Another Kind of Country (12 page)

They were, Miller realized, people
he had learned to love.

He turned from the window, went back to his desk and his letter to T. J. Whitacre, Esq. Hartheim would have to clear it but the Director wouldn’t give this kind of stuff much more than a nod.

He fantasized with the notion of addressing the same letter to Redgrave. Telling the smarmy bastard where to shove it would make any day sweeter.

Oddly enough, he harboured no such fantasies about General Reder, whatever the general’s plans for him might be. He just wished he knew what the general wanted from him.

Rosa Rossman was wrapping up a tutorial on
Room at the Top
.

John Braine’s novel of English provincial life in the 1950s would, she’d felt, inspire some engaging debate among her small group of Third Years. She’d managed to get her hands on half a dozen battered-looking paperback copies and had enthusiastically doled them out to the group as a first ‘discussion book’ of the new semester.
Room at the Top
, she felt, was an ideal choice: a good yarn, good pace, engaging – if not very likeable – characters. Best of all was its candid portrayal of an ambitious young man’s climb to the top of Britain’s class system. Along his way to the pinnacle of the rotten heap, Joe Lampton betrayed the older woman he loved and the younger, richer woman he impregnated.

Her eager group of twenty-year-olds, raised in class-free East Germany, would make short work of Mr Joe Lampton.

Except it hadn’t turned out that way. Yes, her students agreed, they’d enjoyed the novel, the pacy story-telling, the simple language. But Mr Joe Lampton’s slimy climb to the top was hardly reprehensible; in fact, it was completely understandable.

‘And his betrayal of the woman he loved?’

Four female faces, all bespectacled,
stared questioningly back at her. In the two male faces, both bearded, Rosa could read the same uncomprehending question.

‘He betrayed her,’ Rosa said. ‘He caused her death.’

‘Nobody
made
her get pissed.’ Antonia with the granny glasses looked amused. ‘Nobody
made
her take the wheel while she was pissed.’

The half-dozen heads around the table nodded in agreement.

‘And the girl he got pregnant – facing a loveless marriage with a fellow whose only interest is her father’s money?’

Silence in the small room. The ticking of the clock on the back wall seemed louder.

‘It’s her choice too, Frau Rossman.’ Antonia’s wire-rimmed glasses seemed even more granny-like. ‘That’s the way it works.’

The circle of heads nodded again.

‘And this “it”,’ Rosa said. ‘Could this “it” which makes these people behave in such self-destructive ways be the class system itself? A dog-eat-dog system which gives citizens no option except to cheat and lie and destroy themselves and others? Is
Room at the Top
an indictment of the entire class system of the capitalist world?’

No gaze met hers. Everybody stared resolutely at the table, fingered the paperback.

‘Nobody has an opinion?’ This group wasn’t usually reticent, opinions usually shot out of them almost without thought.

‘We have a class system here too, Frau Rossman.’ The words barely audible. Monika. Large Monika with the tiny voice, this time tinier than ever.

‘Pardon?’

Still no gaze met hers. The silence in the room seemed to crackle, like ice getting ready to break. She looked from one bent head to the next,
wondering where these students had spent their summer.

‘That’s quite a statement, Monika. Would you like to enlarge on it a little?’

Monika lifted her head, her round face red, her small mouth pursed. For a moment her eyes met Rosa’s and then she bent again over the table.

‘We have our own class system.’

Rosa looked at David: small, muscular, T-shirt and multi-patched jeans, the recognized brains of the group. She nodded encouragement.

David shrugged. ‘It’s no secret. There’s one law for most of us and no rules at all for a few people at the top. Joe Lampton would have to dish a lot more dirt to get to the top in this society.’ His look was almost apologetic. ‘No offence, Frau Rossman.’

No offence
. Everybody knew about General Reder.

‘None taken.’ And yet something shrivelled inside her. The beast being born on the streets was nosing its way into the classroom. You couldn’t ignore the growl of menace, the hunger for a fairer share of the cake.
But I fear for my father: General Reder took me in, he and his wife made me their daughter. This country gave me back my life
. Maybe the beast could be tamed with kindness.

‘Let’s leave it there for today,’ she said.

They gathered their books and pads with unaccustomed quietness. Nobody stayed behind, nobody had a question, a smile. Their farewells were nodded, sheepish. She’d thought they might continue their discussion over coffee in ZERO but nobody had asked if she’d be there.

A line had been crossed, however faint the line, however hesitant the crossing.

She’d missed something, she
realized, some hint, some indication of this crossing of the line. Or the line had moved, had been moved: Rosa herself was now seen as one of
them
. There was always a
them
. The
them
who were beyond reach, beyond sanction. There were, as David had said, no rules at all for
them
. And now, somehow, she was numbered among
them
.

The idea angered her. Her anger pushed her at speed along the college corridors. A colleague passed, said hello, frowned at her haste, her glum silence.
Slow down. It’s just a bunch of students, maybe you’re mistaken
.

And yet she knew she wasn’t.

It was unfair. She had come to this country as a refugee, spirited out of her own land with nothing except her fear, her sense of loss, her nightmares. She’d become part of this country that had rescued her, had learned to love its friends and to be wary of its enemies. Her students were not her enemies. Nor were they the enemies of the GDR. They were not so different from her. They recognized injustice not only in the pages of a book but on the streets of their country. As she herself did.

General Reder would listen to her, he always did.

The porter at the main door of the institute called out goodbye to her, ‘
Bis morgen
,’ a half-smile, a small wave of his uniformed arm.

‘
Bis Morgen
,’ she said. Until tomorrow. Did he, too, see her as one of them, the daughter of a general of the GDR?

It was unfair.

At the top of the steps outside the institute she stopped, almost frightened by the demonstration below. It was a small affair. Five or six young people walking in a circle at the foot of the stone steps, placards in their hands.
Wir sind nicht frei!
We are not free!
Hallo, Mein Bruder in West Berlin
. Hello, my brother in West Berlin.

And yet solemnity was not
something students could sustain. The smallest of the group carried a bright red placard emblazoned in white: VIVA COCA-COLA!

She smiled but she felt the weight in her heart. She couldn’t be even ten years older than these demonstrators, but she felt like their mother. She could understand their frustration – anyone could see that the system was corrupted – but this wasn’t the way to set about it. Joe Lampton didn’t set out to destroy the system. Greedy bastard that he was, he married into it, became a part of it. Maybe, in his life beyond the book, he might even set about improving it.

A pair of Vopos were making their way towards the demonstration. They walked without haste, sure of themselves, pistols holstered. The small crowd of onlookers took off at speed. The demonstrators offered no resistance. Their placards thrown to the ground, they waited, faces ashen, until the police van arrived and they were herded into its cramped interior, placards chucked in behind them.

She wanted to run after the van, shout at both policemen and students:
it’s not the way, the general has another way, a better way . . .

And part of her wanted only to weep. These people who had sought her out under the warplanes over Chile were tearing themselves apart, destroying one another. Maybe they’d listen to her father. Maybe General Reder wouldn’t even get the chance to speak to them. The Party Secretariat would offer him no platform. The Americans would happily have the general dead.

Her stepfather was an old man with cancer of the thyroid. What chance did he have? And maybe it was foolish even to think that a maverick Englishman like Patrick Miller could help.

She remembered the way Miller’s dark hair fell across his forehead, the
curiously old-fashioned right-hand parting. She remembered the height of him, how his maleness seemed to shelter her when he stooped to take her hand.

Standing on the steps of the Institute of English Studies, Rosa Rossman shivered in the September sun. She wished she were on her way to Cafe ZERO, not to meet her students, but to sit beside Patrick Miller.

September 1989

Checkpoint Charlie

Berlin

It was a ritual, a kind
of waltz they danced
every few weeks to silent music that they both could hear.

First, Miller acknowledged Hartheim’s directorial eminence by explaining that he, Miller, would like to pick up a few journals ‘on the other side’ and would therefore be grateful for the Director’s permission to leave the office early.

Then Hartheim also displayed, firstly, his personal eminence by inquiring if Miller’s assignments were up to speed and, secondly, his personal magnanimity, by graciously granting Herr Miller permission to finish work early.

Neither man smiled during this exchange. To do so would be to recognize the element of farce.

Anyway, Miller reminded himself on his way down the marble staircase of 64A, there wasn’t much to smile about in his life right now. And there was much to be serious about. Not least of which was, what did General Reder want from him?

Wait
. The general would be in touch.

Wait
. He’d been waiting for eight years for an explanation as to what exactly he was doing in East Berlin and he was no wiser now than on the day he’d passed through Checkpoint Charlie with his suitcase and rucksack. Yes,
pick up the messages from Axel and get them to one of Redgrave’s collection points in West Berlin – but for what?

You know what for. You’ve looked at the messages, puzzled over the groups of figures and letters. Maybe codes, times, page numbers of popular books, references to psalms or verses of the bible – the staple fare of thrillers and spy novels.

And finally, on this afternoon, leaving Hartheim’s corner office in 64A Wilhelmstrasse, you have to face the truth: the scraps of paper you carry with such fear and such care have no meaning whatever. They contain neither codes nor times nor technical information; they are no more than distractions, meaningless curlicues and flourishes in a dance composed and choreographed by Redgrave. A waltz as ritualized and meaningless as the
pas de deux
between you and Hartheim. You’re a decoy. You draw the watching eyes, Patrick Miller, while the real action, whatever it is, is conducted on another stage, unlit, unobserved.

A decoy
. The realization triggered in him both relief and anger.

And something more: the realization that this was a truth he’d known for some time but one that he’d refused to countenance.
The truth will set you free
. Maybe. But free to do what? To round on Redgrave and thus bring ignominy upon his mother’s ageing head? His mother had her own reasons for hiding from herself the truth about her gynaecologist husband.

He signed out of the building under the unsmiling gaze of the two male receptionists. When he’d first started work at 64A he’d tried smiling at them, a touch of banter. He soon gave up trying.

The afternoon was sullen, sticky, a hint of thunder in the dark, rolling sky. He shouldered his rucksack, turned off Wilhelmstrasse in the direction of Checkpoint Charlie. At least he didn’t have to worry today about the contents of his pockets or his rucksack. On his evening
jog the night before, there had been neither a plastic bag pushed between the black railings at the back of the red-brick Lutheran church nor a cigarette packet casually impaled on the gate spears of the same church. So, no need to pick up from the hole in the old chestnut tree in the middle of the park nor from behind the moss-covered brick in the wall at the southern edge of the park. Just march confidently towards the checkpoint on Zimmerstrasse. Head up, carefree. You’ve been in and out through Checkpoint Charlie at least a hundred times since you arrived in East Berlin.

It was after four o’clock; already there was a line of day trippers returning to West Berlin. Conspiratorial whispers seemed to hang like cigarette smoke above the line:
Ich bin ein Berliner!
We have bearded the evil dragon in his den and we have the useless Ostmarks in our pockets to prove it.

Miller had given up using English whenever he was accosted by one of these day trippers. His English accent was invitation enough for a conspiracy of criticism, a licence to censure this grey city with its multiple deficiencies – no bananas, or Levi’s or Wranglers.
And no freedom
. Their implicit sense of superiority, displayed like a badge along with their loud labels and brand names, had aroused in Miller a resentment that had surprised even himself.

The checkpoint police were solemn-faced as they surveyed the queue, slow-moving, whispers punctuated by an occasional nervous laugh. Not too nervous: the American soldiers were just a few metres away on the Western side of the checkpoint. A small group of youths got into the line behind Miller, all anoraks and rucksacks and American accents.

The burly border policeman at the head of the line turned to look at the newcomers. He took his time walking towards them, his gaze never wavering. He stood next to Miller, his eyes fixed upon the Americans,
intimidated now into silence. He nodded as if trying to decide something, then turned slightly and pointed at Miller.