When you separate from a woman, what you have to do is kill your love for her; you have to blockade it and starve it to death, just as the sleepwalker set out to do in Leningrad; that’s the only way. To separate Shostakovich from this world, one must be similarly energetic. Basically, it’s a question of time and manpower.
The Gehlen Organization had just finished laying a secret telephone cable in one of the canals which separated East from West Berlin. Fishing the receiver from the water at 2315 hours, I spoke the code word and received the go-ahead. (There was also something about proceeding from Anhalter Bahnhof to Hahenklee, but I’ve woken up since then; I don’t remember that part. I think it happened earlier.) Remembering how it had been once upon a time, when the enemy crept out from between Russian trees to murder us, I felt exactly the way I used to: depressed, yet resolute. So I crossed their canal hand over hand, the cable thrilling me with faint electrical tingles all the way. On the far side, they’d dug in a pole to prop up one pleat in the Iron Curtain for me, to the tune of maybe thirty centimeters. I wriggled under that leaden darkness, kicked down the pole behind me, and was back in Dreamland.
Fleets of narrow windows, perfectly stationed upon each wall’s stony sea, deployed their shallow balconies all around the world like guns. Evidently I had breached the Curtain in Prague. A little operative came up to me and made conversation, whispering: You and I both work in the East, so we know what’s what… .—I nodded, meanwhile shaking the last drops of canal water out of the barrel of my Walther.
The command post is in that cellar, said the little operative, who was codenamed GREINER. Unfortunately, there’s nobody left. The Red Guillotine got them all last night…
Don’t worry, I said, wanting to console him. Everything’s just a dream anyhow. Even if the Red Guillotine catches you, you’ll wake up before you die. You can’t die in a dream.
Unless you really die, he whispered bitterly.
Well, that’s just a contingency, I said. I was already getting sleepy, but only slightly—exactly enough to numb that scared feeling. As we humans say, this can’t really be happening! Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism. I was confident that tonight I could do the job and get stricken from the list of persons who “concerned” the Gehlen Organization. That was my new goal in life. So I shook GREINER’s tiny hand and wished him a long-lasting camouflage. He yawned and crawled into the cellar to sleep, which appeared incautious to me, but in my organization we refrain from advising each other how to live.
My target shouldn’t be difficult to locate, they’d told me, because he quote lives in a fairytale ballet without human context end quote, so I floated in the direction which seemed most inhuman, proceeding rapidly eastward beneath what a nineteeth-century traveler has described as a pearl-grey, faintly blue sky which lent a luminous quality to everything except the pale green roofs, yes, I knew that, everything transparently grey, with lime trees painted on the stage backdrop.
Shostakovich was eating dinner with a younger woman, a certain Galina Ustvolskaya, about whom I’d been given no information; they appeared to be consuming some sort of fat blind white cave-fish which resembled turbot. He looked unhealthy, and she seemed angry about something. Frankly, I didn’t like her. Groaning, my host locked the door behind me and hobbled back to the table. When I asked him how he was, he smilingly quoted the poetess Akhmatova: Call this working! This is the life! To overhear some music, and pretend that it’s my own…
Ustvolskaya began screaming when I drew my gun. I shot him in the head five times, after which he said to me: There’s a musical term—it’s, it’s, well, it’s Italian actually, which you might not… ma non tanto, which I think means but not so much.
Then I woke up in a double bed with starched sheets; on the pillow beside me slept a single long dark hair. That made me very happy, although I wished that I could remember who my co-dreamer had been; on the other hand, if I really chose to know, I could have made inquiries through the Gehlen Organization. Throwing a white bathrobe around my shoulders, I opened the French doors and stepped out upon the terrace, enjoying the sunshine on my bare feet, and the lovely terrace-view of the squat white dome of our Great Hall of the People—how fine it felt to be home again! I let my gaze be carried down the wide white boulevard which passes through the Arch of Triumph (which of course overtowers the French original), then widens, widens again into a perfect white channel in the white maze of Berlin; it becomes a narrow strait between watchtowers, then widens into a horseshoe-shaped courtyard gripped by the rectangular wings of the vast white ministry where our sleepwalker watches over us. Just then my case officers knocked. I rushed back to bed, and hid the long dark hair beneath my pillow just in time. There were three of them—GRAENER, who bore no resemblance to GREINER; HAVEMANN and PFITZNER—and they trooped in almost shyly, because I was their hero, you see; they gathered around my bed, smiling forgivingly. The anti-sleeping pill was working even better than expected, they assured me. I shouldn’t feel discouraged. With a wink, GRAENER patted my pillow and added: The German people need romanticism once more. Then PFITZNER raised the syringe: Here we go again! Close your eyes! They re-injected me into the Soviet Zone.
This time I was getting better at, at, so to speak—my God! Now I was thought-stuttering like him—
I swam through Europe Central, which is an aquarium scattered with the stone shells of ancient Polish institutes. I went to Moscow, which might well have been Leningrad, found Shostakovich, and shot him as dead as I could. That is what I did, more or less. He was alone that time; he must have fallen out with G. I. Ustvolskaya. This time I finished it. I transformed him into a new man. When I’d completed my world-historical mission, he was smashed like the stone lion of Potsdam, and his brains were scattered over three rooms. Since there was one bullet left, I also made sure that his heart had stopped. I repeat: It was only a question of time and manpower. Then I slipped the Walther back into the pocket of my trenchcoat. I was on my way out when he said to me: My heart is actually, so to speak, inside that piano. I wouldn’t have minded if you’d actually, er, written me out of the score, but unfortunately you’ll have to…
How could I bear to look at him? And the timbre of his voice, my God, my God! What was he going to say about me behind my back? I went out into the snowy street, trying not to fall asleep amidst the translucent rushing crowds. Evidently there was more, how should I say, complexity to this situation than I’d been informed. Well, that’s not uncommon in intelligence work. Was I in over my head? I’d better return straightaway to the office and request a deeper briefing.
L. Moholy-Nagy once wrote: Penetration of the body with light is one of the greatest visual experiences. And so I came back into my Germany, the real Germany, where the sunlight was as white as Heydrich’s hands.
Who moves the mover? inquired the pale man in dark glasses. He seemed far unhappier than I. He longed for the old days when soldiers, not dreams, marched through the Brandenburg Gate. He reminded me of his chief grievance: They all dance to Shostakovich’s tune.
I felt so ashamed of my failures that I simply bowed my head. HAVEMANN waggled a finger a me.
Somehow the brightness felt less bright. It was doomed since it was already articulated. What if even the pale man were doomed? I’d begun to feel more suspicious of him, although I still declined to fear him, since I had so easily tricked him. Reminding myself that I had often voyaged eastward of my own volition, I shored myself up; wasn’t I doing exactly what I wanted?