Eleven months after the postcard that closed the last number, the author flies the corridor into the divided city, crosses a line already hardening, and keeps, in a cellar under new management, his appointment with the gentleman who has never yet wanted much. Note 5, as usual where that gentleman is concerned, weighs the want. —Ed.
The postcard of the Michigan Avenue bridge went into a frame on my office wall, the way to keep a thing from being looked into being to hang it up; visitors took it for sentiment, the bridge standing four blocks from my door. Eleven months followed it, and nothing followed the eleven months, which from anyone else is an ended acquaintance and from Anton is a man letting an account season. In November the machine called the election on television and the caption under my face said father of the computer age; the reader has had that number. The first week of December, Sennett's wire came up from Washington in the old dialect: CALCULATION SELLS. EUROPE BUYING. LONDON PARIS BONN. SEE WHAT THE BRITISH HAVE. TRAVEL CUT SEPARATELY.
The travel, cut separately, carried a Berlin leg that no customer justified; nobody buys calculation in Berlin, the trade having gone west with everything else portable. A leg without commercial sense has been my tell for a certain clerk's economy since 1945. I wired Bunny three weeks, packed the dinner jacket and the rule about paper, and went. From Frankfurt the last leg was flown, the only respectable way left for a civilian: a Pan American DC-4 down the corridor, held low, the December zone underneath the color of wash water, Tempelhof coming up between the apartment houses.1
Seven years had passed since the sock and the cellar, and the western half was a going concern: the Kurfürstendamm lit to the third storey, stockings in the shopfront glass; and everywhere our stout new colleagues, democrats in their hearts since 1933 to the last man, certificate available on request; no industry in Germany got back on its feet faster than the one that printed those. I dined out twice on the newsreel face, and once on a colonel's lady who collected it. The second morning there was a note at the hotel desk, grey paper, no stamp, the hand small, tidy, patient: The cellar is under new management. The coffee is no longer recommended. Thursday, four o'clock. Your afternoon will be free. — A. When Thursday came, my afternoon was free; on the Tuesday it had held two appointments. They repaired themselves.
Thursday at half past three I walked east, which in December of 1952 a man could still simply do. The line ran through the town like a chalk mark: a signboard in four languages to say I was leaving the American sector, two People's Policemen at a brazier, and past them the same city, poorer. Since spring the ring around the western half had been wired and ploughed, the telephones between the halves cut dead in one May night, and only the seam through the middle still opened. East of the mark: swept ruin, whitewashed slogans, the generalissimo four storeys tall and fatherly on a gable end, and eastward the cranes of the workers' palaces, whose workers would be heard from inside the year, though nobody had told them yet.2 A column of youngsters in blue shirts swung past singing about peace, in step; the Germans have changed shirts four times in my lifetime and never once dropped the step. Krausenstrasse 17 kept its nine steps and its shored lintel, wore a portrait where the price list had hung; and at the last table, facing the stairs, hat square beside the cup, sat the small grey punctual article himself, seven years older and not one hair further along.3 I have made a career of standing next to the right man; here sat the man I never once got out from next to, and I went down and sat.
He rose the exact inch politeness requires. "Mr. Klipspringer. You are prompt. I have ordered, and I apologize in advance." A waiter set down two coffees that were coffee only administratively. "It was better here under the proprietor. Much was. Drink it hot; heat is its entire merit."
Then he gave me my year, as he had given me my winter here in '45, no paper in sight, in the voice for train times. Election night: "a machine named a president at nine in the evening, and named you with it; I have kept the photograph." The gyroscope on its walnut stand: "it looks well on the desk. I said that it would; allow an old creditor his small correct predictions." The Tuesday letters, three lines the week: "I continue to admire economy in a correspondent; a woman who never needs a fourth line has counted the first three." And June of 1951, mildly: a Sunday of mine opened by the Bureau and closed with a name, given by mouth, in my own front room. "And spelled," he said, "without being asked. Thorough. We enter nothing against it; the man was nothing of ours. You have also sworn their committee an account that exactly one living man could contradict, and he is drinking this coffee with you, and does not contradict. A creditor does not tear up the only note drawn in his favor."
A cigarette burn in the tabletop got a scholar's attention while my hands stayed where they were. I had spelled that name once, to one pencil, and no third soul on the continent; the fright of his recitals was never the contents; in nine years he had never once needed to look anything up. "Somebody in that Bureau mails you their summaries."
"The coffee is bad," Anton said, "but not so bad that you should say such things over it."
I tried my move anyway, built on the airplane, where my best mistakes get built. "You've seen the papers, then. My face sells magazines. A man that lit up is no use to your trade, Anton; your trade wants the dark."
"You reason like a burglar. A burglar wants the dark. We are creditors, and a creditor wants his debtor prosperous, prominent, and in the best of standing. We lent to you in 1944, at the bottom of the market, and you have appreciated. When their television calls you the father of the age, that is collateral improving, and I sleep as you sleep. Excellently. Also, a famous man crosses every frontier on earth with his hat off, and nobody looks in the hat. You crossed one an hour ago. Did they look?"
They had not looked. "Your first card said until the next war," I said. "Seven years, and nobody has declared a thing."
"Declaration is for wars that intend to end. This one is in its eighth year and in excellent health; I told you once what a long war is."
"A sound employer."
"You see. You keep books too. You keep them nowhere, which I have always considered correct. Now the winter. A board is convening for your industry, and your name is on its list. There will be paper on your desk at home: a statement of personal history, twenty years, in your own hand. You have never given anyone twenty minutes in your own hand; you will find it a strain. Do not look for a door. Answer them. We prefer you cleared; we have preferred it since 1944, and who do you suppose has been doing the preferring?"
"And if the board reads me wrong?" It came out lower than I sent it.
"Then America will have mislabeled its inventory. Nothing changes at this table. The entry was made in 1944, and my service does not revise. The entry reads Corporal. Their boards may crown you or burn you; it reads Corporal either way."
"You didn't cross seven years to watch me drink this. What's the errand?"
"Small. Today, nearly nothing at all." Nothing crossed the table but the steam. "Your overcoat hangs on the hook by the stairs, where you hung it. In the left pocket there is now a letter. Family news, a niece in Mecklenburg to her uncle in America; the family is real and the news is dull; it is meant to be. It wants a three-cent stamp and an American box. In the first week of January, on a morning when you would be walking in any case, you will post it. The box at the south end of your bridge." He let that sit, mild as milk. "You have a picture of the bridge."
The frame on my office wall stood up in my mind. The card had never been a greeting; it was the second half of an errand mailed eleven months ahead of the first, by a man so sure of his debtor that he could post the map before the treasure. "And that's the whole of it. A stamp."
"That is the whole of it."
"And if I read the letter?"
"You will read it. Read it; it will bore you; it is built to."
"And if I burn it—"
"You burn what testifies against you," Anton said. "Nothing I have ever handed you testifies against you; that has been the beauty of the arrangement from the first day, and you have never once admired it aloud. Post it, and the account stands as written."
I said yes. The reader knew it before I did. While he counted out the coffee money, aluminum coins laid singly on the saucer, I asked the one thing left: why me, with whatever his shop owned between the Oder and the Golden Gate.
He stood and squared the hat. "Because you carry nothing, sign nothing, keep nothing, and are photographed constantly. One does not repaint a working instrument, Mr. Klipspringer. One also does not leave it in the shed." The handshake was the old one, a claims adjuster closing a folder that has never once been in doubt. On the bottom step, half turned: "Their board will ask you, near the end, whether you would defend the United States against all its enemies. Say yes." He set the hat. "You have always said yes to me."
The overcoat went on an ounce heavier on the left and weighed more than the trainload of '46; the walk to the line was twelve minutes and took a season. At the brazier the People's Police had a westbound spot check going. The rule, free, for the apprentice: carrying another man's paper past a uniform, be a dull man about dull business, and have the business ready; they smell faces, not paper. Mine was a dinner in the American sector I was genuinely late for. The policeman was twenty, with a chin strap that did not fit, and I studied the strap while my card went up and down in his mittens, my mouth making no spit and a long negotiation running below my knees. He looked at the passport, and at me; the newsreel face meant nothing to him; the line was the last place on either side where I was nobody, and I was waved into the lit half. I made the dinner, and was told I told my Berlin stories wonderfully.
Home the week before Christmas. Bunny's Tuesday letter lay on the hall stand, three lines: the lake had frozen early, and Daddy said a firm that gets its name in the papers should mind which pages; I read the third line twice and got no further with it than I ever have. On the office blotter, under Miss Dunn's paperweight, lay the envelope from Washington: a statement of personal history, twenty years, in the subject's own hand, return within thirty days.4 Anton had recited its contents across a cellar table before the Post Office got it over the Alleghenies, and had not thought the fact worth underlining.
The first Monday of January came up grey off the lake. I would have been walking there in any case; that was the deviltry of the thing. A niece's love to her uncle, a three-cent stamp stuck straight, and the box at the south end of the bridge took it with one swallow of the flap. A mounted policeman watched me post it and touched his cap, having the face off the television, and I touched my hat back and went on to the office to be the father of the computer age.5
So the books stood at the new year, and I give them the way I keep them, nowhere. In Washington, a questionnaire wanting twenty years of me in my own hand, and a board in the spring to weigh it, friendly men with a folder; my nose had been reporting them for a month. On the other set, in a hand smaller and tidier than any in Washington, an entry made in 1944 and carried forward every year since, no interest stated and no payment final. Whatever the board decided America had in me, that entry would not move. It reads Corporal this morning. The board convened in March; the reader is owed that room, and will have it.
By the winter of 1952 the division of Berlin had hardened without yet closing. In May of that year the German Democratic Republic sealed its frontier with the Federal Republic behind wire, a ploughed strip, and a prohibited zone, closed the boundary between West Berlin and the Brandenburg countryside around it, and cut some four thousand telephone lines between the two halves of the city in a single operation; the sector boundary inside Berlin, however, stayed open, crossed daily by tens of thousands who lived on one side and worked on the other, and by S-Bahn and U-Bahn trains running through both halves under spot checks of the People's Police. The city was thus the last soft place in the frontier, and the traffic knew it: the flight the sealed border was meant to stop rerouted itself through the Berlin seam, some 182,000 East Germans registering in the West in 1952 and nearly twice as many the year after, until the state that could not keep its people walled them in, in August of 1961. A Western civilian entered as the author did, by air, down one of the three twenty-mile corridors into Tempelhof. —Ed.
The scaffolding he passed was the Stalinallee, the workers' boulevard the young republic was raising as its shopwindow, seven-storey palaces in wedding-cake stone, built in part by volunteer shifts and celebrated on every hoarding in the sector. The workers were heard from on the author's schedule: in June of 1953, ordered to lay roughly a tenth more stone for the same pay, the construction brigades of the Stalinallee put down their tools and marched, and the rising that spread from their sites across the republic was put down by Soviet armor in the streets of this number. The boulevard was renamed in 1961, and the generalissimo's statue on it came down the same year, at night, without announcement. —Ed.
The Soviet services still sat at Karlshorst, in the city's east, by then the largest station their service maintained anywhere on earth (No. 6, note 3). At the date of this meeting the initials were MGB; within four months, on the death of the generalissimo whose portrait hung where the café's price list had been, they were folded into the MVD; within fifteen, they emerged as KGB. The renaming foretold in the earlier note therefore arrived on schedule, twice. The gentleman of these papers, on the evidence of two bundles, changed through all of it precisely nothing: not the tailoring, not the manner, and not the hand, which the reader may set beside the postcard of the last number and the card of 1945 that said until the next war, then. —Ed.
The paper on the blotter was the statement of personal history required of contractors' men under the industrial personnel security program, the machinery of which the reader met at No. 18: charges in summary, sources confidential, doubt resolved for the government. The author's statement, twenty years in the hand of a man whose religion was to leave that hand nowhere, went back to Washington inside the thirty days, and the board it went to convened in the spring of 1953. What was asked in that room, and what was answered, closes this bundle. —Ed.
The device is called an accommodation address: a letter of blameless family news, posted inside the destination country so that it crosses no frontier and wears no foreign postmark, its arrival itself the message, or its paper carrying one reduced past the reach of the eye. Among the exhibits assembled for a federal espionage prosecution in Brooklyn later in the decade, against the resident of an apparatus that had operated in that city since 1948, is an envelope of family news, niece to uncle, postmarked Chicago, January 5, 1953, sender unidentified then and since; the laboratory certified that it could find nothing in it, and the government entered the certificate in evidence as significant. The author's account is that the errand cost him a stamp and no step out of his way. The stamp is on the envelope, canceled four blocks from his office, and the author, as the reader has had occasion to notice, was photographed constantly that winter and questioned never. —Ed.