Potsdam Station (3 page)

The tram started off, bumping noisily along the rails as it headed north towards the Schloss Brücke. Four out of five passengers were women, which Effi assumed was a fair reflection of the city’s population in April 1945. Most of the children had been sent to the country, and most of the men had been sent into battle. Only those over forty-five remained in the battered city, and there were rumours that all under sixty would soon be marched to the various fronts. The Russians had been on the eastern bank of the Oder River – little more than sixty kilometres from Berlin – for almost three months now, and a resumption of their westerly progress was daily anticipated. The Americans, approaching the Elbe River, were not that much further away, but only wishful thinkers and supreme optimists expected them to reach Berlin ahead of the dreaded Red Army. Another month, Effi thought, maybe two. And then, one way or another, everything would change.

The tram was grinding its way around the bend into Alt Moabit, and she had a distant glimpse of the synagogue on Levetzow Strasse from which so many Jews had been sent to the east. Few of Effi’s gentile acquaintances mentioned Berlin’s Jews anymore – it was almost as if they had never existed. Goebbels had even stopped blaming them for all the Reich’s misfortunes.

The star-shaped Moabit Prison loomed on the left, and the tram swung left onto Invaliden Strasse. Up ahead, smoke seemed to be rising through the shattered roof of Lehrter Station, but it proved an illusion – as the road arched over the station throat she could see, across the Humboldt Harbour, several fires raging among the buildings of the Charité Hospital. The red-on-white crosses adorning the tiled roofs might just as well have been targets.

Five minutes later the tram reached Stettin Station. Effi hurried in through the archway, half expecting the worst. If there were no trains to the suburbs before the usual evening air raid, and she couldn’t get out to the rendezvous point, then her fugitives would be left in limbo, and those who had risked life and limb bringing them out of Berlin would have to take them back. She offered a silent prayer to whatever gods were looking after the Reichsbahn and stared up at the still-functioning departure boards.

There were no announcements of delays or cancellations, and the next train for Frohnau was allegedly leaving in five minutes.

It left in fifteen, which was good enough. Given the almost non-stop bombing, it seemed amazing that so many things continued to work. According to Ali the public library on Bismarck Strasse was still lending books, and when the wind was in the right direction they could smell the hops fermenting in Moabit’s breweries. And the police showed no signs of loosening their grip. If anything, there seemed to be more of them, all scouring the streets for any male with four limbs who hadn’t had his turn in the Wehrmacht’s mincing machine.

As they pulled out past the freight yards Effi found herself re-living that night in December 1941, waiting for hours in the freezing boxcar, then rattling out of Berlin with bombs falling all around them. It seemed so long ago.

He seemed so long ago.

But assuming he was still alive, assuming he still loved her, assuming she could survive for however long the Russians were going to take… then maybe…

She looked round at her fellow-passengers. Again they were mostly women, all with that look of mental exhaustion that even the best-fed Berliners habitually wore on their faces. More than three years of shortages and almost two of regular bombings had worn the city out. Everyone wanted it over, everyone but him and his desperate disciples. Gröfaz, as people sarcastically called him, an abbreviation of Grössler Feldherr aller Zeiten, the ‘greatest general of all time’.

The train was passing under the Ringbahn, and a decrepit-looking steam engine was towing a rail-mounted flak gun along the elevated line, pumping more smoke into an already sated sky. Several
flakhelfer
were perched on the gun’s mounting, and none of them looked older than fifteen. Two years ago Effi had seen John’s son Paul in a
flakhelfer
uniform, but he would be eighteen by now, and probably in the regular forces. If he was still alive.

She shook her head to dismiss the thought, and turned her attention to the here and now. Most of the other passengers were clasping newspapers, but no one was reading – the chronic shortage of toilet paper had obviously reached the suburbs. One woman caught Effi looking at her, and stared back, but Effi resisted the impulse to smile – her smile, as John had once told her, was her most recognisable feature. Not that she expected to be recognised, not anymore. These days she always wore glasses, and the grey streaks in her frumpily cut black hair were depressingly authentic. Sitting and walking like a person fifteen years older than her actual age had become so ingrained over the last three years that she sometimes wondered if the process was reversible.

The train had stopped, and the view through the window of unbroken houses and trees was a reminder of the past. It was not representative, of course – the moment the train restarted more bombed-out buildings and charred trees swam into view, and a group of people could be seen gathered, heads bowed, around an improvised grave in someone’s back garden. The damage was less widespread away from the city centre, but still considerable. If the Western allies were targeting anything more precise than Berlin, then their aim was poor.

The light was fading by the time the train reached Frohnau. She resisted the impulse to hurry out of the terminus, and took her time walking across the mostly intact town square. The local Rathaus had lost an end wall to a bomb, but lights were burning in the rest of the building, and people were sitting, wrapped in their winter coats, outside the café restaurant next door. Most of their ersatz coffees looked untouched – maintaining the ritual was clearly more important than the actual drink. The familiar smell of kohlrabi soup drifted out of the open doorway.

There were no uniforms in sight. Effi headed up the street opposite the station, as she and Ali had done on the previous Saturday. They had been carrying a picnic basket on that occasion, but today she was only toting a small bag of extra rations. If she was stopped, these were for an imaginary friend, the one who owned the abandoned lakeside cottage that they had stumbled across at the weekend. As explanations went it was rather thin, but much better than nothing.

There was no traffic, and little sign of life in the neat suburban houses that lined the road. Effi’s watch told her it wasn’t yet seven. She held it against her ear, and listened to a few reassuring ticks. The watch had only cost a few pfennigs in a rummage sale – it had probably been found in the rubble of somebody’s home by a professional scavenger – and had seemed more appropriate to her current identity than the elegant Cartier which a lustful studio boss had given her several years earlier.

Back in the days when she was acting for a living, rather than for her life.

She smiled to herself and wondered, not for the first time, if she would ever act again. Would she want to? She really didn’t know. It was hard to imagine what life would be like after the Nazis, after the war. So much seemed lost, and irretrievable.

The last houses were behind her now, trees leaning out to enclose the road. Effi had brought along a flashlight – a priceless treasure in 1945 Berlin – but hoped she wouldn’t need to use it. The batteries were fading, and replacing them would probably take more time and effort than it was worth.

The hiker’s trail left the road about half a kilometre into the wood, and she had covered around half that distance when she heard the approaching vehicle. The sound preceded the thin gleam of the slit-sealed headlamps, and Effi barely had time to get off the road before the dark shape of a truck rumbled by. She could see nothing of the driver, and no movement in the open rear, but it was worrying nevertheless – unofficial motor transport was rare these days. It might just be a farmer with access to petrol – someone had to be delivering the blue slop which passed for milk in Berlin – but it didn’t seem very likely.

She made her way back to the road as the sound of the lorry faded. Had it been full of Gestapo, there was nothing she could have done. By this time all her co-conspirators would be in motion, beyond warning.

No other traffic disturbed her walk to the turn-off. She turned onto the hiker’s trail, the last flashes of the setting sun splintering through the trees ahead. By the time she reached the lakeside the orange orb had vanished, and the sky was a kaleidoscope of reds. As Berliners were fond of remarking, in their usual bittersweet way, blasted bricks made for wonderful sunsets.

The cottage sat a few metres back from the shore, and Effi used what light remained to check that nothing had changed since the weekend. The door was still half off its hinges, the windows mostly broken, and there was no indication that anyone had been making use of the mouldy chairs or bedding. A weekend retreat rather than a permanent home, the cottage had clearly been abandoned early in the war, its middle-class owners too busy or dead to make use of it.

She went back outside and sat on the rickety jetty. The lake stretched away like a sea of blood, darkening as the minutes went by. The sound of sirens carried faintly across the water, so faintly that she thought she might be imagining them, but then searchlight beams sprang into life, columns of cloudy white crossing over the distant city like giant pairs of scissors. A few minutes more, and they were joined by thinner beams of red and green, desperately swinging to and fro.

It was a quarter-past eight. She went back into the cottage, sat herself down on one of the upright chairs, crossed her arms on the table and rested her head upon them.

Somewhere out there a engine driver was waiting for the all-clear to sound. And when it did his train would jerk into motion, trundling its way around the north-eastern edge of the city, heading for the cutting which lay three kilometres north of where she was sitting. It was a freight train, and one of the covered vans was loaded with crates containing Spanish Embassy furniture. All the friendly embassies had been moved out of Berlin and away from the bombing in 1944, but their new location, some fifty kilometres east of the capital, was in imminent danger of Russian occupation, and the Spanish had requested permission to ship their valuable furniture home through neutral Sweden. The criminal idiots at Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office had decided that the threat to Franco’s sideboards was more important than their own forces’ chronic shortages of supplies, and had ordered the Reichsbahn to divert the necessary rolling stock from military duties.

Franco knew nothing of this, and nor, Effi suspected, did his ambassador. The shipment had been suggested by Erik Aslund, and organised by an attaché whose hatred of the Nazis stemmed from his devout Catholicism. It wasn’t the first time Aslund had used a furniture shipment for his own ends, which centred around getting prospective victims of the Nazi regime to safety. Two years earlier, when the bombing first became serious, the Swedish Embassy had supposedly crated and shipped its own furniture home to Stockholm. Tables and chairs had been carried aboard at one end, Jews helped off at the other. The switch had been made in these woods, the furniture broken up and buried once the fugitives were on their way.

It was soon after that that Effi began working with Aslund. She had never found out what position he held at the Swedish Embassy, but assumed he had one. When she had eventually asked him, as a personal favour to her, to check whether an Anglo-American journalist named John Russell had arrived in Sweden around the end of 1941, it had taken him only a few days to come up with a positive answer.

She knew he had ties with at least two of the Swedish churches in Berlin, but he had never given her any other reason to think him religious. He was obviously a brave man, but she never got the feeling that he enjoyed taking risks – there was something irreducibly sensible about him which reminded her of Russell. He was younger than John, around thirty-five, and conventionally good-looking in the classic Nordic way. She had seen no evidence of a sense of humour, but given the sort of world they shared that was hardly surprising.

As far as she knew, Aslund had no idea of her own true identity. He knew her as Frau von Freiwald, a gentile widow who was willing to shelter fugitive Jews for a few precious days and nights in her spacious Bismarck Strasse apartment. He also, as far as she knew, had no suspicion that Ali, far from being her aryan niece, was one of several thousand Jewish fugitives – or ‘U-boats’ – living illegally in Berlin. He had never offered any explanation of his involvement in dangerous anti-state activities, but perhaps he assumed that common decency needed none. He was a Swede, after all.

Outside, the natural light had vanished, but the night battle over Berlin was throwing moving shadows on the wall behind her, and she could just about hear the familiar medley of droning planes, anti-aircraft fire and exploding bombs. She felt her fists tightening with the usual anger – what possible purpose could so much death and destruction serve? The war was won and lost, and punishing the women of Berlin for the crimes their fathers, sons and brothers had committed elsewhere – many and terrible as these undoubtedly were – seemed like something her own despicable government would have done. For reasons that now escaped her, she had expected better of the British and Americans.

She laid her head back down and closed her eyes. She wondered how John felt about his country’s bombing campaign, and the fact that most of the people he loved were among the millions on the receiving end. She remembered his outrage when the Luftwaffe had bombed the Spanish town of Guernica for Franco, and an argument not long after with his diplomat friend Doug Conway. ‘The bombing of civilians is always, always, a war crime,’ Russell had insisted at the dinner party in question. No one had agreed with him. He was being naive, Conway had said. They had the planes, they had the bombs, and they weren’t going to let an inability to hit precision targets stand in the way of their use. ‘No doubt about that,’ John had agreed. ‘But that won’t make it less of a crime.’