A Story a Week, Page 2

Greta closed the door: another busy-body from the council. Oh, they said they were nothing to do with any kind of government, but what did they take her for? They had the knock. The ‘we-know-you’re-in-there’ one Greta remembered from so long ago.  At least they hadn’t uniforms, nor did they jam a jackboot in the door, but one of them, the woman, had looked like she wanted to. Greta shuffled to the kitchen, grunting a little as she lifted her slipper over Schellenberg. The cat stretched a paw upward. One day she would trip over that damned cat.

  The kitchen could do with cleaning, she had to admit. Ein Blitzputz – a lightning clean. Well, it wouldn’t get another now. Tomorrow was the 27th of January.  One day. One day to remind people of the things that had been done. It was a gesture. Many remembered every day – or every night – in dreams made of sweat and screams. For Greta it was not so bad. There had been ways to get more food, even in those meshugganah gehennas.  No, the nightmare had ended long ago, when the flat-Slavic faces distorted in disgust, the moment they passed through the gates.  It had ended before that, for her parents, for Oma and Opa and Onkel Solomon, his wife and Greta’s twin cousins, and the people who had travelled with them on the train to oblivion.

  Greta stirred the tea, coffee made her feel sick now.  Blockfὓhrer Hἃβler had drunk ersatz coffee constantly. His breath had been foul with it, as foul as the words he whispered into her ear as he leaned into her. Greta had concentrated on the pain from the splinters in her hand, and wondered why the guards’ furniture was as poorly made as the prisoners’. Greta sipped her tea. Tomorrow, tomorrow was the day.  She had bought the plastic jerry can, she would call at the petrol station on her way. 2005 and the Europeans had decided to mark the day too. The 60th Anniversary. Better late than never, people said. But sometimes it just wasn’t true: Onkel Solomon had died on the 26th.

  Yes, Greta thought, it was time: time for something to make them think. The Pastor had done it in Czechoslovakia, no-one had forgotten him.  Greta stepped over Schellenberg and returned to the sofa. Doctors was on on the television, it was taking a break after today’s episode. Definitely. It was the right time.

  3. Chupe

  In the mountains they believe. They believe that landslides are the mountains displeasure. They believe that the frequent floods are God's tears for the dead children and for the old men who still live. The mountains are no place for a policeman from Lima. Or even Llo. Garcia lit a cigarillo and leaned against the jeep. He looked at the buildings; low, flat, stone-built: identical whether barn or bar. He hoped the village was Chupe, but it could have been any other. The map in the jeep was crumpled in the passenger footwell.

  Garcia headed for the one low building with a generator outside. It was off. An oil-stained patch of dirt beneath it gave a clue to why. A dirty sheet of material hung in the doorway. Garcia swept it aside and went in. Two storm lanterns hung from hooks in the ceiling – already lit since the dirt on the windows let very little of the twilight in. He squinted into the gloom. A glum figure stood behind a trestle bar, smearing a glass with a dirty cloth. Two wizened men crouched close over a table arguing in Quechua. Garcia walked to the bar.

  'Whiskey, por favor.'

  The man behind the bar said nothing, placed the smeared glass on the trestle table and tipped no kind of  measure from a bottle with no label into it.

  Garcia drank and half-stifled a cough. He undid the top button of his khaki shirt. Nothing fitted since his promotion. Not his shirts, not his pants, not even this maldito posting to the back of beyond.

  'I'm here about the missing.'

  The man behind the bar cleared his throat,

  'Why? They are gone, Sargento.'

  'Name?'

  'They call me Paco.'

  'Well, Paco, someone always misses those who disappear.'

  'Ha! It is the American who is missed, Policeman.'

  'Not at all.'  Garcia pulled out his notebook. 'Luisa Suarez, 15, 2008. Maria-Jesus Quispé, 18, 2009 and Linda Huamán, 14, 2010.'

  One of the weathered faces at the table looked up at Garcia,

  'And the Americana student, last month.'

  Garcia jabbed his forefinger at the man,

  'You, who are you?'

  'Victor Huamán.'

  The policeman leaned close,

  'Any relation to the 14-year-old?'

  The man spat at the floor near Garcia's boots.

  'Granddaughter.'

  'My friend, in police circles we say look at the family first.'

  Huamán laughed. He laughed and his eyes squeezed tears which travelled the wrinkles on his face like mountain water down arroyos.

  'The mountains take them, Policeman, the mountains. That is what we believe, you should believe it too.'

  Garcia turned away and ordered another whiskey.

  4. The Infinite Scope of Memory

  The Infinite Scope of Memory

   

  Pass me my mnemo-scope,

  careful! It’s versatile.

  Put it to your mind’s eye;

  it’s all the scopes –

  from micro to tele –

  from minutiae to mediation.

  Which one is it,

  today?

  Like all good scopes

  we use it to spy

  on the ‘other’.

  Here, let’s gather

  intelligence

  - on that other

  country: the past.

  FROM THE REPORT: ‘How Could Matthias Rust Get to Moscow?’

  BY: Douglas Clarke, Radio Free Europe

  DATE: 1987-6-2

  In both the East and the West, people

  are asking how it could have been possible for a

  young West German student pilot, Matthias Rust,

  to fly a light aircraft unhindered through the

  vaunted Soviet air defenses.

  ‘It’s easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.’ John le Carré in The Looking-Glass War, London: Heinemann, 1965

  1. Microscope

  It’s a grubby, cloudy slide under the scope.

  It looked like any large institution’s open-plan office – except for the radio-electronic hardware. A really close look would tell you it wasn’t a standard computer room; oh yes, there were huge tape disks and servers the size of small vehicles. But the detail of the missing punch card machines would give it away. I remember the clouds. Of dense, aromatic tobacco smoke; Lambert and Butler, Bensons, – Gauloise for the pretentious few. Everyone smoked then. Tax-free in the NAAFI, why not? One 23 year old guy affected a meerschaum; he did look like the keyboard player from Sparks, though. It was a big room to fill with smoke. You could barely see the terminal in front of you. A hideous brown block of metal, green-screened with a lighter green font; Zenith Data Systems on a silver metal plate on the side.

  It might have been a weekend. Empty seats everywhere you looked: just a few glum faces in the murk. The rest were enjoying ‘Stand-downs’; gash time off in honour of the Soviet holiday, 28th of May, Border Guard Day. We had no pilots to listen to. The Soviet Tactical Air Force in the German Democratic Republic was having a well-earned rest; the pilots drinking vodka, the ground crews siphoning fuel tanks to brew white lightning. How did we know this? We listened: we monitored Soviet radio transmissions; we heard occasional drunken radio checks on common communications frequencies, streams of slurred words demonstrating the rich variety of Russian expletives. Every Soviet holiday was the same; for us as well as them.

  The smoke – and the constantly flickering fluorescent lighting – was hard on the eyes. There were no windows in the top-secret listening station. Top Secret! I remember once seeing its phallic lines on the front page of the Sun during Geoffrey Prime’s treason trial; a year later I was working in it. No real work to do; what did we do that day?

  Change the slide; turn the knob; focus on the specimen.

  Most likely I was listening to a 3-week old
recording of a trainee helicopter pilot making landing after landing at an airfield north of Berlin; tapping Cyrillic keys as fast as I could. There were always recordings left over to listen to: we filled databases for faceless bean counters countries away. It would have been about five p.m. Unofficially, our shift had started a quarter of an hour ago, you had to takeover the reins from the off-going crew. You came in a quarter-hour earlier for a 30-second summary and a scrawled note. The hard core would just have been putting their headphones on:

  - ‘The shift starts at five, ok? I’ll start at five.’

  Little victories. All they had while in uniform. I never saw the point.

  Jock rolled his eyes at me; six hours of head-melting boredom in prospect. He used to string out the administrative duties as long as he could, putting off the donning of the electric hat as long as possible. And he had a hangover; he always did, then. The white noise and static bursts on the cassette recordings made it worse. Twenty years later, we all flinch at loud noises and fail to hear the quiet ones.

  At this time the transcription desks would have looked like a ‘70s school language lab, right down to the empty seats. Eddie had a lurid paperback an inch from his nose and one headset earpiece wedged on the top of his head as far from his good ear as possible. Steve had his feet up beside the desktop control box for his cassette player.

  Someone would have made a coffee – for the dozen or so people there – before half-an-hour was out. The TV room-cum-kitchen was in the basement. Big Paul McGill disappeared for over an hour once just to make six brews: but then he did once go AWOL for three days to work as a labourer on a building site. We all pretended not to see him as we drove past the Teufelseestrasse S-Bahn station, on our way to work in the Prick in the Sky.

  I would have been working at Teufelsberg for five years – off and on – by then. Some took it very seriously: I did too. Only now does the absurdity of it all hit home. You need memory’s lenses to look at the past: the microscope inflates it, the reversed telescope tells the truth; the past is always smaller, sharpened by distance.

  2. epocseleT

  See me: thinner, younger, smiling less. I run to a bench of radio receivers all set to loudspeaker, a lot of talking; agitated, guttural Russian. It should be brief, hourly checks, drunk or not. Do I hear panic over the ether? Someone has let the tape recordings run out. No-one panics in the room. I don’t know what the disembodied voices said. Gone for ever now. Shrugs all round. Good job the Boss Man has taken a rare stand-down.

  ‘Dinnae worry’ says Jock ‘It’ll no be the Red Horde heading for London.’

  ‘We’ll never know now, will we?’ I muse.

  ‘Who cares who wins?’ snorts Steve. Steve’s dad is the Boss Man on one of the other shifts.

  Jock tells me to reload all the cassette recorders in the room, five racks of 16 plus some 8 individual recorders at another listening station; unmanned because ‘we’ve been recording them’. We man-up all the so-called 24-hour posts. The frequencies we monitor are active for a half-hour or so. It transpires the Soviets want to scramble some assets: the responses are vague and evasive: and quite, quite slurred. Things go back to normal. Their periodic radio checks become flat, atonal, perfunctory. An air of anticlimax spreads to the listeners from the listened-to.

  Two more guys come in. In cricket whites, a beer or two to the good after the match. Sport is good for morale. They’ve heard the boss isn’t in. They’ll hide in the bogs at shift change and skip out of the building having cheated the Queen of the uniform for an evening. Little, little victories. They are the highest ranked people in the room.

  Hours later, I’m nodding off. Back in the ‘Language Lab’ again. Auditory fancies coming through the headphones; helicopters landing by elephants – or landed by them. My head jerks spastically, tape-recording whiplash injury imminent. Someone’s shouting:

  - ‘Hurry, downstairs! Come on, the telly.’

  Hauling myself from my seat, as if I can’t bear to leave my vitally important work – it wouldn’t do for anyone to know I’ve slept through most of a C60 cassette, after all – I follow the crowd down to the TV room…

  3.  K

   S C A

  O E O L

  D P E

      I

  Where it was deathly quiet, except for the sound from the TV. In those pre-satellite days there was no rolling news; no buzz bars ticker-taped world events at the bottom of the screen. The nightly news was on ZDF, with the usual impossibly glamorous, slightly S & M, pastel-power-dresser linking the stories: we strained to follow the newscast German:

  - ’19 year old Mattias Rust landed his Cessna light aircraft in Red Square earlier today…’

  I looked round at the faces; Steve, Jock, Paul, the Cricketers: there must have been others – or were others, not these, actually there? Shift the tube and the patterns look different. A few months ago, in Fuengirola, a 50-something man told me he’d sat next to me on the back row of the ‘Language Lab’ for six months; I didn’t even recognise his name.

  So, perhaps, Steve sniggered. Maybe Jock’s face was unreadable. I know I felt sick. It was too near shift change to call in the stood-down personnel. And what good would it have done?

  - ‘Rust departed Finland and crossed into Soviet controlled Airspace before entering Soviet Territory 160 kilometres west of Leningrad,’ the woman on the TV was saying.

  Jock shrugged:

  ‘We cannae hear that from here… It’s no our responsibility.’

  In my head, I was translating his words into Russian.

  FROM THE REPORT: ‘How Could Matthias Rust Get to Moscow?’

  BY: Douglas Clarke, Radio Free Europe

  DATE: 1987-6-21

  This dramatic incident has caused the dismissal of the head of the Soviet Air Defense Forces and the forced retirement of the Soviet Minister of Defense.

  Soviet embarrassment over Rust's choice of a

  landing spot–in Moscow's Red Square–might have

  been a factor in the severity of the official reaction.

  ‘Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.’ John le Carré in The Night Manager, Alfred A. Knopf , 1993.

  6. Leadville

  It was a relief to step down from the carriage of the locomotive. Imagine my surprise when my guide, one Camphor Jack Stadtler, insisted we board something purporting to be a stagecoach. The rails had ended abruptly in Colorado Springs and I was most grateful that the engineer had maintained sufficient control over his charge to bring it to a halt several feet short of where the track petered out. I had held my kerchief to my nose all the way from Denver to the terminus, since Mr Stadtler failed singularly to live up to his name – either by smell or by the condition of his clothes.  Said 'kerchief – though scented with lavender -  was not sufficient to protect me from the former. I had whiled away the journey thus far in counting the holes left by  moths in his frock coat.

  The coach was not entirely un-sprung, but riding in it did entail clamping one's hat to one's head and several involuntary embraces with fellow passengers. Since none of my fellow travellers were youths, gilded or no, this did not offer the pleasure it might have done, in, shall we say, Oxfordshire.

  The leaving of Colorado Springs showed it in its most pleasing aspect. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the entering of Leadville. Vulgar ornacy stood cheek-by-jowl with abject dilapidation. Most vulgar of all seemed to be those buildings which bore the name of my sponsor for this way station on my tour of the United States. I saw a colonnaded bank worthy of the Pergamon and a false-fronted building housing the Leadville Herald, which doubtless was a compendium of the savage and ridiculous, from murder in front of the saloon to the next scheduled performance by Miss Lily Langtry. Worst of all was the venue for my lecture. Miss Langtry was to appear there the following autumn and I could not help but think she might indeed stoop to conquer, but never quite so far as at the Tabor Opera House, Leadvi
lle.

  Tabor himself was an unremarkable and serious-looking man. Bald of pate and bushy of eyebrow, he lacked only the dog-collar to make him one of the Almighty's earthly intermediaries, if only of the less papist – and hence, more boring – variety. I find any religion that does not require its adherents to dress up, is no sort of religion at all. As well hunt the fox in a worsted suit. It was a glorious day. Late spring in the Rocky Mountains had blessed it with a dry heat that lay lightly on the skin.  My sponsor's handshake was unexpectedly limp and clammy, in marked contrast to that of his wife. The couple seemed to have shared the joy and misery of life in much the same manner as Mr & Mrs Spratt disposed of the fat and the lean of their comestibles. The woman, dumpy though she were, attempted to play the coquette with me. I chose not to inform her of the futility of such an endeavour, were she Salome herself. Presently, Mrs Tabor suggested we repair to the Silver Bar Saloon.

  In truth, I rather liked the Silver Bar. The miners were, in the main, rough young fellows and as such better company than either Mrs or Mr Tabor, or their entourage of the town's notables.  Such entertainment as there was consisted of a pianist whose relationship with his instrument was at best strained. Mrs Tabor was at pains to point out the sign on the wall over the musician's head.

  'Please Refrain from Shooting the Piano Player, He's Doing his Best.'

  I remarked to the Tabors that it was the only rational approach to criticism, but I had as well cast necklaces of pearls before the filthiest of swine.

  If I dared say I met anyone of consequence or interest in Leadville – a name apt for it's atmosphere, if not the source of its wealth – it were none other than the strange and outlandishly dressed fellow who appeared later in the evening in the Silver Bar. He was a tall man looking to be in the prime of life, no more than forty, but -in a kindly light – perhaps he could  have been of an age with myself. Handsome, if a little coarse of feature, he outshone his clothes as a king would a beggar's rags. He spoke, if not beautifully, in a voice as mellifluous as it was hard to place in any kind of geographical context. I heard Edinburgh, London, New Orleans and an education in its tones.

  I took the proffered hand,

  'Moffat Anthrop' he said.

  I gave him my own name and refrained from comment on the improbability of the one he had offered himself. He replied, neatly enough.

  'Since you are famous enough to draw a crowd in Leadville, Sir. I expect even the piano  player  knows your name.'

  He inserted a thumb in the pocket of his threadbare weskit.  Its faded playing cards managed the feat of seeming grubby and garish at one and the same time.

  'Would you care for a shot, Sir?' I replied in the affirmative.

  The man regaled me for some hours with a fantastical tale involving murders, inheritance, assumed identities, Hebraic plots, a robbery of the old Confederate Mint and the Underground Railroad. He claimed this autobiographical phantasy as the honest truth, which it most assuredly could not have been, for the man would have had to have passed three score and ten several years since. Yet he looked, as I say, no more than forty and with a following wind would have passed for ten years less. One of the saloon girls affixed herself close to the man's long coat for a time, but he lost patience and shrugged her off without so much as a glance of acknowledgement. I was forced to refuse the offer of a game at cards and was glad of it when I saw his merciless fleecing of the miners foolish enough to sit at table with him. In short, he managed to show as venal a nature as ever I had seen in a man in no more time than it took him to drink an entire bottle of whiskey and threaten a poor loser with a knife.

  I told the fellow before I left the saloon,

  'You are a most intriguing fellow, Sir, I've a mind to put you in a novel.'

  He laughed and seemed younger than ever,

  'See that you do, but I'd like a name that sounds sweet on the ear, if your pen can manage such a thing.'

  'You could give me your own, and I might use that, might I not?'

  'Then use none that I gave you in my tale of earlier, Sir.'

  'So, what name were you born with?' I asked him, blunt though it were.

  He laughed again. 'No, Sir, I leave it to you.'

  And though I felt the name Moffat suited him best, I called him Dorian Gray.

  6. Sand and Glass

  Glass. One or two, a pair, a pane. A mirror’s made of glass. It fascinated him. Glass: how could you make it from sand? Sand, it’s just silica, after all. All this because of something made of sand. A lazy laugh leaked from his lips: it had started with a glass, in a bar surrounded by sand.

  ‘Hi,’ she’d said. ‘I’m Mandy.’

  He’d have made a joke about an old song but she wouldn’t have been born. So:

  ‘Hi, Mandy. I’m John.’ He tried a smile. Got an almost-smile back.

  She was holding out a glass, they were sitting in a chiringuito on the beach in Banus. It was off season, wind blowing through the building. The roof looked like raffia, the bar didn’t open if it rained.

  ‘What is it?’ John asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘You haven’t bought it yet.’

  He came back with two sticky glasses missing the parasols, which disappeared out of season, like the tourists.

  She took a greedy slurp, licked some of the sticky fluid from her lips :

  ‘Mmm. I like it, Caipirinha. Not vodka though, is it?’

  ‘No, um, cachaça. Roberto smuggles it in when he comes back from Bahia.’

  ‘Not Spanish then?’ she asked, dipping a finger in the drink and sucking the fluid greedily.

  ‘No,’ he took a sip, held back a grimace at the yet-to-be-acquired taste. ‘Who is?’

  She laughed. He thought it sounded like bubbling water in a spring.

  Mandy looked at him, her irises so brown they melted into the pupils.

  ‘And you, what are you?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  The spring bubbled again:

  ‘I like that.’ The dark eyes fixed him again: ‘so am I.’

  He waved a hand at Roberto, who was cajoling the other customer into buying one for the road, or at least the pavement. Two more drinks appeared on the barrel head. She moved her long-legged stool closer, laid a hand on his forearm:

  ‘What do you do?’ she put her head on one side, waiting for an answer.

  ‘This,’ he replied. ‘I do this.’

  ‘What? Sit in beach-front bars?’ She took her hand away from his arm.

  ‘Just this one.’ He took a drink, a real one this time.

  ‘What’s so special about this one?’

  ‘I own it.’

  Mandy’s hand came back. He was expecting it on his thigh. But she was better than that. She laid her hand over his.

  ‘Just this one?’ She had that almost smile again.

  ‘Nowadays.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The less you have, the less you need.’

  Her face hardened, ‘never been poor have you?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  She laughed, ‘I can fix that.’

  And he laughed too.

  So he laughed now at the memory of it and rolled closer to the wooden wall of the beach-hut bar he used to own.

  7. 3-6-9

  The seagulls squawked, swooping on the Sanitation Department truck; preferring trash to fish. Ernie Gantz smiled a crooked little smile.  He unscrewed the cap of the bottle in the brown bag. Tossing the metal once in his palm, he hurled it out into the water. Gantz looked out over the harbour. The tall green lady was still welcoming visitors, but it was tourists now. You couldn't see Ellis from where he sat.

  Friedrich and Irma Gans had told the immigration guy their name meant Goose in their own language. He'd still filled the paperwork in wrong. Ernie's mom used to tell the story most Saturdays at dinner. She always said there were worse things officials could do than misspell your name. So Ernie Gantz was his name, and that was fine. What difference did a name m
ake, after all? Hadn't made much difference on the line. Ernie took a sip of Thunderbird, looked out at Liberty Island and thought about another island.