Gordon Ferris - The Unquiet heart

We kept to the back alleys as best we could, heading west. We didn’t speak much.

What was there to say? We eased into the crowd on the Potsdammer Strasse and picked up a crowded bus heading south. If you squinted, it could be Oxford Street: people walking and shopping and chatting in the sun. But the occasional gap or gutted shell jarred. We trundled down Rhein Strasse and into Berliner Strasse. After twenty minutes the buildings began to thin out, and not just because of our bombing. We were coming into a residential area, the suburbs, with individual homes set back from the road among clumps of pine trees.

“This is where the rich live. Used to,” she corrected herself. The damage was less, but an occasional swathe of large houses and pines had been obliterated as though by a giant scythe. We got off the bus in what seemed to be a forest glade, and proceeded on foot down one of the pine-dark avenues. It was much cooler here. The trees were dripping and dank after the rain. The area should have felt luxurious, exclusive; individual villas set in a cool forest, their owners living some Aryan dream. Instead, the homes were crammed side by side in the shade of the heavy trees.

“Why are they all jammed together?”

“Cost of land. Everyone wanted to be here even if they had no elbow room. As long as the next elbow belonged to someone rich.”

“No wonder they liked Hitler’s plans for Lebensraum.”

Studded among the pines the villas were a jumble of styles. Tall rambling wood-clad chateaux next to cubist steel and glass. It was a mess. Many of the houses had boards over the windows and doors. Some had obviously been looted, their entrails hanging out of wrecked windows. We saw no one, though I fancy the odd curtain twitched.

We stopped outside a tall wooden house with a tiny front garden and wood fence.

It must have been a fine home in its heyday. Four storeys, wood-clad with big shutters and a wide porch. I imagined a rocking chair and a glass of beer on a summer evening. We pushed through the gate and walked up the path, and we’d barely begun to climb the steps to the porch when the door crashed open. A skinny, wild-eyed man came out. He wore glasses and a shirt buttoned up to the neck but no tie.

“Ava! Is it you? This is a black day. Who is this? Come in. Quick, now!” His quick-fire German hit us like bullets. He kept casting his eyes about, as if worried what the neighbours might think.

We walked into the hall and he slammed the door behind us. We stood in a slab of light from the glass panel above the door. The house smelled of cabbages and death.

“So, it’s true, Willi?” she asked.

“Who is this, Ava?” He pointed at me.

“A friend. A good friend. He saved us. Gideon and me. Though…”

“I know, I know. Gideon is dead.”

“Are you sure? He was hit. But he might have…”

Willi was shaking his head. “Ach, you mustn’t hope, Ava. They say he hit the Gate and ended up on the bonnet still shouting at them and firing at them. They shot him to pieces.” Her face melted. “It was quick.”

Willi suddenly slid past us like a ferret and headed up the stairs. “We have other things now. Come. Begin’s been waiting for you.”

We followed him up to the top floor and into a room where the ceiling angled down and the window was boarded up. There was a desk and two chairs. On the desk glowed a radio transmitter and receiver with headphones and a microphone. Willi made straight for it and began to tune it. He turned the volume up and the set hummed and warbled. At last there was a steady pitch.

“Come in, Menachem, come in. Menachem, this is Willi calling.” He spoke now in a heavily accented English.

There was a static burst, then, from the loudspeaker, a distant voice. “Willi, this is Menachem. Is she there?” The voice was strong, speaking in English with a guttural mid-European accent: Polish? Russian? “Hold on, Menachem.”

Willi handed over the headphones and seat to Eve. She hooked on the phones and picked up the mike with professional ease.

“Shalom, Menachem, it’s Ava. What happened? Is it true?”

“I made the calls myself. One to the British in the King David. One to the French embassy next door. And one to the press. The British had twenty-five minutes to clear the hotel. They did nothing.”

“Did the French listen?”

“They closed all their shutters.”

“I don’t understand. The British are not stupid.”

“ But they are arrogant. A British officer said we don’t take orders from Jews!

The whole corner of the hotel, above the kitchens, it’s gone. Those idiots!” His voice rose higher and higher with every utterance. Then he broke off.

“Any of our people?” she asked.

“No one in the squad was hurt. It went like clockwork. Such a waste…” He suddenly sounded bone weary.

“Listen, Menachem. We have to act. More than ever we need to get the truth out.

We must tell the world what happened.”

There was silence for a while except for the background hum down the line. “Ava, do you think there is anything we can say that will be believed? Already they are talking of a Jewish massacre. Already they are saying there will be vengeance.”

“It’s all the more important! We must get our story out, Menachem. Tell them we issued a warning.”

His angry voice dripped down the line. “Do you think it matters? So many dead.

Young girls, our own people in the kitchens… Is this the way we build our promised land? There has been so much blood. All we wanted was a scrap of desert. A place we could be safe.”

Eve’s jaw was clenched. She shook her head.

“Menachem, Menachem, we have to try. I’m going to contact our Reuters man. We’ll get the message out. I’ll contact the British press. They’ll listen to me. We have to try.” Her fists were clenched on the table.

“Try, my dear. Try. What is there to lose? Listen, are you safe? Can you get out of there?”

She turned and looked at me. “Don’t worry about me. Shalom, Menachem.”

“Shalom, Ava.”

Eve sat back and took her phones off. She wiped her face and turned to me.

“Willi, do we have a phone? Does it work?”

“Yes, yes. They repaired the lines last week. But I haven’t dared…”

“We must dare, now!” She turned to me. “I’m going to make some calls, Danny. Can you amuse yourself for an hour?”

Eve placed calls with the operator and after a long wait, wonder of wonders, got patched through to New York. She spoke to her man in Reuters, but he seemed to be having a convenient bout of amnesia. He denied all knowledge, denied he knew her, denied the truth as she saw it.

She turned to her radio transmitter. From the world’s radio stations it was clear that the real message wasn’t being picked up. The constant refrain was that the casualty number had risen to eighty and was expected to climb. There was widespread condemnation for this act of evil by these unspeakable terrorists. Eve scrubbed at her hair, her face getting pinker by the minute. At last she flung off her earphones and sat back. We shared our last cigarette.

“I’ve got to get back. I need to see Jim Hutcheson. He’ll listen to me. He’ll print the story.”

I didn’t say anything. Even if she could get through to Hutcheson he wouldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t want to.

We left Willi wringing his hands and asking what would become of him. The authorities would tap the phone calls and come looking for him. We had no advice. We walked back in silence through the steaming pine woods, back to the city stewing in the sulphurous heat of late afternoon. The buses seemed to have stopped. Tainted petrol or a hold-up by one of the marauding gangs. It took us four hours to reach the safe house, sweaty and footsore, and out of cigarettes.