by Ian Mcewan
Over the following days, his embarrassment faded. He accepted the obvious truth that what happened in his head could not be sensed by Maria, even though she was only inches away. These thoughts were his alone, nothing to do with her at all.
Eventually, a more dramatic fantasy took shape. It recapitulated all the previous elements. Yes, she was defeated, conquered, his by right, could not escape, and now, he was a soldier, weary, battle-marked and bloody, but heroically rather than disablingly so. He had taken this woman and was forcing her. Half terrified, half in awe, she dared not disobey. It helped when he pulled his greatcoat further up the bed, so that by turning his head to the left or right he could catch sight of the dark green. That she was reluctant and he was inviolable were the premises of further elaborations. As he went about his business in a city full of soldiers, the soldier fantasy appeared ridiculous, but it was easy enough to put out of mind.
It was more difficult, however, when he found himself tempted to communicate these imaginings to her. Initially, he only squeezed her harder, bit her with considerable restraint, held her outstretched arms down and fantasized that he was preventing her from escaping. He slapped her buttocks once. None of this seemed to make much difference to Maria. She did not notice, or she pretended not to. Only his own pleasure was intensified. Now the idea was growing ever more urgent—he wanted her to acknowledge what was on his mind, however stupid it really was. He could not believe she would not be aroused by it. He slapped her again, bit and squeezed harder. She had to give him what was his.
His private theater had become insufficient. He wanted something between them. A reality, not a fantasy. Telling her somehow was the next inevitable thing. He wanted his power recognized and Maria to suffer from it, just a bit, in the most pleasurable way. He had no trouble keeping quiet once they had finished. Then he was ashamed. What was this power he wanted recognized? It was no more than a disgusting story in his head. Then, later, he wondered if she might not be excited by it too. There was, of course, nothing to discuss. There was nothing he was able, or dared, to put into words. He could hardly be asking her permission. He had to surprise her, show her, let pleasure overcome her rational objections. He thought all this, and knew it was bound to happen.
Toward the middle of March featureless white cloud covered the sky and the temperature rose sharply. The few inches of dirty snow melted in three days. On the walk between Rudow village and the warehouse there were green shoots in the slush, and on the roadside trees, fat sticky buds. Leonard and Maria emerged from their hibernation. They left the bed and the bedroom and brought the electric heater into the living room. They ate at a Schnellimbiss together, and went to a local Kneipe for a glass of beer. They saw a Tarzan film on the Kurfürstendamm. One Saturday evening they went to the Resi and danced to a German big band that alternated romantic American love songs with bouncy Bavarian numbers in strict oompah time. They bought sekt to toast their first meeting. Maria said she wanted to sit apart and send messages through the pneumatic tubes, but there were no vacant tables. They had a second bottle of sekt and just enough money left over to take a bus halfway home. As they walked to Adalbertstrasse, Maria yawned loudly and put her arm through Leonard’s for support. She had put in ten hours overtime in the previous three days because one of the office girls was out with the flu. And the night before, she and Leonard had been awake until dawn, and even then they had had to remake the bed before they slept.
“Ich bin müde, müde, müde,” she said quietly as they began to climb the apartment stairs. Indoors, she went straight to the bathroom to prepare for bed. Leonard finished off a bottle of white wine while he waited in the living room. When she appeared he took a couple of paces toward her and stood blocking her way to the bedroom. He knew that if he acted confidently and was true to his feelings, he could not fail.
She went to take his hand. “Let’s sleep now. Then we’ll have all the morning.”
He had moved his hand away and rested it on his hip. She gave off a childish smell of toothpaste and soap. She was holding the hairclip she had been wearing.
Leonard kept his voice level and, as he thought, expressionless. “Take off your clothes.”
“Yes, in the bedroom.” She went to step around him.
He held her by the elbow and pushed her back. “Do it here.”
She was annoyed. He had anticipated that, he knew they would have to go through that. “I’m too tired tonight. You can see that.” These last words were spoken in a conciliatory way, and it cost Leonard some effort of will to reach out and take her chin between his forefinger and thumb.
He raised his voice. “Do as you’re told. In here. Now.”
She shoved his hand away. She really was surprised, and now a little amused. “You’re drunk. You drank too much at the Resi and now you are Tarzan.”
Her laughter irritated him. He ran her against the wall, harder than he intended. The air was knocked from her lungs. Her eyes were wide. She got her breath and said, “Leonard …”
He knew that fear might come into it, and that they had to get beyond that as soon as possible. “Do as I tell you and you’ll be all right.” He sounded reassuring. “Take it all off or I’ll do it for you.”
She pressed herself against the wall. She shook her head. Her eyes looked heavy and dark. He thought this might be the first indication of success. When she began to obey she would understand that this pantomime was all for pleasure, hers as well as his. Then the fear would disappear completely. “You’ll do as I say.” He managed to suppress the interrogative.
She dropped the clip and pressed her fingers against the wall behind her. Her head was still and a little bowed. She drew a deep breath and said, “Now I’m going to the bedroom.” Her accent was more than usually pronounced. She had moved no more than a few inches from the wall before he pushed her back.
“No,” he said.
She was looking up at him. Her jaw had dropped and her lips were parted. She was looking at him as though for the first time. It could have been wonder on her face, or even astonished admiration. At any moment it would all be different, there would be joyous compliance, and transformation. He hooked his fingers by the catch of her skirt and pulled hard. There was no going back. She yelped, and said his name twice quickly. She held her skirt up with one hand and the other was half raised, palm outward for protection. There were two black buttons on the floor. He took a fistful of material and jerked the skirt down. At that moment she made a lunge across the room. The skirt ripped along a seam and she tripped, scrabbled on the floor and fell again. He rolled her onto her back and pressed her shoulders down on the boards. They should be laughing, he thought. It was a game, an exhilarating game. She was wrong to overdramatize. He was kneeling by her, holding her with two hands. Then he let her go. He lay beside her awkwardly, propped on an elbow. With his free hand he pulled at her underwear and unbuttoned his fly.
She lay still and looked at the ceiling. She hardly blinked. This was the turning point. They were on their way. He wanted to smile at her, but he thought this might destroy for her the impression of his mastery. He kept a stern face as he positioned himself. If it was a game, it was a serious game after all. He was almost in place. She was tight. It was a shock when she spoke so calmly. She did not shift her gaze from the ceiling, and her voice was cold.
She said, “I want you to leave. I want you to go home.”
“I’m staying here,” Leonard said, “and that’s that.” He did not sound as forthright as he wanted.
She said, “Please …”Her eyes filled with tears. She continued to stare at the ceiling. At last she blinked and displaced a trickle. It ran straight down her temples and vanished into the hair above her ears. Leonard’s elbow was stiff. She sucked her lower lip and blinked again. There were no more tears and she trusted herself to speak once more. “Just go.”
He stroked her face, along the line of her cheekbone, down to where the hair was wet. She held her breath, waiting for him to stop.
He knelt up and rubbed his arm and buttoned his fly. The silence hissed around them. It was unjust, this unspoken blame. He appealed to an imaginary court. If this had been anything other than playfulness, if he had meant her harm, he would not have stopped when he did, the very moment he saw how upset she was. She was taking it literally, using it against him, and that was quite unfair. He did not know how to begin saying any of this. She had not moved from the floor. He was angry with her. And he was desperate for her forgiveness. It was impossible to speak. She let her hand go limp when he took it and squeezed. Half an hour before they had been walking arm in arm along Oranienstrasse. How would he ever get back to that? There came to him an image of a blue clockwork locomotive, a present on his eighth or ninth birthday. It used to pull a string of coal trucks round a figure-of-eight track until one afternoon, in a spirit of reverent experimentation, he had overwound it.
Finally Leonard stood and took a couple of steps back. Maria sat up and arranged her skirt over her knees. She too had a memory, but only ten years old and more burdensome than a broken toy train. It was of an air raid shelter in an eastern suburb of Berlin, near the Oberbaum bridge. It was late April, the week before the city fell. She was almost twenty. An advancing Red Army unit had installed heavy guns nearby and was shelling the city center. There were thirty of them in the shelter, women, children, old people, cowering in the din. Maria was with her Uncle Walter. There was a lull in the firing, and five soldiers sauntered into the bunker—the first Russians they had ever seen. One of them pointed a rifle at the group while another mimed for the Germans: watches, jewelry. The collection was swift and silent. Uncle Walter pushed Maria deeper into the gloom, back to the first-aid station. She hid in a corner, wedged between the wall and an empty supply cupboard. On a mattress on the floor was a woman of about fifty who had been shot in both legs. Her eyes were closed and she was moaning. It was a high, continuous sound on one note. It attracted the attention of one of the soldiers. He knelt by the woman and took out a short-handled knife. Her eyes were still closed. The soldier lifted her skirt and cut away her underclothes. Watching over her uncle’s shoulder, Maria thought the Russian was about to perform some crude battlefield surgery, removing a bullet with an unsterilized knife. Then he was lying on top of the wounded woman, pushing into her with jerking, trembling movements.
The woman’s voice dropped to a low sound. Beyond her, in the shelter, people were turning away. No one made a sound. Then there was a commotion, and another Russian, a huge man in civilian clothes, was pushing through to the first-aid station. He was a political commissar, Maria learned later. His face was blotchy scarlet with a fury that stretched his lips across his teeth. With a shout he seized the soldier by the back of his jacket and pulled him off. The penis was vivid in the gloom, and smaller than Maria had expected. The commissar hauled the soldier away by the ear, shouting in Russian. Then it was silent again. Someone gave the wounded woman a drink of water. Three hours later, when it was certain that the artillery unit had moved on, they emerged from the shelter into the rain. They found the soldier lying face downward by the edge of the road. He had been shot in the back of the neck.
Maria stood. She supported her skirt with one hand. She pulled Leonard’s greatcoat off the table and let it fall at his feet. He knew he was going because he could think of nothing to say. His mind was jammed. As he passed her, he placed his hand on her forearm. She stared down at the hand, and looked away.
He had no money, and had to walk to Platanenallee. The following day, after work, he called on her with flowers, but she was gone. The next day he learned from a neighbor she was with her parents in the Russian sector.
Nine
There was no time for brooding. Two days after Maria left, a hydraulic jack was brought to the head of the tunnel to pull the cables down. It was bolted in position under the vertical shaft. The double doors were sealed and the room was pressurized. John MacNamee was there, and Leonard and five other technicians. There was also an American in a suit, who did not speak. To adjust their ears to the rising pressure, they had to swallow hard. MacNamee passed around some boiled sweets. The American sipped water from a teacup. Traffic noise resonated in the chamber. Now and then they heard the roar of a heavy truck and the ceiling vibrated.
When a light flashed on a field telephone, MacNamee picked it up and listened. There had already been confirmations from the recording room, from the people running the amplifiers, and from the engineers responsible for the power generators and the air supply. The latest call was from the lookouts on the roof of the warehouse, who were watching the Schönefelder Chaussee through binoculars. They had been up there all through the digging. They used to bring work to a halt whenever Vopos were directly over the tunnel. MacNamee put down the phone and nodded at two men who were standing by the jack. One of them hung a wide leather strap over his shoulder and climbed a ladder to the cables. The strap was being passed behind the cables and attached to a chain, which was rubberized to stop it chinking. The man at the foot of the ladder fixed the chain to the jack and looked at MacNamee. When the first man was down and the ladder had been stowed, MacNamee picked up the phone again. He then put down the phone and nodded, and the man began to work the jack.
It was tempting to go and stand under the shaft to watch the cables being drawn down. They had calculated just how much slack there would be, and how much was safe to take up. No one knew for sure. But it would not be professional to show too much curiosity. The man turning the jack needed space. They waited in silence and sucked their sweets. The pressure was still rising; the air was sweaty and warm. The American stood apart. He glanced at his watch and made an entry in a notebook. MacNamee kept his hand on the phone. The man straightened from his work and looked at him. MacNamee went to the shaft and looked up. He stood on tiptoe and reached. When he brought his hand down, it was covered in mud. “Six inches,” he said. “No more,” and he went back to be by the phone.
The man who had been up the ladder brought a bucket of water and a cloth. His colleague unbolted the jack from the floor. In its place was lifted a low wooden platform. The man with the bucket took it over to MacNamee, who rinsed his hand. Then he carried it back to the shaft, hauled it onto the platform and washed the cables, which Leonard guessed were only six feet from the ground. A bath towel was passed up for the man to dry the cables with. Then one of the other technicians, who had been standing next to Leonard, took his place near the platform. In his hand was an electrician’s knife and a pair of wire-strippers. MacNamee was on the phone again. “The pressure’s good,” he whispered to the room, and then he murmured some directions into the receiver.
Before the first cut was made, they allowed themselves their moment. There was just room on the steps for three men. They put their hands on the cables. Each one was as thick as an arm, dull black and cold, and still sticky from the moisture. Leonard could almost sense the hundreds of phone conversations and encoded messages flashing to and from Moscow beneath his fingertips. The American came and looked, but MacNamee hung back. Then only the technician with the knife remained on the platform, and he was starting work. To the others, standing watching him, he was visible from the waist down. He wore gray flannel trousers and polished brown shoes. Soon he passed down a rectangle of black rubber. The first cable had been exposed. When the other two had been cut, it was time for the tap. MacNamee was on the phone again, and nothing happened until he gave the signal. It was known that the East Germans kept a regular check on the integrity of their high-priority circuits by sending a pulse down the line which would bounce back if it encountered a break. The thin skin of concrete above the tap chamber could easily be smashed open. Leonard and all the others had learned the evacuation procedures. The last man was to close and bolt all the doors behind him. Where the tunnel crossed the border the sandbags and barbed wire were to be pulled into place, and so too the hand-painted wooden sign that sternly warned intruders in German and Russian that they were enter
ing the American sector.
Supported on brackets along the plywood wall were the hundreds of circuits in neat multicolored bunches, ready to be clipped to the landline. Leonard and another man stood below and handed up wires as they were called for. The pattern of work was not as MacNamee had outlined it. The same man stayed on the platform, working at a speed Leonard knew he could not match. Every hour he took a ten-minute break. Ham and cheese sandwiches and coffee were brought from the canteen. One of the technicians sat at a table with a tape recorder and a set of headphones. In the third or fourth hour he raised his hand and turned to MacNamee, who went across and put one ear to the set. Then he handed it to the American, who was at his side. They had broken into the circuit used by the East German telephone engineers. There would be advance warning now of any alarm.
An hour later they had to evacuate the chamber. The moisture in the air was heavy enough to be condensing on the walls, and MacNamee was worried that it would interfere with the contacts. They left one man monitoring the engineers’ circuit while the rest of them waited beyond the double doors for the moisture level to drop. They stood around in the short stretch of tunnel before the amplifiers with their hands in their pockets, trying not to stamp their feet. It was far colder out here. They all wanted to go back up to the top for a smoke. But MacNamee, who was chewing on his empty pipe, did not suggest it, and no one was prepared to ask. During the following six hours they left the chamber five times. The American left without a word. Finally McNamee sent one of the technicians away. Half an hour later he dismissed Leonard.