A Woman in Berlin

Outside our house we divvy up the loot. The idiotic blue wool managed to get into everything. My share consists of five bottles of burgundy, three jars of preserved vegetables, one bottle of Steinhager, four loaves of whole-grain bread, six packs of pea flour, which the baker generously gave me from his own stores, and one unlabelled can of I-don’t-know-what. Now I’ve lugged everything upstairs to the widow’s.

Hot and sweaty, I recount my adventures to about a dozen people as I stand next to the stove, plate in my left hand, and wolf down a few spoonfuls of the mashed potatoes that the widow fixed. A number of families have chipped in for fuel. More bombs hit outside. The others are eyeing my loot, but they don’t dare go to the barracks which had undoubtedly been emptied of their plunder by now.

Several hours later, around 6 p.m. back in the basement. I was able to get a little sleep, the widow and I having finished the open bottle of burgundy. When I woke up I felt giddy, with a bitter taste in my mouth, it took a while to connect to the kerosene flicker of the underworld. Not until I saw people running out and heard them calling for sacks: ‘Come on, they’re taking potatoes out of the barracks!’

I rush over with the widow. The enemy is taking a break, and things are fairly quiet, which explains the sudden mass of people milling about streets normally deserted in the middle of the day. Two women pass by pulling a child’s toy wagon with a whole barrel on top that smells of sauerkraut. Young and very old alike run like mad in the direction of the barracks. The widow and I have grabbed all the buckets we could find, two for each of us. The way is strewn with trampled potatoes and rotting carrots – you just have to follow them and you can’t go wrong. But right by the stone steps is a patch of blood, I shrink back… but the widow just laughs. ‘That’s marmalade!’ And that’s exactly what it is, too – people are rolling it out by the barrel.

We push through the crowd in the corridor, stumble down the slippery steps, land in a stinky pile of rotting potatoes. By the light of the narrow skylights we dig around in the mush with our hands and shoes, picking out whatever we can use. We leave the carrots and muddy swedes and fill our buckets with potatoes. We find a half-filled sack, and without asking whose it is we grab it and carry it up the stairs, down the street, into our building and up to the first floor.

More rattling and booming. Nobody cares – they’re all gripped by plunder fever. We turn round and run right back, this time returning with buckets full of briquettes. Mobs of people everywhere, running and snatching.

Now they’ve begun to loot the abandoned shops as well. A white-haired man – ‘gentleman’ would be a better description, is hauling a drawer full of boxes of soap powder. The drawer is labelled ‘Rice’.

Up to the first floor. We sit around on the living-room couch. Our arms are stiff, our legs shaky. What windowpanes are still left are quivering slightly. A gentle warmth is wafting through the broken windows – that and the smell of fire. Now and then we hear a voo-oommm! Then a prolonged echo, from the heavy anti-aircraft guns. After that comes a pinng! – a short blow right to the eardrum – heavy artillery. And then, far away, an occasional knackvoom-knackvoom, very fast, accompanied by howling and barking. I have no idea what it is. The widow claims they’re katyusha rockets, the so-called Stalin Organs. Incidentally up to now the Russians have been using individual bombs rather than a carpet.

In the end the two of us go off to see whether there’s any pudding powder left at the corner store that was hit yesterday. It turns out there are still a few customers, and yes, they’re still selling. There’s a price printed on the powder – 38 pfennigs, I think. The person selling, who also owns the store and lives right there, insisted on giving every customer exact change, so he kept running up and down the queue asking who had small coins and could help him. And that while under fire! Only here. We’ll be counting our change right into the grave.

Just for fun we peeked round the corner, to see what was up at the butcher’s, since I still hadn’t used up my ration. There, too, they were selling, with more supply than demand – at most a dozen people were in the store, so we were able to get some good pieces, boneless pork, fairly weighed.

As we walked out of the store a truck drove by, with German troops, red tabs, meaning anti-aircraft. They were headed away from us, toward the centre of town. They sat there mute, staring off into the distance. A woman called out to them, Are you leaving?’ No one answered her. We looked at each other and shrugged. The woman said, ‘They’re just poor souls themselves.’