kilometres wide.
He clambered out of the gun emplacement and started running, only stopping when he reached the sheltered rear of the terminal building. The Soviet artillery had thoughtfully pounded holes in the high wire fence that surrounded the aerodrome, and he had a clear run to the U-Bahn station on Belle Alliance Strasse. He took it at top speed, almost tumbling down the steps as shells exploded further down the road. The booking hall was packed with civilians, most of them women, and none seemed pleased to see him. 'Either go or get rid of the uniform and gun,' one old man told him imperiously. Paul could see his point, but still felt like hitting him.
He went back up the stairs. The Landwehrkanal, just over a kilometre to the north, was the next obvious line of defence, and he supposed that should be his destination. He could think of none better.
Out on Belle Alliance Strasse he could see men in the distance, heading in the same direction. Behind him, the battle for Tempelhof seemed to be winding down. The centre of the wide, traffic-free road offered the clearest path, but he kept to the edge for fear of shell-blast, wending and climbing his way along the rubble-choked pavement. The bodies he came across were mostly women's, though sometimes it was hard to tell.
A single shell exploded a couple of hundred metres up the road, taking the corner off a three-storey block and conjuring flames from within.
As he passed another bombed-out house the Kreuzberg loomed into view, crowning the wooded slopes of Viktoria Park. Why choose blood and stone, he asked himself, when grass and trees were there for the taking? He took the first available turning and worked his way through to the park's eastern gate, then followed a path up through blossoming trees to the summit. He and his Dad had come there often, catching a tram to the depot at the bottom of the hill, walking up, and sitting on a wooden bench, ice cream in hand, with Berlin spread out before them. On a clear day they could usually see the Hertha grandstand away across the city.
There was no such clarity today, but he could still see enough to be shocked. Myriad fires were burning across the city's heart, from the Ku'damm away to the west, through the district south of the Tiergarten, to the Old Town and Alexanderplatz in the east. Every few seconds the flash of another explosion would spark in the smoke- leaden gloom, reminding Paul of the matches flaring to life in the Plumpe grandstand as spectators lit their half- time cigarettes.
Turning his head, he caught sight of Soviet tanks. They were crossing Immelmann Strasse and entering the street that ran along the bottom of the park's western slope. And away to the west, marching up Monumenten Strasse towards him was an absurdly neat formation of infantry. There had to be a couple of hundred men, but there was something odd about them…
Remembering the binoculars, he brought the formation into focus. The 'something odd' about them was their size – they were children. Two hundred neatly-turned out Hitlerjugend were marching out to meet the Red Army, panzerfausts at the ready. And they were walking into a trap.
A machine-gun rattled but no one fell down – either the Russians were too drunk to shoot straight, or they were firing warning shots. The column visibly hesitated, but kept on coming, and more warning shots seemed only to encourage whichever heroic nincompoop was in command. The machine-guns opened up in earnest and the front lines went down, exposing those behind them. As bullets scythed through them, the rear echelons broke and fled, dropping their panzerfausts and sprinting back across the railway bridge. Ivan, to his credit, ceased fire.
Other Russians were visible at the southern foot of the hill. It was time to go. Paul strode back down through the empty park, the clashing smells of death and spring mingling in his nostrils. The depot at the bottom had taken several hits, and through the wide-open entrance he could see one tram half raised on the rear of another, like a dog mounting a bitch. He walked round the corner of the building and started up Grossbeeren Strasse, which had lost most of its houses. At the first intersection he found six bloodied female corpses around a standpipe. Two were still clutching the water buckets they'd come to fill.
A little further on a three-legged dog gave him a hopeful look, and started whining piteously once he'd gone past. Paul wanted to cry, but no tears came. Something inside him was irreparably broken, but he had no idea what it was.
A Soviet plane flew low overhead, and opened fire on something behind the houses to his left. He walked on towards Yorck Strasse, where several women were gathered round a prone casualty. There was an air of hopelessness in their postures, and in the way they glanced up the street, as if they were pretending for everyone's sake that help was on the way. Beyond them, outside the Yorck Strasse police station, another two corpses hung slack-necked from lampposts. Paul walked towards them. The first, a moustachioed man in his forties or fifties, was in army uniform. The second was Werner.
The boy's mouth was open, his fists clenched, his dead eyes full of terror. A piece of card bearing the message 'All traitors will die like this one' had been looped over the second button of his Hitlerjugend shirt.
Paul stood there staring at the boy's body until his legs suddenly folded beneath him, and a sound he didn't recognise, a cross between a wail and a high-pitched hum, welled up from his soul and erupted through his lips.
A few moments later he felt a hand on his shoulder. 'Did you know him?' a woman's voice asked.
'Yes,' Paul managed to say. 'He was only fourteen.'
'He never said. He was a brave little bugger.'
'You saw this happen?' Paul asked. He climbed slowly back to his feet. Why hadn't the boy ditched his uniform?
'From my window. It was the redhead – we've seen him before. He's an Obersturmfuhrer, I think – I can never remember their uniforms. My husband was in the real army.'
'By what authority…'
She shrugged. 'Who knows? He's a law unto himself. He has a few helpers, but he's the judge and the executioner.'
Paul looked up at the body. 'I'm going to cut him down.'
'It's your funeral.'
He took out his knife, clambered up onto the police station wall and managed, with a couple of hacks, to slice through the rope. Werner's corpse dropped to the pavement.
Paul sank to one knee and closed the dead boy's eyes. He went through his pockets, hoping to find something he could take to Werner's mother and sister. Inside the Hitlerjugend documentation there was the family photograph that he'd showed Paul when they first met. It seemed like years ago, but was less than a week.
'Where can I bury him?' he asked the woman. Two of her neighbours had appeared, and all three of them looked at him as if he was mad.
If there was a reply, he didn't hear it. There was a sudden whoosh and the briefest sensation of flight. The earth seemed to explode, a hundred hammers seemed to hit him at once, and then all noise was sucked away, leaving only a shimmering silence. He felt a moment of enormous relief, and then nothing at all. Under the gun April 26 – 27 R ussell was woken by the thump of distant explosions. It had to be an air raid, but sounded louder than anything that had gone before. On and on it went without respite, like a berserk drummer with no sense of rhythm.
Some of the bombs seemed to be falling not too far away, but as Leissner had said, it would take extraordinary bad luck for a shell or bomb to land on their roof, protected as it was by surrounding buildings and a secondary ceiling of elevated tracks. Sound reasoning, which didn't quite still his nerves, or black out the images of trench life under shell-fire which rose unbidden from his memory.
'What are you going to do now?' he murmured to himself, partly in search of distraction, partly because he needed some sort of plan. Was his best bet to stay where he was, wait for the Russians, and hope for their help in finding his family? Mounting a tour of the giant shelters in search of Effi would be pointless. His chances of finding her would be minute, his chances of death by shellfire depressingly high. If Effi was in one of those shelters she should be safe; when the war ended and the shelling stopped, she would doubtless go home, and he would find her there.
It was the sensible option, but still hard to take. Since 1941 a sense of failure, of letting her down, had churned away in the shallower recesses of his subconscious, and inaction always brought it bubbling to the surface. The urge to keep looking was almost irresistible, and he had to keep reminding himself that behaving like a headless chicken might very well lose him his head.
Several hours went by. Varennikov woke up, and the two of them breakfasted on cans of cabbage and cold
