Jacko (23 page)

Soon the girl was back, coming in aglow and leading the man she had found in a bar in Yorktown, a solid man with a red face and a boozy manner who may have been drinking all afternoon. She said his name was Gunter. He said
Good evening
but the effort of it seemed for a moment to deprive him of the ability to focus.

He looked around and came to the presumption that Jacko was boss, and came up to Jacko and me as we read the latest printouts from Berlin.

—God bless freedom! he told us.

—No worries,
Kamerad
eh.

—Do they serve Beck's here? asked Gunter, speaking in such a measured way that it sounded like a question from an English phrasebook.

Jacko asked one of the assistant producers to get Gunter a beer.

—He looks like rent-a-Kraut, Jacko complained to me.

Yet he was a good representative, I thought, of people's imaginings of Eastern bloc man: somewhat high-cheek-boned and alien-looking. He had twisted teeth which I thought of as somehow connected with too much cabbage and not enough oranges. As Jacko and I watched him drink a Beck's, in Durkin's mind the last thing we would attend to before leaving for Teterboro, the young producer named Marian asked Gunter for his passport. It was discovered he didn't have it with him.

—My uncle's house, he said. Over in Queens. Give me the goddam shiny car and I get it.

Durkin covered his eyes with a hand and said, No mate, stay here, maybe have a sleep. We'll send someone. Is it in your drawer? Top? Middle? Top! Okay, we'll send Denise. Give us your uncle's telephone number and we'll tell him strange people are coming. Bugger it!

While Denise fetched the passport in Queens, first one and then another of Basil Sutherland's energetic employees tried to find out from Gunter where his relatives were and who they were and what they had done for a living under Honecker's fatal regime.

His brother was a chemical plant supervisor in Bitterfeld, he told Durkin. One of the girls began looking at a map of East Germany and was relieved to find that Bitterfeld was perhaps as little as seventy-five miles south-west of Berlin.

—How long since you saw your brother? Durkin wanted to know. Durkin was interested in a loving reunion long delayed by tyranny.

Gunter said, I see the sonnerbitch three months ago. His daughter's wedding. In Leipzig.

—But you told Denise you hadn't spoken to him for fifteen years.

—I don't speak to him. He's a big sonnerbitch party asshole. Fifteen years ago he come into the factory I work in and toss his weight here and there. Bigtime party asshole!

Like a small prayer, Durkin's breath escaped him and he laid his forehead on his hands on the bar of the Perugia.

—Oh dear, oh dear, he said. He seemed to sleep for a time before opening his eyes and gazing up at Gunter again.

—You were back in East Germany three months ago?

—Right, said Gunter.

—Do you go back often?

—Three, four times in the last year.

Durkin looked around the room to see if everyone else had heard this debilitating information. Marian and the American journalist Bunker wanly received the news.

—Gunter, I have to ask you, said Durkin. Are you a spy or a bloody drug-runner or both?

—I am a traveller. I go back to Bitterfeld so I have the joy of shoulder-colding my asshole brother.

Durkin noticed Al Bunker dolorously watching Gunter.

—Sorry, Bunker, said Durkin.

—Make them reunite anyhow, Jacko suggested. Gunter, if we're going to fly you across the Atlantic, in a you-beaut airplane, the least you can bloody do for us is to put your arm around your miserable, Stalinist brother for thirty seconds.

—All relationships soured by Marxist dialectics, said Bunker, more vigorously than I would have expected. Brother torn from brother. I think that'll fly …

—We don't have a bloody choice, Durkin told him. It's the small hours in Berlin now. The networks are drinking their first coffee and getting ready to start poncing up and down in front of the Wall.
As dawn breaks over the-no-man's land around the Brandenburg Gate, etcetera
. God bloody help us.

—Take him some luxuries from the good old West, Jacko suggested. Corrupt the bastard eh!

Durkin thought this a good idea and asked Gunter what Gunter's brother was partial to.

—Tangerines. And Calvados. That sonnerbitch, Gunter told him.

—Are you serious?

For Durkin feared Gunter might be stating his own preferences. Indeed, did this brother exist to have preferences in the first place?

—I tell you, tangerines. And
verdammt
Calvados. Communism has rot his brain. But his belly and his liver are all stinking capitalists.

And so I saw bright girls from the best communication schools in America sent to the Korean stores on nearby corners to buy up tangerines by the crate, or else to liquor stores up on Lexington or Third who might stock Calvados by the crate. Bird-boned Jewish and Italian girls of the finest Westchester families lugged wooden boxes of fruit and liquor into the Perugia, to be told by Durkin that they should deposit them in the limos outside. Vixen Six would export tangerines across the Atlantic! For one could not be sure that they could be procured in Berlin.

Jacko and I helped in this loading process.

—Hereya love, Jacko would boom, taking the crates out of delicate, stretched hands. Your parents didn't send you to Vassar so you could be a wharfie.

At last Denise arrived back with Gunter's passport, but was treated coldly by Durkin, as by Dannie and the other producers. She came to Jacko for an explanation.

—Well love, you picked the wrong bloody Kraut, didn't you? Don't let it worry you. You weren't to know.

His mood had grown more elevated still now that it was clear that Dannie was certainly coming to Berlin with us.

A few minutes later we pulled away from the curb, leaving Denise in the doorway of the Perugia with a scowling Durkin. The poor child carried on her forehead that smudge of failure, the peculiar and damaging failure of one whose best is not thought good enough.

In our fleet of limousines, which swung down beneath the river, taking the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, we carried the latest printouts. Honecker, spiritual son of Joseph the fearsome Georgian, was still under detention by his own police.

—The muncher has been munched, Gunter told us.

I think he meant the biter had been bitten, the oppressor oppressed.

On visits to Africa – Poland first for the
New York Times Color Magazine
, then starving East Africa – I had seen Honecker's security forces running the intelligence systems of tyrants like the Ethiopian Mengistu. I also knew the East Germans had given plenty of free advice to the Polish secret police too – they had written the manual on how to interrogate. So I was as gratified as Gunter that the muncher had been munched.

Before we were out of the Tunnel, and in what passed for the open air again, Gunter had fallen asleep on Jacko's shoulder. His breathing was the busy, industrial breathing of the deep drinker.

—Thank Christ I'm the Wall and not the sodding reunion, Jacko told me.

We emerged out into the cold swamplands of trans-Hudson: Jersey as despised by Manhattanites. Rendered piquant by our destination, the moist, migrainously yellow and red lights of the commuting traffic seemed less dismal tonight, more jubilant. The headlights behind, the taillights in front, softened by mist, glowered with abnormal promise, lights from the remade world, a sweeter realm. We rolled at last through a gate where a customs officer waved us through and straight out onto the airfield! No immigration officials, no security search, no squinting at departure information. The jet waited for us all with its stairs laid down for our ascent! A telex machine was fitted aboard with – we were sure – further news that distant tyrants had been locked away, had been hoisted on their own weapons of state. Was the century declaring itself at last a fable, a tale for hopeful children, the casting out of dark knights?

A steward in black tie welcomed us at the top of the stairs, relieving us of the boxes of tangerines and Calvados, promising to stow them. He ushered us all into a cabin designed as a saloon – a bar, banquettes, sofas. Dannie was already collecting more telexes, and I could see Jacko and Gunter prowling amongst the upholstery.

The American Al Bunker told the steward, I'm charged with getting this damn thing off the ground immediately.

The steward reassured him. We had clearance. But he wondered would Jacko and Gunter kindly strap themselves into one of the banquettes for take-off, instead of sitting on stools at the bar.

Dannie briskly distributed more sheets of paper, and everyone but Gunter hungrily read them. Krenz, the new leader of East Germany, was nervously saying that the stability of Europe depended upon the existence of two Germanies. But the drift and the comradely symbolism of events was already against him. Early morning crowds were parading the Ku'damm, embracing Easterners who were coming over through the opened checkpoints. Krenz was calling for an equitable Marxism, a new human-faced socialism. Until tonight, Krenz's plan had been a sentimental dream even to Westerners. I myself had always imagined it as the only possible happy result: Marxism turning kinder, more like the societies that old Jewish Yahweh buried in Highgate Cemetery had had in mind when he took the trouble to craft
Das Kapital
. But the Berliners had lost all confidence in dialectics. They wanted to go shopping. Communism had waited too long to turn humane. Its credit had at least been postponed, and perhaps utterly cancelled.

During take-off, I sat soberly in my banquette, relishing the hour's joy. I had a sense that the work of East Germany's interrogators in the dungeons of Africa may have somehow spurred the dawn now breaking in Berlin; may have fed first the great weariness, the Eastern accidie, and now this day's primal humanity, this great European corroboree.

A new telex Dannie gave me said that every East Berliner who danced across the border was given a hundred marks for shopping.

Although the Wall had been opened, it seemed it was meant to stand. One printout said that when a panel of the wall was attacked by enthusiastic Berliners at dawn, the border guards of the East had driven them off with fire hoses. Again, this appeared to me a realistic limit to what could be permitted in a flawed world. After all the Cold War's occasional flying lead, after the misery and inimical air of that cleft city of Berlin, water seemed almost a kindly riposte to the over-enthusiasm of the Berliners. We were so glibly used to the Wall, so accustomed to looking on it as a perpetual device, that we could almost feel brotherhood with the East Germans with the hoses.

Dannie approached me now with a sort of frown. It showed that maybe Jacko's idea of interviewing his favourite and – according to him – clever mate in front of the Brandenburg Gate didn't generate much zeal in her.

—You've really written for the
New York Times Color Magazine
?

I said I had. I told her of Poland. And the Horn of Africa.

—Well, that's the sort of thing we want. Maybe a bit more specific. A sense of the human event. Nothing highly political. Observations. Humorous if you can manage it. A bit of history. You worn makeup before?

She seemed to imply I might need it if I were to come near exciting any of Vixen Six's thirty million viewers.

Al Bunker was trying to get a not quite coherent Gunter away from the bar and to shoot an interview with him in midair. Bunker hoped people might think Gunter's mumblings arose from the despair of exile, and from the disabling hope which had now been released upon the earth, in particular upon Germans who lived in Queens.

Three enormous sofas lined the walls at the rear of the plane, and people were going there to sleep now, leaving Bunker with a silent plane in which he could try to make something out of shifty, unfocused Gunter. Dannie had sprawled herself in the corner where two sofas met: her feet still on the floor, her shoes kicked off. Along the rear bulkhead lay Jacko, his head on her lap. She patted the sofa on her left, against the side wall.

—There's room for you here if you want, she told me.

I felt somehow sundered in two by exhaustion. It seemed to me that my brain was bouncing against the ceiling and my feet were ten yards away, the two connected by one thin wire. I took to the sofa gratefully. There was no room to lie full length, but plenty of room to recline, as Dannie had. Only kings like Jacko, entitled to six and a half feet of upholstery, lay full length.

I saw that Dannie stroked his head, and was talking softly, though loudly enough so that I could make out what she said. In this context, history's most joyful and clamorous night, the words didn't quite make sense. Gradually it became apparent she was talking about something our wild preparation and departure had already wiped from my mind: Sunny Sondquist's case.

Slavery, was the word which recurred in Dannie's mouth. She was listing a sub-bibliography of slave magazines I never knew about.

—Basically they tell you how to capture, secure and then wreck the mind of your slave. They're extraordinary publications. This is our glorious system of freedoms we're about to bring to the East Germans!

—Who put you onto this stuff? Jacko groaned on the edge of sleep.

—This psychologist, that new one I found. Young, Jewish, sexy. A damned good talker.

—Ah, murmured Jacko. Fancy him, do we? It'd make your mother very happy.

While the rest of us grew somnolent, Dannie still brimmed with information.

—Jesus, Jacko, he told me stuff that would make even Durkin take a long pull on his beer.
Great
material as a matter of fact. Did you know, for instance, there exists something called NAMBLA? North American Man Boy Love Association. Its members share information in their published magazine and through their computer network. These apparently respectable men punch up the program, direct some computer mail to someone they've met, or someone they've talked to before by computer mail, and say, Let's go out and take some adolescent boy prisoner.