A German Requiem Read online

  This was all good advice and I would have done well to have taken it myself, for suddenly the Ivan in my carriage was on his feet and standing unsteadily over me.

  ‘Vi vihodeetye (are you getting off)?’ I asked him.

  He blinked crapulously and then stared malevolently at me and my newspaper before snatching it from my hands.

  He was a hill-tribesman type, a big stupid Chechen with almond-shaped black eyes, a gnarled jaw as broad as the steppes and a chest like an upturned church-bell: the kind of Ivan we made jokes about — how they didn’t know what lavatories were and how they put their food in the toilet bowls thinking that they were refrigerators (some of these stories were even true).

  ‘Lzhy (lies),’ he snarled, brandishing the paper in front of him, his open, drooling mouth showing great yellow kerbstones of teeth. Putting his boot on the seat beside me, he leaned closer. ‘Lganyo,’ he repeated in tones lower than the smell of sausage and beer which his breath carried to my helplessly flaring nostrils. He seemed to sense my disgust and rolled the idea of it around in his grizzled head like a boiled sweet. Dropping the Telegraf to the floor he held out his horny hand.

  ‘Ya hachoo padarok,’ he said, and then slowly in German, ‘… I want present.’

  I grinned at him, nodding like an idiot, and realized that I was going to have to kill him or be killed myself. ‘Padarok,’ I repeated. ‘Padarok.’

  I stood up slowly and, still grinning and nodding, gently pulled back the sleeve of my left arm to reveal my bare wrist. The Ivan was grinning too by now, thinking he was on to a good thing. I shrugged.

  ‘Oo menya nyet chasov,’ I said, explaining that I didn’t have a watch to give him.

  ‘Shto oo vas yest (what have you got)?’

  ‘Nichto,’ I said, shaking my head and inviting him to search my coat pockets. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Shto oo vas yest?’ he said again, more loudly this time.

  It was, I reflected, like me talking to poor Dr Novak, whose wife I had been able to confirm was indeed being held by the MVD. Trying to discover what he could trade.

  ‘Nichto,’ I repeated.

  The grin disappeared from the Ivan’s face. He spat on the carriage floor.

  ‘Vroon (liar),’ he growled, and pushed me on the arm.

  I shook my head and told him that I wasn’t lying.

  He reached to push me again, only this time he checked his hand and took hold of the sleeve with his dirty finger and thumb. ‘Doraga (expensive),’ he said, appreciatively, feeling the material.

  I shook my head, but the coat was black cashmere — the sort of coat I had no business wearing in the Zone — and it was no use arguing: the Ivan was already unbuckling his belt.

  ‘Ya hachoo vashi koyt,’ he said, removing his own well-patched greatcoat. Then, stepping to the other side of the carriage, he flung open the door and informed me that either I could hand over the coat or he would throw me off the train.

  I had no doubt that he would throw me out whether I gave him my coat or not. It was my turn to spit.

  ‘Nu, nyelzya (nothing doing),’ I said. ‘You want this coat? You come and get it, you stupid fucking svinya, you ugly, dumb kryestyan’in. Come on, take it from me, you drunken bastard.’

  The Ivan snarled angrily and picked up his carbine from the seat where he had left it. That was his first mistake. Having seen him signal to the engine-driver by firing his weapon out of the window, I knew that there could not be a live cartridge in the breech. It was a deductive process he made only a moment behind me, but by the time he was working the bolt action a second time I had buried the toe of my boot in his groin.

  The carbine clattered to the floor as the Ivan doubled over painfully, and with one hand reached between his legs: with the other he lashed out hard, catching me an agonizing blow on the thigh that left my leg feeling as dead as mutton.

  As he straightened up again I swung with my right, and found my fist caught firmly in his big paw. He snatched at my throat and I headbutted him full in the face, which made him release my fist as he instinctively cupped his turnip-sized nose. I swung again and this time he ducked and seized me by the coat lapels. That was his second mistake, but for a brief, puzzled half-second I did not realize it. Unaccountably he cried out and staggered back from me, his hands raised in the air in front of him like a scrubbed-up surgeon, his lacerated fingertips pouring with blood. It was only then that I remembered the razor-blades I had sewn under my lapels many months before, for just this eventuality.

  My flying tackle carried him crashing to the floor and half a torso’s length beyond the open door of the fast-moving train. Lying on his bucking legs I struggled to prevent the Ivan pulling himself back into the carriage. Hands that were sticky with blood clawed at my face and then fastened desperately round my neck. His grip tightened and I heard the air gurgle from my own throat like the sound of an espresso-machine.

  I punched him hard under the chin, not once but several times, and then pressed the heel of my hand against it as I sought to push him back into the racing night air. The skin on my forehead tightened as I gasped for breath.

  A terrible roaring filled my ears, as if a grenade had burst directly in front of my face, and, for a second his fingers seemed to loosen. I lunged at his head and connected with the empty space that was now mercifully signalled by an abruptly terminated stump of bloody human vertebra. A tree, or perhaps a telegraph pole, had neatly decapitated him.

  My chest a heaving sack of rabbits, I collapsed back into the carriage, too exhausted to yield to the wave of nausea that was beginning to overtake me. But after only a few seconds more I could no longer resist it and summoned forward by the sudden contraction of my stomach, I vomited copiously over the dead soldier’s body.

  It was several minutes before I felt strong enough to tip the corpse out of the door, with the carbine quickly following. I picked the Ivan’s malodorous greatcoat off the seat to throw it out as well, but the weight of it made me hesitate. Searching the pockets I found a Czechoslovakian-made .38 automatic, a handful of wristwatches — probably all stolen — and a half-empty bottle of Moscowskaya. After deciding to keep the gun and the watches, I uncorked the vodka, wiped the neck, and raised the bottle to the freezing night-sky.

  ‘Alla rasi bo sun (God save you),’ I said, and swallowed a generous mouthful. Then I flung the bottle and the greatcoat off the train and closed the door.

  Back at the railway station snow floated in the air like fragments of lint and collected in small ski-slopes in the angle between the station wall and the road. It was colder than it had been all week and the sky was heavy with the threat of something worse. A fog lay on the white streets like cigar smoke drifting across a well starched tablecloth. Close by, a streetlight burned with no great intensity, but it was still bright enough to light up my face for the scrutiny of a British soldier staggering home with several bottles of beer in each hand. The bemused grin of intoxication on his face changed to something more circumspect as he caught sight of me, and he swore with what sounded like fright.

  I limped quickly past him and heard the sound of a bottle breaking on the road as it slipped from nervous fingers. It suddenly occurred to me that my hands and face were covered with the Ivan’s blood, not to mention my own. I must have looked like Julius Caesar’s last toga.

  Ducking into a nearby alley I washed myself with some snow. It seemed to remove not only the blood but the skin as well, and probably left my face looking every bit as red as before. My icy toilette completed, I walked on, as smartly as I was able, and reached home without further adventure.

  It had gone midnight by the time I shouldered open my front door — at least it was easier getting in than out. Expecting my wife to be in bed, I was not surprised to find the apartment in darkness, but when I went into the bedroom I saw that she was not there.

  I emptied my pockets and prepared for bed.

  Laid out on the dressing-table, the Ivan’s watches — a Rolex, a Mickey Mouse,
a gold Patek and a Doxas — were all working and adjusted to within a minute or two of each other. But the sight of so much accurate time-keeping seemed only to underline Kirsten’s lateness. I might have been concerned for her but for the suspicion I held as to where she was and what she was doing, and the fact that I was worn through to my tripe.

  My hands trembling with fatigue, my cortex aching as if I had been pounded with a meat-tenderizer, I crawled to bed with no more spirit than if I had been driven from among men to eat grass like an ox.

  3

  I awoke to the sound of a distant explosion. They were always dynamiting dangerous ruins. A wolf’s howl of wind whipped against the window and I pressed myself closer to Kirsten’s warm body while my mind slowly decoded the clues that led me back into the dark labyrinth of doubt: the scent on her neck, the cigarette smoke sticking to her hair.

  I had not heard her come to bed.

  Gradually a duet of pain between my right leg and my head began to make itself felt, and closing my eyes again I groaned and rolled wearily on to my back, remembering the awful events of the previous night. I had killed a man. Worst of all I had killed a Russian soldier. That I had acted in self-defence would, I knew, be a matter of very little consequence to a Soviet appointed court. There was only one penalty for killing soldiers of the Red Army.

  Now I asked myself how many people might have seen me walking from Potsdamer Railway Station with the hands and face of a South American headhunter. I resolved that, for several months at least, it might be better if I were to stay out of the Eastern Zone. But staring at the bomb-damaged ceiling of the bedroom I was reminded of the possibility that the Zone might choose to come to me: there was Berlin, an open patch of lathing on an otherwise immaculate expanse of plasterwork, while in the corner of the bedroom was the bag of black-market builder’s gypsum with which I was one day intending to cover it over. There were few people, myself included, who did not believe that Stalin was intent on a similar mission to cover over the small bare patch of freedom that was Berlin.

  I rose from my side of the bed, washed at the ewer, dressed, and went into the kitchen to find some breakfast.

  On the table were several grocery items that had not been there the night before: coffee, butter, a tin of condensed milk and a couple of bars of chocolate — all from the Post Exchange, or PX, the only shops with anything in them, and shops that were restricted to American servicemen. Rationing meant that the German shops were emptied almost as soon as the supplies came in.

  Any food was welcome: with cards totalling less than 3,500 calories a day between Kirsten and me, we often went hungry — I had lost more than fifteen kilos since the end of the war. At the same time I had my doubts about Kirsten’s method of obtaining these extra supplies. But for the moment I put away my suspicions and fried a few potatoes with ersatz coffee-grounds to give them some taste.

  Summoned by the smell of cooking Kirsten appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Enough there for two?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and set a plate in front of her.

  Now she noticed the bruise on my face. ‘My god, Bernie, what the hell happened to you?’

  ‘I had a run-in with an Ivan last night.’ I let her touch my face and demonstrate her concern for a brief moment before sitting down to eat my breakfast. ‘Bastard tried to rob me. We slugged it out for a minute and then he took off. I think he must have had a busy evening. He left some watches behind.’ I wasn’t going to tell her that he was dead. There was no sense in us both feeling anxious.

  ‘I saw them. They look nice. Must be a couple of thousand dollars’ worth there.’

  ‘I’ll go up to the Reichstag this morning and see if I can’t find some Ivans to buy them.’

  ‘Be careful he doesn’t come there looking for you.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.’ I forked some potatoes into my mouth, picked up the tin of American coffee and stared at it impassively. ‘A bit late last night, weren’t you?’

  ‘You were sleeping like a baby when I got home.’ Kirsten checked her hair with the flat of her hand and added, ‘We were very busy yesterday. One of the Yanks took the place over for his birthday party.’

  ‘I see.’

  My wife was a schoolteacher, but worked as a waitress at an American bar in Zehlendorf which was open to American servicemen only. Underneath the overcoat which the cold obliged her to wear about our apartment, she was already dressed in the red chintz frock arid tiny frilled apron that was her uniform.

  I weighed the coffee in my hand. ‘Did you steal this lot?’

  She nodded, avoiding my eye.

  ‘I don’t know how you get away with it,’ I said. ‘Don’t they bother to search any of you? Don’t they notice a shortage in the store-room?’

  She laughed. ‘You’ve no idea how much food there is in that place. Those Yanks are on over 4,000 calories a day. A GI eats your monthly meat ration in just one night, and still has room for ice-cream.’ She finished her breakfast and produced a packet of Lucky Strike from her coat pocket. ‘Want one?’

  ‘Did you steal those as well?’ But I took one anyway and bowed my head to the match she was striking.

  ‘Always the detective,’ she muttered, adding, rather more irritatedly, ‘As a matter of fact these were a present, from one of the Yanks. Some of them are just boys, you know. They can be very kind.’

  ‘I’ll bet they can,’ I heard myself growl.

  ‘They like to talk, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m sure your English must be improving.’ I smiled broadly to defuse any sarcasm that was in my voice. This was not the time. Not yet anyway. I wondered if she would say anything about the bottle of Chanel that I had recently found hidden in one of her drawers. But she did not mention it.

  Long after Kirsten had gone to the snack bar there was a knock at the door. Still nervous about the death of the Ivan I put his automatic in my jacket pocket before going to answer it.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Dr Novak.’

  Our business was swiftly concluded. I explained that my informer from the headquarters of the GSOV had confirmed with one telephone call on the landline to the police in Magdeburg, which was the nearest city in the Zone to Wernigerode, that Frau Novak was indeed being held in ‘protective custody’ by the MVD. Upon Novak’s return home both he and his wife were to be deported immediately for ‘work vital to the interests of the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ to the city of Kharkov in the Ukraine.

  Novak nodded grimly. ‘That would follow,’ he sighed. ‘Most of their metallurgical research is centred there.’

  ‘What will you do now?’ I asked.

  He shook his head with such a look of despondency that I felt quite sorry for him. But not as sorry as I felt for Frau Novak. She was stuck.

  ‘Well, you know where to find me if I can be of any further service to you.’

  Novak nodded at the bag of coal I had helped him carry up from his taxi and said, ‘From the look of your face, I should imagine that you earned that coal.’

  ‘Let’s just say that burning it all at once wouldn’t make this room half as hot.’ I paused. ‘It’s none of my business Dr Novak, but will you go back?’

  ‘You’re right, it’s none of your business.’

  I wished him luck anyway, and when he was gone carried a shovelful of coal into the sitting-room, and with a care that was only disturbed by my growing anticipation of being once more warm in my home, I built and lit a fire in the stove.

  I spent a pleasant morning laid up on the couch, and was almost inclined to stay at home for the rest of the day. But in the afternoon I found a walking-stick in the cupboard and limped up to the Kurfürstendamm where, after queuing for at least half an hour, I caught a tram eastwards.

  ‘Black market,’ shouted the conductor when we came within sight of the old ruined Reichstag, and the tram emptied itself.

  No German, however respectable, consi
dered himself to be above a little black-marketeering now and again, and with an average weekly income of about 200 marks — enough to buy a packet of cigarettes — even legitimate businesses had plenty of occasions to rely on black-market commodities to pay employees. People used their virtually useless Reichsmarks only to pay the rent and to buy their miserable ration allowances. For the student of classical economics, Berlin presented the perfect model of a business cycle that was determined by greed and need.

  In front of the blackened Reichstag on a field the size of a football pitch as many as a thousand people were standing about in little knots of conspiracy, holding what they had come to sell in front of them, like passports at a busy frontier: packets of saccharine, cigarettes, sewing-machine needles, coffee, ration coupons (mostly forged), chocolate and condoms. Others wandered around, glancing with deliberate disdain at the items held up for inspection, and searching for whatever it was they had come to buy. There was nothing that couldn’t be bought here: anything from the title-deeds to some bombed-out property to a fake denazification certificate guaranteeing the bearer to be free of Nazi ‘infection’ and therefore employable in some capacity that was subject to Allied control, be it orchestra conductor or road-sweeper.

  But it wasn’t just Germans who came to trade. Far from it. The French came to buy jewellery for their girlfriends back home, and the British to buy cameras for their seaside holidays. The Americans bought antiques that had been expertly faked in one of the many workshops off Savignyplatz. And the Ivans came to spend their months of backpay on watches; or so I hoped.

  I took up a position next to a man on crutches whose tin leg stuck out of the top of the haversack he was carrying on his back. I held up my watches by their straps. After a while I nodded amicably at my one-legged neighbour who apparently had nothing which he could display, and asked him what he was selling.