Authors: Ian McEwan
I now know of course that you were working with Bob on the Berlin tunnel. The day after the Russians found out about it, Bob came around to Adalbertstrasse and said he needed to ask me some questions. It was all part of some security routine. You’ll have to remember just exactly what was going on at that time. You’d left with the suitcases two days before and I hadn’t heard a word. Nor had I slept. I spent hours scrubbing the flat. I took our clothes to a public dump. I went right over to my parents’ neighborhood in Pankow and sold the tools. I dragged the carpet three blocks to a construction site where they had a big fire and got someone to help me throw it in. I had just finished cleaning out the bathroom when Bob was at the door wanting to come in and ask questions. He could see that something was wrong. I tried to pretend I was ill. He said he wouldn’t take long, and because he was being so kind and concerned, I broke down and cried. And then before I knew it, I was telling him the whole story. The need to tell someone was really powerful. I wanted someone to understand that we weren’t criminals. I poured it out to him and he sat very quiet. When I told him that you’d gone off to the railroad
Station with the cases two days before and I hadn’t heard a thing, he just sat there shaking his head and saying ‘Oh my God’ over and over again. Then he said he would see what he could find out, and he left.
He came back the next morning with a newspaper. It was full of stuff about your tunnel. I hadn’t heard anything about it. Bob told me then that you were part of the tunnel operation and that you’d actually put the cases down there not long before the Vopos broke in. I don’t know what led you to do that. Perhaps you went crazy for a day or two. Who wouldn’t? The East Germans had handed the cases over to the West Berlin police. Apparently a murder investigation was already under way. They were only hours from getting your name. According to Bob, he and several others had actually seen you bring the cases in. We would have been in big trouble if Bob hadn’t persuaded his superiors that this would be bad publicity for Western intelligence. Bob’s people made the police drop the inquiry. I guess in those days it was an occupied city and the Germans had to do what the Americans told them. He got the whole thing covered up and the investigation was dropped.
This is what he told me that morning. He also swore me to secrecy. I was to tell no one, not even you, that I knew what he had done. He didn’t want anyone to think he had perverted the course of justice, and he didn’t want you to know that I’d been told about your involvement in the tunnel. You remember how scrupulous he was about his job. So all that was happening that morning, and then you turned up right in the middle of it, suspicious and looking really terrible. I wanted to tell you we were safe, but I didn’t want to break my promise. I don’t know why. It might have saved a lot of sadness if I had.
Then a few days later there was Tempelhof. I knew what you were thinking, and you were so very very wrong. Now I am writing it down I realize just how much I want you to hear me and believe me. I want you to receive this letter. The truth is that Bob was running all over town that day with
his security investigation. He wanted to say goodbye to you and he got to the airport late. He bumped into me as I was on my way up to the roof to wave to you. That’s all it was. I wrote to you and tried to explain without breaking my promise to Bob. You never answered me properly. I thought of coming to London to find you, but I knew I could not bear it if you turned me away. The months passed and you stopped answering my letters. I told myself that what we had been through together had made it impossible for us to get married. I had a friendship then with Bob, for my part based mostly on gratitude. Slowly that turned to affection. Time played its part too, and I was lonely. Nine months after you left Berlin I began an affair with Bob. I buried my feelings for you as deep as I could. The next year, in July 1957, we were married in New York.
He always spoke very fondly of you. He used to say we would come and look you up in England one day. I don’t know if I could ever have faced that. Bob died the year before last of a heart attack while on a fishing trip. His death hit the girls hard, it hit us all very hard and it devastated our youngest, Rosie. He was a wonderful father to the girls. Fatherhood suited him, it softened him. He never lost that wonderful bouncing energy. He was always so playful. When the girls were tiny it was a marvel to watch him. He was so popular here, his funeral was a major event in the town, and I was very proud of him.
I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I’m not sorry I married Bob Glass. I’m not pretending either that we didn’t also have some awful times. Ten years ago we were both drinking a lot and there were other things too. But we were coming through that, I think. I’m losing my thread. There are too many things I want to tell you. I sometimes think about that Mr. Blake from downstairs who came to our engagement party. George Blake. I was amazed when he was put up for trial all those years ago, 1960 or ‘61. Then he escaped from prison, and then Bob found out that one of the
secrets he gave away was your tunnel. He was right in on it from the beginning, at the planning stage. The Russians knew all about it before the first shovelful had been dug out. So much wasted effort! Bob used to say that knowing that made him all the happier that he had got out. He said they must have diverted their most important messages away from those telephone lines, and that they left the tunnel in place to protect Blake and waste CIA time and manpower. But why did they break in when they did, right in the middle of our troubles?
It was late afternoon when I began this letter and now it’s dark outside. I’ve stopped a few times to think about Bob, and about Rosie who still can’t let him go, and about you and me and all the lost time and the misunderstanding. It’s funny to be writing this to a stranger thousands of miles away. I wonder what’s happened to your life. When I think of you, I don’t only think of the terrible thing with Otto. I think of my kind and gentle Englishman who knew so little about women and who learned so beautifully! We were so easy together, it was such fun. Sometimes it’s as if I’m remembering a childhood. I want to ask you, do you remember this, do you remember that? When we biked out to the lakes at weekends to swim, when we bought my engagement ring from that huge Arab (I still have that ring) and when we used to dance at the Resi. How we were the jiving champions and won a prize, the carriage clock that’s still up in our attic. When I first saw you with that rose behind your ear and I sent you a message down the tube. When you made that wonderful speech at our party and Jenny—do you remember my friend Jenny—who made off with that radio man whose name I can’t recall. And wasn’t Bob going to give a speech that evening too? I loved you dearly, and I never got closer to anyone. I don’t think it dishonors Bob’s memory to say that. In my experience, men and women don’t ever really get to understand each other. What we had was really quite special. It’s true and I can’t let this life go by without
saying that, without setting it down. If I remember you rightly you should be frowning by now and saying, she’s so sentimental!
Sometimes I’ve been angry with you. It was wrong of you to retreat with your anger and silence. So English! So male! If you felt betrayed you should have stood your ground and fought for what was yours. You should have accused me, you should have accused Bob. There would have been a fight, and we would have gotten to the bottom of it. But I know really that it was your pride that made you slink away. It was the same pride that kept me from coming to London to make you marry me. I couldn’t face the possibility of failure.
It’s odd that this familiar creaky old house is unknown to you. It’s white clapboard, surrounded by oak trees, with a flagpole in the yard erected by Bob. I’ll never leave here now, even though it’s way too big. The girls have all their childhood things here. Tomorrow Diane, our middle daughter, is visiting with her baby. She’s the first to produce. Laura had a miscarriage last year. Diane’s husband is a mathematician. He’s very tall, and the way he sometimes pushes his glasses up his nose with his pinky reminds me of you. Do you remember when I swiped your glasses to make you stay? He’s also a brilliant tennis player, which doesn’t remind me of you at all!
I’m rambling again and it’s getting late. What I mean is, these days I get tired early in the evening and I don’t feel I should be apologizing for it either. But I feel reluctant to end this one-sided conversation with you, wherever you are and whatever you’ve become. I don’t want to consign this letter to the void. It won’t be the first I’ve written to you that received no reply. I know I’ll have to take my chances. If all this seems irrelevant to your life now and you don’t want to reply, or if the memories are somehow inconvenient, please at least let your twenty-five-year-old self accept these greetings from an old friend. And if this letter is going nowhere and is never opened and never read, please God, grant us
forgiveness for our terrible deed and be a witness to and bless our love as it was.
Yours,
Maria Glass
He stood and dusted down his suit and folded the letter away, and then began a slow stroll around the compound. He trampled weeds to get to the place where his own room had been. Now it was a patch of oily sand. He walked on around to look at the twisted pipes and smashed gauges of a basement boiler room. Right under his feet were fragments of pink-and-white tiles he remembered from the shower rooms. He looked over his shoulder. The border guards in their tower had lost interest in him. The radio music from the weekend-home garden had changed to old-fashioned rock and roll. He still had a taste for it, and he remembered this one, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” It had never been a great favorite of his, but she had liked it. He wandered back past the gaping trench toward the inner perimeter fence. Two steel girders had been placed to warn trespassers of a concrete-lined hole filled with black water. It was the old cesspit, whose drainage field the sergeants had tunneled through. So much wasted effort.
He was at the fence now, looking through it across the hummocky wasteland to the Wall. Rising above it were the trees of the cemetery in full leaf. His time and her time, like so much unbuilt-on land. There was a cycling path running along this side of the Wall, right at its base. A group of children were calling to each other as they pedaled by. It was hot. He had forgotten this clammy Berlin heat. He had been right, he had needed to come all this way to understand her letter. Not to Adalbertstrasse, but here, among the ruins. What he had not been able to grasp in his Surrey breakfast room was clear enough here.
He knew what he was going to do. He loosened his tie and pressed a handkerchief to his forehead. He looked behind him. There was a fire hydrant beside the teetering sentry box. How he missed Glass too, the hand on his elbow and “Listen, Leonard!”
Glass softened by fatherhood—he would have liked to have seen that. Leonard knew what he was going to do, he knew he was about to leave, but the urgency was not on him yet, and the heat pressed down. The radio was playing jolly German pop music again in strict two-four time. The volume seemed to be rising. Up in the tower a border guard took a languid peek through his binoculars at the gentleman in a dark suit dawdling by the fence and then turned away to speak to his companion.
Leonard had been holding on to the fence. Now he let his hand drop and made his way back along the side of the big trench, through the perimeter gates, across the weeds to the low white wall. Once he was over, he took off his jacket and folded it over his arm. He walked quickly, and that created a little breeze on his face. His footsteps were marking the pace of his thoughts. If he had been younger, he might have broken into a run along Lettbergerstrasse. He thought he remembered from the old days when he traveled for his company. He would probably need a flight to O’Hare, in Chicago, where he could pick up the local service. He would send no warning, he was prepared to fail. He would emerge from the shade between the oak trees, he would pass by the white flagpole on his way across the sunlit lawn to the front door. Later he would tell her the radio man’s name and remind her that Bob Glass did give a speech that night, a fine one too, about building a new Europe. And he would answer her question: they broke into the tunnel when they did because Mr. Blake told his Russian controller that a young Englishman was about to deposit decoding equipment down there for one day only. And she would tell him about the jiving competition, of which he had no memory, and they would bring down the carriage clock from the attic and wind it up and set it going again.
He had to stop on the corner of NeuDecker Weg and stand in the shade of a sycamore. They would return to Berlin together, that was the only way. The heat was intense, and there was still half a mile to the Rudow U-Bahn. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the young trunk. It could take his weight.
They would visit the old places and be amused by the changes, and yes, they would go out to Potsdamerplatz one day and climb the wooden platform and take a good long look at the Wall together, before it was all torn down.
The Berlin Tunnel, or Operation Gold, was a joint CIA-MI6 venture that operated for just under a year, until April 1956. William Harvey, the CIA station chief, was in charge. George Blake, who was living at Platanenallee 26 from April 1955 on, probably betrayed the project as early as 1953, when he was secretary to a planning committee. All other characters in this novel are fictional. Most of the events are too, although I am indebted to David C. Martin’s account of the tunnel in his excellent book,
Wilderness of Mirrors
. The site as described in
Chapter 23
was how I found it in May 1989.
I wish to thank Bernhard Robben, who translated the German and researched extensively in Berlin, and Dr. M. Dunnill, University Lecturer in Pathology, Merton College, Andreas Landshoff, and Timothy Garton-Ash for their helpful comments. I would like to thank in particular my friends Galen Strawson and Craig Raine for their close readings of the typescript and many useful suggestions.