The Helsinki Pact by Alex Cugia Read Free Book Online Page B

say the wrong
thing now.” he thought. He took off his jacket, pushed back into
the side pocket a handkerchief and packet of cigarettes which had
fallen out during the struggle, and hung the garment over his
chair. He sat down again and looked warily at her.
    “I can’t stand rich Wessies
looking down on us, trying to buy their way into everything and
everyone.”
    He looked at her again, trying to
work out if there was something more behind her violent reaction.
Her otherwise perfectly straight nose curled slightly at the tip
and her clear, smooth skin had acquired a healthy pink tinge,
slightly flushed with red. He thought how beautiful she looked and
how desirable her anger had made her to him. If he’d dared he might
have told her so but her reaction just then had awed him with its
vehemence. She was clearly still prickly and suspicious and he was
afraid that an incautious remark would sent her storming off into
the night, out of his reach for ever.
    She rearranged the cutlery in
front of her, lining up the bases of the knives and forks in a
straight line, adjusting them minutely. “So what do you show these
people in your tours? How we survive despite our bad choice in
being here in the first place?" She pulled a face and spoke in a
pantomime voice. "Look, Commies can be almost human! Just
fancy!”
    “It depends. They’re mainly
interested in seeing places connected to escapes from East Berlin.
Checkpoint Charlie, Spy’s bridge, the Wall, obviously – those kinds
of placesthat kind of thing. But I hardly do any general tours now,
it’s nearly all opera or opera and dinner, maybe sometimes a
gallery or a museum. This way I not only get to hear opera most
weeks, twice a week often, but I get paid for it.”
    “And I sometimes get to eat in
restaurants like this one which I could never afford otherwise,
even at special prices.” he added cautiously, just as Axel arrived
to welcome them. He introduced them.
    “I was telling Bettina about the
tours, Axel, and how they love eating here before going on to the
opera. It’s a beautiful building and great food and, well, I
suppose … ” he ploughed on, realising that he was risking another
outburst from Bettina “ … I suppose they’re sometimes a bit
surprised at how good it all is, not what they’ve been led to
expect the East is like.”
    Bettina laughed, glanced at Axel
who was opening a bottle of Elbthaler Weissburgunder which he’d
brought as a gift, and said “Ah, the decadent, ignorant West. They
think it’s all queues, food shortages, old clothes and nothing but
black bread to eat and thin beer to drink, eh Axel?”
    Thomas relaxed and under the
influence of the wine became expansive, amusing Bettina with some
highlights of the tours but then finding himself telling her more
than he’d intended, almost boasting about his success and realising
at one point that the figures didn’t add up at the official
exchange rates, hurrying on so that she wouldn’t notice the slip.
Bettina drank very little, he noticed, even asking for water at one
point. She also congratulated him on the wine, commenting on his
apparent knowledge of the wine industry in Saxony and for a while
they ate in companionable silence or made small talk, sometimes
even eating from each other’s plates.
    “Santé, to a decadent,
capitalistic evening! Now tell me more about yourself, Wessie. What
are your dreams, apart from becoming a millionaire, of
course?”
    “I’m an economics student, as I
told you, but opera’s my real passion and I intend to become a
professional singer. I’ve had real battles with my parents over
this. Both of them said that musicians never made any money, that
music was fine as a hobby but that was all. They insisted I study
economics and be as successful as my father had been. I resisted
that for a while but in the end I thought that economics was maybe
OK as a kind of security blanket thing, something I could always
fall back on. So right now I’m