Pierre Frei: Berlin: A Novel

The queue outside the shop was grey and endless. Many of the women were dressed in old pairs of men's trousers and had scarves over their heads. There were no hairdressing salons these days. Ralf was standing quite a long way back, brushing a broken-off twig back and forth in zigzags over the pavement, while Frau Kalkfurth's tabby kitten tried to catch it. The game came to an abrupt end when a dachshund at the very end of the line broke away and attacked the kitten, which shot off into the garage.

Ralf grabbed the yapping dog's collar and hauled it back to its owner. 'Can't you keep your dog in order?' he asked loudly.

'None of your cheek, young man. Sit, Lehmann!' The man took the dog's lead.

Ralf went into the garage. Old vegetable crates and broken furniture towered up in an impenetrable wall at the back. 'Mutzi, Mutzi,' he called to the kitten. A plaintive mew came from the far side of the lumber. There was no way through. Or was there? The mouldering doors of a wardrobe were hanging off their hinges, and the back of it was smashed. The boy wriggled through. The little cat was crouching on a shabby eiderdown in the dim light. 'Come on, Mutzi. That silly dachshund's back on its lead.' He picked up the frightened animal, which had dug its claws into the eiderdown so hard that the quilt came up with it, revealing the saddle of a motorbike. Carefully, the boy freed the kitten's claws and put the eiderdown back in place. Then he scrambled into the daylight with his protege.

'There you are.' Ben greeted him reproachfully. 'Where's your place in the queue?'

'Behind that woman with the green headscarf.' Ralf let the kitten go and strolled away. Reluctantly, Ben took his slot in the queue. He hated standing in line.

He cut the waiting short by imagining a man in a white jacket with a steaming pan full of sausages slung on a tray in front of him, like that time on the Wannsee bathing beach. He had been very small then, and it was before the war. He could almost hear the squelch as the man squirted mustard on the paper plate from a squeezy bottle. It made a delightfully rude noise.

His mother arrived around six. Gritscher the master cobbler had repaired Ralf's sandals for the umpteenth time. 'That man works miracles,' she told the woman next to her. 'Off you go and do your homework,' she said, turning to her son. And take your brother with you.'

'What'll it be, Frau Dietrich?' Winkelmann beamed at her over the counter, looking healthy and well fed. He had direct access to all good things.

A loaf of bread, 150 grams of powdered egg and the extra margarine ration. Can you let me have the powdered egg as an advance on next week's rations?'

'I'll have to ask the boss about that. Come here a moment, will you, Frau Kalkfurth?'

Martha Kalkfurth had dark hair with strands of grey in it, and a smooth, round, ageless face with a double chin. She sat heavily in her wheelchair, steering it skilfully past sacks of dried potato and cartons filled with bags of ersatz coffee.

'Can Frau Dietrich have 150 grams of powdered egg in advance?'

'Please, Frau Kalkfurth, it's only until Monday when the new ration cards begin.'

Martha Kalkfurth shook her head. 'No special favours from me, even if your husband is with the police.' She turned the wheelchair and went back into the room behind the shop.

Ben found his brother outside the Yanks' ice cream parlour. One of the soldiers was leaning down to hand him a large portion of ice cream. Ralf was a successful beggar; few could resist his angelic face. The two boys scooped up the chocolate and vanilla ice on their way home, using the wafers that came with it. Life was OK.

The soft strains of'Starlight Melody' drifted out of Club 48, combining with the tempting aroma of grilled steaks to arouse impossible longings in the Germans hurrying by. The US Engineers had put the building together from prefabricated components in three days, and within a week it was completely fitted out with a kitchen, cocktail bar, tables and dance floor.

The commandant of the American sector of Berlin, a two-star general from Boston, had handed over the club to the private soldiers and NCOs, dancing the first dance with his wife before withdrawing with relief to the nearby Harnack House. where the commissioned officers and upper ranks of civilian staff drank dry martinis.

Jutta Weber, a pretty blonde aged thirty, worked in the kitchen of the Club. She peeled potatoes, washed dishes. and heaved around the heavy pots and pans used by Mess Sergeant Jack Panelli and his cooks to concoct hearty, unsophisticated dishes from their canned and frozen supplies.

At just before eleven she set off for home. Her bicycle light barely illuminated her way back along Argentinische Allee. The buildings were in darkness; there would he no electricity in this part of town until three in the morning. The coal shortage and the state of the turbines in the city power stations, half of them destroyed in air raids, made power rationing essential. Next came Steglitz. A pedestrian emerged from the darkness. Jutta rang the bicycle bell on her handlebars, making a shrill sound, but he kept coming straight at her. She swerved, caught the edge of the pavement with her front wheel and lost her balance. For a moment she lay there in the road, helpless. Headlights approached. lighting up the face above her for a fraction of a second. The lenses of a large pair of goggles flashed. Then the face disappeared into the darkness again.

An open jeep stopped. The driver jumped out. 'Everything OK?' He helped her to her feet, and she recognized a captain's insignia and the Military Police armband. He was very tall, about one metre ninety, she guessed.

'Everything OK,' she told him. 'I'm on my way home. I work at the FortyEight.' She showed him the ID card allowing her, as a German employee of the army, to be out after curfew. Somewhere nearby the engine of a motorbike started up. The sound rapidly receded.

'Your light's not very strong. Easy to miss an obstacle.' Obviously he hadn't noticed the man with the goggles. 'I'll take you home.'

'There's really no need,' she protested, but he had already lifted her bike into the back of the jeep, and she had no choice but to get in.

'Where do you want to go?'

'Straight ahead, then right into Onkel-Tom-Strasse.'

He started the engine. She glanced at him, but couldn't make out his face beneath his helmet in the darkness. Are you always so late going home?' He had a calm, masculine voice that inspired trust. A bit like Jochen, she thought sadly.

'I never finish before eleven, except on Wednesdays, when I get off at seven.'

'You want to he very careful at night. You never know who may be prowling around in the dark.' He turned into Onkel-Tom-Strasse. Number 133 was one of the two-storey apartment buildings on the right, painted in bright colours in the twenties by an architect with gaudy tastes. He helped her out of the jeep and lifted her bike down.

'Thanks, captain. You were a great help.'

'It was a pleasure, ma'am.' He touched his hand to his white helmet.

Nice American, she thought. She opened the front door of the building, locked it from the inside, and took her bike down to the cellar, where she secured it with a padlock and chain. Then she went quietly upstairs. The little dynamo lamp hummed as she switched it on.

The top apartment on the left had fallen vacant when the Red Army marched in and its tenant, a Nazi local group leader, shot his wife and himself. It had three rooms. The Konigs and their twelve-year-old son HansJoachim, Hajo for short, lived in one. Jutta had the room next to theirs, and the Housing Department had given the room opposite to Jurgen Brandenburg, just released from a POW camp, a small, dark-haired man in his late twenties who wore clothes made from blue Luftwaffe fabric.