The Spy Game by Georgina Harding

Author:Georgina Harding
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General & Literary Fiction, General, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction
ISBN: 9781408801000
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-03-01T01:34:12.754000+00:00

Peter said the cold made it like Königsberg. Winters there were always like this.

The pond in the village had frozen up and some people cleared it of snow and went skating, but most of us didn't have skates and just slipped around in our boots and fell over. I'd never been on ice skates though I guessed it was like roller skating. It looked easy when other people did it.

Peter said that between Königsberg and the sea there was a great lagoon that froze beneath two foot of ice. When the city was under seige in that last winter of the war, the ice was the last way out.

'There had been big bombing raids in the summer, and the Russians had been attacking for ages, getting closer and closer. Everyone knew by then what was going to happen. For months, they'd been leaving, when there were still trains going and roads open back to proper Germany. They didn't believe Germany was so great any more, even if people in Berlin still thought so. They knew the Russians were winning. All that autumn, people had been going, and they went on going all through the winter. Even when the Russians had blown up the bridges and the railway lines and they couldn't get away by land any more, they got away by ship, but sometimes the ships were bombed by the British or torpedoed by the Russians. There was one ship that was torpedoed by a Russian sub, and sank with ten thousand people on it, all refugees, old people and women and children and babies, and they were all killed. Imagine that. And the Russians said it was a great victory and gave the submarine captain a medal. That was why the ice was such a good thing. It gave them another way out. They could walk out from the city over this great lagoon, safe between the land and the sea, where there weren't any tanks or any subs, and walk across, walk miles and miles in the snow and across the ice, and get all the way to Danzig, and that was still a German city. That was the way the last people got out. And the Russians finally captured Konigsberg in April, and by then the ice was melted and there wasn't any way left.'

In 1945 our mother was sixteen. I made a picture for myself of a girl of sixteen walking miles and miles through the snow. When snow was like it was now outside, deep and soft with dark clouds hanging right down over it so that you almost thought you could touch them. When walking made you warm at first but after a while you weren't so warm any more and bits of you started to hurt with the cold.

I pictured the girl walking all alone but Peter said that there were thousands of people escaping all together. So I saw a great flock of people, dark on the snow, spread across it like a picture of caribou in the National Geographic, and the girl in the crowd but alone.

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