A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (34 page)

On the way home I picked my quota of nettles. I was very low on energy; my diet has no fat. There’s always this kind of wavy mist in front of my eyes, and I feel a floating sensation, as if I were getting lighter and lighter. Even writing this down takes effort, but at least it’s some consolation in my loneliness, a kind of conversation, a chance to pour my heart out. The widow told me she’s still having wild dreams of Russians. I haven’t had anything like that, probably because I’ve spewed everything onto paper.

My potato supply looks pretty grim. The rations they’ve given us have to last through to the end of July. We were forced to take them now, and anybody can smell the reason why: the tubers, which had just been dug out of the pit, are fermenting, so that half the potatoes are already a stinking mash. I can hardly stand the smell in the kitchen, but I’m afraid they’ll spoil even more quickly if I keep them on the balcony. What are we supposed to live on come July? What’s more, I’m worried about the gas stove. When there’s enough pressure in the gas line to use it, the pipes start banging like gunshots. And the electric cooker, patched up as it is, doesn’t want to run any more.

I have to guard the bread against myself. I’m already 100 grams into my next day’s ration - I can’t let that become a habit.

TUESDAY, 12 JUNE 1945

The automatic walking machine was back to Charlottenburg. No more joyrides on the S-Bahn. Something went wrong after the first few runs and the trams are once again out of commission. We worked hard; now our designs and proposals must be submitted to all the various offices.

On the way I had a new experience. Bodies were being exhumed from a grassy lawn, to be reinterred in a cemetery. One corpse was already lying op top of all the debris - a long bundle wrapped in sailcloth and caked in loam. The man who was doing the digging, an older civilian, was wiping the sweat off with his shirt sleeves and fanning himself with his cap. It was the first time I had ever smelled a human corpse. The descriptions I’ve read always use the phrase ‘sweetish odour’, but that’s far too vague, completely inadequate. The fumes are not so much an odour as something firmer, something thicker, a soupy vapor that collects in front of your face and nostrils, too mouldy and thick to breathe. It beats you back as if with fists.

At the moment the whole city of Berlin is reeking. Typhus is going around, and hardly anyone has escaped dysentery - Herr Pauli was hard hit. I also heard that they came for the lady with eczema; apparently she’s been quarantined in a typhus-barracks. There are fields of rubbish all over, swarming with flies. Flies upon flies, blue-black and fat. Must be the life for them! Each bit of faeces is covered with a humming, swarming mass of black.

The widow heard a rumour that’s going around Berlin: ‘They’re making us starve as punishment because a few men from Operation Werewolf recently shot at some Russians.’ I don’t believe it. You hardly see any Russians at all in our district, so the werewolves wouldn’t have anyone to prey on. I have no idea where all the Ivans have disappeared to. The widow claims that one of the two drink-and-be-merry sisters who moved to our building-Anya with the cute little son - is still receiving Russian callers with packages. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. I can picture her lying across her sofa, her white throat slit.

[Scribbled in the margin at the end of June] Not Anya and not the throat, but a certain Inge, two buildings down, was found this morning with her skull bashed in, after a night of boozing with four unknown men, still at large. She was beaten with a beer bottle - empty, of course. Probably it wasn’t malice or even a lust for murder. More likely it just happened that way, perhaps after an argument over whose tum it was. Or maybe Inge laughed at her visitors. Russians are dangerous when drunk. They see red, fly into a rage against anyone and everyone else when provoked.

WEDNESDAY, 13 JUNE 1945

A day to myself. The widow and I went out to look for nettles and orache, and roamed through the professor’s ruined garden, now run wild. Even if I did receive permission to tend the garden, I would be too late. Strangers’ have broken off whole branches of the cherry tree, picking the cherries just barely turned gold. Nothing will ripen here; hungry people will harvest everything before its time.

Cold, storms and rain. The tram drove down our street again for the first time. I jumped on right away, just for the ride, but once on board I realized that it would be a good time to go to the town hall and ask whether we really could expect pay for our week’s labour for the Russians. It turned out my name was indeed on the list, along with all the others, with every workday neatly recorded. They’d even entered the amounts to be withheld for tax. I am to be paid 56 marks - though not until there’s money in the coffers again. The clerk asked me to check again next week. At any rate they’re keeping the books and adding amounts and collecting the money, so I’m bound to get something.

While I waited in the rain for the tram to take me back, I spoke with two refugees, a married couple. They’d been travelling for eighteen days from Czech territory and had bad things to report. The man told how the Czech at the border was stripping Germans of their shirts and hitting them with dogwhips. ‘We can’t complain,’ his wife said, wearily, ‘We brought it on ourselves.’ Apparently all the roads from the east are swarming with refugees.

On the way home I saw people coming out of a cinema. I immediately got off and went into the half-empty auditorium for the next showing. A Russian film, entitled
At Six p.m. After the War
. A strange feeling, after all the pulp-novels I’ve been living, to sit in the audience and watch a film.

There were still soldiers in the audience, alongside several dozen Germans, mostly children. Hardly any women, though - they’re still reluctant to venture into dark places with all the uniforms. But none of the men paid any attention to us civilians, they were all watching the screen and laughing diligently. I devoured the film, which was bursting with salt-of-the-earth characters: sturdy women, healthy men. It was a talking movie, in Russian - I understood quite a bit, since it takes place among simple people. The film had a happy end - victory fireworks over the turrets of Moscow, though it was apparently filmed in 1944. Our leaders never risked anything like that, for all their promises of future triumphs.

Once again I feel oppressed by our German disaster. I came out of the cinema deeply saddened, but help myself by summoning things that dull my emotions. Like that bit of Shakespeare I jotted in my notebook, back then in Paris, when I discovered Spengler and felt so dejected by his
Decline of the West
.
'A
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.’ Losing two world wars hits damned deep.

THURSDAY, 14 JUNE 1945

And once again the walking machine was back in Charlottenburg. If only our firm were already in operation and I had my Group II ration card, with 500 grams of bread per day so that I could save a little of it for the evening. As it is I sacrifice all six of the rye rolls I get every morning for breakfast. That is to say, I pack two with me and eat them at the two breaks I allow myself; otherwise I’d give out. Despite my ‘frying’ them in coffee substitute, the rancid-tasting potatoes are difficult to get down. I should pick them over again; the little pile is melting away at an alarming rate.

Dozens of telephones were lining the hallway outside the engineer’s apartment. They’re being collected from everywhere, supposedly for the Russians. Berlin without phones! Looks like we’ll go back to being cavemen.

The evening brought a nice surprise. I finally procured my ration of fat for the past twenty days at the corner shop - 20 times 7 equals 140 grams of sunflower oil. Reverently I carried back home the little bottle I’d been toting around all week in vain. Now my apartment smells like a Moscow
stolovaya
- one of those cafeterias for ordinary people.

FRIDAY, 15 JUNE 1945

I went down very early to get my six daily rolls. They’re dark and wet-we never had anything like them before. I no longer dare buy a whole loaf, because I’d eat up the next day’s portion.

Today we broke into my old employer’s basement. The Hungarian, the engineer and I slipped in through the back, through the laundry room. We had managed to prise open the crate, which was standing untouched in the shed, when the wife of the company’s representative appeared on the basement stairs. They’re still living in the building. I mumbled something about having left some files and papers lying around. The men hid behind the crate. Then we broke off the frames, tore out the pictures - photographs signed by young men decorated with the Knight’s Cross - and stacked the glass panes; we had brought some packing paper and string with us. After that we were able to make our getaway through the back entrance. I don’t really care if they notice the loss; after all, I lost my camera and all my equipment, which I had left at work at my boss’s request, when the place was destroyed by a bomb. What are a few panes of glass compared with that? We absconded with our loot as fast as we could, each of us lugging a heavy stack of glass to my place where the men had parked our two valuable company bicycles. I was given four panes as commission. I could have glazed one whole window in my attic apartment - if I’d had any putty.

In the evening I read some of the rather random selection of books belonging to the apartment’s rightful tenant. I found a copy of Tolstoy’s
Polikushka
and read that for the umpteenth time. Then I ploughed through a collection of plays by Aeschylus, and came across
The Persians
, which, with its lamentations of the vanquished, seems well suited to our defeat. But in reality it’s not. Our German calamity has a bitter taste - of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress-stuffing, soft soap, felt mats - Aeschylus never saw anything like that.

FROM SATURDAY, 16 JUNE TO FRIDAY, 22 JUNE 1945

I haven’t been writing. And I won’t be either- that time is over. It was around 5p.m. on Saturday when the doorbell rang. The widow, I thought to myself. But it was Gerd, in civilian dress, suntanned, his hair lighter than ever. For a long time neither of us said a thing; we just stared at each other in the dim hallway like two ghosts.

‘Where have you come from? Have you been discharged?’

‘No, I just sneaked off. But now would you let me in?’ He was dragging a sled behind him, mounted on small wheels and loaded with a trunk and a sack.

I was feverish with joy. No, Gerd wasn’t coming from the Western Front. His anti-aircraft unit had been shipped out to the east at the last minute. After an enemy shell hit their position three of them went off and parked themselves in an abandoned villa, where they found suits, shoes, a bale of tobacco and sufficient food. The situation got dicey though, when the local authorities, a mixture of Russians and Poles, started going through the houses. The three joined a group of Berlin evacuees and marched home with them. Gerd knew my current address from the red-bordered field-post he received about my apartment being hit. Of course, he fully expected to find my new lodgings destroyed as well and me who-knows-where. He’s amazed I’m here and in one piece. When I told him about my starvation rations he shook his head and claimed that from here on in he’d take care of getting what was needed. He had some potatoes in his sack, in perfect condition, and a piece of bacon. I started cooking it immediately, and invited the widow to join us. She knows Gerd from my stories, greeted him with an effusive hug, even though she’d never seen him before, and in her torrent of words was soon showing him her thumb-and-finger trick: ‘Ukrainian woman - like this. You -like this.’

I could see that Gerd was taken aback. With every sentence he grew colder, pretended to be tired. We tiptoed around each other and were sparing with any words of affection. It’s bad that Gerd doesn’t have anything to smoke. He had expected a flourishing black market like Berlin of old.

After the unaccustomed rich food I felt flustered and highspirited. But in the night I found myself cold as ice in Gerd’s arms and was glad when he left off. For him I’ve been spoiled once and for all.

Disrupted days, restless nights. All sorts of people who were on the march with Gerd came by, and that led to constant friction. He wanted the guests to be fed. I wanted to save as much bacon and potatoes as I could for the two of us. If I sat there and didn’t speak he yelled at me. If I was in a good mood and told stories about our experiences over the past few weeks, then he really got angry. Gerd: ‘You’ve all turned into a bunch of shameless bitches, every one of you in the building. Don’t you realize?’ He grimaced in disgust. ‘It’s horrible being around you. You’ve lost all sense of measure.’

What was I supposed to say to that? I crawled off in a comer to sulk. I couldn’t cry, it all seemed so senseless to me, so stupid.

Do you remember, Gerd? It was a Tuesday towards the end of August 1939, around ten in the morning. You called me at work and asked me to take the rest of the day off, to go on an outing with you. I was puzzled and asked why, what for. You mumbled something about having to leave and again insisted, ‘Come, please tome.’

So we went out to the Mark and roamed through the piney woods in the middle of a working day. It was hot. One could smell the resin. We wandered around a lake in the woods and carne across whole clouds of butterflies. You identified them by name: common blues, brimstones, coppers, peacocks, swallowtails, and a whole gamut of others. One huge butterfly was sunning itself in the middle of the path, quivering slightly without spread wings. You called it a mourning cloak- velvet brown with yellow and blue seams. And a little later, when we were resting on a tree trunk and you were playing with my fingers, so quietly, I asked you: ‘Do you have a draft notice in your pocket?’ You said, ‘Not in my pocket.’ But you had received it that morning, and we sensed it meant war. We spent the night in a remote forest inn. Three days later you were gone, and the war was here. We have both survived it. But is that a go
o
d thing for us?