Gerald Seymour - The Waiting Time

He came off her, out of her. She lay with her wet warmth on him.

‘Thank you, Knautschke, for giving me happiness, thank you little hippopotamus for coming out of the mud.’

She giggled, ‘Daft bugger.’

She broke his hold. Her thigh was across his waist and her heel massaged between his legs. She leaned across him, her breasts hung fluttering on his chest.

‘What’s afterwards, Josh, for us? Not the crap you told me. What’s afterwards, Josh, for you and me?’

She lay on him, snuggled on him. The clock on the Marienkirche chimed midnight, big bells. He wanted, desperate for it, the warmth of her to last.

‘There is an afterwards, for us, for you and for me?’

‘It’s what I’m saying.’

He lay on his back on the mattress and he held her tight against him and his fingers played patterns on the small of her back, and her fingers made tangles with the hairs of his chest. To be his own man was to protect himself. He wanted to trust in the afterwards, to believe that it was not a fraud. He had seen it so many times before in the camps in Germany and the camps in the UK, men under stress and women under stress coupling together for strength and deluding themselves that there was an afterwards when the stress time had passed. He had seen the hurt that was left, two people broken, because the stress time was gone and there was no reality of afterwards. She had told him that before he went on the last bad one, the last bad mission, she had loved the boy to give him strength.

‘Is it enough, Tracy, after what we’ve shared, to make an afterwards?’

She kissed him. ‘It is for me, yes.’

He jerked, pushed himself up on his elbows.

She had offered him the prize, the trophy to be won.

He leaned against the cold damp of the wall and he took her face in his hands. He held her cheeks, gripped them, and against his hands was the smoothed narrowness of her neck.

‘I can’t talk about it.’

‘Afterwards is babies, Josh.’

‘I shouldn’t talk about it, because it isn’t finished.’

‘And puppies, Josh, little black bastards, peeing… And a place that’s our own, babies and puppies and fields…’

‘If I don’t have a plan then we lose.’

‘And no people, just a home and babies and puppies and fields…’

‘I love you, Tracy. I’m so thankful to you. I want it, your afterwards, I want to be with you for it. Can you understand? I’m so frightened. I don’t have a plan, I can’t think… I don’t delude myself, Tracy. If we don’t win tomorrow, there is no afterwards. Loving you, loving me, and I didn’t think it possible that I would find happiness again, find what you’ve given me, but it doesn’t count tomorrow. Have to think, can’t, have to have a plan…’

She slipped off him. The warmth was gone.

Her bed creaked, took her weight.

He tried to think, tried to make the plan. He could not find it and ebbed towards sleep.

‘Did she win?’

‘She won.’

‘You were proud of her?’

‘I was.’

‘Would she be proud of you, Hauptman?’

Gunther Peters oiled his smile. Only the two of them that night in the little annexe corner of the cafe. Peters let his hand, long thin fingers, rest on the fist of Dieter Krause, and asked his questions with a familiarity, as if the old ranking of Hauptman and Feidwebel was no longer of importance, as if they were equals. Peters’ fingers held tight on Krause’s fist.

He hesitated, uncertain. ‘I don’t know.’

‘A man is privileged when his daughter is proud of what he does.’

‘That is shit.’

‘I have had several days to think, Hauptman.’ Peters rolled the word on his tongue. He mocked. ‘Over the last several days I have thought of the future…’

‘Tomorrow it is finished, tomorrow is the end of the future.’

‘Tomorrow I go home, Hauptman? Tomorrow, after it is finished, I go home and you pretend I never came? You go to America, you are the big-shot man, you are free to fuck with your new friends, and I go home and you forget me? You don’t believe that, Hauptman, you cannot believe that.’

Krause tried to break the hold of the fingers on his fist. ‘We came together in common purpose and you go when the matter of common purpose is finished.’

‘I come at a price, Hauptman.’

Krause gazed into the eyes of the former Feidwebel. Peters had been just a face in the corridors, another junior who had snapped smartly to heel-clicking attention each time they passed, just a face sitting at a desk and the order had been shouted through the open door. They had been chosen, grabbed, commandeered, at random. He gazed into the face and the fingers relaxed on his fist.

‘What is the price?’ Krause growled.

‘That is not gracious, Hauptman, that is not generous.’

‘Tell me what is the price.’

‘I come from Leipzig. I leave my affairs, I cancel a business opportunity. I stay, I don’t run, I stand with you.’

‘What is your price?’

‘You give me orders and I obey them. You involve me, I do not complain… and then you wish to forget me, as you would drop the wrapping of a cigarette packet.’

‘What is the goddamn price?’

‘I can do as Hoffmann did, as Siehl and Fischer did. I can walk away. I was only a simple Feidwebel, I was carrying out the orders of my superior officer. That is the usual defence, yes? It does not suit me but it is an option. I can go to my car, I can be on the road, I can reach Leipzig by the morning, if a price is not paid.’

‘Tell me the price.’ Sweat beaded on the forehead of Dieter Krause

‘You have new friends?’

‘I have.’

‘Your new friends have influence?’

‘They have influence.’

‘They value you?’

‘What is the fucking price?’

‘Do you want to be alone tomorrow, Hauptman, when the trawler boat comes in? Can you do it yourself, Hauptman, remove the problem? You want to go to America with the problem behind you?’

‘Name the price.’

He talked softly, silky smoothly. ‘You have new friends with influence who value you. They would protect you. You are the ideal partner for me.’

‘Partner in what?’

‘I put cars out of the country, I put munitions into the country. I move money into Germany and out of Germany, and your new friends, if you were my partner, would protect me.’

‘That is criminal activity.’

‘What is it you do now?’ He laughed quietly. His laughter was without noise, without mirth. ‘Without me beside you tomorrow you fail. If you fail you go to the Moabit gaol. That is the price.’

He was trapped. He squirmed. The rat eyes faced him, and the thin fingers were held out to him. He would be, in the Moabit gaol, with the scum and the filth and the addicts and the foreign pimps. He thought he plunged over a cliff and fell, and fell.

Krause took the hand that was offered to him.

There had been no car to meet him at Moscow Military Headquarters.

He had rung the drivers’ pool office at Defence, and he had won no sense out of an idiot: the idiot did not know why he was not met at Moscow Military. He had telephoned his driver’s home and the call had rung out unanswered.

Pyotr Rykov had hitched a lift into the city. A drunk sergeant, veering over the roads, losing himself, had taken him near to his home.

He had walked on the street past the surveillance car, and each of the three men in the car, smoking behind the misted windows, had looked at him without expression.

Pyotr Rykov banged the door shut after him, and woke Irma. She said, sleepy in her bed, that the telephone did not work and would he have it fixed in the morning.

He stood by the window with the darkness of the living room behind him. His driver, his old friend who should have been at Moscow Military, had told him that he should be careful. He had said, his reply defiant, that the minister was the guarantee of his security.