The Berlin Assignment (40 page)

He was preoccupied with more than going uphill in the Pyrenees. He also lectured her. On the notion of reconciliation.
Suppose no one ever forgave…How many million people died in the last war?…And for what?…We started it…Somebody forgave us…Imagine where we'd be if they hadn't…
After all the many years he wanted to say something about Tony too.
You don't need to forget what he did. Just forgive
.

The last things Sabine wanted to talk about was war and death, or forgiving a former lover. She wanted her father, as he neared his end, to say things about her mother. And she wanted to tell him about Nicholas who was like him. In a weak whisper, Müller continued. Sabine had to strain to catch the words.
Anyway…what did he do?…panicked…ran off…avoided a decision…Once or twice I've done that too…
Limply he squeezed Sabine's hand.
Listen, next year…I'm going to clock more kilometres than the others…There's a neat trophy for that…You and Tony, I want you at the banquet…So you two can talk
.

That night Müller died.

These were not his last thoughts. He became materially minded enough for a few minutes to tell her where his will was kept. He recommended a lawyer to take over the legal cases he was working on. He wrote his bank account number on a piece of paper. He dictated the telephone number of the Polish cleaning woman who wouldn't need to come for a week or two. But reconciliation with Tony was his last request, and few things have the power of the deathbed.

Sabine considered she honoured his wish at the funeral. She accepted Tony's condolences. She appreciated them. She
showed
she forgave. That done, she planned to forget. But then Martina asked about him, boring into the subject, insistently, painfully, like a hammer drill. When Martina didn't stop, she lost composure. Once the story was out though, Martina agreed not to meddle. The Savignyplatz affair thus once more exhumed, was buried again.

Then Tony walked into the store. Sabine knew it was Martina's doing. She tried to maintain her poise but dropped a book, which made the confusion worse. Tony confirmed he wouldn't have come had Martina not pressed him. He was abjectly apologetic. “I don't want anything,” he said. “I don't wish to bother you. I have some pictures of your father. Would you like them?”

“Pictures?” Sabine asked.

“I took them at the Stadium. I'll send them to you.”

“Bring them.”

“When?”

“When you like.”

That evening Sabine made a point of informing her husband that the consul had visited the store. “Him?” Schwartz replied. “The one who upset you? He struck me as a decent man. Invite him for dinner some time.” Werner, Sabine thought, could be casual to the point of being callous.

The photos broke Sabine's heart all over again. From Geissler's they
had gone to a coffee shop, a stand-up place, and leaning on a table with Hanbury beside her, she studied them. She saw her father surrounded by other exhausted cyclists. There was a close-up of him glowering at his defeat, but holding a champagne bottle like a Grand Prix racer; in another, closer shot he gazed into the camera with a look that was part triumph, part pathos and part cheek.

“He knew it was his last race,” Sabine said. “You can see that.” Hanbury asked about the cycling accident. She described the operation, her father pulling through, until the pneumonia set in. “His mind was fine, but his voice wasn't working,” Sabine said. “He was fighting for air.” All around them lunch-time noise was growing, but Tony and Sabine didn't hear the clatter. They were concentrating on picking their way forward in a conversation that covered difficult terrain.

Hanbury described how, having read the obituary in the paper, he went to
The Tankard
where Uwe's son-in-law showed him an old photo. “He said you brought it in. When was that picture taken, Sabine? We were so young then. Those evenings with Müller and Uwe, the four of us. I'll never forget them.” Sabine admitted she found Tony's letters in a box amongst her father's papers. At first she intended to throw them out, but then she read them. “You wrote my father, but you never wrote me. Not one try. Why?”

Hanbury attempted to explain, but the words came out mechanical, bloodless. Gripping his empty coffee cup, staring into its interior, he searched there for adequate descriptions of his failings, how they demonized him on Savignyplatz, how one day they hit him like a freight train, stunning him, making him stagger off. Incapacity for commitment, inability to make decisions, irrational fear of intercultural mingling, a tendency to cowardice. Did she want a longer list? Cowardice feeds on itself, he explained, meaning he could write Müller, but never found the courage to write Sabine. But no matter how hard he tried, the apology that was twenty-five years in the making was halting, even
confused. Sabine could see he was struggling, that he was sweating out contrition.

“What does all that have to do with you coming to the store?” she asked. “Was there a special reason?” Yesterday in the store
he
had been composed. Now it was the other way around.

Hanbury faltered even more. He said something about becoming older. Nothing since Savignyplatz had added up. The way things were then counted for more than he could ever have predicted. “The sessions in
The Tankard
were like being in a family. I haven't experienced anything like it since. I'm glad I had a chance to see your father during his last months.”

Sabine believed he was trying to say that he had come to Berlin hoping to lever part of his youth into his middle age. She accepted it. With her father gone, she was beginning to feel the same way. She too needed a new thread to run through and connect experiences. “Do you still listen to music?” she asked, her tone gentler.

“Oh yes,” said Hanbury, brightening.

“You were beyond reach when you were inside your music.”

“Do you still read as much?”

“When I have a spare five minutes.” The conversation halted for a moment, then Sabine continued. “Your letters to my father said nothing about other people. You wrote about countries, or politics. The only personal news in all those letters was that your mother died. You never married?”

Hanbury shook his head. “No, no. Oh no. It wouldn't have worked.”

“But no shortage of girlfriends. You must run into Martina's type everywhere.”

Hanbury explained Martina's type didn't appeal to him. “You never mentioned her back then,” he said. “She never joined us at
The Tankard
.”

“We went our separate ways for a few years. Martina had a good figure in those days. She gave me a complex.”

Hanbury glanced at Sabine and saw a slight pout. No different, he thought, than what used to slay him on Savignyplatz. “You shouldn't have had a complex, not because of Martina,” he blurted. “No one was more beautiful than you. Martina's type can't hold a candle to you.” This conclusion came out spontaneously and embarrassed both of them. They were silent for a while.

A woman came along to clear away empty cups and plates and muttered accusations about them standing there so long. “Can we do this again?” Hanbury asked outside. Sabine hesitated before nodding yes. That evening she showed her husband the photos of her father. “It's how I remember him.” Schwartz again asked if she had invited the consul for dinner. Sabine replied she doubted he'd have the time, given his many social obligations. A week later, Sabine casually informed her husband she and Tony had met for lunch. They were in the sitting room that was lined on one side with books and on the other with austere portraits of Schwartz's Prussian forbears. A clock ticked. Schwartz continued reading. “Good,” he said slowly. Some minutes later he added, “And you talked about what?”

“His work. My work. We had another talk about what happened between us. I understand better now why he ran away. Perhaps we
should
invite him for dinner.”

“Why not? He must have interesting experiences to talk about.”

“He had one today. Herr Geissler took him into the cellar. They spent half an hour there. I asked Tony afterwards what they did. He said they looked at books. Books as far as the eye can see. There's twice as many books downstairs as upstairs.”

“Does he know anything about books?” Schwartz said, looking up.

“I don't think so. Piles of old books that are new is how he described it.”

“I thought Geissler only went there by himself.”

“As far as I know Tony's the only one he's ever taken down.”

“Well, Geissler has a new friend, and so do you,” Schwartz said nonchalantly. “Maybe we should all have dinner.”

Schwartz went back to his reading. But Sabine saw her husband's concentration was broken. He ceased turning pages. A frown came on his face, as it did when he was preparing for difficult university debates.

Sturm was in form, on account of being in the East, driving down Karl Marx Allee, heading for Normannenstrasse. Hand it to the backseat, he thought. Not many other drivers were asked to navigate their diplomatic cargo to ports of call as exotic as this. “One of the great streets in the city,” Sturm said admiringly of the wide avenue.

“Looks copied from Moscow,” the consul replied. “Stalin's taste, if you ask me.”

“I like the room here, Herr Konsul. Four lanes each way. Nothing wrong with that even if it's on account of Stalin. People treat each other better when there's room for traffic. Have you noticed? In the West we're always shouting at each other. A woman in a Ferrari called me a navel-fucker the other day.”

“And you, what did you call her?”

“A blown-up paper bag. What else? Women in cars like that are pumped up with smelly hot air that arrives courtesy of rich old farts.”

“Maybe it isn't the streets, Sturm. Maybe Ossis
learned
not to shout. Suppose the Stasi heard you shouting? They would have picked you up, right? And given you a dose of psycho-torture.” This idea forced Sturm to reflect.

The Stasi were preoccupying Hanbury. He was thinking of Günther Rauch. Kurt Stobbe had invited him to the Normannenstrasse, but Günther Rauch was the motivation. Günther Rauch
and
Gundula. Both of them. He wanted to see the files. He didn't want to see
their
files.
He just generally wanted to see how lives like theirs were sitting on a shelf. In
Friedensdorf
, when they shared the dark side of their backgrounds, he had been a bystander. Seeing the files, Hanbury reasoned, might change that. It might allow him to contribute next time to their rapid fire dialogue.

He also believed, having heard Günther Rauch on the subject, that he could now speak with some modest authority on the methods of the East German secret police. His ideas about Stasi psycho-torture, for starters. Now he went further. “To keep you in line,” the consul enlightened Sturm, “the Stasi might have blackmailed you into signing a phony letter, maybe to someone outside the country, in which you would hint you worked for the CIA. Once you'd done that they'd have you by the throat. Forever. They could use it to charge you with treason anytime. Then they'd deepen their relationship with you, force you to inform on your friends, your in-laws, your family. Maybe that's why people here don't shout. They learned it was better to get by unnoticed.” To tease his chauffeur further, he added, “Perhaps it got in their genes.”

Sturm thought this over too. The consul was being fairly talkative. Again. A change had come over him in the last weeks. He was often away for mysterious lunches, but came back talkative. He talked to everybody, not just to Herr Gifford. He even made jokes to Frau Carstens. It was inexplicable, but Sturm wasn't complaining. A talking consul was better than one entombed. But that wasn't all. When the consul talked, like now, he was also making sense. The conclusion – the existence of an Ossi gene that made them quieter than Wessis – was sound. Sturm wished he'd made that observation. On the other hand, on matters like genetics, or Stasi practices, he couldn't take a back seat to the consul. Sturm owned this territory. He felt compelled to stake it out. “My brother-in-law knows someone who had that happen,” he said matter-of-factly, “you know, getting framed, accused of links to the CIA. From what he told me – and I know this for a fact – I believe it was worse even than you think.” That
silenced the consul. At the Normannenstrasse complex, the gate swung open and the Opel rolled in. Hanbury got out and looked around.

So this was the scene of Günther Rauch's finest hour? Hanbury wished Gundula were along to share the moment. He hadn't seen her for weeks. Getting through to her had become impossible, although the reason for it could be seen in each edition of the paper. A breathless rush of columns was appearing. Gundula seemed to be writing as if her time was running out. Hanbury suspected the contents were inspired by their evening in
Friedensdorf.
Everyone was talking about her. Half the city was in an uproar. If she could get so much inspiration out of a few hours in a smoky pub, Hanbury thought, imagine what she would do if she spent time roaming around the Stasi complex. In the macabre stillness he drew himself up and entered the building with defiance.
OK Stasi
, his body language seemed to say,
he who laughs last laughs best
.

A guard, detached from the world with his feet up and a nose stuck in a tabloid, took scant notice. He must have thrown an electric switch, however, maybe with a wriggle of his foot, because a security door opened. A rheumatic woman with a bent back and stiff hips soon shuffled up. “
Für Herrn Stobbe, nicht
?” Hanbury nodded. They plunged into a dark hallway that smelled of cheap disinfectants. And every four paces, a door. Endless halls and endless doors, all sealed, the remnants of absolute bureaucracy having gone down to absolute defeat.
St. Günther drove the vermin out and preserved the catacomb for future generations
, the consul proudly thought.