The Valley of Unknowing (31 page)

It took twenty minutes to reach the customs check: twenty minutes under bright lights, being watched on monitors, studied for telltale signs of fear; twenty minutes’ worth of adrenaline building in my system. My memories of the customs inspection are fleeting. I recall a fat man in a wool coat counting out tins of caviar and cartons of cigarettes; a guard with a burn scar on his face in the shape of Lake Balaton; a child pulling at his mother’s arm and shouting urgently ‘Pee-pee! Pee-pee!’; my bottles of vodka clanking like fractured bells as I placed them on the counter. I can picture the guard examining the bag, picking it up and carefully handing it back to me. I may have wished him a happy Christmas.

‘Passport!’

Another guard was sitting behind a desk between the two queues. I’d walked right past him without stopping.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

He looked at me, looked at my picture in the passport, looked at me again, turned to the page with the visa. He was the oldest official so far. On his uniform were several discreet emblems of rank.

He handed my passport back. I said thank you, hardly able to hear the words over the thumping of my heart.

The two queues divided again: one line each for foreigners, East German citizens, West German citizens and residents of West Berlin. I followed Herr Caviar into the West German line. A train rumbled into the station, shaking the floor.

One more inspection: the most thorough.

The queue was down to single file. It wound slowly one way, then another, no sight of the end. I heard doors open and close, the sound repeating in cavernous, invisible spaces. Minutes went by. The line shuffled forward. I took out my book again then put it away, took it out, put it away. How much longer? How much further? I was sweating inside my English raincoat and my writerly velvet jacket. Then Herr Caviar was striding away, hefting his holdall of booty. My turn now, sooner than I thought. I stepped across the white line on the floor.

Two officers occupied a booth; a young one seated, an older one standing behind him. I said good evening. I slid my passport under the glass: Werner Kleinschmidt, sales executive, forty-nine years old, residing at 25 Im Kirschenwäldchen, Kalbach, Frankfurt; married, two children: Klara fourteen, Sebastian eleven. The mantra went round and round inside my head. The seated officer stared at me, picked up the passport, turned over the pages. In all, there were eleven old visas, with their accompanying entry and exit stamps. Herr Kleinschmidt had been a regular visitor to the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. The officer looked at me again. I smiled wearily, feigning incipient impatience.

‘Reason for visit?’

‘Death,’ I said.

‘A funeral?’

I simultaneously nodded and shrugged, as if that was close enough. The officer looked squarely at my floral tie.

‘Relation?’

‘A cousin.’

‘Where’s your cousin buried?’

‘She was cremated. At Baumschulenweg. I wasn’t there, but . . .’ I shrugged again. Shrugging seemed the best available camouflage. Terror and shrugging were unlikely bedfellows.

The older guard was looking at a clipboard. He leaned over the other’s shoulder, closed my passport and handed it back. ‘Good evening,’ he said.

And that was that. The interrogation was over. Four questions.
Four
. I could hardly believe my luck. I said good evening as evenly as I could manage and walked on. All I had to do was find my way to the platform, get on the first S-Bahn train for Westkreuz and it was done.

A tunnel led below ground, cement-lined and echoing. Travellers from all the other queues were heading in the same direction, East Germans, West Germans, Berliners and foreigners, walking out of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State without ceremony or celebration – as if this privilege of crossing borders were no more unusual than the daily journey to work. I inserted myself into the stream, my every step marked by the vodka bottles clanking at my side.

I walked down a flight of steps, turned a corner. The air smelled of scorched soot and bubble gum. The ground was shaking. Another train was rolling in, brakes squealing, wheels clattering – an S-Bahn train, heading into West Berlin. I kept walking, barely glancing at the signs. Herr Kleinschmidt wouldn’t need them. He already knew the way. Up ahead was the platform, yellow carriage windows sliding by, people waiting, silhouetted against them. There was no ticket barrier, no barrier of any sort. The train pulled up. The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. Curious faces peered out: eager for a glimpse of the other side.

I decided to run for it.

A man stepped in front of me. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth; quite a young man, with brown sheepskin gloves. I thought he was going to ask me for a light.

‘Herr Krug?’

There was another man at my shoulder. He wore a raincoat too; a cheap one without belt or buttons. It was a little too short for him.

The first man said. ‘It would be best not to make a scene.’

PART SIX

54

They took me through a door at the side of the tunnel. We walked along a narrow passage and up an iron staircase. Nobody passed us on our way out of the station; nobody saw us leave. It wasn’t until I was sitting in the back of a Wartburg staring at the pedestrians on Friedrichstrasse that I saw another human being besides my two companions. We drove at speed along Unter den Linden and, within a few minutes, were back on the Karl Marx Allee. I wondered, briefly, if we might be going to the Hauptbahnhof, but we passed the turning and continued east into districts I didn’t know, where dim red lights marked the tops of factory chimneys and the air tasted of sulphur.

My arrival at the facility – I had no name for it then – was equally devoid of potential witnesses. We drove through iron gates into a large bare courtyard and from there into a garage where a line of identical vehicles were parked. We went on foot through more doors, along more empty passageways, sometimes halting for reasons connected with the approach of footsteps and the red lights screwed at intervals into the walls. It seemed a matter of importance that my presence, like my arrest (I assumed I had been arrested, though the word had not been used) should go unobserved. As I shuffled down those endless corridors, the phrase that I could not get out of my head was:
Fracture to the left temporal lobe
. Instinctively I touched that cranial spot, recalling in the same moment Theresa’s habit of doing the same.

I was shown into a room. It was dark except for an anglepoise light on a desk. On the other side of that desk sat a man in uniform. He was my age, with tidy grey hair and glasses in heavy black frames. He was reading the contents of a file, rubbing his chin with his thumb as if perplexed. There were no blunt instruments in immediate reach, at least none that I could see.

‘Sit down,’ the man said without looking at me. The light from the lamp reflected off his lenses, hiding his eyes.

I sat down. The two men from the station waited for a nod from their superior and left. I never heard their names.

The uniformed man held out his hand. ‘The passport.’

I handed it over. In the back of the Wartburg I had considered throwing it out of the window, but the window wouldn’t open, there being no handle on the inside of the door. My interrogator opened the passport and flicked through it, returning to the photograph at the front.

‘You were younger then,’ he said. ‘When was this, ten years ago?’

‘Eight,’ I said. ‘I was wearing make-up.’

Michael Schilling had made the same observation. Was this what had tripped me up: that sliver of vanity? Of course it wasn’t. They had called me by name, those men in the tunnel. They had been waiting. How had they known to expect me? The simplest answer was that Claudia Witt had told them to, under interrogation. Of the three possible explanations for her disappearance, I felt sure the worst one had befallen her: she had been arrested. Were they still keeping her here? Had she been questioned in this very room, sitting in this very chair? A wave of hopelessness broke over me. All the precautions Anton had employed to guard against discovery and betrayal I had considered theatrical and excessively elaborate. Now it turned out they were not elaborate enough.

My interrogator closed the passport and moved it aside. To my surprise he did not ask me how I had come by it or who had supplied it. This confirmed my fears regarding Claudia. The only possible explanation for not asking such questions was that the answers were already known.

The interrogator stared at me. ‘The normal sentence for
Republikflucht
is three years’ imprisonment,’ he said. ‘I expect you’re aware of this.’

‘I am now.’

‘It might further be considered appropriate to make an example of a case like yours by extending that sentence, given the elaborate manner of your deception and, more importantly, the many privileges and honours bestowed upon you by the state – honours that apparently mean nothing to you.’

He was right. At that moment they did mean nothing to me, which is not the same as saying they never had.

The interrogator consulted a file that lay in front of him. It was, I noticed, a fat file. ‘Only a year ago you were awarded the title of People’s Hero of Art and Culture.’

‘Champion,’ I said. ‘People’s Champion. The last Hero of Art and Culture was Manfred Dressler, the sculptor.’

A small muscle flexed in the region of my interrogator’s jaw. ‘The Cultural Association should bestow its favours with more care. Two artists honoured for their service to the people, both of whom turn out to be’ – he hesitated before pronouncing sentence – ‘. . . shallow and self-serving.’

I felt a scintilla of relief. I had expected to be called a traitor. Traitors were the lowest of the low. There was no fate they did not deserve. ‘Shallow and self-serving’ was not so bad. It wasn’t so very far from the truth.

‘Why have you turned your back on your country?’ My interrogator seemed genuinely perplexed. ‘It makes no sense.’

‘For a woman,’ I answered.

As I said those words it came to me that I would never see Theresa again. She would soon learn of my arrest – Anton’s network would see to that. They would tell her it wasn’t safe for her in the East. Even if she ignored them and tried to return, how far would she get? No further than this place, no matter how accommodating or useful her father might be. The inner German border had finally put paid to our affair once and for all.

My interrogator was staring at me through his blank lenses. ‘Is that all there is to it? You fell in love?’

‘I fell in love.’

My interrogator consulted the file. ‘The music student.’

‘I’d hoped she would settle here. But it became clear . . . It became clear . . .’

‘Yes?’

It became clear that my hopes were unrealistic; that the love I had inspired in Theresa was not the kind that overcomes all obstacles, regardless of cost. It was not, for instance, like Thomas’s love for Sonja, or Sonja’s love for Thomas. It was a judicious, circumspect love, the kind that authors of fiction do not traditionally concern themselves with.

‘It became clear that she was not prepared to sever her ties in the West.’

The interrogator shook his head, expressed neither scepticism nor scorn, only a bottomless disappointment.

‘You want me to believe that your attempted desertion wasn’t motivated in any way by ideological considerations.’

‘Desertion’ was a more menacing description. Deserters in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State could, in certain circumstances, be shot.

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Then you’ll have no difficulty in cooperating on certain points of information of interest to the authorities.’

I shook my head. Whatever treatment Wolfgang Richter had stood up to before he died, I knew it would be too much for me. I would surrender everything in the end: every who, where and when. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I had anything to tell the authorities that they didn’t already know: because Claudia Witt knew much more than I did.

‘You would be advised to answer my questions fully and honestly.’

I said I would do my best.

My interrogator picked up a pen. ‘Name your contacts in Switzerland.’

‘In Switzerland?’ The question struck me as bizarre. ‘I don’t have any. None that I know of.’

‘In particular Zürich. Who do you know in Zürich?’

‘No one.’

‘In the administrative district of’ – my interrogator consulted his file again – ‘Erlenbach. Was that where you were planning to go?’

Erlenbach. It took me a moment to place the name.

‘I had in mind to go to Munich,’ I said.

The interrogator adjusted his glasses. ‘Is this your idea of cooperation? If so –’

‘I don’t know anyone in Switzerland,’ I insisted. ‘I know
of
someone. That’s the best I can do.’

‘Name?’

‘Martin Klaus.’

‘Spelled?’

‘K – L – A – U – S. He’s an agent.’

My interrogator looked up from his writing. ‘An intelligence agent?’

‘A literary agent. He’s quite famous in artistic circles.’

‘Western artistic circles.’

‘Yes. He was in
Stern
magazine a few months ago – his house too, in Erlenbach.’

What had prompted this line of questioning? How had Klaus’s home town been connected to me? Some fragment of information regarding Theresa’s arrangements in the West had reached my captors, but they didn’t know what to make of it. That, at least, was my impression.

I waited for the questions that would lead us to the issue of Richter’s book. I had already decided to tell the whole truth, humiliating though it was: in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State a deception in the cause of love (in telling Theresa that the book was mine) was less reprehensible and less dangerous than a deception in the cause of freedom.

‘Did this’ – my interrogator read the name from his notes – ‘Martin Klaus know of your plans to cross the border?’

‘No.’

‘Who did you tell? Specifically who in the West?’

‘I told no one in the West.’

The interrogator sighed. ‘I will ask you again. Who did you contact in the West concerning your defection? The truth, this time.’

I wasn’t trying to be evasive. I wanted my interrogator to know that, abject as it may seem. I had decided entirely against a futile act of defiance.

‘I made one attempt,’ I said, remembering my letter to Theresa. ‘I wrote to my . . . to the music student. About a week ago. But I’m sure the letter never arrived.’

‘Because?’

‘Because the person I gave it to was arrested a few days ago, this side of the border.’

‘Arrested for what reason?’

‘For the same reason as me.’ My interrogator looked unimpressed. ‘For
Republikflucht
.’

The interrogator sighed as if this were a diversionary tactic, one that, under the circumstances, was beneath us both. ‘Name?’

Fracture to the right temporal lobe.
How exactly had it happened? Had Richter seen the blow coming? Had it come as a complete shock? Had there been time to flinch? Maybe they had deliberately made him wait for it, just to prolong the terror. These questions, I realised, would never leave me. Once, when I was a boy, after a raid I saw a man’s head lying in the gutter with his hat still on. For years afterwards I wondered what he had been doing when the bomb fell and where the rest of him was. I wonder still.

‘
Name
?’

‘Claudia Witt.’

I had the impression, even through the fog of dread, that my interrogator knew this name, but that he had not expected to hear it from me.

‘Claudia Witt,’ he said. ‘Another musician.’

‘Yes. Recently graduated from the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music. She plays the . . .’

‘Who told you she’d been arrested?’

‘I just assumed . . . Why else am I here? How else did you know to expect me?’

The interrogator took off his glasses and looked at me. He had pale, sad eyes. ‘We have reason to believe Claudia Witt crossed the border illegally seven days ago, using forged papers. Unfortunately she was
not
apprehended.’ He reached under his desk. I heard a faint buzz in the corridor. ‘Perhaps that will teach you not to make assumptions.’

A guard entered the room and led me out by the arm. I preferred not to think where he was taking me. It was all I could do not to volunteer more details about my escape plans in the hope of prolonging what might turn out to be my last conversation this side of the grave.