Strawbridge took a swig from his glass.
“After I came back from dinner, Bennett told me you’d been in. I expect he informed some of the lads and here’s their response to an interfering bloody civvy stuffed with legal crap who tells us what to do with one of our own!”
I was very angry now.
“Sure you didn’t do it yourself, Verne? Tanking yourself up with some Dutch courage and then waiting for my reaction.”
He smirked.
“I don’t need to answer that. Just seeing you upset gives me a good feeling, Mr Lawyer-man.”
“You’re just a cowardly hypocrite, casting aspersions on the staff when you did it yourself!”
Strawbridge stared at me glassy-eyed. I realized he was very drunk.
“Thump me then, you bastard!” he shouted.
I began to raise my fist. Behind him, I could see shadowy figures. I realized then what he wanted me to do and I would find myself being charged with assault, with witnesses to prove it. Breathing heavily, I dropped my arm.
“I’m not going to give you that satisfaction, you shit!”
Strawbridge lunged towards me but was restrained by one of the people behind him. As he was jostled back into the mess, I heard the clink of an object being thrown into the undergrowth followed by a muffled laugh; the key. But I knew I would never be able to find out who had thrown it. Trembling, I got into the car and sped off scrunching the gears. I would never visit that mess again.
I was stunned. Still trembling, I reached home and poured myself a generous measure of German brandy. Gradually, as the events of the night sunk in, I began to examine my conscience about Cockaigne’s case. Yet I knew I had given the right advice which sometimes leads to painful decisions in individual cases. It was part of the job of being a judge. But I hadn’t reckoned on the consequences of that decision, or the savage resentment and hatred which it had caused. Had I pushed my advice too far? After all, I was only human.
As the level of the bottle’s contents fell, I managed to push doubt out of my mind temporarily, but wondered when it would return. I was alone in a foreign land and even more conscious now of the hostility in my working environment.
I had to get out of the house and walk. There was never any danger in this as German towns, on the whole, are quiet and orderly with a marked absence of criminal damage or graffiti in the streets. Moreover, their parks are open day and night, so I headed for the municipal gardens which lay at the back of the town hall. Once there, I paced up and down the gravel paths which ran between well-kept hedges bordering trim grass lawns dotted with flower beds.
As the night sky lightened and the crisp morning air cleared my mind of alcohol, I grew contemplative. Lawyers often have to do difficult things. I had defended many men who had done things deemed unacceptable, if not abhorrent, by society but if my instructions were that they hadn’t committed the crime, it was my duty to ensure an acquittal whatever my personal views. I was just doing my job. Of course, I had read about child killers being acquitted and thus free to murder again and sometimes wondered how a defending barrister must feel in those circumstances. Fortunately, this had never happened to me.
The situation here was rather different. I was no longer a barrister but a judge and had effectively passed a sentence which I knew to be right. Normally, a remedy was available. If the sentence was excessive, a higher court could always reduce it on appeal, but that possibility was no longer available due to his suicide. The stark fact remained that a man had died, albeit by his own hand, because of a decision I had taken. It was no good cloaking it with the fact that it was a decision made by a court martial as a whole. The responsibility lay with me.
I knew I would simply have to live with it forever, but my feelings of guilt, whether justified or not, might have been alleviated if I had been able to save Caley’s career. After the struggles with the Board over Cockaigne, I hadn’t spoken out as strongly as I should have done on Caley’s behalf. He hadn’t died, but his life was ruined nevertheless. One way or another, two shattered lives lay on my conscience.
Depression can take many forms, from the serious clinical type to the low-level kind which began to affect me. I grew bored and listless through not having enough to do now that work had dried up. I began to regret the fact that I’d rejected the Dobstowe alternative and craved diversion to fend off my loneliness...
Nineteen
With the arrival of better weather, I began to sit on the terrace of the ratskeller, a restaurant situated in the basement of the Rathaus (Town Hall) in Bad Zur Linde’s main square. In most ancient German cities the town hall’s cellar has been converted into such a place, with full meals, drinks (including coffee), and snacks being available all day long. So, all types of customers are catered for, bringing a variety of people into the premises and providing a useful source of revenue for the owners – generally the municipal authorities.
There I would sit for much of the day sipping koffie mit milch or eating a light lunch, chosen from the speisekarte, washed down by a glass of hock. Subsequent cups of strong espresso would keep me concentrating on the book I was reading, or sharpened me up for the German lessons emanating from a tape on my Walkman – a hobby I’d taken up to while away the time.
It was in the course of one of those lazy days that I first saw Anna. Every day, at noon, she would appear from a tourist shop across the road, not the tacky kind so often found in Britain but a place where they sold exquisite objects carved in wood depicting figures from German legends.
As she sat at an adjoining table, I used to watch her as she ordered a light meal accompanied by a glass of iced tea with a slice of lemon – a German favourite. Afterwards she would light a cigarette, holding it elegantly in her slim hand.
She was boyishly slim with fine blonde hair, much of which was covered by a green, silk bandana. Her small rounded breasts and pert bottom in tailored jeans, however, left no doubt as to her gender. She possessed level grey eyes too, with a touch of blue, but her best feature was her smile. Her lips may have been a trifle thin, her mouth curving downwards giving her a sad expression, but the smile transfixed her face, causing her eyes to sparkle. It was the most beautiful face I had ever seen.
One day, as I sat puffing my pipe, she asked me for a light.
After I lit her cigarette, I asked impulsively, “Fraulein, darf ich ihnen etwas zu trinken bestsellen?”
She smiled at my effort in asking her in her native language if she would like a drink. A gust of wind lifted a stray strand of fluffy blonde hair from the green, silk bandana.
“So formal,” she laughed. “A question that comes only from a guidebook. You are English, ja?”
She glanced at my trousers. I looked down at them – fawn cords – and realized they were a dead giveaway. Unconsciously, I had taken to copying what army officers tended to wear, on or off duty, in the Garrison.
“You’re right, and as you speak perfect English I’ll stick to that now. My name is Charles – will you tell me yours?”
“Anna – my friends call me Anke.”
“Let’s hope I can soon be one of them.”
I was totally captivated by her eyes which widened as she smiled.
I bought her a coffee and we talked. She was 22, came from Hanover, and a year before had been a student at the university there studying German and English literature. Later, she was to tell me that her parents had been killed in a car crash and she had dropped out, ending up working in a bar in Berlin. After an unhappy love affair, she decided to travel around the country going from one casual job to another.
Our relationship started as a friendship and not an affair. Anke was still bruised from her last relationship and I, not having heard anything further from Andrea about a divorce, was still hoping in a vague way that our marriage might be resurrected.
We began to have lunch together every day. Anke knew about classic English literature but wanted to discuss lighter and more popular fiction which people read more f
or pleasure. She liked psychological thrillers so I told her about the novels of writers such as Susan Hill and Peter James, lending her copies which Andrea had left behind in a box of books.
I spent as little time in my office at Brockendorf as I could, and always contrived to be back in Bad Zur Linde for lunch with Anke.
Our relationship grew closer after we made our first visit to the Wolfram Talsperre Nature Park. The Wolfram Talsperre was one of Germany’s largest dams, built to block the flow of the mighty Wolflusse – one of the country’s most significant rivers. On one side of the dam lay a quiet lake where a variety of pleasure boats operated. The lake was situated in the centre of the nature reserve – an area very popular with families from the surrounding towns. A narrow causeway separated the lake from the dam proper and on one side of the wall the water cascaded several hundred feet to a swirling pool below. The contrast as you crossed this bridge was stark. On one side, water lapped gently only a few feet from the parapet; on the other it cascaded in a torrent, the height of a skyscraper.
It was a warm summer’s afternoon the first time we went there to ramble through the pine and birch woods in the nature reserve. Dusk was falling as we made our way to a little restaurant perched above the lake. We ate our meal by candlelight mingling with the rays of the setting sun. The golden light turned the lake into a sheet of gold which contrasted markedly with the shimmering savagery of the waterfall on the other side.
During those first weeks, sex hadn’t been predominantly on our minds. I had told Anke that I was a married man, only currently separated from my wife and Anke wasn’t ready for an affair at that stage. We were both in need of companionship and just relished in that. Besides, Anke lived in lodgings with a strict Roman Catholic family and intimacy there would never have been possible. My own flat didn’t seem an appropriate place either – the fact that it was army quarters perhaps held me back. Moreover, Anke was 20 years younger than me but as long as our relationship remained a mild flirtation my conscience wasn’t troubled. However, when we began to talk about going on holiday together, we knew our relationship was going to go up a gear.
Wanting to go somewhere a bit different, we opted to go to Leningrad for a long weekend. Russia, due to the Gorbachev reforms, had become easier to travel to, and I duly arranged a package holiday through the state-run Intourist agency. Some days later, we duly flew to Russia’s second city on Aeroflot.
The old imperial capital of the Russian Empire proved to be disappointing, however. The Hotel Kirtana, where we lodged, was a grim tower block built in Stalin’s time in which our room, although en-suite, was pretty basic. There was no bath, no plug in the wash basin and a shower which only emitted sporadic bursts of tepid water.
Yet nothing really mattered that first night except our lovemaking which we knew was going to take place for the very first time...
After consuming a very poor meal of cold borscht in the hotel dining room, we rushed to bed and not even the wrinkled babushka (an old woman who acted as a concierge on our floor) who was permanently on duty just outside the room was going to put us off.
The next day our Intourist guide, Fydor, arrived at the hotel promptly at 9.30 and we were given just 10 minutes to finish our breakfast. A thin and nervous man, he told us that our bus was waiting with many passengers from other hotels already on it. We were to spend the next two days engaged in a conducted tour of the city.
A large group of us, herded like sheep, trudged through the Hermitage Museum, the Peter and Paul Fortress and tramped the length of Leningrad’s longest boulevard, the Nevsky Prospekt. At every junction with a bridge, Fydor regaled us with facts and figures about the construction of the city, built over marshes, until statistics were coming out of our ears and our feet were sore. The buildings we passed, once grand, were run down and what shops there were seemed to consist of grubby grocery outlets.
The hot and sweaty summer weather had exhausted us by the time we found ourselves back at the cheerless Kirtana. Despite the continuing light at night (Leningrad wasn’t dark for very long) Fydor told us that our movements in the evenings were restricted. We were allowed only to visit an ‘Intourist Gala Event’ held some evenings at a neighbouring hotel, which looked even grimmer than the one we were in.
So, perching on rickety bar stools, the shallow seats of which were covered in cheap plastic, we stayed in the Kirtana’s bar which was decorated with murals celebrating the triumphs of soviet workers over the years.
Only foreigners seemed to use the bar (probably because of the prices) and three people were sitting at it already when we arrived. Two were heavyset businessmen of Middle Eastern appearance, huddled together talking intently. The other was a florid middle-aged man, clad in a dirty white suit, his pudgy hands clasped round a beaker of what appeared to be vodka whilst he rasped in Russian to a sullen-looking barman.
As I stood next to him, attempting to catch the attention of the barman myself, he took a large gulp of his drink and glanced at me, seemingly fascinated by the green cardigan I was wearing.
“Ah, a fellow Englishman. The cardigan is a dead giveaway. No Russian could afford something of that quality.”
I laughed and replied, “You got me there!”
My new acquaintance grinned back at me.
“Well, it’s good to see an ex-pat in this neck of the woods – although you’re bound to be a tourist. We’re getting more of them now that this country’s beginning to open up. I’m Trev Duke, by the way.”
He extended his hand and I introduced myself and Anke. Duke described himself as an import/export agent for a number of British firms who traded with the USSR.
“It may be a sodding awful place to live but I get a retainer from a lot of firms which makes it worthwhile. Besides, I do a bit on the side too.” He winked. “That’s why I mentioned the cardy. Western clothes, jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts, and what have you all goes down a treat here. Now when I come back from England I make sure I pack as many clothes as I can. They sell like hot cakes here. You’d get the equivalent of 50 quid in roubles for that cardy alone. Also, when I leave this country I take out stuff as well. Fur, canned caviar, jewels, even gold. Boris, the barman there, is usually up for a bit of business in that direction but tonight he doesn’t want to know. I expect he hasn’t bunged the Militsya sufficiently recently.”
“Militsya?”
I wondered how the Russian Army could be involved.
“Russia’s domestic police force organized on army lines. Haven’t you guys seen their oversized peaked caps with the red star badge? Steer well clear of them, anyway. Now tell me how much are you enjoying Leningrad?”
“Well, we’ve seen the Hermitage and the Peter and Paul Fortress, but the rest of the place seems pretty rundown and depressing.”
“Yeah, sad really when you think this city was once the grand imperial capital. Old Gorby’s got a long way to go before he lifts this country out of the communist mire. Tell you what – if you wanted to see what Leningrad was really like in the days of the czars, you should go to Pushkin. That’s the town which was called Tsarkoe Selo – the village of the czar – in the days before the revolution. The local people are slowly doing up the Catherine and Alexander palaces – full of marvellous artefacts apparently – now the regime is more enlightened.”
“We’d love to go but it’s not on our itinerary.” I pulled a crumpled leaflet from my pocket. “Tomorrow our Intourist guide is taking us to the battleship Aurora and then a visit to the GUM department store, according to this.”
“Blimey, you’re in for a treat…I don’t think! The sailors on the Aurora sparked off the revolution so you’ll be subjected to a longwinded lecture first and then a trudge around GUM for gifts, which isn’t spoilt for choice and awfully overpriced.” He scratched his chin contemplatively. “Now perhaps if I had a word in your guide’s ear after breakfast he might be able to arrange a little private tour – for a consideration, of course. Just offer him that cardy and he’ll be happy
to oblige, I’m sure.”
I had learned from other sources that these sorts of transactions were all too common in the so-called ‘Workers’ Paradise’, so I nodded.
“Fine, leave it to me to organize it. Just point out the guide to me when he comes into the lobby in the morning and I’ll sort it.”
“It’s very good of you to do this for complete strangers.”
“More than delighted, mate. Just top up my glass here and tell me your names and we can have a good chinwag. We ex-pats gotta stick together in a dump like this.”
Twenty
The next day, Trev approached Fydor as he entered the hotel whilst we waited elsewhere in the lobby. Later he joined us, his eyes darting about furtively.
“Tomorrow, we do the tour of the Aurora together,” he muttered. “Then, at 12 we take you to GUM for two hours. After lunch, you go back to the hotel.” He dropped his voice. “Later, I come back here and we can go to Pushkin, You give me the garment and I take you in my car.”
The trip around the Aurora did indeed prove to be boring in the extreme. After a perfunctory view of the battleship, we were subjected to a long complicated lecture on the Russian Revolution delivered by our English-speaking guide there.
After that we went to GUM which, apart from selling the same stuff as was readily available from The Russian Shop in London, retailed shoddily made household goods and badly cut clothes. The only exception was good quality cut glass from East Germany which was considerably cheaper than its equivalent in the UK.
At the end of our visit we were treated to a late lunch which was made up of overdone pork cooked in sour milk, accompanied by a glass of tepid tea and grudgingly served by a sour-faced waitress.
Wig Betrayed Page 13
