Funeral in Berlin

by Len Deighton

  ‘All societies contain within themselves the germ of their own destruction,’ Vaclav said.

  ‘That’s about it,’ said Stok. Not very bright, Vaclav, Stok thought. Even his quotes from Marx were wrong. There was a radio playing near by. ‘The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows.’ Stok softly sang a few bars.

  ‘Have you been often to the West?’ Vaclav asked.

  ‘Often,’ said Stok.

  ‘I too have visited the West,’ said Vaclav. Stok sipped his lemon tea and nodded. ‘You lived in Bayswater—a district of London—during the war,’ said Stok. Then he laughed a deep-throated laugh. ‘Don’t blush, my son.’

  Vaclav was angry at himself for being even slightly embarrassed. ‘I went to join the Free Slovak forces on the orders of Moscow.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Stok, still grinning. He knew all about Vaclav.

  ‘I enjoy a trip to the West,’ said Vaclav. He was like a defiant child, thought Stok. ‘Why not, lad?’

  ‘But the fundamental inequality is what spoiled any pleasure there might be in material things. How can there ever be justice there?’

  ‘We are policemen, Vaclav; and policemen can’t get mixed up with justice. It’s bad enough being mixed up with the law.’ Vaclav nodded but did not smile.

  Vaclav said, ‘But as citizens we must consider such things. Inequality in the eyes of the state is the overwhelming sin of capitalism and will be responsible for its downfall.’

  ‘Sin?’ asked Stok. Vaclav had the pale features of a young priest, thought Stok. Although he wriggled with embarrassment, Vaclav continued, ‘It’s what makes our Socialist Republic strong: the guarantee of humanity, fraternity, justice and prosperity for all. In the West the one-sided invidious processes of commerce which dominate the system inevitably end in militarism, in which truth and justice are suppressed by corruption.’

  He’s like my own young men, thought Stok, well provided with answers. Stok pushed his feet against the hot porcelain of the stove and watched the steam rise from his damp socks.

  ‘Not to believe in justice because of corruption is like not believing in marriage because of infidelity,’ said Stok. ‘A system works according to the kind of people running it. Even fascism would be acceptable if it was run by angels. Marxism assumes that countries are run by men—corruptible men.’

  ‘Are you directed to ask me questions?’ said Vaclav. ‘To test me?’

  ‘May my right hand lose its cunning,’ roared Stok, ‘if I abused my job and your hospitality.’

  Vaclav nodded. Then, putting on his formal voice, he said, ‘Comrade Colonel, what was the purpose of the meeting tonight?’

  ‘There was no purpose,’ said Stok without a pause. ‘It’s just a matter of letting them know we have our eyes upon them.’

  ‘You never intended to arrest them.’

  He was a mass round-up man, this Czech. He’d use an armoured division to shadow a suspect and wonder why he vanished. ‘He’s not a black marketeer,’ Stok said. ‘He is an employee of the British Government. This is all a matter of probing gently. Like a brain operation, Vaclav. A hammer and chisel is all right for getting through the skull, but after that you have to be delicate.’ Stok pronounced it as though the word itself was fragile.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vaclav. Yes, thought Stok. He’d never understand in a million years. He wondered how the Englishman would ever manage, had he an assistant of this calibre.

  There was a long silence. Stok helped himself to some slivovice.

  ‘He seemed not very…’ Vaclav groped for a word, ‘…professional.’

  ‘In our business,’ said Stok with a chuckle, ‘that’s the very height of professionalism. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me if the Englishman came just to show us that they are probing.’

  ‘Probing what?’

  ‘Why must you be so unfeeling, my boy? Just probing: the situation, the way we work, the way we think. Some of us,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘I understand,’ said Vaclav.

  ‘Get a drink,’ said Stok. ‘You’re like an unemployed undertaker.’

  Vaclav said, ‘I have some Western gramophone records that we can play.’

  ‘My oath,’ thought Stok. He was going to be another jazz fan like Bykovsky’s brat. ‘The Aitchison, Topeka and the Santa Fé’ and ‘The Dark Town Poker Club’ were two songs that Bykovsky’s boy sang in word-perfect American. What an awful idea.

  ‘Ideas travel,’ said Stok, ‘and there is nothing any of us can do about that except listen.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vaclav. He didn’t fetch the records, to Stok’s relief.

  Stok curled his toes around the warm metal of the poker. Vaclav watched him without seeing.

  ‘This girl the American wants to marry. Is she working for you?’

  ‘No,’ said Vaclav.

  ‘Now don’t lie to me, you young blackguard,’ Stok said loudly.

  ‘No,’ said Vaclav quietly. They smiled at each other.

  ‘You can like people,’ said Stok, ‘without going into detail.’ Stok’s mind roamed off to the old General Borg. A desiccated old Prussian general, who would have thought that one could have made a friend of him? At first he’d only visited Borg because he was going to make a play for the elder daughter. Stok tugged at his chin again. And now here he was, the younger girl’s Pate. A fine old fuss there would be if that leaked out. Pate—an old-fashioned godfather instead of having her attend the Jugendweihe ceremony that the Communist regime held instead.

  Stok thought of all those books and papers, room after room of documents that the poor girl collated and dusted. He knew that flat as well as any place in the world; it was perhaps the only place he could really call home. The greater part of his time he spent in his office, devoid of anything that could be construed as even the simplest bourgeois comfort. As for the great ocean liner of a place in Köpenick that one of his staff had furnished to impress visiting officials, well! It gave him the shudders just to go inside the door. No, Borg’s place was the nearest thing to a home.

  It had been difficult to keep up with the old man or his daughter at first. This division, that army corps ‘wheeling southward on the Don’, ‘counter-offensive pinching out by concentric attack’. He had only been a captain during the war, and that only for the final seven weeks. Old Borg always spoke to him like he had the ear of Stalin. Stok remembered an American tourist that he had questioned a couple of months back. When Stok asked him where he had travelled on holiday, the tourist said, ‘I don’t know until I develop the film.’

  Stok had laughed at the time. He knew how true that could be. He had never known what he had done in the war until old Borg had explained it to him. The old man wouldn’t last long, Stok thought. He didn’t know what Heidi would do when he died. Heidi, thought Stok, I don’t know what I will do when the old man dies. Stok wondered what the old man would say to the idea of him marrying Heidi. It was a stupid idea and Stok rejected it from his mind. His toes gripped the warm metal of the poker but it slipped from the grasp of his damp sock.

  ‘German man,’ said Vaclav.

  ‘What did you say?’ said Stok.

  ‘You started to tell me about a problem you have with a German man,’ Vaclav said.

  ‘Did I?’ said Stok. He must try and cure himself of this tendency to daydream.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Stok. ‘Well, the problem is this. If you have a German Jew, what is he?’

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Vaclav.

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ said Stok loudly. ‘Is he primarily a Jew, or is he primarily a German? Upon that depends what he will do in a certain situation. That’s why we keep dossiers, my dear Vaclav, to provide matter for anticipatory calculations. My guess is that if a man behaves in a certain flashy, unscrupulous way for long enough he will develop behaviour patterns of that sort, no matter what fantasy life he may lead about retiring to a monastery or university or wherever errant capitalist intellectuals end up.’

  ‘So you
have decided what to do?’ said Vaclav.

  ‘In these tricky cases I always do the same thing,’ said Stok. ‘I make my plans upon the basis of everyone being untrustworthy.’

  Vaclav admired that solution. It had a certain historic ring to it. ‘What about the Englishman tonight?’ said Vaclav. ‘Is he another problem?’

  ‘English?’ said Stok. ‘No, no, no.’ He poured himself another drink. He’d had too many, he knew, but one more wouldn’t make all that difference. ‘“English” is a professional just like you and me. Professionals never make problems.’ Stok curled his toe round the warm poker and lifted it.

  * * *

  1 RG: Revolucni Garda. This was a punitive group formed at the end of the war, to kill Germans for revenge. They operated mostly in the German-settled Sudeten parts of Czechoslovakia. Around the RG, the STB (Statni Bezpecpost) or Security Police was formed. Vaclav is a member of OBZ (Obranne Zpravodajstvi)—the military version of STB.

  Chapter 35

  In medieval times it was the aim of players

  to annihilate every opponent instead of

  checkmating the king.

  Tuesday, October 22nd

  TEREZIN. BELZEC. OSVETIM. GLIWICE. MAJDANEK. SOBIBOR BERGEN-BELSEN. IZIBICA. FLOSSENBURG. GROSSROSEN. ORANIENBURG. TREBLINKA. LODZ. LUBIN. DACHAU. BUCHENWALD. NEUENGAMME. RAVENSBRUECK. SACHSENHAUSEN. NORDHAUSEN. DORA. MAUTHAUSEN. STRASSHOF. LANDSBERG. PLASZOW. OHRDRUS. HERZOGENBUSCH. WESTER-BORK.

  The Pinkas Synagogue is a tiny grey stone fifteenthcentury building, its Gothic Renaissance interior bare of all furnishings except the carefully painted lettering.

  The walls of the little synagogue seem grey, grey with an intricate pattern of tiny writing. Jammed together like the victims themselves, and written with obsessional clarity, are the names of the camps and of the dead. The grey wall stretches away like infinity and the lines of names are as hushed as a Nuremberg rally.

  The man I had come to see tapped the stone wall at shoulder height. Under the scarred finger tip I read the name Broum. As his finger moved in the cool light the name was revealed, hidden, revealed and then hidden again as his hand rested over it.

  ‘The best book is the world,’ said Josef-the-gun, ‘that’s what the Talmud tells us; the best book is the world.’ His hand made a curious turning movement. He looked at it like a stage conjurer, proud that by opening his fist he could make fingers materialize. He looked at the wall as though he had produced that too from his sleeve and he tapped it to show what a solid manifestation it was.

  ‘I know what you are going to say,’ said Josef-the-gun. His voice sounded indecently loud.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Now you understand for the first t-t-t-t-t-time.’ I could see the tip of his tongue vibrate as he stuttered. ‘That’s what they all say and, believe me, it sounds silly.’

  ‘Is that what they all say?’

  ‘One man said “I went to St Peter’s before I understood Luther and I had to come here to understand Hitler”.’

  ‘Understand,’ I said, ‘that’s a complicated word, “understand”.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Josef-the-gun. He moved suddenly like a trout in a patch of sunlight.

  ‘What is there to understand? You write a numeral six, put six zeros behind it and you call it “Jewish Dead”. You write six zeros behind a numeral seven, and you call that “Russian Civilian Dead”. You change the first numeral to three and you have a symbol for murdered Russian prisoners. Five: it’s Polish corpses. Understand? Why, it’s simple mathematics. Just name it as the nearest round million.’ I said nothing. ‘So you are inquiring about Broum?’ he said finally. He removed his wide-brimmed black hat and studied the band of it as though he had some secret message inside.

  ‘Broum,’ I said. ‘Yes. Paul Louis Broum.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the man; ‘Paul Louis Broum.’ He emphasized the given names carefully. ‘That’s the voice of officialdom all right.’ And he gave a secret little smile, then ducked and bobbed away like he thought I was about to strike him. ‘Broum,’ he said again; he rubbed his chin and moved his eyeballs up into his forehead in an attitude of deep thought. ‘And you saw Jan-im-Glück yesterday.’

  ‘Harvey took me there,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said still rubbing his chin. ‘Well, my brother is an old man…’ He stopped rubbing his chin long enough to make a little circular motion with his index finger. ‘…it happens to us all as we get older.’

  ‘He seemed lucid enough,’ I said.

  ‘I meant no d-d-d-disrespect,’ said the man. He ducked away again. I realized that some of the physical movements were to cover his stuttering.

  ‘You knew Broum?’ I asked.

  ‘Everyone knew him,’ said the man. ‘People like that, everyone knows them, no one likes them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘People like what?’

  ‘Very rich people,’ said the man. Didn’t you know he was v-v-v-very rich?’

  ‘What’s the difference,’ I asked, ‘rich or poor?’

  The old man leaned towards me. ‘The difference between the unhappy poor and the unhappy rich is that the unhappy rich can change.’ He gave an abrupt cackle. He shuffled across the cold floor and when he spoke again his voice echoed around the vaulting. ‘When the Gestapo needed a h-h-h-h-h-headquarters here in Prague they chose the Petschek House—that’s a bank—they used the vaults and strongrooms as their torture chambers. A symbolic dwelling for the tortures of fascism, eh? The vaults of capitalist wealth.’ He dodged away waving a finger.

  I realized why he was called ‘Josef-the-gun’—it was because of this stutter. ‘But why was Broum unpopular in the camp?’ I asked to try to get the conversation back on my lines.

  ‘He wasn’t unpopular with the G-G-G-G-G-G-Germans. Oh dear no. They liked him almost as much as his money. Almost as much as his money,’ he said again. ‘They did favours for money, you see, the Germans.’

  ‘What sort of favours?’

  ‘Any sort,’ said the gun. ‘The medical officer for a start, he’d sell all manner of lovely things for money. For the right amount of money he could c-c-c-c-cure you.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Cure you,’ said the old man. ‘You understand what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they could make innocent prisoners suffer or let guilty ones go free.’

  ‘Guilty ones,’ said the man. ‘What a strange vocabulary you have.’

  ‘Who killed Broum?’ I asked. I wanted to cut through the man’s rhetoric.

  ‘International disinterest,’ said the man.

  ‘Who personally killed him?’ I said.

  ‘Neville Chamberlain,’ said the man.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Who actually strangled him?’ I added ‘Broum’, in an effort to avoid another long flight of philosophy and paradox.

  ‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘strangled?’ He put on his hat like a judge about to pass the death sentence. ‘The instrument of death?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was a guard,’ said the man.

  ‘An officer?’ I asked.

  Josef removed his hat and wiped the leather band with a handkerchief.

  ‘Was it the medical officer?’ I prompted.

  ‘Didn’t my brother tell you?’ he said. ‘He knew.’

  ‘You tell me,’ I said. The man put his hat back on. ‘A Landser named Vulkan. Just a boy. Not good nor bad.’

  He walked out of the door into the bright sunlight. Beyond him greenery sprouted between the white gravestones like they were gigantic mustard-and-cress sandwiches. I followed him.

  ‘Did you know this soldier Vulkan?’

  He turned quickly. ‘Just as well as I know you. What do you think Treblinka was—a Conservative club?’ He stepped away. The bright sunlight made his skin waxy and yellow.

  ‘Try to remember,’ I said. ‘This is important.’

  ‘Oh, that’s different,’ said the man. He rubbed his chin. ‘If it’s
important, I’ll have to remember.’ He chewed each syllable carefully and presented the finished word on the tip of his tongue, anxious not to mutilate a vowel or drop an aitch. ‘I was getting it mixed up with the trivia of half a million people being fed into a gas chamber.’ He looked up at me, frankly jeering, and began to walk towards the street.

  ‘This prisoner Broum,’ I said. ‘What had he done?’

  ‘Done?’ said the man. ‘What had I done? To be in a concentration camp you need only be a Jew.’ He opened the cemetery door with a howl of rusty hinges.

  ‘Had he been involved in a murder?’ I asked.

  ‘Have we not all been involved?’ said the man.

  ‘A communist,’ I said. ‘Was he a known communist?’

  The man turned in the doorway. ‘Communist,’ he repeated. ‘You may have heard someone in a concentration camp admit to being a murderer and many agreed that they had been spies. A prisoner would sometimes even confess to having at one time—for a short while—been a Jew. But a communist, no. No one would ever let that word pass their lips.’ He stepped through the door into the street and walked slowly towards the old synagogue.

  I walked alongside. ‘You may be the last chance of bringing a guilty man to justice…’ I pleaded. ‘…a traitor.’

  The man seized on the word ‘traitor’. He said, ‘What’s that mean? Is that another of your special words? What was a man who threw a piece of his bread ration into the children’s compound when it was against his orders as a German soldier to do so?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘What was a man who would only throw his bread for money?’

  ‘What about a Jew who worked for the Germans?’ I countered.

  ‘No worse than a Frenchman who worked for the Americans,’ said the old man cockily. ‘L-l-l-l-look at the clock up there.’

  I looked past the Staronova Synagogue to where an ancient clock with Hebrew numbers glinted golden in the sun.

  ‘This was the Ghetto,’ said Josef with a sudden sweep of his hand. ‘Every day I looked at that clock when I was a young boy. I was eighteen before I discovered that it was different from every other clock in the world.’