Berlin: A Novel (19 page)

One of them shouted and fired a salvo into the blue sky. The others roared something. Two of them seized Helga. She defended herself in silence, but she knew she had no chance.

'Mama, Mama!' Karl came racing up. He was a strong lad of nearly fifteen now, and fearless in his simple innocence. He made for the intruders like a madman, thrust them aside and stationed himself protectively in front of his mother.

'Karl, don't, they'll shoot!' she begged. Her son stood rooted to the spot. One of the six called something out in surprise. He took the pockmarked soldier's arm and pulled him over to Karl. They could all see that the man of Mongolian origin and the mongoloid boy looked like brothers. The men stared in amazement. The soldier hugged Karl and slapped him on the back. The others laughed and applauded. Helga ran into the house, and no one stopped her.

Hejdus had placed himself by the stove with his four women behind him. He was holding a shotgun. 'We'll kill ourselves first,' he growled.

Quickly, Helga flung some clothes on. 'What about your famous Spreewald hospitality?' she cried, running out again. The soldiers were talking to Karl and laughing. Karl took Helga's arm. 'Mama,' he told his new friends. 'My Mama.'

One of them understood. 'Matka.' He pointed to first mother, then son. 'Sin.'

Frau Wanda and the three girls had put on their traditional caps and shawls and carried out trays with water, bread and salt on them. They bobbed curtseys, not submissively but with a welcoming smile. The soldiers understood this gesture of hospitality, and took what was offered with thanks. The two Zastrows came hesitantly out of their cottage. After hiding his shotgun, Hejdus joined them.

Then there was real eating and drinking: sausage made with grits, pancakes, millet and cabbage, with sour milk to drink. They all laughed and talked. The Sorbs and Russians were delighted to find words common to both their Slav languages.

Papa Zastrow ventured to put it into words. 'Friends, I think the war is over.'

Helga had never seen her son so happy before. He raced around in high excitement, filling the guests' plates and mugs. Later they danced to Mato's accordion. Karl stumbled awkwardly around with Breda. He couldn't get enough of the fun. Then, in the middle of the dance, he collapsed. Helga was beside him at once. He lay on the ground, breathing heavily, his eyes closed, his pulse barely perceptible.

The men carried him into the house. Helga undressed him, rubbed him with juniper spirit, and covered him up to keep warm. She sat beside the bed and held his hands. She knew this was the end. His heart, underdeveloped as in all mongoloid children, had held out for almost fifteen years. He opened his eyes. 'Mama,' he said thickly.

You are dying free, my son,' she whispered. 'That's my gift to you.'

Outside, the soldiers started the engine of their pontoon and cast off. The noise of the engine died away. All was quiet in the bedroom. Karl had stopped breathing.

They buried Karl behind the house. The girls wept, but Helga had no tears to shed. The knowledge that she had carried out her task consoled her. She had looked after him and protected him from his first moment of life to his last, had fought for him and defended him, had given him good, happy times. Now that it was all over she couldn't stay in the Spreewald. She returned from Cottbus to Berlin on the roof of a freight train.

The building in Sophie-Charlotte-Strasse was intact, but it was brimming over with people who had been bombed out. Helga kept applying to the Housing Department until they finally let her have a room in her own house. Until then she stayed with her sister in Tempelhof. Monika's small daughter Erika was five. She last saw her father in '42 and can't remember him. They say it will be years before the Russians let their prisoners of war go. Young Frau Pillau next door isn't waiting that long. She takes a student to bed from time to time. It must be fun with a really young man, don't you think?'

Helga told her about her times with Mato. A dear boy. He insists he's coming to visit me here, but I hope some Spreewald girl will put a stop to that. I really don't like the idea. I have to put my life in order and look for work.'

'Why don't you go back to your old job? Children's nurses are always in demand,' Monika encouraged her.

One day soon after that Helga went to the Charite, which was now in the Soviet-occupied sector. The Western Allies had moved into Berlin a few days earlier and taken over their own sectors of the capital. There were no visible lines of demarcation between West and East, only several large and ugly notices on the major thoroughfares: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE BRITISH - FRENCH - AMERICAN - SECTOR OF BERLIN. The Berliners weren't bothered. They went all over their city or out of it, on foraging expeditions or to search for friends and relations who had been bombed out.

'You'd like to come back to us? Good. Just go to the personnel department,' a friendly woman at reception told her.

'Rinke, Helga?' The same man was at the registration desk, except that now he'd removed his Party badge. He brought out a card index. 'Nurse in the children's ward until 1929. Reappointed 1941.' He stopped. 'Just a moment, please.' He disappeared into the room next door. She heard him pick up the phone. '. . . had herself transferred to Klein Moorbach, that euthanasia institute ... my duty as an anti-Fascist. . .'She couldn't hear any more. She didn't need to. Quietly, she left the office. She had to get out of there! The Western newspapers had reported this kind of thing. The NKVD were looking for alleged Nazi criminals all over the Soviet-occupied zone, throwing them into the camps they had taken over from the real wrongdoers.

'They don't go to the trouble of examining the facts.' she explained to her sister. 'Well, luckily they know me as Helga Rinke and not Helga Lohmann. All the same, no one's getting me back in the East again.'

'Go to the newspapers and tell your story,' Monika suggested.

But Helga wouldn't hear of it. 'That won't bring the children of Klein Moorbach back to life.'

'What are you going to do?'

'Look around here for something.'

Young Frau Pillau next door came to her aid. 'Try the Yanks, Frau Lohmann. They're recruiting Germans to work in all sorts of jobs. Schoolgirl English is good enough. My sister-in-law got a job in the Telefunken canteen, the US intelligence people have set up shop there. I'll ask Marina where you apply tomorrow.'

The place to apply, Helga learned, was the German-American Employment Office in Lichterfelde. She got the address, too. It was in Finckensteinallee. Ask for Mr Chalford.'

Mr Chalford was the man in charge of the office. 'How good is your English. Fraulein Loman?'

'Frau Lohmann. My husband fell in the war.' That was close enough to the truth. Death by exploding gun barrel in Doberitz sounded a little banal.

'Can you please say that in English, Frau Loman?'

'My man is dead in the war.' She spoke rather broken English, but it was good enough for Mr Chalford.

'Have you got a profession?' he asked, still in English.

She was surprised to find how well she could understand him. 'I am a sister for children.'

'You mean a children's nurse? Excellent. And do you also know anything about housekeeping? Can you cook?'

I think so.'

'I believe I have something for you. Colonel Tucker and his family are looking for a housekeeper.' Chalford played with a pencil as he talked. He spoke halting German, with a heavy American accent. 'Mrs Tucker needs help, particularly to take care of her two boys. Their house is in Dahlem. Im Doi - funny kind of street name, don't you think? If Colonel and Mrs Tucker like you, you can have the job.' Helga looked at him with interest. She had never been so close to an American before. Chalford was a friendly man in his thirties with thinning fair hair, a round, rosy face, and pale-blue eyes. He seemed to be a pleasant human being. As a man he left her cold. 'You must have a medical first, of course,' he explained. 'We only want healthy people. And then we'll take a photo for our card index of employees. Where do you live?' Helga gave him her address in Sophie-Charlotte-Strasse. Chalford put the pencil down. 'Good luck, Frau Loman.' He winked encouragingly at her and began to read a file.

The T-Line bus wasn't back in service because of the fuel shortage. The Americans had started a bus line of their own, carrying GIs, US civilians, German employees of the army who held bus passes, and several clever Berlin lads who managed to persuade the naive German drivers that they were Americans by chewing gum and wearing garish ties.

Helga's journey took her a quarter of an hour, past Truman Hall, named after the new President, which housed the recently set up Post Exchange, as the US Army commissariat was traditionally known. An American could buy stuff in the PX that the Germans didn't even dream of - they had forgotten that such things existed. The engineers had unrolled a stretch of artificial turf outside this unattainable paradise and planted full-grown trees, which were supported by a framework for the first few months. At the same time, Berliners were cutting down the last fir trees in the Grunewald by night as firewood for the coming winter.

'Im Doi' was a quiet street of villas in Dahlem, evidence of the former prosperity of its inhabitants. The Tuckers' house stood at the very back of its plot of land, invisible from the street. Its rightful owner, a reclusive biochemist, had grown deadly bacterial cultures there for the Nazi regime. He was now continuing his work in a Moscow laboratory.

There was a blue Studebaker parked on the drive. A man in Yankee uniform dyed black was raking the lawn between the birch trees. He stopped work when he saw Helga. 'Yes?'

'I'm Frau Lohmann. Colonel and Mrs Tucker are expecting me. It's about the post as housekeeper.'

He looked condescendingly at Helga. 'You'll never get the job, darling,' he said, with offensive familiarity. 'Tucker likes 'em young.'

'Keep your opinion to yourself. And keep your "darling" for your own kind.' Helga snapped back.

'OK. Take a look through the kitchen window there.'

Tucker, in full uniform, was standing at the kitchen table between the naked thighs of a girl sitting on the edge of it. The girl was uttering small, rhythmic cries.

'Don't go away,' the colonel panted when he saw Helga. Obviously he enjoyed it twice as much with an audience. He stowed his prick back in his trousers. 'I suppose you're the housekeeper. Come on in.' The girl slipped off the table and buttoned up her smock. 'That's Rosie the housemaid,' Tucker said. 'Myra and the boys have gone shopping. They'll soon be back. Rosie, show her around the house.'

Rosie was seventeen, a little brunette with bright, brown eyes. 'What am Ito do?' she said to Helga, by way of excusing herself. 'If he fires me I'll have to go back to the East as a farm hand. What will you do if he gets fresh with you?'

'Get fired. Does Mrs Tucker know?'

'She looks the other way. In return he lets her drink in peace.'

'Who's that fellow in the garden?'

'Klatt. Gardener, sometimes chauffeur too. Steals like a magpie. Brings the colonel new girls, and worms his way into Mrs Tucker's good graces.'

There was a sudden loud noise outside. Two little boys in baseball kit stormed in. A youngish woman with a cigarette in her mouth followed. Klatt carried her shopping into the kitchen.

'Hi. I'm Myra Tucker. I suppose it's about the job as housekeeper?'

'Helga Lohmann,' Helga introduced herself.

'OK, come on, Helga, let's go into the study. Rosie, see to the twins, will you?' Mrs Tucker went ahead. The panelled study was the room where the former master of the house had worked. 'Like a drink?'

'No thank you, madam.'

'For heaven's sake call me Myra.' Mrs Tucker took a bottle of gin off the cocktail trolley and poured a lavish quantity into a large brandy balloon. 'Dry vermouth,' she said, spraying a little into her glass from an atomizer. She took a long gulp. 'I've given up the olives. You can't get the ready stoned sort in the PX. I like them stuffed with anchovies. Do you like olives, Helga?'

'I don't know. I've never eaten an olive.'

'Really? Well, never mind. OK, so you're here about the job. No problem. If you can cook and cope with the boys, it's yours.' Mrs Tucker emptied her glass and refilled it. She forgot about the vermouth this time. She laughed briefly. 'Thank goodness, you're too old for the colonel. Do you have any family?'

'My husband has been dead for some time. My son died in May.'

'Oh, I'm so, so sorry.' Myra Tucker looked at her, eyes swimming with tears. It was easy to guess that behind the gin bottle was a woman who sympathized because she'd been so deeply injured herself. 'Can you start tomorrow, please? That will give you and Rosie two days for the preparations. We're throwing a party on Saturday, OK?'

'OK.' Obeying an instinct, Helga carefully took her new employer's glass away from her. 'You don't need that any more, Myra. You have me now.' She took her hand. The American stiffened. A few seconds later she was just a child, seeking shelter in Helga's arms.