Brandenburg (52 page)

When they got inside, Rosenharte made him sit down on the chair with his back to the cage. ‘Burgundy or Bordeaux? Ah no, I’ve got just the thing for you. There’s a very fine brandy here.’ He picked up a bottle, knocked the top off with a clean swipe against the cage door and handed it to Dürrlich. ‘No glass, I’m afraid, so you’re going to have to watch that you don’t cut yourself.’

Dürrlich began to drink. When he had emptied the brandy, Rosenharte gave him a bottle of wine and then some port, but Dürrlich was already looking pretty pale. Rosenharte waited a further forty-five minutes before he slumped back in his chair, dribbling and groaning. He made him drink a little more port, then bound his hands and feet and tied him securely to the cage. ‘If I was a less charitable man, I’d gag you,’ he said. ‘But I believe you’re going to need your mouth in the coming hours.’

Dürrlich shook his head. ‘Please . . . no . . .’

‘By the time you come to, I’ll be over the border. I’m saying goodbye to this apology for a country. So you can forget any idea of following me.’ He pushed the door shut and began to walk to the Schloss.

It took no more than fifteen minutes to load the Wartburg and say their goodbyes to Flammensbeck, who told them of a place they could stay with a friend of his called Krahl in the mountains. He said he’d discover Dürrlich towards evening on the pretence of doing the repairs that had been ordered. Before getting into the car, Ulrike hugged him and kissed him on both cheeks. The old fellow’s eyes watered up. He had enjoyed having them there more than he could say. It had been the best time he’d had in years, he said.

They spent the next few days touring the sites of his boyhood - the house that once belonged to the Rosenharte family, the school and sports ground where the Rosenharte boys starred and finally Konrad’s last home, which had an air of deserted melancholy now. They camped, hid out in barns and one night stayed with Flammensbeck’s friend Krahl who asked no questions when he was presented with two bottles of vintage Burgundy and a flagon of Flammensbeck’s slivovitz. As well as explaining his past to Ulrike, the trip served to fix Rosenharte’s position for himself after Konrad’s death. He knew that he was saying goodbye to it all because he’d decided to go to Else in the West.

They were sitting at the top of a valley on a Sunday afternoon when Rosenharte turned and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Marry me and come with me,’ he said suddenly. ‘We can get over the border no problem.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Which are you saying
can’t
to?’

‘Coming with you.’

‘But you will marry me?’

She nodded. ‘Of course, Rudi; of course I will.’ She was smiling but also matter of fact about it. ‘But I
must
attend the demonstration tomorrow. I’ve missed too much of what’s been going on. This is my destiny, to stay in Leipzig and see it through.’

He put his hand on her shoulder and craned his head to see her eyes. ‘Most of the time a person’s destiny is what they choose. But if you choose to go to Leipzig I’ll come too and march for one last time. Then I want you to think about leaving with me. Because this - us, you and me
-
is your destiny now.’

She was watching some geese that were moving nervously across the field below them with a sheepdog running and crouching behind them. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.

‘Going to Leipzig now is a big risk.’

She pursed her lips and turned to him with utterly resolute eyes. ‘There isn’t a risk. And even if there is, I have to be there. Look, I’ll phone Biermeier.’

‘His phone will be tapped.’

‘I doubt that, but I won’t speak. I’ll just see if he answers. If he does, we’ll know it’s okay. He’ll know it’s me.’

Later she dialled the number in Berlin twice and let it ring three times before hanging up. On the third occasion she beckoned Rosenharte to place his ear to the receiver. They both heard Biermeier say ‘Hurensohn’ - sonofabitch - before hanging up.

‘Good.
Hurensohn
is our code for all’s clear. We’re going to Leipzig tomorrow.’ She paused. ‘Well, I’m going. I don’t know about you.’

‘Of course I’ll come,’ said Rosenharte.

They stayed that night in a shack above the high, still waters of the lake where Konrad and he had spent so much time flat on their bellies looking at the sticklebacks in summer, and in winter fooling with classmates on an ice slide. It was without question the place he loved most, for it was here that his mind had first become attuned to nature, a passion that down the years had become the counterpoint to his scholarship, urging him to solitude and contemplation.

They made a fire outside the shack, put their backs to its wooden side and covered themselves in rugs and the sleeping bag. The lake seemed to hold light well into the night and above them one or two stars shone through the cold winter haze, which had settled on the mountains at dusk. Rosenharte thought of some lines that he had consciously committed to memory when he was a young man and haltingly spoke them in their original English. ‘These beauteous forms, through the long absence, have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in the lonely rooms and ’mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them in hours of weariness, sensations sweet.’

Ulrike watched him with a curious expression. ‘Who wrote that?’

‘William Wordsworth. It expresses what I feel about this place.’

‘Do you admire the English?’

‘They killed my mother with their bombs, though that was probably a merciful release for her, Konrad and me. And they must share some of the responsibility for my brother’s death. I always liked the idea of the English but not the pleasure they take in their own amateurishness. As Konrad said, they are the only Europeans content to be ignorant.’

Soon afterwards, Ulrike fell asleep propped up against him. He stayed awake for a long time, moving carefully so as not to disturb her when he took a swig from the last bottle of Schwarzmeer’s wine or lit a cigarette. Then he too slept.

They left early next day and found a phone. Ulrike called several friends and when she returned to the car she could barely contain herself. The leadership was in a state of paralysis and didn’t know how to respond to the popular movement or to the country’s worsening economic problems. That very day Democratic Awakening was to constitute itself as a political party, and although the Stasi was trying to mould the revolution by infiltrating new political groups, no one was taking any notice of them. There was almost no evidence of them in daily life in Leipzig. Across East Germany the people were in a state of constant and open defiance of the authorities: demonstrations on the Leipzig model were occurring in every major city. And they were peaceful. Not one example of vandalism had been reported. There was no violence.

‘The beast isn’t slaughtered yet,’ said Rosenharte. ‘I mean it; we have to be careful tonight.’

‘How are they going to find me in a hundred thousand people?’

‘Still, they may be looking, so I think we should stay apart.’

In Leipzig, Rosenharte parked a few streets north of her place and went straight to the Nikolaikirche. When they arrived in the huge crowd outside the church she squeezed his hand and reached up to him, and whispered in his ear that everything that she had dreamt of had come true. She looked at him for a fleeting second with the myopic intimacy of their lovemaking, lifted his hand and placed it to her lips before turning to go into the church.

Rosenharte hung around in the crowd uneasily. He raised the collar of his coat and avoided eye contact with the people around him. At the end of the service the congregation poured into the crowd with a surge of joy. He moved quickly to fall in behind the group of people surrounding Ulrike and followed them to the rally in Karl-Marx-Platz. Nothing could prepare him for the size of the crowd. There were three or four times the numbers of 9 October. Yet the atmosphere was far less charged by the fear of official violence. The citizens of Leipzig had laid title to the square named after the father of socialism: they owned their city, not just for the heady hours of the Monday demonstrations, but for all time. Rosenharte began to feel the battle had been won. He relaxed and fell into conversation with a man next to him, who explained that change had even been noticed in the security forces: young Vopos were refusing to police the demonstrations and desertions from the armed forces were said to be in the hundreds.

Through the evening he never lost sight of Ulrike as she threaded through the crowds greeting old friends, hugging and kissing the companions with whom she had fought the long campaign at the Nikolaikirche. At about ten the crowd began to thin. The people had made their point, and they would do so again, pushing their numbers towards the critical mass necessary for permanent change. But their feet were tired, the working week was ahead of them and, whatever the joy of Leipzig’s new fellowship, they needed their sleep.

Rosenharte tapped Ulrike on the shoulder and said it was time for them to be going. ‘We should leave the city too,’ he said.

‘No,’ she replied firmly. ‘After so long on the road I need my own bed. It will be fine. They would have picked up Biermeier if they suspected anything.’

They walked briskly from the city centre, heads bent against the sharp breeze, talking excitedly about the things they’d seen that night. As they entered her street she slipped her hand in his hip pocket for warmth then withdrew it and looked down.

‘What’s this? Ah, the picture of your mother.’ She handed it to him. ‘I wanted to ask you a question about that picture.’

‘Oh, what?’

‘Why don’t we talk about it when we get inside? It’s probably nothing. I’ll go ahead and make sure everything’s okay. If the outside light is on you’ll know the coast is clear. Okay?’

‘What about the picture? What were you going to say?’

She stopped. ‘It says September 1939. That can’t be right.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, look at her, Rudi! She’s as thin as a rake. Yet you were born three months after that picture was taken. She should have been five or six months pregnant with boy twins that September but she looks like she’s just won a slimming contest.’

‘It’s dated wrongly. I found it in a diary for 1938.’

‘You’re probably right, but what mother makes a mistake like that?’ She smiled. ‘Wait a few minutes then follow me.’

He watched her go, slightly puzzled, and felt for his cigarettes and lighter. He saw her disappear into the wisteria gateway then he began to move slowly up the road. He was less than fifty yards from the entrance when a car moved from the bay that he had used to observe her building and drifted to the kerb on his side of the road. Rosenharte flung the cigarette away and backed into the shadows, his heart pounding. He reached for the gun and fumbled with the safety catch. A man got out and held the back door open as a chauffeur would do. Then two men emerged from the gateway with Ulrike between them. No more than a few seconds elapsed before she was bundled into the back seat and the three men climbed in, but during that time Rosenharte registered that Ulrike did not look his way and that the man who opened the door was Colonel Zank. He raised the gun and aimed, but knew he couldn’t fire. He might hit Ulrike and the sound of the shots would certainly bring a response from Zank’s men. He would be outgunned and killed or taken prisoner. Neither would help her, and that was why she didn’t cry out for his help.

Vladimir turned from the window and dropped the phone onto its cradle. Rosenharte hadn’t understood a word he’d said, and Vladimir’s manner and inflection gave nothing away. After a moment’s deliberation in which he moved a few things around his desk, Vladimir looked him straight in the eye. ‘She’s been taken to Hohenschönhausen. Biermeier also. They’re being held in isolation and neither has any idea of the other’s presence there.’

Rosenharte lowered his eyes then raised them to Vladimir, conscious that his chin was thrust forward. Even now, as the new premier Egon Krenz returned empty-handed from his summit with Gorbachev in Moscow to face a bankrupt economy, as millions demonstrated and the border with Czechoslovakia reopened to placate them, the dark energy at the heart of the state did not wane.

‘And . . . she’s sick,’ said Vladimir. His steady gaze betrayed no feeling. ‘Some kind of respiratory infection. My source says pleurisy or bronchitis. Something she’s had for a while, possibly?’ Rosenharte thought of the dry little cough she’d developed while they were on the run and the almost translucent pallor he had noticed that first day.

‘Is there anything you can do?’ he asked.

The Russian grimaced. ‘You must understand that I compromise myself every time I talk to you. I can’t make these decisions to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign state, not from the regional KGB headquarters and on a salary of eighteen hundred East German marks. What happens if you get caught and tell them about our conversations?’

‘I’m not going to get caught.’

‘But they’re watching for you. You saw how difficult it was to get you in here. The Stasi is still one of the most efficient secret services in the world. You’re mistaken if you think you’re going to walk into Hohenschönhausen and rescue your girlfriend. It’s not in my interest to facilitate your arrest and interrogation.’ He stopped and softened his tone. ‘Abu Jamal has been dealt with; Misha has been effectively neutralized because he has no network to operate through. You achieved what you set out to do: you should leave the country. The borders with Hungary are open again.’ Rosenharte began to shake his head, but Vladimir ignored him. ‘If you go, you can help your friend by using the Western media and publicizing what she and Biermeier did to save people’s lives. The Stasi don’t like high-profile prisoners because they’ve got to look after them.’ He smiled and offered Rosenharte a chunky silver cigarette case engraved with the initials VVP.

‘I’m not going to lose anyone else to that place,’ said Rosenharte quietly. ‘I won’t let her die there like Konrad. I can’t let that happen. One way or another I’m going in to get her, so it’s in your interest that I do this with the minimum of risk. It’s very important to you that I don’t get caught, isn’t it, Volodya?’ He intentionally deployed the nickname he’d heard the other Russians use when he entered Number Four Angelikastrasse that afternoon in the boot of a car.