Little groups milling around the kiosk, people with pasty faces, murmuring.
‘Impossible, who would have thought it would come to this?’
‘There’s not one of us here didn’t have at least a shred of hope.’
‘Nothing the likes of us can do about it.’
The talk turns to western Germany: ‘They’ve got it good. For them it’s over and done with.’ No one uses the word ‘Russians’ any more. It refuses to pass our lips.
Back in the attic apartment. I can’t really call it a home; I no longer have a home. Not that the furnished room I was bombed out of was really mine either. All the same, I’d filled it with six years of my life. With my books and pictures and the hundreds of things you accumulate along the way. My starfish from that last peacetime summer on Norderney. The kilim Gerd brought me from Persia. My dented alarm clock. Photos, old letters, my zither, coins from twelve different countries, a piece of knitting that I’d started. All the souvenirs, the old skins and shells – the residue and warm debris of lived-in years.
Now that it’s gone and all I have is a small suitcase with a handful of clothes, I feel naked, weightless. Since I own nothing, I can lay claim to everything – this unfamiliar attic apartment for instance. Well, it’s not entirely unfamiliar. The owner is a former colleague, and I was a frequent guest before he was called up. In keeping with the times, we used to barter with each other: his canned meat from Denmark for my French cognac, my French soap for the stockings he had from Prague. After I was bombed out I managed to get hold of him to tell him the news, and he said I could move in here. Last I heard he was in Vienna with a Wehrmacht censorship unit. Where he is now…? Not that attic apartments are much in demand these days. What’s more, the roof leaks as many of the tiles have been shattered or blown away.
I keep wandering around these three rooms, but I can’t find any peace. I have systematically searched every single cupboard and drawer for anything usable, in other words, something to eat, drink or burn. Unfortunately there isn’t much. Frau Weiers, who used to clean the place, must have beaten me to it. These days everything is up for grabs. People no longer feel so closely tied to things; they no longer distinguish clearly between their own property and that of others.
I found a letter wedged inside a drawer, addressed to the real tenant. I felt ashamed for reading it, but I read it all the same. A passionate love letter, which I flushed down the toilet. (Most of the time we still have water.) Heart, hurt, love, desire: how foreign, how distant these words sound now Evidently a sophisticated, discriminating love-life requires three square meals a day. My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food.
Two hours later. The gas is running on a tiny, dying flicker. The potatoes have been cooking for hours. The most miserable potatoes in the country, only good for distilling into liquor, they turn to mush and taste like cardboard. I swallowed one half-raw. I’ve been stuffing myself since early this morning. Went to Bolle’s to use up the pale-blue milk coupons Gerd sent me for Christmas. Not a moment too soon – I got the last drops. The saleswoman had to tilt the can; she said there’d be no more milk coming into Berlin. That means children are going to die.
I drank a little of the milk right there on the street. Then, back at home, I wolfed down some porridge and chased it with a crust of bread. In theory I’ve eaten better than I have in ages. In practice, the hunger is gnawing away at me like a savage beast. Eating just made me hungrier than ever. I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation. Something about food stimulating the digestive juices and making them crave more. No sooner do they get going than the limited supply is already digested, and they start to rumble.
Rummaging through the few books owned by the tenant of this apartment (where I also found the blank notebook I’m using to write this), I turned up a novel. The setting is English-aristocratic, with sentences like: ‘She cast a fleeting glance at her untouched meal, then rose and left the table.’ Ten lines later I found myself magnetically drawn back to that sentence. I must have read it a dozen times before I caught myself scratching my nails across the print, as if the untouched meal – which had just been described in detail – was really there and I could physically scrape it out of the book. A sure sign of insanity. Onset of mild delusions brought on by lack of food. I’m sorry I don’t have Hamsun’s Hunger to read up on the subject. Of course, I couldn’t read it even if I hadn’t been bombed out, since somebody snatched my copy right out of my shopping bag over two years ago in the U-Bahn. It had a raffia cover; evidently the pickpocket mistook it for a ration-card holder. Poor man! He must have been a very disappointed thief! I’m sure Hamsun would enjoy hearing that story.
Morning gossip at the baker’s: ‘When they get here they’ll go through the apartments and take whatever they can find to eat… Don’t expect them to give us a thing… They’ve worked it all out; the Germans are going to have to starve for two months… People in Silesia are already running around the woods digging up roots… Children are dying… Old people are eating grass like animals.’
So much for the vox populi – no one knows anything for sure. There’s no Völkischer Beobachter on the stairs any more. No Frau Weiers coming up to read me the headlines about rape over breakfast. ‘Old Woman of Seventy Defiled. Nun Violated Twenty-Four Times.’ (I wonder who was counting?) That’s exactly what they sound like, too, those headlines. Are they supposed to spur the men of Berlin to protect and defend us women? Ridiculous. Their only effect is to send thousands more helpless women and children running out of town, jamming the roads heading west, where they’re likely to starve or die under fire from enemy planes. Whenever she read the paper, Frau Weiers’s eyes would get big and glaze over. Something in her actually enjoyed that brand of horror. Either that or her unconscious was just happy it hadn’t happened to her. Because she is afraid; I know for a fact she wanted to get away. I haven’t seen her since the day before yesterday.
Our radio’s been dead for four days. Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology really is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can’t plug them in somewhere. Bread, however, is absolute. Coal is absolute. And gold is gold whether you’re in Rome, Peru or Breslau. But radios, gas stoves, central heating, hot plates, all these gifts of the modern age – they’re nothing but dead weight if the power goes out. At the moment we’re marching backwards in time. Cave dwellers.
Friday, probably around 7 p.m. Went for one last quick ride on the tram headed for the Rathaus. The air is full of rolling and rumbling, the constant thunder of heavy guns. The tram conductress sounded pathetic, shouting over the din. I studied the other passengers. You could read in their faces what they weren’t saying out loud. We’ve turned into a nation of mutes. People don’t talk to one another except when they’re safe in their basements. When’s the next time I’ll ride a tram? Will I ever? They’ve been pestering us with these Class I and Class II tickets for the past several weeks, and now the news-sheet says that as of tomorrow only people with the red Class III tickets will be allowed to use public transportation. That’s about one in four hundred – in other words no one, which means that’s it.