Nightmare in Berlin (20 page)

Having reflected on this news for a couple of days, Doll decided it was time for him to go and check on Alma for himself. And anyway, it would be very nice to see the look of joy and surprise on his young wife's face when her seriously ill husband suddenly appeared in the door of her room. Doll knew the privy councillor, and rightly doubted whether he would give him permission at this stage to go out on his own into the city. Doll was right in the middle of coming off his sleeping medication, and his moods had not yet quite stabilised; so the doctors were likely to suspect that if he went off into the city on his own, he would try to get hold of additional sedatives or other, more powerful drugs. That's what these doctors were like, or so their patients thought — and therefore Dr. Doll, too: always distrusting their patients, and never able to distinguish the goats from the sheep.

But if Doll was acquainted with the privy councillor and his suspicious ways, he was also familiar with the routines of the establishment, and it was around them that he now constructed his plan to slip out of the locked-down Men's Ward III for a city visit. After lunch, when one shift of nurses was going off for their break and the next shift was returning from theirs, in that moment of transition when nobody was really in charge on the ward, Doll audaciously claimed that someone had phoned through to say that he should report to the office briefly to discuss his account.

‘Well, you'd better get along to the office then!' said the male nurse with casual indifference, and unlocked the door for him.

Doll descended the stairs. The stairs reminded him that he was still very unsteady on his feet, and that this outing into the city was really quite a bold undertaking. Steps now struck him as a funny sort of arrangement; they were never quite where you expected them to be. His knees wobbled, and a light sweat immediately broke out on his brow. But he had successfully got past the first obstacle, and now it was time to tackle the second one, the main door out of the building. Sitting in the porter's lodge was a girl who was always alert, and she would never press the button to open the door without good reason.

Doll tapped on the window of the lodge and then said amiably to the face that peered out: ‘The privy councillor phoned through to the ward — he wants me to go and see him in the spa house.' (This was the main building of the sanatorium, where the privy councillor also resided.) ‘I'm Doll, by the way, from Men's Ward III upstairs.'

The girl nodded, then gave him a searching look. She said ‘I know', but this ‘I know' was in reference only to Doll's name and ward number.

Doll smiled again. ‘Maybe you should call the privy councillor', he said softly, ‘just to check that it's OK.'

But even before he finished the sentence she had made up her mind. She pressed the button, and the door lock buzzed. Doll said ‘Thanks!', and he was standing outside in the grounds. The gate to the grounds was unlocked, and beyond that the street was just a few steps away.

But he said to himself:
I mustn't go out into the street here — the girl might be watching me through the window. I must go through the grounds to the spa house, and use the exit there. She was a little bit suspicious, I thought. It's good that I'm only wearing my suit, and don't have my hat and coat. Nobody goes out dressed like this in late November. Lucky she doesn't know that I don't own a hat or coat!

He smiled to himself. He strolled through the grounds, hands in pockets, expecting any minute to run into a doctor or nurse who would not be taken in so easily. But he was in luck, and he managed to get past the main villa unchallenged and on to the street, where he now quickened his pace and headed off towards the underground station.

It was damned cold, though. Hopefully, Alma would soon be up and about, and the first thing they needed to do was to go back to the small town and fetch some different clothes more suited to the time of year. Well, no, the first thing was to sort out the business with their apartment and the ration cards. They had a lot to do before he could settle down to work in earnest again!

It was really too cold for the summer suit he was wearing, and he was glad when he was finally sitting in the underground train, where it was a little warmer. Now his teeth weren't chattering quite so much. People couldn't stop staring at him because he was so lightly clad, but let them take him for a fitness fanatic if they wanted to …

He sat on a bench, his hands between his knees, his face leaning forward slightly so that it stayed in the shadows. He felt dreadful, overcome with nausea, and the sweating he had experienced on the stairs started again. Those damned dried vegetables he'd had for lunch! It made him feel sick just to think of it. Had they gone through the whole war eating dried vegetables, just to have them dished up now in peacetime, with a helping of mouse droppings?!
It's outrageous — the noble privy councillor can't get rich quickly enough!

But a moment later, Doll had to admit that it was not the dried vegetables that had made him feel ill. He did get two second helpings from the male nurse Franz, after all — and the mouse droppings may not have been mouse droppings at all, but perhaps a bit of burnt turnip. The truth is, it was just too soon for this little jaunt. He wasn't properly well again yet. And it was too cold!

He felt this especially keenly as he made his way slowly from the last underground station to the hospital. It was not very far — a ten-minute walk normally — but today it took him half an hour. He was no longer feeling cheerful, and not especially looking forward to seeing Alma again. Tripping over a granite paving slab that had been dislodged by a bomb, all he could think about on the wearisome trek to the hospital was the even more wearisome return journey afterwards — that, and the reception that awaited him at the sanatorium. They'd be looking for him by now. The male nurse and the girl in the porter's lodge who had let him out would be getting it in the neck. There would be big trouble when he got back! Well, he was already in the little room, so they could hardly put him anywhere worse by way of punishment. Was this endless road going to go on forever? And then it began to drizzle — just the sort of weather you wanted for a little jaunt like this!

But when he was taken to Alma by one of those nuns whose smile, like something lifted from a painting of the Madonna, always has a mysteriously unsettling quality about it, and he found himself standing in the door of Alma's hospital room, and saw her lying there in bed — her back turned towards him, her face to the wall, probably sleeping — and when the lady in the other bed said: ‘Mrs. Doll, I think you have a visitor …', then all that he had been through was suddenly forgotten.

He placed a finger on his lips, took three quick steps forward to her bed, and said softly: ‘Alma! Alma! My very own Alma! My darling!'

She slowly turned over, and he could see that she literally doubted the evidence of her own eyes. But suddenly her face shone with joy, she beamed with delight, stretched out her arms towards him, and whispered: ‘Where have you suddenly sprung from? I thought you were in the sanatorium!'

He was already on his knees at her bedside, and threw his arms around her, his head resting against her breast. He smelt the old familiar scent of his wife, which he'd been deprived of for so long, and whispered: ‘I've run away from them, Alma! I was missing you so much, I couldn't stand it any more, so I just took off …'

What bliss to be together again, and to feel that there was a place for him somewhere in this icy-cold world of loneliness and destruction! Bliss and happiness, he had found them again — when for so long he had thought that he could never be happy again! To hear how she introduced him with pride to her roommate: ‘This is my husband!' And he knew he was just an ageing man in a crumpled and far from pristine summer suit, looking crumpled and anything but pristine himself. But she didn't see any of that, because she loved him, quite simply, and was blind to the rest.

Later on, he sat with her on the edge of the bed and they told each other what they had been doing — dear God, they had so much to tell! They talked about the doctors they had, and about the other patients and the nurses, and about the food, where Alma had had much better luck than him, the poor man! She made him eat some bread that she still had, and also the soup that she got instead of afternoon coffee. She waved some money in the air, and a nurse went off to fetch cigarettes. Oh yes, the money: the two-and-a-half thousand, the balance owing from Ben and the last money she had received, it was nearly all gone already. Money didn't last long with her. He needed a nightshirt, after all (five hundred marks!), she needed a nightshirt (seven hundred!) — and now these cigarettes!
The crooks around here charge her fifteen marks for American cigarettes! They know she is confined to a hospital bed, and can't do anything for herself.

But she laughed about it, laughed about the extortionate prices, laughed about the money that was draining away: live for today, that was her motto! It would all work out somehow. She was twenty-four years old, and somehow it had always worked out so far, something had always turned up. And something would turn up now! Once they were back together again, they would do things differently this time. They would fetch their belongings from the small town; they still owned many things of value, so they could live on their hump for a whole year. They would set up home in a lovely apartment, and she would open a shop on the Kurfürstendamm, selling men's ties. Only very expensive merchandise, mind you, preferably from England! She knew a thing or two about the business — she'd once worked in the most exclusive men's outfitters, as he surely remembered? She would see to it that she only attracted a clientele with real money; she had a nose for such things.

Meanwhile, while she was earning money in this way, he would write a great book that would make him a household name again overnight. But he wouldn't only write, he would also spend some of his time looking after their child, Petta. The child must get used to being around him a lot more; she must learn to love him properly, and never to think of him as her stepfather.

She chattered on. She saw no obstacles anywhere, and could only imagine everything turning out well. He listened to her, and nodded or looked reflective, but none of it signified. She was a child; today's plans would be forgotten tomorrow, and tomorrow there would be other plans, other hopes. He was happy to let her concoct the most outlandish plans, because they would never come to anything. And yet he felt himself infected by her spirit and energy, by this bubbling youthful vitality: breaking out of the sanatorium like this might have been premature, but it was a first independent step, a nod to the future!

So they sat and chatted tenderly about the past and the future, until the light was switched on in the room, which by now was in darkness, and a nun was standing in the doorway, her hand resting on the switch; as their startled faces quickly drew apart, she smiled her Madonna's smile and said: ‘Supper is about to be served! I think it's time for you to go home, Mr. Doll.'

They had been so absorbed in their long conversation that they were quite oblivious to everything around them. They hadn't noticed that the light was failing and that it had now become dark. The dance music on the radio had ended a long time ago, and now some man or other, speaking with a lisp, was giving a speech about the necessity for paying taxes. Even so, Doll didn't leave straightaway. He would be getting back to the sanatorium much too late now anyway. Maybe they wouldn't even save his supper for him, just to annoy him, but right now he couldn't care one way or the other.

The last cigarette, the very last one left, they now smoked together: ‘You take three puffs, then I'll take three, then you take the next three. But hey, no cheating in my favour — that was only two puffs!'

‘You must come back tomorrow!' insisted Alma as he was leaving.

‘Tomorrow?' he replied with a smile. ‘I doubt if I'll be able to come again tomorrow. They'll want to keep me under lock and key for a while as punishment.'

‘Oh, you'll find a way!' she opined confidently. ‘You can do anything if you put your mind to it.' He just smiled at this compliment. ‘And', she added quickly, ‘if you can't come tomorrow, then come in three or four days' time! Just keep thinking to yourself that I'm lying here just waiting for you to come.'

He kissed her. ‘Bye for now, my dear! As soon as I can!'

‘As soon as you can! Bye! Get back safely — oh you poor thing, you'll be frozen out there!'

And he was indeed chilled to the bone on the way home, and glad when he finally reached the sanatorium. From the moment he pressed the bell and the door lock started to buzz, all he could think about, despite the cold, was the reception that awaited him, and he fervently hoped they would go easy on him.

The girl who had opened the door for him, and who was now looking through the lodge window, was the same one who had opened up for him in the afternoon after he had told her a bare-faced lie. She was about to open up her little window, but then thought better of it. Doll climbed the stairs with a sigh of relief, and thought:
Well, I've got over the first hurdle …

But what am I like?
he thought to himself as he was going upstairs.
I'm acting as if I've been summoned to the headmaster's study for playing truant at school. Am I a boy of thirteen, or a man of fifty-two? It's exactly the same feeling I had back then, and now it even smells the same as it did in the Prinz Heinrich grammar school in Grunewaldstrasse! That tingling, expectant sensation of fear, that smell of dry, dead dust warmed by the sun … It's true: we never leave school for the rest of our lives. Not me at any rate. I am and always will be the old grammar-school boy, and I'm still doing the same stupid things I did back then!