The Linden Tree

by Hester Rowan

  ‘It’s good to see you after so many years of faceless cooperation,’ he said.

  ‘Yes – I’m glad to have the chance of thanking you for it, particularly over this latest affair.’ Nicolas drew me forward. ‘This is Kurt Braun who will be looking after you. Braun, this is the new Elisabeth.’

  I held out my hand. ‘I’m Alison –’ I began, but Braun shook his head.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘There is no need for me to know that.’ He took my hand in a firm, brief grip. ‘For me, you are Elisabeth Lorenz, the girl I came here with. You are really very much like her.’

  ‘Everything all right on your side?’ Nicolas asked.

  ‘No problems at all,’ Braun said confidently. Clearly he found it preferable to talk to Nicolas rather than to me. He was no charmer: uneasy, even a little shy with women, I guessed, a shyness that made him abrupt in manner. But his smile, when it came, was all the more pleasant.

  ‘There will be no need for you to worry,’ he told me. ‘I’ll bring you safely back to this house tomorrow. But now,’ he turned again to Nicolas, ‘I’d better rejoin my driver. As you know, we’re suspicious on our side of the Wall. I am here to see that Elisabeth doesn’t try to escape, the driver is here to make sure that I am doing nothing that has not been authorized, and now I must watch that he doesn’t make a bolt for it himself. I shall be back to collect Elisabeth in –’ he checked his watch ‘– exactly fifteen minutes.’ He looked at me sternly, but with a hint of a smile. ‘Please be sure that you are ready.’

  Nicolas pulled me out of sight behind the curtain as Braun opened the front door, and then Frau Henschel came hurrying downstairs carrying a pile of clothes.

  ‘You can change in here,’ she said breathlessly, opening a door that led to a small cloakroom. ‘I hope you will find everything that you need.’

  The room was lighted by a window of frosted glass, and the fittings were solidly old-fashioned. The water came boiling from serpentine pipes, and there was a clean towel, a fresh cake of soap, a box of tissues, a packet of hairpins and a clutch of safety-pins beside the wash-basin. Frau Henschel – or perhaps the Department of Overseas Trade – seemed to have thought of everything.

  I pulled off my sweater, stepped out of my skirt and cleaned all traces of make-up from my face. Elisabeth’s clothes consisted of the raincoat, a brown skirt and a plain cotton blouse in a disagreeable shade of yellow. The skirt came just to my knees, so it must have been very short on her. It was loose at the waist and hips, but I hitched it as securely as possible with the safety-pins.

  I scraped back my hair and twisted and pinned it into place at the nape of my neck, and then examined Elisabeth’s – now my – handbag. It contained very little: an identity card, a purse with a small quantity of East German marks and a return railway ticket to her home in Thuringia, her fake glasses, her watch, a clean handkerchief, a comb and a lipstick.

  I unscrewed the brown plastic case of the lipstick. It was new and unused – sweet of her to think of that – but the texture looked unpleasantly greasy. And I hated the colour, a trying shade of purplish red that wouldn’t suit me, or Elisabeth, or our yellow blouse in the least.

  No, there were limits. What I needed was confidence, and I couldn’t step outside feeling confident if I wore that dreadful colour, any more than if I’d been wearing the fibreglass East German underwear. I rummaged in my own handbag, found and applied my own lipstick. No one would be able to remember what colour Elisabeth had been wearing.

  That cheered me up a little. I slipped my own lipstick as well as hers into Elisabeth’s bag, then put on her watch and adjusted her fake glasses. They tended to slip so I practised her gesture of pushing them up with the second finger of my right hand, and then smoothing my hair into place behind my ear.

  There was a knock at the door. ‘Ready, Alison?’

  I gulped, and took a final glimpse in the mirror. It was exactly like hearing the last call before going on stage. I was trembling with nerves and feeling cold and sick. I had to force my feet into motion to get me through the door.

  Nicolas was waiting, his face anxious, but it lit with a wide smile as he saw me.

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Alison! You’ve done a magnificent job. Really, I’d hardly know the difference!’

  I managed a hollow smile. He’d have to say that, anyway; it was too late to change anything, and he’d know how important it was for me to feel confident.

  He held me at arm’s length. ‘Mind you,’ he said with a grin, ‘I much prefer the original Alison. Just make sure you change back before I see you again – in Norfolk at the week-end, remember? I’m looking forward to that.’

  I nodded wanly and at that moment the doorbell rang. Frau Henschel hurried downstairs to let Kurt Braun in and then, as she turned and saw me, she let out a gasp of surprise and anxiety.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, running to take my hands between hers, ‘my dear, you look so much like Elisabeth – and you are so very brave. All our good wishes and thanks go with you …’

  ‘Ready?’ Braun cut in.

  ‘In a minute,’ Nicolas snapped.

  Frau Henschel’s hands fluttered, and still murmuring her thanks and good wishes she retreated up the stairs. Nicolas took Elisabeth’s raincoat from my arm and placed it round my shoulders, then turned me gently to face him.

  ‘I believe that all good actors have first night nerves,’ he said. ‘But once they’re on stage they’re too much absorbed in their part to think of anything else – am I right?’

  ‘I – I believe so.’

  ‘Well, then … you’ll have no worries. Good luck, Alison.’

  His hands tightened on my shoulders. ‘See you in Norfolk,’ he murmured, and then he bent to kiss me lightly on the cheek, taking care not to disarrange my hair or lipstick. Then he straightened.

  ‘All right, Braun, she’s ready. But for God’s sake take care of her, do you hear?’

  Kurt Braun was impatient. ‘I will, of course. She’ll have no trouble. But we must leave now.’

  Nicolas released me and smiled. ‘Auf wiedersehen, then, Alison – until we see each other again …’

  The time had come to step on to the stage. I took the three slow deep breaths that always help to relax and steady me before the ordeal of appearing in public. Then I pushed the glasses up on to the bridge of my nose, smoothed back my hair, slung Elisabeth’s bag over my left forearm and, stepping quickly and precisely, followed Kurt Braun out of the door and down the steps and into the black East German car that was waiting to take me through the Berlin Wall.

  Chapter Ten

  The engine was already running and the driver seemed impatient to be off. He glanced incuriously at me as I got in, but as soon as the back doors were closed he set the car moving.

  It would have been unnatural to drive in complete silence: ‘And how was your grandmother, Comrade?’ asked Braun.

  I started, shocked by the unexpectedness of the form of address as much as by the question, but then I recalled that I had asked Frau Henschel the same thing. ‘She is very ill,’ I replied quietly. ‘Only a matter of time now.’

  He assumed an air of officious satisfaction. ‘Then it’s fortunate for you that these arrangements could be made, isn’t it? You must make the most of your second visit, tomorrow.’

  His tone had a dismissive hint making it clear that he had no wish to prolong the conversation, and I was relieved. I didn’t think that I would be able to address him as ‘Comrade’ without sounding as self-conscious as I felt, so the less I had to say and the less I drew attention to myself, the better. Besides, no one would expect a girl who had just visited her dying grandmother to be chatty.

  Braun spoke again, addressing the back of the driver’s head: ‘An unimpressive area this, Comrade Felsen.’

  The driver agreed. ‘These old terraces should have been pulled down long ago to make way for workers’ flats. West Berlin has no charms for me, I can tell you.’

  I li
stened with wry amusement as they made a point of outdoing each other in condemnation of all things Western, ignoring everything that was attractive and prosperous and eagerly drawing each other’s attention to the slightest evidence of decay or neglect. And then my stomach tightened as the great grey barrier of the Wall loomed at the end of the street.

  I had assumed that we should be going through the famous Checkpoint Charlie but that, Nicolas told me, was the crossing-point for foreigners. West and East German nationals used one of the two other crossing-points in the centre of the city. We turned a corner, joined a main road and there ahead of us, just as at any frontier between two different countries, were striped barriers manned by border police.

  The driver stopped at the West German barrier. The green-uniformed police glanced at the driver’s papers and waved us through. They might perhaps have been tempted to search a private East German car for smuggled goods, but they knew an official car when they saw it and took care not to provoke a political incident.

  The car rolled forward to the heavy, crash-proof East German barrier, and two grey-uniformed East German guards armed with rifles came up on either side of us. They too recognized the official car, but this seemed to make them even more zealous in their duties. Braun handed them a sheaf of papers, we all passed over our identity cards, and one of the guards took them into the guardhouse. The other stayed with us, hitching his slung rifle higher on his shoulder. Our driver switched off his engine, and we sat and waited.

  Even the driver seemed subdued. Kurt Braun made an attempt at jocular conversation through the car window with the guard but the man was wooden, refusing to commit himself even on the state of the weather. As for me, my mouth was dry with fear and I had great difficulty in stopping myself from trembling visibly.

  This scrutiny of our papers was nonsense. The car had been through the checkpoint only half an hour previously, and no problem over our papers could possibly have arisen in that time … unless …

  Unless of course, they had any reason to think that a switch had been made. And if they had such a reason, if they had the slightest suspicion that anything was wrong, this was the point where it would all start to happen.

  This was where I would be asked to get out of the car and go into the guardhouse for questioning, and if I were questioned I should be lost. I’d try to bluff it out, of course, to maintain for as long as possible that I really was Elisabeth in the hope that they would believe me and let me go. Nicolas had told me enough of her background to enable me to keep up a convincing initial performance.

  But my German would never stand up to skilled questioning. They would break my story with very little trouble, and then the fact that I had lied to them would almost certainly make it worse for me … I might get ten years in prison, not five!

  Oh God, what a mess I was in … what a mess I’d let Nicolas get me into! I could feel that my hands were damp with perspiration, despite the fact that I was cold.

  A telephone in the guardhouse rang with shrill insistence. I started. From the corner of my eye I saw Kurt Braun watching me covertly, anxiously, his spread hand hovering close to mine in mute warning.

  An officer came from the guardhouse, hitching at the belt which held his revolver. He had the papers in his hand, and after glancing at Braun and the driver he came round to where I sat and motioned me to open the window.

  Then he put one elbow on it, frowned at the photograph on Elisabeth’s identity card and peered hard at me from a distance of no more than eighteen inches. I tried not to flinch. He was about thirty, tall and podgy, with fleshy red lips under a small dark moustache, and his breath smelled foully of schnapps.

  ‘Comrade Elisabeth Lorenz,’ he read out slowly. ‘From Eisenach.’

  I tried to loosen my hands from each other’s grasp so as to hide the betraying whiteness of the knuckles. ‘That’s right, Comrade,’ I heard myself murmur.

  He gave a swaggering laugh. ‘A little Thuringian up to see the sights of the big city, eh?’

  ‘To visit my sick grandmother,’ I corrected him quickly.

  He thumbed through the papers. ‘Ah yes, two compassionate visits to the West, one today and one tomorrow. And how did you like it over there, eh?’

  I forced myself to meet his eyes. After all, the real Elisabeth would have had good cause for looking wretched. ‘My grandmother is dying,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh yes?’ His voice was indifferent, entirely devoid of compassion. He looked again at Elisabeth’s identity card and then at me, his tongue flicking wetly over his lips as his eyes roamed. ‘Well, we’ll see you tomorrow, then?’

  ‘Yes … Comrade.’

  ‘Right.’ He tossed the papers to one of the guards and sauntered away, an urban bully-boy showing off to a girl from the country. The guard thrust the papers back through the open window to Braun, and the barriers were lifted to let us through. I expelled a shuddering breath.

  And had that pig of an officer, I wondered, biting my lips as I remembered the discrepancy, noticed that although Elisabeth had been described on her identity card as having grey eyes, mine were most definitely blue?

  And if he hadn’t spotted it today, would he tomorrow?

  The driver was voluble with relief as he accelerated away. He hated going to the West, it was nothing but trouble. And the traffic! He’d much rather stay in the DDR, where driving was still a pleasure instead of a problem.

  He had a point, I could see that. The area we were passing through, just to the east of the Wall, was almost completely empty: of traffic, of buildings, of people. Once it had been the heart of a great city, and now it was a wasteland, with the ruins of a few major buildings still in crumbling evidence as though the war had finished within the last decade instead of in 1945. The car window was still open and when we stopped at an intersection I could hear the silence of desolation.

  But then, away from the Wall and among the streets, the city began to come to life; as though the old centre was a back yard that had been deliberately abandoned. The traffic thickened, though to nothing like the same extent as in West Berlin, and there were more people about. But as I watched and gathered my impressions I realized that whatever it might have been originally, the Wall was no longer a barrier between two halves of the same city.

  The vehicles here were different from those on the other side of the Wall. The traffic signs were different. The clothes were different. The street lights were different. The uniforms of officialdom were different. East Berlin was the capital city of another country.

  A country where the laws were different, too. And I was here illegally, with someone else’s identity card, and only the man beside me could get me out again.

  I looked at him nervously, speculatively. Nicolas had told me that he didn’t know whether I would like Kurt Braun, but that I could certainly trust him. Yes, I felt that instinctively.

  He saw me watching him, and his eyes showed me his relief that we had managed to get through the checkpoint safely. Then, taking advantage of the driver’s preoccupation with a traffic roundabout, he gave me a slow, shy, friendly smile.

  My spirits lifted. I thought that I might very well find myself liking him too.

  Now that we were in the heart of East Berlin, Kurt became more expansive, pointing out the sights to the girl supposedly up from the country. We went along the Unter den Linden, where the trees were still small but definitely flourishing and the pavement cafés, though fewer than in the Ku’damm, seemed to be doing a brisk trade. And then he said, ‘And here we are, back again in Lenin Allee,’ and I guessed that I had reached the end of my journey.

  Lenin Allee was enormous in every sense: a tremendously wide straight avenue with central flower beds, wide roadways and wide pavements, and on either side, block after monolithic block of apartment buildings, with stores at ground level. About half-way along, when the buildings at either end were lost in the mile-long distance, the driver pulled up and Kurt motioned me to get out.

  ‘Here at ten
-thirty tomorrow then, Comrade Felsen, if you please?’ he said politely to the driver, who nodded grudgingly, slammed the door shut and drove off, leaving us alone on the wide pavement.

  ‘We mustn’t stand talking here,’ Kurt said quickly. ‘It might attract attention. There’s just the porter, a woman, by the way, to deal with now. Please ask me, in front of her, to join you for a cup of coffee, so that I can show you where your apartment is. We can talk there.’

  We walked together across the pavement and entered a door. Beside a desk in the entrance hall, a dumpy middle-aged woman sat knitting. As we came in she glanced up, and for a moment her needles froze in motion as she stared at us, her pale blue eyes shrewd and unsmiling.

  ‘Back again, Comrade,’ Kurt announced heartily.

  For a moment I held my breath, and then let it out again as the needles resumed their clacking. ‘Ah yes,’ said the woman. ‘Comrade Lorenz, who is staying in the apartment of Ilse Schmidt, am I right? So many tenants, you know, but I rarely forget a face for more than a few seconds. Now let me see – a compassionate visit to the West, isn’t it?’

  I nodded. ‘My grandmother is dying.’

  The porter stilled her needles for a moment and clicked her tongue sympathetically. ‘Well, well … a good age, I dare say?’

  I had no idea, but it seemed a safe bet. ‘A great age,’ I agreed.

  She sighed robustly. ‘Well, there, we all have to go some time. A big advantage for you, Comrade Lorenz, to be able to visit her – and to be allowed to use one of these fine apartments while you’re in East Berlin! I hope you appreciate your good fortune.’

  I suppressed an instinctive retort that in any right-minded country a girl would be free to visit her relatives at any time, and stay as long as she wished.

  ‘Oh, yes I do,’ I assured her quickly. ‘It’s a beautiful apartment – and now I’m looking forward to making myself some coffee.’ I turned to Kurt. ‘Would you care to join me – er – Comrade?’