Chapter 1

I see her the third day in, a dozen or so women along from me on the bucket chain. We’re clearing a site just off Unter den Linden, and I can’t think why I haven’t noticed her before. Maybe it’s just that the sun hasn’t shone until today, lighting up her wavy blonde hair and making it stand out like a gold coin in a coal scuttle. Not that any of us see much gold, or coal either for that matter, these dark times. The Tiergarten is a sad wasteland, its trees long since gone for fuel.

She’s younger than I am, maybe twenty, with rosy freshness in her cheeks, and wears a sackcloth apron over her pretty green dress, the colour of new leaves after rain. I look down at my old grey frock, made greyer by brick dust, and frown. She smiles a lot as she works, and chats to the women around her. One time, she catches my eye and I smile back at her, my face feeling odd, as if it’s forgotten how this works. I look away in embarrassment. Ruth, I hear her name is, from one of the old women who sit chipping mortar off bricks with a pickaxe so that they can be used again. Berlin will be a phoenix, rising from its own ashes.

And there are so many ashes.

Ruth won’t remember the times before the devil took our country and our people’s hearts, not as I do. So many clubs, like the Dorian Gray and the Topp-Keller, where you could buy a drink and watch handsome women singing in drag, and where pretty boys picked up foreigners for love and money. Berlin was beautiful then, gleaming white and red and gold. Now, the pretty boys are all dead and the clubs long since closed down or destroyed. I had a lover then, Anna, with cornflower eyes and wide, red lips that laughed and swore and kissed me with equal abandon. When she was killed in the bombings of ‘43, I thought my heart died with her.

Is it disloyal of me, to be glad to find some part of it still lives?

The next day, I put on my good dress, the scarlet one people tell me puts colour in my cheeks. It’s too good for work, but what am I saving it for, after all? It still fits me. I’ve always been scrawny, even in the pre-war times when bread was there to be bought any time we chose, and butter not a luxury.

Frau Müller from my building, whose husband was a teacher who came back from the war with no legs and only one arm and slit his own throat the first time they let him have a razor, tells me she’s heard they’re asking two hundred marks for a kilo of butter on the black market. A fantasy, when we earn seventy pfennigs an hour. If you’d told me in 1933 that one day I’d dream of fresh, crusty white bread, warm from the baker’s oven and spread thickly with creamy yellow butter that melts to golden as you watch, I’d have laughed. But then I laughed a lot in those days.

My walk to work takes me through the Brandenburger Tor, that great symbol of peace. Today, it’s pockmarked with bullet holes and scarred from shrapnel, and the quadriga on top is a mangled ruin. The horses are nothing more than twisted scrap, only one head still recognisable of the four.

Anna would have sighed and said, Poor creatures, it isn’t fair that they should suffer too. I would have laughed at her fancy, and put my arm in hers.

A Red Army soldier stares at me as I pass by the six-meter tall picture of Stalin, his name written underneath in Cyrillic, and I duck my head. Maybe the scarlet dress wasn’t a good idea, after all. Soldiers are everywhere in Berlin. They leave graffiti scrawled in their foreign tongues upon our battered, broken walls, as if they hadn’t left enough of a mark already. Elsewhere I’ve seen a notice, the colour of blood, that tells us the Red Army don’t hate us, that they respect the rights of the German folk. Tell that to Ilse, her face hard and her belly big with some Russian soldier’s bastard, a souvenir of their triumphant capture of our city and our nation.

I was luckier, if you can call that luck. But I don’t think of that time any more.

We women, though: we pay for a man’s arrogance and greed. For his inhumanity, although it shocks me so; what we hear about the work camps—can it really be true? I don’t want to believe my fellow Germans could do these things—and yet, I’ve seen so much evidence of what war can do to honour, to decency. I see men on the street now, the ones who have come home, and I wonder, were they the ones to round up the pretty boys I used to know, and the Jews, and the gypsies, and do all those terrible things?

We pay now, with our empty bellies and our aching backs, our blistered hands and our lungs filled with dust. With our broken hearts. There is always the thought: Could I have done more? Back in the thirties, as a professional woman, back when there was such a thing, could I have spoken out, changed minds, before the eyes of the nation narrowed to slits too fine to admit bare humanity? Too late now, with Kinder und Küchebarked out at me so often it rings in my ears even yet, for all that I have no children and there’s precious little food to cook. There was a third K, the Kirchethe Kaiser so generously allowed us, but the National Socialists didn’t care for that one, and now his namesake church on the Kurfürstendamm is a jagged, hollow tooth tearing into an empty sky. God doesn’t live there any more, if he ever did.