Underground in Berlin (31 page)

I often told myself that the bargain we had struck was not a bad one. Burgers did well out of it, but so did I. If we lived to see liberation, we would be quits and I would end the relationship at once. I had plenty of practice, after all, in escape and evasion – in short, in jumping off church towers, as the clairvoyant had put it.

But a time came when I became more and more aware of another question: how was I ever to pay off the duty of gratitude that I owed to Hannchen Koch?

In the end I often ate the food that Luise Blase made me give her after all, because the old woman ate like a bird. She offered me a taste of this and that from her meals increasingly often. That meant that it became a habit for me to keep her company at her midday meal and have some hot food myself. We often sat together for hours.

Luise Blase still had good posture and had kept her figure. Her sparse, snow-white hair had a few blonde strands in it. She wore it in long braids pinned up into an impressive nest. Where her scalp showed through her hair it was ash-grey to black, but her complexion was pink and her hands well tended.

She always sat at a little folding table that, because of her eye trouble, she was constantly moving to a place where the sun wouldn’t dazzle her. This tiny item of furniture, light as a feather, was like an inseparable part of her. She spoke the kind of Berlin dialect, the accent of the metropolis, that had been usual before the First World War, and I liked to hear it. Frail as she was, and almost blind, she worked the whole story of her life into her conversations with me.

She had been born in 1865, the illegitimate daughter of a maidservant. Luise Schieke – that was her maiden name – was at first brought up by her grandparents, but they soon died. Then she was passed on in turn to an assortment of relations, all of whom found her a nuisance. Meanwhile, her mother had risen in the world to some extent, and had married a man from the lower middle class.

‘So now that she’d improved herself,’ Frau Blase said, ‘she had a proper apartment, she didn’t have to go out to work.’ And at last her mother took the girl in. When Luise was ten her half-sister Klara was born, followed ten years later by little Anna, the baby of the family.

Like her mother before her, Luise went to work as a maidservant, and had already left home when the last little girl was born. But she had very affectionate, almost maternal feelings for the child. Every few weeks, when her employers gave her a day off, she went to see her mother’s family, although she had a chilly reception there. Her half-sister Klara showed particular dislike for her.

Once, she had bought a little bag of sweets for Anna out of her tiny wages. As she was giving it to the child, Klara struck the bag out of both their hands as hard as she could, then trampled on the sweets and told her little sister, ‘You know you’re not allowed to take anything from horrid godforsaken Luise!’ After that, Luise and Klara were deadly enemies for the rest of their lives.

For many years Luise Blase had worked as a parlour maid for a Jewish couple who lived in a grand apartment on the Kottbusser Ufer. The father of the family wanted his two sons to be brought up in spartan style so that they would be good businessmen. As for his wife, the mistress of the house, Frau Blase described her as the quintessence of the fat, rich, Jewish social upstart. She settled herself rather more broadly in her chair and imitated her employer’s screech of a voice. ‘That’s how the woman sat, stuffing herself with food,’ she told me. She still remembered exactly what subjects were discussed at length when there were visitors, for instance where to get replacements if the lid of a dish or one of the good porcelain cups was broken.

The lady who stuffed herself with food had a sister who was not in the least like her. She was slender, blonde and blue-eyed, always on the go, doing this or that about the house, very nice to the servants and inclined to physical movement and laughter the whole time. This sister was also rich, and gave large parties. On such occasions she sometimes borrowed Luise from her mistress.

Frau Blase still remembered the woman with affection. She was the only human being who had ever been nice to her. When she had been sent to help her mistress’s sister out, she was welcomed at the door with open arms and a beaming smile. ‘Ah, here’s our little Luise!’

Frau Blase described the dinners there down to the last pot-herbs for the soup. I had no difficulty in identifying the menus as kosher. The meal began with clear soup, then blue trout (so called because the poaching method made the skin look blue), followed by many other courses including delicious specialities. Large quantities of food were bought, so that the kitchen staff could eat the same as the invited guests. But that didn’t suit the servants. ‘Trout, no, never had that before,’ and they somehow didn’t fancy this and that, or would only try a little of it. As a result the cook had asked permission for them to cook themselves something different, said Frau Blase, a huge pan of potato soup. They had crackling on a lavish scale to go with it, and sat comfortably in the kitchen eating this thick soup, rich with fat from the crackling. They were promptly sick afterwards. And as the cook and another of the kitchen staff had to throw up at the same time, they bumped their heads painfully together over the kitchen sink. Old Frau Blase laughed until she cried at the memory; it was one of the funniest experiences in her life.

After Luise Schieke had worked as a parlour maid for a long time, she had to admit to herself that she was getting nowhere. Through the caretakers who lived in the building, and whose apartment was a centre of gossip for all the servants working there, she heard of a widower with two adolescent sons who was in urgent need of a wife. Old Frau Blase imitated, in the style of a caricature, the fine qualities that this good catch on the marriage market was supposed to have: he was a distinguished gentleman, well to do financially, dressed fabulously well, and so forth. In retrospect, her only comment on these advantages was a dry, ‘Humph!’ That said it all.

So Fräulein Luise arranged to meet this fine gentleman in the Hasenheide park. Soon afterwards she married him, and moved into his apartment at Number 2 Am Oberbaum, where she had now lived for thirty years.

Karl Blase was a clerk in a civil service office. He was a short-sighted man who wore pince-nez, much older than she was, pedantic, always finding fault, and generally repugnant. He was domineering, and treated his wife very badly. Frau Blase never knew why or when he would lash out at her. He insisted on having clean, well-ironed shirts, and she could certainly provide him with those. All the same, when she gave him a pile of freshly ironed laundry, he would put on his pince-nez to check that there were no little wrinkles or stains left anywhere. Once, Frau Blase lost her temper. She took a magnifying glass out of his desk drawer and handed it to him, so that he could inspect the shirts even more closely for himself. At that he beat her so hard that she couldn’t sit down for several days.

His two sons were about twelve and fourteen when Luise Blase became their stepmother. The younger was a lout who was always making trouble for her, and even in his teens the elder was on the way to becoming a criminal. Frau Blase lived in constant fear of that heartless youth, whose unusual name was Fridot. He must have done terrible things that as a rule she didn’t mention. But in some situations, for instance after a major reconciliation with Burgers when they had quarrelled, she would fall into a mellow and intimate mood, and say something about it. ‘Fridot once went for his father with a knife,’ she said on one such occasion, in a very different voice.

Money was always in short supply. One day, quite by chance, Frau Blase found out where her husband’s earnings went. She was standing at a tram stop near Nollendorfplatz, and suddenly she saw him on the other side of the street, red in the face as he staggered out of a betting shop.

Her two stepsons left home early. The children that Luise Blase herself brought into the world hardly knew their half-brothers. The elder, her son Gerhard, had already fallen at the front when I moved into Frau Blase’s apartment. I did know the younger, Kurt, because he regularly visited his mother. She had him very late in life; she was already around fifty when she noticed the baby’s movements, and had thought she was well into the menopause. Whether at first she was pleased or horrified by this pregnancy she didn’t say.

Even with two sons of her own, her role in the life of the family was a hard one. Her husband did pay for the rent and for gas, but he gave her hardly anything for the housekeeping. She took cleaning jobs to feed her family. Among other situations, she worked for years at a very good stationer’s, and in a fine perfumery in the west of Berlin.

It was there that she accumulated the treasures she had hoarded in the huge, magical cupboard that stood in the hall between the kitchen and the bedroom. Half of it was full from top to bottom with top-quality stationery, notebooks and exercise books of all kinds, and cartons full of notepaper. The other half contained cakes of the finest French soap, hair lotions and shampoos. She told me, unabashed, how these things had come into her possession. She had always been regarded as a hard-working, thorough cleaner, and also as absolutely reliable and honest. The last bit, however, was not true. Over many years she had appropriated something particularly expensive almost every time she went to work at the stationer’s shop or the perfumery.

In this old woman I recognised someone who, rejected by bourgeois society herself, took her revenge on it by breaking the law all her life whenever she could. Under the Weimar Republic she had even once hidden weapons in her home for a murderous group of paramilitaries.
*
‘Those gentlemen were so nice, they gave bigger tips than I ever had from anyone else in my life,’ she was always telling me.

Her husband died in the middle of the 1920s in the bathhouse that he regularly visited to take what was called a Spanish bath, a kind of sauna. By the time a messenger arrived to tell Frau Blase that he had been found dead in a cubicle there, he was already in the morgue.

At first she had been frozen rigid with horror. A few hours later she began mourning the fact that she was now a widow. She was in torrents of tears until the first light of dawn, when she fell asleep at last – and woke with very different feelings. ‘Then it occurred to me: my God, he’s dead. I could have shed tears again, but what a change! I don’t expect you’ve ever known anything like it. I thought to myself, this can’t be true. Because all at once I realised: that bastard can’t beat me any more. I’m free.’ She rejoiced when it struck her that, while she would have less money coming in than before, because she couldn’t expect more than a tiny widow’s pension, there was no one to spend her money in the betting shop now. At last she would be able to live as she liked. And from that day on she brought up her sons on her own.

Sometimes Luise Blase’s eyes were red-rimmed with weeping, and then I knew that she was mourning for her beloved son Gerhard. She often talked to me about him. Only after much vacillation, however, did she show me an especially sacred treasure: his journeyman’s piece made in the course of his training to work with stucco and gilding. It was a small wooden box thickly covered with stucco and decorated with very ornate roses, the whole thing finished with gold leaf even in the smallest cavities.

She also told me about Gerhard’s birthday parties in every last detail. I learned exactly what cakes were baked, how much beer Frau Blase had brought in, and what a gigantic pan full of bockwurst had been served up as the crowning glory of the birthday meal. Groping shakily about, she brought the pan out to show me, and she described the huge dish of potato salad that was served with the sausages down to the separate cubes of gherkin.

No such stories were ever told of Kurt. He had always been considered stupid by his clever elder brother Gerhard and Gerhard’s friends. He had left elementary school at fourteen, small, pale and still very childlike at the time. His mother had taken the boy to the Osram factory, a high-rise building close to the Oberbaum bridge. And it worked: Kurt was taken on as laboratory assistant to a Jewish physicist.

This man took a benevolent interest in the fatherless boy, who, while not very intelligent, was pleasant and well-behaved. He often patted his head and gave him presents at Easter, Christmas and for his birthday. In retrospect, Frau Blase still described the physicist as an angel, and was so moved that her voice rose to a squeak.

‘What happened to the man?’ I asked, with intentional naïvety. ‘Does he still work for Osram?’

‘No, that rich Jew didn’t like Germany one bit, although he rose so high in the world here and made his fortune. Coward that he was, he went off to America,’ she replied. Naturally, I made no comment.

I hated Frau Blase as a repellent, criminal blackmailer with Nazi opinions, yet I loved her as a mother figure. Life is complicated.

Kurt Blase was now twenty-eight years old. He had pale, fair hair, which he wore combed back and held down with pomade or sugar-water, a style typical of the Nazi era. He was always smartly dressed. Even as an adult and the father of a family, he still had a decidedly childlike face, which appeared to be completely empty. ‘If you were to compare his face to a railway station,’ I said to Burgers, ‘you’d have to put up a notice: No Trains In Service.’

Kurt had met his wife Trudchen in a greengrocer’s shop. The young girl, who was very thin, with curly hair, was weighing out potatoes. Before it was his turn, a woman customer said to Trudchen, ‘What a strong perm you have! The hairdresser must have worked hard over it.’ To which Trudchen replied, ‘I don’t need a perm, it’s all natural. And I never go to the hairdresser. I save the money instead.’

Kurt, who had never made friends or ventured to approach a girl, thought: a woman who doesn’t need the hairdresser is the right wife for me. He made a date with her, took her to the cinema, took her to the cinema again and married her. They had three children within a short time.

Now and then the whole family came visiting. The children were out of nappies, but not old enough for school yet. They were pale, undernourished, backward and seemed to have been taught no manners at all. They rampaged noisily round the kitchen. I felt sorry for Frau Blase. Of course she wanted to love her grandchildren, but it wasn’t possible.