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 chalk-marked 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 over-crowded rooms on the second floor. Contrary to Conway’s expectation, the doctor was out. He was only attending to a neighbour, however, and the older of the two daughters was sent to fetch him, leaving Russell to exchange small talk with his wife and their younger daughter Ruth. Frau Wiesner, a small woman with tied-back blonde hair and tired grey eyes, looked anything but Jewish, while 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 always carry the fragebogen which testified to her aryan descent. 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 ageing fast. He ran a hand through his thinning hair, and got straight down to business – as Conway had said, he hoped to send 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’ve 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, and perhaps I thought… 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 have to vary a bit, though. 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 per cent. It was a generous offer, but Russell couldn’t accept 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.
Always 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 needed to get home 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 puffs of yellow gas in the cold evening air. It was one of those Berlin days when the weather seemed uncertain what to do, one minute veering towards a western warmth, the next favouring an eastern chill.
As he turned into his street Russell 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, and 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 dialled the number of the house in Grünewald, then 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 each other the usual answers, all with that faint awkwardness which they never seemed able to shake. The family had just got back from Hanover, and when Paul came on he was full of the wonders of the autobahn and his stepfather’s new Horch. As far as Saturday was concerned, his usual school lessons had been replaced by Jungvolk meetings, and these ran on 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 as well.’
They chatted for another couple of minutes, before Ilse’s voice in the background decreed that time was up. Feeling the usual mixture of elation and frustration, Russell started up the stairs.
He was waylaid on the third floor landing by the other resident journalist, 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 hot – like the other residents he took advantage of skat night 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. 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 added quickly, ‘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 was visibly 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 full back 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, opening the door to leave. His room at the top of the building was sweltering, but mercifully smoke-free. Guessing that the skat game still had a couple of hours to run, he threw one window wide open 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 lingering odour of McKinley’s pipe smoke suggested a lengthy occupation earlier that evening. There was still a crack of 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.
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.
The next day was Wednesday, and he made the long trek out to Friedrichshain for his first session 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 spoilt daughters of suburban Grünewald and Wilmersdorf whom Russell had taught in the past.
On Thursday, though, both girls looked as though they’d seen a ghost, and Russell wondered whether they’d had bad news about their brother in 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.
‘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 three stamps in an envelope on top of the latest Stanley Gibbons catalogue from England. Russell didn’t bother to check the listings.
When he got back to Neuenburgerstrasse a telegram had arrived from his London agent, pointing out the need for exclusive photographs with his projected piece on Hitler’s new Chancellery. After a quick lunch 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 two hundred 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.
Frau Heidegger was waiting for him – or anyone – in the lobby. Her husband had been killed in the last war – ‘You might have been the one who shot him,’ as she frequently told Russell – and his brother had just been round to see her, full of frightening information about the next one. She had assumed it would take place at some distance from her door, but this illusion had just been cruelly shattered. ‘Cities will be bombed flat,’ her brother-in-law had told her. ‘Flat as ironing boards.’
Russell told her that, yes, English or French or Russian bombers could now reach Berlin, but that most of them would be shot down if they tried, because air defences were improving all the time. She didn’t look convinced, but then neither was he. How many Europeans, he wondered, had any idea what kind of war they were headed for?
Friday morning was sunny and cold. After a late breakfast of rolls and coffee at a local café, Russell walked west along the Landwehrkanal. He wasn’t due to meet Effi for a couple of hours, so he took his time, stopping to read his morning paper on a bench near the double-decker bridges which carried the U-bahn and Reichsbahn lines over the torpid brown water. Coal-laden barges chugged by, leaving thin trails of oil in their wake.
He walked along the footpath for another kilometre or so, leaving the canal where it passed under Potsdamerstrasse. Almost exactly twenty years earlier, the bodies of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been fished out of the waters close to this spot, and the empty site on the other side of the road had been home to a synagogue until the previous November. Rosa, of course, had been everything the Nazis despised – a Jew, a communist, a woman who refused to stay home and rear children. Russell was surprised that no official celebration had been decreed for the anniversary of her death.
Cutting through side streets, he eventually reached the domed U-bahn station at Nollerndorfplatz, and started walking up Kleiststrasse towards the distant spires of the Kaiser Memorial church.
As the U-bahn tracks beside him slid slowly underground, the shops grew progressively larger and richer, the awnings of the pavement cafés more decorative. Despite the cold, most of the outside seats were occupied; men and women sat in their overcoats, or tightly wrapped in large blankets, chewing their cream cakes and sipping at their steaming coffees.
Both sidewalks and road were crowded now. Shoppers
streamed in and out of the Ka-De-We department store on Wittenbergplatz; cars and trams ran bumper to bumper along the narrower Tauenzienstrasse, jostling each other round the neo-Gothic pile of the Memorial Church, with its distressingly secular mosaics celebrating the highly dubious glories of past German emperors. Walking past it, and thinking about his conversation with Frau Heidegger, Russell had a sudden vision of jagged spires looming out of a broken roof, a future Berlin pre-figured in his memories of northern France.
He started up the busy Kurfürstendamm, or the Ku’damm, as everyone called it. The Uhlandeck Café, where he was due to meet Effi, was a ten minute stroll away, and he still had half an hour to spare. An African parrot in a pet shop caught his attention – it was the sort of birthday present Effi would love, but he doubted her ability to look after it properly. For one thing she was away too often; for another, she was Effi.
A woman in a fur coat emerged from the shop with two pedigree schnausers in tow. Both had enamel swastikas fastened to their collars, and Russell wondered whether they had pictures of the Führer pinned up inside their kennels. Would that be considered a sign of respect, or the lack of it? Political etiquette in the Third Reich was something of a minefield.
He passed the ‘aryanised’ Grunfeld factory, and the site of another destroyed synagogue. A photographic album of such sites could, he thought, be a best-seller in Nazi Germany. Judenfrei: the photographic record. Page after page of burnt synagogues, followed by ‘then and now’ pictures of aryanised firms. A foreword by the Führer, which would probably turn out to be longer than the book. The lucky author would probably get invitations to Goering’s hunting weekends and Streicher’s whipping orgies.
Zoo Station Page 4
