home.
Dieter Krause was not more than five minutes late at the meeting in the cafe on Augusten Strasse. Siehl was there, and Fischer, and Peters. They smoked and drank beer. They had all heard on the radio that a man had fallen to his death in Lichtenhagen. He had tried, himself, a dozen times to ring the mobile telephone of the former Leutnant.
He sat with his back to the door, and had not heard the door. He turned because of the smell. It was a moment, in the half-lit corner of the cafe, before he recognized Hoffmann.
Klaus Hoffmann’s hair was messed across his forehead. His eyes were reddened, those of a man who has wept without control. The vomit stains were on his jacket and across the thighs of his trousers.
‘You smell like a fucking pigsty,’ Peters said.
‘Where have you been, Klaus?’ he asked. There was, in that second of time, a hesitation in Dieter Krause.
Hoffmann said, a distant voice. ‘I walked. You see, friends, I saw him fall. It was not I that pushed him. I spoke to him, a few words, as he went into the block. I knew it was him because his name was called from the apartment, there were people to see him. He broke away from me and took the elevator. I saw him on the roof… I have to go home because people have come from the West and attempt to claim our house… The man who threw me onto the rocks from the breakwater, he tried to reach Brandt on the roof. They have come from the West and have an order from the court for the restitution of the property that their grandfather abandoned in 1945. When I spoke to him at the door of the block he had such terror. I told him that we watched him. I made the terror real for him. I did not know we could make such fear, still… They have come to take my house and I am going, now, home to Berlin…’
Dieter Krause said, chill, ‘You walk away from us, Klaus, and you are walking to the Moabit gaol.’
Klaus Hoffmann’s manic laugh rang through the room. ‘Still, the threats, as if you believe that nothing has changed. Too much has changed. I walked and wept and was sick because I realized what had changed… Then, I had an order. Then, I could hide myself behind the instruction of my Hauptman. Then, I could say I was doing my duty as told me by my superior… Now, I have no order and no instruction and no duty, and I am going to my home in Berlin.’
He turned on his heel. He took his smell into the street. He left them, stunned and silent, behind him.
Only when the black shadows came to the streets had Josh left his room to get fast food for the two of them.
He had taken the food and his bedding to her room.
They had not spoken as they had eaten, nor as he had made his bed up.
He lay on his back in the darkness and stared towards the ceiling he could not see.
‘For God’s sake, Josh…‘ The night sounds of the city murmured through the window, through the curtains. He lay on his back with his head in his locked hands.
‘For Christ’s sake, Josh – so, the man fell..
He watched the man go over the edge of the roof.
‘So, you wouldn’t talk to me and walk with me, and I made you by stripping…’
He watched her body hit by the wind on the beach.
‘So, tomorrow is another day, maybe tomorrow we get lucky.’ Josh said, quietly, ‘You have to earn luck.’
‘Have we? Have we earned it?’
‘Not yet,’ Josh said.
Chapter Thirteen
Josh drove.
They had come over the heavy wood bridge at Wolgast, crossed the wide Peene-Strom. He had driven for an hour and a half east from Rostock. She checked the map. She told him where to turn off the big highway that headed for the Polish border.
Until then the talk had been desultory, as if both were too bruised from the day and the night before. But when the forest closed around the road, high, dense pines, straight, towering trees that hid the light, Mantle told her the history of the place.
‘On the night of the seventeenth of August nineteen forty- three, five hundred and ninety-six aircraft were sent here, everything that could fly from the bomber bases in the east of England. The target was Peenemunde where there was the programme for the development of the V2 rocket. There was a clear moon, a rotten night to come. If the target of Peenemunde had not been so critical, they wouldn’t have been asked to fly on a night like that. They were told that if they didn’t crack the target then they’d have to come back and do it all again, face the air defence again, and keep coming back till they’d cracked it. There were three target areas at Peenemunde, pushed up close to each other. The strike had to be really exact.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I read about it. The pilots of the bombers, of course, had never heard of Peenemunde. They weren’t told what was on the ground, just that it was important. There was a firestorm, the casualties were horrendous. But the bomber crews took bad casualties as well, because of the moon, lost forty-nine aircraft over the target and on the way back.’
‘Is that how you spend your evenings, reading about what’s gone?’
‘I read history because it’s important to me. The target area was comprehensively hit. The best of the German rocket scientists were here, and they were creating what was to be the best weapon of the war. Even though the target was pulped, the science survived. The scientists, after nineteen forty-five, were snatched by the Russians and the Americans. Neal Armstrong’s walk came from here, and Apollo and Challenger and the shuttle, and Gagarin and the space stations. It’s all about Peenemunde.’
Tracy said, distantly, ‘Did your wife leave you because you lectured her on what’s gone?’
He said, quietly, ‘I can’t help what drives me. Out of history comes everything. Codes, morals, ethics, they’re all learned from history. Why we’re here today, why we have to be here, is because of the need to learn the lessons of history.’
‘You were better quiet, better when you didn’t lecture.’
‘Please, Tracy, listen. History breeds principles. The history of Peenemunde is about fantastic scientific achievement, but it’s also about slave-labour compounds and about starvation and about men working until they died of exhaustion. That was wrong. The people who were here then, they closed their eyes to what was wrong, believed the wrong – slave labour – did not matter. They wanted to ignore principles, but principles are the core of life.’
‘Did she have to listen to your lectures before she left?’
‘You come to Peenemunde, Tracy, and you learn what was wrong, you learn about when principles were ignored. To get the rockets to London, to develop the science to put a man on the moon, slave labourers died of starvation and exhaustion. It’s the same story. It’s why I’m here. It was wrong to shoot Hans Becker. That is a principle and I try to live by it.’
‘Me, I only want to see the bastard hammered.’
‘You have to know why. You have to hold the principle as faith.’
She closed her eyes and turned away. They went through Trassenheide and Karlshagen, and he saw the cemetery with the exact lines of the stones, and he came to Peenemunde where the bombers had flown. Without principles his life would have been emptied.
‘I talk,’ Josh said, cold. ‘We are quite close. There won’t be any more lectures or much more history… I talk and you write it down.’
The man walked away, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his old coat, and was lost among the first tourists of the day.
Heinz Gerber had been sweeping the roadway that led past the scale-sized model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, past the old Me 163, the MiG-21 and the MiG-23 on their concrete stands. It was his job, each day, to sweep the roadway from the Feld Salon Wagen that had been used by the former ministers and generals, and which was now
