'Two jokes, and one was about Hitler. Paul should know better.'
'Where is he?'
'In his room.'
Russell climbed the stairs, wondering what sort of reception he was going to get. Over the last few months his fourteen-year-old son had seemed increasingly exasperated with him, as if Russell just didn't get it – whatever it was. Ilse thought it age-related, but the boy didn't seem to behave the same way with her or his stepfather, and Russell knew that his being English, and the complications which that had necessarily caused in Paul's German life, had more than a little to do with their recent difficulties. But there was nothing Russell could do about that. 'It's like your snoring,' Effi had told him when they talked about it. 'I want to murder you, and knowing you can't help it makes it even worse. I can't even blame you.'
He crossed the large landing, and put his head around Paul's half-open door. His son was doing his homework, tracing one of the maps in his Stieler's Atlas. 'Another fine mess you've got yourself into,' Russell observed. Paul loved Laurel and Hardy.
'What are you doing here?' Paul exclaimed. 'If you go to the school, it'll makes things worse.'
Russell sat down on the bed. 'They know you have an English father, Paul. It won't be news.'
'Yes, but…'
'What were the jokes?'
'They were just jokes.'
'Jokes are sometimes important.'
'Well I can't see that these two were. All right, I'll tell you. Describe the perfect German.' Russell had heard this one, but let Paul supply the punchline – 'Someone blond as Hitler, slim as Goering and tall as Goebbels.'
Russell smiled. 'You forgot clever as Ley and sane as Hess. What was the other?'
'One man says: "When the war's over I'm going to do a bicycle tour of the Reich." His friend replies: "So what will you do after lunch?"'
Russell laughed. 'That's a good one.'
'Yes, but it's just a silly joke. I don't really think we'll lose the war. It's just a joke.'
'They'll call it defeatism. And the first joke – these people take their racial stereotypes seriously. And they don't like being mocked.'
'But everyone tells jokes like those.'
'I know.'
'John, we have to go,' Ilse called from downstairs.
'Coming,' he shouted back. As he got up he noticed the picture of Udet on the wall, alongside Molders and the U-boat ace Gunther Prien. 'It was sad what happened to Udet,' he said.
Paul looked at him disbelievingly. 'You didn't like him.'
Russell had no memory of saying so to his son, but he probably had. 'He was a wonderful pilot,' he said weakly.
'I want to see the funeral march on Saturday,' Paul insisted.
'Fine,' Russell agreed. 'I'll check the route.'
He kissed his son's head, and went back down to Ilse. 'We just nod our heads and look humble,' she told him as they started down the street towards the school. 'No arguments, no smart replies. And no jokes.'
'You'll be saying he gets it from me next.'
'Well he does, doesn't he? But I'm not blaming you. I like it that he doesn't believe most of what they tell him.'
'What does Matthias think?'
'He's angry. But then these days he's angry about anything that reminds him of the government we've got. He'd rather just wake up when it's all over.'
It was the first time Russell had ever heard his ex-wife criticise her current husband, and he felt rather ashamed of enjoying the moment.
They walked through the school doors and down the corridor to Paul's classroom, where his teacher, a grey-haired man in his fifties or sixties, was marking a pile of exercise books. A large map of the western Soviet Union adorned one wall, complete with arrows depicting German advances. Russell wondered if the teacher knew that he and Ilse had met in Moscow, two young and eager communists out to change the world. No jokes, he reminded himself.
The teacher's name was Weber. He proved stern and apparently humourless, but also surprisingly reasonable. It turned out that one boy had repeated Paul's jokes to his own parents, and the father had turned up at the school in a rage that morning. The boy had not named Paul as the source, but once the matter had been discussed in class, Paul had privately informed Herr Weber of his guilt. The teacher had no intention of divulging Paul's name to the complaining parent, a man, he implied, who was somewhat over-zealous in ideological matters. Paul had an excellent record in the Jungvolk, Herr Weber went on, and had started out well in the Hitlerjugend, but, like many spirited boys of his age, he clearly felt the urge to test the boundaries of what was permissible. Which was all perfectly normal. But in days like these, such testing could have disproportionate consequences, and it was highly advisable for both teachers and parents to clarify those boundaries wherever they could.
Ilse and Russell agreed that it was.
Herr Weber gave them one wintry smile, and thanked them for coming in. It was gone seven when Russell reached the Halensee Ringbahn station, and dense layers of cloud hid the moon and stars, promising one of the deeper blackouts. Accidents were common on the S-Bahn in such conditions, with passengers opening doors and stepping out onto what they mistakenly hoped was a platform.
Russell got off to change at Westkreuz, and stood on the Stadtbahn platform in the near complete darkness for what seemed like ages, listening to the murmur of invisible people and watching the patchwork of glows as passengers on the opposite platform dragged on their cigarettes. He would be arriving late at the Blumenthals, not that it mattered Jews were not allowed out after 8pm, which certainly simplified the task of finding them at home. Especially now that their telephones had all been disconnected.
The Blumenthals were one of several Jewish families that he – and often Effi as well – visited on a fairly regular basis. At first this had been work-inspired, part of Russell's attempt to keep track of what was happening to Berlin's Jewish community as the war went on. It quickly became clear that they could also help in many ways, some small, others increasingly significant. Ration tickets could be passed on, and news of the outside world did something to lessen the sense of helplessness and isolation which many Jews now felt. There was also the sense, for him and for Effi, that they were keeping the doors of their own world open, refusing to be trapped in what a German colleague had once called 'the majority ghetto'. And some of the Jews had become friends, insofar as true friendship was possible in such artificially skewed relationships.
A train finally rattled in behind its thin blue light, and Russell had no trouble finding a seat in a barely-lit carriage. Several Jews were standing together at one end of the carriage, presumably on their way home from a ten-hour shift at Siemens. They were not talking to each other, and he could almost feel their determination not to be noticed.
Leaving Borse Station, he picked a path up the wide Oranienburgerstrasse with the help of the whitened kerbs and an occasional tram. The Blumenthals – Martin, Leonore and their daughter Ali – had a small two-room apartment in one of the narrow streets behind the burnt-out ruins of the New Synagogue. This was reasonably spacious by current standards, but something of a come-down for the family, who had once owned a large house in Grunewald and several shops selling musical scores and instruments. Martin now worked in a factory out near the Central Stockyards, cutting and treating railway sleepers. He was the same age as the century, a year younger than Russell, but he looked considerably older. Hook-nosed and with protuberant lips, he looked like a caricature Der Sturmer Jew; by contrast, his wife Leonore was simply dark-haired and petite, while his seventeen year-old daughter Ali, with her fair hair and green eyes, could have passed an audition for Tristan's Isolde.
Leonore answered the door, apprehension shifting to relief when she saw who it was. Martin leapt up to offer his right hand, his left clutching the copy of Faust he seemed to be forever reading. 'Come in, come in,' he urged. 'It's good to see you. I'm fed up with talking to other Jews – their only topic of conversation is themselves, and how terrible everything is.'
'Everything is terrible,' Russell said, refusing Leonore's armchair and sitting himself down at the table. As if to prove his point, she picked up the coat she'd obviously been working on and continued with her task of re-attaching a yellow star.
'Yes, but it serves no purpose to talk of nothing else. Everything passes, even these… gentlemen. America will enter the war, and that will be that. It's strange – the last war they entered, I was a boy shooting at them. This time I shall invite every last one of them around for dinner.'
Russell laughed. 'I think Leonore might have something to say about that.'
'Chance would be a fine thing,' Leonore said. She was upset about something, Russell thought.
'It will happen,' Martin insisted. 'Tell me, what's the news? Since they took our radios away we have no idea what's actually happening.'
Russell gave him the edited version, as seen from London and Washington – the Russian war in the balance, the looming breakdown in Japanese-American relations.
'Surely the Japanese won't attack America?' Martin mused. 'How could they hope to win such a war?'
'Most people think they'll attack the British and the Dutch, and hope that the Americans stay out,' Russell told him.
They went over the Japanese options until even Martin's curiosity was exhausted. 'Where's Ali?' Russell asked Leonore, seizing his chance. It was Ali who had introduced him to her parents, after Thomas had taken her on as a bookkeeper at his Treptow factory.