Nightmare in Berlin (31 page)

Then came a stand-off period, when they no longer visited him and hardly gave him the time of day; after that, open war was declared on him. One day, a drunken lout had tried to climb over the garden railings and get into the house, whereupon the man declared that it could hardly come as a surprise to anyone who had observed how they shamelessly accosted or taunted every passing man from the balconies of their rooms, after the manner of whores, which of course is what most of them were. This had driven them to extremes of indignation at this liar and traitor. None of them had ever called out to anyone from their balcony — not so much as a word — and when the doctor gave instructions for the balcony doors to be locked anyway, they swore to the man that they would beat him one night until every bone in his body was broken!

Well, they hadn't beaten him. In fact, they had soon abandoned the silent treatment they gave him during the first few weeks following this incident. They were unreliable in everything — even their dislikes. They started speaking to him again, every now and then one of them would come and scrounge a cigarette, and if he couldn't spare a cigarette, then a couple of butt ends would do. But the man didn't forget so easily; he was finished with them for good, even if that meant casting out a few righteous souls for the sake of the many unrighteous.

The man finished his ablutions some time ago, and now he has tidied up his room a bit and locked the two keys to the toilet away in his wall closet. He grinned a little at the thought of Nurse Emma and Nurse Gertrud, who would soon be searching frantically for this key!

He now put on a coat, despite the blazing sun: he was ashamed to be seen on the street in his stained and crumpled suit. He went downstairs and made for the kitchen. In the kitchen, Mother Trüller and her acolytes were busy preparing lunch for the eighty or so residents. Her face was flushed a deep red; her stout chest, invariably covered by a yellow or lilac lace ruffle, heaved mightily as the heavy cooking pots became as light as feathers in her hands. She was working so hard that the sweat stood out on her brow in bright little beads, but she was in an excellent mood.

She smiled radiantly when she caught sight of the man, and said: ‘Mr. Doll, are you leaving so early? You want to sign out now, I expect?'

‘Yes, I'd like to sign out, Mother Trüller, I'm in good health, and ready to roam! And if the truck and trailer really do turn up today, I won't be back for lunch, either. I hope they do turn up.'

‘I hope so, for your sake. But I won't hear of you missing lunch. I'm glad to think I've put twenty pounds on you! If you're not back by three, I'll send out some lunch for you — and enough for the whole family!'

‘No, don't do that, Mother Trüller!' said the man. And in a quieter voice, so that the others wouldn't hear: ‘You know I'm already too deeply in debt to you. Who knows when I'll ever be able to pay it all off again!' And he sighed deeply.

‘Oh, you'll have paid it all off in six months!' announced Mother Trüller with a broad smile. ‘A man like you — healthy again, full of energy, all you have to do is sit down and start working, and you'll be rolling in money! So what is there to sigh about, on a nice summer's day like this?'

While she was administering this good-natured rebuke, she had shepherded Doll to the door of the building, stopping at the threshold that the girls and women who lived here were only allowed to cross when they were fully recovered. ‘Well, all the best, Mr. Doll! Maybe the truck really will come today. And if you should hear anything — you know what I mean — you'll let me know at once?'

‘But of course, Mother Trüller', replied Doll, and stepped out onto the street, into the brilliant sunshine.

That's her all over
, he said to himself as he walked on,
and she'll never change. She'll never forget to remind anyone leaving the house that they must tell her at once if they hear any news. It doesn't matter what they've been talking about — she always thinks to give them this reminder as a parting shot
.

In actual fact, she is always thinking about it, even when she's having a conversation about something completely different. The worry about her missing son is constantly eating away at her, underneath it all — the thought of him, her love for him. As the director and proprietor of this somewhat crazy hospital in Elsastrasse, an institution for women run by a woman, she thinks all the time only of her son, and thinks of herself only as his trustee. She has had no news of him for fifteen months now; Erdmann disappeared at the time of the battle for Berlin. He might have become a POW, or he might be lying somewhere on the streets of this vast sea of ruins, hit by a stray bullet, crushed under falling masonry, buried under rubble. And this might have happened a while back, fifteen months ago.

But his mother is still waiting for him, and she will carry on waiting if she has to, for years on end. And many other mothers and wives are waiting with her for their sons, their husbands — waiting for loved ones who may never return. Meanwhile this farmer's daughter from Hanover, who has worked her way up in the world by her own efforts, is tirelessly busy. She keeps her female patients, who are always up to mischief, on a tight leash, she works day and night, she has a friendly word for everyone, she has a sympathetic ear for everyone's troubles, and tries to help wherever she can. She really doesn't have time to feel depressed and fed up with work. With her plain, no-nonsense approach to life, she is an example to us all.

But she never forgets to say to anyone who is going out: ‘If you hear anything — about my son Erdmann, that is — you must let me know at once.'

The outside world, beyond the neighbouring streets where all her tradesmen live, is a remote, alien world for Mother Trüller, who is always in her little hospital, constantly under pressure to keep people fed and attend to their other basic bodily needs. For her, the big wide world, where miracles can happen every day, begins a leisurely five-minute walk away from her front door — a world where one might run into her missing son Erdmann in the street, and say to him: ‘Look here, Erdmann, it's high time you called in on your mother again. She's been waiting for you constantly, day and night, for fifteen months. She's still living at No. 10 Elsastrasse.'

Not that Erdmann is the kind of son who needs to be told to go and see his own mother. Quite the contrary: Erdmann would have got in touch with his mother without being told.

But the world out there, this vast, sprawling, chaotic Berlin, is so weird and wonderful, so full of wondrous things. The visitor might run across someone who has heard of the son, who has perhaps seen him somewhere. He might have heard news of the repatriation of POWs, the most astonishing and incredible rumours — Mother Trüller is ready to hear anything and everything. Her stout heart is not apt to flutter at the smallest thing; she is not that easily discouraged. Her hopes are kept alive by the story of one home-comer who turned up out of the blue.

So she waits and hopes. And waiting and hoping along with her are hundreds, thousands, of women that nobody talks about. In the war they were good enough to offer up their sons and husbands, and then quietly step into their shoes in the workplace. Now they are quietly waiting, getting on with their work, wherever they are. It's just that they say to anyone who is going out: ‘You will let me know if you hear anything, won't you?'

Good, capable, indestructible Mother Trüller, mother of the people, eternal mother, eternal believer, who waits and faints not, who seeks to help wherever she can …!

As he was thinking these thoughts, the man in the shabby, crumpled, stained clothes under the pale summer coat, which was not exactly in pristine condition itself, walked past quite a few pubs, where — as he very well knew — cigarettes could be bought on the black market. He was dying for a smoke, but he restrained himself. Dear American cigarettes costing eleven marks apiece had been off-limits for a long time now in the Doll household — as he had rightly predicted to his wife. But even so-called ‘cheap' German cigarettes at five marks each were strictly rationed to one a day, at most; one German cigarette only in the evening after supper, the smoke drawn deep into the lungs with sensuous relish — and then that was all for the next twenty-four hours.

All? Well, not quite. The Dolls were smokers; they would always be smokers. Even now, Doll had his pockets filled with something he could smoke. They collected the rose petals from Mother Trüller's garden — not just the ones that had fallen off, but the ones that were in full bloom as well — and dried them. They reasoned thus: ‘This rose will drop its petals in the next few hours anyway!' and then they would pluck them, stuff Doll's pockets with the petals, and turn his room into a drying and curing plant. So the room smelled constantly of roses. They had also smoked the leaves of cherry trees, and, when they were really desperate, even a vile-tasting blood-cleansing tea, from which they first had to pick out the juniper berries and stalks.

That's how frugal they had become, even the young wife, who was so determined never to deny herself anything. They once owned a car — one each, in fact — and money, and all the things that money can buy; such commodities, the good things of this life, were no problem for them. But now the mantra that they were a defeated nation had become engrained in their thinking. They laughed at their foul-smelling ‘tobacco', they were apt to cover up their stained clothing, but they were not ashamed any more.
What do people expect? We are a defeated nation, we have lost an all-out, total war, and now we are reduced to total beggars.
The suburb through which Doll was now walking had survived the war relatively unscathed. Here and there a roof had been blown in, even the odd house reduced completely to rubble, but by and large everything appeared intact and not too run-down amidst the abundant summer greenery. It was just the people on the streets: they could all have done with twenty pounds more weight on them, and fifty fewer wrinkles on their faces. They were still enduring unimaginable poverty, wearing rags instead of clothes, and shoes that were forever falling apart and being mended, held together with string, shoes that looked as if they had trailed the length and breadth of Europe.

For quite a while there was a young girl walking ahead of Doll, who had none of the charm that youth confers on even the most unprepossessing; she walked with difficulty on bloody, festering, dirty legs, as if barely dragging herself along. Her dress appeared to have been made from a couple of flour sacks. When the wearer made it, she still retained a little bit of hope, despite her wretched circumstances; she had added some crudely embroidered decorative trims and a little white collar, as if to say: ‘I'm young, you can still look at me, even if I am only wearing a dress made from old sacking!'

But all these additions were now looking battered and crumpled, and so dirty that the white collar looked almost black, or at any rate no lighter than the sacking. In the course of her long travels she had lost all hope, given up on herself a long time ago.
These people I see walking the streets with me can be divided into two groups
, thought Doll:
the ones who cannot hope, and the ones who dare not hope
.

But all of them, whichever group they belonged to, were carting something around with them: a few wretched twigs snapped off the trees; burst suitcases, whose contents one would really rather not know; handbags stuffed full; and mysterious briefcases whose locks had long since broken because they had been overfilled too often, and which were now held together with a piece of string.

We're all going to perish anyway
, thinks one group.
But first, let us eat our fill again! Eat until we are replete with good things, and contentment flows through our veins along with the bright blood, which has at last received some decent nutrients!

Meanwhile the expressions on the faces of the other group are saying:
We have to gather our strength for our daily toil, so that we can survive these times in one piece
. But all of them were scarred by the war, and all of them shared a tendency to caution, a lingering doubt:
Maybe something terrible will suddenly happen to us, too — so it's good to have had our hopes, at least!
Doll himself was moderately pessimistic: he didn't believe that he or his family would perish, but he thought it entirely possible that the future could get extremely unpleasant.

He now turned off from a main thoroughfare into a quiet, green side street lined with villas. But his access to this street was blocked by a red-and-white barrier pole, with a sentry box next to it painted in diagonal red-and-white stripes, where a Russian sentry and a German policeman were standing guard to ensure that no unauthorised persons entered this area, where only officers of the occupying power were allowed to live. Doll had the necessary identification papers on him, and was let through without difficulty, but he still didn't like going through this barrier. Anything that reminded him too much of the war and the military was unwelcome. The sense of impatience he felt at the sight of this red-and-white sentry box could be more or less summed up thus:
It's time to be done with this kind of business — not just here, but across the whole world!

At the same time, he knew very well that such feelings were foolish. All of this was still necessary: the world, and his fellow countrymen in particular, were not yet ready for a life without constant supervision, without the threat of force. For too long had reason been cast down from its throne. Especially as his dear fellow countrymen would doubtless smash each other's heads in if they were left unsupervised …