Stasiland Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Rolf Richardson

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

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  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  One

  If Johann Kästner had to die, he could not have chosen a better place. The burghers of Saxony were proud of their Upper Elbe scenery, far superior in their view to the more famous River Rhine. The Lorelei? Rubbish! Not a patch on the Bastei. That Kästner had also arranged for his demise to take place in one of their superb old paddle steamers was icing on the cake.

  Which vessel to choose? The fleet’s Methuselah, the Stadt Wehlen, built in 1879? Or the Meissen from 1885? Maybe the Kurort Rathen dating from 1896? Even the baby of the fleet, the 1929 Leipzig? There were nine possibilities.

  Of course I’m being frivolous in suggesting Kästner had any say in selecting where he wanted to shuffle off this mortal coil. It was pure chance, dictated by the Saxon Steamship Company’s timetable. Any premature death is a tragedy – and Johann was only 35 – but life is a joke anyway, so one might as well treat his end with levity.

  It was also pure chance that found me aboard the same vessel at the same time; an unlikely conjunction, but again, life is little more than a series of coincidences.

  For my presence there I blame Maggie, my ex-wife. We had spent the past twenty-five years blaming each other for just about everything, so why stop now? When our two children left the nest, the tenuous bonds that had kept us together finally snapped. Maggie stayed in the house, allowing me to keep the silver Porsche; an inequitable division of spoils, you might think, but by this time I was prepared to agree to almost anything to get her off my back.

  I could afford to be generous. If I had been unlucky in love, the gods had made up for it by allowing me some success in business. I won’t bore you with the details; but suffice it to say, I had enough stashed away to keep me in comfort until the day I received my centenary telegram from the Queen – or, more likely, an email from the King.

  Freed of the burdens of family and the need to earn a crust, I did a Peter Pan; regressed to youth. Every kid in the country now has their inalienable right to a Gap year, extended by some to a Gap lifetime. At the ripe old age of fifty-five, Ed Blake – that’s me – would join the Gap club; for however long I pleased and with the help of my trusty Porsche.

  The years had wrought some changes. I could now think of nothing worse than the teenage utopia of slumming it on a tropical beach, while listening to rap music and indulging in unlimited sex. My Gap would be more civilised, more cultural. The timing was perfect. It was early June and I would set out to explore the cradle of civilisation: the continent of Europe.

  I became a weather fanatic, every day studying the forecasts. What was the intention of that damned jet-stream? If it looked like funnelling depressions across northern Europe, I would dodge south of the Alps, where summers are more stable. But if a dry spell was in prospect over France, Benelux, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, that’s where I would start.

  So far I had been lucky; nothing worse than a thunderstorm over Bruges and some iffy weather in Koblenz. I liked to settle in one place for a few days and cover the local area before moving on. It was with this in mind that I had checked in to the Hotel Lindtner. The location? As I was destined to stay much longer than intended, under circumstances that were, to say the least, unusual, I’ll protect its anonymity and only say it lay on the River Elbe, somewhere between Dresden and the Czech border. Let’s just call it ‘Die Stadt’; The Town.

  Two

  Day one at the Lindtner had been devoted to the area’s main attraction, the Bastei: a rockface rising 600ft from the river. As this aspect was almost vertical and thus off limits to all but mountaineers equipped with crampons, ordinary tourists were directed round the back to a car park near the summit. From there we could take a series of walks through a jumble of weird sandstone monoliths, eventually to emerge high above the Elbe, with spectacular views.

  I had dutifully done this and returned to Die Stadt for a beer and snack lunch before exploring the town itself, which spread up the hill from a narrow shelf of land by the river. The temperature was in the mid-twenties; the sun was shining. With high season almost upon us, the main square was humming with humans intent on enjoying themselves. Maggie and my marital problems were a million miles away. This was the life!

  I perked up even more when enquiring at reception about a good place to have dinner. On duty was Frau Lindtner, whom I had not met until then and who asked to be called Trudi. From the surname I took her to be the owner, the hotel a family affair. She was a comfortably upholstered lady of average height, probably mid-fifties, with longish blonde hair. Had I been God, I might have designed her oval face with a less prominent nose and slimmed down that bone structure, but maybe it was just these imperfections that made her attractive. Or maybe, in my newly liberated state, I was promoting any female with an age still in double figures into a nymphette.

  Get a grip on yourself, Ed, I told myself. The lady in front of me was just an ordinary hotel owner, wearing a smart blue dress and the smile she lavished on every customer.
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  My German is adequate rather than brilliant, so when travelling in the old Western part, where English is often spoken better than in Britain, I tend to gravitate to my mother tongue. However, Trudi came from what had comically been called the German Democratic Republic. Any country that includes the word ‘democratic’ in its title is, by definition, the worst kind of dictatorship, and here the real rulers had been the secret police, the Staatsicherheitsdienst, known to one and all as the Stasi. Die Stadt had languished for 44 years in Communist Stasi-land, where the second language had been Russian; English that of the enemy. Youngsters were catching up fast, but older folk still found it hard, so Trudi abandoned her halting English and we fell back on her mother tongue.

  My hostess had recommended not only an excellent riverside restaurant for dinner, but also insisted I absolutely must take a trip on one of their famous paddle steamers. Upstream is best, she said. Past the Bastei, which you will now see from another angle; after that, riverside villages like Kurort Rathen. Get off at Königstein. Take the bus up to the castle, without doubt the most impressive in Germany. Was she a wee bit biased? And return by train. A wonderful day out.

  Not only was Trudi’s enthusiasm infectious, it was exactly the sort of day I would have chosen myself: nice scenery, a dash of culture and history, and a forecast of wall-to-wall sunshine. Eat your heart out, Maggie! This was bliss.

  Fortified by a solid night’s sleep and with expectations high, I arrived next morning on Die Stadt’s quayside. A frequent source of dispute is the amount of water that comes across the border, only a few miles upstream. The Czechs point out they have no control over the amount of precipitation the Almighty decides to pour over central Europe, while the Germans reply that flood damage could be reduced if the Czechs made some attempt at river management. Now, in June, with snow melt long gone and a preceding spell of dry weather, the river was at an acceptable level; high enough for steamers to ply their trade, low enough to be well away from habitation.

  It was on this gently sloping floodplain, between the town and landing stage, that we waited for our transport up-river. There were perhaps a couple of dozen people milling around, amongst them a father and young son, kicking a ball about. What primeval trigger makes booting a spherical object so irresistible? There’s no obvious survival benefit. But if a group of people even see a ball, they have to start belting it.

  It was all very casual. Just killing time. I happened to be nearby when a small, round, black and white object – hardly FIFA approved, but rolling nicely – began heading for the water. So I came to the rescue; kicked it back up the slope to Dad and his lad. Which prompted Dad to indicate they could do with another team member. “Die Stadt United”. Just until our steamer arrived.

  The father was a slim man in his thirties with a mop of unruly dark hair. The front of his black T-shirt had an image of a Teutonic knight, kitted out in full armour and spear; on the back, the words “Wacht am Rhein”; it looked like a tailor-made piece of clothing. His young number two wore a blue top with “HERTHA” in block capitals on the front; and “Die Alte Dame” on the back. No ambiguity here; the kid supported Hertha, a Berlin football club, known as Die Alte Dame – The Old Lady. If our steamer didn’t turn up soon, he’d be old enough to play for them.

  Sometimes the most innocent of actions can have far-reaching consequences. Had I known what was in store when I rescued this ball from its unintended drift towards Dresden, I might have thought twice about it. But, with no oracle to foretell the future, I simply did my good deed for the day.

  Twenty minutes later our transport came into view; a slender white vessel with light green lines running fore and aft. She had a black funnel with a white collar two-thirds of the way up. Propulsion was by a pair of paddles amidships. The words on the bows and around the paddle housing told us it was the ‘Kurort Rathen’.

  As we lined up to present our tickets, dad turned to me and held out his hand; Germans tend to be more formal than Brits: “Name’s Jonny. Thanks for joining us. Karl’s going to be Hertha’s striker, so needs all the practice he can get. Not that he stands much of a chance the way the damned Bundesliga’s going; all Turks and blacks from Africa. Don’t seem to want good German lads.”

  Not an argument to get involved in, so I let it go. Forgot about it as we scurried on board to find the best seats, which was not that easy because the boat had started her journey three hours and several stops earlier in Dresden.

  In this weather the saloons were almost empty, most people keen to enjoy the scenery from one of the open decks. I managed to find a seat up front, where there was no canopy, and sat down to enjoy the ride.

  As Trudi had forecast, we soon passed the Bastei. I craned my neck to see where I had been the previous day. We then stopped at Kurort Rathen, our ship’s home port; ‘Kurort’ means ‘Cure Place’ – a health resort or spa. In the sunshine it looked an attractive spot, with turreted lookouts on a rocky outcrop and a row of sunshades hosting a clutch of beer drinkers. We moored next to the ‘Bergland’: a ferry?

  After a quick exchange of passengers we left Kurort Rathen for Königstein, where I would be getting off to visit what Trudi had described as ‘the best castle in Germany’. After that, a train back to base.

  I started to feel fidgety; fancied a change from gawking at scenery. During my initial hunt for a seat, I recalled passing the engine room, where the full works lay open for inspection.

  According to the blurb, it was an ‘oil-fed oscillating steam engine’, spotlessly maintained, with lots of copper piping and ancient instruments, the housing painted green and red.

  I left my seat and ambled back for another look at the engine room, but this time stared down in disbelief.

  Another sort of red, rather darker, was seeping from under a figure that lay face down on top of the Kurort Rathen’s immaculate works. His feet were spread out, arms hanging down, as if embracing the cogs and pistons. In large letters on his T-shirt were the words “Wacht am Rhein”.

  It was my football friend, Jonny. Bile rose in my gullet. The paddles were throbbing away, driven by… what was it again? An oscillating steam engine. Jonny was oscillating on top, in a macabre parody of the sexual act. With no apparent effect on the engine’s efficiency.

  I was absurdly slow on the uptake. Just stood there, mesmerised. Those words stared back at me: “Wacht am Rhein”: Watch on the Rhine. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  Why was I fixating on some weird words when I was confronted by a much stranger puzzle? What, in God’s name, was Jonny doing, apparently very dead, in the Kurort Rathen’s engine room?

  Movement beside me signalled I was no longer alone.

  “Jesus!” It was one of the crew, a beer paunch wrapped in a grey shirt, jowly face on top. I put him in his forties, thinning black hair and dark eyes; a night club bouncer going to seed.

  He looked at me, appalled. Gasped: “What the fuck have you done?”

  “What have I done…?

  It took some seconds for the extent of my predicament to sink in.

  Three

  “He has a son,” I said, pointing at Jonny, who was quietly bleeding to death – actually, he looked to be already gone.

  Beer-Gut gave me a glance that said: ‘guy’s totally bonkers’. Who could blame him. It looked as though I was responsible and was now wittering away about some son. As I could scarcely abscond in mid river, Beer-Gut just shrugged and departed, no doubt to tell his captain the good news.

  Why was my attention now focussed on Hertha football club’s young hopeful? It was absurd. But my brain was darting off in strange directions. It seemed important that I locate Kurt… no, the name was Karl, before his dad’s death became common knowledge.

  I made my way swiftly to the aft deck. If I drew a blank there, he would have to be on the upper midships. I found him in the rearmost row of seats talking to a large matronly lady.


  “Here’s the Arsenal fan,” he announced as I approached.

  During our kickabout Karl had asked which club I supported. With no particular sporting allegiance, but having lived in the south of England, on a whim I’d picked Arsenal. In Karl’s eyes I was now a certified Arsenal fan.

  Having found Jonny’s son, I had no idea what to say. Could hardly blurt out that his father was lying face down in the engine room.

  In desperation, I knocked the ball back to his court and asked: “Seen your dad recently?”

  Karl shook his head, uninterested.

  “I think he was last seen chatting to another man,” volunteered the large lady who seemed to have befriended the boy.

  ‘Another man’; that might be interesting, so I tried Karl again. “Can you remember what your dad’s friend looked like?”

  Again he shook his head, this time more sulkily. From my time as father of a young boy – Karl must have been around ten – I remembered they could be tricky to handle.

  Further efforts to prize anything out of the lad were put on hold by our tour guide coming back on the public address. A bubbly young lady, she had been keeping us up to date on the passing highlights and here she was again; first in German, then in English:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we shall soon be arriving in Königstein, where many of you will be getting off to visit one of our famous castles. However, I have to advise you of a short delay, while the authorities come on board. Nothing to worry about and we’ll soon be on our way again. But until this inspection is complete, we ask you to stay in your seats. No standing in the gangways, please. For those leaving us at Königstein, we will tell you when you may disembark.”

  A curious buzz filled the air.

  “Wonder what this is all about,” mused Karl’s mother-figure.

  I kept my counsel. Not for me to say that anyone roaming around the gangways would be treated to a spectacle not in the tour script: a corpse in the engine room. I wondered how the crew would cover up this piece of unpleasantness.