Pierre Frei - Berlin - A Novel

'You think so?' said Jutta. Swaying, she made her way into her apartment and tore her clothes off. She stood in the bathtub and turned on the shower. A trickle of brown fluid was all that came out. 'Oh, bloody shit!' The bad language did her good. She rubbed herself with a towel and the pathetic remnant of some eau-de-Cologne. It gave her the illusion of being clean.

Frau Reiche appeared with a rubber sheet. 'Memento of Grandpa. He wasn't entirely leak-proof at the end,' she said, trying to strike a humorous note. She spread the rubber sheet on the bed. 'Now, lie down.' She had brought an enema syringe and a bottle of seltzer water with her. 'My last. It may help.' There was a pop as she opened the bottle. 'Open your legs.' The seltzer water was cold, and the carbonic acid prickled like little pins. After the douche Jutta felt better.

The motorized advance party was followed by shaggy little horses pulling carts, and soldiers stiff with dirt. Even their own generals saw them not as men, but as primitive human material to be sacrificed in their thousands in achieving some insignificant strategic advantage, or driven into the minefields, clearing a path as they were blown up. Thin cows trotted behind the carts, and chickens cackled in wicker cages. The convoy stopped. Soon smoke was rising from fires built in the road. A pockmarked Asiatic soldier sawed the head off a chicken and let the blood drain from the flapping body before he plucked it. Another cut thick slices of black bread and handed them out to the hungry children. Then he picked up his accordion and began to play.

Jutta dressed: long trousers, a tight belt, a high-necked sweater. As if that would be any use. She put a sharp kitchen knife in her belt. 'I'm going to kill the next one,' she said.

'Then here's your chance,' said Frau Reiche. A mujik with a bristling moustache burst in. His cap was perched perilously on the back of his head, and he was carrying a basket of potatoes encrusted with earth. He made his way through the apartment in search of something. His eye fell on the lavatory. There was water in the bowl. He tipped the potatoes in to wash them, and then, out of curiosity, pulled the chain. The cistern was still full of water. Astonished, he saw his meal disappear.

Jutta laughed out loud. It was a rare moment of complete relaxation. The whiskery man laughed aloud too and went away. Frau Reiche's voice was trembling. 'That could have gone very wrong indeed.'

The women of Berlin smeared their faces with soot, dressed in dirty rags, rolled in filth. It made no difference. Their liberators were perfectly used to dirt and smells. They couldn't read, but they obeyed the vicious orders of the infamous Ilya Ehrenburg writing in Pravda. 'Take their women without mercy. Break their Germanic pride.' The soldiers stood in line, faces expressionless, until it was their turn. There were often thirty men or more.

Towards morning all fell still. The screams of the rape victims had died down, the campfires in the streets were burning out. The liberators lay unconscious in their vodka fumes. Jutta saw it all from the balcony. It was the only time she had ventured into the fresh air. In two or three hours the horrors would begin again.

'Hey, you up there,' a voice whispered. Is this Number 47?' She leaned forward. The man wore a black raincoat buttoned to the neck, the kind that fastened with clips instead of buttons and had been fashionable before the war.

'The front door's open.'

A thin, grey-haired man with a pale face and tired eyes appeared. 'Colonel Werner Liiddeke, Army High Command,' he introduced himself. 'I'm asked by an old lady to tell the tenants of Number 47 that Frowein doesn't have any vegetables after all. Her last words. I think she wasn't quite right in the head any more. She died a few minutes ago. Internal haemorrhaging would be the natural assumption. Those animals shrink from nothing.'

'Frau Mobich. My God, she was eighty.'

The colonel opened the clips of his raincoat. He was in uniform under it. Anything here I could wear? I got away from those Nazi butchers, I don't intend to fall into the hands of the Reds coming after them.'

Jutta gave him Jochen's old track suit and stuffed the uniform into the stove that provided central heating for the whole floor. 'What will you do?'

'Try getting through to the west as a French labourer. I got the papers from a real Frenchman, or rather from what little they'd left of him.'

'Suppose you're caught?'

'Open your fingers.' He dropped a small capsule on the palm of Jutta's hand. 'Bite the glass and pray,' he told her. 'Cyanide takes direct effect on the mucous membranes. It's all over within fifteen seconds. I must get going as soon as it's dark. Will you take the old woman down when it gets light again? Those brutes have nailed her to the church door.'

At dawn they laid the wrinkled old body on the altar: Jutta, Frau Reiche and young Frau Kolbe, whose husband had long ago run for it. 'How often?' Frau Reiche asked the young woman. 'Five times,' was the indifferent answer.

'Let's say a prayer,' Jutta suggested, 'and then we'll put her in the bomb crater behind the sacristy. And then for heaven's sake let's get home before those bastards wake up.' After praying, they put the dead woman in the crater and loosened the soil from around the edge. It soon mercifully covered the abused body. One by one, they left the church.

A new day, thought Jutta. Perhaps my last. She clutched the little capsule in her pocket.

There were splashes of blood on Dr Liselotte Dorn's white coat. 'You'll have to forgive me, but my household help hanged herself after the fifteenth liberator. and I don't have time to do any washing. My card index is up the spout too. It's Frau Weber, isn't it? Don't you come once a year for a check-up?'

'Yes. Jutta Weber, 47 Wilskistrasse. Another tenant in the building was very helpful, she gave me a douche, but I'm afraid it didn't work.'

'In the sixth or seventh week, right? You're the fourth this morning. Most of them in their sixth or seventh week. I was spared — seems they respect a doctor in Russia too.'

There was a view from the surgery window of the flowers in the garden and further away of the Fischtal park, cheerful in the summer weather, where a couple of Russian soldiers were flirting with their girls. Marshal Zhukov had withdrawn the bestial rapists and murderers of the early days, replacing them with slightly more civilized troops. It was safe to venture out again.

'Place your legs there.' The doctor strapped Jutta's knees into the supports. 'Just so that you don't get in my way. I have no anaesthetic for you.'

'The first two Russkis didn't have any for me either.' The dry scraping of the curette in her uterus went through her body like fire. It hurt horribly.

And the third?' Dr Dorn spoke in a conversational tone as she withdrew the sharp instrument from inside Jutta and introduced the next size up.

'My third was a clean, well-shaved sergeant. One of the better sort: Talking helped with the pain. 'He dragged me into Lehmann the butcher's cellar. He had whips, knives and other pretty things ready there. I had to undress. He wanted to tie me up to a hook with my hands above my head. Will it take much longer?'

'We're on number six.' The doctor turned the curette back and fourth. 'Number eight is the last.'

Jutta was breathing hard. The pain was almost unbearable. She forced herself to go on talking. 'There was only one way to stop him.' She screamed.

'Number seven,' said Dr Dorn in a matter-of-fact voice. 'So how did you do that?'

'I did it to him with my mouth — that kept him quiet. Then I pulled him down to me. He thought I was going to get astride him. I stroked his cheek. I had the capsule in my hand, and I rammed it up his nostril and hit it with my fist to make it break. The colonel was right. The mucous membranes of his nose absorbed the poison at once, and in fifteen seconds he was dead. The longest fifteen seconds of my life.'