“We go ahead. We have to. I’ll tell you when. Watch the play.”
Suddenly, a flash of light, the stage flooded with it, stark, exposed, nothing shaded or softened. The Recruiting Officer and the Sergeant talking, a sharp tang in the language, Brecht’s German. An almost palpable pleasure went through the audience, street German, irreverent, theirs. Off he’s gone like a louse from a scratch. You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization. And Ruth, as usual, was right: the stage was the Tiergarten, the street outside, the harsh bareness of it, another wasteland. The Thirty Years’ War. No props or scenery needed. The eye filled it with rubble and scorched trees. A faint harmonica, the canteen wagon rolling onto the stage, Eilif and Swiss Cheese pulling like oxen, up on the seat Mother Courage with dumb Kattrin, Helene Weigel calling out a good day, the voice perfect, a whole character in a line, and then the first song and Dymshits was right too, Dessau’s music gave Weigel her range, coarse and defiant, almost bawdy, the unselfconscious irony hinting at the horrors to come. Alex looked around. A magic in the theater, that moment of breathing together, seeing the extraordinary. And now happening here, with the rubble outside, Germany still alive, capable of art, a future.
Alex sat still, letting the language roll over him. Weigel fighting with Eilif now, drawing papers out of the helmet, omens of death. He shook his head. Pay attention to the audience, not the play. Over the railing, somewhere below, Elsbeth was watching a mother lose her children. Markus and Mielke, down right in a privileged box. How many in the audience were their informants, diligently filing reports? Maybe even on the play. Did any of them trust Brecht really, always slipping something by in a line?
He squinted, trying to see the faces, but the effect of the floodlit stage was to make the rest of the theater even darker. Unless you were in the first few rows, you were swallowed up in the shadows. These ring seats were even less visible. He could barely make out the audience, but they couldn’t see him at all. Unless they were sitting right behind him.
Onstage Mother Courage had lost Eilif and now was opening the second scene selling a capon, a long screech of German that Weigel massaged like an aria, reaching for notes. No one was looking anywhere else. As good a time as intermission, when people get lost in the crowd.
“Now,” he said faintly to Irene’s ear.
She started, as absorbed in the play as the rest of the audience, then nodded and moved her hands to her stomach, waiting a bit, then bending over, a soft grunt, almost inaudible. Alex put his arm around her shoulders, helping her out of her seat and starting up the stairs to the exit.
“We have to go,” he whispered to Roberta. “She’s not feeling well. Take our seats, they’re closer.” And not empty if anyone looked, one body as good as another in the dark. “Her time of the month. She’ll be all right tomorrow.”
Roberta seemed to shrink from this, embarrassed again, and just nodded, turning her head back toward the stage.
At the curtain covering the exit door Alex turned, trying to make out the Russians across. Had they noticed? He waited for a second to see if anyone had followed, some furtive movement, but all he could hear was Weigel arguing with the cook.
They went down the hall, no ushers, Alex’s arm still around her shoulder. The stairs would be trickier, visible to the concession sellers in the lobby. But everyone, it seemed, wanted to see the play, even standing in the back. They slid out the exit door, away from the waiting cars out front. A stagehand having a cigarette, shivering.
“Not feeling well,” Alex said, still whispering.
The stagehand just looked at them, indifferent.
They headed toward Luisenstrasse, the way to Irene’s flat, but then turned right at the corner instead, heading up to the Charité. If anyone was following, he’d have to turn too or risk losing them. They slowed, waiting a minute, but no one turned into the street. A car had come over the bridge and swept past without slowing. A man helping a woman get to the hospital, what you’d expect to see here.
“Where did he leave the key?”
“Under the fender,” Irene said. “It’s taped there.”
“Hell of a risk. Anybody could—”
“It’s DEFA’s car, he doesn’t care.”
The car was in the faculty lot, just in from the street, the key still in place. Irene put her hand on the door, then looked up.
“What if something—?”
Alex shook his head. “Ready?”
“If anything does, I’ll—”
He looked up, waiting.
“I’ll never forget you did this for him.”
Alex opened his door. “We’d better stick to the main roads. At least they’ll be cleared. It’s easy to get lost if they’re not—”
“Don’t worry. I know Berlin. That’s all I know, Berlin.”
He headed north toward Invalidenpark, away from the theater and any cars that might recognize them, then swung east to connect with Torstrasse.
“You never told me where he is.”
“Friedrichshain. By the park.”
“So far.”
“Not from me.”
“No, from the radio. In Sch?neberg, no?”
“We’re not going to the radio. Not now, anyway.”
“But I thought—”
“That’s the choke point. The one place they don’t want him to go. They don’t want him to broadcast. So they’ll be waiting to stop him there. If they know.”
“But it’s how he pays.”
“He will. But not there.”
There was more traffic than he expected, Soviet trucks sputtering diesel and a few prewar cars, so it took a while to reach Prenzlauer Allee. He turned up, then drove between the cemeteries and across Greifswalder Strasse.
“I think we’re all right,” he said. “You see anything?”
“How would I know? They all look alike to me.”
“You’d notice if it’s the same one.”
To be safe, he detoured in a short loop, then came down Am Friedrichshain from the east.