'Quite sure, thank you, Herr Renn.'
He held the drink and stared across the river as if she wasn't there, and when he spoke it was as if he was talking to himself. 'Most of the people on our floor are Germans, time-serving officials like me. None of them are looking for a battle: they are waiting for their pension. The eight "friends" are another matter.' He drank the rest of the schnapps from the metal cup.
Fiona nodded. Since 1945 Russians were always called 'friends', even when some German war veteran found himself recounting the way in which such 'friends' had jumped into his trench and bayoneted his comrades. 'Perhaps I will have a drink,' said Fiona.
Renn wiped the rim of the cup with his fingers and poured one for her. 'Six of those friends are in other departments, and would not be promoted whatever happened to you.'
Fiona took a tiny sip of schnapps. It was damned strong stuff: she nearly choked on it. No wonder the old man had a red-veined face. 'I see what you mean,' she said. It left the two Russians, both German specialists: Pavel Moskvin and the one who affected the operating name of Stinnes (as Lenin and Stalin had assumed theirs). These were the two men she had clashed with during the conference that afternoon. Tough professionals who had let her know that working for a woman was not a relationship to which they would gladly accede. The argument had come about because of a proposed operational journey to Mexico City. She suspected that the whole thing was chosen simply as a way of showing her how formidable their combined strengths could be against her.
Renn said, The big man – Moskvin – is the dangerous one. He has considerable influence within the Party machine. At present he is in disgrace with Moscow – some black-market scandal which was never made public – and such men will go to absurd lengths to prove their worth. He is emotional and violent; and well-adjusted people fall victim to action that is sudden and unpremeditated. The other man – Erich Stinnes – with his convincing Berlin German, complete with all the slang and expletives, is an intellectuaclass="underline" icy cold and calculating. He will always think in the long term. For someone as clever as you, he will prove easier to deal with.'
'I hope so,' said Fiona.
'We must drive a wedge between them,' said Renn.
'How?'
'We will find a way. Moskvin is a skilful administrator but Stinnes has been a field agent. Field agents never really settle down to the self-discipline and cooperation that our work demands.'
'That's true,' said Fiona, and for a moment thought of her husband and his endless difficulties at the London office.
'Don't allow your authority to be undermined. Moscow has put you here because they want to see changes. If there is resistance, Moscow will support change and whoever is making the changes. Therefore you must be sure you are the one making the changes.'
'You are something of a philosopher, Herr Renn.'
'No, Frau Direktor, I am an apparatchik.'
'Whatever you are, I am grateful to you, Herr Renn.' She looked in her handbag, found some aspirins and swallowed two of them without water.
'It is nothing,' said the old man as he watched her gulp the pills, although of course they both knew he'd stuck his neck out. Even more important, he'd indicated to her that under other circumstances he'd probably yield more. Fiona wondered whether he was already calculating what she could do for him in return. She dismissed the idea; better to wait and see. Meanwhile he might prove an invaluable ally.
'To you, perhaps, but a friendly word goes a long way in a new job.'
Renn, who'd been watching the bridge, touched his hat as if in salutation but in fact he eased the hat because the band was too tight. 'From each according to ability; to each according to need,' quoted the old man, stuffing the flask back into his pocket. 'And here comes our Volvo.' Not car, she noted, but Volvo. He was proud that she rated an imported car. He smiled at her.
In a year or so she would scuttle off back to the West and Hubert Renn would be left to face the music: Stasi interrogations were not gentle. They would be bound to suspect that he was in league with her. She hated the thought of what she was doing to him. It made her feel like a Judas, but that of course is exactly what she was. Bret had warned her that these conflicting loyalties were stressful but that didn't make them any easier to bear.
When she got home, to one of the coveted apartments in the wedding cake blocks that line Frankfurter Alice, she sat down and thought about the conversation for a long time. Finally she began to understand something of Renn's motivation. Just as the Russians could not fathom the way in which some Europeans could be staunch capitalists but rabidly anti-American, Fiona had not understood the deeply felt anti-Russian feelings that were a part of Hubert Renn's psyche. Renn, she was later to discover, had seen his mother raped by Russian soldiers and his father beaten unconscious during those memorable days of 1945 when the commander's Order of the Day told the Red Army 'Berlin is Yours'. And later she was to hear Hubert Renn refer to his Russian 'friends' by the archaic and less friendly word 'Panje'.
She washed a lettuce and cut thin slices from a Bockwurst. It was the fresh fruit she missed so much: she still couldn't understand why such things were so scarce. She had found a privately owned baker near the office and the bread was good. She'd have to be careful not to put on weight – everything plentiful was fattening.
It was an austere little room well suited to reflection and work. The walls were painted light grey and there were only three pictures: an engraving of a Roman emperor, a sepia photo of fashionable ladies circa 1910 and a coloured print of Kirchner's Pariser Platz. The frames, their neglected condition, as well as the subject matter, suggested that they had been selected at random from some government storage depot. She was grateful for that human touch just the same. Her bedroom was no more than an alcove with a hinged screen. The old tubular-framed bed was painted cream and reminiscent of the one she'd slept in at her boarding school. There were many aspects of life in the DDR – from the endless petty restrictions to the dull diet – that reminded her of boarding school. But she told herself over and over that she had survived boarding school and so she would survive this.
When she went to bed that night she was unable to sleep. She hadn't had one night of sound natural sleep since coming over here. That terrible encounter with Bernard had been a ghastly way to start her new life. Now every night she found herself thinking about him and the children. She found herself asking why she'd been born with a lack of the true maternal urge. Why had she never delighted in the babies and wanted to hug them night and day as so many mothers do? And was she now being acutely tortured by their absence because of the way she had squandered those early years with them? She would have given anything for a chance to go back and see them as babies again, to cuddle them and feed them and read to them and play with them the nonsense games that Bernard's mother was so good at.
Sometimes, during the daytime, the chronic ache of being separated from her family was slightly subdued as she tried to cope with the overwhelming demands made upon her. The intellectual demands – the lies and false loyalties – she could cope with, but she hadn't realized how vulnerable she would be to the emotional stress. She remembered some little joke that Bret had made about women adapting to a double life more easily than a man. Every woman, he said, was expected to be a hooker or matron, companion, mother, servant or friend at a moment's notice. Being two people was a simple task for any woman. It was typical Rensselaer bullshit. She switched on the light and reached for the sleeping tablets. In fact she knew that she would never return to being that person she'd been such a short time ago. She had already been stretched beyond the stage of return.