I rush over with the widow. The enemy is taking a break, and things are fairly quiet, which explains the sudden mass of people milling about streets normally deserted in the middle of the day. Two women pass by pulling a child’s toy wagon with a whole barrel on top that smells of sauerkraut. Young and very old alike run like mad in the direction of the barracks. The widow and I have grabbed all the buckets we could find, two or each of us. The way is strewn with trampled potatoes and rotting carrots – you just have to follow them and you can’t go wrong. But right by the stone steps is a patch of blood, I shrink back... but the widow just laughs. ‘That’s marmalade!’ And that’s exactly what it is, too –people are rolling it out by the barrel.
We push through the crowd in the corridor, stumble down the slippery steps, land in a stinky pile of rotting potatoes. By the light of the narrow skylights we dig around in the mush with our hands and shoes, picking out whatever we can use. We leave the carrots and muddy swedes and fill our buckets with potatoes. We find a half –filled sack, and without asking whose it is we grab it and carry it up the stairs, down the street, into our building and up to the first floor.
More rattling and booming. Nobody cares – they’re all gripped by plunder fever. We turn round and run right back, this time returning with buckets full of briquettes. Mobs of people everywhere, running and snatching.
Now they’ve begun to loot the abandoned shops as well. A white–haired man – ‘gentleman’ would be a better description, is hauling a drawer full of boxes of soap powder. The drawer is labelled ‘Rice’.
Up to the first floor. We sit around on the living–room couch. Our arms are stiff, our legs shaky. What windowpanes are still left are quivering slightly. A gentle warmth is wafting through the broken windows – that and the smell of fire. Now and then we hear a
voooommm
! Then a prolonged echo, from the heavy anti–aircraft guns. After that comes a
pinng
! – a short blow right to the eardrum– heavy artillery. And then, far away, an occasional
knackvoom–knackvoom
, very fast, accompanied by howling and barking. I have no idea what it is. The widow claims they’re katyusha rockets, the so–called Stalin Organs. Incidentally up to now the Russians have been using individual bombs rather than a carpet.
In the end the two of us go off to see whether there’s any pudding powder left at the comer store that was hit yesterday. It turns out there are still a few customers, and yes, they’re still selling. There’s a price printed on the powder – 38 pfennigs, I think. The person selling, who also owns the store and lives right there, insisted on giving every customer exact change, so he kept running up and down the queue asking who had small coins and could help him. And that while under fire! Only here. We’ll be counting our change right into the grave.
Just for fun we peeked round the comer, to see what was up at the butcher’s, since I still hadn’t used up my ration. There, too, they were selling, with more supply than demand – at most a dozen people were in the store, so we were able to get some good pieces, boneless pork, fairly weighed.
As we walked out of the store a truck drove by, with German troops, red tabs, meaning anti–aircraft. They were headed away from us, toward the centre of town. They sat there mute, staring off into the distance. A woman called out to them, ‘you leaving?’ No one answered her. We looked at each other and shrugged. The woman said, ‘They’re just poor souls themselves.’
These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men and the feelings of all the other women – are changing. We feel sorry for them, they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world – ruled by men, glorifying the strong man – is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of ‘Man’. In earlier wars men could claim that the privilege of killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today, we women, too, have a share. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.
Later in the basement, intelligent conversations over supper. Cosy still–lifes – in one square metre per household. Here tea with bread and butter, there mashed potatoes. Stinchen with the Hamburg ‘s’ wields her knife and fork flawlessly as she pokes at her pickle. Her wounded head has been nearly band aged. The bookselling wife asks: ‘May I serve you some?’
‘Yes, please, if you’d be so kind,’ answers Curtainman Schmidt, softly.
A towel is spread over the canary’s cage. The deserter comes and announces that the Russians are scouting out the cinema. Our comer is currently under fire from small guns. The ex–soldier tells us we can’t have anyone wearing a uniform in the basement, otherwise under martial law we’ll all be subject to execution.
Palaver about the notices in the
Armoured Bear
. Two armies really do seem to be heading to relieve Berlin, Schömer from the south and some other one from the north. Teuenbrietzen, Oranienburg and Bernau are said to have been liberated.
And us? Very mixed feelings, and a sense of fright. ‘So now they’ll be back and forth and we’re caught right in the middle. Are we supposed to stay here for months? We’re lost one way or the other. If things don’t work out for Ivan, then the Americans will come from the air. And God have mercy if they start in with carpet–bombs. We’ll be buried alive in this basement.’
A new announcement from the street: the Volkssturm has retreated, Ivan is pushing right towards us. German artillery has pulled up on our corner, the explosions are booming through the basement. Meanwhile six women are sitting round a little table, the widow is reading the distiller’s wife’s cards. She’s very good at it, too: ‘In the short run you will experience a disappointment in connection with your husband.’ (He’s still holding his post in the distillery – together with the redheaded Elvira.)
I want to go to sleep right away. I’m looking forward to it. The day’s been packed to the brim. The net result: I’m healthy, bold and bright, for the moment my fear is mostly gone. My brain is full of vivid images of greed and rage. Stiff back, tired feet, broken thumbnail, a cut lip that’s still smarting. So the saying’s true after all: ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. ‘
One more thing. An image from the street: a man pushing a wheelbarrow with a dead woman on top, stiff as a board. Loose grey strands of hair fluttering, a blue kitchen apron. Her withered legs in grey stockings sticking out the end of the wheelbarrow. Hardly anyone gave her a second glance. Just like when they used to ignore the rubbish being hauled away.
FRIDAY, 27 APRIL 1945. DAY OF CATASTROPHE, WILD TURMOIL – RECORDED ON SATURDAY MORNING
It began with silence. The night was far too quiet. Around twelve o’clock Fräulein Behn reported that the enemy had reached the gardens and that the German line of defence was right outside our door.
It took a long time for me to fall asleep, I was going over Russian phrases in my head, practising the ones I thought I’d soon have a chance to use. Today I briefly mentioned to the other cave dwellers that I speak a little Russian, a fact I’d been keeping to myself I explained that I’d been to European Russia when I was younger, one of the dozen or so countries I visited on my travels.
My Russian is very basic, very utilitarian, picked up along the way. Still, I know how to count and to say what day it is and I can read the Cyrillic alphabet. I’m sure it will come back quickly now that practice is near at hand. I’ve always had a knack for languages. Finally, counting away in Russian, I fell asleep.
I slept until about 5a.m., when I heard someone wandering around the front of the basement – it was the bookselling wife who had come in from the outside. She took my hand and whispered, ‘They’re here.’
‘Who? The Russians?’ I could barely open my eyes.
‘Yes. They just climbed through the window at Meyer’s’ meaning the liquor shop.
I finished dressing and combed my hair while she delivered her news to the others. Within minutes the whole basement was on its feet.
Taking the back stairs, I felt my way up to the first floor in order to hide our meagre provisions, at least whatever wasn’t already squirrelled away. Before going inside I put my ear to the back door, which was in splinters and could no longer be locked. All quiet, the kitchen empty. Keeping close to the floor I crept over to the window. It was a bright morning outside, our street was under fire, you could hear the whistle and patter of the bullets.
A Russian anti–aircraft battery was turning the corner, four barrels, four iron giraffes with menacing necks tall as towers. Two men were stomping up the street: broad backs, leather jackets, high leather boots. Jeeps pulling up to the kerb. Howitzers rattling ahead in the early light. The pavement alive with the din. The smell of petrol drifted into the kitchen through the broken windowpanes.
I went back to the basement. We ate our breakfast as if in a dream, although I did manage to consume several slices of bread, much to the amazement of the widow. Even so, my stomach was fluttering. I felt the way I had as a schoolgirl before a maths exam – anxious and uneasy. wishing that it was already over.
After that the widow and I climbed upstairs. We dusted her apartment, wiped down the counters and swept and scrubbed with our next–to–last bucket of water. The devil knows why we slaved away like that, probably just to exercise our limbs a little, or maybe fleeing again into a palpable present to escape an uncertain future.
As we worked we kept creeping up to the window and peeking out at the street, where an endless supply train was passing by. Stout mares with foals running between their legs. A cow drearily mooing to be milked. Before we knew it they had set up a field kitchen in the garage across the street. And for the first time we could make out faces, features, individuals – sturdy, broad foreheads, close–cropped hair, well fed, carefree. Not a civilian in sight. The Russians have the streets entirely to themselves. But under every building people are whispering, quaking. Who could ever imagine such a world, hidden here, so frightened, right in the middle of the big city? Life sequestered underground and split into tiny cells so that no one knows what anyone else is doing.
Outside: a bright blue, cloudless sky.
Sometime around noon – the woman from Hamburg and I were just getting the second pot of barley soup, cooked at the baker’s for the entire clan – the first enemy found his way into our basement. A ruddy–cheeked farmer, he blinked as he sized us up by the light of the kerosene lantern. He hesitated, then took a step, two steps towards us.
Hearts pounding. Scared, people offered him their bowls of soup. He shook his head and smiled, still silent.
That’s when I uttered my first Russian words, or rather rasped them, since I suddenly went hoarse: ‘
Shto vy zhelaete
?’ What do you want?
The man spins around, stares at me in amazement. I sense I’ve taken him aback. He doesn’t understand. Evidently he’s never heard one of us ‘mutes’ address him in his own language. Because the Russian word for Germans –
n’ emtzi
–means ‘mutes’. Presumably it dates from Hanseatic League, over 500 years ago, when German merchants used sign language to trade textiles and lace for beeswax and furs in Novgorod and elsewhere.
Anyway, this Russian doesn’t say a thing, answered my question with a mere shake of his head. I ask whether he wants something to eat. With a little smile he says, in accented German, ‘
Schnaps
’ –brandy.
The cave dwellers shake their heads: regrettably they have no brandy or alcohol of any kind. Whoever has any left keeps it well hidden. So Ivan wanders back off, trying to find his way through the labyrinth of passageways and courtyards.
Cheerful bustle of soldiers on our street. Along with two or three other women I venture out to watch. A young man is polishing a motorcycle in our entranceway, a German Zündapp, nearly new. He holds out the cloth, gestures at me to go on buffing. I tell him in Russian that I don’t want to, even manage a laugh, he looks at me in surprise and then laughs back.
Some Russians are wheeling freshly stolen bicycles up and down the driveway. They’re teaching one another to ride, sit ting on their seats as stiffly as Susi the bicycle–riding chimpanzee in the zoo. They crash into the trees and laugh with pleasure.
I feel some of my fear beginning to dissipate. It turns out that Russian men, too, are ‘only men’ – i.e. presumably they’re as susceptible as other men to feminine wiles, so it’s possible to keep them in check, to distract them, to shake them off.
The pavements are full of horses that leave their droppings and spray their pee. A strong scent of stables. Two soldiers ask me to show them to the nearest pump –the horses are thirsty. So we traipse through the gardens for fifteen minutes. Friendly voices, good–natured faces. And questions that will keep coming back, heard now for the first time: ‘Do you have a husband?’ If you say yes, they ask where he is. And if you say no, they ask if you wouldn’t want to ‘marry’ a Russian. Followed by crude flirting.
These two first address me using the familiar ‘du’, but I dismiss the impropriety by sticking with the formal form. We walked down the deserted green path, as artillery shells arc across the sky. The German line is ten minutes away. No more German planes, though, and hardly any German flak. No more water in the taps, no electricity, no gas. Only Russians.
Back with the buckets, now full of water. The horses drink as the two men look on contentedly. I stroll around, talking to this Russian and that. It’s past noon, the sun so hot it feels like summer. There’s something strange in the air though, something I can’t put my finger on, something evil, menacing. A few men look past me shyly, exchanging glances. One young man, small and sallow and reeking of alcohol, gets me involved in a conversation. He wants to coax me off into the courtyard, shows me two watches on his hairy arm, he’ll give one to me if I...