The Innocent (6 page)

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.”

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
Spätheimkehrer
, 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. “…
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 Schöner
, 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.

H
er 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 Düsseldorf 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
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.”