Potsdam Station jr-4

by David Downing

  The girl seemed okay. They’d just shared a can of sardines and some bread in the room which passed for a hospital staff room, and were sitting at their table, listening to the moans of the wounded next door. The hospital was running out of morphine, and only those in excruciating pain were getting any. Some of the unlucky ones were stoical beyond belief, but most found it easier to groan or scream. Effi had hardly noticed while she was working, but now it made her want to join in.

  Annaliese Huiskes sat down beside them. She had somehow got hold of a hot cup of tea, which she offered to share. ‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ she told Effi in a low voice.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Effi told her. ‘You made a brilliant recovery.’ Annaliese had let Effi’s real name slip, but answered the questioning looks with an explanation of staggering simplicity. Dagmar had been given that nick-name, Annaliese explained, because she looked so much like the film star Effi Koenen.

  ‘The traitor,’ one doctor had murmured. Another had denied the resemblance.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Effi said, gesturing at the ringed finger. ‘Did you get married?’

  A shadow passed over the other woman’s face. ‘A corpse marriage,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t call it that – I hate it when other people use that phrase. But it’s more than three years ago. Maybe you’d disappeared by then, but there was a Führer decree allowing women who’d just lost their fiancées to marry them post-mortem. There was a pension included, and that’s why I went for it, but I did love Gerd, and I’m sure he’d have seen the funny side of it – marrying me when he was already dead.’ She smiled to herself. ‘After the war I’ll find a real husband. Or try to. I suppose there’ll be a shortage of men, and I’m not exactly young any more. What about you? What happened to John?’

  ‘Who’s John?’ Rosa asked.

  ‘He was my boyfriend. He went away to Sweden, and I hope he’ll be back when all this is over.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’ Annaliese asked.

  ‘Three and a half years is a long time.’

  Annaliese made a face. ‘He was crazy about you. I only met him once, but that much was obvious.’

  ‘He was then. But if you’re not young any more, what does that make me?’ Effi lowered a voice to a whisper. ‘Do you know you’re the first person who’s recognised me in three years?’

  ‘You look different, but your eyes are the same. And you don’t look old. I think we’ll both look pretty good once we’ve had some decent food and slept through the night a few times. How about your career? Are you going back to it?’

  Effi shrugged. ‘Who knows? There aren’t many parts for women in their forties.’

  Rosa had been paying attention. ‘Were you an actress?’ she asked in a whisper.

  ‘I was,’ Effi admitted. ‘Quite a good one.’

  After his trip out to Wedding, Russell had felt physically and emotionally exhausted. Lying down for a few hours had given his body some rest, but his brain was too busy contemplating Effi’s possible fate for sleep to take over. He had to do something, had to keep on the move. He decided he would go back to Schmargendorf and confront Jens. That evening, after dark.

  Once the last hint of light had disappeared from the cracks in the booking hall ceiling, he made his way down to the tunnel. A different comrade was on guard, and saw no problem in Russell seeing his boss. He found Leissner in his office, head bent over a ledger. When the men from Moscow arrived they would all be up-to-date.

  The Reichsbahn man greeted Russell with a glimmer of a smile, and raised no objections to another foray. He had realised – or been told – that Varennikov was the one who mattered. Or – perish the thought – Moscow had let it slip that Russell himself was far from indispensable.

  Maybe he was being paranoid. Leissner was friendly enough, and seemed more than happy to give him a run-down of the current military situation. The Red Army had breached the Teltowkanal defence line in the south-western suburbs that morning, and were expected in Zehlendorf and Dahlem sometime tomorrow. Schmargendorf should still be safe, but only for forty-eight hours.

  The U-Bahn, Leissner added, was no longer working – the tunnels were being booby-trapped to prevent the Soviets from using them. And the SS had spent the afternoon setting up lots of checkpoints, particularly in the western half of the city. Russell was unlikely to face summary execution in his Reichsbahn uniform, but now that the trains had stopped running he might be pressed into military service. It would, Leissner suggested, be advisable not to argue.

  Russell thanked him, and made his way up and over the elevated tracks to the goods yard entrance. Night had now fallen, and Berlin was bathed in the grim orange glow of cloud-reflected fires. It felt like rain, which might at least put some of them out.

  He walked west, keeping clear of the main thoroughfares and inching his head around corners to check what lay ahead. Twice he avoided checkpoints in this manner, carefully working his way around them. And on three other occasions he came upon those who’d not been so careful, who were now swinging from makeshift gibbets with the signatures of psychopaths pinned to their chests.

  Incoming shells exploded at irregular intervals as the evening wore on, some as close as a neighbouring street, but there was no point in worrying about them. If staying alive was his goal he should have stayed in London.

  By the time he reached the Biesinger house in Schmargendorf it was gone ten, and he felt like falling over. It occurred to him that he’d hardly eaten all day, which hadn’t been very sensible. If he ever did find Effi, she’d be looking after him.

  There were no lights visible through the uncurtained windows, but Jens had his own basement shelter, as befitted a high-ranking Party official. If he was home, he’d be ensconced down there, probably drowning the Reich’s many sorrows. Russell hoped he’d be conscious enough to hear the door-knock.

  He gave it a mighty series of bangs, which the Russians probably heard in Teltow, and was about to repeat the effort when he heard footsteps. As the door began to open he pushed his way through, forcing a gasp from the person inside. A woman’s gasp. It was Zarah.

  ‘What do you… who…’

  ‘It’s John,’ he told her, shutting the door behind him.

  ‘John?’ she exclaimed in astonishment. What are you…’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. Come downstairs, where we can see each other.’

  He followed her down to the cellar. There were camp beds against three of the walls, tables, chairs and armchairs crammed into the centre of the room.

  She turned to look at him, and saw the uniform. ‘What…?’

  ‘Don’t ask. I take it Jens isn’t here?’

  It wasn’t really a question, but she answered with an almost defiant ‘no’. She looked different, much thinner than the last time he’d seen her, and her copper hair was cut much shorter. She should have looked less attractive, but there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘Will he be back tonight?’

  ‘I don’t think so. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking for Effi. I…’

  ‘I don’t know where she is,’ Zarah said despairingly, as if she should know.

  ‘You’ve seen her,’ Russell said, hope rising inside him.

  ‘Not for almost a month.’

  ‘But you’ve seen her. She’s alive.’ He felt joy sweep through his head and heart.

  ‘I hope so. She must have been arrested.’

  That was an eventuality that Russell hadn’t even considered. ‘What for?’ he asked stupidly.

  Zarah smiled ruefully. ‘I don’t know that either. She has never told me anything about the life she’s been living. I know she must be involved in some sort of resistance movement. With the communists, perhaps. I really don’t know.’

  ‘But what makes you think she’s been arrested?’

  ‘She didn’t turn up at our usual time. And she hasn’t been in con
tact since.’

  ‘Yes, but what makes you think she’s been arrested?’ Russell repeated. ‘She might have been hurt in an air raid. Or even killed,’ he added, almost against his own will.

  ‘No, I would know,’ Zarah insisted. ‘John, I know you always thought we were like chalk and cheese – and we are – but there’s a bond… I can’t explain it, but it’s there. Sometimes I’ve wished it wasn’t, and I know Effi has too, but it is. I would know if she’d been killed.’

  Russell believed her, or wanted to. ‘Okay. So you met regularly. Since when?’

  ‘It was the end of April, I think. In 1943. She waylaid me in the cinema, sat down beside me at a matinee on Hardenberg Strasse. I nearly had a heart attack. She sounded just the same, but when the lights came on I found that I’d been talking to an old woman. I don’t think I would recognised her if we’d met in the street. Anyway, we went for a walk in the Tiergarten, and she told me everything that had happened, and that you had escaped to Sweden.’

  ‘How did she find that out?’

  ‘I don’t know, but she did. She asked me to pass it on to your exwife, so that she could tell your son. Which of course I did. And after that we met every two weeks, usually at the same time, but in different places. She soon had another identity, younger than the one before, but still older than her real age. She had her hair cut much shorter, and she just looked different somehow. It was extraordinary. I don’t how she does it.’

  ‘Where is she living?’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me. She wouldn’t even tell me what name she was using.’ Zarah smiled, and for the first time in their long acquaintanceship Russell saw something of Effi in her sister. ‘But I found out. I almost ran into her on the street one day, but she didn’t see me, and I was afraid I might mess something up if I just went up to her. And then it occurred to me – I could follow her. And I did, all the way to her home. It was an apartment at Bismarck Strasse 185. Number 4.

  ‘I never told her that I’d found out, because I knew it would worry her, my knowing. I used to give her ration stamps and money. She took them, but I never got the feeling she needed them.’

  This was wonderful, Russell thought, so much better than he’d feared. Or it had been until three weeks ago. ‘So when was this meeting she didn’t turn up for?’

  ‘Ten days ago. Friday the 13th.’ She wrung her hands. ‘I wasn’t that worried at the time – it had happened before. But she’d always contacted me within a couple of days and set my mind at rest. So I waited a few days, and then I really did start to worry. I went round to Bismarck Strasse on the Wednesday, and the portierfrau told me that she hadn’t seen any of them since the previous Thursday. When she said ‘them’ I thought I’d got the wrong flat, but I managed to get her talking, and it all came out. Frau von Freiwald and her grown-up niece Mathilde had been living there for almost two years, and only the previous week another niece – a small girl – had arrived from Dresden. Frau von Freiwald and the young girl had been there on the Thursday, but no one had seen them since. They must have been arrested, John – Effi wouldn’t leave Berlin without telling me. And who are these fictional nieces – have you any idea?’

  ‘None at all. Have you been back there since?’

  ‘Yesterday. There was no one there, and the portierfrau still hadn’t seen any of them.’

  Russell ran a hand through his hair. ‘Have you asked anyone… no, silly question – who could you ask? Jens, maybe – did he know you were seeing Effi?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t risk telling him. It wasn’t that I thought he would turn her in, not really. It was just easier not to, and.. well, he’s had a lot to deal with lately. Look,’ she went on, responding to the look which Russell failed to suppress, ‘I know you never liked him…’

  ‘I never liked his politics.’

  ‘No, John, be honest, you didn’t like him.’

  ‘Not much, no.’

  ‘I was never interested in politics, and I used to think he was a decent man. He was a good father to Lothar until the war took up all his time.’

  ‘Where is Lothar?’

  ‘With my parents. Effi wouldn’t even let me tell them that she was still alive.’

  ‘Why aren’t you there too?’

  ‘Why do you think? Lothar’s as safe as any German could be, and I had to be here in case Effi needed me.’

  ‘Of course,’ Russell said, though until that evening he’d never quite appreciated just how close the sisters were.

  ‘But now that she really needs me, I haven’t been able to do anything,’ Zarah bitterly admitted. ‘I did ask Jens to look into it – I said Erna von Freiwald was an old friend from school who’d recently got in touch, and had then been arrested. I made up a story about her involvement with a group printing leaflets of Pastor Niemöller’s speeches – the Christians are the only dissidents Jens has any sympathy for. He promised he would look into it, but I don’t think he looked very hard. He discovered there was no one of that name in Lehrter Prison, or in the women’s prison on Barnim Strasse. That was yesterday, and when I asked him again today he told me to forget the whole business, that we had our own fates to worry about. And then he showed me these suicide pills he’d gotten hold of, and seemed to think I would shower him with gratitude. ‘What about Lothar?’ I asked him. ‘And do you know what he said? He said Lothar would know that his parents had been “true to the very end”. I couldn’t stand being with him for a moment longer. I just walked out of his office and came home. I tell you, John, I feel like a corpse bride.’

  ‘So what will you do now?’

  ‘Wait for the Russians, I suppose.’

  ‘That could be dangerous,’ Russell replied without any thought. What other choices did she have?

  ‘You mean I might be raped?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that’s what’ll happen, John. I intend to see my son again.’

  ‘That sounds like a very sane way of looking at it.’

  ‘I hope so. But what are you going to do?’

  ‘I came to find Effi. And my son. I’ll keep on looking until I do.’ He smiled to himself. ‘You know Effi rented a flat in Wedding in case we needed to hide from the police?’

  ‘Yes, she told me that.’

  ‘I went up there yesterday, hoping against hope that she might still be there. And the whole building was gone, absolutely flattened, and I thought, well, you can imagine, and my heart seemed to shrivel inside me…’

  ‘She’s alive, John, I’m sure she is. We’ll get her back’

  ‘I love you for believing that,’ he said, and took her in his arms. ‘I must get back,’ he said after a while. At the outside door they wished each other luck, and Russell had a fleeting memory of standing on the same stoop more than three years earlier, after a drunken Jens had more or less confessed to the deliberate starvation of occupied Russia.

  ‘And here we have the come-uppance,’ he murmured to himself, as he began the long walk back. Two more hours of screeching shells and sudden flares, of wending his way through ruins and evading the occasional patrol, and he was back in the abandoned station. Varennikov was already asleep, so Russell pinched out the still-burning candle and laid himself out on his bed. He had probably walked further in the last five days than in all the five years that preceded them, and he felt completely exhausted.

  Eyes closed, he suddenly remembered Kuzorra again. If the detective still worked at the ‘Alex’ police headquarters he would have access to arrest records. But how could he could be contacted?

  Yorck Strasse

  April 24 – 26

  Soon after dawn Ivan announced himself with an artillery barrage, shattering every window that overlooked the Teltowkanal and blinding several of the divisional lookouts. A katyusha barrage followed, blasting holes in brickwork, cratering towpaths and sending up huge spouts of water. Fires broke out in several buildings, but were all put out with buckets of canal water collected the previous day. A steady stream of wounded disappe
ared in the direction of the field hospital three streets to the north.

  The two nearest bridges had both been destroyed in the night, but there was still no sign of Soviet tanks on the far bank. They’d lose a lot of men getting across, Paul reckoned, but that had never worried their commanders in the past. He wondered if ordinary Russian soldiers were, like their German counterparts, becoming more survival-conscious as the war entered its final days.

  Not that it would matter to him. The Russians would fight their way across this canal sooner or later, just as they had every watercourse between the Volga and Berlin. Just as their comrades moving in from the north would fight their way across the Hohenzollernkanal and Spree. And when they all came together the shouts of ‘hurrah’ would ring through the wastes of the ravaged Tiergarten. Nothing could stop them now, so why try?

  Paul wasn’t sure he knew. It wasn’t the fear of being hanged as a deserter that stopped him from slinking away, though he realised it was a distinct possibility. Nor was it any great sense of responsibility to his current comrades, most of whom were complete strangers. It was more a case of having nowhere to go. When the war began he’d had two sets of parents, a home, a city and a country. All were broken or gone.

  His relief on watch arrived, a boy named Ternath with floppy blonde hair and glasses with one cracked lens. Paul made his way to the back of the building, where the rest of his platoon were gathered in relative safety. Werner was sitting on the wooden floor, his back against the far wall, a ferocious scowl on his face as he tried to make sense of the morning newssheet. Paul found himself hoping that the boy’s mother and sister were still alive. Some people had to be, even in Berlin.

  He was halfway across the room when a wind half lifted him up and almost threw him at the opposite wall. As he slowly picked himself up the sound of the explosion was still rippling in his ears.

  Another shell exploded, this time further away. ‘Ternath,’ someone shouted, and they all rushed lemming-like across the corridor and into the empty machine room which overlooked the canal. The shell had taken out a large chunk of wall, some ten metres down from the window they’d been using. Ternath had been hit by the blast, and by any number of flying bricks, but his head and limbs were still apparently attached to his body. Blood was pouring from several cuts, but no severed artery was fountaining life away. Even his decent lens was stil in one piece. He’d been lucky, and Paul told him so.