The Bridge of Sights

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Small, shallow bullet holes peppered the Brandenburg Gate. Between chipped columns stood soldiers-Soviet on his side, American on the other-waving people through. A trickle of women stood on the American side with empty shopping bags. In another line, women with full shopping bags returned to the West. Emil stood behind them, looking down at a bag of salamis, wishing he’d eaten.

Janos had stood in this same spot eight months ago, February, single-mindedly focused on breaking free of his wife’s support. He had stood near these damaged classical columns, thinking of evidence and blackmail and money. He was already purchasing the apartment in his head, living his new, free life.

And behind Janos, maybe crouching among the blackened shards of the demolished Reichstag, MVD agents had taken notes.

Emil looked back and saw only soldiers with rifles and women with shopping bags. But what he saw didn’t matter; they knew whose path he was following.

The Russian soldier smiled at the women. He was a flirt. The women smiled back as necessary when he asked them why they wanted to leave the Soviet sector, where all their needs would be met. Sometimes he asked to see their papers, then, with a wink, flicked them back. “ Nachste?

Emil handed over his passport. Close up, the soldier wasn’t so young, and he remembered Lena’s conviction that these were just peasant boys who wanted their mothers. Lost children. The boyman looked him up and down and spoke in Russian. “A long way from home, Comrade?”

Emil took out his green Militia certificate, which was half in Russian, and handed it over. “Yes, Comrade.”

The soldier shifted his rifle so that the barrel no longer pointed at the ground. “What kind of business do you have with the Americans?”

The badge was useless, but the soldier might not know this. “Just visiting the enemy, Comrade. Taking a look.”

The soldier pursed his lips as he read the certificate carefully, then handed it back. “Not much to see over there,” he said. “Stalingrad, that’s a city.”

Emil folded the Militia certificate back into his jacket.

“They’re different here,” said the soldier confidentially. “They don’t understand the value of gifls. “

Emil understood. He put his hand in his pocket and spoke loudly. “Thank you very much, Comrade! Your assistance is appreciated.”

He held out his hand to shake, and the soldier, uncertain, took it. When he felt the Ostmarks slide into his palm, his features relaxed. He stood straight, at attention. “May your business long serve the interests of the victorious proletariat!”

“That’s my aim, Comrade,” said Emil, and after five long steps he passed a sign that told him he was in the American sector.

A thick-boned GI asked in clotted German what his business was.

He had an impulse to bribe again, but he’d heard about the Americans. They were fat, rich people for whom a bribe was no temptation. Certainly whatever meager bribe he could afford.

“Tourism.”

The GI nodded at the soldier he’d just left. “What did you show him? That green thing.”

Emil looked back at the Russian, who was busy flirting with some more women, then back at the humorless American. He handed his Militia certificate over, and saw, in a flash, prisons and interrogations. His weak stomach trembled, but he forced it to settle. Just a little war tourism. No one could prove otherwise.

The soldier frowned at the cyrillics. He was young, and Emil wondered if the Americans came from farms like the Russians, and if they also felt lost on this side of the Atlantic, buried deep in bomb-scarred Europe. The soldier took Emil’s passport and badge to a gray guardhouse and spoke with an officer inside. After a moment, the officer, now holding the IDs, stepped out and waved for Emil to follow him. He had wind-chapped features that Emil attributed to American plains in states he had heard of: Kansas, Missouri.

When he looked back, Emil saw the round-faced Russian boy staring from the other side of the Gate, looking as though he had been had.

Thin, white hair stuck out from beneath the officer’s cap. They were beside each other now, approaching a dirty white trailer that, when the door was opened, smelled of scalded coffee. A small iron stove burned in the corner. The officer took off his cap-he was bald on top-and poured coffee from a thermos. He held out a cup, but Emil shook his head. They sat on either side of a small kitchen table covered by a piece of lace.

“Speak English?”

Emil shook his head. “ Deutsch, Russkii.”

“So you’re from the People’s Militia,” the officer said in unbelievably smooth, fluent Russian as he laid the two IDs on the table. Emil wondered how a farmer had learned such fine Russian. “Does this mean you’re investigating something in our sector?”

Emil faltered. His stomach was tearing itself up. The nervousness had come upon him as soon as he had stepped into this room. And now the American officer saw right through him.

But what was he really hiding?

He was hiding everything, because trust was not an option.

“A murder?” the American guessed. “It does say homicide here.”

He had a kind face, but Emil knew from experience that this was impractical evidence.

Again: What did he have to hide?

“A murder,” said Emil. “Yes.” He spoke in clipped syllables, trying to hide his sudden despair.

The farmer-officer pressed his lips together as he nodded. “Are you an agent of Soviet Intelligence? MVD? MGB?”

“What?”

“You heard me.” The kindness had slipped from his features.

“I’m not. I’m neither.”

The officer sipped gingerly and considered Emil a moment. The iron stove kept the trailer very warm. “Tell me about your case.”

His stomach was furious, tumultuous. “I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Emil raised his palms helplessly. “I don’t know much myself. And what I do know is questionable.” He rubbed his face, the adrenaline now exhausting him. Maybe it was the fatigue making him say so much. “This is my dilemma,” he told the American. “What I do know may be of more value than I realize. But not necessarily of value to my case. So I can’t share any of it. Do you understand?”

The officer did, Emil could see this. He leaned back in his chair, nodding, spreading his feet as wide as they would go in the cramped quarters, but said, “Please explain.”

He shifted so his stomach could expel the gasses building inside it, then felt the sharp old wounds. “If I tell you something that is of more value than I realize,” said Emil, “I could be in trouble with my own government. Or with the Russians. As soon as I step back over that line, I could be shot.”

“Nothing would leave this room,” said the American officer. “You can trust that.”

Emil leveled a cool gaze on him, but his empty stomach was a writhing acid pit. “I can t trust that.”

The officer licked the inside of his mouth, rapped his knuckles on the tabletop, then glanced out the window. “What about them, then?”

“Who?”

“The Soviets.” He leaned forward. “You can t be too happy with them, now can you? They marched into your country and set up a puppet dictatorship. You do know this, right? They rewrite history like it’s their own goddamn Tolstoy novel.” He paused to let it sink in. “You’re not a fool, I can tell that. You don’t think that Mihai of yours is doing anything other than listening to his Moscow phone for orders-do you?”

Emil heard his grandfather muttering in his skull, but shrugged it off. “No country’s perfect.”

The officer almost shouted: “That’s what drives me crazy about you people! You’ve got the lowest standards in the world.”

“We’re never disappointed.”

He laughed a big, American laugh, and patted his big hand on the shaking table. Outside, a dented green Opel pulled up. “All right, Emil Brod of the People’s Militia,” he said as he handed back the passport and certificate. “Have a good stay in the American sector. Excuse our lack of electricity. Another gift from your Soviet friends.” He smiled. “And remember. You hurt anyone under our care, and you’ll have the United States up your ass.”

A man got out of the Opel’s passenger’s side and stood waiting.

Emil’s stomach cleared suddenly, then sank. He was so slow. He took too much at face value. The officer had been holding him here, waiting.

“Are they taking me away?” asked Emil.

“What? Them?”

Emil waited for an answer.

“Maybe in your country, kid, but not in ours.” He handed Emil his cane. “Just some eyes to make sure you stay out of trouble.” He held out his hand, and Emil took it.

“Thank you, Comrade.”

That word brought a sudden frown to the officer’s cheery face.

Konrad had given him a name and address-Birgit Schlieger, Friedrichstrasse 36-with a small, hand-drawn map. Emil stopped at a corner to try and orient himself. The demolished Tiergarten was to his right. Upturned trees had been cleared, and someone had planted a few twigs to mark their passing. Along the far end, army blankets held up by sticks formed tents. The Opel hummed on the corner behind him. It was quickly becoming dark, and no lights appeared in the houses, only the faint waver of candlelight. He turned the little map ninety degrees and held it to his nose before finding where he was. Friedrichstrasse was on the opposite side of town.

He took a long tram ride to the street-another demolished wreck-but before searching for the apartment, he stopped at a cafe that had a candle on each of its five tables and mildewed, yellow wallpaper peeling in the corners. He settled near the door. The Opel was nowhere to be seen, but in the corner there was a well-fed American Negro with a round face. He wore a brown overcoat and drank his coffee as if it were water. Emil stared- he’d never seen a Negro in the flesh before, skin that dark, absorbing the light like that. The American nodded pleasantly enough at Emil’s stare, then went back to the candlelit paperback novel in his hand.

On the cover: a lurid painting of a terrified woman under a knife. The decadence, Emil supposed, of capitalism.

He ordered coffee and a breadstick. The waitress didn’t notice his accent, or maybe by now she was all too familiar with Slavs. A couple of thin, coal-blackened men sauntered in and began drinking beer.

He wondered if Leonek had found Lena yet. Alive, safe. He hoped. He remembered the field, Lena stretched whitely in the grass, then that white, bloodstained rug.

The bread was dry and the coffee too watery. But finally being off his feet was something. The coffee made his stomach burn, then the bread bloated it. The two Germans were talking coal: load sizes and quotas. They talked about American C-4s flying from Hanover.

The men worked at Tempelhof Airport, he realized, part of the gangs of Germans hired to unload the planes. He wished he could simply sneak into the compound with them, but Konrad had been clear: Trust Birgit. Absolutely. She’s devoted to the Great Red Cause. What about you? Emil had asked. Friends, he said, that’s what I’m devoted to. That, and the longest path to the grave.

He put his money down as the waitress collected his plate. She stopped, one hand on the edge of the table, and stared at it.

“Isn’t it enough?” asked Emil.

She looked from the money to him, and straightened her black skirt. She spoke bitterly: “Osimarks?”

Emil looked down at the bills. He had known this, of course, but it hadn’t occurred to him. The German workers stared; the American read his thriller. “I apologize,” said EmiL “Can I exchange here? Whatever rate you like.”

Her eyes had narrowed to slits, and she chewed the inside of her mouth. “Just leave,” she muttered. She took his plate away.

In the cool darkness, the whine came from everywhere. Laboring plane engines were echoed and redirected by the blasted walls and valleys of rubble. Beneath the sound, though, he could hear footsteps. Very close. Two pairs.

The black shells of Berlin rose all around him. He couldn’t go directly to Konrad s friend, not when he was being followed, yet as he turned he was less and less sure where he was, but he pressed forward, using his cane for leverage against the uneven concrete. He heard water running and women’s voices from dark homes and children squealing. He turned onto a busy street cut down the middle by tram tracks. Berliners on foot squinted into dark shop windows. He didn’t look back, only dove into a crowd and emerged on the other side of the street, behind a sparking, packed tram, and into an alley. Deep in the blackness someone was coughing, hacking, but he turned back to face the street, waiting for the Tempelhof workers.

“A single Mark,” came the whisper, then more coughing.

Emil held his breath, listening to the voices from the crowded, dark street, then the heavy breaths behind. But no one came after him. He glanced back at the old man emerging from the dark. His face was splotched by lumps, some disease taking hold, and his breath was poisonous. Wiry gray hair twisted over his brow, and he started to speak again. Emil slipped back into the street.

He found his way through the crowd again. The Germans held their thin coats tight to themselves, their eyes encircled in darkness. Planes buzzed in the distance. He couldn’t imagine how anyone slept over here.

The Opel seemed to have vanished.

He heard the truck before he saw it: an urgent voice calling in German. Then it was on their street, weaving around pedestrians: a truck topped by bullhorns, with Rias painted on its door. The voice shouted, “ Berlinern und Berlinerin, your city is in danger!” Then it took the next corner.

The Friedrichstrasse third-floor walk-up was a long railroad apartment with large windows on either end and none along its length. Birgit-stout, with a white bun atop her head and deflated bags for cheeks-didn’t smile much. After she introduced Emil to her fat but grinning husband, Dado, she ordered her happier, sweating half into the kitchen, where he knew to close the door.

“Here,” she said, pointing at a scratched dining table. It was an order, so he settled down quickly. “What’s wrong with your leg?” she demanded as she sat opposite him.

“It’s not my leg. I was shot in the stomach.”

She nodded, unfazed. “Americans?”

It took him a moment to understand. “No, no. Back home.”

“Counterrevolutionaries.” She spoke as if she knew all.

The apartment was cluttered like a grandmother’s-lace on the end tables, lace covering the sofa, lace on the shelves. He wondered how her poor grandchildren would fare. On the mottled wall was a portrait of the Comrade Chairman, his thick brown mustache like a roach on his lip. “Konrad Messer sent me.”

“Of course he did,” she said. “Would you like some tea?”

He shrugged.

“Dado!” she called, her mouth stretching at the edges. “Tea!”

He could hear Dado grunting behind the kitchen door as he stood up. Birgit smiled at him, but only briefly.

“Konrad did this before, you know. Sent me someone from your liberated nation. I was of some small assistance. Tell me. Do you know…” She paused, touching her lower lip in thought. “Mihai, yes. General Secretary Mihai? You know him?”

He shook his head.

“You have friends that do.”

“No,” he said. “The General Secretary keeps to himself.”

This seemed to displease her. She tapped her lip, nodding absently until her eyes snapped back to him. “Do you want to get to the Tempelhof air field basement as well?”

“Yes,” he said. “As soon as possible.”

“It’s a simple thing for the children, you know. They’re always cutting through the fence and running wild. The Americans spend half their time rounding up little German boys.”

He smiled obligatorily and nodded.

She brushed some dirt from the corner of her eye. “What for?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why, then, do you want to go to Tempelhof?”

Konrad had told him she would ask this question. He had given Emil the answer, just as he had given it to Janos months before. “For the interests of world socialism.”

She closed her eyes and nodded sharply. This was what she had suspected; the one reason worth her efforts. Dado stumbled out of the kitchen with a metal tray and two glasses filled with hot, brackish water. His blue worker s shirt was stained by tea drippings, and his thick hands were motor-oil black. He set out the glasses with the efficiency of a drunk headwaiter, then departed.

“Tonight?” she asked.

The tea was unsweetened and bitter. “What?”

“You want to get into the Tempelhof basement tonight?”

“Oh God, yes,” he said automatically.

She frowned at his invocation of the deity, but slowly told him what he needed to know.

Tempelhof Airport was shaped like a parenthesis, the planes collecting on the inside of the curve. She drew it on a piece of butcher s paper. It was a vast complex, she said, much larger than the Americans needed for their airlift, and many sections, particularly in the seven-level basement, remained unused. At the end of the war, German soldiers-boys, probably, the only ones left- laid bombs that destroyed the lowest two layers, but the remaining five were still too vast for the Americans. “This is to your advantage,” she pointed out, hovering over the pencil drawing he was barely able to make out in the candlelight. She drew five Xs for planes, then an angular line around the whole thing. “The fence. Here,” she said, marking, “is the main gate, simple enough. But your concern is the basement, the third floor down. Right here.” She drew another X at the bottom of the parenthesis, on the outside of the curve.

Tempelhof had its own generators, so he would not be left in the dark, not like the rest of the city. “I can get you an ID and a ration card, and that will put you inside. Unlike the little boys, you’ll have to go in the front gate.” She used her chubby finger like a teacher’s pointer. “This is where you will enter the gates. With the other workers. This is where you will separate from the workers. This is where you will enter the building. Here is your storeroom. What are you looking for?”

After all the commands, the question was unexpected. He stalled.

“Why are you sneaking into this place?”

“I’m looking for something,” he said finally. “A file.”

She nodded. “You won’t tell me what.”

“Ijust did.”

She looked as if she didn’t believe him, and moved her teacup away from herself.

“Did Janos Crowder go through this as well?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Comrade Crowder came before the blockade. Any fool could get onto Tempelhof. It was just a matter of waiting in a bathroom until the lights were turned off in the evening. Now…” She shook her head sadly.

He looked at the sketch in the wavering light. This was all quite crazy. But nothing he had done in the last month had any sanity to it. He would see it through, though, because seeing it through was the only dignity left to him. He looked at her. “How did you learn all this?”

“Nothing’s all that secret,” she confided, and smiled a second and final time. “And anyway, prostitutes know everything, haven’t you ever heard that?”