For all that, he felt reluctant to leave. He couldn’t shake the thought that he might have been watched, that someone had seen him bury something, and was only waiting out there in the dark for the chance to dig it up. He knew it was crazy, but there it was. And as he sat there, Russell remembered Mordechai Kohn, the death camp escapee he had interviewed a year or so after the war. Mordechai’s survival tip was to imagine how things might pan out, like a novelist unfolding a plot in his mind, and then take what steps seemed appropriate to help himself and hinder his enemy. ‘A simple example,’ he told Russell, ‘you imagine people coming to arrest you. What will you do when they knock on your door? Well, the first thing you do is head for a back window. And if it’s already open, that will save you precious seconds. So you go and open the window now, before they knock on your door.’
Sitting against the tree in the rapidly-darkening forest, Russell tried to follow the young Jew’s advice. He imagined what might happen, and what he could do about it. One thing came to mind.
It became apparent next morning that their days of waiting were also likely to decide the fate of the city. The morning papers bore out Shchepkin’s predictions of the previous day, and later that morning an RIAS news reporter announced that General Clay had rejected ‘in toto Soviet claims to the city of Berlin’. This was followed up midafternoon by the much-anticipated news that the Western currency reform would be extended to include Berlin. Details would be broadcast at eight that evening.
Like most of the city’s inhabitants, Russell, Effi, and Rosa tuned in to hear them. From midnight on Friday, the old Reichsmarks could be exchanged for new Deutschmarks, on a one-to-one basis for the first sixty, and at a rapidly declining rate thereafter.
‘The shops will be packed for the next two days,’ Effi said.
‘Those that are open.’
The three of them went down to Ku’damm to see what was happening, and found the pavements jammed with people trying to spend their Reichsmarks on goods or extravagant dining. But most of the shops had shut early, and several restaurants had already altered their menus, offering only food that would spoil, and hoarding the rest until the change had been made.
‘Have we got any bills to pay?’ Russell asked Effi on the way home. ‘Because now’s the time to pay them.’
Next morning they woke to a steady drizzle, and the news that the Soviets had closed the road and railways between the Western Zones and Berlin. Some people, though, were already fighting back. KPD demonstrators had been thwarted the previous evening when they’d to break up a City Assembly meeting, and the latter had then decided by a large majority to allow competition between the new Western currency and its Soviet counterpart.
Another hour, and RIAS was reporting sporadic power failures in all three Western sectors of the city. Asked to explain these interruptions in the electricity supply, a Soviet spokesmen claimed serious ‘technical difficulties’ were affecting one of the generating stations in their sector.
Soon after that, Thomas phoned. There was going to be a mass meeting at the Hertha stadium that afternoon-Russell was welcome to a lift if he wanted to come. He did. An hour or so later, when Thomas arrived at the door, the American garrison commander Frank Howley was spitting defiance on the wireless. After promising Berliners that the American people wouldn’t let them starve, he warned the Soviets not to trespass in his sector. ‘We are ready for you-and if the day comes, believe me, many a comrade will go across the golden Volga.’
‘The Chinese curse,’ Thomas said, as they both walked down to the car, ‘to live in interesting times.’
To Russell’s surprise, the Plumpe stadium was packed to capacity, something it had never quite managed in all his and Paul’s years of watching Hertha. It had been a day of ominous portents, but the mood among the crowd was unmistakably upbeat. Hardship might be in prospect, but so was real change, and after the past five years that was a deal that most Berliners were more than willing to make. As Ernst Reuter, the main speaker, explained: It was about systems, not money-while the latter could conceivably be integrated, the former could not. The choice was between a Soviet Berlin and a divided Berlin-there was no third option.
Russell knew he was right, but still felt saddened at the thought of his home being sundered in two.
For Thomas, though, the glass was half-full. ‘Bastards have been running our Berlin for fifteen years. Better to get half of it back than none.’
Gerhard Strohm couldn’t remember a morning when he’d felt less inclined to go to work. He had arrived home the previous evening to a long tirade from Annaliese about conditions at the hospital; the electricity supply cuts, which everyone was quite rightly blaming on the Soviets, had necessitated a reduction in surgery hours. What sort of people, she raged, used the sick as a weapon to blackmail their enemies?
Strohm had had no answer for her then, and walking to work had none for himself. He still found it hard to believe that the Soviets intended starving the city into submission, still hoped that it was all a big bluff in extremely bad taste. As if to remind him of what was at stake, yet another American C-47 roared in across the rooftops a few streets behind him on its approach to Tempelhof. If it was a bluff, it looked as if the Allies were preparing to call it.
He didn’t think the morning could get any worse, but he was wrong. A note calling him upstairs was waiting on his desk, and Strohm knew he was in trouble when Marohn mentioned ‘the business’ at Rummelsburg. ‘You did well there,’ his boss told him. ‘So now that a similar problem has arisen again, well, the people upstairs are hoping you can repeat the trick.’
Strohm didn’t like the suggestion that he’d ‘tricked’ the workers at the railway repair shops-and, by implication, had ‘tricked’ Utermann into taking his own life-but he let it go. Worse seemed likely to follow, and Marohn was only the messenger, and so Strohm simply nodded his acquiescence, and waited for the explanation.
The ‘similar problem’ had arisen in Aue, a small town in Saxony. Railways workers there were refusing to load ore from Wismut’s uranium mines, and the Soviet authorities were hoping that their German comrades could straighten the situation out. If not, they would have to take ‘administrative measures’.
‘Why are the workers refusing?’ Strohm asked.
‘You’ll have to ask Manfred Pieck-he’s the local union leader.’
‘No relation to Wilhelm, I assume.’ Wilhelm Pieck was second only to Ulbricht in the KPD hierarchy.
‘No, but he is a Party veteran. Joined in 1926. He ran the underground in Chemnitz during the war.’
Another Utermann, Strohm thought, his heart sinking at the prospect.
‘I’ve arranged a car for you,’ Marohn was saying, as if that might make the job palatable. ‘With a chauffeur, of course.’
‘I can drive myself,’ Strohm retorted. ‘But why don’t I just take a train? If I arrive like visiting royalty no one’ll listen to me.’
‘The Soviets will, and that’s the point. They’ll only treat you as an equal if you look like one.’
Strohm knew when he was beaten. ‘All right. But I will drive myself.’
Which was easier said than done, of course. He had learned to drive at university almost twenty years earlier, but had hardly been behind a steering wheel since. People said you never forgot, but his first few miles in the shiny Horch 851 were a painful lesson in remembering. The watching faces on the pavement, he noticed, seemed universally contemptuous, though whether of his driving or his privileged status he couldn’t be sure.
According to Marohn, the autobahn would ‘whisk’ him all the way to Chemnitz, but his boss obviously hadn’t been down it recently. There were pot holes everywhere, and huge cracks in the concrete hosting columns of swaying weeds. On the bright side, it was virtually empty, and after a while Strohm began to enjoy himself, slaloming south across the crumbling surface. He loved trains, and the chance they gave you to sit by the window and watch the world go by; but there was something just as liberating about sitting alone in a car, controlling your own direction and speed. An illusion of independence perhaps, but an intoxicating one nonetheless.