Gerti Kruger took an old movie magazine out of her shopping bag and put it on the table. 'I brought you that, she's in it. Have a nice lunch, Inspector.'
The brothers came home from school at one o'clock and sat down expectantly at the table. They had to wait, because their father wasn't back from police headquarters until two. 'Talk about an adventure,' said Klaus Dietrich. 'The lines are damaged once you're past Potsdamer Platz. A horse and cart took me on to Alex, where the boss had the nerve to haul me over the coals for being late. And he drives a car with a fuel allowance from the Russians. Then he complained that our investigations were going too slowly.'
But lunch took his mind off his professional troubles. There were real dumplings in real meat broth. Inge had bartered her husband's fur-lined uniform coat with the wife of a Russian officer in Eberswalde for a hundredweight of wheat flour and a piece of tough beef. Klaus Dietrich never wanted to see that coat again. It reminded him of the past too much. How Inge had got the hundredweight sack of flour from the Russian settlement to the rail station and from there to Berlin on the roof of the freight train remained her secret.
She had kept two pounds of flour back for the dumplings and taken the rest to Frau Molch, who lived on Eschershauser Weg and dealt in everything that was in short supply. They agreed on a pair of shoes and a kilo of knitting wool. Ralf could hardly trudge through the snow in sandals next winter, and Grandma would knit two pullovers for the boys.
'With a grating of nutmeg and fried bacon cubes, that's how we used to have our dumplings,' said the district councillor nostalgically.
'What's nutmeg?'
Ralf got no answer, because his grandfather had launched into a convoluted account of yesterday's district council meeting. They had decided to hold de-Nazification tribunals to try former Party members. 'We owe it to our reputation.'
'What reputation?' Klaus Dietrich left the question hanging in the air. He had deep rings under his eyes from sheer exhaustion. The heat was getting to him too; in the shade of the veranda, the thermometer stood at twentyeight degrees. He dropped a fleeting kiss on his wife's hair and pushed his bicycle through the front garden into the street.
Ben and Ralf went off too. Hajo Konig was waiting for them on the outskirts of the nearby wood. He was a freckled little lad, in the same class as Ralf. They went through the forest, now stripped bare by illicit tree felling, and down to Krumme Lanke. The lake lay quiet in the sun. A family of coots left silver ripples behind them as they crossed the water. Where the autumn rains had washed a small, sandy bay out of the bank over many decades, the boys took off their shirts and trousers. They were wearing bathing trunks underneath. Ben wanted to plunge straight into the water. 'Let's go up to the plantation first,' Hajo urged them.
So they made their way through the forestry plantation above the lake, which was fenced. The young trees of what would be mixed woodland in years to come weren't productive enough for firewood thieves, so they had not been harmed, and mingled with brambles, stinging nettles and other weeds to make dense undergrowth. The Forestry Department, its staff decimated by the war, had no one to spare to tidy it up. A clearing lay ahead. The boys ducked. In the hollow before them was a naked young woman on her front, her head thrown back, her thighs spread. She was moving her hips and moaning aloud. The tall grass hid the man underneath her.
Spellbound, the youthful voyeurs stared at her bobbing breasts. Ben thought of Heidi R6 del. Hajo was fingering the front of his bathing trunks. The young woman cried out and collapsed on top of her invisible lover. They waited hopefully, but nothing else happened. After a while the couple got up. The man was quite old, at least forty, Ben guessed. His penis, now flaccid, gleamed wetly in the sun. The young woman squatted down by a bush and had a pee. They quietly went away.
'Usually it's the woman underneath.' Hajo spoke from the experience of earlier observations.
Ralf smirked at his brother. 'So is Heidi Rodel always underneath too? Or aren't you really doing it with her?'
'Of course we're doing it — lots of times,' Ben assured his brother, and then, to be on the safe side, changed the subject. 'Who's going to be first in the water?'
They ran down to the bank. Ralf and Hajo plunged straight in. Ben followed at a more leisurely pace, so as not to be out of breath. He waded in up to his shoulders. Then he took ten deep breaths to enrich his blood with oxygen. He'd read about doing that in the Neues Universum. He dived down and swam forward with long strokes, against the flow of the water. He hoped to improve his record for the distance. He kept his eyes open, although he could see barely half a metre ahead in the murky water. With mixed feelings, he thought of the giant catfish said to lurk in these depths. Ehlers the fishmonger's in the shopping street had put a specimen on display a few years ago, a fish over a metre long with whiskery, worm-like filaments and sharp teeth.
He delayed coming up for another couple of seconds, although his lungs were almost bursting. When he couldn't stand it any more he shot up to the surface with two mighty strokes at a diagonal angle, which gave him another metre, and gasped greedily for air. The faces of people on the bank were small, pale specks. He was amazed to realize that he'd swum more than half the width of the lake underwater, at least sixty metres.
'We thought you were drowned,' said his brother. There was admiration in his voice.
'It's all in the breathing technique,' Ben told him.
The couple from the plantation were standing knee-deep in the water. Ben liked the look of the young woman better in her black bathing suit than without it. The man was wearing triangular bathing trunks laced up at the side. He whispered something in her ear. The young woman laughed.
They went back through the Riemeister Fen to catch tadpoles. 'Hey, look at that!' cried Ralf, pointing to the quaking, grassy island ahead of them.
An incendiary bomb, covered with moss, lay among the reeds. The marshy bed of this silted-up arm of the waterway had cushioned its impact and prevented it from going off. Two or three years earlier, after a raid on the city centre, a Lancaster bomber had ditched its remaining load over the Grunewald. Most of the bombs had sunk into the fen. This particular specimen had lasted out the rest of the war near the surface.
Ben pulled their find from the reeds, and carried it from the wobbly island of grass to firm land. The bomb was shaped like a hexagonal stick about six centimetres in diameter and half a metre long. It was made of thermite, as heavy as iron. The upper part had a light aluminium jacket which acted as the control unit. Ben snapped it off. A small, thin lead cross came into view, holding the head of the ignition pin. The cross was supposed to be bent upwards by the force of the impact when the bomb dropped, thus releasing the pin to strike the fuse. It was a simple construction and often failed to work. During the war Ben had quite often let off one of these duds in the sand behind the toboggan run, just to enjoy the firework show.
Before the admiring eyes of both his spectators, he applied the blade of his penknife to the lead cross and bent all four of its shanks up. Then he struck the device on a stone, holding it vertical. There was a plop. Sparks shot out of the holes around the fuse, hissing. Ben held the bomb aloft like a torch. 'Child's play.' He flung it up and away into the air in a high arc. Hajo ran after it. 'Leave it alone,' warned Ben. But the little boy grabbed the end of the thing, which was now burning with a white flame, and held it up with his arm outstretched. 'Like a sparkler,' he shouted enthusiastically.
'Throw it away,' cried Ben.
The detonation came unexpectedly. Hajo's face was suddenly black, and he stared blankly at the place where his hand had just been clutching the burning stick. But there was no stick now, and no hand either. The explosive charge screwed into the improved version of these incendiaries was meant to deter people from throwing them out of the window when they were putting out fires. It had torn the boy's hand off. Hajo collapsed on the ground, his eyes rolling back into his head.