Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  The language on the captioned photo he concluded was probably Danish, as it depicted a gathering of Europe’s finest physicists in Copenhagen in 1937. Niels Bohr was in the middle, so readily recognisable. Lisa Meitner, not quite so recognisable, was on his right, a young woman he could not identify on his left, and standing, just behind her left shoulder, was the man posing as Peter Camenzind.

  §79

  Another “Where are you Nell?” was in the process of creation on the outside of the shelter. The one-eyed former soldier, brush in hand, was signing his name—Joe.

  Wilderness asked, “Why do you do this?”

  “In hope. And if hope proves false, proves worthless, then it is an elegy. You take everything away from us, would you take away our elegies too?”

  “No.”

  “Then leave me with hope. Hope that one day . . . Joe and Nell will find each other.”

  Wilderness held out the packet of cigarettes that he’d opened for Camenzind.

  “You smoke?”

  “Of course, who doesn’t?”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

  Johannes—Joe the painter—laughed as he lit up, laughed out the flame on his match.

  “God that’s funny . . . the only currency left is tobacco, and it doesn’t even matter to you. You English amaze me sometimes.”

  “Keep the packet,” Wilderness replied. “It may well be the last I ever give away.”

  §80

  He waited for Burne-Jones at breakfast the following day. Burne-Jones was late. He read a three-day-old copy of the Manchester Guardian almost cover to cover.

  Burne-Jones dashed in looking frazzled.

  “Sorry, old man. Didn’t get in till after two. The RAF aren’t as reliable as the Great Western Railway I’m afraid. All getting a bit Heath Robinson these days.”

  He looked around for a waiter. Gestured at the one he found and then turned to Wilderness.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Nah. I was waiting for you. The service is better if you’re on the other side of the table flashing yer crown and pip. I’ve had three coffees though. I’m swimming in caffeine.”

  “And bursting to tell me something.”

  “That obvious, eh.”

  “Rather.”

  Wilderness placed the Danish photograph in front of him and pointed to Camenzind.

  “Swedish?”

  “Danish. A physicists’ conference in 1937. I have this bloke in a cell right now.”

  “Good lord. Who is he? One of the rocket boys?”

  “No. You got luckier than that. He calls himself Peter Camenzind, but he’s really Peter-Jürgen von Hesse. He wrote this.”

  Wilderness slipped Camenzind’s treatise across the table.

  “Bloody hell. What does it mean?”

  “Your German’s better than mine.”

  “No, I mean, what does it mean mean?”

  “It’s about what happens when you fire neutrons at uranium. It’s one of the immediate precursors to the theory of a chain reaction.”

  “You mean atoms and stuff?”

  “I mean atoms, stuff, chain reactions, and bombs big enough to take out Hiroshima.”

  “Ah,” said Burne-Jones. “The penny has finally dropped.”

  “He’s not one of your rocket boys. He’s a bigger fish by far. If, and you’ll know better than me, Germany was trying to build atomic bombs this would be the bloke who made them.”

  Burne-Jones said nothing while scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and white toast were set in front of them.

  It bought him thinking time and Wilderness could readily see that he was wondering how much to tell him.

  “We . . . that is the governments of both Britain and America . . . were always concerned that Germany might be building a bomb. Most of the boffins with the know-how were German after all, and while most them worked for us . . .” He tapped the treatise with his finger. “There were a fair few who stayed on. No real way during the war of knowing quite what they were up to, so we took out their heavy water plant in Norway just in case. In ’44 the Americans set up a special unit in London with one purpose, to travel with the Allied troops as they crossed France and Germany and find out just how far the Germans had got. Led by a chap named Boris Pash. Met him a couple of times. Tough cookie, as our cousins would say. First American into Paris. In fact, his unit tended to be the first anywhere. They didn’t follow, they led. In April last year they took a small town way down south, Haigerloch, not far from Stuttgart, and only about fifty miles from Lake Constance. They captured a wagonload of boffins and Germany’s nuclear thingie.”

  “Thingie?”

  “Cycle something. Science was never my strong point. I was more a Latin and Greek man.”

  “Cyclotron.”

  “If you say so, although quite how you know this sort of thing baffles me.”

  “They don’t have public libraries in your neck of the woods? I used to sit in Whitechapel Library and read Nature while my mates kicked a tin can around the streets.”

  “Quite an education.”

  “Yeah. That and Cambridge and Rada.”

  “Good old Rada. Where would we be without her? Now, have you talked to this chap.”

  “Oh yes, he’s chatty.”

  “Not too chatty I hope. Yateman doesn’t have your clearance.”

  “I wasn’t aware I had my clearance, but there’s nothing to worry about. The good captain lost interest once Herr Doktor von Hesse revealed his von. Brought out the Pooter in Yateman. He hates toffs more than he hates me.

  “I asked von Hesse why he was in hiding. He said he didn’t really know, but was perfectly happy to be in jail instead. He can smoke for Germany, so I kept plying him with fags and let him rattle on. I think, based on what you just told me, that he’s telling the truth. He was at Haigerloch. He maintains they were nowhere near building a successful bomb. And he lit out only a day or two ahead of your American pal getting there, headed north—on the assumption he’d be looked for heading south for Switzerland—and managed to lose himself in Hamburg. I think he knew he’d get caught one day, and decided we were preferable to the Americans. Once I’d asked him the first question the mask seemed to drop quite readily. As though I’d lifted a burden from him. He seemed to want to cross-examine himself. A lot of it was waffle. I got most of his life story, but in the end what it came down to was guilt by any other name. By that I mean he never used the word.”

  “Guilt about what? The war? The Jews?”

  “Guilt about staying on. What he fears is not arrest or imprisonment; after all, he’s had three of the squarest meals of his last year in the twenty-four hours since I picked him up, all the fags I could have sold on the black market and me last bar of Cadbury’s Bourneville—for which you owe me by the by—and the only charge he faces is lying on his damn Fragebogen. A smack on the wrist, a fine he can’t pay? And he’ll probably get to keep his Persilschein. What he fears is the judgement of fellow scientists. Einstein got out, Lise Meitner got out, Leo Szilard got out . . . he stayed.”

  “Not a Nazi?”

  “Not anything, and I think that’s what bothers him. He doesn’t know who he is any more. He teased that out into a whole thesis last night . . . what is Germany, who are the Germans? ‘Wer sind wir, was sind wir?’ He said, and this is illustrative of the way he thinks, he said, ‘How can I listen to Schubert lieder, how can I write a love letter, how can I describe the splitting of an atom in the same language that told a million lies in propaganda, created euphemisms such as Die Endlösung to disguise mass murder, and ordered children into gas chambers. It would be an obscenity.’”

  “Obscenity?”

  “That’s what he said, and he said it in English.”

  “Who are the Germans?” Burne-Jones echoed. “Who are the Germans? I rather think we’ll all be asking that for many years to come. We now have the German question . . . perhaps it’ll replace the Jewish question? Although I was never wholly certai
n what that was.”

  The German question?

  And Wilderness thought of the one-eyed soldier in his hand-dyed Wehrmacht motley asking his own German question for years to come, perhaps asking for ever

  Nell. I’m alive! Where are you? Joe.

  §81

  Lower Saxony: August 1945

  Nell stuck to unpaved roads. To limestone tracks that snaked across heathland, wound their way in and out of woodland copses, past farmhouses and barns.

  On the third day, making slower progress than she had imagined, close to dusk, she could see in the infinite distance what appeared to be an encampment at the side of the road. It was the way she had imagined pilgrimages would end. Approaching the city, it seems to recede, to be always visible and always out of reach, its plume of smoke curling skyward merely to tantalise.

  It was a caravan—much in the gypsy style.

  It had been off the road a while, grass and bindweed in the wheels, the shafts tied up, pointing to heaven and the cart horse put out to graze.

  By the side of the track a child of indeterminate gender was stirring an indeterminate stew over an open fire, with a Wehrmacht helmet serving as the cauldron.

  The child’s trousers—baggy like pantaloons—puzzled Nell. Who would dress a child in bright red out of choice? But who had a choice? Then she saw the black arm of a hakenkreuz peeping out at the seam. And the faint rattle she had been hearing for the last minute began to make sense. A sewing machine. Someone, someone close and out of sight, was sitting at a treadle sewing machine turning Nazi flags into children’s clothes. The 1945 revision of “swords into ploughshares.”

  The child had noticed her.

  “Mutti!”

  Nell followed as the child ran around the end of the caravan.

  An old woman was indeed paddling away at a sewing machine, her hair tucked up in a headscarf made from the same material, her hands feeding more of the red and the black under the needle.

  “Hullo dearie. Come far have you?”

  “From Celle.”

  “I don’t know where that is. Are you hungry?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “Well . . . there’s enough for three. There is only me and Gretchen now.”

  She pulled the redefined flag from the sewing machine, snipped the trailing threads and held it up—another pair of baggy pantaloons. The Third Reich rendered into the costume of a circus clown.

  Then she eased herself up with her walking stick.

  “Won’t be long. Come and meet the kids.”

  Behind the caravan, the horse grazed on the sparse grass of heathland—half a dozen rabbits nibbled in a wire run—cabbages and carrots struggled in the sandy soil—and three wooden crosses stuck in the ground marked the lives of Mutti’s children.

  “My daughter Kattrin, my son Eilif.”

  “They died here?”

  “No. They neither of them died here. They died in the wars. They died on the road. And we’ve been on the road since the day the Russians entered East Prussia. The graves are markers—tokens if you like. In a world where everything is ersatz, they are ersatz graves for the children I never got to bury.”

  “Why . . . why here?”

  “Here? Because this is where the horse stopped. He would go no further. Folk there are who would have stuck old Pickles like a pig and feasted on horse meat, but he had been too loyal for me ever to do that. Hauled us all the way from Gumbinnen, where I bought him. Before that we pulled the wagon ourselves. He has been too good a horse to end up in the pot. A thousand kilometres and more between the shafts. Allenstein, Graudenz, Bromberg, Landsberg, Berlin. No, dearie. It’s rabbit stew for us. Come, fill up the hole in your belly before you fill one under the ground.”

  They ate from tin plates. Nell was pleased. She had not been at all sure she could have eaten from a Wehrmacht helmet.

  “Going far, dearie?”

  “Berlin.”

  “Ah . . . I was there in . . . March I think it was. Far enough ahead not to hear the Soviet tanks grumbling at my arse.”

  “I have not seen Berlin since December. But it is home. I am a Berliner.”

  “You are a Berliner. I am a Gumbinner. And I will never see my home again. Forget Berlin, dearie. Berlin is gone.”

  In all the warnings she had received—Dekker, the British policeman in Celle—it had not occurred to Nell that Berlin might be “gone.”

  “Berlin cannot be gone,” she said.

  “Once Berlin was not. Then Berlin was. Now Berlin is not.”

  “I must get to Berlin.”

  “No, dearie. You must survive. Sie müssen überstehen.”

  “How?”

  Mutti appeared to be thinking, but Nell knew it was the pretence of thinking, and that what she would say next had been on the tip of her tongue.

  “Never tell all you feel, or better still, feel very little. And always know the price of flour and sugar. Coffee too for that matter.”

  She liked the old woman. The old woman fed her, lent her blankets for the night and let her sleep under the wagon . . . but Nell knew she could not live that way if that was what it took to survive.

  §82

  The map she held was ancient. The newest map of Germany to be found in Klaus’s library dated from 1888, the year of the Kaiser’s accession. On the fourth day she felt she must be somewhat north of Wolfsburg, and close to the green squiggle Dekker had drawn on the map to show her roughly where Russian rule began.

  Another dusty limestone track was leading her to another elusive pilgrim shrine—the iron gates and stone gateposts of a schloss—the castle itself being just visible beyond the trees, its roof peppered with missing tiles, and its slender, spiral turret sporting a shell-shaped hole.

  Someone was singing:

  Oh the grand old Duke of York,

  ’E ’ad ten thousand men.

  So they banged ’im up in Pentonville.

  An’ ’e won’t do that again.

  The singer was tuneless, and out of sight. As Nell rounded the gatepost he finally came into view. A small man, swinging a rifle about and marching up and down somewhat in the manner of Charlie Chaplin. His top half appeared to be a British Tommy of some sort. The lower half beggared belief. Pants as baggy as those Mutti was making out of flags, and in so many colours . . . blacks, greens, and reds . . . with stripes.

  She was staring, and she knew it.

  He lowered the rifle.

  “Wot you looking at?”

  “At you, of course.”

  “Wossamatter? Anyone would think you’d never seen a corporal of the Seaforth Highlanders before.”

  “I haven’t. In fact I’ve never seen anyone dressed like you before.”

  “You can talk. I’ve never seen a battledress worn with a flowery frock before. At least mine’s legitimate.”

  “So’s mine. Issued to me by His Majesty’s Royal Army Medical Corps. And I’ve never seen rainbow-coloured pants before.”

  “Pants! These ain’t pants, these is trews these is!”

  “Shouldn’t you be in uniform?”

  “This is my bleedin’ uniform!”

  From behind the Tommy a second appeared, dressed in the same outfit, but this one was clearly an officer of some sort, knocking the heads off thistles with his swagger stick as he approached.

  “Sharpe! I thought I told you no more! Keep the buggers out!”

  Sharpe, if that was his name, turned around and gave as good as he got.

  “Don’t shout at me you stuck-up fucker! You’re not on the fuckin’ parade ground now. It’s just one more Kraut an’ a little one at that, no more’n a kid.”

  “We’re up to our necks in fucking Flüchtlings. What is the point of you being on guard duty if you guard nothing?”

  He drew level with them now and either proximity or the recognition of Nell as being young or female caused him to lower his voice and change his expression. He was not quite smiling, but not frowning either.

&n
bsp; The battledress threw him. Nell thought he might even be waiting for her to salute. She stared him out.

  “Bill Dobbin,” he said at last. “Captain, 3rd Seaforth Highlanders. And my man, Beckwith Sharpe, corporal of the same. And you are?”

  Before she could answer Sharpe said, “I ain’t his bleedin’ man. Batman, birdman . . . all that malarkey . . . that all went out with the war. And the war’s over. I don’t answer to Sharpe no more. It’s Mister Sharpe to ’im and Becks to you.”

  “And I,” said Nell getting a word in between these bickering conquerors, “am Christina Hélène von Raeder Burkhardt.”

  “Wot a mouthful,” said Sharpe.

  “Au contraire,” said a voice she had not heard before, “a very familiar name.”

  They all turned. An old man had come upon them silently, and was now leaning heavily on his walking stick, and he was smiling, really smiling as though pleased to see her.

  “My dear,” he took her hand and pressed his lips fleetingly to the back of her knuckles. “Graf Florizel von Tripps of Schloss Verrücktschwein. I have known Klaus von Raeder all my life. Your grandfather perhaps?”

  “My great-uncle, sir. My grandmother’s elder brother.”

  “Has he lived through it all?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Ach, so many dead, we must look to the living. Gentlemen, we have room for one more, another Flüchtling for our ark.”

  So saying he offered her his arm and led her through the maze of thistle and nettle into his lost domain.

  “Another?” she heard Dobbin say. “Is he going to take in the whole of Germany?”

  “Told yer,” said Sharpe. “An’ if he is there’s no point whatsoever in bleedin’ guard duty is there?”

  “You mustn’t mind the ‘heroes.’ They are both good men, they are merely frustrated,” von Tripps said to Nell. “They spent most of the war as prisoners. When the British freed them they were assigned to me as guards.”

  “Guards against what?”

  “Oh, Poles mostly. Some French as well. Liberated slave labourers. In the spring the countryside was full of them. Taking what they wanted. Destroying what they wanted. Killing who they wanted. And who could blame them? Then . . . then someone in the Allied command had the bright idea of sending in British POWs to guard us. The displaced, the former slaves were rounded up or began the long walk home. You look rather like one yourself—they all wore bits of uniform, any uniform. A ragbag army, a barmy army. Perhaps that was Hitler’s ultimate achievement, to have abolished the status of “civilian” and to have put us all into uniform, any uniform . . . the pan-uniform of the Europe of 1945.