Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  Wilderness said, “Stride, Frank. Stride would be a better word than trample.”

  “Sure. Seven league boots—you can stride over everything. Like in the Brothers Grimm.”

  “Enough with fuckin’ Krauts,” Yuri said. “We were talking Russia.”

  Frank could not resist a joke, a little dig.

  “I hear Joe Stalin smokes Edgeworth. How about a few tins of Edgeworth for the next time you see him?”

  Yuri smiled, not enough for pleasure.

  “Edgeworth is foul. Like smoking dried shit. I like Walnut Plug. Get me more Walnut Plug and let Stalin find his own tobacco.”

  Wilderness was startled by what sounded like a rush of air above his head and looked up to see a brass cylinder land in the net of the Rohrpoststation. Frank reached up and got the cylinder. Inside was a folded sheet of paper.

  “It’s for you.”

  Wilderness looked at the scrawl on the page, “Table 21. RAF.”

  He unfolded it, puzzled.

  “I’m across the way at table 13. Buy a girl a drink. LT.”

  He looked out across the deserted dance floor. The girl at table 13 wasn’t a girl. She was a woman in her thirties wearing the uniform of an NKVD major. Neater than Yuri’s. Looking as though she had it cleaned and pressed once in a while, but the same gold star upon the shoulders. Two NKVD majors in one night seemed like one too many. Pickup or setup? All the same, he made his excuses, leaving Eddie to interpret, all sense of fairness evaporating rapidly, and walked across the floor to her table.

  She had her nose stuck in a book. Her eyes left the book and her hands closed it with pleasing thump when he was about six paces away.

  With her right foot she pushed a chair out for him.

  Wilderness sat down, glanced back at Frank and Yuri who scarcely seemed to notice he’d gone. Eddie glared at him.

  He looked at the major. A good-looking blonde with big, brown eyes and a perpetual pout to her lips.

  “Why are you sitting here on your own? You could join us.”

  The big eyes opened wider.

  “Why am I sitting here?”

  An accent like Frank’s when he was expecting one like Yuri’s.

  “Why am I sitting here? Because I don’t want to know what Yuri’s up to. He hardly ever comes West. Not since his Schatzi died. And I’ve certainly never seen him in here before. Yuri’s a nice guy, but he’s . . . how to put this . . . bound by the limitations of his origins, and I say that regardless of how far he’s come.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He’s still a peasant. He knows what he knows and so far, and while he has imagination, it leads to a pretty low horizon. He distrusts what he doesn’t know. Makes him a good intelligence officer. Everyone’s an enemy. He still has peasant barter as his model for any exchange. He’s just switched from chickens and beets to cigarettes and whisky. Makes him good at whatever racket it is you guys are running.”

  “Why are you so sure it’s a racket?”

  “’Cos you’re sitting over there with Frank Spoleto, that’s why.”

  “And Frank’s a wrong ’un?”

  “Of course he is. A charming, beguiling rogue. Mr. Personality. Another New York smart-ass.”

  “You know New York?”

  “You think I picked up this accent at Berlitz? Gimme a break, kid. New York, London . . .”

  “London? Then you probably have a take on me too.”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Well . . . your Russian’s not bad, but the accent’s atrocious, so I figure you’ve been trained up by the British. A crash course in Russian and German, and you speak both with the accent of a cockney wide boy. You should work on that, by the way.”

  “Funny. I had prided myself on being a good mimic.”

  “Oh, so you can do London posh, can you? The arf arfs and the tally-hos? You just haven’t mastered the Russian version? Look, when it comes down to it you’re not that different from Yuri. Bound by your origins. But you’re a city kid. Gives you an edge. Gives you more imagination and more chances. You have a bigger horizon. Yuri will always be a peasant. You may not always be an East End gutter rat. But, whatever they promised, whatever the British told you, you’re still a low-grade NCO. Intelligence hasn’t made you Bulldog Drummond. You interpret, you eavesdrop and that’s about it. And you’re bored. And when you’re bored you look for a new game. And the black market is the only game in town.”

  Wilderness aimed for motionlessness. Not a muscular flicker to tell her how well she’d hit home. How the hell did she know all this?

  “I’m impressed. Brains and beauty.”

  “Stop trying to flirt with me. I’m thirty-six years old and an officer. You’re a corporal and you’re what twenty-two, twenty-three?”

  “Nineteen. Twenty next month.”

  “Sheeeit. Green as cabbage. Kid, stop flirting and start looking out. Guys like Frank and Yuri land on their feet. An’ speaking of feet. You ever notice the size of their hands?”

  “Yes, I had as it happens. Frank’s are in proportion . . . Yuri’s . . .”

  “Portion shmortion. They both have hands like shovels. All the better to grab with. They land on their feet with their hands full. Guys like you . . . touch and go. But guys like Swift Eddie. They fall on their faces. They’re life’s victims. Don’t make him one. Don’t put a guy who’s worth two of you and a dozen of Frank or Yuri at risk.”

  “Ah, you know Eddie?”

  “Everybody in Berlin knows Swift Eddie. And right now he’s out of his depth. He just doesn’t know it. Tell me, kid. Did you just introduce Yuri to Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dynamite, match . . . match, dynamite.”

  Wilderness let this sink in, wanting to give her the impression that he understood regardless of whether he agreed with her or not.

  “Can I buy you that drink now?”

  “Jesus. Is your flirt-mode on automatic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Buy me a martini.”

  In all his masquerading as an officer in the restaurants of London, Wilderness had played safe, stuck with scotch without ever acquiring a taste for it. It was what “me” drank. He’d never ordered another cocktail since the day he downed a sickly Tom Collins in the Ritz bar to please Merle. It must have shown.

  “What’s the matter? Out of your depth already?”

  “Yes. And I think you knew I would be.”

  “No big deal. You ask the waiter for what you want. Doesn’t matter that you haven’t a clue what you’re saying.”

  As if by magic a waiter appeared at their table.

  She had him wait a moment as she pitched questions at Wilderness.

  “You can have a martini with vodka or gin. Needless to say I prefer vodka. The only other ingredients are vermouth, ice, and a twist of lemon. So what’s it to be?”

  “No sugar?”

  “Jeez! Who in hell would want to put sugar in a martini?”

  “Then make it vodka . . . can I drink with a Russian and not have vodka?”

  “No, you can’t. Now, shaken or stirred?”

  “Er . . .”

  “It doesn’t need any thought. Nobody shakes a martini. Martinis are stirred. Only a complete shmo would shake a martini.”

  “I’m in your hands, Major.”

  “Damn right.”

  She turned to the waiter.

  “Zwei Wodka Martinis, bitte. Gerührt nicht geschüttelt. Wenig Eis.”

  “Es tut mir leid, gnädige Frau. Wir haben kein Eis.”

  “You hear that? No ice. Berlin in summer.”

  “Would you adam and eve it?”

  There was a pause as the meaning of the phrase surfaced for her, then she started to giggle, and the giggle became an outright laugh. Wilderness saw Frank and Yuri look over for a second to see what the joke was and turn back to business abruptly. Eddie still glared.

  She was tiny, she was funny, she had deepes
t-brown eyes like a pair of conkers, a laugh like Ethel Merman, a bosom like Jane Russell. She was gorgeous, she was Russian, and she was unobtainable. And that was fine with him. Flirtation was one thing, and Nell was all the others.

  “Maybe we should introduce ourselves. John Wilfrid Holderness. Corporal, Royal Air Force. Known as Joe.”

  She caught her breath as the laughter subsided.

  “Nice to meet you, Joe. I’m Larissa Fyodorovna Toskevich. Major, NKVD. Known as Tosca.”

  §118

  As Nell had predicted, from time to time Yuri would simply vanish. Eddie was content supplying their regulars. Once in a while Wilderness would work the Tiergarten with him, watching as another sadistic winter got Berlin in its fist, watching as the calorie count in the ration dropped as quickly as the mercury in the thermometer and the stick insects got brittler and brittler. And it seemed blacker—was there an overcoat in Berlin that wasn’t black? Had an entire age been reshot in monochrome? Had all the colour been looted and shipped back to Moscow?

  Wilderness concluded that it was during absences like this that Yuri went back to Moscow. All the stuff he was piling up in the Eisfabrik at last went to meet orders. An apparatchik having a Christmas party at his state-owned dacha in the woods outside Moscow might be in need of fifty tins of Californian bluefin tuna, twelve bags of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee . . . a couple of thousand Pall Mall cigarettes. And the party favours . . . for the Representatives of the People, a dozen bottles of Laphroaig whisky . . . and for the wives, a few dozen bars of Cadum soap. All of which Wilderness had sold to Yuri over the weeks.

  They spent a quiet Christmas.

  Nell had no more belief than Wilderness but loved the traditions of a German Christmas. Erno remarked that he had “sampled” most religions in his time and thought Hinduism appealing—what other faith encouraged you to take off all your clothes and jump in a river? Wilderness remarked that the Spree was frozen over, but that he was welcome to try.

  The Christmas Eve tradition of eating carp was honoured.

  In the absence of carp, or anything resembling carp, Nell shaped a fish out of mashed potato and onion, cut slices of carrots for the glassy eyes, baked it in the oven and added the last sprigs of dill from her window box to make a tail and fins.

  Erno laughed out loud when he saw it, and duly ate his share.

  On Christmas Day Wilderness waved his magic Schieber’s wand and produced a fresh chicken—for which he had bartered twelve bars of Palmolive and three hundred cigarettes.

  On Boxing Day Nell insisted they walk somewhere, anywhere. Along the snow-covered path of the Landwehr Canal, across the far corner of the Tiergarten and through the Brandenburg Gate, where the Soviet Sector began, to Pariser Platz at the western end of Unter den Linden.

  A hurdy-gurdy man had taken to the streets once more. Wilderness had not seen one in all his months in Berlin. He thought that perhaps this was why Nell had come here. For this glimpse of her childhood. For this cranked-out, barely recognisable tune and the colours—the rich colours, the deep reds and the vivid golds of the music box in a city of blacks and whites. Like everyone else in Berlin, the hurdy-gurdy man’s mode of transport was a pram, in which the hurdy-gurdy sat askew, like a cinema organ in miniature. A balding toy monkey perched on top, paw outstretched with a tin cup. Nell opened her purse and dropped coins into his cup.

  Something like a column of soldiers was advancing down Unter den Linden. Like, in that it was a slow, unrhythmical march, more of a dead-foot shuffle, a column without discipline or dogged by exhaustion.

  A couple of GAZ jeeps swung into Pariser Platz and half a dozen Russian soldiers, rifles at chest height, gesturing wildly with the butt end, cleared a space in front of the remains of the US embassy with what was probably one of only half a dozen words in their German vocabulary—“’Raus,’raus.” It went with Uhri and Frau.

  The hurdy-gurdy man stopped turning his handle. Syncopated Strauss running down like a watch spring.

  “Let’s go,” Wilderness said. “If these silly sods are up to something I don’t need to see it. They’re unpredictable at the best of times, and this looks like a stunt they mean to stage. We don’t have to be their audience.”

  Nell was staring down the street, past the broken stumps of the linden trees at the shuffling group of men and their bored, impatient escorts.

  “No. Wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  She looked up at him, anxiety in her eyes.

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling. An awful feeling.”

  “They put on shows like this just to scare us . . .”

  “Not this time . . . this is . . .”

  He did not press her to finish.

  More jeeps drove down the sides of the column, more infantrymen got out, marking out a defended square between the embassy and the Adlon Hotel.

  After an age that seemed to pass in frosted silence fifty or sixty dishevelled, gaunt men reached the square. A voice behind them boomed out, “Halt!”

  They stood, not even looking around. Men in rags that had once been Wehrmacht uniforms—flashes of colour, flashes of rank peeping out from the universal mud hue they had acquired—waiting upon the next order.

  The next order never came, with balletic speed and coordination the Soviet troops got back in their jeeps, circled the square they had made, and with engines roaring shot off back down Unter den Linden. Several of the men simply fell to earth, into the filthy slush of trampled snow. The crowd that had stood back began to drift forwards staring in disbelief. The eyes of the prisoners did not look back. It seemed to Wilderness that they had been beaten lifeless while still living—when all responses were met with blows it was best to have no responses.

  “Nell, let’s go.”

  A hand upon her arm. She wrenched free, ran down the column, around the back to meet Wilderness coming the other way. Six feet from him she stopped. Her hand to her mouth suppressing whatever cry was bursting from her lips.

  Right in front of her one of the skeletal men sank to his knees, sat back buttock to heel, still staring out at nothing. His hair a dirty, white unkempt haystack. His clothes, the wreckage of a pinstripe suit. A tin cup on a string around his neck his only possession—all worldly wealth in a dozen cigarette butts. The monkey was richer by far.

  Nell put a hand on his shoulder.

  The man looked at her, as it seemed to Wilderness, without seeing her.

  Now she knelt, grabbed Wilderness’s hand and pulled him down next to her.

  “Daddy, Daddy. Don’t you know me? It is Lenchen—your Lenchen.”

  §119

  Max Burkhardt looked about five ten. Wilderness reckoned he weighed less than eight stone. He’d got him naked on the bed and could count his ribs.

  Nell had the gas burner roaring and every ring on the hob boiling pans of water.

  In the absence of any doctor Erno looked him up and down.

  “No open wounds, no rashes . . . his feet are a mess of sores and blisters. God only knows how far he walked. With his club foot, without the offset shoe, they might have crippled him for life.”

  Nell said, “Why doesn’t he speak?”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t want to.”

  “Why doesn’t he look at me?”

  Erno shrugged.

  “I can see his body. Battered but intact. I cannot see his mind. Let us just say that too is battered.”

  Erno and Wilderness lowered him into the bath. The warmth of the water seemed to seep into him. For a moment his eyes focussed, flashed with recognition at the sight of his daughter. Then they closed.

  The next time Max Burkhardt opened his eyes, they had him in bed, in between the sheets, blankets piled deep.

  “Clean,” he said.

  Then nothing.

  Erno nodded.

  “Clean is good,” he said. “Clean can be ecstasy. Up there with food and orgasm.”

  §120

  Nell and Wilderness slept on the floor.


  Her father made hardly a sound. His breath no more than a distant sigh. The beat of a moth’s wing on air.

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Why do they do this?”

  “The Russians?”

  “Yes. Keep men so long. The war is over. What is my father to them? A man they found on the street defending Berlin with a pitchfork and a potato peeler?”

  “There are millions. The speed at which they let the POWs go, there’ll still be men in Soviet camps in 1967.”

  “Why him? Why now?”

  “I don’t know,” he lied.

  §121

  On the twenty-ninth, Max sat up in bed. On the thirtieth, he sat at the table for breakfast.

  Wilderness made porridge.

  He liked porridge the Scottish way, with salt. Max needed calories. He spooned a hefty tablespoon of Tiptree raspberry jam—a NAAFI perk reserved for officers—into Max’s bowl.

  Max finished it slowly.

  Stared down into the bowl, then looked intently at Nell and Wilderness.

  “Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein,” he said.

  Later Wilderness quoted Max’s words to Erno.

  “It’s that arse Nietzsche again,” he said. “You gaze into the abyss and the abyss gazes back. Who knows what he meant? Abyss, shmabyss. It was Germany, it was Russia? Ach.”

  “It was just a bowl of porridge.”

  §122

  On New Year’s Eve, the small, darkest hours of January 1, Wilderness awoke to a blast of freezing air that was coiling itself around him.

  The window was open. And the bed was empty.

  He pulled on his shirt and trousers and climbed out into night and cold and winter.

  The building next door had a flat roof. At the far side a figure sat, wrapped in a blanket, gathering a coat of snow.

  When he touched Max, he knew he was dead. The life had leeched out of him a couple of hours ago. He was in the first stage of rigor. Ice in his hair. Ice on his eyelashes.

  §123

  “This has happened before. In 1945. My great-uncle. I still don’t know how he died. Only that he did it himself. He dug his grave. He lay down and he died. It seems odd that people can just choose to die. But he did and so did my father.”