by Ben Elton
‘Believe it or not, Dagmar, not everyone is motivated entirely by selfishness.’
‘Ha! What could be more selfish than a Communist? You think you can tell everyone in the world how to run their lives and if they won’t do it you shoot them.’
That evening, when the hour of the meeting approached, Dagmar would usually have retreated to her bedroom. But this time she simply could not face being confined once more in the space where she had spent the vast majority of the previous two years. After Paulus had died, Silke had been told that without a husband to look after she had lost the right to employ a maid. The authorities had demanded that the Ukrainian girl Bohuslava whom the Stengels had registered for rations be returned to the employment pool. Silke had therefore been forced to report the fictitious maid as a runaway, and since that moment Dagmar had been truly a ‘submarine’ with no papers or identity whatsoever, surviving in the half light, on food Silke still shared with her for Paulus’s sake.
‘You mustn’t go out!’ Silke said. ‘You’re crazy. You only need to be stopped once.’
‘I’m sorry but I’ve got to, because if I don’t I will go completely sodding mad. The war’s nearly over anyway. Your precious heroic Red Army’s in East Prussia and no doubt we’ll all be Commies in a month.’
‘With any luck we will,’ Silke countered defiantly.
‘Great. I can’t wait to pull on my overalls and go work on a collective farm, but in the meantime I’m going to be a member of the petit bourgeois just one more time. I’m going to pin up my hair, put on some make-up, wear a nice pair of shoes and go for a walk!’
‘For God’s sake, Dagmar, you’re safe inside. Why take the risk?’
‘Because I want to be a fucking human being again!’
‘Keep your voice down!’ Silke hissed. ‘You don’t live here, remember.’
‘You’re all right!’ Dagmar went on, only half heeding Silke’s warning to speak more quietly. ‘You’ve got your stupid politics. What have I got? Nothing. And I haven’t had anything for twelve fucking years.’
‘You had Paulus and Otto!’ Silke snarled back, now raising her own voice.
‘Oh for God’s sake, enough with the Stengel boys,’ Dagmar said, throwing up her arms in exasperation. ‘They loved me, I know. What do you want me to do – whip myself with gratitude? They loved me. They didn’t love you. I’m sorry. No doubt under Communism you could force them to love you, but your revolution’s going to come a bit late for that, isn’t it? Because Pauly’s dead and Otto’s gone!’
‘You’re a real bitch, Dagmar,’ Silke said with tears starting in her eyes. ‘A really mean bitch.’
‘Oh grow up, Silke. I’m going for a walk. And what’s more, if you’ve got any sense you’ll come with me. Because this place is driving us both potty. I am going to go down to the Tiergarten, where I believe they still have cafés, and I’m going to buy a cup or a glass of whatever foul shit they’ll sell me and pretend to be a human being for an hour or two, not a victim of the Nazis. Are you coming?’
‘No, of course I’m not. I have a meeting.’
‘Then goodbye.’
It was the hair and the make-up that were Dagmar’s undoing. Perhaps as Bohuslava the maid in her headscarf, apron and dungarees, she might have passed unnoticed. But Dagmar Fischer always turned heads. Always attracted attention, even as pale and gaunt as she’d become. And she loved it. Basking in the appreciative glances thrown her way by weary soldiers as she swung along the path. And it was good cover too, just what Pauly had advised her to do at the station on the day Otto left. Walk with confidence and nobody will think to question you. It was those who skulked that got caught.
Besides Dagmar felt safe. No German would recognize her as the Jewish heiress who had supposedly killed herself in 1939.
But it wasn’t a German who recognized the beautiful woman who was drawing all the admiring glances as she sat sipping her watery acorn coffee in the rubble of the Tiergarten.
It was a Jew.
‘Hello, Dagmar,’ a voice said. ‘Surely you remember me?’
Dagmar didn’t recognize the voice but when she turned around she knew the questioner immediately and her blood ran cold. The woman smiling at her was one just like herself. A beautiful young woman in her twenties. Another Jewish princess who had faded away in the 1930s. A blonde version of Dagmar, but one whose name was whispered in fear by every submarine in Berlin. Stella Kübler, the Jew-catcher.
The exquisite young woman with her Aryan looks and corn-coloured hair, who bought her life afresh each day by denouncement and betrayal.
The woman known to her Gestapo handlers as ‘Blonde Poison’.
‘I don’t know you,’ Dagmar stammered, attempting to disguise her German. ‘I am Hungarian. A maid.’
‘Come on, Dagmar,’ the Jew-hunter said, ‘the game’s up. We went to half a dozen of the same parties together as girls. We were banned from the same pools. Goodness, my parents even went to your dad’s leaving do at the Kempinski Hotel. I’ve often wondered if you’d ever turn up. Certainly never believed that suicide story, not Dagmar Fischer. You do look well, I must say. How have you managed it?’
There were two men standing behind the sinister beauty, two men in coats and Homburg hats. They stepped forward and laid their hands on Dagmar.
The hiding was over. She was finally a prisoner of the Gestapo.
Between Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood
Berlin, 1956
‘I’VE HEARD OF Stella Kübler, of course,’ Otto said. ‘She got ten years, didn’t she?’
‘That’s right,’ Dagmar replied. ‘They’ve just released her, in fact, and she’s gone to the West. Perhaps someone will slit her throat. I hope so. Not that I can talk. I may not have betrayed two thousand like she did but …’
‘You did betray Silke,’ Otto said, finishing her sentence.
They had begun walking together through the park and had now found their way into the Märchenbrunnen, wandering amongst the hundred and six fantastical fairy-tale sculptures. It almost broke Otto’s heart to remember the beautiful, carefree girl he had once known running amongst those figures. More enchanting than any fictitious magical creature could ever be. Laughing and shrieking and deliberately letting herself be caught between Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood.
She was a different person now. Only the physical flesh was the same.
‘Yes. I betrayed her,’ Dagmar said coldly, staring up at the stone figure that was letting down her long golden hair. ‘It was me or her, that’s all there is to it. No one was under any illusions by then about what the Nazis were doing at the end of their train tracks. The BBC had been telling the world for two years. If you were caught, you were killed, and I’d been caught.’
She sat down on the plinth of Rapunzel’s statue.
‘Do you remember, Ottsy?’ she said with a smile. ‘Kiss-chase in the park?’
‘Of course I remember,’ Otto replied. ‘You, me and Pauly. And Silke. She was there too.’
‘Yes. She was, wasn’t she,’ Dagmar said, trying to make her voice sound indifferent. ‘Scowling as usual as I recall. Furious that you were both chasing me.’
‘What happened, Dagmar?’
‘The inevitable happened. The Gestapo took me in and I offered them a deal. Most people tried to do that. Trade their life for someone else’s. There were heroes of course but a fucking sight fewer than they’d have you believe now.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Well, unlike most of them, I really did have something to trade. I said if they’d let me go I’d lead them to a Red Orchestra cell. They couldn’t believe their luck. I remember thinking, why do they bother? The war was so obviously over by then, the Russians were at the gates, but they seemed to care as much as they ever had about chasing Commies and Jews, like a chicken still running after its head’s been cut off. Anyway, they took me to their headquarters and asked a lot of questions and filled in a lot of forms. Forms! Still fo
rms, in triplicate and double-stamped while every building in Berlin was burning. I told them I was being hidden by Communists and where to find them. I said that after that I could recognize others if they’d let me out on a leash. They agreed and I took them back to the apartment and watched from the end of the street while they made their raid. Silke and three others were dragged out of the building. I remember her shouting, “All power to the Soviets.” Can you believe it? She actually shouted it like she was in some Russian propaganda movie. Just ridiculous. They took them away and I was left with one policeman. I was just beginning to think about trying to seduce him when an air raid started. I say started, resumed would be more accurate. The Americans bombed by day, the British by night, it was pretty continuous. Anyway, the cop wanted to get to a shelter and he started running and I just sort of lost him. Just stopped running and let him go. It was such total mayhem in the city by then, bombs falling everywhere, and shells of course with the Russians so close. Anyway, when that particular raid was over I was alone. So I went back to the apartment, which miraculously was never hit. I had literally nowhere else to go and there was some food there and in those last weeks of the war you went pretty much anywhere for food, whatever the risk. I slept in the apartment that night with the whole place to myself for the very first time. I loved it. Just to have the space. The solitude. Just me and the little woolly monkey you saved for me on the night you also saved my life. Won’t you sit beside me, Otts? It’s hard to tell this story.’
Otto sat down beside her on the plinth of Rapunzel’s statue while Snow White smiled at them from the other side of the path.
Two Women
Berlin, 1945
DAGMAR AWOKE HAVING slept for a long time. She stretched and yawned and wished she could have a wash but water had become too precious for that.
She got up and, collecting the rainwater tin from its ledge, began to prepare some herb tea. Astonishingly there was still gas for the stove. Bits and pieces of Berlin’s civic infrastructure continued to function right to the end. One could just never be sure which bit. Dagmar had filled the pot with boiling water when she heard the front door.
She froze in terror. Sure that now it was all over. That it was the police come for her once again, and that they would either kill her or she’d be forced to become like Stella Kübler, a poison woman, living by betrayal and murder.
But it wasn’t the police.
It was Silke.
For a moment Dagmar felt herself still in terrible danger. Silke must know of her betrayal. Were the three other Communists behind her with knives and clubs bent on vengeance? The Communists were nothing if not ruthless.
But then Silke ran forward and embraced her.
‘They came for us,’ Silke said. ‘Thank God you were out! To think I tried to stop you.’
‘What happened, Silke? I walked for hours and had to take cover from a raid. When I came home you were gone.’
‘Somehow they found us. I’ve always known they would in the end. They’ve arrested so many of us over the years.’
‘But you’re here. You’re free again.’
There was rubble in Silke’s hair and her face and clothes were caked in dust. Dagmar guessed what must have happened but she let Silke tell it.
‘The British saved me,’ Silke said half smiling, the dust cracking at the corners of her mouth. ‘The RAF.’
Dagmar could not help thinking how much Silke would have preferred it if it had been the Russians.
‘The police station got hit in the night before they even had a chance to get to work on me,’ Silke said. ‘They’d put me in a separate cell to the men and that was what saved me. They died and I didn’t. I don’t know what happened to the Gestapo guys. Maybe they got hit too, maybe they took shelter, I don’t know. All I know is that I was knocked unconscious and when I came to it was just me and a lot of bodies. There were no emergency services – perhaps they came later, but I doubt it. Anyway, I didn’t wait around to find out. I just got up, walked out of the wreckage and came home. I came for my stuff. I’m going to need it soon.’
‘They obviously ransacked the apartment when they took you,’ Dagmar observed. ‘Is there anything left?’
Silke crossed the little kitchen, turned off the gas tap and pulled the stove from the wall. Behind it was a bare brick wall from which she removed a loose brick, pulling out various papers and a little booklet from the cavity behind.
‘My Orchestra stuff,’ she said. ‘I need to find another place to hide it now.’
‘Stay a little while, Silks. I’ve made some herb tea.’
‘The police might come.’
Dagmar looked at her watch. It was already mid morning.
‘I don’t think they’re coming, Silke. Perhaps they’re dead. Perhaps they’ve just finally given up.’
Silke sat down and drank her tea. Then they shared some food together and talked a little.
Still the police did not come.
Silke decided to sleep. She said she felt dizzy, and went to her room.
Dagmar sat in the kitchen and wondered.
Had Silke been taken to the same police station as her? It seemed likely. If she had, then the notes the police had made about Dagmar’s arrest and confession, about her betrayal of the Red Orchestra cell, would probably have been destroyed in the air raid.
Probably. But not certainly.
Dagmar did not know what police station it had been. They had taken her to and from it in a sealed van. Somewhere in Berlin it was perfectly possible there remained a detailed police account of how, as the war drew to a close, the Jewess Dagmar Fischer had been caught and had subsequently betrayed a Communist cell.
And the Russians were coming.
Dagmar sat and wondered. What should she do?
The afternoon wore on.
Dagmar’s shadow on the kitchen floor crept slowly towards the wall.
Finally Silke emerged. Looking a little bewildered.
Perhaps it was the strange noise that had woken her. A new sound in a city that had heard so many new sounds in recent years. A low crunching, jerking rumbling.
Looking out of the window into the street below, the two young women saw a new sight to fit the new noise. A Russian tank.
Silke actually shouted for joy.
‘They’re here!’ she cried, grabbing Dagmar in a wild embrace and spinning her round. ‘It’s over. We’re free!’
In the Garden of Innocence
Berlin, 1956
‘POOR SILKE,’ DAGMAR said, an empty deadness to her voice and to her eyes. ‘When she saw that first tank in the street she actually cheered. She danced for happiness. She hung a Red eiderdown from our window for a flag and shouted down to the soldiers below. It was that damn flag that brought them to us first. While most sensible girls were hiding in cellars or being boarded up in attics by their mothers, that idiot Silke was shouting at those beasts. Calling out a welcome. Hey, boys! There’s two young women here!’
There was a little drinking fountain nearby. Dagmar got up and went over to it and took a long draught. She had been talking for a long time. Her voice was dry.
Otto remembered his flask of whisky. He produced it and they shared a gulp or two together. The spirit made Dagmar shiver, or perhaps it was her story.
‘Everything you’ve heard about what happened to the women of Berlin in 1945 is true,’ she said in a voice of cold stone, ‘and worse. The raping went on for weeks. Those Russian soldiers went hunting for women like the Nazis had hunted Jews, kicking down doors, shining lights in faces, seeking out girls in every rat hole, and if they could find no girls, then fucking their mothers instead. Silke and I were amongst the very first caught. We went through it all together. Sisters in misery. Those soldiers that she waved at in the street just couldn’t believe their luck, two girls at once and in a nice apartment with beds and everything. A readymade harem, one blonde, one brunette – we covered all the bases, as your American friends would say.’
&n
bsp; Dagmar tried to smile but couldn’t. She raised Otto’s flask to her lips and took another gulp. It made her cough a little but also helped stiffen her resolve to resume her story.
‘They kept us prisoners in that nice apartment Pauly bought. Using us as they pleased and renting us out to other soldiers for cigarettes and vodka when they got bored themselves. It was very strange really. They sort of set up home with us, going off for their army duties and then coming back to their sex slaves. Me and Silke together. Sometimes in the same room, sometimes separate. I suppose in a way it was even worse for Silke – she had to suffer the disillusionment. Those soldiers represented everything she’d hoped for. The future of the world. She flung open her door to them and they walked right in and started tearing off her clothes. Mine too, right there and then. Within a minute. Silke tried to show them her KPD card. But they didn’t speak German and if they had they wouldn’t have cared. Nor about the radio code books she kept behind the gas stove and her Resistance accreditation. They were hungry peasants and we were meat, that was all. Perhaps if she could have got out of the apartment, found an officer, someone to understand her, she might have been OK. There were decent ones amongst them I’ve heard. But we were trapped.’
‘Did you tell them you were a Jew?’ Otto asked.
‘I tried once or twice but either they didn’t care or they didn’t believe me. All the German Jews they’d seen had been skeletons.’
Otto opened his suitcase and reached in for a third packet of Lucky Strikes. He could scarcely believe it, they’d smoked twenty each already.