The Berlin Assignment (36 page)

All through January Berlin slumbered in a cold fog which, as days turned into weeks, began to squeeze the city like a fist. People lost their bounce. Laughter became rare. If someone tried, it came out sounding hollow and forlorn, as if the Cold War at its most virulent was back.

The weather began its change on New Year's Eve. As the freezing Christmas wind played itself out, the air became motionless and dampness seeped in. Guests at von Helmholtz's party, staged in an old pump house transformed into a restaurant near the canal, clinked glasses –
Prost Neujahr!
– and went outside to hear fireworks cannonading in the streets. That's when they first noticed the stealthy wet-cold reaching in, not stopping until it chilled their bones. Worried about the feast losing its exultant mood if they stayed out too long, they hurried back into the pump house. Hanbury reclaimed his dinner jacket from the shoulders of a spirited elderly lady of Czech descent who had been telling him all evening about the joy of owning a casino in Baden Baden.

The little daylight that penetrated the fog that January had an exhausted quality. It was how people felt. Unable to see further than half a block, everyone started living at the centre of a fatigued, collapsed existence. Some were frightened by the shrinking, as if the fog was a perverse preview of old age, a foretaste of their own senescence. The city's institutions lost definition too. Golden Ilse with her fiery wings of triumph on the Victory Column was swallowed up; the Tiergarten became haunted enough to house every ghost spawned since creation; and Frederick the Great, on his horse on Unter den Linden, while his outline did not entirely disappear, had never been more muted. As the fog hung without moving, the air lost potency. The city, that normally lusty organism, seemed at the mercy of a sapping disease. Like a patient it lay still and brooded.

Such was the weather when the consul and the journalist went to the ball. It was unchanged a few days later when they drove to Prenzlauerberg to search out a drinking hall called
Friedensdorf
. According to Gundula's information it was in this pub that they stood a chance of catching up with Günther Rauch.

Because the January sombreness is predictable, Berliners arrange for gaiety by having balls. Every strata of society has one: the police, the fire fighters, freemasons, taxi drivers, sport clubs, socialists, capitalists, everybody. But the Press Ball towers over all. For half a dozen hours in the middle of the winter it is the centre of the universe. That winter, for Hanbury, the Press Ball became a seminal event. Long afterwards, when his Berlin assignment was history and when he worked at unravelling the complex tangle of causes and effects that led to his demise, he concluded important seeds were planted there. He just didn't recognize them at the time.

The evening began routinely. In a timely fashion he set out for Gundula's flat. He had studied the route to Marzahn and took the S-Bahn line that cuts through the heart of the city from west to east. Curiously, whenever he now took a train, Zella's mind corrupted his. She had been much in his thoughts after she left and he was keeping an eye on things. But he was never really sure whether figures were reproducing themselves in the middle distance. And so, on the evening of the ball, partially to be prudent and partially to have fun, he acted as Zella would have. Because of its honeycombed structure, he used Friedrichstrasse station for a complex act. Trains arrive and depart there on several levels, and stairs and passages go in every direction. The happy flip side of Friedrichstrasse station's confused layout, Hanbury reasoned in accordance with Zella's teachings, was that tails can be shaken there without much effort.

Hanbury got off the train, left the upper S-bahn level by going down three flights of stairs to the lowest level, walked the full length of another subterranean S-bahn train platform, and took a second set of stairs back up to ground level before exiting the station into Friedrichstrasse. Having crossed the street he next descended into the U-bahn system and paced-off the full length of yet another platform. Up to street level again where he doubled back to the main station, re-entering it by a different door and climbing more stairs back to the S-bahn tracks where he had started ten minutes before. The next train heading east soon came clanging in. If someone had been following, the consul thought sardonically, he'd be vertiginous by now after all those twists and turns.

Hanbury's caution would still be holding a few days later when Gundula drove him to Prenzlauerberg and he looked back several times through Trabi's small rear window. But in a fog one pair of weakly glimmering headlamps is like all the others. “Lost something?” Gundula would ask. “Just wondering if anyone is behind us. A habit I
have.” “Tell me about it,” Gundula would say. She could tell stories stretching back years about Stasi Peeping-Toms. During the drive Gundula would be strangely distant – the opposite of what she had been at the ball.

After the Friedrichstrasse antics, Hanbury sat in the train in a state of happy anticipation. A dozen stops along, in the city's far east, he got off and found a taxi. Minutes later, after zipping up the Allee der Kosmonauten, the driver wheeled into a vast expanse of sterile blocks of flats, an ant-heap, a slice of heaven to a doctrinaire socialist. The driver manoeuvred through narrow lanes between the featureless urban towers. No wrong turns, no hitting of dead ends. He had a nose for the one-way alleys. He pointed at a graffiti-decorated entrance. The consul told him to wait. He pressed a buzzer. Gundula was down in seconds. She informed the cab driver where to find room to turn around, but he knew. He lived in the ant heap too. The two of them were bantering immediately, exchanging one litany after another about the shortcomings of the local administration. In his Berlin dialect the taxi driver claimed that only rich Wessis went to the Press Ball. “You'll be lonely,” he cautioned Gundula. “You'll be the only one there from Marzahn.”

“I'm only going for a look,” Gundula reassured him, as if Wessi viewing was a lower category of betrayal than dancing with them. Hanbury was stealing glances at Gundula, his eyes lingering on the long dark coat buttoned to the neck. Her dark hair was brushed back exposing small, unostentatious earrings. As she and the driver conversed in a tribal language, Gundula's face lit up. Put her on the Victory Column, Hanbury thought. Have Gundula replace the golden winged angel. With her power to radiate, from up there, she would disperse the fog in no time.

Gundula, Hanbury had observed, was not given to much personal
decoration. She scarcely wore jewellery and for the ball had few signs of make-up. She probably knew that tiny earrings on her had more impact than strings of diamonds dangling from the earlobes of other women. Only later, when they were checking their coats, did the full impact of Gundula's preparations for the evening unfold. As the overcoat came off, a dark-red minidress came into view. “You look lovely,” Hanbury observed with conviction.

“I didn't know what to wear,” was the cheerful reply, “but, I knew it had to be red.”

“It suits you. First things first. Let's find champagne.”

Hanbury led Gundula upstairs to the bars where drinks were being poured as if the world was ending. Arm in arm, stopping every few minutes to sip, they explored. On the outside, the Berlin Congress Centre is an emulation of a fat, futuristic spaceship. Inside, the intergalactic vessel, a complex of halls and lounges, had plenty of passengers on board. The journey promised to be fascinating. The men, naturally, were all one anothers' clones. But the women! Each one aspired to be a work of cosmic art. Parisian see-through blouses, Latin American dresses cut provocatively up the sides, ballooning oriental trousers, low-cut frilly Viennese waltzing gowns with busts promising to burst out of confinement. The concubines to the super rich were recognizable by their cleavages – all of them lovingly prepared for public viewing in West End tanning studios. In one hallway Hanbury and Gundula saw well-known TV personalities behaving with an energy that seemed to say they would all soon be each other's next lover. In other side rooms, women snappily done up in men's suits leaned on yet more bars and, judging from the wobbly ankles in high heels, a few slinky men had come dressed the other way around. But by the time the thousands were congregated in the enormous inner hold, when the great ship was casting off, Hanbury knew that few in the sealed
structure held a candle to Gundula. It wasn't a conclusion arising from bias; he saw it on numerous faces. Everybody stared at Gundula, up and down, and up again.

“Why red?” he asked when they were seated in the ballroom.

“To set off your penguin outfit. Make you look important. Enhance your social standing.” Gundula smiled the smile of reason.

“It's not like that,” Hanbury protested. “People are probably wondering how someone nondescript like me is out with someone glamorous like you.”

“That's not what they're thinking,” Gundula teased. “They're thinking, why does a prominent diplomat bother with an Ossi, and a gaudy one at that.” The distance between sarcasm and truth can be vanishingly small and only Gundula's little smirk, the upturned corners of her mouth, betrayed her real meaning.

“You're the famous columnist read by thousands.”

“And hated by a good two-thirds of them. By chance, they're all Wessis.”

Hanbury said he refused to believe it. “I think you're a star. Anyway, Ossi, Wessi – it's got nothing to do with me. Let's drink to the opening of the Wall. Without it neither of us would be here.”

Their eyes met and from somewhere deep in space an interstellar burst of energy zapped the consul, hitting him in the spot that triggers uniquely Earthian sensations, in this case a stirring in his groin.

The magic hour came. The band began a Viennese waltz. Anxiety appeared on the consul's face. “I did tell you I don't know how to dance.”

“Yes, but I don't believe it. You have natural grace. You'll pick it up.”

“I never even properly learned the square dance,” he warned. He explained the dancing he had done with little Bonnie and how he once saw a neighbour – Keystone – get his wife into motion at a community centre in Indian Head. Keystone hopped twice on one foot, before
shifting to two hops on the other and back again, bringing his steel-capped boots down hard onto the linoleum floor. As he hopped, he turned his wife's arm like the crank on an ancient tractor. Tony, in a corner of the centre, had mimicked this and thus learned the
Keystone Hop
. But the distance between it and higher forms of dancing, Hanbury was sure, was too great to be bridged.

“I'm sure it's much the same,” Gundula reasoned. “Cowboys jumping, Viennese aristocrats gliding – the difference is only of degree. What they have in common is feet moving to music. Do you have a feel for music?”

“I sometimes listen to it,” he answered evasively.

“Get the rhythm inside your head and let it sink to your feet.”

Gundula got up and led him to a corner of the dance floor. Outside the paths of the free-wheeling enthusiasts she coaxed him. He began by moving stiffly on the spot.
Pinocchio
, she teased. But it changed. After looking down a while with an awkward angle of the head, eyes fixed on Gundula's dainty feet, the wooden puppet sprang to life. Without warning his feel for music did sink to his feet, which began to tap out the equivalent of a keyboard rhythm. And once he owned the rhythm with his feet, it spread back up so his whole body moved with harmony. Gundula led him into ever faster turns. Eyes closed but keeping up, the consul felt cold sweat being replaced by hot perspiration. Having travelled light years beyond Keystone's wife-cranking hop, he was suddenly out amidst the distant constellations, travelling at their speed. “I didn't know dancing could be like that,” he said when the band stopped.

Gundula laughed. “A little overdone. We'll work on economy of movement next.”

They went back at it. The slow waltz was mastered, no problem, but the quickstep was a disaster. “It's not natural,” he complained. On the other hand, he truly came into his own with the samba beat, which lent
itself to primitive leaps. Gundula spurred him on with unrestrained, head-thrown-back laughter. Their tiny sphere on the edge of the great dance floor in the ship heading out towards the stars filled up with immense vitality. In the Indian Head community centre, had there been a competition between the consul and the railway engineer, deciding the winner would have required a toss up.

Vitality was missing in Prenzlauerberg where the street lights in the fog produced a sallow, yellow hue, making the façades look undernourished. Gundula knew where to go. “Around the corner, second door on the left,” she said with indifference. “What are you going to say to him?”

“Ask him how he is. It's been twenty-five years.”

“And if he doesn't remember you?”

“I'll just leave.”

Which is what Gundula did after the exertion of the samba. She excused herself during the band change. Hanbury watched her go, seeing the hint of rebellion in the way she put down her heels. He drifted over to the ballroom doors. Couples by the hundreds crisscrossed. He nodded hellos. Richard von Ringsdorf saw him from a distance and waved. Hanbury thought he might glimpse Viktoria's bare shoulder, but no luck. Sophia came by, hanging on the arm of a blond boy with slicked-down hair, saying it was ages since they saw each other. The consul pleasantly agreed. Cordula was there too, done up in feathers inside which she seemingly hid a thin man half her age. She whispered to the consul that his name was Otto and that politically he leaned towards the Greens. Then, unexpectedly, Martina Ravensberg stood next to him, as at the Wintergarten. Hanbury, not having seen her coming, could not escape.

“I knew you would be here,” she said. She leaned towards him with a slightly stooped and threatening posture. The level of her voice dropped nearly to a whisper. “You have been on my mind. Once or
twice I thought of calling you, but I put it off. That isn't like me.” It sounded like a warning. Hanbury looked at her, past her, and back at her again. She leaned so close he observed the powdered downy hair on her upper lip. He also noticed that Martina's eyes were not quite synchronized. At this close range she seemed to be looking at him twice. Unsure which of the two eyes he should look into, he said, “I don't understand.”