Stepping into the Sun

By Mark Heidenstam

Philip Hart, a fortysomething Norfolk school teacher, has sought solace in drink as he sees his life start to unravel. He suspects, with good reason, he is about to lose out on a promotion to a younger colleague who is assumed to be sleeping with his wife. And one night, driving home drunk from a village pub, he knocks down and kills an old man fleeing from a nearby mental hospital. To avoid blame Hart hides the body in a roadside culvert, but guilt forces him to learn the identity and background of his victim, so he can make some kind of amends. On a visit to the mental hospital he discovers clues to a decades-old mystery somehow involving the inmate, prompting him to sever all ties with his previously cloistered existence. 
Adopting the role of Percival, the holy fool of legend charged with finding a redeeming relic, Hart’s journey takes him very far from Norfolk, into Sweden’s sub-arctic wilderness and to one of the continent’s forbidden places. And also back to that darkest of times, when the world was at war and aflame. 
But if the man he killed had been driven mad by his part in creating this mystery, so Hart is in danger of becoming just as deranged. He has gone beyond needing simply to atone for a single death. He is now on a mission to rekindle what in his increasing obsession he believes is nothing less than the light of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800466098

Mark Heidenstam

Mark Heidenstam grew up in Norfolk, where his novel is part-set. His journalistic career took him to editing weekly papers in Bedfordshire, after which he moved to the night news desk of the Financial Times. Retired, he now lives in Provence.

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Contents

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

PART TWO

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

PART THREE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

PART FOUR

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

EPILOGUE

POSTSCRIPT

PROLOGUE

East Prussia, near the Baltic coast,

Easter Sunday, April 1 1945

Two soldiers are standing side by side on the roof of the one surviving round tower of a bombed-out castle, looking towards the east, awaiting the dawn. The sky is the darkest blue, with a quarter moon, and a speckling of stars. From the north, off the nearby sea, comes a refrigerating wind which blows the last flakes of snow off what remains of the crenellated stonework and flicks at the men’s greatcoats.

One of the watchers, a young man, quite tall, and angular, tilts back his head, with its broad cheekbones, and stares up through grey-blue eyes. He possesses, friends would say, a poetic sensibility. Similes come to his mind, such as campfires in the desert, or diamonds sewn onto a ballgown, but he knows this most wondrous sight is not to be likened to anything.

His companion, half a head shorter, and older by no more than ten years, follows his gaze, and then looks back at the shell of a city. Now just rubble and leaning façades.

Behold the handiwork of the RAF. This used to be a rather grand place. Not beautiful, perhaps, but stately. Very Prussian in that way, I suppose. Imposing buildings, and seven bridges to walk across, which was fun for a child. Only two left intact now.

I had no idea you were from here, Oberst.

From Schlobitten, but my mother would make the journey at least once a year, to meet friends and buy dresses. Well, one dress per visit, usually, given our circumstances. And I would tag along, as a treat, and wander the city in the meantime, go to the zoo in the Tiergarten, usually, and walk down to the harbour. Then we would meet up and go for coffee and a slice of marzipan cake in one of the cafés on Magisterstrasse or Domstrasse.

And Schlobitten, sir?

It is about one hundred kilometres to the south-west, and a bit inland, but you cannot escape from the sea around here. And this is a hard country in winter – the fishermen have to catch small birds to eat to stay alive – but beautiful in summer, and then a long autumn before winter again. The storks have it all worked out. They migrate south to Africa, great flocks of them, and don’t return until the spring. It is a land that follows the seasons. A horse-drawn land, still, and my father was good with horses. Kind hands. For the horses, anyway. He worked as a groom and carriage-driver on the estate of the Dohnas.

A Junker family, I imagine? I knew they still existed here.

Indeed. One of those archetypal old East Prussian Junker families that came to be despised by the leaders of our new order. I suppose they had a point. It was paternalism, benevolent paternalism, and its time probably had gone. But they treated us very well, by their lights. I showed an aptitude for mathematics and science. I put together equipment and did little experiments at home, so old man Dohna paid for extra tutoring. Helped me get to university, at Rostock, which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. And I was set for a quiet career as a physicist, or perhaps an astronomer. Looking up at those stars. Contemplating the infinite.

May I ask what happened, sir?

Ha! The Reichsmarschall happened, that’s what or rather that’s who. Ah, I see I have surprised you! Yes, it does rather call for an explanation. As I said, still a horse-drawn land, and superb hunting territory – bear and wolf, boar, elk even. And Göring is a great hunter, or was. Not much opportunity now, presumably, and perhaps he is starting anyway to understand the viewpoint of the quarry. He had this hunting lodge built at Rominten, to the east of here, to complement what apparently is an even larger mansion near Berlin. That’s named Carinhall, after his first wife. A Swede, oddly. But no doubt absolutely Aryan. Probably more so, if truth be told, than some of our leaders. Anyway, he held lavish parties at Rominten for the Junkers and overseas guests. The King of Bulgaria, for one. The English ambassador, also, I remember. There was talk that he once arranged for two bison to mate, for the delight of those present. Who knows? The Reichsmarschall tended to attract stories like that. On one occasion a group was invited from Schlobitten, my father included. I’d not long finished my studies at Rostock, so I went too. Glad I did. No mating bison, but truly it was awe-inspiring. Like a scene from Norse mythology – the dead stags, massive beasts, were laid out on the grass in front of the lodge, with torches flaming, and the foresters sounding a fanfare of tribute. You could not help but be moved, even if you didn’t want to be. There has always been something primaeval at the heart of this land, and there it was. Uncovered.

Did you take part in the hunt, sir?

No. My father had made sure I could ride well enough, but that was all.

But you met the Reichsmarschall?

He buttonholed me after dinner, because he didn’t know who I was. He knew my father, so that broke the ice, and I explained about my career hopes, now I’d left university, and mentioned the silly scientific stuff I had done as a child. This odd look came into his eyes, and he told me to follow. And up we went into this big attic, which was filled with an enormous model train layout! It was Marklin – O gauge. Turned out some of the wiring for the signals had got messed up – truthfully I think he had tried to fix it, and made it worse – and a couple of the locomotives weren’t working. Something to do with the electrical contacts. I sorted that out, apart from one of the locos, which still wouldn’t go. So we set a couple of the trains in motion and he fetched drinks from a cupboard behind the control panel, and rearranged my future. In particular, he persuaded me to become a soldier.

The sky has lightened to a purple-blue, with the wind dropping away. The Oberst brushes away at the shoulder of his greatcoat, and looks back at the city and then inland, thinking of Schlobitten and the other insulated Junker enclaves, fastnesses against the twentieth century, but which perhaps even now were being pillaged and torn apart by the modern world in all its mechanised, envious savagery. Not just Schlobitten but Steinort, the fiefdom of the Lehndorffs, and Friedrichstein, home to the Dönhoffs. Well, he could hardly raise an objection. What was it? "Carthago delenda est." Yes. A metaphorical sowing of the fields with salt as retribution. Would anything ever grow there again? Would anyone even live there again in the shadow of those roofless palaces, stripped of all their golden trappings and with whitened rectangles on the remaining walls where once had hung rows of gloomy ancestral paintings? Carthago delenda est indeed.

The younger man clears his throat. You were talking about the Reichsmarschall, sir?

You are right. Just… just for a moment I was thinking of another time. A past life we shall not see again. And perhaps no bad thing. Where was I? Yes, the point is that one simply did not say ‘no’ to the Reichsmarschall. The man was a war hero, after all. A fighter ace. But anyway what he said made sense, then at least. The next war, he predicted, would be a question of planning and logistics – and technology. It would need scientists just as much as fighting men. And he was right. And before you say it, Klaus-Peter, I will say it for you. We can be a bit informal, you and I, here and now, given what the future holds. Yes, I thought I was swapping one ivory tower for another. I certainly was not intending to do any fighting. But here I am, on what is about to be the front line. And to command what staff HQ is pleased to call a battalion but is really a ragbag of a few genuine soldiers, who have seen much too much fighting. Plus some sailors from Götenhafen who really wish they were on the high seas, Russian submarines notwithstanding. And pensioners, and boys just old enough to be scared witless. Oh, and nowhere near enough panzerfausts to go around. And with that I am expected to help hold back a massive, battle-hardened professional army. It is very simple – most of the officers who wanted to be fighting soldiers died out. So here indeed I am.

How is it going to be, when they come, assuming they do break through our outer defences? I mean – this is supposed to be a Fortress City, not to be surrendered, on pain of death.

"Oh, they will get through, Klaus-Peter, never fear. The Führer can designate it whatever he likes but I doubt those ‘subhuman Asiatic hordes’ he was always banging on about will pay much attention to a mere title. Somehow or other we kept a corridor towards Pillau and the sea, but that has been all but closed off. And Pillau itself has been bombed to hell, by a Soviet squadron of women flyers apparently. How the world changes. Perhaps if our leader had allowed German women to serve, rather than being stuck in the kitchen and the bedroom, we would not be in this mess. That said, given what happened to the Wilhelm Gustloff back in January one would hardly want to risk escaping by the sea route anyway. No, we are pretty much encircled now. They are already at Metgeten in the west and Altenberg, in the south, so here we will have to stay. And once they start their bombardment the inner ring of forts won’t last long. If you think what the RAF did was bad… he says, gesturing at the fire-blackened shell of the building behind them. I would say within seven or eight days at the most this city will be under new management. Here, where we are standing, they will hoist their flag."

Sir, I understand soldiers have a duty to obey, and if…

If the Führer has said this city must never be surrendered then, yes, Klaus-Peter, that is a death sentence.

But the civilians, sir? Surely they do not deserve to die. It may be our duty, but it is not theirs. I don’t know how many tens of thousands are trapped here now, but I think they believed they would be safe.

Believed? Hoped against hope certainly. Probably more than 100,000, but you’ve read your history, surely – you know the fate of civilians in an occupied land in wartime? Those poor refugees fleeing from the Russian dive bombers along the ice on the Frisches Haff – that was like a woodcut from the Thirty Years’ War come to life. Or a sick parody of a Heimat Christmas card. As for those that made it here – I imagine any that survive the onslaught to come will wish they had not. They will be paying for our crimes, and perhaps their own willingness to be party to all this. Down in the square here there is a 1914–18 monument – ‘Für Uns’. A reminder to the city that their soldiers died for them. Well, now it is the turn of the civilians to do some dying. But not you, Klaus-Peter.

Sir?

Yours is a different duty. That is why you are here, no? What you found, back in 1941 was it, and had sent here, you now must hide away? Have I got that right?

Yes, Oberst, although I was just one of several in the operation.

Indeed, but you were an expert picked because you knew what to look for and what to do. And now you have been sent here to unfind it. How strange life is. All that trouble in pursuit of something only for the whole process to have to go into reverse. If I were an imaginative man rather than a mid-ranking officer in the Wehrmacht, and if I wanted to risk the accusation of treason from Gauleiter Koch, I might say that could stand as a metaphor for our whole adventure into Mother Russia. Oh well. Now tell me, what was that building like?

It occurs to Hauptmann Klaus-Peter Fellendorf to wonder if the senior officer’s mordant irony had always been there – Kind hands. For the horses anyway – or had been driven home by wartime. He also wonders if the officer’s candid reminiscences about his childhood, in a world lost beyond any hope of return, are intended as a valediction from someone who knows his time is short. But those are questions not to be asked.

Like nothing I had seen. Enormous. The façade went on forever, and there were those onion-shaped domes they specialise in. And you have never seen so many chimneys.

Badly damaged?

Not so much. Many of the rooms were knocked about but the building itself was intact. I don’t know about now, though.

Well, they have it back, for what that is worth, and now are nearly here, bless them.

Oberst Rolf Overath pauses, just weighing how more treasonous he might decently be to a junior officer. Do you know, you may not, being an artistic type, about black holes? Some stars – perhaps there is one of them up there – when they come towards the end of their life, grow vastly bigger. This is the theory, anyway. No one has seen this, I should say, but the science of it makes sense. So they expand and expand, way beyond what is possible to sustain, and then they collapse in on themselves until they are tiny, and in doing so create a gravitational field so strong this thing called a black hole is formed, from which nothing can escape. Not even light. That is what is happening to our once bloated 1,000-year Reich. It will shrink and shrink and shrink, down to a tiny point, so in the end nothing and no one will be able to get out. Not even light itself.

‘The bright day is done and we are for the dark’.

Schiller?

"Shakespeare, sir. From Anthony and Cleopatra."

So, death after a battle lost, if I remember? I am a simple soldier, and expendable, and it seems now it will be my role to die, and here, probably.

Sir, forgive me…

You think I am indulging in world-weariness? Possibly. Of course we were bound to have a specific word for it, weren’t we? I gather the English have borrowed it from us. A mirthless chuckle. Weltschmerz indeed. Perhaps I am, just a bit, but we have about 40,000 real fighting men, plus those others I mentioned, the old and the young, and they have three times that, plus control of the skies for their bombers, so it is a simple equation. And while General Lasch might be humane enough to surrender, that would be also be a death sentence from the Führer, and not just for him but his family. But you have that task of yours to perform first. One day this thing you found and now have to hide away again may be rediscovered, and bring some light back to the world. Do you have the trucks available?

No sir, we wait still. But they are promised for tomorrow, or the day after.

Or the day after that. They had better arrive very soon. Our now-absent gauleiter is apparently holed up in his seaside bunker, with an icebreaker on hand to ensure he at least can escape. But if he had given your problem just a little thought, and permitted it, you could have moved it out safely by train weeks ago. As it is the roads are impassable and the railway is cut, with tanks in the way. But you have at least found somewhere in the city that is suitable, I hope?

Sir. Suitable enough.

Good. Good. I should have asked, Klaus-Peter, if you have family to go home to.

My mother and sister are well, sir, I hope. They left Germany before this war started and I haven’t heard from them for nearly three years now, although they should have received letters from me. But they ought to be safe. I may not be supposed to say where, but it was a neutral country.

And your father?

He was in Hamburg.

I am sorry.

The two men have remained still, and side by side, with an occasional turn of the head to look at each other. As people, looking out on a view, do in ordinary conversations. But then Hauptmann Klaus-Peter Fellendorf gives a start and turns to face the senior officer, his eyes suddenly wide. Of course, of course he knew the fate of civilians in wartime. Just as did the Oberst.

Sir, I er…

Klaus-Peter, it is kind of you to think of that. All I can say is at least they are not here. Rominten was overrun in October, I am sure the Russians enjoyed that bit of symbolism, but Schlobitten is much further west, and my parents may have got away, perhaps with the help of the Dohnas. A last act of paternalism. It is quite possible. But I do not know. There has been no word now for months.

Silence follows, and carries on. Fellendorf turns back, and after a minute or two looks upwards again.

Sir, Kant, the philosopher, who lived all his life here, said what filled him with awe were ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’.

I knew of Kant, of course. The people here were supposed to set their clocks by him, so regular was he in his habits. It was a local joke, with a touch of pride. But he said that particularly, did he, Klaus-Peter? That really was another time. The starry heavens, as we see, are still with us. He could still admire that sight. But I confess I have not seen much in the way of a moral law anywhere these last few years. Have you?

Fellendorf knows that is another question best not answered, which in itself is the answer. So the two men return to silence, there on the top of the ravaged tower, in the middle of the toppled city, until the first gleams of dawn insinuate their way between land and sky.

PART ONE

Chapter One

East Anglia 198–

It was early February when winter came in earnest, a dust-sheet slowly falling. A cold front reached Cape Wrath and then shadowed down the country, and with it came the snow. And a singular tragedy.

Philip Hart, listening to the news on the car radio, thought it not so difficult to understand. He pictured the Scottish Borders, and the unchanging wind creating a drift on one side of the motorway to England. He thought of how a contrary, sudden gust might blow the top of the drift across the inside lane of the southbound carriageway, and how the driver of a petrol lorry, finding himself suddenly in a whited-out universe, might brake maniacally. He would survive the skid that would leave his vehicle stalled, sideways on, but the two occupants of the hatchback car travelling only slightly too closely behind would surely not. Hart could see, too, that it might well take three hours for their decapitated bodies to be disentangled from the greased underbelly of the lorry.

Before then, long before the police and the ambulancemen and the casual mechanics arrived, the wind would have resumed its regular station, returning most of the snow to the side of the road. As it did so the lorry driver, running back in a semaphore of limbs, would become the third victim, dispatched by the next car to sweep up the curving, elegantly cambered road. Perhaps, Hart thought, it would remain officially unexplained, and pass into legend, like a sea mystery.

He drove on, away from the village pub in which he had spent the evening, drinking ale in an alcove, and half-watching a succession of darts matches. He had been alone, since that was his custom, and because it was solitariness he needed to contemplate.

It had become his habit, the winter notwithstanding, to meander through the countryside and pick a pub at random, and then spend two or three hours trying to see if his life made more sense in self-exile. Now he was driving home, haphazardly, killing time with frequent turns. A stranger would have kept to the main road and been comforted by the few lights there were to be seen. Hart – in this, at least – wanted no reassurance. He fancied he was at one with the landscape – the expanses of scrubland, the great swathes of conifers, the sudden firebreaks and the matchstick look-out towers, like North Sea oil platforms. It was the kind of landscape in which it seemed natural to be alone. Even in the candescence of summer the Brecklands were dark, interior and pre-historic. He hoped he would have understood that even without knowing of the primitive underground passageways a few miles distant. Once, many years ago, he had ventured down Grime’s Graves, which were not graves at all, but ancient flint mines. Conquering his claustrophobia, he had crawled in his shiny school trousers along the irregular tunnels. Then, later, at the city museum he had come across a diorama of the scene as it might have been, with life-sized models of dwarfish Iron Age men. At the time he had thought neither version gave any sense of the real terror of that subterranean existence, of how full of fear those burrowers must have been, and how much they would have imagined it as a warning of eternity. But perhaps only civilised man, living by electricity, found the dark dreadful, and still more so the subtle terror of the flickering light, always threatening extinction, or the sudden, flaring revelation of what might be in the shadows. For the creators of Grime’s Graves there was, also, quite enough in the clear light of the natural world to be feared.

In this reverie, as he made his way along another tree-bounded road, Hart was reminded of a long-ago early morning journey through the Lincolnshire Fens, carrying a cargo of two young women, in a marijuana-induced doze on the back seat, and beside him, in the front, a wide-awake Belgian hitch-hiker.

Hart had been overcome by tiredness, and in that state been besieged by illusion. Hedges parallel to the road had turned ninety degrees and grown across his path, trees had metamorphosed into people and jumped with one bound onto the cat’s eyes, a five-barred gate had become a herd of charging cattle. All through the ordeal he had somehow separated fact from fancy and had dispelled the visions by driving straight through them, all until an old tree stump, disguising itself as a lame child, had brought his foot down on the brake pedal with a rictus spasm as white-knuckled hands gripped the steering wheel. The baffled Belgian had looked first at the empty road ahead and then at the incoherently apologetic Englishman beside him to try to understand why they had come to such a startling halt on an empty road in the middle of nowhere.

Hart had remembered the incident many times since, and regarded it as a kind of exorcism, since such delusions had not come again. Until now.

It was as it had been before, but worse. The open flat acres of the Fens had provided comparatively few objects for transformation. Here were any number. Hart drove on, as he had done before, knowing it was a challenge and vowing as he did so that this time he would not fail the test. When it came, he would recognise it for what it was, and stare into the middle distance, and drive on, and when it came, in the form of a running, stumbling old man, he did stare into the middle distance and drive on.

Such things are supposed to appear to happen in slow motion, but this did not. At a speed of 45 miles per hour the rubberised front bumper of the car hit the old man on the left knee and sent him spinning instantly out of sight. There was no grand guignol; no sliding of a contorted face across the windscreen, no spattering of blood. It was as casual as the batting away of a child’s ball.

With a delicacy that seemed appropriate Philip Hart brought the car to a halt, and – leaving the engine running and the headlights full on – walked back to where he imagined the collision had been. Another might have walked slowly, or run. But for Hart this was an ordinary necessity, such was his fatalism, which combined with diffidence and a certain snobbishness to produce what to him seemed like sangfroid but to others appeared very much like callousness. It would have done so now, had there been anyone to witness it.

Reaching the probable spot he found it bare. There was not even a scuff mark on the verge to mark the old man’s passage. But he had passed that way. His body was splayed out at the bottom of a five-foot-deep dry ditch which ran along between the road and the forest. He was clearly dead, although Hart assumed the cause had not been the initial impact but the hitting of his head on an angular piece of flint sticking out of the far wall of the ditch. He understood that the man had died because their paths had crossed and that it would be thought his fault, even though he might rationalise that it was not. Certainly he was hardly in a position to report the accident, considering how he had spent the evening.

Walking back, he found the bumper and the rest of the car to be unmarked. It was as if nothing had happened. Since that was the easiest thing to imagine, so be it.

Half turning at a noise, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Where is he, then? asked a middle-aged man in a dark tracksuit who had presumably just emerged from the forest. Did you see the old fool?

I… I…

Is that why you stopped? Did you see him?

The word ‘stopped’ was the rock to which Hart attached himself.

Yes, he said, suddenly calm. Yes. Quite a shock; he ran right across in front of me and into those trees.

By now he felt capable of the odd embellishment. He was moving pretty fast for an old chap.

As he spoke a second man, also in a dark tracksuit, appeared on the scene, and to Hart his dissembling began to seem very prudent. Their clothes, so similar, might be a uniform of a rough kind. There was, now he thought about it, something paramilitary about them. They looked like people who did not expect their presence to be questioned, while the silent preparedness of the second man might well be that of a foot soldier waiting upon his superior. In any event, Hart reasoned, he had started on a course that was now unalterable.

A pity the snow’s not got here yet, the ‘officer’ said. We could have tracked him more easily. There’s no telling what mischief he might get up to. Or harm, come to that.

With that gnomic last sentence he bounded off into the forest at a place indicated by Hart, some yards from where the body lay. His apparent subordinate followed on, and within moments the sound of their progress through the undergrowth had faded away. It was time for an amateur interment.

At another time of year entering the ditch would have been like stepping into an animal’s lair, a trespass upon a universe of rustlings and headlong decampments, frangible and capable of rebirth, humid and slippery, and almost exotic. That time was not yet, despite what had been a mild January. This was perpetually a shaded place, and quite frozen. In that chill Hart proceeded to take several actions that either were driven by some folk-memory reflex or must at the time have seemed natural to him, although