The Berlin Assignment (20 page)

Birgit said she was glad he liked it and invited him for dinner the next night.

Dinner for two. Simple. Quiet. As they stood up to clear the table – Hanbury subsequently replayed the scene in his mind a hundred times – Birgit made an elegant half-turn towards him, light blue eyes transfixing his. She took the plates out of his hands. Her lower lip began quivering. They embraced. Birgit nestled against Hanbury's shoulder; he clasped the small of her back. Then began the slow descent of a zipper. In the stillness it sounded like a long subdued note coming off the A string of a violin. Hanbury would never forget the sound of helping Birgit shed her dress.

In the course of the next weeks a love routine became established. One evening on Birgit's bed, both of them wet from exertion in uncooled, moisture-burdened air, she asked why they were always in her flat. His villa was much nicer. It wouldn't bother her to wake up there and have breakfast on his terrace. “The atmosphere is artificial,” Hanbury replied. “The furniture is awful. You have so many lovely Asian crafts on the walls. My place is pretty bare.” She offered to help him improve the decoration, but he argued it was pointless. “No sooner does the stuff hang than I'm reassigned and it has to come down.” A slight movement of air passed over their bodies. Hanbury was on his back; Birgit hovered over him on an elbow, one breast resting against his chest. An edge entered her voice. She said that in some respects he was a cold person. Sometimes she thought he was holding back. It frustrated her.

“It shouldn't,” Hanbury soothed. “What we have is fine. It couldn't be better.”

“It could.”

“Birgit, let's be realistic. In a few months you're going back to Stockholm. I'll be reassigned. Let's enjoy the present.”

“I don't want to go back to Stockholm. I think I would be happier living like you – moving around, having new experiences.”

“It looks better than it is. Let's enjoy what we have.” Birgit thought about this, then rolled onto her back. Later, Hanbury got up, dressed, kissed her and took a taxi home.

The following evening they were invited as a couple to a dinner party. “Sorry about last night,” Birgit said casually as she drove. “I didn't mean the things I said. I got my period this morning.”

After the party she drove him to his villa, declining the offer of a nightcap. In the weeks that followed, although outwardly the affair continued, they both knew its inner mechanics were deteriorating. Birgit departed before her time in Kuala Lumpur was up. She didn't say whether she planned to re-enter Olaf's prison, or was determined to make a fresh start.

Hanbury missed Birgit. Until Olaf's visit she was a good friend, and afterwards a keen lover. On the other hand, he was convinced someone like Birgit would not be happy living an empty, zig-zag life like his. True, she had expressed anxiety about facing years of tedium with Olaf, but for someone like Birgit a life spent on the move would be at best a temporary solution. Eventually she'd realize she was on the run. She'd want to stop. At the end of the day, for her, someone like Olaf was better. Hanbury was convinced of it. It was a good thing she hadn't moved in with him.

He spent the remaining time in Kuala Lumpur listening to Mozart's music. With a warm glow he marvelled at its regenerative power.

As Hanbury retreated extravagantly into fresh self-containment, Sabine was determined to acquire a modest reduction in her working week. She wanted to quit Geissler's bookstore before Nicholas was born, but her husband talked her out of it. Keep your options open, he counselled. So
she proposed a one-year arrangement to Geissler, involving the wife of another professor to replace her. He grudgingly agreed.

Schwartz had a reason to urge his wife to stay connected to Geissler's. Rare books fascinated him. Shortly after Sabine went to work at Geissler's, she brought him a copy of an unknown, privately published diary kept by a functionary in Bohemia from 1934 to 1938. It described how the Nazis came in and took over. Schwartz was excited. Where did it come from? Out of the cellar, Sabine replied. Geissler brought it up in a basket with other books. What else was in the cellar? No one knew, she said. The door was permanently locked. Schwartz appeared at the bookstore the next day. His wife showed him around and introduced him to Geissler, whose eyes darted back and forth – from the professor, to the books, to Sabine – before he shuffled off. He assumed his customary observation post by the front door. Schwartz followed. “I'm a professor,” he said. “I would like to see your stock. It could be of interest to me.”

“Stock?” an alarmed Geissler said.

“Stored books. Books not on display.”

“Leave my store,” Geissler ordered. “Don't come back.” Swaying awkwardly, as if a fugitive, he made his way to the back, hiding in the darkness until the front door jangled shut.

Schwartz gave detailed instructed to his wife on how to spot more volumes like the one from Bohemia. Periodically she came up with one. “What else is in that cellar?” the professor would mutter.

From Malaysia, Hanbury returned to Ottawa. Investitures assured him he had earned respect in Kuala Lumpur. They would respond in kind. “Know Irving Heywood? Ever heard of him?” the clerk asked.
Hanbury raised and lowered his shoulders and shook his head. “Ah. See. You've been in the wilderness too long. Heywood's a rising star. The Disarmament Priory is hot. Your next stop. His understudy.”

Disarmament was a bewildering terrain. Hanbury acquired the habit of slouching at his desk, rubbing fatigued eyes with his fingertips, combing hands through his hair while he pondered solutions to bureaucratic battles. The sounds of the daily ordeal were of the telephone ringing non-stop and Heywood's voice trumpeting. Some days it seemed he was standing before the walls of Jericho.

“No corner of the Service is as vital for the future of democracy as the Priory,” Heywood confided to Hanbury at the beginning of their five-year partnership. Heywood described the main currents of thinking in disarmament theory since the Korean War. Hanbury listened, but his thoughts wandered back to the sounds and smells of Malaysia.

The Priory drained its members. It sucked them dry. Husbands were too tired for their wives; mothers became estranged from their children. Late at night, in an apartment overlooking the Ottawa canal, Hanbury listened to Gregorian chants. He could cope with nothing else.

A few weeks after calling on the Chief of Protocol, the consul's social life went through a subtle transformation, as a prairie wheat field does when the ripening begins – everything was as before, except the hue. For no reason Hanbury could discern, at least not then, the quality of the daily invitations began changing. More and more of them, according to Frau Carstens, were unusual, in a class apart.

In the early days of his assignment Hanbury trooped from one devastating engagement to another. The celebration of diplomatic arrivals and departures were among the deadliest of the forays. “National day” receptions – bloodless, irrelevant events – ran a close second. Art exhibition openings were a dime a dozen. Luncheon invitations piled up, from clubs with lacklustre speakers on parochial topics:
Daimler Benz, New on Potsdamer Platz and on the New York Stock Exchange: German Industrial Might Revitalized
. There were musical events too, in the large eastern European legations located with a kind of we-still-own-Berlin prestige near the Brandenburg Gate.
Routine events attended by listless crowds. Sturm once observed in his inimitable way that the diplomatic corps was about as interesting as a collection of worn out boots.

The Chief of Protocol, playing an artful role, was the agent lifting Hanbury into a different social strata. He told a media friend about the latest diplomatic arrival's new-world freshness, which resulted in a published newspaper interview accompanied by a good sized portrait. To a dowager, a patron of the opera, he whispered the name of the striking new consul in town, a bachelor. The news spread like a prairie fire. Similar remarks were made to financiers and business moguls. No one in Berlin took the Chief of Protocol's observations lightly. And so it was that blue ribbon parties began crowding humdrum events out of Hanbury's program.

One such event he attended was a surprise thirtieth birthday party – drinks with a light dinner following – for Elisabeth, the wealthy great-granddaughter of a minister in the Kaiser's Imperial Cabinet. Von Helmholtz was her godfather. The list of the party's invitees carried his stamp and Hanbury, having met Elisabeth once before, was on it. The guests assembled in a palm-filled conservatory in a Grunewald mansion and waited for her to arrive. In the absence of a host – von Helmholtz had not yet come to weld the party together – a tension mounted. People stiffly held their glasses, tipped them frequently and looked past each other. Hanbury, his interview having just been published in the paper, was feeling buoyant and told someone standing close by a disarming anecdote about a missing diplomatic bag. “Missing? The diplomatic bag?” The astonishment was expressed a little loudly, and the attention of the whole group shifted to the consul.

“That's right. It didn't arrive.” He grinned. “It caused so much commotion I thought I was in the middle of a cattle round-up.” He shook his head as if it was all quite unbelievable. “Telephones lowed like cows,” he added capriciously, “and the fax machine neighed.” A titter
rose above the rain clattering on the glass roof. Solicitous inquiries were immediately made as to whether the diplomatic bag, that cult object, had in the end been located. “Oh yeah, we lassoed it,” a laughing consul reassured the guests.

The metaphor seemed to relax the gathering and a group conversation began. From missing diplomatic instructions the talk turned to the diplomacy of Bismarck. Someone described the chancellor's extensive use of diplomatic couriers and his full control over instructions sent to ambassadors. Bismarck's one-man-in-charge approach had been a good thing, someone said. It brought Germany an extended period of peace. This subject – Bismarck, strong leadership, the start of Empire – really warmed the group up, and when the transition from politics to personalities took place the conservatory filled up with historical anecdotes expressed so loudly they erased the patter of the rain.

The Chief of Protocol arrived just before his goddaughter. The surprise was then sprung on her, and a rich buffet opened with rare wines freely pouring from crystal decanters. Hanbury spent some time next to a woman called Sophia, not a great beauty, but possessing a disarming willingness to talk about herself. She worked for the Treuhand, the agency putting East Germany up for sale. Sipping wine, sampling caviar, and under cover of a polite exchange on the clean-up costs of a socialist economy run into the dirt, she and the consul eyed each other. Eventually they agreed to get together sometime for lunch. The consul next sidled up to a woman who was Elisabeth's doctor. She informed him she was thinking of quitting medicine to seek a seat in Parliament. For a while they discussed how far the right wing could go in Germany before alarm bells would ring.

The party was shifting into high gear. Guests reclined on velvet sofas and dangled glasses from their finger tips. Hanbury continued his professional rounds, searching out people who might be of diplomatic
use, acquiring their names to pass to Frau Carstens. In the course of the evening, someone whispered to the Chief of Protocol that the consul, with his charming accent and delightful sense of irony, provided an exotic touch. He helped get the party started. Von Helmholtz listened and said he was not surprised. Later, after the consul had chatted politely with the birthday girl, von Helmholtz pulled him aside. “We're always running into each other,” he said, “but we seldom talk. Let's change that.” Could Hanbury come for dinner? Could he keep next Friday evening free? The consul said he would be honoured.

When Hanbury left the party and came down the vast front steps, the Opel wheeled up smartly. Driving off, Sturm said, “Had a good chat with the other drivers, Herr Konsul. Quite a house. There's something on there every night. The Chief of Protocol is there often. Makes you wonder how he does it, where he finds the time. His driver and I are starting to get on well since we see each other often now. He's been driving von Helmholtz for a decade. I learned tonight his wife died tragically years ago. Did you know that?”

“No.” Hanbury knew little about von Helmholtz's personal life. “How did she die?”

Sturm half turned to the back seat. “A disease. It came on quick. When she was gone he began to work like a demon. There isn't an hour in the week that isn't programmed. Apparently he likes meeting younger people.”

Hanbury yawned. “That rules me out.”

“Not sure it does, Herr Konsul. It doesn't seem to.”

“I've never seen him with young people.”

“Not
young
people.
Younger
people. That rules you in.”

“It's doubtful. I only meet him at formal functions with invitations that come by mail. And since you open the mail, Sturm, you know about what I'll be doing before I do.”

The chauffeur felt accused. “It's my job to open the mail,” he said
with a prickly undertone. He changed the subject. “I had a glimpse of that Elisabeth
von Sumplace und Sumwhere
when she arrived. She was silhouetted for a moment at the top of the steps, before all the cheering and the singing started. Perhaps it was the light, but she struck me as very thin. If she had stood there naked I think the wind would have whistled through her ribs.”

“Sturm!”

The chauffeur waited for more reaction, but there was only silence. He tried again. “All of us saw it. We agreed that's how she looked – ribs like strings on a harp. The drivers are good men, Herr Konsul, professional at passing time. One of them this evening claimed his wife was an angel. You know what another one said? He said,
You're lucky. Mine's still alive
.” Sturm detected a faint chuckle. “The same fellow told us about a friend who said he had just become a father.
The wife doing well?
someone asked the new father.
Sure
, he said.
She doesn't know about it yet.
” The polite rear-seat chuckling was a little louder. “They've got a sense of humour,” Sturm said about the drivers. “I hope your talk inside those mansions is as good as it is outside.”