‘He’s English,’ Russell said. ‘As am I.’ He showed the man his Ministry of Propaganda accreditation.
‘He looks Jewish,’ the man said, still staring at Albert, who was now staring back. Why don’t you just take out your circumcised prick and wave it at him, Russell thought sourly. ‘He may be Jewish for all I know,’ Russell told the man, ‘but there’s no law against serving English Jews.’
‘There isn’t?’
‘No, there isn’t.’
The man just stared at him.
‘Do you need to hear it from a policeman?’
‘Not if you say so.’ He gave Albert one final glare and concentrated on pouring out the coffee.
God help us, Russell thought. He could understand Albert’s reaction, no matter how counter-productive it was. But this man – what was he so outraged about? There were no SS men lounging at his tables, no ordinary citizens on the brink of racial apoplexy. Why did he care so much that a Jew was sitting at one of his rusty tables? Did he really think Jewish germs would rub off on his cups and saucers?
The coffee was slurped in the saucers, but it didn’t seem worth complaining. He carried them back to the table, where Albert was now slouched in his chair, legs splayed out in defiance. Russell resisted the temptation to say ‘sit up in your chair’ and handed him a mohrenkopf. His eyes lit up.
They concentrated on eating for a few minutes.
‘Do you really think there’s any chance we’ll get visas?’ Albert asked eventually, allowing the merest hint of hope to mar his cynicism.
‘Yes,’ Russell said, more convincingly than he felt. ‘It may take a while, but why not? The Nazis don’t want you, so why shouldn’t they let you go?’
‘Because they’re even more interested in hurting us?’
Russell considered that. It had, unfortunately, the ring of truth. ‘The way I see it,’ he said, ‘you don’t have many options. You can fight back and most likely end up in a camp. Or dead. Or you can try and work their system.’
Albert gave him a pitying look. ‘There are half a million of us,’ he said. ‘At the current rate it’ll take seven years for us all to get visas.’
Russell had no answer.
‘And how long before we’re at war?’ Albert persisted.
‘Who knows…’
‘A year at most. And that’ll put a stop to emigration. What do you think they’ll do with us then? They won’t let us work for a living now, and that won’t change. They’ll either leave us to starve or put us in work camps – slave labour. Some of my friends think they’ll just kill us. And they may be right. Who’s going to stop them?’
He could add Albert to the list of people he’d under-estimated, Russell thought.
‘My father’s Iron Cross was First Class,’ Albert said. ‘Unlike our beloved Führer’s.’
Russell stared out at the winter trees, and the roof of the old hospital rising above them to the south. ‘If you’re right – if your friends are right – then all the more reason not to jeopardise your chances – your family’s chances – of getting out.’
‘I know that,’ Albert said. ‘But what about the others? One family’s success is another family’s failure.’
Russell had no answer to that either.
‘But thanks for the coffee and cake,’ Albert said.
• • •
Lying in bed unable to sleep, Russell thought about Papa Wiesner’s Iron Cross First Class. It wasn’t a medal given to many – he must have done something pretty special. He supposed he should have realised that a Jew of Wiesner’s age would have fought in the war, but it hadn’t occurred to him. Goebbels’ propaganda was obviously working.
He wondered which front Wiesner had served on. He wondered, as he often did with Germans of his own age, whether they’d been facing him across those hundred yards of churned-up meadow near Merville. He sometimes wondered whether Frau Heidegger’s repeated accusation that he might have shot her husband was simply her way of warding off the possibility that he really had.
He had once thought that he was over the war, that time and circumstance had turned the horror into anger, the anger into politics and the politics into cynicism, leaving only the abiding belief that people in authority tended, by and large, to be incompetent, uncaring liars. The war, by this accounting, had been the latest demonstration of a depressingly eternal truth. Nothing more.
He’d been fooling himself. All those who’d been in that particular place at that particular time had been indelibly marked by the experience, and he was no exception. You never shook it off completely – whatever it was it had left you with, whether nerves in tatters, an endless rage or a joy-sapping cynicism. And the memories never seemed to fade. That sudden waft of decomposing flesh, the rats’ eyes reflected in the shell-burst, the sight of one’s own rotting feet. The unnerving beauty of a flare cracking the night sky open. Splashed with someone else’s brain. Slapped in the face by death.
Jimmy Sewell his name was. After helping carry what was left of him back to the medical station, Russell had somehow ended up with the letter he had just written to his girlfriend. Things were looking up, Sewell had told her, now that the Yanks were arriving in force. It had been late June or early July, 1918. One of a string of sunny days in northern France.
He and Razor Wilkinson had hitched a ride to Hazebrouck that evening, and got pissed out of their minds in a dingy back street bar. The more he drank, the more his brain-spattered face seemed to itch, and he had ended up wading into the River Lys and frantically trying to wash himself clean. Razor had stood on the bank laughing at him, until he realised that Russell was crying, and then he’d started crying too.
Twenty-one years ago, but Russell could still feel the current tugging at his legs. He levered himself out of bed and went to the window. Berlin was sleeping, but he could imagine Albert Wiesner lying in bed on his back, hands clenched around the blankets, staring angrily at the ceiling.
With Paul off on his Jungvolk adventure weekend, Russell and Effi spent most of Saturday morning in bed. Russell slipped on some clothes to bring back pastries and coffee from the shop around the corner, and slipped them off again when making love seemed more urgent than eating. Half an hour later Effi re-warmed the coffee on her tiny stove, and brought it back to the bedroom.
‘Tell me about the film part,’ Russell said, once they were propped up against the headboard. Effi had told him about the offer the night before, but had been too tired to go into details.
‘They start shooting on the thirteenth,’ she said. ‘Two weeks on Monday. Marianne Immel had the part, but she’s sick – pregnant, probably, though no one’s said so. They want me to audition on Tuesday morning, but I’ll have to be pretty bad to miss out – they won’t have time to find anyone else.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘Mother. And that’s me. It’s a big part.’
‘Can I see the script?’
‘Of course, but let me tell you the story first.’ She licked a pastry crumb from her upper lip and pushed her hair back behind her ears. ‘I am Gerta,’ she said. ‘I have a job in a factory, an important administrative job. I almost run the place for the owner. I like my work and I’m good at it.’
‘But only a woman,’ Russell murmured.
‘Indeed. My husband Hans has a good job on the railways. And needless to say he’s active in the SA, very active in fact. Hans earns more than enough money to support the family – we have two children by the way, a sixteen year-old girl and eleven year-old boy – and he rather thinks that I should give up work and look after them. But he’s too kind-hearted to insist, and I keep on working.’
‘I sense tragedy in the offing.’
‘Ah, I should add that my boss fancies me no end. I don’t fancy him – he looks decidedly Jewish by the way – but Hans is always away on Party business – you know, organizing parades, running youth camps and generally saving the nation – and the boss is kind enough and smooth enough to be good compa
ny, so I flirt with him a little and let him buy me pastries. Like you, in fact,’ she added, looking at Russell.
‘Do you flaunt your beautiful breasts at him?’ Russell asked.
‘Certainly not,’ she said, pulling her nightdress closed. ‘Now concentrate.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘One day she and the boss go to visit a factory he’s thinking of buying, and on the way back they decide to stop off at a guesthouse with a famous view. On the way down the mountain his car gets a puncture, and she’s late home. Meanwhile, son and daughter have arrived home from school, and can’t get in. They wait for a while, but it’s raining – buckets of the stuff – and son already has a cold. Daughter notices that one of the upstairs windows is ajar, and decides to climb up and in.’
‘Only she doesn’t make it.’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Dead or just paralysed?’
‘Oh, dead. Though I suppose having her in a wheelchair would provide a constant reminder of my guilt. Which is, of course, enormous. I give up my job, despite the pleas of my boss. But the guilt is still too much, so I try and kill myself. And guess who saves me?’
‘Son?’
‘Exactly. He comes home with a couple of Jungvolk buddies to find me head down on the kitchen table with a empty bottle of pills. They rush me to the hospital on the cart they’ve been using to collect old clothes for Winter Relief.’
‘And when you come round you realize that you can only atone for daughter’s death by becoming the perfect stay-at-home mother.’
‘Hans comes to collect me, takes me home, and tells me he can’t bear me being so unhappy and that I can go back to work if I want to. Whereupon I give the speech of my life, castigating him for letting me have my own way in the past, and saying that all I really want to be is a wife and mother. He weeps with joy. In fact we both do. The end.’
‘It does bring a tear to the eye,’ Russell said. ‘Is it going to make you famous?’
‘Shouldn’t think so. But the money’s good, and it will involve some acting.’
‘But no breast-flaunting.’
‘I only do that for you,’ she said, pulling the nightdress open.
• • •
After he’d walked Effi to the theatre for the Barbarossa matinee, Russell ate a snack lunch at the Zoo Station buffet, climbed up to the elevated platforms and sat watching the trains for a while. It was something he and Paul did on occasion, marvelling at the long lines of carriages snaking in across the bridge from Cologne or Paris or the wonderfully-named Hook of Holland. Today, though, he waited in vain for a continental express. There were only the neat little electric trains of the Stadtbahn, fussing in and out of the local platforms.
He walked round the northern wall of the Zoo and, for want of something better to do, headed home along the Landwehrkanal. It was a long time since he’d spent a Saturday afternoon in Berlin alone, and he felt unexpectedly disoriented by the experience. To make matters worse it was the sort of winter day he hated: grey, damp and almost insultingly warm, so that the canal smelled even worse than usual.
When he reached home Frau Heidegger was lying in wait. Schacht’s long-expected dismissal as President of the Reichsbank had been all over the front pages that morning, and she was worried about how this might affect share prices. ‘My Jurgen’s family gave me some Farben shares after the war,’ she explained, after press-ganging him in for coffee. ‘Just a few, you understand, but I always thought they might come in handy in my old age.’
Russell reassured her that Schacht’s dismissal was unlikely to have any lasting affect. Unlike the coming war, he added to himself. Or her coffee.
‘The Führer’s angry with the Czechs,’ she said from the kitchen, as if following his thoughts.
‘What about?’ Russell asked.
‘Does it matter?’ she asked, coming in with the familiar pot.
‘No,’ he agreed. He was often surprised by Frau Heidegger’s perceptiveness, and surprised he could still be surprised.
‘I told my brother-in-law what you said about air defences,’ she went on. ‘He said he hoped you were right.’
‘So do I,’ Russell agreed.
After climbing the stairs to his apartment he wished he hadn’t: the combination of muggy weather and full throttle heating had turned it into a Turkish bath. He tried opening a window, but there was no welcome hint of cooler air. He tried reading, but nothing seemed to stick.
He went back out again. It was just after four – he had about six hours to kill. He walked south down Belle-Alliance Strasse to Viktoria Park, climbed to the brow of the Kreuzberg and found an empty bench with a view across the city. There was even a slight breeze.
The sky darkened, and his mood seemed to darken with it.
He thought about Effi and the film. They’d had fun that morning, but it was a pretty disgusting piece of work. Did she have any qualms about doing it? She hadn’t said so. He couldn’t believe she needed the money, and he’d heard her views on the Nazi attitude to women often enough. So why was she doing it? Should he ask her? Was it possible to ask someone a question like that without making it an accusation?
He decided it wasn’t, but later that night, halfway down an empty street on their way home from the theatre, he asked it anyway.
‘To make a living?’ she answered sarcastically.
‘But you don’t…’ he said, and stopped himself. But not soon enough.
‘Lots of people think that because my family is rich, I’m rich,’ she said coldly. ‘I took the flat when they offered it. Ten years ago. And I haven’t taken anything since.’
‘I know.’
‘Then what.’
He sighed. ‘It’s just so sordid. I hate the idea of you playing in something… of you playing a part that goes against everything you believe.’
‘That just makes it more of a challenge.’
‘Yes, but the better you do it, the more convincing you are, the more women will think they have to accept all this nonsense.’
She stopped in her tracks. ‘Are we talking about my work or yours?’ she asked. ‘How about your paean to Strength Through Joy cruises? Or your “car for every German worker” piece. You’ve hardly been cutting the ground from under their feet.’
He bit back the surge of anger. She was right.
They both were.
Next afternoon, he went to the Plumpe. Paul had asked him for a programme, and with Effi visiting her family that seemed a good enough reason for going. He had Thomas and Joachim for company, but he missed Paul, and the game itself was dire – a dull 1-1 draw with Berliner SV. Thomas was subdued – like Frau Heidegger and seventy-five million other Germans he’d noticed the tell-tale flurry of government antagonism towards the Czechs. Sandwiched between SV supporters on the southbound U-bahn they arranged to have lunch on the following Thursday.
Back at the apartment he found a courier delivery waiting for him: a copy of the previous day’s Pravda, complete with his first article. His Russian wasn’t up to much, but as far as he could tell they hadn’t altered anything. ‘Approved by the SD, approved by the NKVD,’ he thought out loud. ‘I should have been a diplomat.’ More gratifying still was the accompanying bank draft in Reichsmarks.
There was also the promised list of suggestions for future articles. The last-but-one letters of the opening sentence – who thought up this stuff? – spelled Cracow. Russell groaned. Two sixteen-hour train journeys, just for a chat with Shchepkin. At least, he hoped it was just for a chat.
Zygmunt’s Chapel
‘This is it,’ McKinley said, with the sort of enthusiasm others reserved for stumbling across El Dorado. The object of his excitement was a short cul-de-sac of decaying tenement blocks wedged between railway arches, small industrial workshops and the Neuköllner-Schiffahrtkanal. One forlorn streetlight threw a faint yellow glow over glistening brickwork and rusty iron. It looked, Russell thought, like the sort of place a particularly sentimental German communis
t would come to die.
They had been looking for it for almost an hour, ever since playing hide-and-seek with their probably imaginary Gestapo tail in Neukölln’s famous Karstadt department store. The object of their quest had, according to McKinley, told them to make sure they were not followed, and he had done his best to oblige, leading Russell into the store by the main entrance and out through the kitchens, pursued only by the shouts of an enraged chef. They had then headed east on foot, turning this way and that down a succession of rapidly darkening and profoundly unwelcoming streets. Russell had expected streams of workers returning home, but they had only come across a few, and McKinley’s requests for navigational assistance had been met with either guarded suspicion or outright hostility. There were lights behind the curtains of the residential streets, but they felt far away.
Schönlankerstrasse was no exception. The block they were looking for was the last, pushed up against the elevated tracks of what was probably a freight line. As they reached the entrance another source of light came into view – the red glow of a signal hanging in the darkness.
The limp swastika over the entrance looked like it hadn’t been washed since 1933. Entering the dimly-lit hall, they found the concierge’s door. McKinley tried two taps with the door-knocker – too softly, Russell thought, but the door swung open almost immediately. A middle-aged woman with a rather striking face ushered them inside and quickly closed the door behind them.
‘Who is this?’ she asked McKinley with an angry gesture towards Russell. She had a thick Rhenish accent, which explained why the American had so much trouble understanding her.
‘He’s a friend. He speaks better German than I do,’ McKinley explained, rather in the manner of someone reassuring a foolish child.
She gave Russell another look, thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Come through,’ she said shortly.
The living room was clean but almost bare. There were no comfortable chairs, only a couple of upright chairs beside a small table and what looked like homemade cushions on the floor. A tattered but once-expensive rug occupied the centre of the wooden floor. A girl of around five or six was sitting on it, leaning forward over a drawing she was doing. She didn’t look up when they entered.
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