Dahlem
Berlin
December 1990
The little boy at the gate was blowing into his hands, trying to capture the warm vapour in a tight ball of fingers and thumbs. Even in his best coat and hat and scarf he was beginning to shiver. Grandfather’s friend was late. The street was white with a hard frost and the old man opposite was scraping the ice from the windscreen of his Mercedes. The boy glanced over his shoulder to the house. His grandfather was at the study window, his head turning up and down the street. And a few seconds later, with a broad smile, he began gesturing frantically to the boy’s right. An elderly but tall and upright man in a long black coat was walking carefully along the icy pavement towards him. Tears of frustration and disappointment welled inside the little boy and he ran towards the house. The door was already open and Herr Hans-Gunther Gretschel was standing on the steps, leaning heavily on an ebony stick.
‘Come here, Karl. Wait with me.’
But the little boy slipped past his grandfather’s outstretched arm and disappeared inside the house. It was an imposing villa with a yellow and cream facade and sweeping red-tile roof, set back a little from the road in a mature garden. The little boy’s great-great-grandfather had built it when Dahlem was just a village.
‘Herr Lindsay. So very good to see you,’ and Gretschel dropped a step to offer his hand in greeting. ‘And looking so well.’
In the years since the war Gretschel had perfected the English he had begun to learn as a prisoner.
‘My grandson Karl was watching for you. I’m afraid he’s a little upset you surprised him.’
‘Are you well, Herr Gretschel?’
‘Old and tired and fat.’
And it was true he had put on a great deal of weight since Lindsay had last seen him a few years before. His black flannel trousers looked as if they were under enormous strain. Arthritis had left him much less mobile: ‘My wife says I am turning into a large grey ball.’
He led Lindsay through the hall into the drawing room where Frau Gretschel had left a tray of coffee and cakes. Karl was sitting on the couch in his coat, his cheeks stained with tears. It was a light and modern room quite out of keeping with the imperial character of the facade. The house had been reduced to a shell in the battle for Berlin. Lindsay had visited it for the first time just a fortnight after the city had fallen, drunken Soviet troops roaming the streets, and he had found Gretschel’s elderly parents and sister living in the cellar.
‘Have you seen this?’ Gretschel held out a framed photo to Lindsay. ‘It’s me with your Prime Minister. What a wonderful lady. I admire her so much.’
‘And did you tell her you were the first officer of a U-boat that sank twenty British ships?’
‘Of course not,’ said Gretschel impatiently. ‘It was a happy occasion. The Berlin Chamber of Commerce. Poor Lange was there too.’ He put the photograph back on the shelf alongside a large collection of family pictures.
‘Lange’s daughters have made all the arrangements for today.’
They had moved in different social circles but they had always kept in touch. Lange had worked in the city’s information bureau until a newspaper article forced him to retire. A young hack anxious to make his name wrote a story with the headline, ‘Nazi PK Man Briefing the Press’. Gretschel had used his business contacts to find him another job in public relations.
‘May I smoke?’
‘Karl, please fetch our guest an ashtray. Shouldn’t you give up at your age?’
Lindsay’s wife was still badgering him to stop. After the Navy he had become a journalist and many of his colleagues on Fleet Street were unrepentant smokers too. Now in his seventies he was too old and too impatient to try. He woke each morning with a hacking cough, he was wrinkled and grey and a little short-sighted but a source of wonder to his friends — or so they said — and the doctors considered him fit for his age.
‘I saw Admiral Mohr last month.’ Gretschel reached across to hand Lindsay a cup of coffee.
‘Oh?’
‘A reunion of the old comrades in Kiel. Fewer and fewer of us now. There were veterans from HMS White there as our guests. The Admiral made a generous speech. He’s in good health and sends his regards.’ He paused for a moment, then: ‘I did sense he was a little troubled. Did you read the profile of him in Spiegel?’
‘No,’ Lindsay lied.
‘It suggested he gave vital intelligence to the British during the war. No one believes it.’
‘No.’
They did not speak for a moment but sipped their coffee, the silence broken only by the tinkle of the china cups and by Karl who was crunching a biscuit and showering crumbs on his coat and the couch.
‘Do you think of the war, Herr Lindsay?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I’ve begun to think of it again. I tell Karl stories of our boat. His mother does not like me talking of those times but… I’ve told him a little about the camp too.’ He chuckled and leant forward as if to share a confidence: ‘He knows you did something very secret. He thinks you’re James Bond.’
Lindsay smiled and looked across at the little boy: ‘Does he know we were enemies?’
Gretschel put down his cup and folded his arms slowly over his stomach in a way that suggested he had something of substance to impart: ‘I’ve tried to explain to Karl that sometimes those who appear to be enemies become friends and our friends become our enemies. War is a confusing business. And the battles we fight are often with ourselves — in here,’ and he tapped his head with his forefinger. ‘Of course he doesn’t understand. It was only at the camp in Canada that I began to understand it myself. Perhaps I didn’t dare to before. It was the business with Lange, the night he almost died, that made me wonder what I should render to Caesar. My conscience. Do you understand?’
Lindsay nodded quietly. Gretschel looked at him for a moment, then frowned: ‘You know, it was hard for Lange. Some of the veterans refused to speak to him because he helped the British. And the most ridiculous thing; the young — his own daughters — accused him of being a Nazi propagandist. Can you believe it? After all he went through.’
He glanced at his watch: ‘But we should be going. And your wife will meet us there?’
It was a short drive in Herr Gretschel’s large silver car. Karl came too. A bleak red-brick church and the nave less than a quarter full, the pine coffin before the altar covered with white chrysanthemums. Lindsay found Mary on her knees in prayer and settled into the seat beside her.
‘You’ve got ash on your coat,’ she said as she rose to sit beside him. ‘His daughters are there,’ and she nodded towards two short, very well-built women to the right of the aisle. Two large men were sitting behind with children. The organ was rumbling through some gentle counterpoint.
‘Dr Henderson,’ Gretschel had leant forward from the chair behind to shake Mary’s hand. ‘You look well if I may say so.’
‘You may, Herr Gretschel. You may.’
And she did look well, Lindsay thought, very well, straight-backed and trim and her face still youthful, her green eyes as light and bright as that first day in the Citadel.
The tinkle of a handbell and the priest and his two servers stepped up to the altar. A young priest almost lost in his heavy funeral vestments, his head bent slightly in reverence, his voice soft, a little soapy. And he began with a few words about the dead man. Helmut Lange was a loyal and much loved member of this church who had fought a courageous battle against cancer until it took him from us, missed by family, missed by friends. Funeral words, trite, anonymous words and Lindsay’s thoughts drifted to another place, smoky, half lit, and Lange’s eyes shining, his fingers drumming on the table to the rhythm of the band.
He leant across to whisper to Mary: ‘Do you think he made it to New York?’
She turned slowly to look at him and she was smiling but there were tears in her eyes: ‘You’re thinking of the evening at Hatchett’s. You know, he was a much better dancer than you.’
‘But not as good a lover.’ She pushed his shoulder in rebuke then looked away to hide her smile. In a way it was Lange who had brought them together as lovers again in those weeks after the attempt on his life in the camp. Lindsay remembered it as a sort of healing, scars inside and out — poor Lange carried the marks on his neck always but as a reminder of distant pain.
‘Stand up for this bit,’ and Mary pulled him to his feet.
A short time later and the first snow of winter was swirling lightly through the forest cemetery as they gathered beside the grave. It had been dug between tall pine trees and their roots scratched and rattled the coffin as it was lowered slowly into the hard ground.
Mary squeezed Lindsay’s arm tightly and he reached round her shoulders to hold her closer, her coat flecked with drops of melting snow. Only fifteen people had made the journey from the church to the cemetery. Most of them were Lange’s family, his daughters calm and their husbands indifferent, but there was also a young man shivering in a dark suit, with large brown eyes and long, rather greasy hair. A student, perhaps, without the means for a decent coat. Lindsay had not noticed him in the church but he seemed to be the most affected of those at the graveside. And there was something in his manner, his thin face and dark looks, that rang a distant bell.
The coffin slipped from the pall-bearers’ straps with a clunk and the priest stepped forward with his aspersorium to sprinkle it with holy water. And then he invited them to throw earth into the grave. Lindsay bent to pick up a frozen nugget from the mound for Mary, something to rattle the lid.
‘Make sure he knows we’re here,’ he whispered.
She smiled and squeezed his hand.
As the family began to make its way back to the cars Lindsay stepped up to the grave again and stood staring into the trench, his thoughts full of those few months fifty years before. He was dying for a cigarette. Lange would forgive him but the priest was still talking to the funeral director close by and there was something in his manner and voice, a righteous fervour, that reminded him of the men he used to meet in the interrogation room at Trent Park. Break expectation. As he slipped his hand into his coat pocket for a cigarette, someone touched his elbow.
‘Herr Lindsay.’
It was the young man with the greasy brown hair.
‘Yes?’
‘Herr Lange told me you would be here.’
‘Did he?’
‘My name’s Franz Lehmann,’ and he offered his bony hand. ‘I’m here on behalf of my family.’
‘Oh?’
‘My mother’s a little unwell and couldn’t make the journey.’
One of the cemetery men cleared his throat impatiently and gave them a ‘talk somewhere else’ glance. Three of them were standing ready with their spades. Fifteen minutes of mourning, get the job done, on to the next, order, efficiency, death by timetable.
‘Can we walk a little way?’ Lehmann asked. ‘Just to the chapel.’
Gretschel was hobbling slowly towards the cemetery gates with Mary at his side, their heads bent close in conversation.
‘All right, Herr Lehmann.’
The chapel was a short walk in the opposite direction, half hidden by trees, simple, wooden, windowless, like a pagan longhouse. Beneath the open porch at the west end there was a bench and Lehmann dropped on to his knee to wipe it dry with the sleeve of his jacket. Lindsay sat down and reached for his silver cigarette case: ‘Do you smoke?’
Lehmann pulled a face.
‘So, Herr Lehmann,’ and he bent to light his cigarette. ‘What do you want?’
‘Herr Lange was like a grandfather to me. He helped my father when he was too ill to work, helped me through school and paid for me to come to university here. He was a friend to the family. Excuse me.’
He stopped to blow his nose on a grubby handkerchief. Lindsay looked away until he was calm enough to continue. It was a friendship of more than forty years, that had begun at the end of the war when Lange had found Lehmann’s grandmother and her two children in a hostel for the homeless in Hamburg. Her husband had been killed in the British blitz of the city, her elder son lost on a U-boat, no money, no friends, no hope, two children to feed and care for, one of them Lehmann’s mother.
‘It was a small miracle. He spent weeks searching for my grandmother. He said he owed it to an old comrade, a friend from the U-boat service, my uncle.’
‘Your uncle?’
‘He served on one of the most successful U-boats of the war.’ Lehmann’s voice rang with a pride that would have been a cause of comment in his student hall.
‘The 112?’
‘Yes. Did you know…’
‘Yes. I did know him.’
‘Uncle August. He was only nineteen.’
Yes, they had the same eyes. He could see the little engineer rocking on the chair on the other side of the table, his eyes large and frightened and close to tears. Nineteen. God. So many years lost to him, a terrible waste, a terrible and pointless crime. Black and white and as sharp in his mind as it was fifty years ago, the picture of Heine dangling inches from the washroom floor. It brought a hard lump to his throat.
‘I found out recently that he took his own life in the camp,’ said Lehmann. ‘Do you remember him? Herr Lange said you would.’
‘I didn’t know him well.’
‘No one seems to know why he killed himself. I asked his commander, Admiral Mohr — he spoke of combat fatigue. He said my uncle’s death hit all the survivors of the 112 very badly.’
‘Yes. It was sad and senseless.’
And he thought of Gretschel tapping his finger against his temple. He was right, of course. Every hour, every day, guilt, fear, conflicting loyalties pulling first one way and then the other. Millions of small battles. Fought long after the parades and the bunting and the speeches. Scarred. Victor and vanquished the same. Lange, Mohr, Lindsay, he was sure they were the same. A secret history beyond the numbers and the dates and the shifting of borders. Someone had asked him to do an interview for a radio programme, just his memories of the war, but he declined. Some memories should be buried.
Lindsay leant down to extinguish his cigarette in a puddle, then got stiffly to his feet. A sharp wind was gusting powdery snow from the pines into the chapel porch where it swirled in a fine mist, dropping wet crystals on their clothes and in their hair. It felt colder — perhaps that was the memories — and the sky was a filthy Berlin grey.
‘I think we’d better go back. My wife will be waiting for me.’
They did not speak and the graveyard was silent but for the crunch of their shoes, figures in a monochrome landscape like something from a piece of forgotten archive film. Picking their way slowly between the stones, they found the main path and a few minutes later reached Lange’s grave. The cemetery workers were beating the hard ground between the pines flat with their spades, the rhythm like the ticking of a lazy clock. When it was level they loaded their tools into a handcart and left without a word, rattling down the gravel path to the gate. And Lindsay stood alone at the foot of the grave. He stood there until the raw earth was lost beneath the snow.