Waking alone on Monday morning, Effi had the momentary sensation of being back in the house on Bismarckstrasse, with the war still underway. The sense of relief when she realised it wasn’t caused her to laugh out loud.
The Russians had announced the closure of the Babelsberg studios until Tuesday. The reason given was ‘refurbishment’, but what this amounted to was left unspecified — one joker among the prop boys had put his money on the installation of hidden microphones and cameras. Whatever the reason, Effi had the day off, and a chance to question the authorities about her flat on Carmerstrasse.
She was relieved that Russell had left Berlin. The exodus to Palestine seemed a good story, and few things made him happier than gnawing at one of those. Rather more importantly, it put him — or so she hoped — beyond Geruschke’s reach. Russell might have presented the story of his abduction as a bad, semi-comic movie script, but she could tell how badly it had shaken him. And that had scared her. Losing him was not something she wanted to contemplate.
And then there was Otto 3, who seemed, from the little that Wilhelm Isendahl had told them, like a father who might be worth finding. She might not like the consequences, but she had to put Rosa first.
She was pleased that Hanna and Lotte wanted to come home, even though that meant that she and John would need to move out. The sooner normal life was resumed, the sooner Rosa could come home.
Though of course it would be different for her. Rosa was Jewish — that was why Effi had needed to take her in. But what did that mean for the future? Sometimes the girl’s Jewishness seemed easy to ignore. Rosa had never mentioned, let alone requested, any sort of religious or cultural observance, and she had, on one or two occasions, displayed an unusually virulent atheism for a seven year-old. Though after what she and her family had been through, perhaps nothing should seem surprising.
But still. Could she and John just ignore the girl’s background? Didn’t it help people to know where they came from? The girl’s life had been shaped by the catastrophe that the Nazis had inflicted on her people, and one day she would want to know why. If her father was found, he would raise her as a Jewish daughter.
A second pang of prospective loss was enough to drive Effi from the bed. She threw on some winter clothes and went downstairs in search of breakfast. If they did bring Rosa back, she would have the highest-grade ration card, just like herself and John. The leading actor, the journalistspy, the ‘Victim of Fascism’ — Berlin’s privileged few.
Half an hour later she was boarding a bus at the stop on Kronprinzenallee. Riding northward, she realised that her own doubts were gone — she wanted to stay. The filming was going well, and it felt wonderful, not just to be working again, but to be making a movie that mattered, one that might help her fellow Germans come to terms with what had happened. It felt like atonement of a sort, or the beginnings of such.
And it was good to be around Thomas again, and Ali, and Annaliese.
And John had to be here, at least until he found some way of disentangling himself from the Soviet embrace. Effi remembered him once saying that espionage was like quicksand — the more you struggled, the more you were trapped. But if anyone could wriggle his way free then he could.
The previous evening she had talked to Thomas about the flat on Carmerstrasse, and he had suggested legal help — Berlin might be short of food and housing, but lawyers were springing up like weeds. Effi knew she couldn’t cast a family of refugees out onto the street, but that begged the question of who she would be willing to eject — whoever the current inhabitants were, they wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.
She had hoped Thomas would know how the current system worked, but it seemed to vary from district to district. There had to be tens of thousands of people returning from war or exile, and only a few would be Jews. And, as Thomas had cheerfully reminded her, most of the city’s property deeds had fallen victim to explosions or fire. He had advised her to start at the local town hall and see what they had to say.
She seemed to remember that their local Rathaus had been reduced to its constituent bricks, but, as she’d expected, enough of the front wall remained for a notice board bearing the new address.
The new offices were a ten-minute walk away, in what had once been an elementary school, and probably would be again. There were about twenty people waiting in the old lobby, but none, as she soon discovered, were there to enquire about housing. She was directed down a long corridor, still lined, somewhat surprisingly, with thematic maps of the vanished Reich, to the classroom now occupied by the Housing Office. This comprised an elderly man and woman, stationed at adjoining tables beyond several neat rows of abandoned desks.
The man made a note of her name and the Carmerstrasse address, and began working his way through the twenty or so cardboard boxes which lined the wall behind him, occasionally pausing to stretch his back. After about five minutes he emitted a grunt of surprise, which Effi rightly assumed meant success.
He brought several pieces of paper back to the table, and skimmed through them. ‘This flat was confiscated by the state on February 10th, 1942’, he told her. ‘Ownership was forfeited following the owner’s — your — arraignment for treason.’ He looked over his glasses at Effi with rather more interest than he’d initially shown.
‘Which means what?’ Effi asked him.
He looked confused. ‘Which part don’t you understand?’
‘I understand all of it. Are you telling me that this ruling still holds?’
‘As of this moment, yes.’
‘Decisions of the Nazi courts are still valid?’
‘Most of them, yes. There has to be continuity.’
Effi held on to her temper. ‘Are you telling me the apartment is no longer mine?’
‘No, not necessarily. But I’m afraid you cannot expect to simply resume possession.’
But it’s mine, she felt like shouting.
‘You will have to apply for repossession,’ he said. He was, she realised, actually trying to help.
‘So I’ll need a lawyer.’
He nodded. ‘I would certainly recommend it.’
‘Who’s living there now?’ she asked. ‘And how long have they been there?’ She would feel much better about ejecting a family who’d been gifted the apartment by the local Nazis than she would a group of refugees from the East.
‘The name of the current residents is Puttkammer,’ he read from his papers. ‘A woman and three children. They moved in earlier this year, in March.’
Well at least they weren’t Jews, Effi thought. Not then, and not with a name like that. She asked for advice on how to proceed, and gratefully watched as he wrote out a simple list of steps she needed to take, and where she should go to take them. It sounded straightforward enough, though likely to take every hour God sent. It would all have to wait until filming was over.
She thanked him and made her way back to the street. Schluterstrasse and its cafeteria were only a short walk away, so she headed that way, hoping for lunch with Ellen Grynszpan. The former was available, the latter not, and after eating Effi started for home. But as she passed the remains of the Schmargendorf Rathaus on Hohenzollerndamm, it occurred to her that Zarah’s house might be standing empty.
This time it was a woman she eventually spoke to. Effi explained the situation: that she was there on her sister’s behalf, that Zarah and her son Lothar were in London, and that her brother-in-law was probably dead.
‘Jens Biesinger?’ the woman asked, reaching for a file of papers.
‘Yes,’ Effi agreed, somewhat surprised.
‘What makes you think he’s dead?’
‘The last time Zarah saw him, he told her he had suicide pills for them both. That was in April, just before the Russians entered the city.’
‘And she wanted to live,’ the woman said drily. ‘Apparently he did too.’
‘You mean he’s still alive?’
She was still looking at the file. ‘He is indeed. And would you believe it? — he’s working for us.’
‘Us?’
‘The District Administration. At the Housing Office.’
Effi couldn’t believe it. ‘And where’s that?’
‘On Guntzelstrasse. It’s only a short walk away.’
‘So he’s still the legal owner of the house?’
‘According to this.’
‘Then I suppose I’ll have to go round there,’ Effi decided. She couldn’t honestly say she was eager to see Jens
