The Berlin Assignment by Adrian de Hoog Page B

mother, but one could tell it was true from photos. As for the second wife, the stepmother, she’d been high strung. She wore
herself
out. No one mourned her passing, not even, Sabine suspected, her father.
    Martina began fiddling with her string of pearls and Sabine recognized this sign of boredom. Her father shouldn’t be a topic of conversation too long. This was even truer of her husband, whom Martina didn’t like. Nor should she dwell much on her ten-year-old son Nicholas. Family life generally held little interest for Martina. Sabine changed the subject. “What makes you think Gottfried should go to Mitte?” she asked. “As far as I know the restaurants there aren’t very good.” A report in the paper about dining in the East had concluded it was still a disaster.
    â€œGo sometime. You’d be surprised,” Martina suggested calmly.
    â€œI did once. It was awful. The place is full of former communist party hacks. You can tell them by the way they dress and the lifelessness in their eyes. After all the misery they caused, how is it they’re running around free?”
    â€œTry to see the bright side of the East, Sabine,” Martina said nonchalantly. “Think of all the fine bodies that won medals in theOlympics.” She was reducing the last strips of duck breast to small pieces with her knife. Martina liked the eastern districts, and not only because her billboard company,
Ravensburg Creations
, was doing a brisk business there. She came from East Berlin herself. In the fifties, before the Wall went up, when she was twelve, her family escaped. She had been old enough at the time to know what was happening, but too young to experience the terror as her parents had. After a pause and in a softer voice, she continued, “There are fewer communists than you think. You know, if everyone had got out as I did, they’d have turned out different. They’d be like me. A few might even have turned out like you. That’s what I mean. Look at the bright side.”
    A fresh burst of rain rattled against the windows of Café Einstein. Sabine, continuing to feel assaulted by the season, wasn’t ready to see the brighter side of anything, least of all the eastern boroughs of Berlin. She grew up distrusting the place and nothing convincing had happened yet to switch forty years of suspicion off. “The difference between you and them is that they
didn’t
leave,” she argued. “That’s the point. They could have before the Wall came, but they didn’t. That’s what’s strange.”
    â€œYou try it sometime, leaving behind everything you own except a handbag with maybe only your grandmother’s jewellery in it. It’s not as easy as you think.”
    Sabine shrugged. “So they stayed. For what? Look at what the communists accomplished. Nothing anybody can be proud of. And guess who’ll have to pay to put it right.” This last sentiment was borrowed from Werner. He had strong views about the hike in taxes everyone knew was coming.
    â€œPass the butter, sweetie” Martina said curtly. Naysayers were everywhere – she knew that – but being reminded her best friend was one was mildly irritating. “It’s early days. Things are changing for the better. Everywhere. At Rheinhardt’s they now serve Brandenburg butter. Very creamy, better than these clumps from Denmark. My company hasa contract for a dozen signs to say just that.”
    They continued talking in this way about the fallout from the Wall’s dismantling, Sabine provoking, Martina defending: the traffic tie-ups spreading in tidal waves from the former border checkpoints; the chaos on the underground with Eastern trains mixed in with the Western ones so that the whole system was breaking down; the stench in the air from the exhausts of socialism’s cars; the Poles buying up Berlin’s entire stock of stereos and TVs; and the