A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

East’s a beast and West is best.

I could be that simple, then. I could. I was clear-minded.

We all like to be clear-minded and simple.

The Terrible Enemy is different now. And the same. It serves the same purpose.

We like to repeat our themes — like good opera and bad television.

But do I now dwell amongst the least beastly?

Where are there not beasts? Encouraged and permitted and condemned beasts …

I never would have suited the Foreign Office.

And the FO only recruit the cream from the top of the churn. Or the shit from the top of the water. I’m neither I’d hope, although I could be mistaken.

Plus, I sound foreign … I have an unsuitable name. And that would be one of my repeating themes.

Good opera, bad telly and worse propaganda … Of which I watched a great deal, along with the Sandman show, when I was a student — over in Berlin and fastidiously observing. I’ve always been a man for details, can’t get enough of them. Not a spy, not a bit of it, not really. An observer. Product of an unsentimental education.

It’s the least you can do — watch.

Watch it all tumbling down like the Wall — Berliner Mauer, the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart. Never a good sign when your wording tries that hard to fight reality, it suggests the beginning of your tumble. Yes, it does. It always does.

But I’d rather watch beauty.

And is that a denial of reality, or an attempt to embrace it? I think I am too tired to know. I hope I am too tired to know.

That day with Becky, trying to be on holiday with Becky, I watched the city moving, everything moving — details, details — as we motored on. Mild to uncomfortable guilt — the usual — that here she is, an adult, and I’d been so often held back in the evenings and still working when she was a child, when it was time to talk, to be, to set my own dear baby safe in her bed. Night night.

I’ve missed a lot.

School concerts, parents’ evenings, the time she fell off a pony and scared herself, the times when we should have talked.

I missed the lot. Almost.

I’ve missed my life, I think. I think that might be true. If overly emotive as something to mention.

Regrets apart — and I do always pack them for holidays — in Berlin I was having a good day. In terms of weather. An airy afternoon ahead for hands in pockets and brisk walking, arm-in-arming it along Unter den Linden, wandering about in the theme park and high-gloss purchasing opportunity that central Berlin has become. Poor old Mitte — freedom has done some ridiculous things to you.

Which isn’t what I was thinking — I was full of how much, how so much I like being arm in arm.

And that weekend she hadn’t let me yet.

But on the boat Becky had taken his hand. Their barge had sway-glided on while an instructional narration had attempted to intrude via the tour-guiding headphones that he’d refused to wear. And Jon had closed his eyes against the glare, or to prevent the leakage of his own variation on a theme of stupidity, or to prevent glancing across at his only daughter’s disappointment in him.

But then she had taken his hand.

Always the same way, but always more — she is always more.

The stroke of her forefinger at his wrist and then the warm, soft enquiry when her hand closed over his knuckles, when her thumb slipped under to find out the heart of his palm and make it rest.

Beautiful. A lovely shock.

Not that it was remotely unheard of. They took each other’s hands quite a lot. She’d just surprised him on that occasion because they’d spent the weekend fighting until that point: Friday evening on the plane was unhappy, their Saturday had been spent bickering in the Old and New Museums, the National Gallery, the Pergamon Museum — they liked their culture rigorous and swift, or at least he did — then there was unease in a restaurant, and this morning: fighting, fighting, sulking, fighting and sulking. His fault.

‘You booked it on purpose, Dad.’

‘I didn’t, Becky.’ She was right, though — he’d chosen the Hotel Sylter Hof on purpose. ‘I didn’t choose it on purpose. The place was recommended and it’s nice?’ When he was on the back foot, everything emerged as a question. Especially questions. ‘Don’t you think it’s nice? But afterwards I did notice, I checked and I saw that it was … that there was … is a history to the place. And I didn’t change it to somewhere else. I mean, it’s not happening now — it’s history.’

Which fundamentally contradicts everything I believe about history and she bloody knew it.

‘And it is … I have to say … I mean, Rebecca, Berlin has a past …’ I sounded like an utterly patronising moron. ‘There’s no getting away from it without not being in Berlin. And we are in Berlin. So I didn’t change it. Because it’s nice. As a hotel.’

She always understood when he was lying, when he could do nothing else. ‘You can’t help it, can you? Being miserable. You have to be.’

Becky didn’t add Mother was right , but he heard it in any case — the way that only dogs can hear those special whistles when they’re called to heel. ‘I’m not miserable. I’m interested. I like to keep on being interested.’

‘Implying that you think I’ve stopped learning. I’m not interesting now I’m with Terry?’

‘Not at all.’ She glanced at him, appraising, while he bleated, ‘No.’ She always knew.

That was the first of Saturday’s spats. And she had a perfectly valid point: it was probably not fair to pick a hotel — albeit a perfectly acceptable hotel with good reviews — primarily because it stood on the site of what had been the Jüdischen Bruderverein until its forced sale in 1938. And a forced sale did leave an atmosphere of a kind — the pestilent kind — and then, because those intoxicated by the use of force develop a taste for irony, nurture a specialist and heavy-handed brand of humour, the building was taken over by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt Department IV B4 — the department responsible for ‘Jewish Affairs’, which oversaw the seizure of Jews’ homes and possessions, the removal of their German citizenship.

If there’s a department for you, then you must be a problem. A solution to you must be sought.

So he and his daughter were, yes, sleeping not quite where Adolf Eichmann slept, but where he worked, where he and his administrators, his planners and implementers, his civil servants worked. Becky and Jon had been eating their warm little kaiser rolls — warm little Berlin Schrippen — and their hot boiled eggs that morning inside the shadow of a building where human beings in clean and orderly surroundings had proved unable to connect their paperwork with other human beings elsewhere, or with reality, or with pain.

Unable, or unwilling, or uninterested.

Consenting to one hell, so they could avoid another.

Most likely there had been a canteen back then, maybe other warm little Austrian Kaiserbrötchen , other Schrippen, Schwarzbrot, maybe eggs.

Perhaps not always eggs, perhaps not butter, what with the rationing.

The place had been bombed in the end, like so much of the city. Lord, hadn’t it? He and Becky had already explored the sharply modern and forward-looking riverbank development on foot, its immaculate geometries laid out there between the restored Reichstag and the railway station.

The RAF reduced that whole area to a town planner’s dream — wall stubs and rubble, only the Swiss Embassy left standing and that by chance. It’s still there now. And who can guess what it remembers, where it echoes. Not that Speer hadn’t thought he should wipe out the streets himself and start again — build a temple to bloodshed, a monstrous dome as big as a fake mountain and colonnades and boulevards for parading. The things leaders need to help them feel truly like leaders. And anything’s possible once you’ve cleared away inconvenient residences and residents.