Funeral in Berlin. Len Deighton

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       5

      When a player offers a piece for exchange or sacrifice then surely he has in mind a subsequent manœuvre which will end to his advantage.

       Monday, October 7th

      Brassieres and beer; whiskies and worsteds; great words carved out of coloured electricity and plastered along the walls of the Ku-damm. This was the theatre-in-the-round of western prosperity: a great, gobbling, yelling, laughing stage crowded with fat ladies and dwarfs, marionettes on strings, fire-eaters, strong men and lots of escapologists. ‘Today I joined the cast,’ I thought. ‘Now they’ve got an illusionist.’ Beneath me the city lay in huge patches of light and vast pools of darkness where rubble and grass fought gently for control of the universe.

      Inside my room the phone rang. Vulkan’s voice was calm and unhurried.

      ‘Do you know the Warschau restaurant?’

      ‘Stalin Allee,’ I said; it was a well-known bourse for information pedlars.

      ‘They call it Karl Marx Allee now,’ said Vulkan sardonically. ‘Have your car facing west in the car park across the Allee. Don’t get out of your car, flash your lights. I’ll be ready to go at 9.20. OK?’

      ‘OK,’ I said.

      I followed the line of the canal from the Berlin Hilton to Hallesches Tor U-Bahnstation, then turned north on to Friedrichstrasse. The control point is a few blocks north. I flipped a passport to the American soldier and an insurance card to the West German policeman, then in bottom gear I moved across the tram tracks of Zimmerstrasse that bump you into a world where ‘communist’ is not a dirty word.

      It was a warm evening and a couple of dozen transients sat under the blue neon light in the checkpoint hut; stacked neatly on tables were piles of booklets and leaflets with titles like ‘Science of the GDR in the service of Peace’, ‘Art for the People’ and ‘Historic Task of the GDR and the future of Germany’.

      ‘Herr Dorf.’ A very young frontier policeman held my passport and riffed the corners. ‘How much money are you carrying?’

      I spread the few Westmarks and English pounds on the desk. He counted them and endorsed my papers.

      ‘Cameras or transistor radio?’

      At the other end of the corridor a boy in a leather jacket with ‘Rhodesia’ painted on it shouted, ‘How much longer do we have to wait here?’

      I heard a Grepo say to him, ‘You’ll have to take your turn, sir – we didn’t send for you, you know.’

      ‘Just the car radio,’ I said.

      The Grepo nodded.

He said, ‘The only thing we don’t allow is East German currency.’ He gave me my passport,¹ smiled and saluted. I walked down the long hut. The Rhodesian was saying, ‘I know my rights,’ and rapping on the counter but everyone else was staring straight ahead.

      I walked across to the parking bay. I drove around the concrete blocks, a Vopo gave a perfunctory glance at my passport and a soldier swung the red-and-white striped barrier skywards. I drove forward into East Berlin. There were crowds of people at Friedrichstrasse station. People coming home from work, going to work or just hanging around waiting for something to happen. I turned right at Unter den Linden – where the lime trees had been early victims of Nazidom; the old Bismarck Chancellery was a cobweb of rusty ruins facing the memorial building where two green-clad sentries with white gloves were goose-stepping like Bismarck was expected back. I drove around the white plain of Marx-Engels Platz and, at the large slab-sided department store at Alexanderplatz, took the road that leads to Karl Marx Allee.

      I recognized the car park and pulled into it. Karl Marx Allee was still the same as when it had been Stalin Allee. Miles of workers’ flats and state shops housed in seven-storey Russian-style architecture, thirty-foot-wide pavements and huge grassy spaces and cycle tracks like the M1.

      In the open-air café across the road, lights winked under the trees and СКАЧАТЬ