Masaryk Station (John Russell)

by David Downing

  It had, however, taken them a while to work this out. Russell knew from Shchepkin that late in March the CPSU had sent the YCP an official letter of complaint. According to Moscow, the Yugoslavs had been denigrating the Soviet Union with claims that it was no longer socialist. Which of course was the sort of nonsense you could expect from a party falling well short of genuine Bolshevism.

  The YCP had responded on the 13th of April. They were Bolsheviks, and they did love the Soviet Union, but they admitted to loving their own country, too. It had seemed to Shchepkin, and seemed to Russell, a fairly placatory missive, but what neither knew, and what Hitchen now told him, was that Tito was simply keeping things sweet until he pounced on the local fifth column. And that had happened while Russell was on his train—the Yugoslav version of the MGB had arrested a slew of Party members who put loyalty to Moscow above loyalty to Tito.

  If Nedić had been one of them, Russell thought, then he wouldn’t have to worry about the wretched list. But Hitchen didn’t recognise the name.

  ‘Are they really spoiling for a fight?’ he asked the young journalist. ‘It’s not just a minor squabble?’

  ‘Oh no. They’ve really had it with the Russians. First the Red Army raped its way across the country, then the Soviets insisted on setting up joint stock companies to steal them blind, and then they flooded the place with MGB to watch the locals. The last straw was claiming that the Red Army had done all of the heavy fighting, and that Tito and Co only played a minor role in defeating the Germans. Tito wasn’t having that. The medals he wears makes you think he’d liberated most of Europe.’

  ‘And they’re not afraid that the Red Army will make another visit?’

  ‘A little, perhaps. But I think the Yugoslavs have got it sussed—the Soviets must know it wouldn’t be a walkover, and they can’t afford a real fight, either politically or militarily. I think they’ll just give Tito the boot, and nail down the lid on the other satraps. They’re all easy to reach.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Russell conceded. ‘I don’t suppose the Soviets have commented on the arrests?’

  ‘Not yet. But I expect someone in Moscow’s trawling Lenin’s speeches for appropriate insults.’

  The last remaining scenes of Anna Hofmann were shot on Tuesday morning, and lunch turned into a farewell banquet, which lasted most of the afternoon. There was enough alcohol on offer to refloat the Bismarck, and the hastily-erected picnic tables literally creaked under mounds of food. DEFA’s Soviet supporters were clearly keen to prove that its Hollywood-banked competitors hadn’t cornered the market in excessive rewards.

  Effi, like almost everyone else, spent the afternoon surreptitiously slipping delicacies into her bag for future family consumption. She was just hiding away a couple of particularly tasty almond biscuits when the Soviet Propaganda Minister loomed in front of her.

  ‘Fraulein Koenen,’ Tulpanov greeted her warmly in German. ‘They are good, aren’t they?’ he added with a twinkle.

  ‘I’m taking them home for my daughter,’ Effi explained, unabashed.

  ‘Of course. I was sorry to hear that you decided against A Walk into the Future.’

  ‘Yes, well …’

  ‘I realise that the script was rather crude, compared to some of DEFA’s more recent offerings.’

  ‘My feelings exactly.’

  ‘So you haven’t turned against DEFA?’

  Effi managed to look surprised. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad to hear that. And it’s good to see you looking so, may I say, young?’

  Effi smiled. ‘I won’t complain.’

  ‘Well then. I expect we’ll meet again at The Peacock’s Fan premiere in a few weeks’ time. I went to an advanced screening, and I think your performance is really very special.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Effi said. She had made that film in the previous autumn, and if she said so herself, she had never been better.

  He bowed slightly and moved on.

  They really were making an effort, Effi thought. They needed to. The alcohol had livened things up a little, but the gathering still felt more like a wake than anything else. The cast and crew knew they’d made a decent film, but it was hard to celebrate that fact when it looked like being the last, at least for a while. Those who had signed on for A Walk into the Future were almost apologetic, stressing their families’ need to eat or their hope that DEFA’s fall from cinematic grace would be a swiftly passing phase. No one believed the film itself was worth making.

  The mood on the ride home to the British sector was a sombre affair, and when Effi waved the others off on Carmer Strasse for the last time, the sense of liberation that usually followed the completion of a movie was noticeably absent. She had made half a dozen films with DEFA over the past two years, all of them entertaining, yet also mature reflections on her country and its recent history. She liked some of her performances better than others, of course, but when it came to the movies, she was proud of them all. Amid all the hardship and horrors of the war’s aftermath, something good had been made in Berlin, and knowing it was over was a bitter pill to swallow.

  The previous day’s Soviet decision to restrict all parcel post between Berlin and the Western zones had provided Gerhard Ströhm with a problem. Since the reason supplied to the angry Allies was the sudden and completely bogus unworthiness of the rolling stock in question, he could hardly leave the stock in plain sight. But what should he do with it? The Berlin sector wasn’t so well-endowed with stock that he could afford to hide it away, but if he shifted it into the Soviet zone some bright Red Army spark would send it all east for re-wheeling to the Russian gauge. And then the Soviets would announce that the parcel post was being restored, and where the hell would his trains be?

  Relief arrived in the form of a summons from upstairs—Arnold Marohn wanted to see him.

  The director lost no time in getting to the point. ‘I’ve been asked to loan you out for the day. You remember Stefan Utermann?’

  ‘Of course. We were both on the Stettin yards committee before the war. He was caught, and sent to Buchenwald.’

  ‘But you’ve seen him since.’

  ‘Only once or twice, a couple of years ago. He moved out to Rummelsburg when they started the repair works up again.’

  ‘But you’d call him a friend?’

  ‘A comrade.’ Which in the 1930s had probably meant more.

  ‘So he might take advice from you?’

  Ströhm grimaced. ‘On what?’

  Marohn sighed. ‘He’s in dispute with our Soviet allies. The usual issue—one dismantling too many. Just between us, I don’t think the Russians have handled the matter that tactfully, but that’s the world we live in. And Utermann is being particularly obstinate.’

  ‘Why do the Russians care?’ Ströhm wondered out loud. ‘Why don’t they just ignore him?’ The way they usually ignored KPD qualms, he thought to himself.

  ‘Apparently he’s made himself very popular with the workforce,’ Marohn said. ‘And the Party is anxious to avoid any demonstrations of anti-Russian feeling.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ströhm said automatically. ‘Well, I’ll try of course, but it’s been a long time.’ And Utermann had seemed a different man after Buchenwald—still friendly enough, but wound a lot tighter.

  ‘Just do your best,’ Marohn told him. ‘And go today.’

  ‘Why the rush?’

  ‘The Russians want it settled.’

  ‘Say no more.’

  It wasn’t a task he’d have chosen, but it felt good to be out the office. The white clouds gliding across the bright blue sky made him think of galleons, and one particular book from his American childhood. He wanted children of his own, and he thought Annaliese did too, though they’d never discussed it. But there was plenty of time, and things were bound to improve over the next few years.

  The prospect cheered Ströhm, as did the huge red flag in the distance, which fluttered over the Neukölln rathaus. It was almost twenty ye
ars since he and Utermann had fought all those running battles with the brownshirts on Berliner Strasse and Grenzallee, and in the end it was their flag which had carried the day.

  It was gone noon when he reached the Rummelsburg repair shops. Utermann was out of his office, and the worker who pointed Ströhm in the direction of the erecting shop wasn’t exactly friendly. Inside, he found two lines of locomotives under repair, and Utermann standing between them, talking to another railwayman. When he saw the suited Ströhm striding towards him, his initial frown turned into a smile, but the frown came back when the pfennig dropped.

  ‘What’s a candidate member of the Central Committee doing here? As if I didn’t know.’

  Ströhm didn’t deny the inference. ‘But I’m also a friend,’ he said, offering his hand. And after only the slightest of hesitations, Utermann took it. ‘Where can we talk?’ Ströhm asked.

  ‘Outside,’ Utermann decided. He led the way to a door at the end, and ushered Ströhm through just as a freight train rumbled by. A stack of pallets outside the stores room provided somewhere to sit. ‘You’ll get your suit dirty,’ Utermann warned him with a grin.

  ‘Least of my worries.’ Ströhm sat there for a moment, savouring the sights, sounds and smells of a working railway. This had been his life for more than a decade, and part of him still missed it.

  ‘Feeling nostalgic?’ Utermann asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was simpler back then.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Ströhm looked at his old friend. ‘So, Stefan, tell me what’s happened. What’s at stake here?’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ Ströhm told him. He wanted the story from Utermann. ‘That you’re refusing to accept a dismantling, and have enough support among the workforce to embarrass the Party leadership.’

  ‘That’s a fair enough summary, as far as it goes. It’s not just one dismantling, though. The Russians took everything last summer, and promised me that was it, that they wouldn’t be back. And I sold it to the workforce—that giving them the old works was paying our debt as Germans, and that now we could build a new one as comrades. And we did. We searched the whole bloody Russian zone for the machines we needed, begged, bought, even mounted a couple of robberies. You wouldn’t believe how hard everyone worked, what sacrifices they made. I didn’t believe it myself. We had everything up and working again in six months.’

  ‘And now they’ve come back again.’

  ‘Two weeks ago.’

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘Yeah, but they promised me it wouldn’t. And when I reminded the Russian bastard of that, he just laughed in my face.’

  A suburban train rattled by, forcing a pause in the conversation. Utermann, Ströhm saw, had one fist clenched.

  ‘So you refused?’ he said, once the noise of the train had abated.

  ‘I told him to fuck off,’ Utermann admitted.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The bastard just laughed again. And then he got really nasty. He told me that if I didn’t cooperate, the workers here would be given all the details of my payoks. He had a list of everything I’d received over the past two years—every last bar of chocolate and tin of ham.’ He looked across at Ströhm. ‘You must get them, too. And bigger than mine, I would guess.’

  ‘I get them.’ Every high- or medium-ranking Party official did, along with government officials, scientists, even poets and artists. All those considered crucial to the building of a socialist Germany. One had been delivered to his apartment earlier that week, delighting Annaliese. He’d come home in the evening to find that she’d given half the stuff away to the old folk who lived in their block. That had pleased him enormously, but he still hated the whole idea. Annaliese had listened, agreed, and told him to let it go. ‘What can you do?’ she had asked. ‘Give it all back? What good would that do?’ None at all, as he well knew. He didn’t tell her, but it would actually do him harm. Giving them back would be seen as dissent.

  ‘So you know it’s not easy to refuse,’ Utermann said, as if reading his mind. ‘You give some away, and convince yourself you deserve a little pampering after all the years of struggle.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But the workers don’t see it that way. They don’t see why anyone should be pampered in a socialist society. And they’re right. Even the Russian knows it, which is why he thinks I’ll swallow the medicine, for everyone’s sake. I’ll talk the workers around again, do his dirty work for him, and he won’t bring up my payoks. He’ll get his dismantling, the workers will think their interests are still being represented, and I’ll get to eat a bar of chocolate twice a month. Everyone’s happy.’

  Ströhm knew where this was going. ‘So you won’t change your mind.’

  ‘Enough is enough.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I do, really,’ he insisted in response to Utermann’s look. ‘But it won’t help. The dismantling will still go ahead, and you’ll get sacked. And the workers will lose a good representative.’

  Utermann laughed. ‘Fat lot of good I’ve done them,’

  ‘The Russians won’t be here forever.’

  ‘You think not?’

  ‘Nothing lasts forever.

  ‘You really think I should give in?’

  ‘I don’t see how refusing helps anybody.’

  ‘Maybe so. I know the arguments for giving in. A situation like this—an individual conscience is neither here nor there. A bourgeois luxury. I know the words. I’ve been reading them since I was fourteen.’

  Ströhm was silent.

  ‘The Russian’s are coming back for my answer tomorrow.’

  ‘Save your strength for fights you might win,’ Ströhm urged him.

  Utermann gave him a wintry smile. ‘I might just do that.’ As they walked back through the erecting shop he apologised for the way he had greeted him. ‘It was good to see you,’ he said, as they parted.

  In 1946 the Foreign Press Liaison office had been a few blocks south of the Majestic, but according to Hitchen the current version was in a brand-new building on Makedonska Street. Russell breakfasted in the hotel, and then took the short walk, wondering if these days the Yugoslavs were faithfully aping Soviet methods when it came to dealing with the outside world. The fact that the British had given substantial aid to the partisans during their war might have left them feeling grateful, but somehow he doubted it.

  He had no trouble finding the right office, but for almost an hour that was the limit of his achievement. The long wait to see someone was unexplained, and of Soviet proportions. His eventual interviewer, far from being apologetic, seemed almost insulted by Russell’s temerity in still being there. He was a muscular young man with cold blue eyes, prominent lips and a very flat nose, wearing clothes which he seemed to find too tight—every few seconds he would insert a finger to loosen his collar. A uniform would have suited him better—he looked like he’d been fighting for years, and enjoying it no end. The cigarettes he seemed to be chain-smoking reminded Russell of Artucci’s.

  No name was offered. He examined Russell’s list of desirable interviewees, grunting incredulously at some, merely shaking his head at others, then abruptly got up and left the office. Another long wait ensued. Russell was beginning to think he’d been either forgotten or simply abandoned when the man returned with his list. ‘Tomorrow,’ was the verdict. ‘Nine o’clock.’

  ‘Here?’

  A grudging nod affirmed as much.

  Next morning Russell was back, fully expecting another long wait. But this time he was seen without much delay, and by an official who seemed almost human. Older than yesterday’s version, he had warmer eyes, clothes that fitted, and even introduced himself. His name was Popović.

  He handed Russell a copy of his own list. Most of the names—including the well-known leaders like Tito, Kardelj, and Djilas—had been neatly crossed out, but three had ticks beside them: Marko Srskić, Jovan Udovicki, and Vukašin Nedić. Srskić and Udovicki were known Tito loyalists
and would presumably offer up the current Party line. But why had they included Nedić?

  He soon found out.

  ‘I have taken liberty of arranging times,’ Popović told him in very passable English, passing over another sheet of paper. Srskić and Udovicki were both down for that morning, at eleven and twelve respectively, in their offices at Party headquarters. Nedić was at three, at a different address, for which copious directions had been appended.

  ‘That is his home,’ Popović pointed out. ‘Comrade Nedić has been ill, and remains on leave.’

  ‘Okay,’ Russell said, starting to get up.

  ‘There is more,’ Popović said hurriedly, causing him to sit down again. ‘Comrades Srskić and Udovicki do not speak English, so an interpreter will be supplied for your interviews with them.’

  ‘I also speak German and Russian,’ Russell offered.

  ‘They do not,’ Popović said firmly. ‘But Comrade Nedić does speak English. And Russian, too,’ he added, with what might have been the hint of a smile. ‘So you won’t need an interpreter. But you must supply us with a transcript of your interview, and any articles you wish to file from Belgrade must also be submitted for my approval. Is that clear?’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ Russell agreed.

  ‘You are sure?’ Popović asked, sounding less than certain for the first time.

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ Russell reassured him. ‘Abso-bloody-lutely,’ he murmured to himself as he walked back out to the street.

  The YCP building was a ten-minute walk away. The interpreter, an attractive young woman wearing military fatigues, was waiting in reception, and she escorted him up to Marko Srskić’s third-floor office. The interviews with him and Udovicki proved fairly predictable, and the cynic in Russell wondered if they’d actually been scripted by the same author. On the record, both men affirmed their enormous respect for the first Workers’ State, and insisted that Yugoslavia would fulfil every obligation to all their Cominform allies. There had been friction, yes, but that was only to be expected among members of even the happiest family. Off the record—and they were only too happy to be so—both Yugoslavs comrades admitted how sick they were of their overbearing mentor, and how ready they were to go it alone, regardless of Soviet threats. It was clear to Russell that both official and unofficial messages were intended for public consumption, the first to tell the world how reasonable they were being, the second to let the Soviets know they wouldn’t shrink from conflict.