‘What time’s the train?’
‘I bet that Australian doesn’t turn up. He was a bit drunk.’
‘Let’s pay the bill and get off. We need to change our twenty-five marks too. The daily requirement.’
Ogden folded his arms and shook his head at the reception when he discovered that the hotel bills in the Interhotel group could be paid only with hard currency. That meant running into his 1000-Deutschmark stock. He handed over the daily twenty-five marks to be returned for twenty-five Ostmarks with a very bad grace. It was added to his 520-odd Ostmarks in the wallet – even with all that beer, we had only managed to spend about ten marks between us the day before. Even the train tickets to Leipzig, which Ogden paid for from his illegal stash, made only a very small dent. The socialist policy of making public transport affordable for everyone was for once not welcome. We had to go shopping, I thought. Furs, I thought.
I was sceptical that the Australian professor would turn up, but he was waiting on the sooty platform by the third carriage of the train. He leapt up from the station bench with a big smile and his hand outstretched.
‘Got your tickets? Got your permits? Got a book to read?’ he said. ‘Here we go. Never taken one of these? It’s an adventure. A slow sort of adventure. Sometimes you think you’re not going to get there the same day, or it would be quicker to walk. But you get there. Hungarian rail’s better. See if we can find three seats together.’
We found three seats together.
‘Give you a hard time, did they?’ he said. ‘The permit people at the Reisebüro? They like doing that. It’s all baloney, though. They tell you that you need to get a permit before you move two miles in that direction but I never bother.’
‘Haven’t you got a permit to go to Leipzig?’ Ogden said, impressed.
‘The thing is that before they give you a permit you have to tell them where you’re staying,’ the Australian said. ‘I’m probably going to stay with the lady I usually stay with. She rents out her spare room to whoever – she’s the widow of a professor of physics so she likes a scholar – and she’s in that bit of town by the Opera House. It’s pretty nice and she only charges twenty marks a night.’
‘Doesn’t she know you’re coming?’
‘I’ll just turn up and if it’s taken I’ll find somewhere else.’
‘Why don’t you phone her?’ I asked.
The Australian looked me over, kindly but amused. I blushed to be so immediately forgiven for my naivety. ‘She hasn’t got a phone,’ he said. ‘There aren’t many who do. It’s not like it is in the West. Haven’t you noticed? Your room in the hotel doesn’t have a phone in it, does it? What you do here – you phone up, you book, you make arrangements, you fall in with the arrangements. Everyone has these intricate kind of interlocking arrangements. But here – I don’t think they hand out phones very readily. You can get one, but it takes years and plenty of people just don’t bother. So – you turn up and ring the doorbell and say, “Hi, Frau Bayer, is your spare room available tonight?” and she says yes or no, leider nicht, I’ll walk round the corner with you to see if my friend Frau Kapossy can help. Did you have fun last night?’
‘Spinning a story,’ Ogden said.
‘Yeah, I was kind of listening to your quiet friend here,’ the Australian said, nodding at me. ‘He’s good value when he gets going. That friend of crazily boring Uwe – the guy Matthias with the clients just off the Frankfurterallee – those clients are going to be thrilled with the stuff they’re getting from Matthias. Maybe too thrilled. If I were one of the friends I’d be asking Matthias how it is exactly that after months of reporting on the blameless home life of Uwe and how the beans are growing in Uwe’s allotment in Pankow that he’s got all this red-hot material about radical leftist terrorism in the West. It was a good story, though.’
‘Where do you come from in Australia?’ I asked. I didn’t want to get into the substance of what I had told the informer the night before. I had been drunk during most of it. I had the impression I had been quite exuberant. If the Australian thought I had been making it all up, I wouldn’t put him right.
‘I can honestly say that a vast fog of mid-Pacific oblivion has now arisen between me and Australia so that I hardly remember one thing about it.’
‘Seriously.’
‘I come from a town called Sydney. I learnt German at school. I was one of those weird kids who shut the curtains against the sunlight, never went to the beach, dressed in black, practised adjective endings and tried to read Karl Kraus. Dreamt of living in Vienna or Munich or Berlin. The other kids thought I was so weird I didn’t even get bullied – you know how a pack of dogs will steer well clear of a dog that’s acting seriously strange. I moved to Germany when I was twenty-one, as soon as I could get someone to pay for some research project. It’s harder to be one of those kids in England, I guess. But your German, it’s pretty good. You don’t get to speak good German by learning it unless you’re a bit weird.’
‘Have you ever been to a town called Broome?’
‘Bruhm? A town in Germany?’
‘Broome, Australia. Western Australia. My mother lives there.’ It was comforting even to say ‘Western Australia’. I still wrote WA on an envelope once a month, an envelope filled with warm and funny incident. Once a month I got a warm and funny letter back, bouncy with news and details of my mother’s life in the pearl-fishing capital of Western Australia. They were strangely impersonal in their warmth and comedy, my mother’s letters. Mine were too. Sometimes I made stuff up about Joaquin if he hadn’t said anything worth reporting or done anything interesting all month. Sometimes I made stuff up if what he had done was too interesting or, from my mother’s point of view, hair-raising. This is what is called the art of letter-writing. My relationship with my mother had improved a good deal since I’d stopped seeing her altogether. My feelings towards her, embodied in the words Broome, Western Australia, were delightful, affectionate, and ultimately indifferent.
‘Your mother comes from Broome? Seriously?’
‘No, she moved there. She got divorced from my father and she moved to Broome.’
‘That’s an interesting thing to do. I don’t mean Broome’s interesting. You move to Broome and there’s about twenty people living there and if you don’t much like them then you’d have to go about two thousand miles to meet anyone else.’
‘I suppose my mum gets along with anyone. She’s been there for ten years now so it must suit her. Interesting’s an interesting word.’
‘Nobody in Broome would think it was weird that someone wanted to move there. Moving to Germany would be weird to them. You can’t move to the Democratic Republic of Germany, though. Actually, the East Germans would think that was really weird. They think it’s weird even them living there. That’s why they’re so obsessed with which of them has the right to travel. The ones who go abroad and come back to Erfurt after a week in Munich at some conference. They call their whole family together and say they have an announcement to make. You know, they say, that we all thought it was weird living here. Well, I’ve gone somewhere else and I’ve eaten their food and I’ve seen their shops and I’ve talked to the people who live there and guess what. We were right. It really is weird living here. They all like that. I’ve got this friend in Berlin – in West Berlin. I’m not annoying you, I hope?’
‘No, no,’ I said. I didn’t know why he would think that.
‘Do you know Kreuzberg? In the West? It’s where the drop-outs ended up. And the Turks. All the anarchists and the draft-dodgers and the plotters and the radicals – they’re all in Kreuzberg. When Reagan came on a state visit to Berlin the police thought it would save a lot of trouble if they just put up a big barrier round the whole of Kreuzberg and stopped anyone getting out. A walled city within a walled city. It’s up against the Wall itself, and on the other side of the Wall there’s a place called Friedrichshain, and
Friedrichshain’s exactly the same. There are anarchists and troublemakers and kids who wear nothing but black in East Berlin and they all live in Friedrichshain, some of them fifty metres away from the kids in Kreuzberg. Anyway.
‘There’s this guy I know a bit in Kreuzberg called Christoph. He’s Bavarian but he came here to dodge the draft and he’s been here for years. He works in a museum two days a week. He’s a really fantastic tango dancer. They’re crazy about the tango here, those anarchists. I don’t know why. Christoph’s the best of the best. He teaches an extra-mural class at the Free University in tango. He drinks at Rose’s on the Oranienstrasse and Bierhimmel and Würgeengel, and there’s an abandoned boat on the Landwehrkanal that someone broke into a couple of years ago. Now it’s got fairy lights and electricity and a working bar. It plays seventies German hits at top volume and it’s called the Pick-As, the Ace of Spades, which is a kind of joke. That’s what a really awful bar would be called in suburban Paderborn or somewhere. And it’s usually got Christoph Egger in it. He likes his wheat beer, his Hefeweizen, just like your quiet friend here, and his four beers and his tango class once a week. If you want to find him you go into the Pick-As and you ask the barman if the professor of tango has been in.
‘That’s his life in total. He never goes anywhere. He’s sort of famous in Kreuzberg for never leaving Kreuzberg even. And one night in a bar around four a.m. someone says to him, “Christoph, you’d be better off in the Democratic Republic.” It’s a joke but they start talking about it. They have a point. Christoph would be looked after. He’d have somewhere to live and a job that would be worth doing. They might even find him a wife or something. Christoph wakes up the next day and this conversation makes perfect sense. He goes on considering it. No one can think of anything against it. So one day, after a few weeks, he goes into the East German embassy in West Berlin and tells them he would like to emigrate to the Democratic Republic of Germany. The man whose job it is to interview applicants – I don’t think he has a very busy life. They talk to him all day, they take his details, they send him away. Christoph is over the moon. He’s practically giving his landlord notice. Then the letter comes. They won’t have him.’
‘Just one question,’ Ogden said. ‘Most people who’d think of moving to the DDR would do it because they believed in the project, not for an easier life. Why didn’t he do it for that reason?’
‘That’s what they would have said, I believe,’ the Australian said. ‘Not that they give an explanation. They just turned him down.’
I looked out of the window of the train. It was passing a thick-wooded landscape. It was artificial, neat and regular in its arrangement, like a plantation. There was some mist about, clinging to the trees. There were forests like this by very similar train lines in this country, and the other country over there. There were different political systems governing each of them. Yet the trees grew. Politicians took charge. The trees grew in any case. What is the name of the politician in charge of the growth of trees in this region of the country? Germany. Sleep was overtaking me.
The door of the first-floor apartment was opened a crack. A face, round and brown and suspicious, was there just above the level of the door handle. I explained who we were. We were here with friendly greetings to pass on to the minister from Dr Philip Cawston, the Member of Parliament from England. She opened the door wider. Without any words she gestured us into the hallway. I entered with interest.
We had decided that we should visit Ogden’s contact as soon as we reached Leipzig. We had left our suitcases at the hotel, just by the station. We had come straight away to the address Ogden had, with a copy of Cawston’s book, suitably inscribed. After that, we would go to the central police station to register ourselves as visitors to Leipzig, as required by the authorities.
The flat was heavy with past glories. Facing the door was a ceiling-high glass case filled with miscellaneous objects – statuettes in polished silver of flag-bearers, an African object made out of a fat tuft of hair sprouting from a beaten bronze globe, a mock-Meissen plate bearing a scene of fraternal greeting, its rim obscenely bubbling with glistening fruit like cysts. Although this was the minister’s house, each beautifully dusted object carried a typed label in front of it. These were gifts to the minister, or ex-minister, in his official capacity on his travels around the world – Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Albania, Romania, Zimbabwe. The flat itself was faded in the way that flats become after thirty years of being lived in by the same people. Everything was dusted and clean and muted and worn, and dimmed by time. Someone had chosen this floral wallpaper with love, some time when Erich Honecker was inspiring his new nation. No new painting would be added to the twelve watercolours of insipid rural scenes that lined the corridor. Even the books gave the impression of a completed collection. They were sets of collected classic authors, the neatest bookshelf imaginable. We followed the small woman who had let us in. She had done this before today. Was she his secretary or a housekeeper? She wore a very respectable brown suit. Her hair around the neat, wrinkled face was tight and careful, that of a professional woman.
We were led into a large salon. The minister was sitting in a corner of the room with a pair of people, a woman and a small girl. He paid us no attention, going on with what was evidently a very amusing conversation. The secretary indicated that we should sit quietly in another corner and wait until the minister was ready for us. She promised us tea. She marched off. The flat had high nineteenth-century ceilings. A chandelier hung in the centre of the room. There were three double windows in a line, with shutters open. Heavy dark blue William Morris curtains were tied back. The room was large enough to have a number of groupings of furniture, all modern, or 1950s at least, all gathered around a standard lamp and a coffee-table or card-table. There were rugs on the amber-coloured parquet. The furniture was oatmeal. On the wall over the black grand piano there was a portrait of the minister, holding a scale model of a building, looking up with a disconcertingly inexpert sparkle in his eye. The minister had been in charge of major projects in Saxony-Anhalt, some put up mostly for prestige, for a quarter of a century. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought the architectural model he was holding in the painting might represent the Leipzig Opera House. The painter had been told, late on in the process, to incorporate a visionary gleam in the eye, a visionary socialist gleam as the minister envisaged the future. The people of Saxony-Anhalt flocking straight from work, paint-stained overalls next to insurance suit next to pinny, for a wonderful evening of Wagner. The visionary gleam had been supposed to convey all of that, but all the painter had known how to do was to dab a brilliant blob of white on the subject’s iris. It looked unusual, like a Hollywood leading man in the light of a magnesium glare.
We sat down quietly. The secretary returned, handing the minister a piece of paper. I compared the portrait with the original, sitting in the opposite corner of the room, charming two ladies who were charming him back. His hands disposed of the piece of paper into his pocket. He was busy with the Meissen teapot. Little cakes were beautifully arranged around a Meissen tower of plates. He was dark in the painting. His hair was white now, and he wore glasses. The painter had conveyed quite well his lean and purposeful aura, I saw, even if now that purpose was directed mainly towards a glamorous woman and a small girl. They were very dressed up. The woman was in a suit of nubbly pink tweed – you felt she lived her life beautifully dressed. The girl, around eight or nine, had been told to prepare for a special treat. Her dress was baby blue with lace ruffles at the neck, puffed sleeves, and ruched with scarlet ribbons. She even had a little handbag. She wore it all with panache and even pleasure. It seemed to me that special treats were a regular part of her life, cosseted and petted and charming the great. She was pink and delighted, not showing off but beautifully behaved. She had her own teacup. She took a cake only when invited to do so, eating it in tiny bites, setting it down on the Meissen plate in between. I could not be sure, but her convers
ation appeared to be asking questions of the minister – polite, neutral, ladylike questions, observations about his holiday and his grandchildren. She had been trained well, and trained all her life, not just trained for this afternoon’s encounter. She was, surely, with her grandmother, not her mother. The personal perfection and the air of relaxed irresponsible indulgence were too marked for motherhood. The grandmother and the minister were both delighted with the little girl. The minister, from time to time, leant forward to give the child a pat, even a pinch, on her thigh, on her upper arm, on her cheek. Nobody objected. Nobody acknowledged there was anyone else in the room. I grew self-conscious of what Ogden and I were wearing, could almost feel the dust of the train falling from our old jeans and unwashed sweaters. We waited without speaking, a sort of beginning of a smile on my face.
Some sort of mock-altercation was taking place at the other side of the room. The minister asked the little girl to ask her grandmother something. The grandmother declined, with a smile and a wave of her hand, as if shooing away a fly. But the minister asked again, with a smile, and this time she shook her head and agreed. The minister got up, followed by the woman. To my surprise they came towards our corner of the room. He nodded to us genially. The woman gave a sort of smile that might have been intended for the portrait on the wall to our side. He sat down at the piano. He began to play. The music was not very hard. She began to sing. I know when greatness reveals itself, and here was greatness, in a Chanel suit, and a granddaughter in a dress with ribbons.
Du holde Kunst …
The little Schubert song came to an end. The granddaughter burst into applause – solitary applause: I think Ogden and I both felt we were eavesdroppers there. With a shock I saw that the secretary in the brown suit had quietly entered the room when the minister had begun to play. She stood for a moment as the minister and the great singer, now retired from the concert stage altogether, congratulated each other; she gave a nod; she went back to her work. In five minutes the woman and the little girl had said their goodbyes, submitted to having their hands kissed, and were gone. They were free in their lives, I understood. They lived, both of them, in a world where borders and decisions from above made no difference, a world in which Schubert meant the same anywhere, whatever politicians wanted to do. Du holde Kunst …
A Small Revolution in Germany Page 16
