'I found these bills hidden in Gebhardt's hut. As you can see all of the bills are marked in the top right-hand corner with a small pencil mark, which is I believe a Russian Orthodox cross.'
Savostin examined one of the notes and nodded. 'All of them?' he said.
'Yes, sir.' I knew this because I had marked every one of the bills myself. 'It's my guess that if you were to search the officer named in that notebook you would find him in possession of one or more five-rouble notes with the same pencilled cross in the top right-hand corner, sir. The same officer is left-handed and his arm currently bears a livid scar that was most probably sustained during the attack on Gebhardt.'
Still clutching my cap, I rubbed my shaven head with my knuckle. It sounded like something happening to a piece of wood in the camp workshop. 'If I might speak frankly, sir?'
'Speak, Captain.'
'I don't know what you're going to do with this man, sir. Given who and what he is I can appreciate that it might leave you with a problem. After all, he's your man's man. But he's no good to you now, sir, is he? Not now that we know who and what he is. I suppose you could always use him to replace Gebhardt, as the anti-fa officer, although his Russian isn't up to much. And you'd have to take him away anyway, for political re-education. Either way he's finished in this camp. I just wanted to let you know that, sir.'
'Aren't you jumping the gun a little, Gunther? You haven't proved anything yet. Even if I do find this marked money on Metelmann there's nothing to prove he didn't receive the money before Gebhardt was murdered. And have you considered the possibility that if this man is an informer then it might suit me better to leave him here and have you and the colonel transferred to another camp?'
'I have considered that, yes, sir. It's true there's nothing to stop you doing that. But you can't be sure that we haven't told all our comrades what I've told you. That's one reason why it wouldn't suit you to send us to another camp. Another reason is that the colonel is doing an excellent job as SGO. The men listen to him. With all due respect, sir, you need him.'
Major Savostin looked at the colonel. 'Perhaps I do, at that,' he said.
I shrugged. 'As for proving anything to your satisfaction, Major, that's your affair. I've handed you the gun. You can't expect me to pull the trigger as well. However, if you do decide to search Metelmann, you might ask him the name of his wife, sir.'
'Meaning?'
'Konrad Metelmann's wife is called Vera, sir.' I handed Savostin the ring I had found and which I had assumed was Gebhardt's wedding ring. 'There's an inscription inside.'
Savostin's eyes narrowed as he read what was engraved on the inside of the gold band. 'To Konrad, with all my love, from Vera. February 1943.' He looked at me.
"That was on Gebhardt's ring finger, sir. The finger was broken I think because Metelmann tried to get the ring off Gebhardt's finger after he killed him and failed. Possibly he even broke the finger, I don't know. But I had to use soap to get it off myself.'
'Perhaps Gebhardt bought this from Metelmann.'
'Gebhardt bought it all right. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't from Metelmann. Metelmann hid that ring up his arse for weeks. Then he got a bad dose of diarrhoea and had to wear it on a piece of string around his neck. But one of the guards found it and made him hand it over. As a matter of fact I saw it happen.'
'Who?'
'Sergeant Degermenkoy. My guess is that Gebhardt bought it back from him and promised to return it to Metelmann but never did. Possibly he may have used the ring as leverage to obtain information from Metelmann. Either way, I'm certain this ring is what the fight was about. And I'm sure the sergeant will confirm what I've said, sir. That he sold the ring to Gebhardt.'
'Degermenkoy is a lying pig,' said Major Savostin. 'But I don't doubt that you are correct about what must have happened. You've done very well, Captain. I shall question both men in due course. For now, I thank you, Captain. You too, Colonel, for recommending this man. You may go back to work now. Dismissed.'
Mrugowski and I went out of the guardhouse. 'Are you sure about all of this?'
'Yes.'
'Suppose Savostin searches Metelmann and he doesn't have that five-rouble note?'
'He had it half an hour ago,' I said. 'I know that because it was me who gave it to him. And it's marked with a lot more than just a Russian Orthodox cross. There's a thumbprint in blood on it, too. Rather a good one, as it happens, although I dare say the Ivans won't be looking to make a match.'
'I don't understand,' said Mrugowski. 'Whose thumbprint?'
'Gebhardt's. I put the print on the bill using his dead hand. And I borrowed five roubles from Metelmann the day before yesterday, just so that I could repay him with a marked bill. I marked the bills with the cross, myself. The thumbprint was merely for added effect.'
'I still don't understand.'
'I chalked him out for it. Metelmann. Framed him, so that he could take the bath out.'
Mrugowski stopped and stared at me with horror. 'You mean he didn't kill Gebhardt?'
'Oh, he killed him all right. I'm almost sure of that. But proving it is something else. Especially in this place. Anyway, I don't much care. Metelmann was a point. A lousy informer and we're well rid of him.'
'I do not like your methods, Captain Gunther.'
'You wanted a detective from the Alex, Colonel, and that's what you got. You think those bastards always play fair? By the book? Rules of evidence? Think again. Berlin cops have planted more evidence than the ancient Egyptians. This is how it works, sir. Real police work isn't some gentlemen detective writing notes on a starched shirt cuff with a silver pencil. That was the old days when the grass was greener and it only snowed on Christmas Eve. You make the suspect, not the punishment, fit the crime, see? It was always thus. But more especially here. Here most of all. That Major Savostin isn't the laughing policeman. He's from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I just hope you didn't sell me too hard to that cold-hearted bastard because I tell you this, it's not Lieutenant Metelmann I'm worried about, it's me. I've been useful to Savostin. He likes that. The next time he gets cold hands he's liable to treat me like a pair of gloves.'
Konrad Metelmann was taken away by the Blues the same day and life at Krasno-Armeesk resumed its awful, grey, unrelentingly brutal routine. Or at least I thought it did until it was pointed out to me by another pleni that I was receiving double rations in the canteen. People always noticed things like that. At first none of my comrades seemed to mind, as everyone was now aware that I had uncovered an informer and saved twenty-five of us from a show trial in Stalingrad. But memories are short, especially in a Soviet labour camp, and as winter arrived and my preferment continued – not just more food, but warmer clothes too – I began to encounter some resentment among the other German prisoners. It was Ivan Yefremovich Pospelov who explained what was happening:
'I've seen this before,' he said. 'And I'm afraid it will end badly unless you can do something about it. The Blues have picked you out for the Astoria treatment. Like the hotel? Better food, better clothes and, in case you hadn't noticed, less work.'
'I'm working,' I said. 'Like anyone else.'
'You think so? When was the last time a Blue shouted at you to hurry up? Or called you a German pig?'
'Now you come to mention it, they have been rather more polite of late.'
'Eventually the other plenis will forget what you did for them and remember only that you are preferred by the Blues. And they'll conclude that there's more to it than meets the eye. That you're giving the Blues something else, in return.'
'But that's nonsense.'
'I know it. You know it. But do they know it? In six months from now you'll be an anti-fascist agent in their eyes, whether you are or not. That's what the Russians are gambling on. That as you are shunned by your own people you have no choice but to come over to them. Even if that doesn't happen, one day you'll have an accident. A bank will give way for no apparent reason and you'll be buried alive. But your rescue will come too late. And if you are rescued then you'll have no choice but to take Gebhardt's place. That is if you want to stay alive. You're one of them, my friend. A Blue. You just don't know it yet.'
I knew Pospelov was right. Pospelov knew everything about life at KA He ought to have done. He'd been there since Stalin's Great Purge. As the music teacher to the family of a senior Soviet politician arrested and executed in 1937, Pospelov had received a twenty-year sentence – a simple case of guilt by association. But for good measure the NKVD – as the MVD was then called – had broken his hands with a hammer to make sure that he could never again play the piano.
'What can I do?' I asked.
'For sure you can't beat them.'
'You can't mean that I should join them, surely?'
Pospelov shrugged. 'It's odd where a crooked path will sometimes take you. Besides, most of them are just us with blue shoulder boards.'
'No, I can't.'
'Then you will have to watch out for yourself, with all three eyes, and by the way, don't ever yawn.'
'There must be something I can do, Ivan Yefremovich. I can share some of my food, can't I? Give my warmer clothing to another man?'
"They'll simply find other ways to show you favour. Or they'll try to persecute those that you help. You must really have impressed that MVD major, Gunther.' He sighed and looked up at the grey-white sky and sniffed the air. 'Any day now it will snow. The work will be tougher then. If you're going to do anything it would be best to do it before the snow when days and tempers are shorter and the Blues hate us more for keeping them outside. In a way, they're prisoners just like we are. You've got to remember that.'
'You'd see the good in a pack of wolves, Pospelov.'
'Perhaps. However, your example is a useful one, my friend. If you wish to stop the wolves from licking your hand, you will have to bite one of them.'
Pospelov's advice was hardly welcome. Assaulting one of the guards was a serious offence – almost too serious to contemplate – and yet I didn't doubt what he had told me: if the Ivans kept on giving me special treatment I was going to meet with a fatal accident at the hands of my comrades. Many of these were ruthless Nazis and loathsome to me, but they were still my fellow countrymen and, faced with the choice of keeping faith with them or joining the Bolsheviks to save my own skin, I quickly formed the conclusion that I'd already stayed alive for longer than I might otherwise have expected and that maybe I had no choice at all. I hated the Bolsheviks as much as I hated the Nazis; under the circumstances, perhaps more than I hated the Nazis. The MVD was just the Gestapo with three Cyrillic letters, and I'd had enough of everything to do with the whole apparatus of state security to last me a lifetime.
Clear in my mind what I had to do and, in full view of almost every pleni in the half-excavated canal, I walked up to Sergeant Degermenkoy and stood right in front of him. I took the cigarette from the mouth in his astonished-looking face and puffed it happily for a moment. I discovered I didn't have the guts to hit him but managed to find it in me to knock the blue-banded cap off his ugly tree stump of a head.
It was the first and only time I heard laughter at KA And it was the last thing I heard for a while. I was waving to the other plenis when something hit me hard on the side of head – perhaps the stock of Degermenkoy's sub-machine gun – and probably more than once. My legs gave way and the hard, cold ground seemed to swallow me up as if I'd been water from the Volga. The black earth enveloped me, filling my nostrils, mouth and ears, and then collapsed altogether, and I fell into the dreadful place that the Great Stalin and the rest of his murderous Red gang had prepared for me in their socialist republic. And as I fell into that endless deep pit they stood and waved at me with gloved hands from the top of Lenin's mausoleum while all around me there were people applauding my disappearance, laughing at their own good fortune, and throwing flowers after me.
I suppose I should have been used to it. After all, I was accustomed to visiting prisons. As a cop I'd been in and out of the cement to interview suspects and take statements from others. From time to time I'd even found myself on the wrong side of the Judas hole: once in 1934, when I'd irritated the Potsdam police chief; and again, in 1936, when Heydrich had sent me into Dachau as an undercover agent, to gain the trust of a small-time criminal. Dachau had been bad, but not as bad as Krasno-Armeesk, and certainly not as bad as the place I was in now. It wasn't that the place was dirty or anything; the food was good; they even let me have a shower and some cigarettes. So what was it that bothered me? I suppose it was the fact that I was on my own for the first time since leaving Berlin in 1944. I'd been sharing quarters with one or more Germans for almost two years and now, all of a sudden, there was only myself to talk to.
The guards said nothing. I spoke to them in Russian and they ignored me. The sense of being separated from my comrades, of being cut off, began to grow and, with each day that passed, became a little worse. At the same time I had an awful feeling of being walled in – again, this was probably a corollary of having spent so much of the last six months outside. Just as the sheer size of Russia had once left me feeling overwhelmed, it was the very smallness of my windowless cell – three paces long and half as wide – that began to weigh on me. Each minute of my day seemed to last for ever. Had I really lived for as long as I had with so little to show for it in the way of thoughts and memories? With all that I had done I might reasonably have expected to have occupied myself for hours with a remembrance of things past. Not a bit of it. It was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. My past seemed wholly insignificant, almost invisible. As for the future, the days that lay ahead of me seemed as vast and empty as the steppes themselves. But the worst feeling of all was when I thought of my wife; just thinking of her at our little apartment in Berlin, supposing it was still standing, could reduce me to tears. Probably she thought I was dead. I might as well have been dead. I was buried in a tomb. And all that remained was to die.
I managed to mark the passing time on the porcelain tile walls with my own excrement. And in this way I noted the passing of four months. Meanwhile I put on some weight. I even got my smoker's cough back. Monotony dulled my thinking. I lay on the plank bed with its sackcloth mattress and stared at the caged light bulb above the door wondering how long they gave you for knocking a Blue's hat off. Given the immensity of Pospelov's crime and punishment, I came to the conclusion that I might expect anything between six months and twenty-five years. I tried to find in me something of his fortitude and optimism, but it was no good: I couldn't help but recall something else he said. A joke he made once, only with each passing day, it felt less and less like a joke and more like a prediction.
'The first ten years are always the hardest,' he said.
I was haunted by that remark.
Most of the time I hung on to the certainty that before I was sentenced there would have to be a trial. Pospelov said there was always a trial, of sorts. But when the trial came it was over before I knew it.
They came and took me when I least expected it. One minute I was eating my breakfast, the next I was in a large room being fingerprinted and photographed by a little bearded man with a big box range-finder camera. On top of the polished wooden box was a little spirit level – a bubble of air in a yellow liquid that resembled the photographer's watery, dead eyes. I asked him several questions in my best, most subservient Russian, but the only words he used were 'Turn to the side' and 'Stand still please'. The please was nice.
After that I expected to be taken back to my cell. Instead I was steered up a flight of stairs and into a small tribunal room. There was a Soviet flag, a window, a large hero wall featuring the terrible trio of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and, up on a stage, a table behind which were sitting three MVD officers, none of whom I recognised. The senior officer, who was seated in the middle of this troika, asked me if I required a translator, a question that was translated by a translator – another MVD officer. I said I didn't but the translator stayed anyway and translated, badly, everything that was said to or about me from then on. Including the indictment against me, which was read out by the prosecutor, a reasonable-looking woman who was also an MVD officer. She was the first woman I'd seen since the march out of Konigsberg and I could hardly keep my eyes off her.
'Bernhard Gunther,' she said, in a tremulous voice – was she nervous? Was this her first case? 'You are charged-'
'Wait a minute,' I said, in Russian. 'Don't I get a lawyer to defend me?'
'Can you afford to pay for one?' asked the chairman.
'I had some money when I left the camp at Krasno-Armeesk,' I said. 'While I was being brought here it disappeared.'
'Are you suggesting it was stolen?'
'Yes.'
The three judges conferred for a moment. Then the chairman said, 'You should have said this before. I'm afraid these proceedings may not be delayed while your allegations are investigated. We shall proceed. Comrade Lieutenant?'
The prosecutor continued to read out the charge: 'That you wilfully and with malice aforethought assaulted a guard from Voinapleni camp number three, at Krasno-Armeesk, contrary to martial law; that you stole a cigarette from the same guard at camp number three, which is also against martial law; and that you committed these actions with the intent of fomenting a mutiny among the other prisoners at camp three, also contrary to martial law. These are all crimes against Comrade Stalin and the peoples of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.'
I knew I was in trouble now. If I hadn't realised it before I realised it now: knocking a man's hat off was one thing; mutiny was something else. Mutiny wasn't the kind of charge to be dismissed lightly.
'Do you have anything you wish to say in your defence?' said the chairman.
I waited politely for the translator to finish and made my defence. I admitted the assault and the theft of the cigarette. Then, almost as an afterthought I added, 'There was certainly no intention of fomenting a mutiny, sir.'
The chairman nodded, wrote something on a piece of paper – probably a reminder to buy some cigarettes and vodka on his way home that night – and looked expectantly at the prosecutor.
In most circumstances I like a woman in uniform. The trouble was this one didn't seem to like me. We'd never met before and yet she seemed to know everything about me: the very wicked thought processes that had motivated me to cause the mutiny; my devotion to the cause of Adolf Hitler and Nazism; the pleasure I had taken in the perfidious attack upon the Soviet Union in June 1941; my important part in the collective guilt of all Germans in the murders of millions of innocent Russians; and, not happy with this, that I'd intended to incite the other plenis at camp three to murder many more.
The only surprise was that the court withdrew for several minutes to reach a verdict and, more important, have a cigarette. Smoke was still trailing from the nostrils of one member of the tribunal as they came back into the room.
The prosecutor stood up. The translator stood up. I stood up. The verdict was announced. I was a fascist pig, a German bastard, a capitalist swine, a Nazi criminal; and I was also guilty as charged.
'In accordance with the demands of the prosecutor and in view of your previous record, you are sentenced to death.'
I shook my head, certain the prosecutor had made no such demands – perhaps she had forgotten – nor had my previous record been so much as mentioned. Unless you counted the invasion of the Soviet Union, and that much was true.
'Death?' I shrugged. 'I suppose I can count myself lucky I don't play the piano.'
Oddly the translator had stopped translating what I was saying. He was waiting for the chairman to finish speaking.
'You are fortunate that this is a country founded on mercy and a respect for human rights,' he was saying. 'After the Great Patriotic War, in which so many innocent Soviet citizens died, it was the wish of Comrade Stalin that the death penalty should be abolished in our country. Consequently, the capital punishment handed down to you is commuted to twenty-five years' hard labour.'
Stunned at my declared fate, I was led out of the court to a yard outside where a Black Maria was waiting for me, its engine running. The driver already had my details, which seemed to indicate that the court's verdict had been a foregone conclusion. The Black Maria was divided into four little cells, each of them so cramped and low you had to bend over double just to get inside one. The metal door was perforated with little holes like the mouthpiece of a telephone. They were considerate like that, the Ivans. We set off at speed – you might have thought the driver was in charge of a getaway car after a bank robbery – and when we stopped, we stopped very suddenly, as if the police had forced us to stop. I heard more prisoners being loaded into the Black Maria and then we were off, again at high speed, with the driver laughing loudly as we skidded around one corner and then another. Finally we stopped, the engine was switched off, the doors were flung open and all was made plain. We were beside a train that was already under steam and making strong exhalated hints that it was impatient to leave, but to where, no one said. Everyone in the Black Maria was ordered to climb aboard a cattle car alongside several other Germans whose faces looked as grim as I was feeling. Twenty-five years! If I lived that long it was going to be 1970 before I went home again! The door of the cattle car slid shut with a bang, leaving, us all in partial darkness; the bogies shifted a little, throwing us all into each other's arms, and then the train set off.
'Any idea where we're going?' said a voice.
'Does it matter?' said someone. 'Hell's the same whichever fiery pit you're in.'
'This place is too cold to be Hell,' said another.
I peered through an air hole in the wall of the cattle car. It was impossible to see where the sun was. The sky was a blank sheet of grey that was soon black with night and salted with snow. At the other end of the wagon a man was crying. The sound was tearing us all apart.
'Someone say something to that fellow, for God's sake,' I muttered loudly.
'Like what?' said the man next to me.
'I dunno, but I'd rather not listen to that sound unless I have to.'
'Hey, Fritz,' said a voice. 'Stop that crying, will you? You're spoiling the party for some fellow at the other end of the carriage. This is supposed to be a picnic, see? Not a funeral cortege.'
'That's what you think.' This accent was unmistakably Berlin. 'Take a look out of this air hole. You can see the Kirchhof Cemetery.'
I moved toward the Berliner and got talking to him, and soon afterwards we discovered that everyone in the wagon had been tried in the same court on some trumped-up charge, found guilty and sentenced to a long term of hard labour. I seemed to be about the only man who had committed a real offence.
The Berliner's name was Walter Bingel, and before the war he'd been a park keeper in the gardens of the Sanssouci Palace, in Potsdam.
'I was at a camp next to the Zaritsa Gorge, near Rostov,' he explained. 'I was sad to leave, as a matter of fact. The potatoes I planted were about ready to pull up. But I managed to bring some seeds with me, so maybe we won't go hungry, at wherever it is we're going.'
There was much speculation about where this might be. One man said we were going to a coal-mining camp at Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle. Then another mentioned the name of Sakhalin, and that silenced everyone, including myself.
'What's Sakhalin?' asked Bingel.
'It's a camp in the easternmost part of Russia,' I said.
'A death camp,' said someone else. "They sent a lot of SS there after Stalingrad. Sakhalin means "black" in one of those subhuman languages they use out there. I met a man who claimed he'd been there. An Ivan prisoner.'
'No one really knows if it exists or not,' I added.
'Oh, it exists all right. Full of Nips, it is. The place is so far east it's not even attached to the fucking mainland. They don't even bother with a barbed-wire fence at Sakhalin. Why would they? There's nowhere else to go.'
The train rolled on for almost three whole days, and there was relief when finally they broke the ice on the locks and the door of the wagon opened because the faces of the guards who greeted us were vaguely European and not oriental, which seemed to indicate that we'd been spared Sakhalin. Not all of us had been spared, however. As men jumped down from the wagon it was clear that one man had managed to hang himself from a wooden peg. It was the man who had been crying.
Several hundred of us lined up beside the track awaiting our new orders. Wherever we were now was cold, but not nearly as cold as Stalingrad; perhaps it was the weather, but a new rumour – that we were home – quickly murmured its way through the ranks like a Hindu's mantra.
'This is Germany! We're home.'
Unlike most of the rumours to which we German plenis were often prey, there was some truth in this one, for it seemed that we were just across the border in what many of my more rabidly Nazi comrades probably still thought of as the German Protectorate of Bohemia, otherwise known as Czechoslovakia.
And excitement mounted as we marched into Saxony.
'They're going to let us go! Why else would they have brought us all the way from Russia?'
Why else indeed? But it wasn't long before our hopes of an early release were dashed.
We marched into a little mining town called Johannesgeorgenstadt and then out the other side, up a hill with a fine view of the local Lutheran church and several tall chimneys, and through the gates of an old Nazi concentration camp – one of almost a hundred sub-camps in the Flossenburg complex. Most of us imagined that all Germany's KZs had been closed, so it was a bit of a shock to discover one still open and ready for business. A greater shock awaited us, however. There were almost two hundred German plenis already living and working at the Johannesgeorgenstadt KZ and, even by the poor standards of Soviet prisoner welfare, none of these looked well. The SGO, SS General Klause, soon explained why.
'I'm sorry to see you here, men,' he said. 'I wish I could have been welcoming you back to Germany with pleasure but I'm afraid I can't. If any of you are familiar with the Erzgebirge mountains you will know that the area is rich with pitchblende, from which uranium ore is extracted. Uranium is radioactive and has a number of uses but there's only one use for it that the Ivans are interested in. Uranium in large quantities is vital for the Soviet atom-bomb project and it's no exaggeration to say that they perceive the development of such a weapon as a matter of the highest priority. And certainly a much higher priority than your health.
'We're uncertain what effect prolonged exposure to unrefined pitchblende has on the human body, but you can bet it's not good for two reasons. One is that Marie Curie who discovered the stuff died from its effect; and the other is that the Blues come down the mineshaft only when they have to. And even then only for short periods and wearing face masks. So, if you're down the pit try to cover your nose and mouth with a handkerchief.
'On the positive side, the food here is good and plentiful and brutality is kept to a minimum. There are good washing facilities – after all this was a German camp before it was a Russian one – and we're allowed a day off once a week; but only because they have to check the lifting gear and the gas levels. Radon gas, I'm told. Colourless, odourless, and that's about all I know about it except I'm sure it's also hazardous. Sorry that's another negative. And since we're back on the side of the debits I may as well mention now that in this camp, the MVD employs a number of Germans as recruiting officers for some new People's Police they're planning to create in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. A secret police designed to be a German arm of the MVD. The establishment of such a police force in Germany is banned by the rules of the Allied Control Commission, but that doesn't mean they're not going to do it under the table, by subterfuge. But they can't do it at all if they don't have the men to do it, so be careful what you say and do, for they will most certainly interrogate and interview you at length. D'you hear? I want no renegades under my command. These Germans the Ivans have working for them are communists, veteran communists from the old KPD. What we were fighting against. The ugly face of European Bolshevism. If there were some among you who doubted the truth of our National Socialist cause I imagine you have learned that it was you who were mistaken, not the leader. Remember what I've said and watch yourself.'
I was one of the lucky ones in that I wasn't ordered down the pit immediately. Instead I was put on the sorting detail. Wagonloads of rock were brought up from the mine and emptied onto a large conveyor belt that was running between two lines of plenis. Someone showed me how to inspect the pieces of brownish-black rock for veins of the all-important pitchblende. Rocks without veins were thrown away, the others graded by eye and tossed into bins for further selection by a Blue holding a metal tube with a mica window at one end: the better the quality of the ore the more electric current that was reproduced as white noise by the tube. These higher-quality rocks were taken away for processing in Russia, but the quantities considered useful were small. It seemed that tonnes of rock would be needed to produce just a small quantity of ore and none of the men working at the Johannesgeorgenstadt mine were of the opinion that the Ivans would be building an atom bomb any time soon.
I'd been there almost a month when I was told to report to the mine office. This was housed in a grey stone building next to the pithead winding gear. I went up to the first floor and waited. Through the open door of the office I could see a couple of MVD officers. I could also hear what they said, and I realised that these were two of the Germans General Klause had warned us about.
Seeing me standing there they waved me inside and closed the door. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was eleven a.m. There was a microphone on the table and, I imagined, somewhere a large tape machine ready to record my every word. Next to the microphone was a spotlight but it wasn't switched on. Not yet. There was an undrawn black curtain beside the window. They invited me to sit down on a chair in front of the desk.
'The last time I did this I got twenty-five years hard labour,' I said. 'So, if you'll forgive me, I really don't have anything to say.'
'If you wish,' said one of the officers, 'you may appeal the verdict. Did the court tell you that?'
'No. What the court did tell me was that the Soviets are every bit as stupid and brutal as the Nazis.'
'It's interesting you say that.'
I didn't reply.
'It seems to support an impression we have of you, Captain Gunther. That you're not a Nazi.'
Meanwhile the other officer had picked up a telephone and was saying something in Russian, that I could not hear.
'I'm Major Weltz,' said the first officer. He looked at the man now replacing the telephone receiver. 'And this is Lieutenant Rascher.'
I grunted.
'Like you, I am also from Berlin,' said Weltz. 'As a matter of fact I was there just last weekend. I'm afraid you'd hardly recognise it. Incredible the destruction that was inflicted by Hitler's refusal to surrender.' He pushed a packet of cigarettes across the table. 'Please. Help yourself to a cigarette. I'm afraid they're Russian but they're better than nothing.'
I took one.
'Here,' he said, coming around the desk and snapping open a lighter. 'Let me light that for you.'
He sat down on the edge of the table and watched me smoke. Then the door opened and a starshina came in, carrying a sheet of paper. He laid it on the table next to the cigarettes and left again without saying a word.
Weltz glanced at the sheet of paper for a moment and then turned it to face me.
'Your appeal form,' he said.
My eyes flicked across the Cyrillic letters.
'Would you like me to translate it?'
'That won't be necessary. I can read and speak Russian.'
'Very well, too, by all accounts.' He handed me a fountain pen and waited for me to sign the sheet of paper. 'Is there a problem?'
'What's the point?' I said, dully
'There's every point. The government of the Soviet Union has its forms and formalities like every other country. Nothing happens without a piece of paper. It was the same in Germany, was it not? An official form for everything.'
Again I hesitated.
'You want to go home, don't you? To Berlin? Well, you can't go home unless you've been released and you can't be released unless you appeal your sentence first. Really, it's as simple as that. Oh, I'm not promising anything, but this form puts the process into motion. Think of it like that pithead winding gear outside. That piece of paper makes the wheel start to move.'
I read the form forwards and then backwards: sometimes, things in the Soviet Union and its zones of occupation made more sense if you read them backwards.
I signed it, and Major Weltz drew the form towards him.
'So, at least we know that you do want to get out of here,' he said. 'To go home. Now that we've established that much all we have to do is figure out a way of making that happen. I mean sooner rather than later. To be exact, twenty-five years from now. That is if you survive what anyone here will tell you is hazardous work. Personally, I don't much care to be even this close to large deposits of uranite. Apparently they turn it into this yellow powder that glows in the dark. God only knows what it does to people.'
"Thanks, but I'm not interested.'
'We haven't told you what we're offering yet,' said Weltz. 'A job. As a policeman. I would have thought that might appeal to a man with your qualifications.'
'A man who was never a member of the Nazi Party,' said Lieutenant Rascher. 'A former member of the Social Democratic Party.'
'Did you know, Captain, that the KPD and the SDP have joined together?'
'It's a bit late,' I said. 'We could have used the support of the KPD in December 1931. During the Red Revolution.'
'That was Trotsky's fault,' said Weltz. 'Anyway. Better late than never, eh? The new party – the Socialist Unity Party, the SED – it represents a fresh start for us both to work together. For a new Germany.'
'Another new Germany?' I shrugged.
'Well, we can hardly make do with the old one. Wouldn't you agree? There's so much that we have to rebuild. Not just politics, but law and order, too. The police force. We're starting a new force. For the moment it's being called the Fifth Kommissariat, or K-5. We hope to have it up and running by the end of the year. And until then we're looking for recruits. A man such as yourself, a former Oberkommissar with Kripo, with a record for honesty and integrity, who was chased out of the force by the Nazis, is just the sort of principled man we need. I think I can probably guarantee reinstatement at your old rank, with full pension rights. A Berlin weighted allowance. Help with a new apartment. A job for your wife.'
'No thanks.'
'That's too bad,' said Lieutenant Rascher.
'Look, why don't you think it over, Captain?' said Weltz.
'Sleep on it. You see, to be perfectly honest with you, Gunther, you're at the top of our list in this camp. And, for obvious reasons, we'd rather not stay here longer than we have to. I'm already a father, but the lieutenant here has no wish to damage his chances of having a son if and when he marries. You see radiation does something to a man's ability to procreate. It also affects the thyroid and the body's ability to use energy and make proteins. At least, that's what I think it does.'
'The answer is still no,' I said. 'May I go now?'
The major adopted a rueful expression. 'I don't understand you,' he said. 'How is it that you, a social democrat, were prepared to go and work for Heydrich? And yet you won't work for us. Can you explain that please?'
It was now I realised who the major reminded me of. The uniform might have been different but with the white blond hair, blue eyes, high forehead and even loftier tone, I was already thinking of Heydrich before he mentioned the name. Probably Weltz and Heydrich would have been about the same age, too. If he hadn't been murdered, Heydrich would have been about forty-two now. The younger lieutenant was rather more grey- haired, with a face as wide as the major's was long. He looked like me before the war and a year in a POW camp.
'Well, Gunther? What have you to say for yourself? Perhaps you were always just a Nazi in all but name. A Party fellow traveller. Is that it? Did it take you this long to understand what you really are?'
'You and Heydrich,' I said to the major. 'You're not so very different. I never wanted to work for him either, but I was afraid to say no. Afraid of what he might do to me. You, on the other hand, have shot your bolt there. You've already done your worst. Short of shooting me there's not much more you can actually do to me. Sometimes it's a great comfort to know that you've already hit rock bottom.'
'We could break you,' said Weltz. 'We could do that.'
'I've broken a few men myself, in my time,' I said. 'But there has to be some point to it. And with me there isn't, because if you break me then you'd be doing it just for the Hell of it and what's more I'd be no good to you when you were finished. I'm no good to you now, only you just don't know it, Major. So let me tell you why. I was the kind of cop who was too dumb to act smart and look the other way, or to kiss someone's behind. The Nazis were cleverer than you. They knew that. The only reason Heydrich brought me back to Kripo was because he knew that even in a police state there are times when you need a real policeman. But you don't want a real policeman, Major Weltz, you want a clerk with a badge. You want me to read Karl Marx at bedtime and people's mail during the day. You want a man who's eager to please and looking for advancement in the Communist Party.' I shook my head wearily. 'The last time I was looking for advancement in a party a pretty girl slapped my face.'
'Pity,' said Weltz. 'It seems you're going to spend the rest of your life dead. Like all of your class, Gunther, you're a victim of history.'
'We both are, Major. Being a victim of history is what being a German is all about.'
But I was also a victim of my environment. They made sure of that. Soon after my meeting with the boys from K-5 I was transferred off the sorting detail and into the mine.
It was a world of constant thunder. There was the rumble of underground explosions that broke the rock into manageable chunks; and there was the crash of the cage doors before it slid down the guides and into the shaft. There was the din of rocks we split with pickaxes and then threw into the wagons; and the continual barrage as these moved backwards and forwards along the rails. And with each detonation there was dust and more dust, turning my snot black, and my sweat into a kind of grey oil. At night I coughed great gritty gobs of saliva and phlegm that looked like burnt fried eggs. It all felt like a high price to pay for my principles. But there was a camaraderie down the shaft that wasn't to be had anywhere else in Johannesgeorgenstadt, and an automatic respect from the other plenis who heard our coughing and recognised their own comparative good fortune. Pospelov had been right about that. There's always someone worse off than yourself. I hoped to get a chance to meet that someone before the work killed me.
There was a mirror in the washroom. Mostly we avoided it for fear that we'd see our own grandfathers, or worse, their decomposed bodies, looking back at us; but one day I inadvertently caught sight of myself and saw a man with a face like the pitchblende rock we were mining: it was brownish- black, lumpy and misshapen, with two dull opaque spaces where my eyes had once been, and a row of dark grey excrescences that might have been my teeth. I'd met a lot of criminal types in my life, but I looked like Mister Hyde's black-sheep brother. Acted like him, too. There were no Blues down the shaft and we settled our differences with a maximum of violence. Once, Schaefer, another pleni from Berlin who didn't much like cops, told me that he'd cheered when the leaders of the SDP had been chased out of Berlin in 1933. So I punched him hard in the face and when he tried to hit me with a pickaxe, I hit him with a shovel. It was a while before he got up, and in truth he was never quite the same again after that – another victim of history. Karl Marx would have approved.
But after a while I stopped caring about anything very much, including myself. I would squeeze into tight spaces in the black rock to work in solitude with my pick, which was the most dangerous thing to do, since cave-ins were common. But there was less dust to breathe this way than when they used explosives.
Another month passed. And then one day I was summoned to the office again and I went along expecting to find the same two MVD officers and hear them ask me if my time down the mineshaft had helped to change my mind about K-5. It had changed my mind about a lot of things but not German communism and its secret police force. I was going to tell them to go to Hell and, perhaps, sound like I meant it, too, even though I was ready for someone to come and put some plaster of Paris on my face. So I was a little disappointed that the two officers weren't there, the way you are when you've worked up a pretty good speech about a lot of noble things that don't add up to very much that's important when you're lying in the morgue.
There was only one officer in the room, a heavyset man with receding brown hair and a pugnacious jaw. Like his two predecessors he wore blue breeches and a brown gimnasterka tunic, but he was better decorated; as well as the veteran NKVD soldier badge and Order of the Red Banner there were other medals I didn't recognise. The insignia on his collar tabs and the stars on his sleeves seemed to indicate that he was at least a colonel, or perhaps even a general. His blue officer's cap with its squarish visor lay on the table alongside the Nagant revolver in its bucket-sized holster.
'The answer is still no,' I said, hardly caring who he was.
'Sit down,' he said. 'And don't be a bloody fool.'
He was German.
'I know I've put on a bit of weight,' he said. 'But I thought you of all people would recognise me.'
I sat down and rubbed some of the dust from my eyes. 'Now you come to mention it, you do seem kind of familiar.'
'You, I wouldn't have recognised at all. Not in a million years.'
'I know. I should lay off the chocolates. Get myself a haircut and a manicure. But I never do seem to have the time. My job keeps me pretty busy.'
The officer's pork butcher's face cracked a smile. Almost. A sense of humour. That's impressive, in this place. But if you really want to impress me then stop playing the tough guy and tell me who I am.'
'Don't you know?'
He tutted impatiently and shook his head. 'Please. I can help you if you'll let me. But I have to believe you're worth it. If you're any kind of detective you'll remember who I am.'
'Erich Mielke,' I said. 'Your name is Erich Mielke.'