Standing in the Shadows

John Hatfield

Description

East Berlin, 1983.One dissident rock band. One plan to defect to the west. One traitor.Udo Dirkmeyer, the charismatic and feckless Mick Jagger of East Germany, is having a tough time of it. It's hard enough being an outlaw rockstar in the world's harshest police state. But his relationship with Gerda, the band's beautiful lead singer, is going nowhere and his oldest friend,Thomas, has become a paranoid, alcoholic wreck. Worse still, his arch-rivals, the state-sponsored Poodles, are doing really well while Udo hasbeen banned from every major venue in the entire country.Smiling in the face of the constant surveillance and persecution from the notorious Stasi is proving exhausting. But then Udo discovers that one ofhis bandmates is an informer, intent on destroying him. It's enough to tip even the eternally optimistic Udo over the edge. Just as his life is on theverge of falling apart, his band gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance to escape to the West. Suddenly, his dreams of making it big in the free worldhave a chance of coming true. Udo is determined to escape and make it work but the secret police and his treacherous bandmate will not lethim go that easily.

Sujets

• Psychological thriller
• Thriller
• Berlin

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838599201
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 John Hatfield

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.


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ISBN 978 1838599 201

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To Pauline
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
Acknowledgements
One
Looking back, I reckon I can pinpoint the exact moment when I knew that our little band was doomed. On a dismal November afternoon in 1983, the paranoia and tension that had been simmering for months finally exploded, shattering the last remnants of any trust and solidarity. It happened as we were all bouncing and bumping our way down some desolate Brandenburg country road. The six of us on our way to yet another futile gig, precisely four kilometres north east of the middle of nowhere.
It wasn’t meant to be like this, of course. When I had formed the Udo Dirkmeyer Group twenty years earlier – as a gauche, gangly teenager – it was with the humble ambition of being a massive international success and getting out of East Berlin, preferably in a westerly direction. Now, approaching forty, and still a truculent overgrown adolescent in the all-seeing eyes of the State, I was further than ever from realising that dream. To be honest, though, a lot of that had been my own fault.
In the course of those two decades the band, modestly and imaginatively named after my good self, had seen more personnel changes than Joe Stalin’s back office at the height of the Terror. However the current class of ’83 weren’t a bad bunch, if you ignored their massive personal shortcomings.
Jurgen was driving, squinting through his long fringe and a grimy windscreen that was more opaque than transparent. He was intent on making our crappy little Barkas van handle as if it were one of the new Audi Quattros that everyone on the other side was getting so excited about. That was Jurgen’s attitude all over; I might have to sit in a cheap East German copy, but I can still behave like a getaway driver for the Chicago Mafia. He read too many books, that boy.
Big Dieter, our gentle giant of a drummer, was wedged beside Jurgen in the front passenger seat, his long legs jammed against the dashboard. He was allegedly navigating but he could have been using a medieval map of Asia Minor for all the success we were having in finding our destination. Meanwhile the rest of us were crammed into the back with the instruments and amps, feeling every pothole in the road. Even in the cramped confines of the van, the girls, Jutta and Gerda, had managed to sit as far apart as possible. At least the infernal din of the Barkas’ engine meant that there were no awkward silences or, indeed, silences of any kind at all.
Thomas, our rhythm guitarist and the only other remaining member from the original group, was sprawled across the bench seat at the back. He had been drinking his homemade schnapps neat from a flask since our departure from Prenzlauer Berg, the capital’s bohemian ghetto, and was now at the stage where his blood group was white spirit positive. He may have been a former physicist but he knew nothing about chemistry – the stuff was disgusting.
Thomas sober was increasingly depressed, but Thomas drunk was another story altogether. He would pick a fight with his reflection or any convenient inanimate object. So, really, he was more to blame than me for the big argument.
I can’t really remember how this particular shouting match got started but it probably followed the familiar pattern. Some random aspect of life in our little socialist paradise would be mentioned and that would light my fuse. I had no control over it. Soon the air would be thick with industrial-strength sarcasm and weapons-grade vitriol, all aimed at the old men who ran our wee country as if the entire population were their slightly-retarded grandchildren.
Anyway, I was happily ranting away, giving the band the benefit of the deranged ramblings of my diseased mind – the thoughts of chairman Udo as Gerda called them – when I hit on the topic of informers.
Now, in a country like ours, this is a pretty vexed subject. You have to be careful with whom you discuss these things because one slip of the tongue can get you a trip down to Normannenstrasse, which is where the Stasi hang out. I’d been subjected to my fair share of harassment and psychological persecution over the years – it’s part of the job description for any self-respecting dissident rock star – but recently the interference into my personal life seemed to have been ramped up a couple of notches.
What with 1984 looming, I had decided a few weeks earlier that it would be a great idea to hold a special party to celebrate this auspicious but ominous date. Not least because we had pretty much been living a version of 1984 here for the best part of 30 years. In fact, ever since they put down the East Berlin uprising. I told the band about this brainwave – in confidence – and they were all up for it, being the right bunch of feckless, bohemian ne’er-do-wells that they were.
But that’s when the fun started. Suddenly I found that none of our usual venues – the Cosmonaut Café for example – were available. All were, suspiciously, fully booked. Undaunted, I decided to hold the party at my flat in Belforterstrasse but, what do you know? A certain Herr Geissler from the housing authorities just happened to turn up to inform me that the building was not sound and that occupants would have to vacate the premises over the holidays while they did a structural survey for safety reasons. For the previous decade they’d been happy enough for the whole place to collapse on me but now they were concerned. Hmmm.
It went on. Next, I got a visit from my cousin Jens. Now Jens is a nice guy but he is also a card-carrying member of the Socialist Unity Party (that’s the Commies to you) and the sort of person who irons a crease in his stonewashed jeans.
Jens tends to time his visits to coincide with spikes in my allegedly anti-social behaviour. (Remember that in “our GDR”, as the newsreaders so chummily call it, crossing the road on the red man is a form of treason). So when Jens and his regulation-length hair popped round with half of a homemade apple strudel to see cousin Udo, and then invited me pointedly to a New Year’s get-together at my Auntie Eva’s, I knew there was foul play afoot.
This had all been playing on my mind as we trundled through the Brandenburg landscape in a failing light with the temperature plunging rapidly towards zero. So, since the glow from Jutta’s roll-up wasn’t doing the trick, I warmed myself with a bit of heartfelt rhetoric. Yelling gently above the racket from the engine, I slipped in the observation that there might be an informer in the band, an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (informal co-worker) as I later found out the Stasi liked to call them in their wacky, knockabout style.
Well, that went down about as well as a fart gag in a Honecker speech. Suddenly Thomas was yelling “Stop the bus, stop the bus”, yanking the back door open and half-jumping, half-falling out onto the tarmac, which was as rutted as the barren fields on either side. Luckily the Barkas has a top speed equivalent to a brisk walk and Jurgen managed to pull up, appropriately, next to a derelict old bus shelter that looked as if it had last seen passengers at some time during the Weimar Republic.
Thomas stood there in the middle of the road, flask of schnapps in his left hand, right hand pointing accusingly at me as I climbed down from the van.
“I am not a fucking informer, alright.”
Well, I hadn’t actually accused him personally of being one, so I felt it only fair to point this out.
“I didn’t say you were,” I replied. As devastating one-liners go it wasn’t quite Bertold Brecht but it was, nevertheless, swift. I should have left it there but, of course, I didn’t. I’m Udo Dirkmeyer, of the eponymous group, and winding people up at inappropriate moments is a house speciality.
“That’s your guilty conscious talking, Thomas. Pisshead.” To be honest that last remark may have been accurate but I suppose it was a bit gratuitous. Anyway, it certainly did not help restore the calm and order so beloved of our state security service.
“Me, guilty!” Thomas paused an