and talk to my wife and tell her about it. Back home, I’ll do my ironing, and I’ll go to bed and read a book, and I’ll sleep. Next morning, back to work – the magistrates’ courts, police interview rooms, the Britwell Estate, and the morning after, and the morning after that. That’s it, that’s afterwards.’
‘It’s not much, Josh.’
He pushed himself up. The rueful smile played at his mouth… It wasn’t much, it was sweet bugger all, but it was the truth of afterwards. The memories would be precious, and he would tell Libby, in the dark of the night, of his memories before he went back to the lonely solitariness of the rooms on the top floor of the house behind the London Road. He picked up her chips carton and her pizza tray and put them in the bin with her Pepsi can. He loosed his tie, pulled it from his collar and unbuttoned his shirt.
‘I’m sorry, Tracy, I’m dead on my feet, and I’m bloody poor company.’
She sat cross-legged on her bed and watched him.
‘It is policy and it is principle. When they go together it is when we walk with honour. When they are apart, conflict, then we crawl on our guts, in confusion.’
Julius Goldstein threw clothes from the drawers and wardrobe on to the floor. She walked the room and smoked. What she smoked, Moroccan stuff, was enough to have him thrown out of the BfV without question. They lived together in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, in her apartment, alongside the immigrants, the students, the artisans and painters, because his girl said it was a stimulating place for her work. The apartment was her studio. She worked big canvases with oils and next year, maybe, she would sell one.
‘When they walk together, policy and principle, then I am happy and I applaud. This time they don’t, this time they fight, so we are in shit. The policy is easy. We have a man who gives us status. We take the man to America and feed off the status of the man. We are maggots, we wriggle around and we are happy little maggots, and the Americans love us and give us more status, and we are happier.’
He loved her, part for her mind and part for her body. She wore only her knickers and her roll-neck sweater, the bed was, as always, unmade, and her canvases were propped around the walls. She came from a big-shot family, industrials, from Frankfurt, and she didn’t have to live in a dump in Kreuzberg, and she didn’t have to live with a Jew. He was a token of fair- mindedness at BfV, and a token of her goddamn obstinacy. He didn’t know, didn’t ask, but he thought she might screw around while he was away. He began to throw the clothes, haphazard, into the bag.
‘The principle is not easy. It is full of shit. Our valued asset is guilty, unprovable but guilty, of murder. Never mind that he is an arrogant fuck-pig, he is a killer. We protect him, don’t investigate him.’
He had no dinner suit. For the Pentagon speech, and at dinner afterwards, he would wear a crumpled jacket and an open shirt. He believed he was safe from censure, whatever he wore, because he was the token Jew. His passport and the sachet of travellers’ cheques were on the table with her paint tubes and rags.
‘He should be investigated, prosecuted, locked up. All right, I am a Jew, but I don’t have the heavy thing. I am not obsessed with the camps, but… I go and buy a lottery ticket from an old man in a kiosk and he smiles so kindly at me – was he on the trains that took my grandparents to the camps? Was he in the camps’ watch-towers when my grandparents came off the train? I don’t know. I only know that the guilty were protected then. I see any old man who smiles at me and I have no trust for his smile. It is the same now – there can never be trust unless the guilty are prosecuted. Same then, same now, conflict of policy and principle, and it makes for a shit time.’
She stubbed out the joint of Moroccan stuff. She pulled on paint-smeared jeans. They liked a little Vietnamese place on the Mehring Damm. They’d eat there, and then he would drive to Rostock. That conflict, policy and principle, would be decided the next day.
‘I detest him. He is the same man that killed my grandparents. The same man… I try to be, first, a German, but for me it is impossible. I try to do my German duty and to obey my German orders, but it is impossible. Before I am a German, first I am a Jew. I detest him, and I will never forgive him and never forget what he has done. I am a Jew, I walk in the shadow of such a man. It does not mean that I am obsessed, as are my father and my mother, but it is inevitable. It is what I cannot escape from. I cannot forgive, as a Jew, and I cannot forget. Let’s go..
He went past the lines of the unlit windows.
He had taken them back from the tennis, after the applause. His daughter had punched the air in victory and the coach had come to congratulate him and Eva. The final of the under-fifteen tournament, girls, for Mecklenberg- Vorporren, would be played the next evening. He had driven them home in his wife’s car and left them.
Dieter Krause did what he had never done before: he sidled, walked slowly, past the unlit windows of the big block of red brick and dun concrete on August-Bebel Strasse.
He had never before felt the need to catch at the past. It was, to him, an act of weakness. His window had been on the second floor, the fifteenth window to the right of the main door. The building was now a district court for family and commercial affairs. There was a light in the hallway, behind the main door, but the windows of the second floor were darkened.
He lingered. He stared up. On a Tuesday night, nine years before, the panic call had been switched through to the room on the second floor. Eva had said she was working late that night at the shipyard. If she had not said that she would be working late, he would have been at home when the panic call had come through and the Duty Desk would have handled it, and there would have been delay in finding him. If there had been delay in finding him, if he had been later at the seashore at Rerik then, perhaps, the boy would have drowned in the Salzhaff or, perhaps, the boy would have been taken from the water by the Soviets or, perhaps, the boy would have come ashore and staggered away into the night, but the past could not be altered
The telephone had carried the call, a shrill bell of panic, into his office as he had been slipping on his coat, and he had answered it..
He gazed up at the window, on the second floor, fifteenth on the right from the main door.
He was the prisoner of the building on August-Bebel Strasse.
If he had not interrupted the shrill call of the telephone so long ago…
Josh lay on his back, the mattress on the floor hard under him.
He tried to think it through and make a plan for the morning, when the trawler boat returned to Warnemunde.
He heard her turning in her bed, and he knew she could not sleep.
There must be a plan for the morning, but he could not make the plan because his mind was cluttered with the day gone by, and the day before that, and the day before that. She heaved on the bed beside him, sighed, grunted as if a decision were made. Her blankets and sheets were pushed back, and he sensed the warmth of her foot close to his head. Her hands lifted the blankets that were tight around him. She snuggled against him, the heat of her body was with him, raw heat. He lay on his back and he clenched his hands tight together.
‘Is it wrong? It can’t be wrong.’
‘I don’t know whether it’s wrong or whether it’s right.’
‘You think of her?’
‘Only the bloody bad times. Only the times I was foul and shouldn’t have been, like it’s guilt. Calling back the good times gets harder.’
The warmth of her was against him. ‘She doesn’t own you, Josh, not now.’
His fingers were locked, entwined, hard as he could hold them. ‘She is all that I have to hold to.’
‘What you said, about afterwards, it doesn’t have to be that.’
Josh said, ‘Her funeral, I can remember it. It’s like it was an hour ago. There was the vicar, the box, the men who carried the box, the solicitor and the accountant, and there was me. We had two hymns and only the vicar sang. They carried the box out and put it in the ground and there was a man behind me with a long-handled shovel and a cigarette cupped in his palm. I wasn’t supposed to see the cigarette. I didn’t want to go, to leave the box, but he coughed, like he was telling me that it happened every day and he’d a bloody schedule to keep to, and would I, please, let him get on? The vicar knew the schedule, he shifted me.’
‘Your wife was lucky to have a proper prayer said over her, luckier than my Hans…’
His hands broke apart. He stretched out and she wriggled over his arm. Her head was on his shoulder.
‘It was the little that I knew about love, and it was the little that you knew, Tracy, about love.’
‘You’re making bloody speeches, Josh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It can be better, afterwards…’
He held her. He felt a fear of her. The fear was that she would laugh at his clumsy love of her. He held her,
