The Contract (9 page)

Into the station of Jannowitzbrucke. Change hands. Diving down the wide staircase. Ulf bringing from his pocket a handful of coins, Jutte scratching in her purse. Two twenty-pfennig coins into the machine.

More stairs and corridors that carried the heavy, uncleansed tunnel odour. What betting that the first would be on the Kopenick and Erkner line, not the Schoneweide track? The platform deserted. Only the two young people to make their own

company. The tall boy in the uniform of the Border Guard of the National Volks Armee, the grey cloth fitting him well, the trousers hanging true to their creases, the sharp green of the epaulette and wrist ribbon. The clean-faced girl, athletic and slender, who hung on his arm and gazed up at his face and whose fair hair was long and loose and casual. Both pouring huge, heaving breaths into the cold night air.

Ulf looked again at his watch.

'Don't do it,' she said.

'Perhaps there is still a chance . . .'

'Perhaps . ..'

The train sounded its approach, deep in the black well of the tunnel, taunting them with the slowness of its approach. Coming slowly, coming at its appointed speed.

'Is there a chance?'

'Perhaps . . .' Her breathing had subsided and her breastsl were still and the nipples pushing at the wool of her sweater and the boy wanted nothing more than to bury his face against her and feel her warmth and the gentle scent of her body. ' I think it is not possible. But we will try, lover, we will try to send you back to Weferlingen.' She laughed lightly.

The train came slowly, steadily into the station. No one leaving, only the young couple joining. A stop of a few seconds and the doors were closing on them. Alone in the carriage with the wooden slat walls and the advertisements for mouth rinses and savings policies, into the tunnel darkness, the strangling tunnel, rocking and swaying. Jutte sat very close to her boy. Thigh to thigh, her hand linked under his arm and resting on his knee, her head at his shoulder. Out from the tunnel and into the night.

The crisp rattle of the wheels on the rails. A drugging, soporific rhythm.

'Ulf.'

He was thinking only of how he would spend the time before the early morning train. 'Yes.'

'Did I tell you that I have an uncle that lives in Hamburg?'

'You told me.'

'Well it is not actually Hamburg, that is where his factory is. He lives in Pinneburg which is on the autobahn to Hamburg.'

'You told me.'

'He came to see us last summer.' The train crept into the pale-lit platforms of Treptower Park. 'He came with his Mercedes. When it was parked outside our flat many people came to look at it, not obviously, but they made the oppor- tunity to admire it.'

'So?'

'Do you know his children did not come to see us because they said it was too tedious to come to the DDR, they said it was a waste of time. My uncle said that if ever I reached Hamburg then he would give me a job.

Even a secretary, he said, is paid more than two thousand marks a month.'

'More than four times what my father takes.' Ulf could imagine it, Ulf could feel it. The pay of the NVA conscript was 44 marks a month, with food and accommodation and transport found. 'But there everything is expensive, you pay much for a flat.'

'But not for a car, not for a television, not for a pair of jeans. You see the advertisements on their television in the evening.'

Ulf sagged back, tired, in his seat. He was going back to Weferlingen, the boy who loved her and knew her, and she was talking about the price of a television set and the wage of a secretary in Hamburg. The train was edging clear of Planterwald. Still they were alone in the carriage.

'When we were in the Tierpark my uncle said that many young people were still able to leave, to go over there.'

'If someone pays then perhaps it is possible. There are criminals who will provide forged papers, will try to take people out. They charge thousands of marks, West marks, and many are caught. They are scum, filth, human traffickers.'

Jutte was close against him and her lips brushed against the lobe of his ear and her voice was as a light wind among leaves and her fingers traced patterns on the surface of his trousers. 'My uncle talked of that.

He said what you have said. But he spoke about the border, Ulf. He said it could be crossed.'

He wanted only to love her and she had teased him into j anger. 'It is one thing to talk of it, it is another to act. There is so much there, do you know that? The Restricted Zone, five kilometres deep. The Hinterland fence that is electrified. There are towers for observation, there are patrols, there are minefields, there are automatic guns. You cannot even climb the fence ... It is easy to speak of it, easy only to talk of crossing.'

They passed through Baumschulenweg. No one boarded, no one left the train.

'My uncle said that it could be crossed, but that there was one requisite, one thing was necessary

'What was that?'

'One in the party that makes the attempt must know a particular place.

You cannot go as a blind man and hope to win

through, but if you know the place ... He had

read it in
Stern
magazine, there are places . . .'

The train was slowing, the driver hard with the brakes, the wheels screaming on the rails, the illuminated sign flicking past the windows.

Betr-Bahnhof Schoneweide. Thirty-four minutes past midnight.

Departure time for Magdeburg was ihirty minutes after midnight. Ulf was on his feet and waiting furiously impatient for the doors to open, Jutte gripping his hand in a vice of possession.

'You're going to run?'

He nodded.

The doors opened. They ran, legs stretched, boy and girl, stride matching stride. Along the platform, down the steps, along the corridor, up the steps. There were carriages beside the open, stark platform on the main station. Carriages that carried the routing 'Potsdam, Brandenburg, Genthin, Burg, Magdeburg, Halberstadt'. A whistle blowing, shrieking in his ears. The train sliding forward, crawling and restless. Ulf leapt for the nearest door, wrenched it open and jumped for the high step. .

He heard her voice, firm against the gathering impetus of the train.

'Find me that place, lover. Find it for me.'

He shook his head as if trying to rid himself of a pain, and she was smiling and her face was burning beacon bright, and her eyes shone at him.

'Find it, and write to me.'

She turned and did not look for him again and was lost on the descending steps from the platform.

Ulf Becker began the hunt for a seat. On the night train it would be 4

hours to Magdeburg.

Erica Guttmann had changed to her nightdress and dressing gown, had done that before she carried a pot of tea to her father. She had read a book and listened to her radio, and could not find tiredness. The worry prevented that, the worry and hurt bred from watching his deteriorating efforts to maintain the close routine of their life since the telegram had come from Geneva. An old man, and ageing, and growing in his dependence on her as the days passed.

Renate was both a relative and a friend. A second cousin and a contemporary. They'd met in the town ever since she could remember the holidays in Magdeburg. Always Renate was there from the days of dressing up and playing skipping games and taking picnics, right through to adulthood and confidence. Renate the single girl like herself, and bubbling with a cheerfulness that was champagne to Erica after the long winter and slow spring of Moscow. Bewildering that such a lovely girl as Renate, pretty as a flower, had allowed herself to become the mistress of a policeman. A policeman called Gunther Spitzer. The two girls would be swept by gales of laughter when they spoke of the affair.

But at least he was a senior officer, he was prominent in the Schutzpolizei. What a choice for her lovely friend to have made. But in less than a month they could talk of it. From the drawers of her table she took a writing pad and her pen.

My dear Renate,

You will have heard of the awful thing that happened to Willi in Geneva

. . .

There was pressure on the bathroom space on the Monday morning and on the days that followed. And at eight o'clock sharp Mrs Ferguson bustling into the dining room with her trays of fried food and jugs of coffee and pots of tea and racks of toast played to a full house.

The fierce jollity of the all-male working society. All together, lads, Mawby seemed to be saying, something for us all to have some pride in, and only the best will be acceptable.

'If you don't mind, the butter please.'

'Coming over, Adrian.'

'The marmalade there, Harry?'

'Wish the old lady would get some decent colfee in, right, Johnny?'

'Hear the news this morning, the bloody sewage workers' strike?'

'Nothing changes, does it, Henry?'

'Come on, lads, each to his appointed.'

'Yes, Mr Mawby.'

The men of the Service coming together with their individual areas of expertise in the operation, and all making the effort to pull Johnny into their nest.

Mawby and Carter, the last to leave the table.

'Distant, isn't he, Mr Mawby. Removed from us, like he's an untouchable, don't you think?'

'Self-dependent, and self-reliant, that's the way I see him, Henry, and that's what I'm looking for.'

'He's a cold sort of fish.'

'As he should be for what we want of him.'

'Do you know that he even brought his old army boots down here. Next to no luggage, but he insisted on the boots,

Smithson told me. You'd have thought he'd have turned them out months ago.'

'Let's hope he doesn't need them. Let's hope we're not into a cross-country scamper . . . Take him slowly, Henry, slowly and carefully.'

'Tell us about his health, Willi, his condition physically.'

Carter at the table with the big notepad, sometimes Mawby beside him and taking a lesser part. Willi sat in a straight chair in which it would be difficult for him to relax. Johnny sat behind the boy.

'He's an old man now, he's close to seventy. Up till his sixty-fifth, birthday he used to go to a gymnasium that was in a sports club near our flat, but he strained himself and he has not gone back. We used to have a dog and he could go for walks with it, but it died several years ago. He said it was too much trouble to have another one. He has a medical check-up each twelve months that is done at Padolsk by the Army. He cannot walk far now. Always he used to like to walk, when Erica and I were younger he liked to go with us to the Hartz Mountains, to Wernigerode or Quedlinburg, and then walk in the hills and the woods. I think that he has a little rheumatism . .. Why do you ask these questions, Mr Carter?'

'That's not your worry, Willi. Just answer as best you can, like you're doing.'

In the afternoons in the sitting room, Johnny sat with Adrian Pierce.

Military talk and the resurrection of familiar subjects of the old days before Belfast, before the trial, before the return to Cherry Road.

'You're going to be with a man who is expert in armour and its counter-weaponry. It's possible that the objective of the mission will not succeed, that you will not bring him over, but that you will manage to talk with him. It is possible that defection will be beyond him . . . And bloody daft it would be if the man we've sent has forgotten what the front end of a Main Battle Tank looks like. This is a sort of re- fresher course, Johnny, and by the time we pack you off I want tanks, armour plating widths, squash head, control guidance and all the rest of the paraphernalia running out of your ears.'

Always supper at seven, prompt on the clock, all of them sitting down, napkins spread, glasses filled with water or milk or Coca-Cola. Two tables pushed together. A cotton cloth that was clean each day. All watching the door to the kitchen through which Mrs Ferguson would come with the evening's offering. And after supper back to the sitting room for Johnny and with him Harry Smithson.

'We want you to know as much as is possible before you cross. You'll remember some of the basics from your "I" Corps days, forget that and listen to me. The DDR is a captive state. The regime of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, that's SED in future, survives because of the permanent garrisoning on her territory of a minimum of 20 full strength Soviet divisions. Effectively the country is beholden to Soviet military command headquarters at Zossen- Wunsdorf outside Berlin.

When you pull this one off, Johnny boy, that's where the squeal's going to come from, that's where the boot will be to kick every arse in sight to kingdom come. I said it's a captive state . . . Along a frontier of just under 900 miles with West Germany there is a crip- plingly expensive set of border defences, with some 50,000 men deployed to keep their own brothers and sisters from doing a flit to the BDR. So start with an occupying force and the closed frontiers and you begin to get the sour taste in your mouth, you can call me a fascist if you want to and it'll give no offence, but that's my view of the place and I've been detailed to brief you. They enjoy living there so much that at the latest count more than two million nine hundred thousand citizens have skipped it, given their masters two fingers and run. That's the German Democratic Republic, Johnny. Perhaps I'm just an old right wing bastard, but I hate that place because it's sinister, it's tedious, it's drab.' 'Are you going to hurt my father ?'

Carter's face slackened with surprise.

'No . . . nothing like that

'Why do you want to know so much about him, and about his holiday?'