The dog was tearing at the shroud with short, urgent movements. John saw its curled lip and hungry teeth, its shrunken gut and spindle ribs. He raised his rifle. Didn’t think. Crack.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Berlin: late April 1945

Bette shared Mutti’s big bed now. They all did. No one slept alone, not anymore. A drunken Russian had broken the service door to their apartment, and anyone could walk in, loot the place, and worse. They’d wedged a chair under the handle, but even so. Lieselotte crept beneath the covers in the early hours and whispered to her mother for a long time. Women’s things, Greta said. That’s what they talk about. When the Ivans came, Greta hid in their ceiling space. It was the best Mutti could do. Frau Weber had gone to pieces, so Mutti said.

‘And where does that leave her? And the girls? Or her poor old mother? Just more work for the rest of us.’ Mutti clasped her hands to her head. She was irritable these days, snapped at the slightest thing. She couldn’t get cigarettes now, and that made her temper worse. ‘What will become of us? When will it end?’

Mutti’s hair had turned grey in a week, and the bald patch was bigger. They hadn’t eaten for days, not properly, some nettle soup cooked on the oven heated by laths and splinters gleaned from the bombed-out buildings. The authorities were rationing the coupons now. Their turn to collect had been two days ago, and wouldn’t come again for another day, and even so there was little in the shops and what there was cost a fortune and took all day to buy, what with the queues and the looting. Mutti’s cough seemed worse, too, and they had nothing to give her, not even honey.

Bette pulled on Otto’s trousers, hitched the braces over her shoulders. Her mother and sister were still sleeping. Perhaps, if she was fast, she’d get back and catch them talking, hear what they said. She tiptoed out with the pot. The gunfire was far away, the sharp shot of a pistol, the rattle of a machine gun muted and muffled by the ruins, but the smoke from the smouldering city hung thick and yellow, clogging her nostrils and coating her tongue so she could taste the soot and grit. The burned-out tank, its frame buckled and blackened, was still lodged in the basement of the building five along from theirs. It had been there for days now, squatting half in, half out, part of the furniture, like the pockmarked street signs and the unlit lamps and the broken cobbles.

Bette placed the old check tea towel over the top of the chamber pot.

‘Shame enough we have to use it,’ Mutti said. ‘But that doesn’t mean every Tom, Dick and Harry has to see our business.’