Registration was just a matter of form. An older woman with Jewish features took down our personal data in a thick notebook, giving each of us a certificate of registration, and that was that. Will anything come of this, some tip concerning work, some kind of assistance? Probably not.
For our main meal the widow opened one of the jars of chicken she put up in 1942 and has anxiously guarded ever since. Chicken it was, but chicken with a taste of mothballs. For years the jar has been sitting in the basement between mothballed rugs; by now it was completely permeated with the smell of naphthalene. That gave us a laugh. Even the gluttonous Herr Pauli abstained. The widow managed to get down a few bites and left the rest to me. I came up with a method of holding my nose and swallowing. But for hours afterwards I was burping mothballs.
Around 3.30 p.m. I set off for Charlottenburg to visit Ilse R., who worked as a fashion photographer and as an editor for a women’s magazine until she married an engineer, a specialist in armaments and consequently someone they couldn’t snatch and send off to the front.
After a protracted exchange of goodbyes with the widow I started out. Long streets, desolate and dead. Inside the tunnel, where there used to be lamps both day and night, it was pitch-dark and smelled of excrement. My heart was pounding as I scurried through.
On towards Schöneberg. In a quarter of an hour I met only two people, both women, one barefoot, with varicose veins as thick as ropes. Everything looked so contorted and ghostly, possibly because of the sunglasses I’d put on because of the dust. A Russian woman in uniform with curly black hair was dancing on a wooden platform at the crossing, waving little red and yellow flags whenever a Russian car passed and giving a friendly greeting to the people inside. Her full breasts were dancing with her. A number of Germans carrying water buckets shyly squeezed their way past.
No end to the empty streets. Then, all of a sudden, a crowd of some twenty or thirty people, streaming out of a cinema, where, according to the hand-painted
Bicycles were literally clattering up and down the boulevard – on bare rims since there aren’t any tyres. This is a new and effective way to avoid Russian ‘confiscation’. Incidentally a number of Germans have recently been ‘finding bicycles of their own, since the Russians abandon the ones they’re riding at the first flat tyre, then look for new and better models.
Onward, through green residential streets. All was frozen, paralyzed. The entire district seems to have been scared into hiding. Now and then a young thing came mincing by, all dolled up. The widow heard at the baker’s that people are even dancing again, here and there.
My throat was dry with nervous excitement when I turned onto my friend’s street. When you haven’t seen each other for two months – and what months! – you have no way of knowing whether the buildings are still standing or whether the people inside are still alive.
The building was there, safe and sound but locked shut, no signs of life. I wandered around for nearly fifteen minutes, shouting and whistling, until at last I managed to slip inside with one of the tenants. The familiar name was still on the apartment door upstairs. I knocked and shouted and called my name. I heard a shout of joy and soon I was again embracing a woman with whom I had previously shaken hands at most. Her husband called out, ‘Imagine! She comes waltzing in here as if it were nothing at all!’
Ilse and I hastily exchange the first sentences: ‘How many times were you raped, Ilse?’ ‘Four, and you?’ ‘No idea, I had to work my way up the ranks, from supply train to major.’
We sit together in the kitchen, eating jam sandwiches and drinking real tea they fished out for the occasion, and exchange reports. Yes, we’ve all been through a lot. Ilse got it once in the basement, the other times on the second floor, in an empty apartment where they pushed her inside, using their rifle butts on her back. One of them wanted to keep his rifle with him when he lay down with her. That scared her, so she gestured to him to put his gun aside – which he did.
While Ilse and I discussed the subject, her husband stepped out, to visit their neighbour, as he put it, to get the latest news for me from a crystal set detector. As he left, use grimaced: ‘Yes, well, he can’t really bear to hear about that.’ Her husband is tormenting himself with reproach for staying in the basement and not doing a thing while the Ivans took their pleasure with his wife. During the first rape, down in the basement, he was even within hearing range. It must have been a strange feeling for him.
