Funeral in Berlin
I spread the few Westmarks and English pounds on the desk. He counted them and endorsed my papers.
‘Cameras or transistor radio?’
At the other end of the corridor a boy in a leather jacket with ‘Rhodesia’ painted on it shouted, ‘How much longer do we have to wait here?’
I heard a Grepo say to him, ‘You’ll have to take your turn, sir – we didn’t send for you, you know.’
‘Just the car radio,’ I said.
The Grepo nodded.
He said, ‘The only thing we don’t allow is East German currency.’ He gave me my passport,1 smiled and saluted. I walked down the long hut. The Rhodesian was saying, ‘I know my rights,’ and rapping on the counter but everyone else was staring straight ahead.
I walked across to the parking bay. I drove around the concrete blocks, a Vopo gave a perfunctory glance at my passport and a soldier swung the red-and-white striped barrier skywards. I drove forward into East Berlin. There were crowds of people at Friedrichstrasse station. People coming home from work, going to work or just hanging around waiting for something to happen. I turned right at Unter den Linden – where the lime trees had been early victims of Nazidom; the old Bismarck Chancellery was a cobweb of rusty ruins facing the memorial building where two green-clad sentries with white gloves were goose-stepping like Bismarck was expected back. I drove around the white plain of Marx-Engels Platz and, at the large slab-sided department store at Alexanderplatz, took the road that leads to Karl Marx Allee.
I recognized the car park and pulled into it. Karl Marx Allee was still the same as when it had been Stalin Allee. Miles of workers’ flats and state shops housed in seven-storey Russian-style architecture, thirty-foot-wide pavements and huge grassy spaces and cycle tracks like the M1.
In the open-air café across the road, lights winked under the trees and a few people danced between the striped parasols while a small combo walked their baby back home with lots of percussion. ‘Warschau’, the lights spelled out and under them I saw Vulkan get to his feet. He waited patiently until the traffic lights were in his favour before walking towards the car park. A careful man, Johnnie; this was no time to collect a jaywalking ticket. He got into a Wartburg, pulled away eastward down Karl Marx Allee. I followed keeping one or two cars between us.
Johnnie parked outside a large granite house in Köpenick. I edged past his car and parked under a gas lamp around the corner. It was not a pretty house but it had that mood of comfort and complacency that middle-class owners breathe into the structure of a house along with dinner-gong echoes and cigar smoke. There was a large garden at the back and here near the forests and the waters of Müggelsee the air smelled clean.
There was just one name-plate on the door. It was of neat black plastic: ‘Professor Eberhard Lebowitz’, engraved in ornate Gothic lettering. Johnnie rang and a maid let us into the hall.
‘Herr Stok?’ said Johnnie.
He gave her his card and she tiptoed away into the interior.
In the dimly lit hall there stood a vast hallstand with some tricky inlaid ivory, two clothes-brushes and a Soviet officer’s peaked hat. The ceiling was a complex pattern of intaglio leaves and the floral wallpaper looked prehensile.
The maid said, ‘Will you please come this way?’ and led us into Stok’s drawing-room. The wallpaper was predominantly gold and silver but there were plenty of things hiding the wallpaper. There were aspidistras, fussy lace curtains, shelves full of antique Meissen and a cocktail cabinet like a small wooden version of the Kremlin. Stok looked up from the 21-inch baroque TV. He was a big-boned man, his hair was cropped to the skull and his complexion was like something the dog had been playing with. When he stood up to greet us his huge hands poked out of a bright red silk smoking-jacket with gold-braid frogging.
Vulkan said, ‘Herr Stok; Herr Dorf,’ and then he said, ‘Herr Dorf; Herr Stok,’ and we all nodded at each other, then Vulkan put a paper bag down on the coffee table and Stok drew an eight-ounce tin of Nescafé out of it, nodded, and put it back again.
‘What will you drink?’ Stok asked. He had a musical basso voice.
‘Just before we move into the chat,’ I said, ‘can I see your identity card?’
Stok pulled his wallet out of a hip pocket, smiled archly at me and then peeled loose the stiff white card with a photo and two rubber stamps that Soviet citizens carry when abroad.
‘It says that you are Captain Maylev here,’ I protested as I laboriously pronounced the Cyrillic script.
The servant girl brought a tray of tiny glasses and a frosted bottle of vodka. She set the tray down. Stok paused while she withdrew.
‘And your passport says that you are Edmond Dorf,’ said Stok, ‘but we are both victims of circumstance.’
Behind him the East German news commentator was saying in his usual slow voice, ‘… sentenced to three years for assisting in the attempt to move his family to the West.’ Stok walked across to the set and clicked the switch to the West Berlin channel where a cast of fifty Teutonic minstrels sang ‘See them shuffle along’ in German. ‘It’s never a good night, Thursday,’ Stok said apologetically. He switched the set off. We broke the wax on the fruit-flavoured vodka and Stok and Vulkan began discussing whether twenty-four bottles of Scotch whisky were worth a couple of cameras. I sat around and drank vodka until they had ironed out some sort of agreement. Then Stok said, ‘Has Dorf got power to negotiate?’ – just like I wasn’t in the room.
‘He’s a big shot in London,’ said Vulkan. ‘Anything he promises will be honoured. I’ll guarantee it.’
‘I want lieutenant-colonel’s pay,’ Stok said, turning to me, ‘for life.’
‘Don’t we all?’ I said.
Vulkan was looking at the evening paper; he looked up and said, ‘No, he means that he’d want the UK Government to pay him that as a salary if he comes over the wire. You could promise that, couldn’t you?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘We’ll say you’ve been in a few years, that’s five pounds four shillings a day basic. Then there’s ration allowance, six and eight a day, marriage allowance, one pound three and something a day, qualification pay five shillings a day if you get through Staff College, overseas pay fourteen and three and … you would want overseas pay?’
‘You are not taking me seriously,’ Stok said, a big smile across his white moon of a face. Vulkan was shifting about on his seat, tightening his tie against his Adam’s apple and cracking his finger joints.
‘All systems go,’ I said.
‘Colonel Stok puts up a very convincing case,’ said Vulkan.
‘So does the “find the lady” mob in Charing Cross Road,’ I said, ‘but they never come through with the QED.’
Stok threw back two vodkas in quick succession and stared at me earnestly. He said, ‘Look, I don’t favour the capitalist system. I don’t ask you to believe that I do. In fact I hate your system.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘And you are in a job where you can really do something about it.’
Stok and Vulkan exchanged glances.
‘I wish you would try to understand,’ said Stok. ‘I am really sincere about giving you my allegiance.’
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I bet you say that to all the great powers.’
Vulkan said, ‘I’ve spent a lot of time and money in setting this up. If you are so damn clever why did you bother to come to Berlin?’
‘OK,’ I told them. ‘Act out the charade. I’ll be thinking of words.’
Stok and Vulkan looked at each other and we drank and then Stok gave me one of his gold-rimmed oval cigarettes and lit it with a nickel-silver sputnik.
‘For a long time I have been thinking of moving west,’ said Stok. ‘It’s not a matter of politics. I am just as avid a communist now as I have ever been, but a man gets old. He looks for comfort, for security in possessions.’ Stok cupped his big boxing-glove hand and looked down at it. ‘A man wants to scoop up a handful of black dirt and know it’s his own land, to live on, die on and give to his sons. We peasants are a weak insecure segment of socialism, Mr Dorf.’ He smiled with his big brown teeth, trimmed here and there with an edge of gold. ‘These comforts that you take for granted will not be a part of life in the East until long after I am dead.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We have decadence now – while we are young enough to enjoy it.’
‘Semitsa,’ said Stok. He waited to see what effect it would have on me. It had none.
‘That’s what you are really interested in. Not me. Semitsa.’
‘Is he here in Berlin?’ I asked.
‘Slowly, Mr Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘Things move very slowly.’
‘How do you know he wants to come west?’ I asked.
‘I know,’ said Stok.
Vulkan interrupted, ‘I told the colonel that Semitsa would be worth about forty thousand pounds to us.’
‘Did you?’ I said in as flat a monotone as I could manage.
Stok poured out his fruit vodka all round, downed his own and poured himself a replacement.
‘It’s been nice talking to you boys,’ I said. ‘I only wish you had something I could buy.’
‘I understand you, Mr Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘In my country we have a saying, “a man who trades a horse for a promise ends up with tired feet”.’ He walked across to the eighteenth-century mahogany bureau.
I said, ‘I don’t want you to deviate from a course of loyalty and integrity to the Soviet Government to which I remain a friend and ally.’
Stok turned and smiled at me.
‘You think I have live microphones planted here and that I might attempt to trick you.’
‘You might,’ I said. ‘You are in the business.’
‘I hope to persuade you otherwise,’ said Stok. ‘As to being in the business: when does a chef get ptomaine poisoning?’
‘When he eats out,’ I said.
Stok’s laugh made the antique plates rattle. He groped around inside the big writing-desk and produced a flat metal box, brought a vast bunch of tiny keys from his pocket and from inside the box reached a thick black file. He handed it to me. It was typed in Cyrillic capitals and contained photostats of letters and transcripts of tapped phone calls.
Stok reached for another oval cigarette and tapped it unlit against the white page of typing. ‘Mr Semitsa’s passport westward,’ he said putting a sarcastic emphasis on the ‘mister’.
‘Yes?’ I said doubtfully.
Vulkan leaned forward to me. ‘Colonel Stok is in charge of an investigation of the Minsk Biochemical labs.’
‘Where Semitsa used to be,’ I said. It was coming clear to me. ‘This is Semitsa’s file, then?’
‘Yes,’ said Stok, ‘and everything that I need to get Semitsa a ten-year sentence.’
‘Or have him do anything you say,’ I said. Perhaps Stok and Vulkan were serious.
1 To catch people with stolen passports, or people who spend nights in the East, the passports are often marked with a tiny pencil spot on some pre-arranged page.
6
A bad bishop is one hampered by his own pawns.
Monday, October 7th
Going along the Unter den Linden wasn’t the fastest way of getting to the checkpoint but I had to keep to the main roads in order to find my way about. I saw the ‘S’ signs on the Schnellstrasse and moved up to the legal 60 kph. As I came level with the old Bismarck Chancellery, black and gutted in the bright velvet moonlight, a red disc was moving laterally across the road ahead. It was a police signal. I stopped. A Volkspolizei troop carrier was parked at the roadside. A young man in uniform tucked the signal baton into the top of his boot, walked slowly across to me and saluted.
‘Your papers.’
I gave him the Dorf passport and hoped that the department had gone to the trouble of getting it made up by the Foreign Office and not been content with one of the rough old print jobs that the War Office did for us.
A Skoda passed by at speed without anyone waving it down. I began to feel I was being picked on. Around at the rear of the Taunus another Vopo shone a torch on the US Army plates and probed the beam across the rear seat and floor. My passport was slapped closed and it came through the window accompanied by a neat bow and salute.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the young one.
‘Can I go?’ I said.
‘Just switch on your lights, sir.’
‘They’re on.’
‘Main beams must be on here in East Berlin. That is the law.’
‘I see.’ I flicked the switch on. The troop carrier glowed in the fringe of the beam. It was just a traffic cop doing a job.
‘Good night, sir.’ I saw a movement among the dozen policemen on the big open bus. By now Johnnie Vulkan had also passed me. I turned left on to Friedrichstrasse and tried to catch up with him.
Johnnie Vulkan’s Wartburg was some fifty yards ahead of me as I drove south on Friedrichstrasse. As I reached the red-striped barrier the sentry was handing Johnnie his passport and lifting the pole. The American sector was just a few feet away. He allowed the Wartburg through, then lowered the boom and walked round to me, hitching the automatic rifle over his shoulder, so that it clanged against his steel helmet. I had the passport handy. Beyond the barrier the low hardboard building that was the control post was a mass of red geraniums. In front of it two sentries exchanged words with Vulkan, then they all laughed. The laughter was loud in the still night. A blue-uniformed Grenz-polizist clattered down the steps and ran across to my car.
‘You are wanted inside,’ he said to the sentry in his shrill Saxon accent. ‘On the phone.’ He turned to me. ‘Won’t keep you a moment, sir,’ in English; ‘I am sorry for the delay,’ but he took the sentry’s automatic rifle to hold just the same.
I lit a Gauloise for myself and the Grepo, and we smoked and stared across the hundred yards that separated us from the little walled island that is West Berlin and we thought our different thoughts or maybe the same ones.
It was less than two minutes before the Vopo returned. He said would I please get out of the car and leave the keys where they were. There were three soldiers with him. They all had automatic rifles, none of which were slung on anyone’s shoulder. I got out of the car.
They walked me a few yards west on Leipziger where no one in the west sector could see us no matter how high on the ladder they were. There was a small green van parked there. On the door was a little badge and the words ‘Traffic Police’. The motor was running. I sat between the German soldiers and one of them offered me a strange-tasting cigarette which I lit from the stub of my Gauloise. No one had searched me, put on handcuffs or made a formal statement. They had merely asked me to come along; no one was using coercion. I had agreed to go.
I watched the street through the rear window. By the time we had reached Alexanderplatz I had a pretty good idea of where we were headed. A couple of blocks away was Keibelstrasse: the Polizei Praesidium.
In the cobbled centre courtyard of the Praesidium I heard the sound of half a dozen marching men. Words of command were shouted and the rhythm of the boots varied. I was in a room on the first floor. It was thirty-three steps above the main entrance, where a guard in an armoured glass cubicle must press a small button to unlock the entrance gate. The aged wooden seat upon which I sat backed up against the cream-painted wall; there were two well-thumbed copies of Neues Deutschland lying on it. To my right a large window had the view divided into square spaces by solid-looking bars. Behind the desk was a middle-aged woman, her hair drawn tightly back into a bun. Every action on the desk brought the loud rattle of a large bunch of keys. I knew there must be a way out. None of those young fellows on late-night TV would find it any sort of dilemma.
The grey-haired woman looked up. ‘Are you carrying any sort of knife or weapon?’ Her eyes glinted clearly behind the thick circular lenses.
‘No,’ I said.
She nodded and wrote something on a sheet of paper.
‘I mustn’t be late back,’ I said. Which didn’t seem so hilarious a thing to say at that time.
The grey-haired woman locked each drawer of her desk and then left the room, carefully fixing the door wide open to preclude my taking a short walk around the filing cabinet. I sat there for five minutes, maybe ten. The whole situation was curiously simple and matter-of-fact, like waiting for a driving-licence renewal at County Hall. When the grey-haired woman came back she had my passport in her hand. She gave it to me. She didn’t smile but it seemed friendly just the same.
‘Come,’ she said.
I went with her down the long cream corridor to a room at the extreme western wing of the building. The décor too was like County Hall. She tapped gently on a large door and without waiting for a reply motioned me through. It was dark inside the room with just enough light filtering through the window from the courtyard to see where the desk was. From behind the desk was a sudden red glow like an infra-red flash-bulb. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I saw that the far side of the room was filled with a silvery sheen.
‘Dorf,’ said the voice of Stok. It boomed almost like an amplifier. There was a click from his desk; the yellow tungsten light came on. Stok was sitting behind his desk almost obscured by a dense cloud of cigar smoke. There was Scandinavian-style East German furniture in the room. On the table behind me there was a Hohner simple button-key accordion, piles of newspapers, and a chessboard with some of the pieces fallen over. There was a folding bed near the wall with two army blankets on it and high leather boots placed together at the head. Near the door was a tiny sink and a cupboard that might have held clothes.
‘My dear Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘Have I caused you great inconvenience?’
He emerged from the cigar smoke in an ankle-length black leather overcoat.
‘Not unless you count being scared half to death,’ I said.
‘Ha ha ha,’ said Stok, then he exhaled another great billow of cigar smoke like a 4.6.2 pulling out of King’s Cross.
‘I wanted to contact you,’ he spoke with the cigar held between tight lips, ‘without Vulkan.’
‘Another time,’ I said, ‘write.’
There was another tap at the door. Stok moved across the room like a wounded crow. The grey-haired one brought two lemon teas.
‘There is no milk today I am afraid,’ said Stok; he drew the overcoat around him.
‘And so Russian tea was invented,’ I said.
Stok laughed again in a perfunctory sort of way. I drank the scalding hot tea. It made me feel better, like digging your finger nails into your palm does.
‘What is it?’ I said.
Stok waited while the grey-haired one closed the door behind her. Then he said, ‘Let’s stop quarrelling, shall we?’
‘You mean personally?’ I said. ‘Or are you speaking on behalf of the Soviet Union?’
‘I mean it,’ said Stok. ‘We can do far better for ourselves if we co-operate than if we obstruct each other.’ Stok paused and smiled with studied charm.
‘This scientist Semitsa is not important to the Soviet Union. We have other younger men with newer and better ideas. Your people on the other hand will think you marvellous if you can deliver him to London.’ Stok shrugged his shoulders at the idiocy of the world of politics.
‘Caveat emptor?’ I said.
‘Not half,’ said Stok in a skilful piece of idiom. ‘Buyer watch out.’ Stok rolled the cigar across his mouth and said, ‘Buyer watch out,’ a couple of times. I just drank the lemon tea and said nothing. Stok ambled across to the chessboard on the side-table, his leather coat creaking like a windjammer.
‘Are you a chess player, English?’ he said.
‘I prefer games where there’s a better chance to cheat,’ I said.
‘I agree with you,’ said Stok. ‘The preoccupation with rules doesn’t sit well upon the creative mind.’
‘Like communism?’ I said.
Stok picked up a knight. ‘But the pattern of chess is the pattern of your capitalist world. The world of bishops and castles and kings and knights.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘I’m just a pawn. I’m here in the front rank.’ Stok grinned and looked down at the board.
‘I’m a good player,’ he said. ‘Your friend Vulkan is one of the few men in Berlin who can consistently beat me.’
‘That’s because he is part of the pattern of our capitalist world.’
‘The pattern,’ said Stok, ‘has been revised. The knight is the most important piece on the board. Queens have been made … impotent. Can you say impotent of a queen?’
‘On this side of the wall you can say what you like,’ I said.
Stok nodded. ‘The knights – the generals – run your western world. General Walker of the 24th Infantry Division lectured all his troops that the President of the USA was a communist.’
‘You don’t agree?’ I asked.
‘You are a fool,’ boomed Stok in his Boris Godunov voice.
‘I am trying to tell you that these people …’ he waved the knight in my face, ‘… look after themselves.’
‘And you are jealous?’ I asked seriously.
‘Perhaps I am,’ said Stok. ‘Perhaps that’s it.’ He put the knight back and he pulled the skirt of his overcoat together.
‘So you are going to sell me Semitsa as a little bit of private enterprise of your own?’ I said. ‘If you’ll forgive the workings of my bourgeois mind.’
‘You live only once,’ said Stok.
‘I can make once do,’ I said.
Stok heaped four spoonfuls of coarse sugar into his tea. He stirred it as though he was putting an extra rod into an atomic pile. ‘All I want is to live the rest of my life in peace and quiet – I do not need a lot of money, just enough to buy a little tobacco and the simple peasant food that I was brought up on. I am a colonel and my conditions are excellent but I am a realist; this cannot last. Younger men in our security service look at my job with envy.’ He looked at me and I nodded gently. ‘With envy,’ he repeated.
‘You are in a key job,’ I said.
‘But the trouble with such jobs is that many others want them too. Some of my staff here are men with fine college diplomas, their minds are quick as mine once was; and they have the energy to work through the day and through the night too as once I had the energy to do.’ He shrugged. ‘This is why I decided to come to live the rest of my life in your world.’
He got up and opened one of the big wooden shutters. From the courtyard there was the beat of a heavy diesel engine and the sound of boots climbing over a tailboard. Stok thrust his hands deep in his overcoat pockets and flapped his wings.
I said, ‘What about your wife and your family, will you be able to persuade them?’
Stok continued to look down into the courtyard. ‘My wife died in a German air raid in 1941, my only son hasn’t written to me for three and a half years. What would you do in my position, Mr Dorf? What would you do?’
I let the sound of the lorry rumble away down Keibelstrasse.
I said, ‘I’d stop telling lies to old liars for a start, Stok. Do you really think I came here without dusting off your file? My newest assistant is trained better than you seem to think I am. I know everything about you from the cubic capacity of your Westinghouse refrigerator to the size your mistress takes in diaphragms.’
Stok picked up his tea and began to batter the lemon segment with the bowl of his spoon. He said, ‘You’ve trained well.’
‘Train hard, fight easy,’ I said.
‘You quote Marshal Suvarov.’ He walked across to the chessboard and stared at it. ‘In Russia we have a proverb, “Better a clever lie than the foolish truth”.’ He waved his teaspoon at me.
‘There was nothing clever about that clumsy piece of wife-murder.’
‘You’re right,’ said Stok cheerfully. ‘You shall be my friend, English. We must trust each other.’ He put his tea down on the desk top.
‘I’ll never need an enemy,’ I said.
Stok smiled. It was like arguing with a speak-your-weight machine.