The Stasi office in Rostock was the biggest Bezirksverwaltung in the old DDR. Because of the long state border of the Baltic coast there were many who attempted to escape into the international sea lanes. It was extremely difficult for them to gain access to proper boats, most took to the water at night on rafts they had made or on children’s inflatable sunbeds. In their search for freedom they paid a heavy price. We know of at least seventy- seven persons who were drowned in the attempt to flee the oppression of the DDR. Their bodies were washed up on these shores, on those of the Federal Republic, on Danish beaches. We believe there were many more whose bodies were never found. There were more persons drowned, many of them young, a few of them as young as yourselves, than were shot on the Wall in Berlin or the inner-German border fences. Your generation should remember their courage – they were a witness to the bankruptcy of the state and its Stasi servants…’
‘Doktor Perkins…?’
‘That’s me.’
‘I am the curator, the director. I understand you are from England and interested in research..
He was leaning against the wall. Tracy, on the floor, sat close to his feet. He heard the reedy voice of the uncle through the open door, ‘He is coming, the idiot is coming back from feeding his rabbits.’
Josh started away from the wall. In his mind he had rehearsed the questions. He heard the groan of the window being opened. The wind came through and caught a newspaper on the table, battering it out through the opened door until it wrapped against Josh’s leg. He heard the shout.
‘Brandt, there are people here to see you. Hurry, idiot.’
He heard the cackled laughter from through the open door. Josh thought that only the old knew how to be truly cruel.
Tracy looked up at him. ‘What do we do?’
Klaus Hoffmann heard the shout.
He pressed the button to open the misted window on the front passenger door. He leaned forward and saw the tight, smirking face at the high window. He looked in the mirror. A man came towards his car, hesitant, hugging against the walls of the block as if they were safety, reliant on the support of a stick. It was what he had come for. He saw the man’s anguish as he struggled to cross the empty road. They would have come in at the back. It was what Klaus Hoffmann had waited for. He felt the bile rising in his throat.
‘What do we do? Well, we don’t take him inside there, we don’t talk to him in front of that vicious bastard. Go and meet him, take him somewhere. Have you a better idea?’
He heard the clatter, far below, of elevator doors opening.
She shrugged. ‘That’s OK.’
He heard the rumble of the doors closing. The sound echoed up to him. Josh led down the flights of stairs, taking them two at a time. The strategy was to go gently, go slowly with the poor devil because he was sick. They were on the third flight from the ground when the elevator climbed past them. He thought Brandt would have managed three flights by now. He ran down the last flights and burst into the ground-floor hallway. The elevator moaned high above him. The fear caught at him. He looked out through the doors, into the road and saw the back of the man as he reached his car. The car’s windows were misted and the engine spurted exhaust fumes. The man turned and leaned his elbows on the roof of the car. God Almighty. Josh recognized the man he had pushed down on to the rocks.
He looked at the elevator doors and above, the numbers of the floors. The light came on for the seventh floor, then the eighth. He didn’t tell her, didn’t try to. The sense, disorganized in his mind, was of catastrophe. A woman with shopping bags was pressing, in irritation, at the call button of the elevator.
He bullocked past Tracy and launched himself at the stairs. He charged up the first flight. She was coming after him. He heaved for breath. At the seventh-floor landing, running past the elevator doors, he saw the light slip from the tenth floor to the eleventh. His legs were leaden. She was coming after him, easily. The light had gone from the eleventh, the last light was for the roof. He fell. His feet slipped back and hit the edge of a step, caught the bone of his shin. The pain shimmered through Josh’s body, and he struggled up the last flight of stairs. The elevator door was open, the elevator empty. The door for the low shed structure housing the elevator shaft and the stairwell hung free and rapped in the wind.
Josh stepped, panting, on to the roof of the block, and saw Jorg Brandt out on the roof, away from the shed structure. He stood as if marooned on the puddled asphalt.
He saw the terror on his face.
His coat billowed in the wind and the force of the wind seemed to drag him further from Josh. Brandt edged backwards as if the control over his legs was gone, lost.
There was no rail at the edge of the roof and no wall. Josh saw, behind the man, the town of Warnemunde laid out as a model would have been, the shipyards, the beach, the sea stretched limitless to the cloud horizon. The man dropped his stick, as if the hand which held it was lifeless.
Josh pushed away from the door. He thought Tracy was behind him and moved forward.
‘You have nothing to fear from me, Herr Brandt. I’ve come to help you…’
The man who had been a schoolteacher edged a pace back.
‘Please, Herr Brandt, just come to me. If you cannot come to me just sit down, let me reach you. Please… They cannot get to you, Herr Brandt. When you are with me then they cannot harm you, I promise.’
The man who had been denounced as a paedophile wavered and lurched back.
Josh shouted into the wind, ‘I have come, Herr Brandt, to free you from them. They have no power over you. Their ability to hurt is gone, believe me.’
The man who had been rejected by his family, evicted, destroyed, was at the edge of the asphalt roof.
‘They are finished, Herr Brandt. They are gone, they are history.’
Josh’s voice died. He saw the slow smile settle on the man’s face, as if from turmoil a last peace had been found. Josh crouched and had no more words. The smile was calm. Josh wanted to close his eyes and could not.
The man, Jorg Brandt, turned. It was so quick, two paces, as he stepped off the roof of the block.
Josh stared at the space where Brandt had been. There was no scream. He shook, and wished he could have wept. Tracy walked past him to where the stick lay and kicked it hard and it rolled and teetered close to the edge of the roof.
She faced him. ‘Are you going to stay here all day or are you going to shift?’
He felt so small and so weak and so much a failure. He wanted her comfort.
‘I couldn’t reach him…’
Tracy said, brutal, ‘You were never going to reach him. He would never have let you. The bastard was too yellow ever to have let you reach him.’
She was gone. When they reached the ground floor she did not hesitate. She did not go to see the body, or to join the small knot of a crowd that gathered. He watched the car with the misted windows pull away. They went out into the back, into the inner garden of the square.
She said, without looking at him, ‘You don’t have to blame yourself. It’s him that’s to blame. He was a coward.’
His fist clenched. He could have hit her. They reached the car and he threw her the car keys. They were already on the road when the ambulance passed them, siren wailing.
He had the section and he had the name.
Even by the standards of Albert Perkins, a quality practitioner, heavy flannel bullshit had been needed to win the interest of the curator of the archive – an international affairs research unit, funded by a Cambridge college, a centre of excellence, an acknowledgement that the Rostock archive at DummerstorfWaldeck was the most helpful in all the former DDR. He had the section that dealt with surveillance filming, and now the name of the former Oberstleutnant who had headed the section in the late 1980s. He left a note of thanks, on the desk they had offered him, for the curator. He slipped away down the corridor. The tour of the schoolchildren continued. He saw the earnest teacher and the youngsters who took notes, and the one girl who did not care to hide her disinterest.
‘Those who collaborated with the Stasi have built a great lie. These weak and manipulated people tell the lie now that it was not possible to refuse the Stasi. They try to explain their betrayal of friends and family by spreading the lie. There were enough who refused to kill the lie. It should never be sufficient again in Germany for a man or woman to claim that he or she merely obeyed orders…’
She came to the door. She had already laid out her daughter’s kit on the bed, laundered and ironed.
