Then We Take Berlin (30 page)

It was neither stone nor starvation that killed Marie Burkhardt. It was wood.

They would pile up timber found among the brick and concrete to take home and feed into the stove at the end of the day. It was dark before five, and the
Trümmerfrauen
stopped work when the light went. Gathering up her pile in semidarkness a splinter pierced the grey muscle at the base of Marie’s right thumb, between the glove and the wrist. It went deep, the tip emerging on the palm of her hand.

Being unable to pull it out, she snapped off all but half an inch.

“I’ll be fine,” she said to Nell. “I’ve had worse than this. We’ll get home, find the tweezers and you can pull it out. Remember how you used to cry when I pulled thorns from your hand?”

Nell could not get it all out. The splinter had fragmented inside the wound.

In the morning Marie felt unwell, but insisted she would go to work.

By five in the evening she was weak and delirious.

Nell got her home, put her to bed, and ran to Erno’s.

He came back with every medicine he had and a thermometer.

“Thirty nine point nine. My dear, your mother is seriously ill. This is beyond aspirin. We need a doctor.”

“Are there any left?”

“Köhler, in Pestalozzistraße. I’ll get him.”

Dr. Köhler seemed to Nell to have survived by being too old to have attracted any attention from either side. She thought he must be over eighty.

Marie felt nothing as he opened the wound, removed the fragments, and cleaned out the pus. Her brow ran with sweat, and her head rolled from side to side, and she felt nothing.

Köhler and Erno went into a huddle of whispers, which Nell would not allow.

“I’m not a child. You must tell me whatever it is.”

Köhler took off his spectacles, made a show of wiping the lenses.

“Without treatment, your mother will die.”

“What treatment?”

“There are new drugs. The British have them, the Amis too. Antibiotics. Fungal cultures that kill bacteria. Your mother has a bacterial infection. It must be stopped before it reaches her heart.”

“All that . . . from a splinter?”

“Yes. The body does not discriminate between a splinter and a bullet, although a bullet might have been cleaner. I don’t have such drugs, no German doctor has. They keep them for themselves. There’s no point in even asking.”

Her mother groaned loudly. Nell looked at her and had one thought.

“Do the Russians have these drugs too?”

“I don’t know,” Köhler replied. “I really don’t.”

And if they did? Nell had not seen Yuri for at least three days, and had no idea where to find him. She stayed home. Erno went in search of Yuri and could not find him. He asked every black market
Schieber
he knew, German, American, British, for the “miracle-drug penicillin” and found no sellers.

Thirty-six hours later, around six in the morning, Nell was woken from her sleep on the rug beside the bed by the sound of her mother’s voice.

“Max.”

Nell lit the candle.

Her mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, bolt upright, eyes wide.

“Max,” she said again, stretched out her arm to Nell and died.

§93

They buried her at the Luisenkirchhof, on the far side of Sophie-Charlotten-Straße—yet another street that Marie had cleared of rubble. Rubble would be her only memorial.

Nell thought she had prepared for this. Death had never lost its mystery or its sting, but it had lost its novelty the first day she set foot in Belsen. And from that day until the day she had seen her mother wheeling her pram down Pfefferstraße she had been aware that she might never see either of her parents again. She had crossed Lower Saxony on foot and by bike, with no expectations beyond the unquenchable simplicity of hope.

Hope, she found, had died with her mother.

She lay on the sofa, inert. Nothing moved but the blinking of her eyes.

When at last he spoke she realised she had no idea how long she had lain like this or how long Erno had been in the room. Had he stepped into her dream or she into his?

“Nell. Let us go now.”

“What?”

“Don’t stay in this cellar. The room above me is now empty. One room, but a big room, on the top floor where there is light and air. Don’t stay in this cellar.”

Inertia ruled. She let Erno do as he wished. Let him grant her light and air. Far from the back of her mind she knew why he was moving her. If she stayed in the room where her mother had died then death would be forever clutching at her skirt. And hope would really die.

§94

It was two weeks later, a week before Christmas, Nell installed on the top floor at Grünetümmlerstraße but scarcely settled, when Yuri reappeared in all his greenness. The goblin at her threshold. His blue eyes clear and sad.

He handed her the gift he had always brought her mother. A
pajok
—a food parcel.

She wondered if men had no visible emotions. She could not remember that she had ever seen one cry before Belsen.

Yuri wasn’t crying. He stood, it seemed to her, respectfully—holding his hat in both hands.

“Erno has told me all,” he said. “Прошу прощения. I am sorry. I was in Moscow.”

Nell set the
pajok
down on the table, held her hands clasped in front of her. They were mirrors now. Two respectful strangers with no clear idea of where the boundary lay.

“I will not leave you. I will not see you go hungry. I will not leave you. I will bring you
pajok
s.”

It was more than a statement—it was his manifesto. The terms of the relationship.

“You are kind, Yuri. But I am not my mother. I will not sleep with you for this.”

“And I will not ask you to.”

§95

Berlin
: 1947

It was love at first sight. He and Berlin were made for each other. He took to it like a rat to a sewer.

In the new year of 1947 Burne-Jones met him for breakfast in the Atlantic. Between the crisp bacon and the reconstituted scrambled egg Burne-Jones slid a military buff envelope and another strip of wool across the table to him—corporal’s stripes—the mark of Beelzebub.

“You’ve earned them.”

Wilderness thought he’d earned a damn sight more than that.

He tore open the envelope. A travel warrant to Berlin. The Silk Stocking Express.

“What’s the job?”

“Well . . .”

“More fuckin’ fragebogeys?”

“Inevitably so, but nothing like the pile you’ve just gone through. And this time you’ll be number one. But you’ll be doing a lot more interpreting . . . and some driving.”

“I still haven’t passed a test.”

“Well . . . you managed not to prang my MG in Cambridge, didn’t you? Mind you, a lot more gears on a Land Rover.”

This was goading. They hadn’t mentioned the MG in ages.

Wilderness decided not to take the bait and said simply, “But that’s not all.”

“No, it’s not. I’ll be requiring your special talents from time to time. Not that you can or should regard everything else as a cover . . .”

“’S’OK. I get the picture.”

§96

The Silk Stocking Express was crowded that Saturday afternoon. He almost wished he’d put on his Welsh Guards outfit and been able to demand a seat, but it was too precious, too useful to risk getting busted over a railway journey and a warrant and a uniform that did not match, so he sat on his kit bag in the corridor with a thousand other erks. If the train was heated he couldn’t tell. He’d hung on to the flying jacket Johnnie Blackwall had given him on the flight out to Hamburg, slipped his arms inside it and shoved his hands into his armpits. With depressing regularity someone would fart or belch, the corridor would stink, and Wilderness began to wonder if he was the only person whose guts were in tune—but then, lavatories being frozen as well as everything else, once in a while a window would go down, the cold, clean air would knife in and a bag of shit got thrown out, proving that he wasn’t. “First we bomb your cities flat, then we shower you in shit.”

A stout, misleadingly miserable-looking lance bombardier of the Royal Artillery met him at the Charlottenburg station.

“Welcome to Bizonia,” said Eddie.

“Marx Brothers, right? Groucho singing ‘Hail Bizonia.’”

“That was Freedonia, Joe. This is Bizonia, as of last week. A fairy-tale kingdom. Look out for dwarves, unicorns, and a thousand tons of ’ooky fags. I’m your driver. Been sent to take you wherever you want to go, seeing as you are now a high and mighty corporal.”

“What a turn up for the book. How long have you been in Berlin?”

“Since last August.”

That was galling. Wilderness knew he’d drawn the short straw with Hamburg—but somehow Eddie got posted to Berlin. A city where you could smell money on the breeze.

This was not a breeze. This was a wind that cut to the bone. Suddenly the train seemed like warmth. It was far below freezing, all extremities tingled with cold and his breath hung in the air in billowing nimbus clouds.

“I got the canvas up, but the car’s still like an iceberg on wheels. The sooner we get to our digs the better.”

“Our digs?”

“Yeah, we’re sharing till the next lucky sod gets posted home. We could walk from here, it’s that close, but we’d be like abominable wotsits by the time we got there.”

Eddie drove them along Kantstraße and into Fasanenstraße at the north end, under the railway bridge to a battered five-storey apartment block.

Wilderness had no reaction to the state of the city, except “you’ve seen one ruin, you’ve seen ’em all.”

As they passed another gang of
Trümmerfrauen
Wilderness said, “‘If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year, do you suppose,’ the Walrus said, ‘that they could get it clear?’”

Eddie said, “My old dad used to read that to me at bedtime. And I think the answer’s no. Come back in ten or twenty years’ time, there’ll still be gangs of women sweeping away bits of Berlin. I don’t think there’s a hole big enough to tip it all into. There are three words that sum up life in Berlin, and for all I know in the whole of soddin’ Germany—
Trümmer
,
kaputt
, and
Ersatz
. Everything is either rubbish, broken, or fake.”

The room they shared was on the top floor. As Wilderness gazed around, Eddie went on, “D’you know, they drink tea made from apple peel and coffee made from acorns. They call the coffee
Muckefuck
. It’s the only German word I know of that needs no translation.”

“
Muckefuck
?”

“And that also describes the taste pretty well. Fortunately . . .” Eddie picked a plain brown paper packet off the dresser. “Fortunately we have . . . best NAAFI dark roast, none of your instant and none of your acorns. I’ll put the kettle on.”

He disappeared behind the wooden partition that separated the two beds. Wilderness looked at the room. It was a jolt down from the Atlantic Hotel, but it was warm—a sputtering gas fire set into the chimney breast—and clean—anywhere Eddie lived would be, he lived by order, everything in its place—and light—tall, slender windows that stretched almost floor to ceiling.

Wilderness dropped his kit bag on the bed, sloughed off the sheepskin and his blouse.

Eddie was staring at the shoulder holster.

“Wossup?”

“Never seen one before. Standard issue, is it?”

“I got it from the armourer, so I suppose so. In Hamburg everyone carried a gun outside the base.”

“Not here they don’t. It’s compulsory in theory, but the MPs don’t give a toss about interpreters and medics. Just the combat blokes. I haven’t carried a gun since November. Just as well. Too many opportunities to start World War Three.”

“Good. I was never crazy about having it.”

He pulled at the top drawer in the tallboy. It was empty.

“This one mine?”

“Yep.”

He wrapped the straps around the holster and dumped the gun in the drawer.

Eddie said, “Makes you wonder what Burne-Jones has in mind for you doesn’t it?”

It had and it did, but Wilderness was never going to say that.

“I suppose you’re hungry?”

“Yeah. There was nothing on the train, and if there had been—no way of getting to it short of throwing blokes off the train.”

“Pilchards on toast?”

“I don’t want to pinch your ration, Ed.”

“Ration. Bollocks. I don’t do rationing.”

He disappeared behind the partition once more and returned with a pot of aromatic black coffee and a sixteen ounce can of pilchards.