THE INNOCENT
BY IAN McEWAN
Novels
THE CEMENT GARDEN
THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS
THE CHILD IN TIME
THE INNOCENT
Stories
FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES IN BETWEEN THE
SHEETS
Plays
THE IMITATION GAME and OTHER PLAYS
Oratorio
OR SHALL WE DIE?
DOUBLEDAY
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO
SYDNEY AUCKLAND
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. 666 Fifth Avenue, New
York, New York 10103
Doubleday and the portrayal of an anchor
with a dolphin are trademarks of Doubleday,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead,
is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
McEwan, Ian.
The innocent still Ian McEwan. com1st ed. in the
U.s.a.
Copyright [*copy] 1989, 1990 by Ian
McEwan
All Rights Reserved Printed in the United
States of America
June 1990 First Edition in the United States
of America
  TO PENNY
My labours on the Castle Keep were also made
harder, and unnecessarily so (unnecessarily in that
the burrow derived no real benefit from those
labours) by the fact that just at the place where, according
to my calculations, the Castle Keep should be, the
soil was very loose and sandy and had literally to be
hammered and pounded into a firm state to serve as a
wall for the beautifully vaulted chamber. But for such
tasks, the only tool I possess is my
forehead. So I had to run with my forehead thousands and
thousands of times, for whole days and nights, against the
ground, and I was glad when the blood came, for that was
a proof that the walls were beginning to harden; and in that
way, as everybody must admit, I richly paid for
my Castle Keep.
-Franz KAFKA,
The Burrow,
translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
After dinner we saw an amusing film: Bob
Hope in
The Princess and the Pirate.
Then we sat in the Great Hall and listened to
The Mikado
played, much too slowly, on the gramophone. The
PM said it brought back "the Victorian
era, eighty years which will rank in our island history
with the Antonine age." Now, however, "the shadows of
victory" were upon us. ... After this war, continued the
PM, we should be weak, we should have no money and no
strength and we should lie between the two great powers of the
USA and the USSR.
-John COLVILLE, describing dinner with
Churchill at Chequers ten days after the end of the
Yalta Conference.
The Fringes of Power: Ten Downing Street
Diaries, 1939-1955
  it was Lieutenant Lofting who dominated the
meeting. "Look here, Marnham. You've only just
arrived, so there's no reason why you should know the
situation. It's not the Germans or the Russians
who are the problem here. It isn't even the French.
It's the Americans. They don't know a thing.
What's worse, they won't learn, they won't be
told. It's just how they are."
  Leonard Marnham, an employee of the Post
Office, had never actually met an American
to talk to, but he had studied them in depth at his
local Odeon. He smiled without parting
his lips and nodded. He reached into his inside coat
pocket for his silver case. Lofting held
up his palm, Indian greeting style, to forestall the
offer. Leonard crossed his legs, took out a
cigarette and tapped its end several times against the
case.
Lofting's arm shot out across the desk and offered his
lighter at full stretch. He resumed as the young
civilian lowered his head to the flame. "As you can
imagine, there are a number of joint projects,
pooled resources, know-how, that sort of thing. But do
you think the Americans have the first notion of teamwork?
They agree on one thing, and then they go their own way.
They go behind our backs, they withhold information, they
talk down to us like idiots." Lieutenant Lofting
straightened the blotter, which was the only object on
his tin desk. "You know, sooner or later HMG will
be forced to get tough." Leonard went to speak, but
Lofting waved him down. "Let me give you an
example. I'm British liaison for the
intersector swimming match next month. Now, no
one can argue with the fact that we've got the best pool
here at the stadium. It's the obvious place for the
venue. The Americans agreed weeks ago. But
where do you think it's going to be held now? Way down
in the south, in their sector, in some greasy little
puddle. And do you know why?"
Lofting talked on for another ten minutes.
When all the treacheries of the swimming match seemed
to have been set out, Leonard said, "Major
Sheldrake had some equipment for me, and some sealed
instructions. Do you know anything about that?"
"I was coming to that," the lieutenant said sharply. He
paused, and seemed to gather his strength. When he
spoke again he could barely suppress a yodel of
irritation. "You know, the only reason I was sent
up here was to wait for you. When Major
Sheldrake's posting came through, I was meant to get
everything from him and pass it on. As it happened, and this
had nothing to do with me, there was a forty-eight-hour gap
between the major's departure and my arrival."
He paused again. It sounded like he had prepared this
explanation with care. "Apparently the Yanks
kicked up an almighty
  fuss, even though the rail shipment was locked in a
guarded room, and your sealed envelope was in the safe
in the CO'S office. They insisted that someone had
to be directly responsible for the stuff at all
times. There were phone calls to the CO'S office from
the brigadier, which originated with General Staff.
There was nothing anyone could do. They came over in a
lorry and took the lot-envelope, shipment,
the lot. Then I arrived. My new instructions were
to wait for you, which I've been doing for five days,
make sure you are who you say you are and explain the
situation, and give you this contact address."
  Lofting took a manila envelope from his pocket
and passed it across the table. At the same time
Leonard handed over his bona fides. Lofting
hesitated. He had one remaining piece of bad
news.
  "The thing is this. Now that your stuff, whatever it
is, has been signed over to them, you have to be too.
You've been handed over. For the time being, you're their
responsibility. You take your instructions from
them."
  "That's all right," Leonard said.
  "I'd say it was jolly hard luck."
  His duty done, Lofting stood and shook his hand.
  The Army driver who had brought Leonard from
Tempelhof airport earlier that afternoon was waiting in
the Olympic Stadium car park. Leonard's
quarters were a few minutes' drive away. The
corporal opened the trunk of the tiny khaki car, but
he did not seem to think it was his business to lift the
cases out.
  Platanenallee 26 was a modern
building with a lift in the lobby. The apartment was on the
third floor and had two bedrooms, a large living
room, a kitchen-dining room and a bathroom.
Leonard still lived at home with his parents in
Tottenham, and commuted each day to Dollis
Hill. He strode from room to room, turning on
all the lights. There were various novelties. There
was a big wireless with creamy pushbuttons, and a
telephone standing on a nest of coffee tables. By it
was a street plan of Berlin. There was Army issue
furniture-a three- piece suite of smudgy
floral design, a pouf with leather tassels,
  a standard lamp that was not quite perpendicular, and, against
the far wall of the living room, a writing bureau with
fat bow- legs. He luxuriated in the choice of
bedroom, and unpacked with care. His own place.
He had not thought it would give him so much pleasure.
He hung his best, second best and everyday gray
suits in a wardrobe built into the wall whose door
slid at the touch of the hand. On the bureau he
placed the teak-lined, silver-plated cigarette
box engraved with his initials, a going-away
present from his parents. By its side he stood his
heavy indoor lighter, shaped like a neoclassical
urn. Would he ever have guests?
  Only when everything had been arranged to his
satisfaction did he allow himself to sit in the
armchair under the standard lamp and open the envelope.
He was disappointed. It was a scrap of paper torn
from a memo pad. There was no address, only a
name-Bob Glass-and a Berlin telephone number.
He had wanted to spread out the street plan on the
dining table, pinpoint the address, plan his route.
Now he would have to take directions from a stranger,
an American stranger, and he would have to use the
phone, an instrument he was not easy with, despite his
work. His parents did not have one, nor did any of his
friends, and he rarely had to make calls at work.
Balancing the square of paper on his knee, he
dialed painstakingly. He knew how he wanted
to sound. Relaxed, purposeful.
Leonard Marnham here. I think you "we been
expecting me.
  Straightaway a voice rapped out, "Glass!"
  Leonard's manner collapsed into the English
dither he had wanted to avoid in conversation with an
American. "Oh yes, look, I'm terribly
sorry I ..."
  "Is that Marnham?"
  "Actually, yes. Leonard Marnham
here. I think you've been-was
  "Write down this address. Ten
Nollendorfstrasse, off the Nollendorf
Platz. Get here tomorrow morning at eight."
  The line went dead while Leonard was repeating the
address in his friendliest voice. He felt
foolish. In solitude he blushed. He caught
sight of himself in a wall mirror and ap
proached helplessly. His glasses, stained
yellowish by evaporated body fat-this, at least, was
his theory-perched absurdly above his nose. When he
removed them his face appeared insufficient. Along
the sides of his nose were red pressure streaks,
dents in the very bone structure. He should do without his
glasses. The things he really wanted to see were up
close. A circuit diagram, a valve
filament, another face. A girl's face.
His domestic calm had vanished. He paced his
new domain again, pursued by unmanageable longings.
At last he disciplined himself by settling at the dining
table to a letter to his parents. Composition of this kind
cost him effort. He held his breath at the beginning
of each sentence and let it go with a gasp at the end.
Dear Mum and Dad, The journey here was boring but
at least nothing went wrong! I arrived today
at four o 'clock. I have a nice flat with two
bedrooms and a telephone. I haven't met the people
I am working with yet but I think Berlin will be all
right. It's raining here and it's awfully windy. It
looks pretty damaged, even in the dark. I
haven't had a chance to try out my German yet . .
.
Soon hunger and curiosity drove him outdoors.
He had memorized a route from the map and set off
eastward toward Reichskanzlerplatz. Leonard
had been fourteen on V-E Day, old enough to have a
head full of the names and capabilities of combat
planes, ships, tanks and guns. He had
followed the Normandy landings and the advances eastward
across Europe and, earlier, northward through Italy.
Only now was he beginning to forget the names of every
major battle. It was impossible for a young
Englishman to be in Germany for the first time and not think of
it above all as a defeated nation, or feel pride
in the victory. He had spent the war with his granny
in a Welsh village over which no enemy aircraft
had ever flown. He had never touched a gun, or
heard one go off outside a rifle range;
despite this, and the fact that it had been the
Russians who had liberated the city, he
made his way through this pleasant residential
district of Berlin that evening-the wind had dropped and
it was warmer-with a certain proprietorial swagger, as
  though his feet beat out the rhythms of a speech
by Mr. Churchill.
  As far as he could see, the restoration work had been
intense. The pavement had been newly laid, and
spindly young plane trees had been planted out.
Many of the sites had been cleared. The ground had
been leveled off, and there were tidy stacks of old
bricks chipped clear of their mortar. The new
buildings, like his own, had a nineteenth-century
solidity about them. At the end of the street he heard
the voices of English children. An RAF officer and
his family were arriving home-satisfying evidence of a
conquered city.
  He emerged onto Reichskanzlerplatz, which was
huge and empty. By the ocher gleam of newly
erected concrete lampposts he saw a grand
public building that had been demolished down to a
single wall of ground-floor windows. In its
center, a short flight of steps led to a grand
doorway with elaborate stonework and pediments. The
door, which must have been massive, had been blasted
clean away, allowing a view of the occasional
car headlights in the next street. It was hard not
to feel boyish pleasure in the thousand-pounders that had
lifted roofs of buildings, blown their contents away
to leave only facades with gaping windows. Twelve
years before, he might have spread his arms, made his
engine noise and become a bomber for a
celebratory minute or two. He turned down
a side street and found an
Eckkneipe.
  The place was loud with the sound of old men's
voices. There was no one here under sixty, but he was
ignored as he sat down. The yellowing parchment
lampshades and a pea souper of cigar smoke
guaranteed his privacy. He watched the barman
prepare the beer he had ordered with his carefully
rehearsed phrase. The glass was filled, the rising
froth wiped clear with a spatula, then the glass was
filled again and left to stand. Then the process was
repeated. Almost ten minutes passed before his drink was
considered fit to be served. From a short menu in
Gothic script he recognized and ordered
Bratwurst mit Kartoffelsalat.
He tripped over the words. The
waiter nodded and walked away at once, as though
he could not bear to hear his language punished
in another attempt.
Leonard was not yet ready to return to the silence of
his apartment. He ordered a second beer after his
dinner, and then a third. As he drank he became
aware of the conversation of three men at a table behind him.
It had been rising in volume. He had no choice
but to attend to the boom of voices colliding, not in
contradiction but, it seemed, in the effort of making the
same point more forcefully. At first he heard only
the seamless, enfolded intricacies of vowels and
syllables, the compelling broken rhythms, the delayed
fruition of German sentences. But by the time he had
downed his third beer his German had begun
to improve and he was discerning single words whose meanings
were apparent after a moment's thought. On his fourth he
started to hear random phrases that yielded to instant
interpretation. Anticipating the delay in
preparation, he ordered another half-liter. It was
during this fifth that his comprehension of German
accelerated. There was no doubt about the word
Tod,
death, and a little later
Zug,
train, and the verb
bringen.
He heard, spoken wearily into a lull,
manchmal,
sometimes.
Sometimes these things were necessary.
The conversation gathered pace again. It was clear that it was
driven by competitive boasting. To falter was to be
swept aside. Interruptions were brutal; each
voice was more violently insistent, swaggering with finer
instances, than its predecessor. Their consciences
set free by a beer twice as strong as English
ale and served in something not much smaller than pint
pots, these men were reveling when they should have been cringing
in horror. They were shouting their bloody deeds all
over the bar.
Mit meinen blossen Hdnden!
With my own hands! Each man bludgeoned his way
into anecdote, until his companions were ready to cut
him down. There were bullying asides, growls of
venomous assent. Other drinkers in the
Kneipe,
hunched over their own conversations were unimpressed.
Only the barman glanced from time to time in the direction
of the three, no doubt to check the state of their
  glasses.
Eines Tages werden mir alle dafiletter
dankbar sein.
One day everyone"'11 thank me for it. When
Leonard stood and the barman came across to reckon
up the pencil marks on his beermat, he could not
resist turning to look at the three men. They were
older, frailer than he had imagined. One of them
saw him, and the other two turned in their seats. The
first, with all the stagy twinkle of an old drunk,
raised his glass.
"Na, junger Mann, bist wohl Night aus
dieser Gegend, wiePeople Komm her und trink
einen mit uns. Ober!"
Come and join us. Here, barman! But Leonard was
counting deutsche marks into the barman's hand and
pretended not to hear.
  The following morning he was up at six for a bath.
He took time choosing his clothes, lingering over
shades of gray and textures of white. He put
on his second-best suit and then took it off. He
did not want to look the way he had sounded on the
phone. The young man who stood in his y-front
underpants and the extra-thick undershirt his mother had
packed, staring into the wardrobe at three suits and a
tweed jacket, had an intimation of the power of
American style. He had an idea there was
something risible about his stiffness of manner. His
Englishness was not quite the comfort it had been to a preceding
generation. It made him feel vulnerable.
Americans, on the other hand, seemed utterly at
ease being themselves. He chose the sports jacket
and a bright red knitted tie, which was more or less
concealed by his homemade high-necked jumper.
  Ten Nollendorfstrasse was a tall thin
building undergoing renovation. Workmen who were decorating
the hallway had to move their ladders to allow
Leonard up the narrow stairs. The top floor was
already completed and had carpets. Three doors faced
onto the landing; one of them stood ajar. Through it
Leonard could hear a buzzing. Above it a voice
shouted, "Is that you, Marnham? Come in, for
Chrissakes."
  He entered what was partly an office, partly a
bedroom. On one wall was a large map of the city,
and under it was an unmade bed. Glass sat at a
chaotic desk, trimming his beard with an electric
razor. With a free hand he was stirring instant
  coffee into two mugs of hot water. An
electric kettle was on the floor.
  "Sit down," Glass said. "Throw that shirt on
the bed. Sugar? Two?"
  He spooned the sugar from a paper package and
dried milk from a jar, and stirred the cups so
vigorously that coffee slopped onto nearby
papers. The moment the drinks were ready he turned
off the razor and handed Leonard his cup. As
Glass buttoned his shirt, Leonard had a
glimpse of a stocky body beneath wiry black hair
that grew right across the shoulders. Glass buttoned his
collar tightly round a thick neck. From the desk
he picked up a ready-knotted tie attached to a
hoop of elastic that he snapped on as he stood.
He wasted no movements. He took his jacket from
the back of a chair and walked to the wall map as he
put it on. The suit was dark blue, creased and
worn in places to a shine. Leonard was watching.
There were ways of wearing clothes that made them quite
irrelevant. You could get away with anything.
  Glass struck the map with the back of his hand. "You
been around it yet?"
  Leonard, still not trusting himself to avoid more of his
"Well, actually, no," shook his head.
  "I've just been reading this report. One of the things
it says, and this is just anyone's guess, but what they
say is that between five and ten thousand individuals in
this city are working in intelligence. That's not
counting backup. That's guys on the ground.
Spies." He tilted his head and pointed his beard
at Leonard until he was satisfied with the
response. "Most of them are free-lancers,
part-timers, kids,
Hundert Mark Jungen
who hang around the bars. They'll sell you a story
for the price of a few beers. They also buy. You been
over to the Cafe Prag?"
  "No, not yet."
  Glass was striding back to his desk. He had
had no real need of the map after all. "It's the
Chicago futures market down there. You should take
a look."
  He was about five foot six, seven inches
shorter than Leonard. He seemed bottled up in
his suit. He was smiling, but he
  looked ready to wreck the room. As he sat
down he slapped his knee hard and said, "So,
Welcome!" His head hair was also wiry and dark.
It started well up on his forehead and flew
backward, giving him the high-domed appearance of a
cartoon scientist facing into a strong wind. His
beard, in contrast, was inert, trapping light into its
solidity. It protruded as a wedge, like the
beard of a carved wooden Noah.
  From across the landing, through the open door, came the
urinous scent of burned toast smelled at a
distance. Glass bounced up, kicked the door shut
and returned to his chair. He took a long pull
of the coffee that Leonard was finding almost too hot
to sip. It tasted of boiled cabbage. The trick was
to concentrate on the sugar.
  Glass leaned forward in his chair. "Tell me
what you know."
  Leonard gave an account of his meeting with
Lofting. His voice sounded prissy in his ears. In
deference to Glass, he was softening his
t's
and flattening his
a's.
  "But you don't know what the equipment is or what
the tests are that you have to carry out?"
  "No."
  Glass stretched back in his chair and clasped his
hands behind his head. "That dumb Sheldrake. Couldn't
keep his ass still when his promotion came through. He
left no one accountable for your stuff." Glass
looked pityingly at Leonard. "The British.
It's hard to make those guys at the stadium
take anything seriously. They're so busy being
gentlemen. They don't do their jobs."
  Leonard said nothing. He thought he should be
loyal.
  Glass raised his coffee cup at him and
smiled. "But you technical people are different, right?"
  "Perhaps we are."
  The phone rang while he was saying this. Glass
snatched the receiver and listened for half minute and then
said, "No. I'm on my way." He replaced the
phone and stood. He guided Leonard toward the
door. "So you know nothing about the warehouse? No
one's mentioned Altglienicke to you?"
  "I'm afraid not."
  "We're going there now."
  They were on the landing. Glass was using three keys
to lock his door. He was shaking his head and smiling
to himself as he murmured, "Those Brits, that
Sheldrake, that dumb fuck."
This page is blank.

Two
  The car was a disappointment. On his way
to Nollendorfstrasse from the U-Bahn Leonard
had seen a pastel American vehicle with
tailfins and swags of chrome. This was a
dun-colored Beetle, barely a year old, which
seemed to have suffered an acid bath. The paintwork was
rough to the touch. From the interior all comforts had been
stripped away: the ashtrays, the carpets, the
plastic moldings round the door handles, even the
gearstick knob. The silencer was deficient, or
had been tampered with to enhance the effect of a serious
military machine.
  A blur of road surface was visible through a
perfectly round hole in the floor. In this cold and
resonating shell of tin they were creeping under the
bridges of the Anhalter Bahnhof at a roar.
Glass's method was to put the car in fourth and
drive it like an automatic. At nineteen miles
an hour the frame was shuddering. The pace was not
timid but proprietorial; Glass clenched the
top of the wheel in both hands and fiercely surveyed
pedestrians and other drivers. His beard was raised
up. He was an American, and this was the American
sector.
  Once they were on the wider run of Gneisenau
Strasse, Glass opened out to twenty-five miles
an hour and moved his right hand off the steering wheel
to grip the stem of the gearstick.
  "Now," he called out, settling deeper into his
seat like a jet pilot. "We're heading south
to Altglienicke. We've built a radar station just
across from the Russian sector. You've heard of the
AN/APR9? No? It's an advanced receiver.
The Soviets have an airbase nearby, at
Schonefeld. We'll be picking up their
emissions."
  Leonard was uneasy. He knew nothing about
radar. At the G.p.o. research
laboratories his work had been in telephones.
  "Your stuff is in a room there. You'll have testing
facilities. Anything you want, you tell me,
okay? You don't ask anyone else. Is that
clear?"
  Leonard nodded. He stared ahead, sensing a
terrible mistake. But he knew from experience that it
was poor policy to express doubts about a
procedure until it was absolutely necessary. The
reticent made, or appeared to make, fewer
mistakes.
  They were approaching a red light. Glass
dropped his speed to fifteen before riding the clutch
until they had stopped. Then he shifted
to neutral. He turned right around in his seat
to face his silent passenger. "Come on, Marnham.
Leonard. For Chris- sakes, loosen up.
Speak to me. Say something." Leonard was about to say
he knew nothing about radar, but Glass was embarked
on a series of indignant questions. "Are you married
or what? Where did you go to school? What do you like?
What do you think?" It was the changing light and the search
for first gear that interrupted him.
  In his orderly fashion, Leonard dealt with the
questions in reciprocal sequence. "No, I'm not
married. Haven't even been close to it. I'm still
living at home. I went to Birmingham
University, where I did electronics. I found
out last night that I like German beer. And what I
think is that if you want someone to look at radar
equipment-was
  Glass raised his hand. "Don't tell me. It
all comes back to that asshole Sheldrake.
We're not going to a radar station, Leonard. You know
that. I know that. The aerial on the roof connects
to nothing. But you don't have level three clearance
yet. So we are going to a radar station. The
screwup, the real humiliation, is going to come at the
gate. They're not going to let you through. But that's my
problem. You like girls, Leonard?"
"Well, yes, actually, I do, as a matter of
fact." "Fine. We'll do something together tonight." Within
twenty minutes they were leaving the suburbs for flat,
charmless countryside. There were large brown fields
divided by ditches choked with sodden, matted
grasses, and there were bare, solitary trees and
telegraph poles. The farmhouses crouched low in
their domains with their backs to the road. Up muddy
tracks were half-built houses on reclaimed
portions of fields-the new suburbs. There was even
a half- built apartment building rising from the center
of a field. Further on, right by the roadside, were
shacks of recycled wood and corrugated tin which,
Glass explained, belonged to refugees from the
East.
  They turned down a narrower road that tapered off
into a track. Off to the left was a newly surfaced
road. Glass tilted his head back and indicated
with his beard. Two hundred yards ahead, obscured
at first by the stark forms of an orchard that lay behind it,
was their destination. It resolved itself into two
principal buildings. One was two storeys high and
had a gently pitched roof; the other, which ran off from
the first at an angle, was low and gray, like a cell
block. The windows, which formed a single line,
appeared to be bricked in. On the roof of the
second building was a cluster of four globes,
two large, two small, arranged to suggest a fat
man with fat hands extended.
  Close by were radio masts making a fine,
geometric tracery against the dull white sky.
There were temporary buildings, a circular service
road, and a strip of rough ground before the double
perimeter fence began. In front of the second
building were three military trucks and men in
fatigues milling around them, unloading perhaps.
  Glass pulled to the side of the track and stopped.
Up ahead was a barrier, and a sentry standing beside it,
watching them. "Let me tell you about level one.
The Army engineer who built this place is told
he's putting up a warehouse, a regular Army
warehouse. Now, his instructions specify a
basement with a twelve-foot ceiling. That's deep.
That means shifting a hell of a lot of earth, dump
trucks to take it away, finding a site, and so
on. And it isn't the way the Army builds a
warehouse. So the commander refuses to do it till he
has confirmation direct from Washington. He's
taken aside, and at this point he discovers there are
clearance levels, and he's being upgraded
to level two. He's not really building a
warehouse at all, he's told, it's a radar
station, and the deep basement is for special
equipment. So he gets to work, and he's happy.
He's the only guy on site who knows what the
building is really for. But he's wrong. If he
had level three clearance, he'd know it wasn't a
radar station at all. If Sheldrake had briefed
you, you'd know too. I know, but I don't have
authority to upgrade your clearance. But the point is
this-everybody thinks his clearance is the highest there
is, everyone thinks he has the final story. You
only hear of a higher level at the moment you're being
told about it. There could be a level four here. I
don't see how, but I'd only hear about it if I
was being initiated. But you ..."
  Glass hesitated. A second sentry had
stepped out of his hut and was waving them forward. Glass
spoke quickly. "You have level two, but you know there's
a level three. That's a breach, an
irregularity. So I might as well fill you in.
But I'm not going to, not without covering my ass
first."
  Glass drove forward and wound down his window.
He took a card from his wallet and passed
it up to the sentry. The two
  men in the car stared at the midriff buttons on
the soldier's greatcoat.
  Then a friendly, big-boned face filled the window
and spoke across Bob Glass's lap to Leonard.
"You have something for me, sir."
  Leonard was pulling out his letters of introduction from
the Dollis Hill research unit. But Glass
murmured "Christ, no" and pushed the letters out of the
sentry's reach. Then he said, "Move your face,
Howie. I'm getting out."
  The two men walked toward the guard hut. The
other sentry, who had taken up a position in
front of the barrier, kept his rifle raised in
front of him in almost ceremonial style. He
nodded at Glass as he passed. Glass and the first
sentry went into the hut. Through the open doorway it was
possible to make out Glass talking on the phone.
After five minutes he came back to the car and
spoke through the window.
  "I have to go in and explain." He was about to leave
when he changed his mind, opened the door and sat
down. "Another thing. These guys on the gate know
nothing. They don't even know about a warehouse.
They're told it's high security and
they're going to guard it. They can know who you are, but not
what you do. So don't go showing letters. In fact,
give them here. I'll put them through the office
shredder."
  Glass slammed his door hard and strode away,
folding Leonard's letters into his pocket as he
went. He ducked under the barrier and headed toward the
two-storey building.
  Then a bored, Sunday silence settled on
Altglienicke. The sentry continued to stand in the
center of the road. His colleague sat in the hut.
Inside the perimeter wire there was no movement. The
trucks were lost to view, around the other side of the low
building. The only sound was the irregular tick of
contracting metal. The car's tin plate was drawing
in the cold. Leonard pulled his coat around him.
He wanted to get out and walk up and down, but the
sentry made him uneasy. So he banged his hands
together, and tried to keep his feet off the metal
floor, and waited.
  Presently a side door in the low building
opened and two
  men stepped out. One of them turned to lock the
door behind him. Both men were well over six feet
tall. They wore crew cuts, and gray
T-shirts that were untucked from their loose khaki
trousers. They seemed immune to the cold. They had
an orange rugby ball which they lobbed back and forth
as they walked away from each other. They kept on
walking until the ball was arcing through an improbable
distance, spinning smoothly around its longer axis. It
was not a two-handed rugger throw-in but a single-handed
pitch, a sinuous, whiplike movement over the
shoulder. Leonard had never seen an American
football game, never even heard one described.
This routine, with the catches snapping high, right up on
the collarbone, seemed overdemonstrative, too
self-loving, to represent any serious form of game
practice. This was a blatant exhibition of
physical prowess. These were grown men, showing off.
Their only audience, an Englishman in a freezing
German car, watched with disgusted fascination. It
really was not necessary to make such extravagant play
with the outstretched left hand just before the throw, or to hoot
like an idiot at the other man's pitch. But it was a
jubilant uncoiling power that made the orange
ball soar; and the clarity of its flight through the white
sky, the parabolic symmetry of its rise and
fall, the certainty that the catch would not be fumbled, were
almost beautiful, an unforced subversion of the
surroundings-the concrete, the double fence and its
functional y-shaped posts, the cold.
  That two adults should be so publicly playful-that
was what held him, irritated him. Two British
sergeants with a taste for cricket would wait for a team
practice, properly announced, or at least get
up a proper impromptu game. This was all
swank, childishness. They played on. After
fifteen minutes one of them looked at his watch.
They strolled back to the side door, unlocked it
and stepped inside. For a minute or so after they had
gone their absence dominated the strip of last year's
weeds between the fence and the low building. Then that faded.
  The sentry walked the length of the striped barrier,
glanced inside the hut at his companion, then
returned to his position and stamped his feet on the
concrete. After ten minutes Bob
  Glass came hurrying from the two-storey
building. At his side was a U.s. Army
captain. They ducked under the barrier, passing on
both sides of the sentry. Leonard went to get out
of the car, but Glass motioned to him to wind down the
window. He introduced the man as Major
Angell. Glass stepped back and the major leaned
in and said, "Young man, welcome!" He had
a long, sunken face to which his closely shaved stubble
imparted a green hue. He wore black leather
gloves and he was handing Leonard his papers. "I
saved these from the shredder." He dropped his voice in
mock confidentiality. "Bob was being kind of
zealous. Don't carry them around with you in future.
Keep them at home. We'll issue you a
pass." The major's aftershave invaded the cold
car. The smell was of lemon sherbet. "I've
authorized Bob to show you around. I'm not authorized
to make exceptional clearances over the phone, so
I've come out to speak to these guys myself."
  He moved away toward the sentry hut. Glass
got in behind the wheel. The barrier lifted, and as they
passed through the major saluted comically, with only one
finger raised to his temple. Leonard started
to wave, then, feeling foolish, let his hand drop and
forced a smile.
  They parked alongside an Army truck by the
two-storey building. From somewhere around a corner
came the sound of a diesel generator. Instead of
leading Leonard to the entrance, Glass steered him by the
elbow a few steps across the grass toward the fence and
pointed through it. A hundred yards away, across a
field, two soldiers were watching them through
binoculars. "The Russian sector. The Vopos
watch us day and night. They're very interested in our
radar station. They log everyone and everything that comes in
and out of here. They're getting their first sight of you
now. If they see you coming regularly, you might even
get a code name." They walked back toward the
car. "So, the first thing to remember is to behave at
all times like a visitor to a radar station."
  Leonard was about to ask about the men with the ball, but
Glass was leading him around the side of the building and
calling over his shoulder, "I was going to take you to your
  equipment, but what the hell. You might as well
see the action." They turned a corner and passed
between two roaring generator trucks. Glass held
open a door for Leonard which gave onto a short
corridor at the end of which was a door marked NO
unauthorized ENTRY. It was a warehouse after
all, a vast concrete space dimly lit by dozens
of bare light bulbs slung from steel girders.
Bolted metal frame partitions separated the goods,
wooden boxes and crates. One end of the warehouse
was clear, and Leonard could see a forklift
maneuvering across an oil-stained floor. He
followed Glass toward it down an aisle of
packaged goods stenciled FRAGILE.
  "Some of your stuff is still here," Glass said.
"But most of it is already in your room." Leonard
did not ask questions. It was obvious that Glass was
enjoying the slow unveiling of a secret. They stood
by the clearing and watched the forklift. It had stopped
by orderly piles of curved steel sections, about a
foot wide and three feet long. There were scores
of them, hundreds perhaps. Several were being lifted now.
  "These are the steel liner plates. They've been
sprayed with rubber solution to stop them banging around.
We can follow these ones down." They walked behind the
forklift as it began to descend a concrete ramp
into the basement. The driver, a muscular little man in
Army fatigues, turned and nodded at Glass.
"That's Fritz. They all get called Fritz.
One of Gehlen's men. You know who I mean?"
Leonard's answer was choked by the smell that rose
to meet them from below. Glass continued, "Fritz was a
Nazi. Most of Gehlen's people were, but this Fritz
was a real horror." Then he acknowledged
Leonard's reaction to the smell with a deprecating
smile, very much the flattered host. "Yeah, there's a
story behind that. I'll tell you later."
  The Nazi had driven his forklift over to one
corner of the basement and turned the engine off.
Leonard stood at the foot of the ramp with Glass.
The smell came from the earth that covered two thirds
of the basement floor and was piled to the ceiling.
Leonard was thinking of his grandmother-not of her,
exactly, but of the privy that stood at the bottom of
her garden
  under a Victoria plum tree. It was gloomy
in there, just as it was down here. The wooden seat was
worn smooth at the rim, and was scrubbed near
white. This was the smell that rose up through the hole-not
altogether unpleasant, except in summer. It was earth,
and a lurid dampness, and shit not quite neutralized
by chemicals.
  Glass said, "It's nothing like it was."
  The forklift was parked near the rim of a well-lit
hole that was twenty feet or so deep and as much in
diameter. An iron- rung ladder was bolted to one
of the pilings that had been driven into the floor of the
shaft. At the base, cut into the wall of the shaft,
was a round black hole: the entrance to a tunnel.
Various lines and wires fed into it from above. A
ventilation pipe was connected to a noisy pump set
well back against the basement wall. There were field
telephone wires, a thick cluster of
electrical cable, and a hose streaked with
cement, which fed into another, smaller machine which stood
silent beside the first.
  Grouped around the edge of the hole were four or five
of the big men Leonard came to know as the tunneling
sergeants. One of them was attending to a winch perched
on the rim; another was talking into the field
telephone. He raised his hand lazily in
Glass's direction, then turned away to go on
talking. "You heard what he said. You're right under
their feet. Take it apart slowly, and for fuck's
sake don't hit it." He listened and interrupted.
"If you-listen to me, listen to me, no, listen,
listen, if you want to get mad, come up here and do
it." He put down the phone and spoke across the
hole to Glass. "Fucking jack's jammed again.
Second time this morning."
  Glass did not introduce Leonard to any of the
men, and they took no interest in his presence. He was
invisible as he moved around the shaft to get a better
view. It was always to be like this, and he soon learned
the habit himself: you did not speak to people unless their work
was relevant to yours. The procedure evolved partly
out of a concern for security, and partly, he discovered
later, out of a certain virile cult of competence
2 1
I
  that permitted you to brush by strangers and talk past
their faces.
  He had moved around the edge of the hole to witness
an exchange. A small wagon on rails had
emerged from the tunnel into the shaft. On it was a
rectangular wooden box filled with earth. The man
pushing the wagon, who was naked to the waist, had
called up to the man by the winch, who refused to let
down the steel cable and hook. He called down that
since the hydraulic jack was jammed, there was no
point in sending the liner plates to the tunnel face,
in which case the forklift in the basement could not be
unloaded and could not carry away the box of earth if
it was raised. So it might as well stay where it
was.
  The man in the shaft screwed up his face against the
lights shining down on him. He had not heard
clearly. The winch man repeated the explanation. The
tunneler shook his head and put his hands, which were
large, on his hips. The box could be winched up, he
called, and set aside until the forklift was
ready.
  The winch man had his answer ready. He wanted
to use the time to look at the winch's gearing
mechanism. The man in the hole said what the fuck,
that could be done when the box was up. No the fuck it
couldn't, said the man by the winch.
  The man said he was coming up there, and that was fine by the
winch operator, who said he was ready for him.
  The man in the hole glared up at the winch. His
eyes were almost closed. Then he came bouncing up the
rung ladder. Leonard felt sick at the
prospect of a fight. He looked at Glass.
He had folded his arms and cocked his head. The man
was at the top of the ladder, and now he was walking around
the rim, behind the equipment, toward the winch. The man
there was making a point of not looking up from what he was
doing.
  Somehow, lazily, unintentionally, the other
sergeants drifted into the diminishing space between the
two men. There was a soothing confusion of voices. The
tunneler strung out a sequence of obscenities at
the winch man, who was turning a screwdriver into the
machine and did not reply. This was
  the ritual defusion. The indignant man was being
persuaded by the others to use the jack failure to his
own advantage and take a break. At last he
strode toward the ramp, muttering to himself and kicking
at a loose stone.
  When he was gone, the man at the winch spat into the
shaft.
  Glass took Leonard's elbow. "They've
been on the job since last August, eight-hour
shifts around the clock."
  They walked to the administration building by way of a
connecting corridor. Glass stopped by a window and
once more pointed out the observation post beyond the
perimeter wire. "I want to show you how far we've
got. See, behind the Vopos there's a cemetery.
Right behind that there are military vehicles. They're
parked on the main road, the Schonefelder
Chaussee. We're right under them, about to cross the
road."
  The East German trucks were about three hundred
yards away. Leonard could make out traffic on the
road. Glass walked on, and for the first time Leonard
felt irritation at his methods.
  "Mr. Glass-was
  "Bob, please."
  "Are you going to tell me what this is all for?"
  "Sure. It's what concerns you most. On the far
side of that road, buried in a ditch, are
Soviet landlines that link with their high command in
Moscow. All communications between East
European capitals get routed into Berlin and out
again. It's a legacy of the old imperial control.
Your job is to dig upward and lay the taps.
We're doing the rest." Glass was pressing on,
through a set of swing doors into a reception area where
there was fluorescent light, a Coca-Cola
machine and the sound of typing.
  Leonard caught hold of Glass's sleeve.
"Look, Bob. I don't know anything about digging,
and as for actually laying the ... as for the rest of it . .
."
  Glass whooped with glee. He had taken out a
key. "Very funny. I meant the British, you
idiot. This in here is your job." He unlocked the
door, reached in and turned on the light and allowed
Leonard to enter first.
  It was a large, windowless room. Two trestle
tables had been
  pushed against one wall. On them was some basic
circuit-testing equipment and a soldering iron. The
rest of the space was taken up by identical cardboard
boxes piled right to the ceiling, ten deep.
  Glass gave the nearest a gentle kick. "One
hundred and fifty Ampex tape recorders. Your
first job is to unpack them and dispose of the
boxes. There's an incinerator out back. That'll
take you two or three days. Next, every machine
has to have a plug, then it has to be tested. I'll
show you how to order spare parts. You know about signal
activation? Good. They've all got to be adapted.
That'll take you a while. After that you might be
helping with the circuits down to the amplifiers. Then
the installation. We're still digging, so take your time.
We'd like to see these rolling by April."
  Leonard felt unaccountably happy. He
picked up an ohmmeter. It was of German make,
encased in brown bakelite. "I'll need a finer
instrument than this for low resistances. And ventilation.
Condensation could be a problem in here."
  Glass raised his beard, as though in tribute,
and gave Leonard a gentle thump on the back.
"That's the spirit. Be outrageously demanding. We'll
all respect you for it."
  Leonard looked up to gauge Glass's
expression for irony, but he had turned off the
light and was holding the door open.
  "Start tomorrow, 0900 hours. Now, the tour
continues."
  Leonard was shown only the canteen, where hot
food was brought in from a nearby barracks,
Glass's own office and finally the shower room and
lavatories. The American's pleasure in
revealing these amenities was no less intense. He
warned solemnly of the ease with which the toilets
became blocked.
  They remained standing across from the urinals while he
told a story, which faded skillfully into small
talk on the two occasions someone came in.
Aerial reconnaissance had shown that the
best-drained. land, and therefore the best land for
tunneling, lay through the cemetery on the eastern
side. After long discussion, the proposed route was
abandoned. Sooner or later the Russians were going
to discover the tunnel. There was no point in handing them
a propaganda victory in the story of
  Americans desecrating German graves. And the
sergeants would not care for coffins disintegrating above
their heads. So the tunnel struck out to the north of the
graveyard. But then, in the first month of digging, they
had run into water. The engineers said it was a perched
water table. The sergants said come down and smell for
yourselves. By trying to avoid the graveyard, the
planners had routed the tunnel right through the drainage
field of the establishment's own septic tank. It
was too late to change course.
  "You wouldn't believe what we were burrowing through, and
it was all our very own. A putrefying corpse would have
been light relief. And you should have heard the tempers
then."
  They ate lunch in the canteen, a bright room with
rows of Formica tables and indoor plants under the
windows. Glass ordered steak and french fries for
them both. These were the biggest slabs of meat
Leonard had ever seen outside a butcher's. His
overhung the plate, and the following day his jaw still
ached. He caused consternation when he asked for tea.
A search was about to be mounted for the teabags the cook was
certain were in the supplies. Leonard pleaded a
change of mind. He had the same as Glass,
freezing lemonade, which he drank out of the bottle
like his host.
  Afterward, as they were walking to the car, Leonard asked
if he could take home circuit diagrams for the
Ampex recording machines. He could see himself
curled up on the Army issue sofa, reading in the
lamplight while the afternoon gloom settled on the
city. They were on their way out of the building.
  Glass was genuinely irritated. He stopped
to make his point. "Are you crazy? Nothing, nothing
to do with this work ever goes home with you. Is that
understood? Not diagrams, notes, not even a
fucking screwdriver. You got that?"
  Leonard blinked at the obscenity. He took
work home in England, even sat with it on his lap,
listening to the wireless with his parents. He pushed his
glasses up his nose. "Yes, of course.
Sorry."
  As they stepped outside, Glass glanced around
to make cer

  tain no one was close. "This operation is costing the
government, the U.s. government, millions of
dollars. You guys are making a useful
contribution, especially with the vertical tunneling.
You've also supplied the light bulbs. But you know
something?"
  They were standing on either side of the Beetle, looking
at each other over its roof. Leonard felt
obliged to make his face quizzical. He did not
know something.
  Glass had yet to unlock the driver's door.
"I'll tell you. It's all political. You
think we couldn't lay those taps ourselves? You think we
don't have amplifiers of our own? It's for
politics that we're letting you in on this.
We're supposed to have a special relationship with you
guys, that's why."
  They got in the car. Leonard longed to be alone.
The effort of being polite was stifling, and aggression
was, for him, emotionally impossible.
  He said, "It's very kind of you, Bob. Thank
you." The irony fell dead.
  "Don't thank me," Glass said as he turned
the ignition. "Just don't screw up on security.
Watch what you say, watch who you're with.
Remember your compatriots, Burgess and
Maclean."
  Leonard turned aside to look out of his window.
He felt the heat of anger in his face and across his
neck. They passed the sentry hut and shuddered out
onto the open road. Glass moved on to other
topics-good places to eat, the high rate of
suicide, the latest kidnapping, the local
obsession with the occult. Leonard was sulkily
monosyllabic. They passed the refugee shacks,
the new buildings, and soon they were back among the
devastation and reconstruction. Glass insisted on
driving him all the way to Platanenallee. He
wanted to learn the route, and he needed to see the
apartment for "professional and technical
reasons."
  On the way they drove along a section of the
Kurfurstendamm. Glass pointed out with some pride
the brave elegance of new stores flanked by ruins,
the crowds of shoppers, the famous Hotel am
Zoo, the neon Cinzano and Bosch signs
2 6
  waiting to be turned on. By the Kaiser
Wilhelm Memorial Church with its shorn spire
there was even a small traffic jam.
  Glass did not, as Leonard half expected,
search the apartment for concealed listening devices.
Instead he went from room to room, taking up a
central position in each one and looking around before
moving on. It did not seem right that he should go into the
bedroom, with the bed unmade and yesterday's socks on
the floor. But Leonard said nothing. He waited in
the living room, and still thought he was about to hear a
security assessment when Glass came in at
last.
  The American spread his hands. "It's incredible.
It's beyond belief. You've seen where I live. How
does a fucking technical assistant at the Post
Office get a place like this?" Glass glared across
his beard at Leonard as though he really
expected an answer.
  Leonard had no ready means to respond to an
insult. He had not received one in adult life.
He was nice to people, and they were generally nice back
to him. His heart beat hard, confusing his thoughts. He
said, "I expect it was a mistake."
  Without appearing to change the subject Glass
said, "Look, I'll come by round about seven-thirty.
Show you some places."
  He was moving out of the room. Leonard, relieved
that they were not to have a fistfight after all, accompanied
his guest to the front door with earnest, polite
thanks for the morning's tour and for the evening to come.
  When Glass had gone he returned to the sitting
room feeling sick with contradictory,
unarticulated emotion. His breath tasted meaty, like
a dog's. His stomach was still gaseous and tight. He
sat down and loosened his tie.
This page is blank.

Three
  Twenty minutes later he was sitting at the dining
room table filling his fountain pen. He wiped the
nib with a rag he kept for the purpose. He squared
a sheet of paper in front of him. Now that
he had a workplace he was content, despite the
confusion around Glass. His impulse was to set things
in order. He was preparing to write the first shopping
list of his life. He contemplated his needs. It was
difficult to think about food. He was not at all
hungry. He had everything he needed. A job, a
place where he was expected. He would have a pass,
he was part of a team, a sharer in a
  secret. He was a member of the clandestine
elite, Glass's five or ten thousand, who gave
the city its real purpose. He wrote
Salz.
He had seen his mother make her effortless lists on a
sheet of Basildon Bond: 1 lb. mt, 2
lb. crts, 5 lb. pots. Such feeble encodings were
not appropriate to a member of the intelligence
community, one with level three clearance in Operation
Gold. And he could not cook. He considered
Glass's domestic arrangements, crossed out
Salz
and wrote
Kaffee und Zucker.
He consulted his dictionary for powdered milk:
Milchpulver.
Now the list was easy. As it grew longer
he seemed to be inventing and defining himself. He would have
no food in the house, no mess, no mundanity.
At twelve deutsche marks to the pound, he could
afford to eat in a
Kneipe
in the evening and at the Altglienicke canteen during
the day. He looked in the dictionary again and wrote
Tee, Zigaretten, Streichholzer,
Schokolade.
The last was to keep his blood sugar level up when
he worked late at night. He read the list through as
he stood. He felt himself to be precisely what
his list suggested: unencumbered, manly, serious.
  He walked to Reichskanzlerplatz and found a
line of shops in a street near the
Kneipe
where he had eaten his supper. The buildings that had
once faced directly onto the pavement had been
blasted away to expose a second rank of
structures sixty feet back, whose empty upper
storeys had been sliced open to view. There were
three-walled rooms hanging in the air, with light
switches, fireplaces, wallpaper still intact.
In one there was a rusted bed frame; in another a
door opened onto empty space. Further
along, only one wall of a room survived, a
giant postage stamp of weather-stained floral
paper on raised plaster, stuck onto wet
brick. Next to it was a patch of white bathroom
tiles intersected by the scars of waste pipes. On
an end wall was the sawtooth impression of a
staircase zigzagging five storeys up. What
survived best were the chimney breasts, plunging through
the rooms, making a community out of fireplaces that
had once pretended to be unique.
  Only the ground floors were occupied. An
expertly painted board raised high on two posts
and set by the edge of the
  pavement announced each shop. Well-traveled
footpaths curved between rubble and regular stacks of
bricks to entrances sheltering under the hanging rooms.
The shops were well lit, almost prosperous, with as good
a selection as any corner store in Tottenham.
In each shop there was a small queue. Only
instant coffee was unavailable. He was offered ground
coffee. The lady in the
Lebensmittelladen
would only let him have two hundred grams. She
explained why and Leonard nodded as though he had
understood.
  On the way home he had bockwurst and
Coca-Cola at a pavement stall. He was back
at Platanenallee, waiting for the lift, when two
men in white coveralls passed him and began
to climb the stairs. They were carrying paintcans,
ladders and brushes. He met their glances, and there were
mumbled
Guten Tag's
as they edged past him. He was outside his own front
door, searching for his key, when he heard the men
talking on the landing below. The voices were distorted by the
concrete steps and the glossy walls of the stairwell.
The actual words were lost, but the rhythm, the lilt,
was unmistakably London English.
  Leonard left his shopping by his door and called
down: "Hello . . ." At the sound of his own
voice he recognized just how lonely he felt.
One of the men had set down his ladder and was staring up.
"Hello, hello?"
  "You're English, then," Leonard said as he
came down.
  The second man had appeared from the apartment
directly below Leonard's. "We thought you was a
Kraut," he explained.
  "I thought you were too." Now that Leonard
was standing in front of the men, he wasn't sure what
he wanted. They looked at him, neither friendly nor
hostile.
  The first man picked up his ladder again and carried it
into the apartment. "Live here, do you?" he said over his
shoulder.
  It seemed all right to follow him in. "Just
arrived," Leonard said.
  This was a far grander place than his own. The
ceilings were higher, and the hallway was a wide open
space, where his own was little more than a corridor.
  The second man was carrying in a pile of
du/sheets. "Mostly they contract out to the
Krauts. But we've got to do this one ourselves."
  Leonard followed them into a large living room
empty of furniture. He watched them spread their
du/sheets over the polished wooden floor. They
seemed happy to talk about themselves. They were in the
Royal Army Service Corps, national
servicemen who were in no particular hurry to go back
home. They liked the beer and the sausages, and the
girls. They were settling to their work, rubbing down the
woodwork with sandpaper wrapped round rubber blocks.
  The first man, who was from Walthamstow, said, "These
girls comz long as you're not a Russian,
you can't go wrong."
  His friend, from Lewisham, agreed. "They hate the
Russians. When they came in here, May '45,
they behaved like animals, fucking animals. All
these girls, now, see, they all got older
sisters, or mums, or even their fucking
grannies, raped, knifed. They all know someone,
they all remember."
  The first man was kneeling down to the baseboards.
"We got mates who were here in '53, they were on
duty down by Potsdamerplatz when they started
shooting into the crowds, just like that, women with their
nippers." He looked up at Leonard and said
pleasantly, "They're scum, really." And then,
"You're not military, then."
  Leonard said he was a Post Office engineer come
to work on the improvement of the Army's internal
lines. This was the story agreed with Dollis Hill,
and this was his first chance to use it. He felt mean-spirited
in the face of the men's openness. He would have liked
to tell them how he was doing his bit against the
Russians. There was more desultory chat, and then the
men were presenting their backs to him and bending to their work.
  They said their goodbyes, and Leonard returned
upstairs and took his shopping into the apartment.
The task of finding places on the shelves for his
purchases cheered him. He made tea for himself and was
content to sit and do nothing in the
  deep armchair. If there had been a magazine,
he might have read it. He had never been much
interested in reading books. He fell asleep where
he sat, and woke with only half an hour
to prepare himself for his evening out.
This page is blank.

Four
  here was another man sitting in the front passenger
seat of the Beetle when Leonard went down onto the
street with Bob Glass. His name was Russell, and
he must have been watching their approach in the rearview
mirror, for he sprang out of the car as they
approached it from behind and gave Leonard's hand a
ferocious shake. He worked as an announcer for
AFN, he said, and wrote bulletins for
RIAS, the West Berlin radio service. He
wore a gold-buttoned blazer of a shameless Post
Office red, and cream-colored trousers with sharp
creases, and shoes with tassels and no laces.
  After the introductions, Russell pulled a lever
to fold down his seat and gestured Leonard
into the back. Like Glass, Russell wore his
shirt open to reveal a high-necked white
T-shirt underneath. As they pulled away,
Leonard fingered his tie knot in the darkness. He
decided against removing the tie in case the two
Americans had already noticed him wearing it.
  Russell seemed to think it was his
responsibility to impart as much information as possible
to Leonard. His voice was professionally relaxed,
and he spoke without fumbling a syllable or repeating
himself or pausing between sentences. He was on the job,
naming the streets as they passed down them, pointing out
the extent of the bomb damage or a new office
building going up. "We're crossing the Tiergarten
now. You'll need to come by here in daylight. There's
hardly a tree to be seen. What the bombs
didn't destroy, the Berliners burned to keep warm
in the Airlift. Hitler used to call this the
east-west axis. Now it's street of June 17,
named for the uprising the year before last. Up ahead is
the memorial to the Russian soldiers who took the
city, and I'm sure you know the name of this famous
edifice . . ."
  The car slowed down as they passed West Berlin
police and customs. Beyond them were half a
dozen Vopos. One of them shone a torch at the
license plate and waved the car into the Russian
sector. Glass drove beneath the Brandenburg
Gate. Now it was much darker. There was no other
traffic. It was difficult to feel excitement,
however, because Russell's travelogue continued without
modulation, even when the car crashed through a pothole.
  "This deserted stretch was once the nerve center of the
city, one of the most famous thoroughfares in
Europe. Unter den Linden . . . over there, the
real headquarters of the German Democratic
Republic, the Soviet embassy. It stands on
the site of the old Hotel Bristol, once one of the
most fashionable-was
  Glass had been silent all this while. Now he
interrupted politely. "Excuse me,
Russell. Leonard, we're starting you in the East
so you can enjoy the contrasts later. We're going to the
Neva Hotel . . ."
  Russell was reactivated. "It used to be the
Hotel Nordland, a second-class
establishment. Now it has declined further, but it
is still the best hotel in East Berlin."
  "Russell," Glass said, "you badly need a
drink."
  It was so dark they could see light from the Neva
lobby slanting across the pavement from the far end of the
street. When they got out of the car, they saw there was in
fact another light, the blue neon sign of a
cooperative restaurant opposite the hotel, the
H.o, Gastronom. The condensation on the windows was
its only outward sign of life.
  At the Neva reception a man in a brown
uniform silently directed them toward an
elevator just big enough for three. It was a slow
descent, and their faces were too close together under a
single dim bulb for conversation.
  There were thirty or forty people in the bar, silent over
their drinks. On a dais in one corner a
clarinetist and an accordion player were sorting through
sheets of music. The bar was hung with studded,
tasseled quilting of well-fingered pink which was also
built into the counter. There were grand chandeliers, all
unlit, and chipped gilt-framed mirrors.
Leonard was heading for the bar thinking to buy the first round,
but Glass guided him toward a table on the edge of a
tiny parquet dance floor.
  His whisper sounded loud. "Don't let them see
your money in here. East marks only."
  At last a waiter came and Glass
ordered a bottle of Russian champagne. As
they raised their glasses, the musicians began
to play "Red Sails in the Sunset." No one was
tempted onto the parquet. Russell was scanning
the darker corners, and then he was on his feet and
making his way between the tables. He returned with a thin
woman in a white dress made for someone larger.
They watched him move her through an efficient
foxtrot.
  Glass was shaking his head. "He mistook her in
the bad light. She won't do," he predicted, and
correctly, for at the end Russell made a
courtly bow and, offering the woman his arm, saw her
back to her table.
  When he joined them he shrugged. "It's the diet
here," and
  relapsing for a moment into his wireless propaganda
voice, he gave them details of average
calorie consumption in East and West Berlin. Then
he broke off, saying "What the hell," and ordered
another bottle.
  The champagne was as sweet as lemonade and too
gassy. It hardly seemed a serious drink at
all. Glass and Russell were talking about the
German question. How long would the refugees
flock through Berlin to the West before the Democratic
Republic suffered total economic collapse
because of a shortage of manpower?
  Russell was ready with the figures, the hundreds
of thousands each year. "And these are their best people;
three quarters of them are under forty-five. I'll
give it another three years. After that the East
German state won't be able to function."
  Glass said, "There'll be a state as long as
there's a government, and there'll be a government as
long as the Soviets want it. It'll be pretty
damn miserable here, but the Party will get by. You'll
see."
  Leonard nodded and hmmed his agreement, but he
did not attempt an opinion. When he raised his
hand, he was rather surprised that the waiter came over for
him just as he had for the others. He ordered another
bottle. He had never felt happier. They were
deep in the Communist camp, they were drinking
Communist champagne, they were men with
responsibilities talking over affairs of
state. The conversation had moved on to West Germany,
the Federal Republic, which was about to be accepted as
a full member of NATO.
  Russell thought it was all a mistake.
"That's one crappy phoenix rising out of the ashes."
  Glass said, "You want a free Germany, then you
got to have a strong one."
  "The French aren't going to buy it," Russell
said, and turned to Leonard for support. At that
moment the champagne arrived.
  "I'll take care of it," Glass said, and when
the waiter had gone he said to Leonard, "You owe me
seven West marks."
  Leonard filled the glasses and the thin woman and
her girlfriend walked past their table, and the conversation
took another turn. Russell said that Berlin
girls were the liveliest and most strong-minded in all
the world.
  Leonard said that as long as you weren't Russian,
you couldn't go wrong. "They all remember when the
Russians came in '45," he said with quiet
authority. "They've all got older sisters, or
mothers, even grannies, who were raped and kicked
around."
  The two Americans did not agree, but they
took him seriously. They even laughed at
"grannies." Leonard took a long drink as he
listened to Russell.
  "The Russians are with their units, out in
the country. The ones in town-the officers, the
commissars-they do well enough with the girls."
  Glass agreed. "There's always some dumb chick
who'll fuck a Russian."
  The band was playing "How Ya Gonna Keep
"Em Down on the Farm?" The sweetness of the
champagne was cloying. It was a relief when the
waiter set down three fresh glasses and a
refrigerated bottle of vodka.
  They were talking about the Russians again.
Russell's wireless announcer's voice had
gone. His face was sweaty and bright, reflecting the
glow of his blazer. Ten years ago, Russell
said, he had been a twenty-two-year-old
lieutenant accompanying Colonel Frank
Howley's advance party, which had set off for Berlin
in May 1945 to begin the occupation of the American
sector.
  "We thought the Russians were regular guys.
They'd suffered losses in the millions. They were
heroic, they were big, cheerful, vodka-swilling
guys. And we'd been sending them mountains of
equipment all through the war. So they just had to be our
allies. That was before we met up with them. They came
out and blocked our road sixty miles west
of Berlin. We got out of the trucks to greet them with
open arms. We had gifts ready, we were high on
the idea of the meeting." Russell gripped
Leonard's arm. "But they were cold! Cold,
Leonard!
  We had champagne ready, French champagne,
but they wouldn't touch it. It was all we could do to make
them shake us by the hand. They wouldn't let our party through
unless we reduced it to fifty vehicles. They
made us bivouac ten miles out of town. The next
morning they let us in under close escort. They
didn't trust us, they didn't like us. From day one
they had us fingered for the enemy. They tried to stop us
setting up our sector.
  "And that's how it went on. They never smiled.
They never wanted to make things work. They lied, they
obstructed, they were cruel. Their language was always
too strong, even when they were insisting on a
technicality in some agreement. All the time we were
saying, 'What the hell, they've had a crappy
war, and they do things differently anyhow." We
gave way, we were the innocents. We were talking about
the United Nations and a new world order while they were
kidnapping and beating up non-Communist
politicians all over town. It took us
almost a year to get wise to them. And you know what? Every
time we met them, these Russian officers, they
looked so fucking unhappy. It was like they expected
to be shot in the back at any moment. They didn't
even enjoy behaving like assholes. That's why I could
never really hate them. This was policy. This crap was
coming from the top."
  Glass poured more vodka. He said, "I hate
them. It's not a passion with me, I don't go
crazy with it like some guys. You could say it's their
system you gotta hate. But there's no system without
people to run it." When he set his glass down he
spilled a little drink. He pushed his forefinger into the
puddle. "What the Commies are selling is
miserable, miserable and inefficient. Now they're
exporting it by force. I was in Budapest and Warsaw
last year. Boy, have they found a way of minimizing
happiness! They know it, but they don't stop. I
mean, look at this place! Leonard, we brought you
to the classiest joint in their sector. Look at
it. Look at the people here. Look at them!" Glass
was close to shouting.
  Russell put out his hand. "Take it easy,
Bob."
  Glass was smiling. "It's okay. I'm
not going to misbehave."
4 0
  Leonard looked around. Through the gloom he could
see the heads of the customers bowed over their drinks.
The barman and the waiter, who were standing together at the bar,
had turned to face the other way. The two
musicians were playing a chirpy marching song. This was
his last clear impression. The following day he was
to have no memory of leaving the Neva.
  They must have made their way between the tables, ascended
in the cramped elevator, walked past the man in the
brown uniform. By the car was the dark window of a shopping
cooperative, and inside a tower of tinned sardines,
and above it a portrait of Stalin framed in red
crepe paper with a caption in big white letters which
Glass and Russell translated in messy
unison:
The unshakable friendship of the Soviet and German
peoples is a guarantee of peace and freedom.
  Then they were at the sector crossing. Glass had
switched the engine off, torches were shone into the car
while their papers were being examined, there were sounds of
steel- tipped boots coming and going in the darkness.
Then they were driving past a sign that said in four
languages YOU are
  LEAVING THE DEMOCRATIC SECTOR OF
BERLIN, toward another that announced in the same
languages you are now
ENTERING THE BRITISH SECTOR.
  "Now we're in Wittenbergplatz," Russell
called from the front seat.
  They drifted by a Red Cross nurse seated at
the foot of a gigantic model of a candle with a real
flame on top.
  Russell was attempting to revive his
travelogue. "Collecting for the
Spdtheimkehrer,
the late homecomers, the hundreds of thousands of
German soldiers still held by the Russians . .
."
  Glass said, "Ten years! Forget it. They
ain't coming back now."
  And the next thing was a table set among scores of
others in a vast and clamorous space, and a band up
on the stage almost drowning the voices with a jazzed-up
version of "Over There," and a pamphlet attached to the
menu, this time in only German and English, with
clumsy print that swayed and danced.
Welcome to the Ballhouse of technical wonders,
the place of all
places of entertainments. One hundred thousand
contacts are guaranteeing. . ."
The word was an echo Leonard could not place. "dis .
.
are guaranteeing you the proper functioning of the Modern
Table-Phone-System consisting of two hundred and
fifty Tablephone sets. The
Pneumatic-Table-Mail-Service is posting every
night thousands of letters or little presents from one
visitor to the other
-
it is unique and amusing for everyone. The famous
RESI-WATER-ShOWS are magnificent in their
beauty. It is amazing to think, that in a minute
eight thousand liters of water are pressed through about
nine thousand jets. For the play of these changing light
effects there are necessary one hundred thousand colored
lamps."
  Glass had his fingers in his beard and was smiling
hugely. He said something, and had to repeat it at a
shout. "This is better!"
  But it was too noisy to begin a conversation about the
advantages of the Western sector. Colored
water spouted up in front of the band and rose and
fell and lurched from side to side. Leonard
avoided looking at it. They were being sensible by drinking
beer. As soon as the waiter had gone, a girl
appeared with a basket of roses. Russell bought
one and presented it to Leonard, who snapped off the
stem and lodged the flower behind his ear. At the next
table something came rattling down the pneumatic
tube, and two Germans in Bavarian jackets
leaned forward to examine the contents of a canister. A
woman in a sequined mermaid suit was kissing the
bandleader. There were wolf whistles and cheers. The band
started up; the woman was handed a microphone. She
took off her glasses and began to sing "Too Darn
Hot" with a heavy accent. The Germans were looking
disappointed. They stared in the direction of a table some
fifty feet away, where two giggling girls were
collapsing in one another's arms. Beyond them was the
packed dance floor. The woman sang "Night and
Day," "Anything Goes," "Just One of Those
Things," and finally "Miss Otis Regrets."
Then everyone stood to cheer and stamp their feet and shout
"Encore!"
  The band took a break, and Leonard bought another
round of beers. Russell took a good look around
and said he was too
  drunk to pick up girls. They talked
about Cole Porter and named their favorite songs.
Russell said he knew someone whose father had been
working at the hospital when they brought Porter in from
his riding accident in '37. For some reason the
doctors and nurses had been asked not to talk to the
press. This led to a conversation about secrecy.
Russell said there was far too much of it in the world.
He was laughing. He must have known something about
Glass's work.
  Glass was serious in a punchy way. His head
lolled back and he sighted Russell along his
beard. "You know what the best course I ever took
at college was? Biology. We studied
evolution. And I learned something important."
Now he included Leonard in his gaze. "It
helped me choose my career. For thousands, no
millions of years we had these huge brains, the
neocortex, right? But we didn't speak to each
other, and we lived like fucking pigs. There was nothing.
No language, no culture, nothing. And then,
suddenly, wham! It was there. Suddenly it was something
we had to have, and there was no turning back. So why
did it suddenly happen?"
  Russell shrugged. "Hand of God?"
  "Hand of God my ass. I'll tell you
why. Back then we all used to hang out together all
day long doing the same thing. We lived in packs.
So there was no need for language. If there was a
leopard coming, there was no point in saying, "Hey
man, what's coming down the track? A leopard!"
Everyone could see it, everyone was jumping up and down
and screaming, trying to scare it off. But what happens
when someone goes off on his own for a moment's
privacy? When he sees a leopard coming, he knows
something the others don't. And he knows they don't
know. He has something they don't, he has a
secret,
and this is the beginning of his individuality, of his
consciousness. If he wants to share his secret and
run down the track to warn the other guys, then he's
going to need to invent language. From there grows the
possibility of culture. Or he can hang back
and hope the leopard will take out the leadership that's
been giving him a hard time. A secret plan, that
means more individuation, more consciousness."
  The band was starting to play a fast, loud number.
Glass had to shout his conclusion, "Secrecy made
us possible," and Russell raised his beer
to salute the theory.
  A waiter mistook the gesture and was at
his elbow, so a fresh round was ordered, and as the
mermaid shimmered to the front of the band and the cheers
rang out there was a harsh rattling at their table as a
canister shot down the tube and smacked against the
brass fixture and lodged there. They stared at it,
and no one moved.
  Then Glass picked it up and unscrewed the
top. He took out a folded piece of paper and
spread it out on the table. "My God," he shouted.
"Leonard, it's for you."
  For one confused moment he thought it might be from his
mother. He was owed a letter from England. And it was late,
he thought, he hadn't said where he was going to be.
  The three of them were leaning over the note. Their
heads were blocking out the light. Russell read it
aloud.
"An den jungen Mann mit der Blume im
Haar.
To the young man with the flower in his hair.
Mein Schoner,
I have been watching you from my table. I would like it if
you came and asked me to dance. But if you can't do this,
I would be so happy if you would turn and smile in
my direction. I am sorry to interfere. Yours,
table number 89."
  The Americans were on their feet casting around for the
table, while Leonard remained seated with the paper in
his hands. He read the German words over. The
message was hardly a surprise. Now it was before
him, it was more a matter of recognition for him, of
accepting the inevitable. It had always been certain
to start like this. If he was honest with himself, he had
to concede that he had always known it really, at some
level.
  He was being pulled to his feet. They turned him
around and faced across the ballroom. "Look, she's
over there." Across the heads, through the dense, rising
cigarette smoke backlit by stage lights, he
could make out a woman sitting alone. Glass and
Russell were pantomiming a fuss over his
appearance, dusting down his jacket, straightening his
tie, fixing the flower
  more securely behind his ear. Then they pushed him
away, like a boat from a jetty. "Go on!" they
said. "Atta boy!"
  He was drifting toward her, and she was watching his
approach. She had her elbow on the table, and she was
supporting her chin with her hand. The mermaid was singing,
"Don't sit under zuh apple tree viz anyone
else but me, anyone else but me." He
thought, correctly as it turned out, that his life was
about to change. When he was ten feet away she
smiled. He arrived just as the band finished the song.
He stood swaying slightly, with his hand on the back
of a chair, waiting for the applause to die, and when it
did Maria Eckdorf said in perfect but sweetly
inflected English, "Are we going to dance?"
  Leonard touched his stomach lightly,
apologetically, with his fingertips. Three entirely
different liquids were sitting in there.
  He said, "Actually, would you mind if I sat
down?" And so he did, and they immediately held hands,
and many minutes passed before he was able to speak another
word.
This page is blank.

Five
  Her name was Maria Louise Eckdorf, she was
thirty years old and she lived on
Adalbertstrasse in Kreuzberg, a
twenty-minute ride from Leonard's flat. She
worked as a typist and translator at a small
British Army vehicle workshop in Spandau. There
was an ex-husband called Otto who appeared
unpredictably two or three times in a
year to demand money and sometimes smack her head. Her
apartment had two rooms and a tiny curtained-off
kitchen and was reached by five flights of a gloomy
wooden staircase. On every landing there were voices through
doors. There was no
  running hot water, and the cold tap was kept at
a dribble in winter to stop the pipes freezing up.
She had learned her English from her grandmother, who had
been the German tutor at a school for English
girls in Switzerland before and after the Great War.
Maria's family had moved to Berlin from
Diisseldorf in 1937, when she was twelve.
Her father had been area representative for a company
that made gearboxes for heavy vehicles. Now her
parents lived in Pankow, in the Russian
sector. Her father was a ticket collector on the
railways, and these days her mother had a job too,
packing light bulbs in a factory. They still
resented their daughter for the marriage she had made
at twenty against their wishes, and took no
satisfaction in the fulfillment of all their worst
predictions.
  It was unusual for a childless woman to be living
contentedly alone in a one-bedroom apartment.
Accommodation was scarce in Berlin. The
neighbors on her landing and on the one below kept their
distance, but those on the lower floors, the ones who
knew less about her, were at least polite. She had
good friends among the younger women at the workshop. The
night she met Leonard she was with her friend Jenny
Schneider, who danced all evening with a French Army
sergeant. Maria also belonged to a cycling club, whose
fifty-year-old treasurer was forlornly in love with
her. The April before someone had stolen her bike from
the cellar of the apartment house. Her ambition was
to perfect her English and to qualify one day as an
interpreter in the diplomatic service.
  A few of these facts Leonard came by after he
had stirred himself to move his chair to exclude
Glass and Russell from his view and order a
Pimms and lemonade for Maria and another beer for
himself. The rest were accumulated slowly and with
difficulty over many weeks.
  The morning after the Resi he was outside the
gates at Altglienicke by eight-thirty, half
an hour early, having walked the final mile from
Rudow village. He was sick, tired, thirsty and
still a little drunk. On his bedside table that morning
he had found a scrap torn from a cigarette
packet. On it Maria had written her
address, and it was in his pocket now. On the
4 8
  U-Bahn he had taken it out several times.
She had borrowed a pen from Jenny's friend, the French
sergeant, and written it down using Jenny's back
for support, while Glass and Russell waited
in the car. In Leonard's hand was his radar station
pass. The sentry took it and stared hard at his
face.
  When Leonard arrived at what he now thought of as
his room, he found the door open and three men
inside packing up their tools. From the look of them
they had been working all night. The Ampex boxes
had been piled in the center. Bolted to all the
walls was shelving, deep enough to take an unpacked
machine. A set of library steps provided
access to the higher shelves. A circular hole had
been cut in the ceiling for a ventilator duct, and a
metal grill had just been screwed in place. From
somewhere above the ceiling came the sound of an
extractor fan. As Leonard stepped aside
to let a fitter carry his ladder away, he saw a
dozen boxes of electrical plugs and new
instruments on the trestle table. He was examining them
when Glass appeared at his side with a
hunting knife in a green canvas sheath. His beard
shone in the electric light.
  He spoke without preliminaries. "Open them with
this. Do ten at a time, get them on the shelves, then
carry the cardboard round the back and burn it right
down to ashes. Whatever you do, don't go round the
front with it. They'll be watching you. Don't let
the wind take anything away. You wouldn't believe
it, but some genius has stenciled serial numbers on
the boxes. When you're out of this room, keep it
locked. This is your key, your responsibility.
Sign for it here."
  One of the workmen returned and began searching the
room. Leonard signed and said, "That was a good
evening. Thanks." He wanted Bob Glass
to ask him about Maria, to acknowledge his triumph.
But the American had turned his back and was looking
at the shelves. "As soon as they're up, they'll
need to go under du/sheets. I'll have some brought
around." The fitter was on his hands and knees staring at
the floor. With the toe of his brogues, Glass
pointed to a bradawl.
  "That really was quite a place," Leonard insisted.
"In fact, I'm feeling a bit shaky this
morning."
  The man picked up the tool and left. Glass
kicked the door shut after him. From the tilt of the
beard, Leonard knew he was in for a telling-off.
  "Listen to me. You think this is unimportant,
opening boxes and burning the packing. You think it's
something the janitor should do. Well, you're wrong.
Everything, but
everything
on this project is important, every detail. Is
there any good reason why you should let a craftsman
know that you and I were out drinking together last night? Think
it through, Leonard. What would a senior liaison
officer be doing out with a technical assistant from the
British Post Office? This craftsman is a
soldier. He could be in a bar with his buddy, and they
could be talking it over in a harmless, curious sort
of way. Sitting on the next stool is a bright
German kid who's learned to keep his ears open.
There are hundreds of them all over town. Then
he's straight down to the Cafe Prag or wherever with
something to sell. Fifty marks' worth, twice that
if he's lucky. We're digging right under their
feet, we're in their sector. If they get wise
they'll shoot to kill. They'd be well within their
rights."
  Glass came closer. Leonard was
uncomfortable, and not only because of the other man's
proximity. He was embarrassed for Glass. The
performance was overdone, and Leonard felt the burden
of being its sole audience. Once again, he was
unsure how to set his face. He could smell the
instant coffee on Glass's breath.
  "I want you to get into a whole new state of
mind on this. Anything you're about to do, pause and think
of the consequences. This is a war, Leonard, and you're
a soldier in it."
  When Glass had gone, Leonard waited, then
opened his door and looked both ways down the
corridor before hurrying to the water fountain. The
water was refrigerated and tasted of metal. He
drank for minutes on end. When he returned to the
room, Glass was there. He shook his head and held
up the key Leonard had left behind. He pressed
it into the Englishman's hand and closed his fingers around
it and left without a word. Leonard blushed through his
hangover. To steady himself, he reached into his
pocket for the address. He leaned against the
  boxes and read it slowly.
Erstes Hinterhaus, funfter Stock rechts,
Adalbertstrasse 84.
He ran his hand along the surface of the box. The
pale cardboard was almost skin color. His heart was
a ratchet; with each thud he was wound tighter,
harder. How would he open all these boxes in this
state? He pressed his cheek against the cardboard.
Maria. He needed relief, how else could he
clear his mind? But the possibility of Glass
returning again unexpectedly was equally unbearable.
The absurdity, the shame, the security
implications-he could not think which was worse.
  With a moan, he put the scrap away and reached
for a box on top of the pile and heaved it to the floor.
He drew the hunting knife from its sheath and plunged
it in. The cardboard yielded easily, like flesh,
and he felt and heard something brittle shatter at the
knife's tip. He experienced a thrill of
panic. He cut away the lid, pulled clear
handfuls of wood shavings and compressed sheets of
corrugated paper. When he had cut away the
cheesecloth wrapping around the tape recorder, he
could see a long diagonal scratch across the area that
would be covered by the spools. One of the control knobs
had split in two. With difficulty he cut away
the rest of the cardboard. He lifted the machine out,
fitted a plug and carried it up the library
steps to the topmost shelf. The broken knob he
put in his pocket. He could fill in a form for a
replacement.
  Pausing only to remove his jacket, Leonard
set about opening the next box. An hour later there
were three more machines on the shelf. The sealing tape
was easily cut, and so too were the lids. But the
corners were heavily reinforced with layers of cardboard
and staples that resisted the knife. He decided
to work without a break until he had unpacked his first
ten machines. He had them all on their shelves
by lunchtime. There was a pile of flattened cardboard
by the door five feet high and beside it a heap of
wood shavings that reached up to the light switch.
  The canteen was deserted but for one table of black
tunneling sergeants, who paid him no attention. He
ordered steak and french fries and lemonade again. The
sergeants spoke in
  low murmurs and chuckles. Leonard strained
to overhear. He discerned the word
shaft
several times and assumed they were being indiscreet
by talking shop. He had just finished eating when
Glass came in and sat down at his table and asked
how the work was going. Leonard described his
progress. "It's going to take longer than you
thought," he concluded.
  Glass said, "It sounds right to me. You'll do ten
in the morning, ten in the afternoon, ten in the evening.
Thirty a day. Five days. Where's the problem?"
  Leonard's heart was racing because he had decided
to speak his mind. He downed his lemonade.
"Well, actually, as you know, my field is
circuitry, not box opening. I'm prepared to do
anything within reason because I know it's important.
But I do expect to have some time to myself in the evenings."
  At first Glass did not reply, nor did he
show any expression. He watched Leonard,
waiting for more. Finally he said, "You want to talk
about hours? And job demarcation? Is this the British
Commie trade union talk we keep hearing about?
From the moment you got your clearance, your job here is
to do what you're told. If you don't want the
job, I'll cable Dollis Hill and have them
recall you." Then he stood and his expression
relaxed. He touched Leonard on the shoulder and said
before walking away, "Stick with it, pal."
  And so for a week or more Leonard did nothing but
stab open cardboard boxes and burn them and fit a
plug on each machine, label it and stow it
on the shelves. He worked a fifteen-hour day.
He spent hours commuting. From Platanenallee he
took the U-Bahn as far as Grenzallee, where
he caught the 46 bus to Rudow. From there it was a
twenty- minute walk along a charmless stretch of
country road. He ate in the canteen and at a
Schnellimbiss
on Reichskanzlerplatz. He could think about her
while he traveled or poked at burning cardboard
boxes with his long pole or stood up to his diet
of bratwurst. He knew that if only he had a
little more leisure and were a little less tired he could be
obsessed, he could be a man in love. He needed
to sit down without dozing off and give the matter
mental devotion. He needed that time edged with
  boredom in which fantasy could flourish. The work
itself obsessed him; even the repetition of demeaning
low-level tasks was mesmerizing for one of his
orderly nature, and presented a genuine
distraction.
  Dressed like Father Time in a school play, in a
borrowed bush hat, an Army cape that reached to his
ankles, and overshoes, and equipped with a long
wooden pole, he spent many hours tending his fire.
The incinerator turned out to be a
perpetual, feeble bonfire, inadequately
protected on three sides against the wind and rain
by a low brick wall. Nearby were two dozen
dustbins and beyond them a workshop. Across a muddy
track was a loading bay where Army trucks backed
in and out all day with a grind of low gears. He was under
strict instructions not to leave the fire until it had
burned right down each time. Even with the help of
gasoline, there were some sheets that could do little more than
smolder.
  In his room he was obsessed by the diminishing pile
of boxes on the floor and the growing number of
machines on the shelves. He persuaded himself he was
emptying the boxes for Maria. This was the test of
endurance, the labor he had to perform to be worthy.
This was the work he dedicated to her. He tore into the
cardboard with his hunting knife and destroyed it for her
sake. He also thought how much bigger his room would be
when his task was complete, and of how he would rearrange
his work space. He planned lighthearted notes
to Maria, suggesting with skillful unconcern that they
meet in a pub near her flat. By the time he was
home in Platanenallee, not so long before
midnight, he was too tired to remember the
precise order of words, and too tired
to begin again.
  Years later, Leonard had no difficulty at
all recalling Maria's face. It shone for him, the
way faces do in certain old paintings. In fact
there was something almost two-dimensional about it; the
hairline was high on the forehead, and at the other end
of this long and perfect oval, the jaw was both
delicate and forceful, so that when she tilted her head
in a characteristic and endearing way, her face appeared as
a disk, more of a plane
  than a sphere, such as a master artist might
draw with one inspired stroke. The hair itself was
peculiarly fine, like a baby's, and often wriggled
free of the childish clips women wore then. Her
eyes were serious, though not mournful, and were green or
gray, according to the light. It was not a lively,
animated face. She was a habitual daydreamer,
often distracted by a line of thought she was unwilling
to share, and her most typical expression was one of
dreamy watchfulness, the head slightly lifted and
tipped an inch or so to one side, the forefinger of her
left hand playing with her lower lip. If one spoke
to her after a silence, she might jump. It was the
sort of face, the sort of manner, onto which men were
likely to project their own requirements.
One could read womanly power into her silent
abstraction, or find a childlike dependency in
her quiet attentiveness. On the other hand, it was
possible she actually embodied these contradictions.
For example, her hands were small, and she cut her
fingernails short, like a child's, and never painted them.
But she did take care to paint her toenails a
lurid red or orange. Her arms were thin, and it was
surprising what slight loads she could not raise,
what unjammed windows she could not shift. And yet
her legs, though slim, were muscular and powerful,
perhaps from all the cycling she did before the gloomy
treasurer scared her off and her bike was stolen from the
communal cellar.
  For the twenty-five-year-old Leonard, who had
not seen her for five days, who struggled all day with
cardboard and wood shavings, and whose only token was the
smaller piece of cardboard bearing her address, the
face was elusive. The more intensely he summoned
it, the more provocative was its disintegration. In
fantasy he had only an outline to play with, and
even that wavered in the heat of his scrutiny. There were
scenes he wanted to play out, approaches that had
to be tested, and all his memory would permit was a
certain presence, sweet and alluring, but
invisible. And the inner ear was deaf to the way she had
intoned an English sentence. He began to wonder
if he would recognize her in the street. All he
knew for certain was the effect on himself of spending
ninety minutes
  with her at a table in a dance hall. He had
loved the face. Now the face was gone and all that
remained was the love, with too little to feed on. He
had to see her again.
  He had lost count of the days. It was on the eighth
or ninth that Glass let him rest. All the
machines had been unpacked, and twenty-six of them
had been tested and fitted with signal activation.
Leonard slept in an extra two hours, dozing
in an erotic fug of bed warmth. Then he shaved and
took a bath, and with only a towel around his waist
strolled about the apartment, rediscovering it and feeling
grand and proprietorial. He heard the scrape
of the decorators' stepladder downstairs. It was a
workday for everyone else, Monday perhaps. He had time
at last to experiment with his ground coffee. It was not
an outright success, with the grounds and undissolved
milk powder rolling with the convection in the cup, but he
was happy to be breakfasting alone on Belgian
chocolate, poking his bare feet between the
blades of the scalding radiator and planning his
campaign. There was a letter from home to read. He
opened it casually with a knife, as though receiving letters was
what he did every morning at breakfast.
"Just a line to say thanks for yours and glad you "re
settling in . . ."
  He had it in mind to work on his undemanding note
to Maria, but it did not seem right to start that until
he was fully dressed. Then, when he was, and the letter
was written
(you were kind enough to give me your address last week
when we met at the Resi, so I hope you won't
be troubled to hear from me, or feel obliged to reply
. . . were,
the thought of waiting at least three days for her answer
was more than he could bear. By then he would be back in the
dream world of his windowless room and fifteen-hour day.
  He poured a second cup of coffee. The
grounds had sunk. He had another plan. He would
deliver a note for her to find when she came in from
work. He would write that he happened to be passing and
would be in a certain
Kneipe
on a certain nearby street at six o'clock. He
could fill the blanks in later. He set
to immediately. Half a dozen drafts later he was still
not satisfied. He wanted to be eloquent and
casual. It was impor

  tant that she should think he had scribbled the note
as he stood outside her door, that he had called
by hoping to find her in and only then remembered that she
went out to work. He did not want her to feel under
pressure, and, more important, he did not want
to appear earnest and foolish.
  By lunchtime his attempts lay all about him and the
final copy was in his hands. still
happened to be in your area so I thought I'd pop up
and say hello.
He folded it into an envelope, which he sealed in
error. He took the knife and opened it, imagining
himself to be her, alone at her table, just in from work.
He spread the letter out and read it twice, as she
might. It was perfectly judged. He found another
envelope and stood. There were all the hours of the afternoon
before him, but he knew there was nothing he could do to stop
himself leaving now. He was in the bedroom changing
into his best suit. He was taking the worn scrap
of cardboard from yesterday's trousers, even though he
had memorized the address. He had the
street plan opened out on the unmade bed. He was
thinking of his bright red knitted tie. He was
unbuttoning his traveling shoe-care kit and buffing his
best black shoes as he studied his route.
  To fill out the time and to savor the expedition, he
walked to the Ernst-Reuter-Platz station before taking
the U-Bahn to Kottbusser Tor in
Kreuzberg. Almost too soon he was on
Adalbertstrasse. No. 84 would be less than a
five-minute walk. Here was the worst bomb
damage he had seen. It would have been dismal enough without
it. There were apartment-house facades drilled
by small-arms fire, especially around the doors and
windows. Every second or third building had a
gutted interior and was without its roof. Whole
structures had collapsed, and the rubble lay where it
had fallen, with roof beams and rusted guttering poking
from the heaps. After almost two weeks in the city,
during which he had shopped, eaten, commuted and worked, his
earlier pride in its destruction seemed puerile,
repellent.
  As he crossed Oranienstrasse and saw
building work on a cleared site, he was pleased.
He also saw a bar and went toward
  it. It was called Bei Tante Else,
and it would do. He took out his note and inserted the name
and the street in the blanks. Then, as an afterthought, he
stepped inside. He paused beyond the leather curtain
to accustom his eyes to the dark. It was a cramped and
narrow place, almost a tunnel. Beyond the bar was a
group of women drinking at one of the tables. One of
them fingered the base of her neck to draw attention
to Leonard's tie and pointed.
"Keine Kommunisten hier!"
Her friends laughed. For a moment he thought from their
manner and faked glamour they might all have just come from
a boisterous office party. Then he realized they were
prostitutes. Elsewhere there were men asleep with their
heads on the tables. As he backed out, another of the
women called after him, and there was more laughter.
  Back on the pavement, he hesitated. This was
no place to meet Maria. Nor did he wish
to sit in there alone and wait for her. On the other
hand, he could not alter his note without ruining its
casual appearance, so he decided he would wait
outside in the street, and when Maria came he would
apologize and confess his ignorance of the area. It
would be something to talk about. It might even strike her
as funny.
  No. 84 was an apartment building like all
the others. A curving line of bullet marks above the
tops of the ground-floor windows was probably
machine-gun fire. A wide entrance brought him
into a dark central courtyard. Weeds were growing between
the cobblestones. Recently emptied dustbins lay
on their sides. It was quiet. Kids were still at
school. Indoors, late lunches or suppers were
being prepared. He could smell cooking fat and
onions. Suddenly he missed his daily steak and
chips.
  Across the courtyard was what he took to be the
Hinterhaus.
He walked to it and stepped through a narrow doorway.
He was at the base of a steep wooden staircase.
There were two doors on each landing. He rose through
babies" cries, wireless music, laughter and,
higher up, a man calling with a plaintive stress
on the second syllable, "Papa? Papa?
Papa?" He was an intruder. The elaborate
dishonesty of his mission began to
  oppress him. He took the envelope from his
pocket, ready to post it through the door and descend as
quickly as he could. Her apartment was at the very top.
Its ceiling was lower than the rest, and this too made
him anxious to leave. Her door was a
freshly painted green, unlike the others. He
pushed the envelope through, and then he did an
inexplicable thing, quite out of character.
  His upbringing had instilled a simple faith in the
inviolability of property. He never took a
short cut if it involved trespass, he never
borrowed without first asking permission, and he never
stole from shops like some of his friends at school. He was
an overscrupulous observer of other people's
privacy. Whenever he came across lovers kissing in
a private place, he always felt it proper
to avert his eyes, even though he longed to go closer and
watch. So it made no sense now that without pausing
to reflect, and without even a cursory knock on the
door, he took hold of the handle and turned it.
Perhaps he expected it to be locked, and perhaps therefore
this was one of those meaningless little actions with which daily
life is filled. The door yielded to him and
swung open wide, and there she was, standing right before
him.
Six
  he apartments at the rear of the old Berlin
buildings were traditionally the cheapest and most
cramped. They had once housed the servants, whose
masters lived in the grander quarters at the
front, facing the road. Those at the rear had
windows facing onto the courtyard, or across a narrow
space to the next building. It was a mystery, then,
which Leonard never bothered to penetrate, how late-
afternoon winter sunshine was able to spill out from the open
bathroom door across the floor between them, a
reddish-gold slanting pillar of light that picked out
motes turning in the air.
  It could have been light reflected from an adjacent
window; it did not matter. At the time it seemed an
auspicious sign. Just in front of the wedge of
sunlight lay the envelope. Beyond it, perfectly
still, stood Maria. She wore a thick tartan
skirt and a red cashmere sweater, American made,
a present from the devoted treasurer which she had neither
the selflessness nor the hardness of heart to return.
  They stared at each other across the light, and neither of
them spoke. Leonard was trying to formulate a
greeting in the form of an apology. But how
to explain away something so willed as the opening of a
door? Confusing his responses was his joy in having
her beauty confirmed. He had been right to be so
disturbed. For her part, during the seconds before she
recognized him, Maria had been immobilized
by fear. This sudden apparition stirred
ten-year-old memories of soldiers, usually in
pairs, pushing open doors unannounced. Leonard
misjudged her expression as the understandable hostility
of a householder for an intruder. And he misread the
quick faint smile of recognition and relief as
forgiveness.
  Testing his luck, he advanced a couple of steps
and put out his hand. "Leonard Marnham," he said.
"You remember. The Resi?"
  Even though she no longer felt she was in danger,
Maria took a step backward and crossed her arms
over her chest. "What do you want?"
  It worked in Leonard's favor that he was so put
out by such a direct question. He blushed, fumbled, and
then for an answer picked up the envelope and handed it
to her. She opened it, spread out the single sheet, and
before reading glanced over the top to make sure he was
coming no closer. The flash of the whites of those serious
eyes! Leonard stood helpless. He remembered
his father reading his mediocre end-of-term reports in his
presence. Just as he had imagined, she read the note
over twice.
  "What does it mean, this "pop up"? Just
to open my door, is this a pop up?" He was about
to offer an explanation, but she was beginning
to laugh. "And you wish that I come to Bei
  Tante Else? Tante Else, the
Nuttenkneipe?"
To his amazement, she began to sing. It was from a
number they were always playing on AFN, "Take
Back Your Mink." What made him think that she was
one of those girls? To be mocked by the impossible
sweetness of a German girl's attempt at a
Bronx accent-Leonard thought he might faint.
He was miserable, he was exhilarated. Desperate
for composure, he used his little finger to settle his
specs on the bridge of his nose. "Actually,"
he began, but she was stepping round him to the door and
saying mock sternly, "And why have you come to see me
without the flower in the hair?" She closed the door and
locked it. She was all smiles as she clasped her
hands. It really seemed to be the case, she was
delighted to see him. "Now," she said. "Isn't it
time for tea?"
  The room they were in was approximately ten feet
by ten. Without standing on tiptoe, Leonard could
press his palm against the ceiling. The view from the
window was across the courtyard to a wall of similar
windows. By standing up close and peering down, it was
possible to see the dustbins lying on their
sides. Maria had removed an advanced English
grammar from the only comfortable chair so that he could sit
while she busied herself in the curtained recess.
Leonard could see his breath in the air, so he kept
his coat on. He had grown used to overheated
American interiors at the warehouse, and every room
in his apartment had a ferocious radiator regulated
from somewhere in the basement. He was shivering, but here even
the cold was charged with possibility. He was sharing it
with Maria.
  By the window was a dining table on which stood a
cactus in a bowl. Next to it was a candle in a
wine bottle. There were two kitchen chairs, a
bookcase and a stained Persian rug laid on bare
boards. Pinned to the wall by what Leonard took
to be the bedroom door was a black-and-white
reproduction of Van Gogh's
Sunflowers,
cut out from a magazine. There was nothing else to look
at apart from a jumble of shoes in a corner heaped
around an iron cobbler's last. Maria's room could
not have resembled less the polished and orderly
clutter of the
  Marnham living room in Tottenham, with its
mahogany radiost record player and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in a special case. This room made no
claims. It would be possible to leave tomorrow without
regret, taking nothing. It was a room that managed
to be both spare and untidy. It was grubby and
intimate. It might be possible to say exactly
what you felt here. You could begin again with yourself. To one
who had grown up edging round his mother's porcelain
figurines, ever careful not to mark her walls with his
fingers, it was strange and wonderful that this unfussy
stripped-down room should belong to a woman.
  She was emptying a teapot into the small kitchen
sink where two saucepans balanced on top of a
pile of dirty plates. He was sitting at the
dining table watching the thick material of her skirt,
how it moved in delayed motion, how the warm cashmere
just covered the tops of the pleats and how she wore
football socks inside carpet slippers. All
this winter wool was reassuring to Leonard, who felt
easily threatened by a provocatively dressed
woman. Wool suggested undemanding intimacy, and
body warmth, and a body hiding cosily,
demurely, in the folds. She was making tea in the
English style. She had a coronation caddy, and she
was warming the pot. This too put Leonard
at his ease.
  In response to his question, she was telling him that
when she had first started work at Twelve Armoured
Workshops, REME, it had been her job to make
tea three times a day for the CO and the
second-in-command. She set down on the table
two Army issue white mugs, exactly the same
as the ones he had in his apartment. He had been
entertained to tea a number of times by young women, but
he had never met one who did not trouble to decant the
milk into a jug.
  She sat across from him and they warmed their hands around
the big mugs. He knew from experience that unless he
made a formidable effort, a pattern was waiting
to impose itself: a polite inquiry would elicit a
polite response and another question. Have you lived here
long? Do you travel far to your work? Is it your afternoon
off? The catechism would have
  begun. Only silences would interrupt the
relentless tread of question and answer. They would be
calling to each other over immense distances, from
adjacent mountain peaks. Finally he would be
desperate for the relief of heading away with his own
thoughts, after the awkward goodbyes. Even now, they had
already retreated from the intensity of their
greeting. He had asked her about tea making. One
more like that, and there would be nothing he could do.
  She had set down her mug and had put her hands
deep in the pockets of her skirt. She was tapping
her slippered feet on the rug. Her head was
cocked, with expectation perhaps, or was she marking time
to the tune in her head? Was it still the song she had
teased him with? He had never known a woman tap her
feet, but he knew he must not panic.
  It was an assumption, lodged deep, beyond
examination or even awareness, that the responsibility
for the event was entirely his. If he could not find the
easy words to bring them closer, the defeat would be his
alone. What could he say that was neither trivial nor
intrusive? She had taken up her mug again and was
looking at him now with a half-smile that did not quite
part her lips. "Aren't you lonely living here
by yourself?" sounded too wheedlingly suggestive. She
might think he was offering to move in.
  Rather than tolerate more silence, he settled after
all for small talk and began to ask, "Have you lived
here long?"
  But all in a rush she spoke over him, saying,
"How do you look without your glasses? Show me,
please." This last word she elongated beyond
what any native speaker would have considered
reasonable, unfurling a delicate, papery thrill
through Leonard's stomach. He snatched the glasses
from his face and blinked at her. He could see quite
well up to three feet, and her features had only
partially dissolved. "And so," she said quietly. "It
is how I thought. Your eyes are beautiful, and all
the time they are hidden. Has no one told you how they
are beautiful?"
  Leonard's mother used to say something of the sort when
he
  was fifteen and he had his first pair, but that was
hardly relevant. He had the sensation of rising
gently through the room.
  She took the glasses and folded down the sides
and put them by the cactus.
  His voice sounded strangled in his ears. "No,
no one has said that."
  "Not other girls?"
  He shook his head.
  "Then I am the first to discover you?" There was
humor, but no mockery, in her look.
  It made him feel foolish, immature, to be
grinning so openly at her compliment, but he could do
nothing about it.
  She said, "And your smile."
  She smoothed away a wisp of hair from her
eyes. Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him
of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not
certain how to put this to her. Instead he took her hand
as it completed its movement and they sat in silence for a
minute or two, as they had at their first meeting.
She interlocked her fingers with his, and it was at this
moment, rather than later in the bedroom, or later still
when they talked of themselves with greater freedom, that
Leonard felt irrevocably bound to her. Their
hands fitted well, the grip was intricate,
unbreakable, there were so many points of contact. In this
poor light, and without his glasses, he could not
seeandbrvbarbbwh fingers were his own. Sitting in the
darkening, chilly jj room in his raincoat, holding
on to her hand, he felt he was throwing away his
life. The abandonment was delicious. Something was
pouring out of him, through his palm and into hers; something was
spreading back up his arm, across his chest, constricting
his throat. His only thought was a repetition: so this
is it, it's like this, so this is it ...
  Finally she pulled her hand away and folded her
arms and looked at him expectantly. For no good
reason other than the"
  seriousness of her look, he began to explain
himself. "I shouldI
  have come sooner," he said, "but I've been working
all hours ofandbrvbar;
  the day and night. And actually, I didn't know
if you'd want toea.
  see me, or if you'd even recognize
me.8B
  "Do you have another friend in Berlin?"
  "Oh no, nothing like that." He did not question her right
to ask this question.
  "And did you have many girlfriends in England?"
  "Not many, no."
  "How many?"
  He hesitated before making a lunge at the
truth. "Well, actually, none."
  "You've never had one?"
  "No."
  Maria leaned forward. "You mean, you've never-was
  He could not bear to hear whatever term she was about
to use. "No, I never have."
  She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a yelp of
laughter. It was not so extraordinary a thing in
1955 for a man of Leonard's background and
temperament to have had no sexual experience
by the end of his twenty-fifth year. But it was a
remarkable thing for a man to confess. He regretted it
immediately. She had the laughter under control, but now she
was blushing. It was the interlocking fingers that had made
him think he could get away with speaking without
pretense. In this bare little room with its pile of
assorted shoes belonging to a woman who lived alone
and did not fuss with milk jugs or doilies on
tea trays, it should have been possible to deal in
unadorned truths.
  And in fact it was. Maria's blushes were brought
on by shame at the laughter she knew Leonard would
misunderstand. For hers was the laughter of nervous
relief. She had been suddenly absolved from the
pressures and rituals of seduction. She would not
have to adopt a conventional role and be judged in it, and
she would not be measured against other women. Her fear of
being physically abused had receded. She would not be
obliged to do anything she did not want. She was
free, they both were free, to invent their own terms.
They could be partners in invention. And she really had
discovered for herself this shy Englishman with the steady gaze
and the long lashes, she had him first, she would have him
all to herself. These thoughts she formulated later in
solitude. At the time
  they erupted in the single hoot of relief and
hilarity which she had suppressed to a yelp.
  Leonard took a long pull of his tea, set
down the mug and said
ah
in a hearty, unconvincing way. He put his
glasses on and stood up. After the handclasp,
nothing seemed bleaker than setting off back down
Adalbertstrasse, descending into the U-Bahn and
arriving at his apartment in the early evening darkness
to find the breakfast coffee cup and the drafts of his
foolish letter all over the floor. He saw it all
before him as he adjusted the belt of his coat, but he
knew that with his confession he had made a humiliating
tactical error and he had to go. That Maria should
blush for him made her all the sweeter, and hinted
at the scale of his blunder.
  She had stood too and was blocking his path to the
door.
  "I really ought to be getting back now,"
Leonard explained, "what with work and everything." The
worse he felt, the lighter his tone became. He
was stepping around her as he said, "You make a
terrific cup of tea."
  Maria said, "I want you to stay
longer."
  It was all he wanted to hear, but by now he was too
low to enact a change of heart, too drawn to his
own defeat. He was on his way to the door. "I have
to meet someone at six." The lie was a hopeless
commitment to his anguish. Even as it was happening,
he was amazed by himself. He wanted to stay, she
wanted him to stay, and here he was, insisting on
leaving. It was the behavior of a stranger, and he could
do nothing, he could not steer himself in the direction of his
own interests. Self-pity had obliterated his
habitual and meticulous good sense, he was in a
tunnel whose only end was his own fascinating
annihilation.
  He was fumbling with the unfamiliar lock and Maria
was right at his back. Though it still surprised her, she
was to some extent familiar with the delicacy of
masculine pride. Despite a surface
assurance, men were easily offended. Their moods could
swing wildly. Caught in the turbulence of
unacknowledged emotions, they tended to mask their
uncertainty with aggression. She was thirty; her
experience was not vast, and
  she was thinking mostly of her husband and one or two
violent soldiers she had known. The man
scrabbling to leave by her front door was less like the
men she had known and more like herself. She knew just how it
felt. When you felt sorry for yourself, you wanted
to make things worse. She was touching his back
lightly, but he was not aware of it through his coat. He
thought he had made his plausible excuses and was
free to depart with his misery. To Maria, who had the
liberation of Berlin and her marriage to Otto
Eckdorf behind her, a display of vulnerability of
any kind in a man suggested an approachable
personality.
  He opened the door at last and turned to say his
goodbyes. Did he really believe that she was fooled
by his politeness and the invented appointment, or that his
desperation was invisible? He was telling her he was
sorry he had to dash off, and expressing
gratitude for the tea again, and offering his hand-a
handshake!-when she reached up and lifted his glasses
clear of his face and strode back into her living
room with them. Before he had even started to follow her,
she had slipped them under a chair cushion.
  "Look here," he said, and, letting the door
close behind him, took one step, then another, into the
apartment. And that was it; he was back in. He had
wanted to stay; now he had to. "I really
do have to be going." He stood in the center of the tiny
room, irresolute, still attempting to fake his
hesitant English form of outrage.
  She stood close so he could see her clearly.
How wonderful it was, not to be frightened of a man.
It gave her a chance to like him, to have desires that were not
simply reactions to his. She took his hands in
hers. "But I haven't finished looking at your
eyes." Then, with the Berlin girl's forthrightness that
Russell had praised, she added,
"Du Dummer! Wenn es fur dich das erste
Mai ist, bin ich sehr glucklich.
If this is your first time, then I am a very lucky
girl."
  It was her "this" that held Leonard. He was back
with "this." What they were doing here was all part of "this,"
his first time. He looked down at her face, that
disk, tipped way back to
  accommodate the seven-inch difference in their
heights. From the top third of the neat oval, the
baby hair fell back in loose curls and
straggles. She was not the first young woman he had
kissed, but she was the first who seemed to like it.
Encouraged, he pushed his tongue into her mouth, the
way, he had gathered, one was supposed
to.
  She drew her face back an inch or so. She
said,
"Langsam.
Plenty of time." So they kissed with a teasing
lightness. The very tips of their tongues just touched, and
it was a greater pleasure. Then Maria stepped round
him and pulled out from among the heap of shoes an
electric heater. "There is time," she repeated.
"We can pass a week with our arms just so." She
embraced herself to show him.
  "That's right," he said. "We could do that." His
voice sounded high-pitched. He followed her into the
bedroom.
  It was larger than the room they had left. There was
a double mattress on the floor-another novelty.
One wall was taken up with a gloomy wardrobe of
polished wood. By the window was a painted chest of
drawers and a linen chest. He sat on the linen chest
and watched her plug in the heater.
  "It is too cold to be undressed. We go in
like this." It was true, you could see the vapor on your
breath. She kicked off her slippers; he untied
his laces and took off his coat. They got under the
eiderdown and lay with their arms round each
other in the way she had prescribed, and kissed again.
  It was not a week but several hours, just after
midnight, before Leonard was able to define himself in
strictest terms as an initiate, a truly
mature adult at last. However, the line that
divided innocence from knowledge was vague, and rapturously
so. As the bed, and to a far lesser extent the room,
warmed up, they set about helping each other
undress. As the pile on the floor
grew-sweaters, thick shirts, woolen underwear and
football socks-so the bed, and time itself, grew more
spacious. Maria, luxuriating in the possibility
of shaping the event to her needs, said this was just the right
moment for her to be kissed and licked all over, from the
toes upward. This was how Leonard, halfway through
a characteristically meticulous
  job, came to enter her first with his tongue. That
surely was the dividing line in his life. But so too
was the moment half an hour later when she took him
into her mouth and licked and sucked and did something with her
teeth. In terms of mere physical sensation, this was
the high point of the six hours, and perhaps of his life.
  There was a long interlude when they lay still, and in
answer to her questions he told her about his school, his
parents and his lonely three years at
Birmingham University. She talked more
reticently about her work, the cycling club and the
amorous treasurer, and her ex-husband, Otto, who
had been a sergeant in the army and was now a drunk.
Two months before he had appeared after a year's
absence and had hit her around the head twice with an
open hand and demanded money. This was not the first time he
had intimidated her, but the local police would do
nothing. Sometimes they even bought him drinks. Otto
had persuaded them he was a war hero.
  This story temporarily erased desire.
Gallantly, Leonard got dressed and went down
to Oranienstrasse to buy a bottle of wine. People and
traffic circulated, oblivious of the great
changes. When he returned she was standing at the
stove in a man's dressing gown and her football
socks, cooking a potato and mushroom
omelette. They ate it in bed with black bread.
The Mosel was sugary and rough. They drank it in the
tea mugs and insisted it was good. Whenever he put a
piece of bread in his mouth, he smelled her on his
fingers. She had brought in the candle in the bottle, and
now she lit it. The cosy squalor of clothes and
greasy plates receded into the shadows. The sulfur
smell of the match hung in the air and mixed
with the smell on his fingers. He tried to recall and
recount in an amusing way a sermon he had once
heard at school about the devil and temptation and a
woman's body. But Maria misunderstood, or saw
no reason why he should be telling her this or finding it
funny, and she became cross and silent. They lay
propped on their elbows in the gloom, sipping from their
mugs. After a while he touched the back of her hand
and said, "Sorry. A stupid story."
  She forgave him by turning her hand and squeezing his
fingers.
  She curled up on his arm and slept for half an
hour. During that time he lay back, feeling proud.
He studied her face-how scant her eyebrows
were, how her lower lip swelled in sleep- and he
thought what it would be to have a child, a daughter who might
sleep on him like this. When she woke up she was
fresh. She wanted him to lie on her. He cuddled
up and sucked her nipples. They kissed, and it was
acceptable this time when he was free with his tongue. They
poured out the rest of the wine and she chinked his mug.
  Of what followed he remembered only two
things. The first was that it was rather like going to see a film that
everybody else had been talking about: difficult
to imagine in advance, but once there,
installed, partly recognition, partly surprises.
The encompassing slippery smoothness, for example,
was much as he had hoped-even better, in fact-while
nothing in his extensive reading had prepared him for the
crinkly sensation of having another's pubic hair
pressed against his own. The second was awkward. He
had read all about premature ejaculation and
wondered if he would suffer, and now it seemed he
might. It was not movement that threatened to bring him on.
It was when he looked at her face. She was lying
on her back, for they were what she had taught him
to call
auf Altdeutsch.
Sweat had restyled her hair into snaky coils and
her arms were thrown up behind her head, with the palms
spread, like a comic-book representation of
surrender. At the same time she was looking up at
him in a knowing, kindly way. It was just this combination of
abandonment and loving attention that was too good to be
looked at, too perfect for him, and he had to avert
his eyes, or close them, and think of ... of, yes,
a circuit diagram, a particularly intricate
and lovely one he had committed to memory during the
fitting of signal activation units to the Ampex
machines.
Seven
  It took four weeks to test all the tape
recorders and fit the signal activation units.
Leonard was content working in his windowless room. The very
repetitiveness of his routine absorbed him. When
another ten machines were ready, a young serviceman
came and loaded them onto a rubber-wheeled cart and
took them along the corridor to the recording room.
Already more people were working in there, some of them from England. But
Leonard had not been introduced, and he avoided
them. In his spare moments he liked to doze, and in the
canteen he always took an empty table. Glass
  came by once or twice a week, always in a
hurry. Like all the other Americans he chewed
gum, but with a frenzy that was all his own. This and the
livid semicircles under his eyes gave him the
appearance of an anxious nocturnal rodent. There
were no gray hairs in his beard, but it looked less
black. It was dried out and shapeless.
  His manner, though, was unchanged. "We're
running on schedule, Leonard," he would say from the
doorway, too busy to step in. "We're almost
to the far side of the Schonefelder Chaussee. We
got new people arriving every day. The place is
humming!" And he would be gone before Leonard
had time to put down his soldering iron.
  It was true-after mid-February it became harder
to find an unoccupied table in the canteen. In the
noise of voices around him he could make out
English accents. When he asked for his steak now, he
was automatically handed a cup of tea into which three
or four spoonfuls of sugar had already been stirred.
For the benefit of the Vopos with their binoculars, many
of the Englishmen wore American Army uniforms
bearing the insignia of the Army Signal Corps.
The vertical diggers had arrived, the specialists
who knew how to tunnel upward to the telephone
cables through soft earth without bringing the roof down on their
heads. So too had men from the Royal Signals,
who were to install the amplifiers near the head of the
tunnel. There were faces Leonard recognized from
Dollis Hill. A couple of these fellows nodded
in his direction, but did not approach. It was
possible they were being scrupulous about security, but it
was more likely they considered a technical assistant
beneath them. They had never spoken to him in London.
  And security in the canteen was not tight. As the
numbers eating there rose, so did the din of
conversation. Glass would have been outraged. Small
groups from all over the building talked
shop in closed huddles. Leonard, eating alone,
enfolded with his thoughts of Maria, still amazed at the
changes that had come over his life, was sometimes drawn
against his will into a story at a nearby table. His world
had contracted to a windowless room and the bed he shared with
Maria. Elsewhere in her
  apartment it was simply too cold. He had made
himself an outsider here, and now he was becoming a
reluctant eavesdropper, a spy.
  He heard two vertical diggers at the next
table reminisce with suppressed hilarity in front
of their American colleagues. It appeared that the
tunnel had a predecessor in Vienna. It had
been dug in 1949 by MI6 and ran from a
private house in the Schwechat suburb seventy
feet out under a road, where it picked up the cables
linking the headquarters of the Soviet occupation forces
in the Imperial Hotel with the Soviet command in
Moscow. "They needed a cover, see," one of the
diggers said. A companion laid a hand on his arm,
and the first man continued quietly, so that Leonard had
to concentrate. "They needed a cover for all the coming and
going while they installed the tap. So they opened up
a Harris tweed import shop. They reckoned no
one in Vienna would be too interested in that
kind of thing. And what happened? The locals couldn't
get enough Harris tweed. They were queuing up for it,
and the first shipment was sold out in days. So there were these
poor buggers filling out order forms all day and
answering the phone instead of getting on with their
business. They had to turn customers away and
close the place down."
  "And then," the American said when the laughter had
died away, "our guy walked right into your act."
  "That's right," the Englishman said. "That was
Nelson, Nelson . . ." And it was this name, which
Leonard was to hear again, that brought the group to the full
awareness of its transgression. The conversation turned
to sport.
  Another time, a different group of tunnelers,
vertical as well as horizontal, were comparing
notes. The purpose of nearly all the stories
Leonard heard was to entertain. The Americans
recounted how they had had to shovel their way through the
runoff of their own cesspit. Again there was loud
laughter, and an English voice said to more laughter,
"Digging through your own shit, that just about sums this
business up." Then one of the American sergeants
told how the sixteen of them, all handpicked for the
job, had been made to dig a practice
tunnel in
  New Mexico before they started in Berlin.
"Same kind of soil, was the idea. They wanted
to figure out the optimum depth and check out if there
was going to be any kind of slump on the surface,
so we dug-was "And dug, and dug . . . ," his friends
joined in. "After fifty feet they had all they
needed for the best depth, and there was no slump. But would
they let us stop? You want a picture of
futility? It's a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere
to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long. Four
hundred and fifty feet!"
  One conversation the diners had frequently concerned
how long it would take the Russians or the East
Germans to smash through into the tap chamber, and what would
happen when they did. Would the operators have time
to get clear, would the Vopos shoot, would there be time
to close the steel doors? There had once been a
plan to install incendiary devices to destroy
classified equipment, but the fire risks were thought
too great. On one matter everybody was agreed, and
Glass confirmed this too. There had even been a
CIA study. If the Russians ever did break
in, they would have to keep quiet about it. The
embarrassment of having their top military
lines tapped would be too great. "There are silences
and silences," Glass had told Leonard. "But
there's nothing like the great Russian silence."
  There was another story Leonard heard several
times. Its form changed only slightly with the
retelling, and it worked best on newcomers, on people
who were not yet acquainted with George. So in
mid-February it was often heard in the canteen.
Leonard first heard it while he was waiting in the
queue. Bill Harvey, the head of the Berlin
CIA base, a remote and powerful figure whom
Leonard had never even glimpsed, occasionally
visited the tunnel to check on progress. Because
Harvey was conspicuous around Berlin, he came
only at night. On one occasion he sat in the
backseat of his car and overheard his driver and the GI
beside him complain about their social life.
  "I'm getting nowhere, and boy, am I ready for
it," said one.
"THEINNOCENT
  "Me too," said his friend. "But George is out
there every afternoon, screwing by the fence."
  "Lucky George."
  The men at the warehouse were supposed to be kept
in relative isolation. There was no telling
what they might divulge to a fraulein in a moment
of weakness. The extent of Harvey's anger when he
arrived that night depended on the storyteller. In
some versions he simply asked to see the duty
officer; in others he stormed into the building in an
alcohol- driven rage and the duty officer quivered
before him. "Find this asshole George and get him
out of here!" Inquiries were made. George was in
fact a dog, a local mongrel adopted as the
warehouse mascot. In further elaborations,
Harvey was supposed to have responded with face-saving
calmness. "I don't care what he thinks he is.
He's making my men unhappy. Get rid of
him."
  At the end of four weeks Leonard's great
task was over. The last four tape recorders to be
fitted with signal activation were packed into two
specially constructed cases with snap locks and
canvas straps for extra security. The machines
were to be used for monitoring purposes at the head
of the tunnel. The cases were loaded onto the cart and
taken down into the basement. Leonard locked his
room and wandered down the corridor to the recording
room. It was lit by hooded fluorescent lamps and
was large, but not quite large enough to accommodate
comfortably the 150 machines and all the men who were
working around them. The recorders were stacked three high
on metal shelves and arranged in five rows.
Down the aisles there were people on their hands and knees
tracing power cables and other circuits, and stepping
over and around them were others with spools of tape, in and
out trays, numbered signs and gummed paper. Two
fitters were drilling into the wall with power tools,
preparing to secure a twenty-foot-long bar set of
pigeonholes to the wall. Someone else was already
gluing
  pieces of card with code numbers under each
compartment. By the door was a head-high pile of stationery
and spare recording tape in plain white boxes.
On the other side of the
7 5
I
  door, right in the corner, was a hole in the floor
through which cables dropped down into the basement, down the
shaft and along the tunnel to where the amplifiers were
about to be installed.
  Leonard was at the warehouse for almost a year before
he understood the operating system in the recording
room. The vertical diggers were scraping their way
upward to a ditch on the far side of the
Schonefelder Chaussee in which three cables lay
buried. Each one contained 172 circuits carrying
at least 18 channels. The twenty-four-hour
babble of the Soviet command network consisted of
telephone conversations and encoded telegraph
messages. In the recording room only two or
three circuits were monitored. The movements of the
Vopos and the East German telephone repair
crews were matters of immediate interest. If ever the
tunnel was about to be discovered-if the beast, as
Glass sometimes called the other side, was ready
to break in and threaten the lives of our people-the earliest
warnings would come over these lines. As for the rest, the
taped telephone conversations were flown to London and the
telegraph messages to Washington for decoding,
all in military planes, under armed guard.
Scores of workers, many of them Russian
emigres, toiled in small rooms in Whitehall
and in the temporary huts that littered the way between the
Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
  Standing by the entrance to the recording room on the day
he finished, Leonard was concerned only to find himself
a new job. He teamed up with an older German,
one of Gehlen's men, whom he had seen on his first
day driving a forklift. Germans were no
longer ex-Nazis, they were Maria's compatriots.
So he and Fritz, who had once trained as an
electrician and whose real name was Rudi, stripped
wires and made connections at junction boxes, and
fitted protective covers over power lines and
secured them to the floor so that no one would trip on
them. After an initial exchange of first names, they
worked in comradely silence, passing the
wire-strippers between them and making encouraging grunts
whenever one small job was complete. Leonard took
it as a sign of his new
maturity that he could work contentedly alongside the
man Glass had described as a real horror.
Rudi's big fingers with splayed ends were swift and
precise. The afternoon lights came on, coffee was
brought. While the Englishman sat on the floor with
his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette,
Rudi kept at it and refused refreshment.
  In the late afternoon people began drifting away.
By six Leonard and Rudi had the room to themselves, and
they worked faster to complete a final set of
connections. At last Leonard stood up and
stretched. Now he could allow himself to think again of
Kreuzberg and Maria. He could be there in less
than an hour.
  He was fetching his jacket from the back of a chair
when he heard his name being spoken from the door. A
man too thin for his double-breasted suit was coming toward
him with his hand extended. Rudi, who was on his way
out, stepped aside and called
"Gute Nacht"
to Leonard over the stranger's shoulder. Leonard
had his jacket half on and was returning the goodnight
as he shook the man's hand. During this little flurry,
Leonard was making the automatic, barely conscious
appraisal of manner, appearance and voice by means
of which one Englishman decodes another's status.
  "John Macationamee. We've got someone
fallen sick and I'll be *needing another pair of
hands at the tunnel head next week.
  It's all clear with Glass. I've got half
an hour now if you want me to show you around."
Macationamee had buck teeth, and very few of them-little
pegs set far apart, and rather brown. Hence the slight
lisp in a delivery from which the Cockney had not been
fully expunged. The voice was almost chummy. A
refusal was not expected. Macationamee was already
leading the way out of the recording room, but his
authority was lightly worn.
  Leonard guessed that this was a senior
government scientist.
  A couple of them had been his teachers at
Birmingham, and
  there were one or two in and around the G.p.o.
research
  laboratory at Dollis Hill. Theirs was a
special generation of
  andbrvbarbbunpretentious, gifted men, brought
into prominent govern
  ""ment
  service in the forties by the necessities of
modern scien
  tific warfare. Leonard respected the ones he
had met. They did not make him feel clumsy and
short of the right word the way the public-school boys
did-the ones who would not speak to him in the canteen and
who were all set to rise through the hierarchies of command
by dint of a reasonable grasp of Latin and ancient
Greek.
  Down in the basement they had to stand and wait by the
shaft. Someone in front of them was having
difficulty finding his pass for the guard. Near where
they stood, the earth piled to the ceiling exuded its
cold stench. Macationamee stamped his feet on the
muddy concrete and clasped his bony white
hands. On the way Leonard had taken from his room
a greatcoat Glass had found for him, but
Macationamee had only his gray suit.
  "It'll be warm enough down there when we get those
amplifiers running. It could even be a problem,"
he said. "Enjoying the work?"
  "It's a very interesting project."
  "You fitted out all the recorders. That must have
got boring."
  Leonard knew it was unwise to complain to a
superior, even when prompted. Macationamee was
showing his pass and signing for his guest. "It wasn't
so bad, really."
  He followed the older man down the ladder, into the
pit. By the mouth of the tunnel Macationamee
supported his foot against a railway line and bent
to retie his lace. His voice was muffled, and
Leonard had to stoop to hear. "What's your
clearance, Marnham?" The guard at the edge of the
shaft was looking down at them. Could he possibly
believe, like the sentries on the gate, that he was
guarding a warehouse, or even a radar station?
  Leonard waited until Macationamee had
straightened and they had stepped into the tunnel. The
fluorescent striplights barely dispersed
the blackness. The acoustic was dead. Leonard's
voice sounded flat in his ears. "Actually, it's
level three."
  Macationamee was walking ahead of him, his hands
deep in his trouser pockets for warmth. "Well,
I suppose we might have to bring you into four. I'll
see about that tomorrow."
  They were making a shallow descent as they walked be
  tween the rails. There were puddles underfoot, and
on the walls, where the steel plates had been
bolted together to make a continuous tube, condensation
glistened. There was a conandbrvbarbbjstant hum of a
groundwater pump. On both sides of the tunnel
  *sandbags were piled to shoulder height to support
cables and
  pipes. A number of bags had split and were
spilling their contents. Earth and water were pressing in
on all sides, waiting to reclaim the space.
  IT-HEY arrived at a place where tight
coils of barbed wire were
  stacked by a pile of sandbags. Macationamee
waited for Leonard to draw level. "We're
stepping into the Russian sector now. When they
break in on us, which is bound to happen one of these
days, we're meant to spread the wire across
as we retreat. Make them respect the border."
He smiled at his little irony, revealing his pitiful
teeth. They teetered at all angles, like old
gravestones. He caught Leonard's gaze. He
tapped his mouth with his forefinger and spoke right into the younger
man's embarrassment. "Milk teeth. The other
lot never came
  Ithrough. I think perhaps I never wanted to grow
up."
  They continued along level ground. A hundred
yards ahead a group of men stepped through a steel
door and came toward them. They appeared deep in
conversation, but as they came
M
closer, Leonard realized they were making no sound.
They
  jostled in and out of single file. When they were
thirty feet 2away Leonard caught the
sibilants of their whispers. Those
  ceased too as the two groups squeezed by each
other with wary
Is
nods.
  "The general rule is no noise, especially
once you've crossed the border."
Macationamee was speaking in a voice fractionally
above a whisper. "As you know, low frequencies,
men's voices, penetrate very easily."
  Leonard whispered "Yes," but his reply was lost
to the sound of the pumps.
  Running along the tops of the twin banks of
sandbags were power lines, the air-conditioning conduit and the
lines from the recording room, encased in a lead
sheath. Along the way there were telephones mounted on
the wall, and fire extin
  guishers, fuseboxes, emergency power
switches. At intervals there were green and red warning
lights, like miniature traffic signals. It was a
toytown, packed with boyish invention. Leonard
remembered the secret camps, the tunnels through the
undergrowth he used to make with friends in a scrap of
woodland near his house. And the gigantic train set
in Hamleys, the toy store-the safe world of its
motionless sheep and cows cropping the sudden green
hills that were no more than pretexts for tunnels.
Tunnels were stealth and safety; boys and trains
crept through them, lost to sight and care, and then emerged
unscathed.
  Macationamee murmured in his ear again. "I tell
you what I like about this project. The
attitude. Once the Americans decide to do a
thing, they do it well, and hang the cost. I've had
everything I wanted, never a murmur. None of this
can-you-get-bywith-half-a-ball-of-string nonsense."
  Leonard was flattered to be confided in. He
tried to be humorous in agreement. "Look at
all the trouble they take with the food. I love the
way they do their chips."
  Macationamee looked away. It seemed this
puerile observation drifted with them down the tunnel
until they reached the steel door.
  Beyond it was air-conditioning equipment banked up on
both sides to make a narrow corridor of the
railway lines. They edged past an American
technician who was working there and opened a second
door.
  "Now," Macationamee said as he closed it behind
him. "What do you think?"
  They had entered a brightly lit section of the
tunnel that was clean and well ordered. The walls were
lined with plywood that had been painted white. The
railway lines had disappeared under a concrete
floor, which was covered with linoleum. From overhead
came the rumble of traffic on the Schonefelder
Chaussee. Wedged between racks of
electronics were tidy workspaces, plywood
surfaces with headsets and the monitoring tape
recorders. Neatly stowed on the floor were the
cases Leonard had sent down that day. He was not
being
@y
asked to admire the amplifier. He knew the
model from Dollis
m
Hill. It was powerful, compact and weighed less
than forty
pounds. It was about the most expensive item in the
lab where he had worked. It was not the machine, it was the
sheer quantity of them, and the switching gear, all down
one side of the tunnel, stretching ninety feet
perhaps, stacked head high, like the interior of a
telephone exchange. It was the quantity
Macationamee was proud of, the handling capacity, the
amplifying power and the feat of circuitry it
implied. By the door, the lead-sheathed cables broke
into multicolored strands, fanning out to junction
points from which they emerged in smaller clusters held
by rubber clips. Three men of the Royal Signals
His,
Iwere at work. They nodded at
Macationamee and ignored Leon
ard.
The two men passed along the array at a stately
pace, as though reviewing a guard of honor.
Macationamee said, "Near on a quarter of a
million pounds' worth. We're drawing off a
tiniest fraction of the Russian signals, so we
need the best there is." Since his remark about the
chips, Leonard was confining his
E
appreciation to nods and sighs. He was thinking about an
intel
Hligent
question he might put, and only half listened while
Macationamee described the technicalities of the
circuitry. Close attention was not necessary.
Macationamee's pride in the bright white
amplification room was impersonal. He liked
to see the achievement afresh through the eyes of a
newcomer, and any eyes would do.
Leonard was still working on his question as they approached a
second steel door. Macationamee stopped by it.
"This one is a double door. We're going to keep the
tap room pressurized to stop the nitrogen leak."
Leonard nodded again. The Russian cables
would have nitrogen sealed within them to keep moisture out
and to help monitor breaks. Pressurizing the air
around the cables would make it possible to cut into them
undetected.
Macationamee pushed open the doors, and Leonard
followed
him in. It was as though they had stepped inside a
drum being
I
m
beaten by a wild man. Road noise was filling the
vertical tunnel
andbrvbarbbandbrvbarbband reverberating in the tap chamber.
Macationamee stepped
  over empty sacks of sound insulation piled on the
floor and took a torch from a table. They stood at
the base of the access tunnel. Right up in its roof,
picked out by the narrow beam, were the three cables, each
four or five inches thick and caked in mud.
Macationamee was about to speak, but the pounding intensified
to a frenzy and they had to wait. When it subsided he
said, "Horse and cart. They're the worst. When
we're ready, we'll use a hydraulic jack
to pull the cables down. Then we'll need a day and a
half to cement the roof for support. We
won't make the cut until all the backup is in
shape. We'll bridge the circuits first and then
break in and lead off. There's likely to be more than
a hundred and fifty circuits in each cable.
There'll be an MI6 technician laying the
actual tap, and three standing by in case something
goes wrong. We've one man off sick, so you
might have to be in the support group."
  While he was speaking, Macationamee rested his hand
on Leonard's shoulder. They came away from the
shaft to be out of the worst of the noise.
  "Well I have got a question," Leonard said, "but
you might not want to answer it."
  The government scientist shrugged. Leonard found
that he wanted his approval. "Surely all the
important military traffic will be encoded and
telegraphed. How are we going to read it? These
modern codes are meant to be virtually
unbreakable."
  Macationamee took a pipe from his jacket
pocket and bit on its stem. Smoking, of course,
was out of the question.
  "This is what I wanted to speak to you about. You
haven't been talking to anyone?"
  "No."
  "Have you heard of a man called Nelson, Carl
Nelson? Worked for the CIA'S Office of
Communications?"
  "No."
  Macationamee was leading the way back through the double
doors. He bolted them before they walked on. "This
is level four now. We were going to let you in, I
think. You're about to join an exclusive club."
They had stopped again, this time by the first rack of
amplifying equipment. At the far end the three
men worked on in silence, well out of earshot. As
Macationamee spoke he ran his finger along the
front of an amplifier, perhaps to give the
impression that he was discussing it. "I'll give you
the simple version. It's been discovered that when you
electrically encode a message and send it down the
line, there's a faint electronic echo, a shadow
of the original, of the clear text, that travels with it.
It's so faint that it fades out after twenty miles
or so. But with the right equipment, and if you can tap into the
line within the twenty miles, you can have a readable
message coming straight onto the teleprinter, no
matter how well the material has been encoded.
This is the basis for the whole operation here. We
wouldn't be building something on this scale just
to listen to low-priority telephone chat. It was
Nelson's discovery, and the equipment was his invention.
He was walking about in Vienna looking for a good
place to try it out on the Russian lines when he
walked right into a tunnel we had built to tap those
same lines. So, very generously, we let the
Americans into our tunnel, gave them
facilities, let them make use of our taps.
And you know what? They didn't even tell us about
Nelson's invention. They were taking the stuff back
to Washington and reading the clear text while we were
knocking our brains trying to break the codes. And
these are our allies. Bloody incredible, don't you
think?" He paused for confirmation. "Now that we're
sharing this project, they've let us in on the
secret. But only the outline, mark you, not the
details. That's why I can only give you the
simplest account." Two of the Royal Signals people
were walking toward them. Macationamee steered Leonard
back in the direction of the tap chamber. "On the
need-to-know basis, you shouldn't be getting any of
this. You're probably wondering what I'm up to.
Well, they've promised to share whatever they come up
with. And we have to take that on trust. But we're not
prepared to live off the crumbs from their
table. That's not our understanding of this relationship.
We're developing our own version of Nelson's
technique, and we've found some marvelous
potential sites. We're not talking to the
Americans about them. Speed is important because
sooner or later the Russians are
8 3
  going to make the same discovery, and then they'll
modify their machines. There's a Dollis Hill
team working on it, but it would be useful to have someone here
keeping his ears and eyes open. We think there might
be one or two Americans here who know about
Nelson's equipment. We need someone with a
technical background, and not too highly placed.
As soon as they see me, these people run a mile.
It's the details we're after, odds and ends of
electronics gossip, anything that might help
things along. You know how careless the Yanks can be.
They talk; things are left lying around."
  They had stopped by the double steel doors. "S.
What do you think?" It almost sounded like "fink."
  "They're all very chatty in the canteen,"
Leonard said. "Even our own chaps."
  "You'll do it, then? Good. We'll talk more
later. Let's go up and have some tea.
I'm freezing to death."
  They went back along the tunnel, into the
American sector, up the incline. It was hard not
to feel proud of the tunnel. Leonard remembered
before the war when his father built a small brick
extension onto the kitchen. Leonard lent a child's
token assistance, fetching a trowel, taking a list
to the hardware shop and so on. When it was all finished,
and before the breakfast table and chairs were moved in, he
stood in the new space with its plaster walls,
electrical fittings and homemade window, and he
felt quite delirious with his own achievement.
  Back in the warehouse, Leonard excused himself
from tea in the canteen. Now that he had
Macationamee's approval, his gratitude even,
he felt confident and free. On his way out of the
building he looked in at his room. The absence of
tape recorders on the shelves was itself a small
triumph. He locked the door and took the key
to the duty officer's room. He crossed the compound,
passed the sentry at the gate and set off" for
Rudow. The road was dark, but he knew every step of the
way now. His greatcoat gave poor protection
against the cold. He could feel the hairs in his
nostrils stiffening. When he breathed through his
mouth, the air stung his chest. He could sense the
frozen flat fields around him. He passed the
shacks where refugees
  from the Russian sector had set up home.
There were kids playing in the dark, and as his steps
rang out on the cold road, they shushed each other and
waited until he had passed. Every yard away from the
warehouse was a yard toward Maria. He had spoken
to no one about her at work, and he could not talk to her
about what he did. He was not certain whether this time
spent traveling between his two secret worlds was when he
was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in
balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether
this was the one time he was nothing at all, a void
traveling between two points. Only on arrival,
at this end or that, would he assume or be assigned
a purpose, and then he would be himself, or one of his
selves, again. What he did know for sure was that these
speculations would begin to fade as his train approached
his Kreuzberg stop, and that as he hurried across the
courtyard and took the five flights of stairs two
or even three at a time, they would have vanished.
This page is blank.

  Leonard's initiation happened
to coincide with the coldest week of the winter.
By Berlin's harsh standards, the old hands agreed, it
was exceptional at minus twenty-five degrees.
There were no clouds, and by day even the bomb damage,
sparkling in rich orange light, looked almost
beautiful. At night the condensation on the inside of
Maria's windowpanes froze into fantastic
patterns. In the mornings the top layer on the bed,
usually Leonard's greatcoat, was stiff. During this
time he rarely saw Maria naked, not all of her,
all at once. He saw the gleam of her skin when
he
  burrowed down into the humid gloom. Their winter
bed, top- heavy with thin blankets, coats, bath
towels, an armchair cover and a nursery quilt, was
precarious, bound only by its own weight. There was
nothing large enough to keep the whole together. One careless
move and single items would slide away, and soon
the ensemble would be in ruins. Then they would be standing
facing each other across the mattress, shivering as they
began the reconstruction.
  So Leonard had to learn stealth as he burrowed
down. The weather was enforcing an attention to detail.
He liked to press his cheek against her belly,
taut from all that cycling, or to push the tip
of his tongue into her navel, as intricately
convoluted as a sunken ear. Down here in the
semidarkness-the bedclothes did not tuck under the
mattress, and there was always light leaking in from the
sides-in the closed and clotted space, he
learned to love the smells: sweat like mown grass,
and the moistness of her arousal with its two elements,
sharp but rounded, tangy and blunt: fruit and
cheese, the very tastes of desire itself. This
synaesthesia was a kind of delirium. There were tiny
blades of calluses the length of her little toes.
He heard the rustle of cartilage in her knee
joints. In the small of her back was a mole out of
which grew two long hairs. Not until mid-March,
when the room was warmer, did he see they were silver.
Her nipples sprang erect when he breathed on
them. On the earlobes were the marks left by her earring
clasps. When he ran his fingers through her babyish
hair he saw the roots parting in a three-armed
whorl about the crown, and her skull looked too
white, too vulnerable.
  Maria indulged these
Erkundungen,
these excavations. She lay in a daydream, mostly
silent, sometimes putting words around a stray
thought and watching her breath ascend to the ceiling. "The
Major Ashdown is a funny man . . . that's
good, put your fingers between all the toes, yes, so
... every four o'clock in his office he has a cup of
hot milk and a boiled egg. He wants the bread
cut one, two, three, four, five, like so, and do you
know what he calls them, this military man?"
  Leonard's voice was muffled. "Soldiers."
  "Just so. Soldiers! Is this how you win the war?
With these soldiers?" Leonard came up for air and
she looped her arms around his neck.
"Mein Dummerchen,
my little innocent, what have you learned down there today?"
  "I listened to your belly. It must be dinnertime."
  She drew him in and kissed his face. Marie was
free with her demands, and she allowed Leonard his
curiosity, which she found endearing. Sometimes his
inquiries were teases, forms of seduction. "Tell
me why you like it halfway," he whispered, and she
pleaded, "But I like it deep, really deep."
  "You like it halfway, just here. Tell me why that
is."
  Leonard naturally inclined toward a
well-ordered, hygienic existence. For four days
after the inception of the first love affair of his
life he did not change his underwear or socks, he
had no clean shirt and he hardly washed. They had
spent that first night in Maria's bed talking and
dozing. Toward five A.m. they had cheese,
black bread and coffee while a neighbor just through the
wall was messily clearing his throat as he prepared
to go to work. They made love again, and Leonard was
pleased with his powers of recuperation. He was going to be
all right, he thought, he was just like everyone else. After
that, he fell into a dreamless sleep from which he was
woken an hour later by the alarm clock.
  He came up from under the bedclothes into a cold that
contracted his skull. He lifted Maria's arm
free of his waist, and shivering naked on all fours
in the dark, he found his clothes beneath the ashtray, under
the omelette plates, under the saucer with the burned-out
candle. There was an icy fork in the arm of his shirt.
He had thought to store his glasses in a shoe. The
wine bottle had toppled, and the dregs had drained
into the waistband of his underpants. His coat was spread
over the bed. He pulled it clear and rearranged the
covers over Maria. When he groped for her head and
kissed it, she did not stir.
  With his coat on he stood at the kitchen sink,
moved a frying pan to the floor and splashed
stinging cold water over his face. He remembered
there was, after all, a bathroom. He turned on
  its light and went inside. For the first time in his
life he used another person's toothbrush. He
had never brushed his hair with a woman's hairbrush.
He examined his reflection. Here was the new man.
The day's growth of beard grew too sparsely
to make for a dissolute stubble, and there was the hard red
beginning of a pimple on the side of his nose. But
he fancied that his gaze now, even in exhaustion, was
steadier.
  All day long he wore his tiredness well. It
was just one aspect of his happiness. Lightweight and
remote, the components of his day floated before him: the
ride on the U-Bahn and the bus, the walk past a
frozen pond and out between the white spiky fields, the
hours alone with the tape recorders, the solitary
steak and french fries in the canteen, more hours among
the familiar circuits, the walk in the dark back
to the station, the ride, then Kreuzberg again. It was
pointless, wasting the precious workless hours by continuing
past her district and heading for his own. That evening when
he arrived at her door she was just back from work
herself. The apartment was still a mess. Once again they
got into bed to keep warm. The night
repeated itself with variations, the morning was repeated without
them. That was Tuesday morning. Wednesday and
Thursday went the same way. Glass asked, rather
coolly, if he was growing a beard. If Leonard
needed proof of his dedication to a passion, it was in the
matted thickness of his gray socks and the aroma of
butter, vaginal juices and potatoes that rose from
his chest when he loosened the top button of his
shirt. The excessively heated interiors at the
warehouse released from the folds of his clothes the
scent of overused bedsheets and prompted disabling
reveries in the windowless room.
  It was not until Friday evening that he returned
to his own apartment. It seemed like an absence of
years. He went around turning on the lights,
intrigued by the signs of a former self- the young man
who had sat down to write these nervous, scheming
drafts strewn across the floor, the scrubbed-clean
innocent who had left scum and hairs round the bath
and towels and clothes on the bedroom floor. Here was
the inexpert coffee maker-he had watched Maria and
knew all about
  it now. Here was the childish chocolate bar and beside
it his mother's letter. He read it over quickly and found the
little anxieties expressed on his behalf
cloying, really quite irritating.
  While the bath was filling, he padded around the
place, luxuriating once more in space and warmth.
He whistled and sang snatches of songs. At first
he could not find the untamed number to carry his
feelings. The crooning love songs he knew were
all too courteously restrained. In fact, what
suited him now was the raucous American nonsense
he thought he despised. He recalled scraps, but
they were elusive: "and make a something with the pots and
pans. Shake, rattle and roll! Shake,
rattle and roll!" In the bathroom's flattering
acoustics, he boomed this incantation over and again.
Bellowed in an English voice it sounded foolish,
but it was the right sort of thing. Joyous and sexy, and more
or less meaningless. He had never in his life felt
so uncomplicatedly happy. He had solitude
for the moment, but he was not alone. He was expected.
He had time to clean himself up and tidy the flat, and
then he would be on his way. "Shake, rattle and
roll!" Two hours later he opened his front
door. This time he took with him an overnight bag,
and he did not return for a week.
  During these early days, Maria would not come
to Leonard's flat, despite his
exaggerated description of its luxuries. She
worried that if she started spending nights away, the
neighbors would soon be telling each other that she had
found a man and a better place to live. The
authorities would hear about it, and then she would be out.
In Berlin, demand even for a one- bedroom flat with
no hot water was enormous. To Leonard it seemed
reasonable she should want to be on home ground. They
bundled up in bed, made dashes to the kitchen for
hastily fried meals. To wash, it was necessary to fill a
saucepan and wait in bed until it had boiled,
then hurry to the bathroom to tip scalding water into the
frozen basin. The plug leaked, and pressure in the
single cold tap was unpredictable. For Leonard
and Maria, work was where they got warm and ate
decently. At home, there was nowhere else to be but
bed.
  Maria taught Leonard to be an energetic and
considerate lover, how to let her have all her
orgasms before he had his own. That seemed only
polite, like letting a lady precede you through a
door. He learned to make love in
der Hundestellung,
doggy fashion, which was also the quickest way to lose the
bedclothes, and also from behind as she lay on her
side, facing away from him, on the edge of sleep;
and then on their sides, face to face, locked in
tight, barely disturbing the bedclothes at all. He
discovered there were no set rules for her preparedness.
Sometimes he only had to look at her and she was all
set to go. At others he worked away patiently, like
a boy over a model kit, only to be interrupted
by her suggesting cheese and bread and another round of
tea. He learned that she liked endearments murmured
in her ear, but not beyond a certain point, not once her
eyes began their inward roll. She did not want
to be distracted then.
  He learned to ask for
Preservative
in the
Drogerie.
He found out from Glass that he was entitled to a free
supply through the U.s. Army. On the bus he
brought home four gross in a pale blue
cardboard box. He sat with the package on his
knees, aware of the passengers' glances, and somehow
knew the color was a giveaway. Once, when
Maria offered sweetly to put one on him herself, he
said no too aggressively. Later he wondered
what had troubled him. This was his first intimation
of a new and troubling feature. It was hard
to describe. There was an element of mind creeping
in, of bits of himself, bits he did not really like.
Once he was over the novelty of it all, and once
he was sure he could do it just like everyone else, and when
he was confident that he was not going to come too soon-when
all that was cleared away, and once he was quite convinced
that Maria genuinely liked and wanted him and would go
on wanting him, then he started having thoughts that he was
powerless to send away when he was making love. They
soon grew inseparable from his desire. These
fantasies came a little closer each time, and each
time they continued to proliferate, to take new forms.
There were figures gathering at the edge of thought; now
they were striding toward the center, toward
him. They were all versions of himself, and he knew he
could not resist them.
  It began on the third or fourth time with a simple
perception. He looked down at Maria, whose eyes
were closed, and remembered she was a German. The word
had not been entirely prised loose of its
associations after all. His first day in Berlin came
back to him. German. Enemy. Mortal enemy.
Defeated enemy. This last brought with it a shocking
thrill. He diverted himself momentarily with the
calculation of the total impedance of a certain
circuit. Then: she was the defeated, she was his by right,
by conquest, by right of unimaginable violence and heroism
and sacrifice. What elation! To be right, to win,
to be rewarded. He looked along his own arms
stretched before him, pushing into the mattress, at where the
gingerish hairs were thickest, just below the elbow. He was
powerful and magnificent. He went faster, harder,
he fairly bounced on her. He was victorious and
good and strong and free. In recollection these
formulations embarrassed him and he pushed them aside.
They were alien to his obliging and kindly nature,
they offended his sense of what was reasonable. One
only had to look at her to know there was nothing defeated
about Maria. She had been liberated by the invasion of
Europe, not crushed. And was she not, at least in their
game, his guide?
  But next time around the thoughts returned. They were
irresistibly exciting, and he was helpless before their
elaborations. This time, she was his by right of conquest, and
then,
there was nothing she could do about it.
She did not want to be making love to him, but she
had no choice. He summoned the circuit
diagrams. They were no longer available.
She was struggling to escape. She was thrashing beneath him,
he thought he heard her call out "No!" She was
shaking her head from side to side, she had her eyes
closed against the inescapable reality. He had her
pinioned against the mattress, she was his, there was
nothing she could do, she would never get away. And that was
it, that was the end for him, he was gone, finished. His
mind was cleared and he lay back. His mind was clear
and he thought about food, about sausages. Not
bratwurst or
bockwurst, but English sausages, fat and mild,
fried brownish- black on all sides, and mashed
potatoes, and mushy peas.
Over the following days, his embarrassment faded.
He accepted the obvious truth that what happened in
his head could not be sensed by Maria, even though she was
only inches away. These thoughts were his alone, nothing
to do with her at all.
Eventually, a more dramatic fantasy took
shape. It recapitulated all the previous
elements. Yes, she was defeated, conquered, his by right,
could not escape, and now,
he was a soldier,
weary, battle-marked and bloody, but heroically rather
than disablingly so. He had taken this
woman and was forcing her. Half terrified, half in
awe, she dared not disobey. It helped when he
pulled his greatcoat further up the bed, so that
by turning his head to the left or right he could catch
sight of the dark green. That she was reluctant and he
was inviolable were the premises of further
elaborations. As he went about his business in a city
full of soldiers, the soldier fantasy appeared
ridiculous, but it was easy enough to put out of mind.
It was more difficult, however, when he found himself
tempted to communicate these imaginings to her.
Initially, he only squeezed her harder, bit her
with considerable restraint, held her outstretched arms
down and fantasized that he was preventing her from
escaping. He slapped her buttocks once.
None of this seemed to make much difference to Maria.
She did not notice, or she pretended not to.
Only his own pleasure was intensified. Now the
idea was growing ever more urgent- he wanted her
to acknowledge what was on his mind, however stupid it
really was. He could not believe she would not be aroused
by it. He slapped her again, bit and squeezed
harder.
She had to give him what was his.
His private theater had become
insufficient. He wanted something between them. A
reality, not a fantasy. Telling her somehow was the
next inevitable thing. He wanted his power
recognized and Maria to suffer from it, just a bit, in
the most pleasurable way. He had no trouble keeping
quiet once they had finished. Then he was ashamed.
What was this power he wanted recognized? It was no
more than a disgusting story in
  his head. Then, later, he wondered if she might
not be excited by it too. There was, of course,
nothing to discuss. There was nothing he was able, or dared,
to put into words. He could hardly be asking her
permission. He had to surprise her, show her, let
pleasure overcome her rational objections. He
thought all this, and knew it was bound to happen.
  Toward the middle of March featureless white
cloud covered the sky and the temperature rose
sharply. The few inches of dirty snow melted in
three days. On the walk between Rudow village and the
warehouse there were green shoots in the slush, and on the
roadside trees, fat sticky buds. Leonard
and Maria emerged from their hibernation. They left the
bed and the bedroom and brought the electric heater into the
living room. They ate at a
Schnellimbiss
together, and went to a local
Kneipe
for a glass of beer. They saw a Tarzan film on
the Kurfurstendamm. One Saturday evening they
went to the Resi and danced to a German big band that
alternated romantic American love songs with
bouncy Bavarian numbers in strict oompah time.
They bought sekt to toast their first meeting. Maria said
she wanted to sit apart and send messages through the
pneumatic tubes, but there were no vacant tables.
They had a second bottle of sekt and just enough money
left over to take a bus halfway home. As they
walked to Adalbertstrasse, Maria yawned loudly
and put her arm through Leonard's for support. She
had put in ten hours overtime in the previous three
days because one of the office girls was out with the flu. And the
night before, she and Leonard had been awake until
dawn, and even then they had had to remake the bed before
they slept.
"Ich bin miide, miide, miide,
"she said quietly as they began to climb the apartment
stairs. Indoors, she went straight to the bathroom
to prepare for bed. Leonard finished off a bottle
of white wine while he waited in the living room.
When she appeared he took a couple of
paces toward her and stood blocking her way to the
bedroom. He knew that if he acted confidently and
was true to his feelings, he could not fail.
  She went to take his hand. "Let's sleep now.
Then we'll have all the morning."
  He had moved his hand away and rested it on his
hip. She gave off a childish smell of
toothpaste and soap. She was holding the hairclip
she had been wearing.
  Leonard kept his voice level and, as he
thought, expressionless. "Take off your clothes."
  "Yes, in the bedroom." She went to step around
him.
  He held her by the elbow and pushed her back.
"Do it here."
  She was annoyed. He had anticipated that, he
knew they would have to go through that. "I'm too tired tonight.
You can see that." These last words were spoken in a
conciliatory way, and it cost Leonard some effort
of will to reach out and take her chin between his forefinger and
thumb.
  He raised his voice. "Do as you're told. In
here. Now."
  She shoved his hand away. She really was
surprised, and now a little amused. "You're
drunk. You drank too much at the Resi and now you
are Tarzan."
  Her laughter irritated him. He ran her against
the wall, harder than he intended. The air was
knocked from her lungs. Her eyes were wide. She
got her breath and said, "Leonard . . ."
  He knew that fear might come into it, and that they had
to get beyond that as soon as possible. "Do as I tell
you and you'll be all right." He sounded reassuring.
"Take it all off or I'll do it for you."
  She pressed herself against the wall. She shook her
head. Her eyes looked heavy and dark. He thought
this might be the first indication of success. When she
began to obey she would understand that this pantomime was
all for pleasure, hers as well as his. Then the
fear would disappear completely. "You'll do as I
say." He managed to suppress the
interrogative.
  She dropped the clip and pressed her fingers against
the wall behind her. Her head was still and a little bowed. She
drew a deep breath and said, "Now I'm going to the
bedroom." Her accent was more than usually
pronounced. She had moved no
  more than a few inches from the wall before he pushed
her back.
  "No," he said.
  She was looking up at him. Her jaw had
dropped and her lips were parted. She was looking at
him as though for the first time. It could have been wonder on
her face, or even astonished admiration. At any
moment it would all be different, there would be joyous
compliance, and transformation. He hooked his fingers by the
catch of her skirt and pulled hard. There was no
going back. She yelped, and said his name twice
quickly. She held her skirt up with one hand and the
other was half raised, palm outward for protection.
There were two black buttons on the floor. He
took a fistful of material and jerked the skirt
down. At that moment she made a lunge across the
room. The skirt ripped along a seam and she
tripped, scrabbled on the floor and fell again.
He rolled her onto her back and pressed her
shoulders down on the boards. They should be laughing,
he thought. It was a game, an exhilarating game.
She was wrong to overdramatize. He was kneeling
by her, holding her with two hands. Then he let her
go. He lay beside her awkwardly, propped on an
elbow. With his free hand he pulled at her underwear
and unbuttoned his fly.
  She lay still and looked at the ceiling.
She hardly blinked. This was the turning point. They
were on their way. He wanted to smile at her, but
he thought this might destroy for her the impression of his
mastery. He kept a stern face as he positioned
himself. If it was a game, it was a serious game after
all. He was almost in place. She was tight. It was
a shock when she spoke so calmly. She did not
shift her gaze from the ceiling, and her voice was
cold.
  She said, "I want you to leave. I want you to go
home."
  "I'm staying here," Leonard said, "and that's that."
He did not sound as forthright as he wanted.
  She said, "Please . . ." Her eyes filled
with tears. She continued to stare at the ceiling. At
last she blinked and displaced a trickle. It ran
straight down her temples and vanished into the hair
above her ears. Leonard's elbow was stiff. She
sucked her
  lower lip and blinked again. There were no more tears and
she trusted herself to speak once more. "Just go."
  He stroked her face, along the line of her
cheekbone, down to where the hair was wet. She held
her breath, waiting for him to stop.
  He knelt up and rubbed his arm and
buttoned his fly. The silence hissed around them. It
was unjust, this unspoken blame. He appealed to an
imaginary court. If this had been anything other than
playfulness, if he had meant her harm, he would not
have stopped when he did, the very moment he saw how
upset she was. She was taking it literally, using it
against him, and that was quite unfair. He did not know how
to begin saying any of this. She had not moved from the
floor. He was angry with her. And he was
desperate for her forgiveness. It was impossible
to speak. She let her hand go limp when he took it
and squeezed. Half an hour before they had been
walking arm in arm along Oranienstrasse. How would
he ever get back to that? There came to him an image
of a blue clockwork locomotive, a present on
his eighth or ninth birthday. It used to pull a string
of coal trucks round a figure-of-eight track
until one afternoon, in a spirit of reverent experimentation,
he had overwound it.
  Finally Leonard stood and took a couple of
steps back. Maria sat up and arranged her
skirt over her knees. She too had a memory,
but only ten years old and more burdensome than a
broken toy train. It was of an air raid shelter
in an eastern suburb of Berlin, near the
Oberbaum bridge. It was late April, the
week before the city fell. She was almost twenty. An
advancing Red Army unit had installed heavy
guns nearby and was shelling the city center. There were
thirty of them in the shelter, women, children, old people,
cowering in the din. Maria was with her Uncle Walter.
There was a lull in the firing, and five soldiers
sauntered into the bunker-the first Russians they had
ever seen. One of them pointed a rifle at the group
while another mimed for the Germans: watches,
jewelry. The collection was swift and silent.
Uncle Walter pushed Maria deeper into the
gloom, back to the first-aid station. She hid in a
  corner, wedged between the wall and an empty
supply cupboard. On a mattress on the
floor was a woman of about fifty who had been shot
in both legs. Her eyes were closed and she was
moaning. It was a high, continuous sound on one
note. It attracted the attention of one of the
soldiers. He knelt by the woman and took out a
short-handled knife. Her eyes were still closed. The
soldier lifted her skirt and cut away her
underclothes. Watching over her uncle's shoulder,
Maria thought the Russian was about to perform some crude
battlefield surgery, removing a
bullet with an unsterilized knife. Then he was
lying on top of the wounded woman, pushing into her with
jerking, trembling movements.
  The woman's voice dropped to a low sound. Beyond
her, in the shelter, people were turning away. No one
made a sound. Then there was a commotion, and another
Russian, a huge man in civilian clothes, was
pushing through to the first-aid station. He was a political
commissar, Maria learned later. His face was
blotchy scarlet with a fury that stretched his lips
across his teeth. With a shout he seized the soldier by the
back of his jacket and pulled him off. The penis was
vivid in the gloom, and smaller than Maria had
expected. The commissar hauled the soldier away
by the ear, shouting in Russian. Then it was silent
again. Someone gave the wounded woman a drink of
water. Three hours later, when it was certain that the
artillery unit had moved on, they emerged from the
shelter into the rain. They found the soldier lying face
downward by the edge of the road. He had been shot in
the back of the neck.
  Maria stood. She supported her skirt with one
hand. She pulled Leonard's greatcoat off the table
and let it fall at his feet. He knew he was
going because he could think of nothing to say. His
mind was jammed. As he passed her, he placed his
hand on her forearm. She stared down at the hand, and
looked away.
  He had no money, and had to walk
to Platanenallee. The following day, after work, he
called on her with flowers, but she was gone. The next
day he learned from a neighbor she was with her parents
in the Russian sector.
This page is blank.

Nine
  There was no time for brooding. Two days after
Maria left, a hydraulic jack was brought to the
head of the tunnel to pull the cables down. It was
bolted in position under the vertical shaft. The double
doors were sealed and the room was pressurized. John
Macationamee was there, and Leonard and five other
technicians. There was also an American in a
suit, who did not speak. To adjust their ears to the
rising pressure, they had to swallow hard.
Macationamee passed around some boiled sweets. The
American sipped water from a teacup. Traffic
noise resonated in the chamber. Now and
then they heard the roar of a heavy truck and the ceiling
vibrated.
When a light flashed on a field telephone,
Macationamee picked it up and listened. There had
already been confirmations from the recording room, from the people
running the amplifiers, and from the engineers
responsible for the power generators and the air supply.
The latest call was from the lookouts on the roof of the
warehouse, who were watching the Schonefelder
Chaussee through binoculars. They had been up there
all through the digging. They used to bring work to a halt
whenever Vopos were directly over the tunnel.
Macationamee put down the phone and nodded at two
men who were standing by the jack. One of them hung a
wide leather strap over his shoulder and climbed a
ladder to the cables. The strap was being passed behind the
cables and attached to a chain, which was rubberized to stop it
chinking. The man at the foot of the ladder fixed the
chain to the jack and looked at Macationamee. When the
first man was down and the ladder had been stowed,
Macationamee picked up the phone again. He then
put down the phone and nodded, and the man began to work the
jack.
It was tempting to go and stand under the shaft to watch the
cables being drawn down. They had calculated just how
much slack there would be, and how much was safe to take
up. No one knew for sure. But it would not
be professional to show too much curiosity. The man
turning the jack needed space. They waited in
silence and sucked their sweets. The pressure was still
rising; the air was sweaty and warm. The American
stood apart. He glanced at his watch and made an
entry in a notebook. Macationamee kept his hand
on the phone. The man straightened from his work and
looked at him. Macationamee went to the shaft and
looked up. He stood on tiptoe and reached. When
he brought his hand down, it was covered in mud. "Six
inches," he said. "No more," and he went back to be
by the phone.
The man who had been up the ladder brought a bucket
of water and a cloth. His colleague unbolted the
jack from the floor. In its place was lifted a low
wooden platform. The man
  with the bucket took it over to Macationamee, who
rinsed his hand. Then he carried it back to the shaft,
hauled it onto the platform and washed the cables, which
Leonard guessed were only six feet from the ground.
A bath towel was passed up for the man to dry the
cables with. Then one of the other technicians, who had
been standing next to Leonard, took his place near
the platform. In his hand was an electrician's
knife and a pair of wire-strippers.
Macationamee was on the phone again. "The
pressure's good," he whispered to the room, and then
he murmured some directions into the receiver.
  Before the first cut was made, they allowed themselves their
moment. There was just room on the steps for three men.
They put their hands on the cables. Each one was as
thick as an arm, dull black and cold, and still
sticky from the moisture. Leonard could almost sense the
hundreds of phone conversations and encoded messages
flashing to and from Moscow beneath his fingertips. The
American came and looked, but Macationamee hung
back. Then only the technician with the knife
remained on the platform, and he was starting work. To the
others, standing watching him, he was visible from the waist
down. He wore gray flannel trousers and
polished brown shoes. Soon he passed down a
rectangle of black rubber. The first cable had been
exposed. When the other two had been cut, it was time
for the tap. Macationamee was on the phone again, and
nothing happened until he gave the signal. It was
known that the East Germans kept a regular check
on the integrity of their high- priority circuits
by sending a pulse down the line which would bounce back
if it encountered a break. The thin skin of concrete
above the tap chamber could easily be smashed
open. Leonard and all the others had learned the
evacuation procedures. The last man was to close and
bolt all the doors behind him. Where the tunnel
crossed the border the sandbags and barbed wire were
to be pulled into place, and so too the hand- painted
wooden sign that sternly warned intruders in German
and Russian that they were entering the American
sector.
  Supported on brackets along the plywood
wall were the hundreds of circuits in neat
multicolored bunches, ready to be
  clipped to the landline. Leonard and another man
stood below and handed up wires as they were called for.
The pattern of work was not as Macationamee had outlined
it. The same man stayed on the platform, working at
a speed Leonard knew he could not match. Every hour
he took a ten-minute break. Ham and cheese
sandwiches and coffee were brought from the canteen. One
of the technicians sat at a table with a tape
recorder and a set of headphones. In the third or
fourth hour he raised his hand and turned
to Macationamee, who went across and put one ear to the
set. Then he handed it to the American, who was at his
side. They had broken into the circuit used by the
East German telephone engineers. There
would be advance warning now of any alarm.
  An hour later they had to evacuate the chamber.
The moisture in the air was heavy enough to be condensing on
the walls, and Macationamee was worried that it would
interfere with the contacts. They left one man
monitoring the engineers' circuit while the rest of
them waited beyond the double doors for the moisture level
to drop. They stood around in the short stretch of
tunnel before the amplifiers with their hands in their
pockets, trying not to stamp their feet. It was far
colder out here. They all wanted to go back up to the
top for a smoke. But Macationamee, who was chewing
on his empty pipe, did not suggest it, and no one
was prepared to ask. During the following six hours
they left the chamber five times. The American
left without a word. Finally Mcationamee sent one of the
technicians away. Half an hour later he
dismissed Leonard.
  Leonard passed unseen through the noiseless
excitement round the racks of amplifiers and walked
slowly along the tracks, back toward the
warehouse. He had the long stretch to himself, and he
knew he was delaying leaving the tunnel, leaving the
drama and returning to his shame. He had stood
outside Maria's apartment two nights before
with his flowers, unable to come away. He persuaded
himself that she had gone out shopping. Each time he heard
footsteps on the stairs below, he peered over the
rail and prepared to meet her. After an hour he
posted the flowers, expensive hothouse carnations,
through her door, one by one, and ran down the stairs.
He went back the next evening, this time with
marzipan-filled chocolates in a box whose lid
featured puppies in a wicker basket. This and the
flowers cost him almost a week's money. He was on
the landing below Maria's when he met her neighbor, a
gaunt, unfriendly woman whose apartment exhaled a
carbolic breath through the open door behind her. She
shook her head and her hand at Leonard. She knew
he was foreign.
"Fort! Night da! Bei ihren Eltern!"
He thanked her. She repeated herself loudly when he
continued up the stairs, and she waited for him to come
down. The box would not fit through the door, so he
posted the chocolates through, one by one. When he
passed the neighbor on his way down, he offered her
the box. She crossed her arms over her chest and
bit her lip. The refusal cost her some effort.
As more time passed, the more unbelievable his attack
on Maria seemed, and the less forgivable.
There had been some logic, some crazed,
step-by-step reasoning that he could no longer
recall. It had made good sense, but all he could
remember now was his certainty at the time, his conviction
that ultimately she would approve. He could not
recall the steps along the way. It was as if he were
remembering the actions of another man, or of himself
transformed in a dream. Now he was back in the real
world-he was passing the underground border crossing and
beginning to ascend the slope-and applying the standards of the
world, his actions appeared not only offensive but
profoundly stupid. He had chased Maria away.
She was the best thing to have happened to him since . . .
His mind ran over various childhood treats,
birthdays, holidays, Christmases, university
entrance, his transfer to Dollis Hill. Nothing
remotely as good had ever happened to him.
Unsummoned images of her, memories of her
kindness, of how fond of him she had been, made him
jerk his head to one side and cough to cover the sound of his
agony. He would never get her back. He had
to get her back.
He climbed the ladder out of the shaft and nodded at the
guard. He made his way up to the next floor,
to the recording
  room. No one had a drink in his hand, no one was
smiling even, but the atmosphere of a celebration was
unmistakable. The test row, the first twelve tape
recorders to be connected, were already receiving. Leonard
joined the group watching them. Four machines were
running, then a fifth started, then a sixth; then one
of the original four stopped, and immediately after it
another. The signal activation units, the ones he
had installed himself, were working. They had been tested, but
never by a Russian voice, or a Russian
code. Leonard sighed, and for the moment Maria
receded.
  A German who was standing close by put his hand on
Leonard's shoulder and squeezed. Another of
Gehlen's men, another Fritz, turned around and
grinned at them both. There was lunchtime beer on their
breath. Elsewhere in the room last-minute connections
and alterations were being made. A handful of people with
clipboards stood in a self-important cluster.
Two Dollis Hill men were sitting close in on
a third who was on the phone, listening intently,
probably to Macationamee.
  Then Glass came in, raised his hand
to Leonard and strode toward him. He had not looked
better in weeks. He had a different
suit and a new tie knot. Lately Leonard had
been avoiding him, but half-heartedly. The job for
Macationamee had made him ashamed to spend time with the
only American he could claim a friendship with. At
the same time, he knew that Glass was likely to be
a good source. Glass was tugging him by the lapel
into a relatively deserted part of the room. The
beard had resumed its old light-trapping forward
thrust.
  "This is a dream come true," Glass said. "The
test row is perfect. In four hours the whole
thing'll be rolling." Leonard started to speak, but
Glass said, "Listen. Leonard, you haven't been
completely open with me. You think I wouldn't know when
you go behind my back?" Glass was smiling.
  It occurred to Leonard that the tunnel might be
bugged along its length. But surely Macationamee
would know about it. "What are you talking about?"
  "Come on. This is a small town. The two of you
have been
  seen. Russell was in the Resi on Saturday,
and he told me. His considered judgment was that you'd
been the whole way many times. Is that true?"
  Leonard smiled. He could not help his
ludicrous pride. Glass was being mock
stern. "That same girl, the one who sent the note?
The one you said you got nowhere with?"
  "Well, I didn't at first."
  "That's amazing." Glass had his hands on
Leonard's shoulders and was holding him at arm's
length. His admiration and delight seemed so forceful
that Leonard could almost forget recent events. "You
quiet Englishmen-you don't horse around, you
don't talk about it, you get in there fast."
  Leonard wanted to laugh out loud; it was, it had
been, quite a triumph.
  Glass released him. "Listen, I phoned you every
evening at your apartment last week. You moved in with
her or what?"
  "Only sort of."
  "I thought we might have a drink, but now you've
told me, why don't we make a double date? I
have this nice friend, Jean, from the U.s. embassy.
She's from my hometown, Cedar Rapids. You know
where that is?"
  Leonard looked at his shoes. "Well, the
fact is, we've had a sort of row. Quite a big
one. She's gone off to stay with her parents."
  "And where are they?"
  "Oh, in Pankow somewhere."
  "And when did she leave?"
  "The day before yesterday."
  Leonard was halfway through answering this last question
when he understood that Glass had been on the job the
whole time. Not for the first time in their acquaintanceship,
the American had taken him by the elbow and was steering
him somewhere else. Apart from Maria and his mother, no one
had touched Leonard in his life more than Glass.
  They were out in the quiet of the corridor. Glass
took a notebook from his pocket. "You tell her
anything?"
  "Of course I didn't."
  "You better give me her name and address."
  The misplaced stress on the first syllable of this
last word released in Leonard a surge of
irritation. "Her name is Maria. Her address is
none of your business."
  A small display of feeling from the Englishman
seemed to refresh Glass. He closed his eyes and
breathed deeply, as though inhaling a fragrance. Then
he said in a reasonable way, "Let me reorder the
facts, then you tell me if it's worth my job
to ignore them. A girl you've never seen before
makes a highly unconventional approach to you at
a dance hall. Finally you make it with her.
She's chosen you, not you her. Right? You're doing
classified work. You move in with her. The day before
we lay the taps, she disappears into the Russian
sector. What are we going to say to our
superiors, Leonard? That you liked her a whole
lot so we decided not to investigate? Let's have
it."
  Leonard felt physical pain at the thought of
Glass with legitimate reason to be alone with
Maria in an interrogation room. It started high in
his stomach and spread downward to his bowels. He
said, "Maria Eckdorf, Adalbertstrasse 84,
Kreuzberg.
Erstes Hinterhaus, funfter Stock, rechts."
  "One of those cold-water walkups on the top
floor? Not as classy as Platanenallee. Did
she say she didn't want to stay at your place?"
  "I didn't want her there."
  "You see," Glass spoke as though Leonard
had not replied, "she'd want you at her place if
it was wired."
  For the duration of a single pulse of sheer hatred,
Leonard saw himself seizing Glass's beard with
two hands and ripping it off, bringing face flesh with
it, throwing the mess of red and black to the
floor and stamping on it. Instead he turned and
walked away without thought for his direction. He was
back in the recording room. There were more machines
running now. Up and down the room they were stopping and
starting. All checked and fitted by him, all his own
lonely, loyal work. Glass was at his side.
Leonard started to head down one of the rows, but two
technicians were blocking the way. He turned
back.
  Glass came up close and said, "I know it's
tough. I've seen
  this before. And it's probably nothing. We just have
to run through the procedure. One more question and I'll
leave you in peace. Does she have a day job?"
  No thought preceded the action. Leonard filled his
lungs and shouted. "A day job? A day job? You
mean, as opposed to her night job? What are you
trying to say?"
  It was almost a scream. The air in the room
hardened. Everyone stopped work and turned in his
direction. Only the machines went on.
  Glass pushed his palms downward, miming a
lowering of volume. When he spoke, it was just louder
than a whisper. His lips barely moved.
"Everyone's listening, Leonard, including
some of your own big boys over by the phone. Don't
let them think you're a nut. Don't let them put
you out of a job." It was true. Two of the Dollis
Hill senior staff were watching him coolly.
Glass went on with his ventriloquist's voice.
"Do exactly as I say and we can save this.
Bang me on the shoulder and we'll walk out of here
together like good friends."
  Everyone was waiting for something to happen. There was no
other way out. Glass was his only ally. Leonard
threw him a rough punch to the shoulder and immediately the
American burst into loud, convincing laughter and put
his arm around Leonard's shoulder, and once more walked
him to the door. Between laughs he murmured, "Now
it's your turn, you son of a bitch, save your ass
and laugh."
  "Heh-heh," the Englishman said croakily, and
then louder, "Hahaha. Night job, that's a good
one. Night job!"
  Glass joined in, and behind them a low murmur of
conversation, a friendly wave, swelled and bore them to the
door.
  They were back in the corridor, but this time they
kept walking. Glass had his notebook and pencil
out again. "Just give me the place of work,
Leonard, then we'll have a drink in my room."
  Leonard could not give it to him in one. The
betrayal was too great. "It's an Army vehicle
workshop. British Army, that is." They walked
on. Glass was waiting. "I think it's REME.
It's in
Spandau." Then, outside Glass's room, "The
CO is a Major Ashdown."
"That'll do fine," Glass said, and unlocked the
door and ushered him into the room. "You wanna beer?
Or how about a Scotch?"
Leonard chose Scotch. He had been in here
only once before. The desk was covered with papers.
He was trying not to look too hard, but he could see
that some of the material was technical.
Glass poured and said, "You want me to fetch some
ice from the canteen?" Leonard nodded and Glass
left. Leonard stepped toward the desk. He had,
he estimated, a little under a minute.
Ten
  Every evening Leonard stopped off at Kreuzberg
on his way home. He only had to set foot on
Maria's landing to know she was not there, but he crossed it
all the same and knocked. After the chocolates, he
no longer posted gifts. He wrote no
more letters after the third. The lady in the carbolic
apartment downstairs sometimes opened her door to watch
him come down. By the end of the first week her look was more
pitying than hostile. He ate supper standing up at
the
Schnellimbiss
on Reichskanzlerplatz and most evenings went to the
bar in the narrow street to delay his
  return to Platanenallee. He had enough German
now to know that the locals hunched at their tables were not
discussing genocide. It was the usual pub grumble-the
late spring, the government, the quality of the coffee.
  When he was home he resisted the armchair and the
torpid brooding. He was not going to let himself go.
He made himself do jobs. He washed his shirts in
the bathroom, scrubbing the cuffs and collars with a
nailbrush. He did his ironing, polished his
shoes, dusted the surfaces and pushed the squeaking
carpet sweeper around the rooms. He wrote to his
parents. Despite all his changes, he was unable
to break with the flat tone, the stifling lack of information
or affect.
Dear Mum and Dad, Thanks for yours. I hope
you are well and over your colds. I've been very
busy at work which is going very well. The
weather . . .
The weather. He never gave the weather a second
thought unless he was writing to his parents. He
paused, then he remembered.
The weather has been very wet, but it's warmer now.
p
  What was beginning to oppress him, and it was an
anxiety that his household chores could never quite
silence, was the possibility that Maria would not
return to her apartment. He would have to find out the
address of Major Ashdown's unit. He would have
to go out to Spandau and catch her coming out of work before she
boarded her train for Pankow. Glass would already have
spoken to her. She was bound to assume
Leonardandbrvbar;
  was trying to get her into trouble. She would be
furious. The
  chances of winning her around on the pavement, in full
view of the sentry, or in the homeward crush of the
U-Bahn ticket.
  hall, were slight. She would stride past him, or
shout some German obscenity that everyone but himself would
understand. To confront her he needed privacy and
several hours. Then she could be furious, then
accusatory, then sorrowful and finally
forgiving. He could have drawn an emotional
circuitj
  diagram for her. As for his own feelings, they were
beginning1
  to be simplified by the righteousness of love. When
she knew how much he loved her, she must forgive
him. For the rest, the deed and its causes, the guilt,
the evasion, he tried hard not to
1 1 2
I
  brood. That would solve nothing. He tried to be
invisible to himself. He scrubbed out the bath, washed the
kitchen floor and fell asleep just past midnight
with tolerable ease, faintly comforted by a sense of being
misunderstood.
  One evening during the second week of Maria's
disappearance Leonard heard voices from the empty
apartment downstairs. He put down his iron and went
out onto his landing to listen. Up the elevator shaft
came the sound of furniture scraping on the
floor, footsteps and more voices. Early the next
morning he was descending in the elevator when it
stopped at the floor below. The man who stepped in
nodded and faced away. He was in his early thirties
and carried an attache case. His beard was
trimmed neatly in the naval style, and he gave
off a scent of cologne. Even Leonard could
tell that the dark blue suit was well made. The
two men rode down in silence. The stranger allowed
Leonard to precede him out of the lift with an
economical movement of his open palm.
  They met again on the ground floor by the lift
shaft two days later. It was not quite dark. Leonard
had come in from Altglienicke by way of Kreuzberg
and his customary two liters of lager. The lights in
the lobby had not been turned on. When Leonard
reached the man's side, the lift had just risen to the
fifth floor. In the time it took to come back down,
the man offered his hand, and without smiling or, as far as
Leonard could tell, altering his expression at
all, said, "George Blake. My wife and I
live right under your feet."
  Leonard gave his name and said, "Do I make a
lot of noise?"
  The lift came and they stepped inside. Blake
pushed the fourth and fifth buttons, and when they were
moving looked from Leonard's face to his shoes and
said in a neutral way, "Carpet slippers would
help."
  "Well, sorry," Leonard said with as
much aggression as he dared. "I'll get some."
  His neighbor nodded and pressed his lips together, as
if to say,
That's the spirit.
The door slid back and he went off without another
word.
  Leonard reached his apartment resolved to pound the
floors
  harder than ever. But he could not quite bring himself to it.
He hated to be in the wrong. He trod heavily
along his hall and took his shoes off in the kitchen.
  Over the months that followed he occasionally saw
Mrs. Blake about the place. She had a
beautiful face and a very straight back, and although she
smiled at Leonard and said hello, he avoided
her. She made him feel shabby and awkward. He
overheard her talking in the lobby and thought she sounded
intimidating. Her husband became a little friendlier
over the summer months. He said he worked for the
Foreign Office at the Olympic Stadium, and
he was politely interested when Leonard told him
he worked for the Post Office, installing internal
lines for the Army. Thereafter, he never failed to say
on the few occasions they passed each other in the
lobby or shared the lift, "How are the
internal lines?" with a smile that made Leonard
wonder if he was being mocked.
  At the warehouse the tap had been declared a
success. One hundred and fifty tape recorders
stopped and started day and night, triggered by the
amplified Russian signals. The place
emptied rapidly. The horizontal diggers, the
tunneling sergeants, had long departed. The
British vertical men had left just as the
excitement was growing, and no one noticed them go.
All kinds of other people-experts whose fields, it
seemed, were known only to themselves-drifted away, as
did the senior Dollis Hill staff.
Macationamee called in once or twice a week.
All that remained were the men monitoring or
distributing the take, and these were the busiest and least
communicative. There were also a few technicians and
engineers keeping the systems running, and the security
people. Leonard sometimes found himself eating in an empty
canteen. His instructions were that he should stay on
indefinitely. He carried out routine checks on the
integrity of the circuits and replaced faulty
valves in the tape recorders.
  Glass stayed away from the warehouse, and at first
Leonard was relieved. Until he was
reconciled with Maria, he did not want to hear
news of her through Glass. He did not want
Glass to have the power of an intermediary over him.
Then he began
to find excuses to walk past the American's
office several times a day. Leonard was often at the
water fountain. He was certain
ilMore
that Maria would be cleared, but he had his doubts about
Glass.
The interviews would be opportunities for
seduction, surely. If Maria was still angry and
Glass was sufficiently energetic, the worst might
be happening even as Leonard stood outside the
locked room. Several times he almost phoned
Glass from home. But what was he to ask? How would
he bear the confirmation, or believe the denial?
Perhaps the very question would seem to Glass a form of
incitement.
As the weather grew warmer in May, the off-duty
Americans set up softball games in the rough
ground between the warehouse and the perimeter fence. They were
under strict instructions to wear the insignia of radar
operatives. The Vopos over by the cemetery
watched the games through field glasses, and
when a long ball sailed over the sector boundary
they ran forward willingly and lobbed it back. The
players cheered, and the Vopos waved good-naturedly.
Leonard sat out with his back to the wall watching the
games. One reason he refused to join in was that
softball looked like nothing more than rounders for
grown-ups. The other reason was that he was useless at
any game with a ball. In this one the throws were hard and
low and pitilessly accurate, and the catches were all
taken in an obligatory offhand manner.
Every day now there were hours of idleness. He often
leaned against the wall in the sun below an open window.
One of the Army clerks propped a wireless on the
sill and broadcast AFN to the players. When a
lively song came up, the pitcher might pat out a
rhythm on his knees before a throw, and the men out on the
bases would snap their fingers and practice
, jll shuffles. Leonard had never seen popular
music taken so
seriously. Only one performer could temporarily
halt the
Igame. If it was Bill Haley and the Comets, and
especially if it
was "Rock Around the Clock," there would be shouts for

volume, and players would drift toward the window.
For two
and a half minutes no one could strike out.
To Leonard, the unrestrained exhortation to dance for
hours on end seemed

.
  puerile. It was a counting song that girls with a
skipping rope might chant in the playground. It was
"Hickory Dickory Dock," it was "One
potato, two potato, three potato, four. .
. ." But with repetition, the thumping rhythm and the
virile insistence of the guitar began to stir him, and
he moved from hating the song to pretending to hate it.
  Soon he was glad when the mail clerk crossed
his office at a cue from the announcer and turned up
the volume. More than half a dozen players would
come and stand around where he was sitting. They were mostly
sentries in their late teens, clean and huge, with
bristling heads. All of them knew his first name by now,
and they were always friendly. For them the song seemed to have more
than musical importance. It was an anthem, a
rite; it bound these players and separated them from the
older men who stood waiting on the field. This
state of affairs lasted only three
weeks before the song lost its power. It was played
loudly, but it did not interrupt the game. Then it was
ignored altogether. A replacement was needed, but it did
not come until April of the following year.
  It was at the height of Bill Haley's
triumph at the warehouse, just as the young Americans
were jostling around the open window one afternoon, that John
Macationamee came looking for his spy. Leonard
saw him walking from the administration offices toward the
din. Macationamee had not yet seen him, and there was just
time to dissociate himself from what the government scientist
was bound to despise. However, he felt a certain
defiance, and a degree of loyalty to the group. He
was an honorary member. He compromised by standing and
pushing his way through to the edge of the crowd, where he
waited. As soon as Macationamee saw him,
Leonard went toward him, and together they set off for a
walk along the perimeter fence.
  Macationamee had his lit pipe between his baby
teeth. He leaned toward his charge. "I suppose
you've had no luck."
  "Not really," Leonard said. "I've been in
five different offices with time to look around.
Nothing. I've made approaches to various
technical people. They're all very
security-conscious. I couldn't press too hard."
  The truth was he had had one unsuccessful minute
in Glass's office. He did not find it easy
to fall into conversation with strangers. He had tried a
couple of locked doors, that was all.
  Macationamee said, "Did you have a go at that chap
Weinberg?"
  Leonard knew the one, a whippet-shaped
American with a skullcap who played chess with himself
in the canteen. "Yes. He didn't want
to talk."
  They stopped and Macationamee said, "Ah well .
. ." They were looking toward the Schonefelder
Chaussee, more or less along the line of the
tunnel. "That's too bad," Macationamee said.
He spoke with an unfamiliar tightness, Leonard
thought, a deliberation that seemed more than disappointment.
  Leonard said, "I did try."
  Macationamee looked away while he spoke.
"We've got other possibilities, of course,
but you keep trying." His flat emphasis on this
last word, an echo of Leonard's, suggested
skepticism, an accusation of some sort.
  With a farewell grunt, Macationamee set off
for the administration section. There came
to Leonard an image of Maria walking away from
him too, across the rough ground. Maria and
Macationamee, showing him their backs. Across the
grass the Americans were already back at their game.
He felt his failure as a weakness in his legs.
He had been about to walk back to his place by the
window, but for the moment he did not feel like it, and
remained where he was, out by the wire.
This page is blank.
Leonard stepped out of the lift onto his landing the
following evening and found Maria waiting for him by his
door. She was standing in the corner, her coat
buttoned up, both hands on the strap of her
handbag, which hung down in front of her, covering her
knees. It might have been an attitude of
contrition, but she held her head up and her eyes were
on his. She defied him to assume that by seeking him
out she had forgiven him. It was almost dusk, and very little
natural light reached the landing through the east- facing
window. Leonard had pushed the timed light switch
at
  his elbow, and it had begun to tick. The sound
resembled the panicked heartbeat of a minute
creature. The doors slid shut behind him and the lift
sank away. He said her name, but he
made no move toward her. The single overhead
light made deep shadows under her eyes and nose and
gave her face a hard appearance. She had not
spoken yet, she had not moved. She was staring at
him, waiting for whatever he had to say. The buttoned
coat and formal grip on the handbag hinted that she was
ready to leave if she was not satisfied.
  Leonard was flustered. Too many half-sentences
were crowding before him. He had been handed a gift he
could easily destroy in the unwrapping. The
light-switch mechanism by him raced softly, making
it harder to settle on a coherent thought. He said
her name again-the sound simply left his throat-and
took a half-step toward her. From the shaft came
the rumble of the cables hauling their burden upward, the
sigh of the lift settling on the floor below, then the
doors opening and Mr. Blake's voice, urgent
and muted. It was abruptly cut off by the sound of his
front door closing.
  Nothing in her expression had changed. Finally he
said, "Did you get those letters?"
  She blinked in acknowledgment. The three letters of
love and breathless apology and the chocolates and the
flowers were not to be considered here. He said, "What
I did was very stupid." She blinked again.
This time the lashes touched for a fraction longer,
suggesting a softening, a form of encouragement. He had
his tone now, simplicity. It was not so difficult.
"I ruined everything. I've been desperate since
you went. I wanted to come and find you in Spandau, but
I was ashamed. I didn't know how you would ever be able
to forgive me. I was ashamed of approaching you in the
street. I love you very much, I've been thinking about
you all the time. I'll understand if you can't forgive
me. It was a horrible and stupid thing
  Leonard had never in his life spoken about himself and
his feelings in such a way. Nor had he even thought
in this manner. Quite simply, he had never acknowledged
in himself a
  serious emotion. He had never gone much further
than saying he quite liked last night's film, or
hated the taste of lukewarm milk. In fact,
until now, it was as though he had never really had
any serious feelings. Only now, as he came
to name them comshame, desperation, love-could he really
claim them for his own and experience them. His love for the
woman standing by his door was brought into relief by the
word, and sharpened the shame he felt for assaulting
her. As he gave it a name, the unhappiness of the
past three weeks was clarified. He was
enlarged, unburdened. Now that he could name the fog he
had been moving through, he was at last visible to himself.
  But he was not in the clear. Maria had not shifted
her position or her gaze. He said, after a
pause, "Please forgive me." At that moment the
time mechanism clicked and the light went out. He
heard Maria breathe in sharply. When his eyes had
adjusted he could see the gleam of the window behind him
reflected on the clasp of her handbag and in the
whites of her eyes as she seemed to glance away.
He took a risk and came away from the light
switch without pressing it. His elation gave him
confidence. He had behaved badly; now he was going
to put things right. What was demanded of him was truth and
simplicity. He would no longer sleepwalk through his
misery, he would name it accurately and in that way
dispel it. Andwiththe opportunity provided by this near
darkness, he was about to re-establish by means of touch the
old bond between them, the simple, truthful bond.
The words could come later. For now, all that was
required, he was convinced, was that they should hold hands,
perhaps even kiss lightly.
  As he crossed toward her she moved at last,
back into the corner of the landing, deeper into the shadows.
When he came close he put out his hand,
but she was not quite there. He had brushed her sleeve.
Again, he caught sight of the whites of her eyes as
her head appeared to duck away. He found her
elbow and held it gently. He whispered her name.
Her arm was crooked tight and unyielding, and through the
material of her coat he could feel her trembling.
Now he was close, he was aware of her breathing fast
and shallow. There was a sweaty
  taste in the air. For an instant he thought that she
had mounted swiftly to the extremities of sexual
arousal, a thought rendered instantly blasphemous when
he moved his hand to her shoulder and she half called
out, half screamed an inarticulate sound, followed
by
"Mach das Licht an. Bitte!
Turn on the light!" and then, "Please, please."
He placed a second hand on her shoulder. He
shook her gently, reassuringly. All he wanted
to do was wake her from this nightmare. He had to remind
her who he was really, the young innocent she had
sweetly coaxed and brought on. She screamed again,
this time at full strength and piercingly. He backed
off. A door opened on the floor below. There were
rapid footsteps on the stairs that ran around the
lift shaft.
  Leonard pressed the light switch just as Mr.
Blake rounded the corner of the half-landing. He
took the final flight of stairs three at a time.
He was in shirtsleeves and without a tie, and he had
silver armbands around his biceps. His face was hard,
emanating ferocious military competence, and his hands
were tensed and open at the ready. He was prepared to do
someone a lot of harm. When he arrived at the top
of the stairs and took in Leonard, his face did not
relax. Maria had let her handbag drop to the
floor and had raised her hands to cover her nose and
mouth. Blake took up a position between Leonard
and Maria. His hands were on his hips. He already
knew he was not going to have to hit anyone, and this added
to his ferocity.
  "What's going on here?" he demanded of
Leonard, and without waiting for a reply he turned
away impatiently and confronted Maria. His
voice was kindly. "Are you hurt? Has he tried
to hurt you?"
  "Of course I haven't," Leonard said.
  Blake called over his shoulder, "Shut up!" and
turned back to Maria. His voice was immediately kind
again. "Well?"
  He was like an actor in a wireless
comedy, Leonard thought, doing all the voices. Because
he did not like Blake standing between them like a referee,
Leonard crossed the landing, pressing the light
switch on his way to give them another ninety
seconds. Blake was waiting for Maria to speak, but
he
  seemed to know that Leonard was coming up behind. He
put out an arm to stop Leonard walking around him and
going to Maria. She had said something Leonard had not
caught, and Blake was replying in competent
German. Leonard disliked him more. Was it out of
loyalty to Leonard that Maria answered in
English?
  "I'm sorry to make this noise and bring you from your
house. It's something between us, that's all. We can
make it better." She had taken her hands from her
face. She picked up her handbag. Having it in
her hands seemed to restore her. She spoke around
Blake, though not quite to Leonard. "I'll go inside
now."
  Leonard took out his key and stepped around
Maria's savior to open the door. He leaned in and
turned on his hall light.
  Blake had not moved. He was not satisfied.
"I could phone a taxi for you. You could sit
with my wife and me until it comes."
  Maria crossed the threshold and turned to thank
him. "You're very kind. I'm okay now, see.
Thank you." She walked confidently along the hall
of the apartment she had never visited, stepped into the
bathroom and closed the door.
  Blake stood at the head of the stairs with his hands
in his pockets. Leonard felt too vulnerable, and
too irritated by his neighbor, to offer further
explanations. He stood irresolutely by his
door, restrained from going indoors until the other
man had gone away.
  Blake said, "Women generally scream like that when
they think they're about to be raped."
  The ludicrous knowingness of the remark called for an
elegant rebuttal. Leonard thought hard for
several seconds. What impeded him was that he was being
mistaken for a rapist when in fact he had almost been
one. In the end he said, "Not in this case." Blake
shrugged to indicate his skepticism and descended the
stairs. From then on, whenever the two men met by the
lift, they did so in cold silence.
  Maria had locked the bathroom door and washed
her face. She lowered the lid on the toilet and
sat there. She had surprised herself by her
scream. She did not really believe that
  Leonard had wanted to assault her again. His
awkward and sincere apologies had been adequate
guarantee. But the sudden darkness and his quiet
approach, the possibilities, the associations,
had been too much for her. The delicate
equilibrium she had developed during three
weeks in her parents' stuffy apartment in Pankow had
come apart at the touch of Leonard's hand. It was like a
madness, this fear that someone pretending affection should
want to do her harm. Or that a malice she could
barely comprehend should take on the outer forms of
sexual intimacy. Otto's occasional
assaults, dreadful as they were, did not inspire
anything like this sickness of fear. His violence was an
aspect of his impersonal hatred and sodden
helplessness. He did not wish to do her harm
and
long for her. He wanted to intimidate her and take
her money. He did not want to get inside her,
he did not ask her to trust him.
  The trembling in her arms and legs had ceased.
She felt foolish. The neighbor would despise
her. In Pankow she had come slowly to the decision that
Leonard was not malicious or brutal, and
that it was an innocent stupidity that had made him
behave the way he had. He lived so intensely within
himself that he was barely aware of how his actions
appeared to others. This was the benign judgment she had
reached by way of much harsher evaluations and emphatic
resolutions never to see him again. Now, with her
scream in the dark, her instincts seemed to have
overriden her forgiveness. If she could no longer
trust him, and even if her mistrust was irrational,
what was she doing in his bathroom? Why had she not
accepted the neighbor's offer of a taxi? She still
wanted Leonard; she had realized that in Pankow.
But what kind of man was it who crept up in the dark
to apologize for a rape?
  By the time she emerged ten minutes later, she had
decided to talk to Leonard one more time and see what
happened. She was not committed either way. She kept
her coat on, buttoned up. He was in the living
room. The overhead lights were on, and so were the Army
issue standard and table lamps. He had taken up a
position in the center of the room and looked, she thought
as she came in, like a boy who had just had his
backside
  thrashed. He gestured toward a chair. Maria
shook her head. Someone was going to have to speak
first. Maria did not see why it should be her, and
Leonard was wary of making another mistake. She
came further into the room and he took a couple of
steps back, unconsciously granting her more
space and light. Leonard had the outlines of a
speech in mind, but he was not certain how it would go
down. If Maria were to absolve him of the
responsibility for further explanation by turning on
her heel and slamming the front door on her way
out, he would be relieved, at least initially. When
he was alone, there was a sense in which he ceased
to exist. Here, now, he had to take control of a
situation without destroying it. Maria was watching him
expectantly. She was offering another chance. Her
eyes were bright. He wondered if she had been crying
in the bathroom.
  He said, "I didn't mean to frighten you." He was
tentative; it was almost a question. But she did not have an
answer for him, yet. In all this time she had not
spoken a word to him. She had spoken only to Mr.
Blake. Leonard said, "I wasn't going to
... to do anything. I only wanted . . ." He was
sounding implausible. He fumbled. To get up
close in the dark and hold her hand, that was all he
had wanted, to illuminate with the old terms
of touch. It was his unexamined assumption that he was
safer under cover. He could not tell her, he hardly
knew it himself, that the chance darkness on the landing was one
with the gloom under the covers in the coldest week of
winter, back in the old familiarity when everything had
been new. The blade of calluses on her toe,
the mole with two hairs, the minuscule dents on
her lobes. If she went, what was he going to do with
all these loving facts, these torturing details?
If she wasn't with him, how would he bear all this knowledge
of her alone? The force of these considerations drove the
words out of him, they came as easily as breath. "I
love you," he said, and then he said it again, and
repeated it in German until he had expunged the
last traces of self-consciousness, the wincing
foolishness of the
  formula, until it was clean and resonant, as
though no one in life or in films had ever uttered
it before.
  Then he told her how miserable he had been without
her, how he had thought about her, how happy he had
been before she went away, how happy he thought they
both had been, how precious and beautiful she was,
and what an idiot, a selfish, ignorant fool,
he had been to frighten her. He had never said
so much in one go. In the pauses, when he was searching
for the unfamiliar, intimate phrases, he pushed his
glasses up his nose, or took them off, examined
them closely and replaced them. His height seemed
to work against him. He would have sat down if only she
had.
  It was almost unbearable to watch this clumsy,
reticent Englishman who knew so little about his
feelings lay himself open. He was like a prisoner in
a Russian show trial. Maria would have told him
to stop, but she was fascinated, the way she had been
once as a girl when her father had removed the back
of a wireless set and shown her the bulbs and sliding
metal plates responsible for human voices.
She had not lost touch with her fear, even though it was
diminishing with each halting intimacy. So she
listened, betraying nothing by her expression while
Leonard told her once more that he did not know what
had come over him, that he had not meant her harm, and that
it would never, ever, happen again.
  Finally he ran out. The only sound was that of a
scooter on Platanenallee. They listened to it
changing down at the end of the oad and pulling away.
The silence made Leonard think he was doomed.
He could not bring himself to look at her. He
took off his glasses and polished them on his
hankie. He had said too much. It had sounded
dishonest. If she went now, he thought, he would take
a bath. He wouldn't drown himself. He glanced up.
Around the elongated blur that represented Maria in
his field of vision there was discernible movement. He
returned the glasses to his face. She was
unbuttoning her coat, and then she was crossing the
room toward him.
Twelve
  Leonard was walking along the corridor from the
water fountain to the recording room, a route that
took him past Glass's office. The door was
open and Glass was behind his desk. Immediately he was on
his feet and waving Leonard in.
  "Good news. We ran the checks on that girl.
She's cleared. She's okay." He was pointing at
a chair, but Leonard remained leaning in the
doorway.
  "I told you that in the first place."
  "That was subjective. This is official. She's
a nice-looking girl.
  The CO and the second-in-command out at this
toytown repair outfit have both got the hots for
her in their own British way. But she
plays it very straight."
  "You met her then." Leonard already knew from
Maria about the three interviews with Glass. He
did not like it. He hated it. He had to hear about it.
  "You bet. She told me that you two were having some
trouble and that she was staying out of your way. I told
her, "What the fuck, we're spending valuable
man-hours checking you out because you're stepping out with one
of our guys, the closest we've ever seen to a
genius, godammit, who's doing very important work
for his country and mine." This was after I knew she was
okay. I said, "You just propel your ass around
to his apartment and make it up. Herr Marnham
isn't the kind of guy you mess around with. He's the
best we got, so you better count yourself a
privileged lady, Frau Eckdorf!" Did
she come back?"
  "The day before yesterday."
  Glass whooped and started to laugh in a theatrical
way. "There, see? I did you a big favor, I
built you up, you got her back. Now we're
even."
  All very childish, Leonard thought, this
locker-room treatment of his private life. He
said, "What happened at these interviews?"
  The speed of Glass's transition from hilarity
to seriousness was in itself a kind of mockery. "She
told me you started acting rough. She had to run for
her life. Listen, I keep underestimating you,
Leonard. That's quite an act you keep hidden there.
At work you're Mr. Meek and Mild, then you go
home and wham! It's King Kong."
  Glass was laughing again, genuinely this time.
Leonard was irritated.
  Last night Maria had told him all about the
security check, which had rather impressed her. Now
Glass was back behind his desk, and still Leonard could
not dispel his doubts. Could he really trust this man?
It was undeniable: one way or another, Glass had
climbed into bed with them.
1 2 8
  When the laughter had stopped Leonard said,
"It's not something I'm proud of." Then he added, with
what seemed the correct degree of menace,
"Actually, I'm pretty serious about this girl."
  Glass stood up and reached for his jacket. "I
would be too. She's a honey, a real honey."
Leonard stood aside while he locked his
office. "What is it I heard one of your people saying
once-a proper little darling?"
  Glass put his hand on the Englishman's shoulder
and walked with him along the corridor. The
Cockney imitation was halfhearted, deliberately
appalling, Leonard thought. "C'mon, cheer up.
Let's go an' "ave a nice cuppa tea."
This page is blank.

Leonard and Maria began again on different terms.
As the summer of 1955 got under way, they were
dividing their time more equally between his apartment and hers.
They synchronized their arrivals home from work.
Maria cooked, Leonard washed the dishes. On the
weekday evenings they walked to the Olympic
Stadium and swam in the pool, or, in
Kreuzberg, walked along the canal, or sat
outside a bar near Mariannenplatz, drinking
beer. Maria borrowed bicycles from a cycling
club friend. On weekends they rode out to the
villages of Frohnau and Heiligensee in the
  north, or west to Gatow to explore the city
boundaries along paths through empty meadows. Out here
the smell of water was in the air. They picnicked
by Gross-Glienicke See under the flightpath of
RAF planes, and swam out to the red-and- white
buoys marking the division of the British and
Russian sectors. They went on to Kladow by the
enormous Wannsee and took the ferry across
to Zehlendorf and cycled back through ruins and
building sites, back into the heart of the city.
  Friday and Saturday evenings they went to the
pictures on the Ku'damm. Afterward they jostled with the
crowds for a table outside Kempinski's, or they
went to their favorite, the smart bar at the Hotel
am Zoo. Often they ended up late at night
eating a second dinner at Aschinger's, where
Leonard liked to gorge himself on yellow pea
soup. On Maria's thirty- first birthday they went
to the Maison de France for dinner and dancing.
Leonard did the ordering in German. Later the
same night they went on to Eldorado to see a
transvestite cabaret in which completely convincing
women sang the usual evergreens to a piano and
bass accompaniment. When they got home, Maria,
still tipsy, wanted Leonard to squeeze into one of
her dresses. He was having none of that.
  In their evenings at home, at his place or
hers, they kept the radio tuned to AFN for the
latest American rhythm and blues. They loved
Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" and
Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" and
Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train." This kind
of song made them feel free. Sometimes they heard
Glass's friend Russell giving five-minute
lectures on the democratic institutions of the
West, how the second chamber worked in different
countries, the importance of an independent
judiciary, religious and racial tolerance, and so
on. They found nothing to disagree with in anything he
said, but they always turned down the volume and waited
for the next song.
  There were light, rainy evenings when they stayed in and
sat apart without talking for as long as an hour,
Maria with one of her romantic novels, Leonard
with a two-day-old copy of
The Times.
He could never read a paper, especially this one,
without feeling he was imitating someone else, or in
training for
  adulthood. He followed the
Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit and later on gave
Maria an account of the proceedings and issues in the
urgent tones of one who was personally responsible
for the outcome. It gave him great satisfaction to know
that if he lowered the page, his girl would be there. It
was a luxury to ignore her. He felt
settled, proud, truly grown up at last.
  They never discussed Leonard's work, but he sensed
that she was impressed. The word
marriage
was never mentioned, and yet it was the case that Maria
dragged her feet past store window furniture
displays on the Ku'damm, and Leonard did put
up a crude shelf in the Kreuzberg bathroom so
that his shaving stuff could stand by her one jar of
moisturizing cream and their toothbrushes could lean
together, side by side in a mug. All this was cosy and
companionable. With Maria's prompting, Leonard was
working at his German. His mistakes made her
laugh. They teased each other, giggled a great deal
and sometimes had tickling fights on the bed. They
made love merrily enough, and rarely missed a
day. Leonard kept his thoughts under control. They
felt themselves to be in love. When they were out walking,
they compared themselves favorably with other young couples
they saw. At the same time, it gave them pleasure
to think how they resembled them, how they were all part of
one benign, comforting process.
  Unlike most of the courting couples they saw on
the banks of the Tegeler See on a Sunday afternoon,
however, Leonard and Maria were already living
together, and had already suffered a loss that was not mentioned
because it was not at all defined. They could never regain
the spirit of February and early March, when it had
seemed possible to make their own rules and thrive
independently of those quiet, forceful conventions that
keep men and women in their tracks. They had lived
hand to mouth in lordly squalor, out at the extremes
of physical delight, happy as pigs, beyond all
consideration of domestic detail or personal
cleanliness. It was Leonard's naughtiness- this was the
word Maria had used one evening in a glancing
reference, thereby bestowing the final forgiveness-his
Unartigkeit,
that had ended all that and forced them back. It was
  blissful ordinariness they settled for now. They
had cut themselves off from the world and ended by making themselves
miserable. Now it was the orderliness of going to and from
work, of keeping their places tidy and buying an
extra chair in a
Trodelladen
for Maria's living room, of linking arms in the
street and joining the queues to see
Gone With the Wind
for the third time.
  Two events marked the summer and
autumn of 1955. One morning in mid-July
Leonard walked along the tunnel to the tap
chamber, where he was to make a routine check of the
equipment. Along the last fifty feet or so, before
the antipersonnel door that sealed off the chamber,
he found his way blocked. A new man, an
American for sure, was supervising the removal of the
plugs in the steel liner plates. He had two men
working for him, and the amplifiers made it impossible
to squeeze around. Leonard cleared his throat
loudly and waited patiently. A plug was
removed, and the three men made way for him. It was
Leonard's "Good morning" that prompted the new
man to say in a friendly way, "You guys really
screwed up." Leonard went on through to the
pressurized tap chamber and spent an hour going
over the equipment and its connections. He replaced,
as he had been asked, the microphone installed in the
ceiling of the vertical shaft, the one that would alert the
warehouse to a break-in by the Vopos. On his way
back past the amplifiers he found the men drilling
with hand- turned bits into the concrete that had been
pumped through the liner holes during construction.
Another half-dozen plugs had been removed
further up the tunnel. No one spoke as
he went by this time.
  Back in the warehouse he found Glass in the
canteen. Leonard waited until the man sitting
with him had wandered off before asking what was going on in the
tunnel.
  "It's your Mr. Macationamee. His calculations
were all wrong. Way back he gave us a pile of
crappy math to show that the air- conditioning would take
care of the heat coming off the amps. Now it looks like
he was way off. We brought in a specialist
  from Washington. He's measuring the soil
temperature at different depths."
  "What's the harm," Leonard said, "if the earth
warms up a bit?"
  The question irritated Glass. "Christ! Those
amps are right under the road, right under Schonefelder
Chaussee. The first frost of fall is going to melt
in a handy little block. This way, you guys, there's
something going on under here we want you to see!" There was
a silence, then "I really don't understand why we
let you people in on this. You're not serious the way we
are."
  "That's nonsense," Leonard said.
  Glass did not hear him. "This joker
Macationamee. He should be at home with his
train set. You know where he did his calculations for the
heat output? On the back of an envelope. An
envelope! We would have had three independent teams.
If they hadn't come up with the same result, we would
have wanted to know why. How can the guy think straight with
teeth like that?"
  "He's an eminent man," Leonard said. "He
worked on radio- beam navigation and radar."
  "He makes mistakes. That's all that
matters. We should have done this thing alone.
Collaboration leads to errors, security problems,
you name it. We got our own amps. What are we
doing with yours? We let you in on this for politics,
for some half-assed tradeoff we'll never know
anything about."
  Leonard felt hot. He pushed his hamburger
away. "We're in on this because we have a right. No
one fought Hitler for as long as we did. We saw
the whole war through. We were Europe's last and best
chance. We gave it everything, so we have the right to be in
on everything, and that includes the security of
Europe. If you don't understand that, you belong on the
other side."
  Glass had raised his hand. He was laughing through his
apology. "Hey, nothing personal."
  Indeed, there was something personal. Leonard was still
preoccupied with Glass's time with Maria, and
Glass's boast
  that he had sent Maria back. Maria herself
insisted there had been no such exhortation. According to her,
she had mentioned the separation in the most general terms
and Glass had simply noted it down. Leonard was
still unsure, and the uncertainty made him angry.
  Glass was saying, "Leonard, don't get me
wrong. When I say 'y," I'm talking about your
government. I'm glad
you "re
here. And it's true, what you say. You guys were
great in the war, you were formidable. It was your moment. And
this is my point." He placed a hand on
Leonard's arm. "That was your moment, now this is
ours. Who else is going to face down the
Russians?"
  Leonard looked away.
  The second event took place during the
Oktoberfest. They went down to the Tiergarten on
Sunday and for the following two evenings. They saw a
Texan rodeo, visited all the sideshows and
drank beer and watched a whole pig roasting on a
spit. There was a choir of children with blue
neckerchiefs singing traditional songs. Maria
winced and said they put her in mind of the Hitler
Youth. But the songs were wistful, quite beautiful,
Leonard thought, and the children were so confident with the
difficult harmonies. The next evening they agreed
to stay at home. The crowds were tiring after a day's
work, and they had already spent next week's going-out
money.
  As it happened, Leonard had to stay on at the
warehouse that evening for an extra hour. A row of
eight machines in the recording room had suddenly
failed. It was clearly a fault in the power
circuits, and it took him and one of the senior
American staff half an hour to trace, and as
long to put right. He arrived at Adalbertstrasse
at seven-thirty. Even as he began to climb the
last set of stairs but one, he sensed something
different. It was quieter. It was the muted,
cautious atmosphere one might expect after an
eruption. There was a woman mopping the stairs and an
unpleasant smell. On the landing below Maria's a
small boy saw him coming up and ran indoors
shouting,
"Er kommt, er kommt!"
  Leonard took the last flight at a
run. Maria's door was ajar. A
  small rug just inside the door was askew. In the
living room there was broken china across the floor.
Maria was in the bedroom, sitting on the mattress
in the dark. She was facing away from him, holding her
head in her hands. When he put on the light, she
made a sound of protest and shook her head. He
turned it off and sat by her and put his hand on her
shoulder. He said her name and tried to turn her toward
him. She resisted him. He eased himself along the
mattress to face her. She put her hands across her
face and turned away again. "Maria?" he said again
and pulled at her wrist. There was snot on her hand,
and blood. It was just visible by the light from the living
room. She let him take her hands. She had been
crying, but she wasn't now. Her left eye was
swollen and closed. The left side of her face
had a pulpy texture and was ballooning out. There was
a tear, a quarter-inch gash, in the corner of her
mouth. The sleeve of her blouse was ripped to the
shoulder.
  He had known he would have to face it one day. She
had told him about the visits. Otto came once,
perhaps twice in a year. So far it had been shouted
threats, demands for money and, last time, a
swipe to the head. Nothing had prepared Leonard for
this. Otto had hit her in the face with a closed fist
and with all his strength, once, twice, and then again. As
he went to fetch cotton wool and a bowl of water,
Leonard was thinking through the nausea of shock that he
knew nothing about people, what they could do, how they could do
it. He knelt in front of her and washed first the
wound on her lip. She closed her good eye and
whispered,
"Bitte, schau mich Night an."
Please don't look at me. She wanted him
to say something to her.
"Beruhige dich. Ich binja bei dir.
"I'm here with you. Then, remembering his own behavior
months before, he could not speak at all. He
pressed the cotton wool to her cheek.

This page is blank.
Fourteen
  Leonard returned home for Christmas, having
failed to persuade Maria to accompany him. She
thought that a divorced older woman, a German,
to whom Leonard was not even engaged would not be
welcomed by Leonard's mother. He thought she was being
too scrupulous. He could not honestly
say that his parents lived by such precise and limiting
codes. Once he had been home twenty-four
hours, he realized she had been right. It was
difficult. His bedroom with its single bed and the
framed certificate proclaiming him winner of the
sixth-form maths prize was a child's
  room. He was changed, he was transformed, but it
was impossible to convey this to his parents. Twisted
crepe paper crisscrossed the living room, the
holly was in place, framing the mantelpiece
mirror. They heard out his enthusiastic account on his
first evening home. He told them about Maria and her
work and what she was like, about her apartment and his, about the
Resi, the Hotel am Zoo, the lakes, and the
edginess and excitement of the half-ruined city.
  There was a roast chicken in his honor, and more roast
potatoes than he could eat these days. There were
perfunctory questions, his mother asking how he did for
laundry and his father referring to "this girl you're
seeing." Maria's name evinced a barely conscious
hostility, as though, assuming they would never have to meet
her, they could brush her aside. He avoided
reference to her age or marital status.
Otherwise, their remarks had the effect of grinding
away at the difference between here and there.
Nothing he said aroused curiosity or wonder or
disgust, and soon Berlin was loosened from its
strangeness and was nothing more than an outlying stretch of
Tottenham, confined and known, interesting in itself, but not
for long. His parents did not know he was in love.
  And Tottenham, and all of London, was sunk
in Sunday torpor. People were drowning in ordinariness.
In his street the parallel walls of Victorian
terraces were the end of all change. Nothing that
mattered could ever happen here. There was no tension, no
purpose. What interested the neighbors was the
prospect of renting or owning a television. The
H-shaped aerials were sprouting on the rooftops.
On Friday evenings his parents popped into the house
two doors down to watch, and they were saving hard,
having sensibly set their hearts against
hire-purchase. They had already seen the set they
wanted, and his mother had shown him the corner of the living
room where it would one day stand. The great struggle
to keep Europe free was as remote as the canals
of Mars. Down at his father's pub, none of the
regulars had even heard of the Warsaw Pact, the
ratification of which had caused such a stir in Berlin.
Leonard paid for a round and, prompted by one of his
father's friends,
  gave a slightly boastful account of the bomb
damage, the fabulous money made by smugglers, the
kidnappings-men dragged shouting and kicking into saloon
cars and driven off into the Russian sector, never
to be seen again. These were all things, the company
agreed, that everyone should do without, and the conversation
reverted to football.
  Leonard missed Maria, and he missed the
tunnel almost as much. Daily for almost nine months
he had been padding along its length, securing his
lines against moisture penetration. He had come
to love its earth-water-and-steel smell, and the deep,
smothering silence, unlike any silence on the
surface. Now he was away from it, he was aware of
just how daring, how extravagantly playful, it was
to steal secrets from under the feet of East German
soldiers. He missed the perfection of the construction,
the serious, up-to-the-minute equipment, the habits
of secrecy and all the little rituals that went with it.
He was nostalgic for the quiet brotherliness of the
canteen, the unity of purpose and the competence of all
the people there, the generous portions of food, which seemed
at one with the whole enterprise.
  He fiddled with the living room wireless, trying
to find the music to which he was now addicted.
"Rock Around the Clock" was here, but that was old
hat. He had specialized tastes now. He
wanted Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. He
needed to hear Little Richard singing "Tutti
Frutti," or Carl Perkins's "Blue Suede
Shoes." This music played in his head whenever he was
alone, tormenting him with everything he was away from. He
took the back off the wireless and found a way of
boosting the receptor circuits. Through a wail and
warble of interference he found AFN and thought he
heard Russell's voice. He could not explain his
excitement to his mother, who was watching the partial
dismantling of the family's Grandvox with despair.
  On the street he listened for American voices
and never heard any. He saw someone getting off a
bus who looked like Glass, and felt disappointment
when the man turned his way. Even at the height of
his homesickness, Leonard could not
  delude himself that Glass was his closest friend, but
he was a kind of ally, and Leonard missed the near
rudeness of the American's speech, the hammer-blow
intimacy, the absence of the modifiers and
hesitancies that were supposed to mark out a reasonable
Englishman. There was no one in the whole of
London who would want to seize
Leonard's elbow or squeeze his arm to make a
point. There was no one, apart from Maria, who cared so
much what Leonard did or said.
  Glass had even given Leonard a Christmas
present. It was at the canteen party, which had centered
on a colossal side of beef and dozens of
bottles of sekt-a seasonal contribution, it was
announced, from Herr Gehlen himself. Glass had
pressed a small gift-wrapped box
into Leonard's hands. Inside was a silver-plated
ballpoint pen. Leonard had seen them around, but he
had never used one before.
  Glass said, "Developed for Air Force
pilots. Fountain pens don't work at high
altitudes. One of the lasting benefits of warfare."
  Leonard was about to speak his thanks when Glass
put his arms around him and squeezed. It was the first time
Leonard had been embraced by a man. They were all
well on the way to being drunk. Then Glass
proposed a toast, "to forgiveness," and looked at
Leonard, who took Glass to be referring to the
screening of Maria and drank deeply.
  Russell had said, "We're doing Herr
Gehlen the kindness of drinking his wine. You can't get
more forgiving than that."
  Under a framed photograph of Tottenham
Grammar School's upper sixth, 1948,
Leonard sat on the edge of his bed and wrote
to Maria with his pen. It flowed beautifully, as though
a miniature bolt of bright blue cloth were being
pressed into the page. It was a piece of tunnel
equipment he held in his hands, a fruit of war.
He was sending a letter each day. Writing was a
pleasure, and so, for once, was composition. His
dominant mode was a jokey tenderness-still
long to suck your toes and play upon your clavicle.
He made a point of not complaining about Tottenham.
After all, he might want to entice her here one
day. During the first forty-eight hours at
irr
  home he had found the separation excruciating. In
Berlin he had grown so fond, so dependent, and at
the same time had felt so grown-up. Now the old,
familiar life engulfed him. He was suddenly a
son again, not a lover. He was a child. Here was his
room again, and his mother worrying over the state of his
socks. Early on his second day he woke from a
nightmare in which his Berlin life seemed long in the
past.
There's no point going back to that town now,
he heard someone say,
it's all different there these days.
He sat on the edge of his bed, cooling his sweat,
making plans to have a telegram sent that would
urgently recall him to the warehouse.
  By the fourth day he was calmer. He could
contemplate Maria's qualities, and look forward
to seeing her in just over a week. He had given up
trying to make his parents see how she had changed his
life. She was a secret he carried around with him.
The prospect of seeing her at Tempelhof again
made everything tolerable. It was during this period of
comfortable longing and expectation that he decided he must
ask her to marry him. Otto's attack had pushed
them even closer together, and had made their lives even
less adventurous and more companionable. Maria never
stayed alone in her flat now. If they agreed
to meet there after work, Leonard made a point of
arriving first. While he was in England, she was to stay
a few days in Platanenallee, and then move
to Pankow for Christmas. They stood back to back,
ready to face their common enemy. When they went out
together they always walked close, arm in arm, and in bars
and restaurants they sat in tight, with a good view
of the door. Even when Maria's face had
healed and they had stopped talking about him, Otto was
always with them. There were times when Leonard was angry with
Maria for marrying him.
  "What are we going to do?" he asked her. "We
can't go around like this forever."
  Maria's fear was lightened by contempt. "He's a
coward. He'll run when he sees you. And he
drinks himself to death. The sooner the better. Why do
you think I always give him money?"
  In fact the precautions became a habit, part
of their intimacy. It was cosy, this common cause of
theirs. There were times when Leonard thought it was rather fine,
having a beautiful woman rely on him for
protection. He had vague plans to get himself in
better shape. He found out from Glass that he had the
right to U.s. Army gymnasium facilities.
Weightlifting might be of use, or judo, although
there would be no room to throw Otto in Maria's
flat. But he was not in the habit of taking
physical exercise, and each evening it seemed more
sensible to go home.
  He had fantasies of confrontation that made his
heart race. He saw himself in movie style, the
peaceable tough guy, hard to provoke, but once
unleashed, demonically violent. He
delivered a blow to the solar plexus with a certain
sorrowful grace. He disarmed Otto of his knife,
and in the same movement broke his arm with fastidious
regret and "I warned you not to get rough." Another
fantasy evoked the irresistible power of
language. He would take Otto aside, to a
Kneipe
perhaps, and win him over with a kindly but unflinching
reasonableness. They would be man to man, and Otto would
depart at last in a mood of mellowed acceptance and
dignified acknowledgment of Leonard's position.
Perhaps Otto would become a friend, a godfather to one of
their children, and Leonard would use some recently
acquired influence to secure the ex-drunk a job
at one of the military bases. In other wistful
sequences Otto simply never appeared again, having
fallen out of a train, or died from his habit, or
met the right girl and married again.
  All these daydreams were driven by the certainty that
Otto would be back and that whatever happened would be
unpredictable and unpleasant. Leonard had
occasionally seen fights in pubs and bars in London
and Berlin. The reality was that his arms and legs went
watery at the sight of violence. He had always
marveled at the recklessness of fighting men.
The harder they struck out, the more vicious were the blows
they provoked, but they did not seem to mind. One good
kick seemed worth the risk of a life in a
wheelchair or with one eye.
  Otto had years of brawling experience. He had
nothing
  against hitting a woman in the face with all his
strength. What would he want to do with Leonard?
Maria's account had made it clear that Leonard was
now fixed in his mind. Otto had arrived at her
flat fresh from an afternoon's Oktoberfest drinking.
He had run out of money and had come by to collect a
few marks and remind his ex-wife that she had ruined
his life and stolen everything he had. The extortion and the
ranting would have been the sum of the visit had Otto not
lurched into the bathroom to relieve himself and seen
Leonard's shaving brush and razor. He took his
piss and came out sobbing and talking of betrayal.
He rushed past Maria into the bedroom and saw a
shirt of Leonard's folded on the chest. He
pulled the pillows off the bed and found Leonard's
pyjamas. The sobs became shouts. First he pushed
Maria around the flat, accusing her of whoring. Then
he took hold of her hair in one hand and beat her
face with the other. On his way out he swept
some cups onto the floor. Two flights below he
was sick on the stairs. As he staggered down he
shouted more insults up the stairwell for all the
neighbors to hear.
  Otto Eckdorf was a Berliner. He had grown
up in the Wedding district, the son of the owner of a
local
Eckkneipe
comone of the reasons Maria's parents had opposed the
marriage so bitterly. Maria was vague about
Otto's war. She guessed he had been called
up in 1939, when he would have been eighteen. He was
in the infantry for a while, she thought, and had been part
of the victorious procession into Paris. Then he was
injured, not in combat but in an accident involving an
Army truck overturned by a drunken friend. After a
couple of months in a hospital in northern
France, he was transferred to a signals regiment.
He was on the eastern front, but always well back
from the front lines. Maria said, "When he wants
you to know how brave he is, he tells you about all
the fighting he's seen. Then when he is drunk and
he wants to let you know how clever he is, he
tells you how he kept out of the fighting by getting sent
to the field headquarters as a
telephonist."
  He had returned to Berlin in 1946 and met
Maria, who was working in a food distribution center in
the British sector. The
  answer to Leonard's question was that she had married him
because everything at that time had come apart and it did not
really matter much what you did, because she had fallen
out with her parents, and because Otto was good-looking and
seemed kind. A young single woman was vulnerable in
those days, and she had wanted protection.
  In the gray days after Christmas Leonard took
long walks alone and thought about marrying Maria. He
walked to Fins- bury Park, through Holloway
to Camden Town. It was important, he thought,
to reach a decision rationally, and not be influenced
by separation and longing. He needed to concentrate on
whatever counted against her and decide how important
it was. There was Otto, of course. There was his
lingering suspicion of Glass, but that surely was a
matter of his own jealousy. She had told Glass
more than she had needed to, that was all. There was her
foreignness; perhaps that was an obstacle. But he liked
speaking German-he was even getting good, with her
encouragement-and he preferred Berlin to any place
he had ever been. His parents might
object to her. His father, who had been wounded in the
Normandy landings, used to say he still loathed the
Germans. After a week at home, Leonard
accepted that that would be his parents" problem, not his.
While his father had been lying in the hollow of a sand
dune with a bullet in his heel, Maria had been a
terrified civilian, cowering from the nightly bombing.
  In effect, there was nothing standing in his way, and when
he reached the Regent's Park canal and stopped on
the bridge, he abandoned his rigorous scientific
procedure and permitted all that was lovely about her
to invade his thoughts. He was in love, and he was about
to be married. Nothing could be simpler, more logical
or more satisfying. Until he had asked Maria,
there was no one he could tell. There was no one
to confide in. When it was time to break the news, the
only friend he could imagine being truly pleased for
him, and who would spare nothing to show it, would be
Glass.
  The surface of the canal showed tiny disturbances,
the first
  signs of rain. The thought of walking northward
all the way home, back along the line of his
meditation, tired him. He would take a bus from
Camden High Street instead. He
turned and walked quickly in that direction.
s
friend
This page is blank.


Fifteen
  American songs were what marked out the weeks and
months for Leonard and Maria now. In January and
February of 1956 they favored Screamin' Jay
Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You," and
"Tutti Frutti." It was the latter, sung
by Little Richard at the outer limit of effort and joy,
that started them jiving. Then it was "Long Tall
Sally." They were familiar with the moves. The younger
American servicemen and their girls had been
dancing that way at the Resi for a long time. Until
now, Leonard and Maria had disapproved. The
jivers took up too much space and bumped into the
backs
  of the other dancers. Maria said she was too old for
that sort of thing, and Leonard thought it was showy and
childish, typically American. So they had clung
to each other through the quicksteps and walzes. But this would not
do for Little Richard. Once they had
succumbed to the music, there was nothing for it but to turn
up the volume of Leonard's wireless set and try
the steps, the passes and crossovers and turns,
having first made sure that the Blakes downstairs were
out.
  It was an exhilarating exercise in reading the
other's mind, in guessing your partner's intentions.
There were many collisions in their first attempts. Then
a pattern emerged, devised consciously by neither of
them, the product not so much of what they did but of who
they were. There was tacit agreement that Leonard should
lead and that Maria, by her own movements, should
indicate just how he should do so.
  Soon they were ready for the dance floor. There was
nothing like "Long Tall Sally" to be heard at the
Resi or the other dance halls. The bands played
"In the Mood" and "Take the "A" Train,"
but by now the movements were enough in themselves. Beyond the
excitement Leonard took satisfaction in dancing
in a way his parents and their friends did not, and could not,
and in liking music they would hate, and in feeling at
home in a city where they would never come. He was
free.
  In April came a song that overwhelmed
everybody, and that marked the beginning of the end of
Leonard's Berlin days. It was no use at all
for jiving. It spoke only of loneliness and
irresolvable despair. Its melody was all
stealth, its gloom comically overstated. He loved it
all, the forlorn, sidewalk tread of the bass, the
harsh guitar, the sparse tinkle of a barroom
piano, and most of all the tough, manly advice with
which it concluded: "Now if your baby leaves you, and
you've got a tale to tell, just take a walk down
Lonely Street ..." For a time AFN was playing
"Heartbreak Hotel" every hour. The song's self-
pity should have been hilarious. Instead, it made
Leonard feel worldly, tragic, bigger somehow.
  It formed the background to the arrangements for the
engagement party Leonard and Maria were giving at
Platanenal

  lee. It was playing in Leonard's mind when he
was buying drinks and peanuts in the Naafi. In the
gift section he came across a young officer
languidly stooped over a glass counter display of
watches. It took several seconds to recognize
him as Lofting, the lieutanant who had given him
Glass's number on his first day. Lofting too had
difficulty in placing Leonard. When he
did, he became talkative and a lot friendlier than
before. Without preamble, he told how he had finally
located a wide open site, persuaded a
civilian contractor to clear and level it, and, through
someone in the mayor of Berlin's office, had it
seeded, ready for use as a cricket pitch. "The
speed this grass grows! I've arranged a
twenty-four-hour sentry to keep kids off. You must
come and look." He was lonely, Leonard decided,
and before he had thought the matter through, he was telling
Lofting about his engagement to a German girl and
inviting him to the party. They were, after all, rather short
of guests.
  In the late afternoon before the party
(drinks 6-8
P.m.), Leonard was half humming, half singing
"Heartbreak Hotel" as he carried a sackful of
kitchen rubbish down to the dustbins out the back. The
lift was out of order that day. On his way up,
Leonard bumped into Mr. Blake. They had not
spoken since the scene on Leonard's landing the
previous year. Enough time had passed to neutralize
that, for when Leonard nodded, Mr. Blake smiled
and said hello. Again without reflection, and because he was
feeling expansive, Leonard said, "Would
you and your wife like to drop in for a drink this evening?
Anytime after six."
  Blake was searching in his overcoat pocket for his
key. He took it out and stared at it. Then he said,
"That would be pleasant. Thank you."
  "Heartbreak Hotel" was playing on the wireless
while Leonard and Maria waited for the first guest.
There were peanuts in saucers and, on a table pushed
against a wall, bottles of beer and wine,
lemonade, Pimms, tonic and a liter of gin,
all duty free. There were ashtrays for everyone.
Leonard had wanted pineapple chunks and cheddar
cheese on toothpicks, but Ma

  ria had laughed so hard at this mad concoction that the
matter was dropped. They held hands while they
surveyed their preparations, conscious that their love was
about to begin its public existence. Maria wore a
layered white dress that rustled when she moved, and
pale blue dancing pumps. Leonard had his best
suit on, and-the daring touch-a white tie.
  "dis . . he's been so long on Lonely Street
. . dis8The doorbell rang, and Leonard went.
It was Russell from AFN. Leonard did not know
why he should feel foolish that his wireless was
tuned to that station. Russell did not seem
to notice. He had taken Maria's hand and was
holding on to it far too long. But her friends from work,
Jenny and Charlotte, were suddenly there too, giggling
and holding out presents. Russell stood back as
the German girls swept the bride-to-be away
in embraces and slangy Berlin exclamations and
camped down with her on the sofa. Leonard made a
gin and tonic for Russell, and Pimms and
lemonade for the girls.
  Russell said, "She's the one who sent the
message down the tube?"
  "That's right."
  "She really knows her mind. You want
to introduce me to her friends?"
  Glass arrived, followed immediately by Lofting, whose
attention was drawn by a burst of feminine laughter from
the sofa. So Leonard fixed the drinks and took the
radio announcer and the lieutenant across. When the
introductions had been made, Russell began a
breezy flirtation with Jenny, telling her he just
knew he had seen her someplace before and that she had the
sweetest face. Lofting, more in Leonard's style,
engaged Charlotte in tortured small talk. When
he said, "That's fascinating. And just how
long does it take you to get out to Spandau in the
morning?" she and her friends had a fit of the giggles.
  Glass had agreed to give a speech. Leonard
was touched that his friend had taken the trouble to type it out
on cards. He tinkled a bottle opener against the
gin for silence. Glass started with an amusing account
of Leonard with a rose behind his ear
  and the message coming down the pneumatic tube.
He hoped that one day he too would be delivered from
bachelorhood with a similarly dramatic
approach, and by a girl as gorgeous and as wonderful
in every way as Maria. Russell called out "Hear,
hear." Maria shushed him.
  Then Glass paused to indicate a change in
tone. He was drawing breath to begin again when the
doorbell rang. It was the Blakes. While
everyone waited, Leonard poured their drinks.
Mrs. Blake took an armchair. Her husband
remained standing by the door, staring expressionlessly at
Glass, who tilted his beard in acknowledgment that the
interruption was over.
  He spoke quietly. "We all of us in this
room, German, British, American, in our
different kinds of work, have committed ourselves to building
a new Berlin. A new Germany. A new
Europe. I know that's the grand way politicians
talk, even if it is true. I know that at seven
o'clock on a winter's morning, when I'm getting
dressed for work, I don't think too hard about
building a new Europe." There was a murmur of
laughter. "We all know the kinds of freedom we
want and like, and we all know what threatens them. We
all know that the place, the only place, to start
making a Europe free and safe from war is right
here, with ourselves, in our hearts. Leonard and Maria
belong to countries that ten years ago were at war.
By engaging to be married, they are bringing their own
peace, in their own way, to their nations. Their
marriage, and all others like it, bind countries
tighter than any treaty can. Marriages across
borders increase understanding between nations and make it
slightly harder each time for them to go to war ever again."
  Glass looked up from his postcards and grinned,
suddenly disowning his seriousness. "That's why I'm always
watching out for a nice Russian girl to take back
home to Cedar Rapids. To Leonard and Maria!"
  They raised their glasses, and Russell, who
had his arm around Jenny's waist, called out, "Come
on, Leonard. Speech!"
  The only time Leonard had spoken in
public was at school, where as a sixth-form
monitor in his final year he was obliged
  once every two weeks to take his turn at reading
out the announcements at morning assembly. As he
started now, he found that his breathing was too rapid and
shallow. He had to speak in clusters of three or
four words.
  "Thank you, Bob. Speaking for myself, I can't
guarantee to rebuild Europe. It's as much as
I can do to put up a shelf in the bathroom." His
joke went down well. Even Blake smiled.
Across the room Maria was beaming at him, or was she
half crying too? Leonard blushed. His success
made him light. He wished he had another ten
jokes to tell. He said, "Speaking for us both,
all we can promise, to you and to each other, is to be
happy. Thank you very much for coming."
  There was applause, and again encouraged
by Russell, Leonard crossed the room and kissed
Maria. Russell kissed Jenny, then they all
settled down to drink.
  Blake came across to shake Leonard's hand and
offer his congratulations. He said, "The American
with the beard. How is it you know him?"
  Leonard hesitated. "He's at my
work."
  "I didn't know you were working for the Americans."
  "Ah yes. It's an intersector thing.
Telephone lines."
  Blake gave Leonard a long stare. He
walked with him into a quiet corner of the room. "I
want to give you some advice. That fellow
there-Glass, isn't it?-works for Bill Harvey.
If you're telling me you work with Glass, you're
telling me what it is you do. Altglienicke.
Operation Gold. I don't need to know that. You're
making a security error there."
  Leonard would have liked to say that Blake too had
breached security by indicating that he too was part of the
intelligence community.
  Blake said, "I don't know who these other people here
are. I do know that in these matters this is a very small
town. It's a village. You shouldn't be seen in
public with Glass. It's a giveaway. My
advice is that you keep your professional and
social lives well separated. Now, I'm going
to give my best wishes to your intended, then we'll
take our leave."
  The Blakes left. Leonard stayed apart for a
while with his
  drink. A part of him-a nasty part, he
thought-wanted to see if anything passed between Maria and
Glass. They were ignoring each other completely.
Glass was the next to leave. Lofting had had several
drinks and was making better progress with
Charlotte. Jenny was sitting on Russell's
lap. The four of them had decided to go to a
restaurant, and then to a dance hall. They tried
hard to persuade Leonard and Maria to go with them.
When they were convinced that they could not succeed, they left
with kisses, embraces and goodbyes shouted up the
stairwell.
  There were abandoned glasses on every surface, and
cigarette smoke hung in the air. The apartment was
peaceful.
  Maria put her bare arms around Leonard's
neck. "You made a beautiful speech. You
didn't tell me you were good at that." They kissed.
  Leonard said, "It's going to take you a long time
to find out all the things I'm good at." He had
addressed a crowd of eight. He felt different,
capable of anything.
  They put their coats on and went out. The plan was
to eat in Kreuzberg and spend the night at
Adalbertstrasse, thereby including both
homes in the celebrations. The bedroom there had been
prepared by Maria with fresh sheets, new candles in
bottles and a potpourri emptied into two soup
bowls.
  They dined on
Rippchen unit Erbsenpiiree,
spare ribs and pease pudding, in a pub on
Oranienstrasse that had become their local. The
owner knew about the engagement and brought them glasses
of sekt on the house. It was like a bedroom where they
were, almost like a bed. They were deep in the recesses
of the place, at a table of dark stained wood two
inches thick, boxed in by high-backed pews worn
smooth by backsides. A tablecloth of thick
brocade hung heavily on their laps. Over this a
waiter spread a cloth of starched white linen. There
was dim light from a red glass lantern that hung from
the low ceiling by a heavy chain. A warm, moist air
enclosed them further in a fug of Brazilian
cigars, strong coffee and roasted meat. Half a
dozen old men sat around the
Stamm

tisch,
the regulars' table, drinking beer and
Korn,
and nearer there was a game of skat.
  One of the old fellows paused in his stagger past
Leonard's and Maria's table. He looked
theatrically at his watch and said,
"Aufzur Ollen!"
  When he had gone, Maria explained. It was a
Berlin phrase: "Back to the old woman. Is this
you in fifty years?"
  He raised his glass. "To my
Olle."
  There was another celebration coming up, one he could not
talk to her about. In three weeks the tunnel would be
one year old, calculating, as had been agreed, from
the date of the first interception. It had also been
agreed that something must happen to mark the event, something
that would not violate security, but flamboyant all
the same, and symbolic. An ad hoc committee was
formed. Glass made himself chairman. There were also a
U.s. Army sergeant, a German liaison
officer and Leonard. To emphasize the
collaboration of three nations, the contributions would
reflect something of each national culture. It had
seemed to Leonard a little unfair the way Glass
had divided the responsibilities, but
he said nothing. The Americans would take care of the
food, the Germans would provide the drink, and the
British would offer a surprise entertainment, a
party turn.
  With a budget of thirty pounds, Leonard had
visited the noticeboards in the YMCA and the
Naafi and Toe H clubs, searching for the act that
would do his country honor. There was the wife of a
corporal in the RAOC who read tea leaves.
There was a singing dog, for sale rather than rent,
property of an AKC manager, and there was an
incomplete morrisdancing team, an offshoot of the
RAF rugby club. There was a Universal
Aunt who met children and senile relatives off
airplanes and trains, and there was a "top-notch"
conjuror, for under-fives only.
  It was the very morning of his engagement party that
Leonard had followed up a lead and made contact
with a sergeant in the Scots Greys who promised
to supply, in return for a thirty- pound contribution
to the sergeant's mess fund, a piper in full
  regimental dress-tartan, feathers, sporran,
the lot. This, and his short speech and its successful
joke, and the sekt, and the gin that had preceded it, and the
new language he was beginning to master, and the
Ga//dtte
where he felt so at home, and above all his
beautiful fiancee, who was clinking her glass against
his-all this made Leonard reflect that he had
never really known himself at all, he was far more
interesting and, well, civilized than he had ever
dared suspect.
  Maria had curled her hair for the event.
Artfully disordered wisps lay across the high
Shakespearean forehead, and just below the crown was a new
white clip, the childish touch she was reluctant
to abandon. She was looking at him now with patient
amusement, that same regard, both proprietorial
and abandoned, that had forced him in their early days
to divert himself with circuitry and mental arithmetic.
She was wearing caret the silver ring they had bought from
an Arab on the Ku'damm. Its very cheapness was a
celebration of their freedom. Outside the big
jewelry stores, young couples were eyeing engagement
rings that cost more than three months' wages. After
Maria's hard bargaining, with Leonard, too
embarrassed to listen, standing several paces off, they
got theirs for less than five marks.
  The meal was all that stood between them and Maria's
flat, the prepared bedroom and the consummation
of their engagement. They wanted to talk about sex, so
they were talking about Russell. Leonard was trying out
a tone of responsible caution. It did not quite suit
his mood now, but the force of habit was strong. He
had a warning for Maria to pass on to her friend Jenny.
Russell was a fast mover-an operator, as
Glass would say-who had once claimed that in his
four years in Berlin he had chalked up more than
150 girls. Leonard said in German, "Apart from
the fact that he's bound to have the clap"-
den Tripper;
he had recently learned the word from a poster in a
public lavatory-"he is not going to take Jenny
seriously at all. She ought to know that."
  Maria had put her hand over her mouth and laughed
at
Tripper. "Sei Night dooff
You're . . .
schuchtern.
How do you say it in English?"
  "A prude, I think," Leonard was forced
to say.
  "Jenny looks after herself. Do you know what she was
saying when the Russell came in the room? She
said, "That's the one I want. I don't
get paid till the end of next week and I want
to go to a restaurant. Then I want to go dancing.
And," she said, "he has a beautiful jaw, like
Superman." So, she goes to work, and the Russell
thinks he did it all by himself."
  Leonard put down his knife and fork and wrung his
hands in mock anguish. "My God! Why am I
so ignorant?"
  "Not ignorant. Innocent. And now you marry the
first and only woman you ever knew. Perfect! It's
women who should marry the virgins, not men. We want
you fresh-was
  Leonard pushed his plate aside. It was not
possible to eat while you were being seduced.
  "comwe want you fresh so we can show you how to please
us."
  "Us?" said Leonard. "You mean there's more than
one of you?
  "There's just me. That's all you have to think about."
  "I need you," Leonard said. He waved at the
waiter. It was not the conventional exaggeration. If he
did not lie down with her soon he thought he might be
sick, for there was a cold upward pressure on his
stomach and on the pease pudding in there.
  Maria raised her glass. He had
never seen her so beautiful. "To innocence."
  "To innocence. And Anglo-German cooperation."
  "It was a terrible speech," Maria said, although from
her look he thought she did not really mean it.
"Does he think I'm the Third Reich? Is that
what he thinks you are marrying? Does he really
think that people represent countries? Even the major
makes a better speech at the Christmas dinner."
  But when they had paid and put on their coats and were
walking toward Adalbertstrasse, she resumed more
seriously. "I don't trust this one. I didn't
like him when he was asking me questions. His mind is too
simple and too busy. These are the
dangerous ones. He thinks you must love America
or you must be a spy for the Russians. These are the
ones who want to start another war."
  Leonard was pleased to hear her say she did not like
Glass, and he was reluctant to start an argument
now. All the same he said, "He takes himself very
seriously, but he's not so bad, really. He's been
a good friend to me in Berlin."
  Maria pulled him closer to her. "Innocence again.
You like anyone who's kind to you. If Hitler buys
you a drink, you say he's a decent fellow!"
  "And you'd fall in love with him if he
told you he was a virgin."
  Their laughter sounded loud in the empty street.
As they came up the stairs at No. 84, their
hilarity echoed on the bare wood. On the fourth
floor someone opened a front door a few inches,
then slammed it shut. They made almost as much noise
the rest of the way up, shushing each other and giggling.
  To make a welcome, Maria had left all the
lights on in her flat. The electric heater was
on in the bedroom. While she was in the bathroom,
Leonard opened the wine that had been left ready.
There was a smell in the air he could not quite place.
It was of onions, perhaps, and something else. There was
an association there he could not make. He filled
their glasses and turned on the wireless. He was
ready now for another dose of ""Heartbreak
Hotel," but all he could find was classical
music of some sort, and jazz, both of which he
loathed.
  He forgot to mention the smell when Maria came out
of the bathroom. They took their glasses through to the
bedroom and lit cigarettes and talked quietly
about the success of their party. The smell, which had been
in this room too, and the fragrance of the potpourri, were
lost to the smoke. They were returning to the
urgency they had felt at dinner, and as they talked
they began to undress, and touch and kiss.
Accumulated excitement and unrestrained
familiarity made everything so easy. By the time they were
naked, their voices had dropped to whispers. Beyond the
room came the subsiding rumble of a city beginning
to take itself to bed. They got under the covers,
  which were lighter again now that spring was here. For five
minutes or so they luxuriated in the postponement of
their pleasure with a long embrace. "Engaged,"
Maria whispered,
verlobt, verlobt.
The very word was a form of invitation, incitement. They
began lazily. She was lying beneath him. His right cheek
was pressed against hers. His view was of the pillow and of
her ear, and hers was over his shoulder, of the ripple and
pull of small muscles in his back, and then, the
darkened room beyond the candlelight. He closed his
eyes and saw an expanse of smooth water. It
might have been the Wannsee in summer. With each
stroke he was drawn down the shallow curve of his
descent, further and deeper, until the surface was
liquid silver far above his head. When she stirred
and whispered something, the words poured like mercury
droplets, but fell like feathers. He
grunted. When she said it again, into his ear, he
opened his eyes, though he still had not heard. He
lifted himself onto his elbow.
  Was it ignorance or innocence that made him think that
the accelerating thud of her heart against his arm was
excitement, or that the wide stare of her eyes, the
seed pearls of moisture on her upper lip, the
difficulty she was having moving her tongue to repeat
her words, were all for him? He dropped his head
closer. What she was saying was framed in the
quietest whisper imaginable. Her lips were brushing
his ear, the syllables were furred. He shook his head.
He heard her tongue unglue itself and try again.
What at last he heard her say was "There's someone
in the wardrobe."
  Then his heart was racing hers. Their ribcages were
touching, and they could feel, but not hear, the arrhythmic
clatter, like horses" hooves. Against this
distraction he was trying to listen. There was a car
drawing away, there was something in the plumbing, and behind that
nothing, nothing but silence and inseparable darkness, and
scratchy silence too hastily scanned. He went
back over it, searching the frequencies and watching
her face for a cue. But every muscle there was already
tight; her fingers were pinching his arm. She was
still hearing it, she was willing his attention toward it,
forcing him
  to attend to the band of silence, the narrow sector where
it lay. He had shrunk to nothing inside her. They
were separate people now. Where their bellies touched was
wet. Was she drunk, or mad? Either would have been
preferable. He cocked his head, straining, and then he
heard it, and knew he had been hearing it all
along. He had been searching for something else, for
sounds, for pitch, for the friction of solid objects.
But this was only air, air pulled and pushed; this was
muted breathing in an enclosed space. He rose
on all fours, and turned. The wardrobe was by the
door, by the light switch. He found his glasses
on the floor. They did nothing to clarify the large
dark mass. His instinct was that he could do nothing,
confront nothing, submit to nothing, unless he was
covered. He found his underpants and put them on.
Maria was sitting up. She had her hands cupped
over her nose and mouth.
  The thought came to Leonard, and perhaps it was a
habit from all his time at the warehouse, that they should do
nothing to betray their awareness of the presence. A
pretended conversation was not possible. So Leonard
stood in the dark in his underpants and began
to hum through a constricted throat his favorite song
while he tried to think, in his terror, what to do
next.
This page is blank.

Maria reached for her skirt and blouse. Her
movement made the candle gutter, but it did not quite
die. Leonard took his trousers from a chair. He
had increased the tempo of his humming, transforming it
into a cheerful tune of dotted rhythms. His only
thought now was to be dressed. Once his trousers were
on, he felt the bareness of his chest pricking in the
dark. When his shirt was on, his feet were vulnerable.
He found his shoes, but not his socks. While he was
tying the laces he fell silent. They stood on
either side of the bed, the engaged couple. The rustle of
fabric and Leon

backslash
  ard's song had obscured the breathing. Now they
heard it again. It was faint, but deep and steady.
To Leonard it suggested some unflinching purpose.
Maria's body blocked the candle's light and threw
a giant shadow toward the door and wardrobe. She
looked at him. Her eyes were sending him
to the door.
  He went quickly, and tried to tread quietly on
the bare boards. It took four steps. The light
switch was right against the wardrobe. It was impossible
not to sense the presence, to feel on his fingers and his
scalp the force field of a human presence. They were
about to give themselves away, make it known that they
knew. His knuckles brushed against the polished
surface as he snatched at the light. Maria was
behind him; he felt her hand on the small of his
back. The explosion of light was surely more than
sixty watts. He screwed his eyes up against the
brightness. He had his hands up, ready. The wardrobe
doors would be bursting open now. Now.
  But there was nothing. The wardrobe had two doors.
One opened onto a set of drawers and was firmly
closed. The other door, the one that opened onto the
coat space, a space big enough for a man to stand in,
was slightly ajar. The catch was not engaged. It was a
big brass ring that turned a worn spindle.
Leonard put his hand out toward it. They could hear the
breathing. It was not a mistake. They were not going to be
laughing about this in two minutes. It was breathing,
human breathing. He got his fingers and thumb on the
ring and lifted it without making a sound. Still
holding on, he shuffled backward. Whatever was going
to happen, he wanted there to be space. The greater the
distance, the more time he would have. These geometrical
thoughts came in hard little packets, tightly bound.
Time to do what? The question too was wrapped tight. He
squeezed harder on the ring, and yanked the door open
wide.
  There was nothing. Only the blackness of a serge
coat, and a smell, a miasma, sucked outward by the
door's movement, of alcohol and pickle. Then the
face, the man, was right down by the floor in a sitting
position, with his knees drawn up, asleep.
  The sleep of a drunk. It was beer and
Korn
and onions, or sauerkraut. The mouth hung open.
Along the lower lip was a trail of whitish scum,
interrupted in the center, at right angles, by a big
black split of congealed blood. A cold sore,
or a whack on the mouth from another drunk. They
stepped back, out of the immediate path of the sweet stench.
  Maria whispered, "How did he get in?" Then
she answered herself. "He could have taken a spare
key. When he came last time."
  They stared in at him. The immediate danger was
subsiding. What was taking the place of
fear was disgust, and a sense of violation,
householderly outrage. It did not seem an
improvement. This was not how Leonard had expected
to confront his enemy. He had a chance to size him
up. The head was small, the hair was thinning on top
and was of the sandy, tobacco- stained kind, almost greenish
at the roots, that Leonard had noticed
frequently around Berlin. The nose was big and
weak- looking. Along its sides were ruptured
vessels under tight shiny skin. Only the hands
gave an impression of strength-raw red, and bony
and big at the knuckles and joints. The head was
small, and so were the shoulders. It was hard to tell with
him slumped down, but this was beginning to look like a
runt, a bully and a runt. The threat he had
represented, the way he had knocked Maria around,
had magnified him. The Otto of Leonard's
thoughts had been a weathered Army tough, a survivor
of a war Leonard had not been old enough to fight.
  Maria pushed the wardrobe door shut. They
turned out the bedroom light and went into the living
room. They were too agitated to sit. Maria's
voice grated with a bitterness he had never heard
before.
  "He's sitting on my dresses.
He's going to piss on them."
  This had not occurred to Leonard, but now she had
spoken it appeared the most pressing problem. How were
they to prevent this further violation? Lift him out,
carry him to the toilet?
  Leonard said, "How are we going to get rid of
him? We could get the police." He had a brief
bright thought of two
Polizisten
  carrying Otto out through the front door, and the rest
of the evening resuming after a calming drink and a good
laugh.
  But Maria shook her head. "They know about him,
they even buy him beers. They won't come." She was
distracted. She muttered something else in German and
turned away, changed her mind and turned back.
She was going to speak, and thought better of it.
  Leonard still held to the possibility of rescuing
their celebration. It was simply a matter of getting
rid of a drunk. "I could carry him out, drag him
down the stairs, put him out in the street. I bet
he wouldn't even wake . . ."
  Maria's distraction was settling into anger. "What
was he doing in my bedroom, in our bedroom?" she
demanded, as though Leonard had put him
there. "Why aren't you thinking about that? Why is he
hiding in the wardrobe? Go on, tell me what you
think."
  "I don't know," he said. "I don't care for
now. I just want him out."
  "You don't care! You don't want to think about
it." She sat down suddenly on one of the kitchen
chairs. She was by the heap of shoes piled up around the
cobbler's last. She snatched a pair and pulled
them on.
  It occurred to Leonard that they were about to have a row.
It was their engagement night. It was not his fault and
they were having a row. Or at least she was.
  "It matters to me. I was married to this pig. It
matters to me that when I am making love to you, this
pig, this piece of human shit, is hiding in the
cupboard. I know him. Do you understand that?"
  "Maria-was
  This time she raised her voice. "I know him."
She was trying to light a cigarette and making a
mess of it.
  Leonard wanted one too. He said soothingly,
"Come on now, Maria ..."
  She got hers alight and inhaled. It did not do
her any good, she was still close to shouting.
"Don't talk to me like this. I don't want to be
calmed down. And why are you so peaceful?
  Why aren't you angry? There is a man spying on
you in your own bedroom. You should be breaking the
furniture. And what are you doing? Scratching your
head and saying nicely we should get the police!"
  It seemed to him that everything she was saying was
correct. He had not known how to react, he had not
even thought about it. He did not know enough. She was
older than him, she had been married. This was how you
were when you found someone hiding in your bedroom. At the
same time it irritated him, what she was saying.
She was accusing him of not being a man. He had hold
of the cigarettes now. He took one out. She was still
going on at him. Half of it was in German. She
had the lighter in her fist and she was barely conscious
of him taking it away from her.
  "You're the one who should be shouting at me," she
said. "It's my husband, isn't it? Aren't you
angry, just one little bit?"
  This was too much. He had filled his lungs; now
he expelled the smoke with a shout. "Shut up! For
God's sake, shut up for one minute!"
  She was instantly quiet. They both were. They
smoked their cigarettes. She remained in
the chair. He went and stood as far away as was
possible in the tiny room. Presently she looked
at him and smiled an apology. He kept his
face neutral. She had wanted him to be a little
angry with her; well he would be, for a bit.
  She spent some time stubbing out her cigarette and at
first did not look up from what she was doing when she
spoke. "I'll tell you why he's in there. I'll
tell you what Otto wants. I wish I didn't
know, I hate knowing why. But, so . . ." When she
began again, her tone was brighter. She had a theory.
"When first you know Otto, he is kind. This was before the
drinking began, seven years ago. At first he is
kind. He does everything he can think of to please.
This was when I married him. Then slowly you see that this
kindness is possession. He's possessive, he
thinks all the time you are looking at other men, or
they are looking at you. He is jealous, he starts
hitting me, and making up stories, stupid stories
about me and men, people he knows,
  or people in the street, it doesn't matter. He
always thinks there's something. He thinks one half of
Berlin has been to bed with me, and the other half is
waiting. About this time the drinking gets worse. And
finally, after all this time, I see it."
  She was reaching for another cigarette, but she
shuddered and changed her mind. "This thing, me and another
man, he
wants
this. It makes him angry, but he wants it. He
wants to watch me with another man, or he wants
to talk about it, or he wants me to talk about it.
It excites him."
  Leonard said, "He's . . . he's a sort of
pervert." He had never actually said the word before. It
was satisfying.
  "Exactly so. He discovers about you, that's when
he hits me. Then he goes away and thinks about
it, and can't stop thinking about it. This is all his
dreams come true, and this time it's real. He thinks
and he drinks, and all the time he has a key from
somewhere. Then tonight he drinks even more than usual,
comes up here and waits ..."
  Maria was beginning to cry. Leonard crossed the
room and put his hand on her shoulder.
  "He waits, but we are late and he falls
asleep. Perhaps he was going to jump out while, when
... it was happening and accuse me of something. He still
thinks he owns me, he thinks I am going to feel
guilty ..."
  She was crying too much to speak. She was fumbling
in her skirt for a handkerchief. Leonard gave her
his big white one from his trouser pocket. When she
had blown her nose, she breathed deeply.
  Leonard started to speak, but she spoke over him.
"I hate him, and I hate knowing about him."
  Then he said what he had been going to say.
"I'll take a look." He went into the bedroom
and turned on the light. To open the wardrobe he had
to close the bedroom door behind him. He stared at the
voyeur. Otto's position was unchanged. Maria
called from next door. He opened the bedroom
door an inch or so. "It's all right," he told
her. "I'm just looking at him."
  He continued to stare. Maria had actually chosen this
man as her husband. That was what it came down to.
She might say
she hated him, but she had chosen him. And she had also
chosen Leonard. The same taste exercised. He
and Otto had hboth appealed to her, they had that in
common-aspects of
*personality, appearance, fate, something. Now he
did feel an
gry
with her. She had bound him by her choices to this
man whom she was pretending to disown. She was making out
it
*was all an accident, as if it really had nothing
to do with her.
But this voyeur was in their bedroom, in the wardrobe,
asleep, drunk, about to piss on all the clothes
because of the choices she had made. Yes, now he
really was angry. Otto was her
m
responsibility, her fault, he was hers. And she
had the nerve to
be angry with him, Leonard.
The
turned out the bedroom light and went back into the
living room. He felt like leaving. Maria was
smoking. She smiled nervously.
S8I'm sorry I shouted."
The
reached for the cigarettes. There were only three left.
When he chucked the pack down, it slid to the
floor, by the shoes.
* bar She said, "Don't be angry with me."
@l be8I thought that's what you wanted."
6She looked up, surprised. "You are angry.
Come and sit
caret down. Tell me why."
andbrvbarbbB8I don't want to sit down." He
was enjoying his scene now.
JJJ8ALLYR marriage to Otto is still going on. In
the bedroom. That's
*why I'm angry. Either we talk about how we
get rid of him, or
m
I'm going back to my place and you two can carry
on."
"Carry on?" Her accent gave the familiar
phrase a strange lilt. The menace she intended
was not there. "What are you
Itrying to say?"
It irritated him that she was coming back at him with
anger, instead of allowing him his scene. He had let
her have hers. I8I'm saying that if you don't want
to help me get rid of him,
then you can spend the evening with him. Talk over old
times, finish the wine, whatever. But count me out."
She put her hand to her beautiful high forehead and
spoke across the room to her imagined witness. "I
don't believe this.
caret @y
I
  He's jealous." Then to Leonard. "You too?
Just like Otto? You want to go home now and leave me
with this man? You want to be at home and think about
Otto and me, and perhaps you'll lie on the bed and think
about us . . ."
  He was genuinely horrified. He did not know
she could talk like this, or that any woman could.
"Don't talk such bloody nonsense. Just now I
was for dragging him out into the street and leaving him there.
But you just want to sit here and give me a loving
description of his character, and cry into my hankie."
I
  She balled the handkerchief. up and threw it at his
feet. "Take it. It stinks!"
  He did not pick it up. They both went
to speak, but she got there first. "You want to throw him
in the street, why don't you just do that? Do it! Why
can't you just act? Why do you have to stand around and wait for
me to tell you what to do? You want to throw him out,
you're a man, throw him out!"
  His manliness again. He strode across the room and
grabbed her by the front of her blouse. A button
came off. He put his face up close to hers and
shouted, "Because he's yours! You chose him, he was your
husband, he got your key, he's your
responsibility." His free hand was in a fist.
She was frightened. She had dropped her cigarette
into her lap. It was burning, but he didn't care,
he didn't give a damn. He shouted again. "You
want to sit by while I sort out the mess you've
made of your
U
past-"JJ
  She shouted back, right into his face. "That's
right! I've hadEvery
  men screaming at me, hitting me, trying to rape
me. Now II
I
  want a man to look after me. I thought it was you.
I thought you could do it. But no, you want to be jealous
and scream and hit and rape like him and all the rest-was
  Just then Maria burst into flames.
  From where the cigarette had smoldered leaped a
single finger of flame, which instantly crossed and
wreathed itself around others springing from the folds of white
fabric. These flames were multiplying outward and
upward even before she had drawn her first breath
to scream. They were blue and
  yellow, and quick. She scrambled to her feet,
beating with her hands. Leonard reached for the
wine bottle and the half-full glass that stood beside
it. He emptied the glass over her lap and it
made no difference. As she stood and began a
second long scream he was trying to pour the wine from
the bottle over her. But it would not come quick enough.
There was a moment when her skirt was like a flamenco
dancer's, all oranges and reds, with in-woven
blue, and to a crackling sound she was turning,
thrashing, pirouetting as though she might rise up and
out of it. This was a moment, a fraction of an instant
before Leonard hooked both hands into the waistband and
tore the skirt away. It all came in one
piece, and blazed afresh on the floor. He
stamped on it, glad of his shoes, and as the flames
gave way to thick smoke he was able to turn and see
her face.
  It was relief he saw there, stunned relief, not
physical pain. There was a lining, a stitched-in
petticoat of satin or some natural material that
had been slow to catch. It had protected her. It
was under his feet now, browned but intact.
  He could not stop what he was doing. He had to go
on stamping as long as there were flames. The smoke was
bluish- black and thick. He needed to open a
window, and he wanted to put his arms around
Maria, who was standing motionless, perhaps in shock, naked
but for her blouse. He needed to fetch her dressing
gown from the bathroom. He would do that first, when he was
certain that the carpet would not catch fire. But when at
last he was satisfied and had stepped away, it was
natural that he should turn and embrace her first.
She was shivering, but he knew she was going to be all
right. She was saying his name over and over. And he
kept saying, "Oh God, Maria, oh my
God."
  At last they pulled away a little, only a few
inches, and looked at each other. She had stopped
trembling. They kissed, then again, and then her eyes
shifted from his and widened. He turned. Otto was
leaning by the bedroom door. The remains of the
smoldering skirt lay between them. Maria stepped behind
Leonard. She said something quick in German which
Leonard did not catch. Otto shook his head, more
to
  clear his thoughts, it looked, than to deny what she
had said. Then he asked for a cigarette, a
familiar phrase that Leonard only just managed
to understand. Whatever the improvements in Leonard's
German lately, it was going to be hard following the
conversation of this once-married couple.
"Raus,"
Maria said. Get out.
  And Leonard said in English, "Clear off, before
we call the police."
  Otto stepped over the skirt and came to the table.
He was wearing an old British Army jacket.
There was a V shape of darker material where a
corporal's stripe had been. He was sifting through
the ashtray. He found the largest stub and lit it with
Leonard's lighter. Because he was still covering Maria,
Leonard was unable to move. Otto took a drag
as she stepped around them and made for the front door.
It hardly seemed possible that he was about to step out of
their evening. And it was not. He reached the bathroom and
went inside. As soon as the door closed, Maria
ran to the bedroom. Leonard filled a saucepan
with water and poured it over the skirt. When it was
drenched through, he lifted it into the wastepaper
basket. From the bathroom came the sound of a terrible
hawking and spitting, a thick and copious
expectoration through the medium of an obscene shouting
noise. Maria came back, fully dressed.
She was about to speak when they heard a loud crash.
  She said, "He's knocked down your shelf. He
must have fallen onto it."
  "He did it deliberately," Leonard said.
"He knows I put it up."
  Maria shook her head. He did not see why she
should be defending him.
  She said, "He's drunk."
  The door opened and Otto was before them again. Maria
retreated to her chair by the pile of shoes, but she
did not sit. Otto had doused his face and had
only partially dried himself. Lank, dripping hair
hung over his forehead, and a droplet had formed at the
end of his nose. He wiped it with the back of his
  hand. Perhaps it was mucus. He was looking toward the
ashtray, but Leonard blocked his way.
  Leonard had folded his arms and set his feet
well apart. The destruction of his shelf had got
to him, it had set him calculating. Otto was six
inches or so shorter and perhaps forty pounds lighter.
He was either drunk or hung over, and he was in bad
physical shape. He was narrow and small. Against
that, Leonard would have to keep his glasses on and was not
used to fighting. But he was angry, incensed. That was
something he had over Otto.
  "Get out now," Leonard said, "or I'll throw
you out."
  From behind him Maria said, "He doesn't
speak English." Then she translated what
Leonard had said. The threat did not register on
Otto's pasty face. The gash in his lip was oozing
blood. He probed it with his tongue and at the same
time reached into first one and then another of his jacket
pockets. He brought out a folded brown
envelope, which he held up.
  He spoke around Leonard to Maria. His voice
was deep for such a small frame. "I've got it.
I've got the something from the office of something-something"
was all Leonard could make out.
  Maria said nothing. There was a quality, a
thickness to her silence that made Leonard want
to turn around. But he did not want to let the
German through. Otto had already taken a step forward.
He was grinning, and some muscular asymmetry was
pulling his thin nose to one side.
  At last Maria said,
"Es ist mir egal, was es ist."
I don't care what you've got.
  Otto's grin widened. He opened the envelope
and unfolded a single sheet that had seen much handling.
"They have our letter of 1951. They found it. And our
something, signed by both of us. You and me."
  "That's all in the past," Maria said.
"You can forget about that." But her voice wavered.
  Otto laughed. His tongue was orange from the
blood he had licked.
  Without turning around, Leonard said, "Maria,
what's going on?"
  "He thinks he has a right to this apartment. We
applied for it when we were still married. He's been
trying this one for two years now."
  Suddenly, to Leonard, it seemed a solution.
Otto could take this place, and they would live together
in Platanenallee, where he could never find them.
They would be married soon, they did not need two
places. They would never see Otto again.
Perfect.
  But Maria, as if reading his thoughts, or warning him
off them, was spitting out her words. "He has his own
place, he has a room. He only does this
to make trouble. He still thinks he owns me, that's
what it is."
  Otto was listening patiently. His eyes were on the
ashtray, he was waiting for his chance.
  "This is my place," Maria was saying to Otto.
"It's mine! That's the end of it. Now get out!"
  They could be packed up in three hours, Leonard
thought. Maria's stuff would fit into two
taxis. They could be safe in his apartment before dawn.
However tired, they might still resume their
celebration, in triumph.
  Otto flicked the letter with his fingernail. "Read
it. See for yourself." He took another half-step
forward. Leonard squared up to him. But perhaps Maria
should read it.
  Maria said, "You haven't told them we're
divorced. That's why they think you have a right."
  Otto was gleeful. "But they do know. They do.
We have to appear together before a something-something, to see who
has the greater need." Now he glanced at
Leonard, then round him to Maria again. "The
Englishman has a place, and you have a ring. The
something-something will want to know about that."
  "He's moving in here," Maria said. "So that's the
end of the matter."
  This time Otto held Leonard's gaze. The
German was becoming stronger, less the derelict and
drunk, more the opera

  tor now. He thought he was winning. He spoke
through a smile.
"Ne, ne. Die Platanenallee 26 ware
besser fur euch."
  It was as Blake had said. Berlin was a small
town, a village.
  Maria shouted something. It was certainly an
insult, an effective one. The smile went from
Otto's face. He shouted back. Leonard was in
the crossfire of a marital row, an old war. In
the volleys he caught only verbs, piling at the
ends of staccato sentences like spent ammunition, and the
traces of some obscenities he had learned, but
inflected into new, more violent shapes. They were
shouting at the same time. Maria was ferocious, she was
a fighting cat, a tiger. He had never guessed
she could be so passionate, and he felt momentary
shame that he himself had never aroused her this way.
Otto was straining forward. Leonard put his hand out
to hold him back. The German hardly noticed the
contact, and Leonard did not like what he felt. The
chest was hard and heavy to the touch, like a sandbag. The
man's words came vibrating up Leonard's arm.
Otto's letter had put Maria on the defensive, but
whatever she was saying now was striking home.
You never could, you didn't have, you aren't capable . .
.
She was going for the weaknesses, the drink perhaps, or
sex, or money, and he was shaking, he was
shouting. His lip was bleeding more. His saliva spotted
Leonard's face. He was pushing forward again.
Leonard caught his upper arm. It was hard too,
impossible to deflect from its movements.
  Then Maria said something intolerable, and Otto
tore from pLeonard's grip and went for her,
straight for her throat, cut
  "ting
  off her words and any possible sound. His free hand
was
  raised, the fist was clenched. Leonard caught it
in both hands just as it began the trajectory
to Maria's face. The lock on her windpipe was
tight, her tongue was forced out, purplish-black,
her eyes were big and beyond pleading. The blow still carried
Leonard forward, but he pulled down on Otto's
arm, swung it up and round his back, against the joint,
where it should have cracked. Otto was forced to turn to his
right, and as Leonard firmed his two-handed grip on
the man's wrist and pushed the arm higher up the spine,
Otto let Maria go and spun to free his
  arm and face his attacker. Leonard released him
and took a step back.
  Now his expectations were fulfilled. This was the thing
he had dreaded. He stood to be seriously
hurt, disabled forever. If the front door had been
open, he might have made a run for it. Otto was
little, and strong and vicious beyond belief. All his
hatred and anger were on the Englishman now, everything
that should have been Maria's. Leonard pushed his
glasses up his nose. He did not dare remove
them. He had to see what was about to happen to him. He
put his fists up, the way he had seen boxers do
it. Otto had his hands by his side," like a cowboy
ready to draw. His drunk's eyes were red. What
he did was simple. He drew back his right foot
and kicked the Englishman's shin. Leonard dropped
his guard. Otto punched out, straight for his
Adam's apple. Leonard managed to turn
aside, and the blow caught him on the collarbone. It
hurt, it really hurt, beyond reason. It could be
broken. It would be his spine next. He raised his
hands, palms outward. He wanted to say something,
he wanted Maria to say something. He could see her
over Otto's shoulder, standing by the pile of shoes.
They could live in Platanenallee. It would be all
right with her, if she would only think it through. Otto
hit him again, hard- very hard-on the ear. There was a
ringing sound, an electric bell sound from every corner
of the room. It was so venomous, so ...
unfair. This was Leonard's last thought before they went
into the clinch. They had their arms around each other. Should
he pull the tight, hard, disgusting little body in
closer, or push it away where it might hit him
again? He felt the disadvantage of his height.
Otto was right into him, and suddenly he understood why.
Hands were groping between his legs, and finding his
testicles and closing around them. The grip that had
been around Maria's throat. Burnt ocher
blossomed in his vision, and there was a scream. Pain
was not a big enough word. It was his whole consciousness in a
terrible corkscrewed reverse. He would do anything,
give anything, to be free, or dead. He folded
over, and his head came level with Otto's, his
cheek grazed his, and he turned and opened his
  mouth and bit deep into Otto's face. It was not
a fighting maneuver, it was the agony that clenched his
jaw until his teeth met and his mouth was filled.
There was a roar that could not have been his own. The pain was
diminished. Otto was struggling to be away. He
let him go and spat out something of the consistency of a
half-eaten orange. He did not taste a thing.
Otto was howling. Through his cheek you could see a
yellow molar. And blood, who would have thought there was so
much blood in a face? Otto was coming again.
Leonard knew there would be no escape now. Otto
was coming with his bleeding face, and there was something else
too, something coming from behind, black and high up on the
periphery of vision. To protect himself from this as
well, Leonard stretched up his right hand, and time
slowed as his fingers closed around something cold. He
could not sway it from its course, he could only take
hold and participate, let it carry on down, and
down it came, all force and iron, the sign of the
kicking feet, down it. dropped like justice, with his
hand on it, and Maria's hand, the full weight of a
judgment, the iron foot crashed down on Otto's
skull, and pierced the bone toe-first and went deeper
still and dropped him to the floor. He went down without
a sound, face forward and he was stretched full out.
  The cobbler's last still protruded from his head, and the
whole city was quiet.
This page is blank.

Seventeen
"A
After their engagement party,
the young couple stayed up all night and talked. This
was how he was trying to see it two hours after dawn,
as he waited in line with the rush-hour crowd
for his bus out to Rudow. He andbrvbarbbneeded a
sequence, a story. He needed order. One thing after
W
another. He boarded the bus and found a seat. His
lips were
forming the words as he carried through the actions. He found
a seat and sat down. After the fight, he brushed his
teeth for ten minutes. Then they put a blanket
over the body. Or was it, they covered the body with a
blanket, and then he went in the
  bathroom and brushed his teeth for ten minutes.
Or twenty. His toothbrush was on the floor,
among the broken glass, under the shelf that had crashed
down. The toothpaste had fallen in the basin. The
drunk knocked down the shelf and the toothpaste fell
in the basin. The toothpaste knew it would be needed,
the toothbrush didn't. The toothpaste was in charge,
the toothpaste was the brains . . .
  They did not, could not, remove the last. It stuck
up under the blanket. Maria laughed. It was still there
now. They covered up the last, and it was still there. The
quick and the last. The quick found a seat, the last had
to stand. As they moved along Hasenheide the bus
filled. There was standing room only. Then the driver
called down to the pavement that there was no more
room at all. That was comforting somehow; no one else
could get on. For the moment they were safe. As they
dropped southward, against the rush-hour flow, the bus
began to empty. By the time they reached Rudow
village, there was only Leonard, exposed among
the lines of seats.
  He began the familiar walk. There was more
building going on than he remembered. He had not
been this way since yesterday. Yesterday morning, before
he was engaged. They took a blanket off the bed and
spread it over. It was not respect, why had he ever
thought it had to do with respect? They had to protect
themselves from the sight of it. They had to be able to think.
He was going to pull the last out. Perhaps that was
respect. Or concealment. He knelt down and
took hold. It moved under his touch, like a stick in
thick mud. That was why he could not pull it out. Was
he going to have to wipe it off, rinse it under the
bathroom tap?
  They tried to cover up the lot, and it looked
silly, a worn-out shoe at one end, at the other the
mystery shape looming up, pinching all the blanket
that should have been the shoe's. Maria started laughing,
horrible fall-about laughing, full of fear. He could
have joined in. She did not try to meet his
eye, the way laughing people do. She was alone with it.
She was not trying to stop, either. If she had stopped
she would have started crying. He could have joined in, but
he did not dare.
Things could get out of hand. In films, when women
laughed like that you were supposed to slap them hard round the
face. Then they were silent as they grasped the truth,
then they started crying and you comforted them. But he was too
tired. She might complain or tell him off or
hit him back. Anything might happen.
  It already had. Before or after the blanket, he did
his teeth. The toothbrush was not enough; as a tool it
was insufficient. When he asked her, she fetched him
the toothpicks. That was what he had to use to remove
what was trapped between an incisor and a canine. He
was not sick. He thought of Tottenham and Sunday
lunch and his father and himself with the toothpicks, before pudding.
His mother never used them. Somehow women did not. He
did not swallow the morsel and add to his crimes.
Now, every little thing was a plus. He washed it away
under the tap and hardly saw it, just a glimpse of
something shredded and palest pink, and then he spat and
spat again and rinsed his mouth.
  And then they had a drink. Or he had already had
one to help him lift the last. The wine was
gone, the good Mosel was in the skirt. There was nothing
but the Naafi gin. No ice, no lemon, no
tonic. He took it into the bedroom. She was
hanging up the clothes. Not pissed on-there was another
plus.
  She said,
Where's mine?
So he gave her his and went back for another. He
was by the table pouring it, trying not to look, when he
looked. It had moved. There were two shoes now, and a
black sock. They had not turned it over, they had
not actually checked to see if it was dead. He
watched the blanket for a sign of breathing. It had
started with the breathing. Was there a tremor, a little rise
and fall? Would it be worse if there were? Then they
would have to call an ambulance, before they'd had a chance
to talk, to sort out the story. Or they would have to kill
him again. He watched the blanket, and watching it
made it move.
  He took his drink into the bedroom and told her.
She would not come and look. She was not having it. She
had her mind made up. It was dead. The clothes were
all hung up and she
  shut the wardrobe door. She went next door
to find the cigarettes, but he knew she had
gone to look. She came back and said she could not
find them. They sat on the bed and drank their
drinks.
  When he sat down, his testicles hurt. And his
ear, and his collarbone. Someone ought to look after him.
But they had to talk, and to talk they had to think. To do
that they needed a drink and a sit-down, and that hurt, and
so did his ear. He had to get out of these too fast,
too tight circles. So he drank the gin. He
looked at her as she looked at the ground in front
of her feet. She was beautiful, he knew that, but
he could not feel it. Her beauty did not affect him
the way he wanted it to. He wanted to be moved
by her, and for her to remember how she felt about him.
Then they could face this together, and decide what it was
they were going to tell the police. But looking at her,
he did not feel a thing. He touched her arm and she
did not look up.
  They had to get together so they could be sure they were
believed. The police might think she was beautiful,
they might even feel it. He only knew it for a
fact. If they felt it, they might understand, and that
might be the way through.
It was self- defense,
she would tell them, and that would be all right.
  He took his hand off her arm and said,
What are we going to tell the police?
She did not speak, she did not even look up.
Perhaps he had not spoken. He had meant to, but he
had not heard anything himself. He could not remember.
  He was walking past the refugee shacks. It
hurt to walk. His collarbone only hurt when he
lifted his arm, his ear when he touched it, but his
testicles hurt when he sat down and when he
walked. When he was out of sight of the shacks, he would
stand still. He saw a kid with ginger hair, a
carrot-top. He had short trousers and scabby
knees. He looked like a little bruiser. He
looked like an English kid. Leonard had seen him
often enough before on his way to work. In all this time they had
never spoken or even waved. They just stared, as if
they had known each other in a previous life. Today,
to bring himself luck, Leonard raised his hand in
greeting and half smiled. It
  hurt when he raised his hand. The kid would not have
cared if he had known that, he just stared. The grown-up
had broken the rules.
  He walked on around the corner and stopped to lean
against a tree. Across the road they were building an
apartment house. Soon this would not be
countryside any longer. The people who lived here would not
know what it had once looked like. He would come back
and tell them.
It never did look very good here,
he would say. So
it's all right. Everything is all right.
Except the thoughts, on and on.
  There was nothing he could do. He touched her arm again,
or it was the first time. He asked his question again, or he
asked it for the first time and took care that the words were
actually spoken.
I know,
she said, meaning
I share your question, I share your worry.
Or perhaps
You 'we asked me this already, and I heard you.
Or perhaps still
answered you just now.
  To keep things going he said,
It was self-defense, it was self- defense.
  She sighed. Then she said,
They know him.
Yes,
he said.
So they'll understand.
  She said in a rush,
They liked him, they thought he was a war hero, he
told them some kind of story. They thought he was a
drunk because of the war. He was a drunk who had to be
forgiven. The off-duty ones sometimes bought him a
beer. And they thought he was also a drunk because of me.
They told me that when I asked them round here once.
I wanted protection, and they said, But you're
driving the poor devil crazy.
  He stood up from the bed to help the pain. He
wanted to get the gin. He wanted to bring the bottle
through. He wanted to look for the cigarettes. There were
still three in the pack, but it hurt to walk. And if
he went in there, he might see that it had moved again.
  He stood by the wardrobe and he said,
That's just the local station, the
Ordnungspolizei.
We need to speak to the
Kriminalpolizei,
they're a different bunch.
He was saying this,
but of course there were no criminals, no crime, it
was selfdefense,
k
  She said,
But the locals will get involved all the same. They
have to, it's their area.
g
So,
he said,
what are we going to tell them?
  She shook her head. He thought she meant she
did not know. caret
  But she meant something quite different. It was only
two- thirty then, and she already meant something quite
different.
  Walking his familiar route, he could pretend it
had not happened. He was on his way to work, that was
all. He would go down into the tunnel, he was looking
forward to the tunnel. He had gone out to get the gin.
The cigarettes were nowhere. He looked at the
shoes. They were further out, he could not doubt it. He
could see both socks, and a bare patch of leg with
sparse hair. He hurried into the bedroom and told
her, but she did not look up. She had folded her
arms and she was staring at the wall. He shut the door
and poured them both a gin. Drinking it, he thought of the
Naafi.
  still
tell you what,
he said.
We'll get the British military police. Or
the Americans. I'm attached, you see, it's what
I'm meant to do.
  She almost unfolded her arms, then she slotted
them back together.
I'm involved,
she said.
The German police will have to know.
  He was still standing. He said,
I'll tell them it was all me.
A mad offer.
  She did not smile or soften her voice. She
said,
You 're sweet and kind. But he's German, and this
apartment is mine, and this was my husband once. They have
to tell the German police.
  He was glad the offer was not taken up. He said,
We're getting bogged down. They might think he was
a war hero, but they know he was violent, they know he
was a drunk, and jealous, and it's our word against his,
and if we had wanted to kill him we wouldn 't smash
his head and report it to the police.
  She said,
If we thought we could get away with it, why
not?
  And when he did not answer because he had not
understood, she said, Totschlag,
that's what they'll say. Manslaughter.
  He was approaching the sentries. It was Jake and
Howie on the gate. They were friendly and made a
joke about his swollen ear. He still had to show his
pass. It was just as good as it had been the day before. Not
everything had changed, it wasn't all bad. He
went on through, past the sentry box, along the path,
his usual route. He met no one on his way
to his room.
  Pinned to his door was a note from Glass.
Meet me in the canteen 1300 hours.
The room was as he had left it-the workbench, soldering
irons, ohmmeters, voltmeters, valve testing
equipment, rolls of cable, boxes of spare parts,
a broken umbrella he was intending to fix with
solder. This was all his stuff, this was what he did,
this was what he really did, all quite legal and
aboveboard. Or above one board and below another, and not
legal by every definition. There were some definitions they were
at war with, there were certain definitions they were committed
to eradicating.
I've got to stop this,
he thought,
I've got to slow down.
Manslaughter,
she said. He had to go and sit on the bed, never mind
the pain. It sounded worse than murder.
Slaughter. It sounded worse. It sounded about right for
what they had next door.
  He tried something else. still
tell you what,
he said.
I should go and see a doctor, straightaway.
  She said through a yawn,
Is it really bad?
One more thing she did not want to think about.
  He said,
A doctor should look at my collarbone and my
ear.
He did not say his testicles. They were hurting
now. And he did not want a doctor looking at
them, squeezing them and asking him to cough. He writhed
where he sat and he said, still
should go. Don't you see, it's our proof that it was
self-defense. I should go while it's really bad,
and they could take photos.
But,
he thought,
not of my balls.
  And she said,
Would you tell them it was self-defense too, that
hole in his face?
  He sat there and he almost passed out.
  He went along the corridor to the water fountain.
He wanted the water on his face. He passed
by Glass's office and checked. Out-there was another
plus. He could wave at boys, or say hello
to sentries, but he could not talk to Glass. He
took some valves and other odds and ends from his own
office and locked it. There was a small job left
over from yesterday. It might help him slow down.
An excuse to be in the tunnel, to collect what
he had to fetch from there.
If you see the doctor,
she said,
you have to tell him, and that means the police.
  He said,
But at least we'll have the proof of a fight, a
fight. He would have torn me to pieces.
Oh yes,
she said.
The proof of self-defense, but what about the
hole?
Well,
he said.
You can tell them why I had to do that.
But I don't know why,
she said.
Tell me, why did you bite him like this?
He said,
Didn 't you see? Didn 't you see what he was
doing?
  She shook her head, so he told her. And when
he finished she said, still
didn't see that. You were too close.
Well, it's true,
he said.
  She sipped her gin and asked him,
Did it hurt so bad that you had to bite a hole in
his face?
Of course it did,
he said.
You'll have to tell them you saw it. It's important
that you say that.
  She said,
But you said we had no need to lie, you said we did
nothing wrong, we have nothing to hide from them.
Did I say that?
he said.
I mean, we have done nothing wrong, but we have to make
them believe it, we have to get our story right.
Ah well,
she said.
Ah so, if we are going to lie, if we are going
to pretend things, then we must do it right.
And she uncrossed her arms and looked at him.
  He walked past the spoil piled to the basement
ceiling. They said mushrooms sometimes grew on the
dark slopes, but he had never seen one. He
didn't want to see one now. He was standing by the rim
of the shaft, and he was feeling better. The
  sound of the generators, the bright bare lights at the
mouth of the tunnel, the dim ones up here, the cables and
field lines feeding down, the ventilation, the cooling
systems . . .
The systems,
he thought,
we need systems.
He showed his authority and said to the guard that he would be
bringing up a couple of dis.things and he would need the
lift. "You got it, sir," the man
  said.
  The old vertical iron ladder was gone. These
days you got down by way of a set of stairs that
spiraled one and a half turns on the wall of the
shaft.
They think of everything,
he thought,
the Americans.
They wanted to make things possible, and easy. They
wanted to look after you. This pleasant lightweight
staircase with the nonslip treads and chain-link
banisters, the Coke machines in the corridors,
steak and chocolate milk in the canteen. He had
seen grown men drinking chocolate milk. The
British would have kept the vertical ladder because
difficulty was part of a secret operation.
Americans thought of "Heartbreak Hotel" and
"Tutti Frutti" and playing catch on the rough
ground outside, grown men with chocolate-milk
mustaches playing ball. They were the innocent. How
could you steal secrets from them? He had given
Macationamee nothing, he hadn't really tried. There
was a plus.
  It hurt walking down the stairs. He was glad
when he was down. He had found out nothing about
Nelson's technique, how to separate the
clear text echoes from the encrypted message. They
had these secrets
and
they had their chocolate milk. He had found out
nothing. He had tried a couple of doors. He
had not lied to Macationamee, and he had stolen nothing
so he did not need to lie to Glass.
  She said again,
If we tell them lies . . .
Then she let it hang, and it was his turn.
  He said,
We have to be together, we have to have it clear. They'll
take us in separate rooms and look for
contradictions.
Then he stopped and said,
But there isn't even a lie we can tell them. What
can we say, that he slipped on the bathroom
floor?
I know,
she said. still
know,
by which she meant
You 're right, so move on to the inevitable conclusion.
But he did not move. He
  sat and thought about standing up. He poured more
gin. It did not seem to reach him somehow, this
lukewarm drink.
  In the tunnel there was silky black air sifted
by machine, and manmade silence, and competence,
ingenuity, discretion everywhere he looked. He had the
valves in his hand, he was on a job. He walked
between the old railway lines, the lines that had brought
the dirt out.
You're drinking too much,
she said.
We have to think.
. He emptied the cup so he could put it down on
the bed. He could think better when he closed his
eyes. It hurt his ear less.
I'll tell you another thing,
she said.
Are you listening? Don't go to sleep. They know at
the Rathaus, the city hall, that he was claiming a
right to this place. They have the correspondence, all the
papers.
  He said, So
what? His claim was all nonsense, you told me.
Es macht nichts,
she said.
He had a grievance, and we had a reason
to quarrel.
You mean a motive,
he said.
You're saying that would be our motive? Do we look
like people who solve a housing dispute this way?
Who knows?
she said.
It's difficult to find a place here. In Berlin,
people have killed each other for less than that.
All that says,
he said,
is that he had a grievance and he came here to fight
and it was self-defense.
  When she thought they were getting nowhere she folded her
arms again. She said,
At work I heard this English word,
manslaughter,
from the major. He told me. This happened the year
before I started work there. One of the mechanics in the
workshops, a German civilian, got in a fight
in a
Kneipe
with another man and he killed him. He hit him
over the head with a beer bottle and it killed him.
He was drunk, and angry, but he didn
't mean to kill. He was very sorry when he saw
what he had done.
And what happened to him?
He was sent to prison for five years. He's still
there now, I think.
  It was a normal day in the tunnel. Hardly
anyone around,
  everything in order, the place running smoothly.
It was fine, it was how the rest of the world should be. He
stopped and looked. Tied to this fire extinguisher was a
label showing that the weekly check had been carried out
at 1030 hours the day before. Here were the initials
of the engineer, his office phone number, the date of the
next check. Perfection. Here was a telephone
point, and by it a list of numbers: the duty officer,
security, the firefighting unit, the recording
room, the tap chamber. This cluster of lines, held
in bunches like a little girl's hair with a bright new
clip, ran from the amplifiers to the recording room.
These were the lines to the tap chamber, this piping
circulated water to cool the electronics, these were
the ventilation ducts, this line carried a separate
current to the alarm systems, this was a sensor with a
probe out deep into the surrounding soil. He put his
hand out and touched them. It all worked, he
loved them all.
  He opened his eyes. Neither of them had spoken for
five minutes. Perhaps twenty minutes had gone
by. He opened his eyes and started speaking.
But this wasn 't like a fight in a pub,
he said.
He attacked me, he could have killed me.
He stopped and remembered.
He attacked you first, he had you by the throat.
He had forgotten her throat.
Let me look,
he said.
How does it feel?
There were red marks all the way around and right up to her
chin. He had forgotten about that.
It hurts when I swallow,
she said.
There you are,
he said.
You should come with me to the doctor. This is going to be
our story, and it's the truth, it's what happened.
He would have strangled you.
Yes,
he thought. still
stopped him.
  She said,
It's four o'clock. No doctor will see us now. And
even if he did, I tell you.
She stopped, and then she unfolded her arms. still
tell you, I'm thinking all the time about the police,
and what they see when they come in here.
We'll take the blanket off first,
he said.
  She said,
It doesn 't matter about the blanket. I tell
you what they see. A mutilated corpse.
Don't say that,
he said.
A smashed-in skull,
she said,
and a hole in his face. And what do we have between us? A
red ear, a sore throat?
And my balls,
he thought, but he didn't say a thing.
  There were a couple of technicians working by the
amplifiers. All he had to do was nod at them.
Then he stopped at the end of the racks. There was a
desk, and there they were, stowed underneath, just as he
remembered them. But he could stop on the way back.
He had to do his job, it would help him. Not
even that. He wanted to do it, he had to hold on.
He passed through the pressurized doors, into the tap
chamber. There were two men in here as well, people he
always said hello to but never got to know. One had the
headphones on, the other was writing. They smiled at
him. Talking was discouraged in here; you could whisper if
it was essential, that was all. The one who was writing
pointed to the swollen ear and grimaced.
  One of the two recorders, the one not in use,
needed a valve replacement. He sat down to the
job and took his time unscrewing the cover plates.
This was what he would have been doing if nothing had
happened. He wanted it to last. He replaced the
valve and then he poked around, looking at the
connections and the soldered points on the signal
activation. When he had the covers back on he
continued to sit there, pretending to think.
  He must have fallen asleep. He was on his
back, the light was on, he was fully dressed and
he couldn't remember a thing. Then he remembered.
She was shaking his arm and he sat up.
  She said,
You can't sleep and leave everything to me.
  It was coming back to him. He said,
Everything I say, you're against it. You
tell me.
  She said, still
don't want to tell you. I want you to see it for
yourself.
See what?
he said.
  For the first time in hours she stood. She put her
hand to her throat and said,
They won't believe it about self-defense. No
one will. If we tell them, then we go to prison.
  He was looking around for the gin bottle, which wasn't
  where he left it. She must have moved it, and that was
fine with him because now he was feeling sick. He said,
still
don't think that's necessarily true.
But he did not mean it; it was true, they were going
to prison, German prison.
So,
she said. still
have to say it. Someone has to say it, so I'll say
it. We don't have to tell them, we don 'tsay a
thing. We take him out of here and put him where they
don't find him.
Oh my God,
he said.
And if they do find him one day,
she said,
and they come and tell me, I'll say, Oh, that's very
sad, but he was a drunk and a war hero, he was bound
to get into trouble.
Oh God,
he said, and then,
If they see us taking him out of here, then we're
finished, it will look like murder. Murder.
That's true,
she said.
We must do it right.
She sat down beside him.
We have to work together,
he said.
  She nodded, and they held hands and did not speak
for a while.
  In the end he had to go. He had to leave the cosy
chamber. He nodded at the two men and went out through the
double doors, and swallowed hard to adjust his ears to the
lower pressure. Then he was kneeling by a desk.
There were the two empty cases. He decided to bring
them both. Each one could hold two of the big
Ampex recording machines as well as spares,
microphones, reels and cable. They were
black with reinforced edging, and had big snap locks
and two canvas straps that buckled around for extra
safety. He opened one up. There was no lettering,
inside or out, no Army codes or
manufacturer's name. There was a wide canvas
strap handle. He picked them up and started along the
tunnel. He had trouble squeezing them by the people by the
amplifier racks, but one of the men took a case and
carried it along to the far end for him. Then he was on
his own, bumping along the tunnel to the main shaft.
  He could have carried them up the stairs one at a
time, but the fellow at the top saw him there and swung
the derrick out and started the electric winch. He
put the cases on the pallet,
  and they were up before he was. He went back past
the earth mounds, up to ground level, out through some
awkward double doors and along the side of the road
to the sentry. He had to open up his cases for
Howie-just a formality-then he was off along the open
road, off on his holidays.
  It was deep enough to be a nuisance, his new
luggage. It banged his legs and forced his arms out and
made his shoulders ache. And this was empty luggage.
There was no sign of the carrot-top kid. In the
village he had trouble reading the bus
timetable; the figures drifted upward diagonally.
He read them as they moved. He had forty minutes
to wait, so he set the cases against a wall and sat
on them.
  He was the first one to speak. It was five A.m.
He said,
We could drag him down the stairs now, carry him
to one of the bomb sites. We could put the bottle in
his hand, make it look like something happened with the other
drunks.
He said all this, but he knew he did not have the
strength, not now.
  She said,
There are always people on the stairs. They come in from the
night shifts, or they go off early. And some of them
are old and never sleep. It's never really quiet
here.
  He was nodding all the time she spoke. It was an
idea, but it was not the best idea and he was glad they
were thinking it through now. At last they were agreeing, at
last they were getting somewhere. He closed his eyes.
It was going to be all right.
  Then the bus driver was shaking him. He was still on
the cases, and the driver had guessed he was waiting for
his bus. This was the end of the line, after all.
He had forgotten nothing, he knew it all the moment
he opened his eyes. The driver took one of the
cases, and he took the other. Some mothers with small
children were already seated, off to the city center, to the department
stores. That's where he was going, he had not forgotten
a thing. He would tell Maria, he had stayed with it.
His arms and legs were weak, he had not got them going
yet. He sat at the front, with his luggage on the
seat behind. He did not have to look at it all the time.
  As they headed north they stopped to pick up more
mothers
  and children and their shopping bags. This was the
purposeful, head-down punctuality of rush hour.
Now it was cheerful, chatty, festive. He sat with
their separate voices behind him, the mothers" bright
conversation founded on agreement, ruptured by little
laughs and complicit groans, the children's
irrelevant squawks, finger-pointing exclamations,
lists of German nouns, sudden frets. And him
alone at the front, too big, too bad for a mother,
remembering the journeys with her from Tottenham
to Oxford Street, in the window seat, holding the
tickets, the absolute authority of the conductor
and the system he stood for, which was true-the stated
destination, the fares, the change, the bell
ring-and hanging on tight until the great vibrating
important bus had stopped.
  He got off with everyone else near the
Kurfurstendamm.
  She said,
Don't go to the
Eisenwarenhandlung,
go to a department store where they won't remember you.
  There was a big new one across the road. He
waited with a crowd for a policeman to stop the traffic
and wave the people on. It was important not to break the
law. The department store was new, everything was new.
He consulted a list on a board. He had to go to the
basement. He stepped on the escalator. In the
land of the defeated, no one need walk downstairs.
The place was efficient. In minutes he had what
he wanted. The girl who served him gave him the
change and the
Bitte schon
without a glance and turned to the man at his side. He
took the U-Bahn from Wittenbergplatz and
walked to the flat from Kottbusser Tor.
  When he knocked on the door she called out,
"Wer ist da?"
  "It's me," he said in English.
  When she opened the door, she looked at the
cases he was carrying, and then she turned back
inside. Their eyes had not met. They did not touch.
He followed her in. She had rubber gloves on;
all the windows were open. She had cleaned up the
bathroom. The place had the atmosphere of a spring
clean.
  It was still there, under the blanket. He had to step
over it. She had cleared the table. A pile of old
newspapers was on the floor, and on a chair,
folded up, were the six meters of rubber

  ized cloth she had said she would get. It was bright
and cold in here. He set the cases down by the
bedroom door. He wanted to go in there and lie on
the bed.
  She said, "I made some coffee."
  They drank it standing up. She did not ask about his
morning; he did not ask about hers. They had done
their jobs. She finished her coffee quickly and began
to spread the newspaper on the table two or three
sheets thick. He watched her from the side, but when
she turned in his direction, he looked away.
  "Well?" she said.
  It was bright, and then it was brighter still. The
sun had come out, and though it did not shine directly
into the room, the reflected light of huge cumulus
clouds illuminated every corner, every detail-the cup
in his hand, an upside-down headline on the table in
Gothic script, the cracked black leather of the
shoes protruding from under the blanket.
  If all this suddenly disappeared, they would have a
hard enough time getting back to where they had once been.
But what they were about to do now would block their way
forever. Therefore-and this seemed simple-therefore, what they
were doing was wrong. But they had been through all that, they
had talked the night out. She had her back to him and
she was looking out the window. She had removed the
gloves. Her fingertips were resting on the table. She
was waiting for him to speak. He said her name. He was
tired, but he tried to say it in the old way they had
used, tilted gently upward like a question, whenever they
recalled each other to the essentials-love, sex,
friendship, the shared life, whatever.
  "Maria," he said.
  She recognized it and turned. Her look was
hopeless. She shrugged, and he knew she was right. It
would make it harder. He nodded his acknowledgment and
turned away and knelt beside one of the cases and opened
it. He took out a linoleum cutting
knife, a saw and an axe and set them to one side.
Then, leaving the blanket and the last in place, and with
Leonard at the head, Maria at the feet, they
lifted Otto toward the table.
  From the very beginning, from the moment they laid hands on
him, it went wrong. Now that rigor mortis had
set in, it was in fact all the easier to lift him.
His legs stayed out straight and he did not sag in the
middle. He was face down when they picked him up,
and like a plank. The transformation caught them
unprepared. Leonard fumbled his grip under the
shoulders. The head drooped. The last, pulled by its
own weight, slid out of the skull and fell onto
Leonard's foot.
  Over his shout of pain Maria cried, "Don't
put him down now. We are almost there."
  Worse than the pain of what he thought might be a
broken toe was the fact that there was issuing from under the
blanket, from Otto's brain or mouth, a cold
liquid of some sort, which was soaking into the lower part of
Leonard's trousers.
  "Oh Christ," he said, "get him up there now,
then. I'm going to be sick."
  There was just room for the body stretched out diagonally
on the table. With the lower part of his trousers
clinging to his shins, Leonard limped into the bathroom
and hunched over the lavatory bowl. Nothing came.
He had had nothing to eat since the
Rippchen mit Erbsenpuree
of the night before. He preferred to think only of its
German name. When he looked below his knees,
however, and saw a smear of gray matter edged with
blood and hair highlighted against the dark wet
cloth, he retched. At the same time he struggled
to take his trousers off. Maria was watching him from the
bathroom door.
  "It's on my shoes as well," he said. "And
my foot is broken, I'm sure of it." He
got his shoes and socks and trousers off and shoved them
under the basin. There was nothing to show on his foot but a
faint red mark at the base of his big toe.
  "I'll rub it for you," she offered.
  She followed him into the bedroom. He found some
socks in the wardrobe, and trousers rumpled from
Otto's occupation. By the bed were his carpet
slippers.
  Maria said, "Perhaps you should wear one of my
aprons." That seemed all wrong. Women made
pies and baked bread in aprons.
  He said, "I'll be all right now."
  They went back into the other room. The blanket
was still in place, that was something. On the floor where
Otto had been were two big damp patches on the
carpet? The windows were wide open and there was nothing
to smell. But the light was relentless. It picked out
the fluid that had soaked Leonard. It was greenish
and was dripping from the table to the floor. They stood
around, reluctant to make the next move. Then
  Maria went to the chair where her purchases were and
began to explain them. She took a deep breath at
the beginning of each sentence. She was trying to keep
things moving.
  "This is the cloth, how do you say it,
wasserdicht?"
  "Waterproof."
  She was holding up a red tin. "This is the glue,
rubber glue, which dries quickly. Here is a brush
to spread the glue. I use these dressmaking
scissors to cut the pieces." Like a
demonstrator in a department store, she cut a
large square of cloth as she spoke.
  This detailing of her methods helped him. He
took his own things over to the table and set them down.
There was no need to explain them.
  "Right, then," he said too loudly.
"I'll make a start. I'll do a leg."
  But he did not move. He stared at the
blanket. He could see each separate fiber of the
weave, the infinite replication of its simple
pattern.
  "Take the shoe and sock off first-was was Maria's
advice. She had the lid off the tin and was stirring the
glue with a teaspoon.
  That was practical. He put his hand on
Otto's ankle and eased the shoe off by its heel.
It came easily. There were no laces. The sock
was a disgrace, matted with embedded filth. He
peeled it off quickly. The foot was blackened. He
was glad he was by an open window. He rolled the
blanket up until the legs were exposed from just above
the knees. He did not want to start alone.
  He said to her, "I want you to hold him steady with
both hands here." He indicated the upper leg. She
did as he asked. They were together now, side by side.
He took up the saw. It was finely toothed, and was
sheathed for safety in a fold of cardboard held in
place by a rubber band. He got that off and stared into the
crook of Otto's knee. The trousers were black
cotton and shiny from wear. He held the saw in his
right hand, and with his left he held Otto's
leg just above the ankle. It was colder than room
temperature. It drew the heat from his hand.
  "Don't think about it," Maria said. "Just do it."
She snatched another breath. "Remember I love
you."
  It could not be, of course, but it was important that
they were together in this. They needed a formal declaration.
He would have told her that he loved her too, but his
mouth was so
  dry.
  He drew the saw across the crook of Otto's
knee. It snagged immediately. It was the cloth, and below
that, stringy tendons. He lifted the saw out and, without
looking at the teeth, put it in position again and
tried to pull it toward him. The same thing happened.
  "I can't do this," he cried. "It won't go, it
doesn't work!"
  "Don't push down so hard," she said. "Do it
gently. And do the first few strokes toward you. Afterward
you can go backward and forward."
  She knew about carpentry. She could have made a
better shelf in the bathroom. He did as she
suggested. The saw was moving with lubricated ease.
Then the teeth snagged again, this time on bone, and then
they were engaged. Leonard and Maria had
to tighten their grip on the leg to keep it still. The
saw made a muffled rasping sound.
  "I have to stop!" he shouted, but he did not. He
kept going. He should not have been going through bone. The
idea was to get into the joint. His idea of it was
vague, derived from roast chicken Sunday
lunches. He angled the saw this way and that, and went
at it hard, knowing that if he stopped he would never
resume. Then he was through something, then it was grating
bone again. He was trying not to see, but the April
light exposed it all. The upper leg was oozing
almost black, covering the saw. The handle was
slippery. He was through, there was only skin below, and
he could not get at it without sawing the table. He
took the linoleum knife and tried to scour it with one
stroke, but it puckered under the blade. He had
to get in there, he had to put his hand into the chasm of the
joint, into the cold mess of dark, ragged flesh and
saw at the skin with the blade of the knife.
  "Oh no!" he shouted. "Oh God!" And he was
through. The
  whole of the lower leg was suddenly an item, a thing
in a cylinder of cloth, with a bare foot. Maria was
ready for it. She rolled it tight in the square of
waterproof cloth she had prepared. Then
she glued the ends and sealed them. She tucked the
package into one of the cases.
  The stump was oozing heavily; the whole table was
covered. The newspaper was sodden and disintegrating.
Blood was seeping down the table legs and was already
all over the paper on the floor. The paper stuck
to their feet when they walked over it, exposing the
carpet underneath. His arms were a uniform reddish-brown
from the fingertips to above the elbow. It was on his face.
Where it was drying it itched. There were spots on his
glasses. Maria's hands and arms were covered too,
and her dress was smeared. It was a quiet time of
day, but they called to one another as though they were in a
storm.
  She said, "I'm going to wash myself."
  "There's no point," he said. "Do it at the
end." He took up the saw. Where it had been
slippery, it was now sticky. This would aid his grip.
They took hold of the left leg. She was on his
right, this time steadying the lower leg with both hands. It
should have been quicker, this one, but it was not. He began
well enough, but the saw stuck halfway through, wedged
tight within the joint. He had to get both hands on the
saw. Maria had to stretch over him and steady the
upper leg as well. Even so, as
Leonard struggled with the saw, the body jerked from
side to side in a mad face-down dance. When the
blanket dropped away, Leonard kept his eyes
off the skull. It was at the edge of vision. Soon
it would have to be dealt with. They were sodden now from the
waist down, from where they were pushing up against the table.
It no longer mattered. He was through the joint. It was
the skin again, and he had to put his hand in with the knife.
Would it have been easier, he thought, if the flesh had
been warm?
  The second parcel was in the case. Two rubber
boots side by side. Leonard found the gin. He
drank from the bottle and handed it to Maria. She
shook her head.
  "You're right," she called. "We must keep
going."
  They did not discuss it, but they knew they would do the
arms. They started with the right, the one Leonard had
tried to wrench. It was crooked and stiff. They could not
pull it out straight. It was difficult finding a
way in, or a place to stand to get the saw into the
shoulder. Now that the table and the floor, their clothes and
arms and faces, were bloodied, it was not that bad being
near the skull. The whole of the back of it had
collapsed inward. There was only a little
brain to be seen, pushed up along the line of the
fractures. After red, gray was easy. Maria
held the forearm. He started in the armpit, straight
into the Army jacket and the shirt underneath. It was a good
saw, sharp, not too heavy, just supple enough. Where
the blade met the handle there was an inch or two not
yet obscured by blood. The maker's crest was there,
and the word
Solingen.
He repeated it as he worked. They were not killing
anyone here. Otto was dead. Solingen. They were
dismantling him. Solingen. Nobody was missing.
Solingen, Solingen. Otto is disarmed. Solingen,
Solingen.
  Between the arms he drank the gin. It was easy, it
was sensible. An hour's mess, or five years in
prison. The gin bottle was sticky too. The
blood was everywhere, and he accepted it. This was what
they had to do, this was what they were doing. Solingen. It was
a job. After he had given Maria the left arm,
he did not pause. He got his hands behind Otto's
shirt collar and tugged. The vertebrae at the top
of the spine were designed to hold a saw in place.
He was through the bone in seconds, through the cord,
neatly guiding the flat of the saw against the
base of the skull, snagging only briefly on the
sinews of the neck, the gristle of the windpipe, and through
and through with no need for the linoleum knife. Solingen,
Solingen.
  Otto's banged-up head clunked to the floor and
settled among the crumpled pages of the
Tagesspiegel
and
Der Abend
and offered up his long-nosed profile. He looked
much as he had done in the wardrobe-eyes closed,
skin unhealthily pale. His lower lip, however, was
no longer giving him trouble. What was on the table now
was no one at all. It was the field of operations, it
was a city far below that Leonard had been
2 0 0
  ordered to destroy. Solingen. The gin again, the
sticky Beefeater, then the big one, the thighs, the
big push, and that would be it, home, a hot bath, a
debriefing.
  Maria was sitting on a wooden chair by the open
cases. She took each part of her ex-husband
onto her lap and patiently, with an almost maternal
care, set about folding it away and sealing it and
packing it carefully along with the rest. She
was wrapping the head now. She was a good woman,
resourceful, kind. If they could do this, they could do
anything together. When this job was done, they would start
again. They were engaged, they would resume the
celebrations.
  The saw blade rested snugly along the line of the
crease where the buttocks met the leg. He would not
aim to find the joint this time. Straight through the bone,
a sturdy piece of two-by-two, and a good saw
to cut it with. Trouser, skin, fat, flesh, bone,
flesh, fat, skin, trouser. The last two he
took with the knife. This one was heavy, dripping at
both ends when he took it to her. His carpet
slippers were black and heavy. The gin, and the other
leg. This was the order of things, the order of battle:
everything twice, except the head. The big lump that
remained on the table to be wrapped, the cleaning up,
the washing and scrubbing of skin, their skin, the disposal
of things. They had a system, they could do this again if
they really had to.
  Maria was gluing the cloth around the second thigh.
She said, "Take his jacket off."
  That was easy too, what with no arms to mess with.
It just lifted off. Everything so far was fitting into one
case. The torso would go in the second.
She packed the second thigh and closed the lid.
She had a dressmaker's tape measure. He
took one end and they laid it along the piece on the
table. One hundred and two centimeters from gaping
neck to stumps. She took the measure and knelt
down by the cases.
  "It's too big," she said. "It won't go in.
You'll have to cut it in half."
  Leonard came down, he emerged from a dream.
"That can't be right," he said. "Let's measure it
again."
  It was right. The cases were ninety-seven
centimeters long. He snatched the tape and took
the measurements alone. There was surely some means of
bringing the figures closer.
  "Well squeeze it in. Wrap it up and
we'll squeeze it in."
  "It won't go. It's a shoulder bone here, and the
other end is thick. You have to cut it in half." It
was her husband, and she knew.
  Arms and legs, and even the head, were
extremities that could be lopped off. But cutting
into the rest was not right. He fumbled after a principle,
some general notion of decency to support his
instinctive certainty. He was so tired.
When he closed his eyes he felt himself lifting
away. What was needed here were some guidelines, a
few basic rules. It simply was not possible,
he heard himself telling Glass and a handful of senior
officers, to make abstractions and define general
principles when you were right in the middle of a job.
These things had to be thought through beforehand, leaving the men
free to concentrate on the work itself.
  Maria had sat down again. Her sodden dress
sagged in her lap. "Do it quickly," she said. "Then
we can get cleaned up." She had found the pack with the
three cigarettes inside. She lit one, took a
drag and passed it to him. He did not mind the red
smudges all over the paper, he honestly did not
care. But when he went to pass it back to her, the
cigarette stuck to his fingers.
  "You keep it," she said, "and let's start."
  Soon he had to change his grip to avoid burning
his fingers. The paper came away and the tobacco
spilled out. He let it all fall to the floor and
stamped on it. He took up the saw and untucked
Otto's shirt, exposing the back just above the
waistband of the trousers. Right on the spine was a big
mole. He felt squeamish about cutting through it and
positioned the blade half an inch lower.
His saw cut now was the whole width of the back, and
again the vertebra kept him on track. He was through
the bone easily enough, but an inch or so further in
he began to feel that he was not cutting through things so much
as pushing them to one side. But he kept on. He was
in the cavity that contained all that he did not want
to see. He was keeping
  his head raised so that he did not have to look into the
cut. He looked in Maria's direction. She was
still sitting there, gray and tired and not wanting to watch.
Her eyes were on the open window and the big cumulus
clouds that drifted over the courtyard.
  There was a glutinous sound that brought him the memory
of a jelly dessert eased from its mold. It was
moving about in there; something had collapsed and rolled
onto something else. He was through to the bottom, and now
he faced the old problem. He could not cut through the
belly skin without sawing into the wood. It was a good
table, too, sturdily constructed of elm. And this time
he was not reaching his hand in. Instead he turned the
carcass through ninety degrees and pulled it forward
by the front half, so that the saw cut was in line with the
table's edge. He should have asked for Maria's help.
She should have foreseen the difficulty and come to his
rescue. He was supporting the top half
with both hands. The lower half still rested on the table.
How then was he supposed to use the knife to cut through
the belly skin? He was too tired to stop, even
though he knew he was attempting the impossible.
He brought his left knee up to bear the weight and
stretched forward for the knife, which was on the table. It
might have worked. He could have held the upper body with
his knee and his hand, and with his free hand he could have reached
under and cut through the skin. But he was too tired to be
balancing on one leg. He almost had the knife in
his hand when he felt himself toppling. He had to put
his left foot down. He tried to get the free hand
back in time, but the whole thing fell from his grasp.
The top half swung on its hinge of skin toward the
floor, exposing the vivid mess of Otto's
digestive tract and pulling the bottom half with
it. Both tipped to the floor and disgorged onto the
carpet.
  There was a moment before he left the room when
Leonard suddenly had the measure of the distance they had
traveled, the trajectory that had delivered them from
their successful little engagement party to this, and how all
along the way each successive step had seemed
logical enough, consistent with the
  one before, and how no one was to blame. Before
he made his run for the bathroom he had an
impression of liverish reds, glistening irregular
tubing of a boiled-egg bluish-white, and something
purple and black, all of it shining and livid at the
outrage of violated privacy, of secrets
exposed. Despite the open windows, the room
filled with the close stench of musty air, which itself was a
medium for other smells: of sweet earth,
sulfurous crap, and sauerkraut. The insult
was, Leonard had time to think as he stepped
hurriedly round the upended halves of the torso that were
still joined, that all this stuff was also in himself.
  As if to prove it, he gripped the edges of the
toilet bowl and brought up a mouthful of green
bile. He rinsed his mouth at the basin. The contact
with clean water was a reminder of another life. No
matter that he had not yet finished; he had to be
clean-now. He kicked off his slippers, removed
his shirt and trousers and added them to the pile under the
basin and got into the bath. He crouched down and washed
himself under the running taps. Dried blood was not
easily removed in icy water. The pumice stone
was the most effective, and he scrubbed his skin with no
other thought for a long time-half an hour, perhaps twice
that. By the time he had finished, his hands, arms
and face were rubbed raw and he was shaking from the cold.
  His clean clothes were in the bedroom. He had
forgotten everything, it had left him for the period of his
ablution, and now he would have to walk back through there in
his clean bare feet, past his uncompleted work.
  But when he arrived in the living room with a towel
around his waist, still dripping, Maria was lifting the
largest of the sealed parcels into one of the cases.
  She spoke as though he had been there all the time
and had just asked a question. "It goes like this now. Lower
body, arm, top and bottom leg, and head in this
one. And in this one, upper body, arm and top and
bottom leg."
  By the table was a dustpan and a bucket. The rest was
in there. He helped her close the cases up, and
then, while she sat
  on them, he secured the canvas straps as tight
as they would go. He lugged the cases over to the wall.
Now there was only luggage and a certain degree of
residual mess, which could easily be cleaned up.
He noticed she had a kettle and saucepans
heating on the stove for her wash. He went into the
bedroom, planning to dress and then snatch ten
minutes' sleep while she was in the bathroom. He
wasted time looking for his shoes before he
remembered where they were. He lay down and closed
his eyes.
  Immediately she was there, cleaned up and in her dressing
gown, searching the wardrobe for the right clothes.
  "Don't go to sleep now," she said. "You'll
never wake up in time." She was right, of course.
  He sat up, found his glasses and watched her.
She always turned her back on him while she was
getting dressed, an aspect of her modesty that
usually touched him, excited him even. Now it was
irritating, when he considered what they had been through
together, and how they were engaged. He got off the bed,
edged past without touching her and went into the bathroom.
He picked his shoes up from under the pile of bloody
clothes. It really was not difficult at all to wipe
them clean with a washcloth. He put them on and threw
the cloth down with the rest of the stuff. Then he began
to clean up the living room. Maria had collected
several large paper bags. He was stuffing the
newspaper pages into them when she came in from the
bedroom and joined him. They rolled the carpet up and
put it by the door. It would have to be thrown out later.
To scrub the table and floor they needed the bucket.
Maria emptied it into the largest of her saucepans,
turning her head away as she did so.
  Leonard fetched a scrub brush and was sprinkling
scouring powder on the table when she said, "It's
stupid, both doing this. Why don't you take the
cases now. I'll finish here."
  It was not only that she knew she would make a
better job of the table and the floor than he would. She
wanted him out, she wanted to be alone. And to him the
prospect of leaving this place, setting off by himself,
even with heavy luggage, was
  attractive. It felt like freedom. He
wanted to be away from her just as much as she wanted him
to go. It was as bleak and simple as that. For now they
could not touch each other, they could not even exchange
glances. Even the most conventional gestures-taking
her hand, for example-repelled him. Everything between
them, every detail, every transaction, chafed and
irritated, like grit in the eye. He saw the
tools. The axe was there, unused. He tried
to recall why he had thought he would need it. The
imagination was even more brutal than life.
  He said, "Don't forget to do the knife and the saw
and all the teeth."
  "I won't."
  He put his coat on while she opened the front
door. He stood between the cases, braced
himself, lifted, then made a quick straight run with them
out onto the landing. He put them down and turned.
She stood in the doorway, one hand on the door,
ready to close it. If he had felt the fraction of
an impulse, he would have gone over to her, kissed
her cheek, touched her arm or hand. But what hung in
the air between them was disgust, and it was not possible
to pretend.
  "I'll be back" was all he could manage, and that
seemed an extravagant promise.
  "Yes," she said, and closed the door.
  For two minutes he stood between the cases at the
head of the communal stairs. Once he began on the
next stage, there would be no time for reflection. But
he had few thoughts now. Beyond the spinning tiredness,
he was aware of his pleasure in going. If he was
disposing of Otto, in a sense he was disposing of
Maria too. And she of him. There was bound to be
sorrow in all this, but it could not reach him now. He was
leaving. He picked up his bags and started down.
By bumping the cases on the steps, he was able
to manage both at once. He paused for breath on
each landing. A
  man just in from work nodded as he passed on his way
up. Two boys pushed past him while he
was resting. There was nothing strange about him. Berlin was
full of people with heavy luggage.
  As he descended and the distance from Maria's flat
increased and he was more completely alone, all his
pains returned. The pain in his shoulder was settling
to a deep muscular throb. His ear no longer
required him to touch it for it to hurt. The act of
walking downstairs carrying perhaps more than 150 pounds
was causing further damage in his groin. And now,
Otto's parting blow: an electric pain flashing
outward from the base of his big toe to his ankle.
Down he went, and they all hurt more. At the
bottom he took the cases one at a time through the
door into the courtyard, and then he took a longer
rest. He felt raw, as though he had just been
boiled, or a layer of skin had been peeled from
him. The solidity of things oppressed him. The
rasp of a small stone underfoot made his stomach
swoop. Grime on the wall round the stairwell
light switch, and then the mass of the wall itself, the
pointlessaess of all those bricks, afflicted him,
bore down on him like an illness. Was he hungry?
The thought of taking selected parts of the solid world and
passing them through a hole in his head and squeezing them
through his guts was an abomination. He was pink
and raw and dry. He was leaning against the courtyard
wall, watching kids playing football. Wherever the
ball bounced and wherever shoes skidded in tight
turns was a friction that pained him, rubbed his
unlubricated senses sore. His lids chafed his
eyes when he closed them.
  On level ground, and in the open air, the
courtyard was where he could rehearse the carrying of the
cases. No one ever really had cases as heavy as
these. He picked them up and lurched forward. He
went ten yards before he had to set them down. He could
not afford to stagger. He had to move like any other
traveler. He could not permit himself to wince or
examine his hands too frequently. He had to go
further than ten yards. He set himself a minimum
of twenty-five steps.
  He was across the courtyard in three stages, and now
he was
on the pavement. There were only a few passersby.
If anyone offered help he would have to refuse, he
would have to be prepared to be rude. He would have to look
as though he did
Inot need help, then no one would offer it. He
started on his
twenty-five paces. Counting was a way of
coping with the agony of the weight. It was an effort not
to count out loud. He
andbrvbarbbset the cases down and made a show of
looking at his watch. A quarter to six. There was no
rush-hour traffic on Adalbertstrasse. He had
to make it to the next corner. He waited long enough for
there to have been a complete change of people
Iaround him, then he took the weight and rushed
forward. He
had made it to twenty-five on all the previous
occasions, but
Ithis time he was not going to reach twenty. His steps
were
shorter and quicker. There was a softening in his wrists. His
fingers straightened helplessly, and the cases dropped
to the
andbrvbarbbpavement. One fell on its side.
He was righting it, blocking the way, when a lady with
her dog stepped around him and made a disapproving
clucking noise. Perhaps she was speaking for the whole
street. The dog, a game-looking mongrel, was
interested in the case that Leonard had pulled upright.
It sniffed along the length of the case, wagging its
tail, and then came round the other side, avid all
of Ia sudden and muzzling hard against the
fabric. It was on a
andbrvbarbbIleash, but the woman was one of those owners
who do not like
jj*ffcross their pets. She stood patiently,
with the leash slack in
R
her hand, waiting for the animal to lose interest. She
was less
Pthan two feet away, but she did not look at
Leonard. She spoke
"only to the dog, whose sniffing was now frenetic. It
knew.
"Komm schon, mein kleiner Liebling. 1st doch
nur ein Koffer."
It's only a suitcase.
Leonard also indulged the dog. He needed an
excuse not to pick up the cases. But now it was
growling and whining by
1turns. It was attempting to close its jaws
round a corner of the
case.
"Gnadige Frau,"
Leonard said, "please control your dog." But rather
than pull on the leash, the woman merely increased
the torrent of endearments. "Little silly
one, who do
  you think you are? This luggage belongs to the
gentleman, not to you. Come on now, little sausage .
. ."
  A becalmed and abstracted version of himself was
speculating that if one had something to dispose of, one
could do worse than consider a hungry dog. One
would need a pack. The dog had found a purchase.
It had its teeth into the corner of the case. It was
biting, growling and wagging its tail.
  At last the woman spoke to Leonard. "You must
have food in there. Wurst, perhaps!" There was a touch of
accusation in this. She thought he was a smuggler bringing
cheap food over from the East.
  "It's an expensive case," he said. "If
your dog damages it, you,
gnadige Frau,
will be responsible." He looked around, as if
to summon a policeman.
  The woman was affronted. She gave the leash a
savage jerk and moved on. Her dog yelped and
came to heel, and then seemed to regret its
compliance. As its owner walked away, the dog was
straining to get back. Through the fogs of species
memory it recognized a chance of a
lifetime, to devour a human with impunity and avenge
the wolf ancestors for ten thousand years of
subjugation. A minute later it was still looking back
and giving token tugs on its leash. The woman
sailed on, refusing any compromise.
  There were teethmarks and saliva on the case, but the
fabric was not torn. Leonard positioned himself between
his burdens and lifted. He walked fifteen steps
and had to stop. The woman's disapproval lingered, it
was infecting the glances of other passersby. What could
he possibly have in those cases that could be so heavy?
Why didn't he have a friend to help him? It must be
illegal, it could only be contraband. Why did he
look so haggard, that man with the heavy cases? Why
hadn't he shaved? It was only a matter of time now
before a green
Polizist
caught sight of him. They were always on the lookout for
trouble. That was the kind of city it was. They had
limitless powers, these German police. He would not
be able to refuse them if they wanted him to open up his
luggage. He could not afford to be seen standing around.
He settled for frantic effort,
  for little dashes of ten or twelve steps. He
attempted to transform the trembling
rictus of effort into the smile of a respectable
traveler fresh from the railway station, who needed
neither surveillance nor help. In between, he took
the briefest possible rests. Whenever he stopped he
glanced around him, for the benefit of the passing traffic,
as if lost, or looking for the right house.
  By the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn he set the
cases down on the curb and sat on them. He
wanted to give attention to the pain in his foot. He
needed to get his shoe off. But the cases sagged
unpleasantly under his weight, and he stood up
immediately. If he could get ten, even five
minutes' sleep, he thought, he could manage the
luggage with less fuss.
  He was close to the
Eckladen
where they sometimes shopped for their daily needs. The
owner, who was bringing in his vegetable and fruit
racks, saw Leonard and waved.
  "Holidays?"
  Leonard nodded and at the same time said, "No,
no, not yet," and then in his confusion added in English.
"It's business, really," a statement he instantly
wished to retract. How would he be, answering
routine questions from a curious
Polizist?
  He stood by his cases watching the traffic.
He was seeing objects drifting on the periphery of
vision: an English letter box, a stag with high
antlers, a table lamp. When he turned to them, they
dissolved. His dreams were starting without him. He had
to turn his head to dispel each phantom. There was
nothing sinister. Bananas rotated end over end; a
tin of biscuits with a thatched cottage on the lid
opened by itself. How was he to concentrate when he had
to keep turning aside to keep these things at bay?
Did he dare leave them where they were?
  There was a plan formulated, so long ago that he
doubted whether it could still be valid. But there was no
other; he had to stay with this one. And yet a kind soft
thought was pulling at him. It was getting dark, the cars
already had their headlights on, the shops were closing
up, people were heading home. Above him a streetlight,
screwed wonkily to a crumbling wall, came on
with a crackle. Some kids went by, pushing a
pram.
  The taxi he had been looking for was pulling up
by the curb. He had not even hailed it. The driver
had seen his cases. Even in the dusk he had
guessed at their improbable weight. He
got out and opened the trunk.
  It was an old diesel Mercedes. Leonard
thought he would be able to swing one of the cases in before the
driver touched it. But it turned out that they heaved it in
together.
  "Books," Leonard explained. The driver
shrugged. It was not his business. They shoved the other
case onto the backseat. Leonard got into the
front and asked for the Zoo station. The heater was on;
the seat was huge and shiny. The soft thought was tugging
again. He only had to speak the words and he would be
there.
  But he did not even remember the taxi pulling
away. When he woke, it had stopped and the cases were
already on the sidewalk, side by side, and his own
door was open. The driver must have shaken him. In his
confusion, Leonard overtipped. The man touched the
peak of his cap and strolled over to stand with the other
drivers who collected by the station rank. Leonard
had his back to them and knew they were watching him. It was
for their benefit that he made the effort to carry the
cases smoothly across the ten yards of pavement to the
high double doors that opened onto the station concourse.
  As soon as he was inside he set them down.
He felt safer. Only a few feet
away a dozen British soldiers were lining up with
their own regulation suitcases. All the shops and
restaurants were open, and there was residual
rush-hour bustle for the Stadtbahn trains
upstairs. Beyond a lingerie shop and a bookstall was
a sign pointing the way to the luggage lockers.
Everywhere was the cigar-and-strong-coffee smell of
German well-being. The floor was smooth and he could
drag the cases across it. He passed fruit
stalls, a restaurant, a souvenir shop. It was
all so cheerful, it was all such a success! He was
a legitimate traveler at last, utterly
inconspicuous, a traveler moreover who would not have
to drag his luggage upstairs to the trains.
  The place to check luggage was a little way down
one of the tunnels that led off the main concourse. There
was a circular
  area with newly installed lockers set around the
walls facing a counter where two men in uniform stood
ready to receive bags and stow them on the racks behind them.
Two or three people were waiting to collect or
deposit luggage when Leonard arrived. He
dragged his cases as far as possible from the counter and
found two vacant lockers at floor level.
He moved deliberately, lining up the
cases, straightening to search his pockets for the change
he had brought with him. There was no hurry. He had
a fistful of ten pfennig coins. He opened a
locker and pushed a case with his knee. Nothing
happened. He pocketed the change and pushed harder.
He glanced over his shoulder. There was no one at the
counter now. The two men there were talking and looking in
his direction. He bent down to find the obstruction.
The space was an inch or so too narrow. He made
a halfhearted attempt to squeeze the case, and
then he gave up. If he had not been so tired,
he might now have done the right thing. As he stood up
he saw that one of the luggage officials, a man with a
graying beard, was waving him over. It was logical:
if your luggage did not fit in the lockers, you
took it to the counter. But he had not prepared for this, it
was not in the plan. Was it the right thing? Would they want
to know why his cases were so heavy? What powers did
their uniforms grant them? Would they remember his
face?
  The bearded man was resting his knuckles on the
tinplate counter, waiting for Leonard. It was not right
that an employee who was really no more than a porter
should be dressed like an admiral. It was important
not to be intimidated. Leonard made a
show of looking at his watch and picked up his cases.
He tried to walk away briskly. He took the
only route that would not take him closer to the counter.
He was waiting for a shout, for the sound of running. He
was in a narrowing corridor at the end of which was a set
of double doors. He made it all the way without
stopping. He went through the doors backward and found
himself in a quiet side street. He put the
cases against a wall and sat down on the pavement.
  He had no clear intentions. He needed to rest his
sore foot. If the admiral had come after him, he
would gladly have given
  himself up. What was clear, now that he was sitting
down, was that he ought to be making a plan. His thoughts
were oozing thickly. They were the secretion of an
organ that was not under his control. He could judge the
product, but he could not initiate it. He could
make another attempt to squeeze the cases into the
luggage lockers. He could surrender them to the
admiral. He could leave them here, on the street.
Just walk away from them. Did they really need the
whole week's grace that the luggage lockers
allowed? It was now that the pleasant soft thought
returned. He could go home. He could lock the
door, take a bath, be safe among his
own things, sleep for hours in his own bed, and then,
once refreshed, make a new plan and implement
it-shaved, invigorated, with a clean set of clothes,
beyond suspicion.
  He thought about home. The rooms as big as
meadows, the excellent plumbing, the solitude.
He fantasized and dozed, and at last stood up.
The quickest way to a taxi was back through the station, past
the admiral. But he set off to walk around the
outside. His groin was hurting more than his foot. A
layer of skin was coming off his hands. It took twenty
minutes to get around. He took long pauses,
unwatched. He found his taxi in the rank, another
big old Mercedes, and this time made no attempt
to help lift the cases in, nor did he offer
any explanations. It was surely a sign of
guilt to be apologizing for their weight.
  He left one case on the pavement outside
No. 26, and carried the other with both hands all the
way to the lift shaft. When he went back
outside, the case was still there, which surprised him no
less than if it had gone. How was he to know any
longer what constituted a surprise? The lift
bore the weight easily. He opened his front
door and set the cases down just inside the
hallway. From where he stood he could see that the
lights were on in the living room, and there was music
playing. He went toward it. He pushed the living
room door open and walked into a party. There were
drinks, peanuts in bowls, full ashtrays,
crumpled cushions and the AFN on the wireless.
All the guests had gone. He turned the wireless
off, and the silence was
  abrupt. He sat in the nearest chair. He had
been left behind. The friends, the old Leonard and his
fiancee in her rustling white skirt, they had all
gone, and the cases were too heavy, the lockers too
small, the admiral hostile, and his hands, ear,
shoulder, testicles and foot throbbed in unison.
  He went to the bathroom and drank from the tap for a
long time. Then he was in the bedroom, lying on his
back under the covers, staring at the ceiling. With the
hall light on and the bedroom door half open, it
was as dark as he wanted it. When he closed his
eyes a sickening fatigue smothered him. He had
to save himself as though from drowning by struggling to see the
ceiling again. His eyes were not heavy. As long as they
were open he could stay awake. He was trying not
to think. He was hurting everywhere. There was no one
to look after him. He kept his thoughts
empty by concentrating on his breathing. Perhaps an hour
passed this way, in a light trance, almost a doze.
  Then the phone rang and he was on his way to it before
he had come to fully. He crossed the hallway,
glancing to his left to see the cases there by the
door, and entered the living room without turning on the
light. The phone was on the window ledge. He
snatched it up, expecting Maria, or possibly
Glass. It was a man whose soft-spoken
introductory phrase eluded him. Something about a
paper pay packet. Then the voice said, "I'm
phoning about the arrangements for May the tenth, sir."
  It was a wrong number, but Leonard did not
want to send the voice away. It was pleasantly
accented, and sounded competent and gentle. He said,
"Ah yes."
  "I've been told to phone and see what it was you
wanted, sir."
  It was the sir, the unforced, manly respect, that
Leonard warmed to. Whoever this man was, he
might be able to help. He sounded the sort who might
carry the cases and not ask questions. It was important
to keep him talking. Leonard said, "Er, what do you
suggest?"
  The voice said, "Well, sir, I could
start from some way off, right out of the building, when
everyone is sitting down, and
  approach slowly. You get the picture, sir.
They're all talking and drinking, and then one or two
with good ears hear me faintly, and then they all hear
me, coming closer all the time. Then I come right into the
room."
  "I see," Leonard said. He thought he might
take this man into his confidence. It was a matter of
waiting for an opening.
  "And if you're happy to leave the tunes tome,
sir. . . .some reels, some laments. When they've
had a few drinks-if you'll excuse me,
sir-there's nothing quite like a lament."
  "That's true," Leonard said, seeing his chance.
"I sometimes get very sad."
  "I beg your pardon, sir?"
  If the kind voice would only ask why.
Leonard said, "Things get on top of me
sometimes."
  The voice hesitated, and then it said, "Berlin's
a long way from home, sir, for us all." There was
another pause, and then, "CSM Steele said you'd
need me for an hour, sir. Is that correct?"
  It was in this way that the Scots Greys
piper, Piper McTaggart, was identified.
Leonard concluded the business as rapidly as
possible. He left the phone off the hook and
returned to bed. He turned the hall light out on
the way. The conversation had revived him. The edge of
his tiredness was dulled, and it was easier to sleep.
  He woke some hours later, completely
refreshed. From the silence he guessed it to be between
two and three o'clock. He sat up. He felt
better, he realized, because he had woken with a
simple solution. He had let the matter
overwhelm him when in fact all that was required was
clear thinking and purposeful action. He could get
to work while it was all fresh in his mind. Then he could
sleep again and wake to a resolved situation.
  He stepped out of the bedroom into the hall. He had
never known it so quiet. He did not bother with the
light. There was just enough of a moon to give a colorless
light, although he was not sure quite how moonlight was
penetrating here. He went to the kitchen and found a
sharp knife. He went back in the hall and knelt
by the cases and unfastened the straps on both.
  Then he opened one of them. The parts were neatly in
place, just as Maria had packed them. He lifted
out a piece and cut away the waterproof
material and laid an arm gently down on the
carpet. There was no unpleasant smell; he was not
too late. He pushed the wrapping well away
to one side, and then he set about freeing a leg, a
thigh, and the chest. There was surprisingly little blood,
and besides, the carpet was red. He set the pieces
down on the hall carpet in their correct
positions. The human shape was resuming. He
opened the second case and unwrapped the lower body
and the limbs. It was there before him, a headless body
lying on its back. He had the head in his hands now.
He turned it and saw through the material the outline
of the nose and the imprecise features of a face.
  It was while he was using the point of the knife
to prize away the glued seam that he saw something that
caught his attention. He was holding the heavy head
down on the floor, but he could no longer move the
knife. It was not the prospect of seeing Otto's
face. Nor was it the completed figure lying on the
carpet next to him. What he had seen was the
bedroom wall and his bed. He had forced his eyes
open a fraction and seen the shape of his own body under
the blankets. For two seconds he had heard the
traffic in the street outside, still late-night
traffic, and he had seen his own immovable
body. Then his eyes shut and he was back here, with the
knife in his hand, picking away again at the fabric.
  It worried him to know that what seemed so real was a
dream. It meant that anything could happen. There were no
rules. He was putting Otto back together, undoing
the day's work. He was peeling away a layer of
rubberized cloth, and here was the side of the head, with the
top of an ear visible. He ought to stop himself, he
thought, he ought to wake before Otto came to life. With
an effort he opened his eyes again. He saw a part
of his hand and the impression of his feet under the
blanket. If he could move just one part of himself,
or make a sound, the tiniest of sounds, he could bring
himself back. But the body he occupied was inert. He
was trying to move his toe. He could hear a
motorbike in the street outside. If someone
  would come into the room and touch him. He was trying
to shout. He could not part his lips or fill his
lungs. His eyes were weighing down, and he was in the
hall once more.
  Why was the material sticking to the side of
Otto's face? It was the bite, of course; the
blood from Otto's cheek had congealed on the cloth.
That was only one reason why Otto was going to punish
him. He pulled the cloth and it came
away with a rasping sound. The rest was easy. It
fell away and the bare head was in his hands. The eyes
with the drunk's red rims were watching him, waiting. It
was simply a matter of lifting the head onto the
torn neck; then it could begin again. He should have been
kept divided up, but now it was too late. Even
before the head was properly in place, the hands were reaching
for the knife. Otto was sitting up. He could see the
empty cases, and the knife was in his hand. Leonard
knelt in front of him and tipped back his head
to offer up his throat. Otto would do the job
swiftly. He would have to pack the cases himself. He
would carry Leonard to the Zoo station. Otto was a
Berliner, he was an old drinking friend of the admiral.
Here was the bedroom wall again, the blanket, the edge
of the sheet, the pillow. His body was lead. Otto
would never carry him alone. Piper McTaggart would
help. Leonard tried halfheartedly for a scream.
It was better that it should happen. He heard the air
pass between his teeth. He tried to bend his leg. His
eyes were closing again and he was going to die. His head
moved, it turned an inch or so to one side. His
cheek touched the pillow, and the touch unlocked all
touch and he felt the weight of the blanket on his
foot. His eyes were open and he could move
his hand. He could shout. He was sitting up and reaching
for the light switch.
  Even with the light on, the dream was still there, waiting
for him to return. He slapped his face and stood.
His legs were weak; his eyes still wanted to close.
He went into the bathroom and splashed water over his
face. When he came out he turned on the hall
light. The unopened cases were by the door.
  He could not trust himself to sleep. For the rest of the
night he sat in bed with his knees drawn up and the
overhead light
  on and smoked a pack of cigarettes. At
three-thirty he went to the kitchen and made a pot
of coffee. Toward five o'clock he shaved. The water
stung the broken skin on his hands. He dressed and
went back to the kitchen to drink more coffee. His plan
was simple and good. He would lug the cases to the
U-Bahn and ride out to the end of the line. He would
find a lonely spot, put the cases down and walk
away.
  He had gone through his tiredness to a new clarity.
He drank his coffee and smoked and passed the time
polishing his shoes and putting adhesive strips on
his hands. He whistled and hummed "Heartbreak
Hotel." For the moment it was enough to be free
of his dream. At seven o'clock he straightened his
tie, brushed his hair again and put on his jacket.
Before opening the front door he lifted the cases
experimentally. It was more than weight. There was a
pull, an elemental, purposeful earthward pull.
Otto wanted to be buried, he thought. But not yet.
  He carried the cases one at a time to the lift
shaft. When the lift came, he blocked the door
with one case while he shoved the other in with his knee.
He pressed E for
Etage
but he traveled only one floor down before coming to a
halt. The door slid open to admit Blake.
He was wearing a blue blazer with silver buttons
and he carried an attache case. The lift compartment
filled with the scent of his cologne. The descent
continued.
  Blake nodded coolly. "Pleasant party.
Thank you."
  "We were glad you could come," Leonard said.
  The lift stopped and the doors opened. Blake was
looking at the cases. "Aren't they Ministry of
Defense bags?" Leonard picked one up, but
Blake beat him to the other and lifted it out into the
lobby. "Good Lord. What have you got in
here? It's certainly not a tape recorder."
  The question was not rhetorical. They were standing by the open
lift and Blake seemed to think he was owed an
answer. Leonard fumbled. He had been going
to say they were tape recorders.
  Blake said, "You're taking them out
to Altglienicke. It's all
  right, you can talk to me. I know Bill Harvey.
I'm cleared for Gold."
  "It's decoding equipment," Leonard said. And
then, because he had an image of Blake coming out to the
warehouse to look at it, he added, "It's on
loan from Washington. We're using it in the
tunnel, then it goes back tomorrow."
  Blake was looking at his watch. "Well, I
hope you've got secure transport laid on.
I've got to dash." And he was off across the lobby
without another word, and out to where his car was parked in the
street.
  Leonard waited for him to drive away before he
set about dragging the cases outside. The hardest part
of his day, the journey to the Neu-Westend
U-Bahn station at the far end of the street, was about
to begin, and the encounter with Blake had used up his
reserves. He had the cases out on the
pavement now. His eyes were stinging in the daylight, and the
old pains were starting up. There was a commotion across the
road, which he thought it better to ignore. It was a
car with a particularly noisy engine, and there was a
voice. Then the car engine was cut and he heard the
voice alone.
  "Hey! Leonard. Godammit, Leonard!"
  Glass was climbing out of his Beetle and was
striding across Platanenallee toward him. His beard
shone glossy black with early morning energy.
  "Where the hell have you been? I was trying to reach you
all day yesterday. I need to talk about-was Then he
saw the cases. "Wait a minute. Those are ours.
Leonard, what in God's name have you got in there?"
  "Equipment," Leonard said.
  Glass already had his hand around one of the straps.
"What the hell are you doing with it here?"
  "I've been working on it. All night, in
fact."
  Glass grappled the case to his chest. He was
preparing to cross the road with it. A car was coming and
he had to wait. He shouted over his shoulder,
"We've been through all this, Marnham. You know the
rules. This is madness. What do you think you're
doing?"
  He did not wait for an answer. He bounded
across the road, put the case down and opened the
Beetle's hood. There was just room inside.
Leonard had no choice but to follow with the other
case. Glass helped him heave it into the back.
They climbed into their seats, and Glass slammed his
door hard. The unsilenced engine started with a roar.
  As they juddered forward Glass shouted again,
"Godammit, Leonard! How can you do this to me? I
won't feel safe until this stuff is back where
it belongs!"
This page is blank.

Twenty
  On the way to the warehouse Leonard wanted
to think about the sentries, who would be obliged to search
the cases, while Glass, having exhausted his
indignation, wanted to talk about the anniversary
celebration. There was very little time. Glass had found a
clever route, and they were through Schoneberg within ten
minutes and round the edge of the Tempelhof
airfield.
  "I left a note on your door yesterday,"
Glass said. "You weren't answering your phone, and
then it was busy all night."
  Leonard was staring into the hole in the floor at his
feet. The
  asphalt blur was mesmeric. His cases were about
to be opened. He was so tired he could welcome that.
A process would begin comarrest, interviews and the
rest-and he would abandon himself to it. He would offer no
explanations until he had had a decent sleep.
That would be his one condition.
  He said, "I took it off the hook. I was
working."
  They were in fourth gear and traveling well under
twenty miles an hour. The speedometer needle was
shaking.
  Glass said, "I need to speak to you. I'll be
straight with you, Leonard. I'm not happy."
  Leonard saw a clean white cell, a single
bed with cotton sheets, and silence, and a man
outside the door to guard him.
  He said, "Oh?"
  "On several counts," Glass said. "One, you
had more than a hundred and twenty dollars to spend
on entertainment for our evening. I gather you've blown
it all on one act. One hour."
  Perhaps it would be one of the friendly ones on the gate,
Jake, or Lee or Howie. They would
lift one of the pieces out.
Sir, this isn't electronic equipment, this is a
human arm.
Someone might be sick. Glass, perhaps, who was
moving to his second point.
  "Two. This one-hundred-and-twenty-dollar hour
is going to be one lonely dude playing the
bagpipes. Leonard, bagpipes is not everyone's
idea of a good time. It's not
anyone's,
for Chris- sakes. Do you mean we're going to have
to sit there for one hour and listen to this howling shit?"
  Sometimes a white line flashed across the hole.
Leonard mumbled into it, "We could dance."
  In a theatrical gesture, Glass clamped his
hand over his eyes. Leonard did not look up from his
hole. The Beetle held its course.
  "Third. There are going to be some intelligence
brass there, Leonard, including some of your own
guys. D'you know what they're going to say?"
  "When everyone's had a few drinks," Leonard
said, "there's nothing quite like a lament."
  "Lament is right. They're gonna say, Hmm,
American food,
German wines and
Scottish
entertainment. Is it Scotland in Gold? Do we have
a special relationship with Scotland? Did
Scotland join NATO?"
  "There was a singing dog," Leonard muttered without
lifting his head. "But there again, it was English."
  Glass had not heard. "Leonard, you've
screwed up, and I want you to fix it this morning,
while there's still time. We'll drop this equipment
off, then I'm going to drive you up to the Scots
Greys barracks in Spandau. You're going to talk
to the sergeant, cancel the piper and get our money
back. Okay?"
  They were being overtaken by a convoy of trucks, so
Glass did not notice that his passenger was giggling.
  The antenna cluster on the warehouse roof was
visible. Glass was slowing down further. "These
guys are going to need to see what we've got here.
They can look, but they don't need to know what it is,
okay?"
  The giggling fit had passed. "Oh God,"
Leonard said.
  They stopped. Glass was winding down his window as
the sentry came toward them. It was not a face they
recognized. "This one's new," Glass
said. "And his friend. That means it's
  going to take longer."
  The face that filled the window was pink and large; the
eyes were eager. "Good morning, sir."
  caret "Morning, soldier." Glass handed both
passes to him.
  j caret The sentry straightened and spent a
minute examining
  them. Glass said without lowering his voice, "These
guys are trained to be keen. They have to do six
months' duty before they ease off some."
  It was true. Howie might have recognized them and
waved them through.
  The eighteen-year-old face was in the window again.
The passes were handed back. "Sir, I need
to look in the trunk, and MI have to see inside that
bag."
  Glass got out of the car and opened the front. He
heaved the case onto the road and knelt by it. From
where he sat, Leonard watched Glass unbuckling
the straps. He had ten seconds or so left.
He could, after all, just run off down the road. It
could
  hardly make matters worse. He got out of the
car. The second sentry, who looked even
younger than the first, had come up behind Glass and was
touching him on the shoulder.
  "Sir, we'd like to see it in the guard room."
  Glass was making a great show of arguing with no one.
In security matters, his enthusiastic compliance was
intended to set an example. One of the straps was
already undone. Ignoring it, he hugged the whole
case to his chest and staggered with it to the hut by the side
of the road. The first soldier had opened Glass's
door, and now he stood back politely to allow
Leonard to drag the other case out. The two
sentries followed him as he carried the case with
two hands to the hut.
  There was a small wooden table with a telephone on
it. Glass put the telephone on the floor andwitha
squeezed-out grunt lifted his case onto the table.
There was barely room for four of them in the hut.
Leonard knew Glass well enough to recognize that
all the straining and heaving had made him
bad-tempered. He stood back, breathing noisily
through his nose and stroking his beard. He had carried the
case over; now it was up to the sentries to open it.
And if they failed in their procedures, they could be
sure of being reported.
  Leonard set his case by the table. He
had it in mind to wait outside while the examination
took place. After his dream, he did not want
to see any more, and there was a good chance one of the young
sentries was going to throw up in the confined space.
Perhaps all three of them would. He stood in the
doorway, however. It was hard not to watch. His life
was about to change, and he felt no particular emotion.
He had done his best, and he knew he was not an
especially bad person. The first soldier had set
his rifle down and was unbuckling the other strap.
Leonard watched on, as though from a great distance. The
world that had never much cared for Otto Eckdorf was about
to explode with concern at his death. The soldier
raised the lid and they all looked in at the covered
pieces. Everything was packed in tight, but it did not
much look like electronics. Even Glass could not
conceal his curiosity. The smell of glue and rubber
was rich, like pipe smoke. From nowhere, Leonard
  had an idea, and he acted without premeditation.
He pushed his way to the table just as the sentry was reaching
out to take hold of one of the pieces.
  Leonard held the young man's wrist while he
spoke. "If this search is going to proceed, then
there's something I have to say to Mr. Glass in
private. There are serious security
implications, and I won't need more than a
minute."
  The soldier withdrew his hand and turned to Glass.
Leonard closed the case.
  Glass said, "Is that okay, boys? One
minute?"
  "That's fine," one of them said.
  Glass followed Leonard out of the hut. They
stood by the red-and-white-striped barrier.
  "I'm sorry, Bob," Leonard said. "I
didn't know they were going to go right into the packing."
  "They're new, that's all. And you shouldn't have
taken the stuff out of here."
  Leonard relaxed against the barrier. He had
nothing to lose. "There were reasons for that. But listen.
I'm going to have to break with procedure to protect a
more important matter. I have to tell you now that I
have level four clearance here."
  Glass seemed to come to attention. "Level
four?"
  "It's largely technical," Leonard said, and
reached for his wallet. "I'm level four, and those
chaps are messing about with highly sensitive
material. I want you to phone Macationamee at the
Olympic Stadium. This is his card.
Get him to call the duty officer here. I want this
search called off. What's in those cases is beyond
classification. Tell Macationamee that-he'll know
what I'm talking about."
  Glass asked no questions. He turned and walked
quickly back to the hut. Leonard heard him tell the
sentries to close and secure the case. One of them
must have queried the order, for Glass shouted, "Jump
to it, soldier! This is a lot bigger than you!"
  While Glass was on the phone, Leonard wandered
off along the roadside. It was turning into a fine
spring morning. There were yellow and white flowers
growing in the ditch. There
  were no plants he could identify. Five
minutes later Glass came out of the hut, followed
by the soldiers carrying the cases. Leonard and
Glass stood back while the soldiers loaded the
luggage into the car. Then they raised the barrier and
stood at attention as the car went through.
  Glass said, "The duty officer gave those poor
guys hell. And Macationamee gave the duty
officer hell. That's quite a secret you're carrying
around."
  "It really is," Leonard said.
  Glass parked the car and switched the
engine off. The duty officer and two soldiers were
waiting for them by the double doors. Before they got out
Glass put his hand on Leonard's shoulder and said,
"You've come quite a way since your cardboard-burning
days."
  They got out. Leonard said over the Beetle's
roof, "It's an honor to be involved."
  The soldiers took the cases. The duty officer
wanted to know where they were to be taken, and Leonard
suggested the tunnel. He wanted to go down there and be
soothed. But it was not quite the same, making the descent
with Glass and the duty officer at his side, and the two
soldiers coming up behind. Once they were down the main
shaft, the bags were loaded onto a little wooden
truck, which the soldiers pushed. They passed the
barbed-wire coils that marked the beginning of the
Russian sector. A few minutes later they
all squeezed past the amplifiers, and Leonard
showed the place under the desk where the cases were to be
stowed.
  Glass said, "I'll be damned. I've passed
those bags a hundred times and never thought of looking
inside."
  "Don't start now," Leonard said.
  The duty officer put a wire seal on
both cases. "To be opened," he said, "on your
authority alone."
  They went up to the canteen for coffee.
Leonard's level four revelation had conferred a
kind of promotion. When Glass mentioned going out
to Spandau to find the Scots Greys sergeant, it was
the easiest thing in the world for Leonard to put his hand
to his forehead.
  "I can't face it. I've been up two nights
in a row. Tomorrow, perhaps."
  And Glass said, "Don't worry. I'll do it
myself."
  He offered Leonard a ride home. But
Leonard was not certain where he wanted to be. He
had new problems now. He wanted to be where he could
think about them. So Glass dropped him off on the
way into town, at the Grenzallee station at the end
of the U-Bahn line.
  For several minutes after Glass had left,
Leonard strolled around the ticket hall, exulting
in his freedom. He had been carrying those cases for
months, for years. He sat down on a bench. They
weren't here now, but he had not disposed of them yet.
He sat and stared at the welts on his hands. The
temperature in the tunnel was eighty
degrees, perhaps more under the desk by the amplifiers.
In two days or less the cases would be stinking. It
might be possible to get them out with some kind of
elaborate level four story, but even now
Macationamee would be on his way to the warehouse from the
stadium, bursting to know just what equipment Leonard
had managed to get his hands on. It was a mess.
He had set out to leave the cases in the public
anonymity of a railway station with international
connections, and he had ended up leaving them in a confined
and private space where they were entirely identified
with him. It was a terrible mess. He sat trying
to think his way through the problem, but all that came was
what a mess it was.
  The bench he was on faced the ticket office.
He let his head drop. He was wearing a good suit
and a tie and his shoes were shiny. No one could take him
for a tramp. He drew his feet up and slept for
two hours. Though his sleep was deep, he was aware
of the footsteps of passengers echoing in the hall, and
it was comforting somehow to be safely asleep among these
strangers.
  He woke in a panic. It was ten past noon.
Macationamee would be at the warehouse looking for him.
If the government scientist was impatient
or careless, he might even try to use his authority
to have the seals broken on the cases. Leonard stood
  up. He had only an hour or two in which
to act. He needed to talk to someone. It pained him
to think of Maria. He could not bear to go near her
flat. The bench slats had cut into his
buttocks, and his suit was creased. He wandered
toward the ticket office. It was a characteristic of his
tiredness that he did not make plans. Instead he
found himself beginning to follow them through, as though under
orders. He bought a ticket to Alexanderplatz, in
the Russian sector. There was a train waiting
to leave, and one came in immediately at
Hermannplatz, where he had to change. This ease
confirmed him in his intention. He was being drawn
to it-to a huge, an appalling solution. He had
a ten-minute walk from Alexanderplatz along
Konigstrasse. At one point he had to stop and
ask the way.
  The place was larger than he had imagined it.
He had been expecting something narrow and intimate,
with high-backed booths for whispering in. But the
Cafe Prag was vast, with a remote and grubby
ceiling and scores of small round tables. He
chose a conspicuous place and ordered a
coffee. Glass had once told him that you only
had to wait until one of the
Hundert Mark Jungen
came across. The place was filling up for lunch.
There were plenty of serious-looking types at the
tables. They could just as easily have been local
office workers as spies from half-a-dozen nations.
  He passed the time drawing a map in pencil on
a paper napkin. Fifteen minutes went by, and
nothing happened. It was, Leonard decided, one
of those Berlin stories. The Cafe Prag was said
to be a stock exchange of unofficial information. In
fact it was a large, dull East Berlin cafe where
the coffee was weak and lukewarm. He was on his third
cup and feeling sick. He had not eaten in two
days. He was searching his pockets for East marks
when a young man, face ablaze with freckles, sat
down opposite him.
"Vous etes franqais."
It was a statement of fact.
  "No," Leonard said, "English."
  The man was about Leonard's age. He had his hand
up for a waiter. He seemed to feel no need
to explain or apologize for
  his error. It was simply an opening
line. He ordered two coffees and extended a
speckled hand across the table. "Hans."
  Leonard shook it and said, "Henry." It was his
father's name and felt less like a lie.
  Hans took out a pack of Camels, offered one
and was rather self-conscious, Leonard thought, with his
Zippo. Hans's English was faultless. "I
haven't seen you here before."
  "I haven't been here before."
  The coffee that did not quite taste of coffee arrived,
and when the waiter had left them Hans said, "So, you
like it here in Berlin?"
  "Yes, I do," Leonard said. He had not
imagined there would have to be small talk, but it was
probably the custom. He wanted to get things right,
so he asked politely, "Did you grow up here?"
  Hans replied with an account of a childhood in
Kassel. When he was fifteen his mother had married a
Berliner. It was hard to concentrate on the story. The
pointless details made him feel hot, and now
Hans was asking him about his life in London. After
Leonard had given a brief sketch of his
childhood there, he concluded by saying that he found
Berlin far more interesting. Immediately he regretted his
words.
  Hans said, "But surely this can't be so.
London is a world capital. Berlin is finished.
Its greatness is all in the past."
  "Perhaps you're right," Leonard said. "Perhaps I just
like to be abroad." That too was a mistake, for now
they were talking about the pleasures of foreign travel.
Hans asked Leonard which other countries he had
been in, and Leonard was too tired to offer less
than the truth. He had been to Wales and West
Berlin.
  Hans was exhorting him to be more adventurous.
"You are English, you have the opportunities." Then
there followed a list of places, headed by the United
States, that Hans intended to visit. Leonard
looked at his watch. It was ten past one. He was not
certain what that meant. People would be looking for him.
He was not certain what it was he was going to tell them.
  As soon as Leonard looked at his watch,
Hans brought his list
  to a close and glanced around the room. Then he
said, "Henry, I think you came looking for something.
You wanted to buy something, is that right?"
  "No," Leonard said. "I want to give something
to the right person."
  "You have something to sell?"
  "It doesn't matter. I'm happy to give it
away."
  Hans offered Leonard another cigarette.
"Listen, my friend. I'll give you some advice.
If what you have is free, people will think it's worthless.
If it's good, then you must make people pay."
  "Fine," Leonard said. "If someone wants
to give me money, that's fine."
  "I could take what you have and sell it myself,"
Hans said. "All the profit would be mine. But I
like you. Perhaps I'll visit you in London one day,
if you give me your address. So I'll take a
commission. Fifty percent."
  "Anything," Leonard said.
  "So then. What is it you have?"
  Leonard lowered his voice. "What I have is of
interest to the Soviet military."
  "That's good, Henry," Hans said at normal
volume. "I have a friend here today who knows someone in the
High Command."
  Leonard produced his map. "On the east side
of the Schonefelder Chaussee, just north of this
cemetery here in Altglienicke, their telephone
lines are being tapped. They run along a ditch
here. I've marked the spot where they should
look."
  Hans took the map. "How can they tap these
lines? It's not possible."
  Leonard could not help his pride. "There's a
tunnel. I've marked it with a thick line. It
runs from what looks like a radar station in the
American sector."
  Hans was shaking his head. "It would be too far.
It's not possible. No one will believe this. I
wouldn't get twenty-five marks."
  Leonard was close to laughter. "It's a huge
project. They don't have to believe it. They just
need to go and look."
  Hans took the map and stood up. He shrugged
and said, "I'll talk to my friend."
  Leonard watched him cross to the far side of the
room and speak to a man who was obscured by a
pillar. Then both went out through a set of swing
doors to where the lavatories and telephone were.
A couple of minutes later Hans came back,
looking livelier.
  "My friend says it looks interesting, at least.
He's trying to reach his contact now."
  Hans went back across the room. Leonard
waited until he was out of sight, then he
left the cafe. He was fifty yards down the
street when he heard a shout. A man with a white
tablecloth tucked around his waist was sprinting toward
him waving a slip of paper. He owed for five
coffees. He was just paying up and apologizing when
Hans came running up. His freckles were garish
in daylight.
  The waiter went away and Hans said, "You were
going to give me your address. And look-my friend paid
two hundred marks."
  Leonard walked on, and Hans kept by his
side. Leonard said, "You keep the money, and
I'll keep my address."
  Hans linked his arm through Leonard's. "This
isn't what we agreed."
  The touch gave Leonard a thrill of horror.
He shook his arm free.
  "Don't you like me, Henry?" Hans said.
  "No, I don't," Leonard said. "Bugger
off." He increased his pace. When he glanced over
his shoulder, Hans was walking back toward the cafe.
  At Alexanderplatz Leonard fell into another
dither. He needed to sit down and rest his foot, but
before he did that, he had to decide where to go. He ought
to see Maria, and he knew he still could not
face her. He wanted to go home, but Macationamee
might be waiting for him. If the seals had been
broken on the cases, the military police would be
there. In the
  end he bought a ticket to Neu-Westend. He
could make up his mind on the train.
  He got off at the zoo, having decided to go
into the park and find somewhere to sleep. It was a sunny
day, but once he had walked for twenty minutes and
found a quiet stretch on the banks of the canal,
he found the wind a little too brisk to permit him
to relax. For half an hour he lay shivering on the
newly cut grass. He walked all the way
back through the gardens to the station and took the
U-Bahn home. Sleep was now his only
priority. If the MP'S were there, he would only be
confronting the inevitable. If it was Macationamee,
he would think of a story when it was necessary.
  He glided along the pavement from Neu-Westend
to Platanenallee. Tiredness dissociated him from the
action of his legs. He was being walked home. There
was no one waiting for him. Inside the apartment two
notes had been put through the door. One, from
Maria, said, "Where are you? What's happening?" The
other, from Macationamee said, "Phone me"
and gave three numbers. Leonard went straight
to the bedroom and pulled the curtains. He took
all his clothes off. He did not bother with
pajamas. In less than a minute he was asleep
at last.
  In less than an hour he was awake with an
urgent need to urinate. The phone was ringing, too.
He hesitated in the hallway, not knowing which to attend
to first. He went to the phone and knew as he picked it
up that he had made the wrong decision. He would not
be able to concentrate. It was Glass, sounding distant
and very upset. In the background there was a commotion of
some sort. He was like a man having a bad dream.
  "Leonard, Leonard, is that you?"
  Shivery and naked in his sunless living room,
Leonard crossed his legs and said, "Yes, it's
me."
  "Leonard? Are you there?"
  "Bob, it's me. I'm here."
  "Thank God. Listen. Are you listening
carefully? I want you to tell me what's in those
cases. I need you to tell me right now."
  Leonard felt his legs going weak. He sat
down on the carpet among the debris of the engagement
party. He said, "Have they been opened?"
  "Come on, Leonard. Just tell me."
  "Bob, for a start, it's classified, and
anyway, this is not a secure line."
  "Don't give me that shit, Marnham. All
hell is breaking loose here. What's in those
bags?"
  "What's happening there? What's all that
noise?"
  Glass was shouting to be heard. "Christ!
Haven't you been told? They found us. They broke
into the tap chamber. Our people just made it out. No one
had time to close the steel doors. They're all
over the tunnel, it's all theirs, right up to the
sector boundary. We're clearing stuff out of the
warehouse just to be safe. I'm seeing Harvey in
an hour and I have to give him a damage report.
I need to know what was in those cases. Leonard?"
  But Leonard could not speak. His throat was
constricted by a joyous gratitude. The speed and
simplicity of it all. And now the great Russian
silence could descend. He would get dressed now and
go and tell Maria that everything was fine.
  Glass was shouting his name. Leonard said,
"Sorry, Bob. I was stunned by the news."
  "The cases, Leonard. The cases!"
  "Right. It was the body of a man I hacked
into pieces."
  "You asshole. I don't have much time."
  Leonard was trying to keep the lightness out of his
voice. "Actually, you don't have much to worry about.
It was decoding equipment that I was building myself.
It was only half completed, and it turns out the
ideas were out of date."
  "So what was the big deal this morning?"
  "All decoding projects are level four,"
Leonard said. "But listen, Bob, when did all this
happen?"
  Glass was talking to someone else. He broke
off. "What was that?"
  "When did they break in?"
  Glass did not hesitate. "Twelve
fifty-eight."
  "No, Bob. That can't be right."
  "Listen, if you want to know more, just tune
into Deutschlandsender. They're talking about nothing
else."
  Leonard felt a spreading coldness in his
stomach. "They can't go public with it."
  "That's what we thought. They'd lose face. But
the commandant of the Soviet Berlin garrison
is out of town. The second-in- command, a guy
called Kotsyuba, must be nuts. He's milking
it for propaganda. They're going to come out of this looking
stupid, but that's what they're doing."
  Leonard was thinking of the joke he had just made.
He said, "It can't be true."
  Again someone was trying to talk to Glass. He
spoke hurriedly. "They're holding a press
briefing tomorrow. They're going to show the press corps
around the tunnel on Saturday. They're talking
about opening it up to the public. A tourist
attraction, a monument to American treachery.
Leonard, they're going to use every last damn thing they
can find."
  He rang off, and Leonard hurried to the
bathroom.
caret Twenty-One
John Macationamee insisted on meeting Leonard
at Kempinski's and wanted to sit outside. It was
barely ten o'clock in the morning and all the other
customers were inside. It was the same bright, cold
weather. Each time an enormous white cumulus
cloud drifted in front of the sun, the air became
icy.
Leonard had been feeling the cold
lately. He always seemed to be shivering. The
morning after Glass's phone call he woke with
shaking hands. It was no mere tremble, it was a
palsied shake, and it took him minutes to button
his shirt. It was a
  delayed muscular spasm, he decided, brought
on by carrying the cases. When he went out for his first
meal in over two days at a
Schnellimbiss
on Reichskanzlerplatz, he dropped his
sausage on the pavement. Someone's dog was there
to eat it, mustard and all.
  At Kempinski's he was in a sun trap, but
he kept his coat on and clenched his teeth to stop them
chattering. He could not trust himself to hold a coffee
cup, so he ordered a beer, and that too was icy.
Macationamee looked comfortable enough wearing a tweed
jacket over a thin cotton shirt. When his coffee
came he stuffed his pipe and lit it. Leonard was
downwind, and the smell and its associations made him
feel sick. He went to the lavatory as a
pretext for changing seats. When he came back
he sat on the other side of the table, but now he was in
the shade. He pulled his coat around him and sat on
his hands. Macationamee passed the untouched
beer across to him. There was condensation on the glass, through
which two droplets of water were carving an erratically
parallel path.
  "Right then," Macationamee said. "What about it?"
  Leonard could feel his hands shaking under his
buttocks. He said, "When I couldn't get
anything from the Americans, I began to have one or
two ideas of my own. I started to build something in
my spare time. I really thought I could see my way
through to separating out the clear text echo from the encoded
message. I worked at home for safety. But it
didn't come out right. The ideas turned out to be old
hat anyway. I brought the stuff in, intending
to dismantle it in my room, where I keep all the
parts. I never imagined I'd be searched so
thoroughly. But there were two new boys on the gate.
It wouldn't have mattered, but Glass was right there with
me. I couldn't afford to let him see the kind of thing
I had. It's hardly in my job description.
I'm sorry if it got your hopes up."
  Macationamee tapped his stumpy brown teeth with the
stem of his pipe. "I was rather excited for an hour or
two. I thought you'd got your hands on a version of
Nelson's thing from somewhere. But not to worry-I think
they're almost there at Dollis Hill."
2 3 8
  Now that he had been believed, Leonard wanted
to go. He had to get warm, and he had to look at the
midday papers.
  But Macationamee wanted to reflect. He had
ordered another coffee and a sticky tart. "I like
to think of the pluses. We knew it wouldn't go on
forever, and we had almost a year's run at it. It will
take London and Washington years to process
everything they've got."
  Leonard took his hand out to reach for his beer,
changed his mind and put it away.
  "From the point of view of the special relationship
and all that, the other good thing is that we've worked
successfully with the Americans on a major
project. They've been slow to trust us since
Burgess and Maclean. Now that's all changed for the
better."
  Eventually Leonard made an excuse and
stood. Macationamee remained seated. He was
refilling his pipe as he squinted up at
Leonard, into the sun. "You look like you need a
rest. I suppose you know you're being recalled. The
INTO WILL be in touch."
  They shook hands. Leonard disguised his
palsy by being vigorous. Macationamee did not seem
to notice. His last words to Leonard were "You've
done well, despite everything. I've put in a
good word for you at Dollis Hill."
  Leonard said, "Thank you, sir," and hurried
away up the Kurfurstendamm to buy the
newspapers.
  He scanned them in the U-Bahn
to Kottbusser Tor. Two days later, and the East
Berlin press was still saturated with the story. Both the
Tagesspiegel
and the
Berliner Zeitung
carried double-page spreads of photographs. One
showed the amplifiers and the edge of the desk under which the
cases stood. For some reason, the telephone in the
tap chamber still worked. Reporters called into the
receiver and got no reply. The lights and ventilation
were still functioning, too. There were detailed accounts of
what it was like to walk the tunnel from the Schonefelder
Chaussee end to the sandbagged barrier marking the beginning
of the American sector. Beyond the sandbags was
"darkness broken only by the glow of two
cigarettes. But the observers do not react to our
call. Perhaps their con

  sciences are too bad." Elsewhere Leonard
read that "the whole of Berlin is incensed by the wheeling
and dealing of certain American officers. Berlin will
only be at peace when these agents cease their
provocations." One headline said STRANGE
DISTURBANCES ON the LINE. The story underneath
told how Soviet intelligence had became aware
of noises interrupting regular cable traffic. The
order was given to begin digging up certain stretches
of the line. The article gave no reason why
Schonefelder Chaussee was chosen. When soldiers
broke into the tap chamber, "conditions were such as
to indicate that the spies had left in great haste,
abandoning their equipment." The fluorescent light
bulbs bore the name of Os- ram, England,
"clearly an attempt to mislead. But
screwdrivers and adjustable wrenches give the game
away: all are marked "Made in USA." was
At the bottom of the page, in bold type: "A
spokesman for the American forces in Berlin said in
response to inquiries last night, T don't
know anything about it!" his
  He skimmed through all the stories. The delay in
announcing the discovery of the cases was tiring
him. Perhaps the idea was to isolate the story to give
it all the more impact later. It could be that
investigations were already under way. If it hadn't been
for his foolish remark to Glass, the Russian
claim that they had found a dismembered body in two
suitcases could be easily dismissed. If the East
German authorities quietly handed the matter
over to the West Berlin
Kriminalpolizei,
they had only to ask the Americans and the cases would
be traced to Leonard.
  Even if the Americans refused to cooperate,
it would not take the police long to identify Otto.
There was probably forensic evidence in every tissue of
his body to indicate that he was a drunk. Soon it
would be noted that he had failed to turn up at his
lodgings, that he had not collected his
Sozialhilfe,
that he was no longer in place at his favorite
Kneipe,
where the off- duty police bought him drinks.
Surely the first thing the police did when they found a
body was to look at their missing- persons list.
There were countless and intricate bureaucratic
  links between Otto and Maria and
Leonard: the dissolved marriage, the housing claim,
the official engagement. But surely that would also have
been so if Leonard had managed to leave the cases
at the Zoo station. What was it they were thinking of? It
was a struggle to think it through. They would have been questioned,
but their stories would have been consistent, the apartment would
have been meticulously cleaned. There might have been
suspicion, but there would have been no proof.
  And what was the essence of his crime? To have killed
Otto? But that was self-defense. Otto had
broken into the bedroom, he had attacked. Not to have
reported the death? But that was only sensible, given that
no one would have believed them. To have cut up the body?
But it was already dead then, so what difference could it
make? To have concealed the body? A perfectly
logical step. To have deceived Glass, the sentries,
the duty officer and Macationamee? But only
to protect them from unpleasant facts that did not
concern them. To have betrayed the tunnel? A sad
necessity, given everything else that had gone before.
Besides, Glass, Macationamee and everyone else were
saying that it had always been bound to happen. It could not
have gone on forever. They had had almost a year's run
at it.
  He was innocent, that he knew. Why then
should his hands shake? Was it fear of being caught and
punished? But he wanted them to come, and quickly. He
wanted to stop thinking the same thoughts over, he
wanted to speak to someone official and have his words
written down, typed up for his signature. He
wanted to set out the events, and make known to those whose
job it was to have truths officially established how one
thing had led to another, and how, despite appearances,
he was no monster, he was not a deranged chopper-up
of citizens, and that it was not insanity that had caused
him to haul his victim around Berlin in two
suitcases. Time and again he set out the facts for his
imagined witnesses, his prosecutors. If they were
men dedicated to the truth, they would come to see it his
way, even if laws and conventions constrained them
  to punish him. He recounted his version, it was all
he ever did. Every conscious minute he was explaining,
refining, clarifying, barely aware that nothing was
actually taking place, or that he had been through it
all ten minutes before.
Yes, gentlemen, I plead guilty to the charge as
described, I killed, dismembered, lied and
betrayed. But when you understand the real conditions, the
circumstances that brought me to this, you will see that I am
no different from you, that I am not evil, and
that all along I acted only for what I took
to be the best.
By the hour the language of his defense was being
heightened. Without thinking, he drew on the
courtroom dramas of forgotten films. At times
he spoke at length in a small bare room in a
police station to a half-dozen reflective senior
officers. At others he addressed, from the witness
box, a hushed court.
  Outside Kottbusser Tor station he stuffed the
newspapers into a litter bin and headed down
Adalbertstrasse. And what of Maria? She was part
of his plea. He had brought into being a barrister, an
authoritative presence, who would invoke the hopes
and love of this young couple who had turned their backs
on the violent pasts of their respective countries
and were planning a life together. In whom lay our
hopes of a future Europe free of strife. This
was Glass speaking now. And now Macationamee was before
the court to testify, as far as was compatible with
security, to the important work Leonard had
undertaken in the name of freedom, and how he had set
out single-handedly and in his spare time to devise
equipment that would further that aim.
  Leonard walked faster. There were
moments, minutes on end, of lucidity, when the
repetitions and convolutions of his fantasies
sickened him. There were no truths waiting to be
discovered. There was only what could be imperfectly
established by officials who had many other things to do and
who would be only too pleased to be able to fit a
crime to its perpetrator, process the matter and
move on. Hardly had he set in train that thought,
itself a repetition, than he was drawn to some fresh
mitigating memory. For it was true, surely, that
  Otto had seized Maria by the windpipe.
I had to fight him even though I hate violence.
I knew he had to be stopped.
  He was crossing the courtyard of No. 84. His
first visit back. He started up the stairs. His
hands were shaking badly again. It was difficult to hold
on to the banister. On the fourth landing he stopped.
The truth was that he still did not wish to see Maria.
He did not know what to tell her. He could not
pretend to her that the cases were safely out of the way.
He could not tell where he had put them. That would mean
telling her about the tunnel. But he had told the
Russians, after all. He could tell anyone after
that, surely. He thought what he had already thought: he
was in no condition to make decisions; therefore
he should keep silent. But he had to tell her
something, and he would tell her that the cases were at the
station. He tried gripping the banister tighter. But
neither was he in a state to pretend anything. He went
on up.
  He had his own key, but he knocked and waited.
He could smell cigarettes inside. He was about
to knock again when the door was opened by Glass, who
stepped out onto the landing and steered Leonard by the
elbow to the top of the stairs.
  He murmured hurriedly, "Before you come in-we
have to establish whether they found us by accident or whether
we have a security breach on our hands. Among other
things, we're talking to all non-U.s. wives and
girlfriends. Don't take offense. It's routine."
  They went in. Maria came toward Leonard and
they kissed on the lips, dryly. His right knee was
trembling, so he sat down in the nearest chair.
At his elbow on the table was a full ashtray.
  Glass said, "You looked tired, Leonard."
  He included them both in his answer. "I've
been working round the clock." And then to Glass
alone, "Doing things for Macationamee."
  Glass took his jacket off the back of a chair
and put it on.
  Maria said, "I'll see you to the door."
  Glass gave Leonard a solemn mock
salute as he went. Leonard heard him talking
to Maria at the front door.
  When she came back she said, "Are you ill?"
  He held his hands still in his lap. "I feel
strange, don't you?"
  She nodded. There were shadows under her eyes, and her
skin and hair had a greasy look. He was glad
he did not feel attracted to her.
  She said, "I think it's going to be all right."
  This feminine certainty irritated him. "Oh
yes," he said. "The cases are in the lockers at
the Bahnhof Zoo."
  She was looking at him closely, and he could not
meet her stare. She started to speak and changed her
mind.
  He said, "What did Glass want?"
  "It was like last time, but worse. A lot of questions
about the people I know, where I've been during the last
two weeks."
  Now he was looking at her. "You didn't talk
about anything else?"
  "No," she said, but she looked away.
  Naturally he was not jealous, because he
did not feel anything for her. And he could not bear one
more emotion. All the same, he went through the motions.
It was something to talk about. "He stayed a long time."
He was referring to the ashtray.
  "Yes." She sat down and sighed.
  "And he took off his jacket?"
  She nodded.
  "And all he did was ask questions?"
  In a few days he would be leaving Berlin,
probably without her, and he was talking like this.
  She reached across the table and took his hand from his
lap. He did not want her to feel it shaking, so
he did not let her hold it for long.
  She said, "Leonard, I just think it's going to be
all right."
  It was as if she thought she could soothe him by her very
tone of voice. His own was mocking. "Of course it
is. It's days before they unlock the lockers, before
they come around here- which they will, you know. Have you got rid
of the saw and the knife and the carpet and all the clothes with
blood on them and the shoes and the newspaper? Do we
know that no one saw you? Or saw me leave here with
two big bags, or saw me at the
  station? Is this place so scrubbed out that there's
nothing a trained sniffer dog wouldn't
find?" He was ranting, he knew, but he could not
stop his jaw. "Do we know that the neighbors didn't
hear anything of the fight? Are we going to talk about
our stories and make them agree to every last little
point, or are we going to tell each other that it's
all going to be all right?"
  "I did everything here. You don't have to worry.
The stories are simple. We say it as it
happened, but without Otto. We came back here after
dinner, we went to bed, you went to work the next
morning, I took a day off and went shopping, you
came back at lunchtime, and in the evening you went
to Platanenallee."
  It was a description of a past that should have been
theirs. The happy couple after their engagement. The
normality of it was a mockery, and they fell
silent. Then Leonard came back to Glass.
  "Was this the first time he's been here?"
  She nodded.
  "He was in a hurry to leave."
  She said, "Don't speak to me like this. You need
to calm down." She gave him a cigarette and
took one for herself.
  Presently he said, "I'm being recalled
to England."
  She drew breath and said, "What do you want
to do?"
  He did not know what he wanted. He kept
thinking about Glass. In the end he said, "Perhaps some
time apart would be a good thing, give us a chance to get
our thoughts straight."
  He did not like the ease with which she was agreeing with
him. "I could come to London in a month. That's the
earliest I could leave my job."
  He did not know whether she meant it, or whether it
mattered. As long as he was sitting here next to an
ashtray full of Glass's stubs he would not be able
to think.
  "Look," he said. "I'm terribly tired. You
are too." He stood up and put his hands in his
pockets.
  She stood too. There was something she wanted
to tell him, but she was holding back. She seemed
older; her face was giving warning of how she would
look one day.
  They made no effort to prolong their kiss. Then
he was on his way to the door. "I'll be in touch as
soon as I know my flight." She saw him to the
door, and he did not look back as he started down
the stairs.
  During the next three days Leonard spent most
of his time at the warehouse. The place was being
stripped down. All day and night Army trucks
arrived to take away furniture, paperwork and
equipment. Out in back the incinerator was stoked up,
and three soldiers were posted around it to make sure that
unburned papers did not blow away. The canteen
was taken apart, and a van came at midday to serve
sandwiches and coffee. There were a dozen people working in the
recording room, rolling up cable and packing up
tape recorders six to a wooden crate. All the
sensitive documents had been moved within hours of the
break-in. Most of the time the work was done in silence.
It was as if they were all checking out of an
unpleasant hotel; they wanted the experience behind
them as quickly as possible. Leonard worked in his own
room, alone. The equipment had to be inventoried and
packed. Every valve had to be accounted for.
  Despite this activity and all his other
worries, the tunnel was not on his conscience. If it
was right to spy on the Americans for Macationamee's
interests, it was fine to sell the tunnel for his own.
But that was not what he really meant. He had been
fond of the place, he had loved it, he had been
proud of it. But now it was hard to feel
anything at all. After Otto, the Cafe Prag was
nothing. He went down to the basement to take one last
look. There were armed guards at the top and bottom
of the shaft. Also down there, standing with his hands on his
hips, was Bill Harvey, the station chief and head
of the operation. A U.s. Army officer with a
clipboard was listening to him. Harvey seemed to be
bursting out of his suit. He was making a point of
letting all around him see the holster he wore under
his jacket.
  As for Glass, during all this time he did not
appear at the warehouse once. That was strange, but
Leonard had no time to think about it. His preoccupation
remained his arrest. When was he going to be taken
away? Why were they waiting so
2 4 6
caret As
long? Did they want to tie up their case? Or
could it be that the Soviet authorities had decided
that a dismembered body would only complicate their
propaganda victory? Perhaps- and this seemed most
plausible-the West Berlin police were waiting for him
to present his passport at the airport. He
lived with two futures. In one he flew home and
began to forget. In the other, he stayed here
and began to serve his time. He still could not sleep.
He sent Maria a card telling her the details of
his flight on Saturday afternoon. She wrote back
by return of post and said that she would be at
Tempelhof to say goodbye. She signed herself
"Love, Maria," and the
love
was underlined twice.
On Saturday morning he took a long bath, and
when he was dressed he packed his cases. While
he was waiting to hand over the apartment to the transport
officer, he strode from room to room, the way he
had done in the old days. He had made very little
impact here, apart from a small stain on the living
room carpet. He stood by the telephone a while.
It bothered him now that he had not heard from Glass,
who must surely know that he was leaving. Something was going
on. He could not bring himself to dial his number. He
was still standing there where his doorbell rang. It was
Lofting, with two soldiers. The lieutenant
appeared unnaturally happy.
"My chaps are doing the handover and the inventory," he
explained as they all came in. "So I thought
I'd take the chance of coming out to say goodbye. I've
also found a staff car to take you to the
airfield. It's waiting downstairs."
The two men sat in the living room while the
soldiers counted the cups and saucers in the kitchen.
"You see," Lofting said, "you yourself have been handed
back to us by the Americans. You're in my care
now."
"That's nice," Leonard said.
"Jolly good party last week. Do you know, I'm
seeing rather a lot of that girl Charlotte. She's a
marvelous dancer. So I have to thank you both for that.
She wants me to meet her parents next
Sunday."
"Congratulations," Leonard said. "She's a nice
girl."
  The soldiers came through with forms for Leonard
to sign. He stood to do it.
  Lofting too got to his feet. "And what about
Maria?"
  "She has to work out her notice, then she'll be
joining me." It sounded quite plausible as he said it.
  The inventory and the handover were completed, and it was time
to go. The four men were in the hallway. Lofting pointed
to Leonard's suitcases, which were standing by the front
door. "I say, would you like my chaps to carry those
down for you?"
  "Yes," Leonard said. "I'd like that very much."
The driver of the staff car, a Humber, who turned
out to be driving to Tempelhof to meet someone off a
plane, seemed to feel no obligation to help
Leonard with his luggage. It felt comparatively
light as he bumped his way into the terminal building.
But to be encumbered like this again had its effect. By the
time he joined the long queue for the London flight,
he was feeling demented. Could he risk putting the
bags on the scales? Already there were people behind him. Could
he leave the queue without arousing suspicion? The people
around him were a strange assortment.
  There was a down-at-heel family in
front-grandparents, a young couple and two small
children. They had enormous cardboard suitcases and
cloth bundles tied with string. They were refugees,
obviously. The West Berlin authorities could not
risk sending them out by rail. Perhaps it was a fear of
flying that silenced the whole family, or an
awareness of the tall man behind them, sliding his cases
forward with his foot. Behind him was a group of French
businessmen talking loudly, and behind them were two
British Army officers standing erect and beaming
quiet disapproval at the French. What all these
passengers had in common was their innocence.
He was innocent too, but it would take some
explaining. Over by a newspaper stand was a military
policeman with his hands behind his back and his chin up.
Polizisten
were standing by the entrance to passport control. Who was
going to pull him out of the queue?
  When he felt a hand on his shoulder, he started and
turned too quickly. It was Maria. She was wearing
clothes he had never seen before. This was her new
summer outfit, a floral print skirt with a wide
belt and a white blouse with puffy sleeves and a
deep V neck. She wore an imitation pearl
necklace he had not known she had. She looked like
she was sleeping well. She had a new perfume,
too. She put her hand in his as they kissed. It was
cool and smooth. He sensed something light and
simple returning to him, or at least the idea was
there. Soon he might be able to feel for her again.
Once he was away from her he would begin to miss her,
and separate her from a memory of that apron, the
patient wrapping and application of glue along the
edges.
  "You look very well," he said.
  "I'm feeling better. Have you been able
to sleep?"
  Her question was indiscreet. There were people close behind
them. He pushed his cases forward into the gap that had
appeared behind the refugees.
  He said no and squeezed her hand. They could be an
engaged couple, surely. He said, "I like that
blouse. Is it new?"
  She stepped back for him. There was even a new
clip in her
  hair, blue and yellow this time, more childish than
ever. "I wanted to give myself a treat. What do you
think of the skirt?" She made a little turn for him.
She was pleased and excited. The Frenchmen were watching
her. Someone right at the back gave a wolf
whistle. andbrvbarbb*When she stepped in closer he
said, "You look beautiful." He
  knew it was true. If he kept on saying it,
if only to himself, he would really know it.
  "All these people," she was saying. "If Bob
Glass were here, he could do something and get you to the
front."
  He chose to ignore this. She was wearing the
engagement ring. If they could simply hold to the form
of things, the rest would follow. It would all come
back. As long as no one was coming for them. They held
hands as they shuffled toward the check-in
counter.
  She said, "Have you told your parents yet?"
  "About what?"
  "Our engagement, of course."
  He had meant to. He had intended to write
to them the day after the party.
  "I'll tell them when I'm home."
  Before he did, he would have to believe it again himself.
He would have to get back to that moment when they were
climbing the stairs to her place after their supper, or
to the time
m
when her words reached him like silver drops falling in
slow
  motion, before he had discerned their sense.
  He said, "Did you give your notice?"
  She laughed, and she seemed to hesitate.
"Yes, and the major was not at all pleased. 'Who's
going to boil my egg now? Who can I trust with
cutting the soldiers?"' his
  They laughed. They were being merry because they were about
to part, which was what engaged couples did.
  "Do you know," she said, "he tried to talk me out
of it."
  "What did you say?"
  IS-HE wiggled her ring finger in the air. She
said mock naugh
  1tily,
  "I told him I'd think about it."
  *It took half an hour to get close to the
counter. They were
almost there and still holding hands. After a silence he said,
"I don't know why we haven't heard anything
by now."
She said immediately, "It means we never will."
Then there was another silence. The refugee family
was checking in its cases and bundles. Maria said,
"What do you want to do? Where do you want to be?"
"I don't know," he said in a movie sort of
voice. "It's your place or mine."
She laughed loudly. There was something quite wild in her
manner. The British European Airlines
official looked up. Maria was being so free in her
movements, almost wanton. Perhaps it was joy. The
Frenchmen had long since stopped talking to each
other. Leonard did not know if that was because they were all
watching her. He was thinking he really did love her
as he lifted the bags onto the scales. Nothing
at all-barely thirty-five pounds together. When his
tickets had been checked, they went to the
cafeteria. There was a queue here too, and it did
not seem worth joining it. There were only ten minutes
left.
They sat at a Formica table cluttered with dirty
teacups and plates smeared with yellow cake that had
been used as ashtrays. She pulled her chair
nearer to him and linked her arm with his and leaned her head
on his shoulder.
"You won't forget that I love you," she said. "We
did what we had to and we are going to be all right
now."
Whenever she told him that everything was going to be all
right he felt uneasy. It was like asking for trouble.
Nevertheless, he said, "I love you too."
They were announcing the flight.
She walked with him to the newsstand, where he bought a
Daily Express,
flown in that day. They stopped by the barrier.
"I'll come to London," she said. "We can talk
about everything there. Here there's too much . . ."
He knew what she meant. They kissed, though
hardly the way they used to. He kissed her
lovely forehead. He was going to go. She took his
hand and held on with both of hers.
  "Oh God, Leonard!" she cried.
"If only I could tell you. It's all right. It
really is."
  That again. There were three military policemen on
the gate who looked away when he kissed her for the
last time.
  "I'll go up on the roof and wave," she said, and
hurried off.
  The passengers had fifty yards of pavement
to cross. As soon as he was clear of the terminal
building he looked around. She was up on the flat
roof, leaning on the parapet at the front of the
observation deck. When she saw him she made a
merry little dance and blew him a kiss. The Frenchmen
looked enviously at him as they passed. He waved
at her and walked on until he arrived at the
foot of the aircraft steps, where he stopped and
turned. He had his right hand half raised to wave.
There was a man at her side, a man with a beard.
It was Glass. He had his hand on Maria's
shoulder. Or was it his arm around her shoulder? They
both waved, like parents to a departing child. Maria blew
him a kiss, she dared to blow him the same kiss.
Glass was saying something to her, and she laughed and they
waved again.
  Leonard let his hand drop and hurried
up the steps into the plane. He had a window seat
on the terminal side. He fussed with his seatbelt,
trying not to look out. It was irresistible. They
seemed to know just which little round window was his. They were
looking right at him and continuing to wave their insulting
goodbye. He looked away. He took his paper and
snapped it open and pretended to read. He felt such
shame. He longed for the plane to move. She should have
told him just now, she should have confronted him, but she
had wanted to avoid a scene. It was a humiliation.
He blushed with it and pretended to read. Then he did
read. It was the story of "Buster" Crabbe, a
naval frogman who had been spying on a
Russian battleship moored in Portsmouth
harbor. Crabbe's headless body had been
retrieved by fishermen. Khrushchev had made an
angry statement; something was expected that afternoon in the
House of Commons. The propellers were spinning to a
blur. The ground crew was hurrying away. As the
plane edged for

  ward, Leonard took one last look. They were
standing close together. Perhaps she could not really see his
face, because she raised one hand as if to wave and let
it fall. And then he could see her no
longer.
  In June 1987 Leonard Marnham, the owner
of a small company supplying components to the
hearing-aid industry, returned to Berlin. It took
him no more than the taxi ride from Tegel airport
to the hotel to become accustomed to the absence of ruins.
There were more people, it was greener, there were no trams. Then
these sharp differences faded and it was a European city
like any other a businessman might visit. Its
dominant feature was traffic.
  Even as he was paying the driver, he knew he
had made a mistake in choosing to stay on the
Kurfiirstendamm. He had
  taken a certain pleasure in being knowing and
specific with his secretary. The Hotel am Zoo
had been the only place he could name. There was now a
transparent structure sloping against the facade.
Inside a glass lift slid across the surface
of a mural. He unpacked his bag, swallowed his
heart pill with a glass of water and went out for a
stroll.
  In fact it was not quite possible to stroll, the crowd
was so dense. He got his bearings from the
Gedachtniskirche and the hideous new structure at
its side. He passed Burger King,
Spielcenter, Videoclips, Das
Steak-Restaurant, Unisex Jeans. The store
windows were filled with clothes of babyish pastel
pinks, blues and yellows. He became caught up
in a surge of Scandinavian children wearing
McDonald's cardboard visors, pressing forward
to buy giant silver balloons from a street
vendor. It was hot and the traffic roar was continuous.
Disco music and the smell of burning fat were everywhere.
  He went down a side street, thinking to walk
around in front of the Zoo station and the entrance to the
gardens, but soon he was lost. There was a confluence of
major roads he did not remember. He decided
to sit down outside one of the big cafes. He
passed three, and every last bright plastic chair was
taken. The crowds moved aimlessly up and down,
squeezing by each other wherever the pavement space was
taken up by cafe tables. There was a crowd of French
teenagers all wearing pink T-shirts with FUCK
you! printed front and back. He was amazed to find
himself lost. When he looked around for someone to ask,
he could find no one who did not look like a
foreigner. Eventually he approached a young couple
on a corner buying a pancake with a creme de
menthe filling. They were Dutch, and friendly
enough, but they had never heard of the Hotel am Zoo,
nor were they entirely certain of the Kurfurstendamm.
  He found his hotel by accident and sat in his room
for half an hour sipping an orange juice from the
minibar. He was trying to resist irritable
reminiscence.
In my day.
If he was going to take a walk down
Adalbertstrasse, he preferred to remain calm.
He took from his briefcase the airmail letter he
had been
  rereading on the plane and put it in his pocket.
He was not yet sure what he wanted from all this.
He was eyeing the bed. The experience on the
Ku'damm had drained him. He could happily have
slept the afternoon away. But he forced himself up and out
once more.
  In the lobby he hesitated as he handed in his
key. He wanted to try out his German on the
receptionist, a young chap in a black suit who
looked like a student of some sort. The Wall had
gone up five years after Leonard had left
Berlin. He wanted to have a look while he was here.
Where should he go? What was the best place? He was
conscious of making elementary errors. But his
understanding was good. The young man showed him on a map.
Potsdamerplatz was best. There was a good viewing
platform and postcard and souvenir shops.
  Leonard was about to thank him and cross the lobby,
but the young man said, "You should go soon."
  "Why's that?"
  "A little while ago the students were demonstrating
in East Berlin. Do you know what they were shouting? The
name of the Soviet leader. And the police hit them and
chased them with water cannon."
  "I read about that," Leonard said.
  The receptionist was in his stride. This seemed to be
a pet theme. He was in his mid-twenties,
Leonard decided.
  "Who would have thought that the name of the Soviet general
secretary would be a provocation in East Berlin?
It's amazing!"
  "I suppose so," Leonard said.
  "A couple of weeks ago he came here,
to Berlin. You probably read about that, too. Before
he came everyone was saying, "He'll tell them
to take down the Wall." Well, I knew he
wouldn't, and he didn't. But next time, or the time
after-five years, ten years. It's all changing."
  There was an admonitory grunt from the
inner office. The young man smiled and shrugged.
Leonard thanked him and walked out into the street.
  He took the U-Bahn to Kottbusser Tor.
As he emerged onto
  the pavement he struggled into a hot gritty
headwind, which brought with it scraps of litter.
Waiting for him was a skinny girl in a leather
jacket and tight stretch pants patterned with
moons and stars. As he walked by her she murmured,
"Haste mal The Mark?"
She had a pretty but wasted face. Ten yards
past her he had to stop. Was it possible he had got
off too soon, or too late? But there was the
street sign. Ahead of him a monstrous apartment
complex straddled the way into Adalbertstrasse. On
the concrete pillars at its base were spray-
painted graffiti. At his feet were empty beer
cans, fast-food wrappers, sheets of
newspapers. A group of teenagers, punks he
supposed, were lying by the curb, propped on their
elbows. They all had the same bright orange
Mohican haircuts. Their relative baldness
made their ears and Adam's apples protrude
unhappily. Their heads were bluish-white. One of the
boys was inhaling from a plastic bag. They
grinned at Leonard as he stepped around them.
  Once he had walked under the apartments, the street
was half familiar. All the gaps had been filled
in. The shops-a grocery, a cafe, a travel
agency-all had Turkish names now. Turkish men
stood around on the corner of Oranienstrasse. The
amiable vacancy of southern Europe looked
unconvincing here. The buildings that had survived the
bombing still bore the marks of gunfire. The machine
gunning of No. 84 was still there above the ground-floor
windows. The big front door had been repainted
blue many years ago. In the courtyard, the first thing
he noticed was the dustbins. They were huge and mounted
on rubber wheels.
  Turkish children, girls with their younger brothers and
sisters, were playing in the yard. They stopped running
when they saw him and watched in silence as he crossed
to the rear doorway. They did not respond to his
smile. This pale, large, elderly man, dressed
inappropriately for the heat inla dark suit, did
not belong here. A woman called down what sounded like
a harsh command, but no one stirred. Perhaps they thought he
had something to do with the government. It had been his plan
to walk up to the top landing and, if it seemed the right
thing,
  to knock on the door. But the stairwell was darker
and narrower than he remembered and the air was close,
saturated with unfamiliar cooking smells. He
stepped back and looked over his shoulder. The children
continued to stare. A bigger girl picked up her younger
sister. He looked from one set of brown eyes
to another, then he walked back past them and into the
street. Being here did not bring him any closer
to his Berlin days. All that was apparent was how far
off they seemed.
  He went back to Kottbusser Tor, gave the
girl a ten-mark note as he passed and took a
train to Hermannplatz, where he changed for Rudow.
These days it was possible to go right through Grenzallee,
all the way by U-Bahn. When he arrived he
found a six-lane road cutting across what he
sensed was his direction. Looking back toward the
center of the city, he saw clusters of high-rise
buildings. He waited at the pedestrian lights and
crossed. Ahead of him were low apartment buildings, a
pink stone cycling path, neat rows of streetlights,
and parked cars lining the curb. How else could it be,
what could he really have expected? The same flat
farmland? He passed the little lake, a rural
memory preserved by barbed-wire fencing.
  He had to look at his street plan to find the
turn. Everything was so neat and crowded. The road he
needed was called Lettbergerstrasse, and its
shoulders had been newly planted with sycamore
trees. On his left were new apartments, barely
two or three years old by the look of them. On his
right, replacing the refugee shacks, were the eccentric
one-storey holiday homes of Berlin apartment
dwellers, with their intensely cultivated gardens.
Families were eating out in the deep shade of
ornamental trees; a green Ping-Pong table stood
on an immaculate lawn. He passed an
empty hammock slung between apple trees.
Barbecue smoke rose from the shrubbery. The
sprinklers were on, soaking stretches of pavement.
Each tiny plot of land was a proud and orderly
fantasy, a celebration of domestic success.
Even though scores of families were packed together,
a contented, inward silence drifted upward with the heat
of the afternoon.
The road narrowed into something like the track he
remembered. There was a riding school, expensive
suburban houses, and then he was walking toward a
new high green gate. Beyond it, a hundred feet
of rough ground; then, still encircled by its double
perimeter fence, the remains of the warehouse. For a
moment he stayed where he was. He could see that all
the buildings had been leveled. The white sentry
box stood tipped at an angle by the inner gate,
which was wide open. On the green gate immediately in
front of him a sign proclaimed that the land belonged
to an agricultural company and warned parents
to keep their children away. To one side was a thick
wooden cross commemorating the attempts of two
young men to climb the Wall in 1962 and 1963,
"von Grenzsoldaten erschossen."
On the far side of the warehouse, a hundred yards
beyond its outer fence, was the pale concrete curtain,
blocking the view to Schonefelder Chaussee. He
thought how strange it was that he should come here to get his
first sight of the Wall.
The gate was too high for a man of his age to climb.
By trespassing along someone's drive he was able
to get over a low wall. He passed through the outer
fence and stopped by the second. The barrier, of
course, was gone, but its post was still there, standing clear
of the weeds. He peeped into the lopsided sentry
hut. It was filled with planks. The old
electrical fittings were still in place, high on its
inner wall, and so was the shredded end of a
telephone line. He walked on into the compound.
All that remained of the buildings were crumbling
concrete floors where weeds were breaking through. The
rubble had been bulldozed into piles at one end of the
compound to form a high screen facing the Wall-one last
titillation for the Vopos.
The main building was different. He walked over and
stood a long time by its remains. On three
sides, beyond the fences and the rough ground, the holiday
homes pressed in. On the fourth was the Wall.
Radio music was playing in a garden somewhere; the
German taste for military rhythms lingered in its
pop music. There was a weekend laziness in the
air.
  What remained in front of him was a huge
hole, a walled trench, a hundred feet long and
thirty feet wide and perhaps seven feet deep.
He was staring into the old basement,
now
open to the skies. The great heaps of tunnel workings
were all there, thick with weeds. The basement floor
must have been another five feet down, under the earth,
but the pathway between the heaps was clear enough. The main
shaft at the eastern end was lost under rubble. It was so
much smaller than he remembered. As he
clambered down, he noticed that he was being watched
through binoculars by two border guards in their tower.
He walked the path between the piles. There was a lark
twittering high above him, and in the heat it was beginning
to irritate him. The ramp for the forklifts was here.
The shaft started there. He picked up a piece of
cable. It was the old three-core, with its thick,
unyielding copper wire. He poked at some earth
and stones with the toe of his shoe. What was he expecting
to find? Evidence of his own existence?
  He climbed out of the basement. He was still being
observed from the tower. Brushing away some dirt from the
brick ledge, he sat down, with his feet dangling
into the basement. This place meant far more to him than
Adalbertstrasse. He had already decided not
to bother with Platanenallee. It was here in this ruin that
he felt the full weight of time. It was here that old
matters could be unearthed. He took the airmail
letter andbrvbarbbf his pocket. The envelope with its
crossed-out addresses
  Iwas fascination enough, a biography whose
chapters were a
  succession of endings. It was from Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, and had left the United States ten weeks
before. The sender was thirty years out of
date. It had been sent to him initially in care of his
parents, to their terraced house in Tottenham, where
he had grown up and where they had lived until his
father's death on Christmas Day, 1957. From there it
had been forwarded to the nursing home where his mother had
spent her last years. Then it had been sent on to the
big house in Seven Oaks where his own children had
grown up and where he had lived with his wife until
five years ago. The present owner had kept the
letter
  for many weeks and then had forwarded it with a batch of
circulars and junk mail.
  He opened it and read once more.
  1706 Sumner Drive Cedar Rapids, Iowa
March 30, 1987 Dear Leonard,
  I think there's only the smallest chance in the world
this letter will ever reach you. I don't even know that you're
alive, though something tells me you are. I'm going
to send it to your parents' old address and who knows
what will happen to it then. I've written it so many
times in my head that I might as well get it down
anyway. If it doesn't reach you, it might help
me.
  When you last saw me at Tempelhof on May
15, 1956, I was a youngish German
woman who spoke good English. Now I guess you
could say I'm a suburban American lady, a
high school teacher staring retirement right in the face,
and my good Cedar Rapids neighbors say there
isn't a trace of German in my accent, though I
think they're only being kind. What's happened
to all the years? I know that's what everyone asks.
We all have to make our own arrangements with the past.
I have three daughters, and the youngest finished college
last summer. They all grew up in this house, where
we've lived for twenty-four years. I've taught
German and French in the local high school for the
past sixteen. For the last five I've been
president of our Women in Church organization.
That's where my years have gone.
  And in all this time I've thought about you. A week
hasn't passed when I haven't gone back over
things, what we might or should have done, and how it could
have been different. I was never able to speak about it. I
think I was afraid that Bob might guess at the
strength of my feelings. Maybe he knew anyhow.
I couldn't talk to any of my friends here, even though
it's a close sort of place and there are some good people
I trust. There would have been too much explaining
  to do. It was so bizarre and horrific and
it would have been hard to make anyone understand. I used
to think I might tell my eldest when she was grown
up. But that time, our time, Berlin, is so far away.
I don't think I could get Laura to really
understand, so I've lived with it alone. I wonder if
it's been the same for you.
  Bob left the service in 1958 and we settled
here. He ran a business retailing
agricultural machinery and made quite a success of
it, enough to keep us all comfortably. I taught school
because I was always used to having a job. It's Bob
I want to write to you about, or he's one of the things.
In all this time I've known that there has been an
accusation hanging in the air, a silent accusation from you
and one that you ought to know is completely unfounded. This
is something I've needed so much to get straight. I
hope God helps this letter reach you one day.
  I now know of course that you were working with Bob on the
Berlin tunnel. The day after the Russians found out
about it, Bob came around to Adalbertstrasse and said
he needed to ask me some questions. It was all part of some
security routine. You'll have to remember just
exactly what was going on at that time. You'd left
with the suitcases two days before and I hadn't heard
a word. Nor had I slept. I spent
hours scrubbing the flat. I took our clothes to a
public dump. I went right over to my parents'
neighborhood in Pankow and sold the tools. I
dragged the carpet three blocks to a construction
site where they had a big fire and got someone
to help me throw it in. I had just finished cleaning out
the bathroom when Bob was at the door wanting to come
in and ask questions. He could see that something was wrong.
I tried to pretend I was ill. He said he
wouldn't take long, and because he was being so kind and
concerned, I broke down and cried. And then before I
knew it, I was telling him the whole story. The
need to tell someone was really powerful. I wanted
someone to understand that we weren't criminals. I poured
it out to him and he sat very quiet. When I told him
that you'd gone off to the railroad
  station with the cases two days before and I hadn't
heard a thing, he just sat there shaking his head and saying
"Oh my God" over and over again. Then he said
he would see what he could find out, and he left.
  He came back the next morning with a
newspaper. It was full of stuff about your tunnel.
I hadn't heard anything about it. Bob told me
then that you were part of the tunnel operation and that you'd
actually put the cases down there not long
before the Vopos broke in. I don't know what led
you to do that. Perhaps you went crazy for a day or two.
Who wouldn't? The East Germans had handed the
cases over to the West Berlin police.
Apparently a murder investigation was already under way.
They were only hours from getting your name. According
to Bob, he and several others had actually seen you
bring the cases in. We would have been in big trouble
if Bob hadn't persuaded his superiors that this would
be bad publicity for Western intelligence.
Bob's people made the police drop the inquiry. I
guess in those days it was an occupied city and the
Germans had to do what the Americans told them.
He got the whole thing covered up and the investigation was
dropped.
  This is what he told me that morning. He also
swore me to secrecy. I was to tell no one, not
even you, that I knew what he had done. He
didn't want anyone to think he had perverted the
course of justice, and he didn't want you to know that
I'd been told about your involvement in the tunnel.
You remember how scrupulous he was about his job.
So all that was happening that morning, and then you turned
up right in the middle of it, suspicious and looking
really terrible. I wanted to tell you we were
safe, but I didn't want to break my promise.
I don't know why. It might have saved a lot of
sadness if I had.
  Then a few days later there was Tempelhof. I
knew what you were thinking, and you were so very very wrong. Now
I am writing it down I realize just how much I
want you to hear me and believe me. I want you
to receive this letter. The truth is that Bob was running all
over town that day with
  his security investigation. He wanted to say
goodbye to you and he got to the airport late. He
bumped into me as I was on my way up to the roof
to wave to you. That's all it was. I wrote to you and
tried to explain without breaking my promise to Bob.
You never answered me properly. I thought of coming
to London to find you, but I knew I could not bear it
if you turned me away. The months passed and you
stopped answering my letters. I told myself that what
we had been through together had made it impossible for us
to get married. I had a friendship then with Bob, for
my part based mostly on gratitude. Slowly that
turned to affection. Time played its part too, and I
was lonely. Nine months after you left Berlin I
began an affair with Bob. I buried my feelings
for you as deep as I could. The next year,
in July 1957, we were married in New York.
  He always spoke very fondly of you. He used
to say we would come and look you up in England one day.
I don't Iknow if I could ever have faced that. Bob
died the year
  before last of a heart attack while on a fishing
trip. His death hit the girls hard, it hit us
all very hard and it devastated our youngest, Rosie.
He was a wonderful father to the girls. Faitherhood
suited him, it softened him. He never lost that
  Iwonderful bouncing energy. He was always so
playful. When
  caret the gills were tiny it was a marvel to watch
him. He was so
  Ipopular here, his funeral was a major event in
the town, and
  I was very proud of him.
  I'm telling you this because I want you to know that I'm
not sorry I married Bob Glass. I'm not
pretending either that we didn't also have some awful times.
Ten years ago we were both drinking a lot and there were
other things too. But we were coming through that, I think.
I'm losing my thread. There are too many things I
want to tell you. I sometimes think about that Mr.
Blake from downstairs who came to our
engagement party. George Blake. I was amazed
when he was put up for trial all those years ago,
1960 or '61. Then he escaped from prison, and
then Bob found out that one of the
secrets he gave away was your tunnel. He was
right in on it from the beginning, at the planning stage.
The Russians knew all about it before the first
shovelful had been dug out. So much wasted effort!
Bob used to say that knowing that made him all the
happier that he had got out. He said they must have
diverted their most important messages away from
those telephone lines, and that they left the tunnel in
place to protect Blake and waste CIA time and
manpower. But why did they break in when they did,
right in the middle of our troubles?
It was late afternoon when I began this letter and now it's
dark outside. I've stopped a few times to think
about Bob, and about Rosie who still can't let him go,
and about you and me and all the lost time and the misunderstanding.
It's funny to be writing this to a stranger thousands of
miles away. I wonder what's happened to your
life. When I think of you, I don't only think
of the terrible thing with Otto. I think of my kind and
gentle Englishman who knew so little about women and
who learned so beautifully! We were so
easy together, it was such fun. Sometimes it's as if
I'm remembering a childhood. I want to ask
you, do you remember this, do you remember that? When we
biked out to the lakes at weekends to swim, when we
bought my engagement ring from that huge Arab (i still have
that ring) and when we used to dance at the Resi. How
we were the jiving champions and won a prize, the
carriage clock that's still up in our attic. When
I first saw you with that rose behind your ear and I sent you
a message down the tube. When you made that
wonderful speech at our party and Jenny-do you
remember my friend Jenny-who made off with that radio
man whose name I can't recall. And wasn't Bob
going to give a speech that evening too? I loved you
dearly, and I never got closer to anyone. I
don't think it dishonors Bob's memory to say
that. In my experience, men and women don't ever
really get to understand each other. What we had was
really quite special. It's true and I can't let this
life go by without
  saying that, without setting it down. If I
remember you rightly you should be frowning by now and saying,
she's so sentimental!
  Sometimes I've been angry with you. It was wrong
of you to retreat with your anger and silence. So
English! So male! If you felt betrayed you should
have stood your ground and fought for what was yours. You should
have accused me, you should have accused Bob. There would have
been a fight, and we would have gotten to the bottom of
it. But I know really that it was your pride that made you
slink away. It was the same pride that kept me from
coming to London to make you marry me. I couldn't
face the possibility of failure.
  It's odd that this familiar creaky old house is
unknown to you. It's white clapboard, surrounded
by oak trees, with a flagpole in the yard erected
by Bob. I'll never leave here now, even though it's
way too big. The girls have all their childhood
things here. Tomorrow Diane, our middle daughter, is
visiting with her baby. She's the first to produce.
Laura had a miscarriage last year. Diane's
husband is a mathematician. He's very tall, and the
way he sometimes pushes his glasses up his nose with
his pinky reminds me of you. Do you remember when I
swiped your glasses to make you stay? He's also a
brilliant tennis player, which doesn't remind
me of you at all!
  I'm rambling again and it's getting late. What
I mean is, these days I get tired early in the
evening and I don't feel I should be
apologizing for it either. But I feel reluctant
to end this one-sided conversation with you, wherever you are and
whatever you've become. I don't want to consign this
letter to the void. It won't be the first I've written
to you that received no reply. I know I'll have to take
my chances. If all " this seems irrelevant
to your life now and you don't want to reply, or if
the memories are somehow inconvenient, please at
least let your twenty-five-year-old self accept
these greetings from an old friend. And if this letter is
going nowhere and is never opened and never read, please
God, grant us
  forgiveness for our terrible deed and be a witness to and
  bless our love as it was.
  Yours, Maria Glass
  He stood and dusted down his suit and folded the
letter away, and then began a slow stroll around the
compound. He trampled weeds to get to the place where
his own room had been. Now it was a patch of oily
sand. He walked on around to look at the twisted
pipes and smashed gauges of a basement boiler
room. Right under his feet were fragments of pink-and-
white tiles he remembered from the shower rooms.
He looked over his shoulder. The border guards in
their tower had lost interest in him. The
radio music from the weekend-home garden had
changed to old-fashioned rock and roll. He still had
a taste for it, and he remembered this one, "Whole
Lotta Shakin" Goin' On." It had never been
a great favorite of his, but she had liked it.
He wandered back past the gaping trench toward the inner
perimeter fence. Two steel girders had been
placed to warn trespassers of a concrete-lined hole
filled with black water. It was the old cesspit,
whose drainage field the sergeants had tunneled
through. So much wasted effort.
  He was at the fence now, looking through it across the
hummocky wasteland to the Wall. Rising above it were
the trees of the cemetery in full leaf. His time and
her time, like so much unbuilt-on land. There was a
cycling path running along this side of the Wall, right
at its base. A group of children were calling to each
other as they pedaled by. It was hot. He had
forgotten this clammy Berlin heat. He had been
right, he had needed to come all this way to understand her
letter. Not to Adalbertstrasse, but here, among the
ruins. What he had not been able to grasp in his
Surrey breakfast room was clear enough here.
  He knew what he was going to do. He loosened his
tie and pressed a handkerchief to his
forehead. He looked behind him. There was a fire
hydrant beside the teetering sentry box. How he
missed Glass too, the hand on his elbow and
"Listen, Leon

ard!" Glass softened by fatherhood-he would have liked
to have seen that. Leonard knew what he was going to do,
he knew he was about to leave, but the urgency was not on
him yet, and the heat pressed down. The radio was
playing jolly German pop music again in strict
two-four time. The volume seemed to be rising.
Up in the tower a border guard took a languid
peek through his binoculars at the gentleman in a dark
suit dawdling by the fence and then turned away to speak
to his companion.
Leonard had been holding on to the fence. Now he
let his hand drop and made his way back along the
side of the big trench, through the perimeter gates,
across the weeds to the low white wall. Once he was
over, he took off his jacket and folded it over his
arm. He walked quickly, and that created a little
breeze on his face. His footsteps were marking the
pace of his thoughts. If he had been younger, he
might have broken into a run along
Lettbergerstrasse. He thought he
remembered from the old days when he traveled for his
company. He would probably need a flight
to O'Hare, in Chicago, where he could pick up the
local service. He would send no warning, he was
prepared to fail. He would emerge from the shade between the
oak trees, he would pass by the white flagpole
on his way across the sunlit lawn to the front
door. Later he would tell her the radio man's
name and remind her that Bob Glass did give a
speech that night, a fine one too, about building a
new Europe. And he would answer her question: they
broke into the tunnel when they did because Mr.
Blake told his Russian controller that a young
Englishman was about to deposit decoding equipment
down there for one day only. And she would tell him about
the jiving competition, of which he had no memory, and
they would bring down the carriage clock from the attic
and wind it up and set it going again.
He had to stop on the corner of NeuDecker Weg
and stand in the shade of a sycamore. They would return
to Berlin together, that was the only way. The heat was
intense, and there was still half a mile to the Rudow
U-Bahn. He closed his eyes and leaned back
against the young trunk. It could take his weight.
  They would visit the old places and be
amused by the changes, and yes, they would go out
to Potsdamerplatz one day and climb the wooden
platform and take a good long look at the Wall
together, before it was all torn down.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
  The Berlin Tunnel, or Operation Gold, was a
joint CIA-MI6 venture that operated for just under a
year, until April 1956. William
Harvey, the CIA station chief, was in charge.
George Blake, who was living at
Platanenallee 26 from April 1955 on,
probably betrayed the project as early as
1953, when he was secretary to a planning
committee. All other characters in this novel are
fictional. Most of the events are too, although I am
indebted to David C. Martin's account of the
tunnel in his excellent book,
Wilderness of Mirrors.
The site as described in Chapter 23 was how I
found it in May 1989.
  I wish to thank Bernhard Robben, who
translated the German and researched extensively
in Berlin, and Dr. M. Dunnill, University
Lecturer in Pathology, Merton College,
Andreas Landshoff, and Timothy
Garton-Ash for their helpful comments. I would like
to thank in particular my friends Galen Strawson and
Craig Raine for their close readings of the
typescript and many useful suggestions.
  . M.
Oxford September 1989
ABTHEAUTHOR
IAN McEwan was born in 1948 and began
writing in 1970. His first book,
First Love, Last Rites,
a collection of short stories, won the Somerset
Maugham Award in 1976. His second
collection of short stories,
In Between the Sheets,
was published in 1979. Among his other works are
three novels,
The Cement Garden
(1978),
The Comfort ofStrangers
(1981), and
The Child In Time
(1987), and a book of television dramas,
The Imitation Game less-than but Other Plays
(1982).
Mr. McEwan lives in Oxford,
England, with his wife and their four children.
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