The Zookeeper's War, page 18
‘She was the only one in the building who wasn’t scared of Frau Ritter,’ said the engineer. ‘She knew Frau Ritter hated her, and liked to annoy her with friendliness: cheerful greetings, even offers of milk—sometimes she had extra, thanks to the children’s rations.’
In December of the previous year, the midwife had been arrested for listening to Soviet radio. She’d tuned in to a broadcast of the names of German prisoners, hoping to hear her husband’s.
‘She didn’t,’ said the engineer. ‘But there was another familiar name: Norbert Ritter’s. Naturally she went straight to Frau Ritter and told her that her son was still alive, and later that day Frau Ritter reported her to the police. She was executed two days before you arrived. The children were handed on to relatives.’
Axel sat quietly, trying to absorb what he’d just heard, knowing that the effort was pointless.
The stenographer asked if he wanted to stay for a while, but politely he refused. He thanked them both, said goodbye and crossed the landing, re-entered flat number six and lit a solitary candle. A draught touched the flame and the living room shivered. It felt less like home.
He found the gift in an old-style pharmacy in the Mitte, an ark for glass that was situated a few crucial steps below the pavement. The pharmacist placed the bottle in a tiny box and wrapped it in faded green paper.
At home that night after dinner he presented the box to Vera. She looked up from the armchair in surprise.
‘An apology,’ he explained. ‘Go on, open it.’
She unwrapped the green paper then opened the box and pulled out the small blue bottle.
‘Sniff,’ he said.
She unscrewed the lid, raised the bottle to her nose, closed her eyes and went still. With alarm he saw that her eyelashes were watering and wondered whether eucalyptus was too poignant. He should have realised that the aroma of home might upset her. Abruptly she stood up and embraced him, murmuring endearments on his neck.
‘As I said,’ he repeated, ‘an apology.’
She pulled back her head, looking quizzical, and he told her what he knew about Frau Ritter and the midwife. She heard him out in silence and sighed deeply at the end.
‘You warned me,’ he said, ‘and I should have listened. I’m sorry. For everything.’
This seemed to trouble her, yet when she looked at him he knew he was forgiven. For several seconds they held each other’s gaze—after ten years of marriage still a potent act—then she inhaled the oil one last time and tightened the lid.
It was late, and there were other pressing matters to discuss. He mentioned the Ostarbeiter and Vera screwed up her face, and gently he reminded her that the Reich Labour Front needed an answer soon.
‘I’d like to keep Martin Krypic,’ she said. ‘He’s the smartest in my team and speaks fluent German.’
It was a pity to break up the work teams, but there seemed little choice. ‘Then Herr Krypic stays. We’ll distil a single work team from the existing three.’
He felt relieved to get this particular decision behind him. Compared to ruling on the fate of others, surviving a war was straightforward—you planned, stockpiled, ducked at the right time and trusted your luck. In the east the Soviets were poised outside Warsaw, while the western Allies had re-conquered Paris and Brussels. At home, Himmler had created the Volkssturm, a reserve army from which a Z-card would offer no exemption.
He took Vera by the hands. ‘Liebling, the war’s drawing closer. It’s time we decided what to do if it gets here.’
She looked at him oddly and he asked what was wrong. She collected herself. ‘Nothing. I wasn’t expecting this now.’
‘Any later might be too late.’
He outlined the plan he’d been dwelling on for months. If the Soviets neared Berlin, Vera would go to Freiburg and take refuge with his sister. ‘You’ll be safer in the west.’
She paused. ‘What about your safety?’
‘It’s different for a man.’
‘Different how?’
Axel guessed she knew very well what he was talking about. ‘The risks are different.’
Vera looked sceptical. ‘Even if you’re right and the western Allies are gentler invaders, I wouldn’t leave you here. What if you’re mobilised?’
‘I doubt it’ll come to that.’
‘But the likelihood of it coming to that is the reason you want to send me away.’
He tried to gather his thoughts. There were times when he could understand why some men prized dim-witted wives.
‘Vera, I have to stay. Someone has to look after the animals.’
She said nothing at first, only looked at him impassively, a sign she was displeased but willing to overlook it. She replied in a steady tone: ‘Axel, it’s too late to pose as a defender of the animals.’
Care was needed not to squander her recent affection. ‘Liebling, do I have to spell out the risks here?’
‘No. Because I agree with you. It would be prudent to go.’
At last, progress.
‘But what’s true for me is true for us both, and I’ll never go without you.’ She fixed him with unblinking eyes.
Leave the zoo—the idea was unimaginable. There were choices that would tear up your life by the roots, making your own story meaningless.
But could he afford to ignore Vera’s wishes again? Her willingness to abandon the animals was sobering, and he recalled his vow at Gestapo headquarters to shield her from harm. When the time came, it was essential she leave Berlin. Ten years ago, to be with him, she’d made the city her home, and to return the favour he would have to go with her to the west, however illogical it might be for him personally. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We’ll go together.’
Whatever happened, Krypic knew he would always remember this day. The light and the air were perfect—this was autumn as Renoir would have painted it. The leaves of the trees had become beautiful by dying: claret ash beside goldening elms, like demijohns of red wine and riesling; liquidambars in flames. Poplars yellowed down their western flanks. Only the plane trees yielded gracelessly, their leaves shading to a sullen brown before falling and snagging in the skirts of conifers.
At the primate house he seized the chance to speak with Vera alone. Her face, her dear dark eyes, told him nothing at all, but in the background the lemurs screeched derision. He was a fool, they cried, an idiot, a clown.
Vera smiled and said that she had good news: he could stay at the zoo.
But he’d known this already. It wasn’t enough. Safety was meaningless without the assurance of her love.
He had to be certain. Staring into her eyes, he extended his hands, palms upward—apart from himself, he had nothing to give.
Vera studied his hands then slowly shook her head, and, even as the primate house fractured with shrieks, he saw the irony: she’d understood him with ease.
He thanked her, and in a fit of gallows humour even smiled a little. ‘I’ve decided to leave.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The zoo. And us. Staying would be pointless.’
She looked alarmed, and this pleased him.
‘You can’t leave.’
‘No? And why not?’
‘The risk,’ said Vera. ‘I won’t let you.’
As if what mattered most wasn’t lost already. He tried to smile but suspected he’d smirked. ‘Labour’s too scarce for the authorities to kill us off at random. We’ve never had it so good.’
One by one she listed objections—he’d starve without extra food from the zoo, freeze without the uniform, get randomly thrashed. Point by point he tried to set her mind at rest, or nearly—a little angst would serve as retaliation for his misery.
Vera cajoled, reasoned, begged, but he managed to hold firm. Renunciation was the only worthy way of losing love.
What he hadn’t expected was a tiny frisson of freedom, and even as Vera tried to persuade him to stay he was amazed to find his mind turning to the future. Though he now had the means to get away, he would stay in Berlin. He had contacts here. In the past few weeks he’d neglected forgery, and it was time to get back to it—demand was high, and the destruction of printeries and government offices meant that the format of documents was changing constantly.
‘What will I say to Axel?’ asked Vera. ‘I’ve already told him I want you to stay.’
‘Tell him I prefer to go with the Poles. God knows, I’ve become fond of them.’
Again she begged him to change his mind, and though tempted he reminded himself of her curt refusal to go to Prague.
To forestall the risk of wavering, he picked up his pail and carried it to the white-cheeked gibbons’ cage. Vera joined him and together they fed the gibbons, a respite from speaking. The female was cream-coloured, the male and the juvenile black. Vera had described how the young of the species were born creamy like their mothers and later turned black, then how the females reverted to cream in adolescence.
When the feed was gone, the gibbons took to the ropes, whooping and swinging parabolas on arms twice the length of their bodies, their holds as easy as dancers’ steps. They paused and dangled, the male by one hand.
‘A few days ago you asked me why I stayed in Berlin,’ said Vera. She pointed at the gibbons. ‘Another kind of answer.’
The black juvenile waltzed along the ropes then wound herself to the bar at Krypic’s nose. She tilted her head and peered at him, the rounded eyes intensely human.
Vera’s mood had shifted from pensive to downright nostalgic. ‘Who’d have thought I’d be left by a Slav subhuman?’
Krypic bristled at her levity. It was as if she were remembering a love affair that had ended not minutes ago but years.
She said, ‘To be truthful, I’m glad it was your decision. Did I ever tell you what I missed most about my father when he died?’
He shook his head. He wouldn’t give her this. ‘Vera, I don’t want to know about your father.’
She looked taken aback, another cause for morose satisfaction, then she lowered her eyes, as if acknowledging his rebuke and its justice. This was poor consolation. In the silence that followed he felt amputated from everything hopeful, tender and good.
NINE
At nightfall, a slit moon rose over the ruins of the aquarium. Axel left the zoo with Vera, chaining the gate on a place he barely recognised. The new year had ushered in further air raids, eroding the zoo so quickly that disorientation dogged his every visit.
He took Vera’s gloved hand and they crossed the street. On the pavements around Kaiser Wilhelm church, refugees from Pomerania and Silesia were huddled against the cold. He felt a tightening of Vera’s hold and pressed her fingers in reply. Two women were swinging a child to sleep in a blanket.
Number sixteen Meinekestrasse had partly collapsed. The outer wall of the stairwell had gone, revealing nearby houses and the rear of the old synagogue. No lights shone anywhere. Stairs climbed into a void from the fourth-floor landing and came to rest on the Milky Way.
Flavia answered his knock and hugged him, then hurled her arms around Vera. ‘Freisler’s dead! Killed!’
‘So there is a God,’ said Axel. ‘That’s excellent news.’
Flavia showed them into the flat and told the story in a rush. In the big raid of the day before, Judge Freisler had been the sole casualty at the People’s Court. Flavia was exultant. ‘Justice! And in that place. He would’ve been one of the first against the wall, but the Americans have saved the workers the bullet.’
Lately she had become a communist, and boasted mysteriously of ‘acts of sabotage’. She had a new lexicon of abuse against the bourgeoisie, adapting Motz-Wilden’s aristocratic disdain into a new and more viable idiom. Axel was thankful that she appeared to exempt him and Vera.
She began to brew chicory on an upturned electric iron and Axel examined her repairs to the flat, which now resembled a burrow, making him think of the English term ‘digs’. Flavia had rebuilt an entire wall without mortar and reconnected the electricity with a neighbour’s help, but most of the plaster was gone and the balcony doorway was bricked in for warmth. Thanks to a makeshift fireplace, the flat was heated—for the last two months the destruction of the furniture in raids had gone some way to meeting Berlin’s need for wood.
Flavia poured the chicory and toasted Freisler’s death. Axel raised his mug then nodded to Vera—they’d agreed that she should do the talking.
‘When the time is right,’ said Vera, ‘Axel and I plan to go westwards. We want you to come with us.’
Flavia looked incredulous. ‘And miss the fascists getting their comeuppance? The wife of your Blockleiter, for instance—don’t you want to see her pay?’
‘I’d prefer not to see her at all,’ said Vera. ‘More importantly, we’ll be safer in the west.’
Flavia was sceptical. ‘As refugees?’
‘Safer with the western Allies than the Soviets,’ said Axel. To purge the comment of ideological bias, he added, ‘The comrades have more to forgive.’
Flavia crossed her arms. ‘I disagree that the Red Army will behave worse than any other.’
‘Be serious,’ said Vera. ‘What about the atrocities in Silesia?’
Flavia answered calmly. ‘Propaganda exaggerations.’
Axel could see that Vera was already annoyed. Quickly he reminded Flavia that he’d fought against the British. ‘They’re resolute but fair.’
‘Men are men,’ said Flavia. ‘Nationality makes no difference.’
This was a simplification, thought Axel.
‘Men are schooled by circumstance,’ he said, sounding more pompous than he’d planned.
An argument set in. Once or twice he thought he’d cornered Flavia with logic, only to see her wriggle free with jokes or sloganeering. She could only ever manage one emotion at a time, and for now it was flippancy. Vera laboured on for a while, but it was clear they would have to catch Flavia in another mood.
The war would get serious, ran the latest joke, when the frontline could be visited by U-Bahn. Sooner or later, Flavia would have to see sense.
For six weeks the Red Army stalled on the river Oder, sixty kilometres to the east, giving Berlin an unexpected reprieve. The Wehrmacht was fighting hard against the Soviets, while troops in the west were surrendering en masse, reviving Axel’s hopes that the western Allies would take Berlin first, though as yet they hadn’t penetrated far beyond the German border. For now he was willing to wait and hope, and any escape to the west would have to be last-minute in any case, since exit permits were hard to come by.
On Sunday 18 March, mid-morning, a fleet of Flying Fortresses struck the city for two hours. Axel took refuge with Vera in the tower-bunker, and when they emerged spent the rest of the day fighting fires and putting down injured animals, reminding him of November 1943.
That evening they arrived at 412 Reichenberger to find the rear of the tenement pulverised. No one was hurt, but over half the Stamm—the bus driver and his family, the factory girls, the family from the Ukraine, as well as the engineer and the stenographer—were now left homeless. Most took refuge with friends or family, while the mother and her five children were at last evacuated to the west. During a follow-up raid that night, the cellar was eerily spacious: apart from themselves, the only people who remained were Erna Eckhardt and her mother, Schiefer and the Ritters. To boost morale, the Blockleiter produced gifts of window boxes planted with bulbs for the spring.
The next morning Axel stopped at a litfass column plastered with roughly printed posters:
Berliners!
Every building
Every floor
Every hedge
Every crater
Every sewer
Will be defended to the utmost!
Under the message was a map of Berlin superimposed with concentric rings, meant to suggest a fortress but more closely resembling a target. The bullseye was labelled ‘Zone Z’, die Zitadelle, and Axel saw that it included the zoo. He looked from side to side, tore the poster loose and shoved it into a pocket.
He found Flavia at the Rose. The little theatre had survived, though the only male actors left were all elderly, allowing Flavia to step in at short notice and play the Moor in Johann Schiller’s The Robbers. Her spirits were high.
Axel made her take off a false beard and step out the back of the theatre. He unfolded the poster. ‘Seems that Adolf has included your neighbourhood and my zoo in preparations for a final stand.’
She peered at the map and whistled. ‘We’re sure in for a pounding.’
‘Flavia, staying is madness. Please change your mind.’
She looked distractedly at her watch. ‘The play runs for two more weeks. I couldn’t go before then.’
It was the first sign of a concession, and hastily he agreed. ‘Two weeks then.’
She grinned. ‘After all, someone has to look after you two.’ It was as if she’d just agreed to a picnic at Wannsee.
For the next few days Axel threw himself into planning their escape. Vera was already stockpiling food and packing essentials, but exit permits would be the key to travelling, and so he went to the military command post in Wilmersdorf and joined a queue two blocks long for permits. After lodging an application he was told to come back the following Monday.
For the next week the bombing was relentless: Americans by day, the British by night, though so far the city had been spared the kind of firestorm that had swallowed Dresden. In the cellar, Schiefer no longer invoked the Wunderwaffen. His factory was a ruin. Even Frau Ritter admitted that if necessary she’d flee westwards with her daughter and son-inlaw. The Deutschlandsender sounded more and more hysterical and often talked of the dictator’s ‘unbendable will’.
Axel returned to Wilmersdorf on the appointed day and was told that as ‘established householders’ he and Vera and Flavia were ineligible to leave. He went to the zoo and told Vera the bad news.
