by Paul Griner
“One moment.” She held up a finger. Turning to the English captain, who’d been following their conversation without understanding it, she said, “Do you have a handkerchief?”
“I’m sorry?” He seemed startled by this sudden turn of events.
“A handkerchief? A clean one? It’s absolutely necessary. And you too,” she said to the lieutenant.
They each produced one from an inside pocket. Linen, large, of excellent quality.
“Here,” she said, handing one to the porter as she took his coat. “Put that away for now.” She folded the other into a long neat rectangle. “Cover the leg with this, being careful not to touch the wound itself, since your fingers might infect it, and tuck each end under the fabric of his trousers. In Berlin, he’ll probably have to walk a bit. When he’s resting again, change this one for the one you have in your pocket. And make sure you boil this one before you put it back on.”
He bowed again. “Madame. I can’t thank you enough.”
“That’s not true,” she said as she handed Horst back his coat and slid on the porter’s. “You can’t imagine what this means to me.”
After the porter had gone, the English captain leaned closer and asked her how long she thought it would be before they reached Berlin. She debated whether to speak, then turned her face to the window, ignoring him as she looked past her own reflection at the endless snowy fields, the occasional lines of people trudging through them. Always westward, paralleling their path but far more slowly. She wouldn’t insult him overtly, but she didn’t have to respond, the English couldn’t make her do that. Genug, she thought. Enough. For the first time in her life she felt truly German.
January 7, 1919
THE FIRST SIGNS of Berlin were the outlying suburbs, whose houses grew steadily smaller and closer together; as it neared the city center, the train incomprehensibly sped up and its lights went out, its heat off. They passed through a rail yard with a huge collection of Russian train engines—naphtha burning—rusting to the rails, and a few decrepit cattle cars scattered at its edges. A string of farm wagons stood halted at a crossing, piled with coal and guarded by shotgun-carrying boys, and as the train sped through a tunnel, Kate heard scraping sounds and screams. Something darker tumbled through the darkness outside, and she remembered the roof riders, was amazed that no one else seemed to notice or mind, amazed, too, how little it bothered her. Life was growing cheaper by the mile.
Out in the light again they seemed to have been transported to another world: a dense cityscape with the squalid backs of squalid buildings pressed up against the narrow rails: hanging black clothes, tiny, grimy windows, a dark morass of filthy alleys. The train slowed; the passengers grew restless, the buildings meaner. At the last they were simply tin hovels yards from the tracks, their dispirited inhabitants standing in the doorways, watching them pass. The train stopped, paused, jerked forward, and then glided into the Friedrichstrasse Station, the light paling as they slid under the great glass canopy, and despite what they’d just passed through Kate felt herself growing excited—the familiar thrill of a journey’s end.
The brakes were still hissing when the Polish woman jumped to her feet and opened the door, and in seconds she was on the platform, holding out her hand to her daughter. To Kate’s great surprise, the daughter stood and followed after, walking easily. Seeing Kate stare, the Polish woman said, “Madame, you will need to be quicker now. The war was the men’s turn to fight, the peace is ours.”
The mother and daughter shouldered their way through the surging platform crowd while Kate watched, appalled and fascinated and a bit envious, thinking they were already prepared for what was coming. She wished she were too; the girl had sacrificed her paisley scarf at the end, no doubt to save something more valuable hidden away.
Hawkers shouted, political speakers declaimed, officers stepped from the train and had their epaulets ripped off by groups of angry sailors. Kate looked for their porter. He was up ahead, his son leaning against him, sailors crowded round him, the English soldiers pushing past.
“Quickly, Horst,” she said, and stepped down. She pressed ahead through the raucous crowd and felt him at her back. They had so little that their passage was easy; bobbing a few yards ahead of them was the man with his saddle, which was now riding on his head. Soon they overtook him.
One of the sailors, a red tab like a splash of blood in his hat, pointed to the porter’s feet. “Why, those are my boots!”
“That’s ridiculous!” the colonel said, and tried to brush by him, shielding his son with his shoulder.
The sailor knocked him down and Kate bent to help him up, but before she could, Horst pulled her back, so forcefully her arm hurt. “Not now,” he said. “Not here.”
Only then did she see the other sailors watching them, bent forward as if ready to pounce.
“I’m all right,” the colonel said, standing and wiping grime from his face. “How foolish of me. Your boots.”
He stooped to remove them.
“Put them on me,” the sailor said.
The colonel’s nostrils flared, but another sailor was holding his son by his jacket, and so the colonel knelt in a puddle before him.
“Here,” he said. “Might you know where I could get another pair?”
“You can have mine, if they fit.” The man stepped out of his wooden clogs, open at the back; the colonel’s feet would be soaked and frozen within minutes. He didn’t complain. One of the other sailors squatted and punched him in the face.
Kate did nothing. Horst pulled her away, but over her shoulder she watched the colonel with his bloody face struggle to fit his boots on the sailor, knowing that she’d remember this moment with shame for the rest of her life.
At the station gate Red Cross sisters told the refugees that they could get housing at the criminal courts building, as the courtrooms had been turned into dormitories, and an army band at the end of the platform struck up Wagner’s Lohengrin. Another Red Cross sister sprayed Kate with lavender eau de cologne as she squeezed through.
Horst said, “It was right not to stop, Kate.”
“It was expedient.”
“He’s alive and so are we. At the moment, none of us can wish for more.”
Taxis had disappeared. Instead, lined up outside the station at the high curb were crude beer wagons pulled by stolid bony horses.
“Is this all you have?” Horst asked of an older, stooped man, leaning against the wooden side of the first wagon, wearing the lacquered top hat of a cabman.
“The best we have,” he said, and gestured expansively. At first Horst looked about to refuse. Then he laughed.
“Yes. All right.” He helped Kate up into the hay spread over the flat back and said, “Just what I’ve dreamed of for years, taking you down Berlin’s most elegant street in a beer wagon. Unter den Linden,” he said, and climbed on himself, the hay crackling beneath him as he settled in. Kate slid her hips around until the hay was no longer poking her legs and smiled at Horst, leaned against him.
“Like a ride from my childhood,” she said, knowing it would please him.
At every corner people were gaming—dice and cards—while others argued politics. Pacifists hawked pamphlets, yelling that Germany’s leaders had lied them into war, and former soldiers tried to drum up support for new units, the freikorps, to defend Germany from the Reds. The streets weren’t cleaned of trash, no one moved aside to let the elderly pass, and people stepped in front of cars without waiting for lights to change; if the impatient drivers sounded their horns, the pedestrians pounded on their hoods. The air smelled of burned papers and wasting bodies, and the waxy-skinned Berliners, once famous for their curves, were gaunt and thin, with dark rings under their eyes. The few children she saw were older—three or four at the youngest—but even then they were carried by their parents, their bodies misshapen, their heads large, their eyes ulcerated. Berlin was starving; she hadn’t been prepared for that; in the east until the last month they’d alw
ays had food.
Along the Friedrichstrasse the advertising pillars were covered in competing colors: red posters and the flags of the workers’ councils, black and white imperial flags, orange placards with anti-Semitic slogans written in foot-high block letters: THE JEWS—GERMANY’S VAMPIRES AND DON’T DIE FOR THE JEW! These last horrified her. In Posen and Silesia, the Jews had been important allies, supporters against Polish land claims, which perhaps explained why the Soviet soldiers had brutalized them. But this meant that the brutalization was a wider phenomenon, the Jews made to pay for the world’s tumult. She wondered if it was so everywhere in Berlin or only here in the working-class neighborhoods.
As they moved away from the station, and as the buildings grew more grand, Friedrichstrasse and the side streets were even more crowded, stores and cafés open, people swarming in and out of them; the thin pedestrians stopped at the innumerable street vendors whose display crates sold stockings, cigars, nuts, and umbrellas, indoor fireworks and gingerbread and tinsel left over from Christmas. They also had food—potatoes and turnips, a few scrawny rabbits that looked more like cats, and then, oddly, luxury items like soap and chocolate. Most of the crowd seemed to be just looking. The beer wagon bumped along past them, surprisingly comfortable with its bed of straw.
At Leipziger Strasse, their progress was slowed by a workers’ procession, and Horst hopped down to grab a paper. Actors were reciting revolutionary poems, and a woman who must once have been an opera singer stopped at each corner to belt out the “Internationale.” Once it passed they began to move more swiftly, and Horst jumped aboard the wagon again and handed Kate the paper.
Socialist, put out by those now in control of Berlin’s government, each column a dictat: what was allowed, what wasn’t, times and places for boot and food distribution, and all ending with the same line: the least resistance will be punished by death. She threw the paper aside and pulled the porter’s coat more tightly about her, hoping the line was propaganda, not the literal truth.
In the Palace Square, Spartacists and democrats and socialists stood on various corners, haranguing small groups of people. Bright posters showed White Russians murdering unarmed peasants; others urged Berliners not to forget the German prisoners of war in France. Those clustered about the freikorps speakers were anti-English, their slogans making Kate shiver: “We shall hate our conquerors with a hatred that will only cease when the day of our revenge comes again.” Were they really so desperate for more bloodshed?
The elegant hotels with their liveried doormen and flapping flags began to appear, though with their brass and copper nameplates pried off and paper ones in their places, and, more ominously, with sandbagged machine guns posted outside and bullet holes arcing over their stone window casings. Unter den Linden was closed—street fighting, their driver told them—so they dismounted south of Pariser Platz, near a publishing company that smelled of chlorine, paid the cabman, and began to walk; Horst would find another branch of the bank in a different part of the city. A mock funeral passed, mourning the fallen empire, with the requisite small band playing sentimental military airs, followed by six men in top hats and frock coats carrying manifestoes and poetry instead of wreaths.
One of the mourners handed Kate two postcards, both of which read Postcards from the Front, photomontages of the western and eastern fronts, the back of the first a poem made from newspaper clippings, the back of the other a series of poetry meter markings but accompanying no poem. Someone else handed her a crimson leaflet announcing a masked ball that night; the prize for the best costume was a pound of butter and a dozen eggs. Worth a fortune! It made sense; the whole city seemed in some way dressed for a costume party—the peculiar clothing, the mock funeral, even the cars and bicycles, whose tires were white or black wood or made of noisy steel springs. She slipped the postcards and the flyer into her pocket.
On the next block was Kubiat’s with its famous desserts and pastry. Their display plates, delicate red-rimmed Dresden porcelain, made it seem as if the great enveloping sea of time had missed this small island of the past. Part of her felt guilty that she’d ever cared about such things, remembering how she’d fawned over this pattern in the weeks before her wedding; part of her was transported back to that younger version of herself, a version that hadn’t contemplated anything worse than a few broken plates after extraordinary parties; and part of her remembered the first wave of casualties from a failed offensive in the east, during which she’d found bits of the same china tangled in a wounded soldier’s intestines and felt revolted at her earlier self.
Now the china held no sting for her; it was simply something beautifully made, hand-painted, lovingly done, from an era when people had time for such things, and she was grateful that such beauty had persisted despite the best efforts of other men to destroy it.
“Kate?”
“Yes?” Horst was leaning toward her, as if he’d said her name several times. “I’m fine. It’s just . . .,” she said, and shrugged.
“The food?”
Looking back at the window, she noticed for the first time the neatly displayed open-faced sandwiches. Egg salad, ham salad, liverwurst.
“Yes.”
“I have an idea. I’ll be back soon.”
“What? You’re leaving? Where are you going? For how long?”
“Be calm,” he said, and took her hand from his arm. “I won’t be long. My bank isn’t far, but it doesn’t make sense for both of us to go to the Ku’damm.”
“Where will we meet?”
“Here,” he said, walking with her to the corner and pointing out the Hotel Adlon. “The lobby. It’s three now. I’ll be back by six, no later.”
“Horst, it isn’t safe.”
“It’s safer here. The Reds might be in control of the bank. And you’re tired, and the subway fare for both of us, well.” He shrugged. They had only a few coins left. “But you mustn’t worry, even if I’m late. There might be lines, the electricity could go out. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
Before she could respond the unsettling tat-tat-tat of a machine gun sounded, and she turned to locate it. Those around her didn’t react, and when she turned back Horst was already gone, swallowed up by the crowd spilling through the Brandenburg Gate, its massive sculpture of galloping horses casting a foreboding blue-black shadow over them all.
Horst had left her near a soup kitchen and next to a market selling pale cabbage and paltry turnips, which couldn’t have been by accident—they hadn’t eaten in two days—yet he’d been too proud to go in. She felt a mixture of gratitude and anger that he hoped she would eat and that he might expect her to do what he could not.
Inside, people were drinking the soup from the Iron Cross mugs discarded by the soldiers each time they’d been handed out. Her stomach growled yet she decided to walk off her hunger. West was the Tiergarten, its paths narrowed by piled snow, its heavy trees strung with red banners, its fields swarming with former Russian and French soldiers who stood by shacks with small smoking chimneys, watching her approach. She swerved south toward Potsdamer Platz and its streets of small cheap restaurants, their menus printed on the backs of old war maps and taped to their windows. A few were translated into English. She stopped in front of a restaurant, its windows glowing, frost arcing across the corners, street vendors outside selling cigarettes and soap. A window banner advertised REAL SOUP for sixty pfennigs . . . How hungry she was! If only she had a few coins. She took a deep breath and plunged her hands into the coat pockets, meaning to give herself courage, and her fingers struck metal. Could it be? It was. But how? Had the colonel known of the money and left it for her, or had he simply forgotten? She wished Horst were here to share it with her, but even so, astonishingly happy, she decided to go in.
Though without fat, the soup was hot and pleasantly salty, restorative if not nourishing, and she found something almost sensual in once again attending to the senses: her bare fingers wrapped around the warm porcelain, the smells of coffee and of ba
king bread, steam swirling around her face as she bent to sip the soup, the sense of calm and order that a bustling restaurant gave her.
She let the small roll soak in the broth until it was soft enough to chew, and while she waited, a former soldier came in and played patriotic songs on a harmonium, “Deutschland, Deutschland”; “Die Wacht am Rhein.” He played poorly, skipping notes and missing phrases, and during this two older men at the table beside her carried on a heated conversation about dessert wine. The heavier one wanted an expensive bottle of port. “Why not?” he said to his thinner friend. “You’ve heard the rumors too. Ruinous taxes once we sign the treaty. How else can we pay their outrageous indemnities? Why not spend our money now instead of losing it?”
“But President Wilson—” his companion started to say.
“Wilson! Wilson and the peace! He’s going back on his words, they all are. ‘A just peace, food for the starving.’ Do you see evidence of any of it? Look at this man here,” he said, and indicated the soldier who had finished playing and was holding out his cap for donations. The heavy man had a point; the soldier seemed tubercular or typhus-ridden and had a hacking cough, a rash, a sweating face. The man gave him a few pennies and snapped his fingers for the waiter. “A bottle of port for each of us.”
The other patrons generally ignored the soldier, eating quietly without meeting his gaze, and Kate, finishing off her soup as he made his way around the dining room, supposed they had become inured to such sights. The soldier looked so abashed that she gave him the fifty pfennigs she’d planned to spend on dessert and was happy when her ersatz coffee arrived before the bottles of port at the next table. Sitting next to their bacchanal would depress her.
The drink was hot and black but had neither smell nor taste and was served without a teaspoon to stir in the accompanying dash of molasses. Once again came the tat-tat-tat of machine guns, not too far off, and Kate studiously avoided reacting. Too studiously, perhaps. The waiter said, “It’s all right. The sailors are probably just firing off their guns over near the palace to make sure people know they still have them.