They’re gone! They’re all gone! We can hardly believe it. Out of some involuntarily reflex we look up the street, as if trucks had to be arriving any minute with new troops. But there is only silence – an eerie silence. No horses, no neighing, no roosters. Nothing left but horse manure, which the concierge’s younger daughter is already sweeping out of the hall. I look at the sixteen-year-old girl, up to now the only person I know who lost her virginity to the Russians. She has the same dumb, self-satisfied look she always had. I try to imagine how it would have been if my first experience had come in this way. But I stop myself – it’s unimaginable. One thing is for sure: if this were peacetime and a girl had been raped by some vagrant, there’d be the whole peacetime hoopla of reporting the crime, taking the statement, questioning witnesses, arrest and confrontation, news reports and neighbourhood gossip – and the girl would have reacted differently, would have suffered a different kind of shock. But here we’re dealing with a collective experience, something foreseen and feared many times in advance, that happened to women right and left, all somehow part of the bargain. And this mass rape is something we are overcoming collectively as well. All the women help the other, by speaking about it, airing their pain and allowing others to air theirs and spit out what they’ve suffered. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that creatures more delicate than this cheeky Berlin girl won’t fall apart or suffer for the rest of their lives.
For the first time since 27 April we were able to lock the door to our building. And with that, unless new troops are housed here, we begin a new life.
All the same, at around 9 p.m. someone called up for me. It was the Uzbek repeating my name over and over in his laboured voice (actually the Russified version of my name that the major bestowed on me). When I looked out, I saw him cursing and making threatening gestures at me and pointing at the locked door with great indignation. Well, my chubby friend, that won’t help you one bit. But I let him in, the major close at his heels, limping badly. It’s dear that the bicycling hasn’t helped his condition. Once again the widow fixed some compresses. His knee looks hugely swollen and dangerously red. I can’t imagine how anyone could bike, dance or climb stairs with that. They’re sturdy as horses, we can’t keep up.
A bad night with the feverish major. His hands were hot, his eyes bleary; he couldn’t sleep and kept me awake. Finally the new day dawned.
I escorted the major and his man downstairs and unlocked the door, which once again belongs to us. Afterwards we had a revolting job: the Uzbek evidently has some kind of dysentery, and sprayed the toilet, the wall and the floor tiles. I wiped it up with issues of a Nazi professional journal for pharmacists, and cleaned things as well as I could, using nearly all the water we brought from the pond yesterday evening. If only Herr Pauli knew, with his constant grooming, and his sissy manicures and pedicures!
It’s Tuesday. Around 9 a.m. the secret knock, which we still use even though there are no longer any more Russians in the house. It’s Frau Wendt, with the eczema; she’s heard a rumour that peace has been declared. The last of the uncoordinated German defence has been broken in the south and north. We have surrendered.
The widow and I breathe more easily. Good thing it happened so quickly. Herr Pauli is still cursing about the Volkssturm, all those people senselessly sent to die at the last moment, old, tired men just left there to bleed to death, helpless, with not even a rag to dress their wounds. Fractured bones jabbing out of civilian trousers, snow-white bodies heaped on stretchers, arid bleeding in a steady drip, every trench and passageway blotted with slippery, lukewarm puddles of blood. No doubt about it: Pauli has been through a rough time. Which is why I think the neuralgia that’s kept him chained to his bed for over a week is half psychosomatic – it’s a refuge, a retreat. He’s not the only man in the building with that kind of refuge. There’s the bookseller, for instance, with his Nazi party affiliation, and the deserter with his desertion, and any number of others with this or that Nazi past that makes them fear deportation or something else – they all have some excuse when it comes to fetching water or venturing out to perform some other task. And the women do their best to hide their men and protect them from the angry enemy. After all, what more can the Russians do to us? They’ve already done everything.
