And Freya? No one had said a word about her yet. Among us Germans, that’s how it is.
Had Freya ever existed? Portraits can be faked. Why not repudiate her? To deny the dead is to deny death itself. Why treasure up every grief, as Shostakovich does? Waking from a nightmare of fire, we find counterfeits, improbabilities. Do we even exist anymore? We need a secret mirror—Elena, for instance.
Once upon a time, Lina, whom they called a slim-hipped Mädi, went to the Auluka-Lounge to learn from reflecting herself in women which woman she really was. A former Russian prince was playing the piano, but it wasn’t he who reminded Lina of Elena; it was the artificial snowballs: how cold, how white, hence how Russian! The truth is that Elena would have preferred the Café Olala on Zietenstrasse, whose dirty windows and scratchy records were more “real,” but what’s real when we’re imprisoned in a fairytale?
My reflection in the shopwindow on Thälmann-Strasse is not me. It is Elena Konstantinovskaya. (We’re both so white, aren’t we?) I reach out to touch her and find between my palm and hers—the center of Europe. Elena can be my mirror; how I long for her to be! But not Freya—I don’t want my reflection to be a skeleton.
On the Altmarkt’s shining wet cobblestones, dark crowds queued around the glowing lights of the department store “Howa.” Inside were glowing triangles, glowing stars, perfect statuettes. And then, beyond the Howa, Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse went off into the darkness.
The dead had lain here, while undernourished Hitlerjugend boys and old men in long tired coats passed through, lifting them one by one by the arms and the legs onto horsedrawn carts to be hauled off to the smoking pyres. It was her cousin Vala who told her this. Vala was greyhaired now, and her front teeth were missing. She kept sighing: Oh, Lina, it’s a hard, hard life.
Did they burn Freya here?
Oh, no, said Vala.
Did it happen in the first wave or the second wave? Vala, I have a right. She was my sister.
In the second wave, said her cousin. Let’s not talk about it.
Once upon a time, a smiling, blonde-braided girl planted a bouquet in a Condor volunteer’s buttonhole. Another girl, less blonde and more serious, fumbled over the edelweiss; her soldier looked down at his breast a little anxiously, wondering whether she’d done it right and whether it would be incorrect to say something if she hadn’t. This second girl was Freya.
Who was the smiling girl? There’s always someone else, someone irrelevant. She’s possibly dead herself, and we deny her.
Who then was Freya? She’s dead, so isn’t that irrelevant?
Of course the entire family had been there. They’d stayed at Lina’s flat in Berlin. That must have been in ’36 or ’37, when the Frauenkirche was still whole, when its organ still sang. That day they’d had the privilege of watching with their very own eyes as the sleepwalker wafted himself by in an open Mercedes-Klemm. And the Condor Legionnaires marched through the Brandenburg Gate…
The broken castle, then the Kultur Palace, then the Altmarkt, this was what Lina saw every day when she looked out the window. (Where were the Russians? They separated themselves; they had their own place.) At “Honetta Damenmoden” on the Altmarkt, one could buy a long dress, shoes or perhaps a suitcase. These objects seemed more lonely than they really were because Lina and Vala were gazing at them from the outside as they stood in the arcade on that December night.
And right here, whispered Vala, there was a little blonde girl crying by a wagon of corpses, right where that dripping pipe is. The sweetest little girl you could imagine! One hundred percent Aryan. And for some reason I’ve never stopped wondering what happened to her.
And the two of them stood there, staring wearily at that exposed pipe in the burnt and frozen muck.
Freya didn’t die in the firestorm, did she? asked Lina.
Vala took her arm and led her into a scene without life, only white footprints in the white snow around the Kreuzkirche, and then she said: Are you certain that you want to know?
Yes.
Well, then, it happened on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, when Red Army men always get drunk. Now it’s better, of course. That was when they came into our houses, year after year.
I’ve heard about it.
Exactly. Everything we used to be told in those days was true. They’re not human. For example, Grandmother was in her eighties. Now have you heard enough?
Lina said nothing. They were one of half a dozen black-clad couples walking on the grey sidewalk.
Vala said: They entered the maternity ward at gunpoint and raped the nurse who persuaded them not to rape a mother who’d just given birth. I won’t say who it is; you know her. Perhaps she knew what would happen, in which case I admire her sacrifice. Lina, you have no idea what it was like. They raped us on the streets, on the trains, in the fields. They arrested us and raped us. They raped us as we were cleaning their floors. Of course it wasn’t quite as bad as at the beginning, when they used to rape us in front of our husbands and then—
And you? Don’t tell me if you don’t wish it—
Five times, in broad daylight. If you want to know, it was on a dead horse in the middle of Grossenhanter Strasse, right across from Weber’s wine cellar—
Vala—
But all they did afterward, probably because I’d been a good girl, was kick me in the face a few times. Heinz was already dead, as you know, so at least he didn’t have to witness that… Excuse me for telling you.
Lina knew Vala. She knew that it would be best to refrain from comment on what she had just heard, now and forever. Moreover, she knew not to look at Vala, much less touch her hand. So she said only: I understand. And what about Freya?
Mayor Petzold of Saupersdorf used to arrange parties for the Russians, with vodka and young girls. That was how he maintained his position. You can imagine the rest. Shall we go now? I need to buy two loaves at Meyer’s, before he runs out.
It comforted Lina to learn that no one had intended to kill her sister; she must have merely been, as Vala put it in regards to their grandmother, delicate inside.
Your father did what he could, Vala said. He even went to the colonel to complain, which in those days took courage. The colonel warned him that if he didn’t get out, he’d be arrested for slandering the Red Army.
After that, said Vala, all he did was go around whispering Ivan will never go away.
But this never happened. There never was a Freya. I went to the Albertinium for an exhibition of proletarian painting and sculpture in 1958, and no matter how long I looked, I couldn’t find anything unhappy!
Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information. I do my best to live within that definition when I make my reports. What everybody wants to hear is that everything is perfect, happily ever after.
I enjoy gazing at the loaves of bread stacked four high, end out, and the sausages hanging vertically, one per hook, in that clean shop on Postplatz. To me, that’s perfection. Herr Meyer also thinks so; he’s proud of his establishment. If I wanted to, I could remember November 1945, when the first light came back on in the Postplatz, smokily glowing in the skeletons of buildings; that was a triumph then, but in comparison to the way it is now in 1960, it’s sad. Even when I don’t want to, I sometimes remember a smashed, burned, dust-sugared skeleton lying on the Postplatz in a scorched Nazi armband, the ruined mouth gaping and the black teeth falling out of it like the bricks of the Lukaskirche; that was a triumph, too, for our victorious enemies.