Lehrter Station (3 page)

A light rain began to fall as Effi waited outside the school gates, and she gratefully unfurled the umbrella which Zarah had insisted she take. There had been smiles of recognition from a couple of other women, but frowns of disapproval from a couple more. Her being German had upset some in the beginning, and Effi had hoped that recounting her anti-Nazi exploits in the local paper might reduce any opprobrium which she – and by extension, Rosa – would have to cope with. But while some had probably been mollified, others seemed even more inclined to hold up their noses.

Looking round, she saw another new male face – as the term went by, more and more demobbed fathers were collecting their children. Effi wondered if Rosa had noticed, and thought that she probably had. The girl didn’t miss much.

There were other children whose fathers were not coming home, but most of them seemed to know it. Would it be easier for Rosa if she knew that her father was dead?

The young Jewish girl had arrived at the door to Effi’s Berlin apartment just weeks before the end of the war. Rosa and her mother Ursel had been hidden by an elderly gentile woman for several years, but first Ursel was killed by an American bomb, and then the woman fell seriously ill. The girl had been left with no one to look after her, and the Swede Erik Aslund, who ran the Jewish escape line that Effi worked for, had begged her to take Rosa in.

She never regretted saying yes – the girl, though obviously and deeply traumatised, was an absolute delight. And now that Effi was thirty-nine, the only child she was ever likely to have.

Effi had asked the girl about her father Otto, but all Rosa could remember was his leaving one day and not coming back. She had been about three, she thought, which would place the man’s disappearance sometime around 1941. He was most likely dead, but they couldn’t be sure. Up until June of that year, Jews had still been allowed to leave Germany, and even after that date, some had escaped. Of those that stayed, several thousand of the so-called U-boats had survived several years in hiding, mostly in Berlin. So there was more than a fleeting chance that Otto was still alive.

But if he was, no trace had yet been found. Effi had been round all the refugee agencies in London, and each had agreed to pester their Berlin offices, but so far to no avail. Private correspondence between Germany and the outside world was still not allowed, so there was nothing they could do themselves. When a returning British soldier had kindly dropped off a letter from his ex-wife’s brother Thomas, Russell had tried and failed to find a carrier for his reply. When the restrictions were lifted,
Effi knew Thomas would conduct a thorough search for Otto, but in the meantime…

The school doors opened, and a host of children swept out to the gate, borne on a tide of laughter and chatter. Such a comforting sound, Effi thought, one of those things you never appreciated until it disappeared, as it had in Berlin during the final years of the war.

Rosa was walking with a blonde girl around her own age. Catching sight of Effi, she almost pulled the other girl across to introduce her. ‘This is Marusya,’ she said. ‘She’s from Russia.’

‘How do you do?’ Effi said carefully in English. She was leaning down to shake the girl’s hand when the mother bustled up and seized it instead. ‘Yes, thank you,’ she almost shouted, and tugged the girl away.

Effi stared after them, feeling more upset for Marusya than herself. Rosa, though, seemed unconcerned. ‘Marusya likes drawing too,’ she confided.

They started for home, sharing Zarah’s umbrella and taking the usual path across the foot of Parliament Hill. Rosa chatted happily about her day at school. If she was thinking about her father, she was keeping it to herself.

Back at the flat Zarah was preparing the evening meal and listening to
The Robinson Family
on the wireless. She was also glancing frequently at the clock, Effi noticed. Lothar had announced the previous week that he was too old to be collected from school by his mother, and the way Zarah’s whole body relaxed when she heard him in the hall was almost painful to behold. He gave his mother a dutiful kiss and an ‘I told you so’ look.

A few minutes later the neighbours upstairs started one of their loud and increasingly frequent arguments. The demobbed husband had been home for several weeks now, and things were clearly building to a climax – the last time Effi had seen the wife she had clumsily tried to conceal the fact that both eyes were blackened. Effi itched to intervene, but knew it wouldn’t help. She also had vivid memories of the anti-German outburst that the women had directed at her while complaining about Paul’s noisy nightmares.

Listening to them scream at each other in a language she barely understood, she felt a sudden intense yearning for her real home.

‘Is John here for dinner?’ Zarah asked, interrupting her thoughts.

‘I think so.’

‘Are you two all right?’ her sister inquired in a concerned voice.

‘Yes, of course. What makes you ask?’ Effi replied, hearing the defensiveness in her own voice.

Zarah didn’t push it. ‘Oh, nothing. This is a hard time for everyone.’

‘How often do you think about Jens?’ Effi asked, partly in self-defence. Zarah had last seen her husband, a high-ranking bureaucrat in Hitler’s regime, in April. During their final conversation he had proudly announced that he had suicide pills for them both.

‘Not as often as I used to. I don’t miss him, but I do wonder what happened to him. And I know Lothar does. He has good memories of his father. I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s better not to know. Other times… well…’

Through the doorway to the front room Effi could see Rosa drawing. There was so much unfinished business, so many loose ends… She had a sudden mental picture of the blood-soaked operating room in the Potsdam Station bunker, of stumps being tidied up and cauterised. It wasn’t so easy with minds.

Tuesday morning, the fog eventually lifted to reveal a cold and overcast day. Russell caught a Fulham-bound bus in Piccadilly, and was soon glad he had done so. As part of their current dispute, the conductors were still refusing to allow anyone to stand, and the packed bus was soon leaving knots of irate passengers behind. Traffic was heavy in any case, and their conductor’s determination to explain himself at every stop rendered their progress even slower than it might have been. When the bus finally ground to a halt halfway down the Fulham Road a large proportion of the male passengers decided to continue on foot.

The hawkers were out in force, and doing a fine trade in toffee apples and oranges. The local children were busy pocketing pennies for storing
bicycles in their front gardens and ‘looking after’ cars in the side streets. There were two programmes on sale – an official blue one and a pirate version in red. Russell bought them both for Paul, more out of habit than anything else. Paul had been an avid collector as a boy, but the urge had obviously faded, at least for the moment. Russell wondered what had happened to the boy’s stamp collection. If the albums had been left at the house in Grunewald, someone would have stolen them by now.

Picturing that house brought Paul’s mother Ilse to mind. He had met her in Moscow in 1924, at the same conference where his and Shchepkin’s paths had first crossed. He still found it hard to believe she was dead.

The crowd grew denser as he approached the ground, with many pushing against the tide. The gates were closed, he heard one man say, but if that was the case it didn’t seem much of a deterrent. As Russell crossed the West London Line railway bridge he could see people walking along between the tracks, and others scaling the back of the grandstand. Away in the distance small figures could be seen lining roofs and walls, or precariously clinging to chimney stacks.

He fought his way through to the grandstand entrance, where ticket-holders were still being admitted, and took his place in the fast-moving line. When he passed through the turnstile there was still half an hour before kick-off, so he joined the queue for tea. A party of Russians was ahead of him, happily swapping banter with some of the locals. Watching the exchange, Russell was reminded that most ordinary people still considered the Soviets as friends and allies.

The British press was certainly helping to preserve the illusion. J. B. Priestley had just chronicled a visit to the Soviet Union in a series of articles for the
Sunday Express
, and his impressions had been overwhelmingly favourable. Russell was glad that the popular playwright had noticed some Soviet plusses – particularly in education and culture – but rather more disappointed that he had missed most of the minuses. And Priestley was far from alone. Some descriptions of the Soviet leadership in the British press were naive to the point of idiocy. One journalist had recently compared Stalin to ‘a collie panting and
eyeing his sheep’; another had announced that his successors would be ‘middle-aged Men of Good Will’. Which planet were they living on?

Tea in hand, he followed the signs for the appropriate block and climbed the relevant steps. Emerging above the dull green pitch he found himself looking out across a huge crowd, a large portion of which had already spilled out onto the greyhound track that ringed the playing surface. More to Russell’s surprise, the Russian players were already out, passing several balls between them. Their shirts and shorts were different shades of blue, with a old-fashioned white ‘D’ where British clubs wore their badges. Their socks were a fetching bottle green.

He found his row, and searched the gloom for Shchepkin. The old Comintern operative was a dozen or so seats along, his newly white hair peeking out from under a fur hat. There was an empty seat beside him.

As Russell forced his passage along the row he realised that all those making way were Russians – the whole block was occupied by fur-hatted men smoking strange-smelling cigarettes and conversing in nasal accents. Shchepkin smiled when he saw him coming, and Russell, rather to his own surprise, found himself reciprocating. If a list were made of those ultimately responsible for the mess his life was in, then Shchepkin’s name would undoubtedly come close to the top. But so, Russell knew, would his own. And the past was not for changing.

He took the seat beyond Shchepkin, beside a burly blond Russian in a shiny new suit.

‘This is Comrade Nemedin,’ Shchepkin announced, in a tone which left no doubt of the man’s importance.

‘Major Nemedin,’ the man corrected him. His blue eyes were a definite contender for the coldest that Russell had ever seen. ‘Mister Russell,’ the Russian said in acknowledgement, before turning his attention back to the pitch.

‘We will talk business at half-time,’ Shchepkin told Russell.

‘Right.’

‘How do you like living in London?’ Shchepkin asked him in Russian. Nemedin, Russell guessed, did not speak English.

‘I’ve been in better places,’ Russell replied in the same language. ‘It’ll take a lot more than six months to make up for the last six years.’

‘Did you grow up here?’

‘No, in Guildford. It’s about thirty miles away. To the southwest. But my father worked in London, and we used to come up quite often. Before the First War.’ He had been thinking about those visits lately. On one occasion he and his parents had been caught up in a suffragette rally. To his father’s chagrin and his mother’s great amusement.

Down below them the Dynamos were leaving the pitch. The crowd was now over the inner fence of the greyhound track, and, despite the best efforts of the police, creeping towards the touch and goal lines. On the far side a woman was being lifted across a sea of heads towards a posse of waiting St John Ambulancemen.

‘How are your family?’ Russell asked Shchepkin.

‘Oh.’ The Russian looked disconcerted for a moment, but soon recovered. ‘They are in good health, thank you. Natasha is training to be a teacher.’

‘Good,’ Russell said. They both knew that Nemedin was listening to every word, but Russell felt childishly intent on not being cowed into silence. ‘And how long have you been in London?’

‘Since the Sunday before last. We came with the team.’

‘Of course.’ Russell shifted his attention to Nemedin. ‘And how do you like it here, Major?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Nemedin replied, as if he’d heard a different question. ‘Are they going to force them back?’ he asked, indicating the crowds below.

‘I think they’ll be happy with keeping them off the pitch,’ Russell told him.

‘But… is this normal? There is no control.’

Russell shrugged. Where the English were concerned, the controls were internal. ‘Do you like football?’ he asked the Russian.

‘Of course.’

‘Will the Dynamos do well, do you think?’

‘Yes, I think so. If the referee is fair.’

There was a sound of breaking glass away to their right. Someone had fallen through the grandstand roof, and presumably landed in someone else’s lap. It wasn’t a long drop, so Russell doubted that anyone had died.

The two teams were filing out now: Chelsea in a change strip of red, the Dynamos carrying bouquets of flowers. They lined up facing each other, and those in the seats rose to their feet as the Royal Marines band launched into the Soviet national anthem. The crowd was respectful to a fault, and the wave of emotion which rolled across the stadium was almost palpable, as minds went back to those months when their two nations were all that stood between the Nazis and global domination. The Americans and their economy had certainly played crucial roles in the Allied victory, but if Britain had broken in 1940, or the Soviet Union in 1941, all their efforts might well have been in vain.

‘God Save The King’ followed, and the moment it died away the eleven Dynamo players stepped forward and presented the bouquets to their blushing Chelsea counterparts. A storm of laughter engulfed the stadium, leaving most of the Russell’s immediate neighbours looking bemused. In the seats below one man shouted that it must be Chelsea’s funeral.