Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “And then, after the fall of Berlin, the Prussians came west by the thousand. Dobbin would have me turn them away. That I cannot do.”

  So saying he put his shoulder to a studded oak door and they entered the great hall of the schloss—a room designed to seat and entertain a hundred aristocratic guests and which now housed a hundred refugees—Flüchtlings, like her.

  It reminded her too sharply of Belsen, a swelling sea of neglected humanity—an idea she fought at once. Many might be hungry, but none of these were starving, none of these were dying. Many waved or shouted greetings to von Tripps as they passed through, out of the far door and into the garden. More refugees, makeshift tents by the dozen, women cooking over open fires, children running naked, dogs lazing in the summer sun. What they had brought with them as they fled west amazed Nell. Fleeing for your life, you pack up a brass-ended double bed and a couple of long-armed bed-warming pans. Just a few kilometres ahead of the Russian horde, you load the portraits of your ancestors onto the cart.

  “For myself, and for the ‘heroes’ too, I keep half a dozen rooms. My own bedroom and the old kitchen. My bedroom would house a few dozen more I know, but there are limits to altruism.”

  Even as he said it she knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t mean a word of it.

  “Were you in the last war?”

  “I was. Under von Kluck on the Western Front. I lost my leg at Soignies in August 1914. The war was scarcely three weeks old and it was over for me. There are no one-legged cavalry officers.”

  So saying, he struck his left leg with his walking stick and Nell heard the clunk of wood on metal.

  “Sawn off above the knee.”

  §83

  Von Tripps cooked for them all.

  Dobbin and Sharpe sat and bickered while he did so.

  It was her second decent meal that week. Chicken stewed with onions, tarragon, and garlic. Enough garlic to make Sharpe pull a face. He ate it all the same. Three of the Flüchtlings joined them—three men as old as von Tripps himself, which Nell put at sixty-something, silent beneath their Hindenburg moustaches, enduring the pidgin German of Dobbin and Sharpe, eating everything that was set in front of them.

  As Nell cleared away, neither of the Englishmen so much as moving to help her, Sharpe set out a deck of cards on the vast, scarred kitchen table.

  “Wanna see a trick?” he said to the Flüchtlings.

  Von Tripps translated.

  They looked at each other. Faces breaking into grins as though nothing had amused them in recent memory.

  “This is called ‘Find the Lady.’”

  He took only three cards from the deck—the eight of clubs, the three of diamonds and the queen of spades. Held up all three for everyone to see.

  “Now yer see it, now yer don’t.”

  Nell watched from the sink as his hands flew across the table, juggling the cards from left to right and back again.

  “Nun,” said Sharpe. “Wo ist die Dame?”

  The Flüchtlings looked at one another again, a few mutterings Nell could not quite hear, then the old man in the middle put his finger down on the card on the far right with a look of utter confidence on his face.

  Sharpe flipped up the three of diamonds. The other two laughed out loud at the consternation of the first, slapped him on the back, revelling in his mistake.

  “Wieder,” they said to Sharpe, “Wieder.”

  Nell sat next to von Tripps and watched the hand deceive the eye again.

  The next Flüchtling duly picked out the eight of clubs, and the laughter spread around the table. One voice startled her—amid the English, horsey snorts of Dobbin, the restrained chuckle of von Tripps, and the uproarious satisfaction of the Flüchtlings, one voice stood out, high and clear and unknown to her. It was her own. And she realised she had not laughed . . . had not laughed since some time in the autumn of 1944.

  This cheeky, pushy, careless young corporal of the Seaforth Highlanders had made her laugh.

  He winked at her. One brown eye closing.

  Two more rounds and no one found the lady.

  “Genug. I am for my bed,” von Tripps said.

  “Me too,” said Dobbin. And to Nell, “If you find yourself alone with Becks, young lady, don’t play for money. He’s a wide boy. Another bloody cockney wide boy.”

  With the Flüchtlings gone too, she did indeed find herself alone with Beckwith Sharpe.

  “What is a wide boy?”

  “I suppose Bill means that he thinks of me someone not quite honest, not quite straightforward . . . a bit short of calling me a cheat or a crook. I don’t mind. We’re mates. At least mates while we’re here. Once we get back to Blighty . . . well . . . normal service will be resumed.”

  “You may not see one another?”

  “We sure as hell won’t see one another. ’Cept maybe at a regimental reunion, but I don’t plan on attending many of those.”

  “Do you cheat? Do you steal?”

  “I cut corners. Corners I have to cut to get by. That’s all. It’s what I have to do to survive.”

  “Do you always know the price of coffee?”

  This seemed to baffle Sharpe for a moment, then he grinned and said, “That’s the yardstick is it? That’s how you get the measure of a wide boy?”

  “It’s one way, so I’m told. And the three-card trick?”

  “Harmless. Just a bit o’fun. Harmless. ’Ere. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  Afterwards, ever afterwards, Nell would wonder at the charm, the spell this cockney “wide boy” had cast over her. Sharpe’s tricks were inconsequential and silly. They made her laugh. So little in her life had ever been allowed to be silly. Almost nothing had been inconsequential. She moved in a world of consequences, of action and reaction. Of responsibility. Quite possibly of guilt.

  Something as simple as making her laugh would always seem less than the whole, less than the truth. And at the time, she could not possibly have envisioned where this would lead.

  §84

  She stayed three days, longer by far than she had meant to. Sharpe taught her every variation on his card game—including playing it with shells or coffee cups—and how to shuffle a deck to deliver almost any hand you wanted.

  The ripple as he split the deck and integrated it card by card at the speed of light never ceased to make her laugh. Then he would deal her a perfect straight flush or a full house. It was a game, it was all a game. Every night a game. It was, as Sharpe kept saying, “harmless.”

  In the days she walked the garden, picking her way through half the furniture of East Prussia, seeking out anyone from Berlin and finding no one. She craved news, she longed to know that 21 Pfefferstraße still stood, that her parents were alive and well.

  And on the fourth day she told Graf von Tripps that it was time to go.

  Von Tripps made her put down the knapsack and sit with him awhile, out between the greenhouse and the potting shed, between the Pomeranians and the Silesians.

  “Can I not persuade you otherwise?” he asked.

  “Why would you wish to?”

  “Look around you. Everyone you see has fled from east of Berlin. Berlin is in Russian hands.”

  “The British tell me they have a sector, a part of Berlin that they control. My home was in Charlottenburg. Charlottenburg is part of that sector, I believe.”

  “They do, and so do the French and the Americans. But for how long?”

  “It’s what I have to do.”

  “Nell, who are you trying to save?”

  “I don’t understand. Why would I be trying to save anyone?”

  “You tell me, but in all your conversation I have sensed a desire to . . . to put things back together again.”

  It was almost the same phrase she had used to Dekker all those weeks ago—“put them back together again.” Of course she was. It was just that the words would never pass her lips for fear of hubris.

  “You could go to England with Dobbin and Sharpe. They’ll be rep
atriated soon. They’d find a way. If it was left to Sharpe he’d pack you in his kit bag. England, Nell. England. You’d be safe for ever.”

  “I’m sure I would, but I’d never dare look in the mirror again.”

  Von Tripps prised himself up off an outsized, inverted flowerpot and opened the shed door.

  “For you,” he said. “It may cut a day or two off your journey.”

  And he presented her with a green Raleigh bicycle, complete with brass plate declaring “Made in England,” its tyres pumped and plump, its chain and Sturmey-Archer three-speed gears oiled and glistening.

  “It is—was—my son’s. Nothing has been heard of him since Stalingrad. And what use does a one-legged man have for a bicycle?”

  In the panniers were two bottles of schnapps.

  “You will have to be very careful crossing the green border. The Russians are thieves and rapists, but if we appeal directly to the former you may never meet the latter. If they stop you, make sure they find the schnapps.”

  “And while they drink it I make my escape?”

  §85

  On a dusty, deserted road somewhere between Tülau and Kunrau, just beyond a village named she-knew-not-what, where east and west now met, stood a lone Russian soldier by his lone wooden hut. Of His Majesty’s Forces there was ne’er a sign.

  A skewed placard read, “You are now leaving the British Zone” in four languages, each looking as though scrawled in haste, and just below that, most certainly scrawled in haste, in English and in red chalk, “Watch yer arse!”

  And just beyond that another placard read “You are now entering the Soviet Zone” in four languages, looking handcrafted by a skilled signwriter.

  But the red-and-white-striped pole was cocked skyward and the lone guardian of the East looked tired and bored.

  “Велосипед,” he said simply, his hands gripping the bars as though he might shake her loose.

  “Schnapps,” Nell said, even more simply.

  He sank half the first bottle in what seemed to Nell to be a single gulp.

  There was a pause, a prolonged stillness of several minutes as he drank, belched, blinked, and eventually sat down sharply on his backside.

  Some sense of duty returning to his rapidly clouding brain, he said, “Удостоверение личности. Papiere.”

  Nell said nothing.

  He took another swig from the bottle, belched again. Swigged once more and the bottle was empty. She marvelled at the man’s constitution. All the same, she handed him the second.

  “Спасибо,” he said, with unexpectedly good manners. Then he fumbled for what he should be saying, “Pap . . . Pap . . . Papiere.”

  Nell reached down and picked up his rifle from where it had fallen as he had grabbed the schnapps and with both hands on the barrel spun herself around like a discus thrower and flung it as far as she could into the next field. Then she got back on her bike and rode away.

  The next challenge, she knew, would be crossing the Elbe. One lone idiot on a dusty road might be replaced by an entire squad at any of the Elbe bridges. So she pedalled south and east. Rather than take the bridge at Tangermünde—was it even still there? Either side could have seen fit to blow it up—she would gamble on the ferry at Rogätz—gamble that it was still working, gamble that the Russians thought it less significant than any bridge.

  Whole families seemed to be making the river crossing in both directions. The battledress hidden at the bottom of her knapsack, Nell tagged along with a family boarding the ferry—mother, father and three daughters, one of whom was also pushing a bicycle. Nell struck up a conversation with the girl, walked on with her side by side and the Russians scarcely looked at them.

  That evening, a warm, light August evening, she entered the American Sector of Berlin from the Potsdam side, passing both Russians and Americans, none of whom seemed to care that she did so.

  §86

  Berlin: August 1945

  Berlin had been bad when she left. Now it was worse. What had been damaged was ruined. What had been ruined was obliterated. Buildings stood eyeless and hollow, ribs without flesh—skeletal, slender fingers of brick pointing meaninglessly to a heaven that had forsaken them. They looked less like buildings than trees, winter trees. And the trees themselves were leafless and blasted—late August and not a green leaf to be seen.

  And everywhere people. Berliners drifting as though blown by a wind none but they could feel. And the Allies, static, rooted to the street corners gazing around, hands in pockets, detached from the living scene, watching it all as though it were no more than sideshow entertainment . . . the hurdy-gurdy man at the corner of her childhood. The beggar at her childhood’s end.

  Crossing Adolf-Hitler-Platz a Russian grabbed her bike by the handlebars, just as the border guard had done. He had a better vocabulary.

  To “Велосипед” he added “Fahrrad” and “Byike.”

  He wasn’t alone. Only a few feet away his pals were standing around smoking. And in the other direction half a dozen Americans, smoking and flirting with every girl that passed. As the Russian tugged at her bike she could hear the constant refrain of “Frat? Frat? Fraulein?”

  She let go of the bike, gave the Russian a momentary taste of victory then clouted him round the ear with the flat of her hand as hard as she could. He let go, clapped a hand to his stinging ear and Nell clouted him on the other.

  “Waaaaaghhhh!!!!”

  Every head turned. Nell took her bike by the handlebars and dared him to try again—not wholly sure now if she was fighting for her bike or her life.

  Then it started, a deep rumble from the Russians that the Americans picked up. They were laughing, they were all laughing. Not at her . . . at him. She had thought “thigh-slapping” no more than a metaphor, but that is what Russians did, they all but doubled up and slapped their thighs. And she knew she’d got away with it when the man himself began to laugh.

  She wheeled her bike forward, nodded politely at the Russian as he stepped aside and said, “Спасибо. Добро пожаловать в Берлин.” Thank you. Welcome to Berlin.

  One of the Americans chased after her.

  “Fraulein, fraulein. Spreckenzy English?”

  She wheeled on, with him close behind her and did not turn around until she felt clear of the Russians.

  “Yes. Of course. What is it you want?”

  “Er . . . I guess . . . y’know . . . Frat? I never seen anyone tackle a Russki like that. Lady, you got . . .”

  He stopped short of an obscenity. But Nell no more wanted anything to do with him than with the Russian.

  “Buy you drink, hon? Buy you a meal? I got zigs, I got shockylade. Maybe a little jig-jig, y’know fick-fick?”

  “How kind. But you must excuse me. I have to find my home.”

  Along the Kaiserdamm every naked tree seemed to draw a crowd. As one thinned she could see the reason. Notes on card and paper, notes by the dozen, notes by the hundred pinned to the trunk. Men seeking wives, women seeking husbands. Pleas for the missing. Lost children, lost parents. Lost lives. Berlin was lost.

  “Else, where are you? I am back.”

  “Matthias Bergman is alive and well and living at 71 Köpenicker Straße.”

  And one writ large that seemed almost aimed at her . . .

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

  Common as the name was, she’d never known anyone called Joe.

  §87

  She found 21 Pfefferstraße. What was left of it. Nos. 21, 23, and 25 had collapsed into their own cellars. One wall of 27 stood. Most of 19 was intact, but had neither doors nor windows. Halfway up its wall she could make out the floral wallpaper of what had been her bedroom. The fireplace was intact, jutting out into space, defying gravity, and on the mantelpiece a rag doll she had won playing hoop-la at the Weihnachtsmarkt Christmas fair held in the Lustgarten in 1937. Berlin had blown away, swept up on a hurricane of high explosives—and her rag do
ll, light as a feather, still sat upon the mantelpiece.

  A fence post had been stuck in the rubble of No. 21. Another note for Berlin lost nailed to it.

  Marie Burkhardt now resides at No. 92.

  So, her mother was alive. Other people “lived.” Her mother “resided.” She didn’t doubt that Marie had written it herself.

  No. 92 had fared only slightly better than No. 21. The top two storeys had vanished. They had not collapsed into the cellar, the cellar was occupied. A stout if improvised door half a dozen steps down from the street, a stovepipe sticking out of a peephole window at ground level. On top of the broken wall, just beyond the reach of a human hand, three galvanised buckets of earth, sprouting with parsley, thyme, and a solitary, dusty tomato plant.

  Tacked to the door was a card.

  Prof. Burkhardt—Teacher of Music

  Städtisches Konservatorium, Berlin

  Königlichen Konservatorium, Dresden

  And below that.

  Piano wanted. Cash paid.

  So the piano had died in the war. Her mother’s precious Broadwood.

  The door was padlocked. Nell sat on the steps and waited. Dusk could only be half an hour away. Was her mother out teaching some child the piano? Could anything so normal be taking place in this desert of rubble?

  Very few people passed. Those that did looked at her without concern, more interested in the bicycle than the girl. Ten minutes passed, and an old woman was coming towards her pushing a pram, her head wrapped in a scarf, her body swathed in layers of ragged skirts, her hands in thick leather gloves. A coating of ashen dust from head to foot. She got within ten feet of Nell before Nell recognised her.

  “Mama?”

  Could this old woman, this tramp, possibly be her mother?