A Small Town In Germany Read online

  'Cups aren't secret, that's the difference.'

  'Nor's file trolleys,' Cork pleaded, 'if it comes to that. Nor's the two-bar electric fire from the conference room which Admin are doing their nut about. Nor's the long-carriage typewriter from the Pool, nor - listen, Arthur, you can't be blamed, not with so much going on; how can you? You know what dips are when they get to drafting telegrams. Look at de Lisle, look at Gaveston: dreamers. I'm not saying they aren't geniuses but they don't know where they are half the time, their heads are in the clouds. You can't be blamed for that.'

  'I can be blamed. I'm responsible.'

  'All right, torture yourself,' Cork snapped, his last patience gone. 'Anyway it's Bradfield's responsibility, not yours. He's Head of Chancery; he's responsible for security.'

  With this parting comment, Cork once more fell to survey­ing the unprepossessing scene about him. In more ways than one, he decided, Karfeld had a lot to answer for.

  The prospect which presented itself to Cork would have offered little comfort to any man, whatever his preoccupation. The weather was wretched. A blank Rhineland mist, like breath upon a mirror, layover the whole developed wilderness of bureaucratic Bonn. Giant buildings, still unfinished, rose glumly out of the untilled fields. Ahead of him the British Embassy, all its windows lit, stood on its brown heathland like a makeshift hospital in the twilight of the battle. At the front gate, the Union Jack, mysteriously at half mast, drooped sadly over a cluster of German policemen.

  The very choice of Bonn as the waiting house for Berlin has long been an anomaly; it is now an abuse. Perhaps only the Germans, having elected a Chancellor, would have brought their capital city to his door. To accommodate the immigration of diplomats, politicians and government ser­vants which attended this unlooked for honour - and also to keep them at a distance - the townspeople have built a com­plete suburb outside their city walls. It was through the southern end of this that the traffic was now attempting to pass: a jumble of stodgy towers and lowflung contemporary hutments which stretched along the dual carriageway almost as far as the amiable sanatorium settlement of Bad Godesberg, whose principal industry, having once been bottled water, is now diplomacy. True, some Ministries have been admitted to Bonn itself, and have added their fake masonry to the cobbled courtyards; true, some Embassies are in Bad Godesberg; but the seat of Federal Government and the great majority of the ninety-odd Foreign Missions accredited to it, not to mention the lobbyists, the press, the political parties, the refugee organ­isations, the official residences of Federal Dignitaries, the Kur­atorium for Invisible Germany, and the whole bureaucratic superstructure of West Germany's provisional capital, are to be found to either side of this one arterial carriageway between the former seat of the Bishop of Cologne and the Victorian villas of a Rhineland spa.

  Of this unnatural capital village, of this island state, which lacks both political identity and social hinterland, and is per­manently committed to the condition of impermanence, the British Embassy is an inseparable part. Imagine a sprawling factory block of no merit, the kind of building you see in dozens on the western by-pass, usually with a symbol of its product set out on the roof; paint about it a sullen Rhenish sky, add an indefinable hint of Nazi architecture, just a breath, no more, and erect in the rough ground behind it two fading goalposts for the recreation of the unwashed, and you have portrayed with fair accuracy the mind and force of England in the Federal Republic. With one sprawling limb it holds down the past, with another it smoothes the present; while a third searches anxiously in the wet Rhenish earth to find what is buried for the future. Built as the Occupation drew to its premature end, it catches precisely that mood of graceless renunciation; a stone face turned towards a former foe, a grey smile offered to the present ally. To Cork's left, as they finally entered its gates, lay the headquarters of the Red Cross, to his right a Mercedes factory; behind him, across the road, the Social Democrats and a Coca-Cola depot. The Embassy is cut off from these improbable neighbours by a strip of waste land which, strewn with sorrel and bare clay, runs flatly to the neglected Rhine. This field is known as Bonn's green belt and is an object of great pride to the city's planners.

  One day, perhaps, they will move to Berlin; the contingency, even in Bonn, is occasionally spoken of. One day, perhaps,­the whole grey mountain will slip down the autobahn and silently take its place in the wet car parks of the gutted Reichstag; until that happens, these concrete tents will remain, discreetly temporary in deference to the dream, discreetly permanent in deference to reality; they will remain, multiply, and grow; for in Bonn, movement has replaced progress, and whatever will not grow must die.

  Parking the car in his customary place behind the canteen, Meadowes walked slowly round it, as he always did after a journey, testing the handles and checking the coachwork for the marks of an errant pebble. Still deep in thought he crossed the forecourt to the front porch where two British military policemen, a sergeant and a corporal, were examining passes. Cork, still offended, followed at a distance, so that by the time he reached the front door Meadowes was already deep in conversation with the sentries.

  'Who are you then?' the sergeant was wanting to know.

  'Meadowes of Registry. He works for me.' Meadowes tried to look over the sergeant's shoulder, but the sergeant drew back the list against his tunic. 'He's been off sick, you see. I wanted to enquire.'

  'Then why's he under Ground Floor?'

  'He has a room there. He has two functions. Two different jobs. One with me, one on the ground floor.'

  'Zero,' said the sergeant, looking at the list again. A bunch of typists, their skirts as short as the Ambassadress permitted, came fluttering up the steps behind them.

  Meadowes lingered, still unconvinced. 'You mean he's not come in?' he asked with tenderness which longs for contra­diction.

  'That's what I do mean. Zero. He's not come in. He's not here. Right?'

  They followed the girls into the lobby. Cork took his arm and drew him back into the shadow of the basement grille. 'What's going on, Arthur? What's your problem? It's not just the missing files, is it? What's eating you up?'

  'Nothing's eating me.'

  'Then what's all that about Leo being ill? He hasn't had a day's illness in his life.'

  Meadowes did not reply.

  'What's Leo been up to?' Cork demanded with deep sus­picion.

  'Nothing.'

  'Then why did you ask about him? You can't have lost him as well! Blimey, they've been trying to lose Leo for twenty years.'

  Cork felt the decent hesitation in Meadowes, the proximity of revelation and the reluctant drawing back.

  'You can't be responsible for Leo. Nobody can. You can't be everyone's father, Arthur. He's probably out flogging a few petrol coupons.'

  The words were barely spoken before Meadowes rounded on him, very angry indeed.

  'Don't you talk like that, d'you hear? Don't you dare! Leo's not like that; it's a shocking thing to say of anyone; flogging petrol coupons. Just because he's - a temporary.'

  Cork's expression, as he followed Meadowes at a safe dis­tance up the open-tread staircase to the first floor, spoke for itself. If that was what age did for you, retirement at sixty didn't come a day too early. Cork's own retirement would be from it to a Greek island. Crete, he thought; Spetsai. I could swing it at forty if those ball-bearings come home. Well, forty-­five anyway.

  A step along the corridor from Registry lay the cypher room and a step beyond that, the small, bright office occupied by Peter de Lisle. Chancery means no more than political section; its young men are the elite. It is here, if anywhere, that the popular dream of the brilliant English diplomat may be realised; and in no one more nearly than Peter de Lisle. He was an elegant, willowy, almost beautiful person, whose youth had persisted obstinately into his early forties, and his manner was languid to the point of lethargy. This lethargy was not affected, but simply deceptive. De Lisle's family tree had been disastrously pruned by two wars, and further
depleted by a succession of small but violent catastrophes. A brother had died in a car accident; an uncle had committed suicide; a second brother was drowned on holiday in Penzance. Thus by degrees de Lisle himself had acquired both the energies and the duties of an improbable survivor. He had much rather not been called at all, his manner implied; but since that was the way of things, he had no alternative but to wear the mantle. As Meadowes and Cork entered their separate estates, de Lisle was on the point of gathering together the sheets of blue draft paper which lay scattered in artistic confusion on his desk. Having shuffled them casually into order, he buttoned his waistcoat, stretched, cast a wistful look at the picture of Lake Windermere, issued by the Ministry of Works with the kind permission of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, and drifted contentedly on to the landing to greet the new day. Lingering at the long window, he peered downward for a moment at the spines of the farmers' black cars and the small islands of blue where the police lights flashed.

  'They have this passion for steel,' he observed to Mickie Crabbe, a ragged, leaky-eyed man permanently crippled by a hangover. Crabbe was slowly ascending the stairs, one hand reassuringly upon the banister, his thin shoulders hunched protectively. 'I'd quite forgotten. I'd remembered the blood, but forgotten the steel.'

  'Rather,' Crabbe muttered. 'Rather,' and his voice trailed after him like the shreds of his own life. Only his hair had not aged; it grew dark and luxuriant on his little head, as if fertilised by alcohol.

  'Sports,' Crabbe cried, making an unscheduled halt. 'Bloody marquee isn't up.'

  'It'll come,' de Lisle assured him kindly. 'It's been held up by the Peasants' Revolt.'

  'Back way empty as a church on the other road; bloody Huns,' Crabbe added vaguely as if it were a greeting, and continued painfully down his appointed track.

  Slowly following him along the passage, de Lisle pushed open door after door, peering inside to call a name or a greeting, until he arrived by degrees at the Head of Chancery's room; and here he knocked hard, and leaned in.

  'All present, Rawley,' he said. 'Ready when you are.'

  'I'm ready now.'

  'I say, you haven't pinched my electric fan by any chance, have you? It's absolutely vanished.'

  'Fortunately I am not a kleptomaniac.'

  'Ludwig Siebkron's asking for a meeting at four o'clock,' de Lisle added quietly, 'at the Ministry of the Interior. He won't say why. I pressed him and he got shirty. He just said he wanted to discuss our security arrangements.'

  'Our arrangements are perfectly adequate as they stand. We discussed them with him last week; he is dining with me on Tuesday. I cannot imagine we need to do any more. The place is crawling with police as it is. I refuse to let him make a fortress of us.'

  The voice was austere and self-sufficient, an academic voice, yet military; a voice which held much in reserve; a voice which guarded its secrets and its sovereignty, drawled out but bitten short.

  Taking a step into the room, de Lisle closed the door and dropped the latch.

  'How did it go last night?'

  'Adequately. You may read the minute if you wish. Mea­dowes is taking it to the Ambassador.'

  'I imagined that was what Siebkron was ringing about.'

  'I am not obliged to report to Siebkron; nor do I intend to. And I have no idea why he telephoned at this hour, nor why he should call a meeting. Your imagination is ahead of my own.'

  'All the same, I accepted for you. It seemed wise.'

  'At what time are we bidden?'

  'Four o'clock. He's sending transport.'

  Bradfield frowned in disapproval.

  'He's worried about the traffic. He thinks an escort would make things easier,' de Lisle explained.

  'I see. I thought for a moment he was saving us the expense.' It was a joke they shared in silence.

  CHAPTER TWO

  'I Could Hear their Screaming on the Telephone...'

  The daily Chancery meeting in Bonn takes place in the ordin­ary way at ten o'clock, a time which allows everyone to open his mail, glance at his telegrams and his German newspapers and perhaps recover from the wearisome social round of the night before. As a ritual, de Lisle often likened it to morning prayers in an agnostic community: though contributing little in the way of inspiration or instruction, it set a tone for the day, served as a roll-call and imparted a sense of corporate activity. Once upon a time, Saturdays had been tweedy, volun­tary, semi-retired affairs which restored one's lost detachment and one's sense of leisure. All that was gone now. Saturdays had been assumed into the general condition of alarm, and subjected to the discipline of weekdays.

  They entered singly, de Lisle at their head. Those whose habit was to greet one another did so; the rest took their places silently in the half circle of chairs, either glancing through their bundles of coloured telegrams or staring blankly out of the big window at the remnants of their weekend. The morning fog was dispersing; black clouds had collected over the concrete rear wing of the Embassy; the aerials on the flat roof hung like surrealist trees against the new dark.

  'Pretty ominous for the sports, I must say,' Mickie Crabbe called out, but Crabbe had no standing in Chancery and no one bothered to reply.

  Facing them, alone at his steel desk, Bradfield ignored their arrival. He belonged to that school of civil servants who read with a pen; for it ran swiftly with his eye from line to line, poised at any time to correct or annotate.

  'Can anyone tell me,' he enquired without lifting his head, 'how I translate Geltungsbedürfnis?'

  'A need to assert oneself,' de Lisle suggested, and watched the pen pounce, and kill, and rise again.

  'How very good. Shall we begin?'

  Jenny Pargiter was the Information Officer and the only woman present. She read querulously as if she were contra­dicting a popular view; and she read without hope, secretly knowing that it was the lot of any woman, when imparting news, not to be believed.

  'Apart from the farmers, Rawley, the main news item is yesterday's incident in Cologne, when student demonstrators, assisted by steel workers from Krupps, overturned the Ameri­can Ambassador's car.'

  'The American Ambassador's empty car. There is a differ­ence, you know.' He scribbled something in the margin of a telegram. Mickie Crabbe from his place at the door, mis­takenly assuming this interruption to be humorous, laughed nervously.

  'They also attacked an old man and chained him to the railings in the station square with his head shaved and a label round his neck saying "I tore down the Movement's posters". He's not supposed to be seriously hurt.'

  'Supposed?'

  'Considered.'

  'Peter, you made a telegram during the night. We shall see a copy no doubt?'

  'It sets out the principal implications.'

  'Which are?'

  De Lisle was equal to this. 'That the alliance between the dissident students and Karfeld's Movement is progressing fast. That the vicious circle continues: unrest creates unemploy­ment, unemployment creates unrest. Halbach, the student leader, spent most of yesterday closeted with Karfeld in Cologne. They cooked the thing up together.'

  'It was Halbach, was it not, who also led the anti-British student delegation to Brussels in January? The one that pelted Haliday-Pride with mud?'

  'I have made that point in the telegram.'

  'Go on, Jenny, please.'

  'Most major papers carry comment.'

  'Samples only.'

  'Neue Ruhrzeitung and allied papers put their main emphasis on the youth of the demonstrators. They insist that they are not brownshirts and hooligans, but young Germans wholly disenchanted with the institutions of Bonn.'

  'Who isn't?' de Lisle murmured.

  'Thank you, Peter,' Bradfield said, without a trace of grati­tude, and Jenny Pargiter blushed quite needlessly.

  'Both Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine draw parallels with recent events in England; they refer specifically to the anti-­Vietnam protests in London, the race riots in Birmingham and the Owne
r Tenants Association protests on coloured housing. Both speak of the widespread alienation of voters from their elected Governments whether in England or Germany. The trouble begins with taxation, according to the Frankfurter; if the taxpayer doesn't think his money is being sensibly used, he argues that his vote is being wasted as well. They call it the new inertia.'

  'Ah. Another slogan has been forged.'

  Weary from his long vigil and the sheer familiarity of the topics, de Lisle listened at a distance, hearing the old phrases like an off-station broadcast: increasingly worried by the anti­-democratic sentiments of both left and right... the Federal Coalition Government should understand that only a really strong leadership, even at the expense of certain extravagant minorities, can contribute to European unity... Germans must recover confidence, must think of politics as the solvent between thought and action...

  What was it, he wondered idly, about the jargon of German politics which, even in translation, rendered them totally unreal? Metaphysical fluff, that was the term he had intro­duced into his telegram last night, and he was rather pleased with it. A German had only to embark upon a political topic to be swept away in a current of ludicrous abstracts... Yet was it only the abstracts that were so elusive? Even the most obvious fact was curiously implausible; even the most grue­some event, by the time it had travelled to Bonn, seemed to have lost its flavour. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be beaten up by Halbach's students; to be slapped until your cheeks bled; to be shaved and chained and kicked... it all seemed so far away. Yet where was Cologne? Seventeen miles? Seventeen thousand? He should get about more, he told himself, he should attend the meetings and see it happen on the ground. Yet how could he, when he and Bradfield between them drafted every major policy despatch? And when so many delicate and potentially embarrassing matters had to be taken care of here...