Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  With no preliminaries, there in the classroom, after the other students had gone, she suggested they go back to his place (not hers because of the neighbours). Himmelfahrt acquiesced. He told John in the Teachers’ Room he couldn’t make it for dinner and got a knowing, twinkling look in response. Himmelfahrt tried to look like a bit of a lad, at least until he got out of the room.

  He started to feel sick even as she drove him back to Ossweil in her red Saab. Upstairs in his room she undressed quickly, before he could stop her and tell her he wanted to undress her himself. She got into his bed and snuggled under the covers, shivering. Then she realised something was wrong.

  ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Look, do you have a girlfriend?’

  Himmelfahrt looked down at her pixie face with its shock of short, blonde hair and mumbled something about being free at the moment, though of course in the past …

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Do you have a girl who you regularly go to bed with?’ she snapped.

  Himmelfahrt nodded no, then said ‘I’m sorry,’ very quietly.

  Petra shook her blonde hair impatiently, threw the covers off and turned her back on him as she got dressed again. He looked away. When she was dressed, she left the room without a word. He heard her car roar as it pulled away.

  He went into the bathroom and retched, but he wasn’t sick, as he had been after the same thing had happened with the Swedish girl in Brighton. And the others.

  As Petra Weiss drove off at top speed from the Biedermeiers’ house, she passed a tall, bulky man pacing slowly in the street. His name was Siegfried Gruber. He was watching the house, waiting for Mark Hill to come out.

  *

  The intercepted radio transmission from Mark Hill had caused quite a stir at BND headquarters in Pullach. It had reached General Gerhard Wessel, head of West German Intelligence, in hours. Wessel asked if they had been told there was a British agent in Ludwigsburg. Answer: there was no information about such an agent.

  Was there a Mark Hill registered at the Aliens Office as staying in Ludwigsburg? There was not. The only recently registered Englishman was called Marcus Himmelfahrt. But there was a Mark Hill working at a language school, unregistered. It was thought he was the same person.

  OK, so the British hadn’t told them about their agent — nothing new there. They would have to find out about him for themselves. (No point asking the British, they would just deny everything, as usual.) Wessel had delegated Alfred Neumann, head of Home Division IV, to find someone they could spare to follow agent Hill-Himmelfahrt and keep an eye on him.

  Neumann sighed. You don’t waste your best people following (supposedly) friendly agents. In any case, he had six men signed off sick with various ailments, some of them known only in Germany: he had one man off with a heavy cold, one with circulatory disturbance, one inflamed pancreas, one inflamed liver, one shaken brain and one had come up with a disease new even to Neumann — swollen circulation.

  On top of that three more were at Convalescence and a further two at Post-Convalescence. Yet another one, Herr Neumann noticed with irritation, was at Post-Post-Convalescence. It was the first time he had heard of that one. If the process was allowed to continue, Neumann thought sourly, successive periods of convalescence would be ended only by death, and no doubt they would get themselves written off work for that, too. So it would have to be Gruber.

  Siegfried Gruber was one of those men who attracted a tag — something that was always mentioned whenever his name came up. With Gruber the tag was, ‘He can take a punch.’ The files in front of Herr Neumann, in his poky office in Heilmannstrasse, did not reveal where and when Gruber had attracted this rather two-edged sobriquet: Presumably, the agent had had to be hit quite a few times before the reputation was established.

  Anyway, Gruber had never followed anybody before and had not been trained for it. He was on the strength as a heavy, and lately his duties had included bringing in the lignite briquettes the service was currently burning, instead of proper coal, to save money. But needs must … Herr Neumann snapped the file shut and sent for Gruber.

  *

  Gruber had been outside the Biedermeiers’ house all day. He had read his copy of Bild from cover to cover, standing on the pavement opposite the house, and only the report of Bayern München’s game against Werder Bremen had really caught his interest. To Gruber’s delight, his home team had beaten the northerners 2-1 (Bayern scorers Hoeness and Gerd Muller).

  That Uli Hoeness, thought Gruber, admiringly. He’ll go far, that one. He glanced at the upper storey of the Biedermeiers’ house for the umpteenth time. How could you follow somebody, Gruber thought sadly, if they don’t move?

  *

  Himmelfahrt was too ill to move. All that retching after Petra Weiss had gone had made him feel like death warmed up. Next morning, Frau Biedermeier had phoned Frau Stikuta to say Herr Hill was in bed and not coming in to work. Himmelfahrt was going to take only one day off, though. Frau Stikuta came to visit you if you took more, John and Naomi had warned him about that. And he didn’t fancy having Sticky as a sick-visitor. As ever, he was bored restless with his own company. There wasn’t even the towel for consolation. He didn’t feel up to it and he always stopped for a while after … after one of these disasters.

  This was the fifth time; twice with prostitutes in Soho, then with Carol, a law student from St Hughes College in Oxford. The Swedish girl in Brighton had wanted to help him; she wanted him to talk about it. She was sweet, intelligent, pretty. She had even asked him if he was Jewish. Why had he run away from her, there on the Downs? Run away and been sick. It was the biggest mistake of his life.

  Frau Biedermeier lumbered in with a cup of steaming camomile tea. She stayed there, beaming kindly, while he drank it. Himmelfahrt thought the yellow herbal brew was the most revolting thing he had ever put in his mouth. For one nightmare, paranoid moment he thought Frau Biedermeier had found his wanking towel, boiled it and was feeding him the result, to punish him.

  *

  Late in the evening, after her lessons, Naomi came round sick-visiting. She had missed Himmelfahrt. She was fighting not to acknowledge to herself how much she was looking forward to seeing him. He was like electricity, lighting her up, warming her inside, making her glow. She was battling to deny this, because if she admitted it, it was as good as admitting her marriage had failed. And she wasn’t quite ready to do that. Almost ready, but not quite.

  The Biedermeiers had gone round to Frau B’s parents, so Himmelfahrt let her in in his pyjamas — he hadn’t brought a dressing gown.

  ‘Hello,’ said Naomi cheerily as she followed him back up the stairs. ‘Are you really ill? John thinks you’ve just got a hangover.’

  ‘Hangover? Moi? I can take me drink, Naomi. I just can’t take me food. It was a bilious attack. I’ve got a weak stomach.’

  He went back to bed.

  ‘Oh well, I’ve done the right thing, then. I brought you some grapes. Excuse the cliché. Do you like grapes?’

  ‘I adore grapes. Pop them on the bed. Thanks for coming. I was bored out of my skull.’

  Naomi laid the grapes on the bed and took her pink mac off. She sat down in the hard red bucket chair that only John had ever sat in before, the day after Himmelfahrt first arrived in Ludwigsburg. His colleague was wearing a pillar box red short-sleeved pullover, a shortish, full black skirt and black boots.

  ‘So how’s the school?’ began Himmelfahrt, munching grapes. ‘You struggling on without me? Who’s doing my lessons?’

  He really cared, he registered to his own surprise, he missed the place after being away for just one day.

  Naomi launched into an account of the reshuffling his absence had caused. From there they got onto Ludwigsburg in ‘the old days’ — the late 1960s when Naomi had lived there and he and John hadn’t. Naomi was a born storyteller. As soon as she saw he was really interested, and not too ill, she launched into her stories a
bout the Foreigners Club. This institution, sadly defunct by 1971, had been set up with money from the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft who provided a lawyer called Dr Gaber to run club evenings every Tuesday and Friday.

  The Club was in Schillerplatz; the statue of sad Friedrich Schiller looked across at foreigners having a good time in a little room above a whore plying her trade to feed her child. It was nothing special, unless you were there, or could imagine being there. There was table tennis. There was a bar with cheap beer which made a profit for the Club when one of the non-drinking Muslims was in charge of it and a loss when anybody else was. There was a (rare) chance to watch TV; the foreigners learned German and had a laugh with German TV programmes in black and white.

  There was a chance to meet Germans who wanted to meet foreigners, or wanted to get off with Finnish girls, whatever … There were cheap tickets for the Palace Gardens and the open-air swimming pool at Schlösslesfeld. There were organized quiz evenings which failed and spontaneous Christmas parties where people were so happy they remembered them for the rest of their lives.

  Just one story Naomi told was against Ludwigsburg, and Himmelfahrt was shocked and hurt by it; it made him realise how much he had come to love the place in such a short time. Naomi casually mentioned that Café Lἂrchen had once had a ‘No Foreigners’ sign up on the door. They let Naomi in but not two Arabs from the Foreigners Club who came in to meet the group at the café. Naomi and two Germans who helped run the Foreigners Club (Gerhard and Walter) protested and eventually the Arabs were let in and the sign taken down. Naomi assured an indignant Himmelfahrt that there were no signs like that now.

  Himmelfahrt talked about himself a bit, too. All the glamorous stuff. The stories from the time he had hitchhiked across America. One or two second-hand tales from life at Oxford — which impressed Naomi, as they were intended to.

  Naomi tried to go a couple of times, but Himmelfahrt told her how much she was cheering him up and begged her to stay a bit longer. He pressed her own grapes (no pun intended, as he said himself) on her until eventually she had a few. His joie de vivre was returning. The blood was running in his veins again. He had bounced back from the other episodes pretty quickly and he knew he would this time. Then he would wipe it from his mind, yet again, pretend it hadn’t happened. Go back to denying to himself that anything was wrong.

  It was nearly midnight by the time Naomi left to walk home to Schlösslesfeld. She lived in Schumannstiasse, not far from where Frau Biedermeier’s parents lived. Siegfried Gruber watched her leave from the shadows. Fortunately, he had no private life, very little inner life and did not need much sleep.

  26

  There were several features of Hermann Schaffner’s house that were entirely outside Himmelfahrt’s previous experience. Hermann lived in a three-storey, patrician town-house in Rosenstrasse, one of the quiet tree-lined side-roads near the palace. But he had had the house gutted and the shell re-designed by Merkul, the hot-shot interior design firm from Munich.

  The entire space under the house was a vast cellar which was games room (pool, table-tennis), party room, bar area and wine cellar all in one. Most of the old lounge on the first floor was a 10 metre indoor swimming pool, skirted by a carpeted area with easy chairs round it, where drinks were served.

  The second storey was dominated by a split-level white lounge with a white carpet, white leather armchairs and a dining area with an oak dining table. The themed rooms, like the Chinese Room and the Louis XIV room, were also on this floor.

  The third storey was bedrooms only. All the bedrooms had en-suite bathrooms, ceiling mirrors and turn locks on the inside of the doors, including Hermann’s 30 metre long master bedroom. This, the spiritual centre of Hermann Schaffner’s universe, also had a two-way mirror, film facilities and a specially commissioned fresco of Leda and the Swan by Harald Fischer, the art teacher at the Kerner Gymnasium.

  The party, the latest of Hermann Schaffner’s Dionysian gatherings, saw 125 people mingling and plunging — plunging into the pool, plunging into the food and drink, plunging into each other.

  Champagne (French, Russian Krim and the local Esslingen variety) and chilled white wine (Mundel Riesling, Hermann’s favourite), along with hot and cold devilled snacks from silver trays, was served by turquoise-liveried waiters and waitresses from a Munich catering company.

  Himmelfahrt had ignored the snacks but was very drunk on the wine. He took another glass as a waitress shimmied past him in the lounge area. Even drunk, Himmelfahrt had not neglected his duties as Margarethe Heer’s protector, especially the proprietorial pressing of his lips against the lovely Jeanne Moreau mouth.

  At that moment Margarethe, breathtakingly glamorous in a low-cut, sequinned sheath cocktail dress the colour of her Titian hair, came up to him, very drunk, and put her hand on his shoulder. She said Johannes was in the final of a chess tournament. Her husband had triumphed against a brilliant challenger, young Hans-Peter Fauser, in the semifinal, when everybody thought Fauser would win. She was pleased for him. Himmelfahrt was pleased for both of them. He liked Johannes Heer — decent bloke, generous host. Then she went on a bit about her husband’s friends in the chess club, and how she was all for it, all for it. They were more like brothers, these friends, all for it.

  As she swayed slightly, lovely lips apart, she reminded Himmelfahrt of Marilyn Monroe. Himmelfahrt looked at the beauty, quizzically. Why all this about Johannes? He noticed Margarethe had a darker shade of lipstick than usual; she had just reapplied it. He made to kiss her. She ducked and quickly glided off.

  He swore at himself under his breath. That had been clumsy. Margarethe slid up to Hermann Schaffner. The host was smilingly holding court, exuding blue-jowled perfumed charm in a white tux with a turquoise cummerbund. Margarethe took his arm.

  ‘Oh hello,’ said Gisella Herrold, ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ The smile was warm and very flirty.

  Gisella Herrold was drunk — not so drunk she did not realise what a combustible state she was in, but she did not care. She had known her fiancé, the policeman Gerhard Söderle, since their schooldays. Poor Gerhard was saving for their engagement, doing all the overtime God sent, as he kept telling her. That meant she never saw him. And these days she was pleased she never saw him — because he was bloody boring.

  And another thing: she was more intelligent than him. She had known that from the beginning, but she told herself it didn’t matter. Women always had to hide their intelligence, didn’t they? Except that now she was starting to get fed up with it. She had just started to read novels in English and loved it. She could never tell Gerhard she was reading them at all, let alone discuss them with him. And another thing: all his friends were as boring as he was. His fat partner Andreas Lübke was boring. As well as being fat.

  Word had got around that her English teacher at the language school, Mark Hill, had studied at Oxford. She had also heard that half the women in his evening classes were after him. Gisella Herrold had been competitive since childhood. Success had only made her more so. At 26, she was secretary to the headmaster at the Kerner Gymnasium, young for such a responsible position.

  So when she saw Mark Hill temporarily abandoned by the best-looking woman at the party — Margarethe Heer, damn her — she determined to move in. She yearned to discuss English literature with Mark Hill, preferably in bed. And she would never have a better chance. Schaffner’s parties were notorious; people were already going up to the bedrooms, some for the second time.

  ‘Ah Mr Hill!’

  Himmelfahrt laughed. ‘So formal, Gisella. Call me Mark, please.’

  ‘Mark please.’

  Himmelfahrt laughed. She was clearly very drunk. He nervously gave her one of his politeness compliments, though he meant it. ‘You look great.’

  And so she did. She was wearing a black micro-skirt and a tight white top. Her glasses only made her look prettier. His eyes confirmed the compliment.

  ‘Do you want to dance?’ she said.

  Th
ey were staring at each other.

  Himmelfahrt cleared his throat nervously. ‘My dancing’s lousy.’ She looked puzzled. ‘I dance very badly.’

  ‘Then tell me about The Mayor of Casterbridge.’

  Gisella Herrold had just finished the novel and considered it brilliant. If Mr Mark Hill could tell her something intelligent about it, as you would expect from an Oxford student, Gisella Herrold decided she would take him upstairs to bed and dump Gerhard Söderle. In fact, she thought drunkenly, she was so keen on this plan that the standard of information required was plummeting by the second.

  Mr Hill looked good with his slender body encased in tight blue trousers and a flower-patterned shirt, half-unbuttoned. By the time the Englishman opened his mouth to reply, she would have slept with him if he could correctly name the author.

  Himmelfahrt hesitated. Around them, couples were smooching to the Walker Brothers, more couples, in various combinations of gender, were making out on the plush sofas. And she wants to know about Hardy? At an orgy? Thomas Hardy?

  Himmelfahrt looked round for Margarethe. He feared she had gone off with Hermann. And he feared that Hermann’s plans for her would do her no good at all. But he couldn’t see her. And meanwhile, English literature beckoned.

  ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge,’ repeated Gisella Herrold, pointing her small but shapely, elegantly separated breasts at him. ‘The author is …’

  Gisella Herrold swayed, about to take his hand and haul him upstairs, even if he had said The Mayor of Casterbridge was by Dickens. To hell with an entry test (so to speak). She was so sick of her bloody fiancé, bloody policeman bloody Gerhard …

  ‘Yes, I know who the author is,’ Himmelfahrt said. ‘OK, OK. One thing that isn’t in the books: Hardy trained as an architect. When you read Casterbridge, notice how often he uses an unusual visual angle on whoever is speaking. For example, people are seen through window frames. It’s so visual, it’s like a film script in places.’