Wild Flowers of Berlin Read online

  Wild Flowers of Berlin

  By JL Merrow

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2019 JL Merrow

  ISBN 9781646562053

  Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  With grateful thanks to Petra Howard, Sandra Lindsey, Astrid Ohletz, Annika Buehrmann, Angelika Ranger, Julia and Sage Marlowe.

  This story is dedicated to the Trümmerfrauen of Berlin, the “women of the rubble” who, in the face of their country’s crushing defeat and the loss of so many of their loved ones, laboured to clear the many, many bombsites of the almost flattened city to enable rebuilding to begin.

  * * * *

  Wild Flowers of Berlin

  By JL Merrow

  I see her the third day in, a dozen or so women along from me on the bucket chain. We’re clearing a site just off Unter den Linden, and I can’t think why I haven’t noticed her before. Maybe it’s just that the sun hasn’t shone until today, lighting up her wavy blonde hair and making it stand out like a gold coin in a coal scuttle. Not that any of us see much gold, or coal either for that matter, these dark times. The Tiergarten is a sad wasteland, its trees long since gone for fuel.

  She’s younger than I am, maybe twenty, with rosy freshness in her cheeks, and wears a sackcloth apron over her pretty green dress, the colour of new leaves after rain. I look down at my old grey frock, made greyer by brick dust, and frown. She smiles a lot as she works, and chats to the women around her. One time, she catches my eye and I smile back at her, my face feeling odd, as if it’s forgotten how this works. I look away in embarrassment. Ruth, I hear her name is, from one of the old women who sit chipping mortar off bricks with a pickaxe so that they can be used again. Berlin will be a phoenix, rising from its own ashes.

  And there are so many ashes.

  Ruth won’t remember the times before the devil took our country and our people’s hearts, not as I do. So many clubs, like the Dorian Gray and the Topp-Keller, where you could buy a drink and watch handsome women singing in drag, and where pretty boys picked up foreigners for love and money. Berlin was beautiful then, gleaming white and red and gold. Now, the pretty boys are all dead and the clubs long since closed down or destroyed. I had a lover then, Anna, with cornflower eyes and wide, red lips that laughed and swore and kissed me with equal abandon. When she was killed in the bombings of ‘43, I thought my heart died with her.

  Is it disloyal of me, to be glad to find some part of it still lives?

  The next day, I put on my good dress, the scarlet one people tell me puts colour in my cheeks. It’s too good for work, but what am I saving it for, after all? It still fits me. I’ve always been scrawny, even in the pre-war times when bread was there to be bought any time we chose, and butter not a luxury.

  Frau Müller from my building, whose husband was a teacher who came back from the war with no legs and only one arm and slit his own throat the first time they let him have a razor, tells me she’s heard they’re asking two hundred marks for a kilo of butter on the black market. A fantasy, when we earn seventy pfennigs an hour. If you’d told me in 1933 that one day I’d dream of fresh, crusty white bread, warm from the baker’s oven and spread thickly with creamy yellow butter that melts to golden as you watch, I’d have laughed. But then I laughed a lot in those days.

  My walk to work takes me through the Brandenburger Tor, that great symbol of peace. Today, it’s pockmarked with bullet holes and scarred from shrapnel, and the quadriga on top is a mangled ruin. The horses are nothing more than twisted scrap, only one head still recognisable of the four.

  Anna would have sighed and said, Poor creatures, it isn’t fair that they should suffer too. I would have laughed at her fancy, and put my arm in hers.

  A Red Army soldier stares at me as I pass by the six-meter tall picture of Stalin, his name written underneath in Cyrillic, and I duck my head. Maybe the scarlet dress wasn’t a good idea, after all. Soldiers are everywhere in Berlin. They leave graffiti scrawled in their foreign tongues upon our battered, broken walls, as if they hadn’t left enough of a mark already. Elsewhere I’ve seen a notice, the colour of blood, that tells us the Red Army don’t hate us, that they respect the rights of the German folk. Tell that to Ilse, her face hard and her belly big with some Russian soldier’s bastard, a souvenir of their triumphant capture of our city and our nation.

  I was luckier, if you can call that luck. But I don’t think of that time any more.

  We women, though: we pay for a man’s arrogance and greed. For his inhumanity, although it shocks me so; what we hear about the work camps—can it really be true? I don’t want to believe my fellow Germans could do these things—and yet, I’ve seen so much evidence of what war can do to honour, to decency. I see men on the street now, the ones who have come home, and I wonder, were they the ones to round up the pretty boys I used to know, and the Jews, and the gypsies, and do all those terrible things?

  We pay now, with our empty bellies and our aching backs, our blistered hands and our lungs filled with dust. With our broken hearts. There is always the thought: Could I have done more? Back in the thirties, as a professional woman, back when there was such a thing, could I have spoken out, changed minds, before the eyes of the nation narrowed to slits too fine to admit bare humanity? Too late now, with Kinder und Küche barked out at me so often it rings in my ears even yet, for all that I have no children and there’s precious little food to cook. There was a third K, the Kirche the Kaiser so generously allowed us, but the National Socialists didn’t care for that one, and now his namesake church on the Kurfürstendamm is a jagged, hollow tooth tearing into an empty sky. God doesn’t live there any more, if he ever did.

  Ilse raises her pickaxe in greeting as I reach the site. She’s joined the old women now, her belly too big for clambering on rubble. “A special occasion?” she asks, eyeing my scarlet dress.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “The sun is shining, and we’re alive to see it. How are your children?”

  “See for yourself.” She nods to one side, and I see Erich hammering in cobbles while little Hans, too young to help, squats barefoot by his side. “I had a letter from Franz,” Ilse says, and then pauses, her hand in the small of her back. “He thinks they’ll let him come home soon.”

  “Have you told him?” No need to say about what. He won’t be the only man coming home to a little cuckoo. Although there are more, of course, who won’t come home at all.

  “Not yet.”

  “Franz is a good man,” I tell her, although I’ve never met him. He’s a prisoner of war somewhere in En
gland. They give him good food, Ilse says, but make him work on a farm. He misses the city. Ilse hasn’t told him how little of it is left. “He’ll understand.”

  “Two more months,” she says, and turns to look at her sons again. “It will take longer than that, won’t it, before he’s home?”

  I’m not sure why she says that, but it’s not my business to pry. I rest a hand on her shoulder and go to take my place in the line. It’s a beautiful day, the skies a perfect azure as if no harm could ever come from them.

  “Today would be a wonderful day for a swim,” the woman next to me says, as we pass the buckets of rubble hand to hand. “I used to love trips out to the Wannsee before the war. My friend from the department store and I would take a picnic and our bathing suits, and lie out in the sun and pretend not to notice the men looking at us. Unless they were very handsome, of course.” She laughs, and I see that half her teeth are missing. Her face is thin and lined under her chequered headscarf and I think she’s forty or so. It’s hard to tell. “I don’t think any men would look at me now, do you?”

  “Nonsense,” I say gallantly. “If I were a man, I’d look at you.”

  “Only to ask who left that bag of bones there!” She laughs again, a raucous, rasping sound like too many cigarettes, although I’ve never seen her smoke. “I’m Lili,” she says, “Like Lili Marleen.” She offers me her hand. I stare at it for a moment, expecting a bucket, then catch myself, feeling foolish.

  “Henny,” I tell her as I clasp her dry, roughened hand in mine. “And do you still wait under the lantern for your young soldier?”

  She shakes her head, still smiling. “I’ve waited for so many young soldiers. None of them ever returned. And you?”

  “My young man fell in the early years,” I say, a practised lie become bitter all-but-truth.

  Lili nods, a comradely acknowledgement of shared sorrow, and passes the next bucket. I wonder if those young soldiers were her lovers or her sons. Maybe both.

  I lost so many friends during the war. So many of them, I don’t know if they lived or died. Felice, the ballet dancer with dark eyes and a sharp wit, because she was a Jew. Gerda, the writer, who had a good heart for all she made my head ache with her rhetoric, because she was outspoken and a troublemaker. They took them away, to Ravensbrück and to Bergen-Belsen, and I never heard from them again.

  It haunts me: did they break her spirit, brave, fierce Gerda? Did they force her to become a whore, as other women like us were forced? A woman who would not bear children for the Führer had to be corrected, after all.

  And Anna, my Anna, who smoked too much and drank too much, and kept me awake half the night with her kisses. There are days when I could weep to remember the taste of good wine on my lover’s lips. I didn’t get to kiss her, the night she died. She was late for her shift at the hospital, and she had to run.

  She still didn’t get there in time.

  When work is over for the day, I straighten my back and stretch weary arms. Today was a good day. The sun shone, nobody was hurt when the building we worked on shifted and settled, although the women standing closest looked like ghosts from all the dust, and Lili (who I can’t help but think of as a battle-weary Lili Marleen, Lale Andersen’s sultry, knowing voice ringing in my head) gave me two cigarettes she got from a soldier. A cigarette is a precious thing, these days—they say you can buy a car with a few packs of American cigarettes, although they don’t say where you’d get the petrol.

  These are not American cigarettes, but precious, nonetheless. They’re safe in my pocket as I start the walk back to my room in the British Sector, where Frau Müller will be cooking whatever she can scrape together from our rations and a widow’s smile. Maybe more than a smile, but she doesn’t seem unhappy so I don’t ask. Perhaps I’ll give her one of my cigarettes. Or perhaps I’ll smoke them both myself, and remember how Anna tasted after she’d been smoking. I find myself heartened by the thought; isn’t that odd?

  As I walk through the Brandenburger Tor, leaving the Red Army behind me for the day, a flash of gold catches my eye, burnished copper in the setting sun. I turn.

  “Hello! I don’t think we’ve met?” Ruth says, and smiles at me. Her teeth are white and perfect, except for one little crooked one that hides its face behind another, like a shy teenage girl at her first dance. Her lips are full and pink, and her eyes aren’t cornflower, they’re green, like her dress. “This is my way home too. I like your frock. We need some colour, in these grey surroundings, don’t we?”

  “Sometimes the greyness overwhelms me,” I find myself blurting out. “Our beautiful city. How can we ever start to build again, when so much has been destroyed?”

  “One brick at a time,” she tells me, and she links her arm in mine. She’s taken off her apron and our dresses are bright in contrast, scarlet against green, like wild flowers blooming in a summer meadow. “One brick at a time.”

  I offer her a cigarette, and as the match flares red and gold, I almost think for a moment I can see the phoenix rise.

  THE END

  ABOUT J.L. MERROW

  J.L. Merrow is that rare beast, an English person who refuses to drink tea. She read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where she learned many things, chief amongst which was that she never wanted to see the inside of a lab ever again. Her one regret is that she never mastered the ability of punting one-handed whilst holding a glass of champagne.

  She writes across genres, with a preference for contemporary gay romance and the paranormal, and is frequently accused of humour. Find her online at jlmerrow.com.

  ABOUT JMS BOOKS LLC

  JMS Books LLC is a small queer press with competitive royalty rates publishing LGBT romance, erotic romance, and young adult fiction. Visit jms-books.com for our latest releases and submission guidelines!

 

 

  JL Merrow, Wild Flowers of Berlin

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