Another Kind of Country (43 page)

Miller laughed at that. T. J. Whitacre, he felt, was somebody he could work with. And if Whitacre said he would acquire rights in certain publications, Miller was prepared to believe him.

They shook hands on it.

To celebrate the deal T. J. Whitacre felt he ought to buy a round for the house. Heinrich banged on the counter with the tin of coffee and announced that their distinguished visitor was standing the house a drink. The students knocked on the tables and cheered with ironic gusto. Whitacre, still seated, bowed from the waist in acknowledgement.

Whitacre went back to his hotel.

Miller went to meet Rosa with the good news that, whatever happened in this new and unsettled Germany, at least one of them would have a job.

Whitacre’s job offer also solved Miller’s problem of what to do with the money in the bank in Southend-on-Sea. The ‘investment adviser’ of the Barclays branch had written, via the
Guardian
, to advise Mr Miller that the regular monthly amounts which had been paid into his account since 1980 had ceased some months previously; the investment adviser was also pleased to inform Mr Miller that he should consider transferring the substantial balance in this non-interest-earning current account into the bank’s Alternative Goldplus Fund. The money, to Miller’s mind, was soiled, maybe bloodied, but he’d wondered if he might need it to support himself and Rosa and, possibly, her father; now he could advise the investment manager in Southend –
how did Redgrave choose these banks?
– to donate the money to charities that Miller could enjoy selecting. The money was not his, any more than the boxes of belongings sent to some storage depot near
Heathrow airport. That was another life.

‘Whitacre was right,’ Rosa said. ‘And you still believe he is what he claims to be, an English businessman with no connections to,’ she searched for the words, ‘you know, that other world?’

‘That underworld?’ Miller shook his head. ‘No, T. J. Whitacre has nothing to do with Redgrave and Dover and all that motley crew.’ For a second he shivered. ‘And I’m glad I’m free of that world too.’

‘I don’t have a job,’ Rosa said.

Miller took her hand. ‘So what, Rosa? The last time you were involved in a change of government, you were lucky to escape with your life.’ He shushed her protest. ‘I’m not making a joke and I’m not trying to make little of what you suffered but this is like a Sunday stroll compared to what you went through back then.’

‘I know,’ Rosa said, ‘it’s just that it’s not easy when everything around us is changing.’

‘We’re not short of money,’ Miller said. ‘I have a job and I know you’ll find work – and no matter what happens, we have a place to live.’

‘Forgive the glooms.’ Rosa kissed him; over Miller’s shoulder she saw the new waiter look up from his newspaper, look at her somewhat wistfully. ‘You’re right, Patrick.’

‘And maybe they’ll leave the general in his house,’ Miller said. Whoever
they
were. Miller didn’t even know who he’d be paying his own rent to from now on.

‘Anything is possible in this new world,’ Rosa said, ‘but army generals from the wrong side of the Berlin Wall are not going to be flavour of the month. And neither,’ she added, ‘are their daughters.’

‘General Reder is old
and sick,’ Miller said. ‘And he did no harm to anybody. Maybe they’ll leave him alone.’

‘And his daughter who resigned before getting the inevitable boot?’ Rosa’s smile belied the harshness of her words. ‘You don’t mind being attached to the unemployed daughter of a general without any army?’

‘Which unemployed daughter would that be?’

The mocking words came from the doorway of ZERO. Neither of them had heard the door open; when they turned to look they saw Dieter smiling in the open doorway, General Reder beside him.

‘I was afraid I’d never see you again!’ Rosa had her arms round Dieter. ‘You just disappeared.’

‘You know how it is.’ Dieter disengaged himself, helped Reder to be seated.

Miller signalled to the waiter, already busy with the coffee tin and a couple of fresh mugs. The last time he’d seen Dieter was the night the Wall had been breached, the night they’d walked Dover’s corpse to the bench in the sunless alley in West Berlin – although he was almost sure he’d caught a glimpse of Dieter in the TV pictures of the street demonstrations in Prague that had signalled the death of Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia: a lean, blouson-clad figure just behind the front row of the excited, banner-waving, chanting, marching students. One by one the captive states of Eastern Europe had pulled themselves free of the Soviet embrace. And Miller was also guessing that Dieter had been in attendance at the funeral rites in Poland, in Bulgaria, even at the bloody end of the dictators in Romania on Christmas Day. Gorbachev had kept his word: he’d kept his nose out of satellite business and Soviet troops in their barracks. Maybe Dieter hoped to stay alive among those chanting, banner-waving crowds some seeds of the ideology that had driven him all his
life; if so, Miller reflected, then like many of us he’s going to have to live with the taste of disappointment.

‘How did you know where to find us? Seeing you both here in this place . . .’ Rosa laughed at the presence of General Reder and Dieter in the gloom of ZERO.

‘You think we didn’t know about this place?’ General Reder was smiling.

‘And our intelligence can still locate reactionaries,’ Dieter said, deadpan, ‘at any given moment.’

They all laughed. You could say such things now and laugh. Even though, Miller knew, such things were still true.

The waiter arrived with the fresh coffees. He placed them in front of Reder and Dieter, the mugs on saucers, not a drop spilled. The waiter stood beside Reder’s chair, staring at the general, hands clasping and unclasping.

‘Yes?’ Reder looked up at the waiter, the black T-shirt, the creased jeans and ankle-high basketball boots.

‘
Entschuldigung
.’ The waiter was nervous.

All eyes focused on him, curious, observing his nervousness, the licking of dry lips.

‘Excuse me,’ the waiter said again. ‘May I ask, sir, are you – I mean, I think you are General Hans Reder.’

Reder nodded, said nothing. You always said nothing.

‘Sir,’ the waiter rushed on, ‘my grandfather pointed you out to me a few years ago, you were in uniform, it was a parade, my grandfather served with you in the Panzer Korps in the war – you saved his life, sir, my grandfather told me you were a great soldier.’ The waiter paused for breath, seemed overcome by his own impertinence in approaching Reder. He stood, licking his dry, nervous lips.

‘Your grandfather,’ Reder said quietly. ‘How is he?’

‘He’s well, sir, he
lives in Magdeburg, sir, he saw you when he came to visit us.’ Another pause for breath. ‘He lost an arm in the Ukraine, sir, but he said that if it hadn’t been for you, he’d have lost his life.’

Reder waved a hand: your grandfather was a comrade. ‘And your grandfather’s name?’

‘Gustrow, sir, he was Trooper Jens Gustrow.’

‘Ah, Jens.’ Reder nodded. ‘He was a good soldier, a good comrade.’ He held out his hand to the waiter. ‘You must tell him that I wish him well, that I send him the good wishes of a comrade.’

The waiter seemed not so much a young man as a boy; his eyes were wet as he took Reder’s hand. ‘I’ll tell him, sir, thank you, General Reder.’ The waiter backed away, bowed by the presence of a legend.

For a moment the table was silent, Reder the focus of that silence.

‘Papa.’ Rosa took Reder’s hand. ‘You made that boy happy – happy and proud.’

Miller, too, was impressed, awed. ‘You have some memory, General – out of all those men, all those years ago . . .’ Miller shook his head in wonder.

‘The truth is,’ Reder said, very quietly, ‘I have no recollection whatever of Trooper Jens Gustrow.’

Miller was puzzled.

‘You do what you have to do when you’re a soldier, Patrick.’ Reder seemed to be looking through Miller, into his own past, maybe into his future. ‘I don’t remember the fellow but in a way I remember them all, every last one of them, those who lived and those who died. The boy’s grandfather lost an arm, he said – it’s not too much to make him feel just a little bit better because a general in Berlin remembers him, is it?’ He looked at them.

A soldier, Miller thought. He does what he
must: takes a life when he must, tells a small lie to make an old comrade feel good when he can.

‘You were right, Papa,’ Rosa said. ‘Sometimes a little lie means more than the truth.’

The men looked at her, struck by her odd choice of words. And as soon as she caught their expressions, Rosa herself realized the weight of those words. To varying degrees they had all lived with lies – with versions of a truth – for a long time.

Nobody spoke. What sat at the table among them was the unknowable face of the Germany of tomorrow. From his lair in Bonn, Kohl had lectured and hectored – and pleaded, too – to be allowed to make a united Germany. Now the swallowing was done, the GDR had consented to be reunited or, as some had it, to be swallowed whole, to be reduced. And nobody could tell if they had succumbed to lies or truth – or a combination of both.

Rosa said, ‘I must be a witch – three men struck dumb by my words.’

‘Not by your words,’ Dieter said, ‘but by your beauty.’

‘Oh, yes, flattery gets you everywhere!’ Rosa was laughing, the others joined in.

‘Anyway, it’s the truth, nothing less.’ Miller’s words made the men silent, made Rosa blush.

Dieter caught the way Rosa and Miller looked at each other, stirred in his chair, coughed.

‘We should leave these young folk alone,’ he said to Reder. ‘But first—’

‘But first,’ Reder said, ‘you must give them our news.’

‘It’s for both of you,’ Dieter said, ‘but mainly for you, Patrick. News from England.’

Miller groaned. ‘Redgrave. What’s he up to now?’

Dieter shook his head. ‘Redgrave
is a threat to nobody now, except maybe to himself. He went straight back to England the day after,’ Dieter shrugged, ‘the day after.’ For a moment the darkness of blood hung over the scarred table. ‘Redgrave suffered a breakdown. He’s on medical leave. He’ll never return to his service.’ Dieter looked at Miller. ‘Never.’

‘And you know this because?’ Miller let it hang there.

‘I know this because I know it, Patrick.’

Like you knew where and how to find Rosa and me in ZERO, Miller thought. The world has changed but some things remain unchanged.

‘And you’ve had personal news from England, Patrick,’ Dieter asked, ‘since we last met?’

Are you asking me or telling me, Dieter?

‘Fortunately, more good news,’ Miller said. The news had been anything but good when he’d phoned England in the frantic days after the Wall came down. Even getting a line out of the city had been a challenge, with the world’s media scrambling for connections out of Berlin. General Reder’s reach had engineered a line to Wolverhampton; the result had been his mother’s usual drink-fuelled complaints and tears.
Your poor father never gets time to rest, to be home
.

Miller wasn’t about to go through that with Dieter.
He probably knows anyway
.

And then, remarkably, as unexpectedly as the Berlin Wall had opened, life had changed at leafy Compton Avenue.

‘A few months ago,’ Miller said, ‘my father had a stroke and was in hospital for weeks. He’s made a partial recovery, able to speak a few words, but of course he’s no longer able to work as a doctor. He needs constant care, can’t walk very far, has to be pushed in a wheelchair most of the time. There’s home help but the principal carer is my mother.’

He sipped his coffee, enjoying the
recollection of that phone call. He was smiling now, so was Rosa.

‘Something snapped – or maybe unsnapped – in my mother when my father was hit by the stroke. She was with him when it happened and she simply took charge. Called the ambulance, went to the emergency room with him, bossed doctors and nurses about and generally behaved like a dragon.’ His thin smile broadened. ‘My mother hasn’t touched a drop since. She goes to AA and behaves with all the zeal of a converted sinner. My mother rules the roost – and my father – like a sort of benevolent, teetotal headmistress.’

Every time he phoned, Miller feared the worst. The sound of tears, his mother lost again in her personal cloud of alcohol. It hadn’t happened. The Wall wasn’t the only miracle: Lady Miller was still on the wagon, lording it over her straying gynaecologist husband. And Miller felt the bastard had it coming to him.

‘And in case you’re wondering, Dieter,’ Miller said, ‘I know all this because I know.’ Because I’m Janus, Miller thought.
Almost a decade I’ve been here and I’m still not sure who’s been working my strings, pressing my buttons
.

Miller felt Rosa’s hand on his. At least Rosa stood for truth in his life.

Dieter and Reder were on their feet. Miller stood with them.

‘Must you go, Papa?’

‘I’ll see you later, Rosa,’ Reder said. ‘I may not see Dieter again – I’ll go with him to the barracks in Treptower.’

‘There’s a convoy pulling out shortly,’ Dieter said. ‘I’ll travel part of the way with them; it seems the right thing to do.’

In his mind Miller saw the long line of Soviet military vehicles making their slow way across central Europe to their home in Russia. He saw Dieter in the cabin of one of the trucks, wondered how it would feel for him and the thousands of Soviet soldiers to
be cut off from the land they had occupied for forty years.

‘But we’ll see you again – you’ll visit?’ Rosa’s voice held all the loneliness of parting.

‘Who knows?’ The same loneliness in Dieter’s voice, a chink in the ascetic’s armour he wore against his own dangerous world. ‘My country is changing too and I may soon have to answer to new masters.’ They all knew what he meant: Gorbachev’s decision to play hands-off with his Soviet satellites had undermined – perhaps fatally – his own leadership.

Rosa hugged him. Miller saw her wet eyes, glimpsed the ghosts of a long-gone day, blood on a car seat, a peasant digging a grave in stony soil.