The Berlin Assignment

by Adrian de Hoog

  They’d seen enough of the humiliation. Gundula swung off the autobahn. She knew an area to the south with lakes. They would picnic there. Half an hour later she drove into a thicket. Once Trabi was parked, Hanbury took the picnic bag and followed Gundula down a trail. The innocent summer sound of people frolicking on a beach drifted at them through the trees.

  “In luck,” Gundula said. She had spotted a shady area on the forest edge and marched there through loose sand. Hanbury put the picnic bag down. The reflection of the sun off the water blinded him. Shading his eyes he turned to Gundula, who was removing her sneakers. He was about to tell her the spot was well-chosen when, with an easy movement, she raised her dress up over her head and draped it across the picnic bag. Just as fast she stepped out of her panties. Gundula was lovely anytime and especially when naked, but her stripping down to nothing in the open astonished him.

  “Gundula, what are you doing!”

  “Take your clothes off,” she said with a daring smile.

  “It’s a public beach!” Guiltily he scanned the area. Then he saw she wasn’t the only one naked.

  “Is this a nudist beach?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Just a beach. Let’s swim.”

  “I don’t have a bathing suit along.”

  “People wear bathing suits where you come from?”

  “In public, actually, yes.”

  “How silly.” Gundula took an aggressive stance. “Start with your T-shirt,” she ordered.

  Hanbury slipped it over his head, then undid his sandals. Gundula waited for him to go on, but he hesitated. He closed his eyes to let a strange sensation pass. Gundula continued taunting. “Don’t be prudish. You’ll be noticed only if you swim in walking shorts.”

  “Why go swimming at all?” he asked defiantly, but it was a last line of defense.

  “Tony!” Gundula said impatiently. Reluctantly he unzipped his shorts and stepped out. The underwear was next, whereupon she sweetly took his hand and led him to the water.

  The lake was refreshing. They swam out in the direction of the sun, then back. Coming in with the light behind, Hanbury made stealthy observations. Unclothed, overweight bodies lay on the beach like walruses sunning. Others were playful, taut, lithe and heathen. Gundula caught him staring. “Anyone you particularly admire?” she inquired. He said he would rather look at her, but most of her was under water. Voyeur, she said. Human, he rebutted. You? was the reply.

  For the picnic Hanbury carried the provisions to an inconspicuous area under a low-branched tree. Away from the water’s edge, passing a wine bottle back and forth, eating bread and fruit, they joked about the Russians struggling with the autobahn heat. “A scorched-earth policy in reverse,” Hanbury declared. Gundula said she felt sorry for them. If things had worked out differently she might now be living in the Ukraine, she said. She told Tony about Vassiliev. “I was in love with him. I thought I’d marry him. I went to see him in Kiev.” “And?” Hanbury asked, drinking wine directly from the bottle. “I wasn’t sure it would work. I needed to think about it and left. Not long afterwards he married someone else. But we stayed on good terms. He sends me pictures of his children.” Gundula stretched out on the sand, clasped her hands under the back of her head and closed her eyes. Feeling the wine, Hanbury languidly took time to do two things: he reflected on what Gundula had just said and practised voyeurism. He studied the wet hair clinging to her head; he scanned the neck, the small breasts – dark, perky, pointy nipples – the belly and its undulating contours funnelling down to a jet-black crop of hair. From here the legs began a lovely journey to the feet. Intoxicated – by the wine, but more so by her beauty – he flipped onto a side, leaning on an elbow and thought. Gundula had almost married?

  With eyes closed, she wanted to talk. She described her family in Schwerin, the brother seeking asylum in Vienna, a father refusing to continue with Olympic doping, the Stasi targeting her family. Things she had not talked about before. She was serious and reflective and it reminded Hanbury of her best columns. This was the other Gundula speaking, the one he once despaired he’d ever get to know. “For some reason we never talk about ourselves,” she continued. “Why is that, Tony?” She didn’t often call him by his first name. He would be Cowboy (if he showed chivalry),Your Excellency (when he wore a suit), Superman (if changed a light bulb) or, when he returned to bed with chilled champagne,Herr Bacchus. He presumed Voyeur would now be added to the list. Today, she had called him Tony several times. What was happening? He didn’t answer her question. Instead he said something he had long wanted to share. “I’ve got a Stasi file too.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.” He told her how he had discovered it, that it got started because of Günther Rauch. What was in it? Well, once the system started on him it seemed incapable of stopping. It kept track of him for decades. Trivia. Masses of it. And what was his reaction when he looked into it? “A sense of being taking apart, a sense that little pieces of me were being studied. My life reduced to something like a shop floor manual. At the time I thought you ought to write a column about it.”

  “You should have said something. I might have. Today I could only touch the subject if it were expressed as cabaret.” Hanbury thought he detected a bitter note, but it passed and her humour came on. “Diplomats as shop floor manuals,” she said impishly. “Good cabaret potential. Let’s think of a title.” From her prone position she looked up. “How about, Consul ex machina.”

  After a pause he replied drily, “Why not, Consul machina est?”

  “Also very good. We could have two pieces. Maybe more. You have so many sides.” She became serious again. “We have more in common than I thought. Tell me how you got to be Chopin? You never told me that.”

  The uncomplicated banter was comfortable, almost therapeutic. Was it the effect of the sun and the wine? Or, having bared his body, had he become less hesitant to bare his soul? Whatever the reason, Hanbury was not inclined to be evasive, not this time. “Got an hour?” he asked.

  “Until dawn, if you need it.”

  Hanbury told Gundula the story of Claudette Cadieux, a talented music student who made the serious mistake of falling in love with Hanbury’s father. He was from Moose Jaw, she from Montreal, meeting when they were both students at McGill. What could they possibly have seen in each other? Was it Harold’s self-assurance that impressed Claudette? Did she believe him when he said no place on earth was more beautiful than the prairies? Who knows? The end result was marriage and they headed west. A position waited for him at the experimental farm in Indian Head. “She didn’t know what she was being taken to. She had no idea what it would be like.” Gundula said she knew all about that. It was no different when she travelled to Kiev.

  Hanbury elaborated. Claudette had no inkling she was going into a desert. It wasn’t the countryside that struck her that way when they arrived. Summer rain had fallen; the land was green. Her first impression of the prairie was its melancholy. But no, the desert wasn’t in the landscape. It was something she felt in her heart. After a year or two, Claudette could rattle off the components of this inner desert: an incomprehension that someone from Montreal might speak a different language; little appreciation for the arts – concerts, theatre, exhibitions – things she liked to have around her; no cosy tea houses or specialty stores with stylish clothes; no animated summer gatherings on neighbourhood sidewalks; no night life; no tree-lined streets with tasteful villas; no cathedral; no majestic river spanned by equally majestic bridges. Moving to Indian Head, Claudette convinced herself, was like moving to nothing. When she tried to share this view with Harold, he said she was going about it the wrong way. She should stop comparing, he said. His culture, he argued, was subtler than Montreal’s and she should open up to it. He left her alone to do so, because already in the early years he was preoccupied with the daily ritual of warfare, combatting the drifting off of soil. Into this situation, Hanbury told Gundula, he, Anthony Ernest –Antoine t
o his mother – was born.

  Claudette focussed on him in the same way her husband did on prairie dirt. She wanted her son to become what she might have been: a concert pianist. He had her talent and every day, every week, every month she worked on Antoine’s piano future. He gave concerts in school auditoriums, church basements, community halls. She organized a recital in Regina attended by two hundred people. He accepted the regime. After all, he and his mother were two bodies suffused by a single soul. Everyday she told him that.

  Doubt about this did not arise until he was in his teens, when he became convinced he wanted to be normal and not treated like a freak. He was tired of not being allowed to play basketball because he might break a finger, of not touching a hockey stick because it could stiffen his wrists, of not hanging out around the curling rink because throwing a stone might cause a shoulder dislocation. Tensions grew. The unitary soul was being pried apart. It culminated in a tearful session with Antoine uttering cruel oaths that he would never again touch a piano. He left for Saskatoon to study political theory. Could anyone be more normal than that? After eighteen years, Claudette’s desert now rolled in with a vengeance. She went from one nervous breakdown to the next. “She was less coherent all the time. In the end she wasted away. There was some gossip that my father and I neglected her. That that’s what killed her.” The descending sun was reaching forward under the low-hanging branches. As he talked, Hanbury had watched the edge of the tree’s shadow steadily recede up Gundula’s body until she lay entirely illuminated, as if she were in a spotlight on a stage.

  “That was unfair,” Gundula said. A slow stretch ended with a lazy twist onto her side.

  “What was?” The light had reached him too, but he was oblivious to it.

  “Being held responsible for your mother dying.”

  “It was just gossip.”

  “You dismissed the accusation?”

  “Yes.”

  Thinking back, he believed he began distancing himself from certain things at an early age. The more his mother forced him into the margins, the more he wanted to be mainstream. “Something in me began rejecting her early on.” “A habit you haven’t shaken,” Gundula said casually. She was playing with the sand, taking a handful and allowing it to slip out of her fist as if through an hourglass. “Wanting to be normal?” “No. Rejecting people. Keeping them distant.” When Hanbury didn’t reply, Gundula ceased playing with the sand. She looked directly at him, but he was as expressionless as ever. He stared at the picnic bag for a while, then he shifted his gaze towards the water. He seemed to want to see beyond the sun. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a slight hesitation. “I don’t think so. I don’t know of anyone I do that to.”

  After midnight in the Greco-Roman villa, Tony beside her breathing in a steady rhythm, Gundula reviewed the day’s events. Twice they made love – the moment they were back from the beach, and again just now, pushing the consul into his peaceful sleep. The love-making was good, but better still had been his suggestion that he take a train next weekend to the Baltic coast to join her and her parents. It signified more to Gundula than she had expressed. Suppose you lose your way? she had asked. You’ll find me, he had answered. Why the change? Was it because of the quarrel they had on the beach, the catharsis that took place, because they had, so to speak, cleaned themselves out? Had that rendered them different? Had things permanently changed?

  Tony’s non-response to her assertion that he tended to reject people was totally infuriating. Another example of masterful evasion. He was always steering normal subjects for discussion into a quicksand from which nothing emerged. She told him that. The vehemence surprised him. Pardon? he said with wide-open, innocent eyes. What exactly did she mean? Could she run all that by him once more? She took him back to the evening when he had a breakdown at the piano. “Remember?” Gundula asked severely. “You were unwell because I reminded you of your mother. We drank too much whiskey. Remember? You never did answer my question.” The consul lost composure. Callously he wanted to know what that evening had to do with this picnic, which he had been finding very pleasant. “Everything,” Gundula replied. “Because it’s taken until now for me to get a simple answer. But even so, there’s more of the same. All the time. We live together, but you won’t open up. We seldom talk.”

  That’s when the altercation began. Accusations and counter-accusations. Gundula learned some important things. He agreed, yes, that their easy-going domesticity was superficial, but that was because she wanted it that way. What? she said with disbelief. He admitted it suited him too. Why? Because, first, he had serious misgivings about the long term viability of two cultures mixing, and after today she should understand that. Second, there was the complicating factor that one day he would leave. Let’s not hide our heads in the sand! He said this so loud he almost shouted. Her non-reaction, he claimed, to his suggestions that she pursue other journalistic avenues made him assume she would stay in Berlin. Always. Forever. And he respected that. But in those circumstances, since they had no future, he wondered rhetorically, what was the best course? Go deep, or stay on the surface? He answered his own question with an answer which came out as a kind neo-epicurean cri de coeur: Let’s just enjoy the present!

  His assumption was wrong, she said, deeply stung. Wretchedly wrong. She had thought about becoming a foreign correspondent more often than he could know. She had also contemplated learning English. She had even considered free-lancing if the paper were to decide not to keep her. But none of that would work if he didn’t want it to. Hanbury’s mouth fell open so wide she had nearly asked him to close it. I had no idea. Really, I didn’t. Gundula, that’s terrific.

  Another revelation followed. Since she had told him about her Russian boyfriend, he wanted to tell her about a liaison he once had, at the same time he got to know Günther Rauch. The story was somewhat long. By the time he finished it the sun had dipped below the trees on the far shore. He admitted he should have told her earlier. His panicky flight from Berlin, he took pains to point out, was not a rejection of Sabine. He had merely been afraid of a repetition of the disastrous marriage of Harold and Claudette. He wanted Gundula to know that. Gundula said she left Kiev in circumstances that were not too different. Such things happen when you’re young, she added, putting it into a broad perspective. After this unburdening, the consul was a different man. Gundula, let’s go home, he said, which was a far cry from,Shall we go to my place?

  It was when Trabi clattered back to Berlin that he sprung the surprise, the one that thrilled her. “I’m not doing anything next weekend,” he said. “I could take a train to the Baltic. You could introduce me to your folks.” Scarcely suppressing her excitement, Gundula teased him to travel light. “Leave your bathing suit at home. Up there, textiles are optional.” Once the front door of the mansion shut behind them, they turned on each other with passion and made love, first standing up, then half-crouching on the landing. After showering they retired to the terrace. She picked out the music; he fetched a tray of food and a bottle of champagne. The disc she chose was by the band that played at the Ball. “Remember the diplomatic shuffle?” Gundula asked, laughing. “All I remember about that night is that you were annoyed I didn’t right away hustle you into bed.” He shook his head recalling the depravity. “Also, you promised to teach me the quickstep. And where is it?” “By next season I’ll have you doing the quickstep and the tango.” He said, since this was her favourite music, they could start with a little shuffling now. In the night air on the terrace they danced to Soul and in the middle of it he whispered that he loved her. “I see,” she murmured back, almost adding,I’d like that on paper, signed by a head of state and ratified by a Parliament. But a long kiss substituted for all of it.

  The second round of love lasted longer than the one on the landing. The smell of it lingered. As long as it did, Gundula didn’t want to sleep. She lay wide awake, thinking of the future. Once the summer was finished, her evenings would again be spent in the halls
of cabaret, and the mornings doing the reviews. But the afternoons would be used for learning English. And the words she learned she would practice on the consul after he came home at night. The whole time she was awake she thought forward to preparing for a great experiment. It was hours before she slept.

  PATERFAMILIAS II

  Bo Bilinski, like a caged Rocky Mountain cougar, was pacing back and forth along the bank of windows in his office. Elma was having trouble placing a call. The delay had brought him close to boiling. This day, like the ones before, had started well enough. For a few weeks now Bilinski had been enjoying an inner peace he hadn’t known for years. The fact was, he had bought a ranch. Because of that he was now spending a good part of each day before the windows, studying the distant Gatineaus, thinking quietly of the future. Earlier this afternoon, he had slipped once more into a meditation. The Gatineaus didn’t exactly remind him of the Alberta foothills. They were not as big, not rugged, certainly not dangerous. They lacked a spectacular unbroken mountain wall as soaring backdrop. But all the same, if he looked at them long enough – and made an imaginative jump – he could picture them as being emptier and wilder than they were. Which made him think of home. Here in the east, Sharon, the children, the whole family had bobbed on the surface of things too long. The little skiff that was their life had been battered by the unclean Eastern sea. He was glad to be getting back to the West, back to purity and peace.

  Bo had confided to Sharon that during the second half of his earthly existence he wanted to be surrounded by real things: open country, horses, cattle, the annual noise and dust of roundups. He went so far as to tell her that the years in government had made him feel polluted. It was because of Policy. Suppose, he asked her, that Policy’s intangibility were transformed into some form of matter – what would it be? Festering mucous? Pus itself? And the nightmares hadn’t helped. In them, he experienced a slimy substance oozing from his pores. “The crap of government,” he whispered to his wife during the hours of insomnia, “I tell you, Sharon, it’s like sitting in a vat of goddamn filth.” Bo Bilinski cracked his knuckles as he recalled the fateful confession. The next day Sharon left for Calgary to find a ranch.