Gerald Seymour - The Waiting Time

The city was listless to suffering. The kids were pitched through their front doors to find their way to school. The city was indifferent to violence. The oldest went for comfort in prayer to the Marienkirche and the Nikolaikirche and the Petrikirche. The youngest went in search of work and hope. The newest culture of the city was self and survival. The people of the city, as the grey dawn came, lived lives dictated by the past. The past lived in Rostock.

On the radio, the announcer said that another low pressure trough approached fast from the north and the west, that after a dull dry morning there would be rain showers followed by sleet showers followed by persistent snow showers.

That day, unremarkable, ushered in by a chill grey dawn, the city and the flatlands around it, and the sand dunes and the deep tossed waters of the Baltic, would again be a battlefield, and there would be few who would recognize the combat.

The radio announcer wished his listeners a happy and successful day.

He sat very still.

He had drawn back the curtain and a dreary light seeped into the room. He sat on the hard chair and he held in his hands the Waither PPK pistol. He had stripped it and cleaned the working parts with the duster that he kept with his shoe-polish tins, and reassembled it. He held the pistol tight in his hands as if the feel of it would give him strength. He had taken each of the bullets from the magazine and then he had reloaded it because it was his experience that the breech mechanism of the Walther PPK could jam if the rounds were left too long in the magazine.

He sat on the hard chair and looked down the length of her bed. He could see only the red autumn of her hair. She lay on her side and the bedclothes were close around her. Beside him was his grip bag and her rucksack, packed. It would be finished before tonight. After he had buffed his shoes, especial attention to the toe-caps, and after he had cleaned the working parts of the pistol and reassembled it, he had put the duster into the cloth sack, closed his grip bag and locked it. He had started, then, on her clothes. They had been scattered, haphazardly, on the rug and on the linoleum, and he had handled each item of her clothing with care as if it were precious. On the dressing table, neatly folded, were a sweater for her, a T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse motif, the bra she had worn the day before, the last of her clean knickers, the final pair of unused socks and the best of her jeans. He had left her wash-bag on top of her filled rucksack for when she woke, and her anorak. He had cleaned the room with his handkerchief, wiped each surface, sanitized the room. At the end of the morning, they would go, leave the room, and it would be as if they had never been there. His mattress and the pillow and blankets were already in the room next door, and the bed was made. He wore the good suit he had brought with him, a clean white shirt, the green tie and the polished black shoes. He had shaved with care so that he did not cut himself and had used a fresh blade. He had combed his hair and left an exact parting. It had seemed important to him. He sat and watched her and held the pistol. He did not understand how, at the dawn of the last day, she could sleep in such peace and calm… but he understood so little of her. He loved her, and knew nothing of her. The pistol was gripped in his hands, and the light of the last day settled on her hair.

‘Aren’t you going to shave today?’

He had come home late in the night. They had lain in the bed, separated. Sometimes, early in the morning, he went downstairs and brought her a cup of decaffeinated coffee, and sometimes a grapefruit juice, not that morning. He had dressed, he had shouted for Christina and told her it was time for her to be up. He was wearing the trousers he had used the day before, dirty and dried out from scrambling up the river’s bank, and the same shirt.

He reached up and lifted down from the top of the wardrobe the suitcase, good leather, which they had bought him for his journey to England, and dumped it on the bed. He thought it necessary that he should pack it now. He did not know when the day would be finished, or how it would finish. She kicked her legs out of the bed.

She sneered, as she left the room, ‘Are you going to take the appearance, on your last-chance day, of a refugee migrant?’

All the clothes that he packed in the suitcase were new, and the shoes. They had chosen everything that he packed, walked in the stores with him and told him what was suitable. Raub had cleared his old wardrobe and drawers, Goldstein had taken the old suits, shirts, ties and shoes to a charity shop on Doberaner Strasse. The schedule was in his mind – what he would wear when they came off the plane at Washington, what he would wear at the Pentagon and at the Agency and at the Rand Corporation. He packed the suitcase. He heard Christina’s radio playing loud, and he heard her in the bathroom. Raub had shown him, with the superior grimace, how he should pack so that his new shirts were not creased in the case. He closed it and fastened the combination lock.

He took the Makharov pistol from the drawer beside the bed, put the spare magazine in his coat pocket, checked the safety, and armed the weapon so that the first bullet was in the breech. He carried his case down the stairs. He remembered, when he was in the hallway putting the case down by the street door, that he had not picked up the photograph of Eva and Christina in the silver- plate frame from beside the bed, but he did not go back up the stairs for it. He went into the living room.

The lightness of the robe and the sheer silk of the nightdress lay on her legs and on her breasts and on her hips. She had the old photograph album in her hands. There was little enough in the new house of their old life, but the album with the frayed and disintegrating cover was from the past. He walked behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders. She turned the pages of the album for him as if to taunt him… Dieter Krause and the wife of Dieter Krause and Pyotr Rykov and the wife of Pyotr Rykov, in the kitchen of the commanding officer’s house on the base with bottles on the table and the used plates, glasses raised. She turned the page. At the picnic site on the south side of the Malchiner See, the men in shorts and the women in swim costumes, and he did not have his arm around Irma Rykov and she had her arm around Pyotr Rykov, and they were laughing… Another page. His fingers were hard on the bones of her shoulders… Pyotr Rykov standing behind her, close, and she held the fishing rod, he guided her cast of the lure, and they were laughing… His fingers ground at the bones of her shoulders, but she did not cry out… Pyotr Rykov in his best dress uniform with his arm around Eva Krause, and they were laughing at the man who held the camera… He held her so that he would hurt her. She looked up at him and she taunted him.

‘He was your friend.’

He loosed his fingers from her shoulders. He scraped the photograph, Pyotr Rykov with his arm around Eva Krause, from the album, tore it into small pieces and dropped them on the new carpet.

‘You boast that he was your best friend… and you betray him.’

He destroyed the photographs. He tore to tiny broken pieces the images of his wife and Pyotr Rykov as they laughed.

‘You take him on the street. You are like a pimp with a whore. You sell him.’

What he had done was for her. Krause laid the album with the empty pages back on her lap. From the first day he had always told himself, he had gone to Cologne for her, and made his statement. He went to the wooden cabinet beside the television set for which he had the only key. He took the video-cassette, knelt and slotted it into the recorder. He switched on the recorder and the television. He would say to himself, and he would believe the lie, that everything he had done was for her.