The Contract

He rolled from her and hastened to pull up his underclothes and trousers. She made no move to follow and lay quite still on the two crumpled blouses.

'Ulf is a soldier, he should know how to fight the Fatherland… if that is his wish.'

'It is easy to talk of it.'

'Some boys were talking at the Humboldt…'

Ulf creased his lips, a swift spasm of rage. He hated, detested it when she spoke of life at the University in Berlin. Jutte the second year student of Mechanical Engineering. Ulf the second year border guard of the National Volks Armee. She the daughter of the Director of an industrial Kombinat. He the son of a lorry driver. Jutte the product of the Party elite. Ulf the product of the Party faithful.

'What did they say at the Humboldt?'

She grinned up at him, careless and happy in her power. 'They said there was only one way to fight them.'

'What way was that?' Hoarseness crawled into Ulf s voice.

'To run away from them…' Her laugh tinkled close to him. 'That they hate. That is why they have so many of you pretty boys on the border.

The ones who run from them are the ones who fight them.'

He shrugged, uncertain. 'It is impossible.'

'Some do it,' she whispered. 'We see it on the television that comes over from the West. Two families and they made a balloon, they did it.

The man with the glider, the man who swam with the air tanks, the man who pushed the boat with his wife and daughter across the Elbe There was a nervousness now about the boy, and he bridled. 'You have not seen it.'

'It has been done so it must be possible.'

'If you saw it for yourself then you would not say that. There are automatic guns, there are mines, the wire is more than three metres high, there are dogs… vicious horrible things. If you had seen the frontier you would not say that it is possible.'

He pulled her upright, then bent to pick up her brassiere and to shake the pine needles from her blouse. She stood with her trousers at her ankles.

'Why do they go there, those who come to the frontier and face the gun that you hold?'

'We should get back, or we will be missed.'

'The boy who said piss on the Fatherland, that boy is afraid that the FDJ nursemaid will miss him?'

He knelt at her feet. A ridiculous posture, and his nose brushed against her upper legs and he kissed her and pulled at her trousers till they were at her waist. He flicked the mud from her blouse and pushed her hair back to its parting. 'What do you want of me, Jutte?'

She took his hand and they went slowly to the path. 'I want you to know that my father is going this afternoon to Dresden, some dreary meeting early tomorrow, and my mother is going with him. I want you in their bed at home when these children's games are finished.'

' I have to get the train at midnight.'

'Piss on the Fatherland, the boy said. Silly boy, you'll get your train.'

He put his arm around her waist, squeezed her. The girl pressed her hips close to his as they went back towards the chalets. They would be in time for lunch. Lunch would be Stew, that was usual for the Sunday meal at the Schwielowsee camp.

It had been a low, wearing day for Johnny. Marking time, treading water, waiting.

He had walked the grounds, mapped the geography of the small wood, and the orchard and the thick-grassed tennis court, and the lawns and the outbuildings, once stables. The place smacked of a lost grandeur, everything had slipped out of hand. Only the chain link fence topped with the single strand of barbed wire that ringed the boundary was new.

They'd be bound to pick a house like this, he thought, with a warren of rooms and ivy clinging to the stonework and eating through the mortar, and the paint falling from the window frames. Crumble right into the bloody undergrowth if they weren't careful. Smithson and Pierce had brought the Sunday papers back with them. In the afternoon Johnny curled in a chair in the hall and read. It was a long wait before the car came, scraping on the gravel.

Charles Mawby came thrusting through the front door. Instinctively Johnny stood up. This was the power, the head of patronage.

George, the sheepdog, herded them into the living room while Mawby settled his bag in his bedroom. Carter brought from the interrogation room and holding his notepad. But not Willi. Smithson and Pierce roused from their siesta. And Johnny who was there to be told of a mission.

They stood, eyeing the chairs, as if even those on the team were uncertain of the seating protocol. The fire was not lit, the curtains not drawn. A virile chill in the air.

Mawby came in, closed the door firmly behind him, took an armchair and waved them down. Johnny sat back a little way from the inner circle.

He was not yet a part of their plan.

'We'll have some tea later. I don't want Mrs Ferguson fussing about us just as we get going,' Mawby said. There was a slim chorus of agreement.