Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

High over London, a single aircraft trail was just beginning to glow like a hot wire against the steel-blue sky, picking up the sunlight that was still below the horizon to the ground. A lone cyclist in a track suit rushed down Kingsway at a speed impossible at any other time of day. An electric milk float whined around Aldwych and a baker's van was delivering French loaves, carried like big bundles of orange firewood, to the Waldorf Hotel. But most of the city was still asleep, its streets empty and at peace.

High up in Bush House, two men and a girl sat reading the newsflashes on a television screen, calling up fresh ones by tapping instructions on a computer keyboard. The shimmering green printout made the news seem unreal, like stock market prices, and they longed to hear the original broadcasts that the BBC monitors at Caversham Park had picked out of the air. Six hundred miles away, where it was already full day, an army was out in the streets of East Berlin.

The girl asked: "Why do they always use tanks?" She spoke German with the stiff Hanseatic accent.

"Just a reminder. " The older of the two men wore a shabby but once-expensive leather jacket and had a neat dark beard.

"But they aren't even practical," the girl persisted. "You can't send a tank into a building. They could do it all just with their soldiers. This way, tomorrow there'll be pictures of tanks in the Unter den Linden all over the world. It's become aclichéof Russian occupation, and it's so unsubtle. "

"Ivan isn't always trying to be subtle." His voice was unmistakably Bavarian and he didn't do much actual broadcasting himself. Mostly he built up analyses for the Political Unit and the weekly'Aspekte'round-up of East German affairs. "They don't mind people seeing a bit of armour plate every generation or so. I wonder if they'll call it an attempted Faschisischter Putsch like they did in 1953."

"A railway strike?" The girl stared at him, disbelieving.

"The Red Army takes railways seriously. No railways, then no petrol, no food, no bullets."

The second man was making quick notes. An announcer-translator, he would be reading the first of the BBC's German Language Service newscasts in three-quarters of an hour. He wasn't allowed to write it himself, just translate what the Central Newsroom sent up, and perhaps add a few non-controversial details – if he had them. He wasn't quite thirty and dressed neatly, by BBC standards.

"Heinz Manger?" he said suddenly. "As the new General Secretary? They can't be serious. I'd heard he'd got cancer."

"A caretaker, perhaps," the analyst said. "While they catch their breath and work out a real successor. If he's really dying, so much the easier when it comes to make a change." He leant forward as the story rippled across the screen. "Dear God, they've had a real harvest. "

In all, six names had been dropped from the ten-man Secretariat, including the old General Secretary, Spiesshofer. All the others had some connection with railways or the cities where the strikes had been most complete. Only four men had been raised from the Politbureau to fill the empty seats. The A-T man started searching desperately for the office copy of Who's Who In Eastern Europe.

"Gustav Eismark,"the girl read. "Do we know him?"

The analyst nodded thoughtfully. "Odd one, that. You might even say he's a bit of a liberal – in their terms. He was in shipping; he represented Rostock at one time."

"Are you sure of that?" the A-T man called, still unable to find the Who's Who.

"Oh yes. He went to Moscow after the war, then helped rebuild the Rostock shipyards. Then he dropped out of sight for a while." He tried to recall why but couldn't. "Then he started a comeback after the '62 economic shakeup."

"Who's in his tail?" the girl asked. No Communist politician – perhaps no politician anywhere – gets far without a 'tail' of well-placed friends and relatives, they pushing him ever upwards and automatically being pulled up after him.

"I don't know, except that his son's something in State Security. It's nice to have that in the family." A friendly link with the SSD was as vital as a Party card. "And the younger scientists and engineers like him, he talks their language. Probably he's been put up there to keep them happy… Ivan knows you can't do it all with tanks; you need the sugar-bread as well as the whip. And he's younger than most of them… it'll be interesting to see what happens at the Party Congress, probably not this year, but…" He was already working on his 'think-piece' for later in the week.

"I can't use speculation!" snapped the A-T man, angry at the mess in the office.

The teletype rattled and the analyst and the girl walked across to read what the authorised version was to be.

Russian tanks and troops moved early this morning to break the strike that has paralysed the East German railway system for the past two days. Our correspondent in Berlin reports that there has been some shooting, and casualties are…

"I still don't see why they use tanks," the girl said stubbornly.

"It was his sister," the analyst suddenly remembered. "It was something to do with his sister…"

"And why does it always have to be at dawn?"

"Just an old army custom."

At a quarter past five the sun was a lemon disc hanging low in the faint mist over the dale. On the far side, the gentle hills were a sequence of flat shapes fading paler and paler into the distance. It was just like the Chinese watercolour her grandmother kept in the hall at Herzgerode.

Last night, the weather forecast had been thundery showers; it was pleasant when they got the bad news wrong as well.

At that time of day, she was the only thing alive, before the birds, before the roaring aeroplanes. She was the only thing that moved, even if every movement hurt in some way. She loved the loneliness of the dawn; the one thing better was sleep, and she longed for sleep from the moment she woke, but lying there pretending to sleep was the worst of all. Then her body, so difficult to make move, moved by itself in little twitches and jerks, as if it were trying to escape from her. So she had to get up and shuffle through to the little music room, struggling for control of the body that seemed to hate her as much as she hated it. Now she even bathed in the dark so as not to see who she was.

She swallowed one of the yellow tablets that made her dizzy and sent a buzzing in her ears, then two Disprin, turned on the radio and carefully filled the electric kettle. She listened vaguely to a review of new classical records, wondering with a flash of real bitternesswhy they let that Italian moron loose on Debussy, and mixed a mug of black tea flavoured with lemon juice from a plastic squeezer. There was a real lemon in the cupboard but it was too early for her to trust her hands with a knife. She put the rest of the hot water into a plastic bowl and cooled it from the tap until she could sit there soaking her hand in it.

Who was coming today? Thursday – that meant the younger Allison girl and after her the one who had cancelled on Tuesday because she had to go to the dentist in Pateley Bridge. Gillian something. That one could be good, if she kept at it. She at least had the advantage of parents who were totally ignorant of music, even the piano. When parents became convinced they had bred a genius, they were already halfway to turning the poor child into a nervous ruin.

Eismark, the radio said. Gustav Eismark. Or had it? She stood up suddenly and the first little twist of vertigo hit her and she clutched back at the table, spilling the bowl across the linoleum. But that was why it was plastic; any other she would have broken a hundred times over.