Brandenburg (35 page)

‘I haven’t received a letter,’ said Rosenharte. Sonja hadn’t mentioned anything to him about a letter. ‘Did he say how he found you?’

She shook her head. ‘He had a car . . . I’m sorry, I should have asked him some questions, but I had just got back here and I was concentrating on the boys.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve got his number now. I’ll call him over the next few days.’ He folded the note and slipped it inside his jacket pocket.

The Wartburg’s headlights forked through curls of mist that lay about the meadow as they set off down the track. Florian and Christoph had immediately fallen asleep either side of Idris in the back seat, despite the portable radio he held to his ear. Else sat in the front with the food bag on her lap, looking ahead and not speaking. He understood well enough what it meant to be leaving Konrad behind in the GDR and to be closing the door on the home she loved. Yet he thought he’d seen a new resolve in her eyes as they had taken a hasty breakfast in the kitchen. Far from being cowed by the Stasi, as he had initially suspected, she had decided to eliminate all considerations except her children’s needs. He touched her on the back of the hand as they reached the road and said, ‘So, your journey to freedom begins here.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ she said, without turning to him.

The village of Herresbach lay about twenty-five miles to the south-east of Holznau, but it would take them the best part of an hour to reach it by the exceptionally tortuous road system in the Erzgebirge mountains. Rosenharte was thoroughly familiar with the area and thought he remembered a bridge at the point Griswald had described. As they went, Idris occasionally relayed news from the outside world, in particular from Czechoslovakia where trains were being prepared to take the people from the West German embassy in Prague to the Federal Republic.

‘I didn’t know you were so interested in the news,’ remarked Rosenharte after one of these retold bulletins.

‘It’s why I speak German so good,’ said Idris.

Rosenharte smiled, shook his head and looked in the mirror. ‘I hope we see each other again, Idris. I would hate not to have you in my life.’

Idris nodded absently, his attention having already returned to his radio.

Dawn rose on Wednesday 4 October. The valleys below them were filled with mist; to the south was a large pall of brownish smog produced overnight by the lignite-burning power stations on the other side of the border. They passed through four or five villages in which there was no movement whatsoever. Else distracted herself by commenting on the gardens and houses along the way. She reminded him that both sides of her family had been Sudeten Germans who were expelled from their homes in northern Czechoslovakia at the end of 1945. She would be the first member of her family to return to their homeland in forty-four years.

After a long pause, she said, ‘It never ends, does it?’

‘What?’ asked Rosenharte.

‘The war: we live with it every day. Konrad, you, me - we live with the consequences as though we’ve all been cursed. It should end. That’s what I think.’

The road rose to a bald summit where there were a few sheep, then plummeted into Herresbach, passing a shop, a church, a yard full of broken-down agricultural machinery and an austere pre-war factory sited beside a roaring torrent. They continued to the bottom of the valley, where the stream meandered through dense pinewoods, and rounded a corner.

Suddenly Rosenharte cursed. Ahead of them were two military trucks parked in a passing place on the right. A detachment of Grenzpolizei - border guards - had evidently just arrived to enforce the new restrictions. His first instinct was to accelerate past them, but then sense prevailed. ‘Put the bag on the floor and look as if you are in distress,’ he hissed to Else as he slowed to a halt.

He jumped out of the car and hailed them. ‘Good morning. Do any of you know where I can find a doctor at this hour? I’m not from these parts.’

‘What’s the matter?’ asked an officer.

‘My wife - she’s four months pregnant and has complications. We were staying at a friend’s house for a few days to try to get some rest but now we’ve got this crisis we don’t know where to go.’

He looked back at the car. Else had laid both hands over her belly, which it had to be said was convincingly large, and was leaning against the window with her eyes closed. Idris had removed the radio from his ear.

The officer walked towards the car. ‘Have you tried the village of Herresbach? There may be a doctor there.’

‘We’ve stopped in four separate villages now. We were told that no one can help.’

‘Then you’d better go on. You should find what you need in any of the bigger towns ahead - Schwarzenberg, Schneeberg.’ He paused. ‘Who’s the character in the back with the children?’

‘He’s a professor from the Technical University in Dresden. I work with him.’

‘I see,’ said the man doubtfully.

‘He’s more important than he looks,’ said Rosenharte with a rather long-suffering look.

Else let out a moan, which was just audible from where they stood.

‘You’d better be on your way, friend,’ advised the officer. ‘Good luck.’

They left the trucks with an impressive spray of gravel and drove on for a further five and a half miles before seeing the bridge on their right. It was blocked to vehicles by a single red and white bar and three large boulders, which had been hauled from the bed of the stream. He drifted to a stop and looked up into the trees. He knew exactly where he was. The border lay just over the hill though the top of it was hidden by the mist that smouldered in the trees from halfway up. He drove on for a hundred yards and then took a lumber track on his left, gunning the Wartburg’s little engine to carry them up the dirt slope. He parked behind a stack of timber, hopped out and put on his walking boots and anorak, then folded his coat and stuffed it into his pack. Taking his camping knife, he unscrewed the registration plates and hid them some way off in the undergrowth. The licence and ownership details were placed in the front flap of his anorak for the same reason: if the car was found, he didn’t want it to be traced back to Ulrike. Finally, he covered the rear of the car with boughs cut from the trees nearby so it wouldn’t be seen from the road.

Before shouldering his own rucksack, he checked Else’s and the boy’s shoes. They couldn’t take their eyes off Idris, who was dressed in a long, tailored prelate’s coat, a turban improvised from a piece of striped towel, and trainers. On his back he carried a large grip, which served as a pack, with the long handles acting as straps.

Keeping hidden from the road, they made for the bridge, crossed it and entered a patch of open and very marshy ground at the base of the slope. Rosenharte and Idris carried the boys to a clump of evergreen bushes on the far side and returned to help Else, who was struggling across the tufts of bog grass with the bag of Konrad’s films. After redistributing the luggage between himself and Idris, he led them into the dark, silent forest and moved slowly up the hill, along a path more trodden by deer and foxes than by men. Rosenharte brought up the rear while Idris strode out ahead with a boy on each side hanging onto his skirts. It was plain that in all his years in Dresden he had never seen the great, dismal forest of German mythology and now he seemed awed by it, as if something enormously important about Germany had been revealed to him.

The hill was higher than it had seemed from the bridge, and since Else had already broken out in a sweat they sat down on a tree trunk and had another drink. Idris wandered a little way up the path to see how far there was to go, while Rosenharte, encouraged by Else, talked to the boys about their new life in the West and told them that they would never again be taken from their mother in the middle of the night. There was a long journey ahead of them, he said: a funny man with a very red and misshapen nose would drive them in a foreign car. He was English and he talked with an accent that Rosenharte imitated.

Suddenly they spotted Idris sliding and tripping down the path, waving his arms. Rosenharte grabbed the boys by their hands and led them to a spot where the boughs of the pines touched the ground and made them lie down. Else and Idris followed and they all three flattened themselves to the bed of pine needles and waited, panting.

It began to rain. At first there were just one or two heavy drops, but within a few minutes a downpour ensued and the mist rolled down the hill, filling the forest. They remained dry under the trees, but visibility was reduced to about forty feet, and they could only just make out the path they’d been walking.

‘Did they see you?’ Rosenharte whispered.

Idris shook his head.

‘How many were there?’

Idris held up four fingers, then made a sign to indicate that they were carrying weapons.

‘Grepos?’

He nodded. His eyes were staring out at the forest.

They waited for an hour under the trees. Else pulled her boys to her and held them to keep them warm, because the rain had brought a sudden drop in temperature. Still, the rain was no bad thing: it would cover up their tracks on the hill and wash away the tyre marks on the lumber road. Rosenharte looked at his watch: it was eight fifteen. They were late, but there had been no one to meet them at the bridge, as the American suggested there would, and Rosenharte was sure they’d be on the other side of the border. The mist had lifted a little over the forest and the rain had stopped. He rose to his knees very slowly and crawled out of the shelter to see if there was any movement above them. Idris tugged at his trousers. Rosenharte dropped down. A minute or two passed, during which he heard only the thunder of the stream below. Idris touched his leg again. Rosenharte craned his neck to see him pointing at one of the children’s backpacks propped up against the trunk where they had stopped. Anyone coming down the path would see it immediately. He cursed and wriggled forward, but just as he was deciding to get up and save his trousers from the mud ahead of him, he heard the voices coming down the path. It was too late to retreat the few feet back to the others, so he sank to the ground and hugged it for dear life.

There was in fact a party of six guards. Evidently they had been sheltering somewhere on the top of the hill, because their uniforms were barely wet. He could hear what they were saying. One was telling a story about an officer who had been caught on the job at a local farm and been reduced to the ranks and sent to the Polish border. Every time he wanted to emphasize a point, he would turn and his colleagues would stop to listen and chip in with their own comments.

When they reached the bag, one of them spotted it and picked it up. They crowded round and looked inside, but it didn’t occur to them that it had been left there recently, still less that the fugitives were within a few feet of them in the undergrowth. The man then flung it high into the trees, where it dangled from a branch by one of the straps. This seemed to amuse them and they continued on their way, laughing.

Rosenharte left it a quarter of an hour before moving again and summoning the others back onto the path. They climbed the next 200 yards quickly, carrying the boys up the steeper parts and helping Else, whose size and lack of fitness was beginning to prove a problem. Eventually they reached a large rock, from which sprouted a few birch saplings. It was the highest point on the range and they were able to look down into Czechoslovakia, which at that moment was a cauldron of mist broken by the spires of dead pine trees. Else bent over to clutch her knees and asked if they had arrived. Rosenharte told her that there was just one more obstacle which he was going to look at. He urged them to stay hidden behind the rock while he was gone.

He jogged the fifty or so yards and came to a rusty mesh fence topped by three lines of barbed wire. Compared to the defences along the East-West border, this was pretty rudimentary. There were no sensors or automatic guns aimed at body level, and despite seeing the detachment of the guards earlier, he did not think that this section of the border was heavily patrolled. He felt the spring of the mesh and realized it wouldn’t take much to dislodge it from the ring fittings on the concrete posts.

A little way up he had noticed a fairly sizeable log, which he now dragged down to the fence. Aiming one end at the point where the mesh was fixed to the fence, he jabbed at the mesh and burst the fitting with little difficulty. He dragged the log to two more posts and repeated the procedure, at the last one shouting for the others to join him. Very soon he had pushed the mesh over with the log so that it lay at an angle of forty-five degrees from the ground. They were able to scramble under the barbed wire and drop down on the other side. When they were all safely over they gave up a little cheer and Rosenharte tousled the boys’ hair.

Griswald had said that the road clipped the border about five hundred yards down the slope. If they followed an easterly route they would find it. Rosenharte took his compass from the side pocket of the rucksack and they set off, taking a rather too literal course, which led them first to a little cliff and then across a stream that tumbled over a series of waterfalls into the mist. Eventually they came to the road and quite miraculously found the red Volvo estate parked up in the mist with its lights on.

Inside, the Bird and Robert Harland were sharing a flask of coffee.

Rosenharte knew there would be a difficulty about Idris and there was. Harland got out, shook his hand and explained that Macy Harp was ill with flu. Then he let his eyes run over the figure in the long flowing robes. The Bird articulated his thoughts. ‘Who’s this? King Melchior? The bloody Lion of Judah?’

Rosenharte made the introductions and explained very quietly that unless they dropped Idris somewhere near Prague they wouldn’t hear the new information he’d brought from Kafka.

‘I don’t mean to be rude, Rosenharte,’ said Harland, ‘but I’m not fucking around here. I want the information now, or I’ll leave your brother’s wife and kids on this road. Tell me what you’ve got and we’ll talk about your friend here after that.’ He led Rosenharte thirty feet beyond the car. ‘Well?’ he said.