In Berlin-West I made my plans all day, although the brightness hurt my eyes; I almost wished for the old wartime blackouts. Or perhaps it was simply that I couldn’t bear to stay awake. Could I bear to live this way anymore? Moment by moment I try not to be gruesome. Hospital wards crammed full of soldiers without legs or eyes, never mind! Shostakovich’s music, fine. NATO’s come to save us from all that. But until we’ve garrisoned our side of the Wall, I’ll dwell in dreams.
First the Iron Curtain, then the Gendarmenmarkt, that was how it would go. Belgian Nazis who survived by selling their memories to both sides advised me to poison his piano; that would get to him; but the little operative codenamed GREINER, whom I was frankly beginning to consider defeatist, insisted that the Soviets had antidotes to everything, even unfortunate facts. I found myself dreading the night; I didn’t know why, for I preferred the east side now; I craved the safe and comfortable feeling which always came over me when I saw Stalin’s massive, star-topped portrait guarding the Hotel Adlon, which had been more or less burned down by drunken Red Army men in search of wine.
All the same, GREINER had taught me that the Gehlen Organization was in the right to pursue Operation ELENKA: Our target (you know whom I mean) was a pianist in exactly the same sense as were those members of the infamous Red Orchestra, who consorted with innocent German women, sold us black market goods at friendly prices, and carried out orders in our offices across occupied Europe; all the while, these fanatically loyal subordinates, whom we’d trusted in our noble German manner, were playing Hagen’s part, stabbing Siegfried in the back with their myriad Judeo-Bolshevik spears. But halt! Our subject was pianists. Oh, yes, they rented flats in Paris, Brussels, even Berlin itself; and at hours and frequencies which their Center, which they undoubtedly called Europe Central, dictated, they hunched over their transmitters (which it sometimes took us great trouble to pinpoint) and played our enciphered tunes of troop dispositions for Operation Barbarossa, strategic objectives for Operation Blau, entrainments for Operation Citadel. Gestapo Müller used to be a friend of mine. He said: Think of them all as dark little Jews, bent over their transmitters at night, clicking away all our dearest secrets!—Actually, he was never my friend; I seem to have been dreaming someone else’s dream. I couldn’t even hum my own songs.
More and more I say to myself: Why bother? Haven’t I already failed at everything? Isn’t it better that I don’t know to whom that strand of long dark hair belongs? Especially since I’ve long since lost it; I’d tied it to my ring of invisibility for luck…
Enough dreaming! In 1950 we’d bored a listening tunnel under the Curtain; that had been Operation Gold. Today was the dawn of Operation Quick-silver. In other words, Operation ELENKA will mutate into its own success. I recited to myself: We must base our work on the assumption of victory.
Next ploy: I rang up ELENKA on the black telephone.
Crumpling a piece of cellophane up against the receiver all the while, to imitate static, I shouted: Comrade Shostakovich, Europe Central calling! You’ve been summoned to the Teltowkanal at once.
But this is really, I mean, thank you, thank you!
I crumpled cellophane.
And could you tell me please exactly where the, how should I say it, this Teltowkanal—oh, oh, excuse me, someone is knocking now. What if it’s, how should I say? Just a moment; just a moment!
And that tricky bastard hung up on me!
Well, never say die. Flashing my passport, I crossed legally behind the Curtain, this time at Friedrichstrasse, because I was now both a foreigner and a diplomat. I was a one-man column of marchers luxuriously flowing in a specific direction.
Skipping silently between the land mines, I came to a burned tank, ducked down, caught my breath, and peered carefully around to see East Germans working by torchlight, hauling away limestone from the shell of our Reich Chancellery on their special narrow-gauge railway. Well, why not? It was dead, and its half naked skeleton was flanked by hills of its own gravel and powder. If only they could trundle away my last few vanities and illusions! I wanted to fulfill myself by casting off everything dubious. I wished to become a perfect skeleton. No doubt if I only swallowed the correct pill I’d be able to reach a zone where the Chancellery still stood, and then if I strode down the Marble Gallery, which was as long as a runway for light aircraft, I’d get farther and farther from this brave new night of red-starred constellations. Unfortunately, they were breaking up the Marble Gallery right now. They were using it to make headstones for Soviet heroes. Talk about illusions!
They’d already torn down the American Embassy by the Brandenburg Gate. I had to laugh; it seemed so pointless! They’d reopened the Volksbühne Theater for proletarian shows. They’d renamed everything they could. We’d changed Bülowplatz to Horst-Wessel-Platz, so they changed it to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. I should have known! Wilhelmstrasse became Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse, and who the hell was Otto Grotewohl? Let’s just say that he was no Kaiser. If you don’t mind, I’ll keep calling it Wilhelmstrasse. They deny the broken earthworks of their war memories by memorializing the future; I do the same by living in the past. Frankly, that’s why we’ll always need two Germanys. (But everything’s all dreams, all nothingness.) Dorotheenstrasse became Clara-Zetkin-Strasse; well, I can live with that; I’m not against women, even women Communists. If only one of them would kiss me again! But Reds have no time for kisses. Besides, who would kiss me? I’m a traitor to both sides, and I’m long in the tooth; my eyeballs are sinking into my face, so to hell with everything except for that one black hair which can’t say no to me. They’d stolen the pearl-studded golden ball with a golden crucifix attached to it by bands of gold; they’d crowned Stalin with our crown of precious stones; they’d given him our crosshatched dagger, our golden scepter. They could shove it up Stalin’s ass—oh, I was in a fine mood these days! PFITZNER had informed me that my colleagues were getting disappointed. Well, how was I supposed to neutralize an unkillable target? For that matter, what had PFITZNER done to further our goal? He could at least have obtained the cooperation of a small neutral country. I detested PFITZNER. And these land mines on the Wilhelmstrasse where our Foreign Office used to be, those ruins in the night, their spires and lacunae sweeping up and down like the spans of fancy bridges, all that was enough to irritate anyone.
Over there stood the Schauspielhaus, almost untouched. Why hadn’t they demolished it yet? I once saw Marlene Dietrich there in 1927. Now they used it for giving uplifting speeches about work quotas. Never mind. I was used to falling asleep; their speeches wouldn’t trouble me. Besides, the pale man at the Gehlen Organization had promised me that we’d get everything back.
I went and hid behind one of those impressive pillars, which were scarcely even scorched, and took my bearings.—No, I’d underestimated those Slavs! The voice of Elena Kruglikova rose into the sky.
That was when I realized the following: I am Shostakovich’s shadow.
But what do we each stand for? We’re opposites, granted. So, if his significance gets added to my significance, is the result zero? In that case, why proceed?
I was beginning to wonder if the only way to kill him was for me to kill myself.
That cold night zone opened up before me; it was even wider than the boulevard which the sleepwalker had once planned out for Berlin (it would have put the Champs-Élysées to shame by twenty meters); I sped through space until I met him at the stroke of midnight; he seemed to be expecting me, for just as I floated in through the window, Elena Konstantinovskaya screamed and he feebly raised one hand in front of his eyes.