Underground in Berlin (33 page)

‘Ah,’ said Kurt thoughtfully. ‘And there am I shivering with cold at home.’ He lived in Thaerstrasse in the Friedrichshain district, in a chilly apartment that couldn’t be kept warm.

From then on we were in league over the peacetime coal question, and Kurt dropped in almost every day. Before going to see his mother, he knocked at the wall of my room from outside in the stairwell. I quietly opened the door, gave him the cellar key, he went downstairs, packed a briefcase full of coal, hid it somewhere or other, and only then did he ring the bell, visit his mother, and go away again with his loot. These regular visits greatly reinforced our friendship.

He liked me, and I liked him too. When he raised one eyebrow, as he often did, it always looked as if he were marvelling at something. And in fact he was, because he was learning the phenomenon of friendship for the first time in his life. Kurt never made remarks of any kind about National Socialism or about the Jews. Why he had become a Nazi and what he had thought about it I preferred not to ask. Thinking wasn’t his strong point anyway.

Once Kurt Blase got a bonus of 200 or 250 marks for his achievements at work. To him, that was a large sum. He told us that he wasn’t going to let Trudchen know about it; he would do something for his own pleasure for once. Frau Blase was enthusiastic, and clapped her hands with glee; she hated her daughter-in-law like poison, and liked to think of Kurt going behind Trudchen’s back. It turned out, opportunely, that he had gone on a little work-related trip to Frankfurt an der Oder, and on the journey had met two very nice girls. One was a nurse, the other an office worker. He had plucked up the courage to amuse himself with both girls and exchange addresses.

One of them had a birthday soon afterwards. He wanted to send her flowers, and went to some trouble to get them. His mother recommended him to get me to write a letter to send with them, perhaps in verse. I was happy to do that, and it impressed him greatly, particularly when the girl felt very flattered.

Kurt spent all the rest of his bonus meeting the two girls and inviting them to all kinds of harmless pleasures. Then he told me that, sad to say, he would have to break off contact with them, because the money had run out.

‘Wouldn’t you like to make real friends with one of them?’ I asked.

‘Get intimate, you mean? Nothing doing,’ he said brusquely. ‘If I get fun out of something, then judging by all I’ve known so far I’d be bound to …’ He didn’t finish his sentence, began stammering, and finally collapsed on my breast in sobs. I had difficulty keeping a straight face, but I pulled myself together. So the two of us sat harmoniously united on the sofa. I put my arm round his neck to console him, and thought, with an echo of Goethe:
Happy is he who from the world can take his well-earned rest / without a grudge, while the SA is held against his breast
, simply changing the words
einen Freund
[a friend] to refer to the SA.

A few days later I had a very unpleasant experience. I was wearing a winter coat that didn’t fit me properly, an ugly garment that I had inherited. I tried to make up for its shortcomings by belting it in round the waist. I also usually slipped my shoes on barefoot, since I had no stockings. I would have needed clothing coupons to buy some, and I had none of those either. That day a woman stared at me in the street and then let fly. ‘Ha, ha, ha – I never saw the likes of that before! Ever such an elegant coat –’ she didn’t mean that ironically – ‘and no stockings!’ She cocked a snook at me, and when I swiftly turned and walked away, feeling afraid of her, she followed that up with a torrent of abuse. Once again I felt unhappy with my decision to class myself with the poor, oppressed and exploited, or in Christian terminology those who labour and are heavy laden. I just didn’t like the company.

‘Wait a moment,’ said Kurt, when I told him about this scene. He hurried off to his mother and came back a few minutes later, beaming, with her card of clothing coupons. ‘I told Mother that I’d like to give those two ladies stockings, and if Trudchen knew she’d explode with rage.’ He opened his wallet and gave me not only the card of clothing coupons but also money to buy stockings. I was truly moved. And Frau Blase was delighted about anything that was withheld from her daughter-in-law.

That also applied to the cigarettes that Trudchen chain-smoked. As neither Kurt nor Frau Blase smoked, she consumed their entire rations. It drove her mother-in-law to distraction. One day I heard her in the kitchen, coughing and making inarticulate sounds: at the age of seventy-eight, and after all the setbacks she had known, Frau Blase was smoking the first cigarette of her life. She hoped that she might yet become a smoker and thus use up her whole tobacco ration by herself.

In the winter of 1943–1944, Frau Blase fell severely ill. First she had a bad chill, then she caught a cough as well, and she stayed in bed all day. She did come into the kitchen to wash, she went to the toilet, and she also made herself something to eat. She didn’t want me to look after her; she was well-disciplined and refused to spare herself, to the point of obstinacy.

But then her condition deteriorated. She ran a high temperature, wheezed as she breathed, was unsteady on her feet and had to hold on to the kitchen stove to keep from falling over. Several times I suggested fetching a doctor, although that was a near-impossibility, because most doctors were in the field with the armed forces. She refused. ‘I can die without doctors, but I don’t want to die and I’m not going to,’ she announced.

One day, when I was busy in the kitchen, I heard cries for help. Of course the magic door was closed, but out of a presentiment that she might need someone she had left her bedroom door wide open, and in her feverish state, she had fallen out of bed and lost her sense of direction. With great difficulty I lifted her, put my arms round her and got her back into bed. I had never been in her bedroom before. Then I brought her a cup of tea.

She was over the worst of it now. Her temperature gradually came down, but she would never be really well again. Within a few weeks she seemed to age ten years. She was a case for nursing now, she had to lie down a great deal, and never came out of her bedroom before eleven in the morning again.

But the weaker Luise Blase was, the easier my own situation became: I was now solely responsible for the housekeeping, and I took the best care I could of the old lady, in need of nursing as she was. That way she could stay in her familiar surroundings and keep her independence. She was deeply grateful to me for that, and so was Kurt. Now and then she gave me one of those wonderful soaps or shampoos from her cupboard; the mere perfume of them was a joy to me.

It was absurd: here was I, going into hiding with a Nazi blackmailer who lavished consumer goods on me, luxuries that even the most privileged members of society could hardly hope for. When I was alone in the kitchen in the morning, I would fill the wash tub with water, put it over two gas rings and then manoeuvre it over to two chairs placed opposite each other. Then I took a real hip bath, splashing the water about and singing. Sometimes I felt so happy in that apartment that I hardly know how to express it.

The situation with the Kochs was also rather easier now. Emil, who by this time was over forty and extremely short sighted, had been moved to another barracks, where they asked him what job he used to do. He replied, as most people who were quick off the mark did at the time, by saying that he had been a cook. He had no idea how to prepare food, but his wife quickly taught him some of the basics.

From now on, Emil had access to considerable quantities of food. Hannchen made him a kind of wax-cloth vest to be worn under his clothes: an undergarment equipped with artificial kangaroo pouches. When, as was often the case, there was meat loaf or meatballs for the firefighters, she sacrificed their white bread coupons so that he could bulk out the minced meat to make it go further. He brought the stuff home by the kilo in those wax-cloth bags fitted to his body. He also regularly brought whole rye loaves back for us. I didn’t have to listen to comments about the high price that a black-market loaf had cost me any more.

And now Hannchen Koch revealed to her husband what he had already worked out for himself anyway: I wasn’t in Bulgaria, and my visit to that country had been a long time ago; I was back in Berlin. I had slept that one night in the Kochs’ marital bed in their little wooden house in Kaulsdorf after my return. Emil Koch had found a hairpin of mine there, and made his own deductions.

One day, when I was sitting with Hannchen Koch in the Köpenick café, Emil suddenly came in. We greeted one another warmly, and after that we all three of us sometimes met there. He would buy me a glass of wartime beer and one or two cigarettes, but he never made me feel that I owed him eternal gratitude.

I was still getting pocket money of five marks a week from Hannchen Koch, and that did weigh on my mind. She earned less than a hundred marks a month, so it was really difficult for her to spare such a sum. And she went on telling me, at frequent intervals and in an affected tone of voice, ‘I’m naturally given to self-sacrifice.’

I kept house as well as possible with the food available to us. No one starved, but our diet was often terribly monotonous, and short of vitamins. Frau Blase was all the happier with anything special that I could get hold of. For instance, you couldn’t get salt and mustard on a ration card; you had to be known in the shop to buy such things, but I didn’t want to be on very friendly terms with the shopkeepers in case they started asking me personal questions.

So I devised my own ways and means. Once, shopping in a greengrocer’s, I had been given fifty pfennigs too much change. I didn’t notice until I got home; fifty pfennigs wasn’t much, and money had no real purchasing power anyway. But I wanted to be honest, so I went back to the shop next day to return the money. The saleswoman was really touched to find that in wartime, when everything was so coarse and brutalised, there were still honourable people around.

Then I tried the same thing in several other shops. I would go in and say, ‘I bought something here two weeks ago, and you gave me fifty pfennigs too much change. I haven’t been around here again until today, but now I’d like to give it back.’ The reaction was always one of pleasure and respect, and in that way, for instance, I came by three little packets of fruit paste off the ration, available only under the counter. Burgers was delighted, Frau Blase enchanted, and I gave Hannchen Koch the third packet.

Once I also went to the Rigaer Strasse indoor market in Friedrichshain. Frau Blase had once worked as a cleaner for a married couple who had a butcher’s stall there. ‘Look in on them and give them my regards,’ she told me. To my surprise, after we had chatted for a little while she gave me a large ring of blood sausage for my landlady off the ration, and two small blood sausages ‘for you and the Dutchman’.

I was taken aback. ‘How do you know about me?’ I asked.

‘Well, it’s obvious who you are. Kurt lives hereabouts, and he told me what a tough time you’re having.’ So people didn’t keep themselves to themselves as much as I’d thought, but my luck held, and no one denounced me.

As usual when I had a message for Frau Blase, she was delighted to think that, as she put it, I’d been in touch with someone who knew her. In this cheerful mood, she told me that the butcher and his wife had always thought her very honest, but every time she went to work for them she had abstracted meat or sausage from the market stall under their very noses. That was her speciality.

You had to queue for a very long time, on average an hour, to make every purchase. For me it was twice that time, because for safety’s sake I had registered the ration cards of Burgers and Frau Blase in different shops, in case some inquisitive shop assistant asked, ‘Is your surname Burgers or Blase, and who’s the other one?’

You were really supposed to enter your first name on the ration card as well, but I had put only an initial: G. Burgers.

‘Shall I guess your name?’ a salesgirl once asked me. ‘Gerda!’

‘Quite right!’ I said, beaming at her. She filled in the name on the card, so from then on I was Gerda Burgers in that shop.

Waiting in line, I was quite often asked to change places temporarily when a couple of acquaintances wanted to talk to each other. That was how I got to know a pleasant woman who looked as if she were in her forties. This Frau Rose was telling her friend about her very old mother who needed nursing, and as the friend was very hard of hearing she had to raise her voice. So I learned that Frau Rose was always short of washing powder, because she had to re-bandage her mother’s leg ulcers so often and change her sheets several times a day.

This was a case where I could be helpful. Frau Koch had given me a whole handful of crumpled coupons for wartime soap and washing powder. They came from customers at the laundry, and she should really have stuck them on their cards, but she didn’t want the extra work. However, she couldn’t exchange the coupons for anything, because it would have been obvious where they came from. So I went up to the woman in the queue, apologised politely for overhearing her conversation, and offered her soap coupons if she had anything to exchange for them.