survival but of loss. I could feel the hate welling inside me, inside the
regret, boiling over it, swallowing the regret, swallowing me. I hated this grey cleric, this grey stone building.
‘Wait, Herr Ritter, please.’
The pastor’s hand was on my arm; I hardly knew that I had turned away from him.
‘Please.’
The grey eyes locked on mine. A kind of pleading in them. And knowledge. The knowledge of loss, maybe hopelessness.
‘Sit a moment.’ He motioned me towards a pew, waited, watching, while I sat, as though I were an invalid.
‘My son and I have not been very welcoming, Herr Ritter, and you must forgive us. In the past,’ the faint smile again, ‘we
didn’t welcome the kind of visitors who called at our door. Nowadays we get callers at the weekend, mostly kind folk who have
given to our rebuilding fund. Sometimes they come to see how we’re spending their money, sometimes they’re just full of curiosity
about how we’re making out in
dunkel Deutschland.
’ Dark Germany: a phrase the Western newspapers used: I hated it. The pastor went on, smiling, ‘But we don’t getmany visitors from Brandenburg, early on a frosty Wednesday morning.’
I had come to ask a question, full of doubts about my own sanity in doing so. Yet, doubting and disbelieving, I heard myself
recounting my recent past to this backwater pastor. He was what I had once heard Frau Mertens, recalling her childhood in
Poland, describe to my mother as a ‘listening priest’; there were two kinds, Frau Mertens had said, the kind that knew nothing
but thought they knew everything and just kept talking at you, and the kind that knew something but wanted to know more and
just listened a lot.
Pastor Bruck was surely one of the listeners. He prompted me a little but for the most part he just listened to my story.
Of my school, my job. And back to my studies in Rostock. And further back to my days in the Freie Deutsche Jugend. And forward
again to my weekend with Dieter’s family at their villa in this very place, in Bad Saarow. And so to my school job. And November
1989. And the streets of the East blooming with Helmut Kohl’s flowers and, most recently, my dismissal for my undesirable
past.
To this day I don’t know why I should have told all these things to somebody I had never met before. Maybe it was the womblike,
tomblike building I found myself in. Or the weeks of silence, of isolation, since my mother had died. Or a delayed reaction
to her death. Whatever. The fact remains that I laid out the bones of my life, as I had never done before, in front of this
dog-collared officer of an organization which trafficked in lies and superstition.
When I had finished, my own breathing, shallow and raspy, sounded loud in the silence of the small church. I sat in the dark
pew with bowed head, my hands covering my face, as though to hide from the grey eyes. From the loin-clothed figure on the
crucifix behind the altar. From the inscription:
My Lord And My God
. Maybe from myself.
‘We all have a past, Herr Ritter.’
It’s not the past, I wanted to say, it’s this fucking present that’s the problem.
‘All of us have to live with what we have done and what we have failed to do.’
His words horrified me. Did this fellow think I had come here searching for forgiveness?
‘Is that why you’ve come looking for me, Herr Ritter? So that you might be forgiven?’
‘What?’
‘Is that why you have come here?’
I could hardly remember why I had come. It didn’t matter: I got no chance to answer.
‘Who cares why he’s here?’ It was Thomas, standing in the aisle beside his father. I hadn’t heard him come into the church,
didn’t know how long he’d been there or what he’d heard.
‘He’s one of the bastards who made our lives a misery.’ Fury unleashed in the growled words. ‘He’s one of those bastards who
broke down our door in the middle of the night and then broke your