Glaring sun. The bridge is deserted. We pause to look down at the railroad embankment, a jumble of tracks, straw-coloured in the sunlight, pockmarked with craters one yard deep. Pieces of rail wrenched high above the ground, upholstery and scraps of fabric streaming out of bombed sleepers and dining cars. The heat is stifling. The smell of fire hangs over the tracks. All around is desolation, a wasteland, not a breath of life. This is the carcass of Berlin.
On into Schöneberg. Here and there we see people in the doorways – a woman, a girl, their blank eyes staring into space, their features vapid and bloated. I can tell by looking that the war has only recently ended here. They still haven’t recovered from the shock; they’re still as numb as we were several days back.
We head down Potsdamer Strasse, past blackened offices, empty tenements, heaps of rubble.
A moving sight on one corner: two rickety old women standing in front of a pile of rubble so huge it towers above them. They scratch at the refuse with a small shovel, load it onto a little cart. At that rate it will take them weeks to move the entire mountain. Their hands are knobby and gnarled, but perhaps they’ll finish the job.
Kleist Park is a wasteland with masses of rags, mattresses and cushions torn from cars lying under the arcades and piles of faeces everywhere, swarming with flies. Right in the middle stands the half-finished high-rise bunker, like a hedgehog surrounded by iron spikes, that was intended to shelter us from bombs in the seventh year of the war. Two civilians are yanking away at a stack of beams, one of them sawing the timbers into more manageable pieces. Everything belongs to everyone. The saw cuts through the silence with its pitiful rasp. Reflexively the widow and I drop our voices to a whisper. Our throats are parched – the dead city has taken our breath away. The air in the park is full of dust, all the trees are covered in white powder, riddled with bullet holes, badly wounded. A German shadow hurries past with a load of bedding. At the other end of the park we find a Russian grave surrounded by wire. Another set of gaudy red wooden uprights, and in the middle a flat granite slab bearing an inscription in lime-paint: here rest heroes who fell for the fatherland. The Russian word for hero is
Twenty minutes later we are in front of the house where the widow’s friends live. ‘He was in the same brotherhood as my husband,’ she says of the man, a lecturer in classical literature. The building looks completely dead, the front door boarded up with slats. As we search for the back entrance we run into a woman who has lifted her skirt and is taking care of her needs in the corner of the courtyard, completely unembarrassed. I’ve never seen that in Berlin before either, not so publicly. Finally we find the entrance, climb the two flights of stairs, knock and shout, the widow’s name as a password. Noises inside, steps and whispers, until they finally realize who it is. The door flies open, we embrace, I press my face against that of a stranger – after all, I’ve never seen these people before. First the wife, then her husband emerges, holding his hands out to us, asking us inside. The widow talks as if in a fever, her words a jumble. The other woman is talking as well and neither is listening. It takes a while before we’re seated in the apartment’s one inhabitable but very drafty room. We fish out the butter sandwiches we’ve brought along and offer them to the widow’s friends. They’re both amazed. They haven’t seen any bread, and the Russians didn’t leave any behind. In answer to the standard question, ‘How often did they…?’ the lady of the house answers with a broad East Prussian accent, ‘Me? Only once, the first day. After that we locked ourselves down in the basement. We had a wash-boiler full of water.’ The conquerors reached the neighbourhood later and left earlier. Everything happened in a flash.
What are they living off? ‘We still have a sack of groats and a few potatoes. Oh, and our horse too!’
Horse? They laugh, and the woman explains with graphic gestures. While the German soldiers still controlled the street, someone came running into the basement with the good news that a horse had been killed, and in no time people were outside. The animal was still twitching and rolling its eyes as the first bread knives and penknives plunged into its body – all under fire, of course. Everyone sliced and dug at the first spot they found. When the classicist’s wife reached over towards some shimmering layers of yellow fat, someone rapped a knife handle across her fingers and said: ‘You! Stick to your own place!’ She managed to hack out a six-pound piece of meat. ‘We used the last of it to celebrate my birthday,’ she told us. ‘It tasted excellent. I had pickled it in what vinegar I had left.’
