The Valley of Unknowing (26 page)

To make matter worse, I dropped the torch. It hit the cement floor with a loud crack and went out. I stooped down to recover it, aware now that something in the audible environment had changed. I held my breath and listened: the noise of dripping water, previously constant, had stopped. The water had been turned off. The janitor had accomplished that task. In which case, where was he now?

I found the torch, batted it against the palm of my hand. The bulb flickered and came back on. At the same moment, as loud and clear as if she were standing beside me, hugging me as she had at the Tolkewitz Crematorium, I heard Frau Richter’s voice:
It would have been his birthday next week. His twenty-eighth birthday
.

The funeral had been in early January. It was a simple matter to work out Wolfgang’s date of birth to within a few days.

The 1959 files shared a drawer along with the 1957, 1958 and 1960 files. The medical requirements of men in their twenties, it seemed, were few and far between. Even so, the drawer was packed tight and, with the torch now clenched between my jaws, it took time to locate the period I was after. Finally I found what I was looking for, written in fountain pen along the vertical tab:
Richter, W. F.

I was about to open the file when I heard footsteps splashing along the corridor. They were coming closer. I switched off the torch and hurried to the door. Through the glass panel I caught sight of a burly man in overalls carrying a bucket and a mop. Muttering to himself, he set down the bucket and got to work. There was nothing I could do, no alternative way out. I was a prisoner among the filing cabinets until he was done.

I slipped Richter’s file into my toolbox and crouched down in the darkness to wait. No sooner was I down on my haunches when I heard someone else outside, their approach marked by the familiar rubbery footfalls of institutional footwear. Again I peered out through the glass. Nurse Pitmann, alternately silhouetted and starkly lit, was making her way gingerly down the swampy corridor. I hoped she had come to check on the progress of the clean-up, but then I saw what she was carrying under her matronly arm:
another stack of files
.

I was certain to be discovered. Frantically I tried to think of an excuse, an explanation for my presence in a room full of confidential records. Nothing sprang to mind. But then it was suddenly clear to me what I had to do. With an agility that surprises me even now, I raised myself towards the ceiling, planting my feet on the handles of the filing cabinets on either side of me. I reached up and with a single motion yanked the fuse out of the neon light fitting. All this must have made some noise, but I suppose the janitor’s mopping and splashing made even more. I jumped down again and scurried into the far corner just as the door opened.

Nurse Pitmann threw the light switch. Nothing happened. She repeated the action twice more, with the same result.

‘Unbelievable,’ she said under her breath.

I heard her footsteps squeak and splash down the corridor.

‘The bulb in there’s gone again,’ she said. ‘We’ll need a new one right away.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ the janitor said.

‘No, it can’t.’

The janitor squeezed out his mop and walked away towards the stairs. I got up and crept back to the door, just in time to see Nurse Pitmann disappear into the men’s lavatory. Whatever the reason for such an early return visit, it gave me my one chance to make a clean getaway. I didn’t need a second.

45

The journey back to Blasewitz was a journey across a city I no longer knew and where I did not belong. After my escape from the clinic, when finally the building disappeared from view round the corner of Angelikastrasse, I had experienced a moment of elation – relief, mixed with pleasure at my own decisiveness and guile – but that moment had been all too brief. By the time I was standing at the tram stop, standing in plain view of Stasi regional headquarters, its rows of blank windows like a blind man’s eyes, I was in the grip of different emotions. I had committed a criminal act. I was now a renegade, a saboteur. My actions were that of a man who had changed sides. But fear of detection was only part of it. I was afraid of what I was about to discover, afraid of the slender file concealed in my toolbox. That file would answer questions I had spent a year trying not to ask. (A year? Or was it much longer than that?) I climbed aboard a tram, stared through the cloudy windows at streets and skylines that were simultaneously familiar and strange, homely and hostile. I searched for reassurance in the faces of passengers and passers-by. Their expressions revealed nothing but a determination to keep their thoughts to themselves. And it came to me then, their very silence told me, that they all knew the answers to my questions. They had known them all along.

I was sure police officers couldn’t be waiting for me at my apartment, not yet. Whatever detective powers had been brought to bear on the mystery of the unidentified plumber, they were unlikely to have produced results in under forty minutes. Even so, the sweat was trickling down my face as I turned the final corner. What if the file was snatched away from me before I had a chance to read it? I might be forced to spend the rest of my life in a state of suspense, able neither to begin a new life, nor return to my old one. Nor, I might add, did the prospect of imprisonment hold any kind of appeal.

In the event I found the street empty. The schoolchildren were playing outside, filling the air with their innocent screams, but otherwise everything seemed normal. Slowly I climbed the stairs to my apartment – slowly, because I was still unprepared for the possible verdict of
guilty
that awaited me upon arrival. When at last I turned my key in the lock, a voice in my head told me to stop what I was doing before it was too late, to destroy the file instead of reading it. My old life could still be salvaged. Nothing had to change. The years of waiting might still be rewarded. It was like the voices in my dreams that said
stay where you are
; only this time I wasn’t going to listen. There was another voice now, Richter’s voice, my literary son and heir. I couldn’t bring myself to ignore it any longer.

I gulped down a glass of water and went to sit down in my leather armchair. Less than a year had gone by since I first read Richter’s untitled manuscript – read it sitting in that same chair, opposite that same window with that same rooftop view – but recalling the occasion now was like recalling an event from adolescence. I couldn’t disown the individual who had sat in that chair, but neither could I be proud of him. The Bruno Krug I saw was the one Wolfgang Richter saw, and probably many others besides. I didn’t want to be in his company for longer than necessary.

I turned away from the armchair and sat down instead at the dining table. I opened the toolbox. I took out the file. I allowed myself two deep breaths, then opened it.

The file held just one sheet: a form, printed on thin white paper. At the top were the words:
PATIENT ADMISSION (Emergencies)
. Underneath were sections for name, date of birth, identification number, time of admission, the name of the attending physician and other administrative details. These had all been filled in by hand. The blood group was stated as O. Finally I saw a number of tick boxes relating to medical conditions that, I assumed, might affect the range of possible treatment: allergy to penicillin, morphine and cortisone, haemophilia, asthma, hepatitis. All of these were blank, but for a smear of blue ink across the bottom of the page.

I turned the form over. The back too was blank. Nothing more had been written, not so much as a line about the patient’s actual condition. Richter’s file was a non-file. It recorded his arrival at the clinic – at 4.14 a.m. on a Saturday in December – but nothing more, as if the clinic were a cemetery, a final resting place from which new arrivals were not expected to progress. I saw then that I had been naive. Richter’s death had been unusual and unexpected. There had been a risk of contagion, allegedly, perhaps of an epidemic. If that were true, the proper medical records were most likely under study at the Ministry of Health – either that, or they were still in the basement of the clinic, still in that same drawer, where I, in my haste, had failed to notice them.

I stared at the form, at Dr Gatz’s handwriting (tidy but blot-prone on account of the inferior grade of paper), and something struck me as peculiar. Near the top left-hand corner was a paper clip, one easily large and robust enough to hold twenty sheets of paper. But it was holding only one. One sheet of paper does not need a paper clip. It is in no danger of becoming detached from itself. At one point there had to have been at least one other page, perhaps several. But they had been removed, the top sheet retained perhaps out of respect for bureaucratic tidiness.

My stomach began a slow-motion capsize. I turned the form over again. In several places the ink from Dr Gatz’s fountain pen had seeped all the way through. Letters and traces of words appeared in mirror-image, slanting backwards. Here again, something wasn’t right. I flipped the paper over and back again, to make sure I wasn’t deceiving myself. But I was not mistaken: the mirror images of Dr Gatz’s writing outnumbered the originals. The explanation was instantly clear: ink from a second sheet of paper had leached into the one on top.

Examination with a magnifying glass revealed that there had been several lines of writing. Full stops, commas and dotted ‘i’s came through clearly. But as far as the words were concerned, I could make out next to nothing. Only one fragment held out a promise of meaning, but no matter how long I stared at it, that meaning eluded me:

Fr   t r de   li k    Schlä  nl  p    ns,

I needed more light. I needed a reflection.

I went into the bathroom and stood before the mirror, holding the form in one hand and the magnifying glass in the other. Somewhere in the building water was emptying from a sink, temporary airlocks popping and belching as the pressure slowly re-equalised in the system. As if approaching through a mist, the letters became words and the words a phrase:

Fraktur des linken Schläfenlappens,

which roughly translates into English as:
Fracture to the left temporal lobe.

The words pulsed before my eyes, black on white, white on black. Then my vision clouded over and I vomited into the sink.

46

This was not the easiest time. I prefer, if I am truthful, not to discuss it. In any case my recollection is unclear. I stayed a while in the bathroom. I’m not sure how long. At some point I wandered into the sitting room, the familiarity of which brought me the opposite of comfort (something like revulsion). Again, I cannot say why. I went to the window and looked out over the city, at the low rolling sky, at the ragged clouds, indistinguishable from smoke, at the children in the playground, obscured behind a veil of leafless trees. I must have stood for some time, because it was almost dark when I turned away and the children had gone. I cannot report on my thoughts. I am not sure if thought was what went through my head in any case. I saw pictures and heard voices, some from the past, others from a past that might have been (if I had done things differently, if only I had known), others from a future that was now lost and could never be recovered. Their effect was like – if it was
like
anything, if metaphorical treatment is what the occasion requires – it was like music, except that music has the power to soothe and purify; and these visions did neither. I did not eat. That much I can say. I had no appetite, and no pain either, of the physical sort. I was, I suppose, simply waiting: waiting for that state of being to pass, waiting to feel something – anything – other than what I did feel. Because sooner or later I would feel something else. It is in the prosaic nature of life that it continues to demand maintenance, attention to physical necessities, the endless rekindling of purpose. In the West this blessing, or this burden, is called simply ‘carrying on’. And, much like the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, there is very little hope of escaping it, this side of death.

In my case what rescued me, the lifeline that I clung to, was anger: anger that burned with a righteous heat and grew with each passing hour. Such is the utility of outrages and atrocities for those who survive them: they simplify matters. Moral ambiguities, paralysing complexity, divided loyalties, all of them are swept away. My anger left me clear about what to do next, which was no less than what Richter had always wanted me to do (the Richter of my thoughts and dreams, and the occasional fleeting vision): I had to speak out. What had
really
become of Sonja and Thomas, the hopeful young lovers in
The Orphans of Neustadt
? What had become of us all, who had put our faith in that dream of a better world, a world of justice and common purpose? Richter had been waiting for me to answer that question all his life and half of mine.

But I could do nothing where I was, there in the suffocating bosom of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. To speak out there would have been suicidal and impracticable, there being no means to disseminate my words. First I had to leave, to brave the death strip, to vault the inner German border, and the sooner the better. Every day of silence would be another day of falsehood, another drop of poison.

Theresa was still in East Berlin. My first thought was to go to her and beg her to set the fugitive wheels in motion (phone calls and letters were out of the question). Her network had helped Manfred Dressler; they had agreed to help Wolfgang Richter. Surely they would help me. But Theresa had said she was done with the artist smuggling business and besides, if we talked it over beforehand the matter was sure to become entangled with the issue of our future together. She might think I was trying to force her hand, to crush her doubts beneath a weight of obligation: changing my life, leaving everything I knew, just for her. In short, I was afraid that to escape such an obligation she might decide to leave me once and for all.

No, I would not go cap in hand to Theresa. I would approach the network myself, on my own behalf. I knew the name of her contact. His name was Anton. All I had to do was find him.