The Waiting Time by Gerald Seymour

Author:Gerald Seymour
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2013-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

‘It was sex. It was physical sex. I did not have to be an expert to learn what it was. Not love, I do not think it was anything more than a lust for the physical business of sex. It was not necessary for her to tell me, she wore it like the clothes on her. The desire for sex with the Russian was in her eyes and her hands.’

The sunlight came through the window, filtered by the dirt on the glass, and fell on the floor, which was filthy, and on the table, which had not been cleared from his morning meal, and struggled through the smoke of his cigarettes. Albert Perkins paced the small room without comment. He let the American sit and talk.

‘When she first came it was to regular classes in the evenings. Her husband handled me – that’s how she would have known about me. No, she did not know that I informed to her husband. He would have sent her, and it started out as the regular classes, English literature. But she was a busy woman, and it soon had gotten that she couldn’t make all the classes, she had meetings half the night, half the evenings of the week, something with the FDGB down in the shipyard. She asked if she could come here, fit in one-to-one classes when she didn’t have meetings. She paid. She was working, her husband was a top cat, she wasn’t short of money. She paid me and she came here. About a month after she’d started coming here, because of the way her talk was, liberated, I went to another officer who had handled me when Krause was away, sort of signed up for him with a different codename and a different file, and talked about her to him. It wasn’t a big deal, at least I didn’t think so.’

Perkins wore his coat. The bar on the fire was not lit. The grimed dirt in the apartment seemed worse when the sunlight splayed on it than it had the evening before. Probably it was good that the wretched little man smoked because the cigarettes were strong enough to wipe out more pungent smells.

‘You said what you would do for me. It was South Carolina where I was raised, near to Summerville, up the river from Charleston. It was a crappy little place. You know, where we lived half the community turned out to see me head off on the bus to Charleston and the military, and half of that half wouldn’t have known where Germany was. I hated that place for its ignorance. My father had a bronchitis problem, he won’t have lasted. I think my mother would still be there. There were two sisters I had, younger than me, and I think they’d still be there because people from that sort of place don’t go far. It would have been about the day after the Wall came down that I stopped hating that place. What could

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