“And he came to see you again later?” Erlendur asked.
“That was quite strange actually. Him coming after all those years to reminisce. I’d forgotten the whole business really, but it was obvious that Tomas had forgotten nothing. He remembered it all. Every detail, as if it had happened yesterday.”
“What did he want?” Elinborg said.
“He was asking me about Emil,” Hannes said. “If he’d worked for Lothar. If they’d been in close contact. I don’t know why he wanted to know, but I told him I had proof that Emil needed to get into Lothar’s good books.”
“What kind of proof?” Elinborg asked.
“Emil was a hopeless student. He didn’t really belong at university, but he was a good socialist. Everything we said went straight to Lothar, and Lothar made sure that Emil received a good grant and good marks. Tomas and Emil were good friends.”
“What proof did you have?” Elinborg repeated.
“My engineering professor told me when I said goodbye to him. After I was expelled. He was hurt that I wasn’t allowed to finish the course. All the teaching staff talked about it, he said. The teachers disliked students like Emil, but couldn’t do a thing. They didn’t all like Lothar and his ilk, either. The professor said that Emil must have been valuable to Lothar, because there was hardly a worse student around, but Lothar ordered the university authorities not to fail him. The FDJ sanctioned the move and Lothar was behind it.”
Hannes paused.
“Emil was the staunchest of us all,” he said after a while. “A hardline communist and Stalinist.”
“Why…” Erlendur began, but Hannes continued as if his mind were elsewhere.
“It was all such a shock,” he said, staring ahead. “The whole system. We witnessed absolute dictatorship by the party, fear and repression. Some tried to tell the party members here about it when they got back, but made no headway. I always felt that the socialism they practised in East Germany was a kind of sequel to Nazism. This time they were under the Russian heel, of course, but I pretty quickly got the feeling that socialism in East Germany was essentially just another kind of Nazism.”
30
Hannes cleared his throat and looked at them. They could both tell that he found it difficult to talk about his student days. He did not appear to be in the habit of recalling his Leipzig years. Erlendur had forced him to sit down and open up.
“Is there anything else you need to know?” Hannes asked.
“So Tomas turns up years after he left Leipzig and asks you about Emil and Lothar, and you tell him you have proof that they were operating together,” Erlendur said. “Emil performed for him the important task of monitoring and informing on the students.”
“Yes,” Hannes said.
“Why was Tomas asking about Emil, and who is Emil?”
“He didn’t tell me why and I know very little about Emil. The last I heard, he was living abroad. I think he did ever since we studied in Germany. He never moved back as far as I know. I met one of the students from Leipzig a few years ago, Karl. We were both travelling in Skaftafell and we started talking about the old days, and he said he thought Emil had decided to settle abroad after university. He hadn’t seen or heard of him since.”
“But Tomas, do you know anything about him?” Erlendur asked.
“Not really. He did engineering at Leipzig but I’m not aware that he worked in the field. He was expelled. I only met him once when he got back from Germany, that one time he came to ask about Emil.”
“Tell us about it,” Elinborg said.
“There’s not much to tell. He dropped in and we reminisced about the old days.”
“Why was he interested in Emil?” Erlendur asked.
Hannes looked at them again.
“I should make some more coffee,” he said and stood up.
Hannes told them how he had been living in a new townhouse in the Vogar district of Reykjavik at the time. One evening the doorbell rang. When he opened it Tomas was standing on the steps. It was autumn and the weather was rough, the wind shook the trees in the garden and sheets of rain lashed against the house. Hannes did not recognise the visitor at first and was taken aback when he realised it was Tomas. He was so astonished that it did not occur to him at first to invite him in out of the rain.
“Sorry to disturb you like this,” Tomas said.
“No, it’s fine,” Hannes said. Then he realised: “What awful weather. Come on in, come on.”
Tomas took off his coat and greeted Hannes’s wife; their children came out to look at the guest and he smiled at them. Hannes had a small study in the basement and when they had finished their coffee and chatted about the weather he invited Tomas down. He sensed that Tomas was ill at ease, that something was preying on him. He was jumpy and a little awkward about having called on people he really did not know at all. They had not been friends in Leipzig. Hannes’s wife had never heard Tomas’s name mentioned.
When they had settled down in the basement they reminisced about their Leipzig years for a while; between them they knew where some of the students were now, but not others. Hannes sensed how Tomas was inching towards the purpose of his visit, and he thought to himself that he would have liked him if he’d known him better. He remembered the first time he saw him at the university library. Recalled the impression of polite bashfulness that he gave.
Well aware of Ilona’s disappearance, he remembered the previous time Tomas had visited him, just back from East Germany and a changed man, to tell him what had happened. He felt nothing but pity for Tomas. He had sent him a message written in a moment of anger, blaming him for his expulsion from Leipzig. But when his rage had died down and he was back in Iceland he realised that it was not Tomas’s fault, but as much his own for defying the system. Tomas mentioned the note and said it was preying on his mind. He told him to forget it, that it had been written in a fit of pique and did not represent the truth. They were fully reconciled. Tomas told him he had contacted the party leaders about Ilona and they had promised to make inquiries in East Germany. He was severely reproached for being expelled, for abusing his position and the trust he had been shown. Tomas had admitted to it all, he said, and repented. He told them whatever they wanted to hear. His sole aim was to help Ilona. It was all in vain.
Tomas mentioned the rumour that Ilona and Hannes had been going out together at one time and that Ilona wanted to marry in order to leave the country. Hannes said that was news to him. He had been to a few meetings and seen Ilona there, then given up all involvement in politics.
And now Tomas was sitting there again, in his home. It was twelve years since they had last faced each other. He had begun talking about Lothar and finally seemed to be getting to the point.
“I wanted to ask you about Emil,” Tomas said. “You know we were good friends in Germany.”
“Yes, I knew,” he said.
“Could Emil have, say, had a special connection with Lothar?”
He nodded. Although he disliked maligning people, he was no friend of Emil’s and felt he understood what sort of character he was. Hannes repeated the professor’s words about Emil and Lothar. How it confirmed his suspicions. That Emil had been actively engaged in interactive surveillance and had benefited from his loyalty to the student organisation and the party.
“Do you ever wonder if Emil played a part in your expulsion?” Tomas asked.
“That’s impossible to say. Anyone could have grassed on me to the FDJ — more than one person, more than two. I blamed you, as you remember. I wrote you that note. It gets so complicated talking to people when you don’t know what you’re allowed to say. But I haven’t been dwelling on it. It’s over and done with long ago. Buried and forgotten.”
“Did you know that Lothar is in Iceland?” Tomas suddenly asked.
“Lothar? In Iceland? No, I didn’t.”
