Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  Werner spoke as though he’d been slapped in the face and challenged to a duel with sabres.

  “I do not care to sit down with the Allies, Herr Corporal.”

  Nell had not even noticed Joe’s rank. The sneer as Werner said “corporal” was impossible to miss.

  “Now, don’t you go bashin’ corporals. We may be a bunch of numskulls but some of us go on to run empires that last a thousand years.”

  Werner turned on his heel and was gone.

  The three soldiers were giggling like schoolboys. Nell was not laughing, nor was Joe.

  “Sorry, is he a friend?”

  “Oh yes. We do not deny our friends, do we?”

  “Probably not Miss Burkhardt, but I don’t have any friends that deny Auschwitz.”

  Oh God, had Werner talked that loud?

  “Nell,” she said. “My name is Nell.”

  §104

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

  §105

  “Can I drive you home?”

  “Thank you. But I live only walking distance from here. In the American Sector. In Wilmersdorf. Near the Ludwigskirche. On Grünetümmlerstraße.”

  Bit by bit there was too much detail for this to be a brush-off. Everything short of a zip code. Somewhere in there, amongst the longitude and latitude, he was certain, was an implicit invitation. Coupled to an equally distinct “not now.”

  “Then I could walk you home.”

  “And you, Joe. Where do you live?”

  “Fasanenstraße.”

  “Near the synagogue?”

  “Down the street from it, or from what’s left of it. I think the RAF got there before me.”

  “I’m sure they did, but in this instance they bombed a ruin. Goebbels’s SA sacked the synagogue on Kristallnacht in 1938. My father saw it burn. I went inside once. When I was a girl. It was beautiful.”

  He ought to say “good night” now. He knew it. But couldn’t.

  Then she said, “Why don’t I walk you home. You can pick up your jeep later. I’d like to see the synagogue again, even as it is.”

  It was a variation on an old adage. Advice given to young ladies back in London. “It is easier to walk out of his place than to have to throw him out of yours.”

  The walk was not long enough. A matter of minutes. They stared at the gaping cavern that had been the synagogue. He felt nothing and had no idea what she was feeling.

  He showed her the block he and Eddie, and fifty other erks, lived in.

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek and walked back down towards the Ku’damm without another word.

  §106

  “Eh?”

  “I’m moving out.”

  “I got that bit. It’s the moving in bit I can’t quite grasp.”

  “Admit it, Eddie. You’d love to have the place to yourself.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “You know, we try hard enough we could have this whole conversation in song titles. About six weeks. Since the night she took us on at three-card monte in the Marrokkaner.”

  “And Fraulein Breakheart has asked you to move in?”

  “Yes. How many ways do you want me to say it.”

  “I wouldn’t have said she was the type.”

  “Is there a type?”

  “Well . . . she’s not like us, is she?”

  “What do you think she is?”

  “Honest.”

  Wilderness went on packing. Eddie scratched his head with an invisible hand, not moving a muscle.

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Older’n you, then?”

  “I lied about me age.”

  “Great start, Joe.”

  Wilderness hefted his kit bag under his right arm, wrapped his left around Eddie’s shoulders.

  “Eddie, we’ll be fine. You, me, Nell—fine.”

  “It’s for real is it, Joe?”

  “It’s very real, Ed.”

  §107

  Top floor. Tucked under the eaves. Flaking whitewash. Moonlight on broad elm floorboards. A brass bed held together with bent bits of wire that had creaked embarrassingly the first time they had made love and on every occasion since.

  She lay curled in the crook of his arm. Mouse small.

  “Why do they call you Joe?”

  “It’s me name.”

  “Not your real name.”

  “Never really been a John. Hated being called Wilf. Joe was the compromise. The English love nicknames.”

  “We like . . . diminutives.”

  “Like Hansel and Gretel.”

  “If you like.”

  “Like Nell?”

  “Oh Nell. She is the grown-up. The little girl was Lenchen. To my father I was always Lenchen. Christina Hélène von Raeder Burkhardt is such a mouthful. So I am Nell.”

  “One woman called me Wilderness. I don’t think she could quite pronounce my surname. So she called me Wilderness.”

  “Sounds . . . savage. You know . . . like Kaspar Hauser.”

  “Maybe. Wild child. But I doubt it. Eddie calls you Fraulein Breakheart when he’s trying to make a point.”

  Up on one elbow now. Eye to eye. Almost nose to nose.

  “Breakheart?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that who we are? Wilderness and Breakheart.”

  “Yeah . . . but we’re nowhere near as bad as it makes us sound.”

  She slumped into the curve of his arm again. Fell asleep. Oblivious to all the things that kept him awake. Since he arrived in Berlin not a single night had passed without the sound of gunfire. And when he nodded off, the pungent smell of carbide lamps drifting up from the street could penetrate any depth of sleep.

  She stirred. Up on one elbow once more. One eye opened, one eye closed. He touched the scar beneath her left eye with his fingertips.

  “My . . . war wound.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  So she did.

  §108

  Nell kept a journal. Fat, ochre-coloured with coarse onion-skin pages. It sat upon a writing slope, which in turn sat upon the small table that passed for her desk. It would not have occurred to Wilderness to look inside, curious or not. What intrigued him most was not the possibilities of content, but the pencils she used. Different colours worn to different lengths. When she had finished writing whatever it was she wrote, she would arrange the pencils on her desk in order of length. If he moved one, sooner or later he would find she had moved it back. A creature of some disorder himself, he could admire order—he admired Eddie’s sense of order, a man who matched up socks and rolled them into balls; an act for which Wilderness thought life too short—but Nell’s order prompted questions, questions without form or language. An elusive sense of belonging and not belonging, of wondering where he fitted into this woman’s life.

  He thought of all the women in his life—the few. His drunken, feckless mother, who had died with a gin and lime in her hand, who had scarcely seemed to know he was alive. Mercurial, beautiful, utterly amoral Merle—a woman without a care in the world because she cared for no one and nothing, who had seduced him on a whim. Rada—a demanding, generous mind, the biggest influence in his life—trapped in her own memories even as she narrated them to him, nurturing an inconsolable, unarticulated grief that had killed her. Nell—charming, severe, funny, humourless, driven . . . above all else driven—the weight of the world on her shoulders. Standing straight, standing tall in a city which lay in pieces at her feet. A one-woman moral storm.

  He came to realise that her distinction between guilt and responsibility was vital. The apartment was one room—cooker and sink at one end, bath at the other, bed and all else in the middle. It was too big for one woman by the standards of Berlin in 1947. As he learnt on their second “date,” Nell had no living relatives—a condition Wilderness thought much of Berlin might be in—and felt that to live alone, in a room of one’s own was wrong. However desirable, wrong. But for this he dou
bted she would have let him move in after so short a courtship.

  The nearest thing she had to a relative, she told him, was the man who lived on the floor below. Erno Schreiber, and old friend of her parents. A man in his late fifties, or thereabouts. A Jew.

  “How did he survive?”

  “Hid his identity. Changed his name. Forged all his papers. And forged them for others. I should think there are over two hundred Jews in Berlin who owe their lives to Erno’s skill as a forger. His masterpiece was the Bombenschein. Rather like your Persilschein. It was a catch-all document stating that all other papers had been lost in an air raid.”

  This intrigued him. This was his territory, far more than it was hers.

  Arriving home ahead of her one day, the door to Erno Schreiber’s room was ajar. He knocked, the door swung inward on its own weight and Wilderness found himself looking at a small, white-haired man in an unravelling cardigan, hunched over a desk, writing by the light of a twenty-five watt lamp, surrounded by junk—piles of newspapers, overburdened bookshelves, the paraphernalia of the practised hoarder. Nowhere to sit, no way to move. Walkways through the junk, like looking down on the pattern of a maze.

  The ginger tomcat perched on the highest shelf looked down at Wilderness. Erno did not look up.

  Just said, “Ah, the boyfriend. I had wondered when you might call.”

  “Yes,” Wilderness said. “And you’re the forger.”

  Now he looked up. His glasses unhooked from the right ear to dangle by their brass loop from the left.

  “And you’re the Schieber.”

  “She told you?”

  “My dear Schieber. We’re talking about a woman whose honesty may well be her only vice.”

  “Well, we’re all Schiebers of one sort or another aren’t we?”

  “Indeed, it is the norm. I cannot think of any other reason why Nell would tolerate one let alone . . . admit one. She is so earnest, so adamant about sharing in the common fate.”

  “Not so long ago, thinking like that would have got you killed.”

  “Quite, so easy to die of obedience or conformity. Now, what can I do for you Herr Schieber?”

  “An identity card.”

  “What kind of identity card?”

  “A pay book. British army regiment. Welsh Guards.”

  He picked up a pencil now, ready to take notes.

  “Date of birth and name?”

  Thinking on his toes. If he made his doppelgänger older, what was his war record?

  “August 3 . . . 1926 . . . Rupert . . .”

  Most officers were Ruperts or Tobys.

  “Rupert Charles . . .”

  Most officers had three Christian names. You weren’t a proper toff without three initials. Most officers had a posh surname hyphenated with a common one. Burne-Jones sprang to mind to be readily dismissed.

  “Rupert Charles Montgomery Tatten-Brown.”

  “Montgomery. Hmm. How patriotic. And the rank?”

  “Second Lieutenant. No . . . make that first lieutenant.”

  “You want pips with that?”

  “You got pips?”

  On the wall above Erno’s desk was a cabinet of fifty tiny drawers, something out of an apothecary’s shop—the chemical symbols in gold leaf that had faded into near-nothingness.

  “Welsh Guards . . . Welsh Guards . . . let me see.”

  A few seconds rummaging in CuSO4 and two shoulder pips were placed on the desk in front of Wilderness.

  “You got pips for everything?”

  “More or less. You want to pass for a tram inspector or an SS Standartenführer, I’m your man, although the tram inspector will cost you more. And if you really were an SS Standartenführer wanting to pass for a tram inspector you can double any figure you might be thinking of. And I’d still call the police. Now, you want the tree to put on your cap?”

  “Tree?”

  Erno held out a Welsh Guards cap badge.

  “That’s not a tree, it’s a leek. And I already got the cap and badge.”

  “What’s a leek?”

  “Sort of like an onion.”

  “How quaint . . . no swords or daggers . . . just vegetables. Food is so much more important, you will agree. Were you thinking of paying me in food, Herr Schieber?”

  “If you like. What do you want? Chocolate? Tinned stuff?”

  “Coffee.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Coffee is the one thing Yuri never puts in a pajok. Far too precious.”

  “Yuri? Who’s Yuri?”

  §109

  “Who’s Yuri?”

  They were seated at opposite sides of the little table in the portion of Nell’s room that passed as “dining.” A close parody of the prim and proper. Once in a while this seemed to be what Nell wanted. And the rest of the time she was content to sit on the floor or sprawl on the bed.

  He had brought fresh eggs. Nell had scrambled them and served them with tinned broad beans she had been saving. She stirred the egg on her plate slowly and looked up at him.

  “Yuri was . . . is . . . my mother’s protector. An NKVD major.”

  “Was? Is? You mean he’s your protector?”

  “I think he is, although he does not visit as regularly as he used to and the pajoks are fewer.”

  “Pajok?”

  “Food parcel. You bring pajoks. You just didn’t know the word.”

  “Protector?”

  “A man who took you on board in ’45, who brought you pajoks and told every other Russian that you were his was a protector. If he did none of those things he was a rapist. My mother avoided rape by accepting his patronage, his sexual exclusivity . . . and his pajoks.”

  “Yet still he brings you pajoks.”

  “For which he receives nothing but my lasting gratitude. He hasn’t been here in weeks. It is his habit just to vanish from time to time.”

  §110

  Yuri showed up the next day.

  When Wilderness returned late in the afternoon a small man in a nondescript uniform was sitting with Erno, drinking the coffee he had given Erno yesterday.

  He did not know how to read Russians in uniform. He’d passed them in the street every day. One or two even came to the Marrokkaner. Laughing loudly, never breaking their circle, wanting to know no one. But, then, he’d never tried. And if those who spoke Russian never tried talking to Russians who would?

  They were raggy men in baggy pants and jackboots. Some of them were even raggy women. Collar flashes could be blue, could be yellow, but, as with Yuri, were mostly dirt-coloured. The only thing that broke up the muddiness of his battledress was a row of medal ribbons in all the spectrum of the rainbow, the single gold star of a major on each shoulder, and the shiny brass button on the flap holster that held his seven-shot Nagant revolver.

  He’d lost track of the initials too. The Soviet Union and the Third Reich had this in common—they’d invent a new organisation and a new acronym on the spot to cope with contingencies. Nell had said he was NKVD in 1945. It was easiest to go on thinking of him that way.

  Yuri hoisted his cup of coffee, by way of toast, by way of greeting.

  “Good good,” he said. “Is yours?”

  Yuri swirled the coffee in his cup and downed it in a single gulp. Erno poured a cup for Wilderness, muttered an apology about the lack of milk. Yuri cradled the empty cup in hands that seemed huge, out of all proportion to his body, with fat fingers, broad flat thumbs and tiny slivers of fingernails—brown hands peeking out of brown sleeves, hands that had been calloused and scarred and tanned. And in the sunburnt, Asiatic face, nut-brown and wrinkled like a walnut, when his deep blue eyes opened from their narrow slits, they twinkled with mischief. He held out the cup for more.

  “Good good,” he said again, and Wilderness realised he had not answered.

  “Yes,” he said. “Part payment. Erno is doing a little job for me.”

  This was one way of flushing the fox out. Major Myshkin would hardly be sitti
ng there if he too were not “one of us”—a Schieber of one kind or another.

  The cup was laid gently down on one of the piles of old newspapers that seemed to serve Erno as furniture. The right hand slid across his midriff to flip the button on his holster.

  Wilderness’s gun was in a drawer in Fasanenstraße. He wasn’t even sure which drawer.

  Yuri withdrew his hand and Wilderness found himself looking down the barrel of a saxophone-shaped Hungarian pipe, as Yuri gestured with it.

  “Perhaps you can do a little job for me?”

  The left hand rummaged in his jacket pocket, pulled out a worn, square tin of Ogden’s Walnut Plug.

  “That might be possible,” Wilderness said. “How much would you like?”

  The tamping and the lighting up, the sucking and the puffing slowed the conversation to a tortoise crawl.

  “Fifty pounds. I can use fifty pounds.”

  “I can get your brand of tobacco too, if you like. It’s English.”

  “Da, so. My own private pajok.”

  Suck, puff, breathe out a cloud of smoke, suck puff, puff puff. Wilderness had never found this unpleasant—it had been Abner’s choice of brand too—but he had concluded in childhood that men smoked pipes only to make other men wait.

  “From Leeverrpol, da?”

  “Da,” said Wilderness.

  “But . . . you must bring to me.”

  “What? In the East?”

  “Da. I cannot always come West. And I can hardly stand in Tiergarten like a Berlin Hausfrau.”

  “Where in the East?”

  “That should be a moveable feast. We’ll move around. Points east, east of Pariser Platz.”

  “A hundred.”

  “Is that your price?”

  “No. The quantity. It has to be worthwhile if you want me to shift stuff over the line, and run the risk of your cops as well as ours . . .”

  “My people will leave you well alone, believe me.”

  “And ours are at their nosiest at the line . . . a hundred pounds of coffee and I’ll deliver to you in the East.”

  Suck, puff, cloud.

  “Okeydokey, Englishman. A hundred pounds a time. Now, can we talk money or had you forgotten that?”

  Wilderness had not forgotten the money any more than a dog forgets to eat, but he was worrying about something just as vital—where could he get a hundred pounds of coffee?