Another Kind of Country (7 page)

On the island in the middle of the road a military policeman was checking the papers of a frightened-looking, middle-aged man with a tan briefcase in his hands. Under the steel helmet the policeman’s face was as sweaty as his quarry’s, his face unsmiling as he handed back the ID card and waved the man on.

Nerves, Miller
thought: the crowds in the embassies and the candlelit protests in the Leipzig church have the bosses spooked, police on the corners, lines of soldiers tramping in and out of their barracks with assault rifles in readiness.

The green man lit up, Rosa touched his elbow to cross the street. Yet another helmeted policeman held up the lines of traffic, hand raised, whistle at the ready.

Miller followed Rosa off the main street, behind a red-brick church. These were his streets but he wondered where she was taking him. In these winding alleys you wouldn’t find the kind of fancy cafes suitable for the daughters of generals. And you wouldn’t find a bus stop or a tram halt here in these back streets.
Maybe she’s after my body. You wish
.

She led him between two tall buildings with cemented-up windows. The sun did not reach in here; the unpaved passageway was rich with flowering weeds, clogged with rubbish.

In front of them was a single-storey breeze-block building with blackened windows. The tar-black door was shut. ZERO, the hand-painted sign over the door said, in black letters on a plain white board. Faint music came humming from behind the closed door and blackened windows.

She seemed to sense Miller’s hesitancy.

‘It’s OK.’ She was smiling. ‘It’s just a cafe the students showed me.’

‘Frau Rossman,’ he tried to smile, ‘my department is part of the Ministry of State Security—’

‘And you’re afraid you
might be compromised?’ Eyebrows arched above the black pools. ‘Do you think I would make trouble for my father, Herr Miller? The general found out I was in the habit of coming here with some of my students – there’s no need to ask
how
he found out – and he assured me that, after a thorough investigation, ZERO was definitely
not
a hive of counter-revolutionary reactionism.’ She laughed, a bell pealing in a grim and sunless alley. ‘I like to think it’s a different kind of place,
Herr Miller, but we both know that eyes are watching wherever you go.’

Go home, Miller told himself. If you get yourself arrested and expelled you’ll be no use to anybody. Not to Redgrave and his pinstriped acolytes. Not to your mother. Not even to your groper father.
Go home. Now
.

But she was smiling again, opening up those dark pools of infinity to him, and Miller feared that he might swim into any darkness they might lead him to.

The interior of ZERO seemed harmless. Strings of ceiling-hung bulbs compensated for the locked-out daylight; candle stubs in wax-ringed wine bottles made an amateurish attempt at student-type bohemianism. To Patrick Miller it seemed like a poor man’s attempt at recreating the student haunts of his own undergraduate days in London.

The students were different. A mixture of shaven heads and pre-Raphaelite shoulder-length hair – and that was the men. The females favoured kohl-ringed eyes and cropped haircuts. The air was smogged with rising clouds of cigarette smoke. And the sweet scent of grass – Miller was sure he could smell it.

He knew that Frau Rosa Rossman was watching him.

He sniffed, smiled. ‘The general didn’t raise any objections to that?’

‘My father has more important battles to fight.’

He wondered what she was driving at. He let it go: better to wait. It wasn’t for his pale body that she had brought him here.

He made to move towards the small counter but she caught his sleeve, gestured with her other hand to a small table. ‘You sit – they know me.’

Heads were raised to watch her thread her way between the tables to the small serving counter. She nodded, smiled, in response to a couple of hellos.

She came
back with two beakers of black coffee. ‘I should have asked – they only do tea or coffee.’

He waved away her concern, thanked her. He thought of saying something – anything – to put her at her ease, facilitate the telling or asking of whatever it was she had brought him to this place for. But he said nothing. It was, after all, her choice, her place. Rosa Rossman didn’t look like somebody who’d have a problem making her point.

Or making her request. In this battened-down world behind the Wall there was always somebody who wanted something from a fellow like himself – a state employee who had clearance to cross into West Berlin at will.

Her opening gambit was simple. ‘You’re wondering why I’ve brought you here, Herr Miller.’

‘It’s not every day I am brought anywhere by a beautiful woman.’ The cigarette smoke from the table behind ringed her like a halo. ‘And my name is Patrick.’

‘And I’m Rosa.’

‘Rosa
Rossman
.’

‘Yes.’

‘In my office you said you were adopted by General Reder.’

The staccato music from the record player behind the counter was something punk, English words bellowed above the pogo-stick beat.

‘I was eighteen when the general and his wife legally adopted me. I asked if I might keep my name and they said it was what they wanted too.’

Miller nodded. ‘I suppose our name wraps up our identity.’
Even if you’re living a lie, like me
.

‘Rossman was my mother’s name.’

‘Naturally – a fine German name.’

She looked at him then, directly, her back seeming to straighten on the paint-peeling kitchen chair. ‘My father was from Chile.’ A pause, pink tongue licking the rose-red lips. ‘Like me.’

‘Not everyone
in England is as nosy as me, Rosa.’
She’s a fucking general’s daughter
.

An elegant shrug, a rippling of the T-shirt. ‘I don’t mind telling you – it’s not as if it’s a secret – but I’d prefer to know about Patrick Miller.’

Miller laughed. The pogo-stick shouting was climbing to a crescendo. ‘I imagine that General Reder knows more about me than myself.’
Or he thinks he does
.

‘Let me summarize what the general has told me, Patrick.’

Miller was almost amused by the schoolmistressy way she ticked off the main events of his life on her elegant fingers; part of him wondered what it would be like to be touched by those hands.

‘One, you are the only son of a doctor, a gynaecologist, whose practice is private, someone whose loathing for your National Health Service is public knowledge. Two, you attended a private school and went from there to the University of London. You started out studying English but switched to modern history. You graduated top of your class in nineteen seventy-two. Three—’

‘Three,’ Miller said, ‘I taught history at a college of further education but was fired after one term for preaching Communist politics in class.’ He grinned. ‘Blah-blah-blah. It’s ancient history.’

‘Hardly
ancient
, Patrick – you’re thirty-nine years old.’

‘So?’

‘So my father says you’re a man of principle. After you lost your job you survived in London doing odd jobs and writing left-leaning articles for small publications.’

‘
Communist Radical
.’ He leaned closer to her. Maybe it was the pounding music of ZERO that had led to Rosa’s choice of coffee-and-talk venue. ‘
Marxist News, Fighting Fist
and god knows what else. I made more money washing dishes in the cafeteria at Euston station.’

‘But
eventually you made it into bigger publications – you became a book reviewer for a magazine called
New States-man
and then got a job as a feature writer at the
Guardian
newspaper.’

‘Where I preached my brand of socialism to middle-class lefties who were senior civil servants and comprehensive school headmasters.’

Rosa looked puzzled. ‘Why do you belittle what you were doing? For some time you were one of England’s most respected left-wing commentators – you spoke often on radio, you appeared on television chat shows. In your own world you had become famous. And then—’

‘And then I resigned in a blaze of publicity and announced that I was going to live in a socialist democracy, a land where ideals were respected, where factory workers and farmhands were the social equals of intellectuals and political leaders and,’ he turned in his chair, gestured airily, ‘and students.’

‘The general says you were a nine-day wonder.’

‘Yes.’ For a minute he was silent, savouring days that he had tried to banish from memory. ‘A nine-day wonder just about says it all.’

‘You announced that you were moving to East Germany—’

‘And the East Germans said it was the first they’d heard of it.’

‘Was it?’

‘Rosa!’ Miller laughed. ‘You know it was – or at least the general knows it was. It’s all in the files.’ Files showing records of hours of interviews after he’d crossed into the Eastern half of the divided city – files that would be accessible to a general of the National Volksarmee.

‘My father
wonders if you think now it was worth it. You gave up your country to be here and, well, not to be offensive, but you’ve been given a job that my father says is,’ she hesitated, ‘“glorified pen-pushing”.’

‘In that case why is the general so interested in me?’ Despite himself, Miller was nettled. ‘In a glorified pen-pusher? My work is vital to the state – I evaluate proposed publications and I pay particular attention to how our publications might be used against us by the capitalist media in the West.’

‘Patrick.’ She laid a hand on his. He became aware that there was a lull in the pounding music, that his raised voice had caused heads to turn. He saw the way the students looked at him, at his suit and collar and tie; he saw the hostility in their faces and then, as their gaze met his, he saw the resentment change to fear as they turned again to their own huddled conversations.

‘I think I’ve outstayed my welcome here,’ he said.

‘D’you mean in ZERO,’ Rosa asked, ‘or in East Germany?’

Miller thought it was a good question. But he wasn’t about to say that to the adopted daughter of General Reder. His passage into East Germany had been conducted in the headlights of publicity – and under the most twisted of threats. And not threats alone: there had been the seductiveness of living under a banner that he had long championed. Now, having lived under the reality of that banner, and in these days of candlelit demonstrations and soldiers on the streets, he was no longer sure what drum he would march to.

None of which was tellable to Rosa Rossman. You could say less and still finish up in the holding cells of the Stasi at Normannenstrasse. And it didn’t pay to think about what might lie beyond that: nobody came out of the Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen in the same condition – either physical or mental – as they had entered it.

Miller decided it
was time to turn the talk in a safer direction.

‘General Reder’s life is an example to us all,’ he said.

‘He has been more than an example to me,’ Rosa said. ‘He gave me back my life, he and his wife both.’

Miller was silent. Maybe now he would learn exactly why he had been brought here, away from the listening tapes of his office.

‘Maybe sometime I’ll tell you how I came to be here, Patrick.’

And once more Miller knew he was being measured, examined, considered for something – but what? – by those ebony eyes.

‘What about your father, Patrick? Were you close?’

You’re not slow to use your clout as a general’s daughter to ask sensitive questions.

‘We got along – up to a point.’

‘The point of politics?’

‘My father is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who thinks the sun shines out of Margaret Thatcher’s you-know-what.’
And an old lech who can’t keep it zipped up
.

‘And he is
Sir
Roger Miller.’

Miller shrugged. ‘A piece of medieval flummery.’

He knew the examination was continuing, that the dark eyes – and the sharp intelligence behind them – were still probing, still assessing. The metal music was pounding again, loud, threatening. The smoke-thick air seemed edged with menace.
Get up from your seat and go – now
.

He stirred in the chair.

Rosa Rossman said something he didn’t catch above the hard rock.

He leaned
closer, straining for her whispered words.

‘The general would like to meet you.’

‘To discuss his book?’

‘Among other things.’

Among other things. Get up and leave now, while you still can.

‘My boss, Director Hartheim, might like to do that particular interview himself.’

‘My father doesn’t wish to meet Herr Hartheim.’

They were both whispering now.

‘But that’s not my call, Rosa.’

She hesitated, shook her head. ‘He doesn’t have to know you’re meeting.’

This had ‘out of bounds’ written all over it. On the other hand, he might learn something to keep Redgrave off his back for a while.

‘But how? You said yourself that we’re always watched.’

‘General Reder will organize it.’

And if Hartheim finds out later, what then? And Hartheim was not the sole problem: technically, Miller’s department was part of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit – what the people called (disparagingly and fearfully) the Stasi. Even a native-born Englishman who had wilfully chosen to live in East Germany could expect no kid-glove treatment in the bowels of Normannenstrasse or Hohenschönhausen.

All this Miller considered in the moments he looked across the formica-topped table in ZERO at the sculpted face of Rosa Rossman. The invitation to meet secretly with General Reder stank to high heaven; only a fool would think otherwise. And yet . . .

And yet Miller, in his seven years in East Germany, had grown tired of watching, listening, looking over his shoulder. He was tired of the cross-border trips to West Berlin, the delivery of information that must seem worthless even to Redgrave, cufflinked and proper in his whispering club off the Haymarket.

After all of it, he
just felt worn and disenchanted. Not to mention how enchanted he was by the voice and face and nearness of Rosa Rossman.