The City of Lies by Michael Russell

Author:Michael Russell [Russell, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472121981
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2017-05-03T23:00:00+00:00

14

Berlin Friedrichstrasse

It was late afternoon when the train from Paris arrived at the Friedrichstrasse station. The journey into the city was like the journey into any city: an untidy sprawl of factories and warehouses and scruffy sidings, and waste ground that seemed unconnected to anything. There were clusters of apartment blocks and roads hemmed by the backs of houses, all thinly spread, then more and more densely packed, until buildings closed the railway lines in on either side, and even the smallest, scruffiest patches of empty space had disappeared. Berlin was a city Stefan Gillespie felt he knew in some way. On childhood visits to Germany, a trip to the city had often been planned, though it had never materialised, but once, five years earlier, he had changed planes at the Tempelhof aerodrome, on his way to the Baltic city of Danzig. He didn’t even leave the airport. He felt he knew Berlin in the same way he had always felt he knew London long before he went to England. It existed in his imagination, because it existed in the imaginations of the people around him. Yet the way it existed in his youth, when that knowledge came from his family, was not the way it existed now. Berlin was the city of Adolf Hitler, and as such it had a place in everyone’s imagination. For some it had been a city of new hope and light, of glorious parades and joyful patriotism; the city of a shining future, where everything modern and new met ancient values of order and faith, to shape a destiny for a world in chaos; it was a shining city, built on a hill. For others it was the fount of all the darkness spilling out across Europe and the world; not simply the cause of the war that had become what the world was, but the war itself. But as Stefan watched the heart of Berlin grow around him, it was its ordinariness that struck him. From the train, it was any city anywhere.

Stefan was met at the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse by the Irish embassy’s German driver, an oval-faced Bavarian called Otto, who spoke a little English and seemed relieved not to have to use it. He had memorised one phrase in Irish, ‘Céad mile fáilte’, a hundred thousand welcomes, which he used whenever he could, to advertise the job he did; a badge of identity. They were the words he greeted Stefan with as he left the train, and they were repeated half a dozen times, with a cheerful grin, while they walked to the car. Stefan felt obliged to offer one polite reply in Irish, but left it at that when he realised that whatever he said would provoke Otto to repeat his one Irish phrase over and over again.

As they walked to the car, Stefan saw a gap in the row of buildings on the other side of Friedrichstrasse, only a short distance away. Further back, several floors of two buildings still stood, but had been torn open.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.