Authors: Ian McEwan
I felt myself shrinking inside his daughter. I kept a sensible tone. ‘Bernard, I didn’t catch a word of that. Start again, slowly.’
Jenny was making signs, offering to take the receiver from me. But Bernard had started again. I shook my head and turned my gaze into the pillow.
‘Turn your radio on, dear boy. Or the television, even better. They’re streaming through. You won’t believe it ...’
‘Bernard, who is streaming through what?’
‘I just told you. They’re taking down the Wall! It’s hard to believe, but I’m watching it now, East Berliners coming through ...’
My first, selfish thought was that nothing was immediately required of me. I did not have to leave my bed and go out and do something useful. I promised Bernard I would call him back, put the phone down and told Jenny the news.
‘Amazing.’
‘Incredible.’
We were doing our best to keep its full importance at arm’s length, for we did not yet belong to the world, to the striving community of fully dressed people. An important principle was at stake, that we maintain the primacy of the private life. And so we resumed. But the spell had been broken. Cheering crowds were surging through the early morning gloom of our bedroom. We were both elsewhere.
Finally it was Jenny who said, ‘Let’s go downstairs and look.’
We stood in the living room in our dressing-gowns with mugs of tea, staring at the set. It did not seem right to sit. East Berliners in nylon anoraks and bleached-out jeans jackets, pushing buggies or holding their children’s hands, were filing past Checkpoint Charlie, unchecked. The camera bobbed and weaved intrusively into wide-armed embraces. A tearful woman, her complexion rendered ghoulish by a single TV spotlight, spread her hands, went to speak and was too choked up to utter the words. Crowds of West Berliners cheered and thumped good-naturedly on the roof of each brave ludicrous Trabant nosing into freedom. Two sisters clung to each other and wouldn’t be parted for an interview. Jenny and
I were in tears, and when the children came running in to greet her, the little drama of reunion, the hugs and cuddles on the living-room carpet, drew poignancy from the joyful events in Berlin – and made Jenny cry outright.
An hour later Bernard phoned again. It was four years now since he had started to call me ‘dear boy’, ever since, I suspected, he had joined the Garrick Club. Such, Jenny maintained, was the distance travelled since ‘comrade’.
‘Dear boy. I want to get over to Berlin as soon as possible.’
‘Good idea,’ I said straight away. ‘You should go.’
‘Seats are gold dust. Everyone wants to go. I’ve put a hold on two places on a flight this afternoon. I have to let them know in an hour.’
‘Bernard, I’m just off to France.’
‘Make a diversion. It’s a historic moment.’
‘I’ll phone you back.’
Jenny was scathing. ‘He has to go and see his Big Mistake put right. He’ll need someone to carry his bags.’
When it was put like that, I was ready to say no. But during breakfast, roused by the tinny triumphalism of the black and white portable we had balanced by the kitchen sink, I began to feel an impatient excitement, a need for adventure after days of domestic duties. Again the set gave out a miniature roar, and I was feeling like a boy locked out of the stadium on Cup Final day. History was happening, without me.
After the children had been delivered to their playgroup and schools, I raised the matter with Jenny again. She was pleased to be back home. She moved from room to room, cordless phone always within reach, tending the house plants that had wilted under my care.
‘Go,’ was her recommendation. ‘Don’t listen to me,
I’m jealous. But before you go, you’d better finish what you started.’
The best of all possible arrangements. I rerouted my flight to Montpellier through Berlin and Paris, and confirmed Bernard’s booking. I phoned Berlin to ask my friend Günter if we could borrow his apartment. I called Bernard to tell him that I would collect him in a taxi at two o’clock. I cancelled engagements, left instructions and packed my bag. On the TV was a half-mile queue of East Berliners outside a bank, waiting for their hundred Deutschmarks. Jenny and I returned to the bedroom for an hour, then she left in a hurry to an appointment. I sat in the kitchen in my dressing-gown and ate an early lunch of warmed-up left-overs. On the portable, other parts of the Wall had been breached. People were converging on Berlin from all over the planet. A huge party was in the making. Journalists and TV crews could not find hotel rooms. Back upstairs, standing under the shower, invigorated and clarified by lovemaking, bellowing the snatches of Verdi I could remember in Italian, I congratulated myself on my rich and interesting life.
An hour and a half later I left the taxi waiting in Addison Road and sprinted up the flight of steps to Bernard’s flat. He was actually standing just inside the open doorway, holding his hat and coat, and with his bags at his feet. He had only lately acquired the fussy exactitude of old age, the necessary caution to accommodate a reliably useless memory. I picked up his bags (Jenny was right) and he was about to pull the door to, but already he was frowning and raising a forefinger.
‘One last look round.’
I put the bags down and followed him in, in time to see him scoop up his housekeys and passport from the
kitchen table. He held them up for me with a told-you-so look, as though I were the one who had forgotten them, and he were to be congratulated.
I had shared London cabs with Bernard before. His legs almost reached the partition. We were still in first gear, still pulling away, and Bernard was making a steeple of his fingers under his chin and beginning, ‘The point is ...’ His voice did not have June’s clipped, wartime mandarin quality; instead, it was pitched slightly high and was over-precise in its enunciation, the way Lytton Strachey’s might have been, or Malcolm Muggeridge’s was, the way certain educated Welshmen used to talk. If you didn’t already know and like Bernard, it could sound affected. ‘The point is that German unity is an inevitability. The Russians will rattle their sabres, the French will wave their arms, the British will um and ah. Who knows what the Americans will want, what will suit them best. But none of it matters. The Germans will have unity because they want it and they’ve provided for it in their constitution and no one can stop them. They’ll have it sooner rather than later because no Chancellor in his right mind is going to let the glory go to his successor. And they’ll have it on West German terms because they’re the ones who’ll be paying for it.’
He had a way of presenting all his opinions as well-established facts, and his certainties did have a sinuous power. What was required of me was to present another view, whether I believed in it or not. Bernard’s habits of private conversation had been formed by years of public debate. A fair bout of adversarial discussion was what would bring us to the truth. As we headed towards Heathrow I obligingly argued that the East Germans might retain attachments to some features of their system and therefore might not be so easy to assimilate, that the
Soviet Union had hundreds of thousands of troops in the GDR and could certainly affect the outcome if it wanted, and that marrying the two systems in practical and economic terms could take years.
He nodded in satisfaction. His fingers still supported his chin, and he was waiting patiently for me to finish so that he could set about my arguments. Methodically, he took them in order. The enormous popular momentum against the East German state had reached a stage where lingering attachments would only be discovered too late, in the form of nostalgia; the Soviet Union had lost interest in controlling its eastern satellites. It was no longer a super-power in any but military terms, and it badly needed Western goodwill and German money; as for the practical difficulties of German union, they could be dealt with later, after the political marriage had ensured the Chancellor his place in the history books and a good chance of winning the next election with millions of new and grateful voters.
Bernard was still talking and seemed unaware that the taxi had stopped outside our terminal. I leaned forwards and settled the fare while he was addressing at length the third of my points. The driver turned round in his seat and opened his sliding glass door to listen. He was in his fifties, completely bald, with a rubbery, babyish face and large staring eyes of a blazing fluorescent blue.
When Bernard was done he chipped in. ‘Yeah, and then what, mate? The Krauts’ll start throwing their weight around again. That’s when the bother’ll start ...’
Bernard flinched the moment the driver began to speak, and fumbled for his bag. The consequences of German unity were probably the next subject for debate, but instead of being drawn in, even for a condescending minute, Bernard was embarrassed and scrabbling to get out.
‘Where’s yer stability?’ the driver was saying. ‘Where’s
yer balance of power? On your eastern side you got Russia going down the tube and all them little countries, Poland and stuff, deep in the shit with debts and everything ...’
‘Yes, yes, you’re right, it is indeed a worry,’ Bernard said, as he gained the safety of the pavement. ‘Jeremy, we mustn’t miss that plane.’
The driver had wound down his window. ‘On the west, you got Britain, not a European player is it, not really. Still got its tongue up the American fundament if you’ll pardon my French. Which leaves the French. Christ, the French!’
‘Goodbye, and thank you,’ Bernard cooed, and was even prepared to seize his own bags and totter with them to open up some distance. I caught up with him by the terminal’s automatic doors. He put his bag down in front of me and rubbed his right hand with his left as he said, ‘I simply cannot stand being harangued by cabbies.’
I knew what he meant, but I also thought that Bernard was rather too fastidious about whom he debated with. ‘You’ve lost the common touch.’
‘Never had it, dear boy. Ideas were my thing.’
Half an hour after take-off, we ordered champagne from the drinks trolley and toasted ‘freedom’. Then Bernard returned to the matter of the common touch.
‘Now June had it. She could get along with anybody. She would have taken on that taxi driver. Surprising in someone who ended up a recluse. She was a far better communist than I was, really.’
These days, a mention of June sent a little charge of guilt through me. Since her death in July 1987 I had done nothing with the memoir I was supposed to be writing beyond sorting the notes into order and putting them away in a box file. My work (I run a small publishing company specialising in text books), family life, a house-move last
year – the usual kind of excuses did not make me feel easier. Perhaps my trip to France, the bergerie and its associations, would set me going again. And there were still things I wanted to know from Bernard.
‘I don’t think June would think that was much of a compliment.’
Bernard held up his perspex goblet to allow the sunlight flooding the cabin to be refracted by the champagne. ‘These days who would? But there was a year or two when she was a real tigress for the cause.’
‘Until the Gorge de Vis.’
He knew when I was pumping him. He leaned back and smiled without looking at me. ‘Is this the life and times we’re on now?’
‘It’s time I did something about it.’
‘Did she ever tell you about the row we had? In Provence, on our way home from Italy, at least a week or so before we reached the Gorge.’
‘I don’t think she mentioned it.’
‘It was on a railway platform near a little town whose name I don’t remember now. We were waiting for a local train to take us into Arles. It was an uncovered station, barely more than a stop really, and terribly smashed up. The waiting room had been burned down. It was hot, there was no shade, and there was nowhere to sit down. We were tired and the train was late. We also had the place to ourselves. Perfect conditions for our first matrimonial set-to.
‘At one point I left June standing with our luggage and wandered the length of the platform – you know how one does when time drags – right along to where it ended. The place was a mess. I think a barrel of tar or paint had been spilled. The paving stones had been dislodged and weeds had pushed up and dried out in the
heat. At the back, away from the tracks, was a clump of arbutus which had managed somehow to flourish rather well. I was admiring it when I saw a movement on a leaf. I went closer and there it was, a dragonfly, a ruddy darter, Sympetrum sanguineum, a male, you know, brilliant red. They’re not exactly rare but it was unusually large, a beauty.
‘Amazingly, I trapped it in my cupped hands, then I ran back along the platform to where June was and got her to take it in her hands while I dug into my bag for my travelling kit. I opened it and took out the killing bottle and asked June to bring the creature over to me. She still had her hands cupped, like this, but she was looking at me with an odd expression, a kind of horror. She said, “What are you going to do?” And I said, “I want to take it home.” She didn’t come closer. She said, “You mean you’re going to kill it.” “Of course I am,” I said. “It’s a beauty.” She went cold and logical at this point. “It’s beautiful therefore you want to kill it.” Now June, as you know, grew up near the countryside and never showed much compunction about killing mice, rats, cockroaches, wasps – anything that got in her way really. It was jolly hot and this was not the moment to start an ethical discussion about the rights of insects. So I said, “June, do just bring it over here.” Perhaps I spoke too roughly. She took half a step away from me, and I could see she was on the point of setting it free. I said, “June, you know how much it means to me. If you let it go I’ll never forgive you.” She was struggling with herself. I repeated what I had said, and then she came towards me, extremely sullen, transferred the dragonfly to my hands, and watched me put it in the killing bottle and store it away. She was silent as I put my stuff back in the case, and then, perhaps because she was blaming herself
for not setting it free, she flew into an almighty rage.’
The drinks trolley was making a second run and Bernard faltered as he decided against ordering a second champagne.