Deadfall in Berlin

by Robert Alexander

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  He nodded, and in English said, “I'm okay.”

  Far away one of the delayed ones exploded. Then across the deathyard in front of me I sensed something, and saw the first of the lucky ones emerging from the Zoo Bunker. Nearby I heard a faint sobbing. I pushed myself to my hands and knees, crawled from beneath the wagon, crawled across the burnt grass, managed to make it to the lorry. I reached out, touched Mother.

  “Mama…”

  Hair twisted, knotted, face black. She was sobbing but not crying. Screaming but quiet. Begging something but wordless. Her eyes were crazed white balls. I scooched over, touched the motionless furry ball next to her.

  “Tante Lore?”

  Nothing.

  I jabbed her. “Tante Lore!”

  Nothing until a faint and exhausted: “Ja, ja, ja…”

  She moved, rolled over. Her face was also black. But dripping from her left ear was the most beautifully colored blood I'd ever seen. All nice and brilliant and glistening.

  I grabbed onto one of the lorry's wheels and pulled. Weak, stiff. I stood. Looked around. Erich? I stumbled forward, made it over to the wagon. I reached down with one hand, took Joe.

  “My brother's missing,” I gasped. “We have to find him.”

  Holding each other by the hand, Joe and I started toward the bunker. Nearby a woman started to scream as she bounced like a pinball among the wreckage.

  She shrieked: “I can't see! I can't see! Where am I? I can't see!”

  Part of her clothing had been burned away, exposing flesh that looked like a toasted blob of drippy cheese.

  I ignored her, stumbled through the crowd that was now pouring from the shelter, my dry throat calling, “Erich… Erich…”

  Joe broke away, pushed on ahead. I swerved, searched toward the planetarium. Maybe Erich had taken shelter there. Maybe he'd found something to protect himself with. I bit my lip. Erich who had so much trouble walking. Hampered by that brace. No, he couldn't have made it this far by himself. Why wasn't he in the countryside? Why? Oh. Please. I began to cry. Warm drops on my steaming face.

  “Erich… Erich…”

  I turned back, made my way around the edge of a smoldering car, nothing left of it but a smoking shell. Then suddenly I saw something odd and black stretched on the ground. Staring at the black lump that was all charred, I froze as if my own heart had been plucked out. That thing, I realized, was a figure, the remains of something caught in the very eye of the firestorm. But, God, no. Please no!

  My hands turned to tight claws. My face flushed lobster red. I rushed forward, then stopped and studied this… this thing. It was a body shrunken from the intense heat, and now baked and charred into a crispy shape. And I was staring at a wing. No, an arm. Oh, Lord. Everything in my body wanted to rush out, be squeezed into the universe. At the other end I saw a piece of twisted metal. It was a frame. No, a brace with all its leather burned off and now gently melted, and I knew and I screamed to burst my lungs, to kill my heart, when I realized that I was staring at all that was left of my little brother.

  “ERICH!”

  Chapter 17

  Now that I'd touched death, I felt it black and thick in my heart. Some odd haze descended over me, wrapped around and around, and after I'd screamed until my vocal cords nearly tore, I just stood there, not believing, not comprehending. I closed my eyes, sealed them with tears. This couldn't be…

  “I'm sorry, Willi. I'm so very sorry.”

  I remembered Erich diving into me, calling me a big ape, punching and punching until it even hurt. Oh, Erich. Hit me again. Please!

  Hands took me and pulled me aside, buried me deep in someone's coat. Fur. Yes. It was Loremarie. She pulled me into her as my mother collapsed on the ground and screamed to the heavens, shrieked for her little boy's return, cursed the world. But nothing happened. Barely anyone noticed or even heard. There was crying all around us. For others.

  Joe slipped off his coat and wrapped up the remains of my little brother, and we started home, a shocked party of mourners traversing a city aflame. Death had been all around me before, lingering, nipping but never biting. Until now. And now I felt it everywhere, saw it everywhere. Crushed bodies. Headless ones. Burned figures. And crumbling buildings and blazing cars and smoking homes. Something terrible beyond my imagination had happened, and there was no fixing it. Ever.

  Passing through the waves of smoke and cries that rolled continuously over us like a nightmarish fog, Joe led the way back to our bunker bar. Mother stumbled after him, hysterical, sobbing, lost in a drunken nightmare. And I walked numbly, like a zombi, pulled along by the ever-stoic Loremarie.

  As we passed the Bahnhof Zoo, I heard a plea unlike any other. I looked through a cloud of smoke, saw a horse, it's hide singed and blackened. Over and over again it cried out, opened its wiggly lips and exposed huge teeth. Over and over again the creature tried to rise. But the old nag couldn't for it's rear legs had been grated to the bone by shrapnel.

  I broke Loremarie's grasp of my hand and tore toward the horse. I couldn't stand that animal plea. I was going to get a board, do what I should have done to that Gestapo agent. Yes, I would get something big and long and hard and I would smash that horse, beat its head again and again, beat the misery right out of it.

  “Willi!” shouted Loremarie, charging after me, seizing me by the shoulder.

  “Let go!” I cried.

  I had to get to that horse! I had to—

  Right before me, the creature collapsed, caving in on itself like a deflated balloon. It crumbled onto the rubble-strewn street, quivered, and was still.

  “It's all right now,” said Loremarie, taking me firmly by the hand. “See, the horse is all quiet. It won't hurt anymore.”

  No, not anymore because it had escaped. Like Erich. Gone far away.

  In the distance a building collapsed with a roar, shattering the peace after the raid. Of course, I thought, as Loremarie led me on after Joe and Mother. We're trapped. We will never escape. I looked up. Before it had been a perfect winter day, the sun low but sharp. Now, however, the sun was gone and the sky was swirling with sparks and snowy ash. Berlin, I realized, was an enormous coffin in which we were to be buried, nailed right up, for eternity. The Red Horde was gathering on the other side of the Oder River, just waiting to seal our death.

  But there were, of course, no coffins in Berlin; the living were too busy trying to stave off death to worry about that. Nevertheless, late that afternoon Joe and I went looking. We saw a sardinelike stack of baked bodies pulled from a shelter and piled out in the open, but there was nothing to cover them with, let alone bury them in. And here and there lay corpses covered with sheets or blankets, and of course bodies dropped everywhere like discarded waste. But nothing, not so much as the simplest pine box, could be found, and I sniffed the dirty-sweet stench of fresh-killed flesh everywhere. The only buried bodies were the thousands mushed in the ruins of the bombed buildings. And I thought, if this war ever ends, if the bombers ever go away and never come back, so many of the dead will never be found. But an end? No, I couldn't imagine it.

  I wanted to scrounge wood from that apartment building, salvage nails from that window, that door. A coffin. My Erich had to have a proper box. A real final home. I could hunt for the material, Joe could construct something, no matter how crude. But that might take days, Joe said, and besides, where would we find a hammer?

  He shook his stubbly face. “And what about a saw?”

  I couldn't argue much because I couldn't speak much, my throat raw from screaming. So in the end I gave up, and we did what all the other Berliners were doing. Stole cardboard. The windows of the city had all been shattered years ago and people had given up the reglazing which they had done early in the war. When success was only a matter of weeks away. But later, mostly after Stalingrad, sheets of cardboard were used instead of glass. It didn't crack, didn't shatter, and the corrugated kind could black out a window at night, ye
t be removed for fresh air during the day. Very practical then, and now too. Fairly plentiful and good for wrapping bodies. You didn't need a hammer or saw.

  I led the way to a block that had been bomb-pounded over and over again yet never firebombed. We salvaged enough cardboard from just two windows of a smashed house; we didn't need much because Erich was so small. I found a board, too. Held it up to me. Erich was that tall, just a bit over my waist. That could hold him. We'd wrap the body in a sheet, place it on the wood for rigidity, then fold cardboard around it all and secure it with twine.

  The next morning, with Erich my brother made into a package, we carried him to a cemetery just past Potsdamerstrasse, near Yorkstrasse and the heavily damaged railyards. Of course the graveyard looked like the moon, all pockmarked with craters, but Mother, her body bound in as much black as she could find, didn't want any old hole. She wanted a fresh one, so she led our little troop to a far corner, to the shadows of a wall. We had no burial permission. There was no one around to ask. Either the groundskeeper was dead already, or he was off digging trenches or being killed that very moment.

  We did have a shovel, though, a big, solid one, just in case we ever needed to dig our way out of our underground Kneipe. Joe started, breaking through frozen earth, then carving a clean, deep hole—very deep—because in deathly peace we all wanted Erich to be as safe and as far away as possible from war. Over and over Joe jabbed the earth, and Mother and Loremarie stood and watched in silence.

  Dieter was off to the side, fashioning a cross out of several pieces of wood. I sat next to him, dropping myself onto a fallen tombstone. I watched him twist and pull a piece of wire. Then I looked up. I was almost surprised to see that the sky had cleared of ash and soot and dust. As if a whole new front had blown in, the sky was clean and crisp now. No. There, toward the central district, great columns of smoke still bloomed into the sky. I stared up and up and up, and—

  “That's good,” said a coarse voice.

  I glanced at Mother, then over at Joe. The hole was now almost as deep as he was tall. How long had he been digging?

  “Oh, ja” agreed Loremarie. “Das ist tief genug.” That's deep enough.

  Joe heaved out a few more shovelfuls of soil, scraped the walls, packed the floor. Then he lifted out the shovel and extended his hands. Gently. This child would be put to rest gently.

  “Pass him to me,” Joe said.

  Dieter hopped over on his one foot, and Loremarie groaned as she bent down to the bundle of cardboard. I sat there and watched as the two of them attempted to lift the makeshift casket. Then suddenly there was another voice, a strange, deep one.

  “Here, let me help.”

  Loremarie looked up and gasped, “You shouldn't be here!”

  My fingers clenched the tombstone. I spun around. Approaching us was a tall figure with very dark hair. And a face that was long and thin and extremely pale.

  “When a ray of sunshine is buried, all must come to mourn,” said Anton. “Don't worry, I was careful.”

  “Dear Lord,” muttered Loremarie.

  Then the two of them, Loremarie and Anton, bent down and lifted the remains of Erich and carried him to the edge of the grave. Mother stepped right up to the edge of the hole.

  Flatly, she said, “Willi.”

  I understood that she, the mourning mother, wanted me at her side. But I said nothing.

  “Willi, komm her zu mir!” Come to me!

  She held out her hand. I was to be the dutiful son, stand by her and comfort her in her loss. But who was to comfort me?

  “Damn you, Willi!” she screeched.

  I pushed myself to my feet, walked slowly over the dirt, took my position at her side. Her hand did not reach out and hold mine, though. Rather, her tight fingers wrapped around my shoulder, held me in position. And I smelled cigarette smoke, thick and musty, in the folds of her coat. Brandy, too, all sweet and syrupy on her breath. Yesterday it was drink to ward off fear. Today it was drink to drown all that hurt.

  “There's more, isn't there, Willi?”

  I was numb. My face rested flat and glazed over, my arms hung heavy and still. The bombs that had killed my little brother yesterday were still bursting within me. I was the big brother. The little soldier of the house. I'd promised Erich I'd take care of him. I'd promised! I should have stolen him from Mother, ripped him away. The two of us should have run off to the mountains where we would have been safe. But I didn't do that, any of that. And now Erich was dead! He was dead because I didn't think soon enough, act quick enough!

  “No, Willi, your brother is dead because he was killed in an air raid. The world is at war, and he's a victim and you're a victim, too. Just look at your hands and your arms and your legs, too. Look at how small you are. Small because you're just a boy. A boy who could have done nothing.”

  But—!

  I felt something squeeze my shoe. I looked down. Joe was touching my little foot, pressing his love into me and staring right into my boyish face. I started to shake. He knew I would have done anything, given anything to save my brother!

  Holding one end of the cardboard coffin, Anton knelt by me, and said, “Will you help me!”

  I wiped my eyes and nodded. This was the reality: Erich was dead and there was no way I could change that. I accepted a corner of the coffin, and Anton, Loremarie and I lowered it down and into Joe's arms. Then sliding the thing downward, Joe lowered the boxed remains onto the dirt floor of the grave. Ashes to ashes…

  Joe reached up, readied himself to be hoisted upward and into the world of the living. On his knees, Anton reached down.

  Suddenly, Loremarie noticed something at the other end of the cemetery, and snapped, “Stay down! There's a Striefe!”

  Starting to turn around, Mother said, “Eine Streife—Kettenhunde? ”

  Mother was referring to the MP force of the Wehrmacht, those troops who wore shiny metal breast plates and often patrolled these railyards looking for deserters. Roaming in groups of twos and threes, they were the one's who'd been executing AWOL soldiers and stringing them up from lampposts.

  “Ja, but just stay still, Eva!” commanded Loremarie. “Pretend as if all is normal.”

  My heart clenched and buckled tight. Dear God. We hadn't yet returned to Anton's to get the rest of Joe's identification; the measly ration cards and what-not that Joe did have were only enough to get him killed as a treasonous German instead of an American spy. And Anton. I glanced at his white face, his squinting eyes. If he were caught he'd be executed on the spot. No, if he were caught, we'd all be shot.

  “Deiter,” said Loremarie, maintaining calm as she shifted closer to Eva, “get your crutches and come stand by me. And Willi, get up and stand next to your mother. I think we can block their view.”

  Dieter cursed and mumbled. Grunting, he grabbed at his crutches, pulled himself up, and catapulted himself over and around.

  Flushed with anger, he said, “I won't be killed because of some American, particular this one!”

  “Shut up or I'll kill you myself!” threatened Loremarie.

  I bit my lip. So it was Dieter who had tipped off the Gestapo, brought them snooping about the bar. Of course it was. I could hear the hatred in his voice.

  Loremarie continued, “Now, Anton, just help Joe up.” Joe scrambled up the dirt walls and out of the grave, and she said to him, “Good. Now keep low and crawl backwards. That's it. The wall's only five or six meters behind you. There's a hole. Just crawl through it and get out of here. We'll be all right.”

  “I'll see you at the house tonight,” said Anton.

  “Ja, ja, ja!”

  I stood rigid next to my mother, and watched as Joe and Anton pushed back over the cold earth, across the stubbly, dormant grass. They snaked around a gravestone, over a mound of dirt and a cherubic stone head. Next a wing. Someone's guardian angel, I thought, blasted to bits.

  Keeping, low, beneath the height of the crosses, Anton made it to the wall first. He glanced at Loremarie, o
ffered a hopeful smile, then crawled through the hole. Joe followed, his gut to the ground, his hands pawing over bricks. And then he was gone as well.

  I looked up at my mother and, my voice hoarse, said, “He doesn't know the way back, does he?”

  “He'll be all right.”

  But he might not be. And in an instant I broke away, swerved around the pit of death that held my Erich, dashed over a mound of fresh dirt, and reached the cemetery wall.

  “Willi!” cried my mother.

  I popped through the hole, emerged on the other side, and found myself standing in a rubble-strewn street. I looked to my right and saw Anton slipping into the shell of a nearby building. To the left I saw Joe cutting into an alley. I chased after him, eager to show him a safe way home and to ask him again about escaping from the city.

  “Joe!” I called, my voice hushed.

  But I already knew the answer. The full moon was tonight, and I had to accept that it was now too late to flee, had to accept that we were caught here in Berlin.

  Chapter 18

  I was sitting on a bench at one of our heavy wooden tables. The piano was only a few feet away, Dieter's accordion slumped over next to it. I remembered when I'd first brought Joe here, how crowded and lively it had been. Mother had been pulling a song from her body, her life. Now it was empty. Dark and quiet in our bunker bar. Joe was in the back room, lying down on the cot.

  I had my head in my arms when they returned. I heard the door above, scraping as it was pulled open, and I looked up and gazed around. I'm still here, I thought. Still really here. But not for much longer. No. Not much longer at all.

  I suppose it could have been the SS or the Gestapo or something else horribly official coming down the stairs, but I heard the steps and knew it wasn't. Slow steps, sliding down the curling stairs. That was Mother, walking on the front of her heeled shoes, the dark brown ones. And Loremarie. And the odd noise—Dieter on his crutches. Glancing over, I saw all three emerge.

  Mother gazed at me through a veil of tear-soaked eyes. I was sure she was going to scold me, but then her face suddenly expanded in fear.