The Berlin Assignment (13 page)

The office of the Chief of Protocol finally called. A strike! Sturm washed and waxed the Opel. A standard was attached to the right front fender. He picked out a new stiff flag. This ride would have a higher order of importance.

He weaved in and out of lanes, hit the brakes at crucial moments, ignored a stop sign and jumped two red lights. Berliners shook their heads in consternation. As the car roared up the
Strasse des 17. Juni
, the Maple Leaf flapped like a banner in a tempest. The consul, stone-faced, kept his eyes focussed on the distance. Frau Carstens had done a final inspection, righting his tie, pinning a white carnation to his lapel. Pedestrians saw the radiating flower, but the passive visage was hidden in the rear seat's shadows.

Through the Brandenburg Gate, past the Russian Embassy, down Unter den Linden, deeper into the East. A slowdown at Friedrichstrasse caused by clouds of dust from a demolition job forced Sturm to jump the car onto the sidewalk. He honked people to the sides and motioned to a cop to open up a passage. Seeing the fluttering Maple Leaf, the officer hassled people away and saluted the disappearing Opel. Sturm sped on – composed, silent, concentrated – past the statue of Frederick the Great, across the palace bridge with the sculptures of divinely proportioned gods, onto the island in the Spree, past the barren emptiness where the Kaiser's palace once stood. A last right turn, then left.

A uniformed escort stood on the city hall's front steps. As the consul got out, she approached. “
Herr Konsul, ich begrüsse Sie. Herzlich willkommen im Roten Rathaus
.” Welcome to Red City Hall.

Red City Hall, Hanbury thought. Where was that troublemaker Adamanski? “Thank you,” he replied. “Such an interesting building.” He paused momentarily on the steps to study decorative work done in brick.

They went up a staircase of imperial proportions. The escort said the word ‘red' in
Rote Rathaus
had no political significance. It came from the colour of the bricks. The ochre shade was chosen, she said, because at the time of Bismarck and the Kaiser, imperial buildings were sandstone. Berliners, no great fans of the Kaiser, decided that the new city hall should stand out. Red bricks clashed with sandstone. Kaiser Wilhelm reportedly gnashed his teeth when the new civic structure stood in full view from his palace. Naturally, Berliners were delighted when they heard this. Hanbury laughed when she finished. “
Eine schöne Geschichte
.” A fine story. Red as the colour of impertinence. He ought to send Adamanski a postcard.

Much later, when the forces arrayed against him were overwhelming and not even the Chief of Protocol and his great influence could help, Hanbury thought back to the day he first met Gerhard von Helmholtz. He recalled that merely being in the presence of the man made the world seem thoughtfully determined, filled with reason, much less random. The very way the Chief of Protocol moved conveyed a will to lift the world's affairs onto a higher plane. Hanbury never forgot the visit – not his first impression of this imposing man, nor the altercation with the French ambassador at the end.

The office of Berlin's long-serving Chief of Protocol was on the building's south side. Tall window doors accessed a narrow balcony. They would eventually become, in Hanbury's mind, a portal to odd twists of fortune. Who would have predicted during his first visit that a day would come when von Helmholtz would usher him onto the balcony a second time, for a conversation in the rain, claiming that speaking in his office ran a risk of being listened to? Listened to! How? By whom? A sinister notion. And ridiculous too, because already this first time Hanbury noticed that sound dissolved there. The office had infinite room for it to disappear. Upwards, sideways, in all directions. Its sheer size made you feel confidentially alone.

Hanbury's first view of von Helmholtz was of him rising from his desk, removing reading glasses and inquisitively coming forward. Silver hair combed back sharply, a strong nose with a slight beak, and an aristocrat's erectness. “
Konsul Hanbury
,” he said in a voice accustomed to command. “I'm pleased to meet you.” The consul expressed gratitude that time had been found for him in a most demanding schedule. “I wanted to see you earlier,” the Chief of Protocol replied. A slight shake of his head spoke of the inevitability of many things.
“Innumerable visitors. Every one wants to see Berlin. They come and go, but our good fortune is that you will stay.”

The phrases born of good breeding stuck in Hanbury's mind. He remembered being flattered. He also remembered making a fatuous reply. He commented on the impressiveness of the building and so much going on outside. “Dust storms in the middle of a city!” he exclaimed. Von Helmholtz nodded politely. “The task of rebuilding the city is enormous.” The consul described his own observations and ones he borrowed from Sturm: the stitching together of two public transport systems, bridges being reconstructed, two electricity supply systems being meshed. He made it sound as if technical details fascinated him. This interest delighted von Helmholtz. “For decades Berlin was the centre of German Communism,” he said, “but also the focus for the fight against it. Such dichotomy isn't bridged in a few months. It almost seems now that we are back together we have a sense of loss. Berlin as ideological battleground no longer exists. Instead, we are the laboratory for German reunification. Less exciting and more painful.” On an impulse, he took Hanbury by the elbow and led him to the balcony doors which stood slightly open. The muffled rattle of traffic drifted up from below. “Let's step out.”

Opposite the balcony in the distance were sad grey buildings without architectural coherence. Helmholtz identified each one. Some had dishevelled Roman columns of pompous proportions. Others were in the socialist style of pre-fab concrete cells stacked up. Interspersed were a few ruins dating back to the days of carpet bombing by the Allies. “This was once a fine view,” the Chief of Protocol said of the diseased cityscape. “Twelve years of Fascism, a war, forty-five years of Communism. See what it does to physical heritage. East Berlin received a terrible dressing-down. We are determined to make it great again.”

Holding the balcony railing, they surveyed the scene. Nearby
jackhammers sounded like flat, toneless instruments of percussion. The
Rathaus
trembled. A dust cloud welled up and obscured the view before a gust of air carried it off in the direction of Karl Marx Allee.

“Is the city hall being torn down?” the consul asked with alarm.

“New foundations only. The war weakened them. When the
Rathaus
was rebuilt, like so much else in East Berlin, the footings were left porous. Now we have to retrofit.” He nudged Hanbury back inside, closed the doors and led him to two sofas at right angles around a glass-top table. Two cups of coffee had been poured.

Hanbury began the formal part of the call. “You're a Berliner,” he said. “I'm interested in your view of what lies in store.” A deep and complex question was made to sound as if there was a simple answer.

Von Helmholtz smiled knowingly and ephemerally. He answered slowly to provide context. He started with the Berlin of the twenties, touched on the thirties, forties and fifties, went deeper into the pump-primed West Berlin of the sixties and seventies and the plateau of the eighties. He admitted the gloss was off now. “We hope to regain a spark, a vibrancy,” he said, “as in the twenties. We're not planning to be mediocre. But the truth is we don't know what Berlin will be. We need a pioneering outlook, I suppose.”

Hanbury nodded. He knew about pioneers. Their will to triumph on the prairies had been special. They wouldn't have survived without it. Dust storms, blizzards, grass fires, cloudbursts, spring floods, locust clouds, mosquitoes in pestilential numbers and the brutal reality of distance. “People usually rise to the challenges they face,” he said with optimism. “Our pioneers made it. Why won't you?”

It came out sounding a little absurd, but that's not how the Chief of Protocol took it. He asked some serious questions about the prairie spirit. He wanted to know what so much space does to people; do they feel at nature's mercy, do they sense humility? He became reflective. He
explained that when he was young he longed to break away, to be a geographer and cross continents. But the war came along. Afterwards he entered public life. Since then he had managed only pin-point visits to other countries. He had not seen the Prairies, nor for that matter the Steppes, or the Pampas. One day, an optimistic von Helmholtz claimed, he would.

The consul's courtesy call was taking on an unusual tone. A series of signals jumped between the two men and rapport intensified. They told each other more about their pasts. Hanbury described how he had grown up in the vise-grip of his mother's ambition; four hours a day at the piano, at least. The Chief of Protocol said that when he became a teenager he became a soldier.

The story von Helmholtz told was difficult to forget. When the bombing of Berlin began in earnest von Helmholtz was thirteen, old enough for anti-aircraft work, so he was soon manning a searchlight on one of Berlin's flak towers. Thick posses of bombers droned in; the beams on the flak towers searched out and held the intruders. The guns went after them. The sky filled with the spectacle of tracer bullets as bombs rained down. All around, night after night, the city was in flames. For a thirteen year old, not fully understanding, the pyrotechnics were engrossing. The next step was to operate the guns. Leaning back, swivelling, the helmet a little big, Gerhard concentrated on the beams now operated by boys younger than himself. He was good at keeping the sights steady on a bomber and got a few hits. When the bombing stopped, the Red Army was closing in. The boys were next organized into anti-tank commandos. With their grenade launchers –
Panzerfausts
– they were sent into positions on the eastern outskirts of the city. As soviet tanks rumbled in the agile boys sneaked into perfect positions. They couldn't miss. Gerhard knocked out four. It would have been more, but ammunition ran out.

The Soviets were taking Berlin house by house, slowed down by a lonely
Panzerfaust
operator here, some snipers there. In the last days, when German resistance was crumbling, deserters, whether fourteen or sixty, were hanged on the spot. In one of the last nights of the war von Helmholtz also vanished from the scene of battle. The game then was to get from one end of town to the other without getting caught by the SS. Dashing, hiding, zig-zagging, he made his way to Charlottenburg. The family apartment was bombed out, von Helmholtz recalled. His mother, an aunt and two cousins were in the cellar. They quickly burned his uniform. Short pants turned him back into a boy. The family packed some things and left, walking west, picking their way through the lines, arriving three days later at family friends in the country. A Soviet victory orgy was beginning in Berlin; mass rape went on for days, thousands of women being repeatedly violated. Once the Americans had taken control of their sector in the south-west, the family walked back and joined in clearing the rubble. Four years later von Helmholtz became logistics coordinator for the Berlin airlift, which was how his public career began.

Hanbury was slowly digesting all this when a secretary interrupted, saying the French ambassador was waiting. The consul stood up to leave, but the Chief of Protocol gestured that he stay. The French ambassador, his expression said, could wait. Hanbury sat down again. Von Helmholtz didn't dwell long on the '49 airlift, or even the building of the Wall. That was interim history now. It was the current plans for grafting a new city onto the old which excited him. Would the immensity of the destruction be matched by the rebuilding? Friedrichstrasse, Potsdamerplatz, the barren stretches around the
Reichstag
– renewal would have to be massive and historic. “We must find the will. Get out of your office,” he counselled. “Walk around. Feel the moment. It's unlike anything that's happened.” He made it
sound as if Berlin was defying gravity and taking flight.

The secretary reappeared. “
Sie können den Französischen Botschafter doch nicht so lange warten lassen, Herr von Helmholtz
.” No French ambassador has ever lived, she was in effect saying, who could be kept waiting without it turning into an affair of state. The consul checked his watch. “I really ought to go.” “Bring the ambassador in,” von Helmholtz ordered. Getting up, he said, “The man's mildly pretentious. A little wait will do him good. I enjoyed our chat, Herr Konsul. We must continue it. I talked too much and learned too little.” He escorted Hanbury to the door where a glowering ambassador stood waiting.

“
Monsieur l'Ambassadeur
,” Hanbury said gracefully.

“
Vous avez parlé beaucoup
,” the ambassador said, his voice cutting like a knife. “
Grandes affaires d'état, sans doute
.”

“
Oui, oui. Bien sûr
,” the consul confirmed agreeably.

The ambassador cocked a disbelieving eyebrow.

“Think about it,” von Helmholtz reminded the consul. “Buy yourself some walking shoes.”

The ambassador snorted.

“
Au revoir
,” a polite consul said.

The Chief of Protocol turned to the ambassador and, silky smooth, said, “Excellency, I kept you waiting. My apologies.” Then the padded door clicked shut.

Outside, because of the long wait, Sturm had lost his concentration. He observed, however, that when the consul finally emerged he was excessively cheerful. Sturm thought he acted like a lottery winner. He shook the hand of the pretty escort and plopped into the back seat with a satisfied bounce. Out of character entirely, as far as Sturm could judge.
Still, a relaxed and happy human cargo relaxed him too. “Went well?” he inquired, driving off. In the rearview mirror he saw that the consul was waving like a lunatic at the girl in the silly uniform.