Shadows of Berlin полностью

“What?” his wife wants to know. “Gelika, what is Tatte saying?” This is an irksome habit of her mother’s, asking Angelika to translate her father’s meaning. But it’s Tatte who answers.

“There was a complication,” he says in Yiddish, pretending to watch the newsreel. Es iz geven a kamplakeyshan. “The man wanted more money.”

“But…” Mamme swallows. “But that’s all the money we have. There is no more money. Didn’t you tell him this?”

“Of course, I told him, what do you think? Am I an idiot? The man doesn’t care about our problems, Mamme. He wanted more money.” Finally, he confesses at the end of the story. “All I could afford was one.”

Again, a blank terror hushes Mamme’s voice. “One?”

Tatte does not respond to her. He relinquishes the envelope quickly, reaching across his wife and forcing it into his daughter’s hands. “For you, Angelika,” he declares. “Put it away quickly.”

Angelika blinks at the envelope, stupefied.

Her mother is asking, “Why only one, Tatte? Why only hers?”

“Because she is our only child, Mamme. She is the only one who matters to the future.” Then he frowns at Angelika. “Put it away, I said.”

“But what are we to do, Tatte?” Mamme wants to know. “You and I? Gelika, what is your father saying?”

But Angelika understands that her mother has been erased from the conversation.

“You should go. Now,” her father commands. “I think I may have been followed.”

The fear rises in Mamme’s voice. “Followed? Followed by whom?”

Again, to Angelika he speaks. “Go. Your mamme and I will look after ourselves. Go. You must.”

Mamme is whispering frantically. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand… What is happening?” But her daughter understands perfectly, and she is on the move. She kisses her parents quickly. Deflects her mamme’s beseeching voice.

“Goodbye, Mamme. Goodbye, Tatte.” That’s all she says. What else can she say but goodbye? Vacating the mezzanine, she forces the image of her parents into the background of her mind as the martial sweep of the newsreel anthem reaches its crescendo.

The sound of the film is muted as Angelika descends the stairs to the lobby, hurried but measured. Excusing herself, she shoves past a slower-­moving patron, who squawks a mild complaint as he’s forced to clear the way, causing him to bump into two men in leather trench coats who are ascending the steps to the mezzanine. The leather coats and snap-­brim hats are the standard uniform of the Gestapo, so it’s the patron who’s apologizing now. Angelika makes it past without a whiff of Stapo interest.

Cutting through the lobby crowd, she’s almost at the doors to the street. Almost free! When a hand seizes her by the wrist.

“Not so fast,” she hears the man instruct. She doesn’t call out, just tenses for confrontation. The hand belongs to a slyly handsome young man with flaxen blond hair and eyes like gray smoke. He wears a snap-­brim hat and an expensive cashmere coat, but there is something of the working-­class scavenger about him. A handsome fox from the proletariat. Drawing her in closer, he has a question for her. “So. Where is your star, Liebchen?”

He gives her a piece of advice. He, the man with the flaxen hair. Make yourself useful to them. These are the words he speaks as she and her parents are loaded into the rear of a green police lorry along with other captured U-­boats. One of the Gestapo trench coats calls over to him with a certain camaraderie. “Not a bad haul. A good day’s work!” The blond fox grins, showing teeth, but then squeezes Angelika’s arm and whispers into her ear. His lips close. His breath heated. “Make yourself useful to them,” he instructs. Nützlich is the word he chooses for her. Helpful. Beneficial. Valuable.

The stones in the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin have been desecrated. Workers have used pickaxes, spades, and sledgehammers to smash tombstones and to dig a zigzagged air-­raid trench through the burial ground. Fractured gravestones bear the Magen David and epitaphs in Hebrew. Bones have been cleared like roots. This is Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Across the street from the cemetery stands what was once the Jewish Community Home for the Aged, but the elderly inhabitants have long since been evacuated eastward. Now the building is the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Sammellager, a collection camp for Berlin Jews. An assembly camp run by the Gestapo for filling deportation quotas set by the SS Jewish Bureau, Referat IV B4.