As she turned to walk away, he asked what her name was.
‘Natasha,’ she said.
Emerging from the soldiers’ mess on Koppen Strasse, Paul Gehrts could see flames still leaping from the buildings further up the street. They had been hit a couple of hours earlier, courtesy of an idle or incompetent Allied bombardier. The rest of the bombs had fallen, to rather more relevant effect, in the marshalling yards beyond Silesian Station.
There was only one fire engine visible, and no sign of hoses in use. A couple of uniformed men were leaning against the engine, puffing on cigarettes, watching the dancing flames.
Paul walked the other way, towards Stralauer Platz, in hope of finding a tram to take him across the city. Four days had passed since Gerhart’s death. The loss had numbed him, but not for long – the shock had worn off all too quickly, and left him seething with an anger he could hardly contain. His sergeant, sensing that he might do something stupid, had persuaded battalion to let Paul take some of the leave he was owed.
Reaching the capital had taken all night, and his first sight of the city in over six months had been a sobering experience. The streets were like obstacle courses, and in places it seemed as if almost half the buildings had been damaged beyond repair. After Russia and Poland, he was used to ruins, but this was Berlin, his home and one of the world’s great cities. Germany’s heart, as his stepfather had used to say.
There were no trams in Stralauer Platz, but he managed to hitch a lift on an ammunition lorry heading for the Tiergarten. The city centre had taken several hits that morning, and blankets of smoke hung above the streets. Pedestrians crossed his line of vision, striding purposefully this way and that, as if they hadn’t noticed that their city was on fire.
As the lorry crossed the Schloss Brücke he saw two bodies floating in the Spree, both head-down with arms stretched forward, like frozen swimmers. As the driver wove his way down Unter Den Linden, he noticed that the Bristol Hotel had been almost razed to the ground – only the revolving doors remained, opening onto rubble. On the other side of the boulevard a line of identical posters bore the message: ‘Führer, We Thank You!’
The Brandenburg Gate loomed ahead, and he remembered his feeling of pride when German soldiers had paraded through the Arc de Tri-omphe in Paris. Five years ago. Five long years.
The Adlon Hotel loomed to the left, still intact, and now enclosed by a grim protective wall that reared up to the first floor balconies. He had a sudden memory of an afternoon there – he must have been about ten – sitting at the bar drinking Coca-Cola through a striped straw as his father interviewed someone on the other side of the room. It must have been the first time he drank the America soda – it had tasted so different, so good. He had wanted it to last forever.
He felt the familiar pang of resentment, the feeling of betrayal that he couldn’t really justify, but which rankled deep inside. His head told him – had always told him – that his father had done the right thing, but his heart could not believe it.
This, after all, was the father who had told him that being right was often the consolation prize.
The lorry was skirting the eastern end of the Tiergarten, which looked more like a desert than a park, an area of churned nothingness punctuated by bomb craters and the angular stumps of murdered trees. The Zoo Bunker gun and control towers loomed in the distance, like the gravestones of brother giants.
His lift was going no further, so Paul walked down Budapester Strasse towards the end of the Ku’damm. As a child, he had assumed that his father was just being loyal to the country of his birth, but later he had come to realise that his was not the case – his father felt no attachment to England either; his beliefs transcended nationality. Paul had a rough notion of what those beliefs were – a commitment to fairness, a hatred of prejudice? – but nothing more. It was never easy to work out what other people really believed in. Take Gerhart – he had hated the Nazis, but had he actually believed in anything? He was German through and through, so he must have believed in a different Germany. But different in what way?
What did he believe in himself, come to that? Nothing really. War took away the option of belief, left you too busy fighting for survival, your own and that of your comrades. Particularly a losing war.
But maybe that was the answer. It was how you fought that mattered – you had to fight and lose with honour, or defeat would leave you with nothing.
People like Gerhart would die. Thousands of them, millions of them. He couldn’t blame the Russian pilot who had dropped the bomb. He was just doing what he had to do; on another day he might have come down in flames.
But that Russian prisoner in Diedersdorf – he hadn’t deserved to die. His death had been a matter of convenience, nothing more. Killing him hadn’t been right.
He suddenly remembered something else his father had said. Paul had used to pester him about the First War, and every now and then his father had responded, usually in a vain attempt to undermine all the Hitlerjugend stuff which had swirled so happily around his young brain. ‘You can’t afford to turn off,’ Russell had said. ‘Both your mind and your emotions – you have to keep them turned on. You own what you do. You live with it. If you can, you use it to make yourself kinder or wiser or both. You make sense of it.’
His father had always believed in making sense of things. Paul could remember an exasperated Effi telling his father that some things would never make sense. Russell had laughed, and said she was living proof of her own argument.
Paul wondered where he was now. Where she was. He remembered the weeks after their disappearance, how he’d scanned all the newspapers he could get hold of, dreading news of their arrest or execution.
And that day in the spring when he’d finally discovered that his father was safe. The relief. The rage.
He skirted round what was left of the Memorial Church, and started up the Ku’damm. A gang of Russian women prisoners were hard at work clearing rubble, one sharing a joke with the German overseers, and the sidewalks were surprisingly crowded, mostly with tired-looking women. Several elderly couples were sitting outside one of the surviving cafés, and most seemed to be nursing their cups between both hands, as if the warmth mattered more than the drink.
The trams were still running in the West End, and one took him down Uhland to Berliner, where he caught another heading east to the Hohenzollerndamm S-Bahn station. Crossing the railway bridge, he forked right down Charlottenbrunner Strasse. Grunewald’s suburban avenues had lost many trees to fuel hunger, and several of the detached houses and villas had been damaged or destroyed by bombs, but an air of serene gentility lingered on. In one large garden an elderly man in a wing collar was digging a grave for a grey-haired corpse in a wheelbarrow. The legs dangling over the end were still stockinged, the feet encased in purple slippers. In another garden, two old women were absorbed in a game of croquet, the sharp crack of mallet on ball echoing down the empty avenue.
Paul finally reached Herbert Strasse, the northern section of which seemed almost intact. Reluctant to reach his destination, he slowed his pace, and even found himself hoping that the house would be gone, and Gerhart’s mother with it – with the father and brother already dead there would be no one left to inherit the grief.
But the neat little villa was still standing in its large tree-shaded garden, just as he remembered it from their school days. He opened the wooden gate, walked slowly up the path, and let the knocker fall.
She smiled when she saw it was him, but only for the briefest of moments. Realisation dawned, and her face seemed to collapse in front of him. ‘No,’ was all she said, without even a trace of conviction.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Her hand grasped at the door-jamb for support. She looked entreatingly at him, tears coursing down her cheeks. ‘Why?’
There was no answer to that, so he told her how: the Russian plane, the bomb, one moment there, the next moment gone. No time to think, no pain. The grave in the woods out
side Diedersdorf. He would take her there after the war.
‘But why?’ she said again, this time with anger. ‘Why are you still fighting? Everyone knows the war is lost. Why don’t you just say no?’
There was no answer to that either, or none that would help. Why were they still fighting? For each other. And because someone would shoot them if they refused. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he found to say. ‘I loved him too,’ he added simply.
She shut her eyes, reached for the door like a blind woman, and closed it in his face.
He stared at it for a few seconds, then turned away. Back on the street he took out the family photograph which Gerhart had always carried. He had meant it to give it her, but it would have been like slapping her in the face with all she had lost. He would bring it round later. If there was a later.
His own house, the one he and his step-sisters had inherited, was less than a kilometre away. He hadn’t intended to go there, but he found himself walking that way, drawn by the need for solitude to the only private space that was available to him.
The key felt strange in his hand as he opened the front door. He half expected to find the place full of refugees, but privilege was obviously still able to exercise its malign protective spell – those members of the Grunewald rich now hiding in the countryside would be expecting to find their homes the way they left them when peace made it safe for them to return.
The house had been empty for almost a year, since his parents’ death in the car crash. By then permission to drive a private car had been granted to very few, and his stepfather would have appreciated the irony of it – death by privilege. His mother would not have been so amused. Why, he wondered, had she married two men whose sense of humour so exasperated her?
The rooms smelt stale, and looked, for some reason, like one of those film sets he had seen when Effi gave him a tour of Babelsberg. Uncle Thomas had written to say he would look after the place, but had probably been called up to the Volkssturm not long after that. He might be dead by now.
On impulse, Paul unhooked the telephone, and much to his surprise, it still worked. He looked up Uncle Thomas’s number in the book on the side table, and dialled it. He could picture it ringing in the hall of the house in Dahlem, but no one answered.
He went upstairs to his old room. It was as he’d left it, a shrine to his childhood, lined with maps and pictures of his boyhood heroes: Ernst Udet performing aerial acrobatics at the Berlin Olympics, Rudolf Caracciola beside his Silver Arrow at Monaco, Max Schmeling after defeating Joe Louis.
More usefully, he found a drawer-full of socks and underwear that might still fit him.
The bed was only slightly damp, and almost obscenely comfortable. He lay on his back, staring up at the pictures on the walls, and wondered what had happened to the boy who put them there. Several hours later he was woken by the sirens, and chose to ignore them. There were worse things in life than a bomb through the ceiling.
The ghost of a star
April 10 – 13
They came in the night, as they always did. A half-heard key in the door, a rough hand on the shoulder, a succession of barked orders – ‘get up, get dressed, get a move on.’ Then the back staircase, the Black Maria parked beside the rubbish bins, the short drive up an empty Mokhavaya Street, the archway and gates swallowing him up.
He was bundled in through a side door, walked down a blue-lit corridor and into a yellow-lit reception room, planted on a stool in front of a desk. His personal details were copied from his passport and other papers onto a new form, and he was asked, somewhat bizarrely, whether or not he smoked. When he asked the official across the desk the reason for his arrest he was given nothing more than an if-you-don’t-know-I’m-not-going-to-tell-you smirk.
Registration complete, he was hustled along barely lit corridors and up barely lit stairs to his new quarters. His escort shoved him in, pulled the door shut, and flicked up the metal flap to make sure he was still there. It was a six-by-four-foot cell. The bed took up half the available space, a battered tin bucket sat in the far corner. He was not going to get much exercise.
Nor much sleep if the light bulb hanging from the ceiling was always on, which it doubtless was. He could see other yellow lights through the window, which suggested his cell overlooked the inner courtyard, but what the hell did that matter? The quality of the view was hardly a priority.
He lay down on the bed, wondering if the solo cell boded well or ill. Privacy was nice, but so was someone to talk to. And he would have liked someone other than the authorities to know he was there.
He should be terrified, he thought, but all he could feel was a damning sense of failure.
He had let Effi and Paul down, behaved like an idiot. Making a pain in the arse of himself hadn’t worked in the US or Britain, where the only sanction was refusing his calls. So why in God’s name had he expected it to work here, where swatting away human pests was almost a national sport?
Stupid, stupid.
But this was no time for self-flagellation. If there was any flagellating to do the Soviet authorities would be only too happy to oblige. He needed to calm down, keep his wits about him. ‘Sobriety breeds success’, as one puffed-up schoolmaster had written on one of his essays, the day before Archduke Franz Ferdinand bit the dust.
He wondered whether someone had overheard him at the Shchepkins’ door, and reported him for breaching the ‘general rules governing conversations between foreigners and Soviet citizens?’ He hoped not – Shchepkin’s wife and daughter would also be under arrest if that was the case – but it seemed the logical explanation. Of course, if Shchepkin himself had been carted away on some ludicrous pretext of consorting with foreign agents, then a foreigner trying to contact him would be a dream come true to those who’d done the carting. It would provide them with ‘evidence’ that Shchepkin was in touch with ‘foreign powers’. The irony was, the only real spying Russell had ever done had been for the Soviet Union. His work for the Americans had involved him in nothing more dangerous than lining up potential contacts.
His request to join the Red Army’s triumphal progress could hardly have given them reason to arrest him. They only had to say no, as indeed they had. And if they wanted to punish him for chutzpah, then a swift deportation would surely have been more than sufficient.
So why was he here? He supposed they would tell him eventually, always assuming there was a reason.
* * *
In Berlin, Effi woke soon after eight with the sun in her eyes – it was reflecting off an unbroken window on the other side of Bismarck Strasse. She examined the sleeping face of the child beside her for traces of the nightmare which had woken them both a few hours earlier, but there were none. The face was almost serene.
In the thirty-six hours which had passed since her arrival, Rosa had given no additional cause for concern. True, she didn’t talk very much, but she replied when spoken to, and did all that was asked of her. She had objected only once, albeit with an almost desperate intensity, when Effi suggested they get rid of a particular blouse. It wasn’t that the blouse was badly faded and frayed, though that in itself would have been reason enough. The problem was the incompleteness of the fading, and the star-shaped patch which had held its colour beneath the yellow badge.
‘My mother made this blouse,’ Rosa had pleaded. ‘It’s the only thing I have. Please.’
Effi had relented. ‘But we must hide it well. And you must never wear it. Not until the war is over.’
Rosa had accepted the conditions, folded the blouse with the sort of care one reserved for religious relics, and placed it at the bottom of a drawer.
Other items in her suitcase included a chess set and a pack of cards, both homemade. Her mother had taught her many games during their years of hiding, and Rosa had become particularly good at chess, as Effi soon discovered. She could also sew, though not with the same proficiency.
Her real talent was for drawing. Effi had assumed that the beautifully crafted cards
and chess ‘pieces’ were the work of Rosa’s mother, but it soon became apparent that they were the child’s. Given a pencil and paper that second afternoon, she produced a drawing of the street outside that astonished the two adults. It wasn’t the rendering of the bomb- gapped buildings opposite which caught their attention, accurate though that was. It was the figure in the foreground: a man walking by with a suitcase, looking back over his shoulder, as if in fear of pursuit. Real or imagined, he was utterly convincing.
In the Lyubyanka, the sun had risen and fallen before they came for Russell again. Breakfast had been a bowl of thin soup with a hunk of stale bread, dinner the same. Yet he didn’t feel hungry. It had been like that in the trenches on the eve of a German attack – the mind was too busy fighting off fear to take note of what the body was saying.
They passed along many corridors, ascended and descended several staircases, as if his escort had orders to disorient him. Eventually they came to their destination – a large, windowless room that smelt of mould. There were seats on either side of a table, one upholstered leather, the other bare metal. Ordered onto the latter, Russell tried to bolster his spirits by compiling a probable list of the books in the prison library. Kafka, of course. The Marquis de Sade and Machiavelli. The Okhrana Book for Boys. What else? Had Savonarola written his memoirs?
The door opened behind him, and he resisted the temptation to turn his head. A tall faired-hair man in an NKVD uniform walked briskly past him, placed a depressingly thick file of papers on the desk, and took the leather chair behind it. He was about thirty-five, with wide nose, full-lipped mouth and blue eyes just a little too close together.
He placed his cap on the side of the desk, positioned the desk-lamp to shine in Russell’s face, and turned it on.
‘Is that necessary?’ Russell asked.
‘I am Colonel Pyotr Ramanichev,’ the man said, ignoring the question and opening the file. He looked at the top page. ‘You are John David Russell, born in London, England, in 1899. You lived in Germany from 1924 to 1941, and became an American citizen in 1939. You lived in the United States for most of 1942, and then returned to England. You describe yourself as a journalist.’
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