The Girl in Berlin (3 page)

‘I work for the Third Programme. Features.’ Alan spoke gruffly. Even to state the plain truth somehow sounded like boasting, as if he were deliberately contrasting his own success – or luck, or both – with Colin’s blighted fortunes. He frowned. ‘You must have oodles of contacts.’

‘Well … not necessarily,’ replied Alan cautiously, hoping he didn’t sound as dismayed as he felt. Alan was adept at avoiding emotional discomfort, but this conversation was becoming awkward. He was experiencing a mixture of guilt at his own success and irritation that Colin was always his own worst enemy.

‘I’ve tried so hard to make a life for myself there, but it’s not easy.’

Alan looked at Colin’s bent head and felt an unwelcome surge of pity. The trouble was Colin
always
tried too hard. He’d actually fought in Spain, when so many just talked about it. He’d actually stayed in the Communist Party when so many had left. He’d actually gone to live in an outpost of the Soviet Union, when so many found it easier to sneer at tarnished idealism. Like Alan himself. Out of guilt he said heartily: ‘I’ll give it some thought. Three years in Berlin isn’t going to help, of course,’ he added more brutally than he’d intended, ‘unless – were you able to do any filming …?’

Colin shook his head. ‘I did investigate the possibility of getting work at the German studios in East Berlin, at UFA, but …’

Alan controlled his impatience. What a fool Colin was, really. He’d been in documentaries once, he could surely have got something. But as soon as the thought formed itself Alan felt he was being a bit of a cad. ‘Perhaps if you could write something on spec … I mean, if you’ve been doing journalism over there – that might be a subject, well, East Germany, that’s a subject in itself, of course, although there isn’t much sympathy for any of those countries at the moment …’

‘You surprise me.’ Colin’s tone was bitterly sarcastic.

There was an awkward silence. Colin stood up. ‘I’d better be off. I’m … you’ll be late home. I mustn’t keep you.’

Alan jumped to his feet too. ‘You can’t just bugger off like that – look, I’ll do what I can, you know I will.’

‘Trying to get your black sheep commie friend some work. It’d be embarrassing, wouldn’t it.’

‘Colin! Please. Sit down. Don’t be so touchy. I do want to help.’

And, to Alan’s surprise, Colin did sit down. But the silence was heavier than ever.

‘Couldn’t the Party find you something?’ Alan was feeling a bit desperate, and also it really was getting late.

Colin smiled grimly. ‘I’m not in the Party’s good books these days.’ He drank again. ‘I’m an embarrassment to them, like I said. There are too many bureaucrats in the Party now and not enough revolutionaries. There as well as here. Of course it’s really difficult, actually coming to power and running a country. Especially a divided country.’

Alan looked at his watch. ‘Look, why don’t you come home with me and have something to eat. Dinah’d love to see you.’

Colin shook his head.

‘At least let me get you another drink.’

Colin shook his head again. Then: ‘Oh, all right.’ He sank back in his chair. ‘Can’t stay long, though.’

Returning with the beer, Alan was tense with curiosity. ‘Have you left the Party, then?’

‘No … no … it’s not like that …’

Silence.

‘Well then?’ said Alan impatiently.

Colin leaned forward and suddenly became more animated. ‘I’ll tell you one thing you’ll be pleased to hear.’ And now his grin was hostile. ‘I fell in love.’ He stared angrily at Alan, daring him to react. ‘The bit that’ll please you is it’s a girl.’

Alan swallowed his astonishment and managed an encouraging smile. He’d always tried to appear liberal and tolerant, but underneath ran a current of repulsion and Colin hadn’t been fooled after all.

‘A German girl. Her name’s Frieda, Frieda Schröder. We
want to get married, but there’ve been so many problems. And King Street haven’t been helpful. They don’t think anyone should be encouraged to leave a socialist country.’

Alan hadn’t thought about King Street for centuries. He’d been there, the Covent Garden headquarters of the British Communist Party … in the very cold winter, when Colin had been in frightful trouble. It all seemed so long ago … lost youth … He sighed.

‘How could they help you bring her over here?’

‘Oh … I don’t know. But anyway, they’d just rather I stayed disappeared, I suppose. At first I thought we’d just get married and stay in Berlin, but then – well, Frieda doesn’t want to stay there. She wants to get right away, so that meant my getting a job back here – and there’s still quite a lot of red tape if you marry a German … it’s easier than it was just after the war, but – as I said, it’s a bit awkward for the Party – an East German girl who wants to defect just as the socialist dawn appears over the horizon. That’s not what they want to hear.’

He can’t bear to look me in the eye, thought Alan, and didn’t understand why.

‘The main thing is, though, I have to get work. If I am going to come back, that is.’

‘Look – you
must
come back up to Hampstead and have something to eat. Meet Dinah again and my son.’ (With what pride Alan spoke the last two words.) ‘I insist. I’m not taking no for an answer.’

Dinah heard the key in the lock and when the door opened she saw with real joy the tall figure looming behind her husband.

‘Colin!’

She flung her arms round him as he stepped forward. ‘How wonderful to see you!’ But she felt his body go rigid at this unusual display of emotion and her arms fell back to her sides.

They sat round the table in the basement kitchen and it was just – almost – like the old times before Colin’s trial. She eked out the shepherd’s pie with baked beans and there was some Scotch in the cupboard to supplement the bottled beer the men had brought.

Whether it was the drink or the warmth of the kitchen or Dinah, something was freed in Colin. He talked and talked. When Dinah heard about the German girl she clapped her hands. ‘Oh, that’s marvellous!’ – although as soon as she’d said it her hand flew to her mouth, for of course it sounded as if she’d disapproved of his being queer in the first place. To tell the truth she’d never really understood that – the queerness – and this was so much better. Except that his fiancée was still in Berlin.

‘She’s … you’ve no idea what she’s been through …’

But he was talking more about Berlin than about the girl. ‘It’s so hard to describe what it’s like … the bomb damage – so much worse than here – just miles of rubble—’

‘Worse than
London
?’

‘Of course, much, much worse. They’ve started to build again now, but in 1948 it was still …’ Colin smiled grimly. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy going round ruins again. You remember, Alan, that Cambridge trip to Italy and Greece before the war? How we loved wandering round Pompeii and all those ruined temples and cities and villas? Well, in Berlin I thought: it’s just like that. It’s like wandering through the ruins of some ancient civilisation, a long-dead culture. The difference was people were still living there, in cellars, in ruins, in cemeteries. As if all the corpses in Pompeii had risen from the dead and were living some macabre kind of after-life. And they’re still there, some of them. Five years after the war.’

The kitchen was filled with their cigarette smoke. ‘I can’t bear the Cold War,’ Dinah burst out. ‘The Bomb – it’s all so terrible.’ She knew her words sounded trite, but that was
because there were no adequate words for the horror that loomed behind everything in life: nuclear warfare; Hiroshima. She was suddenly afraid she might burst into tears. It must be the Scotch. Her thoughts skidded back to safer ground – not that it was that safe, as Colin seemed so twitchy. ‘What are you going to do now, Colin? What are your plans?’

‘I was saying to Alan, I want to come back, with Frieda, of course, but I need a job and that isn’t going to be easy. And there’s an awful lot I’ve got to do first – visas and so on. The red tape makes it all so difficult. At both ends.’

‘Can’t you just marry her there? You’d be able to bring her back then.’

‘It’s not that simple. She’d still have to apply for British citizenship.’

‘But that wouldn’t be difficult, would it, if she were married to you?’ Alan was genuinely puzzled.

Dinah knew there was more, that there was much Colin hadn’t told them. ‘What’s she like? Tell us about her. How did you meet her?’

Colin smiled, more relaxed. ‘When I first got there I stayed with some friends of friends, a Party connection. They were living in a derelict apartment in the Prenzlauerberg – still are, for that matter. There wasn’t really room for me, but they were very kind … I have a sort of hotel room now … but that’s expensive.’ He frowned. ‘It’s difficult to explain what life’s like over there. Frieda, for instance, she has a job in West Berlin. I’m not clear what happened to her right after the war. I think they were in West Berlin for a bit. But anyway, if a German woman could get a job with the Allies, it didn’t matter what kind of job, waitressing, cooking, cleaning, it was a godsend for them, it meant they got more food, some cigarettes, chocolate and other things like that. Frieda did cleaning in an Allied officers’ club. But she’s been lucky and managed to progress to office duties. She still works in the British sector, but far fewer people
are crossing over now. It’s becoming a bit of a problem … I have a snapshot of her. It’s not very good.’ He fished it from his wallet and held it out awkwardly.

Dinah looked at the small, creased photograph. You could hardly see the face of the young woman trying to smile as she squinted into the sun. She wore a print dress and her hair hung in waves to her shoulders, the front pinned back in a wartime style. There was something poignant about the snapshot, perhaps there was always something poignant about the way people looked when they were photographed like that, it would always be a hopeful moment, and yet already it was locked in the past. She handed it back and Colin tucked it in his wallet.

‘As I said, she’s desperate to get away from it all, so I’ll have to find something here.’

‘I’m sure you will, sooner or later.’ But Dinah knew her words were empty ones.

Colin pushed his shock of hair back, a familiar gesture. ‘I’d better get going.’

‘Stay,’ ordered Alan. ‘It’s after midnight. The tube shut hours ago.’

So Dinah made up a bed on the sofa in the sitting room, and they left Colin unlacing his shoes.

three

A
FEW LIGHTS PRICKED THE DUSK
along the Kurfürstendamm. Frieda had worked late, because Herr Schneidermann insisted. There was no point. The canteen provided lunches for those British personnel and a few Germans with cushy jobs, attached to the occupying forces. There were no customers after six in the evening, but he kept her there, gave her silly clerical jobs and now and then ran his hand over her bottom. He would have liked to go further, but she’d long ago perfected a chilly hauteur that froze off men like Herr Schneidermann. The veneer was brittle. She had no power to prevent men from doing whatever they wanted, but it usually worked.

Herr Schneidermann knew how she’d got work in the British sector, of course: through her British friend. The British were less interested in women than the Russians and the Americans. It was said they did not much like women, their educational system saw to that, but Colonel Ordway had been kind to her. Stiff and unattractive, with sparse, mousy hair, a fierce toothbrush moustache and staring blue eyes, he had helped get her through the bad time, at least until … Only too soon he’d gone back to England and his wife and anyway
der Vater
had insisted they move into the Russian sector. But she’d kept the job.

Herr Schneidermann had got
his
job as canteen manager by more dubious means, she felt sure, but it was not done to
ask too many questions. Even the seemingly harmless ‘Where do you come from?’ was often too much. Yet Schneidermann couldn’t resist dropping a hint from time to time of his importance before 1945. Frieda didn’t care that he might have been a Nazi supporter, or even an active Nazi, and that denazification had left him unscathed. Anyway, Nazism hadn’t been purged or cleansed, it had simply subsided and disappeared, seeping silently into the ground like poison from some chemical factory site, polluting the environment in a different, quieter way.

What wore her down was the way Herr Schneidermann hated everyone: the Amis, the Russians, the English, the German refugees from the East, and the Poles. This universal hatred found expression in his low-grade bullying of her. He found petty ways to annoy, he criticised her work and he even sneered at her shabby clothes, although his weren’t much better. But it was work. It might not last that much longer, but she was determined to hang on until the place finally closed down. There were definite advantages to living in the Eastern sector and working in the West.

Frieda kept her bicycle in the storeroom at the back of the canteen. The bicycle was the only tangible memento of Colonel Ordway, other than the job itself. He’d found it somehow for her when they moved to Prenzlauerberg. This evening as she bent to unchain it, she saw the back tyre was flat. How could that have happened? She suspected Schneidermann, but surely even he would not be that spiteful.

Now she must wheel the heavy machine right across the city. That meant she would be late, which in turn would mean trouble from her father. He would shout and scream at her for being so careless with the precious machine. It would just have to be endured. Her experiences for the past six years, since their shattered arrival in Berlin in 1945, had taught her stoicism. The Colonel, too, had unexpectedly given her strength. It was what they called the stiff upper lip. ‘Chin up, old bean. Things
won’t look so bad in the morning.’ When he was worried about something he hummed or sang a quaint song from some previous war: ‘It’s a long long way to Tipperary’ or ‘
Après la guerre
, there’ll be a good time everywhere’. A hymn, ‘Time, like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away’ was another favourite. It was soothing, especially when she was exhausted after one of those evenings when she’d been out scavenging for her father.