The Innocent

by Ian Mcewan

  He stood up from the bed to help the pain. He wanted to get the gin. He wanted to bring the bottle through. He wanted to look for the cigarettes. There were still three in the pack, but it hurt to walk. And if he went in there, he might see that it had moved again.

  He stood by the wardrobe and he said, That’s just the local station, the Ordnungspolizei. We need to speak to the Kriminalpolizei, they’re a different bunch. He was saying this, but of course there were no criminals, no crime, it was self-defense.

  She said, But the locals will get involved all the same. They have to, it’s their area.

  So, he said, what are we going to tell them?

  She shook her head. He thought she meant she did not know. But she meant something quite different. It was only two-thirty then, and she already meant something quite different.

  Walking his familiar route, he could pretend it had not happened. He was on his way to work, that was all. He would go down into the tunnel, he was looking forward to the tunnel. He had gone out to get the gin. The cigarettes were nowhere. He looked at the shoes. They were further out, he could not doubt it. He could see both socks, and a bare patch of leg with sparse hair. He hurried into the bedroom and told her, but she did not look up. She had folded her arms and she was staring at the wall. He shut the door and poured them both a gin. Drinking it, he thought of the Naafi.

  I tell you what, he said. We’ll get the British military police. Or the Americans. I’m attached, you see, it’s what I’m meant to do.

  She almost unfolded her arms, then she slotted them back together. I’m involved, she said. The German police will have to know.

  He was still standing. He said, I’ll tell them it was all me. A mad offer.

  She did not smile or soften her voice. She said, You’re sweet and kind. But he’s German, and this apartment is mine, and this was my husband once. They have to tell the German police.

  He was glad the offer was not taken up. He said, We’re getting bogged down. They might think he was a war hero, but they know he was violent, they know he was a drunk, and jealous, and it’s our word against his, and if we had wanted to kill him we wouldn’t smash his head and report it to the police.

  She said, If we thought we could get away with it, why not? And when he did not answer because he had not understood, she said, Totschlag, that’s what they’ll say. Manslaughter.

  He was approaching the sentries. It was Jake and Howie on the gate. They were friendly and made a joke about his swollen ear. He still had to show his pass. It was just as good as it had been the day before. Not everything had changed, it wasn’t all bad. He went on through, past the sentry box, along the path, his usual route. He met no one on his way to his room.

  Pinned to his door was a note from Glass. Meet me in the canteen 1300 hours. The room was as he had left it—the workbench, soldering irons, ohmmeters, voltmeters, valve testing equipment, rolls of cable, boxes of spare parts, a broken umbrella he was intending to fix with solder. This was all his stuff, this was what he did, this was what he really did, all quite legal and aboveboard. Or above one board and below another, and not legal by every definition. There were some definitions they were at war with, there were certain definitions they were committed to eradicating. I’ve got to stop this, he thought, I’ve got to slow down.

  Manslaughter, she said. He had to go and sit on the bed, never mind the pain. It sounded worse than murder. Slaughter. It sounded worse. It sounded about right for what they had next door.

  He tried something else. I tell you what, he said. I should go and see a doctor, straightaway.

  She said through a yawn, Is it really bad? One more thing she did not want to think about.

  He said, A doctor should look at my collarbone and my ear. He did not say his testicles. They were hurting now. And he did not want a doctor looking at them, squeezing them and asking him to cough. He writhed where he sat and he said, I should go. Don’t you see, it’s our proof that it was self-defense. I should go while it’s really bad, and they could take photos.

  But, he thought, not of my balls.

  And she said, Would you tell them it was self-defense too, that hole in his face?

  He sat there and he almost passed out.

  He went along the corridor to the water fountain. He wanted the water on his face. He passed by Glass’s office and checked. Out—there was another plus. He could wave at boys, or say hello to sentries, but he could not talk to Glass. He took some valves and other odds and ends from his own office and locked it. There was a small job left over from yesterday. It might help him slow down. An excuse to be in the tunnel, to collect what he had to fetch from there.

  If you see the doctor, she said, you have to tell him, and that means the police.

  He said, But at least we’ll have the proof of a fight, a fight. He would have torn me to pieces.

  Oh yes, she said. The proof of self-defense, but what about the hole?

  Well, he said. You can tell them why I had to do that.

  But I don’t know why, she said. Tell me, why did you bite him like this?

  He said, Didn’t you see? Didn’t you see what he was doing?

  She shook her head, so he told her. And when he finished she said, I didn’t see that. You were too close.

  Well, it’s true, he said.

  She sipped her gin and asked him, Did it hurt so bad that you had to bite a hole in his face?

  Of course it did, he said. You’ll have to tell them you saw it. It’s important that you say that.

  She said, But you said we had no need to lie, you said we did nothing wrong, we have nothing to hide from them.

  Did I say that? he said. I mean, we have done nothing wrong, but we have to make them believe it, we have to get our story right.

  Ah well, she said. Ah so, if we are going to lie, if we are going to pretend things, then we must do it right. And she uncrossed her arms and looked at him.

  He walked past the spoil piled to the basement ceiling. They said mushrooms sometimes grew on the dark slopes, but he had never seen one. He didn’t want to see one now. He was standing by the rim of the shaft, and he was feeling better. The sound of the generators, the bright bare lights at the mouth of the tunnel, the dim ones up here, the cables and field lines feeding down, the ventilation, the cooling systems … The systems, he thought, we need systems. He showed his authority and said to the guard that he would be bringing up a couple of things and he would need the lift. “You got it, sir,” the man said.

  The old vertical iron ladder was gone. These days you got down by way of a set of stairs that spiraled one and a half turns on the wall of the shaft. They think of everything, he thought, the Americans. They wanted to make things possible, and easy. They wanted to look after you. This pleasant lightweight staircase with the nonslip treads and chain-link banisters, the Coke machines in the corridors, steak and chocolate milk in the canteen. He had seen grown men drinking chocolate milk. The British would have kept the vertical ladder because difficulty was part of a secret operation. Americans thought of “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Tutti Frutti” and playing catch on the rough ground outside, grown men with chocolate-milk mustaches playing ball. They were the innocent. How could you steal secrets from them? He had given MacNamee nothing, he hadn’t really tried. There was a plus.

  It hurt walking down the stairs. He was glad when he was down. He had found out nothing about Nelson’s technique, how to separate the clear text echoes from the encrypted message. They had these secrets and they had their chocolate milk. He had found out nothing. He had tried a couple of doors. He had not lied to MacNamee, and he had stolen nothing so he did not need to lie to Glass.

  She said again, If we tell them lies … Then she let it hang, and it was his turn.

  He said, We have to be together, we have to have it clear. They’ll take us in separate rooms and look for contradictions. Then he stopped and said, But there isn’t even a lie we can tell them. What can we say, that he slipped on the bathroom fl
oor?

  I know, she said. I know, by which she meant You’re right, so move on to the inevitable conclusion. But he did not move. He sat and thought about standing up. He poured more gin. It did not seem to reach him somehow, this lukewarm drink.

  In the tunnel there was silky black air sifted by machine, and manmade silence, and competence, ingenuity, discretion everywhere he looked. He had the valves in his hand, he was on a job. He walked between the old railway lines, the lines that had brought the dirt out.

  You’re drinking too much, she said. We have to think.

  He emptied the cup so he could put it down on the bed. He could think better when he closed his eyes. It hurt his ear less.

  I’ll tell you another thing, she said. Are you listening? Don’t go to sleep. They know at the Rathaus, the city hall, that he was claiming a right to this place. They have the correspondence, all the papers.

  He said, So what? His claim was all nonsense, you told me.

  Es macht nichts, she said. He had a grievance, and we had a reason to quarrel

  You mean a motive, he said. You’re saying that would be our motive? Do we look like people who solve a housing dispute this way?

  Who knows? she said. It’s difficult to find a place here. In Berlin, people have killed each other for less than that.

  All that says, he said, is that he had a grievance and he came here to fight and it was self-defense.

  When she thought they were getting nowhere she folded her arms again. She said, At work I heard this English word, manslaughter, from the major. He told me. This happened the year before I started work there. One of the mechanics in the workshops, a German civilian, got in a fight in a Kneipe with another man and he killed him. He hit him over the head with a beer bottle and it killed him. He was drunk, and angry, but he didn’t mean to kill. He was very sorry when he saw what he had done.

  And what happened to him?

  He was sent to prison for five years. He’s still there now, I think.

  It was a normal day in the tunnel. Hardly anyone around, everything in order, the place running smoothly. It was fine, it was how the rest of the world should be. He stopped and looked. Tied to this fire extinguisher was a label showing that the weekly check had been carried out at 1030 hours the day before. Here were the initials of the engineer, his office phone number, the date of the next check. Perfection. Here was a telephone point, and by it a list of numbers: the duty officer, security, the firefighting unit, the recording room, the tap chamber. This cluster of lines, held in bunches like a little girl’s hair with a bright new clip, ran from the amplifiers to the recording room. These were the lines to the tap chamber, this piping circulated water to cool the electronics, these were the ventilation ducts, this line carried a separate current to the alarm systems, this was a sensor with a probe out deep into the surrounding soil. He put his hand out and touched them. It all worked, he loved them all.

  He opened his eyes. Neither of them had spoken for five minutes. Perhaps twenty minutes had gone by. He opened his eyes and started speaking. But this wasn’t like a fight in a pub, he said. He attacked me, he could have killed me. He stopped and remembered. He attacked you first, he had you by the throat. He had forgotten her throat. Let me look, he said. How does it feel? There were red marks all the way around and right up to her chin. He had forgotten about that.

  It hurts when I swallow, she said.

  There you are, he said. You should come with me to the doctor. This is going to be our story, and it’s the truth, it’s what happened. He would have strangled you.

  Yes, he thought. I stopped him.

  She said, It’s four o’clock. No doctor will see us now. And even if he did, I tell you. She stopped, and then she unfolded her arms. I tell you, I’m thinking all the time about the police, and what they see when they come in here.

  We’ll take the blanket off first, he said.

  She said, It doesn’t matter about the blanket. I tell you what they see. A mutilated corpse.

  Don’t say that, he said.

  A smashed-in skull, she said, and a hole in his face. And what do we have between us? A red ear, a sore throat?

  And my balls, he thought, but he didn’t say a thing.

  There were a couple of technicians working by the amplifiers. All he had to do was nod at them. Then he stopped at the end of the racks. There was a desk, and there they were, stowed underneath, just as he remembered them. But he could stop on the way back. He had to do his job, it would help him. Not even that. He wanted to do it, he had to hold on. He passed through the pressurized doors, into the tap chamber. There were two men in here as well, people he always said hello to but never got to know. One had the headphones on, the other was writing. They smiled at him. Talking was discouraged in here; you could whisper if it was essential, that was all. The one who was writing pointed to the swollen ear and grimaced.

  One of the two recorders, the one not in use, needed a valve replacement. He sat down to the job and took his time unscrewing the cover plates. This was what he would have been doing if nothing had happened. He wanted it to last. He replaced the valve and then he poked around, looking at the connections and the soldered points on the signal activation. When he had the covers back on he continued to sit there, pretending to think.

  He must have fallen asleep. He was on his back, the light was on, he was fully dressed and he couldn’t remember a thing. Then he remembered. She was shaking his arm and he sat up.

  She said, You can’t sleep and leave everything to me.

  It was coming back to him. He said, Everything I say, you’re against it. You tell me.

  She said, I don’t want to tell you. I want you to see it for yourself.

  See what? he said.

  For the first time in hours she stood. She put her hand to her throat and said, They won’t believe it about self defense. No one will. If we tell them, then we go to prison.

  He was looking around for the gin bottle, which wasn’t where he left it. She must have moved it, and that was fine with him because now he was feeling sick. He said, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. But he did not mean it; it was true, they were going to prison, German prison.

  So, she said. I have to say it. Someone has to say it, so I’ll say it We don’t have to tell them, we don’t say a thing. We take him out of here and put him where they don’t find him.

  Oh my God, he said.

  And if they do find him one day, she said, and they come and tell me, I’ll say, Oh, that’s very sad, but he was a drunk and a war hero, he was bound to get into trouble.

  Oh God, he said, and then, If they see us taking him out of here, then we’re finished, it will look like murder. Murder.

  That’s true, she said. We must do it right. She sat down beside him.

  We have to work together, he said.

  She nodded, and they held hands and did not speak for a while.

  In the end he had to go. He had to leave the cosy chamber. He nodded at the two men and went out through the double doors, and swallowed hard to adjust his ears to the lower pressure. Then he was kneeling by a desk. There were the two empty cases. He decided to bring them both. Each one could hold two of the big Ampex recording machines as well as spares, microphones, reels and cable. They were black with reinforced edging, and had big snap locks and two canvas straps that buckled around for extra safety. He opened one up. There was no lettering, inside or out, no Army codes or manufacturer’s name. There was a wide canvas strap handle. He picked them up and started along the tunnel. He had trouble squeezing them by the people by the amplifier racks, but one of the men took a case and carried it along to the far end for him. Then he was on his own, bumping along the tunnel to the main shaft.

  He could have carried them up the stairs one at a time, but the fellow at the top saw him there and swung the derrick out and started the electric winch. He put the cases on the pallet, and they were up before he was. He went back past the earth mounds, up to ground level, out th
rough some awkward double doors and along the side of the road to the sentry. He had to open up his cases for Howie—just a formality—then he was off along the open road, off on his holidays.

  It was deep enough to be a nuisance, his new luggage. It banged his legs and forced his arms out and made his shoulders ache. And this was empty luggage. There was no sign of the carrot-top kid. In the village he had trouble reading the bus timetable; the figures drifted upward diagonally. He read them as they moved. He had forty minutes to wait, so he set the cases against a wall and sat on them.

  He was the first one to speak. It was five A.M. He said, We could drag him down the stairs now, carry him to one of the bomb sites. We could put the bottle in his hand, make it look like something happened with the other drunks. He said all this, but he knew he did not have the strength, not now.

  She said, There are always people on the stairs. They come in from the night shifts, or they go off early. And some of them are old and never sleep. It’s never really quiet here.

  He was nodding all the time she spoke. It was an idea, but it was not the best idea and he was glad they were thinking it through now. At last they were agreeing, at last they were getting somewhere. He closed his eyes. It was going to be all right.

  Then the bus driver was shaking him. He was still on the cases, and the driver had guessed he was waiting for his bus. This was the end of the line, after all. He had forgotten nothing, he knew it all the moment he opened his eyes. The driver took one of the cases, and he took the other. Some mothers with small children were already seated, off to the city center, to the department stores. That’s where he was going, he had not forgotten a thing. He would tell Maria, he had stayed with it. His arms and legs were weak, he had not got them going yet. He sat at the front, with his luggage on the seat behind. He did not have to look at it all the time.

  As they headed north they stopped to pick up more mothers and children and their shopping bags. This was the purposeful, head-down punctuality of rush hour. Now it was cheerful, chatty, festive. He sat with their separate voices behind him, the mothers’ bright conversation founded on agreement, ruptured by little laughs and complicit groans, the children’s irrelevant squawks, finger-pointing exclamations, lists of German nouns, sudden frets. And him alone at the front, too big, too bad for a mother, remembering the journeys with her from Tottenham to Oxford Street, in the window seat, holding the tickets, the absolute authority of the conductor and the system he stood for, which was true—the stated destination, the fares, the change, the bell ring—and hanging on tight until the great vibrating important bus had stopped.