Free News From Berlin by Otto de Kat

silenceswith the occasional query thrown in, a smirk, a sigh, a cigarette being lit, a weary gesture. And the constant tapping of a shoe on the floor.
    Emma looked past the man into a tiny courtyard, or rather a shaft, which admitted some daylight. Such a sad little nook, overlooked by the architect, a hole with no purpose other than to deepen the gloom of the surroundings. The silence and murkiness of the building began to oppress her. She felt the fear welling up again. Everyone in Germany knew about this address, this place where she now was. Everyone avoided this street. The pavements were deserted, the entire premises radiated menace. How in heaven’s name could she make her escape, what kind of attitude should she take? She forced herself to think of her father, which calmed her down somewhat. All this was about him – she had realised that at the first question. Not about Carl or Adam, thank goodness. Not yet. Her father was safe in Switzerland, for the time being anyway. She had not thought of him as someone important enough to be watched by the Gestapo. Her father, whom she looked up to and dearly loved but never felt she really understood. The unusual relationship between her parents perplexed her periodically, but it remained a mystery. Harmonious for the most part, open-minded, alert, witty, buton the edges there was loneliness. They both seemed to have distanced themselves, or else outgrown each other.
    “What is your father’s occupation in Switzerland?” the lugubrious man said, his tone making it clear that he did not expect her to tell the truth.
    She replied curtly that he worked at the Dutch embassy in Berne and that she didn’t know exactly what his job entailed. “My father didn’t discuss his work much at home.”
    The man leered at her. He probably didn’t discuss his work much at home either, Emma thought in a flash of grim amusement. The fear receded. She had to get away from there, and quickly.
    They had made her wait for two hours in a sort of kitchen-cum-cloakroom, without anybody looking at her twice. People went in and out, fetched coffee, hung their coats up and generally ignored her. And there, in that poky space, she had been overwhelmed by thoughts of Watse, her dearest friend in Holland. Watse Hepkema, the boy she grew up with, the boy executed a few months ago by these people’s partners in crime. Watse, shot without trial for resisting. There, between those walls, she felt his death as if it were taking place in the next room. The news had left her stunned for days, unable to take it in. He had urged her so many timesto get out of “that rotten city, that rotten country”, as soon as possible, and to tell Carl he had no business being there either. Watse had been her closest tie with Holland, and now he was dead. The images came back to her. Watse, arrested and shot, allegedly while trying to escape, not long after the Tour of 1941, which he had done on ice-hockey skates because his speed skates had been stolen – the blades on which no-one could touch him. When the wind was against them he would skate in front of her, he was as strong as a bear. Her memory of their last expeditions over the Sneekermeer was as fresh as yesterday, and his question continued to gnaw at the back of her mind: “Is Carl still working for those gangsters?” Yes, he was. Slowly, far too slowly, she had begun to realise that they were trapped. It was impossible for Carl to leave. There was no way he could emigrate, let alone switch sides. Every person on German soil was lost. Marriage to a German meant that she was German too, someone regarded with suspicion, someone who had to queue endlessly with a coupon for this and a coupon for that. Emma’s love of Carl was undiminished, but her sense of isolation weighed more heavily by the day. Friends from Holland stopped writing, relatives fell silent, only within Carl’s circle was there any respite. Germans, pigs? Not Trott, not Langbehn, not Haeften,