William Boyd - The New Confessions

A message from Eugen. We are to meet tomorrow in the Dandy Bar at midday .

Eugen wasn’t actually allowed in the bar because he was too badly dressed. I arrived to find him arguing with the doorman. I led him away and calmed him down. He was close to tears.

“My God! In the old days I wouldn’t have looked into a stinking dive like that!” he said. “I belonged to five clubs. Five. Very select. The most exclusive places.”

“Have you found him?”

“What? Yes. Yes, I think so.”

He calmed down when I gave him his cigarettes.

He took me off somewhere in the French sector. There were Tricolors everywhere. I think the French were enjoying occupying Berlin just as much as the Russians. We abandoned the car and walked through a partially cleared street. Tremendous fires had raged here and the buildings were quite black with soot. It was a cool cloudy day with occasional drizzle. From time to time the fresh wind unpeeled a patch of encrusted soot from the walls and sent it dancing through the air like a stiff black handkerchief. We turned a corner and came to an open space, once a small square perhaps. Beyond it, the houses had been completely flattened and we found we were in a brick wasteland, big as a soccer field, pretty with copious weeds and wildflowers. Here and there people seemed to be camping in hollows burrowed in the rubble. A crowd of about thirty gathered round a blazing bonfire.

With some difficulty Eugen and I made our way across the uneven ground towards a half-demolished church. I felt most peculiar. I could hardly believe I was going to meet Karl-Heinz. I felt childishly tearful and full of trepidation. I stumbled badly and my leg began to ache.

The roof of the church had gone and so had all the pews and furniture — for firewood, I assumed. Many people seemed to be living there, sitting docilely against the wall guarding bundles of possessions, or crouched over tiny fires cooking food in steaming pots. We went down into the crypt. It was lit by electric light, to my surprise, and was very smoky. Eugen spoke to a young woman with one arm. I looked around: the place was full of young people — boys and girls. She pointed her stump towards the back of the room.

We walked towards the rear past a row of makeshift rickety tables. Half a dozen people sat at them; they seemed to be rolling cigarettes but I couldn’t be sure, I only glanced at them.

Then I saw Karl-Heinz.

He was cooking something over a large woodburning stove that was responsible for all the smoke. He wore a thick, crudely cut greatcoat that came down to his ankles. His hair had recently been shaved off and was now a patchy prickly furze. It was mostly gray. He was very thin and his grizzled neck and jaw looked like those of an old man, slack flesh and stretched sinew, no firmness. He looked up and turned. His eyebrows were the same dark circumflexes. He smiled. A few teeth had gone.

“Hello, Johnny,” he said, simply. We embraced. He stank. But it reminded me of that day in 1924, at 129B Stralauer Allee.

I don’t mind telling you that I wept. I blubbed. I was happy to see him and at the same time unbearably sad. He was only a couple of years older than me but he looked like my father. We sat down around the stove and he insisted on serving up a miserable lunch. A soup of breadcrumbs and salt in hot water and potatoes fried in old coffee grounds scavenged from U.S. Army messes.

“At least it gives them a taste,” he said.

While we ate Karl-Heinz told me briefly about his war. He had been declared unfit for military service because of his ulcer, which, owing to wartime deprivations and the crudity of the liquor he consumed, had flared up in 1942. He carried on working in the theaters while they were open. He was in Hamburg for a while and then Munich. However, as the war neared its end he was drafted into a special battalion of men all suffering from stomach disorders. They were sent east of Berlin to face the Russians as they advanced.

“It was a very strange unit, Johnny. We talked about nothing except our health, our doctors. Ninety-five percent of us had ulcers.” I tried without success to imagine this unit.

By the time they had retreated from the Ringbahn to Potsdamer Platz, Karl-Heinz decided that this was the moment to desert and go to ground. For three months he pretended to be insane.

“Best performance of my life,” he said with a thin smile.

“What did you do?”

“Not while we’re eating, Johnny, please.”

I looked around at the disabled youngsters. “What’s going on here?”

“Well, I had to live. I became a Kippensammler . I collected cigarette butts. Then I decided to become an entrepreneur. There were all these young people living in the ruins. I got them to collect cigarette ends for me. It takes about seven butts to make a new cigarette. We sell them for two marks each. I pay them some money and we buy food on the black market. For a while we did well, but then everybody started doing it. Life had got hard again. But then you arrive …” He smiled. “My God, Johnny, you remember the day we met in Weilburg, 1918?” He stopped suddenly. The thought of all that time in between seemed to unsettle him. His smile faded. It unsettled me too. It is one of the least happy consequences of aging. All that “past” seems to mass behind the present, rendering it insignificant and nugatory. I thought of our two lives. All that effort, all those years, to end up eating coffee-flavored potatoes in the crypt of a bombed-out church. Around us the ruins of the third-largest city in the world. And there was still the future to come.

“I want you to come away with me,” I said to him. “We must get you to America.”

“Very nice idea,” he said. “What for?”

“We’re going to finish The Confessions. ”

I think for the first time in the twenty-eight years we had known each other, Karl-Heinz looked at me with unalloyed admiration.

I found Karl-Heinz a place to stay not far from Henni’s building. I read a notice in the street that there was a room to let in a basement apartment. The young family who owned it were delighted to welcome him. The wife had seen him onstage many times. I bought him some clothes, gave him money for food, had him deloused and medically examined and secured him some false teeth and a new set of papers. All that was comparatively easy. Getting him out of the country seemed impossible.

Finally, I learned of a special Home Office scheme that had been created to allow German nationals the opportunity to rejoin members of their families in Britain. I applied on Karl-Heinz’s behalf, saying that he was a half brother of Mungo Dale and that there was accommodation and a job for him at Drumlarish. This claim was met with some skepticism. Proof was called for. I had conspired with Mungo and he obligingly wrote to the authorities saying that Karl-Heinz was the offspring of his mother’s second marriage and that he had spent many summers with the family before the Great War. They had rather lost contact with him since Mrs. Dale had died, but would be delighted to welcome him back to the Dale household once more.

In Berlin a search was instigated for documents to verify the story. It would take time, I was told, and in the end might be futile — so much had been destroyed. By this stage we were almost into June.

In the end I solved my problem by blackmailing a wing commander in the RAF (later Air Marshal Lord D—) who was suitably placed in the hierarchy of the military government to give the authorization. He was making a fortune by flying stolen antiques back to London dealers in RAF planes (an open secret in WarCorrMess). He was not alone. I could give the names of half a dozen high-ranking British officers who secured a comfortable postwar income for themselves based on German loot. This particular man was completely unperturbed when I put the deal to him. He said no editor of a British newspaper would dare print the story. I pointed out that I worked for an American newspaper and was not similarly constrained. He signed and had Karl-Heinz’s papers drawn up and authorized while I waited. As I left, he said, “It’s little shits like you who voted Winston out of office.”