Potsdam Station (37 page)

A little further on a three-legged dog gave him a hopeful look, and started whining piteously once he’d gone past. Paul wanted to cry, but no tears came. Something inside him was irreparably broken, but he had no idea what it was.

A Soviet plane flew low overhead, and opened fire on something behind the houses to his left. He walked on towards Yorck Strasse, where several women were gathered round a prone casualty. There was an air of hopelessness in their postures, and in the way they glanced up the street, as if they were pretending for everyone’s sake that help was on the way. Beyond them, outside the Yorck Strasse police station, another two corpses hung slack-necked from lampposts. Paul walked towards them. The first, a moustachioed man in his forties or fifties, was in army uniform. The second was Werner.

The boy’s mouth was open, his fists clenched, his dead eyes full of terror. A piece of card bearing the message ‘All traitors will die like this one’ had been looped over the second button of his
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shirt.

Paul stood there staring at the boy’s body until his legs suddenly folded beneath him, and a sound he didn’t recognise, a cross between a wail and a high-pitched hum, welled up from his soul and erupted through his lips.

A few moments later he felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Did you know him?’ a woman’s voice asked.

‘Yes,’ Paul managed to say. ‘He was only fourteen.’

‘He never said. He was a brave little bugger.’

‘You saw this happen?’ Paul asked. He climbed slowly back to his feet. Why hadn’t the boy ditched his uniform?

‘From my window. It was the redhead – we’ve seen him before. He’s an Obersturmführer, I think – I can never remember their uniforms. My husband was in the real army.’

‘By what authority…’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? He’s a law unto himself. He has a few helpers, but he’s the judge and the executioner.’

Paul looked up at the body. ‘I’m going to cut him down.’

‘It’s your funeral.’

He took out his knife, clambered up onto the police station wall and managed, with a couple of hacks, to slice through the rope. Werner’s corpse dropped to the pavement.

Paul sank to one knee and closed the dead boy’s eyes. He went through his pockets, hoping to find something he could take to Werner’s mother and sister. Inside the
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documentation there was the family photograph that he’d showed Paul when they first met. It seemed like years ago, but was less than a week.

‘Where can I bury him?’ he asked the woman. Two of her neighbours had appeared, and all three of them looked at him as if he was mad.

If there was a reply, he didn’t hear it. There was a sudden whoosh and the briefest sensation of flight. The earth seemed to explode, a hundred hammers seemed to hit him at once, and then all noise was sucked away, leaving only a shimmering silence. He felt a moment of enormous relief, and then nothing at all.

Under the gun

April 26 – 27

R
ussell was woken by the thump of distant explosions. It had to be an air raid, but sounded louder than anything that had gone before. On and on it went without respite, like a berserk drummer with no sense of rhythm.

Some of the bombs seemed to be falling not too far away, but as Leissner had said, it would take extraordinary bad luck for a shell or bomb to land on their roof, protected as it was by surrounding buildings and a secondary ceiling of elevated tracks. Sound reasoning, which didn’t quite still his nerves, or black out the images of trench life under shell-fire which rose unbidden from his memory.

‘What are you going to do now?’ he murmured to himself, partly in search of distraction, partly because he needed some sort of plan. Was his best bet to stay where he was, wait for the Russians, and hope for their help in finding his family? Mounting a tour of the giant shelters in search of Effi would be pointless. His chances of finding her would be minute, his chances of death by shellfire depressingly high. If Effi was in one of those shelters she should be safe; when the war ended and the shelling stopped, she would doubtless go home, and he would find her there.

It was the sensible option, but still hard to take. Since 1941 a sense of failure, of letting her down, had churned away in the shallower recesses of his subconscious, and inaction always brought it bubbling to the surface. The urge to keep looking was almost irresistible, and he had to keep reminding himself that behaving like a headless chicken might very well lose him his head.

Several hours went by. Varennikov woke up, and the two of them breakfasted on cans of cabbage and cold water. They talked for a while about Russia, and Russell’s first visit in 1924, when the hopes were still high. Listening to himself talk, and seeing the pride in Varennikov’s face, Russell felt sadness rather than anger. He was getting old, he told himself.

Stefan Leissner had come to see them each morning so far, but noon passed without a visit. And, as a quick trip downstairs revealed, the sentry in the tunnel was gone. What was happening? Russell went back up to Varennikov, and asked the Russian if he fancied a trip to Leissner’s office – ‘you haven’t been out since we got here.’

Varennikov demurred. He knew he was being over-anxious, he said, but there was always a chance that the papers they’d buried would be destroyed by a shell or a bomb. ‘Or even eaten by an animal,’ he added. ‘So I must keep myself safe until what I’ve learned has been passed on.’

Fair enough, Russell thought. Crazy, but hardly grounds for committal. He descended once more on his own, walked down the short stretch of tunnel, and climbed the other spiral staircase. It seemed deathly quiet in the underground office complex, and neither Leissner nor anyone else was in residence,

He took the two flights of stairs to the elevated goods warehouse, which was equally deserted. The short walk along the elevated tracks offered a panoramic view of hell, the sort of thing Hieronymus Bosch might have painted if he’d been born a half-millennium later, but, for the moment at least, no shells were landing nearby. He hurried across the tracks, noting only the curtain of fire that hung above the northern horizon, and what looked like a rail-mounted flak gun further down the viaduct.

He found Leissner in the goods station forecourt. A bomb had fallen on this side of the elevated tracks, killing two men he didn’t recognise and almost severing their host’s right leg. He – or someone else – had tied a tourniquet above the knee, but that had been some time ago, and if Russell was any judge the unconscious man was in serious danger of losing the limb. He loosened the tourniquet and wondered what else he could do. Nothing much, was the answer. He could haul Leissner back down to his underground office, but the leg might break off in the process. Or he could leave him here, on the old principle that two bombs never fall on the same spot. Out in the open he might attract a passing medic’s attention.

Or not. If he fetched Varennikov, Russell realised, the two of them could carry the man down to his office. They could all stay there until the Russians came. It would be just as safe as their current abode.

He made his way back through the offices and up towards the tracks, still juggling options in his mind. Perhaps he should head for Effi’s new flat now, and leave Varennikov with Leissner. They could welcome the Red Army just as well without him.

As he emerged onto the viaduct he heard a rumbling sound. The rail-mounted flak gun was grinding its way along the viaduct some two hundred metres to the north. Spasms of black smoke rose behind it, as an invisible steam engine propelled it forward. The barrel of the gun was questing to and fro, as if it was smelling the air.

Where the hell did they think they were going? Russell wondered. Poland?

He didn’t wait to find out, hustling down two sets of stairs to the tunnel below. Here he received an unpleasant surprise – there was gunfire in the tunnel leading south. It still sounded some way away, but over the last few days Russell had learned how being underground could warp one’s sense of distance.

He scurried down the tunnel to the abandoned station and headed for the spiral staircase. He had climbed about five steps when the blast of air and sound hit him, blowing him backwards against the handrail and spilling him onto the platform. The debris cascading down the stairwell sounded like a coalman emptying his sack.

Russell scrambled unsteadily to his feet. He felt like he’d been hit by a wall, but no bones seemed broken.

He started up the iron staircase, holding his collar against the swirling dust. He was used to darkness above, but the old booking office was now awash with beams of light, flooding down and around a mountain of metal. The flak gun and its mount had fallen through the roof, crushed the interior walls of the old station building, and come to rest on solid earth, half in the old booking office, half in the room where Russell and Varennikov had spent most of their time. The long barrel of the 88mm gun lay across the remains of the inner wall, as if it was resting from its long labours.

Varennikov was somewhere underneath it. Russell squeezed himself between a wall and several huge wheels, then through a gap between buffers. There was more space left in the other room, and he allowed himself a moment of hope that the young Russian had survived. But no – there were his legs, both severed by an edge of armoured plate. The rest of his body was underneath the fallen carriage, crushed to a pulp.

It would have been quick. Varennikov might have heard the viaduct give way, but he would barely have had time to look up before nemesis fell through the ceiling.

Russell worked his way back into the old booking office. There were two more corpses behind the gun, both of boys in
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uniforms. There were probably more outside. The viaduct above looked as if someone had taken a huge bite out of it, but there were no signs of charring or smoke. The structure had probably been compromised already, the gun just a little too heavy.

So what now? Russell asked himself. With the viaduct half-destroyed he might find it hard to reach Leissner, and what, in any case, would be the point? – there was nothing he could do for the man, other than keep him company. There were people with more claim to his attention, people he loved.

Not that he knew where they were. He decided he would try to reach Effi’s flat. If she stayed in one of the big shelters she should be all right, but if she ended up at home his protection – and Nikoladze’s letter – might be worth something.

The Reichsbahn uniform was somewhere under the wreckage, but the foreign worker outfit he was wearing should be almost as safe. Surely the Nazis had better things to do with their final hours than check credentials.

He hesitated for a moment at the top of the staircase, wondering what he could say to mark Varennikov’s passing, but nothing came to mind. He remembered what the young Russian’s father had said, that his son’s life would unfold like the chronicle of a better world. So much for a father’s dreams.

He gingerly worked his way down the wreckage-strewn staircase. At the bottom he hesitated, uncertain which way to go. North would take him away from the West End and Effi’s apartment, but south was where he heard the gunfire. He opted for the latter. One thing about Russian soldiers – you could usually hear them coming.

He passed the bottom of the other spiral staircase and entered uncharted territory. It was hard to be certain underground, but the tracks seemed to be rising, which suggested they would soon emerge into the open. He knew there was an east-west running U-Bahn line somewhere in the near vicinity, but had no idea if there was any way of accessing it from the tunnel he was in. Iron ladders rose up to the roof at regular intervals, but the U-Bahn line would surely pass beneath him.

He was making his way around a long curve in the tracks when the walls ahead briefly shone with a faint yellow light. A split-second later he heard the scream, also faint, but no less bloodcurdling in its intensity. A flamethrower, he guessed. A few moments of agony before you died.

He could hear voices now, and the echoes of running feet. German voices, not that it mattered. No one coming down that tunnel would hesitate to shoot him.

He turned on his heels and hurried back towards the first iron ladder. It seemed much further than he remembered, and the voices behind him were growing louder. Had he missed one in the dark?

If so, he almost missed another, catching the gleam of metal as he hurried past. He grabbed hold of the ladder and started up, just as a burst of machine-gun fire erupted in the tunnel behind him. He was climbing into utter darkness, but assumed that the ladder had to lead somewhere. And then his head made painful contact with something hard – an iron railing. He hung there for several seconds, gripping the ladder until the dizziness abated, then risked using the flashlight to examine his surroundings. He was at the top of a cylindrical shaft, where the ladder ended in a small platform, just beneath a circular plate.

The running feet sounded almost beneath him. He hauled himself onto the platform and pushed in desperation at the heavy-looking plate. Much to his surprise, it almost shot upwards, losing him his balance and tipping him back into the tunnel. He clambered swiftly out onto into the open air, rolled the cover plate back into place and looked around for something to weigh it down. He seemed to be in another goods yard, and the only movable objects with any weight were a couple of porters’ trolleys lying on the ground nearby. He dragged them over and piled them on top of the plate, realising as he did so that they weren’t heavy enough. But there was nothing else.