Funeral in Berlin (20 page)

The Exchange: when a player sacrifices
something for an opponent’s piece of lesser
value he is said to be ‘the exchange down’.

Monday, November 4th

The first thing you see is the ‘No Entry’ sign. It’s on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and beyond that the whole thing is laid out. There is the little white hut sitting in the middle of the road with ‘
US ARMY CHECKPOINT
’ written in huge letters on the roof. Then above there is a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes and there are always a few olive-and-white Taunus cars and jeeps about. There are some West German policemen standing around in long grey overcoats and Afrika Korps caps and inside the hut a couple of young pink-faced GI’s in starched khaki shirts write in a vast ledger and sometimes talk on the phone. There are lots of notices but the biggest one says, ‘You are leaving the American Sector’ and then says the same thing over again
in French and Russian. Filing past that, prim old lady journalists go crowding up the short flight of steps that lead nowhere, like it’s the royal box for the last public hanging.

The wall itself is a shoddy breeze-block affair that looks as though one of the old ladies falling off the steps could tumble the whole thing from here to Potsdamerplatz. The West German policeman stands very near the wall on the West side and he lifts the long-hinged barrier for the traffic. On the Eastern side there are three solid concrete barriers that block three-quarters of the road’s width. Since the gaps they leave are staggered, a vehicle driven through has to zig-zag at full lock slowly past the barriers. That’s what the big hearse had to do after they had removed the coffin.

Six uniformed men were hastily pressed into service as coffin-bearers. There were Vopos, Grepos, policemen and soldiers stumbling along under the heavy weight and swinging their caps in their hands at arm’s length to help them keep their balance. A policeman at the front missed his footing at one moment and almost fell, but an elderly NCO began to sing out the time in the idiom of the old Army. They rested the coffin down on to the stretcher-like grid of the bier at the second barrier. The policeman who had nearly fallen wiped the inside of his shako and then held it up to adjust the cockade so that he didn’t have to look at the others.

It looked as though the DDR had chosen a representative of each of its services as they stood there dusting off their blue, green and grey shoulders where the coffin had left an epaulette of dirt. Beneath me on the American side of the barrier were thirty men, all dressed in khaki light-weight raincoats. Each of them had a strange-shaped leather box at his feet. There were boxes for bassoons and boxes for bass clarinets, boxes for French horns, trombones, violins and cornets. The kettledrums were wrapped in soft black velvet bags. Two girls stood among the men dressed in the same raincoats but wearing long white woollen stockings. From where they were standing below me they couldn’t see as well as I could. ‘Some kinda procession, ain’t it?’ one said.

‘Bringing a funeral through by the look.’

‘Say, ain’t that sump’n?’

Two of the musicians unlocked the leather cases and looked inside before locking them again. One of the men tapped the belly of a double bass and said, ‘Gee, I sure didn’t think I’d be toting a bull-fiddle when I moved in among the commies.’

The flautist got his instrument out of the case. ‘It’s as lethal in your hands as an M-60,’ he laughed and played a little riff. In the silence caused by the attention to the coffin, the passage he played was the only sane thing for a hundred yards in every direction and, even before the overtones of that had faded, an American MP shouted, ‘You want a goddam water-cannon to wash you across
the sidewalk, fella? Put it away before they get the idea it’s a telescope.’

‘I told you not to point it at anyone,’ said the string player to ease the tension. The flautist said, ‘But I had the safety on.’

‘Here she blows,’ someone said.

They had the coffin back inside the long black unstreamlined hearse that looked very Al Caponelike especially with Stok standing on the running boards. Stok was dressed in his corporal’s uniform in order not to alert the newsmen who constantly gaze across the border from Checkpoint Charlie to the Friedrichstrasse Kontrollpunkt.

There were two wreaths with the coffin; they were great lifebelts of fir-tree leaves with intertwined flowers and huge decorative ribbons of silk with ‘Last greetings from old friends’ and the date printed across them. The driver drove very slowly, nodding feverishly at Stok every now and again. The hearse stopped again and the driver produced a map, unfolding it across the steering wheel. In the no-man’s land of the world, two men in a hearse were looking at a map and discussing where to make for.

Stok was talking energetically to the driver, who was probably a Red Army transport soldier, and the driver was nodding like mad. The glass panels at the sides were decorated with a complex engraved palm-leaf pattern, and the big coffin, chosen to give Semitsa room to stretch an elbow, could just be seen inside.

The hearse moved slowly again and one Grenzpolizist was walking ahead of it, brandishing the documents like a royal flush. Two East German soldiers, leaning against the flower boxes and talking, made a joke about the hearse and then straightened their jackets and walked away in case they should be reprimanded. Overhead a US Army helicopter clattered along the line of the wall, saw the hearse and circled, watching the activity around it. It crossed. One of the two GIs stepped out from the glass-sided box to salute a captain who had just arrived in a white Taunus with a spotlight and the words ‘Military Police’ on its side.

The GI waved the hearse forward and, as the western barrier was flipped open, the captain leaned into the shop downstairs and shouted ‘Let’s go, feller’ to me. I turned away from the window, but not before taking one last look at Stok. He grinned and held his clenched fist in the air—a salute from worker to worker across the last frontier of the world. I grinned back and gave him the same salute in return. ‘Let’s go,’ I heard the captain say again. I rattled down the ancient creaking staircase and jumped into the Taunus. By now the hearse was way down near the canal. The captain pumped the accelerator and jammed the siren on. ‘Hoo-haw, hoo-haw,’ the doleful bray had the traffic pulling aside and halting at the roadside.

‘This isn’t the St Patrick’s Day Parade,’ I said irritably. ‘Switch the bloody thing off, can’t you? Didn’t anybody tell you that this mission is secret?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Then why collect me in this carnival wagon?’

He flipped the siren off and it died with a whimper. ‘That’s better,’ I said.

‘It’s your funeral, bud,’ said the officer. He drove in silence, overtaking the hearse at the Tiergarten, at which stage of its journey it was attracting no attention at all.

At the address in Wittenau Johnnie was awaiting me. ‘Wittenau,’ I thought; to a Berliner the word is invariably linked with the lunatic asylum here. The car stopped in a sordid street.

It had perhaps been a shop at one time or maybe a tiny warehouse, but now it was a garage. There was a large wooden double door big enough to back in a lorry—or a hearse. At the rear there was a heavy bench with a metal-working vice and a few simple rusty tools and junk that the previous tenant had abandoned. As I opened one half of the door a thin shaft of daylight connected me with Johnnie Vulkan—like a carpet unrolling across the stone floor to where he was leaning against the bench. The single unshaded light bulb that looked so infirm in the daylight became newly significant in the darkness. I shot the large rectangular bolts and noticed how smoothly they moved into their oiled slots. There was grease underfoot too, and that smell of carbonized oil and spilt petrol that hangs around motor-car repair places.

The light was directly above Vulkan’s head and his eye-sockets were great piratical patches of
darkness and under his nose was a moustache of shadow. He put a cigarette into his mouth and it gleamed under the light.

Johnnie was watching me intently. He removed the unlit cigarette.

‘Get through to London?’ he asked.

‘Just fine—clear as a bell.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They said “Unanimous agreement”, the code word. What did you expect them to say?’

‘Just checking,’ said Johnnie.

I squinted at him in an obvious sort of way. ‘Do you know something that I don’t know, Johnnie?’

‘No. Honest. Just checking. You got the documents in the name of Broum?’

‘Yes.’

‘Spelt correctly?’

‘Knock it off will you,’ I said. ‘I’ve got them.’

Johnnie nodded and ran his fingers through his hair and carefully lit his cigarette with an expensive lighter. He began to recount the plan to himself to be sure he remembered it.

‘They’ll go to the mortuary first. They will put him into a station wagon there. It should take at least another forty minutes.’ We had both disussed the plan a dozen times. I nodded. We smoked in silence until Johnnie threw his cigarette butt on to the floor and stepped on it carefully. In the area around his feet the white rectangles of flattened cigarette ends were strewn like confetti. Overhead
I heard the rattle of the low-flying helicopter which was watching the movement of the hearse between Checkpoint Charlie and the West Berlin mortuary.

As my eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness I could see the junk that had accumulated in the building. There was a disembowelled motorcar engine with old torn gaskets hanging off it. The cylinder head had been hastily slid back on to its bolts without being seated and it rested drunkenly upon the engine. Beyond it was a heap of bald tyres and some dented oil drums. Vulkan had looked at his watch so often that he finally tucked his shirt cuff under the gold rim to make it easier to glimpse the time. He heaved deep sighs and every now and again he would go up to the engine and kick some part of it gently with the very tip of his hand-lasted Oxfords.

‘There’s a funeral,’ he said.

I looked at him quizzically. ‘That’s what’s delaying the transfer at the mortuary, a
real
funeral.’ I looked at my watch. ‘There’s no delay,’ I said, ‘and if it doesn’t arrive for another five minutes they will still be on time according to the schedule.’

We both stood there in the dismal light of the bare bulb when suddenly Johnnie said, ‘I was in prison once in the next street to this one.’

I offered him a Gauloise and lit one myself and, when we had finished lighting them and having that first inhalation that makes you dive for a cigarette, I said, ‘When was that?’

‘Spring of 1943,’ said Vulkan.

‘What charge?’

Johnnie grinned and stabbed the shadows with his cigarette. ‘I was a communist, Roman Catholic Jew, who had deserted from the Army.’

‘Is that all?’ I said.

Vulkan gave a sour smile. ‘I can tell you,’ he said, ‘it was grim. There wasn’t much to eat for heroes in 1943—for prisoners…’ He drew on his cigarette and the garage was full of the pungent aroma of French tobacco, and he drew on his cigarette again like this was all some complex dream he was dreaming while really he was in prison just a few year-yards away.

He rubbed two fingers of his left hand and then put them under his armpit as you do when you’ve hit them with a hammer—put them into some dark, warm place where they can stay for ever and never come out into the daylight.

‘Defined areas,’ said Vulkan suddenly. ‘Defined areas of hatred.’ His voice was firm and yet seemed to originate from another time and another place, almost like a voice speaking through a medium, a voice that was just using the larynx and sound apparatus of Vulkan’s body. ‘It’s easy then. When I was first arrested I was badly knocked about.’ He made that motion of the hand that in some Latin parts of the world is a sign of pure joy: he flung his hand around on the end of his wrist like he wanted it to spin away into a corner. He held it up to me and I saw the skin grafts along the
last two fingers. ‘It wasn’t so bad for me, those beatings. The French had arrested me; they were so anxious to demonstrate to their German masters how well they had learned from them. Those Frenchmen were the most evil men I had ever seen—they were sadists, I mean really, in the medical sense of the word. When they beat me they beat me for their own special sexual delight and just by being beaten I was participating in a sexual relationship with them—you understand me?’

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘It was filthy,’ he said. He clawed at his lip to find a shred of tobacco and finally spat heartily. I waited to see if he was going to continue; for a minute or so I thought he would say no more. Then he said, ‘But it was uncomplicated for me. I could understand that a Frenchman felt hate for a German.’ He stopped speaking again and I guessed that the conversation was proceeding in his head. ‘The French prisoners were worse off because they…’ He stopped talking again and his eyes were fixed on something from another time and place. ‘But the first time I was ill-treated by a German—I don’t mean pushed to one side or knocked off a chair, deliberately and systematically tortured, beaten—it was…I don’t know, it threw me out of equilibrium. That’s why the communists were almost the last to crack, they were able to cling to their “in” group, they had sharply defined areas to hate.’

I said, ‘Most prejudice tends to operate against
groups that it’s easy to recognize. It’s no accident that minorities only suffer where the prejudice has had time to develop its power of detection. Mexicans don’t have trouble in New York City; it’s down on the Mexican border they run into it. Pakistanis are honoured guests in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s in Birmingham, England, that they run into prejudice.’

‘That’s it,’ said Johnnie. ‘Well, after the war, communists had the best chances of rehabilitation. They’d always known that the forces of reaction (that’s to say non-communists) were swine, so nothing had surprised them. The Jews had known about anti-Semitism for a few centuries. It was the ones who had suffered at the hands of their
own
people who were faced with an insoluble enigma. The Frenchman who had been tortured by other Frenchmen, the Italian partisan captured by the Italian fascists. We have this terrible thing to live with.