The Berlin Assignment

by Adrian de Hoog

“I don’t know how to dance.”

  “It’s televised. People go there to be seen. No one dances. It’s too crowded.”

  Hanbury’s interest perked up. The Lustgarten rally had been crowded; no one could move there either. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  Frau Carstens reminded him it was a ball. “You’ll need an escort,” she said severely.

  When he was alone, Hanbury fingered the Press Ball invitation and on impulse called Gundula.

  “Cowboy!” she exclaimed. “Congratulations on your act of bravery. Throwing yourself in front of an egg aimed at the President. Is that taught in diplomatic school?”

  “Thank you for the picture. Where did you get it?”

  “The photo department. By the way, your western outfit added character. Have you started keeping horses?”

  Hanbury chuckled. “The only ones I’ve been near recently were under the hood of a Trabi and they sounded sick.”

  “Trabi has never felt better. He’s been serviced. I told you that when I invited you up here for lunch.”

  “Speaking of invitations, ever been to the Press Ball?”

  Gundula had not.

  “Would you like to go?”

  A silence hung between them, then she said, “I don’t think it’s my milieu.”

  “There would be advantages,” Hanbury said playfully.

  “Such as?”

  “You could introduce me to your press friends.”

  “That’s true. Some of them still talk about you in the club.”

  “And I hear you don’t actually have to dance there.”

  “But I love dancing,” protested Gundula. “I’m good at the quick-step.”

  Hanbury did some quick thinking, but decided to plunge on. “I’m not,” he admitted. I’m better at slow steps, the slower the better. But if you show me how to quickstep, I could show you how to waltz without moving.”

  “Waltz without moving,” she asked with deepening interest, “a diplomatic step?”

  “It demands skill,” Hanbury confirmed. He wished he could see Gundula through the phone. Did she have her head thrown back in noiseless merriment? No one he knew had a sharper sense of humour. “Now take journalists,” he continued. “Quickstepping is all they ever do. They probably don’t even need music.”

  “You’re perceptive, cowboy.”

  There was another moment where neither said a word, when the conversation could have gone in one of several directions, but Hanbury brought it down to earth. “Even if we do different steps, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go to the same ball,” he said quietly. “It might be fun.” That settled it.

  He asked about her work. Some days had passed since her last column. Gundula replied she was working on something new and it hadn’t jelled yet. “I’m exploring a new perspective. By the way, progress on your friend Günther Rauch. He’s around – that’s confirmed – but he’s not in politics. Still interested?”

  “I don’t care about politics. I only want to see how he is.”

  “It might take a while to pin down his whereabouts. The route is not direct.” As Gundula was hanging up, she thanked him for the invitation; she looked forward to it, she said.

  When Tony was in grade six, the square dance teacher in Indian Head emphasized that compatibility was essential for couples if they wanted to be good dancers. Tony wondered what she meant, because he and the girls from the outlying farms lived in divergent worlds. He went to square dancing only because his father insisted, arguing it was part of an all-round, prairie education. Tony’s mother disagreed. She wanted him to use lunch breaks for complicated finger exercises to keep his piano technique nimble. Tony himself would have preferred to be outside, studying rabbit tracks in the snow. The father prevailed and that winter Tony practised compatibility twice a week with a beefy daughter of the land called Bonnie. Forty years later, Bonnie, ironically, was the reason Hanbury considered the Press Ball might work. If he had survived being trampled by that determined little girl, dancing with Gundula, he was sure, would be like levitating.

  Faint recalls of square dancing had faded when shortly afterwards he prepared to go out. “Where are you off to?” Frau Carstens demanded. “The zoo,” he said, passing her desk and pulling on a coat. “Buffalo viewing.” “Sturm will drive!” she called, but saw he wore his walking shoes. “No need!” he yelled back, surging out the door. It wasn’t a complete fabrication. He took the direction of the zoo, but went past it, up Budapesterstrasse, to the park for the appointment with Schwartz.

  Hanbury knew the Tiergarten from years before, an island of tranquillity in a sea of turbulence, but he had obtained a new perspective from Sturm. On the way to a meeting with the minister for city planning Sturm informed him it hadn’t always been so peaceful. When the Allied bombers swooped in for their runs, the statues of great Germans in the clearings trembled under the explosions of a city going up in flames. Uncannily, high over the park golden-winged Victoria on her column, affectionately referred to as Golden Ilse by Sturm, remained untouched. Sturm went on to claim it was because the Tiergarten wasn’t really a park. Manoeuvring slowly in dense traffic around the Victory Column, he explained it was a location for certain supernatural events. “It may look like a park, but it’s really a camp for ghosts. See the statues? Ghosts in them come out when the sun is down. The park is full of statues, so it gets busy. On the night of the first of May the ghosts of the Soviet soldiers who died in the fighting for the Reichstag come out too. They’re in a big grave, up ahead, by the memorial. That’s two thousand more ghosts! Things are really hopping then. There’s hardly any room left for the living. Myself, I don’t go near this place at night.”

  Sturm made a nifty move into an opening in the traffic, cutting off a woman in a Porsche. She lowered her window. “Are you blind?” she yelled. Sturm, gloomily preoccupied with the proximity of ghosts, was not about to take this. “No,” he shouted back, “but some people have a mouth so big I can see through them.” “If you can see so good, I guess you can see why I think you’re a dink.” Hanbury followed the exchange with interest. The woman was pretty. She had lovely red hair and a well-formed mouth tastefully highlighted with dark lipstick. “I can see so well through your big mouth that I have a good view of the inside of your asshole!” cried Sturm. “Sturm,” cautioned the consul. “Easy.” “Dann sind Sie wohl ein Arschficker!” the redhead screamed, accusing him of sodomy. “Ah,” Sturm said with practised denigration, waving her away, “Sie Arsch mit Ohren.” Having reduced the beauty to no more than a fat ass with a pair of ears, he rolled his window up. She beat the dashboard of her Porsche, but the traffic began moving. “Phew,” said Hanbury. “Good thing we don’t come by here often.” “It doesn’t mean much,” a relaxed Sturm said. “It’s the ghosts. People shout to keep them distant. Deep down they don’t mean it.”

  Ten minutes later Hanbury mentioned the traffic snarl around the Victory Column to the city planning minister, who felt confronted. He stared at the consul with eyes set deep in an emaciated face. “We have to condense fifty years of development into five,” the tired man lamented. “But we have a solution for the traffic.” He pointed at a wall map and for half an hour reviewed the advantages of tunnelling beneath the park.

  The traffic tunnel was controversial, but Schwartz supported it. He believed it might help a city which was spiralling out of control. Almost overnight, too much of everything had come into Berlin – from countries to the east. Refugees, beggars, gangs of thieves, foreign workers. Traffic was endlessly choked. Chaos. As far as he was concerned, the new excesses should be removed – at a stroke. Bold decisions were needed to re-establish order. But what was there instead? To drive home what he meant he liked to point at Berlin’s Flächennutzungsplan, a land-use blue print. It was a perfect piece of fudge, a sad escape act for politicians. Schwartz ridiculed it, likening the thousands of dabs of colour to a bad impressionistic painting. What did it do? What were its result? Streets dug up, filled in, dug up agai
n; scaffolding permanently confiscating sidewalks; cobblestones piled up on intersections; bridges pulled apart; one-way-street signs appearing randomly, then overnight being pointlessly reversed. The plan symbolized democracy running rampant, so everything ceased to work.

  At least the Tiergarten remained exempt, a sanctuary for contemplation, a preserve for the bundling of thoughts. Which was why Schwartz had suggested it to the consul. In the Tiergarten they could have an undisturbed talk. Making his way to the entry gate, Schwartz thought back to the stadium scene. It had unfolded fast, too fast to think. Sabine’s flight had been unsettling enough. But then came Müller’s claim that he and the intruder had his wife in common! Schwartz prided himself on not being easily shocked, but at the stadium – as the figure before him calmly poured champagne – he had come close.

  Sabine, when he caught up with her, was livid. “Who was that?” he demanded. She trembled, not saying a word. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. They entered a cemetery near the stadium. Proceeding along the rows of graves, he waited. “I knew him long ago,” she finally said, partly defiant, partly apologetic. “He called a few months ago. I told him to go away.” The late afternoon light was disappearing. The graves were as graves should be – silent and in full repose. Schwartz asked what long ago meant. “Before I met you.” After more questions a story came out which was not especially unusual. Schwartz wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t even surprised his wife never told him. Everyone has secrets. He had his. When she came to the day when the Savignyplatz affair ended, she began to cry. “This is ridiculous,” she said, pulling out a handkerchief. Schwartz suggested looking on the consul’s return as a gain. “He might be interesting to get to know. Think of his experiences around the world.” But Sabine was resolute. “He humiliated me. I want nothing to do with him.”

  In itself, the Savignyplatz affair was uninteresting for Schwartz, but a functioning diplomat was different. What of the world’s affairs had he seen up close? More intriguingly, what local entrées did he enjoy? In the cemetery, Schwartz decided to cast a net, if only to see what it might bring.

  For the rendezvous he chose the gate into the Tiergarten opposite the former diplomatic quarter. The consul might be interested to see the area where decades earlier his trade was plied. A gas lamp cast a faint illumination around the entrance. The air was chilly and Schwartz’s breath lit up before drifting away beyond the range of light. Dampness was on the attack. The lamp post was drenched with evening dew and a frost, creeping out of the ground, was hardening the wet into a wispy white. In his flaring loden cape he was a pyramidal silhouette rocking patiently back and forth.

  The consul came up with shoulders hunched. When he was a few steps away, Schwartz extended a hand from inside the cape. “You found it.”

  “No problems.”

  “I’m glad we have a chance to talk. It was awkward at the stadium.”

  The consul agreed. He hadn’t expected Müller’s family would be present at the race.

  “We were all surprised. No doubt Sabine’s father was playing a trick.” A silent understanding went between them that no more need be said about the scene. “By the way, embassies stood here once.” Schwartz gestured to the street behind the consul. “Diplomacy was an expanding industry in Berlin a hundred years ago. I admit I once considered the profession, but one has to believe in the national positions. Shall we go this way? I know a café.”

  Proceeding into the park, he inquired into the consul’s work. Conversing quietly they passed a lake in amongst the trees; it was a black mirror holding up the forming fog. When Schwartz heard Hanbury had worked on disarmament questions, he became excited. A subject involving the great powers, he said. He began to set forth his view of Russians. “They treat the world as if they’re in a bazaar. They posture, they threaten, they haggle. International agreements mean little to them. You must have noticed that.”

  The consul recalled the proof he assembled on the illegally deployed radar in Siberia, the Salt II violation. “We were planning to stand up to them,” he added. “We had the evidence, but the Cold War ended.”

  “It would have been the right thing to do.” Schwartz took the consul’s arm and slowed him down. “Now take us,” he said ominously. “We Germans. We have acquired the habit of making no decisions unless it’s by consensus. As a nation we’ve become addicted to self-appeasement.”

  Within the intimacy of the thickening mist, Schwartz’s low voice was compelling. “That may be happening everywhere internationally,” Hanbury said evasively.

  “You see!” Schwartz declared. “You know what I mean. Appeasement signals the death of an important political art, I mean the art of manipulating fear.” He came to a halt and prevented Hanbury from going forward. “Fear,” he emphasized. “Not terror. Terror is effective in the short term only. People react unpredictably to terror. But they respond rationally to fear. A distinction Hitler didn’t make. One can speculate on what might have happened if he had. He might have coasted on forever. Another lesson he didn’t heed was never push the Anglo-Saxon world beyond a certain limit.” Hanbury listened quietly. “East Germany made the same mistake. They adopted some of Hitler’s formulas. You must have seen how clumsy they were. Sabine told me you used to go there.”

  The reference to Sabine stirred Hanbury and he laughed self-consciously. Something in Schwartz’s voice made him open up. “I could never get her to come along,” he said. “I was going to lectures on socialism. Where I come from we don’t have a feel for that sort of thinking. I was curious about a functioning communist state and went to have a look.” He chuckled when he told Schwartz about trying to share impressions of Stalinism with Sabine. “She wouldn’t talk about it. Absolutely not.”

  “Is that why you didn’t marry her,” Schwartz asked casually, “because she didn’t share your curiosity for political ideas?” He made it sound as if he wasn’t married to Sabine, as if she were a distant relative, as if for purposes of this conversation she belonged to Hanbury more than him.

  “I didn’t believe she would leave Berlin,” Hanbury replied simply. The fatalism he had back then was creeping back. “No matter how I looked at it, it was going to be painful – me not able to stay, her unable to leave.”

  “I’m sorry she remains set against you,” Schwartz said. “I tried to convince her to let bygones be bygones, but some things can’t be forced.” They continued talking about Sabine, dissecting her character, treating her like an epic femme fatale and thus, in a way, confirming what Müller had claimed – that she was a woman they shared.

  Over a beer in the café, Schwartz became interested in Hanbury’s background. “Don’t mind my questions,” he said disarmingly. “The pursuit of a historian. We love biography. What did your father do?” The consul spread his hands. There wasn’t much to say. He talked about the prairies and the role of a soil scientist whose life was spent in a contest with nature. “I think he won. He certainly received enough awards.” Hanbury then turned Schwartz’s question around. What was the professor’s family like?

  “No award winners on my side,” Schwartz said distantly. “Not in the last few generations. No medals either. Losses only. My father died in Stalingrad when I was in the womb.” The forebears on his mother’s side, he claimed, had been more interesting. She had been a von Pöllnitz, a family with roots going back to the time when an Elector in the Hohenzollern family declared himself King in Prussia. A certain Oscar Pöllnitz, owner of a brewery at the time, was far-sighted. He gave the young royal house good discounts and in return his name acquired the prefix von. This started a dynasty which acquired and developed huge land and industrial holdings all over Prussia. “But it was nationalized by the Russians. All my mother had left at the end of the war was some property in West Berlin, a few paintings and my father’s books.” Schwartz’s voice had darkened, but he seemed then to dismiss the losing hand which history had dealt his family.

  The story caused Hanbury to think of Müller, hard at work, po
ring over files, untangling the German property mess. He asked if some of the family assets might come back. Schwartz replied there wasn’t a chance. “It’s because of the spirit of compromise.” Appeasers were in power now, he argued, and sympathy for the fate of the great families such as his mother’s had ebbed away long ago. “Today’s politics have no backbone. Deterioration is everywhere, from the handling of the great issues of state all the way to the breakdown you see in the streets.” He described Berlin’s graffiti plague, the unchecked vandalism and rampant mugging and the daily wave of break-ins, including in his own neighbourhood. “Chaos is everywhere. It’s time someone did something about it.” Had such concerns come up in the consul’s many meetings?

  “It has,” Hanbury confirmed, “one way or another.”

  “Tell me about it,” the professor urged. “Tell me with whom you talk about such things. Whom have you got to know?”

  Hanbury laughed, as if to say,whom don’t I know? He rattled off a list. Schwartz listened, both nodding yes and shaking no. He might have been reviewing a stack of doctoral applicants. “An interesting start,” he said.

  “The Chief of Protocol was helpful.”

  “Von Helmholtz? You’ve fallen in with him?”

  “Does he get a nod or a shake?” the consul playfully inquired.

  “He could have been a great man.”

  “But…?”

  “He’s too liberal for most peoples’ tastes.”

  Hanbury had occasion to think back to this first meeting with Schwartz and how they bantered about Berlin’s elites. Schwartz was a rich source of information. Anecdotes on public figures emerged by the bucketfull. Hanbury recalled, when they got up to leave, that Schwartz suggested they had barely scratched the surface of innumerable subjects. Why not get together again? Hanbury had agreed. Already then he reflected on the situation’s irony – that the irreparable situation with Sabine was being overtaken by an acquaintanceship with her husband. As for Schwartz’s strong opinions on public issues – his flashes of political contempt – the consul saw these as a spillover from too intense an academic life, a mild and not-uninteresting eccentricity. He did not realize – how could he have? – that in consenting to see more of the professor he was reordering his future and tampering with fate.