Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt

  “For Christ’s sake, you shiny ape,” said Krupinsky. “What we have to think about is the welfare of our wives. You heard what’s going on. The Russians are raping and killing.”

  “Not these,” said the Yugoslav. “These first troops are elite and disciplined.”

  “And the mark will have no value whatsoever,” continued Treponesco. “We need to think about how to get some occupation money.”

  The Chief, pacing in our direction, overheard Treponesco. “What we need to be thinking about,” he said, “is how to continue our research.”

  “I think,” said that schmuck Treponesco, “that we should take advantage of the tremendous sexual appetite of the Red Army. How if we get half a dozen ladies from the tenderloin district in Berlin, put them in the empty apartments, and say to the Russian soldiers, ‘Be my guest’—for a slight fee, of course.”

  We laughed at this—all but the Chief and Krupinsky, who was too worried about his wife to think anything funny. Our mood was lifting. We were not afraid, at that moment, of the Soviets, and slowly it began to dawn that we may have been liberated.

  “There must be another way,” said François Daniel, “short of turning the Institute into a brothel.”

  “How if we use the fertilizing concept?” said the Yugoslav.

  “What the hell does that mean, Mitya?” asked Krupinsky.

  “Use your imagination. The doctors up in Brain Research are sitting on a huge supply of sulfonamides and condoms, and Treponesco has been collecting watches, jewelry—”

  “That stuff’s mine,” Treponesco said, petulantly.

  “Like hell it is,” said the Yugoslav. “You got it on Institute requisitions”

  “Not all of it. I bought and traded.”

  “That’s enough!” said the Chief, infuriated. “I am one hundred percent against the idea of selling anything here.”

  “But Chief, how will we eat?”

  “I will find a way. Max and I. No doubt we will be supplied with what we need for survival. There will be no funds for new experimentation for a while, but we must continue with what we can. There will be no time for commerce. This is a place of serious research!” And he stalked off to listen to the other group.

  The search team returned with Professor Kreutzer, and, after a brief conference, the commissar addressed us again in German: “So far all is clear here. But my men have found some interesting things.” He laughed. “The most interesting might be those monkeys on the second floor.”

  “This place,” he continued, in good humor, “is so full of women and inebriating substances, some of which may be poisonous, that if the soldiers following us get into it, we might as well stop the Berlin offensive.”

  We laughed.

  “So I must declare this place off limits to our soldiers, or we would lose the war in Berlin. The attack groups are well disciplined, but those that follow us are disorderly. For your protection I leave an armed guard to keep the Red soldiers out.” He turned to the Chief. “The colonel who will be in charge of the hospitals needs help from any physicians you have here who can speak both Russian and German.”

  “Of course,” the Chief said. “Dr Krupinsky here speaks Russian and is a fine medical doctor.”

  Krupinsky, at the mention of his name, stepped forward smiling, blushing like a bride.

  “Would you mind coming with us now, Dr Krupinsky, to the hospitals?”

  “I would be overjoyed to be in a hospital again.” He actually had tears in his eyes. “Can I get my things? My medical equipment—and my wife?”

  “Yes, of course. But perhaps your wife would be safer here for a day or two.”

  Krupinsky hesitated.

  “But you may take her, if you wish.” He turned to the rest of us and said, “One more announcement. This Institute is hereby placed under the jurisdiction of the Commander of the Hospital Section, Berlin-Hagen. Starting tomorrow afternoon or, at the latest, the day after, your personnel will be placed on hospital officers’ rations. Three good meals a day will be brought over.”

  We all looked at each other and smiled very much.

  “We go now,” said the commissar. “Sergeant Lazar and his guards are here. He will be in shortly to introduce himself.”

  It was noon. The young commissar and his troops left. We, still standing in the lobby, “liberated,” were not certain what to do next.

  Professor Kreutzer took command and captured our attention by changing from the rimless to the black-rims. We mustered about him to await orders. “My friends,” he said, so softly that one had to strain to hear, “do not forget that there are guards at the gate.”

  “But Max,” said the Yugoslav, “it is for our protection.”

  “Guards have two functions. One is to keep people out; the other is to keep people in. Do not forget that even under Nazi rule there were no guards at our gate.”

  “It is true,” said the Chief. “‘Protection’ is a term common to both Nazis and Bolshevists. The first and foremost purpose of this ‘protection’ is to prevent any of us from leaving. We are under house arrest. Being under the protection of the Red Army is the same as being a prisoner. Correct, Max? Or am I right?”

  “You are correct,” said Professor Kreutzer. “Quiet! We have company.”

  A Soviet soldier had entered the lobby and was looking, hesitantly, in our direction. An older man, late fifties or so, he approached us, removed his cap, and bowed deferentially. “Hello, will you please excuse me,” he said in what sounded like Middle High German. “I am Sergeant Lazar. My guards have surrounded this place, and you will be safe.” No, it was Yiddish. He was speaking a patois of German and Yiddish.

  “How many are you?” growled the Chief.

  “We are only fourteen, but with automatic weapons that is sufficient, believe me.”

  “Sufficient to keep us locked in as prisoners, you mean.”

  “Oh, no, Herr Professor! Not at all! We are not NKVD. You are free to go and come. Believe me. I am not even a real soldier, even though I have been in one army or the other all my adult life; I am a farmer and I never once volunteered. Oh, no, to the contrary, we are here to protect you from the troops that follow. They are . . . let me put it this way: Are you aware of what the Nazis have done to the land and to the people?”

  “We have heard of the concentration camps—the atrocities,” said the Chief.

  “Whatever you have heard,” said Sergeant Lazar, “it is wrong. It is not enough. No words can describe what I have seen.” He had tears in his eyes and took a great red handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, blew his nose before he could go on. “You see, it has made the Red Army very angry.” He sighed. “But this place? This place is heaven, and I am very happy to be assigned here to help you, and so are my men.”

  “You’re not Russian, are you?” asked the Chief.

  Sergeant Lazar smiled. “No, I am not. I am from Galicia.”

  “Yet you have been in the Russian army all your life?”

  “Did I say that? Oh, no, I said I have been in the army all my life—but not the Russian army. You see, I was in university—agriculture—when the First World War began, and I was conscripted into the Austrian army. After the war, I went back to university and was promptly drafted by the Polish army for several little wars. In 1939, I was taken prisoner by the Reds and was given the option to go to Siberia or to join the Red Army. So here I am. All the time I have distinguished myself by never rising above the rank of sergeant.”

  The Chief began to laugh. “Josef,” he said, “give our friend here some vodka.”

  “Oh, no, thank you. I don’t drink.”

  The Chief turned to Professor Kreutzer. “Max, what do you think? Can we trust this commissar? Is it safe to dig into the supply of cornmeal we’ve been saving and eat all we want?”

  Professor Kreutzer shook his head. “Let’s wait! There’s enough for all personnel to have a bowl for each meal for several weeks. We’d better wait and see.”

&n
bsp; “Excuse me, Herr Professor,” said Sergeant Lazar, “don’t you worry. If the commissar said there will be food tomorrow, then there will be food tomorrow and plenty of it. This place is heaven,” he said again, rolling his eyes.

  And, indeed, the food came the next evening. Stew so rich and thick with meat, mostly meat, with peas and carrots and potatoes; good bread—moist, dark, heavy sourdough—and sausages, as good as before the war; real coffee, cream, and white sugar; Russian cigarettes; and American chocolate bars; all in generous amounts. But the day of our “liberation,” we continued with the rationing, and life went on much as usual. As soon as Sergeant Lazar left us, Professor Kreutzer said, “Josef, it’s time for Latte’s x-ray treatment. Would you give me a hand?”

  This, then, was what it was like to be liberated.

  There were guards at the gate, a Soviet flag on the pole, and I sat in the small control booth of the Radiation Laboratory, watching the valves and meters, looking through the aquarium of glass and water at the wavering image of the Security Officer, who removed his white lab coat and lay down on the table, and at Professor Kreutzer, who fussed with the equipment. Today the neck. One wondered how long he would go on? It was the same as always, except that now our Gestapo in the House no longer wore the black uniform of the S.S.; Krupinsky and Kirsti were gone; it was more convenient to be advertised as a Jew than as a German; and I was beginning to worry about Tatiana. She should have stayed at the Institute.

  When the x-ray treatment was over. Professor Kreutzer told me to shut down the high-voltage generators. The pumps for the linear accelerator had been turned off permanently in January, when the Russians had crossed the Oder. Professor Kreutzer said he could not take the risk of a sudden power failure; besides, there was no money to run anything. So when I shut down the generators, the Radiation Laboratory was silent and dark.

  Sergeant Lazar allowed selected Soviet soldiers into the building to shop. The Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco opened his store in Rare Earths and sold the watches and jewelry he had been collecting. The physicians up in Brain Research opened a drugstore in a lab on third and sold sulfonamides and condoms. The French Physicist François Daniel had a couturier shop in Physics: bathing suits, silk stockings—whatever he had been able to get his hands on. The most popular concession of all, though, was the Yugoslav’s. He charged admission to see the masturbating monkeys.

  Having been away, I was unable to make such preparations, but the good sergeant from Galicia, Lazar, gave me a brilliant idea when he wandered into my lab and mentioned that he had sent a picture of himself to his wife when he was in the Austrian army in 1914, again when he was in the Polish army in 1920 and 1938, but that in all his years in the Russian army, he had not had a portrait taken.

  “Poor woman doesn’t know what I look like anymore.”

  “How would you like it if I took your picture so you could send it to her?”

  “Like it? I love it.”

  “Give me an hour to set it up, and I’ll take your photograph.”

  “You come find me. I be out in front—by the door.”

  As soon as he left the lab, I ran up the stairs to the darkroom on the third floor, picked up the old box camera, film, and lights, took them back to my lab, arranged the camera and lights, hung a dark blackdrop, pulled up a chair, just so, and then ran down the stairs and out the front door to invite Sergeant Lazar to be the first to have his picture taken, free of charge.

  I had a slight problem with the paper. All we had at the Institute was electrocardiogram and electroencephalograph paper made for optical writing. So the pictures not only had too much contrast—stark light, stark dark, and no grays—but also faded rather quickly. By the time the pictures arrived in Russia, they would mostly be faded. My studio was popular, almost fifteen to twenty customers every afternoon—after the sorting of the flies—thanks to Sergeant Lazar, who did an especially good job of soliciting for me.

  Still, the Yugoslav’s concession was the star attraction. The Russian soldiers were entranced by the masturbating monkeys and crowded in to see them. They were so popular—in fact, that the young commissar who had “liberated” us in April stopped by on his way back to Moscow, in June, to pick them up.

  The Chief summoned us all to the lobby to have a final vodka with our “liberator.” By the time I got down the stairs, there was an intense discussion going on between Professor Kreutzer and the commissar.

  “They will not travel,” said Professor Kreutzer. “They have all had delicate brain operations. What he tells you is true. They will not survive the journey. They will all die.”

  “Then he is responsible that they live,” said the commissar, nodding toward the Yugoslav. “He will come with us.”

  “Let me talk with him,” said the Chief. “I will convince him of the folly,” and he argued with the commissar, heatedly, in Russian, the Yugoslav and Ignatov joining in.

  Professor Kreutzer stepped back to where I stood with François Daniel, and began to change his glasses, absentmindedly: that is, he took off the gold-rims he was wearing, wiped them clean, and put them back on.

  The Yugoslav, in utter despair, left the discussion and joined us. “It seems they want to give them as a gift to Stalin from the 484th Platoon. If it weren’t for the rest of you, I would kill myself right now and save them the trouble. They will never survive the trip, the primates, and when they die, I will be killed.”

  Within an hour, the trucks were loaded—the primates in their cages, the Yugoslav under armed guard.

  Ignatov and Rabin went with them of their own free will. There would be no more music.

  When they were gone, François Daniel said, “I’m getting out of here.”

  “Where will you go?” Bolotnikov asked.

  “To the Americans, wherever they are.”

  “I go, too,” said Bolotnikov.

  Back in my lab, I had time to take one photo before the Chief stormed in, in such a rage that my clients, waiting patiently in line to have their pictures taken, fled in fright.

  “Because of this”—he waved his arm at my photography shop—“because of these markets, they have taken Mitya.” He paced furiously.

  I turned to my worktable. Because there was no money, no new experimentation was going on, and although I, alone, was left in our laboratory, I continued the routine sorting of the Drosophila for three or four hours a day, putting up cultures, examining them after ten or twelve days, making statistics and analysis. But the Chief was not pleased with this, either. “And you!” He was standing behind me now. “How dare you make only one hundred or one hundred and fifty cultures. Your statistics mean nothing. Statistical analysis requires a large number, a very large number.”

  I was silent.

  “No one is listening to me,” he said. “Things fall apart.” And he stalked from the lab.

  At least I was keeping the flies going by not allowing them to breed themselves to death in the small flasks, clearing out those which were not useful, putting them into the alcohol bottle, the mass grave.

  It needed emptying. The Drosophila were heaped well above the level of the alcohol in the wide-mouth jar, the new flies falling onto the heap, dying slowly from the fumes rather than instantly from the liquid itself. But they were gassed, sleeping, and felt no pain.

  The last few to be discarded were asleep on a white index card. I uncorked the alcohol jar, tapped the anesthetized flies onto the heap, recorked the jar, and then immediately uncorked. One little fellow on top was moving. I inserted my pencil; he climbed onto it, and I lifted him out onto the white index card. He was wet from the moisture in the jar and quite drunk from the alcohol vapor and the ether. He looked wingless, the wings pasted to his body by the moisture. But he could walk, barely. Stagger, stop, weave. Quite drunk, but living. He stood in one place now, rubbing together his two front legs, rubbing them against his face and head, freeing one wing and then the other. The staggering became less severe; he could walk a straighter line. H
op. He lifted himself off the ground. Hop. Then took a small flight. I made black spots on the white card, then put a small splash of polenta pudding with yeast on the card. And there he was, landing, ignoring the yeast and hopping the spots.

  I corked the bottle. Other flies had attempted to escape, but the fumes were too much. They would have had to have been helped.

  I walked down to Chemistry to see if one of the girls would like to go to the darkroom. They had given up their apartment in Hagen and were living in the complex in the park, which at that time was mostly empty.

  I still had no word from Tanya.

  Twice in June and once in July, I walked into Berlin—the trains were not yet running—to Tanya’s western suburb, Dahlem, which was not far from my father’s house. On the first two trips, I found their house occupied by Russian officers; on the third, by Americans, none of whom could—or would—give me any information about the family. I began to imagine that I was in love with her, and I blamed myself for every failure in our relationship—until mid-July, when the Americans restored phone service city-wide and I was able to talk to her.

  I was alone in the lab, sorting the flies, when the Chief came in. “We have telephones again,” he said. “See if you can reach Tatiana.”

  I thought, at first, it was she who answered.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Tanya?”

  “Hello? No, this is not Tanya.”

  “I beg your pardon.” My heart was pounding. The Chief stopped pacing and stood beside me. “Is Tatiana Backhaus there?”

  “Who is calling?”

  I looked at the Chief, who was pacing again, and took a deep, shaky breath. “Josef Bernhardt. Is she there? Is Tanya there?”

  “Josef! I told her you would call.”

  “Is she all right?”

  The Chief, again, stopped pacing and growled, “Well, is she there?”

  “Tanya, Tanya,” I heard her mother’s voice call. “It’s Josef. I told you he would call.”

  I shoved the phone at the Chief. “She’s there.”