Zoo Stationee

by David Downing

  “I’ve got some teaching work for you if you want it,” he told Russell while they waited. “It’s a Jewish family called Wiesner. The father is—was—a doctor. His wife is ill most of the time, though I don’t know what with—worry, most likely. Their son was taken off to Sachsenhausen after Kristallnacht and hasn’t been seen since, though the family have heard that he’s still alive. And there are two daughters, Ruth and Marthe, who are both in their teens—thirteen and fifteen, or something like that. It’s them you’d be teaching.”

  Russell must have looked doubtful.

  “You’d be doing me a real favor if you took them on,” Conway persisted. “Felix Wiesner probably saved Phyllis’s life—this was back in 1934—there were complications with the birth and we couldn’t have had a better doctor. He wasn’t just efficient; he went out of his way to be helpful. And now he can’t practice, of course. I don’t know what he intends to do—I don’t know what any of them can do—but he’s obviously hoping to get his daughters to England or the States, and he probably thinks they’ll have a better chance if they speak English. I have no idea what his money situation is, I’m afraid. If he can’t earn, and there’s all the new taxes to pay . . . well. . . . But if he can’t pay your normal rate then I’ll top up whatever he can afford. Just don’t tell him I’m doing it.”

  “He might like the idea that somebody cares,” Russell said.

  “I don’t know about. . . .”

  “I’ll go and see him.”

  Conway smiled. “I hoped you’d say that.” He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his inside pocket and passed it across the table. “Here’s his address.”

  It was in Friedrichshain, hardly a normal stomping ground for high-class Jewish doctors.

  “He used to live in Lützow,” Conway explained. “Now they’re all hunkering down together in the poorest areas. Like medieval ghettos.”

  The food arrived and they ate in silence for a couple of minutes, before exchanging news of their children and the German schools they were attending. Conway and his wife had also seen Effi’s musical, and clearly wished they hadn’t, though Conway was much too diplomatic to actually say so.

  Over coffee Russell asked how the Embassy saw the next few months.

  “Off the record?”

  “Off the record.”

  “We’re on a knife-edge. If our mustachioed chum is happy with what he’s got, then fine. The appeasers will say ‘I told you so—he may be a nasty little shit, but he can be managed.’ But if he goes after more—Danzig or the Corridor or the rest of Czechoslovakia—then Churchill and his pals will be the ones saying, ‘I told you so.’ And there’ll be a war.”

  “Doug, how do you persuade the British people that the Czechs weren’t worth fighting for, but the Poles are? The Czechs have a functioning democracy of sorts. The Poles would be just like this lot if they had any talent for organization.”

  Conway grimaced. “That’ll be up to the politicians. But I’ll tell you what London’s really worried about. If Hitler does behave for a few years, and if he keeps building tanks, U-boats and bombers at the current rate, then by Forty-one or Forty-two he’ll be unstoppable. That’s the real nightmare. As far as we’re concerned—from a purely military point of view—the sooner the better.”

  THERE WAS NO TELEPHONE at the Wiesners’ but, as Conway had noted, the doctor didn’t have much to go out for. No U-bahn had been built out into the working class wastes of Friedrichshain, so Russell took a 13 tram from the Brandenburg Gate to Spittelmarkt and a 60 from there to Alexanderplatz and up Neue Konigstrasse. The city deteriorated with each passing kilometer, and by the time he reached his destination most of it seemed to be on sale. The sidewalk was lined with makeshift tables, all piled high with belongings that would-be Jewish emigrants were trying to shift. The complete works of Dickens in German were on sale for a few Reichsmarks, a fine-looking violin for only a little more.

  The Wiesners’ block made his own seem middle class. The street was cobbled, the walls plastered with advertisements for auctions and lists of items for sale. On the pavement a group of painfully thin young girls were hopping their way through a game of Heaven and Earth on a chalkmarked grid. In the courtyard of the Wiesners’ building the far wall still bore the faintest outline of a large hammer and sickle and the much-faded slogan ERST ESSEN, DANN MIET—first food, then rent.

  The Wiesners shared two overcrowded rooms on the second floor. Contrary to Conway’s expectation, the doctor was out. He was only attending to a neighbor, however, and the older of the two daughters was sent to fetch him, leaving Russell, Frau Wiesner, and her younger daughter to exchange small talk. Frau Wiesner, a small woman with tied-back blond hair and tired gray eyes, looked anything but Jewish, while her younger daughter Ruth bore a striking resemblance to Effi, both physically and, Russell judged, temperamentally. Effi had often been mistaken for a Jew, and various employers had insisted she carry the fragebogen, which testified to her Aryan descent, at all times. She of course liked nothing better than shoving the mistake back in people’s faces.

  Dr. Wiesner appeared after a few minutes, looking decidedly harassed. His wife and two daughters abruptly withdrew to the next room and closed the door behind them.

  He was about fifty, Russell guessed, and aging fast. He ran a hand through his thinning hair and got straight down to business—as Conway had said, he hoped to get his daughters away to relations in England. He was working on getting them visas and exit permits, and in the meantime he wanted them to learn English. “I speak a little,” he said in that language, “and I will try and help them, but they need a proper teacher.”

  “I have taught around twenty German children,” Russell said.

  Wiesner grunted. “German children,” he repeated. “I’m afraid my children are no longer considered German.”

  Russell said nothing.

  “You are wondering why we stayed,” Wiesner said. “I ask myself the same thing every day and I have many answers, but none of them is worth anything. My wife is not Jewish,” he added, “so my children are only half-Jewish, or mischlings as the Nazis call them, but I thought perhaps. . . . Well, I was a fool.” He reached behind himself and plucked a piece of paper from a shelf-full of music. It was, of all things, a page of Der Stürmer. “Listen to this,” the doctor said, adjusting his glasses on his nose and holding the page almost at arm’s length. “‘Even if a Jew slept with an Aryan woman once, the membranes of her vagina would be so impregnated with alien semen that the woman would never again be able to bear pure blooded Aryans.’” He lowered the paper and looked at Russell. “Who could believe such pre-scientific nonsense? It doesn’t even make sense on their own illiterate terms—surely the master race would have the all-powerful blood, not the people they despise.” He saw something in Russell’s face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I am telling you all this. It’s just so hard to accept.”

  “I understand,” Russell said.

  “So why do you, an Englishman, stay in Germany?” Wiesner asked him.

  Russell gave a short account of his situation.

  “That is difficult,” the doctor agreed. “But good news for my daughters if you agree to teach them.”

  “How many lessons do you have in mind?”

  “As many as you can manage. And as often.”

  “Three times a week? Monday, Wednesday, Friday? It’ll vary a bit. I can’t do Friday this week, but I could do Thursday.”

  “Whatever you say. Now for the difficult part. I have some money, but not very much. And—here I must trust you—I have some valuable stamps. I can show you the valuation in the current catalogue and add another ten percent.”

  It was a nice idea, but Russell couldn’t do it. “The catalogue value will suit me fine.”

  IT WAS ALMOST DARK when he emerged from the Wiesners’ block, and the tram rides home through the evening rush hour seemed endless. By the time he reached Hallesches Tor he was ready for supper, and his favourite beerhouse beneath the elevated U-bahn provided the necessary meatballs and potato pancakes. Over a second beer he decided not to sell any of Wiesner’s stamps unless he
really needed to. He would give them to Paul, whose collection could do with some rarities.

  That was assuming his son would accept them. Paul was forever worrying about his father’s financial state—an anxiety which Russell occasionally, and without much conviction, tried to blame on his ex-wife Ilse.

  He looked at his watch: He didn’t have long to ring Paul before his bedtime. A U-bahn rattled into the station above as he emerged from the beerhouse, and a stream of people were soon pouring down the iron staircase, exhaling thick puffs of breath in the cold evening air. It was one of those Berlin days when the weather seemed uncertain what to do, one minute veering toward a western warmth, the next favoring an eastern chill.

  Entering his street, he noticed what looked like an empty car parked across from his apartment block. This was unusual—very few people in the area could afford one. He thought about crossing the street to take a look inside but decided he was being paranoid. He hadn’t done anything to upset the authorities. Not yet, anyway.

  A blast of hot air greeted him as he opened the outside doors of the apartment block. Frau Heidegger’s skat evening was in full swing, the volume of laughter suggesting a large consignment of empty bottles for the morning collection. Russell dialed the number of the house in Grunewald, put the earpiece to one ear and a finger in the other. As he half-expected, Ilse picked up. They asked each other the usual questions, gave the usual answers, all with the faint awkwardness which they never seemed able to shake. The family had just gotten back from Hanover, and when Paul came on he was full of the wonders of the autobahn and his stepfather’s new Horch 830 Bl. As far as Saturday was concerned, his usual school lessons had been replaced by Jungvolk meetings, and these ran until one o’clock. “Muti says you can pick me up then.”

  “Right.” Effi would be pleased, Russell thought. He wouldn’t have to leave while she was still fast asleep.

  “And we’re still going to the Viktoria match?”

  “Of course. I expect Uncle Thomas and Joachim will come too.”

  They chatted for another couple of minutes, before Ilse’s voice in the background decreed that time was up. Russell said good night and, feeling the usual mixture of elation and frustration, started up the stairs.

  He was waylaid on the third floor landing by the other resident journalist in the building, a young American named Tyler McKinley. “I thought I heard your weary tread,” the American said in English. “Come in for a minute. I want to ask you something.”

  It seemed simpler to say yes than no. McKinley’s room wasn’t particularly warm—like the other residents he knew that skat night was a chance to freshen the air—but it was full of pipe-smoke from the atrocious Balkan mixture he had adopted during a weekend trip to Trieste.

  “How was Danzig?” his host asked, though Russell could see he was bursting with stuff of his own to talk about. There was something lovable about McKinley, but also something profoundly irritating. Russell hoped that this wasn’t just because McKinley, with his quasi-religious belief in crusading journalism, reminded him of himself in long-gone days. That was the trouble with the young—their stupidities brought back one’s own.

  “Interesting,” he answered, though it had been anything but in the way that McKinley meant. He considered telling him about the stamp wars, but could imagine the look of incomprehension and vague derision which that would elicit.

  The younger man was already back in Berlin. “I’m chasing a really interesting story,” he said. “I don’t want to say anything yet,” he hastened to add, “but . . . do you know anything about the KdF, the Kanzlei des Führers?”

  “It’s the great man’s private chancellery.”

  “Is it a government office?”

  “No, it’s a Party office, but an independent one. There’s no connection to Bormann’s bunch in Munich.”

  McKinley looked excited. “So who is it connected to?”

  Russell shrugged. “Nobody. It reports directly to Hitler as far as I know.”

  “So if he wanted to do something on the quiet, it would be the ideal instrument.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  McKinley beamed, as if he’d just awarded himself a gold star.

  “You want to tell me what you’re talking about?” Russell asked, interested in spite of himself.

  “Not yet,” the American said, but he couldn’t resist one more question. “Does the name Knauer mean anything to you?”

  “A fullback with Tennis Borussia a few years back?”

  “What? Oh, a soccer player. No, I don’t think so.” He reached for a lighter to re-start his pipe. “But thanks for your help.”

  “You’re welcome,” Russell said, and resumed his ascent.

  His room was sweltering, but mercifully smoke-free. Guessing that the skat game still had a couple of hours to run, he threw one window wide and gazed out across the rooftops. In the far distance the red light atop the Funkturm winked above the roofscape.

  He sat down at the typewriter, inserted a sheet of paper, and reminded himself that the letter he was about to write was—as far as the Soviets were concerned—just a long-winded way of saying yes. His real audience was the Gestapo.

  Play the innocent, he thought. The Gestapo would think he was trying to fool the Soviets, and assume he was just being cynical.

  He began by asserting the happy coincidence that National Socialism and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had one crucial word in common—socialism. That should give them both a laugh, he thought. They might seem like enemies, he continued, but clearly they had something important in common—socialism’s determination to serve all the people. What could serve the people better than peace? And what served peace better than mutual understanding? If the Soviet people were offered, in a series of articles, a clearer idea of how much National Socialism had achieved for ordinary German people, then the chances of peace were bound to be enhanced. As an Englishman with a long experience of Germany he was ideally placed to explain it to foreigners. And he had a strong personal reason for desiring peace—if war came, he added pathetically, he and his German-born son might be separated for years and years. “Here I am,” he murmured to himself, “a propaganda tool for the taking.” The Gestapo would lap it up.

  He copied the address from Shchepkin’s note onto an envelope, unearthed a stamp from the table drawer, and perched the completed missive on his typewriter. Hearing the sounds of departing concierges floating up from the courtyard he made a dive for the window and pulled it shut.

  Bed, he thought. The bathroom on the floor below which he shared with McKinley and two other men—a stationery rep from Hamburg and a waiter from the Harz Mountains—was empty for once, though the strong smell of McKinley’s pipe smoke suggested a lengthy occupation earlier that evening. There was still light under the American’s door, and Russell could hear the soft clicking of his typewriter—the newer machines were much quieter than his own antique.

  Back in bed, he re-read Paul’s postcard and resumed reading the detective novel he had forgotten to take to Danzig. Unable to remember who anyone was, he turned out the light and listened to the muffled hum of the traffic on nearby Lindenstrasse. The Führer was probably allowed to sleep with his windows open.

  HE SPENT THE NEXT two days looking after business. Wednesday and Thursday morning, he made the long trek out to Friedrichshain for two 90-minute sessions with the Wiesner girls. The elder daughter Marthe was a bit shy at first, but Ruth’s enthusiasm proved infectious enough to bring her out. The two of them knew very little English, but they were a joy to teach, eager to learn and markedly more intelligent than the spoiled daughters of Grunewald and Wilmersdorf whom Russell had taught in the past.

  This was on the Wednesday—the following day both girls looked as though they’d seen a ghost, and Russell wondered whether they’d had bad news from Sachsenhausen. When he asked if they were all right, he thought Marthe was going to cry, but she took a visible grip on herself and explained that her brother had come home the previous evening.

  “But that’s wonderful. . . .” Russell began.
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br />   “He doesn’t seem like Albert,” Ruth broke in, looking over her shoulder at the door through to the other rooms. “He has no hair, and he doesn’t say anything,” she whispered.

  “He will,” Marthe told her sister, putting an arm round her. “He’s just seen some terrible things, but he hasn’t been hurt, not really. Now come on, we have to learn English. For everyone’s sake.”

  And they did, faster than any pupils Russell could remember. Neither mother nor brother emerged from the other rooms, and Doctor Wiesner was out on both days. On the Thursday he left Russell a small amount of marks and three stamps in an envelope on top of the latest Stanley Gibbons catalogue from England. Russell didn’t bother to check the listings.

  Wednesday afternoon, he had typed out the stamp wars article and stuck two copies in the red air mail box by the Hotel Bristol entrance on Unter den Linden. Thursday morning, a telegram arrived from his London agent pointing out the need for exclusive photographs with his piece on Hitler’s new Chancellery, and that afternoon Russell dragged himself out to a photographic studio in the wilds of Neukölln, only to discover that the photographer in question, a Silesian named Zembski whom he’d used in the past, had just lost his official accreditation after starting a brawl at one of Goering’s hunting parties. Zembski weighed over 200 pounds, and could hardly be smuggled into the Führer’s new insult to architecture, but he did prove willing to rent out one of his better cameras. After a short instruction course Russell carried the Leica back to Hallesches Tor.