by Ian Mcewan
Glass had his fingers in his beard and was smiling hugely. He said something, and had to repeat it at a shout. “This is better!”
But it was too noisy to begin a conversation about the advantages of the Western sector. Colored water spouted up in front of the band and rose and fell and lurched from side to side. Leonard avoided looking at it. They were being sensible by drinking beer. As soon as the waiter had gone, a girl appeared with a basket of roses. Russell bought one and presented it to Leonard, who snapped off the stem and lodged the flower behind his ear. At the next table something came rattling down the pneumatic tube, and two Germans in Bavarian jackets leaned forward to examine the contents of a canister. A woman in a sequined mermaid suit was kissing the bandleader. There were wolf whistles and cheers. The band started up; the woman was handed a microphone. She took off her glasses and began to sing “Too Darn Hot” with a heavy accent. The Germans were looking disappointed. They stared in the direction of a table some fifty feet away, where two giggling girls were collapsing in one another’s arms. Beyond them was the packed dance floor. The woman sang “Night and Day,” “Anything Goes,” “Just One of Those Things,” and finally “Miss Otis Regrets.” Then everyone stood to cheer and stamp their feet and shout “Encore!”
The band took a break, and Leonard bought another round of beers. Russell took a good look around and said he was too drunk to pick up girls. They talked about Cole Porter and named their favorite songs. Russell said he knew someone whose father had been working at the hospital when they brought Porter in from his riding accident in ’37. For some reason the doctors and nurses had been asked not to talk to the press. This led to a conversation about secrecy. Russell said there was far too much of it in the world. He was laughing. He must have known something about Glass’s work.
Glass was serious in a punchy way. His head lolled back and he sighted Russell along his beard. “You know what the best course I ever took at college was? Biology. We studied evolution. And I learned something important.” Now he included Leonard in his gaze. “It helped me choose my career. For thousands, no millions of years we had these huge brains, the neocortex, right? But we didn’t speak to each other, and we lived like fucking pigs. There was nothing. No language, no culture, nothing. And then, suddenly, wham! It was there. Suddenly it was something we had to have, and there was no turning back. So why did it suddenly happen?”
Russell shrugged. “Hand of God?”
“Hand of God my ass. I’ll tell you why. Back then we all used to hang out together all day long doing the same thing. We lived in packs. So there was no need for language. If there was a leopard coming, there was no point in saying, ‘Hey man, what’s coming down the track? A leopard!’ Everyone could see it, everyone was jumping up and down and screaming, trying to scare it off. But what happens when someone goes off on his own for a moment’s privacy? When he sees a leopard coming, he knows something the others don’t. And he knows they don’t know. He has something they don’t, he has a secret, and this is the beginning of his individuality, of his consciousness. If he wants to share his secret and run down the track to warn the other guys, then he’s going to need to invent language. From there grows the possibility of culture. Or he can hang back and hope the leopard will take out the leadership that’s been giving him a hard time. A secret plan, that means more individuation, more consciousness.”
The band was starting to play a fast, loud number. Glass had to shout his conclusion, “Secrecy made us possible,” and Russell raised his beer to salute the theory.
A waiter mistook the gesture and was at his elbow, so a fresh round was ordered, and as the mermaid shimmered to the front of the band and the cheers rang out there was a harsh rattling at their table as a canister shot down the tube and smacked against the brass fixture and lodged there. They stared at it, and no one moved.
Then Glass picked it up and unscrewed the top. He took out a folded piece of paper and spread it out on the table. “My God,” he shouted. “Leonard, it’s for you.”
For one confused moment he thought it might be from his mother. He was owed a letter from England. And it was late, he thought, he hadn’t said where he was going to be.
The three of them were leaning over the note. Their heads were blocking out the light. Russell read it aloud. “An den jungen Mann mit der Blume im Haar. To the young man with the flower in his hair. Mein Schöner, I have been watching you from my table. I would like it if you came and asked me to dance. But if you can’t do this, I would be so happy if you would turn and smile in my direction. I am sorry to interfere. Yours, table number 89.”
The Americans were on their feet casting around for the table, while Leonard remained seated with the paper in his hands. He read the German words over. The message was hardly a surprise. Now it was before him, it was more a matter of recognition for him, of accepting the inevitable. It had always been certain to start like this. If he was honest with himself, he had to concede that he had always known it really, at some level.
He was being pulled to his feet. They turned him around and faced across the ballroom. “Look, she’s over there.” Across the heads, through the dense, rising cigarette smoke backlit by stage lights, he could make out a woman sitting alone. Glass and Russell were pantomiming a fuss over his appearance, dusting down his jacket, straightening his tie, fixing the flower more securely behind his ear. Then they pushed him away, like a boat from a jetty. “Go on!” they said. “Atta boy!”
He was drifting toward her, and she was watching his approach. She had her elbow on the table, and she was supporting her chin with her hand. The mermaid was singing, “Don’t sit under zuh apple tree viz anyone else but me, anyone else but me.” He thought, correctly as it turned out, that his life was about to change. When he was ten feet away she smiled. He arrived just as the band finished the song. He stood swaying slightly, with his hand on the back of a chair, waiting for the applause to die, and when it did Maria Eckdorf said in perfect but sweetly inflected English, “Are we going to dance?”
Leonard touched his stomach lightly, apologetically, with his fingertips. Three entirely different liquids were sitting in there.
He said, “Actually, would you mind if I sat down?” And so he did, and they immediately held hands, and many minutes passed before he was able to speak another word.
Five
Her name was Maria Louise Eckdorf, she was thirty years old and she lived on Adalbertstrasse in Kreuzberg, a twenty-minute ride from Leonard’s flat. She worked as a typist and translator at a small British Army vehicle workshop in Spandau. There was an ex-husband called Otto who appeared unpredictably two or three times in a year to demand money and sometimes smack her head. Her apartment had two rooms and a tiny curtained-off kitchen and was reached by five flights of a gloomy wooden staircase. On every landing there were voices through doors. There was no running hot water, and the cold tap was kept at a dribble in winter to stop the pipes freezing up. She had learned her English from her grandmother, who had been the German tutor at a school for English girls in Switzerland before and after the Great War. Maria’s family had moved to Berlin from Düsseldorf in 1937, when she was twelve. Her father had been area representative for a company that made gearboxes for heavy vehicles. Now her parents lived in Pankow, in the Russian sector. Her father was a ticket collector on the railways, and these days her mother had a job too, packing light bulbs in a factory. They still resented their daughter for the marriage she had made at twenty against their wishes, and took no satisfaction in the fulfillment of all their worst predictions.
It was unusual for a childless woman to be living contentedly alone in a one-bedroom apartment. Accommodation was scarce in Berlin. The neighbors on her landing and on the one below kept their distance, but those on the lower floors, the ones who knew less about her, were at least polite. She had good friends among the younger women at the workshop. The night she met Leonard she was with her friend Jenny Schneider, who danced all evening with a French Army
sergeant. Maria also belonged to a cycling club, whose fifty-year-old treasurer was forlornly in love with her. The April before someone had stolen her bike from the cellar of the apartment house. Her ambition was to perfect her English and to qualify one day as an interpreter in the diplomatic service.
A few of these facts Leonard came by after he had stirred himself to move his chair to exclude Glass and Russell from his view and order a Pimms and lemonade for Maria and another beer for himself. The rest were accumulated slowly and with difficulty over many weeks.
The morning after the Resi he was outside the gates at Altglienicke by eight-thirty, half an hour early, having walked the final mile from Rudow village. He was sick, tired, thirsty and still a little drunk. On his bedside table that morning he had found a scrap torn from a cigarette packet. On it Maria had written her address, and it was in his pocket now. On the U-Bahn he had taken it out several times. She had borrowed a pen from Jenny’s friend, the French sergeant, and written it down using Jenny’s back for support, while Glass and Russell waited in the car. In Leonard’s hand was his radar station pass. The sentry took it and stared hard at his face.
When Leonard arrived at what he now thought of as his room, he found the door open and three men inside packing up their tools. From the look of them they had been working all night. The Ampex boxes had been piled in the center. Bolted to all the walls was shelving, deep enough to take an unpacked machine. A set of library steps provided access to the higher shelves. A circular hole had been cut in the ceiling for a ventilator duct, and a metal grill had just been screwed in place. From somewhere above the ceiling came the sound of an extractor fan. As Leonard stepped aside to let a fitter carry his ladder away, he saw a dozen boxes of electrical plugs and new instruments on the trestle table. He was examining them when Glass appeared at his side with a hunting knife in a green canvas sheath. His beard shone in the electric light.
He spoke without preliminaries. “Open them with this. Do ten at a time, get them on the shelves, then carry the cardboard round the back and burn it right down to ashes. Whatever you do, don’t go round the front with it. They’ll be watching you. Don’t let the wind take anything away. You wouldn’t believe it, but some genius has stenciled serial numbers on the boxes. When you’re out of this room, keep it locked. This is your key, your responsibility. Sign for it here.”
One of the workmen returned and began searching the room. Leonard signed and said, “That was a good evening. Thanks.” He wanted Bob Glass to ask him about Maria, to acknowledge his triumph. But the American had turned his back and was looking at the shelves. “As soon as they’re up, they’ll need to go under dustsheets. I’ll have some brought around.” The fitter was on his hands and knees staring at the floor. With the toe of his brogues, Glass pointed to a bradawl.
“That really was quite a place,” Leonard insisted. “In fact, I’m feeling a bit shaky this morning.”
The man picked up the tool and left. Glass kicked the door shut after him. From the tilt of the beard, Leonard knew he was in for a telling-off.
“Listen to me. You think this is unimportant, opening boxes and burning the packing. You think it’s something the janitor should do. Well, you’re wrong. Everything, but everything on this project is important, every detail. Is there any good reason why you should let a craftsman know that you and I were out drinking together last night? Think it through, Leonard. What would a senior liaison officer be doing out with a technical assistant from the British Post Office? This craftsman is a soldier. He could be in a bar with his buddy, and they could be talking it over in a harmless, curious sort of way. Sitting on the next stool is a bright German kid who’s learned to keep his ears open. There are hundreds of them all over town. Then he’s straight down to the Café Prag or wherever with something to sell. Fifty marks’ worth, twice that if he’s lucky. We’re digging right under their feet, we’re in their sector. If they get wise they’ll shoot to kill. They’d be well within their rights.”
Glass came closer. Leonard was uncomfortable, and not only because of the other man’s proximity. He was embarrassed for Glass. The performance was overdone, and Leonard felt the burden of being its sole audience. Once again, he was unsure how to set his face. He could smell the instant coffee on Glass’s breath.
“I want you to get into a whole new state of mind on this. Anything you’re about to do, pause and think of the consequences. This is a war, Leonard, and you’re a soldier in it.”
When Glass had gone, Leonard waited, then opened his door and looked both ways down the corridor before hurrying to the water fountain. The water was refrigerated and tasted of metal. He drank for minutes on end. When he returned to the room, Glass was there. He shook his head and held up the key Leonard had left behind. He pressed it into the Englishman’s hand and closed his fingers around it and left without a word. Leonard blushed through his hangover. To steady himself, he reached into his pocket for the address. He leaned against the boxes and read it slowly. Erstes Hinterhaus, fünfter Stock rechts, Adalbertstrasse 84. He ran his hand along the surface of the box. The pale cardboard was almost skin color. His heart was a ratchet; with each thud he was wound tighter, harder. How would he open all these boxes in this state? He pressed his cheek against the cardboard. Maria. He needed relief, how else could he clear his mind? But the possibility of Glass returning again unexpectedly was equally unbearable. The absurdity, the shame, the security implications—he could not think which was worse.
With a moan, he put the scrap away and reached for a box on top of the pile and heaved it to the floor. He drew the hunting knife from its sheath and plunged it in. The cardboard yielded easily, like flesh, and he felt and heard something brittle shatter at the knife’s tip. He experienced a thrill of panic. He cut away the lid, pulled clear handfuls of wood shavings and compressed sheets of corrugated paper. When he had cut away the cheesecloth wrapping around the tape recorder, he could see a long diagonal scratch across the area that would be covered by the spools. One of the control knobs had split in two. With difficulty he cut away the rest of the cardboard. He lifted the machine out, fitted a plug and carried it up the library steps to the topmost shelf. The broken knob he put in his pocket. He could fill in a form for a replacement.
Pausing only to remove his jacket, Leonard set about opening the next box. An hour later there were three more machines on the shelf. The sealing tape was easily cut, and so too were the lids. But the corners were heavily reinforced with layers of cardboard and staples that resisted the knife. He decided to work without a break until he had unpacked his first ten machines. He had them all on their shelves by lunchtime. There was a pile of flattened cardboard by the door five feet high and beside it a heap of wood shavings that reached up to the light switch.
The canteen was deserted but for one table of black tunneling sergeants, who paid him no attention. He ordered steak and french fries and lemonade again. The sergeants spoke in low murmurs and chuckles. Leonard strained to overhear. He discerned the word shaft several times and assumed they were being indiscreet by talking shop. He had just finished eating when Glass came in and sat down at his table and asked how the work was going. Leonard described his progress. “It’s going to take longer than you thought,” he concluded.
Glass said, “It sounds right to me. You’ll do ten in the morning, ten in the afternoon, ten in the evening. Thirty a day. Five days. Where’s the problem?”
Leonard’s heart was racing because he had decided to speak his mind. He downed his lemonade. “Well, actually, as you know, my field is circuitry, not box opening. I’m prepared to do anything within reason because I know it’s important. But I do expect to have some time to myself in the evenings.”
At first Glass did not reply, nor did he show any expression. He watched Leonard, waiting for more. Finally he said, “You want to talk about hours? And job demarcation? Is this the British Commie trade union talk we keep hearing about? From the moment you got your clearance, your job here is to d
o what you’re told. If you don’t want the job, I’ll cable Dollis Hill and have them recall you.” Then he stood and his expression relaxed. He touched Leonard on the shoulder and said before walking away, “Stick with it, pal.”
And so for a week or more Leonard did nothing but stab open cardboard boxes and burn them and fit a plug on each machine, label it and stow it on the shelves. He worked a fifteen-hour day. He spent hours commuting. From Platanenallee he took the U-Bahn as far as Grenzallee, where he caught the 46 bus to Rudow. From there it was a twenty-minute walk along a charmless stretch of country road. He ate in the canteen and at a Schnellimbiss on Reichskanzlerplatz. He could think about her while he traveled or poked at burning cardboard boxes with his long pole or stood up to his diet of bratwurst. He knew that if only he had a little more leisure and were a little less tired he could be obsessed, he could be a man in love. He needed to sit down without dozing off and give the matter mental devotion. He needed that time edged with boredom in which fantasy could flourish. The work itself obsessed him; even the repetition of demeaning low-level tasks was mesmerizing for one of his orderly nature, and presented a genuine distraction.
Dressed like Father Time in a school play, in a borrowed bush hat, an Army cape that reached to his ankles, and overshoes, and equipped with a long wooden pole, he spent many hours tending his fire. The incinerator turned out to be a perpetual, feeble bonfire, inadequately protected on three sides against the wind and rain by a low brick wall. Nearby were two dozen dustbins and beyond them a workshop. Across a muddy track was a loading bay where Army trucks backed in and out all day with a grind of low gears. He was under strict instructions not to leave the fire until it had burned right down each time. Even with the help of gasoline, there were some sheets that could do little more than smolder.