Another Kind of Country (5 page)

The blue-shirted stewardess drew her into the plane’s still-dark interior. She could make out seemingly endless rows of seats; her eyes focused and she saw white faces, rows and rows of them staring up at her.

‘Take your seats quickly.’ The stewardess was pointing at the empty rows in front. In German, unsmiling. ‘You’re the last. We’ve been waiting for almost two hours.’

‘Comrade.’ The pale-faced woman, her lips so thin, so compressed, you wondered how the word escaped. ‘You have a problem with our late arrival?’

The stewardess blanched, her own face suddenly whiter than her interrogator’s.

‘Of course not, Frau Comrade, I merely wish to expedite—’

‘Enough.’ A single word spoken, a single finger raised in the face of the stewardess, and yet it seemed to Rosa that the entire plane was holding its breath.
Who is she, this woman who thinks Dieter just wasted time on me?

Behind the frozen stewardess the door to the flight deck swung open. The captain stood there, white-shirted in the lighted doorway.

‘Frau Colonel.’ The slightest heel click, the slightest bow. He extended his hand to shake the woman’s. ‘You are welcome aboard. We are ready to leave when you are.’

The woman thanked him. All eyes watched as the captain helped her into her seat, helped fasten the belt across the skinny lap before returning to the cockpit.

Within minutes the Tupolev was climbing from the runway into the night sky. The metal frame shuddered in the dark, strained against the clawing grip of gravity.

Her childhood
seemed to fall away into the land lost beneath them.
The house in the Barrio Alto, the little well in the courtyard and your mother wearing your father’s pyjama bottoms in the brightness of your morning kitchen. Your mother’s impatience with your foul language and your father trying to keep the smile off his face
.

In the metallic clamminess of the plane she dozed and woke, dozed and woke.

She feared she would dream, that she would see her mother rise from her stony grave. Perhaps her exhaustion was more powerful than her fear of dreaming. Maybe her spirit was saving the dreams for later. Maybe it was Dieter’s nearness that kept the dreams at bay. Whenever she stirred on the long flight through the night, she checked to make sure he was there, strapped into the narrow seat beside her.

Once she thought he whispered something to her but the loud droning of the engines distorted sound.

‘I’m here.’ She thought that’s what he said. But maybe she dreamed it.

They landed in the white light of day. More soldiers, more jeeps; she watched them on the dark tarmac, looking down at them through the porthole.

‘Lisbon,’ Dieter whispered.

Nobody was allowed off the plane while they refuelled but the doors were opened and the sunshine spilled into the crowded fuselage. An officer stepped in, in sunglasses and braided cap; he spent a few minutes closeted on the flight deck with the captain and then left without so much as acknowledging the silent passengers staring up at him.

The doors of the plane closed and voices chattered like school kids’ when the teacher has left. The thin woman stood up in the aisle and looked back along the plane. The chattering ceased.

Later, on her way back
from the cramped toilet, Rosa noticed how all the passengers avoided eye contact with her. They feigned sleep, buried themselves in magazines, looked over her shoulder. What had that woman called them?
A cadre of factory workers
. Factory workers who asked no questions and shunned the eyes of a bunch of latecomers who boarded like refugees in the night. Refugees for whom the plane waited for hours in a remote corner of Asunción Airport.

What kind of country was it that these silent, cowed workers came from?

The Tupolev powered north-east through the skies of Europe. The sky was blue, flecked with clouds as innocent as puffs of cotton wool.

The clouds over Santiago had signalled horror below. She could see her father in La Moneda, knew instinctively that he would have stood close to the President, would have remained beside him to the end. She tried not to think of that end but the blood from her mother’s broken body leaked on to her hands like red slime.

The tears came then, great silent tears like rain on her face. She felt Dieter’s hand on hers.

His voice was low and soft, the words German.

‘We’ll be
home soon, Rosa.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘In Germany.’

September 1989

East Berlin

German
Democratic Republic

They knocked on
your door but they never waited for your answer.

This time it was Bendtner
who pushed in the door and stood there, blue-jawed, close-cropped, fully suited.

‘The Herr Direktor wishes to see you in his office.’ Hand still on the door handle, ready to depart. ‘Immediately.’

Miller nodded. He wondered if it was his office alone that Bendtner walked into with such little ceremony.

He didn’t get the chance to ask. He wouldn’t have asked anyway, even if the door had not closed as abruptly as it had opened. Even if Bendtner were not already halfway down the marble staircase to rejoin his colleague at the porter’s desk in the lobby of 64A Wilhelmstrasse. You learned quickly not to ask too many questions in East Berlin. Not even such innocent ones as why Bendtner was ordered to climb to the fourth floor with a message that Direktor Hartheim (or his secretary) could more easily have delivered by picking up the phone.

Miller stood up from
his grey, metal desk and put on his jacket. This September afternoon’s sticky heat wasn’t much affected by the small fan in the corner of the office but the Director was a stickler for formality.

Miller hurried to the tiled, echoing toilet to check his hair and tie in the small mirror above the equally small washbasin.

The doors along the corridor were closed. Inside the Secretariat for Socialist Correctness in Publishing you learned to value whatever little privacy you could find.
And after a while you learned that the idea of privacy was an illusion
.

Enough, Miller told himself, hurrying along the corridor; it’s almost ten minutes since Bendtner delivered his message.

He tapped gently on the glass door at the end of the corridor.

Frau Siedel left him standing there for the statutory minute and a half before she opened the door. And in statutory silence she ushered him into her own box of space, the ante-chamber to the Director’s office.

Miller took care to touch nothing on Frau Siedel’s desk while the secretary phoned to announce his arrival.

‘
Ja
.’ The blond head bobbed at the phone. Frau Siedel was young, good-looking, Hartheim’s latest secretary selection. ‘
Alle ist klar
.’ Hartheim’s appetite for young blondes did not go unnoticed in 64A; like much else, it was not spoken of. There was a certain stiffness about this one, Miller felt, that told you she wouldn’t be staying too long.

‘You may enter now,’ Frau Siedel told Miller.

Miller thanked her, went into the Director’s office.

Helmut Hartheim’s chair was, as usual, pushed well back from his desk to accommodate his huge stomach. Like his secretary, he left Miller waiting for some internally measured interval before lifting his head from the paper in his hands. Maybe he counts, Miller thought, or maybe he’s one of those people you read about, men with metronomes pulsing away inside their heads.

‘Ah, Herr Miller!’ As though
surprised to see somebody standing in front of his desk. ‘It’s good of you to come.’

The big, round head nodded Miller towards the chair on the other side of the clutter-free desk. Hartheim laid the sheet of paper down carefully – upside-down – on the desk, moving the box of pens a fraction to the left, in line with something that Miller could neither see nor imagine.

Tune in
. Hartheim was asking about the English language edition of the nineteenth-century farm labourer’s diary.

‘Everything is in order, Herr Direktor. I’ve cleared the final page proofs and you yourself have approved the cover design.’
You could at least read photographs
.

‘Good.’ A ponderous lifting of the basketball head. ‘And you are satisfied that the language adequately conveys the socialist spirit of the original?’

Miller nodded. ‘Most faithfully.’ Although why a minor university in Western Australia should choose to publish a translation of a nineteenth-century farmhand’s memoir of life under upper-crust Prussian landlords was beyond Miller. The print run was agreed at 500 copies; Miller reckoned that at least 400 of them would finish up in remainder bins. ‘It’s an excellent translation, sir,’ he added with extra conviction.

Hartheim’s was a corner office; two windowed walls looked out over the rooftops on to the tree-lined stretch of Unter den Linden. Over the Director’s shoulder Miller could see, through the glass, the slow-moving traffic on the wide thoroughfare. Most of the traffic was heading east, or swinging on to Friedrichstrasse; westward lay only the barricaded columns of the Brandenburg Gate, at the heart of the Berlin Wall.

‘We are fortunate,’ Hartheim was saying, ‘to have a distinguished writer – a native speaker – to help us with these English translations.’

‘It’s my
good fortune to be here, sir.’ In the beginning Miller had been inclined to swallow such compliments. ‘And the cause is greater than any of us.’ Although after seven years of life in East Berlin, Miller wasn’t sure if he was still a believer.

‘Still, it was an unusual event, your arriving here like that, Herr Miller.’

Miller nodded.
And more unusual than you ever found out, not even after all the interrogations
.

He spread his hands, smiled. ‘The struggle is ongoing, Herr Direktor, but it is worthwhile.’
And you sound like a page from a textbook. Even after seven years you still have an itch to tell the truth, no matter what the bastards in Pall Mall might say
.

‘It’s a pity those fuckers in Budapest don’t feel the same.’ With unexpected grace Hartheim got to his feet and moved towards the small television on a corner table.

The hum of the TV set filled the office. The black-and-white pictures fashioned themselves into focus; the sound of a helicopter rotored from the small set.

‘The fuckers are still at it.’

It was impossible to tell where Hartheim’s venom was directed: at the camera operators in the unseen helicopter or at the shirt-sleeved crowd waving up at the helicopter from the grounds of the West German embassy in Budapest.

‘Cunts.’ Hartheim had resumed his seat. ‘We should drop a bomb on them.’ His whole body turned as he looked west through the window. ‘And another one on the cunts over there.’

All summer long, since the Hungarians had opened their border with Austria, the roads and trains had been crowded with fleeing East Germans making their roundabout way to West Germany through Hungary and Austria.

The camera swooped low over the waving crowds in the embassy garden; the growling noise of the chopper grew louder in Hartheim’s office.

Miller held his
breath. Like most people in East Berlin, he had his television aerial tuned to the West. Like Hartheim and other accredited East German staff, Miller was authorized to do so. Now it seemed almost that such authorization no longer mattered. All of the German Democratic Republic was staring at these pictures of a people in flight and even the Stasi seemed not to know what to do about it.

‘Cunts,’ Hartheim said again. He waved a hand. ‘Please – turn it off.’

Miller wondered why the TV had been turned on in the first place. Some lesson for himself? Or simply further evidence of Hartheim’s capricious nature? With Hartheim you never knew – and you never asked.

Miller waited. He knew he hadn’t been summoned to Hartheim’s office simply to report progress on an Australian edition of an almost-forgotten nineteenth-century memoir. His work consisted in the main of examining new books for any wayward comments on socialism as practised in the German Democratic Republic. Once upon an innocent time, in his life before East Berlin, his own articles in the British press had been a continuous hymn to the glories of German socialism.

Hartheim was taking a bulky manila folder from a drawer in his desk.

And this is where your hymn-singing has landed you
.

‘I have an important
task for you, Herr Miller.’ Hartheim laid the thick file on his desk. His left hand rested on top of the file, the one with the chewed-off index finger. In the last days of the war, as the Red Army powered its way through the rubble of Berlin, Hartheim had been one of the Communist provocateurs rounded up by a fanatic Nazi commander. Interrogation was cursory and brutal: the Gestapo officer had slashed Hartheim’s hand with his knife and offered the bloodied finger to the half-starved Dobermann pinscher at his side. The crazed dog had devoured Hartheim’s index finger with a single bite. Then the Russians arrived and both dog and master died in a sudden burst of gunfire.

Hartheim had a habit of stroking with his right hand the knuckle stub of the missing finger. Watching it always made Miller queasy, as though the wolfish dog were chewing away in front of him. Hartheim was doing it now – fat, sausage fingers poking away at the lumpy knuckle.

Tune in!

Of late, Miller felt he was too easily distracted. Maybe it was all that embassy-refugee shit on the television. The entire country seemed distracted.

Hartheim was droning on in his thick Berlin accent.

‘It’s a routine reading, a matter of form, the autobiography of a distinguished soldier. The general understood better than anyone that the Party is truly “the sword and shield” of our country. Just set down your reactions in your usual objective way.’

The general?
Miller looked longingly at the file but Hartheim’s pudding hand was covering the name stickered to the top of the brown cardboard.

Aloud he said, ‘Would it be possible for me to see our reports from earlier readers?’
You didn’t want to fuck around with the memoirs of a fucking general, no matter which general it was
.