There are only three people in Berlin who know i killed a man.
And not just any man. A Russian, an officer in the Red Army.
One with fancy boots and even fancier medals on his chest.
There are only three people in Berlin who know I killed a man. My
mother. My friend Kristina. And Martha Dieleman. These are the
three. They know that I didn’t just shoot the bastard or even stick a
knife between his ribs. They know I picked up a broken brick off the
filthy ground in one of Berlin’s back alleyways and pounded his head
to a pulp till my hands were sticky with his blood and whatever he’d
had for brains was trailing from my fingers. That’s why I am here,
alive, cycling up and down the grey and decimated streets of Berlin,
and he is not.
The war is over. But the unspoken war of whispers, of midnight
arrests and tortured body parts rages on unseen. I honestly believed I’d
have learned to forget the killing by now, to roll the memory of his
scream into a tight little wad and toss it away to rot among the piles of
rubble that were stacked high in Berlin’s streets.
Yet that killing still breathes deep inside me like a living thing. I feel it
curled up behind my ribs, hidden away under my shabby brown coat
where no one can see it. No one, that is, except me. Each morning I take
my hard grey pumice stone and I scrub at a spot in the exact centre of my
breastbone to rid myself of the stain of it. I scour it raw again and again.
Yes, I know the scrubbing is pointless because the killing has sunk too
deep into the very bones and sinews of who I am. It is a part of me now.
But I say this, so you know: the Russian deserved to die.
‘Where is he?’
I open my eyes. The darkness and the cold in the room are pressing
down on me like something solid, trapping me. I can’t breathe right. I
drag in icy Berlin air but it feels as if it is packed full of tiny needle-sharp
fishhooks that catch in my throat and snag on the inside of my lungs. I
try to cough them up but it is like coughing up glass. I force myself to
sit up. I spit out blood.
‘Where is he?’
I begin to panic.
‘Where is he? Where is he?’
Is that my voice? It sounds hoarse and scraped raw. My words hang
unheard in my bedroom, and I can tell I am in my own narrow bed
because my fingers are gripping the silky animal warmth of the sable
coat that I throw over at night to fight the cold. A ribbon of ice-white
moonlight unfurls across the floorboards where Felix’s crib should
stand. It is gone.
‘Where is he?’ This time I scream it.
I throw back the bedcover and am shocked by the effort it takes, my
arm is shaking, and beneath me the sheet smells of stale sweat and
vomit. It dawns on me that I am sick. And I am alone.
I get myself as far as the door of my room and am forced to lean
against it, clinging to the doorknob to keep me on my feet. I ache. My
whole body aches and my lungs are on fire, but none of it matters. It is
fear that has dragged me from the depths of God-knows-where. It is
fear that flares into an inferno, consuming the room. Consuming me.
The fear that she has stolen my child.
I open the door. I listen. Silence.
It was the silence that had finally woken me. There were no cries, no
sweet chuckles, no hungry whimpers. No snuffling snores. Nothing.
How long? How long had I lived in silence?
I don’t know.
Hours? Days? Weeks? How long have I been sick?
I light the stub of the candle in an old candlestick that stands on a
table by the door – we have no electricity supply at this hour. I make
my way into what used to be the large drawing room of our apartment,
before the Soviets came and carved it up into a pokey miserable living
space. It lies in total darkness. I raise the candle to scour every corner
of the room. The flame creates shadows that writhe away from me as
though I am the one to fear, but I find nothing until a sudden swirl of
light at the other end of the room sets my heart racing.
‘Felix!’ I whisper.
But it is a mirror, the moving light is a reflection of my own candle.
For a moment I stand there, shaking, then I rush to my mother’s bedroom
door and throw it open. It slams against the wall behind and
rebounds, almost knocking me to the ground.
‘Mutti!’ I shout and storm in.
Except the shout is more of a rasp and the storming is more of an
unsteady hobble, but inside my head I shout and storm and demand the
truth from my mother.
‘Mutti, where is he?’
‘Where is who?’
‘Felix.’
She is sitting bolt upright in bed, startled, a picture of wide-eyed
innocence. She wears a high-necked white silk nightdress and her long
hair is scooped together by a white ribbon and hangs neatly over one
shoulder in an immaculate braid. Her face is thin, her cheekbones jutting
out under pearly skin, and her lips set tight with annoyance at this
intrusion. My mother is a woman of fifty but in the swaying dim light
of my candle she has the soft untouched appearance of a young girl,
except for the look in the intense blue of her eyes. There you can see it.
You can see exactly who she is.
‘Get out, Anna,’ she says.
I move forward past the stacks of furniture, avoiding the tottering
footstool propped atop the carved Black Forest chairs that had once
been my father’s favourites. She is frightened that I will burn them for
firewood, so she guards them in here. I reach my mother’s bedside and
look down on her, while I hold the candlestick high. Whenever I look
at her eyes, I see his. Whenever I look at her mouth, I see his. I wonder
now how she can face me and ask, Where is who?
‘What have you done with my baby?’ I demand. ‘Where is my Felix?’
She blinks slowly. It has always been her way of making someone
wait, even Papa if he was trying to hurry her. I can’t wait.
I try not to shout. ‘Mutti, Felix is only three months old. It is winter
and he will die if he is out in the cold. Where is he?’
‘He has gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Away.’
‘What do you mean, away? Away where?’
‘You were too ill with pneumonia to care for the little bastard and he
wouldn’t stop crying. I got rid of him. You know I never wanted him
here, not from the very beginning. He was tainted. He brought shame
on our name, we both know that. He’s gone.’
‘Where?’
I was shaking so hard the candle flame guttered and would have extinguished
itself if my mother had not removed it from my grip and placed it
on her bedside cabinet. With the same cold hand that had removed my son.
‘You almost died, Anna.’
‘Where?’
I lean down over her and it is only when I see a drop of moisture fall
on her silk nightgown and spread tendrils through its fibres that I realise
I am crying. The wind claws at the shutters and I think of Felix
somewhere out there without me.
‘Tell me, Mutti.’ I seize her arm, nothing but bird bones, hollow and
fragile. ‘Tell me what you did with him?’
‘I gave him away.’
‘To whom?’
‘To the first person who would take the brat.’ She pushes me aside
and swings herself out of bed. She stares glassy-eyed at the empty
vodka bottle next to the candlestick instead of at me. ‘He’s gone, Anna.
He’s been gone more than a week and I have no idea where or with
whom, so don’t bother asking. Forget him. This city is crawling with
unwanted children. You’ll never see him again.’
‘Is he still alive?’
I have visions of her lowering her pillow over his precious sleeping
face and burying his limp body in the rubble of the city, while I lay
burning with fever, soaking the sheets of my bed.
‘I have no idea,’ she says and I can hear the truth of it in her voice.
‘He’s gone. Accept it.’
Something breaks inside me, something vital that I had believed was
unbreakable, and I know it cannot be mended.
‘His crib? His toys?’
‘I burned them,’ she says. ‘Like the Russians burned our city.’
I cannot bear to breathe the same air as her any more; rage is suffocating
me and I leave the bedroom with images in my head that I
cannot bear to look at. I am in the dark. Pitch dark. In our living
space I cling to the icy window frame and press my forehead tight
against its blackness as an ocean of grief sweeps through me and I
recall the final terrifying Russian bombardment of Berlin. In April
outside our city the Soviet Union assembled the largest force of military
power ever seen, and Russian Marshal Zhukov inflicted
enormous casualties and crippling damage to gain the glory of capturing
the prize of Berlin. He grasped our poor city in a death grip.
So now we live under Russian control, much of the time in darkness
and in freezing cold because the winter is here. We have no lighting
other than candles and oil lamps, or firelight if we ’re lucky, because
oil is worth more than gold in Berlin. But right now none of this
means a thing to me.
‘Felix, my sweetest heart,’ I whisper. ‘Somewhere you are out there.
Somewhere in this godforsaken city you are alive, I can feel your heart
beating within mine.’ I force myself to believe my own words. ‘I love
you and I will find you, my child, I swear it. Wait for me. I will come.’
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