Then We Take Berlin (54 page)

The Gramercy

Frank had drifted in early, as though there were more on his mind than he was admitting and he admitted nothing.

Wilderness was still shaving, half a mask of white foam across his cheeks. Frank lay on the bed, leafing through a copy of
Life
magazine and singing not quite tunelessly to himself.

“You’re doing swell, you’ll go to hell, you can be sure of Shell.”

Over and over again.

“Frank?” Wilderness called from the bathroom.

“Hear you loud and clear kid.”

“Steve’s wife’s aunt. Hannah Schneider, right?”

“Right.”

“A Jew?”

“Is the bear Catholic, does a pope shit in the woods? Of course she’s a Jew. You think a guy like Steve would marry outside the tribe? Hasn’t seen the inside of a synagogue in thirty years, but he’d never marry a shicksa. Personally I don’t get it. Who talks religion in the sack? Even if you fuck on Sunday.”

Wilderness ignored this. Frank at his crudest. If the USA ever permitted the advertising of condoms, Frank was their man.

“Steve’s been here how long?”

“Born here. Round about 1900 or 1901. His old man came over from Ruritania or somewhere in the nineties. One o’ them pogrom things I guess. Changed the family name during the First War.”

“And his wife. That is, Debbie’s family?”

“About the same time I reckon. I heard her life story ten times over. Damn woman never shuts up.”

“Aha . . . but the aunt got left behind . . . somehow.”

“Yep.”

“Where?”

Wilderness heard the magazine rustling stop. As though he had Frank’s attention for the first time.

“Whaddya mean where?”

“Germany?”

“Germany? Sure.”

“Berlin?”

“I guess so.”

“And she survived?”

“Obviously.”

“In Berlin, during the war? Frank, how many Jews do you think survived in Berlin during the war?”

“None. I guess.”

“Actually, a couple of thousand survived. Against the odds but they did.”

“You don’t say?”

“Yep. I met some of them. When I was living with Nell.”

“There’s a blast from the past. Nell Breakheart. Old flames never die, eh Joe? ‘You’re doing swell, you’re fucking Nell . . .’ Well . . . you may be right, but I never met any Jews in Berlin.”

The magazine was rustling again. When Wilderness stepped out of the bathroom, Frank was angling the magazine sideways to take in an advert.

It was hard to tell. Frank was indifferent to so many things it was often impossible to be certain whether or not he’d just given you the brush-off.

§180

They took breakfast downstairs in the Gramercy. They had it almost to themselves. Frank let his guard down, an old, familiar air of who-gives-a-damn.

Between coffees Frank slid a passport and a driving licence across the table to him.

Wilderness picked them up.

“James Johnson?”

“Easy to remember.”

“From Hoboken?”

“New York without being New York. It’s across the river in New Jersey. Sinatra’s home town. You used to do a good impression of Sinatra. Ought to be an easy accent if you ever need it.”

Wilderness leafed through the passport.

“It’s fake?”

“Of course it’s fake. But it’s a good one. Guys at Checkpoint Charlie will never spot it, ours or theirs.”

“Then why do you need me?”

“Excuse me?”

“If you can get hold of fake passports this good, why not just get one to the old woman and have her walk across? Why bother with the tunnel?”

“No can do. She speaks no English, so it would have to be a West German passport. And she’d never stand up to questions. Retired schoolteacher. Toughest ordeal of her life was probably facing the PTA.”

“That and living through the Allied bombing of Berlin and a secret life as a Jew in Nazi Germany.”

“Whatever. You guys have a phrase for it . . . ‘Wouldn’t say boo to a gander’? Something like that. Anyway, there are Kraut fakes around, maybe even good ones, but even if I could get my hands on one the Ivans are wise to them. Getting East Berliners out has become something of a sport—maybe that’s understating it . . . maybe it’s a badge of honour among the new generation of Germans. Kids for whom the war is a distant memory, if that. Bunches of ’em have been trying to get Easterners out ever since the wall went up. The fake passport scam worked for a while, but it’s over. It’s become a one-way ticket to a labour camp. I couldn’t risk that. Besides . . .”

He slid a brown envelope across to Wilderness. Wilderness opened it—a postcard-size photograph of an unsmiling young man of about twenty.

“Manfred Oppitz. Student of Political Science, and leader of half a dozen idealistic kids who have been tunnelling. You need to meet with him.”

“Tunnelling?”

“Yep. Got twenty-nine out before the Russians shut ’em down. Twenty-fuckin-nine, Joe! And now . . . every sewer gate and manhole between East and West is welded shut.”

“I don’t need tunnellers, I have a tunnel.”

“I was coming to that. You do need this kid. The tunnel may well be intact, after all . . . has anyone been down it since you? I doubt it. But the Tiergarten end has been built on.”

“You could have told me this yesterday.”

“It’s not that bad. It’s just a car park for the zoo. Since you and I stomped around there the zoo’s got a lot bigger.”

“Just a car park?”

“Sure. It’s not as if they built the fuckin’ elephant house on it. A sheet of blacktop. That’s all. Last time you shifted tons of rubble—the remains of the goddam flak tower.”

“Last time I had Fat Stanley, the Sappers Corps, and a couple of bulldozers.”

“Fat Stanley? Whaddya know? Jeez. I had totally forgotten him. But, no matter. Don’t worry. This ought to be what you call a doddle and I call a cinch. You set it up. The kids do the digging. You get ten grand. They get another old Kraut, another feather in their caps.”

“In a municipal car park? With traffic cops and Joe Public to contend with?”

“You’ll think of a way. You always did. A few deutschmarks scattered around, grease a few palms, a few more fake documents, knock out another batch of inky smudges. Come on Joe, earn your ten grand.”

“And where will you be?”

“Good point. Goooood point. No real reason I should be in Berlin is there? At least not until Fraulein Schneider is out. London, I’ll be in London. At the Connaught. Call me when it’s over.”

It was an inept choice of phrase, almost custom-made to remind Wilderness of the relationship that he and Frank used to have, “Call me when it’s over.” He could almost see him picking flecks of dust off his trouser turnups.

“Yeah. I’ll do that. Although I’d hate to drag you away from dinner at the Ivy.”

Frank was stuffing his face with ham and eggs, oblivious to sarcasm.

“’S’OK. Just leave a message.”

§181

West Berlin
: June 1963

Frank’s arrangements did not skimp. Wilderness might have chosen somewhere quieter, somewhere off the main drag, but he could not argue with Frank’s generosity in picking the Kempinski Hotel. It was big and bold and shiny. Its name in huge letters along the curving roofline. It was a part of the new Berlin that was coming into being. Berlin never arrived. Berlin was always in the process of arriving, always giving birth, and by now Wilderness had concluded it would be that way for ever. A process rather than a place.

In 1948 the Kempinski had been the ruin at the end of their street, bombed into oblivion by the RAF.

Wilderness had checked in, had a martini in the bar, and after a second martini in the bar had felt nostalgic enough to want to wander down Fasanenstraße and look at the old apartment block he and Eddie Clark had lived in. He’d not done this on the last trip or the one before or the one before that. It had gone, and in its place something new was rising up behind the sheeting and the scaffolding and the labour pains. The RAF and the Luftwaffe had seemed lethal at the time, yet were as nothing compared to the post-war municipal wrecking ball. But . . . the synagogue had risen again. Very little of the original remained, but somehow the portico arch had been incorporated into a new building—it was now called the
Jüdisches Gemeindehaus—
in a modern style Wilderness could only think of as “chunky.” That was the thing about the new Berlin, it was “chunky.” Modernist slabs of flat concrete and plate glass that could leave the observer craving the ragged beauty of ruins—but Albert Speer had planned for ruins, had imagined all his grandiose designs in a state of decay many years hence and, if ruins were what one craved, Berlin still had enough of those to go round.

He drifted on, southwards. At the far end of the street he stood on the corner of Lietzenburger Straße, once the non-line between the American Sector and the British, in front of the old Imperial Hotel. A Berlin summer evening, a time to stand and stare. The perfect post-martini, pre-Copernican moment—to be standing on a street comer and feel the world revolve around you.

What surprised him now had surprised him on every visit since he had left in ’48. Trees. He’d never get used to trees in the Berlin streets. Living trees. Trees with leaves. Trees in bustin’ June blossom. Trees not waiting to be chopped up for fuel. Unter den Linden still hadn’t restored its lime trees—perhaps the DDR never would—but West Berlin had trees, a waving, rustling sea of green.

On the other side of the street a short, stout-ish man—overdressed for the time of year, buttoned up to his chin in a dark green overcoat, a Tyrolean-style hat on his head—was staring back at him. Wilderness was about to cross when a pale yellow tram shot between them and blocked his view. When the tram had passed, the man had gone. What lingered was that the man had looked like Yuri Myshkin.

§182

At Checkpoint Charlie first the Americans and then the Russians had turned over every page in his passport scrutinised his visa and waved him through without requiring a word from him. He might never get to try out his American accent.

He’d driven his rented Opel Rekord out to Pankow. The car was grey, relieved by a tasteless streak of blood red along each side. And he’d parked in front of this eight-storey slab of people’s apartments.

It was just another plain block of flats in the Soviet style that had made East Germany a byword for grey and boring. Both words were too often invoked to describe not just its architecture but also its food, its people, and its culture. Wilderness had nothing against any of these. The flats seemed at least as practical as the tower blocks now dotted around East London and rising up like triffids all the way out to Dagenham—the people looked little different from the way they’d looked at the end of the war—fatter perhaps, but still fed on spuds and cabbage, a literally “grey” diet lacking protein and vitamins that dulled the skin and took the shine out of their eyes. Culture? Well, in the post-war carve-up they got Brecht. We got . . . God knows, he loathed the “university” wit of Kingsley Amis, he loathed that sodding professional Yorkshireman John Braine . . . perhaps the hope of England rested on this new bloke Alan Sillitoe. He had read a couple of his books and thought they had bite. None of ’em were Brecht, but did Brecht make up for spuds and cabbage?

He was daydreaming. Found himself staring up at the windows. He knew why. It was the name. It was the sort of thing only new, revolutionary, or self-inventing countries ever bothered with. They named streets after heroes. Even literary heroes. England seemed not to want to acknowledge its heroes and settled for naming everything after monarchs or battles—Victoria, Waterloo . . . one day some innocent tourist might enquire who King Euston was or where the Battle of Euston had taken place. This was Arnold-Zweig-Straße, named for the novelist of the Great War who’d gone on to be something big in East Germany’s arts, president of this, chairman of that. Somewhere in the East Zweig might still be alive. He’d be eighty-ish. He might even be living on Arnold-Zweig-Straße. Or if not then he’d probably be quite at home on Ibsenstraße or Zolastraße. Kingsley-Amistraße? God forbid.

Apartment 606 was not on the sixth floor, it was on the fifth. Wilderness stopped dreaming, stopped guessing and rang the bell. A slow grinding followed as the clockwork mechanism ran down with no sound much resembling a bell—but it was enough to bring Hannah Schneider to her door.

She looked at him across the chain that might keep out another old lady but wouldn’t last two seconds against a jackboot.

“Herr Johnson?”

“Schubert,” Wilderness said—the password he and Frank had agreed on.

Hannah Schneider just looked baffled, then a look of enlightenment flickered in the nut-brown eyes.

“Oh do forgive me . . . I am so unused to this sort of thing . . .
Der Erlkönig
. That is the reply?”

And the chain slid off, the door swung open.