Potsdam Station (41 page)

‘Not that stupid,’ she said, carefully disentangling herself from the sleeping child. ‘And I can at least join you over there.’

But entwined and kissing on the narrow camp bed, the issue became rather more pressing. ‘Have the customs changed since 1941?’ Russell eventually whispered. ‘Is lovemaking in air-raid shelters permitted these days?’

‘Not between brother and sister.’

‘Oh.’

‘So we’ll have to be very quiet.’

No longer a road leading home

April 28 – May 2

I
t had been light for about an hour, and already the city centre was taking a frightful hammering. As Russell and two other men from the shelter worked their way down Grolman Strasse in search of a working standpipe, the sky to their left seemed choked with Soviet planes, the rise and fall of whining shells overlapping each other like a gramophone nee-dle stuck in mid-symphony. In the centre of it all, the Zoo Bunker Gun Tower loomed above the ruined city, giving and taking fire, half cloaked in drifting smoke.

Paul was inside it.

Russell remembered what Effi had said about the boy seeming overwhelmed. He couldn’t think of a better word to describe his own feelings. Seeing Effi again had filled him with joy, yet left untouched the dread of losing his son.

And Thomas too. If anyone deserved to survive this war then Thomas did.

A crowd up ahead suggested water, which proved to be the case. Join-ing the queue, they stood there scanning the sky like everyone else, knowing that a bomb could perhaps be outrun, that a shell would give no warning.

Neither fell, and soon they were hurrying back up the street with their containers, trying not to slosh any water overboard.

Effi was waiting at the bottom of the steps, looking almost angry. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been so long.’

Russell put the containers down, and explained that the usual standpipe had taken a direct hit. ‘We had to go further afield. One of the men I was with remembered a tap on Grolman.’

‘I…’ she started to say, and just pulled him to her.

‘There were soldiers here while you were gone,’ Rosa announced from behind her.

‘Two of them,’ Effi confirmed. ‘They said the Russians are in Westkreuz, so it shouldn’t be long.’

‘Where did they go?’

Effi shrugged. ‘Who knows? They seemed lost, but they wouldn’t abandon their uniforms, so Frau Essen had to ask them to leave.’ The three of them made their way back to their corner. There was a drawing on Rosa’s bed, one of Effi that almost brought tears to his eyes. Russell realised that the girl had drawn the pictures he had seen upstairs. ‘This is wonderful,’ he told Rosa. ‘We must get it framed, and hang it in our new house.’

Effi smiled at that, and Rosa’s face lit up. ‘I can do one of you too,’ the girl said. ‘If you’d like. But I promised Frau Pflipsen I’d draw her next. ’

‘Whenever you have time,’ Russell assured her. It was noisy in the shelter, and while Rosa was across the room immortalising her latest subject, he and Effi had the chance to talk. During the night she had told him where Rosa had come from, and now he asked her if Erik Aslund was still in Berlin.

‘As far I know,’ she replied.

‘We may need him,’ Russell said quietly. He made sure that they were not being overheard. ‘Look, I’ve been doing some thinking. The Nazis are history, or soon will be. We can forget the bastards, thank God. Germany will be divided up between the Russians, the Americans and the British. And maybe the French. They’ve already drawn the boundaries. The same goes for Berlin. It’ll be right in the middle of the Russian zone, but the city itself will be shared out.

‘But not for a while,’ he went on. ‘The Russians will want to grab everything they can, so they’ll take their time. They’ll say the city isn’t properly secure – something like that.’

‘Whose bit are we in now?’ Effi asked out of curiosity.

‘Probably the British, but what I’m saying is that they won’t be here for weeks, maybe even months. It’s the Russians we’ll have to deal with, and they’ll be eager to talk to me.’

‘Why?’ Effi asked. ‘You still haven’t told me why they brought you here.’

He went through the story – the American decision to let the Russians take Berlin, his own trip to Moscow, the offer of inclusion in the Soviet team seeking out atomic secrets. He told her what had happened to Kazankin and Gusakovsky at the Kaiser Institute, and how he and Varennikov had hidden out in Thomas’s house.

‘There are plans for an atomic bomb buried in Thomas’s garden?’ she asked incredulously.

‘In Hanna’s vegetable patch, to be precise.’

‘Okay.’

‘And I’m the only one who knows where they are,’ he added. ‘Varen-nikov was killed a few days later.’

‘How?’

Russell sighed. ‘A train fell on him.’

‘A train fell on him,’ she repeated.

‘I know. But that’s what happened.’

‘All right. But what’s the problem? You just hand the plans over to the Russians – no one else need know.’

‘That might be the sensible thing to do. Or it might not. I can think of two good reasons why it wouldn’t be. First off, the Russians might want to make absolutely sure that I don’t tell anyone else. Like the British or the Americans.’

‘But that’s silly,’ Effi protested. ‘You could never tell them that you’d just helped the Russians to an atomic bomb. They’d put you in prison.’

‘Or hang me for treason. I know that and you know that, but the NKVD doesn’t like loose ends.’

‘I suppose not.’ She felt crestfallen. Overnight it had seemed like the worst might be over.

‘I’ve been thinking I need to bargain with them,’ he went on.

‘The papers for your life,’ she guessed.

‘Yes, but more than that. If Paul and Thomas survive, they’ll end up in Soviet camps. Zarah might be arrested too – she is the wife of a prominent Nazi, and the Russians are certainly feeling vindictive. So I thought I’d offer them the papers in exchange for the whole family.’

Effi smiled, but looked dubious. ‘You know the Russians better than I do, but won’t they think that a bit of a cheek? And what’s to stop them beating the location out of you? Or just agreeing and then reneging on the bargain once they have the papers?’

‘Nothing, at the moment. But that’s where your Swedish friend might be useful.’ Russell outlined what he had in mind, and she began to see a glimmer of hope. ‘But first we wait,’ he said. ‘The Soviets gave me a letter to use when making contact, and I hope it’ll offer us – you – some sort of protection when the ordinary troops arrive. Once the battle’s over, I’ll find someone senior to approach.’

‘That sounds good,’ Effi agreed. When they woke up that morning, she had half expected him to set off in search of Paul.

‘I thought about heading over to the Zoo Bunker,’ he said, as if reading her mind. ‘But even if I got there safely, and no one arrested me on the spot, what could I do? I can’t order Paul to come home. He’s not fourteen anymore, and he’ll have a much better idea of the situation down there than I have. If he wants to desert, and he thinks he can get away with it, then he will.’

‘He has this address,’ Effi reminded him.

It was soon after eleven in the morning that an overheard conversation in the soldiers’ canteen pointed Paul in the direction of escape. There were, it seemed, over five hundred corpses in the two towers, not to mention a vast and growing collection of amputated limps. All needed burying, but finding men willing to leave the safety of the walls and dig the necessary graves, while Soviet gunners cratered and re-cratered the area concerned, was far from easy. Why risk the living for the dead?, was most people’s response to any such request.

A few thought differently. Some were claustrophobic, others beaten by the smell or undone by the stress of waiting. Some, like Paul, saw no point in dying to defend a last fortress when everything else was lost. If they were going to die, then better to die outside, where at least you could move and breathe. And where there was always the chance you might slip through a crack and keep on living.

There were around twenty of them all told, lined up outside the packed mortuary with rags across their nostrils to keep out the appalling smell. Each pair carried a bloody stretcher, but Paul, finding himself odd man out, was given two large sacks of arms, legs and heads to carry. He tried to keep the sacks off the ground, but they were simply too heavy, and once outside the walls he settled for dragging them across the grass.

The plot chosen for the burials was just to the north of the Zoo, around two hundred metres from the Gun Tower, but no one had thought to bring digging implements. A few men went back for them, and while Paul and the others awaited their return a shell struck the Control Tower, gouging a hole a metre deep in a wall three times as thick. He supposed the towers might eventually be battered into submission, but the food would run out long before that.

All the men were privates or corporals, and the only deterrents to walking off were peer pressure and a calculation that life on the streets would prove even more hazardous than life in the tower. Paul had intended burying his two sacks, but as more and more minutes went by with no sign of spades, he felt his sense of obligation fade. When others started back towards the tower, leaving their stretchered corpses on the grass, he abandoned his own bag of body-parts and hurried off towards the nearest bridge across the Landwehrkanal.

It was broken, and so, he could see, was the next one up. He retraced his steps and headed for the Zoo, whose geography he knew by heart from many childhood visits. Using one of several new gaps in the boundary wall, he worked his way between wrecked cages and cratered enclosures in the general direction of the nearby railway station. Several eviscerated antelopes were spread across one area, and a dead hippopotamus was floating in the pool. A few yards further on, he almost tripped over a human corpse, a man with a Slavic face in a tattered suit. They were about the same size, and Paul hesitated for a moment, considering a switch of clothes. He was, he realised, reluctant to shed his uniform. He told himself he’d be safer with than without it – if the SS caught him in civilian clothes they wouldn’t waste time with questions.

Walking on, he found another convenient gap in the boundary wall and emerged onto the road that ran alongside the railway embankment. Zoo Station’s glass roof was gone, or rather it was dispersed in a million shards. On the far pavement a group of civilians were walking eastward in close formation, like an advancing rugby scrum. Paul crunched his way across the square where he’d often met his father, and turned up Hardenberg Strasse. The railway bridge was still standing, but a gaping hole showed through the tracks.

The occasional plane flew low overhead, and only seconds went by without a shell exploding somewhere nearby, but today he felt strangely immune. It was ridiculous, he knew – maybe the concussion had left him with delusions of invincibility. Maybe the Führer had received a bang on the head in the First War. It would explain a lot.

He heard himself laugh on the empty street, and felt the sting of tears. ‘No one survives a war,’ Gerhart had told him once.

There was a barricade up ahead, so Paul headed back down to Kant Strasse. At the farthermost end of the long straight street a tattoo of sparks split the gloom. Muzzle flashes, he thought. The Russians were closer than he’d expected.

He worked his way around Savignyplatz, turned the corner into Grolman Strasse, and came to an abrupt halt. On the far side of the street, around thirty metres in front of him, a tall SS Obersturmführer was facing away from him, holding a rifle. His uniform seemed stunningly black amidst the ash and the dust, his boots insultingly shiny. Red hair peeked out from the rear of his cap.

Werner’s killer.

He was about to kill again. Two men were kneeling in front of him, one protesting violently, the other looking down at the ground. The muzzle of the rifle was resting on the former’s forehead.

Behind them, a line of women with petrified faces were clutching all sorts of kitchen pots. The standpipe beside them was noisily splashing water into the dust.

The rifle cracked and the head almost seemed to explode, showering the victim’s companion with blood and brain. Several women screamed, and some began to sob. Paul started forward, pulling the machine pistol from his belt.

Some of the women noticed him, but none of them shouted out. The rifle cracked again, and the second man collapsed in a heap.

Paul was about ten metres away. Hearing footsteps behind him the Obersturmführer turned. Seeing a soldier in uniform he offered Paul a curt smile, as if to reassure him that everything was in hand.

He was still smiling when Paul put a bullet in his stomach. He tried to lift the rifle, but a second shot to the chest put him down on his knees. He looked up with lost puppy eyes, and Paul smashed the pistol across the side of his head with all the force he could muster.

The man slumped to the ground, blue eyes dead and open.

Paul dropped the pistol. He felt suddenly dizzy, and stood there, swaying slightly, only dimly aware of the world around him. A woman was saying something, but he couldn’t hear what. He could see something coming towards him, but had no idea what it was.