Max

  When the old women try to talk to her, she politely avoids engaging with them, replying only yes or no. The others have finally understood that it’s better to leave her in peace in her corner.

  Back in the apartment, we try to get sorted. Manfred does the cleaning. Even though we tell him there’s no point, since the dust comes straight back, he insists. Too bad, if he wants to play at being one of the Trümmerjungen, the ‘rubble kids’. He also washes our clothes when the water isn’t cut off. Lukas burned his Napola uniform in the stove. He was ecstatic that day, dancing around the fire, yelling, ‘Burn, filthy rubbish! Burn!’

  He found a pair of pants, a sweater and a shirt among the remaining clothes that belonged to Manfred’s father. They’re too big, but even if they fitted him I reckon he’s less good-looking out of uniform. He’s less good-looking now anyway. It must be adolescence. He’s not as fine-featured: his nose and lips have flattened out, and his jaw has broadened. Since he can’t shave anymore, there are darkish patches of odd whiskers on his cheeks and upper lip. He’s even got a few pimples on his forehead. I bet he’d be rejected if he had to go through the selection process again. Everyone in the cellar would be rejected, except the tall blonde woman.

  There’s no change of clothes for me. I don’t fit into Manfred’s clothes. But he’s washed my uniform and darned the holes, so I’m almost presentable. It’s just the lice that are driving me crazy.

  Manfred is trying his hand at cooking and doing all right. He knows how to spice up rotten potatoes, preparing them in different ways, depending on what’s around. He also makes some kind of semolina slop and a beetroot soup. When I see him with his little tea-towel tied around his waist like an apron, singing as he prepares our grub, I realise how hard it must have been for him at the Napola.

  It’s up to Lukas and me to scavenge for food. It’s quite a process and we have to be strategic. First we have to listen to the neighbours at night in the cellar, to what they’re whispering, so as not to be heard. Some of them know, for example, about such and such a deserted shop or warehouse. In which case, Lukas and I run off first thing in the morning, instead of going back up to the apartment. The deal is: first come, first served. If it’s not too far away, we go by foot. Our training at the Napola means that we run faster than the Berliners. And we know how to fight: manners have gone out the window now; everyone fights to the death for food. When the shop is too far away, we catch the tram. Normally you need a special transport card, so most of the obedient Berliners don’t take the tram unless they have a card. But we couldn’t care less. As if a ticket controller is more dangerous than a mortar shell, a fine more deadly than a bomb!

  If we haven’t gleaned any tips from the neighbours, Lukas sets off early in the morning on the lookout for inside information. He listens, watches, spies. If someone is running, it means he’s got a tip-off, so all Lukas has to do is follow him. That’s how he heard that a Luftwaffe freight car had been abandoned with all sorts of food left inside. Lukas brought back tins of jam, coffee—the real stuff, not ersatz coffee—bottles of wine, even loaves of bread and chocolate. He looked like he’d just been in a boxing match, his face all swollen, but he was thrilled and pleased with himself. And rightly so.

  What a feast we had that day. We had to make sure we didn’t eat it all at once. We put some of the jam aside and I went out and swapped the wine for margarine and potatoes. I’m in charge of bartering.

  In the evening, as soon as the air-raid siren goes off, we lock our precious things in a suitcase and head down to the cellar. Lukas sits on the case so no one steals it. But I still worry and keep an eye out. You never know, part of his flirting with Ute might involve him bribing her fat mother with chocolate.

  I must say, sometimes I feel like giving something to the tall blonde woman. She’s so thin. She obviously doesn’t care about getting food, doesn’t give a damn if she dies of hunger or of anything else.

  One day Lukas played dress-ups. He put on one of Manfred’s mother’s dresses (a floral dress that hadn’t been stolen). He scrunched up paper into balls to make fake breasts, used coal as eyeliner, and tied up his hair—he has long hair now, like us all. I thought he looked funny, but Manfred was not amused. He burst into tears and made Lukas get changed straightaway. But he didn’t have time because there was an air-raid warning and we had to rush to the cellar.

  In the dark, old Hauptman put his hand on Lukas’s bum, mistaking him for a new girl.

  In between hunting for food and the long breaks to recover from the sleepless nights in the cellar, time passes strangely. We don’t think about the future. Well…

  On the Reichstrasse, and elsewhere in Berlin, it’s chaos. Hundreds of cars are heading off to the west, but their path is often blocked by tarpaulin-covered carts filled with refugees, or else they’re gunned down by Russian fighter bombers.

  In the cellars, the rumour is growing: The Russians are coming!

  We had quite a disturbing time in the cellar last night. There were lots of bombs. The walls were shaking and above our heads the dim light from the kerosene lamp flickered under the crisscross of beams. Would it hold up if the building collapsed? Was it actually such a good idea to be buried alive? Or was it more dangerous to be trapped outside in the rubble?

  No one slept a wink. All Lukas, Manfred and I wanted to do was get upstairs, jump in our beds and sleep. Sleep all day, hoping it would be a day—they hardly ever happen anymore—when the air-raid siren didn’t go off every hour. Too bad if we couldn’t eat. We were too tired to go hunting for food. And, anyway, the less we ate, the less hungry we’d be.

  But when we climb out of the cellar, there are people in the apartment. We can tell immediately from the smell in the air. Sweat. Gunpowder. As we creep quietly across the lobby, we bump into huge kitbags on the floor. One more step, and there in the living room is a soldier, lying on the armchairs which I usually make up as my bed. He’s fast asleep, his arms dangling, his legs folded sideways, his chin sunk in the collar of his jacket.

  Holding our breath, without a word, we turn and look towards the master bedroom. As there’s no door we can see four soldiers lying close together on the bed. Then we look into Manfred’s bedroom opposite, where two more soldiers are lying top-to-tail in the single bed.

  ‘Ruskis?’ whispers Manfred, terrified.

  He’s shaking like a leaf—I think I can hear his knees knocking.

  We don’t answer. We’ve lost our voices, our hearts are pounding, our legs are like jelly. I glance at Lukas. He’s as white as a ghost, the blood drained from his face. But wasn’t he looking forward to the arrival of the Ruskis? Now that they’re here, don’t tell me he’s scared, too?

  He raises his hand and signals us not to make a sound, not to move. No chance of that—we’re petrified. He creeps on tiptoe into each room then comes back to us.

  ‘Not Ruskis,’ he mouths, ‘Krauts!’

  Relieved, I check out the rooms as well, Manfred right on my heels, like my shadow. They’re definitely our soldiers: part of the last infantry units in retreat. Normally they travel through the streets of Berlin at night, only rarely do you see any during the day. They walk slowly, not marching in time, limping, dawdling, oblivious to the people gawking at them.

  These ones are sleeping like logs. They look exhausted. They’re filthy—their uniforms encrusted with mud—and thin, hollow-cheeked, unshaven. They’ve fallen asleep in weird positions, one guy’s boots on top of another’s helmet. Some are facedown, so they must have fallen on top of the bed just like that. I find them pathetic, ugly, pitiful—they already look like prisoners. They also look like they couldn’t give a damn about having lost the war.

  After staring at them for a bit, I turn to see Lukas, still in the lobby, armed with a submachine gun that he must have taken out of one of the kitbags. He points it at the soldier in the living room. I recognise that warlike glint in his eye. Here we go again: he’s back to his obsession with taking out a German in uniform.
r />   I run, not caring at all about the noise I make, or that I’ve dropped Manfred, who was clinging on to me. ‘Stop! You can’t do that!’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Just watch me!’ shouts Lukas. ‘Get out of the way, or I’ll shoot you!’

  I jump on him and we roll onto the floor. I try to grab the gun. He holds firm. That’s when Manfred starts sobbing, and screaming, too. ‘Stop! I mean, stop! You’re mad!’

  It reminds me of our fight at Kalish. Except that here the fight stops short. Bang, bang, bang! The submachine gun has gone off, making three big holes in the living room wall. Lukas and I freeze.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ yells Manfred. ‘Are you dead?’

  No, miraculously, we’re neither hurt nor dead. And, even more miraculously, the soldier in the living room hasn’t woken up. Nor have the others. None of them has moved.

  Silence.

  Aren’t they going to react? It’s impossible that they didn’t hear our screams, the gunshots. Well, no, it’s not: they’re still asleep. You’d think they were dead.

  The three of us suddenly get the giggles, and that doesn’t wake the soldiers either. Then we stop whispering and start talking normally. Lukas wants to get rid of the men, which means killing them. I point out that we’ll have to get rid of the bodies, and that won’t be easy. He insists, and so do I. Things are getting heated and we’ll be fighting tooth and nail again before you know it. The air-raid siren ends the discussion.

  We have to clear out fast. The bombs will take care of the intruders.

  Before we leave, I can’t help performing one last test. I go up to the sleeping soldier in the living room, the highest-ranking one, with three stars and two stripes. I lean over and yell in his ear, ‘Look, Hauptsturmführer! Look at that boy there’—I point to Lukas—‘He’s a Jew! A Jew! The real McCoy!’

  I feel better, liberated. All those years with that sentence stuck in my throat. Apart from that one time in the study hall when I made a pathetic attempt, I’ve never been able to utter it. Now that it’s out I feel like I can breathe better.

  Manfred pulls me out the door by the sleeve. ‘Stop saying rubbish.’

  ‘It’s not rubbish. Lukas is Jewish, I swear! Why don’t you ask him.’

  ‘Sure, sure, okay. He’s Jewish, and I’m French. Come on, let’s get going.’

  The soldiers stayed two days in our apartment and had disappeared by the morning of the third day.

  People are panicking now. ‘The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!’ That’s all we hear, everywhere, night and day. In the cellars and outside. There’s no more radio or newspapers, but word of mouth is working at full speed. Relaying the truth.

  The other night, Frau Oberham, the fat woman, went up to the blonde woman and peered over her shoulder at the photo the woman was holding in her hands, as usual. She shook her head, sighed loudly and said, ‘I know it’s difficult, but you should burn that photo. If the Russians see you with it, they’ll kill you.’

  The blonde woman didn’t reply. She held the photo to her chest, as if the other woman had tried to grab it from her, and then she moved to another spot.

  Now word of mouth has announced that the Red Army is on the outskirts of the city. Owners are turning up briefly at their apartments to destroy any incriminating evidence: portraits of Hitler, uniforms, party insignia, correspondence. They’re raising white flags on balconies (to show the brigades, who are killing the occupants of houses with Nazi flags).

  Lukas hangs a white flag on the balcony of our apartment. He orders me to take off my Napola uniform and burn it. When I complain that I don’t have any other clothes, he leaves and returns an hour later with a pair of pants and a sweater my size, both bloodstained.

  He took them off a corpse in the street.

  I put them on; I have no choice. Now I really look like a Skullface.

  My uniform was still smouldering when the telephone rang.

  We looked at each other, all three of us transfixed, more terrified by the ring than we had been by the air-raid siren, more shocked than by the presence of the soldiers the other day.

  The telephone doesn’t work, so how can it ring? Manfred and I had often played with it; there was no ringtone.

  ‘Who could it be?’ asked Lukas.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Daddy! Mummy!’ Manfred screams. Before we can stop him, he runs and picks up the receiver. ‘Hello…Yes…Who’s speaking?’ Trembling, he grows pale. The receiver stuck to his ear like a prosthesis, he stares at us, his eyes wide with fear. ‘Nein! Nein!’ he screams. ‘Hello? Hello?’

  Whoever it was has hung up on him. Manfred drops the receiver, which dangles from its cord like one of the ‘cowards’ hanging from the lampposts in the street, and rushes over to me.

  ‘So? Who was it?’ asks Lukas.

  ‘I think it might have been…a Ruski.’

  ‘Well, what did he say to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t understand, ’cause he was speaking Russian and only at the end in German.’

  ‘When he said what?’ Lukas has had enough.

  ‘He said: “You SS?” I said no, but I don’t think he believed me.’

  We all pause. Lukas looks at me. I look at Lukas. Manfred looks at us.

  ‘We’re getting out of here, for good,’ yells Lukas.

  The night of the Russians.

  A sleepless night.

  We’ve all taken up our positions in the cellar again, except the suitcases aren’t there to mark out our separate spaces. Now we want to feel the physical presence of our neighbours, their warmth, breathing, trembling. The suitcases have been piled up in front of the door like a barricade. A useless barricade. It’s merely psychological, but it makes us feel better all the same.

  It’s the 27th of April, 1945, and I keep thinking about turning nine a week ago. My birthday present arrived a week late: the Ruskis.

  It’s quiet tonight. Too quiet. Only a few bombs. The walls aren’t shaking, but we are. No chatting, no gossip. Not a word. Everyone has their own idea of what will happen. Frau Diesdorf looks like she’s flat out thinking under her bathtowel. Frau Evingen holds her artificial leg fiercely to her. Frau Betstein keeps patting Manfred’s head over and over. The fat woman and Ute are clutching each other. Although Herr Hauptman is seated, he’s holding himself to attention, as upright as a mortar shell. Lukas won’t stop looking at me, trying to give me an encouraging smile, but it’s more like a grimace. It feels as if he’s more worried about me than Ute. The blonde woman, as usual, won’t take her eyes off her photo.

  I think the scenario we’re each imagining for ourselves is not that different: we’re going to die, all of us. Except perhaps Lukas, since he’s not German.

  At 5 a.m., the roof suddenly starts to vibrate, waking us from the daze we’d all slipped into. The sound of engines in the street above. They stop, probably parked along the footpath. A strong smell of petrol reaches us. Then silence again.

  Frau Diesdorf cracks first. ‘I’m going to see what’s going on!’

  She stands up and removes the towel, which is a first. Some sort of coquettish gesture towards the new occupiers? Or is she planning on committing suicide by exposing her bare head to the bombs? She leaves and fifteen minutes later we hear her charging down the staircase in a rush. She shuts the door behind her, pulls the bolt across to lock it, and hastily rebuilds the suitcase barricade.

  ‘SO?’ ask all the other women together.

  ‘They’re here! In the next cellar. I think all hell’s broken loose.’

  ‘What do they look like?’

  ‘No idea. I only saw two from the back. Big leather jackets, knee-high leather boots…The girl!’ she says suddenly, pointing to Ute. ‘They mustn’t see her! Hide her! Quickly!’

  Action stations. The women pull out all the clothes they can from the suitcases and make a big pile against the end wall, where they hide the girl. Frau Oberham sits in front of the pile to form a screen and tells Lukas to sit
next to her to double the cover.

  And what about us? No need to hide the kids? Why only Ute?

  Manfred stares at me, anxious, pleading, as if begging me to intervene and get the women to hide us, too.

  Silence again. More waiting. An hour later—or two, or three, unless it was only a minute—footsteps echo on the stairs. Loud banging on the door. The lock doesn’t last long, nor the heap of suitcases. The door gives way, swings open, and a beam of light from a torch scans the cellar, stopping on each of our faces. We blink, blinded, unable to focus, then each of us in turn, as the light moves on to our neighbour, stares at two boots, two knees, a torso—big, like Frau Diesdorf said—and finally a bearded face. Long, curly ginger hair. Red nose and cheeks, crimson. Black eyes. A falcon’s stare.

  ‘Ouri! Ouri!’ yells the Ruski.

  No doubt about it, he’s a Ruski. He is so big that he has to bend down so he doesn’t bump into the roof. He looks like an ogre. He’s going to eat us all.

  We look at each other: does anyone happen to speak Russian? Even one word, the one the Ruski keeps repeating, as he gets more and more annoyed by our passive silence. He stretches out his arm, rolls up the sleeve of his jacket and starts up his chant again, hitting his wrist: ‘Ouri! Ouri!’

  There’s nothing more effective than sign language. Now we get it. Ouri is a version of Uhr. ‘Watch.’ He wants our watches. Herr Hauptman and the women pull off their watches and throw them in the Ruski’s pouch as he responds vigorously, ‘Ya! Ya!’ He walked past Manfred and me without stopping, no doubt assuming that we were too young to be wearing watches. But he grabs Lukas, the left arm, then the right, pushing up his sleeves to make sure he’s not hiding anything. Then, when he catches sight of the pile of clothes against the wall, he points his torch beam at it.

  ‘Keine Uhr hier!’ screams Lukas straightaway. ‘Ouri, niet! Niet!’

  Hey, that’s odd. Lukas spontaneously spoke in German…Isn’t the Ruski supposed to be his friend, his ally? Wouldn’t it be now or never, the moment to give up the language he’s always hated? Why isn’t Lukas declaring that he’s Polish or, better still, Jewish? Why isn’t he taking advantage of it to get out of this hellhole? Is it because of Ute? Is he so in love with her?