________
He had now been in Berlin for more than two weeks without receiving a single sign, not one indication that he was supposed to make his big contribution in the name of Freedom. He had checked into the hotel where he was supposed to stay. Everything had gone without a hitch, and as far as he knew, he hadn’t aroused any suspicions. Henry the secret agent had played the role of the tourist and by now he had walked up and down the streets in every part of town. Kreuzberg, Schöneberg, Tempelhof, Steglitz, Wedding and Charlottenburg – he knew them all by heart, as the English say. And he had seen the Wall, Die Mauer. He had seen the wet, dripping, heavy Wall, which ran right through town, like some sort of architectonic terror. It went right through buildings, right across streets and squares: the bricks were mute, with the tears of totalitarian silence dripping down each side.
But he didn’t receive the slightest signal. Henry was starting to suspect that something was wrong, that something had happened. Yet he was just a little cog in a large-scale machine. The Girrman League was not the only group occupied with this sort of self-sacrificing ‘charity’ of people-smuggling.
As time passed, Berlin too became a dreary place. Henry had heard a great deal of marvellous jazz, going to every club in town since he was officially there to study the music scene. But even music can start to pall if you’re feeling properly depressed.
On the day when he left the bar on Fasanenstrasse, quite intoxicated after his argument with Franz and quite disappointed after Verena had disappeared, Henry staggered through the rain towards his hotel to go to bed. He felt drunk and a bit sick, feverish and sluggish at the same time, and all he wanted to do was go to sleep.
‘Goot eftning, misterr Yard,’ said the hotel clerk in lousy English. ‘Zere iss ah letter forr yo,’ he continued, handing over an envelope.
Henry was thrilled, and he sobered up on his way to his room. He went in, sat down on the bed, still wearing his drenched coat, and slit open the envelope.
‘You play part very well, Bill. Trust in you. Hear from us in two days. Money in advance. Franz.’
Henry read the words backwards and forwards at least fifteen times. Then he riffled through the crisp dollar bills, which were the equivalent of five thousand kronor. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Everything started spinning around, and he fell asleep.
________
The next day he had a hard time remembering anything. He had slept heavily and dreamlessly all night, fully dressed, and he couldn’t even recall what Verena Musgrave looked like. She had red hair and freckles and a rather large, Jewish nose. But that was all. There was something pale and hazy about her. She interested him much more than that fucking Franz, with his money and his armless exploits.
After lunch Henry went down to Bleibtreustrasse to look for the boarding house near Savignyplatz. The ground shook and rumbled beneath his feet as the U-Bahn, the underground, passed through its tunnels. He had a hard time finding the way, since he never used maps. Henry usually took his bearings from the sun, but there was no sun right now. Berlin is an undermined city, a flat city with few monuments to use as landmarks. There was no use even dreaming of the sun.
He walked through the streets, reading signs and wondering who had been able to remember the names of all the bombed streets after the war. Some avenues had been renamed after new heroes. Others had been restored, and perhaps the names were actually the only indication of the streets’ existence when there was nothing but ruins and burning rubble, with no street signs or building numbers. The reality was ruins and burning rubble, but the names lived on as ideas, as concepts. In the collective subconscious of Berlin’s citizens there was a picture of a city with addresses and squares, and presumably they sat down with the outline of a map to rechristen everything when peace was declared. Not even the Stalinists could blast away a language.
It turned out to be true that there were many dilapidated boarding houses along Bleibtreustrasse. There were also many landladies, including a talkative old Polish woman who ran her business with Polish zeal. But she didn’t have any Verena living in her building, although she let it be known that she could provide girls with plenty of other names.
Henry thanked her for her thoughtfulness and gave up. He was disappointed and dispirited, slightly hungover and out of sorts, so he went into a pub. He ordered a beer and a schnapps as a pick-me-up. On the walls hung old name plates made of dark wood that had been fastened to hallways before the war. Henry read all the names on one sign: Schultze, Hammer- stein, Pintzki, Lange and Wilmers. Maybe they too had just disappeared, not yet declared dead. Unknown soldiers who would remain unknown.
________
Several days passed during which Henry did nothing in particular. The days flowed by in exactly the way he often allowed his days to flow. He would lie motionless on his bed with his hands clasped behind his head as he whistled monotonous tunes, his eyes fixed vacantly on the ceiling. That’s how he and Leo used to lie in bed when they were little, competing to see who could whistle most off-key. Leo usually won with the piercing and unbearable sound he made when he inhaled.
Henry lay there, longing to be somewhere else. He suddenly had five thousand kronor in crisp dollar bills, but nothing was happening. No one contacted him, no one wanted to have him cross the border. He felt superfluous.
On a rainy, gloomy day – it was the greyest day he had ever experienced, and he told me that it seemed as if there were no sky at all over Berlin on that day – he made his way back to Bleibtreustrasse. He was determined to look for Verena again. He had nothing else to do. Maybe he just wanted to buy her a beer in return, or maybe he was actually in love with her.
There are moments in a person’s life when he goes looking for something; it might just as well be in a bureau drawer as in a world metropolis, but he blindly seems to head straight for his goal. This was just such a moment for Henry the secret agent. He stepped out into the foggy street and went inside a boarding house that he had missed the first time. The woman in charge of the place was, appropriately, an old, magisterial woman wearing a black dress with her grey hair in a French twist. Henry asked her if she had a lodger by the name of Verena Musgrave.
‘You mean the English lady?’ she said, her face lighting up.
‘Exactly,’ said Henry.
‘Top floor,’ said the woman. ‘Room 46.’
Henry climbed the stairs, feeling a little nervous. The whole place reeked of a deeply-rooted mixture of paraffin and clothing that had been hanging in a wardrobe for two winters. It was dark, and every step creaked. Here and there he could heard murmuring and fragments of conversation. Someone was cooking.
On the sixth floor a big, heavy door opened onto a corridor. Henry walked straight over to room 46. The door was ajar and opened even further when he knocked. The room was empty. He went in. It looked as if the lodger had left in great haste.
Henry immediately assumed that the old woman had been mistaken, and he raced back down the five floors of stairs to ask her if she had really meant room 46.
‘The room is empty?’ said the old woman in alarm. ‘That’s not possible!’
‘Yes, it’s empty,’ said Henry.
‘You must be mistaken, my young man,’ said the woman. She checked the hotel register herself to make sure.
‘Maybe I made a mistake up there in the dark,’ admitted Henry. ‘It’s so dark today.’
‘It really is dark today,’ said the woman. ‘You must have made a mistake.’
Henry climbed up to the sixth floor again, convinced that he had made a mistake. But he hadn’t. Room 46 really was empty, abandoned in haste. Maybe she had simply run off without paying the bill.
Henry went into the room. The curtains were drawn. He pulled one aside but it made no difference. The wardrobe was empty, except for a few swaying clothes-hangers. It smelled of mothballs.
There was a mirror above the sink next to the wardrobe. A little picture was stuck into the frame. He pulled it out. It was a silhouet
te, the kind that old men cut out in one fell motion in places where tourists gather. This one had presumably been cut out by the man who had staked out a place near the abandoned U-Bahn cars at Nollendorfplatz. He charged five marks, which was considered cheap.
Verena had actually stayed in this room. Henry recognised her profile at once in the little silhouette of black paper on a white background. Her hair falling over her forehead, her nose with that cute bump, and her full lower lip. That’s exactly how she looks, thought Henry. The portrait had been cut with skill and sensitivity.
He put the silhouette in his pocket and left the room. The old woman was waiting on tenterhooks in the foyer.
‘Well? Were you mistaken?’ she asked with satisfaction.
‘That’s right,’ said Henry. ‘I made a mistake in the dark.’
‘I thought so,’ said the woman. ‘She seems so respectable, that girl.’
He cut across the street, went into a bar and ordered a beer. He lit a Roth- Händle and started to brood on things. There was something very wrong about this situation, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He went over every word he had said to all the people he had met, especially Franz and Verena. The talk about people who had disappeared, the archive in Dahlem and that silhouette. He put the piece of paper in his wallet, thinking he would keep it as a souvenir. Maybe he wasn’t really in love. He was just a lonely secret agent in Berlin.
________
After a good month of rain and fog, grease and smoke and soot and damp in Berlin, Henry was well on his way to falling apart. Nothing had happened, and he no longer even thought it was fun to go out drinking. But then another letter arrived, this time postmarked Stockholm. Henry was very surprised. No one in Sweden was supposed to know who Bill Yard was.
He eagerly slit open the envelope and read the letter in astonishment. ‘Get out of there, Bill. The game is up. Go to see Miss Verena Musgrave at ‘Pensionat Belleke’, Bleibtreustrasse 15. If you find her picture in the display case at Kurfürstendamm 108, it’s all right to take off. You’re very brave. Burn this letter. W.S.’
When a sense of unreality closes in around someone, he either becomes totally paranoid with shock, or he mobilises all his intellectual and physical resources to accomplish whatever is best in the given situation. For a long time Henry vacillated between pure paranoia and the greatest clarity. After he had read the letter over and over again, he burned it in an ashtray, smoked five cigarettes in a row and started haphazardly packing his clothes in the suitcase with the false bottom and the dozen counterfeit passports. He couldn’t see any reason to suspect anyone in particular. The most confusing part was how in hell Wilhelm Sterner had got mixed up in all this. The only thing he could think of was that W.S. might have been one of the Quakers’ important contacts in Sweden, a man who had previously been a member of the diplomatic corps. But Henry didn’t understand a thing. All he knew was that he had to go out and find Kurfürstendamm 108.
________
There was, as predicted, a display case in the middle of the wide pavement. It contained advertisements for nearby shops as well as a series of photographs of women, Before and After. They were ads for the plastic surgery procedures at a beauty institute – just like some ads for body-builders show how a thin clerk from Before can become a beach boy with bulging muscles After.
Except that in this instance, it was just the opposite. Here something was cut away in order to make improvements. The photos showed a couple of women with noses that were unmistakably hooked which, step by step, took on an Aryan shape. According to the text, the beauty institute was famous all over the world.
One of the women in the display-case photos was Verena Musgrave.
HAIR
(Leo Morgan, 1963–64)
It could be said that 1963 was the year when the hairdressing business was struck by a worldwide crisis, from which it has never truly recovered. On the other hand, it was a big year for Leo Morgan and many others who liked their own hair. The world was changing radically. Leo was known as the legendary Jazz Baron’s son, a poet and child star, remembered from Hyland’s Corner and considered a desirable interview subject by the weekly papers. The precocious and very shy adolescent would state his opinion only on rare occasions, but then he did so with great thoroughness, speaking about everything from Arne Imsen and the Maranata movement to the new members of the Swedish Academy. On those infrequent days when he was in a good mood, even a mediocre reporter might be able to find a gold nugget of considerable value if he panned for it.
Leo’s fame made an impression at school, of course. He became a model for the other pupils and every teacher’s pet. He could expect high marks in every subject, although not in gym class, where a stressed and dejected teacher had to inform his colleagues of the mere passing grade he was able to give – an insignificant blot on young Morgan’s otherwise impeccable report card.
That was the spring when Henry Morgan created a scandal by becoming a deserter; he ran off, escaped across the Swedish border and went into exile in Copenhagen. Yet the scandal made very little impact because it was hushed up most effectively. Everyone was talking about it, although not publicly. Henry became a sort of secret hero. But he had never spent a great deal of time at home anyway, and Leo couldn’t feel any insuperable sense of loss when Henry was gone. Greta, of course, went around in a permanent state of worry, but the younger boy could see right through her concern. It wasn’t the usual sort of moaning and groaning. In her heart Greta knew that Henry always turned up sooner or later, and it was absolutely pointless to wring her hands over him. Henry had always come back.
And he seemed to be doing quite well. Soon letters started arriving from Copenhagen, saying that he was being well taken care of by a group of people called Quakers. Greta and Leo looked up the word in the encyclopaedia and thought it sounded very hopeful. There were plenty of others who were worse off.
Things were undoubtedly worse off downstairs in the Hansson flat. Verner hadn’t become any less strange over the years. He was now in high school, and Leo would soon follow, but they had grown apart somewhat. Their games had come to an end, as had the stamp collecting, the Key Club and other activities. Verner had founded the Association for Young Inventors – without success, since at that age boys were clearly more interested in discovering the female body – and he had become more and more obsessed with his research into all those people who had disappeared. Verner’s missing persons archive had kept on growing and growing as he brooded and pondered, making charts and coming up with hypotheses about various individual cases as well as about matters in general. One such general theory was that all the people who had disappeared were sitting together somewhere on the globe, idling away the time and entertaining themselves by following the vain attempts of all the detectives trying to track them down. They had all left through some sort of crack in our reality, an opening to another world known only to those who were select co-conspirators.
Mrs Hansson thought the boy had lost his mind because he didn’t have a father to look up to and respect. She had never really tried to correct his delusion that his father was waiting for him on some island in the South Pacific. Things didn’t get any better when the TV series ‘Hubbub in the South Seas’ had its premiere that spring and became a big hit. Verner sat right up close to the TV, and of course it was himself and ‘Hansson’ – as he called his absent father – that he saw on the screen. His mother continued to refuse to tell him what she knew about his father, and perhaps that was what rankled most. She had something to hide that might harm the young man, and she wanted to protect him from reality, but like all attempts to protect someone from reality, it was doomed to failure.
After consulting several teachers at school, she sent her son to England that summer, to a language course in Bournemouth. Mrs Hansson really had to dig deep to scrape up enough money for the trip, but she managed, thanks to a scholarship from the school. Verner himself had no real desire to go; his mother had to persuade him
. It was something that she would end up bitterly regretting.
________
It was only by his fingerprints that anyone could identify Verner Hansson when he returned home from that language course in Bournemouth, England, in the autumn of 1963. The intent had been that it would do him good to have a change, to get some fresh sea air and meet new friends who could divert his attention from his thoughts, which were far from pleasant.
The language course was an undeniable success. The old Verner was dead. In one and a half months – the course consisted of six weeks of intensive language instruction in a cheerful, youthful environment, as it said in the ad – the boy had been transformed from a pimply bookworm with dandruff into something that indicated the start of a new era in Western history. The grey, foul-smelling, nail-biting, information-grubbing chess whiz, who was also the chairman of the Association for Young Inventors, had left Sweden at Midsummer and now returned at the end of August as a totally different person. His greasy, dandruff-ridden hair was suddenly clean and bleached by long afternoons spent on the rocky English beaches; worst of all, it was combed forward into a fringe, a Beatle fringe. He had also rid himself of all his old clothes – the thick, prickly, grey rags with mended patches and sweat marks – and bought new, modern gear during a visit to London.
Verner Hansson showed up at school two days after classes started, and this tardiness alone bore witness to the fact that something had changed. The lad seemed to bounce along in a pair of high-heeled shoes that he called ‘boots’, using the English word, and his astonishing fringe hung in his eyes, his shampooed hair fluttered in the breeze. A miracle had occurred.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 26