Wilderness booked a hotel for Eddie and Bernard, out of sight. Out of the over-populated, over-policed city centre—a Bismarck-era villa in Dahlem, once the home of a Berlin baron of industry or trade. Something the Nazis had confiscated from its owners, that the Americans had confiscated in turn and sold to the highest bidder.
He could have stayed there too. Waited for Eddie to arrive.
He didn’t.
Trudie had given him choice.
And temptation.
Lying on a rug, on the floor of his old room, under the eaves at Grünetümmlerstraße, listening/not listening to Berlin settle, it seemed to Wilderness that time was unwinding, that he was caught in its loosening spring, its cosmic clockwork, heading inexorably back to 1948 … 1947 … that trickster memory was playing with his ears. He could hear airfreighters dropping down to Tegel and Gatow, all those Lancasters and Yorks, all those Douglas C-54s, keeping Berlin alive as Stalin’s grip tightened around it. Bread and beef and coal. Then he could hear Nell trying to make coffee as quietly as possible to avoid waking him—an effort that always failed. And then he could hear the heavy tread of Yuri Myshkin’s boots upon the stairs—for a small man he seemed incapable of the light touch.
He dragged the eiderdown off the bed. A pillow for his head. He couldn’t sleep in that bed. God knows, the mattress might have been changed half a dozen times in twenty years—it was the axe with four new handles and two new blades, but still the same axe. It was the same bed. He couldn’t sleep in that bed. Not without Nell.