53
The Franck family travelled to Hungary in two Trabant cars. They were going on holiday. Hungary was a popular summer destination for East Germans who could afford the petrol.
As far as they could tell, they were not followed.
They had booked their holiday through the Tourist Office of the East German government. They had half expected to be refused visas, even though Hungary was a Soviet bloc country; but they had been pleasantly surprised. Hans Hoffmann had missed an opportunity to persecute them: perhaps he was busy.
They needed two cars because they were taking Karolin and her family. Werner and Carla were madly fond of their granddaughter, Alice, now sixteen. Lili loved Karolin, but not Karolin’s husband, Odo. He was a good man, and he had got Lili her present job, as administrator of a church orphanage; but there was something forced about his affection for Karolin and Alice, as if loving them was a good deed. Lili thought a man’s love should be a helpless passion, not a moral duty.
Karolin felt the same. She and Lili were close enough to share secrets, and Karolin had confessed that her marriage had been a mistake. She was not miserable with Odo, but nor was she in love with him. He was kind and gentle, but not sexy: they made love about once a month.
So the holiday group was six people. Werner, Carla and Lili took the bronze car and Karolin, Odo and Alice went in the white one.
It was a long drive, especially in a Trabi with a 600cc two-stroke engine: six hundred miles all across Czechoslovakia. The first day took them to Prague, where they stayed overnight. When they left their hotel, on the morning of the second day, Werner said: ‘I’m pretty sure no one is following us. We seem to have got away with it.’
They drove to Lake Balaton, fifty miles long, the largest lake in Central Europe. It was tantalizingly close to Austria, a free country. However, the entire border was fortified by 150 miles of electric fence, to prevent people escaping from the workers’ paradise.
They pitched two tents side by side at a campsite on the southern shore.
They had a secret purpose: they were going to meet Rebecca.
It was Rebecca’s idea. She had spent a year of her life looking after Walli, and he had succeeded in giving up drugs. He now had his own apartment near Rebecca’s in Hamburg. In order to care for him, she had turned down a chance to stand for the Bundestag, the national parliament; but when he got well, the offer had been renewed. Now she was an elected member, specializing in foreign policy. She had travelled to Hungary on an official trip, and seen that Hungary was deliberately attracting Western holidaymakers: tourism and cheap Riesling were the country’s only means of earning foreign currency and reducing its massive trade deficit. The Westerners went to special, segregated holiday camps, but outside the camps there was nothing to stop fraternization.
So there was no law against what the Francks were doing. Their trip was permitted, and so was Rebecca’s. Like them, she was coming to Hungary for a budget holiday. They would rendezvous as if by accident.
But the law was merely cosmetic in Communist countries. The Francks knew there would be terrible trouble if the secret police found out what they were up to. So Rebecca had arranged everything clandestinely, through Enok Andersen, the Danish accountant who still frequently crossed the border from West Berlin to East to see Werner. Nothing had been written down and there were no phone calls. Their greatest fear was that Rebecca would somehow be arrested – or even just kidnapped by the Stasi – and taken to a prison in East Germany. It would be a diplomatic incident, but the Stasi might do it anyway.
Rebecca’s husband, Bernd, was not coming. His condition had deteriorated and his kidneys were malfunctioning. He was working only part-time, and could not travel far.
Werner straightened up from hammering in a tent peg to say quietly to Lili: ‘Take a look around. They didn’t follow us here, but maybe they felt they didn’t need to, because they had sent people on ahead.’
Lili strolled around the site as if exploring. The campers at Lake Balaton were cheerful and friendly. As an attractive young woman, Lili was greeted and offered coffee or beer and snacks. Most tents were occupied by families, but there were some groups of men and a few of girls. No doubt the singles would find one another over the next few days.
Lili was single. She liked sex and had had several love affairs – including one with a woman, which her family did not know about. She had the same maternal instincts as other women, she supposed, and she adored Walli’s child, Alice. But Lili was put off the idea of having children of her own by the dismal prospect of raising them in East Germany.
She had been refused a place at university, because of her family’s politics, so she had trained as a nursery nurse. She would never have been promoted if the authorities had had their way, but Odo had helped her get a job with the church, where hiring was not controlled by the Communist Party.
However, her real work was music. Along with Karolin, she sang and played guitar in small bars and youth clubs, often in church halls. Their songs protested against industrial pollution, destruction of ancient buildings and monuments, clearing of natural forests, and ugly architecture. The government hated them, and they had both been arrested and cautioned for spreading propaganda. However, the Communists could not actually be in favour of poisoning rivers with factory effluent, so they found it difficult to take drastic action against environmentalists, and in fact usually tried to co-opt them into the toothless official Society for Nature and Environmental Protection.
In the US, Lili’s father said, conservatives accused environment campaigners of being anti-business. It was more difficult for Soviet bloc conservatives to accuse them of being anti-Communist. After all, the whole point of Communism was to make industry work for the people rather than for the bosses.
One night Lili and Karolin had sneaked into a recording studio and made an album. It was not officially released, but cassette tapes of it in unmarked boxes had sold by the thousand.
Lili made a circuit of the campsite, which was occupied almost exclusively by East Germans: the camp for Westerners was a mile away. As she was returning to her family she noticed, outside a tent close to theirs, two men of about her own age drinking beer. One had receding fair hair, the other was dark with a Beatle haircut fifteen years out of date. The fair one met her eye and looked quickly away, which aroused her suspicion: young men did not generally avoid her eye. These two did not offer her a drink or ask her to join them. ‘Oh, no,’ she muttered.
Stasi men were not hard to spot. They were brutal, not smart. It was a career for people who craved prestige and power but had little intelligence and no talents. Rebecca’s first husband, Hans, was typical. He was little more than a nasty bully, but he had risen steadily and now seemed to be one of their top commanders, driving around in a limousine and living in a large villa surrounded by a high wall.
Lili was reluctant to call attention to herself, but she decided she needed to verify her suspicion, so she had to be brazen. ‘Hello, guys!’ she said amiably.
Both men grunted a perfunctory greeting.
Lili was not going to let them off easily. ‘Are you here with your wives?’ she said. They could hardly fail to recognize that as a come-on.
The fair one shook his head and the other just said: ‘No.’ They were not clever enough to pretend.
‘Really?’ This was almost confirmation enough, she thought. What were two single men doing at a holiday camp if not looking for girls? And they were too badly dressed to be homosexual. ‘Tell me,’ said Lili, forcing a bright tone, ‘where do you go for a good time in the evenings here? Is there anywhere to dance?’
‘I don’t know.’
That was enough. If these two are on holiday, I’m Mrs Brezhnev, she thought. She walked away.
This was a problem. How could the Francks meet Rebecca without the Stasi men finding out?
Lili returned to her family. Both tents were now up. ‘Bad news,’ she told her father. ‘Two Stasi men. One row south and three tents east of us.’
‘I was afraid of that,’ said Werner.