'And a smelter?'
He nodded thoughtfully, and then more vigorously as the light dawned. 'You want some coal, don't you?'
'Can you get some?'
'How much do you want?'
'Fifty kilos would be about right.'
'Very well.'
'Be back here in twenty-four hours,' I told him. 'I should have some information by then.'
Thirty minutes later, after leaving a note for my wife, I was out of the apartment and on my way to the railway station.
In late 1947 Berlin still resembled a colossal Acropolis of fallen masonry and ruined edifice, a vast and unequivocal megalith to the waste of war and the power of 75,000 tonnes of high explosive. Unparalleled was the destruction that had been rained on the capital of Hitler's ambition: devastation on a Wagnerian scale with the Ring come full circle the final illumination of that twilight of the gods.
In many parts of the city a street map would have been of little more use than a window-cleaner's leather. Main roads meandered like rivers around high banks of debris. Footpaths wound precipitously over shifting mountains of treacherous rubble which sometimes, in wanner weather, yielded a clue unmistakable to the nostrils that something other than household furniture was buried there.
With compasses in short supply you needed a lot of nerve to find your way along facsimile streets on which only the fronts of shops and hotels remained standing unsteadily like some abandoned film-set; and you needed a good memory for the buildings where people still lived in damp cellars, or more precariously on the lower floors of apartment blocks from which a whole wall had been neatly removed, exposing all the rooms and life inside, like some giant doll's house: there were few who risked the upper floors, not least because there were so few undamaged roofs and so many dangerous staircases.
Life amidst the wreckage of Germany was frequently as unsafe as it had been in the last days of the war: a collapsing wall here, an unexploded bomb there. It was still a bit of a lottery.
At the railway station I bought what I hoped might just be a winning ticket.
Chapter 2
That night, on the last train back to Berlin from Potsdam, I sat in a carriage by myself. I ought to have been more careful, only I was feeling pleased with myself for having successfully concluded the doctor's case: but I was also tired, since this business had taken almost the whole day and a substantial part of the evening.
Not the least part of my time had been taken up in travel. Generally this took two or three times as long as it had done before the war; and what had once been a half-hour's journey to Potsdam now took nearer two. I was closing my eyes for a nap when the train started to slow, and then juddered to a halt.
Several minutes passed before the carriage-door opened and a large and extremely smelly Russian soldier climbed aboard. He mumbled a greeting at me, to which I nodded politely. But almost immediately I braced myself as, swaying gently on his huge feet, he unslung his Mosin Nagant carbine and operated the bolt action.
Instead of pointing it at me, he turned and fired his weapon out of the carriage window, and after a brief pause my lungs started to move again as I realized that he had been signalling to the driver.
The Russian burped, sat down heavily as the train started to move again, swept off his lambskin cap with the back of his filthy hand and, leaning back, closed his eyes.
I pulled a copy of the British-run Telegraf out of my coat-pocket. Keeping one eye on the Ivan, I pretended to read. Most of the news was about crime: rape and robbery in the Eastern Zone were as common as the cheap vodka which, as often as not, occasioned their commission. Sometimes it seemed as if Germany was still in the bloody grip of the Thirty Years' War.
I knew just a handful of women who could not describe an incident in which they had been raped or molested by a Russian. And even if one makes an allowance for the fantasies of a few neurotics, there was still a staggering number of sex-related crimes. My wife knew several girls who had been attacked only quite recently, on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. One of these girls, raped by no less than five Red Army soldiers at a police station in Rangsdorff, and infected with syphilis as a result, tried to bring criminal charges, but found herself subjected to a forcible medical examination and charged with prostitution. But there were also some who said that the Ivans merely took by force that which German women were only too willing to sell to the British and the Americans.
Complaints to the Soviet Kommendatura that you had been robbed by Red Army soldiers were equally in vain. You were likely to be informed that 'all the German people have is a gift from the people of the Soviet Union'. This was sufficient sanction for indiscriminate robbery throughout the Zone, and you were sometimes lucky if you survived to report the matter. The depredations of the Red Army and its many deserters made travel in the Zone only slightly less dangerous than a flight on the Hindenburg. Travellers on the Berlin-Magdeburg railway had been stripped naked and thrown off the train; and the road from Berlin to Leipzig was so dangerous that vehicles often drove in convoy: the Telegraf had reported a robbery in which four boxers, on their way to a fight in Leipzig, had been held up and robbed of everything except their lives. Most notorious of all were the seventy-five robberies committed by the Blue Limousine Gang, which had operated on the Berlin-Michendorf road, and which had included among its leaders the vice-president of the Soviet-controlled Potsdam police.
To people who were thinking of visiting the Eastern Zone, I said 'don't'; and then if they still wanted to go, I said 'Don't wear a wristwatch the Ivans like to steal them; don't wear anything but your oldest coat and shoes the Ivans like quality; don't argue or answer back the Ivans don't mind shooting you; if you must talk to them speak loudly of American fascists; and don't read any newspaper except their own Taegliche Rundschau.'
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.
