Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  But for some time now there has been something new. It has not escaped Wiegand that for a few weeks a young man he has never seen before has appeared in the depot. Of course there is nothing unusual about new people turning up in the depot, but there is something quite special about this young man, he doesn’t wear the uniform of the Reich railwayman, sometimes he is dressed in inconspicuous plain clothes, and then he is usually accompanied by inspectors and senior inspectors of the plant output, or else he wears a blue overall that is still quite new and shows no traces of work, no bare patches, no tears, no mending and no oil stains, and then he roams around like a hunting dog that has lost its scent, or strolls about harmlessly, but his eyes are constantly darting about. He presents himself as an engineer who is supposed to be getting to know the depot, and he doesn’t play his part badly, he even has some knowledge of engineering, but it is just a role that he is playing. Wiegand has soon worked out that he is anything but an engineer, he seems more like someone who knows a few Latin quotations but not the simplest declension or conjugation because he has no knowledge of the language itself.

  So why is this young man wandering about the depot? During these weeks when the whole workforce of the Reichsbahn is being exploited down to the very last man, is there really time to allow a young engineer to act as some kind of volunteer, like a junior manager from a partner depot? Unlikely, very unlikely. It is no secret that the mood in the Karlshorst depot is extremely bad, with the advance of the Allied armies, but since the Russians have reached Küstrin and Frankfurt an der Oder the foreigners have become increasingly recalcitrant, they often stay away from work without any explanation, they are becoming rebellious, and only a few weeks ago a foreman was beaten half to death by a gang of Eastern workers who could no longer bear to watch him sadistically tormenting a group of Ukrainian women who had to do extremely difficult work on the tracks. Were they going to set another example here, were a few men going to be sent to the camps? The fellow smells like a spy, and he can’t hide it with the perfume of benevolence and sympathy with the workers, there’s something of the police informer about him, he’s a good actor, but only to the superficial observer. Over the years of living underground Wiegand’s eye has grown keener, he can’t see ghosts, but he can see behind masks and listen out for undertones.

  Or … struck by a sudden suspicion, Wiegand pauses. What if the presence of this chap has something to do with his own sabotage work and the distribution of those flyers? Wiegand forces his memory to concentrate on a particular point.

  How did that happen? The lad has also approached him, there’s no doubt about it, the conversations, most of which only lasted a few minutes, weren’t exactly forced, but equally they weren’t quite natural either, they always started out with some kind of technical question and then immediately leaped to the war and the situation in general, then the young man always hinted that he had had enough of the war, and that the Führer ought to call the whole thing off before all was lost. Wiegand had only smiled inwardly, he was decades past the stage of reacting to provocative phrases, so he hadn’t been tempted to join in, had instead cursed the bloodhound Stalin, the alcoholic Churchill and war criminal number one Roosevelt, stressing his confidence of victory and his trust in the new weapons that were about to be put into action, but even though Wiegand had only expressed himself in positive terms, the young man had come to him another two or three times. Had he attracted suspicion after all?

  Wiegand runs through his behaviour over the past while but can’t find anything suspicious that would have lifted him out of the crowd, he has always gone to work with extreme caution, he has never had a witness, never a confidant, he has always worked alone because he sees that as the best guarantee of going undiscovered. Only once was he nearly caught, he still remembers that night very clearly, all the details have fixed themselves firmly and inextinguishably in his mind. It was during an air-raid warning, a few dozen Mosquitoes had dropped bombs and blockbusters, immediately after the pre-all-clear Wiegand and some others had left the air-raid shelter, the lamps on the tall masts above the sidings hadn’t yet been lit, the emergency lights were still on in the locomotive workshop, a few spare, blue-glass bulbs had dispersed a gloomy light around the long, dark hall.

  He knew that a locomotive had just been made ready to drive on track 5, an ammunition train had been left in Erkner because of mechanical damage and Karlshorst had to supply an 03 as a replacement, it was already under steam and only needed watering. The hall was still deserted, there wasn’t a soul. The only sound was the monotonous stamp of the air compressor and the hum of a few night fighters circling pointlessly above the city. He jumped impetuously onto the train, with a wrench he struck back the levers that held the smoke chamber shut and threw a high-explosive cartridge between the flue tubes. Just as he was about to shut the door of the smoke chamber and push the locking lever forward again, someone who had apparently slept through the alarm in one of the trains grabbed him by the shoulder from behind. Fear numbed Wiegand like a blow to the heart, but only for a few seconds, he didn’t fight back, but knocked his attacker down with a wrench and disappeared into the darkness. When the all-clear sounded a few minutes later he was standing at his workplace. Of course there had been a big investigation, but it had yielded no results, not a hint of suspicion had fallen on him, and otherwise he had never given himself away.

  No, Wiegand shakes his head and walks on, it’s out of the question that … And yet, something inside him errs on the side of caution. But for now he won’t have any chance of committing acts of sabotage, since from tomorrow he has been transferred to a track-building column. However unpleasant that transfer might be, he is reassured, because if he was suspected of being the saboteur they would probably have left him in the depot to catch him in flagrante.

  When Wiegand reaches Lebuser Strasse, the sirens are piercing the air with a long wail. All clear! So the American squadrons have changed direction and not flown towards Berlin.

  Number four Lebuser Strasse is a bleak, grey, discoloured stone box that no longer deserves the term house, in fact it never did, it rises five storeys high, massive and crude, among its equally botched neighbours and lines a small, dark courtyard, its asphalt warped, battered and full of holes, with rubbish bins spilling over. It is divided into the front part, two side buildings and a rear wing, every corner is exploited to the maximum. The architect saw comfort as a waste of space, because it brought the rent down. There is a musty, stuffy atmosphere in the building, which was created by a capitalist desire for profit and a subservient, complacent architect.

  Wiegand is lying on the sofa, he is very tired, and would like to sleep for a few hours before going to Klose’s, but sleep doesn’t come, even though weariness lies heavy on his eyelids and his limbs are like lead. It isn’t just the thoughts circling incessantly within him and keeping him from sleep, it’s something else, something that keeps him awake. The hostile caution with which every German meets foreigners, the hypocrisy with which he arms himself, the shy rejection that he puts on like armour, these things are very much Wiegand’s own. He is a sober and realistic thinker, he pays no heed to omens and premonitions, he isn’t superstitious in the slightest, but he reacts to the finest stimuli of his instinct, he is aware of the tiniest deviations and the most delicate vibration of his compass needle. There is something in his room that makes him uneasy, something, something. But what?

  He picks up the Morgenpost and scans the Wehrmacht report, as always he reads the news from the eastern front first, but nothing is happening there.

  Between the Drava and the Danube … The brave defenders of Breslau … Between the mouth of the Neisse and the Oderbruch the Soviets have carried out numerous attacks, which were supported by a heavy tank presence particularly to the west of Küstrin. Our divisions fought off the Bolsheviks and in fierce fighting destroyed 98 tanks. Artillery effectively halted the concentrations of troops and the attacking enemy forces with heavy fire. From the plain to the
west of the Vistula … Sambia front … Holland … between Ems and the Lower Elbe …

  South-east of Magdeburg grenadiers pushed back the Americans who had advanced over the Elbe. Further south counter-attacks were under way against other local bridgeheads.

  Ruhr … Bergisches Land … western and southern Harz … south of Bernburg a large American fighting unit forced its way across the Saale. The troops advancing on Leipzig and Chemnitz were halted by reservists and containing troops.

  Wiegand sets aside the paper, he is unsettled about something, he straightens his torso and looks around, but everything is in the right place, nothing has changed. But there’s something … Suddenly Wiegand knows what has startled him: the room smells of tobacco, not insistently, but perceptibly. Wiegand knows very well that he hasn’t smoked here for days, the smell that floats in the room tells him that someone has been smoking here very recently. Clouds of tobacco that settled here a long time ago smell differently, there is something musty and stale about them, but this smell is unmistakeably fresh. Wiegand slips from the sofa, walks around the room and sniffs around like a dog with his nose in the air.

  No, he’s not mistaken. Someone has been smoking in the room very recently, he even thinks he can sense that it isn’t one of the usual cigarettes, a Stambul or a Juno or one of the new rationed varieties, but one with a sweetish Virginia smell. Who has been smoking here? There’s no point wondering about something if there’s a chance of discovering the truth. Wiegand leaves his room, crosses the corridor and seeks out his landlady in her kitchen.

  ‘Has anyone been asking after me, Mrs Schmitz?’ he begins.

  ‘No, Mr Adamek,’ the woman replies.

  ‘And no one was waiting for me in my room?’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Adamek,’ Mrs Schmitz reassures him. ‘No one has been here.’

  Wiegand stands there uncertainly for a moment, he doesn’t know whether and how he should take his questions further, but then he quickly decides he has to get to the bottom of things, too much depends on it.

  ‘Do you smoke, Mrs Schmitz?’ he asks first.

  Mrs Schmitz looks up in surprise and lets the stocking she is darning fall into her lap. ‘You ask very odd questions, Mr Adamek,’ she says dubiously.

  ‘Odd or otherwise,’ Wiegand replies impatiently, ‘please answer my question.’

  ‘If you really want to know,’ Mrs Schmitz says, slightly insulted, ‘I don’t smoke, I send the few cigarettes on my women’s ration card …’

  Wiegand waves her words away. ‘But someone has been smoking in my room,’ he says firmly, ‘yesterday or today.’

  Mrs Schmitz sets aside her darning with a resolute gesture, as if to open a completely new phase of the conversation. ‘What are you getting at, Mr Adamek?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything, Mrs Schmitz, I’m just asking,’ Wiegand replies.

  ‘Then I’m sorry, I don’t understand your question,’ Mrs Schmitz says.

  Wiegand pulls himself together. ‘I would like you to tell me who has been smoking in my room today or possibly yesterday.’

  “No one has been smoking in your room, Mr Adamek, no one has been here,’ Mrs Schmitz says emphatically. ‘Or do you think I have a boyfriend and go to your room, of all places, to … Please, Mr Adamek.’

  ‘You misunderstand me, Mrs Schmitz,’ Wiegand says, calming the excitable woman. ‘I don’t suspect you at all, far from it, but I need to know who has been in my room.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Schmitz says and shrugs, ‘I really don’t know. Is it so important to you?’

  A matter of life and death, Wiegand thinks, but of course he can’t say that to the woman, he hasn’t been able to look behind the mask that everyone wears in Hitler’s Reich, and previously he hasn’t been interested. Questions usually produce counter-questions, and he has no intention of lifting even a hem of the camouflage coat that he has to wear, for this woman he is the railway worker Franz Adamek from Ratibor, who is getting divorced from his wife, that was what he told her when he rented a furnished room from her in September 1944, and he has added no further information to that. He avoided all attempts by Mrs Schmitz and her husband, who was sent off to join the Volkssturm a few days before, to set up a kind of house community, and apart from a few general phrases when they have happened to meet they have barely exchanged two dozen words.

  ‘It isn’t as important as all that,’ Wiegand says, ‘but I would have liked to know. You know my wife always spies on me … Were you away for a long time yesterday?’

  ‘Yesterday evening I was with my sister on Fruchtstrasse for a few hours,’ Mrs Schmitz replies, and looks at Wiegand with a surprised and questioning eye. ‘Do you mean that in my absence …’

  Wiegand doesn’t answer the question. ‘And did you notice anything? Was anyone hanging about here on the stairs or outside the front door?’

  Mrs Schmitz shakes her head. ‘No, I didn’t see anyone … unless you mean something like the key turning heavily in the lock, when it usually closes so easily …’

  ‘The lock didn’t work?’

  ‘That would be taking it too far,’ Mrs Schmitz thinks, ‘but it was difficult, as if someone had been fiddling with it. Do you really think someone tried to get into the flat?’

  ‘I think someone not only tried, but was in the flat, in my room,’ Wiegand says stoutly. ‘So now the matter is resolved, there is nothing missing. Good evening, Mrs Schmitz.’

  The matter is far from resolved, Wiegand thinks as he leaves the kitchen and goes back to his room, it is only just starting, and we will have to establish once and for all whether anything is missing.

  When he enters his room again he can smell cigarettes very clearly. He begins to look systematically through all the containers in which he keeps his things. Everything is still very orderly, but not so untouched and in such neat order that Wiegand wouldn’t notice that it has been moved by the hands of a stranger. Since living underground, Wiegand has assumed the habit of committing to memory how he leaves his things, and now he can see quite clearly that everything has been touched and then put back in its old place. The stranger who has gone through his belongings has taken the greatest trouble to leave everything as he found it, but he didn’t quite succeed, because Wiegand knows very well that it was not the Nachtausgabe but the Berliner Morgenpost that was on top of the pile, he deliberately left the lining of his right jacket pocket poking out, and now it has been put smoothly and neatly back, he also notices that the mattress of his bed is sticking out a little more over the side, and that the bed sheet has only been loosely stuffed back in, and there are other clues, only tiny trivia, but they indicate beyond a doubt that a thorough search has been carried out by a very smart sleuth. And he has also taken something with him, an identity card that is two years old and which Wiegand no longer needs because the Reichsbahn has introduced new IDs in the meantime.

  When Wiegand has thoroughly searched his room, he sits down in an armchair, crosses his legs and considers what he knows. Someone has secretly entered the flat and very thoroughly searched his room, a stranger at the depot has taken a keen interest in him on a number of occasions. Might there be a connection between those two things? The question is not unimportant, in fact it is of great importance, because it contains another question: does the search relate to railway worker Franz Adamek or former Reichstag member Friedrich Wiegand? At any rate it is clear that he is under suspicion, suspicion of something, and in the Third Reich suspicion alone means Gestapo and the camps. It is, however, unclear why he hasn’t yet been arrested, a lack of evidence has never prevented the Gestapo from arresting someone, the gentlemen from the Prinz Albrecht Palais and Kurfürstenstrasse aren’t as highly strung as that, and if he’s being allowed to keep walking freely around, there must be a reason for it, it wouldn’t happen without some particular intent. There isn’t time right now to discover that intent, he needs to act quickly and resolutely.

  Wiegand sits very still for a few more minutes a
nd looks into the gloom outside the window. He can feel the net that has been thrown over him almost physically, he feels it on his skin, contracting and snaring him, taking his breath away. But he isn’t anxious, he has forgotten what fear feels like in the difficult years of the Nazi terror. He didn’t know it in the past either, when he had to put himself at risk at demonstrations or in beer-hall fights, but no net is so tightly woven that there isn’t a way of slipping out of it. You just have to find the gap.

  Wiegand gets to his feet and packs his things together, there aren’t many of them, they fit comfortably in the middle-sized suitcase that he takes from the wardrobe. When it is completely dark, he will leave the flat and not go back into it, and he won’t go to work tomorrow either, there’s no point putting himself unnecessarily in danger and waiting until the Gestapo’s fist comes crashing down on him with all its weight.

  Wiegand is under no illusions: they are on his trail, and he has to erase it.

  X

  15 April, 3.00 p.m.

  These days getting from Charlottenburg to Silesian Station is more difficult, more awkward and almost more time-consuming, at any rate it is more laborious and tiring than a journey from Berlin to Königsberg once was. The S-Bahn, which only runs now for certain sections of the route, or on only one track, has been completely cancelled since the raid, and even the underground isn’t running, or after only a few stations they say, ‘Everybody out!’, and whether and where and when it will start running again is unknown and difficult to find out. The trams, whose timetables change from day to day, have only run irregularly since the daylight raid on the western and south-western suburbs, to Spandau, Lichterfelde, Wilmersdorf, Halensee, Grunewald. No lines are running in the direction of the city centre and Moabit.