Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  In the lobby he was surprised to find an ornate ceiling arcing overhead and a panelled staircase hinting at art nouveau origins. It was the most undamaged piece of Germany he’d yet encountered. Something the RAF had missed.

  The office of Information Services Control was on the ground floor.

  He knocked at the secretary’s door and walked in.

  A good-looking blonde in a severe charcoal grey two-piece was ripping paper from the roller of her typewriter. She paused with the pages mid-air, looked at him, then screwed them into a ball, carbon and all, and lobbed them over her shoulder.

  “Butterfingers,” she said.

  “No, Holderness.”

  “Very witty. You must be the colonel’s bright boy. We’ve been expecting you.”

  “Am I going to be Burne-Jones’s bright boy wherever I go?”

  “Dunno. There’s not a lot of competition round here at the mo’. But you could always try not living up to it.”

  She picked up two pages and a carbon and fed them into the typewriter.

  “You know I could have stayed at home, done the deb thing and married a Guards officer. I didn’t have to learn to type, and on days like these when I wake up with ten thumbs I wish I hadn’t. But, alas I didn’t know all that many Guards officers. Back down the corridor, second on the left. There’s a desk for you, and a pile of Fraggywotsernames to be going on with. I’ll finish the major’s letters and be with you in about half an hour.”

  “The major?”

  “Major Frampton. He’s in charge. He’ll want to see you at some point, but as you answer to Colonel Burne-Jones it’s not all that urgent he sees you today. I can brief you. As I said, second on the left.”

  It was a large, light room—bigger than the room that housed him, Eddie and two cots. The desk was a monstrosity in carved oak, at least seven feet wide and three deep. Designed to intimidate. It intimidated him until he remembered, it was his desk. He wasn’t sharing with anyone. Just as well, he did not share with easy grace.

  A foolscap envelope was on the desk, addressed to him.

  He shook it.

  Two pamphlets slid out onto his desk.

  Control Council Directive No.24: Concerning the Removal from Office and Positions of Responsibility of Nazis and People Hostile to Allied Purposes. January 1946.

  And . . .

  Allied Kommandatura Order No.10: The Elimination of National Socialism and Militarism from Public and Economic Life. March 1946.

  Wilderness almost sighed out loud. But, on the back of the latter Burne-Jones had scribbled.

  Wouldn’t bother reading these if I were you, but it might be as well if you left them lying around on your desk. Might intimidate the natives and fool our side into thinking you actually have read them. ABJ.

  Then there was the pile of Fragebogen, forty or so—131 X 40 = 5,240 soddin’ questions, and 5,240 soddin’ answers.

  There was one consolation: it was bollock freezing outside, and he was indoors and a damn sight warmer than any German.

  There were two consolations: the secretary was a looker, a bit of posh with, it seemed, no snooty ways about her.

  He’d read a dozen Fragebogen by the time she reappeared.

  “Are they all musicians? How many second violins did the Berlin Philharmonic have?”

  “Not all . . . no . . . but the list will be skewed that way. In theory you have the right to pick up any Fraggey you wish and recall its author. In practice almost everything we do is geared to the archive the Nazis abandoned upstairs, the files of the Reichskulturkammer. Somehow, in the two months the Russians had this building they managed to miss it. Any artist who wanted to continue working under the Nazis filled in a German version of a Fraggey. Now they all want to work again, indeed we want them to work again, and it doesn’t matter if they’re Fred Schmidt or Wilhelm Furtwängler, they all have to be assessed. Hence we have in this building the Spruchkammer für Entnazifizierung, which is a kind of court that will exonerate, but only if we, in this case you, say so. That would amount to official denazification. Once whitewashed they are eligible for certain perks in the way of rationing. A leading actor may well qualify for a class-one card, the same as a chap doing heavy labour or a Trümmerfrau—by the by we didn’t think this one up; the Russians did, we just sort of levelled it a bit—and the choice they make is between, say, the German equivalent of Sir Cedric Hardwicke and some music hall comic who’s just had a walk-on in a Will Hay comedy. All a bit of a farce really.

  “And of course we have a pretty wide brief. Class one is artists and scholars but also engineers and the like. Who, after all, is to say that an engineer is not an artist? So somewhere in that pile you may stumble across an architect or bloke who designed bridges. But the bottom line is this. It doesn’t matter if a chap has traded in poetry for plumbing—if he filled in a Nazi Fragebogen, and they’re the basis of the 250,000 files in the Reichskulturkammer upstairs, he fills in one of ours.

  “But . . . we also have the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands. And please don’t ask me to repeat that. Dozens, no hundreds of chaps mill around here every day to get fixed up with cards by one lot and then the other tries to keep them gainfully employed in the propagation of non-Nazi art. And then it all turns into a rather thirdrate coffee-house-cum-arts-club and you summon the chucker out. It’s all a communist front, of course, but there’s nothing we can do about it. They’re on the floor above. You’re bound to come across them but there’s no real reason to have much to do with them. You deal with the Spruchkammer, and they’re pretty much at your mercy. No Persilschein from you, no privileges, no work. They’re absolutely full of it of course, so try not to get stuck in a lift with any of them. And I’m Rose Blair, by the by, thank you for asking. And thank you for not flirting. I’m at least ten years older than you, and not interested. Now, any questions?”

  Wilderness wanted to laugh. He could not tell from her expression whether she expected him to laugh.

  “There wasn’t a lot in the envelope Burne-Jones left me. Did he say anything specific to you?”

  “Yeeees. He did rather. Work your way through the pile. There’ll be more over the next couple of days. Your first interview isn’t until Thursday, and you’re only interviewing in the mornings. In the afternoons the colonel asked that you, and I quote, ‘Get to know Berlin, you’re—’”

  “‘No use to me if you don’t know Berlin.’”

  “Exactly. His very words.”

  §100

  His days achieved a pattern of tolerable dullness. He read Fragebogen, he rubber-stamped Berliners back into gainful employment by issuing Persilscheins. He would have said he was attentive, but this long after the war, in a country where everyone and no one had been a Nazi, he could see little point in the job. Burne-Jones had warned him not to regard the job as a cover. So he tried to see it that way. Burne-Jones had had him issued a spy’s gun, not a soldier’s. Had him trained to use it. What was it Weatherill had said? “I’m sure you don’t need me to teach you to die. I’m here to teach you to kill.” He tried that on too. And when added up it all came to one question: “When will Burne-Jones reappear?”

  In the afternoons he walked Berlin as Burne-Jones had requested, wondered at the ease with which he could cross from one sector to another unmolested, strolled the length of Unter den Linden, trying to reconstruct it in his imagination. To see it draped with Swastikas in black and red. To see it at the turn of the century, as it had been in the Kaiser’s day. Late afternoon, in the twilight hours, he would meet Eddie in either Eddie’s jeep or his own and they would unburden themselves of coffee, soap, perfume, tinned fish . . . whatever . . . on the eager citizens of Berlin. A people starving, on the ration or off it. The stick insects.

  He could not deny it made money. He, Eddie, Spud, and Pie Face were no more short of money than they were short of food. They weren’t starving.

  But it was a diversion at best.

  The real game was somewhere
else.

  It had to be.

  §101

  It was the second week of February. Wilderness had just issued a Persilschein to a bloke with a badly damaged hand. Afterwards he could remember little about the man—they all tended to blur into one single importuning German—but he held a cigarette in a little black holder stuck between the stumps of the fingers on his right hand, and had old-fashioned good manners. Perhaps because he wasn’t scared of Wilderness. It brought a reciprocal response. Against habit Wilderness had shown him to the door, chatted about so much nothing in the lobby, only to see a young woman fly down the stairs and hug the man—he in turn had embraced her with his good, left arm as she chattered away in faster German than Wilderness could keep up with.

  He watched as she walked him to the front door. Small. Slim. Beautiful. Long black hair, piled up and pinned up for the office. A bottle-green dress that seemed far too summery for the time of year. She could be anything between sixteen and twenty.

  “So, you’ve noticed?”

  He turned. Rose Blair was standing in her office doorway.

  “Noticed who?” he lied.

  “Our Fraulein Burkhardt. Or rather, their Fraulein Burkhardt. Works for the Kulturbund upstairs. Gorgeous, isn’t she? You don’t stand a chance. All the actors try it on with her—at least all those that aren’t queer. Come to think of it, maybe you do stand a chance.”

  Her door was about to close.

  Wilderness said, “You know her? I don’t suppose . . .”

  “Burne-Jones pays me to keep an eye on you Corporal Holderness, not to fix you up with dates. You want a Schatzi, find her yourself.”

  §102

  He did not find her.

  She found him.

  §103

  Nell had known Werner Fugger all her life. His father was her godfather, and had worked for the city of Berlin alongside her own father, alongside Berlin’s mayor-elect Ernst Reuter. Werner was two years younger, and playing with him when she was ten had seemed like an ordeal and required coercion. Not much had changed. Unlike her he’d been in the Hitler Youth—the natural scepticism of his father had not been enough to get him out of that—and while she’d been away, with Great-Uncle Klaus, with Nicolas Dekker, Werner had served with the Volkssturm, and at the age of fourteen had fought in the streets outside the bunker, had taken out a Russian tank with a crude but effective weapon known as a Panzerfaust. The Führer had surfaced from his bunker, perhaps for the last time, to pinch cheeks and pin medals on Werner and a dozen others. Only one of them had been younger than Werner.

  One of Werner’s comrades-in-arms had slung his iron cross into the rubble when news of Hitler’s death emerged, saying it would become a curse upon them. He urged Werner to throw his away too. Werner wouldn’t.

  Nell could respect Werner’s experience, without respecting his opinions. Werner veered between denouncing Germany and denouncing the Allies, without ever denouncing the Reich. His mental footwork lacked skill as it lacked years. And he and Nell had the same argument over and over again in cafés and bars across the city centre.

  “Auschwitz was Russian propaganda. The camp and its gas chambers hastily faked by the Russians in January 1945.”

  Nell would counter this by telling him what she had learnt firsthand talking to survivors of Auschwitz in Belsen.

  Scarcely conceding her point with a “for the purposes of argument only, let us suppose you are right . . .” Werner would then argue strongly for Hitler having been surrounded by a “conspiracy of silence . . .”

  “Surely you can see that if the Führer knew about such things, he would have put a stop to them at once.”

  “Why would he? It was everything he believed in, the summation of every policy he ever espoused, every speech he ever made. Everything he did and said from the day he got out of the army was destined to end with Auschwitz.”

  If Werner insisted that the Führer had known nothing, sooner rather than later, he could kill an evening. Their mutual friends would drift off, exasperated and bored by him.

  Nell regretted that she had asked him along this evening, but to leave him to his own devices only meant that he would fall in with more idiots who thought as he did—and God alone knew how many of those there were. Half Berlin was only too eager to wrap itself in the stars and stripes, and half would fly the hakenkreuz if only they had the nerve. Perhaps her choice of bar was a mistake—the Marrokkaner Club in Grolmanstraße? Perhaps any bar was a mistake when dealing with a war hero not yet seventeen?

  Werner had moved on to the subject of the Nuremburg Trials. Two of their friends had left already, leaving only Nell and Franz, a thoughtful, near-silent young man of nineteen, an undecorated, unheroic, unbelieving veteran of the Volkssturm, to listen to Werner.

  “The idea of collective guilt is nonsense . . . an entire country cannot be guilty . . .”

  “Then,” Nell said. “Perhaps guilt is the wrong word. Not Schuld but Haftung—responsibility.”

  “Are you saying we are all responsible, responsible for things of which we knew nothing, for things you say were done by our parents’ generation? We were children . . .”

  “Some children fought and some of us won medals,” Franz said softly without a hint of sarcasm. “Or is this where you tell me you and I were only following orders?”

  “Yes. I followed orders, but . . .”

  And where Werner was concerned clauses beginning with “but” could last all night.

  From the other side of the partition she could hear the voices of the occupiers. Another reason not to bring Werner here. It was a favourite with the Allied troops—it was in the eastern end of the British Sector where Charlottenburg met the zoo and the Tiergarten, only walking distance from her work in Schlüterstraße, a short hop from the American Sector, which began only a few metres south of No. 45.

  An English voice was holding forth. A little louder than conversation might permit. Not a lecture, not a raised voice . . . a game.

  “Right gentleman . . . now yer sees it, now yer don’t . . . all you have to do is find the lady.”

  Sharpe!

  “The quickness of the ’and deceives the eye . . .”

  Sharpe!

  She stood up, in the middle of whatever rubbish Werner was uttering and walked around the partition to the other banquette.

  Sharpe!

  Three British soldiers were sitting around the table with half-drunk beers and scrappy piles of reichsmarks in front of them, poised as a fourth in the pale blue of the Royal Air Force worked his huckster’s magic, hands flashing across the cards.

  One of the soldiers was Swift Eddie Clark, who’d worked at Schlüterstraße from time to time. She didn’t know the other two, and the man in RAF blue wasn’t Beckwith Sharpe. Too young, too handsome, too tall. He simply sounded like Sharpe.

  She was about to apologise for the interruption when he looked straight at her. Fair hair and light blue eyes. A beguiling rogue’s smile. Were all cockneys charming rogues? Was Sharpe simply a blueprint for the London millions?

  “May I?” she said.

  Eddie pulled out a chair for her.

  “You can’t beat Joe, Miss Burkhardt. He’s the gaffer at this.”

  Silently adding “gaffer” to her English vocabulary, she took the deck of cards the one called Joe was holding out to her, picked out the queen of hearts, a seven and a nine and held them up for all to see.

  “Nun, meine Herren. Mal sehen, wer die Dame finden kann.”

  The Cockney spoke.

  “In English, Miss. Eddie and I are OK, but Pie Face here hardly speaks English let alone German.”

  Nell concluded the one not laughing was Pie Face. Besides, he had a face like a pie. Flat and puffy at the same time.

  “Entschuldigung. And that will be my last word in German.”

  She held the red queen and the seven in her left hand, the nine in her right, palms up. Palms down and her hands moved faster than a Paganini variation.

  P
ie Face said, “It’s Toy Town money after all. Five doodads on . . .”

  He put his folded note on the card nearest to him.

  Eddie followed suit.

  The third man said, “An’ I’m Spud” as he put his note on the centre card. How aptly the English applied their nicknames. Spud, indeed. Kartoffelgesicht was clumsy by comparison.

  That left the blue-eyed Cockney.

  The blue eyes were fixed on her.

  She had no wish to give him ideas, and looked in turn at all the others, waiting for him to place his bet.

  At last, like a ball decelerating on the rim of a roulette wheel, her eyes came to meet his, the imaginary ball jumping from slot to slot, clicking like a ratchet until their eyes locked. He would get the wrong idea. She knew he would.

  His hand poised over the cards, then dropped a 5RM note onto the centre card.

  She flipped the outside card, heard Pie Face sigh in defeat as the seven showed. Stared back at Joe.

  He moved first, flipped the centre card, nine up.

  Eddie said, “Bloomin’ ’eck. Joe, she beat you. I’ve never seen anyone beat you at three-card monte.”

  Nell flipped the queen and raked in her winnings.

  Now, Joe was not looking at her, he was looking up and over her shoulder.

  She turned.

  Werner was standing behind her.

  “We should go now.”

  “No, I want to stay. This is fun. You go if you want.”

  The she heard Joe say, “Or you could join us. Doesn’t have to be three-card monte. Doesn’t have to be for money. Just a game.”

  She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to be left alone with the Englishman, but she didn’t want Werner as her chaperone either.