Leaving Berlin: A Novel Read online

  “Irene, how can you talk like this?” Elsbeth said, her mouth narrowing. “To father.”

  But it was Elsbeth, prim and conventional, who was offended, not Fritz, who enjoyed jousting with Irene, a daughter cut from the same rough cloth.

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t ask for proof,” Fritz said. “Untouched.”

  “Papa,” Elsbeth said.

  “Well, it’d be worth the wait. For a von Armin,” Irene said, enjoying herself. “But then—I don’t know—maybe not. The von Bernuths only marry for love. Isn’t that right? Just like you and Mama.”

  “That was different.”

  “Yes? How many acres did she bring?”

  “Don’t make fun of your mother.”

  A woman Alex remembered always in the same full skirt, piled hair held by a tortoise comb, a Wilhelmine figure who spent her days running the house—the long, rich meals, the polishing and dusting—as if nothing had changed outside the heavy front doors, the kaiser still in place, the angry noises in the street better ignored, a time before politics.

  “I can also run a trace through CROWCASS,” Campbell had said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Registry of war criminals. Convicted. Suspected.”

  “No. They weren’t like that.”

  “If you say so. Nobody was, not now. Just ask them.”

  Alex shook his head. “You didn’t know them. They were in their own world. Fritz—I don’t think he ever had an idea in his head. Just shooting birds and chasing the maids.”

  “Shooting birds?”

  “Game birds. And deer. Hunting. It’s a big thing in that part of the world. Was, anyway.”

  The house parties, long cold days in the fields, beaters up ahead, then a rush of birds up through the trees, yellow birch against the dark green firs. Lined up for pictures with the day’s kill laid out in front, bonfires, bottles of Sekt, dinners that went on all evening. Sometimes an invitation farther east, the thick forests of East Prussia, wild boar.

  “I thought you said they were broke.”

  “It doesn’t cost anything to be a guest—they were one of the old families. Anyway, they had enough for that.” He looked at Don. “He didn’t care about Hitler, any of that. They never talked about politics.”

  Until it was all they talked about, the unavoidable poisoned air everyone breathed, even the dinner table under siege.

  “I won’t have it in this house,” Fritz said. “All this talk. Bolsheviks.”

  “Bolsheviks,” Erich said, dismissive, his father’s bluster by now a familiar joke. “It’s not Russia here.”

  “So what, then? Hooligans? Maybe you prefer hooligans. Otto Wolff and the rest of your gang. Socialists. What does it even mean, ‘Socialists’? Kurt Engel. A Jew—” Catching himself, aware of Alex down the table. “Fighting in the streets. We had enough of that after the war. Spartakists. That woman Luxemburg. Of course dead. How else would she end up?”

  “We’re not fighting in the streets,” Erich said, an exaggerated patience. “The Nazis are fighting.”

  “And cracking skulls. Yours, if you’re not careful, and then what? Politics.” Almost spitting it out. “I don’t want trouble. Not in this house.” What he wanted was his wife, with the tortoise comb, the boiled beef with horseradish sauce, and Kaiserschmarren for dessert, life the way it had been. He looked at Erich. “You have responsibilities.”

  “So go stick my head in the sand. How much room is left down there, where you stick yours?”

  “Bolsheviks. And how do you think that’s going to end? No property rights, that’s how.”

  “Don’t worry,” Irene said, “by that time we won’t have any property left, so what’s the difference?”

  “Quatsch,” Fritz said, genuinely angry.

  “Well, how much is left? This house, yes, Berlin. But the country? I know you’ve been selling it off. You think nobody knows, but everybody talks. How much is left?”

  “Enough to feed you. Where do you think the money goes? You think your dresses are free? Food?” His hand sweeping over the long table with the silver carving dishes.

  “So it’s for us. Not the card games. Those women you—”

  “Irene,” Elsbeth said.

  “Oh, what’s the difference? Mother’s dead. Everybody knows.”

  “Alex, you talk to them,” Fritz said, shifting, suddenly embarrassed. “How can someone at this table be with the Bolsheviks? Does that make sense? They kill people like us.”

  “But what is the choice?” Alex said quietly. “The Nazis? They’ll kill everybody before they’re through.”

  “Hindenburg will never accept that man. Von Papen—”

  “Has no one behind him.”

  “I tell you. He will never accept him.”

  “Oh, you know this?” Erich said. “Your friends at the club?”

  “He has to form a government,” Alex said.

  “Not with Communists. Socialists.”

  Alex looked at him. “Then you’ve made your choice.”

  “I don’t choose any of them,” Fritz said, exasperated. “They’re all—” He turned to Erich. “You’ll see. All the same. Keep out of it. Keep your head down.” Alex’s father’s advice too, burrowing in.

  He opened his eyes. A sound, stopping. Not the airplanes, still humming in the distance. Closer, in the hall. Footsteps. He listened, holding his breath. Where had they stopped? Just outside? The way he used to listen after Oranienburg, an ear to the door even when he was asleep. The middle of the night. No, there was a faint light outside the window. Not yet morning but not night anymore. Then the steps started again, soft, not wanting to be heard. He got up and went over to the door, listening.

  But why would they be checking on him at this hour? Suspecting what? We just want information, Don had said. Some ears to the ground. There’s no danger to you. If you’re careful. Hedging. Careful of what? People listening at doors. The hall was still. Alex turned the knob, easing the door open a crack. A dim night-light, empty corridor. But someone had been here. Then he saw the shoes at the next door, just polished, the Adlon overnight service, even in the ruins. He leaned against the doorjamb, feeling foolish. But it might have been somebody.

  And now he was up, restless, the room closing in again. If he lay down they’d come back, not dreams exactly, bits of his life that still hovered in the air here. He should change, have a bath, but he didn’t want to run water now, risk pipes clanging, let everyone know he was up. What he wanted, just for a while, was to be invisible, someone nobody could see. Another ghost.

  He pulled on his overcoat and started down the hall, as quiet as the shoe boy, keeping to the carpet runner. The lobby was deserted except for the night porter, half asleep, whose surprised look Alex had to answer before he’d unlock the door.

  “Couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d take a walk.”

  “A walk,” the porter said. “It’s not safe, nights. It’s the DPs. I know, they’ve had a rough time, still—”

  Alex looked out at the deserted street. “It’ll be light soon.”

  “The kids are worse. Children, you think, and then they’re all over you. They picked me clean. Me.”

  Alex nodded, glancing down at the door lock.

  “Friedrichstrasse should be all right. Police by the station, so the gangs stay away. You don’t want to go into the park, not at this hour.” Hand still on the door, waiting. A concern for Alex’s safety or something to put in a report later? The night porter at the Adlon would see things, be a useful source. Alex looked at him. Well, where? And suddenly he knew.

  “I want to see if something’s still there.”

  Outside he glanced across the square to the Brandenburg Gate, covered in scaffolding, the Quadriga gone, and turned right toward Wilhelmstrasse. Streets he would know even in the dark. He could walk straight down to Hitler’s Chancellery, have a gloating moment. You didn’t win, not in the end. But who did? Now that it was all just rubble.

  Instea
d he made his way east, Französische Strasse to the Gendarmenmarkt, both churches in ruins, the concert hall smashed, only a path cleared through the wreckage. Given this, how could the house have escaped? But faster now, because maybe it had. Odd buildings had been spared, as if the flames had just skipped over them. The post office on Französische Strasse had made it through. Why not a town house tucked away on a side street, the pompous architecture at least solid, built to last. But as he reached Hausvogteiplatz, his heart sank. Every building on the square seemed to have taken a hit, the small park at the center now a huge gaping hole. Where the U-Bahn station had been. He walked toward the edge, ignoring the warning signs, visible in the half-light. Why hadn’t they at least covered over the open wound? People could fall in. The least of their worries. Out of the square, really a triangle, and then Kleine Jägerstrasse, just a dog’s leg off Niederwallstrasse, not even a full block long, a few old buildings and the von Bernuth house. Still there.

  He went farther into the little street. Not all of it. The roof was gone and most of the inside gutted, but the big old front doors were intact, and through a blasted section of the façade he could see the great staircase, hanging from its support wall, no longer going anywhere, the second floor open air. The sconces along the staircase wall, once gas, were still in place, even singed pieces of wallpaper, the same familiar pattern, now exposed to the street, all privacy gone, a woman whose clothes had been ripped away.

  Alex stared for a few minutes, then stepped back to the pile of rubble across the street and sat down, taking out a cigarette. The von Bernuth house. All the thick carpeting and carved mahogany gone, presumably ash now. Had they rescued the silver or any of the Caspar David Friedrichs in their old-master frames? Or had all that been removed before the raids started?

  The house had always been in the wrong part of town. Even in Fritz’s grandfather’s time the big town houses were being built near the Tiergarten, Vossstrasse, and then even farther west. But old Friedrich, whose lucky bet on a railway stock made the house possible, didn’t know Berlin well—he liked the feel of Hausvogteiplatz, the bargain price for the lot. When the clothing factories began to move in, the new office buildings, it was too late. The von Bernuths had a mansion in the middle of a commercial neighborhood. More amusement than stigma attached to this—it was considered a joke on old Friedrich, another family story.

  Alex had heard them all. How the elder Friedrich invested in railroad after failing railroad, hoping for the pay dirt of another Anhalter-Bayerische line. How Fritz’s father accidentally shot a tenant, then gave him one of the farms when he recovered. How a note to a mistress was put in the wrong envelope. The sunny, overdressed years before the first war. He knew the stories because Irene and Elsbeth told them to him. It was part of their charm that the von Bernuths saw their family history as a comedy, a series of hapless misadventures. And then when the real stories ran out, he made up more, a book of them.

  “You’ve made us more interesting than we are,” Irene had said.

  “Not you.”

  At night there were only a few lights in Kleine Jägerstrasse, so the house had seemed that much brighter, light pouring out the windows, the door lamps like beacons, waiting for guests. There were always people, the girls’ friends staying over, parties when they were older. Elsbeth was the pretty one, creamy and delicate as a Dresden doll, but it was Irene people came for, her jokes and careless sensuality, the swollen lower lip, the tangle of blond hair, forever falling out of place. And after the parties, the house cleaned and aired, there were the Sunday lunches, the long table and stiff napkins, one rich course after another, swimming in gravy, the platters almost too heavy for the maids. Saddle of venison and red cabbage and spaetzle, or pork stuffed with prunes, soups thickened with cream, breast of veal, potatoes Anna, a full afternoon of food. His aunt Lotte, who’d married Fritz’s brother Hermann, had warned him. “There’s always another course, so just take a little or you’ll never get through it.” Lotte had giggled. “They have to lie down afterward. They can’t move.” Desserts. Stewed fruit and elaborate cakes, a Spanische Windtorte. A Sunday lunch of the last century, before the money had begun to run out.

  He finished the cigarette and stood up, wiping the dust off his coat. In Hausvogteiplatz a few people were on their way to work, the sky finally morning. He could see details now, not just shadowy clumps. The brass knocker on the door was gone, valuable scrap, the interiors long since ransacked. He pushed at the door.

  “What do you want there?” An old man with a worker’s cap.

  “Nothing.” He hesitated. “I knew the family. The owners.”

  The man shook his head. “What owners? It belongs to the bank,” he said, indicating the big office building on Kurstrasse, new to Alex. “The Reichsbank.” An unexpected pride in his voice, not just any bank.

  “Well, a family used to live here.”

  The man nodded. “I saw you sitting here. So you’re looking for them? It’s a long time now. Since anybody was here. The bank was going to knock it down. To put up a new building. That was the idea. But then the war started and that was the end of that.”

  “So it just sat here?”

  “They used it for storage. Files, things like that. But then it was hit and everything went up. People thought maybe there were safes here. You know, for the gold. But we never moved it.”

  “We?”

  “I was night watchman. At the bank. I saw it, you know. The gold. In bars. But it was never moved here. I thought that’s what you wanted, to see if there was anything to take. But there’s nothing. Here, look.” He pushed the door open. “Nothing.”

  Not even broken pieces of furniture, scavenged for firewood, just bricks and chunks of plaster. He looked across what had been the hall to the suspended piece of staircase. The built-in closet underneath it, dumping ground for umbrellas and trunks and boots, had been cut away, surgically removed by blast. The newel post had been ripped away too. Where they used to stand the Christmas tree, the first thing you saw when you came in, draped with strings of electric candles.

  “Careful of the glass,” the old man said.

  Alex took a step, then stopped. What was the point? “That’s all right,” he said. “I just wanted to see if the house was still here.”

  The man closed the door behind them, a watchman’s instinct.

  “A thousand years Adolf said. Now look.” He turned to Alex. “How is it you didn’t know? About the house. You were in the army?”

  “No. I was away.” Evading.

  “Away,” the man said, leaping somewhere else. “Not so many come back from that. You hear the stories—” Wanting to hear Alex’s, what the camps were like, and now it was too late to correct him, too many layers of embarrassment. When Alex said nothing the man sighed and looked away. “Well, it was no picnic here either,” he said, his hand taking in the street. “Night after night. A thousand years. What a liar. And now we’ve got the Russians. That’s what he gave us instead. The Russians. A thousand years of them.” A quick glance at Alex, to see how he was responding to this. “I never thought I’d see that. Russians in Berlin. Any of it.” He hesitated, not sure how to ask. “You’re a Jew?”

  “Half,” Alex said.

  “Half. That didn’t matter to them, did it?”

  “No.”

  “Swine. And now they blame us. The Germans did it. Who? Me? No, those liars. They say the Jews brought it on themselves, but I don’t agree. It was them. They took everything too far.” A pause, awkward, the easiness gone. He touched his hat. “Well, so.”

  Alex watched him go, his shoes loud on the pavement. Kleine Jägerstrasse had always been an echo chamber, sounds bouncing between the buildings. That night they had heard shouts first, running footsteps, then heavy boots, stopping just outside, not sure where to go next, a tension you could almost feel through the door. Erich had outrun them only by seconds, just long enough to slip through the side door before the maid bolted it, eyes wide with fear.
Kurt Engel was bleeding from a gash in his scalp, Erich holding him up, his own face bloody from a smashed nose. Fritz and the girls had rushed in from the sitting room, little involuntary cries, the whole house beginning to flutter. Then more shouts in the street.

  Alex peeked through the curtains. “SA,” he said. “Did they see you come in?”

  “Who cares what they saw?” Fritz said. “Call the police.”

  “The police won’t do anything,” Erich said.

  “What’s that? Blood?” Fritz said. “Are you hurt? Ilse, get some water—”

  The maid began to run then stopped short as the brass knocker began pounding on the door.

  “Open up! Scum!”

  Alex could hear the sharp intake of breath in the room, the beginning of panic. Elsbeth was swallowing, her eyes darting nervously.

  “Call the police,” Fritz said.

  “Papa,” Erich said. “They’ll kill us.”

  “In my house?” Fritz said.

  “Open!” Another pounding, even the heavy door shaking with it.

  “Over here,” Irene said, opening the closet door under the stairs. “Quick.”

  Erich put his arm around Kurt’s waist and half dragged him behind the Christmas tree.

  “Turn on the tree lights,” Irene said to the maid.

  “Open!”

  “You have to answer them,” Alex said to Fritz, watching Irene shut the closet door and move two wrapped presents up against it, part of the display spread under the tree.

  “Who is that?” Fritz shouted. “What do you want?”

  “Open up!”

  Alex nodded at Fritz, who looked around, a directive to stay still, then went over and opened the door.

  “What is the meaning of this? What do you want? You should be ashamed of yourself. Are you drunk?”

  The leader, a burly man in his twenties, rushed through, then stopped, not expecting the lights, girls in dresses.

  “They came in here. There’s nowhere else—”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “Jewish scum. Communists.”

  “Here? Don’t be ridiculous.”