It had been a dreadful week in Brussels, Dieter Nimitz thought, though flying home to Hamburg for the weekend wasn’t necessarily an improvement. A senior officer in the office of the EU Commissioner for Refugees, he worked devising and trying to implement European-wide policy on migration and refugees, but despite his best efforts and those of his colleagues the situation was a shambles. Thousands of refugees were pouring into the south of Europe and the member countries of the EU could not agree on even the first step of what to do about it.
Matters weren’t helped for Dieter by his boss, a Dutchman called Van der Vaart, who was both critical of his staff and unhelpful. Dieter mentally divided the Dutch into two categories: the benign, pipe-smoking type, with liberal opinions, and the less common Calvinist sort, dour and right-wing. Van der Vaart was decidedly of the latter, and it made him an intolerant taskmaster, always looking for someone to blame. Dieter, the most senior of the staff, bore the brunt of the Dutchman’s criticisms, and he sometimes felt that but for his friendship with his British colleague Matilda, and the loyalty of the juniors he spent much of his time defending, his job would be intolerable.
Coming through Customs now, Dieter froze. Ahead of him, waiting behind the rail, was a middle-aged woman, with greying hair parted in the middle. For a split second he thought it was his wife, come unexpectedly to meet his flight. But as the woman turned and the light fell on her face, he saw that it wasn’t Irma, and he relaxed.
Once it might well have been her: in the early days of their marriage, Irma would often drive the forty minutes to the airport to meet him as he flew in from Brussels. Ostensibly, she came out of love, so delighted to see her husband that she couldn’t wait for him to make his way home. But he knew even then, in the early days of their marriage, that she was there to keep an eye on him – to make sure he didn’t stray; that he hadn’t struck up a conversation with some blonde on the short flight home from Brussels.
Her jealousy seemed odd, since he didn’t believe she really felt strongly for him even then. Sometimes he wondered whether it was jealousy at all, or just some need to control him. Thank God she didn’t know about Matilda. There was nothing more than friendship between them, and there never would be, but that didn’t mean Matilda wasn’t special to Dieter. He was at pains to keep the friendship secret from Irma, and since he only saw Matilda during his working week in Brussels, that wasn’t difficult.
He took the train from the airport to Blankensee, the affluent suburb of Hamburg where he and Irma lived. Theirs was a pleasant villa, not one of the larger houses on the street, but ample for their needs; they had no children. It had a garden with rose bushes and an ancient elm that lost a branch or two in the storms each autumn. As he reached the house and climbed the steps to his front door, Dieter tried to remind himself how lucky he was. And how far he had come.
A month prior to this, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had visited their offices. Van der Vaart had escorted her around, staying close to her side, reluctantly introducing her to his more senior staff with a proprietary air. When it was Dieter’s turn he had addressed the Chancellor in German. She had asked where he was from and he’d explained that he had grown up in Bavaria, which wasn’t true at all, but that he lived now in Hamburg. This made her smile as she explained that Hamburg was where she had been born – though she had moved as a little girl to East Germany.
Dieter thought of the ironies in their exchange. Merkel, born in Hamburg, had moved to Templin, sixty miles east of Berlin, and grown up in the German Democratic Republic. He had moved to Hamburg after a childhood that he claimed had been spent in a village in Bavaria, hundreds of miles south, but actually he had been born and raised in Templin. None of this did he ever admit to anybody.
Dieter Schmidt had known from his earliest years that his father worked for the government of the GDR. This meant the family was not poor – well, everyone was poor then in East Germany, but they were less poor than others. They lived in one of the Stalinist apartment blocks erected in their thousands in the 1950s. Theirs was a block for government officials but they had one more room than their neighbours. Dieter had attended a local primary school, then a Gymnasium¸ gradually learning from the mixture of apprehension and respect that his teachers showed towards him that his father worked not just for the government, but for its most feared part, the Stasi – East Germany’s lethal combination of intelligence service and secret police.
He never quite knew if this was why he was selected, but at the age of seventeen, as he prepared for his university entrance exams, two men came to visit the household. One of them wore a Homburg hat – he always remembered that – while his companion spoke German badly with an accent he later realised was Russian. His brothers and sisters had been sent outside, and his mother had withdrawn to the kitchen as they asked: Did he like school? Who was his closest friend? Did he have a girlfriend? Did he play football?
The two men had seemed almost bored by their own queries, until suddenly they became less banal. Was he good at languages? He was, as a matter of fact; he was top of his class in both Russian and English. Would he be interested in living abroad? Definitely – who in the grimness of East Germany wouldn’t be? And finally, could he keep a secret – a big secret? Wordlessly, he nodded.
The two men had gone away, without an explanation for their visit, and his parents, whatever they knew, told him nothing. He had almost forgotten about this strange interview when a few months later he was summoned to the Head’s office and found the man in the Homburg sitting there. ‘Sit down,’ the man said curtly, and nodded to the Head, who left the room. As Dieter listened with mounting incredulity, the visitor sketched out what the future was about to consist of.
And now, as he went into his house in Blankensee, calling out hello to Irma, Dieter reflected how accurate his forecast had proved.
He had been sent to Moscow immediately after his exams. There he had been schooled to an extraordinary degree in the details of what was to become his new identity. He felt like a man given a new shirt with instructions to memorise each and every stitch it contained. His name was changed immediately to Dieter Nimitz; thirty years later it took an effort of will to remember that he had been born ‘Schmidt’.
He had expected that he would be given intensive schooling in Russian, but in fact he was schooled intensively in Bavarian German, since, it was explained to him, that was what the young Dieter would have spoken at home. After six months, Dieter had been sent back to East Germany and, after a final emotional farewell with his family, he had left for West Germany. He had travelled with a teenage group sent West on a two-week exchange, but he was the one member of the group to stay behind. Ten days later he entered Hamburg University as a languages student, having apparently freshly graduated from a Gymnasium in Bavaria. He’d worked hard at university, graduating with distinction, and then, obeying instructions he received, he took a job with an import–export firm in Hamburg. There he acquired managerial skills and some business acumen. He stayed in that small family-owned firm for seven years, having no contact with his family in the East – and hearing nothing from his controllers. He had become convinced that they had forgotten about him, when suddenly he was told to apply to the European Commission in Brussels.
By then he had met and married Irma, a German schoolteacher whom he met through friends at a picnic on the banks of the Elbe. Irma was a formidable character, who knew what she wanted and usually got it. She made it clear she wanted Dieter, and he felt both amazed and helpless in the face of her determination; they were married within a year. His explanation for the absence of family on his side at the wedding ceremony was that he had been orphaned early in life and raised by a succession of foster parents.
Other than two sets of instructions as to his employment, Dieter heard nothing from the Russians. As far as he could tell, they had utterly and irrevocably changed his life for no apparent purpose. Yet he felt no anger or regret about this, even when the Berlin Wall fell, since he was confident that one day the Russians would need him for something – he didn’t know what, but he was certain of this. He also did not imagine his life would have been any happier had he stayed in Templin, and there was no prospect of going back there now – he learned of the deaths of his parents when browsing the online edition of the Templin local paper, and about his brothers and sisters, he knew nothing, and assumed they knew nothing of him.
He never revealed the truth about his real past to his wife; she seemed completely content with the version he had told her when they first met. He did sometimes think it strange that she never asked about his family, but they never talked much about their respective childhoods, so he knew very little about hers, either. It just was not something they ever discussed.
But from time to time, and more frequently as he got older, he thought of the man in the Homburg hat and the months in Moscow. At those times he felt certain that since a foreign power had gone to enormous pains to make him into something he was not, he would one day learn that there was a purpose to it all.