International Relations

Nada finished polishing the glass. Shook the cloth in Phil’s face. It would have been a playful gesture a week ago, before he’d met her daughter. Phil’s grin was glued in place by a gallon of Warsteiner beer and Yugoslavian schnapps. The lights were dim in Nada’s: the pink-lettered neon outside said ‘Treffpunkt’ at the front and ‘Meeting Point’ on the side. Nada’s could be found deep in the Ku’damm Eck, an indoor drinking precinct, with the odd shop. On the Kurfurstendamm; maybe it’s still there.

It had been a funny night in Nada’s: Julischka, her daughter, was out of bounds for chit-chat now. No point in asking about Nada’s latest man. Her last romantic adventure was also a no-go area. There hadn’t been much else to talk about. As usual, all the other custom had been casual: people may have met here, but few stayed. Except us.

It was after five: the last of the electro-pop had been played on the bar’s cheap stereo; Howard Jones had given way to reels and wailing from somewhere round Zagreb. It was the signal to drink up and leave, bat-blind in the dawn. Unless, of course, you were favoured guests, foot up on the rail at the Stammtisch.

‘Reckon we’d better go…’ I said jerking my head towards Phil.
‘Aye, he’s cocked it up alright… haha...’ Jock slurred a little.
‘Very funny: I’m surprised she let us use the table.’
‘ You’re no’ wrong. Phil’s awfy gubbed, eh?’
‘Feeling guilty, I bet’.

I asked for the bill. Only in Berlin; a rootless Brit speaking fractured German to a Yugoslavian emigrée. She’d be a Bosnian Serb nowadays. Berlin was full of ‘Balkan’ restaurants, Yugoslav run bars -and clip-joints. Phil had complained one night in the Elephant Bar before the cabaret; a whore had hit him, he’d said, to a very large man with a shaven head and a silver-coloured front tooth.

'What you do?' The man had asked, his English as good as his German.

'Nothing, nothing,' Phil had protested, 'I only asked her what part of Balkania she was from.'

Maybe the heavy’d just decided against beating up someone already brain-damaged; he’d given an angry growl and thrown all of us out.

Nada offered one for the road; a Bismarck. A powerful schnapps she saved for special occasions. Like Phil’s birthday, six months ago.
The big galoot had got comatose on it: Nada had taken him home. Next days off, in the early evening, I’d asked her what went on.

-‘Nichevo, nichts, nothing’ the smile had spread across her face, making her look 30-ish - not forty something.
-‘What? What’s the joke?’
‘First the British sink the Bismarck… then the Bismarck sink the British!’

She’d exploded with laughter. Tears rolling; the years falling off her as they did.
She was an attractive woman; twenty years older than all of us; me, Jock and Phil. The offer of a schnapps for the road seemed genuine.
Maybe Phil hadn’t queered the pitch after all. Nada’s brown eyes were blackly unreadable in the crepuscular gloom of the bar. I accepted the drinks for all of us.
‘He’s had enough! Just you.’ She hissed.

Phil didn’t notice. The grin stayed, but he wasn’t there. His body could have followed his mind and left us with the Cheshire teeth gleaming. Nada’s lips were taut, every movement was accompanied by a toss of her black hair. Glasses clattered onto the shelves. Her heels machine gunned across the tiles behind the bar. I knew where she was aiming.

We should all have named Nada as a ‘foreign contact’. Any foreign national you met more than once had to be declared to the correct authorities. I’d never have had time to go to work. Anyway, checking up on us gave the men in the sports jackets and brogues something to do. While they missed the real spies in the next door office at the base headquarters.

Jock eyed this one last drink warily, as if suspecting a mickey. That was ludicrous; we were on the Ku’damm not in Kreuzberg. I raised my glass.

‘Zdorovye, Nada!’ I tossed it off in the Slavic style, pretended to throw the glass, before carefully setting it on the copper bar-top. She didn’t return the toast. Unusual, but not unexpected in the circumstances.

‘Let us buy you something, Nada.’ I suggested.

‘You’ll take a whiskey, aye!’ said Jock, who never touched the stuff. ‘You’ve the Talisker away up there.’ Thereby proving he could read and bluff at the same time. Jock was always the most reluctant to leave this bar. After the night of Phil’s birthday Jock hadn’t spoken to him for a week. It had been quiet in Jock's car on the way to work. I’d felt like a SALT talks interpreter, a go-between for the irreconcilable.

-‘Take him home,’ she couldn’t say his name.
-‘Of course we will’. We chorused, anxious to placate.
-‘Don’t come back, not with him.’

She hawked, and spat with vigour on the gleaming copper, in front of the oblivious Phil.

©Ewan Lawrie 2007