Read Online The Darkness of Wallis Simpson by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online

woollen serge, because this was December in East Berlin. While packing his knapsack, Hector S. had told himself that he would have to travel in his uniform, that he had no choice; he didn’t possess any other really warm clothes and where he was going, it would be as cold as death.
    He was a man with a narrow frame, not tall, with pale anxious eyes. Women thought him beautiful, but found him frigid. He was twenty-eight and he’d only slept with one girl. This one girl was his sister, Ute.
    Ute kept a pet swan in a lean-to hutch on the apartment estate. She’d named it Karl and fed it on sunflower seeds. Morning and evening, she’d let it out to peck the grass and it allowed her to stroke its neck. There were no ponds or rivers in Prenzlauer Berg, the suburb of East Berlin where they lived, and when Hector informed Ute that he was leaving for Russia, she asked him to take her and Karl with him. But he told her firmly that this was impossible, that he had to go alone with almost nothing, just his bicycle and a bag of tinned food and his rifle. He told her he couldn’t travel that vast distance – right across Poland, where he knew that hatred of all Germans, West or East, still endured – in the company of a swan.
    Ute took this badly. She clutched at Hector’s arm. She was already imagining the beautiful Russian lake where Karl would remember the lost art of swimming.
    â€˜Hecti,’ she said, ‘don’t leave us behind!’
    Hector S. disliked emotional scenes. When their mother, Elvira, had died in 1980 Hector had basked in the wonderful quiet that descended suddenly upon the apartment. Now, he told Ute that it was different for her, that she would be able to fit into the new Germany and that she had nothing to be afraid of. She began to cry in exactly the same way Elvira used to cry, grabbing two hunks of her hair and saying she hated being alive. Hector walked away from her. One part of him wanted to say: ‘When I get there, Ute, I promise I will send for you’ but another part of him wanted to remain as silent as the tomb, and on this occasion it was the tomb that prevailed.
    Hector’s father, Erich, on the other hand, didn’t try to persuade his son to take him with him; neither did he try to persuade him not to leave. All he said was: ‘A frog in a well says that the sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well, but now you have to become something else, Hector, and see the whole fucking sky. In the old imperial fairy tales, frogs turn into princes, eh?’ And he slapped his knee.
    Hector replied that he had no intention whatsoever of turning into a prince.
    â€˜So,’ said Erich, ‘what are going to become?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ said Hector. ‘Don’t ask me yet.’
    â€˜All right,’ said Erich, ‘but remember, when you walk away from one place, you are inevitably walking towards another.’
    â€˜I know that,’ said Hector. ‘That’s why I’m going east.’
    What should Hector take with him? This question troubled him more than many others. His knapsack wasn’t large. It was the bag in which he’d carried his lunch or his supper, depending on which shift of Guard Duty he’d been working. He would make more room in it by attaching his water bottle to the outside of it. Then there were the two saddlebags on his bicycle, but that was all.
    He decided, eventually, to line the saddlebags with underwear and socks. Then he put in jars of dill pickles and some plastic cutlery. He tucked these in with maps of Poland and the Brandenburg Marshes. He added a compass made in Dresden and five boxes of matches. The knapsack he filled almost entirely with tinned meat, wrapped in a woollen sweater. There was room for a torch and two spare batteries, a notebook and a pen. He put in a solitary lemon, a precious possession he’d been lucky enough to find in his local grocery store, and he