The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  “And?” prodded Ganz.

  “All they could tell me was he walked in a strange manner. From the description of the children, it sounds like a man used to using cover, and that he wore what sounds like a Russian quilted jacket.”

  There was a silence as each man examined the desirability of a Russian being the prime suspect in these murders.

  “A war veteran, surely,” snorted Weber explosively. “An officer, probably, walking with a rod up his backside or with wounds honorably gained in defense of the Fatherland. Veterans and Americans. This is perfect!”

  “Have you called social services about those children?” Tanneberger asked suddenly.

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you intend to?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?” Tanneberger lifted his face from his papers. Next to him, Ganz’s face was expressionless, but Reinhardt knew he would be frustrated at this nit-picking.

  “I will mention them in my report, but I believe that they can take care of themselves well enough for now.”

  “For now?”

  “For the time we need to concentrate on this investigation.”

  “I’m surprised, Reinhardt. I did not expect such callousness from you.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t so softened up by the Americans as we thought,” Ganz said, taking back the initiative. Most of the men grinned, as they were supposed to, a few more looked uncomfortable.

  Tanneberger grinned, a quick twitch of his mouth. “Where are you with the report?”

  “It needs to be typed up, and I need Berthold’s and Endres’s findings.”

  “Very well. Let me have it as soon as it’s done.”

  “Yes, sir. There is one more thing. The unidentified victim seemed to me too well-dressed, too well-fed, and too clean to be a Berliner. Or if he is one, he is very well-connected.”

  The room was silent.

  “Meaning?”

  “There may be an Allied connection, sir.”

  The room shifted. Someone groaned.

  “Allied?” Tanneberger asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “Americans. Who bloody else with Reinhardt?” Weber muttered.

  “Quiet!” Ganz growled. “Reinhardt?”

  “I have no idea. As I said, it is an impression.”

  “Because he was well-fed?”

  “And he was found in the US sector,” offered Ganz, his eyes like two cherries pushed into dough.

  “I’m sorry, what’s that you’re saying, Ganz?” asked Reinhardt, stung into a reaction. “Are you saying the people in the US sector are better off than in others? The Soviet sector, for example?”

  There was a hiss of laughter, and Ganz reddened, made to say something, but Tanneberger cut him off.

  “Enough, the pair of you. The US MPs were called?” Reinhardt nodded. Tanneberger looked at him with his blank face. “And they had nothing to say? No surprise, there. Well, if they saw nothing to worry them, I see nothing for us to worry about. I will let Bliemeister know,” Tanneberger finished, referring to the assistant chief of police of the American sector. He looked at Ganz, and something unspoken passed between them.

  Reinhardt hesitated a moment. “One of the children also said he’d seen Poles watching the building. From what I could gather, these Poles may have been searching for war criminals.” The room was very quiet.

  “Sterling work, Reinhardt,” Ganz said, “to land us with an investigation possibly involving the Allies.” There was a smattering of laughter. “And, of course, not forgetting your impression this might have happened before. So. Circulate the victims’ information to the other precincts, and make sure the Allied military police command is informed as well. Then get some rest and be back in later. You’re off night shifts until this is cleared up. Some sunlight should do you some good. You look like a bloody corpse.”

  6

  Reinhardt left the station with his head spinning from lack of sleep. The sun was well up, and Berlin was well awake. The streets were spotted with people, dark-clothed for the most part, although here and there were splashes of color on women, among the younger ones especially. The young recovered faster, and made more efforts to appear normal. He felt terribly old as he thought that, walking past people huddled around the window displays in the few shops that were open, and there were already queues in front of the bakeries and butchers.

  A few cars, mostly Allied vehicles, moved along the main roads, which had been largely cleared and above which the stark façades of the ruins reared their gashed and scored faces from skirts of debris. All the surfaces seemed sanded down, even clean, somehow, paint and stonework chipped and blasted away.

  The destruction, as titanic as it was, was not what repelled his eye and mind as he walked under the empty-socketed stare of the buildings. It was that the city seemed deaf and blind. There was almost no noise. No crowds, no traffic. And it was the lack of windows, although that knowledge, that impression, had not come easily or quickly, and until it had, Berlin had left him with a feeling of wrongness at odds with the colossal damage that had been wrought on it. There was no light, no reflections. There was almost no glass, so the light seemed to vanish into the gaping fissures of the ruins. Reinhardt did not know what other people thought of the face of their city, but he could not get used to it, could not draw his eyes away from the jigsaw jumble. The only time it had become something more than a tangle of ruins was in winter, when the snow had turned the ruins into cathedrals, lining broken walls and brick like lace.

  He walked down Grunewaldstrasse and took the steps to the underground station at Bayerischer Platz. The atmosphere on the platform was frosty with humidity, the tang of unwashed people, wet brick, stagnant water. A train came eventually, the yellow square of its frontage flickering through the crowds that then surged forward into the carriages. He squeezed in and swayed and jostled with the rest of the passengers. He let himself be wedged up against the wall of the carriage, his eyes lost somewhere else—somewhen else—but he was not so lost he did not feel the little fingers that tried to worm into his pockets. He clamped his hand around a thin wrist, looking down at a boy. A pickpocket. The boy blinked up at him with eyes hard as glass, the ripple of a snarl on his face. Reinhardt shook his head, lifted a finger to say “wait,” and fished a couple of Luckies from his pack, handing them over. The boy stared at them, then snatched them and was gone as the train’s doors opened onto Kurfürstenstrasse station.

  Reinhardt lost sight of him almost immediately, wishing the little boy some measure of luck in this ruined world, where crime had taken on dimensions never before seen in Berlin. Theft, assault, rape, extortion, black marketeering, corruption . . . everything and anything that the malicious could foist on the desperate, and that the desperate could get away with, most of it committed by Berliners on Berliners while the occupying forces passed immune through it all. Not many would dare raise a hand to one of them, but he knew there were few things a Berliner would not do to win the favor of an Allied soldier. Especially the women. Widows and young women. German women and Allied soldiers. It provided the women with money or chocolate or cigarettes, but he knew it fueled a cycle of violence within families and communities. People could not help but look with condescension and contempt on such behavior. Time-bound conservatism was hard to shift at the best of times. Desperate times strengthened them, and he knew some men were driven to savagery at what their womenfolk did, or what they suspected they did.

  Another time-honored stricture, for a man to take his failings out on his woman or children.

  The train carried on east and he alighted at Hallesches Tor, walking up to Belle Allianz Platz, where, in place of the prewar circle of elegant, classical buildings, there was nothing, just a suggestion of space bounded by heaps of ruin. He had worked here, once, in the CID offices at No. 5. They were gone. Total
ly gone, and because the memories of those years were not good, he had nothing to hold him, and his steps led him on, almost without him thinking, away from the main thoroughfares, paralleling the Landwehr Canal off to his right, where Berlin’s defenders had made one of their last stands against the Soviet advance, and eventually into a ruined street, all but deserted, many of the buildings simply gone and reduced to stone and rubble. Times and places like this, Reinhardt knew it was not a lack of words to describe the damage, it was simply a new language, a new alphabet that was needed to quantify it, and to what it had done and was doing to those who lived here.

  Even among ruin so immense, here and there smoke spiraled up from the piles of debris, and washing hung limply on sagging lines, evidence of life still going on somewhere down below all this. People picked across the ruins, poking with sticks, from time to time stooping to pick something up and place it in a bag. Children chased each other across mounds of masonry, the older ones leaping fleet-footed, the younger ones picking their more cautious way. Where walls still stood, they were covered in scrawled messages that families and friends had left one another, desperate and forlorn announcements of their safety, their location in the aftermath of the war’s end.

  He paused outside one such building, messages and addresses scribbled densely up and over the archway of its entrance. The arch, and a few feet of wall to either side and over it, was about all that remained of the apartment building that had once stood here. Reinhardt walked under it, his feet crunching on stone and plaster, past where a staircase lurched up to end abruptly in a splintered mess of wood, looking up and across the hewed piles of rubble where the building had collapsed in on itself. He made his careful way across it, stepping aimlessly, seeing how his shoes were powdery with dust. His eyes roved across the ruins, over shattered stone, blackened timber, over the straight lines and the curved, as if searching for something. He would lean down, sometimes, his eye drawn by a spot of color, a piece of wood, trail his fingers across the dust on a scrap of fabric, but whatever he found, he left, and whatever he looked for, he did not find.

  After a while, he brushed clean a stretch of wall and sat, folding his coat around him, and lit one of his Luckies. His eyes kept moving, finding nothing, as always, but he could not help this pilgrimage, the urge that pulled him nearly every day, here, to where he used to live. To where he had once lived with Carolin, his wife, and with Friedrich, the son he had lost to the Nazis, and who had vanished on the Eastern Front at Stalingrad. Somewhere, down there, under all this, there must be a trace of her, of them, for he had nothing, now. He remembered the last time he had seen Friedrich, before his son had stormed out and left for the army. It had been the day his wife died. He had sat at the kitchen table and made tea in the blue pot she always would use. Was it down there, he wondered? Under all this? Had someone else come into the apartment, seen it, maybe used it, used it carefully . . . Just a blue teapot, a china teapot bought for a few marks in a Berlin department store, but he could not stop thinking about it.

  He sat, smoking slowly, making the cigarette last. He did not have that sense of being watched. The last few times he had come, he had thought someone else was here, and once, he was sure he had seen a shape passing, but it was usually at night that he came, and he was not sure anyone was there at all. Places like this, moods like his, you could hear and imagine anything.

  When he finished, he resumed his walk through the wakened city, his steps slow and dragging for all that he wanted to be off the streets. The sun was low in the east and its light lay in a sawed line down the middle of the street. Like the moon, the sun shone past and into places it never should have, glimmering and shining through the ruins in ways that probed and startled. He took the southbound C line U-bahn to Paradestrasse, not far from Tempelhof airfield. A crocodile file of children wound down the street, escorted by Swedish nurses, probably on their way to breakfast in one of the schools. He put his head into one or two shops, but the shelves were empty where there were no queues, and would be soon where the queues had formed. A man bumped into him as he came out of a butcher’s, a flattened piece of meat flopping over the scrap of greaseproof paper he held in his palm. The man ducked his head in apology, pulling his purchase closer to his chest.

  “There’s meat?”

  “If you can call it that,” the man answered. He summoned up a smile from somewhere. “You know what they say, right? It’ll be peace when the butcher asks ‘and can I offer you a quarter pound more . . . ?’”

  “Or they increase fish rations, only to run out of newspaper to wrap it in.”

  Across the street from the butcher’s, Reinhardt spotted a small crowd in the entrance to an alleyway and when he peered past heads and shoulders, he saw a woman, probably a farmer from the countryside, selling produce from a suitcase. He shouldered through the crowd, ignoring the menacing gaze of the man who stood behind the farmer holding an iron-bound club in his hands, and exchanged some Luckies for six eggs and some ham, and a small pot of cream. The eyes of the crowd pricked into him as the goods changed hands, richness that almost none could afford anymore.

  He kept an eye out that none of them sought to follow and rob him. He folded himself into a corner on a tram and rode it most of the rest of the way back to where he lived. He was very tired now, his mind slowly running down as the ruined buildings began to fall away outside the windows, the destruction lessening as the tram squealed onward. The buildings became smaller, until they were houses, standing in rows and on little plots, perhaps one of the last vestiges of the Weimar vision of Berlin as a garden-style city, all individual homes and gardens.

  He left the tram, walking down a quiet street and unlocking the front door of a small house with white walls and a high peaked roof of red tiles. The house was quiet inside, and despite the war and the poverty it somehow maintained a deep smell of wax and wood, and the heavy odor of old fabrics and air left still. Somewhere further into the house, a clock ticked remorselessly. In the kitchen at the back, light shone thickly through the tall windows, slanting and breaking around the leaves of the plants that clustered along the sills. An old lady sat at a table, a mug in front of her, a scent of mint in the air and a newspaper folded open. She looked up as he came in taking off his hat, slight surprise on the austere lines of her face.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Meissner.”

  “Good morning, Gregor,” she replied. “Will you have some tea?”

  “Thank you, no.” If she was offering tea, it meant there was nothing to eat. He put what he had bought on the table. Meissner’s face stayed steady, but her eyes blinked as she looked things over. The rations were very low and his salary, although regular enough, did not bring enough extra in, not on black market prices. Without his cigarettes, without the largesse of his American friends, they would be far worse off. “Nothing for me but some rest. I will check the garden first, though.”

  “I did it already,” she replied. “Nothing is missing.” Reinhardt shrugged out of his coat as he went quietly upstairs, opening the door of his room. It was dark, the curtains drawn, only the sound of slow breathing to disturb the stillness. He draped the coat over the end of what passed for his bed—a child’s mattress laid atop some empty ammunition crates—jacket and tie following as he sat and heeled off his shoes. He sat there, elbows on knees, eyes nodding closed, then fluttering open to look across the room where, curled like a dog into a corner, lay Brauer.

  Reinhardt looked at him a long moment, before lying back on his bed, a long, low sigh escaping as he did so, fingers cupping the flame of his knee. He lay awake, eyes open on the ceiling, listening to the harsh rasp of his oldest friend’s breathing. Reinhardt’s stomach rumbled, and he turned in the bed, the wood of the crates creaking. Perhaps disturbed by Reinhardt’s movement, Brauer cried out in his sleep, turning in distress. Reinhardt craned his head up, seeing Brauer with his eyes open, but he knew he was not awake.

  “It’s not our
war, is it?” Brauer called hoarsely. “It’s not. So why?”

  Reinhardt slipped across the room, putting a hand on Brauer’s shoulder, smelling the alcohol on his breath, and rocked him back onto his side.

  “No,” he murmured. “It’s not our war.”

  He stayed there a moment, his hand on Brauer’s shoulder, feeling how thin he was, before going back to bed, lying down quietly. He lay awake some time, listening to Brauer’s breathing, before he, too, eventually found sleep himself.

  —

  The Feldjäegers stood in ranks four deep beneath a warm sun on a field of green grass. As places went, Reinhardt thought, looking at the Americans, drawn up in their own ranks, it was as good a place as any for it to end, and these were men good enough for it to end with. He watched the general step out in front of the Feldjäegers. Opposite him, an American general mirrored his movement.

  The end. At last.

  The German saluted the American, received a salute back. He turned to face his men, looking across the ranks of Feldjäegers. Two Germans stepped out to face him, one of them the colonel. Scheller. More words, then Scheller was moving down the ranks toward where Reinhardt stood with Lainer and Benfeld, with the others who had fought all the way up from Bosnia to here, this field in southern Germany.

  Scheller faced his men, his eyes roving back and forth.

  “Feldjäegers. My friends. My comrades. It has been a long war. A year longer than it might have been. Than it should have been. But we have reached the end, when so many of us have not, and now, this day, this month of June, this year of 1946, it is over for us. It is time to lay down our arms. It is over.”

  Over, Reinhardt thought, as he unstrapped his pistol belt and laid it on the ground. Around him, Feldjäegers were doing the same. Over, he thought again. He remembered November 1918. That war had ended for him in a hospital bed, seemingly bereft of purpose, but there had been a light then, a sudden light that was Carolin. There was nothing here, now.