summer I toured Czechoslovakia in my battered little VW Beetle car. Nearing the Ukraine border I had some difficulties with the local police there because I hadn’t stuck to my prearranged route and itinerary. In fact, I had written ‘camping’ into the blank space on the visa form and then wandered around stopping when and where I chose. From Prague I drove north to Berlin. In those days the Cold War was very chilly. I had been delayed in setting out and it was about 2.00am when I was flagged down by Russian army traffic police because I was on a road that led directly into East Berlin. They had spotted my British licence plate. There were very few Western vehicles coming north from Prague and the Russian military decreed that foreigners like me must approach Berlin only from the west. With a military escort I was taken to the local army barracks and held there. A young Russian officer decided it was an opportunity to try out his English language skills, which were on a par with my command of Russian. It was after an hour or so of limited communication that I remembered that I had an unopened bottle of brandy in my baggage. It was soon opened and eventually the officer was telephoning some unknown person with the news that everything was all right after all. Accompanied by a Russian army jeep I was allowed to proceed up the forbidden road. I arrived at the Adlon Hotel in East Berlin just as they were mopping the lobby of this dilapidated remnant of the old luxury hotel.
It was a dramatic beginning to my stay in East Berlin. Kurt more than returned any favour I had done for him in London. He introduced me to many people and made me feel at home. As I said to him, not once but many times, that of all my friends he was the only one that enjoyed the bourgeois benefits of domestic servants and a valuable art collection. And this was communism? I made a few forays to West Berlin and came back with all manner of desirables for Kurt and his friends. A child’s wheelchair, asparagus and ladies fashion magazines such as Burda was one consignment. The wheelchair was a tight fit in my car and I was grilled about it but Burda magazine was the only thing confiscated that time; I suppose the border guards had fashion-conscious wives. But while I was feeling at home in East Berlin I was aware of the fact that I had no friends or acquaintances in West Berlin. On subsequent visits to the city, that gradually changed until I had very good and generous friends in West Berlin, but that initial stay in East Berlin had a lasting effect upon the way I saw it all. And Kurt was kind enough to include me in the listed production staff for a film he made about the Spanish Civil War. This included journeys and long periods in East Germany, and the chance to visit towns such as Leipzig and Weimar; grim and grey under communist rule. In Weimar I was accommodated in the Elephant Hotel, which was a favourite stopover for Adolf Hitler. Kurt told me that the room I was given was the one Hitler always used. The bath was about six feet long; the biggest bath tub I have ever been in. Despite his earnest assurances, I always suspected that Kurt might have been joking. He was a droll fellow and he liked to counter what he said was my English sense of humour with japes of his own.
Berlin was soon a second home to me. I became obsessed by Berlin. I studied its history and collected old photographs of its streets, street life and architecture. I talked to many who had served and many who had suffered under the Third Reich. I still can wander through its streets and alleys and see the past, even when there is little evidence of the past remaining. I learned about its electricity, gas and sewage systems, much of which could not be divided and had to be shared; a fact kept secret by both sides. The whimsical way in which the town was split made it even more bizarre. It was a microcosm of a divided world.
In all my time behind the ‘iron curtain’ I made no secret of my dislike of the repressive and regimented society that is essential to socialism. I had been advised by a very experienced English newspaperman to air my ‘capitalist’ beliefs. As far as I could tell, this procedure in no way impeded my life and my researches. I did have the occasional confrontation with cops and bureaucrats but I suffered no lasting damage.
My second book – Horse Under Water – had sidestepped the Cold War but now I was in the front line. The critics had been kind to my previous books and this encouragement helped me to discover what sort of books I wanted to write. I’d never had any childhood ambitions to be a writer, so I was not tempted to write ‘serious literature’. My feelings have never changed. This is not because I think that serious literature is too serious. It’s because I think most serious literature is not serious at all.
By some measures, Funeral in Berlin was my most successful book. The American edition spent six months on the New York bestseller list. The New York Times, Life magazine and the news magazines all gave the book a generous reception. To get away from it all, I went for a holiday in Paris and spent my days researching the town’s best restaurants. Perhaps I should have gone to New York instead but I had become a professional writer, and I decided that any writer’s fatal enemies were alcohol and praise.
Len Deighton, 2009
Players move alternately – only one at a time.
Saturday, October 5th
It was one of those artificially hot days that they used to call ‘Indian summer’. It was no time to be paying a call to Bina Gardens, in south-west London, if there was a time for it.
Outside the house I sought there was a bright card tied to the railings with green twine. On it in large exact capitals was penned ‘Lost – Siamese cat. Answers to the name Confucius.’
Answers what? I walked up the steps where the sun was warming up a pint of Jersey and a banana-flavour yoghurt. Tucked behind the bottles a Daily Mail peeped its headline ‘Berlin a new crisis?’ There were buttons on that door-post like on a pearly king’s hat but only one said ‘Robin J. Hallam, FRSA’ in a flowing copper-plate; that was the one I pressed.
‘You haven’t seen Confucius?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I only missed him last night.’
‘Really,’ I said, feigning warm interest.
‘The bedroom window doesn’t close properly,’ said Hallam. He was a gaunt-faced man of about forty-five well preserved years. His dark-grey flannel suit was baggy and in the lapel of it he wore three neat discs of egg yolk, like the Legion of Honour.
‘You will be one of Dawlish’s little men,’ he said.
He exposed a white palm and I walked into the cool stone hall while he closed the daylight out.
He said, ‘Could you let me have a shilling – the gas will go any moment.’
I gave him one and he galloped away with it.
Hallam’s room was tidy the way a cramped room has to be. He had a desk that was a sink and a cupboard that was a bed and under my feet a battered kettle on a gas ring was sending Indian signals to the bookcase. Flies were whining in great bed-spring spirals of sound, then going to the window to beat on it with their feet. Through the window there was a large section of grey brick wall; on it there were two perfect rectangles of white sunlight reflected from some high sunny place. I moved three Bartok LPs and sank into a mutilated chair. Hallam turned on the tap in the disguised sink and there was a chugging sound like a bronchial road-drill. He rinsed the cups and wiped them on a tea-cloth that depicted the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in primary colours. There was a clink as he set the cups into their ordained saucers.
‘Don’t tell me. You’ve come about the Semitsa business’, he said to the gas meter as he poured boiling water on to the Darjeeling. ‘You like Darjeeling?’
‘Darjeeling’s OK,’ I said. ‘What I’m not so keen about is you batting that name about like that. Have you ever heard of the Official Secrets Act?’
‘My dear boy, I am trussed up with the OS Act twice a year like a very old and intractable turkey.’ He put half a dozen wrapped sugar pieces on the table and said, ‘You won’t take milk in Darjeeling’: it wasn’t a question. He sipped his unsweetened tea from an antique Meissen cup; around mine it said ‘British Railways SR’ in brown grot