A Small Town in Germany Read online

  ‘All the files here are related, they’re bound to be. Give me any file from next door; any file you want, I could trace you a path clean through the whole Registry, from Icelandic shipping rights to the latest guidance on gold prices. That’s the fascination of files; there’s nowhere to stop.’

  The speaker is the archivist Meadowes, a man possessed by information, in thrall to the bureaucratic Sublime.

  ‘You think you run an archive,’ he says. ‘You don’t. It runs you …The files get hold of you … They’re wife and child to some men – I’ve seen it happen … by the time you shake yourself out of it you’re ten days older and none the wiser, but maybe you’re safe again for a couple of years. Obsession, that’s what it is. A private journey.’

  The embassy archives are a kind of realist analogue to Borges’s Library of Babel or the sublimely unknowable totalitarian systems of Kafka. The Bonn Embassy is in some ways a precursor to the ‘Circus’ of the Smiley novels, which ranks among English Modernism’s greatest depictions of bureaucracy. Both the Embassy and the Circus are organs of the State, but while the Circus is an institution enveloped in silence and terror, the Embassy has a public face. It is both a microcosm of class-ridden post-Imperial British society and a text that Turner, the Bevin-Boy embodiment of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, must interpret in order to find his place in the world. Scrutinizing the hand-written sign on Harting’s door, he verges on paranoia. ‘He could make out the faint ruled lines of pencil dictating the upper and lower limits of each letter; defining the borders of a modest existence perhaps; or a life unnaturally curtailed by deceit.’

  Like many of le Carré’s characters, Turner inhabits a world made chiefly of information, a constantly reconfigured network of fact and rumor which often feels more present on the page than the material particulars of time and place. A conversation in a le Carré novel may take place on a boat, in a park or behind the wheel of a car, but that is always secondary to its existence within a net of other conversations, observed or unobserved, overheard, recorded, reported or suspected. The novels of the sixties and seventies are full of recording devices and message systems and documents of every kind. In le Carré’s Cold War, words are the primary weapons. Guns, when they appear, seem incidental and insubstantial, an afterthought.

  Le Carré’s own literary words didn’t escape Cold War deployment. After The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) became an international bestseller, le Carré left government service to write full time. Throughout the sixties he garnered praise in London and New York as an impartial chronicler of the human cost of the conflict. Observers in the Soviet Union felt differently. The ‘cheap romanticism’ of Western spy fiction, and in particular Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, had long been a target of scorn for Soviet literary critics, who saw in Bond – the amoral predator, wallowing in sexual conquest and luxury – a crude form of capitalist propaganda. In 1966 the Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet Union’s leading literary magazine, ran a review of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Looking Glass War, arguing that, despite its cool distance and relative impartiality, le Carré’s fiction was still propaganda – merely of a more effective kind.

  Le Carré chose to respond in the pages of Encounter, a magazine which (perhaps embarrassingly) was later revealed to have been funded by the CIA as a tool to innoculate the Anglo-American liberal intelligentsia against communism. His piece took the form of an open letter titled To Russia, with Greetings. Answering the charge that he was no more than an ironized Fleming, he made a case for the primacy of the individual:

  In espionage as I have depicted it, Western man sacrifices the individual to defend the individual’s right against the collective. That is Western hypocrisy, and I condemned it because it took us too far into the Communist camp, and too near to the Communist’s evaluation of the individual’s place in society.

  Ulrike Meinhof, of course, came to a different conclusion. A few months before her death she wrote:

  The collective is a key part of the guerrilla’s structure, and once subjectivity is understood as the basis of each person’s decision to fight, the collective becomes the most important element. The collective is a group that thinks, feels, and acts as a group.

  Meinhof’s desire to subsume herself in the collective experience of the urban guerilla was poignant, given her situation. Increasingly isolated from (and apparently bullied by) her fellow RAF prisoners, she committed suicide in her cell in Stammheim prison, following the confrontational logic of the Cold War to the very end. Le Carré’s literary world of isolated, ethically compromised romantics yearning for connection seems in some ways the funhouse mirror-image of Meinhof’s violent fantasies of committed collectivity. Both depend on the same consciousness of the spectres of history, and the terrible consequences of forgetting. Both find authentic human connection elusive. Responding to his accusers in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, le Carré seemed to despair of the absolutism he saw on all sides:

  The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century. Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers. Mr Voinov, I suspect, smelled in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and political misery.

  Hari Kunzru, 2011

  Prologue

  The Hunter and the Hunted

  Ten minutes to midnight: a pious Friday in May and a fine river mist lying in the market square. Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire. Bonn was a dark house where someone had died, a house draped in Catholic black and guarded by policemen. Their leather coats glistened in the lamplight, the black flags hung over them like birds. It was as if all but they had heard the alarm and fled. Now a car, now a pedestrian hurried past, and the silence followed like a wake. A tram sounded, but far away. In the grocer’s shop, from a pyramid of tins, the handwritten notice advertised the emergency: ‘Lay in your store now!’ Among the crumbs, marzipan pigs like hairless mice proclaimed the forgotten Saint’s Day.

  Only the posters spoke. From trees and lanterns they fought their futile war, each at the same height as if that were the regulation; they were printed in radiant paint, mounted on hardboard, and draped in thin streamers of black bunting, and they rose at him vividly as he hastened past. ‘Send the Foreign Workers Home!’ ‘Rid us of the Whore Bonn!’ ‘Unite Germany First, Europe Second!’ And the largest was set above them, in a tall streamer right across the street: ‘Open the road East, the road West has failed.’ His dark eyes paid them no attention. A policeman stamped his boots and grimaced at him, making a hard joke of the weather; another challenged him but without conviction; and one called ‘Guten Abend’ but he offered no reply; for he had no mind for any but the plumper figure a hundred paces ahead of him who trotted hurriedly down the wide avenue, entering the shadow of a black flag, emerging as the tallow lamplight took him back.

  The dark had made no ceremony of coming nor the grey day of leaving, but the night was crisp for once and smelt of winter. For most months, Bonn is not a place of seasons; the climate is all indoors, a climate of headaches, warm and flat like bottled water, a climate of waiting, of bitter tastes taken from the slow river, of fatigue and reluctant growth, and the air is an exhausted wind fallen on the plain, and the dusk when it comes is nothing but a darkening of the day’s mist, a lighting of tube lamps in the howling streets. But on that spring night the winter had come back to visit, slipping up the Rhine valley under cover of the predatory darkness, and it quickened them as they went, hurt them with its unexpected chill. The eyes of the smaller man, straining ahead of him, shed tears of cold.

  The avenue curved, taking them past the yellow walls of the University. ‘Democrats! Hang the Press Baron!’ ‘The World belongs to the Young!’ ‘Let the English Lordlings beg!’ ‘Axel Springer to the gallows!’ ‘Long Live Axel Springer!’ ‘Protest is Freedom.’ These post
ers were done in woodcut on a student press. Overhead the young foliage glittered in a fragmented canopy of green glass. The lights were brighter here, the police fewer. The men strode on, neither faster nor slower; the first busily, with a beadle’s flurry. His stride though swift was stagy and awkward, as if he had stepped down from somewhere grander; a walk replete with a German burgher’s dignity. His arms swung shortly at his sides and his back was straight. Did he know he was being followed? His head was held stiff in authority, but authority became him poorly. A man drawn forward by what he saw? Or driven by what lay behind? Was it fear that prevented him from turning? A man of substance does not move his head. The second man stepped lightly in his wake. A sprite, weightless as the dark, slipping through the shadows as if they were a net: a clown stalking a courtier.

  They entered a narrow alley; the air was filled with the smells of sour food. Once more the walls cried to them, now in the tell-tale liturgy of German advertising: ‘Strong Men Drink Beer!’ ‘Knowledge is Power, Read Molden Books!’ Here for the first time the echo of their footsteps mingled in unmistakable challenge; here for the first time the man of substance seemed to waken, sensing the danger behind. It was no more than a slur, a tiny imperfection in the determined rhythm of his portly march; but it took him to the edge of the pavement, away from the darkness of the walls, and he seemed to find comfort in the brighter places, where the lamplight and the policemen could protect him. Yet his pursuer did not relent. ‘Meet us in Hanover!’ the poster cried. ‘Karfeld speaks in Hanover!’ ‘Meet us in Hanover on Sunday!’

  An empty tram rolled past, its windows protected with adhesive mesh. A single church bell began its monotonous chime, a dirge for Christian virtue in an empty city. They were walking again, closer together, but still the man in front did not look back. They rounded another corner; ahead of them, the great spire of the Minster was cut like thin metal against the empty sky. Reluctantly the first chimes were answered by others, until all over the town there rose a slow cacophony of uncertain peals. An Angelus? An air raid? A young policeman, standing in the doorway of a sports shop, bared his head. In the Cathedral porch, a candle burned in a bowl of red glass; to one side stood a religious bookshop. The plump man paused, leaned forward as if to examine something in the window; glanced down the road; and in that moment the light from the window shone full upon his features. The smaller man ran forward: stopped; ran forward again; and was too late.

  The limousine had drawn up, an Opel Rekord driven by a pale man hidden in the smoked glass. Its back door opened and closed; ponderously it gathered speed, indifferent to the one sharp cry, a cry of fury and of accusation, of total loss and total bitterness which, drawn as if by force from the breast of him who uttered it, rang abruptly down the empty street and, as abruptly, died. The policeman spun around, shone his torch. Held in its beam, the small man did not move; he was staring after the limousine. Shaking over the cobbles, skidding on the wet tramlines, disregarding the traffic lights, it had vanished westward towards the illuminated hills.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The beam rested on the coat of English tweed, too hairy for such a little man, the fine, neat shoes grey with mud, the dark, unblinking eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ the policeman repeated; for the bells were everywhere now, and their echoes persisted eerily.

  One small hand disappeared into the folds of the coat and emerged with a leather holder. The policeman accepted it gingerly, unfastened the catch while he juggled with his torch and the black pistol he clutched inexpertly in his left hand.

  ‘What was it?’ the policeman asked, as he handed back the wallet. ‘Why did you call out?’

  The small man gave no answer. He had walked a few paces along the pavement.

  ‘You never saw him before?’ he asked, still looking after the car. ‘You don’t know who he was?’ He spoke softly, as if there were children sleeping upstairs; a vulnerable voice, respectful of silence.

  ‘No.’

  The sharp, lined face broke into a conciliatory smile. ‘Forgive me. I made a silly mistake. I thought I recognised him.’ His accent was neither wholly English nor wholly German, but a privately elected no-man’s-land, picked and set between the two. And he would move it, he seemed to say, a little in either direction, if it chanced to inconvenience the listener.

  ‘It’s the season,’ the small man said, determined to make conversation. ‘The sudden cold, one looks at people more.’ He had opened a tin of small Dutch cigars and was offering them to the policeman. The policeman declined so he lit one for himself.

  ‘It’s the riots,’ the policeman answered slowly, ‘the flags, the slogans. We’re all nervous these days. This week Hanover, last week Frankfurt. It upsets the natural order.’ He was a young man and had studied for his appointment. ‘They should forbid them more,’ he added, using the common dictum. ‘Like the Communists.’

  He saluted loosely; once more the stranger smiled, a last affecting smile, dependent, hinting at friendship, dwindling reluctantly. And was gone. Remaining where he was, the policeman listened attentively to the fading footfall. Now it stopped; to be resumed again, more quickly – was it his imagination? – with greater conviction than before. For a moment he pondered.

  ‘In Bonn,’ he said to himself with an inward sigh, recalling the stranger’s weightless tread, ‘even the flies are official.’

  Taking out his notebook, he carefully wrote down the time and place and nature of the incident. He was not a fast-thinking man, but admired for his thoroughness. This done, he added the number of the motor-car, which for some reason had remained in his mind. Suddenly he stopped; and stared at what he had written; at the name and the car number; and he thought of the plump man and the long, marching stride, and his heart began beating very fast. He thought of the secret instruction he had read on the recreation-room noticeboard, and the little muffled photograph from long ago. The notebook still in his hand, he ran off for the telephone kiosk as fast as his boots would carry him.

  Way over there in a

  Small town in Germany

  There lived a shoemaker

  Schumann was his name

  Ich bin ein Musikant

  Ich bin für das Vaterland

  I have a big bass drum

  And this is how I play!

  A drinking song sung in British military messes in Occupied Germany, with obscene variations, to the tune of the ‘Marche Militaire’.

  1

  Mr Meadowes and Mr Cork

  ‘Why don’t you get out and walk? I would if I was your age. Quicker than sitting with this scum.’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ said Cork, the albino cypher clerk, and looked anxiously at the older man in the driving seat beside him. ‘We’ll just have to hurry slowly,’ he added in his most conciliatory tone. Cork was a cockney, bright as paint, and it worried him to see Meadowes all het up. ‘We’ll just have to let it happen to us, won’t we, Arthur?’

  ‘I’d like to throw the whole bloody lot of them in the Rhine.’

  ‘You know you wouldn’t really.’

  It was Saturday morning, nine o’clock. The road from Friesdorf to the Embassy was packed tight with protesting cars, the pavements lined with photographs of the Movement’s leader, and the banners were stretched across the road like advertisements at a rally: ‘The West has deceived us; Germans can look East without shame.’ ‘End the Coca-Cola culture now!’ At the very centre of the long column sat Cork and Meadowes, becalmed while the clamour of horns rose all round them in unceasing concert. Sometimes they sounded in series starting at the front and working slowly back, so that their roar passed overhead like an aeroplane; sometimes in unison, dash dot dash, K for Karfeld our elected leader; and sometimes they just had a free for all, tuning for the symphony.

  ‘What the hell do they want with it, then? All the screaming? Bloody good haircut, that’s what half of them need, a good hiding and back to school.’

  ‘It’s the farmers,’ Cork said, ‘I told yo
u, they’re picketing the Bundestag.’

  ‘Farmers? This lot? They’d die if they got their feet wet, half of them. Kids. Look at that crowd there then. Disgusting, that’s what I call it.’

  To their right, in a red Volkswagen, sat three students, two boys and a girl. The driver wore a leather jacket and very long hair, and he was gazing intently through his windscreen at the car in front, his slim palm poised over the steering wheel, waiting for the signal to blow his horn. His two companions, intertwined, were kissing deeply.

  ‘They’re the supporting cast,’ Cork said. ‘It’s a lark for them. You know the students’ slogan: “Freedom’s only real when you’re fighting for it.” It’s not so different from what’s going on at home, is it? Hear what they did in Grosvenor Square last night?’ Cork asked, attempting once again to shift the ground. ‘If that’s education, I’ll stick to ignorance.’

  But Meadowes would not be distracted.

  ‘They ought to bring in the National Service,’ he declared, glaring at the Volkswagen. ‘That would sort them out.’

  ‘They’ve got it already. They’ve had it twenty years or more.’ Sensing that Meadowes was preparing to relent, Cork chose the subject most likely to encourage him. ‘Here, how did Myra’s birthday party go, then? Good show, was it? I’ll bet she had a lovely time.’

  But for some reason the question only cast Meadowes into even deeper gloom, and after that Cork chose silence as the wiser course. He had tried everything, and to no effect. Meadowes was a decent, churchy sort of bloke, the kind they didn’t make any more, and worth a good deal of anybody’s time; but there was a limit even to Cork’s filial devotion. He’d tried the new Rover which Meadowes had bought for his retirement, tax free and at a ten per cent discount. He’d admired its build, its comfort and its fittings until he was blue in the face, and all he’d got for his trouble was a grunt. He’d tried the Exiles Motoring Club, of which Meadowes was a keen supporter; he’d tried the Commonwealth Children’s Sports Day which they hoped to run that afternoon in the Embassy gardens. And now he had even tried last night’s big party, which they hadn’t liked to attend because of Janet’s baby being so near; and as far as Cork was concerned, that was the whole menu and Meadowes could lump it. Short of a holiday, Cork decided, short of a long, sunny holiday away from Karfeld and the Brussels negotiations, and away from his daughter Myra, Arthur Meadowes was heading for the bend.