‘Say, ain’t that sump’n?’
Two of the musicians unlocked the leather cases and looked inside before locking them again. One of the men tapped the belly of a double bass and said, ‘Gee, I sure didn’t think I’d be toting a bull-fiddle when I moved in among the commies.’
The flautist got his instrument out of the case. ‘It’s as lethal in your hands as an M-60,’ he laughed and played a little riff. In the silence caused by the attention to the coffin, the passage he played was the only sane thing for a hundred yards in every direction and, even before the overtones of that had faded, an American MP shouted, ‘You want a goddam water-cannon to wash you across the sidewalk, fella? Put it away before they get the idea it’s a telescope.’
‘I told you not to point it at anyone,’ said the string player to ease the tension. The flautist said, ‘But I had the safety on.’
‘Here she blows,’ someone said.
They had the coffin back inside the long black unstreamlined hearse that looked very Al Caponelike especially with Stok standing on the running boards. Stok was dressed in his corporal’s uniform in order not to alert the newsmen who constantly gaze across the border from Checkpoint Charlie to the Friedrichstrasse Kontrollpunkt.
There were two wreaths with the coffin; they were great lifebelts of fir-tree leaves with intertwined flowers and huge decorative ribbons of silk with ‘Last greetings from old friends’ and the date printed across them. The driver drove very slowly, nodding feverishly at Stok every now and again. The hearse stopped again and the driver produced a map, unfolding it across the steering wheel. In the no-man’s land of the world, two men in a hearse were looking at a map and discussing where to make for.
Stok was talking energetically to the driver, who was probably a Red Army transport soldier, and the driver was nodding like mad. The glass panels at the sides were decorated with a complex engraved palm-leaf pattern, and the big coffin, chosen to give Semitsa room to stretch an elbow, could just be seen inside.
The hearse moved slowly again and one Grenzpolizist was walking ahead of it, brandishing the documents like a royal flush. Two East German soldiers, leaning against the flower boxes and talking, made a joke about the hearse and then straightened their jackets and walked away in case they should be reprimanded. Overhead a US Army helicopter clattered along the line of the wall, saw the hearse and circled, watching the activity around it. It crossed. One of the two GIs stepped out from the glass-sided box to salute a captain who had just arrived in a white Taunus with a spotlight and the words ‘Military Police’ on its side.
The GI waved the hearse forward and, as the western barrier was flipped open, the captain leaned into the shop downstairs and shouted ‘Let’s go, feller’ to me. I turned away from the window, but not before taking one last look at Stok. He grinned and held his clenched fist in the air—a salute from worker to worker across the last frontier of the world. I grinned back and gave him the same salute in return. ‘Let’s go,’ I heard the captain say again. I rattled down the ancient creaking staircase and jumped into the Taunus. By now the hearse was way down near the canal. The captain pumped the accelerator and jammed the siren on. ‘Hoo-haw, hoo-haw,’ the doleful bray had the traffic pulling aside and halting at the roadside.
‘This isn’t the St Patrick’s Day Parade,’ I said irritably. ‘Switch the bloody thing off, can’t you? Didn’t anybody tell you that this mission is secret?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then why collect me in this carnival wagon?’
He flipped the siren off and it died with a whimper. ‘That’s better,’ I said.
‘It’s your funeral, bud,’ said the officer. He drove in silence, overtaking the hearse at the Tiergarten, at which stage of its journey it was attracting no attention at all.
At the address in Wittenau Johnnie was awaiting me. ‘Wittenau,’ I thought; to a Berliner the word is invariably linked with the lunatic asylum here. The car stopped in a sordid street.
It had perhaps been a shop at one time or maybe a tiny warehouse, but now it was a garage. There was a large wooden double door big enough to back in a lorry—or a hearse. At the rear there was a heavy bench with a metal-working vice and a few simple rusty tools and junk that the previous tenant had abandoned. As I opened one half of the door a thin shaft of daylight connected me with Johnnie Vulkan—like a carpet unrolling across the stone floor to where he was leaning against the bench. The single unshaded light bulb that looked so infirm in the daylight became newly significant in the darkness. I shot the large rectangular bolts and noticed how smoothly they moved into their oiled slots. There was grease underfoot too, and that smell of carbonized oil and spilt petrol that hangs around motor-car repair places.
The light was directly above Vulkan’s head and his eye-sockets were great piratical patches of darkness and under his nose was a moustache of shadow. He put a cigarette into his mouth and it gleamed under the light.
Johnnie was watching me intently. He removed the unlit cigarette.
‘Get through to London?’ he asked.
‘Just fine—clear as a bell.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They said “Unanimous agreement”, the code word. What did you expect them to say?’
‘Just checking,’ said Johnnie.
I squinted at him in an obvious sort of way. ‘Do you know something that I don’t know, Johnnie?’
‘No. Honest. Just checking. You got the documents in the name of Broum?’
‘Yes.’
‘Spelt correctly?’
‘Knock it off will you,’ I said. ‘I’ve got them.’
Johnnie nodded and ran his fingers through his hair and carefully lit his cigarette with an expensive lighter. He began to recount the plan to himself to be sure he remembered it.
‘They’ll go to the mortuary first. They will put him into a station wagon there. It should take at least another forty minutes.’ We had both disussed the plan a dozen times. I nodded. We smoked in silence until Johnnie threw his cigarette butt on to the floor and stepped on it carefully. In the area around his feet the white rectangles of flattened cigarette ends were strewn like confetti. Overhead I heard the rattle of the low-flying helicopter which was watching the movement of the hearse between Checkpoint Charlie and the West Berlin mortuary.
As my eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness I could see the junk that had accumulated in the building. There was a disembowelled motorcar engine with old torn gaskets hanging off it. The cylinder head had been hastily slid back on to its bolts without being seated and it rested drunkenly upon the engine. Beyond it was a heap of bald tyres and some dented oil drums. Vulkan had looked at his watch so often that he finally tucked his shirt cuff under the gold rim to make it easier to glimpse the time. He heaved deep sighs and every now and again he would go up to the engine and kick some part of it gently with the very tip of his hand-lasted Oxfords.
‘There’s a funeral,’ he said.
I looked at him quizzically. ‘That’s what’s delaying the transfer at the mortuary, a real funeral.’ I looked at my watch. ‘There’s no delay,’ I said, ‘and if it doesn’t arrive for another five minutes they will still be on time according to the schedule.’
We both stood there in the dismal light of the bare bulb when suddenly Johnnie said, ‘I was in prison once in the next street to this one.’
I offered him a Gauloise and lit one myself and, when we had finished lighting them and having that first inhalation that makes you dive for a cigarette, I said, ‘When was that?’
‘Spring of 1943,’ said Vulkan.
‘What charge?’
Johnnie grinned and stabbed the shadows with his cigarette. ‘I was a communist, Roman Catholic Jew, who had deserted from the Army.’
‘Is that all?’ I said.
Vulkan gave a sour smile. ‘I can tell you,’ he said, ‘it was grim. There wasn’t much to eat for heroes in 1943—for prisoners…’ He drew on his cigarette and the garage
was full of the pungent aroma of French tobacco, and he drew on his cigarette again like this was all some complex dream he was dreaming while really he was in prison just a few year-yards away.
He rubbed two fingers of his left hand and then put them under his armpit as you do when you’ve hit them with a hammer—put them into some dark, warm place where they can stay for ever and never come out into the daylight.
‘Defined areas,’ said Vulkan suddenly. ‘Defined areas of hatred.’ His voice was firm and yet seemed to originate from another time and another place, almost like a voice speaking through a medium, a voice that was just using the larynx and sound apparatus of Vulkan’s body. ‘It’s easy then. When I was first arrested I was badly knocked about.’ He made that motion of the hand that in some Latin parts of the world is a sign of pure joy: he flung his hand around on the end of his wrist like he wanted it to spin away into a corner. He held it up to me and I saw the skin grafts along the last two fingers. ‘It wasn’t so bad for me, those beatings. The French had arrested me; they were so anxious to demonstrate to their German masters how well they had learned from them. Those Frenchmen were the most evil men I had ever seen—they were sadists, I mean really, in the medical sense of the word. When they beat me they beat me for their own special sexual delight and just by being beaten I was participating in a sexual relationship with them—you understand me?’
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘It was filthy,’ he said. He clawed at his lip to find a shred of tobacco and finally spat heartily. I waited to see if he was going to continue; for a minute or so I thought he would say no more. Then he said, ‘But it was uncomplicated for me. I could understand that a Frenchman felt hate for a German.’ He stopped speaking again and I guessed that the conversation was proceeding in his head. ‘The French prisoners were worse off because they…’ He stopped talking again and his eyes were fixed on something from another time and place. ‘But the first time I was ill-treated by a German—I don’t mean pushed to one side or knocked off a chair, deliberately and systematically tortured, beaten—it was…I don’t know, it threw me out of equilibrium. That’s why the communists were almost the last to crack, they were able to cling to their “in” group, they had sharply defined areas to hate.’
I said, ‘Most prejudice tends to operate against groups that it’s easy to recognize. It’s no accident that minorities only suffer where the prejudice has had time to develop its power of detection. Mexicans don’t have trouble in New York City; it’s down on the Mexican border they run into it. Pakistanis are honoured guests in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s in Birmingham, England, that they run into prejudice.’
‘That’s it,’ said Johnnie. ‘Well, after the war, communists had the best chances of rehabilitation. They’d always known that the forces of reaction (that’s to say non-communists) were swine, so nothing had surprised them. The Jews had known about anti-Semitism for a few centuries. It was the ones who had suffered at the hands of their own people who were faced with an insoluble enigma. The Frenchman who had been tortured by other Frenchmen, the Italian partisan captured by the Italian fascists. We have this terrible thing to live with.
‘I have more in common with the Germans than with any other nation on the earth. I’ve lived among them, I understand them in ways I could never get to understand you, no matter if I was chained to you from now until the day I die. But I never go into a roomful of Germans without thinking to myself: is there a man here who tortured me? Is there a man here who killed my friends? Is there a man who just stood beyond the door while I screamed and believed that nothing outside of my torn body was real? Is there a woman here who was the daughter of such a one, a sister or mother of such a man? And such is the power of mathematical reasoning that I am sure that often the answer has been “Yes” if only I had known.’ He spat again in some sort of cathartic endeavour.
Johnnie spoke suddenly. ‘They might pull some sort of trick,’ he said.
‘Could be,’ I agreed.
‘Do you have a pistol or a knife?’
‘I don’t think they are likely to try that sort of trick,’ I said.
‘Do you have a pistol or a knife or a persuader?’
‘I have a persuader,’ I said. ‘Two hundred dollars in singles.’
‘The Americans,’ said Johnnie. He walked over to the old engine. ‘You shouldn’t have told the Americans,’ he said.
‘How would we have got it past Checkpoint Charlie?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said petulantly and kicked his collection of cigarette ends to the far corners of the building.
He turned his back to me and began to toy with the junk on the bench, setting up some monstrous chess game. He tapped the rusty sparking plugs and squeezed valve springs in the palm of his hand. At the side of the bench was a thick polished oval of wood. There were twelve different sizes of drill stuck into it like matches in a peg board. Johnnie amused himself throwing the springs over the shiny drills. ‘Schmidt’s of Solingen,’ it said on a scroll around the wooden base. ‘Best drills in the world.’
He arrived right on time, the same Red Army driver in a black station wagon. He rapped at the ancient wooden doors, but the joins in the woodwork were so warped that we had both already seen the car arrive and back up to the doors. Johnnie moved quickly. The doors swung back smoothly, the car chugged back in as far as the bench. Then the gigantic coffin slid out of the back of the car with just the three of us pulling. Johnnie and I one on each side and the Russian at the front of the car, bracing himself on the dashboard and pushing the end of the coffin with the soles of his boots. It wasn’t very dignified but it was smooth and fast. As soon as the coffin was on to the bench the Russian stepped round to the driver’s seat and came back bearing the two gigantic wreaths that I had seen on top of the hearse. There were great sprays of lilies and chrysanthemums and a bright red ribbon with ‘Letzter Gruss’ printed on it in Gothic script. ‘Take those back,’ said Johnnie to the young Russian. The Russian said he couldn’t and there was a small argument.
The Russian said he had tried to leave them at the mortuary but they didn’t want them and he couldn’t take them back through Checkpoint Charlie or it would seem highly suspicious. Johnnie argued in fluent Russian but it didn’t do him any good: the boy wouldn’t take the wreaths away with him. The more Johnnie swore, the more the Russian shrugged. Finally Johnnie turned away and the Russian jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. I opened the doors and the boy gunned the motor and gave the car full lock as he sped out into the street and away towards the border.
Johnnie had climbed on the bench by the time I had turned round. He was using one of the big rusty screwdrivers to scratch the wood-filler from the sockets above the countersunk screws. He was so frantic in his haste that he had been working feverishly for five minutes or more before he noticed that I wasn’t helping.
‘Get the items out of my case,’ he said.
There were two small suitcases. One was a midwife’s set adapted to take an oxygen bottle. In the other case Johnnie had put a bottle of Glenlivet malt whisky, one of those sand hot-water bottles that keep hot for hours, a heavy sweater, sal volatile, smelling salts, a box containing a hypodermic needle and four small ampoules of megimide, four vials of aminophylline and a dark bottle that I guessed was nikethamide—a circulatory stimulant—a mirror to detect breathing, a short Piorry’s wooden stethoscope, a thermometer, a pen torch suitable for examining pupils, and a marking pencil.
‘It’s really complete,’ I said. ‘You take this pretty seriously, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Vulkan. He hadn’t removed his coat and he was sweating profusely. Sometimes in the exertion of the work his head would set the bare bulb swinging and all the shadows would dance crazily and his face glistened with sweat as I remembered it glistening with rain.
‘That’s the last one,’ he said.
‘Just like the last scene of Romeo and Juliet,’ I said and Vulkan said ‘Yes’ ov
er his shoulder and started to chip at the seam where the lid and bottom joined, but I doubt if he even heard what I said.
‘Help me,’ he said. He began to strain at the heavy lid. It must have been inlaid with lead for it was so heavy to move that at first I felt sure that there were still some screws holding it—then it began to move.
‘Look out,’ shouted Vulkan and the bottom end of the lid fell on to the bench, missing our toes by only inches. The crash was ear-splitting and the vibration rocked the bench. At first the shadow of the coffin lid obscured the view, but, when it slid away, even Vulkan could cling to his hopes no more.
‘Six reasons why the Deutsche Demokratische Republik should be represented in the West.’ There were hundreds of them, stacks and stacks of leaflets stuffed into the huge coffin—Stok’s last joke. I climbed down to the floor.
‘It doesn’t look like you’ll need your hot-water bottle,’ I said to Vulkan, and for just one split second reflexes pulled his face into a smile, but only for a second. ‘They can’t,’ he said. ‘They dare not, they promised—your Government must take action.’ I suppose I laughed again, for Vulkan became past all rational argument.
He held his splayed fingers before his face like he was studying an invisible hand of cards. ‘You and Stok,’ he said, over-salivating slightly. ‘You planned this.’
‘He doesn’t consult me,’ I said. Vulkan was still standing on the bench three feet higher than I was.
‘But you are not surprised,’ Vulkan shouted.
‘I’m not in even the slightest way surprised,’ I said. ‘That Red Army boy didn’t even hang around to get a signature. Let alone for forty thousand pounds. I’d never believed any part of the whole deal, but that really convinced me. It’s about time you came to grips with reality, Johnnie; there is no Santa Claus. People just don’t give away anything for nothing. What could Stok gain?’
‘Then why did he go to all this trouble?’ said Johnnie. He leaned down and moved some of the leaflets around in the coffin as though he thought he might find Semitsa in there if he dug deep enough.