The Berlin Assignment (60 page)

“It's not the Potsdam Rotary Club,” Schwartz sneered. “
Weiter gehen
?” Continue?

“We've come this far.” Occasionally Gundula would dare him with the same words –
Weiter gehen?
– just before entering another of her East Berlin dives. We've come this far, he always said. But here he was less nonchalant. Schwartz didn't have Gundula's light-hearted, peppy way.

Inside the stockade patches of earth were scarred where fires had burned. Schwartz went to a side door and tapped out a complicated pattern. A small shutter slid aside, then the door opened. “
Ein Gast
,” Schwartz said quietly. He led his guest into a narrow passage to the main hall of the house. An oak staircase was in near collapse. In the muted light Hanbury saw rough planks had been hammered over missing steps. Schwartz followed his gaze. “The Russians,” he said. “They used it last.”

Thick candles marked a passage down another hallway. A pounding noise grew louder as they went. When Schwartz opened a heavy door the sound instantly converted into wild, driving music which seemed to jump at them. Hanbury stood still, thinking maybe it was better to turn back now, but Schwartz motioned and he followed, down narrow stone steps
to a cellar. The music was an assault on more than the ears. It created a black, disorienting pressure. Pushing forward, Hanbury had trouble with his breathing. Finally the professor parted a curtain and preceded him into a cavern where more candles flickered. The consul recoiled. This time the assault was on his eyes. On low stools, around slices of tree trunks serving as tables, swaying to the driving beat, sat a pack of drinking, smoking warriors. Most heads were shaven, others had tails growing out the back. Army fatigues, chains draped over bare chests, swastikas tattooed on upper arms, army belts with bayonets in sheaths, jackboots laced up to the knees. Was this the corked-up creativity which Schwartz declared was being wasted?

One glance was enough. Hanbury wanted out. He had a sickening sensation that if he went one step further, this sullen pack would rip him apart. But Schwartz continued in, raising a palm in greeting to a nearby table, giving a finger salute to others. Hanbury followed against his will, as if caught in a slipstream. At a vacant chunk of tree they sank down on stools. The professor pointed two fingers at a figure draped with cartridge belts who snapped an index finger back and soon brought them each a beer.

The loudspeakers fell silent; the grotto calmed. In a corner a video began playing on a large screen. Nazis marching at the Nuremberg rallies; tanks rolling; dictators making rousing speeches; footage of crosses burning in the presence of the Ku-Klux-Klan. Random fascist images. There was little talk. The warriors smoked and drank and watched the video. Hanbury saw one with an Iroquois swath of hair growing from his forehead, over his scalp and down his neck, who operated a Polaroid. He was in demand, the pictures coming out setting off little eddies of manly giggling. “Well?” the professor challenged. “Do they look like beggars?” Hanbury shrugged. “Good local colour,” he said non-committally, masking a deep foreboding. He noticed Schwartz was different here. The academic arrogance was gone. A severity, a deadly lack of humour had
replaced it. “I understand what you meant about the pent-up energy. It's powerful,” Hanbury added, wanting to be conciliatory. “I thought you would,” said Schwartz with cold triumph. He looked in the direction of the video which showed brownshirts smashing Jewish windows.

Hanbury wanted to remark he didn't need to stay longer, but the skinhead operating the Polaroid came over. Without warning the flash went. Schwartz was instantly annoyed. “
Franz! Nein. Das will ich nicht
.” I don't want that. “It's a Polaroid, Herr Professor,” the skinhead smiled. “If you don't like the picture, throw it away.” Franz lifted the photo off the back. Before their eyes, it formed. The consul looked lost; the professor stared out of the picture with hatred. The back of a warrior at the next table, naked from the waist up, was on the picture's edge and hieroglyphic markings on the wall behind seemed to spring out of their heads. “It's yours,” Franz said to Schwartz, “or yours,” to the guest. He continued to the next table. “I don't like my picture being taken,” Schwartz muttered.

Hanbury studied the photo, then turned around to look at the markings on the wall. “What's that?”

“Symbols of an ancient Aryan cosmogony,” Schwartz said, taking the photo from Hanbury and putting it in his pocket. “They depict fire, air, earth and water.” He pointed at several specific symbols. Hanbury asked about the others. Schwartz explained that a symbol with three curved hooks joined at the centre portrayed the swirling fire whisk from which the universe was born. Inverted triangles and anti-clockwise markings including the swastika – he called them triskelions – symbolized stages in cosmic evolution. Such portrayals, he said, had developed over time into the Maltese cross, which in turn was the basis for the iron cross with its Prussian importance. “I did research into ancient Nordic runes years ago,” continued Schwartz. “I explained the meanings to these boys. They wanted to believe in them. One might say, they felt it pointed
them towards a divinity that was uniquely theirs. The book you got from Geissler improved my understanding. It revealed pictograms I hadn't seen before. It had quite an impact here, as if their version of the Dead Sea scrolls had been found. Well, now they have the full spiritual vocabulary of the ancients. So they painted the signs on the wall. This space is their temple.”

Hanbury was incredulous. And what are you doing here? he almost cried. Where do you fit in all of this? But the video was over and the music restarted. Schwartz's spiritual horde began their motionless contemplation once more. As the pain of the eardrum-cracking beat became unbearable, he shouted into Schwartz's ear that he wished to go. The professor nodded. It was too loud for him too. In the upstairs hallway Schwartz took the photo from his pocket, stuck it in a candle and held the burning picture by a corner until it was gone. “Visits here do not take place,” he said. “We did not come. Agreed?” The cold severity was gone. The customary arrogance was back. “Sure,” Hanbury replied meekly. Schwartz broke into grin. “It would take too long to explain to Sabine.”

Reappearing in the easy evening air was like awakening from a disturbing dream. Hanbury now asked his question. “How did you get involved with them?”

“Research,” Schwartz answered smugly. “A historian needs to understand the present to interpret the past as much as he studies the past to shed light on the present.”

“And you were comfortable there?” Hanbury probed. “I wasn't. I admit it. That was a brutal video.”

“There are no restrictions, no taboos in my work. That video tells us about power and how it is manipulated. The Nazis had good insight into power, but they set themselves poor objectives. Imagine what could have been achieved with better goals.”

Hanbury thought about this. He might have asked more questions. Why furnish neo-Nazis with the spiritual vocabulary of ancient Aryans? Or, was there a link between this and the information he had dug out of the Stasi archives? But Hanbury didn't ask his questions. He didn't want to know the answers.
Visits here do not take place
. He agreed with that. As Schwartz's car rolled and pitched out of the forest, he tried to purge his mind of what he'd seen. He wanted to get back to the beginning, to the time before he and Schwartz began collaborating. He wanted to get back to simplicity and innocence, to his sanctuary in Dahlem, where Gundula sat next to him at the piano and afterwards they went onto the terrace to drink champagne, looking at the treetops silhouetted against the stars, until a nudge from her said it was time to go inside, and holding hands to ascend the stairs.

“My dear Alex, if you really want to know more,” McEwenwas telling Graf Bornhof on the phone, “do come to Berlin.”

The graf had called McEwen to thank him for the photo. He had examined it, he said, and had some questions. McEwen, picking up signals of worry behind the graf's casual tone, pressed his advantage. Graf Bornhof paused, then said he'd be on a plane the next day.

A picture is not only worth a thousand words, McEwen thought as he rang off, a picture concentrates the mind, even the Hun's.

He was quite a picture himself, a perfect picture of a merry uncle. McEwen was engaged, as he liked to say, in pleasurable, last minute, pre-retirement planning. And with Graf Bornhof consenting to visit, the send-off would be grand. McEwen sang a
Tra-la-la
, until his crusty vocal chords tightened up and the notes flipped into a squeal.
That
made him giggle. The new file – his final file – had been thickening nicely. He was undecided on one point only: whether to put the photograph from a last and loyal spectator in Potsdam on the front cover as a
stirring opening, or at the very back, as a finale. Technology nowadays, thought McEwen. Remarkable how little cameras take pictures from inside big cameras. He sat at his kitchen table paging through the dossier with an avuncular air, feeling good towards Graf Bornhof, overcome with anticipation for the Yorkshire farm, indescribably thankful to the consul for being more duplicitous than could ever have been imagined and, not least, giving way to a feeling of magnanimity towards the Hun. When you're about to leave a land forever and are swollen with success, the locals, McEwen grudgingly admitted, deserve a modicum of credit.

The joy filling McEwen's apartment was matched by a carefree exultation on the streets. Berlin was devoting itself to pleasure. As the summer's intensity grew and temperatures notched up ever higher, life in the bars and cafés spilled into the open, and bathers clogged the beaches around the city's delightful forest lakes.

Gundula's apartment in the concrete jungle of Marzahn had become unbearable. The scorched fields of concrete scarcely cooled at night. The pre-fab cages there were like ovens getting hotter by the day. Gundula, accustomed to spending nights in the consul's villa with its high-ceilinged rooms and liveable temperatures, accepted his suggestion to move in. During the days they went their separate ways. But with the consul's social obligations also having hit the summer doldrums, they whiled away the evenings on the terrace. The first hour was spent catching up on reading and then, outside speakers activated, they listened to Gundula's favourite tracks of Soul.

It was somewhere in the middle of that lazy summer period, spending so much time together, that Gundula began to wonder about something. At first she attributed it to the heat, which could do funny
things to the imagination, then to the leisurely pace of the days, which freed the mind. Then she realized her preoccupation with Tony had nothing to do with either. The thought was slowly crystallizing that she was with him all the time, yet scarcely knew him. When she thought about it, in her mind he mostly added up to a collection of negations. He was, to start with, not like other men she'd known. Most were intent on treating women as creatures to be steered towards self-improvement. Nor was he anything like the Russian swimmers she knew when she was a girl. They had a dark side to their passion. She recalled they would speculate for hours about the spiritual dimensions of a man and woman having been united in sex. It had strained her patience to the limit. But Hanbury didn't go in for exploring mystical meaning. Once or twice she actually tried to find out what he thought about their steady sex. He said he looked upon it as a wonderful prelude – to a glass of chilled champagne – adding he was off to get some. She couldn't be too vexed, because he was right: chilled champagne after making love on warm nights was a high. No, he wasn't ponderously self-important like her German men, nor spiritually moody like the Russian ones. Nor was he much of a cowboy – even if she still occasionally called him that – because, really, he lacked swagger. And, despite his talent for the piano, she'd also stopped calling him Chopin. Missing entirely was a volatile artistic temperament. For a while, she teasingly called him Casanova, but Casanova petered out. He was no commanding officer, neither in bed, nor out. He was no intellectual, but not a fool. He wasn't decisive. He wasn't stubborn. He wasn't almost anything. So, other than being pleasant and accommodating, what was he?

The fuzziness of his persona made Gundula recall a saying she sometimes heard her grandmother use: things vague when they begin show purpose when they end. Did this apply to Hanbury? Did it apply to them? She also wondered if it applied to her career. Her purpose at the paper was on hold. Having been relegated to the back pages, her assignment
now was cabaret reviews. How would that end? She and Tony talked about it once on the terrace. He listened attentively and made a suggestion. He probably meant it well, but it wasn't carefully thought through. “International relations, Gundula,” he said. “Write about that. You'd be a good foreign correspondent.”

“A foreign correspondent for whom?”

“Your paper.”

“I happen to live
here
.”

“You'd have to do some travelling.”

“The only other language I speak is Russian. Sorry, I'm not interested in going there.”

“Go back to school. Learn English. You could practice on me.”

“You make it sound so effortless. It don't think it would be easy.”

Given the precarious situation at the paper, any hint to management that she was interested in training could mean them easing her out permanently. No, she had to tough it out, spend time camouflaging her talent, put up with writing for the popular culture section, and reestablish credentials.

“If you decided to do it, you'd be successful. I'm sure of it.” Hanbury told her. Although Gundula wouldn't admit it, she had once or twice considered, purely in the abstract, what Tony suggested. Gerhard von Helmholtz had hinted she should be doing that too. The problem with their line of thought was that it didn't clarify her career outlook. If anything, it made the future even hazier.