“Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.”

• Philip Larkin (Trees)

CHAPTER 1: OLD AND NEW

                               The electric lamps were coming to life on Postdamer Platz as Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann realized that they have spent four hours strolling the streets of Berlin. After a long time, Pastor Arnold Hartmann had made time for his wife. Despite living in Berlin for so many years, this date aroused in them the feeling of novelty. Everything looked new, infused with life.

The shadow and light created by the lamps on trees and streets reflected people’s state of mind after the war. The city was trying to restore its happiness, and above that – its pride.

The light also reflected something that stopped Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann. They both looked in each other’s eyes.

“Do you think we should?” asked Mrs. Hartmann.

Arnold nodded.

The sight that have held them in Postdamer Platz was: of tears. The lights have made visible a girl in her twenties, not more than twenty-six or seven, in a shabby dress. Her face giving a youthful prettiness, her dark hairs turned around, her neck giving her personality a stillness. Her face had a tinge of pink, which made its presence felt despite all the yellows and greens. In her eyes, nothing but tears, which rolled down her face in continuous movement without ceasing, and without an attempt from her to stop or wipe it.

Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann watched her for some minutes. Then with their reluctant steps approached her.

“Dear, where are you from?” Mrs. Hartmann asked, hesitantly.

Hearing this question stirred her heart with an iron comb – she did not want that question. She was sitting there in order to forget the very existence of her.

Mrs. Hartmann sat beside her, hoping to relieve some of her pain, remembering numerous occasions in which she was in despair in her youth and somebody did exactly that now she did. She kept her hand on the girl’s shoulder. Feeling the hand of Mrs. Hartmann sent a trembling down her feet. She looked over herself to Arnold. Arnold’s eyes implored her melancholic face as if one does to a beautiful but dying plant. Arnold always have had a penchant for understanding people’s soul, and meeting them with their sins, he had developed himself to pin pains without the person verbalizing them.

“If we confess, he is faithful and just to forgive us for our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” Arnold said, fixing his gaze at the girl.

“I can’t. This sin cannot be washed,” replied the girl in broken syllables. Hearing her German, it was easily determinable that she was not from a German speaking land.

Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann at once understood what it was.

“Where do you live?” asked Mrs. Hartmann.

“Used to,” she replied in her quivering voice.

“We will talk to your father. Mr. Hartmann, here, is a pastor. People take a serious note of what he says. Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.”

Mrs. Hartmann looked toward Arnold. The situation was becoming more and more clear to him and his expressions were telling loud to Valda Hartmann the heart of the matter.

“Where do you used to live, dear?” asked he.

“Wellplatz.”

Hearing the name shook the souls of Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann. After so many years of listening to pains, though, they knew how to conceal their emotions from their faces.

“What is your name, dear?”

“Ulyana,” said she in a low voice.

As she said her name, a drop of water came and rested on Valda Hartmann’s face. She looked toward Mr. Hartmann and they both sidestepped a few meters from the bench. Mrs. Hartmann was seen to be talking unflinchingly to him. He was listening to every word of his wife, nodding now and then every few seconds.

By the time, they returned to the bench, rain had started to pour in an ominous manner.

“Ulyana, dear, would you like to come with us? To our home?” she asked, piercing the noises the rain produced. “Pastor Hartmann, until makes arrangements for you, you can live in our house.”

“No, I don’t want to bring shame and misfortune to anybody now.”

“Dear, I assure you do not carry a misfortune, and ashamed should be those hearts that carry the evil in themselves,” counseled Mr. Hartmann.

Ulyana looked at them through the water droplets that sat on her eyelashes. She had accepted the worse for her when the tragedy struck. She was not afraid now even to walk into the nether world.

“God has his own ways, dear. He has sent you and this life with you to us – He wants the best for both of you,” said Mrs. Hartmann.

While the darkness and rain had engulfed Ulyana, a sense of sereneness could be felt around her, which she had buried a long ago, and had thought this feeling would never resurrect when she had been brought from Odessa.

CHAPTER 2: HISTORY AND FUTURE

                               The morning light poured into the grey room. In front of the flower vase, lying beside the window, Ulyana sat seeing the birds chirp, morning breeze making the newspaper vendors nuzzle their nose into their breasts. A tolling of bell coming from the community church soothed the ears of Ulyana.

Ulyana had not felt so blessed in a long time. In fact, from the time she was eleven, she had none. A poor but dignified home she grew in. The people who burnt her home, along with her mother, father and brother would have burnt her too, if her mother had not sent her to the Uncle. The Uncle terrified, desperate, and pathetic, in order to save himself, in turn sold her to the brothel in Warsaw. And the upheaval that saw Warsaw in the Great War took her to and through the various doors of Berlin.

With people in languish and prostitutes in plentitude in post-war Berlin, no one wanted to hold on to one with a child. So when she asked the one who had always admired her, one who gave examples of Vincent’s ears, one who had promised her to take out of the ‘rut,’ who always wanted to be with her, to be with her – he refused.

“I cannot live with a Russian slut,” he stated fiercely, and stormed out of the three-storied building where his love had been roaring a day earlier.

She had been listening this now for more than fifteen years, it did not break her, what did was the words coming out of someone she had projected her faith into. She left Wellplatz. At the bench, she knew she would be in the Spree by morning. But here she was looking out through the window at the rising Sun, as if the Sun has just risen for her, just to show her how it gives birth to life every day, forgetting and forgiving the previous.

A knock on the door was heard. She opened the door gently.

“How are you feeling, dear?” asked Mrs. Hartmann, keeping the tray of breakfast on the table by the lamp.

“Fine,” she said through her quivering voice, not knowing how or what to say. “Thank you, Ma’am.”

“You can call me Mrs. Hartmann, dear. No one has been knighted here,” said Mrs. Hartmann, smiling.

“Okay, ma’am…. Mrs. Hartmann.”

“I might have some dresses for you. After breakfast, come and choose what you would like to wear,” Mrs. Hartmann said, touching her dried cheeks gently.

She nodded.

“Mr. Hartmann has invited the housing commissioner over today. He is little tough, but we hope we will be able to secure for you a house and maternal care.”

“Will I have to get back to that after?” she asked Mrs. Hartmann with a gloom vibrating in her face.

“Oh, no dear! Do not say such things. Mr. Hartmann and I will help you secure a position. Hopefully, in a government office. After all, our city was the most prosperous in Europe, it will be again, and no person will be left out of a rightful work,” Mrs. Hartmann assured her.

Alfred Börlein was not the tough headed man that he is today. Before the war, he worked in the Department of Taxation, had an affair with the receptionist, was well respected and valued in the community. He was known for his logistics ability – to gather resources in order to get a task executed. So when the war struck and there was increasing demand for astute strategists – he was called on. By the end of the war, though, he had lost substantially: shell shock, vanished love, the humiliation that the treaty of Versailles brought, and change of departments. The whole experience left him irritable, bitter, and despotic.

Listening to Arnold Hartmann’s sermons used to bring a calming peace to his mind: that is how Mr. Hartmann knew him, otherwise he did not approach a man whom he did not know, and the stranger men who dared to approach him had their day ruined. If someone else, than Mr. Hartmann had called on him, he would not have come.

When Ulyana came down the stairs, Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann and the housing commissioner seemed to be engaged in a serious conversation, which was broken only by the creaking of the wood.

“Come, dear!” Mrs. Hartmann invited her.

“Hello, Miss Ulyana,” said the housing commissioner, holding out his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, sir.”

“Have a seat,” said Mrs. Hartmann to her. “Now, as I was telling you, housing in the post-war Berlin has become a tricky business. Not even I get to decide who lives where, or where to develop the next housing unit. It all comes to, and from, the central authority itself. It’s a city without Hestia.”

“So there is nothing you can do?” asked Mrs. Hartmann.

“I am really sorry, ma’am. At this time, I am tied with ropes. But I can arrange some work for her, something which she can do from home.”

Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann looked at each other.

“Hold out for some time, for a year at most, things will get rationalized in the city. Then, I am sure I can get for them a comfortable apartment. Besides, she will need a helping hand now.”

“He is right,” affirmed Mr. Hartmann, “so it is. She will stay with us until the child comes along.”

Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann always wanted to have a child. And the prospect of even spending an hour with a child used to lighten up their hearts.

“I must leave now, Pastor. If you understand, the times are really hard; and I am always indebted to you Pastor, not able to be use for you and Mrs. Hartmann is a blot on my soul.”

“No, no, Mr. Börlein. You are doing your job. God loves for our rightful labor,” said Mrs. Hartmann.

“You can only do what’s in your grasp, Mr. Commissioner. Please, do not malign yourself like this,” assured Mr. Hartmann. “I will see you out.”

CHAPTER 3: TIME AND LOST

                                Halfway through the pregnancy of Ulyana, Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann provided for her as if their own child was coming to the world. The times were hectic for the couple but was full of unspoken enthusiasm and energy, which made itself clear in a bliss which one has not experienced before.

The Pflegen Hospital staff held the Hartmanns in great respect: so in other cases as that of like Ulyana’s, they may have not allowed entry, to her, though, they gave utmost care.

“She is doing extremely well, Mrs. Hartmann,” the long-faced, stubble beard doctor said flipping through the papers attached to a clipboard. “Is she being given the diet that was recommended?”

“Yes, doctor. Everything as you prescribed.”

“Good, very well. Don’t loose on walking on any day of the week, that is important.”

“Most certainly, doctor. The girl does everything you ask for here. She is in the light of God – after all that she has been through – she now does all that is to live a godly life,” submitted Mrs. Hartmann.

The doctor nodded and gave a set of papers to her. Meanwhile, Mr. Hartmann, though a calm and kind-hearted man who tries to be as distant to politics as possible, was engaged in a serious political talk in the corridor, where the rays of sun was coming in lines of shadow and light as if drawn with a pencil, with the secretary of Pflegen.

“Hitler is all the way right, Mr. Hartmann. It was the internals who failed us, stabbed us, before the externals could have touched.”

“We will stand to see that, sir,” replied Mr. Hartmann, looking at his wife and Ulyana coming out of the doctor’s cabin.

“I see, you men are again in the depths of politics, scratching the same old questions in order to get new answers,” interjected Mrs. Hartmann, greeting the secretary.

“That’s all we have got left now, ma’am,” replied the secretary with a laugh, leaving the trio.

“So?” asked Mr. Hartmann.

“She is doing really well,” replied Mrs. Hartmann, rubbing Ulyana’s shoulders.

On the way home, Mrs. Hartmann took the bobble head, which she had it made for Ulyana. She collected two like, large headed Ulyanas at Graham’s Geschäft in Mitte.

“She always have had a liking for these bouncing heads,” said Mr. Hartmann, “never understood her on this.”

“These defy mortality; always in motion; always brimming with life – at the same time telling our minds are more than our bodies,” answered Mrs. Hartmann, giving one of the bobble heads to Ulyana.

“For me?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I don’t know how to thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Hartmann. You are doing so much for someone like me.”

“Never say that, dear, never say that.”

CHAPTER 4: GRIEF AND RAPTURE

                                   The summer went by, and at the doorsteps of winter, the child came through in the ever-changing world. The coming of the child was supposed to bring a light in Ulyana’s life and to some extent in Hartmanns’ as well. But the circumstances were greatly altered two weeks before the birth.

Two men in grey suits and blue tie presented themselves in Hartmann House. They were from the Human Resource Department. After a draining war, the Department did not want to have their children of next generation to become impaired in any intellectual way. The tall one, with the mole on his nose, did all the talking, while the other one just stared around the house.

They had come to inform the Hartmanns that the coming forth child was “fatherless,” that to become a “capable citizen of Berlin” the child will be taken to Berlin’s childcare unit, and the state will look after him or her, acting as a parent.

Mr. Hartmann approached some people of notoriety, who claimed to be an “important part of the machinery of Berlin,” but every effort was in vain. The new republic, they said, is pensive about its new generation.

So it was, despite Ulyana’s pleading, Hartmanns’ calm urging, the child departed after a day from birth to childcare unit on the outskirts of Berlin. It was a total havoc for Ulyana, she thought she might not be able to survive, tried several times to hang herself – but every time the Hartmanns saved her from herself and the trauma which would break any human being.

“And since we are His children, we are His heirs. Together with Christ we are heirs of
God’s glory. But if we are to share His glory, we must also share His suffering. Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory He will reveal to us later,” Mr. Hartmann read to her.

Time did heal her longing for the child, but not the constant unrelenting pain. She found herself now more stable and regularly gave a helping hand to Mrs. Hartmann.

In January of twenty-four, Arnold Hartmann was invited to give his sermons in Munich. This was a first time that he was called outside Berlin to give sermons. This did took off the dark clouds of gloom over the Hartmanns House after a long time.

The night that Mr. Hartmann left, Ulyana found herself sitting near Mrs. Hartmann, reading a magazine. Mrs. Hartmann, knitting, told her about her childhood, her meeting with Arnold, and other humorous tales from her life.

At one, Ulyana had a laughing splurge so strong that she begged Mrs. Hartmann to stop. She clutched Valda’s right thigh trying to control herself. The laughter receded slowly, while Valda Hartmann looked at her, smiling. Ulyana’s hands still grabbed Valda’s thigh. She did not want to stop feeling the warmth. Valda’s eyes struck to Ulyana’s and she kissed Ulyana on the lips.

That night Ulyana slept beside Mrs. Hartmann, and the feeling that Valda had with Ulyana felt to her soothingly liberating.

CHAPTER 5: BREAK AND BORN

                                The sermons in Munich went really well for Arnold Hartmann. He found himself among new friends, new crowd, and new books – all of which stimulated him to continue doing the good work that he was doing.

In the meantime, Mrs. Hartmann’s love for Ulyana grew with each passing day. She felt ashamed of her sometimes. But what she felt for Ulyana was no less than what she once felt for Mr. Hartmann, or never did – she questioned the love itself which made her ashamed.

On the day when Mr. Hartmann arrived, she gave a thought whether she should be with Ulyana or perform the duties of marriage faithfully.

“How was your trip?” asked Mrs. Hartmann, taking his overcoat and cap.

“It was splendid, Valda. It was Godful. You should have seen the surfacing of calm over me and my listeners after the sermons. Mr. Horowitz said that I am one of the best preachers in the whole of Germany.”  

“Now I think, I should have gone with you.”

“Yes, you and Ulyana both should have. It’s the most comforting when we get to know new people of God with ones we already knew,” said Mr. Hartmann. “How is she?”

“She seems to be better now.”

“Yes, that’s what we pray to God always,” said Mr. Hartmann, holding the hands of Mrs. Hartmann.

“Yes, we do,” uttered Mrs. Hartmann, forcing a smile.

The February days were even colder than of January. Through various nights, Valda Hartmann thought about ending whatever Ulyana and she have had – but it was those emotions she had never felt that she never wanted to let go off.

The rush of emotions that manifested when she was with Ulyana, the deep bond that was getting stronger with every passing day found its antithesis, eventually, in Valda Hartmann’s relationship with her husband. They were not angry at each other, nor, maybe, displeased but the understanding, the depth that existed between the two was fading – the relationship getting estranged.

So when one moonless night, she headed for the study of Mr. Hartmann to have a talk – which barring for the absolute necessary they have had none in recent days – she couldn’t control her rage. The rage devoured her body as if a snake does to a bird. She trembled, her eyes wide open getting more and more discolored. The mild light coming from the lamp in the study was failing to illuminate her body, which was getting darker and darker as if soaked in black clouds. She got herself to her room and wept. After a quarter of an hour, though, she left the room, her eyes still doused with tears. The stream of water never left her eyes even once in the whole night: Seeing someone you love and someone you used to love involved physically is seldom a sight which a person bears easily.

The next morning, as the Sun broke into the sky, Mrs. Hartmann found herself at the police station.

“From dawn, since I woke up, I couldn’t find Mr. Hartmann, neither Ulyana in the whole house,” replied Mrs. Hartmann, weeping, to the officer with greying hairs and bulky eyes.

“Were they in the house at night?”

“Yes, officer.”

“I am sorry, Mrs. Hartmann,” apologized the officer, hinting his verdict.

EPILOGUE

                        Months passed when the Housing Commissioner got the news of Mr. Hartmann leaving the city with Ulyana. He paid a visit to the Hartmann House. He was amazed at the number of dogs that were present outside the residence of Hartmanns.

“You have grown fond of dongs?” asked the housing commissioner.

“Since Mr. Hartmann left, they have been here for me. They make me less alone.”

“I am really sorry, Valda,” said the commissioner. “How can anyone leave a pious wife like you?”

Tears rolled on Mrs. Hartmann’s eyes.

“I have joined the church. Only God can wash the sins I have.”

“You have no sins, Valda, no sins.”

“I should be going now. I had hoped that this year would be better but it’s all the same – and worse at many,” said the housing commissioner, and bid adieu to Mrs. Hartmann.

Mrs. Hartmann also left for the church. The dogs following her to the end of the street. Neuen Glauben Church treated Mrs. Hartmann with same respect they gave to Arnold Hartmann. When she returned, she fed the dogs, who started climbing here and there, barking in an extreme joy.

After getting dinner, she took out a brown wooden box from under the bed, opened the lock, and sat there looking in the box for a minute. There were two skulls in the box, sitting next to each other; one bigger in size than the other. The light from the lamp made them shine; she took out the smaller one. She spent the whole night talking to it, with the moon half-alive in the starry night and the pleasant breeze playing its music with the leaves.