The laundry room, down a short flight of stone steps behind the kitchen, was equipped with a stone sink and an electric washing machine that needed only to be plugged in and filled with water. Gudrun found another dress for Natalia to wear, and Natalia washed the one she’d been given at the camp. When she did the laundry, Natalia wore a bibbed apron that wrapped around her waist and tied in the front. One of the Americans came to the door of the laundry room and talked to her, not that she could understand every word he said. His name was Mike Rose. He was married; his wife’s name was Gloria; they had two kids; he taught music at a high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He played in a band and collected records and sang. She had heard him earlier that morning, in the kitchen, humming and singing. He sang:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey
Sing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.”
One morning she got up too fast from a chair and fainted. An American doctor took her blood pressure and said it was low. He shone a light in her eyes and examined her hands. He didn’t comment on the scars, for which she was grateful. She was anemic, he said, and advised her to eat red meat. Eat lots of everything, he said, and asked her whether the meals were adequate. Yes, more than adequate, she said. At the table the Americans told her to dig in. Obediently, Natalia picked up her fork. Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.
James drove her into Berlin.
She saw men returning from the war, many severely injured. She saw small children running in packs, like wild dogs. She saw a dead horse that had been butchered for its meat, the carcass heaving with huge, fat flies. Beneath the rubble, bodies were interred; the stench of decay was unendurable. She saw buildings on Friedrichstrasse and Leipziger Strasse bombed nearly flat. She saw Russian soldiers. She saw German women made to clear the rubble. They wore dresses, high heels, some of them. They wore scarves to keep the dust out of their hair. They were guarded by American soldiers with guns, and yet the women could smile; there were signs of camaraderie.
Nowhere in the city was there a place for the eye to rest. No clean, straight lines, no right angles. Berlin had been gutted, pulverized. This was Stunde Null. Zero hour. That was the term she heard. There couldn’t be anywhere to go from here but up, could there? Already the Americans had restored water and electricity to Berlin. The tramlines and the U-Bahn were operating; cabarets and restaurants and shops were reopening.
Messages were chalked on brick walls, scrawled on windows; notes were nailed to posts: Have you seen my mother? Have you seen my parents? Where are my parents?
“If you could drop me off,” she said to James, “I could look on my own.”
No, he said. She must not be alone in Berlin. There was a lot of crime in the city. Red Army soldiers stole from everyone. They stole watches, wine. They swaggered through Berlin, intoxicated, undisciplined and behaved without decency toward German women. It wasn’t only the Russians, either. Mostly the Russians but not exclusively the Russians, James said.
Gudrun, too, had told Natalia about the rape of women in Berlin. In eastern cities, in Danzig, the Russians spared no woman, not the very young or the very old. The women were raped and killed, the men tortured and killed. That, she thought, was how it went: the conquerors took what they wanted from the conquered.
* * *
President Truman came to Berlin for a conference in Potsdam. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin were meeting at the Cecilienhof, once the palace of the Prussian crown prince, to work out the conditions of the peace. Mike Rose told Natalia and Gudrun he’d spent the day chauffeuring Potsdam Conference delegates around Berlin. He said he’d heard two generals saying that at the conference Truman and Stalin sparred with each other through their translators, while Molotov stood at Stalin’s right arm like a well-trained dog. Mike had been there when Churchill toured the Reich Chancellery. Churchill had placed his hand on a globe of the world in what had been the Führer’s office. Then he sat in Hitler’s personal chair, after a British soldier had tested it to make sure it was safe. Wherever he went in Berlin, Churchill attracted crowds; people tried to shake his hand, touch his coat. These were Germans, Mike said.
Mike said being that close to Nazi rule, the actual place where they’d planned and carried out the worst evil the world had ever seen, gave him the creeps.
Gudrun and Natalia were sitting on the steps at the back of the house, and Mike was standing, smoking a cigarette. Gudrun had snipped a few sprigs of parsley and held them in her hands. In 1939, before the war started, she said, she and her husband had sent their children to England. Her husband was Jewish, and she was Lutheran, but they weren’t religious. There was anti-Semitism in Germany before 1938, but with the Nuremberg Laws the Nazis institutionalized racial hatred; they made it an obligation. Even if Jews had been born in Germany and their families had lived in Germany for generations and had established businesses in Germany, or were doctors or lawyers or had sacrificed their sons in war for Germany, as her husband’s family had, the Nazis said they had no right to live and work in Germany. Hitler said they had no right to exist. In August 1939, Gudrun and her husband got their children to England on a Kindertransport. Her little boy was only three then, and he was eight, nearly nine now, and her daughter would soon be fifteen. Gudrun feared she would be a stranger to her children, a stranger who had to tell them their father had died in a concentration camp. According to his death certificate he had died of heart failure, but Gudrun knew it wasn’t like that. Her husband had been thirty-eight and in excellent health.
“I’m Jewish,” Mike Rose said. “In the States, we didn’t do enough. We didn’t see it coming. We should have, we have no excuses, but we didn’t see it. In 1939 a boat carrying a thousand Jewish refugees from Europe was turned away by the U.S. and Britain and Canada. That’s something we should never forget.”
Gudrun took a photograph out of her apron pocket. “Look,” she said. “It’s from England. The Red Cross sent it with a letter.”
“These are your children?” Natalia wiped her hands and took the photograph.
Mike Rose said, “Your kids are almost the same ages as mine. They look like you, Gudrun.”
“Elise, my daughter, looks like her father,” she said. “She has his smile. My little boy’s name is Henry. In the letter it says they’re thriving, but of course it would say that, wouldn’t it? They should be wearing coats in that wind.”
Mike stood. He started to go into the house and then turned and asked if Gudrun and Natalia had heard the news. President Truman had delivered an ultimatum to Japan: unconditional surrender or an escalation in the bombing campaign. Hiroshi Ō-shima, the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, had been flown to New York. It was believed he would recommend to Tokyo an acceptance of the terms of surrender, as drawn up at the conference.
“And the war in the Pacific will end, maybe,” Natalia said. “And there will be peace.”
She and Gudrun went inside and started getting supper ready. Gudrun drained steaming water from a pot of boiled potatoes and then sat with Natalia at the table, where she was shelling peas.
“When you see your children, it won’t seem like you were apart that long,” Natalia said.
Gudrun said that at times she wanted only to give up. Two years earlier, when she got kicked out of her apartment in Charlottenburg by the Nazis, she went to stay with a cousin in Berlin Mitte. She helped with the housework and looked after her cousin’s twin daughters. Then, this April, as the Russians were entering Berlin, Gudrun went out to shop for food. She waited hours in a queue for a loaf of bread and some tinned beans and when she returned to the apartment, she found her cousin and her family dead. Her cousin’s husband had shot the little girls and his wife and then himself. The gun was still in his hand. He had, Gudrun knew, been taking an amphetamine called Pervitin to keep
himself awake at night, in case the Russians came. People did that. There was a big demand for that drug. She believed in his case the drug had caused a mental breakdown, because otherwise he would never have harmed his family. In Berlin there were suicides every day. People knew what the Russians had done in Pomerania, as they marched west. They had heard of the rapes and torture and murders. Gudrun covered her cousin’s body, and those of the children and the husband, with bedsheets, and locked the apartment door, put the key under the doormat, and walked away. She should have taken her cousin’s gun with her.
“At night I hid in the ruins. For a few days friends let me stay with them, until the Russians got too close, and I left.
“In the Tiergarten,” she said, “there were dead SS men lying on the ground. It looked like Hell, like a vision of Hell, everything black and dead, the trees gone, dead animals in the zoo. Imagine being an animal in a cage with bombs falling and antiaircraft guns firing. Imagine. There was a boy. He had been dead for some time. A child, no older than fourteen, a cheap celluloid swastika pinned to his coat, no doubt conscripted to man the flak tower in the Tiergarten.
“Often I feel such shame. Many things have happened that I feel shame over. The Russians caught up to me. Even though it wasn’t my fault, I felt like it was. I thought of throwing myself into the canal. But my kids shouldn’t lose both parents, I told myself. It’s strange, isn’t it? When you want to die, you don’t. Somehow you go on living.”
“Yes,” Natalia said. “Somehow you do.”
“In England there’s a nursing home for elderly Jewish refugees. Daphne told me about it. She said I could get a job there, as a cleaner, or helping in the kitchen maybe, or as a cook, and if it works out, I’ll stay. I won’t come back to Germany.”
The living room of the house on Cäcilienallee had thick, richly patterned carpets on polished oak floors, elegant plaster cornices around the ceiling, brass wall sconces beside the fireplace. There was a Bechstein grand piano with a bust of Beethoven on it, a gramophone, a tall pendulum clock that showed the phases of the moon, and on a shelf above a cabinet, a glass skull. Beside the skull were opera glasses and a stuffed songbird on a ceramic stand. A bookcase held books by Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Schiller, newer authors such as Vicki Baum and Ernst Jünger and Thomas Mann, and, she noticed, a novel by Arthur Schnitzler—all writers that had been banned by the Nazis. There were the two volumes of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, which of course brought to her mind Martin Becker on the train to Prague all those years before. Had he survived? She hoped so. On a lower shelf of the bookcase were gramophone recordings of Schubert, Beethoven, Wagner. Götterdämmerung. Der fliegende Holländer.
So this family listened to Wagner, hung romantic, sentimental oil paintings of peasants toiling in fields on their walls, read Schiller and Goethe, but also had a collection of modern novels, books that had been banned by the Nazis, right there on their bookshelves. Perhaps they’d supported the Nazis and perhaps not. Perhaps they deserved to have their house taken over by the Americans and perhaps not.
She got a cold stare from the glass skull. Once a curio, now—overtaken by the war—a horror.
A car turned into the drive, stopped, and two men in U.S. Army uniform got out. She drew back from the window and went to the kitchen and scrubbed potatoes and cut up carrots, and then, when she and Gudrun were having a cup of tea, Mike Rose came in to tell them that Lieutenant General George Tanner would be staying at the house. “Come and meet him when you’ve finished your tea,” he said.
There were suitcases in the hall. In the living room the lieutenant general had spread a red swastika flag on the sofa and was sitting on it, smoking a pipe and drinking cognac. He stood, his pipe in his hand, and shook hands with Natalia and Gudrun and asked if they would like a drink.
“No, thank you,” Natalia said.
“Yes, that would be nice,” Gudrun said.
The lieutenant general’s aide-de-camp, Major Stevens, handed Gudrun a drink. The lieutenant general sat on the sofa. Fair hair, a narrow, intelligent face, narrow eyes. A very direct gaze. “Your name, again?” he asked Natalia.
“Natalia Andorján,” she said.
“Hungarian?” the lieutenant general asked.
“My husband is Hungarian,” she said.
“Frau Andorján was a prisoner in a concentration camp near Hanover,” Mike Rose said. “I believe she’s recovering well, now, though, sir. Isn’t that so, Frau Andorján?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, thank you.”
“Good, that’s good,” Lieutenant General Tanner said, taking a lighter out of his uniform pocket and relighting his pipe.
Within a few days, typewriters and filing cabinets had been moved into the sitting room. Telephone lines were installed. In Bavaria, Natalia learned, Lieutenant General Tanner had been in charge of a German-language newspaper published by the U.S. Army, the Bayerischer Tag. Now he was assembling the equipment and resources to publish a similar newspaper in Berlin, a German-language newspaper aimed, it was said, at the intelligent reader who needed a little encouragement, a nudge in the direction of accepting a free, democratic Germany with strong economic and political ties to the United States. An American information control office was being set up on Milinowskistrasse, in Zehlendorf. At the former Ullstein Verlag building in Tempelhof, a printing press had been recovered and repaired.
The lieutenant general employed the glass skull as a paperweight. He played Wagner on the record player. He often reclined on the sofa, his feet up on the swastika flag—the modest spoils of war, he said—while writing rapidly in a stenographer’s notebook. At first he intimidated her. She felt more at ease with him when she learned he was, in civilian life, a journalist, like Miklós. They were all journalists or newspapermen in some capacity, these Americans assigned to publishing a newspaper. She wondered whether anyone at the American information office knew anything of her husband, she said to James Grant, and one afternoon he took her to the house on Milinowskistrasse. A Polish newspaperman there said in German that Miklós Andorján had filed reports with the Associated Press from Stalingrad and Moscow and, more recently, from western Poland. Count Andorján had been with the Russian Forty-Seventh Guards Tank Division. In January, he’d been in Warsaw. Then he’d been in Łódź. In February, he filed a story from Poznań. That was six months ago, Natalia thought. “If you see him, if you hear news, any word, would you please let me know?” She wrote her name and the telephone number of the house on Cäcilienallee on a slip of paper and gave it to the person who seemed to be in charge.
While they were in Zehlendorf, Natalia showed James her mother’s villa.It seemed strange, to be standing there, in the garden of what had been her home. She remembered the day in 1934 when they came to see Zita, just after the Gestapo had released her and she was recovering from her injuries. James Grant was watching her and she turned and told him how Zita had been imprisoned and beaten by the Gestapo.
“She had a compound fracture of the arm; her face was bruised. When Miklós and I saw her, she had a plaster cast on her arm and she was drowsy from the Luminal her doctor had given her for pain. My husband talked to her about hiring a lawyer. ‘The lawyers are all Nazis now,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s not true,’ she added. ‘But these days you almost feel left out if you aren’t picked up and interrogated.’”
Natalia remembered Hildegard carrying a tea tray into the room, and then Beatriz pouring the tea and announcing quite casually that she and Zita were thinking again of leaving Germany to live in Buenos Aires. “You and Natalia can’t stay here, either,” she said to Miklós. “Not with the child.”
“This is where my work is,” Miklós said.
“You think you can file stories from a prison cell?” Beatriz said.
“I can’t leave my mother alone in Hungary,” he said.
“Bring her too,” Beatriz said. “Bring her to Buenos Aires. The climate would do her good.”
Natalia remembered
she’d been listening to this exchange while she knelt on the floor, playing toy soldiers with Krisztián: Napoleon at Austerlitz, the French general and his troops fighting the armies of the tsar of Russia and the Habsburg emperor. She combed her son’s fine, blond hair with her fingers. Firmly he pushed her hand away. Her beautiful Krisztián, with his translucent skin and blond curls, his stubborn willful mouth. The way he would laugh, his head back, his eyes crinkling. She could never punish him; if he did anything wrong, he made her laugh. Before he was two years old, he knew who he was. He looked sometimes disapprovingly at his parents and grandmothers; even Rozalia couldn’t get away with a thing around Krisztián.
That day, at Beatriz’s house, he plucked a French cavalry officer from the fray and carried it to his father. Then he leaned against Zita’s knee and touched the cast on her arm.
“You must be gentle with Zita’s sore arm, that’s a darling,” his grandmother said.
“As if this little lamb could hurt me,” Zita said.
“It’s time for his nap,” Natalia had said.
They should have gone to Argentina that year. But Beatriz and Zita had kept delaying their departure and then when they did sail to Argentina, in 1938, it was too late for Natalia and Miklós. They couldn’t leave Rozalia. They couldn’t leave the castle, which held so many memories of their son. It pained her, to think that if they had left, maybe Krisztián would not have contracted a fatal illness. And Miklós would not have gone into a war zone. She would not have been sent to a concentration camp, and right now, at this moment, she and her husband would not be separated.
James asked her if she was all right. He got her to move into the shade of a tree. He gave her his parents’ address in Seattle. “If you would like to write to Anna,” he said.
“Yes, I would like to do that,” she said, putting the folded slip of paper in her dress pocket.
“There’s something I should tell you,” she said, as they walked back to his car. “Perhaps you know already that Anna has family in Prague? I believe she has grandparents in Heidelberg as well. Her father’s parents; they’re German. And there was an uncle and his family, also in Heidelberg. Did Anna tell you about them?”
Midnight Train to Prague Page 25