1989 (15 page)

Col Lehmann was impressed. He noted tersely on the bottom of her report: ‘This source is reliable. Any verification of the
information
contained in this report must protect the identity of the source.’

She obviously had a long chat with Jochen about me afterwards.
Two weeks later, for the first time – a signal mark of the general incompetence of attempts at total surveillance – there is a detailed report on Metzer Eck: ‘We have been informed unofficially that M is often to be seen in the pub Metzer Eck. He is considered a regular and always given a seat on the
Stammtisch
. He pays close attention to everything that is said and therefore must be considered extremely up to date on popular attitudes and opinions on political matters.’ Lehmann’s deputy Col Franz adds the note: ‘Any verification of this information must protect the identity of the source’.

Right to the very end of my time as resident correspondent they used every means possible to observe every meaningless detail. As we were having our belongings packed up for transport to Moscow a customs official was required to visit the flat to check we were not taking away valuable historical relics. Afterwards he was required to submit a report to the Stasi. He had noticed a West German
magazine
lying on the table in the office, he told them, obviously shocked. ‘During our presence in the flat, the teleprinter was running,’ he noted further, adding just that extra little professional detail: ‘It was a Kamp brand.’ That good old Prussian thoroughness again. Well and truly wasted.

But by then they were already writing me off, for the time being at least: ‘The transfer of the files to the Soviet fraternal service has been carried out’. There were no prizes for guessing who Big Brother was. Like Kolya said: I was entering the lion’s den.

They gave a farewell party for us in Metzer Eck. We were sad to go; they were sad to see us go. This was not a world in which people popped back and forth across borders readily. None of us was really sure when we would meet again. Or if. East Germans were required to go through the same lengthy visa application procedure as
Westerners
if they wanted to visit the Soviet Union. ‘Big Brother’ liked to limit the number of houseguests

Alex, invariably, managed to make a joke out of it all. ‘How about that,’ he quipped, ‘they could go anywhere in the world and where do they choose? Next door to Siberia’. And then he brought out the
pièce de résistance
for the long evening of drinking ahead: a vodka bottle frozen in ice, from which he poured viscous shots into small glasses which we knocked back with mock Russian shouts of ‘
Na zdorovye
’ – one Russian phrase every East German knew – and chased with cold Berlin Pilsener. Alex stood up and gave his mock ‘loyal toast’: ‘
Wer denkt das Saufen so viel Freude macht, als wir, die lieben die Sowjetmacht
!’, which translates roughly as: ‘Who is more loyal to the Supreme Soviet – than those of us who keep our lips wet?’ And we hooted with laughter. And he poured another round. By which time we had got round to the usual lavatory humour from Dieter: ‘Why does a Russian take three pieces of wood when he goes for a shit? One to balance on, one to lean on, and one to keep the wolves away.’ Everybody cracked up, just as they always did when he told that one. It was a reflex action: even those Germans who lived under the Soviet jackboot couldn’t help thinking that somehow the world had been turned upside down.

Britons on our little offshore island so often think of continental politics – when we think of them at all – either as the ‘meddling bureaucrats’ of Brussels or as the historical ogres who were held off by our most powerful defence: a twenty-one-mile stretch of water. It
has often occurred to me that Britain’s relationship with the rest of our continent would be more sane – and less marked by delusions of effortless superiority – if
la Manche, der Ärmelkannel
(only we call it the
English
Channel) had dried up. Certainly in Berlin, a city that more than many others has felt the tide of European history lap over it, there was no one without at least a modest understanding of geopolitics. When I told Reinhard, one of the two German
correspondents
who worked in Reuters’ West Berlin office that I was planning to drive to Moscow in January, he looked at me as if I was stark staring mad: ‘Remember what happened to Napoleon. And Hitler didn’t even get there. What makes you think you will? In a Volvo 340!?’

He had a point. We nearly didn’t. There was thick snow falling already as we drove east on the long straight
autobahn
through the pine forests that led to the drab little industrial town of
Frankfurtan-der-Oder
, where I had tried to get comments about life under martial law from the few Poles who crossed over to work. Now we were about to find out for ourselves; we had a seventy-two-hour transit visa.

The first night was spent in Poznan, until 1945 the German city of Posen and one of the Führer’s supposed fortress cities. It was bleak, the snowy streets empty. The car cassette player blared a track from an album by Canadian punk group Rational Youth entitled
Cold War Nightlife
. It had been sent to me by a friend in England with a wry sense of humour. The band were belting out, ‘Saturdays in Silesia, holidays are for heroes.’ Another track on the same album was fancifully entitled ‘Dancing on the Berlin Wall.’ I often wonder if they knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We spent the night in a dingy hotel where the menu featured little more than
barscz
, Poland’s typical beetroot soup, a thin red peppery bouillon with only a cheese straw to stir in it. We had a beer and went to bed hungry. The next day it was on to Warsaw, where I renewed acquaintance with a couple of British and American
correspondents
at a restaurant that served roast duck and red cabbage, if little else. The Solidarity story, they told us, had died on its feet. The spark had been extinguished. Those leaders who weren’t
incarcerated
knew that if they did not keep quiet they soon would be.
There were soldiers everywhere on the streets, but at least they were Polish, not Russian. For the moment.

Day three, we drove east from Warsaw under blue skies but on sheet ice that on one occasion saw me swerve so radically that we spun off the road into a rubbish collection yard. The border post at Brest-Litovsk looked like the bridge of an ocean liner trapped in Arctic ice. The Polish guards didn’t emerge, just waved me in from behind their plate-glass windows. I got out and went into the
building
to show them our documents. They were sitting around in shirt sleeves over cups of coffee. They didn’t look like they got a lot of business, smiled sceptically and shrugged as if it was not their
business
to stop fools rushing in where angels would have put their feet up, had a beer and given it a second thought. Then they raised a
red-and-white
barrier thick with snow that looked as if it hadn’t lifted in weeks and let us out. To be eaten by bears.

The Soviet frontier post was a hundred yards or so away. In the distance stretched a line of flat-blocks that marked the
outskirts
of Brest, a long low line of concrete between blue skies and white snow. Ahead was a barrier similar to that we had just come through, guarded by two soldiers in greatcoats and fur hats with a red star badge and Kalashnikovs held at attention. They moved forward, inspected my papers unsmilingly, gave a signal to some unseen superior and the barrier rose. Apprehensively I edged the car forward onto Soviet soil, only to see a line of black-clad,
furhatted
men emerge from the building ahead of us. I had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for.

The Russians greeted us with open arms. We were obviously the best thing that had happened in a year to a group of bored customs officials whose routine job was stamping the papers of lorry drivers carrying concrete in both directions. They pulled the car apart, of course. That was the best bit. For them. They checked out all the tapes for the cassette player, playing a few snatches here and there, not to check for seditious sermons – God knows what they might have made of
Cold War Nightlife
if they had understood the words – but to hear new songs. They inspected our clothing, our socks, our underwear as if eager to find out whether Westerners had the same anatomy. They pored over our photograph albums. For hours.
Honest. Not looking for evidence of anti-communist propaganda but out of genuine, ridiculously enthusiastic, almost childish human interest: ‘So that’s your nan, is it? How old is she then? And is that where you live in England? Does everybody have a house like that? What sort of car is that then? How much does that cost? How fast does it go?’ It was astounding, endearing, amusing, infuriating, downright bloody maddening after five hours of it, before
eventually
they realised it could not go on for ever and somebody –
claiming
at last to have had the proper clearance from ‘above’ – finally let us pack up again (no offers to help there) and said, with obviously great reluctance, that we could go.

‘Where are you heading for tonight, then?’ one of them finally asked.

‘Minsk,’ I said. We had no choice: we had been obliged not only to book our accommodation in advance but also to give details of our route, and estimated times of arrival. The estimates were now shot to hell, to say the least.

‘How long will it take to get there?’ I asked.

He shrugged, thought a minute and said, ‘How fast does your car go?’

An East German would have told me precisely how long it would have taken, driving at the legal speed limit of 100 kph. Russia, I was already learning, worked on a whole different set of rules. I put my foot down. It was late, already turning dark – despite the fact we had set out from Warsaw early and reached the border well before noon – but we made good progress at first. We were, after all, on the smart new motorway that the five-year plan decreed be finished for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, nearly eighteen months ago. It had two lanes – occasionally three – in each direction. And next to no traffic.

In fact, there was less and less traffic the further we went on. And gradually – ever so gradually – I began to realise why. It was a bit odd, after all, to see chunks of debris on the hard shoulder. And then there was the occasional obstacle on the carriageway itself: a pile of sacks of cement or something similar where the central reservation ought to be. It had been a while since we had seen traffic of any sort coming in the other direction. And then the obstacles started to become more frequent: pallets of concrete cladding in the slow 
lane; heaps of stone that now were clearly not just random debris but piles of aggregate. It’s at times like that that the human brain does its utmost to shut out realisation of the blindingly obvious. At least until you run into it, head on. Which is what we now did, in the shape of at first one huge pothole, then another and then,
definitively
, inescapably, incontrovertibly – no matter how the mind tried pathetically not to recognise it – the physical end of the motorway. Not in a diversion sign, or a turn-off, or a line of brightly-coloured warning tape stretched across the carriageway, but in the sudden, immediate absence of paved surface, concrete pavement replaced by frozen mud. The car bucked, slid and juddered, as I braked hard and we swerved, bounced and rattled decisively to a halt. Possibly forever.

Ahead of us, about a hundred yards away, was what would have been a motorway bridge, had the motorway got far enough to go under it. It hadn’t. The Olympic motorway not only hadn’t made it to Moscow in time for the games, it hadn’t even made it to Minsk, still over 100 kilometres away. And Moscow was a full day’s drive beyond that. I was fast beginning to know how Napoleon – and even Hitler – had felt.

For one thing, we couldn’t move. Not an inch. We had bumped our way to a standstill in a rut that was not just bigger and deeper than our car tyre – the bumper was resting on the earth in front of it – but also frozen solid. We would have to get out and push to get any chance of purchase at all. Thank God, I thought, as I lugged the heavy things out from under our hastily repacked luggage, at least we had brought snow chains. What we hadn’t done, of course, was ever practise putting them on. Not even under perfect easy
circumstances
, like on the street outside the office, let alone at ten o’clock at night stuck in a frozen muddy rut in pitch blackness with the temperature pushing minus ten degrees Centigrade.

It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was virtually impossible. With our fingers freezing we battled with fiddly catches, cold metal, hard rubber and frozen mud. ‘Push this way,’ shouted Jackie. ‘No, pull this way. It needs to fasten here,’ I replied. ‘No it doesn’t, I’ve got the clip here. ‘Well, it’s supposed to be here!’ These are the sort of little occasions that have been known to cause just the mildest marital strain.

Where the hell were the KGB? That was what I wanted to know. Where were the omnipotent, omniscient masters of secret
surveillance
who were supposed to be watching our every move? Were they lurking, sniggering to themselves, just out of sight a few hundred yards behind us, in a comfy Volga saloon, with the heating turned up, sharing a flask of vodka-reinforced coffee. Maybe, but I doubted it. They were back home in bed, tucked up and warming their feet against the backs of their well-upholstered wives. There was only so much a man would do in the service of socialism. And keeping an eye on two ill-informed, off-course Westerners who were obviously no danger to anyone but themselves was quite literally above and beyond the call of duty. And as far as I was concerned, it just wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t just the whereabouts of the KGB that was on my mind. It was the whereabouts of the wolves. This might be a motorway
building
site in what is today Western Belarus, rather than the depths of Siberia. But at the time it didn’t feel to me as if there was much
difference
. And I’m still not sure there is. At least not in the depths of winter. I didn’t know the exact numbers (between 1,500 and 2,000 at the latest estimate) but I knew there were wolves out there. And every time I heard a howl – which was not infrequently – it might have been a mangy dog in some forsaken farmyard, but as far as I was concerned it was a prowling monster with ice-blue eyes and snow-grey fur circling in the dark, already licking its lips and
summoning
the rest of the pack at the thought of a tasty little Irishman and his bride for a midnight snack.

The trouble was: there didn’t seem any way out of it. None at all. Even with the snow chains half-fastened – which was the best we had the remotest chance of hoping for – the wheels spun and spun. On either frozen mud or empty air. We weren’t going anywhere fast. In fact, we weren’t going anywhere at all. I was beginning to wonder about a Volvo 340’s life-support systems. Would it be best to keep the engine running all night to keep us warm, even at the risk of the tank being empty by morning. And was there any guarantee anyone would come by in the morning? I had no idea where we were – other than halfway to Minsk – or how far it might be to the nearest human settlement. There were certainly no lights – friendly or otherwise
– to be seen in a landscape of unremitting darkness and unreflecting snow. What we needed was a miracle.

And then the miracle arrived. Out of nowhere. At least so it seemed. With no glare of headlights to announce it, just a dull gleam from dirty sidelights in the dark, puffing, grunting and farting loudly, a dilapidated, noxious gas-emitting parody of an
open-backed
beaten–up truck. I would later learn this was the ubiquitous workhorse of the Soviet economy, and in pretty routine condition. Then, all of a sudden the headlights came on and we stood in them illuminated like timorous frozen bunnies.