The Berlin Crossing (24 page)

For a moment they all laughed together. Then, abruptly, their laughter died together and they stared out in silence at the
dark empty fields around them.

‘I can hide you for a couple of days in our old church, anything longer is too dangerous. They come back every now and again,
just to see if there’s something they forgot to smash the last time.’ They were rounding a bend, the priest changed down.
‘Maybe after that I can get you to Leipzig and try to get you across from there.’

‘The summer houses,’ Petra said. ‘It’s safer there than in your church.’

‘The summer houses? But the men use them all the time, even now.’

‘Not the old ones, Pastor.’

‘Across the stream?’

‘Yes, across the stream. Nobody goes there now, not since the war, they say.’

‘But they’re wrecks, Petra. No glass, hardly any doors, roofs gone – the lad would freeze there.’

‘Not in this one, Pastor.’

The priest glanced over his shoulder at her. ‘
This one
– it’s a safe place?’

‘As safe as any place can be. I use it sometimes when I want to get away. Sometimes I even go there to play.’

‘You’re a strange one, Petra.’ The priest smiled. ‘But if
you
say it’s safe . . .’ He turned to Roland. ‘So how do you fancy a vacation in one of our exclusive summer homes?’

‘What kind of summer home?’

‘I suppose you’d call them garden sheds, Roland, but here they are a place of refuge, a place where you drink beer, watch
TV, talk to your garden neighbours or maybe just fall asleep on an old sofa.’

‘
A sofa
in a garden shed?’

‘We’re a funny lot in the GDR, Roland,’ Petra was half laughing, ‘but you’ve probably noticed that already.’

Lights were glimmering in the darkness ahead.

Roland watched them grow closer, thinking about what the girl had said. His day in the life of the GDR had been dangerous
and exhausting – but no weirder than life in the company of Ingham and Corporal Adams.

‘Time to get you on the floor, Roland,’ the priest said. ‘Bad Saarow is a small place but that doesn’t mean there are no watchers.’

Pastor Bruck eased the Trabi to a halt and Roland climbed out on to the dark road. The sky was starless, the air sharp with
the edge of winter. He tipped the seat forward and Petra got out of
the car. For a moment, standing close together in the night, it seemed like a dream.

‘In you get,’ she said.

He touched her hand as he stooped to get into the car and he felt the pressure of her fingers on his. The space behind the
front seats was minimal but he squeezed himself in lengthways as best he could.

‘I’m going to cover you with my coat,’ Petra said, and he felt her hands on him through the material of the coat.

‘Nobody will stop us,’ Pastor Bruck said, ‘but just in case . . .’

‘I won’t even breathe.’

But he did, inhaling from the stuff of her coat the fresh smell of her as the car moved on through the darkness.

Her fingers still tingled from his touch. Strange: after the farce of the audition, she’d been deflated and angry; now, this
foreigner hiding under her coat had her lurching towards an unfamiliar excitement.

She felt Pastor Bruck’s eyes on her as he swung past the railway station, felt the question in his glance.

‘You OK, Petra?’

‘Yes, Pastor.’ She didn’t trust herself to say more.

The ticket collector standing outside the station was giving the green Trabi her full attention. Ticket collectors in Bad
Saarow were not overworked; nearly everybody in the town worked locally, at the army barracks, at the Soviet military sanatorium,
or, like herself, at the Cartography Institute and printing works. Visitors to the town tended to come in cars to protect
their privacy.

They just didn’t go as far as covering themselves with her overcoat.

The street was almost empty. Reiner, the local policeman, was standing outside the small police station, smoking. Petra could
feel his eyes following their progress along the street. Beside her, Pastor Bruck swallowed noisily.

‘Are we in the town yet?’ Roland’s voice sounded weird, muffled by her coat.

She laughed nervously.

Pastor Bruck hushed them both.

In the distance, the lights of the sanatorium were forbidding, illuminating the KEEP OUT signs. The place was avoided even
by the soldiers in the local barracks, the squat building on the edge of the town.

It wasn’t much of a town but it was at least an escape from the laughter-free zone of the orphanage in Karl-Marx-Stadt. In
the flat in her workers’ block, she had to share a kitchen and a bathroom but at least she had her own room, her private space
for daydreaming and music.

And she had her own summer house. Not hers exactly but nobody else ever went there; she hoped nobody else knew about it.

They were on the long road that ran past the villas of Party members and other dignitaries. The trees were dark behind these
cosseted homes; beyond the trees was the expanse of the Scharmützel Lake, the summer playground of the army brass and civilian
bosses.

She wondered if the young man hiding behind her seat belonged to the class of bosses in his home town: his father drove a
Mercedes.

She clasped her hands tightly together, as if to imprint his touch more deeply on her own skin. Boss class or not, she was
going to help him. Maybe, just maybe, the trip to Berlin had not, after all, been a complete waste of time.

Somewhere in the town a dog barked: a casual bark, brief, exploratory, as if wondering if anybody were up and about in the
darkened town. The answering growl was sustained, menacing. She turned her head and saw, behind the spear-tipped fencing around
a cream-coloured villa, the muscular black and tan Dobermann pinscher observing their progress, the long head
poised attentively. She shivered, reached back between the seats to touch him through the woollen coat.

‘I don’t dare drive as far as the allotments.’ Pastor Bruck was whispering. ‘Somebody might notice and wonder.’

‘We’ll go through the woods,’ Petra said, ‘from your place. I know the way.’

On her right, between the trees, she could glimpse the stuccoed village that housed the Cartography Institute; further back,
unseen, was the flat-roofed printing works.

‘Do they know you travelled in with me this morning?’ Pastor Bruck was still whispering.

‘I didn’t tell them but I suppose they know. It’s why people like Baumeister exist, just to
know
things.’

‘He can’t know
everything
, Petra.’

‘Maybe nobody told him I travelled with you.’ Now she was whispering too. ‘I hope not. You know how much he hates what you
do.’

‘Maybe he’s just frightened,’ Pastor Bruck said. ‘Like the rest of us.’

He slowed, changed down, swung on to the dirt track between the trees. They wound their way slowly along the path until they
came to the church, grey and silent in the night.

Petra reached back and pulled the coat away.

‘Time to move, Roland.’

‘But no talking,’ Pastor Bruck whispered. ‘Follow me and Petra.’

The car seemed to tremble when he turned the engine off, like a dog shaking itself. The fresh smell of the wood mixed with
the oily smell of the car when they stood together in the dark. Roland stretched, muscles cramped after his confinement in
the car. Instinctively, all three of them were silent, listening to the small sounds of the night. Leaves stirred, a branch
shook, something rustled deep among the trees.

‘Let’s go.’ The priest led them along the wall of the unlit church. Roland wondered what kind of church it was, with a chained
padlock on its front door and its windows boarded up.

‘Careful.’ Petra stopped in front of him, pointing at a pile of dark-green metal gun casings. ‘They store some old equipment
in the church.’

Pastor Bruck had his finger to his lips. He pointed to a corner at the back of the church, signalled to them to wait.

They watched him walk on alone towards a low cottage with a lighted window.

‘He has a young son, Thomas.’ Roland could feel the girl’s breath, whispering in his ear. ‘He doesn’t want him mixed up in
this.’

He could taste her breath on his face.

They heard the priest’s approaching footsteps and drew apart.

They felt the priest’s eyes upon them and looked away from his gaze, wondering if their confusion was written in their faces.

Pastor Bruck smiled at them, shook his head as if at some private joke.

‘Here.’ He handed Roland a small canvas sack. ‘You’ll be hungry.’

‘We’d better move.’ Petra’s voice was different, nervous. ‘If I get back too late, the others might start to wonder.’

‘Yes.’ Pastor Bruck looked at her, at her rucksack, at the violin case. ‘You can manage in the dark?’

‘It’s not a problem.’

‘I don’t know when we can meet. I have to go into Berlin tomorrow to make arrangements for the funeral.’

‘I know.’ She turned away, spoke to Roland. ‘We have to go – now.’

A quick handshake with the pastor, a whisper of thanks, and then Roland was following her along the wall of the church. She
stepped in among the trees and for a second she was lost to him in the gloom. He heard her whisper and joined her in the darkness.

‘Stay close,’ she whispered, ‘and not a sound.’

And yet the night was full of sounds. Branches stirred in the wind. A twig cracked underfoot. Night creatures scurried in
the undergrowth. Dogs barked way off, lonely, lost. A car, probably a lorry, whooshed by on the road beyond the trees and
they both stopped for a moment, heads poised, listening. The motor died in the distance but his heart thumped even louder.

Ahead, beyond the treeline, he glimpsed a makeshift city. Flat roofs, pitched roofs, arranged in symmetrical rows like a play
town for grown-ups.

‘The allotments,’ Petra whispered. ‘The summer houses.’

They hugged the inside of the treeline, skirting the empty town of allotments and garden sheds. Beyond the garden town, Roland
could make out a high ditch, an earthen bank marking the end of the allotments.

Petra turned to him, her finger on her lips. Her face was pale, almost white; her eyes seemed deeper, larger than before.

They left the shelter of the trees, passed through a gap in the earthen ditch. A narrow stream confronted them; ahead lay
another expanse of garden sheds, shabby, broken down, abandoned. A wooden footbridge led across the stream into this garden
ghost town.

They were exposed here, unsheltered. Petra quickened her step. She led him among the ruins to the furthest corner.

The garden shed she stopped at seemed, at a glance, as derelict as the other buildings: a flat roof, peeling wooden walls,
a sagging door. And yet, as Petra stooped, reaching behind a loose board in the front wall, Roland could see that, for all
its ramshackle appearance, this garden shed – and it was no more than that –
seemed secure. The pitched roof, covered in ancient tarpaulin, was unbroken; the windows, although without glass, were carefully
boarded over with weathered planks.

And the sagging door was locked: when Petra stood up, she held a large key in her hand.

‘Let me,’ he said.

He took the key from her and turned it in the ancient, rusty lock. The door swung open as easily as the key turned in the
lock.

‘I like to come here to be alone,’ Petra whispered. ‘I oiled the lock and the hinges.’

She eased the door shut behind them and a deeper darkness enveloped them. He sensed rather than saw her fumbling in her rucksack
and heard the crack of a match. In the sizzling flame of the match, she smiled at him, then bent over a candle stub in a jam
jar on an old table pushed against a wall of the shed. The cluttered interior took shape among the shadows: a table, an old
car wheel, lengths of wood and rusty piping, a short ladder with missing rungs lying on the wooden floor. The rusting base
of an old iron bedstead leaned against the back wall of the shed.

‘No one knows I come here.’ Petra was whispering. ‘But I leave all this junk lying about just in case somebody gets in here.’

She saw the puzzlement in Roland’s face.

‘Not here.’ A smile on her face. ‘Back here.’

She moved the iron bedstead and a couple of planks that were propped beside it against the back wall of the shed. Behind the
planks he could see a gap in the wall about a metre high.

Petra motioned for him to follow her. He pushed behind her into a space so narrow that he had to stand sideways in it. The
candle flickered in the jam jar and their shadows were huge on the unpainted walls.

She stooped over the wooden floor and he drew back to give
her space. He saw her take hold of a brass ring and watched, astonished, as she lifted a wooden slab from the floor and let
it rest against the wall of the narrow passage.

‘Careful now.’ Her voice in his ear. ‘Hold the candle.’

He held the candle over the open trapdoor as she manoeuvred herself on to the ladder that was resting against the wooden lip.
He held the candle lower into the space as she descended into the darkness.

‘Now hand me down your stuff.’

She took the bag of food from him, then the candle and he followed her down the ladder.

The walls and floor of the underground space were lined with wood. The space seemed slightly smaller than the shed above and
was just high enough for him to stand upright. A table and chair stood in a corner. Along the opposite wall a foot-high platform
had been built, wide enough and long enough to lie on. After the cold of the night, the space seemed warm, even stuffy.

He held her to him, wondering who had hidden here, deep under the ground.

‘It must have been the Jews.’ He heard her whisper, wondered at how she could read his thoughts. ‘During the war, when they
were being hunted.’ Her body shivered against his and he drew her closer. ‘I walked in here not so long ago, the door of the
shed was open, and I was rummaging about, just passing the time, when I saw the gap in the false wall.’ She leaned back in
his arms to look up at him. ‘I felt that I had found my own secret place, where I could get away from – from things. I cleaned
it out, found an old lock for the door and put some things down here.’ She pointed at the box of books under the table, the
big bottle of water on the wooden bed. ‘I can’t always get here. I don’t think anyone knows but you always feel somebody is
watching you.’