Then We Take Berlin (33 page)

Sharpe!

“The quickness of the ’and deceives the eye . . .”

Sharpe!

She stood up, in the middle of whatever rubbish Werner was uttering and walked around the partition to the other banquette.

Sharpe!

Three British soldiers were sitting around the table with half-drunk beers and scrappy piles of reichsmarks in front of them, poised as a fourth in the pale blue of the Royal Air Force worked his huckster’s magic, hands flashing across the cards.

One of the soldiers was Swift Eddie Clark, who’d worked at Schlüterstraße from time to time. She didn’t know the other two, and the man in RAF blue wasn’t Beckwith Sharpe. Too young, too handsome, too tall. He simply sounded like Sharpe.

She was about to apologise for the interruption when he looked straight at her. Fair hair and light blue eyes. A beguiling rogue’s smile. Were all cockneys charming rogues? Was Sharpe simply a blueprint for the London millions?

“May I?” she said.

Eddie pulled out a chair for her.

“You can’t beat Joe, Miss Burkhardt. He’s the gaffer at this.”

Silently adding “gaffer” to her English vocabulary, she took the deck of cards the one called Joe was holding out to her, picked out the queen of hearts, a seven and a nine and held them up for all to see.

“
Nun, meine Herren. Mal sehen, wer die Dame finden kann
.”

The Cockney spoke.

“In English, Miss. Eddie and I are OK, but Pie Face here hardly speaks English let alone German.”

Nell concluded the one not laughing was Pie Face. Besides, he had a face like a pie. Flat and puffy at the same time.

“
Entschuldigung
. And that will be my last word in German.”

She held the red queen and the seven in her left hand, the nine in her right, palms up. Palms down and her hands moved faster than a Paganini variation.

Pie Face said, “It’s Toy Town money after all. Five doodads on . . .”

He put his folded note on the card nearest to him.

Eddie followed suit.

The third man said, “An’ I’m Spud” as he put his note on the centre card. How aptly the English applied their nicknames. Spud, indeed.
Kartoffelgesicht
was clumsy by comparison.

That left the blue-eyed Cockney.

The blue eyes were fixed on her.

She had no wish to give him ideas, and looked in turn at all the others, waiting for him to place his bet.

At last, like a ball decelerating on the rim of a roulette wheel, her eyes came to meet his, the imaginary ball jumping from slot to slot, clicking like a ratchet until their eyes locked. He would get the wrong idea. She knew he would.

His hand poised over the cards, then dropped a 5RM note onto the centre card.

She flipped the outside card, heard Pie Face sigh in defeat as the seven showed. Stared back at Joe.

He moved first, flipped the centre card, nine up.

Eddie said, “Bloomin’ ’eck. Joe, she beat you. I’ve never seen anyone beat you at three-card monte.”

Nell flipped the queen and raked in her winnings.

Now, Joe was not looking at her, he was looking up and over her shoulder.

She turned.

Werner was standing behind her.

“We should go now.”

“No, I want to stay. This is fun. You go if you want.”

The she heard Joe say, “Or you could join us. Doesn’t have to be three-card monte. Doesn’t have to be for money. Just a game.”

She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to be left alone with the Englishman, but she didn’t want Werner as her chaperone either.

Werner spoke as though he’d been slapped in the face and challenged to a duel with sabres.

“I do not care to sit down with the Allies, Herr Corporal.”

Nell had not even noticed Joe’s rank. The sneer as Werner said “corporal” was impossible to miss.

“Now, don’t you go bashin’ corporals. We may be a bunch of numskulls but some of us go on to run empires that last a thousand years.”

Werner turned on his heel and was gone.

The three soldiers were giggling like schoolboys. Nell was not laughing, nor was Joe.

“Sorry, is he a friend?”

“Oh yes. We do not deny our friends, do we?”

“Probably not Miss Burkhardt, but I don’t have any friends that deny Auschwitz.”

Oh God, had Werner talked that loud?

“Nell,” she said. “My name is Nell.”

§104

Nell. I’m alive! Where are you? Joe.

§105

“Can I drive you home?”

“Thank you. But I live only walking distance from here. In the American Sector. In Wilmersdorf. Near the Ludwigskirche. On Grünetümmlerstraße.”

Bit by bit there was too much detail for this to be a brush-off. Everything short of a zip code. Somewhere in there, amongst the longitude and latitude, he was certain, was an implicit invitation. Coupled to an equally distinct “not now.”

“Then I could walk you home.”

“And you, Joe. Where do you live?”

“Fasanenstraße.”

“Near the synagogue?”

“Down the street from it, or from what’s left of it. I think the RAF got there before me.”

“I’m sure they did, but in this instance they bombed a ruin. Goebbels’s SA sacked the synagogue on Kristallnacht in 1938. My father saw it burn. I went inside once. When I was a girl. It was beautiful.”

He ought to say “good night” now. He knew it. But couldn’t.

Then she said, “Why don’t I walk
you
home. You can pick up your jeep later. I’d like to see the synagogue again, even as it is.”

It was a variation on an old adage. Advice given to young ladies back in London. “It is easier to walk out of his place than to have to throw him out of yours.”

The walk was not long enough. A matter of minutes. They stared at the gaping cavern that had been the synagogue. He felt nothing and had no idea what she was feeling.

He showed her the block he and Eddie, and fifty other erks, lived in.

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and walked back down towards the Ku’damm without another word.

§106

“Eh?”

“I’m moving out.”

“I got that bit. It’s the moving in bit I can’t quite grasp.”

“Admit it, Eddie. You’d love to have the place to yourself.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“You know, we try hard enough we could have this whole conversation in song titles. About six weeks. Since the night she took us on at three-card monte in the Marrokkaner
.
”

“And Fraulein Breakheart has asked you to move in?”

“Yes. How many ways do you want me to say it.”

“I wouldn’t have said she was the type.”

“Is there a type?”

“Well . . . she’s not like us, is she?”

“What do you think she is?”

“Honest.”

Wilderness went on packing. Eddie scratched his head with an invisible hand, not moving a muscle.

“How old is she?”

“Twenty.”

“Older’n you, then?”

“I lied about me age.”

“Great start, Joe.”

Wilderness hefted his kit bag under his right arm, wrapped his left around Eddie’s shoulders.

“Eddie, we’ll be fine. You, me, Nell—fine.”

“It’s for real is it, Joe?”

“It’s very real, Ed.”

§107

Top floor. Tucked under the eaves. Flaking whitewash. Moonlight on broad elm floorboards. A brass bed held together with bent bits of wire that had creaked embarrassingly the first time they had made love and on every occasion since.

She lay curled in the crook of his arm. Mouse small.

“Why do they call you Joe?”

“It’s me name.”

“Not your real name.”

“Never really been a John. Hated being called Wilf. Joe was the compromise. The English love nicknames.”

“We like . . . diminutives.”

“Like Hansel and Gretel.”

“If you like.”

“Like Nell?”

“Oh Nell. She is the grown-up. The little girl was Lenchen. To my father I was always Lenchen. Christina Hélène von Raeder Burkhardt is such a mouthful. So I am Nell.”

“One woman called me Wilderness. I don’t think she could quite pronounce my surname. So she called me Wilderness.”

“Sounds . . . savage. You know . . . like Kaspar Hauser.”

“Maybe. Wild child. But I doubt it. Eddie calls you Fraulein Breakheart when he’s trying to make a point.”

Up on one elbow now. Eye to eye. Almost nose to nose.

“Breakheart?”

“Yep.”

“Is that who we are? Wilderness and Breakheart.”

“Yeah . . . but we’re nowhere near as bad as it makes us sound.”

She slumped into the curve of his arm again. Fell asleep. Oblivious to all the things that kept him awake. Since he arrived in Berlin not a single night had passed without the sound of gunfire. And when he nodded off, the pungent smell of carbide lamps drifting up from the street could penetrate any depth of sleep.

She stirred. Up on one elbow once more. One eye opened, one eye closed. He touched the scar beneath her left eye with his fingertips.

“My . . . war wound.”

“Tell me about it.”

So she did.

§108

Nell kept a journal. Fat, ochre-coloured with coarse onion-skin pages. It sat upon a writing slope, which in turn sat upon the small table that passed for her desk. It would not have occurred to Wilderness to look inside, curious or not. What intrigued him most was not the possibilities of content, but the pencils she used. Different colours worn to different lengths. When she had finished writing whatever it was she wrote, she would arrange the pencils on her desk in order of length. If he moved one, sooner or later he would find she had moved it back. A creature of some disorder himself, he could admire order—he admired Eddie’s sense of order, a man who matched up socks and rolled them into balls; an act for which Wilderness thought life too short—but Nell’s order prompted questions, questions without form or language. An elusive sense of belonging and not belonging, of wondering where he fitted into this woman’s life.

He thought of all the women in his life—the few. His drunken, feckless mother, who had died with a gin and lime in her hand, who had scarcely seemed to know he was alive. Mercurial, beautiful, utterly amoral Merle—a woman without a care in the world because she cared for no one and nothing, who had seduced him on a whim. Rada—a demanding, generous mind, the biggest influence in his life—trapped in her own memories even as she narrated them to him, nurturing an inconsolable, unarticulated grief that had killed her. Nell—charming, severe, funny, humourless, driven . . . above all else driven—the weight of the world on her shoulders. Standing straight, standing tall in a city which lay in pieces at her feet. A one-woman moral storm.

He came to realise that her distinction between guilt and responsibility was vital. The apartment was one room—cooker and sink at one end, bath at the other, bed and all else in the middle. It was too big for one woman by the standards of Berlin in 1947. As he learnt on their second “date,” Nell had no living relatives—a condition Wilderness thought much of Berlin might be in—and felt that to live alone, in a room of one’s own was wrong. However desirable, wrong. But for this he doubted she would have let him move in after so short a courtship.

The nearest thing she had to a relative, she told him, was the man who lived on the floor below. Erno Schreiber, and old friend of her parents. A man in his late fifties, or thereabouts. A Jew.

“How did he survive?”

“Hid his identity. Changed his name. Forged all his papers. And forged them for others. I should think there are over two hundred Jews in Berlin who owe their lives to Erno’s skill as a forger. His masterpiece was the
Bombenschein
. Rather like your
Persilschein
. It was a catch-all document stating that all other papers had been lost in an air raid.”

This intrigued him. This was his territory, far more than it was hers.

Arriving home ahead of her one day, the door to Erno Schreiber’s room was ajar. He knocked, the door swung inward on its own weight and Wilderness found himself looking at a small, white-haired man in an unravelling cardigan, hunched over a desk, writing by the light of a twenty-five watt lamp, surrounded by junk—piles of newspapers, overburdened bookshelves, the paraphernalia of the practised hoarder. Nowhere to sit, no way to move. Walkways through the junk, like looking down on the pattern of a maze.