Jutta wakes in her bed for the second time on August 13th, though fully clothed and caught in a shaft of sunlight streaming through her bedroom window. She’s hot and disorientated, and it takes her a moment to remember what day it is, what she’s already seen and heard with her own eyes. She turns from the sun and finds herself faced with Karin’s side of the room they’ve shared for years: empty. The shadow of loss sits heavy already, anchoring her to the bed for a while.
When she gets up, the apartment is unusually silent, and Jutta bathes in the luxury for a few minutes, torn between her hunger for news and her reluctance to pad out the air by turning on the radio. Hugo is clearly still at work, Uncle Oskar ‘out and about’ as he so often is these days, and she guesses her mother and Gerda have ventured into the streets, unable to simply sit and wait for news of Karin. The neighbourhood gossip may well heighten their anxiety, but how much worse can it get? Whatever they learn, it won’t change the fact that Karin isn’t here, to wander out for pastries with her, as they do early every Sunday.
Jutta’s brain is fuzzy and the pot of coffee she brews doesn’t have the desired effect. She wants to lie back down but the sofa – one of Oskar’s ‘acquisitions’ – is notoriously lumpy and she can’t face the bedroom again or stomach staring at the empty bed and that old, musty eiderdown her sister refuses to give up. Jutta cannot understand why this feels so much like a bereavement, when common sense tells her it should soon be sorted: Karin is only twenty-four, young and healthy. She will get better. Jutta will make her sister’s case to some officious person in a faceless GDR building, and Karin will return home to their portion of the divided city. And if everything happening out there today is to be permanent, they will adjust to a new normality, because that’s what Berliners have done for centuries. So why doesn’t it feel straightforward?
Ruth and Gerda bustle through the door at just gone three, laden with gossip from street corners and the few local shops that open on Sundays, women milling about their own news points for tittle-tattle, and whose sensors are on high alert today.
‘One man from behind the bakery says he saw a whole stream of lorries driving into the city in the last week – he works on the East side,’ Ruth reports, busying herself with the kettle. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s going to do if he can’t cross over to work. How will he manage?’
‘Apparently, the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn are running, but they stop at Friedrichstrasse station and won’t go any further,’ Gerda tells Jutta. ‘Hugo was on the phone earlier. He’s circled almost the entire border and it’s the same everywhere. No one’s allowed across, except foreign press and the military, and a lucky few with passes.’
‘And did our police and the army really not know?’ Jutta questions. Much like the rest of the Western world, she sees what is happening but cannot believe it went undetected, that an entire city has been corralled so suddenly. So secretly, and with so much bulky, heavy hardware.
‘Seems not,’ Gerda says. ‘What police there are don’t seem to know what to do. And as for the Allied armies … pah!’ – she throws up her arms in disgust – ‘Nowhere to be seen. There are Soviet tanks hovering at the city limits and the Americans do nothing. No British or French either. Neither sight nor sound.’
It’s then they both hear Ruth’s distress above the hiss of the kettle. Jutta knows, because she feels it too, that when her mother is busy and animated, she can almost forget for a few moments that her daughter isn’t here to share everyone’s disbelief at the news. But when Ruth stops, even for a second, the tears start. Jutta watches as Gerda pilots her sister into the living room and lowers her onto the armchair, couching her sibling’s distress with her big, muscular arms, those that have skilfully caught a thousand and one babies over the years. She looks up at her niece and, though she is silent, Jutta hears Gerda’s stout voice loud and clear: Your mother shouldn’t have to go through this. Not again.
It’s true that Ruth has lost more than most. And in the post-war rubble-scape of Berlin that Jutta remembers all too well, it amounts to a lot. Living under the thumb of Hitler’s increasingly draconian Germany was tempered for a young Ruth only by meeting the dark and handsome Rolf Voigt at a dance in early 1935. It was an instant attraction, with true love hot on its heels. After a whirlwind romance: they were married later that year, and by early 1936 Ruth was happily pregnant. With Rolf a skilled carpenter, he had enough work to provide for his family, and Gerda – then a nurse and midwife – was able to support her sister through a heavy, tiring pregnancy, their bond as children even tighter in the face of a rapidly changing nation. In the event, Gerda needed to physically hold her sister through the labour itself.
If Gerda had ever suspected there was not one but two heads fighting for space and sustenance, eight limbs instead of four, she never said. As per the story she’s told countless times since, she was not in the least surprised when Ruth pushed out one beautiful baby girl with a cap of dark hair on her living room floor, after an intense, rapid labour at thirty-seven weeks, the thick December snow on the streets preventing a dash to the hospital. The baby was a little smaller than average and Gerda’s radar as a midwife began to twitch then, since the baby’s neat proportions did not account for the sizeable girth of her sister over the previous six months, especially as Ruth had always been the slighter of the two sisters. And nothing, bar one conclusion, could explain away the continued rippling of her sister’s only half-flaccid belly. In all her years caring for mothers, Gerda had never seen a placenta fidget.
‘What’s happening, Gerda? It’s coming again!’ Ruth had panted. With such a quick labour and no other midwife to hand, Gerda was forced to place the newly born Jutta, at just ten minutes old, into the nearest clean receptacle, a wooden box that Rolf had recently crafted. She lay wrapped and silent as her womb companion slid feet first from the confines of its mother, a second girl and identical in almost every way, though smaller, feet a little daintier.
By the time Rolf arrived back from the bar where men traditionally decamped in their arduous wait for news, Ruth was sitting up, cleaned, fed and watered, though still numb from shock as one baby suckled at each available breast. The colour drained from Rolf’s face, and then swiftly refilled to show his delight.
The babies were easy, even if life wasn’t. Juggling two hungry girls and a household in a world rapidly sliding towards conflict, tension building on the streets, drained everything from Ruth. When Rolf was conscripted early in 1940 to Hitler’s Wehrmacht army, Ruth and the girls moved into the larger Schöneberg apartment with Gerda, Oskar and Hugo, only a year older; it was snug but exactly what the sisters needed, and they shared chores as well as the pleasures of motherhood. Gerda, having been told she ought not to attempt another pregnancy after Hugo, was more than happy to become a semi-surrogate to the girls.
Living together proved to have been the best decision, meaning the sisters and children were companions as they queued for food, dodging the flying masonry of air attacks, and cowering more than once under the kitchen table while the Allies bombed the buggery out of Berlin, in retaliation for Hitler’s own desecration of Europe. Oskar, exempt from military service as a vital cog in Berlin’s water services, occasionally joined them under the table, when he wasn’t wheeler-dealing in a bar somewhere in Mitte, or ‘obtaining’ something vital at a bombed-out supply depot in Potsdam. The women rarely complained, because it meant they didn’t starve, and they had each other.
Rolf did return from the Eastern Front in 1944, bruised but relatively intact – although it was obvious to all who knew him that he had left a portion of his soul on the battlefield, along with two of his fingers lost to frostbite. Considering he still had use of two legs and two arms, however, he remained valuable to the increasingly desperate Reich, and was set to work in the defence of Berlin as the Allies marched towards Germany’s capital. It was here that he finally succumbed in April 1945, during the ferocious and bloody Fall of Berlin, defending a city he loved, alongside a cause he’d always hated. Rumour had it that he perished just a mile or so from the family home, having survived the brutality of war thousands of miles to the east, only to die in chaotic crossfire from one of his own battalion – though Ruth still chooses not to believe that precise detail. In her heart, Rolf was simply valiant in the protection of her and the girls, who had decamped from under the kitchen table with Gerda to the basement of their building. This was where the ‘liberating’ Soviet soldiers found them: filthy and afraid, the children wide-eyed and silent.
It was the twins, subsequently, who proved to be the family’s saviours. Even now, women in Berlin can hardly speak of the atrocities that followed Germany’s surrender, many of them victims at the hands of a hungry and bitter Soviet army, starved of female company. Survival was in one of two ways: capitulating to the Red Army marauders or befriending them. By pure chance they came under the gaze of a somewhat kindly Russian colonel, who’d left his own identical twin girls back in Moscow, around the same age. The sight of nine-year-old Jutta and Karin – tall, dark and willowy, with their sea-green eyes – brought big, burly Yuri Kalinov to tears. In exchange for the simple company of a family, he brought them food and the security of his rank. Whether it was fate or just good luck in meeting Yuri, it nonetheless kept them alive, especially since Oskar had been forced into hiding on the city’s outskirts.
Yuri left Berlin in 1946 and the Red Peril diluted in time, but money still needed to be made. With Oskar gone, it was down to Ruth, as the youngest and fittest, to take to the streets as a trummerfrauen, a ‘rubble woman’, part of the army of wives and mothers hauling mounds of debris from bombed-out buildings strewn across the city. She arrived home each night exhausted and plastered in the grime of defeat, the girls ritually washing and oiling the ribbons of flesh on her battered hands. It was clear that Ruth left part of her soul among the broken bricks and dust, though she rarely spoke of the bodies they found: some long decayed, some kept fresh by being packed in concrete, others entwined in a last embrace before the certainty of death.
The long winter of the Berlin Blockade of 1948 proved another draw on the women’s already spent resources, reminding them all of empty bellies and hunger pangs. In a currency war with the West, the Russians closed off road supply routes to West Berlin, leaving the ‘island city’ marooned. The Allies were forced to keep their political stronghold afloat for almost eleven months, with plane upon plane loaded with food and fuel, only a little of which made its way into the Voigt household; even now, Jutta painfully recalls the sight of her mother hovering outside a local café for any leftovers in those weeks when Oskar and his black-market supplies were conspicuously absent.
Cold and hungry as they were, it also marked the beginning of a very Cold War. That same war that has just become a good deal chillier.
So yes, Gerda is right, as she pours her concerned gaze into Jutta: Ruth cannot live through the trauma again. Not after Rolf and, with it, a third of her life. One more third in Karin is unthinkable.
‘Try to ring the hospital again, will you, Jutta, my love?’ Gerda says.
Jutta does as she is asked, though she holds out little hope. Yet, the constant ringing on the other end is finally answered, and the doctor summoned to the phone.
‘What’s wrong?’ she murmurs into the receiver. ‘How ill? But I thought you said that the operation had gone well?’
She listens intently and with horror, and Jutta feels the older women close behind her, straining to catch each word.
‘How long until you know?’ Jutta questions again, panic rising as her heart deflates. ‘She will be all right, won’t she?’