Underground in Berlin (30 page)

My heart was thudding, and I was frightened to death. I wasn’t to know that the quarrel would be made up a few hours later, without a word to explain it. Burgers and Frau Blase hated and loved each other equally.

Our landlady’s attitude to me was no less ambivalent. On the one hand, I was a Jewish girl, and of course you had to be hostile to such people and exploit them. On the other hand, she had chosen me as a substitute for the daughter she had always wanted but never had.

When money came in for her, it was always a cause for celebration. Frau Blase was indeed blackmailing the Dutchman to get a higher rent from him, in return for her tolerating my presence in the apartment. But it wasn’t clear to her that she was gaining only a ridiculously small sum, ten or fifteen marks a month. I had heard rumours that when those who had gone underground suddenly had to spend a night in one of the boarding houses on the Kurfürstendamm, they were now charged about a hundred marks for it. Frau Blase wasn’t making anything like that kind of money.

When those few extra marks came in from Burgers, she would rub her hands, cackling in her ancient voice, and tell me, ‘Here’s money, dear daughter. You go down to the bar and get us a can of beer from Altermann. That’s one in the eye for those Jews, dear daughter. So now there’s money in the house, let’s have a drink.’

She was curious too, of course. For instance, she wanted to know how my father had made his living. I couldn’t say he was a lawyer; to her, the word suggested someone enthroned in the clouds. But it had to be something respectable. When she asked me, I happened to be standing by the big, bricked-in kitchen stove, one corner of which was covered with yellowed newspaper. My eye fell on an advertisement for the services of a house-painter in Köpenick.

‘We had a little shop selling paints and varnishes in Köpenick,’ I said.

‘What was the address?’ asked Frau Blase.

I quickly read out an address from another advertisement. Then she asked me more questions, showing a great interest in paints and varnishes.

Of course I didn’t know the first thing about the subject. So the next time I had a chance, I went into a paint shop in Neukölln and asked the saleswoman a lot of questions about its wares, most of which were not in evidence. ‘Where’s your bombing certificate?’ the elderly woman inquired. She meant a document in official jargon, to the effect that I had been bombed out and thus had permission to buy a given number of rolls of wallpaper or similar goods.

‘I haven’t got one,’ I admitted.

‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ she asked, annoyed.

‘Yes, of course. I just wanted to know what it used to be like.’

‘What’s all this nonsense in aid of?’ The saleswoman lost her temper. ‘No one’s ever tried to annoy me like this before! It ought to be forbidden by the police!’

‘Police’ was a word that immediately choked me with fear. Of course I was over-reacting; the woman was just saying what came into her head, and would certainly not have gone to raise the alarm at once. But to me it was the signal for flight. I quickly said goodbye and left the shop. As soon as I had turned the next corner I ran for all I was worth. I was surprised by my own athletic prowess, for in sports at school I had been at best an average runner.

*

And then, one morning, someone really did ring the front doorbell. Old Frau Blase was still in bed, and Burgers was already at work. I told myself: if for some reason or other I’ve been denounced, it makes no difference who lets the Gestapo in. I’m here and they’ll find me anyway. So I opened the door. There were indeed two police officers outside, with a warrant to search the place, but they weren’t interested in me. It was about the Polish and Hungarian couple.

This wasn’t the first time the police had come on account of those two. The man was considered work-shy, which in those days was a crime that could get you sent to a concentration camp or even sentenced to death. The officers took him, the woman and the child away, and the three of them never came back to the apartment.

I must admit that I was relieved. The couple had been curious about me, and suspicious, and had made themselves at home in the kitchen in an unbearable way. The child had cried a lot. We could never all have got along together in that apartment for long. At the time I hardly even thought about the family’s ultimate fate.

After this incident Frau Blase said she really didn’t want the police visiting her apartment, and she was never going to rent to such ‘dirty foreigners’ again. I was welcome to move into the empty room, she added, but she would need money for it. Burgers offered to pay a few more marks if she promised him to let the room stand empty. She shook hands on the deal at once.

The next explosion between Burgers and Frau Blase was because of the various bugs that infested the entire apartment. The Dutchman had already warned me about this problem when we were first on our way there over the Oberbaum bridge. Whole districts of the poorer parts of Berlin were plagued by insects, and at that time there was no really effective way to get rid of them. All three apartment blocks would have had to be cleared and then filled with gas to destroy the pests, because if only a few of them were killed the survivors would emigrate into the neighbourhood through cracks in the walls and would soon be back.

Burgers had tried putting the bugs down with disinfectant, but not very successfully. You couldn’t even reduce their numbers; on the contrary, they increased and multiplied. Finally he took off one of his slippers and squashed them against the wall with it.

Frau Blase’s son often came to see her, and she told him to inspect our room. Kurt Blase was an SA man, and a believer in the final victory. He was a textbook Nazi. He saw the bloodstains on our wall and reported them to his mother, who immediately kicked up a fuss. Instead of apologising for the bug infestation and lowering the rent, she wanted financial compensation for the marks on the wall. Once again she called Burgers a ‘filthy foreigner’. Once again there were furious scenes, and I was terrified. But after a few hours it all passed over, nothing much was said about the row, and an odd sort of harmony set in.

When a similar scene threatened on another occasion, I went straight into the kitchen and talked to the old lady. ‘Gerrit was going to clean your windows tomorrow. What with the air raids there isn’t a window cleaner left in the whole of Berlin, but please don’t make a fuss about it, you’ll do yourself no good.’ And I told Burgers, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! It’s getting harder and harder to find a place to live in Berlin, and we’ve been lucky here. It’s not worth quarrelling with the old woman at her great age. She’s really very fond of you, you know.’ And I took his hand, led him into the kitchen, and that was the end of it.

However, soon Burgers and I had our own first real, violent quarrel, and just because I was reading a light novel that Trude had lent me. The book was lying open on the desk in Burgers’s room. He had finished work for the day, and we were sitting on the sofa. But I found talking to him terribly boring, so I kept getting up and taking a few steps over to the desk to go on reading my novel, which was no great work of literature but was very exciting.

‘You’re not to read when I’m at home,’ he grumbled, at first mildly enough, but then sounding annoyed and then shouting. ‘You’re supposed to be here just for me.’ I obeyed his instructions for a few minutes, and then went on reading from where I was on the sofa, quite a way from my book. When he noticed what I was doing, he felt so irate that he took off one of his boots and hit me on the head with it.

I had a black eye for some time afterwards. At first that embarrassed me a great deal, but then I realised that only now did I fit into my present surroundings. People didn’t notice my black eye; indeed, it made me inconspicuous. It was local colour, so to speak.

I was horrified, humiliated, repelled, and angry with the invisible enemies who might ultimately have been to blame for my situation. I told myself that I was not just anyone, as my aunt Sylvia had put it. I was a lady, I had taken my school-leaving certificate, and I belonged to the middle classes, if only to the less prosperous part of them.

I set myself an allotted task to be done daily, and called it work. I would make myself maintain a dignified manner of everyday speech in line with the class to which I really belonged. I decided to write my internal, imaginary diary in literary German some of the time, and the rest of the time I would also write it in the most vulgar and improper Berlin slang. I determined that sometimes I would think in hexameters and write in an old-fashioned German style, but I had to give that up. I couldn’t use the language of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries correctly because I had no access to a single book of that period, which annoyed me very much.

When I was still lodging with the Jacobsohns in Schmidstrasse, I often used to feel fear and anxiety weighing heavily down on me when I awoke in the morning. That was the time of the deportations from Berlin, and I sensed nothing but unhappiness in the air. Now that I was living at Number 2 Am Oberbaum, however, I almost always woke in a good temper after a deep, refreshing sleep.

Burgers went to work very early. I got up when he did, but often went back to bed for another hour after he had left. If it was fine weather outside, I opened the window of our room later and did gymnastics, entirely naked. At first I didn’t notice that our window was directly opposite the stationmaster’s little office at the Stralauer Tor overhead railway station, so that he could see me from that vantage point. Once the elderly gentleman, who looked like a stationmaster from a picture book, greeted me from his office, smiling and waving to me with his signalling disc. I cheerfully waved back, but I remembered to pull the curtain over the window in future.

One morning in late spring I had a surprise visit from Trude Neuke. She brought me a tiny bunch of primroses. She had even managed to get them wrapped in the shop, although paper was in very short supply. Trude always set great store by conventions and proper behaviour. She unwrapped the flowers and gave them to me without any fuss, but with an elegant gesture. I was very pleased to see her, asked her in, and we sat on the plush-covered sofa in Burgers’s room. I put the flowers on the table in a glass.

After a little preliminary talk, Trude asked me cautiously whether I found the relationship with Burgers tolerable. I could give her a positive answer, saying that we had begun to get used to each other. My influence over him was increasing, and Frau Blase and Burgers often said that they felt they were looked after better than ever before.

I had no particular trouble in adjusting to the Dutchman and his whims. For instance, just before Burgers came home in the evening I often poured some water over the floor and spread it around. That took about two minutes, but he was delighted. His countrymen, in particular his mother, as he emphasised, set great store by cleanliness, but he had never before met a housewife who washed the floor again in the evening. He was quite beside himself with delight.

The primroses that Trude had brought me lived for a long time. Often I just sat looking at them. Without knowing it, Trude had granted a great wish of mine. Despite all the less welcome aspects of my situation, I longed to lead something like a normal life.

However, there were still some terrible scenes between Burgers and me during the first six months at Am Oberbaum. For instance, when he discovered that Frau Blase was getting food out of me by blackmail, he reacted with a fit of rage. Every week I met Frau Koch, who always gave me a big black shopping bag full of food. When Frau Blase saw this, she wanted some of it, and gave me a second bag to take specially. I found this very disagreeable, particularly when I realised that Frau Koch was not simply dividing my rations in two but giving me some of her own sparse provisions, so that both bags would look as if they were half full.

Once I came back very late from one of these meetings. Burgers was home already, looked at the two bags, and saw me giving one of them to Frau Blase. As he had already put his slippers on, he didn’t even need to take a boot off in order to give me another black eye.

The next quarrel between us flared up because he was extremely keen for me to share everything he had. In itself that was very nice of him, but unfortunately he insisted on it fanatically. His favourite dish was the wartime bread that he moistened with ersatz coffee and sprinkled with a thick layer of sugar. When he wanted me to eat some I declined, repelled by it. That led to another violent scene.

But then I did succeed in explaining that tastes differ, and he mustn’t take it personally if I didn’t like his bread and sugar. However, I had no objection to the fact that he smoked like a chimney and wanted me to keep pace with him. I was a heavy smoker myself.

Our relationship therefore gradually became easier. I could almost always avert his fits of fury in time. And unlike Frau Blase, he never threatened to denounce me or put me out on the street.