The Berlin Assignment

by Adrian de Hoog

  But the story in the secret diary is different. Gregor’s inner eye formulates questions. Everyone has a cheap apartment alright, but why does it take eight years to get one? Why in a land of plenty is it a problem to get a couple of new spokes for a bike? And, if life is so perfect, why do people want to leave? Or, why are children ill after swimming in the lake? Gregor would like to know the reason for people waiting twelve years to get a Trabi, yet Bozos seem to get them on demand. Gregor has a thousand questions.

  Gregor writes a lengthy digression in his diary on the charms of being a Bozo. Bozodom is what he calls the dauntless apparatus running the Neighbourhood’s affairs. The interplay between Bozodom and the Neighbourhood is an enduring subject for Gregor. His inner eye focuses on curiosities. Gundula quotes a telling passage from the diary in her column to help her readers get the flavour.

  Although no one is without a job, only half the people work. Although only half the people work, Bozodom’s targets are easily exceeded. Although the targets are exceeded, there is nothing in the stores to buy. Although the stores are empty, Bozodom claims everyone has much more than needed. But although everyone’s needs are surpassed, most people hate the Bozos. And although Bozodom is universally despised, it claims that more than 99.9 percent of the people vote for it.

  McEwen guffawed with delight when he unscrambled this. He lifted out a notebook, licked a pencil and copied the passage. Such insight should be kept handy. Gregor’s secret questions never stop. There is much for the inner eye to see. What is it about the world outside the Neighbourhood that is so dangerous? he asks. Why is no one allowed to see it? Or, why do Bozodom statistics show great wealth when everywhere he looks – bridges, roads, buildings – are crumbling? And why The Firm? Why does The Firm snoop into ordinary people’s lives, forcing neighbours to live in suspicion of each other? Gregor confesses to his diary that even during the jolliest moments in the campground, neighbours don’t talk openly. Not even husbands and wives, he states, dare discuss Bozodom frankly, unless they’re in a boat far out in the middle of the lake.

  One day Gregor writes excitedly to his mother. He has learned Gorby will be visiting. He tells her he aims to go and see him. Gregor hopes he can touch Gorby’s coat. A diary entry of the same date explains this. Gorby is rumoured to have a cure for certain congenital diseases which derive from Bozodom.

  The letter he sends her afterwards is even more enthusiastic. Many people touched Gorby. Gorby said great things. Everyone was inspired. This inspiration builds into fervour. Gregor is writing like crazy trying to record the changes. Gorby, it turns out, was quite the healer, because one day the Neighbourhood wakes up and finds The Cure has taken. Not only are Bozodom’s cancers eliminated, Bozodom itself is gone for good. Gregor is free to bring his diary into the open. He fills pages with spontaneously-felt, euphoric observations. Neighbours can finally talk. And they travel! All in separate directions. They travel until they drop. They know of the fabulous wealth amassed by the Relatives on the other side of the Wall and they go wild with anticipation. Nor do the Relatives skimp. They promise that a huge train full of goodies is being loaded. But more! Soon on its way will be the Miracle Machine. For forty long years the Neighbourhood awaited this.

  Gregor’s Life and Times, thus far, were spread by Gundula over about three weeks of columns. Then she informed the Gregor fans, that he was going through a major adjustment, a personal crisis of some kind. For example, he stopped writing to his mother. Perhaps he could no longer keep her happy with good news. In any event, only the diary record remains to trace the rest of the story. Yet, even Gregor’s diary is no longer crisp. Frequently the entries are a confused jumble of observations with the inner and the outer eyes mixed up. It seems the euphoria in Gregor’s Neighbourhood over the Cure began ebbing.

  Gregor claims in his diary that many in the Neighbourhood are beginning to experience terror. Before, under Bozo rule, the rules were clear. There was fear, sure, but all the same a peculiar form of security reigned. That’s gone. Some people in the Neighbourhood now actually think life is getting worse. Gregor attributes this to the Miracle Machine. Gundula speculated to her readers about this contraption. Gregor saw it, she explained, as something intangible: a phenomenon, possibly metaphysical, arising from the non-sense of being. McEwen put the paper and the dog-eared dictionary down and clapped. He loved this part. The non-sense of being! A concept typical of the Hun.

  Gundula quoted Gregor’s diary again:

  We asked our Relatives to send it in, their Miracle Machine. How badly we wanted it even though we didn’t know how it worked. They said it would set itself in motion. Up front is a hopper for raw materials. Inside, unknown miraculous processes are at work: design, competition, productivity, financing, marketing. What notions! As in alchemy! And with a pinch of labour, nifty products come out the other end.

  Gundula wrote that Gregor recorded his neighbours’ expectations. They thought they would soon be surrounded by splendour; life would be like the pictures in glossy magazines. But what really happened? The Machine arrived, as the Relatives promised, and they laid down rules for it to work. Step one was that everything in Gregor’s Neighbourhood had to be privatized. The Machine couldn’t work unless all the factories were owned by somebody – it didn’t matter whom. Then the Neighbourhood was informed certain laws and regulations were required. Without that, the Relatives argued, the Miracle Machine would not start up. Ever seen them Wessi laws? My God! They require more shelf space than the files assembled by the Firm. What next? As the Machine creaked into motion, nearly everybody lost their job. And all the things that had been free were, so to speak, thrown out the window. Clubs, sports facilities, theatres, symphony orchestras, day-care – everything disappeared. Something-for-nothing was not possible in the environment that the Miracle Machine required.

  Now, if you look objectively at what is going on, Gregor said with a touch of his old sharp perception, what arrived wasn’t a Miracle Machine at all. It was more like a Flattening Machine, a Steamroller. Many in the Neighbourhood, according to Gregor, felt fooled. The Relatives, according to a whispered Neighbourhood complaint making the rounds, kept the real Miracle Machine for themselves, while the Steamroller they sent in was designed to never stop flattening.

  Randolph McEwen loved the columns dealing with the Steamroller. He re-read them several times. Overweening pride, gaudy wealth, the what-I’ve-got-you-can’t-have attitude. A perceptive description of the Hun. Give Gundula credit. Over the top of his reading glasses McEwen looked out the window of the train. He pondered needling Graf Bornhof. Fingers drummed the pocket dictionary as he weighed options. Quite delightful, really, how Gregor heaped disdain on the Wessi’s love of rules.

  McEwen suspected that the Steamroller notion provided enjoyment to other readers too, judging from the flood of letters to the editor. True, some of them showed faint signs of hostility. Some Wessi readers, for example, argued they had worked long and hard to improve their situation. Ossis shouldn’t think they got to where they were without sacrifice. Gregor didn’t seem to appreciate this, they pointed out. Such views, however, were a mere trickle and the editor must have been undeterred, because Gundula stayed on the editorial page. Through Gregor, Gundula next explored a subject called Morbidity.

  Soon after The Cure had taken, after Gregor stopped writing bouncy letters to his mother, many of the questions he once committed to his diary were being answered. The whole Neighbourhood had answers. Actually there were now too many answers. People were overwhelmed; they had never wanted to know that much.

  An entry from the diary held McEwen’s attention.

  The Neighbourhood is beginning to realize it underestimated the corruption by the Bozos. Corruption was of various kinds. The Bozos were expert at supplying themselves with material comforts. That was known. And the Neighbourhood is now becoming aware how the attitudes of children were manipulated by the Bozos. But even this is nothing compared to learning about the pervasiveness of
The Firm. The Firm’s informers were everywhere. Model citizens, highly regarded authors, respected bishops, athletes, actresses, professors, stalwart members of the Neighbourhood. They all snooped for the Firm.

  It is morbid to know, Gregor wrote introspectively in his diary, that Bozodom was so corrupting, and more morbid still that no one did anything about it. He next claimed that the Neighbourhood, even the members who kept their distance from the Bozos, were now subjected to an all-inclusive suspicion from the Relatives. The Relatives were developing a habit of looking at everyone in the Neighbourhood as having fed at Bozodom’s trough. This, Gregor claimed, was the most morbid of the post-Cure let-downs.

  At this stage in the publication of Gregor’s Life and Times, unhappiness on the part of readers really began growing. The editor began to receive more and more unflattering letters. Wessi readers didn’t like being accused of harbouring anything so superficial as an all-inclusive suspicion. They had suspicions, they admitted, but they were nuanced. Anyway, they were paying taxes to get the Neighbourhood back on its feet and they should be allowed some indulgence. Ossi readers on the other hand repudiated letters written by the Wessis. A literary war broke out. McEwen tried to follow it, but he didn’t grasp all the deeper meanings.

  Gundula became still more controversial with an episode she called The Devil and the House of God. Gregor had done some scribbling in his diary about disturbing things he heard about the Church. He made the observation that Bozodom liked to pin medals on the chests of churchmen. Some of them were receiving so many they looked like soldiers returning from the front. Of course, the medals were not for bravery, but for cooperation. Was it administrative cooperation? Gregor speculated. Were the medals for devising a socially acceptable way of believing in God? Or was it for helping out with snooping? Did Bozodom convince churchmen to help spot troubled people? And what role did they play in the mystifying disappearance of money which members of the Neighbourhood occasionally inherited from relatives on the other side? The Church was helpful funnelling funds through the bureaucratic complications of Bozodom, yet most of it never arrived.

  We trusted in the House of God, not knowing it too was in a pact with the Devil.

  Once this section of the diary was paraphrased in Gundula’s column, the mailbag to the editor was stuffed fuller than a Christmas turkey. This time Wessis rubbed their hands with glee and certain Ossis howled. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! they shouted in their letters. The Church had been the catalyst, they said. The Church prevented the Cure from turning bloody. But others argued this missed the point. In the days of Bozodom, it would have been normal for the Church, like all the other institutions, to have developed a split personality. Why not come clean, they asked. It’s a good question; why did churchmen accept Bozodom medals?

  The editor’s phone rang off the hook. The Life and Times of Gregor was threatening to get out of hand. Letters, the editor believed, are an important part of democracy, but they shouldn’t trigger intra-tribal warfare. Time for a talk with Gundula. Was there not some way for Gregor to stop writing his diary? he asked. Couldn’t Gregor go back to writing letters to his mother? Impossible, Gundula replied. Gregor could never go back to looking at the world as in the pre-Cure days. In any event, Gundula told the editor, Gregor’s mother had passed away; his repair shop had folded. All he had left in life was scribbling in his diary, a habit he would keep until he died. This gave the editor an idea. He wished to know about Gregor’s health? Was he suffering from too much good food and drink, or from a broken heart, or something? Gundula got the point. She asked the editor to give Gregor a period of decline, a chance to look back at his not especially long life. That was possible, the editor said. In fact, it made sense.

  The days that remained for Gregor were the ones which Randolph McEwen loved best. How marvellous it would be to shove each of the final columns right under Graf Bornhof’s nose.

  After the strategy session with the editor, Gundula informed her readers that Gregor had confided to his diary that he was not well and was becoming philosophical in the way people do when they know they’re fading. Gundula wrote that Gregor wanted to get at the origins of certain things that shaped his life. He was formulating a new question. Was Bozodom something that arose from within the Neighbourhood, or was it forced on them from outside? After a struggle, Gregor concluded the answer was both yes and no.

  The Bozos, Gregor recalled, wore red socks. There seemed to be a competition for whose socks were the reddest. Bozos whose socks were more than red, whose socks were one hundred and ten percent red, acquired the finest privileges. But let’s not forget, Gregor reminded, that before the red-socked Bozos came along, when the Tribe was whole, before it broke up into the Neighbourhood and the Relatives, there had been other Bozos, brown-shirted ones. Many members of the Tribe were happy with the Bozos in brown. They loved and admired the Greatest-Bozo-Ever. Does this imply there was – or is – a certain predilection in the Tribe for rule by Bozos?

  McEwen licked his pencil nervously. His eyes took on a look of greed, like a fortune seeker at the entrance of a cave containing fabled riches. Feverishly he made more notes. What really happened after the Greatest-Bozo-Ever lost the war and the Tribe was split? This was the question Gregor addressed, as he neared the end. The Relatives, he observed, were given a few quick lessons in how to run a pluralist democracy by their opponent who thrashed them in the war. The former enemy behaved honourably, like a Teacher. The Relatives, devastated and hungry for a better life, learned their democracy lessons quickly. Furthermore, the Teacher spent money to help democracy sprout roots. The Relatives and the Teacher, suddenly like-minded, became close friends.

  But in the Neighbourhood, the victor was a Bully who had been wearing red socks for years. The Bully insisted that the Neighbourhood become his spitting image. A few people were tasked to make the likeness complete. It’s interesting to note, Gregor said in parenthesis, that the red-socked Bozos aped the methods not only of the Bully, but also of the brown-shirts. Both Bozodoms relied on a Firm to keep a close eye on the people. Their soldiers marched in the same odd way, legs flung high up in the air before the boots were smashed down on the pavement. Both systems insisted that photographs of children should always show them smiling in a hearty, wholesome way. And, in both cases, people with normal aspirations, such as wanting to get out of the country, were shot.

  What does this add up to? It is arguable, Gregor explained humbly, that many members of the Tribe wanted the brown shirts. But the red-socks were imposed and almost no one in the Neighbourhood wanted them.

  Freedom was a gift to the Relatives, but the Neighbourhood had to free itself from the red socks. Freedom fought for – and gained – is of a rarer type, more precious, less likely to be squandered, than when brought in on a platter.

  These, Gundula informed her readers, were Gregor’s last written words.

  The end, she wrote, came quickly. Gregor asked to be buried in Potsdam, on a hill overlooking a fine old palace. For centuries this hilltop has been dotted by a collection of fake ruins. Gregor’s gravestone, Gundula wrote, is camouflaged amongst the ruins. But it’s there. Momentarily confusing for visitors is the fact that the name Gregor Donner Reich is not chiselled into the granite. He had thought about it, he said just before he died, and he didn’t believe his name was too important. The forty years or so he had been around had been melancholy and sometimes down-right ridiculous. These were the qualities he wanted expressed on his gravestone. And that’s how the inscription came to read:Gloomy Daft Remains.

  McEwen put the clippings carefully back into his briefcase and stared at the passing Bavarian countryside. He had experienced a sense of loss when Gregor died. During the weeks that Gregor ruled his corner of the opinion page, McEwen had eagerly opened the paper every day to begin translating Gundula’s latest instalment. Even though Gregor’s Life and Times were over, force of habit still made McEwen turn the pages – to see what Gundula would be turning her attention to next. But Gund
ula was no more, at least not on the political pages. It was as if she too had died.

  McEwen stiffened. What was he doing? Getting sentimental over Gundula? No matter how good a journalist she was, she was still in collusion with the consul. No matter where and how well she might be hiding, a knock on her front door would have to come. McEwen sighed. He hoped she would cooperate. How splendid it would be if she agreed to round out the evidence against Friend Tony. Once he was out of the picture, repatriated by the Beavers, she could be reprieved. With her wit and spirit and ability to sting, she should be left free to roam.

  The Munich hotel, with the indoor tropical garden as breakfast nook, was no longer affordable for Berlin Station, so McEwen spent the night in a rooming house not far away. Early next morning he walked to the hotel and loitered in reception. On time, a silent predator, the Mercedes 600 outfitted with aerials on the roof, slid up the drive. The meta-diplomat descended. A driver jumped out to open the back door. McEwen nodded a greeting in the direction of the chauffeur and sank like a potentate into the car. The door shut with a gentle thud. Passers-by looked on. Silly oglers, he thought, presenting them with a serene silhouette.