‘Look at it as a wonderful opportunity,’ said Silas. ‘The one thing we must be sure about is that this KGB fellow doesn’t cotton on to Sinker. I don’t want him to even get a hint that our strategy is now directed towards the economy.’
‘Is that what it’s directed at?’
‘Don’t be bitter, Bret. You’ve got just about everything you’ve asked for. We can’t go one hundred per cent manpower and economy: the military and political considerations are still valid.’
‘It’s a matter of definition, Silas. Rearmament can be described in economic terms or political ones without bending the figures.’
Silas took another bean from its pod and examined it. ‘We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow their Wall down.’ He offered Bret a bean. Bret didn’t want one.
‘I’m not the big bad wolf,’ said Bret.
14
East Berlin. September 1983.
Fiona Samson was surprised when her secretary, Hubert Renn, invited her to his birthday party and she spent an hour or so thinking about it. She knew that Germans liked to celebrate birthdays, but now that she had got to know him better she had found him to be a pugnaciously independent personality, so set in his ways that it was hard to imagine him going to the trouble of arranging a birthday party, let alone one to which his superior was to be invited.
Fiona had come to terms with him but she knew that Renn did not easily adapt to taking orders from a young person or from a woman, let alone a young foreign woman. But Renn was German and he did not make his feelings evident in any way that would affect his work.
And there was the problem of what present to give him, and what to wear. The first was quickly solved by a visit to the valuta shop where Fiona, as a privilege that went with her job, was permitted to spend a proportion of her salary on goods of Western manufacture. She bought a Black and Decker electric drill, always one of the most sought-after imports in a country where repairs and construction were constant problems. She wrapped it carefully and added a fancy bow.
What to wear was not so easily decided. She wondered what sort of event it was to be. Would it be a small informal dinner, or a big family gathering, or a smart affair with dancing to live music? She rummaged through the clothes she’d brought with her – all of them selected for banality of design and sombre colours – and decided upon a short afternoon dress she’d bought long ago at Liberty in Regent Street: narrow stripes of black and crimson with pleated skirt and high buttoned collar. She had bought it for a holiday with Bernard and the children. They had stayed at a farm in western Scotland and it had rained almost every day. She had brought the dress home again still unworn. She looked at herself in the mirror and decided that, now she had at last discovered a reasonably good hairdresser, it would do.
The dinner party, for such it turned out to be, was given in a private room in an elaborate sports club complex near Grünau. Although she could have ased for the use of a car, Fiona went on the S-Bahn to Grünau Station, and then caught a street-car.
Here in this attractive suburb southeast of the city, the River Spree has become the Dahme and there is extensive forest on both banks. The club’s main entrance, around which the new premises had been built, dated from the 1936 Olympics. Along this 2,000 metres of swastika-bedecked Berlin river, thirty thousand spectators had seen the amazing triumphs of physically perfect German youth using radically new designs of lightweight sculls and shells. Hitler’s Olympics were transmitted on the world’s first public TV service and Leni Riefenstahl made her world-acclaimed film Olympiad. The golden successes resulting from selection, dedicated training and German technology – and the way in which the propaganda machine used them – provided the Third Reich with a political triumph. The 1936 Olympics afforded a glimpse of the Nazi war machine in mufti. It had been, in all its aspects, a taste of things to come.
Fiona was in the lobby looking at the Tenth Olympiad photos, and some of the old awards, displayed in a big glass case, when Hubert Renn saw her. She offered him her best wishes and he bowed. ‘Are you interested in sport, Frau Direktor?’
‘At college I was on the swimming team. And you, Herr Renn?’
‘No. Apart from hockey I was never able to do very much. I was not tall enough.’ Renn was dressed in a suit she hadn’t seen before, with a red bow tie and matching kerchief in his top pocket. ‘I am so glad you were able to honour us with your presence, Frau Direktor. It will be only a small gathering and it won’t go on too late. We are simple people.’
The day of the celebration was not his saint’s day, of course; Renn’s father, a dedicated atheist, could never have sanctioned a baptism. But there were candles in abundance, for in Germany – where the pre-Christian heritage is evident in every old festival and custom – no revelry is complete without the flame of the candle.
It was a small gathering, held in the Gisela Mauemayer room, named in honour of Germany’s 1936 world discus champion. Her portrait was painted on the wall, a beautiful sad-eyed girl with long blonde hair worn in a bun. The table was laid out with wines and water already to hand. At the head of the table a few small presents had been placed next to Hubert’s plate. Renn’s wife, Gretel, was wearing a wonderful dress. When Fiona admired it she admitted that it had belonged to her grandmother and she hadn’t had a chance to wear it for over eight years. Gretel was a shy slim woman, aged about fifty, with greying hair that had obviously been specially tinted and waved for this evening.
The meal was excellent. Some hunter friend of the Renns always provided venison as a birthday gift. Marinated in wine, spices and herbs, it made a delicious pot roast at this time of the year when the Berlin evenings were becoming chilly.
It was a curious party, marked by a certain stiffness that was in no way accounted for by any shortcoming in Fiona’s grasp of the language. Yet the birthday rituals seemed rehearsed, and even when the drink had been consumed, Fiona noticed no substantial relaxation amongst the guests. It was as if they were all on their best behaviour for her.
Among those seated round the table there was Renn’s daughter Käthe, noticeably pregnant, and her dutiful husband who worked in one of the lignite-burning power stations that polluted the Berlin air. Hubert Renn’s bearded brother Felix was a retired airline pilot, seventy years old and a veteran of Spain’s civil war. There were also a man and his wife who worked as clerks in the same building as Fiona and Renn, and, seated next to Fiona, a cordial Englishwoman named Miranda. She was, like Fiona, in her middle thirties and spoke with the brisk accent affected by smart Londoners, and those who wish to be mistaken for them.
‘It’s an unusual name,’ said Fiona. ‘Is that a tedious thing to say?’
‘I chose it. I was an actress before I married. It was my stage name. I discovered it when I was in The Tempest at school. I was a terrible little snob. It stuck.’
‘It’s a lovely name.’
‘No one over here thinks it’s very unusual, of course, and I’ve got used to it.’
‘Were you an actress in England?’
‘Yes. I was quite good. I should have kept to it but I was getting on for thirty years old and I’d never had a decent West End part. My agent had decided to retire. A man fell in love with me and I married him. You know how it happens.’
‘And he was German?’
‘Very German…young and sexy and masterful, just what I needed at the time, I suppose. He was on holiday in England and staying with people I knew.’
‘And he brought you to Berlin?’
‘I’d been a member of the party since I was eighteen so I couldn’t yield to the capitalist lures of Hollywood, right? And my mister-right had friends at the Babelsberg film studios. Babelsberg, I thought, the UFA studios; Josef von Sternberg, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich. Wow! And this Wunderkind guaranteed that there would be plenty of acting work over here.’
‘And was there?’
‘I don’t know, I promptly became pregnant, so after a few one-day jobs playing Engl
ishwomen and American women for TV, I looked for other work. I did ghastly little jobs translating for various government departments: travel adverts and that sort of garbage. And then my husband died.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. What did your husband do?’
‘He got fall-down drunk.’
‘Oh,’ said Fiona.
‘Little Klaus was born. I managed. I had the apartment and there was a decent pension. I suppose the DDR is the best place to be if you have to find yourself a widow with a baby.’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘You’re married?’
‘I left my husband to come here,’ said Fiona. It had become her standard reply to such questions but it still hurt her to say it. Into her mind there immediately came the picture of Bernard and the two children sitting round the table eating a frozen dinner the night she first met Harry Kennedy. How she yearned for them now.
‘Yes, Hubert told me that you’d given up everything for your beliefs. That was a wonderful thing to do. Your perfume is heavenly. Sometimes I think good make-up and perfume are the only things I miss. What is it…if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘No, of course not. Arpège. I haven’t graduated to any of the new ones. Was your husband related to the Renns?’
‘Arpège, yes, of course it is. Hubert is the Godfather to my little Klaus.’
‘I see.’
‘Not really a Godfather, of course; this erstaz arrangement they have over here.’
‘Namengebung,’ said Fiona. It was the secular ceremony permitted by the communist regime.
‘Your German is fantastic,’ said Miranda. ‘Fancy your knowing that. I wish my German was half as good. When I hear you gabbing away, I envy you.’
‘Your German sounded excellent to me,’ said Fiona.
‘Yes, it’s very fluent, but I don’t know what I’m saying half the time.’ She laughed. ‘I suppose that’s how I got myself into trouble in the first place.’
It was then that Hubert’s brother Felix stood up to propose a toast. The Sekt was poured, and the cake was cut. Cakes are to German-speaking people what soufflés, spaghetti and smoked salmon are to their European neighbours. Hubert Renn’s birthday cake in no way challenged this doctrine. The beautifully decorated multi-layered cake was so big that even one thin slice proved too much for Fiona.
Felix, a tall bony old fellow with a closely trimmed beard, proved to be a good speaker and he kept the company amused for five minutes before toasting the Renns.
When the celebration ended they came outside to find a brilliant moon. A light wind moved the trees and there was no sound other than a distant plane. Felix Renn said it was the late flight heading out of Berlin for Warsaw.
Declining offers of a car ride, Fiona walked back to Grünau Station. She had discovered walking to be one of the compensations of her life here. A woman could walk in these empty streets without fear of being attacked or accosted, and even this urban neighbourhood, so near the centre of town, was green and rural.
Living alone in a strange town had not been good for Fiona. She kept telling herself that it provided her with a chance to collect her thoughts in a way she could never do before. In fact the loneliness had slowly given way to bouts of depression: black and morbid moods, not that state of low spirits that is called depression by those who have never known the real thing. Fiona had the black bouts of despair and self-disgust from which recovery comes slowly. And like most psychological illness her fears were rooted in actuality. It was crippling to be without Bernard and the children –and painful to think how much they must hate her. Only with great difficulty was she able to endure her miseries.
Work was the medicine she took. When she wearied of the work provided by her job, she read German history and improved her spoken and written German: she still got the cases wrong sometimes. She never thought about how long she might be here. Like a committed combat soldier she adjusted her mind to the idea of being dead. Fortunately Renn, and the others, had not known her in her normal frame of mind and assumed that this moody woman with her unexplained silences and flashes of bad temper was the person she had always been.
As she walked along under the trees, the moonlight bright enough to throw her shadow on the grass verge, she speculated about Renn’s birthday party, and his choice of guests, and could not help wondering if there was to be another birthday party that would better reflect the relatives, friends and neighbours that he clearly had in abundance. Were the people present the ones closest to him and his wife after a lifetime spent here in the city? If not why not?’
And if such an elegant little dinner – extravagant by the standards of life in the DDR – was a normal event in the life of the Renns, why had his wife Gretel not worn that dress for eight years?
What of the forthright Miranda? In this puzzling town, with all its half-truths and double-meanings, there was nothing more enigmatic than candour. She still hadn’t worked it out by the time she reached Grünau. The grandiose nineteenth-century Stadtbahn station was bleak and neglected, a puddle of rain under the arch, cracked paving and its shiny brickwork, and enamel signs, stained with dribbles of rust. And yet the platforms were swept and tidy and the litter bins emptied. To Fiona a lot of the East sector of the city was like this; like the dilapidated mansion of some impoverished duchess who will not admit defeat. The other people waiting for the train were quietly spoken and respectably dressed. Even the mandatory drunk was sitting on a trolley humming softly to himself.
The train came in and the guard, in a smart uniform, watched the drunk stumble safely aboard before giving the go-ahead.
As the train rattled along, elevated above the city on its elaborate iron support, Fiona thought again about the guests. Felix, Hubert’s eloquent brother: she wondered which side he’d fought for in the civil war in Spain. If for the communists how did he survive the Nazi years, and if for Franco how did he endure the ones following? And yet it was the presence of Miranda that puzzled Fiona most. She wondered why Hubert Renn had never mentioned that the mother of his ‘Godchild’ was a Londoner born and bred, and why he’d not told Fiona that another Englishwoman was to be with them tonight. Had it been the birthday party of some other person, none of these things might have merited comment, but Fiona knew Renn by now and she knew this birthday dinner was not the sort of function he enjoyed.
Fiona’s curiosity would have been satisfied by the scene in the same Gisela Mauemayer room at ten-thirty the next morning. Miranda was there together with two Russians and a black girl. She had described the previous evening in great detail.
Fiona’s bellicose colleague Pavel Moskvin was also there. He was about fifty years old and weighed over 200 pounds. He had the build of an American football player. His hair was closely cropped and his eyes set a little too close to the squashed nose that made his large head look as if it had been bowled along the ground until its protuberances broke off, and then stuck upon his shoulders without a neck.
Sitting calmly in a corner, occasionally reading from a book, there was Erich Stinnes, a wiry man with a pointed face and hair thinning enough to show his scalp. His metal-rim spectacles, of the most utilitarian design, brown corduroy suit and heavy boots made up an ensemble that well-paid communists sometimes found irresistible.
Opposite Stinnes sat a tall lively Jamaican woman in her late twenties. Her fake leopard-skin coat was thrown across a chair and she was dressed in a tight white sweater and red pants. She sat toying with a red apple, rolling it across the table from hand to hand. Miranda looked at the black girl: quite apart from her clothes and make-up, there was something about her manner that had immediately identified her as being from the West.
Staring at Miranda, Moskvin, restless with the contained anger which boiled continually within him, said, ‘Tell me about her.’ His voice was hoarse, like that of a man who shouts too much.
‘I’ve told you,’ said Miranda softly. She stood at the other end of the table. She refused to sit down and was determined not to
be intimidated by him. She’d seen his type of Russian before; many of them.
‘Tell me again, damn you.’ He went and studied the painting of the discus thrower with unseeing eyes.
Miranda spoke to his back. ‘Frau Samson is an inch or so taller than I am. She has longer legs.’
Without turning round he said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘You know nothing,’ said Miranda, contemptuous now that she was on the firm ground of her own expertise. ‘If I am to imitate her walk, it will make a difference.’
The black girl took a noisy bite out of the apple. Moskvin glared at her: she smiled. They all disliked him, Moskvin knew that. He’d grown up amongst such hostility; it was not something that had ever troubled him.
‘We’ll arrange it so that you won’t have to imitate the walk,’ said Moskvin, still looking at the black girl. Then he turned and fixed those eyes on Miranda. ‘Can you do her voice?’
‘Her voice is easy,’ said Miranda.
The black girl took another bite of the apple. ‘Keep quiet,’ said Moskvin.
‘I gotta eat, buddy,’ said the black girl.
Moskvin went to the table and switched on the tape recorder. Fiona’s voice came from it, saying, ‘It’s a lovely name.’ (pause) ‘Were you an actress in England?’ (pause) ‘And he brought you to Berlin?’ (pause) ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ (pause) ‘What did your husband do?’
Moskvin switched off the machine. ‘Now you,’ he said.
Miranda hesitated only a moment, and then stiff and formal, and holding her hands together as if about to sing Lieder, she recited the same words: ‘It’s a lovely name.’ She took a breath. ‘Were you an actress in England?’ She wet her lips and, completely relaxed now, she delivered the last three without pausing. ‘And he brought you to Berlin? Oh, I’m sorry. What did your husband do?’ Then she smiled. It was an impressive performance and she knew it. She’d always had this ability to mimic voices. Sometimes she found herself copying the voices of people she was speaking with, and it could cause annoyance.