Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

Mr Albrecht left his driver’s cab, slung his satchel over one shoulder, and walked along the grime-spattered side of the tram to the rear doors.

Inside, he stood for a few moments looking down at his only passenger. The sleeping figure was bundled up in a long padded coat, its hem wet with slush and its hood pulled up. Within the hood, Mr Albrecht could see a scarf wrapped around the lower half of his passenger’s face. He reached down and took hold of one shoulder and shook gently.

“Hey, mate.”

The sleeping figure stirred. “Mm?”

“As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to stay,” said Mr Albrecht. “But this tram’s not going any further tonight.”

The figure looked up, blinked blearily. “Where?”

“Potsdam-Stadt depot.”

The eyes, which were all that Mr Albrecht could see, narrowed. “Shit. I was supposed to get off at Babelsberg. I have to get to Rosa Luxembourg Strasse.”

“You’ll have to get a taxi.”

The passenger shook his head. “I haven’t got any money for a taxi.”

Mr Albrecht sighed. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a folded five-mark note. “Here.” He pressed the note into his passenger’s gloved hand. “You can pay me back.” He gestured out into the big brightly-lit shed of the depot, the ranks of parked trams. “Just leave it at the main office and say it’s for Albrecht. Everyone knows me.”

The passenger mumbled thanks, took a big heavy-looking duffel bag from the floor under his seat, and got off the tram. Mr Albrecht watched him disappear by degrees into the white howl beyond the depot doors, and shook his head at the chances of finding a taxi in this weather.

It was almost one o’clock in the morning when he got back to his flat on Voltaire-Weg, overlooking the hated razor-wire border thrown up by those damned New Potsdamers to keep intruders out of their pocket kingdom, but his wife was still waiting, with the patience of long years’ experience, with his evening meal on the table.

Mr Albrecht had been asked never to speak of his other work, highly infrequent though it was, but he had sworn to himself on his wedding day that his would be a marriage without secrets, so when he had finished his meal and he was drinking a coffee he told his wife about the sleeping passenger he had driven to the depot.

“What was he like?” his wife asked.

Mr Albrecht had only seen the passenger’s eyes and heard his voice, but he had been driving a tram around Potsdam for twenty-three years and when you do that you see all types, and you learn some things.

“He was,” he said, “very young.”

IN A DOORWAY not far from the tram depot, Rudi took out the five-mark note the stringer on the tram had given him. Unfolding it, he tilted the note towards a streetlight’s illumination and squinted to read the time and place pencilled in tiny letters on its margin. Then he took a stamped and addressed envelope from his pocket, sealed the note inside, and left the doorway. On his way down the street, he dropped the envelope in a post box and let the German postal service dispose of the evidence.

OLDER THAN BERLIN by two centuries, Potsdam had started life as a Slavic fishing village on the banks of the River Havel. Its name – its Slavic name at any rate, Poztupimi – was first recorded when its charter was signed by Otto III in the year 993 AD.

Friedrich Wilhelm built himself a summer palace near the river in 1660, and linked it to Berlin with a road lined with lime trees. Frederick the Great gave the city Sanssouci, one of the age’s greatest palaces. In 1747, Bach came to play for him, and three years later he debated philosophy there with Voltaire.

Almost two centuries later, Allied bombers all but destroyed the heart of the town, and towards the end of the War Truman, Churchill, Stalin and Attlee met at the Schloss Cecilienhof and decided how postWar Germany should be parcelled out. Potsdam fell within the Soviet Sector, and in 1961 the Berlin Wall cut it off from the West, severing Friedrich Wilhelm’s road to Berlin where it crossed the Havel.

Sometime later, after Potsdam had grown grimy and battered under the Communists, after die Wende brought a certain degree of bemused rebuilding, after the world woke up from its post-Millennium hangover, a group of anarchists squatting in a building off Hegel-Allee declared their home to be an independent nation.

In this, they were only doing what hundreds of other groups had been doing, with wildly varying degrees of success, all over the world for a number of years. They issued passports, printed their own money, raised their own taxes – these being, it was understood, lamentable and temporary but necessary measures to protect their new country from the predations of the outside world. It was meant to be a suitably obscene gesture to Authority, but to the anarchists’ consternation the idea spread to a neighbouring building. And then another. And then another.

The anarchists were forced to form committees to cope with finance, food, power, water and sewerage. Periodic attacks by drunken shaven-headed youths forced them to form a Border Guard. The necessity of coordinating maintenance on their buildings required some kind of works committee. Cameramen from Die Welt and Bild and Time/Stone Online came, took their photos, posted their stories, and went away again. There was a moment – nobody identified it until much later – when events seemed to pause for a breath.

And then the anarchists’ gesture against authority was a nation a little over two kilometres across and it was called New Potsdam.

After a week of tense negotiations with the Potsdam city council – which had failed to take the New Potsdamers seriously until much too late – the anarchists were deposed in a bloodless coup by a neo-Traditionalist faction which wanted to run the new polity along strictly Prussian lines. Most of the anarchists departed, muttering darkly to the Press but privately pleased to be relieved of responsibility for sewage and economics.

Meanwhile, Berlin – which had too many of these pissant nations to deal with already – watched the coup and gave New Potsdam no more than two years before its citizens were clamouring to rejoin Greater Germany.

Until that happened, the New Potsdamers were still trying to consolidate the country they had, almost by surprise, found themselves living in. All their services still depended on Greater Germany, including their electricity grid.

Responsibility for the supply to the western quarter of New Potsdam ran through a featureless four-storey building in Berlin, overlooking the Spree. There, in a room on the third floor, was a certain computer workstation, and at this workstation, on this particular evening early in his shift, Wolf sat down, pushed his spectacles up his nose with his forefinger, and air-typed a couple of strings of commands.

The heads-up drew him a schematic of New Potsdam’s security cameras and their relevant security stations. Wolf, in his late twenties but already with a receding hairline that gave him a deceptively serious look, swept the cursor to a certain closed-circuit television monitoring station inside New Potsdam, and double-clicked.

Almost all the buildings in New Potsdam which depended on the Greater German grid had backup generators, but generators cost money and they required manpower to install them and there were little blind spots here and there. Wolf pulled up a sub-menu and scheduled a fifteen-minute brownout for this particular New Potsdam monitoring station.

He thought this was rather elegant. A blackout would have been just as easy to program, but a reduction of eighty percent would cause the monitoring system to shut itself down just as effectively, and he could imagine how much it would annoy the New Potsdamers.