The Last Compromise (5 page)

‘There’s
only one school in the whole town?’

‘It’s
the European school. They teach in almost all the languages. If your kids speak
for example Swedish at home, they go to a class with other Swedish-speaking
children and they have a teacher from Sweden. It also makes it easier to go
back, because your kids can continue and finish school in the normal Swedish
system. And it’s a good school.’

‘I
see.’ Hans knew from colleagues that the main logistical challenge in a new job
was not getting familiar with the work or finding an apartment. It was the
school and the day-care for the children. Now he heard it confirmed once again.
He said, ‘Okay, anything else?’

‘No.’

Hans
was still holding the receiver to his ear. Viktor had hung up.

Luxembourg

Zayek
had finished high school in his German home town in the mid-nineties, which had
been a perfect moment, geopolitically speaking. The Cold War had been over, but
Germany had not yet abolished conscription, and had still been drafting young
men for about a year into either military service or an alternative civilian
service. Russia, meanwhile, had no longer been what it used to be in Soviet
times, but it still had retained some of its appeal as a vaguely evil power. The
black navy fur hats with the red stars, later replaced by golden double-headed
eagles; the rusting but impressively heavy submarines and the crumbling
concrete facilities in the snow. Perhaps this appeal was just something Russia
had inherited, not something it had genuinely deserved or had actually earned
at the time. It had been relatively benign, or just toothless, on the
international arena. However it still had nuclear weapons, and a foreign
intelligence service, and certain interests that it sought to promote. And
movies had still exploited all this to great effect, even or in fact
particularly in the nineties, with the camera swinging over the Kremlin to the
thundering chant of an army choir. And the intelligence gathering back then would
have been much the same as it had been in the Cold War. Less of the expensive
technology perhaps, compared with America, except for old spy satellites maybe,
but instead more of human intelligence. Contacts, sleepers, informants. That
was the real stuff. Like Yul Brynner playing a Soviet defector who wasn’t a
defector at all, but an operative sent to harm Western agencies by falsely
denouncing their loyal members as double agents. Or that Brandauer movie, where
the Russians wanted to provoke the Americans into telling them what they wanted
to know from a source, in the hope that they would reveal what they
didn’t
know so the Russians could infer from that what they
did
know.

When
it came to choosing sides, for Zayek it had clearly been Russia. Working for
Germany’s own BND, the foreign intelligence agency, while still living inside
Germany itself would have been pointless. And Zayek had felt no connection to
America, the banal leader of the West. No, it had to be Russia. You could spy
for the Russians in the nineties without leaving your country, and it would still
be a crime, but a much more harmless crime than it would have been during the Cold
War. And an intelligent crime, too.

And
so he had gotten himself recruited into the German army, rather than into the
civilian service, in order to make photocopies of maps and technical drawings
and lists of names and numbers, and pass them on to the Russians. At least that
had been his plan, because at that point he hadn’t established any contact with
any Russian agency yet. He’d wanted to approach them from within the army. His
parents had felt visibly uncomfortable when he had come to visit them on
weekends wearing his camouflage uniform and his heavy boots. They would have
been happier had he entered the civilian service. But he had accepted this as a
price to be paid. At the age of twelve or thirteen he had read the memoirs of a
German spymaster, an old Nazi basically, who, with American help, had built up
the West German BND after the war. And Zayek had remembered a phrase: ‘You
sacrifice everything, your marriage, your health, and at the end you look back
and see nothing but the ruins of a broken life.’ Or something like that. Brilliant.

JRC-PRR,
0-26-9, uranium-235, 55.3, 6623

JRC-PRR,
0-26-9, uranium-235, 51.2, 6656

Save

Whether
his parents approved or disapproved of his subsequent life choices didn’t
matter much now. His mother had died eight years ago, and by that time he
hadn’t been talking much to his father anyway. Now he certainly didn’t. The man
was living with a new wife somewhere. And since Zayek didn’t have any brothers
or sisters, his old German identity was completely gone. He had notified his
town authorities that he was moving abroad, to Luxembourg, which had been more
or less true. Now he wasn’t a missing person, he was just registered as having
moved abroad with an unspecified address. And at his current residence in
Wincheringen on the river Mosel he had registered under his new Bulgarian
identity. His passport was clearly the result of some sort of manipulation,
because the picture in it was his own, but for the rest it was perfectly valid.
When it expired he’d just prolong it. Or maybe apply for German citizenship;
how bizarre would that be, to ask to have your real nationality back.

‘Anneli!’,
he shouted through the open doors, putting a smile into his voice just like she
had done in the morning. ‘You want a coffee?’

‘Yes,
let’s go and have coffee,’ Anneli said, quietly. She had been standing in his
open doorway.

Zayek
looked up to her with his eyes wide open. He was somewhat surprised. ‘Okay,
great!’

Good
thing he hadn’t smoked in the car, because now he was smelling just fine.

It was getting
late, and Hans was stuck. People had been walking past his open office door all
day, some of them had come in for a brief chat. He’d even thought of closing
the door at some point.

At
first he had been considering to simply ask around, like normal people within
the Commission would have done. Everybody knew someone. Except he could hardly
just ask around without drawing attention, suspicion even. Hello, I’m from
anti-fraud, do you know who exactly draws up the nuclear reports? Yes, but who
actually is the first person to receive the raw data? No, don’t worry, it’s just
a routine question, please don’t call your boss.

It
was the same for Viktor over in Luxembourg, who was surely known to be
associated with anti-fraud. And he didn’t want to ask Tienhoven to contact some
fellow boss at atomic energy. Then he had briefly talked to Julia on his mobile
phone, a few minutes of conversation during an afternoon break, their voices
transmitted electronically across the continent. He had suggested that she
should call the atomic energy department from her place, pretending to be a
journalist for a local paper, or something like that. Over the landline, it
would show up as an international call, completely from outside. She had gotten
angry with him, about his stupid games, about her having a lot of work, why
didn’t he just date his boss, you child.

Now
Hans stared blankly at his screen which had long returned to sleep mode.

He
had met Julia at a student dorm. It had been a decrepit former hotel that had
been due for demolition already a decade earlier, but it had still provided
something of a communal home for a few of his friends. And for some of hers,
too, it had turned out. He’d seen her a few times there and had talked to her
only briefly. Then, one night, they’d all been baking pizza together, and Hans
and Julia had been assigned the task of cutting up salami and vegetables.
They’d stood next to each other, alone in the small kitchen, while in the room
next door the others had been enthusiastically trying to open a can of maize
with a beer bottle before trying it the other way around. When Hans had rested
his hand on the kitchen table Julia had gently touched the nail of his index
finger with the tip of her own index finger. He’d kissed her on the lips. Then
he’d kissed her again, and she had opened her mouth a little. It had been an
overwhelming sensation.

He’d
felt obliged to spend the rest of the pizza evening sitting next to her. And to
call her the next day. They’d had some more overwhelming moments after that
night at the dorm. But not too many, in proportion to the number of years that
had followed. And now, for the third year in a row, they even lived in
different countries, seeing each other only during holidays or on some extended
weekends. Hans was firmly based in Brussels. What was he supposed to do? What
was he doing here?

He
was born and raised in Estonia, the new generation. Too young to really
remember the Soviet days. Yes, my name is Hans. No, it’s an Estonian name. Yes,
it’s also a German name. No, I’m not German. Yes, from Estonia. No, not Latvia,
the one above Latvia. Yes, right next to Russia. No, Estonian is not very
similar to Russian. Yes, it is very similar to Finnish. Yes, it’s great that
Estonia is part of the European Union now. He had been explaining it a lot,
patiently, cheerfully, sharing hearty laughs about the silly confusion every
time as if he’d been explaining it for the first time in his life. And he would
keep explaining it patiently and cheerfully until the day he would die. But right
now he was at the heart of that very European Union which his native country
had joined, right here in Brussels. And he was meant to do his job.

He
was doing it well. And he was doing it correctly, too. To get the Tallinn
harbour extension file, for example, he’d had to sign an extra declaration
about there being no conflicts of interest, since the case concerned his home
country. He’d made an honest declaration. That was more than could be said of
the director who’d hired her own nephew. Who had hired a consultant who was
suspected to be her nephew, to be precise, soon they’d know for sure.

Hans
looked at the phone sitting next to his dormant screen. Time to call in some
favours with a fellow countryman. He looked up and dialled the number, and
waited for Siim to pick up his phone.

‘Siim
Kruuse.’

Hans
greeted him, ‘Tere Siim, kuidas läheb?’

‘Tere
Hans. Thanks, I’m fine. Your number suppression keeps creeping me out, though.’

‘How
about a beer or two?’

‘Or
three? Murphy’s, like last time?’

‘Perfect,
at eight?’

‘Let’s
say nine, I have to wrap up some stuff here. And I’ll leave the car at work, too.
There are twenty construction sites around our building now, I’m faster on
foot. And freer.’

‘All
right, see you there!’

‘Sure
thing, bye!’

Hans
hung up. Siim didn’t exactly owe him any favours. None at all, in fact. But
they were both Estonian expats of the same generation. They may not necessarily
have met, let alone gone out for beers, back in Estonia. While Hans had been at
the chief prosecutor’s office, Siim had been working at the Tallinn branch of a
Swedish bank. Yet here in Brussels they were compatriots from a tiny nation of not
even one and a half million people, inside a European Union of half a billion
inhabitants. Ties that bind. Besides, Siim had actually turned out to be a
likeable guy.

Hans
didn’t have much to wrap up for the moment, and he would obviously walk, too,
since he had a driver’s licence but no car. There just was no need for one here
in Brussels, he went to and from work either by bus or on foot. He decided to
leave the office, take a long walk and have a kebap at the Turkish place
halfway between anti-fraud and Murphy’s. He knew that Siim would do something
similar before coming to meet him.

***

They
sat at a corner table made of dark heavy oak, in the pleasant gloominess of an Irish
pub not far from the European quarter of Brussels. The place was called ‘Not
Murphy’s’, an attempt at being somewhat witty about naming your pub which, Hans
thought, wasn’t even bad. Or not very bad. People nevertheless called it
Murphy’s, obviously. There was happy but unobtrusive Irish folk music, and
cheerful chatter, and darkness, and warmth. And there was dark, cool, frothy
Guinness from the tap. Hans didn’t particularly like it, but he did like the
combination of it all, which to him included the taste of the beer. And if it
was fresh and cold, like it was in this place, it was quite drinkable. The
glass standing in front of him on the heavy oak was absolutely fine, for
instance. But then it wasn’t his first tonight. It wasn’t Siim’s first, either.

‘So
here’s to our mutual fatherland,’ Siim said, toasting. They both had a swig.

Siim
was from the north of Estonia, a town between Tallinn and the Russian border.
Hans was from Tartu in the south. They had met in Brussels, at the housewarming
party of a mutual acquaintance of theirs, a girl from Denmark. Afterwards Siim had
gone on spending a lot of time at that flat. He had fallen in love with the
Danish girl’s flatmate.

‘How’s
life at transport, still doing the railway thing?’

‘What
do you mean ‘still’,’ Siim protested. ‘Now it’s getting political, which is the
sexy part.’

Siim
was working in the policy department for transport and infrastructure. Their current
big project was European legislation on common standards for the certification
of train engineers and railway crews. The point was to make sure countries
recognised each other’s training and certificates, so that international trains
would not have to change crews every time they crossed a border between two European
countries. A classical example of European legislation making cross-border exchanges
easier and bringing costs down, Hans had thought the first time he had heard
about it. The countries were getting real value for money out of the organisation
they had founded.

‘The
draft texts and the impact assessments are all ready,’ Siim continued. ‘That’s
the Commission’s part of the job. To work out a proposal, as usual. The
European Parliament likes it, or most of them do, which is good enough. But now
the national governments of the member countries themselves must decide whether
they want it or not.’

Siim
took just a small sip, because he wanted to keep talking.

‘And
they are all in favour
in principle
,’ he continued. ‘But then they all
come and want an exception for themselves. They want their drivers to be able
to cross into other countries, but they don’t want drivers from abroad on their
own rails in return. They want exceptions for their train drivers’ unions or
some other lobbies. Or they want to change the common training standards. Some
countries don’t want to bring their existing national standards down, others
don’t want high standards imposed on them. The British don’t want any of it,
they say we’re an island and most of our railroad traffic is purely internal.
Which is true, in fact, but they threaten to ruin it for the rest as well.’

Hans
took a swig and suppressed a little burp.

‘What’s
Estonia saying?’, Hans asked.

‘Estonia
is a small country. They only open their mouth when it really matters to them. Border
security, yes. Customs duties on external trade, yes. Energy independence from
Russia, yes. They’re all in favour of more renewable energy sources. Even
nuclear power is better than Russian gas. But on railroads they’re fine either
way. Happy to play along.’ Siim took a big swig, and breathed out. ‘Happy to be
inside to begin with. After such a century.’

Hans
didn’t say anything, he didn’t even nod. That wasn’t necessary. He knew Siim’s
family history, Siim had told him. When Stalin invaded Estonia, the Soviets first
deported some of their family members to Siberia, where half of them died. Then
they drafted Siim’s grandfather into the Red Army. A year later Nazi Germany
invaded the Soviet Union, marching through Estonia along the way. More
deportations followed. The neighbours got rounded up because they were Jews,
and they never came back.

Hans
took another swig, and held his breath. He knew his own family history, too. Hans’s
grandfather got grabbed by the Germans, not by the Red Army. They drafted him into
their very own Estonian legion to help them fight the Soviets. So both
grandfathers, Siim’s and Hans’s, without knowing each other, found themselves
fighting on opposing sides. Shooting at each other, presumably. Very likely
even, because when the fighting reached Estonia again, both sides put their
respective Estonians in the front line, telling them to go liberate their beloved
land from the vicious invaders.

Hans
breathed out slowly through his nose. At the end of the war Hans’s grandfather
became a prisoner of war, since he was found wearing a German uniform. The
Soviets put him on a cattle train and shipped him to their deadly labour camps.
They also grabbed Siim’s grandfather, a Soviet lieutenant by then, and put him
on a cattle train to Siberia, too. He was taken there along with many other victorious
Soviet soldiers. These soldiers had been to Western Europe, after all, in the
course of their push for Berlin. They had seen the living standards of workers
in even the poorest capitalist countries, which even in wartime could not possibly
have corresponded to what they’d been told by the Soviet government all their
lives. And Estonians like Siim’s grandfather were deemed unreliable Soviet
citizens anyway. So they went into the Gulag. Both grandfathers survived the
camps, and both returned to Estonia, which was again under firm Soviet control.
A freshly liberated constituent part of the Soviet Union. Estonian partisan
groups called the forest brothers held out in the woods for a few years, but
theirs had been a lost cause from the start. Estonia would remain Soviet for
another forty years.

Siim
and Hans both knew most of their respective stories from aunts or uncles, or
from neighbours. Hans’s grandfather had died before he was born anyway. But
even if he hadn’t, the grandfathers had kept their mouths firmly shut. Old
Estonians were not the most talkative bunch on the best of days, but when it
came to the war, many of them fell even more silent than they already were.

‘We
got into the European Union at a fortunate moment,’ Hans said quietly. ‘And into
NATO as well, which is maybe even more important. When Russia was behaving like
a more or less normal country.’

‘Maybe
that wasn’t normal. Maybe the nineties were abnormal, and now they’re back to
normal again.’ Siim put his glass down. ‘Some normal, though. Do they never
wonder why no normal country wants to be friends with them voluntarily? It’s
all Irans and Syrias and North Koreas.’

In
fact Hans had seen it with several Russians he knew personally. Neighbours, Russian
classmates at school and their parents. His own maternal grandmother, too. She
had married his other grandfather in the fifties and then lived all her life in
Estonia, but she was originally from Russia, making Hans a quarter Russian. The
logic of their reasoning was always more or less the same. The Russian national
spirit seemed to harbour an ambivalent but real desire to be a bit like
America. There was a conviction that securing national borders and creating a
safe geostrategic space was a normal and legitimate thing for a country to do,
just like America did. America bullied everybody, meddled in other countries, toppled
governments, sold weapons to its clients, cited human rights only when it
suited its interests, pushed around its impotent so-called allies in Europe,
and it lied to them and it spied and it hacked into their servers and it read
their e-mails. And in Russia there was a deep frustration about how the
Americans managed to do it and get away with it, even be genuinely liked. While
Russia, when it was doing exactly the same thing, was inevitably pictured as a
violent alcoholic who broke the rules of the civilised world. Maybe Russia did
it too clumsily, too directly. Not smartly enough in an age of mass media. But
the game surely was the same for all countries, large or small. Russia just
happened to be bigger than others. So it behaved like big countries were
entitled to behave, and like other big countries in fact did behave.