The Berlin Assignment (31 page)

“
Knautschkommode
?”

“Sort of an accordion. With that grin someone should have taken you by the ears and pushed and pulled to get a squeak out. I said that to Frau Schwartz.”

Hanbury had a strange sensation. Sabine talking with Uwe's son-in-law about him? “And she said?”

“She laughed. She said I was close. She complimented me on my understanding of human nature. Well…” Thick lips pursed in modesty. “…why else am I a bartender? She really is a great lady. She said back then, if you were anything, you were a
Flitzpieper
, a little bird that flits around. I had to laugh. Ilse was like that when I met her. She wasn't reliable either. Maybe he's grown out of it, Frau Schwartz then said, referring to the figure in the photo. I didn't know it was you, but if I had I would have told her you are now a VIP. I liked Frau Schwartz. She made me promise to look after the picture. It was a day or two ago.”

Rain driven by wind assailed the windows. Hanbury on the bar stool was motionless. Only a fraction of his mind was listening to the bartender's descriptions of other candidates for the new picture gallery next to the toilets. Mostly he was sifting through what he'd heard. Suppose the account of Sabine's visit to
The Tankard
was only partly accurate; even with that limitation her attitude was light years different from at the stadium. There, she would have trampled on the photo. Here she wanted the bartender to put it on display. He continued the rhythm of lifting and lowering his
Pils
, but his innards churned. What belonged together has to stay together. Why would she say that? Hanbury's sadness about Albert's death was acquiring an overlay of hope.

He paid for the
Pils
, zipped his jacket high and eased into the rain. A dash to the U-bahn was followed by the steady rocking of the train. The hypnotic effect helped with the mental composition of a note. In the bungalow he put it down on paper, sealed it in an envelope and, resolve undiminished, walked it to a mailbox before retiring for the night.

Dear Sabine: I saw the notice in the paper. I am deeply sorry your father passed away. No one was like him. Parts of him belonged to many people, but no one has lost as much as you. I feel your sorrow.
The only person I know who came close to having your father's pleasure in living was Uwe. I remember the two of them sharing stories. If only those moments could have been recorded. Was it Uwe who once called me a Flitzpieper? Whoever it was, no doubt he was right, but of course it was long ago.
With the support of your family and friends I hope you will get through this and find the strength to carry on. – Tony.

Rudi Metzger and Horst Baumann were calling on Frau Schwartz in her apartment. Horst was doing the talking. Rudi confirmed all he said by whispering,
Jenau, so isses. That's it, that's right
. Sabine was composed as she poured tea. She said she knew the Eagles meant a great deal to her father.

Sabine had discovered there was no choice but to maintain composure. Many people needed to express their sadness; she was the only one they could do it to. The trauma of the accident, the roller-coaster days in the intensive care unit, the few last precious conversations she and her father had – he partly flippant, partly earnest, she hanging on every word – the phone call from the doctor that it was all over. Then came the burden of funeral arrangements, notices to be sent out, innumerable decisions to be made. And everyone who had a claim on her father's time now wanted to claim some of hers. Where in all this was there time for grief?

Tony's note arrived an hour before Herr Metzger and Herr Baumann came. She read it twice and put it with the others. What the two Eagles were saying reminded her of Tony's note. They too claimed her father had meant a great deal and had belonged to them, although they knew her loss was greater. She thought back to the note.
It had a feel of wanting to communicate something subtly, but what?
Flitzpieper
. The word struck her. Words like that popped out of her like they did out of her father. She remembered using it recently at
The Tankard
. But back then, had Uwe really called Tony a
Flitzpieper
? She didn't recall.

She listened to Horst who was describing the meeting of the Eagles and slowly coming to the point: the Eagles hoped to play a small role in the funeral ceremony. “In what way?” she inquired kindly. “We had hoped,” Horst said solemnly, “that Rudi – Herr Metzger – might speak.” “
So isses
,” confirmed Rudi. Sabine nodded, but it demonstrated a thinking process, not that she had decided. “The day of the funeral hasn't been settled. It's difficult to get a slot,” she said. “
Jenau!
” agreed Rudi, adding he knew it was a busy burying period. Old people at this time of year, with the flu making the rounds, were dropping like flies. “In my apartment building there's been three gone down these past two months. There's fewer old folks all the time. My friends are getting to be young. It's fine to have young friends when you're young, but when you get old you need some your own age. Like Albert. His spirit inspired us. It's still with us.” Afterwards, on the street, Rudi and Horst agreed the daughter possessed all the finest qualities Albert used to deploy sparingly: cordiality, politeness, graciousness, restraint.

When a funeral time was fixed, Frau Schwartz called Herr Metzger to confirm he could speak for the Eagles. Rudi immersed himself in preparing an oration. He was on the phone to Horst. Ulf and Dieter called with ideas. A session in the pub was devoted to reviewing the text, but everyone had a different opinion. Some wanted the suffering of the war years emphasized; others that Albert had been an outstanding lawyer; one Eagle insisted there should be a reference to the fact that he had two wives. Rudi protested too much was being added. He was scratching the margins full, his handwriting getting worse as his
impatience grew. The sheets were beginning to look like something out of an asylum. Finally he thanked them. “It's coming together now,” he said. “I know how it should be.”

Several days before the funeral, a printed black-edged card in an envelope was delivered through the bungalow mail slot. On it stood Müller's name in capitals, the commencement and completion dates of his long life, plus information on the time and location of the memorial service. Hanbury turned the card over. No other signs. He thought about its meaning – a reply to his own note? – and of the process that brought it to him. He checked his schedule to see if he was free.

Frau Carstens desired to see the consul urgently on the morning of the funeral, but he kept his door shut, wanting no distraction. Even at that late hour he struggled with a question. Was the card an invitation, or would his participation in the service trigger a reaction like at the stadium? A now-or-never moment was chiselled on his watch. When the time came, he yanked the door open with angry determination. Frau Carstens, jarred by the violence, grabbed her reading glasses which threatened to slip off her nose. “An appointment,” he snapped, throwing his coat on, striding past her desk. She pointed at her scheduling book, her mouth frozen into speechlessness. She recovered enough to demand to know where he was going. “A funeral,” he said harshly. Frau Carstens cried that Sturm should drive –
especially to a funeral!
– but he was gone. She frantically checked her files for a protocol notice about a death, but drew a blank.

The sidewalk in front of the chapel was full of life. A previous funeral was ending. Its mourners were spilling out as the Müller party was waiting to go in. Into these two flocks mixing awkwardly in one
spot, Hanbury made a quiet entrance, joining the back of the Müller party filing in. The chapel, a circular pantheon-like construction with a dome, had sitting room for perhaps eighty, but Müller was drawing a good crowd. At least forty mourners were forced to stand. Hanbury sought a spot on the periphery, relieved that the structure with shadows behind a semicircle of interior columns provided anonymity. From there he viewed the coffin. It was embellished by a bouquet of small red roses. Around it lay expansive floral wreaths and around the wreaths stood a colonnade of vases full of flowers.

Hanbury recognized several Eagles from the stadium. Uwe's son-in-law was there too, shoulder to shoulder with Ilse. The family slipped in through a side door and took seats close to the coffin. Hanbury froze. He studied Sabine. Shuddering with guilt he slunk deeper into the shadows. He saw her son – he had his mother's anxious eyes – clinging to her arm. Her husband held the other. Hanbury, looking at Sabine and at the coffin, became miserably preoccupied with things living and things dying.

The ceremony began with music, a piece from Telemann. It seemed to postulate that the human spirit is irrepressible, that it has no choice except to move forward. The bold, carefree, triumphant cadences might be a portrayal, Hanbury thought, of nature. He couldn't help seeing wheat fields dancing to the prairie wind. The imagery transported him to another funeral he had attended, staged not in a chapel, but under a much larger dome.

The June weather for that other funeral had been perfect. A westerly breeze puffed white clouds forward under a deep blue heaven. Not a speck of dust was in the air that day, nowhere over a million square
miles of prairie. The soil scientist had achieved much, and everyone who had profited from his work was in attendance. Universities and governments, co-ops and seed companies, sun-bitten farmers. The many admirers hung around on the edges of the main event in separate clusters. Because the little prairie chapel couldn't hold a tenth of them, the pasture next to the cemetery became a makeshift holy ground. The breeze, bearing smells of black earth and a promising crop, blew playfully into the microphone, as if God Himself had come to play a role. The pastor said a prayer and read from the Bible; the eulogy repeated what everybody knew. Dr. Hanbury, researcher emeritus, following a stroke, departed the world at sixty-seven. In his life he had arranged, amongst other things, for the important switch from ploughs to discs to work the land, for shelter belts of trees to be planted to break the wind, for the introduction of a Russian strain of crested wheat grass which holds soil in place at times of drought, and, as his time on earth was ending, for the acceptance of zero-tillage-cultivation, a technique that stops the wind from sucking moisture from the ground. The list was long. Without his drive and determination, who knows, half the prairies might have become desert. The eulogy scarcely mentioned the family, except that a wife, an accomplished piano teacher born in Montreal who tried to bring culture to the area, preceded him in death by many years. The son, it was admitted, continued the tradition of serving, although he went abroad to do so. Afterwards, in the cemetery, on a rise surrounded by rich fields that stretched as far as the eye could see, prairie soil clattered down on the casket. The son was no more than a minor spectator at that event because from start to finish, really, it belonged to science.

In the round chapel it was Telemann's music rather than the voice of God that whispered into a microphone, followed by a pastor making a short reading. Then came the eulogy. An old man, older than Müller, Hanbury estimated, came forward. There was a touch of the performer in him, for he looked at the mourners with a steady eye and gazed meaningfully for a moment in the direction of the family. In a creaky voice, difficult to hear in the spaces between the columns, he began to talk about an eagle and the nobleness of a life lived high above the fray. He described the deft use of up-currents on good days and of powerful wing strokes necessary to fight down drafts during inauspicious weather.

Hanbury moved forward to hear better. Caught by the dignity of the metaphor presented in a nearly breaking voice, he came into the light. As he listened intently his attention once more moved from Müller's coffin to Sabine. With a start he realized she had seen him, but her eyes betrayed no feeling, neither anger nor surprise. It was as if he was supposed to stand there, that he was meant to fill that spot. She studied him steadily. Or was she looking through him and so dismissing him? He shuddered, deflecting his eyes to the flowers on the chapel floor and back to the coffin, before easing back into the shadows. The doyen now placed a hand on the casket.
You're our advocate up there, Albert, and we know your spirit will be with us when we Eagles soar.

It was the way Rudi Metzger spoke, more than what he said, which touched the listeners. Some dabbed their eyes, others cleared their noses. Amongst the Eagles, here and there, tears flowed without restraint. But Sabine was composed and dignified, her head high, one hand rubbing the cheek of her child. Another piece of recorded music played before the Müller party filed out. Caught on the side, Hanbury was amongst the last to leave. Outside, the mood was now busy, relieved, nearly buoyant. Hanbury picked his way through, not seeing
Sabine coming until she stood before him, viewing him with the same passive patience as in the chapel.

Masking a fresh burst of inner turmoil, he blurted out two words. “My condolences.” Even as he said them he knew he had seldom sounded so stiff.

Sabine nodded. “Thank you. Also for your note. I appreciated it.” “Your father meant a great deal to you.” But this too came out without much feeling. They stood in silence.

“Thank you again.” Sabine turned away. Hanbury had an urge to take her shoulder, to ask her to wait, to talk everything through, starting at the beginning, but she was slipping off, back into the pack, towards her family. In the distance, he saw Schwartz was engaged in holding the hand of a bored and jumping Nicholas. As Sabine went, everyone was saying something to her. All received a graceful answer. A large woman in a white fur coat breezed towards her. Hanbury saw their short embrace. The platinum blond asked Sabine questions and looked in his direction. Rudi Metzger infringed and Sabine must have congratulated him for he looked pleased. Sabine began attending to her father's other friends. All the Eagles wanted a moment with her.