Today Carla and Maud were happy because they had sold a chest of drawers. It was a Jugendstil piece in burled light oak that Walter’s parents had bought when they got married in 1889. Carla, Maud and Ada had loaded it on to a borrowed handcart.
There were still no men in their house. Erik and Werner were among millions of German soldiers who had disappeared. Perhaps they were dead. Colonel Beck had told Carla that almost three million Germans had died in battle on the Eastern Front, and more had died as prisoners of the Soviets – killed by hunger, cold and disease. But another two million were still alive and working in labour camps in the Soviet Union. Some had come back: they had either escaped from their guards or had been released because they were too ill to work, and they had joined the thousands of displaced persons on the tramp all over Europe, trying to find their way home. Carla and Maud had written letters and sent them care of the Red Army, but no replies had ever come.
Carla felt torn about the prospect of Werner’s return. She still loved him, and hoped desperately that he was alive and well, but she dreaded meeting him when she was pregnant with a rapist’s baby. Although it was not her fault, she felt irrationally ashamed.
So the three women pushed the handcart through the streets. They left Rebecca behind. The Red Army orgy of rape and looting had passed its nightmare peak, and Rebecca no longer lived in the attic, but it was still not safe for a pretty girl to walk the streets.
Huge photographs of Lenin and Stalin now hung over Unter den Linden, once the promenade of Germany’s fashionable elite. Most Berlin roads had been cleared, and the rubble of destroyed buildings stood in stacks every few hundred yards, ready to be re-used, perhaps, if ever Germans were able to rebuild their country. Acres of houses had been flattened, often entire city blocks. It would take years to deal with the wreckage. There were thousands of bodies rotting in the ruins, and the sickly sweet smell of decaying human flesh had been in the air all summer. Now it smelled only after rain.
Meanwhile, the city had been divided into four zones: Russian, American, British and French. Many of the buildings still standing had been commandeered by the occupying troops. Berliners lived where they could, often seeking inadequate shelter in the surviving rooms of half-demolished houses. The city had running water again, and electric power came on fitfully, but it was hard to find fuel for heating and cooking. The chest of drawers might be almost as valuable chopped up for firewood.
They took it to Wedding, in the French zone, where they sold it to a charming Parisian colonel for a carton of Gitanes. The occupation currency had become worthless, because the Soviets printed too much of it, so everything was bought and sold for cigarettes.
Now they were returning triumphant, Maud and Ada steering the empty cart while Carla walked alongside. She ached all over from pushing the cart, but they were rich: a whole carton of cigarettes would go a long way.
Night fell and the temperature dropped to freezing. Their route home took them briefly into the British sector. Carla sometimes wondered whether the British might help her mother if they knew the hardship she was suffering. On the other hand, Maud had been a German citizen for twenty-six years. Her brother, Earl Fitzherbert, was wealthy and influential, but he had refused to support her after her marriage to Walter von Ulrich, and he was a stubborn man: it was not likely he would change his attitude.
They came across a small crowd, thirty or forty ragged people, outside a house that had been taken over by the occupying power. Stopping to find out what they were staring at, the three women saw a party going on inside. Through the windows they could observe brightly lit rooms, laughing men and women holding drinks, and waitresses moving through the throng with trays of food. Carla looked around her. The crowd was mostly women and children – there were not many men left in Berlin, or indeed in Germany – and they were all staring longingly at the windows, like rejected sinners outside the gates of paradise. It was a pathetic sight.
‘This is obscene,’ said Maud, and she marched up the path to the door of the house.
A British sentry stood in her way and said: ‘
Maud addressed him in the crisp upper-class English she had spoken as a girl. ‘I must see your commanding officer immediately.’
Carla admired her mother’s nerve and poise, as always.
The sentry looked doubtfully at Maud’s threadbare coat, but after a moment he tapped on the door. It opened, and a face looked out. ‘English lady wants the CO,’ said the sentry.
A moment later the door opened again and two people looked out. They might have been caricatures of a British officer and his wife: he in his mess kit with a black bow tie, she in a long dress and pearls.
‘Good evening,’ Maud said. ‘I’m frightfully sorry to disturb your party.’
They stared at her, astonished to be spoken to that way by a woman in rags.
Maud went on: ‘I just thought you should see what you’re doing to these wretched people outside.’
The couple looked at the crowd.
Maud said: ‘You might draw the curtains, for pity’s sake.’
After a moment the woman said: ‘Oh, dear, George, have we been terribly unkind?’
‘Unintentionally, perhaps,’ the man said gruffly.
‘Could we possibly make amends by sending some food out to them?’
‘Yes,’ Maud said quickly. ‘That would be a kindness as well as an apology.’
The officer looked dubious. It was probably against some kind of regulation to give canapes to starving Germans.
The woman pleaded: ‘George, darling, may we?’
