Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  The line went quiet, so quiet Wilderness wondered if they’d been cut off.

  Then Burne-Jones said, “That’s it then. It’s over. Nobody’s kidding anybody any more. As you so aptly put it, no more free lunch.”

  §131

  “What did he mean by ‘over’?” Frank asked.

  “Quadripartite rule of Berlin is over.”

  “Quadri what?”

  “Four sectors, four military governments trying to act as one. That’s over.”

  “Oh is that all? Well . . . fukkit . . . I thought you meant the peace was over.”

  “It is.”

  “I don’t hear any tanks rolling.”

  “Frank . . . try rolling with this. The Russians have given up. The temperature has changed . . . it may not be a raging hot war . . . but it might be, to paraphrase Harry Truman, a bollock-freezing cold one.”

  “And that affects business how exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on what the Russians do next. They’ve got us surrounded after all.”

  “You think they’d cut us off?”

  Spud and Pie Face had sat silent throughout, as had Eddie—but it was Eddie’s turn.

  “They can cut us off Frank, and they will.”

  “Nah . . . they wouldn’t dare . . .”

  But Wilderness was nodding.

  “Aw shit, kid . . . just when life was getting so fucking sweet.”

  “Geld schmeckt süß,” said Eddie.

  “Yeah, whatever,” said Frank.

  §132

  On April 1 Russian troops stopped every American train on the Frankfurt–Berlin line at Marienborn on the Eastern Zone border, citing “technical problems” and introducing new “temporary regulations.” Despite the date it was not a joke.

  On April 2 General Clay ordered USAF C-47s to begin airlifting supplies into Tempelhof. He wasn’t joking either.

  That evening the Schiebers gathered at Paradies Verlassen.

  Spud was last to arrive. He put a plain, off-white packet in front of them, like a cardsharp letting the punters see the full deck before he shuffled.

  “Wossat?” Pie Face asked.

  Spud tipped out two cigarettes.

  “Try one.”

  Pie Face stuck one in his mouth and lit up. Frank picked one up with a muttered, “Why not? First in two years.”

  Spud was poised and smiling now.

  Pie Face exploded, red-faced and coughing.

  “Fuck me! What is this?”

  Frank coughed once and stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “Jesus H. Christ!”

  Spud said, “They’re called Droogs, the tobacco’s Bulgarian, and they’re everywhere.”

  Pie Face took another drag.

  “I suppose you could get used to ’em but . . .”

  “But it tastes like dried shit?” Wilderness said.

  “Yeah. It does. Dried dog shit to be exact. Where d’you say you got ’em, Spud?”

  “Tiergarten, where else?”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-four reichsmarks a pack. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “The bloke selling ’em will tell you the price in marks but only takes dollars.”

  Wilderness admired the way Spud had strung this out.

  “Any chance you recognised the bloke?”

  “Dunno his name, but he was one of Yuri’s ‘Silents.’”

  Frank said, “So the bastard’s undercutting us? In our own briar patch?”

  “Hardly the point, is it?” Wilderness replied.

  “OK Corporal Smart-ass, what would be the point?”

  “The point is . . . he’s taking only dollars . . . but he’s paying us in reichsmarks.”

  “So,” Frank mused. “He’s building up a stash for something.”

  “I’d guess he has no intention of getting stuck with any reichsmarks when the big day dawns—our marks or their marks.”

  “Weeeell . . . fuckim.”

  “I think we need a word with Major Myshkin.”

  They thinned out at the cabaret—little of it was to the taste of Spud or Pie Face. (“Wot’s the point of strippers who never get their bleedin’ togs off?”)

  “What’s the plan kid?”

  “What Spud said just confirms what I’ve been thinking. We need to change tack.”

  “I been thinking the same.”

  “Me too,” said Eddie.

  “Now . . .” Frank went on. “I’ve said all along that we should be in commodities. I was right, and that was then. But right now, I’d say we need to be in cash.”

  “Why?”

  Eddie answered, “It’s perfectly clear to me, Joe. Currency reform’s definite. It’s going to happen. It changes the game. They mean to control inflation, get rid of rationing, get rid of the black market—above all else, get rid of the black market. What it all adds up to is an end to barter of any kind. The economy normalises . . . nothing is scarce . . . nothing is hooky . . . and those of us who take easy pickings off it all are out of business.”

  It had sounded to Wilderness like the opening of one of Eddie’s not infrequent “Workers’ Educational” lectures. The result of reading Penguin books and the Manchester Guardian.

  “Ed’s right,” Frank said. “We’re better off out of goods and into cash. Means we take a loss at conversion, but we’ll ride it out.”

  Wilderness made them pause. Sat silent while Frank got more drinks in.

  “Spit it out, kid. I feel like we’ve just suggested skinning your grandmother and tanning her hide.”

  “No,” said Wilderness. “It’s not going to happen that way.”

  “Sez you. Currency reform’s just a matter of time. Goddammit, we flew the bills in by the million as long ago as January.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence. Everything happens for a reason. Yesterday, the Russians cut us off . . . today they flood the West with cheap, dodgy fags.”

  “Yeah . . . and tomorrow they’ll plug us back in. It’s just a stunt.”

  “No it’s not. It’s a teaser. It’s a foretaste of what they’ll really do come reform. They’ll turn this place into a fortress. West Berliners will get their deutschmarks . . . they’ll revel in having real money for a day or two . . . the shops will fill up with all the stuff that’s been hoarded for months till the price was right . . . then the gates of hell will slam shut again . . . West Berlin will become an island in a Soviet Sea and stuff will become as scarce as it was in 1945. So . . . I say we stay in goods.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Ed, pass the bottle. The kid is frying my brain.”

  Eddie, pushed the bottle towards Frank, looking at Wilderness.

  “So, what do we do?”

  “First, we stop taking reichsmarks altogether.”

  “That cuts our market.”

  “And we spend what we have. Start offloading reichsmarks now. Buy anything and everything you think we can sell. And when we sell we take only dollars. Pay over the odds if it gets rid of reichsmarks. Let’s have nothing left to convert when conversion comes . . . because we’re going to be in no position to convert . . . that’s when all the questions will be asked and we’ll find ourselves nicked. From now on we’re a dollar economy.”

  “Just like Yuri, huh kid?”

  “As I said, we need to talk to Major Myshkin.”

  §133

  “Bastards. Fokkin’ bastards!”

  “Yuri, you’re raking in every dollar West Berlin has with your crap fag racket. You don’t want to get stuck with worthless currency, and nor do we. From now on it’s dollars. You pay us in dollars.”

  “Or what?”

  “It’s not a threat. It’s just terms of business. We supply you with very good stuff. For your dollars you get Pall Mall and Lucky Strike. For their dollars West Berlin gets Droogs. Think about it. We’re not a flea market . . . Fortnum & Mason.”

  Yuri was sitting on a case of Jack Daniel’s. The Eishaus was stacked with booty. T
hey’d brought the whiskey in by padding their jerry cans. Forty-eight bottles a trip—trips beyond counting.

  Frank grinned.

  “Look under your own ass, Yuri. You’re sitting on twelve bottles of the best.”

  Yuri didn’t look as angry as he sounded, and it seemed to Wilderness to be merely tactical to be angry with them.

  “OK, bastards. But there is a scratchy-my-back here.”

  “What kind of scratchy your back?”

  “Penicillin.”

  “Penicillin?”

  “Sure . . . we got clap running riot in Red Army. Everybody pissing razor blades. Hadn’t you heard?”

  They’d never dealt in drugs or medicines of any kind.

  Wilderness turned to Frank.

  “Can we get penicillin?”

  “I guess so. Turns out we’re stockpiling everything against the day these guys cut off the West . . . you and the top brass seem to think alike on that score . . . so it stands to reason we’re stockpiling Band-Aids and aspirin . . . and probably penicillin.”

  “Good good.”

  “And you guys do mean to cut us off don’t you, Yuri?”

  “Da, da . . . but the English have a phrase for it.”

  “They do?”

  “Business as usual.”

  §134

  Driving back Wilderness said, “You’d better act as banker from now on.”

  “What?”

  “I need to rake in every reichsmark we have. It’ll all be easier if you take everything, spend it, stockpile . . . and collect the dollars off Yuri.”

  “Jeez . . . you think our guys will go for that?”

  “They’ll do what I tell ’em. Besides, the pickings will be too good to resist.”

  “Still thinking big, huh?”

  “Is there any point in thinking small?”

  “How long do you think this Russian stunt will last?”

  “Dunno. But maybe you’re right, maybe it’s a stunt—I prefer to call it a dummy run. Could last a week, could last a month. They’re testing us. But when currency reform comes in it’ll be real.”

  §135

  The little blockade fizzled out in ten days.

  Two months later, on June 18, the deutschmark was introduced by the Western zones of Germany. It was to be valid in all the sectors of Berlin, but the Russians refused to accept its validity. Something resembling panic preceded this, as Berliners went on a forty-eight hour spending spree—paid every bill, bought any object to unload the potentially worthless reichsmark. By then, Frank had divested the Schiebers of most of their reichsmarks, and had sheds out at Tempelhof filled to the rafters with what he called “the solid stuff,” as opposed to “the folding stuff.”

  On June 24 the Russians blockaded Berlin for real. No stunt. No dummy run. Road and rail links to the Western sectors closed and only the air lanes remained open.

  On June 26 the airlift began. The British and the Americans flew in everything. From coal to candy. RAF Yorks and USAF Dakotas buzzed by Russian fighters in the biggest game of “chicken” since the end of the war.

  The sound of planes landing and taking off replaced the sound of gunfire as the ambient noise beneath Berlin skies, and the black market rose from the dead and exploded like an atomic bomb.

  §136

  Nell had none of this and dutifully accepted her free allocation of deutschmarks and exchanged her reichsmarks at the set rate. It exasperated Wilderness. He had grown accustomed to her po-face, it was part and parcel of her unshakable virtue, but he could not understand the lack of self-interest.

  “Gypping yourself is just stupid.”

  Nell did not understand the word.

  “Gyp . . . from Gyppo . . . you know, Gypsy? Swindling yourself.”

  “How quaint. Does English use other races as derogatory verbs?”

  “Well . . . yeah . . . Jew means much the same thing.”

  Nell was appalled.

  “So . . . I Gyp and Jew myself. So fucking what?”

  He’d never heard her swear in English before.

  The same day, round about seven in the evening he got home to find a meal prepared from civilian rations. Meagre and unsustaining, but corresponding roughly to what Berliners now had to live off. Less than they had before the blockade. All the canned food Wilderness had brought her was piled up on the dresser.

  “From now on,” she said. “We live like Berliners. We eat like Berliners. We are Berliners.”

  “Every Berliner buys hooky stuff on the black market. You don’t eat hooky food and buy hooky clobber, you’re not a Berliner. Everybody has a pajok. Everybody!”

  The word hit home. It was tempting to ask her what she’d do if Yuri turned up with a pajok of Russian goodies off-ration, but he didn’t.

  Nell said, “Very well. You may bring me eggs.”

  So po-faced, so patrician, even as her virtue admitted a vice.

  “Eggs? Bleedin’ eggs, is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  That night as she slept and he didn’t, he could smell the scent he had given her—L’Aimant by Coty. When she stopped wearing that he’d believe her.

  In the morning he woke to find thin ersatz coffee, Blumenkaffee, a confection of roast acorns and who-knows-what, bubbling gently on the hob.

  He tipped it away and made Java.

  §137

  It was late July. Almost a month into the new game with the new Russian rules. Demand was high. They could have sold anything and everything twice over in the West, and still the demand from the East to be satisfied. The taps ran dry, the coal ran out and the electricity came and went like the man in the weather house. Still, they made money.

  It was hard not to feel complacent.

  Drinking alone was a strange pleasure. Wilderness hardly ever chose it—it arose if others were late and if no one in Paradies pinged him through the pneumatic tubes. That, after all, is what they were there for, and more often than not used not person to group or group to group but solitary individual to solitary individual. He had come to think of it as civilised. When the social code, the sexual code, dwindled to a tongue-tied mess, this was clear and direct. He’d even heard of men receiving notes as simple as “Möchten Sie ficken?” Fancy a fuck?

  He heard a cylinder land and reached up for it.

  Still creaming it, kid? You have to admit your Uncle Joe is good for business. The business of the USSR is business . . . ah. No that was some other guy, some other country. LT.

  The club was half-empty, he could see clearly to Major Tosca’s table, her face buried in a book. She must have known he’d got the message by now, but didn’t so much as glance back, so he concluded she’d said what she had to say. If she wanted him to come over, she’d look up, smile, blow him a phony kiss. She didn’t.

  Frank arrived. He was getting fatter. Sweating through that beautifully tailored uniform in the summer heat. Perhaps Frank’s pleasure was strictly food and drink. After that first girl he’d bought with soap, there’d never been so much as a mention of a woman, and if you couldn’t get picked up in Paradies, you couldn’t get picked up anywhere. He made tough-guy, “we’re all men of the world,” almost backslapping crude jokes about Wilderness and Breakheart, as he insisted on calling Nell—as though somehow the sexuality, the scent of their relationship had spread to him and those around him, like the undisguisable, acrid smell of a lubricated condom—but that stance just masked his celibacy. Wilderness figured Frank was one for hookers. Since everything was a commodity to Frank, he probably preferred to buy his women. It was neat and business-like. He would enjoy haggling. And no messy emotions to contend with. Eddie? Eddie was a different case. Women would just clutter up his ordered life. There were times Wilderness thought that he and Frank might well be the worst things that had ever happened to Eddie. They’d taken his little fiddle and . . . and Eddie had been quite happy with the scale on which he’d fiddled.

  Frank summoned a waiter. Beer and wurst. Pile on the pounds.


  “You’re not eating?”

  “Too hot to eat.”

  “What’s that you’re drinking?”

  “White wine. An Orvieto from Italy.”

  “Where in Italy?”

  “I thought you were an Italian-American?”

  “Every American’s a hyphenated American. Don’t mean diddly. So happens Spoleto used to be Spoletowski or some such gobbledygook. Who gives a fuck? I’m a damn Yankee. Let me taste.”

  “Pity. I was about to tell you this was made only twenty-five miles from Spoleto.”

  “Showing off your Reader’s Digest Book of Facts again, eh kid?”

  “Nah. I’m educated I am.”

  Wilderness pushed the glass across the table. Frank sipped at it and pulled face.

  “How can you drink this piss? Tinted water. Goes to show . . . if they don’t make it in Milwaukee.”

  “Ah . . . but you’re not a social climber, Frank.”

  Frank missed or ignored the irony, just as Eddie sauntered in. A smile upon his face, glee withheld, a surprise in the offing.

  Frank got the waiter’s attention and held up two fingers, doubling his beer order.

  “What’s got you?” Wilderness said.

  “What day is it today?”

  “I dunno, twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth.”

  “No . . . today is the day we all enter cloud cuckoo land . . . the dwarves and unicorns have finally landed.”

  He held up a 5RM note. Something white stuck to it. No bigger than a postage stamp.

  “This is the new Russki Mark. Новая валюта. Novaya Valyuta.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Issued today. Already got a nickname . . . Tapetenmark.”

  Through his first mouthful of bread and wurst, Frank said, “What?”

  “Wallpaper, Frank.”

  Eddie was grinning like a Cheshire cat as the punchline hove in sight. He waved the note in front of them—a mother’s hankie shaken in the direction of a departing train and child. The white sticker fell off and floated down onto the table.