The Berlin Assignment

by Adrian de Hoog

  The church filled to standing room only. Between Christmas carols belted into the holy night, the preacher spoke about freedom, their gratitude for the gift of German reunification, the need for patience to make it work, and the necessity for vigilance against too much power ever again being held by the state. Afterwards, in a boisterous Prenzlauerberg pub populated by other refugees from Christmas Eve, Zella asked about the preacher’s sermon. The stillness as he spoke had impressed her. “Even Christmas around here is political,” she concluded when Hanbury finished explaining.

  Later, in the bungalow, Zella motioned to keep the front room dark while she studied the street and the parked cars. “Phantom viewing?” Hanbury asked with a hand on the light switch. Zella concentrated like an animal sensing danger. With a shrug she turned and flicked a finger, a sign for Hanbury to flip the switch. “All the world’s a stage and I’m in charge of lighting,” he said. A disc went into the stereo. “Theme music for the play you’re producing,” he joked. “What is our play, Zella? A spy thriller? A light comedy?”

  Hanbury’s lack of alarm threw a switch in Zella too. She approached, intertwining her fingers with his. “How about something adult?” she said. But on the sofa she talked about the church service again. It had moved her. She wondered how the people there had survived Communism. She had met several Russian ambassadors in her day who always had an air of distance. She said she often thought of Russia, especially its lack of stability. It worried her.

  “I was pretty close to what was going on in Russia in the Priory,” Hanbury replied. “Some of the information in classified reports I read was frightening.” The disc had run its course. He stood up to replace it with something lighter. “Take all that uranium and plutonium that’s sitting around,” he said. “Weapons-grade nuclear material like that has value.” Zella, shaking her head at absurd, yet real and frightening possibilities, agreed. “I know it’s possible to buy it,” she said. “There’s dealers around. There’s a market for it.” Music once more came out of the speakers. “We’ll leave that problem to the CIA,” Hanbury declared. “Do we really want to talk about that? I have a Christmas present for you.” He produced a small hand-painted porcelain bowl from Meissen. Zella was deeply touched.

  The next day, before she did anything, before even putting on a robe, Zella got up, went to the front room and studied the cars on the street. Afterwards she crawled back into bed. “What was that about?” he asked, reaching for her. “A weather check.” “It must be freezing out there. It’s cooled you right off. Come here.”

  After breakfast, they went walking in the Grunewald. “I took a look at the parked cars this morning,” Zella said. “About thirty metres down the street one of them had someone inside studying your house. The same car was there last night, but I couldn’t see if it was occupied. When we left just now, the car was gone, but another one, same model, was parked in the other direction, also someone in it.”

  “Someone waiting for his girlfriend,” Hanbury said.

  “Would you mind stopping to retie your shoe?”

  “Sure, Zella. Want me to switch socks while I’m at it?” He bent down. Zella took a few more steps, then turned to watch him. “Well,” he asked. “More phantoms?”

  “Somebody back there just stopped.”

  They continued their walk, taking side trails deep into the forest. Eventually, if there had been a phantom, he was gone. As they came out the forest Zella, masking premonitions about distant apparitions, asked breezily, “What’s on tonight?”

  “How about a transvestite show?”

  “Perfect!” she cried, clapping her hands.

  “I know one in a nice neighbourhood.”

  Later in the day on the way there, they repeated the routine of jumping from a train as doors were closing. “Just in case,” she said grimly.

  That evening the transvestites – one of them, Hanbury supposed, was Sturm’s Juliette – were in top form. Lithe, slender-limbed men. They had the neighbourhood audience in stitches. Hanbury was a failure at translating their repartee, but Zella, drinking glass after glass, rose above the limitations of language and developed transexual empathy. The Juliettes made her fight tears. “If I could live in a neighbourhood like this I’d stop travelling,” she said during a break. “I’d settle down and get to know my neighbours. They’re wonderful.”

  In the early hours they crawled first into a taxi and then directly into bed.

  “No checking of parked cars?” Hanbury asked in the darkness.

  “It’s over tomorrow,” Zella murmured. “I’m going to miss this.”

  “The phantoms too?”

  “I guess we’ll find out if it’s you or me they’re after.”

  “I’m sure it’s me,” he said pensively. “No one would tangle with you.”

  “No more talking,” Zella whispered. “Let’s get close. I want to feel you.”

  The next morning, Zella instructed the taxi driver to head for Bahnhof Zoo. “But you’re flying.”

  “The railway station,” she said firmly. They entered Bahnhof Zoo quickly. At the last moment, Zella turned from the stairs going up to the railway lines and dragged him down into the underground. They took the first train that came along, went one stop and got off. “I think you’re taking this a little far,” he complained.

  “No. We were being followed again. I don’t want them to know I’m flying. A computer could figure out in seconds which passengers today arrived three days ago. My name would jump out in neon lights. I don’t know if it’s you or me, but something’s going on. We’re supposed to report stuff like this.”

  “It’s the Russians wanting to recruit you because of your experience in the Crypt.”

  “Don’t make jokes like that, not about the Crypt.”

  “No? They must die laughing reading reports on people like us.”

  In the next taxi, this time to the airport, Zella became more relaxed after a few checks through the back window turned up nothing. At the terminal she kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I had a lovely time.”

  Hanbury kissed her back. “Christmas would have been dreary without you. You made the days come alive. I got used to you being there day and night. I’ll remember it.”

  “My turn next to show you an exciting place,” she said warmly.

  “Yellowknife?”

  “You’re on.”

  “I guess that’s it then.”

  “I hoped it would be like it was. You’ve got your career, Tony. I have mine. We intersected for three days. You made me feel good about myself. Thank you.”

  Hanbury kissed her other cheek.

  “One last thing. Stop trusting. Look over your shoulder. Think about what’s coming at you from behind.”

  At the gate she blew him a final kiss and disappeared. Hanbury felt empty. Performing a slow turn, he scanned the area, but no one in a grey coat and fiddling with a map was anywhere in sight.

  THE WELL - TEMPERED DIPLOMAT

  All through January Berlin slumbered in a cold fog which, as days turned into weeks, began to squeeze the city like a fist. People lost their bounce. Laughter became rare. If someone tried, it came out sounding hollow and forlorn, as if the Cold War at its most virulent was back.

  The weather began its change on New Year’s Eve. As the freezing Christmas wind played itself out, the air became motionless and dampness seeped in. Guests at von Helmholtz’s party, staged in an old pump house transformed into a restaurant near the canal, clinked glasses –Prost Neujahr! – and went outside to hear fireworks cannonading in the streets. That’s when they first noticed the stealthy wet-cold reaching in, not stopping until it chilled their bones. Worried about the feast losing its exultant mood if they stayed out too long, they hurried back into the pump house. Hanbury reclaimed his dinner jacket from the shoulders of a spirited elderly lady of Czech descent who had been telling him all evening about the joy of owning a casino in Baden Baden.

  The little daylight that penetrated the fog th
at January had an exhausted quality. It was how people felt. Unable to see further than half a block, everyone started living at the centre of a fatigued, collapsed existence. Some were frightened by the shrinking, as if the fog was a perverse preview of old age, a foretaste of their own senescence. The city’s institutions lost definition too. Golden Ilse with her fiery wings of triumph on the Victory Column was swallowed up; the Tiergarten became haunted enough to house every ghost spawned since creation; and Frederick the Great, on his horse on Unter den Linden, while his outline did not entirely disappear, had never been more muted. As the fog hung without moving, the air lost potency. The city, that normally lusty organism, seemed at the mercy of a sapping disease. Like a patient it lay still and brooded.

  Such was the weather when the consul and the journalist went to the ball. It was unchanged a few days later when they drove to Prenzlauerberg to search out a drinking hall called Friedensdorf. According to Gundula’s information it was in this pub that they stood a chance of catching up with Günther Rauch.

  Because the January sombreness is predictable, Berliners arrange for gaiety by having balls. Every strata of society has one: the police, the fire fighters, freemasons, taxi drivers, sport clubs, socialists, capitalists, everybody. But the Press Ball towers over all. For half a dozen hours in the middle of the winter it is the centre of the universe. That winter, for Hanbury, the Press Ball became a seminal event. Long afterwards, when his Berlin assignment was history and when he worked at unravelling the complex tangle of causes and effects that led to his demise, he concluded important seeds were planted there. He just didn’t recognize them at the time.

  The evening began routinely. In a timely fashion he set out for Gundula’s flat. He had studied the route to Marzahn and took the S-Bahn line that cuts through the heart of the city from west to east. Curiously, whenever he now took a train, Zella’s mind corrupted his. She had been much in his thoughts after she left and he was keeping an eye on things. But he was never really sure whether figures were reproducing themselves in the middle distance. And so, on the evening of the ball, partially to be prudent and partially to have fun, he acted as Zella would have. Because of its honeycombed structure, he used Friedrichstrasse station for a complex act. Trains arrive and depart there on several levels, and stairs and passages go in every direction. The happy flip side of Friedrichstrasse station’s confused layout, Hanbury reasoned in accordance with Zella’s teachings, was that tails can be shaken there without much effort.

  Hanbury got off the train, left the upper S-bahn level by going down three flights of stairs to the lowest level, walked the full length of another subterranean S-bahn train platform, and took a second set of stairs back up to ground level before exiting the station into Friedrichstrasse. Having crossed the street he next descended into the U-bahn system and paced-off the full length of yet another platform. Up to street level again where he doubled back to the main station, re-entering it by a different door and climbing more stairs back to the S-bahn tracks where he had started ten minutes before. The next train heading east soon came clanging in. If someone had been following, the consul thought sardonically, he’d be vertiginous by now after all those twists and turns.

  Hanbury’s caution would still be holding a few days later when Gundula drove him to Prenzlauerberg and he looked back several times through Trabi’s small rear window. But in a fog one pair of weakly glimmering headlamps is like all the others. “Lost something?” Gundula would ask. “Just wondering if anyone is behind us. A habit I have.” “Tell me about it,” Gundula would say. She could tell stories stretching back years about Stasi Peeping-Toms. During the drive Gundula would be strangely distant – the opposite of what she had been at the ball.

  After the Friedrichstrasse antics, Hanbury sat in the train in a state of happy anticipation. A dozen stops along, in the city’s far east, he got off and found a taxi. Minutes later, after zipping up the Allee der Kosmonauten, the driver wheeled into a vast expanse of sterile blocks of flats, an ant-heap, a slice of heaven to a doctrinaire socialist. The driver manoeuvred through narrow lanes between the featureless urban towers. No wrong turns, no hitting of dead ends. He had a nose for the one-way alleys. He pointed at a graffiti-decorated entrance. The consul told him to wait. He pressed a buzzer. Gundula was down in seconds. She informed the cab driver where to find room to turn around, but he knew. He lived in the ant heap too. The two of them were bantering immediately, exchanging one litany after another about the shortcomings of the local administration. In his Berlin dialect the taxi driver claimed that only rich Wessis went to the Press Ball. “You’ll be lonely,” he cautioned Gundula. “You’ll be the only one there from Marzahn.”

  “I’m only going for a look,” Gundula reassured him, as if Wessi viewing was a lower category of betrayal than dancing with them. Hanbury was stealing glances at Gundula, his eyes lingering on the long dark coat buttoned to the neck. Her dark hair was brushed back exposing small, unostentatious earrings. As she and the driver conversed in a tribal language, Gundula’s face lit up. Put her on the Victory Column, Hanbury thought. Have Gundula replace the golden winged angel. With her power to radiate, from up there, she would disperse the fog in no time.

  Gundula, Hanbury had observed, was not given to much personal decoration. She scarcely wore jewellery and for the ball had few signs of make-up. She probably knew that tiny earrings on her had more impact than strings of diamonds dangling from the earlobes of other women. Only later, when they were checking their coats, did the full impact of Gundula’s preparations for the evening unfold. As the overcoat came off, a dark-red minidress came into view. “You look lovely,” Hanbury observed with conviction.

  “I didn’t know what to wear,” was the cheerful reply, “but, I knew it had to be red.”

  “It suits you. First things first. Let’s find champagne.”

  Hanbury led Gundula upstairs to the bars where drinks were being poured as if the world was ending. Arm in arm, stopping every few minutes to sip, they explored. On the outside, the Berlin Congress Centre is an emulation of a fat, futuristic spaceship. Inside, the intergalactic vessel, a complex of halls and lounges, had plenty of passengers on board. The journey promised to be fascinating. The men, naturally, were all one anothers’ clones. But the women! Each one aspired to be a work of cosmic art. Parisian see-through blouses, Latin American dresses cut provocatively up the sides, ballooning oriental trousers, low-cut frilly Viennese waltzing gowns with busts promising to burst out of confinement. The concubines to the super rich were recognizable by their cleavages – all of them lovingly prepared for public viewing in West End tanning studios. In one hallway Hanbury and Gundula saw well-known TV personalities behaving with an energy that seemed to say they would all soon be each other’s next lover. In other side rooms, women snappily done up in men’s suits leaned on yet more bars and, judging from the wobbly ankles in high heels, a few slinky men had come dressed the other way around. But by the time the thousands were congregated in the enormous inner hold, when the great ship was casting off, Hanbury knew that few in the sealed structure held a candle to Gundula. It wasn’t a conclusion arising from bias; he saw it on numerous faces. Everybody stared at Gundula, up and down, and up again.

  “Why red?” he asked when they were seated in the ballroom.

  “To set off your penguin outfit. Make you look important. Enhance your social standing.” Gundula smiled the smile of reason.

  “It’s not like that,” Hanbury protested. “People are probably wondering how someone nondescript like me is out with someone glamorous like you.”

  “That’s not what they’re thinking,” Gundula teased. “They’re thinking, why does a prominent diplomat bother with an Ossi, and a gaudy one at that.” The distance between sarcasm and truth can be vanishingly small and only Gundula’s little smirk, the upturned corners of her mouth, betrayed her real meaning.

  “You’re the famous columnist read by thousands.”

  “And hated by a good
two-thirds of them. By chance, they’re all Wessis.”

  Hanbury said he refused to believe it. “I think you’re a star. Anyway, Ossi, Wessi – it’s got nothing to do with me. Let’s drink to the opening of the Wall. Without it neither of us would be here.”

  Their eyes met and from somewhere deep in space an interstellar burst of energy zapped the consul, hitting him in the spot that triggers uniquely Earthian sensations, in this case a stirring in his groin.

  The magic hour came. The band began a Viennese waltz. Anxiety appeared on the consul’s face. “I did tell you I don’t know how to dance.”

  “Yes, but I don’t believe it. You have natural grace. You’ll pick it up.”

  “I never even properly learned the square dance,” he warned. He explained the dancing he had done with little Bonnie and how he once saw a neighbour – Keystone – get his wife into motion at a community centre in Indian Head. Keystone hopped twice on one foot, before shifting to two hops on the other and back again, bringing his steel-capped boots down hard onto the linoleum floor. As he hopped, he turned his wife’s arm like the crank on an ancient tractor. Tony, in a corner of the centre, had mimicked this and thus learned the Keystone Hop. But the distance between it and higher forms of dancing, Hanbury was sure, was too great to be bridged.

  “I’m sure it’s much the same,” Gundula reasoned. “Cowboys jumping, Viennese aristocrats gliding – the difference is only of degree. What they have in common is feet moving to music. Do you have a feel for music?”

  “I sometimes listen to it,” he answered evasively.

  “Get the rhythm inside your head and let it sink to your feet.”

  Gundula got up and led him to a corner of the dance floor. Outside the paths of the free-wheeling enthusiasts she coaxed him. He began by moving stiffly on the spot. Pinocchio, she teased. But it changed. After looking down a while with an awkward angle of the head, eyes fixed on Gundula’s dainty feet, the wooden puppet sprang to life. Without warning his feel for music did sink to his feet, which began to tap out the equivalent of a keyboard rhythm. And once he owned the rhythm with his feet, it spread back up so his whole body moved with harmony. Gundula led him into ever faster turns. Eyes closed but keeping up, the consul felt cold sweat being replaced by hot perspiration. Having travelled light years beyond Keystone’s wife-cranking hop, he was suddenly out amidst the distant constellations, travelling at their speed. “I didn’t know dancing could be like that,” he said when the band stopped.