Restitution (24 page)

Robin wrote from Hanover a few weeks later, asking her to marry him.

She thought for two days before finding a rare sheet of virgin writing paper.

The pen stopped. How to explain that she already considered herself married? Married and widowed and not ready to marry again. She’d have to think of some other reason. She couldn’t
bear to hurt poor dear Robin.

Love. Security. A home – in England eventually, perhaps, where people watched cricket and the police weren’t allowed to drag you off to prison in the middle of the night. And Robin
was a nice-looking, clever, kind man. But . . .

Gregor

Berlin, early May 1945

They drove to a suburb in the south-west of Berlin to hunt for a senior civil servant Vavilov was keen to interrogate. The streets up here had escaped the worst. Gardens threw
out the scent of spring flowers and birds sang – almost like peacetime.

‘Smell that lilac,’ said Vavilov. ‘Was there ever such abundance?’

Everyone said it was the most perfect spring they could remember. Gregor shuddered: blossom-decked streets with corpses in the gutters, tulips waving in the breeze beside children so hungry they
couldn’t stand. They turned a corner and Gregor heard Vavilov’s intake of breath. Outside a building which appeared to be a hospital or clinic, a woman crawled along the pavement
dragging a bundle and trailing blood. The men ran towards her. ‘What happened?’ Gregor shouted.

‘What do you think? They even fucked us while we were in labour. And the nuns, too.’ She clutched her baby, wrapped in what looked like a ripped curtain. She frowned.
‘What’s a German doing in that uniform? Traitor!’ Her spittle caught Gregor on the chest.

He reached into his pocket, dug out some chocolate. ‘Take this. I’ll find one of our medics—’ She pushed his hand away and resumed her slow progress over the pavement.
Gregor looked round for Vavilov. He’d reached the door of the hospital and had pinned a conscript to the wall. He was hitting him round the face with one of his leather gloves. Gregor had
rarely seen his face lose its customary neutral sleepiness.

Nobody was watching him. Gregor walked off.

He walked all morning and part of the afternoon, without direction at first, circling the suburban streets. At lunchtime he started to head north-east to the rubble that had
once been the
Mitte,
the city centre. By dusk he made out the dark outline of the Reichstag, from where gunshots had cracked only days earlier. He stopped, gazing at the rubble and dazed
citizens and wondering what kind of victory this was. Seven years had passed since he’d left this city – it might have been seven centuries. From time to time he heard rustles and
squeaks in the piles of bricks. Rats. Probably feasting. Gregor wanted to retch.

Knowing he wasn’t far from his parents’ old apartment, he headed east, cutting into Unter den Linden, the long avenue leading east from the Brandenburg Gate to the museums and the
palace – if they still existed. The avenue, littered with burned-out tanks and collapsed masonry, bore no resemblance to the street he’d strolled along as a child on Sunday afternoon
outings.

He’d be shot for desertion before he got very far, or else a German would lob a grenade at him; but he was going to try and find his parents’ apartment. A group of Russians emerged
from a side street. He walked on, expecting the shout, the hand on his shoulder. No one stopped him. Perhaps the Polish uniform confused them. He turned off, striding through anonymous roads,
grateful for the few remaining road signs because there were no landmarks. Occasionally a rare surviving flowering cherry threw its colour over the muted canvas, or a tiny patch of unscorched soil
bloomed yellow and green with narcissi, or a red Soviet flag would dance in the breeze, fragments of brightness which turned Gregor’s stomach as he thought of the woman sprawling on the
pavement by the maternity hospital. Better that the world throw itself into complete mourning; this gaiety was sacrilege.

On a whim he turned into a street that a wooden sign assured him was Friedrichstrasse, where his mother had shopped before the war, negotiating the piles of rubble and twisted metal that rose
like the waves of a petrified ocean, to reach the corner where one of her favourite stores had been. The sign banning Jews had sprung up overnight one summer, must have been ’33 or ’34,
preventing Eva from buying a new hat for Matthias’s annual office boat trip along the Spree to Charlottenburg. Gregor kicked a burnt piece of wood.

An old woman hobbling past turned to flash a toothless grin at him. ‘You tell them, handsome.’

At least she hadn’t feared he’d rape her.

Gregor headed back to the Linden and continued east. During his time in Kolyma he’d sometimes dreamed of coming back here, confronting random Berliners and asking them if they knew what
had happened to him and his parents. But now he was back he couldn’t imagine confronting the wan-faced people. He’d thought he’d hate them but he felt nothing, only weariness. He
could have curled up in the broken masonry and slept. But he forced himself on, grateful for the few surviving façades that acted as guides. Somewhere on this street had once stood a
restaurant where Russian Cossacks flamed kebabs on their daggers, to the accompaniment of ooohs from the diners; his father had taken him for dinner on his tenth birthday. Now the Cossacks would be
making a dash for the Elbe before their Communist brothers could catch up with them.

He walked on, disorientated. Somewhere here had stood the Catholic cathedral of St Hedwig. He couldn’t locate its copper dome. Gone. He turned south, letting his feet drag past fragments
of buildings until they stopped. He was standing on the corner of what had once been his own street. He doubted he’d recognize the apartment block. But there in front of him was
Dieter’s father’s garage. It had lost some of its roof. The showroom windows behind which those shiny Mercedes cars had once stood must have shattered; singed timbers and sheets of
corrugated metal now replaced the glass. The forecourt appeared to be acting as a store for piles of broken bricks.

A wooden board informed Gregor that the garage was now trading bicycle spare parts and providing repairs. Gregor had already felt a secret pleasure watching Russian soldiers falling off the
stolen bikes they didn’t know how to ride. Anyone who could provide spare tyres and chains would be doing well by Berlin standards. The shop next door that had sold newspapers and chocolate
had vanished, as had most of the apartments on the other side of the street. But not his block, which stood only metres beyond the garage. As far as he could see in the gloom, its Biedermeier
exterior was intact. No saying what the apartments would look like inside, though.

Among the rubble at the end of the street a small lake had formed and on it a swan was gliding. Amazing nobody had yet grabbed it for the pot.

He walked up to the garage door and knocked. No way in hell could his friend Dieter’s family still live here. The door opened an inch or so and he smelled the familiar oil and rubber
scent. The wary face of Dieter’s mother appeared, flinching as she saw his uniform. ‘It’s me, Frau Braun, Gregor Fischer,’ he told her.

She stared at him, wiping oily hands on overalls, her mouth making a perfect O. Then the door flung open and she enfolded him in her broad arms. The aroma of oil and old, tired clothes was the
best he’d smelled since he’d left Alix’s bed. ‘Gregor Fischer! I knew you’d come back! I kept telling Dieter, Gregor’s a clever one, he’ll look after
himself. And when the bombing started I said you were better off out of it.’

He could have clung to her for eternity and had to force himself to let her go. She touched his cheek. ‘Did you think we’d all be gone, Gregor? Well you might. Dieter’s father
died in an air raid in February. Werner was killed in Normandy last year. Erik’s fighting the Americans somewhere near the Elbe.’ She shook her head, managing to express unspoken scorn
for this endeavour. ‘The girls are still here. Except for Marta – you probably never saw her. She was born in 1939. Died in 1943. Whooping cough.’

Werner, Deiter, Erik, Ute and Sabine. And Marta. Werner had been older than Dieter and Gregor and spent most of the time he could spare from Hitler Youth helping out in the garage. The other
three Gregor remembered as small kids playing with old tyres in the repair yard. They were only allowed to join in with Dieter and Gregor’s games if they agreed to play supporting roles.

‘And Dieter?’

‘Prisoner of war. Some camp near Moscow. Perhaps they’ll let them come home soon.’ The words were casual but the expression in her eyes was not.

Gregor tried to nod, remembering what he’d heard of the fate of the captured German soldiers he’d seen heading east, stinking, blank-eyed. She dragged him inside and bolted the door
behind them. A couple of candles and a gas lamp illuminated the office. The family had lived in an apartment above the premises but Gregor noticed that they’d brought bedding and cooking pots
downstairs, along with a portable stove. Frau Braun pointed to a photograph on the wall: Dieter wearing his Wehrmacht uniform. Even the official photographer hadn’t succeeded in dampening the
glint in Dieter’s eyes.
Scheissköpfe.
Gregor could almost hear him say it.

‘So it’s just the girls and me now.’ Her voice was matter-of-fact. No time for emotion when there was food to scrounge or daughters to hide from the Russians. ‘But
you’ll be wanting the key.’

‘The key?’

‘To the apartment.’

After all these years he’d remembered that Frau Braun had the key. Or perhaps he’d simply retained some memory of her kindness. ‘Before you left Berlin in thirty-eight your
mother gave me a key so I could keep an eye on the place. Rushed down here, she did, said there was no time to explain. Where in God’s name did I put it?’ She rummaged in a drawer of
nuts and bolts and handed him the key. ‘Here we are. Those bastards turned over the place but they left most of your stuff and the Russians haven’t come sniffing round here yet. I let a
few folk sleep up there if they were desperate.’ She looked worried. ‘I hope you don’t mind, it’s about the only block still standing on this street. Apart from this
garage.’

‘How could I mind?’

‘I’m going to find you some of Dieter’s clothes, you don’t want to be shot as a deserter.’ She didn’t seem surprised that he’d escaped from the Red
Army. She vanished upstairs to the family’s apartment, returning a few minutes later with underwear, shirt, trousers and jacket. ‘Still a lot of wear in them. Dieter’d only had
them for a few months when they called him up.’ Her eyes had misted over. She pushed the clothes into his arms.

She still hadn’t asked him where he’d been, what had happened. He could have hugged her for not probing. Perhaps people didn’t ask questions any more. Perhaps exhaustion had
deprived her of all curiosity. She put an arm round him and took him through a back entrance, leading to a rear door of the apartment block. ‘Quieter, this way.’ She gave him a
meaningful look. ‘Keep your head down. Let me know if you need food.’

She was gone before he could thank her.

The staircase had lost its carpet and stair-rods. Patches of brickwork showed through cracked plasterwork. Gregor climbed to the second floor. His mother had been so thrilled when they moved
here in ’thirty-two, loving the closeness to shops and galleries and the view from their balcony, which she crammed with pots of flowers. She’d loved looking out of the rear windows
too, at the
Hinterhof,
the inner courtyard where neighbours gossiped and cats stretched out in the sun. Not even the existence of the garage on the corner had dampened the family’s
enthusiasm for their new home. Anyway, back then the garage had featured a shiny plate-glassed showroom full of gleaming automobiles. Nobody had known about Eva’s father then and the police
hadn’t really shown much of an interest in Matthias. But his name must already have been on some police file.

As Gregor reached the landing something moved and his hand went to the revolver in his belt. A woman – wild-eyed, dishevelled. Frau Schiffer, the woman who hadn’t liked having a
half-Jewish neighbour. He smelled the civilian odour of sour, empty stomach and decaying teeth which he hadn’t noticed on Dieter’s mother. He heard a dripping and saw she’d wet
herself. ‘I’m German.’ He blinked. This was the second time he’d said the words. She didn’t seem to hear him.

He unlocked the apartment door. It smelled of old newspaper, metallic – like an iron that had been left on too long. Nothing a good blast of fresh air wouldn’t disperse. He could
almost smell his mother’s Mitsouko scent, hear her chatting to his father in the sitting room. The first door on the right was his father’s study. Matthias Fischer, gone so long ago.
Gregor opened the door. The desk was empty. When Matthias had lived here it had been covered in towers of paper. Gregor went into the sitting room. Someone had covered his piano with a dust cloth.
He pulled it off and opened the lid. Not as grand as Alix’s Steinway, but he’d missed it. At least the mouth organ had given him some limited musical outlet. Or had done until
he’d lost it. It was probably sitting in some soldier’s rancid pocket.