Zoo Station

Class. It wasnt a medal given to manyhe must have done something pretty special. He supposed he should have realized that a Jew of Wiesners age would have fought in the war, but it hadn't occurred to him. Goebbelss propaganda was obviously working.

He wondered which front Wiesner had served on. He wondered, as he often did with Germans of his own age, whether theyd been facing him across those hundred yards of churned-up meadow near Merville. He sometimes wondered whether Frau Heideggers repeated accusation that he might have shot her husband was simply her way of warding off the possibility that he really had.

He had once thought that he was over the war, that time and circumstance had turned the horror into anger, the anger into politics, and the politics into cynicism, leaving only the abiding belief that people in authority tended, by and large, to be incompetent, uncaring liars. The war, by this accounting, had been the latest demonstration of a depressingly eternal truth. Nothing more.

Hed been fooling himself. All those whod been in that particular place at that particular time had been indelibly marked by the experience, and he was no exception. You never shook it off completelywhatever it was it had left you with, whether nerves in tatters, an endless rage, or a joy-sapping cynicism. And the memories never seemed to fade. That sudden waft of decomposing flesh, the rats eyes reflected in the shell-burst, the sight of ones own rotting feet. The unnerving beauty of a flare cracking the night sky open. Being splashed with someone elses brain, slapped in the face by death.

Jimmy Sewell was his name. After helping carry what was left of him back to the medical station, Russell had somehow ended up with the letter he had just written to his girlfriend. Things were looking up, Sewell had told her, now that the Yanks were arriving in force. It had been late June or early July, 1918. One of a string of sunny days in northern France.

He and Razor Wilkinson had hitched a ride to Hazebrouck that evening, and gotten pissed out of their minds in a dingy back street bar. The more he drank, the more his brain-spattered face seemed to itch, and he had ended up wading into the River Lys and frantically trying to wash himself clean. Razor had stood on the bank laughing at him, until he realized that Russell was crying, and then hed started crying too.

Twenty-one years ago, but Russell could still feel the current tugging at his legs. He levered himself out of bed and went to the window. Berlin was sleeping, but he could imagine Albert Wiesner lying in bed on his back, hands clenched around the blankets, staring angrily at the ceiling.

WITH PAUL OFF ON his Jungvolk adventure weekend, Russell and Effi spent most of Saturday morning in bed. Russell slipped on some clothes to bring back pastries and coffee from the shop around the corner, and slipped them off again when making love seemed more urgent than eating. Half an hour later Effi re-warmed the coffee on her tiny stove, and brought it back to the bedroom.

Tell me about the film part, Russell said, once they were propped up against the headboard. Effi had told him about the offer the night before, but had been too tired to go into details.

They start shooting on the thirteenth, she said. Two weeks on Monday. Marianne Immel had the part, but shes sickpregnant, probably, though no ones said so. They want me to audition on Tuesday morning, but Ill have to be pretty bad to miss outthey wont have time to find anyone else.

Whats it called?

Mother. And thats me. Its a big part.

Can I see the script?

Of course, but let me tell you the story first. She licked a pastry crumb from her upper lip and pushed her hair back behind her ears. I am Gerta, she said. I have a job in a factory, an important administrative job. I almost run the place for the owner. I like my work and Im good at it.

But only a woman, Russell murmured.

Indeed. My husband Hans has a good job on the railways. And needless to say hes active in the SA, very active in fact. Hans earns more than enough money to support the familywe have two children by the way, a sixteen-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boyand he rather thinks that I should give up work and look after them. But hes too kind-hearted to insist, and I keep on working.

I sense tragedy in the offing.

Ah, I should add that my boss fancies me no end. I dont fancy himhe looks decidedly Jewish by the waybut Hans is always away on Party businessyou know, organizing parades, running youth camps and generally saving the nationand the boss is kind enough and smooth enough to be good company, so I flirt with him a little and let him buy me pastries. Like you, in fact, she added, looking at Russell.

Do you flaunt your beautiful breasts at him? Russell asked.

Certainly not, she said, pulling her nightdress closed. Now concentrate.

Ill try.

One day she and the boss go to visit a factory hes thinking of buying, and on the way back they decided to stop off at a guesthouse with a famous view. On the way down the mountain his car gets a flat tire, and shes late getting home. Meanwhile, son and daughter have arrived home from school, and cant get in. They wait for a while, but its rainingbuckets of the stuffand son already has a cold. Daughter notices that one of the upstairs windows is ajar, and decides to climb up and in.

Only she doesnt make it.

How did you guess?

Dead or just paralyzed?

Oh, dead. Though I suppose having her in a wheelchair would provide a constant reminder of my guilt. Which is, of course, enormous. I give up my job, despite the pleas of my boss. But the guilt is still too much, so I try and kill myself. And guess who saves me?

Son?

Exactly. He comes home with a couple of Jungvolk buddies to find me head down on the kitchen table with an empty bottle of pills. They rush me to the hospital on the cart theyve been using to collect old clothes for Winter Relief.

And when you come round you realize that you can only atone for your daughters death by becoming the perfect stay-at-home mother.

Hans comes to collect me, takes me home, and tells me he cant bear me being so unhappy and that I can go back to work if I want to. Whereupon I give the speech of my life, castigating him for letting me have my own way in the past, and saying that all I really want to be is a wife and mother. He weeps with joy. In fact we both do. The end.

It does bring a tear to the eye, Russell said. Is it going to make you famous?

Shouldn't think so. But the moneys good, and it will involve some acting.

But no breast-flaunting.

I only do that for you, she said, pulling the nightdress open.

AFTER HED WALKED EFFI to the theater for the Barbarossa matinee, Russell ate a snack lunch at the Zoo Station buffet, climbed up to the elevated platforms, and sat watching the trains for a while. It was something he and Paul did on occasion, marveling at the long lines of carriages snaking in across the bridge from Cologne or Paris or the wonderfully named Hook of Holland. Today, though, he waited in vain for a continental express. There were only the neat little electric trains of the Stadtbahn, fussing in and out of the local platforms.

He walked around the northern wall of the zoo and, for want of something better to do, headed home along the Landwehrkanal. It had been a long time since hed spent a Saturday afternoon in Berlin alone, and he felt unexpectedly disoriented by the experience. To make matters worse it was the sort of winter day he hated: gray, damp, and almost insultingly warm. Even the canal smelled worse than usual.

When he reached home Frau Heidegger was lying in wait. Schachts long-expected dismissal as President of the Reichsbank had been all over the front pages that morning, and she was worried about how this might affect share prices. My Jurgens family gave me some Farben shares after the war, she explained, after press-ganging him in for coffee. Just a few, you understand, but I always thought they might come in handy in my old age.

Russell reassured her that Schachts dismissal was unlikely to have any lasting effect. Unlike the coming war, he added to himself. Or her coffee.