A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  I wasn’t sure I meant this. It was surely a mistake to have brought up Ogden’s employer when he had not mentioned the fact that he worked in Parliament on his application form.

  ‘Anyway, it’s lunchtime now. We should go back around four, four thirty. They said three hours and they close at five.’

  ‘I told Phil I was going to East Germany,’ Ogden said. ‘He said fine, good idea. He gave me the names and phone numbers of a couple of people he knows in Berlin and somebody he met from Leipzig. They’re party stalwarts, not subversives.’

  ‘You should have told the bloke,’ I said. ‘You should have said. He asked three times. I translated at least once. You must have known he was asking.’

  ‘It’s just an innocent meeting,’ Ogden said. ‘It’ll only take half an hour. He wants me to give them copies of his book.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘The man asked whether you’d been given anything. You said no. We’re in big trouble now.’

  ‘It’s just his book,’ Ogden said. ‘You know his book, a sort of manifesto about achieving socialism in the UK, what needs to be done from within the Labour Party. He’s been writing it for years. He wanted it to come out before the 1983 election, so Foot would have had to give him a job when they won. Then that didn’t happen. So he went on writing it. It’s ended up explaining everything that’s gone wrong and how they need socialism again.’

  ‘He ought to leave the Labour Party,’ I said lightly, ‘and join someone a bit more serious. Do you think the comrades in Dresden are that interested in where Kinnock went wrong?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Ogden said. ‘I’ve actually come to think that you’re not going to hold the same beliefs that you had at sixteen all your life. Not if you want to grow up at all.’

  I ignored this. ‘I don’t suppose it’ll get that far,’ I said. ‘You know they’re going to search your bags. They’re not going to let multiple copies of the same book through.’

  ‘Phil asked me to,’ Ogden said briefly.

  ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t say, “Be that as it may,” when I mention Joaquin,’ I said.

  Ogden looked startled; flushed; looked away. There was nothing much for him to look at. A strikingly beautiful woman, dark, with a black fur collar on her coat, was walking a substantial pug. An empty bus drove by. In a moment Ogden said, ‘Let’s go and find something to eat.’

  I have been to Berlin since then. It has been a united city for nearly thirty years now. It’s hard to remember the appearance of the Reichstag then, like an old cow lying sick in a field, abandoned, and just beyond it the photo opportunity of the Wall running in front of the Brandenburg Gate. You could have gone anywhere to see the Wall, but that afternoon, looking for something to do, Ogden and I went to the place that all visiting politicians went to. We made the sort of remarks, half jeering, that you would expect people like us to make – remarks about photo opportunities. About the loss of nerve of the DDR in building the Wall, since the opportunists who wanted to run away would have tailed off by now. Ogden knew that the numbers of people who had illicitly crossed, or tried to cross, the border had diminished over the years. It was now statistically insignificant. We had a reasonable discussion. I felt, nevertheless, that it was going to be hard to stay with Ogden for two weeks. One of the first things that anyone had said to me about him was that he was ‘a queer’ – one of those boys I used to hang around with, Matthew or Simon, had made the observation. There had never been any sign of a romantic attachment in Ogden’s case. He quite liked it if some other people embarked on an attachment, so long as it was clearly and absolutely ludicrous, and conducted for a reason of public policy, as it were. The summer before we all went to university, he encouraged Tracy Cartwright to go to bed with Mohammed at the end of a long night. It was so strange, that summer: for the first time ever, we had nothing to do, scholastically speaking, between handing in our final A-level papers and packing our stuff into the boots of our parents’ cars, driving off to university at the beginning of October. Those three months, irresponsibility set in: we never drank so much, plotted so ingeniously, wrote on so many walls. When Tracy and Mohammed were found to be snogging each other, it seemed hilarious, preposterous, inevitable, a good idea all round. I think Ogden hoped that it would affront either set of parents. A point could be made here. In reality Tracy’s mother didn’t care, and the distance between Mohammed and his parents was immense. Their polite, bearded, veiled, monoglot world was already far removed from what he did and wanted. A blonde girl who slept with him was not the strangest thing they had seen or envisaged. He got a tattoo that summer, as well. The encouragement and excitement died down over the course of a couple of months. Mohammed came to visit Tracy at Oxford three weeks into term. She had changed. It was over.

  Now we were walking the immured streets of West Berlin. Ogden was still unable to make any reference to Joaquin, the position he held in my life. My own madness, that summer, had been subdued. I had been with Joaquin for two years. He was often described as ‘crazy’ by the others, but his madness was circumscribed, formally distinct, taking place within certain hours and for particular purposes. It was a festivity like Christmas, starting and finishing on a timetable. When Joaquin had decided that he would break out in this direction, whether to smash up a political gathering, to get hopelessly drunk, or to take hold of me, seizing me, tearing his own clothes and mine off, falling onto the nearest bed or just some horizontal surface, the madness he had decided on looked unbordered, unplanned, terrifyingly limitless. You never felt you knew what Joaquin might be about to start doing. But this was misleading. Whatever he was going to be capable of doing, he had decided that it would carry on for the next two hours (say) and stop short at a certain point. Whether I was walking with Joaquin towards an estate agent’s shop window with a pot of paint and a bag full of half-bricks, or bent over a chair, mid-afternoon, with my face pressed hard against the floor, my books and papers thrown aside, my trousers looped around my ankles, feeling Joaquin’s pulse and heartbeat hot and hard and unrelenting within me, the pressure and heat of his blood inside me, I was certain that his animal madness had formal and respectful limits. Animal: a very good thing for other people to be. He knew more exactly how far I wanted to join in with something than I did myself. Just then, walking with Ogden through the streets of West Berlin, I thought it had been a mistake to come here with him. I had nothing further in common with him. I wished I had come away with Joaquin – that I had stayed where I was with Joaquin, that I had decided to continue my daily life or to take a holiday, whichever it was, to be with Joaquin yesterday and today and tomorrow. I was homesick for a Chilean refugee.

  ‘I think we ought to clear the air,’ Ogden said carefully, ‘if we’re going to be two weeks together.’

  ‘I think that’s right,’ I said. I was surprised. I didn’t think Ogden would raise anything in this way.

  ‘There just seems to be some tension here,’ Ogden said. ‘I don’t quite understand, but there definitely seems to be some tension here.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just that we aren’t used to each other,’ I said. ‘I mean, we don’t see each other every day.’

  ‘To be honest,’ Ogden said, ‘I wish you’d make a bit more of an effort. That’s what would improve things.’

  ‘You wish I’d improve things? I mean, you wish I’d make more of an effort?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I said. I don’t want to be rude but, you know, you’ve hardly said a word for the last twenty-four hours. It’s a bit like walking round with a large inanimate object, like pulling a fridge on wheels or something.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Look, I know what this is about. I’m really sorry. But responding to what I say, then shutting up and looking at the ground, then once in a blue moon making some kind of cold, rude observation, “I’d be very grateful if in future you’d refrain from referring to …” you m
ust see what that sounds like.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m trying to be sympathetic here, after what you’ve been through.’

  ‘What do you mean, after what I’ve been through?’

  ‘Well, I mean – your dad. Anyone can see that’s going to have a massive impact on anyone. You’ve never even mentioned it to me.’

  ‘My dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My dad was just a bastard.’

  ‘I meant about him dying like that. I’m sorry. You’re just in shock in some way.’

  Sometimes as humans we decide without consultation what would be best for people. We consider human nature in general. We then think about what might be most likely to be driving the human animal in particular. Ogden’s was a political mind, for whom the individual case would always be encased within a range of the most likely general responses. He took it for granted that my emotional response would be much the same as the emotional response of anyone whose father had been as detached and simply disapproving as mine. Anyone, that is, whose father had chosen to commit suicide in such a way. In fact, my response had been my own, and in response to nobody but my father. Of course, everybody in the world whose father committed suicide was likely to be overwhelmed with grief. It might be everybody but one. My response was my own. My father was who he was and nobody else. I was not even sure that I had responded at all. I didn’t think I needed to. I didn’t know what Ogden was talking about when he said that I had not engaged with him since we had met. I thought we had been talking perfectly well when it had been necessary to say anything.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re not living in the house,’ Ogden said. ‘Surely it would make more sense to live in your house than where you are.’

  ‘It’s not my house,’ I said. ‘It never was. It was my dad’s and he left it to the fern society. You know he was keen on ferns. It went to them.’

  The gardens at the house were a little marvel, two hundred different ferns – quite similar-looking, I think – embedded in mosses, under trees. It took, I understand, some skill to get them to propagate, the moss to do whatever moss does. My father might have hoped that the Pteridological Society would open the garden as a visitor site. There was a sentence in the will about a visitor centre. But the society took the bequest. In time, long after this trip, they were to sell the house, and use the proceeds for their own festival purpose, probably paying the salary of a new chief executive for a decade. There never has been any question, for them, of a visitor centre.

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘Fifty thousand of my dad’s savings. I kept a bit of that and I gave most of it to the Communist League. The Revolutionary Communist League, I mean, not the other lot. They needed it.’

  ‘But I thought you resigned from that?’

  ‘Over their stance towards the Soviets in Afghanistan. Yes, I did. We both did. There was no real way of reconciling their position and our positions on that. We left. We weren’t the only ones. There’s five of us who take the same position. The RCL’s in the hands of a reactionary cadre. It’s us who kept things going. I gave them the money before we broke away.’

  ‘Well, that was sensible.’

  ‘I got them to buy a van with some of the money,’ I said. ‘And then after the meeting that resulted in the split—’

  ‘You drove off with it.’

  ‘Well, yes. I was the nominated driver. I had the keys.’

  ‘At least you got something back.’

  ‘I honestly don’t care about any of that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want the money. I don’t care that my dad’s dead. It was pretty thoughtless of him all round. The cleaner he’d taken on complained that she’d lost a job she was counting on – he got her to come in three days a week for three hours a time. The fern society got in touch to ask if I’d do all the work of putting the house on the market and just sending them the cheque.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Joaquin told them to piss off. They’ll think twice about calling us up next time. It’s just standing empty while they decide what to do with it.’

  ‘You should go and live there. Sounds like they don’t want the trouble.’

  ‘I don’t want to live there.’

  ‘Well, I can see that. Your dad, though. He wasn’t like Frinton’s mum with her Eartha Kitt and the crying fits. I’m sorry.’

  It seemed to me then that, as a depressive, it is actually much easier to be really, publicly, effortlessly crazy and insistently noisy about it. Frinton’s mother never had to do anything. She never had to go downstairs to open up the bar or do the accounts or make breakfast for Frinton and his brother. Depression gave her permission to sit on the sofa in a dressing-gown eating Dairy Milk bars and yawning and scratching and watching all those old Eartha Kitt videos.

  ‘It’s fine. My dad goes to work every day and shouts at his underlings and comes back and does what needs to be done in the line of housework and ensuring that I get fed and his little hobbies to blank out whatever there is to be blanked out and then one day he does what his voice has been telling him to do twenty times a day, all his life. He didn’t leave a note. My mum said she didn’t have a clue either. That’s why she went. Anyway. Shit happens.’

  ‘And now Frinton’s got a job working on a London newspaper owned by a foreign billionaire.’

  ‘Writes the third leader every day. The funny one.’

  ‘On his way to the top. Let’s go and pick up the visas.’

  ‘I don’t think there are going to be any visas,’ I said. ‘I think they’re about to turn us down. He looked pretty unhappy with what he was hearing, that bloke.’

  ‘Revolutionaries, eh?’

  ‘The revolution was a long time ago. There’s a bourgeoisie that’s reformed itself within the revolutionary society.’

  ‘But how can a bourgeoisie even function in a free-floating way outside the paradigms of a society? How does that work?’

  We carried on all the way back to the Reisebüro. It was like old times. On the second floor I handed over the red ticket I had been given when we had left. The man at the desk – I had christened him Kurt or Klaus – performed a short, satisfied nod. He handed over our two passports and a pair of stamped permits indicating our agreed itinerary. It had all been for show, after all.

  ‘Was it Eartha Kitt Frinton’s mother liked?’ Ogden said. ‘Or was it Dusty Springfield?’

  ‘Definitely Eartha Kitt,’ I said. I began to sing an old number.

  ‘God, you gays,’ Ogden said, quite warmly. ‘You love your torch songs, you really do.’ We turned into a bar. It was only five o’clock, but they served us.

  In the morning, we had breakfast at Frau Dittberner’s – ‘Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen!’ – in an atmosphere of slightly doomed hilarity. It was the morning of an examination that had been inadequately prepared for. The tense wariness between us had lifted the night before. We paid Frau Dittberner. We travelled to the crossing point by U-Bahn. It was a famous crossing point. As foreigners, we were required to cross at the celebrated ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. ‘It’s only famous,’ Ogden said, ‘because Americans have to cross here.’ The different checkpoints used by citizens of the Western part of the city or the Federal Republic had never seeped into the public consciousness. The crossing point was temporary in appearance, with low-built offices spanning what must once have been a busy road. There was a chevroned path for motor vehicles, blocked with barriers. The signs indicated the paths that military vehicles and others should take: the specific and yet inadequate information that ‘YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR’ was written in huge letters above everything else. We had been full of excitement and fun, even giggling, at breakfast. Now we were quiet. In the crossing post itself we handed over our documentation with our passports, which were stamped. We changed the regula
tion twenty-five Deutschmarks into the same number of Ostmarks. We opened our suitcases, which were gone through by different agents. I had a copy of Ogden’s boss’s book. He had another, as well as one in his overcoat pocket. The searching was not so thorough as all that, or as coordinated, and nothing was confiscated. We were through.

  I was in a socialist state for the first time in my life. The streets were empty, apart from the fast-dispersing tourists and day-trippers who had come through Checkpoint Charlie with us. There was an unfamiliar smell in the air, which I now know to be the brown coal that the DDR burnt everywhere. It was long forbidden in the West.

  In five minutes we were in a busier place. The cars that were driving the streets were white or baby blue. They were all the same in appearance. The people looked no different from the people in the West. We were not in any way of interest to them. Their orderly and contented quality was not apparent at first glance. They had seen people like us before.

  The hotel admitted our reservation, under a show of reluctance. There was a long, frowning consultation in a heavy ledger. But the time of check-in was at two in the afternoon exactly. Could we leave our luggage here until the time of check-in? The woman clerk had hair disconcertingly similar to Mrs Thatcher’s blonde helmet, a neat pale blue uniform glistening with artificial fibres, a stripe of matching pale blue eyeshadow. She looked at us unblinkingly, not evidently thinking. In the end we paid our hotel bill in full, in advance, in what the guidebook called ‘hard currency’, by which it meant Western currency. On this condition she agreed that we could leave our bags. We would return at two o’clock. It was now ten.

  I realized, as we left the hotel, that I had no real idea where we should go in Berlin – Hauptstadt Berlin, as we should call it. Our task, of assessing and experiencing the life of the state, was, I understood all at once, an impossible one. The life of the state is only to be experienced by those who are not idle. We were idle. We could experience only a simulacrum of being busy. A guidebook was in my hand, and a map of the whole city. The possibilities of museums, monuments, historic objects lay in front of us.