The war had made him famous. Not as famous as Murrow, the voice of London, and not as famous as Quent Reynolds, now the voice of the documentaries, but famous enough to get a promise from Collier’s (“four pieces, if you can get there”) and then the press pass to Berlin. In the end, it was Hal Reidy who’d made the difference, juggling the press slots like seating arrangements, UP next to Scripps-Howard, down the table from Hearst, who’d assigned too many people anyway.
“I can’t get you out till Monday, though. They won’t give us another plane, not with the conference on. Unless you’ve got some pull.”
“Only you.” ‹›Hal grinned. “You’re in worse shape than I thought. Say hello to Nanny Wendt for me, the prick.” Their censor from the old days, before the war, when they’d both been with Columbia, a nervous little man, prim as a governess, who liked to run a pen through their copy just before they went on the air. “The Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment,“ Hal said, the way he always did. ”I wonder what happened to him. Goebbels poisoned his own kids, I hear.“
“No. Magda,” Jake said. “The gnddigefrau. In chocolates.”
“Yeah, sweets to the sweet. Nice people.” He handed Jake the traveling orders. “Have a good time.”
“You should come too. It’s a historic occasion.”
“So’s this,” Hal said, pointing to another set of orders. “Two more weeks and I’m home. Berlin. Christ. I couldn’t wait to get out. And you want to go back?”
Jake shrugged. “It’s the last big story of the war.”
“Sitting around a table, divvying up the pot.”
“No. What happens when it’s over.”
“What happens is, you go home.”
“Not yet.”
Hal glanced up. “You think she’s still there,” he said flatly.
Jake put the orders in his pocket, not answering.
“It’s been a while, you know. Things happen.”
Jake nodded. “She’ll be there. Thanks for this. I owe you one.”
“More than one,” Hal said, letting it go. “Just write pretty. And don’t miss the plane.”
But the plane was hours late getting into Frankfurt, then hours on the ground unloading and turning around, so it was midafternoon before they took off. The C-47 was a drafty military transport fitted out with benches along the sides, and the passengers, a spillover of journalists who, like Jake, hadn’t made the earlier flights, had to shout over the engines. After a while Jake gave up and sat back with his eyes closed, feeling queasy as the plane bumped its way east. There had been drinks while they waited, and Brian Stanley, the Daily Express man who had somehow attached himself to the American group, was already eloquently drunk, with most of the others not far behind. Belser from Gannett, and Cowley, who’d kept tabs on the SHAEF press office from a bar stool at the Scribe, and Gimbel, who had traveled with Jake following Patton into Germany. They had all been at war forever, in their khakis with the round correspondent patch, even Liz Yeager, the photographer, wearing a heavy pistol on her hip, cowgirl style. He’d known all of them one way or another, their faces like pins in his own war map. London, where he’d finally left Columbia in ‘42 because he wanted to see the fighting war. North Africa, where he saw it and caught a piece of shrapnel. Cairo, where he recovered and drank the nights away with Brian Stanley. Sicily, missing Palermo but managing, improbably, to get on with Patton, so that later, after France, he joined him again for the race east. Across Hesse and Thuringia, everything accelerated, the stop-and-go days of fitful waiting over, finally a war of clear, running adrenaline. Weimar. Then, finally, up to Nordhausen, and Camp Dora, where everything stopped. Two days of staring, not even able to talk. He wrote down numbers-two hundred a day-and then stopped that too. A news-reel camera filmed the stacks of bodies, jutting bones and floppy genitals. The living, with their striped rags and shaved heads, had no sex.
On the second day, at one of the slave labor camps, a skeleton took his hand and kissed it, then held on to it, an obscene gratitude, gibbering something in Slavic-Polish? Russian? — and Jake froze, trying not to smell, feeling his hand buckle under the weight of the fierce grip. “I’m not a soldier,” he said, wanting to run but unable to take his hand away, ashamed, caught now too. The story they’d all missed, the hand you couldn’t shake off.
“Old home week for you, boyo, isn’t it?” Brian said, cupping his hands to be heard.
“You’ve been before?” Liz said, curious.
“Lived here. One of Ed’s boys, darling, didn’t you know?” Brian said. “Till the jerries chucked him out. Of course, they chucked everybody out. Had to, really. Considering.”
“So you speak German?” Liz said. “Thank god somebody does.”
“Berliner deutsch,” Brian answered for him, a tease.
“I don’t care what kind of deutsch it is,” she said, “as long as it’s deutsch.” She patted Jake’s knees. “You stick with me, Jackson,” she said, like Phil Harris on the radio. Then, “What was it like?” Well, what was it like? A vise slowly closing. In the beginning, the parties and the hot days on the lakes and the fascination of events. He had come to cover the Olympics in ‘36 and his mother knew somebody who knew the Dodds, so there were embassy cocktails and a special seat in their box at the stadium. Goebbels’ big party on the Pfaueninsel, the trees decked out in thousands of lights shaped like butterflies, officers swaggering along the footpaths, drunk on champagne and importance, throwing up in the bushes. The Dodds were appalled. He stayed. The Nazis supplied the headlines, and even a stringer could live on the rumors, watching the war come day by day. By the time he signed on with Columbia, the vise had shut, rumors now just little gasps for air. The city contracted around him, so that at the end it was a closed circle: the Foreign Press Club in Potsdamerplatz, up the gloomy Wilhelmstrasse to the ministry for the twice-daily briefings, on up to the Adlon, where Columbia kept a room for Shirer and they gathered at the raised bar, comparing notes and watching the SS lounging around the fountain below, their shiny boots on the rim while the bronze frog statues spouted jets of water toward the skylight. Then out the East-West Axis to the broadcasting station on Adolf Hitler Platz and the endless wrangling with Nanny Wendt, then a taxi home to the tapped telephone and the watchful eye of Herr Lechter, the blockleiter who lived in the apartment down the hall, snapped up from some hapless Jews. No air. But that had been at the end.
“It was like Chicago,” he said. Blunt and gritty and full of itself, a new city trying to be old. Clumsy Wilhelmine palaces that always looked like banks, but also jokes with an edge and the smell of spilled beer. Sharp midwestern air.
“Chicago? It won’t look like Chicago now.” This, surprisingly, from the bulky civilian in a business suit, introduced at the airport as a congressman from upstate New York.
“No, indeed,” Brian said, mischievous. “All banged about now. Still, what isn’t? Whole bloody country’s one big bomb site. Do you mind my asking? I’ve never known. What does one call a congressman? I mean, are you The Honorable?”
“Technically. That’s what it says on the envelopes, anyway. But we just use Congressman-or Mister.”
“Mister. Very democratic.”
“Yes, it is,” the congressman said, humorless.
“You with the conference or have you just come for a look-in?” Brian said, playing with him.
“I’m not attending the conference, no.”
“Just come to see the raj, then.”
“Meaning?”
“Oh, no offense. It’s very like, though, wouldn’t you say? Military Government. Pukkah sahibs, really.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, neither do I, half the time,” Brian said pleasantly. “Just a little conceit of mine. Never mind. Here, have a drink,” he said, taking another, his forehead sweaty.
The congressman ignored him, turning instead to the young soldier wedged next to him, a last-minute arrival, no duffel, maybe a courier. He was wearing a pair of high riding boots, his hands gripping the bench like reins, face white under a sprinkling of freckles.
“First time in Berlin?” the congressman said.
The soldier nodded, holding his seat even tighter as the plane bounced.
“Got a name, son?” Making conversation.
“Lieutenant Tully,” he said, then gulped, covering his mouth.
“You all right?” Liz said to him.
The soldier took off his hat. His red hair was damp.
“Here, just in case,” she said, handing him a paper bag.
“How much longer?” he said, almost a moan, holding the bag to his chest with one hand.
The congressman looked at him and involuntarily moved his leg in the tight space, out of harm’s way, turning his body slightly so that he was forced to face Brian again.
“You’re from New York, you said?”
“Utica, New York.”
“Utica,” Brian said, making a show of trying to place it. “Breweries, yes?” Jake smiled. In fact, Brian knew the States well. “Fair number of Germans there, if I’m not mistaken.”
The congressman looked at him in distaste. “My district is one hundred percent American.”
But Brian was bored now. “I daresay,” he said, looking away.
“How did you get on this plane anyway? I understood it was for American press.”
“Well, there’s Allied feeling for you,” Brian said to Jake.
The plane dropped slightly, not much more than a dip in a road, but evidently enough for the soldier, who groaned.
“I’m going to be sick,” he said, barely opening the bag in time.
“Careful,” the congressman said, trapped.
“Just get it out,” Liz said to the soldier, a big-sister voice. “That’s it. You’ll be all right.”
“Sorry,” he said, half choking, clearly embarrassed, looking suddenly no older than a teenager.
Liz turned away from the boy. “Did you ever meet Hitler?” she asked Jake, the question bringing the others with her, as if she were drawing a privacy curtain in place for the soldier.
“Meet, no. Saw, yes,” Jake said. “Lots of times.”
“Up close, I mean.”
“Once,” he said.
A sultry early evening, coming up from the Press Club, the street almost in shadow, but the new Chancellery still catching the last of the light. Prussian moderne, the broad steps leading down to the waiting car. Just an aide and two guards, curiously unprotected. On his way to the Sportpalast, probably, for another harangue against the devious Poles. He stopped for a second near the bottom stairs, looking down the empty street at Jake. I could reach into my pocket now, Jake had thought. One shot, put an end to all of it, that easy. Why hadn’t anyone done it? Then, as if the thought had carried like a scent, Hitler raised his head and sniffed, anxious as prey, and looked back at Jake. One shot. He held the look for a second, assessing, then smiled, just a twitch of the mustache, lifted his hand in a languid heil of dismissal, and headed toward the car. Gloating. There was no gun, and he had things to do.
“They say the eyes were hypnotic,” Liz said.
“I don’t know. I never got that close,” Jake said, shutting his own, making the rest of the plane go away.
Not long now. He’d go to Pariserstrasse first. He saw the door, the heavy sandstone caryatids holding up the balcony over the entrance. What would she say? Four years. But maybe she’d moved. No, she’d be there. A few more hours. A drink at the cafe down the street in Olivaerplatz, catching up, years of stories. Unless they stayed in.
“Pleasant dreams?” Liz said, and he realized he was smiling, already there. Berlin. Not long now.
“We’re coming in,” Brian said, his face at the little window. “God. Come have a look.”
Jake opened his eyes and jumped up, a kid. They crowded around the window, the congressman at their side.
“My god,” Brian said again, almost in a hush, silenced by the view. “Bloody Carthage.”
Jake looked down at the ground, his stomach suddenly dropping, all his excitement draining away like blood. Why hadn’t anyone told him? He had seen bombed cities before-on the ground in London, ripped-up terrace houses and streets of glass, then Cologne and Frankfurt from the air, with their deep craters and damaged churches-but nothing on this scale. Carthage, a destruction out of the ancient world. Below them there seemed to be no movement. Shells of houses, empty as ransacked tombs, miles and miles of them, whole pulverized stretches where there were not even walls. They had come in from the west, over the lakes, so he knew it must be Lichterfelde, then Steglitz, the approach to Tempelhof, but landmarks had disappeared under shifting dunes of rubble. As they dropped lower, scattered buildings took shape, smashed but there, a few chimneys sticking up, even a steeple. Some kind of life must still be going on. A beige cloud hung over everything- not smoke, a thick haze of soot and plaster dust, as if the houses could not quite bring themselves to leave. But Berlin was gone. The Big Three were coming to divide up ruins.
“Well, they got what they deserved,” the congressman said suddenly, a jarring American voice. Jake looked at him. A politician at a wake. “Didn’t they?” he said, a little defiantly.
Brian turned slowly from the window, his eyes filled with scorn. “Boyo, we all get what we deserve. In the end.”
Tempelhof was a mess around the edges, but the field had been cleared and the terminal itself was still there. After the tomb city they’d seen from the air, the airport seemed dizzy with life, swarming with uniformed ground crews and greeters. A young lieutenant, full of hair and chewing gum, was waiting at the foot of the stairs, picking out faces as they disembarked. The sick soldier had staggered down first, running off, Jake guessed, for the men’s room.
“Geismar?” The lieutenant stuck out his hand. “Ron Erlich, press office. I’ve got you and Miss Yeager. She on board?”
Jake nodded. “With these,” he said, indicating the cases he’d been lugging off the plane. “Want to give me a hand?”
‘What’s she got in there, her trousseau?“
‘Equipment,“ Liz said behind him. ”You going to make cracks or give the man a hand?“
Ron took in the uniform, with its unexpected curves, and smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said, giving a mock salute, then picked up the cases in one easy movement, impressing a date. “This way.” He led them toward the building. “Colonel Howley sends his regards,” he said to Liz. “Says he remembers you from his days in the ad business.”
Liz grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ll take his picture.”
Ron grinned back. “You remember him too, I guess.”
“Vividly. Hey, careful with that. Lenses.”
They went up the gate stairs behind the congressman, who seemed to have acquired an entourage, and into the waiting hall, the same tawny marble walls and soaring space as before, when flying had been a romance. People had come to the restaurant here, just to watch the planes. Jake hurried to keep up. Ron moved the way he talked, breezing a path through the gangs of waiting servicemen.
“You missed the president,” he said. “Went into town after lunch. Had the whole Second Armored lined up on the Avus. Quite a picture. Sorry your plane was so late, that’s probably it for town shots.”
“Wasn’t he at the conference?” Liz said.
“Hasn’t started yet. Uncle Joe’s late. They say he has a cold.”
“A cold?” Jake said.
“Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Truman’s pissed, I hear.” He glanced at Jake. “That’s off the record, by the way.”
“What’s on?”
“Not much. I’ve got some handouts for you, but you’ll probably throw them away. Everybody else does. There’s nothing to say till they sit down, anyway. We have a briefing schedule set up at the press camp.”
“Which is where?”
“Down the road from MG headquarters. Argentinischeallee,” he said, rolling it out, a joke name.
“Out in Dahlem?” Jake said, placing it.
“Everything’s out in Dahlem.”
“Why not somewhere nearer the center?”
Ron looked at him. “There is no center.”
They were climbing the big flight of stairs to the main entrance doors. “As I say, the camp’s right by MG headquarters, so that’s easy. Your billet too. We found a nice place for you,” he said to Liz, almost courtly. “Photo schedule’s different, but at least you’ll get out there. Potsdam, I mean.”
“But not press?” Jake said.
Ron shook his head. “They want a closed session. No press. I’m telling you this now so I don’t have to hear you squawk later, like the rest of them. I don’t make the rules, so if you want to complain, go right over my head, I don’t care. We’ll do the best we can at the camp. Everything you need. You can send from there, but your stuff goes through me, you might as well know.”
Take looked at him, forced to smile. A new Nanny Wendt, this time with gum and get-up-and-go.
“Whatever happened to freedom of the press?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll get plenty of copy. We’ll have a briefing after every session. Besides, everybody talks.”
“And what do we do between briefings?”
“Drink, mostly. At least that’s what they’ve been doing.” He turned to Jake. “It’s not as if Stalin gives interviews, you know. Here we go,” he said, swinging through the doors. “I’ll get you out to your billet. You probably want to clean up.”
“Hot water?” Liz said.
“Sure. All the comforts of home.”
In the driveway the congressman was being bundled into a requisitioned Horch with an American flag painted on the side, the others into open jeeps. Beyond them, at the end of the drive, were the first houses, not one of them intact. Jake stared, everything emptying out again. Not an aerial glimpse anymore; worse. A few standing walls, pitted by artillery shells. Mounds of debris, broken concrete and plumbing fixtures. One building had been sliced through, a strip of wallpaper hanging off an exposed room, scorch marks around the window holes. How would he ever find her in this? The same dust he’d seen from the plane, suspended in the air, making the afternoon light dull. And now the smell, sour wet masonry and open earth, like a raw building site, and something else, which he assumed was bodies, still lying somewhere under the rubble.
“Welcome to Berlin,” Ron said.
“Is it all like this?” Liz said quietly.
“Most of it. If the roofs gone, it was bombs. Otherwise, the Russians. They say the shelling was worse. Just blew it all to hell.” He threw the bags into the jeep. “Hop in.”
“You two go on ahead,” Jake said, still looking at the street. “Something I want to do first.”
“Hop in,” Ron said, an order. “What do you think you’re going to do, get a taxi?”
Liz looked at Jake’s face, then turned to Ron and smiled. “What’s the rush? Take him where he wants to go. You can give me a tour on the way.” She patted the camera slung around her neck, then put it up to her eye, crouching down. “Smile.” She snapped his picture, busy Tempelhof behind.
Ron glanced at his watch, pretending not to pose. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
“A little tour,” Liz said, wheedling, snapping a few more. “Isn’t that part of the service?”
He sighed. “I suppose you want to see the bunker. Everyone wants to see the bunker, and there’s nothing to see. The Russians don’t let you in anyway, say it’s flooded. Maybe Adolf’s floating around down there, who knows? But it’s their sector and they can do what they want.” He smiled back at Liz. “You can get the Reichstag, though. Everybody wants a picture of that and the Russians don’t care.”
“You’re on,” she said, lowering the camera.
“If I can get us there. I know the way from Dahlem, but-”
Liz jerked her thumb toward Jake. “He used to live here.”
“You navigate then,” Ron said, shrugging, and motioned Liz into the jeep. “You can ride up front.” Another grin.
“Lucky me. Just keep your hands on the wheel. The whole U.S. Army’s got this problem with their hands.” Jake paid no attention, the flirting a harmless buzz beside him. Some people had emerged from one of the piles of rubble, two women, and he watched them pick their way carefully over the bricks, listless, as if they were still shell-shocked. In the July heat they were wearing overcoats, afraid to leave them home in the basement of the ruined house, where everything, maybe even themselves, must be open for the taking. What had it been like these last few months? Carthage. Maybe she was like these two, burrowed in somewhere. But where? He realized for the first time, looking at the women, that he might not find her at all, that the bombs must have scattered people too, like bricks. But maybe not. He turned to the jeep, suddenly anxious to get there, a pointless urgency, as if everything that could have happened to her had not already happened.
He lifted himself into the back, next to Liz’s cases.
“Where first, the bunker?” Ron said to Liz, who nodded. He turned to Jake. “Which way?”
Not where he wanted to go, but stuck with it now, a favor to Liz. “Turn right at the end.”
Ron let out the clutch. “Don’t bother taking notes. Everybody says the same thing anyway. Lunar landscape. That’s the big one. And teeth. Rows of decayed teeth. AP had rotting molars. But maybe you’ll come up with something original. Be nice, something new.”
“How would you describe it?”
“Can’t,” Ron said, no longer flip. “Maybe nobody can. It’s-well, see for yourself.”
Jake headed them north on the Mehringdamm, but they were forced to detour east and in minutes were lost, streets blocked off or impassable, the whole map redrawn by debris. Five minutes back and already lost. They threaded their way through the ruins, Ron glancing back at him as if he were a broken compass until, luckily, another detour put them on the Mehringdamm again. A cleared stretch this time, which would get them to the Landwehrkanal, an easier route to follow than the unpredictable roads. Only the major streets had passable lanes, the others reduced to winding footpaths, when they were visible at all. Berlin, a flat city, finally had contours, new hills of brick. There was no life. Once he spotted children skittering over the rubble like crickets, and a working detail of women reclaiming bricks, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs against the dust, but otherwise the streets were quiet. The silence unnerved him. Berlin had always been a noisy city, the elevated S-bahn trains roaring across their trestle bridges, radios crackling in the apartment block courtyards, cars screeching at red lights, drunks arguing. Now he could hear the motor of the jeep and the eerie creaking of a single bicycle ahead of them, nothing else. A cemetery quiet. At night it would be pitch dark, the other side of the moon. Ron had been right-the unavoidable cliche.
At the Landwehrkanal there was more activity, but the smell was worse, raw sewage and corpses still floating on the water. The Russians had been here two months; had there been so many to fish out? But there they were, bodies stuck on the piles of the wrecked bridges or just suspended face down in the middle of the canal, held in place by nothing but the stagnant water. Liz had dropped her camera to hold a handkerchief over her mouth against the smell. No one said a word. Across the water, Hallesches Tor was gone.
They followed the canal toward the Potsdamer bridge, which took traffic. At one of the footbridges he saw his first men, shuffling across in gray Wehrmacht uniforms, still in retreat. He thought, inevitably, of the night he’d seen the transports set out for Poland, a big public display down the Linden, square-jawed faces out of a newsreel. These were blank and unshaven and almost invisible; women simply walked around them, not looking up.
There were landmarks now-the Reichstag in the far distance, and here in Potsdamerplatz the jagged remains of the department stores. Wertheim’s gone. A burned-out truck had been pushed to the side, but there was no traffic to block, just a few bicycles and some Russian soldiers leading a horse-drawn wagon. The old crowded intersection now had the feel of a silent movie, without the jerky rhythm. Instead, everything passed by in slow motion, even the bicycles, wary of punctures, and the wagon, plodding down a street as empty as the steppes. How many nights of bombing had it taken? Near the truck, a family sat on suitcases, staring into the street. Maybe just arrived at Anhalter Station, waiting for a phantom bus, or too tired and disoriented to go on.
“You have to feel sorry for the poor bastards,” Ron said, “you really do.”
“Who, the Germans?” Liz said.
“Yeah, I know. Still.”
They turned up the Wilhelmstrasse. Goering’s new Air Ministry, or its shell, had survived, but the rest of the street, the long line of pompous government buildings, lay in sooty heaps, their bricks spilling into the street like running sores. Where it had all started.
There was a crowd near the Chancellery, an unexpected popping of flashbulbs. Scattered applause.
“Look, it’s Churchill,” Liz said, grabbing her camera. “Pull over.”
“Guess they all want the tour,” Ron said, pretending to be bored but staring nevertheless at the stairs, starstruck.
Jake got out. Just where Hitler had stood smiling. Now it was Churchill, in a light summer uniform, cigar clenched in his teeth, surrounded by reporters. Brian next to him. How did he get here so fast? But Brian’s corklike ability to bob up everywhere was legendary. Churchill was stopping on the stairs, disconcerted by the applause. He raised his fingers in a V sign, a reflex, then dropped them, confused, aware suddenly of where he was. Jake glanced at the crowd. It was British soldiers who were applauding. The Germans stood silently, then moved away, embarrassed perhaps by their own curiosity, like people at an accident. Churchill frowned and hurried to the car.
“Let’s take a look,” Jake said.
“You out of your mind? And leave a jeep full of cameras?” Churchill’s car was pulling away, the crowd following. Ron lit a cigarette and sat back.
“Go ahead. I’ll hold the fort. Bring me a souvenir, if there’s anything left.”
There were Russian guards at the entrance, squat Mongols armed with rifles, but they seemed to be no more than a show of force, since people went in and out at will and there was, in any case, nothing to guard. Jake led Liz past the entrance hall with its gaping roof, then down the long reception gallery. Soldiers roamed through the building, sifting through the wreckage for medals, something to carry away. The huge chandeliers lay in the middle of the floor, one of them still suspended a few feet above the litter. Nothing had been cleared away. It was somehow more shocking than the bomb damage outside, the visible fury of the final assault, a destructive madness. Furniture smashed to pieces, its upholstery ripped open by bayonets; paintings slashed. Drawers looted and then flung aside. In Hitler’s office, the giant marble desktop was overturned, its edges chipped away for keepsake fragments. Papers everywhere, stamped with muddy boot marks. All the disturbing evidence of a rampage. The Mongolian horde. He imagined the guards outside shouting as they raced through the halls, ripping and grabbing.
“What do you think these are?” Liz said, holding up a fistful of cards, blank pieces of stationery edged in gold, the Nazi eagle and swastika engraved at the top.
“Invitations.” He fingered one. The Fiihrer requests your presence. Tea. Boxes of them. Enough to last a thousand years.
“Just like Mrs. Astor,” Liz said, stuffing a few in her pocket. “That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Let’s go,” he said, unsettled by the mess.
“Just let me get a few shots,” she said, taking a picture of the room.
Two GIs, hearing English, came over to her and handed her a camera.
“Hey, how about it? Do you mind?”
Liz smiled. “Sure. Over there by the desk?”
“Can you get the swastika in?”
A massive ornamental swastika, lying face down on the floor. They each planted a leg on it, one slinging his arm over the other’s shoulders, and grinned at the camera. Kids.
“One more,” Liz said. “The light’s bad.” She clicked, then looked at their camera. “Where’d you get this, anyway? Haven’t seen one of these since the war.”
“You kidding? They’re practically giving them away. Try over by the Reichstag. Couple of bottles of Canadian Club should do it. You just got in, huh?”
“Just.”
“How about I buy you a drink? I could show you around.”
“Now, what would your mother say?”
“Hey.”
“Easy,” she said, then nodded toward Jake. “Besides, he gets mean.”
The GI glanced at Jake, then winked at her. “Maybe next time then, babe. Thanks for the picture.”
“There’s one for the books,” she said to Jake as the GIs moved away. “I never thought I’d get picked up in Hitler’s office.”
Jake looked at her, surprised. He had never thought of her being picked up at all. Now he saw that, scrubbed of combat dirt and bluff, she was attractive. “Babe,” he said, amused.
“Where’s the bunker?” ‹›“There, I guess.” He pointed through the window to the back courtyard, where a group of Russian soldiers stood guard. A small concrete blockhouse, a scarred, empty patch of ground. The two GIs were being turned away but offered cigarettes around until the guards stepped aside to let them take a picture. Jake thought of Egypt, the valley of bunkers where the pharaohs had gone to ground, in love with death. But even they hadn’t taken their city with them.
“They say he married her at the end,” Liz said.
While the Russians ran wild overhead, the very last hour.
“Let’s hope it meant something to her.”
“It always does,” she said lightly, then glanced at him. “I’ll come back. I can see you’re not in the mood.”
Everybody wants to see the bunker, Ron had said. The last act, right down to the ghoulish wedding and finally, too late, the one shot. Now a story for the magazines. Did Eva have flowers? A champagne toast, before they put the dog down and Magda murdered her children.
“It’s not a shrine,” Jake said, still looking out the window. “They should bulldoze it over.”
“After I get my picture,” Liz said.
They moved back into the gloom of the long gallery. There were the broken-up chairs again, stuffing bursting out of the bayonet slashes. Why had the Russians left it like this? Some kind of barbarous lesson? But who was here to learn it? GIs were taking pictures by the fallen chandeliers, oblivious tourists. Near the wall was a heap of medals, thrown out of drawers. Iron Crosses. When Jake bent over to pick one up, a souvenir for Ron, he felt like a gravedigger scavenging through remains.
The uneasy mood followed him up the street, the mountains of rubble no longer an impersonal landscape but the Berlin he’d known, a part of his life knocked out too. At the corner, Unter den Linden was gray with ash. Even the Adlon had been bombed.
“No,” Ron corrected him. “The Russians burned it, after the battle. No one knows why. Drunk, probably.” ‹›He looked away. But what was a building, compared to the rest of it? The hands you couldn’t shake off. Across the square, the Brandenburg Gate was standing, but the Quadriga had skidded off its mount, like a chariot overturned in a race. Red flags and posters of Lenin were draped on the columns, hiding some of the shell holes. As they passed into the Tiergarten he could see a large crowd milling in front of the Reichstag, GIs exchanging their bottles of Canadian Club, Russian soldiers examining wristwatches. Some of the Germans, like the two women near Tempelhof, wore overcoats in the hot afternoon, presumably to hide whatever they’d brought to sell. Cigarettes, tins of food, antique porcelain clocks. The new Wertheim’s. A few young girls in summer dresses were hanging on to soldiers’ arms. In front of the Reichstag, its charred walls covered with Cyrillic graffiti, soldiers were posing for pictures, another stop on the new tourist circuit.
At the park he hit bottom. Buildings, like soldiers, were expected casualties of war. But the trees were gone too, all of them. The dense forest of the Tiergarten, all the winding paths and silly, tucked-away statues, had burned down to a vast open field littered with dark charcoal stumps and the twisted metal of streetlamps. The jeep was heading west along the Axis, and in the far distance, over Charlottenburg, the last of the sun had turned the sky red, so that for a moment Jake could imagine the fires still burning, glowing all night to guide the bombers. A fragment of one had fallen, and a single propeller stuck up out of the ground, a surreal piece of junk, like those old refrigerators and rusting tractor parts you sometimes saw on the front yards of poor farms.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Liz said, “look at them.”
A landscape full of people, moving slowly all around them. Suitcases. Clothes tied up in bundles. A few handcarts and baby carriages. The movement of exhaustion, one step at a time. Old people, and families with no bags at all. Displaced Persons, the new euphemism. No one begged or called out, just trudged past. Going where? Relatives in a cellar? A new camp, delousing and a bowl of soup and no further address? Stunned to find, in the heart of the city, a wasteland worse than the one they had left. Yet they were moving somewhere, a survivors’ trek, just like the ones in the old engravings, wandering through the burned landscape of the Thirty Years’ War. ‹›It wasn’t supposed to end this way, Jake thought. But how else? Parades? Berlin as vibrant as ever, with the Nazis taken away? How else? The odd thing was, he’d never imagined it ending. There’d been no life outside the war, just one story that led to the next and then another. And now the last one, what happens when it’s over. You go home, Hal had said. Where he hadn’t been in ten years. So he’d come back to Berlin, another DP in the Tiergarten. Except he was in a jeep, flying past the stragglers, with a sassy girl taking pictures and a driver lighting another cigarette worth a meal. The people on foot merely glanced at them without expression, then kept going. He realized, with an unexpected lurch, that what they saw was a conqueror, one of the priapic teenagers and souvenir hunters, not a homecoming Berliner. That delusion was gone now too, with everything else.
But something must be left. Years of his life. People survived, even this He ordered Ron to turn at the Victory Column and aimed them down toward the flak towers at the zoo, his eyes still cataloguing the missing. The Kaiser Wilhelm Church, its steeple blown away. Kranzler’s in bits. More people now. The Kurfiirstendamm smashed but recognizable. No glass in the storefronts or the display boxes along the sidewalks, but occasional buildings, roulette winners in the bombing. Left down the Fasanenstrasse.
“This is out of our way,” Ron said.
“I know. I want to see something,” Jake said, his voice edgy, expectant.
A right past the Ludwigkirch, a route he could follow blindfolded, after all the nights in the blackout. The chestnut trees were gone, so that the street seemed in a kind of unnatural glare, clear all the way to Olivaerplatz.
“Stop here,” he said suddenly. They had overshot it, because there was nothing there. For a moment he simply stared, then got out of the jeep and walked slowly over to the pile of rubble. Nothing. Five stories, collapsed, the light brown facade lying now in slabs. Even the heavy wrought-iron-and-glass door had been blasted away. Crazily, he looked around for the caryatids. Gone. A washbasin perched on one of the mounds of broken plaster.
“Is this where you lived?” Liz said, her voice loud in the deserted street. He heard a camera click.
“No,” Jake said. “Someone else.”
They’d only come here a few times, when Emil was away. Afternoons, the leafy branches outside making patterns on the drawn shades. Sheets damp with sweat. Teasing her because she covered up afterward, pulling the sheet over her breasts, even as her hair lay tangled and moist on the pillow, as illicit as the warm afternoon, the room where they shouldn’t be, their time together.
“You didn’t mind before.”
“That was before. I can’t help it. I’m modest.” She met his eyes, then started to laugh, a bed laugh, intimate as touch. She turned on her side. “How can you joke?”
He fell down next to her. “It’s supposed to be fun.”
She put her hand along the side of his face. “Fun for you,” she said, but smiling because the sex was playful, part of their other excitement, getting away with something.
The early days, before the guilt.
He walked toward a small pathway in the debris. Maybe someone was still living in the cellar. But the path led nowhere. There was nothing but rubble and the cloying smell. Whose body? A stick with a piece of paper was wedged in the broken bits of plaster like a grave marker. He bent down to read it. Frau Dzuris, the fat woman on the ground floor, evidently still alive, had moved. A street he didn’t recognize in Wilmersdorf. Frau Dzuris is now residing — the quaint, formal language of a receiving card. He took out his notebook and jotted down the address. A nice woman, fond of poppyseed cakes, whose son worked at Siemens and came to lunch every Sunday. The things you remember. He turned back to the jeep.
“Nobody home?” Ron said.
Jake stopped, then let it go and shook his head. “Not here, anyway.” But somewhere. “How do they find anybody? With all this?”
Ron shrugged. “Bush telegraph. Ask the neighbors.” Jake looked at the empty street. “Or message boards. You see them at the corners. ‘Request information on the whereabouts of-you know, like a Miss Lonelyhearts club.” He caught Jake’s expression. “I don’t know,” he said, still airy. “They do, though, somehow. If they’re alive.”
An awkward silence. Liz, who’d been watching Jake, turned to Ron. “Your mother raise you or did you just get this way by yourself?”
“Sorry,” he said to Jake. “I didn’t mean-”
“Skip it,” Jake said wearily.
“Is this what you wanted to see? It’s getting late.”
“Yes, this was it,” Jake said, climbing back into the jeep.
“Okay, Dahlem,” Ron said.
Jake took a last look at the rubble. Why had he expected anything to be here? A cemetery. “Is there really hot water? I could use a bath.”
“That’s what everybody says,” Ron said, cheerful again. “After. It’s all the dust.”
Their billet was a large villa in Gelferstrasse, a suburban street behind the Luftwaffe headquarters on Kronprinzenallee that now housed the Military Government. The Luftwaffe buildings were in the same style as Goering’s ministry, gray streamlined masonry, here with decorative eagles jutting out of the cornices, poised for flight, but the compound bristled with American flags, flapping on the roofs and the aerials of cars lining the driveway. There was damage here too, burned-out patches where houses had been, but nothing like what they had just seen, and Gelferstrasse itself was in fairly good shape, almost peaceful, some of it still shaded by trees.
Jake had never spent much time in Dahlem, whose quiet streets, away from the center, reminded him of Hampstead, but the relief of seeing houses standing, with their traditional tile roofs and brass knockers, made it seem more familiar than it was. Most of the win-dowpanes were still missing, but the street had been swept free of glass, tidied up, and the smell that had followed them through the city was finally gone, the bodies swept away too in the general house-cleaning.
The villa was a three-story pile of pale yellow stucco, not as lavish as the millionaire mansions up in Grunewald but substantial, the home probably of a professor from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute a few streets away.
“I had to give the congressman the master bedroom,” Ron said, an innkeeper leading them up the stairs, “but at least you won’t have to double up. I can switch you later,” he said to Liz. “He’s only here a few days.”
“Hit and run, huh?” Liz said.
“Nobody stays for long, except the MG personnel. They’re all on the second floor. One more flight. Dinner’s at seven, by the way.”
“Where do the enlisted men stay?”
“All over. Mostly barracks down in the old Telefunken factory. Some over by Onkel Toms Hutte,” he said, pronouncing it in English.
“Uncle Tom’s Hut?” Liz said, amused. “Since when?”
“Since always. Their name. They like the book, I guess.”
Jake’s room must have belonged to the daughter of the house. There was a single bed with a pink chenille spread, floral wallpaper, and a vanity with a round mirror and pink ruffled skirt. Even the blackout drapes had been backed with pink fabric.
“Sweet.”
“Yeah, well,” Ron said. “Like I said, we can switch around in a few days.”
“Never mind. I’ll just think virginal thoughts.”
Ron grinned. “That’s one thing you won’t have to worry about in Berlin.” He turned to the door. “Just leave any laundry on the chair. They’ll pick it up later.” And then, with a click, he was gone, taking his breeze with him.
Jake stared at the frilly room. They who? A house staff to fetch and carry, one of the spoils of victory. What had happened to the girl, requisitioned out of her pink cocoon? He walked over to the glass-topped vanity. A trace of powder, but otherwise cleared off, all the jars and tubes swept into some case on the way out. Idly he opened the drawers, empty except for a few publicity stills of Viktor Staal with pinholes in the corners, presumably no longer her dreamboat. But at least she’d had a room to leave. What about Lena? Did she pack her perfume bottles and compacts and get out in time, lucky, or linger until the roof caved in?
He lit a cigarette and walked over to the window, unbuttoning his shirt. The yard below had been dug up to make a vegetable garden, but the rows had become a muddy tangle, tramped over, he supposed, by the Russians foraging for food. Still, you could breathe here. The wounded city, just a few miles away, had already begun to fade, hidden by the trees and suburban houses, the way an anesthetic blotted up pain. He should have taken notes. But what was there to say? The story had already happened. From the looks of it, building by building, old men and teenagers sniping from doorways. Why had they held out? Waiting for the Americans, he’d heard. Anyone but the Russians. The peace will be worse — Goebbels’ last warning, the only one that came true. So, the final madness. Whole streets on fire. There’d been roving packs of SS, hanging boys from lampposts as deserters. To make an example. In the camps they’d killed people right up to the last hour. Here they’d even turned on their own. Not war anymore, a bloodlust.
Jake hadn’t filed a real story in two months, not since the camps; he had been waiting for Berlin. Now he felt that Berlin would defeat him too, that all the copy would end in Ron’s lunar landscapes and decayed teeth, inadequate attempts at scale. He had run out of words. personalize it. Not the thousands, just one. She’d be here. It wasn’t too much to hope for, one survivor. He looked again at the garden. Near a shed in the back, a gray-haired woman was hanging wet clothes over an improvised line of rope. A hausfrau.
“But what are you going to do?” he’d said. “Come with me. I’ll arrange it. I’ll get you out.”
“Out,” she said, dismissing it, the word itself improbable. Then she shook her head. “No, it’s better.” She’d been sitting at her dressing table, still in her slip, perfectly made-up again, her nails red. “I’ll be a hausfrau,” she’d said almost casually, putting on lipstick. “A good German hausfrau.” She lowered her eyes. “Not this, all the lies.”
“They’re not lies,” he’d said, putting his hands on her shoulders.
She looked up at his face in the mirror. “The lies to him.”
Down below, the gray-haired woman had spotted him in the window. She hesitated, then nodded in a servant’s bow and picked up the wicker basket. He watched her cross the muddy yard. Personalize it. What had her war been like? Maybe she’d been one of the faithful, shouting her lungs out at the Sportpalast, now doing laundry for the enemy. Or maybe just a hausfrau, lucky to be alive. He crossed over to the bed, dropping his shirt. What did it matter either way? Losers’ stories. Back home they’d want the glamour of the conference, Truman horse-trading with Stalin, the great world they’d won, not the rubble and the people in the Tiergarten with the future knocked out of them.
He took off the rest of his clothes and wrapped a towel around his waist. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, and he opened the door to a rush of steam and a surprised yelp.
“Oh.”
Liz was in the tub, her breasts barely clearing the soapy water, wet hair swept back from her face.
“Don’t you knock?”
“Sorry, I-” he said, but he didn’t move, watching her slide down into the tub, covering herself, her flesh as pink as the vanity ruffle.
“Have a good look?”
“Sorry,” he said again, embarrassed. A soft woman’s body, without the uniform and gun holster, now hanging on a peg.
“Never mind,” she said, smiling, a veteran of shared tents and field latrines. “Just keep your towel on. I’ll be out in a sec.”
She plunged her head into the water to rinse, then smoothed her hair back and reached for a towel.
“You going to turn around, or do you want the floor show too?”
He turned his back to her as she stepped out. A splash of water and a rustling of cloth, the sounds themselves intimate.
“I suppose I should take it as a compliment,” she said, wrapping herself in a robe. “You never noticed before.”
“Sure I did,” he said, his back to her.
“Uh-huh.” He could hear the water running down the drain in gulps. “Okay, decent.”
She was in a silk wrapper, toweling her hair. He looked at her, then cocked his head like the young GI at the Chancellery.
“How about I buy you a drink later?”
“With my clothes on? Can’t. I’m busy.”
“That was fast. Not young Ron?”
She grinned. “I wouldn’t have the strength.” She fixed the towel around her head in a turban. “Just business. Have to see a man about a duck. I’ll take a rain check, though.” She nodded at the tub. “Better run your water. It takes a while.” She gathered her things slowly from the stool, then sat down.
“Are you staying?”
“Jake? Tell me something. That business this afternoon-who was she?”
“Why a she?”
“Because it was. What’s the story? You know I’ll get it out of you eventually.”
“No story,” he said, turning on the taps. “She went back to her husband.”
“Oh,” she said, “that kind of story. She left you?”
“I left Berlin. Dr. Goebbels’ request. There was an attitude problem.”
“I’ll bet. When was this?”
‘ ’Forty-one. Did me a favor, I suppose. A few months later and I’d have been stuck.“ He waved his hand to take in the city. ”In all this.“
“So only she got stuck.”
He looked at her for a moment, then went back to adjusting the taps.
“She stayed with her husband,” he said flatly.
“I wouldn’t have,” she said, trying to be casual, a light apology. “Who was he? One of the master race?”
He smiled to himself. “Not too masterful. He was a teacher, actually. A professor.”
“Of what?”
“Liz, what is all this?”
“Just making conversation. I don’t often get you at a disadvantage. The only time a man will talk is when he has his pants off.”
“Is that a fact.” He paused. “Mathematics, since you ask.”
“Math?” she said, laughing slightly, genuinely surprised. “An egghead? Not very sexy.”
“It must have been. She married him.”
“And slept with you. Mathematics. I mean, a ski instructor or something I could understand-”
“He did ski, as a matter of fact. That’s how they met.”
“See,” she said, playing, “I knew it. Where was this?”
He glanced at her, annoyed. Another woman’s magazine piece, the encounter on the slopes, as wistful as Eva Braun’s last glass of champagne.
“I don’t know, Liz. Does it matter? I don’t know anything about their marriage. How would I? She stayed, that’s all. Maybe she thought they’d win the war.” The last thing she thought. Why say it? He turned off the taps, annoyed now with himself. “My bath’s ready.”
“Were you in love with her?”
“That’s not a reporter’s question.”
She looked at him and nodded, then stood up. “That’s some answer.”
“This towel is coming off in two seconds. You’re welcome to stay-”
“Okay, okay, I’m going.” She smiled. “I like to leave a little something to the imagination.” She gathered up her things, slinging the holster belt on her shoulder, and went to the door.
“Don’t forget the rain check,” he said.
She turned to him. “By the way, a piece of advice? Next time you ask a girl for a drink, don’t tell her about the other one. Even if she asks.” She opened the door. “See you around the campus.” Contents — Previous Chapter / Next Chapter