Just because Charlotte's name includes the hereditary title "countess," , doesn't mean she's rich, spoilt, privileged, arrogant, or bigoted. Raised on a farm in East, she's spent more time harvesting hay and mucking out stalls than going to balls. She provides one of the two most important German points-of-view in the novel as a woman who has lost everything. Charlotte represents the German victims of the war.
Excerpt 1:
Charlotte started up the shallow stairs. By the dim light of the single light bulb hanging over each landing, it was hard to imagine how elegant this stairwell had once been. The paint was peeling and covered with smoke. Only broken remnants of the plaster mouldings on the underside of the stairs remained. The beautifully carved banister was badly scratched and broken in places.
On the first floor, Charlotte passed the grand, double-doored entrance to her late uncle’s apartment. His grand flat stretched around the courtyard, occupying the entire floor. Four families of refugees from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, a total of 19 people, lived there now. On the second floor, two doors opened off the landing, each leading to an apartment housing families bombed out of their homes. Three elderly couples lived in one and three women and five children in the other. The two third-floor apartments were occupied respectively by Herr Dr Hofmeier and a trio of young men of dubious character. The latter went by names like “Braun,” “Schulz” and “Meyer.” Charlotte was certain these were false identities and that the young men engaged in questionable activities having to do with the black market. She supposed she ought to befriend them and learn more about their activities for a newspaper article, but her natural aversion to parasites made her shy away from them instead.
Finally, she reached the fourth floor. To the left was the apartment of the Liebherrs and to the right her own. She let herself into her flat, closed, locked and bolted the door. Only then did she feel safe. She turned immediately into the little kitchen, switched on the light and with a match lit the gas stove. She filled a pot with water from the sink and put it on the flame to boil. She did not remove her coat, as it was nearly as cold inside as outside, but she set to work getting the oven lighted so the room would start to warm up a little. When she finished, she returned to close the kitchen door to keep the heat inside. She could not afford to heat any other room, so she lived here except for creeping under her thick, goose-feather comforters to sleep at night.
As she sank down into a chair beside the little wooden table, she heaved a sigh of relief to have made it back without incident, and exhaustion overwhelmed her. It had nothing to do with the long interview, nor the long walk home. The exhaustion was deeper than that. She was tired of living.
With a start, she realised it was 19 November — the day she’d learned that her fiancé Fritz had gone missing on the Eastern Front. It was four years since that day and not another word about his fate had ever reached her. Nothing. After the war was over, she’d made enquiries. She was able to determine that he hadn’t been a member of the Soviet-controlled prisoner organization called the National Kommittee Freies Deutschland, but he was not among the known dead or prisoners either. He was just missing — still.
Yet the more she learned about the Gulags and the Soviet equivalent of the Gestapo, the NKVD, the more she believed that Fritz might still be alive somewhere — enslaved, imprisoned, exiled to the wastes of Siberia. Alone, hopeless, cold, maybe even disabled. When feeling cynical, she supposed he was probably embittered, hardened, even brutalised. So many men came back that way, almost vicious in their cynicism.
But she couldn’t think of Fritz like that. He had been too gentle, a man who loved nature and life too much, a man naturally at ease with dogs and horses and every living thing. She had lived for her time with Fritz, and he for his few precious days with her in Walmsdorf, but he was gone along with her brothers, her parents and Walmsdorf itself. All consumed by the war. She alone had survived to see ‘peace.’ And what had it brought her? Terror, humiliation, and self-hatred. What was the point of living like this? Perpetually on the brink of starvation with nothing to look forward to. Why struggle day after day in this wasteland of ruin and hatred?
When we first meet Charlotte in November 1947, she is living alone in Berlin. Both her brothers and her fiance served in the Wehrmacht and are dead or missing. While fleeing before the advancing Red Army, her parents were killed by a strafing Soviet fighter. She lives from the rations handed out by the Americans (because she lives in the American Sector). Her only professional training was as a secretary before the war, but she never actually worked in an office because her father needed her to come home and do the work of the men being drafted into the army. But at least she's learned to type, so she's trying to make a little extra money as a free-lance journalist. Only her heart isn't in it because she's terrified to go out onto the streets and meet with people across the city. She really doesn't have the heart to keep going.
But then something unexpected happens. Her cousin Christian, the son of her father's younger sister, has survived the war in an American POW camp -- and he turns up in Berlin. Christian isn't intimidated by defeat. He is still proud and determined to remind Germans and Allies alike that not all Germans were Nazis. There were some, like his brother Philip, who fought them before -- and after -- they came to power. Christian wants both to remind the world of the good Germans and see justice served on the bad. But first, he discovers, he has to help Charlotte.
Excerpt 2
Christian looked around in the dark corridor and noted that he could see his breath. Without thinking he exclaimed, “It’s colder in here than outside!”
“I can’t afford to heat anything except the kitchen,” Charlotte apologised embarrassed. “Come!” She opened the closed kitchen door and shooed him inside. The kitchen was lit by a naked light bulb hanging over a battered, wooden table.
“I’ll buy wood or coal for the other ovens tomorrow,” Christian answered setting his suitcases down, while Charlotte closed the door behind him. “What else do you need?” He added surveying the nearly empty kitchen.
“I don’t need much, Christian, but what about you? I had no idea you were coming and I have nothing--”
“Don’t worry about me. I can organize anything we need tomorrow. Tonight, let’s celebrate our long-overdue reunion. Where are the wine glasses?”
She shook her head. “I don’t have any, but it doesn’t matter because I can’t afford wine. I can make some tea. Grandma Walmsdorf sends me packets from England.” She started towards the stove.
Christian stopped her. “Don’t bother. I brought samples of our Schloss Feldburg premium wine — so all we need are some glasses, any kind of glasses.”
Charlotte went to the cupboard, while Christian laid one of his suitcases on its side and removed one of several bottles with screw-on tops labelled “Listerine.”
Charlotte gaped as he placed it on the table with a grin. “It’s impossible to bring wine across the Zone without the Ivans seizing it for themselves, so I disguised it as mouthwash. Allegedly, some Soviet soldier tried drinking this American mouthwash and nearly died. The word spread among the Ivans that it was poison, and they won’t touch the stuff. Come. Sit down and try it!” he urged confidently.
Still looking sceptical, Charlotte sat down and held out her glass for Christian to pour while he explained cheerfully, “We’ve always produced some wine for our own consumption, but we never tried to make a business of it before. Last year, Mother decided that since it is a high-margin business, we ought to see if wine could put us back on our feet faster.”
“Aunt Sophia is amazing,” Charlotte acknowledged, referring to Christian’s mother, her father’s sister. She lifted her glass to sniff at the pale-yellow liquid tentatively.
“My mother is focusing on the future because, she says, if she thinks about the past, she’d kill herself.”
“There are a lot of us like that,” Charlotte noted, adding in a barely audible whisper “— or there would be if we could see any future.”
… “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her eyes closed and her cheeks wet. “Please stay with me, Christian. At least a little while. Please.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he assured her, holding her firmly. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought things would be this bad.
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