A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY by John le Carré

‘Karl-Heinz also has fantastic English,’ the little doll said. ‘You are too modest, Karl-Heinz. It is just as good as Herr Siebkron’s.’ Between her breasts, deep down, Turner glimpsed a tiny flash of white. A handkerchief? A letter? Frau Saab did not care for Siebkron; she cared for no man, indeed, whose virtue was extolled above her husband’s. Her interjec­tion had cut the thread; once more the conversation lay like a fallen kite, and for a moment not even her husband had the wind to lift it.

‘You said forbid him.’ Siebkron had picked up a silver nut­meg grater in his soft hand and was gently turning it in the candlelight, searching for tell-tale flaws. The plate before him was licked quite clean, a cat’s plate on a Sunday. He was a sulky, pale man, well scrubbed and no more than Turner’s age, with something of the hotelier about him, a man used to walking on other people’s carpets. His features were rounded but unyielding; his lips autonomous, parting to per­form one function, closing to perform another. His words were not a help but a challenge, part of a silent interrogation which only fatigue, or the deep cold sickness of his heart, prevented him from conducting aloud.

‘Ja. Forbid him,’ Saab assented, leaning well across the table in order to reach his audience. ‘Forbid the meetings, forbid the marching, forbid it all. Like the Communists, that’s the only damn thing they understand. Siebkron, Sie waren ja auch in Hannover! Siebkron was there also: why don’t he forbid it? They are wild beasts out there. They have a power, nicht wahr, Siebkron? My God, I have also made my experiences.’ Saab was an older man, a journalist who had served a number of newspapers in his time, but most of them had disappeared since the war. No one seemed in much doubt what sort of experiences Herr Saab had made. ‘But I have never hated the English. Siebkron, you can confirm that. Das können Sie ja bestätigen. Twenty years I have written about this crazy Repub­lic. I have been critical – sometimes damn critical – but I have never been hard against the English. That I never was,’ he concluded, jumbling his last words in a way which at once cast doubt upon the whole assertion.

‘Karl-Heinz is fantastically strong for the English,’ the little doll said. ‘He eats English, he drinks English.’ She sighed as if the rest of his activities were rather English too. She ate a great deal, and some of it was still in her mouth as she spoke, and her tiny hands held other things that she would eat quite soon.

‘We owe you a debt,’ said Bradfield with heavy cheerfulness. ‘Long may you keep it up, Karl-Heinz.’ He had arrived back from Brussels half an hour ago, and his eye was on Siebkron all the time.

Mrs Vandelung, the wife of the Dutch Counsellor, drew her stole more snugly over her ample shoulders. ‘We are going to England every year,’ she said complacently, apropos of nothing at all. ‘Our daughter is at school in England, our son is at school in England…’ She ran on. Nothing she loved, cherished or possessed was not of an English character. Her husband, a shrivelled, nautical man, touched Hazel Bradfield’s beautiful wrist and nodded with reflected fervour.

‘Always,’ he whispered, as if it were a pledge. Hazel Brad­field, waking from her reverie, smiled rather solemnly at him while her eyes regarded with detachment the grey hand that still held her. ‘Why, Bernhard,’ she said gently, ‘what a darling you are tonight. You will make the women jealous of me.’ It was not, all the same, a comfortable joke. Her voice had its ugly edge; she could be one of several daughters, Turner decided, intercepting her angry glance as Saab resumed his monologue; but she was not merciful to her plainer sisters. ‘Am I sitting in Leo’s place?’ he wondered. ‘Eating Leo’s por­tion?’ But Leo stayed at home on Tuesdays… and besides, Leo was not allowed here, he reminded himself, raising his glass to answer a toast from Saab, except for a drink.

Saab’s subject, miraculously, was still the British, but he had enriched it with autobiographical matter on the discomforts of bombing: ‘You know what they say about Hamburg? Question: what is the difference between an Englishman and a man of Hamburg? Answer: the man of Hamburg speaks German. You know in those cellars, what we were saying? Thank God they are British bombs! Bradfield, prosit! Never again.’

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