'If you will permit me one small arrogance, Herr Gunther: do you seriously believe that I, an MVD palkovnik, would consider that the matter of your deception and arrest was more important than the affairs of the Allied Control Council?'
'You're a member of the Kommendatura?' I was surprised.
'I have the honour to be Intelligence officer to the Soviet Deputy Military Governor. You may inquire at the council headquarters in Elsholzstrasse if you don't believe me.' He paused, waiting for some reaction from me. 'Come now. What do you say?'
When I still said nothing, he sighed and shook his head. 'I'll never understand you Germans.'
'You speak the language well enough. Don't forget, Mara was a German.'
'Yes, but he was also a Jew. Your countrymen spent twelve years trying to make those two circumstances mutually exclusive. That's one of the things I can't understand. Change your mind?'
I shook my head.
'Very well.'
The Colonel showed no sign of being irritated at my refusal. He looked at his watch and then stood up.
'I must be going,' he said. Taking out a notebook he started to write on a piece of paper. 'If you do change your mind you can reach me at this number in Karlshorst. That's 55-16-44. Ask for General Kaverntsev's Special Security Section. And there's my home telephone number as welclass="underline" 05-00-19.'
Poroshin smiled and nodded at the note as I took it from him. 'If you should be arrested by the Americans, I wouldn't let them see that if I were you. They'll probably think you're a spy.'
He was still laughing about that as he went down the stairs.
Chapter 5
For those who had believed in the Fatherland, it was not the defeat which gave the lie to that patriarchal view of society, but the rebuilding. And with the example of Berlin, ruined by the vanity of men, could be learned the lesson that when a war has been fought, when the soldiers are dead and the walls are destroyed, a city consists of its women.
I walked towards a grey granite canyon which might have concealed a heavily worked mine, from where a short train of brick-laden trucks was even now emerging under the supervision of a group of rubble-women. On the side of one of their trucks was chalked 'No time for love'. You didn't need reminding in view of their dusty faces and wrestlers' bodies. But they had hearts as big as their biceps.
Smiling through their catcalls and whistles of derision where were my hands now that the city needed to be reconstructed? and waving my walking-stick like a sick-note, I carried on until I came to Pestalozzistrasse where Friedrich Korsch (an old friend from my days with Kripo, and now a Kommissar with Berlin's Communist-dominated police force) had told me that I could find Emil Becker's wife.
Number 21 was a damaged five-storey building of basin-flats with paper windows, and inside the front doorway, smelling heavily of burnt toast, was a sign which warned 'Unsafe Staircase! In use at visitor's own risk'. Fortunately for me, the names and apartment-numbers that were chalked on the wall inside the door told me that Frau Becker lived on the ground floor.
I walked down a dark, dank corridor to her door. Between it and the landing washbasin an old woman was picking large chunks of fungus off the damp wall and collecting them in a cardboard box.
'Are you from the Red Cross?' she asked.
I told her I wasn't, knocked at the door and waited.
She smiled. 'It's all right, you know. We're really quite well-off here.' There was a quiet insanity in her voice.
I knocked again, more loudly this time, and heard a muffled sound, and then bolts being drawn on the other side of the door.
'We don't go hungry,' said the old woman. 'The Lord provides.' She pointed at her shards of fungus in the box. 'Look. There are even fresh mushrooms growing here.' And so saying she pulled a piece of fungus from the wall and ate it.
When the door finally opened, I was momentarily unable to speak from disgust.
Frau Becker, catching sight of the old woman, brushed me aside and stepped smartly into the corridor, where with many loud insults she shooed the old woman away.
'Filthy old baggage,' she muttered. 'She's always coming into this building and eating that mould. The woman's mad. A complete spinner.'
'Something she ate no doubt,' I said queasily.
Frau Becker fixed me with the awl of her bespectacled eye. 'Now who are you and what do you want?' she asked brusquely.
'My name is Bernhard Gunther ' I started.
'Heard of you,' she snapped. 'You're with Kripo.'
'I was.'
'You'd better come in.' She followed me into the icy-cold sitting-room, slammed the door shut and closed the bolts as if in mortal fear of something. Noticing how this took me aback, she added by way of explanation: 'Can't be too careful these days.'
'No indeed.'
I looked around at the loathsome walls, the threadbare carpet and the old furniture. It wasn't much but it was neatly kept. There was little she could have done about the damp.
'Charlottenburg's not too badly off,' I offered by way of mitigation, 'in comparison with some areas.'
'Maybe so,' she said, 'but I can tell you, if you'd come after dark and knocked till kingdom come, I wouldn't have answered. We get all sorts of rats round here at night.' So saying she picked up a large sheet of plywood from off the couch, and for a moment in the gloom of the place I thought she was working on a jigsaw-puzzle. Then I saw the numerous packets of Olleschau cigarette papers, the bags of butts, the piles of salvaged tobacco, and the serried ranks of re-rolls.
I sat down on the couch, took out my Winston and offered her one.
'Thanks,' she said grudgingly, and threaded the cigarette behind her ear. 'I'll smoke it later.' But I didn't doubt that she would sell it with the rest.
'What's the going rate for one of those re-cycled nails?'
'About 5 marks,' she said. 'I pay my collectors five US for 150 tips. That rolls about twenty good ones. Sell them for about ten US. What, are you writing an article about it for the Tagesspiegel? Spare me the Victor Gollancz-Save Berlin routine, Herr Gunther. You're here about that lousy husband of mine, aren't you?
Well, I haven't seen him in a long while. And I hope I never clap eyes on him again. I expect you know he's in a Viennese gaol, do you?'
'Yes, I do.'
'You may as well know that when the American MPs came to tell me he'd been arrested, I was glad. I could forgive him for deserting me, but not our son.'
There was no telling if Frau Becker had turned witch before or after her husband had jumped his wife's bail. But on first acquaintance she wasn't the type to have persuaded me that her absconding husband had made the wrong choice. She had a bitter mouth, prominent lower jaw and small sharp teeth. No sooner had I explained the purpose of my visit than she started to chew the air around my ears. It cost me the rest of my cigarettes to placate her enough to answer my questions.
'Exactly what happened? Can you tell me?'
'The MPs said that he shot and killed an American army captain in Vienna. They caught him red-handed apparently. That's all I was told.'
'What about this Colonel Poroshin? Do you know anything about him?'
'You want to know if you can trust him or not. That's what you want to know.
Well, he's an Ivan,' she sneered. 'That's all you should need to know.' She shook her head and added, impatiently: 'Oh, they knew each other here in Berlin because of one of Emil's rackets. Penicillin, I think it was. Emil said that Poroshin caught syphilis off some girl he was keen on. More like the other way round, I thought. Anyway this was the worst kind of syphilis: the sort that makes you swell up. Salvarsan didn't seem to work. Emil got them some penicillin. Well, you know how rare that is, the good stuff I mean. That could be one reason why Poroshin's trying to help Emil. They're all the same, these Russians. It's not just their brains that are in their balls. It's their hearts too. Poroshin's gratitude comes straight from his scrotum.'