FRIDAY, 27 APRIL 1945
DAY OF CATASTROPHE, WILD TURMOIL – RECORDED ON SATURDAY MORNING
It began with silence. The night was far too quiet. Around twelve o’clock Fräulein Behn reported that the enemy had reached the gardens and that the German line of defence was right outside our door.
It took a long time for me to fall asleep; I was going over Russian phrases in my head, practising the ones I thought I’d soon have a chance to use. Today I briefly mentioned to the other cave dwellers that I speak a little Russian, a fact I’d been keeping to myself. I explained that I’d been to European Russia when I was younger, one of the dozen or so countries I visited on my travels.
My Russian is very basic, very utilitarian, picked up along the way. Still, I know how to count and to say what day it is and I can read the Cyrillic alphabet. I’m sure it will come back quickly now that practice is near at hand. I’ve always had a knack for languages. Finally, counting away in Russian, I fell asleep.
I slept until about 5 a.m., when I heard someone wandering around the front of the basement – it was the bookselling wife who had come in from the outside. She took my hand and whispered, ‘They’re here.’
‘Who? The Russians?’ I could barely open my eyes.
‘Yes. They just climbed through the window at Meyer’s’ – meaning the liquor shop.
I finished dressing and combed my hair while she delivered her news to the others. Within minutes the whole basement was on its feet.
Taking the back stairs, I felt my way up to the first floor in order to hide our meagre provisions, at least whatever wasn’t already squirrelled away. Before going inside I put my ear to the back door, which was in splinters and could no longer be locked. All quiet, the kitchen empty. Keeping close to the floor I crept over to the window. It was a bright morning outside, our street was under fire; you could hear the whistle and patter of the bullets.
A Russian anti-aircraft battery was turning the corner, four barrels, four iron giraffes with menacing necks tall as towers. Two men were stomping up the street: broad backs, leather jackets, high leather boots. Jeeps pulling up to the kerb. Howitzers rattling ahead in the early light. The pavement alive with the din. The smell of petrol drifted into the kitchen through the broken windowpanes.
I went back to the basement. We ate our breakfast as if in a dream, although I did manage to consume several slices of bread, much to the amazement of the widow. Even so, my stomach was fluttering. I felt the way I had as a schoolgirl before a maths exam – anxious and uneasy, wishing that it was already over.
After that the widow and I climbed upstairs. We dusted her apartment, wiped down the counters and swept and scrubbed with our next-to-last bucket of water. The devil knows why we slaved away like that. Probably just to exercise our limbs a little, or maybe fleeing again into a palpable present to escape an uncertain future.
As we worked we kept creeping up to the window and peeking out at the street, where an endless supply train was passing by. Stout mares with foals running between their legs. A cow drearily mooing to be milked. Before we knew it they had set up a field kitchen in the garage across the street. And for the first time we could make out faces, features, individuals – sturdy, broad foreheads, dose-cropped hair, well fed, carefree. Not a civilian in sight. The Russians have the streets entirely to themselves. But under every building people are whispering, quaking. Who could ever imagine such a world, hidden here, so frightened, right in the middle of the big city? Life sequestered underground and split into tiny cells so that no one knows what anyone else is doing.
Outside: a bright blue, cloudless sky.
Sometime around noon – the woman from Hamburg and I were just getting the second pot of barley soup, cooked at the baker’s for the entire clan – the first enemy found his way into our basement. A ruddy-cheeked farmer, he blinked as he sized us up by the light of the kerosene lantern. He hesitated, then took a step, two steps towards us.
Hearts pounding. Scared, people offered him their bowls of soup. He shook his head and smiled, still silent.
That’s when I uttered my first Russian words, or rather rasped them, since I suddenly went hoarse: ‘Shto vy zhelaete?’ What do you want?
The man spins around, stares at me in amazement. I sense I’ve taken him aback. He doesn’t understand. Evidently he’s never heard one of us ‘mutes’ address him in his own language. Because the Russian word for Germans – n’emtzi – means ‘mutes’. Presumably it dates from Hanseatic League, over 500 years ago, when German merchants used sign language to trade textiles and lace for beeswax and furs in Novgorod and elsewhere.
Anyway, this Russian doesn’t say a thing, answered my question with a mere shake of his head. I ask whether he wants something to eat. With a little smile he says, in accented German, ‘Schnaps’ – brandy.
The cave dwellers shake their heads: regrettably they have no brandy or alcohol of any kind. Whoever has any left keeps it well hidden. So Ivan wanders back off, trying to find his way through the labyrinth of passageways and courtyards.
Cheerful bustle of soldiers on our street. Along with two or three other women I venture out to watch. A young man is polishing a motorcycle in our entranceway, a German Zündapp, nearly new. He holds out the cloth, gestures at me to go on buffing. I tell him in Russian that I don’t want to, even manage a laugh; he looks at me in surprise and then laughs back.
Some Russians are wheeling freshly stolen bicycles up and down the driveway. They’re teaching one another to ride, sitting on their seats as stiffly as Susi the bicycle-riding chimpanzee in the zoo. They crash into the trees and laugh with pleasure.
I feel some of my fear beginning to dissipate. It turns out that. Russian men, too, are ‘only men’ – i.e. presumably they’re as susceptible as other men to feminine wiles, so it’s possible to keep them in check, to distract them, to shake them off.
The pavements are full of horses that leave their droppings and spray their pee. A strong scent of stables. Two soldiers ask me to show them to the nearest pump – the horses are thirsty. So we traipse through the gardens for fifteen minutes. Friendly voices, good-natured faces. And questions that will keep coming back, heard now for the first time: ‘Do you have a husband?’ If you say yes, they ask where he is. And if you say no, they ask if you wouldn’t want to ‘marry’ a Russian. Followed by crude flirting.
These two first address me using the familiar ‘du’, but I dismiss the impropriety by sticking with the formal form. We walked down the deserted green path, as artillery shells arc across the sky. The German line is ten minutes away. No more German planes, though, and hardly any German flak. No more water in the taps, no electricity, no gas. Only Russians.
Back with the buckets, now full of water. The horses drink as the two men look on contentedly. I stroll around, talking to this Russian and that. It’s past noon, the sun so hot it feels like summer. There’s something strange in the air though, something I can’t put my finger on, something evil, menacing. A few men look past me shyly, exchanging glances. One young man, small and sallow and reeking of alcohol, gets me involved in a conversation. He wants to coax me off into the courtyard, shows me two watches on his hairy arm, he’ll give one to me if I…
I draw back to the passage that leads to our basement, then sneak out to the inner courtyard, but just when I think I’ve shaken him he’s standing next to me, and slips into the basement along with me. Staggering from one support beam to the next, he shines his torch on the faces, some forty people all together, pausing each time he comes to a woman, letting the pool of light flicker for several seconds on her face.