Introduction by the author: Annabel, a young civil rights lawyer
working for a Hamburg charity, is about to risk her career by hiding her
client Issa, a Muslim Russian illegal immigrant of her own age, from
forcible return to the Russian prisons he has escaped from. By good fortune,
she is in the process of moving flats.
They had reached her house. Turning, she saw Issa cowering in the darkness of
an overhanging lime tree, his bag clutched in the folds of his black coat.
“What’s the matter?”
“Your KGB,” he muttered.
“Where?”
“They followed us from the taxi. First in a big car, then in a small one. One
man, one woman.”
“They were just two cars that happened to pass by.”
“These cars had radio.”
“In Germany all cars have radios. Some have telephones as well. Please, Issa.
And keep your voice down. We don’t want to wake everyone up.”
Glancing up and down the road but seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she
descended the steps to the front door, unlocked it and nodded him forward,
but he shied to one side and insisted on entering after her, and at a
distance.
She had left the flat in a hurry. Her double bed was unmade, the pillow
crushed, her pyjamas strewn across it. The wardrobe had two sides, to the
left her own clothes, to the right, Karsten’s. She had thrown Karsten out
three months ago, but he’d never had the guts to fetch them. Well, screw
him. One top-brand buckskin jacket, one pair of designer jeans, three
shirts, one pair of soft leather moccasins. She dumped them on the bed.
“These are your husband’s, Annabel?” Issa enquired from the doorway.
“No.”
“They are whose, please?”
“They belonged to a man I had a relationship with.”
“He is dead, Annabel?”
“We broke up.”
“Why did you break up, Annabel?”
“Because we weren’t suited to each other.”
“Why were you not suited? Did you not love each other? Perhaps you were too
severe towards him, Annabel. That is possible. You can be very severe. I
have noticed this.”
At first she didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or slap him down. Then she
remembered that, in the world he had escaped from, there was no such thing
as privacy. Also that she was the first woman he’d been alone with after
years of confinement, and they were standing in her bedroom in the early
hours of the morning.
“Would you lift that bag down for me, please, Issa?”
Karsten’s holdall was gathering dust on top of the wardrobe. Issa lifted it
down and laid it on the bed beside the clothes. She shoved the clothes into
it and fetched her rolled-up sleeping bag from the bottom of the airing
cupboard.
“Was he a lawyer like you, Annabel? This man you had a relationship with?”
“It doesn’t matter what he was. It’s not your business, and it’s over.”
Now it was she who wished urgently for greater distance between them. In the
kitchen he was too tall for her and too present, however much he hung back.
She set a bin-bag on the table and brusquely held up items for his approval:
whole-grain bread, Issa? Yes, Annabel. Green tea? Cheese? Live yoghurt from
the funky organic shop ten minutes’ cycle ride away that she determinedly
patronised in opposition to the supermarket up the road? Yes, Annabel, to
all of it.
“I can’t give you meat, okay? I don’t eat it.”
But what she wanted to say was: nothing’s going on here. All that’s happening
is I’m sticking my neck out for you. I’m your lawyer and that’s all I am,
and I’m doing this for the principle, not the man.
They carted their luggage to the crossroads. A cab appeared and she directed
it to a point above the harbour-front. Then for the second time, she walked
him the rest of the way.
HER new apartment was eight rickety flights of wooden staircase high, set in
the loft of an old dockside warehouse that according to its owner was the
only building the British had had the grace to leave to posterity when they
bombed the rest of Hamburg into oblivion. It was a ship-like attic fourteen
metres by six with iron rafters and a grand arched window that looked down
onto the harbour; and a bathroom crammed into one eave and a kitchen in the
other. She had first seen it on its Open Day with half of Hamburg’s young
rich tripping over themselves to buy it, but the owner had taken a shine to
her and, unlike her present landlord, he was gay and didn’t want to get her
into bed.
By the same evening, the flat was miraculously hers, a Karsten-free life in
the making, and for the last six weeks she had been cosseting it, fussing
over its wiring and plaster work and paint work, replacing rotting
floorboards, and in the evenings, after another sickening tribunal or
another lost battle with authority, racing down here on her bicycle, just to
stand at the arched window with her elbows on the sill and watch the sun go
down, and the cranes and cargo ships and ferries interweaving and relating
in the way that human beings should, respectfully and without crashing into
one another, and the gulls swirling and warring, and the kids rampaging on
the playground.
And in what she knew to be a rosy surge of optimism, she would congratulate
herself on the woman she was about to become, married to her work and her
colleagues, men and women who like herself were dedicated to fighting the
good fight for people whom the accidents of life had earmarked for the scrap
heap.
Or put another way: coming home as exhausted and empty as the flat that
awaited her, knowing that however hard she had pushed herself all day, there
was only herself to look forward to at night. But even nothing was better
than Karsten.
They climbed the stairs slowly, Annabel leading, and at each floor she put
down her bin-bag of provisions and made sure Issa was struggling after her
with the holdall and the bedroll. She would have shared more of the load
with him but every time she tried he waved her angrily away, although after
two flights he was looking like an old, thin child, and after three his
breathing was coming in rasps that echoed up and down the stairwell.
The din they were making alarmed her until she remembered it was Saturday and
there were no other tenants. All the other floors were given over to fancy
offices of haute couture, designer furniture, and gourmet food companies:
worlds she told herself that she had resolutely left behind.
Issa had stopped halfway up the last flight and was staring past her, his face
stiff with fear and incomprehension. The door to her loft was of old
hammered iron with heavy bolts. Its giant padlock would have secured the
Bastille. She hurried down to him and this time accidentally seized his arm,
only to feel him recoil.
“We’re not locking you up, Issa,” she said. “We’re trying to keep you free.”
“From your KGB?”
“From everyone. Just do as I say.”
He slowly shook his head, then in an act of terrible submission lowered it,
and step after step, but so laboriously that his feet might have been
chained together, he followed her up the last of the stairs. Then stopped
again, head still bowed and feet together, while he waited for her to unlock
the door. But all her instincts told her not to.
“Issa?”
No reply. Stretching out her right hand until it was directly in his eyeline,
she laid the key on her open palm and offered it to him the way she had
offered carrots to her horse when she was small.
“Here. You open it. I’m not your gaoler. Take the key and unlock the door for
us. Please.”
For a lifetime, as it seemed to her, he remained staring downward at her open
hand, and at the rusted key lying on it. But either the prospect of taking
it from her was too much for him, or he was fearful of making contact with
her bare flesh, for abruptly his head, then his whole upper body, turned
away from her in rejection. But Annabel refused to be rejected.
“Do you want me to open it?” she demanded. “I need to know, please, Issa. Are
you telling me I may open this door? Do I have your permission? Answer me,
please, Issa. You’re my client. I need your instructions. Issa, we’re going
to stand here and get very cold and tired until you instruct me to open this
door. Do you hear me, Issa? Where’s your bracelet?”
It was in his hand.
“Put it back on your wrist. You’re not in danger here.”
He put the Koran bracelet back on his wrist.
“Now tell me to open the door.”
“Open.”
“Say it louder. Open the door, please, Annabel.”
“Open the door, please.”
“Annabel.”
“Annabel.”
“Now watch me unlock the door at your request, please. There. Done. I go in
first and you follow me. Not like prison at all. No, leave the door open
behind you, please. We won’t close it until we need to.”
© David Cornwell 2008
Extracted from A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré to be published by Hodder &
Stoughton on September 23 at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.09,
including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
