All through January Berlin slumbered in a cold fog which, as days turned into weeks, began to squeeze the city like a fist. People lost their bounce. Laughter became rare. If someone tried, it came out sounding hollow and forlorn, as if the Cold War at its most virulent was back.
The weather began its change on New Year’s Eve. As the freezing Christmas wind played itself out, the air became motionless and dampness seeped in. Guests at von Helmholtz’s party, staged in an old pump house transformed into a restaurant near the canal, clinked glasses –Prost Neujahr! – and went outside to hear fireworks cannonading in the streets. That’s when they first noticed the stealthy wet-cold reaching in, not stopping until it chilled their bones. Worried about the feast losing its exultant mood if they stayed out too long, they hurried back into the pump house. Hanbury reclaimed his dinner jacket from the shoulders of a spirited elderly lady of Czech descent who had been telling him all evening about the joy of owning a casino in Baden Baden.
The little daylight that penetrated the fog that January had an exhausted quality. It was how people felt. Unable to see further than half a block, everyone started living at the centre of a fatigued, collapsed existence. Some were frightened by the shrinking, as if the fog was a perverse preview of old age, a foretaste of their own senescence. The city’s institutions lost definition too. Golden Ilse with her fiery wings of triumph on the Victory Column was swallowed up; the Tiergarten became haunted enough to house every ghost spawned since creation; and Frederick the Great, on his horse on Unter den Linden, while his outline did not entirely disappear, had never been more muted. As the fog hung without moving, the air lost potency. The city, that normally lusty organism, seemed at the mercy of a sapping disease. Like a patient it lay still and brooded.
Such was the weather when the consul and the journalist went to the ball. It was unchanged a few days later when they drove to Prenzlauerberg to search out a drinking hall called Friedensdorf. According to Gundula’s information it was in this pub that they stood a chance of catching up with Günther Rauch.
Because the January sombreness is predictable, Berliners arrange for gaiety by having balls. Every strata of society has one: the police, the fire fighters, freemasons, taxi drivers, sport clubs, socialists, capitalists, everybody. But the Press Ball towers over all. For half a dozen hours in the middle of the winter it is the centre of the universe. That winter, for Hanbury, the Press Ball became a seminal event. Long afterwards, when his Berlin assignment was history and when he worked at unravelling the complex tangle of causes and effects that led to his demise, he concluded important seeds were planted there. He just didn’t recognize them at the time.
The evening began routinely. In a timely fashion he set out for Gundula’s flat. He had studied the route to Marzahn and took the S-Bahn line that cuts through the heart of the city from west to east. Curiously, whenever he now took a train, Zella’s mind corrupted his. She had been much in his thoughts after she left and he was keeping an eye on things. But he was never really sure whether figures were reproducing themselves in the middle distance. And so, on the evening of the ball, partially to be prudent and partially to have fun, he acted as Zella would have. Because of its honeycombed structure, he used Friedrichstrasse station for a complex act. Trains arrive and depart there on several levels, and stairs and passages go in every direction. The happy flip side of Friedrichstrasse station’s confused layout, Hanbury reasoned in accordance with Zella’s teachings, was that tails can be shaken there without much effort.
Hanbury got off the train, left the upper S-bahn level by going down three flights of stairs to the lowest level, walked the full length of another subterranean S-bahn train platform, and took a second set of stairs back up to ground level before exiting the station into Friedrichstrasse. Having crossed the street he next descended into the U-bahn system and paced-off the full length of yet another platform. Up to street level again where he doubled back to the main station, re-entering it by a different door and climbing more stairs back to the S-bahn tracks where he had started ten minutes before. The next train heading east soon came clanging in. If someone had been following, the consul thought sardonically, he’d be vertiginous by now after all those twists and turns.
Hanbury’s caution would still be holding a few days later when Gundula drove him to Prenzlauerberg and he looked back several times through Trabi’s small rear window. But in a fog one pair of weakly glimmering headlamps is like all the others. “Lost something?” Gundula would ask. “Just wondering if anyone is behind us. A habit I have.” “Tell me about it,” Gundula would say. She could tell stories stretching back years about Stasi Peeping-Toms. During the drive Gundula would be strangely distant – the opposite of what she had been at the ball.
After the Friedrichstrasse antics, Hanbury sat in the train in a state of happy anticipation. A dozen stops along, in the city’s far east, he got off and found a taxi. Minutes later, after zipping up the Allee der Kosmonauten, the driver wheeled into a vast expanse of sterile blocks of flats, an ant-heap, a slice of heaven to a doctrinaire socialist. The driver manoeuvred through narrow lanes between the featureless urban towers. No wrong turns, no hitting of dead ends. He had a nose for the one-way alleys. He pointed at a graffiti-decorated entrance. The consul told him to wait. He pressed a buzzer. Gundula was down in seconds. She informed the cab driver where to find room to turn around, but he knew. He lived in the ant heap too. The two of them were bantering immediately, exchanging one litany after another about the shortcomings of the local administration. In his Berlin dialect the taxi driver claimed that only rich Wessis went to the Press Ball. “You’ll be lonely,” he cautioned Gundula. “You’ll be the only one there from Marzahn.”
“I’m only going for a look,” Gundula reassured him, as if Wessi viewing was a lower category of betrayal than dancing with them. Hanbury was stealing glances at Gundula, his eyes lingering on the long dark coat buttoned to the neck. Her dark hair was brushed back exposing small, unostentatious earrings. As she and the driver conversed in a tribal language, Gundula’s face lit up. Put her on the Victory Column, Hanbury thought. Have Gundula replace the golden winged angel. With her power to radiate, from up there, she would disperse the fog in no time.
Gundula, Hanbury had observed, was not given to much personal decoration. She scarcely wore jewellery and for the ball had few signs of make-up. She probably knew that tiny earrings on her had more impact than strings of diamonds dangling from the earlobes of other women. Only later, when they were checking their coats, did the full impact of Gundula’s preparations for the evening unfold. As the overcoat came off, a dark-red minidress came into view. “You look lovely,” Hanbury observed with conviction.
“I didn’t know what to wear,” was the cheerful reply, “but, I knew it had to be red.”
“It suits you. First things first. Let’s find champagne.”
Hanbury led Gundula upstairs to the bars where drinks were being poured as if the world was ending. Arm in arm, stopping every few minutes to sip, they explored. On the outside, the Berlin Congress Centre is an emulation of a fat, futuristic spaceship. Inside, the intergalactic vessel, a complex of halls and lounges, had plenty of passengers on board. The journey promised to be fascinating. The men, naturally, were all one anothers’ clones. But the women! Each one aspired to be a work of cosmic art. Parisian see-through blouses, Latin American dresses cut provocatively up the sides, ballooning oriental trousers, low-cut frilly Viennese waltzing gowns with busts promising to burst out of confinement. The concubines to the super rich were recognizable by their cleavages – all of them lovingly prepared for public viewing in West End tanning studios. In one hallway Hanbury and Gundula saw well-known TV personalities behaving with an energy that seemed to say they would all soon be each other’s next lover. In other side rooms, women snappily done up in men’s suits leaned on yet more bars and, judging from the wobbly ankles in high heels, a few slinky men had come dressed the other way around. But by the time the thousands were congregated in the enormous inner hold, when the great ship was casting off, Hanbury knew that few in the sealed structure held a candle to Gundula. It wasn’t a conclusion arising from bias; he saw it on numerous faces. Everybody stared at Gundula, up and down, and up again.
“Why red?” he asked when they were seated in the ballroom.
“To set off your penguin outfit. Make you look important. Enhance your social standing.” Gundula smiled the smile of reason.
“It’s not like that,” Hanbury protested. “People are probably wondering how someone nondescript like me is out with someone glamorous like you.”
“That’s not what they’re thinking,” Gundula teased. “They’re thinking, why does a prominent diplomat bother with an Ossi, and a gaudy one at that.” The distance between sarcasm and truth can be vanishingly small and only Gundula’s little smirk, the upturned corners of her mouth, betrayed her real meaning.
“You’re the famous columnist read by thousands.”
“And hated by a good two-thirds of them. By chance, they’re all Wessis.”
Hanbury said he refused to believe it. “I think you’re a star. Anyway, Ossi, Wessi – it’s got nothing to do with me. Let’s drink to the opening of the Wall. Without it neither of us would be here.”
Their eyes met and from somewhere deep in space an interstellar burst of energy zapped the consul, hitting him in the spot that triggers uniquely Earthian sensations, in this case a stirring in his groin.
The magic hour came. The band began a Viennese waltz. Anxiety appeared on the consul’s face. “I did tell you I don’t know how to dance.”
“Yes, but I don’t believe it. You have natural grace. You’ll pick it up.”
“I never even properly learned the square dance,” he warned. He explained the dancing he had done with little Bonnie and how he once saw a neighbour – Keystone – get his wife into motion at a community centre in Indian Head. Keystone hopped twice on one foot, before shifting to two hops on the other and back again, bringing his steel-capped boots down hard onto the linoleum floor. As he hopped, he turned his wife’s arm like the crank on an ancient tractor. Tony, in a corner of the centre, had mimicked this and thus learned the Keystone Hop. But the distance between it and higher forms of dancing, Hanbury was sure, was too great to be bridged.
“I’m sure it’s much the same,” Gundula reasoned. “Cowboys jumping, Viennese aristocrats gliding – the difference is only of degree. What they have in common is feet moving to music. Do you have a feel for music?”
“I sometimes listen to it,” he answered evasively.
“Get the rhythm inside your head and let it sink to your feet.”
Gundula got up and led him to a corner of the dance floor. Outside the paths of the free-wheeling enthusiasts she coaxed him. He began by moving stiffly on the spot. Pinocchio, she teased. But it changed. After looking down a while with an awkward angle of the head, eyes fixed on Gundula’s dainty feet, the wooden puppet sprang to life. Without warning his feel for music did sink to his feet, which began to tap out the equivalent of a keyboard rhythm. And once he owned the rhythm with his feet, it spread back up so his whole body moved with harmony. Gundula led him into ever faster turns. Eyes closed but keeping up, the consul felt cold sweat being replaced by hot perspiration. Having travelled light years beyond Keystone’s wife-cranking hop, he was suddenly out amidst the distant constellations, travelling at their speed. “I didn’t know dancing could be like that,” he said when the band stopped.
Gundula laughed. “A little overdone. We’ll work on economy of movement next.”
They went back at it. The slow waltz was mastered, no problem, but the quickstep was a disaster. “It’s not natural,” he complained. On the other hand, he truly came into his own with the samba beat, which lent itself to primitive leaps. Gundula spurred him on with unrestrained, head-thrown-back laughter. Their tiny sphere on the edge of the great dance floor in the ship heading out towards the stars filled up with immense vitality. In the Indian Head community centre, had there been a competition between the consul and the railway engineer, deciding the winner would have required a toss up.
Vitality was missing in Prenzlauerberg where the street lights in the fog produced a sallow, yellow hue, making the façades look undernourished. Gundula knew where to go. “Around the corner, second door on the left,” she said with indifference. “What are you going to say to him?”
“Ask him how he is. It’s been twenty-five years.”
“And if he doesn’t remember you?”
“I’ll just leave.”
Which is what Gundula did after the exertion of the samba. She excused herself during the band change. Hanbury watched her go, seeing the hint of rebellion in the way she put down her heels. He drifted over to the ballroom doors. Couples by the hundreds crisscrossed. He nodded hellos. Richard von Ringsdorf saw him from a distance and waved. Hanbury thought he might glimpse Viktoria’s bare shoulder, but no luck. Sophia came by, hanging on the arm of a blond boy with slicked-down hair, saying it was ages since they saw each other. The consul pleasantly agreed. Cordula was there too, done up in feathers inside which she seemingly hid a thin man half her age. She whispered to the consul that his name was Otto and that politically he leaned towards the Greens. Then, unexpectedly, Martina Ravensberg stood next to him, as at the Wintergarten. Hanbury, not having seen her coming, could not escape.
“I knew you would be here,” she said. She leaned towards him with a slightly stooped and threatening posture. The level of her voice dropped nearly to a whisper. “You have been on my mind. Once or twice I thought of calling you, but I put it off. That isn’t like me.” It sounded like a warning. Hanbury looked at her, past her, and back at her again. She leaned so close he observed the powdered downy hair on her upper lip. He also noticed that Martina’s eyes were not quite synchronized. At this close range she seemed to be looking at him twice. Unsure which of the two eyes he should look into, he said, “I don’t understand.”
“I was balancing my interests against Sabine’s and I’m afraid she kept winning.”
Hanbury took a moment to digest this. “I still don’t know what you mean.”
“We talked about you,” she said with unconcealed triumph. “I told her you and I were getting to know each other. She didn’t take that well. Then she told me all about Savignyplatz.” Hanbury didn’t move. “I think you should call her,” Martina advised. Her countenance was as inscrutable as a poker player’s.
It seemed the January fog was reaching in to affect his vision. He looked backwards into time, then forward, and saw nothing in the mist in either direction that provided grounds for listening to this woman. “I don’t think it would be wise,” he said flatly.
“We’ll discuss it next week,” Martina declared. “Tuesday, one o’clock. You know Rheinhardt’s in the Nikolai Viertel?” He nodded. The idea that he might see Sabine again was hypnotizing. A rotund man walked up. She introduced Professor Kraft. Hanbury learned he was a linguist. He listened patiently to the professor’s perfectly acquired English. Martina, not understanding a word, expressed delight that the two men shared a medium from which she was excluded. When Kraft paused for air, the consul fled.
At the table, in a slouch, hands wrapped around an empty glass, Hanbury’s inner eye went through one involuntary vision after another: Sabine walking next to him along the riverbank in Spandau; Sabine preoccupied with nest building on Savignyplatz; Sabine in a white hot rage at the Olympic Stadium; Sabine dignified at her father’s funeral. The visions blurred. Sabine in the inner world was fading because in the outer one Gundula, with a jaunty step, was coming back. “Are you sad because your glass is empty?” she asked.
“Why is the quickstep so impossible?” he countered, lifting himself out of his slouch. “Let’s get some more champagne.”
It was then that Gundula, sipping from a fresh glass, delivered the news. “Progress on Günther Rauch,” she announced. “Are you free Tuesday evening? I know where to meet him.” It took Hanbury’s mind off Martina’s disturbing interruption. “They say he’s not polite to strangers,” she warned. “Half the western hemisphere has sent journalists his way and he hates story seekers.”
“What is it about him, Gundula?”
“He took on the Stasi. Pierced the dragon. He’s a folk hero, a saint. St. Günther.” Hanbury wanted to know more, but she said Günther Rauch could tell his own story. What she knew of it was second hand.
A band flown in from Harlem began to play Soul and Gundula became excited. Soul was her favourite. Hanbury learned he could dance to Soul, especially the slow numbers. The band’s rhythms captured them both and made them one. Between numbers they held hands. Jamaican Reggae was next so they took another walk, arms around each other.
Hours later, the space vessel, completing its long cruise, berthed back in the real world where the fog hit the disembarking passengers with the ferocity of an ice cold shower. “I’ll take you home,” Hanbury said.
“You don’t have to. I can get there by myself.” But he insisted. “Cowboy manners?” Gundula asked, eyes glinting. “Are they written down somewhere?”
They scarcely spoke during the early morning cab ride back to Marzahn. Gundula was alert enough, but she and the driver lacked a common wavelength. Hanbury’s mind was shutting down; he fought to keep his eyes open. Off the Allee der Kosmonauten, Gundula directed the taxi into the melancholy ant heap. When it stopped, Hanbury told the driver to wait. He took Gundula by the arm as they walked to her door. “I heard right?” she said. “You asked him to wait?” Hanbury mumbled yes and on autopilot, thanked her for a lovely evening. “Think nothing of it,” she replied. “You better run. Your taxi’s waiting.”
Hanbury squeezed her hand. “See you Tuesday. Sankt Günther. Right?”
“Bring your book of manners,” she advised. She turned a key and was gone.
Walking back to the cab, Hanbury noticed the hoarfrost. The air’s damp was settling out in coral-like formations, fairy tale beauty, even in Marzahn. “Grunewald,” he instructed the driver. The driver was surprised. “We’ve just come from there.” “My turn to go home.” “A circle,” observed the driver. “My wife believes in circles. I don’t. I believe in sine waves.” “At this time of night,” the consul yawned, “I believe in everything.”
Monday morning in the office, the consul could have sworn the weekend frost had found its way inside. The air was warm enough, but the atmosphere was frigid. Frau Carstens’s face was carved with deep lines of bitterness. When he asked what was wrong, resentment burst forth.
She had seen him at the ball. On her TV. Twice. First in a moving camera shot. He looked nice enough in his evening dress, but ridiculous too, since he was leaning idly against a pillar, hanging out alone, when everybody else was there in couples. The commentator had suggested in that posture he looked like a ballroom cowboy. The pain! And later the camera focussed on him on the dance floor. Why hadn’t he told her he wanted to go? She would have fixed him up with a companion. “Also,” she continued icily, “why would you dance with a total stranger like that columnist!”
“That columnist?” he asked.
“The one in the flimsy dress. Gundula Jahn is her name, if you want to know.”
“How did that come out?”
“Society spotters identified you both.”
“I didn’t know…”
“Her name? You didn’t introduce yourself when you asked her to dance?”
“I didn’t need to do that…”
“You didn’t ask her escort whether you might dance with her?”
“How utterly ridiculous…”
Under the relentless attack the consul had no chance to explain. Frau Carstens, eyes blazing as if conducting a blitzkrieg, pushed on. “I’m informed she is not held in high regard.” She got up and disappeared in the direction of the washroom. Hanbury, shaken by the depth of her feeling and the enormity of the misunderstanding, thought of waiting at her desk to explain, then changed his mind. It was all too preposterous for words.
The next day communication continued to be sparse, so Frau Carstens was not informed of his lunch at Rheinhardt’s. Late in the morning he simply took his coat and quietly walked out.
Hanbury took the S-Bahn to Alexanderplatz, then came back to the Nikolai Viertel, crossing the space where he and Günther Rauch used to meet. The Stasi’s playground had disappeared into the impenetrable brew. The weather had been explained in a front page article quoting a professor at the university. The cause was an inversion, warm air up high trapping cold air below. There being no mixing, oxygen was being used up, the professor estimated, at a rate of a half-percent a day, adding that in ten more days it would get serious. He used a stoppered bottle with a burning candle to demonstrate the smothering. The story went on to describe how in the city’s pubs customers were belting out the famous ode to Berlin’s clean air –Berliner Luft – with special verve, and prayers of thanksgiving were reportedly being given in cabarets that the factories in the East which once belched like volcanoes had closed. All the same, crossing Alexanderplatz, the consul smelled the unmistakable, acidic pungency of burnt brown coal.
Martina arrived at Rheinhardt’s shortly after he did. She was out of breath. “A big day. Closed a deal. I’m glad you’re here. Someone to celebrate with.” Hanbury politely asked what the deal was about. “Firewalls in Mitte.” A beautification project. “Have you counted the firewalls in Mitte, Herr Konsul?” He answered he had not, but he’d seen a few. Gaping cavities in the urban landscape where buildings once stood were now defined by austere walls of solid brick. Ravensberg Creations, Martina claimed, had landed a contract to turn 300 of them into works of art. “If only my papa were alive.” They ordered drinks.
“Has your papa been dead long?” he inquired solicitously.
“Quite long. He did not experience the Wall coming down. Too bad. We escaped before it went up. We used to live in Pankow. I’ve moved back there now into our old house. You need to feel the eastern pulse if you want to profit from it.”
Hanbury had heard dozens of escape stories. Every third person in West Berlin has one. Tunnels, balloons, snorkelling, scuba diving, fake hulls in boats, concealed compartments in meat transport trucks, false fuel tanks in small aircraft – the ingenuity of people in the people smuggling business has no limits.
So, how did Papa Ravensberg get out?
“You’re interested?” Martina said. “We had a routine escape. We left what we had behind and walked out. Mama with my brother into the French Sector. Papa took me into the American Sector. We met up at Rathaus Schöneberg where we all wept.” Martina laughed quietly remembering how nervous her papa had been. “Shall we look at the menu?”
The lunch had the makings of an endurance test the way Martina was talking. She looked disinterestedly at her food and indifferently past Hanbury while her mind wandered. Finding cheap artists for Creations (luckily there were plenty in the East); living in Pankow (friendlier than Dahlem); advertising in the East (it had to be done differently from the West). She became personal too. Her mother throughout the years complaining about poverty; her father reacting defiantly. What do you want me to do, Martina mimicked him,ask the Almighty to take out a rib and turn it into something better? Martina as a young girl: withdrawn in a world of fantasies. Sabine as a young girl: acting hers out. The monologue had no direction. Or did it? When she got to Müller’s funeral, most of her life’s terrain had haphazardly been sketched in.
What struck her at the funeral when everyone was standing around outside, Martina said, was the way Sabine walked up to Hanbury. “She was determined. I was keeping an eye on her and saw that when she noticed you nothing else mattered. Who is that man, I asked. Who has Sabine been keeping from me?”
“She didn’t say much,” Hanbury said, putting up a defence.
“True, and you said less. When a man and a woman say that little to each other, something is going on. And then the Wintergarten, Herr Konsul. When I recognized you and you told me who you were, the mystery became oh-so-delightful.”
Martina described how she confronted Sabine. “At first she didn’t want to talk about it, so I threatened, a little.” Martina giggled. “I said I had started seeing you, that you had a nice feel about you. Was I going too far?” She described how Sabine became livid. Why the anger? Martina asked. What’s so special about the consul? To her he seemed like just another interesting man. The consul was none of Martina’s business, was Sabine’s answer. Martina said she didn’t understand. Anyway she was planning to make him her business. Another prize exhibit for her den of tomcats? Sabine asked acidly. Why didn’t Martina hang out on the Strasse des 17. Juni after sundown with all the other public women if she couldn’t keep her nymphomania under control. Martina was grateful for the suggestion. And, since Sabine wasn’t pulling punches, she wouldn’t either. She accused Sabine of leading an overly orderly existence, an act normal people can’t follow. Normal people can’t be that perfect, Martina said. That’s why she had her tomcats. She needed them and wasn’t afraid to admit it.
Sabine broke down. That isn’t true, she said,I know disorder. I’ve had as much as anyone. She claimed that Tony Hanbury, a stray student, caused more disorder in her life than anyone should ever wish to have. Haltingly, then torrentially, and in much more detail than with her husband, the Savignyplatz story once more came out. The waiter in Café Einstein avoided their table. Only when a soggy handkerchief was returned to Sabine’s purse did he approach to tell them that the dessert special of the day was built up around the passion fruit.
And now, in Rheinhardt’s, the consul focussed on one word. “Disorder?”
“That’s what Sabine said. Other than the problems with her stepmother, I think you are the only disorder she ever had. You’re special.”
“Did she mention the Olympic Stadium?”
“Oh yes. And then, after her father died, she found your letters to him. As far as I could make out, they came from everywhere. You have travelled. That’s clear. She’s angry with you for creating disorder. She’s angry you wrote her father, but not her. She’s angry with her father for not saying he was in touch with you all those years. All in all, she is, well, angry. But I think she wants to see you.”
“I doubt it would be wise,” said Hanbury. “Her husband would wonder.”
“Her husband? He plays no role. Husbands, wives, pah, of no consequence. People like you and me, we ignore them. You don’t look convinced. I’ll be indiscreet. Her husband is the cause of Sabine’s need for order. She has a natural weakness for it, true, but he has turned her into an addict. Someone should help her kick the habit. Why not you?”
“You don’t understand. I don’t want to pick up with Sabine where we left off. I only want to get re-acquainted, maybe become friends.”
“Friends? Nonsense! It would do Sabine a world of good to have a side interest, a dependable lover. Take my advice, Herr Hanbury, go to Bücher Geissler where she works. Stir things up.” Martina patted his hand with a wise affection. “And I want to be kept informed how you make out.”
Hanbury looked at the expensive platinum-blond coiffure, the steady eyes that seemed to come at him from two directions, the determination that hung around Martina’s glistening red mouth, and understood why Ravensberg Creations was winning contracts.
For the remainder of the afternoon, a distracted consul immersed himself in other people’s lives. Strangers marched into his office. Passports, oaths, authentications of wills, certificates stating that marriages could proceed: his stamping hand dealt with all such needs. But another part of him was not there. That part of his mind hung motionless at the centre of several competing and perfectly balanced forces – Sabine and Gundula. He was silent when Sturm drove him home. Only later, when the sputtering of Trabi’s engine and a tinny horn sounded outside, did he come out of suspension.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” Gundula said, turning onto the city autobahn. “I almost decided not to come.” Her voice was cold.
“How so?” he inquired. The change in Gundula’s mood puzzled him.
“Günther Rauch has his circle of friends. I don’t think you’re their type.”
“Are you?”
“Barely.”
“If we feel we don’t fit, we won’t stay. I only want to say hello. Thanks for this, Gundula. I tried to call you Sunday. I wanted to ask how you survived the ball.”
“I was out all day,” she said grimly, putting her boot down and pushing Trabi to the limit. The plume of smoke behind was a permanent black tunnel in the fog.
“I would like to ask him about his fight with the Stasi.” Hanbury shouted to be heard above the noise.
“Ask him what you like. I might not stay,” she yelled back.
“The Stasi got to you too, didn’t they?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Don’t you remember? After Gerhard’s dinner you said all your boyfriends were on file.”
“What the Stasi did to me was disgusting.”
“Maybe they had a file on me – from the Günther Rauch days.” He hoped to provoke flippancy in Gundula, to bring her out of her distant mood, but she didn’t budge. Where was the Gundula with whom he danced to Harlem Soul?
“You’re better off not knowing,” was all she cried back.
The noise level dropped when Gundula left the autobahn and made her way through Wedding towards Prenzlauerberg. “If I had a file I might understand how you feel,” he said.
Hanbury glanced sideways. She wore a black suede jacket with the collar turned up and tight white jeans. Someone should be painting her, he thought. “Ever heard of a Dr. Stobbe?” he asked casually, still trying to conquer her distance.
“Why?”
“Maybe you met him researching your columns. He’s in charge of the Stasi files.”
“I’m sure he leaves a trail of breadcrumbs whenever he goes in to find the way back out. Those files reach to the moon and back.”
Once Trabi was parked amongst his peers, she took him to a building with a double wooden door which creaked. Behind was a cobble-stoned passage leading to a courtyard where socialist cars of various types, all of them beat up and stripped, lay about in a composition of anarchistic art. A hand painted sign read Friedensdorf. There was a distant rumble of many voices.
“Something left over from the old days?” Hanbury asked.
“A hot bed of dissent.”
“Against what?”
Gundula didn’t answer. She continued down some steps and went in. Peace Village might be its name, but there was no restraint in its assault on the senses. The noise level was higher than Trabi’s engine at top speed. Beer glasses were in heavy motion, and with the crowd sucking neurotically on cigarettes the smoke hung thick. Tattooed arms were standard and every nose seemed pierced with metal rings. Artists? Intellectuals? Skinheads? A new political elite? Gundula and Hanbury moved through. Entschuldigung, the consul kept saying, excusing himself with every squeeze.
How do you find someone you knew twenty-five years earlier when you’re searching in a place so full the view is limited to six inches? Gundula pushed on. They were coming to the back where there were side rooms, leftover bomb shelters from the war, also full of smoking and drinking figures.
As things turned out, it was Günther Rauch who did the discovering. “Das ist nicht wahr!” It’s not true! The booming voice was like a detonation. Günther Rauch was coming forward fast with outspread arms. “Ich glaube es nicht!” I don’t believe it! he thundered. Hanbury only had time for a glimpse and saw that Günther Rauch was almost twice as wide as he once was, with a paunch big enough to hide a football; red hair turning grey stuck out in all directions making the head enormous; the face was wider with eye sockets deeper and the beard longer. But that’s all Hanbury saw because a bear hug smothered him. When he emerged, he tried to regain composure. “Günther,” he said calmly. “How are you? I’ve been hoping to run into you.” “Mein Kamerad!” Günther Rauch replied, laughing, but on the verge of tears. He kissed Hanbury on both cheeks. “My best traitor. Twice you came to see me. Then nothing. I was ten weeks in solitary on account of you. Did anyone tell you?”
“I hear you gave it back to them with interest not long ago,” the consul said.
“You heard that? How far did the news travel? Across the ocean?”
“Gundula here told me.”
No one after a lifetime in a police state shakes the habit of suspicion. Günther Rauch looked Gundula over. He asked some questions. She stood her ground, asking the same questions back.
“She’s fine,” Hanbury said. “She’s got a Stasi file too.”
“Everybody has one,” grumbled the world authority on Stasi files. “The Stasi were so addicted to shit they ate from their own asshole.” But suspicion drained away. “The Stasi may be history,” he said to explain, “but they left a space behind and we all know nature abhors a vacuum. Today’s version, thank God, is hopeless.” He addressed Gundula. “Thanks for bringing this traitor around.”
“Anything to please a consul,” Gundula shot back.
“Cowboy,” said Hanbury quickly. “My best friends call me cowboy.”
“Consul!” Günther Rauch exclaimed with loud delight. Some villagers looked up. “Here? In Berlin? Fantastic! A great career!”
The consul shrugged. “It’s a job.”
“Ah! We must celebrate. Sit down. You too,” he ordered Gundula. “Heinz!” Günther Rauch roared. “Pils! For everybody.”
An elated Günther Rauch squeezed Hanbury’s cheek, touched his hand, put an arm around his shoulders. “We could have been friends,” he kept saying. “But you didn’t come. I thought you were dead.” Hanbury, needing to atone for twenty-five years of silence began to fill them in. He described his travels. Günther Rauch listened. No one can do that much travelling, his shaking head seemed to be saying, and manage to come through alive.
“What I have to tell you is meagre,” Günther Rauch admitted when Hanbury insisted it was his turn. “I tried, as you know, but did not succeed in becoming a public nuisance. I wanted to be subversive; they told me I was a joke. I always hoped they would sell me to the West. “Now if I’d had some help…if my views had been smuggled out by a friend and published in Western papers, I might have seen more of the world too.” He took Hanbury by the ears and playfully shook his head. Gundula watched a one-way love affair between two grown men.
“Eventually they said I would be a street cleaner,” Günther Rauch continued. “So I swept East Berlin for more than twenty years. The same round, over and over again, an endless repetition. I had a good look at the proletariat at ground level, I can tell you, and I learned they were confused. No wonder. The Communist party was Fascist more than Marxist. So when the chance came to throw it out…” Günther Rauch faltered, dropped his great head onto his chest. He closed his eyes. “I lived and breathed the revolution,” he murmured. “Those months in eighty-nine were the finest.”
Hanbury raised his glass. “To revolution,” he said cheerfully. Beer mugs clashed. Günther Rauch again told Gundula she had done well to bring the traitor by. “Everybody says you’re a hero,” Hanbury claimed. “How did you do that?”
“By chance. Pure luck. How else? For years, I cleaned the streets near Stasi headquarters. I knew their habits. After the Wall opened I could tell something was going on.” Günther Rauch, thoughtful beer-hall commentator, described the day when he was sweeping as usual and keeping a close watch on the Stasi complex.
First, he noticed signs of torn paper blowing about in little eddies underneath a delivery ramp. A strange event for a bureaucracy which treated every scrap of paper like gold. And smoke was rising from a chimney which had not smoked before, not even in the dead of winter. It didn’t smell of brown coal either. Bits of matter in the smoke glowed. Paper being burned! Günther Rauch quickly knocked on a few reliable doors behind which the regime’s overthrow was always the first prayer in the morning and the last incantation at night. His citizen’s committee assembled before the Normannenstrasse complex.
At the gate, Günther Rauch in a reverberating voice demanded to see a ranking officer, but none was left. As the smoke continued to rise, so did the indignation of the citizen’s committee. The Stasi had been stealing pieces of their lives for as long as they remembered and, watching the chimney emissions, they knew it was their files, their lives going up in smoke. With resounding authority Günther Rauch announced he had been invested with the Will of the People and had come to take control. Five minutes remained before the People would act.
The gate slid open and confusion set in. The news had spread that the Stasi were being overthrown. Citizens arrived from all over. No one in the complex knew who might be Stasi, who was citizen’s committee and who was there to hunt for souvenirs.
Günther Rauch’s first act was to stop the burning. Workers in coveralls were told to support his cause. They said, as always, they would follow orders. File destruction was stopped. Incinerators were shut off. Bags of torn-up files were counted, recorded and sealed. Doors were locked, keys signed for. All in all, an exemplary neo-Prussian changing of the guard. Looting had started, but was stopped. Time to clear the building. Souvenir hunters were seen running off with life-sized portraits of Honecker. Better to have my picture stolen, than to have my corpse strung up, cried someone, mimicking the high pitched, scratchy voice of the former dictator.
“Us Ossis can’t stop reading them,” Günther Rauch said with bitterness, referring to the files. He asked Gundula if that wasn’t true and yelled at Heinz to bring another round. “They called it a socialist paradise, but all the regime was really good at was snooping.”
Günther Rauch and Gundula began to compare notes on how their files became so thick. Who generated the information? For Günther Rauch the relevant people included a student friend with whom he spent three summer vacations and whose wedding he attended. Also there was Franz, a placid, middle-aged man whom he often met for a chat on a bench in the neighbourhood park and, later, a street cleaner like himself. For Gundula they included an aunt, a school teacher and a neighbour across the street, a nice lady who kept a garden and regularly invited Gundula for tea.
When Gundula described the people who informed on her, Günther Rauch nodded and looked burdened. They described the other disappointments, other sequences in their life stories – thoughts, attitudes, feelings – things that can’t be put into a file. Günther Rauch sat back in his chair, a beer mug in one fist, the other knocking the wooden table in harmony with the cadence of his voice. He was treating Gundula like a pupil. He encouraged her, corrected her, agreed and disagreed with her. But Hanbury saw she was quicker and cleverer. She left him behind in exposing the underlying weaknesses of a society of double standards, duplicity and lies. Only bombast made the difference. Bombast, Hanbury saw, kept Günther Rauch in charge.
As for the final outcome of the revolution, Günther Rauch admitted he and the citizen’s committee soon lost control. It didn’t work out as they wanted. The proletariat is always unpredictable, he confided. You could hardly say, once the regime had been kicked out, that a new and improved solidarity set in. Everything was suddenly ruled by markets – labour markets, financial markets, global markets. To get something, to go anywhere, to achieve, you had to wheel and deal and race around and compete.
Gundula was saying less and less and Hanbury wondered whether Friedensdorf was opening up old wounds. But Günther Rauch, he could see, was gathering momentum for a monologue. Villagers sensed it too. They leaned forwards on their chairs, straining to catch his words.
The West set about colonizing the East, Günther Rauch postulated with a firm knock on the table. A whole society – factories, farms, parks, clubs, kindergartens – was decreed to have had no value. Now only money talked. And labour, the highest good in the world after only the human reproductive act itself, had been reduced to nothing more than a cost input, an entry on a ledger. Imagine being told you can no longer make love because economists say it’s too expensive, said Günther Rauch to disciples roaring with laughter. Even I have been affected, thundered Günther Rauch. Hand-pushed eastern brooms are out. Too slow. Too costly. Imagine me! Günther Rauch. A luxury item! A roll of palms drumming on the tables reached down Friedensdorf. Hanbury saw Gundula was becoming pensive.
“What we need,” Günther Rauch declared, “is a new party. An Ossi party. To fight colonization.” Villagers cheered. “Marx-based. Pure Marx. Stalin’s corruptions not allowed. And we’ll achieve power through the ballot box.” Some cheers, some whistles. Günther Rauch turned to Hanbury. “What do you say old friend? Will you visit me once I’m respectable. Or do you take as dim a view of parliamentarians as you do of Marx?”
“From broompusher to lawmaker,” someone yelled.
“From Friedensdorf into the Bundestag!”
“I propose a toast to Karl,” roared Günther Rauch. More and more villagers were leaning around the corner of the alcove.
“We’ll need money,” a realist proclaimed.
“Can you make a contribution, Herr Konsul?” Günther Rauch demanded loudly. “My friends. This man is a diplomat. He’ll help us.” Günther Rauch clamped a fist on Hanbury’s shoulder. “You have international connections. We need their support.”
“No problem,” the consul smiled wryly. “A few phone calls and you’ll all be in power.”
Günther Rauch started laughing. He laughed so hard he nearly wept.
Hanbury and Gundula walked back to Trabi in silence.
“I can take a taxi,” Hanbury said. “It’s out of your way.”
“No,” Gundula said coldly.
She drove a few blocks. Without warning, on Kollwitzplatz, she pulled over and cut the engine. “There’s something I have to say.”
Hanbury glanced at Gundula. She was nearly hidden inside her jacket collar.
“Tonight was good,” she said. She had her hands on the steering wheel and looked through the windscreen at the square’s feeble lights. “You handled him well. From what I’ve heard, Günther Rauch doesn’t warm up to people. But you told him things and asked him questions and got him going. Well done.”
“Not me. It was you. You two did all the talking.”
“He wouldn’t have tolerated me for thirty seconds if it hadn’t been for you. He toyed with me, but he wanted to impress you.”
“I don’t think so, Gundula.”
“But now what? Will you see him again?”
“Well, yes. Occasionally. Of course the air in Friedensdorf is bad. And, well, you noticed too. He does go on.”
“Occasionally, you say. You’ll go see him occasionally. Not too often. When you consider it suitable, then you’ll go see Günther Rauch?”
“I imagine so. Gundula, what is this?”
“I ask because it seems to be your general approach.”
Hanbury said nothing. He also fixed his eyes on the emptiness of Kollwitzplatz. In the little park, he knew, stood a statue of Käthe Kollwitz. He had seen it on his walks. She sat on a pedestal, calm, stripped of illusions. Some minutes passed in silence. He tried to come to grips with an inner agitation. Finally he asked, “What are you driving at?”
“Look at you. You make an attempt to find Günther Rauch. You let him know you’ve gone to some trouble. You get him going. He falls in love with you all over again. I imagine that’s what happened twenty-five years ago. What will happen next? Because the air in Friedensdorf is irritating, you may not bother to see him again until you’re both seventy. I want to know if that, generally, is how you treat people.”
“Günther Rauch in love with me? That’s absurd.”
“I don’t think it’s far off. He called you his best traitor. It sounded like he was joking, but he wasn’t. He missed you all those years.”
Hanbury thought about this. “I don’t think that’s fair. And it has nothing to do with you.”
“No? Another question then. Why did you take me to the ball?”
Hanbury’s confusion deepened. “I thought it would be fun. I don’t know many women.”
“I suppose, yes.”
“Then why me?”
“Gundula. This is odd.” He felt as if she was forcing him to cross a river covered with broken ice: one misstep would send him under.
She pressed on. “You could have taken others, but decided on me. Why?”
Hanbury shifted his weight in the narrow confines of the Trabi. “I invited you because I like you,” he admitted glumly.
“You like me?”
“Yes.”
“But you want to keep it a secret.” Hanbury sighed, but held his tongue. “Well then, what do you like about me?”
“Gundula, for heaven’s sake!”
“Tell me. We need to get to the bottom of something.”
“Bottom of what?”
“First tell me why you like me.” She still gripped the steering wheel, but was turning slowly towards him as if she was giving in to a terrible anger.
Trabi, in the cold fog on Kollwitzplatz, was not a warm place. Yet Hanbury was sweating. He took a deep breath to keep his voice from trembling. “I like your eyes when they flash.”
“That’s all?”
In the middle of the perilous river Hanbury had no choice but to go forward. “I like it when you tease…I like it when you teach me how to dance…” He was close to faltering. “I don’t understand. What does this have to do with Günther Rauch?”
“Nothing. It has to do with me. When you asked me to the ball, it meant something. It was a lovely evening. But how did it end? First, you insist on going back to Marzahn. I want to take you home, you said. I hear you saying it. When we got there, you instruct the taxi to wait. You shake my hand. Very professional. Why? A sign that the consul’s duties are done? Proof of a well-tempered diplomat?”
“No!” he cried. “The ball had nothing to do with my duties. You’re wrong about that. We could have gone to a pub to drink beer. I would have enjoyed it more. I’m not much of a dancer.”
“A cosy beer? Like tonight? You put on a professional performance? Think of how you treated Günther Rauch. Asking, probing, smiling, nodding. Your interest appeared genuine. Perfect diplomacy. Well done, Herr Konsul!”
“You’re reading too much into nothing,” Hanbury protested blandly. “I was tired after the ball. I scarcely recall what happened. I fell asleep in the taxi on the way home.” The view into Kollwitzplatz was disappearing because the windscreen was fogging up. “What should I have done?” he asked, resigned.
“You could have sent the taxi away. You could have tried to stay the night.” Gundula’s voice was subtly changing, away from the volleys of accusation. “I don’t know whether I would have asked you up. Probably not. But there would have been no harm in trying. What I want to say is, don’t treat me like a professional contact.”
Gundula started Trabi’s motor. They drove off in silence.
“I’m really sorry about the ball.” Hanbury said. “I felt great on Sunday. I tried to call you to say that. I would like to try some of those dance steps again.”
“The music was good,” Gundula agreed.
“Those guys from Harlem were terrific. They opened my eyes. They really did.”
On the city autobahn Trabi went calmly. Gundula explained why the Harlem band impressed her. She hummed a few notes to demonstrate her point. At the bungalow, Hanbury asked, “A drink?”
Gundula looked him over, head shaking, eyes back to teasing. “No thanks. You need time alone to study that book of cowboy manners.”
“It’s thick. Suppose I never finish it?”
“Let’s put it this way – once you have, let me know.”
Hanbury stood on the sidewalk thinking this over. Trabi’s engine roared. Gundula popped the clutch, but the engine died on the spot. Hanbury opened the door. “If you’re gonna hang out with cowboys, get yourself a decent horse.”
“Get away!” she laughed and tried again. With some coaxing Trabi, that dapper creature, disappeared into the fog.
Inside, he put a new disc into the stereo, a compilation, The Best of Soul. He set the volume loud and listened critically for a while. His thoughts wandered – to Gundula, furious with him for reasons he found deeply fascinating – to Günther Rauch, to whom an olive branch had been delivered – and to Bücher Geissler, an unknown place he felt compelled to explore.