Berlin Blind

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘What does it want?’

  ‘It’s starving.’

  ‘I must get out of here.’

  ‘For God’s sake, help me! Throw something.’

  Bruno hurled the concrete at it. It smashed into the rubble to the right of the animal, but this time the wolf controlled her fear. She sprang to one side, the growl rising in pitch. Instead of turning and running, she came down towards them. It was enough for Bruno. He turned and ran headlong over the rubble, slipping and scrambling.

  ‘Bruno!’ Spencer shouted. ‘Bruno!’ But all he could hear were Bruno’s running footsteps in the street outside.

  The wolf stood on the pile of rubble. She had been smelling blood for several hours and finally her needs had overcome her fear. Spencer watched her as he groped for something to throw. She came down the broken slope towards him. He picked up a piece of plaster and hurled it at her. It hit her on the side but had no force. She stopped. Her lips were drawn back, revealing her long teeth, and she was snarling continuously.

  She turned away from Spencer and slowly, as though suspecting something was going to attack her, she advanced on the dead torso of Mrs Mentzel. Spencer threw one piece of plaster after another, but the wolf had grown used to them now and hardly noticed as they fell around her. She stopped several paces from Mrs Mentzel and then, as though having made up her mind, she darted forward and snatched at one of the hands, tearing away the flesh below the thumb, biting off the fingers. She retreated. Stopped. Stood. Watched. There was no reaction from the old lady’s body. The wolf knew now that it was safe. Spencer watched her go forward again, but this time with confidence. He knew what was going to happen and he buried his head in his hands, trying to cover his ears as well as the wolf settled down to feed.

  And that is how they found him two hours later, stiff with cold, almost dead. When they asked him what had happened to the woman’s body he said he didn’t know.

  ‘Don’t ask him questions,’ one of the Hilfsdienst officers said. ‘Can’t you see he’s almost a goner?’ They put him on a stretcher and carried him away.

  They kept him in hospital for two days, until his legs were better, then they let him go. During that time he came to a decision: Bruno must clearly think him dead so why not be dead. He decided not to go back to the villa in Graf Speestrasse, but instead to go to Annie.

  In the two days he had been in hospital there was almost continuous bombing and when he reached the area in which she lived he saw that her apartment block had been hit and one of the corners of the building had been demolished. He ran into the main entrance. The elevators were not working and there was dust and plaster everywhere and great cracks in the walls. He climbed the six flights on painful legs and hammered at her door. It opened almost instantly. They held each other desperately for a moment and through her tears she said, ‘I thought you were dead.’ They went into the room and closed the door behind them, still holding on to each other as though by losing physical contact they might be wrenched apart and never find each other again.

  ‘When you didn’t come I went to the villa,’ she said. ‘The whole street had gone except for a couple of houses. Your house is a pile of rubble. I thought you might be under it but the wardens said there was no one. Then I thought instead of looking for you I’d sit tight. You knew where the apartment was. If you were all right you’d come. I haven’t been out for nearly forty-eight hours.’ She enveloped him in her arms, smiled and said, ‘This surely calls for a celebration.’ She fetched a bottle of schnapps from the kitchen and poured him a glass and one for herself. He had tasted the oily liquor at the house in Charlottenburg with Astley and Richards and the first time it had almost made him gag. Now the adrenalin was flowing so quickly through his veins that he hardly tasted it.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ she said. They were sitting together on a small sofa. She was holding his hands. He turned to look at her and she moved her head and said, ‘Don’t look at me.’ Her skin was sallow, her eyes puffy, her hair lank and uncombed. Wait, before you tell me, give me a minute.’ She went to the bathroom and they talked through the door. She told him about the raid in which her apartment building was hit. Several tenants on the opposite side had been killed. After ten minutes she came out and rejoined him. She was wearing a flowered housecoat, her hair was done and her face was made up. She looked more in possession of herself. ‘Now,’ she said. What happened?’

  Spencer told her. He left nothing out. When he’d finished she whispered, ‘My God!’ and sat trying to assimilate what she had heard. She asked him several times about his legs and he reassured her. And then about the old woman. She never mentioned the wolf, it was as though she did not want to think about it.

  After a while, when she had recovered, she gave him another drink and said, ‘Listen, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. You can’t go back to Graf Speestrasse because the house doesn’t exist any more. And if you go to the authorities you’ll be sent to fight the Russians and they’re only eighty kilometres away. People say they’re going to reach Berlin before the British or the Americans. You could stay here with me, but what happens when the Russians get here? I know what they’ll do to me. But God knows what they’ll do to you. I figure it’s best for you to get back to the camp and be there when the Allies get there. That way no one need know.’

  Spencer thought of the thousands of refugees making their way westwards, choking the roads and the railways.

  ‘You’ve got to have a special pass to travel on the trains.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been figuring. I want to get out too. I’ve got a car. It’s not much, but it goes. And I’ve got a friend from my conservatorium days who lives in Bremen. She’ll give me a bed. And we’ll be near each other. Then after you’re released...’ Her voice faded away,

  ‘What?’

  ‘We mustn’t think about that. No one knows what the future holds.’

  Had Spencer been older he would have noticed the change in her. His absence and the thought of his death had broken down the barrier which her age and caution had caused her to place between them. Until then she had enjoyed their affair on her terms, had been touched at the depth of his feelings for her but had managed to restrain her own, knowing that what was happening had no future. Each moment was to be savoured for itself. But when he had not come, when she had seen the ruin of the house in Graf Speestrasse, when she had sat hour after hour in her apartment thinking of him dead, of his limbs broken, shorn from his body, a change had come over her. She had longed for him, for his beauty and his companionship, for his love. All her pent-up emotions, which had never expressed themselves in Herr Beckmann’s company, were released. She knew she was a middle-aged woman pretending to be nineteen, that ahead lay only emotional danger, but she could not help herself. She loved him with all the passion and tenderness of which she was capable.

  They spent the night in the big double bed and the following morning early she took him to the underground garage two streets away where she kept her little Fiat Topolino. The car had two bucket seats and a small space behind them for luggage. He had nothing and she took with her only a small leather travelling bag, a present from Herr Beckmann. The rest of the space was taken up by three jerrycans of petrol which she had been hoarding against such a contingency.

  They left Berlin as dawn was breaking and drove out on the Potsdam Chaussee. The road surface was pockmarked with bomb craters and was strewn by bumt-out trucks and cars caught by Allied fighter-bombers. There was also the usual quota of refugees from the east pushing their belongings in prams or riding bicycles pulling small carts. The tiny Topolino was the ideal car for the journey as it was small enough to squeeze through gaps in the traffic and by the time they reached Wolfsburg, the road was almost clear. They turned towards Celle and there the gearbox broke down and they could only travel in third. The Hanover-Bremen autobahn was being strafed by low-flying Spitfires and Annie said, ‘We must get off this, can you work something out on the map?’

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p; They turned on to a series of small roads that kept them parallel with the autobahn but south of the Weser. Spencer sat with the road map on his knees, trying to navigate as well as watch out for aircraft. They had not very far to go to Bremen when the fighters finally found them. Approaching Bassum he looked back and saw three Spitfires flying low up the road towards them.

  ‘Planes!’ he shouted. ‘Behind us!’

  ‘There’s a lane!’ she said.

  He saw a small road leading into a pine forest that would give them perfect shelter. She put her foot down to the floorboards, but they were going up a small hill and being in third gear the engine could not take it. The car spluttered and stalled. At that moment the first Spitfire was thundering in at treetop height behind them. At five hundred metres it started pumping machine-gun and cannon fire from its wings. As Spencer looked back he could see the flashes. The explosions ripped up the road in two lines then the car was engulfed and hot metal was screeching past his face. He opened the door and flung himself out into a ditch. He waited for Annie to jump out on the opposite side. But nothing happened. The planes flew on, not bothering to turn, not bothering with the Topolino any more, looking for bigger game. He shouted at her. There was no reply. He got out of the ditch and ran back to the car. She lay over the wheel, arterial blood dripping down on to the floor. A fragment from a cannon shell had severed her spinal cord at the base of her neck and she was dead.

  Three days later he reached the prisoner-of-war camp. He had buried Annie as best he could, scraping a grave for her in the pine forest with one end of the starting handle, lining it with fir branches and placing her on them as though in a catafalque. Then he covered her body with more branches and took a private farewell.

  Her death changed him. He had loved her with the simplicity of youth; now she had been taken from him. After the first shock wore off it was as though the soft malleable clay of his personality had gone through fire in a kiln and come out hard and tough and not easily broken.

  The camp was as he remembered it, except for one vital difference: it was now in the hands of the prisoners and the Kommandantur was a smoke-blackened shell. As he went up the road towards it he found himself part of a mob of prisoners, some armed with carbines, some with bayonets, some with heavy sticks, who were clearly in charge both of the camp and the surrounding countryside. Not a German was in sight. Many of the men were drunk. Some lay on the ground near the huts and Spencer could not tell whether they were sleeping it off or whether they were dead.

  He learned that the camp authorities had left several days before and that the Allies were expected within twenty-four hours. He made his way to his old hut. He didn’t care now whether there was a bunk for him or not. If the Allies were as close as they were said to be, everything would change, everything would be reorganized when they arrived. There was no one in the room and he noticed that his bunk was bare of blankets or palliasse; he would have somewhere to sleep after all. He looked round calmly at the familiar features, the table, the benches, the chairs, the stove; everything was filthy, nothing had been washed up; nothing had been cleaned. It was as though freedom had given his former hutmates the opportunity of living as they would have wished. He looked out of the window and saw that in places the wire had been cut and one or two of the guard towers were now being patrolled by a former prisoner.

  He heard a sound behind him and turned — and there was Campbell. ‘Well,’ the big stoker said. ‘Well, well, look who’s back!’ He kicked the door closed behind him and came across the hut. ‘So you couldna do without me.’

  From the time he had left Berlin Spencer knew that this moment had been inevitable. He slipped his hand inside his heavy seaman’s coat and came out with a screwdriver, part of the Topolino’s tool kit. The two nights he had spent on the road since Annie’s death he had used to sharpen it on whatever stone was handy; now in the dull afternoon light from the window it gleamed like the point of a needle. He held it low, aiming at Campbell’s stomach.

  ‘Touch me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll kill you.’

  Campbell blinked. There was something different about the pretty boy he’d wanted so badly some months before. He took another step forward as though to test him but Spencer did not move, not even an eyelid. He stood there calmly waiting to disembowel the Scot.

  ‘My Gawd,’ Campbell whispered. ‘I believe you would!’ He backed away towards the door and went out into the compound.

  The following morning Allied tanks came up the road to the camp and the war, for all of them, was finally over.

  *

  When Spencer awoke the next morning in his Berlin hotel the effect of the sleeping pill had made him thick-headed and he thought at first that the memories were part of a nightmare and then he remembered lying awake and sweating, trying not to think, but being forced to remember not only Bruno but Annie and Campbell, and he realized with a sense of shock that the one person of whom he should be thinking, on whom his whole mind should be concentrating had had no place in his thoughts — Sue. Again the picture flashed into his mind of the tangled limbs by the front door, Sue on her side, her arm flung out, the great bulge of her belly, the pattern of red holes across her chest; but the anger did not spurt; it had been damped down by other thoughts and other emotions. He was in the grip of Berlin again. There was layer upon layer into which he had dug and now the layers threatened to bury him.

  His eyes fell on the telephone number which Lange had sent him and he seemed to feel cold fingers touch his bowels at the thought of telephoning Bruno. The picture of the cellar, the brutality, remained vivid and had somehow undermined his will. He decided to leave it until after breakfast. Or on the other hand, he told himself angrily, it was simply the effects of the pill. He flung back the covers and went into the bathroom and had a boiling hot shower followed by an ice cold one and felt better. It was well after ten o’clock by the time he was dressed, and breakfast was over, so he went to the konditorei next door and had coffee and a roll. He was standing at the cash desk waiting to pay when out of the comer of his eye he saw something that caught his attention. Through the big window he glimpsed Lilo coming out of the hotel and crossing the road to her car. The woman behind the cash desk had turned to the waitress to check something on the bill and by the time he had paid, Lilo was in her car. He shouted but she did not hear him. An empty taxi was leaving the hotel and Spencer told the driver to follow the blue Manta.

  They crossed the centre of the town and then drove along the Bismarck-strasse. Finally she turned off into a quiet suburban street in Charlottenburg and parked. Spencer stopped the taxi a little short of her car and followed her to the entrance of a small apartment block.

  She must have felt his presence for she turned, startled. When she saw who it was her eyes widened with anger. ‘You followed me! How dare you come here! How dare you spy on me!’

  ‘I saw you at the hotel. You came to see me.’

  ‘You should not have come here! This is my private life! It is nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I’m not prying into your private life.’

  Abruptly she moved away from the door and stood with her back to the letter-boxes. It was as though she was saying: ‘Keep away from me.’

  ‘I’m not going to harm you,’ he said. ‘You wanted to see me. I wanted to see you.’

  She paused and then reluctantly said, ‘Now that you’re here, you’d better come up.’

  He put out his hand, indicating that she should go first, but she stood her ground. He opened the street door and went in. ‘The first floor,’ she said. ‘On the left.’

  He went up the stairs to the landing. As on the ground floor there were two apartments, one left, one right. She unlocked the door on the left and said, ‘Please go in, I will be with you in a minute.’ She walked across to the other apartment, rang the bell and went in. A moment later she came out again carrying a baby boy of about eighteen months. He was a beautiful child with fair hair and blue eyes. He was clutching a panda alm
ost as big as himself.

  ‘This is Peter,’ she said, and the hostility seemed to have vanished.

  Spencer was as surprised now as she had been a few minutes before. ‘Hello, Peter,’ he said.

  She closed the apartment door behind her. ‘It’s time for his sleep. I must put him down. Please wait in the sitting-room.’

  But he followed her into the child’s bedroom. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve seen babies changed before.’ The child reminded him of Dick, the same fair skin, the same blue eyes. He felt a wrench of longing and sadness, and above all, a need to communicate. For weeks he had been unable to communicate on a domestic level. Ever since Sue’s death he had been a person within a person. But now everything was shaking loose. And Lilo was the only person he had; Lilo, who was a total enigma.

  ‘You’ve never changed one,’ she said, fetching a fresh cotton wool pad and beginning to unbutton Peter’s overpants.

  ‘Many times.’

  ‘But you didn’t have children.’

  ‘A boy like Peter.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me. How can I write a story about you if I do not have all the facts?’

  For the hundredth time he wondered whether she was lying but he let it pass.

  ‘His name was Dick,’ he said briefly. He died.’

  She swung to look at him, frowning. ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Grown up, with a family.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Car accident.’

  She bent and went on with what she was doing. When they’re very young you look after them almost hour by hour,’ he said, more to himself than to her. ‘You try to guess what they’ll do, what harm they can come to. Can they reach that window? Can they pull that cupboard on to themselves? Can they get out of that door? Down that flight of steps? Across that road? You try and see every eventuality and then, just when they’re grown up and beginning to reap the benefits of having got there... bang! Out like a candle.’ He stared from the window. ‘It wasn’t only Dick. His wife and child were in the car. They were also killed.’