The Informer

by Craig Nova

  “Why is that?” she said.

  “I’d be careful,” he said. “Particularly in the Russian sector.”

  Then she managed to get a ride to the building where she was going to stay, a brownstone that wasn’t too far from where she had lived before. She unpacked her suitcase in the stink of what could have been dead rats, but which she was sure was something else. She sat on the edge of the single cot in her room. The light came in the window, at once luminescent and oddly gray, and she tried to reconcile the subtle effect of it (as though it were a sensation of isolation made visible) with her desire to come home.

  Berlin was now a city of women. They had been hired to clean up the bricks and to salvage what they could to rebuild. Armina went by women who sat by piles of the rubble where they chipped mortar off bricks with a mason’s hammer and then made a neat stack, just like in a brickyard. Others dragged I beams out of the mess, fifteen or so on one piece of steel, straining together, their hair in kerchiefs covered with dust, their fingers cement colored as they gripped the top of the I beam.

  The city looked like a boneyard of itself, but here you didn’t see ribs and tusks, but empty buildings without windows and roofs, just the skeleton of the city after everything else had been burned by the incendiary bombs. The houses stretched off in endless repetition, only varying in the shapes of the roofs, which suggested broken teeth. The buildings seemed to be made out of smoke that had turned into a hard substance.

  The most obvious landmarks were gone, although from time to time Armina found the remains of a store, a movie theater, a shop, a restaurant that she had known, but as she walked through a city she remembered but yet only partially she was unsure as to what was here, what was real, and what was just sentimental memories and half-baked expectation. Armina began to think of herself as being like the city, somehow reduced to a variety of rubble. The women who chipped mortar from a brick with a mason’s hammer were resolute in their almost furious attempt to put things back together.

  A pile of bricks, like a gray slag heap, was all that was left of the Inspectorate. In fact, she wasn’t even sure if this was the place, and she stood there, facing the next block over where a lattice of windows appeared in a building that had burned but not collapsed. She reached down and picked up a brick, the weight of it as familiar as old desire.

  Armina had been assigned to a section of the Berlin Police Department in the American sector, and the Inspectorate was set up in a brown-stone building at the end of a side street. The usual craters marked the places where buildings had been, and beyond them the walls of masonry and brick stood with that gray and black wall that had the pattern of a waffle, and the pattern, the empty windows in the half-burned walls, repeated itself wherever she could see between two buildings or look over the piles of bricks. Paths had been cleared here and there between the mounds of rubble, and a postman, with his sack, made his way, looking for people who lived in cellars.

  The police precinct was in a brownstone that had a few windows, although most of the frames were filled with cardboard and wood from packing crates. It had electricity, although it came from the Russian sector and was intermittent. The odor of the street was dust, soot, and the miasma of dirty socks and rotting meat that rose like a gas from the piles of brick.

  She went up the steps of the station and through the door, which opened with a creak that seemed to linger. A man sat at a desk made of three planks and two packing crates from the American army that had held mortars, the word stenciled on the wood in a sort of frank, almost innocent script. His chair was made of oak with slats at the back, and he kept it well polished. The thing glowed in the otherwise dusty room, and Armina wondered how many cigarettes the furniture polish had cost on the black market.

  Armina gave him her name and the clerk said that her boss would see her in a minute. Would she like to sit down? Herr Ritter wouldn’t be too long, although he was busy these days. There was a lot to do.

  “Who did you say?” she said.

  “Ritter,” said the man without looking up.

  She sat down on a bench that looked like it had come from the pew of a church, and as she waited she assumed, for a moment, that she hadn’t heard correctly. It was all by association, she guessed, and she was so troubled by coming back to this place that she naturally was hearing things that weren’t there, as though her feelings were so strong as to leave her in a dreamlike state, not really here, not really in Berlin before the war. She had the impulse to walk out into the ghostly street, to go back to her room, to pack her bag and to find a way to leave. Instead she sat there on the long bench, feet together, hands in her lap, shoulders square, as though by being precise in the way she sat, she could bring precision to her thoughts. The man at the desk read a report, and in the silence of the lobby she heard the sighing of the wind as a piece of cardboard dragged a little in a window frame, the papery grating starting and stopping and then beginning again.

  After the Russians had arrived, the police department had been revived, although the men who worked for it had no experience as policemen and some of them had just gotten out of jail for robbery, murder, and extortion. They guessed that the best place to hide was on the police force, which gave them an air of respectability, not to mention a sort of license to do what they wanted, particularly where the black market was concerned. It needed, as far as they were concerned, a little regulation, a sort of tax, although this was becoming more dangerous as the black market was acquiring better protection from the military government. After all, how else could occupying soldiers obtain good scotch, fresh strawberries, silk sheets, and other things that made life in Berlin a little easier, not to mention the number of antiques that could be shipped back home?

  It didn’t take long for the military government to realize it needed people with experience to run the police department, men who understood how to run an organization, and if that meant using members of the regime, even party members, they looked the other way.

  In the distance three rifles went off in an uneven salvo. Ban-ban-bang. The man at the desk said, “The Russians, I guess. They shoot any civilian caught carrying a firearm. No trial. Nothing like that. Summary. I guess that’s what it was.”

  They went back to waiting. The cardboard in a window had stains on it, and Armina tried to see shapes in them, as though they were countries on a map. Argentina? What was the shape of Argentina?

  “He’ll see you,” said the man at the desk. “One flight up.”

  Ritter sat at a desk that was polished and untouched, as shiny as a piano lid and as black. A lamp stood on the desk, the yellow circle of its light on the papers in front of Ritter. It winked out as she stood opposite him.

  “That’s the Russians for you,” said Ritter. “It’ll come back on.”

  The dim light came in from the window. Ritter was still thin and tall, but he didn’t look elegant so much as worn down, as though he were only the pattern of what he had been before, the plan, not the realization of it. He looked like a car from before the war that is still running, still showing its lines, but that sags on its springs. His clothes were large, and the bagginess made him seem as though he had shrunk. His hair was thinner, gray as dust, combed back. His eyes were alert, but he seemed less obvious in his intent, more hidden than before.

  “Armina,” he said. He held out his hand. She stared at his long fingers, his pale palms, his wrists that came out of the sleeve of a coat made from an army blanket. The sound of someone chipping away on a brick came into the room with a steady tap tap tap, then the hollow click as the brick was added to a pile.

  “I see,” he said. He dropped his hand. “Sit down.”

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Why, I have a job,” he said. “I have an organization to run.”

  “And what about the past?” she said.

  “Oh,” he said “I was never a big fish. Not really. And this is Berlin. I have papers that give me a clean bill of health. Politically speaki
ng.”

  “Really?” she said.

  “You must understand how things are,” he said. “We have a job to do.” He cleared his throat. “I am useful.”

  “And what about the clean bill of health?” she said.

  “Everything can be arranged. Why, people are desperate. Haven’t you looked around?”

  “What did you pay for your bill of health?” she said.

  “Ten pounds of butter,” he said. “And a bargain at the price. Are you going to work with us or not?”

  He picked up a list of names.

  “The military government is interested in these people. Many of them were in the city before the war. You probably even know what some of them look like.”

  He held out the sheets. The tapping as the mortar was chipped off a brick came into the room.

  “The black market meets in a lot of places, but behind the Reichstag in the morning is a good place to begin. I’ll bet you could find some of these men there.”

  He held out the papers.

  She stood up straight up, if only because her dismay left her with the impulse to slump down, to lean against the wall, and to slide to the bottom. Her arm rose, not to take the papers, but to slap him, and for an instant she imagined the satisfying sound, the smack of her open hand against his cheek, the jerking of his head, the look in his eyes. She leaned closer, over the desk, directly opposite him. He didn’t blink, since he seemed too tired to do that.

  “Are you going to do the right thing?” he said.

  “Who are you to talk about the right thing?” she said.

  “Forget about me,” he said. “What about you? Are you going to run away? Nothing is clean the way you want it. Nothing. So, what are you going to do?”

  She sat down, opposite him. In the street a tired woman chipped away at the mortar on a brick.

  “Don’t you have some unfinished business here?” said Ritter. “Why else would you come back?”

  The room shimmered, as though heat were rising from the floor. She thought of those nights when she had been alone, thinking of the islands in the Pacific, and when she had craved something to make her feel that she could sleep, that allowed her to go on, to get up, to stop flinching whenever she thought of herself. And now it had come to this. She stood up and took the papers.

  “All right,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “The light will go back on soon.”

  He stood up.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said.

  She went on staring at him.

  “Oh,” he said. “You’ll get over all of that.”

  DOWNSTAIRS, SHE SAT on the steps of the building and looked at the names on the list. She supposed she would find what she needed in the black market, since information could be bought and sold as well as strawberries or champagne, but it wasn’t just the men on the list she wanted to find, but a detail that suggested certainty. If nothing else she was left with a desire for clarity, or a way of confronting those obligations she had felt so keenly at three in the morning when she considered those women in the park, how they had been found, the delicacy of their fingers in the leaves, the brutality of those marks.

  It was difficult for her to believe some of the rumors about the black market, but she guessed that the stories contained an element of truth, at least as far as the spirit of them was concerned. For instance, there was the story of a wounded veteran who stood on the street with his crutches, and when a girl came by, he asked her if she would deliver a letter for him. He seemed pale and sick and he said he was too tired and too uncomfortable to do it himself, and when she agreed, he said, “There’s a good girl.” But as she walked the few blocks to the apartment where the letter was supposed to be delivered, she fingered the envelope. Even children were suspicious, particularly young women, and as she walked along, she finally got over her uneasiness about opening someone else’s mail. It said, in formal script, in the kind of hand that a schoolmaster before the war might have used, “Here’s the butter I owe you.”

  In the morning the sellers arrived with the last of their possessions, silk nightgowns, an antique chair, an umbrella, a leather briefcase, a silver picture frame (from which the photograph of a marriage had been removed), a man’s suit, a pair of shoes that were sold for some potatoes. One man had a suitcase of his wife’s clothes, and he took them out and displayed them, evening gowns, stockings, all of the things that his obviously dead wife had worn. He stood with a blank face, just hoping for a good price from a farmer whose wife wanted some clothes. Even fresh flowers could be had, since when they were left at a hospital by a relative who had come to visit a patient, a nurse brought them here before they had wilted. And one of the most sought-after items was powder, since women had long since been unable to bath, and instead they dusted themselves in the morning. There were rumors, too, of cannibalism, stories of the disappearance of children that contained the same truth as the story of the butter, not so much fact, although that was possible, but the suggestion of just how desperate people were.

  At night, by the light of a kerosene lantern, Armina looked at a blank sheet of paper—she wanted to write to Rainer, but what could she say or how could she describe the atmosphere of desperation, the look in the eyes of the man who waited with his wife’s clothes? And worse, was she beginning to have that same blank expression? Did she have it because she had agreed to go back to work? Shouldn’t she have gone home, if there was a place she could call home? She put the paper aside and got into her single bed and pulled up the blanket. The shadows of her head and hands, which slid across the walls with such delicacy as she reached out to turn off the lantern, reminded her of just how alone she really was and how the sense of it entered her awareness with the same delicacy as the shadows that moved across the walls. Then she was left in the dark.

  The first thing was to find water. As Felix searched for it, his gray coat acted as a camouflage as he walked between gray piles of brick that had an almost natural appearance, as though this were a desert of undulating hills that had been pushed up by some geological force. If he stood still, no one could see him. This was important, if only because he wanted not to be seen by the Russians, who were so unpredictable, sometimes friendly, sometimes angry, always looking for wristwatches. They used a toilet to wash potatoes, and when they flushed it and the potatoes disappeared, they’d shoot up everyone in the house. Sometimes, when he climbed over a mound of bricks, the Russians’ brown-green uniforms were in the distance. At least he didn’t want to be seen by them now, although later, when the still was running, he guessed they’d find him. He was hungry, getting thinner, more tired with each passing day.

  Felix had found the pipe at the rear of a building in what had been the kitchen. He turned the tap and the water came out, a silvery ribbon that ran into what was left of the sink. He quickly turned it off, as though he was afraid that someone would hear the sound and try to take the water away. The kitchen was concealed from the plain of bricks and dust, although Felix guessed the smell might give him away. They’d have to come here, though, since he didn’t want to have to carry the stuff very far, just as he thought that the best thing would be for the Russians to bring their own bottles.

  He needed a cooker and a screw. In the basement of what had been a hotel he found a copper pot with a lid that had a hole in it, and he dragged it across town, not looking one way or another, as though an obvious purpose might protect him. The pot had been used to make stock, and when he had first dragged it over the piles of brick, he thought the thing looked like a tub out of a cartoon in which missionaries were cooked by cannibals. The lid would have to be soldered, and he knew that he would have to trade on the black market for that. The copper tube had come from a ball bearing factory, and before Felix had made it into a screw, it had been used to convey oil from a tank to the milling machines used to fabricate the rings that held the bearings. It had been hard to get it clean, and Felix guessed that the first couple of batches might taste a little fu
nny because of the milling oil, but from what he had heard the Russians weren’t too particular.

  Felix was thirty-one years old, although he looked much younger. He still walked with a limp, and he dragged his leg behind him, but now he was less concerned about what had caused him so much grief, his gimpy leg, the hump in his back: they had been just enough to keep him out of the army until the last futile defenses had been organized. Then he had found a place to hide, although he had come out to see others who had been hung, with the signs pinned to their clothes that said I was a coward. He had experienced the bombing of the city with an intensity that was too large to be good or bad, something that left him almost relieved, as though the explosions, the fire, the endless reverberation were all evidence of some truth that Felix believed but yet couldn’t really articulate. He liked the smell of an exploding bomb. It was proof that no one cared what he had done before the war.

  He needed help, too, and he found Frieda as she was looking for something to eat in the Tiergarten. She was so thin as to look like the frame of an umbrella, her hair short as it grew in after being shaved to get rid of the lice. It gave her a goofy, childlike quality, which was enhanced by her thinness. She lived underground in a cellar with her grandparents, and although Felix had never been inside, he sensed them there in the darkness, blinking at the light behind him. Felix’s gray coat made him appear like a vampire who had fallen on bad times, but Frieda had looked him over and thought, Well, at least he’s cunning.

  Felix didn’t know how to run the still himself, but he had found a man who had worked as a distiller in the 1930s and during the war, too, and who said that he could keep Felix’s apparatus producing something that, while rank, would still be able to do the job. Felix imagined this stuff as coming out of the copper screw one drip at a time, just like coins into his hand.

  The distiller’s name was Manfred. He was a man in his sixties, and hadn’t served on the eastern front or any other front, since being a distiller was considered a critical job, and the breweries and the distilleries had been running right up to a few months before. Manfred looked like he had been made out of pipes, as though he were part of a species of robots constructed out of junk, related to one another. Frieda, for instance, could have been his daughter.