The Aftermath Read online

  ‘Scram, you little fucker.’

  ‘Good Tommy. I know London. You have River Ritz. Batter-zee power station!’

  ‘Hark at him! Move. Get! Schnell!’

  ‘You sprechensiedeutsch good, Tommy.’

  ‘Schnell!’

  ‘Not Russkies. Not Stalin. I vont English Vay of Life.’

  ‘You should be in school. Schule?’

  ‘No Schule. No Haus. No Mutti. Some ciggies, Tommy. Please. You have for me? My Mutti ist dead.’

  ‘Mine too. Now sod off. Stop pestering.’

  ‘Ah … Ich glaube, ich werde … ohnmächtig.’

  ‘Agh! Come off it! Don’t do that!’

  Ozi dead-drop fainted in front of the guard, his body falling into the cushion of fresh snowfall and making a squeaky crump as he landed. Lying there in his fur coat, he looked like a shot fox. The soldier who was guarding the entrance to British Military HQ stood at his post, trying to look resolute, his eyes straight ahead, ignoring the boy. But a woman wheeling a pramful of potatoes paused right in front of the boy now lying on the pavement before her. She looked at the unmoving guard, indicating towards the boy with a flick of her chin.

  ‘Schämen Sie sich, Soldat!’ She shot him a withering look.

  Other German civilians started rubbernecking. Not wanting to create a spectacle, the guard propped his rifle against his sentry box, leant over Ozi – squatting rather than kneeling so as to keep his knees dry – and pulled him up to a seated position by the scruff of his coat.

  ‘Come on, nipper. Wake up.’ He tap-slapped the boy’s cheeks with his icy gloves. ‘Look at you. What the hell are you wearing? You look like sodding Noël Coward.’

  Ozi fake-fluttered his eyelids and spieled his well-practised mock-delirium:

  ‘Mr Attlee. Danke. King George. Danke. Tommy guard. Danke. Ciggies. Ciggies for Ozi. Ciggies for bread. Tommies are Christians. Ciggy-givers.’

  The soldier pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and made a conspicuous play of tapping some out for the boy.

  ‘Here you go, nipper,’ he said, offering him not one, not two, but three cigarettes. Content that he’d done his bit for public relations, the guard stood up, half expecting applause, but when he looked around he saw that there was no one there to witness his gesture.

  ‘Now sod off, you little blighter.’

  In exchange for his crazed complimenting of English culture, Ozi received three cigarettes and four new words for his already expletive-heavy English repertoire.

  ‘Sod. Off. Little. Blighter!’ He repeated the phrase, brushing himself down and setting off at a sprightly pace along the Ballindamm towards the Alster, clutching his hard-won fruits of charity. By his high standards of begging and stealing, this was a paltry haul. All day, he’d foraged for food and supplies in and around the Tommy-requisitioned shops and hotels that surrounded the lagoons of the Alster, doing his praising-English-culture-fainting routine to no avail. The Tommy women shopping at the NAAFI stores seemed immune to his compliments about their hair and hats, while the usually bountiful bins behind the Atlantic Hotel had been sealed off. When he’d begged for scraps on the stairs of the Victory Club – ‘Hey, Yankee, what are you doing here? Take me to America, Yankee’ – he had been shooed away by an American: ‘Get!’

  Ozi wondered if his clothes might be putting Tommy off. Today he was wearing maximum mufti: lined leather flying-hat, high-society woman’s fur coat, with silk dressing gown on top, and riding boots three sizes too big for him. He’d picked up the coat at the Salvation Army’s weekly hand-out; the boots he’d got from the Red Cross. Perhaps he was too well clad to stir their sympathies, but in this cold he could not afford to wear less with his chest the way it was.

  Ozi put the cigarettes in his pencil case. Three cigarettes for a day’s work. He might get a loaf of bread for them, but it would not be enough to placate Berti, who was getting more demanding these days; he didn’t want just cigarettes or medicine any more, he wanted papers and passes: stuff that was hard to find, and expensive. Ozi would have to find Herr Hokker at the Information Centre and trade his watch to get what Berti wanted.

  Most of what Ozi knew about British culture he’d gleaned from his visits to the handsome Information Centre, built right next to the Rathaus in the heart of the city. Earlier that summer, the Bürgermeister had opened it with a big speech about friendship and learning. ‘Die Brücke’ – the bridge – was built, the Bürgermeister had said, ‘to educate German visitors about Britain’s leading institutions and achievements’. It had a large reading room, an exhibition gallery, a film screening room and a lending library. The centre was always packed. Germans seemed hungry for any information about the outside world beyond their own experience, and were curious to know about the British way of life. But while it was true that they were happy to learn about British rivers or women’s rights, what they really wanted was somewhere warm to sit and a place to scrounge a voucher or two. Any German with sense knew: die Brücken were places to exchange goods as much as culture.

  Ozi reached into the soft pocket of his fur coat and checked his watch. It was a Holdermann und Sohn, but he would be glad to get rid of it. He’d taken it from the pocket of a dead DP lying in a stairwell in Altona. It didn’t seem right that the watch had continued ticking after the man’s own ticker had stopped; like fingernails growing long after the soul has flown, it was somehow disloyal. It also gained twenty minutes every hour. The day chronometer was now telling him it was Tuesday, when it was Monday; at this rate, it would be 1950 before the month was out.

  The centre was stifling with the heat of compacted bodies. Ozi swooned for a moment, feeling the change in temperature. It was hard to see the display in the exhibition room for the press of people seeking the benefits of free newspapers and warmth. A poster for the newly established Anglo-German Frauenclub announced a talk on ‘A journey from Cairo to Jerusalem to be delivered by a Mrs T. Harry’ and a forthcoming visit from the great English poet T. S. Eliot, ‘who would be delivering a lecture in German as well as English on the unity of European culture’. Ozi paused to look at the photograph of the stern-chinned poet, unsure if it was a man or a woman. Next to this, another poster advertised a film called ‘Britain Can Make It’ and a slide show about the Pathan people of the Anglo-Afghan frontier.

  Hokker was sitting at his usual place, reading the English newspapers, which were kept in wallets and on chains to stop people stealing them. Hokker spent most of his days here. He didn’t need to go out when the world came to him. He was the channel for more illegal freight than any other black marketeer in Hamburg. All dirty rivulets, streams and brooks flowed to and through Hokker. If you wanted something, Hokker could find it for you – as long as you could pay.

  Ozi barged through the crowd to get to him. With his black coat and homburg, Hokker looked like a funeral director. He was head down over a newspaper, his finger following the run of the print. His hat was lying on the desk at his side, a pool of snow melting in its brim.

  ‘Hallo, Herr Hokker! What is happening in Tommyland today?’

  Hokker didn’t look up. He was quite absorbed, his lips moving as he read, in English, to himself.

  ‘Ozi Leitman. Things are not so good in Tommyland.’

  ‘No? What’s up?’

  ‘Tommy doesn’t like paying for this occupation. Tommy says why should Germans eat when we have no food ourselves?’

  Herr Hokker liked to show off his English as well as his ability to translate it. Before doing a deal, Ozi always tried to get him to read something; it usually knocked a few ciggies off the price of whatever it was he wanted.

 
‘This winter is not helping,’ Hokker said.

  ‘Otto says it will last for a thousand years,’ Ozi ventured. ‘It’s punishment for all the things we’ve done. There will be no cherry blossom in Stade. No apples in the orchard. No sunshine on curtains. No swimming naked in the Alster. Just a thousand years of ice and snow. What do you think, Herr Hokker?’

  ‘It feels that way. Every river in Germany is frozen. Even the Rhine.’

  Hokker licked his finger rather grandly and turned the pages of the newspaper. ‘We are famous. Look here. We are on page seven of the Daily Mirror newspaper of England: a picture of Hamburg.’

  Ozi was dumbfounded. There, in the middle of the English newspaper, was the razed residential area of Hammerbrook where he had once lived. This was where he had seen windows melt and roads bubble and a woman’s clothes ripped from her body by an invisible thermal wind. He could hear the sound of that wind again – like someone playing every note of a church organ at the same time. He could see the red snowflakes of ash falling, the doorways burning like the rings of fire through which circus lions jump. Sorbenstrasse. Mittelkanal. People stuck in the melted asphalt. Mutti’s hair on fire! Brains dribbling down noses and from split temples. Bodies like tailor’s dummies, shrunk to half his size. ‘Bombenbrandschrumpffleisch’ was what they called them. ‘Bodiesshrunkbyfire.’

  ‘Mutti …’

  ‘Are you all right, boy?’

  Ozi shut his eyes and opened them again to make these images disappear. He looked once more at the picture of his old, flattened neighbourhood. Superimposed on it was a drawing of a new accommodation complex.

  ‘They will make it new for us?’ he asked.

  ‘This is for Tommy to live in. They are going to move everyone out to build it. The headline says: “£160 Million a Year. To Teach the Germans to Despise Us”.’

  ‘What is this?’ Ozi asked, pointing to a cartoon. It depicted a British couple standing outside a ruined house with the man saying: ‘Let’s move to Germany. I hear they have nice big houses there.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘They are making a joke. They are saying that it is better in Germany than in England.’

  ‘Tommy is crazy. He makes jokes about anything.’

  ‘So. What do you want today, Ozi Leitman?’

  Ozi placed the watch on the Daily Mirror and, like a conjurer, Hokker made it disappear, under his hat.

  ‘What do you want for it?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to look?’

  ‘I already did. It’s a good watch. A fine German make.’

  ‘I need more medicine and a truck driver’s pass.’

  Hokker looked at Ozi. ‘You ask me for difficult things.’ He lifted the hat and looked at the watch. He picked it up and put it to his ear. As long as he didn’t listen for a while, he’d know no different.

  ‘It belonged to my father,’ Ozi said.

  Hokker looked at the boy sceptically. ‘No man from Hammerbrook would own a watch like this.’

  ‘Can you get me the pass?’

  Hokker picked something from his teeth and examined it. It looked like bacon fat. He absently put the morsel back in his mouth.

  ‘The watch is no good to me. Nobody wants to tell the time these days. Time is irrelevant in this zero hour. Everything has frozen. No time for time.’

  ‘It is worth something.’

  Hokker reached inside his coat and placed a strip of three food coupons on to his newspaper.

  Ozi shook his head. All day Tommy had denied him, and now Hokker was trying it on.

  ‘Ten.’

  Hokker laughed and took his hat off the watch, leaving Ozi free to take it back.

  ‘Three or nothing.’

  Ozi looked at the vouchers. One for bread, one for milk and eggs and one for margarine. He would have to deal with Berti, find yet another excuse, but, in his head, he was already cooking the breakfast he would eat tomorrow.

  Hokker nudged the three vouchers towards him.

  ‘Take them. You can’t eat a watch.’

  Lewis stood in front of the mirror shaving, trying not to wake Rachael, using his fingernail to extract the stubble from the blade rather than tapping it out on the sink. All the bathrooms in the house had been fashioned from mustard-and-gold marble slabs, and he couldn’t get used to it: every time he shaved he felt like an officer in the Indian Army indulging in the munificence of a nabob. Not even the thought of his own benevolence in allowing the natives to keep their property could avert the feeling that he was just another carpetbagger.

  He finished shaving, towelled his face dry and tidied up. The silver strip of standard-issue prophylactics lay behind the beaker, showing one used in three months. It made a dismal calendar. Lewis had left them there in the vague hope that Rachael might see them while doing her own toilet and somehow want to improve the record. This was a ridiculously circuitous approach to lovemaking, as unlikely to effect a change as it was unfair; but he’d lost his confidence, his ability to be direct with her. (Indeed, when trying to recall moments from the past in which he had shown openness in such matters, he could remember only their period of courtship, when he had fearlessly told her that she would be Mrs Morgan before the year’s end.) Lewis told himself that her loss of appetite for intimacy was, like her headaches and sleeping in late, just another symptom of her condition, of what he summarized euphemistically as her ‘post-war blues’, and that, in time, things would improve. At least, he hoped so; he was simply too busy to contemplate any other treatment.

  Rachael was asleep, lying on her side, making soft, dry clicking noises with her tongue and lips, her face twitching, perhaps from a dream. Dr Mayfield had suggested that sleep would be both a symptom of and cure for her condition, but Lewis would have preferred her to be more active. If he had a philosophy, it was: stay occupied.

  The good news was that she was going out again, having accepted an offer to take another trip into Hamburg with Susan Burnham. Lewis had met the Intelligence officer’s wife once, at the mess; despite being a busybody, she had a vivid humour and fingers in all kinds of cultural and social pies, and Lewis was grateful for anything that might get Rachael out of the house.

  He opted for his Russian front coat; it was one of the few things that offered protection to his fatless body against the spite of a winter that was already setting records. There had been reports of the North Sea freezing at Cuxhaven and of people walking across the Baltic to escape from the Russian zone. He looked at his cache of cigarettes in the chest of drawers; was he compensating for a lack of physical satisfaction by smoking more? The stack seemed several packs down. He took his usual sixty, reminding himself to reduce his intake to twenty by Christmas – if only to show solidarity with the people out there for whom cigarettes equated to bread. He looked at Rachael again, thought about kissing her on the forehead, but elected not to; instead, he slipped from the room, leaving her to her dreams and permitting himself to wish that he might be featuring in one of them.

  Even in the snow, the car was as steady and thoroughgoing as a battle cruiser slicing through the ocean. When Schroeder retired, owing to a resurgence of an old war wound, Lewis should have found someone to replace him, but he enjoyed driving himself too much. The Mercedes had become an important daily pleasure; a warm, mobile cloister in which he was free to contemplate. As soon as he was behind the wheel, the commotion in his thinking cleared and he felt sure of himself again.

  Outside, there was balm in the scene: the skies had cleared of yesterday’s slate-grey snowclouds and were as blue and clean as a senior ward sister’s tunic. The low-angled sun made everything sparkle, while the thickness of the snow
was felty and reassuring and as white and bobbly as hospital linen. It was beautiful, but frustrating. It would give the minister a false impression. On such a day as this, a visitor who had just arrived might be forgiven for thinking that Hamburg was making a startling recovery. The snow disguised the trauma by throwing an equalizing blanket over everything, giving jagged metal and broken brick a new, hopeful covering. It was a bad day to conduct a tour that was meant to show how ugly and grey life was amidst the German ruins.

  Lewis entered through the revolving doors of the Atlantic Hotel and passed the reception area, where a painting of the Duke of Wellington had been hung on the wall behind the concierge, transforming the building into a little piece of Whitehall. The minister would hardly know he’d left home.

  Ursula was standing in front of the great fireplace, warming herself. She looked both elegant and modest in her knitted woollen blouse, herringbone skirt and black, wedge-heeled court shoes. She’d done her hair in the conventional and appropriate way of the CCG interpreter – back and up behind the ears – but if it was meant to underplay her looks, it served only to enhance them: the wolfish eyebrows, the slender antelope neck. Lewis found himself clumsily complimenting her.

  ‘… Schön.’ It wasn’t quite the right word but he’d started speaking before knowing what word he was going to use. ‘Lieblich’ was probably better but it was hardly appropriate to ask her to translate and correct her own compliment.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Sorry I’m late … Die Strassen sind eisig. Is that right? Eisig?’

  ‘Yes. Icy.’

  Ever since Edmund had asked Lewis a question in clear, precise German, Lewis had insisted on trying to speak the language to Ursula as much as he could. His son’s fluency was shaming.

  ‘There were no trams today.’

  ‘Eine schlechte Reise?’

  ‘It was fine. I have a warm coat and it was a nice walk. Here – your routine for the day.’ Ursula handed Lewis a typed itinerary. He scanned it, seeing Minister Shaw’s full title at the top.