Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “I thought you just said it went to the zoo?”

  “In 1800 that was nowhere. Just an obscure corner of the Tiergarten. The zoo has been there scarcely a hundred years. It would have made more sense if the tunnel ended at Bellevue. The construction of palace and tunnel would have been undertaken at roughly the same time. An escape route for queens and princes? But who knows? An error in navigation? Unlikely. But there it is, ending nowhere. And since the RAF all but flattened Monbijou in ’43, beginning nowhere.”

  “But you can find it?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause, the kind that might be called pregnant.

  “You were kindness itself the last time we met, Herr Holderness, and it pains me to have to ask something of you in return. But—the devil drives.”

  Ask away, thought Wilderness. Coffee, butter, sardines in tins. Whatever.

  “Ask away,” he said.

  “You can still issue Persilschein? I need a Persilschein for my son.”

  “No problem. I’ve met your son. We don’t bother much with people that young.”

  “No, Herr Holderness. My other son.”

  Nell might have been stung. She swung around to face Jeltsch-Fugger in an instant.

  “Andreas! No!”

  Jeltsch-Fugger smiled his smile of well-bred tolerance and said to Wilderness, “Might you give us a moment alone?”

  “No,” Nell said. “You give us a moment alone. Joe, outside!”

  Wilderness said nothing as they scraped back their chairs. Jeltsch-Fugger signalled the waiter for another coffee, unperturbed.

  On the pavement, anger made Nell seem suddenly bigger than she was.

  “I won’t let you do this, Wilderness.”

  “I—”

  “Andreas had three sons. Kurt died over England flying for the Luftwaffe. Werner you know. It is Otto he’s talking about now.”

  “So . . . we don’t take it out on kids. There’s even a category called youthful indiscretion or some such. God knows, even Hitler’s secretary got off scot-free under that one.”

  “Otto isn’t a kid. He’s the eldest. He served throughout the war.”

  It was obvious where this was headed.

  “So tell me the worst.”

  “Andreas wants you to issue a Persilschein in the name of SS Obersturmbannführer Otto von Jeltsch-Fugger.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “He worked for Heydrich in the SD. It’s a miracle he isn’t on trial or in prison already, but he isn’t. And if you give him a Persilschein, he’ll get away with everything!”

  “Get away with what exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Do I need to know? We all know what the SD did. Wilderness I cannot, I will not let you do this.”

  Wilderness’s “no” was accepted graciously. They finished their coffee discussing books and music, Wilderness’s fondness for Brahms, Jeltsch-Fugger’s love of English metaphysical poetry. As they parted on the pavement, Jeltsch-Fugger deemed the meeting most enjoyable, hoped they would all have the opportunity to get together under different circumstances soon, and handed Wilderness his card.

  He looked at the sky, remarked that it “might come on to rain later,” doffed his hat to Nell and walked away.

  “It might come on to rain? How bloody English can a German get?”

  “I told you, Wilderness. He’s the most civilised man alive.”

  She kissed him.

  “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I know what it cost you. Joe Holderness resists temptation. I should get that chipped in stone.”

  §143

  That night, in bed, Wilderness said, “If his big brother was in the Gestapo . . . how can Werner go on saying what he says? Talking the kind of bollocks he talks. How can he go on denying what happened?”

  “You said it yourself. He’s just a kid.”

  “So were you during the war.”

  “But I saw Belsen with my own eyes. Werner fought the Russians when he was fourteen in the Volkssturm. He too believes what he saw. That the Russians were a savage enemy. It’s a short hop from that to wanting to believe they faked Auschwitz. Though I flatter myself I’ve knocked that one out of him, he still wrestles with the same question they all do. Wer sind wir? Was sind wir? If you were French or Dutch, the Nazis occupied your country. If you were German they occupied your mind. Try to think of Werner that way.”

  “So . . . all the same, he’s just a kid?”

  “Yep. He’s harmless, as you say of yourself. Only difference is I really believe he is.”

  “And you don’t believe I am?”

  “Of course not.”

  She turned over to sleep, squirmed her backside against his hip.

  “Wer sind wir? Was sind Wir?”

  A whisper and a mantra.

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

  A scrawl upon a thousand walls.

  §144

  He called Jeltsch-Fugger from the office in Schlüterstraße. Arranged to pick him up in the staff jeep by the Adlon Hotel, opposite the gigantic picture of Josef Stalin, in benign, paternal pose and festooned with medals. The Russian welcome to the Soviet Sector.

  It was pouring with rain, the wettest summer in thirty years, battering down on the canvas roof of the jeep, and rivulets that coursed down Stalin’s face—the tears he’d never shed.

  “You have the Persilschein?”

  “You have the map?”

  “Indeed. I shall show you the eastern end, Monbijou. I doubt you need me to direct you to the zoo, after all.”

  “Just one thing. Nell is never to know.”

  “Of course. We are criminals bound together by a dark and dirty secret. Over the Schloss Bridge and left on Burgstraße.”

  The S-bahn overground metropolitan railway was no respecter of history or architecture. It sliced the “heart” of Berlin in two at Alexanderplatz, and it clipped the corner of Monbijou Park en route from the Börse station to Friedrichsstraße Station, passing close enough to have detracted from what had been a fairy-tale palace at the time the S-bahn had been built just after the Great War. After the new war it wasn’t quite a ruin, but Wilderness could not think of a single word to describe the state it was in. Once it had fronted the river, much as the Naval College at Greenwich had done, with a garden of topiaried pine trees leading down to a shining white balustrade at the water’s edge. It was an easy leap of imagination to see gilded barges moored at the steps, waiting upon the pleasure of queens and princesses.

  At some point during the war, the Germans had bricked up its high windows. At some point during the war the British had caved in much of its roof.

  He parked the jeep under the S-bahn between the stilts that propped up the elevated track. It was dark under the S-bahn, illuminated only in flashes—sunlight through the latticework, sparks from the electric line running overhead. It was like looking at an old-fashioned magic lantern show. And what he saw by the light of the lantern was an ornate cast-iron kiosk, rather like a Parisian pissoir—bigger, more elaborate and capped by a small spire that resembled nothing quite so much as the spike on a pickelhaube.

  “How did that survive?”

  “I would imagine,” Jeltsch-Fugger replied. “That the railway line provided cover. Otherwise it might be in the same state as the palace.”

  “You’re a Berliner?”

  “Through and through. Apart from summers spent reliving the last shreds of the ancestral-country-house-life to please my parents, I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

  “Then you must be appalled by what has happened to the city.”

  “I’m an engineer not an architect or an historian. You are asking me to mourn Monbijou? Fine, catch me one night with half a bottle of schnapps inside me and I might. Indeed if the palace appeals to your taste for the rococo, take a good look. The Russians mean to demolish it—the Kaiser’s schloss too. If they stay here ten years I predict they will flatten every structural symbol of imperial Berlin. But what is a flattened city
to an engineer but a chance to build? And if you want my professional opinion, the survival of this absurd piece of cast iron under the S-bahn throughout six years of war is less surprising than it making it through the previous hundred and fifty years in one piece.”

  “You’d almost think no one had noticed it was there.”

  “That’s more true than you could know. I think you’ll find curiosity is not second nature to Germans. Once its purpose had been forgotten it probably never occurred to anyone to ask. It was there. That would be enough for most. What is is.”

  “Why didn’t they knock it down when the S-bahn was built?”

  “They didn’t have ‘permission’ would be my guess—if they had they would have done—permission from God knows who, and in the absence of a god they left things as they found them . . . and as I just said, what is is. Curiosity has no part in it.”

  Jeltsch-Fugger produced a ring of oversized keys, some of them six to eight inches long. They approached the kiosk.

  “One of these should fit.”

  The third key turned the lock. The door swung open, groaning for oil.

  “Remarkable,” Jeltsch-Fugger said. “No one has opened this for the best part of ten years. Until Max and I came here just before the war, I doubt anyone had opened it in more than a century. Even then it opened without effort.”

  Wilderness looked inside. A wide spiral staircase, winding around a central void.

  “A hundred and fifty feet you said?”

  “Give or take.”

  Jeltsch-Fugger lobbed a pebble down the shaft. It seemed an age before Wilderness heard the clunk.

  “Point taken.”

  Will you be going down?”

  “No. I want to see both ends first.”

  Jeltsch-Fugger handed the ring of keys to him.

  “You might let me have it back, when you have finished.”

  They spread a map across the bonnet of the jeep.

  Berlin as it had been in 1938. Five years into The Thousand-Year Reich. A monument in the making.

  A few drops of rain spotted the grey-white paper. Jeltsch-Fugger glanced up at the tracks above and held out a hand. Nothing more fell.

  “You will appreciate, the original map on which Max found the tunnel is in a state not unlike confetti, and far too precious to bring out in a storm.”

  He took a red crayon and traced the course of the tunnel on the pre-war map.

  It followed the route of the S-bahn under the Spree and the island as far as Friedrichsstraße, then curved south directly under Pariser Platz, and then ran parallel to the Charlottenburger Chaussee as it sliced under the avenues that radiated out from the central circle like the strands on a spider’s web to end just north and slightly west of the Zoo Flak Tower.

  Wilderness said, “It passes under an awful lot of lakes in the Tiergarten.”

  “All of them artificial and quite shallow. Max walked the length of the tunnel in ’39. Nothing would stop him—not even his club foot. It was as though he had been given the key to Pandora’s box. And he assured me it was dry. But, of course the flak tower didn’t go up until ’41. If anything was likely to affect the tunnel it’s the tower. I’ve no idea how deep it goes. I’ve never been in it. When your people blew it up this summer all they blew up only was what was visible. The damn thing could be like an iceberg. For all I know it goes down all the way to hell. But . . . I am alarming you unnecessarily. The tunnel and the tower are at least a hundred metres apart and the tunnel, as you can see, curves in from the north.”

  “Can I keep the map?”

  “Can I keep the Persilschein?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  The abrupt change of subject did not dent von Jelscht-Fugger’s sangfroid.

  “Do you think I can write off a son, Herr Holderness?”

  “I think many a German has written off the family Nazi.”

  “The family Nazi. Like the idiot son sent into the church, or the importuning uncle hourly expecting a cheque in the post? The skeletons in all our dynastic cupboards. And I cannot. I cannot write off my family Nazi. Why I accept my son—note I do not say forgive—is none of your concern. Let us merely agree that I do. You should concentrate on what does concern you.”

  “And that is?”

  “Nell Burkhardt, Herr Holderness. She should concern you more than the internal strife of my family. Give no more thought to my sons. Think of Nell. You are all she has.”

  §145

  The Zoo Flak Tower was formidable—at a height of one hundred and twenty feet, and with walls thirty feet thick, quite possibly the densest concrete structure on earth. With its own internal reservoir and diesel generators, it had resisted a Russian siege in the April of 1945 somewhat in the manner of a Norman keep, and had been taken only by a negotiated surrender.

  Built to prevent the RAF from dominating the skies over Berlin, it had become a hospital, a repository for Berlin’s art treasures and the looted gold of Troy, and finally a shelter. It was thought that up to thirty thousand people had taken refuge there in the last weeks of the war. Meanwhile, the antiaircraft guns mounted on the upper storeys lowered their sights and continued to harass the Soviet forces as far away as the Reichstag.

  It was too significant to leave standing, visible above the treetops for miles around. The smaller tower to the north had succumbed to dynamite in the June of 1947. Later that summer attempts to blow up the main tower had failed. At last, at the end of July 1948, after drilling and packing more than thirty tons of dynamite the British had managed to blow it up. And down.

  It could not be worse, thought Wilderness, but he did not say it.

  Eddie did.

  “Oh, bloody Norah. How the effin’ ell are we going to shift that lot.”

  Wilderness looked at the detritus of the flak tower. Countless tons of shapeless concrete and twisted steel. A small mountain of rubble bulldozed up at the spot von Jeltsch-Fugger had indicated for the tunnel entrance, a far corner of the Tiergarten, tucked away between the Landwehr canal and the S-bahn, mud-caked and rain-spattered. Another hundred yards and his tunnel would have achieved perfect symmetry with both ends under the elevated railway tracks.

  Frank said, “Do you think Jelly-Fucker got it wrong?”

  Wilderness looked at the map, at the small red x that marked the spot like pirate treasure, looked from the map to the small army of British sappers clearing, carting off the remains of this vast symbol of Hitler’s power, dumping it here there and everywhere.

  “No. I don’t think he did. I think the entrance is under there and I think he didn’t know all this had been dumped. He hasn’t been back to look. He just knew we’d finally blown up the flak tower. And how many times have we tried to blow it up and failed?”

  He led off in the direction of the tower, across ridged tracks of mud that sucked at his shoes, through a sparse, balding forest of blasted, leafless trees—everything the Berliners had not fed into their stoves last winter, but would chop down at the next turn in the seasons.

  Frank keeping up, Eddie slouching behind.

  “You got a plan, kid?”

  “Frank, when do I not have a plan?”

  The tower lay on its side, looking to Wilderness like a ship run aground, tilted on its keel—or a giant top hat that had been sat upon, its five storeys of solid concrete concertinaed and crumpled as though made of something far less substantial.

  As they reached the site, a Royal Engineers sergeant had his back to them, barking orders at the unfortunate bunch of erks who’d drawn this particular short straw.

  “Sergeant?”

  The man turned. A little, red-faced bloke, his gut straining his belt, his arms bulging with muscle, all but bursting out of the leather, sleeveless jacket that, it seemed, only the sappers got to wear.

  He looked at Wilderness with irritation, and just about saluted when he recognised rank on Frank.

  “Sir,” he said, without a hint of deference. “An international delegati
on, p’raps?”

  “Nope,” said Frank. “We’re what you might call private enterprise.”

  “His kind of enterprise?”

  He was pointing past them. They turned. Eddie had caught up.

  “Hello, Stanley.”

  “Eddie. These blokes with you?”

  “Yes, Stanley. My business partners.”

  “I don’t need any coffee today, mate.”

  “It’s not about coffee,” Wilderness said, hoping to get them to the point before they started on news from home or the price of sausages. “We want you to tip your rubble somewhere else, and clear a way through that lot for us.”

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “Yes. I do mind. We’ll make it worth your while. You can be sure of that.”

  “Like I said. I don’t need no coffee.”

  “Then tell me what you want.”

  “To open up that lot?”

  “To clear a way to the middle. You can leave a circle of rubble for cover. Somewhere in the middle is a . . .”

  For a moment Wilderness could not think what to call it. The last word he wanted to utter was tunnel. And pissoir might be meaningless to the man.

  “Hole. We need access to a hole.”

  “Nole? You gotta nole?”

  “How much?”

  Stanley feigned thought, then said far too readily, “Soap. I wants a hundred bars of Lux, the good stuff with a nice niff to it, and twenty apiece for my three lads wot drives the diggers and dumpers. Take it or leave it.”

  Stanley, clearly, saw himself as a wheeler-dealer. Wilderness hoped he was not smiling. The man had named an astonishingly low price. He asked for a minute, stepped back with Frank and pretended to confer.