A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY by John le Carré

A girl brought tea. A brown woolly cosy covered the pot and the cubes of sugar were individually wrapped and stamped with the Naafi ‘s insignia. Turner grinned at her but she ignored him. He could hear someone shouting about Hanover.

‘They do say things are bad in England too,’ Meadowes said. ‘Violence; demonstrations; all the protests. What is it that gets into your generation? What have we done to you? That’s what I don’t understand.’

‘We’ll start with when he arrived,’ Turner said. That’s what it would be like, he thought, to have a father you believed in: values for their own sake and a gap as wide as the Atlantic.

‘I said to Leo when he came, “Leo, just keep out of the way. Don’t get between my feet, and don’t go bothering other people.” He took it like a lamb. “Right-ho, Arthur, whatever you say.” I asked him whether he’d got something to get on with. Yes, he said, Personalities would keep him going for a bit.’

‘It’s like a dream,’ Turner said softly, looking up at last from his notebook. ‘It’s a lovely dream. First of all he takes over the Exiles. A one man takeover, real Party tactics; I’ll do the dirty work, you go back to sleep. Then he cons you, then he cons Bradfield, and within a couple of months he’s got the pick of Registry. How was he? Cocky? I should think he could hardly stand up for laughing.’

‘He was quiet. Not cocky at all. Subdued I’d say. Not at all what they told me he was like.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh… I don’t know. There’s a lot didn’t like him; there’s a lot more were jealous of him.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Well, he was a diplomat, wasn’t he. Even if he was a tempor­ary. They said he’d be running the place in a fortnight, taking ten per cent on the files. You know the way they talk. But he’d changed. They all admitted that, even young Cork and Johnny Slingo. You could almost date it, they said, from when the crisis began. It sobered him down.’ Meadowes shook his head as if he hated to see a good man go wrong. ‘And he was useful.’

‘Don’t tell me. He took you by surprise.’

‘I don’t know how he managed it. He knew nothing about archives, not our kind anyway; and I can’t for the life of me see how he got near enough to anyone in Registry to ask; but by mid-February, that Personalities Survey was drafted, signed off and away, and the Destruction programme was back on the rails. We were working all round him: Karfeld, Brussels, the Coalition crisis and the rest of it. And there was Leo, still as a rock, working away at his own bits and pieces. No one told him anything twice, I think that was half the secret. He’d a lovely memory. He’d scrounge a bit of information, tuck it away, and bring it out weeks later when you’d forgotten all about it. I don’t think he forgot a word anyone ever said to him. He could listen with his eyes, Leo could.’ Meadowes shook his head at the reminiscence: ‘The memory man, that’s what Johnny Slingo used to call him.’

‘Handy. For an archivist of course.’

‘You see it all differently,’ Meadowes said at last. ‘You can’t distinguish the good from the bad.’

‘You tell me when I go wrong,’ Turner replied, writing all the time. ‘I’ll be grateful for that. Very.’

‘Destruction’s a weird game,’ Meadowes said, in the reflec­tive tone of a man reviewing his own craft. ‘To begin with, you’d think it was simple. You select a file, a big one, say a subject file with twenty-five volumes. I’ll give you an example: Disarmament. There’s a real rag-bag. You turn up the back numbers first to check the dates and the material, all right? So what do you find? Industrial dismantling in the Ruhr, 1946; Control Commission policy on the allocation of shotgun licences, 1949. Re-establishment of German military potential, 1950. Some of it’s so old you’d laugh. You take a look at the current columns to compare, and what do you find? Warheads for the Bundeswehr. It’s a million miles away. All right, you say, let’s burn the back papers, they’re irrelevant. There’s fifteen volumes at least we can chuck out. Who’s the desk officer for disarmament? Peter de Lisle: put it up to him: “Please may we destroy up to nineteen-sixty?” No objection, he says, so you’re off.’ Meadowes shook his head. ‘Only you’re not. You’re not even half-way to off. You can’t just carve off the back ten volumes and shove them in the fire. There’s the ledger for a start: who’s going to cancel all the entries? There’s the card index; that’s got to be weeded. Were there treaties? Right: clear with legal department. Is there a military interest? Clear it with the MA. Are there duplicates in London? No. So we all sit back and wait another two months: no destruction of originals without written permission from Library. See what

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *