A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

  I could offer you Pym the infant refugee, though I never starved, had a valid British passport and in retrospect seldom wanted for a kindly word. But he did dip tallows for a religious candlemaker, sweep the aisle of the Minster, roll beer barrels for a brewer and unstitch sacks of carpets for an old Armenian who kept urging him to marry his daughter, and come to think of it he might have done worse; she was a beautiful girl and kept sighing and draping herself over the sofa but Pym was too polite to approach her. All those things he did and more. All of them at night, a night animal on the run through that lovely candlelit city with its clocks and wells and cobble and arcades. He swept snow, carted cheeses, led a blind dray-horse and taught English to aspiring travel agents. All under cover while he waited for Herr Bertl’s hounds to sniff him out and bring him to justice, though I know now the poor man bore me no grudge whatever, and even at the height of his rage avoided mentioning Pym’s part in the affair.

  “Dear Father,

  “I am really happy out here and you must not worry about me at all as the Swiss are kindly and hospitable and have all sorts of remarkable bursaries for young foreigners keen on reading law.”

  I could sing of another great hotel, not a stone’s throw from the first, where Pym went to earth as a night waiter and became a schoolboy again, sleeping under avenues of lagged piping in a basement dormitory as big as a factory where the lights never went out; how he took gratefully once more to his little iron bed and how he jollied his fellow waiters as he had jollied his fellow new boys, for they turned out to be peasants from Ticino who wanted only to go home. How he rose willingly with every bell and donned a white dicky that, though thick with last night’s grease, was not half as constricting as Mr. Willow’s collars. And how he took trays of bubbly and foie gras to ambiguous couples who sometimes wanted him to stay, Amor and Rococo beckoning from their glances. But once again he was too polite and too unknowing to oblige. His manners in those days were a barbed-wire cage. He only lusted when he was alone. Yet even as I allow my memory to brush past these tantalising episodes, my heart is hurtling ahead to the night I met the saintly Herr Ollinger in the third-class buffet of Bern railway station and, through his charity, stumbled into the encounter that altered all my life till here—and I fear your life as well, Jack, though you have yet to learn by how much.

  Of the university, how Pym enrolled there and why, my recollections are equally impatient. It was for cover. All for cover as usual, leave it there. He had been working in a circus at its winter home, which was a patch of land just beneath the same railway station where his footsteps so often finished after his all-day walks. Somehow the elephants had drawn him. Any fool can wash an elephant, but he was surprised to learn how hard it was to dip the head of a twenty-foot brush into a bucket when the only light comes in shafts from the spotlights in the apex of the marquee. Each dawn when his work was done he made his way home to the Salvation Army hostel that was his temporary Ascot. Each dawn he saw the green dome of the university rising above him through the autumn mist like an ugly little Rome challenging him to convert. And somehow he had to get inside the place, for he had a second terror, greater than Herr Bertl’s hounds: namely that Rick despite his problems of liquidity would appear in a cloud of Bentley and whisk him home.

  He had fabricated for Rick handsomely and imaginatively. I have won that foreigners’ scholarship I was talking about. I am reading Swiss law and German law and Roman law and all the other laws there are. I am attending night school on the side to keep myself out of mischief. He had praised the erudition of his non-existent tutors and the piety of the university chaplains. But Rick’s systems of intelligence, though erratic, were impressive. Pym knew he was not safe until he had given substance to his fictions. One morning therefore he found the courage and marched up there. He lied first about his qualifications and then about his age, for the one could not have been earned without an adjustment to the other. He paid out the last of E. Weber’s white banknotes to a crew-cut cashier, and in return received a grey cloth-card with his photograph on it, describing him as legitimate. I have never in my life been so gratified by the sight of a false document. Pym would have given his whole fortune for it, which was a further seventy-one francs. Philosophie Zwei was Pym’s faculty and I still have only the sketchiest notion of what it comprised, for Pym had asked for law but somehow been rerouted. He learned more from translating the students’ bulletins on the notice-board, which invited him to a string of unlikely forums and gave him his first rumblings of political gunfire since Ollie and Mr. Cudlove had vented their anger against the rich and Lippsie had warned him of the hollowness of possessions. You remember those forums too, Jack, though from a different aspect, and for reasons we shall come to soon enough.

  It was from the university notice-board also that Pym discovered the existence of an English church in Elfenau, the diplomatic fairyland. Along he went—he could hardly wait—often two or three Sundays running. He prayed, he hovered outside the doors afterwards, shaking hands with anything that moved, though little did. He gazed soulfully at elderly mothers, fell in love with several, consumed cake and lifeless tea in their thickly curtained houses and charmed them with extravagant accounts of his parentless upbringing. Soon the expatriate in him couldn’t get along without its weekly shot of the English banality. The English church with its iron-back diplomatic families, ancient Britons and dubious Anglophiles became his school chapel and all the other chapels he had defected from.

  Its counterpart was the third-class railway buffet where, if he wasn’t working, he could sit all night smoking himself sick on Disque Bleus over a single beer and fancying himself the most stateless, world-weary globe-trotter he had ever met. Today the station is an indoor metropolis of smart boutiques and plastic-coated restaurants, but in the immediate post-war years it was still an ill-lit Edwardian staging post, with stuffed stages in the concourse and murals of freed peasants waving flags, and a scent of Bockwurst and fried onion that never went away. The first-class buffet was full of gentlemen in black suits with napkins round their necks, but the third class was shadowed and beery, with a whiff of Balkan lawlessness and drunks who sang out of tune. Pym’s favourite table was in a panelled corner near the coats where a sacred waitress called Elisabeth gave him extra soup. It must have been Herr Ollinger’s favourite also for he homed on it as soon as he entered and having bowed lovingly at Elisabeth, who wore a low-cut Tracht with perforated smocking, bowed at Pym too, and fidgeted with his poor briefcase, and hauled at his disobedient hair, and asked, “Do we disturb you?” in a tone of breathless anxiety while he stroked an old yellow chow dog that hung grumbling on its lead. Thus as I now know does our Maker disguise His best agents.

  Herr Ollinger was ageless but I guess now fifty. His complexion was doughy, his smile regretful, his cheeks were dimpled and pendulous like an old man’s bottom. Even when he did finally allow that his chair was not taken by superior beings, he lowered his round body so gingerly into it that you would think he expected to be shooed away any minute by someone more deserving. With the assurance of an habitué Pym took the brown raincoat from his unresisting arm and threaded a hanger into it. He had decided he needed Herr Ollinger and his yellow chow dog urgently. His life was going through a fallow period at the time and he had not exchanged more than a few words with anyone for a week. His gesture threw Herr Ollinger into a vortex of hopeless gratitude. Herr Ollinger beamed and declared Pym most friendly. He grabbed a copy of Der Bund from the rack and buried his face in it. He whispered to the dog to behave itself and tapped it ineffectually on the snout, though it was behaving with exemplary tolerance. But he had spoken, which gave Pym reason to explain, in a set sentence, that unfortunately I am foreign, sir, and not yet equal to your local dialect. So please be kind enough to speak High German and excuse me. After this, as he had learned to, he added his surname, “Pym,” at which Herr Ollinger confessed that he was Ollinger, as if the name implied some frightful slur, and afterwards presented the chow
as Herr Bastl, which for a moment rang uncomfortably of the luckless Bertl.

  “But you speak excellent German!” Herr Ollinger protested. “I would immediately have thought you are from Germany! You are not? Then where do you come from, if I may be so impertinent?”

  And this was kind of Herr Ollinger for nobody in his right mind, in those days, could have confused Pym’s German with the real thing. So Pym told Herr Ollinger the story of his life, which was what he had intended from the first, and dazzled him with tender questions about himself, and in every way he knew laid upon Herr Ollinger the full burden of his sensitive charm—which as it later turned out was a totally needless exertion on Pym’s part since Herr Ollinger was unselective in his acquaintance. He admired everybody, pitied everybody from below—not least for their dreadful misfortune in having to share the world with him. Herr Ollinger said he was married to an angel, and possessed three angel daughters who were musical prodigies. Herr Ollinger said he had inherited his father’s factory in Ostermundigen, which was a great worry to him. And so indeed it should have been, for in retrospect it is clear that the poor man rose diligently every morning in order to run it further into the earth. Herr Ollinger said Herr Bastl had been with him three years but only temporarily, because he was still trying to find the dog’s owner.

  Reciprocating with equal generosity, Pym described his experiences in the blitz, and the night he had been visiting his aunt in Coventry when they hit the cathedral; how she lived but a hundred yards from the main doors and her house by a miracle was unscathed. When he had destroyed Coventry, he described himself in an imaginative tour de force as an admiral’s son standing at his dormitory window in his dressing-gown, calmly watching the waves of German bombers flying over his school and wondering whether this time they were going to drop the parachutists dressed as nuns.

  “But did you have no shelters?” Herr Ollinger cried. “That’s a disgrace! You were a child, my God! My wife would be completely furious. She is from Wilderswil,” he explained, while Herr Bastl ate a pretzel and farted.

  Thus Pym skipped on, piling one fiction on another, appealing to Herr Ollinger’s Swiss love of disaster, enthralling the neutral in him with the dire realities of war.

  “But you were so young,” Herr Ollinger protested again when Pym related the rigours of his early military training at the Signals Depot in Bradford. “You had no nest warmth. You were a child!”

  “Well, thank God they never had to use us,” said Pym in a throw-away voice as he called for his bill. “My grandfather died in the first one, my father was given up for dead in the second, so I can’t help feeling it’s time our family had a break.” Herr Ollinger would not hear of Pym paying. Herr Ollinger might be breathing the free air of Switzerland, he said, but he had three generations of English to thank for the privilege. Pym’s sausage and beer were a mere step in the mercurial progress of Herr Ollinger’s generosity. It was followed by the offer of a room, for as long as Pym wished to do him the honour, in the narrow little house in the Länggasse that Herr Ollinger had inherited from his mother.

  It was not a big room. It was actually a very small room indeed. An attic, one of three, and Pym’s was in the middle, and only the middle of it was big enough for him to stand in, and even then he was more comfortable with his head poked through the skylight. In summer the daylight lasted all night, in winter the snow blacked out the world. For heating he had a great black radiator cut into the party-wall, which he heated from a wood stove in the corridor. He had to choose between freezing and boiling, depending on his mood. Yet, Tom, I have not been so content anywhere until I found Miss Dubber. Once in our lives, it is given us to know a truly happy family. Frau Ollinger was tall and luminous and frugal. On a routine patrol of the house Pym once watched her through a crack in a doorway while she slept, and she was smiling. I am sure she was smiling when she died. Her husband fussed round her like a fat tug, upsetting the economy, dumping every waif and sponger on her that he came upon, adoring her. The daughters were each plainer than the next, played musical instruments atrociously, to the fury of the neighbours, and one by one they married even plainer men and worse musicians whom the Ollingers thought brilliant and delightful—and by thinking made them so. From morning till night a trail of migrants, misfits and undiscovered geniuses drifted through their kitchen, cooking themselves omelettes and treading out their cigarettes on the linoleum. And woe if you left your bedroom unlocked, for Herr Ollinger was quite capable of forgetting you were there—or, if need be, of persuading himself you would be out tonight, or that you wouldn’t mind a stranger just until he’s got somewhere. What we paid I don’t remember. What we could afford was next to nothing and certainly not enough to subsidise the factory in Ostermundigen, for the last I heard of Herr Ollinger he was working happily as a clerk in Bern’s main post office, enchanted by the erudite company. The only possession I associate with him apart from Herr Bastl is a collection of erotica with which he consoled himself in his shyness. Like everything else about him it was there to be shared, and it was a great deal more revealing than Amor and Rococo Woman.

  Such then was the household on which Pym’s crow’s-nest was built. For once his life was as good as complete. He had a bed, he had a family. He was in love with Elisabeth in the third-class buffet and contemplating marriage and early fatherhood. He was locked in a tantalising correspondence with Belinda, who felt it her duty to inform him of Jemima’s love affairs, “which I’m sure she only has because you are so far away.” If Rick was not extinct he was at least quiescent, for the only sign of him was a flow of homilies on Being Ever True to your Advantages, and avoiding the Foreign Temptations and the Snares of Synicism, which either he or his secretary could not spell. These letters had the distinct air of being typed on the run, and never came from the same place twice: “Write care Topsie Eaton at the Firs, East Grinstead, no need to put my name on envelope.” “Write to Colonel Mellow post restaurant the main G.P.O. Hull who obliges by collecting my mail.” On one occasion a handwritten love letter varied the diet, beginning: “Annie, my sweet Pet, your body means more to me than Riches of the earth.” Rick must have put it into the wrong envelope.

  The only thing Pym missed therefore was a friend. He met him in Herr Ollinger’s basement on a Saturday at midday, when he took down his laundry for his weekly wash. Upstairs in the street the first snowfall was driving out the autumn. Pym had an armful of damp clothes in front of his face and was concerned about the stone steps. The basement light was operated by a time switch; any second he could be plunged into darkness and trip over Herr Bastl, who owned the boiler. But the light stayed on and as he brushed past the switch he noticed that somebody had ingeniously jammed a matchstick into it, a very sleek matchstick trimmed with a knife. He smelt cigar smoke but Bern was not Ascot—anyone who had a few pence could smoke a cigar. When he saw the armchair he mentally assigned it to the junk Herr Ollinger set aside as a gift to Herr Rubi the rag-and-bone man who came on Saturdays on his horse-drawn float.

  “Don’t you know it is forbidden for foreigners to hang their clothes in Swiss basements?” said a male voice, not in dialect but in a crisp High German.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t,” said Pym. He peered round for someone to apologise to and saw instead the unclear form of a slender man curled on the armchair, clutching a patchwork blanket to his neck with one long white hand and a book with the other. He wore a black beret and had a drooping moustache. No feet showed, but his body had the look of something spiky and wrongly folded, like a tripod that had stuck halfway. Herr Ollinger’s walking-stick was propped against the chair. A small cigar smouldered between the fingers that clutched the blanket.

  “In Switzerland it is forbidden to be poor, it is forbidden to be foreign, it is completely forbidden to hang clothes. You are an inmate of this establishment?”

  “I am a friend of Herr Ollinger’s.”

  “An English friend?”

  “My name is Pym.”

  Discov
ering the moustache, the fingers of one white hand began stroking it reflectively downward.

  “Lord Pym?”

  “Just Magnus.”

  “But you are of aristocratic stock.”

  “Well, nothing very special.”

  “And you are the war hero,” the stranger said, and made a sucking noise that in English would have sounded skeptical.

  Pym did not like the description at all. The account of himself that he had given to Herr Ollinger was obsolete. He was dismayed to hear it revived.

  “So who are you, if I may ask?” said Pym.

  The stranger’s fingers rose to claw at some irritation in his cheek while he appeared to consider a range of alternatives. “My name is Axel and since one week I am your neighbour, so I am obliged to listen to you grinding your teeth at night,” he said, drawing on his cigar.

  “Herr Axel?” said Pym.

  “Herr Axel Axel. My parents forgot to give me a second name.” He put down the book and held out a slim hand in greeting. “For God’s sake,” he exclaimed with a wince as Pym grasped it. “Go easy, will you? The war’s over.”

  Too challenged for his comfort Pym left his washing for another day and took himself upstairs.

  “What is Axel’s other name?” he asked Herr Ollinger next day.

  “Maybe he hasn’t one,” Herr Ollinger replied mischievously. “Maybe that’s why he has no papers.”

  “Is he a student?”

  “He is a poet,” said Herr Ollinger proudly but the house was stiff with poets.