A Perfect Spy

Herr Ollinger was ageless but I guess now fifty. His complexion was doughy, his smile regretful, his cheeks were dimpled and pendulous like an old man’s bottom. Even when he did finally allow that his chair was not taken by superior beings, he lowered his round body so gingerly into it that you would think he expected to be shooed away any minute by someone more deserving. With the assurance of an habitué Pym took the brown raincoat from his unresisting arm and threaded a hanger into it. He had decided he needed Herr Ollinger and his yellow chow dog urgently. His life was going through a fallow period at the time and he had not exchanged more than a few words with anyone for a week. His gesture threw Herr Ollinger into a vortex of hopeless gratitude. Herr Ollinger beamed and declared Pym most friendly. He grabbed a copy of Der Bund from the rack and buried his face in it. He whispered to the dog to behave itself and tapped it ineffectually on the snout, though it was behaving with exemplary tolerance. But he had spoken, which gave Pym reason to explain, in a set sentence, that unfortunately I am foreign, sir, and not yet equal to your local dialect. So please be kind enough to speak High German and excuse me. After this, as he had learned to, he added his surname, “Pym,” at which Herr Ollinger confessed that he was Ollinger, as if the name implied some frightful slur, and afterwards presented the chow as Herr Bastl, which for a moment rang uncomfortably of the luckless Bertl.

“But you speak excellent German!” Herr Ollinger protested. “I would immediately have thought you are from Germany! You are not? Then where do you come from, if I may be so impertinent?”

And this was kind of Herr Ollinger for nobody in his right mind, in those days, could have confused Pym’s German with the real thing. So Pym told Herr Ollinger the story of his life, which was what he had intended from the first, and dazzled him with tender questions about himself, and in every way he knew laid upon Herr Ollinger the full burden of his sensitive charm — which as it later turned out was a totally needless exertion on Pym’s part since Herr Ollinger was unselective in his acquaintance. He admired everybody, pitied everybody from below — not least for their dreadful misfortune in having to share the world with him. Herr Ollinger said he was married to an angel, and possessed three angel daughters who were musical prodigies. Herr Ollinger said he had inherited his father’s factory in Ostermundigen, which was a great worry to him. And so indeed it should have been, for in retrospect it is clear that the poor man rose diligently every morning in order to run it further into the earth. Herr Ollinger said Herr Bastl had been with him three years but only temporarily, because he was still trying to find the dog’s owner.

Reciprocating with equal generosity, Pym described his experiences in the blitz, and the night he had been visiting his aunt in Coventry when they hit the cathedral; how she lived but a hundred yards from the main doors and her house by a miracle was unscathed. When he had destroyed Coventry, he described himself in an imaginative tour de force as an admiral’s son standing at his dormitory window in his dressing-gown, calmly watching the waves of German bombers flying over his school and wondering whether this time they were going to drop the parachutists dressed as nuns.

“But did you have no shelters?” Herr Ollinger cried. “That’s a disgrace! You were a child, my God! My wife would be completely furious. She is from Wilderswil,” he explained, while Herr Bastl ate a pretzel and farted.

Thus Pym skipped on, piling one fiction on another, appealing to Herr Ollinger’s Swiss love of disaster, enthralling the neutral in him with the dire realities of war.

“But you were so young,” Herr Ollinger protested again when Pym related the rigours of his early military training at the Signals Depot in Bradford. “You had no nest warmth. You were a child!”

“Well, thank God they never had to use us,” said Pym in a throw-away voice as he called for his bill. “My grandfather died in the first one, my father was given up for dead in the second, so I can’t help feeling it’s time our family had a break.” Herr Ollinger would not hear of Pym paying. Herr Ollinger might be breathing the free air of Switzerland, he said, but he had three generations of English to thank for the privilege. Pym’s sausage and beer were a mere step in the mercurial progress of Herr Ollinger’s generosity. It was followed by the offer of a room, for as long as Pym wished to do him the honour, in the narrow little house in the Länggasse that Herr Ollinger had inherited from his mother.

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