10

Judith reached Sassnitz late that afternoon. Dark clouds were building over the isle of Rügen. It was oppressively humid. Not even the breeze through the van windows cooled her. When she got stuck in a traffic jam close to the port at Mukran the air in the vehicle reached boiling point. A ferry must have just arrived from Klaipeda because cars from Latvia crawled up the hill and helplessly lost camper vans compounded the chaos. Only after she turned off the B96 did it get better. She abandoned the advertised tourist routes in the city centre to the others and turned right after entering the city limits, entering a shabby residential area with four-storey buildings that had only been half-heartedly renovated or not at all.

Sassnitz. Before 1990, it still used the old spelling, with a ‘ß.’ A port city. A trans-shipment point. A restricted area. No turn-of-the-century charm, no Wilhelmina spa architecture. A heavily guarded transit for tourists, commodities, and the Soviet Army. Later, somehow forgotten and pushed aside by ostentatious beauties like Binz, Göhren, and Sellin. The port was moved six miles south, and with that the city lost its last remnants of industrial raison d’être. What was left was the view of the ferries as they floated past, far out to sea.

Judith drove more slowly and studied the derelict buildings. The best maintained were the garage blocks. Maybe your own car was the only thing worth taking care of around here. She remembered the Saturday afternoons when the men circled their boxy Trabi cars, leaning back on their heels, giving each other the once-over and exchanging tips, messing around with the engines and the exhaust, and constantly wiping down the mudguards with a rag.

The sun slipped through a narrow gap in the clouds. It hung low in the sky and Judith saw the Baltic glittering in the distance. The sunset glow gilded the old port area; the beach promenade, and the part of the cliff coast that drew the tourists a couple of hundred metres further on with its promise of views from Caspar David Friedrich paintings. Maybe that was Sassnitz’s fate: missing everything by a hair’s breadth. The eternal way station.

The bus stop to the right, a graffiti-covered ruin. Judith almost missed it by a whisker. Behind that was the Strasse der Jugend, paved with cobblestones and bumpy. Snaking along sharp turns, she drove through the woods and down to the water. The old fish factory, a huge, abandoned area now only good for getting rid of bulk waste. And then – Judith’s hands cramped around the steering wheel, and she instinctively slowed to walking speed – a group of tall buildings made of brown bricks to the left and right. She let the car roll to a stop on the edge of the road.

A near ghostly calm lay over the entire compound. It seemed abandoned, despite new windows and an intercom with Haus Waldfrieden inscribed on it. Judith ignored the bell. The gate opened easily – the first and perhaps most important difference from the days when the notice read Yuri Gagarin Children’s Home. She didn’t head towards the main entrance, but rather went to the left, where the ground fell away towards the edge of the woods.

The playground equipment seemed new; even the benches and sand boxes looked orderly. She slowly continued toward the edge of the property. The fence was tall, but the barbed wire was gone. Only the concrete posts were the same, but they were less threatening and were more of a help for climbing than a deterrent for anyone who was seriously intent on running away. A gust of wind whistled through the tips of the trees, the harbinger of a storm. Judith suddenly had the feeling of being watched. She looked around but the building behind her still seemed silent, forbidding and deserted.

She breathed in the scent of woods and sea, but something essential was missing. Just as she turned to go back up to the house she saw a figure standing way back, where the larches almost grew up to the sky. A girl, ten or twelve years old, with long blonde hair. The girl looked over to her, and for a short, completely irrational moment, Judith’s heart began to pound. It couldn’t be. She was crazy. A hallucination. A chance similarity. For a moment, she had really believed she was seeing herself just because the girl had light curls. The little girl disappeared. Judith began to move, slowly at first, then running towards the trees, seeing the way the light shone down into the undergrowth once again.

‘Hello? You there!’ Someone from the building was coming quickly towards her

Judith stood still. The child had disappeared. Maybe she had never been there.

‘What are you doing here?’

The woman was in her early twenties and wore a suit and high heels unsuitable for this terrain. Her heart-shaped face was without make-up; she wore her brown hair straight and chin-length.

‘Are you looking for someone?’

Two nights with hardly any sleep and then returning to this nightmare, which, with its well-trimmed lawn and the freshly painted fence, seemed as if it had never existed. Judith rubbed her eyes with her hands, blinked, and concentrated on the young woman who had stopped in front of her, a little out of breath.

‘Who are you?’

The question was sharp, the first attempt towards kicking Judith off the property.

‘My name is Judith Kepler. I was here as a child.’

‘OK.’ The woman adopted a friendlier facial expression but wasn’t particularly successful. ‘You have to call ahead. You need an appointment if you want a tour.’

‘I don’t want a tour.’ Judith studied her interlocutor. The first words indicated that this was someone who prevented more than she made possible. ‘I want to know who leaked my file.’

‘That must be a mistake. We don’t release any files.’

‘I had it in my own hands.’

Judith didn’t know why the answer made her so aggressive. Maybe it was the smile. Without any empathy; without the slightest understanding. That’s the way Trenkner had smiled when she reached for the bottle with the soapy water. She suddenly remembered that she was still wearing the blue smock. People talked differently to you when you were wearing a smock.

‘When I came of age, I was told that my file had been shredded. But now it has suddenly reappeared. But not sent to me. It was in the hands of complete strangers. Haus Waldfrieden must be the assignee of Yuri Gagrin. So either I find out how that happened, right here and now, or I’ll press charges.’

‘Something must have gone terribly wrong. How terrible for you!’

The woman widened her eyes in apparent sympathy. It seemed a little exaggerated and about as real as her chilly smile.

‘Of course that can’t be allowed to happen. But unfortunately I can’t do anything for you. Please contact the regional archive in Rügen. There’s the inventory from the “District Committee” in the National Education and Youth Assistance division. The assistants in the reading room will surely be able to help, even with questions about file access times and . . .’

‘What do you think I’ve been doing for the past few years?’

‘This isn’t the right place. Not right at all.’ The woman extended her hand. Judith took a step back.

‘Where’s Trenkner?’

‘Who?’

‘The assistant director of the home back then. Or Martha Jonas, one of the teachers? Trinklein, the physical education teacher. Blum, Wagner, Stoltze. Where did they all go? The people, the files?’

‘We’re an independent agency. We took over the property twelve years ago. The buildings were empty. None of the former employees are still here. I’ll have to ask you to go.’

‘I was 3452.’ The rage transformed Judith’s voice into a hoarse whisper. ‘Building three, dorm IV, number 052. I spent nearly ten years here. There must be something left.’

‘No. There’s nothing. And if you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.’

She took out her phone and weighed it in her hand, waiting. She looked like she was accustomed to unpleasant visitors and knew how to fend them off. This was a dead end. The woman really didn’t know anything. But she might have gone to the trouble of finding out what kind of home she was in charge of.

‘OK,’ Judith said. ‘I’ll leave. But I’m coming back.’

‘With an appointment. I’ll follow you.’

Judith walked up the lawn to a small forecourt. There used to be flag ceremonies and public punishment for the children who hadn’t developed into the proletarian ideal. Another gust of wind swept over the yard and whipped up dust and a couple of withered leaves. Two basketball hoops hung from the brick wall. It was still unnaturally quiet.

‘Where are all the children?’ Judith asked.

‘At supper,’ the woman answered.

It was five-thirty.

She had to get her feelings better under control.

Judith walked along the edge of the woods. The wind picked up and shook the tops of the trees. Breathless, she reached the old factory compound. The first drops slipped from black clouds. They slapped on the slabs of broken road like huge, dead insects. Sassnitz Fisch was written on a sign with red lettering, the rest of the paint having peeled off long ago. The spelling revealed that there had been work here for at least a couple of years after reunification.

Spread across several acres, and slowly being reclaimed by nature, were abandoned factory buildings. Production, cold storage, storage halls, smoke-house. Not a single pane of glass was still whole. Bulk waste was stacked inside almost up to the ceiling, the overgrown roads and paths were lined by the left-overs cast off by the city. Thunder collected over the sea, and rumbled towards the land as a warning. The drops fell heavier. Then the heavens suddenly opened their floodgates. Judith ran to the storage hall IV and reached the awning over the ramp. The pelting rain battered the treetops.

She leaned against the wall, where the plaster was peeling, and pulled out her package of tobacco. Had she smoked her first cigarette here? She had been fourteen. Old enough to work after school. Subbotnik, Soviet-style voluntary work. There had been no question about its voluntary nature. There was herring in tomato sauce until the cows came home. She had enjoyed the work. There were always twenty-four cans in a box. She didn’t know why it always had to be exactly twenty-four. Maybe it was a special kind of Advent calendar. She hadn’t touched a tin of fish since then. She rolled a cigarette. When she licked the papers and looked back up, the girl was standing in front of her.

The child wore a white summer dress and was sopping wet. On her feet she wore cheap, bright pink plastic clogs, the kind tourists bought on holiday and threw away when they got home. The girl stood in front of the loading ramp, letting herself get soaked, and said: ‘Hello.’

So it hadn’t been a hallucination after all. She climbed up the loading ramp like a weasel and stood next to Judith. She was up to her shoulder. A thin, tall girl with freckles and unnaturally fair skin. A mythical creature who seemed at one with the cloud-bursts and the overgrown ruins.

‘My name is Judith.’

‘My name is Chantal.’

Chantal. Who inflicted these names on children?

‘You were at the home?’ the child asked. ‘I’m there too.’

Judith lit her cigarette. Children in homes were used to worse things than the sight of an adult smoking.

‘How long?’ Judith asked.

‘Only for a couple weeks. Until the people at social services say I can go back home. My father hit my mother. And me, too. Look.’

She pushed aside the strap of her summer dress. Judith recognised the healed scars and welts on the skinny shoulder.

‘Shit,’ Judith said.

The girl put the strap back. She didn’t appear to have a big problem with the scars. At least not with the visible ones.

‘And what’s it like?’

‘OK. If my mother could be there it’d be really good.’

‘Is there still a cellar?’

The child looked at Judith in surprise. ‘You mean the bicycle cellar?’

‘The coal cellar,’ Judith answered. Every era had its own cellar. It didn’t always have to be deep underneath the surface.

‘They don’t heat with coal. I think there’s a machine in there, and an oil tank. Mrs Langgut kicked you out. Why?’

‘Because I didn’t ask if I could come. And you don’t do that.’

‘Why did you want to come?’

‘Because I wanted to talk to someone from back then. From when I was at the home.’

‘Why?’

‘Because . . . it used to be something like my home.’ Inside Judith bristled at the idea of using that word even vaguely in that context. ‘I was there for ten years.’

‘Ten years?’ Chantal’s eyes widened. For her it was a lifetime. An eternity. ‘Why?’

‘Because my mother couldn’t take care of me and died.’

‘And your father?’

Judith smoked and watched a wet crow hopping over an old blanket, searching for something.

‘I don’t have one,’ she finally answered.

Chantal already had another ‘why’ on the tip of her tongue, but kept it to herself this time. She ran her clogs over the ribbed surface of the loading ramp.

‘Another woman came who had once lived there,’ she said. ‘It was only last week. She was in the building at night and was caught and she screamed and they took her away.’

‘Who?’ Judith asked.

‘An ambulance. With lights.’

‘I mean, who was the woman?’

Chantal raised her narrow shoulders. ‘No idea. She was old. And really terrible. She took dirt and threw it at the house and then rubbed it over herself. Creepy.’ Chantal shuddered.

‘Do you know where they took her?’

‘To the Stasi home.’

‘Where?’

‘You know, where the criminals come from.’

‘You mean prison.’

‘No. The Stasi home. There’s lots of old people there.’

Judith flicked the cigarette butt down into the dripping weeds. Chantal could only mean a nursing home or a retirement home. There weren’t any Stasi homes. There wasn’t any Stasi anymore.

‘How do you know that the woman was from back then?’

‘The first thing she did was go to the fence. Just like you.’

The rain dissipated. A muffled, stale smell emerged from the inside of the storage hall.

‘Where’s this home?’

‘Down by the old harbour. Behind the tracks. We used to play there. But now we’re not allowed over there. Everything is fenced off, and dogs patrol at night.’

‘Well then, it’s better to steer clear of that. That’s dangerous.’

Judith jumped off the ramp. Chantal followed her.

‘And you’re not allowed to play here either. Didn’t you see the sign over there? Caution!’

She pulled Chantal aside, who was just about to step on one of the steel floor panels covered by weeds.

‘They are loose down there. If you fall in you’ll never get out.’

‘OK.’

Chantal didn’t look like she would take the advice seriously.

‘How old are you?’

‘Ten.’

Judith smiled. You were invincible at ten.

They separated up at the road. Chantal ran quickly down the wet cobblestones, so quiet on plastic soles that Mrs Langgut certainly wouldn’t hear her when she secretly slipped back into the Waldfrieden. Judith waited a couple of minutes before turning over the van’s motor and letting it slowly roll down the hill towards the old harbour.

A Stasi home. Amazing what kids managed to make out of whispered words and rumours. The road lead directly into the woods, took a curve to the left and went steeply downhill. Along the road there were the remnants of the restricted area. Concrete shafts, iron plates, wire mesh. This far and no further. Forgotten barbed wire hung limply from the tops of the poles. She remembered how the harbour was one of the best-guarded areas of the city. The sea shone through the woods, grey as a wool blanket pulled over the sky. Heavy drops were still falling on the windscreen but they came from the treetops, not the sky.

The path became even bumpier and led directly to the old piers. Judith drove past an abandoned little guard-house with barred doors. A sign on a concrete pole was labelled ‘Harbour Border.’ She rumbled over the potholes and old, rusty rails. It had to be somewhere here. The track wasn’t paved with asphalt, just made up of large concrete plates, and led down behind Sassnitz along the water and to the right toward Mukran, but then was lost in that direction in barren wasteland after just a few metres.

Judith turned off the engine, got out and went over to a small path as close to the water as the old foundations allowed. She looked to the north: the view went past several sheds to the former ferry terminal. Misty screens of fog hung over the woods and the roofs of the buildings. The city was steaming. The rectangular silhouette of the spa hotel sat enthroned over the shore.

She looked to the south: wasteland. In the distance there were a couple of cranes, a passenger ship was approaching from the sea and kept course for the new piers and terminals. Chantal had been mistaken.

Judith turned around, went back, and was just about to get back into the van when she stopped, stock still. On the other side of the path, in the woods, surrounded by a thick green hedge and a rusty fence, lay a pretty white house. Perhaps it had been a hotel once. Maybe an official agency – the old harbour master’s office? Or a sanatorium.

Judith slammed the open car door. Or maybe an old folks’ home.

Massive lilac and cherry laurel bushes almost completely covered the fence. As far as Judith could determine, the property couldn’t be accessed from the shore. As she approached she heard dogs barking.

There was a house. There were dogs.

Judith turned around and went back to the van. She wouldn’t make the same mistake that she had with Mrs Langgut. She would shower, change clothes, and then come back well prepared.

The air smelled fresh. She suddenly realised what was missing. The stench of diesel and fish.