Max

by Sarah Cohen-Scali

  Guess what we found on one of the steps of the station bunker? Sitting there like a Christmas present, or rather a Christmas reject…Manfred. Shrivelled up, wizened, even smaller and frailer than he was at the Napola, his limbs no thicker than a spider’s legs. He was like an old man, his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes covered in white dust, and his skin gouged with wrinkles from the ingrained plaster particles.

  Their platoon leader had, of course, abandoned them. While the rest of the kids had managed as best they could, Manfred had just sat down on his step and hadn’t moved. For five months! He didn’t try to go home, find his parents, nothing. He stayed there, immobile, waiting. He had only survived thanks to passing women who gave him food.

  He didn’t recognise me. When I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, his arms shot up in defence, as if I was going to hit him. Unbelievable, he thought I was a Russian soldier. Once he recognised me, he jumped up and hugged me. ‘Konrad! My Konrad!’ he shouted. ‘Is it really you? I’m saved! I’m saved!’

  ‘I knew you had a girlfriend, Skullface!’ said Lukas, when he saw the little dickhead clinging to me.

  So now we’re stuck with him. Manfred, our ball and chain. As soon as one of us goes anywhere, he starts panicking, shaking all over. But things are also on a more even keel: Lukas orders me around, and I order Manfred around.

  What strikes me the most in this devastated Berlin is not the bombing, or the ruins, or the filth, and not even the defeatist attitude, which I find very disappointing.

  It’s the women. There are so many of them, everywhere. They’ve taken charge of the city. They’re running it. I’m not used to being surrounded by women. At the Napola, apart from the cooks, whom we scarcely glimpsed, there were only men. I have vague memories of the nurses in Steinhöring, much stronger ones of the Brown Sisters—those bitches—and of the prostitutes of Poznan. The women I have been around more recently, and whom I remember the best, are the warden bitches from hell at Kalish.

  But the Berlin women are neither prostitutes nor bitches.

  No more three Ks. Now the women have taken over from the men—with confidence, determination, energy and efficiency. They’re not tall and blonde, like we’d been taught in Biology at the Napola. With few exceptions, they are dark, petite, strong—muscular from carrying sacks of coal and heavy suitcases in which they have packed all their belongings before descending into the shelters. And they’re brave. When there’s no more water, they’re the ones who risk their lives outside at the water pumps. They’re not afraid of the bombs. They queue for hours in front of shops for a few grams of margarine.

  There’s still a little bit of the three Ks about them: some just can’t help cleaning. Their nickname is the Trümmerfrauen, ‘the women of the rubble’. In between the bombings they form a human chain to clear the rocks and paving stones, which they load into buckets. And they’re always sweeping, sweeping—debris, dust, shit. They’re creating order in a city that is falling to pieces.

  The other day one of them caught Manfred and me. She’d got it into her head to wash us. She was suddenly obsessed with the idea. ‘It’s simply unacceptable to be this grubby!’ she exclaimed, nabbing us by the collar, like a lioness grabbing her cubs by the skin of their necks.

  With a scrap of cloth that she dipped in a jar of boiling water, she rubbed our faces, hands and armpits. She even tried to take our pants off to wash our bums. Manfred let her, but I gave her a kick and ran off.

  Another woman had a go at Lukas in a shelter. Not about washing him; she couldn’t have grabbed a big guy like him. But she’d heard him swearing. Without hesitation, she slapped him across the face. ‘There are children here,’ she snapped. ‘You watch your language, my boy!’

  ‘I’m sorry, madam,’ Lukas said, his eyes lowered.

  The other day, I saw a woman cutting up a horse killed by a mortar shell; she was putting the pieces in jars filled with vinegar. She gave me one. We cooked some of the meat and had three meals in a row from it. Horse is easier to chew and digest than monkey. Less tasty, too.

  I’m sick of the subway. Sick of shelters. Sick of being underground. Sick of all these people we don’t know. Sick of following their rules. For once, I’m with Lukas: after Kalish and the Napola, we’ve had enough of communal living. We want to be by ourselves and make our own rules, that is, no rules.

  So we decide to leave and set ourselves up in an abandoned house. There are plenty of them. Outside, Berlin is deserted. Who cares if we have to watch out for bombs and mortar shells, as well as the crime squads of the SS and the Military Field Police, who arrest individuals and forcibly enlist them in improvised military units. Nothing like the Hitler Youth groups we passed when we fled the Napola. These guys here are hardcore. They string up anyone who is reluctant from the trees along the road, or from lampposts, and they hang a sign round their necks: ‘I was a coward.’

  ‘Here’s to the arrival of the Russians and the Americans!’ yells Lukas. After gulping a swig of schnapps, he passes me the bottle.

  ‘To the victory of the Reich!’ I yell, raising my arm to kill two birds with one stone: to annoy Lukas and pass the bottle to Manfred.

  ‘To the arrival of the Russians and to the victory of the Reich!’ yells Manfred.

  I choke on my schnapps. ‘You’re such an idiot! That’s impossible,’ I spit, and the mouthful of alcohol that went down the wrong way lands on him.

  ‘What’s impossible?’

  ‘To toast the arrival of the Russians and the victory of the Reich. It’s one or the other, you have to choose sides!’

  ‘But…but why do I have to choose? You’re brothers, and if Lukas is for the Russians and you’re for the Reich, that means both are possible at the same time, doesn’t it? You…you’re not on the same side?’ Manfred whines, with that hangdog expression he gets whenever he says or does anything stupid.

  He is really thick. Hell, he clearly didn’t understand a word in our History and Politics classes at the Napola. And has no idea about the present situation. (He still thinks we’re brothers because we’re too lazy to tell him the truth. It would take too long to tell him the whole story and he wouldn’t get it anyway.)

  ‘Shut up!’ interrupts Lukas. ‘You’re both as stupid as each other. And you more that anything,’ he adds, pointing to me. ‘You’re talking shit. When is it finally going to sink into your head, your puny Skullface head, that the victory of the Reich is impossible?’

  I’m about to respond but he stops me. He suddenly breaks into a huge smile and proclaims, ‘Come on, we’re not fighting today, it’s a celebration! Happy 1945!’

  He’s right. We can have a truce for the 31st of December.

  ‘Happy 1945!’ I grab the bottle back from Manfred and take another swig of schnapps, which goes down fine this time.

  ‘Happy 1945,’ repeats Manfred.

  Yes, it’s New Year’s Eve, and we’re doing fine. Even if the noise of the bombings is getting louder and louder and we have to shout to be heard over the din. The sky is blazing red. It’s almost as if the explosions had been arranged especially to create a festive atmosphere.

  It’s midday, not midnight. We’re having the toast now, because there’s no guarantee we’ll be alive at midnight to see in the new year. We’ve got schnapps, cigarettes and a piece of bacon, a sausage and boiled potatoes. We’re lucky; it’s a good meal, even if the potatoes taste like soap. The schnapps warms us up, the cigarettes stop us from feeling hungry, and we’re so comfortable in an apartment.

  Yes, we did find one. When we left the U-Bahn, Lukas asked Manfred, ‘Do you know how to get to your place? Do you remember your address?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, of course! Number 1, Reichstrasse. It’s this way.’

  Manfred’s eyes lit up, as if they were lit by those little Christmas tree candles you see in normal times. As if suddenly the word ‘Mummy’ was twinkling in his left eye, and ‘Daddy’ in his right. For him, going back to his home was like finding his parents. He ha
dn’t dared do it alone, but with us he felt up to facing the danger. He was imagining that, once we got there, he would see his mummy in the kitchen preparing him a delicious snack, and his daddy in the living room, welcoming him. ‘So, son, how was your last term at school?’

  Lukas and I made sure we didn’t tell him that there was absolutely no chance that he’d see his parents again. And probably not his apartment, given how few buildings were still standing. We had first to make sure that he took us there. And that’s what he did.

  Of course, the apartment had been bombed, gutted. The glass in the windows was broken and a thick grey layer of plaster dust covered everything, as if a nearby volcano had erupted. But the roof and floors were still intact, only slightly damaged, just a few holes here and there that were easy to mend. There was no more central heating or electricity, but it was good enough for us. At least it was for Lukas and me. Manfred, however, was in shock.

  ‘I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!’ he kept saying as he took in the damage.

  All his special belongings had disappeared—his toys, his drawings, most of his clothes, the furniture in his room—as well as the crockery, knick-knacks, sheets. There was almost nothing left. The fact that his parents weren’t there didn’t dawn on him until later, which meant we didn’t have to put up with the floods of tears we were dreading. He started looking for a letter, a note, that his mummy and daddy might have left somewhere to tell him where they were. But there was nothing at all. Zilch. To cheer him up, Lukas assured him that the letter must have blown out of one of the broken windows.

  Lukas and I checked out the apartment. A kitchen. The cupboards were empty, of course, the hotplates on the stove didn’t work, but the room had potential. After all, the kitchen is where you prepare food. (We just had to find some.) A living room. Two big armchairs, which the looters must have decided were too heavy to carry, still had pride of place. The upholstery had been ripped apart—they probably thought money or jewels were hidden there—but you could sit on them just fine. Our poor bums, sore from the subway tracks and the cement steps of the shelters, were more than happy to make contact with this new softness. Two bedrooms, one for the parents, one for Manfred. And finally, miraculously, wonder of wonders, a toilet! Dusty but clean. And, to top it off, a toilet flush that worked! It felt like a palace.

  We argued over who would have the honour to christen the dream toilet. I won. All of a sudden, my gut began to express its suffering. I started farting so loudly that, under attack from such lethal gas, my rivals conceded defeat.

  I locked myself in the cosy hideaway for a whole hour, despite Lukas and Manfred screaming and pounding on the door. Then there was another argument when I wanted to wipe my bum with the pages from some of the books I’d found on the collapsed shelves in the living room.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ shouted Lukas, blocking my way to the toilet. ‘We’re not still at the Napola, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘They’re my father’s books,’ protested Manfred.

  ‘Your father’s books?’ repeated Lukas, suddenly wary.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did your father do?’

  ‘He worked at the Ministry of—’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Lukas cut him off, and went to get some of the books. ‘Shit! Shit! And more shit!’ he cursed, as he inspected each one.

  He made two piles. He chucked the first pile on the ground in the toilet and the second next to the stove in the living room.

  ‘There you go, you can wipe your bum with them. They’re Nazi books. Especially that one,’ he added, pointing to the book on top. ‘The rest of them will be fuel for our stove and keep us warm. A little bit of book burning will bring back happy memories, right?’ he said with a nasty smile.

  The book on the top of the pile was Mein Kampf.

  I hesitated for a while. I couldn’t use that to wipe myself. It was beyond me. I could still hear the voice of the Heimführer, who used to read us extracts in the dining hall. I was frightened the words would peel off the paper and sting me in the bum in retaliation. I sneaked the book to the bottom of the pile, hoping that perhaps we wouldn’t get through the whole supply of paper.

  After the fight about the toilet, then about the toilet paper, came the fight about the bedrooms. Claiming the advantage of age, Lukas nabbed the parents’ room. Insisting on having his old room, Manfred suggested I share it with him. No, thank you. I decided that I could stick the two armchairs together to make a fine bed. It was okay to live together in an apartment but sleeping in the same room as Manfred would remind me too much of the Napola.

  Except that…once it was dark, and the sirens started wailing, and the bombardments came unremittingly, and the floor trembled, and the ceiling cracked, Manfred and I, without a second thought, fled into Lukas’s room. He didn’t send us away. The three of us cuddled up together in the big bed. Holding hands. Tightly. But there was no way we were going to sleep, and we quickly worked out that we’d be safer in the cellar.

  We stay in the apartment during the day, and at night we never leave the cellar. Unfortunately it’s not a private cellar just for us, as we’d assumed by the absence of anyone else on the other floors. The neighbours are well and truly here; they live in the cellar all the time, and the lack of space is a real pain. Here we go again: sardines in a tin, a dormitory where everyone disturbs everyone else and no one sleeps.

  Manfred is overjoyed because he’s met up with a woman named Frau Betstein, who is a friend of his parents.

  ‘My darling Manfred! My sweetheart, you’re alive! What a miracle. How you’ve grown.’

  Grown? Wow, he must have been a total dwarf before coming to the Napola.

  ‘Well, what do you know, your parents gave me a letter for you. Yes, yes, don’t worry, they’re fine. They went to the country while it was still possible. They were going to come and get you, so there must have been a hold-up. But there’s no need to be anxious, I’ll keep an eye on you now.’

  So Manfred ended up getting the letter he’d busted a gut looking for. Now he spends the whole time reading it and re-reading it, snuggled up with Frau Betstein, who, as the days pass—the nights, I should say—replaces his mother. She comforts him, looks after him, sorts out his clothes, shares her food rations with him. (The first night, idiot Manfred ate her food right under our noses, but the next day, back at the apartment, Lukas and I sorted him out. Now he knows that he has to hang on to whatever the old lady gives him and share it with us.)

  There’s quite a system set up in the cellar now. Everyone has sorted out their own spot, their living space. The most organised among them brought quilts, pillows, chairs. Like Manfred, people pass their time reading letters or looking at photos. Sometimes, when they have paper, they write. Letters? What’s the point? There’s no mail anymore. And they talk, a lot. Apart from one old man, there are only women, so it’s non-stop chatter.

  They’re all crazy in this underground crowd. Living down here rots your brain in the end. There is Frau Diesdorf, for example, who keeps a bathtowel on her head all the time. She’s already ugly, but that turban thing stuck on her head like a beehive hairdo doesn’t help.

  ‘Frau Diesdorf, excuse me,’ asked a suitcase neighbour one day. (‘Suitcase neighbour’ because people use their luggage either as seats or to mark the dividing lines between their personal areas.) ‘Why do you keep that towel on your head? Just so you know that, if it’s because of lice, it’s completely useless, it doesn’t prevent contamination and—’

  ‘I do not have lice! I’m clean,’ spluttered the offended Frau Diesdorf. ‘Not like some. Let it be known that this towel is protecting me from explosions!’

  So they had a fierce argument; who knows what it was about, they got so worked up.

  Another woman, Frau Evingen, carries around her son’s artificial leg all the time. She claims it’s her talisman. Don’t even try to understand.

  My suitcase neighbour is Herr Hauptman, an old bloke whose br
eath stinks. ‘If a bomb ever hits you, my boy, don’t forget to lean forward.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So your lungs don’t explode.’

  I’m more likely to die asphyxiated by your bad breath than to get hit by a bomb.

  I hate this cellar. But Lukas and Manfred are coping okay. I’ve already explained why that’s the case for Manfred. For Lukas, it’s because his suitcase neighbour is a girl the same age as him. Her name is Ute Oberham. They’ve got the hots for each other and never stop making eyes at one another. They’re always taking advantage of the close quarters to touch each other’s hands, knees, thighs; and then they go as red as beetroots, and look ridiculous. The girl’s mother ended up cottoning on to their goings-on. She’s a huge woman—I don’t see why her fat hasn’t disappeared at the same time the rations have. One night, Frau Oberham swapped places with her daughter. Now Lukas is squashed between her spare tyres and the wall. Serves him right.

  One woman is different from the others. She keeps herself apart as much as possible, given the lack of room. She doesn’t speak—or only rarely. She is beautiful. I hardly ever see her standing up, but I can tell she’s tall, blonde, and has beautiful blue eyes. (It’s been a while since I’ve seen all the characteristics of the Nordic race embodied in one person.) Despite her threadbare clothes, she’s elegant. She spends her time looking at a single photo. Sometimes a tear rolls down her cheek. It must be a photo of her husband, who is no doubt dead. Or it’s her brother. It couldn’t be her son; she looks too young to have a son at the front, unlike most of the other old chooks here.

  She often stares at me, tries to smile at me, but can’t, and then there are more tears. I have no idea why she looks at me like that. It reminds me of the time when women were all over me because of my angel face. But that’s finished now. I don’t have an angel face any longer. I just have a dirty, pale, tired face. Sometimes I like the blonde woman gazing at me. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But often it makes me uneasy. Luckily she doesn’t persevere; she ends up returning to her photo.