overeager exits. Effi and Rosa helped one old woman down the steps and into the shelter of the woods which lined each side of the tracks. She was visiting her daughter in Furstenwalde, and had already decided that this would be 'the last time.'
They waited for the best part of an hour, but no plane swept down to attack the stationary train, and eventually the driver sounded his whistle to announce the resumption of their journey. Everyone climbed back on board, and the train set off again. A stop at Erkner was mercifully brief, but long enough to allow an inspection team aboard. These men were meticulous, Effi noticed, as they slowly advanced down the corridor, and for a few seconds she entertained the wholly ridiculous idea of jumping from the train. Instead, she gave Rosa a comforting pat on the shoulder and reminded herself that idiots like these had been checking Frau von Freiwald's papers for years without noticing anything amiss.
They were finally in front of her, two plump, fortyish men in plain clothes with bile for brains. The taller of the two took the papers from Effi, and began to examine them. 'And why are you going to Furstenwalde?' he asked without looking up. He made it sound the most unlikely of destinations.
'To see my sister. I'm hoping that I can persuade her to return to Berlin with me. This is her daughter, my niece.'
'What is your mother's address?' the shorter man asked Rosa.
'Nordstrasse 53,' the girl said promptly. With no time to visit the library, Effi had picked the name out of the ether the previous night. 'Do you think the Fuhrer is still in Berlin?' Rosa asked her questioner, improvising rather too freely for Effi's peace of mind.
The man opened his mouth and then shut it again, apparently reconsidering his answer. 'The Fuhrer's whereabouts are not a matter for public discussion,' he eventually decided.
'Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know,' Rosa said with a look of surpassing innocence.
'Well now you do,' the man said weakly. His colleague was going through their papers for a second time, as if determined to find something amiss. Failing, he almost flung them back at Effi.
'She's very young,' Effi told the shorter man in part-apology. 'But she means well.'
'I'm sure she does,' he said coldly. He gave them a quick nod, and turned away. His partner scowled at them both before moving on into the next carriage.
'He stank of onions,' Rosa whispered.
And so much else, Effi thought to herself.
When they finally reached Furstenwalde late in the afternoon, Effi was still hopeful of their getting back to Berlin that day. But the news was all bad. A bridge had been bombed a few miles to the east, a locomotive had broken down a similar distance to the west, and nothing much was moving.
The station platforms were already crowded with families in flight from the east, and looking at them convinced Effi that a quick change of clothes was in order for herself and Rosa. Reasoning that an outward show of respectability should help them through checkpoints, they had ventured east in fairly smart outfits, but Effi had also thought to pack some shabbier clothes in their suitcases for this eventuality. Rosa had even remembered something one of her mother's friends had once said – that tying a piece of string around a suitcase made the owner look more desperate.
Once darkness had fallen, they changed clothes in the still-immaculate station toilets. They flushed as well as they looked, and Effi took the opportunity to dispose of her papers. She had grown rather fond of Erna von Freiwald, and felt slightly bereft at losing her.
Looking suitably distressed, they availed themselves of the free food on offer from the NSV – the National Socialist Welfare Agency – in the forecourt outside. Feeling unusually replete, they returned to a different end of the crowded platform, found a space for themselves, and settled down to wait. Rosa soon fell asleep, but Effi lay there, her head resting uncomfortably on the edge of her suitcase, listening to the conversations going on around her. There were two main themes – the horror of what had gone before, and the fear of what was to come. Rape and murder had apparently been commonplace in those parts of Germany now overrun by the Russians, and if the voices in the dark could be believed, the popular stories of crucifixions and other atrocities were not just the product of Goebbels' imagination. When it came to the future, it was Berlin and its people that seemed to worry the refugees most. Everyone knew that all Berliners were liars and thieves, and the thought of living in this modern day Gomorrah seemed almost as frightening as what they'd already been through.
Many of the stories were hard to listen to, and Effi was glad that Rosa was sleeping. But she kept her own ears open. These were the experiences that her new fictional identity would remember, and she needed every conviction-enhancing detail she could get.
It was a few minutes after six, and the light of the unrisen sun was leaking into the eastern sky, when Paul let himself out of the Grunewald house, locked the front door and set off without a backward look for the West- kreuz S-Bahn station. He had spent most of the last forty-eight hours indoors, going out only once to eat at a restaurant in nearby Halensee. He had listened to the BBC for a couple of hours each evening, and heard nothing that really surprised him. He had used the daylight hours to tidy and clean, working on the house like a doctor feverishly intent on saving a patient. It had felt absurd – he was not really expecting to see the place again – but also deeply satisfying. One small part of his world was in order.
He was heading for Westkreuz because a clerk at the Halensee station had told him that Stadtbahn trains were still running out to the eastern suburb of Erkner, and that from there he could take a suburban train on to Furstenwalde. He was leaving at first light in hope of getting across Berlin before the morning air raid, and because he suspected that his sixty-kilometre journey would take most of the day. Whatever fate and the Russians had in store for him, he had no intention of being shot for desertion.
Half an hour later he was part of the crowd waiting on the Westkreuz eastbound platform. He didn't have long to wait. A train ran in, already full to bursting, and he joined those forcing themselves aboard. The closing doors almost took his head off, leaving him squeezed inside with his arms pinioned to his sides. Once turned around, face up against the glass, he found himself with a panoramic view of what the Western allies had done to Berlin. Street upon gap-toothed street, the demolished Zoo and the scoured Tiergarten, the hollowed-out dome of the Winter Garden. The train sat for a while beneath the skeletal roof of Friedrichstrasse Station, then ventured onwards, almost tiptoeing around the long elevated curve above Dircksen Strasse. Many got off at Alexanderplatz and Silesian Station, but even more seemed to get on. Where were they all going?
In the yards beyond Silesian Station two railway cranes were clearing away debris, and a crowd of prisoners was at work replacing damaged sections of track. Soon they were running under the Ringbahn tracks and into Kopenick, passing several allotments full of old men tending vegetables. Like the farmers a few miles further on, they knew that the war was about to roll over them, but no one was expecting the Russians to feed Berlin. Every potato and carrot would count.
The train terminated at Erkner. Alighting, Paul was almost bowled over by the smell of the soldiers crowding the platform. There was no train east for several hours, so he went in search of food. There was none at the station, and getting into town involved passing through a military police checkpoint. As an officer checked through his papers, Paul surveyed the wall behind him, which was plastered from floor to ceiling with identical posters threatening death for desertion.
Paul walked on into the town, which had clearly been bombed more than once. He eventually found a restaurant with something to offer, though it was only thin soup and stale bread. He ate it with a soldier's gusto, and made his way back to the station, where the crowd seemed somewhat thinner. His train, when it came, was absurdly full, but once the MPs had cleared the front five carriages of civilians the soldiers were able to get on board, and they were soon steaming out across the orbital autobahn and into open country. There were watchers fore and aft looking out for Russian planes, but none put in an appearance, and in midafternoon they reached Furstenwalde.
The service was continuing east, and those wanting the Seelow line had to change. As Paul jostled his way through the crowd his train pulled noisily away, revealing an equally packed westbound platform. A woman in a long black dress caught his eye, though he couldn't have said why. She was talking to a small girl, and perhaps it was the way she inclined her head that made him think of Effi. At that moment, as if aware of his stare, she suddenly looked across at him, and almost broke into a smile.
And then a train slid between them, hiding her from view.
He told himself it couldn't have been her. He had always assumed that she had left with his father, that the
