Making Enemies

by Francis Bennett

  The snow was falling again and had started to settle in drifts. It had been snowing on and off all day, and the bitter wind had returned. The city was silent.

  ‘God, I hate this place. Why can’t we go home and leave them to it? They got themselves into this mess in the first place.’

  Many of us in Berlin thought like that. We saw ourselves working for the people we had defeated. We saw the efforts that were being made to rebuild their country and obliterate the evidence of the recent past, and we wondered how much was being done to restore our own shattered homes. From what we heard and read in the newspapers, not enough.

  ‘Here we are, babysitting the people who yesterday we tried to kill. And what does our vanquished enemy do? He tries to make us believe that he was really on our side all the time. Always someone else’s doing. Him or her but never me. Pitiful.’

  ‘Can you blame them for turning against each other if that’s how they think they’ll survive?’ I asked.

  ‘I blame them for everything,’ Milner said bitterly. ‘In particular, I blame them for keeping us here, in this godforsaken hole.’

  I’d been in Berlin for eight months by then, working for the Allied Control Commission. Our task was to interview the locals living in the British zone of occupation to find suitable people to take part in the new civilian administration the Allies were setting up. We were expected to exclude former Nazis and communists from our selection. It was a thankless exercise, without certainties and with little reward.

  Each morning we were greeted by the same lengthy queues of hopeful Germans; each day we asked the same questions and we listened to the same stories, so often pathetic inventions to hide a truth we all knew. We inspected papers, some genuine, some forged, some stolen, the currency of hope on which to build a new life out of the ruins of the old. Each day we made our decisions, a tick or a cross, a simple mark on which so much depended. That is the true expression of victory, the exercise of absolute power.

  ‘Don’t you worry about the ones you let through?’ I asked. ‘Putting the guilty back into their old positions of power?’

  I found it increasingly difficult to know if my judgements were right. I was haunted by the thought that I might be reinstating the old guard of unreformed Nazis or a new guard of communist activists.

  ‘Nobody gets it right every time,’ Toby said. ‘We’re bound to make mistakes. It’s a question of degree. Are we more right than wrong? That’s how I look at it. You’ve got to come away at the end of each day thinking you’ve got money in the bank.’

  ‘I wish I could see it like that.’

  ‘You know where you go wrong? You treat them as people.’

  ‘They are people.’

  ‘Wrong. They’re problems. Nothing more.’

  ‘I can’t hate them enough for that.’

  ‘I don’t hate them and I don’t despise them. The truth is, I don’t care about them any more.’ There was more than a hint of exhaustion in his voice. ‘They sit there in front of me, I listen to their self-pity, their petty acts of betrayal, their self-righteousness and what do I hear? The litany of guilt. They were all in it, every man jack of them, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.’

  A dog howled from somewhere inside a ruined house on the other side of the street. The desolate sound seemed to sum up the mood of the city.

  ‘That’s when I want to put a cross against all their names. But I suppose there comes a moment when you have to stop settling scores and look to the future. Then they become names on a sheet of paper, decisions to be made, right or wrong, yes or no. That’s all. No emotion. No involvement.’

  I hated the hopeful faces that looked across my desk each day. But I was prepared to do it because I was ordered to do it. Like countless others, I had been under orders for years. Obedience was a way of life. I was still too frozen by the experience of war to feel even the slightest pull of rebellion.

  Toby Milner touched my arm in a gesture of parting. ‘We’re supposed to be building a new world,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, we’re using the bricks of the old.’

  With a wave he turned the corner and disappeared.

  *

  I never told anyone about Miriam, which means I am ashamed of this short episode in my life. The facts are these. During my months in that ruined city, I shared the bed of a woman called Miriam. I gave her food, sometimes clothes and cosmetics, she gave me herself, or at any rate, her body.

  That she was, or had been, technically the enemy was something that never entered my mind. She was simply a lonely woman trying, like so many others, to bring herself back to life. She saw no wrong in the exchange of her body for the material things she lacked, and at that time neither did I. The relationship was one of convenience, and I justify what I did by saying that we both knew it. My presence in her life encouraged her to hope for more. Hoping was a symptom of coming back to life. She knew I would go away, that nothing was permanent. She had only to look at the ruins of the city she had grown up in to know that.

  Memory is the enemy of all that cold rationality. When she cried herself to sleep I knew she was remembering how life had once been so different. She had been a schoolgirl when the war began, with ambitions to become a research chemist. She had lived with her parents and her sister in a suburb of Berlin. Home, parents, sister, all her dreams, had been obliterated in the smoke of war. Her thoughts would turn to the past, and she would cry.

  ‘One more day,’ she said as I let myself into her room. ‘One more day and then I shall be all alone.’

  ‘Not for long.’

  I was hanging my greatcoat behind the door, watching the melting flakes of snow slide slowly down the sleeves to form a pool on the floor.

  ‘Even one day is too long.’

  It was an unspoken convention that there were no endearments between us, no words that might lay claim to an emotional territory that was out of bounds. But the expression in her voice told me that tonight she wanted the rules to be broken.

  ‘I’m coming back.’ I hoped I didn’t sound as weary as I felt.

  ‘My father was in Cambridge years ago. He was a student there. He went to learn English and write a thesis.’

  ‘What did he read?’

  ‘He was a philosopher. He said Cambridge was the home of philosophy. He admired G. E. Moore. He admired the English.’ She looked at me over her cup. ‘We have more in common than you know. My father was a teacher too.’

  ‘I’ve brought you these.’

  I opened my briefcase. In it were some tins, meat and condensed milk, a packet of biscuits and some lipstick.

  ‘Cigarettes?’ she asked. They were cheap for us, but on the black market cigarettes had become a currency of their own. By selling what I gave her, Miriam could supplement what she earned working in the kitchens of our headquarters.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, putting a carton of two hundred on her table. She never told me that she sold them but we both knew she did.

  ‘Look at this.’ She had found the lipstick. She tried it at once. ‘It is wonderful. Wonderful.’

  She stood in front of the mirror, anointing her lips.

  ‘Do you like me?’

  She turned, smiling.

  ‘You look lovely.’

  ‘I look frightful, a mess. Look at me. Look at my hair.’ She laughed. ‘This awful skirt, woollen stockings, mittens, and now lipstick. Absurd.’

  But there was a note of excitement in her voice I had not heard before, and she was laughing. She came as close then as she ever did to touching my heart.

  ‘I have something for you.’ She gave me a small parcel, wrapped in used brown paper, tied with string. ‘Open it later. When you are in Cambridge.’

  ‘You won’t be there.’

  ‘You can think of me when you open it.’ She took the parcel from me and put it in my briefcase. ‘We will be together then, if only for a moment.’

  I should have been able to read the code. That night she gave me all the
clues I needed. If I had wanted to, I am sure I would have. But I did not have a mind for code-breaking in that city. Her messages remained undeciphered and unanswered.

  I spent the night there, even though I had told myself I wouldn’t. The snow was falling too heavily by then and I was tired. I have a memory, not of that night in particular, but of any night in that small, cold room, how we would cling to each other in the dark, and after a time I got used to sleeping without turning over. The need for warmth was as great as that for sleep, and there is no warmth like that of another human body held close.

  *

  I travelled with an American on my journey home. We nodded at each other as he entered the compartment, the salute of one uniform to another, but we said nothing. I huddled in my corner and looked out of the window as the train set off.

  In a world of bullets and bombs you expect destruction. As an inevitable consequence of my makeshift life as a soldier, I had become used to the sight of the torn skeletons of buildings. They looked as if they had been ravaged by a disease whose scars were a bitter reminder of what once had been the homes of people like myself. But I was not prepared for the impossibility of living among the ruins of what I and so many others like me had done to our enemies. I wanted to remove the image, like turning a page in a magazine to look at something else. But at that time in Berlin there was nowhere to turn to.

  I looked at the countryside with relief. If the signs of war were there, they were invisible from my compartment window. It was the towns I hated. Each time we passed through a station I tried to close my eyes and forget where I was. But the images of the shattered buildings and the endless piles of rubble were imprinted on my mind. I wanted nothing more than to leave Germany and never come back.

  Holland was different. You cannot spend your early life on the edge of the East Anglian fenland and remain indifferent to flat marshy country. I loved the fens then as I do now, and I feel the same attraction in Holland. Endless dark fields passed by that day, the earth hardened by the winter and lined with frozen irrigation canals shining silver in the cold light. Always the same flat line of horizon, wherever you looked, its limits marked by the silhouettes of trees or, occasionally, a windmill.

  If Germany was a country living with the unburied corpse of its past, Holland was springing back to life. What you could see of the faces between scarves and hats had purpose. There was none of the dazed, lost look with which I was so familiar. As we pulled into Utrecht, I saw skaters, bodies bent forward, hands held gracefully behind their backs as they leaned into the wind, their movements expressing a pleasure I had not seen for months. My spirits lifted.

  ‘Care for some coffee?’

  My American companion had taken a thermos flask from his haversack and was pouring the hot, black liquid into a cup. I took it gratefully, letting the steam warm my face.

  ‘Going far?’ he asked.

  The train, not unsurprisingly, was prone to unscheduled stops in the middle of nowhere. We were already some hours late.

  ‘London. If we ever get there.’

  ‘Me too. My wife’s English. I’ve got a little boy I’ve never seen.’

  The carriage door opened, letting in a blast of cold air. Two Dutch women sat down beside us. One of them dropped a package as she settled herself in her seat. The American retrieved it. The woman smiled and said something in Dutch. The American said, ‘You’re welcome.’ The train jerked its way slowly out of the station.

  ‘You married?’

  ‘No.’

  I smiled but said nothing more, and my companion settled back into the silence of his own thoughts. The Dutch women shared some food, talked quietly to one another, and I slept fitfully as the countryside moved agonizingly slowly past us.

  I awoke to someone shaking my arm.

  ‘Amsterdam,’ the American said. ‘We get out here.’

  I took my haversack down from the rack and followed him on to the platform. Dusk was falling and lights were coming on. But the growing darkness could not hide the sharp outlines of damage, even after seven years. Now we had the unenviable task of putting it all back together again. What demons might we be storing up to ruin another generation’s future?

  ‘Care for a drink? We’ve missed one connection. We’ve got to wait a couple of hours for the next one.’

  We found a bar not far from the station and a warm corner. I shed my coat for the first time that day.

  ‘You stationed in Berlin?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me too. God, I hate that city.’

  ‘Too many ghosts?’

  ‘Times past? No. All that’s buried. Done with.’ He thought for a moment. ‘It’s the Soviets. I hate the way they think they won the war on their own and that victory allows them to dictate the peace. Look at the way the bastards make trouble just for the hell of it. Whatever you give them, it’s never enough. They want more. Sometimes, when you sit across a table with them, you want to grab them by the lapels of their uniforms and knock their stupid heads against the wall. You know,’ he said, finishing his beer, ‘I thought war was bad enough but politics is worse.’

  ‘Their kind of politics.’

  ‘Right. Everything is about advantage. Win, win, win, every time, on every little thing.’

  Someone had turned on a radio and I could hear dance music, then a woman’s voice singing. The bar was filling up as the working day came to an end. The warmth and the people gave an air of festivity to the place.

  ‘How about you? What keeps you in Berlin?’

  ‘I vet the locals. See if they’ve repented.’

  ‘Have they?’

  ‘None of them was guilty in the first place, or so they tell me. They were all secretly on our side but they never had an opportunity to do anything about it.

  ‘Are they suitable citizens to run their own country? Right?’

  ‘We can’t defeat the Nazis one day and install them back in power the next.’

  ‘Why not? Anything’s better than the Reds.’

  It was an astonishing statement. For a moment I wanted to challenge him, then I thought better of it.

  ‘And let the guilty get away with it? The people we’ve been at war with for six years?’

  ‘So what? That war’s over and done with. We’ve got to build up their country as fast as we can. Who cares if they were Nazis once? They’re Germans now and they’re on our side. The world’s moved on. New times, new enemies.’

  ‘Reds?’

  ‘Right. Bastards. Real godforsaken, motherfucking communist bastards. They’re the enemy now. Berlin’s the front line and we’re the guys getting shot at.’

  I had met a few Russians in the course of my duties in Berlin and their behaviour had been impossible, unreasonable to a degree I’d never experienced before. My companion sensed agreement in my silence.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else. This is the way the world’s headed from now on. Us against the Reds, eyeball to eyeball, wherever you turn. Try telling that to a politician. Your people. Mine. Who gives a shit? The war to end wars is over, they say. War talk is talking dirty. We all love the Russians because Stalin was on our side when it counted, so he’s a great guy. Nobody wants to know what he’s doing to us now. That’s what scares me. I tell you, there’s a new war starting, right here, right now, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, especially when they get their own nuclear bomb.’

  He took my empty glass from me and stood up.

  ‘The Russians snatch people off the streets every day in Berlin, but who cares about Berlin? If it were London or Washington we’d be on the brink of World War Three. By the time our politicians come to their senses, it will be London or Washington. What will the fuckers do then? Call in the military to save their skins once more. Nothing new in that, is there? That’s what men in uniform have been doing since time began. Saving skins that don’t deserve to be saved. If the guys back home would listen to us, none of this need ever happen.’

&nbs
p; He laughed and broke the mood.

  ‘Let’s have another drink.’

  He returned from the bar with two other Americans and they spent the next two hours telling stories about their wars. It was the companionship of uniform, fine as long as it lasted but soon enough forgotten.

  Our journey began again shortly after midnight. I tried to sleep but the cold crept into my bones and I sat for most of the night staring out into the darkness, seeing nothing but the occasional light reflected on the snow. We could have been going anywhere. I hoped we were going to Calais.

  3

  RUTH

  Andropov is questioning her once more. How long is it since her first interview? She can no longer remember.

  Her mother has been released unharmed. She continues to live in her apartment, her son has not suffered at school, her neighbours are not whispering about her or avoiding her, the babushka in the front hall recognizes her when she leaves the building or returns home (though she never smiles), she continues her work at the Institute. On the surface it is as if the interrogation had never taken place. But she knows that her own freedom is now a technical matter.

  ‘If I were to ask you what is the most valuable piece of information the West has given us about their nuclear programme, what would you answer?’

  She shifts uncomfortably in her chair and says nothing. To her relief he is not waiting for her to reply.

  ‘Sixteen months ago, when they dropped their bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they told us that a nuclear device can be exploded. That moment shifted the balance of power decisively in their favour. The West has done what we have so far found impossible to do. That puts our own nuclear programme under very considerable pressure.’

  What is the phrase she has heard Yuri Miskin use? Problem Number One, for which a State Committee has been created. (Every problem in need of a solution has a State Committee.) The pressures of Problem Number One are obvious even to her, and generally she has little contact with the political staff. Work harder, work faster, achieve more, they tell the Institute from their protected position on the sidelines. Be patriotic, think only of the state. How little politicians and their apparatchiks understand about the scientific process.