The Berlin Crossing (32 page)

‘I write shopping lists in it.’ She smiled. ‘Not that there’s ever much in the shops to buy.’

‘If you don’t need it—’

‘It’s yours,’ she said, smiling now. ‘What’re you going to do, write your life story?’

‘Something like that. I’ll have time to kill before I go to the station; I thought I might write down a few bits and bobs
about me and where I come from.’ He took her face between his hands. ‘Something to remind you of the Irish fellow who tried
to make a mess of your untroubled life. It could be a long time before I get back for you.’

She stood on tiptoe, kissed him quickly on the lips.

‘You make sure you don’t forget me, Roland Feldmann, and get yourself back here as soon as you can.’ On tiptoe again, kissing
him again. ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

They climbed the ladder and stood at the door of the shed, looking out at the night. The clouds had lifted, stars sequinned
the dark sky. The abandoned sheds were ghostly in the starlight. The world was silent, asleep, waiting.

‘I love you,’ she whispered.

‘And I love you.’

He watched her slip away between the sheds. One last time she turned and waved and blew him a kiss and he waved back at her
and she was gone. For a long while he stood there, his hand raised in farewell, looking at the spot where she had stood, as
though her image were imprinted on the night. She was imprinted on his heart, he knew that. He knew, too, that he would never
see her again.

The ticket clerk hardly lifted his head as he sold him the ticket to Berlin. It was after three o’clock, the afternoon chilly.
At the far end of the platform, a tall, thin commuter with a briefcase was stamping his feet to keep warm. In the wooden shelter
a woman with a canvas sack at her feet sat chomping on an apple.

Bad Saarow in mid-afternoon. The kind of place where nothing happened twice. Every day. The kind of place where you waited
for a train that would take you away from the girl you loved. Where you left her just a notebook with pages filled with jottings
of your life in another land.

He placed himself midway along the station platform, drawing the navy-blue cap down tighter on his head. The cap, folded in
on itself, had been stuffed into the pocket of the coat from Prenzlauer Berg. It looked like a sailor’s cap, with a small
peak. There were two buttons under the crown that might have held a strip of braid, maybe printed with a name. Maybe the late
Marta’s late husband had owned a boat, pottered about on the river on a Sunday afternoon.

They could hear the train now, could see the plume of black smoke above the engine. The woman with the canvas sack stood up,
positioned herself in front of the shelter, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. She glanced at Roland and he looked beyond her
at the approaching train, refusing to catch her eye. The fellow
with the briefcase was probably staring at him too: he knew he looked trampish, dirty, in need of a shave. He didn’t look
like the guy who had clobbered Major Fuchs with an ashtray.

Which was good if it got him out of Bad Saarow unrecognized.

Which was useless if, when they found him, they didn’t recognize him.

Which was why he’d written the Prenzlauer Berg address on a page torn from Petra’s notebook and folded it over and over until
it was no bigger than a postage stamp and stuffed it into his trouser pocket. They weren’t stupid, he knew that now, but maybe
they were too clever. It was something his father often said, considering the failings and failures of shopkeeping rivals:
‘He’s not stupid, just too clever for his own good.’

The train belched to a halt. It was almost empty: he had the pick of empty compartments. A whistle, a green flag from the
ticket clerk in his other role, and they were clanking west, towards Berlin.

Ingham was likely gone now, him and Corporal Adams. He wondered if other eyes had watched his stumbling progress in East Berlin,
had reported back. It didn’t matter now, he was out of time.

It was what had driven him to cover the pages after Petra had left the shed: his time was running out and he wanted her to
know him after he was gone. Especially after he was gone. And so he had begun: ‘I was born in Galway, a small town on the
west coast of Ireland, on November 19th 1942 . . .’

He’d gone on writing in the cellar until the candle guttered and then he’d climbed the ladder and, sitting on the plank, gone
on filling the yellow pages. Dawn had broken, light filtered through the cracks in the wooden walls. Somewhere a bird warbled,
the trees stirred in the new day. He’d have liked to
savour it, this last sweet day, but he wanted to leave his story behind. Sentences were reduced to phrases, glimpses of the
life he had known. When he’d finished, the watery sun was high. He left the notebook on the chair in the cellar, words of
love for the time when he was gone. On the last page, like a schoolboy, he’d signed off: ‘Roland xxx Petra.’ He looked at
it one last time, smiling before wrapping himself in Johannes Vos’s blanket on the wooden bed. He’d give himself an hour,
maybe he’d sleep. He was exhausted but he needed to be gone before Petra returned, even if she had some word of help from
Pastor Bruck. He knew now what needed to be done. And he hoped he could do it.

The train steamed on across the flat landscape. The wind caught the plume of smoke, blew it freakishly low alongside the train.
For a few moments the land was hidden in the pall of smoke and then they were out of it, clanking, cruising towards the city.
He was out of the gloom now, could see his way to the end. It had always been his strength, what set him apart from Terry:
this ability to unknot the problem and then tie it up the way it should be tied.

Sometimes he wished it were not so. Sometimes he’d have enjoyed being helpless, even feckless, on the receiving end of mollycoddling
in the house back in Ireland.

It was too late now. They were entering the city. Apartment blocks, factories and embankment walls lined the route. And to
his left, as they entered a delta of tracks, a high mesh fence topped with razor wire. The Wall on the railway, it
must
be. And then they were past, sliding once more between embankments.

He got off the train at Alexanderplatz, one among a couple of dozen passengers. On the adjoining platform another train was
disgorging a heavier load of travellers and he angled his way until he was in their midst, making for the exit gate. It was
almost five
o’clock, the station busy with commuters. Volkspolizei patrolled in pairs but Roland saw nobody being cut out for questioning.
He stayed with the flow of the crowd, not knowing where they were going. They entered a tunnelled walkway, went down stone
steps, signs overhead. U-bahn. The tube to High Street Kensington flashed into his mind, the blood on the tiled floor, Terry
wheezing, panicking.
Which is what you can’t do right now, so concentrate
.

He concentrated, moved halfway along the underground platform. There were Vopos here too, just standing, watching. There were
trains arriving on both sides of the platform.
Eeny, meeny, miney, mo
. Take the train on the left. He tried to picture in his mind the street-maps that Adams had quizzed him on in the down-at-heel
dining room in Highfield.
Think
. He found a seat next to a pair of schoolgirls, their hair blond as Petra’s. He looked at their hands, resting on their schoolbags,
saw their fingers were whole, unbandaged.
For Christ’s sake, think
. The train slowed to a halt, some of the passengers stood up, moved to the doors. He saw the name on the platform: Jannowitzbrucke.
Think
. The doors were sliding open. It came to him in a flash, this route, Adams forcing him to recite the litany of stops.
Get out here
.

He felt the girls’ eyes on him as he stood up. Their noses wrinkled as they looked at each other, smiling.

At least he knew he was headed in the direction of the Wall. Beyond the Jannowitz bridge stretched Bruckenstrasse. Straight
on lay Heine Street. And the Wall. Traffic was light on the bridge; he felt exposed, vulnerable above the dark waters of the
Spree.

And the wind cut him; the old overcoat might as well have been made of paper. He turned into a side street, away from the
traffic. A church tower rose out of the quietness. Opposite the church he saw the lighted window of an Imbiss and he was
reminded of his hunger. He was out of time but he might as well eat, get warm.

The heat inside the small snack bar was muggy. Two young men were eating
wurst
at a high table beside the sweaty window; they looked at him for a moment, then went back to their beer and sausage, their
complaints about the Dynamo striker. The middle-aged woman behind the zinc counter said, ‘Good evening,’ in an accent that
might have been Polish. She hardly looked at him as she began to prepare his portion of
currywurst
; she lifted her eyes to his only when he asked for tea. She seemed about to say no, then looked again at his unshaven face,
his flimsy coat, and went back through a hanging plastic curtain into the kitchen. He wondered if she might be phoning, perhaps
the Vopos; he thought about walking out of the Imbiss. Then she was back and he cupped his hands gratefully around the steaming
glass of black tea. He paid her, took the tea and plate of sausage to the chest-high shelf on the wall beside the door.

There was an old copy
of Junge Welt
strung on a nail above the shelf. He turned the pages of the magazine as he ate: keen young Party workers beamed out at him,
hiking, swimming, playing football. They didn’t seem any different from schoolboys and schoolgirls back home. He wondered
if Petra read
Junge Welt
. Strange, how you could love someone more than yourself, more than your life, and still know so little about them.

The woman behind the counter thanked him when he returned the empty glass and plate. She didn’t smile as one of the counter-staff
in Feldmann, Watchmakers and Jewellers would have done but her eyes met his, took in his unkempt appearance, his need of a
shave. It occurred to Roland, meeting her frank gaze, that hers might be the last human face he would look upon close up.
She was about his mother’s age, her round face maternal, a small mole below her left eye. It might not be the face you’d choose
to
look your last upon but it wasn’t a bad face either. He thanked her, gave her a smile and was rewarded with a softening in
the brown eyes.

It was a softening that he took with him out of the snack bar into the night.

It had begun to snow, the first fall of the year. Instinctively he drew the collar of the old coat tighter. It didn’t make
any difference but that didn’t matter any more. The snow fell in large, soft flakes; when they melted on his face they felt
soothing. He padded along the deserted street, remembering his mother’s hands, taping a wounded knee. He wondered if they’d
have snow back home; it didn’t fall often in the west of Ireland. Maybe Petra was out in the snow, feeling its softness, wondering
if he was feeling it too.

Enough
. A last look at the silent church tower, like something on a snowy Christmas card; a last wry reminder to himself that he
would not be seeing Pastor Bruck’s old grey church in the snow. He bore south along the deserted street, towards the Wall.

They went to bed early in the GDR, he thought. Or maybe they were all playing chess behind the shuttered windows. Listening
to West German radio, Ingham would say.
Maybe they’d report tonight’s incident at the Wall
.

He hurried on, his shoes plopping on the damp pavement. A car squished past on the snow-wet road; he watched it swing left
at the corner, in the direction of Heine Strasse.

Roland turned right. He knew the kind of quietness he sought; he could only hope it existed. There was a park to his left,
bare trees gaunt inside iron railings, the undisturbed snow carpeting the grass with a fine whiteness. He hurried away from
it, exposed against the white backdrop.

He turned into a narrow street of two-storey houses, small, intimate, the kind you’d find in the back streets behind Feldmann,
Watchmakers and Jewellers. For a moment he paused, taken back,
taken aback by the unexpected streetscape. He gasped, breathless, like Terry without his inhaler.

Move
. Not far to go now, time and space running out. He gulped at the air, felt the snow on his tongue, savoured the wet freshness
of it. Goodnight, Terry,
auf wiedersehen
.

He tiptoed into a passageway between two blocks of houses, past dustbins slick with snow. Behind him he heard a door opening
and he hurried around the corner of the house, leaning backwards into the wall. The noises carried in the night: a lid raised,
rubbish dumped, the lid banged down. A man’s cough, a door closing.

His own heart thumping
.

When he lifted his eyes, his heart thumped even louder.

The Wall reared above the small back gardens of the houses. The grey slab of it glistened in the falling snow, a dark menace
that the night had spawned. Over ten feet high, and not a hand grip in sight.

For a moment longer he hugged the shadows of the house.
Move
, he told himself. This is journey’s end. Put your money where your mouth is. Put your life where all those noble thoughts
of protecting her have been admiring their own wonderfulness.
Move
.

The short back gardens were an unfenced continuum, with an evenly spaced line of wooden sheds. One after another he tried
the sheds; one after another he found them locked. He was contemplating forcing open a door when he saw the ladder, lying
on the snowy ground, resting lengthways against the base of the shed. It was a homemade structure, the wooden rungs of uneven
thickness, but it seemed solid enough. And it had to bear his weight only once: there would be no return ticket.

He lifted the ladder from the ground, manoeuvred it into the space between the wooden sheds and the Wall. He stood the
ladder upright, then let it fall cautiously towards the Wall. It hit the cement top with a soft clunk and Roland stood, listening,
waiting for alarms. Nothing stirred except the softly falling snow. He found two stones, wedged them under the feet of the
ladder and started to climb up. The ladder creaked under his weight. At any moment he expected to hear shouted commands.