He walked back there, shadow in tow. The desk clerk spoke enough German to understand his question, and told him that two other journalists were staying at the hotel, one from England and one from France. The former was called Ronald Hitchen, and the clerk thought he worked for The Times. Neither the name, nor, later that evening, the face, jogged Russell’s memory.
He was sitting in the almost empty hotel bar when a young man with tousled brown hair and a pleasant boyish face came up and introduced himself. ‘I’m Hitchen. I hear you’ve been asking for me.’
‘What can I get you?’
‘Oh, I’m cultivating an addiction to slivovitz.’
‘There are worse things.’
They introduced themselves. Hitchen, it turned out, was also a freelance, but found that people who thought he worked for The Times were generally more helpful than people who knew he didn’t. He had been in Belgrade for a week, and had already talked to quite a few people. ‘I came with a lot of introductions,’ he admitted. ‘My uncle was part of the British mission to Yugoslavia during the war, and made quite a few friends among Tito’s people.’
Gold, Russell thought, I’ve struck gold. He already had a broad understanding of the differences between Moscow and Belgrade-they arose, like the differences between Moscow and the KPD back home, from a basic unwillingness on Stalin’s part to allow the so-called fraternal parties any responsibility for their own affairs. Like the KPD, the Yugoslav Communist Party knew better than Moscow what local conditions required, but it was much better placed to say so. Unlike the KPD, the YCP had largely liberated its own country, and those Red Army units that had passed through Yugoslavia had long since left. If not universally popular, the YCP could, alone in eastern Europe, count on the support of a clear majority. If the Soviets picked a fight with Tito, they wouldn’t find it easy.
It had, however, taken them a while to work this out. Russell knew from Shchepkin that late in March the CPSU had sent the YCP an official letter of complaint. According to Moscow, the Yugoslavs had been denigrating the Soviet Union with claims that it was no longer socialist. Which of course was the sort of nonsense you could expect from a party falling well short of genuine Bolshevism.
The YCP had responded on the 13th of April. They were Bolsheviks, and they did love the Soviet Union, but they admitted to loving their own country, too. It had seemed to Shchepkin, and seemed to Russell, a fairly placatory missive, but what neither knew, and what Hitchen now told him, was that Tito was simply keeping things sweet until he pounced on the local fifth column. And that had happened while Russell was on his train-the Yugoslav version of the MGB had arrested a slew of Party members who put loyalty to Moscow above loyalty to Tito.
If Nedic had been one of them, Russell thought, then he wouldn’t have to worry about the wretched list. But Hitchen didn’t recognise the name.
‘Are they really spoiling for a fight?’ he asked the young journalist. ‘It’s not just a minor squabble?’
‘Oh no. They’ve really had it with the Russians. First the Red Army raped its way across the country, then the Soviets insisted on setting up joint stock companies to steal them blind, and then they flooded the place with MGB to watch the locals. The last straw was claiming that the Red Army had done all of the heavy fighting, and that Tito and Co only played a minor role in defeating the Germans. Tito wasn’t having that. The medals he wears makes you think he’d liberated most of Europe.’
‘And they’re not afraid that the Red Army will make another visit?’
‘A little, perhaps. But I think the Yugoslavs have got it sussed-the Soviets must know it wouldn’t be a walkover, and they can’t afford a real fight, either politically or militarily. I think they’ll just give Tito the boot, and nail down the lid on the other satraps. They’re all easy to reach.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Russell conceded. ‘I don’t suppose the Soviets have commented on the arrests?’
‘Not yet. But I expect someone in Moscow’s trawling Lenin’s speeches for appropriate insults.’
The last remaining scenes of Anna Hofmann were shot on Tuesday morning, and lunch turned into a farewell banquet, which lasted most of the afternoon. There was enough alcohol on offer to refloat the Bismarck, and the hastily-erected picnic tables literally creaked under mounds of food. DEFA’s Soviet supporters were clearly keen to prove that its Hollywood-banked competitors hadn’t cornered the market in excessive rewards.
Effi, like almost everyone else, spent the afternoon surreptitiously slipping delicacies into her bag for future family consumption. She was just hiding away a couple of particularly tasty almond biscuits when the Soviet Propaganda Minister loomed in front of her.
‘Fraulein Koenen,’ Tulpanov greeted her warmly in German. ‘They are good, aren’t they?’ he added with a twinkle.
‘I’m taking them home for my daughter,’ Effi explained, unabashed.
‘Of course. I was sorry to hear that you decided against A Walk into the Future.’
‘Yes, well …’
‘I realise that the script was rather crude, compared to some of DEFA’s more recent offerings.’
‘My feelings exactly.’
‘So you haven’t turned against DEFA?’
Effi managed to look surprised. ‘Of course not.’
‘Well, I’m glad to hear that. And it’s good to see you looking so, may I say, young?’
Effi smiled. ‘I won’t complain.’
‘Well then. I expect we’ll meet again at The Peacock’s Fan premiere in a few weeks’ time. I went to an advanced screening, and I think your performance is really very special.’
‘Thank you,’ Effi said. She had made that film in the previous autumn, and if she said so herself, she had never been better.
He bowed slightly and moved on.
They really were making an effort, Effi thought. They needed to. The alcohol had livened things up a little, but the gathering still felt more like a wake than anything else. The cast and crew knew they’d made a decent film, but it was hard to celebrate that fact when it looked like being the last, at least for a while. Those who had signed on for A Walk into the Future were almost apologetic, stressing their families’ need to eat or their hope that DEFA’s fall from cinematic grace would be a swiftly passing phase. No one believed the film itself was worth making.
The mood on the ride home to the British sector was a sombre affair, and when Effi waved the others off on Carmer Strasse for the last time, the sense of liberation that usually followed the completion of a movie was noticeably absent. She had made half a dozen films with DEFA over the past two years, all of them entertaining, yet also mature reflections on her country and its recent history. She liked some of her performances better than others, of course, but when it came to the movies, she was proud of them all. Amid all the hardship and horrors of the war’s aftermath, something good had been made in Berlin, and knowing it was over was a bitter pill to swallow.
The previous day’s Soviet decision to restrict all parcel post between Berlin and the Western zones had provided Gerhard Strohm with a problem. Since the reason supplied to the angry Allies was the sudden and completely bogus unworthiness of the rolling stock in question, he could hardly leave the stock in plain sight. But what should he do with it? The Berlin sector wasn’t so well-endowed with stock that he could afford to hide it away, but if he shifted it into the Soviet zone some bright Red Army spark would send it all east for re-wheeling to the Russian gauge. And then the Soviets would announce that the parcel post was being restored, and where the hell would his trains be?