A Woman in Berlin

It’s strange how the men always start by asking, ‘Do you have a husband?’ What’s the best way to answer? If you say no, they start making advances right away. If you say yes, thinking they’ll leave you in peace, they just go on with their grilling: ‘Where is he? Did he stay in Stalingrad for good?’ (Many of our troops fought at Stalingrad; they wear a special medal.) If you have a real live man around, one you can actually show them (as the widow does with Herr Pauli, even though he’s her tenant and nothing more), they’ll back off a bit – at first. But they don’t really care; they take what they can get, married or not. However, they prefer to keep the husband out of the way for as long as needed, by sending him off somewhere or locking him up or doing something else. Not because they’re afraid. They’ve already noticed that none of the husbands here are very likely to fly into a rage. But having one around makes them uncomfortable – unless they’re completely plastered.

As it happens I don’t know how to answer that question, even if I wanted to be completely honest. Gerd and I would have married long ago if it hadn’t been for the war. But once he was called up that was it, he didn’t want to any more. ‘Bring another war orphan into the world? Not a chance. I’m one myself, I know what it’s like.’ And that’s the way it’s been up to now Even so, we feel just as tied to each other as if we were married. Except I haven’t heard from him for over nine weeks; his last letter was posted from the Siegfried Line. I hardly know what he looks like any more. All my photos were bombed, except the one I had in my bag, and I tore that one up on account of the uniform. Even if he was just an NCO, I was afraid. The whole building got rid of anything that had to do with soldiers, anything that might upset the Russians. They all burned books, too, but at least when the books went up in smoke they provided some warmth, a little hot soup.

We’d barely managed to drink our ersatz coffee and eat a few buttered slices of the plundered bread when Anatol’s men marched in. Our place has become a kind of restaurant for them, albeit one where the guests bring their own food. This time they brought a decent man along, the best I’ve met so far: Andrei, a sergeant, a schoolteacher by profession. Narrow forehead, icy-blue eyes, quiet and intelligent. My first political conversation. That’s not as difficult as it sounds, since all the words having to do with politics and the economy have Latin or Greek roots, so they sound similar in both languages. Andrei is an orthodox Marxist. He doesn’t blame Hitler personally for the war; instead he faults capitalism, which spawns the Hitlers of the world and stockpiles war materiel. He thinks that Russia and Germany make a good economic match, that Germany can be a natural partner for Russia, once it has been built up along socialist lines. The conversation did me a lot of good, and not so much because of the subject, which I’m not as well versed in as Andrei, but simply because one of them treated me as an equal, without once touching me, not even with his eyes. He didn’t see me as a mere piece of female flesh, like all the others up to now.

People were coming and going throughout the morning, while Andrei sat on the sofa writing his report. As long as he’s there we feel secure. He brought a Russian army newspaper; I deciphered the familiar names of Berlin districts. There’s not much left of our city that’s still German.

Other than that we feel completely at the mercy of anyone and everyone. When we’re alone we jump at every noise, every step. The widow and I huddle around Herr Pauli’s bed, the way we are right now as I am writing this. We linger for hours in the dark, icy room. Ivan has driven us to the very depths – even literally, in some cases; there are still a few groups on our block that haven’t been discovered, families who have been living in their basements since Friday, who only send people out early in the morning for water. I think our men must feel even dirtier than we do, sullied as we women are. In the queue at the pump one woman told me how her neighbour reacted when the Russians fell on her in her basement. He simply shouted, ‘Well, why don’t you just go with them, you’re putting all of us in danger!’ A minor footnote to the. Decline of the West.