Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [146]
Yes, Ernestine thought, Father is always right ... always. Father is never wrong. “Did you know about slaves in your Labor Bureau?”
He smashed his fist on the table. “How dare you!”
“Apologize to your father,” Herta demanded.
“I am sorry, Father. Forgive me.”
Her sister, Hilde, pushed away from the table and walked away. Arguments! Always damned arguments!
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Where?”
“Just out of here.”
“When will you be back?”
Hilde shrugged and left.
“All day she is gone,” Bruno said. “Where does she spend her time? Where does she get that stuff to paint her face?”
“Uncle Ulrich gave it to her,” Ernestine said quickly. “I must go to work.”
“Think about Ulrich’s offer. Think about us,” her father said as she left.
When in the devil will she learn to leave the past alone, Bruno thought when she left. Life is hard enough. The future looks hollow. Fate has been cruel.
Herta packed a small sack containing a tin with five ounces of tobacco strained out of cigarette butts that Bruno had gathered at the beer garden and she put in a number of bars of soap made from laundry scrapings that she had remelted. Herta was clever in the ways of the open barter market in the Tiergarten, where trading was permitted.
She learned to stay clear of the Russian soldiers who had been paid in occupation currency which was near worthless
in Berlin and which they could not send home. They were forced to work the barter market themselves, and bullied merciless bargains.
“Try to get a camera,” Bruno said. “I have a line with some Ami soldiers. I will be able to get up to a dozen cartons of Ami cigarettes for a decent one.”
A dozen cartons of Ami cigarettes! A dozen bags of gold!
The underground took Ernestine out of Steglitz to the center of the city. She had to take a round-about way to get to the hospital where she worked in Neukölln as a nurse’s aide. In the last-ditch fighting many parts of the subway system had been flooded, forcing innumerable detours.
The car was filled with sallow, ragged people. She was a bit lightheaded, now remorseful about the question she had asked her father. Of course he would not know about slave labor. It was the times. One had to remember father was a respected official and had given them all a good life. It was a pity to see so proud a man reduced to poverty.
How could she really tell him why she worked for Dr. Hahn and could not take Uncle Ulrich’s offer?
Hospital? It was a sorry excuse for a hospital. Half bombed out, boarded windows, stripped down to the bedding by the Russians. It was filled with patients, even in the corridors, and there was a shortage of everything. So many old people died these days in a state of confusion, and the newborn screamed into a world of hunger and fear.
Only yesterday the gas was turned on in a section of Neukölln and the hospital received nearly a hundred suicides and attempted suicides. Ten yesterday had died of dysentery, typhus, and diphtheria. Half were little children.
Ernestine followed the lethargic line of trudgers to Potsdamer Platz, close to what was once the heart of Berlin. It was too horrible to walk in Berlin any more. The city was a grotesque, surrealist graveyard palled in a gray mist. The half lifeless who staggered about were damned and tormented.
Dietrich Rascher was dead. When she grew fuzzy-minded she thought of him. At first she would not accept that he would never return, even after the last letter from Stalingrad. But there would be no miracle.
In the last years, through the agony of Berlin, it was Ernestine who was the one of calm strength in the Falkenstein family. They all looked to her, even her father. She held them together during the bombings, the news of Gerd’s capture, the rape by the Russians. But now, Ernestine was unable to keep from plunging into deep smoky pits and mazes.
She came to the Tiergarten; barter market and black market were in full swing.
She stared at ravaged trees and gardens and for a moment in her haze she was once again strolling with father and