by Ian Mcewan
Bernard had a sudden change of mind. He swung round to me. ‘By God, you’re so keen to know,’ he cried. ‘I’ll tell you this. My wife might have been interested in poetic truth, or spiritual truth, or her own private truth, but she didn’t give a damn for truth, for the facts, for the kind of truth that two people could recognise independently of each other. She made patterns, she invented myths. Then she made the facts fit them. For God’s sake, forget about sex. Here’s your subject – how people like June bend the facts to fit their ideas instead of the other way round. Why do people do that? Why do they go on doing it?’
I was hesitating over the obvious rejoinder as we came up on the edges of the crowd. Two or three thousand had gathered in the hope of seeing the Wall come down at its most important, symbolic point. On the twelve-foot-high concrete blocks that straddled the approach to the Gate a line of nervous young East German soldiers were standing at ease, facing west. They were wearing their service revolvers tucked away out of sight in the small of their backs. An officer walked up and down in front of the line smoking and watching the crowd. Behind the soldiers rose the illuminated flaking façade of the Brandenburg Gate with the flag of the German Democratic Republic just stirring. Barriers held the crowd back, and the moans of disappointment must have been for the West Berlin police who were positioning their vans in front of the concrete blocks. As we arrived someone tossed a full beer-can at one of the soldiers. It flew high and fast, trailing white foam picked out by the overhead lights, and as it passed over the young soldier’s head there were immediate shouts of disapproval from the crowd and calls in German for no violence. The spread of sound made me realise that there were dozens of people up in the trees.
It was not difficult to push our way to the front. Now we were among it, the crowd was more civilised, more varied than I had thought. Small children sat on their parents’ shoulders with a view as good as Bernard’s. Two students were selling balloons and ice-creams. An old man with dark glasses and a white cane stood still with his head cocked, listening. A wide space had been left around him. When we arrived at the barrier Bernard pointed to where a West Berlin police officer was in conversation with an East German Army officer. ‘Discussing crowd control. Half way to unification already.’
Since his outburst, Bernard had become detached in his manner. He stared around him with a cool, imperious look that was hard to reconcile with his excitement early that morning. It was as though these people and the event had a certain fascination, but only up to a point. After half an hour it was obvious that nothing was going to happen to satisfy the crowd. There were no cranes in sight to lift away sections of the Wall, no heavy machinery to push aside the concrete blocks. But Bernard was for staying. So we stood about in the cold. A crowd is a slow, stupid creature, far less intelligent than any one of its members. This one was prepared to stand all night, with the patience of a dog, waiting for what we all knew could not happen. I began to feel irritable. Elsewhere in the city were joyful celebrations; here there was only dull patience and Bernard’s senatorial calm. Another hour went by before I was able to persuade him to walk with me towards Checkpoint Charlie.
We were on a muddy path close by the Wall whose lurid graffiti were rendered monochrome by street light. On our right were abandoned buildings, empty sites with coils of wire and heaped rubble and last summer’s weeds still standing high.
I was no longer inclined to suppress my question. ‘But you stayed in the Party ten years. You must have bent an awful lot of facts yourself to manage that.’
I wanted to stir him out of his self-satisfied calm. But he shrugged his high shoulders and hunched deeper into his coat and said, ‘Of course.’
He paused for a noisy band of American students to squeeze by us in a narrow passage between the Wall and a derelict building. ‘What are those lines of Isaiah Berlin’s that everybody quotes, especially these days, about the fatal quality of utopias. He says, if I know for certain how to bring humanity to peace, justice, happiness, boundless creativity, what price can be too high? To make this omelette there can be no limit on the eggs I might need to break. Knowing what I know, I wouldn’t be doing my duty if I couldn’t accept that thousands may have to die now so that millions can be happy for ever. Hardly how we put it to ourselves at the time, but it’s right about the frame of mind. If you ignored or reshaped a few uncomfortable facts for the cause of Party unity, what was that to the torrent of lies from what we used to call the capitalist propaganda machine? So you press on with the good work, and all the time the tide is moving up around you. June and I were latecomers, so we had the water round our ankles from the start. The news we didn’t want to hear was trickling through. The show trials and purges of the thirties, enforced collectivisation, mass transportations, labour camps, censorship, lies, persecution, genocide ... Finally the contradictions are too much for you and you crack. But you always do it later than you should. I went in fifty-six, I almost went in fifty-three, and I should have gone in forty-eight. But you hang on. You think, the ideas are good but the wrong people are in charge and that will change. And how can you let all this good work go to waste. You tell yourself it was always bound to be difficult and the practice hasn’t quite squared up to the theory yet and it all takes time. You tell yourself that most of what you’re hearing is Cold War smears. And how can you be so wrong, how can so many intelligent, brave, good-willed people be wrong?
‘If I hadn’t had a scientific training I think I might have hung on even longer. Laboratory work teaches you better than anything how easy it is to bend a result to fit a theory. It isn’t even a matter of dishonesty. It’s in our nature – our desires permeate our perceptions. A well-designed experiment guards against it, but this one had long been out of control. The fantasy and the reality were pulling me apart. Hungary was the last thing. I cracked.’
He paused before saying with deliberation, ‘And that’s the difference between June and me. She left the Party years before me, but she never cracked, she never sorted the fantasy from the reality. She swapped one utopia for another. Politico or priestess, it didn’t matter, in essence she was a hardliner ...’
This was how it came about that I was the one who lost his temper. We were passing by that section of wasteland and Wall still known as Potsdamerplatz, threading our way through clusters of friends gathered round the steps of the viewing-platform and souvenir kiosk, waiting for something to happen. What struck me then was not simply the injustice of Bernard’s remarks, but a wild impatience at the difficulty of communication, and an image of parallel mirrors in place of lovers on a bed, throwing back in infinite regression likenesses paling into untruth. As I turned on Bernard my wrist knocked something soft and warm from the hand of a man standing near me. It was a hot dog. But I was too agitated to apologise. People at Potsdamerplatz were starved of interest; heads turned our way as I shouted, and a circle began to form around us.
‘That’s crap, Bernard! It’s worse, it’s malicious! You’re a liar!’
‘Dear boy.’
‘You never listened to what she was telling you. She wouldn’t listen either. You accused each other of the same thing. She was no more of a hardliner than you are. Two softies! You loaded each other with your own guilt.’
Behind me I heard my last words being translated in a low rapid murmur into German. Bernard was trying to usher me out of the circle. But I was elated in my anger and I would not move.
‘She told me she’d always loved you. You’ve said the same. How could you waste so much time, and everyone else’s time, and your children ...?’
It was this last incomplete accusation that touched Bernard beyond embarrassment. His mouth tightened in a line and he stepped away from me. Suddenly my anger was gone, and in its place was the inevitable remorse; who was this upstart, presuming to describe at shouting pitch a marriage as old as himself, right into the face of the distinguished gentleman? The crowd had lost interest and was drifting back to the queue for scale-model watch-towers
and postcards of no-man’s-land and the empty beaches of the death strip.
We were walking on. I was in too much turmoil to apologise. My only retraction was a lowered voice and a pretence at reasonableness. We walked side by side, quicker than before. Bernard’s own flurry of feeling was evident in the expressionless set of his face.
I said, ‘She didn’t go from one fantasy utopia to another. It was a search. She didn’t claim to have all the answers. It was a quest, one she would have liked everyone to be on in their own way, but she wasn’t forcing anyone. How could she? She wasn’t mounting an inquisition. She had no interest in dogma or organised religion. It was a spiritual journey. Isaiah Berlin’s description doesn’t apply. There was no final end for which she would have sacrificed others. There were no eggs to break ...’
The prospect of debate revived Bernard. He pounced, and at once I felt forgiven. ‘You’re wrong, dear boy, quite wrong. Calling what she was on a quest doesn’t alter the fact of her absolutist streak. You were either with her, doing what she was doing, or you were out. She wanted to meditate and study mystical texts, that sort of thing, and that was fine, but it wasn’t for me. I preferred to join the Labour Party. She wouldn’t have that. In the end she insisted on us living apart. I was one of the eggs. The children were among the others.’
While Bernard was speaking I was wondering what I was about, attempting to reconcile him to a dead wife.
So when he finished, I signalled acceptance with my open hands and said, ‘Well what did you miss in her when she died?’
We had come to one of those places along the Wall where cartography and some long forgotten political obduracy had forced a sudden kink, a change in direction of the sector boundary that reverted after only a few yards. Right by it was a deserted viewing-platform. Without a word, Bernard began to climb the steps, and I followed. At the top he pointed.
‘Look.’
Sure enough, the watchtower across from us was already deserted, and below, in the glare of fluorescent lights, moving peaceably over the raked sand that concealed land mines, booby traps and automatic guns, were dozens of rabbits, searching out fringes of grass to nibble.
‘Well, something flourished.’
‘Their time is almost up.’
We stood in silence for a while. Our view was back along the direction of the Wall which was in fact two walls, at this point a hundred and fifty yards apart. I had never visited the border at night, and staring down this broad corridor of wire, sand, service road and symmetrical lampheads, I was struck by the innocent brightness, the shameless indignity; where traditionally states kept their atrocities well hidden, here the advertisement was more lurid than any Kurfürstendamm neon.
‘Utopia.’
Bernard sighed, and might have been about to reply when we heard voices and laughter from different directions. Then the observation stand began to tremble as people came stomping up the wooden steps. Our isolation had been mere chance, a hole in the crowd. Within seconds fifteen others were squeezed up around us, clicking cameras and calling excitedly in German, Japanese and Danish. We pushed our way down against the flow and continued on our way.
I assumed Bernard had forgotten my question, or preferred not to answer it, but as we came to where our path ran alongside the steps of the old Reichstag building he said, ‘What I miss most is her seriousness. She was one of the few people I know who saw her life as a project, an undertaking, something to take control of and direct towards, well, understanding, wisdom – on her own particular terms. Most of us reserve our forward planning for money, careers, children, that sort of thing. June wanted to understand, God knows, herself, existence, “creation”. She was very impatient with the rest of us, drifting through, taking one thing after another, “sleepwalking”, she called it. I hated the nonsense she filled her head with, but I loved her seriousness.’
We had come to the edge of a large hole, a sixty-foot-long trench at basement level, on a site of earth heaps. Bernard stopped here and added, ‘Over the years we either fought, or we ignored each other, but you’re right, she did love me, and when that’s taken from you ...’ He gestured towards the hole. ‘I’ve been reading about this. It’s the old Gestapo headquarters. They’re digging it up, researching the past. I don’t know how anyone of my generation could accept that – Gestapo crimes neutralised by archaeology.’
I saw now that the trench had been dug along the line of what once must have been an access corridor to the series of white-tiled cells we were looking down into. Each one was barely big enough for one prisoner, and in each there were two iron rings set into the wall. On the far side of the site was a low building, the Museum.
Bernard said, ‘They’ll find a fingernail extracted from some poor wretch, clean it up and shove it in a glass case with a label. And half a mile over there, the Stasi will be cleaning out their cells too.’ The bitterness in his voice surprised me and I turned to look at him. He leaned his weight against an iron post. He looked weary, and thinner than ever, hardly more than a post himself inside his overcoat. He had been on his feet for almost three hours, and now he was drained further by residual anger from a war only the old and weak could remember at first hand.
‘You need a rest,’ I said. ‘There’s a café just up here, by Checkpoint Charlie.’
I had no idea how far it was. As I led him away, I noticed how stiff and slow his steps were. I blamed myself for my thoughtlessness. We were crossing a road chopped to a cul-de-sac by the Wall. Bernard’s face by street light was a sweaty grey and his eyes looked too bright. His big jaw, that friendliest aspect of his huge face, showed a faint tremor of senility. I was caught between the need to hurry him along towards warmth and food and the fear that he might collapse altogether. I had no idea how one summoned an ambulance in West Berlin, and here, in the derelict fringes of the border, there were no phones, and even the Germans were tourists. I asked him if he wanted to sit and rest a while but he did not seem to hear me.
I was repeating my question when I heard a car horn and a ragged cheer. The concentrated illumination of Checkpoint Charlie projected a milky halo from behind a deserted building ahead of us. Within minutes we emerged, right by the café and before us was the dream-like slow-motion familiarity of the scene I had watched with Jenny that morning; the frontier furniture of guard-rooms, multilingual signs and stripy gates, and the well-wishers still greeting pedestrians from the east, still thumping Trabant rooftops, but with less passion now, as though to demonstrate a difference between TV drama and real life.
I had hold of Bernard’s arm as we paused to take this in. Then we edged through the crowd towards the café’s entrance. But the people we passed were in a queue. They were being let inside only as spaces became vacant. Who would want to give up a table at this hour of the night? Through windows mottled by condensation we could see the privileged eaters and drinkers wrapped in their fug.
I was about to force a way in, pleading medical necessity, when Bernard broke free and hurried away from me to cross the road towards the traffic island where most of the crowd was standing, by the American guardroom. Until then I hadn’t seen what he had seen. Later he assured me that all the elements of the situation had been in place when we first arrived, but it was only when I called after him and followed him that I saw the red flag. It was supported on a short pole, a sawn-off broomstick perhaps, held by a slight man in his early twenties. He looked Turkish. He had black curls and black clothes – a black double-breasted jacket worn over a black t-shirt and black jeans. He was strolling up and down in front of the crowd, head tipped back, the flag on its pole slanted across his shoulder. When he stepped backwards into the path of a Wartburg he refused to move, and the car was obliged to manoeuvre round him.
As a provocation it was already beginning to succeed, and this was what was drawing Bernard towards the road. The young man’s antagonists were a mixed bunch, but what I saw in that first instant were two men in suits – business types or solicitors – right by
the kerb. As the young man passed, one of them flicked him under the chin. It was not so much a blow as an expression of contempt. The romantic revolutionary jerked away and pretended nothing had happened. An old lady in a fur hat screamed a long sentence at him and raised an umbrella. She was restrained by the gentleman at her side. The flag-man raised his standard higher. The second solicitor type took a step forwards and punched out at his ear. It did not connect well, but it was enough to make the young man falter. Disdaining to touch the side of his head where the punch had landed, he continued his parade. By this time Bernard was half way across the road and I was just behind.
As far as I was concerned, the flag-man could have what he was asking for. My anxiety was for Bernard. His left knee seemed to be giving him trouble, but he was limping ahead of me at a fair pace. He had already seen what was coming next, an uglier manifestation, coming at a run from the direction of Kochstrasse. There were half a dozen of them, calling to each other as they came. I heard the words they were calling, but at the time I ignored them. I preferred to think that a long evening in the rejoicing city had starved them of action. They had seen a man punched in the head, and had been energised. They were aged between sixteen and twenty. Collectively they exuded a runtish viciousness, an extravagant air of underprivilege, with their acned pallor, shaved heads, and loose wet mouths. The Turk saw them charging towards him and tossed his head like a tango dancer and turned his back. To be out here doing this on the day of communism’s final disgrace showed either a martyr’s zeal or an unfathomable masochistic urge to be beaten up in public. It was true that most of the crowd would have dismissed him as a crank and ignored him. Berlin was a tolerant place, after all. But tonight there was just sufficient drunkenness, and a vague sense in a few people that someone ought to be blamed for something – and the man with the flag seemed to have found them all in one place.