Black Dogs (11 page)

Bernard said, ‘They’ll find a fingernail extracted from some poor wretch, clean it up and shove it in a glass case with a label. And half a mile over there, the Stasi will be cleaning out their cells too.’ The bitterness in his voice surprised me and I turned to look at him. He leaned his weight against an iron post. He looked weary, and thinner than ever, hardly more than a post himself inside his overcoat. He had been on his feet for almost three hours, and now he was drained further by residual anger from a war only the old and weak could remember at first hand.

‘You need a rest,’ I said. ‘There’s a café just up here, by Checkpoint Charlie.’

I had no idea how far it was. As I led him away, I noticed how stiff and slow his steps were. I blamed myself for my thoughtlessness. We were crossing a road chopped to a cul-de-sac by the Wall. Bernard’s face by street light was a sweaty grey and his eyes looked too bright. His big jaw, that friendliest aspect of his huge face, showed a faint tremor of senility. I was caught between the need to hurry him along towards warmth and food and the fear that he might collapse altogether. I had no idea how one summoned an ambulance in West Berlin, and here, in the derelict fringes of the border, there were no phones, and even the Germans were tourists. I asked him if he wanted to sit and rest a while but he did not seem to hear me.

I was repeating my question when I heard a car horn and a ragged cheer. The concentrated illumination of Checkpoint Charlie projected a milky halo from behind a deserted building ahead of us. Within minutes we emerged, right by the café and before us was the dream-like
slow-motion familiarity of the scene I had watched with Jenny that morning; the frontier furniture of guard-rooms, multilingual signs and stripy gates, and the well-wishers still greeting pedestrians from the east, still thumping Trabant rooftops, but with less passion now, as though to demonstrate a difference between TV drama and real life.

I had hold of Bernard’s arm as we paused to take this in. Then we edged through the crowd towards the café’s entrance. But the people we passed were in a queue. They were being let inside only as spaces became vacant. Who would want to give up a table at this hour of the night? Through windows mottled by condensation we could see the privileged eaters and drinkers wrapped in their fug.

I was about to force a way in, pleading medical necessity, when Bernard broke free and hurried away from me to cross the road towards the traffic island where most of the crowd was standing, by the American guardroom. Until then I hadn’t seen what he had seen. Later he assured me that all the elements of the situation had been in place when we first arrived, but it was only when I called after him and followed him that I saw the red flag. It was supported on a short pole, a sawn-off broomstick perhaps, held by a slight man in his early twenties. He looked Turkish. He had black curls and black clothes – a black double-breasted jacket worn over a black t-shirt and black jeans. He was strolling up and down in front of the crowd, head tipped back, the flag on its pole slanted across his shoulder. When he stepped backwards into the path of a Wartburg he refused to move, and the car was obliged to manoeuvre round him.

As a provocation it was already beginning to succeed, and this was what was drawing Bernard towards the road. The young man’s antagonists were a mixed bunch,
but what I saw in that first instant were two men in suits – business types or solicitors – right by the kerb. As the young man passed, one of them flicked him under the chin. It was not so much a blow as an expression of contempt. The romantic revolutionary jerked away and pretended nothing had happened. An old lady in a fur hat screamed a long sentence at him and raised an umbrella. She was restrained by the gentleman at her side. The flag-man raised his standard higher. The second solicitor type took a step forwards and punched out at his ear. It did not connect well, but it was enough to make the young man falter. Disdaining to touch the side of his head where the punch had landed, he continued his parade. By this time Bernard was half way across the road and I was just behind.

As far as I was concerned, the flag-man could have what he was asking for. My anxiety was for Bernard. His left knee seemed to be giving him trouble, but he was limping ahead of me at a fair pace. He had already seen what was coming next, an uglier manifestation, coming at a run from the direction of Kochstrasse. There were half a dozen of them, calling to each other as they came. I heard the words they were calling, but at the time I ignored them. I preferred to think that a long evening in the rejoicing city had starved them of action. They had seen a man punched in the head, and had been energised. They were aged between sixteen and twenty. Collectively they exuded a runtish viciousness, an extravagant air of underprivilege, with their acned pallor, shaved heads, and loose wet mouths. The Turk saw them charging towards him and tossed his head like a tango dancer and turned his back. To be out here doing this on the day of communism’s final disgrace showed either a martyr’s zeal or an unfathomable masochistic urge to be beaten up in public. It was
true that most of the crowd would have dismissed him as a crank and ignored him. Berlin was a tolerant place, after all. But tonight there was just sufficient drunkenness, and a vague sense in a few people that someone ought to be blamed for something – and the man with the flag seemed to have found them all in one place.

I drew level with Bernard and put my hand on his arm. ‘Stay out of this Bernard. You could get hurt.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said, and shook his arm free.

We arrived at the young man’s side several seconds before the kids. He smelled strongly of patchouli, which was not, to my mind, the true scent of Marxist-Leninist thought. Surely he was a fraud. I just had time to say, ‘Come on!’ and I was still tugging at Bernard’s arm when the gang arrived. He stood between the boys and their victim and spread his arms.

‘Now then,’ he said, in the old-fashioned kindly-stern voice of an English bobby. Did he really think he was too old, too tall and thin, too eminent to be hit? The kids had stopped short and were bunched up in a pack, breathing heavily, heads and tongues lolling in bemusement at this beanpole, this scarecrow in a coat who stood in their way. I saw that two of them had silver swastikas pinned to their lapels. Another had a swastika tattoo on his knuckle. I did not dare turn round to look, but I had the impression that the Turk was taking the opportunity to roll up his flag and slip away. The solicitor types, amazed by what their own violence had conjured up, had retreated deeper into the crowd to watch.

I looked around for help. An American sergeant and two soldiers had their backs to us as they walked to confer with their East German counterparts. Among the kids the bemusement was turning to anger. Suddenly two of them ran round Bernard, but the flag-man had already
forced a way through to the back of the crowd, and now he was sprinting up the road. He turned the corner into Kochstrasse, and was gone.

The two gave half-hearted pursuit, then came back to us. Bernard would have to do instead.

‘Now off you go,’ he said brightly, shooing them with the backs of his hands. I was wondering whether it was more understandable, or rather more loathsome, that these people with swastikas should be German, when the smallest of them, a pin-headed tyke in a bomber jacket, nipped forwards and kicked Bernard on the shin. I heard the thud of boot on bone. With a little sigh of surprise, Bernard folded up in sections on to the pavement.

There was a groan of disapproval from the crowd, but nobody moved. I stepped forwards and swung out at the boy and missed. But he and his friends were not interested in me. They were gathering round Bernard, ready, I thought, to kick him to death. One last glance towards the guardroom showed no sign of the sergeant or the soldiers. I jerked one of the boys back by his collar and was trying to reach for another. There were too many for me. I saw two, perhaps three black boots withdrawing on the backswing.

But they did not move. They froze in place, for just then, out of the crowd there sprang a figure who whirled about us, lashing the boys with staccato sentences of piercing rebuke. It was a furious young woman. Her power was of the street. She had credibility. She was a contemporary, an object of desire and aspiration. She was a star, and she had caught them being vile, even by their own standards.

The force of her disgust was sexual. They thought they were men, and she was reducing them to naughty children. They could not afford to be seen shrinking from
her, backing off. But that was exactly what they were doing now, even though the outward signs were laughs, shrugs, and the unheard insults they called out to her. They pretended, to themselves, to each other, that they were suddenly bored, that it would be more interesting elsewhere. They began moving back towards Kochstrasse, but the woman did not let up her tirade. They probably would have liked to run from her, but protocol obliged them to keep to a forced, self-conscious swagger. While she followed them down the street, shouting and waving her fist, they had to keep the catcalls coming and their thumbs hooked in their jeans.

I was helping Bernard to his feet. It was only when the young woman came back to see how he was, and her identically dressed friend appeared at her side, that I recognised them as the two who had swished past us on the June 17th Street. Together we supported Bernard while he tested his weight on his leg. It did not appear to be broken. There was some applause in the crowd for him as he put his arm round my shoulder and we shuffled away from the Checkpoint.

It took us several minutes to reach the corner of the street where we hoped to find a taxi. During that time I was anxious to have Bernard acknowledge the identity of his rescuer. I asked her her name – Grete – and repeated it to him. He was concentrating on his pain, he was bent over it, and he may have been in mild shock, but I persisted in the interest of, what exactly? Unsettling the rationalist? In him? In me?

Finally Bernard lifted a hand in the girl’s direction for her to take and said, ‘Grete, thank you my dear. You saved my bacon.’ But he was not looking at her as he said it.

On Kochstrasse I thought I would have time to ask
Grete and her friend Diane about themselves, but as soon as we arrived we saw a taxi dropping people off and we called it over. There followed the hiatus of easing Bernard in, and thanks and farewells and thanks again during which I hoped he would at last take a look at his guardian angel, the incarnation of June. I waved to the girls out of the rear window as they walked away, and before giving the driver his instructions I said to Bernard, ‘Didn’t you recognise them? They were the ones we saw by the Brandenburg Gate, when you told me how you used to expect a message from ...’

Bernard was arranging his head, tipping it right back against the headrest and he interrupted me with a sigh. He spoke impatiently to the padded ceiling of the car, inches from his nose. ‘Yes. Quite a coincidence, I suppose. Now for goodness sake Jeremy, get me home!’

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
he did not stir from the apartment in Kreuzberg. He lay on a couch in the tiny living room looking morose, preferring the television to conversation. A doctor friend of Günter’s called round to examine the injured leg. It was likely that nothing was broken, but an X-ray in London was recommended. I went out for a stroll in the late morning. The streets had a hung-over look, with beer-cans and smashed bottles underfoot and, round the hot-dog stalls, paper napkins smeared with mustard and tomato ketchup. During the afternoon, while Bernard slept, I read the newspapers and wrote up our conversations of the day before. In the evening he was still untalkative. I went out for another stroll and had a beer in a local Kneipe. The festivities were beginning again, but I had seen enough. I was back in the apartment within an hour, and we were both asleep by half past ten.

Bernard’s flight the next morning to London, and mine to Montpellier via Frankfurt and Paris were only an hour apart. I had arranged for one of Jenny’s brothers to meet the plane at Heathrow. Bernard was livelier. He hobbled across the terminal at Tegel looking well-suited to the walking-stick he had borrowed, using it to hail an airline employee and remind him of the wheelchair that had been ordered. It would be waiting, Bernard was
assured, by the departure gate.

As we walked in that direction I said, ‘Bernard, I wanted to ask you something about June’s dogs ...’

He interrupted me. ‘For the life and times? I’ll tell you something. You can forget all that nonsense about “face to face with evil”. Religious cant. But, you know, I was the one who told her about Churchill’s black dog. You remember? The name he gave to the depressions he used to get from time to time. I think he pinched the expression from Samuel Johnson. So June’s idea was that if one dog was a personal depression, two dogs were a kind of cultural depression, civilisation’s worst moods. Not bad, really. I’ve often made use of it. It went through my mind at Checkpoint Charlie. It wasn’t his red flag you know. I don’t think they even saw it. You heard what they were shouting?’

‘Ausländer ’raus.’

‘Foreigners out. The Wall comes down and everybody’s out there dancing in the street, but sooner or later ...’

We had arrived at the departure gate. A man in a braided uniform manoeuvred the wheelchair behind Bernard and he lowered himself with a sigh.

I said, ‘But that wasn’t my question. I was looking at my old notes yesterday. The last time I saw June she told me to ask you what the Maire of St Maurice de Navacelles said about those dogs when you had lunch at the café that afternoon ...’

‘The Hôtel des Tilleuls? What those dogs had been trained to do? A perfect case in point. The Maire’s story simply wasn’t true. Or at the very least, there was no way of knowing. But June chose to believe it because it fitted nicely. A perfect case of bending the facts to the idea.’

I handed Bernard’s bags to the flight attendant who stowed them behind the wheelchair. Then he stood with
his hands in the pushing position, waiting for us to finish. Bernard leaned back with his stick across his lap. It bothered me that my father-in-law should take so easily to his invalid status.