‘They probably do.’

After the clothes came furniture. You could buy a bed for twenty-five dollars. Everything was cheap if you had fifty dollars a week. And it went on and on. There were hundreds of things that could not be bought for any money in the Soviet Union: toys and games, beauty products, guitars, elegant chairs, power tools, novels in colourful jackets, Christmas decorations, and electric toasters.

There was even a tractor. ‘Do you think,’ Zoya said, ‘that any farmer in America who wants a tractor can have one right away?’

‘Only if he has the money,’ said Volodya.

‘He doesn’t have to put his name down on a list and wait for a few years?’

‘No.’

Zoya closed the book and looked at him solemnly. ‘If people can have all this,’ she said, ‘why would they want to be Communist?’

‘Good question,’ said Volodya.

22

1946

The children of Berlin had a new game called Komm, Frau – Come, Woman. It was one of a dozen games in which boys chase girls, but it had a new twist, Carla noticed. The boys would team up and target one of the girls. When they caught her, they would shout: ‘Komm, Frau!’ and throw her to the ground. Then they would hold her down while one of their number lay on top of her and simulated sexual intercourse. Children of seven and eight, who ought not to know what rape was, played this game because they had seen what Red Army soldiers did to German women. Every Russian knew that one phrase of the German language: ‘Komm, Frau.’

What was it about the Russians? Carla had never met anyone who had been raped by a French, British, American or Canadian soldier, though she supposed it must happen. By contrast, every woman she knew between fifteen and fifty-five had been raped by at least one Soviet soldier: her mother, Maud; her friend Frieda; Frieda’s mother, Monika; Ada, the maid; all of them.

Yet they were lucky, for they were still alive. Some women, abused by dozens of men, hour after hour, had died. Carla had heard of a girl who had been bitten to death.

Only Rebecca Rosen had escaped. After Carla had protected her, the day the Jewish Hospital was liberated, Rebecca moved into the von Ulrich town house. It was in the Soviet zone, but she had nowhere else to go. She hid for months like a criminal in the attic, coming down only late at night when the bestial Russians had fallen into drunken sleep. Carla spent a couple of hours up there with her when she could, and they played card games and told each other their life stories. Carla wanted to be like an older sister, but Rebecca treated her like a mother.

Then Carla found she was going to be a mother for real.

Maud and Monika were in their fifties, and too old to have babies, mercifully; and Ada was lucky; but both Carla and Frieda were pregnant by their rapists.