With a handkerchief over his mouth, giving muffled disguise, he spoke to a recording machine on the number given him and told what he knew, didn't give his name and rang off. He hoped he had done something to help one man and skewer another.
When he came to the platform in the faint first light, he had seen the mass of scattered feathers.
Anger churned in Oskar Netzer. He stood beside the upright poles, straightened and nailed, of the platform and in the growing brightness he saw the devastation of the killing site. The feathers were spread about an area of mud beside the pond. At the moment of the attack the ducks would have fled but now they had returned and stayed on the far side of the water. The bird had flown off, low and hugging the dunes' shallow contours, the moment he had reached the platform, and it would have carried a last scrap of the duck's breast in its talons.
The killing bird circled high and at a distance.
It would have been aware, with its keen eyesight, of him standing beside the posts. It wanted to feed, to take more of the flesh of its victim… Oskar saw the remaining eiders, innocent and without protection, and seemed to hear the voice of his mother as she read the letter that had been left with a lawyer by his uncle, who had driven the lorry from the camp at
Neuengamme to the school at Bullenhuser Damm. He saw the killer struggling for stable flight in the wind and he listened as his mother read the story of the children being hoisted up for the ropes to be dropped round their necks. Was it in the blood? Did it run in Oskar Netzer's veins, as it did in the harrier's – an instinct of barbarity? The demons tugged at him. His uncle Rolf had not intervened, had sat in the cab of the lorry as the atrocity was done in the school's cellars
… He would break a rule of the island's wilderness.
He would turn his back on a law of Baltrum's nature park. The harrier was the cock: it fed and savaged for two; the hen would be on the nest, eggs under her warmth. Alone, a little of the madness of old times ravaged him. He strode away.
The anger, and the demons, gripped him.
He knew, to within ten metres, the location of the marsh harriers' nest.
His uncle Rolf had done nothing to save the innocents. He would.
He would find the nest in the reeds on the land side of the island, and he would ignore the screaming of the harriers over him and he would stamp his boot down on the carefully woven bowl of fronds – and see no beauty in it – and would break the eggs and see the yolks splatter out of them. He would do it to escape the demons, and to save the eiders.
Tugged at by the wind and spat at by the rain, he was a slight, solitary figure moving among scrub and between the low trees that were crushed and stunted by the weather. He slipped into the reed bed. Beyond its expanse was the sea's inner channel, the Steinplatte, but he would not see the mainland, which was shrouded in mist and cloud. What he found was a track made by men.
Confusion smacked his mind.
The track was not clean, but blundered across the route he took to approach the nest.
He stopped. Who was the greater enemy? The harriers that killed his ducks or strangers who broke the peace of paradise? He turned away from the direction of the nest where a hen bird sat upon eggs, and felt relief swamp him that rules and laws would stay inviolate. He began to follow the track of snapped-down reeds. None of the island's residents, he knew, would have walked through the reed beds and made a track that led towards the heart of the island from the land-side shore of Baltrum.
He walked the track.
He could recognize the prints left by rabbits, different gulls, oyster-catchers, divers and ducks, and it was not hard for Oskar Netzer to follow a trail left clumsily by two men coming in darkness. New purpose came to him, and the image of demons – of children's swinging feet – was killed. He saw the tread of a pair of boots preserved in mud and the smooth sole shapes of street shoes, and he went where they had gone. Old eyes, but sharp, identified the route two men had taken when they had come out of the reed bed and on to the sand of the lower dunes and he saw the flattened grass where they had sat, then two places where they had gone in the night into the scrub thorn. At one a handkerchief had been tugged from a pocket and hung as a marker on the scrub's barbs, and at another he spotted the fibres of a coat. He imagined them cursing, trying to force a way through, twice turning back and searching for a new way. He moved now with greater care, as if he were the harrier, and tested each footstep, as if he were the hunter. The wind sang noisily around him but Oskar's movement was silent. He froze when he heard a long, hacked cough and a man spluttering phlegm from his throat, then went closer.
First he saw the shoes.
They were shoes for a city's pavements. They were sodden wet and mud-stained and had been hung on scrub branches above a small grassed hollow that was sheltered from most of the driven rain. He thought it a futile gesture to try to dry them because the wind did not come into the hollow.
A man slept there. He was on his side, his back to Oskar, hunched, knees drawn up. He thought the man had coughed in his sleep. Beside him was a plastic bag and its neck guttered in the light wind in the hollow.
He saw the firearm, a loaded machine pistol, and a metal box… On his way home, he had stopped at the cemetery at the edge of Ostdorf, and he had sat by the grave. He had told Gertrud of the young woman who had helped him rebuild the viewing platform, of her kindness, her interest in him and her sweetness – so different from the many who abused and sneered. He saw one of two strangers, and a machine pistol, and his eyes showed him the path taken by the second man, who had the heavy tread of strong boots.
He lost the sense of time.
He would not have known, or cared, whether he followed the boots' tread for an hour or for two hours.
He had seen the weapon and moved with considered caution. It did not cross his mind that he should turn on his heel, tramp back to Westdorf and go to the little brick building where the island's policeman lived. He did not have a friend in authority on the island, did not have a friend in the world – except Gertrud. He crossed the dunes, a wraith, and every few paces he would stop, listen, then go forward with his head low and his eyes searching for the tread marks.
If he had not, for a short moment, been upright, Oskar would not have seen him.
The man was briefly visible at the top of the dunes; below him would have been the soft sand that fell away to the beach and the sea. The man bent again, as if to satisfy himself a last time, then – abruptly – began to retrace his steps. On his stomach, Oskar Netzer, nine days short of his seventieth birthday, ducked and crawled into the last of the scrub. A dozen metres from him, seen through a tangle of branches, the man stopped, took a cloth from his pocket, ripped a strip from it, and tied the strip to a branch, as if for a marker. Then he was gone. Oskar saw his face as he passed, sallow and stubble-covered: the face of a stranger who threatened paradise.
When he came out from the cover and gazed back, he saw a second cloth marker knotted to a scrub bush.
He went forward, where the man had been.
At the top of the dune, where it looked over the sand, the beach and the sea, a triangular support had been made from a length of driftwood and two dead but solid branches. The pieces of wood had been driven into the ground and lashed together with string to form a cradle. In it was as large a flashlight as Oskar had ever seen, facing the beach and the surf. He believed he had found a light that would be used after darkness to signal to the sea. He believed that the two men would come in the black of the night, using markers left to guide them, unencumbered by the weight of the light. Why? He had no idea, no interest.
With clinical ferocity, he tore apart the string that held the light in place, kicked in the glass face and the bulb, then used his hands to scoop out a hole in the sand. He dug and dug, then he buried the broken light, and the glass shards, and felt some small pleasure at having safeguarded paradise.
After they had gone, the professor went out on to the veranda and dropped heavily, exhausted from the emotion of the encounter, into his favourite chair of woven rushes. He had been shown the photographs, magnified almost to life-size, of his son, and had been told they were taken from illegal travel documents.
He had been asked if he could identify them. He believed that, in their search for information, the political police had visited many scores of homes – any family where a son had shown an early trace of opposition to the regime, then disappeared. He had not been able to hide his recognition and he had seen the boredom of many denials flee the two men's faces; his nostrils had scented their excitement. He had dumbly nodded his agreement. Any father would know a photograph of his son, even when he had not seen or heard of him for a decade. Was he alive? He had not been told. Where was he? A second refusal.
