The following day, the two Germans drove me to Motzstrasse in the American sector.
We drew up outside number twenty-eight. The building was in a much better state of repair than it had been the last time I was there. For one thing, it had been painted canary yellow; there were several window boxes filled with geraniums; and, in front of the heavy oak door, someone had planted a thriving lime tree. The whole area looked like it was doing well. Across the street was an expensive porcelain shop, and below Elisabeth’s first-floor apartment was an equally pricey restaurant called Kottler’s, where my two escorts elected to wait for me.
The street door was open. I went upstairs and rang the bell and listened. Inside Elisabeth’s apartment I could hear music, and then it stopped. A moment later, the door opened and she was standing in front of me. Five years older and at least seven kilos heavier. Before she’d been a brunette. Now she was a blonde. The weight suited her more than the hair color, which didn’t really match her widening brown eyes, but I hardly minded that, as it was six months since I’d even spoken to a woman, let alone one in her dressing gown. Just seeing Elisabeth like that reminded me of a more innocent time before the war, when sex still seemed like a practical proposition.
Her jaw dropped and she blinked deliberately, as if she really didn’t believe her own eyes.
“Oh, my God, it’s you,” she said. “I was afraid you were dead.”
“I was. Eternal life has its advantages, but it’s amazing how quickly you get bored. So here I am again. Back in the city of mahogany and marijuana.”
“Come in, come in.” She vacuumed me inside, closed the door, and hugged me fondly. “I don’t have any marijuana,” she said, “but I have good coffee. Or something stronger.”
“Coffee will be fine.” I followed her along a corridor and into the kitchen. “I like what you’ve done with the place. You’ve put furniture in it. The last time I was here, I think you’d sold everything. To the Amis.”
“Not everything.” Elisabeth smiled. “I never sold that. Lots did, mind. But not me.” She set about making the coffee and then said: “How long has it been?”
“Since I was last here? Six or seven years.”
“It seems longer. Where have you been? What were you doing?”
“None of that matters now. The past. Right now, the only thing that matters is right now. Everything else is irrelevant. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.”
“You really were dead, weren’t you?”
“Mmm hmm.”
She made coffee and led the way into a small but comfortable sitting room. The furniture was solid but unremarkable. Outside, the copper-colored leaves of the linden tree helped to shade the window from the bright autumn sun. I felt quite at home. As much at home as I was likely to feel anywhere.
“No sewing machine,” I observed.
“There’s not much call for expensive tailoring anymore,” she said. “Not in Berlin, anyway. Not since the war. Who can afford such things? These days I run a club called The Queen. On Auguste-Viktoria Platz. Number seventy-six. Drop by sometime. Not today, of course. We’re closed on Sundays. Which is why I’m here.”
“Is it a Sunday? I don’t know.”
“Dead and just coming back to life. That’s hardly respectable. But the club is. Probably too respectable for a man like you, but that’s what the customers want nowadays. No one wants the old Berlin anymore. With the sex clubs and the whores.”
“No one?”
“All right. The Americans don’t seem to want them. At least not officially.”
“You surprise me. In Cuba, they couldn’t get enough of the sex clubs. Every night there was a long line outside the most notorious club of all. The Shanghai.”
“I don’t know about Cuba. But here we get some very Lutheran Americans. Well, this is Germany, after all. It’s as if they think the Russians might use any sign of depravity as an excuse to invade West Berlin. They seem to want to make the Cold War as cold as possible for everyone involved. Did you know that you can get yourself arrested for nude sunbathing in the parks?”
“At my age, that’s hardly a concern.” I sipped her coffee and nodded my appreciation.
Elisabeth lit a cigarette. “So it was you. The person who sent me that money from Cuba. I thought it must be.”
“At the time, I had more than enough to spare.”
“And now?”
“I’m sorting things out.”
“You don’t look like someone who’s just back from the sun.”
“Like I said. At my age. I was never one for lying around in the sun.”
“Me, I love it. Whenever I can. After all, the winters we get. What sort of things are you sorting out?”
“The Berlin kind.”
“Hmm. That sounds suspicious. This used to be a city of whores. And you don’t look like a whore. Now it’s a city of spies. So—” She shrugged and sipped her coffee.
“I expect that’s why they don’t like joy ladies and sex clubs. Because they want their spies honest. And as for nude sunbathing, well, it’s difficult being something you’re not when you’ve got your clothes off.”
“I’ll bear that in mind. As a matter of fact, we get lots of spies in the club. American spies.”
“How can you tell?”
“They’re the ones not wearing uniforms.”
She was joking, of course. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I glanced over at a radiogram the size of a drinks cabinet from which a low murmur was emanating. “What are we almost listening to?”
“RIAS,” she said.
“I don’t know that station. I don’t know any of the Berlin stations.”
“It stands for ‘Radio in the American Sector.’” She said it in English. Good English, too. “I always listen to RIAS on a Sunday morning. To help my English. No, to improve my English.”
I pulled a face. On the coffee table was a copy of Die Neue Zeitung. “American radio. American newspapers. Sometimes I think we lost a lot more than just a war.”
“They’re not so bad. Who’s paying your rent?”
“The VdH.”
“Of course. You were a prisoner yourself, weren’t you?”
I nodded.
“A couple of years ago, I went to one of those exhibitions put on by the VdH,” she said. “On the POW experience. They had reconstructed a Soviet POW camp, complete with a wooden watchtower and a four-meter-high barbed-wire fence.”
“Was there a gift shop?”
“No. Just a newspaper.”
“Der Heimkehrer.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a rag. Among other things, the VdH leadership believes that a free people cannot renounce in principle the protection of a new German army.”
“But you don’t believe that?”
I shook my head. “It’s not that I don’t think military service is a good idea. In principle.” I lit a cigarette. “It’s just that I don’t trust our Western allies not to use us as cannon fodder in a new war that some lunatic Confederate American general thinks he can safely fight on German soil. Which is to say, a long way from America. But which in reality no one can win. Not us. Not them.”
“Better Red than dead, huh?”
“I don’t think the Reds want a war any more than we do. It’s only the men who fought the last war, not to mention the one before that, who can really know how many human lives were wasted. And how many comrades were sacrificed needlessly. People used to talk about the phony war. Remember that? In 1939. But if you ask me, this war, this Cold War, that’s the phoniest war of the lot. Something dreamed up by the intelligence people to scare us and keep us all in line.”