Berlin Blind

by Alan Scholefield

  He heard the front door open and pretended to be asleep. Bruno came up into the room and Spencer felt him standing over the bed and looking down. He kept his eyes shut and tried to breathe evenly and after a moment or two Bruno left. Spencer lay awake for a long time and when he finally fell asleep he dreamed of the blood-stained carcasses of white oxen.

  *

  They had left the clear, frosty weather in England and the Konigin Wilhelmina tied up at the Hook of Holland on a grey morning with a bitter east wind blowing off the Delta. Customs was a formality and again there were no searches. The trains were waiting in the station beyond the customs shed. The Scandinavian Express was at platform three, the Berlin section at the front. Except for one or two American army personnel returning to bases in Germany the four Berlin coaches were deserted. He found his first-class compartment, put his luggage aboard and sat staring out at the raw morning.

  The Rheingold Express left, and then it was the Scandinavian Express’s turn and the Dutch station announcer wished its passengers a happy journey. Spencer went into the buffet car and had coffee and rolls and stared out at the achingly neat Dutch back gardens as they went through the outskirts of Rotterdam. If he had thought about it at all he would have assumed that a journey from the Hook of Holland to Berlin would have called for one of the more important European trains, but it soon split, the bulk of it going off towards Denmark, leaving four carriages to chug into Germany. In effect, it became a local. People were getting on and off at each small station and he knew that sooner or later he would have to share the compartment. He also knew that sometime in the early afternoon the train would start crossing East Germany and that East German police and customs officials would come aboard.

  The compartment was devoid of hiding places except for the areas under the seats which would be the first place any policeman would look. But at last he found somewhere he could hide his gun. He was sitting in a window-seat and he pushed the pistol underneath the white headrest cover and lodged it between the seat and the outer wall of the train where it was hidden and did not make a bulge. He had barely finished when he heard the door of the compartment slide back. He looked up and saw the woman journalist who had tried to interview him in the grounds of Kenwood House the day before.

  ‘You do not seem pleased to see me,’ she said.

  In a curious way he was. At least she was company,

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I followed you.’

  He thought of the train at Liverpool Street and then the boat; he could have sworn she was not a passenger. He had been careful, but clearly not careful enough.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘And I told you - ’

  ‘I lied to you yesterday. I’m not from Der Spiegel.’

  ‘I wondered when I saw the camera. It’s not professional.’

  ‘I’m a free-lance. A story like this could mean a lot to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I told you before.’

  ‘It has already cost me a lot.’

  ‘That’s not my fault.’

  ‘I could write a story now. Just a few paragraphs and sell it to Bild.’

  ‘They’d never use it.’

  ‘Don’t you understand, you are news! I can get off at the next station and telephone them. That’s all. When you reach Berlin their reporters are at the station. Is that what you wish? And the police. They will read the story. Everyone will want to know why is Mr Spencer coming to Berlin after what happened to him and his wife? I, too, would like to know.’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘If I send this story you will never be allowed to do what you want to do. But let me be with you a few days. Let me talk with you. Perhaps take some more photographs. Then when you have done what you have come to do in Berlin, and gone away again, only then will I write the story.’

  There was something appealing about her. Something almost wistful about the angular face. What she said was true enough and he recognized it. If she wrote the sort of story she was threatening to write he would have the daily press down on him — plus Hoest. And this time the Chief Superintendent would be in his own territory. The questions would be sharper, more pointed. He would want to know what had happened in Berlin. He would want to know all kinds of things. Again Spencer felt an iciness in his bowels.

  But at the same time came another thought. She was a journalist. She had contacts. Maybe he could turn that to his advantage. She was planning to use him; he might be able to use her. ‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

  He saw her relax and lean back in her seat. ‘We can go slowly,’ she said. ‘We have a whole day on this train. Will you smoke?’ She took a packet of thin cheroots from her bag.

  He pointed to the sign on the window which indicated a nonsmoking compartment.

  ‘Do you never break rules?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  He reached forward and took one. ‘What about some coffee?’

  ‘There is no buffet car until Hanover now.’

  He felt some of the tension begin to seep away. ‘Where do you want to start?’

  She looked confused. ‘Start?’

  ‘Don’t you have a notebook?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She drew one out of her bag.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I think we had better make a biography,’ she said, and then she smiled. She had particularly nice teeth, white and even, and they glistened against the heavy red of her lips. ‘Unless you have anything you do not wish to tell me.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘With most people there is something. There are places where I would lie.’

  ‘Ask your questions. We’ll see.’

  He began to talk, slowly at first, picking the words, editing everything, but after a while he noticed she had stopped writing things down and he became somewhat less inhibited. The train drove on into the grey day. Neat, heavily populated Jlolland gave way to a slightly more shaggy, more rural Germany at Bentheim. By lunch they were in Hanover waiting to be coupled to the Berlin express.

  They left the train and walked up and down the platform. In the months since Sue’s death Spencer had hardly spoken to anyone but the police or his colleagues at work. Now he had spent a whole morning talking to a strange woman and he realized he was feeling less tense for the moment. ‘I’ve said enough about myself for the moment. What about you? Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Me? I’m afraid that is very boring.’

  ‘You’ve had me talking for hours.’

  ‘But that is fascinating.’

  ‘Anyone’s life is fascinating if you dig. Let me ask the questions, “make a biography” as you put it.’

  ‘Is that not how you say it?’

  ‘Of course it is.’ She smiled again and he felt a sudden warmth. ‘All right. Birth. When were you born?’

  ‘Ladies do not like talking of such things.’

  ‘Let me guess then. You’re twenty-eight,’ he said, subtracting seven years from his original estimate.

  ‘You are very kind. I must confess more.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Berlin.’ Slowly, too, her background emerged. The daughter of an officer in the Schutzpolizei. We were a police family. My father. My uncle. My grandfather.’ As she spoke her mouth turned slightly downwards and a bitter expression crossed her face, she looked suddenly older. She talked of her childhood in Berlin. She had been bom, it transpired, the year war had ended and remembered nothing of the early post-war days. She had been part of the West German ‘miracle’.

  Just then the Berlin train came into the station and their four coaches were coupled up.

  ‘What about lunch?’ he said, and they went to the Mitropa and had venison goulasch and a bottle of Piesporter. Over coffee he returned to the subject of the boom years and suddenly she said, ‘You get nothing for nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean
that you must pay for a miracle. And when you pay you ask yourself was it worth it? You are one of the few people outside Germany to be affected by such a payment. You lost your wife. Here in Germany it is not so rare: our judges are killed, our business must have bodyguards and go to work by different routes every day. In Bonn our parliament is guarded by tanks, in the streets where our politicians live there are armoured cars. You must ask yourself, Mr Spencer, what is better: to have a little lower standard of living, but no terrorism, or be like us.’

  They talked on at some length. She was bitter and angry and after a while she told him why.

  ‘You remember in 1971 when the Japanese commando came to Tegel?’

  At first her choice of words confused him and then he began to remember. ‘Japanese terrorists. They took over the airport, didn’t they?’

  ‘For nearly twenty hours. There were six of them and they took four hostages. They wanted the release of two Palestinians and two other Japanese from another terrorist attack. They said they would give the German authorities twelve hours to make ready a plane and bring the terrorists. The authorities said no. The terrorists said they would shoot one of the hostages. The Government said they did not deal with terrorists. So they shot a hostage. My father.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Yes. Like your wife, Mr Spencer. They just shot him. They made him kneel down and shot him in the back of the head. I know this because the other hostages saw it.’

  ‘They got away, didn’t they?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That was enough for the Government. They gave the plane and released the prisoners and they all flew to Libya.’

  The train began to slow down. ‘We are at the border,’ she said. They entered the bleak station at Marieborn; no one got off.

  ‘We must go to the compartment,’ Lilo said.

  He stood in the corridor. The station was surrounded by high barbed-wire fences. The East German border police in their grey uniform walked slowly up and down the train. Several held Alsatians, some looked under the coaches; finally they came aboard and the train pulled out into East Germany.

  He went into the compartment, took his seat at the window and stared out at the German Democratic Republic. Again the landscape had changed, this time dramatically. It seemed, apart from the ploughed fields, to be untouched. There were no houses, and the few roads he saw wound emptily past fields and woods and simply disappeared in the distance. The emptiness of the landscape reminded him of Africa. Occasionally a small Skoda car could be seen bouncing along the badly kept roads, and as infrequently a far-away village. No houses, no petrol stations, no sign of any commerce was to be seen. He thought that this was how it could have looked in the eighteenth century. He heard Lilo turn over the pages of her notebook and then she said, ‘I see there is a gap.’

  ‘Oh? When was that?’

  ‘After you left the camp at Bremerhaven. What happened then?’

  Before he could answer, the door was pushed open by two East German Border Police. ‘Passport, bitte’ one of them said. They were young men and the one who spoke had an air of toughness and authority. Spencer handed over his passport. The second policeman stood in the corridor looking casually over the compartment. The first man turned over the pages of the passport and then said something in German which Spencer did not catch. The policeman waited, took a step towards him and stretched out his hand and Spencer thought: They know about the gun.

  He put up his own hand as though to ward off a blow. He heard Lilo say something, but the policeman’s hand was in front of his face and he pushed it away.

  ‘Mr Spencer,’ Lilo said. ‘He only wants you to take off your dark glasses.’

  He tried to smile. He took his glasses off. But the policeman was not to be mollified. He asked Spencer and Lilo to go into the corridor and the two began to search the compartment.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Spencer said, ‘I didn’t realize...’

  ‘You have made them angry.’

  The policeman told them to open their suitcases and they pulled the cushions out from the seats and felt under the seats and looked up on the racks and Spencer knew then that if they found the gun they’d take him off the train at Magdeburg. They searched for five minutes but they found nothing and he realized that it had been more of a reprisal than a search: they had not expected to find anything, just to disrupt. When they had gone he repacked his case and resumed his seat.

  Lilo was looking at him oddly. He felt angry and embarrassed and when she said, ‘Can we go back to the... he answered abruptly: ‘Do you mind... I’m a bit tired.’

  He sat watching the countryside unroll. At Magdeburg they stopped outside the station. Several Hast German local trains passed them. All the coaches were marked second class and the passengers sat on wooden benches. The station was crowded, so were the trains and the people looked dowdy in their simulated leather coats. They crossed the Elbe and went on towards Berlin.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr Spencer,’ Lilo said, ‘but it will not be too long now and there are some questions I must ask.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘When you left the camp at Bremerhaven the war was not yet over.’

  ‘It’s very simple,’ he said, keeping as close to the truth as he could. ‘In Bremerhaven I’d been in a camp with older men. One of them had assaulted me. The commandant thought I’d be safer somewhere else. But there were no camps for sixteen-year-old boys. So I was sent to Berlin to be looked after by a family.’

  ‘You mean you were free?’ she said, surprised.

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘You, an Englishman, in the middle of Berlin in wartime?’

  ‘I know it sounds crazy,’ he said, ‘but I wasn’t the only one. There were others like me, also very young, too young for the camps.’

  He told her about the Gutmanns and Lange, editing everything but staying close enough to the facts.

  ‘And these people have something to do with you now?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen them since then.’

  ‘Can I ask then why you are going to Berlin?’

  ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Forgive me?’

  ‘Look at it from my point of view. Out of all the houses in Britain they chose mine. Why? Who do I know who could have caused this? The only people I know in Germany are the people I stayed with.’

  ‘What can they have to do with it?’

  ‘Perhaps nothing. But then again they may. It’s what I must find out.’

  ‘But the mother. Mrs - ’

  ‘Gutmann.’

  ‘She would be very old now. And so would the other gentleman. Lange.’

  ‘But not Bruno.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave it to the police?’

  ‘I have. They’ve achieved nothing.’

  ‘So what you are doing now — ’

  ‘What I’m doing now is finding out.’

  ‘But that is the question. After all these years how will you find out?’

  ‘You’ll help me.’

  She smiled at him uncertainly.

  Part three

  Berlin

  His disorientation began at the Zoo Station. In his memory it was a building not unlike Waterloo Station in London, crowded with refugees and soldiers in field grey, with first aid posts and shelter signs and rubble. The train arrived at 6.30 and everything was much smaller than he recalled and much more modern. They took a taxi to his hotel in Kurfurstenstrasse and when he looked at the map he realized that this was the way he and Bruno had walked on their visits to the house in Charlottenburg. Not a single thing brought back a memory except the ruin of the Gedachtniskirche. There was a sign which said Budapesterstrasse. This was where he had been beaten up. Now it could have been a street in any city in the world; nothing seemed the same. Everything was glass and concrete and trees; wide streets, modern buildings. In his mind it had been an old city, half-ruined, but now he realized that eventually it ha
d been wholly ruined. Only when he saw all the new buildings did he realize the extent of the damage; for wherever a new building stood, an old one had been flattened.

  At the hotel he said, ‘Come in for a drink.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I have things to do. Anyway, I must try and find out what happened to these people if I am to be of service to you.’

  ‘Don’t take that too literally.’

  ‘From now on will be the best part for me,’ she said. ‘For my article. Especially if we find them. I have some contacts.’

  He paused, but she did not expand. ‘When will I see you?’ he said.

  ‘I will telephone you tomorrow.’

  He watched the taxi disappear and went up to his room. He poured himself a strong whisky from a litre he had bought in the duty-free shop on the ship and drank it quickly. He found himself wondering where she was, what she was doing. She had told him she was divorced so she was not going home to a husband. But a lover? He ran a bath and lay in it sipping a second whisky. The picture he retained of her was when they had been walking up and down the station at Hanover: long, slender legs under a blue suede coat, red lips, very white teeth, black hair cut severely across her forehead. Then the image splintered as when a reflection in a pool is broken by a stone, and he saw Susan in the suede coat; Susan’s long legs, Susan’s dark hair, Susan’s blue eyes. Rage suffused his body and he found he had squeezed the soap into a shapless mass.