Zoo Stationee

by David Downing

  By the time they reached Brösen the sky had visibly lightened. Russell got off outside the closed casino, where a single loudspeaker was manfully trying to distort the Führer’s message. Russell listened to the crackle for a few seconds, struck by the notion that he and Hitler were sharing a private moment together. The latter was promising help with the “general pacification of the world.” Russell wondered how much irony one nation could eat.

  He walked down past the boarded-up refreshment stands and pad-locked beach huts to the snow-strewn beach. The previous season’s final water temperature was still legible on the lifeguard hut blackboard, alongside a poster explaining the mysteries of artificial respiration. The men in the poster all wore striped bathing suits and mustaches, like a posse of cartoon Führers.

  The sea was gunmetal gray, the sky almost as dark, slate gray with a yellowish tinge. There was no one else in sight.

  A couple of kilometers to the east, two beacon lights marked the end of Danzig’s channel to the sea, and Russell started walking in that direction. In the distance the lighthouse at the end of the dredged channel flickered into life with each revolution. To the north, a darker line marked the horizon and the outflung arm of the Hela Peninsula. Between the two a smudge of a freighter was inching out across the bay.

  The stamp story was made for him, he thought. A story that amused and didn’t condemn. A story of stupidity, and rather lovable stupidity at that. He could implant a few ironies just beneath the skin of the text for those who wanted to pick at it, leave enough clues about the real situation for those who already understood it. They would congratulate themselves on reading between the lines, and him for writing between them. And he could sit on his necessary fence for a few more months, until Hitler drove something through it.

  Too many metaphors, he told himself. And not nearly enough satisfaction.

  He thought about the real Danzig story. Ten years ago he’d have written it, and written it well. But not now. Step out of line that far, and the toadies at the Propaganda Ministry would have him deported before he could say “Heil Hitler.” He’d be saying goodbye to his son, probably for the duration of a war. And probably to Effi as well. She’d told him often enough that she’d go to England, or better still America, with him, but he had his doubts whether she meant it, whether she’d ever willingly leave her sister, parents, agent, and vast array of friends for life in a new country where no one knew who she was.

  He left the path and walked down to the edge of the water, searching for pebbles to skim. He wanted to take Shchepkin’s offer, he realized. He wasn’t sure why, though. He only half-bought the argument that by helping the Soviets he’d be hurting the Nazis. If he really wanted to take Hitler on there were more effective ways, but most of them depressingly self-sacrificial. The money would be nice, but the risks would be high. The Nazis still beheaded spies.

  He skimmed a flat pebble between two waves. Could he trust Shchepkin? Of course he couldn’t. The Soviets might want what they said they wanted—no more, no less—but even if they did, that wouldn’t be the end of it. You didn’t do a few articles for Stalin, bank the checks, and move on. You were now on a list, one of their people, someone to call up when something else was needed. And once you were on the list, they took refusals badly.

  And then there was the attitude of his own country to worry about. He didn’t need England now, but the way things were going he soon might, and writing for Stalin would hardly endear him to the Foreign Office. He could end up persona non grata with just about everyone. Why was he even thinking about it?

  He knew why. A couple of weeks before Christmas Paul had told him about an exercise that new recruits into the Jungvolk were forced to undergo. They were taken out into the countryside without maps and invited to find their way back home the best they could. It was called a Fahrt ins Blau, a journey into the blue.

  The idea had appealed to Paul, as it probably did to most boys of eleven. It appealed to Russell too. If he took this journey into the blue he might, conceivably, find his way home again.

  He skimmed his last stone, a large one that took a single bounce and sunk. The sparse daylight was receding. The freighter and the Hela Peninsula had both been sucked into gray, and the beam from the lighthouse was sending shivers of reflection back off the darkening sea. He was in the middle of nowhere, lost in space. With ice for feet.

  THE TWO POSTMASTERS WERE both short-sighted men in sober suits with small mustaches. The Polish one could hardly wait for the honor of distributing his new stamps. A minion was sent for samples, and came back with King Jagiello and Queen Hedwig. The Polish queen, the postmaster explained, had spurned a German prince in favour of marrying the Lithuanian Jagiello. Their joint kingdom had forced the Prussians to accept the first Polish Corridor and bi-national status for Danzig. Admittedly this had all happened in the early fif-teenth century but—and here the postmaster leaned back in his chair with a self-satisfied smile—the contemporary relevance should be obvious. Even to a German.

  The German postmaster had his own sample. His stamp featured a beautiful miniature of stout Danzigers routing the Polish forces of King Stefan Batory in 1577. “A German city defended by German arms,” he announced smugly. Russell repeated the question he had put to the Polish postmaster—weren’t these stamps a little provocative? Shouldn’t the civil authorities be trying to reduce the tension between their two countries, rather than using their stamps to stoke up old quarrels?

  The German postmaster gave the same reply as his Polish opposite number. How, he asked, could anyone take postage stamps that seriously?

  RUSSELL’S TRAIN LEFT THEHauptbahnhof at ten o’clock. After paying for a sleeping berth he could barely afford, he sat in the restaurant car for the better part of two hours, nursing a single gold-flecked schnapps, feeling restless and uncertain. The Polish customs officials checked his visa just before Dirschau and the German authorities examined his passport at Flatow, on the far side of the Polish Corridor. He had no trouble with the latter: If the Danzig SA were submitting a report on his visit they must have still been struggling with their spelling.

  He thought about the kindertransport, wondered where it was at that moment. Still chugging west across Germany, most likely. The Englishwoman’s cheek would be purple by now—he hoped she would go to the press when she got back and make a real stink. Not that it would do any good. It had taken her five minutes to learn what Nazism was all about, but there was no substitute for first-hand experience. If you told people they didn’t believe you. No one, their eyes always said, could be as bad as that.

  He walked back down the train to his sleeping compartment. The two lower berths were empty, one of the upper occupied by a gently snoring German youth. Russell sat on the opposite lower berth, pulled back the edge of the curtain, and stared out at the frozen fields of Pomerania.

  He lay back and shut his eyes. Gisela Kluger looked back at him.

  He would write Shchepkin’s articles. See where the journey took him. Into the blue. Or into the black.

  Ha! Ho! He!

  RUSSELL’S TRAIN STEAMED ACROSS the bridge over Friedrichstrasse and into the station of the same name just before eight in the morning. An eastbound Stadtbahn train was disgorging its morning load on the other side of the island platform, and he stood behind the stairwell waiting for the crowd to clear. On the other side of the tracks an angry local was shaking a toasted almond machine in the vain hope that his coin would be returned. A railway official intervened and the two men stood there shouting at each other.

  Welcome to Berlin, Russell thought.

  He took the steps down to the underground concourse, bought a newspaper at the waiting room kiosk, and found himself a seat in the station buffet. The sight of his neighbor, a stout man in an Orpo uniform, cramming his mouth with large slices of blood sausage, did nothing for Russell’s appetite, and he settled for a buttered roll and four-fruit jam with his large milky coffee.

  His newspaper shielded him from the blood sausage eater, but not from
Nazi reality. He dutifully read Goebbels’s latest speech on the vibrancy of modern German culture, but there was nothing new in it. More anti-Jewish laws had come into force on the first: Driving automobiles, working in retail, and making craft goods had all been added to the verboten list. Russell wondered what was left. Emigration, he supposed. So why make it so hard for the poor bastards to leave?

  He skimmed through the rest. More villages judenfrei, more kilometers of autobahn, more indignation about Polish behavior in the Corridor. A new U-boat epic at the cinema, children collecting old tin cans for Winter Relief, a new recipe for the monthly one-pot-stew. A Reich that will last a thousand years. Six down, nine hundred and ninety-four to go.

  He thought about taking the U-bahn but decided he needed some exercise. Emerging onto Friedrichstrasse he found the remains of the last snowfall dribbling into the gutters. A ribbon of pale sunlight was inching down the upper walls on the eastern side of the street, but the street itself was still sunk in shadows. Little knots of people were gathered at the doors of about-to-open shops, many of them talking in that loud, insistent manner which non-Berliners found so annoying in the capital’s inhabitants.

  It was a three kilometer walk to his rooms near Hallesches Tor. He crossed Unter den Linden by the Café Bauer, and strode south through the financial district, toward the bridge which carried the elevated U-bahn over Mohrenstrasse. Berlin was not a beautiful city, but the rows of gray stone buildings had a solidity, a dependability, about them.

  On one corner of Leipzigerstrasse a frankfurter stall was gushing steam into the air, on another the astrologer whom Effi sometimes consulted was busy erecting his canvas booth. The man claimed he’d prepared a chart for Hitler in pre-Führer days, but refused to divulge what was in it. Nothing good, Russell suspected.

  Another kilometer and he was turning off Friedrichstrasse, cutting through the side streets to Neuenburgerstrasse and his apartment block. Walking south from Leipzigerstrasse was like walking down a ladder of social class, and the area in which he lived was still hoping for a visit from the twentieth century. Most of the apartment blocks were five storeys high, and each pair boasted a high brick archway leading into a dark well of a courtyard. A bedraggled birch tree stood in his, still clinging to its mantle of snow.

  The concierge’s door was open, light spilling into the dark lobby. Russell knocked, and Frau Heidegger emerged almost instantly, her frown turning to a smile when she saw who it was. “Herr Russell! You said you would be back yesterday. We were beginning to worry.”

  “I tried to telephone,” he lied. “But. . . .”

  “Ah, the Poles,” Frau Heidegger said resignedly, as if nothing better could be expected from her neighbors to the east. She wiped her hands on her apron and ushered him in. “Come, you must have a coffee.”

  Accepting was easier than refusing. He took the proffered seat in her living room and gazed about him as she re-heated—for the last of heaven’s know how many times—her eternal pot of coffee. Her Advent wreath was still hanging from the light fixture along with its four gutted candles. On the walnut chest of drawers two packs of cards stood beside her precious People’s Radio. It was Tuesday, Russell realized, the day Frau Heidegger and three of her counterparts from the nearby blocks played skat.

  She came back with the coffee and a small pile of post. A postcard from Paul, a probable Christmas card from his mother in the US, a letter from his American agent, and a business letter with a Berlin postmark.

  “You had two telephone messages,” the concierge said, looking down through her pince-nez at a small piece of paper. “Your fiancée”—Frau Heidegger always referred to Effi in that way, despite the fact that no prospective marriage had ever been mentioned—“says she will be back extremely late on Thursday night and will meet you at the Café Uhlandeck at noon on Friday. Does that sound right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a Herr Conway—yes?—he would like you to call him as soon as possible.”

  “I’ll call him after I’ve had my coffee,” Russell said, taking a first exploratory sip. It was burned, but so strong and sweet that you hardly noticed.

  Frau Heidegger was telling him how she’d recently caught one of the tenants—the Sudeten German on the first floor who Russell hardly knew—opening a window. This was strictly forbidden when the heating was on, and the tenant had only been forgiven on the grounds that he came “from the mountains” and could hardly be expected to know any better. He didn’t know how lucky he was, Russell thought; his own rooms on the fourth floor sometimes resembled neighboring ovens. During one warm week in December he had regularly set his alarm for 3:00 AM, when the concierge was fairly certain to be asleep and he could throw open his windows for a life-saving blast of cool air.

  He took another sip of coffee and wondered whether the war minister would be interested in developing it as a weapon. “Thank you, Frau Heidegger,” he said, carefully replacing the cup in its saucer and getting to his feet. “I already had two cups at the station,” he added in excuse.

  “It’s good to have you back,” she said, following him to the door. She didn’t close it, though. She might miss something.

  Russell walked over to the telephone at the foot of the stairs. Its installation a couple of years earlier had given Frau Heidegger cause for pride—her block was leading the way on Neuenburgerstrasse. But it had soon turned into something of a mixed blessing. A popular propensity for ringing at all times of the day and night had necessitated the introduction of a curfew, and the phone was now off the hook from ten at night till eight in the morning. It could still be used for outgoing calls during that time, but heaven help anyone who forgot to take it off again.

  He unhooked the earpiece and dialed the British embassy’s number. Doug Conway worked in the commercial department, or so he claimed. Russell had met him at the Blau-Weiss club, where English-speaking expatriates played tennis, talked about how beastly their German hosts were, and lamented the lack of reliable domestic help. Russell hated the place, but time spent there was often good for business. As a journalist he had made a lot of useful contacts; as a part-time English tutor he had been pointed in the direction of several clients. He hoped Doug Conway had found him another.

  “I’m rushed off my feet today,” Conway told him. “But I can squeeze in an early lunch. Wertheim at 12:30?”

  “Fine,” Russell agreed, and started up the four flights of stairs which led to his rooms. At the top he paused for breath before unlocking the door and wondered for the umpteenth time about moving to a block with a lift. His rooms were stuffy and hot, so he left the front door ajar and risked opening a window by a few millimeters.

  Stretched out on the threadbare sofa, he went through his mail. Paul’s postcard began “Dear Dad,” but seemed mostly concerned with the Christmas presents he’d received from his stepfather. The boy did say he was looking forward to the football game on Saturday, though, and Russell took another look out of the window to convince himself that the weather was warming up and that the game would be played.

  The envelope from America was indeed a Christmas card from his mother. It contained one cryptic line: “This might be a good year to visit me.” She was probably referring to the situation in Europe, although for all Russell knew she might have contracted an incurable disease. She certainly wouldn’t tell him if she had.

  He opened the business letters. The one from his American agent contained a check for $53.27, payment for an article on “Strength Through Joy” cruises which a dozen US papers had taken. That was the good news. The Berlin letter was a final, rather abusively written demand for payment on a typewriter repair bill, which would account for more than half the dollar inflow.

  Looking round the room at the all-too-familiar furniture and yellowing white walls, at the poster from Effi’s first film, the tired collage of photographs, and the dusty overloaded bookshelves, he felt a wave of depression wash over him.

  THE CITY’S LARGEST WERTHEIM department store occupied a site twice the size of the late-lamented Reichstag, and a
frontage running to 330 meters. Inside, it boasted 83 lifts, 100,000 light bulbs and 1,000 telephone extensions. Russell knew all this because he had written an article on the store a year or so earlier. More to the point, the restaurant offered good food and service at a very reasonable rate, and it was only a five-minute walk from the British embassy on Wilhelmstrasse.

  Doug Conway had already secured a table, and was halfway through a gin and tonic. A tall man of around 35 with sleek blond hair and bright blue eyes, he looked custom-made for Nazi Berlin, but was in fact a fairly decent representative of the human race. State-educated and low-born by embassy standards—his father had been a parks superintendent in Leeds—he had arrived in Berlin just as the Nazis seized power. His pretty young wife Mary was probably brighter than he was, and had once confided in Russell that she intended to torch the Blau-Weiss Club before she left Berlin.

  Conway’s taste in food had not traveled far from his roots. He looked pained when Russell ordered the pigs knuckle and sauerkraut, and plumped for the pot roast and mash.