Another Kind of Country (25 page)

Miller’s briefcase held pens and pencils, a copy of that day’s
Neues Deutschland
and a manila wallet folder packed with typed pages. His ID card as an official of the Secretariat for Socialist Correctness in Publishing was enough for the guards; they barely looked at the stack of typed pages in the manila folder. It would have taken a page-by-page search to uncover, scattered in random order throughout an English version of a Polish academic’s thoughts on the responsibilities of socialist writers, Miller’s own account of the pressures being heaped on the GDR from within its borders – and possibly from outside provocateurs. The article carried the byline
By Our Special Correspondent
; it could have been dictated by General Hans Reder.

He assured the guards that he would be returning before midnight and passed into the Western half of the city. In the kiosk across the street he bought a copy of
Berliner Zeitung
, quickly turning to the classifieds. The notice was halfway down the ‘Items for Sale’ column.

So, the Tempelhof rendezvous. He took the U-Bahn, climbed up the steps
to the street and made his way to the cafe on the other side of the little park near the airport.

Despite its name the Flughafen Cafe drew little business from airport passengers. Tucked away in a side street, it could not be seen by those leaving or arriving at Tempelhof. Which was, perhaps, why the cafe figured on Redgrave’s list of movable meeting points in West Berlin.

Redgrave was already there, at a corner table, turning the pages of a magazine, a half-drunk beer on the table. The black rucksack on the chair beside him and the blue windcheater hanging from the back of the chair told you that this was just another worker having a beer on the way home after work.

He waved at Miller, stood up, shook hands. Two friends who perhaps hadn’t met for some time. Or maybe since the football match on Sunday morning. Redgrave’s German accent was pure Berliner.

‘You’re well?’

They went through the motions and sounds of meeting and greeting. Redgrave called for another beer. They raised their glasses, touched the bases, said, ‘
Prost
’, with genial gusto. The few other patrons in the Flughafen Cafe had gone back to their own conversations and newspapers: nothing worth looking at or listening to at the corner table.

And Redgrave and Miller’s voices had, imperceptibly, dropped a couple of levels.

‘What’s up?’ Redgrave asked. ‘I hope there’s some good reason for dragging me all this way.’

All the way from Friedrichstrasse the night before last?

Miller bit his tongue, killed the flip response. Knowing something that Redgrave didn’t gave him some advantage – if he could only figure out how to use it.

‘There’s something strange going on at the office.’

Redgrave waited, pale
eyebrows raised.

‘Umpteen contracts for backlist books have been doctored, all reference books, art books, that kind of thing.’

‘So?’

‘The rights in these books can now be sold by Hartheim – our Director – to whoever he pleases.’

‘You brought me all this way to tell me about new clauses in some publishing contracts?’

All this way
. Easy does it, Miller told himself.

‘Don’t play the idiot, Redgrave. You know as well as I do that tampering with state contracts over there,’ Miller nodded vaguely in the direction of the East, ‘can lead to a very sudden one-way trip to Moscow, Gorby or no Gorby.’

‘It’s your office,’ Redgrave said. ‘What d’you expect me to do about this?’

‘We both know that nobody except the government of the GDR can dispose of these rights. Neither Hartheim nor anybody else can flog these rights as long as . . .’ Miller paused; no matter what General Reder said, the idea was absurd.

‘As long as
what
, Miller?’

‘As long as the GDR exists.’

Redgrave sipped his beer, turned a page of his magazine. ‘And you think that existence might be nearing its end?’

‘It’s what you want, it’s what the Americans want.’ Miller heard the frustration in his own voice. ‘It seems to be what half the fucking world wants.’

Redgrave smiled. ‘And you, Miller, is it what you want?’

‘I want to know what’s fucking going on!’

‘You going all native on us, Miller? Turning into the Dean Reed of the pen?’

Miller had met Reed at a reception shortly after arriving in Berlin: a handsome rock’n’roll singer from Colorado who’d turned his back on
the American dream and settled in East Berlin. Party bosses across the Communist bloc had loved him as much as the masses: their very own rock’n’roller.

‘Poor Dean,’ Miller said.

‘Mind you don’t finish up like him,’ Redgrave said.

Poor Dean. Found dead in his car in a lake near Berlin in 1984. Suicide, they said.
But you could never be sure
.

They both drank, studied their beer. Nobody really knew how Dean finished up dead in a half-submerged car.

‘Initially we had hopes they might parade you as a kind of journalistic Reed.’ Redgrave shook his head. ‘Patrick Miller, the caped crusader who dishes the dirt on capitalism, that sort of thing. Instead they stick you in an office reading manuscripts and contracts.’

‘How terribly disappointing for you,’ Miller said. ‘I’ll try to do better next time.’

‘Fortunately you’re not our only asset here, Miller.’

‘Maybe your other “assets” could fill me in on what’s going on.’

Redgrave sipped almost delicately from his glass. ‘What’s going on is that you’ve dragged me here on a fool’s errand, Miller, with some tuppence-halfpenny tale of changes in a few contracts – which hardly justifies the time and effort of making this trip, does it?’

‘A helluva trip.’ Frustration got the better of him. ‘All the way from Friedrichstrasse the other night.’

Miller could read the anger in Redgrave’s expression.

‘What are you talking about, Miller?’

‘Stop pissing me about, Redgrave. I saw you there, in a Polski Fiat; you and some guy with a bad limp.’

Silence settled on the corner table. Redgrave looked at Miller, looked around the small cafe as if looking for an extra exit.

‘Miller,’ he said, ‘take
my advice – my
friendly
advice – and don’t meddle in dangerous matters. Now,’ voice descending almost to a whisper, ‘tell me how and where you claim to have seen me.’

‘After the parade you passed me, driving slowly.’

‘What time?’

‘After the parade, I was just having a stroll.’

‘A stroll?’

Miller nodded. How had this turned into an interrogation?

‘On your own?’

He heard the fear in Rosa’s voice, saw the birthmark red in the lamplight on the passenger’s neck.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You said we were in a car.’

Miller nodded again.

‘Why say the other fellow had a limp?’

‘Did I?’

‘You know you did.’

Miller laughed. ‘It was a Polski Fiat, maybe he got out to push.’

‘Miller—’

He raised a placatory hand. ‘I was coming round the corner, heading for the S-Bahn, and there you were, the pair of you, getting into the old Fiat, I almost called out, then I thought I was mistaken.’

‘And that’s all you saw?’

‘Did I miss something interesting?’

‘You know, Miller, one of these days you’ll shoot your mouth off to somebody who’s less courteous than I am. Just do what you’re supposed to be doing and keep your nose out of what doesn’t concern you.’

‘I’ve been here for years,’ Miller said, ‘and what I’m supposed to be doing still isn’t clear to me.’

‘I haven’t time for
this, Miller, and you’re trying my patience.’ Redgrave reached for his jacket.

You’ve learned nothing, Miller told himself.

‘They know,’ he said.

‘Who? Who knows what?’

‘They know I carry messages for you.’

Redgrave’s jacket hung from one arm. ‘What are you talking about? Who knows?’

‘I can feel it, I’m sure they know.’
Don’t give them Reder, don’t lead them to Rosa
.

‘You feel it? Has anybody done or said anything to you?’

Miller shook his head. Suppose Redgrave asks Birthmark to check on the general, suppose he connects him to Rosa? ‘It’s just a feeling,’ he said, ‘but I’m sure.’

Redgrave finished putting his jacket on. ‘What you need is a holiday, Miller.’

He stood up, went to the counter to pay. When he came back to the table, he was smiling.

‘A “feeling” indeed!’

‘You’re not going to tell me what you were doing on the other side?’

‘You know how it is, Miller – honouring the fortieth anniversary celebrations.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Affairs of state, my dear fellow.’ Despite the windcheater and the rucksack, he spoke like a Whitehall mandarin. ‘Need to know and all that.’

‘And if they know what I’m doing?’

‘Try not to use your imagination so much, Miller.’ Redgrave hoisted the rucksack. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

Miller watched him go, picked up the magazine Redgrave had been reading.
Der Spiegel
, Gorbachev on the cover, smiling under the
banner, THE WALL IN HIS HANDS. Gorbachev looked surprised, happy but surprised, as if he hadn’t been expecting the flash of a camera.

Redgrave hadn’t looked surprised. He’d shrugged it off, tried to make a joke of it. But he hadn’t looked surprised.

General Reder wasn’t the only one who knew.
Redgrave knew that the East Germans knew
. And it didn’t seem to bother him.

All of it bothered Patrick Miller. More than ever he felt like a marionette, pulled every which way by hands on both sides of the Wall.

In the late-night post office near the Zoogarten, Miller reassembled the pages of his article for the
Guardian
. The counter clerk looked only at the London address on the brown envelope as he handed Miller his change. There was no way to tell if he was being watched by other eyes; what was not in doubt, Miller reminded himself as he pushed the envelope into the Deutsche Post box, was that he was again behaving puppet-like on a string – he was doing exactly as General Reder had directed.

He was at his window again, looking out at the night. Outside, more shadow than light. Half-light over a half-city.

And his mind full of the same shadows, the same absence of light. He’d been over it and over it, always reaching the same conclusion – a conclusion which was no more than one more question: Redgrave knew that some of the East German establishment were aware of his message-carrying activities but was not at all bothered by this knowledge, and the question was, why not?

Were the messages he ferried across the Wall of no importance, in whatever direction he carried them?

Were they fragments of misinformation, designed to mislead? What else could it be?

He’d chewed upon it on
the trek home, through Checkpoint Charlie, up the stairs to his flat, a dog with a bone that yielded no marrow, no answer.

And if Redgrave knew that he was rumbled, why did he allow it to continue?

The same question could be asked of General Reder. If the general knew, then others also knew.

But not everybody knew. Some did. Some did not. A faction. Or perhaps factions. Divisions in a divided city. Perhaps these divisions spanned the Wall that cut through the city.

Miller saw himself reflected in the window, the city a dark backdrop behind his own image.

No answers in the dark city.

And in his own reflection, answers he had no wish to discover. Eight years in East Berlin, written in the dark glass. Dark hair flecked with grey, the hairline receding. Was the jawline sagging? The eyes deeper, the face paler? Or was it all a distorted image in a distorted city?

He should take himself in hand, get jogging again, dust off the bike in the basement cage and take to the forest trails north of Pankow – where Rosa lived with the general. Rosa of the long dark hair and the black eyes: why would she ever look twice at a pen-pusher, a reader of contracts, a carrier of messages? At least Dean Reed had had a guitar to pluck, hips to rock, songs to sing.

Miller knew himself for what he was: a jumped-up clerk sitting alone in his fourth-floor flat looking at his own reflection at eleven o’clock at night. He hadn’t touched a woman for almost two years: an editor on a business trip to Berlin who’d drunk too much and fumbled her way through hurried intercourse in her cramped hotel room before scuttling back, apologetically, to her husband and children in Leipzig. She’d left no phone
number – nor had Miller asked for one.

Once upon a time you were a columnist with a name that people recognized. Now look at yourself.

Miller was sick of looking at himself.

He was turning away from the window when there was a knock on his door. Three taps, soft, almost intimate.

‘
Ja, wer ist da?
’ Who’s there? His words little more than a whisper: you didn’t welcome callers here at such an hour.

‘It’s me.’ Her words also whispered but like music in his heart.

She slipped past him when he opened the door. He checked the corridor: darkness, all doors closed. He eased the door shut, saw the tension in her face as she looked at him.

She saw the question in his eyes.

‘I waited until someone left the back door open.’ A small smile. ‘I was lucky, I didn’t have to wait too long.’

He imagined her hidden in the shadows, maybe watching from the corner of the apartment block. It didn’t surprise him that doors opened for her.

‘And if nobody had left the door open?’

She shrugged. ‘Why worry about the what-ifs?’

They were both whispering.

She pointed at the TV; while he switched it on she shut the blinds.

‘May I?’

Miller watched as she turned the TV to the local channel. Late news from East Berlin: the East German Politburo has been in emergency session, the activities of reactionary hooligans had been discovered. Leader Erich Honecker looked tired, old, like a weak tree waiting for the storm. The hooligans, he said, would be firmly dealt with.