Once darkness had fallen, they changed clothes in the still-immaculate station toilets. They flushed as well as they looked, and Effi took the opportunity to dispose of her papers. She had grown rather fond of Erna von Freiwald, and felt slightly bereft at losing her.
Looking suitably distressed, they availed themselves of the free food on offer from the NSV – the National Socialist Welfare Agency – in the forecourt outside. Feeling unusually replete, they returned to a different end of the crowded platform, found a space for themselves, and settled down to wait. Rosa soon fell asleep, but Effi lay there, her head resting uncomfortably on the edge of her suitcase, listening to the conversations going on around her. There were two main themes – the horror of what had gone before, and the fear of what was to come. Rape and murder had apparently been commonplace in those parts of Germany now overrun by the Russians, and if the voices in the dark could be believed, the popular stories of crucifixions and other atrocities were not just the product of Goebbels’ imagination. When it came to the future, it was Berlin and its people that seemed to worry the refugees most. Everyone knew that all Berliners were liars and thieves, and the thought of living in this modern day Gomorrah seemed almost as frightening as what they’d already been through.
Many of the stories were hard to listen to, and Effi was glad that Rosa was sleeping. But she kept her own ears open. These were the experiences that her new fictional identity would remember, and she needed every conviction-enhancing detail she could get.
It was a few minutes after six, and the light of the unrisen sun was leaking into the eastern sky, when Paul let himself out of the Grunewald house, locked the front door and set off without a backward look for the West- kreuz S-Bahn station. He had spent most of the last forty-eight hours indoors, going out only once to eat at a restaurant in nearby Halensee. He had listened to the BBC for a couple of hours each evening, and heard nothing that really surprised him. He had used the daylight hours to tidy and clean, working on the house like a doctor feverishly intent on saving a patient. It had felt absurd – he was not really expecting to see the place again – but also deeply satisfying. One small part of his world was in order.
He was heading for Westkreuz because a clerk at the Halensee station had told him that Stadtbahn trains were still running out to the eastern suburb of Erkner, and that from there he could take a suburban train on to Fürstenwalde. He was leaving at first light in hope of getting across Berlin before the morning air raid, and because he suspected that his sixty-kilometre journey would take most of the day. Whatever fate and the Russians had in store for him, he had no intention of being shot for desertion.
Half an hour later he was part of the crowd waiting on the Westkreuz eastbound platform. He didn’t have long to wait. A train ran in, already full to bursting, and he joined those forcing themselves aboard. The closing doors almost took his head off, leaving him squeezed inside with his arms pinioned to his sides. Once turned around, face up against the glass, he found himself with a panoramic view of what the Western allies had done to Berlin. Street upon gap-toothed street, the demolished Zoo and the scoured Tiergarten, the hollowed-out dome of the Winter Garden. The train sat for a while beneath the skeletal roof of Friedrichstrasse Station, then ventured onwards, almost tiptoeing around the long elevated curve above Dircksen Strasse. Many got off at Alexanderplatz and Silesian Station, but even more seemed to get on. Where were they all going?
In the yards beyond Silesian Station two railway cranes were clearing away debris, and a crowd of prisoners was at work replacing damaged sections of track. Soon they were running under the Ringbahn tracks and into Köpenick, passing several allotments full of old men tending vegetables. Like the farmers a few miles further on, they knew that the war was about to roll over them, but no one was expecting the Russians to feed Berlin. Every potato and carrot would count.
The train terminated at Erkner. Alighting, Paul was almost bowled over by the smell of the soldiers crowding the platform. There was no train east for several hours, so he went in search of food. There was none at the station, and getting into town involved passing through a military police checkpoint. As an officer checked through his papers, Paul surveyed the wall behind him, which was plastered from floor to ceiling with identical posters threatening death for desertion.
Paul walked on into the town, which had clearly been bombed more than once. He eventually found a restaurant with something to offer, though it was only thin soup and stale bread. He ate it with a soldier’s gusto, and made his way back to the station, where the crowd seemed somewhat thinner. His train, when it came, was absurdly full, but once the MPs had cleared the front five carriages of civilians the soldiers were able to get on board, and they were soon steaming out across the orbital autobahn and into open country. There were watchers fore and aft looking out for Russian planes, but none put in an appearance, and in midafternoon they reached Fürstenwalde.
The service was continuing east, and those wanting the Seelow line had to change. As Paul jostled his way through the crowd his train pulled noisily away, revealing an equally packed westbound platform. A woman in a long black dress caught his eye, though he couldn’t have said why. She was talking to a small girl, and perhaps it was the way she inclined her head that made him think of Effi. At that moment, as if aware of his stare, she suddenly looked across at him, and almost broke into a smile.
And then a train slid between them, hiding her from view.
He told himself it couldn’t have been her. He had always assumed that she had left with his father, that the two of them had spent the last three years enjoying life in New York or Hollywood. But even if she’d never left Germany, what would she be doing in Fürstenwalde? And with a girl who was at least seven, and couldn’t be her daughter. And the woman had been too old – Effi couldn’t have aged that much in three and a half years. No, it had to be someone who looked like her. Had to be.
He searched the windows of the stationary train, but the face did not reappear. And when the train pulled out, she was not among the passengers who had failed to get aboard. He shook his head and made his way to the Oderbruch Railway platforms, which stood ominously empty. The line ran much too close to the current Russian positions for comfort, and its northern section had been closed several weeks before. A shuttle service to Seelow had survived, but this, as a harassed railway employee told him, was now only running under cover of darkness. He had six hours to wait.
Paul wandered out of the station, passing the spot where he and Ger- hart had sat the week before. He would have found it difficult then to imagine his friend dead; now he found it hard to imagine him alive. Life seem punctuated by implacable, irreversible events, like a series of doors clanging shut behind him in an endless straight corridor.
He walked on into town, hoping to pick up a lift, but nothing seemed to be going his way. He did find a relatively well-stocked shop, and exchanged his remaining ration coupons for a pound of sugar. Neumaier, who liked four spoonfuls in any hot drink, would be deep in his debt.
As he walked back outside, a water lorry drew up beside him and the driver, a Volkssturm man in his forties or fifties, leant out and asked directions for Seelow. ‘I’ll show you,’ Paul told him as he climbed aboard.