Then We Take Berlin (29 page)

Very few people passed. Those that did looked at her without concern, more interested in the bicycle than the girl. Ten minutes passed, and an old woman was coming towards her pushing a pram, her head wrapped in a scarf, her body swathed in layers of ragged skirts, her hands in thick leather gloves. A coating of ashen dust from head to foot. She got within ten feet of Nell before Nell recognised her.

“Mama?”

Could this old woman, this tramp, possibly be her mother?

“Mama?”

Marie Burkhardt pulled off her headscarf in a shower of grit. Her face was brown and dry, her eyes dull, and her lips cracked.

“Oh God, Nell. Why have you come back?”

§88

Marie yanked on a string and the light flickered on. A single, unshaded overhead bulb. Nell had been expecting squalor. A hovel. It wasn’t. Her mother had turned some neighbour’s cellar into a home. Nell found herself trying to remember which neighbour—Herr Obermann who’d vanished into
Nacht und Nebel
in 1942? Herr Schumann who’d been killed in an air raid in ’43?

She recognised none of the furniture. At least none of it as being the furniture she had grown up with. She recognised all of it obliquely. The sofa looked like the one Frau Wagner had had at No. 35. The spiky plant in the brass pot looked like Frau Graz’s and the table it stood on had surely been made by Herr Kaufmann for his wife’s birthday in 1939. Then she realised. All lives had been rearranged. The pieces were the same, they just weren’t in the same place on the board. And the lives that owned those pieces had been contained, discrete—now blown open, and blown apart. What lives had been spared salvaged what had been spared. One day perhaps, some enterprising child might procure a long stick and knock her rag doll off the mantelpiece and claim it as her own—and someone seeing this might wonder whatever happened to Frau Burkhardt’s little girl.

But her eyes drew her inevitably from the trivia of memory to the one fact that mattered. It was a woman’s home—no trace of a man anywhere.

Marie was sitting on the edge of the sofa, head down.

When she looked up she answered the unasked question.

“Your father is dead. In all probability dead.”

“How?”

“A Russian bullet most likely.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere near the Reich Chancellery. The last report I ever had of him was somewhere on Wilhlemstraße on May Day. The Volkssturm fighting off Russian tanks with cutlery and broomhandles. All in the name of a Führer who was already dead.”

“But . . .”

“No, Nell, there is no body. No one saw him die. But who could live through that?”

“And you?”

“It’s like this. I do what I have to do to get by. I stole the pram. The first thing I have ever stolen in my life, but not the last. The potatoes the British tip in the street in a free-for-all. I find a woman can punch as hard as a man. I give more black eyes than I get . . . ”

“And?”

“I get by.”

“Then
we
shall get by.”

“Oh God—the inexorable logic of being Nell Burkhardt.”

And her head dropped again.

Nell knelt, wrapped her arms around her mother. Marie stayed rigid, flexed herself against the alienness of embrace, and as Nell squeezed the harder softened and relented, her arms around her daughter’s shoulders, her tears running down her cheeks.

“When you were little,” she said between sobs. “When you were no more than nine or ten, and you were beginning to understand what was happening to Germany, to us all, to us as a family, there were no tears, no self-pity, just your resolve. You said ‘Mama, we will survive and we’ll be safe, we’ll be safe for ever.’ Is this surviving? Is this safety? Is this for ever?”

And nothing would staunch her tears.

§89

Two rooms in a cellar amounted to luxury.

Marie made up a bed for Nell on the sofa.

In the morning she dressed in her protective layers again, wrapped the headscarf around her hair, put on her rawhide gloves.

“I am a
Trümmerfrau
. I clear rubble. It gets me the highest ration the British will allow. The lowest ration Berliners call the death card. It is hard work, but . . .”

“I can do it too?”

“You won’t have any choice. It’s compulsory. But, I can get you on a gang with me. You’ll need papers, you’ll need to register with the British for your ration card. See your Uncle Erno. He hasn’t moved. He’s survived everything. He’ll help you. I have no time now. I have cleared Kantstraße and Leibnizstraße . . . and Berlin runs out of philosophers . . . so I’m on Bismarckstraße. But I must go now.”

After a cup of ersatz coffee—“always know the price of coffee” echoing in her mind—and a cold wash standing with her feet in a bowl—Nell set off in search of Uncle Erno.

As she crossed sectors at Lietzenburger Straße she could almost swear the sound of the wolf whistles changed. On the north side of the street it seemed to her that the Tommies whistled at least a semitone lower than the Amis on the south side.

Erno was not a blood relative. He was an old friend of her father’s. Nor was Erno Schreiber his real name. Long, long ago he had hidden his real identity, his Jewish name and ancestry and become a “ghost.” The Nazis had never found him.

He lived on Grünetümmlerstraße in Wilmersdorf in the American Sector, surrounded by books, newspapers, and the tools of his trade—forger.

Nell had no idea how old Erno was. He had always looked sixty, but it was likely that he was not much older than her father—who was a child of the nineties and dead at fifty-one.

On an August morning, the heat of the day already rising, Erno had the windows closed and a small fire going in the iron stove—always something to be burnt, always something incriminating to be disposed of. Always a light on, in a room that was pools of light and pits of darkness.

He showed no surprise as he opened the door to her. Kissed her on the forehead, said, “I’d have known if you were dead. I should have felt it in my bones. I live, you live . . .”

A ginger tomcat wove its way between her legs.

“And no one ate Hegel,” Erno added.

Over more acorn coffee Nell recounted the last nine months to Erno, and at the end reiterated, “I lied to the British about my age. It is a lie I wish to hold on to. It is a time to be a grown-up. Sixteen doesn’t seem grown-up. Eighteen does. Besides, I’m tall for my age.”

“Quite. But only a sixteen-year-old would say that. So . . . you want an identity card dating you to . . . when exactly?”

“January 14, 1927.”

“Consider it done.”

“Mama says you will tell me how to register with the British for my ration card?”

“Why bother. I can give you that as well. Will you be a
Trümmerfrau
too? Then a grade two card.”

“Who gets grade one?”

“Would you believe the Russians reserved that for artists? They cannot feed us, they cannot house us, they cannot flush away our ordure . . . but they’ve already put on their first opera.”

§90

There was one trace of “man” in the cellar. Ferreting around she found her father’s best suit, not the one he had worn to the office—she assumed he had gone into battle wearing that, that he had died wearing it.

On her first day as a
Trümmerfrau,
Nell rolled up the trouser legs and drew the belt tight into her waist. The symbolism was not lost on her mother.

“Deutschland, Deutschland—who wears the trousers now?”

The British had laid track down the centre of Bismarckstraße, a miniature railway, tilting steel wagons that could be loaded from either side and then pushed along the East–West Axis all the way into the Tiergarten, where Berlin was being tipped.

A morning of loading these and Nell was exhausted. Marie switched her to cleaning bricks, a job that could be done sitting down at the rate of twelve reichsmarks per thousand. Nell lost count within half an hour.

Arriving home, she craved sleep, which she would most certainly get, and hot water, which she most certainly wouldn’t.

The electricity was off. A candlelit meal of boiled potatoes and cabbage—seasoned with fresh parsley—and tinned beef stew. Nell eating slowly, but not as slowly as her mother.

“Mama—the beef. About the beef. Do you buy on the black market?”

“I told you. I do what I have to do to get by.”

“When I found the suit . . . well, there were six tins of beef.”

Marie finished her meal in silence. Then . . .

“Do you remember how Goebbels would warn us all about the Russians, the Slav beast, the Mongol horde . . . all that nonsense?”

“On the radio? Yes. Of course.”

“It wasn’t nonsense. It was more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Russians took Berlin almost four months ago, the British did not arrive until six weeks ago. In between the Russians did as they wished. ‘
Uhri, Uhri, Uhri
.’”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“It was the first word any of them uttered. Quite possibly one word in a vocabulary of only three. They were obsessed with watches. I know no one who now owns a wristwatch. I saw one Ivan roll up his sleeves and show off a dozen or more on each arm to his comrades.”

Nell could see what was coming.

“And the other two words?”

“They were
Frau
and
komm
.”

“And . . .”

“And I did what I had to do to get by.”

“Were . . .”

“Don’t ask.”

Marie shook her head as though dislodging an insect, held her head up, lowered it to meet her daughter eye to eye.

“One way, possibly the only way, to avoid being taken by force is to give yourself voluntarily. Yuri is my protector, Yuri is my carer, Yuri is my breadwinner,
Yuri ist . . . mein Mann.
”

“Yuri? Who’s Yuri?”

§91

The indeterminacy of his uniform was at odds with the brightness in his eyes. His eyes were deep sea blue. Was he green or was he brown? Nell decided he was green. A little green goblin of a man, with eyes that shone and laughter lines that could turn his face into a walnut, somewhere between a giggle and a guffaw.

It was Friday night. They had a weekend to themselves. He sat on the sofa next to Marie, took her hand in both of his. The gentleness of the gesture was striking. It occurred to Nell that her mother had taken up with this man within days of her father’s death, but the obvious affection he had for her pushed the thought further back in her mind where it might linger without too much troubling her.

His German was good. Her Russian was better.

He told her he was a major in the NKVD and came from a small village just outside Gorky, the city on the Volga some three hundred kilometres east of Moscow—hometown of the author in whose honour the USSR had renamed the city from its original Nizhny Novgorod. And no, he’d never met Maxim Gorky. He rather thought he might have died.

“I love your mother. For my work I am often away, often in Moscow. But no Soviet soldier will touch her. No Soviet soldier will harm her or you.”

From somewhere Yuri produced half a kilo of fresh loin of pork. It occurred to Nell to wonder what Prussian peasant might have been robbed of his pig to furnish this meal, but quite obviously it did not occur to her mother.

Over dinner Yuri told her of his childhood in Gorky, how his father had died when he was ten, how they had given up the farm and moved to the city, how he had been twelve at the time of the revolution and already a party member. How at nineteen, shortly after the death of Lenin, he had been summoned to Moscow, taught English and German and told to get ready for the next German war.

Limited as the conversation was, there was also an apparent rough charm to the man. With the meal over, Yuri and her mother retired to the bedroom, and Nell made up her bed on the sofa and decided not to think about her father. Instead she dreamt of the old woman she had met on the road—Mutti at her sewing machine, turning Nazi flags into pantaloons. Doing what she had to do to get by.

Mutti drew the twin threads from under the silver foot of the machine, snipped them with her scissors, threw the pants into a wicker basket on top of a dozen others, and then held out her hand to Nell.

“
Gib mir Tabak
,” she said.

§92

The war was over. Everybody told her so. And still people died in their tens of thousands. Cholera, typhus, vengeance . . . starvation.

The winter of 1945–1946 in Berlin became known as Starvation Winter.

Nell and Marie had cleared Bismarckstraße, had gone on to clear Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße and by December were on Brandenburgische Straße. Berlin would never run out of streets with high-sounding names, nor would it ever run out of rubble. Nell had heard one of the British officers say that it would take twelve or fifteen years to clear the streets and another twenty to rebuild. She had heard others say that Berlin would not be rebuilt, that Germany would be returned to a peasant economy without cities or industry. It did not strain the metaphor too much, brick after brick after brick, to say that Berlin had returned to the Stone Age.