Underground in Berlin (35 page)

Suddenly I saw a decrepit old gentleman marching along beside the soldiers, doing the goose-step. He must once have been a singer, because he had a good voice and articulated the words very well. He wore a bowler hat, a red handkerchief peeked out of his coat pocket, and he was the kind of eccentric you don’t often see at large.

This man was simulating the trumpet prelude to the Radetzky March in a very loud voice, and then he followed up the melody, in stentorian tones, by singing, ‘So put your hand right up my arse, and I’ll give you the Radetzky March.’ Hundreds of soldiers stopped singing and laughed. And I marched along with them like a good girl, deliberately keeping time with the rhythm set by the old man singing his Radetzky March song.

I can’t describe the fun of it all: the cacophony of the performance, discords from the idiotic song about the dark brown hazelnut mingling with the demand to ‘put your hand right up my arse’. I loved the disharmony which, to me, expressed the essence of resistance.

I remembered the experience for a long time: the way a single decrepit old man, with a cord round his waist instead of a belt, had brought hundreds of soldiers to a halt, and nothing terrible had happened to him. I wondered: what might a properly organised resistance still do even now, when the war couldn’t last much longer?

It’s worth it, I thought. It’s worth not marching in time. And it’s been worth facing all the fear and unpleasantness. Because life is beautiful.

Our caretaker Grass was a gifted comic. And since the Nazis had no sense of humour – dictators never do – almost everything that could raise a good laugh was to do with resistance.

I was walking towards the Oberbaum bridge late one afternoon, a few steps behind Alexander Grass, when the local ‘Golden Pheasant’, as we called certain Nazi officials, came towards us. Grass suddenly began moving as if he had no backbone, raising his arm to the Golden Pheasant in the Hitler salute and at the same time, wriggling like an eel, bowing to him, while he came out with a verbal mishmash somewhere between ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Good evening, sir!’ The Golden Pheasant roared with laughter and, influenced by the power of suggestion, responded with equally idiotic jabbering. I laughed at that for a long time in retrospect.

It was a very good thing for me that Herr and Frau Grass were also in charge of the air-raid shelter in the cellar. With the aim of keeping everyone in uniform at a distance, Grass had even volunteered his services as assistant air-raid warden. There was not, in reality, any such post, or at least not officially. But he had made it clear to the real air-raid warden that people had to stick together in hard times, and he was therefore prepared to take full responsibility for the apartments at numbers 1 to 3 Am Oberbaum. He would make sure that everyone, including the old folk, got down to the cellar when the air-raid warning sounded. And after the all clear, he would check to see whether an incendiary bomb had fallen anywhere. He did all that just so that I could use the air-raid shelter safely. If a uniformed man did happen to look in, Grass was there at once, claiming all his attention and chatting away to him until he left again.

The inhabitants of all three buildings sat together in one large cellar that was the air-raid shelter. Many of them had brought their own chairs, others perched on the primitive benches that Herr Grass had made. Whenever the alarm went off, people brought their emergency kits with them. Stout Frau Grass stood in the middle of the room looking rather self-important as she showed everyone to their places; they all knew where to go anyway.

The young people sat together in a corner. Here we regularly met Grete Grass, the caretakers’ daughter, who was an assistant in a food shop. Then there was a girl juggler who lodged in one of the buildings next to ours. She suffered from chronic conjunctivitis, and was being treated by the ophthalmologist Dr Martha Jun, who was well known as an anti-Fascist and a staunch opponent of the Nazis. The young performer told me once that she knew exactly who I was; an apprentice of the Kaufhold troupe in Zeuthen had told her about me. So there was a great deal of interested gossip, even though – or perhaps because – Frau Fiochi had tried to make a great secret of my origin. It is really astonishing that no one ever denounced me.

Another of the young people was Lotte, a prostitute who cheerfully admitted to her profession. I had a reliable protector in this vehement anti-Nazi. She would talk frankly and in the most ribald Berlin dialect about her work as a tart, using all the professional jargon of her trade. The average model would have been envious of Lotte’s figure. Men called out
Beene wie Marlene
, after her,
legs like Marlene’s
. But she had a huge conk of a nose, and jagged at that. It bent once sharply to the left and then sharply to the right. Lotte was always cracking jokes, and not just about her nose. Everyone roared, screeched, rolled in the aisles with laughter when she began talking. If I had a prize for brilliant comedy to award, I’d be hard put to it to decide between Alexander Grass and Lotte the whore. For a while I tried linking the two of them together in a double act, which I thought would be terrific, but it didn’t work. They simply didn’t interact with each other, and at the most exchanged banalities.

‘Yours is really an excellent profession,’ I once told Lotte, to show how much I liked her.

‘But it wouldn’t do for you if you survive,’ she replied. ‘I guess you’ll study and get a “Doctor” in front of your name. That’s your way, and mine is mine.’

Once, when I was climbing the stairs to our apartment, I heard a lot of noise in the attic. I was immediately terrified: was it the Gestapo? Nonsense, I told myself at once. If I were denounced they wouldn’t be setting to work with hammers and pickaxes in the attic. But I had to persuade myself firmly of that to get my fear under control.

The same evening Alexander Grass told me what had in fact been going on up there: a gang of construction workers had been breaking through the thick firewalls between the separate buildings, so that people could get from one attic to another.

There had been similar openings in the cellar for a long time. If access to one cellar was blocked by rubble, then we would be able to get out into the open through another. Now our assistant air-raid warden had persuaded the man who was really responsible, the official air-raid warden, to do something like it in the attic storey. When he told us about their conversation, Burgers and I laughed out loud. ‘You see, comrade, you have to think logically,’ Grass had told the man. ‘Where will people run to? If they’ve run down from upstairs to get away from the bombs, and then the bombs fall, they’ll have to run up from downstairs again.’ Grass had bombarded the air-raid warden with this nonsense at top speed, twisting and turning like an eel, until the man was worn down and agreed.

And our caretaker had done it especially for me. ‘If the danger comes from downstairs, from the lowest riff-raff ever known, and that’s the Nazis, you don’t want to run down, you want to run up. Because there’s usually one of them still standing outside the door. Then you can get into another building by way of the attics, and leave again in another street,’ he explained. When I tried to thank him, he would have none of it. ‘No need for you to thank anyone. On the contrary. What’s been done to you and your people is monstrous. It’s you we have to thank if we can help you.’

In the evening Lotte went fishing for customers in Altermann’s bar in Mühlenstrasse just round the corner. I had to go there now and then myself. When Frau Blase was in a good temper she would hand me a green glass jug with a patent lid on it and send me to fetch draught beer from the cask. I didn’t like the bar, or the wartime beer either. In addition I was afraid of losing control of myself if I drank alcohol; I wanted to be wide awake all the time with my mind clear. So I developed ways of quietly tipping the beer from the big jug down the kitchen sink without letting Frau Blase notice.

Once she asked me to give her regards to Altermann. ‘Lads,’ announced the landlord in a loud voice, ‘any of you lot remember Full Bladder?’
*
A few old soaks who were drunk even in the afternoon explained to the others where the nickname came from. It was because she used to drink beer without stopping. There was much noisy shouting in the bar, and then one of the old soaks went from table to table, whispering something that had the drinkers in an uproar again.

Later, I learned what sensational news he had been spreading. Frau Blase often talked about the long and difficult time she had spent away from home, and how terribly sorry she had been for her dear children. It was some time before she admitted that she had been in a women’s prison for a while, because she had been procuring prostitutes for Altermann, to improve her small pension and her earnings when she went out cleaning.

She had been found out only because she also tried to blackmail the elder of her two half-sisters, Klara Kalliwoda, whom she hated. Klara had risen to some prosperity working as a midwife in Wedding; she had scraped together the money, as we said in Berlin, by performing illegal abortions. When Frau Blase threatened to report her to the police if she didn’t pay a certain sum, Klara Kalliwoda engaged a private detective. He quickly found out what criminal activities Luise Blase herself had been pursuing at Altermann’s bar. And so in the end she was the one facing a judge.

Incidentally, Frau Blase spoke of her blackmail of her half-sister without the slightest moral scruples. She thought it no more than her right, while of course Klara, who had hired a detective to get Luise out of her way, was the nastiest creature in the world.

At first we laboriously took Frau Blase down to the cellar every time there was an air raid. But soon she said she wouldn’t bother, because it was too much of a strain for her. That was a great relief for us. Burgers had enough to do getting our air raid kits down to the cellar, two cases in each hand, and I myself was busy taking old people’s cases and helping them down the cellar stairs. There were hardly any able-bodied men in the building, and everyone agreed that the young lady (me) was so kind.

Once, when a bomb was dropped close to us, all the window panes broke. Burgers and I spent a whole Sunday standing out in the yard, in sunny weather, removing splinters from the frames, a horrible job. But the windows couldn’t be reglazed unless all the splinters were gone. The old folk wanted to pay us for doing it, but luckily Burgers and I agreed that we weren’t going to accept any money. Our neighbours were moved to tears to think that there were good-natured people around.

None of these neighbours of ours ever denounced me, but they were not opponents of the Nazis, let alone anti-Fascists in general. Some of them might well have reported an elderly man weighing 150 kilos who looked as they imagined a rich Jew would. I was never sure.

Once, when I came back from a long, refreshing walk, I found a strange woman in our kitchen. I disliked her at first sight. She was vulgar and primitive, dressed from head to foot in various shades of red. She was introduced to me as the new tenant of our empty room.

This woman, I discovered, wanted to be near her husband, an anti-aircraft gunner. One of those guns was mounted on a roof close to our building. I could see when the gunners had an approaching aircraft in their sights, and I felt like calling out to the British or American pilots, ‘Go away, or they’ll shoot you down.’

The woman had asked in all the surrounding buildings whether there was a room for rent anywhere. I hadn’t come home yet when she rang our doorbell, and Frau Blase had been sitting in the kitchen. Feeling that she was asking an enormous amount, she had said she wanted five marks a day for the room. The woman, with peasant cunning, realised that she was talking to someone with no idea of present-day values. ‘Rather expensive,’ she said, ‘but I can pay five marks.’ Anywhere else many times that sum would have been demanded.

I was a thorn in her flesh from the first. She was a Nazi, suspicious by nature, and she had it in for me. Once again I wondered whether any tolerable situation that I had laboriously created for myself could last in the long run. But after a few days she appeared with her eyes red from weeping. ‘I’m leaving, my husband is going to the front,’ she said. And luckily that was the end of that.

‘Mother Blase,’ I said affectionately to our landlady, ‘she was a harmless woman. But suppose you’d opened the door to a robber? The foreign workers around here are riff-raff, you’re always saying so yourself! Someone like that could knock you over and rob you blind. You must never open the door again if I’m not here!’

Our landlady thanked me for the warning, and agreed that she had been lucky yet again. We decided on a way for Kurt to ring the bell showing that it was him. He reinforced her in her belief that she should take my warnings seriously. For all his love for his mother, Kurt was now loyal to both sides. He would never have done anything to hurt me.

Now and then Frau Blase received letters, although she never wrote to anyone. She couldn’t, and not just because of her poor eyesight. For instance, on her birthday a card arrived from Anna Ziervogel, the little sister of Gerhard’s fiancée, Gerhard being the son whom Frau Blase had loved so dearly and who had fallen at the front. The fiancée had obviously consoled herself with someone else in short order, and never got in touch again. Anna Ziervogel seemed very indignant about that, and even sent Luise Blase a poem that she had written herself.

In me, Frau Blase had someone who could reply to such letters, and so a lively correspondence developed between me and Anna Ziervogel. Of course I always replied on behalf of Luise Blase and signed the letters with her name. Once I even wrote a serious poem about the feelings and thoughts of an old woman. Anna liked it, and wanted to meet me – I mean the old lady – but she lived far away in Pomerania. Furthermore, she was a great admirer of the Führer and believed firmly in the Final Victory. As a farmer’s daughter, she had no idea how dependent we were on our meagre rations of food in the city. So I sent her one of the wartime recipes that were good for nothing but making inadequate ingredients into barely edible dishes.