Nightmare in Berlin (3 page)

Dr. Doll had now been joined by his wife, and with a slightly mocking smile he explained that that was just the point: he was clearing the paths for these long-awaited visitors. The ladies inquired with astonishment if he was planning to stay here and wait for the enemy to arrive, because that was surely not advisable, with two children, an aged grandmother, and a young wife? The people living out here on the edge of town, at any rate, had all got together and agreed to cross by boat to the other side of the lake when dusk fell, and to hide deep in the forest and await the next turn of events.

Doll's wife replied for her husband: ‘Well, we won't be doing anything like that. We're not going anywhere, and we're not hiding anything away; my husband and I are going to welcome the long-awaited liberators at the door of our house!'

The two ladies urged them strongly to reconsider, but the more forcefully they argued, the more they wavered in their own resolve, and the more doubtful they seemed about the safety of the forest retreat they had just been commending so warmly. When they finally left, Doll said to his wife with a smile: ‘They won't do anything, you'll see. They'll poke around aimlessly for a couple of hours, like the hens when there's a storm brewing, picking things up and putting things down. But in the end they'll just flop down exhausted and do what we've all been doing for weeks: just wait for the liberators to arrive.'

As far as her friends were concerned, Alma was in complete agreement with her husband; but as for herself, she felt neither exhausted nor disposed to wait patiently. After lunch she told Doll, who planned to lie down on the couch for a while after his unaccustomed morning's labours, that she just wanted to cycle into town quickly to replenish her supply of gallbladder medicine, as there was unlikely to be much opportunity to do so in the coming days.

Doll had some concerns, as the Russians could arrive at any moment, and it would be best if they were there at home together to welcome them. But he knew from past experience that it was a waste of time to try and dissuade his young wife from some course of action by pointing out the possible risks. She had proved to him a dozen times — during the heaviest air raids, battling the firestorms of Berlin, under attack by low-flying enemy aircraft — that she was utterly fearless. So he gave a small sigh and said: ‘If you must. Take care, my dear!', watched from the window as she cycled off, lay down on the couch with a smile on his face, and fell asleep.

Meanwhile Mrs. Alma Doll was pedalling hard uphill and down, heading for the local small town. Her route took her initially along quiet tracks, where there were hardly any houses, then along an avenue lined on both sides with villas. It struck her here that the streets were completely empty, and that the villas — perhaps because every single window was shut — looked unoccupied and somehow ghostly.
Maybe they're all in the forest already
, thought Mrs. Doll, and felt even more excited about her little adventure.

At the junction of the avenue and the first street of the town proper, she finally encountered a sign of life, in the form of a large German army truck. A few SS men were helping some young women and girls to climb on board. ‘Come quickly, young lady!' one of the SS men shouted to Mrs. Doll, and it sounded almost like an order. ‘This is the last army vehicle leaving the town!'

Like her husband, Mrs. Doll had been very pleased to learn that the town was not going to be defended, but would be surrendered without a fight. But that didn't stop her answering back now: ‘That's just like you bastards, to clear out now, when the Russians are coming! Ever since you've been here, you've acted like you owned the place, eating and drinking us out of house and home; but now, when the going gets tough, you just turn tail and run!'

If she had spoken to an SS man like that only the day before, the consequences for her and her family would have been very serious. The situation must have really changed dramatically in the last twenty-four hours, because the SS man replied quite calmly: ‘Just get on the truck and don't talk rubbish! The leading Russian tank units are already up in the town!'

‘Even better!' cried Mrs. Doll. ‘I can go and say hello right now!'

And with that she stood on the pedals and rode off into the town, leaving behind the last German army truck that she hoped to see in her life.

Once again, it felt as if she was riding through an abandoned town — perhaps those few women by the army truck really were the last people living in the town, and everyone else had already gone. Not one person, not even a dog or a cat, was to be seen on the street. All the windows were shut, and all the doors looked like they had been barricaded. And yet, as she cycled on through the streets, approaching the town centre, she had the feeling that this creature with many hundreds of heads was just holding its breath, as if at any moment — behind her, beside her — it could suddenly erupt in a hideous scream, tormented beyond endurance by the agonizing wait. As if living behind all these blind windows were people driven almost mad with fear for what lay ahead, mad with hope that this horrendous war was finally coming to an end.

This feeling was reinforced by a few white rags, barely the size of small towels, that had been hung over some of the doors. In the ghostly atmosphere that had enveloped Mrs. Doll since she entered the town, it took a moment for her to realise that these white cloths were meant to signify unconditional surrender. This was the first time in twelve years that she had seen flags other than ones with swastikas on them hanging from the houses. She involuntarily quickened her pace.

She turned the corner of the street, and that sense of a pervasive unseen fear was gone in an instant. And she had to smile in spite of herself. On the uneven street of the small town, moving in all directions in a seemingly random way, were eight or ten tanks. From the uniforms and the headgear worn by the men standing in the open hatches, Mrs. Doll could tell at once that these were not German tanks; these were the leading Russian tank units she had just been warned about.

But this didn't seem like the sort of thing you needed to be warned about. There was nothing menacing about the way these tanks drove back and forth in the fine spring sunshine, effortlessly mounting the edge of a pavement, scraping past the line of lime trees and then dropping back onto the roadway. On the contrary: it seemed almost playful, as if they were just having fun. Not for one moment did she feel herself to be in any kind of danger. She wove in and out between the tanks and then, when she reached her destination, the chemist's shop, she jumped off her bicycle. In her sudden mood of relief she had failed to notice that the houses in this street, too, had been barricaded and closed up by their fearful occupants, and that she was the only German among all the Russians, some of whom were standing around in the street with submachine guns.

Mrs. Doll dragged her gaze away from this unusual street scene and turned her attention to the chemist's shop, whose doorway, like those of all the other houses, was securely barricaded and shut up. When banging and shouting failed to raise anyone, she hesitated only for a moment before walking straight up to a Russian soldier with a submachine gun who was standing close by. ‘Listen, Vanya', she said to the Russian, smiling at him and pulling him by the sleeve in the direction of the chemist's shop, ‘open up the shop for me there, will you?'

The Russian returned her smiling gaze with a look of stony indifference, and for a moment she had the slightly unsettling sensation of being looked at like a brick wall or an animal. But the sensation vanished as quickly as it had come, as the man offered no resistance and let himself be pulled over by her to the chemist's shop, where, quickly grasping her purpose, he hammered loudly on the panel of the door a few times with the butt of his weapon. The leonine head of the chemist, a man in his seventies, promptly appeared at a little glass window in the upper part of the door, anxiously peering out to see what all the noise was about. His face normally had a jovial, ruddy complexion, but now it looked grey and ashen.

Mrs. Doll nodded cheerily to the old man, and said to the Russian: ‘It's fine, and thanks for your help. You can go now.'

The soldier's expression didn't change as he stepped back onto the street without so much as a backward glance. Now the key was turning in the lock, and Mrs. Doll was able to enter the chemist's shop, where the seventy-year-old was holed up with his much younger wife and her late-born child of two or three years. As soon as Mrs. Doll was inside, the door to the shop was locked again.

Though each individual memory of this first day of occupation was still fresh and vivid a long time after the events themselves, Mrs. Doll's recollection of what had been said inside the chemist's shop that day was unclear. Yes, she had her usual medication dispensed with the customary precision, and she knew, too, that when she went to pay for it her money was initially declined, and then accepted with a weary twinkle of the eye, like the playful antics of some silly child. After that, it was just casual talk; they told her, for instance, that she couldn't possibly set out on the long ride home with all those Russians about, and that she absolutely had to remain in the shop. And then, a few moments later, the same people who had urged her to stay were wondering if the house was still a safe place to be, or whether they would not have done better to go and hide in the forest after all. And they began to reproach themselves for not getting out much earlier and heading for the western part of Germany — in short, what Mrs. Doll heard here was the same wretched, pointless talk, the talk of people worn down by endless, anguished waiting, that could be heard in just about any German household around this time.

Here, however — given that Russian tanks were rolling past the windows of the chemist's shop — such talk was especially pointless. There were no more decisions to be made: everything had been decided, and the waiting was over! And anyway, Mrs. Doll had been outside, out in the sunny spring air, she had cycled in between the tanks, she had impulsively grabbed a Russian by the sleeve. The last vestige of that pervasive, unseen fear had left her — and she just couldn't bear to listen to any more of this talk. In the end, she asked the family rather abruptly to open the door for her again, and she stepped back out onto the street, into the bright daylight, mounted her bicycle, and rode off towards the town centre, weaving in and out between the growing number of tanks.

Mrs. Doll was presumably the last person to see the chemist and his wife and child alive that afternoon. A few hours later, he gave his wife and child poison, then took some himself, apparently in an act of senseless desperation; their nerves, stretched to breaking point, had finally snapped. They had endured so much over the years, and now, when it looked as if things were starting to get better, and nothing could be as bad as before, they refused to endure the uncertainty of even the briefest of waits.

But the same chemist's hand that had just now dispensed Mrs. Doll's medication for her bilious complaint with such practised precision proved less adroit in measuring out the poison for himself and his family. The very old man and the very young child, they both died. But the wife recovered after a protracted period of suffering, and although she was left alone in the world, she did not repeat the suicide attempt.

Alma Doll had not gone very far on her bicycle before a very different scene caught her attention and brought her to a halt again. Outside the small town's largest hotel, a group of about a dozen children had gathered, boys and girls aged around ten or twelve. They were watching the tanks rolling past, shouting and laughing, while the Russian soldiers seemed not to notice them at all.

The mood of wild abandon that had taken hold of these otherwise rather placid country children was explained by the wine bottles they had in their hands. Just as Mrs. Doll was getting off her bicycle, a boy slipped out of the front door of the hotel clutching an armful of new bottles. The children in the street greeted their companion with cries of joy that sounded almost like the howling of a pack of young wolves. They dropped the bottles they were holding, regardless of whether they were full, half-full, or empty, letting them smash on the pavement, while they grabbed the new bottles, knocked off the necks on the stone steps of the hotel, and raised the bottles to their childish mouths.

This spectacle immediately roused Mrs. Doll to fury. As a mother she had always abhorred the sight of a drunken child, but what made her even angrier now was that these children, not yet adolescents, were dishonouring the arrival of the Red Army by their drunkenness. She rushed forward and fell upon the children, snatching the wine bottles from their grasp, and handing out slaps and thumps with such gusto that the next minute the whole bunch had disappeared around the nearest corner.

Mrs. Doll stood quietly and breathed again. The fury of a moment ago had ebbed away, and her mood was almost sunny as she gazed upon the street, deserted by its residents, where apart from her there was nothing to be seen except tanks and a few Russian soldiers with submachine guns. Then she remembered that it was probably time to be heading home again, and with a soft sigh of contentment she turned to retrieve her bicycle. But before she could reach it, a Russian soldier stepped towards her, pointing to her hand, and pulled a little package from his pocket, which he tore open.

She looked at her hand, and only now realised that she had cut it when she was grabbing the bottles from the children. Blood was dripping from her fingers. With a smiling face she allowed the helpful Russian to bandage her hand, patted him on the shoulder by way of thanks — he looked through her blankly — got on her bicycle, and rode home without further incident. But at the very spot where the German army truck had been parked an hour earlier, Russian tanks were now rolling through. Had the truck got away in time? She didn't know, and would probably never know.