We wished her many happy returns. A bottle of Bordeaux appeared. We drank, raising our glasses to the wife. The widow talked about how she compares with a Ukrainian woman we have lost all sense of moderation.
We said goodbye over and over. The classicist rummaged about the room, searching for something he could give us in exchange for the bread, but didn’t find anything.
Then we moved on to the next district, the Bayerisches Viertel, to look in on my friend Gisela. The streets were blocked with row after row of German automobiles, practically every one of them gutted. One barber had reopened his shop; a piece of paper advertised that he cut men’s hair and washed women’s, if they brought their own warm water. We actually saw a customer in the half-dark and a man jumping around with a pair of scissors. The first sign of life in the city carcass.
Up the stairs to Gisela’s. I knocked and called out, shaking with excitement. Once again we pressed our cheeks together, though the most we ever used to do was give each other’s hand a firm squeeze.
Gisela was not alone. She’s taken in two young girls, students sent by an acquaintance, refugees from Breslau. They sat mutely in a nearly empty room that had no windowpanes but nevertheless clean.
After the first eager exchanges a lull settled in the conversation. I could sense suffering in the air. Both young girls had black cirdes under their eyes. What they said sounded so hopeless, so bitter. At one point Gisela led me out to the balcony and whispered that both of them had been deflowered by the Russians, they’d had to withstand repeated rapes. Hertha, a blonde of twenty, has been having pains ever since and doesn’t know what to do. She cries a great deal, according to Gisela. There’s no word from her family; from Silesia they were scattered to the winds – who knows if they’re still alive. She clings to Gisela hysterically. The other one, delicate Brigitte, is nineteen and defends herself psychologically with an angry cynicism. She’s brimming with gall and hate: life is-filthy and all men are swine. She wants to go away, far away, some place where she won’t see that uniform, the mere sight of which makes her heart lose a beat.
Gisela herself came through unscathed, using a trick I learned about too late, unfortunately. Before she became an editor, she had had ambitions to be an actress and had taken courses in which she learned a little about stage make-up. In the basement she painted a wonderful old-lady’s mask on her face and tucked her hair under a handkerchief. When the Russians came in and spotted the two young students with their flashlights, they pushed Gisela, charcoal-wrinkles and all, back onto her bedding. ‘You, babushka, sleep.’ I couldn’t help laughing, but I immediately had to rein in my merriment – the two girls looked too glum, too bitter.
These girls have been forever deprived of love’s first fruits. Whoever begins with the last phase, and in such a wicked way, can no longer quiver with excitement at the very first touch. There’s one boy I’m thinking of, Paul was his name. He was seventeen, just like me, when he pushed me into the shadows of an unfamiliar entranceway on Ulmenstrasse. We had been to a school concert – Schubert, I think – and were still warmed by the music, though we had no idea what to say about it. Both of us were inexperienced, teeth pressed against teeth, and I waited faithfully for the wonder you’re supposed to feel when you kiss – until I realized that my hair had come undone. The hairslide I used to keep it up was gone.
In a panic I shook out my dress and collar. Paul felt around in the dark on the pavement. I helped him and our hands met and touched, but no longer with any warmth. We didn’t find the hairslide. I had probably lost it on the way. That was very
annoying as my mother would notice right away, ask me what had happened, give me stern looks. And surely my face would betray what Paul and I had done in the entranceway. We parted in a hurry, suddenly at a loss, and never drew close to each other again. Even so, those shy minutes in the shadows have always kept their silver sheen.
We stayed at Gisela’s an hour and spent a long time saying goodbye. These days it’s so hard to separate from your friends; you never know whether and how you’ll see one another again. So much can happen. Nonetheless I invited Gisela to visit us the next day. The widow had invited her friends as well. We want to see that they get a crust of bread.
Back home, the same desolate, long, dusty way. It turned out that the trip really was too much for the widow. Her feet were aching, and we had to make frequent stops to rest on the kerb. I trudged along as if under a heavy load, the burdensome feeling that Berlin might never rise again, that we would remain rats in the rubble for the rest of our lives. For the first time I entertained the thought of leaving this city, of looking for bread and shelter elsewhere, some place where there’s air and open countryside.
