Silesian Station (2008) (34 page)

Drehsen moved towards her almost apologetically, a hawk turning into a friendly owl. As she caught sight of him a hint of hope crossed Effi's face.

He let her speak first, and knowing what she intended to say, Russell had no trouble reading her lips: 'Have you come from my uncle?'

Drehsen smiled like an uncle's friend would, said a few words, and reached, almost tentatively for the suitcase. She hesitated for a second, then smiled gratefully back. He gestured towards the exit.

Russell followed them out. As they headed down the side of the station towards Frucht-Strasse he crossed the busy road beyond the taxi rank and headed along the opposite pavement, looking for any sort of concealed vantage point. He found one of the ubiquitous Der Sturmer display cabinets standing almost opposite Frucht-Strasse, and stood there pretending to enjoy the usual cartoons about Jewish bakers draining the blood from Christian children to make their matzoh.

Drehsen and Effi had reached the Mercedes, which she seemed to be admiring. He had opened the back door but Effi , as they had agreed, was insisting on sitting up front. Drehsen shrugged, put the suitcase on the back seat, and opened the front door for her. She got in.

He walked round to the driver's side and was reaching for the door handle when he saw the flat tyre. He got down on his haunches, picked up and examined the piece of glass, and dropped it again. He squatted there for a moment, presumably considering his options. Would he go for the spare?

He opened the driver's door and leaned in, talking to Effi . Was he suggesting a taxi? If not, then she would be. The exchange seemed to last a long time, but eventually he straightened his back, closed the door and went to retrieve the suitcase from the back seat. Effi got back out, and Russell found himself sighing with relief.

She and Drehsen walked back towards the taxi rank in the station fore-court, Russell keeping pace on the opposite pavement. The queue for taxis had evaporated and three were waiting in line. The driver of the leading cab took the suitcase from Drehsen and opened the rear door for Effi . Drehsen said something to him and got in on the other side.

Russell was around thirty metres ahead, close to the western throat of the forecourt. As the taxi pulled out he rushed diagonally across the road towards it, waving frantically. The driver slammed on his brakes, swerved to the right and ground to a halt inches from the kerb.

Effi erupted from the taxi. 'Uncle Fritz!' she cried happily.

'Magda,' he said. 'I'm so sorry. I was held up.'

She explained the situation to the driver, and apologised profusely for losing him his spot at the head of the line. Drehsen climbed slowly out of the back, seemingly unsure what to do, and exchanged glances with Russell. Making up his mind, he touched his cap to Effi and walked back into the station without another word.

It was what they had expected - after all, what else could he do? - but the coolness with which he did it was breathtaking.

Russell took the suitcase and they began walking the short distance to Bre-slauer Strasse, where he had left the Hanomag. Putting an arm round Effi's shoulder, he realized she was shaking. He stopped, put the suitcase down and enfolded her in a hug. She took a huge deep breath.

'All right?' he asked after a while.

'Yes,' she said. 'What a creepy man. And so convincing...'

'Did it work?' Russell interrupted her.

'Oh yes, it did. He told the cabbie Eisenacher Strasse and my heart sank, but the cabbie - God bless him - asked what number. It's 403. We were lucky really. If it hadn't been such a long street he'd never have asked.'

'You did wonderfully.'

'You too.' She reached up to kiss him. 'But the sooner we can dispense with the moustache, the better.'

'First things first,' he said, picking up the suitcase. 'We can take a look at 403 Eisenacher Strasse while Drehsen's getting his tyre changed.'

'He wanted me to wait while he changed it. And he didn't like the idea of a taxi. I had to get quite hysterical before he agreed.'

Eisenacher Strasse ran north to south across Schoneberg for almost two kilometres. Number 403 was a third of the way down, one of a row of detached three-storey houses immediately above Barbarossaplatz. It was impossible to tell which house it was - the sun had set and all were silhouetted against a deep red sky. On the other side of the road, bathed in reddish light, were a typing college and a small bookbinding factory. This part of Schoneberg had seen better days, but it still represented a considerable step up from Neukolln or Wedding. There were no tram-tracks, and not much traffic, but several modest-looking cars were parked in the spaces between the detached houses.

There was no way of stopping without drawing attention to themselves. Russell drove on to Barbarossa Platz, took the third exit, and pulled the car to a halt. 'Let's take a walk,' he said.

Three right turns brought them back onto Eisenacher Strasse, some two hundred metres above the row of houses. There were several other pedestrians on the pavement, and they fell in some twenty metres behind a uniformed young man and his girlfriend. The pair walked ever so slowly, as if intent on stretching out their time together.

The college and factory were in darkness but most of the houses had one or two lighted windows, some curtained, some not. 403 was the third from the end. Every window was curtained, and all showed lines of light. In the parking space alongside, two vehicles were drawn up, and there were two uniformed men talking in the front seats of the one nearer to the road. As they walked past one looked up, caught Russell's eye, and seemed to move them on with an almost involuntary twitch of the head.

'How,' Effi asked, when they'd walked another few paces, 'are we going to find out what's inside?'

'God knows.'

'One more look,' Effi suggested, as they reached the Hanomag.

'Why not? It's dark enough.'

Their persistence was rewarded. As the Hanomag drew level with the house the front door swung inwards, spilling yellow light down the steps to the street, and framing two uniformed men. There was a glimpse of shiny boots descending, a muffled shout of farewell. Effi twisted round in her seat to catch them under the streetlight and identify the black uniforms. 'SS,' she said, turning the consonants into a hiss.

'What a surprise,' Russell murmured. 'And emerging, unless I'm very much mistaken, from a brothel.'

'Oh no.'

'It could be a lot worse. If it is a brothel, then there's a good chance that Miriam is still alive.'

Russell woke early on Saturday morning, shut the door on the still-sleeping Effi , and waited heart in mouth as her People's Radio warmed up. When the strains of one of Beethoven's lighter sonatas emerged, he clicked off the set with a sigh of relief. No war had begun.

He went down to the Adlon to find out why.

According to the small coterie of American journalists already gathered in the bar, the answer was far from obvious. There were rumours that Mussolini had abandoned his buddy, rumours that Hitler had offered to guarantee the British Empire in return for a free hand in eastern Europe. If the latter rumours were true the Fuhrer had already had his answer - the previous afternoon the Brits and Poles had finally formalized the British guarantee as a pact of mutual assistance.

All in all, it looked as though Hitler had pulled back from the brink. The British Ambassador had travelled to London, presumably with something new to communicate, and the telephone and telegraph connections with the outside word had been restored in the early hours of the morning. Berlin's foreign press corps could again tell the world that they hadn't a clue what was going on.

There were no Foreign Office briefings to help them out, no press releases to interpret. Russell telephoned several contacts, all of whom proved less than communicative. His colleagues had much the same experience - German officials, it seemed, were loth to confirm or deny the dates of their own birthdays. Russell wrote out his version of what was happening and wired it off, aware that it would be overtaken by events long before it reached the newspaper bins around San Francisco's Union Square.

He had lunch with Slaney - who, for the first time since Russell had met him, seemed subdued by the weight of events - and headed out to Grune-wald for his Saturday afternoon with Paul. The boy was waiting by the gate, dressed, for once, in normal clothes.

'No Jungvolk meeting?' Russell asked as his son got into the car.

'Yes, there was, but it ended early. I had time to change.'

He'd had time before, and hadn't changed, but Russell decided not to probe. 'What shall we do?'

'Can we just go for a drive? Out of the city, I mean. Take a walk in the woods or something.'

'All right.' Russell thought for a moment. 'How about the Brauhausberg?' he asked. They could take the Avus Speedway most of the way, and take one of the southbound exits before Potsdam.

'That would be good,' Paul agreed, though without a great deal of enthusiasm. 'If America comes into the war, will you be arrested?' he asked abruptly.

Russell waited at a crossroads while a line of troop lorries drove past. 'No, I'd just have to leave Germany. Like the British and French journalists have done.'

'They've left already?' Paul blurted out, obviously surprised.

'On Thursday, most of them. The rest yesterday. But they may be back. And in any case, there's no chance of America coming into the war. You really don't need to worry about me.'

'Joachim's already gone,' Paul said.

'When?'

'A few days ago.'

'Where?'

'They won't tell the families that,' Paul said, sounding surprised at his father's stupidity.

'No, no, of course not.' He wondered how Thomas and Hanna were coping with their son's call-up. He should have phoned them.

They were on the Speedway now, and Russell was surprised by the volume of traffic. Cars full of families heading out for a day in the sunshine, anywhere beyond the reach of their radios and the city's loudspeakers. If they didn't get the dreadful news until evening, then that was one more day of peace they'd grabbed from their government.

'Do you think England will really go to war for Danzig?' Paul wanted to know.

'I think they'll stand by Poland.'

'But why? Danzig is German. And it's not England's fight.'

'Maybe not. But the English can't break their word again. And it's not about Danzig. Not really.' He expected Paul to ask what it really was about, but he didn't. He already knew.

'We've been doing a project on the victory in Spain,' Paul said, 'and how important the Luftwaffe was. They'll bomb London, won't they?'

'I expect so.'

'And the English air force will bomb us.'

'Yes.'

Paul was silent for more than a minute, looking out of the window and, Russell guessed, picturing a sky full of English bombers. 'It will be terrible, won't it?' Paul said eventually, as if he'd suddenly realized what a war could do.

Russell didn't know whether to be glad or sad.

'You never talk about your war,' Paul said almost accusingly. 'I used to think it was because you fought for England and you didn't want to upset people here, but it's not that, is it?'

'No, it's not.' He wondered what he should say, what he could say to a twelve-year-old boy and have him understand it. The truth, he supposed. 'It's because, in a war, you see what damage people can do to each other.' He paused for breath, like a man about to walk through fire. 'Exploding bodies,' he said deliberately, 'limbs torn off, more blood than you can imagine. The look in a man's eyes when he knows he's about to die. The smell of rotting human flesh. People without a scratch whose minds will never be the same again. The constant fear that it'll happen to you. The terrible knowledge that you'd rather it happened to anyone else.' He breathed in again. 'These are not things you want to remember, let alone share.' He glanced sideways to check Paul's reaction, and saw, for the first time, pity in his son's eyes.

What have I done? Russell asked himself, but over the next couple of hours, as the two of them walked and talked their way along the wooded paths of the Brauhausberg, Paul seemed more his usual self, as if some sort of burden had been lifted. Or perhaps it was just the sunshine though the leaves, the birdsong and the leaping squirrels, the mere insistence of life. There was no way the boy could have any real notion of the enormity of what was coming, and perhaps that was a blessing. Sometimes knowledge set you free, as one old comrade used to say, but sometimes it locked you up.

During the hours with his son Russell hardly spared a thought for Miriam Rosenfeld or 403 Eisenacher Strasse. Effi , he discovered on reaching home, had not been so fortunate. She had set aside the afternoon for evaluating a film script - an ensemble piece about soldier's wives in Berlin during the Great War - but had found the necessary concentration hard to come by. 'I can't stop thinking about her,' she said angrily. 'It's driving me crazy. I'm sure there are people being beaten to death in the concentration camps all the time, but they don't haunt me. Maybe they should, but they don't. Nor do all the children starving in Africa. But I can't stop thinking about one girl in a Schoneberg brothel. I can't get her out of my mind.'

Russell poured the two of them a drink.

'And you know what else I realized,' she continued. 'They're Jews. The girls will all be Jews. Jews for the SS to fuck.'

'Maybe.'

'No, definitely. Don't you see? Blonde is good. Blonde is worthy. Blonde is about pure love and motherhood and child-breeding. There's no place for pleasure in any of that, no sensuality. It's all about duty. Dark, on the other hand, is bad and dirty and unworthy. Dark is all about pleasure. I see the way most of these creeps look at me, as if I must be able to give them something they can't get at home. And Jewish girls are the darkest of the dark, the ultimate forbidden fruit. Who would the SS want more?'

'You're probably right,' Russell said, 'but what can we do?'

'We have to get Miriam out. And the others.'