The room had been aired sufficiently by now. “Better smelly and warm than fresh and cold.” Such was that year’s motto when wood and coal were so hard to find. Muschan closed the window and turned to his two older children. Twelve year old Manfred was of prewar vintage. He was playing with a Marklin toy train made from salvaged parts. Hannelore, conceived in 1941 during a furlough from the front busied herself with a doll that her grandmother had conjured out of a couple cleaning rags. This Christmas there were finally going to be new toys. You could buy everything again. Helga, the youngest, had just started walking and she was pulling everything off the coffee table and the shelves. Uschi was not rushing over to put the things back in place even though she loved to keep things neat. She was a born administrator and had worked in the Wilmersdorf City Hall where she had overseen the office of standards and measures. The picture frame of their 1936 wedding was dusty. She drew her finger across the glass. They had been the best looking pair by far.
The doorbell rang. Kurt Muschan went to the door. “That’s probably Bernhard, he’s come to pick me up. Tonight’s our skat night, at his house in NeuKölln.” Uschi wanted to know who Bernhard was, he had never mentioned him before. “He’s a guy at the District Attorney’s but he’s working at police headquarters to gain experience.” Once a month, four of them met at a colleague’s house to play skat. The money was put in a common piggy bank and they opened it on Father’s day. Muschan opened the door. “Do come in, unless you want money from me…”
Bernhard Bucheran shook his head. “Please don’t go to any trouble, we’re already 15 minutes late.” Still, he took the time to say hello to Ursula Muschan and to kiss her hand with a slightly ironical formality. She looked at him with the deep sadness of the Fado singer. He took care also to give each child a cream candy. Then they left. When they got to the station they waved to the mother and the children once more. When the circle line came from Papestrasse they were gone. There were six stops to NeuKlln but Muschan got off after two stops at Schöneberg.
Bacheran grinned. “Have fun.”
“You guys too.”
“None of us is going to score like you tonight.”
Muschan smiled at his friend and colleague once more and disappeared down the steps to the Wannsee line below. He felt his conscience weighing down on him… But nature was stronger. What could you do? Kurt Muschan looked like a happy man but there was one thing that oppressed him: his sexual appetite. He had just turned 37 and a man needed to have a woman from time to time. Really have her, not just platonic love. Without that a man wouldn’t feel alive. But after Helga was born, Uschi didn’t want to anymore. Whenever he had managed to convince her, as soon as he penetrated her she would cry out in pain. She didn’t go to the doctor’s, and felt ashamed. “It will come back, we just need to wait a little…” He’d been waiting for two years and now he couldn’t stand it anymore. He didn’t relieve himself, his strict upbringing wouldn’t allow it and he didn’t visit prostitutes. He was afraid of catching something and worried that one of his superiors would find out and they would refuse him a promotion. It was in that state of sexual famine that he had met Elisabeth Kusian. Although their meeting took place at work and not for instance in a dance hall, she had immediately guessed where things stood with him.
They had decided to meet at the Zoo station but he had wanted to surprise her and, after he got off at Friedrichstrasse, he went only as far as Bellevue to wait for her there. Minutes went by. The policeman in him immediately pictured some very precise explanations for her lateness. She was coming from the hospital and if she wanted to take the S-Bahn she would have to walk through the Tiergarten and … all of a sudden a man had run up behind her, slipped a clothes line over her head, dragged her into the bushes, after taking advantage of her and was now busy choking her… he could see it in his mind.
It only dawned on him later, too late, that she had probably taken the tram. The number 2 stopped right in front of the hospital and went to the Zoo. He jumped aboard a train that was just leaving the station hoping he wouldn’t be too late. And there she was, of course, standing under the clock.
“Baby, here you are.” She took him in her arms in front of everybody. “Oh, Elisabeth…” he took advantage of the hustle and bustle and the dim lighting to push his right thigh as high between her legs as her dress and coat would allow and to rub against her with his knee where she liked it.
“Wait, my little bull, calm down.” She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform and she was afraid of attracting onlookers’ attention and an official reprimand. “Tell me about your work.” “Well…” Holding each other tight they walked up the Joachimsthalerstrasse and went across the Hardenbergerstrasse and, after a hundred yards, turned into Kantstrasse. “Thank God I don’t have to deal with the body parts that were found at Stettiner station. Our colleagues in the East are taking care of that. Right now we only have small fry. Scrap metal thieves, break-ins, people robbed after sex…” Just saying that word heightened his urge and he could barely wait until they were in her room. “And I have to write all that stuff down in the logbook by hand, pen and paper. I still don’t have a typewriter… Ah…if I could have a typewriter! My kingdom for a typewriter.”
“Just you wait…” She looked at him with the impish smile of a girl with a secret. “It’ll be Christmas soon.”
“Elisabeth, you’re crazy!”
“Yes, crazy about you.”
“You can’t possibly give me a typewriter, you don’t make that much money.”
“Don’t worry, my in-laws are very comfortable and they always take care of me. Their clinic in Thuringia brings in quite a lot.”
What could he say? She spoiled him through and through. He sat down on the sofa and she gestured toward the writing desk, opened her pocketbook, took out a key and handed it to him. “Would you like to open it and see what’s inside? No…” She took the key back. “I don’t want to spoil the fun, so you’ll wait.” Instead she opened the armoire and brought out several presents. “For you… from Saint Nicholas, first, a hat.” She put it on Muschan’s head and it fit him perfectly. “That’s from my father in law in the Eastern zone. He still comes by although his son Wilhelm, my husband, has been dead such a long time. And he also gave me these elastic suspenders. Take them and throw yours away: there’s no rubber left in them.”
The doorbell rang. A delivery woman brought in a six piece silver place set. Elisabeth showed him. “This is my present for Christmas so you have something to give your Uschi.”
Kurt Muschan felt overwhelmed. And very scared. He only wanted one thing from this woman…and now, she was crazy in love with him. There wasn’t the slightest chance he would leave Uschi and the kids for this woman. But what if she blackmailed him?
I’ll find a way, he thought, after all I’m with the police… These days if a body is properly dismembered and the pieces hidden somewhere in East Berlin, the risk of being found out is small.
6.
Dorothea Merten liked selling typewriters and she felt a quasi erotic bond to many of the machines; she was filled with pleasant sensations whenever she could examine or try out one of the little monsters. As soon as she thought of a word, there it was on paper. As if it had been engraved and set for eternity, a wonder of human ingenuity, a gift from the gods. Although she was thoroughly familiar with the mechanics of the machines, for her the whole thing was still a kind of miracle. It was magical. Only people who possessed typewriters counted for anything with her and she considered anyone who wrote letters by hand as some sort of primate or Neanderthal. Whenever she touched the keys she became happy as a child who has just been given colored pencils and drawing paper: she could unburden herself and give free vein to her imagination, vent her rage or just let all the things that had collected in her unconscious pour out freely. She could utter the primeval cry, she could tell fairy tales, she could imagine and create her own world. Whenever she had any free time she would write poems and short stories a
nd right now she was writing a novel. She couldn’t type without looking at the key board, and had to look for each key and be satisfied typing with one finger. But once she’d finally found the right key, her right index finger swooped down like a bird of prey on a plump hare. Her prey was caught when the lever struck the cylinder and deposited its inky imprint. Blue or black, according to the ribbon set in the machine. As long as it wasn’t an older model with a covered cylinder. When she wrote too fast, the levers bunched together and she had to separate them carefully. If she happened to bend the levers, the unlucky woman could expect Günther Beigang, the director, to blow his top. She had to be very careful. Also, if she erased letters too often, the typewriter wouldn’t look new anymore and not be fit for sale. She was 46 years old, five foot five, stocky. She had brown eyes and her hair was dyed a reddish brown. When she smiled a gold tooth glinted at the corner of her mouth.
Beigang Typewriters was a well known store and had been in business for almost 25 years. Located on Linkstrasse, a fairly busy street linking Reichpietschufer to Potsdammer Platz: it had been the target of more bombing on average than the rest of the city. The houses were numbered 1 to 46: numbers 1 to 15, 17, 20, 22 and 25 lay in ruins. New typewriters were a rare commodity since all manufacturing plants had been reduced to ashes. It was said that the Olympia factory in Wilhelmshaven wouldn’t resume production before 1951, maybe 1952. But Beigang was in contact with traffickers who brought in machines from over the border between the zones. In the GDR, where work had already resumed in Sommerda, an Erika travel typewriter with an imitation leather case cost about 350 DM-East. Beigang bought them for 250 DM West. The smuggler thus made a large profit since the daily exchange rate was about 1:6 and he could buy many more new machines from the East to sell in the West.
The most important client that day was the owner of a small publishing company on Potsdammer Platz. Dorothea Merten took very special care of him not because she would get a commission if she sold a machine or because she was hoping for praise from her employer, but because she thought he might represent an opportunity for her big novel, once she managed to finish it.
The publisher was in a bad mood. “Some of our authors deliver their manuscripts in such a state… You can’t imagine! In Sütterlin and written in indelible copy ink. If I went to the printer with that, he would go on strike. So I have to ask some of my ladies to type all this stuff up before I send it out. They’re not happy about it at all…” He looked sharply at Dorothea. “If you want to earn a few extra Mark in the evening…”
“Well of course, but I write too…” Dorothea Merten blushed as if she were openly declaring her love to someone.
The publisher laughed. “What do you write: bills, lists…?”
“No, short stories… and right now, I’m writing a novel.”
“Oh… Well, if you can get me the right kind of paper, I’ll print it. Do you have those kinds of connections with the Allies?”
Dorothea Merten didn’t understand what he meant. “No, I… It’s the story of the garden community where I was brought up. A family’s house is destroyed and they go and live there, on Baumschulenweg. That’s the reason for the title: The Sudpol Colony… It’s a love story and…”
“Write it…” The publisher was jovial: “I’ll be happy to read it, once it’s finished.”
When he had left, the director came over and stared at her angrily. “Miss Merten, you are chasing away my customers. Doctor Duker will never come back to the store if you bother him with your requests.”
“I’m sorry, but…”
“This must never happen again.”
“I understand, Herr Beigang.”
The director shouldn’t have spoken to her like that, not when she had to fight off his advances so often. Even as he kept repeating how happy he was with his dear Erna and how they were soon going to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. He was always after her. Her sister used to say: “His name should be Hardong instead of Beigang. In any case, since he’d lost an arm during the war, and the right arm at that, she always managed to slip away from him when he tried to embrace her. To make matters worse he also had a glass eye that constantly threatened to fall out whenever he got too excited. Oh, well, she could be grateful that she had a job. She was actually a certified book keeper but since there was so little book keeping to be done in a type writer dealership, she was mostly a saleslady. She didn’t have any children, she was married but separated from her husband although they shared the same apartment. However hard things might be, she was the antithesis of sadness: The war was over, the blockade had ended, she had survived and, every evening, she could escape into another world when she sat at her old typewriter and wrote.
“Six o’clock. Closing.” Beigang wanted the iron curtain rolled down at exactly 6PM. She could only leave the store by the back entrance down the corridor. During the periods when the electricity was cut off, she hated going down that corridor but now that the lamps burned bright again, she enjoyed it. She lived in Spandau, on Pichelsdorferstrasse, but today she wasn’t going home, she was going to her sister’s in Weissensee. She was invited for Advent coffee.
In order to please Ilse she didn’t take the subway from Potsdammer Platz to Weissensee, she took the 74 streetcar. Her sister drove a streetcar; she was stationed at the Treptow-Elsenstrasse yards of the BVG-East, the BVB. It was all extremely complicated. Ever since March 20, 1949, the D-Mark was the only currency accepted in West-Berlin and at the border between the sectors East German conductors took over from the West Germans. The driver remained. When Ilse Breitenstein sat in the driver’s seat of the number 3, one of the shared lines, she drove from Treptow-Esenstrasse (in the East) to Seestrasse (in the West) and the conductors changed at the Bosen Bridge station. She loved to tell stories about what happened at work: driving a tram was her life. She started off as soon as they had kissed.
“My favorites are the double streetcars where passengers get on in the middle – the TM 31, the 33 and the 36- because they pull out fast; recently, we’ve had a T33 U again, the “dining room and kitchen” streetcar. This was the nickname Berliners had given these trams because inside there was door dividing the space into two sections, a big one for non smokers (the dining room) and a smaller one for smokers (the kitchen). “It was early in the morning. Everybody was on their way to work and in a hurry. But almost everybody on board was a smoker and the smoking section was at the front in the forward direction. I called repeatedly: “Please go through to the non smoking section or else we’ll tip forward!” But people are so pigheaded. Guess what happened… First the car starts seesawing, then the tray comes loose and falls unto the tracks and gets stuck there… So that was that. Bye bye streetcar.”
Dorothea Merten loved her sister. Ilse was three years older than she and she was the kind of person Berliners called an ‘athlete of happiness’. Her husbang Waldemar was still in a Soviet prisoner of war camp and was working somewhere in the forests near Workutsk. Her mother in law came every day to take care of the two children, Jorg and Hannelore. “We’re really doing very well. If things got any better, we couldn’t stand it.” She had no problem with Walter Ulbricht and the SED. “They don’t bother me none, and I don’t bother them none.” Her opinion of the “Workers and farmers” state was very simple: “With them, we women are better off. In the West, it’s only the guys that drive the streetcars…” When she made the effort, she could speak correct German, but why should she when she was home sitting by the stove drinking ersatz coffee. “Who cares…”
For Dorothea Merten her sister was the embodiment of happiness and at her house that day she felt wonderful. The order of the day was talk, gossip.
“What’s Rudy up to? Is he still after you?”
“Yes, but only because he can’t find a place to live. Margot got him work at Siemens, he’s an office messenger at the switch factory.”
“Well, maybe he’ll make out. And him an experienced butcher.”
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��The only reason he had to learn was to take over his father’s business. He’s much too intelligent for that.”
“Well, listen to you, lady: you’re still in love with him.”
“No, I’m not.” She insisted: “I’m not.”
“Well I hope so… I’ve always been a little afraid for you when he’s around. The guy’s got something strange about him… And with the butchering he’s learned, he could be coming at you with that little axe of his and chopping you up into sausage meat. Just like the corpse they just found at Stettiner station, all cut up in nice little pieces.”
Dorothea Merten put her hand on her stomach. “Stop, I won’t be able to eat if you go on like that.”
“Don’t worry my little one, all I have today are vegetables.” Although the stores in Berlin were much better stocked by then, Ilse Breitenstein still swore by the recipes of wartime. She said: “That was healthy then. Nothing healthier, no way.” That day she’d prepared pea sausages for her sister. “125 grams of peas, five quarter liters of water, three boiled potatoes, three spoonfuls of white flour, salt, thyme. You cook the peas until they form a thick brew, you pass them through a sieve, mix in all the ingredients, shape them into patties and bake them. That simple. And it’s good! You can start now.”
Dorothea had just taken her first bite when the door bell rang and Margot came in. Her favorite cousin lived in ‘Rudow by the city’ as Ilse always said and so her visit was a real surprise. “What wind has blown you over to Weissensee?”
“Love, again.” Margot had met a man at a dance at the lake Casino out in Rangsdorf and he lived around the corner on Gustav-Adolfstrasse. “He looked at me… with his eyes…” She opened her handbag and the cousins were horrified when she pulled out an eye and put it next to Dorothea’s plate. “Don’t scream, it’s only a glass eye. Hans used to work for IG Farben and now he makes a living selling glass eyes – he doesn’t wear one himself.”
Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949 Page 4