A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (21 page)

Gasping for breath, I proudly carry the bike upstairs, along with my load of coal. This time it’s the major who comes running down towards me. He’s all agitated, imagining his bike stolen and me who-knows-where. Meanwhile the Uzbek has drifted in as well. Right away the widow sends him to the pump with two buckets to get water for us. He trots off goodnaturedly; he’s become like part of the family.

I’m sun-drunk and exhilarated from riding fast. I feel more cheerful than I have in weeks, practically elated. On top of that the major has brought some Tokay wine. We drink it; I feel good, cosy as a cat. The major stayed till 5p.m.; after he left I felt rotten. I cried.

[Weeks later, scribbled in the margin, to be used by novelists: For three heartbeats her body became one with the unfamiliar body on top of her. Her nails dug into the stranger’s hair, she heard the cries coming from her own throat and the stranger’s voice whispering words she couldn’t understand. Fifteen minutes later she was all alone. The sunlight fell through the shattered panes in broad swathes. She stretched, enjoying the heaviness in her limbs, and brushed the tousled fringe back from her forehead. Suddenly she felt, with uncanny precision, a different hand burrowing into her hair, the hand of her lover, perhaps long dead. She felt something swelling, churning, erupting inside her. Tears came streaming out of her eyes. She tossed about, beat her fists against the cushions, bit her hands and arms until they bloomed red and blue with tiny tooth marks. She howled into the pillow and wanted to die.]

TUESDAY, 8 MAY 1945, WITH THE REST OF MONDAY

Evening came and we were all alone - Herr Pauli, the widow and I. The sun went down red - a repugnant image that reminded me of all the fires I’d seen over the past few years. The widow and I went to the little pond for some dirty washing water. (For drinking water a German still has to count on an hour’s wait.)

It might have been 8p.m. - we’re living without a clock because the one wrapped in a towel and hidden in the back of the chest keeps stopping. Things are quiet around the pond. The murky water is littered with bits of wood, old rags, and green park benches. We fill our buckets and trudge back, letting the cloudy liquid inside the third one slosh away as we carry it between us. Beside the rotting steps that lead up the grassy slope we see something, a shape on the ground - a person, a man, lying on his back in the grass, knees bent and pointing upward.

Is he sleeping? Yes, and very soundly, too: the man is dead. We both stand there gaping. His mouth is hanging open so wide you could stick your whole hand inside. His lips are blue, his nostrils waxen, caved in. He looks about fifty; dean-shaven, bald. Very proper appearance - a light grey suit with hand-knit grey socks and old-fashioned lace-up shoes that are polished and shiny. I touch his hands, which are splayed out on the lawn next to him; his fingers are crooked into claws, facing up. They feel lukewarm, far from the cold of rigor mortis. But that doesn’t mean anything since he’s been lying in the sun. There’s no pulse; the man is definitely dead. His body hasn’t been looted though; there’s a silver pin in his tie. We wonder whether we should check his vest for papers in case there are relatives to notify. It’s a creepy feeling, disturbing. We look around for people, but there’s no one in sight. I bound a few steps down the street and see a couple standing in a doorway; a young woman and a young man, and ask them both to please come with me, there’s a body lying over there. Reluctantly they follow me, pause beside the dead man a moment, don’t touch a thing. Finally they leave without a word. We stand there a little longer, at a loss, and then we leave as well. Our hearts are heavy. Nevertheless my eyes automatically register every little piece of wood, and just as mechanically, my hands stash them in the bag we’ve brought expressly for that purpose.

Just outside the door to our building we run into our old friend Curtainman Schmidt, together with our deserter. I’m astounded that these two have dared venture out onto the street. We tell them about the dead man, the widow imitating the position of his mouth. ‘Stroke,’ mumbles the ex-soldier. Should we all go to have another look?

‘I wouldn’t,’ says Curtainman Schmidt. ‘Next thing there’ll be something missing from his pockets and everyone’ll claim it was us. ‘ And then he says something that makes even us immediately forget about the dead man. ‘The Russians have all left.’ While we were getting water from the pond they moved out of our building and out of the block and drove off in the trucks. Curtainman Schmidt describes how well upholstered these trucks were, with mattress parts and sofa cushions from the abandoned apartments.

They’re gone! They’re all gone! We can hardly believe it. Out of some involuntarily reflex we look up the street, as if trucks had to be arriving any minute with new troops. But there is only silence - an eerie silence. No horses, no neighing, no roosters. Nothing left but horse manure, which the concierge’s younger daughter is already sweeping out of the hall. I look at the sixteen-year-old girl, up to now the only person I know who lost her virginity to the Russians. She has the same dumb, self-satisfied look she always had. I try to imagine how it would have been if my first experience had come in this way. But I stop myself - it’s unimaginable. One thing is for sure: if this were peacetime and a girl had been raped by some vagrant, there’d be the whole - peacetime hoopla of reporting the crime, taking the statement, questioning witnesses, arrest and confrontation, news reports and neighbourhood gossip - and the girl would have reacted differently, would have suffered a different kind of shock. But here we’re dealing with a collective experience, something foreseen and feared many times in advance, that happened to women right and left, all somehow part of the bargain. And this mass rape is something we are overcoming collectively as well. All the women help the other, by speaking about it, airing their pain and allowing others to air theirs and spit out what they’ve suffered. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that creatures more delicate than this cheeky Berlin girl won’t fall apart or suffer for the rest of their lives.

For the first time since 27 April we were able to lock the door to our building. And with that, unless new troops are housed here, we begin a new life.

All the same, at around 9p.m. someone called up for me. It was the Uzbek repeating my name over and over in his laboured voice (actually the Russified version of my name that the major bestowed on me). When I looked out, I saw him cursing and making threatening gestures at me and pointing at the locked door with great indignation. Well, my chubby friend, that won’t help you one bit. But I let him in, the major close at his heels, limping badly. It’s clear that the bicycling hasn’t helped his condition. Once again the widow fixed some compresses. His knee looks hugely swollen and dangerously red. I can’t imagine how anyone could bike, dance or climb stairs with that. They’re sturdy as horses, we can’t keep up.

A bad night with the feverish major. His hands were hot, his eyes bleary; he couldn’t sleep and kept me awake. Finally the new day dawned.

I escorted the major and his man downstairs and unlocked the door, which once again belongs to us. Afterwards we had a revolting job: the Uzbek evidently has some kind of dysentery, and sprayed the toilet, the wall and the floor tiles. I wiped it up with issues of a Nazi professional journal for pharmacists, and cleaned things as well as I could, using nearly all the water we brought from the pond yesterday evening. If only Herr Pauli knew, with his constant grooming, and his sissy manicures. and pedicures!

It’s Tuesday. Around 9a.m. the secret knock, which we still use even though there are no longer any more Russians in the house. It’s Frau Wendt, with the eczema; she’s heard a rumour that peace has been declared. The last of the uncoordinated German defence has been broken in the south and north. We have surrendered.

The widow and I breathe more easily. Good thing it happened so quickly. Herr Pauli is still cursing about the Volkssturm, all those people senselessly sent to die at the last moment, old, tired men just left there to bleed to death, helpless, with not even a rag to dress their wounds. Fractured bones jabbing out of civilian trousers, snow-white bodies heaped on stretchers, and bleeding in a steady drip, every trench and passageway blotted with slippery; lukewarm puddles of blood. No doubt about it: Pauli has been through a rough time. Which is why I think the neuralgia that’s kept him chained to his bed for over a week is half psychosomatic it’s a refuge, a retreat. He’s not the only man in the building with that kind of refuge. There’s the bookseller, for instance, with his Nazi party affiliation, and the deserter with his desertion, and any number of others with this or that Nazi past that makes them fear deportation or something else - they all have some excuse when it comes to fetching water or venturing out to perform some other task. And the women do their best to hide their men and protect them from the (angry enemy. After all, what more can the Russians do to us? They’ve already done everything.

So we put on our harness and pull. That’s logical enough. Nevertheless there’s something about this that bothers me. I often find myself thinking about what the fuss I used to make over the men on leave, how I pampered them, how much respect I showed them. And some of them had come from cities like Paris or Oslo - which were farther from the front than Berlin, where we were under constant bombardment. Or else they’d been in places where there was absolute peace, like Prague or Luxemburg. But even when they were coming from the front, until 1943 they always looked neat and well fed, unlike most of us today. And they loved to tell their stories which always involved exploits that showed them in a good light. We, on the other hand, will have to keep politely mum; each one of us will have to act as if she in particular was spared. Otherwise no man is going to want to touch us anymore. If at least we had a little decent soap! I have this constant craving to give my skin a thorough scrub - I’m convinced it would make me feel a little cleaner in my soul as well.

A good conversation in the afternoon that I want to record that as precisely as I can, I still have to mull it over. The hunchbacked chemist from the soft drink plant showed up again. I’d practically forgotten about him, although we often exchanged a few words down in the air-raid basement. Until recently he’d survived in a neighbouring basement that the Russians never discovered, but where he nevertheless heard all the latest news - particularly about women raped while getting water. One of the victims, a very shortsighted woman, lost her glasses in the struggle, so that she now staggers about completely helpless.

It turns out that the chemist is a ‘comrade’, meaning he was a member of the Communist Party until 1933. He once even spent three weeks with an Intourist Group travelling through the Soviet Union, and he understands a few words of Russian - none of which he admitted to me in the basement, any more than I told him about my own travels and language skills. The Third Reich cured us of that kind of hasty confidence. Still, I have to wonder: ‘So why didn’t you stand up and identify yourself to the Russians as a sympathizer?’

He looks at me, embarrassed. ‘I would have,’ he claims. ‘I just wanted to let the first wild days pass.’ And then he adds, ‘In the next day or so I’ll go down and report at the town hall. As soon as there are authorities in place I’ll put myself at their disposal.’

My own sense, which I didn’t share with him, is that the reason he didn’t come forward is because of his hunchback. With so much male fury seething all around, he would have felt doubly bitter about his deformity, which would have made him seem pitiful, half a man in the eyes of those strong barbarians. His head is set deep between his shoulders, he moves with difficulty. But his eyes are bright and intelligent, and he is very articulate.

‘So have you lost a little of your enthusiasm?’ I ask him. Are you disappointed in your comrades?’

‘Hardly,’ he says. ‘We shouldn’t look at what’s happened too personally, we shouldn’t be too narrow in our perspective. It’s a case of urges and instincts having been unleashed. A thirst for revenge, too. After all, we did a few things to them over there in their country. Now it’s time for change and introspection, for us as well as for them. Our old West is a world of yesterday. A new world is being born, the world of tomorrow, and it’s a painful birth. The Slavic nations are stepping onto the stage of world history, they’re young and full of unspent energy. The countries of Europe will blast open their borders and merge into larger regions. Just as Napoleon swept away all the little kingdoms and tiny fiefdoms, the victorious superpowers will do away with the nations and countries.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘you believe that Germany will become a part of the Soviet Union, a Soviet republic?’

‘That would be nice.’

‘Then they’ll take away our homeland and scatter us far and wide, to destroy our sense of nationhood.’

‘It’s quite possible that we Germans living today are really just a sacrifice, a kind of fertilizer, a means of transition. Maybe our best use is as skilled teachers. But no matter what the case, I think it’s up to each of us, even under these circumstances, to make our lives as meaningful as we can. No matter where we end up, we take ourselves.’

‘Even if it’s to Siberia?’

‘I have enough faith in myself that with a measure of goodwill I would be able to create a meaningful life even in Siberia.’

He certainly would, too, judging from his past performance: a hunchback, he still managed to hold a good job, as the head chemist of a large soft drink and mineral water plant. But is he physically up to what the future might demand of us? Are the rest of us up to it? He shrugs.

At times I think I could survive anything on earth, as long as it came from without and not from some devious trick of my own heart. I feel so burned up, I can’t imagine what could possibly move me today or excite me tomorrow. So if one has to go on living, it might, just as well be in some icy wasteland. The doctor and I shook hands, both feeling recharged by the conversation.