One more person came to say goodbye: Andrei, the schoolteacher from Anatol’s group with the icy blue eyes. He sat with me a while at the table, talked about politics in his quiet, composed, voice, gave me a lecture full of words like
sotsialisticheski, kapitalisticheski, ekonomicheski
. I listened quietly, mending my one and only towel and patching my violated garter. We’re starting to see a semblance of order again.
That evening we sat by Herr Pauli’s bed - the widow, the deserter’s wife and me, by candlelight. We gave the deserter’s wife one of our candles; she let us have a box of matches. The major showed up right on time, along with his chubby Uzbek shadow. He played on his little harmonica - a plundered German Hohner - wildly and full of fire. He even wound up asking his orderly to help him out of his soft leather boots and danced a Krakowiak in his socks, swinging his hips gracefully and lithely, fully aware of his talent, too. Then he danced a tango with the widow, while the rest of us sang a popular hit. After that he played some more, this time from
Rigoletto
and
Il Trovatore
- it’s amazing the music he can get out of that tiny mouth organ. His Uzbek didn’t take his pitch-black Mongol eyes off him for a second, and every now and then he’d voice his admiration in childlike, awkward Russian: ‘Oh, he is good. No one else like that.’ Finally the Uzbek let the major talk him into singing an Uzbek song, very nasal, very strange. After endless begging he also agreed to dance on his chunky legs. The deserter’s wife, a tough Berlin woman, drank the major’s wine and received his ceremonial bows. While he was dancing with the widow our guest whispered to me, ‘Well, for him I could flat out forget myself!’
The major stayed. A difficult night. His knee had swollen up from all the dancing and caused him a lot of pain. He groaned every time he moved. I scarcely dared stir. He left me alone completely. I slept deeply.
SATURDAY, 5 MAY 1945
The May sky is dreary today. The cold doesn’t want to go away. I sit hunched on the stool in front of our stove, which is barely kept burning with all sorts of Nazi literature. Assuming everyone is doing the same thing - and they are -
Mein Kampf
will go back to being a rare book, a collector’s item.
I just polished off a pan of cracklings, and am giving myself a thick spread of butter, while the widow paints a black picture of my future. I pay no attention to her. I don’t care about tomorrow. I just want to live as well as I can for now, otherwise I’ll collapse like a wet rag, given our recent way of life. My face in the mirror is round again.
Today the three of us discussed the future. In his mind Herr Pauli is already settling back at his desk at the metal works; he forecasts a huge upturn in the economy with the help of our conquerors. The widow wonders whether she could land a job there herself as a cook, in the factory cafeteria; she’s pessimistic about the modest annuity from her deceased husband’s insurance, and is afraid she’ll have to look for work. And me? Well, at least I’ve studied a number of things; I’m sure I’ll find something. I’m not afraid. I’ll just sail blindly ahead, trusting my little ship to the currents of the times; up to now it’s always managed to carry me to green shores. But our country is despondent, our people are in pain. We’ve been led by criminals and gamblers, and we’ve let them lead us like sheep to the slaughter. And now the people are miserable, smouldering with hate. ‘No tree is high enough for him,’ I heard someone say of Adolf this morning at the pump.
A number of men showed up in the afternoon, German men this time, from our own building. It felt very strange, once again being around men you don’t have the slightest reason to fear, men you don’t have to constantly gauge or be on guard against or keep an eye on. They recounted the saga of the bookseller that is now echoing throughout the building, the tale of how this Bavarian, a gnarled stump of ·a man, really and truly yelled at a Russian. It all happened right outside the couple’s door, when an Ivan grabbed the bookseller’s wife as she was coming back with water. (She won’t let her husband go to the pump because he was in the party.) The woman shrieked, and her husband came running out of the apartment, making straight for the Ivan and shouting, ‘You damned bastard! You prick!’ As the saga has it, the Russian piped down, shrivelled up and backed off. So it can be after all. The Russian’s barbarian-animal instinct must have told him that the bookseller was capable of anything at that moment, that his rage had blinded him to all consequences - so the soldier simply relinquished his booty.
It’s the first time I’ve heard of one of our men responding with that kind of red-eyed wrath. Most of them are reasonable - they react with their heads, they’re worried about saving their own skins, and their wives fully support them in this. No man loses face for relinquishing a woman to the victors, be it his wife or his neighbour’s. On the contrary, they would be censured if they provoked the Russians by resisting. But that still leaves something unresolved. I’m convinced that this particular woman will never forget her husband’s fit of courage, or perhaps you could say it was love. And you can hear the respect in the way the men tell the story, too.
But they didn’t come just for conversation, they’ve made themselves useful. They’d brought a few boards, which they sawed off size on the kitchen table and nailed up diagonally across the jambs of the back door. They had to work quickly so as not to get caught by some Russian. As payment we handed out cigars from the ample supply the major brought yesterday. We really are quite rich.
After the entire doorframe was boarded up, a Russian appeared on the back stairs. He kicked hard at the boards, tried to break in, but without success. That was a relief. Now we won’t have strangers barging in night and day. Of course, they also come to the front door, but that has a good lock and is made of solid wood. As it is, most of the people who know us call up from outside, just to reassure us: ‘
Zdyes
’ Andrei’ means that it’s Andrei. And the major and I have worked out a special knock.
A touching story: around noon we have a visit from Fräulein Behn, our fearless lead mare from the basement. She’s now lodging with young Frau Lehmann, whose husband is missing in the east, and helping out with her two children. To date, neither the young mother nor Fräulein Behn has been raped... although both are quite nice-looking. It turns out the small children are their great protection. They understood this from the first night of Russians, when two rough men showed up, shouting and pounding their rifle butts and demanded to be let in. When Fräulein Behn started to open the door they just pushed her into the room... then stopped in front of the crib where the baby and four-year-old Lutz were sleeping together. One of them said in flabbergasted German, ‘Small child?’ They both stared at the crib a while and then stole away on tiptoe.
Fräulein Behn asks me to come up for a couple of minutes; they have two Russian visitors, one older, one young. They’ve been there once before and today they’ve brought some chocolate for the children. The women would like to speak with them, so they’ve asked me to play interpreter.
Soon we’re all sitting across from one another: the two soldiers, Fräulein Behn, Frau Lehmann with Lutz clinging to her knee, and me. The baby is right there in her stroller. The older Russian asks me to translate: ‘What a beautiful little girl! Areal beauty!’ And he winds his index finger into one of the baby’s copper curls. Then he asks me to tell the two women that he also has two children, two boys, who are living with their grandmother in the country. He fishes a photo out of his battered cardboard wallet: two crew-cut heads on paper that’s turned a darkish brown. He hasn’t seen them since 1941. I’ve figured out that concept of home leave is foreign to nearly all the Russians. Most of them have been separated from their families since the beginning of the war; that’s nearly four years. I assume that this is because most of the war has been fought in their country, and with the civilian population being transferred back and forth, no one knows for sure where his family is at any given moment. On top of that there’s the enormous distances and the pitiful condition of the roads. It’s also possible that, at least in the first years of the German advance, the authorities were afraid their people might desert or go over to the other side. Whatever the case, these men were never entitled to home leave like ours were. I explain this to the two women, and Frau Lehmann says, full of understanding, ‘Well, that excuses somethings.’
The second Russian guest is a young boy of seventeen, a former partisan who joined up with the westward-advancing troops. He looks at me, brow deeply furrowed, and asks me to translate that in his village German soldiers stabbed some children to death and took others by the feet and bashed their heads against a wall. Before I translate I ask, ‘Did you hear that? Or see it yourself?’ He gazes off and says in a stem voice, ‘I saw it twice myself’ I translate.
‘I don’t believe it,’ answers Frau Lehmann. ‘Our soldiers? My husband? Never!’ Fräulein Behn tells me to ask the Russian whether the soldiers in question had ‘a bird here’ (on their caps) or ‘a bird there’ (on their arms) - in other words, whether they were Wehrmacht or SS. The Russian understands the question right away-the villagers probably learned to make that distinction. But even if it was SS men in this case, our conquerors will consider them part of the ‘nation’ and charge us all accordingly. Talk like this is already making the rounds; today at the pump I heard several people say; ‘Our boys probably weren’t much different over there.’
Silence. We all stare into space. A shadow has fallen in the room. The baby pays no attention - she bites the foreign finger, cooing and squealing. I feel a lump rising in my throat. She seems like a miracle to me, pink and white with copper curls, flowering here in this desolate, half-looted room, among us adult human beings so mired in filth. And suddenly I realize why the warriors are drawn to the little baby.
SUNDAY, 6 MAY 1945
First for the rest of Saturday. Once again the major showed up around 8p.m. with his Asian orderly, who reached into his bottomless pockets and this time pulled out two turbots - by no means large, but fresh. The widow breaded and baked the delicious fish, which we then all shared. Even the Uzbek was given a piece in his corner window, which he always makes a beeline for, just like a loyal dog. A very tasty meal indeed.
Did the major stay the night? I wouldn’t have dared undress on my own, wouldn’t have dared go to sleep in the room alone, I know that. Even though our back door is now boarded up, even though the war is no longer raging outside, there’s still a strong dose of fear in all of us. Fear of people who are roaring drunk or in a fury. The major is our protection. Today he was limping; his knee is still swollen. The widow, who has gentle hands for that kind of work, made him a compress before he joined me in bed. He’s confessed to me the funny nickname his mother used to call him, and he translated my own name into Russian, using an affectionate diminutive. So I guess we’re friends. Nevertheless I keep telling myself to be on guard, and to talk as little as possible.
In the morning, alone again, we sat around Herr Pauli’s bed, ate a solid breakfast and listened to what was going on outside. Finally the widow ventured into the stairwell and ran upstairs to the booksellers’, where a dozen neighbours are still rooming together. When she came back she said, ‘Here, give me the rest of the Vaseline.’
She was swallowing hard and her eyes were full of tears. She’d heard that the liquor distill er had returned to his wife, in the night under cover of darkness, creeping and crawling through the front line, right past the troops, together with Elvira the redhead, who’d been helping him man his post in the distillery, though why I can’t say. Was it a joint defence of the liquor bottles? There must be something rooted in us, some instinct that makes us sink our claws into our possessions when threat looms near.
Together the widow and I went up to the apartment on the fourth floor. It turns out that the distill er’s buxom wife, the one from the basement who’d been honoured with the first Russian advances, has been living unmolested in her fourth-floor apartment ever since - just a minute while I do the calculations - for over a week. Equipped with a tub full of water and a decent stock of provisions, she’s been left entirely to herself I can believe it, too. Although it took us a while to figure out, the fact is the Russians dislike climbing stairs. Most of them are farm boys used to living close to the earth, in homes with only a single floor - so that they’re not very experienced stair climbers. Morover, they probably feel too cut off when they’re so high up, that four flights of stairs is too long a retreat. As a result, they hardly ever dare go that far up.
We tiptoe into the apartment, as if entering a sickroom. The redhead is sitting on a kitchen chair, staring off into the distance. Her feet are in a bucket of water. She’s soaking her toes, which are battered and bloody, according to the distiller. His own feet look just as bad. They both passed through the frontline in their stockinged feet, through streets full of rubble and ruin. The Russians had taken their shoes.
The redhead is in her slip, with a blouse draped over her, probably from the man’s wife - it is far too big. She sits there groaning as she moves her toes, while the man tells us how his distillery was in the middle of the fighting for two whole days, how first German, then Russian soldiers had helped themselves to what was left of the ·alcohol. As they were rummaging for liquor the Russians finally found Elvira and him behind a wooden partition, along with another woman, an employee who’d sought shelter there as well. Here the man shrugs his shoulders, doesn’t want to say any more, walks out of the kitchen.
“They lined up,’ his wife whispers to us, while the redhead stays silent. ‘Each took his tum. She says there were at least twenty, but she doesn’t know exactly. She had to bear the brunt of it herself. The other woman wasn’t well.’