The Thirteenth of August

By the last week of July the heat had settled on West Berlin like a lid on a pot. It came up off the cobbles at night and in through the open windows of Goltzstraße, and with it came the sound of every wireless on the street, all tuned to the same station. RIAS read the numbers every evening at seven, in the level voice of a man reading the football results. Twelve hundred and eighty-four registered at Marienfelde yesterday. Fifteen hundred and seventeen the day before. A record for a Tuesday.

Mara climbed the four flights with the day's work still in her head. The work was always the same: the East German papers, Neues Deutschland and the Berliner Zeitung and the trade union weekly, read at a steel desk on the second floor of the Mission and rendered into English for men who would skim the first paragraph. Today Neues Deutschland had given two full columns to the Western slave traders who lured skilled workers across the sector line with promises of cars and refrigerators. Mara had translated the phrase Menschenhändler four different ways before settling on traffickers in people, and then wondered whether anyone in London would notice that it had taken four tries.

The Mission itself lived out at the Olympic Stadium, in the long stone buildings that had been put up for the Games of 1936, with their colonnades and their eagles chiselled off. Twelve hundred British clerks, soldiers and officials worked in rooms built for athletes and officials of another kind. Mara rode out there every morning on the S-Bahn from Schöneberg, past allotment gardens and railway yards and the backs of tenements. Mara worked all day in a room with three other translators and a ceiling fan that did not turn, and at five rode back again with the same newspapers under her arm, now in English.

Eight months in Berlin. Mara had come out in November with two languages, a university degree in one of them, a letter of appointment on Mission paper and a suitcase that was now too heavy to lift onto the wardrobe. Her German was good enough that shopkeepers in Schöneberg had stopped answering in English. Her Russian was good enough to be useful at the quarterly meetings with the Soviet liaison staff, where Mara sat at the end of the table and wrote down what everyone had said and what they had meant by it, and the two columns rarely matched.

The stairwell smelled of floor polish and somebody's supper. On the first landing, behind the door with the brass plate that said OSTROWSKI, a wireless was playing, and it was not RIAS. It was the East's own station, Radio DDR, with its choirs and its production figures. Frau Ostrowski listened to both, every evening, one after the other. She said it was like reading two newspapers. The truth lay somewhere on the floor between them, she said, and a sensible woman swept it up.

The door opened before Mara reached the second flight.

"You are late," said Frau Ostrowski. She said it every evening, whatever the hour. She was seventy, small and upright, in a flowered housecoat, with her white hair pinned into a knot and her glasses on a chain. She had come from Breslau in the spring of 1945 with one suitcase and a sewing machine, and the building had been hers since 1952, and nothing happened on its stairs that she did not hear. "There is post. It came at four. English stamps." She held out an envelope and did not let go of it at once. "And a man was asking for you."

Mara stopped on the step.

"What man?"

"A man in a hat. At three. He asked the Hoffmann boy downstairs if the English translator lived here, and the Hoffmann boy said yes, top floor, because the Hoffmann boy would tell the Russians the time of day if they asked him politely." Frau Ostrowski let go of the envelope. "When I came down he was gone. The boy says he had a nice hat. That is all he noticed. A nice hat." She sniffed. "In my day a boy noticed shoes."

"Did he leave a name?"

"Men in hats do not leave names," said Frau Ostrowski. "That is what the hat is for."

Behind her in the flat, the Radio DDR choir had stopped, and a man was reading a statement from the Council of Ministers about measures to protect the republic against the activities of Western agents and speculators. Frau Ostrowski tilted her head toward the sound without turning around.

"Measures," she said. "Every week they have measures. In Breslau in January of forty-five they also had measures. On Tuesday the Gauleiter said nobody would leave the city, and on Saturday the trains stopped running, and on Sunday we walked." She looked at Mara over her glasses. "You have eaten?"

Her kitchen was hot and very clean, with oilcloth on the table and a calendar from a Breslau emigrants' association on the wall, open to July and a watercolor of a church that no longer stood. She gave Mara potato salad and cold sausage and a slice of dark bread, and sat across the table with her hands folded, watching her eat, because she held that a person alone in a foreign city ate badly and should be observed.

"The Hoffmann boy's mother is going over on Saturday," she said. "To her sister in Pankow. For the christening. She will come back Sunday night." She turned her glass of water on the oilcloth. "Everybody goes over. Everybody comes back. For now."

"You think it will stop?"

"I think nobody tells an old woman anything, and so she must listen." Frau Ostrowski nodded toward the wireless on the dresser, off now. "When they say nobody intends to build a wall, I think: who asked about a wall? Nobody asked. So somebody has been thinking about one." She got up and took Mara's plate. "My brother Emil stayed in Breslau. He said the Russians would need bakers too. That was sixteen years ago. I had a card from him in 1950 and nothing since." She ran water in the sink. "Eat, and sleep, and keep your door locked. Men with nice hats."

Later, near midnight, the heat broke a little. Mara lay on top of the sheet with the windows open, listening to the city: a dog, a motorcycle on the Hauptstraße, a woman laughing somewhere below. Far off, from the east, a long goods train was crossing on the Ring, the wheels ticking over the joints for minutes on end.

Everyone in Berlin had a theory that summer. The man at the newspaper kiosk on the corner said the Americans would never allow it. The typists at the Mission said the Russians would never allow it. The Soviet liaison officer at the last quarterly meeting had said, in Russian, over the tea, that the German comrades were under great pressure and that pressure had to go somewhere. Mara had written it down in the column for what people meant, and then crossed it out. It was not what the man meant. It was what the man knew.

The letter with the English stamps lay unopened on the table by the window, in the light from the street lamp. Mara would read it in the morning. Mara would answer it on Sunday, as always, with news of the heat and the lime trees along the Kurfürstendamm and the opera at the Städtische Oper, and nothing else, because there was nothing else to tell. Tomorrow was Thursday. On Thursdays, after work, Mara took the U-Bahn to Moritzplatz and walked up Oranienstraße to Adler's bookshop, where the Russian books were in a crate under the window at fifty pfennigs each.

Somewhere below, on the first landing, Frau Ostrowski's wireless came on again, very low, and a man began reading the late news. Mara could not make out the words. It sounded like numbers.