Zoo Stationee

by David Downing

“I have the tickets and reservations,” Jens told him. “We were lucky: There were four seats left on next Thursday’s London flight. It leaves at two, but you should be there half an hour earlier. The return flight is on Sunday, at eleven. I have booked two rooms at the Savoy Hotel—have you heard of it?—on a road called Strand. And a car to take you from the airport in Croydon to the hotel and back again. And of course the appointment. I hope that covers everything.”

  Russell almost asked where the appointment was, but presumed Jens was being cagey for a reason. “It sounds, perfect,” he said. The Savoy! he thought.

  “Good. Now, this other business.” He paused for a moment and Russell could imagine him checking that his office door was shut. “Your friend’s Jewish doctor has been arrested for conducting an abortion on a girl of seventeen. Her name is Erna Marohn, from a good German family. Her father is an officer in the Kriegsmarine.”

  “Who made the complaint?”

  “The mother. The father is away at sea. There is no doubt the girl had an abortion: She was examined by a police doctor. And there is little doubt that Wiesner carried it out. She was seen entering the clinic he runs in Friedrichshain for other Jews.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It is. A German doctor caught performing an abortion can expect a lengthy term of imprisonment. A Jewish doctor caught performing one on a German girl, well. . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “But there is some good news. I have managed to arrange a pass for you to visit him in Sachsenhausen. Next Wednesday, the day before you go to England. A courier will bring the pass to your house. You should be at the camp by 11:00 AM. But you will not be able to take anything in or out. And you must not report anything you see or hear. They are letting you in as a favor to me, but not as a journalist. You do understand that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “If anything appears in print, in England or anywhere else, describing the conditions there, they will assume that you have broken your word, and, at the very least, you will lose your journalistic accreditation. I was asked to tell you this.”

  “I understand. And thank you, Jens.”

  “You are welcome.”

  FRIDAY DAWNED CLEAR AND COLD. Russell packed a bag for the weekend, and headed toward Friedrichshain, stopping for a newspaper and coffee at Alexanderplatz Station. The only interesting piece of news concerned a train: In Westphalia a 37-ton excavating machine had run amok on a night freight. Whatever it was that pin-ioned the steel arms in an upright position had come undone, dropping them into their working position over one side of the wagon. A mile’s worth of telegraph poles, signals, and huts had been demolished, and a station reduced to rubble when the canopy supports were swept away. The train had only been stopped when a witness phoned ahead to a signal box. The guard hadn’t noticed anything was amiss. Hitler’s Germany in microcosm—flailing away in the darkness, ruins piling up behind.

  At the apartment in Friedrichshain he told Frau Wiesner what Jens had told him. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Felix will tell you what really happened.” He gave the two girls a lesson, and promised to come by on the following Tuesday when he returned from Hamburg. Driving back across town to pick up Effi, he wondered how to dispel the sense of gloom that seemed to be enveloping him.

  He needn’t have worried. It was about 200 kilometers to Stralsund, and by the time they reached it Effi’s defiant mood of romantic adventure had overtaken him. After crossing the narrow sound on the steam ferry, they drove the last 40 kilometers to Sassnitz in gathering darkness. On one forest stretch their headlights caught two deer hurrying each other across the road.

  As Russell had expected the small resort was virtually empty, and they had their pick of those hotels not closed for the winter break. They chose the Am Meer, right on the promenade, and were given a room with views across the darkened Baltic. With the dining room closed for refurbishing, dinner was served in the lounge, in front of a dancing fire, by a girl of about fourteen. Happy and full, they walked out across the promenade and listened to the comforting caress of the tide. Above the sea the sky was bursting with stars, and over the hills behind them a thin crescent moon was rising. As they clung together for warmth, and kissed on the stony beach, it crossed Russell’s mind that this was as perfect as life ever got.

  Back in their room they discovered, much to Effi’s amusement, that the bed squeaked and creaked at their slightest movement, and midway through making love she got the giggles so badly that they had to take a break before resuming.

  The good weather continued, sunlight advancing across their bed the following morning. After wrapping up warmly they set out for the famous Stubbenkammer cliffs, a ten-kilometer drive through the Stubnitz beech woods. After gingerly looking over the 140-meter precipice, Russell gave Effi her first driving lesson on the large expanse of tarmac laid out for the summer sightseeing coaches. Clanking the gears atrociously, she jerked her way through several circuits before pronouncing: “This is easy!”

  They had lunch in a restaurant they had noticed on the drive up, a sprawling wooden building with intricately carved façades which nestled among the beeches, and then spent a couple of hours walking along the well-tended paths of the sun-dappled forest. The only other signs of human life were various fragments of a Hitler Youth group on a weekend trip from Rostock: groups of two or three boys, their eyes flickering from compass to path and back again. Their leaders, who brought up the rear, claimed to have seen a bear, but the beer on their breath suggested otherwise.

  It got dark too early, but there was always the creaking bed. Afterward, they drank, ate, and sat in front of the same fire, hardly speaking, and not needing to. The bed was uncomfortable as well as noisy, but Russell slept better than he had for weeks.

  On their final morning he drove them northwest toward the long sandspit which connected the Jasmund and Wittow peninsulas. Seeing that the road along the spit was empty he relinquished the wheel to Effi, and she drove the next twenty kilometers, far too fast, with a huge smile lighting up her face. At the end of the spit they took to the sandy beach, walking a kilometer or more and back again, watching the wind raising whitecaps on the water and the clouds scudding eastward across the blue-gray Baltic. No cars went by, no walkers. No ships appeared on the horizon. The earth was theirs.

  But not for long. Effi’s train back to Berlin left Stralsund at three, and as they made their way back across the island the sunshine became increasingly intermittent, finally disappearing beneath a looming wall of cloud. The short ferry ride was choppy, the railway carriages clanking ominously in their chains, and rain was falling by the time they reached the Hauptbahnhof.

  “This is really sad,” Effi said. “You’ll only be back for a day or so, and you’ll be gone again. And I’ve no idea what the filming schedule’s going to be.”

  “It’s only a couple of weeks,” he told her.

  “Of course,” she smiled, but he knew he’d said the wrong thing.

  “Let’s do this again,” he said. “Soon.”

  “Please.” A whistle sounded, and she leaned out of the window to kiss him. “Are you sure we have this the right way round?” she asked. “You should be on a train to Hamburg and I should be driving back to Berlin.”

  “Sometimes other people want to use the road,” he told her as the train jerked into motion.

  She made a face, and blew him a kiss. He stood there watching the train’s red taillight recede into the distance, then strode back down the platform and out of the station. The car seemed colder without her.

  THE ROAD ACROSS THE NORTHERN heathlands was mostly empty, the rain persistent and occasionally heavy. He drove west at a steady fifty kilometers an hour, half-hypnotized by the steady slap of the windshield wiper as his eyes struggled to pierce the gloom ahead. Darkness had fallen by the time he left Lubeck, and on the last stretch across southern Holstein a stream of trucks did their best to blind him with their headlights. The dimly lit suburbs of eastern Hamburg came as a blessed relief.

  He had already booked himself
a room with bath at the Kronprinz Hotel on Kirchenallee. This was one of the Hamburg establishments favored by journalists on an expense account. It was expensive, but not that expensive—the journalists concerned could always produce proof that other hotels were more so. The receptionist confirmed what he already expected, that he was a day ahead of the crowd. With the launch set for lunchtime Tuesday, most of the press would be arriving late on Monday.

  After examining his room and eating dinner in the hotel restaurant he went out. The Kronprinz was just across from the main station, which lay at the eastern end of the old town. Russell walked through the station and down Monckebergstrasse toward the looming tower of the Rathaus, turning right before he reached it, and headed for the Alsterbassin, the large square of water which lay at the city’s heart. He had visited Hamburg many times over the last fifteen years, and walking the mile-long, tree-lined perimeter of the Alsterbassin had become almost a ritual.

  Despite the damp cold, many others were doing the same. On summer days the water was usually busy with rowing, sailing, and steamboats, but on this winter evening the seagulls had it to themselves. Russell stopped for a beer at a café on one of the quays, and thought about Effi. She was wonderful with children, but he couldn’t remember her ever saying she wanted them. Did he want another one, with her? Despite the fact that the world was about to collapse around them, he rather thought he did. Far across the water a seagull squawked in derision.

  He slept well, ate a large breakfast, and drove across the city to St. Pauli, the suburb between Hamburg and Altona which housed a high proportion of the city’s seafaring population. His British agent had particularly liked the idea of including sailors among his “Ordinary Germans,” and this was an obvious place to find them. Interviewing men past active service seemed like a good way of deflecting any suspicion that he was collecting intelligence rather than human interest news, and his first port of call was one of several homes for retired seamen close to the waterfront.

  Over the next couple of hours he talked to several delightful pensioners, all eager to share the sources of alcohol concealed on their persons. They had all fought in the war: one, a rare survivor from the Battle of the Falklands; two others, participants in the Battle of Jutland. Both of the latter offered broad hints that they’d taken part in the High Seas Mutiny of 1918, but they clearly hadn’t suffered for it, either then or under the Nazis. Their retirement home seemed comfortable, efficient, and friendly.

  All the residents he talked to admired the new ships, but none were impressed by the current standards of gunnery. Not, they admitted, that this mattered that much. Ships like the new Bismarck looked good—and were good—but the money and labor would be better spent on U-Boats. That, unfortunately, was where future naval wars would be won or lost.

  Russell had less success with working sailors. Trawling the waterfront bars he found some amiable seamen, but rather more who treated his questions with suspicion verging on hostility. Some were clearly supporters of the regime. One young officer, pacified by a brief perusal of Sturmbannführer Kleist’s letter, was particularly optimistic about Germany’s naval prospects: He saw the Bismarck, in particular, as symbolic of a burgeoning renaissance. “In five years time,” he promised, “we’ll have the British hiding in their harbors.” Others, Russell guessed, would once have been open opponents of the regime— Hamburg, after all, had been a KPD stronghold, and a key center of the Comintern’s maritime organization. As far as these men were concerned he was, at best, a naďve English journalist, at worst, an agent provocateur.

  That afternoon Russell spent a few marks on the circular tour of Hamburg harbor, an hour and a half of channels, shipyards, quays, and towering cranes in dizzying profusion. Colored bunting was going up everywhere, and the Blohm and Voss slipway, which housed the future Bismarck, was a ferocious hive of activity as last-minute preparations were made for the launching ceremony. The ship itself was disappointing. Still lacking a superstructure, it looked more like a gigantic canoe than the future of naval warfare. The overall impression Russell carried back to the hotel, however, was of power and energy, of a nation with a long and lengthening reach.

  He ate dinner at a small restaurant on the Jungfernstieg which he’d been to before—the oysters were as good as he remembered—and made his way back across town to the Klosterburg, the beer restaurant near his hotel where journalists usually gathered. Hal Manning and Jack Slaney were sitting at the bar, staring across the room at a particularly boisterous table of SA men. One man, beer slopping from a raised glass, was outlining what he’d do to Marlene Dietrich if she ever dared set foot in Germany again. His proposal made up in violence what it lacked in imagination.

  Russell hoisted himself onto the vacant stool next to Slaney’s and bought a round of drinks.

  “She’s making a film with Jimmy Stewart at the moment,” Slaney said. “And her character’s called Frenchie. I guess that shows which side she’s on.” He carried on staring at the SA table, whisky chaser poised in his hand. “We should think up a new collective noun for these people—you know, like a gaggle of geese. A crassness of stormtroopers. No, that’s much too kind.” He threw his head back and tipped in the chaser.

  “A void,” Manning suggested.

  “Too intellectual.”

  “A deposit,” Russell offered.

  “Mmm, not bad. A passing, perhaps.” He reached for his beer. “If only they would,” he added sourly.

  AT 11:00 THE NEXT MORNING, two buses organized by the Ministry of Propaganda arrived at the forecourt of the Reichshof, just up the road from the Kronprinz, to collect the assembled foreign press corps. “We’ll be hanging around for hours,” Slaney complained, as their bus headed south toward a bridge across the Norder Elbe, but he had reckoned without the traffic. There was only one road through the docks to the Blohm and Voss shipyard, and forward movement was soon reduced to a crawl.

  “Adolf won’t like sitting in a jam,” Russell said.

  “He’s coming by yacht,” Manning told him. “The Grille. A little journalistic detail for you.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  They reached Slipway 9 at quarter past 12:00, and were dragooned, rather like schoolboys, into an enclosed area behind and slightly to the right of the ship’s towering bow. From here a flight of steps led up to a platform around ten meters square, and from that a smaller flight of steps to the actual launching platform, right up against the bow.

  It wasn’t “Hitler weather,” but at least it was dry, with a few desultory streaks of blue amid the gray. Several thousand people were present, lining the sides of the slipway and the area behind the platforms. Some shipyard workers were leaning over the ship’s rail, others perched precariously on the vast scaffolding of girders which rose above the ship. The larger platform was full of city and state officials, naval brass and Party hacks.

  The first of several loud booms silenced the crowd.

  “Naval salutes,” Slaney murmured. “Unless they’re firing on Hitler’s yacht.”

  “No such luck,” Russell said, indicating the man in question, who had just appeared at the bottom of the steps leading to the first platform. Bismarck’s elderly granddaughter was climbing the steps ahead of him, and Hitler was visibly chafing at the delay, casting frequent glances at her progress as he talked to the portly Goering.

  Once the Führer, Dorothea von Bismarck, and the three service chiefs were all gathered on the higher platform, the former gave, by his own standards, a remarkably brief speech extolling the virtues of Germany’s last Navy—scuttled to spite the British in 1919—and the Iron Chancellor himself, “a true knight without fear or reproach.” Bismarck’s granddaughter then named the ship—her querulous voice barely audible above the raucous shouts of the seagulls—and broke the traditional bottle of champagne on the bow.

  There was a sound of blocks being knocked away, and then . . . nothing. The ship failed to move. Hitler continued staring at the bow, like a cat facing a door which refused to open. One of the service chiefs looked around, as if he were asking “wha
t do we do now?” A couple of seagulls hovered above the upper platform, as if intent on mischief.

  “If this goes on much longer,” Slaney said, watching them, “the Limeys’ll be running a book on who gets crapped on first.”

  There were more knocking noises from below, but still no sign of movement. Russell looked at his watch—two minutes and counting. Hitler was still staring rigidly ahead, but what else could he do? It was hardly the place for a major tantrum.

  One of the service chiefs leaned over to say something, and stiffened as if he’d been slapped. And then a cheer burst forth from those lining the slipway—at last the ship was inching forward. The figures on the platform visibly relaxed, and as the stern slid into the river, Hitler, turning slightly to one side, smiled and brought a clenched fist sharply down on the railing.

  “They must have sent Goering down to give it a push,” Slaney said. “Anyway,” he added, “the good news is that it won’t be ready for sea until 1941.”

  The American’s train wasn’t until nine that evening, and he jumped at the offer of a lift back to Berlin in the car. There was little conversation—Slaney slept for most of the journey, despite snorting himself awake on several occasions—and Russell was left to brood on his visit to Sachsenhausen the following day. At least he’d have no trouble getting there. Come to think of it, that was what made car ownership in Germany special—the concentration camps became so accessible.