The Berlin Crossing (26 page)

‘Now,’ he said. ‘You poured coffee for somebody?’

She sat beside him on the narrow bed and told him, and he saw her in that metallic office, heard her grotesque boss’s grotesque
advances and in a way it was almost laughable, this frog with his groin scalded with steaming coffee – but it wasn’t really
a laughing matter, was it?

He wasn’t the only one in danger.

And danger had more than one face.

He held her hand, drew the blond head on to his shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, so sorry.’

On his shoulder the blond head stirred.

‘No, don’t talk about it.’

‘But—’

‘I’m OK, don’t let’s talk about it.’ She lifted her head, turned so that her eyes looked into his. ‘Tell me about your home,
about your town, about your mother and father – I want to know all about you, Roland Feldmann.’

‘Paulusstrasse,’ Roland said. ‘Paulusstrasse in Berlin.’

She said nothing but he saw the puzzlement in her expression.

‘It’s the street where my father lived, before the war. Sometime in the nineteen thirties he went to Ireland to work in Galway.’
A shrug of his shoulders. ‘I went to Paulusstrasse the day before I met you, Petra. I just stood there, looking up at number
thirty-one.’

He liked her stillness, the way she didn’t interrupt with questions, just waited for him to continue.

And he didn’t really want to speak about Berlin; she had troubles of her own.

‘My father sings the praises of Ireland so much that it’s almost embarrassing – when he starts at it in front of visitors
you don’t know whether to hide or to laugh.’ A rueful shake of the head. ‘But he still made us all learn German – me, my brother,
my two kid sisters.’ He was going to say that it was his command of German that had got him into his predicament but he saw
the complexity of it. ‘Maybe I should thank him – if he hadn’t pushed me at the German, I’d never have met you.’

A squeeze of his hand, a smile shared.

For a little while they were in two places: in an underground refuge where safety was questionable and in a cosy home in a
faraway town on the edge of Europe where safety was as certain as his mother’s patience and his father’s irritability. Where
his brother Terry wheezed and puffed on his inhaler; where his two kid sisters, even in puberty, behaved already like a pair
of houseproud German hausfraus.

‘I think,’ Petra said, ‘they wouldn’t be impressed by the lodgings I’ve offered you.’

They were back in the dingy cellar, huddled together in the night like a pair of animals.

‘No.’ He was having none of it. ‘They’d love you, I know they would.’

‘I still don’t know why you’re here, why they’re hunting you.’

He stood up, paced the cramped cellar, looked at her in anguish.

‘The priest – Pastor Bruck – he kept saying that it’s safer not to know too much.’

‘I think we’ve gone beyond that, Roland, don’t you?’

And he saw the rucksack on the floor, the flask on the crumb-laden stool, saw her making her way through the hostile night
to his hiding place, and knew the truth of her words.

‘I can never repay you for what you’ve done for me, Petra.’

‘You’re here,’ she said, ‘that’s repayment enough.’

And he saw it then, grasped at the possibility.

‘I could be happy here – I could go to them and tell them everything and you and I could be together—’

‘Tell them what, Roland?’

She listened as he told her all, from the fracas in the tube station in Kensington to the police station nearby; from the
storklike Ingham to the big house in the countryside; from Heathrow to Templehof and Paulusstrasse.

He told her about Prenzlauer Berg, about the body in the apartment and the man with the yellow eyes.

‘I was frightened,’ he said, ‘but –’ he shivered – ‘I struck the fellow so hard I could’ve killed him.’

She put her arms around him, held him close.

‘They wouldn’t listen, would they? They wouldn’t let us be together.’

His words demanded no answer.

They kissed.

To Roland their kiss seemed as inevitable as everything that had happened to him since he crossed into Zimmerstrasse at
Checkpoint Charlie. And even before then: that all his life he had been moving, aware but unaware, towards this garden hut
in a place he had never heard of, in the arms of a girl he had never known. And now, the apple scent of her hair, the softness
of her skin, the silk of her lips – he knew now that all his life he had been waiting, searching, for this Petra from the
GDR.

‘I want to stay but I have to go.’ Her breath whispering the words in his ear. ‘I live with two others, I don’t want to make
them suspicious.’

He framed her face in his hands.

I’m so happy I could die
.

‘We’ll get out together, Petra. I’ll take you home with me.’

His words held her. A life beyond the Wall, beyond the reach of the groping eyes and hands of Baumeister. A life with this
strong-willed, gentle fellow from a small town that he said was grey-stoned and wet and windy and friendly . . .

Go now. Before you are found out, before you betray him. Take his words to bed with you, this insane dream of escape
.

‘I have to go, Roland.’

They had to kiss again.

And once more inside the door of the shed.

And once more outside, in the silent night, under the white stars. A gentle kiss there, a sharing of a dream.

He watched her go, saw her slip into the shadows of the trees, followed in his mind her silent way towards the church, towards
the unknown apartment block. The night was cold but his heart was warm with her touch, her memory.

Time stood still the next day. Or at least the hands on the clock crawled at funeral pace on their circular journey.

She tried not to think of him in the basement: alone, cold, hungry. It made her shiver just to think of him, made the stylus
tremble between her fingers as she bent over the map on her drawing board.

She could feel eyes upon her, knew that every head in the calligraphy office was inclined towards her every few minutes throughout
the long day. You never knew how the information got out but somehow whatever happened within the Institute’s walls seemed
to become common currency. And always in distorted, counterfeit coin. Baumeister’s coffee-soaked groin could easily have escalated
by now into a vodka-fuelled rage.

Or worse.

Nothing was said, you read the runes of the sudden silence at the canteen lunch table, the eyes that failed to meet yours.
Maybe Baumeister’s secretary had said something. Maybe somebody had taken note of the Deputy Director’s awkward way of walking
in the car park.

She tried not to think of Roland.

Nor of Baumeister.

As the working day edged to its close, she began to think she’d escaped, that she would not be summoned to his office.

Baumeister left it till later.

‘You.’ Frau Krug stood beside her wearing an oddly sympathetic expression. ‘Now, Herr Baumeister’s office.’

Twenty minutes to day’s end.
You can’t scald him with coffee again
.

Her hands shook as she began to tidy her work station, a pencil fell to the floor.

‘Leave it, Fräulein Ritter, I’ll do it.’ The supervisor’s voice less harsh than usual. ‘Go, I’ll tidy your stuff.’

Petra thanked her, dismayed.
You’re in trouble if this old battleaxe feels sorry for you
.

At least she wouldn’t have to worry about her skirt; not that loose slacks over boots amounted to unsurmountable armour.

But there was determination in her step as she made her way to Baumeister’s office. Somehow – maybe by a promise, a hint –
you have to keep the bastard at bay until
. . .

Until what?

Until she and Roland might, somehow, be safe together?

She knocked on Baumeister’s door, waited for the command to enter.

The Deputy Director was seated on the corner of his desk, buttocks splayed across the metal surface.

He waved her to a low chair with his swinging foot.

She fixed herself in the chair, primly, thighs tight, arms held close.

‘How are you, Petra?’ His face screwed into a smile.

‘Fine, thank you, sir.’

‘Let’s put that little mishap of yesterday behind us, shall we, Petra? Just an accident, it could happen to anybody.’ The
brown shoe, surprisingly tiny, like a child’s, swung towards her knee.

‘Thank you, sir.’

Baumeister shifted himself on the desk. When he spoke again,
his voice was softer. ‘Why don’t you give up this music nonsense and concentrate on your work here?’ She wasn’t sure if it
was his oniony breath or his very nearness that nauseated her. ‘Frau Krug assures me that you have great potential in your
work and, of course, I take a great personal interest in your welfare here.’ He adjusted his rump on the desk; his hanging
foot seemed to inch towards her thigh. ‘I can assure you, Petra, that there are great prospects here for any willing worker
who earns my personal interest.’

She couldn’t meet his bulging gaze. She stared past the mound of his belly as though she could see her ancient violin and
hear the words of Herr Lorre, one-armed survivor of the war, jack-of-all-trades teacher in the orphanage in Karl-Marx-Stadt:
‘The violin is of no use to me, Petra. Learn it and love it – I notice how you love music.’ And she
had
learned to play and to love playing the instrument: old Herr Lorre himself had done his utmost to teach her. And, in an odd
twist of fate, it was her musicianship that had brought her to this pass, in the utilitarian office of the Deputy Director
of the Institute of Cartography with those bulging eyes boring into her thighs. Frau Koch, Supervisor of the Orphanage, had
happened to see Petra’s transcriptions of the musical scores, had expressed admiration for the neat penmanship – and that
had been that. Petra had no idea who had said what to whom but, like everyone else, she knew how the system worked: a word
from one Party functionary to another, and so on up the line, and the orphan from Karl-Marx-Stadt was on her way to the Cartography
Institute in Bad Saarow. ‘Keep playing, I’ll send your name to the conservatory in Berlin,’ Herr Lorre had told her as they
parted. ‘You never know.’

Well, now she knew. And Herr Franz Baumeister’s brown shoe was a millimetre from her thigh while he waited for her answer
to his proposition.

There was a sharp knock on the glass-panelled office door.

Baumeister turned, irritated.

‘Yes?’

The door opened. Baumeister’s secretary, grey-haired, frightened-looking, stood in the doorway.

‘I
told
you – no interruptions.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. It’s Berlin – it’s urgent, they said.’

‘Who said? What are you talking about, woman?’

To Petra, watching with a kind of shamed relief, the woman seemed visibly to draw herself together before answering.

‘Herr Deputy Director, it’s the Ministry of State Security on the line. Major Fuchs. He asked for you personally. He said
it was urgent.’

‘Major Fuchs?’

Fuchs
. The fox. Although Baumeister had met the Stasi officer only a couple of times, the name alone was enough to bring to mind
the narrow face with its pointed features and strange, yellow eyes.

‘Yes, sir.’ Relief in the woman’s voice.

‘You’d better put him through.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ The door seemed to close soundlessly behind her.

Baumeister hauled himself to his feet.

To Petra, he seemed both irritated and curious.

She stood up. ‘May I go now, sir?’

Once more she felt herself undressed by the bulging eyes.

‘Yes, go now.’ He reached out, tilted her chin upwards with his fingers. ‘You and I will finish our discussion later, Petra.’

‘Yes, sir.’

She forced herself not to run from the office. The phone on Baumeister’s desk was ringing as she shut the office door.

* * *

Markus Fuchs was careful not to allow the telephone to touch his good ear. The other ear was heavily taped with sticking plaster;
his whole head felt as if that bastard of an Engländer had put his foot right through his brain.

The hospital doctor who’d seen to Fuchs had been lucky to escape with no more than a tongue-lashing. Fuchs had delayed going
to the hospital until after midnight. Leaking blood, aching with pain and reeling with dizziness, he’d scoured the darkening
streets of Berlin in the hours after the debacle in Prenzlaue Berg. The streets yielded nothing. The idiots manning the checkpoints
had clipboards covered with inky acres of nothing.

Only at midnight, driven mad with anger and frustration – and a renewed flow of blood – did Major Fuchs consent to be driven
to the casualty unit of the nearest hospital.

He bellowed when the night-duty doctor touched his wounded ear.

It might have been fear of the bellowing Stasi officer that prompted the young intern to administer a heavy sedative.

It was almost ten o’clock when Fuchs came to in the hospital bed the following morning. His ear still screamed with pain and
the hammering in his head was louder than ever. Worst of all, the major’s wooziness made straight thinking almost impossible.
While he slept in a hospital bed, the Engländer bastard was still on the run
.

A fuck-laden tirade reduced the doctor to a trembling jelly. The major’s uniform was retrieved, coffee provided, the major’s
car summoned. On his angry way through the hospital corridor Fuchs stumbled, was only prevented from falling by a passing
porter who helped him to his waiting car.

He made it to the office, shaved in the bathroom on the second
floor, drank more coffee, seated himself at his desk with a pile of reports from roadblocks across the city.

Somehow Fuchs’s bandaged head didn’t engage with the task in hand. He made phone calls and knew, somewhere amid his pounding
pain, that the questions he asked were, somehow, off target.

He should leave Normannenstrasse, go home; he knew that his trawl through the reports was also off the mark.
Walk away from your duty when everybody in the building knows by now that you let a fucking Engländer beat the shit out of
you?