by Ian Mcewan
They parked alongside an Army truck by the two-storey building. From somewhere around a corner came the sound of a diesel generator. Instead of leading Leonard to the entrance, Glass steered him by the elbow a few steps across the grass toward the fence and pointed through it. A hundred yards away, across a field, two soldiers were watching them through binoculars. “The Russian sector. The Vopos watch us day and night. They’re very interested in our radar station. They log everyone and everything that comes in and out of here. They’re getting their first sight of you now. If they see you coming regularly, you might even get a code name.” They walked back toward the car. “So, the first thing to remember is to behave at all times like a visitor to a radar station.”
Leonard was about to ask about the men with the ball, but Glass was leading him around the side of the building and calling over his shoulder, “I was going to take you to your equipment, but what the hell. You might as well see the action.” They turned a comer and passed between two roaring generator trucks. Glass held open a door for Leonard which gave onto a short corridor at the end of which was a door marked NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY. It was a warehouse after all, a vast concrete space dimly lit by dozens of bare light bulbs slung from steel girders. Bolted metal frame partitions separated the goods, wooden boxes and crates. One end of the warehouse was clear, and Leonard could see a forklift maneuvering across an oil-stained floor. He followed Glass toward it down an aisle of packaged goods stenciled FRAGILE.
“Some of your stuff is still here,” Glass said. “But most of it is already in your room.” Leonard did not ask questions. It was obvious that Glass was enjoying the slow unveiling of a secret. They stood by the clearing and watched the forklift. It had stopped by orderly piles of curved steel sections, about a foot wide and three feet long. There were scores of them, hundreds perhaps. Several were being lifted now.
“These are the steel liner plates. They’ve been sprayed with rubber solution to stop them banging around. We can follow these ones down.” They walked behind the forklift as it began to descend a concrete ramp into the basement. The driver, a muscular little man in Army fatigues, turned and nodded at Glass. “That’s Fritz. They all get called Fritz. One of Gehlen’s men. You know who I mean?” Leonard’s answer was choked by the smell that rose to meet them from below. Glass continued, “Fritz was a Nazi. Most of Gehlen’s people were, but this Fritz was a real horror.” Then he acknowledged Leonard’s reaction to the smell with a deprecating smile, very much the flattered host. “Yeah, there’s a story behind that. I’ll tell you later.”
The Nazi had driven his forklift over to one corner of the basement and turned the engine off. Leonard stood at the foot of the ramp with Glass. The smell came from the earth that covered two thirds of the basement floor and was piled to the ceiling. Leonard was thinking of his grandmother—not of her, exactly, but of the privy that stood at the bottom of her garden under a Victoria plum tree. It was gloomy in there, just as it was down here. The wooden seat was worn smooth at the rim, and was scrubbed near white. This was the smell that rose up through the hole—not altogether unpleasant, except in summer. It was earth, and a lurid dampness, and shit not quite neutralized by chemicals.
Glass said, “It’s nothing like it was.”
The forklift was parked near the rim of a well-lit hole that was twenty feet or so deep and as much in diameter. An iron-rung ladder was bolted to one of the pilings that had been driven into the floor of the shaft. At the base, cut into the wall of the shaft, was a round black hole: the entrance to a tunnel. Various lines and wires fed into it from above. A ventilation pipe was connected to a noisy pump set well back against the basement wall. There were field telephone wires, a thick cluster of electrical cable, and a hose streaked with cement, which fed into another, smaller machine which stood silent beside the first.
Grouped around the edge of the hole were four or five of the big men Leonard came to know as the tunneling sergeants. One of them was attending to a winch perched on the rim; another was talking into the field telephone. He raised his hand lazily in Glass’s direction, then turned away to go on talking. “You heard what he said. You’re right under their feet. Take it apart slowly, and for fuck’s sake don’t hit it.” He listened and interrupted. “If you—listen to me, listen to me, no, listen, listen, if you want to get mad, come up here and do it.” He put down the phone and spoke across the hole to Glass. “Fucking jack’s jammed again. Second time this morning.”
Glass did not introduce Leonard to any of the men, and they took no interest in his presence. He was invisible as he moved around the shaft to get a better view. It was always to be like this, and he soon learned the habit himself: you did not speak to people unless their work was relevant to yours. The procedure evolved partly out of a concern for security, and partly, he discovered later, out of a certain virile cult of competence that permitted you to brush by strangers and talk past their faces.
He had moved around the edge of the hole to witness an exchange. A small wagon on rails had emerged from the tunnel into the shaft. On it was a rectangular wooden box filled with earth. The man pushing the wagon, who was naked to the waist, had called up to the man by the winch, who refused to let down the steel cable and hook. He called down that since the hydraulic jack was jammed, there was no point in sending the liner plates to the tunnel face, in which case the forklift in the basement could not be unloaded and could not carry away the box of earth if it was raised. So it might as well stay where it was.
The man in the shaft screwed up his face against the lights shining down on him. He had not heard clearly. The winch man repeated the explanation. The tunneler shook his head and put his hands, which were large, on his hips. The box could be winched up, he called, and set aside until the forklift was ready.
The winch man had his answer ready. He wanted to use the time to look at the winch’s gearing mechanism. The man in the hole said what the fuck, that could be done when the box was up. No the fuck it couldn’t, said the man by the winch.
The man said he was coming up there, and that was fine by the winch operator, who said he was ready for him.
The man in the hole glared up at the winch. His eyes were almost closed. Then he came bouncing up the rung ladder. Leonard felt sick at the prospect of a fight. He looked at Glass. He had folded his arms and cocked his head. The man was at the top of the ladder, and now he was walking around the rim, behind the equipment, toward the winch. The man there was making a point of not looking up from what he was doing.
Somehow, lazily, unintentionally, the other sergeants drifted into the diminishing space between the two men. There was a soothing confusion of voices. The tunneler strung out a sequence of obscenities at the winch man, who was turning a screwdriver into the machine and did not reply. This was the ritual defusion. The indignant man was being persuaded by the others to use the jack failure to his own advantage and take a break. At last he strode toward the ramp, muttering to himself and kicking at a loose stone.
When he was gone, the man at the winch spat into the shaft.
Glass took Leonard’s elbow. “They’ve been on the job since last August, eight-hour shifts around the clock.”
They walked to the administration building by way of a connecting corridor. Glass stopped by a window and once more pointed out the observation post beyond the perimeter wire. “I want to show you how far we’ve got. See, behind the Vopos there’s a cemetery. Right behind that there are military vehicles. They’re parked on the main road, the Schönefelder Chaussee. We’re right under them, about to cross the road.”
The East German trucks were about three hundred yards away. Leonard could make out traffic on the road. Glass walked on, and for the first time Leonard felt irritation at his methods.
“Mr. Glass—”
“Bob, please.”
“Are you going to tell me what this is all for?”
“Sure. It’s what concerns you most. On the far side of that road, buried in a ditch, are Sovi
et landlines that link with their high command in Moscow. All communications between East European capitals get routed into Berlin and out again. It’s a legacy of the old imperial control. Your job is to dig upward and lay the taps. We’re doing the rest.” Glass was pressing on, through a set of swing doors into a reception area where there was fluorescent light, a Coca-Cola machine and the sound of typing.
Leonard caught hold of Glass’s sleeve. “Look, Bob. I don’t know anything about digging, and as for actually laying the … as for the rest of it …”
Glass whooped with glee. He had taken out a key. “Very funny. I meant the British, you idiot. This in here is your job.” He unlocked the door, reached in and turned on the light and allowed Leonard to enter first.
It was a large, windowless room. Two trestle tables had been pushed against one wall. On them was some basic circuit-testing equipment and a soldering iron. The rest of the space was taken up by identical cardboard boxes piled right to the ceiling, ten deep.
Glass gave the nearest a gentle kick. “One hundred and fifty Ampex tape recorders. Your first job is to unpack them and dispose of the boxes. There’s an incinerator out back. That’ll take you two or three days. Next, every machine has to have a plug, then it has to be tested. I’ll show you how to order spare parts. You know about signal activation? Good. They’ve all got to be adapted. That’ll take you a while. After that you might be helping with the circuits down to the amplifiers. Then the installation. We’re still digging, so take your time. We’d like to see these rolling by April.”
Leonard felt unaccountably happy. He picked up an ohm-meter. It was of German make, encased in brown bakelite. “I’ll need a finer instrument than this for low resistances. And ventilation. Condensation could be a problem in here.”
Glass raised his beard, as though in tribute, and gave Leonard a gentle thump on the back. “That’s the spirit. Be outrageously demanding. We’ll all respect you for it.”
Leonard looked up to gauge Glass’s expression for irony, but he had turned off the light and was holding the door open.
“Start tomorrow, 0900 hours. Now, the tour continues.”
Leonard was shown only the canteen, where hot food was brought in from a nearby barracks, Glass’s own office and finally the shower room and lavatories. The American’s pleasure in revealing these amenities was no less intense. He warned solemnly of the ease with which the toilets became blocked.
They remained standing across from the urinals while he told a story, which faded skillfully into small talk on the two occasions someone came in. Aerial reconnaissance had shown that the best-drained land, and therefore the best land for tunneling, lay through the cemetery on the eastern side. After long discussion, the proposed route was abandoned. Sooner or later the Russians were going to discover the tunnel. There was no point in handing them a propaganda victory in the story of Americans desecrating German graves. And the sergeants would not care for coffins disintegrating above their heads. So the tunnel struck out to the north of the graveyard. But then, in the first month of digging, they had run into water. The engineers said it was a perched water table. The sergants said come down and smell for yourselves. By trying to avoid the graveyard, the planners had routed the tunnel right through the drainage field of the establishment’s own septic tank. It was too late to change course.
“You wouldn’t believe what we were burrowing through, and it was all our very own. A putrefying corpse would have been light relief. And you should have heard the tempers then.”
They ate lunch in the canteen, a bright room with rows of Formica tables and indoor plants under the windows. Glass ordered steak and french fries for them both. These were the biggest slabs of meat Leonard had ever seen outside a butcher’s. His overhung the plate, and the following day his jaw still ached. He caused consternation when he asked for tea. A search was about to be mounted for the teabags the cook was certain were in the supplies. Leonard pleaded a change of mind. He had the same as Glass, freezing lemonade, which he drank out of the bottle like his host.
Afterward, as they were walking to the car, Leonard asked if he could take home circuit diagrams for the Ampex recording machines. He could see himself curled up on the Army issue sofa, reading in the lamplight while the afternoon gloom settled on the city. They were on their way out of the building.
Glass was genuinely irritated. He stopped to make his point. “Are you crazy? Nothing, nothing to do with this work ever goes home with you. Is that understood? Not diagrams, notes, not even a fucking screwdriver. You got that?”
Leonard blinked at the obscenity. He took work home in England, even sat with it on his lap, listening to the wireless with his parents. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Yes, of course. Sorry.”
As they stepped outside, Glass glanced around to make certain no one was close. “This operation is costing the government, the U.S. government, millions of dollars. You guys are making a useful contribution, especially with the vertical tunneling. You’ve also supplied the light bulbs. But you know something?”
They were standing on either side of the Beetle, looking at each other over its roof. Leonard felt obliged to make his face quizzical. He did not know something.
Glass had yet to unlock the driver’s door. “I’ll tell you. It’s all political. You think we couldn’t lay those taps ourselves? You think we don’t have amplifiers of our own? It’s for politics that we’re letting you in on this. We’re supposed to have a special relationship with you guys, that’s why.”
They got in the car. Leonard longed to be alone. The effort of being polite was stifling, and aggression was, for him, emotionally impossible.
He said, “It’s very kind of you, Bob. Thank you.” The irony fell dead.
“Don’t thank me,” Glass said as he turned the ignition. “Just don’t screw up on security. Watch what you say, watch who you’re with. Remember your compatriots, Burgess and Maclean.”
Leonard turned aside to look out of his window. He felt the heat of anger in his face and across his neck. They passed the sentry hut and shuddered out onto the open road. Glass moved on to other topics—good places to eat, the high rate of suicide, the latest kidnapping, the local obsession with the occult. Leonard was sulkily monosyllabic. They passed the refugee shacks, the new buildings, and soon they were back among the devastation and reconstruction. Glass insisted on driving him all the way to Platanenallee. He wanted to learn the route, and he needed to see the apartment for “professional and technical reasons.”
On the way they drove along a section of the Kurfürstendamm. Glass pointed out with some pride the brave elegance of new stores flanked by ruins, the crowds of shoppers, the famous Hotel am Zoo, the neon Cinzano and Bosch signs waiting to be turned on. By the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church with its shorn spire there was even a small traffic jam.
Glass did not, as Leonard half expected, search the apartment for concealed listening devices. Instead he went from room to room, taking up a central position in each one and looking around before moving on. It did not seem right that he should go into the bedroom, with the bed unmade and yesterday’s socks on the floor. But Leonard said nothing. He waited in the living room, and still thought he was about to hear a security assessment when Glass came in at last.
The American spread his hands. “It’s incredible. It’s beyond belief. You’ve seen where I live. How does a fucking technical assistant at the Post Office get a place like this?” Glass glared across his beard at Leonard as though he really expected an answer.
Leonard had no ready means to respond to an insult. He had not received one in adult life. He was nice to people, and they were generally nice back to him. His heart beat hard, confusing his thoughts. He said, “I expect it was a mistake.”
Without appearing to change the subject Glass said, “Look, I’ll come by round about seven-thirty. Show you some places.”
He was moving out of the room. Leonard, relieved that they were not to have a fistfight after all,
accompanied his guest to the front door with earnest, polite thanks for the morning’s tour and for the evening to come.
When Glass had gone he returned to the sitting room feeling sick with contradictory, unarticulated emotion. His breath tasted meaty, like a dog’s. His stomach was still gaseous and tight. He sat down and loosened his tie.
Three
Twenty minutes later he was sitting at the dining room table filling his fountain pen. He wiped the nib with a rag he kept for the purpose. He squared a sheet of paper in front of him. Now that he had a workplace he was content, despite the confusion around Glass. His impulse was to set things in order. He was preparing to write the first shopping list of his life. He contemplated his needs. It was difficult to think about food. He was not at all hungry. He had everything he needed. A job, a place where he was expected. He would have a pass, he was part of a team, a sharer in a secret. He was a member of the clandestine elite, Glass’s five or ten thousand, who gave the city its real purpose. He wrote Salz. He had seen his mother make her effortless lists on a sheet of Basildon Bond: 1 lb. mt, 2 lb. crts, 5 lb. pots. Such feeble encodings were not appropriate to a member of the intelligence community, one with level three clearance in Operation Gold. And he could not cook. He considered Glass’s domestic arrangements, crossed out Salz and wrote Kaffee und Zucker. He consulted his dictionary for powdered milk: Milchpulver. Now the list was easy. As it grew longer he seemed to be inventing and defining himself. He would have no food in the house, no mess, no mundanity. At twelve deutsche marks to the pound, he could afford to eat in a Kneipe in the evening and at the Altglienicke canteen during the day. He looked in the dictionary again and wrote Tee, Zigaretten, Streichhölzer, Schokolade. The last was to keep his blood sugar level up when he worked late at night. He read the list through as he stood. He felt himself to be precisely what his list suggested: unencumbered, manly, serious.
