The Berlin Assignment (5 page)

“Moose Jaw? That's just three hours up the road.”

“My family left and came East when I was a baby. What did your father do? A farmer?”

“A scientist.”

“On the prairies?”

“Soil scientist, at a research station in Indian Head.”

“That's freaky. Well, what do you want to know about Berlin?”

Hanbury was still thinking. He recalled a magazine survey on Germany he'd read. He'd made some mental notes of the headlines and these came back “With Germany reunified” he said, “there could be a shortage of capital to put the East on its feet. Interest rates could go through the roof. Is that of concern? And what about Berlin and its new role as German capital? What are the long term geopolitical implications of that?”

“That's several questions all at once, Mr. Hanbury. I'll answer
them one by one. For interest rate developments, we use the
Financial Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
. Anything they don't get around to reporting on we get from the IMF. Don't try to compete with that. As for Berlin, it may be Germany's capital, but that's on paper only. As far as I can see, it sits out there all by itself in the middle of a former Communist rustbelt. Frankly, who cares? Listen. It's important for you to remember your consular territory is East Germany. That was a whole country until not too long ago and you're there by yourself. So my advice is, don't extend yourself. Keep lots of flex in case some Canuck gets into trouble and you need time to get him out of jail. I'm sure the local staff will brief you on what's left. And don't forget, if we don't hear from you, the assumption is everything's fine. My sense of upstairs is that that's the way they want it. Our real interests with Germany are pursued elsewhere.” Krauthilda paused to view him through her great spectacles. “Okay? All set? Well, gotta go.” As she got up, Hanbury saw slim hips pushing out against a tight skirt which fell in straight lines to the ankles. Krauthilda grabbed a fierce briefcase – out of proportion to her slender figure – and lugged it out. At the door she turned. “By the way, where
did
you acquire German? It was on the piece of paper I saw, but no mention of how you learned it.” Hanbury shrugged. “What's the best place to learn a language?” he asked, also rising.

This broke the ice. She laughed with unexpected earthiness. Her red mouth spread wide. “I get the picture, Mr. Hanbury. My taste runs towards Italian. Enjoy!” With trim hips swinging, and the huge case forcing her to walk lopsided, Krauthilda swept away.

Hanbury watched her go and knew then who had drawn the obscene wallpecker hieroglyph on the Berlin file. Emboldened by the way she drew (and walked), he scribbled a note suggesting she drop by Berlin if ever she was in the neighbourhood. He signed it, playfully adding a replica of her bird, and placed it in the centre of the cluttered desk. Krauthilda's conclusion about the place where Hanbury learned
German was perceptive. Had she probed, she would have found that he lived in Berlin in the late sixties, attending the Goethe Institute for one year and going to lectures the next at the Free University. He would gladly have revealed other experiences: being temporarily arrested as a bystander at a student demonstration, and being shadowed by the Stasi during visits he made to East Berlin. Had someone asked about this when he joined the Service, he would willingly have written a long essay on his stay. But, like Krauthilda, the Service hadn't inquired, and he hadn't bothered to volunteer the information. That's how these two years in his late youth – formative for him, but insignificant for his employer – were accounted for in his personnel file by two vague words:
travelling overseas
. His Berlin experiences had no paper trail which meant, officially, they did not exist.

Some months after his deputy's departure, Heywood was himself transferred from the Disarmament Priory – to Investitures – where he indulged in his boundless curiosity for the unseen particulars of other people's lives. In the first few weeks he went on a binge, snuffling through documents every day, his large frame hulking over the cabinets like a bear going through offal. Hanbury's file intrigued the new Investitures priest as much as the others. Questions still nagged him. Did Hanbury get the nod because he spoke the language? Had he been tested and, if so, what was the result? Desiring answers Heywood repeatedly went back to the confidential records room.

Hanbury's short memorandum to Investitures, setting out his reasons for the assignment, was there. Next to Hanbury's claim that he spoke German was an annotation. Painfully small writing in the margin in red ink said:
Language capability not essential. Nothing speaks for this request. Refusal strongly recommended.
Heywood recognized the
troubled scrawl as the sour cleric's whom he sent packing the day he became Investitures priest. Beneath the cleric's scribble, in neat printing from an expensive fountain pen in a radiantly happy, mind-expanding, almost transcendental blue that ran down the margin and continued along the bottom of the page before petering out, was a detailed presentation of the pros and cons of assigning Hanbury to Berlin, written by Elmer Borowski, then Investitures priest.
So in the end I am forced to agree
, Elmer summarized like a high court judge,
even though he is the only candidate we have and we don't know where else we could send him…

Then came a question in crisp green from an unidentified source, addressed to the Zealots. Underneath it yet another very prominent contribution in a thick black marker pen. The answer to the question was signed
Hilda C
. and it magnanimously concluded,
No damage can be done if he's assigned to Berlin.

The final entry on the memo was another green-inked line, this one in capitals and addressed to Elmer.
MR. BOROWSKI: BERLIN IS OK. PLEASE ACTION.

Heywood whistled through his teeth. It was there in all the colours of the rainbow. Nobody wanted Hanbury and nobody, except Hanbury, wanted Berlin. The match was perfect. The Investitures priest looked deeper in the file, but found nothing that corroborated Hanbury's claim that he spoke the language. This little puzzle, however, was overtaken by a larger one. Who, Heywood dearly wished to know, had been the new consul's green champion? He searched in vain. He looked in other files too, to try to find more green. Yet nowhere else (and never after) did he find another example of the decisive matchmaking that had instructed Elmer Borowski. All the same, inspired by the succinct elegance of the appearance of the phrase –
BERLIN IS OK
– the Investitures priest decided that, henceforth, he too would promulgate his views in green.

Berlin's delights fade quickly when the summer ends. Autumn's darkness sets in with a vengeance. Dull skies hang low; storm winds drive the rain. The carefree young families that romped on the sandy shores of the city's lakes disappear into their dwellings. Will their psychic reserves built up by the summer sun last the winter? They wait anxiously for the first school break, when they trek to the airports, boarding flights to Mallorca, or the Canary Islands, even the Florida Keys. They're like a tribe on the move then. They seek a hasty, final week of sun, a last opportunity to top up. Light as a holy grail.

Berliners in middle age are hardier. Until well past the equinox they continue their daily ritual of swimming in the forest-surrounded lakes. Still, at some stage in the year's decline, even they acknowledge defeat, and the waters are reclaimed by shivering, forlorn, sporadically quacking ducks.

Not long ago things were different. Communist patrol boats on the Havel provided year-round company for the waterfowl. The guards on
the boats acted like outdoors sportsmen. They shot away happily – not at the ducks – but at people trying to get to West Berlin. Now that the eastern files have opened, it is known they did their casual killing more often than was commonly supposed.

The autumn's gloominess never failed to affect Sabine. When daylight began disappearing like water down a funnel, when the skies assumed their dreaded, lead-grey hue, and when the fog crept in to claim the trees and veil the rhododendrons in the city's inner courtyards, Sabine's reaction was predictable. She brooded about the inequities of geography. She yearned, not for other places, but for Berlin to have more summer. A twirl of the globe in Werner's study, with a finger tracing a constant line of latitude, showed Berlin is up there, more or less, with Hudson's Bay and the Kamchatka Peninsula. She once mentioned this depressing fact to her husband. The heating season had barely started, but the city's sombreness had already taken on its peculiar force. Werner laughed, not jovially, more dismissively. “Well,” he said, condescendingly, “make sure the sun shines in your heart.”, knowing full well that with her in a brittle mood, this would aggravate. “Personally,” he added, “I like the darkness. It helps me think.”

The effect of light, or rather, its lack, was evident everywhere. Most people experienced some sort of inner collapse without the summer's pumping force, much like the fountains at Schloss Charlottenburg which, having fought gravity since spring, one day simply stopped struggling. But Sabine's friend Martina had a different solution. In the autumn she switched from chilled sparkling white wine to Spanish red at their weekly lunch at Café Einstein. “It helps me feel the South,” she murmured as the wine went down. “God, give me daily hallucinations – Andalusian earth, orange groves, olive trees, southern men…” Martina was psychologically more robust than Sabine. Physically, too, she was a
show of strength. Her body, once curved and ripe, had swelled with the years, though it hadn't slowed the throughput, as she said, of
meine lieben Kater
, her darling tomcats.

The waiter attending them Wednesdays in the Café Einstein library was called Gottfried. Martina liked teasing him, calling him a heavenly tomcat,
mein himmlischer Kater
. Gottfried had a heavy mustache and long hair at the back which touched his shoulders – like General Custer. With his large nose, high forehead and muscular neck, he was imposing: a man at ease with women. Gottfried would tease Martina in return when he passed the menus, referring to her as
ein süsses Gänseblümchen
– a sweet daisy – causing a telling smile to form on Martina's scarlet lips and her eyes to fill with a fresh hallucination – she and Gottfried on daisy-filled summer meadows engaging in extravagant acts. “It is a dreary season”, she would agree with Sabine once Gottfried disappeared with the order. She might twirl her long, pearl necklace then and eye Sabine's faint facial lines. “But you complain too much my little dove. Learn to use your body to drive the darkness off. I use mine at every opportunity to create
spiritual
light.”

Contrary to Martina, whose body temperature went up when outside temperatures plummeted, Lisa, the second of Sabine's girlhood friends, became coldly censorious with the annual ebbing of the light. The impact on her was a redoubling of the struggle against vaguely-defined dooms. Lisa never really relaxed, not at any time of year. Having married early and now approaching middle age, and with her children gone, she had time but nothing much to do – except listen to her conscience. Her interests ranged from lofty causes, such as teak trees felled on Java, to mundane problems like the high incidence of double-parking on the Hohenzollerndamm. Pacing like a restless vixen, she'd go back and forth from one citizens' committee to another. Only once had she been in a steadily happy mood – three years before, during
Berlin's most frenzied and euphoric moment ever when the Wall came down. Wearing black jeans and a worn-out flak jacket, she'd been hoisted by strong young men onto the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Lisa's normal melancholy – her deep conviction that the human species was hell-bent on self-destruction – had been swept aside by the utter joy then reigning in the streets. “It's fantastic,” she said breathlessly on the day following the opening. She had dropped by
Bücher Geissler
to report to Sabine. “People from both sides are hugging each other at Checkpoint Charlie.” But the moment passed. The embracing stopped. The dismantling of the Wall became routine and Lisa, and for that matter Berlin, was not blissful much longer. After the high came the low. The city, after forty-five years of division, now finally reunified – though on paper only – faced a tougher grind than before.

Bücher Geissler
, the place Sabine worked, was ideal for catching your breath when global crises closed in on you. It served as Lisa's periodic haven. Amongst the timeless stacks of books rising in disorderly dignity to the ceiling, her thin, tense frame was out of place. But the books soothed and Lisa relaxed. The thought of so much learning waiting to be teased out from between the covers made her feel slightly mystic, that there was another world, another dimension behind the one she knew, a place characterized by perfection. Sensing this was a pleasant change from the political battles in the neighbourhood committees.

The bookstore's respite and Sabine's sympathetic ear were the reasons Lisa liked to loiter. True, Geissler, that old buzzard, bombarded her with evil glances. Inevitably he stood on guard near the front of the store, his head continuously moving back and forth like a mechanical monitor. Depending on how light struck the lenses of his glasses, they alternately flashed like beacons, or became a pair of tunnels going deep. Lisa found it impossible to decipher whether he was sullen because she
was keeping Sabine from her work, or because she'd come in wearing her tattered military jacket.

On the morning of the day when the new consul arrived in Berlin to assume his duties, the streets were being pelted by a cold, persistent downpour. That day, about the time Hanbury stepped off the plane, Lisa was entering
Bücher Geissler
. She took off her jacket and standing next to the philosophy section, warmed her hands by cramping them under her arms in a tight self-embrace. Sabine ceased tidying up the shelves and looked at Lisa's soggy garment on the floor. Thinking of what happened to a neighbour the night before, she said with resignation, “Maybe the rain will stop the Poles stealing our cars.”