by Jane Thynne
She had read the entire booklet twice over. She still had no idea what that meant.
* * *
—
SOMEWHERE AFTER THE CHAOS of VE Day, her name had surfaced in the mind of Henry Franklin. Franklin had joined the Control Council established under the rule of the four powers—America, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France—to run postwar Germany. Remembering Cordelia’s knowledge of German as well as French, he had summoned her to the CCG’s offices in Knightsbridge. There he suggested that she might like to accompany the Allied forces into Germany—specifically operational HQ in Berlin—as part of the de-Nazification process. Following a brief interpreter’s course in Prince’s Gardens, next to Hyde Park, she would be posted to the British sector of the city, encompassing Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg, Tiergarten, and Spandau, to assist in the lengthy bureaucracy of sorting Germans into Nazis, Nazis’ friends, and those who were only obeying orders.
After he had briefed her, Franklin took her to the American Bar at the Savoy for a pink gin.
“What happened to your sister, by the way?”
“I haven’t heard from her for years. She went to her in-laws’ country home near Weimar.”
That was what Irene had written she would do if anything bad happened.
Henry Franklin raised his eyebrows but said nothing. No one wasted words anymore. Economy was a habit, as much with conversation as with sugar or tea. Besides, what was there to say?
* * *
—
THE TRAIN STOPPED WITH a shuddering creak, and after disembarking and making her way through the station, Cordelia picked her way down the steps and into a waiting truck, crammed with tired and hungry British troops who courteously shuffled their kit bags to give the only woman extra space.
As the truck trundled along, juddering and bouncing on the cratered streets, she marveled at the scene that confronted her. Berlin was a corpse, empty and dead, with ruins sticking up like ribs. In the summer heat the air hung fetid and polluted. Seeping beneath the thick stench of rubbish was the sweetly sick stench of bodies. A reek arose from the canal, packed with cadavers, and from cellars, where casualties lay unburied. The city was soot blackened, pocked with bullet holes, and drained of color, except for dank green pools of water under veils of flies. Buildings were gutted, windowless and roofless, and a fretwork of jagged bricks doilied the sky.
In the past, before the war, Irene had written to her of the endless noise of Berlin, how if you shut your eyes the roar of the city rose up around you—buses and trams, the blare of horns, the cries of newspaper boys and pretzel sellers—yet now the streets were eerily hushed. The only sounds were the clop of wooden-soled shoes, the rattle of handcarts, the chug of a wood-fueled bus, and the growl of tarpaulin-covered army lorries cruising through moonscapes of rubble. Occasionally, a crash of masonry billowed into clouds of dust, sending a canopy of splintered glass across the spaces where streets used to be.
People with bundles under their arms walked as if in a trance, hunched and bitter. Some of the men still wore tattered remnants of Wehrmacht uniforms with their crutches and eye patches. To Cordelia they were figures from Hieronymus Bosch; the same bent, cadaverous, Middle Europe peasants he had seen five centuries earlier, with sooty faces and rags for clothes. As they trudged past an American news camera they pointedly averted their faces.
The Brandenburg Gate, its quadriga and horses knocked sideways, was hung with a banner saying YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE BRITISH SECTOR, and beyond it, along Unter den Linden, monumental pictures of Stalin and Lenin stood. The truck swung round the ruins of the Reichstag, now a sooty skeleton pitted with artillery holes, and she saw a crowd milling on the steps.
“Black market. They pay a hundred marks for a pack of Gold Flakes, apparently.” The soldier beside her brightened at the thought of it.
“You here for long, miss? If you fancy an outing to the Reich Chancellery, Adolf’s old office, you can do a spot of souvenir hunting. They say you want to hurry before it’s knocked down. I would take you to Adolf and Eva’s bunker, but the Russkies have commandeered it and only let you in on Sundays.”
They were crossing a barren wasteland that must have been a park, cluttered with rubble and the razed, blackened stumps of trees.
“What’s this place?”
The soldier consulted his folded map. “Tiergarten.” Irene had written about it. Berlin’s enchanting, flowered-filled central park. Where she would ride with the American Ambassador’s vivacious daughter, Martha Dodd, their horses thundering down the sandy path, necks dappled with sweat.
On a patch of mud an animal skeleton lay, no more resembling the horse it used to be than Berlin resembled a city.
* * *
—
TWO VAST, SCULPTED VALKYRIES flanked the steps to number seventeen, Uhlandstrasse, where the truck deposited Cordelia. There was no guard at the door, nor any other sign of security, so she followed a long corridor until she found a door marked INTERPRETERS’ POOL CCG (BE). There a brisk man with a thin nose and a narrow mustache sat behind an immense hand-carved desk. He sprang up to greet her.
“Tash McDonald.” His Edinburgh accent was as sharp as his nose, and he seized her hand as though determined to wring every ounce of acquaintance out of it. “D’you like it?”
He gestured at the ornate walnut desk with brass fittings and clawed lion’s feet that offered an excessive amount of Lebensraum for his neat blotter, pens, and little pot of paper clips.
“It belonged to our friend the SS Gruppenführer, but he won’t be needing it where he is, even if it did fit in his cell. I’m only sorry I didn’t get the one belonging to Walter Schellenberg. Apparently that one was fitted with hidden machine guns to spray his unwanted guests. Would you have some tea, Miss Capel?”
“Please.”
McDonald went over to where an electric kettle and a box of tea bags stood on a tin tray. “No standing on ceremony here, I’m afraid.”
While the kettle boiled, he opened a file in front of him, and Cordelia noticed her photograph pinned to the top left of the sheet.
“Thank you for showing up. Berlin’s screaming for interpreters. You were in Germany in the early thirties, I see.”
“Six months in Munich. Learning singing.”
“Won’t be any need for singing, I can promise you that. No one’s even humming round here. But we do need people who understand the idiom. It’s extremely important to get the full picture, and some of these Nazis are damn clever.”
He went over to the window and frowned down at the street, as though duplicitous Nazis could still be seen among the bedraggled and exhausted citizens passing below.
“I’ve read your file and I’ve been told you’re a pretty robust character, but I need to warn you. Some of these Jerries are devious. There are eight million Nazi Party members here. More than ten percent of the population. Go into the upper classes and the professionals and the figure’s even higher. That’s not counting the Nazi-related organizations with huge memberships, twenty-five million in the German Labor Front, the League of German Women, the Hitler Youth, the Doctors’ League, and so on. In Hitlerland if it moved, they made an organization for it.”
“And we’re planning to prosecute one in ten of the population?”
He turned back to her. “Excuse my French, but Christ knows what we’re doing with them. Sorting them, to start with, into followers, lesser offenders, profiteers, minor criminals, and major criminals. There’s all kinds. Industrialists, who almost certainly used slave labor; tobacco importers; oil company bosses; forest owners; anyone who did well out of Adolf. The difficulty’s getting the truth out of them. They all insist they were never loyal Nazis. They’ve destroyed their documents and burned their uniforms. A lot of them are lawyers, and they’re damn shrewd. They’ll get round all of us somehow and reinvent themselves. They’ll probably start def
ending all the others who were guilty of the same crimes they were.”
“It sounds…complicated.”
McDonald handed her an army-issue green china teacup and lined the tea bags up to dry for later use.
“It is. Frankly most of us believe we should focus on the real war criminals, not persecute anyone lower down the food chain. They were only obeying orders and so on. They’ll all deny they joined the Hitler Youth. But ours not to reason why, ours just to get the bloody Boche to talk.”
“And how exactly do we do that?”
“Suffice to say the different sectors take rather different approaches. The Yanks are probably handing out bubble gum, whereas our Russian cousins have taken off the kid gloves. But we’re not going to behave like barbarians. We’re supposed to be the civilized ones.”
He sniffed and adjusted the photograph on his desk. It was of a middle-aged woman—Mrs. McDonald, Cordelia guessed—wearing a ferocious bun, a kilt, and a no-nonsense expression. She looked as if she would side with the Russian way of doing things.
“What’s to stop them escaping? Moving to a different country?”
“We confiscate their passports. No Nazi is going to be leaving this place for a long time. Let them stay and help pick up the pieces, it’s the least they deserve.” He clattered his cup back into his saucer. “It’s the kiddies I feel sorry for, poor devils. Growing up in a place like this, knowing what their parents got up to…Anyhow, Miss Capel, you’ll want to get unpacked. Freshen up. Where are you staying?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea, sir.”
He went back to the desk and scrawled on a sheet of paper.
“Here’s a requisition form for accommodation in a woman’s barracks in Schlüterstrasse.” He flashed a grin. “You’re lucky. Some of my lads are camping in the Grunewald. If you find your way to the interpreters’ pool mess, you can help yourself to some porridge and a mug of tea.”
“I think I might go and have a look around.”
“Fine, but don’t take any food in the street. You’ll find the kids all over you like a swarm of flies. They’re feral, like little wild animals. Watch out for the bodies too. The place is strewn with them and there’s no wood for coffins. I went to a concert evening for the staff the other night and found myself stepping over a corpse. It was grinning like something out of Hamlet. I tell you, Berlin’s like a cocktail party in a morgue.”
“Could I borrow a map?”
“No need. There’s no north or south, everywhere’s the same, Miss Capel. Obviously you speak the lingo, but any problem with the locals, shout at them in English. That usually sorts them out.”
* * *
—
MOST OF THE STREET signs had been destroyed, so Cordelia decided simply to walk, and see where her footsteps took her. If she mistook her way she could always ask, and besides, walking helped make sense of her own life’s map. As she went she passed walls scrawled with chalk messages or fluttering with pathetic, handwritten cards. ICH SUCHE FRIEDA WINKLER. ICH SUCHE MEINE FRAU, ANNA SCHULTZ. ICH SUCHE MEIN SOHN, ERICH BRANDT. ACHTUNG! ICH SUCHE MEINE TOCHTER CHRISTA KOCH.
There was no point looking for the man she had lost.
She tried not to think of Torin, but whenever she did she felt his name, rather than heard it, like a heavy iron bell in her chest. Even now it was as though a part of her was still frozen on that last night. It was impossible to forget Torin’s shining eyes staring into hers as they made love. Look at me. At times her craving for intimacy was so intense she felt physically weak.
Sometimes she’d caught herself staring resentfully at couples, whether on buses or trams, in dance halls, or just walking along. Yet at the same time she had become freshly sensitive to other people who had suffered loss. It was as though she had acquired a new hat, and began suddenly to notice all the women with similar hats she would never have registered before.
When would this sorrow begin to dissipate? She remembered Churchill’s speech after the Battle of Britain: This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it might, perhaps, be the end of the beginning. That didn’t work with grief. Cordelia hadn’t wanted a beginning, but she couldn’t bear to think of an end.
She approached the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, whose jagged broken spire was already nicknamed the Hollow Tooth, and turned along Kant Strasse, scattered with spent bullet casings. Reeking pools had formed in the cratered pavement, and she was forced to sidestep gaps where entire chasms had opened up in the ground. At one point a telephone rang, eerily, from deep beneath a pile of masonry.
Outside the Theatre des Westens, a building’s girders splayed out of shattered concrete like bicycle spokes, and as she skirted them, a voice pieced her thoughts.
“Zigarette? Schocklit? Whaddya got? You give me.”
The boy was grinning, though his face was as pale as someone drowned in a lake.
Cordelia felt in her pocket for a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut she had bought in London. In a second, a swarm of clamoring children materialized, and then, behind them, she saw a gang of women, hair tied up in turbans, dresses covered with smocks that were white with masonry dust. In their fists they clutched rusty hammers to knock the mortar off bricks and stack them for reuse.
Trümmerfrauen. Rubble women.
The sight of them tore at the heart. How long would it take them to clear these mountains of rubble? Years, it looked like, and these women would be put to work, day and night, patching up the ruins, passing buckets of bricks from hand to hand, in return for food. Yet Cordelia didn’t feel sorry for them. They were responsible, deliberately or inadvertently, each of them, for countless deaths. Back in April, along with most of London, she had sat in the cinema in shocked silence watching newsreels of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and struggling to absorb the reporter’s stunned commentary. I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom. She would never forget those images on the screen. Dead bodies mingled with those alive. Mountains of bones waiting to be buried. SS men trying to run away and the weakened inmates attempting to grab them.
As if to echo her thought, a man in uniform arrived and began to plaster a fresh poster onto an ornate green metal advertising pillar above the tattered remnants of advertisements for Fanta and Ritter chocolate and Khasana lipstick.
This poster had nothing to sell. It showed a pile of corpses, stacked like sheets of bones, and alongside them the soon to be dead, their chests jutting out, hollow cheeks concave. Ancient faces, sunken pleading eyes, and sexless, emaciated frames. Underneath the photograph a slogan in German read, YOU, THE GERMAN NATION, ARE ALL GUILTY.
The Trümmerfrauen looked up impassively at the man’s work, absorbed it a moment, then carried on.
* * *
—
“NOT MUCH FURTHER, MISS.”
A cheerful Tommy escorted Cordelia through the police administration building in Wilmersdorf that had been adapted as a temporary interrogation center. The heat was oppressive. After an uncomfortable night spent on a metal camp bed alongside four other women, she had reported with her typewriter for her first interview. The center’s décor was utilitarian khaki green, but despite the prison-like surroundings, a busy, institutional clatter sounded and the rooms hummed with the ring of telephones, the clip of shoes on parquet, and the constant murmur of voices. Eyes flicked toward Cordelia, in her neat, box-shouldered uniform, stockings, and heels, as she followed the British soldier down the corridor.
“How long does each session go on for?” she asked him.
“Not too long, normally. By the time they come to us, they’re usually all too keen to oblige. They’ve been made to watch footage of the concentration camps and they’ve all been given the Fragebogen, that’s a questionnaire: Have you ever been a member of the Party or a National Socialist agency or organization? Did you participate in any auxiliary organization?
If married or widowed, state husband’s former name and profession. It determines the extent of their collaboration with the regime. The idea is they shouldn’t escape responsibility for what they’ve brought on themselves.”
He grinned, revealing a glint of gold. “Not that it makes much difference. A party the other day said to me, ‘You Allies never understand how we suffered. You have no idea how it felt to be showered with your bombs when we were already crushed beneath the Nazi state.’ I said, ‘Who voted Adolf in then?’ and he couldn’t answer.”
He reached the end of the corridor and paused by a door.
“Not for you to worry about procedure, though, miss. The officer will ask the questions. You just interpret and take notes where necessary. I’m afraid your first case is a bit of a problem, though. Lieutenant Thompson is having a tough time, and it doesn’t help that he had a night out with the Fräuleins last night and is feeling frail.”
He winked.
“Actually this lady’s putting up more resistance than any Fräulein. She’s led him a merry dance. Refused to cooperate at all. Won’t even fill out the questionnaire. She hasn’t said a word since the Russians handed her over. I’m pretty sure you’ll not have anything to interpret at all.”
He pushed open the door.
She stepped into a space that stank of dust, misery, and fear. The narrow interrogation room was lit by a single hanging bulb, with one high window, through which a smeared rectangle of bone white sky was visible. A desk and chair stood in one corner, for Cordelia, and a stack of typing paper. In the center, a table, pockmarked with cigarette burns, was flanked on one side by Lieutenant Thompson, who was leaning back in his chair, cigarette in hand, booted legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. Drops of sweat beaded his temples and snaked in runnels down the side of his face.
On the other side of the table a woman sat in silence, hands demurely folded in her lap, staring straight ahead.