A Woman in Berlin

LOOKING BACK ON SUNDAY, 29 APRIL 1945 RECORDED ON TUESDAY, 1 MAY

The first part of the day was filled with the constant, whip-like popping of rifle fire. Trucks rolling up down below, trucks driving away. Hoarse shouts, neighing, clinking of chains. The field kitchen sends its smoke right through our missing kitchen window, while our own oven, stoked with nothing but a few broken crates and pieces of lath, is smoking so much it makes us cry.

The widow asks me through the smoke, ‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘You mean of the Russians?’

‘That, too. But it’s really Anatol I’m thinking of. Such a great big bull of a man.’

‘I’ve got him eating out of my hand.’

‘While he gets you with child,’ the widow responds, poking at the fire.

Ah yes. She’s right, that threat is looming over us all, though until now I haven’t been very worried about it. Why not? I try to explain to the widow, with a saying I once heard: ‘No grass grows on the well-trodden path.’

The widow disagrees; she doesn’t think that logic applies here. So I continue. ‘I don’t know, I’m simply convinced it couldn’t happen to me. As if I could lock myself up, physically shut myself off from something so unwanted.’

The widow’s still not satisfied. Her husband was a pharmacist, she knows what she’s talking about. Her medicine chest is well stocked; unfortunately, she doesn’t have anything that would help me protect myself, as she puts it.

‘And you?’ I ask back.

Next thing I know she’s running to her purse, which is lying on the kitchen cabinet, fishing out her ID card and showing it to me, pointing to her date of birth, as self-conscious as if she were undressing in front of me. Sure enough, she’s turning fifty this year. I had pegged her as about six years younger.

‘That’s at least one worry I don’t have,’ she says. Anyway, we should start thinking about whom to go to in case it does happen.’ She assures me that she has connections, thanks to her late husband. let me handle it. I’ll figure things out. You’ll be able to get rid of it, no question.’ She nods as if that were that and, having finally brought the water to a boil, pours it over the coffee substitute. And I stand there, my hands on my belly, feeling stupid. But I’m still convinced that my sheer aversion can prevent such a tragedy, that I can will my body shut.

It’s strange how the men always start by asking, ‘Do you have a husband?’ What’s the best way to answer? If you say no, they start making advances right away. If you say yes, thinking they’ll leave you in peace, they just go on with their grilling: ‘Where is he? Did he stay in Stalingrad for good?’ (Many of our troops fought at Stalingrad; they wear a special medal.) If you have a real live man around, one you can actually show them (as the widow does with Herr Pauli, even though he’s her tenant and nothing more), they’ll back off a bit – at first. But they don’t really care; they take what they can get, married or not. However, they prefer to keep the husband out of the way for as long as needed, by sending him off somewhere or locking him up or doing something else. Not because they’re afraid. They’ve already noticed that none of the husbands here are very likely to fly into a rage. But having one around makes them uncomfortable – unless they’re completely plastered.

As it happens I don’t know how to answer that question, even if I wanted to be completely honest. Gerd and I would have married long ago if it hadn’t been for the war. But once he was called up that was it, he didn’t want to any more. ‘Bring another war orphan into the world? Not a chance. I’m one myself, I know what it’s like.’ And that’s the way it’s been up to now Even so, we feel just as tied to each other as if we were married. Except I haven’t heard from him for over nine weeks; his last letter was posted from the Siegfried Line. I hardly know what he looks like any more. All my photos were bombed, except the one I had in my bag, and I tore that one up on account of the uniform. Even if he was just an NCO, I was afraid. The whole building got rid of anything that had to do with soldiers, anything that might upset the Russians. They all burned books, too, but at least when the books went up in smoke they provided some warmth, a little hot soup.

We’d barely managed to drink our ersatz coffee and eat a few buttered slices of the plundered bread when Anatol’s men marched in. Our place has become a kind of restaurant for them, albeit one where the guests bring their own food. This time they brought a decent man along, the best I’ve met so far: Andrei, a sergeant, a schoolteacher by profession. Narrow forehead, icy-blue eyes, quiet and intelligent. My first political conversation. That’s not as difficult as it sounds, since all the words having to do with politics and the economy have Latin or Greek roots, so they sound similar in both languages. Andrei is an orthodox Marxist. He doesn’t blame Hitler personally for the war; instead he faults capitalism, which spawns the Hitlers of the world and stockpiles war materiel. He thinks that Russia and Germany make a good economic match, that Germany can be a natural partner for Russia, once it has been built up along socialist lines. The conversation did me a lot of good, and not so much because of the subject, which I’m not as well versed in as Andrei, but simply because one of them treated me as an equal, without once touching me, not even with his eyes. He didn’t see me as a mere piece of female flesh, like all the others up to now.

People were coming and going throughout the morning, while Andrei sat on the sofa writing his report. As long as he’s there we feel secure. He brought a Russian army newspaper; I deciphered the familiar names of Berlin districts. There’s not much left of our city that’s still German.

Other than that we feel completely at the mercy of anyone and everyone. When we’re alone we jump at every noise, every step. The widow and I huddle around Herr Pauli’s bed, the way we are right now as I am writing this. We linger for hours in the dark, icy room. Ivan has driven us to the very depths – even literally, in some cases; there are still a few groups on our block that haven’t been discovered, families who have been living in their basements since Friday, who only send people out early in the morning for water. I think our men must feel even dirtier than we do, sullied as we women are. In the queue at the pump one woman told me how her neighbour reacted when the Russians fell on her in her basement. He simply shouted, ‘Well, why don’t you just go with them, you’re putting all of us in danger!’ A minor footnote to the. Decline of the West.

I’m constantly repulsed by my own skin. I don’t want to touch myself, can barely look at my body. I can’t help but think about the little child I was, once upon a time, the little pink and white baby who made her parents so proud, as my mother told me over and over. And when my father had to become a soldier in 1916, when he said goodbye to my mother at the train station, he reminded her never to forget to put my lace bonnet on to protect me from the sun. So that I would have a lily-white neck and a lily-white face. That was the fashion of the times for girls from good homes. So much love, so much bother with sunbonnets, bath thermometers and evening prayers – and all for the filth I am now.

Back to Sunday. It’s difficult to recollect everything, my mind is such a jumble. By 10 a.m. all the usual guests were gathered: Andrei, Petka, Grisha, Yasha and little Vanya as well, who once again washes our dishes in the kitchen. They ate, drank and chatted away. At one point Vanya told me, his child’s face turning very serious: ‘We humans are all bad. Me too, I’ve done bad things.’

Then Anatol showed up, lugging a record player – I have no idea from where – with two of his entourage carrying the records. And what do they keep playing, over and over, at least a dozen times? After quickly sampling and rejecting records like Lohengrin and Beethoven’s Ninth, Brahms and Smetana? An advertising jingle! – A record the C&A Textile Company on the Spittelmarkt used to give customers for buying a certain amount. ‘Stroll on down to C&A and see what’s in our store today…’ Followed by a list of their entire collection crooned to the rhythm of a foxtrot. But that’s just what Ivan wants – they started warbling along, happy as larks.

Once again the spirits are going around the table. Anatol gets the familiar glint in his eye and finally kicks everybody out under fairly obvious pretences. This particular door doesn’t even have a lock; he simply shoves the wing chair against it. Meanwhile I can’t stop thinking about my conversation with the widow, this morning at the oven. I make myself stiff as stone, shut my eyes, concentrate on my body’s veto, my inner No.

He moves the chair back away from the door to let the widow in with the soup tureen. She and I take our places at the table. Even Herr Pauli comes hobbling in from his room, perfectly shaved and manicured, in a silk robe, but Anatol stays sprawled across the bedstead, his legs dangling in their boots, his black hair tousled. He sleeps and sleeps, gently exhaling.

For three hours he sleeps, like a baby, all alone with us three enemies. But we feel safer, even when he’s sleeping; Anatol is our earthwork, our rampart. He snores away, his revolver stuck in his holster. And outside there’s war, the crackle of gunfire, the centre of town all in smoke.

The widow takes out a bottle of the burgundy I looted from the police barracks and serves it to us in coffee cups – just in case of Russians. We talk very quietly, so as not to wake Anatol. It does us good to be together like this, polite and friendly. We enjoy an hour of calm, the chance to be nice to one another. Our souls recover somewhat.

Around 4 p.m. Anatol wakes up and rushes out, head over heels, to attend to some duty. A little later we hear loud banging on the front door. We tremble, my heart skips a beat. Thank God it’s only Andrei, the schoolteacher with the icy-blue eyes. We beam at him; the widow hugs him with relief. He smiles back.

We have a good conversation, this time about humanity, not politics. He lectures, about himself, about how he sees women as comrades and not mere female bodies, how he disapproves of ‘that kind of thing’ – and here he looks past me, awkward and embarrassed. Andrei is a fanatic, his eyes are far away as he says this. He is convinced that his dogma is infallible.

There are times now when I have to wonder whether my knowing some Russian is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand it gives me a degree of assurance the others don’t have. What they consider animal grunting and screaming is for me a real human tongue – the richly nuanced, melodious language of Pushkin and Tolstoy. Of course, I’m afraid, afraid, afraid (though a little bit less because of Anatol), but at least I speak with them as one person to another, at least I can tell who’s truly evil from who is bearable, can picture them as separate human beings, distinguish them as individuals. For the first time I also have a sense of being a witness. There probably aren’t many in this city who can talk to them, who’ve seen their birch trees and their villages and the peasants in their bast sandals and all the new, hastily constructed buildings they’re so proud of – and that are now, like me, nothing more than filth beneath their boots. By the same token it’s also easier for those who don’t understand a word of Russian. For them the Russians are more alien; they can talk themselves into the idea that these men aren’t people but savages, mere animals. They can bury their feelings deeper. I can’t do that. I know they’re people, just like we are – less highly developed, perhaps, as it seems to me, and younger as a nation, but closer to their roots. This is probably how the Teutons acted when they sacked Rome, snatching the perfumed Roman ladies, with their pedicures and manicures and artificial curls. Being conquered means having salt rubbed in your wounds.

Around 6 p.m. there was a sudden shouting in the stairwell. A knock at the door, the prearranged dactyl. ‘They’ve looted the basement!’ Andrei, who’s sitting on our sofa, nods. He tells us that he’s known about it for hours, advises us to go right away and see to our things.

Absolute chaos below: wooden partitions battered down, locks torn off, trunks slit open and trampled. We stumble over things that don’t belong to us, tread on laundry that’s still clean and crisply creased. We hold up a candle stump to light our corner, salvage this and that a few towels, a side of bacon on the string. The widow complains that the big trunk with all her best clothes is missing. In the corridor she dumps out someone else’s suitcase that’s been slit open and starts filling it with the few things she has left, using her hands to shovel flour that’s spilled on the floor, as if she’s lost her mind. Left and right the neighbours rummage about by flickering candlelight. Shrill cries and wailing. Eider down whirls through the air, the place reeks of spilled wine and excrement.

We drag our things upstairs. Andrei is clearly embarrassed about the looting. He consoles us by saying that he’s sure they were only looking for alcohol, and that even though everything else has been turned upside down there shouldn’t be anything missing. Then, half in Russian, half in German, Vanya the Child, who has shown up in the meantime as well, promises the widow with a serious expression in his black eyes, that he’ll go with us in the morning when it’s daylight and stay by our side until we’ve found everything that belongs to us.

The widow cries, sobbing afresh each time she recalls a specific item from her trunk – her good suit, her knitted dress, her well-made shoes. I, too, am despondent. We have no rights; we’re nothing but booty, dirt. We unload our rage on Adolf. Anxiously we ask where the front is, when there will be peace.

While we whisper among ourselves at Herr Pauli’s bed, where he retreated once again after eating his midday meal, Andrei holds a war council with his comrades at the mahogany table. Suddenly all the window casements fly open, pieces of cardboard whiz through the room, an explosion throws me against the opposite wall. Something crunching, grinding, then a cloud of dust in the room… and a wall comes crashing down somewhere outside. As we learn from a neighbour half an hour later, a German mortar shell hit the house next door, wounding several Russians and killing a horse. We find the animal in the courtyard the next morning – the meat neatly removed and lying on a bloody sheet, the fatty entrails coiled on the wet red earth beside it.

Exactly how the evening passed escapes me at the moment. Presumably alcohol, bread, herring, canned meat, coitus, Anatol. Now I have it: a whole tableful of Russians, known and unknown. They keep pulling out their watches, comparing the time, the Moscow time they brought with them, which is an hour ahead of ours. One of the men has a thick old turnip of a watch, an East Prussian brand, with a shiny yellow, highly concave dial. Why are they so fixated on watches? It’s not because of the monetary value; they don’t ogle rings and earrings and bracelets the same way at all. They’ll overlook them if they can lay their hands on another watch. It’s probably because in their country watches aren’t available for just anyone and haven’t been for a long time. You have to really be somebody before you can get a wristwatch, that is, before the state allots you something so coveted. And now they’re springing up like radishes ripe for the picking, in undreamt-of abundance. With every new watch, the owner feels an increase in power. With every watch he can present or give away back home, his status rises. That must be it. Because they can’t distinguish a cheap watch from an expensive one. They prefer the ones with bells and whistles – stopwatches, or a revolving face beneath a metal case. A gaudy picture on the dial also attracts them.

I look at the men’s hands resting on our table, and felt a sudden twinge of disgust at their bald show of strength. What is clinging to those hands? I chase the feeling down with some brandy. They shout, ‘Vypit’ nado!’ whenever I put the glass to my lips and celebrate each swallow as if it were a deed worthy of distinction. This time there’s red wine in addition to the spirits, probably from the basement. A candle fixed to a saucer provides a flickering light, casting the Slavic profiles on the wall.

For the first time we have a real discussion, with at least three highly talented debaters: Andrei with the icy-blue eyes, schoolteacher and chess player, composed and quiet as always. Then a man from the Caucasus, with a hook nose and a fiery gaze. (I’m not Jewish, I’m from Georgia,’ was how he introduced himself to me.) He’s amazingly well read, able to quote fluently both verse and prose, very eloquent and as adroit as a fencing master. The third intellectual is also here for the first time – a lieutenant, extremely young, wounded this evening by some shrapnel. He has a makeshift bandage on his shin and limps around with a German hiking pole, decorated with all sorts of badges from well-known destinations in the Harz mountains. He is pale blond and has an ominous look and a nasty way of speaking. He starts to say, As an intelligent person, I—’ whereupon the Georgian interrupts him.

‘There are other intelligent people here too – the n’emka, for example,’ (meaning me).

We talk about how the war started; they see the root cause in Fascism, in a system driven towards conquest. Shaking their heads, they explain that there was absolutely no reason for Germany to go to war at all – such a wealthy country, so cultured, so well tended, even now, despite the destruction. For a while the discussion turns to the stunted form of early capitalism that was inherited by the October Revolution, and to the later stage that is evident in Germany – where capitalist society is more advanced, in wealth as well as decadence. Suddenly cautious, they put forward tentative arguments for why their country is on the verge of a great development, and therefore should be considered, critiqued and compared only from the perspective of the future.

One of the men points to the nineteenth-century style furniture in the room as an example of a superior culture. Finally they come to the subject of ‘degeneration’ and argue whether we Germans are degenerate or not. They enjoy the gamesmanship, the lively back and forth of the debate. Andrei guides the conversation with a gentle rein and a quiet voice.

Every now and then the wounded lieutenant directs a vicious outburst against me personally. Scorn and ridicule for Germany’s plans of conquest, for its defeat. The others, displaying a sense of tact more becoming to a victor, refuse to follow suit, quickly changing the subject, and telling him to watch his language.

Then in the middle of all this talk Anatol comes bursting in, yawning, exhausted from work. He sits down a while, but soon gets bored. He can’t keep up with the others. He’s from the countryside, from the kolkhoz – he’s told me that he was in charge of milk, a kind of dairy manager.

‘How interesting,’ I said.

‘It’s all right, you know, but milk, all the time, nothing but milk…’ And he sighed.

Half an hour later he goes, leaving the others to debate.

Herr Pauli is sleeping in the next room. Once again the widow has set up her improvised bed dose to him. Otherwise the situation is clear: the apartment is open to a few friends of the house, if that’s what they can be called, as well as to the men Anatol brings from his platoon and no one else. But only their chief, only Anatol, has the right to spend the night. It seems that I really am taboo, at least for today. But who can say about tomorrow? Anatol comes back around midnight, whereupon the debaters disperse on their own. The last one out is the blond lieutenant, who limps away with his hiking pole, sizing me up with evil eyes.

Now there are holes in my memory. Once again I drank a great deal, can’t recall the details. The next thing I remember is Monday morning, the grey light of dawn, a conversation with Anatol that led to a minor misunderstanding. I said to him, ‘You are a bear.’ (I know the word well – m’edv’ed – which was also the name of a well-known Russian restaurant on Tauentzienstrasse.)

Anatol, however, thought I was getting my words mixed up, so he corrected me, very patiently, the way you’d speak to a child: ‘No, that’s wrong. A m’edv’ed is an animal. A brown animal, in the forest. It’s big and roars. I am a chelav’ek – a person.’