A Small Town in Germany

'Go for the girls, did he?' Turner asked, more to break the uncomfortable silence than because he had been preparing questions in his mind.

'Only banter.'

'Ever hear of a woman called Aickman?'

'No.'

'Margaret Aickman. They were engaged to be married, her and Leo.'

'No.'

Still they did not look at one another.

'He liked the work too,' Meadowes continued. 'In those first weeks.

I don't think he'd ever realised till then how much he knew by comparison with the rest of us.

About Germany, I me an, the soil of it.'

He broke off, remembering, and it might have been fifty years ago. 'He knew that world too,' he added. 'He knew it inside out.'

'What world?'

'Post-war Germany. The Occupation; the years they don't want to know about any more. He knew it like the back of his hand. "Arthur," he said to me once, "I've seen these towns when they were car parks. I've heard these people talk when even their language was forbidden." It used to knock him clean off course sometimes. I'd catch sight of him deep in a file, still as a mouse, just fascinated. Or he'd look a way, look round the room, for someone with a moment to spare, just so he could tell them about something he'd come across:"Here," he'd say. "See that? We disbanded that firm in 1947. Look at it now!" Other times, he'd go right off in to a dream, and then you'd lost him altogether; he was on his own. I think it bothered him to know so much. It was queer. I think he almost felt guilty sometimes. He went on quite a lot about his memory.

"You're making me destroy mychildhood," he says one time - we were breaking up some files for the machine - "You're making an old man of me." I said, "If that's what I'm doing you're the luckiest man alive." We had a good laugh about that.'

'Did he ever mention politics?'

'No.'

'What did he say about Karfeld?'

'He was concerned. Naturally. That's why he was so glad to be helping out.'

'Oh sure.'

'It was trust,' Meadowes said defiantly. 'You wouldn't understand that. And that was true, what he said: it was the old stuff we were trying to get rid of; it was his childhood; it was the old stuff that meant the most to him.'

'All right.'

'Listen: I'm not holding any brief for him. He's ruined my career for all I know, what there was left after you finished with it. But I'm telling you: you've got to see the good in him too.'

'I'm not arguing with you.'

'It did bother him, his memory. I remember once with the music: he got me listening to gramophone records. Mainly so that he could sell them to me, I suppose; he'd worked some deal he was very proud of, with one of the shops in town. "Look," I said. "It's no good, Leo; you're wasting your time. I get to know one record so I learn another. By that time I've forgotten the first one." He comes right back at me, very fast: "Then you ought to be a politician, Arthur," he says. "That's what they do." He meant it, believe me.'

Turner grinned suddenly. 'That'squite funny.'

'It would have been,' said Meadowes, 'if he hadn't looked so darned fierce with it. Then another time we're talking about Berlin, something to do with the crisis, and I said, "Well, never mind, no one thinks of Berlin any more," which is true really. Files I me an; no one draws the files or bothers with the contingencies; not like they used to, anyway. I me an politically it's a dead duck. "No," he says. "We've got the big memory and the small memory. The small memory's to remember the small things and the big memory's to forget the big ones." That's what he said; it touched me, that did. I me an there's a lot of us think that way, you can't help it these days.'

'He came home with you, did he, sometimes? You'd make an evening of it?'

'Now and then. When Myra was out. Sometimes I'd slip over there.'

'Why when Myra was out?' Turner pounced quite hard on that: 'Youstill didn't trust him, did you?'

'There's rumours,' Meadowes said evenly. 'There was talk about him. I didn't want her connected.'

'Him and who?'

'Just girls. Girls in general. He was a bachelor and he liked his fun.'

'Who?'

Meadowes shook his head. 'You've got it wrong,' he said. He was playing with a couple of paper clips, trying to make them interlock.

'Did he ever talk about England in the war? About an uncle in Hampstead?'

'He told me once he arrived at Dover with a label round his neck. That wasn't usual either.'

'What wasn't-'

'Him talking about himself. Johnny Slingo said he'd known him four years before he came to Registry and he'd never got a word out of him. He was all opened up, that's what Johnny said, it must be old age setting in.'

'Go on.'

'Well, that was all he had, a labeclass="underline" Harting Leo. They shaved his head and deloused him and sent him to a Farm School. He was allowed to choose apparently: domestic science or agriculture. He chose agriculture because he wanted to own land. It seemed daft to me, Leo wanting to be a farmer, but there it is.'

'Nothing about Communists? A left-wing group of kids in Hampstead?

Nothing like that at all?'

'Nothing.'

'Would you tell me if there was something?'

'I doubt it.'

'Did he ever mention a man called Praschko? In the Bundestag.'

Meadowes hesitated. 'He said one night that Praschko had walked out on him.'

'How? Walked out how?'

'He wouldn't say. He said they'd emigrated to England together, and returned here together after the war; Praschko had chosen one path and Leo had chosen another.'

He shrugged. 'I didn't press him. Why should I? After that night he never mentioned him again.'

'All that talk about his memory: what do you think he had in mind?'

'Something historical, I suppose. He thought a lot about history, Leo did. Mind you, that's a couple of months back now.'

'What difference does that make?'

'That was before he went on his track.'

'His what?'

'He went on a track,' Meadowes said simply. 'That's what I'm trying to tell you.'

'I want to hear about the missing files,' Turner said. 'I want to check the ledgers and the mail.'

'You'll wait your turn. There's some things that aren't justfacts, and if you'll only pay attention you'll may be hear about them. You're like Leo, you are: always wanting the answer before you've even heard the question. What I'm trying to tell you is, I knew from the day he came here that he was looking for something. We all did. You felt it with Leo. You felt he was looking for something real. Something you could almost touch, it meant so much to him. That's rare in this place, believe me.'

It was a whole life which Meadowes seemed to draw upon. 'Anarchivist is like an historian; he has time-periods he's faddy about; places, Kings and Queens. 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.'

Meadowes ran on. Turner studied the grey, parental face, the grey eyes clouded with concern, and he felt the dawning of excitement.

'You think you run an archive,' Meadowes said. 'You don't. It runs you. There's qualities to an archive that just get you, and there's not a thing you can do about it. Take Johnny Slingo now. You saw him as you came in, on the left there, the old fellow in the jacket. He's the intellectual type, college and all the rest. Johnny's only been at it a year, came to us from Admin as a matter of fact, but he's stuck with the nine-nine-fours: Federal Germany's relations with Third Parties. He could sit where you are and recite the date and place of every single negotiation there's ever been about the Hallstein Doctrine. Or take my case, I'm mechanical. I like cars, inventions, all that world. I reckon I know more about German infringement of patent rights than any desk officer in Commercial Section.'

'What was Leo's track?'

'Wait. It's important what I'm telling. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it in the last twenty-four hours, and you're going to hear it right, whether you like it or not. The files get hold of you; you can't help it. They'd rule your life if you ever let them. They're wife and child to some men, I've seen it happen.

And times they just take you, and then you're on a track and you can't get off it; and that's what they did to Leo. I don't know how it happens. A paper catches your eye, something silly: a threatened strike of sugar-workers in Surabaya, that's our favourite joke at the moment."Hullo," you say to yourself, "why hasn't Mr So-and-So signed that off?" You check back: Mr Soand- So never saw it. He never read the telegram at all. Well, he must see it then, mustn't he? Only it all happened three years ago, and Mr So-and-So is Ambassador in Paris. So you start trying to find out what action was taken, or wasn't taken. Who was consulted? Why didn't they inform Washington? You chase the cross-references, draw the original material. By then it's too late; you've lost your sense of proportion; you're a way, and by the time you shake yourself out of it you're ten days older and none the wiser, but may be you're safe again for a couple of years. Obsession, that's what it is. A private journey. It happens to all of us. It's the way we're made.'