A Woman in Berlin полностью

Burgemestr is the Russian word for mayor, from the German Bürgermeister. Crowds of people are milling about the Rathaus and running up and down the dim corridors. Men dash from room to room, doors bang open and shut. Somewhere a typewriter is rattling away. Identical handwritten notices have been posted on the few pillars that have a little light: a family is searching for a woman who lost her mind on 27 April and ran away. ‘The person in question is forty-three years of age, teeth in poor condition, hair dyed black and wearing slippers.’

In the mayor’s office a swarm of men is buzzing around the desk talking, and gesturing intently as an interpreter keeps chattering. Within minutes the sub lieutenant is handed a list of the banks. A girl types out the addresses. The window seat is adorned with a bouquet of lilac.

We set off. The lieutenant is reserved and very polite. He asks if he’s going too quickly, if I know much about banking, if it really isn’t a burden to accompany him.

At the Dresdner Bank we find things in good order: clean desks, with pencils placed at right angles. The ledger books are open, all the safes intact. The entrance to this bank is inside a larger entranceway; it was probably overlooked.

Things are different at the Commerzbank – a real pigsty, filthy, forlorn and empty. The vaults have all been broken into, as well as the deposit boxes, boxes and cases have been slit open and trampled. There’s human excrement everywhere; the place stinks. We flee.

The Deutsche Bank looks halfway decent. Two men are busying themselves sweeping the floor. The safes have been cleaned out, but very neatly, obviously opened using the keys from the bank. One of the men tells me how ‘they’ had got hold of the director’s home address and raced off with a truck to get him. When they arrived they found him dead, along with his wife and daughter – poisoned. Without wasting time they drove straight to the deputy director and demanded that he unlock the vaults. This bank has even opened for business. A sign states that the teller will receive deposits from 1 to 3 p.m. I’d like to see who’s interested in making a deposit right now The old-fashioned stocking or mattress method strikes me as decidedly more secure.

I can’t quite figure out why the Russians burrowed their way into the banks like that, with such determination. Surely their orders did not include this sort of brutal safe-cracking – that’s clear from the bank where the boxes were so ruthlessly smashed open and from the overwhelming faecal stench left by the robbers. It’s possible the looters had been taught that banks in this country are the bulwarks of the evil capitalists, so that by plundering them they were performing a kind of expropriation of the expropriators, a deed worthy of praise and celebration. But it doesn’t add up. This looks more like sheer unbridled looting, each man for himself, boldly snatching whatever he can. I’d like to ask the sub lieutenant about it, but don’t dare.

A big cleaning operation is under way in the Stadische Sparkasse. Two elderly women are scrubbing the floor. There are no vaults here. As far as we can see the tills are completely empty. The lieutenant promises to send a guard tomorrow. But what is there to guard?

We spend a good while searching in vain for the the Kreditund Bodenbank. At last we find it in a back courtyard, safe and sound, peacefully slumbering away like sleeping Beauty, behind a folding security grate. I ask around in the building and eventually am able to give the sub lieutenant the bank manager’s address. No Russian ever even laid eyes on this bank. The glass sign out by the street that used to announce its presence is now nothing more than a few splinters dangling from a couple of screws.

There’s one more branch of the Deutsche Bank, at the edge of our district. We make our way there. The sun is burning. I drag myself along, tired, weak and weary. The sub lieutenant kindly slows down to accommodate me. He asks some personal questions about my education, what languages I know. And suddenly he says in French, very quietly and without looking at me, Dites-moi, est-ce qu’on vous a fait du mal?’

I’m taken aback, stammer in reply, ‘Mais non, pas du tout.’ Then I correct myself. ‘Oui, monsieur, enfin, vous comprenez.’

All at once there’s a different atmosphere between us. How is it that he speaks French so well? I know without his telling me: he is a byvshy – someone from the ‘has-been’ class, the former ruling class in old Russia. He proceeds to tell me his background: he’s from Moscow, his father was a doctor, his grandfather a well-known surgeon and university professor. His father studied abroad, in Paris, Berlin. They were well-off, with a French nanny. The sub lieutenant, who was born in 1907, was still able to imbibe something of the ‘has-been’ way of life.