Field Gray (34 page)

“Oh, my God, it’s you,” she said. “I was afraid you were dead.”

“I was. Eternal life has its advantages, but it’s amazing how quickly you get bored. So here I am again. Back in the city of mahogany and marijuana.”

“Come in, come in.” She vacuumed me inside, closed the door, and hugged me fondly. “I don’t have any marijuana,” she said, “but I have good coffee. Or something stronger.”

“Coffee will be fine.” I followed her along a corridor and into the kitchen. “I like what you’ve done with the place. You’ve put furniture in it. The last time I was here, I think you’d sold everything. To the Amis.”

“Not everything.” Elisabeth smiled. “I never sold that. Lots did, mind. But not me.” She set about making the coffee and then said: “How long has it been?”

“Since I was last here? Six or seven years.”

“It seems longer. Where have you been? What were you doing?”

“None of that matters now. The past. Right now, the only thing that matters is right now. Everything else is irrelevant. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.”

“You really were dead, weren’t you?”

“Mmm hmm.”

She made coffee and led the way into a small but comfortable sitting room. The furniture was solid but unremarkable. Outside, the copper-colored leaves of the linden tree helped to shade the window from the bright autumn sun. I felt quite at home. As much at home as I was likely to feel anywhere.

“No sewing machine,” I observed.

“There’s not much call for expensive tailoring anymore,” she said. “Not in Berlin, anyway. Not since the war. Who can afford such things? These days I run a club called The Queen. On Auguste-Viktoria Platz. Number seventy-six. Drop by sometime. Not today, of course. We’re closed on Sundays. Which is why I’m here.”

“Is it a Sunday? I don’t know.”

“Dead and just coming back to life. That’s hardly respectable. But the club is. Probably too respectable for a man like you, but that’s what the customers want nowadays. No one wants the old Berlin anymore. With the sex clubs and the whores.”

“No one?”

“All right. The Americans don’t seem to want them. At least not officially.”

“You surprise me. In Cuba, they couldn’t get enough of the sex clubs. Every night there was a long line outside the most notorious club of all. The Shanghai.”

“I don’t know about Cuba. But here we get some very Lutheran Americans. Well, this is Germany, after all. It’s as if they think the Russians might use any sign of depravity as an excuse to invade West Berlin. They seem to want to make the Cold War as cold as possible for everyone involved. Did you know that you can get yourself arrested for nude sunbathing in the parks?”

“At my age, that’s hardly a concern.” I sipped her coffee and nodded my appreciation.

Elisabeth lit a cigarette. “So it was you. The person who sent me that money from Cuba. I thought it must be.”

“At the time, I had more than enough to spare.”

“And now?”

“I’m sorting things out.”

“You don’t look like someone who’s just back from the sun.”

“Like I said. At my age. I was never one for lying around in the sun.”

“Me, I love it. Whenever I can. After all, the winters we get. What sort of things are you sorting out?”

“The Berlin kind.”

“Hmm. That sounds suspicious. This used to be a city of whores. And you don’t look like a whore. Now it’s a city of spies. So—” She shrugged and sipped her coffee.

“I expect that’s why they don’t like joy ladies and sex clubs. Because they want their spies honest. And as for nude sunbathing, well, it’s difficult being something you’re not when you’ve got your clothes off.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. As a matter of fact, we get lots of spies in the club. American spies.”

“How can you tell?”

“They’re the ones not wearing uniforms.”

She was joking, of course. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I glanced over at a radiogram the size of a drinks cabinet from which a low murmur was emanating. “What are we almost listening to?”

“RIAS,” she said.

“I don’t know that station. I don’t know any of the Berlin stations.”

“It stands for ‘Radio in the American Sector.’” She said it in English. Good English, too. “I always listen to RIAS on a Sunday morning. To help my English. No, to improve my English.”

I pulled a face. On the coffee table was a copy of
Die Neue Zeitung
. “American radio. American newspapers. Sometimes I think we lost a lot more than just a war.”

“They’re not so bad. Who’s paying your rent?”

“The VdH.”

“Of course. You were a prisoner yourself, weren’t you?”

I nodded.

“A couple of years ago, I went to one of those exhibitions put on by the VdH,” she said. “On the POW experience. They had reconstructed a Soviet POW camp, complete with a wooden watchtower and a four-meter-high barbed-wire fence.”

“Was there a gift shop?”

“No. Just a newspaper.”

“Der Heimkehrer.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a rag. Among other things, the VdH leadership believes that a free people cannot renounce in principle the protection of a new German army.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

I shook my head. “It’s not that I don’t think military service is a good idea. In principle.” I lit a cigarette. “It’s just that I don’t trust our Western allies not to use us as cannon fodder in a new war that some lunatic Confederate American general thinks he can safely fight on German soil. Which is to say, a long way from America. But which in reality no one can win. Not us. Not them.”

“Better Red than dead, huh?”

“I don’t think the Reds want a war any more than we do. It’s only the men who fought the last war, not to mention the one before that, who can really know how many human lives were wasted. And how many comrades were sacrificed needlessly. People used to talk about the phony war. Remember that? In 1939. But if you ask me, this war, this Cold War, that’s the phoniest war of the lot. Something dreamed up by the intelligence people to scare us and keep us all in line.”

“There’s a waiter at the club,” she said, “who’d disagree with you. He’s a former POW, too. He came home last year, still a rabid Nazi. Hates the Bolsheviks.” She smiled wryly. “I’m none too fond of them myself, of course. Well, you remember what it was like when the Red Army turned up in Berlin with a hard-on for German women.” She paused for a moment. “I had a baby. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Well, he—the baby—died, so it didn’t seem important, I guess. He got influenza meningitis, and the penicillin they used to treat it turned out to be fake. That was—God, February 1946. They got the men who sold the stuff, I’m happy to say. Not that it really matters. Made in France, it was. Glucose and face powder dissolved in genuine penicillin vials. Of course, by the time anyone knew it was fake it was too late.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to remember what it was like back then. People would do or sell anything to make money.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, darling. It was a long time ago. Besides, even after I had it, the baby, I was never really sure I wanted it.”

“Under the circumstances, that’s hardly surprising,” I said. “You never told me this before.”

“Well, you had your own problems, didn’t you?” She shrugged. “And that, of course, is the real reason I never sold my body to the Amis, of course. Gang rape. It tends to take away your sexual appetite for quite a while. By the time I did start feeling inclined that way again, it was too late. I was on the shelf, more or less.”

“Nonsense.”

“Too late to find a husband, anyway. German men are still in rather short supply, in case you hadn’t noticed. Most of the good ones were in Soviet POW camps. Or Cuba.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. You’re a fine-looking woman, Elisabeth.”

She took my hand and squeezed.

“Do you really think so, Bernie?”

“Of course I do.”

“Oh, there have been men, all right. I’m not completely clapped out, it’s true. But it’s not like it used to be. Nothing ever is, of course. But…There was an American who worked for the U.S. State Department at HICOG, in the Headquarters Compound on Saargemünder Strasse. But he went home to his wife and children in Wichita. And there was a guy, a sergeant, who ran Club 48—that’s the U.S. Army’s NCO club. It was him who helped me to get the job at The Queen. Before he went home, too. That was six months ago. My life.” She shrugged. “It’s not exactly
Effi Briest
, is it. Oh, I do okay at the club. Pays well. The customers behave. Good tippers, I’ll say that for the Amis. At least they show their appreciation. Not like the British. Worst tippers in the world. Hell, even the French tip better than the British. You wouldn’t think they’d won the war, they’re so tight with their money. They say that even the mousetraps are empty in the British sector. I tell you, this fellow Nasser, I’m on his side. And when Uruguay beat England, I think I was even more happy than I was when West Germany won the actual trophy.”

“Talking of West Germany, Elisabeth, do you go there ever?”

“No. I’d have to cross the Green Border. And I don’t like to do that. I did it once. I felt like a criminal in my own country.”

“And East Berlin. Do you ever go there?”

“Sometimes. But there’s less and less cause to go. There’s not much there for those of us who live in West Berlin. Just before Jimmy—my American sergeant—went back to America, we took a trip around old Berlin. He wanted to buy a camera, and you can still get a good one for not much money in East Berlin. We got a camera, too, but not in a shop. On the black market. The only shop we visited, a department store the communists call H.O., had very little in it. And as soon as I saw it, I realized why so many East Germans turned up here last year to get a food parcel. And why quite a few of them never went back.”

“But you wouldn’t say it was dangerous.”

“For someone like me? No. You read about the odd person getting snatched by the Soviets. Injected with something and then bundled into a car. Well, I suppose if you were important, that might happen. But then, you wouldn’t go there in the first place if you were someone like that, would you? All the same, I wouldn’t have thought you would want to go across to the Russian sector. You having escaped from a POW camp and all.”

“Look, Elisabeth, there’s nobody left in Berlin I can really trust. If it comes to that, there’s no one left I even know. And I need a favor. If there was anyone else I could ask, I would.”

“Go ahead and ask.”

I handed her an envelope. “I was hoping I could ask you to deliver this. I’m afraid I don’t know the correct address, and I thought—well, I thought you might help. For old times’ sake.”

She looked at the name on the envelope and was silent for a moment.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “But it would help me a lot.”

“Of course I’ll do it. Without you, without that money you sent, I don’t know how I’d ever have hung on to this place. Really I don’t.”

I finished my coffee and then my cigarette. I must have looked as if I was about to leave, because she said, “Will I see you again?”

“Yes. Only, I’m not sure when. I’m not living in Berlin at the moment. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be staying in Göttingen.” She looked puzzled at that. So I explained: “With the VdH? Göttingen is near the Friedland Transit Camp for returning POWs. They’re there for only a couple of weeks, during which time they receive food, clothing, and medical aid. They’re also given army-discharge certificates, which they need to obtain a residency permit, a food-ration card, and a travel warrant to get home.”

“Poor devils,” she said. “How bad was it, really?”

“I’m not about to sit here and tell any woman from Berlin about suffering,” I said. “But maybe, because of it, we’ll know how and where to find each other.”

“I’d like that.”

“Do you have a telephone?”

“Not here. If I want to make a call, I always use the telephone at the club. If you ever need to get in contact with me, that’s the best place to do it. If I’m not there, they’ll take a message.” She found a pencil and paper and scribbled down the number:
24-38-93
.

I put the number in my empty wallet.

“Or you could write to me here, of course. You should have written before to let me know you were coming. I’d have prepared something. A cake. I wouldn’t have been in my dressing gown. And you should have sent me an address in Cuba. So that I could have written back to thank you.”

“That might have been a little difficult,” I confessed. “I was living there under a false name.”

“Oh,” she said, as if such an idea had never occurred to her. “You’re not in any trouble, are you, Bernie?”

“Trouble?” I smiled ruefully. “Life is trouble. Only the naïve and the young imagine that it’s anything else. It’s only trouble that finds out if we’re up to the task of staying alive.”

“Because if you are in trouble…”

“I hate to ask you another favor….”

She took my hand and kissed the fingers, one by one. “When are you going to get it through your thick Prussian head,” she said. “I’ll help you in any way I can.”

“All right.” I thought for a moment and then, taking her pencil and paper, I started to write. “When you get to the club, I want you to make a call to this number in Munich. Ask for a Mr. Kramden. If Mr. Kramden isn’t there, tell whoever it is that you will call back in two hours. Don’t leave your name and number, just tell them that you want to leave a message from Carlos. When you get to speak to Kramden, tell him I’ll be staying with my uncle François in Göttingen for the next few weeks at the Pension Esebeck, until I’ve met Monsieur Voltaire off the train from the Cherry Orchard. Tell Mr. Kramden that if he and his friends need to contact me I’ll be going to the St. Jacobi Church each day I’m in Göttingen, at around six or seven o’clock in the evening, and to look for a message under the front pew.”

She looked over my notes. “I can do that.” She nodded firmly. “Göttingen’s quaint. Pretty. What Germany used to look like. I’ve often thought it would be nice to live there.”