But the neat little villa was still standing in its large tree-shaded garden, just as he remembered it from their school days. He opened the wooden gate, walked slowly up the path, and let the knocker fall.
She smiled when she saw it was him, but only for the briefest of moments. Realisation dawned, and her face seemed to collapse in front of him. ‘No,’ was all she said, without even a trace of conviction.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Her hand grasped at the door-jamb for support. She looked entreatingly at him, tears coursing down her cheeks. ‘Why?’
There was no answer to that, so he told her how: the Russian plane, the bomb, one moment there, the next moment gone. No time to think, no pain. The grave in the woods outside Diedersdorf. He would take her there after the war.
‘But why?’ she said again, this time with anger. ‘Why are you still fighting? Everyone knows the war is lost. Why don’t you just say no?’
There was no answer to that either, or none that would help. Why were they still fighting? For each other. And because someone would shoot them if they refused. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he found to say. ‘I loved him too,’ he added simply.
She shut her eyes, reached for the door like a blind woman, and closed it in his face.
He stared at it for a few seconds, then turned away. Back on the street he took out the family photograph which Gerhart had always carried. He had meant it to give it her, but it would have been like slapping her in the face with all she had lost. He would bring it round later. If there was a later.
His own house, the one he and his step-sisters had inherited, was less than a kilometre away. He hadn’t intended to go there, but he found himself walking that way, drawn by the need for solitude to the only private space that was available to him.
The key felt strange in his hand as he opened the front door. He half expected to find the place full of refugees, but privilege was obviously still able to exercise its malign protective spell – those members of the Grunewald rich now hiding in the countryside would be expecting to find their homes the way they left them when peace made it safe for them to return.
The house had been empty for almost a year, since his parents’ death in the car crash. By then permission to drive a private car had been granted to very few, and his stepfather would have appreciated the irony of it – death by privilege. His mother would not have been so amused. Why, he wondered, had she married two men whose sense of humour so exasperated her?
The rooms smelt stale, and looked, for some reason, like one of those film sets he had seen when Effi gave him a tour of Babelsberg. Uncle Thomas had written to say he would look after the place, but had probably been called up to the Volkssturm not long after that. He might be dead by now.
On impulse, Paul unhooked the telephone, and much to his surprise, it still worked. He looked up Uncle Thomas’s number in the book on the side table, and dialled it. He could picture it ringing in the hall of the house in Dahlem, but no one answered.
He went upstairs to his old room. It was as he’d left it, a shrine to his childhood, lined with maps and pictures of his boyhood heroes: Ernst Udet performing aerial acrobatics at the Berlin Olympics, Rudolf Caracciola beside his Silver Arrow at Monaco, Max Schmeling after defeating Joe Louis.
More usefully, he found a drawer-full of socks and underwear that might still fit him.
The bed was only slightly damp, and almost obscenely comfortable. He lay on his back, staring up at the pictures on the walls, and wondered what had happened to the boy who put them there. Several hours later he was woken by the sirens, and chose to ignore them. There were worse things in life than a bomb through the ceiling.
The ghost of a star
April 10 – 13
They came in the night, as they always did. A half-heard key in the door, a rough hand on the shoulder, a succession of barked orders – ‘get up, get dressed, get a move on.’ Then the back staircase, the Black Maria parked beside the rubbish bins, the short drive up an empty Mokhavaya Street, the archway and gates swallowing him up.
He was bundled in through a side door, walked down a blue-lit corridor and into a yellow-lit reception room, planted on a stool in front of a desk. His personal details were copied from his passport and other papers onto a new form, and he was asked, somewhat bizarrely, whether or not he smoked. When he asked the official across the desk the reason for his arrest he was given nothing more than an if-you-don’t-know-I’m-not-going-to-tell-you smirk.
Registration complete, he was hustled along barely lit corridors and up barely lit stairs to his new quarters. His escort shoved him in, pulled the door shut, and flicked up the metal flap to make sure he was still there. It was a six-by-four-foot cell. The bed took up half the available space, a battered tin bucket sat in the far corner. He was not going to get much exercise.
Nor much sleep if the light bulb hanging from the ceiling was always on, which it doubtless was. He could see other yellow lights through the window, which suggested his cell overlooked the inner courtyard, but what the hell did that matter? The quality of the view was hardly a priority.
He lay down on the bed, wondering if the solo cell boded well or ill. Privacy was nice, but so was someone to talk to. And he would have liked someone other than the authorities to know he was there.
He should be terrified, he thought, but all he could feel was a damning sense of failure.
He had let Effi and Paul down, behaved like an idiot. Making a pain in the arse of himself hadn’t worked in the US or Britain, where the only sanction was refusing his calls. So why in God’s name had he expected it to work here, where swatting away human pests was almost a national sport?
Stupid, stupid.
But this was no time for self-flagellation. If there was any flagellating to do the Soviet authorities would be only too happy to oblige. He needed to calm down, keep his wits about him. ‘Sobriety breeds success’, as one puffed-up schoolmaster had written on one of his essays, the day before Archduke Franz Ferdinand bit the dust.
He wondered whether someone had overheard him at the Shchepkins’ door, and reported him for breaching the ‘general rules governing conversations between foreigners and Soviet citizens?’ He hoped not – Shchepkin’s wife and daughter would also be under arrest if that was the case – but it seemed the logical explanation. Of course, if Shchepkin himself had been carted away on some ludicrous pretext of consorting with foreign agents, then a foreigner trying to contact him would be a dream come true to those who’d done the carting. It would provide them with ‘evidence’ that Shchepkin was in touch with ‘foreign powers’. The irony was, the only real spying Russell had ever done had been for the Soviet Union. His work for the Americans had involved him in nothing more dangerous than lining up potential contacts.
His request to join the Red Army’s triumphal progress could hardly have given them reason to arrest him. They only had to say no, as indeed they had. And if they wanted to punish him for chutzpah, then a swift deportation would surely have been more than sufficient.
So why was he here? He supposed they would tell him eventually, always assuming there was a reason.
In Berlin, Effi woke soon after eight with the sun in her eyes – it was reflecting off an unbroken window on the other side of Bismarck Strasse. She examined the sleeping face of the child beside her for traces of the nightmare which had woken them both a few hours earlier, but there were none. The face was almost serene.