Prague Fatale

CHAPTER 15

It felt good to be in Berlin again. At least it felt good for an hour or two. Soon after arriving back at my apartment in Fasanenstrasse I discovered to my disappointment that the two Fridmann sisters from downstairs had been deported to some shithole in Poland. Behnke, the block warden, who knew these things, insisted that it was a nice town called Lodz and that they’d be happier there ‘living with their own’, instead of with ‘decent Germans’. I told him I had my doubts about this but Behnke didn’t want to hear them. He was more interested in learning Russian so that he would be able to speak to his peasants when eventually he met them. He really thought he was going to get some of that living space in Russia and the Ukraine that Goebbels was forever ranting about. I had my doubts about that, too.

It grew cold. Wind tore the leaves off the trees and hurried them east in their thousands. The water on the Spree looked like corrugated iron. The cold felt like barbed wire. There was one thing to be done before the snows arrived, a sentimental gesture that meant nothing to anyone I had ever met; but I suppose I wanted to feel better about myself. I organized the release of Geert Vranken’s remains from Berlin’s Charité Hospital and paid for them to be buried in a zinclined wooden crate – just in case, after the war, his family wanted to dig it up and take his remains home to the Netherlands.

There was one other person at the funeral: Werner Sachse from the Gestapo. With his black leather coat, his black hat and black tie, he looked like a proper mourner. The short service was conducted by the pastor of St John’s Church, in Plotzensee, and when it was over Sachse told me he admired the thought if not the practice.

‘Where would we be if policemen paid for every foreign worker who gets killed in an accident?’ he asked.

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I reminded him.

Sachse shrugged as if the correction I’d offered hardly mattered. The fact remained that the dead man wasn’t German and therefore his death was of little or no account.

For a moment I wondered if telling him why I was doing it was a mistake; and then I told him anyway.

‘I’m doing it so that somewhere, someone who isn’t German will have a better opinion of us than we deserve.’

Sachse pretended to be surprised about that, but before we parted we shook hands, so I knew he wasn’t.