Joseph Kanon: Leaving Berlin

“Oh, and so now we’re Junkers. And I suppose we lost the war too. Pickelhauben .”

“Read the book,” Alex had said, knowing Fritz never would.

“What does it mean, anyway? Downfall . What happens to them? The father gambles? So what?”

“They lose their money,” Alex said.

Old Fritz turned, embarrassed now. “Well, that’s easy enough to do. In the inflation everybody lost something.”

Alex waited, the air settling around them. “It’s not you,” he said again.

And Fritz believed him.

“But the camp in The Last Fence ,” Martin was saying. “That’s Sachsenhausen, yes? They said at the office you’d been in Sachsenhausen.”

“Oranienburg, in the first camp there. They built Sachsenhausen later. They put us in an old brewery. Right in the center of town. People could see through the windows. So everyone knew.”

“But it was as you describe? You were tortured?” Martin said, unable to resist.

“No. Everyone was beaten. But the worst things-I was lucky.” Hands tied behind their backs then hung from poles until the shoulder joints separated, torn from the sockets, screams they couldn’t help, pain so terrible they finally passed out. “I wasn’t there long enough. Somebody got me out. You could still do that then. ’33. If you knew the right people.” The one thing old Fritz had left, connections.

“But in the book-”

“It’s meant to be any camp.”

“It’s nice, though, don’t you agree, to know what the author has in his mind, what he sees?”

“Well, Sachsenhausen then,” Alex said, tired of it. “The layout was described to me, so I knew what it was like. Then you invent.”

“ ’33,” Martin said, backing off. “When they rounded up the Communists. You were in the Party even then?”

“No, not then,” Alex said. “I just got caught in the net. If you were sympathetic. If you had Communist friends. They scooped up all the fish and you were caught. You didn’t need to have a card.”

“And now the Americans are doing it, putting Communists in jail. They said that’s why you left.” A question. “They’re trying to destroy the Party. Just like the Nazis.” The only way it made sense to the Kulturbund.

“They’re not sending people to Sachsenhausen,” Alex said evenly. “It’s not illegal to be a Communist.”

“But I thought-”

“They want you to tell them who the others are. Give them names. And if you don’t-then that’s illegal. So they catch you that way.”

“And then to jail,” Martin said, following the logic.

“Sometimes,” Alex said vaguely.

Or deportation, the Dutch passport of convenience that had once saved his life now something to use against him. “Might I remind you, you are a guest in this country?” The congressman with the thick athlete’s neck, who probably thought exile a greater threat than prison. And let Alex slip away.

“So you came home to Germany,” Martin said, making a story.

“Yes, home,” Alex said, looking out the window again.

“So, that’s good,” Martin said, the story’s end.

There were city buildings now, the jagged graveyard streets of the newsreels, Friedrichshain probably, given the direction they were coming from. He tried to picture the map in his head-Grosse Frankfurter Strasse? — looking for some familiar landmark, but all he could see were faceless bombed-out buildings heaped with rubble. He thought of the women handing down pails of debris, hammering mortar off reusable bricks-and four years later the rubble was still here, mountains of it. How much had there been? Standing walls were pockmarked by shelling, marooned in empty spaces where buildings had collapsed, leaving gaps for the wind to rush through. The streets, at least, had been cleared but were still lined on either side with piles of bricks and smashed porcelain and twisted metal. Even the smell of bombing, the burned wood and the sour lime of broken cement, was still in the air. But maybe, like the airlift planes, you didn’t notice after a while.

“You still have family in Germany?” Martin was asking.

“No. No one,” Alex said. “They waited too long.” He turned to Martin, as if it needed to be explained. “My father had the Iron Cross. He thought it would protect him.”

But did he? Or was it simply a cover for a fatalism so knowing and desperate that it couldn’t be admitted? It was almost as if he had exhausted himself getting Alex out. How much had it cost? Enough to wipe out Fritz’s debts? More?

“You owe him your gratitude,” was all his father would say.

“You should come too,” Alex had said.

His father shook his head. “There’s no need. Not for me. I’m not the one they send to prison for having such friends. The Engel boy, he was always trouble. Who does he think he is, Liebknecht? Times like these, you stay quiet.” He took Alex’s shoulder. “You’ll be back. This is Germany, you know, not some Slavic- So it passes and you’ll come back. Nothing is forever. Not the Nazis. Now don’t worry your mother.”

But it turned out the Nazis were forever, long enough anyway to turn his parents into ash, seeping into the soil somewhere in Poland.

“There’s Alexanderplatz up ahead,” Martin said.

The welcome lunch and bad roads had made the trip longer than they’d expected, and it was late now, their car lights stronger than the occasional streetlamp shining a pale cone on the rubble. On the side streets there were no lights at all. Alex leaned forward, peering, oddly excited now that they were really here. Berlin. He could make out the scaffolding of a building site and then, beyond a cleared, formless space, the dark hulk of the palace, singed with soot, the dome just a steel frame, but still standing, the last Hohenzollern. Across from it the cathedral was a blackened shell. Alex had expected the city center, the inevitable showcase, to be visibly recovering, but it was the same as Friedrichshain, more rubble, endless, the old Schinkel buildings gutted and sagging. Unter den Linden was dark, the lindens themselves scorched clumps. There was scarcely any traffic, just a few military cars driving slowly, as if they were patrolling the empty street. At Friedrichstrasse, no one was waiting to cross. A sign in Cyrillic pointed to the station. The city was as quiet as a village on some remote steppe. Berlin.

All the way in Martin had talked about the Adlon, where Alex was to stay until a flat could be arranged. It was for Martin a place of mythic glamour, of Weimar first nights, Lubitsch in a fur collar coat. “Brecht and Weigel are there too, you know.” Which seemed to confirm not only the hotel’s status, but Alex’s own. But now that they were almost there, with no lights visible up ahead, no awning or doormen whistling down taxis, he began to apologize.

“Of course it’s only the annex. You know the main building was burned. But very comfortable I’m told. And the dining room is almost like before.” He checked his watch. “It’s late, but I’m sure for you they would-”

“No, that’s all right. I just want to go to bed. It’s been-”

“Of course,” Martin said, but with such heavy disappointment that Alex realized he’d been hoping to join him for dinner, a meal off the ration book. Instead, he handed Alex an envelope. “Here are all the papers you’ll need. Identity card. Kulturbund membership-the food is excellent there, by the way. You understand, for members only.”

“No starving artists?”

A joke, but Martin looked at him blankly.

“No one starves here. Now tomorrow we have the reception for you. At the Kulturbund. Four o’clock. It’s not far, around the corner, so I will come for you at three thirty.”