Philip Kerr - The Other Side of Silence

As an officer I was entitled to a room at the Park Hotel, on Huntertragheim Street and close to the Lower Pond. Built in 1929, the Park was the last word in modern luxury; at least it was until almost two hundred RAF Lancaster bombers turned up on two consecutive nights at the end of August 1944 and bombed the city to bits. Almost every building to the south of Adolf-Hitler-Platz, including the famous castle and the cathedral where Kant was buried, were destroyed or damaged. Thirty-five hundred people were killed and tens of thousands made homeless-a foretaste of the terrible fate that was soon to befall Berlin. The upper floors of the Park Hotel and many of the men living on them disappeared in fire and smoke, but the second floor I lived on was spared and somehow the restaurant next door survived, too, which was just as well as it was one of the few places where German officers were allowed to take girls from the women’s auxiliary services who, even in 1944, were sometimes strictly chaperoned.

There was one girl in particular, Irmela Schaper, a signals officer with the German naval auxiliary, of whom I was very fond. I had recently remarried, but that didn’t make much difference to either Irmela or me since the city was more or less encircled by the Red Army and it was obvious to both of us that we were probably going to be killed. Irmela was a local girl. Her father worked for Raiffeisen Bank on Strasemanstrasse not very far away from naval headquarters in the old seaport. I worked in the basement of what had been the post office close to Paradeplatz and we first met in a tobacconist’s on Steindamm a short way north of there. We’d both heard that the cigarette ration had arrived in the city and went there simultaneously, only I got there first and bought the last packet. Not that these were much of a smoke, just a roll of cardboard and a few centimeters of inferior tobacco. It’s hard to credit what we used to smoke back then. Anyway, she looked very smart in her double-breasted naval uniform, blond and buxom, which is just the way I like them, and as soon as I saw her I offered to share this last packet with her. I’m telling you all this because Irmela is the key to the whole story of what happened with Harold Heinz Hebel, or Captain Harold Hennig as he then called himself. But you’ll have to let me tell this story in my own way; I’m not a professional like you, Mr. Maugham; you’d probably tell me to start more fashionably in the middle instead of at the beginning. Well, maybe I can still do that.

Ten each,” I said to her, filling my cigarette case and then handing her the packet.

“That’s very gallant of you,” she said, and let me light one for her. She smoked it like a schoolgirl, hardly sucking the stuff in at all, and it made me smile, a little, but not so much that she might have thought I was laughing at her; that would have been impolite and foolish. Most women like to believe they’re sophisticated, even when you’re pleased that they’re not.

“Don’t be fooled. My armor is all rusted up and we had to eat my trusty white steed before he starved. If I tried to bow I’d probably fall flat on my face. Since the RAF left town my sense of balance isn’t so good. My ears still feel like there’s a brass band just around the corner.”

“You mean there isn’t? These days I don’t hear so well myself. In fact, I may never sleep through a thunderstorm again without thinking Thor is an English bomb aimer in a Lancaster.”

“As far as I’m concerned, ‘sleep’ is just a nice word in a fairy story. I’d like to believe in it, but experience and the Ivans have taught me different.”

“Maybe we should get together for a drink one night and see who yawns first.”

“It won’t be me. I’m wide awake. You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to me since I arrived from Berlin.”

“Don’t you like Konigsberg?”

“As a matter of fact, I love it.”

“It’s my hometown. I used to live here.”

“And now?”

“You call this living?”

“It’s better than the alternative, perhaps. Well, now I know it’s your hometown I love it even more.”

“It was a nice place to live before the English decided to redecorate it.”

“Let’s not think about that now. What do you say we get a boat and you let me row you around Castle Pond?”

“Why would you want to do something so arduous on a warm day like this?”

“I don’t particularly, but I can hardly offer to show you around your own hometown.”

“Why not? Frankly, your guess about where anything is now is as good as mine. Yesterday I went for a walk along Copernicus Strasse before I realized it was Richard-Wagner-Strasse. I feel like a stranger here myself.”

“It doesn’t matter. The streets are all going to have Russian names soon. This time next year Richard-Wagner-Strasse will probably be Tchaikovsky Prospekt, or Borodin Street.”

“That’s a pleasant thought.”

“Sorry. I’m an intelligence officer, but sometimes you really wouldn’t think it.”

“I think it’s best to know the worst that can happen.”

“That seems to be my job description.”

“We could talk about it over dinner.”

“That’s the most pleasant thought I’ve heard in a long time. Where would you like to go? The safest place for dinner used to be the Blutgericht in the Castle courtyard basement.”

“I know. Until they bombed it.”

“Which leaves the Park Hotel.”

“There’s another place I know near the zoo on Erich-Koch-Platz.”

I shook my head. “It can’t be the Stadtkeller. That’s closed, too.”

“No, this is somewhere else.”

“Not the naval nunnery.”

Nunneries were what we called the dormitories where most of the women’s auxiliary services were housed.

“No, but it’s somewhere quiet, candlelit, with just the one exclusive table. Mine.”

“I like the place already.”

“After the bombing my parents left their apartment and went to live at their country house in Pillau. I stayed on. The auxiliary service commander thinks they’re still living there.”

“Which means that you don’t have to keep the service women’s curfew.”

“Exactly.”

“Nice.”

“So. You’re invited for dinner. It’s canned stuff, mostly. But my father did have quite a decent selection of Mosels.”

“Suddenly I seem to have quite an appetite.”

“Shall we say eight o’clock?”

I glanced at my watch. “That’s going to be the longest five hours of my life. What am I going to do with myself until then?”

“So go row a boat.”

And that was it. I went to her parents’ apartment in Hammerweg Strasse for dinner. She cooked me a meal, I drank a couple of bottles of nice cold Mosel, and within a couple hours of me arriving there, we were lovers. That’s how things were in those days. Implausibly fast. Uncomplicated. Nobody mentioned love or marriage or consequences. Nobody thought about the future because nobody thought they had a future. Really, you can’t beat how easy life can be when you think there isn’t going to be a tomorrow. Weeks passed like this and together, as winter arrived, we celebrated what we assumed might be our last few months on earth.

Irmela was tall and athletic. She was also highly intelligent, which was why she was working as a lightning maid in the naval signals section. She had to be intelligent to encrypt all communications using a special four-rotor code machine called the Scherbius Enigma before sending them. Before the war, she’d studied mathematics at Albertina University on Paradeplatz. The university was destroyed, like almost everything else in Konigsberg, and while many people, including me, still took the risk of going into the remains of the university library in search of books-Grafe und Unzer, the largest bookstore in Europe and opposite the university, had been completely consumed by flames after a napalm bomb fell through the glass roof-General Lasch, the military commander of Hitler’s northern army, had his army headquarters in a bunker deep under the ruins. For several weeks I was just happy to see a lot of Irmela, who was an enthusiastic and noisy on-the-top kind of lover with considerable experience of men, which I came to appreciate. She knew I was married and didn’t want anything from me except my company and my jokes, which in those days were a lot better than they are now. Experience has taught me that it’s better to be serious, and I should know; I’ve tried and failed to be serious on thousands of occasions.