Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  ‘An old couple live in the flat above,’ Klose says, ‘they will have gone to sleep ages ago, and I’m sure they won’t have heard a thing, on the right there’s the hallway, on the left the chemist’s and there’s no one there at night. I don’t think anyone will have heard anything, and in any case the nights are unsettled enough …’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to know,’ Wiegand says quickly. ‘Give me the gun, Lassehn …’

  Lassehn hesitates, he is still holding the gun in his hand.

  ‘Give it to me,’ Wiegand insists, walks up to Lassehn and takes the gun from his hand. For a few seconds he stands motionlessly by the Nazi, who is still lying on the floor, his body bowed and his legs bent, one hand on his head as if to protect himself, the other strangely twisted on his back. It is curiously quiet in the room, the only sound the men’s breathing.

  ‘Do it,’ Klose says with an impatient gesture. Wiegand looks at Dr Böttcher, he is quite calm, the hand holding the revolver isn’t shaking.

  ‘In the temple,’ Dr Böttcher says, ‘put the gun right against his head, it will silence the shot and there won’t be a spray of blood.’

  Wiegand bends over Sasse and puts the muzzle of the revolver to the side of his forehead, he can’t find the temple straight away, it’s too dark in this corner of the room. Then the Nazi moves slightly, the cold steel against his temple prompts a reflex, his hand twitches and slips from his head to the floor. It is only a short, dull sound, but it cuts through the silence like a crash of thunder, Wiegand recoils a little, the gun slides away from its target, but he regains control of it, puts the muzzle back in place and fires. A dull explosion and a quick cracking sound, the Nazi’s body rears slightly and then crashes back down, his legs straightening as if to kick something away.

  ‘Gone, finished,’ Klose breaks the silence. ‘And now?’

  ‘In Berlin right now there shouldn’t be any problems in getting rid of a corpse,’ Dr Böttcher says in a clear voice. ‘And it’s dark tonight as well. Where do you suggest, Klose?’

  Klose thinks. ‘We should take him out,’ he begins, and then laughs grimly. ‘As a matter of fact, isn’t that what we’ve just done?’

  ‘Seriously now,’ Dr Böttcher says disapprovingly, ‘we need to make sure they don’t find him straight away, so that we can hide our tracks. Where should we take him to?’

  ‘There are plenty of ruined buildings on Koppenstrasse,’ Klose says seriously. ‘It’s not far, a hundred metres, maybe a hundred and fifty.’

  ‘I know where it is,’ Böttcher says. ‘Will you give me a hand, Lassehn?’

  Lassehn has been sitting motionless and apparently indifferent on the sofa; now, at Böttcher’s request, he gives a start. ‘Pull yourself together, Lassehn,’ Wiegand says severely. ‘How many times have you killed people anonymously as a soldier, people more innocent than that man there, Russian farmers or workers or students, and now you’re losing your nerves because you’ve shot someone who wanted to slit your throat? Yes, my dear boy, there’s no time for silly emotions here, or for inconsistency, you’d have been better off staying with your unit and being ordered to kill, carrying out instructions and relying on that thing called duty. But then you didn’t want to do that either!’

  Lassehn shakes himself violently back into life.

  ‘You’re right, Mr Wiegand,’ he says, ‘it was a shock.’

  ‘Reason on its own won’t help you,’ Klose says and shakes his head a few times, ‘you also need to know how to use it.’

  ‘No long conversations,’ Dr Böttcher says energetically. ‘We’ll take the man away now, and you can clear everything up, Klose, remove any bloodstains you happen to see. We’ll carry him between us like a drunk, and the third man supports him from behind, then if we bump into anyone it will look as if we’re carrying home a drunken friend. But first I want to seal up the wound to his head. Wiegand, bring my medical bag.’

  Dr Böttcher works quickly and deftly, he twists a plug of cotton and stuffs it into the head wound with pincers, then sticks two strips of plaster over it at an angle. ‘Right, that’ll do,’ he says, and gets back to his feet.

  ‘I’ll open the front door,’ Klose says, ‘then you don’t need to walk through the courtyard.’ He takes a bunch of keys from his trouser pocket and unlatches the door to the restaurant, but stays in the doorway.

  For a few seconds the men stand there irresolutely, avoiding each other’s eyes. Even though they have often dealt with corpses, with mutilated and shredded cadavers, one professionally because he is a doctor, and the others out of habit because they were soldiers, they hesitate to touch the dead man, their respect for human life, even that of the enemy, is too great for them to be able to forget that this man in his brown uniform was still standing here a few minutes ago, untouched by thoughts of death.

  ‘Right, then, off we go,’ says Wiegand. ‘Come on, Doctor. Lassehn, lift him with your hips. Can you do that?’

  Lassehn gulps violently, he has an unpleasant taste in his mouth, but he sees that he has to lend a hand – after all, he started this. ‘I’ll manage,’ he says. ‘We had to touch worse things in the field.’

  Dr Böttcher nods to him, then they lift up the Nazi’s body, Dr Böttcher and Wiegand reach under his armpits, Lassehn hoists him up by his belt. Then Dr Böttcher and Wiegand put his arms around their necks, they have to support Sasse’s torso by wedging their hands under his armpits because the Nazi is significantly taller than they are, but even that way his legs still drag, his head slumps forward and rocks back and forth. This movement of the bald white head suddenly reminds Lassehn of a grotesque figure from an advertisement that they used to see in shop windows, a thin man with big, round, bulging eyes, a bald head and thick, pouting lips that moved mechanically while his head rocked back and forth like an upside-down pendulum, and one hand tapped on the glass with a stick.

  Klose picks up the brown cap from the table and crams it over the dead man’s head. ‘Off we go to Valhalla,’ he says.

  The lifeless body seems to weigh a ton, it has to be dragged and pulled rather than carried, after only a few steps both men have broken into a sweat, but they have no other choice, the corpse must be removed.

  Klose gently opens the door to the restaurant and carefully pushes aside the grille. ‘It’s all quiet,’ he says, turning back to the others, ‘not a soul in the street.’

  ‘Let’s carry on straight to the corner,’ Wiegand says.

  Then they’re in the street, it’s pitch-dark, they can hardly see a few metres in front of them, only over by Silesian Station is the darkness broken, a few faint lights shimmer through the windowless ribcage of the station hall, the sound of steam escaping from a locomotive comes from the ramp of the railway post office, for a few seconds a car’s headlights send narrow beams of light into the blackness of the street.

  The hundred metres from Klose’s restaurant to the corner of Koppenstrasse seem endless, they have to trudge the distance metre by metre, the corpse becoming heavier and heavier, Wiegand and Dr Böttcher have long since given up supporting the body under the armpits, they have grabbed the dead man’s arms, which are draped around their shoulders, with both hands, so the corpse is literally hanging around their necks. Lassehn is left to push the body that dangles between Dr Böttcher and Wiegand.

  There is no one to be seen, the street is deserted, the only sound the even tread of a policeman under the viaducts on Koppenstrasse.

  At last they have reached Koppenstrasse, there is barely a house still standing, everything burnt out, entirely destroyed by fire.

  ‘In here,’ Wiegand says in a low voice.

  They are standing by a gap that was once the doorway to a house, the entrance is blocked with stones and rubble, but this is the right place. Dr Böttcher and Wiegand release themselves from the dead man’s embrace, let him slip to the ground and pause, panting, for a few seconds.

  ‘Stay here, Lassehn,’ Wiegand whispers, ‘and take the other arm as well.
’

  Dr Böttcher reaches for the other arm of the dead man, which is passed to him like a relay baton. Wiegand grabs the corpse’s feet and brings them level with the edge of the cellar, then they push the body slowly over the edge.

  ‘Now,’ Wiegand says quietly.

  They let go at the same time. The corpse slips down into the cellar, rolls a few metres and comes to rest, carrying a few stones down with it, they clatter dully and then it is still. The dead man has disappeared into the shadow of the night.

  Wiegand and Dr Böttcher listened to the sound and stood there motionless for a few seconds, then they climb back over the mounds of rubble. When they stand in the nocturnal silence of the street they feel as if they have emerged into daylight from the grim darkness of a catacomb.

  XVI

  16 April, 11.00 a.m.

  Even where the city is most densely populated idylls can still be found. Where house presses closely against house, the apartments are crammed as tightly together as cells in a beehive, the courtyards are only narrow fireplaces, and the streets reduced to mere canyons. Where family lives side by side with family, human close to human. In the houses facing the front, where large families dwell in miniature apartments, and in the buildings to the rear small-scale industry carries on in dark, smoky, run-down factory halls. Where the many cafés, pubs, restaurants, dance halls, bars, foyers, billiard halls and cinemas are sprinkled like freckles over the dark face of the workers’ district, and questionable pleasures, prostitutes who have seen better days, rejects of the smarter districts, offer fleeting satisfaction for a small reward. Where the pavements spill over with people and the carriageways are crammed with vehicles of every kind, handcarts, delivery vans and enormous goods trains, horses and carts, cyclists and trams. Where it is never quiet, not even in the depths of night or first thing in the morning, where turmoil, haste and urgency form the element of life, and everything is purposeful, bare, matter-of-fact reality. Where the city comes together into a dense, impenetrable core and the houses are not lined up along the streets, but the streets seem to be carved into a rock built with houses. This is where idylls are found. There are no flower-covered meadows or shady forests and no charming river walks or gentle hills. There is none of that here, it wouldn’t fit the place at all. But there are corners which, even if they are not exactly born to blush unseen, still breathe rather more quietly, their hearts beating at a more moderate rhythm.

  One such corner is the passageway that leads from Grosse Frankfurter Strasse to Weberstrasse. Here a breach is cut into the dark line of houses on Grosse Frankfurter Strasse, a narrow alleyway runs between blackened, ugly fire walls. After a few metres it turns to the north-east and then opens up onto a square on which St Mark’s Church stands. Here, in the barren midst of asphalt, granite slabs, pebbled roadway and cobblestones, there are two little islands of earth on which sparse greenery sprouts. This little alley, which doesn’t even have a name and is identified only as ‘passageway to Weberstrasse’, has only pedestrian traffic, no wagons rattle down here, no cars dash, the streams of the big city flow by to the north and south, the voices of the city, noise, shouting, hubbub, are heard only from a long way off, bouncing faintly against the walls and seeping away.

  Lassehn has never been to this part of the city before. Now that he passes this way for the first time, everything is dead. It is the deadly silence of a city killed by aerial and incendiary bombs and blockbusters. The silence of the little alley known as ‘passageway to Weberstrasse’ has also spread to the adjacent streets, trams no longer ring their bells along Grosse Frankfurter Strasse, the whoosh of cars and the roar of lorries has fallen silent, people’s voices have gone mute, over the smoke-blackened walls and the mountains of rubble silence has settled like a shroud. Only here and there does a spark of life still glow in the stump of a building that has chanced to escape complete destruction, only losing the plaster of its façade and its upper storeys, where people still lead a ghostly life between hecatombs of the slaughtered, burnt and suffocated dead, who lie beneath the ruins, the quick, hungry rats darting among them.

  How even the most terrible images may fade and, in the end, barely attract a glance, in fact barely enter the consciousness – Lassehn has experienced that while passing through this eastern part of the inner city. He has come along Andreasstrasse, Langestrasse and Markusstrasse, he has crossed Wallnertheaterstrasse, the Brauner Weg and Blumestrasse, but straight ahead and to his right and left he has hardly seen anything but burnt-out, bombed and ruined houses, ravaged, smoke-blackened rows of buildings, and breathed in the revolting smell of burning, mixed with the miasma of escaped gas. It has been like striding over a field of graves where the air seems to stand still. Only fleetingly has he been touched by the idea that the abysses and chasms, the craters and heaps of these stony mountains were once houses designed by architects and engineers on a drawing board, built by bricklayers and carpenters, plumbers and fitters, roof and floor layers, and finally inhabited by people. All the material possessions carried into those houses and all the experience that settled in them like a patina were shaken to pieces and scattered in just a few minutes into the chaos of a pile of glowing bricks, wood and iron.

  The adaptability of the human spirit is one of the most significant, but also one of the most terrible gifts of man, the deadening effect of habit can take hold of him so completely that terrible things are no longer terrible, gruesome things no longer gruesome, the fearsome no longer fearsome. A ruined house, a torn-up carriageway no longer prompts an unusual reflex in the retina; they cease to convey a sense of agitation to the brain.

  Lassehn has observed this quite matter-of-factly, and pushed aside the images that tried to cram their way into his brain, he has concentrated entirely on the task he has been given, which has eased and smoothed his journey through the sea of ruins. When he reached the corner of Markusstrasse and Grosse Frankfurter Strasse, he stopped for a few seconds before he discovered the passageway that Klose had precisely described to him. Klose told him much else besides, and Lassehn had to commit it all to memory in great detail, because nothing must be written down. He looked cautiously around several times before crossing the deserted carriageway of Grosse Frankfurter Strasse, and then he turned hesitantly into the alley of ‘Passageway to Weberstrasse’. His delay is based not on fear, what holds him back is his amazement that there is still life in this chaotic wasteland of stones and rubble. He entered the little alley, climbed over a few piles of rubble on his right, forced his way through a gap in a wall that had half collapsed, and then stood by a flight of steps leading down to a cellar, its roof piled high with mounds of rubble. Lassehn stopped again, assailed by doubts about whether he had understood Klose correctly, he ran through all his directions once more and finally reached the conclusion that he was on the right track. Then he climbed down the cellar steps and in the end found himself standing in a dark room that was damp and smelled of mildew. Only after a while, once his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, did he discover a niche, and in it a door. He knocked on the door, two short knocks and one long.

  Then the door opened, a small, squat man held the latch in his hand and didn’t say a word.

  Lassehn handed him a piece of newspaper, the man held it and matched it carefully, almost pedantically, against a scrap of newspaper that he had taken from his breast pocket, and only when he established that the two pieces fitted precisely together did a strange conversation unfold between Lassehn and the man.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I am to pass on greetings from Uncle Otto.’

  ‘I don’t know any Uncle Otto.’

  ‘Not even the one from Halberstadt?’

  ‘Halberstadt?’

  ‘Halberstadt in Saxony.’

  ‘Oh, he’s the one you mean, what does he want?’

  ‘Seeds.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Six hundred.’

  ‘Have you brought a bag?’

  ‘Yes, here it
is.’

  The door has fallen closed again, endless minutes pass, during which Lassehn casts his eyes around the place. He sees nothing, in the cellar there is only darkness, cold and wet, a penetrating smell of burning and an unreal silence. Then the door opened again, his bag was handed back to him, for a moment Lassehn was able to glimpse the cellar, where in the light of two faint bulbs he saw an apparatus that is probably a hand-press.

  ‘Here is the bag,’ the man said, and quickly closed the door again.

  ‘Thank you,’ Lassehn replied.

  ‘Greetings to Uncle Otto.’

  ‘I’ll tell him. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  Lassehn turned round to go when the voice called him back.

  ‘You’re new!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good luck, Comrade!’

  A hand was extended to him, Lassehn took it and felt a brief, firm handshake, then the door closed again.

  And now Lassehn is standing back in Grosse Frankfurter Strasse. In spite of the oppressive surroundings he feels inspired, and he knows very clearly why that is. It is that man’s firm handshake, his familiar tone and the word ‘comrade’, it is the contents of the briefcase, which he doesn’t know, but which makes him part of the group which, he now knows, calls itself the resistance movement. He has probably heard of it before, but it was just a name, every now and again he imagined something like a partisan division or a gang like the one led by Karl Moor in Schiller’s play The Robbers, but now he can’t help smiling at himself. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, there are no impenetrable forests, no closed-off tracts of land, neither are there people or groups who can live outside the community. The net of official surveillance and registration has been cast over everyone, and the system of food cards, which was created at the start of the war as a new and effective instrument of control, has tightened the meshes of the net so narrowly that it forms an excellent complement to the police and military registration apparatus. The present-day revolutionaries no longer retreat into the woods to lead a more or less romantic life like Karl Moor and his companions, they are – and Lassehn has finally worked this out – Janus-headed creatures, they have bourgeois professions, because they are forced to adapt to the organization of state and outwardly submit to its demands, if they don’t want to be stripped a priori of all opportunities to get rid of it. This produces the paradoxical situation whereby even the sworn enemies of the state must somehow work for it, be active on its behalf, must in fact encourage and support it through their work, through their compulsory membership of associations, because they cannot avoid paying their taxes and making their donations (and even the donations to the Winter Relief Fund and the Red Cross, the National League of Germans Abroad and the Reich Colonial League, even for collections of bones and waste paper, are the price for modest security), use its terminology, because more than anyone else they need to be careful not to stand out. Anyone who stands out also forfeits what freedom of movement the Third Reich has left its citizens, they must build magnificent façades on which the emblems of the state are visibly apparent. Those façades are the Potemkin villages of the Third Reich. The enemies of the state differ from those loyal to it only by the fact that they try to keep to a minimum the fulfilment of their civic duties. The ones living underground, like Lassehn, barely take part in conspiracies, and they cannot because they can show neither valid papers nor employment in civil society as an alibi.