The Berlin Assignment

by Adrian de Hoog

  As Checkpoint Charlie neared, Günther Rauch opened his arms forwards. “As I see it,” he said, gesturing towards the barriers, “if I can become troublesome enough they’ll jail me permanently until the day when they’ll sell me to the West. They do that to my type. They doom us to a capitalist way of life.” After more steps he muttered under his breath. “Alright. Let’s rehearse our lines. If they press me, I’ll tell them you urged me to become a good citizen of the Great Decaying Republic, while you tell them I opened your eyes to the magnificence of Marx.”

  Hanbury loved it. “Bullshit baffles brains,” he cried spontaneously, remembering the expression from Saskatoon where he once heard leftist students in debate.

  Günther Rauch ignored this. “If they try to recruit you when they interrogate, you’re on your own,” he said. “I can’t give you any pointers there. The next time you visit, if I think you’ve started wearing some kind of Stasi medal on the inside of your jacket, I won’t ask any questions. I just won’t say much anymore. Those invisible decorations are much in fashion around here nowadays. Everybody wants one.”

  As it was, Hanbury experienced little delay getting out and a few weeks later he was back on Alexanderplatz.

  “Get a visit?” he asked Günther Rauch, looking him over for fading bruises.

  “Sure. The both of them. They didn’t appreciate my tone of voice. Three days and nights in the Stasi lair. I have to say it, the interrogation business was up. I had to wait my turn. Some strays from West Berlin kept whispering all night about their rights. That’s the problem with you Westerners, you’ve got rarified concepts of law. You’re out of touch with human nature.”

  Hanbury suspected this was just a prelude for another afternoon of theories about the human condition, the economic causes of misery, the dialectical process, and the inevitability of proletarian revolutions. But the lecture didn’t start just yet.

  The bearded iconoclast wanted to air a few practical issues first. “I told the Stasi you’re interested in Marx, that I was trying to win you over. I didn’t change my tune. It’s important in situations like that to think of something simple and keep repeating it, like a nursery rhyme, so that eventually they get it. Well, what about you? Did you get a visit? Did they win you over?”

  Hanbury shook his head. “Not even a nibble.”

  Günther Rauch examined him closely, but if he had suspicions he dismissed them. He switched effortlessly to a treatise on the nature of ownership. “The Stasi think they own me and you and everybody else. But I ask, can anyone own anything, since we don’t meet a basic requirement for real ownership, namely, everlasting existence. When you die, what you have goes to someone else. Nicht wahr? Isn’t that right? That’s a telling fact. That’s why the Stasi think they can own people. They’re convinced they’ll be around forever. Interestingly, the Nazis thought that way too.”

  From here Günther Rauch’s line of argument developed randomly as he laid bare once more the underpinning elements of fascism, national socialism, communism, totalitarianism, stalinism, proletarian struggles and the politics of protest. “We’ve got that here, all rolled up together in a couple of run-down neighbourhoods. I tell you, you’re standing in a test tube. This is the spot where theories get proven. It’s nice being an actor in one abysmal experiment after another.”

  Hanbury had a sense of being at a dark play, but for the second time. There was no growth to Günther Rauch’s thinking. He said the same thing over and over again. Still, Hanbury liked Rauch’s flamboyance, the arms spreading to make a point, the balled hand punching the air to show he meant it. Marching along on drab East Berlin pavement, Hanbury spent more hours listening.

  When Hanbury left that second time, once more by way of Checkpoint Charlie, he was detained. The questions came fast. Why did he meet Günther Rauch the first time? Why did he come a second time? What precisely did Günther Rauch have to say? Hanbury had difficulty capturing the essence of all the arguments Günther Rauch poured out, so he lamely repeated they talked first about Marx, then again about Marx, and finally still more about Marx. It was all noted down. After several hours of intimidation the same questions were asked again. Mindful of Günther Rauch’s nursery rhyme argument, he repeated the same answers. Eventually they let him go.

  “They sure kept you a spell,” a crew-cut American checking his passport said. “Saw ’em haul you in. That was 17:49 and now it’s 21:11. Do something dumb? Three hours is standard for folks that do stuff out there that ain’t smart.” Hanbury cheekily replied the time had been used for careful deliberations about whether he deserved the Order of Lenin. The American didn’t think that was funny. “Don’t fool with them sons of bitches, boy,” he quietly advised. Hanbury nodded appreciation. Günther Rauch was entertaining, but of East Berlin he’d had his fill.

  And now, sailing along on the thick soles of his new shoes and crossing Unter den Linden, the consul almost imagined the polyester knits were after him again. At one point he even made the same slow turn as years before on Alexanderplatz. He thought he saw Sturm in the distance turning his back. But that was crazy. Times had changed.

  Penetrating Friedrichstrasse southwards Hanbury ran into absolute devastation. It forced him to revise all he’d imagined about how new cities arise from where others stood. Poor Friedrichstrasse! It was no longer merely sullen, as when he walked there with Günther Rauch. Friedrichstrasse, Hanbury thought, was a wild science-fiction scene.

  In the past, when he’d seen it through Günther Rauch’s lens on the human condition, he learned that before the Allied bombing Friedrichstrasse had been a vibrant, restless Berlin street. Up and down its length, life spun around in whirlwinds. Cafés, entertainment houses, pubs. Friedrichstrasse was spicy, parts were scruffy, it never slept. The city lots were small and the owners numerous, which was why, in Günther Rauch’s view, it was restless. Hundreds of different decisions on how to eke a living from the street constantly reset the stage. In prewar days Friedrichstrasse worked, Günther Rauch theorized, because it was a place for people. After the war’s carpet bombing, Friedrichstrasse was first a river of rubble, then a place where Soviet and American tanks stood nose to nose at Checkpoint Charlie. As for the future, Günther Rauch had said, look at it, look at the arid, the destitute thinking.

  Now, Hanbury decided, the thinking was different again. The street was a self-contained tumultuous world of robots. Machines with jaws at the end of pneumatic necks – mechanized dinosaurs – were perched high on mountains of rubble. The long necks swayed, the jaws sought vulnerable spots in a defenceless socialist architectural quarry and bit away. All along Friedrichstrasse the jaws clacked, probed under roofs, punched through walls, pecked at corners, ripped into the masonry, chewed through cables, nibbled at the edges of exposed floors. Debris plunged down. Below, robotic beetles, bulldozers with reinforced steel roofs, heaved rubble into serpentine lines of waiting trucks. A thunderous scene. Total demolition. A grey-brown mist rose from the steady cataract of bricks. Tiny men with fire-hoses scrambled around, spraying water on the rubble, trying to smother the dust.

  Hanbury took in the scene. The spirit of Günther Rauch suddenly sprang up to explain:Mammon is speaking. His version of the bombs. His legacy of death and disfigurement in Berlin.

  Elsewhere, the rubble had been hauled away and power shovels reached down into soft sand. The roots of Friedrichstrasse’s next instalment would be planted deep. Further along, the excavation was finished. The cacophony here was of drills and saws, cement pumps gurgling and rivets being hammered into steel. High above, the cranes drew elegant, slow circles, perilously passing each other, sweeping out great arcs, as if to bless the superstructures rising from the earth.

  Günther Rauch crowded in once more and Hanbury began asking questions. What were the chances that these new, colossal constructions would bring exotic acts of self-expression, of spice and life, back into this latest remake of the street? It dawned on Hanbury that for all the swagger of developers and archite
cts, disaster on a grand scale was creeping into Friedrichstrasse. Nearing Checkpoint Charlie’s leftovers, he turned for a last view of the ballet of the cranes. What, he wondered, would Günther Rauch have said about all that?

  It began to drizzle. Hanbury made his way back to Leipzigerstrasse, then east past the Rote Rathaus to Alexanderplatz. The TV tower stood decapitated by the weather; the whole square was veiled in grey. A bench, like the one from which Günther Rauch first targeted him, offered a view of not much more than just the fog thickening. Hanbury sat down, not noticing the fog, not noticing anything. He was seeing other scenes. His mind focussed on them one after another: Müller pouring brandy in his study; the Chief of Protocol’s optimism in a high-ceilinged office; the consulate staff fussing about his comfort. And Sabine appeared too. He couldn’t help it. In an imaginary dialogue Hanbury asked her what she thought about Friedrichstrasse. Had she by now seen the famous street?

  Back then when they were lovers she hadn’t. Domestic bliss was the order of the day on Savignyplatz. Few things marred it except that, always just below the surface, Sabine had a hatred of the Wall and the communist regime behind it. She hated the Saxonian accents at both ends of the transit corridors to the West. She abhorred the way they used machine guns there as instruments of instruction, how a casual gesture of the gun barrel meant the back seat of a car would have to be removed to prove no East German citizens were being smuggled, how a subtle look of complaint from the Westerners in transit – maybe nothing more than a slight hardening of the eyes – would make the machine gun point in the direction of a parking lot full of other defiant West Berliners, and how for four, five, six hours they had the pleasure of being whimsically subjugated to the infinite power of the Great Decaying Republic. By the time Sabine moved into the Savignyplatz apartment, she had enough grievances against the East to last a lifetime. Tony for his part was curious about the feel of things on the other side. He wanted her to come along. Let’s go have a look. For fun. Sabine looked at him as if he’d lost his marbles. So he went alone.

  He didn’t really understand Sabine’s closed mind towards East Berlin. In other ways she didn’t seem shy at all about new experiences. Take those of the bed. She was unburdened there, free and eager for innovation. During the day she was the leader too, trekking off with him to a never-ending feast of museums. The city was even richer when it came to pubs. Hanbury liked visiting them, but little by little Sabine began losing interest in the pubs. More and more she preferred that they spend evenings in the apartment. In between reading novels she began paging through catalogues, always asking Tony whether he liked what she was looking at. But what could he tell her about furniture, crockery and a thousand other household items he’d never thought about?

  The East was a taboo subject. But so was the West, the far West, the West as far away as Indian Head. It was not possibly to talk to Sabine about the place he came from. Any existence he might have had before the one with her appeared unimaginable for Sabine. That made it seem as if he didn’t come from anywhere. He was ready to admit there wasn’t much to say about his background. Growing up in Indian Head, plus a few years of little consequence in Saskatoon, paled in comparison to being raised in West Berlin on the front line of the Cold War. But although his pre-Berlin existence wasn’t much, it wasn’t nothing either. After all, he survived fifteen years of unrelenting music instruction courtesy of his mother on the only grand piano in Indian Head. As for global politics, true, Indian Head was no spy capital, but you could argue the Cold War was visible there too. American B-52s with bellies full of nuclear bombs lumbered by every day at 40,000 feet, heading north to their patrol routes around the Soviet Union. It didn’t seem right that all this pre-Berlin experience should always remain unmentionable. Could anyone blame young Hanbury for asking himself – since sharing on Savignyplatz was simultaneously being embraced and rejected – where the housekeeping experiment was heading?

  Questions like this accumulated. One day their combined weight was suddenly too heavy. Things tilted. A certainty came to Hanbury the student so quick it shock-froze his insides. His heart ceased beating. He uttered a deep, visceral groan. He knew absolutely he had to leave. Too many unmentionables were being stacked up in a dark corner of the relationship.

  Thinking how Sabine would react if he told her made him sick. It would be easier to disappear. He paid three months rent, packed a suitcase, wrote a short note, abandoned his stereo and fled. Years later, he continued to rationalize that the misery he created on Savignyplatz was small compared to what had been prevented. Continuing in this same, self-comforting vein, Hanbury convinced himself that in youth there should be allowance for at least one callous act, especially if lessons are drawn. But deep down he knew this was self-deceit. A coward stays a coward, even if he wants to make amends.

  On foggy Alexanderplatz Hanbury’s mind, still focussed on the inner stage, saw the coward slink away, only to re-materialize as consul. In the next scene Frau Carstens offered him words of comfort. He’d mentioned to her the cramped, depressing little bungalow located on a narrow wooded lane, squeezed in between the Grunewald and the exhibition grounds. “When you get your things,” she had said, “the house will feel better. You’ll get used to it.” She was right. His things made a difference. The magnificent stereo was set up in the front room. A sofa had been crowded into a corner and an arm chair placed before the speakers. When sound leapt out of the giant speakers, the little room was a balloon filled to the bursting point.

  The daily routine contributed to blanking out the bungalow’s shabbiness. Arriving back from the social functions where diplomats had stood around like a defeated football team, Hanbury would eat quickly in the kitchen. Then he’d grab a bottle of champagne, stuff a few discs into the changer and sink into the lumpy chair. Rachmaninov, Mahler, Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven. They transported him into a boundless inner sphere.

  On the dripping bench between trees rendered indistinct by fog, Frau Carstens faded out. Earl Gifford, crack administrator, now ruled the scene. Waving an arm he swept the concept of bungalow aside and, snapping fingers, made a lovely villa appear out of nothing. Earl Gifford was out to prove the dictum that every top administrator is a world class conjurer in disguise. The consul had studied a piece of paper from headquarters that authorized acquisition of a residence. He noted it had been approved by someone fairly senior. “Incredible,” he had said to Gifford. “How did you do it?” Gifford beamed, eyes rising to his halo, but he kept the mechanics of his great act a secret. The consul agreed that the administrator should act on the instructions received. “Let me know when you think you have something I should look at.” “I’ll need occasional access to the diplomatic seal,” Gifford replied quickly. “For legalising documents. To make everything bona fide. To speed things up. Is there a way I can get at it? In case there’s something urgent when you’re away?” Hanbury thought for a moment; he wavered. “It would be a shame if an opportunity were spoilt merely because we didn’t react fast,” Gifford added. The consul mulled this over too. “How about this approach, Tony,” the administrator offered. “If you’re away I check it out with headquarters. If they say – fine, go ahead, use the seal – that would be my authority. I believe that would safeguard all the interests.” The consul nodded “I suppose that would work. But inform me.” Gifford gave assurances that would naturally be the case. The consul had then taken the seal from a strongbox in his office, put it in a locked cabinet in Frau Carstens’s room, and issued Gifford a second key.

  The scene with Gifford ended. Hanbury on the wet bench, feeling optimistic, lifted himself out of the long reverie. Once there is a proper residence, he thought, I’ll invite the Chief of Protocol for dinner. He planned a party for Müller too, a birthday party for his eighty-fifth. And if Günther Rauch ever surfaced, he would be a regular visitor, maybe stay for weekends. Imagine the creativity of the iconoclast’s thinking in the opulence of a diplomatic setting.

  Irrespective of that futu
re ambience of comfort and magnificence, his current one, the soggy bench, was becoming uncomfortable. The drizzle hadn’t stopped. Hanbury, wringing wet and getting cold, got up and made his way to the S-bahn to take a train back to Charlottenburg.

  Sturm, frustrated, missed that train, but the next one came fast enough and he jumped on. As far as he was concerned, the consul could get mugged, abducted, taken hostage or sent out of the country in a chest. He had had enough, not of the weather, but of ghosts. Determined to have it out, the soaked chauffeur made his way back to the office.

  It was after hours and quiet. Gifford, in near darkness, was still working. A table lamp lit up his desk. Photos and dossiers of fine houses were piled up in the area of light.

  “I’m no good at this,” Sturm announced, sitting down opposite Gifford in the shadow. His hair was dripping. “I’m not cut out to play Stasi.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No.”

  “Quite sure?”

  “He didn’t come up to shake my hand if that’s what you mean. Sorry, I’m not doing it again.”

  “Security, Sturm. The Turkish consul has two bodyguards, the Israeli three.” Gifford, leaning back, removed his reading glasses and began chewing on the ends.

  “Then he should have a real one,” Sturm replied. “I’m a driver. I’d break my arms just taking on a karate position. Anyhow, bodyguards don’t sneak around.”

  “I tried to get him to take you along. He refused. We’re responsible for his well-being.”

  Sturm shook his head. He didn’t think the consul faced threats. “It was about as eventful out there as watching a pensioner in a park. He walks down Friedrichstrasse gawking at the cranes as if they’re pigeons on the fly, trots up Leipziger Strasse infatuated by all those dog-eared socialist flats, then arrives at Alexanderplatz, which has disappeared in the rain and where he looks around as if he’s seeing the eighth wonder of the world. I’m behind a tree trying to be inconspicuous. The rain keeps coming down. What does he do? He sits down on a bench, not twitching for an hour. Only his expression changes. First a grin, like he’s taking a bath with a girlfriend. A silly look comes next, sort of satisfied, as if someone’s massaging his behind. Then he hangs his head as if repenting for a crime. Why all that sitting in the rain? It scared me. It was spooky. It sent shivers up my back.” Sturm shook his head gravely. “It’s like that all the time. Everyday I think I’ve got a ghost in the back seat. It’s getting to me. It’s not my cup of tea. I’m not doing it again. He doesn’t need a body guard.”