the ground, holding candles and cakes, second-hand clothes and shoes, weapons and kettles, pots and scratched 78s, dirty postcards and poetry books. Men with big pockets and Hessian sacks showed off their finds: a few decaying potatoes, a lump of coal. It was the fag-end of a society, and in its way brought home to me how close we were. And how stupid it had all been.
This was Petticoat Strasse, with its spivs and shysters, fishwives and conmen, mugs and fraudsters. The smells were much the same: tobacco everywhere, a pungent tang from a stall selling coffee made from acorns, the great unwashed wearing the same clothes day in day out, nostril-twitching perfumes and hair-cream made from cooking oil. And as I watched and listened and tuned into the language, I began to feel strangely at home. If a camp with barbed wire and gun towers could fairly be called home.
I stopped at lunchtime for a beer and a black bread sandwich of some strong cheese. Re-fuelled, I pressed on through the afternoon. I repeated the process in two other spots, one to the south in the American sector and one to the north in the French. I followed the same pattern in each: threading my way through the crowds, stopping here and there to ask, in growing self-confidence, if they had seen the woman in the photo. I chose the ones who stood back a little, or who flitted between groups and who whispered in others’ ears. I got shakes of the head and curt neins. From one I got a long cool glance. He reached inside his jacket and brought out his identity card. He was American, security services.
“Watch who you’re talking to, buddy.” I guess my accent wasn’t fooling anybody.
I was doing something, but the heat was oppressive and my feet were killing me.
I was beginning to lose heart, and thinking about calling it a day, when I heard a phrase that made my ears twitch like a pony’s. A phrase I’d found twice in Eva’s notes. Hellish door. Two middle-aged women in headscarves were gossiping while they rummaged through a pile of third-hand clothes.
“Excuse me, Fraulein. Hellish door? What is that?”
The fat one eyed me up like I’d just pinched her huge bum. “Hallesches Tor, you fool. Everyone knows that.”
“It is a place, then?”
The slimmer one sighed. “Hildie, he’s from Hamburg. Hear him. Yes, Hallesches Tor is a place. Old Berlin. In Kreuzberg. It’s caught between the Reds and the Americans. Don’t go there if you want to come back with both balls!”
The women roared at their humour. I laughed with them and pressed them into giving me a better picture of this segment of the city. The way they described it, my pronunciation wasn’t far wrong. Even before the war it was a slum, they said. Rats as big as the children, and full of cutthroats, gypsies and Jews. I asked of black markets in the area. They told me of a very black market off Wassertorstrasse, where you could buy fresh meat, if you weren’t fussy if it came from a rat or a Jew. They laughed some more, but I sensed they weren’t entirely joking.
I limped off, my leg and feet aching but my head throbbing with excitement. I went back to my room and had a wash and a cup of tea. I had time to grab a bite at the canteen and then I set off again.
Dusk was already gripping the Leipziger Strasse as I passed the giant portrait of Stalin and slipped into the Russian zone. I began to notice the difference in the sectors. Here, there were fewer working gas lamps, and – maybe it was my imagination – something in the attitude of the people, something more closed and wary, that distinguished them from their cousins in the west.
I recognised Wassertorstrasse by the cobbled paving and the old stone gate that must have marked the city boundary centuries before. Here the streets were even narrower and darker. Hardly a lamp remained, and the rubble from ruined tenements lay where they’d toppled. Thin paths led through the mounds of stones, and the smell of raw sewage hung in the air like a curtain. Old posters of Brown Shirt rallies stained the walls. Swastikas were carved in the stones. Scrawled denunciations of Jews still held sway.
The tenements themselves were three and four storeys tall, with narrow closes and broken windows. Washing hung from poles stuck outside some of the open windows. Rubbish lay in the streets, wrapped round the piles of bricks and slates from bombed buildings. Though it was already too dark to see properly, thin and dirty kids still ran in and out of the entries screaming and laughing, oblivious to their bare feet and hollowed cheeks. I stopped and looked around me, and wondered if I’d taken a wrong turning in time and place, and wound up back in the Gorbals.
I was aware of eyes on me from windows and doorways, and for comfort I shifted the gun, tucked into my waistband at the back, round to the front. Shooting my own balls off suddenly seemed like a lesser risk.
I pressed on and emerged on to a small enclosed square with one entrance and one exit on the far side. It was like a ghoul’s convention. The scene was lit by a central bonfire and the pale glow from the windows of a bar. Clumps of people stood round talking and haggling. Here and there people had thrown rugs down on the cobbles to present their shoddy wares in the best light. Crockery and food lay in dark piles. I’d found the black market.
Some of the groups shunned the firelight. They were in complete darkness except for the red glow of a cigarette or a struck match. I felt an intruder. I had no wish to approach anyone and show them Eve’s photo. I stood back in the shadows, watching, thinking through my next steps.
I’d all but decided to beat a retreat when I saw her. A fleeting glimpse. A profile, a cast of the shoulder. But it was enough. My heart stopped. I drew back further into the shadows to watch her go from one group to another, always checking around her. She didn’t see me. She wore a knee-length frock of some dark material. On her head was a familiar beret, less bulky than before. She carried a shopping bag, its straps over her shoulder. At last she broke free and walked off into the night, heading away from Wassertorstrasse and deeper into the Russian zone. Hardly breathing, I began to follow her.
SIXTEEN
She walked fast, in that purposeful way I knew so well, going somewhere, doing something. There were one or two others around and I kept to the opposite side of the street. She turned down an alley and we were again on cobbles. It made her heels click louder and I grew more conscious of my own footsteps. I daren’t lose her, but I couldn’t get too close. Once she glanced round but kept going. A patrol stopped her under a gas lamp. They joked with her until she showed her papers, then let her go and picked on me a hundred paces behind her. They seemed to take forever reading my documents, warned me about the curfew and finally let me go.
I looked down the narrow street. It was deserted. Frantically I trotted after her. There was a crossroad ahead. She must have turned off. I had to get there before she disappeared completely. A much narrower alleyway ran at right angles to this one. I peered down the dark shaft to my left and listened for a footstep. She could have gone into any of a dozen tenements along here; the entries were black and forbidding. I darted over to the other side and stared and listened. All I could hear was the blood in my ears. Then faintly, I heard some steps, far down the alley. I plunged into the gloom. The walls crowded round me. I could almost touch both sides at once.
I was deep into the wynd. My eyes began to adjust and I made out dustbins and a great pile of rubble. I skirted it as best I could, stumbling and clutching the wall for support. I clambered down on to the cobbles and straightened up. That’s when the world landed on my head. I fell forward, with a great weight crushing my skull and sending fireworks off inside my eyeballs. I thought part of the crumbling building had collapsed on me. I was dazed and on my hands and knees when the blow came again. This was no act of god, and this time it was final.
“Bring me some water.”
It was her voice from a distance, so I knew I was dreaming. But I stirred my head anyway and felt pain blasting through me. I heard a gasp and realised it came from me. I lay panting, moving my hands and legs trying to feel the rest of my body. I seemed to be on a bed, lying on my side.
“Take it slow.” She was speaking again. This time she was closer.
Another groan. I opened my eyes. Pain washed through my skull again. “Oh shit.”
I managed.
“Danny, if I lift your head can you take a drink?”
Impossible. It would hurt too much. “Yes.”
I felt her hand go under my neck and ease my head up a fraction. The pain clutched at my eyes. “Sick,” I got out. She eased me back down and rolled me further over so that my face was at the edge of the bed. She stood up fast, and came back with a bowl, just in time to catch my vomit. It brought great gasps from me and I felt myself
