The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  We waited for the procession to go and then started back. The sky was lightening, luminous cracks in the clouds. When the sun came out it would all of a sudden feel like June again. But in these last moments of greyness Peter muttered something in my ear. He brushed by me. He still had his hood up and his hands in his pockets with his elbows out so that he jabbed my side. I didn't catch his meaning until he had gone on a few yards ahead down the path. He said something about Harry Lime. The name took a moment to register.

  Harry Lime was the man in a film we'd seen on a Sunday afternoon.

  People went to Harry Lime's funeral but he wasn't dead.

  Peter was walking away like Harry Lime's girl did in the film, walking down the wide aisle between the graves. He was walking on, away, and he would not look up even if I went alongside, even if I were to go past him and call.

  Harry Lime was in Vienna, of course. The Third Man was set in Vienna, not Berlin. I used to see my parents meeting on the wet cobbles of a shadowy Vienna. Even now, coming to Berlin, I must remind myself of what is true.

  A tram line passes the hotel room in Kastanienallee. When I wake I hear the rain first and then the tram. I know the sound as it comes to a stop just across from my window, the soft rush as it goes on. Even if I have not lived with the sound of a tram before it is one that is familiar and full of associations as it has been heard a hundred times in films: long raincoats and cigarette smoke and fleeting en-counters; my father and mother there as characters in a story.

  'You know where we met, don't you? It was in 1947. I'd been in Berlin six months, interpreting, and this young German girl came into the office one day and it was your mother.' Dad was driving home after we'd been to the cemetery. I sat in the front, Peter slumped and sullen in the back. He was talking to me but he was trying to deal with the problem of Peter. I could see that. It was easier to have me in the front and address his words to me but really he was speaking to Peter. We were driving along a straight high ridge over the top of the Cotswolds. I used to love that stretch of road. The land fell away from it in a wide valley like the Promised Land in my illustrated Bible.

  'She didn't have anyone. There were people in Berlin who had no family, no home, nothing but their names, and she was one of those. You have no idea how it was in Berlin then, how destroyed it was. I've got some photographs somewhere, I don't think I've shown them to you, have I? Well, I'll show them to you sometime. They're not much, just houses reduced to rubble, sometimes a wall standing with a chimney in it, or the front of a house, an apartment-block façade and there's only sky through the windows. When you look at them you have to multiply them in your mind, think of whole streets, districts, a whole city like that, great mounds of bricks and paths going through where there had been straight wide streets, and people were living in this, living right in the middle of the ruins. They had tidied them and stacked the bricks, and marked bits off and made shelters. Some of them lived in the cellars that were left when houses were destroyed above, and climbed out when you didn't expect to see anyone, they'd come up suddenly like ghosts, pale from under-ground, or if the weather was good they would have cooking stoves outside, and sit around, all neat and tidy sometimes, families with little girls in plaits, sitting on chairs among the bricks eating their food.

  'Anyway, your mother wasn't one of those. She'd found an apartment somehow in a partially damaged building. The rooms were fine but the front of it was shot up and the windows were gone so she had put paper across them. Just her there. She didn't have any family and I don't think she knew anyone. She was meant to be sent out to the countryside. That was what they did with most of the German refugees; they were all sent to different towns and villages, but she had managed to get to Berlin and stay there on her own, and she spoke English and was useful, so we found work for her. Your mother was lucky. There were thousands about like her. And there were a million others besides Germans: French and Italians and Poles and Lithuanians and Czechs and what-have-you, who'd been forced to work in Germany during the war or somehow ended up there, and some of them were still in camps and some were just milling around. Most of them were trying to join up with their families again, if their families were alive and if they could trace them, and get back to wherever it was they came from, and some who came from the East, like your mother, didn't want to go back. They'd moved the boundaries, you see, and pieces of Poland and Germany became Russia, and other pieces of Germany became Poland, and it was all a great muddle. A lot of people wanted to go on to Britain or America, somewhere new, because they thought they would find nothing left where they came from or because they were scared of the Russians or because they thought they would do better in the West.'

  'Like Harry Lime's girl,' I said.

  'Who?'

  'Harry Lime's girlfriend in that film. She was all alone, and she needed papers and Harry got them for her.' Anna Schmidt, she was called. Another Anna.

  'Well, yes,' he said. 'I suppose it was a bit like that.'

  A pause then. The sound of the car. I hadn't really understood why Anna Schmidt needed the papers so badly. It came to me that my mother looked a bit like Anna Schmidt; and the actress who was Anna Schmidt looked a bit like Hedy Lamarr. They all looked a bit the same.

  Peter spoke for the first time since we were in the cemetery.

  'How long did you know her, when you got engaged?'

  'Oh, not very long. A few months. She came in the winter and we were engaged in the spring. We got married pretty much as soon as we were allowed.'

  'What had she been doing, before?'

  'She moved around, from place to place. It was a chaotic time. As I told you, there were a million people on the move.'

  'Why didn't she look for her family? She should have been looking for her family.'

  'She didn't have any family left.'

  'How did she know, if it was all such a muddle? How could she be so sure?'

  His questions came from the back of the car like a series of shots, one after the other, each one becoming a little closer and more hostile. The car slowed. We came to a roundabout and turned off it in silence. And that was the end of the story. I suppose Dad thought that time would heal. That's what people would have told him: leave the boy, let him be; he'll get over it, he just needs time. So he put the radio on and we listened to the soothing voices of the Home Service all the rest of the way home. He didn't attempt to go back to the subject later. I could see why. It wasn't the kind of conversation you could start up again. It was the sort of conversation that could happen only in transit, in a car, when you didn't look at one another but only at the road.

  His photos are nothing special. I have them with me so that I can attempt to identify their sites: faded shots of the River Spree, of young Russian soldiers in some relatively intact street, of a train of refugee wagons passing a spanking new Russian memorial. I imagine he took his pictures with the same little Brownie that I remember, that he kept for years. They are small, faded, vague, not nearly so good as those that are reproduced in books, but they have a particular value. They have meaning because I know who took them, because they speak to me directly as the extensions of a lost memory. These things my father saw. When he died and I cleared his house I brought the album home. At some point, when the occasion arose, I showed it to my daughter. That was Berlin just after the war. Where your grandparents met. But my daughter perceived them only as history. Where I was still implicated, she was detached. She looked through the pictures with an objectivity which was the difference between history and memory.

  The old postcards they sell in Berlin will mean as much to her: the defeated city, the Reichstag without its roof. I have bought some to send home. I shall write them this morning before I catch my train. I shall get to the station in good time so that there is no worry, and then I can sit somewhere and have a last coffee and write my cards. There is one of a springtime crowd in the open-air cafés of an Unter den Linden without limes. I shall send her that one. Funny to think that
your grandparents could have been there, in that picture.

  So many faces there: the faces of Allied soldiers, bombed-out Berliners, camp survivors, the displaced from all of Europe, mingled beneath the spring sun. They wear uniforms and smart city clothes and some things that are almost rags, and some of these outfits are worn as surely as skin and others with doubt as if the wearer had only that moment stepped into them. So many stories there, and my mother's story is just one of these, the story of a girl who is one of eight million driven out from eastern Germany, coming alone to Berlin, making her way, getting out. The story will have certain standard elements of tragedy - it is a story of war, after all, of war and defeat with all the variable probabilities of bombing, loss, flight, rape - and particular features at which I can only guess: some special quality of toughness or of marvellous luck in its protagonist, who came a refugee and left with a British officer husband and a silver fox coat.

  In the films the Friedrichstrasse was a sinister place, the station in the East a connecting point to the West and thus a place of surveillance, of whispers and observing eyes, where a raw-faced soldier in an ugly olive uniform stood at the edge of the platform sighting his machine gun along the painted yellow line. Its present reality is innocuous: up stairs, raised above the streets, a dozen grey platforms; isolated figures on them, walking, standing, fumbling at ticket machines.

  This first train is headed for the Baltic coast. There are few passengers on a wet Monday in April. In an hour I will get off and change for Poland. I have a window all to myself and watch the landscape, looking for whatever details define it beneath the rain. The city has been quickly passed, the order of the massive Communist blocks randomly broken down between factories and allotments and new housing, giving way to land that is wide and low, that rolls in long undulations, showing green with new wheat beneath the greyness of cloud. It would be similar to parts of eastern England, only there are lakes, and the long rectangles of arable fields are broken up by rambling stretches of forest, dense forest that is used for hunting, with wooden towers for shooting deer set up in clearings and in fields close to the forest edge. Every so often a group of wind turbines stands white and pure on a rise in the land. So this is the place that was East Germany.

  The station where I must change trains is a small one. A handful of other passengers are making the same connection. Two youths who look like students. An old woman and her daughter. The others travelling separately, two other men, a lone girl in a bright-yellow mac. The colour is the most distinctive thing in the journey. It goes ahead of me along the open platform to where the new train is waiting, enters the far end of my carriage. Along the corridor inside I catch a glimpse of yellow passing into a compartment.

  In Poland the rain has eased off. I must have been dozing for a time. There is more forest now than farmland outside the window. I take a small bottle of water from my bag. The water is fresh and clean, and my mouth was dry after sleep. I begin to enjoy just the sense of travelling, the flatness, the anonymity of it.

  There is a small boy in the compartment. For most of the journey he has sat quiet beside his mother but now he is bored and wanders between our legs. His mother with a tired gesture pulls the door shut before he can go out into the corridor, pats the seat and tells him to come and sit down again. But he doesn't. He stands before me and stares, his hot hand on my knee. Why does he come to me? He comes like a cat selecting the person in a room who shows least interest. I do not easily make contact with strange children. I am too shy, I suppose, too conscious. Wary of what a child might see.

  This boy's look is blank, without awareness. He is not an attractive child. The other passengers, another young woman and a middle-aged man, watch as I say hello to him in English.

  'I am sorry,' says his mother, scolding him in his own language. 'He is bothering you.'

  'No,' I say. 'Not at all.'

  'You are English?'

  'Yes.'

  'Where are you from?'

  'London.' It is not true but it is easy to say. I have spoken to people enough to understand that they like it if I come from London. What does it matter here who I say I am?

  'My cousin is working there.'

  Most of the Polish people I meet will have a cousin working in London. The others in the carriage observe the conversation but do not speak. Probably they under-stand what I am saying. They too will have cousins in London.

  'Where are you going?'

  'Gdahsk.'

  'Tourist?'

  'Yes.'

  The boy loses interest and the other woman offers him a biscuit. A conversation starts in Polish.

  I saw Peter shortly before I left. He happened to be in London on business so I went up for the day and met him for lunch. It was probably a mistake that it was lunch. Dinner might have been more relaxed. Peter was in a suit and the restaurant was full of businessmen, and every time he looked at his watch I was aware that he had a meeting to go to afterwards.

  He didn't eat much either. He said that he had to eat too many dinners on business trips and only wanted something light. So we had salads, no wine, and the table seemed too empty to fill the time.

  Peter has done well, keeps well. In Hong Kong, he said, he keeps fit, swims, goes to the gym, sails at weekends.

  'That's good,' I said. 'I should do more exercise. I don't seem to do much nowadays apart from a bit of gardening.'

  His wife, his girls were all fine, though I don't know if he would tell me if they weren't. My family were fine too. The news is done with fast, in these sporadic meetings, relayed over too great a distance, like telegrams used to be, every word counted, counting for more than itself, others left out in the spaces between. Another day I might have tried to spin it out but this time I wanted the preliminaries over so that I could tell him about the trip I had planned.

  'You won't find anything.'

  'But at least I'll see. I've never seen any of those places.'

  'Berlin's worth the visit. There's some stunning new architecture, and wonderful art. You'll enjoy the art. But you don't want to go to Kaliningrad. It's Russia. you know.'

  'Of course I know. I've got my visa, haven't I?'

  'But are you sure it's safe?'

  Just fifteen minutes together and he had me on the defensive. Peter knows more than me. He always knows more. The old patterns remain.

  'Why don't you just take a nice holiday? Come and see us. You've never done that.'

  Peter doesn't look one quite in the eye. Or if he does, his look passes on too quickly. There are layers of reserve in him, with me at least. I know too much. I know who he used to be.

  We talked on, stilted, skirting things. We had coffee. He asked for the bill. The movement seemed to make it easier for me to speak, that we were turning in our chairs, that the waiter was clearing the cups away.

  'I saw something odd in the paper, just the other day. An obituary for Istvan Kiss, did you see? He died. He was famous after all.' (And real. I did not say that but the thought hung there between us, the whole story that we had never mentioned, the knot of words and adult figures in some deep pit of memory, that we evade, that we have evaded all our adult lives, that we have never once unravelled even to excuse ourselves, to say that we were only children, that it must anyway have been too late, that there was nothing that we might have done.)

  Peter was getting his credit card from his wallet. It was a smart wallet, lots of cards in it. The waiter stood ready to take his payment.

  'I saw him play once, didn't I ever tell you? Years ago, when I was working in Boston.'

  So he had not forgotten either. He had forgotten no more than I, for all his smoothness. And I answered as smoothly, covering it over.

  'No, I never knew. Was he good?'

  'Very good. He played a Bach concerto. He was superb.'

  Then the waiter was gone and there was an opening between us.

  'Goodbye, Anna. Look after yourself in Russia. And tell me if you do end up finding anything, won'
t you?'

  Poland first. I check the time. We will be at Gdahsk soon. It is necessary to gather my thoughts before arrival, not only book and bags and coat. Where to go. How to get there. It looks bleak outside even though there has been no rain here. I will need to wear my coat, and besides, if I wear the coat I will have less to carry. (For two weeks I have more luggage than Sarah Cahn had for the rest of her life.) The man opposite picks up my scarf from the floor and hands it to me. It must have fallen when I took the coat down from the luggage rack. He says something all in Polish but his gestures explain: no hurry, calm down. This is only Gdynia. Gdahsk will be the next stop, or possibly the one after. He is a squat middle-aged man with stubby fingers and scarcely a neck, but his face is kinder and more expressive than you would expect. So I must sit a while longer, hot in my coat with my suitcase crowding the foot-space and another bag on my lap.

  An anxious moment squeezed in the corridor before the door, and then I am out on the platform. In Poland. I join the flow of people off the platform and down into an underpass. That must be the way out, but I cannot ask. Coming to a new country like this one feels suddenly without voice as well as language, without identity. There is the coat again, the bright yellow of it, and the wearer who is a Polish girl with hair of a synthetic copper colour. Again I find myself following her, through the crowded tunnel beneath the station, lifting my suitcase up the steps that emerge into daylight, crossing the road towards the gables and spires that mark where the old town is, that are the rebuilt buildings of Danzig. My coat begins to feel too warm now. The wheels of the case snag on the cobbles. I shall stop in a cafi. I shall stop a moment before finding my hotel.