But what on earth could I do now? My mind went back to Nick’s contacts. What if the Americans could help get him out? Some sort of deal. They did those from time to time: a man sent each way across the border, overseen by someone from the League of World Nations. But I could hardly walk into the American Embassy and ask. There had to be another way.

The more I tried to work it out, however, the more I realized how exhausted I was; and, in the end, I fell asleep without even undressing.

21

Sources within the RGB say the constant jostling for influence among the senior members of the Communist Party is crippling the country. Economic output is grinding to a halt, as internal bickering means state industries are run by bureaucrats with no experience of managing them. The result has been those companies teetering on the verge of collapse. As winter bites, shortages of food and fuel are already being felt. Scenes of great hardship are now expected in what was once the most fertile part of our island.

News broadcast, Radio Free Europe,
Wednesday, 19 November 1952

I woke just after eight o’clock the next morning, stiff in my clothes. I stretched and rubbed my limbs, but it did little good.

Nick had said that the concussion would take a couple of days to ease, and I lay there trying to recall more of that day when I had found Lorelei. I closed my eyes and pictured her there in the damp room as the light played on her skin. Her hands seemed to lift up to me and I looked deep into her glittering, searching eyes. But all that came back to me was a sense that there had been words on her lips: a cry of warning or distress. And what the words had been, I couldn’t tell. I went to the bathroom and examined my face in the mirror above the sink. I asked myself how fanciful it was, that sense that I had that the division of our nation had in some way seeped into my own body, to divide me from my memories? Or was I just a silly woman wanting to blame her own failings on a political situation that had absolutely nothing to do with them? Well, maybe. But what did Socialism mean if not a connection between the individual and the state, one reflecting the other? At least on some level, even the most basic animal level of all, the injury I had sustained, the one that had beaten my memory from my mind, had been a result of the changes in how we lived – of the suspicions that we were forced to foster. The doubts about my own husband that had drawn me to Lorelei’s house that day. On that level, it was no absurdity. It was a hard, physical fact.