A Woman in Berlin полностью

After our first exchange in French, we grow quiet again. The man is dearly uncomfortable, unsure. All of a sudden he blurts out, staring ahead of him, ‘Oui, je comprends. Mais je vous prie, Mademoiselle, n’y pensez plus. Il faut oublier. Tout.’ He looks for the right words, speaks earnestly and forcefully. I answer, ‘C’est la guerre. N’en parlors plus.’ And we don’t speak any more  about it.

Silently we step into the bank lobby, which is wide open, utterly destroyed and looted. We trip over drawers and index files, wade through floods of papers, carefully stepping round the piles of excrement. Flies, flies, flies everywhere. I’ve never seen such massive swarms of flies in Berlin. Or heard them. I had no idea they could make so much noise.

We climb down an iron ladder into the vault, which is crowded with mattresses and strewn with the ever-present bottles, flannel boot liners, trunks and briefcases slit open. A thick stench over everything, dead silence. We crawl back up into the light. The sub lieutenant takes notes.

Outside the sun is scorching. The sub lieutenant wants to rest, have a glass of water. We amble a little down the street – the deserted, bleak, silent street that we have all to ourselves. We sit down on a garden wall beneath some lilacs. ‘Ah, c’est bien,’ he says, but he prefers speaking Russian with me. Although he has a perfect French accent, it’s clear he lacks practice, so that his French is quickly exhausted after the first questions and phrases. He finds my Russian quite valiant, but smiles at my accent, which he finds – ‘Excusez, s’il vous plaît’ – Jewish. That’s understandable: after all, the Russian Jews speak Yiddish, which is a dialect of German as their mother-tongue.

I look at the lieutenant’s brownish face and wonder if he isn’t Jewish. Should I ask? Right away I dismiss the idea as tactless. Afterwards I started thinking: with all the invectives and accusations the Russians heaped on me, they never once brought up the persecution of Jews. I also remember how concerned the man from the Caucasus was to let me know he wasn’t a Jew – it was the first thing he said to me. In the questionnaire we all had to fill out in Russia when I was there, the word ‘Jew’ was in the same ethnic column as ‘Tatar’ or ‘Kalmuck’ or Armenian’. I also remember a female clerk there who made a great fuss about not being listed as a ‘Jew’, insisting that her mother was Russian. Still, in the offices where foreigners have to report, you find very many Jewish citizens with typically German-sounding surnames, names that have a certain flowery ring – Goldstein, Perlmann, Rosenzweig. Generally most of these officials are proficient in languages and devoted to the Soviet dogma – no Jehovah, no Sabbath, no Ark of the Covenant.

We sit in the shade. Behind us is yet another red column, another silent lodger, a Sergeant Markov. The door to the basement apartment opens a tiny crack, an ancient woman peers out and I ask her for a glass of water for the Russian. Amicably she hands over a glass; it’s cool, fogged up with condensation. The sub lieutenant stands up and bows in thanks.

I can’t help thinking of the major and his model etiquette. Always these extremes. Either it’s ‘Woman, here!’ and faeces on the floor, or all gentleness and bowing. In any case the lieutenant couldn’t be more polite, couldn’t treat me more like a lady – which I evidently really am in his eyes. In general I have the feeling that as long as we German women are somewhat dean and well-mannered and possessed of some schooling, then the Russians consider us very respectable creatures, representatives of a higher kultura. Even the lumberjack Petka must have felt something like that. Perhaps it’s a matter of context, too, surrounded as we are by the remnants of well-polished furniture, the pianos and paintings and carpets – all the bourgeois trappings they find so splendid. I remember Anatol expressing his amazement at how well off the German farmers he met in the villages were as the front moved west. ‘They all had drawers full of things!’ Yes, all the many things that’s new to them. Where they come from, people don’t have as much, everything can be packed into a single room. Instead of a wardrobe, many families just have a few hooks on the wall. And if they do acquire things, they manage to break them very quickly. Russians take no delight in the mending and tinkering of typical German housewives. I saw with my own eyes how the wife of a Russian engineer swept the floor, then whisked the dirt right under the cupboard, where there was undoubtedly more than enough already. And hanging behind the door to their sitting room was a towel where all three children blew their noses – the smallest one at the bottom, the older ones higher up. Just like back in the village.