Potsdam Station

Führer, we thank you!

April 7 – 9

Russell woke early, which was just as well, as he’d forgotten to request a wake-up bang on his door. Assuming the American Embassy hadn’t moved in the last five years, he had time for breakfast and a quick visit before his appointment with the Soviet authorities. He washed and shaved in unexpectedly hot water, got dressed, and hurried down to the restaurant.

It was better patronised than the evening before, and those idly playing with the suspicious-looking slices of cold meat included one British and two American foreign correspondents. One of the latter, Bill Manson, was an old acquaintance from pre-war Berlin. He’d represented various East Coast papers in half a dozen European capitals since the 1920s, and his eternal crew-cut was suitably grey. He had to be well over sixty.

‘I thought you were with Ike,’ Manson said as Russell sat down.

‘I was. I needed a change.’

‘Well, if you needed a rest, you’ve come to the right place. Nothing’s happened here for months, and nothing will until the victory parade. Lenin’s birthday or May Day, depending on how quickly Zhukov and Co. can wrap things up. If you like watching tanks roll by for hours on end you’ll be in seventh heaven.’

‘Sounds riveting. I’m John Russell,’ he told the other two. ‘San Francisco Chronicle.’

‘Martin Innes, Daily Sketch,’ the thinner of the two Englishmen said. He had slicked-back brown hair and rather obvious ears book-ending a pleasant, well-meaning face.

‘Quentin Bradley, News Chronicle,’ the other chipped in. He had wavy blonde hair, a chubby face, and the sort of public school accent which made Russell’s teeth stand on edge.

‘Is this the usual breakfast?’ he asked.

‘Never changes,’ Manson confirmed. ‘One day I took the meat away with me, just to make sure they weren’t bringing the same pieces back each morning.’

Russell reached for the bread and jam. The former was dark and stale, the latter surprisingly good. Cherries from the Caucasus, most likely.

‘How did you get here?’ Innes asked.

Russell went through his itinerary, raising a few eyebrows in the process.

‘You must have been really keen,’ Manson commented when he’d finished. ‘Any particular reason?’

Russell told them he was hoping for a ringside seat when the Red Army entered Berlin.

Not a chance, was the unanimous response.

‘Why not?’ Russell asked. ‘Don’t they want witnesses to their triumph? Are they treating German civilians that badly?’ He hadn’t wanted to believe the reports coming out of East Prussia – of German women raped and nailed to barn doors.

‘They probably are,’ Manson said, ‘but that’s not the whole story. I think the main reason they won’t allow any foreign reporters near the Red Army is what it might tell them about the Soviet Union. They don’t want the world knowing how utterly reckless they are with their own soldiers’ lives, or how backward most of their army is. The front-line units are good, no doubt about it, but the rest – no uniforms, not enough weapons, just a huge rabble following on behind, stealing wristwatches by the dozen and wondering what flush toilets are for. It’s hardly an advert for thirty years of communism.’

Russell shrugged. ‘I have to try.’

‘Good luck,’ Manson said with a sympathetic smile.

He was probably right, Russell thought, as he made his way across Sverdlov Square and down Okhotnyy Ryad in the direction of the American Embassy, trying to ignore the man in the suit walking some twenty metres behind him. It was his first glimpse of the city by day, and Moscow seemed a much sorrier place than it had in 1939. There was a lot of visible bomb damage, given that years had elapsed since the last real German attacks. The shop windows were empty, and people were queuing in considerable numbers for whatever was hidden inside.

He supposed things were slowly getting back to normal. Trams trundled along the wide boulevards, and hordes of plainly dressed pedestrians hurried along the pavements. In what had once been shady parks, a few surviving trees were budding into spring. It was certainly hard to believe that only three years had passed since the Wehrmacht came hammering at the city’s door.

As Russell approached the embassy building he noticed two of the new Gaz-11s parked on the other side of the road. There were at least two men in each, and they were presumably waiting for someone to follow. The regime’s paranoia was scaling new heights.

Once inside, Russell was asked to sign the usual book, and told to wait.

‘I have another appointment in twenty minutes,’ he objected.

‘This won’t take long,’ the duty officer told him

Half a minute later, a dark-haired, bespectacled man in his early thirties came down the stairs. Russell hadn’t seen Joseph Kenyon since late 1941, when the diplomat was stationed in Berlin. He’d first met him in Prague two years earlier, during his own brief stint working for American intelligence.

After they’d shaken hands, Kenyon ushered him through the building and out into a large and barely tended courtyard garden. ‘The rooms are all bugged,’ the diplomat told him, as he reached for an American cigarette. ‘Or at least some of them are. We find them and destroy them, but they’re surprisingly efficient at installing new ones.’

‘It’s good to see you,’ Russell said, ‘but I only came to register my presence. I’ve got a meeting at Press Liaison in fifteen minutes.’

‘Just tell me who you’re here for,’ Kenyon said. ‘We’ve received no word.’

The penny dropped. ‘I’m here for the Chronicle, no one else. I gave up working for governments in 1941.’

‘Oh,’ Kenyon said, clearly surprised. ‘Right. So why Moscow? Nothing’s happening here.’

Russell gave him a quick précis.

‘Not a chance,’ Kenyon told him, echoing the journalists at the Metropol.

After scheduling a drink for that evening, Russell hurried back up Okhotnyy Ryad, his NKVD shadow keeping pace. The sky, like his mood, was darkening, and large drops of rain were beginning to fall as he reached the Press Liaison office on Tverskaya Street. A minute late, he was kept waiting for a further twenty, quite possibly as a punishment. There was a picture album of Soviet achievements on the anteroom table, all dams, steelworks and happy kolkhoz workers driving their brand new tractors into the sunset. He laughed out loud at one photograph of Stalin surrounded by nervously smiling women in overalls, and received a withering glare from the young receptionist.

Someone arrived to collect him, a thin, balding man in his thirties with a worried look who introduced himself as Sergey Platonov. Upstairs, Russell discovered the reason for Platonov’s anxious expression – another man of roughly the same age with bushier hair, harder eyes and an NKVD major’s uniform. His name was Leselidze.

Russell was reminded of another interview he had endured, in Berlin several years earlier. Then too, the monkey had asked the questions while the organ grinder just sat there, making everyone nervous.

The room was like a small lecture hall, with several short rows of seats facing a slightly raised dais. They all sat down, Platonov and Leselidze behind the lecturer’s desk, Russell in the audience front row. It felt like more like a tribunal than an interview.

Platonov asked, in almost faultless English, whether Russell was aware of the wartime restrictions on movement applicable to all non-Soviet citizens.

‘Yes,’ Russell replied in the same language. A moving crane caught his eye in the window, proof that some rebuilding was underway.

‘And the general rules governing conversations between foreigners and Soviet citizens?’

‘Yes.’

Did he understand the specific rules governing foreign reporters in the Soviet Union, particularly those regarding the transmission of any information deemed detrimental to the Soviet state?

‘I do,’ Russell affirmed. He had no knowledge of the current details, but the gist was unlikely to have changed – foreign journalists would be allowed to prop up the main hotel bars, sit quietly at official press confer-ences, and have spontaneous conversations with specially selected model workers at tractor assembly plants. Anything else would be forbidden.

‘Do you have anything you would like to see?’ Platonov asked. ‘A collective farm, perhaps.’ He sounded every inch the caring host, but his companion’s face told a different story.

‘I would like to see Berlin with the Red Army,’ Russell said, tiring of the game and switching to Russian. ‘The rest of the world should know who really defeated the Germans.’

Flattery made no impression. ‘There is no possibility of that,’ Platonov replied calmly in English. ‘We have strict rules – only Soviet journalists are allowed with Soviet forces. We cannot be responsible for the safety of foreign journalists in a war zone. That is quite impossible.’

‘I…’ Russell began.

‘What makes you so certain that the Red Army will reach Berlin ahead of the Americans?’ Leselidze asked him in Russian. Platonov slumped back in his chair, as if relieved that his part was over.

Russell answered in the same language. ‘About ten days ago General Eisenhower wrote a personal letter to Comrade Stalin. He told the Generalissimo that the Allied armies would not be advancing on Berlin, that their next moves would be towards Hamburg in the north, Leipzig in the centre and Munich in the south.’

Leselidze smiled. ‘I was unaware that the details of this letter had been made public in the West. But that is not important. What matters is whether General Eisenhower was speaking the truth. We know that Churchill wants Berlin, and that all the generals do too, both British and American. Why should Eisenhower be any different? He’s a general; he must want the glory which goes with the biggest prize. So why does he tell us he doesn’t?’ The Russian leaned forward in his seat, as if eager to hear Russell’s answer.

‘You’re mistaken,’ Russell told him. ‘You don’t understand how things work in the West. The war is effectively won, but a lot more soldiers are going to die before it ends, and the US government would rather they were Russians than Americans. The occupation zones have already been agreed, so they don’t see any point in sacrificing lives for territory that they’ll have to hand back. And on top of all that, they’ve got this ridiculous bee in their bonnets about diehard Nazis heading south to the Alps, where they’ve supposedly built a fortress to end all fortresses.’

Leselidze shook his head. ‘You are clever enough to see through this, but your leaders are not?’

‘I know the Nazis better than they do. If Hitler and his disciples knew how to plan ahead they might have won the damn war. And one last thing. Eisenhower loathes Montgomery, who would have to be given a leading role in any advance on Berlin. Believe me, Ike would rather let Zhukov take the prize than give Monty that sort of glory.’

Leselidze sat back in his seat, still looking less than convinced. ‘Very interesting. Thank you, Mr Russell. But, as Comrade Platonov has explained to you, the policy forbidding journalists from travelling with Soviet forces is an extremely strict one. So…’

‘I’m sure it’s a very good policy. But it would be in your interests to make an exception in my case.’

Leselidze looked blank. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Comrade Leselidze, I have personal reasons for wanting to enter Berlin with the Red Army. My wife and child are probably in the city. My wife, who helped me escape from Germany in 1941, has been a fugitive from the Gestapo for more than three years. And now the Red Army is coming. The soldiers have all read Comrade Simonov’s articles calling for punishment of the German people…’

‘Yes, yes. But Comrade Stalin has now issued an order calling for the troops to only punish Nazis…’

‘I know. And a very wise order it is. But after what the Germans did to your country and your people, an army of saints would be out for revenge. And while I can appreciate that, I still want to protect my family. Can you understand that?

Leselidze shrugged. ‘We all wish to protect our families,’ he said blandly. ‘But I fail to see how helping you protect yours will benefit the Soviet Union.’

‘Because I have something to offer in exchange,’ Russell told him.

‘What?’

‘My knowledge of Berlin. Whatever your generals need to know, I can tell them. Where everything is, the best roads, the vantage points. I can save Russian lives in exchange for my family’s.’

Even to Russell himself, it sounded dreadfully thin.

‘I would be very surprised if we did not already possess this information,’ Leselidze told him. ‘I will of course pass your offer to the relevant authorities, but I am certain that the answer will be no.’

Alighting from the tram at her Bismarck Strasse stop, Effi checked that her building was still standing. Reassured, she scanned the rest of the wide street for fresh bomb damage. None was apparent. The smoke still rising away to the north-west suggested that the latest British attacks had fallen on that area of the city, where many of the larger war industries were situated. Which made for a pleasant change.

She walked up to their second-floor apartment, feeling the tiredness in her legs. She also felt emotionally numb. Had she grown accustomed to living with fear, or more adept at suppressing her feelings? Was there a difference? She was too tired to care.

Ali wasn’t home, but a note on the kitchen table promised she’d be back by four. There was no mention of where she was, which caused Effi a pang of probably unnecessary anxiety. For all her youth, Ali was never careless of her own safety, and only the previous day had lectured Effi on the importance of not growing over-confident. It would be so terrible to fall at the very last hurdle, after all they’d been through.

Ali had left her some soup in a saucepan, but there was no gas, and Effi didn’t feel hungry enough to eat it cold. She nibbled on a piece of bread instead, and walked through to her bedroom, thinking she’d lie down for however long it took the Americans to arrive overhead. It would probably make more sense to go straight downstairs, but the idea of spending any unnecessary time in the basement shelter was less than appealing.

She lay down on the bed, closed her eyes, and wondered what Ali would do after the war. Marrying Fritz would be a good start, and no less than she deserved. The girl had lost so much – her parents deported and presumably killed, her first boyfriend the same – but she’d grown into such a resourceful young woman. She had certainly saved Effi’s own life. When the two fugitives had run into each other in the Uhlandeck Café in June 1942, it had been Ali who had put Effi in touch with the forger Schönhaus, and he who had documented the fake identity that had served her ever since.

Where was he, she wondered. In 1943, he’d been recognised and almost caught by one of the Jewish greifer – ‘catchers’ – that the Gestapo employed, and had taken off for Switzerland. No one had ever heard from him again, which was probably good news – if the Gestapo had caught him, they would have gloated. His story would make a good film, she thought. A final pan-out filling the screen with Alps…

She was woken by the air-raid sirens. Was she imagining it, or were they sounding increasingly the worse for wear? How many air raids did the average siren last?

She walked quickly downstairs, out across the rear courtyard and down the narrow stairway to the large basement shelter which served her own building and four others. There had sometimes been as many as a hundred and fifty people camped out down there, but lately there seemed about half that. The Volkssturm call-up and evacuation programme had taken most of the remaining men and children, and several women had fallen prey to the bombing. Many of the latter had recently lost a husband or son, and had, in their grief, stopped taking any precautions for their own safety.

Strangely, but somehow predictably, the occupants of the different houses stuck together in their shared shelter, arranging their camp beds and chairs in a laager-like circle, regardless of how little contact they had with each other above ground. And each group, Effi guessed, would have the same cross-section of stereotypes. There was the cynic who disbelieved everything the authorities said, and the old Nazi who still clung to his faith in ultimate victory. There was the woman who talked of nothing but her missing son, and the old man who had fought in the First War, when things were done so much more efficiently. There was the couple who held each other’s hands and always seemed to be praying. Sometimes Effi sat there casting the movie, assigning actors and actresses of past acquaintance to the various parts.

Frau Pflipsen was the one she would like to play, in the hopefully distant future. The woman claimed to be ninety, and quite possibly was, having lost two grandsons at Verdun in 1916. A diminutive physical presence, all of 1.45 metres tall and weighing in at not much more than 40 kilos, she was more than happy to share her feelings about the authorities in general, and the Nazi leaders in particular. She had a reluctant soft spot for Goebbels – ‘you have to admit it, the little shit is clever’ – but thought the rest should be lined up against a wall and shot. A few months earlier, Effi and Ali had amused themselves by scripting a meeting between Frau Pflipsen and the Führer. The latter had hardly got a word in.

That morning, Frau Pflipsen was reading aloud from the single sheet that passed for a daily paper. The Red Army’s assault on ‘Fortress Königsberg’ was in full swing, and Promi – the Propaganda Ministry – was obviously determined that other German cities should be fully aware of their possible fate. Why, Effi wondered, as Frau Pflipsen cantered through lurid accounts of Soviet atrocities, and the faces around her grew more alarmed. What good did scaring people do? If Goebbels really believed that German defeats were down to a lack of backbone, then he wasn’t such a clever little shit after all.

Once Frau Pflipsen had finished her recitation, Frau Esser raised an arm in hopeful pursuit of silence. Her husband had been block-warden until mid-March, when an unheralded raid had killed him and his infant cabbages on a nearby allotment, and she had inherited the post by default no one else wanted the job, and no one else could read his handwritten lists of the local residents. Frau Esser was less than keen herself, a fact that aroused occasional feelings of guilt in her own breast, but bothered no one else. During these final weeks, less than keen seemed a highly appropriate response.

‘I have a short announcement,’ she said. ‘Any woman who wishes can register for a half day’s firearms training at the barracks down by the Li-etzensee. The instructors will be from the SS. If you’re interested come and see me.’

A couple of women did, and Effi thought about joining them. Were they handing out guns with the training? If so, it might be worth risking a few hours in the company of the SS. She smiled inwardly at the memory of the last such occasion, when she and Ali had accepted a poster invitation to an SS Christmas party on Potsdamer Platz. The food and drink had been wonderful, and their only problem had been shaking off Ali’s newly acquired SS suitor. He had insisted on escorting her back to the apartment, and only relented when Ali explained that her husband – a Wehrmacht major – was expected home on leave that day, and would be outraged if his wife returned with another man.

Those were different days, Effi thought. In 1943 neither had really expected to survive the war, and the feeling of nothing to lose had encouraged the taking of risks. Now that survival seemed almost in reach, the instinctual urge was to do nothing that might attract attention. She would forget about the firearms training, Effi decided, but she might still try to get hold of a gun. Men behaved badly in wars, particularly in their final days, when neither winners nor losers had much to gain by behaving well.

She lay back on her camp bed, hoping to get some more sleep, just as the sound of exploding bombs penetrated the shelter. They were falling at least a mile away, Effi guessed – like most Berliners, she had grown quite proficient at estimating such things.

The next stick was closer, but not close enough to shake dust from the ceiling. A quarter-mile at least. She looked up, wondering for the umpteenth time whether the floor above would hold if the building above collapsed. They had done their best to shore it up, but no one really knew. If it did come down, she hoped it came down on her head. The thought of being buried alive filled her with dread.

More explosions, and this time little specks of dust floated down from above. Like everyone else, Effi braced herself for the sudden crack of thunder, but as the moments lengthened it became apparent that none were coming. There were muffled explosions in the distance, then more still further away.

The all-clear sounded earlier than usual. Provided there was no British daytime raid, the streets should be safe until dark, and Effi knew she should use the opportunity to do some shopping. With the Russians on the Oder, who knew when the city’s ration supplies would suddenly dry up?

It was still grey outside, and most of the eastern sky was full of smoke. The government district, she guessed. Serve them right. She didn’t suppose Hitler had been standing by a window when it blew in, but one could always hope.

The queue at the local grocery was long, but there was still no sign of food running out. Effi used her and Ali’s ration cards to buy rice, lentils, dried peas, a small amount of fat and an even smaller piece of bacon. There was, unusually, no ersatz coffee to be had, but few seemed disposed to lament the fact. And in general, the mood seemed one of almost cheerful resignation. For months the favourite joke among Berliners had been ‘enjoy the war – peace will be dreadful’, but lately things had got so bad that even a Russian occupation might be some sort of improvement.

It was almost three when Effi left the shop, and the sun was struggling to break through the clouds. She thought about walking to one of her favourite cafés on Savigny Platz or the Ku’damm, not for the barely drinkable coffee and barely edible cakes, but because taking a seat on the sidewalk and watching the world go by was a way of stepping back in time, to when such pleasures could be taken for granted. It was too risky, of course – the Gestapo greifer hovered around those cafés like vultures. They, above all people, understood the fugitive’s desperate desire to relive a few moments of his or her former life.

She walked home. Discovering to her surprise that gas was available, she put water on for a pot of tea. The flame was pathetically low, but half an hour later, just as Ali was letting herself in through the apartment door, steam began to rise.

‘How did it go?’ Ali asked as she took off her coat.

She was looking good, Effi thought. Too thin, of course, and their diet was doing nothing for her skin complexion, but she would be a lovely young woman again when all this was over. A real catch for any man who could cope with an independent spirit, and she believed that Fritz could. ‘I don’t really know,’ she admitted in answer to the question. She gave Ali a run-through of the night’s events, ending with the Gestapo officer. ‘I don’t know whether he believed me or not,’ she concluded. ‘If he didn’t, then we may have visitors. But we’ve had them before,’ she added, seeing Ali anxiously purse her lips, ‘and we sent them packing. Remember the ice?’

Ali laughed. About eighteen months earlier, the Gestapo had suspected ‘Frau von Freiwald’ of harbouring a Jewish U-boat. She and her ‘niece’ had been living in a ground floor apartment then, and watchers had been stationed front and rear. One evening Effi had poured boiling water across the path at the back, and the freezing temperature had done its work. A few hours later they were treated to the sound of a heavy fall and subsequent volley of curses. Soon thereafter the watchers were withdrawn, and a month or so later Effi was able to resume her provision of temporary sanctuary for those in desperate need.

‘And Erik will warn us if things have gone wrong,’ she added.

‘If he’s not the first one they arrest,’ Ali protested, but without too much conviction.

Years earlier, Effi had listened to a conversation between John and his ex-wife’s brother Thomas about their times in the trenches. There were some men, they agreed, whom everyone knew would remain unscathed. The Swede, she realised, had that sort of aura.

Of course, Russell had added at the time, the intuition was sometimes mistaken, and when one of the certain survivors was killed everyone else became twice as depressed.

‘So how was internment?’ Russell asked Joseph Kenyon that evening. Like all the American diplomats and journalists marooned in Berlin when the Japanese carrier fleet hit Pearl Harbor, Kenyon had endured five long months of ‘protective custody’ at Bad Nauheim’s Grand Hotel. Russell had been on the run by then, or he would shared the same fate.

‘It was probably a decent hotel before the war,’ Kenyon said. ‘But by the time we arrived the staff were all gone, and the heating and electricity had both packed up. Things got better, I suppose. After we kicked up a fuss, we probably ate better than the local Germans, but that wasn’t saying much.’

‘I can’t say I’m sorry to have missed that,’ Russell admitted. He reached for his drink and took in their surroundings. The bar of the National Hotel bar was large and almost deserted; there were a couple of Swedish journalists sharing a bottle of wine on the far side of the room, and an obvious NKVD snoop at a table close to the door. He kept checking his watch as if expecting relief.

‘And how did you get out of Germany?’ Kenyon asked.

Russell gave the diplomat the expurgated version, which had him passed, like a parcel in the children’s game, from one group of selfless anti-Nazis to another, until Sweden loomed on the horizon.

Kenyon wasn’t fooled for a second. ‘The communists got you out.’

‘I suppose most of them were Party members,’ Russell admitted ingenuously.

‘And once you got to Stockholm?’

‘I got passage on one of the neutral sailings the Swedes had arranged with the Germans. Got dropped off in Havana, took a flight to Miami, arrived just in time for my mother’s funeral, which was really sad – I hadn’t seen her since 1939. I spent the next six months trying to tell America what was happening to the Jews, but no one wanted to hear it. Would you believe the New York Times has only had two lead editorials on the Jewish question since the war started? Lots of short pieces on page 11 or page 19 – 19,000 Jews killed in Kharkov, how Treblinka operated, etc etc – but no one would spell it all out in capital letters. It became a minor running story.’

Kenyon lit a cigarette. ‘Did you work out why they wouldn’t?’

‘Not really. Several of the editors were Jews, so you couldn’t put it all down to anti-Semitism. I think some of them convinced themselves that a war for the Jews would be harder to sell than a war against tyranny. Some journalists told me the stories were exaggerated, but their only reason for thinking so was that most of the atrocity stories from the First War had turned out to be fakes.’ Russell grimaced. ‘When it came down to it, they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the Nazis were murdering every Jew they could get their hands on. Apart from being inconvenient, it was just too much to take in.’ He took a swig from his glass. ‘Anyway, I tried. You can only go on flogging an unwilling horse for so long. After that, well, I was feeling a long way away from the people I loved.’

‘They’re still in Berlin?’

‘As far as I know. My wife – she’s my girlfriend really, but people take a wife much more seriously – anyway, she was on the run with me, but things went wrong, and she had to stay behind. If the Gestapo caught her, they never let on, and I’m praying that she’s been in hiding all this time. My son was only fourteen when I left, and he’s more German than English. There was no way I would have put him at risk, even if his mother – my first wife – would have let me.’

‘And you haven’t heard from either of them since ’41?’

‘No. The Swedes got their Berlin embassy to let Paul know I was safe. He thanked them for letting him know, but he had no message for me. He must have been furious with me, and I can’t say as I blame him. When I got to London at the end of ’42 I tried to persuade the BBC to broadcast a message that only Effi would understand, but the bastards refused.’

‘Three years is a long time,’ Kenyon mused.

‘I’d noticed,’ Russell said wryly.

‘So you left the States,’ Kenyon prompted.

‘I was lucky. The San Francisco Chronicle’s London correspondent wanted to come home – family reasons of some sort – and my old editor asked if I was interested. I jumped at it.’ He smiled at Kenyon. ‘I’m afraid having an American passport hasn’t made me feel any less English.’

‘It’ll come.’

‘I doubt it. There’s a lot I love about America, and a lot I loathe about England and Germany, but Europe still feels like home.’

‘Try Moscow for a few years. But how was London?’

‘Okay. In any other circumstances I’d have probably loved it, but all I did was sit around and wait. I began to think that the Second Front was never going to happen. When it did, I managed to convince my editor that a year in the trenches qualified me as a war correspondent, and I’ve been trailing after the troops since Normandy. Until now, that is.’

‘They’re making a huge mistake,’ Kenyon said.

‘Who is?’

‘Well, Ike, to start with. But the president as well, for not overruling him.’

‘Word is, Roosevelt’s not long for this world.’

‘I know, but there must be someone at the wheel. Ike’s telling everyone that his business is winning the war as quickly and cheaply as he can, and that winning the peace is down to the politicians. If he doesn’t get the connection, then someone should be getting it for him.’

‘Career soldiers rarely do. But if the occupation zones are already decided, what’s the point?

‘The point,’ Kenyon insisted, tapping the ash from the end of his cigarette, ‘is to show some resolve, give the Russians something to think about. If the Red Army takes Berlin, the Soviets will come away with the impression that they’ve won the war on their own.’

‘They damn near have.’

‘With a hell of a lot of help. Who built the trucks their soldiers are riding on? Who supplied the cans they’re eating from? Who just surrounded three hundred thousand of the bastards in the Ruhr Pocket?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Take it from me, the Russians will go from friend to foe in the time to takes to say “Hitler’s dead”. They’ve already got their hands on half of Europe, and they’ll be eyeing the rest. They might not be as nasty as the Nazis, but they’ll be a damn sight harder to shift.’

He was probably right, Russell thought. But if the Americans had been through what the Russians had, they’d also be looking for payback.

‘What are you going to do when they say no?’ Kenyon asked, changing the subject.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Russell admitted.

He was still pondering that question as he walked back up Okhotnyy Ryad to Sverdlov Square and the Metropol. He seemed stuck in what bomber pilots called a holding pattern; he couldn’t ‘land’ until he knew what had happened to Effi and Paul. One or both could be dead, which would change everything. But even if both were alive… Paul was eighteen now, and more than ready to strike out on his own. Effi might have fallen in love with someone else. Three years, as Kenyon had said, was an awfully long time.

And if she still loved him, well, where would they live?

In the ruins of Berlin? She might be longing to leave the city behind. She might feel more tied to the place than ever.

He had no idea where he wanted to be. Living in hotel rooms and lodgings for three years had left him with an abiding sense of root-lessness. This war had set millions in motion, and some would have trouble stopping.

‘I can’t see what I’m doing,’ Effi said, putting the half-sewn dress to one side. Outside the light was fading, and there’d been no electricity since that morning’s bombing.

‘Have my seat,’ Ali suggested. ‘The light’s better.’

‘No, it’s all right. It’s not as if there’s any hurry. I don’t think the Skoumal sisters will be going out gallivanting any time soon.’ When Effi and Ali had set up the business in late 1942, Frau Skoumal had been one of their first clients, and fashioning dresses for her and her daughters had yielded them a steady supply of food and ration stamps. They had lived above the shop in Halensee in those days, because residents of commercial premises were not obliged to register with the local authorities.

Effi stood up and stretched her arms above her head. ‘I can’t believe how…’

She was interrupted by an urgent series of knocks on their front door. The two women looked at each other, and saw their fears mirrored.

‘Did you hear a car?’ Effi whispered, as she headed for the door.

‘No, but…’

There were more knocks.

‘Who is it?’ Effi asked, remembering to put a few years on her voice.

‘It’s Erik,’ a voice almost hissed.

She let him in, wondering what new disaster had occurred. It was only the second time he had been to the apartment, and he looked shabbier than usual – his coat was missing a button, his trousers badly frayed at the ankles. He was also unshaven, she realised – the first time she had seen him so.

‘I’m sorry for coming here,’ he said at once, ‘but there was no time to contact you in the usual way.’

‘Were those men caught?’ Effi asked.

‘No. At least, not as far as I know. We still haven’t heard from Lübeck, and no news is usually good news. But that’s not why I’m here.’

‘One of them knew me,’ Effi told him. ‘And he stayed here.’

Aslund looked mortified. ‘Oh, that’s bad. I’m sorry. It’s just.. there’s no excuse, but the arrangements… there was no time. I am sorry,’ he repeated.

‘Have a seat,’ Effi offered. Her anger was already turning to guilt. Aslund had saved so many innocent lives.

‘No, I can’t stay. The reason I came – I have someone in need of a refuge.’

‘Of course,’ Effi said instinctively, and tried to ignore the sense of resentment that suddenly welled up inside her. They had not had a ‘guest’ for several months, and she had grown accustomed to living without that particular hostage to Gestapo fortune.

‘I know,’ Aslund said, as if he could feel her reluctance. ‘But…’

‘For how long?’ Effi asked.

‘Until it’s over,’ the Swede admitted. ‘This one’s different,’ he continued, seeing the look on Effi’s face. ‘She’s only eight years old. Her mother was killed by a bomb about a month ago, and the woman who’s looking after her – who sheltered them both for more than two years – she’s seriously ill. She can’t look after the girl anymore.’

‘She’s Jewish?’ Ali asked.

‘Yes. The name on her new papers is Rosa. Rosa Borinski. She’s a lovely little girl.’

Effi hesitated. She wanted to say no, but she didn’t know why. One risk too many, perhaps.

‘There’s no one else,’ Aslund said softly.

‘Of course we’ll take her,’ Effi said, looking at Ali. How could they refuse?

Ali looked concerned. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ she said. ‘I told Fritz that I’d move in with him until it’s all over. There’ll be more room, but I won’t be around much to help.’

‘That’s all right,’ Effi told her. She felt upset that Ali was going, but hardly surprised. ‘I can manage the girl on my own,’ she told Aslund.

‘That’s wonderful,’ Aslund said, as if a huge weight had just been lifted from his shoulders. ‘Someone will bring her here tomorrow. After the day raid, if there is one.’

‘They haven’t missed a day for weeks.’

‘True. But it can’t last much longer. Once the Russians are in the city, the Western allies will have to stop their bombing.’

‘And how long before the Russians are here?’ Effi asked him.

Aslund shrugged. ‘A few weeks. No more than that. And maybe less.’

Russell was woken by the early morning sunlight, and found it impossible to go back to sleep. With two hours to wait until the restaurant opened, he enjoyed a long soak in the oversize bath and then sat by the window with his Russian dictionary, checking through words he might need to use. When the Cyrillic letters began to blur he put the book down, and stared out at the square. A group of four women cleaners were gathered beside the statue of Marx, leaning on their brooms like a coven of witches. Marx hadn’t noticed them, of course – he was staring straight ahead, absorbed in saving humanity.

He ate breakfast alone surrounded by yawning waiters, and then went for a walk, cutting round the back of the Lenin Museum and into Red Square. On the far side, a couple of people were crossing in front of St Basil’s, but otherwise the vast expanse was free of movement. There were no guards outside Lenin’s tomb, a sure sign that the mummified corpse had not yet returned from its wartime vacation in distant Kuybyshev.

Russell ambled across the cobbles, wondering what to do. Would the Soviets actually communicate a refusal, or just leave him dangling for days? Probably the latter, he thought. He needed to push for an answer – it wouldn’t hurt and it might even help. The Soviet Union was one of those strange places – like Oxford or the Church – where money didn’t talk very loudly, and where making yourself heard called for a certain directness. Like shouting, or banging one’s fist on a table.

If the British introduced a National Health Service he could almost guarantee that those who shouted loudest would get the best treatment. Which would still be better than rationing according to income.

His mind was rambling. What if the shouting failed to shift them? What should he do then – travel back to the West? Once the Red Army took Berlin, the Americans, British and French would insist on their own people going in to administer the agreed zones, and he, as a Western journalist, should have no trouble going with them. But who knew how long it would be before the Red Army declared the city safe, and allowed their Allies in? Weeks probably, maybe even months.

Was there nothing more he could offer the Soviets? He couldn’t think of anything. He needed a friend, a sponsor.

Shchepkin, he thought, without much hope. But there was no one else.

Yevgeny Shchepkin was the closest thing he had to a friend in Moscow. When Russell had refused the Russians’ invitation to the Soviet Union at the end of 1941, he had gained the impression that Shchepkin had actually been pleased, as if he knew that his bosses meant Russell no good, and was pleased that their plans had come to nought. That might have been wishful thinking – it was hard to know. When they had first met in 1924, both had been enthusiastic communists. At their meetings in 1939, Shchepkin had still seemed committed, but on a much more pragmatic level, and by 1941 Russell had gained the distinct impression that his old comrade was just going through the motions.

Shchepkin might speak in his favour, he thought. Always assuming he could – the average life expectancy of Stalin’s international reps had taken something of a dip in recent years.

But how could he find him? There were no private numbers in the Moscow telephone directory.

He could just go straight to the NKVD. Put them at their ease by sticking his head between their jaws. Say Shchepkin was an old friend whom he wanted to look up while he was in Moscow. Witter on about internationalism and other mad ideas from Lenin’s day. What did he have to lose? They could only say no.

The young woman who brought the child seemed cold and brusque to Effi, as if she was passing on a parcel rather than another living soul. ‘This is Rosa,’ was all she said, handing over the false papers and a small and very battered suitcase. She was clearly disinclined to linger, and Effi did nothing to detain her. The child could answer any questions about herself.

Rosa seemed small for her age, with large hazel eyes, a small straight nose and soft lips. In better times, she would have been pretty, Effi thought, but hunger and grief had taken a toll. The curly fair hair was short and roughly shorn, adding to the waif-like impression. More to the point perhaps, there was nothing in the girl’s features or colouring to suggest her Jewish heritage.

‘I’m Erna,’ Effi said. ‘Erna von Freiwald. And this is Mathilde,’ she added, introducing Ali. ‘She’s moving out in couple of days, but she’ll still come to see us.’

Rosa solemnly shook hands with both of them. ‘Rosa is not my real name,’ she said. ‘But I can’t tell you my real name until the war is over.’

‘That’s good,’ Effi said. ‘Erma and Mathilde aren’t our real names either. When the war’s over we can all tell each other.’

The girl nodded. ‘Are you my mother now?’ she asked Effi, with a discernible hint of challenge.

‘We’re both going to be your friends,’ Effi offered, uncertain of what to say. ‘And we’ll try and look after you the way your mother would have wanted.’

‘For ever?’ the girl asked.

‘I don’t know. Until the war is over, at least. I’m sorry, but no one has told us about your family – what happened to your father?’

‘I don’t know. Mother told me he might be alive, and we must hope, but I don’t think she believed it.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘I don’t remember. I was very small. He just went away one day.’

‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘I don’t think so. Is there any food, please? I’m very hungry.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry, I forgot. I made some soup this morning for when you arrived.’

There was no gas to heat it, but Rosa gulped it down. After she’d finished, Effi showed her round the apartment. ‘You’ll sleep with me,’ she said. ‘I hope that’s all right.’

‘I think so,’ Rosa agreed. ‘I go to bed at eight o’clock.’

‘Where you were before,’ Effi asked, ‘did you go down to the shelter for the air raids?’

‘Not when my mother was alive. We had to stay in the shed where we lived. We used to get under the bed, but mother went out to get something.’ Her eyes brimmed with tears, which she angrily wiped away. ‘Frau Borchers took me down after that. She said I was her niece from Dresden, and that my mother and father had been killed.’

‘That’s a good story,’ Effi agreed. ‘We shall say the same here.’

Later that evening, as the British thundered overhead, she told the same story to Frau Esser. The block warden wrote down the fictional details, which someone somewhere would doubtless try to verify. Most such stories, as many U-boats had found to their cost, could eventually be checked, but surely the time was now too short. With any luck at all, the Gestapo would be much too busy looking for last-ditch ways of saving their own skins.

Watching Rosa interact with the other children in the shelter, Effi was reassured by the child’s obvious reticence. She wouldn’t be giving herself away – her mother had taught her well.

Later, lying awake upstairs with the sleeping girl’s arm possessively draped around her, Effi found herself wondering how many millions of children would enter the coming peace as orphans.

Russell’s Monday morning visit to the NKVD headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Street was long and fruitless. His arrival caused consternation, his request for Shchepkin’s address a look of such incredulity that it almost made him laugh out loud. The young officer stood there mute for several seconds, torn between a transparent desire to send him packing, and an equally obvious fear that doing so would render him personally liable for any other outrageous acts that Russell might commit in the temple of socialism. After ordering him to take a seat, he disappeared in search of help.

He returned five minutes later with a senior officer, a much older man with a prominent scar on one side of his neck, who coldly asked what Russell wanted.

He repeated his story. He had attended the Fifth Conference of the Party in 1924 as a fraternal delegate, and made friends with a young Russian, Yevgeny Shchepkin. Since his job as a journalist had brought him back to Moscow, he was hoping to renew their acquaintance. But, unfortunately, he had lost his old friend’s address.

‘And why have you come here?’ the officer asked.

‘I met Yevgeny again in Stockholm in early 1942, and he told me he worked for State Security. These are the State Security offices, are they not?’

The NKVD officer gave Russell a long look, as if trying to determine what he was dealing with – an idiot or something more threatening. He then spent five minutes examining the passport and papers which Russell had voluntarily submitted to his first questioner. ‘I hope this is not some journalist’s scheme to make trouble,’ he said eventually. ‘I find it hard to believe that you expected us to tell you the address of a security officer.’

‘I did not expect it. I just hoped. And I have no wish to make trouble.’

‘Perhaps. In any case, there is no one of that name working for this organisation. I think you have been misinformed.’

‘Then I’m sorry to have troubled you,’ Russell said, extending a hand for his passport.

After a moment’s hesitation, the officer handed it back. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.

‘The Metropol.’

‘It is a good hotel, yes?’

‘Very good.’

‘Enjoy your stay, Mr Russell.’

He nodded, and walked back out onto a sunlit Dzerzhinsky Street. A mistake, he thought. Entering the monster’s lair was always a bad idea, especially when the monster was as paranoid as this one. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been followed since his first visit to the American Embassy, but he was willing to bet that a fresh human shadow would be soon be waiting at the Metropol.

So why go back? He altered course, turning left down the side of the Bolshoi Theatre and eventually finding a street which led him through to Red Square. As on his last visit, the vast expanse was almost empty. A few lone Russians were hurrying across, and a party of middle-aged men were conversing in Polish as they gawped up at Stalin’s windows. The next government in Warsaw, Russell guessed.

He walked on past St Basil’s and down to the river. Leaning on the parapet above the sluggish-looking water, he wondered how else he could search for Shchepkin. What had made him think that the NKVD man lived in Moscow? Had he just assumed it? No, he hadn’t. He remembered Shchepkin telling him so, if not in so many words. In Stockholm, the Russian had taken him out in the embassy car – a minion had done the actual driving – and walked him round the city’s Northern Cemetery. Standing in front of Alfred Nobel’s grave, Shchepkin’s had said how much he enjoyed cemeteries. ‘They make you think about life,’ he had said. ‘And its absurdities. Nobel probably thought his prizes would stop people associating him with dynamite, but of course the juxtaposition was too perfect – people who remember one always remember the other.’

And then Shchepkin had half joked that some graves were a constant reproof, and that he lived near Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, where Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Revolution’s most famous poet, was buried.

Where was the Novodevichy Cemetery? The first three passers-by that Russell asked gave him looks of alarm and hurried on, but the fourth – an oldish man with a thumb-sucking child in tow – told him what he wanted to know: the cemetery was next to the monastery of the same name, an hour or so’s walk along the river. Or if he was in a hurry, he could walk straight down Kropotkin Street.

Russell set off, walking west between the Kremlin and the river, and eventually found the head of Kropotkin Street. As he strode down the broad avenue, he remembered more of what Shchepkin had said. To reach Mayakovsky’s grave, it was necessary to pass Kropotkin’s. And Shchepkin often talked to them both. ‘I try to answer their criticisms of where the Revolution has taken us.’

‘And are they convinced?’ Russell had asked him with a grin.

‘Who knows?’ Shchepkin had admitted with an answering smile. Chekhov’s grave was another that gave him pause for thought. The playwright had died in 1904, the year before the first Russian Revolution, and had therefore missed the most tumultuous years of his country’s history. But Chekov’s own times had been just as compelling, just as challenging to him, as these times were for those who lived through them. ‘It might be a lifetime to us,’ Shchepkin said, ‘but no one experiences more than a brief span of history.’

‘So only history can judge itself,’ Russell had suggested, half ironically.

‘No, we have to make our own judgements. But we do so on insufficient evidence, and we should always bear that in mind.’ And having said that, Shchepkin had tried to persuade Russell that the Soviet Union should be his temporary home. Russell had told him he could never get used to the weather.

No one could complain about it today – the sun was still shining in a mostly blue sky, and out of the slight breeze it actually felt warm. When he finally reached the unguarded gates of the Novodevichy Cemetery, the lure of a bench under shady trees proved irresistible. He sat for a while enjoying the sense of peace and beauty, the grey stones amidst the greenery, the golden onion domes of the adjacent monastery gleaming in the bright blue heavens. He thought about looking for Kropotkin, but the stones were myriad, and there was no one to ask.

Outside again, he began the search for Shchepkin’s home. He remembered the Russian mentioning an apartment, but it soon became apparent that all the houses in the cemetery’s vicinity had been converted into flats. Most of the buildings looked at least a century old, and were quite beautiful – Russell found it easy to picture Tolstoy’s Natasha gazing rapturously out of one of the large bay windows, or dancing down a flight of steps to a waiting droshky.

He began knocking on doors, expecting a long and probably fruitless afternoon. Several nervous rejections confirmed his pessimism, but then, at only the sixth or seventh attempt, he struck unexpected gold. A young man leaving by the front door simply held it open for him. ‘Number four,’ he said.

It was on the first floor, at the back of the building. Russell’s knock was answered by a smartly dressed young woman. She was slim, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and looked about nineteen. She had her father’s mouth.

‘Yes?’ she asked, almost angrily. There was fear there, too.

‘My name is John Russell,’ he said. ‘I am looking for Yevgeny Shchepkin.’

‘He’s not here,’ she said abruptly, and started to close the door.

‘Who is it?’ another woman’s voice asked anxiously from further inside the apartment. The young woman’s answering burst of rapid-fire Russian contained the word ‘father’.

‘I am a friend of your father,’ Russell told her.

The second woman appeared in the doorway. She was probably in her forties, with grey hair tied back in a bun, and clothes that had been worn too long. She had been a beauty once, but now looked worn-out. There was a large spoon in her hand, and Russell realised he could smell borscht.

‘My name is John Russell,’ he said again.

‘You are German?’ she asked, worrying him somewhat. Was he speaking Russian with a German accent?

‘I’m English. Are you Comrade Shchepkina?

‘Yes,’ she admitted.

‘I met your husband in Poland in 1939, and again in Sweden in 1942. And as I was here in Moscow, I thought I would visit him.’

‘He’s not here,’ she said dully. ‘He is away.’

‘Will he be back soon?’

‘No, I do not think so. I’m sorry. We cannot help you. Please.’

The young woman said something to her mother about Russell being a friend of father’s, but she was still opening her mouth to reply when they all heard the creak of a door opening further down the landing.

No one appeared.

‘I will show Grigori Sergeyevich back to the Metro,’ the daughter said in a loud voice. Her mother looked like she wanted to argue, but forbore from doing so. ‘Come,’ the daughter said, almost pushing Russell towards the head of the stairs. The door down the landing clicked shut.

Outside on the street, she turned towards the river. ‘The spiteful old cow won’t be able to see you if we go this way,’ she told him coolly.

Like father, like daughter, Russell thought to himself. ‘I know my way back,’ he told her.

She ignored him. ‘Tell me about my father,’ she said with more than a hint of hostility.

‘What?’

‘I’ve hardly seen him since I was a child.’

‘Surely your mother…’

‘She knows him the way a wife knows her husband. The world outside – she doesn’t like to even think about it. When he leaves, it’s as if he was never there. Until he suddenly appears again, and then it’s as if he had never left. It drives me crazy.’ She put an arm through Russell’s. ‘So tell me.’

‘I don’t really know him. We met more than twenty years ago, here in Moscow. We were both in the First War…’ He paused to order his thoughts. ‘I think we both became communists because of what that war showed us about the way the world was run. But we didn’t get to know each other, not really. We were both involved in the same discussions and arguments about the Revolution, and where it should be headed. Your father was always full of passion,’ he added, remembering as he did so that Shchepkin had said the same of him in that Danzig hotel room six years earlier.

‘Passion?’ she murmured, as if trying the word on for size. They had reached the river, and the half-repaired roof of the Kiev Station was visible to the north. A line of empty barges was chugging downstream.

‘That’s how all this started,’ Russell said, as much to himself as to her. ‘Hard to believe now, perhaps. But twenty years is a long time. Once it becomes clear that your passion will also cause innocents to suffer, it begins to wear you down. First there’s good and evil, and then the good gets tarnished, and soon it’s only a lesser evil. Some quit at that point; they walk away, either physically or mentally. Those that don’t, it just gets harder. Your father kept going – that’s the one and only thing I really know about him.’

‘You make him sound like a hero,’ she said, with more than a trace of anger.

‘Do I? I don’t mean to. People like your father, they lock themselves in. Like a sailor who ties himself to a mast in a storm. It makes sense, but once you’re tied up there’s not much you can do for anyone else.’

‘Why did you really come looking for him?’

‘I need help, and he’s the only person I could think of.’

‘I don’t think he can help himself anymore,’ she said.

‘You think he’s been arrested?’

‘We don’t know, but we haven’t seen him for over year. I went down to Dzerzhinsky Street just before Christmas, and they said his whereabouts were unknown. I asked why they had stopped sending my mother his pay, and the man promised he would look into it. But we’ve heard nothing.’

‘If he was dead, they would have informed you,’ Russell said, with more conviction than he felt.

‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘You can take a tram from that stop over there,’ she said, pointing across the street. ‘It goes up Arbat and along Mokhavaya.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

As she turned to walk away, he asked what her name was.

‘Natasha,’ she said.

Emerging from the soldiers’ mess on Koppen Strasse, Paul Gehrts could see flames still leaping from the buildings further up the street. They had been hit a couple of hours earlier, courtesy of an idle or incompetent Allied bombardier. The rest of the bombs had fallen, to rather more relevant effect, in the marshalling yards beyond Silesian Station.

There was only one fire engine visible, and no sign of hoses in use. A couple of uniformed men were leaning against the engine, puffing on cigarettes, watching the dancing flames.

Paul walked the other way, towards Stralauer Platz, in hope of finding a tram to take him across the city. Four days had passed since Gerhart’s death. The loss had numbed him, but not for long – the shock had worn off all too quickly, and left him seething with an anger he could hardly contain. His sergeant, sensing that he might do something stupid, had persuaded battalion to let Paul take some of the leave he was owed.

Reaching the capital had taken all night, and his first sight of the city in over six months had been a sobering experience. The streets were like obstacle courses, and in places it seemed as if almost half the buildings had been damaged beyond repair. After Russia and Poland, he was used to ruins, but this was Berlin, his home and one of the world’s great cities. Germany’s heart, as his stepfather had used to say.

There were no trams in Stralauer Platz, but he managed to hitch a lift on an ammunition lorry heading for the Tiergarten. The city centre had taken several hits that morning, and blankets of smoke hung above the streets. Pedestrians crossed his line of vision, striding purposefully this way and that, as if they hadn’t noticed that their city was on fire.

As the lorry crossed the Schloss Brücke he saw two bodies floating in the Spree, both head-down with arms stretched forward, like frozen swimmers. As the driver wove his way down Unter Den Linden, he noticed that the Bristol Hotel had been almost razed to the ground – only the revolving doors remained, opening onto rubble. On the other side of the boulevard a line of identical posters bore the message: ‘Führer, We Thank You!’

The Brandenburg Gate loomed ahead, and he remembered his feeling of pride when German soldiers had paraded through the Arc de Tri-omphe in Paris. Five years ago. Five long years.

The Adlon Hotel loomed to the left, still intact, and now enclosed by a grim protective wall that reared up to the first floor balconies. He had a sudden memory of an afternoon there – he must have been about ten – sitting at the bar drinking Coca-Cola through a striped straw as his father interviewed someone on the other side of the room. It must have been the first time he drank the America soda – it had tasted so different, so good. He had wanted it to last forever.

He felt the familiar pang of resentment, the feeling of betrayal that he couldn’t really justify, but which rankled deep inside. His head told him – had always told him – that his father had done the right thing, but his heart could not believe it.

This, after all, was the father who had told him that being right was often the consolation prize.

The lorry was skirting the eastern end of the Tiergarten, which looked more like a desert than a park, an area of churned nothingness punctuated by bomb craters and the angular stumps of murdered trees. The Zoo Bunker gun and control towers loomed in the distance, like the gravestones of brother giants.

His lift was going no further, so Paul walked down Budapester Strasse towards the end of the Ku’damm. As a child, he had assumed that his father was just being loyal to the country of his birth, but later he had come to realise that his was not the case – his father felt no attachment to England either; his beliefs transcended nationality. Paul had a rough notion of what those beliefs were – a commitment to fairness, a hatred of prejudice? – but nothing more. It was never easy to work out what other people really believed in. Take Gerhart – he had hated the Nazis, but had he actually believed in anything? He was German through and through, so he must have believed in a different Germany. But different in what way?

What did he believe in himself, come to that? Nothing really. War took away the option of belief, left you too busy fighting for survival, your own and that of your comrades. Particularly a losing war.

But maybe that was the answer. It was how you fought that mattered – you had to fight and lose with honour, or defeat would leave you with nothing.

People like Gerhart would die. Thousands of them, millions of them. He couldn’t blame the Russian pilot who had dropped the bomb. He was just doing what he had to do; on another day he might have come down in flames.

But that Russian prisoner in Diedersdorf – he hadn’t deserved to die. His death had been a matter of convenience, nothing more. Killing him hadn’t been right.

He suddenly remembered something else his father had said. Paul had used to pester him about the First War, and every now and then his father had responded, usually in a vain attempt to undermine all the Hitlerjugend stuff which had swirled so happily around his young brain. ‘You can’t afford to turn off,’ Russell had said. ‘Both your mind and your emotions – you have to keep them turned on. You own what you do. You live with it. If you can, you use it to make yourself kinder or wiser or both. You make sense of it.’

His father had always believed in making sense of things. Paul could remember an exasperated Effi telling his father that some things would never make sense. Russell had laughed, and said she was living proof of her own argument.

Paul wondered where he was now. Where she was. He remembered the weeks after their disappearance, how he’d scanned all the newspapers he could get hold of, dreading news of their arrest or execution.

And that day in the spring when he’d finally discovered that his father was safe. The relief. The rage.

He skirted round what was left of the Memorial Church, and started up the Ku’damm. A gang of Russian women prisoners were hard at work clearing rubble, one sharing a joke with the German overseers, and the sidewalks were surprisingly crowded, mostly with tired-looking women. Several elderly couples were sitting outside one of the surviving cafés, and most seemed to be nursing their cups between both hands, as if the warmth mattered more than the drink.

The trams were still running in the West End, and one took him down Uhland to Berliner, where he caught another heading east to the Hohenzollerndamm S-Bahn station. Crossing the railway bridge, he forked right down Charlottenbrunner Strasse. Grunewald’s suburban avenues had lost many trees to fuel hunger, and several of the detached houses and villas had been damaged or destroyed by bombs, but an air of serene gentility lingered on. In one large garden an elderly man in a wing collar was digging a grave for a grey-haired corpse in a wheelbarrow. The legs dangling over the end were still stockinged, the feet encased in purple slippers. In another garden, two old women were absorbed in a game of croquet, the sharp crack of mallet on ball echoing down the empty avenue.

Paul finally reached Herbert Strasse, the northern section of which seemed almost intact. Reluctant to reach his destination, he slowed his pace, and even found himself hoping that the house would be gone, and Gerhart’s mother with it – with the father and brother already dead there would be no one left to inherit the grief.

But the neat little villa was still standing in its large tree-shaded garden, just as he remembered it from their school days. He opened the wooden gate, walked slowly up the path, and let the knocker fall.

She smiled when she saw it was him, but only for the briefest of moments. Realisation dawned, and her face seemed to collapse in front of him. ‘No,’ was all she said, without even a trace of conviction.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Her hand grasped at the door-jamb for support. She looked entreatingly at him, tears coursing down her cheeks. ‘Why?’

There was no answer to that, so he told her how: the Russian plane, the bomb, one moment there, the next moment gone. No time to think, no pain. The grave in the woods outside Diedersdorf. He would take her there after the war.

‘But why?’ she said again, this time with anger. ‘Why are you still fighting? Everyone knows the war is lost. Why don’t you just say no?’

There was no answer to that either, or none that would help. Why were they still fighting? For each other. And because someone would shoot them if they refused. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he found to say. ‘I loved him too,’ he added simply.

She shut her eyes, reached for the door like a blind woman, and closed it in his face.

He stared at it for a few seconds, then turned away. Back on the street he took out the family photograph which Gerhart had always carried. He had meant it to give it her, but it would have been like slapping her in the face with all she had lost. He would bring it round later. If there was a later.

His own house, the one he and his step-sisters had inherited, was less than a kilometre away. He hadn’t intended to go there, but he found himself walking that way, drawn by the need for solitude to the only private space that was available to him.

The key felt strange in his hand as he opened the front door. He half expected to find the place full of refugees, but privilege was obviously still able to exercise its malign protective spell – those members of the Grunewald rich now hiding in the countryside would be expecting to find their homes the way they left them when peace made it safe for them to return.

The house had been empty for almost a year, since his parents’ death in the car crash. By then permission to drive a private car had been granted to very few, and his stepfather would have appreciated the irony of it – death by privilege. His mother would not have been so amused. Why, he wondered, had she married two men whose sense of humour so exasperated her?

The rooms smelt stale, and looked, for some reason, like one of those film sets he had seen when Effi gave him a tour of Babelsberg. Uncle Thomas had written to say he would look after the place, but had probably been called up to the Volkssturm not long after that. He might be dead by now.

On impulse, Paul unhooked the telephone, and much to his surprise, it still worked. He looked up Uncle Thomas’s number in the book on the side table, and dialled it. He could picture it ringing in the hall of the house in Dahlem, but no one answered.

He went upstairs to his old room. It was as he’d left it, a shrine to his childhood, lined with maps and pictures of his boyhood heroes: Ernst Udet performing aerial acrobatics at the Berlin Olympics, Rudolf Caracciola beside his Silver Arrow at Monaco, Max Schmeling after defeating Joe Louis.

More usefully, he found a drawer-full of socks and underwear that might still fit him.

The bed was only slightly damp, and almost obscenely comfortable. He lay on his back, staring up at the pictures on the walls, and wondered what had happened to the boy who put them there. Several hours later he was woken by the sirens, and chose to ignore them. There were worse things in life than a bomb through the ceiling.