Nightmare in Berlin (30 page)

But for now the sky does not look as if a storm is brewing. It is radiant with sunshine, completely cloudless, and not so much blue as a dull, whitish silver with just a hint of blueness. Whenever the man looks up from his writing and gazes out of the window (which he does not infrequently; he appears to be not all that absorbed by his labours), he finds himself squinting a little to shield his eyes against the glare of the summer sky. But then beneath this sky shimmering with heat he sees something that gladdens the heart, even in a suburb of Berlin: green treetops, the gables of houses, and red roofs, but not a single ruin. There's not so much as a freshly repaired roof to be seen, and even the windows of the houses appear to be all intact. A real sight for sore eyes in this city of ruins!

The writer looks up frequently from his work. He sits there, pen in hand, poised to begin writing again. But first he listens out for the voices down in the yard. The voices he hears are invariably women's voices, and almost always those of young women, and they all speak in the easy, rather throwaway manner of native Berliners. More than once, somebody says: ‘It's too ‘ot indoors by ‘alf today!' or: ‘I'll tell you what
that's
all about, so I will!'

But the man doesn't smile at this, and he doesn't feel the slightest bit superior when he hears this kind of rough, ‘uneducated' talk. He has learned that he has no reason to feel superior to anything or anyone.

Although the voices sound young, and although the man only needs to stand up and step over to the window to get a good view of the women as they speak, he doesn't do so. He knows that some of these girls and women are very pretty, and they are sunning themselves out there in the most casual state of undress, but he is not curious; instead he feels old, very old, and tired. During the last year, his hair has gone very grey; but given how old he feels, it ought to be snowy-white.

As he writes, the man frequently hears another sound apart from the chattering of the women. He lays the pen down and listens, straining hard to hear. It's a very strange sound that comes to his ears, a cross between the cooing of a dove and the fluting of a slightly out-of-tune blackbird. This strange sound, which he could not identify at all during the first few weeks of his stay here, is made by a large dog, half Doberman and half Alsatian. This creature was probably driven out of its mind by all the gunfire and the flames and the crazy commotion during the final assault on Berlin, and is now chained up somewhere down there beneath the green treetops, looked after by a halfwit who lives in this building at No.10 Elsastrasse. In the evening, Hermann — that's what everyone in the house calls her, though her real name is Hermine — lets the dog loose, and the creature then guards No.10 Elsastrasse through the night; and woe to the stranger who dares to climb over the fence! The dog would tear him apart without a moment's hesitation: it is a mad dog, and nothing could hold him back, not even his keeper Hermann.

The strange thing is that this dog — called ‘Mucki', a name conferred on him in happier times that no longer suits him at all — can bark at night, but during the day, when he is chained up, he can only flute and coo like a bird. He just didn't have a good war. Wounded inside, he cries out in pain, is capable of murder, and is no use for anything. The man sometimes wonders, when he hears this strange sound, how many humans are in much the same place as this Mucki.

Yes, the man finds all kinds of reasons for looking up from his work and taking a break for a few minutes from the concentrated effort of writing in his scratchy hand. From time to time, he looks across at a loudly ticking wall clock to check the time and see if it is still too soon for him to stand up and tidy his papers away. This wall clock with its faded blue face and brass-coloured pendulum is the only item of furnishing in the small, cramped room that goes beyond the bare essentials. A table, a chair, a bed, a narrow wall closet, and an ancient, completely faded velvet armchair constitute the sum total of the room's furnishings.

Except — there is one object that should not be forgotten, even though it is generally tucked away out of sight. It is a black velvet cushion, decorated with a kind of painted scene. The scene depicts a castle with three turrets, lilac-coloured roofs, and lots of windows, which are red at the bottom and yellow at the top, while the walls of the castle are formed by the unpainted black velvet. One turret has a white flag on top of a long pole, the second has a cross, also in white, and the third just has a kind of very long white lance. Also in the picture are trees with white trunks and green leaves in many shades; rocky crags in pink, lilac, and flame-red; and dotted about here and there, for no apparent reason, are white railings. Hanging over the whole scene is a circular, yellow orb, which might equally well be the moon or the sun.

The man loathes this cushion with a fierce hatred. He curses it just because it has survived this war undamaged in all its bovine ghastliness, while so much of beauty has been destroyed. He hides the cushion at the bottom of his bed or in the little wall closet, just so that he doesn't have to look at it all the time. But the cleaning lady keeps on finding it, and helpfully pats it out flat again on the faded velvet armchair, clearly delighting in this choice work of art. The man could ask the cleaning lady to leave the cushion where he has hidden it, but he refrains from doing so. He never says a word to this woman, even though she always announces in the same friendly manner, when she has finished cleaning the room: ‘Now you can get back to your work!' or: ‘Now you can have a cup of coffee.'

Not that one could really blame the writer all that much for pausing so often in his labours. He is only writing out of a sense of duty, without any real enthusiasm or belief in what he is doing, perhaps in part just to prove to himself and others that he is capable of finishing what he has started. Begun six months or so earlier, this piece of work at first seemed to be going well. Then came various interruptions, due to personal disagreements, illness, or simply a lack of appetite for work, and the more he delayed final completion, the less interest the writer himself took in the work he was doing.

But the situation on this fifth of July was a little different. On this morning, the man had awoken from a sound night's sleep and had suddenly realised how to steer the little ship of his writing out of the sea of facts and into a tranquil harbour at last. He could not yet say with certainty whether he would reach this harbour in two days, eight days, or twelve days, but even a voyage of twelve days held no more terrors for him, since he now knew that a safe harbour awaited. When he paused in his work today, he was just continuing the bad habits of previous days; he was not deliberately looking for excuses to be lazy.

The man glanced again at the wall clock with the faded blue face, and saw that it was late enough for him to stop writing with a clear conscience. He gathered up pen and paper, put them away in the wall closet, and picked up a block of wood with a key hanging from it. With this key and some toilet things, he crossed a forecourt towards a door on the far side, on which was hung a sign that said in large, clear letters: ‘Not to be used by gon. or syph.!'

The man made to open the door when he saw that there was already a key in the lock, attached to a block of wood exactly like the one he was holding in his hand. He muttered something about ‘bloody cheek!' and was about to place his hand on the door handle when the door was opened from the inside and a girl or young woman, dressed only in a very short shirt, brushed past him, obviously feeling guilty, and disappeared through the door of a nearby room.

The man gazed after her for a moment, in half a mind to kick up an almighty fuss over this unauthorised use of his toilet. The sign was clear enough, after all. But then he thought better of it. He had never yet sounded off since he had been living in this place, and he would adopt a different tactic. He withdrew the key from the lock, went into the toilet with both keys, and bolted the door behind him.

As he was having a thorough wash in there, he wondered whether he should complain to Mother Trüller about this blatant disregard for the no-entry sign, or whether it would not be simpler just to commandeer this second key, which was supposed to be for the sole use of the nursing staff, and had only been left in the door as a result of someone's carelessness. He decided on the second course of action: Mother Trüller had enough on her plate, and the effect of even the most severe dressing-down from her would last only for a day at most. As for the so-called patients here …

Yes, as for these so-called patients, who for the most part were not actually ill at all, as for these sixty women, with whom he shared this madhouse at No.10 Elsastrasse as the only male occupant, all warnings, tongue-lashings, pleas, and prohibitions were completely lost on them. On the contrary, they were all imbued with the best of bad intentions, determined to break all the rules and make trouble wherever they could.

When the man moved in here a good eight weeks previously, and suddenly found himself in the company of sixty women who were mostly young and pretty, he had expected to be living a highly entertaining and also instructive life. Not that he had any designs on these ladies, not at all: the nature of the diseases that had landed them in this place — usually under gentle pressure from the police — was such as to deter him from any such designs. The women had picked up these diseases, the names of which were spelled out with brutal clarity on the no-entry sign on the door of his toilet, out there in the city of Berlin, recklessly, knowingly, or — in a few cases — unknowingly. They had been diagnosed by doctors and put on a course of treatment.

But these women had given up on the treatment, either failing to turn up for their appointments at the doctor's surgery or choosing to ignore the doctor's instructions, so that they posed a constant threat to anyone who had anything to do with them. That's when the gentle police pressure was applied, and they were deposited at the door of this institution, which they were not allowed to leave until they were fully cured. Some of them had proved difficult to find; they knew what awaited them. They had changed their address, avoiding their treatment by devious cunning, only to be scooped up eventually in some police raid.

Well, despite all this, or perhaps precisely because of it, the man had hoped to derive some entertainment and instruction from these ladies, and hear some colourful life stories. Instead he soon realised that all these girls were hopelessly stupid and dishonest. To hear them talk, they had all ended up in this place through the dirty tricks of the doctors, the public health authorities, and the police, and it was only when they got here that they had been infected by the immoral women they had to share a room with!

It didn't take great powers of discernment to see that they were lying, and as for their laziness, it beggared belief. Although they were not confined to bed by illness, except on the days when they were given their injections or a crash course of pills, there were many among them who hardly got out of bed during the whole eight or twelve weeks of their treatment. There they lay, young and blooming, with strong, healthy limbs, but bone idle and not prepared to do any useful work. They were so lazy that if one of them felt sick from the large intake of pills, none of the others could be bothered to hold out the sick bowl for her. For all they cared, she could vomit all over the floor — that's what the nurse was there for, to clean it up afterwards. So they would ring for the nurse, and if she didn't come at once, the mess stayed where it was. The filth and smell didn't bother them, but the idea of doing any work at all was anathema to them.

That wasn't what they were here for, living in a world where it is so easy for a pretty young girl to clean a man out, like a nicely fattened Christmas goose! And they would boast to each other of their triumphs, telling of pockets daringly picked, of their magnetic charms as barmaids, of their whole wasted, useless lives — and the more useless, the more glorious in their eyes. And then they went and stole cigarettes from each other, and tossed their medical prescriptions out of the window or dropped them down the toilet (being too ‘smart' to let themselves be poisoned by these doctors!); and when their relatives came to visit them on Sundays, they complained bitterly about how bad the food was here, and how they had to go hungry. Yet according to their regular weekly weight checks, they were growing steadily fatter from idleness and gluttony.

No indeed, the man's expectations had not been fulfilled. There was nothing romantic about these women; they were not bathed in some redemptive glow. He was not very patient with them, it is true. There had been great excitement among them when this man came to live in a house of women; they had been friendly and welcoming towards him, and in the first few weeks there had been no shortage of visitors who sought him out in his room under all manner of pretexts. But he had soon given up chatting to them. It annoyed him every time that they thought him stupid enough to believe their cock-and-bull stories.

And they were greedy. He could tell from the way they looked at the food on his plate, comparing it with their own portions. As a private patient of the senior consultant, who had not been able to find room for him anywhere else but here, he did enjoy something of a special position, but by and large he was given exactly the same food as they had. Mother Trüller could hardly cook separate meals for one man! But they eyed the size of his bread slices, gauged the thickness of the topping, and said: ‘It's all right for some!' Or else: ‘I couldn't care less!'

And then they always wanted something from him: a cigarette, or a light for a cigarette, or a book or a newspaper or fuel for their lighter — they took it to such extremes that he would refuse them the simplest favour.