A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (23 page)

I felt dizzy. I could literally feel the bruise swelling on my forehead. The fire was soon contained and smothered. I joined a group of people and, at first, couldn’t understand why they were cursing owner of the delicatessen in the ruined building. Then I learned the man had left some of his wine stores in the basement, which was partially intact. The Russians discovered the alcohol, or perhaps I should say they sniffed it out, and cleared it off the shelves, candles in hand. By accident a spark must have landed in some of the straw used for wrapping the bottles and that eventually led to the fire. According to one witness: ‘The boys were lying dead drunk in the gutter. With my own eyes I saw one of them who was still able to stand in his boots go down the row pulling watches off his comrades’ arms.’ General laughter.

Now I’m lying in bed, writing, cooling my bruise. For tomorrow we’re planning a trip all the way across Berlin to the Schöneberg district.

THURSDAY, 10 MAY 1945

The morning went by with housework, breaking wood, fetching water. The widow soaked her feet in water with baking soda after trying out various hairstyles to find the one that shows as little grey as possible. Finally at 3p.m. we were ready to set off on our first tour of the conquered city.

Poor words, you do not suffice.

We clambered past the cemetery in the Hasenheide park long, uniform rows of graves in the yellow sand from the last big air raid in March. The summer sun was scorching. The park itself was desolate. Our own troops had felled all the trees to have a clear field for shooting. The ground was scored with trenches strewn with rags, bottles, cans, wires, ammunition. Two Russians were sitting beside a girl on a bench. It’s rare to see one on his own; they probably feel safer in twos. We went on, through what were once heavily populated working-class streets. Now they seem so mute, the houses locked up and shut off from the world - you would think the ten thousand people who lived there had emigrated or were dead. No sound of man or beast, no car, radio or tram. Nothing but an oppressive silence broken only by our footsteps. If there are people inside the buildings watching us, they are doing so in secret. We don’t see any faces at the windows.

Onward to the edge of the Schöneberg district. We’ll soon find out whether we can continue, whether any of the bridges leading west over the S-Bahn survived intact. Some of the buildings have red flags, the first we’ve seen. Actually they’re more like flaglets, evidently cut from old Nazi flags -:-here and there you can still make out the line of a circle, where the white field containing the black swastika used to be; The little flags are neatly hemmed, undoubtedly by women’s hands. How could it be otherwise in our country?

All along the way we see debris left by the troops: gutted cars, burned-out tanks, battered gun-carriages. Occasional posters in Russian celebrating May Day, Stalin, the victory. Here, too, there are scarcely any people. Now and then some pitiful creature darts by - a man in shirt sleeves, a woman with dishevelled hair. No one pays us much attention. A woman passes us, barefoot and bedraggled. She answers our question - ‘Yes, the bridge is still there’ - and hurries away. Barefoot? In Berlin? I’ve never seen a woman in that condition before. The bridge is still blocked by a barricade of rubble; my heart is pounding as we slip through a gap.

Glaring sun. The bridge is deserted. We pause to look down at the railroad embankment, a jumble of tracks, strawcoloured in the sunlight, pockmarked with craters one yard deep. Pieces of rail wrenched high above the ground, upholstery and scraps of fabric streaming out of bombed sleepers and dining cars. The heat is stifling. The smell of fire hangs over the tracks. All around is desolation, a wasteland, not a breath of life. This is the carcass of Berlin.

On into Schöneberg. Here and there we see people in the doorways - a woman, a girl, their blank eyes staring into space, their features vapid and bloated. I can tell by looking that the war has only recently ended here. They still haven’t recovered from the shock; they’re still as numb as we were several days back.

We head down Potsdamer Strasse, past blackened offices, empty tenements, heaps of rubble.

A moving sight on one corner: two rickety old women standing in front of a pile of rubble so huge it towers. above them. They scratch at the refuse with a small shovel, load it onto a little cart. At that rate it will take them weeks to move the entire mountain. Their hands are knobby and gnarled, but perhaps they’ll finish the job.

Kleist Park is a wasteland with masses of rags, mattresses and cushions torn from cars lying under the arcades and piles of faeces everywhere, swarming with flies. Right in the middle stands the half-finished high-rise bunker, like a hedgehog surrounded by iron spikes, that was intended to shelter us from bombs in the seventh year of the war. Two civilians are yanking away at a stack of beams, one of them sawing the timbers into more manageable pieces. Everything belongs to everyone. The saw cuts through the silence with its pitiful rasp. Reflexively the widow and I drop our voices to a whisper. Our throats are parched - the dead city has taken our breath away. The air in the park is full of dust, all the trees are covered in white powder, riddled with bullet holes, badly wounded. A German shadow hurries past with a load of bedding. At the other end of the park we find a Russian grave surrounded by wire. Another set of gaudy red wooden uprights, and in the middle a flat granite slab bearing an inscription in lime-paint: here rest heroes who fell for the fatherland. The Russian word for hero is geroi. It sounds so Prussian.

Twenty minutes later we are in front of the house where the widow’s friends live. ‘He was in the same brotherhood as my husband,’ she says of the man, a lecturer in classical literature. The building looks completely dead, the front door boarded up with slats. As we search for the back entrance we run into a woman who has lifted her skirt and is taking care of her needs in the corner of the courtyard, completely unembarrassed. I’ve never seen that in Berlin before either, not so publicly. Finally we find the entrance, climb the two flights of stairs, knock and shout, the widow’s name as a password. Noises inside, steps and whispers, until they finally realize who it is. The door flies open, we embrace, I press my face against that of a stranger - after all, I’ve never seen these people before. First the wife, then her husband emerges, holding_ his hands out to us, asking us inside. The widow talks as if in a fever, her words a jumble. The other woman is talking as well and neither is listening. It takes a while before we’re seated in the apartment’s one inhabitable but very drafty room. We fish out the butter sandwiches we’ve brought along and offer them to the widow’s friends. They’re both amazed. They haven’t seen any bread, and the Russians didn’t leave any behind. In answer to the standard question, ‘How often did they... ?’ the lady of the house answers with a broad Bast Prussian accent, ‘Me? Only once, the first day. After that we locked ourselves down in the basement. We had a wash-boiler full of water.’ The conquerors reached the neighbourhood later and left earlier. Everything happened in a flash.

What are they living off? ‘We still have a sack of groats and a few potatoes. Oh, and our horse too!’

Horse? They laugh, and the woman explains with graphic gestures. While the German soldiers still controlled the street, someone came running into the basement with the good news that a horse had been killed, and in no time people were outside. The animal was still twitching and rolling its eyes as the first bread knives and penknives plunged into its body - all under fire, of course. Everyone sliced and dug at the first spot they found. When the classicist’s wife reached over towards some shimmering layers of yellow fat, someone rapped a knife handle across her fingers and said: ‘You! Stick to your own place!’ She managed to hack out a six-pound piece of meat. ‘We used the last of it to celebrate my birthday,’ she told us. ‘It tasted excellent. I had pickled it in what vinegar I had left.’

We wished her many happy returns. A bottle of Bordeaux appeared. We drank, raising our glasses to the wife. The widow talked about how she compares with a Ukrainian woman - we have lost all sense of moderation.

We said goodbye over and over. The classicist rummaged about the room, searching for something he could give us in exchange for the bread, but didn’t find anything.

Then we moved on to the next district, the Bayerisches Viertel, to look in on my friend Gisela. The streets were blocked with row after row of German automobiles, practically every one of them gutted. One barber had reopened his shop; a piece of paper advertised that he cut men’s hair and washed women’s, if they brought their own warm water. We actually saw a customer in the half-dark and a man jumping around with a pair of scissors. The first sign of life in the city carcass.

Up the stairs to Gisela’s. I knocked and called out, shaking with excitement. Once again we pressed our cheeks together, though the most we ever used to do was give each other’s hand a fun squeeze.

Gisela was not alone. She’s taken in two young girls, students sent by an acquaintance, refugees from Breslau. They sat mutely in a nearly empty room that had no windowpanes but nevertheless clean.

After the first eager exchanges a lull settled in the conversation. I could sense suffering in the air. Both young girls had black circles under their eyes. What they said sounded so hopeless, so bitter. At one point Gisela led me out to the balcony and whispered that both of them had been deflowered by the Russians, they’d had to withstand repeated rapes. Hertha, a blonde of twenty, has been having pains ever since and doesn’t know what to do. She cries a great deal, according to Gisela. There’s no word from her family; from Silesia they were scattered to the winds - who knows if they’re still alive. She clings to Gisela hysterically. The other one, delicate Brigitte, is nineteen and defends herself psychologically with an angry cynicism. She’s brimming with gall and hate: life is-filthy and all men are swine. She wants to go away, far away, some place where she won’t see that uniform, the mere sight of which makes her heart lose a beat.

Gisela herself came through unscathed, using a trick I learned about too late, unfortunately. Before she became an editor, she had had ambitions to be an actress and had taken courses in which she learned a little about stage make-up. In the basement she painted a wonderful old-lady’s mask on her face and tucked her hair under a handkerchief. When the Russians came in and spotted the two young students with their flashlights, they pushed Gisela, charcoal-wrinkles and all, back onto her bedding. ‘You, babushka, sleep.’ I couldn’t help laughing, but I immediately had to rein in my merriment - the two girls looked too glum, too bitter.

These girls have been forever deprived of love’s first fruits. Whoever begins with the last phase, and in such a wicked way, can no longer quiver with excitement at the very first touch. There’s one boy I’m thinking of, Paul was his name. He was seventeen, just like me, when he pushed me into the shadows of an unfamiliar entranceway on Ulmenstrasse. We had been to a school concert - Schubert, I think- and were still warmed by the music, though we had no idea what to say about it. Both of us were inexperienced, teeth pressed against teeth, and I waited faithfully for the wonder you’re supposed to feel when you kiss -until I realized that my hair had come undone. The hairslide I used to keep it up was gone.

In a panic I shook out my dress and collar. Paul felt around in the dark on the pavement. I helped him and our hands met and touched, but no longer with any warmth. We didn’t find the hairslide. I had probably lost it on the way. That was very annoying as my mother would notice right away; ask me what had happened, give me stem looks. And surely my face would betray what Paul and I had done in the entranceway. We parted in a hurry; suddenly at a loss, and never drew close to each other again. Even so, those shy minutes in the shadows have always kept their silver sheen.

We stayed at Gisela’s an hour and spent a long time saying goodbye. These days it’s so hard to separate from your friends; you never know whether and how you’ll see one another again. So much can happen. Nonetheless I invited Gisela to visit us the next day. The widow had invited her friends as well. We want to see that they get a crust of bread.

Back home, the same desolate, long, dusty way. It turned out that the trip really was too much for the widow. Her feet were aching, and we had to make frequent stops to rest on the kerb. I trudged along as if under a heavy load, the burdensome feeling that Berlin might never rise again, that we would remain rats in the rubble for the rest of our lives. For the first time I entertained the thought of leaving this city; of looking for bread and shelter elsewhere, some place where there’s air and open countryside.

In the park we rested on a bench. A young woman sitting next to us was taking a walk with· two small boys. A Russian came by and waved his inevitable companion over, saying to him in Russian, ‘Come here, there are some children. They’re the only ones you can talk to in this place.’ The mother glanced at us, anxious, and shrugged her shoulders. Sure enough a conversation developed between the men and the two little boys, whom the soldiers took on their knees and bounced to a Russian song.

Then one of the soldiers turned to me and said in the friendliest tone in the world, in Russian, ‘It’s all the same who sleeps with you. A cock’s a cock.’ (I’d learned that expression in all its country-boy crudeness from Anatol.) I had to strain to keep up my act of not understanding what he was saying - since that’s what he was counting on. So I just smiled, which made the two men roar with laughter. As you please!

Home with tired feet. Herr Pauli had posted himself in an armchair next to the window and was keeping an eye out for us. He refused to believe that in three hours of trekking about we’d run into only a few wandering Russians. He had imagined the centre of town would be abuzz with troops. After the fact we were surprised ourselves, and wondered where all the victors might have gone. We· gulped down the clean air of our corner, still shuddering at the thought of the dusty wasteland in Sch
ö
neberg.