Nightmare in Berlin (10 page)

Of course, from this moment onwards it was hard to find anyone who didn't change his tune and discover that in actual fact he had always thought a great deal of Doll, and had always wished only the best for him. When they had said as much to their friends and neighbours half a dozen times, they really believed it themselves, and would have called anyone a liar and a slanderer who reminded them of what they had said earlier about this self-same Doll.

For his part, Doll had not wanted to take on the job of mayor, but he was given no choice in the matter. He'd never been someone who took part in public life, and he was certainly not cut out for officialdom; and just because he had given one speech, fired up by vodka, that did not mean he had any desire to pursue a career in public speaking. Moreover, as already noted, he was in a state of deep personal crisis at the time. He was tormented by doubt and lack of faith in himself and in the world around him; a profound despondency robbed him of all strength, and a wretched apathy prevented him from taking an interest in anything that was happening in the world. Furthermore, his instinct told him that this office, by virtue of which the fortunes of his fellow citizens were placed in his hands, would probably bring him nothing but worries and cares, and a lot of extra work. His wife said: ‘If you become mayor, I'm going to jump in the lake!' When he took the job because he was ordered to, she didn't do it, of course; she stayed with him, lived only for him, and did her best to make the few hours he spent at home as comfortable as possible. But it was effectively the end of their normal family life together.

For Doll had been absolutely right in his prediction — his position as mayor would bring him little joy, but a whole load of trouble and care. He was inundated with work, more than he could really cope with, and while his area of jurisdiction was not that large, with the small town and some thirty or so rural parishes, he still had to work from the early morning until late at night — and even the mayor of the biggest city on earth can't put in more hours than that. There were an endless number of things that needed rebuilding, organizing, setting up and sorting out, and there were virtually no resources available: everything had been plundered and destroyed by the Nazis and the SS, including the spirit of cooperation among the local population. They were so mean-minded, petty, and self-centred that they had to be ordered, pushed around, and often threatened with punishment. Behind his back, they did everything they could to undermine the common cause and feather their own nests. In fact, they often wrecked things out of pure
schadenfreude
, without any benefit to themselves.

But Doll had more or less foreseen all this, and when they were obstructive and malicious it just made him more determined to get his way; and he could always rely on the support of the Red Army officers. They were planning and working for the long term, and not just thinking from one day to the next. But what Doll had not foreseen was a new loss of self-esteem, and even though he was doing this job, he felt somehow diminished in his inner being. That's what it felt like, and the longer this feeling persisted, the stronger it grew, even now when he was leading such a busy life, as if Doll — and no doubt many other Germans like him — was now to be stripped of his last remaining inner resources. They would be left naked and empty, and in letting go of the lies that had been drip-fed to them all their lives as the most profound truth and wisdom, they would be stripped of their inner resources of love and hate, memory, self-esteem, and dignity. In those days, Doll often doubted whether the empty space inside him would ever be filled up again.

For twelve years he had been bullied and persecuted by the Nazis: they had interrogated him, arrested him, banned his books some of the time, allowed them at other times, spied on his family life; in short, they had made his life a misery. But as a result of all these hurts, great and small, inflicted upon him, and as a result of all the vile, disgusting, and horrendous things he had seen and heard in those twelve years, and read between the lines of all the vainglorious news bulletins and swaggering editorials, a lasting feeling had grown up within him: an utter hatred of these people who had destroyed the German nation, a hatred so profound that he could no longer stomach the colour brown, or indeed any mention of the very word. If he saw anything brown around him, he had to paint it over, paint it out: it was an obsession with him.

How often he had said to his wife: ‘Just be patient! Our turn will come again! But when that day comes, I won't have forgotten anything, and I won't be forgiving anyone. There is no way I'm going to be “magnanimous” — who is ever “magnanimous” to a poisonous snake?'

And he had described how he would haul the schoolmaster and his wife out of their house, how he would interrogate them, harass them, and finally punish them, this pair who had not scrupled to make children of seven or eight spy on their own parents! ‘Where has your father hung his picture of the Führer? What does your mother say to your father when the man comes round collecting for the Winter Relief Organisation? What does your father say in the morning — does he say “Good morning” or does he say “Heil Hitler!”? Do you sometimes hear people speaking on the radio in a language that you don't understand?'

Oh yes, the hatred he felt for this educator of our youth, who had shown photos of horribly mutilated corpses to seven-year-old children, that hatred seemed to have taken permanent root.

And now this same Doll had become mayor, and a portion of that retribution of which he had so often spoken, feeding his hatred by imagining how it would be, had now become a duty laid upon him. It was his job — among his many other responsibilities — to classify these Nazis as harmless fellow travellers or guilty activists, to root them out from the bolt holes where they had been quick to hide themselves, to kick them out of the cushy jobs they had cleverly and shamelessly landed for themselves once again, to strip them of the possessions they had acquired by fraud, theft, or blackmail, to confiscate the stocks of food they had been hoarding, to quarter the homeless in their big houses — all of this had now become his bounden duty. The local Party bigwigs and principal culprits had, of course, fled west a long time ago, but the National Socialist small fry were just as disgusting in their way. All of them claimed — either with righteous indignation or with tears in their eyes — that they had only joined the Party under duress, or at most for economic reasons. All of them were willing to sign a statement under oath to that effect, and if they'd had their way they would have sworn it right there and then, before God and the whole world, with the most sacred of oaths. Among these two or three hundred National Socialists there was not a single one who claimed to have joined the Party out of ‘personal conviction'. ‘Just sign the statement', Doll would frequently snap impatiently. ‘It doesn't alter anything, but if it makes you happy …! Here in the office we've known for a long time that there were only ever three National Socialists in the world: Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels! Off you go — next, please!'

Mayor Doll would subsequently visit the houses and apartments of these National Socialists with a few policemen (some of whom, in those early days, were pretty dubious characters themselves) and a clerk to take notes. He found cupboards piled high with linen, some of it hardly used, while up in the attic a mother evacuated from her bombed-out home in Berlin didn't know how she was going to put clothes on her children's backs. Their sheds were stacked to the ceiling with dry logs and coal, but the door was securely padlocked, and none of it was shared with those who lacked the wherewithal to warm a pot of soup. In the cellars of these brown hoarders they found sacks of grain (‘It's just feed for the chickens!'), meal (‘For my pig! Got it on a ration coupon from the Food Office!'), and flour (‘It's not proper flour, just the sweepings from the mill floor!'). In their pantries the shelves were packed with supplies, but for every item they had a lie ready to hand. They feared for their precious lives — it was clearly written in their faces — but even now that fear could not stop them fighting to the bitter end for these supplies, claiming that everything had been acquired by legal means. They would still be standing there, next to the cart, when their hoarded treasures were taken away. They didn't dare cut up rough, but their faces wore an expression of righteous indignation at the injustice visited upon them.

Doll's own expression when carrying out these confiscations was invariably one of anger and contempt, but inside all he felt was disgust and weariness. As someone who had always preferred to live quietly on his own, and who even within his marriage had defended his right to solitude as something sacrosanct, he now had to spend nearly the whole day with other people, talking to them, trying to wring something out of them, seeing tears, listening to sobs, protests, objections, pleas; his head often felt like an echoing abyss filled with noise.

Sometimes he thought fleetingly:
What happened to my hatred? These are the Nazis I swore to be revenged on, after all, whose vile deeds I said I would never forget and never forgive. And now I'm standing here, and the only thing I feel is disgust, and all I want is my bed, and the chance just to sleep and sleep and forget about all this — just so that I don't have to look at all this filth any more!

But in these days and weeks when he was constantly overworked, he never had time for himself. He could never think his own thoughts through to the end, because his mind was constantly taken up with other things. Sometimes he had the unsettling feeling that his insides were leaking away, and that one day he would just be a hollow skeleton with a covering of skin and nothing else. But he had no time to dwell on this thought, and he couldn't decide whether he really had stopped hating the Nazis, or whether he was just too tired to feel any kind of strong emotion. He wasn't a human being any more; he was just a mayor, a machine for doing work.

There was only one case where the feelings of hatred seemed to come alive again in Doll. A certain Mr. Zaches had lived in the little town for as long as anyone could remember, like his parents and grandparents before him — a genuine local, therefore, and the only kind recognised as such by the natives. Now up until the time when the Nazis seized power, this Mr. Zaches had run a small, struggling beer wholesaling business, and also used to make fizzy drinks for children from spring water, carbon dioxide, and coloured flavourings; latterly he had also supplied wholesale tobacco goods to the hospitality trade. But all of this combined had not been enough to support Zaches and his family. So the two nags he kept to transport beer were also pressed into service for all kinds of other haulage jobs — fetching suitcases and crates from the station, hauling timber out of the forests, ploughing and working the fields of local smallholders. Yet even with all this, the family could barely make ends meet; Zaches was constantly on the brink of ruin, the loss of a customer was enough to put the whole business at risk, and the days when payments to the brewery became due were days of fear and trepidation for the Zaches household.

But when the Nazis came to power, all that changed completely. Like many businessmen threatened with ruin prior to 1933, Zaches had joined the Party, bedazzled by all the talk of ‘smashing the tyranny of usury' and of the universal prosperity that would surely follow. He wasn't a bit interested in politics, of course, but only in doing well for himself — and in that he succeeded after 1933. Quietly at first, but then more and more brazenly, he set about stealing business from his competitors, who had not been smart enough to join the Party in good time. He put pressure on landlords to order goods only from him, and those who complied were rewarded with little favours. He made minor political difficulties disappear, secured advantages for them by having a word with the local mayor, and generally used his position on all manner of committees, boards, and councils to ruthlessly advance his own interests. If anyone opposed him, he secretly gathered evidence against that person, set his spies to work to listen and watch, and then either issued threats or drew the net closed, whichever best suited his own needs.

As a result, his business flourished. As well as the cart horses, he now kept a separate team that only hauled crates of beer and barrels. And Zaches, the obsequious, ever-courteous pauper had now turned into Mr. Zaches, the National Socialist Party member, a man with a finger in every pie and a sharp tongue in his head, who knew that he had a lot of money behind him, as well as a Party that could make or break its fellow citizens, and held the power of life and death over them. On the back of all this, Zaches had become big and fat, and only his unhealthy, sallow complexion and his dark, piercing eyes, which avoided the direct gaze of others, recalled the lean years of the past. When the war broke out and merchandise in his line of business became particularly scarce and sought-after, his substantial earnings were unaffected; on the contrary, he made more money from a limited supply of inferior merchandise than he had been making from the good stuff. On top of that, the departure of so many men to go and fight in the war brought him a number of new posts, and like all National Socialists he did not feel bound by the rules governing the rationing of food. He took whatever he needed from the land — bacon, eggs, poultry, butter, and flour — and what he couldn't eat himself he sold on at extortionate prices, secure in the knowledge that an old Party member was effectively untouchable.

And so he remained — until the Red Army arrived on the scene. Zaches was one of the first to be arrested. His sworn statement that he had only joined the Party for economic reasons was surely no less than the truth in his case, but for many years now he had been such a selfish parasite and enemy of the people that economic reasons were no mitigation whatsoever. Yet once again he had more luck than he deserved. The authorities soon had to grant him a measure of freedom again, because he was needed for work in the town's dairy. In his youth, Zaches had learned the dairy trade, and when times were tough he had helped out there from time to time — so now he was just the man to step in and lend a hand. For better or worse, it was necessary to employ him there, though nobody liked the idea — least of all Doll. But the pressing need to feed the mothers and children of the town meant that political interests had to take a back seat for now.