A Woman in Berlin

SATURDAY, 19 MAY 1945

We exist without newspapers and with no sense of time, following the sun, like plants. After fetching water and wood I went shopping. The first things I got using the new ration cards were groats, pork and sugar. The groats are full of husks, the sugar is lumpy, since it got wet, and the meat is stiff with salt. But it’s food nevertheless, and we’re happy with it. ‘I’m curious whether your Nikolai’s going to show up tomorrow,’ the widow said as I was putting the bags and packages on the table.

In the afternoon we celebrated with a great housecleaning, set in motion when the widow cried out, ‘Look at that!’ And lo and behold, water was dripping out of the tap, genuine, thick drops of water trickling out of pipes that had been dry for such a long time. We opened the valves all the way and a strong stream came shooting out, first brown, but soon bright and clear. No more water shortages! An end to the ceaseless fetching! At least for us on the second floor – we found out later, those living higher than the third floor aren’t so blessed. But even they can now get their water down in our own courtyard, or else from those below them. I should note, however, that our vaunted community, the communal sense forged by national identity and living in the same building and sharing an air-raid shelter, is gradually eroding. In fine urban fashion everyone is locking themselves within their four walls and carefully choosing the people they mix with.

Our cleaning performance was first-rate – we turned our apartment inside out. I kept looking at the water, couldn’t get enough of it, kept fiddling with the tap. So what if it ran dry towards evening? We’d already filled the tub to the rim.

It’s a strange feeling now, to have these technological wonders, these achievements of the modern age, reinstated one by one. I’m already looking forward to the day we get electricity back.

In the meantime, while we were hard at it, the blonde who’d been relocated here and whose high-ranking Nazi lover was taken away two days ago came by for a visit, and subjected me to a tabloid tale of love and fidelity: ‘He told me that our love was nothing like he’d ever experienced. He said it must be the greatest love ever.’ Maybe that really is how the greatest love ever talks. But to me it sounded atrocious, as if her lines had been lifted from a cheap film or romance. She sat lamenting while I scrubbed the floor. ‘Where could he possibly be? What could they do to him?’ I don’t know. Anyway, she didn’t dwell very long on that, and soon turned the subject to herself. ‘You think they’ll come for me as well? Maybe I should get out of here? But where should I go?’

‘Nonsense! They haven’t posted any announcements saying party members have to report.’ Then I asked, ‘Do you know who squealed on him?’

She shrugged. ‘I assume it was his wife. She was evacuated to Schwiebus with their children, but she’s bound to have come back to Berlin, to the house they have in Tretow. So she probably heard from the neighbours that he’d often been out there with me to pick things up.’

‘Did you know his wife?’

A little bit. I used to be his secretary.’

A typical example of what Berliners jokingly call a ‘refugee camp’, a sheltering bed for husbands who’d been ordered to evacuate their women and children – and were all too happy to comply. Of course, plenty of stories are also being told about the husbandless evacuees, the ‘Mu-Kis’ – for Mutter-und-Kind-Verschickten, mothers and children sent away, about lovers climbing through windows and lots of racy goings-on. You can’t just transplant the average human with impunity, given all his moral weaknesses. The familiar worlds of kith and kin, of neighbourhood, of polished furniture and hours chock full of activity serve as a strong moral corset. It seems perfectly plausible to me that the enraged wife turned her husband in – maybe because she assumed his companion would be punished as well.

‘Ach, he was so delightful,’ she assured me, when I finally managed to steer her to the door. And she wiped away a tear.

July 1945 [scribbled in the margin]: she was the first woman in the house to have an American: a cook, big belly, fat neck, the man keeps lugging packages up to her.