Every morning, Walter Kusian hoped for one thing: that he wouldn’t have to wake up. That he wouldn’t hear the damn alarm clock anymore. And he wouldn’t have to freeze so much. Or suffer from sciatica. A person whose life isn’t good in the first place should at least be allowed a beautiful death. There will be another miracle…Yea, right. He groped for the switch on the bedside lamp, and turned it on. He wondered if, when you died in your sleep, there was a fraction of a second where you could register what was happening to you. Maybe it was exactly like a man who had survived a head wound. At the hospital he had seen a lot of men who had survived being shot in the head and most of them had felt as if they were swept up in a wave of pleasure. Did the man he had killed feel like that?
Walter Kusian jumped out of bed and walked over to the washstand. The white sink was filled to the top. The enamel had peeled away and the black spots looked like mussels or leeches that had sucked themselves dry and remained stuck. Digusting. The water was so cold that he wouldn’t have been surprised if he had to break through a layer of ice when he first put his fingers in. A few splashes on his face would be enough. So what if he smelled a little: there was no woman he wanted to please. And if he shoveled some refuse again, it was only for the cat, so… He went out to the toilet. It was at the far end of the landing and was used by the Sielaffs and two more people who were subletting. If you happened to be in a hurry, you were in real trouble. So Walter Kusian took bigger steps when he heard Grandpa Pausin closing the door to his room behind him. He reached his goal first and shut himself inside for a long leisurely session. The more he heard Grandpa Pausin and Else Lehman tramping and complaining outside, the better he felt. There was only a weak fifteen watt bulb hanging above the door but his eyes were still good and it was enough to read the paper by. The Telegraf, that Mrs Sielaff cut up in book size sheets and hung on a nail to use as toilet paper was already 14 days old but it was free. Outside, they were complaining and getting angrier. “Is it my fault that I have a hard stool!” Walter Kusian shouted. It was one of the only pleasures he still enjoyed, being able to make the other lodgers angry like this.
“And this man pretends he was a nurse!” said Else Lehman who, during the day, sat behind the counter at the AOK maternity home. “Whoever died in your care was probably better off dead than alive.”
“I can take care of you too; why don’t you come to my room later.”
That was enough. She yanked out the fuse and he sat in the dark. There was nothing left then but to use his reading material for his backside. He walked out and whistled past the other two on his way back to his room and set about having some breakfast. The water for the instant coffee was soon ready on the immersion heater. True, he didn’t have the money for real coffee but he did at least have enough to put yoghurt on his bread. He liked that very much even though his coworker Arthur always joked: “Runny white cheese makes you go but it don’t make you strong.”
Walter Kusian left home at exactly six o’clock. No reason he should be cold. He wore heavy boots and black corduroy pants that a coal delivery man had given him in exchange for a stolen rabbit. Even the old Wehrmacht overcoat he had was a lucky find. It would have been even better if he could have kept the epaulets and the stripes. In any case, it had belonged to a First Lieutenant. As for him he had only made it to private in the medical corps. He never forgave the Führer for that; he was one of the so-called “old warriors”: he had joined the NSDAP Nazi Party early on. He had been a party member since 1926. “I will lead you to a magnificent future…” Walter Kusian had believed in the words of Adolf Hitler. He tramped down the steps.
The Sternstrasse in Wedding was like a gigantic backdrop for a film: all drizzle and ruins. THE KILLERS ARE AMONG US. Cars and swerving headlights were as few and far between as shooting stars in the night sky. He crossed the Nordbahnstrasse to get to the Wollanstrasse station and went up the stairs to the S-Bahn train. The downtown train was just pulling out of the station. But he didn’t have to wait and freeze. It took him less than ten minutes to walk to the Friedrichstrasse station and go up to the train. After just one stop, at Lehrter station, he got off again because he realized it was better to take the streetcar from here directly to the Knie instead of having to walk from the Zoo station.
He hated the long trip to work! What angered Walter Kusian the most was that he had to travel through two cities. The separation of Berlin that had now become a fact of life had started in June 1948 when the Soviet Union had pulled out of the Allied Control. When East Berlin was declared capital city of the GDR in October 1949, West Berlin remained formally a Four Power city and simply but expensively the sacrosanct appendix of Bonn and its Republic. The Social Democrat head of Economic Affairs put it well when he said: “We must face the fact that Berlin will be separated into two parts as if they were two cities.”
The stop was right at the exit on the Invalidenstrasse. Although it was still very early there was already a group of people waiting at the stop. Four and a half years after the end of the war they still looked desperate, pale, thin and care-worn. He thought of Elizabeth’s words: “Woe to the vanquished.” There were few men. The two he saw were wearing a Wehrmacht cap just like his. You were lucky to have one. Even the goalkeepers at the soccer games prized them. The women were bundled up so thickly you could hardly guess they had a shape. But maybe they were not women any more, he thought, maybe it’s all overgrown between their legs. Who would ever think of bedding a Trümerfrau, a rubble picker! He wouldn’t. He was used to better things. He thought of the joke Arthur had told them: “A boy and a girl are in an orphanage and are going to be washed. The boy says: “Oh! You don’t have what I have hanging between my legs.” The girl answers: “No I don’t. We are refugees and we had to leave everything at home.”
Five minutes later the streetcar came up from the Sandkrug bridge. The car itself still looked pretty much like a wreck but at least the windows all had glass panes now. No more wood, no more cardboard. Please. Just as he was beginning to feel content, the rucksack of the person in front of him hit him full in the face. The buckle cut the bridge of his nose.
“Hey, watch out, you idiot!” Walter Kusian snapped.
“I don’t have eyes in the back of my head, man.”
“Right. If you did, you wouldn’t be walking around here, they would have taken care of you when we had Adolf…”
“Hey you… I’ll call the police!”
The conductor, a woman, pushed Walter Kusian away. “No fighting in the cathouse! We want to stick to our schedule.”
Walter Kusian swallowed what was on the tip of his tongue, that more people deserved to die in the war. Damn. He could have gotten somewhere if the Führer had won. But now, now he was stuck in this lousy job and he had to live with these low class jerks. He didn’t even have a seat. Oh well, it wasn’t far to the Knie. Someone had already pulled the signal. They turned into Rathenower Strasse. The Moabit Criminal Justice Building stood across the street, dark, massive and threatening; together with the detention center next to it, it dominated the whole area between AltMoabit, Wilsnacker Strasse and Rathenower Strasse. He hated it. He hated everything.
Soon they turned left into Gotzkowskystrasse then drove over the Spree and down Franklinstrasse and Marchstrasse.
“Anybody just got on, anybody without a ticket? Do you need a ticket? Who doesn’t have one?”
Walter Kusian had hoped that the conductor wouldn’t manage to reach his spot in the mass of people but here she was in front of him clicking her change machine. She looked like Claire Waldoff. The same snub nose, the same husky voice: You trying to pull a fast one? He liked that kind of woman, the kind who wouldn’t take any bullshit. Even if it cost him 20 pfennig.
“Knie.” He’d just punched in his ticket and he had to get off. At that time Ernst Reuter had already become mayor of West Berlin but the large esplanade, called “Knie”, where the underground metro ran from the Zoo and Ruhleben and turned from the Hardenbergerstrasse into the Bismarckstrasse, and looked like a knee on the subway map, wouldn’t bear his name for many years. All the buildings in the area had been completely destroyed and the immense expanse was slowly being cleared up. As if they were laying the ground for a city airport. The greatest number of completely destroyed houses was in the Berlinerstrasse, later renamed Otto-Suhr Allee; it led to the Charlottenburg city hall and the Castle. Walter Kusian turned into it. His task was to help clear the ruins at the corner of Cauerstrasse. The number 54 to Spandau/Johannesstift passed by. He would have liked to have a little house out there. And a big retirement pension so he wouldn’t have to work anymore. Live, for once.
A man came up from behind him and turned the brim of his hat down over his eyes. On the hat it said: “Basement prices at HO!” That could only be Arthur, his old companion from better days, who often shopped at HO. HO stood for Handels Organisation or Trade Organisation; the store was in the East and wanted to attract West Berliners. “The intelligent Housewife Shops at HO” said the ad. There were many HO stores all along the border between the sectors. The two friends didn’t talk about what to buy where but about the damage done by the hurricane of December 5th and about the body that had been found at Stettiner station on the same day. The date was December 8, 1949.
“In our neighborhood a birch tree fell on the roof of a garden shed.” Arthur had lost his house to the bombs in 1944 and he lived with his wife and two children in the Laube, the garden allotments near Blankenburg station. “But no one died.”
“You were lucky.” In the inner city it was mostly the ruins of buildings that had tumbled to the ground and seven people had been killed.
“You were lucky too…” Arthur looked at his friend. “You still have your lower legs.” He was alluding to the body parts that had been found in Stettiner station. It was all over the newspapers.
Walter Kusian smiled. “The children found what…? An arm, a thigh and two calves. Where do you think the other pieces can be?”
“In the pot on your stove.”
“Right. Like to join me for supper…?”
“They say human flesh tastes pretty good, just a little too sweet.”
“What do you think they put in our sausage?”
Arthur made a face. “We’d better stop joking about it because the guy who did that, he’s not gonna stop any time soon. It could happen to anyone.”
They had reached the spot where they were working. They were employed by a small outfit whose owner had obtained a contract to clear up a section among the rubble to build a news stand. Arthur was wary. “Wouldn’t the surrounding buildings come tumbling down…?” He looked up. The apartment building had been hit by a demolition bomb. The entire façade was gone. It was like a doll house with everything in it emptied or pushed back. The wallpaper was still on the walls. The doors leading to the other floors and the other rooms were also intact and, right after the war, it often occurred that people unaware of the damage to the building, opened a door and plunged into the void. The back part of the building was inhabited. Everyone was desperate for a place to live. If they were unlucky a piece of chimney or a partition wall that hadn’t been secured might fall off.
The boss arrived in his flatbed motorcycle truck, bringing spades, pick axes and crowbars. He warned them: “Be careful, over there in the corner, the basement ceiling has caved in.” He drove off.
Arthur wanted to go down into the cellar to see if the rest of the structure was safe. Walter Kusian was against it. “What do you think could happen, we’re all so underweight. And when we’re done clearing the debris there’ll be even less weight.”
“Still…”
“God, what a coward you are. No wonder we lost the war with soldiers like you.”
That did it, Arthur didn’t go to check the cellar; resigned, he started chipping away. Walter Kusian picked up the bricks, broke them apart, chipped off the mortar that still clung to them and stacked them in neat little piles. “All I need is a kerchief and I’ll be a perfect little ruin frau.”
And so they worked hour after hour. There were very few distractions. Sometimes a girl passed by and they could whistle at her, sometimes the horse drawn carriage came by with the guy ringing his bell and calling out: “Exchange firewood for potato peelings!” Across the street someone had bought a Christmas tree, hanging it upside down from the window to keep it fresh. God, two weeks from now and it’ll be Christmas.
“What will you do for the holidays?” Arthur asked.
“I’ll sit around… I’ll listen to …”
“No, to silence. I might go to my mother in law’s…”
Arthur rested his pick axe against the little wall that his colleague had built up. “Barman, a beer.”
“Coming, just a second.”
This exchange was an allusion to the fact that until recently Walter Kusian had worked as a barman at the Casablanca bar on Augsburger strasse, but that he had been fired. One of the regulars, a wealthy film producer, had recognized him and refused to be served by a Nazi. In the ensuing exchange Walter Kusian had become somewhat aggressive.
Time passed by very slowly. It was foggy, wet and cold. Walter Kusian wouldn’t have minded if a piece of wall broke off and killed him. The best thing in life was to die suddenly without fear. Arthur could at least look forward to the evening with his family out there in the garden colony. But for him there was only an entire evening alone in his little room…Only people who had money, a lot of money could afford to hope. The owner of the furniture store across the street surely had a lot of dough, he made sure that the movers carried his expensive stuff up the stairs without any scratches. ‘GG Furniture: a great idea.’ GG stood for Gregor Göltzsch, Walter Kusian had seen the name in the paper. The thought of killing him, of opening his treasure chest and… That made him warmer even than the mulled wine that the boss handed out when daylight had fallen and he came back to pick up the tools. “Guys, let’s call it a day.”
Walter Kusian walked to the stop to take the streetcar, he got on the number 2; it was completely packed. The car had no doors so he stood on the platform, almost outside and froze. On Turmstrasse he caught sight of two women yapping. They were just walking out of the Robert Koch hospital. Elizabeth Kusian and her friend Anni.
He called out to her: “Hi there, sister in law!”
“Hi, brother in law.”
“Will you have a little time for me tonight?”
Elizabeth Kusian made a big NO sign with her right hand in front of her face, two or three times, as if he were too thick to catch on the first time. “No, absolutely not.”
“You better watch out your bones don’t end up inside a ruin.” Walter Kusian whispered as the streetcar went on its way.