A Woman in Berlin

There are times now when I have to wonder whether my knowing some Russian is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand it gives me a degree of assurance the others don’t have. What they consider animal grunting and screaming is for me a real human tongue – the richly nuanced, melodious language of Pushkin and Tolstoy. Of course, I’m afraid, afraid, afraid (though a little bit less because of Anatol), but at least I speak with them as one person to another, at least I can tell who’s truly evil from who is bearable, can picture them as separate human beings, distinguish them as individuals. For the first time I also have a sense of being a witness. There probably aren’t many in this city who can talk to them, who’ve seen their birch trees and their villages and the peasants in their bast sandals and all the new, hastily constructed buildings they’re so proud of – and that are now, like me, nothing more than filth beneath their boots. By the same token it’s also easier for those who don’t understand a word of Russian. For them the Russians are more alien; they can talk themselves into the idea that these men aren’t people but savages, mere animals. They can bury their feelings deeper. I can’t do that. I know they’re people, just like we are – less highly developed, perhaps, as it seems to me, and younger as a nation, but closer to their roots. This is probably how the Teutons acted when they sacked Rome, snatching the perfumed Roman ladies, with their pedicures and manicures and artificial curls. Being conquered means having salt rubbed in your wounds.

Around 6 p.m. there was a sudden shouting in the stairwell. A knock at the door, the prearranged dactyl. ‘They’ve looted the basement!’ Andrei, who’s sitting on our sofa, nods. He tells us that he’s known about it for hours, advises us to go right away and see to our things.

Absolute chaos below: wooden partitions battered down, locks torn off, trunks slit open and trampled. We stumble over things that don’t belong to us, tread on laundry that’s still clean and crisply creased. We hold up a candle stump to light our corner, salvage this and that a few towels, a side of bacon on the string. The widow complains that the big trunk with all her best clothes is missing. In the corridor she dumps out someone else’s suitcase that’s been slit open and starts filling it with the few things she has left, using her hands to shovel flour that’s spilled on the floor, as if she’s lost her mind. Left and right the neighbours rummage about by flickering candlelight. Shrill cries and wailing. Eider down whirls through the air, the place reeks of spilled wine and excrement.

We drag our things upstairs. Andrei is clearly embarrassed about the looting. He consoles us by saying that he’s sure they were only looking for alcohol, and that even though everything else has been turned upside down there shouldn’t be anything missing. Then, half in Russian, half in German, Vanya the Child, who has shown up in the meantime as well, promises the widow with a serious expression in his black eyes, that he’ll go with us in the morning when it’s daylight and stay by our side until we’ve found everything that belongs to us.

The widow cries, sobbing afresh each time she recalls a specific item from her trunk – her good suit, her knitted dress, her well-made shoes. I, too, am despondent. We have no rights; we’re nothing but booty, dirt. We unload our rage on Adolf. Anxiously we ask where the front is, when there will be peace.

While we whisper among ourselves at Herr Pauli’s bed, where he retreated once again after eating his midday meal, Andrei holds a war council with his comrades at the mahogany table. Suddenly all the window casements fly open, pieces of cardboard whiz through the room, an explosion throws me against the opposite wall. Something crunching, grinding, then a cloud of dust in the room… and a wall comes crashing down somewhere outside. As we learn from a neighbour half an hour later, a German mortar shell hit the house next door, wounding several Russians and killing a horse. We find the animal in the courtyard the next morning – the meat neatly removed and lying on a bloody sheet, the fatty entrails coiled on the wet red earth beside it.