The Berlin Assignment

by Adrian de Hoog

  Hanbury, in contrast, was serene as he left the car. Gripping him was nostalgia. The citadel, the river, the locks, the foot paths, Sabine’s sunny voice instructing him in Spandau history. He recalled how, when it came to the history of her own time, her voice hardened. She described the day the Wall went up around the western edge of Spandau not far from where she lived. Through barbed wire they watched the torment of neighbours on the other side. Then came concrete blocks and the view – and sense of neighbour – disappeared. The sinister permanence of the Wall made everyone feel violated. The communists, Sabine said bitterly to Tony, had sealed her in. “Maybe not sealed in,” he replied, pointing at a bright side. “Maybe the other side got sealed out.” Sabine didn’t argue. “Sealed in. Sealed out,” she said with resignation. “Sealed off.” Hanbury wasn’t much affected by such local history. He enjoyed Sabine doing the talking as they walked along the river. In their cocoon he liked the feel of their arms around each other and of their hips moving as one. And now, walking through unchanged streets to where she then lived, still hearing their past merriment, he was thinking of phrasing an apology.

  At a gate with a familiar, small bronze sign,Albert Müller – Rechtsanwalt und Notar, he pressed a bell. At first, no answer. He pressed again, longer. A speaker built into the gatepost crackled. “Schon gut. Schon gut. Alright, alright. No need to bring the house down. Who is it?” Hanbury leaned forward to the gate. “Albert? Tony Hanbury hier.” There was a silence, then Müller came back on. “Mensch! Tony! Alter Knallkopp. Was machst du hier?” Hanbury didn’t recall being called a knucklehead in the early days, but he recognized Müller’s tone as a warm hello. The old man hadn’t changed. An electronic release buzzed. Hanbury went forwards. The front door opened. A ramrod figure lit up from behind hovered in silhouette. They viewed each other in the darkness. When Müller said, “You expect me to serve drinks in the cold? Come in. Come in.” Hanbury knew that at least the second of his olive branches had been delivered.

  The furniture stood in the same places; the house still smelled of air that should be changed. Müller was timeless too, except his voice had a little more sand in it, an old man’s net of tiny veins had crept to the surface of his cheeks, and the eyes stood deeper, though they were undimmed and vigorous, as full as ever with impertinence. Müller was as Hanbury remembered him. Unable to suppress his feelings, he took Müller by the shoulders, as if their roles had been reversed, as if the old man was the prodigal son unexpectedly returned.

  “So,” Müller said, looking him over, “there you are. Resurrected from the dead. Did the devil send you with advice for me on what the after-life is like? You almost came too late. A lot of people think I’m at the end.” But the old man’s shoulders felt solid, far from ready to give up. Other elderly people Hanbury had known, not as old as Müller, but weaker, were long gone – a mother, a father, a neighbour called Keystone, a colleague or two. “You’re looking fit,” he said.

  “Exercise and alcohol. Plenty of both. That’s the secret.” Müller led Hanbury into his study where a lit desk lamp showed he’d been working. “What are you doing here?” He asked, motioning to a sofa. “You should have written.”

  “I was worried if I wrote you wouldn’t open the door,” Hanbury said. Nothing had changed in the study either. He’d spent hours here listening to Müller.

  The old man opened a cabinet and took out a bottle. “If you had, I likely would have arranged to be away. When you stopped sending me birthday wishes, I wrote you off. You’re still written off, but that could change. You haven’t answered me. What are you doing in Berlin?” He poured two brandies. “Prost.” When Hanbury described he’d been assigned to Berlin, Müller raised his glass in genuine surprise. “Konsul? Ich gratuliere.” But the voice was already acquiring a familiar undertone and an eyebrow began rippling with irreverence. Hanbury recognized the signs. He experienced them first when he scarcely knew Sabine’s father, when he had brought her home after a party and she had invited him in, first into the quiet house and, half an hour later, from the carpet on the study floor into her accommodating bed. In the middle of the night he went to use the bathroom. Tiptoeing back to the comfort of Sabine’s warmth, Müller came out of his bedroom. The two collided. Both were naked. “It’s you,” the father said, scarcely taken aback. “Staying nights now too? Lovely pyjamas. See-throughs, I see. Present from a girlfriend?” He disappeared into the bathroom. Sabine giggled when her devastated lover described what happened. “He likes you,” she said. Tony was worried that Sabine’s stepmother, a shadowy figure that stalked the family from a distance, would learn he was spending a good part of the night a mere two walls over, but Sabine assured him her father wouldn’t tell. The stepmother found out all the same. Some days later she read telltale signs on sheets going in for washing. A violent scene followed, the stepmother shrieking, the stepdaughter shouting. Sabine moved out, into Tony’s Savignyplatz apartment.

  Back then Müller took it all philosophically, and he was philosophic now. He asked where Hanbury’s last ten years were spent. “Your last letter was from some place on the edge of the known world. Kuala Lumpur I think. I assumed a snake got you, or a revolution, or that you fell into the clutches of an Asian woman.” He tipped his brandy glass convincingly, emptying it with one smooth gulp.

  “It was tough going,” agreed the diplomatic adventurer, “I was lucky to survive. Sorry I stopped writing, Albert. No good reason for it.”

  “Don’t have a breakdown over it,” the prickly old man said. “I didn’t consider it a loss.”

  The letter writing to Berlin went on for fifteen years. Hanbury wrote his mentor more often than home. Müller’s replies were short and factual – a legal tone – except when he described his marathons. Details were always included on the last and the next race. Claiming he’d soon win, he’d write:It’s in the bag. All I need to do is train. A postscript in one letter informed Hanbury that Sabine had married. Hanbury recalled it gave him a shock, a sense of loss, a dull ache that lasted weeks. He had studied the postscript closely. One never knows, he may turn out to be a stand-out as a son-in-law, but I won’t hold my breath.

  His own letters had been long. He wrote about being third, second and finally first secretary. He had interesting things to write about: other continents, pathetic countries, squalid cities. He reported visiting Inca shrines, sailing in a dhow on the Arabian Sea, walking in the Himalayas. He described music pouring out of stereo speakers into his tropical garden in Malaysia. When a Mahler symphony was playing and the kettle drums began, he wrote, all birds big and small took flight. A spectacle! Music and nature in a clinch.

  Hanbury was unable to write home in the same way. Letters there were short. His father’s only interest was to bring an end to prairie dust storms while his mother was slowly going insane. Writing Keystone, the family neighbour was easier. Keystone, a railroad engineer, liked to hear about trains. It didn’t matter where the trains were – Asia, Africa, Indochina – anywhere. Hanbury made trains the subject of those letters. In Japan he rode the Bullet Train. I think we touched 200 miles an hour, he wrote Keystone. Was that baby moving! Keystone wrote right back: Imagine doing that here! There’s a dip just before Broadview and with that speed…on the way up…I sure would love to see a fast freight get airborne. Keep riding them bullet trains, son. We always knew you’d be a fast mover. Keystone retired soon afterwards. The next time Hanbury was home he saw the railroader wasn’t adjusting well to doing nothing after forty-eight years working for Canadian Pacific. During that visit Hanbury realized it was a toss-up who would be the first to go, his mad mother or the retired neighbour.

  “There were advantages,” Müller was saying slowly, “not getting letters from you anymore. It saved time. Wading through them sometimes ruined my schedule. Uwe wondered what was keeping me. What was I supposed to tell him? That I was delayed on account of reading a letter? He would have barred me from The Tankard. Also it took pressure off my shelf space.” He gestured to th
e rows of legal files crammed up to the ceiling. Hanbury looked up and down and noticed two framed photographs on the far end of a middle shelf. He didn’t recall seeing photographs in the Müller household before. Two women in their prime. He recognized Müller’s second wife. In the picture she was staring into the distance at something, an intangible devastation, just as she did when he first met her. The troubled look dominated an otherwise pretty face. The second woman could have been Sabine – blond hair, high cheeks, moody eyes, a slight pursing of the mouth – an exquisite, smouldering beauty. “You had lovely wives,” Hanbury said.

  “Usually the women outlast the men,” shrugged Müller. “Bad luck for me. Number two passed away four years ago.” He paused, nonchalantly sipping brandy. “I can tell you about her now since she’s no longer with us. I married her after Sabine’s mother passed away because the infant needed care. From the beginning they didn’t get along. I knew early on marrying again was a big mistake. By the way, I seldom saw Sabine after you left. Only when her stepmother was gone did she start coming around again. Now it’s every week. It’s like having part of my first wife back. You never married, or did you?”

  Müller had never posed personal questions, not once during all the times they drank together. Nor had his letters inquired why Hanbury abandoned Sabine. Was the old man working up to asking for an explanation? Hanbury lamely replied he always doubted he’d be able to make marriage last. “Well, it’s none of my business,” Müller said.

  “I never wanted to cause misery.”

  “Very noble. Have another brandy.” Müller poured one for his visitor and one for himself. “Another question. Why did you upset Sabine the day before yesterday?”

  “She told you I called?”

  “No. All I saw was a volcano ready to erupt. Her mother got that way sometimes. I learned not to stir when things were that explosive. Something was causing it. I doubted it was her husband. When you announced yourself just now, I knew.”

  Hanbury was silent. He sat forward on the sofa, studying the carpet, as if seeing the whole Savignyplatz experience with Sabine pass for another review.

  “Her face was set in stone,” Sabine’s father said. “Remember that look? I couldn’t help remark someone would soon be mistaking her for a pillar of granite. She turned on me I tell you.”

  “I shouldn’t have called her. I thought she might be over it. How is she?”

  “The same as when I last wrote you ten years ago. She bore a son whose second name is after me. Once a week we have an afternoon together. Things are as she likes them, orderly and routine. We always go to museums. A different one every time.”

  “Museums? Of course. Always the museums.” Hanbury couldn’t count all the museums Sabine had dragged him to.

  “What else? The last one was full of Casper David Friedrich paintings. Typical Sabine scenes. I think she likes the way he does clouds. They’re sort of tumultuous. I wanted to cheer her up. I was looking at one and she asked me if I liked it. I told her I liked the frame, delicately carved, lovely, quite wide, big for a small picture. I believed a Rembrandt might have set the frame off a little better – but only marginally. For that frame, on the whole, I thought Casper David had done a good job, and I told her that.” Müller spread his hands, as if to ask what else he could have said? “I admit, she laughed. You know how she gets indignant but doesn’t really mean it. She was better for a while, but when we parted, I could see she was hardening again. I guess you got to her.”

  Hanbury nodded. When Sabine stood before a painting, he remembered, she left this world and slipped into another. Going to a museum took her hours. She loved soft, gentle, sentimental pictures, scenes she wanted to live in herself. She was already keen on Caspar David Friedrich then. Explosive sunsets, opalescent dawns, women motionlessly studying maritime horizons, the human species dwarfed by nature, ruins – the works of man decaying – presented as odes. Spirituality on canvas, was how she summed it up. Staring at his brandy glass, Hanbury remembered she would stand transfixed for fifteen minutes before a single painting, by which time he had happily scanned the whole salon. Distantly, mechanically, his inner eye remaining on Sabine, he began to answer Müller’s question about what had happened to him in the years since he stopped writing.

  “So your father died,” was Müller’s reaction when Hanbury said the soil scientist passed away while he was on posting in Kuala Lumpur. “That proves it happens. Something to keep in mind.” The old man had finished a second brandy and gave his guest the impatient, twisting hand motion of a glass going bottoms up.

  “To moderation,” Hanbury said, emptying his.

  Müller did the refills and explained why he switched from running the marathon to cycling. “Eagles soar.” He spread his arms like a giant bird gliding. The roads of Brandenburg were improving, he said, and the annual race for seniors from the Oder River to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin was soon coming up. “It’s called To Olympia. I plan to win. I’m even training for it.”

  “I guess you have the time,” Hanbury said innocently. This rubbed the old man the wrong way. Provoked, like a startled parrot, he cried, Time for it? Time for it? Sorry, but he had no time. He had never been busier. For him, German reunification came at a bad time. Just as his practice was drifting to an end and he looked forward to sport full-time, the chaos of East Germany hit his desk. “Why couldn’t they have waited ten more years to unify the fatherland? I’d be gone by then. All because East Germans wanted to travel and see Paris, or have afternoon naps on the Costa Brava, or pay a fortune for a cup of coffee with a view of Mont Blanc. Pah!”

  It was the East German property mess, the old man explained, that had derailed his retirement plans. “Millions of claims. When you think about it, a country that produces such a mess deserves to sink away.” He described the problem, which began before the war when the Nazis expropriated the belongings of Jews. After the war the Russians in their zone made things worse, nationalizing industry, rearranging land ownership, throwing the Prussian Junkers out. After that, when East Germany came into being, private property became a truly chaotic notion. Enemies of the state lost it, party comrades acquired it. “And now all those original owners want back what they say is theirs,” Müller said with a lawyer’s dispassion. “But who is the original owner? It’s complicated, a nightmare. Only Germans can create such a mess and then make a maze of rules to disentangle it. It interferes with cycling, I tell you.”

  Why at his age, Hanbury wanted to know, would he still be taking an interest in other people’s property problems?

  “It’s an addiction,” Müller admitted. “A temptation. He began to talk about a case he had been working on, a Jewish businessman who saw the writing on the wall in ’34 and sold his business to an Aryan friend before moving to Buenos Aires.

  Müller was a different man, Hanbury decided, when he was the lawyer. The tongue-in-cheek undertone to all he said disappeared; his expression lost its irreverence. As a lawyer, even with a few brandies in him, he was serious, incisive. “The Aryan was no friend of the Nazis,” Müller continued. “He had nothing but contempt for the SS. So he was detained, tried by a Nazi court, convicted and sent to Buchenwald, his property taken from him. He survived the labour camp. When the war was over he went home. He decided he didn’t like the Communists anymore than the Fascists. In the early fifties he quit East Berlin, automatically losing his property again. It’s an age-old scam. Create a society people don’t want and when they leave, declare what’s theirs yours.”

  Hanbury looked at Müller’s legal files, some of them slanting over as if they were tired. He was tired. With the brandy in his system, he’d soon be slanting too. His mind was too slow now to consider a society in conflict, sixty years of unstable public order and endless internal conflicts over bits of land. “A German saga,” he yawned.

  “Exactly,” declared the lawyer. “Full of unexpected winners and unexpected losers and it keeps me busy.” He pointed the bottle towards Hanbury. “Yo
u’re falling behind.”

  Hanbury asked Müller about Sabine’s husband. The old man stiffened, saying he had nothing against history, nor the people who study it, but Werner Schwartz dabbled in strange things. Occultism, theosophy, Aryan supremacy, that sort of thing. Müller with a motion of rejection, waved all that garbage away and gave a long explanation why even an objective search for knowledge, historical research, or whatever, could in some areas go too far.

  They talked, and the level of the brandy in the bottle continued to go down. They sank deeper into the sofas too, chins boring into chests. Müller began to reminisce about the Dorf Krug, the Village Tankard, where they had often gone, Sabine sometimes joining them. Did Tony remember the time when Uwe, the owner, had dared her to down a schnapps in one gulp and how, maybe to prove something, she’d thrown it back, how swallowing it had hit her hard, her face turning crimson and eyes filling with water? Yes, Hanbury remembered. She had coughed violently and he, feeling somehow guilty, had run to get a glass of water. “Uwe was unperturbed,” Müller continued. “I recall he advised she’d made a good start. He urged her to keep it up, that she’d improve with practice.”

  Hanbury asked, “Is Uwe still around?” “Uwe passed away,” sighed Müller. “Kidney failure. We talked shortly before the end. He was a convert then. He tried to convince me of the senselessness of drinking. One drink after another, Müller mimicked Uwe’s gravelly baritone , all your life, all to forget the old lady. But when you get home, in that state, you see her double.” Müller and Hanbury chuckled remembering Uwe. “His son-in-law runs The Tankard now. Hey…” Müller studied Hanbury’s glass. “…you’ll never see double today if you don’t get going. What are you waiting for? Evaporation?”

  The brandy bottle continued to pass between them, as if they were sailors thirsting after a long voyage. At last Hanbury insisted he ought to get going. In the hallway, by the front door, they stood and swayed. Müller mumbled a complaint about the damage done to next day’s training. “Sorry,” Hanbury fretted. “Sorry. Very sorry. I stayed too long.” This exasperated the old man. “You stayed away too long,” he bristled. “And don’t come again, not if you insist on snivelling.” Hanbury nodded heavily, before Müller, like a nightclub bouncer, shoved him out the door.