Joseph Kanon: Leaving Berlin

And now he was up, restless, the room closing in again. If he lay down they’d come back, not dreams exactly, bits of his life that still hovered in the air here. He should change, have a bath, but he didn’t want to run water now, risk pipes clanging, let everyone know he was up. What he wanted, just for a while, was to be invisible, someone nobody could see. Another ghost.

He pulled on his overcoat and started down the hall, as quiet as the shoe boy, keeping to the carpet runner. The lobby was deserted except for the night porter, half asleep, whose surprised look Alex had to answer before he’d unlock the door.

“Couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d take a walk.”

“A walk,” the porter said. “It’s not safe, nights. It’s the DPs. I know, they’ve had a rough time, still-”

Alex looked out at the deserted street. “It’ll be light soon.”

“The kids are worse. Children, you think, and then they’re all over you. They picked me clean. Me.”

Alex nodded, glancing down at the door lock.

“Friedrichstrasse should be all right. Police by the station, so the gangs stay away. You don’t want to go into the park, not at this hour.” Hand still on the door, waiting. A concern for Alex’s safety or something to put in a report later? The night porter at the Adlon would see things, be a useful source. Alex looked at him. Well, where? And suddenly he knew.

“I want to see if something’s still there.”

Outside he glanced across the square to the Brandenburg Gate, covered in scaffolding, the Quadriga gone, and turned right toward Wilhelmstrasse. Streets he would know even in the dark. He could walk straight down to Hitler’s Chancellery, have a gloating moment. You didn’t win, not in the end. But who did? Now that it was all just rubble.

Instead he made his way east, Französische Strasse to the Gendarmenmarkt, both churches in ruins, the concert hall smashed, only a path cleared through the wreckage. Given this, how could the house have escaped? But faster now, because maybe it had. Odd buildings had been spared, as if the flames had just skipped over them. The post office on Französische Strasse had made it through. Why not a town house tucked away on a side street, the pompous architecture at least solid, built to last. But as he reached Hausvogteiplatz, his heart sank. Every building on the square seemed to have taken a hit, the small park at the center now a huge gaping hole. Where the U-Bahn station had been. He walked toward the edge, ignoring the warning signs, visible in the half-light. Why hadn’t they at least covered over the open wound? People could fall in. The least of their worries. Out of the square, really a triangle, and then Kleine Jägerstrasse, just a dog’s leg off Niederwallstrasse, not even a full block long, a few old buildings and the von Bernuth house. Still there.

He went farther into the little street. Not all of it. The roof was gone and most of the inside gutted, but the big old front doors were intact, and through a blasted section of the façade he could see the great staircase, hanging from its support wall, no longer going anywhere, the second floor open air. The sconces along the staircase wall, once gas, were still in place, even singed pieces of wallpaper, the same familiar pattern, now exposed to the street, all privacy gone, a woman whose clothes had been ripped away.

Alex stared for a few minutes, then stepped back to the pile of rubble across the street and sat down, taking out a cigarette. The von Bernuth house. All the thick carpeting and carved mahogany gone, presumably ash now. Had they rescued the silver or any of the Caspar David Friedrichs in their old-master frames? Or had all that been removed before the raids started?

The house had always been in the wrong part of town. Even in Fritz’s grandfather’s time the big town houses were being built near the Tiergarten, Vossstrasse, and then even farther west. But old Friedrich, whose lucky bet on a railway stock made the house possible, didn’t know Berlin well-he liked the feel of Hausvogteiplatz, the bargain price for the lot. When the clothing factories began to move in, the new office buildings, it was too late. The von Bernuths had a mansion in the middle of a commercial neighborhood. More amusement than stigma attached to this-it was considered a joke on old Friedrich, another family story.

Alex had heard them all. How the elder Friedrich invested in railroad after failing railroad, hoping for the pay dirt of another Anhalter-Bayerische line. How Fritz’s father accidentally shot a tenant, then gave him one of the farms when he recovered. How a note to a mistress was put in the wrong envelope. The sunny, overdressed years before the first war. He knew the stories because Irene and Elsbeth told them to him. It was part of their charm that the von Bernuths saw their family history as a comedy, a series of hapless misadventures. And then when the real stories ran out, he made up more, a book of them.

“You’ve made us more interesting than we are,” Irene had said.

“Not you.”

At night there were only a few lights in Kleine Jägerstrasse, so the house had seemed that much brighter, light pouring out the windows, the door lamps like beacons, waiting for guests. There were always people, the girls’ friends staying over, parties when they were older. Elsbeth was the pretty one, creamy and delicate as a Dresden doll, but it was Irene people came for, her jokes and careless sensuality, the swollen lower lip, the tangle of blond hair, forever falling out of place. And after the parties, the house cleaned and aired, there were the Sunday lunches, the long table and stiff napkins, one rich course after another, swimming in gravy, the platters almost too heavy for the maids. Saddle of venison and red cabbage and spaetzle, or pork stuffed with prunes, soups thickened with cream, breast of veal, potatoes Anna, a full afternoon of food. His aunt Lotte, who’d married Fritz’s brother Hermann, had warned him. “There’s always another course, so just take a little or you’ll never get through it.” Lotte had giggled. “They have to lie down afterward. They can’t move.” Desserts. Stewed fruit and elaborate cakes, a Spanische Windtorte. A Sunday lunch of the last century, before the money had begun to run out.

He finished the cigarette and stood up, wiping the dust off his coat. In Hausvogteiplatz a few people were on their way to work, the sky finally morning. He could see details now, not just shadowy clumps. The brass knocker on the door was gone, valuable scrap, the interiors long since ransacked. He pushed at the door.

“What do you want there?” An old man with a worker’s cap.

“Nothing.” He hesitated. “I knew the family. The owners.”

The man shook his head. “What owners? It belongs to the bank,” he said, indicating the big office building on Kurstrasse, new to Alex. “The Reichsbank.” An unexpected pride in his voice, not just any bank.

“Well, a family used to live here.”

The man nodded. “I saw you sitting here. So you’re looking for them? It’s a long time now. Since anybody was here. The bank was going to knock it down. To put up a new building. That was the idea. But then the war started and that was the end of that.”

“So it just sat here?”

“They used it for storage. Files, things like that. But then it was hit and everything went up. People thought maybe there were safes here. You know, for the gold. But we never moved it.”

“We?”

“I was night watchman. At the bank. I saw it, you know. The gold. In bars. But it was never moved here. I thought that’s what you wanted, to see if there was anything to take. But there’s nothing. Here, look.” He pushed the door open. “Nothing.”

Not even broken pieces of furniture, scavenged for firewood, just bricks and chunks of plaster. He looked across what had been the hall to the suspended piece of staircase. The built-in closet underneath it, dumping ground for umbrellas and trunks and boots, had been cut away, surgically removed by blast. The newel post had been ripped away too. Where they used to stand the Christmas tree, the first thing you saw when you came in, draped with strings of electric candles.