body still felt weak and unresponsive. As fast as I tried to move, it took me longer than I would have liked to escape the forest. I began to speed up a little once I was on Dammweg and en-route to the S Bahn. Moving, as painful as it was, seemed to help. Every now and then my muscles would spasm and cramp, responding to alien signals, but the further I walked the more my body felt my own again.

I was crossing over towards the station when a familiar car pulled up alongside me and my heart sank. I really didn’t have time for this. The driver wound down his window and leaned out, a smile sitting strangely on his cauliflower face.

‘Good afternoon, Herr Shining,’ said Ernst Spiegel, the KGB officer who had followed me from my arrival at Gatow. ‘I’ve been looking for you all over the place. How good to have finally found you.’

Behind him a car beeped its horn. He showed no anger, just waved at it to drive past, never taking his eyes off me.

‘Get in,’ he said. ‘We can have a nice long talk.’

I considered making a break for it. I really didn’t have the time to delay. It showed on my face.

‘Don’t run, Herr Shining,’ he said. ‘I have no wish for this to be uncomfortable. Besides, you may be surprised to hear what I have to say.’

I didn’t see that I had much choice. It was unlikely that I’d be able to outrun him. At least he was on his own, so I didn’t discount the possibility of being able to overpower him and take his car.

I climbed into the passenger seat.

‘Good man,’ he said. ‘Which way were you aiming?’

‘Mitte,’ I told him, which was true but general enough to give me some leeway as and when I made a break for it.

He nodded and headed north.

I stayed silent. If he wanted to talk it was up to him to pick the subject. Apparently, it was to be my potted history.

‘August Shining,’ he began. ‘Brought into the secret service direct from Cambridge University. Eventually given control of Section 37, a department whose reputation could hardly be more of a joke.’

‘Break it to me gently, why don’t you?’

He laughed. ‘It is the truth. I know all about it from Gavrill, a friend of mine. He is in the same business as you.’

Gavrill Leonin, my Russian counterpart. In a few years I would handle his defection to the UK, his department having been pulled out from underneath him. Back then he was still in operation, albeit in an even more limited capacity than Section 37. The KGB simply didn’t have any interest in his work.

‘And just as respected,’ I told Spiegel.

‘Just as respected!’ Spiegel laughed again. ‘Because nobody likes to believe in such things, is that not so? Even when they find one of their own men going mad and shooting his fellows. Or a petty smuggler setting fire to himself and jumping off a balcony.’ He looked at me and winked. ‘Or an old film star jumping to her death from the Ferris wheel.’

‘You sound like you have lots of problems,’ I replied, refusing to be led.

‘Problems shared, I think. And problems that my bosses are not willing to consider. They do not listen to me. They ignore what is happening because it does not make sense to them.’

‘And it makes sense to you?’

‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but I am not a man who believes in ignoring what he does not understand. It is not a risk to security, I think. These are not people with access to important information.’

‘You can add four homeless to your list of deaths. They weren’t in possession of state secrets either.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘People are dying and I do not know how to stop it. Do you?’

I decided to take a risk. ‘If I did, what would you want to do about that?’

‘I would find a way of letting you do so that did not betray my country. You are not important to us, Herr Shining. Your government doesn’t want you and neither does mine. I could take you in, but for what? They would laugh at me as if I’d brought home a stray dog. “It can’t stay here!” they’d say. “Put it back where you found it.”’

‘Or have it put to sleep?’

Spiegel shrugged. ‘I would rather not. I am not a monster, Herr Shining. I am not someone who kills another for the sake of it.’

‘But the thing that’s causing us both trouble is.’

‘And you can make it stop? Because Gavrill, he talks of you in a most unpatriotic manner. He thinks you are a very special man.’

‘If I send him a Christmas card, will it get him shot?’

‘I do not think he gets post in his little Moscow basement,’ Spiegel laughed. Then he looked at me seriously. ‘You do not answer me. Can you make it stop?’

‘I mean to try.’

‘Then tell me where you are going and I will let you do so.’

‘Isn’t that traitorous? I had it on good authority you were rather loyal.’

‘I am loyal to my people. If I suspected you meant my country harm, you would be in the trunk of the car not the passenger seat. I do not believe you wish harm. At least not today.’ He laughed. ‘Tomorrow is always another day for us, no? But if you can help in this, then today I will ignore you. I will, in fact, pretend you were never in this car. Let tomorrow be another story.’

I gave him Robie’s address.

That night was much talked about on both sides of the Wall. Few knew the real cause of the chaos that was to come of course — though Ernst Spiegel may have made some educated guesses — only those who later read my report (and believed it). It was a night referred to in sad, horrified whispers by all of those who saw it. Even when the Wall fell and Berlin made its valiant effort to memorialise the past but move on from it, the story of the crossings survived. It existed not on official accounts but in the horror stories told by those who had been there, the soldiers, the witnesses, the families who lost their loved ones.

When you visit Berlin now, Checkpoint Charlie exists as a museum, a place to reflect on times that the young are lucky enough to struggle to imagine. People stand next to it and smile into digital cameras. They laugh and smile and wave at the photographer. Look where we are! It’s that place from those old movies! How cool is that? Back then, it was an unremarkable structure that signified so much more. Much like the wall itself, a simple, grey functionalist thing that towered higher in its ideology than it ever could in the flesh. Charlie was not just a set of prefab structures, barriers and signs, it was – like all the crossing points in the city – a focal point of the absurdity that Berlin lived through, a city divided. A city possessed.

I didn’t see much, I knew only my own small part of it, but I picked up enough of the details from talking to people later.

The first to run was a young woman. Her name was Heidi Ackermann and people said that, like many others, she must have hankered for what she believed would be a better life in the West. The fact that she was leaving behind her husband and an ailing mother was glossed over. ‘It was the child,’ they said. ‘She was doing it for the child’.

Certainly she was holding the baby, screaming in her arms, as she jumped over the Wall. Its cries carried even over the sound of her own laughter, the shouts of the guards and the eventual gunfire that cut her down in the snow, mere feet from the other side.

Then there was Franz Brand, a watchmaker from Pankow. He’d shown no interest in crossing before then, by all accounts having accepted his place in the East. He had focused on the intricate cogs and gears of his craft rather than the metaphorical ones that ground around him. Nonetheless, while Heidi Ackermann was still bleeding into the snow, her baby howling in pain and terror next to her, Herr Brand followed her example, running out into the no man’s land of the death strip. The guards, already on edge thanks to Ms Ackermann, were quicker to respond, Brand didn’t even make it halfway towards the West; a single pistol shot brought him down. According to eyewitnesses, he was giggling at the time.

There was some discussion about that single shot, Western news agencies debating how that proved the lie with regards the GDR’s claims that, while they had issued orders to border guards encouraging them to use their weapons in the event of an illegal crossing, they had not issued ‘shoot to kill’ orders. If the so-called ‘traitor’ was killed with a single shot, the commentators said, the guard holding the gun was either extraordinarily unlucky or in no uncertain terms as to both his literal and figurative aim. No doubt this commentary was well-meant, yet to me it was another example of people focusing on the detail in order to avoid the atrocity as a whole. Franz Brand was only one of many who was to die – what did the number of shots matter?

Herbert Feldt came next, pulling his wife behind him. She begged him to stop, yanking him back towards the border but he cuffed her around the head until she was barely conscious as she was dragged through the snow, her feet leaving a deep pair of tracks behind them.

Then there was Helmut Fuchs, Claudia Gott, Hans Kahler, Werner Jund, Maria Hoefler, Gert and Sofie Hermann… Am I boring you? Do you find this list of names hard to process? I’m sorry but the list goes on. Friedrich Gross, Veronika Forst, Anneke Derrick (she was only twelve years old and was performing a cartwheel through the death strip when she was cut down).

The guards had lost their minds by then, calling for reinforcements, convinced they were about to be overrun by rebellious citizens. They were panicked. It’s easy to paint them as the villains, isn’t it? To consider them ruthless killers with happy trigger fingers, cutting down men, women and children. But they were blind to rational thought by then; they thought the balloon was going up and their turn would be next. One even fired into the crowd, convinced they were about to charge. Of course they weren’t – everyone was in shock and afraid for their lives. The crossings came from up and down the strip. Some as far as a couple of hundred metres away, some from within the crowd itself.

At one point, one of the border guards even made a run for the West. Lieutenant Heinz Dreher. He acted like he was charging an opposing trench, running towards the crowds building on the Western side, spraying them with bullets from his machine gun. It was the Western border guards that killed him. What choice did they have?

Are you still trying to find a villain in all of this? Still trying to rationalise the dead? The names on a page, on a tombstone? Of course, there was one, and I was running as fast as I could up the stairs to Robie’s apartment, desperate to stop him.

Robie had been tied to the balcony railing facing the death strip. It was his private box for an evening of cruel theatre, watching each and every one of the innocents forced across the line by the thing that wanted his body. ‘How many?’ it had no doubt asked him. ‘How many before you just say yes?’

Lucas was a pragmatist. You have to be, in our world. He knew that the deaths would not stop if he gave in, they would just stop
for now
. He knew that, but still he couldn’t hold out for ever.

By the time I’d made it up the stairs and through the open door of his apartment, he was begging for it to stop. He would do anything, he told it, just let the killing stop.

The stairs had exhausted me and I all but fell into the room, Robie framed by the open arcadia door that led out onto the balcony. He was thrashing against the balcony wall and I could see that the rope tying him to the rail had torn his wrists open.

I had no plan, no idea how I was to stop what was happening. I just knew that I had to be there, to try anything, for Lucas’s sake as well as everything else.

‘Do it!’ he screamed. ‘Do it! Just make it stop!’

He thrashed one more time and then slumped down, his legs giving out beneath him.

I was too late. Lucas was no more. Now there was only what was wearing his body.

‘Is that the little man?’ he said, turning slightly to peer under his new arm, ‘come to prove he’s better than me?’

‘To try,’ I admitted.

‘What’s your plan?’ he asked.

I didn’t reply.

‘Then maybe you could come over here and cut me lose?’ he asked. ‘You’ll find a decent knife in the kitchen.’

I was on my way back with the knife before I’d even realised what had happened. Hadn’t I always been immune to Lucas’s charm? I was sure that had been the case, and yet now, at the slightest suggestion I had been about to do as I was told. I stopped in the middle of the living room, staring at the dangling body, the knife in my hand.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Cut me free.’

I took another step forward before managing to stop myself.

‘You didn’t think this through, did you?’ I said, fighting hard to focus on the situation, to push away the urge to help him. ‘You’ve taken him over and now you’re trapped.’