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Authors: Kevin Brophy

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BOOK: Another Kind of Country
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Miller almost smiled as the train shuttled high above the streets, snaking its way between the upper floors of peeling apartment blocks and rundown government buildings. In his years in the GDR he had grown his own skin of cunning. He just hadn’t figured out why he had been forced to come here. Maybe the messages he delivered from Axel to his drop points in the West were no more than Marxist horoscopes or last week’s football results from Saxony. All these years in these down-at-heel streets and he still didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to be doing here. He might be no more than a ‘sometime Englishman’ but, even after all these years, it still went against the grain to find himself lined up against Shakespeare’s ‘other Eden’. So, Miller told himself, trust your instinct; what you ferry across the Wall is as lethal as a Dresden
Hausfrau
’s grocery wish list.

The Ostbahnhof, Miller had to admit, wasn’t such a bad choice. It was, after all, East Berlin’s main station. Passengers on long-distance trains and suburban trains interchanged here. Even after eight o’clock the platforms were busy with arrivals and departures under the vaulted roof.

Miller made his way to
the southern exit. Just inside the tall doors stood one of the city’s best-known kiosks, Georg’s Currywurst. The stall had been raised amid the rubble of the city after the Second World War. Somehow Georg, now seventy years old and surveying his aromatic domain from a high stool, had managed to source potatoes and horsemeat to serve up to Russian soldiers who – mostly – paid for their newspaper-wrapped snacks with occupation Marks. Although a woman in the Western half of the city claimed to have ‘created’ currywurst – slices of sausage doused in a thick and tangy curry sauce – the leaders of East Berlin always claimed the dish had been invented by the now-elderly Georg. In a society where most shops were identified by number and category, Georg’s Currywurst had been allowed to hang on to its individual name in its new station home. And the city’s guardians, who were known to dispatch their personal drivers to collect their
grosse Portionen
, ensured that any food shortages did not affect the supplies of
Wurst
to Georg’s Currywurst. Miller avoided Georg’s eyes as he accepted his cardboard dish of currywurst from the young blonde assistant and left his coins on the high wooden counter. Not that it made much difference. A fellow like Georg, with his connections and supplies, just
had
to be a Stasi informant. Fat, suited and powdered, he sat on his high stool like a squat spider who spun webs with his searching eyes.

Miller took his food to one of the half-dozen high tables that stood outside the serving counter. The other tables were occupied: all men, intent on their food and newspapers, briefcases and bags on the stone floor nestling against their shins. He had his back turned to Georg and the blonde girl. He laid his own paper on the wooden table beside his cardboard dish. He started to eat.
What now?

Neues Deutschland
no longer interested
him but he folded the newspaper into a small shape and pretended to read an article which spouted the usual condemnation of Hungary for opening its socialist border with Austria. It could have been Hartheim come to roost on the zinc-topped high table in the Ostbahnhof. As ever, Miller’s own feelings on the flight of East Germans from their homeland were complex. He wasn’t even sure where his sympathies lay. Not to mention the activities he found himself mixed up in. He had lived and worked in the GDR for long enough to know its pitfalls: the need for strategic silence – even lies; the fear of the midnight hammering on the door; the ever-present menace of the anonymous letter of denunciation. And yet, in spite of – perhaps even because of – these undeniable failings, Miller was still in love with this half-crippled country that limped onwards towards its own notion of a worker’s paradise.

Cue scornful laughter
, he told himself. These tired-looking commuters dragging themselves across the station concourse were no different from their opposite numbers scurrying through the tiled halls of Waterloo or Liverpool Street towards their dormitory towns in Surrey or Essex. And if the Wall were breached, as the candle-lighting demonstrators in Leipzig were praying and demanding, the commuter trek to and from the outer reaches of Hamburg or Munich or wherever would prove no less unpalatable.

It was hard, Miller told himself, for an honest man to know what to think. Safer to belt up. Maybe his mother was right: shut your nose to the smell and your ears to the lies and busy yourself with polishing your mausoleum. Maybe you’d be dead by the time it came tumbling down around you.

Maybe that’s what General Reder was at – presenting an innocuous memoir, devoid of insight into a life lived with danger and violence, a bland memoir that could serve as an equally bland epitaph for his tombstone.

Where the hell was the
general’s messenger?

Another train clanked in overhead. A fresh stream of disembarking passengers descended the stone staircase. A pair of men moved resolutely towards Georg’s Currywurst. They sat at a table next to Miller’s, two middle-aged fellows in shiny suits, conversing in low tones. They didn’t look much like couriers or messengers.

The high tables were emptying. Miller’s currywurst was eaten, the orange grease congealing on the empty dish. Time to go: too many trains had come and gone to allow him to linger longer.

The young blonde assistant was moving between the empty tables with a cardboard box in one hand and a wet cloth in the other. Miller watched her at work: a circular sweep of her folded rag swept crumbs and debris into the brown box, a second swipe gave the table a perfunctory cleaning. The girl worked with a tight-lipped concentration: wipe and swipe, wipe and swipe. The zinc tables gleamed wet and empty in her wake. She barely looked at Miller as she pushed his plate aside and wiped the table clean. Her heavy nylon coat seemed to creak as she took her box back behind the counter.

Miller was left staring at the tiny piece of paper sticking to the curry grease on his box. He palmed it as he picked up the paper dish and dumped it in the bin beside the counter. Georg said, ‘
Danke schön
’, without lifting his great head from his magazine. The blonde girl went on cleaning.

Miller could feel the stickness of the paper in his clenched fist as he made his way to the basement toilet. In the ill-lit cubicle he unrolled the paper.
Exit No. 3
. He flushed the lavatory, watched the greasy scrap disappear in the swirling water.

He washed his hands quickly, hurried
up the stairs.
Take it easy, slow down
.

Exit No. 3 led out into a lane which seemed to contain only the service entrances of shops. Rubbish bins gleamed darkly under the pale light of the single street lamp at the far end of the street. He made his way softly along the cobbles but his footsteps echoed loudly in the narrow street.

An engine growled into life. He saw it at the end of the street: a dark motorbike, its helmeted rider clad in equally dark trousers and tight jerkin.

The rider looked at Miller from under his helmet but said nothing.

‘I am . . .’ Miller hesitated. ‘Are you from . . .’

The rider gestured towards the pillion seat with a gloved hand.

Miller climbed on board. He wrapped his arms around the rider, felt the engine throb between his thighs. The rider pushed off and the night and wind cut into his eyes and Miller bent his head against the wide, dark-jacketed shoulders in front.

The watcher behind the rubbish bins straightened gratefully and flexed his shoulders. Pity he couldn’t flex his knees: it continued to amaze him that artificial joints of metal or silicon – or whatever the knees were made of – could be a source of pain.

Bionic man indeed.

Those TV clowns should try walking – or crouching – with a set of metal inserts inside you on a chilly Berlin night. Only September and the city already felt like winter. ‘Six-million-dollar man!’ More like six-million-dollar rubbish.

He lit a cigarette, drew the hot smoke and the cold air into greedy lungs. Three pulls, no more, that was his concession to the doctor’s warnings about emphysema. Fucking doctors – and none worse than the agency quacks. Did they think that laboratory conditions applied on the streets where he operated? Like this shithouse alley at the rear of a rundown station in East Berlin?

He trod on the cigarette, ground it into the cobbles until it was no more than a flaky mess in the darkness. Carelessness could kill you quicker than nicotine. It was carelessness that had cost him his knees in that squabble in Chile. Fucking Communists.

He cleared his throat, hawked a mouthful of phlegm on to the ground. Almost half an hour he’d crouched behind the reeking rubbish bins, waiting to see who came out of the station to join the motorcycle rider. He’d tailed the motorcycle for fifteen minutes through the night-time streets, driven past him at the mouth of the alley before parking the Lada at the other side of the Ostbahnhof.

How predictable was it, a meet at the back end of a railway station? You’d expect more from a seasoned old bird like General Reder.

Only one thing puzzled him: the guy who climbed on to the pillion seat. A new face.

They’d have him figured tomorrow. Baister was waiting at the general’s villa, crouched somewhere with his night-work camera. He didn’t like Baister much better than the desk guys back in Washington. Just another Kraut, no matter what side he was on. He hoped his nuts were freezing behind some garbage bins outside General Reder’s villa.

He pulled his collar closer around his neck. Even his birthmark seemed to hurt in the cold. But the
ponytail had had to go so he could become
Walter Buchner, electrician, resident of East Berlin. He missed it, the comfort of it, lying against his neck. The desk fliers at the agency didn’t really know what it meant, this fucking cold war.

He headed back to the waiting Lada.

Twelve

Monday, 18 September 1989

East Berlin

German Democratic Republic

The crumpled little fellow in the leather
button-backed armchair didn’t look much like the General Reder that Miller had seen take the salute on May Day on Unter den Linden. That general stood erect among the line of ribboned and medalled commanders of the GDR on the garlanded podium, hands raised in salute as the massed ranks of soldiers marched past and fighter planes screamed overhead.

This general was small, shrivelled, bundled in a brown cardigan that seemed several sizes too large for him.

And yet he had to believe Rosa’s words.

‘My father, General Reder,’ she was saying, and then, ‘Papa, this is Patrick Miller.’

There was nothing shrivelled or crumpled about the manner in which the general came to his feet. He was wearing soft grey house shoes but Miller could have sworn he heard leather heels click as General Reder bowed and extended his hand. This was, after all, a soldier who had been a decorated hero of the Panzer Korps in the Third Reich and, later, a hero of the GDR. Age might have withered the general but he had not lost the edge of command.

‘Thank you for coming, Herr Miller.’ A hoarseness in the voice but there, too, the tone of authority.

‘Thank you for inviting me, General.’ Despite himself, Miller found himself bowing slightly to the smaller man. ‘I’m sorry I could not give more specific information about your book, General. Our Director will be in touch—’

The general waved a dismissive hand, motioned for Miller to take a seat.

‘My book?’ The general snorted. ‘It’s something I dictated some time ago for,’ an ironic raising of eyebrows, a shake of the bald head, ‘shall we say for the “official” record.’

Miller sat, shifted in the armchair, said nothing.
Keep out, dangerous landmines
. Even generals –
especially
generals – could lead you beyond the perimeters of safe roadways.

The general smiled, pale puffy features stretched into a hint of the lean-jawed tank commander who had survived both the eastern front and a Red Army POW camp.

‘Your silence commends you, Herr Miller. When you lived in England you shouted your beliefs in the pages of newspapers but here,’ the bald head nodded, ‘here in the GDR you have learned the virtue of discretion and silence.’

‘General, I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘And you have learned how to utter words that themselves have no meaning.’

‘General—’

‘Please, Herr Miller.’ General Reder raised his hand, palm out. ‘I do not mock you. It is for your discretion that I sought you out and asked my daughter to invite you here.’ General Reder reached a liver-spotted hand for his daughter’s, standing beside his chair. ‘In your years among us, Herr Miller, you have learned
that some things are sometimes best not spoken about.’

Such as the cloak-and-dagger arrangements for getting me here
. Rosa had been waiting inside the
wicket gate at the back of the large garden surrounding the house. Miller had wondered how she’d known of their approach: the rider had coasted the last stretch of their journey, the motorbike’s engine killed. No word had been exchanged between the rider, still helmeted, and the general’s daughter, as she led Miller through the darkened garden to the house.

Miller knew they were somewhere in Pankow, the northern district of the city favoured by Party elite. Further north, in Wandlitz, the members of the Politburo were housed in a heavily guarded compound. He knew that Hartheim lived in the area although he had never been invited to the Director’s house.

Now, seated in what he took to be General Reder’s study, he could only wish that he had never been invited to his house either. The general’s elliptical words signified nothing good, and the way his fingers were wrapped around Rosa’s didn’t augur well for any notions Miller might harbour about his daughter.
Down, boy, and pay attention
.

The general’s silence seemed to demand a reply.

Miller said, ‘Thank you, General.’

And waited.

The general smiled as though gratified.

BOOK: Another Kind of Country
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