The Innocent

by Ian Mcewan

  And Tottenham, and all of London, was sunk in Sunday torpor. People were drowning in ordinariness. In his street the parallel walls of Victorian terraces were the end of all change. Nothing that mattered could ever happen here. There was no tension, no purpose. What interested the neighbors was the prospect of renting or owning a television. The H-shaped aerials were sprouting on the rooftops. On Friday evenings his parents popped into the house two doors down to watch, and they were saving hard, having sensibly set their hearts against hire-purchase. They had already seen the set they wanted, and his mother had shown him the corner of the living room where it would one day stand. The great struggle to keep Europe free was as remote as the canals of Mars. Down at his father’s pub, none of the regulars had even heard of the Warsaw Pact, the ratification of which had caused such a stir in Berlin. Leonard paid for a round and, prompted by one of his father’s friends, gave a slightly boastful account of the bomb damage, the fabulous money made by smugglers, the kidnappings—men dragged shouting and kicking into saloon cars and driven off into the Russian sector, never to be seen again. These were all things, the company agreed, that everyone should do without, and the conversation reverted to football.

  Leonard missed Maria, and he missed the tunnel almost as much. Daily for almost nine months he had been padding along its length, securing his lines against moisture penetration. He had come to love its earth-water-and-steel smell, and the deep, smothering silence, unlike any silence on the surface. Now he was away from it, he was aware of just how daring, how extravagantly playful, it was to steal secrets from under the feet of East German soldiers. He missed the perfection of the construction, the serious, up-to-the-minute equipment, the habits of secrecy and all the little rituals that went with it. He was nostalgic for the quiet brotherliness of the canteen, the unity of purpose and the competence of all the people there, the generous portions of food, which seemed at one with the whole enterprise.

  He fiddled with the living room wireless, trying to find the music to which he was now addicted. “Rock Around the Clock” was here, but that was old hat. He had specialized tastes now. He wanted Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. He needed to hear Little Richard singing “Tutti Frutti,” or Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes.” This music played in his head whenever he was alone, tormenting him with everything he was away from. He took the back off the wireless and found a way of boosting the receptor circuits. Through a wail and warble of interference he found AFN and thought he heard Russell’s voice. He could not explain his excitement to his mother, who was watching the partial dismantling of the family’s Grandvox with despair.

  On the street he listened for American voices and never heard any. He saw someone getting off a bus who looked like Glass, and felt disappointment when the man turned his way. Even at the height of his homesickness, Leonard could not delude himself that Glass was his closest friend, but he was a kind of ally, and Leonard missed the near rudeness of the American’s speech, the hammer-blow intimacy, the absence of the modifiers and hesitancies that were supposed to mark out a reasonable Englishman. There was no one in the whole of London who would want to seize Leonard’s elbow or squeeze his arm to make a point. There was no one, apart from Maria, who cared so much what Leonard did or said.

  Glass had even given Leonard a Christmas present. It was at the canteen party, which had centered on a colossal side of beef and dozens of bottles of sekt—a seasonal contribution, it was announced, from Herr Gehlen himself. Glass had pressed a small gift-wrapped box into Leonard’s hands. Inside was a silver-plated ballpoint pen. Leonard had seen them around, but he had never used one before.

  Glass said, “Developed for Air Force pilots. Fountain pens don’t work at high altitudes. One of the lasting benefits of warfare.”

  Leonard was about to speak his thanks when Glass put his arms around him and squeezed. It was the first time Leonard had been embraced by a man. They were all well on the way to being drunk. Then Glass proposed a toast, “to forgiveness,” and looked at Leonard, who took Glass to be referring to the screening of Maria and drank deeply.

  Russell had said, “We’re doing Herr Gehlen the kindness of drinking his wine. You can’t get more forgiving than that.”

  Under a framed photograph of Tottenham Grammar School’s upper sixth, 1948, Leonard sat on the edge of his bed and wrote to Maria with his pen. It flowed beautifully, as though a miniature bolt of bright blue cloth were being pressed into the page. It was a piece of tunnel equipment he held in his hands, a fruit of war. He was sending a letter each day. Writing was a pleasure, and so, for once, was composition. His dominant mode was a jokey tenderness—I long to suck your toes and play upon your clavicle. He made a point of not complaining about Tottenham. After all, he might want to entice her here one day. During the first forty-eight hours at home he had found the separation excruciating. In Berlin he had grown so fond, so dependent, and at the same time had felt so grown-up. Now the old, familiar life engulfed him. He was suddenly a son again, not a lover. He was a child. Here was his room again, and his mother worrying over the state of his socks. Early on his second day he woke from a nightmare in which his Berlin life seemed long in the past. There’s no point going back to that town now, he heard someone say, it’s all different there these days. He sat on the edge of his bed, cooling his sweat, making plans to have a telegram sent that would urgently recall him to the warehouse.

  By the fourth day he was calmer. He could contemplate Maria’s qualities, and look forward to seeing her in just over a week. He had given up trying to make his parents see how she had changed his life. She was a secret he carried around with him. The prospect of seeing her at Tempelhof again made everything tolerable. It was during this period of comfortable longing and expectation that he decided he must ask her to marry him. Otto’s attack had pushed them even closer together, and had made their lives even less adventurous and more companionable. Maria never stayed alone in her flat now. If they agreed to meet there after work, Leonard made a point of arriving first. While he was in England, she was to stay a few days in Platanenallee, and then move to Pankow for Christmas. They stood back to back, ready to face their common enemy. When they went out together they always walked close, arm in arm, and in bars and restaurants they sat in tight, with a good view of the door. Even when Maria’s face had healed and they had stopped talking about him, Otto was always with them. There were times when Leonard was angry with Maria for marrying him.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked her. “We can’t go around like this forever.”

  Maria’s fear was lightened by contempt. “He’s a coward. He’ll run when he sees you. And he drinks himself to death. The sooner the better. Why do you think I always give him money?”

  In fact the precautions became a habit, part of their intimacy. It was cosy, this common cause of theirs. There were times when Leonard thought it was rather fine, having a beautiful woman rely on him for protection. He had vague plans to get himself in better shape. He found out from Glass that he had the right to U.S. Army gymnasium facilities. Weight-lifting might be of use, or judo, although there would be no room to throw Otto in Maria’s flat. But he was not in the habit of taking physical exercise, and each evening it seemed more sensible to go home.

  He had fantasies of confrontation that made his heart race. He saw himself in movie style, the peaceable tough guy, hard to provoke, but once unleashed, demonically violent. He delivered a blow to the solar plexus with a certain sorrowful grace. He disarmed Otto of his knife, and in the same movement broke his arm with fastidious regret and “I warned you not to get rough.” Another fantasy evoked the irresistible power of language. He would take Otto aside, to a Kneipe perhaps, and win him over with a kindly but unflinching reasonableness. They would be man to man, and Otto would depart at last in a mood of mellowed acceptance and dignified acknowledgment of Leonard’s position. Perhaps Otto would become a friend, a godfather to one of their children, and Leonard would use some recently acquired influenc
e to secure the ex-drunk a job at one of the military bases. In other wistful sequences Otto simply never appeared again, having fallen out of a train, or died from his habit, or met the right girl and married again.

  All these daydreams were driven by the certainty that Otto would be back and that whatever happened would be unpredictable and unpleasant. Leonard had occasionally seen fights in pubs and bars in London and Berlin. The reality was that his arms and legs went watery at the sight of violence. He had always marveled at the recklessness of fighting men. The harder they struck out, the more vicious were the blows they provoked, but they did not seem to mind. One good kick seemed worth the risk of a life in a wheelchair or with one eye.

  Otto had years of brawling experience. He had nothing against hitting a woman in the face with all his strength. What would he want to do with Leonard? Maria’s account had made it clear that Leonard was now fixed in his mind. Otto had arrived at her flat fresh from an afternoon’s Oktoberfest drinking. He had run out of money and had come by to collect a few marks and remind his ex-wife that she had ruined his life and stolen everything he had. The extortion and the ranting would have been the sum of the visit had Otto not lurched into the bathroom to relieve himself and seen Leonard’s shaving brush and razor. He took his piss and came out sobbing and talking of betrayal. He rushed past Maria into the bedroom and saw a shirt of Leonard’s folded on the chest. He pulled the pillows off the bed and found Leonard’s pyjamas. The sobs became shouts. First he pushed Maria around the flat, accusing her of whoring. Then he took hold of her hair in one hand and beat her face with the other. On his way out he swept some cups onto the floor. Two flights below he was sick on the stairs. As he staggered down he shouted more insults up the stairwell for all the neighbors to hear.

  Otto Eckdorf was a Berliner. He had grown up in the Wedding district, the son of the owner of a local Eckkneipe—one of the reasons Maria’s parents had opposed the marriage so bitterly. Maria was vague about Otto’s war. She guessed he had been called up in 1939, when he would have been eighteen. He was in the infantry for a while, she thought, and had been part of the victorious procession into Paris. Then he was injured, not in combat but in an accident involving an Army truck overturned by a drunken friend. After a couple of months in a hospital in northern France, he was transferred to a signals regiment. He was on the eastern front, but always well back from the front lines. Maria said, “When he wants you to know how brave he is, he tells you about all the fighting he’s seen. Then when he is drunk and he wants to let you know how clever he is, he tells you how he kept out of the fighting by getting sent to the field headquarters as a telephonist.”

  He had returned to Berlin in 1946 and met Maria, who was working in a food distribution center in the British sector. The answer to Leonard’s question was that she had married him because everything at that time had come apart and it did not really matter much what you did, because she had fallen out with her parents, and because Otto was good-looking and seemed kind. A young single woman was vulnerable in those days, and she had wanted protection.

  In the gray days after Christmas Leonard took long walks alone and thought about marrying Maria. He walked to Fins-bury Park, through Holloway to Camden Town. It was important, he thought, to reach a decision rationally, and not be influenced by separation and longing. He needed to concentrate on whatever counted against her and decide how important it was. There was Otto, of course. There was his lingering suspicion of Glass, but that surely was a matter of his own jealousy. She had told Glass more than she had needed to, that was all. There was her foreignness; perhaps that was an obstacle. But he liked speaking German—he was even getting good, with her encouragement—and he preferred Berlin to any place he had ever been. His parents might object to her. His father, who had been wounded in the Normandy landings, used to say he still loathed the Germans. After a week at home, Leonard accepted that that would be his parents’ problem, not his. While his father had been lying in the hollow of a sand dune with a bullet in his heel, Maria had been a terrified civilian, cowering from the nightly bombing.

  In effect, there was nothing standing in his way, and when he reached the Regent’s Park canal and stopped on the bridge, he abandoned his rigorous scientific procedure and permitted all that was lovely about her to invade his thoughts. He was in love, and he was about to be married. Nothing could be simpler, more logical or more satisfying. Until he had asked Maria, there was no one he could tell. There was no one to confide in. When it was time to break the news, the only friend he could imagine being truly pleased for him, and who would spare nothing to show it, would be Glass.

  The surface of the canal showed tiny disturbances, the first signs of rain. The thought of walking northward all the way home, back along the line of his meditation, tired him. He would take a bus from Camden High Street instead. He turned and walked quickly in that direction.

  Fifteen

  American songs were what marked out the weeks and months for Leonard and Maria now. In January and February of 1956 they favored Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You,” and “Tutti Frutti.” It was the latter, sung by Little Richard at the outer limit of effort and joy, that started them jiving. Then it was “Long Tall Sally.” They were familiar with the moves. The younger American servicemen and their girls had been dancing that way at the Resi for a long time. Until now, Leonard and Maria had disapproved. The jivers took up too much space and bumped into the backs of the other dancers. Maria said she was too old for that sort of thing, and Leonard thought it was showy and childish, typically American. So they had clung to each other through the quicksteps and walzes. But this would not do for Little Richard. Once they had succumbed to the music, there was nothing for it but to turn up the volume of Leonard’s wireless set and try the steps, the passes and crossovers and turns, having first made sure that the Blakes downstairs were out.

  It was an exhilarating exercise in reading the other’s mind, in guessing your partner’s intentions. There were many collisions in their first attempts. Then a pattern emerged, devised consciously by neither of them, the product not so much of what they did but of who they were. There was tacit agreement that Leonard should lead and that Maria, by her own movements, should indicate just how he should do so.

  Soon they were ready for the dance floor. There was nothing like “Long Tall Sally” to be heard at the Resi or the other dance halls. The bands played “In the Mood” and “Take the ‘A’ Train,” but by now the movements were enough in themselves. Beyond the excitement Leonard took satisfaction in dancing in a way his parents and their friends did not, and could not, and in liking music they would hate, and in feeling at home in a city where they would never come. He was free.

  In April came a song that overwhelmed everybody, and that marked the beginning of the end of Leonard’s Berlin days. It was no use at all for jiving. It spoke only of loneliness and irresolvable despair. Its melody was all stealth, its gloom comically overstated. He loved it all, the forlorn, sidewalk tread of the bass, the harsh guitar, the sparse tinkle of a barroom piano, and most of all the tough, manly advice with which it concluded: “Now if your baby leaves you, and you’ve got a tale to tell, just take a walk down Lonely Street …” For a time AFN was playing “Heartbreak Hotel” every hour. The song’s self-pity should have been hilarious. Instead, it made Leonard feel worldly, tragic, bigger somehow.

  It formed the background to the arrangements for the engagement party Leonard and Maria were giving at Platanenallee. It was playing in Leonard’s mind when he was buying drinks and peanuts in the Naafi. In the gift section he came across a young officer languidly stooped over a glass counter display of watches. It took several seconds to recognize him as Lofting, the lieutanant who had given him Glass’s number on his first day. Lofting too had difficulty in placing Leonard. When he did, he became talkative and a lot friendlier than before. Without preamble, he told how he had finally located a wide open site, persuaded a civilian contractor to clear and l
evel it, and, through someone in the mayor of Berlin’s office, had it seeded, ready for use as a cricket pitch. “The speed this grass grows! I’ve arranged a twenty-four-hour sentry to keep kids off. You must come and look.” He was lonely, Leonard decided, and before he had thought the matter through, he was telling Lofting about his engagement to a German girl and inviting him to the party. They were, after all, rather short of guests.

  In the late afternoon before the party (Drinks 6-8 P.M.), Leonard was half humming, half singing “Heartbreak Hotel” as he carried a sackful of kitchen rubbish down to the dustbins out the back. The lift was out of order that day. On his way up, Leonard bumped into Mr. Blake. They had not spoken since the scene on Leonard’s landing the previous year. Enough time had passed to neutralize that, for when Leonard nodded, Mr. Blake smiled and said hello. Again without reflection, and because he was feeling expansive, Leonard said, “Would you and your wife like to drop ih for a drink this evening? Anytime after six.”

  Blake was searching in his overcoat pocket for his key. He took it out and stared at it. Then he said, “That would be pleasant. Thank you.”

  “Heartbreak Hotel” was playing on the wireless while Leonard and Maria waited for the first guest. There were peanuts in saucers and, on a table pushed against a wall, bottles of beer and wine, lemonade, Pimms, tonic and a liter of gin, all duty free. There were ashtrays for everyone. Leonard had wanted pineapple chunks and cheddar cheese on toothpicks, but Maria had laughed so hard at this mad concoction that the matter was dropped. They held hands while they surveyed their preparations, conscious that their love was about to begin its public existence. Maria wore a layered white dress that rustled when she moved, and pale blue dancing pumps. Leonard had his best suit on, and—the daring touch—a white tie.