journalists never went, Prenzlauer or the tenement streets in Wedding, just to see what they were like, his eyes gliding from building to building, oblivious to curbs. Now he had to step carefully, skirting clumps of broken cement and picking his way through plaster and glass that crunched underfoot. The city had become a trail hike, full of obstacles and sharp things hidden under stones. Steel rods twisted into spiky shapes, still black from fire. The familiar rotting smell. At the corner of Pallasstrasse, the remains of the Sportpalast, where bicycles used to whiz by in the rac-ing oval and Hitler promised the faithful a thousand years. Only the giant flak tower was standing, like the ones at the zoo, too sturdy even for boombs. A soldier was propped against the wall with one hand, talking to a girl and fondling her hair, the oldest black market in the world. Across tile street, a few other girls in thin dresses leaned against a standing wall, gesturing to convoy trucks. At ten o’clock in the morning.
The side streets were clogged with debris, so he kept to the main roads, turning left on Bulowstrasse for the long walk up to the zoo. This was a part of town he’d known well, the elevated station hulking over Nollendorfplatz, with its ring of bars. A movie marquee had slid down to the pavement nearly intact, as if the building had been whipped out from under it, like the magic trick with a tablecloth. A few people were out, one of them pushing a baby carriage filled with household goods, and Jake realized that the dazed, plodding movement he’d seen from the jeep two days ago was the new pace of the city, as careful as his own. Nobody walked quickly over rubble. Why would anyone come to Berlin? Had Tully been before? There must be traveling orders, something to check. The army ran in duplicate.
More blocks of collapsed buildings, more groups of women in headscarves and old uniform pants, cleaning bricks. A woman in heels stepped out of one building, smartly dressed, as if she were heading up the street as usual for some shopping at KaDeWe. Instead she wobbled over some broken plaster to a waiting army car and straightened her nylons as she pulled her legs in, a different kind of excursion. And KaDeWe, in any case, was gone, ripped through by bombs and sagging into Wittenbergplatz, not even a window mannequin left. They used to meet here sometimes, by the wurst stands on the food floor, where you were likely to run into anybody, then leave separately for Jake’s flat across the square. Taking different sides so that Jake could see her through the crowd as he waited at the stoplight, watching to see that no one followed. No one did. A game to make it more exciting, getting away with something. Then up the stairs where she’d be waiting, a ring to make sure Hal was out, and inside, sometimes grabbing each other even before the door clicked shut. The flat would be gone now too, like the afternoons, a memory.
Except it wasn’t. Jake looked across the street, shading his eyes again. A piece of the building had been knocked out, but the rest was there, with his corner flat still facing west onto the square. He took a step, elated, then stopped. What would he say? ‘I used to live here and I want to see it again’? He imagined another Frau Dzuris, looking puzzled and hoping for chocolate. A woman came to the window, opening it wider to the air, and for an instant he stopped breathing, straining to see. Why couldn’t it be? But it wasn’t Lena, wasn’t anything like
Lena. A truck went by, blocking the view, and when it passed, the broad back was turned to the window so that he couldn’t see her face, but of course he’d know, just the movement of her arm at the window, even from across the square. He dropped his hand, feeling foolish. A friend of the landlord’s, no doubt, eager to snap up the flat when Hal finally left. Someone who wouldn’t know him, might not even believe he’d been there at all. Why should she? The past had been wiped out with the streets. But the flat was there, real, a kind of proof that everything else had happened too. If he looked long enough, maybe the rest of the square would come back with it, busy, the way it all used to be.
He turned away and caught a glimpse of himself in a broken shard of plate glass from the store window. Nothing was the way it used to be, not even him. Would she recognize him now? He stared at the reflection. Not a stranger, but not the man she had known either. A lived-in face, older, with two deep lines bracketing his mouth. Dark hair thinning back from the temples. A face he saw every day shaving, without noticing it had changed. He imagined her looking at him, smoothing away lines with her fingers to find him. But faces didn’t come back either. They got cluttered with assignments and frantic telegrams, squint“ lines from seeing too much. They’d been kids. Only four years, and look at all the marks. His face was still there, like the flat, but scarred now too, not the one he’d had before. But the war had changed everybody. At least he was here, not dead or turned into a set of initials. POWs. DPs.
He stopped, a tiny, nagging jolt. Initials. He took out the carbon sheets and scanned them again. That was it. He put the top sheet under, glanced over the second, then automatically shuffled for the third and stopped, empty-handed. But Jeanie had had three carbons. He squinted, trying to remember. Yes, three, like a stacked deck. He stood for another minute thinking, then put the sheets away and started up the street again toward the zoo, where small amounts of money were being made. ‹›The driver took him back to Bernie’s office, a small room in the old Luftwaffe building crammed with files and stacks of questionnaires that spilled off the couch and rose in piles on the floor, a mare’s nest of paper. How did he find anything? The desk was worse. More stacks and loose clippings, stale coffee cups, even an abandoned tie-everything, in fact, but Bernie, who was out again. Jake flipped open one of the files, a buff-colored fragebogen like one Lena might have filled out, a life on six typed pages. But this was Herr Gephardt, whose spotless record deserved, he claimed, a work permit.
“Don’t touch anything,” said a soldier at the door. “He’ll know. Believe it or not.”
“Any idea when he’ll be back? I keep missing him.”
“You the guy from yesterday? He said you might be by. Try the Document Center. He’s usually there. Wasserkafersteig,” he said, breaking it into syllables.
“Where?”
The soldier smiled. “Mouthful, huh? If you hold on a sec, I’ll take you-I was just going myself. I can find it, I just can’t spell it.”
They drove west past the press camp to the U-bahn station at Krumme Lanke, where a handful of soldiers and civilians huddled in a miniature version of the Reichstag market, then turned right down a quiet street. At the far end Jake could see the trees of the Grunewald. He thought of the old summer Sundays, with hikers in shorts heading out to the beaches where the Havel widened into the series of bays Berlin called lakes. Today, in the same hot sun, there were only a few people gathering fallen branches and loading them into carts. An axe chipped away at a broad stump.
“Pathetic, isn’t it?” the soldier said. “They chop down the trees when nobody’s looking. There won’t be anything left by winter.” A winter with no coal, according to Muller.
At the edge of the woods, they turned up a narrow street of suburban villas, one of which had been turned into a fortress with a high barbed-wire double fence, floodlights, and patrolling sentries.
“They’re not taking any chances,” Jake said.
“DPs camp out in the woods. Once it’s dark—”
“What’s in there, gold?”
“Better. For us, anyway. Party records.”
He showed a pass at the door, then led Jake to a sign-in ledger in the entrance hall. Another guard was inspecting the briefcase of a soldier on his way out. Neither spoke. The council headquarters had had the busy shoe-clicking hum of a government office. This was quieter, the locked-in hush of a bank. One more ID check took them into a room lined with filing cabinets.
“Christ. Fort Knox,” Jake said.
“Bernie’ll be down in the vault,” the soldier said, smiling. “Counting the bars. This way.”
“Where’d you get it all?” Jake said, looking at the cabinets.
“All over. The party kept everything right to the end-membership applications, court records. Guess they never thought they’d lose. Then they couldn’t destroy them fast enough.” He spread his hand toward the cabinets as they walked. “We got the SS files too, even Himmler’s personal one. The big haul, though, that’s downstairs. Index cards. The central party registry in Munich kept duplicates of all the local cards-every single Nazi. Eight million and counting. Sent them to a paper mill in Bavaria finally, to pulp them, but before the owner could get around to it, the Seventh Army arrived. So, voila. Now we’ve got them. Here we go.” He went down a staircase to the basement. “Teitel, you here? I found your guy.”
Bernie was bent over a broad table whose littered surface was a mirror image of the mess in his office. The room, an alcoved cellar that might once have held wine, was now walled from floor to ceiling with wooden drawers, like card catalogues in a library. When he looked up, his eyes were confused, as if he had no idea who Jake was.
“Sorry to barge in like this,” Jake said. “I know you’re busy. But I need your help.”
