Brandenburg (13 page)

Of course there were those who still possessed surplus energy. He saw them out training for sports or throwing themselves into various activities organized by Party and factory. Others became obsessed with their damned correspondence courses, although the qualifications did little to improve their lives in the impersonal apartment blocks that rose around Dresden; the diplomas and certificates didn’t put food on the table or reduce the waiting list for a Trabant or allow them a foreign holiday or get them a phone or a new jacket. It was pointless work designed to keep people occupied and vaguely in the service of the state, the theory being that self-improvement added to the collective strength of the GDR.

He knew that it was part of the accommodation people had to reach with the Party. They went through the motions of loyalty, making occasional acts of obeisance and paying lip service to the idea of socialist progress. Konrad had captured it in a script called
The Sleep Walkers,
which was his most overtly political work. It had come from a conversation they had had about the oddities of Rosenharte’s neighbours. There was fat Willi Ludz who dealt in auto spare parts from an apartment where he kept bits of car engines wrapped in oily rags and catalogued like the precious finds of an archaeological dig. Old Klemm from Number Seventy-four spent most of his time in the library plumbing the mysteries of Marxism-Leninism and reading
Neues Deutschland
in a private quest to reconcile what he saw around him with the texts of the political faith. And in Number Twenty-two there was an unmarried mother named Letitia who Rosenharte had learned occasionally worked as a prostitute at the Bellevue Hotel to make ends meet.

These characters were woven into a tale inspired by a book Konrad had read about a tribe living on the Amazon which believed that their waking hours were all a dream while their real lives were led when they slept. All that was significant in the stories of the characters based on Ludz, Klemm and Letitia occurred in the boundless and borderless freedom of their dream world. It was a rather moving idea and he wished his brother had been able to shoot more than a few minutes of
The Sleep Walkers
.

He too moved as though in a trance and completed his rounds in the Gemäldegalerie with unusually leaden diligence, attending the daily meeting with the director Professor Lichtenberg, visiting the restoration department where he kept an eye on works by Titian, Parmigiano and Wouvermans and writing one of the endless reports about bringing high art to the people with a socialist message. The gallery was not free from the East German addiction to paperwork, the mountains of reports, commentaries and analyses - or
Papierwulst
- that clogged every office in the country. He knew no one would read it but this was simply a requirement of his job, a piece of protocol that he would have been foolish to neglect.

On Wednesday 20 September he decided to take his first risk. He made a detour on his round through the galleries and arrived outside Lichtenberg’s office where he found the professor’s assistant, Sonja Weiss, alone. She was perched on the edge of a desk buffing her nails while reading an old Hungarian travel brochure. Sonja and he had once had a short, uncomplicated affair lasting six or seven months, which had ended without rancour when she found someone she preferred. Her attitude to sex and the manner of departure were equally straightforward. Two years later, they were still firm allies and, because the Stasi hadn’t named her during his interrogation a week before, he assumed she was not one of their informers.

Sonja hopped off the desk, gave him a mischievous smile and popped a kiss on his cheek. She had a taste for cheap costume jewellery and jarring combinations of styles in her dress. She experimented uninhibitedly with different hair colours. At the moment it was jet black with blonde streaks. Vulgar perhaps, but nothing she did detracted from the natural prettiness which lay underneath and her neat, well-proportioned figure.

They talked for a little while, then he cleared his throat. ‘Sonja, can I ask you a favour?’

‘And here I was getting all nostalgic. You want to use the phone in his office? Right? Go ahead. We think it’s clean. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that some man came looking for you when you were away. A weird guy - gawky. He didn’t leave a name, but said he’d be back.’

‘You don’t have any more information then?’

‘I think he was a foreigner, maybe Czech or Polish. But he spoke quite good German. The professor told me to get rid of him and wanted to find out how he had got in here.’

‘One of our
friends
?’

She shook her head. ‘No, a country boy. You could see by his clothes.’

‘I suppose we’ll find out when he shows up again.’ He paused. ‘How’s Sebastian - that’s your man’s name, isn’t it?’

‘Good but busy.’ He thought he caught a significant raise of her eyebrows to emphasize the last word, indicating that Sebastian was involved in political agitation.

‘I see. Well . . . tell him to be careful. Now, you make yourself scarce for the next few minutes, okay?’

He went into the office and closed the door, praying that the place wasn’t bugged. He dialled the number in East Berlin that he’d memorized in front of Harland and the American in Trieste and was put through to an answerphone which clicked on without a recorded message. ‘It’s Prince,’ he said, his eyes straying to a small landscape by Salomon van Ruysdael on the professor’s wall. ‘I need a delivery of material within the next week. Good material.’ He hung up and slipped out of the office.

Sonja gave him a conspiratorial look in the corridor. ‘Good luck - and
you
be careful, my handsome Doktor.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I will.’

At this time of year, Rosenharte would normally head out of the city on a Friday to spend a couple of days walking in the hills around Marienberg, near where he had been brought up and where Konnie and Else now lived. But with all the family in one sort of custody or another, he didn’t feel like it and, besides, he knew he should remain visible and available in the city. He spent Friday evening in his apartment, restlessly arranging books and fiddling with three tomato plants on the ledge outside his window.

The place was not ideal - nothing ever was - but he still thanked his luck that he had managed to find it so soon after his divorce from Helga. He had left everything with her and the flat was still pretty sparse. Basically it was one long room, equally divided between sleeping and living areas by a thick red curtain. The bed was an old pre-war affair, with sagging springs and squeaking iron joints, from which Rosenharte could see out of the window across the roofs of the Technical University. Along the wall were a small bookcase and a wardrobe whose legs had been wedged to stop it toppling over on the uneven wooden floor. Over the years Rosenharte’s lovers had introduced touches of decoration and comfort to the living room - vases, the odd cushion, a rug and a reproduction of the battle of San Romagno by Paolo Uccello. When they moved on, the place quickly surrendered to his work. Books accumulated in neat columns and the old sixties typewriter, which he had such difficulty finding ribbons for, resumed its position at the centre of the table. There were a few framed black and white snapshots along the bookshelves: one of himself and Konnie on a cross-country skiing trip in 1972 and another of them standing either side of Marie Theresa after university graduation. The largest photograph was of Rosenharte in profile, taken by Sonja three years before. He kept it because it made him look young and reminded him of a spectacular walk in the frosted woods near a village called Cunnersdorf; but he had his doubts about the leather and steel photo frame, which Sonja had made for him.

This picture was the only sign of vanity in Rosenharte’s home, which in its concentration on study and exercise - a corner was devoted to walking boots, rucksack, ski poles and climbing ropes - resembled a college student’s rooms. There was no television set, no record player - he did not have the money to replace the one Helga took with her - and only minimal cooking facilities. Like many a student, he was used to making the trip to another floor to take a bath, but he did have his own lavatory and a large old-fashioned basin with pre-war taps that occasionally sputtered hot water.

He was ambivalent about the place. He liked the solitude it gave him but, after a prolonged occupation, he began to feel his life had somehow become suspended, which was why sometimes late at night he fled and went drinking, then brought a girl back.

That Friday evening he remained in the apartment, cooked a meal and shared it with a cat that came across the roofs from a neighbour’s apartment, read the final draft of the lecture he was to give in Leipzig, despaired at the long-winded title - ‘The Evolutionary Purpose of Representational Art’ - then dropped it in favour of ‘The Bull in the Cave’
.

In the evening he began to notice tiny discrepancies between the way he’d left the apartment and its present state. He assumed as a matter of course that they’d searched it when he was picked up before going to Trieste. But also, it seemed, since he had been back. Three books habitually placed beside the typewriter, on top of each other and always opened at pages 102, 203 and 304, had been moved. The middle volume about Gothic art, which he never consulted, was now open at page 210. On the shelf, a matchbox containing a pen nib and some paper clips placed exactly in front of the letters GEN of a book entitled
Der Jugendstil
now stood in front of the letters NDS. The shade of the table lamp was angled differently and some papers had been moved on the windowsill: beside them was a narrow band that was free of dust. He realized that the rooms must have been bugged and marvelled at the wasted effort. He had no phone, because he was on a list of thousands waiting to be connected, and it had been months since anyone else had been there with him. The only human voice heard in the apartment was the sound of him sleep-talking. He imagined some milk-faced technician up all night, straining to interpret the slightest murmur, and when he eventually got into bed at midnight he muttered a few incomprehensible sentences to the dark.

Next day, he went out early to buy a packet of cigarettes at the local Konsum store, and immediately noticed that there were far fewer Stasi on his tail. He guessed that this was because there was so much talk of demonstrations and meetings. Sonja had mentioned it in a stage whisper as she skittered past him in the Dutch collection on Friday afternoon. And now, as he walked through the Technical University campus with the idea of putting in an appearance in the gallery, he was approached by an old acquaintance, a good sort named Heinz Kube who taught fluid mechanics and was now full of the burgeoning democratic movements that were challenging the state.

Before Kube could go on about the manifesto released by the New Forum two weeks earlier, Rosenharte put both hands on his shoulders and cut him off in mid flow. ‘My friend, I think I’m being followed. I don’t want to get you into trouble. Just shake my hand and congratulate me on my lectures. When they ask you what passed between us, tell them that.’ Poor Kube, thought Rosenharte, they’ll have him in overnight and give him the third degree.

He went to the park and read
Neues Deutschland
, mentally grimacing at its pieties, then turned to an Austrian academic periodical he had brought with him. He was sick of being watched and had just about decided to move on to the gallery, where he would at least find some privacy, when about a dozen punks entered the park from his left. At the same moment, another group materialized from beneath the shade of some poplar trees - skinheads with laced boots reaching to the top of their calves and tight denims held up with braces. Very soon a bottle arced through the air towards the punks and broke on the path in front of them. One of the punks picked up the broken neck and flung it back at them, catching a skinhead on the forearm. The youth looked down and yelled out, ‘
Scheisse - Punkscheisse
.’ Stones and more bottles started flying and the two groups closed in.

Rosenharte put down his periodical and watched, bemused, then he noted that the Stasi team were consulting each other. One broke cover to use a radio, while the other two moved hesitantly towards the edge of the fray.

‘You’d better stop those louts before someone gets hurt,’ shouted a man in a checked shirt and a cream-coloured cap. ‘Today’s youth!’ he said despairingly to Rosenharte. ‘You’d think they’d got better things to do.’

Rosenharte nodded and then with astonishment saw that the man was winking at him. It was Harp, the British intelligence officer he’d met briefly at the hotel with Harland. With the cane and clothes, he looked fifteen years older. The accent was good too; exactly right for the region.

‘Time to get going, Dr Rosenharte,’ he murmured. ‘Ditch this lot and find your way to the Neustadt Bahnhof by five this afternoon. There’s an old building opposite the station that was a restaurant before the war. You’ll see the sign. To the right of the sign there’s a door, which you can push open. I’ll see you in there after five. Mind how you go. The place is in a terrible state. Got all that? Good. Make sure you’re not followed.’ With this, he strolled away to talk to three or four onlookers who were shaking their heads.

Rosenharte moved quickly to the side of the park and, spotting a bus going to the centre of town, ran to catch it. As the doors closed he saw one of the Stasi men frantically looking round. He rode the bus for two stops, then boarded another bound for the suburb of Weisser Hirsch, across the River Elbe to the east of the city. At the last stop before the bus turned round he got off and set out across the Dresdener Heide, the great heath to the north of Weisser Hirsch. He lay in the sun and ate the meagre lunch that he had kept in his pocket since leaving the apartment. At four, he made for the outskirts and then picked his way through the sleepy streets until he reached an almost entirely ruined block that lay between Königsbrücker Strasse and the railway line. There were very few people about, but Rosenharte moved cautiously, waiting and watching at every turn. When he found the burnt-out restaurant near the station he sidled up to the door, placed his back against it and lit a cigarette. Satisfied that no one was watching, he pushed the door with his backside and slipped through to find he was in a large space that was open to the sky. The roof had fallen in several years before and charred timbers hung down from the floors above. A profusion of shrubs and weeds had taken root in the rubble.