Then We Take Berlin (41 page)

Yuri was sitting on a case of Jack Daniel’s. The
Eishaus
was stacked with booty. They’d brought the whiskey in by padding their jerry cans. Forty-eight bottles a trip—trips beyond counting.

Frank grinned.

“Look under your own ass, Yuri. You’re sitting on twelve bottles of the best.”

Yuri didn’t look as angry as he sounded, and it seemed to Wilderness to be merely tactical to be angry with them.

“OK, bastards. But there is a scratchy-my-back here.”

“What kind of scratchy your back?”

“Penicillin.”

“Penicillin?”

“Sure . . . we got clap running riot in Red Army. Everybody pissing razor blades. Hadn’t you heard?”

They’d never dealt in drugs or medicines of any kind.

Wilderness turned to Frank.

“Can we get penicillin?”

“I guess so. Turns out we’re stockpiling everything against the day these guys cut off the West . . . you and the top brass seem to think alike on that score . . . so it stands to reason we’re stockpiling Band-Aids and aspirin . . . and probably penicillin.”

“Good good.”

“And you guys do mean to cut us off don’t you, Yuri?”

“Da, da . . . but the English have a phrase for it.”

“They do?”

“Business as usual.”

§134

Driving back Wilderness said, “You’d better act as banker from now on.”

“What?”

“I need to rake in every reichsmark we have. It’ll all be easier if you take everything, spend it, stockpile . . . and collect the dollars off Yuri.”

“Jeez . . . you think our guys will go for that?”

“They’ll do what I tell ’em. Besides, the pickings will be too good to resist.”

“Still thinking big, huh?”

“Is there any point in thinking small?”

“How long do you think this Russian stunt will last?”

“Dunno. But maybe you’re right, maybe it’s a stunt—I prefer to call it a dummy run. Could last a week, could last a month. They’re testing us. But when currency reform comes in it’ll be real.”

§135

The little blockade fizzled out in ten days.

Two months later, on June 18, the deutschmark was introduced by the Western zones of Germany. It was to be valid in all the sectors of Berlin, but the Russians refused to accept its validity. Something resembling panic preceded this, as Berliners went on a forty-eight hour spending spree—paid every bill, bought any object to unload the potentially worthless reichsmark. By then, Frank had divested the
Schieber
s of most of their reichsmarks, and had sheds out at Tempelhof filled to the rafters with what he called “the solid stuff,” as opposed to “the folding stuff.”

On June 24 the Russians blockaded Berlin for real. No stunt. No dummy run. Road and rail links to the Western sectors closed and only the air lanes remained open.

On June 26 the airlift began. The British and the Americans flew in everything. From coal to candy. RAF Yorks and USAF Dakotas buzzed by Russian fighters in the biggest game of “chicken” since the end of the war.

The sound of planes landing and taking off replaced the sound of gunfire as the ambient noise beneath Berlin skies, and the black market rose from the dead and exploded like an atomic bomb.

§136

Nell had none of this and dutifully accepted her free allocation of deutschmarks and exchanged her reichsmarks at the set rate. It exasperated Wilderness. He had grown accustomed to her po-face, it was part and parcel of her unshakable virtue, but he could not understand the lack of self-interest.

“Gypping yourself is just stupid.”

Nell did not understand the word.

“Gyp . . . from Gyppo . . . you know, Gypsy? Swindling yourself.”

“How quaint. Does English use other races as derogatory verbs?”

“Well . . . yeah . . . Jew means much the same thing.”

Nell was appalled.

“So . . . I Gyp and Jew myself. So fucking what?”

He’d never heard her swear in English before.

The same day, round about seven in the evening he got home to find a meal prepared from civilian rations. Meagre and unsustaining, but corresponding roughly to what Berliners now had to live off. Less than they had before the blockade. All the canned food Wilderness had brought her was piled up on the dresser.

“From now on,” she said. “We live like Berliners. We eat like Berliners. We are Berliners.”

“Every Berliner buys hooky stuff on the black market. You don’t eat hooky food and buy hooky clobber, you’re not a Berliner. Everybody has a
pajok
. Everybody!”

The word hit home. It was tempting to ask her what she’d do if Yuri turned up with a
pajok
of Russian goodies off-ration, but he didn’t.

Nell said, “Very well. You may bring me eggs.”

So po-faced, so patrician, even as her virtue admitted a vice.

“Eggs? Bleedin’ eggs, is that all?”

“Yes.”

That night as she slept and he didn’t, he could smell the scent he had given her—L’Aimant by Coty. When she stopped wearing that he’d believe her.

In the morning he woke to find thin ersatz coffee,
Blumenkaffee
, a confection of roast acorns and who-knows-what, bubbling gently on the hob.

He tipped it away and made Java.

§137

It was late July. Almost a month into the new game with the new Russian rules. Demand was high. They could have sold anything and everything twice over in the West, and still the demand from the East to be satisfied. The taps ran dry, the coal ran out and the electricity came and went like the man in the weather house. Still, they made money.

It was hard not to feel complacent.

Drinking alone was a strange pleasure. Wilderness hardly ever chose it—it arose if others were late and if no one in Paradies pinged him through the pneumatic tubes. That, after all, is what they were there for, and more often than not used not person to group or group to group but solitary individual to solitary individual. He had come to think of it as civilised. When the social code, the sexual code, dwindled to a tongue-tied mess, this was clear and direct. He’d even heard of men receiving notes as simple as “
Möchten Sie ficken?
” Fancy a fuck?

He heard a cylinder land and reached up for it.

Still creaming it, kid? You have to admit your Uncle Joe is good for business. The business of the USSR is business . . . ah. No that was some other guy, some other country. LT.

The club was half-empty, he could see clearly to Major Tosca’s table, her face buried in a book. She must have known he’d got the message by now, but didn’t so much as glance back, so he concluded she’d said what she had to say. If she wanted him to come over, she’d look up, smile, blow him a phony kiss. She didn’t.

Frank arrived. He was getting fatter. Sweating through that beautifully tailored uniform in the summer heat. Perhaps Frank’s pleasure was strictly food and drink. After that first girl he’d bought with soap, there’d never been so much as a mention of a woman, and if you couldn’t get picked up in Paradies, you couldn’t get picked up anywhere. He made tough-guy, “we’re all men of the world,” almost backslapping crude jokes about Wilderness and Breakheart, as he insisted on calling Nell—as though somehow the sexuality, the scent of their relationship had spread to him and those around him, like the undisguisable, acrid smell of a lubricated condom—but that stance just masked his celibacy. Wilderness figured Frank was one for hookers. Since everything was a commodity to Frank, he probably preferred to buy his women. It was neat and business-like. He would enjoy haggling. And no messy emotions to contend with. Eddie? Eddie was a different case. Women would just clutter up his ordered life. There were times Wilderness thought that he and Frank might well be the worst things that had ever happened to Eddie. They’d taken his little fiddle and . . . and Eddie had been quite happy with the scale on which he’d fiddled.

Frank summoned a waiter. Beer and wurst. Pile on the pounds.

“You’re not eating?”

“Too hot to eat.”

“What’s that you’re drinking?”

“White wine. An Orvieto from Italy.”

“Where in Italy?”

“I thought you were an Italian-American?”

“Every American’s a hyphenated American. Don’t mean diddly. So happens Spoleto used to be Spoletowski or some such gobbledygook. Who gives a fuck? I’m a damn Yankee. Let me taste.”

“Pity. I was about to tell you this was made only twenty-five miles from Spoleto.”

“Showing off your Reader’s Digest
Book of Facts
again, eh kid?”

“Nah. I’m educated I am.”

Wilderness pushed the glass across the table. Frank sipped at it and pulled face.

“How can you drink this piss? Tinted water. Goes to show . . . if they don’t make it in Milwaukee.”

“Ah . . . but you’re not a social climber, Frank.”

Frank missed or ignored the irony, just as Eddie sauntered in. A smile upon his face, glee withheld, a surprise in the offing.

Frank got the waiter’s attention and held up two fingers, doubling his beer order.

“What’s got you?” Wilderness said.

“What day is it today?”

“I dunno, twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth.”

“No . . . today is the day we all enter cloud cuckoo land . . . the dwarves and unicorns have finally landed.”

He held up a 5RM note. Something white stuck to it. No bigger than a postage stamp.

“This is the new Russki Mark. Новая валюта.
Novaya
Valyuta
.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Issued today. Already got a nickname . . .
Tapetenmark
.”

Through his first mouthful of bread and wurst, Frank said, “What?”

“Wallpaper, Frank.”

Eddie was grinning like a Cheshire cat as the punchline hove in sight. He waved the note in front of them—a mother’s hankie shaken in the direction of a departing train and child. The white sticker fell off and floated down onto the table.

First Wilderness and then Frank, swallowing hastily to avoid choking but still showering them with crumbs, burst out laughing.

Eddie grinned from ear to ear.

“They just took the crappy old ostmark and stuck a coupon on it. You know what they make the glue from?”

Wilderness could not speak for giggles. Frank was spraying out crumbs and wurst faster than a Maxim gun.

“Taters,” Eddie concluded.

He took another dozen notes from his pockets and waved them in the air and a shower of confetti covered the table.

Tosca looked up from her book. The stern librarian annoyed by a whisper.

Wilderness snatched a note out of the air.

“I don’t believe it. I don’t bloody believe it. It’s pure Mickey Mouse. What a bunch of clowns. Potato paste. I don’t bloody believe it. I used to make that to stick pictures in my scrapbook when I was a nipper. They all fell off too.”

Then, the merest shift of gear, a moment of high seriousness.

“Frank, we’re not accepting this crap are we?”

“Are you kidding. Dollars only. You think I don’t listen to you? Dollars only, you said. On the nail. Yuri wouldn’t dare offer us shit like this.”

§138

Nell had known Ernst Reuter as long as she could remember. He and her father had worked alongside each other at City Hall. Since she returned to Berlin she had not seen him, but then, who had she seen? He had been elected mayor, but the Russians had refused to acknowledge this. He was de facto mayor of West Berlin—a place that didn’t quite exist. The Russians could obstruct and divide—they could in all probability assassinate him or simply kidnap him off the streets as they did with hundreds of others, but they didn’t . . . and short of that they could not shut him up.

That summer, the summer of the roaring planes and the power cuts, Reuter addressed Berlin in the open air half a dozen times. Each time the crowd was bigger. In a crowd it is impossible to tell whether you are one of three thousand or thirty thousand. Later on newspapers will tell you—and none of them will agree.

Late in August, Nell stood at the eastern end of the Tiergarten in front of the Reichstag. She had learnt of this meeting from one of the American RIAS vans that toured the British and American sectors, using loudspeakers to create street-corner radio.

Reuter was not wearing his beret—his trademark as recognisable as Churchill’s cigar and FDR’s cigarette holder. Today he looked less like a bohemian and more like a leader, even to the carnation in his buttonhole.

“People of this world, people in America, in England, in France, in Italy! Look at this city and recognise that you must not give up this city, you must not give up its people . . . Berliners don’t want to be an object of exchange . . . we can’t be traded in, we can’t be negotiated and no one can sell us . . . In this city a bulwark, an outpost of freedom has been erected, which nobody can give up with impunity. Anyone who would give up this city and its people would give up a whole world and even more he would give up himself . . . People of the world! You also should do your duty and help us through the times that lie ahead of us, not just with the roar of your planes . . . but with the steadfast and indestructible guarantee of the common ideals that can secure our future and secure yours. People of the world, look at Berlin! And people of Berlin, be assured we will win this fight.”