‘Already they are coming in from the villages. Twelve thousand people they will have in that damn Market Place. You know what they are building? They are building a Schaffott.’ His English had once more defeated him. ‘What the hell is Schaffott?’ he demanded of the company at large.
Siebkron stirred as if he had been offered water. ‘Scaffold,’ he murmured, and the dying eyes, lifting in Turner’s direction, flickered and went out.
‘Siebkron’s English is fantastic!’ Saab cried happily. ‘Siebkron dreams of Palmerston in the daytime and Bismarck in the dark. Now is evening, you see: he is in the middle!’ Siebkron heard the diagnosis and it gave him no comfort at all. ‘A scaffold. I hope they maybe hang the damn fellow on it. Siebkron, you are too kind to him.’ He lifted his glass to Bradfield and proposed a long toast pregnant with unwelcome compliments.
‘Karl-Heinz also has fantastic English,’ the little doll said. ‘You are too modest, Karl-Heinz. It is just as good as Herr Siebkron’s.’ Between her breasts, deep down, Turner glimpsed a tiny flash of white. A handkerchief? A letter? Frau Saab did not care for Siebkron; she cared for no man, indeed, whose virtue was extolled above her husband’s. Her interjection had cut the thread; once more the conversation lay like a fallen kite, and for a moment not even her husband had the wind to lift it.
‘You said forbid him.’ Siebkron had picked up a silver nutmeg grater in his soft hand and was gently turning it in the candlelight, searching for tell-tale flaws. The plate before him was licked quite clean, a cat’s plate on a Sunday. He was a sulky, pale man, well scrubbed and no more than Turner’s age, with something of the hotelier about him, a man used to walking on other people’s carpets. His features were rounded but unyielding; his lips autonomous, parting to perform one function, closing to perform another. His words were not a help but a challenge, part of a silent interrogation which only fatigue, or the deep cold sickness of his heart, prevented him from conducting aloud.
‘Ja. Forbid him,’ Saab assented, leaning well across the table in order to reach his audience. ‘Forbid the meetings, forbid the marching, forbid it all. Like the Communists, that’s the only damn thing they understand. Siebkron, Sie waren ja auch in Hannover! Siebkron was there also: why don’t he forbid it? They are wild beasts out there. They have a power, nicht wahr, Siebkron? My God, I have also made my experiences.’ Saab was an older man, a journalist who had served a number of newspapers in his time, but most of them had disappeared since the war. No one seemed in much doubt what sort of experiences Herr Saab had made. ‘But I have never hated the English. Siebkron, you can confirm that. Das können Sie ja bestätigen. Twenty years I have written about this crazy Republic. I have been critical – sometimes damn critical – but I have never been hard against the English. That I never was,’ he concluded, jumbling his last words in a way which at once cast doubt upon the whole assertion.
‘Karl-Heinz is fantastically strong for the English,’ the little doll said. ‘He eats English, he drinks English.’ She sighed as if the rest of his activities were rather English too. She ate a great deal, and some of it was still in her mouth as she spoke, and her tiny hands held other things that she would eat quite soon.
‘We owe you a debt,’ said Bradfield with heavy cheerfulness. ‘Long may you keep it up, Karl-Heinz.’ He had arrived back from Brussels half an hour ago, and his eye was on Siebkron all the time.
Mrs Vandelung, the wife of the Dutch Counsellor, drew her stole more snugly over her ample shoulders. ‘We are going to England every year,’ she said complacently, apropos of nothing at all. ‘Our daughter is at school in England, our son is at school in England …’ She ran on. Nothing she loved, cherished or possessed was not of an English character. Her husband, a shrivelled, nautical man, touched Hazel Bradfield’s beautiful wrist and nodded with reflected fervour.
‘Always,’ he whispered, as if it were a pledge. Hazel Bradfield, waking from her reverie, smiled rather solemnly at him while her eyes regarded with detachment the grey hand that still held her. ‘Why, Bernhard,’ she said gently, ‘what a darling you are tonight. You will make the women jealous of me.’ It was not, all the same, a comfortable joke. Her voice had its ugly edge; she could be one of several daughters, Turner decided, intercepting her angry glance as Saab resumed his monologue; but she was not merciful to her plainer sisters. ‘Am I sitting in Leo’s place?’ he wondered. ‘Eating Leo’s portion?’ But Leo stayed at home on Tuesdays … and besides, Leo was not allowed here, he reminded himself, raising his glass to answer a toast from Saab, except for a drink.
Saab’s subject, miraculously, was still the British, but he had enriched it with autobiographical matter on the discomforts of bombing: ‘You know what they say about Hamburg? Question: what is the difference between an Englishman and a man of Hamburg? Answer: the man of Hamburg speaks German. You know in those cellars, what we were saying? Thank God they are British bombs! Bradfield, prosit! Never again.’
‘Never again indeed,’ Bradfield replied, and wearily toasted him in the German style, looking at him over the brim of his glass, drinking and looking again.
‘Bradfield, you are the best piece. Your ancestors fought at Waterloo, and your wife is as beautiful as the Queen. You are the best piece in the British Embassy and you didn’t invite the damn Americans and you didn’t invite the damn French. You are a good fellow. Frenchmen is bastards,’ he concluded to everyone’s alarm, and there was a moment’s startled silence.
‘Karl-Heinz, I’m sure that isn’t very loyal,’ said Hazel and a little laugh went up at her end of the table, originated by a pointless elderly Gräfin summoned at the last moment to partner Alan Turner. An unwelcome shaft of electric light broke upon the company. The Hungarians marched in from the kitchen like the morning shift and cleared away bottles and china with inconsiderate panache.
Saab leaned still further across the table and pointed a big, not very clean finger at the guest of honour. ‘You see this fellow Ludwig Siebkron here is a damn odd fellow. We all admire him in the Press Corps, because we can’t never damn well get hold of him, and in journalism we admire only what we cannot have. And do you know why we cannot have Siebkron?’
The question amused Saab very much. He looked happily round the table, his dark face glistening with delight. ‘Because he is so damn busy with his good friend and … Kumpan.’ He snapped his fingers in frustration. ‘Kumpan,’ he repeated. ‘Kumpan?’
‘Drinking companion, ’Siebkron suggested. Saab stared at him lamely, bewildered by assistance from such an unexpected quarter.
‘Drinking companion,’ he muttered; ‘Klaus Karfeld,’ and fell silent.
‘Karl-Heinz, you must remember Kumpan,’ his wife said softly, and he nodded and smiled at her valiantly.
‘You have come to join us, Mister Turner?’ Siebkron enquired, addressing the nutmeg grater. Suddenly the lights were on Turner, and Siebkron, risen from his bed, was conducting the rare surgery of a private practice.
‘For a few days,’ Turner said. The audience was slow in gathering, so that for a moment the two men faced one another in secret communion while the others continued their separate pursuits. Bradfield had engaged in a desultory cross-talk with Vandelung; Turner caught a reference to Vietnam. Saab, suddenly returning to the field, took up the subject and made it his own.
‘The Yanks would fight in Saigon,’ he declared, ‘but they wouldn’t fight in Berlin. Seems a bit of a pity they didn’t build the Berlin Wall in Saigon.’ His voice was louder and more offensive, but Turner heard it out of the dark that was beyond Siebkron’s unflinching gaze. ‘All of a sudden the Yanks are going crazy about self-determination. Why don’t they try it in East Germany a little bit? Everyone fights for the damn Negroes. Everyone fights for the damn jungle. Maybe it’s a pity we don’t wear no feathers.’ He seemed to be challenging Vandelung, but without effect: the old Dutchman’s grey skin was as smooth as a coffin, and nothing would sprout there any more. ‘Maybe it’s a pity we don’t have no palm tr
ees in Berlin.’ They heard him pause to drink. ‘Vietnam is shit. But at least this time maybe they can’t say we started it,’ he added with more than a trace of self-pity.
‘War is terrible,’ the Gräfin whickered, ‘we lost everything,’ but she was talking after the curtain had gone up. Herr Ludwig Siebkron proposed to speak, and had put down the silver nutmeg grater in order to signify his will.
‘And where do you come from, Mister Turner?’
‘Yorkshire.’ There was silence. ‘I spent the war in Bournemouth.’
‘Herr Siebkron meant which Department,’ Bradfield said crisply.
‘Foreign Office,’ said Turner. ‘Same as everyone else,’ and looked at him indifferently across the table. Siebkron’s white eyes neither condemned nor admired, but waited for the moment to insert the scalpel.
‘And may we ask Mr Turner which section of the Foreign Office is so fortunate as to have his services?’
‘Research.’
‘He’s also a distinguished mountaineer,’ Bradfield put in from far away, and the little doll cried out with the sharp surprise of sexual delight, ‘Die Berge!’ Out of the corner of his eye Turner saw one china hand touch the halter of her dress as if she would take it clean off in her enthusiasm. ‘Karl-Heinz – ’
‘Next year,’ Saab’s brown voice assured her in a whisper. ‘Next year we go to the mountains,’ and Siebkron smiled to Turner as if that were one joke they could surely share.
‘But now Mr Turner is in the valley. You are staying in Bonn, Mr Turner?’
‘Godesberg.’
‘In a hotel, Mr Turner?’
‘The Adler. Room Ten.’
‘And what kind of research, I wonder, is conducted from the Hotel Adler, Room Ten?’
‘Ludwig, my dear chap,’ Bradfield interposed – his jocularity was not so very hollow – ‘surely you recognise a spy when you see one. Alan’s our Mata Hari. He entertains the Cabinet in his bedroom.’
Laughter, Siebkron’s expression said, does not last for ever; he waited until it had subsided. ‘Alan,’ he repeated quietly. ‘Alan Turner from Yorkshire, working in Foreign Office Research Department and staying at the Adler Hotel, a distinguished mountaineer. You must forgive my curiosity, Mr Turner. We are all on edge here in Bonn, you know. As, for my sins, I am charged with the physical protection of the British Embassy, I have naturally a certain interest in the people I protect. Your presence here is reported to Personnel Department no doubt? I must have missed the bulletin.’
‘We put him down as a technician,’ Bradfield said, clearly irritated now to be questioned before his own guests.
‘How sensible,’ said Siebkron. ‘So much simpler than Research. He does research but you put him down as a technician. Your technicians on the other hand are all engaged in research. It’s a perfectly simple arrangement. But your research is of a practical nature, Mr Turner? A statistician? Or you are an academic perhaps?’
‘Just general.’
‘General research. A very catholic responsibility. You will be here long?’
‘A week. Maybe more. Depends how long the project lasts.’
‘The research project? Ah. Then you have a project. I had imagined at first you were replacing someone. Ewan Waldebere, for instance; he was engaged in commercial research, was he not, Bradfield? Or Peter McCreedy, on scientific development. Or Harting: you are not replacing Leo Harting, for instance? Such a pity he’s gone. One of your oldest and most valuable collaborators.’
‘Oh Harting!’ Mrs Vandelung had taken up the name, and it was already clear she had strong views. ‘You know what they are saying now already? That Harting is drunk in Cologne. He goes on fits, you know.’ She was much entertained to hold their interest. ‘All the week he wears angels’ wings and plays the organ and sings like a Christian; but at weekends he goes to Cologne and fights the Germans. He is quite a Jekyll and Hyde I assure you!’ She laughed indulgently. ‘Oh he is very wicked. Rawley, you remember André de Hoog I am sure. He has heard it all from the police here: Harting made a great fight in Cologne. In a night club. It was all to do with a bad woman. Oh, he is very mysterious I assure you. And now we have no one to play the organ.’
Through the mist Siebkron repeated his question.
‘I’m not replacing anyone,’ Turner said and he heard Hazel Bradfield’s voice, quite steady from his left, but vibrant for all that with anger unexpressed.
‘Mrs Vandelung, you know our silly English ways. We are supposed to leave the men to their jokes.’
Reluctantly the women departed. Little Frau Saab, desolated to leave her husband, kissed his neck and made him promise to be sober. The Gräfin said that in Germany one expected a cognac after a meal: it aided the digestion. Only Frau Siebkron followed without complaint; she was a quiet, deserted beauty who had learnt very early in her marriage that it paid not to resist.
Bradfield was at the sideboard with decanters and silver coasters; the Hungarians had brought coffee in a Hester Bateman jug which sat in unremarked magnificence at Hazel’s end of the table. Little Vandelung was lost in memories; he was standing at the French windows, staring down the sloping dark lawn at the lights of Bad Godesberg.
‘Now we will get port,’ Saab assured them all. ‘With Bradfield that is always a fantastic experience.’ He selected Turner. ‘I have had ports here, I can tell you, that are older than my father. What are we getting tonight, Bradfield? A Cockburn? Maybe he will give us a Cruft’s. Bradfield knows all the brands. Ein richtiger Kenner: Siebkron, what is Kenner auf Englisch?’
‘Connoisseur.’
‘French!’ Saab was outraged. ‘The English have no word for Kenner? They use a French word? Bradfield! Telegram! Tonight! Sofort an Ihre Majestät! Personal recommendation top secret to the damn Queen. All Connoisseurs are forbidden. Only Kenner permitted! You are married, Mister Turner?’
Bradfield, having sat himself in Hazel’s chair, now passed the port to his left. The coaster was a double one, joined elaborately with silver cords.
‘No,’ said Turner, and it was a word thrown down hard for anyone to pick up who wanted it. Saab, however, heard no music but his own.
‘Crazy! The English should breed! Many babies. Make a culture. England, Germany and Scandinavia! To hell with the French, to hell with the Americans, to hell with the Africans. Klein-Europa, do you understand me, Turner?’ He held up his clenched fist, stiff from the elbow. ‘Tough and good. What can speak and think. I am not so damn crazy. Kultur. You know what that means, Kultur?’ He drank. ‘Fantastic!’ he cried. ‘The best ever! Number one.’ He held up his glass to the candle. ‘The best damn port I ever had. You can see the blood in the heart. Bradfield, what is it? A Cockburn for sure, but he always contradicts me.’
Bradfield hesitated, caught in a genuine dilemma. His eye turned first to Saab’s glass, then to the decanters, then to his glass again.
‘I’m delighted you enjoyed it, Karl-Heinz,’ he said. ‘I rather think, as a matter of fact, that what you are drinking is Madeira.’
Vandelung, from the french windows, began laughing. It was a cracked, vengeful laugh and it went on for a long time, while his whole body shook to the tune of it, rising and falling with the bellows of his old lungs.
‘Well now, Saab,’ he said at last, walking slowly back to the table, ‘maybe you will bring a little of your culture to the Netherlands as well.’
He began laughing again like a schoolboy, holding his knobbly hand to his mouth in order to conceal the gaps, and Turner was sorry for Saab just then, and did not care for Vandelung at all.
Siebkron had taken no port.
‘You went to Brussels today. I hope very much that you had a successful journey, Bradfield? I hear there are renewed difficulties. I am sorry. My colleagues tell me New Zealand presents a serious problem.’
‘Sheep!’ Saab cried. ‘Who will eat the sheep? The English have made a damn farm out there and now no one won’t eat the sheep.’
Bradfield’s voice was all
the more deliberate. ‘No new problem has been raised at Brussels. The questions of New Zealand and the Agricultural Fund have both been on the table for years. They present no problems that cannot be ironed out between friends.’
‘Between good friends. Let us hope you are right. Let us hope the friendship is good enough and the difficulties small enough. Let us hope so.’ Siebkron’s gaze was on Turner again. ‘So Harting is gone,’ he remarked, laying his hands flatly together in prayer. ‘Such a loss to our community. Particularly for the Church.’ And looking directly at Turner he added: ‘My colleagues tell me you know Mr Sam Allerton, the distinguished British journalist. You spoke with him today, I believe.’
Vandelung had given himself a glass of Madeira and was sampling it ostentatiously. Saab, sullen and dark faced, stared from one of them to the other, comprehending little.
‘Ludwig, what an extraordinary idea. What do you mean, “Harting is gone”? He’s on leave. I cannot imagine how all these silly rumours have got about. Poor fellow, his only crime was not to tell the Chaplain.’ Bradfield’s laughter was wholly artificial, but it was an act of courage in itself. ‘Compassionate leave. It is not like you, Ludwig, to get your information wrong.’
‘You see, Mr Turner, I have great difficulties here. For my sins, I am responsible for civil order during the demonstrations. Responsible to my Minister, you understand; and only in a modest capacity. But responsible all the same.’
His modesty was saintly. Put a ruff on him and a surplice and he could sing in Harting’s choir any time. ‘We are expecting a little demonstration on Friday. I am afraid that among certain minority groups the English are at present not very popular. You will appreciate that I don’t want anybody to get hurt; anybody at all. Naturally therefore I like to know where everybody is. So that I can protect them. But poor Mister Bradfield is often so overworked he does not tell me.’ He broke off and glanced once at Bradfield, and then no more. ‘Now I am not blaming Bradfield that he does not tell me. Why should he?’ The white hands parted in concession. ‘There are many little things and there are even one or two big things which Bradfield does not tell me. Why should he? That would not be consistent with his vocation as a diplomat. I am correct, Mister Turner?’
A Small Town in Germany Page 20