The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  The bath water was lukewarm and brown, and whatever was suspended in it making it brown clung to the soap, producing a frothy scum on top of the water like effluent. She dressed, putting the money in the small of her back just below the elastic of the waistband, always in the bathroom. She lay on the bed and read a book, turning the pages without taking in a word. Reception called at 7.30 p.m. to tell her the driver was waiting for her downstairs. He took her on a short drive to a modern development called Ernst-Thälmann Park.

  Günther Spiegel’s apartment was on the eighth floor of a high-rise block overlooking the statue of Ernst Thälmann himself, all thirteen metres of black Ukrainian marble. Spiegel stood with her at the window, shaking his head, drinking wine as they looked out over the flat expanse of the city, still covered with a crust of ice-hardened snow.

  ‘We moved here from a beautiful nineteenth-century tenement in Belforterstrasse because the old place was falling to pieces, the plumbing didn’t work and the electrics were life-threatening, all of which the State refused to repair. They insisted we move here. It was brand new. And now it’s as bad as the hundred-year-old places. You have been fortunate to find the lift working, although the eight-floor climb means that for the first hour you are warm when the central heating breaks down and, of course, State plumbers hibernate in winter…it’s well known.’

  The meal was marginally better than the one in the hotel and both Herr and Frau Spiegel apologized separately for the poor quality of the meat.

  ‘The State moved into pig production in a big way recently,’ said Spiegel, ‘so now we get no vegetables and all our terrible meat is sold to the West for pet food.’

  ‘Your poor dogs,’ said Frau Spiegel.

  After the meal Spiegel beckoned her into the bathroom and asked her if she had any spare hard currency. He must have done this before, and with visitors more important than she, because he showed no signs of embarrassment or humiliation.

  He told her they would have to find a taxi near the S-bahn station because the usual driver was off for the night. They went down together and found one cruising the estate. Spiegel spoke to the driver while Andrea got into the back.

  The cab driver didn’t go back the way she had come, but headed off down Greifswalderstrasse and kept going until a park appeared on the left.

  ‘Volkspark Friedrichshain,’ he said.

  They headed along the south side of the park and passed a statue.

  ‘Statue of Lenin,’ said the driver, in bad English. ‘New. Nikolai Tomski.’

  ‘I’d prefer to go straight back to my hotel,’ she said.

  ‘No problem.’

  He turned back into the centre and headed into the Prenzlauer Berg district.

  ‘Volksbühne…theatre,’ he said, their eyes meeting in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Hotel Neuwa, Invalidenstrasse,’ she replied. ‘Please.’

  ‘Patien’,’ he said.

  At the Senefelderplatz U-bahn he bore right up Kollwitzstrasse, past the Jewish cemetery and right on to Belforterstrasse, where Spiegel had said he used to live. The driver turned left again, checking his mirrors all the time.

  ‘Water tower,’ he said. ‘Nazis use to murder people in cellar.’

  Andrea didn’t say anything this time.

  ‘Good. You relax now,’ said the driver.

  He crossed the Kollwitzplatz, keeping on the Knaackestrasse, and swung hard left into a Mietskasern, driving swiftly under the entrance arch, through a courtyard and another arch, until he parked up in the total darkness of the second courtyard. He opened her door, took her by the arm and led her to the staircase.

  ‘Top floor. Right side,’ he said. ‘Hand on the wall. Very dark. I wait for you.’

  She shivered, not cold, involuntary, as if fingertips had brushed her ribs.

  The Snow Leopard saw the car arrive and put on the ski hat. He had arranged two piles of cement blocks on either side of the table as stools to sit on. He had a torch in his pocket. He heard the uncertain steps coming closer, feet searching across each landing to the next flight. He yawned until tears came into his eyes. He was surprised to find so much adrenalin in his system. He pulled the mask down over his face.

  The feet reached the top floor and moved down the corridor. He turned on the torch, pointed it at her feet, stroked the stockinged ankles with the light. She stopped, he asked her where the three white leopards sit and she replied. He led the feet into the room and laid the torch on the table. The fog from their breath met at the edge of the low light. He took out a packet of Marlboros and a lighter. She slid one out. He lit her face with the yellow oily flame from his petrol lighter. His hand shook. She steadied it. He lit his own cigarette and there followed a long silence of the sort that rarely happens at the beginning of a meeting.

  ‘They said you would wear a mask,’ she said, to break the deadlock.

  ‘Do you mind if I look at your face? Shine the torch in your face?’ he asked.

  ‘If that would help…we’ll have to know each other properly eventually…I expect.’

  He shone the torch at her from several angles. She looked straight ahead without closing or screwing up her eyes. The defined circle of light in his hand trembled.

  ‘Do you mind if I turn it off for a moment?’ he asked. ‘I need to hear your voice without distraction.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  He turned off the torch. They sat in darkness, only the two coals of their cigarettes provided any light. His heart was like thunder, no distinct beats, just a tremendous roll of noise in his chest.

  ‘Do you know me?’ he asked.

  ‘How could I?’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you look like.’

  ‘What does anyone know from just looking?’

  Silence.

  ‘You’re the expert,’ she said. ‘You’re the spy.’

  ‘Everybody’s a spy,’ he said. ‘We all have our secrets.’

  ‘But…but you’re the professional.’

  ‘Unpaid. Remember. That’s why you’re here.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the business,’ she said, relieved. ‘I have your money. Twenty thousand Deutschmarks.’

  ‘You’d know me by my voice now, wouldn’t you?’ he asked. ‘You listen carefully.’

  ‘I don’t know how you’ve arrived at that conclusion.’

  ‘They say a child will always recognize its mother’s voice.’

  ‘But I’m not your child,’ she said, something shaking inside her or rather outside, as if there was an earth tremor, something completely strange. ‘Can we have the light on now, please?’

  ‘Would the same apply to a lover?’ he asked, ignoring her. ‘Between lovers?’

  ‘It’s not the same, is it? It’s not a blood tie.’

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’

  ‘I haven’t risked coming here to discuss that with a total stranger.’

  ‘Of course. Not to talk about those kind of secrets…but other ones…duller ones.’

  Silence again.

  He pulled off his mask, flattened it on the table.

  ‘Would you answer the same question from someone you didn’t know?’ she asked.

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’

  ‘Only once.’

  ‘Who with?’ she asked, her heart undecided about its next beat.

  ‘You…crazy.’

  She coughed against the sudden knot in her throat. Her cigarette wavered in the dark.

  ‘Now do you know me?’ he asked.

  No answer.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and after another long silence, ‘I’m not sure I know myself.’

  ‘We’ve changed…’ he said, almost blasé, distant, ‘that’s normal. Isn’t that completely normal? I’m not as I used to be either.’

  He recognized his own coldness and reached over, found her hand.

  ‘Let me see your face,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve only half a face you’ll
remember.’

  ‘Just show me.’

  ‘The good news or bad news?’

  ‘Where I come from, we always ask for the bad news first.’

  He turned his head to the right, switched on the torch and held it at table height so that he looked ghostly, ghastly, horrific.

  ‘That’s the worst news,’ he said.

  He turned his head to show the other profile, and there was Karl Voss, almost as she’d first known him. She put her fingertips to his face, touched the bones which were still prominent, still vulnerable under the tight skin.

  ‘That’s the slightly better news,’ he said. ‘A Russian flame-thrower grilled the other side.’

  ‘They told me you’d been shot in the Plötzensee Prison.’

  ‘A lot of us were,’ he said. ‘I was in a line up but they were firing blanks that day. Scaring us to death.’

  ‘Rose said you were involved in the July Plot.’

  ‘I was. I was their man in Lisbon.’

  ‘How did you survive that?’

  ‘I happened to be interrogated by a man called SS Colonel Bruno Weiss who, although he was a very nasty piece of work – I think they hanged him in ‘46 – was someone I knew from my days in the Wolfsschanze. I had a particular connection with him there.’

  He stopped, because she was looking at him, transfixed, tears rolling silently down her face.

  ‘It is me,’ he said. ‘I am here.’

  ‘Can you believe it?’

  ‘No. I’m trying not to think about it.’

  ‘I’d forgotten you.’

  ‘Had you? That wouldn’t surprise me. I imagine you were told something, a few lines, I don’t know, maybe only several words. Voss has been shot. They were wrong, that’s all.’

  ‘This is what Rose told me, he said: “We’ve had news of Voss, by the way. Not good. Our sources tell us that he was shot at dawn in Plötzensee Prison last Friday with seven others.” That’s what he said. Those were his words.’

  ‘I never liked Rose but he did happen to tell you the truth. Perfect intelligence. It was a Friday. Yes. And there were eight of us. We were shot too…but only shot at.’

  ‘That lie has…’

  ‘It wasn’t a lie…only an untruth. I doubt he knew and if he did, he probably thought it would make life easier for you. You were young. You could recover.’

  ‘No,’ she said, quickly. ‘It made it hard, incredibly hard. If I’d known you were somewhere, even if I couldn’t see you, there would still be possibilities. That word “never” would not have got stuck in my vocabulary.’

  ‘You’re angry.’

  ‘Because I thought this could never happen, I’ve never considered it. If I had, anger is not what I would have expected. I’d have thought that we’d flood back into each other’s arms, like they do in films, but it’s twenty-seven years, isn’t it, Karl? It’s the nature of frost that after time it becomes permafrost. It doesn’t thaw out in ten minutes, and definitely not in this climate.’

  ‘It is cold,’ he said. ‘And you’re right. I never had to live with the loss. That would have been hard.’

  Silence again.

  ‘It’s warmer when it snows,’ he said, and she knew he was thinking.

  ‘Then let’s talk,’ she said. ‘Tell me about that particular connection to Bruno Weiss.’

  Silence while he finished the cigarette, rubbed his thighs up and down, went back to that black trunk with the white stencilled address in the furthest recess of his memory.

  ‘I planted a bomb for him, which killed a great man,’ he said. ‘Fritz Todt. A great man and I killed him. I didn’t know that I was killing him, but I did and afterwards I entered the world of SS Colonel Bruno Weiss and, what’s more, I accepted it. I didn’t just keep my mouth shut. I went a step further and planted a lie for him. He sort of returned the favour some time later by trying to help me get Julius out of the Kessel at Stalingrad but…it was too late.’

  ‘But he got you off the hook after the July Plot.’

  ‘Off the hook, yes,’ he said, thinking about the irony of that. ‘He chose to believe me, that was all. There were others, who I knew were innocent, whom he chose not to believe and he tortured them and executed them. But me…he didn’t exactly let me go. I ended up reduced to the ranks on the East Front. But even there, you know, this appalling luck pursued me and within a few months the shortage of officers was such that I was back in a captain’s uniform. Some of my men said I was “blessed”, as if that could possibly be the right word for being allowed to continue in that hell.’

  ‘That depends on what you believe.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, almost aggressive. ‘What do I believe in?’

  ‘Perhaps, like me, you’d begun to think there’s nothing beyond the door into the dark.’

  ‘That’s true. I certainly didn’t want to see behind that door. Not then. I can’t think why. There was every reason. Being embraced by the dark should have been a relief.’

  ‘And the Russian flame-thrower?’

  ‘I’d like to tell you that was purification by fire, but I think it was just simple luck again. We were retreating, every day we were retreating in front of that Russian onslaught. We were on the outskirts of Berlin. I was pushing a car out of a mudhole so that my men could get a piece of artillery through and, as I grunted against the back window, I came face to face with General Weidling, who was an old friend of my father’s. He recognized me but couldn’t place me. We had one of those absurd chats, where a world war seems to stop for a few minutes, and he tried to think where he’d seen me before but I’d already changed my name by then. It had been easy enough in the confusion, amongst all that death and destruction, to pick up some ID tags. My men knew my history, they even came to me with Captain Kurt Schneider’s documents one day, found them on a body in a shell crater. They knew it would be hard for me if later the Russians traced me back to the Abwehr. Military intelligence. Spying. It never looks good. So I told Weidling I was Kurt Schneider but, as with Bruno Weiss, Weidling and I had made some strange connection and he asked me how well I knew Berlin. I’d lived there all my life before going to Heidelberg so I knew it very well. He ordered me to take him to the Führer’s bunker, which I did, and when I got him back in one piece he made me a member of his staff. My men couldn’t believe it.

  ‘It helped being on Weidling’s staff but I wasn’t out of the war. Occasionally the fighting caught up with our constantly mobile HQ – it was all street to street, house to house with the Russians. Terrible fighting. Terrible loss of life. And one day some of the original Kurt Schneider’s luck caught up with me and I got my leg stuck under some rubble after a tank blasted a hole in a house wall. A Russian cleaned out the room with a flame-thrower. I was left for dead and picked up only after the fighting had more or less stopped.

  ‘When the Russians found out I’d been on Weidling’s staff I was given some medical treatment and eventually flown to Moscow on a planeload of loot. They did some rough repair work on my face and I was taken to a prison camp north of the city called Krasnogorsk 24/III. Weidling was being interrogated in Moscow and one day the NKVD came to see me when they heard that I’d been in the Führer’s bunker with him near the end. I told them everything I’d seen, which wasn’t much, waiting at the bottom of the stairs while Weidling delivered the latest atrocious news…but I embellished. Then I mentioned I’d studied physics at Heidelberg University and I slipped in Otto Hahn’s name, and that was it – anything to get out of that camp.

  ‘They interviewed me, sent me to some technical centre in Moscow and then out to Tomsk, where I was a lab assistant in a research laboratory for twelve years, until 1960. I married and, maybe because of my father-in-law’s contacts, I was offered a place at the M-P school, which was the Soviet Intelligence Academy in Moscow. I leapt at it, because they said it would get me back to Germany. They gave me a Berlin posting in ‘64, so here I am – Major Kurt Schneider, Ministry for State Security, Arbeitsgruppe Ausländ
er – I monitor foreign visitors to East Berlin. Wilkommen nach Ost Berlin.’

  ‘You’re married.’

  ‘With two daughters. And you?’

  ‘I was married. I got married straight after I was told that you’d been shot. I had to. I thought I had to at the time.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Any children?’

  She stared into the table. The wood was stained with rings from mugs and glasses, creating a series of Venn diagrams. Connections. Overlaps. Differences. She opened her bag and took out a photograph of Julião. She slid it across the rough surface. He tilted it towards himself. Frowned.

  ‘My God,’ he said.

  ‘I called him Julião.’

  ‘But that’s extraordinary,’ he said, flicking the corner of the photograph, until finally he took the torch to it and inspected the face minutely.

  She fought it back down several times – the instinct to lie, to dissemble, still strong, even in front of the one person who she could and should tell.

  ‘The Portuguese and their fado,’ she said. ‘Do you remember that?’

  ‘We heard some that night we went walking in the Bairro Alto.’

  ‘It seems we’re destined to live our lives in minutes and hours, instead of years and decades. My life’s been two weeks long, where everything that has happened to me is as a result of that short fortnight and its endless repercussions.’

  He flicked the torch up at her, to see if her face said more than her words.

  ‘Why do you think he looks like Julius?’ she said.

  He stood up, paced the room, snatched at the cigarettes and lit two up, gave one to her in passing.

  ‘I can’t think,’ he said. ‘I can’t think. Don’t talk. I can’t hear. I can’t speak.’

  Her hands trembled the cigarette to her lips. Her lips trembled the cigarette back into her fingers. She laid it on the edge of the table, interrupted his pacing, grabbed the lapels of his coat.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked. ‘Just tell me where he is, so that I can imagine him there.’

  She was suddenly aware of how cold it was in the room. Standing close to, they were immersed in each other’s breath. The air was freezing in her mouth and nostrils, chill in her lungs, ice around her temples.