Then We Take Berlin (27 page)

Then she eased herself up with her walking stick.

“Won’t be long. Come and meet the kids.”

Behind the caravan, the horse grazed on the sparse grass of heathland—half a dozen rabbits nibbled in a wire run—cabbages and carrots struggled in the sandy soil—and three wooden crosses stuck in the ground marked the lives of Mutti’s children.

“My daughter Kattrin, my son Eilif.”

“They died here?”

“No. They neither of them died here. They died in the wars. They died on the road. And we’ve been on the road since the day the Russians entered East Prussia. The graves are markers—tokens if you like. In a world where everything is ersatz, they are ersatz graves for the children I never got to bury.”

“Why . . . why here?”

“Here? Because this is where the horse stopped. He would go no further. Folk there are who would have stuck old Pickles like a pig and feasted on horse meat, but he had been too loyal for me ever to do that. Hauled us all the way from Gumbinnen, where I bought him. Before that we pulled the wagon ourselves. He has been too good a horse to end up in the pot. A thousand kilometres and more between the shafts. Allenstein, Graudenz, Bromberg, Landsberg, Berlin. No, dearie. It’s rabbit stew for us. Come, fill up the hole in your belly before you fill one under the ground.”

They ate from tin plates. Nell was pleased. She had not been at all sure she could have eaten from a Wehrmacht helmet.

“Going far, dearie?”

“Berlin.”

“Ah . . . I was there in . . . March I think it was. Far enough ahead not to hear the Soviet tanks grumbling at my arse.”

“I have not seen Berlin since December. But it is home. I am a Berliner.”

“You are a Berliner. I am a Gumbinner. And I will never see my home again. Forget Berlin, dearie. Berlin is gone.”

In all the warnings she had received—Dekker, the British policeman in Celle—it had not occurred to Nell that Berlin might be “gone.”

“Berlin cannot be gone,” she said.

“Once Berlin was not. Then Berlin was. Now Berlin is not.”

“I must get to Berlin.”

“No, dearie. You must survive.
Sie müssen überstehen
.”

“How?”

Mutti appeared to be thinking, but Nell knew it was the pretence of thinking, and that what she would say next had been on the tip of her tongue.

“Never tell all you feel, or better still, feel very little. And always know the price of flour and sugar. Coffee too for that matter.”

She liked the old woman. The old woman fed her, lent her blankets for the night and let her sleep under the wagon . . . but Nell knew she could not live that way if that was what it took to survive.

§82

The map she held was ancient. The newest map of Germany to be found in Klaus’s library dated from 1888, the year of the Kaiser’s accession. On the fourth day she felt she must be somewhat north of Wolfsburg, and close to the green squiggle Dekker had drawn on the map to show her roughly where Russian rule began.

Another dusty limestone track was leading her to another elusive pilgrim shrine—the iron gates and stone gateposts of a schloss—the castle itself being just visible beyond the trees, its roof peppered with missing tiles, and its slender, spiral turret sporting a shell-shaped hole.

Someone was singing:

Oh the grand old Duke of York,

’E ’ad ten thousand men.

So they banged ’im up in Pentonville.

An’ ’e won’t do that again.

The singer was tuneless, and out of sight. As Nell rounded the gatepost he finally came into view. A small man, swinging a rifle about and marching up and down somewhat in the manner of Charlie Chaplin. His top half appeared to be a British Tommy of some sort. The lower half beggared belief. Pants as baggy as those Mutti was making out of flags, and in so many colours . . . blacks, greens, and reds . . . with stripes.

She was staring, and she knew it.

He lowered the rifle.

“Wot you looking at?”

“At you, of course.”

“Wossamatter? Anyone would think you’d never seen a corporal of the Seaforth Highlanders before.”

“I haven’t. In fact I’ve never seen anyone dressed like you before.”

“You can talk. I’ve never seen a battledress worn with a flowery frock before. At least mine’s legitimate.”

“So’s mine. Issued to me by His Majesty’s Royal Army Medical Corps. And I’ve never seen rainbow-coloured pants before.”

“Pants! These ain’t pants, these is trews these is!”

“Shouldn’t you be in uniform?”

“This is my bleedin’ uniform!”

From behind the Tommy a second appeared, dressed in the same outfit, but this one was clearly an officer of some sort, knocking the heads off thistles with his swagger stick as he approached.

“Sharpe! I thought I told you no more! Keep the buggers out!”

Sharpe, if that was his name, turned around and gave as good as he got.

“Don’t shout at me you stuck-up fucker! You’re not on the fuckin’ parade ground now. It’s just one more Kraut an’ a little one at that, no more’n a kid.”

“We’re up to our necks in fucking
Flüchtling
s. What is the point of you being on guard duty if you guard nothing?”

He drew level with them now and either proximity or the recognition of Nell as being young or female caused him to lower his voice and change his expression. He was not quite smiling, but not frowning either.

The battledress threw him. Nell thought he might even be waiting for her to salute. She stared him out.

“Bill Dobbin,” he said at last. “Captain, 3rd Seaforth Highlanders. And my man, Beckwith Sharpe, corporal of the same. And you are?”

Before she could answer Sharpe said, “I ain’t his bleedin’ man. Batman, birdman . . . all that malarkey . . . that all went out with the war. And the war’s over. I don’t answer to Sharpe no more. It’s Mister Sharpe to ’im and Becks to you.”

“And I,” said Nell getting a word in between these bickering conquerors, “am Christina Hélène von Raeder Burkhardt.”

“Wot a mouthful,” said Sharpe.

“Au contraire,” said a voice she had not heard before, “a very familiar name.”

They all turned. An old man had come upon them silently, and was now leaning heavily on his walking stick, and he was smiling, really smiling as though pleased to see her.

“My dear,” he took her hand and pressed his lips fleetingly to the back of her knuckles. “Graf Florizel von Tripps of
Schloss Verrücktschwein
. I have known Klaus von Raeder all my life. Your grandfather perhaps?”

“My great-uncle, sir. My grandmother’s elder brother.”

“Has he lived through it all?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Ach, so many dead, we must look to the living. Gentlemen, we have room for one more, another
Flüchtling
for our ark.”

So saying he offered her his arm and led her through the maze of thistle and nettle into his lost domain.

“Another?” she heard Dobbin say. “Is he going to take in the whole of Germany?”

“Told yer,” said Sharpe. “An’ if he is there’s no point whatsoever in bleedin’ guard duty is there?”

“You mustn’t mind the ‘heroes.’ They are both good men, they are merely frustrated,” von Tripps said to Nell. “They spent most of the war as prisoners. When the British freed them they were assigned to me as guards.”

“Guards against what?”

“Oh, Poles mostly. Some French as well. Liberated slave labourers. In the spring the countryside was full of them. Taking what they wanted. Destroying what they wanted. Killing who they wanted. And who could blame them? Then . . . then someone in the Allied command had the bright idea of sending in British POWs to guard us. The displaced, the former slaves were rounded up or began the long walk home. You look rather like one yourself—they all wore bits of uniform, any uniform. A ragbag army, a barmy army. Perhaps that was Hitler’s ultimate achievement, to have abolished the status of “civilian” and to have put us all into uniform, any uniform . . . the pan-uniform of the Europe of 1945.

“And then, after the fall of Berlin, the Prussians came west by the thousand. Dobbin would have me turn them away. That I cannot do.”

So saying he put his shoulder to a studded oak door and they entered the great hall of the schloss—a room designed to seat and entertain a hundred aristocratic guests and which now housed a hundred refugees—
Flüchtling
s, like her.

It reminded her too sharply of Belsen, a swelling sea of neglected humanity—an idea she fought at once. Many might be hungry, but none of these were starving, none of these were dying. Many waved or shouted greetings to von Tripps as they passed through, out of the far door and into the garden. More refugees, makeshift tents by the dozen, women cooking over open fires, children running naked, dogs lazing in the summer sun. What they had brought with them as they fled west amazed Nell. Fleeing for your life, you pack up a brass-ended double bed and a couple of long-armed bed-warming pans. Just a few kilometres ahead of the Russian horde, you load the portraits of your ancestors onto the cart.

“For myself, and for the ‘heroes’ too, I keep half a dozen rooms. My own bedroom and the old kitchen. My bedroom would house a few dozen more I know, but there are limits to altruism.”

Even as he said it she knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t mean a word of it.

“Were you in the last war?”

“I was. Under von Kluck on the Western Front. I lost my leg at Soignies in August 1914. The war was scarcely three weeks old and it was over for me. There are no one-legged cavalry officers.”

So saying, he struck his left leg with his walking stick and Nell heard the clunk of wood on metal.

“Sawn off above the knee.”

§83

Von Tripps cooked for them all.

Dobbin and Sharpe sat and bickered while he did so.

It was her second decent meal that week. Chicken stewed with onions, tarragon, and garlic. Enough garlic to make Sharpe pull a face. He ate it all the same. Three of the
Flüchtling
s joined them—three men as old as von Tripps himself, which Nell put at sixty-something, silent beneath their Hindenburg moustaches, enduring the pidgin German of Dobbin and Sharpe, eating everything that was set in front of them.

As Nell cleared away, neither of the Englishmen so much as moving to help her, Sharpe set out a deck of cards on the vast, scarred kitchen table.

“Wanna see a trick?” he said to the
Flüchtling
s
.

Von Tripps translated.

They looked at each other. Faces breaking into grins as though nothing had amused them in recent memory.

“This is called ‘Find the Lady.’”

He took only three cards from the deck—the eight of clubs, the three of diamonds and the queen of spades. Held up all three for everyone to see.

“Now yer see it, now yer don’t.”

Nell watched from the sink as his hands flew across the table, juggling the cards from left to right and back again.

“
Nun
,” said Sharpe. “
Wo ist die Dame?
”

The
Flüchtling
s
looked at one another again, a few mutterings Nell could not quite hear, then the old man in the middle put his finger down on the card on the far right with a look of utter confidence on his face.

Sharpe flipped up the three of diamonds. The other two laughed out loud at the consternation of the first, slapped him on the back, revelling in his mistake.

“
Wieder
,” they said to Sharpe, “
Wieder
.”

Nell sat next to von Tripps and watched the hand deceive the eye again.

The next
Flüchtling
duly picked out the eight of clubs, and the laughter spread around the table. One voice startled her—amid the English, horsey snorts of Dobbin, the restrained chuckle of von Tripps, and the uproarious satisfaction of the
Flüchtling
s, one voice stood out, high and clear and unknown to her. It was her own. And she realised she had not laughed . . . had not laughed since some time in the autumn of 1944.

This cheeky, pushy, careless young corporal of the Seaforth Highlanders had made her laugh.

He winked at her. One brown eye closing.

Two more rounds and no one found the lady.

“
Genug
. I am for my bed,” von Tripps said.

“Me too,” said Dobbin. And to Nell, “If you find yourself alone with Becks, young lady, don’t play for money. He’s a wide boy. Another bloody cockney wide boy.”