The Berlin Assignment (29 page)

“Thank you for the picture. Where did you get it?”

“The photo department. By the way, your western outfit added character. Have you started keeping horses?”

Hanbury chuckled. “The only ones I've been near recently were under the hood of a Trabi and they sounded sick.”

“Trabi has never felt better. He's been serviced. I told you that when I invited you up here for lunch.”

“Speaking of invitations, ever been to the Press Ball?”

Gundula had not.

“Would you like to go?”

A silence hung between them, then she said, “I don't think it's my
milieu
.”

“There would be advantages,” Hanbury said playfully.

“Such as?”

“You could introduce me to your press friends.”

“That's true. Some of them still talk about you in the club.”

“And I hear you don't actually have to dance there.”

“But I love dancing,” protested Gundula. “I'm good at the quick-step.”

Hanbury did some quick thinking, but decided to plunge on. “I'm
not,” he admitted. I'm better at slow steps, the slower the better. But if you show me how to quickstep, I could show you how to waltz without moving.”

“Waltz without moving,” she asked with deepening interest, “a diplomatic step?”

“It demands skill,” Hanbury confirmed. He wished he could see Gundula through the phone. Did she have her head thrown back in noiseless merriment? No one he knew had a sharper sense of humour. “Now take journalists,” he continued. “Quickstepping is all they ever do. They probably don't even need music.”

“You're perceptive, cowboy.”

There was another moment where neither said a word, when the conversation could have gone in one of several directions, but Hanbury brought it down to earth. “Even if we do different steps, it doesn't mean we shouldn't go to the same ball,” he said quietly. “It might be fun.” That settled it.

He asked about her work. Some days had passed since her last column. Gundula replied she was working on something new and it hadn't jelled yet. “I'm exploring a new perspective. By the way, progress on your friend Günther Rauch. He's around – that's confirmed – but he's not in politics. Still interested?”

“I don't care about politics. I only want to see how he is.”

“It might take a while to pin down his whereabouts. The route is not direct.” As Gundula was hanging up, she thanked him for the invitation; she looked forward to it, she said.

When Tony was in grade six, the square dance teacher in Indian Head emphasized that
compatibility
was essential for couples if they wanted to be good dancers. Tony wondered what she meant, because he and the girls from the outlying farms lived in divergent worlds. He went to square dancing only because his father insisted, arguing it was part of an all-round, prairie education. Tony's mother disagreed. She
wanted him to use lunch breaks for complicated finger exercises to keep his piano technique nimble. Tony himself would have preferred to be outside, studying rabbit tracks in the snow. The father prevailed and that winter Tony practised compatibility twice a week with a beefy daughter of the land called Bonnie. Forty years later, Bonnie, ironically, was the reason Hanbury considered the Press Ball might work. If he had survived being trampled by that determined little girl, dancing with Gundula, he was sure, would be like levitating.

Faint recalls of square dancing had faded when shortly afterwards he prepared to go out. “Where are you off to?” Frau Carstens demanded. “The zoo,” he said, passing her desk and pulling on a coat. “Buffalo viewing.” “Sturm will drive!” she called, but saw he wore his walking shoes. “No need!” he yelled back, surging out the door. It wasn't a complete fabrication. He took the direction of the zoo, but went past it, up Budapesterstrasse, to the park for the appointment with Schwartz.

Hanbury knew the Tiergarten from years before, an island of tranquillity in a sea of turbulence, but he had obtained a new perspective from Sturm. On the way to a meeting with the minister for city planning Sturm informed him it hadn't always been so peaceful. When the Allied bombers swooped in for their runs, the statues of great Germans in the clearings trembled under the explosions of a city going up in flames. Uncannily, high over the park golden-winged Victoria on her column, affectionately referred to as Golden Ilse by Sturm, remained untouched. Sturm went on to claim it was because the Tiergarten wasn't really a park. Manoeuvring slowly in dense traffic around the Victory Column, he explained it was a location for certain supernatural events. “It may look like a park, but it's really a camp for ghosts. See the statues? Ghosts in them come out when the sun is down. The park is full of statues, so it gets busy. On the night of the first of May the ghosts of the Soviet soldiers who died in the fighting for the Reichstag come out too. They're in a big grave, up ahead, by the
memorial. That's two thousand more ghosts! Things are really hopping then. There's hardly any room left for the living. Myself, I don't go near this place at night.”

Sturm made a nifty move into an opening in the traffic, cutting off a woman in a Porsche. She lowered her window. “Are you blind?” she yelled. Sturm, gloomily preoccupied with the proximity of ghosts, was not about to take this. “No,” he shouted back, “but some people have a mouth so big I can see through them.” “If you can see so good, I guess you can see why I think you're a dink.” Hanbury followed the exchange with interest. The woman was pretty. She had lovely red hair and a well-formed mouth tastefully highlighted with dark lipstick. “I can see so well through your big mouth that I have a good view of the inside of your asshole!” cried Sturm. “Sturm,” cautioned the consul. “Easy.” “
Dann sind Sie wohl ein Arschficker!
” the redhead screamed, accusing him of sodomy. “Ah,” Sturm said with practised denigration, waving her away, “
Sie Arsch mit Ohren
.” Having reduced the beauty to no more than a fat ass with a pair of ears, he rolled his window up. She beat the dashboard of her Porsche, but the traffic began moving. “Phew,” said Hanbury. “Good thing we don't come by here often.” “It doesn't mean much,” a relaxed Sturm said. “It's the ghosts. People shout to keep them distant. Deep down they don't mean it.”

Ten minutes later Hanbury mentioned the traffic snarl around the Victory Column to the city planning minister, who felt confronted. He stared at the consul with eyes set deep in an emaciated face. “We have to condense fifty years of development into five,” the tired man lamented. “But we have a solution for the traffic.” He pointed at a wall map and for half an hour reviewed the advantages of tunnelling beneath the park.

The traffic tunnel was controversial, but Schwartz supported it. He believed it might help a city which was spiralling out of control. Almost overnight, too much of everything had come into Berlin – from
countries to the east. Refugees, beggars, gangs of thieves, foreign workers. Traffic was endlessly choked. Chaos. As far as he was concerned, the new excesses should be removed – at a stroke. Bold decisions were needed to re-establish order. But what was there instead? To drive home what he meant he liked to point at Berlin's
Flächennutzungsplan
, a land-use blue print. It was a perfect piece of fudge, a sad escape act for politicians. Schwartz ridiculed it, likening the thousands of dabs of colour to a bad impressionistic painting. What did it do? What were its result? Streets dug up, filled in, dug up again; scaffolding permanently confiscating sidewalks; cobblestones piled up on intersections; bridges pulled apart; one-way-street signs appearing randomly, then overnight being pointlessly reversed. The plan symbolized democracy running rampant, so everything ceased to work.

At least the Tiergarten remained exempt, a sanctuary for contemplation, a preserve for the bundling of thoughts. Which was why Schwartz had suggested it to the consul. In the Tiergarten they could have an undisturbed talk. Making his way to the entry gate, Schwartz thought back to the stadium scene. It had unfolded fast, too fast to think. Sabine's flight had been unsettling enough. But then came Müller's claim that he and the intruder had his wife in common! Schwartz prided himself on not being easily shocked, but at the stadium – as the figure before him calmly poured champagne – he had come close.

Sabine, when he caught up with her, was livid. “Who was that?” he demanded. She trembled, not saying a word. “Let's go for a walk,” he said. They entered a cemetery near the stadium. Proceeding along the rows of graves, he waited. “I knew him long ago,” she finally said, partly defiant, partly apologetic. “He called a few months ago. I told him to go away.” The late afternoon light was disappearing. The graves
were as graves should be – silent and in full repose. Schwartz asked what
long ago
meant. “Before I met you.” After more questions a story came out which was not especially unusual. Schwartz wasn't surprised. He wasn't even surprised his wife never told him. Everyone has secrets. He had his. When she came to the day when the Savignyplatz affair ended, she began to cry. “This is ridiculous,” she said, pulling out a handkerchief. Schwartz suggested looking on the consul's return as a gain. “He might be interesting to get to know. Think of his experiences around the world.” But Sabine was resolute. “He humiliated me. I want nothing to do with him.”

In itself, the Savignyplatz affair was uninteresting for Schwartz, but a functioning diplomat was different. What of the world's affairs had he seen up close? More intriguingly, what local entrées did he enjoy? In the cemetery, Schwartz decided to cast a net, if only to see what it might bring.

For the rendezvous he chose the gate into the Tiergarten opposite the former diplomatic quarter. The consul might be interested to see the area where decades earlier his trade was plied. A gas lamp cast a faint illumination around the entrance. The air was chilly and Schwartz's breath lit up before drifting away beyond the range of light. Dampness was on the attack. The lamp post was drenched with evening dew and a frost, creeping out of the ground, was hardening the wet into a wispy white. In his flaring loden cape he was a pyramidal silhouette rocking patiently back and forth.

The consul came up with shoulders hunched. When he was a few steps away, Schwartz extended a hand from inside the cape. “You found it.”

“No problems.”

“I'm glad we have a chance to talk. It was awkward at the stadium.”

The consul agreed. He hadn't expected Müller's family would be present at the race.

“We were all surprised. No doubt Sabine's father was playing a
trick.” A silent understanding went between them that no more need be said about the scene. “By the way, embassies stood here once.” Schwartz gestured to the street behind the consul. “Diplomacy was an expanding industry in Berlin a hundred years ago. I admit I once considered the profession, but one has to believe in the national positions. Shall we go this way? I know a café.”

Proceeding into the park, he inquired into the consul's work. Conversing quietly they passed a lake in amongst the trees; it was a black mirror holding up the forming fog. When Schwartz heard Hanbury had worked on disarmament questions, he became excited. A subject involving the great powers, he said. He began to set forth his view of Russians. “They treat the world as if they're in a bazaar. They posture, they threaten, they haggle. International agreements mean little to them. You must have noticed that.”

The consul recalled the proof he assembled on the illegally deployed radar in Siberia, the Salt II violation. “We were planning to stand up to them,” he added. “We had the evidence, but the Cold War ended.”

“It would have been the right thing to do.” Schwartz took the consul's arm and slowed him down. “Now take us,” he said ominously. “We Germans. We have acquired the habit of making no decisions unless it's by consensus. As a nation we've become addicted to self-appeasement.”

Within the intimacy of the thickening mist, Schwartz's low voice was compelling. “That may be happening everywhere internationally,” Hanbury said evasively.

“You see!” Schwartz declared. “You know what I mean. Appeasement signals the death of an important political art, I mean the art of manipulating fear.” He came to a halt and prevented Hanbury from going forward. “Fear,” he emphasized. “Not terror. Terror is effective in the short term only. People react unpredictably to terror. But they respond rationally to fear. A distinction Hitler didn't make. One can speculate on what might have happened if he had. He might have coasted on forever.
Another lesson he didn't heed was never push the Anglo-Saxon world beyond a certain limit.” Hanbury listened quietly. “East Germany made the same mistake. They adopted some of Hitler's formulas. You must have seen how clumsy they were. Sabine told me you used to go there.”

The reference to Sabine stirred Hanbury and he laughed self-consciously. Something in Schwartz's voice made him open up. “I could never get her to come along,” he said. “I was going to lectures on socialism. Where I come from we don't have a feel for that sort of thinking. I was curious about a functioning communist state and went to have a look.” He chuckled when he told Schwartz about trying to share impressions of Stalinism with Sabine. “She wouldn't talk about it. Absolutely not.”

“Is that why you didn't marry her,” Schwartz asked casually, “because she didn't share your curiosity for political ideas?” He made it sound as if he wasn't married to Sabine, as if she were a distant relative, as if for purposes of this conversation she belonged to Hanbury more than him.

“I didn't believe she would leave Berlin,” Hanbury replied simply. The fatalism he had back then was creeping back. “No matter how I looked at it, it was going to be painful – me not able to stay, her unable to leave.”