Funeral in Berlin

‘I see.’ I flicked the switch on. The troop carrier glowed in the fringe of the beam. It was just a traffic cop doing a job.

‘Good night, sir.’ I saw a movement among the dozen policemen on the big open bus. By now Johnnie Vulkan had also passed me. I turned left on to Friedrichstrasse and tried to catch up with him.

Johnnie Vulkan’s Wartburg was some fifty yards ahead of me as I drove south on Friedrichstrasse. As I reached the red-striped barrier the sentry was handing Johnnie his passport and lifting the pole. The American sector was just a few feet away. He allowed the Wartburg through, then lowered the boom and walked round to me, hitching the automatic rifle over his shoulder, so that it clanged against his steel helmet. I had the passport handy. Beyond the barrier the low hardboard building that was the control post was a mass of red geraniums. In front of it two sentries exchanged words with Vulkan, then they all laughed. The laughter was loud in the still night. A blue-uniformed Grenz-polizist clattered down the steps and ran across to my car.

‘You are wanted inside,’ he said to the sentry in his shrill Saxon accent. ‘On the phone.’ He turned to me. ‘Won’t keep you a moment, sir,’ in English; ‘I am sorry for the delay,’ but he took the sentry’s automatic rifle to hold just the same.

I lit a Gauloise for myself and the Grepo, and we smoked and stared across the hundred yards that separated us from the little walled island that is West Berlin and we thought our different thoughts or maybe the same ones.

It was less than two minutes before the Vopo returned. He said would I please get out of the car and leave the keys where they were. There were three soldiers with him. They all had automatic rifles, none of which were slung on anyone’s shoulder. I got out of the car.

They walked me a few yards west on Leipziger where no one in the west sector could see us no matter how high on the ladder they were. There was a small green van parked there. On the door was a little badge and the words ‘Traffic Police’. The motor was running. I sat between the German soldiers and one of them offered me a strange-tasting cigarette which I lit from the stub of my Gauloise. No one had searched me, put on handcuffs or made a formal statement. They had merely asked me to come along; no one was using coercion. I had agreed to go.

I watched the street through the rear window. By the time we had reached Alexanderplatz I had a pretty good idea of where we were headed. A couple of blocks away was Keibelstrasse: the Polizei Praesidium.

In the cobbled centre courtyard of the Praesidium I heard the sound of half a dozen marching men. Words of command were shouted and the rhythm of the boots varied. I was in a room on the first floor. It was thirty-three steps above the main entrance, where a guard in an armoured glass cubicle must press a small button to unlock the entrance gate. The aged wooden seat upon which I sat backed up against the cream-painted wall; there were two well-thumbed copies of Neues Deutschland lying on it. To my right a large window had the view divided into square spaces by solid-looking bars. Behind the desk was a middle-aged woman, her hair drawn tightly back into a bun. Every action on the desk brought the loud rattle of a large bunch of keys. I knew there must be a way out. None of those young fellows on late-night TV would find it any sort of dilemma.

The grey-haired woman looked up. ‘Are you carrying any sort of knife or weapon?’ Her eyes glinted clearly behind the thick circular lenses.

‘No,’ I said.

She nodded and wrote something on a sheet of paper.

‘I mustn’t be late back,’ I said. Which didn’t seem so hilarious a thing to say at that time.

The grey-haired woman locked each drawer of her desk and then left the room, carefully fixing the door wide open to preclude my taking a short walk around the filing cabinet. I sat there for five minutes, maybe ten. The whole situation was curiously simple and matter-of-fact, like waiting for a driving-licence renewal at County Hall. When the grey-haired woman came back she had my passport in her hand. She gave it to me. She didn’t smile but it seemed friendly just the same.

‘Come,’ she said.

I went with her down the long cream corridor to a room at the extreme western wing of the building. The décor too was like County Hall. She tapped gently on a large door and without waiting for a reply motioned me through. It was dark inside the room with just enough light filtering through the window from the courtyard to see where the desk was. From behind the desk was a sudden red glow like an infra-red flash-bulb. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I saw that the far side of the room was filled with a silvery sheen.

‘Dorf,’ said the voice of Stok. It boomed almost like an amplifier. There was a click from his desk; the yellow tungsten light came on. Stok was sitting behind his desk almost obscured by a dense cloud of cigar smoke. There was Scandinavian-style East German furniture in the room. On the table behind me there was a Hohner simple button-key accordion, piles of newspapers, and a chessboard with some of the pieces fallen over. There was a folding bed near the wall with two army blankets on it and high leather boots placed together at the head. Near the door was a tiny sink and a cupboard that might have held clothes.

‘My dear Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘Have I caused you great inconvenience?’

He emerged from the cigar smoke in an ankle-length black leather overcoat.

‘Not unless you count being scared half to death,’ I said.

‘Ha ha ha,’ said Stok, then he exhaled another great billow of cigar smoke like a 4.6.2 pulling out of King’s Cross.

‘I wanted to contact you,’ he spoke with the cigar held between tight lips, ‘without Vulkan.’

‘Another time,’ I said, ‘write.’

There was another tap at the door. Stok moved across the room like a wounded crow. The grey-haired one brought two lemon teas.

‘There is no milk today I am afraid,’ said Stok; he drew the overcoat around him.

‘And so Russian tea was invented,’ I said.

Stok laughed again in a perfunctory sort of way. I drank the scalding hot tea. It made me feel better, like digging your finger nails into your palm does.

‘What is it?’ I said.

Stok waited while the grey-haired one closed the door behind her. Then he said, ‘Let’s stop quarrelling, shall we?’

‘You mean personally?’ I said. ‘Or are you speaking on behalf of the Soviet Union?’

‘I mean it,’ said Stok. ‘We can do far better for ourselves if we co-operate than if we obstruct each other.’ Stok paused and smiled with studied charm.

‘This scientist Semitsa is not important to the Soviet Union. We have other younger men with newer and better ideas. Your people on the other hand will think you marvellous if you can deliver him to London.’ Stok shrugged his shoulders at the idiocy of the world of politics.

‘Caveat emptor?’ I said.

‘Not half,’ said Stok in a skilful piece of idiom. ‘Buyer watch out.’ Stok rolled the cigar across his mouth and said, ‘Buyer watch out,’ a couple of times. I just drank the lemon tea and said nothing. Stok ambled across to the chessboard on the side-table, his leather coat creaking like a windjammer.

‘Are you a chess player, English?’ he said.

‘I prefer games where there’s a better chance to cheat,’ I said.

‘I agree with you,’ said Stok. ‘The preoccupation with rules doesn’t sit well upon the creative mind.’

‘Like communism?’ I said.

Stok picked up a knight. ‘But the pattern of chess is the pattern of your capitalist world. The world of bishops and castles and kings and knights.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘I’m just a pawn. I’m here in the front rank.’ Stok grinned and looked down at the board.

‘I’m a good player,’ he said. ‘Your friend Vulkan is one of the few men in Berlin who can consistently beat me.’

‘That’s because he is part of the pattern of our capitalist world.’

‘The pattern,’ said Stok, ‘has been revised. The knight is the most important piece on the board. Queens have been made … impotent. Can you say impotent of a queen?’

‘On this side of the wall you can say what you like,’ I said.

Stok nodded. ‘The knights – the generals – run your western world. General Walker of the 24th Infantry Division lectured all his troops that the President of the USA was a communist.’

‘You don’t agree?’ I asked.

‘You are a fool,’ boomed Stok in his Boris Godunov voice.

‘I am trying to tell you that these people …’ he waved the knight in my face, ‘… look after themselves.’

‘And you are jealous?’ I asked seriously.

‘Perhaps I am,’ said Stok. ‘Perhaps that’s it.’ He put the knight back and he pulled the skirt of his overcoat together.