A Small Town in Germany

by John le Carré

  It might have been daytime. All the lights were on, doors open. Secretaries, clerks and diplomats, hastening down corridors, ignored them as they passed. The talk was of Brussels. The city’s name was whispered like a password. It lay on every tongue and was stammered out by every typewriter; it was cut into the white wax of the stencils and rung on every telephone. They climbed another flight to a short corridor that smelt of a swimming-pool. A draught of fresh air struck them from their left. The door ahead of them said ‘Chancery Guard Private’ and the label underneath, ‘Mr and Mrs J. Gaunt, British Embassy, Bonn.’

  ‘We don’t have to go in, do we?’

  ‘This is where he came and saw you? Friday evenings after choir? He came up here?’

  Gaunt nodded.

  ‘What happened when he left? Did you see him out?’

  ‘He wouldn’t let me. “You stay there, my boy, and watch your telly, I’ll see myself off the premises.” ’

  ‘And that’s the door: the back staircase.’

  He was pointing to his left where the draught came from.

  ‘It’s locked though, see. Hasn’t been opened for years.’

  ‘That’s the only way in?’

  ‘Straight down to the basement it goes. They were going to have a rubbish chute till the money ran out so they put stairs instead.’

  The door was solid and unrelieved, with two stout locks that had not been disturbed for a long time. Shining a pencil torch on to the lintels, Turner gently fingered the wooden beading that ran down the two sides, then took a firm grip on the handle.

  ‘Come here. You’re his size. You try. Take the handle. Don’t turn it. Push. Push hard.’

  The door yielded without a sound.

  The air was suddenly very cold and stale; American air when the conditioners fail. They stood on a half landing. The stairs under them were very steep. A small window gave on to the Red Cross field. Directly below, the cowl of the canteen chimney puffed floodlit smoke into the darkness. The plaster was peeling in large blisters. They heard the drip of water. On the reverse side of the door post, the wood had been neatly sawn away. By the thin light of the torch they began their descent. The steps were of stone; a narrow strip of coconut matting ran down the centre. ‘Embassy Club this way,’ a very old poster ran. ‘All welcome.’ They caught the sound of a kettle bobbing on a ring and heard a girl’s voice reading back a passage of dictation: ‘While the official statement of the Federal Government describes the reason for the withdrawal as merely technical, even the most sober commentators …’ and instinctively they both stopped, heart in mouth, listening to the clear words precisely spoken into the stairwell.

  ‘It’s the ventilation,’ Gaunt whispered. ‘It’s coming through the shaft, see.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  They heard de Lisle’s voice languidly correcting her. ‘Moderate,’ he said. ‘Moderate would be much better. Change sober to moderate, will you, my dear? We don’t want them to think we’re drowning our sorrows in drink.’

  The girl giggled.

  They must have reached the ground floor, for a bricked doorway stood ahead of them, and fragments of wet plaster lay on the linoleum. A makeshift noticeboard advertised vanished entertainments: the Embassy Players would present a Christmas performance of Gogol’s Government Inspector. A grand Commonwealth Children’s Party would be held in the Residence; names, together with details of any special dietary requirements, should be submitted to the Private Office by 10th December. The year was 1954 and the signature was Harting’s.

  For a moment Turner fought with his sense of time and place, and almost lost. He heard the barges again and the chink of the glasses, the fall of soot and the creak of the rigging. The same throbbing, the same inner pulse beyond the register of sound.

  ‘What did you say?’ Gaunt asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Giddy and confused, he led the way blindly into the nearest passageway, his head wildly beating.

  ‘You’re not well,’ said Gaunt. ‘Who did that to you then?’

  They were in a second chamber occupied by nothing but an old lathe, the filings rusted at its base. There was a door in the further wall. He pushed it open, and for a moment, his composure left him as he drew back with a short cry of disgust, but it was only the iron bars of the new grille reaching from the ceiling to the floor, only the wet overalls hanging from the wire and the moisture pattering on the concrete. There was a stink of washday and half-burnt fuel; the fire had set a red glow trembling on the brickwork; small lights danced on the new steel. Nothing apocalyptic, he told himself, as he moved cautiously along the gangway towards the next door, just a night train in the war; a crowded compartment and we’re all asleep.

  It was a steel door, flush against the plaster, a flood door deep below the water line, rusty at the frame and lintel with KEEP OUT done long ago in flaking Government paint. The wall on his left side had been painted white at some time, and he could see the scratches where the trolley had passed. The light above him was shielded with a wire basket and it laid dark fingers on his face. He fought recklessly for consciousness. The lagged water pipes which ran along the ceiling chugged and gurgled in their housings, and the stove behind the iron grille spat white sparks which turned small shadows on and off. Christ, he thought: it’s enough to power the Queen Elizabeth, it’s enough to brand an army of prisoners; it’s wasted on one lonely dream factory.

  He had to fight with the key; he had to shake the lever handle hard before the lock would turn. Suddenly it had snapped like a stick and they heard the echo fly away and resound in distant rooms. Keep me here; oh God keep me here, he thought. Don’t change my nature or my life; don’t change the place or move the path that I’m following … There must have been a piece of grit beneath the door for it shrieked, then stopped and Turner had to force it with his whole body, force it against the water, while Gaunt the Welshman stood back, watching and lusting but not daring to touch. At first, fumbling for the switch, he saw only the darkness; then a single window thick with cobwebs come gloomily forward and it frightened him because he hated prison. It was high in the wall and arched like a brick oven and barred for security. Through its topmost panes he glimpsed the wet gravel of the car park. While he stood there watching and swaying, the beam of a headlight groped slowly along the ceiling, a prison spotlight searching for escapers, and the whole catacomb filled with the roar of a departing engine. An army blanket lay on the sill and he thought: you remembered to black out the window; you remembered the firewatching in London.

  His hand found the light switch; it was domed like a woman’s breast, and when he pressed it down it thumped like a punch against his own body and the dust rolled longingly towards him over the black concrete.

  ‘They call it the Glory Hole,’ Gaunt whispered.

  The trolley was in an alcove beside the desk. Files on top, stationery below, all in varying sizes, nicely crested, with long and standard envelopes to match, all laid out ready to hand. At the centre of the desk, next to the reading light, square on its felt pad and neatly covered with a grey plastic cape, lay the missing typewriter with the long carriage and beside it three or four tins of Dutch cigars. On a separate table, a thermos and a quantity of Naafi cups; the tea machine with the clock; on the floor a small electric fan in two tones of plastic, trained conveniently upon the desk to help dispel the unfortunate effects of damp; on the new chair with the rexine seat, a pink cushion partially embroidered by Miss Aickman. All these he recognised at a glance, dully, greeting them curtly as we greet old friends, while he stared beyond them at the great archive which lined the walls from floor to ceiling; at the slim black files each with a rusted loop and a rounded thumb-hole, some grey with bloom, some wrinkled and bent with damp, column after column in their black uniforms, veterans trained and waiting to be called.

  He must have asked what they were, for Gaunt was whispering. No, he couldn’t suggest what they were. No. Not his place. No. They had been here longer than anyone co
uld remember. Though some did say they were Jag files, the Judge Advocate General’s Department he meant, that’s what talkers said and the talkers said they came from Minden in lorries, just dumped here for living space they were, twenty years ago that must be now, all of twenty years, when the Occupation packed up. That’s all he could say really, he was sure; that’s all he’d happened to hear from the talkers, just overheard it by chance, for Gaunt was not a gossip, that was the one thing they could say about him. Oh more than twenty years … the lorries turned up one summer evening … Macmullen and someone else had spent half the night helping to unload them … Of course in those days it was thought the Embassy might need them … No, nobody had access, not these days, didn’t want it really; who would? Long ago, the odd Chancery officer would ask for the key and look something up but that was long ago, Gaunt couldn’t remember that at all, and no one had been down here for years, though Gaunt couldn’t say for sure, of course; he had to watch his words with Turner, he’d learnt that now, he was sure … They must have kept the key separate for a while, then added it to the Duty Officer’s bunch … But a while back now, Gaunt couldn’t say when, he had heard them talking about it; Marcus, one of the drivers, gone now; saying they weren’t Jag files at all but Group files, it was a specialist British contingent … His voice pattered on, urgent and conspiratorial, like an old woman in church. Turner was no longer listening. He had seen the map.

  A plain map, printed in Polish.

  It was pinned above the desk, pinned quite freshly into the damp plaster, in the place where some might put the portraits of their children. No major towns were marked, no national borders, no scale, no pretty arrows showing the magnetic variation: just the places where the camps had been. Neuengamme and Belsen in the north, Dachau, Mauthausen to the south, to the east, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz; in the centre Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Kulmhof and Gross Rosen.

  ‘They owe me,’ he thought suddenly. ‘They owe me.’ God in Heaven what a fool, what a plain, blundering, clumsy fool I have been. Leo, you thief, you came here to forage in your own dreadful childhood.

  ‘Go away. If I want you I’ll call you.’ Turner stared at Gaunt sightlessly, his right hand pressed against a shelf. ‘Don’t tell anyone. Bradfield, de Lisle, Crabbe … no one, do you understand.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Gaunt said.

  ‘I’m not here. I don’t exist. I never came in tonight. Do you understand.’

  ‘You ought to see a doctor,’ said Gaunt.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Pulling back the chair, he tipped the little cushion to the floor and sat down at the desk. Resting his chin in his hand, he waited for the room to steady. He was alone. He was alone like Harting, contraband smuggled in, living like Harting on borrowed time; hunting, like Harting, for a missing truth. There was a tap beside the window and he filled the tea machine and played with the knobs until it began to hiss. As he returned to the desk he nearly tripped over a green box. It was the size of a narrow briefcase, but stiff and rectangular, made of the kind of reinforced leather-cloth used for bridge-sets and shotgun cases. It had the Queen’s initials just beneath the handle and reinforced corners of thin steel; the locks had been ripped open and it was empty. That’s what we’re all doing, isn’t it? Looking for something that isn’t there?

  He was alone, with only the files for company and the stink of warm damp from the electric fire; and the pale breeze of the plastic fan and the muttering of the tea machine. Slowly he began turning the pages. Some of the files were old, taken from the shelves, half in English and half in a cruel Gothic script jagged as barbed wire. The names were set out like athletes, surname first and Christian name second, with only a couple of lines at the top and a hasty signature at the bottom to authorise their ultimate disposal. The files on the trolley were new, and the paper was rich and smooth, and the minutes signed with familiar names. And some were folders, records of mail despatched and mail received, with titles underlined and margins ruled.

  He was alone, at the beginning of Harting’s journey, with only his track for company, and the sullen grumbling of the water pipes in the corridor outside, like the shuffling of clogs upon a scaffold. Are they like horses? Hazel Bradfield’s voice enquired. Do they sleep standing up? He was alone. And whatever he found there was the other part of coming alive.

  Meadowes was asleep. He would not for a moment have admitted it; and Cork would not, in charity, for a moment have accused him of it; and it is true that technically, like Hazel Bradfield’s horses, his eyes were open. He was reclining in his upholstered library chair in an attitude of well-deserved retirement, while the sounds of dawn floated through the open window.

  ‘I’m handing over to Bill Sutcliffe,’ Cork said, loud and deliberately careless. ‘Nothing you want, is there, before I knock off? We’re brewing a cup of tea if you fancy it.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Meadowes said indistinctly, sitting forward with a jerk. ‘Be all right in a minute.’ Cork, staring down through the open window into the car park, allowed him time to collect himself.

  ‘We’re brewing a cup of tea if you fancy it,’ he repeated. ‘Valerie’s got the kettle on.’ He was clutching a folder of telegrams. ‘There hasn’t been a night like that since Bremen. Talk, that’s all it is. Words. By four this morning they’d forgotten about security altogether. H. E. and the Secretary of State were just chatting direct on the open line. Fantastic. Blown the lot I should think: codes, cyphers, the whole bloody orchestra.’

  ‘They’re blown already,’ Meadowes replied, more for himself than for Cork; and came to join him at the window. ‘By Leo.’

  No dawn is ever wholly ominous. The earth is too much its own master; the cries, the colours and the scents too confident to sustain our grim foreboding. Even the guard at the front gate, doubled since evening, had a restful, domestic look. The morning light which glistened on their long leather coats was soft and strangely harmless; their pace as they slowly walked the perimeter was measured and wise. Cork was moved to optimism.

  ‘I reckon today might be the day,’ he said. ‘A father by lunchtime: how’s that, Arthur?’

  ‘They’re never that quick,’ Meadowes said, ‘not the first ones,’ and they fell to counting off the cars.

  ‘Full house, near as nothing,’ Cork declared; and it was true. Bradfield’s white Jaguar, de Lisle’s red sports car, Jenny Pargiter’s little Wolseley, Gaveston’s shooting-brake with the baby chair mounted on the passenger seat, Jackson’s rugged Two Thousand; even Crabbe’s broken down Kapitän, twice personally banished from the car park by the Ambassador, had crept back in the crisis, its wings bent outward like crooked claws.

  ‘Rover looks all right,’ said Cork. In reverent silence they duly admired its distinguished outlines against the fencing on the other side of the canteen. Nearer at hand, the grey Rolls stood in its own bay, guarded by an army corporal.

  ‘He saw him, did he?’ Meadowes asked.

  ‘Sure.’ Cork licked his finger, selected the relevant telegram from the folder which he carried under his arm and began reading out loud, in a facetious, nursery-rhyme voice, the Ambassador’s account of his dialogue with the Federal Chancellor … ‘ “I replied that as Foreign Secretary you had implicit trust in the many undertakings already given to you personally by the Chancellor, and that you had every confidence that the Chancellor would not for a moment consider yielding to the pressure of vociferous minorities. I reminded him also of the French attitude to the question of German reunification, describing it not merely as unsound but as downright anti-American, anti-European and above all anti-German – ” ’

  ‘Listen,’ said Meadowes suddenly. ‘Shut up and listen.’

  ‘What the –’

  ‘Be quiet.’

  From the far end of the corridor they could hear a steady drone like the sound of a car climbing a hill.

  ‘It can’t be,’ Cork said shortly. ‘Bradfield’s got the keys and he –’ They heard the clank
of the folding gate and the small sigh of a hydraulic brake.

  ‘It’s the beds! That’s what it is. More beds. They’ve got it going for the beds; he’s opened it up for them.’ In confirmation of his theory, they heard the distinct clank of metal on metal, and the squeak of springs.

  ‘This place will be a Noah’s Ark by Sunday, I’ll tell you. Kids, girls, even the bloody German staff: Babylon, that’s what it’ll be. Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s better. Here, what happens if it comes on while they’re demonstrating? Just my luck, that would be, wouldn’t it? My first kid: baby Cork, born in captivity!’

  ‘Go on. Let’s hear the rest.’

  ‘ “The Federal Chancellor took note of the British anxiety which he thought misplaced; he assured me he would consult his Ministers and see what could be done to restore calm. I suggested to him that a statement of policy would be very useful; the Chancellor on the other hand thought repetition had a weakening effect. At this point he asked that his best wishes be conveyed to yourself as Secretary of State, and it became clear that he regarded the interview as closed. I asked him whether he would consider reserving fresh hotel accommodation in Brussels as a means of ending uninformed speculation, since you were personally distressed by reports that the German delegation had paid its bills and cancelled its bookings. The Chancellor replied that he was sure something of that sort should be done.” ’

  ‘Zero,’ said Meadowes distractedly.

  ‘ “The Chancellor asked after the Queen’s health. He had heard she had a touch of influenza. I said I thought she was over the worst but would make enquiries and let him know. The Chancellor said he hoped Her Majesty would take care of herself; it was a tricky time of year. I replied that all of us sincerely hoped that the climate would be more settled by Monday and he had the grace to laugh. We left on good terms.” Ha ha ha. They also had a little chat about today’s demonstration. The Chancellor said we weren’t to worry. London are copying to the Palace. ‘The meeting,’ ” Cork added with a yawn, ‘ “ended with the customary exchange of compliments at twenty-two twenty hours. A joint communiqué was issued to the press.” Meanwhile, Econ are going up the wall and Commercial are totting up the cost of a run on the pound. Or gold or something. Or maybe it’s a slump. Who cares?’