Gerald Seymour - The Contract

Trousers slipping, elasticated pants stretching, fingers grasping, mouths meeting hot and wet and seeking each other. And the rain falling in a steady drip on the boy's back and him unaware, and she too uncaring that the water rivers ran on her face and savaged the hair that she had carefully combed that morning. No need for preparation, no vantage from ritual courtship. Her hands drifting beneath the cover of his trousers, and the boy arching and desperate and she wriggling her bottom upwards that he might draw her clothes down, that she should bare herself to him. Ulf panting. Jutte moaning, a sweet and soft treacle sound and the call for her boy. Ulf s trousers at his knees, and his face wrapped in the moment of annoyance as he must lose her and reach for his back pocket. Always when he was on leave from Weferlingen and he would see Jutte he went first to the chemist or the machine in the lavatory at Schoneweide railway station. And always at that time she helped him, he passing it to her, and she tearing the packet open. And always then the fast road to the glory and the escape and the fierce freedom. Rising and falling, the raw wind cutting against their nakedness, wrapped in arms, encircled in legs, till the shriek of pleasure burst in them and the strength failed and eventually crawled away. Hard together they lay, a long time, exposed only to each other, bewildered by the beauty.

'Sweet boy.'

Darling Jutte, darling lovely Jutte.'

'So good.'

'Better than good.'

'Better than the best.' The girl's fingers reached to his neck, held his head close to her shoulder, wound the thin strands from his cropped hair between her nails under which had caught the earth from the forest carpet. 'You are a good son of the Fatherland, Ulf… always you get better, always your production is higher…' She giggled.

'Piss on the Fatherland.' The snarl exorcised the gentleness from his mouth.

'Piss on the Fatherland?' Jutte dreaming, eyes closed in safety. 'Piss on it? Even little Ulf, hero of output in the DDR, protector of its frontier

… even he cannot drown it.'

' Does not even know how to fight it.'

Jutte opened her eyes, pushed his head back so that she could look into his face and the clean bones beneath his skin, and the downy blond hair on his upper lip, and his clean and even-set teeth. 'Does not know how to fight it? Ulf does not know how to fight the Fatherland?'

He rolled from her and hastened to pull up his underclothes and trousers. She made no move to follow and lay quite still on the two crumpled blouses.

'Ulf is a soldier, he should know how to fight the Fatherland… if that is his wish.'

'It is easy to talk of it.'

'Some boys were talking at the Humboldt…'

Ulf creased his lips, a swift spasm of rage. He hated, detested it when she spoke of life at the University in Berlin. Jutte the second year student of Mechanical Engineering. Ulf the second year border guard of the National Volks Armee. She the daughter of the Director of an industrial Kombinat. He the son of a lorry driver. Jutte the product of the Party elite. Ulf the product of the Party faithful.

'What did they say at the Humboldt?'

She grinned up at him, careless and happy in her power. 'They said there was only one way to fight them.'

'What way was that?' Hoarseness crawled into Ulf s voice.

'To run away from them…' Her laugh tinkled close to him. 'That they hate. That is why they have so many of you pretty boys on the border.

The ones who run from them are the ones who fight them.'

He shrugged, uncertain. 'It is impossible.'

'Some do it,' she whispered. 'We see it on the television that comes over from the West. Two families and they made a balloon, they did it.

The man with the glider, the man who swam with the air tanks, the man who pushed the boat with his wife and daughter across the Elbe There was a nervousness now about the boy, and he bridled. 'You have not seen it.'

'It has been done so it must be possible.'

'If you saw it for yourself then you would not say that. There are automatic guns, there are mines, the wire is more than three metres high, there are dogs… vicious horrible things. If you had seen the frontier you would not say that it is possible.'

He pulled her upright, then bent to pick up her brassiere and to shake the pine needles from her blouse. She stood with her trousers at her ankles.

'Why do they go there, those who come to the frontier and face the gun that you hold?'

'We should get back, or we will be missed.'

'The boy who said piss on the Fatherland, that boy is afraid that the FDJ nursemaid will miss him?'

He knelt at her feet. A ridiculous posture, and his nose brushed against her upper legs and he kissed her and pulled at her trousers till they were at her waist. He flicked the mud from her blouse and pushed her hair back to its parting. 'What do you want of me, Jutte?'

She took his hand and they went slowly to the path. 'I want you to know that my father is going this afternoon to Dresden, some dreary meeting early tomorrow, and my mother is going with him. I want you in their bed at home when these children's games are finished.'

' I have to get the train at midnight.'

'Piss on the Fatherland, the boy said. Silly boy, you'll get your train.'

He put his arm around her waist, squeezed her. The girl pressed her hips close to his as they went back towards the chalets. They would be in time for lunch. Lunch would be Stew, that was usual for the Sunday meal at the Schwielowsee camp.

It had been a low, wearing day for Johnny. Marking time, treading water, waiting.

He had walked the grounds, mapped the geography of the small wood, and the orchard and the thick-grassed tennis court, and the lawns and the outbuildings, once stables. The place smacked of a lost grandeur, everything had slipped out of hand. Only the chain link fence topped with the single strand of barbed wire that ringed the boundary was new.

They'd be bound to pick a house like this, he thought, with a warren of rooms and ivy clinging to the stonework and eating through the mortar, and the paint falling from the window frames. Crumble right into the bloody undergrowth if they weren't careful. Smithson and Pierce had brought the Sunday papers back with them. In the afternoon Johnny curled in a chair in the hall and read. It was a long wait before the car came, scraping on the gravel.

Charles Mawby came thrusting through the front door. Instinctively Johnny stood up. This was the power, the head of patronage.

George, the sheepdog, herded them into the living room while Mawby settled his bag in his bedroom. Carter brought from the interrogation room and holding his notepad. But not Willi. Smithson and Pierce roused from their siesta. And Johnny who was there to be told of a mission.

They stood, eyeing the chairs, as if even those on the team were uncertain of the seating protocol. The fire was not lit, the curtains not drawn. A virile chill in the air.

Mawby came in, closed the door firmly behind him, took an armchair and waved them down. Johnny sat back a little way from the inner circle.

He was not yet a part of their plan.

'We'll have some tea later. I don't want Mrs Ferguson fussing about us just as we get going,' Mawby said. There was a slim chorus of agreement.

'You've all met each other now,' Mawby said quietly. 'You've had the opportunity to see a bit of Mr Donoghue, though from this stage on I'm going to call him Johnny.. He smiled. 'For everyone's benefit,' Mawby continued, 'we'll take the history first and then the plan. Willi Guttmann, Soviet citizen, junior diplomat, defects from Geneva. He is of little value to us, but for the accident of his birth. Willi Guttmann is the son of Doctor Otto Guttmann who is as important to this country and her allies as the boy is unimportant. Otto Guttmann heads a major and highly specialised weapon research team that is currently working on the replacement for the Red Army of the MCLOS Sagger in the ATGW range