‘Want some tea?’ Stephen suggested, and went to make it.
There floated about both of them the glow of an evening well spent, and perversely their warmth depressed my already low spirits to sinking point; like Scrooge at Christmas.
‘What you need,’ Stephen said, coming back and making an accurate diagnosis with a glance, ‘is half a pint of vodka and some good news.’
‘Supply them,’ I said.
‘Have a biscuit.’
He unearthed a packet from the recesses of the bookcase and cleared a space on the table for the mugs. Then, seeming to be struck by a thought, he began rigging up a contraption of drawing-pins and string, and upon the string he threaded his bedside alarm clock, so that it hung there loudly ticking on the wall. It was only towards the end of this seemingly senseless procedure that I remembered that that exact spot was the lair of the bug.
‘Better interference than nothing, if they’re listening,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And they get a right earful when the alarm goes off.’
The tea probably did more good than the unavailable vodka. A certain amount of comfort began to creep along the nerves.
‘All visitors have to be gone by ten-thirty,’ Stephen nonchalantly said.
‘Will they check?’
‘I’ve never known it.’
Halfway down the mug a modicum of order returned to my thoughts. Very welcome: like a friend much missed.
‘Gudrun,’ I said lazily, ‘would you cast your peepers over something for me?’
‘Sorry?’
I put down the mug and picked up the telex, and she noticed the up-to-date state of the hand I hadn’t used.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘That must really hurt.’
Stephen looked from my fingers to my face. ‘Are they broken?’ he said.
‘Can’t tell.’
I could scarcely move them, which proved nothing one way or the other. They had swelled like sausages, and gone dark, and it was a fair certainty the nails would go black, if they didn’t actually come off. It was no worse, really, than if one had been galloped on by a horse, and injuries of that order had been all in the day’s work. I smiled lop-sidedly at their horrified faces and handed Gudrun the telex.
‘Would you read all the stuff about Hans Kramer, and see if it means anything to you which it doesn’t to me? He was German, and you are a German, and you might see a significance I’ve missed.’
‘All right.’ She looked doubtful, but compliantly read right to the end.
‘What strikes you?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing very much.’
‘He went to eight different schools,’ I said. ‘Would that be usual?’
‘No.’ She frowned. ‘Not unless his family moved a lot.’
‘His father was and is a big industrialist in Dusseldorf.’
She read through the schools again, and finally said, ‘I think one of these places specialises in children who are... different. Perhaps they have troubles like epilepsy, or perhaps they are...’ She made tumbling motions with her hands, at a loss for the word.
‘Mixed-up?’
‘That’s right. But they also take people who have a special talent and need special schooling. Like athletes. Perhaps Hans Kramer went there because he was exceptionally good at riding.’
‘Or because seven other schools slung him out?’
‘Perhaps, yes.’
‘What about the doctors and hospitals?’
She read through the list again with her mouth negatively pursed, and finally shook her head.
‘Would they be, for instance,’ I said, ‘anything to do with orthopaedics?’
‘Bones and things?’
‘Yes.’
Her eyes went back to the list, but the no’s had it.
‘Anything to do with heart troubles? Are any of those people or places specialists in chest surgery?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
I thought. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘anything to do with psychiatry?’
‘I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t know much about...’ Her eyes widened suddenly and she looked rather wildly down at the list. ‘Oh my goodness...’
‘What is it?’
‘The Heidelberg University clinic.’
‘What about it?’
‘Don’t you know?’ She saw from my face that I didn’t. ‘Hans Kramer attended it, it says here, for about three months in nineteen seventy.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why is that important?’
‘Nineteen seventy... There was a doctor called Wolfgang Huber working there. He was supposed to be great at straightening out... mixed-up... children from rich families. Not little children... teenagers and young adults, our age. People who were violently rebellious against their parents.’
‘He seems to have managed it all right with Hans Kramer, then,’ I said. ‘Because isn’t that clinic the last on the list?’
‘Yes,’ Gudrun said. ‘But you don’t understand.’
‘Tell me.’
She could hardly frame the sentences, so intense were her thoughts.
‘Dr Huber taught them that to cure themselves they had to destroy the system which was making them feel the way they did. He told them they would have to destroy the world of their parents... He called it terrorism therapy.’
‘My God.’
‘And... and...’ Gudrun practically gasped for breath. ‘I don’t know what effect it had on Hans Kramer... but... Dr Huber was deliberately teaching his patients... to follow in the footsteps of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.’
Time, as they say, stood still.
‘You’ve seen a ghost,’ Stephen said.
‘I’ve seen a pattern... and a plan.’
The teachings of Dr Wolfgang Huber, I supposed, had been a sort of extreme extension of the theories behind the communist revolution. Destroy the corrupt capitalist system and you will emerge into a clean healthy society run by the workers. A seductive, idealistic dream which seemed always to appeal most to intellectuals of the middle class, who had both the brains and the means to pursue it.
Even in the hands of visionaries the doctrine had led to widespread killing. People like Dr Huber, however, had preached their gospel not to reasoning adults, but to already disturbed youth, and the result in widening ripples had been the Baader-Meinhof followers, the Palestinian Black September, The Irish Republican Army, the Argentinian ERP and The Japanese Red Army, with endless virulent offshoots among small groups like Croatians, South Moluccans, and Basques.
The place most free from terrorism was the land which still encouraged and nurtured it, the land where the seedling had raised its attractive head.
At the Munich Olympics, the world had awakened in a state of shock to the existence of the growing crop.
Eight years later, at the Moscow Olympics, someone was planning to carry the fruit home.
14
Stephen lent me his bed and went to share Gudrun’s, which seemed to please them both well, and was certainly all right by me. Foreign students were positively encouraged to lie together, he said sardonically, so that they didn’t go out and pursue the natives.
I shivered a good deal, and at the same time felt feverish, which boded ill.
I didn’t sleep much, though that didn’t matter. My hand throbbed like a pile-driver but my head was clear, and I much preferred it that way round. I spent most of the time thinking and wondering and guessing, and coming back to the problem of the next day. I had somehow got to take some positive steps towards staying permanently alive.
In the morning Stephen fetched some tea, lent me his razor, and bounced cheerfully off to a student breakfast.
He returned with some things like empty hamburger buns from the basement supermarket, and found me studying the long string of letters on the envelope which had held the telex.