Potsdam Station (9 page)

She ignored him. ‘Tell me about my father,’ she said with more than a hint of hostility.

‘What?’

‘I’ve hardly seen him since I was a child.’

‘Surely your mother…’

‘She knows him the way a wife knows her husband. The world outside – she doesn’t like to even think about it. When he leaves, it’s as if he was never there. Until he suddenly appears again, and then it’s as if he had never left. It drives me crazy.’ She put an arm through Russell’s. ‘So tell me.’

‘I don’t really know him. We met more than twenty years ago, here in Moscow. We were both in the First War…’ He paused to order his thoughts. ‘I think we both became communists because of what that war showed us about the way the world was run. But we didn’t get to know each other, not really. We were both involved in the same discussions and arguments about the Revolution, and where it should be headed. Your father was always full of passion,’ he added, remembering as he did so that Shchepkin had said the same of him in that Danzig hotel room six years earlier.

‘Passion?’ she murmured, as if trying the word on for size. They had reached the river, and the half-repaired roof of the Kiev Station was visible to the north. A line of empty barges was chugging downstream.

‘That’s how all this started,’ Russell said, as much to himself as to her. ‘Hard to believe now, perhaps. But twenty years is a long time. Once it becomes clear that your passion will also cause innocents to suffer, it begins to wear you down. First there’s good and evil, and then the good gets tarnished, and soon it’s only a lesser evil. Some quit at that point; they walk away, either physically or mentally. Those that don’t, it just gets harder. Your father kept going – that’s the one and only thing I really know about him.’

‘You make him sound like a hero,’ she said, with more than a trace of anger.

‘Do I? I don’t mean to. People like your father, they lock themselves in. Like a sailor who ties himself to a mast in a storm. It makes sense, but once you’re tied up there’s not much you can do for anyone else.’

‘Why did you really come looking for him?’

‘I need help, and he’s the only person I could think of.’

‘I don’t think he can help himself anymore,’ she said.

‘You think he’s been arrested?’

‘We don’t know, but we haven’t seen him for over year. I went down to Dzerzhinsky Street just before Christmas, and they said his whereabouts were unknown. I asked why they had stopped sending my mother his pay, and the man promised he would look into it. But we’ve heard nothing.’

‘If he was dead, they would have informed you,’ Russell said, with more conviction than he felt.

‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘You can take a tram from that stop over there,’ she said, pointing across the street. ‘It goes up Arbat and along Mokhavaya.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

As she turned to walk away, he asked what her name was.

‘Natasha,’ she said.

Emerging from the soldiers’ mess on Koppen Strasse, Paul Gehrts could see flames still leaping from the buildings further up the street. They had been hit a couple of hours earlier, courtesy of an idle or incompetent Allied bombardier. The rest of the bombs had fallen, to rather more relevant effect, in the marshalling yards beyond Silesian Station.

There was only one fire engine visible, and no sign of hoses in use. A couple of uniformed men were leaning against the engine, puffing on cigarettes, watching the dancing flames.

Paul walked the other way, towards Stralauer Platz, in hope of finding a tram to take him across the city. Four days had passed since Gerhart’s death. The loss had numbed him, but not for long – the shock had worn off all too quickly, and left him seething with an anger he could hardly contain. His sergeant, sensing that he might do something stupid, had persuaded battalion to let Paul take some of the leave he was owed.

Reaching the capital had taken all night, and his first sight of the city in over six months had been a sobering experience. The streets were like obstacle courses, and in places it seemed as if almost half the buildings had been damaged beyond repair. After Russia and Poland, he was used to ruins, but this was Berlin, his home and one of the world’s great cities. Germany’s heart, as his stepfather had used to say.

There were no trams in Stralauer Platz, but he managed to hitch a lift on an ammunition lorry heading for the Tiergarten. The city centre had taken several hits that morning, and blankets of smoke hung above the streets. Pedestrians crossed his line of vision, striding purposefully this way and that, as if they hadn’t noticed that their city was on fire.

As the lorry crossed the Schloss Brücke he saw two bodies floating in the Spree, both head-down with arms stretched forward, like frozen swimmers. As the driver wove his way down Unter Den Linden, he noticed that the Bristol Hotel had been almost razed to the ground – only the revolving doors remained, opening onto rubble. On the other side of the boulevard a line of identical posters bore the message: ‘Führer, We Thank You!’

The Brandenburg Gate loomed ahead, and he remembered his feeling of pride when German soldiers had paraded through the Arc de Tri-omphe in Paris. Five years ago. Five long years.

The Adlon Hotel loomed to the left, still intact, and now enclosed by a grim protective wall that reared up to the first floor balconies. He had a sudden memory of an afternoon there – he must have been about ten – sitting at the bar drinking Coca-Cola through a striped straw as his father interviewed someone on the other side of the room. It must have been the first time he drank the America soda – it had tasted so different, so good. He had wanted it to last forever.

He felt the familiar pang of resentment, the feeling of betrayal that he couldn’t really justify, but which rankled deep inside. His head told him – had always told him – that his father had done the right thing, but his heart could not believe it.

This, after all, was the father who had told him that being right was often the consolation prize.

The lorry was skirting the eastern end of the Tiergarten, which looked more like a desert than a park, an area of churned nothingness punctuated by bomb craters and the angular stumps of murdered trees. The Zoo Bunker gun and control towers loomed in the distance, like the gravestones of brother giants.

His lift was going no further, so Paul walked down Budapester Strasse towards the end of the Ku’damm. As a child, he had assumed that his father was just being loyal to the country of his birth, but later he had come to realise that his was not the case – his father felt no attachment to England either; his beliefs transcended nationality. Paul had a rough notion of what those beliefs were – a commitment to fairness, a hatred of prejudice? – but nothing more. It was never easy to work out what other people really believed in. Take Gerhart – he had hated the Nazis, but had he actually believed in anything? He was German through and through, so he must have believed in a different Germany. But different in what way?

What did he believe in himself, come to that? Nothing really. War took away the option of belief, left you too busy fighting for survival, your own and that of your comrades. Particularly a losing war.

But maybe that was the answer. It was how you fought that mattered – you had to fight and lose with honour, or defeat would leave you with nothing.

People like Gerhart would die. Thousands of them, millions of them. He couldn’t blame the Russian pilot who had dropped the bomb. He was just doing what he had to do; on another day he might have come down in flames.

But that Russian prisoner in Diedersdorf – he hadn’t deserved to die. His death had been a matter of convenience, nothing more. Killing him hadn’t been right.

He suddenly remembered something else his father had said. Paul had used to pester him about the First War, and every now and then his father had responded, usually in a vain attempt to undermine all the
Hitlerjugend
stuff which had swirled so happily around his young brain. ‘You can’t afford to turn off,’ Russell had said. ‘Both your mind and your emotions – you have to keep them turned on. You own what you do. You live with it. If you can, you use it to make yourself kinder or wiser or both. You make sense of it.’

His father had always believed in making sense of things. Paul could remember an exasperated Effi telling his father that some things would never make sense. Russell had laughed, and said she was living proof of her own argument.

Paul wondered where he was now. Where she was. He remembered the weeks after their disappearance, how he’d scanned all the newspapers he could get hold of, dreading news of their arrest or execution.

And that day in the spring when he’d finally discovered that his father was safe. The relief. The rage.

He skirted round what was left of the Memorial Church, and started up the Ku’damm. A gang of Russian women prisoners were hard at work clearing rubble, one sharing a joke with the German overseers, and the sidewalks were surprisingly crowded, mostly with tired-looking women. Several elderly couples were sitting outside one of the surviving cafés, and most seemed to be nursing their cups between both hands, as if the warmth mattered more than the drink.

The trams were still running in the West End, and one took him down Uhland to Berliner, where he caught another heading east to the Hohenzollerndamm S-Bahn station. Crossing the railway bridge, he forked right down Charlottenbrunner Strasse. Grunewald’s suburban avenues had lost many trees to fuel hunger, and several of the detached houses and villas had been damaged or destroyed by bombs, but an air of serene gentility lingered on. In one large garden an elderly man in a wing collar was digging a grave for a grey-haired corpse in a wheelbarrow. The legs dangling over the end were still stockinged, the feet encased in purple slippers. In another garden, two old women were absorbed in a game of croquet, the sharp crack of mallet on ball echoing down the empty avenue.

Paul finally reached Herbert Strasse, the northern section of which seemed almost intact. Reluctant to reach his destination, he slowed his pace, and even found himself hoping that the house would be gone, and Gerhart’s mother with it – with the father and brother already dead there would be no one left to inherit the grief.

But the neat little villa was still standing in its large tree-shaded garden, just as he remembered it from their school days. He opened the wooden gate, walked slowly up the path, and let the knocker fall.

She smiled when she saw it was him, but only for the briefest of moments. Realisation dawned, and her face seemed to collapse in front of him. ‘No,’ was all she said, without even a trace of conviction.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Her hand grasped at the door-jamb for support. She looked entreatingly at him, tears coursing down her cheeks. ‘Why?’

There was no answer to that, so he told her how: the Russian plane, the bomb, one moment there, the next moment gone. No time to think, no pain. The grave in the woods outside Diedersdorf. He would take her there after the war.

‘But why?’ she said again, this time with anger. ‘Why are you still fighting? Everyone knows the war is lost. Why don’t you just say no?’

There was no answer to that either, or none that would help. Why were they still fighting? For each other. And because someone would shoot them if they refused. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he found to say. ‘I loved him too,’ he added simply.

She shut her eyes, reached for the door like a blind woman, and closed it in his face.

He stared at it for a few seconds, then turned away. Back on the street he took out the family photograph which Gerhart had always carried. He had meant it to give it her, but it would have been like slapping her in the face with all she had lost. He would bring it round later. If there was a later.

His own house, the one he and his step-sisters had inherited, was less than a kilometre away. He hadn’t intended to go there, but he found himself walking that way, drawn by the need for solitude to the only private space that was available to him.

The key felt strange in his hand as he opened the front door. He half expected to find the place full of refugees, but privilege was obviously still able to exercise its malign protective spell – those members of the Grunewald rich now hiding in the countryside would be expecting to find their homes the way they left them when peace made it safe for them to return.

The house had been empty for almost a year, since his parents’ death in the car crash. By then permission to drive a private car had been granted to very few, and his stepfather would have appreciated the irony of it – death by privilege. His mother would not have been so amused. Why, he wondered, had she married two men whose sense of humour so exasperated her?

The rooms smelt stale, and looked, for some reason, like one of those film sets he had seen when Effi gave him a tour of Babelsberg. Uncle Thomas had written to say he would look after the place, but had probably been called up to the Volkssturm not long after that. He might be dead by now.

On impulse, Paul unhooked the telephone, and much to his surprise, it still worked. He looked up Uncle Thomas’s number in the book on the side table, and dialled it. He could picture it ringing in the hall of the house in Dahlem, but no one answered.

He went upstairs to his old room. It was as he’d left it, a shrine to his childhood, lined with maps and pictures of his boyhood heroes: Ernst Udet performing aerial acrobatics at the Berlin Olympics, Rudolf Caracciola beside his Silver Arrow at Monaco, Max Schmeling after defeating Joe Louis.