mind and deflected him, breaking his train of thought. They had left Rostock early, before the traffic was on the main streets. The irritation grew in him because he had not made a plan in his mind. It was another day, the day for Artur Schwarz. Time was so precious, and was running, sand grains from the upper bowl slipping steadily into the lower… but the bloody song, the tune, hacked at his ability to use the time. His irritation surged.
‘Can you leave it?’
‘Leave what?’
He said, ponderous, ‘Can you leave that noise?’
‘What noise?’
‘Can you, please, stop whistling, singing, whatever, that puerile dirge?’
‘What’s the harm of it to you?’
‘Just that I can’t think.’
She lifted her eyebrows and made a face at him that was grotesque. She closed her eyes and pursed her lips shut as if to show him how idiotic she thought his irritation. The song was her anthem. She would have lain in her bed at Brigade in Berlin and heard it played on the radio and known that her boy, beyond the Wall, heard it too.
He had the wipers on now. The light was a grey smear ahead, to the west. The sleet storm burst over the car, was running free over the flat expanse of the fields either side of the road. They had driven through the last village before they came to Starkow. He had not used the main road from Ribnitz-Damgarten to Stralsund, the obvious way to Starkow. He tried to think. He could see into the low cloud of the storm. He could see the dulled shapes, far away, of rectangles of planted forestry, and at the fringes of the trees were timber-built platforms for the marksmen who shot deer in summer. Cranes were feeding in the yellow weed grass close to the road, tall, elegant birds who seemed not to notice the blow of the sleet storm against them. He wanted cover from which to watch the farm, high ground or hedgerows or a plantation of forestry…
There was only one farm at Starkow. The village was a main street of old houses, a post office, a shop with a new front and a church. From the main street he could see the farm. Up a long lane, between open fields, was the huddle of buildings. There was a rectangular block of trees away to the left, and a marksman’s tower, but nowhere to leave the car where it would be hidden. There was no way to the forestry and the marksman’s tower but across the open yellow weed grass of the field. He parked the car at the end of the village main street, and saw a curtain flicker. He stood beside the car and shivered. The sleet blew into his face and settled on her hair. He looked at his feet.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry?’
‘Because I didn’t think it through. Because we don’t have the right footgear.’
‘Is that why you’re so miserable?’
He stamped away ahead of her. There was a hawk in front of him, blown by the storm, careering in flight, not able to hover and hunt. The mud was a slippery carpet to the frozen ground. He plodded forward. It caught at his shoes, clung to them, weighted them. Once, he fell and slithered to the ground and she stood over him and grinned. He hoped, the night before, that she had slept and had not known that he had held her hand and kissed it. He went across the open field towards the block of forestry. He was near it, close to the marksman’s tower, when he saw the car leave the farm, bump away on the potholed track from the buildings of grey-red brick and grey-brown wood. He was too far from the track to see who was driving behind the misted windows. The wind swayed the high trees above.
‘How long are we staying here?’
‘Long enough to see who comes to and who goes from the farm.’
‘What about the taxi?’
‘Was it a taxi?’
‘Didn’t you see that? Of course it was a taxi. It had the sign on it for a taxi.’
He felt the cold. He huddled behind the trees. He stared at the farm buildings away across the open fields and tried to scrape the mud off his shoes.
He wondered if they had come to the farm too late. Nothing moved. There were dull lights in the windows of the farmhouse and in one of the barn buildings but he did not see the signs of man, woman or child.
‘We wait and we watch,’ he said. ‘We wait and watch until I am satisfied.’
He had wept the night that the mob had entered the building on August-Bebel Strasse. Ulf Fischer, the former Feidwebel who was now a taxi driver and the maker of orations at the funerals of old people, had stood on the far side of the street, on the fringe of the mob, and he had watched the clamouring, jeering crowd beat on the doors of the building and hammer at the shuttered windows. It was said, among the lowly ranks of the Stasi, that the Generalleutnant had forbidden the guards to use their weapons, that the senior officers had argued bitterly on whether they should open fire on the mob. The ‘realists’ had wanted to shoot and the ‘idealists’ had wished to capitulate. He had not, that night, seen Hauptman Krause. He had thought it the worst hour of his life.
He sat in his taxi outside the one small bar in the village of Starkow. Before he went back to the rank for taxis on Lange Strasse, he would need to hose off the farm mud from the wheels and bodywork of his Mercedes taxi. He had not felt guilt when he had pushed his boot down on the throat of the young man so that the Hauptman could have the easier shot at his head. He was with, then, the power of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. The power had protected him from guilt. Sitting in his taxi, going to the farm at Starkow, he had decided, with personal anguish, that he no longer believed in the protection. He would make one last action, and he had agonized on it in his taxi, in defence of the power. He could see, from where he was parked outside the bar, the hire car in which they had come. His last act, before he went back to Rostock and found a car wash at a garage and took his place on the taxi rank, would be to telephone the Hauptman and give him the make, colour and registration of the hire car. He had no more fear of the cells of the Moabit gaol. He held the telephone in his hand and the tears coursed down his cheeks, as they had done on August-Bebel Strasse when the mob had come in. Afterwards, he would go to the car wash and clean his taxi and take his place on the rank, and in the evening he would go home, as Leutnant Hoffmann had gone home and as Unterleutnant Siehl had gone home.
She said, ‘Do you chase the tail of the beast or do you chase its head?’
Dieter Krause sat in his chair in the living room of the new house.
She said, ‘You can forever cut the tail of the beast but you do not kill the beast until you cut the head.’
Dieter Krause sat in his chair and held the telephone. It had been ringing when Eva had come back to the house. She had been in the hallway when he had answered it. She stood in front of him, above him. The shopping bags were by her feet.
She said, ‘You have to cut the head of the beast or the beast is with us always, will take everything and break us.’
Dieter Krause looked up into her face. There was a hardness that he had not known before, a pitiless contempt that he had not seen before.
She said, ‘If you do not cut the head from the beast then it will be behind you for ever, and for ever you will look over your shoulder for the beast.’
Dieter Krause put the telephone into his inside pocket. The tail of the beast was the witnesses. The head of the beast was the man who had come from England and the young woman with the copper-gold hair who had kicked and scratched and bitten him. He tapped, a reflex movement, at his waist, and he felt the shape of the pistol lodged there by his belt. He picked up the car keys from the table beside the door.
She said, ‘You have to be there tonight, when she plays… First you must cut the head.’
The sleet storm swirled around the farm. He had seen no movement, but there were short times when the storm was so intense that the blizzard took from him the view of the farm buildings. He had heard, faint, a man’s shouting but he had not seen the man. He had heard the noise, distant, of a tractor engine starting up but he had not seen the tractor.
The sun came out abruptly, great pillars of light that fell on the fields and onto the buildings, as if a curtain was drawn back. The cold was gone, and the driving sweep of the sleet, but still Josh held his arms across his chest for warmth. Away to the right, from the forest block, a young deer with stubbed antlers came cautiously from the cover and tried to find food in the yellow weed grass. The light played on its back.
He took Tracy’s arm, squeezed it hard. He started to walk across the field towards the farm buildings, lit by the sun.
