Troubled Waters by Dean Hughes

Author:Dean Hughes [Hughes, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2002-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

During the years when Hans had longed to escape his country, he had told himself that he could manage to leave his family. Now, however, he was finally away from home—in Magdeburg, at the university—and he missed his parents and Inga every minute. He had never really been away from his family for more than a few days at a time, and he hadn’t experienced any other way of life. Now he was almost 200 kilometers away and wouldn’t be able to make a trip home until Christmas. What was worse than that was that he knew he would probably never live at home again. His homesickness really was like an illness, weakening him, ruining his appetite, upsetting his stomach. He worked hard, did his homework dutifully—partly because it occupied his mind—but he felt no connection to other students. They thought differently, behaved differently, and they took a dim view, for the most part, of his Mormon background.

Hans was a year younger than the typical first-year student. Most prospective students had to work in a practical field for a year before entering a university, but Direktor Knorr had arranged for the government to waive that requirement. He had convinced officials that they should allow Hans’s labor during the year he had been away from school to substitute for his practical training. Hans had worried until the last second that the Stasi would protest his admission, but he had heard nothing more from their agents. What he didn’t have was any assurance that the matter was closed.

Hans tried to be happy that he was finally a university student, but he attended his classes, studied in the library or his dorm room, and stayed on the edges of university life. It was easier not to get to know people so he wouldn’t have to explain himself, his beliefs. He even avoided becoming personal with his roommate, Rainer Kuntze.

Hans had stopped asking himself whether he was the cause of Berndt’s death. He knew it was something he could never answer, and he had to go on with life. But avoiding the question didn’t take the picture out of his head. At odd times, and often in dreams, he would see Berndt’s body fall, see his shape in silhouette, and he would hear the gunfire. He knew it was a kind of self-indulgence, something like self-pity, to blame himself, and yet it was a dark spot in his memory, an ugly awareness, and it represented Hans’s vulnerability. He could lose what he had gained, his chance to study, at any moment. He never lived a day without wondering whether the Stasi would show up.

Even though Berndt had not been a terribly close friend, he was virtually Hans’s only friend. Now there was no one. Greta had seemed to fill the void for a time. Her letters had been evidence that she liked him, and his imagination had made her part of his life. He had been able to picture a day when he would sit down to breakfast with her, their children around them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.