the wounded. Knowing the SS, he doubted it.
Back at their hideaway in the abandoned station, Varennikov looked up from the book he was reading by candlelight. 'No luck,' he deduced from Russell's expression.
'No.'
'I'm sorry,' the Russian said in a heartfelt tone. 'I don't know how I'd survive without my Irina.'
Dawn brought a quickening of the long range artillery attacks, but Paul's area around the Schulenburg Bridge only received a couple of hits. Most of the shells were falling far behind them, on the Old Town, the government quarter and the West End. Either Ivan was having a particularly inaccurate morning, or he was saving the more obvious military targets for when his infantry was poised and waiting on the other side of the canal.
Sent in search of something to eat by his fellow-excavators, Paul ran into soldiers from his own division. There were about forty of them in the immediate vicinity, a lieutenant told him. Their situation had been reported, he said, but they hadn't yet received any new instructions. Until they did, it seemed wisest – he nodded his head in the direction of the SS officer who seemed in overall charge of the Schulenburg Bridge position – to follow the orders of those on the spot.
A mess had been set up in the underground booking hall of the Grenzallee station. It was staffed by local volunteers, women in their forties and fifties with gaunt faces and dead eyes. A huge tureen of soup was all they had to offer, but it smelled and tasted good – the ingredients, one women told him in a whisper – had come from the Karstadt department store on Hermann Strasse, two kilometres up the road. The SS in charge of the adjoining warehouse had been cajoled into releasing some supplies for the fighting men at the front.
Back in the cemetery, Paul shared out the contents of his billycan. There had been a handbill delivery in his absence, and he read through one as he ate. Hitler, it seemed, was actually in Berlin, and still directing the military traffic. And General Wenck was on his way to relieve the capital. According to the Fuhrer Order reprinted as part of the leaflet, 'Wenck's Army' had been summoned to Berlin's aid, and was now approaching the city. 'Berlin is waiting for you! Berlin longs for you with all its heart!' the order concluded. It sounded like some idiot hero in a Babelsberg weepie.
Paul didn't believe a word of it, and could hardly bear the look of hope on Werner's face.
A couple of hours later, a passing corporal filled them in on the latest news. The Soviet shelling, unlike the Allied air raids which preceded it, was more or less continuous, and those Berliners that could had taken up more-or-less permanent residence in underground shelters of one sort or another. After two whole days of this many had begun to wonder where their food would come from when present supplies ran out. It was no great secret where the authorities had stored the ration supplies, and that morning crowds had gathered outside many of the relevant premises, invading and looting those that were insufficiently guarded.
At the Karstadt department store on Hermann Strasse, the SS were in charge, and seemed intent on blowing up the building rather than leave the Russians such a treasure trove of supplies. The people of Neukolln had turned up en masse, and been grudgingly permitted a few hours to cart away all of the food. Some had taken the opportunity to seize less edible ware, like silk dresses and fur coats, but Karstadt staff had guarded the doors and taken such items back. Having their stock reduced to rubble was obviously preferable to giving it away.
'And there's a big drive on to round up deserters,' the talkative corporal added. 'It started this morning. There are roadblocks everywhere, and gangs of the black bastards are going round the basements. Those they find, they hang, so I advise you all to wait here for Ivan.'
He laughed at his own joke, re-lit the stump of his cigarette, and wandered off down the cemetery path.
It wouldn't be long, Paul thought. Looking around, he could see smoke rising in every direction. Soon this cemetery would erupt all around them, throwing up old corpses, sucking in new. Berlin was waiting for an army all right, but it wasn't Wenck's.
It was mid-afternoon when a private came to fetch him. The largest remnant of his division was deployed four kilometres to the east, where the road to Mariendorf and Lichtenrade crossed over the same canal, and he and his fellow stragglers were to join it at once. The assembly point was outside the Grenzallee U-Bahn station.
'I'm on my way,' Paul said, stabbing his spade into the earth.
'Can I come too?' Werner asked. 'Where you're going is only a few kilometres from my house.'
The SS on the bridge might argue, but only if someone was foolish enough to ask them. 'Okay', he told the boy. After wishing the tank team luck they left the cemetery by the back gate, and worked their through the side streets to the station, where thirty-odd men were scattered across the staircase leading down to the booking hall. The lieutenant looked twice at Werner, but said nothing.
There was no transport, but it was only an hour's march, and still light enough outside for vehicles to be something of a mixed blessing.
The lieutenant fell them in and sent them off in pairs, keeping a decent distance between them to minimise the damage a single shell might do. The first street they walked down was almost intact, but the hospital district on the other side of the Britzer Damm had been almost obliterated, and the area of small streets which lay between the canal and the Tempelhof aerodrome was in equally terrible shape. There were ruins and rubble everywhere, and no sign that anyone was interested in clearing anything up. The few adults they passed looked either angry and resentful or listless and indifferent; the only child they encountered ran alongside them firing an imaginary gun and making the appropriate noises, until Paul felt like shooting him.
It was getting dark by the time they reached the Berliner Chaussee, and another long hour was spent waiting in the deepening cold while the lieutenant sought out the divisional HQ. He found it in the basement of a factory which overlooked the canal basin just east of the Stubenrauch Bridge. The remnants of the division – all 130 of them – were deployed in and around the basin, mostly in other industrial buildings. The division's last four artillery pieces were well dug in and camouflaged, ready for the Soviet onslaught. Paul had been hoping to find a place with one of them, but there was already a waiting list. At least ten men had to die before he got his old job back, and only then if the gun survived its minders.
Still, there was food enough, and old acquaintances to pass the time with. Not everyone had died. Not yet.
The Hitlerjugend held his watch up to the kerosene lamp. 'It's after nine,' he told Effi.
She'd lost track of the time, something easy to do in what smelt and felt like the bowels of the earth. She could no longer hear or see the war, but the constant turnover of casualties was proof enough of its continuance. The smell of fresh blood had been with her all day.
The shift had lasted twelve hours. She was working as a nursing assistant, her uniform a bloodstained apron, her tasks mostly menial – fetching and carrying, boiling instruments, cleaning what had to be cleaned with water collected from the pumps outside. Her only close contact with patients lay in bandaging the wounded and trying to comfort the dying.
Rosa had been with her throughout, sometimes helping but mostly just drawing. Effi had no idea what mental and emotional havoc was being wreaked on the already traumatised seven-year-old, but she didn't dare let her out of her sight. She told herself that watching people so intent on saving life must surely have a positive effect, but she didn't really believe it.
The girl seemed okay. They'd just shared a can of sardines and some bread in the room which passed for a hospital staff room, and were sitting at their table, listening to the moans of the wounded next door. The hospital was running out of morphine, and only those in excruciating pain were getting any. Some of the unlucky ones were stoical beyond belief, but most found it easier to groan or scream. Effi had hardly noticed while she was working, but now it made her want to join in.
Annaliese Huiskes sat down beside them. She had somehow got hold of a hot cup of tea, which she offered to share. 'I'm sorry about earlier,' she told Effi in a low voice.
'Don't worry about it,' Effi told her. 'You made a brilliant recovery.' Annaliese had let Effi's real name slip, but answered the questioning looks with an explanation of staggering simplicity. Dagmar had been given that nick-name, Annaliese explained, because she looked so much like the film star Effi Koenen.
'The traitor,' one doctor had murmured. Another had denied the resemblance.
'I've been meaning to ask you,' Effi said, gesturing at the ringed finger. 'Did you get married?'
