The Berlin Assignment (61 page)

One Saturday morning after breakfast, both of them with their noses in the paper, Hanbury raised the subject once more. He read aloud a headline from the foreign section. “Isn't it interesting what's going on in Papua New Guinea?” he said. Holding his part of the paper between them like a barrier, he then asked for her opinion.

The question irritated her. “I don't know a thing about Papua New Guinea. Do you? Are you planning to become ambassador there?”

“I'm not making any plans. I've learned to keep a low profile.” A voice of unconcern spoke from behind a wall of paper.

She could have given a stinging reply to that! She could have speculated that must be why men turn into consuls: because they want no profile. But she didn't. It was simply another case of him being a non-thing. Naturally he wasn't making any plans. He spurned every hint of planning. She didn't consider herself a particularly strong planner either, but all the same she did more of it than him. She was planning a holiday on the Baltic coast to coincide with one her family would be taking. She was hoping he would take a train up for one of the weekends. But when she hinted at it, he was non-committal. Non-planning, non-committing, non everything. She let it pass and instead read to him from the Saturday feature section. “It says here the Russians are beginning to depart. Six hundred thousand of them. Imagine the logistics.”

“One of the all-time great military retreats.”

Gundula suggested a drive to the Oder River. Perhaps they would see Russians abandoning German soil. Afterwards they could have a picnic.

“If you think Trabi is up to it,” he said.

I'm not making any plans.
An innocent enough remark. But for Hanbury it went deeper than being disinterested in an ambassadorship in Papua New Guinea. He had a problem Gundula knew nothing about. It originated with Sabine. She had made a proposal that had been gnawing at him these past few days. It occupied his thoughts even as he agreed with Gundula to go look for Russians. By mutual consent, given the fine weather, he and Sabine no longer visited museums. They went walking in the Grunewald instead. A few days before, as usual, Hanbury arrived at
Bücher Geissler
for the outing, but the front door was locked. The lights in the store were off. He rattled the door to see if it might spring
open. He pressed his face against the glass and cut off reflections with cupped hands. No sign of life. A grey eminence, someone picking a living off the street, came hobbling by. When the consul began rapping on the glass, he stopped to lick the stubble around his mouth. “Knock as hard as you want,” he said. “It won't bring 'im back. He's dead.” “Who's dead?” Hanbury asked the scruffy guardian of the street. “Who do you think? The stinker that lived there. He wasn't even that old.” The scrawny Methuselah seemed proud he had outlived yet another human being.

The door opened. Sabine, looking grave, motioned Hanbury to enter. The grey eminence spat and shuffled off. “Is it true?” he asked anxiously. “Has Herr Geissler passed away?” She relocked the door, nodding a quick affirmation. He followed her to the rear. “When? How?”

“Yesterday morning. He didn't come down. I called the police. They broke into his apartment on the top floor. He was lying on the floor. A stroke.”

“Sabine, how awful for you. I'm so sorry.”

“He wasn't well. Something could have happened any time.” She tried hard to stay objective, but a tear slid down her cheek.

Hanbury took her by the shoulders and she began to cry, burying her face against his chest. Hanbury tried to give support. A bad patch, he said. It would pass. She had her family, her friends. “I don't know why I'm upset,” Sabine blurted. She took out a handkerchief to blow her nose. “I didn't particularly like him. But the last months – after you started coming by – he was different. You meant a lot to him. He's left me the store, the apartments, the whole building. I don't deserve it. I don't like it when people die.”

“Wash your face. We'll talk about it over lunch.”

They found a table in deep shade under an awning in a nearby restaurant. Hanbury listened to the details. Sabine was well along in
making arrangements. Once an ambulance had removed the body, she contacted an undertaker who arrived within an hour. Any next of kin, the undertaker asked? No one she knew about. Was there a will? he next inquired. Occasionally the deceased left instructions for their final ceremony. Sabine replied Geissler had never said anything about a will, although he had recently muttered he was ordering his papers. Check the desk, the undertaker advised. They went into Geissler's office and found an envelope addressed to her with several papers in it, including a handwritten will. “Does it say it's a will?” the undertaker asked. Sabine confirmed it did, but there were no funeral instructions. After the undertaker left, she read the will carefully and called her husband who left his institute immediately. Once he too had read the will, he made an urgent appointment with a notary. Completely genuine, the notary said: Sabine was the beneficiary of everything. They returned to
Bücher Geissler
where a bewildered Sabine began ordering the office and an eager Schwartz descended into the cellar.

“Werner believes the books in the cellar alone are worth a fortune if marketed properly,” she told Hanbury.

He had been listening patiently. “I'm glad Geissler left you the store. You deserve it.”

“It's exciting. But it frightens me too.”

After lunch Sabine claimed she had too much work now for strolling in the Grunewald. Walking back to the store, she said casually, “A note from Herr Geissler mentioned you.” Hanbury stopped. “He suggested you become a partner in the store. He wrote he trusted you with the books.” Hanbury was speechless. The overall situation with Geissler having died was serious, but the notion of him becoming a clerk in a bookstore was too absurd. Restraining himself from saying anything rash, he stared at Sabine and stayed silent. She wanted to know what he thought about it. She and Werner had discussed it and Werner believed it
would work. “I'll need help running the store. It would be wonderful if you decided to settle in Berlin. You say you feel at home here and you're practically a member of the family.”

“I don't know anything about books.”

“You have a way with books. Herr Geissler noticed it. What you don't know you'd learn. I can't imagine a better business partner. I plan to modernize the store, go upscale.” They were back at the
Bücher Geissler
storefront. “Anyway, there's time to think about it.” Sabine suddenly had an objective tone, the bearing of a manager. “We can talk about it more next week. Don't feel you have to decide right away.” Hanbury nodded. “I'll think it over.” Sabine kissed him lightly on both cheeks and disappeared into her new world.

The proposal had been preying on him ever since. Gundula would divert his thoughts, but before long it crept back, stalking him, creating an unease, a sense of something slipping out of control, a fear that the uncomplicated mid-week hours with Sabine would end. It was almost perverse, he thought. The last time he saw her husband, when they went to Potsdam, he came away with foreboding. And now for different reasons, Sabine filled him with apprehension too. Could he seriously contemplate spending the years beside her at a sales counter, as if in their advancing age this would correct the failed partnership of their youth?

Even now, heading towards the Oder River, when he should be concentrating on Gundula in her skimpy summer dress, and teasing her for pushing Trabi beyond his limit, Sabine's proposal was with him. The simple thing would be to tell her no, but confronting her made him feel ill at ease. It affected his conscience. His staying would mean much to her.
You're practically a member of the family
. How could he turn that down? How could he reject Sabine a second time? On the other hand, he turned
white with fear imagining himself spending decades standing in a store. In comparison to that suffocating vision, the whining and vibrating confines of Trabi seemed like a huge wide open space with plenty of room left to grow.

“Trabi is really flying,” he yelled at Gundula, forcing himself back to the present. Her farewell dress for the Russians was all-white with a V-cut plunging front and back. A few grams of silk, no more. A political provocation. “Let's hope he doesn't overheat,” Gundula shouted back. The noise level approached that of an open cockpit in a biplane. The exhilaration of flying along in Trabi, always on the edge of mechanical breakdown, must be, Hanbury speculated, the same as the early pilots experienced in their rickety test machines. “Think we'll see some Russians?” he yelled once more, as if they really were in a plane, flying low, maybe over the African savannah, as if in search of elephants. “They're around.” Gundula yelled at the top of her lungs, radiating a pilot's confidence.

Hanbury's thoughts, wretchedly stuck for days on selling books, now skipped to another possible future, the one that posed the question of where Gundula fit in his life. Suppose he decided to stay and sell books, how would Gundula react? Badly, he was sure. She would never be part of something which implied that kind of static permanence. A bookstore future, he was convinced, would not have Gundula anywhere near it.

Were there other possibilities? Take the current situation. He and Gundula on the move. Suppose
it
were permanent. He could see Gundula focussed and determined to get them where they planned to go, Gundula finding the solutions to life's labyrinths, Gundula being saucy, Gundula teasing, Gundula punching hole after hole into diplomacy's staidness, Gundula at night, immodest, insatiable and tender. Was a future
without
Gundula imaginable? Hanbury concluded it was not. He had come to love her. She had come in through his front door and taken over. But a precondition for this future, both of them on the move
together, was her leaving the paper, which he knew she never would. Whenever he raised the subject, she posed objection after objection, steering the suggestion – and their future – into a swamp where it sank from sight.

A lose-lose situation. If he decided to settle in Berlin Gundula would be scared off, while continuing the affair required subtle assurances that one day it would end. The only way to keep her was one day to leave her. But, if Gundula could not figure in his future, why not stay to sell books? Whichever way he looked at it, his prospects sent shivers up and down his back.

“Russians!” the pilot cried triumphantly. Ahead on the autobahn a long column of military vehicles, camouflaged trucks transporting artillery pieces darkened the right lane. Some kilometres later, they hit a more menacing column: three hundred armoured personnel carriers and heavy, self-propelled, wheeled guns, perfect for manoeuvring in cities, indispensable for suppressing revolution. “Imagine how nervous everybody would get if this were going the other way,” Hanbury said.

“What do you know about it? Was your country occupied by Russians?”

“It's our pleasure to have the Yanks close by.”

“You can't compare them.” In Gundula's opinion Russians were charming individually, but brutal as an army. Americans were the other way around.

Ten minutes later, a third column. This one had stalled. Stretching down the autobahn was an endless gypsy caravan. Trucks filled with civilian goods and hundreds of private vehicles – Ladas, Skodas, Trabis, Wartburgs – half of them in tow. The cars were stacked as full as the trucks. Cardboard boxes, piles of clothing, jerry cans, old radios and TVs, bits of furniture, heaps of random junk. The feared Russian army departing German soil was a rag-tag band on the move. Gundula said there was a rumour that they were even lifting runways off military airfields, carting
the concrete slabs home.

They'd seen enough of the humiliation. Gundula swung off the autobahn. She knew an area to the south with lakes. They would picnic there. Half an hour later she drove into a thicket. Once Trabi was parked, Hanbury took the picnic bag and followed Gundula down a trail. The innocent summer sound of people frolicking on a beach drifted at them through the trees.

“In luck,” Gundula said. She had spotted a shady area on the forest edge and marched there through loose sand. Hanbury put the picnic bag down. The reflection of the sun off the water blinded him. Shading his eyes he turned to Gundula, who was removing her sneakers. He was about to tell her the spot was well-chosen when, with an easy movement, she raised her dress up over her head and draped it across the picnic bag. Just as fast she stepped out of her panties. Gundula was lovely anytime and especially when naked, but her stripping down to nothing in the open astonished him.

“Gundula, what are you doing!”

“Take your clothes off,” she said with a daring smile.

“It's a
public
beach!” Guiltily he scanned the area. Then he saw she wasn't the only one naked.

“Is this a nudist beach?” he asked suspiciously.

“Just a beach. Let's swim.”

“I don't have a bathing suit along.”

“People wear bathing suits where you come from?”

“In public, actually, yes.”

“How silly.” Gundula took an aggressive stance. “Start with your T-shirt,” she ordered.

Hanbury slipped it over his head, then undid his sandals. Gundula waited for him to go on, but he hesitated. He closed his eyes to let a strange sensation pass. Gundula continued taunting. “Don't be prudish. You'll be noticed only if you swim in walking shorts.”

“Why go swimming at all?” he asked defiantly, but it was a last line of defense.

“Tony!” Gundula said impatiently. Reluctantly he unzipped his shorts and stepped out. The underwear was next, whereupon she sweetly took his hand and led him to the water.

The lake was refreshing. They swam out in the direction of the sun, then back. Coming in with the light behind, Hanbury made stealthy observations. Unclothed, overweight bodies lay on the beach like walruses sunning. Others were playful, taut, lithe and heathen. Gundula caught him staring. “Anyone you particularly admire?” she inquired. He said he would rather look at her, but most of her was under water.
Voyeur
, she said.
Human
, he rebutted.
You?
was the reply.