Free The Darkness of Wallis Simpson by Rose Tremain

up into the soil to make little holes for these bulbs?’
    â€˜This is a graveyard . . .’ began Hector.
    â€˜It is?’ said the youth. ‘Oh, I thought it was a Communist rubbish dump. It contains the scum who made our lives a misery and a farce for forty years. But it’s changing now, right? Every fucker in here was wrong ! And I tell you what they’re going to do with this place. They’re going to bring in the bulldozers and dig up these stiffs and use them to put out Russian reactor fires and then when they’ve vacated it, they’re going to—’
    Hector walked three paces to his right and picked up his rifle. The click the youth heard was the release of the safety catch. The click stopped the flow of words and the pale face looked blank once again.
    â€˜Leave,’ said Hector. ‘Leave now.’
    â€˜OK, OK,’ said the youth and put up his hands, one of which still held the bulb bag. The putting up of hands was a gesture which Hector had been trained to ignore when necessary. He aimed the rifle at the youth’s groin.
    â€˜Hey,’ said the youth, ‘don’t kill me! I know you bastards. Don’t kill me!’
    â€˜Go then,’ said Hector. ‘Go.’
    The youth tried to walk away backwards, keeping his eyes on Hector’s gun. He stumbled over a grave and fell down, and the bag of bulbs dropped out of the hand with which he tried to save himself. Then he got to his feet and ran.
    So there were no confidences shared with Elvira, nothing to make her lick her lips, or bring on one of her storms of weeping. And Ute wasn’t left behind, but was carried onwards in Hector’s heart.
    Hector was sitting now in a café in Marzahn, the last housing estate in East Berlin, built to accommodate 160,000 people in 60,000 apartments, 2.6 humans to a unit. Beyond Marzahn were the Brandenburg Marshes and the wide open sky.
    Hector had come to the café because after what happened at the cemetery, he’d started to feel chilly. He sat at a plastic table with his hands round a cup of coffee and the life of the café went on as if he weren’t there. He hoped that, in Russia, people would talk to him more, in whatever language they could muster. He really didn’t want these familiar small sufferings – feeling cold inside, being ignored by people in public – to go on for the rest of his life. But nor would he ever pretend to be something other than what he was. It wasn’t his fault if ideologies had a finite lifespan, if his world was falling away like flesh from a bone, a little more each day. He’d been a Communist and a patriot. He wanted to stand up in this cheap Marzahn café and say: ‘My name is Hector S. and, to me, the word “patriot” is not a dirty one.’
    He sat in the café for a long time. He smoked four Karos. He went to the toilet and pissed and washed his face and hands in warm water. He stole a wedge of paper towels and put them into his overcoat pocket. He’d been told by a colleague that one of the marvels coming to East Germany in the near future would be toilet rolls printed with crossword puzzles.
    Then he went out into the early afternoon and saw that it was later than he’d imagined and that a few lights were coming on in the tower blocks. Brought up to abhor waste, Hector admired the way East Germans used electricity. Light looked normal here. Across the wall, he’d seen it become more and more startling and chaotic. On the long night shifts, he used to stare at all the rippling and blinking neon and wonder if it could, in the end, by reason of its absolute pointlessness, create blank spots in the human brain.
    Now, he was leaving all the city light behind. It would hang in the sky at his back for a while and he’d be able to turn round and see its faint glow and say, ‘That’s Berlin.’ And then it wouldn’t even be a glow and the