worked, either for crops or pasture. German agriculture, at least in the vicinity of Berlin, seemed a thing of the past.
Eventually they reached another road, and passed into another stretch of woodland. Russell was beginning to feel tired, and the younger Varennikov seemed only slightly more energetic. Kazankin and Gusakovsky, by contrast, looked capable of walking all the way home to the Soviet Union.
There were big houses in these woods, but neither lights nor barking dogs. The rich owners were long gone, probably up in the Alps, lamenting the fact that they couldn't ski all the year round.
And then, suddenly, they were standing on a small pebble beach, staring out across the dark Havelsee. The lake was at its narrowest here, little more than five hundred metres across. There were no lights visible, and all they could hear were breeze-ruffled leaves and their own breathing.
Kazankin was right, Russell thought. The Grunewald was big – almost fifty square kilometres. If they ran into walkers, so what? – they were foreign labourers, looking after the paths and the trees. They should get across tonight.
Gusakovsky was already inflating the boat, although where he was finding the breath was beyond Russell.
'On the map,' Kazankin said, 'there was an island a few hundred metres south of here.'
'Lindwerder,' Russell said.
'Is it inhabited?'
'It was used for test-firing rockets in 1933,' Russell remembered. 'But only for a few weeks. As far as I know, it was only used as a picnic spot in the years before the war.'
'It might be a good place to spend the day,' Kazankin said, as much to himself as Russell. 'We would have advance warning of any visitors.'
'A good idea,' Russell agreed.
Ten minutes later, Gusakovsky had inflated the boat. He took it out into the water, rolled himself in, and kept it in situ with one of the wooden paddles that Kazankin had extracted from his holdall. The others waded out to join him, and somehow got themselves aboard. The dinghy seemed alarmingly low in the water, but showed no sign of sinking any lower. The two NKVD men started paddling them towards the island.
Russell sat gazing out at the barely visible shores, remembering Sunday afternoons here with Effi, Paul or both. A Berlin institution – a sail on the Havelsee, with a shore-side stop for a picnic. He didn't think he'd ever seen the lake in darkness.
Lindwerder hove slowly into focus, a low forested hump in the water around two hundred metres long. They grounded the dinghy on a gravel beach, then carried it up into the trees. 'Wait here,' Kazankin ordered, and disappeared into the darkness.
He was back ten minutes later. 'There's no one here,' he said. 'Follow me.'
He led them up through the trees, over the crest of the island's slight ridge, and came to an abrupt halt. Looking down, Russell could just about see a natural hollow in the slope.
Kazankin took two small spades from the holdall, and handed one to Gusakovsky. Both men began to dig, their breathing growing steadily heavier as the minutes went by. After about fifteen, Kazankin pronounced himself satisfied.
Russell wondered how many hides like this the two men had built in their time with the partisans.
'It's almost dawn,' the Russian commander said, staring up at the eastern sky. 'We'll wait for light to build the roof. And take another look at the maps.'
Half an hour later the roof was in place, and Kazankin was pulling the briefing material from his trusty canvas bag. There was a street map of Dahlem and Zehlendorf, an aerial photograph of the area surrounding the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and, most useful of all, a hand-drawn plan of that part of the Institute supposedly used for atomic research. The map was only a few years old, the photograph reasonably clear, and the diagram, according to Nikoladze, had been drawn by an Institute worker only three years before. Russell had seen them all at the Lissa airfield, and been impressed – the NKVD researchers had exceeded his expectations. Kazankin was no slouch either. As the Russian commander described their intended course of action, Russell felt a reluctant admiration. The man said what needed to be said and nothing more; he seemed determined and utterly fearless.
Outliving him would not be easy.
Despite sleeping with Rosa tucked into her body, Effi awoke in the middle of the night feeling colder than she could ever remember. The hospital's electricity supply had been cut off on the previous day, and what little heating there was had disappeared with it. According to rumour, they were also running out of water. Some sort of end seemed near.
Any day now they might all be led outside and shot. Come to that, they might be shot where they were.
It was, she thought, about three in the morning. Rosa was sleeping soundly, but many of the adults seemed as wakeful as she was – all across the room limbs were shifting, murmurs and whispers being traded.
The idea of dying here, in the last days of the war, was almost too much to take. She had thought about trying to escape – she assumed almost everyone had – but not to any useful effect. Even with the end so near, the camp was efficiently guarded by locks, walls and guns. On her own, she would have preferred any risk to simply waiting, but she wasn't on her own anymore. How many people, she wondered, had gone to their deaths with their children, when they might conceivably have saved themselves on their own? It was wonderful really, if you could say that of something so tragic.
Would she ever have a child? She had been asking herself that question with increasing frequency since her forced separation from John. Which was somewhat ironic – when they'd been together the subject had rarely been raised. They'd had each other, and he'd had Paul, and she'd had her career and her nephew. They'd never ruled out having a child with each other, but there had been a tacit acceptance that they wouldn't, or at least not yet.
Well, if she had another birthday in May, it would be her thirty-ninth. Which might well be too late, although miracles happened. And then there was Rosa, or whatever her real name was. Effi had only known the girl for ten days, but already found life without her hard to imagine. And there was no one to send her back to. She wondered how John would feel about adopting a daughter. She wasn't sure why, but she felt fairly confident that he'd like the idea. And Paul, if he lived, could be the grown-up brother.
The thought brought tears to her eyes. She lay there in the dark, the sleeping girl enfolded in her arms, trying not to sob.
The makeshift defence line on the eastern outskirts of Muncheberg was still in German hands when Paul's adopted combat group reached it just before dawn. This was almost a pleasant surprise, given how over the course of the night the Russians had often seemed ahead of them.
Around fifty of them had slipped out of Worin and across the open fields when darkness fell on the previous day. Once assembled in the next patch of forest, they had struck out for Muncheberg, some ten kilometres to the west. It had been a long and twisting journey, in which the sights or sounds of fighting nearby had often dictated a change of course. Stopping to rest while the moon was up, they had watched in petrified silence as one line of enemy lorries had passed a mere stone's throw away, the soldiers within filling the night with their songs of triumph. Only a kilometre or two from Muncheberg they had found themselves forced between two burning villages, not knowing which side was setting the fires.
And Muncheberg itself, it transpired, was soon to be parted from the Reich. According to the latest reports the Russians had broken through to both north and south, leaving most of Ninth Army in peril of encirclement. All troops were being pulled back to the Berlin defence lines, either with their own units or as members of combat groups newly formed by the military police who controlled the crossroads outside the town. Paul, to his intense annoyance, was told to join up with a new unit built around the remnants of a Hitlerjugend battle group. When he protested this decision, arguing that his gunnery skills would be utterly wasted in an infantry unit, he was treated to a lecture on the bravery and commitment of the Hitlerjugend, who could 'give the fucking army a lesson in how to stand and fight.'
They probably could, but only because they were too young to know any better. Most of his new comrades
