two of them had spent the last three years enjoying life in New York or Hollywood. But even if she'd never left Germany, what would she be doing in Furstenwalde? And with a girl who was at least seven, and couldn't be her daughter. And the woman had been too old – Effi couldn't have aged that much in three and a half years. No, it had to be someone who looked like her. Had to be.
He searched the windows of the stationary train, but the face did not reappear. And when the train pulled out, she was not among the passengers who had failed to get aboard. He shook his head and made his way to the Oderbruch Railway platforms, which stood ominously empty. The line ran much too close to the current Russian positions for comfort, and its northern section had been closed several weeks before. A shuttle service to Seelow had survived, but this, as a harassed railway employee told him, was now only running under cover of darkness. He had six hours to wait.
Paul wandered out of the station, passing the spot where he and Ger- hart had sat the week before. He would have found it difficult then to imagine his friend dead; now he found it hard to imagine him alive. Life seem punctuated by implacable, irreversible events, like a series of doors clanging shut behind him in an endless straight corridor.
He walked on into town, hoping to pick up a lift, but nothing seemed to be going his way. He did find a relatively well-stocked shop, and exchanged his remaining ration coupons for a pound of sugar. Neumaier, who liked four spoonfuls in any hot drink, would be deep in his debt.
As he walked back outside, a water lorry drew up beside him and the driver, a Volkssturm man in his forties or fifties, leant out and asked directions for Seelow. 'I'll show you,' Paul told him as he climbed aboard.
They drove out of Furstenwalde and up onto the plateau, Paul scanning the sky for hostile aircraft while his taciturn companion watched the road. As they drew nearer to the front the sounds of sporadic gunfire grew louder, and it became apparent that the driver was unused to such proximity. 'Do you think the offensive has started?' he asked.
'No,' Paul told him. He had been through offensive-opening barrages, and conversation had not been possible. 'When they do attack it'll be just before dawn,' he added reassuringly.
The driver let him off in the woods between Diedersdorf and Seelow, and Paul, watching the lone lorry motor off down the sun-dappled avenue of trees, had a sudden inexplicable urge to cry. He resisted it, feeling angry with himself. What did he have to be upset about? He was alive.
Ten minutes later he was back at the clearing. Neumaier and Hannes were still kicking their ball to and fro, which momentarily angered him. But football hadn't killed his friend.
Sergeant Utermann was at his usual post, sitting on the fallen tree trunk outside their dugout. The soldier perched beside him looked young from a distance and younger close up – his uniform was way too big for him, and when he stood to salute the trousers bunched up around his ankles. More depressing still, he had the look of someone pleased to be there.
'This is Haaf,' Utermann told Paul.
Half a soldier, Paul thought, remembering his English. Well it wasn't the boy's fault. He offered a hand.
'Haaf heard some good news at battalion,' Utermann went on, as Neumaier and Hannes came over to join them. 'The British and Americans are about to make peace. With any luck they'll soon be fighting the Russians alongside us.'
'And there are 500 new tanks on the way,' the boy added with barely suppressed excitement. 'And special divisions with new weapons.'
'Is that all?' Hannes asked drily, causing the boy to blush.
'It's what I heard,' he insisted.
'It could be true,' Utermann said, backing him up. 'Someone at battalion told me that everything's being held back for the Fuhrer's birthday.'
'Which is next Friday,' Haaf added. 'He'll be fifty-six.'
'I wouldn't put any bets on him reaching fifty-seven,' Paul heard himself say. It was, he realised, exactly the sort of thing his father would have said.
In Russell's Lyubyanka cell two more meals implied the passing of another day. He had been expecting his anxiety levels to rise, but actually felt calmer. A sudden realisation that the war might end without his knowing induced only a mild panic, which soon dissipated. He felt distanced from his own plight, almost philosophical.
It seemed somehow appropriate that he should end up in a Soviet prison. The final stop of a long and almost predictable journey. From the Flanders trenches to the Lyubyanka; from one murderous balls-up to another. A true twentieth-century Odyssey. Or should that be Iliad – he could never remember which was which.
How would he explain it all to Paul, assuming he ever got the chance? Where would he start?
He remembered that evening in Langemarke, the Belgian village behind the lines where he first heard news of the Bolshevik Revolution. He had carried the excitement back to his unit, and seen haggard faces break into smiles. Few of his fellow-soldiers were socialists, let alone Bolsheviks, but the war had given anyone with half a brain a pretty fair idea of how things really worked, and most needed little convincing that their world was ripe for radical change. The Bolshevik Revolution seemed like the first decisive breach in the wall, a great strike against privilege and exploitation, a wonderful harbinger of equality and brotherhood.
The desire for some sort of revolution had been intense, and support for the only one on offer was bound to reflect that fact. Despite the many indications, over succeeding years, that life was considerably less than perfect in the new socialist paradise, many found it hard to give up on the Soviet Union, and even those that did seemed burdened with a lingering affection. Russell had left the Party in the twenties, but had still given Stalin the benefit of the doubt for many more years than he should have. And now he had run the full gamut, from fraternal foreign comrade to enemy of the state. How many thousands – millions, even – had traversed the same path? For him, the straw that broke the camel's back had been Stalin's return of exiled German communists to the Nazis. But there'd been plenty of others to choose from.
And yet. There were still thousands of communists out there – millions even – who thought they were fighting for a better world. They had taken the fight to the Nazis and fascists before anyone else, and they still led most of the resistance armies, from France through Yugoslavia and all the way to China. Communists like Gerhard Strohm in Berlin, and the Ottings in Stettin – they had fought the good fight. They had saved Russell's life in the process, and probably paid with their own.
He supposed the same could be said of Christians and Christianity. Russell had been an atheist as long as he could remember, and generally despised all religion, but there was no denying the integrity and bravery of those individual Christians who had stood up to the Nazis, and who were now either dead or languishing in concentration camps. Perhaps both Christianity and communism only worked in opposition, as inspirational ideologies for the have-nots of any particular time and place. Once the proponents of those ideologies became established in power, moral corrosion always set in.
It was not an original thought, but he was very tired. He could think up a new universal theory tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. There seemed no shortage of time.
It was him, Effi thought; she was certain it was. She tried to force her way through to the windows on the other side, but made little headway. The train was packed with real refugees, bearing all the belongings that they'd managed to rescue from the ruins of their former lives, and they weren't about to surrender another square foot.
'What are you doing?' Rosa shouted after her, the obvious anxiety stopping Effi in her tracks.
'I thought I saw someone I knew,' Effi told her, once they were together in the corridor.
'Who?' Rosa asked excitedly. 'No, don't tell me,' she quickly added, having obviously realised than the 'someone' might well be out of place in their new fictional existences.
'He was the son of an old friend,' Effi told her. 'I haven't seen him for two years,' she added. And then only for a few seconds in the Tiergarten. He'd been a flakhelfer then, but now he was wearing an army uniform. He looked about a foot taller. And he was heading east, into the disaster which everyone knew awaited the army.
Both before and during the war – right up until his illicit exit in December 1941 – John had often talked about taking Paul and her away from Germany, but they had always known that the boy would refuse to go. His father
