Another Kind of Country (41 page)

‘It’s dangerous,’ Dieter said. ‘Our passenger?’

‘He won’t bother us,’ the general said.

Rosa looked then, adjusted the rear-view mirror, tried to focus on the hooded figure in the back seat. The hood slipped and she saw the face of her nightmare. She shivered; the car jolted to a holt.

‘It’s OK.’ The general’s voice was husky, comforting. ‘It’s OK,’ he said again. ‘Are you able to drive?’

She turned the mirror away, nodded to Reder.

‘I’m OK, Papa.’
It’s not the first time I’ve sat in a car with a body in the back. I ought to be glad he’s there, lifeless, propped up between my lover and my oldest living friend, but I’m not. The killing has to stop some time
.

She rounded a
corner, swung the Volvo west. Miller caught her eye in the rear-view mirror, tried to smile. He wondered at her, at himself. Rosa knew – he could read it in her eyes – that their passenger was a corpse.
And you – you’ve seen a man killed tonight and still you sit there as if you’d witnessed nothing more significant than a minor traffic accident
.

It’s this city, Miller told himself, as they moved through the dark streets. He’d been forced to come here – allowed himself to be forced – but still he’d arrived in Berlin full of hope, full of heart. And after nine years he could sit beside a fresh corpse without fear or concern. Somewhere along the way he’d lost a piece of himself and the thought crossed his mind that that piece might be gone for good. He looked at Rosa, at the dark hair escaping from under the peaked cap, saw the tender curve of her cheek and the way her fingers curled on the steering wheel and Miller told himself, maybe you’ve lost something but you’ve also found something precious here. Hold on to what you’ve found and you’ll find yourself again.

He reached forward and touched her dark hair and Rosa half turned and smiled at him. It was enough.

As they neared the Wall and its environs the night air began to throb with a kind of humming and the sky seemed brighter. Rosa let the window down; from ahead came the murmur of many voices. Hundreds of voices, maybe more. And the lights were spreading, up and out into the night sky. They heard laughter, shouts. Torch beams flashed across the sky. Car horns blared, honked in unrehearsed concert. And yet somehow rehearsed.

In the middle of
the road, caught in the beam of the Volvo, two men linked elbows and swung each other crazily, faces broad with laughter, beer bottles raised in their free hands. On the pavement, looking baffled and confused, a Vopo stood watching with folded arms. He caught sight of the Volvo and spread his hands, palms out:
what can I do?

‘Should we turn back, Papa?’ As they nosed ahead, the press of people was thickening.

‘No.’ General Reder looked back at Dieter. ‘Our friend should also go west if the crossing is open.’

Dieter nodded. Better if the crap is found on a Western doorstep.

The crowd was greatest along the Potsdamer Platz, right up to the Brandenburg Gate in the forbidden zone. The gate was illuminated; its great horizontal arch, scarred and wounded in the war, was lit up in a noonday blaze. The spotlights were beamed from the Western side of the wall.

‘Why now?’

Nobody could answer Dieter’s question.

‘The flag is still there,’ General Reder said, pointing to the banner of the GDR on top of the gate. In the cold, calm night the flag hung limp against the white pole.

‘But for how long?’

Nobody answered Miller’s question either.

Rosa swung the car away from the crowds.

‘It might be easier at Charlie,’ she said.

No place was easy that night. Crowds were surging towards the checkpoints from all sides.

‘We need to get out of this car,’ Dieter said.

The crowd was loud, animated. Whoops of joy punctuated the steady hum of noise. But you never knew; even amid such excitement the sight of the Volvo might tip high spirits into violence.

Rosa spotted an open gate, pulled into a dark yard. The smell of garbage clogged the night. She coasted the car to a halt beside the rubbish bins, looked questioningly at General Reder.

‘Our
friend,’ he pointed at Dover’s remains, ‘is going to walk through Checkpoint Charlie.’ He looked at Dieter, at Miller. ‘I’m not able to do this.’ They could hear the apology in Reder’s voice. ‘Can you handle it?’

They manhandled Dover out of the car on Dieter’s side. Rosa stood apart. Miller and Dieter held Dover upright while Reder drew the hood of the parka lower over the waxen face. Reder fastened all the toggles on the coat, bent to pull the ends of the parka below the knees. The heavy parka concealed the faint ooze of blood from Dover’s torso. Reder was wheezing from the effort.

‘Papa.’ Rosa turned to him. ‘Let me.’

She tried not to look at the face as she arranged the coat below Dover’s knees. Reder whispered his thanks, knew what it had cost her.

The weight astonished Miller. He grunted, locking his right arm more tightly around Dover’s shoulder.

‘Gently,’ Dieter said. ‘It’s easier if we lift rather than pull and drag.’

Their bizarre procession seemed an organic element of the sea of people borne towards Checkpoint Charlie. Rosa and General Reder linked arms, walked ahead of Miller and Dieter with their lumpen cargo. Their neighbours in the crowd, good-humoured, joshed them about the drunken companion being carried between them.

‘Pissed!’ someone said.

‘Pissed on freedom!’ his neighbour said.

Someone was pushed too close, wrinkled his nose.

‘He’s not just pissed, he shat himself as well!’

Miller
and Dieter joined in the laughter. They stopped a number of times, pressed close to the wall, Rosa and Reder shielding them from the crowd as they changed shoulders.

‘Careful now.’ Dieter’s whisper barely audible in the throng.

Ahead lay Checkpoint Charlie. The roundabout queuing system had been abandoned; now the press of people pushed forward towards the West across a wide, single front. The border guards, under the lights, looked pale, puzzled.

‘They’re not checking everyone’s ID.’ Miller, taller than the others, could see over the heads. If the Grepos tried to hold back the crowd to check every ID, he thought, there’d be a riot.

They reached the head of the line, felt themselves scrutinized by the four Grepos on duty. No eye contact. Miller looked beyond the guards, at the lighted West, hoisted Dover higher on his shoulder, heard himself tell a corpse – loudly – to sober up, saw Rosa and the general ease back a step as if to obscure Miller and Dieter and their lifeless burden.

It wasn’t working. One of the Grepos was advancing purposefully, small eyes fixed on Dover.

‘Herr Miller!’ The advancing Grepo was almost shouldered aside by a beaming Sergeant Heinz-Peter Reibert. ‘You are enjoying a night out with your friends?’ Heinz-Peter looked as if he’d been doing a little celebrating himself. Cap pushed back on his head, cheeks flushed. He stood close to Miller, smiling. ‘And your friend here has enjoyed himself a little too much, maybe?’

Miller held his breath as Heinz-Peter turned to Dover. Heinz-Peter flinched as the smell hit him. He turned his gaze on Miller, on the general and Rosa; he looked at Dieter, once more at Miller. In Heinz-Peter’s eyes Miller could read puzzlement, even alarm. He saw the shoulders shrug in the greatcoat, saw the smile gleam in the frank eyes:
on this night, Herr Miller, it’s not my business
.

‘Have a good
time on the Ku’damm, my friends!’ Heinz-Peter winked at Miller, waved them through.

‘I don’t know what went on there,’ Dieter said out of the side of his mouth to Miller, ‘but thank you.’

Miller smiled.
Thank God for toiletries and sweets for the children
.

On the Western side they were engulfed by welcoming crowds. More car horns blaring. Someone trying to blow a bugle. Laughter, shouts, a medley of sound rising to the Berlin sky. Someone yelled the slogan of the candle-lit demonstrations, and the mass of people took up the chant: ‘
Wir sind ein Volk!
’ The lines of people still on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie joined in, voices swelling in unison: ‘
Wir sind ein Volk!
’

We are all one people!

Miller looked back: the Grepos weren’t chanting, they were motionless, statues marooned at a checkpoint that was no longer a crossing point but a meeting place.

‘We have to get rid of this!’ Dieter’s voice urgent.

They pushed on through the crowd, past outstretched hands, past smiling faces, beer bottles proffered, hellos in the night. Even a bubbling bottle of Sekt.

And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the sea of hands and faces eddied them into a long, narrow street, a fjord clawed between the backs of houses and lock-up garages. The silence silenced them. They went forward hesitantly into the dark culde-sac, as though fearful of what they might find.

What they found was a garden bench with scrolled, rusted, iron legs and the green paint peeling from its wooden laths. Incongruous, marooned in a slime of mud and wet rubbish, the bench was pushed against the high stone wall that blocked the end of the alley.

‘It was
waiting for him,’ Dieter said.

They laid Dover there, silent on the bench, wrapped in Klaus Kneesestrecke’s parka, facing the dark wall where the sun would never reach. It might be days – weeks – before the remains of Herbert Dover were discovered.

In silence they trooped back to the bright street. It was almost midnight yet the city seemed to sing – to swing – to a communal rhythm.

‘Papa.’ Rosa drew General Reder into a shop doorway. ‘You look exhausted, we should get you home.’

The general’s smile was wan, tired. He shook his head. ‘Who could sleep on a night like this?’

Miller, watching, listening, saw the history of a country in the general’s tired, lined face; heard, in the general’s cancered, puzzled voice the uncertainty – the fear – of what might dawn on the morning after such a night as this.

‘Besides,’ General Reder went on, ‘Dieter and I have things to do, phone calls to make.’

Dieter nodded. ‘The sooner the better.’ He stopped, looked at Rosa and Miller. Miller knew.
Soon
would not come soon;
soon
was a date postponed until the smoke had cleared and the lie of a new, uncertain land could be measured, studied.

‘A taxi on a night like this . . .’ General Reder was musing aloud.

‘The S-Bahn is running.’ Dieter was smiling. ‘No matter if the Wall is open, the trains don’t let you down here.’

‘But Papa—’

Reder hushed Rosa. ‘There are things we have to do, Rosa, you know that.’

On the street someone let off a firecracker and all four of them jumped, frightened, then looked skyward to gaze at the comet of colourful stars soaring into the night above the unsleeping city.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Rosa said.

The technicoloured
stars fizzled out, vanished in the darkness.

‘It doesn’t last long,’ Dieter said, almost to himself.

‘I wonder,’ Miller said, ‘if the open crossings will be as short-lived.’

‘I don’t think so.’ General Reder was still looking skyward. ‘After this there’s no going back.’

‘All the more reason, Hans,’ Dieter said, ‘that you and I should get moving.’

‘But where must you go, Papa? And when will you be home?’

‘I’ll be home tomorrow, child, unless,’ he paused, shrugged, ‘unless I’m not. Patrick will stay with you, yes?’ Miller nodded. ‘Dieter and I need to get to a secure phone, we have a few calls to make.’

Reder and Dieter kissed Rosa, shook hands with Miller.

Rosa leaned into Miller’s body as they watched the two older men make their way to the station on the next corner. Miller felt the smallness of her and wanted to shelter her; felt the warmth of her and knew there was no place else he wanted to be.

A train rumbled by, unseen, overhead, behind the street of shops and houses. Another firecracker went off; another cascade of coloured stars spilled into the night.

‘A secure phone,’ Rosa said. She was staring at the corner where General Reder and Dieter had climbed out of sight, on to the S-Bahn platform.

‘They’ll get one,’ Miller said into her hair.
Maybe in Charlottenburg, in the back-street lock-up that is regularly swept for bugs
. He could imagine soldiers, airmen, engrossed in TV and radio reports, picking up phones in Rostock and Erfurt and Karl-Marx Stadt, listening to the new orders that stood them down, put on hold whatever action had been planned.

He felt Rosa shiver in his arms, wondered if it was the cold or the unforgettable knowledge that someone had been killed that night.

‘Patrick,’ her voice
was muffled in his chest, ‘who did it? Was it Dieter or . . .?’

‘It was all of us.’ Miller drew her closer into his arms. ‘Yes, it was all of us.’

She let it go, lifted her face to be kissed.

A teenage couple with a bundle of firecrackers caught her eye, smiled at her.

‘Are
you from over there?’ the boy called. He was pointing to the East. How does he know? Rosa wondered.

She said yes, gave him a small wave.

The boy’s face broke into a broad smile; he waved to her with a firework that he was readying for the Berlin sky.

‘
Willkommen!
’ he called. ‘
Willkommen!
’

Wednesday, 3 October 1990

Berlin

The reunification
of Germany didn’t seem
to have had much impact
on ZERO. The same black walls, the same naked bulbs and cigarette-burned tables. A dinosaur refusing to die or a haven of principle too steadfast for changing?

The same old question, Miller thought; you’ve been asking it for the last year.
Give it a rest
.

The fellow behind the counter, pouring boiling water on instant coffee, was unfamiliar.

‘Heinrich sleeping it off?’ The entire population of the city seemed to have been at the knees-up along the Wall – or what remained of it – the night before, the night that East Germany ceased to exist.