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220 D Chapter Sixty-Five d neW sorroWs, neW Jobs Sergeant Major Atkinson, the bearer of devastating tidings, disappeared from my life after that fateful day in Haseldorf. I never saw him again, even though hardly a day goes by when, if nothing else, the bump above my right eye reminds me of what happened during a night in April 1946. Seeing no purpose in staying on in what was now the British zone of Germany, I decided to return to Berlin to be with my mother. There was still no legal way for me to cross the border; John decided to smuggle me into West Berlin in a British Army vehicle. Since he and I had decided to get married as soon as his divorce was final, he wanted to meet my mother. The only authority he had to be aware of was the British Military Police at the checkpoint in Helmstedt; the Soviets were not allowed to stop a British officer in uniform. Seated next to John during the first part of the journey, just before the border, he drove off the autobahn into the woods and made me climb into the trunk of his car, a procedure that would not have presented the slightest problem in the spacious Buick he usually drove; unfortunately, it had broken down the previous day, and he had been issued a GermanVW, a Beetle, for his trip to Berlin. In order to fit in the so-called trunk, located at the front of the car, I had to fold myself to the size of a newspaper, after which John succeeded in closing the hood by sitting on it. Locked inside, I found to my dismay that I shared my cramped quarters with another blind passenger, a wasp of considerable size, equipped with a very unpleasant disposition, determined to defend the confined space with his life. After a brief struggle, he ended up squashed to a pulp before he could sting me. At the Helmstedt border, British guards, followed a few minutes later by the Soviets, lifted the barriers for the car to pass.After reaching a safe distance,John drove off once more into a small forest to extract me from my tight prison, unfolding my limbs one by one like the blades of a rusty jackknife. Unfortunately, the unpleasant maneuver had to be repeated before entering the island of West Berlin. My mother could not believe her eyes and, after demonstrating to her how I had traveled , decided to fall instantly in love with John. When I told her that he and I were going to be married as soon as possible, she expressed some doubts. “I just don’t believe you’ll marry him,”she said with the same firmness with which she had maintained that—against all odds—her house would not be destroyed. As expected, her prophecy would come true. In 1946, in Rhodesia, where he had gone to visit his son, John’s car collided with a speeding Destruction unlimiteD 221 train during a torrential thunderstorm at night.Whatever was left of him had to be excised with shears from the wreckage. Unable and unwilling to deal with reality, I fell into what seemed a bottomless hole, even declining to resume my interrupted acting career.Not even my dear friend and former teacher Walter Franck could persuade me to return to my learned profession. He was starring in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and I realized that I, too, was waiting for someone like Godot, whoever he was, only I did not really care if he ever came. But since I had to make a living, I accepted a position offered to me by a friend, who himself had narrowly escaped execution by the Nazis. Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt, a dynamic young man and a well-known figure in the resistance , had been close to the circle around Albrecht Haushofer, murdered by the Gestapo on April 23, 1945. He asked me to join the “League against Inhumanity,” an organization closely affiliated with the League of Human Rights. Officially limiting itself to the investigation and care of ex-prisoners and refugees from the Soviet zone, it was in reality an antiCommunist agency,operated and financed by the United States.After my rigorous training by British Intelligence, the position seemed perfect. I was assigned to a job that required interrogating hundreds of escapees from the eastern zone, among them prisoners from Soviet concentration camps well as former political prisoners...

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