The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  They walk past a group of Russian soldiers. In the streets and the parks here the Russians and the Americans seem to hang about in larger groups, young - many of the Russian soldiers look astonishingly young - and assertively male like teams of footballers or hunters or schoolboys. The British and the French tend to wander more thoughtfully, in pairs and threes. These Russians eye the girl quite openly, but in an appreciative rather than a predatory way. Whatever it is they say may be a compliment to her or an expression of envy at the inappropriately soft-looking Englishman who has her company. If the girl understands the Russian words, if she has spoken Russian in some other place, she does not show it. If she has suffered at Russian hands, if (like so very many) she has known the horror of Russian soldiers inside her, she does not show that either, as if her body would have been a separate thing, lined with hardness, insulated against feeling. Her senses will be open only as she wills them, to the sights, odours, tastes, touch that she chooses to know.

  'So what are you thinking, Alec? Give me a penny for them, is that what you English say?' (Most of her phrases come direct from the textbooks in which she has learnt them.)

  'That's what they say we say, but you don't much hear people say it. I was thinking about potatoes.'

  Her laugh is clear. No one would know about the steel within her.

  'No, really,' he says. And she steps before him, turns so that their bodies brush, looks up into his face.

  'I was thinking that this isn't good soil for potatoes. It's too sandy here. Potatoes grow much better at Charlottenburg. Someone told me that when they laid out the Charlottenburg gardens they imported topsoil from else-where.'

  'You weren't listening to me then, to what I was saying, before! '

  'No, why, should I have been? Was it important?'

  No. It was not important. She cannot even remember what it was. She sees that that is how it is with him. He likes to hear her talk but he does not listen to her words. There is a separation there that leaves her free.

  They come to one of the ponds. There is lilac beside it, lilac thick beside the water.

  'I have never seen,' he says, 'lilac so heavy with flower as here.' He has never known spring arrive with such raw force as in this city, this year. Or perhaps it is only because of what surrounds it; or because it is silent, because there are no birds, because the birds have gone, flown away or killed in the bombardment or eaten by the starving. 'But then this the ideal place for lilac, isn't it? It grows like a weed in this part of Europe.' She's a city girl, and hasn't noticed.

  The thread of his thought is a constant beneath every-thing else, his observation of what interests him; his interest, here in this place, in this park in the spring, in what grows and how well it does. In years to come when they are married this will become more evident, his gardener's eye at times a joke and at times an irritation to his wife, but now his comments come to her brightly as a reinforcement of hope, as he speculates that the effect of all the destruction, the fires and the ashes, may act in the soil as a stimulant to growth.

  'Close your eyes,' she says, 'and smell it. The lilac, the warm air. It makes you forget.'

  When she opens her eyes, his are still closed. He looks serious like a man praying and that makes her laugh.

  The pond is still and brown, bronze where the light hits the water. Where a sapling cherry has survived the bombardment and the felling, there is a light spray of petals across its surface. Black leaves show in the water at its edge. When the water is disturbed these are churned up and a smell escapes of sodden leaves and decay. There is a boy there, poking in the water with a stick. He has seen something that interests him, some piece of debris that is buried beneath last year's leaves. He is a thin boy with messy blond hair and he stands with his feet right at the edge of the pond and tries to lift whatever it is with the long stick that he has found. A man who is passing stops and watches him. That draws attention to him and some others stop also, a little further away.

  'Alec, look!' She catches his arm.

  Others like themselves see that something is going on, but only through the corner of an eye as they walk by, not consciously registering the event yet aware, so that if something further were to occur they would remember having seen it from the start. It is a woman who makes the move, an elderly woman who is neatly dressed in a coat and hat that are too heavy for the day. She calls to the boy with an authority that suggests that she might once have been a schoolteacher, and he looks up, holds still. She goes closer and speaks to him then, urgently, shaking her head. Slowly he lifts the stick out of the water. There are leaves clinging to it and drips falling away. He throws it down. As the water clears those who have been observing come closer. The dirt and the black leaves swirl and settle about a metal shape that could just be the casing of a shell.

  The couple pull tight together now and walk away down a path that leads between two bushes of purple and paler lilac. The moment of fear has put a charge between them. In a place where the light shafts on to them, they stop and hold each other, where the grass is very green. Yet here too there are people, another couple, approaching. They seek a place where there is no one else, but in this cleared park there is no hidden place where a British intelligence officer might make love to a German girl. And so she leads him away. She leads him to where they can take a tram, out from the centre of the city to where she has her apartment, only one room and a kitchen, and nothing inside it is hers, but it is private, up shaky flights of stairs.

  There is a chance on that journey that the whole thing might end, right there, when it has scarcely begun. Close to the tram stop is a market where people sell things. They come and lay things out before them on a blanket on the pavement: china, gold, watches, stockings, cigarettes in packets that are already battered with handling, a bundle of precious sticks of asparagus from the countryside. The Englishman wants to buy her a present. He stops, browses, bends to take a closer look at a piece of jewellery. All the time she does not loose the hand of his that she holds but grasps it tighter, pulling at his fingers. He, laughing, reaches back for her, puts his arm now around her waist. Here, how about this one? It is an amber necklace, a fine colour, very clear.

  'How much is it?' he asks the woman there. The girl has scarcely looked at her until now. She is a middle-aged woman of tight respectability. She has brought her possessions in a suitcase, and a folding chair for herself to sit in, laid the things out on the suitcase lid. There are not very many of them but they are all good; besides the necklace, a large brooch also of amber, trinkets and scarves and pieces of lace, a clock, a cup and saucer that may perhaps be Meissen. She has been sitting with that hunched anonymity that so many of the market traders have, that is part boredom, part a removal of herself from the fact of what she is doing there. It is only now, with the possibility of a sale, that she becomes alert, and the girl looks into her face and knows her from the past.

  She is certain that the woman must recognise her also. This woman has known her all of her life, but as another person under another name. Yet she does not say it. She looks away, looks now only at the Englishman and names a price, and it is the high sort of price you would name to a British soldier who appears to be in love. Then when he does not bargain she unclasps her bag and takes from it a scrap of tissue paper that she has smoothed and folded from its previous use, and wraps the necklace in it, and takes the notes he gives her and folds them and puts them away. And lets the girl go on being the other person that she has become, and the girl goes on and does not know whether the woman has acted out of discretion or amnesia.

  The boy with the stick stands idle, looking out across the pond. A roller skater comes up behind him, then another, two youths who are bigger, bulkier, than he is. The second brushes so close behind him that he takes a step forward, almost to the water's edge. He shouts something angry after them, throwing down his stick. Then scuffs away, hands in his pockets. He goes right past me where I sit on this bench in the sun.

  A NO
TE ON THE TYPE

  The text of this book is set in Granjon. This old-style face is named after the Frenchman Robert Granjon, a sixteenth-century letter cutter whose italic types have often been used with the romans of Claude Garamond. The origins of this face, like those of Garamond, lie in the late fifteenth century types used by Aldus Manutius in Italy.