Silesian Station (2008) (24 page)

They reached Breslau soon after six, too late, Russell guessed, for catching Josef Mohlmann at work in the Direktion Reichsbahn building. He walked across on the off -chance, and was directed up to a room on the third floor, just in time to intercept a young parasol-wielding secretary. Yes, Herr Mohlmann was still in his office, she said, clearly keen to be on her way.

'I'm an old friend,' Russell lied helpfully.

'You know where he is then,' she said cheerfully, giving him the clue he needed with a slight flick of the head.

'Thanks,' he said, walking in the direction indicated. The first door he came to bore Mohlmann's name under the job description Deputy Director of Operations, South-East Germany. Without hesitating, he opened the door and walked in.

A man of around forty looked up from what looked like a sheaf of time-tables, light flashing off his spectacles as he did so. His short brown hair was combed straight back, his face carved in the sort of angles a cubist would have admired. Elastic arm-bands held up his sleeves, red braces his trousers.

His response to Russell's precipitate entry belied the sternness of his features. 'Good evening,' he said questioningly, when most men so confronted would have spluttered something along the lines of 'Who the hell are you?'

'Good evening,' Russell replied, advancing with hand extended, his brain working overtime. He'd expected a lowly cog in the Reichsbahn's administrative machinery, not a Deputy Director of Operations. 'Your secretary told me to go straight in,' he lied. 'I have a message for you,' he said as they shook hands. 'From Franz Boyens in America.'

Mohlmann's eyes lit up. 'From Franz? He is well?'

'He's fine.'

'When did you see him?'

'A few weeks ago. In New York. Look, do you have time for a meal or a drink somewhere?'

Mohlmann looked down at his timetables, and his hand jerked slightly, as if he was checking a sudden desire to sweep them from his desk. 'Of course,' he said. 'I work too many hours in any case,' he added jokingly, taking his suit jacket from the back of his chair.

The building seemed almost empty as they walked down the wide central staircase, but Russell hadn't wanted to risk a real conversation in Mohlmann's office - there was no knowing how thick the walls were or who was on the other side.

'Where shall we go?' Mohlmann asked. 'I have a car,' he added almost apologetically.

'It's your city,' Russell said.

'The Biergartenstrasse then. It's the local name for the promenade above the Stadtgraben,' he explained. 'And not too far away.'

His car, an Opel Kapitan, was parked behind the building. They drove round the station, under the bridge carrying the westbound tracks, and up towards the city centre. Biergartenstrasse was aptly named - a series of beer gardens overlooking the waters of the ancient city moat - and doing a brisk business with after-work drinkers. 'This is the furthest garden from the loud-speakers,' Mohlmann said, pushing through a particular gate. He steered Russell to a tree-shaded table and insisted on buying the first round. 'So tell me about Franz.'

Russell did. The Americans had actually introduced him to Franz Boyens, a serious man in his thirties who yearned to do something for what he called the real Germany. He had been a signalling engineer in Breslau until 1934, when someone had informed the Gestapo of his involvement in a local strike. After six months in a concentration camp Boyens had smuggled himself into Poland on a freight train, walked all the way to the Baltic, and worked his passage to America. The New World had provided him with rewarding work and a loving wife, things that would have caused many men to forget their anger and sorrow for the old country, but Boyens' success had just made him sorrier for those he'd left behind. Men like Mohlmann, whom he'd known in the final years of the Weimar Republic.

Russell had liked Boyens. He told Mohlmann about his job with the Pennsylvania Railroad, about his expectant wife Jeannie and their house in suburban Trenton with its big garden backing onto the tracks. He told him that Boyens was active in the union, and a campaigner against the pro-Nazis who dominated the German-American Bund. All of which was true, at least in outline.

'I'm really happy for him,' Mohlmann said. 'I didn't know him for long, but, well, it was a time when you found out who your friends were. When the Nazis were arresting anyone who'd ever said a word against them.'

'I was here,' Russell said. 'In Berlin, that is.'

Mohlmann gave him a shrewd look. 'So you know then.'

This was the moment to talk about potential American help for resisters, but Russell held back. He simply nodded, and signalled the waiter to bring them more beers. 'Have you always lived in Breslau?' he asked.

'No. I was posted here in 1920. I was called up in the last week of the war,' he added, 'and my father had a job waiting for me when I was discharged. He was a Station Manager in Hamburg, and he wanted me as far away as possible, in case anyone accused him of nepotism. And my wife liked it here.' He looked away, as if gazing out across the water, but not before Russell had seen the hint of tears in his eyes. 'She died not long ago,' Mohlmann said, as if he still had trouble believing it.

'I'm sorry.'

'It takes some getting used to.'

'Do you have any children?'

'Two daughters, both married to Party members. One in Dresden, one in Berlin.'

'Ah.'

'At least they're safe,' he said wryly.

'I've been down to the border for my newspaper,' Russell told him, 'but I had another reason for coming to Breslau.' He told Mohlmann the story of Miriam Rosenberg's probable trip to Berlin, and studied the other man's face as he did so. He wasn't disappointed.

'That's disgusting,' was Mohlmann's verdict on the Berlin Kripo's refusal to investigate.

Russell showed him his picture of the Rosenberg family.

Mohlmann studied it closely. 'You know, I think I saw this girl. A month, six weeks ago - I can't be sure. I was on my way to lunch with a friend in the station and a girl like this was sitting on the seat outside. She was with a young man. I remember thinking what an odd couple they looked - she was so dark and Jewish, and he had this tousled blond hair. Perhaps they went off together. A Silesian Romeo and Juliet.'

'I'm afraid not. She was seen on the train to Berlin. Alone.'

'Just one life,' Mohlmann murmured, unconsciously echoing Thomas. 'But that's all any of us are.' He drained the last of his beer. 'Were you ever in the SPD?' he asked Russell.

'I was in the KPD until 1929. After my son was born it seemed sensible to leave. Although that wasn't the only reason.'

'Social Democrats and Communists - we should have fought together,' Mohlmann said. 'That was the one big mistake.'

They talked for another half an hour, mostly about Germany's problematic history, but Russell's mind was already made up. Mohlmann dropped him off at the Monopol, after extracting a promise from Russell to share an evening on his next visit to Breslau. A lonely man, Russell thought, as he trudged upstairs to a new room. And an angry one, with no distracting responsibilities. He would make a wonderful spy, but not for the Americans. What use would a knowledge of train operations in south-east Germany be to them? For the Soviets, on the other hand, they might be the difference between life and death.

Looking round the Monopol's breakfast room the following morning, Russell could understand why Hitler had stayed there. It was the first time he had seen it in daylight, and it was impressive in a Fuhrerish sort of way. Huge brass chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, which was held up by enough dappled marble columns to support a small Egyptian temple. Portraits of earlier German megalomaniacs featured on all but one panelled wall, which carried a mirror large enough to encourage serious delusions of grandeur. Rolls and coffee hardly did the setting justice.

The hotel receptionist told him that the Polish Consulate was a fifteen- minute walk away, on Oderstrasse, a small street between the Ring and the river. Or at least it had been. She couldn't remembering anyone mentioning it for several years.

Russell walked north up Schweidnitzer Strasse to the Ring, the market square at the city's heart. The six-hundred-year-old Rathaus which occupied the square's south-eastern corner was famous throughout Germany, and it wasn't hard to see why - the gable at the eastern end was both huge and elaborate. Walking down the swastika-draped southern side he came to the square's open space, a long cobbled rectangle flanked by classic five-storey houses in pastel shades. At the north-western corner the soaring spire of a shadowed church glinted in the morning sunshine.

The entrance to Oderstrasse was beside the church, and Russell was nearing its far end when he found a plaque announcing the Polish Consulate. A typed notice in a small glass case beside the door gave opening hours of 10am to 3pm, which left him with at least two hours to kill. Assuming the place was still in business. He looked up at the windows for any sign of life, and found none. There was still glass in them, though, which might mean something.

It was worth coming back, he decided. There had been five thousand Poles in Breslau in 1918, and it would be interesting to know what had become of them. In the meantime, another coffee.

He walked on to the Oder and across its southern channel, then stopped to watch two lightermen manoeuvre two fully-laden coal barges into the lock on the canalized section. Away to his right a cluster of spires rose out of the trees on the far bank, a picture of peace until a clanking tram drove across it.

Retracing his steps to the southern bank, Russell walked east past a row of university buildings, and finally found an open cafe close to the Market Hall. Music was playing from the loudspeaker on the street corner, and Russell just had time to order his coffee before a voice started droning. It was the Chief of the German Police, giving a speech on the perils of alcohol in the workplace. The authorities' answer, needless to say, was 'sterner measures'. Like all his Nazi buddies, the Chief was not given to moderation in thought or language. 'Pitiless proceedings' would be taken against canteens where workers got drunk.

Pitiless, Russell thought, was the word that characterised the bastards best. They just loved the concept.

He gulped down his coffee and tried to leave the voice behind. It was easier imagined than done - Breslau seemed unduly blessed with loudspeakers, and only the smallest streets offered areas of relative immunity. Russell suddenly remembered that Breslau had been officially designated 'Adolf Hitler's Most Faithful City' during the previous year's Sportsfest. A future badge of shame if ever there was one.

He reached a crossroads which had been spared an outlet for the regime's rantings. Not by accident, though - the loudspeaker was there, but two lonely lengths of wire hung down beside its host pole. Someone had got fed up with listening. Russell had a mental picture of a figure creeping out under cover of darkness, wire-cutters at the ready.

A small church occupied one corner of the crossroads, and a boy was sitting outside its gate, a rough pile of books beside him. Intrigued, Russell walked across. The books were all the same - a twenty-year-old collection of Johann Scheffler's poems.

'Angelus Silesius,' the boy explained. The Silesian Angel.

Russell knew who the poet was, and he recognized the book. Ilse had been reading it in the Moscow canteen when he first spoke to her.

'He's buried inside,' the boy said helpfully. 'The books are two marks.'

The church door creaked and groaned as Russell opened it, and even in high summer the interior felt chilly and damp. It was beautiful, though, the stained glass-filtered sunlight throwing a kaleidoscope of colour across the pews and walls.

He found Scheffler's tomb and portrait in a patch of sunlight and sat down in the nearest pew. He remembered wondering on that day in 1924 why an ardent young communist like Ilse Schade would be reading religious poetry, and he also remembered teasing her about it after they had become lovers. How could she take such nonsense seriously?

'Easily,' she'd told him, and showed him one of Scheffler's epigrammatic verses:

In heaven life is good:

No one has aught alone.

What one possesses there

All others too will own.

'See,' she said. 'He was a communist.'

Russell had expressed doubts.

'It's how you read them,' she told him. 'Look at this one -

The nearest way to God

Leads through love's open door;

The path of knowledge is

Too slow for evermore.'

'Yes, but...'

'Just substitute socialism for God, and apply the rest to our Revolution. We need love and a socialist spirit more than we need science and organization.'

It had seemed a stretch at the time, but Scheffler and she had been right, Stalin and Trotsky wrong. 'Believers,' he muttered to himself. They had all been believers then - or had aspired to be. But the world had caught up with them.

He looked up at the poet's portrait, the serene certainty in the eyes. The world had moved a lot slower in Scheffler's day - grab hold of a vision and there was a good chance you'd make it to the grave before someone tore holes in it.

Back in the sunlight he handed over his two marks, more because the seller looked hungry than because he really wanted the book.

It was almost ten o'clock. He walked back to Oderstrasse but the Polish Consulate was still devoid of life. He banged a fist on the door rather harder than he intended, the noise echoing down the narrow street. The only answer came from behind him. 'They're gone,' a woman shouted from a first floor window. 'And good riddance!'