The Berlin Assignment

by Adrian de Hoog

  SUMMER DOLDRUMS

  “My dear Alex, if you really want to know more,” McEwenwas telling Graf Bornhof on the phone, “do come to Berlin.”

  The graf had called McEwen to thank him for the photo. He had examined it, he said, and had some questions. McEwen, picking up signals of worry behind the graf’s casual tone, pressed his advantage. Graf Bornhof paused, then said he’d be on a plane the next day.

  A picture is not only worth a thousand words, McEwen thought as he rang off, a picture concentrates the mind, even the Hun’s.

  He was quite a picture himself, a perfect picture of a merry uncle. McEwen was engaged, as he liked to say, in pleasurable, last minute, pre-retirement planning. And with Graf Bornhof consenting to visit, the send-off would be grand. McEwen sang a Tra-la-la, until his crusty vocal chords tightened up and the notes flipped into a squeal. That made him giggle. The new file – his final file – had been thickening nicely. He was undecided on one point only: whether to put the photograph from a last and loyal spectator in Potsdam on the front cover as a stirring opening, or at the very back, as a finale. Technology nowadays, thought McEwen. Remarkable how little cameras take pictures from inside big cameras. He sat at his kitchen table paging through the dossier with an avuncular air, feeling good towards Graf Bornhof, overcome with anticipation for the Yorkshire farm, indescribably thankful to the consul for being more duplicitous than could ever have been imagined and, not least, giving way to a feeling of magnanimity towards the Hun. When you’re about to leave a land forever and are swollen with success, the locals, McEwen grudgingly admitted, deserve a modicum of credit.

  The joy filling McEwen’s apartment was matched by a carefree exultation on the streets. Berlin was devoting itself to pleasure. As the summer’s intensity grew and temperatures notched up ever higher, life in the bars and cafés spilled into the open, and bathers clogged the beaches around the city’s delightful forest lakes.

  Gundula’s apartment in the concrete jungle of Marzahn had become unbearable. The scorched fields of concrete scarcely cooled at night. The pre-fab cages there were like ovens getting hotter by the day. Gundula, accustomed to spending nights in the consul’s villa with its high-ceilinged rooms and liveable temperatures, accepted his suggestion to move in. During the days they went their separate ways. But with the consul’s social obligations also having hit the summer doldrums, they whiled away the evenings on the terrace. The first hour was spent catching up on reading and then, outside speakers activated, they listened to Gundula’s favourite tracks of Soul.

  It was somewhere in the middle of that lazy summer period, spending so much time together, that Gundula began to wonder about something. At first she attributed it to the heat, which could do funny things to the imagination, then to the leisurely pace of the days, which freed the mind. Then she realized her preoccupation with Tony had nothing to do with either. The thought was slowly crystallizing that she was with him all the time, yet scarcely knew him. When she thought about it, in her mind he mostly added up to a collection of negations. He was, to start with, not like other men she’d known. Most were intent on treating women as creatures to be steered towards self-improvement. Nor was he anything like the Russian swimmers she knew when she was a girl. They had a dark side to their passion. She recalled they would speculate for hours about the spiritual dimensions of a man and woman having been united in sex. It had strained her patience to the limit. But Hanbury didn’t go in for exploring mystical meaning. Once or twice she actually tried to find out what he thought about their steady sex. He said he looked upon it as a wonderful prelude – to a glass of chilled champagne – adding he was off to get some. She couldn’t be too vexed, because he was right: chilled champagne after making love on warm nights was a high. No, he wasn’t ponderously self-important like her German men, nor spiritually moody like the Russian ones. Nor was he much of a cowboy – even if she still occasionally called him that – because, really, he lacked swagger. And, despite his talent for the piano, she’d also stopped calling him Chopin. Missing entirely was a volatile artistic temperament. For a while, she teasingly called him Casanova, but Casanova petered out. He was no commanding officer, neither in bed, nor out. He was no intellectual, but not a fool. He wasn’t decisive. He wasn’t stubborn. He wasn’t almost anything. So, other than being pleasant and accommodating, what was he?

  The fuzziness of his persona made Gundula recall a saying she sometimes heard her grandmother use: things vague when they begin show purpose when they end. Did this apply to Hanbury? Did it apply to them? She also wondered if it applied to her career. Her purpose at the paper was on hold. Having been relegated to the back pages, her assignment now was cabaret reviews. How would that end? She and Tony talked about it once on the terrace. He listened attentively and made a suggestion. He probably meant it well, but it wasn’t carefully thought through. “International relations, Gundula,” he said. “Write about that. You’d be a good foreign correspondent.”

  “A foreign correspondent for whom?”

  “Your paper.”

  “I happen to live here.”

  “You’d have to do some travelling.”

  “The only other language I speak is Russian. Sorry, I’m not interested in going there.”

  “Go back to school. Learn English. You could practice on me.”

  “You make it sound so effortless. It don’t think it would be easy.”

  Given the precarious situation at the paper, any hint to management that she was interested in training could mean them easing her out permanently. No, she had to tough it out, spend time camouflaging her talent, put up with writing for the popular culture section, and reestablish credentials.

  “If you decided to do it, you’d be successful. I’m sure of it.” Hanbury told her. Although Gundula wouldn’t admit it, she had once or twice considered, purely in the abstract, what Tony suggested. Gerhard von Helmholtz had hinted she should be doing that too. The problem with their line of thought was that it didn’t clarify her career outlook. If anything, it made the future even hazier.

  One Saturday morning after breakfast, both of them with their noses in the paper, Hanbury raised the subject once more. He read aloud a headline from the foreign section. “Isn’t it interesting what’s going on in Papua New Guinea?” he said. Holding his part of the paper between them like a barrier, he then asked for her opinion.

  The question irritated her. “I don’t know a thing about Papua New Guinea. Do you? Are you planning to become ambassador there?”

  “I’m not making any plans. I’ve learned to keep a low profile.” A voice of unconcern spoke from behind a wall of paper.

  She could have given a stinging reply to that! She could have speculated that must be why men turn into consuls: because they want no profile. But she didn’t. It was simply another case of him being a non-thing. Naturally he wasn’t making any plans. He spurned every hint of planning. She didn’t consider herself a particularly strong planner either, but all the same she did more of it than him. She was planning a holiday on the Baltic coast to coincide with one her family would be taking. She was hoping he would take a train up for one of the weekends. But when she hinted at it, he was non-committal. Non-planning, non-committing, non everything. She let it pass and instead read to him from the Saturday feature section. “It says here the Russians are beginning to depart. Six hundred thousand of them. Imagine the logistics.”

  “One of the all-time great military retreats.”

  Gundula suggested a drive to the Oder River. Perhaps they would see Russians abandoning German soil. Afterwards they could have a picnic.

  “If you think Trabi is up to it,” he said.

  I’m not making any plans. An innocent enough remark. But for Hanbury it went deeper than being disinterested in an ambassadorship in Papua New Guinea. He had a problem Gundula knew nothing about. It originated with Sabine. She had made a proposal that had been gnawing at him these past few days. It occupied his thoughts even as he agreed w
ith Gundula to go look for Russians. By mutual consent, given the fine weather, he and Sabine no longer visited museums. They went walking in the Grunewald instead. A few days before, as usual, Hanbury arrived at Bücher Geissler for the outing, but the front door was locked. The lights in the store were off. He rattled the door to see if it might spring open. He pressed his face against the glass and cut off reflections with cupped hands. No sign of life. A grey eminence, someone picking a living off the street, came hobbling by. When the consul began rapping on the glass, he stopped to lick the stubble around his mouth. “Knock as hard as you want,” he said. “It won’t bring ’im back. He’s dead.” “Who’s dead?” Hanbury asked the scruffy guardian of the street. “Who do you think? The stinker that lived there. He wasn’t even that old.” The scrawny Methuselah seemed proud he had outlived yet another human being.

  The door opened. Sabine, looking grave, motioned Hanbury to enter. The grey eminence spat and shuffled off. “Is it true?” he asked anxiously. “Has Herr Geissler passed away?” She relocked the door, nodding a quick affirmation. He followed her to the rear. “When? How?”

  “Yesterday morning. He didn’t come down. I called the police. They broke into his apartment on the top floor. He was lying on the floor. A stroke.”

  “Sabine, how awful for you. I’m so sorry.”

  “He wasn’t well. Something could have happened any time.” She tried hard to stay objective, but a tear slid down her cheek.

  Hanbury took her by the shoulders and she began to cry, burying her face against his chest. Hanbury tried to give support. A bad patch, he said. It would pass. She had her family, her friends. “I don’t know why I’m upset,” Sabine blurted. She took out a handkerchief to blow her nose. “I didn’t particularly like him. But the last months – after you started coming by – he was different. You meant a lot to him. He’s left me the store, the apartments, the whole building. I don’t deserve it. I don’t like it when people die.”

  “Wash your face. We’ll talk about it over lunch.”

  They found a table in deep shade under an awning in a nearby restaurant. Hanbury listened to the details. Sabine was well along in making arrangements. Once an ambulance had removed the body, she contacted an undertaker who arrived within an hour. Any next of kin, the undertaker asked? No one she knew about. Was there a will? he next inquired. Occasionally the deceased left instructions for their final ceremony. Sabine replied Geissler had never said anything about a will, although he had recently muttered he was ordering his papers. Check the desk, the undertaker advised. They went into Geissler’s office and found an envelope addressed to her with several papers in it, including a handwritten will. “Does it say it’s a will?” the undertaker asked. Sabine confirmed it did, but there were no funeral instructions. After the undertaker left, she read the will carefully and called her husband who left his institute immediately. Once he too had read the will, he made an urgent appointment with a notary. Completely genuine, the notary said: Sabine was the beneficiary of everything. They returned to Bücher Geissler where a bewildered Sabine began ordering the office and an eager Schwartz descended into the cellar.

  “Werner believes the books in the cellar alone are worth a fortune if marketed properly,” she told Hanbury.

  He had been listening patiently. “I’m glad Geissler left you the store. You deserve it.”

  “It’s exciting. But it frightens me too.”

  After lunch Sabine claimed she had too much work now for strolling in the Grunewald. Walking back to the store, she said casually, “A note from Herr Geissler mentioned you.” Hanbury stopped. “He suggested you become a partner in the store. He wrote he trusted you with the books.” Hanbury was speechless. The overall situation with Geissler having died was serious, but the notion of him becoming a clerk in a bookstore was too absurd. Restraining himself from saying anything rash, he stared at Sabine and stayed silent. She wanted to know what he thought about it. She and Werner had discussed it and Werner believed it would work. “I’ll need help running the store. It would be wonderful if you decided to settle in Berlin. You say you feel at home here and you’re practically a member of the family.”

  “I don’t know anything about books.”

  “You have a way with books. Herr Geissler noticed it. What you don’t know you’d learn. I can’t imagine a better business partner. I plan to modernize the store, go upscale.” They were back at the Bücher Geissler storefront. “Anyway, there’s time to think about it.” Sabine suddenly had an objective tone, the bearing of a manager. “We can talk about it more next week. Don’t feel you have to decide right away.” Hanbury nodded. “I’ll think it over.” Sabine kissed him lightly on both cheeks and disappeared into her new world.

  The proposal had been preying on him ever since. Gundula would divert his thoughts, but before long it crept back, stalking him, creating an unease, a sense of something slipping out of control, a fear that the uncomplicated mid-week hours with Sabine would end. It was almost perverse, he thought. The last time he saw her husband, when they went to Potsdam, he came away with foreboding. And now for different reasons, Sabine filled him with apprehension too. Could he seriously contemplate spending the years beside her at a sales counter, as if in their advancing age this would correct the failed partnership of their youth?

  Even now, heading towards the Oder River, when he should be concentrating on Gundula in her skimpy summer dress, and teasing her for pushing Trabi beyond his limit, Sabine’s proposal was with him. The simple thing would be to tell her no, but confronting her made him feel ill at ease. It affected his conscience. His staying would mean much to her. You’re practically a member of the family. How could he turn that down? How could he reject Sabine a second time? On the other hand, he turned white with fear imagining himself spending decades standing in a store. In comparison to that suffocating vision, the whining and vibrating confines of Trabi seemed like a huge wide open space with plenty of room left to grow.

  “Trabi is really flying,” he yelled at Gundula, forcing himself back to the present. Her farewell dress for the Russians was all-white with a V-cut plunging front and back. A few grams of silk, no more. A political provocation. “Let’s hope he doesn’t overheat,” Gundula shouted back. The noise level approached that of an open cockpit in a biplane. The exhilaration of flying along in Trabi, always on the edge of mechanical breakdown, must be, Hanbury speculated, the same as the early pilots experienced in their rickety test machines. “Think we’ll see some Russians?” he yelled once more, as if they really were in a plane, flying low, maybe over the African savannah, as if in search of elephants. “They’re around.” Gundula yelled at the top of her lungs, radiating a pilot’s confidence.

  Hanbury’s thoughts, wretchedly stuck for days on selling books, now skipped to another possible future, the one that posed the question of where Gundula fit in his life. Suppose he decided to stay and sell books, how would Gundula react? Badly, he was sure. She would never be part of something which implied that kind of static permanence. A bookstore future, he was convinced, would not have Gundula anywhere near it.

  Were there other possibilities? Take the current situation. He and Gundula on the move. Suppose it were permanent. He could see Gundula focussed and determined to get them where they planned to go, Gundula finding the solutions to life’s labyrinths, Gundula being saucy, Gundula teasing, Gundula punching hole after hole into diplomacy’s staidness, Gundula at night, immodest, insatiable and tender. Was a future without Gundula imaginable? Hanbury concluded it was not. He had come to love her. She had come in through his front door and taken over. But a precondition for this future, both of them on the move together, was her leaving the paper, which he knew she never would. Whenever he raised the subject, she posed objection after objection, steering the suggestion – and their future – into a swamp where it sank from sight.

  A lose-lose situation. If he decided to settle in Berlin Gundula would be scared off, while continuing the affair required sub
tle assurances that one day it would end. The only way to keep her was one day to leave her. But, if Gundula could not figure in his future, why not stay to sell books? Whichever way he looked at it, his prospects sent shivers up and down his back.

  “Russians!” the pilot cried triumphantly. Ahead on the autobahn a long column of military vehicles, camouflaged trucks transporting artillery pieces darkened the right lane. Some kilometres later, they hit a more menacing column: three hundred armoured personnel carriers and heavy, self-propelled, wheeled guns, perfect for manoeuvring in cities, indispensable for suppressing revolution. “Imagine how nervous everybody would get if this were going the other way,” Hanbury said.

  “What do you know about it? Was your country occupied by Russians?”

  “It’s our pleasure to have the Yanks close by.”

  “You can’t compare them.” In Gundula’s opinion Russians were charming individually, but brutal as an army. Americans were the other way around.

  Ten minutes later, a third column. This one had stalled. Stretching down the autobahn was an endless gypsy caravan. Trucks filled with civilian goods and hundreds of private vehicles – Ladas, Skodas, Trabis, Wartburgs – half of them in tow. The cars were stacked as full as the trucks. Cardboard boxes, piles of clothing, jerry cans, old radios and TVs, bits of furniture, heaps of random junk. The feared Russian army departing German soil was a rag-tag band on the move. Gundula said there was a rumour that they were even lifting runways off military airfields, carting the concrete slabs home.