Sidney Chambers and The Dangers of Temptation

by James Runcie

  There were no witnesses, and the first motorist who had stopped confirmed that Günter was already dead when she found him in a ditch. Even though she was a nurse, there was nothing she could do. She thought he had turned over and gone into a tree. Rolf Müller was very sorry. Günter had been one of his closest friends.

  Maria Jansen turned on him. ‘Why could you not look after my husband or save him from his drunkenness?’

  Rolf replied, in as kindly a manner as he could, that Günter was not a man who could be told what to do.

  ‘Where was he found?’ Hildegard asked.

  ‘Just outside Binz. There is a blackspot. So many times this happens.’

  ‘He said the road was straight.’

  ‘There is a turn across the railway line; first right and then left on to the main road into town. We think he misjudged it in the darkness, lost control on the bend and went into a skid.’

  ‘What time do you think it was?’ Sidney asked.

  Rolf Müller was surprised by the question. ‘I sent them home at three in the morning. Günter wanted to stay longer but we had all had enough.’

  ‘And it was still dark?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sidney persisted. ‘He told me that he would come home when it was light.’

  ‘He changed his mind.’

  ‘Was he very drunk?’

  ‘He was good at hiding it. Because he is, he was, so convivial, people could never tell.’

  ‘There was no rain last night, the roads were dry,’ Sidney continued. ‘And he knew that road so well. It’s very unfortunate.’

  ‘It certainly is,’ Müller snapped in German.

  Sibilla Leber turned to her son-in-law. ‘You are being too nosy.’ Again, she used the word neugierig.

  Hildegard put her hand on her husband’s arm and apologised on his behalf. ‘Sidney is upset when people die, needlessly, in pain and alone.’

  ‘As a priest he must be used to it.’

  ‘Every death is different,’ said Sidney. ‘And each one matters.’

  Hildegard told Anna to play quietly in their room. She was going to have to support Maria when she broke the news to Jürgen but, at that moment, she was more concerned about her husband. ‘It could have been you, Sidney. You could have been riding with him. I cannot bear to think how he died.’

  ‘Pray for him.’

  ‘I am anxious about you. I am sorry that I have not been kind.’

  ‘Nonsense. You have behaved perfectly to all of us. This is your home.’

  ‘Coming back makes me nervous. I can admit that now.’

  ‘And now we have more important things to think about.’

  ‘One accident and everything is changed.’

  ‘I think someone must have hit him,’ said Sidney. ‘Even when drunk Günter knew the road too well to just veer off like that.’

  ‘If that was the case then why didn’t the driver stop?’ Hildegard asked.

  ‘He should have done. He must have felt the impact on his car.’

  ‘You are assuming it was a man? A woman found him. A nurse.’

  ‘Whoever it was, I suppose they will not have wanted to stop and spend any time with the authorities. If they had been drunk as well, then they would be charged. It’s just odd that it happened on such a straight road.’

  Hildegard began to weep.

  Husband and wife were silent for a while, holding each other and taking the news in when they heard Jürgen cry out. He was shouting that it couldn’t be true, his father was a brilliant driver; he had promised his son that he was going to live for ever. He screamed at Maria: ‘Someone has taken Father. I will find out who it was and I will kill him. I will kill. I will kill. I will kill.’ The boy banged his head against the door until it bled.

  Anna started talking to the moon again.

  ‘Mr Moon, what makes you so bright?’

  ‘I have a light inside me.’

  ‘Do you ever go out?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  She began to whirl herself round and round in circles. ‘I go round and round and round and round and round for ever and ever and ever and ever until everyone goes dizzy and falls down dead.’

  And she fell to the floor.

  Sidney and Hildegard attended Sunday morning service at the local Protestant church with Maria and Lena Jansen. Sibilla Leber had already been to the early service and stayed behind to look after Jürgen and Anna. The church was an austere late-nineteenth-century red-brick building resting on a hillock of woodland on the road to Putbus. The choir sang Bach’s Cantata for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity: ‘Behold and see if there be any sorrow like my sorrow’. Lena and Hildegard wept. Günter’s widow stared blankly ahead. She was so pale, so still.

  Sidney prayed for the dead man’s soul, hoping his prayers would reach God in a country so hostile to belief. He wondered what price the priest had had to pay for accepting the notion that an alternative socialist heaven was being built on earth. What compromises did he have to make? Would it mean a double life? Was that the same kind of existence that Günter had led, pretending to be one thing while being another? As he contemplated the communion service he remembered Hildegard’s observation about their host’s hypocrisy: he preaches water but drinks wine.

  Günter must have had enemies. But this was not the way to think, Sidney chastened himself; not now, in church, in a foreign land where no one wanted him to raise the questions he was burning to ask.

  The music continued to tell the story of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. It was a tale of sorrow, sin and zealotry, exploring the tension between God’s anger and Christ’s mercy, and built up to a deluge of destruction and despair. The text, taken from the Book of Lamentations, spoke of punishment, judgement and storms of vengeance before a final sorrowful chorale asked that sinners should not be allowed to get away with their wrongdoing. It was a grim message for a Sunday morning, with a quietly prayerful ending, and the family returned home in an even more sombre mood than when they had left.

  On reaching the sea front they found that Jürgen’s grief had manifested itself in the strangest of ways. He was sitting on the roof of the Villa Friede, refusing either to speak or come down.

  Sibilla Leber was in despair. She had been so busy looking after the children she hadn’t even started on the lunch. ‘There is nothing we can do or say. I don’t even know how he got up there. I can’t see any ladder.’

  Anna explained what had happened. ‘He keeps talking about a sparrow in a nest. I think he wants to be a bird.’

  ‘I will speak to him,’ said Maria. ‘Go inside, everyone. I think we need to be alone.’

  It took her almost an hour. After she had persuaded her son to descend, Jürgen went to his bedroom, slammed the door and refused to come out. His mother left him some food on a plate. The family only saw him the next morning when he sat out at the front of the house with a tape recorder, listening to the same section of tape again and again, leaning forward with an earphone in his right ear. Play. Stop. Rewind.

  Sidney asked the boy what he had recorded and what he was listening to.

  Jürgen did not answer but concentrated on his tape. Perhaps he was listening to his father’s voice. Play. Stop. Rewind.

  * * *

  Maria told Hildegard that she was almost relieved her husband was dead. Now she didn’t have to worry what might happen to them all. The worst had happened now. People might even leave them alone.

  ‘Don’t say such things,’ Hildegard counselled, tacitly pointing out that the kitchen was likely to be bugged.

  ‘I can’t help it. I speak my thoughts. I can be less afraid.’

  ‘You have always dreaded such a time?’

  ‘I expected it would happen one day.’

  Hildegard tried to comfort her. Maria had known love and it would come back to her. She would remember the best of her marriage, the happy times.

  ‘I am not sure I have ever known happiness. Günter took pity on me. Tha
t is all.’

  ‘I think it must have been more than that.’

  ‘His father insisted on our marriage. You had already married, Hildegard. My parents said it was a good idea. They thought I was the only suitable woman left for him.’

  ‘And you didn’t love him?’

  ‘I knew he still loved you; but I accepted him. I would be looked after. Everyone told me that. Even him.’

  ‘You have good friends,’ Hildegard reminded. ‘Otto Pietsch, Karl Fischer . . .’

  ‘Oh, friends. Yes, of course. They are supposed to bring comfort. Perhaps they will. Karl is always kind to me, it is true. He came this afternoon. That is one thing that will be easier, I suppose. His visits. Günter was always jealous, so suspicious. And there was no cause for him to be so. Karl and I are friends; that is all. He is someone I hope I can trust and in this country that is not always so easy.’

  * * *

  That evening, while walking on the beach where no one could overhear or record their conversation, Hildegard and Sidney discussed the accident once more. ‘I was wondering . . .’ Sidney began tentatively.

  ‘Go on . . .’

  ‘My father once had a motorbike with a sidecar, a second-hand Norton with a Swallow two-seater. I think he paid a hundred and seventy-five pounds for it. He let me have a go and it was heavy to handle, I can tell you . . .’

  ‘I know what you are saying . . .’

  ‘Quite hard to turn that lot over.’

  ‘Günter could have fallen asleep . . .’

  ‘Unlikely on a bend and with the breeze in his face.’

  ‘We don’t know he had that. In fact we don’t know anything.’

  ‘I just don’t think we’re getting the full story, Hildegard.’

  ‘In this country that is normal.’

  They both knew that the dead man’s participation in the revolutionary socialist movement had garnered him enough medals to prove that he must have been a member of the Stasi. But surely he was not important enough for this to be some state-sanctioned murder? He was only der Hecht im Karpfenteich: a big fish in a small and fairly irrelevant pond.

  They would have discussed Günter’s death further but they saw Karl Fischer approach. He was wearing dungarees and was carrying his electrician’s toolbox, telling them that he was on his way to help out a friend. He was reluctant to be dragged into a meeting but once he had been spotted there was no escape. Hildegard offered her condolences, saying she knew that Günter and he had been friends for a long time.

  ‘We were at school together. We both did well.’

  ‘Your fathers must have been very proud of you as you grew up,’ said Sidney.

  ‘We were proof of their beliefs; examples of good parenting, ensuring the health and happiness of the working class.’

  ‘Was it hard to live up to their expectations?’ Sidney asked.

  Karl Fischer put down his toolbox. He could see that this was going to last longer than he had hoped but he didn’t want to appear rude. ‘Hans Leber was the great orator. Werner Jansen, Günter’s father, was more of a politician, like his son. He could play the game. The politicians liked him. When the party leaders came to Rügen they asked for Jansen’s advice.’

  ‘About what?’

  Karl hesitated for a moment, uncertain where the conversation was leading and when he could move on. ‘They wanted to know how to make the island open and accessible to everyone; how to give the workers better holidays. Less private ownership. More state control. The Jansens saw to that. It wasn’t so hard.’

  ‘Some people found it more difficult,’ Hildegard observed. ‘I heard Otto was upset about the way in which everyone failed to support his father when he ran into all that trouble. I’m sure he must have talked to you about it, even at the festival.’

  ‘They lost their property. You know that. But Otto’s father was greedy. He didn’t reveal how much he had when they asked him for details. And so he was punished. Günter and his family couldn’t defend him without endangering their own security. Neither could we, I am afraid.’

  ‘Did your father ever see Thomas Pietsch in prison?’ Sidney asked.

  ‘Visits were not encouraged. Only his family went. But we all attended the funeral in the spring. It was a sad time. Now there’s another. We must look after each other in our grief.’

  ‘And you help Maria Jansen?’

  ‘I try to be a good neighbour. That is all.’ He stopped, hoping that his answer would be sufficient, but Sidney said nothing, forcing Karl to continue. ‘I don’t think Maria has ever been happy.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Hildegard asked.

  ‘You know the answer. Why do you make me say it? She knew her husband loved you.’

  ‘That was so long ago.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. She never had any confidence. I once told her that she would look lovely if, instead of having her hair swept back so tightly, she had a fringe. It would be pretty. She told me that she was too angry to be pretty. Günter was a bully like his father. I hope Jürgen will not be the same when he finds a woman to love.’

  ‘Has Maria ever sought your help?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  What Sidney really wanted to say was this: ‘Did Maria Jansen ask you to murder her husband?’ But he could hardly do that now; even out on an open beach with no one close enough to overhear the conversation. Instead Hildegard explained that everyone was so upset about what had happened that they had started to come up with all sorts of theories. They were all highly improbable, she said. It was just that no one could quite accept that Günter Jansen, a larger-than-life jovial figure, had simply driven off the road.

  ‘You suspect something else? Something deliberate?’ Karl Fischer picked up his toolbox. ‘I believe that Günter was drunk. It was an accident. These things happen. Fate takes its course. If you think it is something else then you should talk to Otto. His father was the one who suffered at the hands of Günter’s family. I have to leave you now.’

  Hildegard agreed with Sidney that Günter Jansen’s recent attempt to acquire a property that had once been the Pietsch family home could be seen as a provocative act.

  ‘We should see the widow, Sidney. I am sure Hanna Pietsch could tell us things.’

  ‘Would we need an excuse to go?’

  ‘My mother is already planning a visit. We just have to find a way of joining her. If her son has only recently found out how culpable the Jansen family were in putting his father in prison all those years ago, then he might have been angry enough to do something about it.’

  ‘And all the men were together that night. It could have been any one of them, I suppose.’

  ‘Karl has a soft spot for Maria, Otto may want revenge for his father’s imprisonment, Rolf is owed money. They also know each other well enough to create a conspiracy of silence. But Hanna Pietsch may tell us more. I’ll have a word with my mother.’

  Sibilla Leber was immediately suspicious about the visit; why did Sidney have to come too?

  Hildegard described her husband’s pastoral gifts and his interest in seeing all walks of life. The fact that Hanna Pietsch lived in social housing was a side of Germany that tourists never normally saw. A visit would, she said, be an exemplary demonstration of the care given by the communist party to the poorest members of society.

  The Pietsch home was salutary proof of how far the family had fallen. Having owned a beautiful twelve-bedroomed Bäderstil villa in the 1950s, mother and son now lived in a concrete block of flats next to a fish-processing plant and a patch of industrial wasteland; reduced to two bedrooms with a tiny lounge and bathroom. Communal washing hung from a shared green, but the large discharge pipes from the factory that snaked around the building compromised any chance of clean air. Sidney thought it would have been hard to live with any pride in such a place.

  Hanna Pietsch expressed her sorrow for Günter’s death, especially after such a happy night.

  ‘It was not so happy at the end,’ S
ibilla Leber observed. ‘But fate punishes those who think they can defy it.’

  ‘I know they all drank too much,’ said Hanna. ‘My son could hardly walk when he came through the door. He slept for most of the next day.’

  ‘Is he here now?’

  ‘Otto has gone away for a few days. I am not sure where.’

  ‘What time did he get home that night?’ Hildegard asked.

  ‘It was already light. I think it must have been almost five o’clock. I heard him come in. He made such a noise.’

  ‘And he had been with Günter the whole time?’

  ‘Karl too. And Rolf. They are good friends.’

  ‘And do you know if they all left Rolf’s house together?’

  ‘So many questions,’ Sibilla Leber muttered.

  Hanna was unperturbed. ‘I imagine they did. Otto often drives them all home. But his car was outside when I went to bed. I checked because I thought he was home already but he was not. Then I was glad he had not taken it. I do not like it if he drinks too much. I think Karl must have been driving them. They never tell me. He has a car too. He can afford a better model. He knows how to work the system.’

  ‘And Otto does not?’ Sidney asked.

  ‘He did not have such a fortunate start in life. It was hard for him to find work. The authorities thought we were decadent and so we had to look even poorer than we were. It was difficult to do this at first and then, in time, it became easier and easier. We became very poor. Otto still drives his father’s car. It is old, like me, and it keeps breaking down, also like me. It makes him so cross.’

  ‘Is he often angry?’

  ‘With his father for dying; and with me for living.’

  Hanna Pietsch explained how they had stayed in the same flat for over fifteen years. It was not how they had once lived, but she could not complain and she did not want to draw attention to herself with the authorities, believing that the limitations on her freedom were mitigated by the fact that the state would always look after her.

  Sidney was impressed by her forgiving attitude, considering what had happened in the past, and he said so.

  ‘You know about that?’ Hanna asked.