The Berlin Crossing (8 page)

Pastor Bruck closed the door to the altar and motioned me towards the two stools beside the small plug-in radiator. The sacristy
was an odd mix: religion, dressing room, kitchen. A large wooden crucifix with a delph Christ hung above the wide chest of
drawers; another smaller crucifix stood on top of the dark chest. A cassock and a plain white surplice on hangers were hooked
to the back of the door; a wall cupboard and a stainless-steel sink completed the minimalist furniture of the small room.

I sat on the stool beside the radiator. There wasn’t much heat; it felt like sitting in a bus shelter.

Pastor Bruck looked at me almost apologetically.

‘We rely on donations, Herr Ritter. We have to be careful with our bills.’

He moved his stool closer to me. He looked even straighter sitting on the small stool. The brace, I thought. The brace and
the pain. Every day, his son had said.

‘My mother,’ I said.

‘Your mother. Petra Ritter.’

‘Yes, Petra Ritter.’

‘Please, show me the photograph again.’

Once more the priest looked at the small picture of my mother and me. An image from a lost time. A fair-haired young woman
who seemed almost to be trying not to smile, a serious-faced youngster trying to live up to the cap and uniform of his Socialist
Boy Scouts. The wheezy breathing of Pastor Bruck and the irregular clicking noise of the small electric heater. And my own
heartbeat, loud in my head, waiting for this old fellow to speak of my past.

‘I knew her,’ he said at last, ‘but how can I know who you are, Herr Ritter?’

‘She was my mother.’ I stared at the priest, confused. I hadn’t expected this. ‘I’m her son.’

‘So you say.’

I took my wallet from my inside pocket and drew out my shiny new Bundesrepublik ID card. He was turning the laminated card
over in his long bony fingers when I handed him my old GDR driving licence.

The thin lips curled, a hint of a smile.

‘Two cards, two countries,’ he said.

‘One person,’ I said, ‘only one.’

‘And which country do you belong to, Herr Ritter?’

I shrugged. ‘I have no choice about that. I’m here because my mother sent me, Pastor Bruck. That’s all I know.’

‘And you are Petra Ritter’s son.’ He looked at the photograph. ‘I can see it in the face, in the eyes. The same look of –
of stubbornness, a refusal to be told what to do. Does that ring a bell, Herr Ritter?’

My mother’s lonely-furrow obduracy came back to me. Her manifold refusals. To join our apartment block committee. To join
the Workers Committee at the factory. Or the Parents Committee at my primary school. Or to go on the North Sea
holiday with the rest of her factory colleagues. Her face set, one ‘no’ after another.

‘That sounds like my mother,’ I said.

‘And yourself?’ The priest was smiling.

I shrugged again. I wasn’t about to reveal to this priest any more personal stuff. I had said too much on my first visit.

‘My father,’ I said. ‘My mother sent me here to ask about my father.’

‘You never had a father at home?’ Gentleness in the wheeziness.

‘It was just my mother and me, just the two of us.’

‘So why now, Herr Ritter? Why try to find your father now? What good can it do you? You and your mother shared a life, she
brought you up on her own and I’m sure she was proud of you. You did your best, you told me you have a doctorate from Rostock
University, any mother would be proud of your achievement. What good can it do you now to seek out knowledge that might upset
you, even do you harm?’

‘My mother wanted me to know.’

‘Your mother was dying, Herr Ritter. I’ve seen a lot of people die. Sometimes they want to change things just
because
they’re dying. They ask for things they’d run a mile from if they thought they could go on living.’ The priest edged his
stool closer to mine. ‘Despite what you read in storybooks, Herr Ritter, the words of the dying have no special value – they’re
just the words of people who know they haven’t long to live. They have no special wisdom, believe me.’

‘Still, she sent me to you—’

‘And I’m saying to you to think of yourself. All we have is today, the past is over and done with.’

‘So everybody keeps telling me.’ I could tell from the look he gave me that he knew what I meant but he let it go.

‘So why go chasing a father now, Herr Ritter?’

And in that barely heated sacristy in Bad Saarow, under the grey gaze of a priest I hardly knew, I found myself confronting
the many ghosts of my absent father. School prize days, certificate days, days when my classmates gloried – and, as teenagers,
squirmed – in the presence of their fathers. Fathers on the touch-line at football games, loud with encouragement and remonstration.
Fathers in summer allotments, smoking in shirtsleeves, hailing one another across the makeshift fences. And the way they’d
sometimes call me into the allotment huts with their own children for a lemonade and a sandwich and I’d try not to see the
wariness in their expressions, the words held back, constrained in the presence of this serious schoolboy with the non-participating
mother and the dead father.

Maybe the priest read the struggle in my expression.

‘I just want to know.’ It sounded lame, even to myself. ‘I’m thirty and I just want to know.’

Pastor Bruck studied my ID card for a moment.

‘You were born in August nineteen sixty-three, Herr Ritter,’ he said, fingering the card.

‘So I’m told. I don’t remember any of it.’

Pastor Bruck chose to ignore my flippancy.

‘I knew your mother for a short while in the winter of nineteen sixty-two, Herr Ritter.’

‘I suppose . . .’ I hesitated, ‘I was on the way then.’

‘In November and December of nineteen sixty-two your mother was . . .’ it was the pastor’s turn to hesitate, ‘a slim and lovely
young woman. And brave too.’

‘Brave?’

‘Yes, brave and beautiful.’

‘She sent me here – you must have known my father?’

The priest seemed to slump on the stool; maybe the metal
brace was failing in its job of keeping him upright.

‘I knew the young man she loved at that time – the young man who loved her.’

He looked away from me. He closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around himself as though to protect himself against something
other than the damp cold of the sacristy.

‘Please,’ I said.

When he opened his eyes, I could see the struggle in him.

‘In that winter of nineteen sixty-two, the world was a different place. It was a dangerous world. In Berlin they had just
built the Wall, every day we could see army trucks and tanks on the roads. Many of us feared there might be war, the Americans
and the British were rumoured to be building up their armies in the West. Rumours, always rumours. And the Russians were here
– officers, colonels, generals, being driven in and out of Berlin, on the boats in the lake – and the sky was full of planes,
Herr Ritter, even here in this quiet place, in Bad Saarow.’ He paused. I could see the shadow in his face, the remembered
fear, but I wanted to get the old man back to the point.

‘What’s all that got to do with my father, Pastor Bruck?’

‘It was in that dangerous time that Petra Ritter met a young man in Berlin. God help us, I was responsible for their meeting.
It wasn’t what I wanted, I was just trying to help a young fellow in serious trouble but then, I suppose, things happened,
the way they do between a young woman and a young man.’

‘What young man? Tell me.’

‘The young man was a foreigner, Herr Ritter, he was on the run from the police – and God knows who else. Like I said, the
roads were thick with the military anyway and you couldn’t tell if they were on manoeuvres or hunting your . . .’ He spread his
hands, looked up at the wall as though enlightenment might descend from the crucifix.

‘Or hunting my father,’ I finished for him.

‘Yes,’ Pastor Bruck said, ‘or hunting the man who probably was your father.’

‘And they caught him?’

The priest’s pale face became whiter than ever. Eyes closed, the skin stretched like brittle paper across the skeletal cheekbones.

‘They always caught their quarry, Herr Ritter.’

Quarry. A beast fleeing across the snow-covered fields somewhere beyond the sacristy. Men and dogs in loud pursuit, the squeal
of pain, blood on the snow
.

‘But why? What had the man done?’

‘It didn’t matter. He was guilty of whatever they said he was guilty of.’

‘And this man, this man they were hunting – what was his name?

‘Roland.’ The eyes closed, remembering. ‘His name was Roland.’

‘What . . . what was he like?’

‘He was young, Herr Ritter, younger than you are now. He was young, and he was brave and he was lost.’

‘And he came here to meet my mother?’

The priest smiled at that. ‘Maybe that was the
real
reason he came, Herr Ritter. Maybe that was the real God-sent reason that brought him here, so that he and your mother could
meet. But in terms of this earthly kingdom, no, Roland didn’t come here to meet Petra Ritter.’ He moved his stool a little;
the metal stool leg squealed against the wooden floor. ‘Roland was sent here by others, on a mission, they would have said,
but really, to carry out an impossible task.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Which of us did understand, Herr Ritter?’ He stood up suddenly, agitated, his long frame filling the small room. ‘The
world we lived in seemed beyond understanding. That young man was lost from the moment he stumbled into this crazy world of
ours – I imagine that your mother was the only thing in it that made any kind of sense to him.’

‘I wish it made sense to me, Pastor Bruck.’ I struggled for words. ‘Where is this man – this Roland? If he was my father,
why did I never see him? Why did my mother never speak of him?’

‘For the same reason, Herr Ritter, that I never spoke of him, never until this night. It was too dangerous. One life had been
lost, wasn’t that enough?’

I knew the meaning of his words, I knew the question I wanted to ask. I couldn’t ask it. In my heart I already knew the answer.

I felt the priest’s hand on my shoulder.

‘It’s not easy,’ he said. ‘You’ve just lost your mother, now you lose your father in the moment of finding him.’

‘Some of us,’ I said, looking directly at him, ‘have lost a country.’

It was impossible to contemplate: how could the country I loved have taken from me the father I never knew
?

‘And some of us cannot share your grief about that, Herr Ritter.’ The mildness of tone took the sting out of the rebuke. ‘Come,
I’ll show you.’

I stood up, buttoning my coat.

‘Show me what?’

‘You want to learn about Roland – about your father?’

I nodded.

‘Then come with me.’

The cold night air filled the sacristy when he opened the door. Pastor Bruck waited until I had negotiated the stone steps
that led down from the sacristy before switching off the lights. I watched while he locked the door with a black iron key
and then, in the darkness, I followed him on the dirt path among the graves.

The pastor’s son must have been watching out for us: the door of the cottage at the end of the churchyard swung open and Thomas
Bruck stood there in the lighted doorway. By way of greeting he gave me a malevolent glare; in silence he switched on the
flashlight he was carrying and led the way along the side of the little cottage into a small fenced-off back garden. Thomas
unlatched a low, wooden gate in the fence and went on into a bare open space; fifty or sixty metres beyond lay the dark bulk
of the pine forest.

Even in the dark, Thomas’s step was sure. He flashed his torch along the bare earth until the beam fastened on a small wooden
cross. The tiny cross bore neither name nor date; in the dim light of the torch it looked lost, orphaned.

Nobody spoke. Just three overcoated men standing in silence around a bare wooden cross in the darkness of Bad Saarow.

Pastor Bruck took a smaller torch from his pocket and switched it on. I blinked as he flashed it towards me; I saw Thomas
blink too as the beam fell for a moment on him.

‘Thomas.’ There was a note of pleading in the pastor’s voice.

His son made no attempt to hide his anger. For a long moment he glared at his father but then he shrugged and stooped over
the earth beside the wooden cross.

In the weak light of the torches I had not noticed that the earth here was disturbed, newly turned. Nor had I noticed the
mound of fresh earth just beyond the beam of torchlight.

‘Help me.’ Thomas Bruck was looking at me with undisguised loathing.

I knelt beside him.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to my right.

Thomas was lifting an earth-covered board about the size of a door. I moved away from him and scrabbled with my fingers in
the earth until I located the other end of the board. Together, still
on our knees, we raised it from the ground and laid it against the mound of freshly dug soil.

Beneath the board was a shallow grave. I caught my breath, the smell of the soil as strong as dung. Above my own breathing
I could hear the hoarse whisper of other times, other lives, insistent in this open trench. Pastor Bruck, standing above us,
played the beams of both torches into the dark hole in the ground. Incongruous in the grave, a white plastic bag lay folded
in the wet earth. Thomas took the bag from the grave, handed it to his father. The bag was folded a couple of times around
something rectangular, like a small box, maybe a book.

‘We opened the grave earlier today.’ Pastor Bruck looked at me, then at Thomas. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness:
I could see the pity in the priest’s face. ‘Thomas opened it, Herr Ritter.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. It didn’t take much to work out whose remains lay here in this unmarked spot.

Thomas Bruck didn’t answer me, his expression grim as ever. Maybe he was still thinking about the brace on his father’s back.

‘This is yours, Herr Ritter.’ Pastor Bruck handed me the plastic bag.