The Spy Game (18 page)

I might as well go now.

And yet it is so hard to go; some compulsion, the old paranoia, edging back, all the looking for things that weren't there.
The gaps. The wordlessness.

So I stay and browse the files for a while longer, just turning the pages, turning through at random. Grey pages, heavy black
type. So many names. Each name a person, a family history. So many Frenzels, Hermanns, Hoffmanns. Seven columns of Hoffmanns.
What if my mother's name were Hoffmann; which of four hundred-odd Hoffmanns might have been my grandfather?

Or Schwarz. Schwarzes run from one page on to another. Almost a column of Schwarzes, and one at the top of the second page
catches my eye. Sophia Schwarz is a name I know.
Sophia Schwarx, Witwe, Koggengasse 21.

The discovery comes like that. It is so simple, only an idle chance. If it is a discovery.

Halfway down the previous column, a Heinrich Schwarz at the same address.
Witwe
is 'widow'; the majority of the women named as householders are listed as
Witwe.
An old woman, perhaps, Sophia Schwarz, a widow, and her son in an apartment in the same building. (One family owning two apartments.
Polished brown furniture, heavy curtains and lace before the glass. Room for a grand piano.) I turn to the street listings:
Sophia Schwarx, Witwe, fifh poor; Heinrich Schwarz, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer,fourth.

'Excuse me, I'm so sorry, can you possibly help me?'

The archivist comes over. She does understand a few words of English, now that no one is here to translate, can even speak
a few.

'Where is - where was - this street? Can you show me on the map?'

There is a big map of old Königsberg on the wall above a cabinet. The archivist points with her pen to an area just too high
for her to reach.

She points to some streets in the old centre, close to the Pregel River and the docks. (The part of the city you see in old
pictures, a quarter of tall houses with long roofs and dormers in them like eyes.)

'Koggengasse. Are you sure?'

'Ja. Hier.'

I feel an urge to laugh. It is the shock, I suppose, and the absurdity. Absurd to have found this, that I happened to find
this place, that just that page caught my eye.

'Thank you so much, that's such a help.
Danke,
I mean,
spasiba
. I will go now.
Do svidaniya,
goodbye.'

The blank steel door slams shut behind me. A building like a filing cabinet, the archivist had said. The air outside is fresh
and free of the smell of dust.

I meet my friends in what they called the caf6 down the street. Caf; is almost too formal a name for an enterprise that is
no more than a booth, a striped umbrella and a cluster of plastic chairs on a patch of concrete at the edge of a garden long
gone wild. At least there is coffee, and the afternoon is unusually mild and the spot catches the sun.

No need for me to speak at first. The old man is full of news of his own. There is an unlikely giggle in him, as if he is
a schoolboy with a joke to tell. The slight hesitancy in his speech frustrates him. Now you will come and see the family house.
Come and see what has become of it.

I go with them like a passenger.

We cut through the block of derelict gardens and walk a couple of streets further. The house stands on a corner. It is not
at all what I had expected, but an extraordinary and elaborate suburban villa, shining and new as if it comes fresh from some
architect's fantasy. A touch of baroque, a touch of
Jugendctil.
High walls about it, iron gates, security cameras and intercoms, urns, balconies, a vast silver Mer-cedes drawn up before
a marble-columned porch.

The camera moves to watch us as we stand at the gate.

'Two years ago I came here and there were four families in the house and they used the garden for a toilet. Now look at it.
You would think this was Beverly Hills!'

He laughs, too loudly. A dark-coated figure comes out of the house, glares at us where we stand.

The guard shouts something. Waves us away as if we're stray dogs.

The old man dislodges the spittle in his throat. His joke has gone sour.

'Damn these Russians!'

He is suddenly agitated. His wife takes his arm.

'My grandfather was a respected man. A judge. This was a respectable house. It is a good thing my grandfather did not live
to see what happened here. He died in '43. Not the war. Cancer. It was a mercy, when you think of what came after.'

Nothing I can say but only wonder about my own grandfather, here, somewhere, who he was.

Come, the wife says. We walk on.

After a time he collects himself and asks how it went at the archive.

'It went fine,' I say. 'Thank you, it was interesting. But I didn't really find anything. I couldn't very much expect to,
could I, with so little information to go on?'

What am I to tell them? That there were five Herr Odewalds, any one of whom might have been the father of Karoline. That by
chance I found that there was a Heinrich Schwarz and he may have had a daughter called Sophie, who might or might not have
played the piano, and a mother called Sophia who lived in the apartment upstairs. That Heinrich was in the SS. That the name
is familiar to me. That I have a hunch. That there have been too many stories and I don't know my way between them.

The old people walk slowly. There is pause in such a stroll for talk, questions, confidences. But for silence also.

As long as we walk down these residential avenues the ghost of Königsberg persists about us. Karl Marx Street used to be Hermann-Goringstrasse.
The tram runs just behind here, the man says. He offers the memory flatly, bitterness dissipated now. They used to get this
tram to school. The line runs behind tall backs of tenements and then out on to the main thoroughfare and we are in Russia
again.

I
n the jewellery box she kept a couple of amber neck-laces (one dark, one light, two shades of marmalade), one good string
of cultured pearls, a pair of gold earrings shaped like tiny bells that tinkled when she wore them, a dozen other pairs of
earrings and various costume beads of little value. Sometimes she opened the box and let me look through all its contents.
The box had an inner case lined with green velvet that had separate compartments and slots into which rings and earrings fitted,
and inside the lid there was another flat compartment where she kept her rosary and a few mementoes. It would have been easy
to miss this compartment if you did not know that it was there, as the catch was small and concealed within the folds of the
fine velvet lining.

'Where did this come from? And this? Daddy bought this for you, didn't he?'

I took things out one by one and held them up before the mirror.

My mother's laugh was dark, a depth of German in it like in her voice.

'Daddy bought them all for me, almost all. When I met him I had almost nothing but the clothes I stood up in.'

This evening she was wearing a black dress for a cocktail party. She spent ages getting dressed for a party. Sometimes I thought
she went just for the excuse it gave her to dress up. She took the pearls from the box and put them on, winding them three
times and fastening the delicate clasp behind her neck. The pearls were his wed-ding present to her, which he had given her
when they first came to England.

The amber necklaces were from Berlin. I held these up now and saw how the light caught in the beads and showed up flaws. I
liked the paler one best, that was like Golden Shred.

'Those come from the sea, from where we used to go for holidays.'

'But you didn't get them there.'

'No. I've told you this before, haven't I? Daddy bought them on the black market. I was with him one day and we saw this woman
whom I had known before, and she was selling them. She had been a friend of my parents, rather grand, and there she was in
the street in Berlin selling her jewellery. He gave her a good price, of course.'

'Because she was your friend?'

'No, not because she was my friend. Because your father is your father. He didn't even know that I knew her. But he was so
soft-hearted, he always gave everyone a good price.'

'I'm going to wear these, when I'm older.'

'Have I told you about how amber is made? How old it is, how it came out of trees thousands and thousands of years ago, and
how they find it now under the sea?' She had put pearl studs in her ears to go with the necklace.

'Can I keep it on when you go?'

'If you like.'

'Can I look in the secret compartment?'

'But I'm going in a minute.'

I knew what I would find. I had looked many times before. There was a tiny metal frog the size of my father's thumbnail, which
came from a restaurant in Paris. They had been for a holiday to Paris once and gone to a restaurant called La Grenouille where
you were given a little frog when you had paid the bill. There was a rosary which had strange brown beads like nuts and had
been blessed by the Pope. And then there was the little cat that my mother had kept on all her travels, which was the only
thing that came from her home and her childhood. It was a tatty thing of black fur and wire, with bendy legs and tail, and
glass beads for eyes, and a ribbon round its neck with a silver medallion on it like a bracelet charm, and that name was engraved
on the medallion,
Sophie
Schwam.
The letters were Gothic and hard to read.

'Why does it say that?'

'What did you say, sweetheart?' She was standing up, ready to give me a kiss and go. My father was calling from downstairs.

'Whose name is it?'

She bent and kissed me on the cheek, and then on the top of the head.

'Oh but it's the cat's name, of course.'

'It's a funny name for a cat.'

'What's funny about it? I think it's a fine name.
Schzuarx
means black. It's a black cat.'

The jewellery box is one of the things I brought home when my father died. Even when I was a child I had always assumed that
it would come to me and not to Peter. It was mine because I was the girl, my mother's daughter. The amber necklaces have gone
to Peter's girls in Hong Kong. I sent them because I thought it would be a connection for them with the past, if they wanted
it. I don't know if they valued the gift. Their letters of thanks were neat and formal and I couldn't tell, and Peter himself
never acknowledged it. Later I thought that I should not have bothered. I should have kept them for my own daughter.

I promised Peter a postcard from Kaliningrad. There aren't many to be had here but in a little shop by the amber museum I
found some of pre-war Königsberg, old images reprinted in sepia by the Russians for nostalgic Germans, who must be almost
their only tourists: the lost city, the cathedral, the forts, the drawbridge over the river, even the synagogue with a group
of Jewish schoolgirls posing before it. There's a street scene Peter might like, a view with the castle to one side and a
road and trams and a scattering of pedestrians. It looks a pompous place, with statues of sword-bearing Prussian warriors
and nineteenth-century commercial buildings.

Dear Peter,
I might write,
It's not like this now. Really there's almost nothing to see here.

That was what she said, wasn't it? When I asked her if we might go. There's nothing to see there. What should a child see?
Only clean and neat and pretty things, pretty maids all in a row. No ruin, no death. Not the truth. Not things that are already
buried.

Dear Peter, There's nothing to see here. The war and the Russians eradicated it all. Only guess what I found
. . .

It was so smooth, her lie.
It's a black cat.
If it was a lie. She is like glass to me. Her image is smooth as glass. I could shatter it with a word. Then there will be
glass, mirror pieces, shattered all about me. Splinters of her on the floor about my feet.

It is hard to sleep here. Earlier I slept a snatch, and woke up feeling shaken by a dream of glass. This room is oppressive,
out of proportion; both too narrow and too tall, so that the walls seem to close in. It must have been cut out of the next
room in some cheap refurbishment, the bathroom cut out of it, leaving a thin vertical space that takes the single bed and
just the space to walk beside it. I have the metal window open now and the noise of the street comes in, the noise of rough
cars and of a nightlife that goes on into the early morning. For a while I had the window closed. It is substantially double-glazed
so that it had sealed out the sound, but that only increased the sense of claustrophobia.

I have got out of the bed and put on my coat to keep me warm. I am still aware of the faint sour smell of the room, which
I notice whenever I walk into it, a smell that lasts even when you live in it, that may be the smell of use or of disuse,
a hotel smell of old carpet and bodies and ancient smoke and doors that are almost always closed. A sort of smell that might
hang on a person if they were to spend too long in rooms like this, alone, paying by the night. That won't wash off under
the bathroom's feeble shower.

There is a small brown desk and a chair before the window. A green-shaded desk lamp that makes a pool of light. I cannot finish
my postcards. I have nothing to say in them. Instead, I make notes for myself, list facts and possibilities.

There were a number of Odewalds living in Königsberg before the war, but none sofar as I know living in a house like the one
I remember described.

A Sophia Schwarz lived in a place that
fits
the desmiption, one poor above her son Heinrich. It is possible that Heinrich had a daughter called Sophie or Sophia after
her grandmother.
The young Sophie (if she existed) may or may not have escaped Königsberg before or during the siege. If she did not, $she
was still there when the Russians captured the city, then as the daughter of a senior SS oficer she had good reason to become
somebody else.

There is another point to consider which I have already noted.

Under the laws of the Allied occupation, a German citizen could not marry a British soldier until 1947 After that a special
permit was introduced, issued by the Army following satisfactory completion of a one-hundred-and-sixty-point
questionnaire detailing political backround. How a person's identity and bacbound could be verzfied in the case of a refugee
from a destroyed city under Russian occupation
is
unclear.

My daughter phoned today.

'I just wanted to call you. To check you're all right.'

'I'm fine. It's nice of you to call.'

'Did you find out anything?'

'I'm not sure. Maybe.'

'What?'

'Or maybe not. I don't know. I thought it mattered but perhaps it doesn't.'

'Tell me.'

'It'll take too long.'

'Tell me some of it.'

'It's a long story, I wouldn't know where to start. Don't waste your phone bill. I'll tell you when I get back.'

'Promise? '

'I just said I would, didn't I?'

'Bet you don't, when it comes to it. You'll keep it to yourself. You never tell me anything.'

'You should have come with me,' I said. All of a sudden I wished terribly that she had been here with me. 'Really you should
have. I should have waited like you said, and then we could have come together, the two of us, in the summer.' A sudden fantasy:
an unlikely holiday in this place, the two of us in summer clothes, sunglasses, eating ice cream in the café by the zoo.

After May 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany (part of which became Poland, part Kaliningrad, part the German Democratic
Republic) sixteen thousand persons were charged with participation in mimes against humanity and for war crimes. These would
have included many members of the SS. Many more thousands of other Germans were transported to labour camps.

The transported Germans were not returned West until 1947 earliest. An individual might only have been. released sooner under
the most exceptional circumstances -for example,
if
he or she had made some deal or was working for the Russians.

It is said that the Russians were placing spies in the West from the moment the division of Germany occurred.

There's a commotion outside. A car's brakes, a crunch of metal, angry voices. I look out to see a dark car skewed across the
road, shiny beneath the street lamps, a cluster of people gathered before its lights, others crossing to the opposing pavement,
walking on, heads down. Cold air. Nothing to do with me. I close the window again, draw the curtain back across it.

The chill stays with me. I see myself in this moment as I saw her, so long ago. This room is like the room I used to dream
her in. In the early hours of the morning in a Soviet city, a woman stands awake in a room with her coat pulled about her.
She stands at the window looking down. Sees a car below.

It was so potent, the spy story. At times I more than half believed it. It was so easy to imagine; the images, clichés all
of them, so often reinforced. The adult world fed us all that spy stuff and did not know how deep it went.

Of course it didn't end there at the cemetery. I wanted to go back sometime with flowers for her. I would have picked her
favourites from the garden and taken them in a jar. But that didn't stop me dreaming things.

It didn't stop Peter either. It went on building in him and in the end it drove him right away.

'Dad doesn't know anything.'

Or if he does, he has to pretend. He works for the Government, doesn't he? Maybe he's signed the Official Secrets Act. Maybe
he's a spy as well, one of ours. Has to keep silent so he doesn't blow his cover.

It was just after that day Dad showed us the grave, perhaps the very next day but one of those shining summer days that one
cannot connect with any preceding day of rain. Dad was in the garden, oblivious as ever. Peter was too stubborn to go out.
Peter must resist even the sun. His paleness was an assertion of his determination not to accept things as they were or as
others would have them.

'You don't know anything either.'

He knew that I'd be with Dad in the end. That he was the odd one out, that I was like Dad and that if he might have been close
to anyone it would have been to the one person who was no longer there. (And he was right in that; Dad and I had an understanding
even in our silence, from which he was excluded, and that was in our nature, in the dynamic, and there was nothing any of
us could have done about it.)

'I saw her, when I ran away. I did. I saw her.'

He spoke flatly, without force. The French windows were open and there was the sound of summer outside, yet his voice resounded
between us.

'You didn't. It's not true.'

He went upstairs to his room. He removed himself so completely that he didn't even have to slam the door. I heard his radio
start up and knew that he had cut himself off as effectively as by any violence.

It was such a big lie he couldn't ever go back on it.

I was going to write to Peter. Give him the facts, the history and the circumstantial clues, let him make out of them what
story he will. See, he could say then. Even if he does not say the words I would hear them in him and that would be the same.
Peter's old dry tone. A bitter self-justification. He was right, we were right to sense that she was not who she said she
was. That there was something there to be discovered. So, she might have been a spy, a plant, a sleeper, after all.

But there's more to it than that. There's something else. It comes to me now. Strange, how things can suddenly make sense
in the darkness; that there can be clarity in the dark that isn't there in the day. I see how important it was. It hadn't
seemed to matter much before.

'Say she's Polish, if anyone asks you, at school or any-where.'