yellow stars, only there was something about this I didn’t like. I suppose it made me feel complicit in the whole horrible police order. Especially since I was a policeman. So, halfway down the stairs with the yellow dress draped over my arm I went back to my flat and fetched all of the dresses that were in my closet. But even this felt inadequate and, as I handed over my wife’s remaining wardrobe to these harmless women, I quietly decided to do something more.
It isn’t exactly a page from some heroic tale as described by Winckelmann or Holderlin, but that’s how this whole story got started: if it hadn’t been for the decision to help the Fridmann sisters I’d never have met Arianne Tauber and what happened wouldn’t have happened.
Back inside my apartment I smoked the last of my cigarettes and contemplated putting my nose in some records at the Alex, just to see if Mikhail and Efim Fridmann were still alive. Well, that was one thing I could do, but for anyone with a purple J on their ration cards it wasn’t going to help feed them. Two women who looked as thin as the Fridmann sisters were going to need something more substantial than just some information about their loved ones.
After a while I had what I thought was a good idea and fetched a German Army bread-bag from my closet. In the bread bag was a kilo of Algerian coffee beans I’d purloined in Paris and which I’d been planning to trade for some cigarettes. I left my flat and took a tram east as far as Potsdamer Station.
It was a warm evening, not yet dark. Couples were strolling arm in arm through the Tiergarten and it seemed almost impossible that two thousand kilometres to the east the German Army was surrounding Kiev and slowly tightening its stranglehold on Leningrad. I walked up to Pariser Platz. I was on my way to the Adlon Hotel to see the maitre d’ with the aim of trading the coffee for some food that I could give the two sisters.
The maitre d’ at the Adlon that year was Willy Thummel, a fat Sudeten German who was always busy and so light on his toes that it made me wonder how he ever got fat in the first place. With his rosy cheeks, his easy smile and his impeccable clothes he always reminded me of Herman Goring. Without a doubt both men enjoyed their food, although the Reichsmarshal had always given me the impression that he might just have eaten me, too, if he’d been hungry enough. Willy liked his food; but he liked people more.
There were no customers in the restaurant — not yet — and Willy was checking the blackout curtains when I poked my nose around the door. Like any good maitre d’ he spotted me immediately and quickly came my way on invisible casters.
‘Bernie. You look troubled. Are you all right?’
‘What’s the point of complaining, Willy?’
‘I don’t know; the wheel that squeaks the loudest in Germany these days usually gets the most grease. What brings you here?’
‘A word in private, Willy.’
We went down a small flight of stairs to an office. Willy closed the door and poured two small glasses of sherry. I knew he was seldom away from the restaurant for longer than it took to inspect the china in the men’s room so I came straight to the point.
‘When I was in Paris I liberated some coffee,’ I said. ‘Real coffee, not the muck we get in Germany. Beans. Algerian beans. A whole kilo.’ I put the bread bag on Willy’s desk and let him inspect the contents.
For a moment he just closed his eyes and inhaled the aroma; then he groaned a groan that I’d seldom heard outside a bedroom.
‘You’ve certainly earned that drink. I’d forgotten what real coffee smells like.’
I hit my tonsils with the sherry.
‘A kilo, you say? That’s a hundred marks on the black market, last time I tried to get any. And since there isn’t any coffee to be had anywhere, it’s probably more. No wonder we invaded France. For coffee like this I’d crawl into Leningrad.’
‘They haven’t got any there, either.’ I let him refill my glass. The sherry was hardly the best but then nothing was, not even in the Adlon. Not any more. ‘I was thinking that you might like to treat some of your special guests.’
‘Yes, I might.’ He frowned. ‘But you can’t want money. Not for something as precious as this, Bernie. Even the devil has to drink mud with powdered milk in it these days.’
He took another noseful of the aroma and shook his head. ‘So what do you want? The Adlon is at your disposal.’
‘I don’t want that much. I just want some food.’
‘You disappoint me. There’s nothing we have in our kitchens that’s worthy of coffee like this. And don’t be fooled by what’s on the menu.’ He collected a menu off the desk and handed it to me. ‘There are two meat dishes on the menu when the kitchen can actually serve only one. But we put two on for the sake of appearances. What can you do? We have a reputation to uphold.’
‘Suppose someone asks for the dish you don’t have?’ I said.
‘Impossible.’ Willy shook his head. ‘As the first customer comes through the door we cross off the second dish. It’s Hitler’s choice. Which is to say it’s no choice at all.’
He paused.
‘You want food for this coffee? What kind of food?’
‘I want food in cans.’
‘Ah.’
‘The quality isn’t important as long as it’s edible. Canned meat, canned fruit, canned milk, canned vegetables. Whatever you can find. Enough to last for a while.’
‘You know canned goods are strictly forbidden, don’t you? That’s the law. All canned goods are for the war front. If you’re stopped on the street with canned food you’d be in serious trouble. All that precious metal. They’ll think you’re going to sell it to the RAF.’
‘I know it. But I need food that can last and this is the best place to get it.’
‘You don’t look like a man who can’t get to the shops, Bernie.’
‘It isn’t for me, Willy.’
‘I thought not. In which case it’s none of my business what you want it for. But I tell you what, Commissar, for coffee like this I am ready to commit a crime against the state. Just as long as you don’t tell anyone. Now come with me. I think we have some canned goods from before the war.’
We went along to the hotel storeroom. This was as big as the lock-up underneath the Alex but easier on the ear and the nose. The door was secured with more padlocks than the German National Bank. In there he filled my bread bag with as many cans as it could carry.
‘When these cans are gone come and get some more, if you’re still at liberty. And if you’re not then please forget you ever met me.’
‘Thanks, Willy.’
‘Now I have a small favour to ask you, Bernie. Which might even be to your advantage. There’s an American journalist staying here in the hotel. One of several, as it happens. His name is Paul Dickson and he works for the Mutual Broadcasting System. He would dearly like to visit the war front but apparently such things are forbidden. Everything is forbidden now. The only way we know what’s permitted is if we do something and manage to stay out of prison.
‘Now I know you are recently returned from the front. And you notice I don’t ask what it’s like out there. In the East. Just seeing a compass these days makes me feel sick. I don’t ask because I don’t want to know. You might even say this is why I went into the hotel business: because the outside world is of no concern to me. The guests in this hotel are my world and that’s all the world I need to know. Their happiness and satisfaction is all that I care about.
‘So, for Mr Dickson’s happiness and satisfaction I ask that you meet with him. But not here in the hotel. No, not here. It’s hardly safe to talk in the Adlon. There are several suites of rooms on the top floor that have been taken over by people from the Foreign Office. And these people are guarded by German soldiers wearing steel helmets. Can you imagine it. Soldiers, here in the Adlon. Intolerable. It’s just like 1919 all over again but without the barricades.’
‘What are workers from the Foreign Office doing here that they can’t do in the Ministry?’
‘Some of them are destined for the new Foreign Travel Office, when it’s finished. But the rest are typing. Morning, noon and night, they’re typing. Like it’s for a speech by the Mahatma.’
