Read Another Kind of Country for Free Online Page B

Austria, the roads and trains had been crowded with fleeing East Germans making their roundabout way to West Germany through Hungary and Austria.
    The camera swooped low over the waving crowds in the embassy garden; the growling noise of the chopper grew louder in Hartheim’s office.
    Miller held hisbreath. Like most people in East Berlin, he had his television aerial tuned to the West. Like Hartheim and other accredited East German staff, Miller was authorized to do so. Now it seemed almost that such authorization no longer mattered. All of the German Democratic Republic was staring at these pictures of a people in flight and even the Stasi seemed not to know what to do about it.
    ‘Cunts,’ Hartheim said again. He waved a hand. ‘Please – turn it off.’
    Miller wondered why the TV had been turned on in the first place. Some lesson for himself? Or simply further evidence of Hartheim’s capricious nature? With Hartheim you never knew – and you never asked.
    Miller waited. He knew he hadn’t been summoned to Hartheim’s office simply to report progress on an Australian edition of an almost-forgotten nineteenth-century memoir. His work consisted in the main of examining new books for any wayward comments on socialism as practised in the German Democratic Republic. Once upon an innocent time, in his life before East Berlin, his own articles in the British press had been a continuous hymn to the glories of German socialism.
    Hartheim was taking a bulky manila folder from a drawer in his desk.
    And this is where your hymn-singing has landed you
.
    ‘I have an importanttask for you, Herr Miller.’ Hartheim laid the thick file on his desk. His left hand rested on top of the file, the one with the chewed-off index finger. In the last days of the war, as the Red Army powered its way through the rubble of Berlin, Hartheim had been one of the Communist provocateurs rounded up by a fanatic Nazi commander. Interrogation was cursory and brutal: the Gestapo officer had slashed Hartheim’s hand with his knife and offered the bloodied finger to the half-starved Dobermann pinscher at his side. The crazed dog had devoured Hartheim’s index finger with a single bite. Then the Russians arrived and both dog and master died in a sudden burst of gunfire.
    Hartheim had a habit of stroking with his right hand the knuckle stub of the missing finger. Watching it always made Miller queasy, as though the wolfish dog were chewing away in front of him. Hartheim was doing it now – fat, sausage fingers poking away at the lumpy knuckle.
    Tune in!
    Of late, Miller felt he was too easily distracted. Maybe it was all that embassy-refugee shit on the television. The entire country seemed distracted.
    Hartheim was droning on in his thick Berlin accent.
    ‘It’s a routine reading, a matter of form, the autobiography of a distinguished soldier. The general understood better than anyone that the Party is truly “the sword and shield” of our country. Just set down your reactions in your usual objective way.’
    The general?
Miller looked longingly at the file but Hartheim’s pudding hand was covering the name stickered to the top of the brown cardboard.
    Aloud he said, ‘Would it be possible for me to see our reports from earlier readers?’
You didn’t want to fuck around with the memoirs of a fucking general, no matter which general it was
.
    Hartheim croaked akind of laugh. ‘They’re not relevant, Herr Miller. What we expect of you is your usual assessment of how the general’s book might be received in the Western media. We both know how our enemies distort and murder the truth in the West. We simply don’t want to present them with opportunities to do so in our own publications.’ An attempt at a smile on the round face. ‘Nobody knows better than you, Herr Miller, how a word or a phrase can be seized upon and twisted into an untruth. It is that expertise of yours which has been so helpful to us over the last few years. Just do your