The Linden Tree

by Hester Rowan

  ‘That’s fine … The only thing is,’ I added hesitantly, ‘I haven’t any money for the fare, you know.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve arranged all that.’ Kurt checked his watch, frowning. ‘Now listen carefully, because I haven’t much time. The coach is on one of its regular sight-seeing round trips from Hanover. The tourists have had a few days in West Berlin, and now they’re off to Marberg. There’s a folk festival going on there this week, that’s why it’s an ideal place for you to wait – it’ll be crowded with visitors and you won’t be noticed. The only problem is going to be accommodation.’

  ‘Everywhere is full, I suppose?’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘That’s not the point. Things are done differently, here in East Germany. All tourist accommodation is State-controlled, and foreign visitors can come into East Germany only if they have booked their rooms in advance. When they come to the frontier, they are issued with visas in exchange for their hotel reservation vouchers. No accommodation, no visa. No visa, no entry.’

  I pulled a wry face. ‘You don’t need to remind me that I’m here illegally! What do I do, then, Kurt?’

  ‘With luck,’ he explained cautiously, ‘you may be able to stay at the official tourist camping site in Marberg. There’s a party of young Americans travelling on the coach, on a camping tour of Europe. They have to get their camping vouchers in advance, too, but if you can manage to give the impression that you’re one of their party, there’s no reason why any official should suspect that you aren’t a genuine tourist. The camp site will have none of the reception desk problems that you’d meet in a hotel. If you can make friends with the Americans, telling them the same story that I told the driver, I’m sure they’ll be glad to help by making room for you in one of their tents.’

  I could see no foundation for his confidence. ‘Oh, but that’s expecting a bit much!’ I protested. ‘I couldn’t possibly go and foist myself on them.’

  He pushed his greying hair wearily off his forehead. ‘There’s no alternative, my dear. You can’t go it alone in East Germany. If you’re picked up by the Vopos you’ll be finished.’

  ‘But – supposing the Americans don’t agree to help?’

  He hesitated. ‘In that case, you will have to ask Willy Hendricks for help,’ he said reluctantly. ‘He has relatives in the town, but for that reason he has to be doubly careful. I’d rather not involve him any further, so please go to him only as a last resort. Oh, don’t worry.’ Kurt smiled at me reassuringly. ‘I’m quite sure the Americans will appreciate your problem and be glad to help. You’ll be all right. Just stay with them, so that I know where to find you – I won’t let you down, I promise. But I really must go now or the Vopos will be out looking for both of us.’

  I pulled myself together. I was being selfish again. Kurt was taking a terrible risk to help me, and I was wasting his time over foolish objections.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologized, scrambling out of the car. ‘I’ll do as you say, of course. Only – you will try to let Nicolas know where I am, won’t you?’

  He sighed, but nodded his acknowledgement.

  Poor Kurt. It was tactless of me to remind him so frequently of my emotional dependence on Nicolas. Nicolas, who had got me into this mess, wasn’t here to get me out of it. For my present safety, and therefore my future happiness, I was utterly dependent on Kurt. The least I could do was to show him my gratitude.

  Impulsively, I put my hand through the open window of his car. He hesitated for a moment, then took it eagerly.

  I smiled at him. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘from the bottom of my heart.’

  He looked at me for a moment, intent, unsmiling, then lifted my hand briefly to his lips. I stood watching as he drove quickly out of sight, and then I turned and walked towards the West German coach.

  The tubby driver had finished his sandwich and was now enjoying a pipeful of tobacco in the warmth of the sun.

  ‘Good morning, Herr Hendricks,’ I said. It was a relief to be able to speak in English, for the first time since I had left Nicolas, and not to have to try to remember to address people as Comrade.

  He nodded at me comfortably, taking the pipe from his mouth. ‘Guten Tag, Fräulein. Call me Willy, everybody does. Happy to have you with us as far as Marberg.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We shall leave here in ten minutes.’

  He gave me another friendly nod and waddled away, his pipe sticking from his teeth at a jaunty angle, to speak to the driver of a newly-arrived tourist coach. I stood staring uneasily at the massive white colonnades and statues of the Memorial that towered above the car park, nervously conscious of my aloneness and total lack of possessions. Would anyone believe the story Kurt had invented for me?

  About a dozen men and girls, most of them rather younger than I was, were heading back towards the coach. Several of them had the name of an American university blazoned across their tee-shirts. They looked a very pleasant, friendly crowd, but even so I didn’t relish the prospect of proposing myself as a member.

  I moved away from the door of the coach, wretchedly uncertain of my next move, and then, totally unexpectedly, it was made for me.

  ‘Monumental sort of place, isn’t it?’ said a gloomy young American voice at my elbow.

  I turned eagerly. He was about my own height, and a good deal younger than the others in the group; probably fifteen or sixteen years old, very slim, but with disproportionately long legs and wide shoulders that suggested that he still had a good deal of growing to do. His voice was deep, but his cheeks still boyishly rounded. He looked, I thought, with his engagingly upturned nose and his fair hair curling round his ears and on to his forehead, extraordinarily like a Botticelli angel in jeans.

  And like an angel, he had appeared at a most propitious time. I seized the opening he offered.

  ‘Monumental was exactly the word I wanted,’ I agreed.

  He looked at me with interest, his head on one side. ‘You’re English, aren’t you? My name’s Scott Fletcher. Hey, how come I haven’t seen you on the coach before? I mean, I couldn’t not have noticed you. Have you just joined, or something? Are you on your own?’

  I drew a deep breath and told him the story that Kurt had given me. ‘It’s just a matter of somewhere to stay while I’m waiting, you see,’ I finished. ‘There’ll be endless bother if I arrive at the tourist hotel in Marberg without any papers.’

  ‘Don’t even think of trying it,’ Scott warned. ‘The hassle there was at the checkpoint when we tried to cross the Wall into East Berlin, just because I’d lost my camping voucher! How was I to know it was so important?’

  ‘Wouldn’t the East Germans let you through?’

  He shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. It took us a whole day out of the trip, just to get my papers sorted. Now we’ve missed visiting the Sans-Souci Palace at Potsdam, and my sister Nancy is so mad at me that she’ll hardly speak.’ He pushed curls out of his eyes with a rather grubby hand. ‘I guess I am a little young for them, at that,’ he observed wistfully. ‘The others are all in pairs – it gets kind of lonely.’

  I knew exactly how he felt. ‘Yes,’ I agreed, and there was nothing artificial about the desolation in my voice.

  He studied me, charmingly diffident. ‘Look, I don’t want to seem pushy,’ he said earnestly, ‘but if you’re coming on your own as far as Marberg, maybe you could team up with us?’

  I accepted with alacrity. ‘I’d be most grateful, Scott,’ I said equally seriously. ‘As long as your sister and her friends agree, of course.’

  The boy beamed. ‘Why shouldn’t they?’ he demanded, ushering me into the coach and swinging himself into the seat beside me.

  I could think of several good reasons, but none that I could mention.

  Scott introduced me to a bewildering succession of names and faces as the rest of the group boarded the coach, and we all said ‘Hi’. Willy, the driver, manoeuvred the coach out of the park and Scott’s sister Nancy and her dark, stocky friend Paul settled in the seat
in front of us and turned to talk.

  They were clearly ready to be friendly, until Scott blurted out the story I had told him. ‘So of course,’ he finished eagerly, ‘I said that as Alison didn’t have her visa with her, she’d better stay with us until her boy-friend arrives. She can have my tent.’

  Nancy and Paul exchanged wary looks.

  ‘You’re in a tough spot,’ commented Paul, sympathetic but in no rush to help.

  ‘We know what a problem these documents can be,’ agreed Nancy. ‘Eh, Scott?’ She looked hard at her brother. The golden-haired family likeness was unmistakable, but there was a definite chill in the air. ‘If you lose your papers now,’ she warned him, ‘we’ll never get you out of East Germany, you know that? They’ll imprison you for sure.’

  Scott blushed and wriggled. ‘Of course I won’t lose them,’ he muttered, ‘not now I know. But Alison hasn’t lost hers, she just needs a bit of help until her boy-friend catches up with her. Oh, come on, Nancy, how would you feel if you were in her place?’

  There was a long moment of hesitation. Paul and Nancy looked at each other uncertainly, and Scott looked appealingly from one to the other like an outsize puppy who doesn’t care which one makes the decision to take him for a walk, as long as the decision is made.

  ‘If there’s the least hint of bother when we get to the camp site,’ I promised breathlessly, praying that it was a promise I wouldn’t be called on to honour, ‘I’ll make it absolutely clear that you don’t know me.’

  Nancy shrugged, then smiled. ‘That’s it, then. If the East Germans let you into the camp, I guess we’ll be glad to help from then on.’ She nodded cordially and turned away.

  ‘Oh, that’s great!’ Scott exclaimed. ‘Everything’ll be fine, Alison. I’ll take care of you.’

  I realized that my hands had been trembling with tension. Now they relaxed a little. ‘Thank you so much for your help, Scott,’ I said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he replied grandly, enjoying his new role of protector. Then he added: ‘When did you say you were expecting your boy-friend to meet you?’

  ‘Oh … I’m not exactly sure … Within the next day or two.’

  He frowned. ‘He is coming to Marberg?’

  ‘I hope so, Scott,’ I said fervently.

  Dear heaven I hoped so.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Scott talked virtually without pause from East Berlin to the Harz, and I was glad of it. Glad too, to be heading westwards, even though I knew that the heavily-guarded border lay between me and freedom. The fact that I was temporarily with a group of people to whom the border guards presented no threat, made me feel slightly less trapped.

  The coach carried us at speed across the intensively cultivated North German plain and then, beyond Magdeburg, turned off the autobahn and headed south-west on little-used roads. The countryside became more intimate, with rolling hills and frequent villages and farmsteads. The road was dusty, but shaded in places by wild cherry trees whose ripe fruit brushed against the windows of the coach as we passed. In the fields women in long dark dresses, with white scarves protecting their heads from the sun, stopped working as we approached, straightened their backs and waved, and all of us, the driver included, waved back.

  And then, with the evening sun blinding our eyes, we threaded along even narrower roads through the wooded mountains of the Harz, and came at last to Marberg.

  We saw the town first from a hilltop half a mile away. I could remember, from my childhood in Thuringia, seeing a good many picturesque little German towns – but never one that came, like this, straight out of an illustrated book of fairy tales.

  Marberg was set securely on the top of a steep, wooded, rocky hill, high above a river that meandered through meadows golden and pink with wild flowers. The town was compact, walled-in as a protection against medieval enemies. Above the snaking stone wall, set at intervals with red-roofed watch towers and bastioned gateways, rose a jumble of half-timbered gables, red-tiled roofs hung at crazy angles, sturdy bell towers and delicate slated spires whose gilded finials glittered as they caught the setting sun. At one end of the town, looking like an upward extension of the rock it stood on, towered the sheer walls and turrets of an imposing castle.

  ‘Wow!’ breathed Scott reverently. ‘Is that for real, or am I just imagining it?’

  Willy Hendricks, who acted as guide as well as driver, had stopped the coach to give us the benefit of the view. He used the stem of his pipe to point out landmarks, and gave us a potted history of the town including the storming of the castle in the sixteenth-century peasants’ revolt, the subject of the festival that the tourists had come to see.

  ‘Who lives in the castle now?’ asked one of the girls. ‘Is it still the same family?’

  ‘No, no, Fräulein,’ Willy explained patiently. ‘This is East Germany. Castles like this all belong to the State. Some are left to ruin, some – like this one – are homes for the old or sick, some are museums for tourists. The East German government now wishes to encourage tourists, and that is why they allow the townspeople to hold their festival again.’

  ‘And is that the camp site?’ asked Paul, pointing. Among the trees at the foot of the hill on which the town was set, we could glimpse the blue and orange of tents.

  ‘That is so,’ Willy said, tucking his pipe away and starting his engine. ‘There will be rehearsals for the festival in the town tomorrow morning,’ he told us over his shoulder as he drove down the hill. ‘And in the afternoon the pageant itself. And you will be ready for me to take you across the border and back to Hanover the day after, nicht?’

  ‘Right,’ Nancy agreed.

  Two days, then …

  I would have just two days with the Americans, and after that I should be on my own. Nowhere to stay, no money, no possessions, no visa, no passport. No friends.

  What was happening to Kurt? I wondered. My escape would have been discovered hours ago. Had they suspected him immediately? Were they interrogating him now?

  Had he had time to get in touch with Nicolas first?

  All the others were excited as we approached the camp site, looking forward to stretching their legs and having a meal and exploring the town. Even Scott had temporarily forgotten me and, fraternal relations restored, was leaning over the seat in front to tease his sister. For a long, chilling five minutes I felt isolated: an outsider accompanying them on false pretences, an illegal entrant to the country, a woman wanted by the East Berlin Volkspolizei. I felt alarmingly vulnerable – cold, tense, queasy, utterly alone.

  We had crossed the swift clear river by an old stone bridge and were now driving along a road that looped through the meadows at the foot of the hill. Above us, wooded slopes rose up towards the encircling stone wall of the town. And then we reached the point where the trees gave way to the sheer outcrop of rock on which the castle was perched, and we all craned our necks to look up through the roof lights of the coach at the massive, centuries-old walls of the stronghold towering above.

  ‘Sure beats Disneyland,’ someone said.

  I could see his point. With its sheer walls, its round Rapunzel corner turrets, each with a single high oriel window and a conical cap of red tiles, and its massive steeply-pitched central roof in which rows of small windows were set under individually outcurving eaves, giving the impression of eyes peering from under eyebrows, Marberg appeared to be the original of every castle in the entire works of the Brothers Grimm.

  But their famous name carried, at that moment, no happy childhood connotation. To me in my distress, Marberg Castle looked grim enough to be a prison.

  Scott, and his sister and Paul, were as quiet and tense as I was when we approached the camp site, and we all sighed with relief when the man in charge allowed us to enter with only a cursory glance at the mass of papers Paul gave him. There was no attempt to count heads. The site was crowded, and the man had problems enough without looking for more.

  The boys quickly unloaded all the gear from the coach,
and Willy drove it away. The routine was obviously well practised: Scott worked busily on his own, putting up one very small ridge tent while the others erected bright pavilions on metal frames. When he had finished, Scott beckoned me over to admire his work.

  ‘This is mine, Alison,’ he said proudly. ‘I’ve used it since I was so high. I’d like you to consider it yours, as long as you’re with us.’

  I’d never slept in a tent of any kind, let alone one with a ridge. It sagged alarmingly in the middle, and I had visions of it collapsing on me in the early hours of the morning.

  ‘Thank you very much, Scott,’ I said. ‘It’s sweet of you, but I couldn’t possibly turn you out –’

  ‘No bother,’ he said eagerly. ‘I can sleep in the open – I’d like to, truly.’

  Nancy had been listening and now she strolled over to join us.

  ‘Believe it or not,’ she said, ‘you’ll have more room there than we have in the girls’ tent – it’s a crush, I can tell you. It may not look it, but Scott’s is a good offer – I should take it if I were you.’

  ‘Gladly,’ I said quickly. ‘I feel bad about turning your brother out, though.’

  Nancy tucked a strand of long fair hair back behind her ear and gave her brother a drily affectionate look. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that – all this medieval scenery is making him feel chivalrous, eh, Scott? If you have any dragons you need slaying, Alison, I think he’ll be glad to oblige. And if you haven’t the least you can do is to allow him to sleep in the open on your account! He’ll be fine in his sleeping bag, and if you come over to our tent I’ll fix you up with a blanket.’

  But it was more than a blanket I needed, of course. They were all extremely kind and helpful but I felt wretchedly, embarrassingly dependent as someone found me a clean towel and others lent soap and a comb. Everyone was too polite to comment, but the fact that I had nothing at all with me, apart from what I was wearing, obviously made them uneasy.