Stattin Station by David Downing Read Free Book Online Page A

report of what Dallin had said, the Colonel made a face. 'Is that all?'
    'Yes.'
    'Very well.'
    'But there is one other thing.'
    'Yes?'
    'When I started working for the Abwehr in this way I made it clear to the Admiral that I could not continue doing so if Germany became involved in a war with my own country.'
    'I believe that was the understanding,' Piekenbrock agreed.
    'So I will be permitted to leave with all the other journalists?'
    'That is my understanding,' the Colonel confirmed.
    'That's all I wanted to know,' Russell said, getting up. He only wished he could believe it.
    It had grown visibly darker during his brief visit, and the chances of his reaching the second daily press conference on time were remote. But why bother? He wasn't going to learn anything significant, and if one of Goebbels' minions inadvertently let something slip, he wouldn't be allowed to file it. His job was a joke, whichever way he looked at it.
    He turned west along the canal towpath, thinking Effi might be home early for once, only to remember as he reached the Cornelius Bridge that this was her hospital night. A drink, he thought, and after skirting round the Zoo he made tracks for the bar on the Ku'damm where he'd last encountered some real whisky. Crossing Hardenbergstrasse he suddenly remembered that Effi's last film was showing just up the road at the Ufa-Palast.
    She had, unusually for her, refused to see the film with him when it first came out, and he had never gotten around to seeing it on his own. He walked on up to the giant cinema, which had been the largest in Europe until Hamburg built a bigger one. The early evening showing was beginning in less than fifteen minutes.
    There was a long queue at the box office, and the cinema itself was more crowded than he expected, with over three-quarters of the seats filled. Russell settled into an aisle seat near the front, just as the recorded orchestra struck up a rousing theme over shots of the German countryside. The film was dedicated to those Germans whose forefathers had emigrated to the East and faced the ensuing hardships, chief among which, it soon transpired, was proximity to Poles.
    Effi soon appeared on screen, sporting a Brunhilde hairstyle and dressed like Babelsberg's idea of a humble schoolteacher. Watching her, Russell always felt an absurd pride, as if he had anything to do with how good she was. She dismissed her loving class of bright young Germans and walked home through the town, accompanied by looks from the local Poles which mingled disgust and lechery in equal measure. Her father, the local German doctor, was waiting with news that the German hospital was being closed down.
    So far, so predictable, Russell thought; but as the film unfolded he was left with a grudging respect for its makers. It could have been so much worse - such films usually were. This one occasionally teetered on the edge of unintentional farce - the scenes with the Jews were risible as ever - but in general the temptation to over-egg the pudding was manfully resisted. For once in Babelsberg's Nazi life, actions were allowed to speak louder than the cartoon villains, and it worked. Once Effi's father had been beaten to death, his lawyer friend shot and blinded and another young girl treated to a stoning, the audience were ready for Effi's reluctant declaration of war on the local Poles. In her final stirring speech, delivered to her fellow Germans after they'd all been imprisoned for listening to a Fuhrer broadcast, she painted an idealistic picture of the future, and the Reich of which they'd soon be a part, where 'all around the birds are singing and everything is German.' In a bad film it would have sounded ludicrous, but in this one it somehow worked - by this time even Russell found himself rooting for the poor beleaguered minority, and very upset by the final shooting of Effi's character. When the Wehrmacht arrived to put things right, he felt like shaking a fist though, unlike many in the