Potsdam Station jr-4

by David Downing

  ‘To see my sister. I’m hoping that I can persuade her to return to Berlin with me. This is her daughter, my niece.’

  ‘What is your mother’s address?’ the shorter man asked Rosa.

  ‘Nordstrasse 53,’ the girl said promptly. With no time to visit the library, Effi had picked the name out of the ether the previous night. ‘Do you think the Führer is still in Berlin?’ Rosa asked her questioner, improvising rather too freely for Effi’s peace of mind.

  The man opened his mouth and then shut it again, apparently reconsidering his answer. ‘The Führer’s whereabouts are not a matter for public discussion,’ he eventually decided.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know,’ Rosa said with a look of surpassing innocence.

  ‘Well now you do,’ the man said weakly. His colleague was going through their papers for a second time, as if determined to find something amiss. Failing, he almost flung them back at Effi.

  ‘She’s very young,’ Effi told the shorter man in part-apology. ‘But she means well.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ he said coldly. He gave them a quick nod, and turned away. His partner scowled at them both before moving on into the next carriage.

  ‘He stank of onions,’ Rosa whispered.

  And so much else, Effi thought to herself.

  When they finally reached Fürstenwalde late in the afternoon, Effi was still hopeful of their getting back to Berlin that day. But the news was all bad. A bridge had been bombed a few miles to the east, a locomotive had broken down a similar distance to the west, and nothing much was moving.

  The station platforms were already crowded with families in flight from the east, and looking at them convinced Effi that a quick change of clothes was in order for herself and Rosa. Reasoning that an outward show of respectability should help them through checkpoints, they had ventured east in fairly smart outfits, but Effi had also thought to pack some shabbier clothes in their suitcases for this eventuality. Rosa had even remembered something one of her mother’s friends had once said – that tying a piece of string around a suitcase made the owner look more desperate.

  Once darkness had fallen, they changed clothes in the still-immaculate station toilets. They flushed as well as they looked, and Effi took the opportunity to dispose of her papers. She had grown rather fond of Erna von Freiwald, and felt slightly bereft at losing her.

  Looking suitably distressed, they availed themselves of the free food on offer from the NSV – the National Socialist Welfare Agency – in the forecourt outside. Feeling unusually replete, they returned to a different end of the crowded platform, found a space for themselves, and settled down to wait. Rosa soon fell asleep, but Effi lay there, her head resting uncomfortably on the edge of her suitcase, listening to the conversations going on around her. There were two main themes – the horror of what had gone before, and the fear of what was to come. Rape and murder had apparently been commonplace in those parts of Germany now overrun by the Russians, and if the voices in the dark could be believed, the popular stories of crucifixions and other atrocities were not just the product of Goebbels’ imagination. When it came to the future, it was Berlin and its people that seemed to worry the refugees most. Everyone knew that all Berliners were liars and thieves, and the thought of living in this modern day Gomorrah seemed almost as frightening as what they’d already been through.

  Many of the stories were hard to listen to, and Effi was glad that Rosa was sleeping. But she kept her own ears open. These were the experiences that her new fictional identity would remember, and she needed every conviction-enhancing detail she could get.

  It was a few minutes after six, and the light of the unrisen sun was leaking into the eastern sky, when Paul let himself out of the Grunewald house, locked the front door and set off without a backward look for the West- kreuz S-Bahn station. He had spent most of the last forty-eight hours indoors, going out only once to eat at a restaurant in nearby Halensee. He had listened to the BBC for a couple of hours each evening, and heard nothing that really surprised him. He had used the daylight hours to tidy and clean, working on the house like a doctor feverishly intent on saving a patient. It had felt absurd – he was not really expecting to see the place again – but also deeply satisfying. One small part of his world was in order.

  He was heading for Westkreuz because a clerk at the Halensee station had told him that Stadtbahn trains were still running out to the eastern suburb of Erkner, and that from there he could take a suburban train on to Fürstenwalde. He was leaving at first light in hope of getting across Berlin before the morning air raid, and because he suspected that his sixty-kilometre journey would take most of the day. Whatever fate and the Russians had in store for him, he had no intention of being shot for desertion.

  Half an hour later he was part of the crowd waiting on the Westkreuz eastbound platform. He didn’t have long to wait. A train ran in, already full to bursting, and he joined those forcing themselves aboard. The closing doors almost took his head off, leaving him squeezed inside with his arms pinioned to his sides. Once turned around, face up against the glass, he found himself with a panoramic view of what the Western allies had done to Berlin. Street upon gap-toothed street, the demolished Zoo and the scoured Tiergarten, the hollowed-out dome of the Winter Garden. The train sat for a while beneath the skeletal roof of Friedrichstrasse Station, then ventured onwards, almost tiptoeing around the long elevated curve above Dircksen Strasse. Many got off at Alexanderplatz and Silesian Station, but even more seemed to get on. Where were they all going?

  In the yards beyond Silesian Station two railway cranes were clearing away debris, and a crowd of prisoners was at work replacing damaged sections of track. Soon they were running under the Ringbahn tracks and into Köpenick, passing several allotments full of old men tending vegetables. Like the farmers a few miles further on, they knew that the war was about to roll over them, but no one was expecting the Russians to feed Berlin. Every potato and carrot would count.

  The train terminated at Erkner. Alighting, Paul was almost bowled over by the smell of the soldiers crowding the platform. There was no train east for several hours, so he went in search of food. There was none at the station, and getting into town involved passing through a military police checkpoint. As an officer checked through his papers, Paul surveyed the wall behind him, which was plastered from floor to ceiling with identical posters threatening death for desertion.

  Paul walked on into the town, which had clearly been bombed more than once. He eventually found a restaurant with something to offer, though it was only thin soup and stale bread. He ate it with a soldier’s gusto, and made his way back to the station, where the crowd seemed somewhat thinner. His train, when it came, was absurdly full, but once the MPs had cleared the front five carriages of civilians the soldiers were able to get on board, and they were soon steaming out across the orbital autobahn and into open country. There were watchers fore and aft looking out for Russian planes, but none put in an appearance, and in midafternoon they reached Fürstenwalde.

  The service was continuing east, and those wanting the Seelow line had to change. As Paul jostled his way through the crowd his train pulled noisily away, revealing an equally packed westbound platform. A woman in a long black dress caught his eye, though he couldn’t have said why. She was talking to a small girl, and perhaps it was the way she inclined her head that made him think of Effi. At that moment, as if aware of his stare, she suddenly looked across at him, and almost broke into a smile.

  And then a train slid between them, hiding her from view.

  He told himself it couldn’t have been her. He had always assumed that she had left with his father, that the two of them had spent the last three years enjoying life in New York or Hollywood. But even if she’d never left Germany, what would she be doing in Fürstenwalde? And with a girl who was at least seven, and couldn’t be her daughter. And the woman had been too old – Effi couldn’t have aged that much in three and a half years. No, it had to be som
eone who looked like her. Had to be.

  He searched the windows of the stationary train, but the face did not reappear. And when the train pulled out, she was not among the passengers who had failed to get aboard. He shook his head and made his way to the Oderbruch Railway platforms, which stood ominously empty. The line ran much too close to the current Russian positions for comfort, and its northern section had been closed several weeks before. A shuttle service to Seelow had survived, but this, as a harassed railway employee told him, was now only running under cover of darkness. He had six hours to wait.

  Paul wandered out of the station, passing the spot where he and Ger- hart had sat the week before. He would have found it difficult then to imagine his friend dead; now he found it hard to imagine him alive. Life seem punctuated by implacable, irreversible events, like a series of doors clanging shut behind him in an endless straight corridor.

  He walked on into town, hoping to pick up a lift, but nothing seemed to be going his way. He did find a relatively well-stocked shop, and exchanged his remaining ration coupons for a pound of sugar. Neumaier, who liked four spoonfuls in any hot drink, would be deep in his debt.

  As he walked back outside, a water lorry drew up beside him and the driver, a Volkssturm man in his forties or fifties, leant out and asked directions for Seelow. ‘I’ll show you,’ Paul told him as he climbed aboard.

  They drove out of Fürstenwalde and up onto the plateau, Paul scanning the sky for hostile aircraft while his taciturn companion watched the road. As they drew nearer to the front the sounds of sporadic gunfire grew louder, and it became apparent that the driver was unused to such proximity. ‘Do you think the offensive has started?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Paul told him. He had been through offensive-opening barrages, and conversation had not been possible. ‘When they do attack it’ll be just before dawn,’ he added reassuringly.

  The driver let him off in the woods between Diedersdorf and Seelow, and Paul, watching the lone lorry motor off down the sun-dappled avenue of trees, had a sudden inexplicable urge to cry. He resisted it, feeling angry with himself. What did he have to be upset about? He was alive.

  Ten minutes later he was back at the clearing. Neumaier and Hannes were still kicking their ball to and fro, which momentarily angered him. But football hadn’t killed his friend.

  Sergeant Utermann was at his usual post, sitting on the fallen tree trunk outside their dugout. The soldier perched beside him looked young from a distance and younger close up – his uniform was way too big for him, and when he stood to salute the trousers bunched up around his ankles. More depressing still, he had the look of someone pleased to be there.

  ‘This is Haaf,’ Utermann told Paul.

  Half a soldier, Paul thought, remembering his English. Well it wasn’t the boy’s fault. He offered a hand.

  ‘Haaf heard some good news at battalion,’ Utermann went on, as Neumaier and Hannes came over to join them. ‘The British and Americans are about to make peace. With any luck they’ll soon be fighting the Russians alongside us.’

  ‘And there are 500 new tanks on the way,’ the boy added with barely suppressed excitement. ‘And special divisions with new weapons.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Hannes asked drily, causing the boy to blush.

  ‘It’s what I heard,’ he insisted.

  ‘It could be true,’ Utermann said, backing him up. ‘Someone at battalion told me that everything’s being held back for the Führer’s birthday.’

  ‘Which is next Friday,’ Haaf added. ‘He’ll be fifty-six.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put any bets on him reaching fifty-seven,’ Paul heard himself say. It was, he realised, exactly the sort of thing his father would have said.

  In Russell’s Lyubyanka cell two more meals implied the passing of another day. He had been expecting his anxiety levels to rise, but actually felt calmer. A sudden realisation that the war might end without his knowing induced only a mild panic, which soon dissipated. He felt distanced from his own plight, almost philosophical.

  It seemed somehow appropriate that he should end up in a Soviet prison. The final stop of a long and almost predictable journey. From the Flanders trenches to the Lyubyanka; from one murderous balls-up to another. A true twentieth-century Odyssey. Or should that be Iliad – he could never remember which was which.

  How would he explain it all to Paul, assuming he ever got the chance? Where would he start?

  He remembered that evening in Langemarke, the Belgian village behind the lines where he first heard news of the Bolshevik Revolution. He had carried the excitement back to his unit, and seen haggard faces break into smiles. Few of his fellow-soldiers were socialists, let alone Bolsheviks, but the war had given anyone with half a brain a pretty fair idea of how things really worked, and most needed little convincing that their world was ripe for radical change. The Bolshevik Revolution seemed like the first decisive breach in the wall, a great strike against privilege and exploitation, a wonderful harbinger of equality and brotherhood.

  The desire for some sort of revolution had been intense, and support for the only one on offer was bound to reflect that fact. Despite the many indications, over succeeding years, that life was considerably less than perfect in the new socialist paradise, many found it hard to give up on the Soviet Union, and even those that did seemed burdened with a lingering affection. Russell had left the Party in the twenties, but had still given Stalin the benefit of the doubt for many more years than he should have. And now he had run the full gamut, from fraternal foreign comrade to enemy of the state. How many thousands – millions, even – had traversed the same path? For him, the straw that broke the camel’s back had been Stalin’s return of exiled German communists to the Nazis. But there’d been plenty of others to choose from.

  And yet. There were still thousands of communists out there – millions even – who thought they were fighting for a better world. They had taken the fight to the Nazis and fascists before anyone else, and they still led most of the resistance armies, from France through Yugoslavia and all the way to China. Communists like Gerhard Ströhm in Berlin, and the Ottings in Stettin – they had fought the good fight. They had saved Russell’s life in the process, and probably paid with their own.

  He supposed the same could be said of Christians and Christianity. Russell had been an atheist as long as he could remember, and generally despised all religion, but there was no denying the integrity and bravery of those individual Christians who had stood up to the Nazis, and who were now either dead or languishing in concentration camps. Perhaps both Christianity and communism only worked in opposition, as inspirational ideologies for the have-nots of any particular time and place. Once the proponents of those ideologies became established in power, moral corrosion always set in.

  It was not an original thought, but he was very tired. He could think up a new universal theory tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. There seemed no shortage of time.

  It was him, Effi thought; she was certain it was. She tried to force her way through to the windows on the other side, but made little headway. The train was packed with real refugees, bearing all the belongings that they’d managed to rescue from the ruins of their former lives, and they weren’t about to surrender another square foot.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Rosa shouted after her, the obvious anxiety stopping Effi in her tracks.

  ‘I thought I saw someone I knew,’ Effi told her, once they were together in the corridor.

  ‘Who?’ Rosa asked excitedly. ‘No, don’t tell me,’ she quickly added, having obviously realised than the ‘someone’ might well be out of place in their new fictional existences.

  ‘He was the son of an old friend,’ Effi told her. ‘I haven’t seen him for two years,’ she added. And then only for a few seconds in the Tiergarten. He’d been a flakhelfer then, but now he was wearing an army uniform. He looked about a foot taller. And he was heading east, into the disaster which everyone knew awaited the army.

  Both b
efore and during the war – right up until his illicit exit in December 1941 – John had often talked about taking Paul and her away from Germany, but they had always known that the boy would refuse to go. His father might be English, but his mother, stepfather, stepsisters, friends – his life – were German.

  And this was where his generation of German boys had ended up.

  She felt like weeping, but that was nothing new.

  At least she and Rosa were on a train, with a chance of reaching Berlin before the Russians. And after almost twenty-four hours in Fürstenwalde that was something to be thankful for.

  After around an hour the train jerked back into motion, and was soon moving at a surprisingly respectable speed. This remained so until they reached Köpenick, where it slowed to a crawl before eventually stopping completely. There was a fine view of the sunset through the window, but no explanation given for the delay. By the time they got going again darkness had fallen, and the refugees were spared an early sighting of their capital in ruins.

  It could hardly have made them more anxious. There was near-silence among the refugees as the train rattled in towards Silesian Station, even the children hushed by their parents’ obvious concern. There was no rush for the doors when the train came to a halt, which suited Effi very well. She knew where the NSV desk was, and hoped to be first in the queue. In the event, she settled for fourth, and while those in first place began filling in forms, she took a look around the familiar concourse. Before the war, this was where their old enemy Drehsen had met his victims, and she had dangled herself in front of him as a means of discovering where he had taken the others. It seemed a long time ago. She remembered sitting in the car with Russell on Dragoner Strasse, eager to confront the bastard in his lair. He had made her wait, and she had admitted that patience was not one of her virtues. Well, that had at least changed. If the Nazis had taught her anything, it was patience.