It has been a harrowing week for the dying city. In the first few days of February, the worst air raids of the war are inflicted, not only on the population attempting to hang on to ruined apartments, waiting for loved ones to return, but for thousands of refugees arriving day and night on cramped freight trains.
Emma and Eva are off tonight, and so is Nadja, but Hilde and Lilly are here with Anna. So are the boys from the downtown emergency service. Fritze, Picco Graumann, von Moor, (‘the Negro’) with the carrot red mop of hair, and the others. Hilla, pink and round, is assisting at the Nurses’ station. ‘The Pipsqueak’ is a tag-along, somebody’s little brother, not officially called up, but tolerated, and always helpful. They and the girls have taken eleven hundred refugees, with their babies, their elderly and their bundles, out of box cars and led them in the blacked out night off the pock-marked platforms of Anhalter Bahnhof, down damaged stairways and through the tunnel, around deep craters in the street and into the multi-level bunker, down down down ramps, past shower rooms, and coffee kitchens, past the medical centre, and into dormitories whose floors are covered in burlap sacks filled with straw.
Fritze is with her, big, calm, reliable Fritze, and Anna is grateful.
“Memorize the number on the door when you leave to go to the toilet,” they tell the exhausted, smelly, haggard people, whose eyes are expressionless and who do not speak.
A few do ask if they could perhaps wash somewhere, and are relieved to receive a towel for the shower. Others sit upright against the wall clutching a cup of steaming coffee, cradling sleeping children in their lap. Men, women and many children.
Fritze carries heavy sacks, bundles and even wounded to the bunker. The trains are strafed regularly by low flying fighter-bombers. This train had a badly injured engineer, who just made it into the station.
Anna takes women with hugely swollen legs to the nurse’s medical centre, where there is a long line-up. Then back up to bring more people, with the help of newly arrived wardens who announce an impending air-raid before the refugees can be taken to safety. When a pre-alert is received, the doors are rolled shut in the remaining cars, and today another engineer, about to go off shift, takes this train out to the woods or at least will try. Word is they will return later to pick up the many others who made it into the bunker, who will sleep tonight, will eat decent soup with bread, will receive milk for their children, clean diapers for their babies, and will be issued a supply of cigarettes.
The smoke and dust, the sickly-sweet stench of decomposing bodies under the ruins outside, make it difficult to breathe, and the children are crying as they climb over the rubble in the road. Fritze carries as many as he can, and with his enormous wingspan, manages often a toddler in each arm, and another on his back, and he makes them laugh, calms them down, hums songs, tickles, coos. But after the train has left, the air in the bunker is beginning to get thick from unwashed bodies, wet diapers, cigarette smoke, kitchen odours. The ventilation leaves much to be desired.
Outside, Anna tries not to look to the right, behind a demolished car near the station, where there is a small stack of bodies under a tarpaulin, waiting to be picked up by a truck, unidentified victims from the train.
This is the first time they haven’t been able to go home after their shift, have been on duty for almost thirty-four hours, and Anna is feeling light-headed. Theoretically she is to go to school tomorrow morning, for the four hours of core curriculum that have been set up for kids in the Emergency Service units, but she can’t imagine staying awake, even for these extraordinary, beloved teachers, who have been called up, out of retirement. Both, Dr. Witte, who was 20 minutes late one morning, newly bombed out, and Mrs. Schöner, who reassured their students that yes, there would be a future. They would be contributors to the recontruction of their country, and they would succeed.
When they hear the all clear, and Hilde and Lilly disappear into their own dormitory upstairs on level one, Fritze pulls Anna aside at the door.
“I can’t sleep now. I mean I’m dog- tired, but I just can’t sleep. I need to go for a walk. You don’t have to come, of course. Do you want to lie down or something?”
“No, I couldn’t sleep a wink. It’s just so, just so—” And they climb up and out of the bunker. To their amazement, the immediate vicinity has not been hit this time. Usually, tons of bombs are dropped into already ruined city blocks. Carpet-bombing, they call it, areas marked by sets of multi-coloured drop flares, that the Berliners have dubbed ‘Christmas trees’. But the carpets were marked elsewhere this time, and so the flames are visible to the south-east and to the north of them, the wind reasonably low, smoke and soot levels bearable for now.
Fritze and Anna look around. Loud hammering emanates from the terminal less than a hundred metres away. They are laying wood planks along the single platform that is being kept intact, are expecting more trains, many more, though there is a rumour that it won’t be long before the refugee trains will be moved to freight ramps closer to the suburbs, in Schönholz, where the engines can be refurbished with water and coal at the depot, by a relief crew, where possible, on the spot.
“I win,” says Fritze, pointing to the six storey building a few blocks from them, the single edifice around that is still standing. “You said it would be gone by today. I figured it’s housing a bunch of bureaucrats, it’s got to have SOMETHING going for it, remember?”
“Yes,” says Anna, “you win alright.” They walk in the direction of the building, carefully avoiding holes and rubble, but the cloud cover has opened up and they can see very well. The front door is not locked, allowing anyone caught in the neighbourhood in an emergency to walk in and take shelter.
They stand in the remarkably clean front hall. Fritze squeezes Anna’s shoulder.
“Do you see what I see? Do you??”
“No, what—” And then she does. At the left rear wall of the building there appears, quietly and slowly, a ‘Pater Noster’, the open, perpetually moving elevators found in buildings from the turn of the century, taking only the fleet-footed and courageous to upper floors. You have to jump and get your balance to take advantage of the ride, but at least it moves.
“My dentist had one of these in his building,” says Fritze. “I always wondered how this works up in the attic. I asked my mother if the cabin turns upside down before heading down again.”
“Does it?”
“She said she didn’t know. And so to this day… it’s one of the major unsolved questions in my life.”
“Let’s find out!” says Anna. “What are we waiting for?”
Anna, giggling, and Fritze, whistling through his teeth, jump on the next car. Anna has clamped her right hand around his sleeve and does not let go as they pass the last floor and head up into the attic.
Slowly the cabin rises above the floor level and a disappointingly barren attic, featuring a number of water buckets, is revealed. Now the moment of truth. Will they land on their sides and travel down on their heads? As they look at each other in the dark, the cabin chucks and ratchets sideways, stops momentarily, then, emitting screeches, adjusts for the downwards trip. They cough and holler, giggle and sigh, and finally leap out on the main floor.
“You can let go of my sleeve now,” says Fritze, “but you don’t have to. I like your hand there.”
Anna drops it like the proverbial hot potato.
Outside they can’t see, but hear a number of fire engines and trucks rumbling away in the distance.
As they stand there, Anna decides to touch on another unsolved question.
“Have you ever wondered how the sides of our bodies get clean?”
“What? I didn’t hear you.”
“I’m not sure how boys do it, but I always wash top to bottom, front and back, but never actually the sides. Of my torso. You know?”
Fritze decides to wait this one out.
“About two years ago I was awake one night and wondered if I wasn’t unbelievably messy from the armpit down. So I got up and ran into the bathroom and checked in front of the mirror —”
“Can we look again right now, for any grey flakes?” Fritze says.
“But everything was clean. I don’t know how.”
Fritze shakes his head sympathetically, looks up at the sky.
“What time is it?” Anna doesn’t have a watch that works. Fritze does.
“Three-thirty,” he says. “Want to get in trouble now or later? Someone’s bound to feel we were obligated to sleep for the war effort.”
“True,” says Anna. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. We could go back in, of course, and help them make all those sandwiches for the poor people on that train, but I’m so weary, you know?”
“Ditto,” says Fritze. “Let’s go over there. If my eyes don’t betray me, there’s another building standing, sort of, not really, but—”
“Yes, let’s visit some rats or whatever,” says Anna, and they walk along a narrow path, right past a large sign that warns, ACHTUNG - KEIN DURCHGANG! No trespassing. A huge crater to their right is filled with muddy water. Fritze leads Anna by the shoulder.
As they approach the building from the rear, they realize that the street in front is intact and three staff cars are parked neatly facing a pock-marked entrance. As they hesitate and lean against a long side wall, they hear voices coming from inside a small cellar door, and then they hear music. Loud music. Jazz, earsplitting, searing, mindboggling, totally surprising and seductively sweet, live jazz.
Fritze takes a deep breath.
“We have to go in while they’re making a racket,” he explains sensibly. “And find a hiding place. When they stop playing, everybody will start walking around.”
Anna agrees, except that she doesn’t feel it necessarily follows they should be caught in there at all, being under-age and everything. But Fritze has already opened the door, peered inside and is pulling her in behind him. They are standing on a circular platform with one winding staircase leading down into a basement, and another leading up towards a heavy curtain to the left, a stage curtain. Behind it, in the wings, they see several female dancers, a chorus line in very scanty costumes, two of them necking, but Anna must be mistaken. A numbing scent of perfume and grease paint surrounds them. To the right, Fritze has spotted what appear to be a number of small make-shift dressing rooms, an open door revealing instrument cases, jackets, silky shawls. He pulls Anna in there and pushes the door to within a couple of inches of its frame.
“What is going on here?” Anna whispers, leaning against the wall, but Fritze can’t hear.
“I have to see who’s in the audience,” Fritze says right above her ear, and he slips out for a moment and peeks around the corner.
“I was wrong,” he says when he retreats, “I thought it was a bunch of party brass, but no: it’s officers, some wounded, and a few very famous ladies.”
“Who?” says Anna. “Didn’t the dancers see you?”
“Yes, I think they may have, but they don’t care. Why should they? You’ve got to peek while they’re playing. Now.” Fritze gently opens the door and moves Anna to the side and forward where she now hears English words, spoken by the musicians. And a little French. There appear to be six of them. They are not really singing to accompany their play, but are talking with it, some lowering their horns for a moment, and talking. Fritze hadn’t told her that the musicians are black! The whole band is black! And yes, now she sees a very famous German actress, right at a front table, with three officers, champagne glasses and a bottle in a bucket. Will she sing, or is she a guest?
‘Tiger Rag,’ plays the band, and ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ and then Fritze pulls her back, when it looks like the musicians might be taking a break. She slips back into the room, and the line of dancers moves out.
“We’re fighting the wrong people,” says Anna. “How can you be mad at anyone playing like that?” She has broken out in goose-bumps.
“You can,” says Fritze soberly, “just as soon as you step outside and are reminded of what they’ve done to us.”
But he sits down and closes his eyes with a relaxed expression on his face that Anna has never seen there before.
“God, yes,” says Anna. “I almost forgot. Music is innocent, though. It’s words that are shitty.” (“I said shitty,” she thinks, “and I didn’t apologize or anything.”)
Then three burly MPs with their metal breastplates come clanking up the stairs, and they check all the backstage areas ‘for minors’, as they explain. “I.D.?” Fritze and Anna show their I.D. and it pronounces them guilty as charged. So they are expelled out into the cold moonscape, the smell of smoke, not perfume, in their nostrils, their tender age protected against the corrupting effect of enemy music, not enemy fire, and slowly pad back along the rubble, and return to the bunker.
Almost all the boys return to homes downtown, either already in ruins, or in immediate danger of losing this night what was left.
“Yesterday, my Mom’s entire bookshelf divorced our family,” says one, “crashed right through the wall. Landed in a bathtub down in the yard.”
Anna feels shame. She, Nadja and the other girls return home each day, walking through the familiar streets with all the houses intact, sheltered by a puzzling sense of safety out there among the trees.
“I liked that, earlier. The story about not soaping down the side. I mean, you didn’t have to tell me,” says Fritze.
This time it’s Anna who looks up at the sky, hoping for clouds, as usual.
It isn’t this adventure, though, not this night that causes Anna’s nightmares for years to come. It’s only a week later, in a night raid with these same emergency crews, including Lilly, Hilde, Emma, Nadja and Fritze, among others.
They emerge from the bunker and are choking with smoke, see burning ruins all around them. The air raid wardens, first up at the all clear, spread their arms to drive everyone back in. There is no train in the station and none will now come in. Anna has pulled her uniform scarf in front of her nose and mouth when she notices a group of Berliners, who take shelter downstairs every night, pushing past and rushing towards an immense new crater just down the street. She grabs Fritze’s jacket and he follows her. They join the silent crowd, looking up. It is hard to see at first, smoke and huge flames licking high into the sky. Their eyes burning, they make out a figure, dangling, slowly descending from the night sky, suspended from an immense parachute, now driven in their direction by a powerful wind. Will he land in the flames, get killed by the firestorm his plane just helped unleash? If he doesn’t, if these enraged people get a hold of him, he won’t have a chance either. He is helpless and knows it, the drop much faster now in the last few metres, it seems.
Fritze and Anna push through the silent wall of rage to the front of the crater. If he lands close to the side, they may be able to get a hold of him, but the parachute is sure to catch fire, and then what can they do?
He crashes roughly just below them, and the crowd moves forward, shouting obscenities. Fritze pushes people aside. But they shove him back, determined.
“Don’t do this, don’t,” he calls to them, when three burly MPs, having arrived in a Kübelwagen, wade right in.
“Stand back!” they yell. They drop down into the crater and drag the airman up, just as the parachute catches fire. In no time they have cut the lines, and the airman brushes against Anna before they surround him and yank him to the car.
“Engländer?” calls one of the MPs. But he shakes his head, and Anna thinks she hears, “Canadian.”
The Berliners surround the vehicle, beside themselves with outrage.
“Those bastards,” shouts a middle-aged woman. “What have I done to them? They came and bombed my apartment, killed my mother and my kid. Those bastards. What did my kid do? What? My Mother! And you guys protect them.”
“Let them burn, get a taste of their own medicine—” shouts a man.
The MPs are off, the wardens have arrived in larger numbers and are driving the people back into the bunker, behind them a howling fiery wind gathering strength.
Anna is standing just inside the main entrance. Her teeth are chattering loudly and she can’t get control of them. Her hands shake, her arms crossed, and she doesn’t notice that Fritze is standing behind her with his arms locked around her.
“Oh girl,” he says shakily, “oh girl.”
Now Lilly is there and takes over, walks her back and forth along the top floor, back and forth, back and forth talking quietly, then leading her into the dormitory where one of the boys gives her his pillow and she falls fast asleep.