Jörg changed his appearance again for the visit to Berlin. This time he chose a merchant, as he figured it would be helpful in their trip to Kleinerbrunn, and decided to make him middle-aged because people wouldn’t trust him during negotiations if he looked too young.
“What about me?” Lila asked.
“It would be bad for you to stay as a child, so the best thing would probably be if you looked around the age of a young secretary. Your simulacrum can be either a man or a woman with masculine features. Which would be easier for you to act as?”
“Either one’s fine with me.”
“In that case, try out a few different looks later and choose one. Also, to play the part, I’m going to talk down to you a little bit. You won’t mind?”
“Of course not, it’s just acting. But no yelling or hitting.”
Jörg gave her a wry smile. “I would never do that. When we’re there, try not to speak too much, otherwise you’ll draw their suspicions.”
“Okay. So what do we do first?”
“We meet Diana in the real world and let her see that we really exist. Then we talk with her about our plan to distribute food. The best-case scenario would be if Diana can move to the countryside with her whole family, but if that’s impossible, we’ll have to come up with a way for them to receive the food where they are. Assuming they can’t relocate, we’ll need to secure a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. There are eyes everywhere in Berlin, so we’ll need a place that’s inconspicuous.”
“How are we going to keep watch over a warehouse?”
“We’ll rent the storehouse of a monastery brewery. That way, someone will always be there to keep an eye on things, and the deliveries won’t catch anyone’s attention.”
Gentlemen in dark cloaks weren’t the only people walking through Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. Many in the crowd pulled at the collars of their thin, dirty jackets as they stumbled around on unsteady legs. There was only a smattering of horse-drawn carriages in the square, likely because most had been requisitioned by the army. The number of automobiles paled in comparison to Paris, but even so, a line of large roofless cars made their way down the roads. In their windows, healthy, smiling faces chatted with female companions—a single glance of which was enough to tell that the people riding in them belonged to the upper class.
A metallic whine accompanied a streetcar as it stopped, letting off tired-looking workers holding the handrails, who stepped down onto the street. Buildings with grand awnings lined both sides of the wide avenue, while domed roofs could be seen far off in the distance. The historic stone buildings of this big city impressed both Jörg and Lila.
Jörg wore a fedora and an outfit suitable for a middle-aged gentlemen, while Lila had on a flat cap and was dressed like a boy. Her simulacrum was slender and androgynous, but with her short hair, she looked like a typical bag boy serving his boss. Such a pair wouldn’t garner any undue attention wherever they went—or so they’d decided in choosing their disguises.
As Jörg and Lila waited beneath the appointed streetlight, they saw a young woman walk down the sidewalk. She looked nothing like her appearance at the Eiffel Tower. Diana as a soul was full of youthful vigor, but the woman standing before them was rail-thin with sunken cheeks and pale skin devoid of the vibrancy of life. Her eyes still shone fiercely, though, likely because the one remaining thing she could rely on was her strength of will.
Diana noticed Jörg and Lila right away and called out to them.
“Mr. Jörg Huber, I presume.”
“That’s correct,” Jörg replied in the relaxed tone of a middle-aged man. “And you must be Ms. Diana from the Eiffel Tower.”
She nodded, then continued as if embarrassed. “Um, I…was under the impression, when we met at the Eiffel Tower, that you were younger, Mr. Huber. I’m sorry for not speaking more respectfully to you during our prior meeting.”
Jörg gave Diana a quick smile and waved her apology away. “There’s no need to stand on ceremony. I act young when I’m just a soul. And I’m also partially to blame for behaving rather immaturely back then.”
Standing next to Jörg, Lila greeted her as well. “It’s nice to meet you outside of dreams, Ms. Diana. I’m Lila.”
“Oh?” Diana looked stunned. “Lila, you look like a boy.”
“This was less conspicuous for coming to Berlin.”
“It really suits you.”
“Thank you. In England, the working women wear pants, right? I think German women should do the same.”
“That’s a wonderful idea. Mr. Huber, what do you do for work?”
“I trade in general commodities,” Jörg replied. “I’m currently based in Prague. Which is why I know a little about the logistics of food distribution.”
It was a lie, but Diana seemed to buy it.
“Where shall we go to talk?” Jörg asked, changing the subject.
“Let’s go to a Mittelstandküche, where the middle class eat. I want to show you what it’s like in Berlin now.”
The place Diana took them to had been either a normal dining hall up until the start of the war or a restaurant that had closed down because of it and was now being used by the government. The soot-stained brick walls showed the building’s age, and even the lights hanging from the ceiling beams were incredibly dark. The inside stank of that same odor Jörg knew from the battlefield, causing Lila to scrunch up her face slightly. At the Port of Kiel, the smell of oil and paint had overpowered the stink of human bodies, but here their lungs choked on it. The heaters were off, most likely from a lack of fuel, but the press of people made the air in the room feel warm, damp, and stagnant.
Seeing Lila’s reaction, Diana whispered an apology. “Sorry. The air’s horrible here. Plus it’s cold.”
“No, it’s not so bad,” Jörg answered instead. “The battlefield is worse.”
“No one has soap to wash themselves with anymore. All the rations for daily necessities have been used up.”
Although it was a dining hall, there were no options to choose from. Everyone just picked up a spoon and one of the bowls that had been brought out from the kitchen and placed on the serving table. The meal consisted of soup with a scant few vegetables floating in it and a thin slice of hard bread. There was no ham, milk, or coffee, and you couldn’t even hope for something like beer. But at least the soup was warm.
The room was crowded with people, making it hard to find someplace to sit.
When they finally settled at a table, Jörg pointed to his soup and asked, “Is this turnip?”
“Yes,” replied Diana. “They’re just the ones that were used to feed livestock before the war, though—nothing like the flavorsome ones we cooked with during peacetime. But the cities don’t have anything else.”
Jörg scooped up a piece of turnip with his spoon and put it in his mouth. The bland soup needed more salt, and he only tasted the bitterness of the turnip. Tiny bits of potato sat at the bottom of the bowl, along with one extremely thin sausage. “You still have potatoes, though, it seems. And sausages.”
“The sausage is made from rats. All the pork’s gone.”
An image of rats feasting on soldiers’ corpses in the trenches flashed through Jörg’s mind, and his throat tightened reflexively. He remembered one of the men in his squad killing the vermin with his club and army shovel, then stringing them all up in a row. He’d smiled and posed for the war correspondent’s camera, and Jörg and everyone else had cheered and carried on.
Diana’s voice brought Jörg back to the present.
“This is for the middle class, so the food’s still passable. The public Volksküche soup kitchens are much worse. They don’t serve anything fit for human consumption.”
She picked up a slice of bread. “This is made by mixing wheat and barley flour with potato flour. A ten percent mix is called K-Brot, and anything over twenty percent is KK-Brot. They call it bread, but it’s dry, crumbly, and flavorless. We can’t even get K-Brot most days, though. We get about one egg every three weeks and water down our milk to make it last longer. Since there are no more coffee beans, people also dry and roast turnips and barley and call it ersatz coffee. You can probably imagine just how fucking disgusting that tastes.”