In the Mouth of the Bear

by Ewan Lawrie

Doc his wallet.

  Mustapha's Taxi

  The taxi-driver's heavily accented German was difficult to understand. I tried English.

  'Mustapha's, off Giesebeckstrasse, please, mate.'

  'Ah. English. Mustapha's is good name for restaurant, yes.'

  At least that meant he'd heard of it. Doc was blootered in the back seat saying

  'Geez A Break Strasse' and giggling. Probably still relieved at our narrow escape after our visit to Thimbles. We needed some food right enough.

  'My friend, sorry. Is it open the Mustapha's?'

  'What time is it? I asked.

  '3.55.'

  'That's ok, just need to be at a table before 5.30 a.m.'

  I shoved Doc over to the other side of the back seat. The snores were deafening in my right ear. The driver wasn't Turkish, I knew that much. It was unusual that it wasn't a German though. I couldn't remember the last time a 'foreigner' had been behind the wheel of one of the big cream Mercedes taxis.

  'You're a long way from home, eh?' I ventured. He could answer, or not. His choice.

  'Yes, my friend. Further than you think.' An intriguing answer, had he meant it to be? No chance of repartee with Doc at the moment, so I said:

  'But you don't know what I think, do you?'

  'OK, my friend, you guess where I come from, you don't pay. You don't guess,

  pay double meter, yes?' It was a 10-minute ride, how could I lose?

  The driver was olive skinned, the five-o-clock shadow looked like nearing the second time around, although I'd have bet he'd shaved before coming on shift. He was about 30. He wore a collarless, white shirt, a cheap if well-cared for suit. Every so often he would smile and a gold tooth would glint in the street lighting or the car headlamps. I could not for the life of me place his accent; he could have been born anywhere from Khartoum to Kazakhstan.

  He smiled.

  'My name is Mustapha too. I will help you. You can ask me questions, except for the obvious ones, OK?'

  It seemed fair enough.

  'Are you a Muslim?' No use beating about the bush, I thought.

  'Well, yes, I am.'

  'Did you learn to drive in your home country?' I admit it, I was quite drunk too.

  He laughed.

  'Yes, we have roads and everything.'

  'And how long have you been in Berlin?'

  I was hoping to catch him out somehow.

  'I have been here 2 years I left? well I left home in 1982.'

  Almost, I thought.

  'And do you have a visa. A permit.' I sounded like the police.

  'I am here legally.' He wasn't fazed.

  'Why?' Well, I might as well find out something about him, I thought.

  He sighed.

  'It's complicated?'

  We were at a set of lights, waiting to filter right off the Kantstrasse: Mustapha's was just around the corner.

  'Come on, I haven't long left?' I hadn't a clue.

  'I am a political refugee, Germany's policy is very helpful, if you can get here.'

  I was none the wiser. The taxi was pulling to a halt in front of the restaurant. I thought I'd try an outlandish guess: some far flung Soviet Republic on the Islamic fringe.

  'Krzygystan.' I stumbled over the name. ' It's Krzygystan, isn't it>'

  He shook his head, smiled ruefully;

  'No, no it's not.'

  'How much?' I asked, I couldn't see the meter.'

  '12 marks, OK?'

  'It's ok with me, he's paying.'

  I nudged Doc awake and gave him the good news. He handed over the cash. Doc was half-way through the restaurant door. I tapped on the driver's window.

  'OK, where are you from?'

  'Kosovo.' A catch in his voice.

  'What's that? Is it even a country? I've never heard of it.'

  'You will,' he said. 'You will.

  The Infinite Scope of Memory

  Pass me my mnemo-scope,

  careful! It's versatile.

  Put it to your mind's eye;

  it's all the scopes -

  from micro to tele -

  from minutiae to mediation.

  Which one is it,

  today?

  Like all good scopes

  we use it to spy

  on the 'other'.

  Here, let's gather

  intelligence

  - on that other

  country: the past.

  FROM THE REPORT: 'How Could Matthias Rust Get to Moscow?'

  BY: Douglas Clarke, Radio Free Europe

  DATE: 1987-6-2

  In both the East and the West, people

  are asking how it could have been possible for a

  young West German student pilot, Matthias Rust,

  to fly a light aircraft unhindered through the

  vaunted Soviet air defenses. 1

  "It's all a game." Dennis

  1. Microscope

  It's a grubby, cloudy slide under the scope.

  It looked like any large institution's open-plan office - except for the radio-electronic hardware. A really close look would tell you it wasn't a standard computer room; oh yes, there were huge tape disks and servers the size of small vehicles. But the detail of the missing punch card machines would give it away. I remember the clouds. Of dense, aromatic tobacco smoke; Lambert and Butler, Bensons, - Gauloise for the pretentious few. Everyone smoked then. Tax-free in the NAAFI, why not? One 23 year old guy affected a meerschaum; he did look like the keyboard player from Sparks, though. It was a big room to fill with smoke. You could barely see the terminal in front of you. A hideous brown block of metal, green-screened with a lighter green font; Zenith Data Systems on a silver metal plate on the side.

  It might have been a weekend. Empty seats everywhere you looked: just a few glum faces in the murk. The rest were enjoying 'Stand-downs'; gash time off in honour of the Soviet holiday, 28th of May, Border Guard Day. We had no pilots to listen to. The Soviet Tactical Air Force in the German Democratic Republic was having a well-earned rest; the pilots drinking vodka, the ground crews siphoning fuel tanks to brew white lightning. How did we know this? We listened: we monitored Soviet radio transmissions; we heard occasional drunken radio checks on common communications frequencies, streams of slurred words demonstrating the rich variety of Russian expletives. Every Soviet holiday was the same; for us as well as them.

  The smoke - and the constantly flickering fluorescent lighting - was hard on the eyes. There were no windows in the top-secret listening station. Top Secret! I remember once seeing its phallic lines on the front page of the Sun during Geoffrey Prime's treason trial; a year later I was working in it. No real work to do; what did we do that day? Change the slide; turn the knob; focus on the specimen.

  Most likely I was listening to a 3-week old recording of a trainee helicopter pilot making landing after landing at an airfield north of Berlin; tapping Cyrillic keys as fast as I could. There were always recordings left over to listen to: we filled databases for faceless bean counters countries away. It would have been about five p.m. Unofficially, our shift had started a quarter of an hour ago, you had to takeover the reins from the off-going crew. You came in a quarter-hour earlier for a 30-second summary and a scrawled note. The hard core would just have been putting their headphones on:

  'The shift starts at five, ok? I'll start at five.' Little victories. All they had while in uniform. I never saw the point.

  Jock rolled his eyes at me; six hours of head-melting boredom in prospect. He used to string out the administrative duties as long as he could, putting off the donning of the electric hat as long as possible. And he had a hangover; he always did, then. The white noise and static bursts on the cassette recordings made it worse. Twenty years later, we all flinch at loud noises and fail to hear the quiet ones.

  At this time the transcription desks would have looked like a '70s school language lab, right down to the empty seats. Eddie had a lurid paperback an in
ch from his nose and one headset earpiece wedged on the top of his head as far from his good ear as possible. Steve had his feet up beside the desktop control box for his cassette player.

  Someone would have made a coffee - for the dozen or so people there - before half-an-hour was out. The TV room-cum-kitchen was in the basement. Big Paul McGill disappeared for over an hour once just to make six brews: but then he did once go AWOL for three days to work as a labourer on a building site. We all pretended not to see him as we drove past the Teufelseestrasse S-Bahn station, on our way to work in the Prick in the Sky.

  I would have been working at Teufelsberg for five years - off and on - by then. Some took it very seriously: I did too. Only now does the absurdity of it all hit home. You need memory's lenses to look at the past: the microscope inflates it, the reversed telescope tells the truth; the past is always smaller, sharpened by distance.

  2. epocseleT

  See me: thinner, younger, smiling less. I run to a bench of radio receivers all set to loudspeaker, a lot of talking; agitated, guttural Russian. It should be brief, hourly checks, drunk or not. Do I hear panic over the ether? Someone has let the tape recordings run out. No-one panics in the room. I don't know what the disembodied voices said. Gone for ever now. Shrugs all round. Good job the Boss Man has taken a rare stand-down.

  'Dinnae worry' says Jock 'It'll no be the Red Horde heading for London.'

  'We'll never know now, will we?' I muse.

  'Who cares who wins?' snorts Steve. Steve's dad is the Boss Man on one of the other shifts.

  Jock tells me to reload all the cassette recorders in the room, five racks of 16 plus some 8 individual recorders at another listening station; unmanned because 'we've been recording them'. We man-up all the so-called 24-hour posts. The frequencies we monitor are active for a half-hour or so. It transpires the Soviets want to scramble some assets: the responses are vague and evasive: and quite, quite slurred. Things go