Stattin Station (3 page)
He and Strohm descended the stairs, retraced their path between the lines of carriages to the distant bridge. After climbing the steps to the street they separated, Russell walking wearily south, his imagination working overtime. What were those thousand Jews thinking as their train worked its way around the Ringbahn, before turning off to the East? What were they expecting? The worst? Some of them certainly were, hence the rising number of suicides. Some would be brimming with wishful thinking, others with hope that things weren't as bad as they feared. And maybe they weren't. Two families that Russell knew had received letters from friends deported to Litzmannstadt, friends who asked for food packages but claimed they were well. They were obviously going hungry, but if that was the worst of it Russell would be pleasantly surprised.
He reached home soon after midnight. Effi was already in bed, the innocence of her sleeping face captured in the grey light that spilt in from the living room. Staring at her, Russell felt tears forming in his eyes. It really was time to leave. But how was he going to get them both out?
Shortly before five the following morning, Effi Koenen let herself out of the apartment and walked down to the stygian street. The limousine was ticking over, its slitted headlights casting a pale wash over a few yards of tarmac. The only evidence of the driver was the bright orange glow of a cigarette hanging in mid air. It seemed absurd that the studio still had petrol to burn when the military was apparently running so short, but Goebbels had obviously convinced himself that his movie stars were as vital to the war effort as Goering's planes or the army's tanks, and on a cold November morning Effi found it hard to disagree with him.
'Good morning, Fraulein Koenen,' the driver said, expunging his cigarette in a shower of sparks. She recognised the voice. Helmut Beckman had first driven her to work almost ten years earlier, and she still felt grateful for the trouble he'd taken to calm her beginner's nerves.
Effi took the seat beside him, as she did with most of the drivers. As she'd once told a disbelieving co-star, she felt a fraud sitting in the back - she was happy to play royalty on stage or on screen, but not on the journey to work. The view and the conversation were also better, although these days the former usually amounted to a black tunnel stretching into an uncertain distance.
'I took my wife to see
Homecoming
at the weekend,' Beckmann said once they had turned the first corner, heading for the Ku'damm. 'You were very good.'
'Thank you,' Effi said. 'And the film?'
There was a short silence, as the driver arranged his thoughts. 'It was well done,' he said eventually. 'I can see why it won that prize at the Venice Film Festival. The story was...well, there wasn't much of a story, was there? Just a succession of terrible things happening one after the other. It was a bit...I suppose
transparent
is the word. The writer had his point to make, and everything was lined up so he could. But I guess when you work in the business you notice things like that. And it was certainly better than most. My wife loved it, though she was really upset that you were killed.'
'So was I,' Effi said lightly, although in fact she'd been rather glad. Her character, a German schoolteacher in the territories acquired by Poland in 1918, had succumbed to a stray Polish bullet only minutes before salvation arrived for her fellow Germans in the form of the invading Wehrmacht. She had hoped that her overblown martyrdom would further undermine the credibility, and propaganda value, of the film, but from what she could gather, Frau Beckmann was far more typical than her husband. According to John, acts of violence against Polish POW workers had risen markedly since the film's release a few weeks earlier.
'But she didn't think much of the lawyer,' Beckmann added. 'And when I told her Joachim Gottschalk had turned down the part she got all weepy. She still hasn't got over what happened to him.'
'Few of us have,' Effi admitted. 'Joschi' Gottschalk had committed suicide a couple of weeks earlier. He had been one of Germany's favourite leading men, particularly among female cinema-goers, and the Propaganda Ministry had been more than happy to bank his bulging box office receipts so long as he kept quiet about his Jewish wife and half-Jewish son. But Gottschalk had chosen to parade his wife before a social gathering of high-level Nazis, and Goebbels had blown his diminutive top. The actor had been ordered to get a divorce. When he refused, he was told that the family would be separated by force; his wife and child would be sent to the new concentration camp at Theresienstadt in the Sudetenland, he to the Eastern Front. Arriving at the film star's home to enforce this order, the Gestapo had found three dead bodies. Gottschalk had taken what seemed the only way out.
News of his fate had not been officially released, but as far as Effi could tell, every man, woman and child in Berlin knew what had happened, and many of the women were still in mourning. There had even been talk of a studio strike by his fellow professionals, but nothing had come of it. Effi hadn't particularly liked Gottschalk, but he'd been a wonderful actor, and his family's fate had offered a chilling reminder - if one was really needed - of the perils of saying no to the Nazi authorities.
'What are you shooting today?' Beckmann asked, interrupting her reverie. They were driving through the Grunewald now, following the red lights of another limousine down the long avenue of barely visible trees. A procession of stars, Effi thought dryly.
'We're re-shooting the interiors with Hans Roeder's replacement,' she said. 'There aren't many, and they decided it was easier to shoot them again with Heinz Hartmann than write the character out of those scenes which haven't been shot.' Hans Roeder had been one of the few Berliners killed in a British air raid that year, and only then by falling shrapnel from anti-aircraft fire. Unlike Gottschalk he had been unpopular, essentially talentless, and a ferocious Nazi. A Goebbels favourite.
How much longer, she asked herself. She had always loved acting, and over the years she'd gotten pretty damn good at it. Over the last ten years she'd done her share of propagandist films and stage shows - one of her and John's favourite pastimes had been ridiculing the stories the writers came up with - but she had also done work that she was proud of, in films and shows which weren't designed to canonize the Fuhrer or demonize the Jews, which did what she thought they were supposed to do, hold up a mirror to humanity, loving if possible, instructive if not.
But now there was only the propaganda, and today she would be back in the costume of a seventeenth-century Prussian countess, bravely resisting a Russian assault on Berlin. The moral of the film was clear enough: the writers had not burdened the story with any conflicting ideals. As far as she could tell, the main crime of the Russians - apart, of course, from their initial insolence in invading Germany - lay in their physiognomy. The casting director had scoured the acting profession for men with a Slavic turn of ugliness, and come up with more than enough to fill the screen.
All of which pleased her no end. Even Frau Beckmann would struggle to find this film convincing.
When his number 30 tram eventually hove into view, Russell noticed with some dismay that it was one of the older vehicles. More and more of these were being brought back from the breakers' yards to replace modern relatives now gathering rust in the depot for want of spare parts or a mechanic to fit them. They were certainly more beautiful - this one had exquisite porcelain lamps attached to its inner sides - but that was all that could be said for them. They were almost as slow as walking, and their lack of springs ensured that every bump in the track was experienced to the full. This particular one was packed, and despite the cold weather smelt as rank as yesterday's U-Bahn.
The passengers thinned out a bit on Tauenzien Strasse, and quite a lot more on Potsdamer Strasse, but there were still a lot standing when an obviously pregnant woman got on at Potsdamer Platz, the yellow star conspicuously sewn across the left breast of her rather threadbare coat. Russell watched the expressions of his fellow passengers, wishing he had a seat to give up. Many simply turned their heads, and most of those that didn't looked angry, as if they'd been insulted or threatened in some way. But not all. Much to Russell's surprise, a young German in an army uniform abruptly got to his feet and offered the Jewish woman his seat.
She tried to refuse, but he was having none of it, and, with a quick smile of gratitude, the woman sat herself down. The soldier then looked round at his fellow passengers, daring any of them to raise a protest. None did, at least verbally, leaving Russell to wonder what would happen if the woman's champion got off before she did. In that event, he decided, he would pick up the torch. He hadn't hit anyone in several years, but there was something about living in Hitler's Germany which cried out for that sort of release on a fairly regular basis.
In the event, his services were not required; both he and the woman got off at the Brandenburg Gate, she heading in the direction of the Reichstag, he down Unter den Linden, past the barely-functioning American Consulate and Goebbels' 'fumigated' Soviet Embassy, towards Kranzler's and what passed these days for a morning coffee. He bought a
Volkischer Beobachter
from the kiosk outside, took a window seat in the sparsely populated restaurant, and got out the appropriate pink, yellow and white ration sheets for his ersatz coffee, watered-down milk and real sugar. One of the ancient waiters eventually noticed him, lumbered over, and laboriously cut off the requisite stamps with the small pair of scissors which hung like a fob watch from the front of his waistcoat.
War speeded up the process of dying, Russell thought, but tended to slow down everything else.
He examined the front page of the
Beobachter
, and the black-rimmed photograph of Generaloberst Ernst Udet that filled most of it. Udet, the head of the Reich Air Ministry's development wing, had been killed the previous day while test-piloting a new German fighter.
Russell had seen the Great War ace's flying show back in the 1920s, and Udet had never struck him as a real Nazi, just one of those people who are supremely gifted in one narrow sphere, and never apply much thought to anything else. The job of creating a new Luftwaffe would have appealed to him, but he wouldn't have worried too much about how or why it might be used. According to German friends, Udet had been more responsible than anyone for the highly successful Stuka dive bomber, and Russell hardly felt inclined to mourn his passing. Paul would though, and Russell could see why. Only the U-boat aces could compare with the fighter pilots when it came to the sort of lone wolf heroics that young boys of all ages loved to celebrate.
A state funeral was planned for the coming Saturday. And unless he was very much mistaken, Paul would want to go.
Russell went through the rest of the paper, secure in the knowledge that all the other papers would be carrying the same stories. Some, like the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, would be better written, others, like the
Deutsche Allegemeine Zeitung
, would be tailored to a particular class sensibility, but the political and military facts would not vary. What one paper said, they all said, and all were equally disbelieved. The German people had finally woken up to the fact that the claimed tally of Russian prisoners now exceeded the stated number of Russians in uniform, all of which chimed rather badly with the sense that those same Russians were fighting the German army to a virtual standstill. Each week another pincer movement was given the honour of being the most gigantic of all time, until it seemed as if the whole wide East was barely large enough to accommodate another battle. But still the enemy fought on.
And yet, despite themselves, the German newspapers did offer their readers a mirror to the real situation. It was merely a matter of learning to read between the lines. Over recent weeks, for example, there had been many articles stressing the inherent difficulties of the war in the East: the inhuman strength of the primitive Russian soldier, the extremes of climate and conditions. Prepare yourself for possible setbacks, the subtext read, we may have bitten off more than we can chew.
Russell devoutly hoped so. He drank the last of his coffee with a suitable grimace, and got up to leave. He had twenty minutes to reach the Foreign Ministry, which hosted the first of the two daily press conferences, beginning at noon. The second, which was held at the Propaganda Ministry, began five hours later.
Outside the sun was still shining, but the chill easterly wind was funnelling down the Unter den Linden with some force. He turned into it, thinking to check out the window of the closed American Express office on Charlottenstrasse, which someone had told Effi about. The reported poster was still in pride of place, inviting passers-by to 'Visit Medieval Germany.' Either the authorities had missed the joke, or they were too busy trying to catch people listening to the BBC.
Russell laughed, and received an admonitory glance from a passing soldier. Further down the street he encountered two women dressed in black, with five sombre-looking children in tow. Their soldiers wouldn't be coming back.
At the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse he climbed the two flights of bare steps to the Bismarck Room, took one of the remaining seats at the long conference table and nodded greetings to several of his colleagues. As ever, a pristine writing pad sat waiting on the green felt, a sight which never ceased to please Russell, knowing as he did where the pads actually came from. They were manufactured at the Schade printing works in Treptow, a business owned and run by his friend and former brother-in-law Thomas, and mostly staffed by Jews.
The Berlin Congress had been held in this room in 1878, and the furnishings seemed suitably Bismarckian, with dark green curtains, wood-panelled walls and more Prussian eagles than Goering had paintings. An enormous and very up-to-date globe sat on one side of the room; a large map of the western Soviet Union was pinned to a display stand on the other. The arrows seemed perilously close to Moscow, but that had been the case for several weeks now.
At noon precisely, Braun von Stumm strode in through the far doors and took the presiding seat at the centre of the table. A diplomat of the old pre-Nazi school, he was much the more boring of the two principal spokesmen. His superior Dr Paul Schmidt - young, fat, rude and surprisingly sharp for a Nazi - was more entertaining but even less popular. He tended to save himself for the good news.
The first question of the day was the usual plant, dreamt up by the Germans and asked by one of their allies, in this case a Finn. Would the German Government like to comment on the American plan to ship large numbers of long-range heavy bombers to the Philippines, from which they could reach Japan? The German Government, it became clear, would like to comment at length, on this and every other aggressive move which the warmonger Roosevelt was making these days. The American journalists doodled on their pads, and Russell noticed a particularly fine caricature of von Stumm taking shape under the scurrying pencil of the
Chicago Times
correspondent.