Time and Time Again

32

STANTON TOOK A walk down Unter Den Linden and went for lunch in the Tiergarten. Bratwurst, mustard and a stein of beer. A typically German meal to celebrate the private knowledge that by what he had just done he had preserved a better Germany for the century to come. That Germany of contented, progressive people who were more fond of beer and sausage than conquest and murder. The Germany the previous twentieth century had corrupted.

The Tiergarten had been quiet and rather sedate when he had walked through it previously but now it was full and what would in another age be called ‘buzzing’. The news of the Kaiser’s death was crashing through the city like cannon fire, and as Stanton sat at his lunch it occurred to him that he was watching a city becoming collectively traumatized. All around him hundreds of identical conversations were occurring as the news was shared. Nannies with their charges, wide-eyed with shock, portly gentlemen waving their arms in horror, earnest students tight-lipped and grim. Each had been going about his or her business, strolling through the park, chatting to friends, pondering some private thought, only to overhear a comment or join a conversation and be suddenly transformed. Their faces turning in an instant to blank bewilderment and utter horror.

If it were possible for an entire city to go into shock, that was what was happening to Berlin.

Nobody in that city was ever going to forget what they were doing when they heard the news that the Kaiser had been assassinated.

Stanton felt a little uncomfortable, almost like a voyeur spying on someone else’s sorrows. That sensation brought to mind his own personal isolation and loneliness. He was still on the outside, still emotionally unconnected with the world in which he was living, in which he would always live now. Nonetheless that loneliness was tinged with elation. It came upon him in little waves. The world-historical task with which he had been entrusted was over and he had done his duty.

And he had done what a million British soldiers had dreamt of doing. He’d killed the Kaiser.

On that thought he decided to order another beer but discovered that he’d been lucky to get the first. On hearing the momentous news the owners had quickly concluded that serving beer and sausage wasn’t an appropriate thing to do on such an afternoon. The waiters were at that moment closing the little entrance gate to their tea garden and telling the customers that they were shutting up indefinitely out of respect for the fallen Emperor.

Stanton decided to return to his apartment.

This wasn’t his grief, his trauma. He might have caused it but he was not of it. His had been a clinical action, theirs was a guttural reaction. By dying the Kaiser had brought the whole city together far more completely than he had ever done in life. But Stanton wasn’t part of it.

He had a bottle of raspberry-flavoured schnapps waiting in his room and some Liebfraumilch wine, keeping cool wrapped in a wet undershirt. He had laid these in in anticipation of not quite knowing what to do with himself after the event. So he decided to go home, get a little drunk and once more consider his future. A future that was finally his to consider.

On his way back to Mitte he noticed that it wasn’t just the cafes in the Tiergarten that were closing their doors, the whole city was shutting down. Remembering that he had no food at all in his room he darted into a little grocer on a corner of the Alexanderplatz just before they closed their doors. He was lucky to get in, otherwise he would have had no supper and probably no breakfast either. He bought bread, cheese and ham, biscuits and some peaches, which would keep him going till the city opened up again. He knew the store, he’d shopped there before, and he recognized the young woman who was serving behind the till. On the previous day when he’d bought some summer fruits from her he had been rather charmed because she smiled so broadly and sang softly to herself while she measured out the strawberries. It had been a song about Erdbeer being sweet but not as sweet as love. Today, however, there were no smiles and no singing. The girl had been crying so hard she could barely count out his change.

‘Our Kaiser is with God now,’ she said, before adding, ‘and may God curse whoever did this.’

She was cursing him. It was a strange feeling.

The grocer’s girl wasn’t the only one who was weeping and cursing. Leaders are always more popular in death and there were many on the streets unable to contain their emotions. Stanton saw one old woman beating her breast in despair. He’d never imagined anybody actually did that. He thought it was just some old-fashioned phrase from the days of melodrama, but this woman was actually pummelling at her chest in a kind of paroxysm of grief while another woman tried to comfort her. Those who weren’t openly crying just looked drawn and grim as if they were forcing back tears. There wasn’t a single person who was not obviously and deeply affected by what was clearly being seen as a national tragedy of previously undreamt of proportions. Stanton had expected as much, of course, but the intensity still took him by surprise.

He made his way back to his street and let himself into his building. The outer door opened into a little vestibule and stairwell where an old concierge sat. He was a taciturn man who had never said anything to Stanton beyond a brief Morgen or Abend. On this afternoon, however, the man felt moved to speak.

‘Bastards,’ he spat as Stanton greeted him. ‘Those swine. Those vermin. Those Untermensch. We’ll hang them all.’

‘Who?’ Stanton asked. ‘Who will you hang?’

‘The Socialists, of course,’ he answered. ‘And the Anarchists with them, those revolutionary scum.’

‘Well, first the police have to catch them, don’t they?’ Stanton reminded the man.

‘We know where they are,’ the old concierge replied darkly. ‘They can’t hide.’

Stanton went up to his little room, laid out his food for later and opened his bottle of wine. He drank a glass straight down, toasting himself in the mirror above his wash bowl.

Now was the time to look again at the list he’d begun that morning. Shackleton. Everest. Fly the Atlantic. Soldiering … Bernadette.

Now at last he could move on.

But at that moment he found he couldn’t even begin to move on. For some reason he felt no sense of completion whatsoever. He was as all at sea as he’d felt in those first moments when he had found himself apparently alone in the cellar in Istanbul, the taste of the half-naked Turkish girl’s spearmint lip gloss still on his lips.

Drinking deep at his wine he tried to put this feeling of unease down to the fact that he had killed someone that day. That was a terrible thing to have to do, and any man who remained unmoved by such a thing should never be trusted with a gun. Stanton had killed before, of course, but not very often and he’d found that it never got any easier. But that was just the natural human horror at taking a life; he didn’t regret it. Far from it, in fact. He was absolutely confident in his mind that he’d acted for the right reasons and done the right thing. If he had it to do again he would.

So why did he feel so unsettled?

Seeking comfort, he took a book from his bag. A book he had brought with him from the future and which also, because of him, would never now be written. It was the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. A favourite of Stanton’s since he was a boy.

He’d read those poems many times since arriving in the past, because he could think of no better argument for his mission than those harrowing but infinitely moving chronicles of quiet heroism, appalling carnage and pointless sacrifice. Owen’s heartfelt verse described more poignantly than any statistics ever could the nightmare that Stanton was preventing. It had given Stanton great strength to know that Owen would write different poems after his mission was complete. That instead of dying in a great and terrible war, Wilfred Owen would instead get his chance to live. And Brooke and Sassoon and millions of other brave young men whose lives were equally important, though their names had only ever been celebrated on neglected war memorials in town and village squares.

But that afternoon, with his wine and his schnapps and the great German warmonger dead, he found the poems didn’t help. The troubled and uncomfortable feeling that had been growing in him since first he had emerged from the Wertheim store wasn’t to do with him doubting the validity of his mission.

It was just that he felt – uneasy.

Things were getting noisier outside now. Stanton’s window was open because of the warmth of the afternoon and it was beginning to sound as if the entire population of Berlin was spilling out on to the streets.

And if people were still weeping outside, then the sound of it was drowned out by other noises. Less peaceful ones. There were shouts and chanting and the occasional sound of breaking glass.

Also there were clanging bells, whistles and klaxons as the authorities spread their net hunting for a killer they would never find.

Sitting listening to it all in his apartment, the Liebfraumilch tasting bitter for all its sweetness, Stanton sensed madness in the air. He’d experienced something very similar before: in Kabul, when an American drone aircraft had gone out of control and crashed down on to a school, destroying it totally. The Afghan people had flooded on to the streets then just as they were doing in Berlin now. It had been a bad time to be an American, or indeed a Westerner of any kind. Stanton and his comrades had barricaded themselves into their compound and sat it out for days with their safety catches off.

It was Socialists whom the crowd was seeking this time but Stanton suspected that the hatred would be just as general and arbitrary. Death to Socialists! he could hear them chant through his open window. Hang them all!

That was the message: all of them. Not just the guilty ones, but all of them.

Leaning out of his window he saw people brandishing the early editions of the evening papers. He went downstairs and bought one himself. The grim, black-trimmed headline adhered to the elegantly verbose standards of the day. There was no KAISER DEAD, as would have been the case in Stanton’s own age. Instead the headline ran: HIS IMPERIAL HIGHNESS IS ASSASSINATED IN BERLIN. Socialist Conspiracy Is Suspected.

Stanton felt a thrill at that. This was, after all, the first historic front page of a new and different twentieth century. He found himself thinking how one day the very headline he was looking at would be reproduced digitally in documentaries on the television in some other version of his own age.

But there was certainly going to be a price to pay. The mood in the street was getting angrier. Strangers were exchanging rumours that the police had uncovered a massive leftist conspiracy to overthrow the government. Stanton heard people speaking confidently about hundreds of ‘Revolutionaries’ and ‘Anarchists’ who had been poised to seize control.

Over and over again he heard the word ‘revenge’.