He stared out of the window at the empty square. It was only seven-thirty in the evening, but the city already seemed asleep. He had meant to check in at the American Embassy the moment he arrived, but tomorrow morning would do – he didn’t think the NKVD would have gone through all the rigmarole of settling him into a hotel if they planned an early hours arrest.
Dinner, he decided, and made his way down to the cavernous, ornate restaurant room. A few Russians were dining at two of the tables, but otherwise it was empty. There was only one meal on the menu, and by the time it eventually arrived, he was drunk enough not to notice the taste.
The tram that limped to a halt at the stop on Schloss Strasse had at least one seriously damaged wheel, but Effi and her fellow would-be travellers were hardly spoilt for choice. The wide avenue stretched emptily away to both east and west, offering the sort of pre-industrial calm that earlier generations of Berliners had deemed lost for ever. Getting it back had, of course, proved rather costly – most of the grand terraced houses were now detached or semi-detached, and the fires ignited by the latest raid were still smudging most of the sky with their smoke. It was almost four in the afternoon, and the city was making the most of the several hours’ breathing space which the RAF and USAF usually allowed between one’s departure and the other’s arrival.
The tram started off, bumping noisily along the rails as it headed north towards the Schloss Brücke. Four out of five passengers were women, which Effi assumed was a fair reflection of the city’s population in April 1945. Most of the children had been sent to the country, and most of the men had been sent into battle. Only those over forty-five remained in the battered city, and there were rumours that all under sixty would soon be marched to the various fronts. The Russians had been on the eastern bank of the Oder River – little more than sixty kilometres from Berlin – for almost three months now, and a resumption of their westerly progress was daily anticipated. The Americans, approaching the Elbe River, were not that much further away, but only wishful thinkers and supreme optimists expected them to reach Berlin ahead of the dreaded Red Army. Another month, Effi thought, maybe two. And then, one way or another, everything would change.
The tram was grinding its way around the bend into Alt Moabit, and she had a distant glimpse of the synagogue on Levetzow Strasse from which so many Jews had been sent to the east. Few of Effi’s gentile acquaintances mentioned Berlin’s Jews anymore – it was almost as if they had never existed. Goebbels had even stopped blaming them for all the Reich’s misfortunes.
The star-shaped Moabit Prison loomed on the left, and the tram swung left onto Invaliden Strasse. Up ahead, smoke seemed to be rising through the shattered roof of Lehrter Station, but it proved an illusion – as the road arched over the station throat she could see, across the Humboldt Harbour, several fires raging among the buildings of the Charité Hospital. The red-on-white crosses adorning the tiled roofs might just as well have been targets.
Five minutes later the tram reached Stettin Station. Effi hurried in through the archway, half expecting the worst. If there were no trains to the suburbs before the usual evening air raid, and she couldn’t get out to the rendezvous point, then her fugitives would be left in limbo, and those who had risked life and limb bringing them out of Berlin would have to take them back. She offered a silent prayer to whatever gods were looking after the Reichsbahn and stared up at the still-functioning departure boards.
There were no announcements of delays or cancellations, and the next train for Frohnau was allegedly leaving in five minutes.
It left in fifteen, which was good enough. Given the almost non-stop bombing, it seemed amazing that so many things continued to work. According to Ali the public library on Bismarck Strasse was still lending books, and when the wind was in the right direction they could smell the hops fermenting in Moabit’s breweries. And the police showed no signs of loosening their grip. If anything, there seemed to be more of them, all scouring the streets for any male with four limbs who hadn’t had his turn in the Wehrmacht’s mincing machine.
As they pulled out past the freight yards Effi found herself re-living that night in December 1941, waiting for hours in the freezing boxcar, then rattling out of Berlin with bombs falling all around them. It seemed so long ago.
He seemed so long ago.
But assuming he was still alive, assuming he still loved her, assuming she could survive for however long the Russians were going to take… then maybe…
She looked round at her fellow-passengers. Again they were mostly women, all with that look of mental exhaustion that even the best-fed Berliners habitually wore on their faces. More than three years of shortages and almost two of regular bombings had worn the city out. Everyone wanted it over, everyone but him and his desperate disciples. Gröfaz, as people sarcastically called him, an abbreviation of Grössler Feldherr aller Zeiten, the ‘greatest general of all time’.
The train was passing under the Ringbahn, and a decrepit-looking steam engine was towing a rail-mounted flak gun along the elevated line, pumping more smoke into an already sated sky. Several flakhelfer were perched on the gun’s mounting, and none of them looked older than fifteen. Two years ago Effi had seen John’s son Paul in a flakhelfer uniform, but he would be eighteen by now, and probably in the regular forces. If he was still alive.
She shook her head to dismiss the thought, and turned her attention to the here and now. Most of the other passengers were clasping newspapers, but no one was reading – the chronic shortage of toilet paper had obviously reached the suburbs. One woman caught Effi looking at her, and stared back, but Effi resisted the impulse to smile – her smile, as John had once told her, was her most recognisable feature. Not that she expected to be recognised, not anymore. These days she always wore glasses, and the grey streaks in her frumpily cut black hair were depressingly authentic. Sitting and walking like a person fifteen years older than her actual age had become so ingrained over the last three years that she sometimes wondered if the process was reversible.
The train had stopped, and the view through the window of unbroken houses and trees was a reminder of the past. It was not representative, of course – the moment the train restarted more bombed-out buildings and charred trees swam into view, and a group of people could be seen gathered, heads bowed, around an improvised grave in someone’s back garden. The damage was less widespread away from the city centre, but still considerable. If the Western allies were targeting anything more precise than Berlin, then their aim was poor.
The light was fading by the time the train reached Frohnau. She resisted the impulse to hurry out of the terminus, and took her time walking across the mostly intact town square. The local Rathaus had lost an end wall to a bomb, but lights were burning in the rest of the building, and people were sitting, wrapped in their winter coats, outside the café restaurant next door. Most of their ersatz coffees looked untouched – maintaining the ritual was clearly more important than the actual drink. The familiar smell of kohlrabi soup drifted out of the open doorway.
There were no uniforms in sight. Effi headed up the street opposite the station, as she and Ali had done on the previous Saturday. They had been carrying a picnic basket on that occasion, but today she was only toting a small bag of extra rations. If she was stopped, these were for an imaginary friend, the one who owned the abandoned lakeside cottage that they had stumbled across at the weekend. As explanations went it was rather thin, but much better than nothing.