month of December 1988. The woman quietly passed new files to be untied and unfastened. The night drifted.
The taxi had dropped him off at an hotel on the Unter den Linden. He had walked straight across the foyer and found a fire door, pushed the bar and gone out.
Past midnight, long past, and Josh walked slowly up the big street. He checked his map. On the empty road, it would have been easy for him to spot a dawdling car or foot surveillance. He stood at the end of Saarbrucker Strasse. He saw the building. The front, caught by dimmed lights, was scarred from bombs or artillery. That registered with him. The past should be known about: it was right to learn from the past. The third-floor windows were darkened.
He thought it wrong to wake them.
He settled down on the pavement beside the step of the building. Light snow was falling. He was back tight against the wall to keep the wind from him. After Libby had died, after he had gone derelict and dossed and boozed, he had learned to sleep on pavements. He huddled in the shadow beside the step, and waited for the morning.
Her throat was dry from the air-conditioning, her eyes ached and watered. The typed lines on the paper were blurred, merged. The woman stood beside her and bent to pick up the last of the files to place them back on the racks.
‘What can we do?’
Tracy squatted on the cold concrete of the basement’s bottom floor. Her head was down.
A small voice: ‘How long do we have?’
‘The early shift comes at five. Before that we have to be gone. We have forty-one minutes. What is the point of having forty-one minutes if we do not know where to look?’
She tried to call him back, the wide smile on his face as he had made love to her, and the pain on his face as they had dragged him off the trawler boat. She sat very still. She gazed at the rough floor of concrete and at the files stretching on their racks as far as she could see. Nobody had cared, as nobody cared now.
‘In Rerik, if he had run, if they had hunted him, if people had seen him..
‘If people had seen him they would have held their silence.’
Dogged. Clinging to the wide smile, so tired, and the pain. ‘If the Stasi had known that people had seen him…’
‘Their silence would have been gained by intimidation.’
‘What would have been done to eye-witnesses?’
‘Threats, then moved out of their community.’
Tracy hissed, ‘How long afterwards?’
‘Three weeks, there was bureaucracy, four weeks, after they had been destroyed, five weeks… If there had been eyewitnesses they would have sent them out of Rerik.’
Tracy jack-knifed to her feet. They ran between the racks of files for the stairs, for the middle basement floor.
He had the boy drunk, slumped in the chair at the back of the hotel bar, in shadow. He made the sign to the waiter. Another vodka, double, with ice and tonic for the Jewish boy who had driven him to the hotel, another mineral water with ice for himself. The boy, Goldstein, thought he drank vodka, matched him. Perkins was always patient when sober and listening to a drunk who interested him.
‘I joined because I wanted to confront the new Nazis. You live as a Jew in this country, you want to be German and not a Jew, it is impossible… They are neurotic about the past, that the past can come again… They try to erase the twelve years of Nazi rule. Ask any old man what he did between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-five, he does not answer.. They do not trust themselves, they censor the books and films, they need to ban Mein Kampf. They take the power from us, Office of the Protection of the State, because of fear that the old abuse of legal process will come again… Yet they cry for authority, regulation, as they had it before – no lawn-mower in the afternoon, no children shouting, brought to the court for taking a shower late at night which disturbs neighbours, cannot wash a car on a Sunday, cannot touch vegetables in a public market. You know where my parents met? In Auschwitz. They were six years old, both of them. They survived. Their parents, my grandparents, did not. My father is put on TV each anniversary of the Holocaust. They want to suffer, hear him talk. My father says the same thing for the TV each year. “Our parents just climbed the fence so that they would be shot… I never had a childhood, I never learned to play
· · · At six years old I was as hard as granite stone.” They have purged their conscience because they have watched and listened to the TV, and they can forget… My father has invitations to go to dinner as far away as Hannover, because it is exciting for a hostess to have a Jew from the camps at her table. I thought it was my duty to show that I was not a parrot in a cage, that I was a German. I thought that I could be a good German if I worked against the new Nazis.’
The boy gulped at his drink. Perkins sipped the mineral water, and prompted, ‘But there are two colours of Fascism. There is the black of the Nazis, there is the red of the Communists. Black or red Fascism, any difference?’
‘You know, Perkins, there was an American writer, nineteen forty-five, walked round Germany, never could find a Nazi, the Nazis were always in the next vifiage. People she met told her how they’d suffered. The way she heard it, there was never a Nazi in Germany. Today, you meet a little old man – will he tell you he stood in a watch-tower guarding the camps? Wifi he tell you he coupled the cattle trucks going to the camps? Somebody did, and they’re now little old men and denying it… That’s good, Perkins, red and black Fascism, the same. You go East, you see the crowds outside the hostels with petrol bombs, where the Romanians are, the Poles, the Vietnamese, old Fascists and new Fascists, the same hatred just new Jews for them to hate. Try to find, in the East, an informer of the shit Stasi. Better, try to find an officer of the shit Stasi. Like they didn’t exist..
Perkins nudged him again. ‘You’d know an officer of the shit Stasi, you’re alongside one.’
‘The young woman…’
‘Don’t worry yourself about her.’
‘What you’ve done to her…’
Perkins said soothingly, ‘She’s fine, she can look after herself. About that shit Stasi officer..
Albert Perkins traded. Seven double vodkas to Julius Goldstein for a plate of scum from the ifie of Hauptman Dieter Krause. Damn good trading.
‘I was with that shit, minding him at the trial, a little “grey mouse”, foreign ministry. She was pathetic…’
The third week in December, nothing. The files were heaped around Tracy’s feet, ripped open, grasped at. The second week in December, nothing. She pushed files away from her, grabbed at more.
The woman glanced at her watch, shrugged, passed the ifies for the third week of December as she placed the others back on the racks. Again, the look at the watch. Tracy scattered the pages of the file as she read, discarded, read.
Who had slept with whom. Who was denounced as being negatively disposed towards socialism. Who was to be taken from the community…
The woman reached down to pull Tracy up. Her finger rapped the face of her watch.
Tracy squealed.
She read the names. Brandt, Gerber, Schwarz, Muller.
Her squeal echoed between the racks of files. Brandt, Jorg (school-teacher).
There had been four pages on the instruction order. The fourth page had been missed. Gerber, Heinz (town hall, refuse disposal dept).
Three pages taken from the file, one page unnoticed.
Schwarz, Artur (senior engineer, railways, Bad Doberan).
One page left in the ifie by the fucking bastards. Muller, Willi (trawler deck-hand).
Tracy held the sheet of paper above her head. She jumped, leaped, danced. Twenty-seven days after the killing of Hans Becker, four men had been forced or sent out of the small community of Rerik. She grasped the paper. She thrust it under her sweater and buried it against her breast. Together they tidied the floor, put the last file together, as they had found it, but for one sheet of paper. They ran up the concrete steps.
They showed their cards and scribbled their initials on the check-out list.
Between the high buildings was the first smear of light. They passed the early shift, coming in cars, on scooters and bicycles, walking.
The woman panted, ‘You did not mean that? He never remembered my name?’
