'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 and 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 Kurfurstendamm 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, considered 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.
He jerked the back of his head at his haversack. 'My leg,' he said without any trace of regret.
'That's too bad.'
His face registered quiet resignation. Then he looked at my watches. 'Nice,' he said. 'There was an Ivan round here about fifteen minutes ago who was looking for a good watch. For 10 per cent I'll see if I can find him for you.'
I tried to think how long I might have to stand there in the cold before making a sale. 'Five,' I heard myself say. 'If he buys.'
The man nodded, and lurched off, a moving tripod, in the direction of the Kroll Opera House. Ten minutes later he was back, breathing heavily and accompanied by not one but two Russian soldiers who, after a great deal of argument, bought the Mickey Mouse and the gold Patek for $1,700.
When they had gone I peeled nine of the greasy bills off the wad I had taken from the Ivans and handed them over.
'Maybe you can hang on to that leg of yours now.'
'Maybe,' he said with a sniff, but later on I saw him sell it for five cartons of Winston.
I had no more luck that afternoon, and having fastened the two remaining watches to my wrists, I decided to go home. But passing close to the ghostly fabric of the Reichstag, with its bricked-up windows and its precarious- looking dome, my mind was changed by one particular piece of graffiti that was daubed there, reproducing itself on the lining of my stomach: 'What our women do makes a German weep, and a GI come in his pants.'
The train to Zehlendorf and the American sector of Berlin dropped me only a short way south of
