A Woman in Berlin полностью

A typical example of what Berliners jokingly call a ‘refugee camp’, a sheltering bed for husbands who’d been ordered to evacuate their women and children – and were all too happy to comply. Of course, plenty of stories are also being told about the husbandless evacuees, the ‘Mu-Kis’ – for Mutter-und-Kind-Verschickten, mothers and children sent away, about lovers climbing through windows and lots of racy goings-on. You can’t just transplant the average human with impunity, given all his moral weaknesses. The familiar worlds of kith and kin, of neighbourhood, of polished furniture and hours chock full of activity serve as a strong moral corset. It seems perfectly plausible to me that the enraged wife turned her husband in – maybe because she assumed his companion would be punished as well.

‘Ach, he was so delightful,’ she assured me, when I finally managed to steer her to the door. And she wiped away a tear.

July 1945 [scribbled in the margin]: she was the first woman in the house to have an American: a cook, big belly, fat neck, the man keeps lugging packages up to her.

A glorious day. From very early on our street echoed with the footsteps of countless people marching off to visit friends and relatives in other parts of the city. We lingered over breakfast until eleven in the morning – cake and a mix of real coffee and coffee substitute. The widow regaled us with all sorts of family anecdotes – her strong suit. Her clan is truly and bewilderingly droll: her father-in-law was married three times, with long periods of bachelordom in between; he outlived two of his wives. So there are children and grandchildren running around from all the marriages, aunts younger than their nieces, uncles sitting in the same schoolroom as their nephews. On top of that, the widow confesses, the last wife, who outlived him, married again, and her second husband is Jewish. To be sure, this Jewish stepfather-in-law died long before the Third Reich, but there he was, a blot on the family record. Today, however, the widow goes out of her way to mention him, to the point of boasting about him.

After our midday meal I went up to the attic apartment, rummaged through the mountains of plaster and debris, carried buckets of rubbish downstairs, mopped the floors. I planted some chervil and borage in the rotting balcony boxes, that is to say, I made some shallow grooves and sprinkled in the brown grains and tiny black seeds that are supposed to become my kitchen garden. I have no idea what these herbs look like except for the pictures on the front of the packages the woman from Hamburg gave me, from some of her leftovers. Then I lay in the sun on the floor of the terrace. A full hour of deep contentment – followed by unease and restlessness. I feel something nagging at me, boring into me. I can’t go on living like a plant, I need to move, I have to act, start doing something. I feel as though I’ve been dealt a good hand of cards but don’t know whether I’ll be able to play them. And who am I playing with? The worst thing of all at the moment is our being so cut off.

I went back down to the widow’s and found her absolutely jubilant. Suddenly and completely by accident she turned up her late husband’s pearl tie-pin – the one she’d stashed away and couldn’t find – in the toe of a much darned sock. ‘How could I forget something like that?’ she wondered.

Pentecost Sunday passed peacefully. From 8 p.m. on I waited for Nikolai the sub lieutenant, who’d asked me on Wednesday if he could drop by today. He didn’t show up, nor is it likely he ever will. Herr Pauli couldn’t resist the occasion to make a snide remark.

This Pentecost Monday didn’t feel much like a holiday at all. Hardly anyone is still employed. Berlin is on an extended vacation. While out for wood I stumbled on a notice calling on ‘cultural workers’ – artists – people in publishing, journalists, to report to the town hall today at eleven. We are to bring records of previous employment as well as samples of our work.

Off I go. The queue on the second floor is unmistakable. Full-fledged artists in their stubbornly unconventional clothes, theatre girls next to elderly female painters lugging paintings smelling of oil. Here a mannish woman, there a womanly young man with long lashes, probably dancers. I stand in the middle listening to the talk on either side, about famous So-and-so who was supposedly hanged. Until a woman’s voice breaks in shrilly: ‘That’s not right at all! Haven’t you heard? It’s just come out that he was half Jewish.’ That might be true, too. Everywhere you look ‘non-Aryans’ who’d been kept hidden deep in the family tree are being spruced up and put on display.