‘Fucking idiots,’ a one-legged veteran muttered as he scuttled past on his crutches.
‘You got that right,’ Wolfgang replied to the back of the man’s shaven head and little army cap.
The newspapers called these ongoing disturbances a ‘revolution’ but if it was a revolution it was of a peculiar German kind. Civic authority continued to function and business was still done. Kids still played on the pavements. Secretaries were at their typing machines by eight thirty. The police still checked the licence discs on parked cars, even while their owners were in a nearby cellar kicking somebody to death or being kicked to death themselves.
Berlin simply carried on with its own affairs while Communist gangs and right-wing
Freikorps
militia killed each other during their lunch breaks.
Frieda and Wolfgang carried on too, or at least Wolfgang did, sweating over the cart handles, despite the cold, as he pushed his wife through the rubble-strewn streets, swearing and cursing his way around the occasional barricade until finally arriving before the splendid steps of the famous five-thousand-bed teaching hospital on Lindenberger Weg, the largest in all Europe.
Wolfgang pulled up his cart, drawing deep, painful breaths of freezing air, and took down Frieda’s bag.
‘Heavy enough, isn’t it?’ he gasped. ‘Do you really need all these books?’
‘I might be in for a while,’ Frieda replied, sliding herself heavily over the tailboard and down on to the pavement, wincing as her swollen ankles took the weight. ‘I need to get some work done.’
‘Well, I’m with you on that, Fred,’ Wolfgang agreed, treating himself to a smoke. ‘You married a musician. A musician who at some point hopes to find himself living in the style to which he would like to become accustomed.’
‘You’re a
composer
, Wolf.’ Frieda smiled. ‘Not just a musician. I told my parents I was marrying the next Mendelssohn.’
‘God help us, I hope not. Too many damn tunes.
Kaffee und
Kuchen
music ain’t for me, Freddy, you know that.’
‘People like tunes. They
pay
for tunes.’
‘Which is why I grabbed myself a nice clever girl when I had the chance. Every jazz man needs a besotted lady doctor to look after him.’
Wolfgang took Frieda around her huge waist and kissed her.
Frieda laughed, disengaging herself. ‘I’m not besotted, I’m barely tolerating. And I’m not a doctor either. Not yet, there’s the little matter of my final exams. And be careful with my books. They’re all borrowed and they fine you if there’s even a tiny crease in a page.’
Frieda was studying medicine at the University of Berlin. She even had a grant of sorts, a fact her deeply conservative parents still had difficulty believing.
‘You mean they
pay
for your education? Even
women
?’ her father had enquired incredulously.
‘They have to, Pa. Most of the boys are dead.’
‘But all the same. Women doctors?’ her father replied, confusion reigning behind the solid, timeless certainty of his close-cropped Prussian moustache. ‘Who would trust them?’
‘Who will have a choice?’ Frieda countered. ‘It’s called the twentieth century, Pa, you really ought to join some time, it’s been going two decades already.’
‘You’re wrong,’ her father said with sombre gravity, ‘it began only recently, when his Imperial Highness abdicated. God only knows where or when it will end.’
Frieda’s father was a policeman and her mother a proud housewife. He brought in the salary, she ran the home and raised the children. Their attitudes had been formed under the Kaiser, and the political and cultural earthquake of the post-war Weimar Republic had left them reeling. Neither of them understood a government which while unable to stop gunfights on the high streets concerned itself with sexual equality.
Or a son-in-law who was happy to begin a family despite not being able to afford to pay for a taxi to take his wife to the hospital.
‘I think if Papa saw you pushing his pregnant daughter to her confinement in a grocer’s cart, he’d take out his gun and shoot you,’ Frieda remarked as they laboured up the hospital steps together.
‘He nearly shot me for
getting
you pregnant,’ Wolfgang replied, searching in the pockets of his jacket for the hospital admission papers.
‘If you hadn’t married me he would have done.’
‘Right, this is it. We’re here.’
All around them sick, cold people crowded, bustling in and out of the great doors of the hospital.
‘I’ll come back this evening,’ Wolfgang said. ‘Make sure there’s three of you by then.’
Frieda gripped his hand.
‘My God, Wolf,’ she whispered, ‘when you put it like that … Today there’s just you and me, tomorrow there’ll be you, me … and our children.’
A gust of wind caused her to shiver. The harsh, rain-speckled chill penetrating her threadbare clothing. Once more Wolfgang folded her in his arms, no longer playfully but this time passionately, almost desperately. Two, small, cold people huddled together beneath the unforgiving granite columns of the enormous civic building.
Two young hearts beating together.
Two more, younger still, warm in Frieda’s belly.
Four hearts, joined by love in the harsh squalls of another, greater heart. One made of stone and iron. Berlin, heart of Germany.
‘That’s right,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘You, me and our children. The best and most beautiful thing that there ever was.’
And for once he spoke without smiling or trying to make a joke.
‘Yes, that ever was,’ said Frieda quietly.
‘Well then. Let’s get to it, Fred. It’s too bloody cold to be standing around being soppy.’
There was no question of Wolfgang waiting at the hospital. Very few expectant fathers in post-war Berlin had the leisure to hang about outside maternity wards waiting to hand out cigars in the traditional manner. Herr Sommer needed his cart back and Wolfgang, like everybody else in the city that terrible winter, needed to begin queuing.
‘There’s meat at Horst’s,’ he said, as he began to descend the steps to where he had left the cart. ‘Lamb and pork. I’m going to get some for you if I have to pawn my piano. You’ll need the iron if you’re going to feed our little son and daughter.’
‘Our little
sons
,’ Frieda replied. ‘It’ll be boys. I’m telling you, a woman knows. Paulus and Otto. Boys. Lucky, lucky boys.’
‘Why lucky?’ Wolfgang called back. ‘I mean, apart from having the most beautiful mum in the world?’
‘Because they’re
twins
. They’ve got each other, Wolf. This is a tough town in a tough world. But no matter how tough it gets – our boys will always have each other.’
Tea and Biscuits
London, 1956
STONE STARED AT the hessian-covered table in front of him. At the teacups and the biscuits and the block of yellow notepaper with the fountain pen on top. He focused on the black Bakelite telephone with its sharp angular edges and its frayed, double-twisted, brown fabric cord. It must have dated from the early 1930s.
What had he been doing when that cord was new?
Fighting, no doubt. Or running in terror along some Berlin pavement looking for an alley to dodge down. He and his brother chasing each other’s heels, two teenage boys in mortal fear for their lives.
Stone’s eye followed the cord down off the table, across the slightly warped, ruby-coloured linoleum and into a largish black box screwed to the skirting board. He fancied he could hear the box humming but it might have been the distant traffic on the Cromwell Road.
He shifted nervously in his seat. He had never quite got used to being interviewed in bare rooms by government officials. Even now he could not quite persuade himself that he was safe. Even now some part of him expected violence.
Except of course that this was England, they didn’t do that sort of thing here. Some of Stone’s more left-leaning acquaintances sneered when he said that. But then they had never had the misfortune to live in a country where sudden and absolute violence was the norm and not the exception.
Stone looked once more at his interrogators. A classic pair. One short and rather plump, balding, with an officious little soup stain of a moustache, his beady eyes flicking constantly at the biscuits. The other not much taller but thinner, standing in the corner of the bare windowless room, watching through slightly hooded eyes. It felt to Stone like he was in a scene from a movie. That he was being questioned by Peter Lorre while Humphrey Bogart looked on inscrutably, keeping his own counsel.
‘You are travelling to Berlin in the hope of meeting up with your brother’s widow.’
This was the second time the shorter man, Peter Lorre, had asked this question.
Or was it a statement? It was certainly true. But how did they know?
They had read Dagmar’s letter. Obviously.
‘
Presumed
widow,’ Stone replied, evading the question. A lifetime’s experience had taught him that it was usually wise to withhold any information from the authorities until forced to divulge it.
‘You don’t think your brother’s dead?’
‘There has never been any actual proof of it.’
‘You mean a corpse?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Your brother is certainly
presumed
dead,’ Lorre replied, finally capitulating to the biscuit plate and choosing a shortbread finger. ‘Killed by the Russians during the battle for Moscow in 1941.’
‘That is what I was told,’ Stone said, ‘after the war, by the East German authorities.’
‘Have you any reason to doubt it?’
‘No. None at all. I’ve always hoped, that’s all. My brother generally had a plan. He would have been a hard man to kill.’
‘The Waffen SS tended to be made up of hard men to kill. At least until they started recruiting boys. Your brother joined in 1940, didn’t he?’
Was there a hint of a sneer? Stone felt his anger rising. What right did this smug little man, munching on his shortbread finger, have to judge? He hadn’t been where his brother had been. Where his mother and father had been. And Dagmar.
Again the guilt.
Survivor guilt
, the shrinks called it.
‘My brother wasn’t a Nazi,’ Stone stated firmly.
‘Of course he wasn’t,’ Peter Lorre replied, and now the sneer was unmistakable. ‘None of them were Nazis, were they? Or so they all claim
now
. And the Waffen SS wasn’t really
proper
SS anyway, was it? They never ran the camps. You can’t blame
them
.’
‘My brother was married to a Jew,’ Stone said.
‘Yes, we know. Dagmar Stengel, née Fischer. You are travelling to Berlin to meet her. Is that not the case?’
Stone stared at the cups and saucers once more. He didn’t like telling them his business, but it was clearly a rhetorical question and he didn’t want to be caught in a lie.
‘Yes. Dagmar Fischer,’ he admitted.
‘Dagmar Stengel.’
‘I knew her as Dagmar Fischer. She married my brother after I left Germany.’
‘When did you last see Mrs Stengel?’
Stone drew deeply on his cigarette and closed his eyes. How often had he relived that moment? The whistling and shunting of the trains. The smell of her hair. The martial music on the loudspeakers that made it so hard to whisper the things he needed to say.
‘In 1939,’ he answered.
‘In Berlin?’
‘Yes. In Berlin.’
‘And after the war? Did you try to find her?’
‘Of course. I tried to find all my family.’
‘You were in Germany?’
‘Yes. With the army. I worked in the Displaced Persons camps, with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. You know all this, it’s in my records.’
‘So,’ Peter Lorre observed through a mouth filled with biscuit, ‘well placed to look for an elusive Jewess?’
Elusive Jewess. Such a phrase. The little man clearly had no idea of the casual contempt and innate suspicion contained within it. ‘An
elusive Jewess
?’ Stone repeated. ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘I mean Frau Stengel of course.’
‘Then bloody well say so.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘Frau Stengel then?’ Lorre resumed. ‘You didn’t find her?’
‘No.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘I never found out.’
‘One more anonymous victim of the Holocaust?’
‘I presumed so.’
‘But you now think she survived?’
Stone paused for a moment, considering his reply.