‘Once I was so shy I’d hardly open my mouth. Now I spend my days travelling round trying to sniff out people who have gold and silver. You mustn’t think I like it. But one has to live, here too. And if you want to live you have to get used to anything.’
Yes, one must live, and of course one must get used to anything. Her companion, a newly returned soldier, comes in and keeps me company for a time. He was in Italy and has a damaged forehead as a memento of the first Allied landing on Sicily and a grenade-splinter in his breast as a souvenir of the siege of Monte Cassino. If he is reproved for being a black-marketeer he says: ‘I have an allowance of forty-five marks a month. That’s enough for seven cigarettes.’
When asked if he was a Nazi he replies that he spent seven years in the war and that he takes that to be enough of an answer. When asked if he has voted he says he has, but it won’t do any good. And which party? The Christian Democrats? No, he is not religious. The Communists? No, he has friends who were POWs in Russian camps. That leaves the Social Democrats, because they mean least to him.
But he carries memories not only from Nettuno and Monte Cassino, but also from a Berlin that was once a friendly place. He is able to tell jokes. He tells me the one about the four occupiers of Berlin who rule over a pond and each has his own goldfish. The Russian catches his goldfish and eats it up. The Frenchman catches his and throws it away after pulling off the beautiful fins. The American stuffs his and sends it home to the USA as a souvenir. The Englishman behaves most strangely of alclass="underline" he catches his fish, holds it in his hand and caresses it to death.
This freezing, starving, surreptitiously bargaining, dirty and immoral Berlin can still tell funny stories, can still be friendly enough to ask lonely strangers home to tea, still has such people as this Polish teacher and this soldier, who are certainly living unlawfully but who serve, paradoxically enough, as points of light in a great darkness, since they have sufficient courage to sink with their eyes open.
But as I take the oddly-smelling underground home in the evening there is a small drunk English soldier-boy sitting between two dissipated blondes whose rigid smiles look as if they belonged to the wrong faces. He caresses both of them but then when he leaves the train alone the smiles quickly drop from the faces, and the two girls set up a raw, humourless wrangle that lasts for over three stations and the air tingles with hysteria. Nothing could be less like goldfish than those two.
The Unwelcome
Nowadays goods trains generally have priority on German railways. The same people who bitterly claim that Germans have been degraded to a third-class people when the occupying powers have taken season tickets for several rows in the city theatre, sit in the ice-cold compartments of the shabby passenger trains and interpret the new train system symbolically. One must certainly learn to wait: certain kinds of goods train are considered more important than several fully loaded freezing passenger trains bulging with people and their newly filled or still empty potato-sacks.
But there are goods trains and goods trains. There are goods trains that are considered to be so insignificant that they are shunted into side-tracks at the junctions, forgotten or neglected and left to stand there for days on end until they are sent on. These trains usually arrive unannounced out of the night and are treated by dispatchers and authorities with the appropriate sort of reluctance that always meets the uninvited. In spite of that, the unwelcome goods trains continue, with embarrassing persistence, to reveal themselves like ghost-ships at the stations, and the railway staff continue to send them on when the line at some point is by chance open.
One can well understand this reluctance and hesitation on the part of the railway officials. The uninvited goods trains are hardly models of their kind; they are not even typical examples of German post-war rolling-stock. They consist of wagons which in normal times would go to the scrap-heap, but which are now coupled together and supplied with small informative signs saying: ‘Not watertight. Unsuitable for the transport of perishable goods.’ This means that the rain comes in through the roof and that the wagon can therefore be used only for the transport of goods which do not rust and in general will not suffer from being soaked through or which quite simply are thought to be so worthless that it would not matter if they really did come to harm — in other words, things not worth the effort of stealing and scarcely deserving the use of a goods train claiming respect and priority when its approach is signalled down the line.
In a cold grey downpour such a train is standing in a marshalling yard in Essen. It consists of nineteen wagons and has spent the whole week parked here in the rain. The engine was uncoupled, and the interest which usually greets the arrival of useful-looking goods trains has not been forthcoming in this case. And yet this abandoned, famished goods train contains something which ought to be of great interest to the city of Essen: two hundred citizens of Essen who have been evacuees in Bavaria since the first Allied blanket-bombing spread over the Ruhr and who have now returned in this train to their home city or rather to the station of their home city because they are not allowed to come further.
All Germans know that most of the larger German cities are subject to Zuzugsverbot, which means that travel within Germany is forbidden to the extent that while one is permitted to walk about among the ruins of any German city one chooses, it is none the less forbidden to look for work, to eat or to live there. The Bavarian authorities know that too, but their knowledge did not prevent them from evicting, at five days’ notice, the non-Bavarian evacuees who had been assigned to the unscathed Bavarian villages. The non-watertight goods trains are put together in Bavarian stations, the non-Bavarians are stuffed into the wagons, whose sole amenities consist of floor, roof and walls, and as soon as the line is clear the trains are sent off towards the north-west.
Fourteen days later a train reaches its destination, and its destination first does not know about its arrival, and then does not want to know. During the fourteen days in which the train was on its way its passengers were not furnished with any official possibility of being fed, but their home city shows a little goodwill in offering a plate of thin soup per day in a small shed at the side of the tracks.
It is embarrassing and highly unpleasant coming to such a place and feeling quite helpless. The main station-building vanished several years ago and twisted rails coil like snakes beyond the one track that has been put in order, and there the lonely goods train stands. The cracked platform has been made muddy by the endless rain. Some of the passengers wander up and down outside the wagons, whose doors are half open to the grey day. I have come here with a young medical officer whose painful duty it is to state that the inhabitants of the train are in a poor state of health and to tell them that unfortunately the city authorities can do nothing about their state of health.
His arrival however rouses vain hopes in the starving passengers. An old woman leans out over a rusty stove-pipe and calls us. It turns out she has a two-year-old granddaughter lying on a little bed in there in the darkness. Apart from when she coughs, the girl lies quite still. The poverty of the goods wagon: a ragged bed along one wall, a pile of potatoes tipped into a corner (the only provisions during this journey without a destination), a small heap of dirty straw in another corner, where three people sleep, and all muffled in the calm blue smoke from the ramshackle stove, which was rescued from one of Essen’s ruins. Here two families live, six people in all. There were eight of them to start with, but two hopped off somewhere along the way and never came back. Dr W. can of course lift the girl up and say how she is, he can carry her over to the light coming from the open flap of the stove and declare that immediate hospital treatment is needed urgently, but then he must also explain how there are no vacant places in the hospitals and how the city’s administrative bureaucracy is as usual considerably more slow-moving than death.