by Ian Mcewan
“This is what I wanted to speak to you about. You haven’t been talking to anyone?”
“No.”
“Have you heard of a man called Nelson, Carl Nelson? Worked for the CIA’s Office of Communications?”
“No.”
MacNamee was leading the way back through the double doors. He bolted them before they walked on. “This is level four now. We were going to let you in, I think. You’re about to join an exclusive club.” They had stopped again, this time by the first rack of amplifying equipment. At the far end the three men worked on in silence, well out of earshot. As MacNamee spoke he ran his finger along the front of an amplifier, perhaps to give the impression that he was discussing it. “I’ll give you the simple version. It’s been discovered that when you electrically encode a message and send it down the line, there’s a faint electronic echo, a shadow of the original, of the clear text, that travels with it. It’s so faint that it fades out after twenty miles or so. But with the right equipment, and if you can tap into the line within the twenty miles, you can have a readable message coming straight onto the teleprinter, no matter how well the material has been encoded. This is the basis for the whole operation here. We wouldn’t be building something on this scale just to listen to low-priority telephone chat. It was Nelson’s discovery, and the equipment was his invention. He was walking about in Vienna looking for a good place to try it out on the Russian lines when he walked right into a tunnel we had built to tap those same lines. So, very generously, we let the Americans into our tunnel, gave them facilities, let them make use of our taps. And you know what? They didn’t even tell us about Nelson’s invention. They were taking the stuff back to Washington and reading the clear text while we were knocking our brains trying to, break the codes. And these are our allies. Bloody incredible, don’t you think?” He paused for confirmation. “Now that we’re sharing this project, they’ve let us in on the secret. But only the outline, mark you, not the details. That’s why I can only give you the simplest account.”
Two of the Royal Signals people were walking toward them. MacNamee steered Leonard back in the direction of the tap chamber. “On the need-to-know basis, you shouldn’t be getting any of this. You’re probably wondering what I’m up to. Well, they’ve promised to share whatever they come up with. And we have to take that on trust. But we’re not prepared to live off the crumbs from their table. That’s not our understanding of this relationship. We’re developing our own version of Nelson’s technique, and we’ve found some marvelous potential sites. We’re not talking to the Americans about them. Speed is important because sooner or later the Russians are going to make the same discovery, and then they’ll modify their machines. There’s a Dollis Hill team working on it, but it would be useful to have someone here keeping his ears and eyes open. We think there might be one or two Americans here who know about Nelson’s equipment. We need someone with a technical background, and not too highly placed. As soon as they see me, these people run a mile. It’s the details we’re after, odds and ends of electronics gossip, anything that might help things along. You know how careless the Yanks can be. They talk; things are left lying around.”
They had stopped by the double steel doors. “So. What do you think?” It almost sounded like “fink.”
“They’re all very chatty in the canteen,” Leonard said. “Even our own chaps.”
“You’ll do it, then? Good. We’ll talk more later. Let’s go up and have some tea. I’m freezing to death.”
They went back along the tunnel, into the American sector, up the incline. It was hard not to feel proud of the tunnel. Leonard remembered before the war when his father built a small brick extension onto the kitchen. Leonard lent a child’s token assistance, fetching a trowel, taking a list to the hardware shop and so on. When it was all finished, and before the breakfast table and chairs were moved in, he stood in the new space with its plaster walls, electrical fittings and homemade window, and he felt quite delirious with his own achievement.
Back in the warehouse, Leonard excused himself from tea in the canteen. Now that he had MacNamee’s approval, his gratitude even, he felt confident and free. On his way out of the building he looked in at his room. The absence of tape recorders on the shelves was itself a small triumph. He locked the door and took the key to the duty officer’s room. He crossed the compound, passed the sentry at the gate and set off for Rudow. The road was dark, but he knew every step of the way now. His greatcoat gave poor protection against the cold. He could feel the hairs in his nostrils stiffening. When he breathed through his mouth, the air stung his chest. He could sense the frozen flat fields around him. He passed the shacks where refugees from the Russian sector had set up home. There were kids playing in the dark, and as his steps rang out on the cold road, they shushed each other and waited until he had passed. Every yard away from the warehouse was a yard toward Maria. He had spoken to no one about her at work, and he could not talk to her about what he did. He was not certain whether this time spent traveling between his two secret worlds was when he was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether this was the one time he was nothing at all, a void traveling between two points. Only on arrival, at this end or that, would he assume or be assigned a purpose, and then he would be himself, or one of his selves, again. What he did know for sure was that these speculations would begin to fade as his train approached his Kreuzberg stop, and that as he hurried across the courtyard and took the five flights of stairs two or even three at a time, they would have vanished.
Eight
Leonard’s initiation happened to coincide with the coldest week of the winter. By Berlin’s harsh standards, the old hands agreed, it was exceptional at minus twenty-five degrees. There were no clouds, and by day even the bomb damage, sparkling in rich orange light, looked almost beautiful. At night the condensation on the inside of Maria’s windowpanes froze into fantastic patterns. In the mornings the top layer on the bed, usually Leonard’s greatcoat, was stiff. During this time he rarely saw Maria naked, not all of her, all at once. He saw the gleam of her skin when he burrowed down into the humid gloom. Their winter bed, top-heavy with thin blankets, coats, bath towels, an armchair cover and a nursery quilt, was precarious, bound only by its own weight. There was nothing large enough to keep the whole together. One careless move and single items would slide away, and soon the ensemble would be in ruins. Then they would be standing facing each other across the mattress, shivering as they began the reconstruction.
So Leonard had to learn stealth as he burrowed down. The weather was enforcing an attention to detail. He liked to press his cheek against her belly, taut from all that cycling, or to push the tip of his tongue into her navel, as intricately convoluted as a sunken ear. Down here in the semidarkness—the bedclothes did not tuck under the mattress, and there was always light leaking in from the sides—in the closed and clotted space, he learned to love the smells: sweat like mown grass, and the moistness of her arousal with its two elements, sharp but rounded, tangy and blunt: fruit and cheese, the very tastes of desire itself. This synaesthesia was a kind of delirium. There were tiny blades of calluses the length of her little toes. He heard the rustle of cartilage in her knee joints. In the small of her back was a mole out of which grew two long hairs. Not until mid-March, when the room was warmer, did he see they were silver. Her nipples sprang erect when he breathed on them. On the earlobes were the marks left by her earring clasps. When he ran his fingers through her babyish hair he saw the roots parting in a three-armed whorl about the crown, and her skull looked too white, too vulnerable.
Maria indulged these Erkundungen, these excavations. She lay in a daydream, mostly silent, sometimes putting words around a stray thought and watching her breath ascend to the ceiling. “The Major Ashdown is a funny man … that’s good, put your fingers between all the toes, yes, so … every four o’clock in his office he has a cup of hot milk and a boiled egg. He wants
the bread cut one, two, three, four, five, like so, and do you know what he calls them, this military man?”
Leonard’s voice was muffled. “Soldiers.”
“Just so. Soldiers! Is this how you win the war? With these soldiers?” Leonard came up for air and she looped her arms around his neck. “Mein Dummerchen, my little innocent, what have you learned down there today?”
“I listened to your belly. It must be dinnertime.”
She drew him in and kissed his face. Marie was free with her demands, and she allowed Leonard his curiosity, which she found endearing. Sometimes his inquiries were teases, forms of seduction. “Tell me why you like it halfway,” he whispered, and she pleaded, “But I like it deep, really deep.”
“You like it halfway, just here. Tell me why that is.”
Leonard naturally inclined toward a well-ordered, hygienic existence. For four days after the inception of the first love affair of his life he did not change his underwear or socks, he had no clean shirt and he hardly washed. They had spent that first night in Maria’s bed talking and dozing. Toward five A.M. they had cheese, black bread and coffee while a neighbor just through the wall was messily clearing his throat as he prepared to go to work. They made love again, and Leonard was pleased with his powers of recuperation. He was going to be all right, he thought, he was just like everyone else. After that, he fell into a dreamless sleep from which he was woken an hour later by the alarm clock.
He came up from under the bedclothes into a cold that contracted his skull. He lifted Maria’s arm free of his waist, and shivering naked on all fours in the dark, he found his clothes beneath the ashtray, under the omelette plates, under the saucer with the burned-out candle. There was an icy fork in the arm of his shirt. He had thought to store his glasses in a shoe. The wine bottle had toppled, and the dregs had drained into the waistband of his underpants. His coat was spread over the bed. He pulled it clear and rearranged the covers over Maria. When he groped for her head and kissed it, she did not stir.
With his coat on he stood at the kitchen sink, moved a frying pan to the floor and splashed stinging cold water over his face. He remembered there was, after all, a bathroom. He turned on its light and went inside. For the first time in his life he used another person’s toothbrush. He had never brushed his hair with a woman’s hairbrush. He examined his reflection. Here was the new man. The day’s growth of beard grew too sparsely to make for a dissolute stubble, and there was the hard red beginning of a pimple on the side of his nose. But he fancied that his gaze now, even in exhaustion, was steadier.
All day long he wore his tiredness well. It was just one aspect of his happiness. Lightweight and remote, the components of his day floated before him: the ride on the U-Bahn and the bus, the walk past a frozen pond and out between the white spiky fields, the hours alone with the tape recorders, the solitary steak and french fries in the canteen, more hours among the familiar circuits, the walk in the dark back to the station, the ride, then Kreuzberg again. It was pointless, wasting the precious workless hours by continuing past her district and heading for his own. That evening when he arrived at her door she was just back from work herself. The apartment was still a mess. Once again they got into bed to keep warm. The night repeated itself with variations, the morning was repeated without them. That was Tuesday morning. Wednesday and Thursday went the same way. Glass asked, rather coolly, if he was growing a beard. If Leonard needed proof of his dedication to a passion, it was in the matted thickness of his gray socks and the aroma of butter, vaginal juices and potatoes that rose from his chest when he loosened the top button of his shirt. The excessively heated interiors at the warehouse released from the folds of his clothes the scent of overused bedsheets and prompted disabling reveries in the windowless room.
It was not until Friday evening that he returned to his own apartment. It seemed like an absence of years. He went around turning on the lights, intrigued by the signs of a former self—the young man who had sat down to write these nervous, scheming drafts strewn across the floor, the scrubbed-clean innocent who had left scum and hairs round the bath and towels and clothes on the bedroom floor. Here was the inexpert coffee maker—he had watched Maria and knew all about it now. Here was the childish chocolate bar and beside it his mother’s letter. He read it over quickly and found the little anxieties expressed on his behalf cloying, really quite irritating.
While the bath was filling, he padded around the place, luxuriating once more in space and warmth. He whistled and sang snatches of songs. At first he could not find the untamed number to carry his feelings. The crooning love songs he knew were all too courteously restrained. In fact, what suited him now was the raucous American nonsense he thought he despised. He recalled scraps, but they were elusive: “and make a something with the pots and pans. Shake, rattle and roll! Shake, rattle and roll!” In the bathroom’s flattering acoustics, he boomed this incantation over and again. Bellowed in an English voice it sounded foolish, but it was the right sort of thing. Joyous and sexy, and more or less meaningless. He had never in his life felt so uncomplicatedly happy. He had solitude for the moment, but he was not alone. He was expected. He had time to clean himself up and tidy the flat, and then he would be on his way. “Shake, rattle and roll!” Two hours later he opened his front door. This time he took with him an overnight bag, and he did not return for a week.
During these early days, Maria would not come to Leonard’s flat, despite his exaggerated description of its luxuries. She worried that if she started spending nights away, the neighbors would soon be telling each other that she had found a man and a better place to live. The authorities would hear about it, and then she would be out. In Berlin, demand even for a one-bedroom flat with no hot water was enormous. To Leonard it seemed reasonable she should want to be on home ground. They bundled up in bed, made dashes to the kitchen for hastily fried meals. To wash, it was necessary to fill a saucepan and wait in bed until it had boiled, then hurry to the bathroom to tip scalding water into the frozen basin. The plug leaked, and pressure in the single cold tap was unpredictable. For Leonard and Maria, work was where they got warm and ate decently. At home, there was nowhere else to be but bed.
Maria taught Leonard to be an energetic and considerate lover, how to let her have all her orgasms before he had his own. That seemed only polite, like letting a lady precede you through a door. He learned to make love in der Hundestellung, doggy fashion, which was also the quickest way to lose the bedclothes, and also from behind as she lay on her side, facing away from him, on the edge of sleep; and then on their sides, face to face, locked in tight, barely disturbing the bedclothes at all. He discovered there were no set rules for her preparedness. Sometimes he only had to look at her and she was all set to go. At others he worked away patiently, like a boy over a model kit, only to be interrupted by her suggesting cheese and bread and another round of tea. He learned that she liked endearments murmured in her ear, but not beyond a certain point, not once her eyes began their inward roll. She did not want to be distracted then.
He learned to ask for Präservative in the Drogerie. He found out from Glass that he was entitled to a free supply through the U.S. Army. On the bus he brought home four gross in a pale blue cardboard box. He sat with the package on his knees, aware of the passengers’ glances, and somehow knew the color was a giveaway. Once, when Maria offered sweetly to put one on him herself, he said no too aggressively. Later he wondered what had troubled him. This was his first intimation of a new and troubling feature. It was hard to describe. There was an element of mind creeping in, of bits of himself, bits he did not really like. Once he was over the novelty of it all, and once he was sure he could do it just like everyone else, and when he was confident that he was not going to come too soon—when all that was cleared away, and once he was quite convinced that Maria genuinely liked and wanted him and would go on wanting him, then he started having thoughts that he was powerless to send away when he was making love. They soon grew inseparable fr
om his desire. These fantasies came a little closer each time, and each time they continued to proliferate, to take new forms. There were figures gathering at the edge of thought; now they were striding toward the center, toward him. They were all versions of himself, and he knew he could not resist them.
It began on the third or fourth time with a simple perception. He looked down at Maria, whose eyes were closed, and remembered she was a German. The word had not been entirely prised loose of its associations after all. His first day in Berlin came back to him. German. Enemy. Mortal enemy. Defeated enemy. This last brought with it a shocking thrill. He diverted himself momentarily with the calculation of the total impedance of a certain circuit. Then: she was the defeated, she was his by right, by conquest, by right of unimaginable violence and heroism and sacrifice. What elation! To be right, to win, to be rewarded. He looked along his own arms stretched before him, pushing into the mattress, at where the gingerish hairs were thickest, just below the elbow. He was powerful and magnificent. He went faster, harder, he fairly bounced on her. He was victorious and good and strong and free. In recollection these formulations embarrassed him and he pushed them aside. They were alien to his obliging and kindly nature, they offended his sense of what was reasonable. One only had to look at her to know there was nothing defeated about Maria. She had been liberated by the invasion of Europe, not crushed. And was she not, at least in their game, his guide?
But next time around the thoughts returned. They were irresistibly exciting, and he was helpless before their elaborations. This time, she was his by right of conquest, and then, there was nothing she could do about it. She did not want to be making love to him, but she had no choice. He summoned the circuit diagrams. They were no longer available. She was struggling to escape. She was thrashing beneath him, he thought he heard her call out “No!” She was shaking her head from side to side, she had her eyes closed against the inescapable reality. He had her pinioned against the mattress, she was his, there was nothing she could do, she would never get away. And that was it, that was the end for him, he was gone, finished. His mind was cleared and he lay back. His mind was clear and he thought about food, about sausages. Not bratwurst or bockwurst, but English sausages, fat and mild, fried brownish-black on all sides, and mashed potatoes, and mushy peas.