Midnight Hunter

He glances in the rearview mirror, and the tiniest flicker in his eyes lets me know that he is worried for me. Deeply worried. “It wouldn’t be worth putting you on trial. Too embarrassing for the Party. Your fate would be a bullet in the head and an unmarked grave.”

We drive north on our sham journey toward Szczecin. In a town called Myslibórz I watch him use a call box on the street, the door jammed open with his foot as he smokes a cigarette and talks. Beyond I can see the steep red tile roof of a cathedral rising into the blue sky. When he gets back into the car he’s got a small smile on his face, and we drive on.

There’s nothing to do but watch the road ahead through the windscreen and the road behind in the rear view mirror. And think. There’s been little time since the night of the bakery raid for me to consider all that has happened and what I want. Or rather, little opportunity to consider that I might have a say in my own future. But I’m choosing it now. I look at the gold ring on my finger. I’m married, in name if not in oath. Reinhardt. My husband.

I turn to him. “I want to stop taking the pill.” The birth control pill, the ones he thrust at me after telling me about Johanna.

He doesn’t say anything but I feel the tension in the car thicken. Finally, he asks, “You want children?”

Does he really dislike children so much? Indifference would be understandable, being the workaholic that he is. But seeing me with Frau Fischer’s grandson in my arms all those weeks ago seemed to provoke a visceral response. It was one of shock. Intense dislike. I can sense that same hostility now. “I want your children. I want us to have a family.”

“Let’s just get to Sozopol first.”

But I keep looking at him, trying to discern what he’s thinking. I’m not his captive anymore. I won’t be silenced. I’m sure there’s something he’s not telling me. Is he already a father, or did he lose a child? Was Johanna—

And then I remember what he said the night I first learned he had lost the woman he loved, after Ulrich nearly killed me. When the prisoners arrived at the camp an SS officer assessed each one, and either pointed recht and they were put to work, or links, and they were gassed immediately. She was sent to the left.

“Reinhardt,” I say softly. “At the camps, why was Johanna sent to the left?”

He flinches like I’ve struck him.

A memory from the schoolroom comes back to me. Something I read in our history textbook. “Prisoners were only sent to the left if they were too old or young or infirm to work.” I take a deep breath. “Or if they were carrying infants.”

I don’t want to push him about something so painful, so I sit silently, watching him as he drives. But my hands are clenched in my lap and I will him to speak. This isn’t going to work if he won’t confide in me.

Finally, after several miles he replies in a low voice. “The last letter I got from her in the prisoner of war camp… She got pregnant when I was on leave in Berlin, just before I was sent to Africa. The birth certificate, I think that was how she was found out. The registry office looked into her adoption records and discovered she was a Jew.”

So he knew she was carrying his child while he was a prisoner of war. His worry was for both of them, not knowing what was happening to his fiancé and his child on the other side of the world. Not knowing for years. Sending letter after letter but hearing nothing back. Imagining the worst fates for both of them. “Reinhardt, I’m so sorry.”

“When I started working for the Stasi I requested a copy of the child’s birth certificate. The father was listed as unknown. She must have realized she was going to be found out. I think she was protecting me.”

I open my mouth to say something but he cuts me off. “It was a long time ago. Let’s not talk about it.”

I don’t want to let it go. He hasn’t talked about this in twenty years and while I understand his pain he can’t go on letting his past haunt our lives. I see that his face is tight and closed so I let it go, for now.

Late in the afternoon we stop in a town a few miles south of Szczecin. He directs the car down a narrow, lonely laneway and I sit up a little in my seat, suddenly curious. He pulls in behind a neat little orange Skoda. I recognize the make, a Czechoslovakian car that I’ve seen occasionally on the streets of East Berlin. It has East German plates.

Reinhardt gets his handkerchief out and starts wiping down the steering wheel and the ignition. Catching on, I start to do the same on my side with the sleeve of my cardigan, removing my fingerprints from everything I’ve touched.

He gets out of the car and goes to the Skoda and removes a set of keys from the top of the front wheel. This must be the result of the phone call he made earlier, asking an agent to arrange this for him. Reinhardt puts a holdall of my clothes and a small case of his own into the trunk of the Skoda, and then gets to work with a screwdriver taking the plates off the Mercedes-Benz. Holding them with his fingers covered by his handkerchief he throws them far into the trees. Then he moves to get into the Skoda.

I stop him. “You didn’t do a very good job of wiping your prints—you closed the trunk with your bare hand. And they’ll find those plates. You should have buried them.”

He smiles at me and gathers me into his arms. “Well spotted. You would have made an excellent informant.” We kiss in the deep silence of the laneway, his mouth coaxing mine open and sending sparks through my body despite where we are and what we’re doing. Disappearing together. Running away.

I’m out of East Berlin, I remember with a fierce thrill. And I’m never going back.

Reinhardt breaks the kiss and strokes a forefinger down my nose. “As for the trunk and the plates, I know.”

He wants the car to be found. He wants the Stasi to know that we were in it and think that we were scared enough to not do a very good job of trying to conceal the fact. But I grab his hand as he goes to get into the Skoda again, another thought occurring to me. “The agent or informant or whoever arranged this car for us will hear about your betrayal. They’ll tell the Stasi what to look for.”

He smiles again. “Not eve

ryone I know loves the Stasi, Liebling.”

I give him a pert look and I want to reply that he has an answer for everything, but it would be churlish to complain about this in the circumstances.

The orange Skoda isn’t as roomy as the Mercedes-Benz but it’s got a better engine than most Eastern Bloc cars and when we get back to the main road Reinhardt puts his foot down. A Trabant couldn’t reach half this speed, and neither could a Wartburg, which Dad and I drove in once to go to—