The Contract

Memories bounced into Otto Guttmann's mind. Memories of a small boy laughing and bickering with his father and mother on picnics on the Lenin Hills outside the city. Memories of a child dressed and scrubbed for school. Memories of a teenager complaining of lack of attention.

Memories of the adulthood of his son and the pride of the boy that by his own efforts he had achieved selection to the interpreter school of the Foreign Ministry.

Such a short time ago, it seemed, since Otto Guttmann had seen the case open and the clothes and trivial possessions placed in it and then its top pushed down and zipped and the lock fastened, and he heard again the laughter and excitement before the departure to the airport. The first time that one of his children had left the nest that he had made of the flat after the death of their mother. He stared down at the bag and in his hand was the key that the messenger had given him and he knew that by himself he lacked the will to open the fastenings. Old men can cry, are permitted to weep, it is the young who must not demonstrate their feelings of sorrow at bereavement. The tears came slowly and then rained on and on.

Why had Willi been out on the lake in the darkness?

Why had he taken a boat when the harbours were deserted? Why could they not even produce a body for a father to bury?

His daughter had come into the room behind him, quiet as a gazelle, respectful of his mood. He started and shook himself as her hand linked under his arm and her fingers gripped at his elbow. A girl nearly as tall as himself. As the daughter of an old man should be, the prettiness of a picture, the strength of a buttress. She eased up on her toes and softly kissed his tearstained cheek.

'I heard the bell, but I didn't think it would be this, not so early.'

'They said that they would bring it today, they said that in the letter from the Ministry.'

The letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had scarred him. Hand delivered as the telegram had been five days previously. The letter had been confirmation of the unthinkable and had irrevocably destroyed the chance that some terrible mistake had been woven around the family.

'You want to open the bag, Father?'

'We should.' His voice had a husked control.

'The car will be waiting

'This once let it wait.'

Erica Guttmann carried the suitcase to her brother's bedroom, and her father followed. It was a tiny cubicle of a room that Willi had used, but then there had been no com- plaints; a three-bedroomed flat was a rare privilege, was the evidence that Otto Guttmann had been accepted into the elite of the establishment. A poster from the Olympic Games took pride of place on the wall in front of them, the symbol of the yachting competitions fought out in the Baltic city of Tallin. On another wall was a large framed colour photograph of a crew at work in the interior of a Soyuz space craft. A desk that was bare and cleaned. A radio with chrome finish on a low table and the pile of cassettes neatly stacked beside it. Curtains that had been drawn in the awful moments after the telegram had arrived. The single bed with gaudy coverlet where Willi would have slept the last two nights if he had returned with the delegation from Geneva.

The room of Otto Guttmann's son, the room of Erica Guttmann's brother.

She lifted the bag onto the bed.

'It is best that it's done now,' she said.

The key turned smoothly in the lock. The top garments spilled out and across the bed cover and with a careful discipline she began to make piles around the suitcase. Trousers and jackets, shirts and vests and underpants, ties and handkerchiefs. The shoes she put on the floor. She felt the brooding, wretched presence of her father, but did not look round at him, continued with her task, and then she sighed as she reached the bottom of the bag and the thick, dear plastic sack in which her brother's personal possessions had been packed. She bit at her lip, and emptied the contents onto the bed. A wallet that had been his father's present for his eighteenth birthday. A silver ink pen that had been Erica's gift at the last Christmas. A photograph frame that held in its three compartments pictures of father and sister and the three together in the sunshine of the Archangelskoye Park with Willi shining in his happiness and rising half a head above those who looked down at the picture. The girl heard her father's choked breath and his hand came to rest on her shoulder.

'Go and get your work ready, Father. I will finish it.'