Berlin: A Novel (69 page)

'I'm twenty-five and I want you.'

She draped her legs to left and right, over the arms of the chair. He knelt between her thighs. His erect penis turned slightly upwards; he guided it with one hand, rubbing the glans against her clitoris with circling movements. She relished the sensation that promised fulfilment as it grew stronger, but went on and on. The glans moved further and lingered between her lips. He did not move, and by that very fact brought her to the verge of a pulsating orgasm that she didn't want just yet, much as she was responding to him. He withdrew, and then thrust right into her. His staccato movements shook both her body and the chair, making its springs squeak. She looked down at herself, saw his hard prick parting her blonde pubic hair again and again as it thrust in, heightening her desire until it was intolerable and release came -- but there was more to come.

When she came out of the bathroom, fully dressed, he was standing by the window in his dressing gown. 'Unfinished business - we had to deal with it sometime,' he said, without turning round.

'Once and for all,' she agreed.

'No repeat performances.'

'Of course not.'

The glass of the shop window was miraculously intact. Jutta stood among the books in her stockinged feet. She opened the third little window of the Advent calendar. Outside, two small girls were pressing their noses flat against the pane, counting the days till Christmas. Only the children could still look forward to it. Adults were in a state of anxiety, somewhere between dwindling hope and growing fear. The incessant Allied air raids made Berlin purgatory in the days leading up to the Christmas of 1944. Hell itself still waited in the wings.

She put the calendar back between Rudolf Binding's On Riding: For a Lover and Goethe's Elective Affinities, books which she had decorated with a few sprigs of fir and some tinsel. Yawning, she climbed out of the window. A British air raid had kept her in the cellar all night, and she hadn't had a wink of sleep. She was also tormented by toothache. A filling had fallen out, and there were no dentists left in Onkel Toms Hutte. The younger ones were with the forces, and the one old dentist who had come out of retirement fled to his sister in the country soon after re-opening his practice.

'Perhaps they'll have some aspirin in the pharmacy.'

'Take a Eumed, Jutta, that'll help just as well.' Diana Gerold offered her the tin tube of tablets. And do go and see my dentist.'

Diana had been urging her to go for days. Jutta kept putting it off. Dr Brauer's practice was in the city, which meant three-quarters of an hour by U-Bahn. No one liked to leave the deceptive security of their immediate surroundings. including the generally inadequate air-raid shelters.

'Well, if you really insist.' She wound her silk scarf round her neck and put on the fox fur. The lined ankle-boots had been donated from Frau Gerold's wardrobe. She went up the slight rise of the shopping street to where the ground ran level, bought a return ticket and climbed down the wide flight of steps to the platform. The train came in. She got into one of the yellow no-smoking carriages. The smoking carriages were red. Four small children were chasing noisily around a man home on leave. He looked well-fed and content. He was stationed in Norway. His wife looked anxious and worn out. She was wearing a brightly embroidered, sheepskin coat that looked as if it didn't belong to her: it was obviously a present her husband had brought home.

Fresh snow had fallen overnight, turning the suburbs into a landscape dusted with icing sugar. In the city, it had already turned to a dirty-yellow slush that was being cleared away by horse-drawn snow ploughs.

Dr Brauer had his practice on the second floor of an apartment building in Budapester Strasse. The secretary at reception was expecting Jutta. 'Frau Gerold rang to say you were coming. There's another patient still to see the dentist before you. Please would you wait in the next room.'

The other patient turned out to be Armin Drechsel. He had grown fat. His brown Party uniform was stretched over a paunch. His sandy hair was sparser than five years earlier, and his pale, infantile face fuller, but as expressionless as ever. 'Heil Hitler, Frau Weber,' he greeted her without showing any surprise.

Her stomach cramped. She could have thrown up there and then, but she controlled herself. 'Good day, Herr Drechsel, what a coincidence.'

A wisdom tooth. What about you?'

'I'm having a filling replaced.'

'It's a long time since we last met. I'm head of the Political Education Institute in Schwerin now. How are you doing?'

Dr Brauer appeared, a kindly, white-haired gentleman with gold-rimmed glasses. 'Herr Drechsel, please.' She was glad when the door closed. A dull physical pain filled her, slowly giving way to icy rage.

Dr Brauer brought the patient back into the waiting room shortly afterwards. A few minutes, please, until the injection takes effect. Would you come in now, Frau Weber?' She had to pass very close to Drechsel. If I had a weapon now, she suddenly thought, and there was no melodrama in her mind, only deadly determination.

'Please rinse,' the dentist told her when he had replaced the filling. At that very moment the sirens howled. The first bombs dropped very close. 'They don't warn you in good time any more,' said Brauer crossly. 'Come on, down the back stairs is quickest.' He hurried ahead, white coat flying.

Down below, candles cast a little light in the cellar. More and more of the tenants of the building arrived and sat down on the rough-hewn benches. Dr Brauer's receptionist took knitting out of her big bag. Drechsel was nowhere to be seen.

The anti-aircraft shells sounded like the kind of theatrical thunder you make with sheets of metal. The flying fortresses of the US Air Force droned ten thousand metres above the city. The blast from the bombs shook their targets even before they made impact. So far the bombers had spared the west of the city: their targets were the workers' quarters. The plan was to make the working classes rebel against the Nazi regime, although the Allies had miscalculated. The woman next to Jutta put what they were all fearing into words: 'It's our turn today.'

Confirmation followed within seconds. The roar of five hundred kilos of exploding Amtex 9 paralysed them all. A bomb had hit the roof and detonated before it could pass through the floors below. Part of its force was muted.

Hits close by shook the foundations of the building. The cellar was full of people, screaming, coughing and whimpering. The beam of a torch lit up the dust like car headlights penetrating fog. The receptionist sat like a white marble statue, still knitting.

An acrid smell of phosphorus grew stronger. 'They're carpet bombing us, and we're right in the line of fire!' someone shouted. 'We must get out of here!'

Blindly, Jutta groped her way through the thick smoke. She stumbled on the bottom step of a staircase and crawled up, on all fours. No one followed her. Obviously the tenants of the building knew another way out.

The plaster of the ceiling in the hall had come down, blocking the entrance to the building and revealing the sky above. Acrid smoke from the burning buildings came in through a hole in the wall on the first floor. Someone was gasping for air. She vaguely made out a figure in the lift. A heavy beam had fallen in front of the grating. She tried to raise it - and looked into the infantile face that was usually incapable of showing emotion. Now it was distorted by fear.

Girders were glowing up on the fourth floor. Burning phosphorus flowed stickily down the lift shaft and ran over the linoleum on the floor of the cabin. making the man inside tread from foot to foot like a dancing bear on a hot iron surface. 'Help me out of here,' he croaked.

A hit nearby flung her to the floor. She picked herself up. The pressure had burst the door of the porter's lodge open. There were holes which had once been windows in the living-room wall. It was a way out! Behind her, the man imprisoned in the lift desperately rattled the brass bars. She didn't need to kill him, she could just have let it happen. An offer from the devil himself.

It seemed like a betrayal of Jochen and Didi, but she couldn't do it. She couldn't let him burn to death. She braced herself against the beam. Her shoulder hurt, but she kept pushing. Slowly she got the beam upright. One last effort, and the force of gravity sent it falling the other way. She opened the folding door, and the man staggered out past her.

Outside, burning rubble was raining from the rooftops. People were protecting themselves with wet blankets, getting the water from burst hydrants. Fragmentation bombs cut down dozens of fugitives. Then the bombers moved away. Jutta stood in the middle of the street. Her red fox fur looked like the skin of a mangy dog. Animals from the nearby Zoological Gardens were wandering around, disorientated. A female gorilla was carrying her infant in the charred stumps of her arms. The phosphorus had burnt her hands off. Drechsel lay dead on a black heap of snow on the pavement. His brown uniform had been shredded by bomb splinters, and one of the zoo's jackals was licking his empty, infantile face.

'They won't drop bombs at Christmas.' Frowein the greengrocer had heard it from a customer who had heard it from her dressmaker, whose brother knew someone in counter-intelligence. And they have people close to the enemy, believe you me.'

'Not spending Christmas in the cellar would be nice,' Jutta sighed. She put the pound of apples and the few nuts to which she was entitled in her shopping bag along with a red cabbage. Next door in Otto's: Coffee Roasters, which had had nothing to roast for ages, there was a special ration of real coffee and even a few ginger biscuits. She hung her net bag in the back room of the bookshop, where her boss was unwrapping something. A bony object came into view. 'What's that supposed to be?' asked Jutta, surprised.

Diana Gerold was slightly nettled. A goose, of course.' Her friend in the Swiss Embassy had proved useful yet again. 'Rather a thin one, I'll admit, but it will do for the three of us. Can we have Christmas dinner at your place, Jutta? Our stove isn't working. A bomb hit the gas mains.' She opened the Morgenpost. 'Electricity supply guaranteed for Christmas,' it said on page two. 'We can roast the bird in your electric oven. Anja still has a bottle of cherry brandy left from last Christmas. But we'd have to stay the night, there'll be no transport running late.'

'I can contribute a bottle of burgundy from Father's last stocks.'

The shop door opened. Herr Lesch was returning two library books. 'Time this mess was sorted out,' he grumbled. 'Not a new Hercule Poirot to be had anywhere. Do you think Agatha Christie is still writing?'

'We'll find out after the Final Victory.'

'Do you believe in that?'

'What, in Agatha Christie?'

Herr Lesch muttered something and left the shop. Outside, he peered in through the display window, which had been cracked in many places and repaired with sticky tape, and watched Jutta open the last little window on the Advent calendar. It was 24 December 1944.

Anja Schmitt came at midday, wearing a black cloth coat with a grey astrakhan collar in honour of the occasion, along with fur cap and boots. She looked like a pretty Cossack boy. 'From my Petersburg nights,' she laughed. She had once had an affair with a White Russian princess. Diana Gerold preferred her loden coat and hunter's hat, which made her resemble the mistress of a country estate. Jutta had restored her red fox coat to its former glory with shampoo and a hairdryer. You had to ignore the bare, burnt patches. Pretending was part of survival.

'So let's shut up shop.' Frau Gerold bolted the shop door on the inside and put the security bar in front of it. They left the bookshop through the back door. Here too she closed all three locks, which she never usually did. Jutta watched in surprise. 'Shall we go the long way round through the Fischtal park? We never get any fresh air these days.'

Fresh snow had fallen, giving the area something of a Christmassy look. The fir trees in the park were dusted white. Ice crystals glittered in the late afternoon sun. Children slid down the slope on their toboggans, squealing. A lad of fifteen in the uniform of a 'Luftwaffe auxiliary' passed them on one ski. He had turned up his empty trouser leg.

The sun sank red in the haze. It promised to be a bright, cold night. The three women walked faster. Freezing, Jutta pulled the fur close around her. 'We'll soon warm up at home. I have a little coke left in the cellar.'