We went to dinner at the nearby Stadthalle, formerly the Hermann Goering Stadthalle—a very large round building that was a bit like Fat Hermann himself. With its green roof the place was half concert hall and half circus tent, but according to Vigée, there was also a good restaurant.
“Not as good as Paris, of course,” he said. “But not bad for Hannover. With quite a reasonable wine list.” He shrugged. “I expect that’s why Goering liked it, eh?”
As we arrived for dinner, everyone else was leaving to go to the Friday-night concert, and I decided the French had probably timed it that way so we could talk without fear of being overheard. The music helped, of course. It was Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony, the Scottish.
The two Frenchmen were disappointed with the food, but to me, after months of prison fare, it was delicious. My two fellow Germans had also brought hearty appetites, although little in the way of conversation. They wore gray suits to match their gray skin. Neither was very tall. One of them had bright blond hair that must have come out of a bottle; the other might have come out of a bottle himself, he drank so much, although it appeared not to affect him at all. The blonder man was called Werner Grottsch; the other called himself Klaus Wenger. Neither seemed inclined to try to find out anything about me. Perhaps they were already well-informed on that subject by Vigée, but I thought it more likely that they knew better than to ask, and if so, it was a compliment I repaid by making no inquiries of them.
Eventually, Vigée brought the conversation around to the true purpose of our acquaintance.
“Sébastien’s not crossed the border before,” he said. “At least not since the implementation of the DDR’s special regime. Werner, perhaps you’d like to put him in the picture about what will happen tomorrow. You’ll be in a car with French diplomatic number plates. Even so, it’s always useful to know how to behave. What to expect.”
Grottsch nodded politely, extinguished his cigarette, leaned forward, and clasped his hands, as if he were going to lead us in prayer.
“It’s called the special regime because the measures are intended to keep out spies, diversionists, terrorists, and smugglers. In other words, people like us.” He smiled at his own little joke. “We’ll be crossing at Checkpoint Alpha. At Helmstedt. It’s the largest and busiest crossing point because it allows for the shortest land route between West Germany and West Berlin. It’s one hundred and eighty-five kilometers through East Germany to Berlin. The road runs through a fenced corridor that’s heavily guarded. A bit like No Man’s Land, if you remember that, and almost as dangerous, so if we have a breakdown, on no account get out of the car. We wait for assistance, no matter how long that takes. If you get out, you risk being shot, and people do get shot. The border police—the Grepos—are particularly trigger-happy. Do I make myself clear?”
“Abundantly clear, Herr Grottsch. Thank you.”
“Good.” Grottsch cocked an ear at the air and nodded his appreciation. “What a pleasure, to listen to Mendelssohn again. And not to be worried that one was being unpatriotic.”
“He was German, wasn’t he?” I said. “From Hamburg.”
“No, no,” said Grottsch. “Mendelssohn was a Jew.”
Wenger nodded and lit a cigarette. “That’s right,” he said. “He was. A Jew from Leipzig.”
“Of course,” Grottsch went on, “going in is one thing. Getting out is quite another. Inspection pits, mirrors, there’s even a mortuary where they can look inside coffins to check if an occupant who wanted to be buried in West Germany is really dead. Even Mendelssohn couldn’t leave these days without the proper paperwork. And he’s been dead for a hundred years.”
“Your lady friend,” said Wenger. “Fräulein Dehler. You’ll be pleased to know she’s still at the same address. But she’s no longer a dressmaker. She now runs a nightclub called The Queen on Auguste-Viktoria Strasse.”
“A straight kind of place?”
“As straight as they go.”
Helmstedt was an attractive little medieval town of brightly colored towers and unusual churches. The town hall looked like an enormous organ from a cathedral that, typically, no longer existed. The redbrick university building resembled a military barracks. I might have seen more of it, but my two companions were keen to get through Checkpoint Alpha so that we might reach Berlin before dark. And I could hardly fault them for that. From Marienborn, Berlin was a three-hour drive through an inhospitable landscape of barbed wire and, on the other side of the fence, men with dogs, and mines. But nothing compared with the inhospitable faces of the Grepos at Checkpoint Alpha. In their jackboots, cross-belts, and long leather coats, the border police reminded me strongly of the SS, and the long wooden huts from which they emerged were like something from a concentration camp. The swastikas were gone, replaced by the red stars and the hammer and sickle, but everything else felt the same. Except for one thing: Nazism had never looked quite so permanent as this. Or thorough.
Grottsch and Wenger shared the driving, which was straightforward enough; if you drive east on the A2 for long enough, you arrive in Berlin. But they remained wary of asking questions, as if the French had warned them against the answers. So when we spoke at all, it was concerning nothing of any real consequence: the weather, the scenery, the Citroën versus the Mercedes, life in the DDR, and, as we got nearer our destination, the Four Powers and their continuing occupation of the former German capital, which, we all agreed, none of us liked. It went without question that we thought the Russians the worst of all, but we spent at least an hour arguing which of the other three was going to take the silver medal. It seemed my two colleagues were of the opinion that the British had the same faults as the Americans—arrogance and ignorance—without any of their virtues—money—that made their arrogance and ignorance easier to ignore. The French, we decided, were simply the French: not to be taken seriously and, therefore, beneath any real contempt. Personally, I had my doubts about the British; and if I had any lingering doubts about my silver-plated dislike of the Americans, they were soon to be dispelled. Just southwest of Berlin, at the Dreilinden border crossing into the city in Zehlendorf, we were obliged to stop to present our papers again, and entering the American zone we parked our car and went into a shop to buy some cigarettes. I was used to seeing, and smoking, mostly American brands. It was all the other American brands in the shop that brought me up short: Chex breakfast cereal, Rexall toothpaste, Sanka caffeine-free coffee, Ballantine beer, Old Sunny-brook Kentucky whiskey, Dash dog food, Jujyfruits, Appian Way pizza mix, Pream, Nescafé, and 7Up. I might have been back in Berlin, but not so as you would have noticed.
We drove into the French sector, to a safe house on Bernauer Strasse that overlooked the Russian sector, which is to say the French controlled the north sidewalk and the Russians controlled the south. It hardly mattered. Even if it didn’t look like the Berlin I remembered—on the Soviet side of the street the bombed-out buildings remained in an appalling state of disrepair—it still felt and smelled much the same: cynical, mongrel—perhaps more mongrel than ever. In my head and heart, an orchestra the size of a division was playing “Berliner Luft” and I was clapping and whistling in all the right places for a true citizen. In Berlin it wasn’t about being German—Hitler and Goebbels never understood that—it was being a Berliner first and telling anyone who wanted to change that to go to hell. One day we would surely be rid of the rest of them, too. The Ivans, the Tommies, the Franzis, and yes, even the Amis. Friends are always harder to get rid of than enemies; especially when they believe they’re good friends.