'I took my wife to see Homecoming at the weekend,' Beckmann said once they had turned the first corner, heading for the Ku'damm. 'You were very good.'
'Thank you,' Effi said. 'And the film?'
There was a short silence, as the driver arranged his thoughts. 'It was well done,' he said eventually. 'I can see why it won that prize at the Venice Film Festival. The story was...well, there wasn't much of a story, was there? Just a succession of terrible things happening one after the other. It was a bit...I suppose transparent is the word. The writer had his point to make, and everything was lined up so he could. But I guess when you work in the business you notice things like that. And it was certainly better than most. My wife loved it, though she was really upset that you were killed.'
'So was I,' Effi said lightly, although in fact she'd been rather glad. Her character, a German schoolteacher in the territories acquired by Poland in 1918, had succumbed to a stray Polish bullet only minutes before salvation arrived for her fellow Germans in the form of the invading Wehrmacht. She had hoped that her overblown martyrdom would further undermine the credibility, and propaganda value, of the film, but from what she could gather, Frau Beckmann was far more typical than her husband. According to John, acts of violence against Polish POW workers had risen markedly since the film's release a few weeks earlier.
'But she didn't think much of the lawyer,' Beckmann added. 'And when I told her Joachim Gottschalk had turned down the part she got all weepy. She still hasn't got over what happened to him.'
'Few of us have,' Effi admitted. 'Joschi' Gottschalk had committed suicide a couple of weeks earlier. He had been one of Germany's favourite leading men, particularly among female cinema-goers, and the Propaganda Ministry had been more than happy to bank his bulging box office receipts so long as he kept quiet about his Jewish wife and half-Jewish son. But Gottschalk had chosen to parade his wife before a social gathering of high-level Nazis, and Goebbels had blown his diminutive top. The actor had been ordered to get a divorce. When he refused, he was told that the family would be separated by force; his wife and child would be sent to the new concentration camp at Theresienstadt in the Sudetenland, he to the Eastern Front. Arriving at the film star's home to enforce this order, the Gestapo had found three dead bodies. Gottschalk had taken what seemed the only way out.
News of his fate had not been officially released, but as far as Effi could tell, every man, woman and child in Berlin knew what had happened, and many of the women were still in mourning. There had even been talk of a studio strike by his fellow professionals, but nothing had come of it. Effi hadn't particularly liked Gottschalk, but he'd been a wonderful actor, and his family's fate had offered a chilling reminder - if one was really needed - of the perils of saying no to the Nazi authorities.
'What are you shooting today?' Beckmann asked, interrupting her reverie. They were driving through the Grunewald now, following the red lights of another limousine down the long avenue of barely visible trees. A procession of stars, Effi thought dryly.
'We're re-shooting the interiors with Hans Roeder's replacement,' she said. 'There aren't many, and they decided it was easier to shoot them again with Heinz Hartmann than write the character out of those scenes which haven't been shot.' Hans Roeder had been one of the few Berliners killed in a British air raid that year, and only then by falling shrapnel from anti-aircraft fire. Unlike Gottschalk he had been unpopular, essentially talentless, and a ferocious Nazi. A Goebbels favourite.
How much longer, she asked herself. She had always loved acting, and over the years she'd gotten pretty damn good at it. Over the last ten years she'd done her share of propagandist films and stage shows - one of her and John's favourite pastimes had been ridiculing the stories the writers came up with - but she had also done work that she was proud of, in films and shows which weren't designed to canonize the Fuhrer or demonize the Jews, which did what she thought they were supposed to do, hold up a mirror to humanity, loving if possible, instructive if not.
But now there was only the propaganda, and today she would be back in the costume of a seventeenth-century Prussian countess, bravely resisting a Russian assault on Berlin. The moral of the film was clear enough: the writers had not burdened the story with any conflicting ideals. As far as she could tell, the main crime of the Russians - apart, of course, from their initial insolence in invading Germany - lay in their physiognomy. The casting director had scoured the acting profession for men with a Slavic turn of ugliness, and come up with more than enough to fill the screen.
All of which pleased her no end. Even Frau Beckmann would struggle to find this film convincing.
When his number 30 tram eventually hove into view, Russell noticed with some dismay that it was one of the older vehicles. More and more of these were being brought back from the breakers' yards to replace modern relatives now gathering rust in the depot for want of spare parts or a mechanic to fit them. They were certainly more beautiful - this one had exquisite porcelain lamps attached to its inner sides - but that was all that could be said for them. They were almost as slow as walking, and their lack of springs ensured that every bump in the track was experienced to the full. This particular one was packed, and despite the cold weather smelt as rank as yesterday's U-Bahn.
The passengers thinned out a bit on Tauenzien Strasse, and quite a lot more on Potsdamer Strasse, but there were still a lot standing when an obviously pregnant woman got on at Potsdamer Platz, the yellow star conspicuously sewn across the left breast of her rather threadbare coat. Russell watched the expressions of his fellow passengers, wishing he had a seat to give up. Many simply turned their heads, and most of those that didn't looked angry, as if they'd been insulted or threatened in some way. But not all. Much to Russell's surprise, a young German in an army uniform abruptly got to his feet and offered the Jewish woman his seat.
She tried to refuse, but he was having none of it, and, with a quick smile of gratitude, the woman sat herself down. The soldier then looked round at his fellow passengers, daring any of them to raise a protest. None did, at least verbally, leaving Russell to wonder what would happen if the woman's champion got off before she did. In that event, he decided, he would pick up the torch. He hadn't hit anyone in several years, but there was something about living in Hitler's Germany which cried out for that sort of release on a fairly regular basis.
In the event, his services were not required; both he and the woman got off at the Brandenburg Gate, she heading in the direction of the Reichstag, he down Unter den Linden, past the barely-functioning American Consulate and Goebbels' 'fumigated' Soviet Embassy, towards Kranzler's and what passed these days for a morning coffee. He bought a Volkischer Beobachter from the kiosk outside, took a window seat in the sparsely populated restaurant, and got out the appropriate pink, yellow and white ration sheets for his ersatz coffee, watered-down milk and real sugar. One of the ancient waiters eventually noticed him, lumbered over, and laboriously cut off the requisite stamps with the small pair of scissors which hung like a fob watch from the front of his waistcoat.
War speeded up the process of dying, Russell thought, but tended to slow down everything else.
He examined the front page of the Beobachter, and the black-rimmed photograph of Generaloberst Ernst Udet that filled most of it. Udet, the head of the Reich Air Ministry's development wing, had been killed the previous day while test-piloting a new German fighter.