The Berlin Assignment

by Adrian de Hoog

  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.

  OLD FRIENDS

  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. Th
e 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.”

  The remark had a vague link to the testy subject of Berlin traffic and Lisa seized on it. Straightaway she expounded her current cause, though her hostility was not directed at the Poles, nor the routine disappearance of cars from desirable neighbourhoods. “I won’t stand for it,” she said heatedly. Wet strands of hair stuck to sallow cheeks as she began talking about a new, kilometres-long traffic tunnel under the central park, the Tiergarten. It had been announced in the morning paper. The article had been accompanied by a map with a double dotted line that showed it snaking from West to East. “A disaster! Is that what we wanted when the Wall came down…more roads, more bridges, more pollution? Of course not! We must stop it, Sabine.”

  Lisa made her fighting remarks in a loud voice. By the front door Geissler stopped the rhythmic swaying of his head and directed his lenses in the women’s direction. Lisa continued. “Everyone knows the more you pamper cars, the more you feed traffic jams. Appeasement doesn’t work. As for the Poles, as far as I’m concerned they can’t steal our cars fast enough.” Sabine, although nodding sympathetically, hadn’t really listened. She was worried that with the chilling wind and rain, her father, who would be out on his bike as he was every morning, might catch a cold. Colds develop into pneumonia and pneumonia can be quickly fatal for someone over eighty.

  The weather, Sabine had noticed, also affected the public’s taste in books. She believed that on dreary days customers preferred novels with mystic plots and tragic figures. More of that genre, she sometimes argued, should be displayed on the shelves. But Geissler, with a trivializing motion of his left, his only arm – the right one having been severed by shrapnel and left behind in Africa at the time of Rommel – disagreed. With a few almost-swallowed words he’d say the store was his, implying he’d decide the titles that should be moving.

  According to some old photos pinned on the wall of a little office at the back, Geissler’s forefathers, all of them booksellers, had been well-groomed and correct. But this Geissler was different. He dressed slovenly and seldom shaved. He stooped and his mouth stood slightly open. Then there were his eyes, magnified behind the wire-rimmed glasses, which made him look primitive, even possessed. In short, he didn’t have the appearance of a bookseller. The politics of the thirties and forties did this to him. He had no choice then but to fight in a war from which he returned physically maimed and with a mind as badly scarred as his body. The result was silence, decades of haunted silence. Sometimes days went by without him saying a word. He would stand at the front of the store, inspecting the street, pushing back the memories of horror, engaging only in a sweeping motion of his head.

  The bookstore went back to Bismarck’s time when Berlin boomed. Bücher Geissler flourished, then, and through the succeeding generations. But under this last Geissler the business turned static. An ancient bell jangled when the door opened. Customers entering made the wooden floor boards moan. The lights, partly bare bulbs, partly flickering fluorescents, hung down from electric cords, or makeshift metal chains. In the narrow aisles, where the rows of books on the shelves were always tending to disorder, the air was stagnant, smelling like a cave.

  Bücher Geissler was run down, yes, but at every turn it offered delightful gifts – literary gems – hidden in amongst the volumes on display. Gremlins, it seemed, had been at work to put them there. Rare first editions were always coming out of the cellar. The old books from below had gone through hardship obviously – some kind of upheaval – because often they were scratched or dented, but inside they were new. The pages had not been cut or turned. A vast collection had to be down there, seemingly thrown together in a random pile. When Geissler went into the cellar to rummage around he grunted and groaned as if he was at work in a mine. The cellar door was permanently locked when he wasn’t below. Sabine had never, not in twenty years, gone down the stairs. Geissler sometimes referred to his stock there, saying it was difficult to find things, referring to awful light. With a queer, sad shuffling noise he would descend, returning half an hour later with several dozen rare volumes in a basket slung from his sole arm. Geissler positioned the new arrivals erratically amongst the other curiosities, plugging gaps on the shelves where sales left openings. Judging from the antiquarian reinforcements coming up year-in, year-out, from down below, Sabine suspected there was more than a pile of books in the cellar. It had to be at least a mountain, or, as she once told Werner in a moment of dark humour, maybe a book factory operated by history’s ghosts.

  Geissler’s painful ceremony with the cellar books, especially its unpredictable timing, provided Sabine with secret excitement. The inexhaustible supply of classical works – German translations of Greek philosophers, of Russian histories and Czech plays, Hungarian travelogues or, for that matter, Roman poetry, American frontier novels, not to mention the full, rich German literary tradition itself – had an addictive effect. Like other book lovers who picked through the shelves with eager, probing fingers and rocked on their feet in the narrow aisles, reading glasses stuck on the tips of noses, Sabine was mesmerized by the printed word. She appreciated complex plots, fiery characters, elegant dialogue, subtle innuendo. She loved the way books exposed the inner workings of real and imaginary things, the way they allowed life to be suspended, or spent in a different world.

  Lisa’s visit had not helped Sabine’s mood. Shortly after the tirade against the outrageous Tiergarten tunnel, she left for the weekly lunch at Café Einstein. Marching under an immense umbrella, her shoulders knotted up, Sabine felt imprisoned by the weather. Shaking the water out at the café’s front door, she saw Martina, smiling overwhelmingly as always, already at their table with a carafe of red. When Sabine had settled, Martina asked how the book business was doing. “Your charms are wasted there, sweetie,” she added cheerfully. “I’ve told you that before.”

  “It’s going nowhere,” Sabine answered. “The rent from the apartments upstairs keeps Geissler going. Two people came in this morning and one wasn’t even a customer. It was Lisa. She dropped by to tell me about some new social problem. A traffic tunnel so
mewhere.”

  “Well my business is booming,” Martina said nonchalantly, “all over town. Everybody in the West wants to put up advertising in the East. All those run-down buildings with exposed fire walls left over from the war – we’re going to cover them with colour. I’ve told you before, I’ve got a sales spot waiting for you. You could start tomorrow. You’ve got a perfect figure for the job.” She padded the back of her platinum-streaked-blond fluffy hairdo.

  “Geissler has fewer customers all the time,” Sabine continued. “People are looking for bargains outside Berlin now, though you couldn’t get old books cheaper than from him. Some he lets go for nineteen-thirties prices.”

  “I don’t know much about book prices,” Martina replied, “but the good thing about money nowadays is that Berlin is once again attracting it. Did you know? Fresh men loaded with cash are arriving by the dozens. They’re buying everything that’s going. Dahlem villas are hot items. I’m very optimistic.”

  “I doubt it’s for the better. Everything is getting worse with the Wall gone.”

  Sabine watched Martina finish off a first glass of wine. She often wondered how someone outwardly slow and slightly eccentric like Martina could be so lightning-swift in business. When Martina talked business her eyes filled with excitement. Disconcertingly, however, they focussed in slightly different directions, as she suffered from an eye problem. When the prospect of business animated Martina, one eye would fix on the person opposite and the other on something in the distance. This could be unsettling. Sabine noticed Martina’s eyes began to wander when she talked of layering East Berlin in colour, but as she poured herself another glass of wine, a degree of synchronisation filtered back.