Making Enemies Read Online Free Page B

this mess in the first place.’
    Many of us in Berlin thought like that. We saw ourselves working for the people we had defeated. We saw the efforts that were being made to rebuild their country and obliterate the evidence of the recent past, and we wondered how much was being done to restore our own shattered homes. From what we heard and read in the newspapers, not enough.
    ‘Here we are, babysitting the people who yesterday we tried to kill. And what does our vanquished enemy do? He tries to make us believe that he was really on our side all the time. Always someone else’s doing. Him or her but never me. Pitiful.’
    ‘Can you blame them for turning against each other if that’s how they think they’ll survive?’ I asked.
    ‘I blame them for everything,’ Milner said bitterly. ‘In particular, I blame them for keeping us here, in this godforsaken hole.’
    I’d been in Berlin for eight months by then, working for the Allied Control Commission. Our task was to interview the locals living in the British zone of occupation to find suitable people to take part in the new civilian administration the Allies were setting up. We were expected to exclude former Nazis and communistsfrom our selection. It was a thankless exercise, without certainties and with little reward.
    Each morning we were greeted by the same lengthy queues of hopeful Germans; each day we asked the same questions and we listened to the same stories, so often pathetic inventions to hide a truth we all knew. We inspected papers, some genuine, some forged, some stolen, the currency of hope on which to build a new life out of the ruins of the old. Each day we made our decisions, a tick or a cross, a simple mark on which so much depended. That is the true expression of victory, the exercise of absolute power.
    ‘Don’t you worry about the ones you let through?’ I asked. ‘Putting the guilty back into their old positions of power?’
    I found it increasingly difficult to know if my judgements were right. I was haunted by the thought that I might be reinstating the old guard of unreformed Nazis or a new guard of communist activists.
    ‘Nobody gets it right every time,’ Toby said. ‘We’re bound to make mistakes. It’s a question of degree. Are we more right than wrong? That’s how I look at it. You’ve got to come away at the end of each day thinking you’ve got money in the bank.’
    ‘I wish I could see it like that.’
    ‘You know where you go wrong? You treat them as people.’
    ‘They are people.’
    ‘Wrong. They’re problems. Nothing more.’
    ‘I can’t hate them enough for that.’
    ‘I don’t hate them and I don’t despise them. The truth is, I don’t care about them any more.’ There was more than a hint of exhaustion in his voice. ‘They sit there in front of me, I listen to their self-pity, their petty acts of betrayal, their self-righteousness and what do I hear? The litany of guilt. They were all in it, every man jack of them, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.’
    A dog howled from somewhere inside a ruined house on the other side of the street. The desolate sound seemed to sum up the mood of the city.
    ‘That’s when I want to put a cross against all their names. But I suppose there comes a moment when you have to stop settling scores and look to the future. Then they become names on a sheet of paper, decisions to be made, right or wrong, yes or no. That’s all. No emotion. No involvement.’
    I hated the hopeful faces that looked across my desk each day. But I was prepared to do it because I was ordered to do it. Likecountless others, I had been under orders for years. Obedience was a way of life. I was still too frozen by the experience of war to feel even the slightest pull of rebellion.
    Toby Milner touched my arm in a gesture of parting. ‘We’re supposed to be building a new world,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, we’re using the bricks of the old.’
    With a wave he turned the corner