Читать онлайн «Leaving Berlin»

They were still A few miles out when he heard the planes, a low steady droning, coming closer, the way the bombers must have sounded. Now loaded with food and sacks of coal. After Köpenick he could make out their lights in the sky, dropping toward the dark city, one plane after another, every thirty seconds they said, if that were possible, unloading then taking off again, the lights now a line of vanishing dots, like tracer bullets.

“How does anyone sleep?”

“You don’t hear them after a while,” Martin said. “You get used to it. ”

Maybe Martin had, new to Berlin. But what about the others, who remembered huddling in shelters every night, waiting to die, listening to the engine sounds-how near? — the whining thrust as the nose was pulled up, free of the weight of its bombs, now floating somewhere overhead.

“So many planes,” Alex said, almost to himself. “How long can they keep it going?” Die Luftbrücke, Berlin’s lifeline now, with little parachutes of candy for the children, for the photographers.

“Not much longer,” Martin said, certain. “Think of the expense. And for what? They’re trying to make two cities. Two mayors, two police. But there’s only one city. Berlin is still where it is, in the Soviet zone. They can’t move it. They should leave now. Let things get back to normal. ”

“Well, normal,” Alex said. The planes were getting louder, almost overhead, Tempelhof only one district west. “And will the Russians leave too?”

“I think so, yes,” Martin said, something he’d considered. “They stay for each other. The Americans don’t leave because the Russians-” He stopped. “But of course they’ll have to.

“Neutral but Socialist?”

“How else now? After the Fascists. It’s what everyone wants, I think, don’t you?” He caught himself. “Forgive me. Of course you do. You’ve come back for this, a Socialist Germany. To make the future with us. It was the dream of your book. I’ve told you, I think, I’m a great admirer-”

“Yes, thank you,” Alex said, weary.

Martin had joined him when he changed cars at the Czech border, straw-colored hair slicked back, face scrubbed and eager, the bright-eyed conviction of a Hitler Youth. He was the first young man Alex had met since he arrived, all the others buried or missing, irretrievable. Then a few dragging steps and Alex saw why: a Goebbels clubfoot had kept him out of the war. With the leg and the slick hair he even looked a little like Goebbels, without the hollow cheeks, the predator eyes. Now he was brimming with high spirits, his initial formal reticence soon a flood of talk. How much Der letzte Zaun had meant to him. How pleasing it was that Alex had decided to make his home in the East, “voting with your feet. ” How difficult the first years had been, the cold, the starvation rations, and how much better it was now, you could see it every day. Brecht had come-had Alex known him in America? Thomas Mann? Martin was a great admirer of Brecht too. Perhaps he could dramatize Alex’s Der letzte Zaun, an important antifascist work, something that might appeal to him.