Leaving Berlin Read Online Free PDF

the Quadriga gone, and turned right toward Wilhelmstrasse. Streets he would know even in the dark. He could walk straight down to Hitler’s Chancellery, have a gloating moment. You didn’t win, not in the end. But who did? Now that it was all just rubble.
    Instead he made his way east, Französische Strasse to the Gendarmenmarkt, both churches in ruins, the concert hall smashed, only a path cleared through the wreckage. Given this, how could the house have escaped? But faster now, because maybe it had. Odd buildings had been spared, as if the flames had just skipped over them. The post office on Französische Strasse had made it through. Why not a town house tucked away on a side street, the pompous architecture at least solid, built to last. But as he reached Hausvogteiplatz, his heart sank. Every building on the square seemed to have taken a hit, the small park at the center now a huge gaping hole. Where the U-Bahn station had been. He walked toward the edge, ignoring the warning signs, visible in the half-light. Why hadn’t they at least covered over the openwound? People could fall in. The least of their worries. Out of the square, really a triangle, and then Kleine Jägerstrasse, just a dog’s leg off Niederwallstrasse, not even a full block long, a few old buildings and the von Bernuth house. Still there.
    He went farther into the little street. Not all of it. The roof was gone and most of the inside gutted, but the big old front doors were intact, and through a blasted section of the façade he could see the great staircase, hanging from its support wall, no longer going anywhere, the second floor open air. The sconces along the staircase wall, once gas, were still in place, even singed pieces of wallpaper, the same familiar pattern, now exposed to the street, all privacy gone, a woman whose clothes had been ripped away.
    Alex stared for a few minutes, then stepped back to the pile of rubble across the street and sat down, taking out a cigarette. The von Bernuth house. All the thick carpeting and carved mahogany gone, presumably ash now. Had they rescued the silver or any of the Caspar David Friedrichs in their old-master frames? Or had all that been removed before the raids started?
    The house had always been in the wrong part of town. Even in Fritz’s grandfather’s time the big town houses were being built near the Tiergarten, Vossstrasse, and then even farther west. But old Friedrich, whose lucky bet on a railway stock made the house possible, didn’t know Berlin well—he liked the feel of Hausvogteiplatz, the bargain price for the lot. When the clothing factories began to move in, the new office buildings, it was too late. The von Bernuths had a mansion in the middle of a commercial neighborhood. More amusement than stigma attached to this—it was considered a joke on old Friedrich, another family story.
    Alex had heard them all. How the elder Friedrich invested in railroad after failing railroad, hoping for the pay dirt of another Anhalter-Bayerische line. How Fritz’s father accidentally shot a tenant, then gave him one of the farms when he recovered. How a note to amistress was put in the wrong envelope. The sunny, overdressed years before the first war. He knew the stories because Irene and Elsbeth told them to him. It was part of their charm that the von Bernuths saw their family history as a comedy, a series of hapless misadventures. And then when the real stories ran out, he made up more, a book of them.
    “You’ve made us more interesting than we are,” Irene had said.
    “Not you.”
    At night there were only a few lights in Kleine Jägerstrasse, so the house had seemed that much brighter, light pouring out the windows, the door lamps like beacons, waiting for guests. There were always people, the girls’ friends staying over, parties when they were older. Elsbeth was the pretty one, creamy and delicate as a Dresden doll, but it was Irene people came for, her jokes and careless sensuality,