East German Police Girl

Natalia Pastukhova

Description

A young lad stealthily posts anti-regime posters up in a small East German town. It is 1955. The search for him leads to his innocent sister's unjust death. A young police lass - threatened with sexual abuse by a high-ranking officer from Berlin - seizes the opportunity to flee to the West. A ghastly female police informant is by implication, likened to Judas Iscariot.Entangled with this is a police chief's bitterness and grief over the girl he has always loved, but who would never accept him.

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 26 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839525018
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published 2022
Copyright © Natalia Pastukhova 2022
www.theeastgermanpolicegirl.com
The right of Natalia Pastukhova to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership Ltd, 10b Greenway Farm, Bath Rd, Wick, nr. Bath BS30 5RL
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-500-1 ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-501-8
Cover design by Kevin Rylands Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK
This book is printed on FSC certified paper
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This poignant tale came to me through my grandfather, a signals officer who was stationed near Weimar in the fifties.
I am also deeply indebted to Peter Morris for his scrupulous and indefatigable efforts to give my often stilted English a more even, natural and engaging form.
PROLOGUE
Come, let me tell you a story, hard and obscure, yet of great depth.
Its origin is twofold; one, a rebuffed lover who allowed bitterness to darken his heart; and two, some fools seeking a cache of hidden gold.
But, you ask, who am I? I am a Good Spirit who keeps watch over our characters, like the Lares or Penates of a Roman household; the gods of the hearth.
Our tale is set in December 1955, in the communist state of East Germany and the hard winter of that year.
CHAPTER ONE
The hilly Thuringian Forest lay snow-bound.
By eight o’clock – an hour before curfew – on this bleak and wintry December evening, almost everyone had retired to the refuge of their poor farmsteads and hovels. Spasmodic gusts scurried over the dark and benumbed land and only the distant snorting of a goods train echoed in the stillness.
A solitary figure in baggy trousers and a thick jacket neared the railway halt at the hamlet of Edstedt, where he lingered behind a rigid snow-powdered copse of holly as the puffing grew closer.
The soot-encrusted engine, silhouetted against the white landscape, made metallic clanking sounds and expelled rasps of steam. The blaze from its fire-box reflected off the glistening rails beneath it. Its string of tarpaulined wagons clunked rhythmically over the joints in the track.
When it had gone, the boy crossed the low platform to the wooden passenger shelter. He tugged off the outer pair of his two sets of mittens, extracted a home-made poster from an inside pocket and – after fumbling with a matchbox full of drawing-pins – stuck it up.
A stencilled stylised outline of a rose preceded some amateurish ill-aligned print: ‘BEFREI UNSER HEILIGES DEUTSCHLAND’ – ‘Free our sacred Germany’.
The lad knocked an icicle from the sagging roof, then retraced his half-obliterated boot-dents alongside a drift-submerged hedge.
In the lane which led to Essbach, his boots crunched the chalk-like snow. He padded softly past hoar-patterned fences and rime-etched sheds. A twinkling snowman grinned.
In the slumbering crystalline town a tenuous bluish mist shrouded the wooden and stone dwellings with their dim oblongs of light.
*   *   *   *
In Essbach that same evening – Tuesday December the thirteenth – a girl drew a curtain to one side.
A power-cut had engulfed the first-floor flat, though the gas-fire emitted a wavering pinkish light.
‘Kornhausgasse is in darkness too.’ She noted two dead spiders strung between the inner and outer pairs of tightly closed windows. ‘What shall we do? Something exciting ... or just the usual?’ She spun round with a quizzical, though dimpled, grin.
Lorenz Bauss sat on the edge of the bed. She perched herself beside him and fingered a roll of blubber on the back of his broad neck.
He smiled wryly. ‘Perhaps something unusual. After all that is a part of my body which seldom interests you.
How chapped your hands are.’ He took and kissed them.
She shrugged. ‘It’s the swarf from the gear-cutting at the works. I rubbed them on your neck to smear them with fat.’
Carine could tease easily and make him tractable.
She gathered up the playing cards.
Bauss was forty-seven and stout, but energetic when the fancy took him.
In the room were a bed, a sagging leather sofa, a coffee-table and a bookcase stuffed mostly with nineteen-thirties popular fiction. On it stood a lamp – with a dusty shade with tassels – a walnut-veneered wireless set and a pre-war telephone.
This telephone consisted of a green wooden box with a nickel-plated voice cup and an ear-piece which hung on an elevated hook. An oval brass plate read, ‘Siemens & Halske – Berlin’. It had no dial as it connected only to a manual exchange.
Its hemispherical bell jangled.
Bauss rose, went to it and lifted the ear-piece.
‘Connecting you.’
‘Herr Oberkommissar? Jörg here.’
‘Good evening, Lieutenant.’
‘Sir, Ziggi and Goneril have … ’
‘Stop!’ Bauss cut in. ‘Tell me in the morning.’
‘But you said to put you in the picture ... ’
‘Good night!’ The Police Chief replaced the ear-piece. Its weight drew down the spring-loaded hook and ended the call.
Yesterday some shifty officials from Berlin had appeared in Essbach and one was rumoured to be lurking in the town’s telephone exchange. ‘Party high-ups,’ he bristled.
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Heaven knows. There’s a thug in a spivish suit and two snooty women.’
Bauss was Head of the Border Police unit here, the Grenzpolizei . Whatever this dubious crew were up to, he dared not interfere. He had told his men though to keep an unobtrusive eye on them.
Carine lit a candle and brought in a tray with cups of coffee and two slices of bread spread with butter and treacle.
Lorenz looked glum.
She patted his puffy jowls. ‘Would it please Caligula if I peeled a grape for him?’
‘Reports of enemy activity. Go and investigate, Legate.’
‘And leave you sulking alone in the palace?’
This pretty lass from Liège, brought cheer to Bauss. Twenty-eight and displaced by the war, she had an attractively sculpted figure, a stylish gait and eyes which twinkled, either with happiness or sadness.
The lilac nimbus from the softly hissing gas-fire shone across the fluffless threads of the carpet.
‘So shall we go to bed … or shall we sit up so we’re not so tired in the morning?’
Sitting in a sloppy woolly, he shook his head with silent amusement, then blew out the candle.
‘Am I the light of your life, Lori?’
He nodded. ‘Forty watts at least.’
‘Is that enough?’
‘I nodded.’
‘Oh. Not just a spasm of your neck muscles?’
The town was still. The last tram had screeched by on Kornhausgasse half an hour before. He turned off the gas-fire and it faded with an orangy-crimson glow.
The hostile cold of the outside world would gradually re-enter through door-crack and window-pane, but another enemy lurked in the shadows too; a less physical one.
He had tried to hurt Isolde in lieu of her mother in revenge for those long-gone rejections, but due to some eerie mischance his plan had failed.
He chewed over half-forgotten curses. One, an archaic past participle for ‘roasted’, was short no doubt for, ‘May she be roasted in hell.’ Another, ‘Blocksberg’ stemmed from the saying, ‘Go to Blocksberg.’ This non-existent mountain was where he wished her to be entombed.
‘ Au lit .’ Carine preferred to make love in her native tongue.
‘ Roule ma poule ,’ retorted Lorenz.
She took off her knickers, but kept on her socks, dress and woollies and they flopped into bed, pulling up all five blankets and covers. They turned to embrace blindly in their snug invisible world.
She gripped his genitals. ‘ Avance, s’il te plaît .’
He stroked her hair then slid his plump fingers down onto her nicely-pointed breasts. In front of young men she would sometimes thrust them out. At least for the present though, she was his.
Carine longed to be physically loved as well as treated kindly.
After sex, he fell asleep.
She typically spent three nights a week with him and he gave her tins of food, extra clothes coupons and a little money in exchange.
After an hour she fell asleep and he awoke.
He recalled again the only girl he had truly and dearly loved. As in Plato’s story of the cave, he had briefly sighted the sun, but had then been forced to withdraw to an inner darkness.
‘Susanne Dettmann? My beloved Sussi?’ She had sensed that elusive life-and-death force too, so why had she rebuffed him? Why?
*   *   *   *
In Essbach’s only hotel, the Gasthaus Lindeneck, three rooms had been taken by the ‘visitors’ from Berlin.
In the poorly lit dining-room these guests ate capons, carrots and potatoes.
The sauce finally arrived.
‘Thank you for being patient,’ said the chef.
How do you know we’re being patient? We might be seething … ready to explode?’
He smiled uneasily and retired.
Brunhilde’s father – Balthasar Axt, State Treasurer – and Luise’s uncle – Minister for Harbours and Railways – had sent them here together with Edgar Joos.
On a simple street map, Joos drew a circle with a red crayon.
‘Malabar Terrasse?’ queried Luise.
‘Yes my lovely sugar-coated bun. Number six. Where the Stehrs once lived.’
‘So?’
‘Tomorrow, go there please and call on a lad by the name of Thilo Hengel … ’
There were some crepuscular movements in the unlit hallway.
‘Do we want the door open?’ asked Joos.
‘Shut it,’ said Luise.
‘Do you mean be quiet or close the door?’
The slinky young waitress brought in their cheese-cakes and coffees.
Joos sipped his. ‘This coffee’s homeopathic. “Weak” doesn’t come close.’