Another Kind of Country (13 page)

‘You,’ the accent heavy, guttural, ‘come with me. Now!’

The collective intake of breath from the bunch of Americans was audible.

Miller stepped out of the line, followed the sergeant to the head of the queue.

He kept a straight face until they were both inside the checkpoint hut.

‘Heinz-Peter,’ he spoke quietly – the captain of the guard was smoking beside the window – ‘you scared the shit out of those kids.’ Miller recognized the captain from previous crossings. His face looked thinner than he remembered, cheeks sucking with desperation at the untipped cigarette.

‘
Ja
.’ The sergeant grinned. ‘It’ll give them a story to tell back in America.’

One of their goons hauled this guy out of the line at Checkpoint Charlie
. . .

‘It’s a pity,’ Miller said, ‘they’ll be able to see me walking to the other side all in one piece.’

‘Maybe I should give you a few thumps outside, Herr Miller, just for the benefit of our American visitors.’ The sergeant’s voice was low. ‘But then we might have an international incident and the captain has enough to worry about already.’

‘Nobody needs an international incident now, Heinz-Peter.’ He looked around at the tables spread with handbags, tote bags, rucksacks and their varied, spread-out contents under the poking hands of the border guards. ‘You’re all under pressure?’

Sergeant Heinz-Peter Reibert nodded slowly. ‘All leave cancelled, everyone confined to barracks – I haven’t seen my family for days.’

Heinz-Peter, Miller knew
from their encounters over the years, had a wife and two children – a boy and a girl, if he remembered correctly. And – rightly or wrongly in this secretive society – they had dared to trust each other in a superficial way. He leaned closer to Heinz-Peter. ‘You need anything?’ He’d opened his rucksack on the table; the sergeant made a show of searching it.

‘The usual, Herr Miller.’ The words muttered into the rucksack as he drew it tight. ‘Toothpaste, shampoo, maybe a toothbrush.’

‘Done.’ Miller took his bag. ‘What time d’you knock off?’

‘Midnight.’

Miller nodded, headed for the door. Outside he looked back at the group of Americans, closer now to the front of the queue. He saw the recognition in their faces, the flash of fear.

He turned away from them. They’d never understand, images burned on their minds of their murdered President spouting facile rhetoric at the Wall, and youngsters bleeding in the killing zone of no-man’s-land. They’d never quite grasp that folk lived on this side of the city and, for all the shortages and difficulties, some of them wanted to go on living on this side. Maybe he himself did.

He shouldered his bag and walked towards the waiting American soldiers.

None of the policemen on the Western side of Zimmerstrasse looked familiar. Nor any of the American soldiers. They stood casual, confident, as though Berlin were theirs, the strident sign at the mouth of the street loud as an American flag: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR. Also, just to make sure you got the message, in Russian, French and German.

One of the soldiers stepped away from the US army half-track near the sign and whispered something to the German policeman.

Miller was holding out
his ID card even before the policeman summoned him.

The flimsy East German ID card was examined as though the policeman had never seen one before.

‘
Warum kommen Sie nach West Berlin?
’ Why are you coming to West Berlin?

Miller shrugged, gave the same answer as always: just for a look.

The American soldier stood closer. Miller could smell from the fellow a cloying mix of deodorant and sweat and cigarette smoke.

‘What d’you want to look at, fella?’

Miller had underestimated this broad-shouldered American who, unusually, could understand at least a few words of German.

There was no point in pretending he didn’t speak English. ‘Toiletries,’ he said. ‘Shaving cream, soap, that kind of stuff.’ He met the American’s gaze. ‘Maybe some newspapers and magazines.’

‘You’re English?’

Miller nodded.

‘So what the hell are you doing with East German ID?’

‘I live there.’ Miller looked at the German policeman. ‘
Kann ich jetzt gehen?
’ Can I go now?

He pocketed his ID, moved away among the crowd. Behind him he could hear the American, astonishment in the loud voice: ‘Fucking Commies!’

Miller walked towards the Tiergarten, then changed his mind: he wasn’t in the mood for parkland, trees, babies in prams. He wasn’t quite sure what he was in the mood for. The years in Berlin had made him introspective: the price of constant vigilance over what you said taught you to say less. Not knowing why you were where you were made you wonder if there was
anywhere
you belonged.

Meeting Rosa had rattled
him. Even more so his meeting with her stepfather. He’d tried to keep his head down all these years, get on with the routine of work, the collection and delivery of bits of paper. Truth to tell, he’d learned to like the life he’d been ordered to live, like easing your feet into new shoes that pinched at first.

A bus pulled in just as he was passing a bus stop.
Zoogarten
. Miller got on. There might be recent newspapers at the station. A girl reading a paperback made room for him in a seat near the back of the bus. When she turned a page he stole a glance at the cover. In English, an old Len Deighton book:
Funeral In Berlin
.

Whose funeral?

Increasingly Miller felt that he had much to lose. And, in some odd way that he could not articulate even to himself, he was beginning to learn something new about himself: that he might be prepared to risk losing it. Whatever the fuck ‘it’ might be.

The bus reached the Zoogarten. West Berlin’s busiest station was, as usual, busy.

You’re really on song today with these useful observations
. Even the editor of the
Wolverhampton Express & Star
would be embarrassed by their poverty.

Miller shook himself, piled into the station with the end-of-work crowds.

The newsagent’s was crowded. He scanned the papers, found a day-old
London Times
, the previous week’s
Sunday Express
. He took his place in the line, paid, looked across at the paperback stand, changed his mind.

You don’t know what you want.

Back on the street he went into a pharmacy, bought toiletries for Heinz-Peter, more for himself.
You never knew: the American might still be there later, might inquire if he’d bought his toothpaste.

He found a small sweet shop, bought
some toffees and jelly babies for Heinz-Peter’s kids. He’d never met Heinz-Peter’s children but, well, it felt good to have some kind of connection that was
real
in this divided city.

The demonstrators on the streets at night were real.

The Wall was real.

The pictures on TV of hundreds of refugees from the GDR spilling into Munich from crowded Austrian trains were real.

You had to ask: was the threat to the GDR real? At least, Miller figured, if he was right about the stuff he carried across the Wall, he was not a direct part of the threat.

He was walking aimlessly on a side street off Savigny Platz when a car pulled in alongside him. A small car, blue, some kind of Citroen. What Miller noticed were the peculiar rucked curtains on the back windscreen and the rear side windows.

The driver’s door swung open, across the pavement, blocking Miller’s way.

‘Herr Miller.’ A small face in tinted spectacles looked at Miller. ‘Get in the back, please.’ The driver reached behind, swung the rear door open over the pavement.

Miller stooped, glanced into the interior of the car, saw the balding figure leaning against the opposite door.

He looked again at the street, heard the S-Bahn rumbling on the bridge overhead, watched the cars and pedestrians pass by, utterly heedless. It’s not like
Funeral in Berlin
at all, he thought, it’s just a car stopping in a daytime street and you know you have no choice.

‘Please, Herr Miller,’ the hoarse voice said, ‘get in or people will notice.’

Miller nodded, got in beside General Reder, and the blue Citroen moved smoothly off.

September 1989

West Berlin

Say nothing, Miller told
himself as the driver nosed the small car along the commuter-time streets. Let the general explain what this is all about.

The general seemed to have the same idea. They sat in silence in the back seat, stared straight ahead at the busy streets, at the driver’s shaven neck, the black beret clamped on his small round head. The wire arms of his spectacles seemed to disappear into the flesh behind his tight ears.

Once Miller made as if to move the rucked curtain but he sensed the general’s forbidding eyes and he dropped his hand.

They were moving slowly enough for Miller to realize that they were circling and criss-crossing their own tracks. The same shops slid by, the same intersections, the same traffic policemen on point duty. The driver’s bereted head swung from side to side, from wing mirror to wing mirror. In the rear-view mirror his eyes caught Miller’s, coins of pale blue behind the wire-framed lenses.
At this speed we could be in a funeral: a fucking funeral in Berlin
.

The car leapt forward in the gathering gloom. The driver raced through the gears. The engine growled like a beast unleashed. A powerful engine, not the pedestrian gadget the manufacturer had fitted. The street
ahead was suddenly clear of traffic, even empty of street lights.

Miller was no longer sure of where they were, in which direction they were racing. Not that you could go far in any direction in West Berlin. Every road in this isolated city led quickly enough to the closed frontiers of the GDR: north or south, east or west, you soon ran into the walls and fences of enemy country, the dammed waterways, the checkpoints, the patrol boats. You could cycle along country lanes to the north and west and imagine yourself in the great unfettered outdoors – but only for a little way. Only until you met the high walls, the spiked fences, the steel nets in the lakes and rivers.

Miller was pretty sure they weren’t heading back to East Berlin.

He caught a glimpse of a familiar shopfront, realized they were racing through Charlottenburg. Heard the rumble of the S-Bahn overhead, knew he was right. He tried to keep track of their umpteen turns but the driver was too good –
how does he not confuse himself with so many turns?
– and Miller gave up.

They were in a dark street. No lights, no pavements, just cobblestones gleaming under the dimmed lights of the Citroen.

The driver killed the lights. The engine idled, so faint that Miller had to strain to hear its whispering. When the driver’s door eased open, Miller was not surprised that no courtesy interior light came on. Everything about this souped-up version of a foolish-looking little car said the same thing:
Stasi or Redgrave or some such entity. Maybe even the Americans
.

The driver pressed a recessed button, head high, beside a steel shutter. The shutter began to rise, the driver got behind the wheel again, drove the car into an unlighted space.

Behind them the steel shutter closed silently.

In the dark silence the general’s breathing sounded coarse, laboured. When the lights
came on suddenly, the general’s face was flushed, a fleck of spittle at the corner of his mouth. He pulled his dark tie down, opened the neck button of his white shirt.

‘I’ll be OK,’ he said to Miller. ‘I just need to get out of this fucking little French box.’

Miller got out, circled the car. He held the door open and helped the general out. For a small, almost shrunken man his grip was strong.

All this in the confined darkness. To Miller’s ears even his own breathing seemed loud, an echo of the general’s panting. The driver seemed like a study in still life, motionless behind the Citroen’s steering wheel. The car gave off its own cooling, petrolly hum.

The general moved, swore as he bumped into something in the blackness.

‘Fucking lazy idiots!’ The voice of the barracks, no longer the politeness of an officer at home with his daughter. ‘How many times do these bastards have to be told!’

Which bastards? Miller thought. Whose? Yours or ours?
And which side is ours anyway?

The general still had his finger on the wall switch, an empty carton upended beside him. White walls, white ceiling, stone floor. Empty of furniture. A series of steel rings bolted to a corner of the stone floor. The kind of rings you could moor a small boat to. Or a man, a man who needed to be moored. The stone floor was black, the kind of black that probably absorbed red stains.

‘Come.’ The general beckoned Miller to follow.

The door in the end wall swung open. A smaller space inside, a mixture of kitchen-cum-living space-cum-office. No windows here either, just a silence so deep that you couldn’t tell where the front of the building was. You
could be anywhere or nowhere. Here was neither east nor west, neither checkpoint nor border.

‘Nobody can hear anything we say in here.’

The general’s words reminded you that there
was
a border, that in every corner of this broken city ears were straining to hear every word whispered, every breath drawn.

Miller sat on a metal-legged chair at the small table.

‘You have nothing to say, Herr Miller?’ The general was pouring coffee into two mugs from a silver flask that was ready on the worktop.

‘I think I’m here to listen, General Reder.’

‘I like a man who knows how to keep his trap shut, Herr Miller.’ The general handed him a mug of black coffee. ‘I’ve seen men die because they spoke out of turn.’

‘I haven’t.’ Miller shrugged. ‘I guess I’ve led a sheltered life.’

‘You make a kind of joke of it,’ the general said, ‘but this is not a joking matter.’

Miller looked at the smaller man seated opposite. ‘You forget, General,’ he said, ‘that I’m on the same side as you – at least I think I am. We’re both visiting in West Berlin and shortly we’re both going back home to the German Democratic Republic. At least,’ Miller paused, ‘I am.’