They could be here any time. Then what?' wailed the old woman.
'Well, I don't suppose you have anything to fear yourself, ma'am.' Lieutenant Kolbe smirked.
Herr von Hanke cleared his throat, embarrassed. 'The Russians are civilized people like us. I know them well. I was attache to the Imperial German Embassy in St Petersburg in 1912, and made many friends there. As it happens I speak Russian, although French was the language preferred in high society.'
'You'll have a chance to try both out soon,' Jutta laughed.
The thunder of artillery over the last few days had grown fainter. Instead, they could hear the tack-tack-tack of machine guns. 'Time I changed my clothes,' announced Lieutenant Kolbe. 'What does a man of the world wear to receive the Russians?'
A suit in sober colours. No dinner jacket until after six in the evening,' Jutta suggested. The telephone in her apartment was still working. She dialled her parents' number. Her father, in great distress, answered. She could hear yelling and shooting in the background. 'Jutta? This is dreadful — they're here.'
'Listen. Vati, you must keep calm and be friendly. Do what they ask, and don't show any fear. It won't be all that bad. I'll call again when it's over.'
It hadn't even begun yet in Onkel Toms Hutte. Low-flying aircraft roared over the district for two days, and still nothing happened. The rattle of tanks could be heard. Three T34s crawled up Riemeister Strasse and came to a grinding halt outside the U-Bahn station. Their gun turrets swivelled menacingly back and forth. Someone on the top floor of Sommerfeld's cafe waved a white sheet on a broomstick. Pillow cases, towels and napkins followed suit from the windows of the surrounding buildings. The hatch of one of the monster vehicles was raised, and a round face under a leather helmet came into view. The tank soldier waved, laughing. There was applause from behind the white flags. The soldier disappeared, the hatch closed, the colossus started moving again.
They heard the applause down in the cellar. 'Well, there we are,' said Herr von Hanke, and he pulled out his white silk handkerchief and went up the steps. Jutta and a few of the others hesitantly followed. Old Frau Mobich ran past them. They have fresh vegetables at Frowein's!' she cried, her expression ecstatic.
A jeep stopped, and a personnel carrier behind it. An officer jumped down from the jeep, a dark, stocky man with short legs. Herr von Hanke addressed him courteously in Russian. It was the Russian of the Tsarist period: a deadly insult. The officer drew his pistol and shot the old man in the forehead. He kicked the corpse aside with his boot. Then his gaze fell on Jutta. He shouted an order. Two soldiers grabbed the struggling woman, dragged her to the jeep, threw her across the hot radiator bearing the red star and held her firmly there, grinning. Panting, the officer writhed on top of her. He stank of vodka and garlic. She felt nothing, convincing herself that she wasn't the one being raped, it was some other woman, a stranger. The officer finished quickly, let her go and got back into the jeep. He drove off without a moment's thought as she fell into the road.
A soldier helped her up, a boy with a friendly smile. She thanked him, smoothed down her dress, turned to go back to the others. He held on to her, saying something in a halting voice: it sounded like a request. Another time, right?' she promised, just for something to say. His eyes narrowed. He struck her in the face and dragged her into the bushes in front of the building. This one took a long time. The rapist forced her into more and more contorted positions. He was enjoying his victory to the full. Afterwards, she staggered into the building, exhausted. At least you've got it behind you,' Frau Reiche consoled her.
'You think so?' said Jutta. Swaying, she made her way into her apartment and tore her clothes off. She stood in the bathtub and turned on the shower. A trickle of brown fluid was all that came out. 'Oh, bloody shit!' The bad language did her good. She rubbed herself with a towel and the pathetic remnant of some eau-de-Cologne. It gave her the illusion of being clean.
Frau Reiche appeared with a rubber sheet. 'Memento of Grandpa. He wasn't entirely leak-proof at the end,' she said, trying to strike a humorous note. She spread the rubber sheet on the bed. 'Now, lie down.' She had brought an enema syringe and a bottle of seltzer water with her. 'My last. It may help.' There was a pop as she opened the bottle. 'Open your legs.' The seltzer water was cold, and the carbonic acid prickled like little pins. After the douche Jutta felt better.
The motorized advance party was followed by shaggy little horses pulling carts, and soldiers stiff with dirt. Even their own generals saw them not as men, but as primitive human material to be sacrificed in their thousands in achieving some insignificant strategic advantage, or driven into the minefields, clearing a path as they were blown up. Thin cows trotted behind the carts, and chickens cackled in wicker cages. The convoy stopped. Soon smoke was rising from fires built in the road. A pockmarked Asiatic soldier sawed the head off a chicken and let the blood drain from the flapping body before he plucked it. Another cut thick slices of black bread and handed them out to the hungry children. Then he picked up his accordion and began to play.
Jutta dressed: long trousers, a tight belt, a high-necked sweater. As if that would be any use. She put a sharp kitchen knife in her belt. 'I'm going to kill the next one,' she said.
'Then here's your chance,' said Frau Reiche. A mujik with a bristling moustache burst in. His cap was perched perilously on the back of his head, and he was carrying a basket of potatoes encrusted with earth. He made his way through the apartment in search of something. His eye fell on the lavatory. There was water in the bowl. He tipped the potatoes in to wash them, and then, out of curiosity, pulled the chain. The cistern was still full of water. Astonished, he saw his meal disappear.
Jutta laughed out loud. It was a rare moment of complete relaxation. The whiskery man laughed aloud too and went away. Frau Reiche's voice was trembling. 'That could have gone very wrong indeed.'
The women of Berlin smeared their faces with soot, dressed in dirty rags, rolled in filth. It made no difference. Their liberators were perfectly used to dirt and smells. They couldn't read, but they obeyed the vicious orders of the infamous Ilya Ehrenburg writing in Pravda. 'Take their women without mercy. Break their Germanic pride.' The soldiers stood in line, faces expressionless, until it was their turn. There were often thirty men or more.
Towards morning all fell still. The screams of the rape victims had died down, the campfires in the streets were burning out. The liberators lay unconscious in their vodka fumes. Jutta saw it all from the balcony. It was the only time she had ventured into the fresh air. In two or three hours the horrors would begin again.
'Hey, you up there,' a voice whispered. Is this Number 47?' She leaned forward. The man wore a black raincoat buttoned to the neck, the kind that fastened with clips instead of buttons and had been fashionable before the war.
'The front door's open.'
A thin, grey-haired man with a pale face and tired eyes appeared. 'Colonel Werner Liiddeke, Army High Command,' he introduced himself. 'I'm asked by an old lady to tell the tenants of Number 47 that Frowein doesn't have any vegetables after all. Her last words. I think she wasn't quite right in the head any more. She died a few minutes ago. Internal haemorrhaging would be the natural assumption. Those animals shrink from nothing.'
'Frau Mobich. My God, she was eighty.'
The colonel opened the clips of his raincoat. He was in uniform under it. Anything here I could wear? I got away from those Nazi butchers, I don't intend to fall into the hands of the Reds coming after them.'