The Butchers of Berlin

by Chris Petit

  The Russian was obviously harmless, probably brain-damaged and certainly too addled to make sense of their questions. The idea of even going to another part of town seemed beyond his comprehension. What would he do there and when would he go? They were marched to work, worked all day, and were marched back.

  In his eagerness, Lazarenko appeared to have miscalculated, Schlegel thought. He even felt a little sorry for him, however irritating the man’s unctuous aggression.

  Lazarenko produced the pay slip. The Russian stared at it and rattled off something that embarrassed Lazarenko.

  ‘Well?’ asked Morgen.

  Lazarenko said the slip was meaningless. They all threw theirs away. He had no idea how it got where it had.

  Morgen asked if that was all.

  Lazarenko squirmed and mumbled that the man had said the slip wasn’t large enough to wipe his arse with.

  Schlegel thought Lazarenko’s discomfort was more about making a fool of himself with them. Even if he had been told to follow up on the pay slip by Gersten, Schlegel was sure he had puffed up his own importance.

  Lazarenko continued to push hard on the fact that workers were let out unsupervised on Sundays. The Russian spoke fast, his contempt plain.

  Lazarenko turned to them, his expression one of impotent anger.

  ‘He’s a lying bastard. It’s clear. He pretends he stayed at home all day playing cards. He says anyone can confirm that, but that’s because he knows they will cover for him.’

  Morgen dismissed the Russian and addressed Lazarenko. ‘Don’t waste my time. You’re going to have to come up with something better than this.’

  Schlegel watched the Russian staggering off like he’d had a skinful.

  Lazarenko, crestfallen, promised more. He hoped they would make a good team yet. Morgen whistled at the sky. Schlegel saw who he reminded him of. It was the actor Charles Laughton. He had been a big star before the war. Schlegel had been with his mother to see Mutiny on the Bounty. His mother complained about the actor they used to dub Laughton’s beautiful speaking voice into German. It was a quality he shared with Morgen.

  Morgen said little on the drive back other than he thought there might be something to Lazarenko’s theory. There was more. The underbelly Lazarenko inhabited was riddled with informers. Almost certainly he had come to them as someone’s spy.

  Schlegel supposed Lazarenko was Gersten’s man, sent to sniff them out. He supposed even he, Schlegel, was Stoffel’s spy because he had been asked to report on Morgen. He wanted to ask whose spy Morgen was.

  Morgen said, ‘It would make perfect sense for the Russians to kill anyone they found spying, and be brutal, but I can’t see them leaving the money. They’re dirt poor. And why transport the body across town?’ He added, ‘I wonder if Gersten knows Lazarenko calls himself a consultant.’

  Schlegel asked whether Morgen was going to carry on wearing his uniform.

  ‘What you mean is, you don’t want anyone thinking you are SS.’

  Touché, thought Schlegel.

  ‘It is the authority with which I am invested,’ said Morgen, deadpan, leaving Schlegel wondering about him again. Sometimes he seemed deadly serious, at other times dangerously flippant, as with the sloppy salute to the motor-pool clerk.

  ‘I don’t think I have a suit. The moths got them.’

  16

  Night had fallen as Schlegel walked up to Hackescher Markt. He cut under the railway and what sounded like chanting at a football match came from the direction of Rosenstrasse. By the sound of it, the gathering of the few he had seen on Saturday was now a sizeable crowd. They shouted for their men to be released.

  As he neared the scene, Schlegel saw that some carried torches. He was reminded of a dutiful congregation at a religious observance. No rowdy drunks sent in to wreck things, which was the usual procedure.

  That the police weren’t breaking it up meant the situation must be delicate.

  They seemed eager to have their story heard, being naive enough to believe anyone among them was sympathetic. They also possessed the certainty of those in the right.

  Schlegel presumed a significant armed presence was assembled nearby.

  He saw the pale upturned faces of those around him. It had grown bitterly cold again. He sensed doughty women, so wrapped up as to be shapeless; middle-aged and older. An exception was a young woman, who looked up at the building with an expression of almost ecstatic yearning.

  A car drew up, sounding its horn. Men got out and went inside. Their arrival set the crowd off again. Schlegel watched the young woman shouting with unwavering fervour.

  A long blast on a whistle sounded. Everyone ignored it. A man shouted through a megaphone for them all to disperse.

  Silence fell. Schlegel heard a line of soldiers step forward, followed by the snap of rifle bolts. The sound threw him back, and filled him with dread.

  The crowd melted away down side streets.

  He thought it unlikely they would start firing in the dark, massacring civilians in the middle of the capital. They saved that sort of thing for elsewhere.

  Fifteen minutes later the women started gathering again, their silent disapproval palpable.

  Schlegel went and stood where he was before, near an advertising pillar. His ungloved hand was freezing in his pocket. The young woman took up her position next to him. She looked defeated, her face pale in the moonlight, her tears frozen to her cheeks.

  About a ten-minute walk from where Schlegel was standing in the crowd, another woman sat and waited in the dancehall in Auguststrasse that occupied the ground and first floors of the building where he lived. It was the second evening she had gone and waited there. She had in fact noticed Schlegel on the Saturday night, watching her.

  She did not know what the man she was assigned to meet looked like. He, however, knew her from her identity photographs. The arrangement had been made through a go-between, who left a message in a particular café explaining where to go.

  The waiting woman, as the photograph for her false papers showed, was still beautiful, if no longer young. It crossed the minds of most men looking at her to wonder what she was like in bed. She had the air of someone who could pick and choose in a way that would make any man feel special.

  That may have been the case once. Now life had become a matter of seeking protection, not on her own terms but for survival. She had been an entertainer and actress, not a very successful one. Since meeting the man in the leather coat, with his questionable mouth, everything had become shrouded in fear and uncertainty.

  The story in her mind for that evening was she was seeking romantic attachment in exchange for protection, and the obvious excellence of the man’s papers. Her hope was to throw herself at his mercy so he would take pity and hide her, in return for being given the ride of his life. She wished him no harm. She would, in the language of romantic magazines, beguile him.

  Nothing had happened on the Saturday. She sat in the large room at the back, near the kitchens, with a view of the floor. She got asked to dance and wondered each time if it was him. There weren’t many in, apart from pimply youths and aged lotharios, a few soldiers on leave and what looked like a contingent from Prinz-Albrechtstrasse slumming it. For a while she watched the strange young man with stranger white hair staring like he had seen a ghost or experienced something equally unsettling. She thought of asking him for a dance because he looked so lost.

  ‘There is something pleasantly old-fashioned about this place without it being frumpy,’ she announced to one of her passing companions. It seemed as though someone were speaking through her, in a voice that came from a different time. ‘I suddenly feel like being in another world, compared to outside.’ She was light-headed yet had drunk no alcohol. Nothing else mattered other than dancing for the moment. She spoke more solemnly than usual, with what she believed approached wisdom.

  She watched women and girls dance with each other for lack of men. The music was a combination of the over-jolly, schmalt
z and sad. The three-piece combo probably had become reduced over time from a proper band; two were old men and the drummer little more than a boy who had trouble keeping the beat. A sad place after all, she thought. A sad life. The movement of the dancers made her think of the rise and fall of the sea, which she had seen only twice in her life. She dreamed of its impossible openness, and of the opportunity to give herself freely, without condition and all the usual romantic and physical nonsense, which was never fulfilled by the fumbling and hasty transaction of fluids, and left her thinking of crude scientific tests and inadequate exchanges of information. However well she had trained her body to respond, her head was a million miles away, like an astronaut looking down on those clumsy, red-faced men who grimaced terribly at the end, and thought their balls were the world and were so proud of their ugly cocks.

  When no one came for her that first night she went home. Sundays the place was shut like everywhere and she reviewed her diminishing options. She spoke with two actors she knew. One was in a chorus line and said he was about to be called up. The other, older, of whom she remained fond, held her hand and said all of them at the Schaubühne lived in fear of their contracts not being renewed. The woman could not tell if she was being spurned because she was not as vivacious as she once was, or whether everyone’s choice was reduced to having none.

  On the Monday evening she returned with a heavier heart. She sat by a yellow stove, on a little platform by the stage.

  She feared that the man in question would not come. She would dance with others. She would allow them to buy her drinks this time. They would get her tipsy and she would grow maudlin. She would be barely aware of whatever man was sitting opposite her. She would watch the dancers. The same souls, coming together. She fancied the music would be more sentimental than on the Saturday; the start of another long week. She would wonder about all the people who had placed their glasses on the scarred table top and sat on those chairs. She would think about all the invitations to dance. She would see past and present mix, her mind lulled as she considered the swirl of time and think: This is a place where one can come to forget.

  The man watched her dance – noting her distant yearning – and watched her go back to her table alone.

  The low wail came from far off, growing louder. Everyone stood in disbelief. Sirens! Air raids had not played a part in their lives for nearly a year. A woman said in wonder, bombers are coming, and a ripple ran through the crowd.

  To Schlegel’s ears that whooping ululation, somewhere between a lament and a screech, filling the skies with dread, was the most frighteningly modern sound. He wouldn’t put it past the authorities to be sounding a false alarm to get the crowd to disperse. Two women discussed how they had better go as it was forbidden to be out during a raid.

  Sybil knew she should have gone home but drifted back to Rosenstrasse, drawn by the extraordinariness of the event. The women took her for one of them, offering smiles of encouragement. She took comfort from their toughness and resilience. Men sent off to fight just did what they were told. Their lives were ordered and they were looked after. They did not have to find food or keep everything together. These ordinary women were the real heroes of the war. They gave her hope. She had a clear image of describing the scene to Lore and Lore would not begrudge her lingering.

  She left when the troops threatened to move in. She took the train from Friedrichstrasse to Charlottenburg, hurried down streets still crowded with workers going home, ran up the back staircase of Alwynd’s apartment, only to find their room empty.

  She supposed Lore was with Alwynd but his side was dark too.

  She returned and lay on the bed, trying to block any thought of Lore in the hands of the Gestapo.

  Her heart shrank when the sirens started. In among their wailing she heard footsteps on the back stairs and thought it had to be them coming for her.

  She turned out the light and hid under the bed.

  The door opened. The light went on. Sybil held her breath and shut her eyes, then knew she was being a fool. There had been no banging on the door.

  Lore looked amused more than surprised as Sybil embarked on the undignified business of extricating herself.

  Sybil asked where she had been, annoyed by her own behaviour.

  The cinema, Lore said casually.

  Before that she had read the paper at the Bollenmüller from cover to cover and Sybil was right; no one bothered her. ‘I never would have thought of that,’ she said in admiration.

  She still seemed excited by the whole episode.

  ‘And then?’ asked Sybil.

  ‘I went to the cinema after coming back and finding you weren’t here.’

  Sybil thought Lore should have waited. She would have and said so, accusing Lore of being insensitive, trying to ignore her own guilt about not returning straight away as promised.

  Lore appeared unbothered.

  ‘It never crossed my mind you weren’t safe. I thought you were probably looking for your mother. I went to the cinema for the sake of watching something mindless, until they switched the lights on, right in the middle of the film, and a sign came up saying an air raid was on its way, so we all got up and trooped out. I looked back and saw great clouds of cigarette smoke and dust trapped in the light of the projector. That’s what we’d all been breathing, and I thought it so unfair that someone decides one person is allowed to breathe that foul air and another is not.’

  Sybil thought she didn’t know Lore at all really.

  ‘The break in the film was like reality had intruded. I thought of our lives as celluloid unwinding through a projector, and our film not being allowed to continue, like those jerks in the Bollenmüller coming in and cheerfully announcing, ‘We’re switching the lights on now. Off you go.’ But at the same time as having these strange thoughts, I felt so sure of myself I asked the cinema manageress for a refund.’

  Sybil looked at her in astonishment. ‘Did you get one?’

  Lore laughed. ‘No, but she said come back any time and see the film for free.’

  The first defence guns started in the distance.

  ‘The planes are coming,’ Sybil said. ‘I just want to go to bed and be held.’

  It was too cold to get undressed. Lore remained in her strange mood, an almost morbid exhilaration she tried to share.

  ‘I hear the blast kills more than the explosion. The body can be quite undamaged afterwards. Maybe we’ll be found quite preserved like those entwined couples in the ruins of Pompeii.’

  The dancehall waiter presented the woman with a drink she hadn’t ordered. The glass was placed in front of her with such certainty she didn’t think to question it. Before she could ask he was gone. She’d barely glimpsed him in the time it took. She watched his departing back and thought him so suave in the way he moved he could have been an actor. Perhaps he was. Next time she would ask. They might have friends in common. Why hadn’t she noticed him before? She considered going after him but that was not her style; men came to her. She looked at the glass of bright green liquid and saw the message written on the drink mat to meet outside a house number down the street. She wondered whether the waiter was merely the messenger or the man that wanted her. She could do a lot worse, she thought. She blocked out any intimation of what she called the other business; the man in the leather coat with his seductive voice and insistent demands, always making out there was a choice.

  They would be watching the door to see if she left alone or with a companion. She went to the toilet. The window was too high to climb out of. When she came out a waiter was hurrying from the kitchen. She slipped through before the door stopped swinging and walked quickly towards where she hoped the exit was. There it was; her luck was in. Her eyes took time to adjust to the dark. She made her way through the garden and climbed over the low wall that divided it from the street.

  She turned left and went and stood in the sheltered doorway of the number she had been given. The street was empty. It wasn’t as dark as most
nights. The cloud had lifted and the sky was clear. She waited and no one came. Shadowy figures drifted past not seeing her. At one point she heard distant laughter and a little later a man and a woman shouted at each other. She grew anxious. The sirens started up and she was leaving when a figure came towards her out of the dark, addressing her, and she couldn’t tell if this man was her waiter. She wanted only to feel safe and attractive and appreciated. The loneliness got to her most. She found herself smiling for the first time that evening. This prospect of love with a stranger, like a romantic interlude in a corny song. A line came into her head, from a play, she thought: Let the devil take the hindmost. She could not remember what it meant. She hoped he would be a practised seducer and in the dark she could forget about the other brute.

  The sirens chased Schlegel all the way to the fortress-like shelter in Reinhardstrasse, a colossal concrete block that rose into the air, an invitation to be hit, rather than going underground because of the insubstantial substrata. The sirens sounded in waves and in between an expectant hush settled over the city. In the fifteen-minute walk along the river he saw cars abandoned and trams halted between stops. The only noise apart from the electronic wail was of hurrying footsteps. There was still time. The bomber fleet would have been spotted by the coastal defences and had yet to penetrate the outer ring.

  Wardens checked the papers of everyone entering. The prospect of apocalypse did nothing to improve anyone’s manners and Schlegel was caught in a scrum of pushing and shoving. People spoke in hushed terms, apart from the few who speculated in loud voices about a false alarm. The interior of the shelter offered a grim set of endless rooms, overcrowded with nervous faces, some already babbling. Rudimentary ceiling lights cast a sickly glow. Some rooms were mainly families. In others children were kept away because the occupants were noisy and drunk. Schlegel settled for one less full than the rest. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be there when the bombs fell. It was too much like waiting to be buried alive. Several couples around him took the prospect of their demise as an excuse to grope each other. A women’s skirt was yanked up, exposing white thigh above stocking top. Sex and death, Schlegel thought. The man’s hand worked away at the woman, who rolled her eyes. Schlegel wanted to tell them to slow down or they would be finished long before the bombs came and have nothing to do. Others squirmed and writhed. He did his best to ignore the dog-like in-and-out of a panting, grunting couple on all fours in the corner. A woman with a small boy entered the chamber and slapped a hand over his staring eyes before dragging him off.