The Butchers of Berlin (12 page)

‘There is something pleasantly old-fashioned about this place without it being frumpy,’ she announced to one of her passing companions. It seemed as though someone were speaking
through her, in a voice that came from a different time. ‘I suddenly feel like being in another world, compared to outside.’ She was light-headed yet had drunk no alcohol. Nothing else
mattered other than dancing for the moment. She spoke more solemnly than usual, with what she believed approached wisdom.

She watched women and girls dance with each other for lack of men. The music was a combination of the over-jolly, schmaltz and sad. The three-piece combo probably had become reduced over time
from a proper band; two were old men and the drummer little more than a boy who had trouble keeping the beat. A sad place after all, she thought. A sad life. The movement of the dancers made her
think of the rise and fall of the sea, which she had seen only twice in her life. She dreamed of its impossible openness, and of the opportunity to give herself freely, without condition and all
the usual romantic and physical nonsense, which was never fulfilled by the fumbling and hasty transaction of fluids, and left her thinking of crude scientific tests and inadequate exchanges of
information. However well she had trained her body to respond, her head was a million miles away, like an astronaut looking down on those clumsy, red-faced men who grimaced terribly at the end, and
thought their balls were the world and were so proud of their ugly cocks.

When no one came for her that first night she went home. Sundays the place was shut like everywhere and she reviewed her diminishing options. She spoke with two actors she knew. One was in a
chorus line and said he was about to be called up. The other, older, of whom she remained fond, held her hand and said all of them at the Schaubühne lived in fear of their contracts not being
renewed. The woman could not tell if she was being spurned because she was not as vivacious as she once was, or whether everyone’s choice was reduced to having none.

On the Monday evening she returned with a heavier heart. She sat by a yellow stove, on a little platform by the stage.

She feared that the man in question would not come. She would dance with others. She would allow them to buy her drinks this time. They would get her tipsy and she would grow maudlin. She would
be barely aware of whatever man was sitting opposite her. She would watch the dancers. The same souls, coming together. She fancied the music would be more sentimental than on the Saturday; the
start of another long week. She would wonder about all the people who had placed their glasses on the scarred table top and sat on those chairs. She would think about all the invitations to dance.
She would see past and present mix, her mind lulled as she considered the swirl of time and think: This is a place where one can come to forget.

The man watched her dance – noting her distant yearning – and watched her go back to her table alone.

The low wail came from far off, growing louder. Everyone stood in disbelief. Sirens! Air raids had not played a part in their lives for nearly a year. A woman said in wonder,
bombers are coming, and a ripple ran through the crowd.

To Schlegel’s ears that whooping ululation, somewhere between a lament and a screech, filling the skies with dread, was the most frighteningly modern sound. He wouldn’t put it past
the authorities to be sounding a false alarm to get the crowd to disperse. Two women discussed how they had better go as it was forbidden to be out during a raid.

Sybil knew she should have gone home but drifted back to Rosenstrasse, drawn by the extraordinariness of the event. The women took her for one of them, offering smiles of
encouragement. She took comfort from their toughness and resilience. Men sent off to fight just did what they were told. Their lives were ordered and they were looked after. They did not have to
find food or keep everything together. These ordinary women were the real heroes of the war. They gave her hope. She had a clear image of describing the scene to Lore and Lore would not begrudge
her lingering.

She left when the troops threatened to move in. She took the train from Friedrichstrasse to Charlottenburg, hurried down streets still crowded with workers going home, ran up the back staircase
of Alwynd’s apartment, only to find their room empty.

She supposed Lore was with Alwynd but his side was dark too.

She returned and lay on the bed, trying to block any thought of Lore in the hands of the Gestapo.

Her heart shrank when the sirens started. In among their wailing she heard footsteps on the back stairs and thought it had to be them coming for her.

She turned out the light and hid under the bed.

The door opened. The light went on. Sybil held her breath and shut her eyes, then knew she was being a fool. There had been no banging on the door.

Lore looked amused more than surprised as Sybil embarked on the undignified business of extricating herself.

Sybil asked where she had been, annoyed by her own behaviour.

The cinema, Lore said casually.

Before that she had read the paper at the Bollenmüller from cover to cover and Sybil was right; no one bothered her. ‘I never would have thought of that,’ she said in
admiration.

She still seemed excited by the whole episode.

‘And then?’ asked Sybil.

‘I went to the cinema after coming back and finding you weren’t here.’

Sybil thought Lore should have waited. She would have and said so, accusing Lore of being insensitive, trying to ignore her own guilt about not returning straight away as promised.

Lore appeared unbothered.

‘It never crossed my mind you weren’t safe. I thought you were probably looking for your mother. I went to the cinema for the sake of watching something mindless, until they switched
the lights on, right in the middle of the film, and a sign came up saying an air raid was on its way, so we all got up and trooped out. I looked back and saw great clouds of cigarette smoke and
dust trapped in the light of the projector. That’s what we’d all been breathing, and I thought it so unfair that someone decides one person is allowed to breathe that foul air and
another is not.’

Sybil thought she didn’t know Lore at all really.

‘The break in the film was like reality had intruded. I thought of our lives as celluloid unwinding through a projector, and our film not being allowed to continue, like those jerks in the
Bollenmüller coming in and cheerfully announcing, ‘We’re switching the lights on now. Off you go.’ But at the same time as having these strange thoughts, I felt so sure of
myself I asked the cinema manageress for a refund.’

Sybil looked at her in astonishment. ‘Did you get one?’

Lore laughed. ‘No, but she said come back any time and see the film for free.’

The first defence guns started in the distance.

‘The planes are coming,’ Sybil said. ‘I just want to go to bed and be held.’

It was too cold to get undressed. Lore remained in her strange mood, an almost morbid exhilaration she tried to share.

‘I hear the blast kills more than the explosion. The body can be quite undamaged afterwards. Maybe we’ll be found quite preserved like those entwined couples in the ruins of
Pompeii.’

The dancehall waiter presented the woman with a drink she hadn’t ordered. The glass was placed in front of her with such certainty she didn’t think to question it.
Before she could ask he was gone. She’d barely glimpsed him in the time it took. She watched his departing back and thought him so suave in the way he moved he could have been an actor.
Perhaps he was. Next time she would ask. They might have friends in common. Why hadn’t she noticed him before? She considered going after him but that was not her style; men came to her. She
looked at the glass of bright green liquid and saw the message written on the drink mat to meet outside a house number down the street. She wondered whether the waiter was merely the messenger or
the man that wanted her. She could do a lot worse, she thought. She blocked out any intimation of what she called the other business; the man in the leather coat with his seductive voice and
insistent demands, always making out there was a choice.

They would be watching the door to see if she left alone or with a companion. She went to the toilet. The window was too high to climb out of. When she came out a waiter was hurrying from the
kitchen. She slipped through before the door stopped swinging and walked quickly towards where she hoped the exit was. There it was; her luck was in. Her eyes took time to adjust to the dark. She
made her way through the garden and climbed over the low wall that divided it from the street.

She turned left and went and stood in the sheltered doorway of the number she had been given. The street was empty. It wasn’t as dark as most nights. The cloud had lifted and the sky was
clear. She waited and no one came. Shadowy figures drifted past not seeing her. At one point she heard distant laughter and a little later a man and a woman shouted at each other. She grew anxious.
The sirens started up and she was leaving when a figure came towards her out of the dark, addressing her, and she couldn’t tell if this man was her waiter. She wanted only to feel safe and
attractive and appreciated. The loneliness got to her most. She found herself smiling for the first time that evening. This prospect of love with a stranger, like a romantic interlude in a corny
song. A line came into her head, from a play, she thought: Let the devil take the hindmost. She could not remember what it meant. She hoped he would be a practised seducer and in the dark she could
forget about the other brute.

The sirens chased Schlegel all the way to the fortress-like shelter in Reinhardstrasse, a colossal concrete block that rose into the air, an invitation to be hit, rather than
going underground because of the insubstantial substrata. The sirens sounded in waves and in between an expectant hush settled over the city. In the fifteen-minute walk along the river he saw cars
abandoned and trams halted between stops. The only noise apart from the electronic wail was of hurrying footsteps. There was still time. The bomber fleet would have been spotted by the coastal
defences and had yet to penetrate the outer ring.

Wardens checked the papers of everyone entering. The prospect of apocalypse did nothing to improve anyone’s manners and Schlegel was caught in a scrum of pushing and shoving. People spoke
in hushed terms, apart from the few who speculated in loud voices about a false alarm. The interior of the shelter offered a grim set of endless rooms, overcrowded with nervous faces, some already
babbling. Rudimentary ceiling lights cast a sickly glow. Some rooms were mainly families. In others children were kept away because the occupants were noisy and drunk. Schlegel settled for one less
full than the rest. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be there when the bombs fell. It was too much like waiting to be buried alive. Several couples around him took the prospect of their demise as
an excuse to grope each other. A women’s skirt was yanked up, exposing white thigh above stocking top. Sex and death, Schlegel thought. The man’s hand worked away at the woman, who
rolled her eyes. Schlegel wanted to tell them to slow down or they would be finished long before the bombs came and have nothing to do. Others squirmed and writhed. He did his best to ignore the
dog-like in-and-out of a panting, grunting couple on all fours in the corner. A woman with a small boy entered the chamber and slapped a hand over his staring eyes before dragging him off.

Schlegel decided he’d had enough of this death in waiting. It was like being in an Egyptian tomb. He made his way back to the entrance. No one was supposed to leave but he showed his badge
and was allowed to go.

He had the streets to himself. He walked fast. At least I have my hat back, he thought. He wondered where Morgen was. Perhaps a bomb would fall on the man. He wished him no harm but life would
be less anxious without him. Perhaps the bomb would land on him and make everyone’s life easier. He saw his mother at his funeral, weeping crocodile tears behind a becoming black veil,
throwing the first scoop of earth onto his coffin; a silver scoop at her insistence because the dear boy deserved nothing less. That he was somehow alive and sentient in the coffin was another
matter.

The moon came out to welcome the bombers. The first searchlights switched on, casting an eerie light. Friedrichstrasse, utterly deserted, resembled an empty stage set. He cut through to
Oranienburger Strasse. Distant gunfire sounded from the north in dry, hacking coughs. The sky began to glow. He was back in his apartment as the first bombs fell on the outskirts. After turning off
the gas, he sat in the kitchen. He supposed he ought to go down to the cellar but instead went up to the roof. Darkness was transformed as hundreds of searchlights swept the sky, the night ahead a
mass of flashes from bursting shells. He learned to distinguish between the angry sound of flak guns and the heavier anti-aircraft batteries. The drone of the planes grew. Concentration of fire
provided a magnificent, terrible sight. Searchlights chased in desperate search of planes, their beams catching puffs of smoke from exploding shrapnel.

The sky became full of red flares, like falling chandeliers as they burst and continued to burn on the ground. Then it was the turn of the green flares. Schlegel tried to make sense of what he
was seeing. The first planes must be the pathfinders. He braced himself for the main force. He heard their heavy engines, a mighty roar coming in low. It was orchestrated chaos, the percussion of
the heavy bombs, the staccato of the defence guns. Sticks of incendiaries drew incandescent streaks across the sky. Bright lines of tracer fire shimmered. What a spectacle! Four years of blackout
and it was like someone had switched on the entire city’s conserved energy supply. Schlegel was too mesmerised to be scared, even grew exhilarated at the thought of his exploding,
disintegrating body. Everyone should be out watching. A herd of spooked cattle stampeded down the street beneath, their bellows distinguishable over the noise. They would be from the nearby dairy
and the white drayhorse that followed, sparks flying from its hooves, would be the local brewery’s. One, two, three bombs fell near enough to make his building shake. It must be the heaviest
raid yet. Now they seemed to be coming in barely higher than the housetops. He lost count of how many. There would be rubble and ashes tomorrow and burst pipes and mains. Half the department would
phone in to say it couldn’t get in because of transport disruptions. Parts of the city close by were starting to burn, perhaps streets he had walked down that day. An explosion bigger than
the rest sounded as something fell with an enormous blast. The aftershock came seconds later. The roar was so deafening he clapped his hands to his ears. He looked up and still the planes came.
Hundreds if not thousands. He saw one trapped in the cone of a searchlight. It started to twist and turn as it tried to lose the light, which hung on for the tracer to zone in. The big machine
became like a ponderous four-engined beast of death, thrown around with such abandon that Schlegel thought it surely must shed its rivets and fall apart. The pilot succeeded in losing the
searchlight, which chased the darkness after it, catching the aircraft’s silhouette briefly then losing it for good. Schlegel had hardly been aware of the ear-splitting drama while watching
the chase. His building shook again as other bombs fell, enough to make the windows rattle. He saw the first starburst of flame as the aircraft started to burn. The searchlight pursued and picked
it up again, subjecting it to its pitiless gaze. The hit plane fell, majestic and lumbering, flames streaking from its fuselage and wing. He heard the engine stutter, even amid the cacophony. Guns
zeroed in and blazed away long after it was obvious the bomber would not be limping home. Schlegel watched the aircraft’s burning descent in awe. Every blast and tremor and window rattle told
him that he, and not they, was the one who was alive.