wrongly chosen door led them out into enemy fire, and a choice between death and going to ground. Paul had a ten-metre crawl to reach the nearest communication trench, and it seemed a lot farther.
Once inside, he was little more than a spectator. A hail of shells whooshed over him, provoking a sporadic response from the surviving German machine-guns and artillery. The latter, he assumed, were conserving their ammunition.
Clouds of smoke and brick dust coalesced and spread, until the whole area seemed choked in a brown haze. Around nine o'clock, lines of Soviet infantry came charging out of the fug, singing and shouting like there was no tomorrow. For most of them, there wasn't – the first wave succumbed almost to a man. Some had been carrying small boats, but only a single soldier reached the edge of the canal, toppling into the oily water with blood pumping from his neck.
The Soviet artillery redoubled their efforts, slowly reducing the buildings around the harbour to their constituent bricks. Planes came swooping out of the smoke on low-level bombing runs, and stretches of the trench system on either side of Paul were plastered with human gore.
More infantry appeared, and this time some succeeded in launching their boats. None got safely across, but the bodies now floating in the water were like marks left by a rising tide. It was all so fucking predictable, Paul, thought. So many pushes, so many corpses, and sooner or later…
Soviet tanks were now firing across the canal, and drawing no response. The next wave would wash over them, Paul realised. And so, apparently, did Major Jesek. As more Soviet infantry loomed on the southern bank, the order was given to pull back.
Paul joined the rush along the trench, clambering over the dead and still groaning, out into a rubble-strewn gap between ruins. Jesek was there, looking in his element, giving each soldier an encouraging smack on the shoulder until his head blossomed blood and his body pitched into the bricks.
Paul stumbled on, out of the industrial area and into residential streets. There were houses missing in all of them, and houses burning in most. Ahead of him, a soldier was frantically shaking his hands, as if he was trying to dry them – catching him up, Paul saw that the man's mouth was hanging open in a silent scream.
The soldier suddenly sank to his knees.
Paul put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and the man violently shook it off. 'Go fuck yourself,' he hissed.
Paul left him where he was. Looking back once, he saw the man still kneeling in the middle of the road, his former comrades passing by on either side, like a stream divided by a fallen rock.
A kilometre to the north, under the S-Bahn bridge by Tempelhof Station, the MPs were waiting for them. They joined the fifty or so men who had already been rounded up, and listened to the sound of the battles still raging while they waited for stragglers. When the road to the south was empty they were marched through the Tempelhof aerodrome gates and delivered to those in charge. There were lots of tanks dug in around the airport buildings, tanks they could have used that morning.
'Guess why they're here?' the Volkssturm man beside him asked, as if he was reading Paul's mind.
'Tell me.'
'Someone special might need a last-minute flight,' the man replied. The thought seemed to amuse him.
It didn't amuse Paul, and neither did the prospect of yet more digging. If he'd stayed in one place he'd be in China by now.
The emplacements, as it turned out, had already been dug, and all that remained was the wait for Ivan. It was actually a beautiful day, the sun shining out of a perfect blue sky until just before noon, when a horde of Soviet IL-4 bombers appeared out of nowhere and started blowing holes in the hangars and terminal buildings. They were careful not to damage the runway – mindful, presumably, of their own future needs.
Paul was assigned to one of the PaK41 emplacements in the aerodrome's north-eastern corner, and had only a distant view of the afternoon's battle, which raged between the S-Bahn defence line and the aerodrome's southern perimeter. Every now and then a jeep full of Hitlerjugend armed with panzerfaust would careen away across the tarmac to take on the Soviet armour, and several familiar-sounding explosions would eventually follow. The gun commander claimed he could see several burning hulks through his binoculars, and Paul had no reason to doubt him. But none of the jeeps came back.
Darkness fell with the Soviets still held at arm's length, but scattered engagements rumbled on by the light of the full moon, and as midnight approached the Russian infantry were still pushing forward. Paul's own gun was down to eleven shells, which didn't bode well for the dawn.
It had been a long and so far fruitless day, in which Varennikov had almost driven him mad with his non- stop ramblings. Sometimes Russell could hear the idealism of his own younger years, but mostly it was just the stupidity. There was nothing he really disliked about the young Russian, but Russell wished he would shut up. After a while he simply tuned him out, and focussed his ears on listening for sounds on the stairs.
It was well into evening before he heard them, and Strohm's head emerged from the stairwell. 'You didn't tell me she was Jewish,' he said without preamble.
'Effi? She isn't.'
'Well, she was arrested as one. On the 13th of April. She was taken to the detention centre for Jews on Schulstrasse – the old Jewish hospital – do you know it?'
Russell felt something grip his heart. 'Yes, I went there once… but that's out beyond the Ringbahn. It'll be in the Soviet hands by now.'
'It is. But Erna von Freiwald was released on the 21st. Last Saturday.
It's in the records – all the remaining prisoners were released that day. I assume the people in charge were trying to earn themselves some credit for the future.'
'Where did she go?' Russell asked automatically.
'I'm sorry, there's no way of knowing.'
'No, of course not.'
'Perhaps she went home,' Strohm suggested.
'No, her sister went to the apartment only two days ago.'
'Then she's probably in one of the mass shelters – you know where they are: underneath the flak towers in the Tiergarten, under Pariserplatz. There's one right next to Anhalter Station. They're all incredibly overcrowded at the moment. Lots of women are hoping that there's strength in numbers, that the Red Army will behave better in front of a thousand witnesses.'
After finishing her shift and eating, Effi could stand it no longer. She had to get some fresh air, had to convince herself that the moon and stars still shone. 'Would you like to go outside, just for a minute?' she asked Rosa.
The girl thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
'Then let's go,' Effi said, taking her hand.
The rooms beyond the hospital seemed more crowded than ever, the smells of sweat, urine and excrement almost impossibly pungent. There were guards on the bunker entrance, but they had no objection to people taking the air – it was, as one of them said, 'their funeral'. Perhaps it would be, Effi thought, but she was beyond caring. She stood for a few moments at the bottom of the steps, inhaling the smoke-laden breeze and listening for sounds of explosions close by. In the sky above, a few faint stars glimmered in the murk.
They went up into the Berlin night. The square was not silent, as Effi had expected, nor empty of movement. Several walkers were visible, all keeping close to those walls that remained. Far up Hermann Goering Strasse a lorry was driving away. Berlin still had a heartbeat, albeit a faint one.
They could see no fires, but the sky was a deep shade of orange, and several of the surrounding buildings were silhouetted against areas of bright yellow. Streamers of dark smoke hung in the air, like photographic negatives of the Milky Way. Far in the distance, she could hear the faint rattle of machine-gun fire..
The familiar keening turned into the familiar scream, and for one dreadful second Effi thought she'd managed to kill them both. But the shell hit a building on the far side of the square, starting an avalanche of masonry and igniting a furnace within.
What people had built, people destroyed, and would no doubt build again. She felt weighed down by the
