Zoo Station (12 page)

They concentrated on eating for a few minutes.

Do you really think theres any chance well get visas? Albert asked eventually, allowing the merest hint of hope to mar his cynicism.

Yes, Russell said, with more conviction than he felt. It may take a while, but why not? The Nazis dont want you, so why shouldnt they let you go?

Because theyre even more interested in hurting us?

Russell considered that. It had, unfortunately, the ring of truth. The way I see it, he said, you dont have many options. You can fight back and most likely end up in a camp. Or dead. Or you can try and work their system.

Albert gave him a pitying look. There are half a million of us, he said. At the current rate itll take seven years for us all to get visas.

Russell had no answer.

And how long before were at war? Albert persisted.

Who knows. . . .

A year at most. And thatll put a stop to emigration. What do you think theyll do with us then? They wont let us work for a living now, and that wont change. Theyll either leave us to starve or put us in work campsslave labor. Some of my friends think theyll just kill us. And they may be right. Whos going to stop them?

He could add Albert to the list of people hed underestimated, Russell thought.

My fathers Iron Cross was First Class, Albert said. Unlike our beloved Fuhrers.

Russell stared out at the winter trees, and the roof of the old Krankenhaus Hospital rising above them to the south. If youre rightif your friends are rightthen all the more reason not to jeopardize your chancesyour familys chancesof getting out.

I know that, Albert said. But what about the others? One familys success is another familys failure.

Russell had no answer to that either.

But thanks for the coffee and cake, Albert said.

LYING IN BED UNABLE
to sleep, Russell thought about Papa Wiesners Iron Cross First Class. It wasnt a medal given to manyhe must have done something pretty special. He supposed he should have realized that a Jew of Wiesners age would have fought in the war, but it hadnt occurred to him. Goebbelss propaganda was obviously working.

He wondered which front Wiesner had served on. He wondered, as he often did with Germans of his own age, whether theyd been facing him across those hundred yards of churned-up meadow near Merville. He sometimes wondered whether Frau Heideggers repeated accusation that he might have shot her husband was simply her way of warding off the possibility that he really had.

He had once thought that he was over the war, that time and circumstance had turned the horror into anger, the anger into politics, and the politics into cynicism, leaving only the abiding belief that people in authority tended, by and large, to be incompetent, uncaring liars. The war, by this accounting, had been the latest demonstration of a depressingly eternal truth. Nothing more.

Hed been fooling himself. All those whod been in that particular place at that particular time had been indelibly marked by the experience, and he was no exception. You never shook it off completelywhatever it was it had left you with, whether nerves in tatters, an endless rage, or a joy-sapping cynicism. And the memories never seemed to fade. That sudden waft of decomposing flesh, the rats eyes reflected in the shell-burst, the sight of ones own rotting feet. The unnerving beauty of a flare cracking the night sky open. Being splashed with someone elses brain, slapped in the face by death.

Jimmy Sewell was his name. After helping carry what was left of him back to the medical station, Russell had somehow ended up with the letter he had just written to his girlfriend. Things were looking up, Sewell had told her, now that the Yanks were arriving in force. It had been late June or early July, 1918. One of a string of sunny days in northern France.

He and Razor Wilkinson had hitched a ride to Hazebrouck that evening, and gotten pissed out of their minds in a dingy back street bar. The more he drank, the more his brain-spattered face seemed to itch, and he had ended up wading into the River Lys and frantically trying to wash himself clean. Razor had stood on the bank laughing at him, until he realized that Russell was crying, and then hed started crying too.

Twenty-one years ago, but Russell could still feel the current tugging at his legs. He levered himself out of bed and went to the window. Berlin was sleeping, but he could imagine Albert Wiesner lying in bed on his back, hands clenched around the blankets, staring angrily at the ceiling.

WITH PAUL OFF ON
his
Jungvolk
adventure weekend, Russell and Effi spent most of Saturday morning in bed. Russell slipped on some clothes to bring back pastries and coffee from the shop around the corner, and slipped them off again when making love seemed more urgent than eating. Half an hour later Effi re-warmed the coffee on her tiny stove, and brought it back to the bedroom.

Tell me about the film part, Russell said, once they were propped up against the headboard. Effi had told him about the offer the night before, but had been too tired to go into details.

They start shooting on the thirteenth, she said. Two weeks on Monday. Marianne Immel had the part, but shes sickpregnant, probably, though no ones said so. They want me to audition on Tuesday morning, but Ill have to be pretty bad to miss outthey wont have time to find anyone else.

Whats it called?

Mother
. And thats me. Its a big part.

Can I see the script?

Of course, but let me tell you the story first. She licked a pastry crumb from her upper lip and pushed her hair back behind her ears. I am Gerta, she said. I have a job in a factory, an important administrative job. I almost run the place for the owner. I like my work and Im good at it.

But only a woman, Russell murmured.

Indeed. My husband Hans has a good job on the railways. And needless to say hes active in the SA, very active in fact. Hans earns more than enough money to support the familywe have two children by the way, a sixteen-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boyand he rather thinks that I should give up work and look after them. But hes too kind-hearted to insist, and I keep on working.

I sense tragedy in the offing.

Ah, I should add that my boss fancies me no end. I dont fancy himhe looks decidedly Jewish by the waybut Hans is always away on Party businessyou know, organizing parades, running youth camps and generally saving the nationand the boss is kind enough and smooth enough to be good company, so I flirt with him a little and let him buy me pastries. Like you, in fact, she added, looking at Russell.

Do you flaunt your beautiful breasts at him? Russell asked.

Certainly not, she said, pulling her nightdress closed. Now concentrate.

Ill try.

One day she and the boss go to visit a factory hes thinking of buying, and on the way back they decided to stop off at a guesthouse with a famous view. On the way down the mountain his car gets a flat tire, and shes late getting home. Meanwhile, son and daughter have arrived home from school, and cant get in. They wait for a while, but its rainingbuckets of the stuffand son already has a cold. Daughter notices that one of the upstairs windows is ajar, and decides to climb up and in.

Only she doesnt make it.

How did you guess?

Dead or just paralyzed?

Oh, dead. Though I suppose having her in a wheelchair would provide a constant reminder of my guilt. Which is, of course, enormous. I give up my job, despite the pleas of my boss. But the guilt is still too much, so I try and kill myself. And guess who saves me?

Son?

Exactly. He comes home with a couple of
Jungvolk
buddies to find me head down on the kitchen table with an empty bottle of pills. They rush me to the hospital on the cart theyve been using to collect old clothes for Winter Relief.

And when you come round you realize that you can only atone for your daughters death by becoming the perfect stay-at-home mother.

Hans comes to collect me, takes me home, and tells me he cant bear me being so unhappy and that I can go back to work if I want to. Whereupon I give the speech of my life, castigating him for letting me have my own way in the past, and saying that all I really want to be is a wife and mother. He weeps with joy. In fact we both do. The end.

It does bring a tear to the eye, Russell said. Is it going to make you famous?

Shouldnt think so. But the moneys good, and it will involve some acting.

But no breast-flaunting.

I only do that for you, she said, pulling the nightdress open.

AFTER HED WALKED EFFI
to the theater for the
Barbarossa
matinee, Russell ate a snack lunch at the Zoo Station buffet, climbed up to the elevated platforms, and sat watching the trains for a while. It was something he and Paul did on occasion, marveling at the long lines of carriages snaking in across the bridge from Cologne or Paris or the wonderfully named Hook of Holland. Today, though, he waited in vain for a continental express. There were only the neat little electric trains of the Stadtbahn, fussing in and out of the local platforms.

He walked around the northern wall of the zoo and, for want of something better to do, headed home along the Landwehrkanal. It had been a long time since hed spent a Saturday afternoon in Berlin alone, and he felt unexpectedly disoriented by the experience. To make matters worse it was the sort of winter day he hated: gray, damp, and almost insultingly warm. Even the canal smelled worse than usual.

When he reached home Frau Heidegger was lying in wait. Schachts long-expected dismissal as President of the Reichsbank had been all over the front pages that morning, and she was worried about how this might affect share prices. My Jurgens family gave me some Farben shares after the war, she explained, after press-ganging him in for coffee. Just a few, you understand, but I always thought they might come in handy in my old age.

Russell reassured her that Schachts dismissal was unlikely to have any lasting effect. Unlike the coming war, he added to himself. Or her coffee.

The Fuhrers angry with the Czechs, she said from the kitchen, as if following his thoughts.

What about? Russell asked.

Does it matter? she asked, coming in with the familiar pot.

No, he agreed. He was often surprised by Frau Heideggers perceptiveness, and surprised that he could still be surprised.

I told my brother-in-law what you said about air defenses, she went on. He said he hoped you were right.

So do I, Russell agreed again.

After climbing the stairs to his apartment he wished he hadnt: The combination of muggy weather and full throttle heating had made it feel like the hot room of a Turkish bath. He tried opening a window, but there was no welcome hint of cooler air. He tried reading, but nothing seemed to stick.

He went out again. It was just after fourhe had about six hours to kill. He walked south down Belle-Alliance Strasse to Viktoria Park, climbed to the brow of the Kreuzberg, and found an empty bench with a view across the city. There was even a slight breeze.

The sky darkened, and his mood seemed to darken with it.

He thought about Effi and the film. Theyd had fun that morning, but it was a pretty disgusting piece of work. Did she have any qualms about doing it? She hadnt said so. He couldnt believe she needed the money, and hed heard her views on the Nazi attitude toward women often enough. So why was she doing it? Should he ask her? Was it possible to ask someone a question like that without making it an accusation?

He decided it wasnt, but later that night, halfway down an empty street on their way home from the theater, he asked it anyway.

To make a living? she answered sarcastically.

But you dont. . . . he said, and stopped himself. But not soon enough.

Lots of people think that because my family is rich, Im rich, she said coldly. I took the flat when they offered it. Ten years ago. And I havent taken anything since.

I know.

Then what. . . .

He sighed. Its just so sordid. I hate the idea of you playing in something . . . in playing a part that goes against everything you believe.

That just makes it more of a challenge.

Yes, but the better you do it, the more convincing you are, the more women will think they have to accept all this nonsense.

She stopped in her tracks. Are we talking about my work or yours? she asked. How about your paean to Strength Through Joy cruises? Or your car for every German worker piece. Youve hardly been cutting the ground from under their feet.

He bit back the surge of anger. She was right.

They both were.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, HE
went to the Plumpe. Paul had asked him for a program, and with Effi visiting her family that seemed a good enough reason for going. He had Thomas and Joachim for company, but he missed Paul, and the game itself was direa dull 1-1 draw with Berliner SV. Thomas was subduedlike Frau Heidegger and 75 million other Germans hed noticed the telltale flurry of government antagonism toward the Czechs. Sandwiched between SV supporters on the southbound U-bahn they arranged to have lunch on the following Thursday.

Back at the apartment he found a courier delivery waiting for him: a copy of the previous days
Pravda
, complete with his first article. His Russian wasnt that good, but as far as he could tell they hadnt altered anything. Approved by the SD, approved by the NKVD, he thought out loud. I should have been a diplomat. More gratifying still was the accompanying bank draft in Reichsmarks.

There was also the promised list of suggestions for future articles. The last-but-one letters of the opening sentencewho thought up this stuff?spelled Cracow. Russell groaned. Two 16-hour train journeys, just for a chat with Shchepkin. At least, he hoped it was just for a chat.

Zygmunts Chapel

THIS IS IT,
McKinley said, with the sort of enthusiasm others reserved for stumbling across El Dorado. The object of his excitement was a short cul-de-sac of decaying tenement blocks wedged between railway arches, small industrial workshops, and the Neukollner Schiffahrtkanal. One forlorn streetlight threw a faint yellow glow over glistening brickwork and rusty iron. It looked, Russell thought, like the sort of place a particularly sentimental German communist would come to die.