The Berlin Crossing (12 page)

I have been telling the pastor about the replies from the Documentation Centre when, suddenly, the trees are louder than ever
with song, as though some unseen conductor has driven the birds of the forest to a rapturous finale. In the aftermath, in
the hush, we stand wordless under the trees.

And I hear myself say, ‘I don’t know what to do with all this
stuff
– all this information I’m gathering.’

The priest considers the treetops, seems to hear something, his head inclined, listening.

‘Write it down, Michael.’ The listening pose again, the eyes narrowed. ‘Yes, write it all down.’

I laugh half-heartedly, confused. I hadn’t expected such a concrete response.

‘But . . . I have a lot of stuff, yes, but the gaps are bigger than the information I’ve got.’

‘Then fill the gaps in, Michael.’ A hint of a smile on the pale features, a nod towards the treetops. ‘Listen to the birds,
listen to your heart. Your heart knows more than your head, Michael.’ The smile broadens. ‘That’s one of the things they never
learned in Normannenstrasse.’ I feel his hand on my arm: the simple gesture took the sting out of his words and brought home
to me how much this god-believing, ascetic priest had come to mean to me.

‘You mean, make it up as I go along?’ It is my turn to smile. ‘Just make up a bunch of lies – the very thing you accuse the
Party of having done?’

‘I’ve come to know you in these last months, Michael, and I don’t think you’re capable of making up a load of lies.’ No smile;
just the pale eyes locked on my own. ‘What I mean is this: put
together all you’ve got – Roland’s own words, the stuff from the Documentation Centre, even what I’ve told you myself. And
if there are gaps, and if you think they must be filled, then fill them in with the truth as you feel it and as you see it.’

‘I’m not sure I’m able—’

‘Nonsense, Michael, you’re a doctor of the University of Rostock, and you’re a writer! Of course you’re able to do it.’ He
is smiling, teasing.

‘But this is different.’

‘Yes, of course it’s different. So what? The
world
is different now. Who knows that better than you and me?’

He makes me smile with that absurd illogical leap of his. And yet the idea intrigues me.

‘It’s a lot of work.’

‘And work is what you need. Don’t tell me that you don’t miss your work.’

‘No, I won’t tell you that.’ Sometimes I linger outside my old school, the engine clanking in the Trabi, until the might-have-been
drives me away.

And yet . . .

‘Who would read such a thing? I mean, apart from you and me.’

‘Even you and I would be enough, Michael, but . . .’ He stops on the forest trail and his words are spoken slowly, like one of
his prayers. ‘
Someone may come. Someone who wants to know
. That’s what your mother said to me.’

Something chokes in my throat. Neither of us speaks; the words that my mother spoke long ago to the pastor are vibrant in
the forest air.
Someone may come:
it is reason enough.

In the weeks and months that follow I labour at Roland’s story. Labour becomes habit, a kind of loving. I make notes, fill
pages, scrap them, begin again. I muse by the window, I watch and listen
to the whistle of the trains, I return to the table and the typewriter and my version of Roland’s story. I have a few facts,
a handful of files. Typed records of interrogations, rosters for a manhunt. And mostly I have gaps, the gaps I fill in when
I am seated at the window, looking out at the trains. Yes, I hear the trains, but mostly I do what Pastor Bruck suggested:
I listen to my heart, to a young man’s song, to the cry of my own lost country.

And I read between the lines of Roland’s story in the yellow pages. I know now that he had not long to live when he wrote
these pages for my mother . . . and for someone who might come. Always, every time, I am struck by the first words he wrote:

I was born in Galway, a small town on the west coast of Ireland, on November 19th 1942 – I can’t swear to the truthfulness
of this – I hadn’t learned to spell at the time – but my mother and father assured me that it was so
.

What manner of man could be so jaunty, with the wolves almost at his door? He had a way with him, this Roland who was my father;
he could, I thought, crack a joke halfway up the steps of the gallows.

I go on writing, imagining, listening as the chill of winter comes round again. Snow blankets the streets of Brandenburg but
my heart is warmed, brought home, by the story I am shaping. Only very rarely, pacing the frozen streets of my town, does
the icy cold pierce me and I recall what Pastor Bruck said to me: ‘Follow your heart, Michael, but have a care:
you might find a father but you might lose your faith.
’

AUTUMN 1962

September 1962, London

A sweaty Saturday night in Marylebone police station. Even sweatier in the windowless confines of Interview Room No. 2.

He can’t be certain, but Roland Feldmann thinks that the small room is at the basement level. The shouted commands when the
police van had pulled to a halt in the station yard had been disorientating. The night angry with barked commands. ‘Move yer
arse, Paddy, we haven’t got all fucking night.’ Feeling the fear in Terry’s hand as he helped him down from the back of the
van.
Touching
, the sarcastic voice of the London copper. ‘A pair of holdy-handy Irish fairies.’ The other bobby laughed. ‘Leprechauns,
you might say.’ The drink-laden smells of the other prisoners, eight of them black; all of them herded together up the ramp
and through the back door into the station. And the air suddenly foul inside, like a locked room that hadn’t been aired for
a long time: the smell of disinfectant, cigarette smoke, despair. Terry’s hand tighter in his as they were herded along a
stone corridor that seemed to flow down below the building, he couldn’t be sure, what with the shouts of the coppers, the
swelling sense of confinement and the panic in Terry’s fingers clutching at his own.

A schemozzle in a larger stone-floored space at the end of the
corridor. A bald, shirt-sleeved policeman behind a waist-high counter scarred with cigarette burns.

‘What’ve you got for me, gentlemen? All drunk’n’disorderly?’ His voice is high-pitched and squeaky.

‘The usual bunch of clowns, Sarge.’ The small one, the one who talked about leprechauns, is doing the talking. ‘Pissing on
the Queen’s highway and taking the piss out of Her Majesty’s constabulary. The usual Saturday-night shite. All except these
two beauties.’ The copper’s baton poking in Roland’s stomach. ‘A pair of Paddies indulging in GBH in High Street Ken. Maybe
worse than grievous. Poor bastard they laid into is gone to hospital with a busted skull, he might not make it.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ Terry’s frightened voice. ‘He was attacking a girl.’

‘Shut it, Paddy.’ A wolfish grin, a flash of small yellow teeth. ‘Be nice, Paddy. Didn’t your mummy back in Paddyland teach
you to have manners, to speak when you are spoken to? Eh?’

‘That’ll do, Bates.’ The shirt-sleeved sergeant’s rebuke was offhand. ‘Put them in Number Two until CID can get to them.’

Another corridor and a short flight of steps. Another short-sleeved copper joined them, took names and addresses without comment,
put the contents of their pockets into separate envelopes. Issued receipts, told them to wait. And no, they could not phone
home to Ireland, maybe after the detectives had had a word.

Roland looked at Terry’s pale, frightened face and asked if his brother might have a cup of tea.

The policeman who was filling in the forms said this was a police station not a fucking hotel.

‘Please.’

‘Can’t he speak for himself?’

‘He’s only eighteen,’ Roland said. ‘He’s frightened.’

‘He wasn’t too frightened when he hit the fellow on the head.’

‘It wasn’t him.’ Roland looked from the policeman to his brother. ‘It was me . . . and we were just trying to help that girl.’

The policeman shrugged. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he looked at the name he had just written on the form, ‘Roland. Tell the detectives.’

But he got them both some tea and told them it was almost one o’clock. He watched them in silence as they drank their tea
and waited for the detectives.

Two of them, ties loosened, shirt collars opened, sports jackets draped over the backs of the grey plastic chairs. Both smoking,
the air thick and fuggy in the windowless room. And disbelief on both their faces as Roland recounted what had happened as
they walked along Kensington High Street a couple of hours earlier.

‘You’re telling us
you
struck this fellow and he fell and cracked his head on the footpath?’ the older of the two asked Roland.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s not what we are hearing.’ A long suck on the Senior Service cigarette. He picked a shred of yellow tobacco from his
lower lip and examined it carefully. ‘We’re told it was your brother here that did the damage.’

‘I’m telling you it was me.’

‘So tell us from the start.’ The two detectives exchanged a glance. ‘And this time you and I will keep it between ourselves.
Your brother here can keep Detective Menton company in the next room.’

‘But—’

‘No buts.’

A scrape of chair legs on the green lino, Terry’s face white in the doorway, looking back over the detective’s shoulder. The
pleading in his own eyes, willing Terry to stick to the story, that it
was Roland who had struck the blow. Feeling the detective’s eyes upon him, forcing himself to be calm, to meet those hard
eyes.

‘From the top, please,’ the detective said.

It was like doing an exam, Roland thought. Sift the information in your head, move the bits and pieces about to suit the pattern
the examiner wanted; if you didn’t have all the information, then bluff as convincingly as you could. You couldn’t fabricate
but you could try to paper over the cracks, you could hint that – like the examiner himself – your grasp of the basic facts
was such that it wasn’t necessary to write them all down.
From the top
, the detective said, but it was up to you to decide where the beginning began. And a smile never did any harm either.

So he gave the detective his widest smile, it worked with the girls at home, sometimes it even worked with his father – why
not try it on with this middle-aged detective with the nicotine-stained fingers?

And could he have a cigarette? Please.

He didn’t even like smoking, but the business of taking a fag from the policeman’s packet, then lighting it and exhaling the
first lungful of smoke – it all gave him a little more time to shape his thoughts, find his beginning. And another chance
to smile at the detective while he thanked him for the cigarette.

‘You need to understand that you could be in serious trouble here, Roland.’ The detective’s words cut across his thoughts:
this was more serious than a degree exam in German. ‘A man is in hospital with a serious head wound. He could die.’ A pause,
the policeman looking straight at him across the veneer-topped table. ‘I don’t want to hear any horseshit from you.’

Smiles wouldn’t be much good with this fellow: he looked sterner than his father behind the counter of the jewellery store
when an unwary customer ventured to ask for a discount on the
gold bracelet or the silver cross he wanted to buy for his girlfriend.

‘Terry and myself were coming out of the tube station on to High Street Ken when we saw the guy – he had her in a doorway
and she was shouting – screaming – so . . .’

A blur in his mind, like a film rewound and then played at speed: the shouting from the darkened doorway, a glimpse of a pale
frightened face, blond hair, the dark bulk of the fellow holding the girl—

‘So you wade in like Sir Galahad and beat the shit out of the fellow and now he’s at death’s door in intensive care.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ Words were harder to find here than in an exam. ‘It all happened so quickly. The girl was screaming,
everybody else was ignoring it and I didn’t think, I just wanted to help, it seemed the right thing to do.’

‘And then your brother struck him with something, a rolled-up umbrella or a stick – we have a witness statement – and this
man is on the ground with his brains hanging out.’ Detective Ransom pulled heavily on his cigarette. He didn’t think much
of the Irish; they’d hugged the sidelines while he and his mates were fighting the Second World War. ‘And our witness never
mentions a girl being attacked, just your brother striking the victim and then there’s blood all over the pavement.’

‘The girl ran off.’ He could remember the smudged mascara on the white face, the clatter of high heels on the tiles. ‘I suppose
she was running for the last train.’

‘You suppose.’

‘I’m telling you the truth.’

‘You’re lying.’ Another drag on the cigarette. ‘You and your brother were drunk and you attacked an innocent man minding his
own business. Why? Was he taking the piss? Call you Paddy or something like that?’

‘We weren’t drunk. We had a few drinks but we weren’t drunk.’

Roland tried to keep the panic out of his voice. The dirty cream-coloured walls and the green linoleum were closing in on
him; the smell of cigarette smoke and stale sweat was cloying. ‘I’m telling you, it was all over in a minute.’

‘What did your brother strike the victim with?’

The change of tack caught him off guard.

‘Terry didn’t hit him, it was me.’ He saw his brother’s arm raised, felt the swish of air past his own face, heard the thudding
noise as the other man’s head was struck – and then another blow fell, the fellow’s grip loosened on his own arm, there was
a sharper crack as the man’s head struck the pavement and blood was pooling around his shoes.

‘What did your brother hit him with?’

‘I told you, it was me.’

Ransom ignored his words. He glanced as his watch. Jesus, nearly two thirty. He’d had enough of this.