by Ian Mcewan
It was almost unbearable to watch this clumsy, reticent Englishman who knew so little about his feelings lay himself open. He was like a prisoner in a Russian show trial. Maria would have told him to stop, but she was fascinated, the way she had been once as a girl when her father had removed the back of a wireless set and shown her the bulbs and sliding metal plates responsible for human voices. She had not lost touch with her fear, even though it was diminishing with each halting intimacy. So she listened, betraying nothing by her expression while Leonard told her once more that he did not know what had come over him, that he had not meant her harm, and that it would never, ever, happen again.
Finally he ran out. The only sound was that of a scooter on Platanenallee. They listened to it changing down at the end of the road and pulling away. The silence made Leonard think he was doomed. He could not bring himself to look at her. He took off his glasses and polished them on his hankie. He had said too much. It had sounded dishonest. If she went now, he thought, he would take a bath. He wouldn’t drown himself. He glanced up. Around the elongated blur that represented Maria in his field of vision there was discernible movement. He returned the glasses to his face. She was unbuttoning her coat, and then she was crossing the room toward him.
Twelve
Leonard was walking along the corridor from the water fountain to the recording room, a route that took him past Glass’s office. The door was open and Glass was behind his desk. Immediately he was on his feet and waving Leonard in.
“Good news. We ran the checks on that girl. She’s cleared. She’s okay.” He was pointing at a chair, but Leonard remained leaning in the doorway.
“I told you that in the first place.”
“That was subjective. This is official. She’s a nice-looking girl. The CO and the second-in-command out at this toytown repair outfit have both got the hots for her in their own British way. But she plays it very straight.”
“You met her then.” Leonard already knew from Maria about the three interviews with Glass. He did not like it. He hated it. He had to hear about it.
“You bet. She told me that you two were having some trouble and that she was staying out of your way. I told her, ‘What the fuck, we’re spending valuable man-hours checking you out because you’re stepping out with one of our guys, the closest we’ve ever seen to a genius, godammit, who’s doing very important work for his country and mine.’ This was after I knew she was okay. I said, ‘You just propel your ass around to his apartment and make it up. Herr Marnham isn’t the kind of guy you mess around with. He’s the best we got, so you better count yourself a privileged lady, Frau Eckdorf!’ Did she come back?”
“The day before yesterday.”
Glass whooped and started to laugh in a theatrical way. “There, see? I did you a big favor, I built you up, you got her back. Now we’re even.”
All very childish, Leonard thought, this locker-room treatment of his private life. He said, “What happened at these interviews?”
The speed of Glass’s transition from hilarity to seriousness was in itself a kind of mockery. “She told me you started acting rough. She had to run for her life. Listen, I keep underestimating you, Leonard. That’s quite an act you keep hidden there. At work you’re Mr. Meek and Mild, then you go home and wham! It’s King Kong.”
Glass was laughing again, genuinely this time. Leonard was irritated.
Last night Maria had told him all about the security check, which had rather impressed her. Now Glass was back behind his desk, and still Leonard could not dispel his doubts. Could he really trust this man? It was undeniable: one way or another, Glass had climbed into bed with them.
When the laughter had stopped Leonard said, “It’s not something I’m proud of.” Then he added, with what seemed the correct degree of menace, “Actually, I’m pretty serious about this girl.”
Glass stood up and reached for his jacket. “I would be too. She’s a honey, a real honey.” Leonard stood aside while he locked his office. “What is it I heard one of your people saying once—a proper little darling?”
Glass put his hand on the Englishman’s shoulder and walked with him along the corridor. The Cockney imitation was half-hearted, deliberately appalling, Leonard thought. “C’mon, cheer up. Let’s go an’ ’ave a nice cuppa tea.”
Thirteen
Leonard and Maria began again on different terms. As the summer of 1955 got under way, they were dividing their time more equally between his apartment and hers. They synchronized their arrivals home from work. Maria cooked, Leonard washed the dishes. On the weekday evenings they walked to the Olympic Stadium and swam in the pool, or, in Kreuzberg, walked along the canal, or sat outside a bar near Mariannenplatz, drinking beer. Maria borrowed bicycles from a cycling club friend. On weekends they rode out to the villages of Frohnau and Heiligensee in the north, or west to Gatow to explore the city boundaries along paths through empty meadows. Out here the smell of water was in the air. They picnicked by Gross-Glienicke See under the flightpath of RAF planes, and swam out to the red-and-white buoys marking the division of the British and Russian sectors. They went on to Kladow by the enormous Wannsee and took the ferry across to Zehlendorf and cycled back through ruins and building sites, back into the heart of the city.
Friday and Saturday evenings they went to the pictures on the Ku’damm. Afterward they jostled with the crowds for a table outside Kempinski’s, or they went to their favorite, the smart bar at the Hotel am Zoo. Often they ended up late at night eating a second dinner at Aschinger’s, where Leonard liked to gorge himself on yellow pea soup. On Maria’s thirty-first birthday they went to the Maison de France for dinner and dancing. Leonard did the ordering in German. Later the same night they went on to Eldorado to see a transvestite cabaret in which completely convincing women sang the usual evergreens to a piano and bass accompaniment. When they got home, Maria, still tipsy, wanted Leonard to squeeze into one of her dresses. He was having none of that.
In their evenings at home, at his place or hers, they kept the radio timed to AFN for the latest American rhythm and blues. They loved Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” and Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train.” This kind of song made them feel free. Sometimes they heard Glass’s friend Russell giving five-minute lectures on the democratic institutions of the West, how the second chamber worked in different countries, the importance of an independent judiciary, religious and racial tolerance, and so on. They found nothing to disagree with in anything he said, but they always turned down the volume and waited for the next song.
There were light, rainy evenings when they stayed in and sat apart without talking for as long as an hour, Maria with one of her romantic novels, Leonard with a two-day-old copy of The Times. He could never read a paper, especially this one, without feeling he was imitating someone else, or in training for adulthood. He followed the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit and later on gave Maria an account of the proceedings and issues in the urgent tones of one who was personally responsible for the outcome. It gave him great satisfaction to know that if he lowered the page, his girl would be there. It was a luxury to ignore her. He felt settled, proud, truly grown up at last.
They never discussed Leonard’s work, but he sensed that she was impressed. The word marriage was never mentioned, and yet it was the case that Maria dragged her feet past store window furniture displays on the Ku’damm, and Leonard did put up a crude shelf in the Kreuzberg bathroom so that his shaving stuff could stand by her one jar of moisturizing cream and their toothbrushes could lean together, side by side in a mug. All this was cosy and companionable. With Maria’s prompting, Leonard was working at his German. His mistakes made her laugh. They teased each other, giggled a great deal and sometimes had tickling fights on the bed. They made love merrily enough, and rarely missed a day. Leonard kept his thoughts under control. They felt themselves to be in love. When they were out walking, they compared themselves favorably with other young couples they saw. A
t the same time, it gave them pleasure to think how they resembled them, how they were all part of one benign, comforting process.
Unlike most of the courting couples they saw on the banks of the Tegeler See on a Sunday afternoon, however, Leonard and Maria were already living together, and had already suffered a loss that was not mentioned because it was not at all defined. They could never regain the spirit of February and early March, when it had seemed possible to make their own rules and thrive independently of those quiet, forceful conventions that keep men and women in their tracks. They had lived hand to mouth in lordly squalor, out at the extremes of physical delight, happy as pigs, beyond all consideration of domestic detail or personal cleanliness. It was Leonard’s naughtiness—this was the word Maria had used one evening in a glancing reference, thereby bestowing the final forgiveness—his Unartigkeit, that had ended all that and forced them back. It was blissful ordinariness they settled for now. They had cut themselves off from the world and ended by making themselves miserable. Now it was the orderliness of going to and from work, of keeping their places tidy and buying an extra chair in a Trödelladen for Maria’s living room, of linking arms in the street and joining the queues to see Gone With the Wind for the third time.
Two events marked the summer and autumn of 1955. One morning in mid-July Leonard walked along the tunnel to the tap chamber, where he was to make a routine check of the equipment. Along the last fifty feet or so, before the antipersonnel door that sealed off the chamber, he found his way blocked. A new man, an American for sure, was supervising the removal of the plugs in the steel liner plates. He had two men working for him, and the amplifiers made it impossible to squeeze around. Leonard cleared his throat loudly and waited patiently. A plug was removed, and the three men made way for him. It was Leonard’s “Good morning” that prompted the new man to say in a friendly way, “You guys really screwed up.” Leonard went on through to the pressurized tap chamber and spent an hour going over the equipment and its connections. He replaced, as he had been asked, the microphone installed in the ceiling of the vertical shaft, the one that would alert the warehouse to a break-in by the Vopos. On his way back past the amplifiers he found the men drilling with hand-turned bits into the concrete that had been pumped through the liner holes during construction. Another half-dozen plugs had been removed further up the tunnel. No one spoke as he went by this time.
Back in the warehouse he found Glass in the canteen. Leonard waited until the man sitting with him had wandered off before asking what was going on in the tunnel.
“It’s your Mr. MacNamee. His calculations were all wrong. Way back he gave us a pile of crappy math to show that the air-conditioning would take care of the heat coming off the amps. Now it looks like he was way off. We brought in a specialist from Washington. He’s measuring the soil temperature at different depths.”
“What’s the harm,” Leonard said, “if the earth warms up a bit?”
The question irritated Glass. “Christ! Those amps are right under the road, right under Schönefelder Chaussee. The first frost of fall is going to melt in a handy little block. This way, you guys, there’s something going on under here we want you to see!” There was a silence, then “I really don’t understand why we let you people in on this. You’re not serious the way we are.”
“That’s nonsense,” Leonard said.
Glass did not hear him. “This joker MacNamee. He should be at home with his train set. You know where he did his calculations for the heat output? On the back of an envelope. An envelope! We would have had three independent teams. If they hadn’t come up with the same result, we would have wanted to know why. How can the guy think straight with teeth like that?”
“He’s an eminent man,” Leonard said. “He worked on radio-beam navigation and radar.”
“He makes mistakes. That’s all that matters. We should have done this thing alone. Collaboration leads to errors, security problems, you name it. We got our own amps. What are we doing with yours? We let you in on this for politics, for some half-assed tradeoff we’ll never know anything about.”
Leonard felt hot. He pushed his hamburger away. “We’re in on this because we have a right. No one fought Hitler for as long as we did. We saw the whole war through. We were Europe’s last and best chance. We gave it everything, so we have the right to be in on everything, and that includes the security of Europe. If you don’t understand that, you belong on the other side.”
Glass had raised his hand. He was laughing through his apology. “Hey, nothing personal.”
Indeed, there was something personal. Leonard was still preoccupied with Glass’s time with Maria, and Glass’s boast that he had sent Maria back. Maria herself insisted there had been no such exhortation. According to her, she had mentioned the separation in the most general terms and Glass had simply noted it down. Leonard was still unsure, and the uncertainty made him angry.
Glass was saying, “Leonard, don’t get me wrong. When I say ‘you,’ I’m talking about your government. I’m glad you’re here. And it’s true, what you say. You guys were great in the war, you were formidable. It was your moment. And this is my point.” He placed a hand on Leonard’s arm. “That was your moment, now this is ours. Who else is going to face down the Russians?”
Leonard looked away.
The second event took place during the Oktoberfest. They went down to the Tiergarten on Sunday and for the following two evenings. They saw a Texan rodeo, visited all the sideshows and drank beer and watched a whole pig roasting on a spit. There was a choir of children with blue neckerchiefs singing traditional songs. Maria winced and said they put her in mind of the Hitler Youth. But the songs were wistful, quite beautiful, Leonard thought, and the children were so confident with the difficult harmonies. The next evening they agreed to stay at home. The crowds were tiring after a day’s work, and they had already spent next week’s going-out money.
As it happened, Leonard had to stay on at the warehouse that evening for an extra hour. A row of eight machines in the recording room had suddenly failed. It was clearly a fault in the power circuits, and it took him and one of the senior American staff half an hour to trace, and as long to put right. He arrived at Adalbertstrasse at seven-thirty. Even as he began to climb the last set of stairs but one, he sensed something different. It was quieter. It was the muted, cautious atmosphere one might expect after an eruption. There was a woman mopping the stairs and an unpleasant smell. On the landing below Maria’s a small boy saw him coming up and ran indoors shouting, “Er kommt, er kommt!”
Leonard took the last flight at a run. Maria’s door was ajar. A small rug just inside the door was askew. In the living room there was broken china across the floor. Maria was in the bedroom, sitting on the mattress in the dark. She was facing away from him, holding her head in her hands. When he put on the light, she made a sound of protest and shook her head. He turned it off and sat by her and put his hand on her shoulder. He said her name and tried to turn her toward him. She resisted him. He eased himself along the mattress to face her. She put her hands across her face and turned away again. “Maria?” he said again and pulled at her wrist. There was snot on her hand, and blood. It was just visible by the light from the living room. She let him take her hands. She had been crying, but she wasn’t now. Her left eye was swollen and closed. The left side of her face had a pulpy texture and was ballooning out. There was a tear, a quarter-inch gash, in the corner of her mouth. The sleeve of her blouse was ripped to the shoulder.
He had known he would have to face it one day. She had told him about the visits. Otto came once, perhaps twice in a year. So far it had been shouted threats, demands for money and, last time, a swipe to the head. Nothing had prepared Leonard for this. Otto had hit her in the face with a closed fist and with all his strength, once, twice, and then again. As he went to fetch cotton wool and a bowl of water, Leonard was thinking through the nausea of shock that he knew nothing about people, what they could do, how they could do it.
He knelt in front of her and washed first the wound on her lip. She closed her good eye and whispered, “Bitte, schau mich nicht an.” Please don’t look at me. She wanted him to say something to her.
“Beruhige dich. Ich bin ja bei dir.” I’m here with you. Then, remembering his own behavior months before, he could not speak at all. He pressed the cotton wool to her cheek.
Fourteen
Leonard returned home for Christmas, having failed to persuade Maria to accompany him. She thought that a divorced older woman, a German, to whom Leonard was not even engaged would not be welcomed by Leonard’s mother. He thought she was being too scrupulous. He could not honestly say that his parents lived by such precise and limiting codes. Once he had been home twenty-four hours, he realized she had been right. It was difficult. His bedroom with its single bed and the framed certificate proclaiming him winner of the sixth-form maths prize was a child’s room. He was changed, he was transformed, but it was impossible to convey this to his parents. Twisted crepe paper crisscrossed the living room, the holly was in place, framing the mantelpiece mirror. They heard out his enthusiastic account on his first evening home. He told them about Maria and her work and what she was like, about her apartment and his, about the Resi, the Hotel am Zoo, the lakes, and the edginess and excitement of the half-ruined city.
There was a roast chicken in his honor, and more roast potatoes than he could eat these days. There were perfunctory questions, his mother asking how he did for laundry and his father referring to “this girl you’re seeing.” Maria’s name evinced a barely conscious hostility, as though, assuming they would never have to meet her, they could brush her aside. He avoided reference to her age or marital status. Otherwise, their remarks had the effect of grinding away at the difference between here and there. Nothing he said aroused curiosity or wonder or disgust, and soon Berlin was loosened from its strangeness and was nothing more than an outlying stretch of Tottenham, confined and known, interesting in itself, but not for long. His parents did not know he was in love.
