Then We Take Berlin (20 page)

She tried to reduce his narrative to keywords, found herself crossing out and rephrasing. Ink leaking onto her fingers.

“Can I ask you about your medical history? Diseases and the like?”

“Ah . . . the British doctors. Everything in its place. Yes. And I shall answer. I had not a day’s illness in my life until last year.”

“And . . . then?”

“I caught an incurable disease.”

“What’s it called?”

“Germany.”

§55

Of course, it did not work.

As more and more inmates moved from the squalor of the camp to the relative order of the nearby Panzer Barracks, the British organised hospital wards. Nell followed, and as the British Red Cross nurses treated the results of prolonged malnutrition, she gently probed, filling in her cards, sketching faces, trying, as Nowak had told her, not to make it all sound like statistics. Statistics were no more than a hypodermic in the hands of a German nurse, and that no less than a Luger in the hands of a Wehrmacht soldier. Fear was everything. Once overcome, there was listlessness, aggression, and lethargy.

On one day, she estimated, she had made out over one hundred and fifty cards. She gave each individual a card and handed the duplicate set to Dekker. The next morning she found dozens of them, blowing with the dust or strewn across the ward floor. It was predictable. So many of the women on the wards had looked blankly at her as she had pressed the half-filled cards into their hands. She doubted that any had really forgotten their name, but a good number had seemed incapable of uttering it.

“Futility,” Dekker said, “is the name of the game.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you have to risk it; nothing ventured nothing gained. And when it all goes
Fuß über Kopf
you accept it as futile and start again.”

She gathered up the cards. Sat in the nurses’ lavatory, tearful, trying to interpret Dekker’s homily on futility. It would have been hubristic ever to think that she could give anyone back their identity, and she had only ever thought that for a second. The best she could do was help someone, anyone, resurrect their own identity. Nowak, in his unsubtle way, had pointed out the gulf between identity and an identity card, but what other method was available to her? Was Dekker’s “perhaps all you can do is listen” all there was to be done?

Two Red Cross nurses came in to scrub up.

“Ah,” said one. “The little ink girl.”

And she saw herself as some transparent, useless flake of a child in a Hans Andersen tale. No longer invisible, but futile. The Little Ink Girl.

Then the other one said, “Cheer yourself up, ducks. I always find a bit of makeup does me the world of good. That and a nice cup of char.”

And she pressed something small, hard, and metallic into her hand.

Nell unfolded her fingers.

It was a tube of lipstick.

She had never worn lipstick.

She pulled off the little golden cylinder. It was searing red, and the imprint of the nurse’s lower lip was sculpted in. A twist grip on the base propelled the lipstick upwards. It was a toy.

She looked at the bundle of cards, sifted through them. Her sketches now looked to her to be all alike—the same hollow cheeks and new moon eyes, the same shining skull.

She clutched them in hand, pen, cards, and lipstick and returned to the ward. Most of the women were milling around in a susurrus of slow Polish talk, the effort of animation all but beyond them.

Alone on her bed sat a Belgian woman she knew only as Bruges—knees tucked up to her flattened chest, Nowak-style, Belsen-style, hands around her ankles, head down. Her card was on the top.

Nell sat on the edge of her bed and held it out to her.

She looked up and offered no reaction.

Nell set the rest of the cards on the bed—the pen rolled off the pile, she reached out for it. The lipstick rolled off the pile and another hand grabbed it.

What to Nell had been a toy was a magic wand to Bruges. She took the twist grip between finger and thumb and turned it as slowly as was possible, the fierce red tip peeping out like the tongue of a cat. And when she looked up she was smiling.

Nell looked around, almost desperate for a mirror. She tipped a few shreds of gauze out of a kidney dish and held the flat base up to her.

Bruges tipped her head from side to side, coping with the distortion, looked once at Nell and then put the lipstick to her lips.

It occurred to Nell that there were few mirrors in the barracks and none in the camp—it could be the first time Bruges had looked at herself in an age. But Bruges was focussed, if she was shocked by her thin face and sparse hair, she did not show it. She applied the lipstick with artistry, arching her top lip, stretching her lower, pursing them together in a scarlet pucker, almost blowing a kiss to herself in the mirror.

She smiled at Nell, as Nell lowered the dish, and held the lipstick out to her. Nell did not take it—around her, all around her, gathered like silent shadows, every woman in the ward.

§56

Later the same day, the afternoon brightening into April sunshine, Nell sat at a makeshift desk outside Dekker’s office filing her cards alphabetically.

“Sabine Michel,” Bruges had said at last. “I am twenty-six years old.”

Nell had sat on the edge of the bed and listened, and then she had sat on the edge of every bed in the ward and listened as every pair of red lips told a tale.

She had just filed Katya Żebrowska when the quartermaster, Staff Sergeant Cox, appeared with a cardboard box under his arm.

“I hear you can use these,” he said.

She looked at the stencilled label on the outside.

“Field Dressings x 40. RAMC type 101/7. Dec. 1944”

“Thank you Mr. Cox, but I think not.”

“Not so fast, Inky Fingers.”

He flipped the lid off. There were no field dressings, the box was full of lipstick, hundreds of tubes of lipstick, all marked “Max Factor,” and “Made in the USA”—rose red, poppy red, flame red . . . every red that Max could factor.

“My God! Where did you get this?”

“You don’t think I ordered them do you? Nah. Cock-up back at HQ. I was getting ready to send ’em back before some light-fingered bugger got his hands on ’em and sold the lot on the black market, but then I heard about you and yer tube of lipstick.”

“You heard?”

“The whole bleedin’ camp heard.”

Nell sat on the edge of a bed, any bed, and listened to red lips talk. She would go on listening for over three months.

§57

Of course it did not work.

Dekker had been right about futility, right about the pursuit of futility, but as soon as resources permitted he assigned Red Cross nurses to record keeping. And some of those who would not or could not talk to nurses would talk to Nell, and Nell would listen.

She would go on listening for over three months. She would go on listening for eternity.

§58

Weeks passed. The Allies, in the form of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force—a phrase that put Nell more in mind of an Antarctic trek than a total war—recognised the nature of the problem and found a bureaucratic solution. By the thousand printed, tick-in-the-box, Displaced Person cards arrived. Twenty questions poised upon a precipice. The card asked all the questions Nell had been asking and several she might not. It invited the contempt Dekker had so accurately predicted, and Nowak so acutely embodied with his “just another number.”

So often the answers were all too predictable.

“Do have a husband?”

“Auschwitz.”

“Do you have children?”

“Auschwitz.”

“What was your last address?”

“Auschwitz.”

“What is your religion?”

“I left that in Auschwitz too.”

And sometimes not.

“You are a Displaced Person.”

“No I’m not. I know exactly where I am.”

What she had learnt fed into the system. And the cards fell in the dust, fluttered in the wind, blew out across the heath into a symbolic, anonymous confetti of freedom much as her first efforts had done. She had not learnt not to care, she had learnt not to mind.

Dekker could not resist a joke. Which was more prevalent the Displaced Person or the Displaced Card?

§59

On May 20 no one died. The first day without a death, but by then they had buried over twelve thousand, and would bury more.

On the twenty-first the original Belsen camp was evacuated. The survivors were housed in the former Panzer Barracks, now renamed a Displaced Persons Camp.

The British burned Belsen to the ground and threw a party.

Nell went home to Klaus, as she did every night.

§60

On a light evening in the middle of August she came home to find the house silent again. A common occurrence. It seemed to her that Klaus had vanished into silence. Into silence and vegetables. As the days had lengthened he spent more and more time in the garden—planting out his cabbages, earthing up his potatoes. His evenings were spent behind his pipe and the gentle smoke screen he blew. If the radio or the gramophone went on it was because Nell put them on. Things that had interested him before, few though they were, seemed to have dropped away, petals, leaves and all, leaving the husk of the man. The British, who had rounded up and pressed into service—fetching, carrying, cleaning . . . burying—hundreds of the younger able-bodied, had left old Klaus alone.

It had been April, almost the end of April, when she had tuned in to the BBC and they had learnt of the death of Hitler. An occasion that might have been cause for rejoicing in a house such as theirs received only a muttered, “Well, that’s that then” and a rhetorical “How many millions have died for him?” The news of Admiral Dönitz’s unconditional surrender,
Stunde Null
, a matter of days later, drew forth a sigh of utter world-weariness and an equally rhetorical, “Was it all for nothing?”

The house was silent, the doors open front and back to let the breeze pass through.

She called out his name, and when there was no answer walked through the dining room towards the back door.

On the dining table an envelope was propped against a bottle of Cognac and an empty glass.

To my niece,

Christina Hélène von Raeder Burkhardt

It was closed and sealed with red wax, and the imprint of his signet ring, an interwoven KvR. The ring itself he had dropped into the empty glass.

The message was simple.

We all knew. Forgive me. KvR.

She knew he was dead. It was a simple matter to find the body.

Out in the garden he had dug one more trench and lain down in it. She had no idea how he had killed himself, but knew he had. A rational strand in her mind told her that he had spared her the task of cutting him down from a roof beam or mopping up the blood from a shot to the head. He had left her but one task, to bury him. He had left his garden spade in a mound of earth and he had pinned his two iron crosses onto the left breast of his jacket. He lay ramrod straight, his eyes closed and his arms folded like a Teutonic knight carved on a tombstone.

She was still looking at Klaus when she became aware of someone looking at her.

Nowak was standing on the other side of the grave. She had not seen him in days, perhaps weeks. She heard he had volunteered as a porter and stayed on after many of the able-bodied had chosen to leave. He had put on weight, his hair had grown back. She could see now that he was a young man, probably well under forty, whereas before he had been both aged and ageless. He was clean, if dusty, and he was carrying a fawn knapsack much like her own.

“I came to find you. The door was open. I wasn’t sure if you still lived here. I came to find you. I came to say goodbye. I am leaving.”

She said nothing. He picked up the spade and said, “It’s the least I can do. A thank-you for all the tobacco he gave me.”

She watched as Nowak buried her uncle, thinking that the old man had outlived his time and that perhaps it was a rare gift to know when to die, and thinking that three months ago Nowak had scarcely had the strength to lift a pipe let alone a spade.

At last she said, “Leaving? Where will you go?”

“The Dutch have already gone back to Holland and the Belgians to Belgium. The Jews are lobbying to go to Palestine. The Czechs are on their way to Czechoslovakia. Few of the Poles want to go to Poland. You couldn’t pay me to go back to Poland. So . . . I think perhaps I shall go to England. This displaced person is displacing himself once more.”

“How?”

“I’ll walk if I have to.”

“And papers. Do you have papers?”

Nowak smoothed out the mound that covered Klaus and stuck the spade back into the earth. From his inside pocket he took a folded card and handed it to her. It was dog-eared and grubby now, but it was the same card she had given him as they sat in the dust together at the gates of Belsen. The inky sketch she had done of him now dated as he had gained both flesh and hair.