A Woman in Berlin

At four o’clock I hear the crowing of a rooster, part of the supply train. Right away I’m wide awake, pull my arm out from under Petka. He smiles, showing his white teeth. He gets up quickly, explaining that he has guard duty, but he’ll definitely be back at seven, absolutely! In parting he practically crushes my fingers.

I crawl back under the blanket and sleep fitfully, in fifteen-minute intervals. Once I think I hear the word ‘Help!’ and jump up but it was only the rooster. Now the cow is mooing as well. I unwrap our alarm clock (it’s really the widow’s, but I now consider myself part of the household) – just to be safe we keep it wrapped in a terry cloth towel, far back in the chest. We never look at it unless we’re completely alone and safe. We don’t want to lose it to some Ivan.

It is five o’clock. I can’t sleep any more. I get up and smooth out the bed, shove the crates and chairs back against the rear door with its broken lock, clear the empty bottles the men have left behind and check to see whether we still have our burgundy in the kitchen cupboard, hidden in the old bucket. Thank God they didn’t find that.

A reddish-grey light shining through the window means the war is still on outside. A distant rumble and hum. The front is now rolling into the centre of town. I get dressed, wash myself as best I can, and listen carefully to the morning quiet of the stairwell. Nothing but silence and emptiness. If only I knew where the widow had sneaked off to! I don’t dare knock on any doors, don’t want to frighten anyone.

The next time I prick up my ears, I hear voices. I run up, they’re already coming my way, a whole group of women, with the widow in the lead, sobbing lamentably, ‘Don’t be angry with me!’ (As of yesterday we’ve been calling each other by the familiar ‘du’.) A number of women around her are sobbing as well. I just laugh in the face of all the lamentation: ‘What’s the matter, I’m alive, aren’t I? Life goes on!’

As we head up to the next floor, to the booksellers’, the widow whispers in my ear about how she knocked on several doors and asked people to take us in and give us shelter for the night. In vain. No one opened. At the postmaster’s they hissed through the chained door: ‘The girl? That would be asking for trouble. No, we don’t want to be luring them this way!’ After that it was pitch-dark when some Russian came up and grabbed her, threw her on the floorboards… A mere child, she whispers, no beard at all, smooth-skinned and inexperienced – a smile breaks through her face, so swollen with sobbing. I don’t know her age exactly. I’m not even sure she would tell me. Probably between forty and fifty; she dyes her hair. But for them any woman will do, when they’re grabbing in the dark.

Some fifteen people have holed up at the booksellers’, bringing their bedclothes and spreading out on the sofas, the floor, wherever there’s room. The doors of the apartment has patent deadbolts and extra reinforcements anchored in the floor. On top of that the front door has a metal backing on the inside.

We sit around the unfamiliar kitchen table, all of us hollow-eyed, greenish pale, worn out for lack of sleep. We speak in whispers, our breathing is forced, we gulp down the hot malt coffee (which the bookseller cooked on the stove over a fire of Nazi literature, as he tells us).

We keep staring at the back door, locked and barricaded, hoping it will hold. Hungry, I stuff myself with someone else’s bread. We hear steps coming up the back stairs, then those unfamiliar sounds, to our ears so coarse and animal-like. The table freezes, falls silent. We stop chewing, hold our breath. Hands clenched over hearts. Eyes flickering wildly. Then silence once again as the steps fade away. Someone whispers, ‘If things go on like this…’

No one answers. The refugee girl from Königsberg throws herself across the table, crying out: ‘I can’t take any more! I’m going to end it all!’ She’d been through it several times in the night, up under the roof, where she had fled an entire troop of pursuers. Her hair in tangles, covering her face, she refuses to eat or drink.

We sit, wait, listen as the missiles pipe away overhead like an organ. Shots whip through our street. It’s seven o’clock by the time I creep down to our apartment, together with the widow, carefully checking to see the stair landings are secure. We stop to listen outside our door, which I left ajar – when suddenly it opens from inside.

A uniform. Shock. The widow clutches my arm. Then a sigh of relief – it’s only Petka.