The Nero Decree

by Greg Williams

  Johann nodded. He had sheltered there and in the bunker at Gesundbrunnen when he was in the city. Anja and Nadine used the same place.

  “They were in the bakery cellar,” the boy continued. “But the building caved in on top of them. They tried to dig them out but—well, you know.”

  “But why are you here, like this?”

  “I was sent to a home for orphans,” Lukas said. “I’m not even sure where it was, somewhere in the west, way past Spandau. It was horrible: bread with worms, thin cabbage soup.… We weren’t cared for. It was like they were keeping us alive because they had to, not because they wanted to. There were some lessons, but the teachers were brutal. So I decided to leave. We were locked up at night, but it wasn’t too hard. I opened a window and climbed down a set of pipes outside my room. I asked others to come with me, but they were too scared.”

  “Don’t you have any relatives outside Berlin you could stay with?”

  “Yes, there are some,” Lukas said, “but I don’t have their addresses. Those went with my parents. And it’s not like the phone lines are up so we can call them.”

  Johann thought about Anja for a moment. How he wished that he could pick up a telephone and call her.

  “When were your parents killed?” Johann asked.

  “November last year,” Lukas replied. “I suppose I should think myself lucky that I was in the institution for the first winter. But this year wasn’t so bad, I suppose. It’s dry in here and there’s an old stove over there. And I manage to find quite a bit of wood on the bomb sites if I get there before the other scavengers.”

  “You can’t stay here; you know that, don’t you?”

  The boy cast him a dark look. “Why not?”

  Johann closed his eyes again and leaned back in the chair. As much as he wanted to get across Berlin, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to stay awake. He was overcome by the quiet, warmth, and apparent safety of the workshop. He could still taste the bread in his mouth. The situation felt as good as he might hope for.

  “How old are you now?” Johann asked the boy, who had gotten up and was now fiddling with a clock that appeared to have been salvaged from a bomb site.

  “Fifteen,” the boy said.

  “How old?” Johann repeated.

  “Thirteen,” the boy replied, quietly this time.

  Johann sighed. The expelling of air relaxed him. He felt guilty; how could he feel relaxed, knowing that he was so close to Anja and Nadine? The chalked message was obscure to others, but he was sure now what it meant: They were at Otto’s apartment in Moabit. If he started out soon, he could be there in—what?—maybe two hours. He stood up, trying to energize himself. He couldn’t afford to sit around. For all he knew his wife and niece were leaving tomorrow morning and he would miss them. Then another, terrifying thought occurred to him: They could already be gone.

  He tried to gather his thoughts: It was around twenty-one hundred hours. He desperately needed rest. He hadn’t slept for two days. If he just allowed himself a few hours’ sleep he would be rested and in a better position for them all to escape. But he felt that if he allowed himself to fall asleep then he might not wake for days. No, he had to leave this place. Had to trek to the northwest and then lead them south to Lehrter Bahnhof and away from the city.

  He paced around a little, trying to boost his body for the walk to Moabit.

  “A thirteen-year-old boy shouldn’t be living alone in an abandoned building,” he said. “Nor should he have a weapon.”

  The boy looked at him as if he was absolutely insane.

  “I’m sorry,” Johann said. “That was a very stupid thing to say.”

  “Herr Schultz,” the boy said. “I’d like my pistol back, please.”

  Johann realized that he had pocketed the weapon after the incident on the roof.

  “How did you come to have this?” he asked Lukas.

  “It was when I first came back to the city,” he said. “I tried to find some friends and people that my parents knew, but I couldn’t find anyone, so I decided that I needed to take care of myself. I wasn’t looking for a gun. I’d found this place. But one day I had gone out to get some food and there was a raid. I was used to helping myself to ration cards afterward, but then it suddenly occurred to me, I should take a gun. The Red Army. Criminals. Who knows? So I saw a dead soldier, and the pistol was sitting there in his holster. He had no further use for it, so I took it.”

  Johann pulled the gun from his pocket. Every bone in his body told him that giving a child a weapon was wrong, that this was a lunatic path. Battle-hardened, front-line troops would not hesitate to kill anyone they encountered with a weapon—even if it was a child. But he thought about the opportunists and predators who were now prowling the city. The boy needed protection.

  Then something else occurred to him.

  “Here,” he said, and put the weapon on a small bookcase. “I pray to God you never need to use it.”

  “I already have,” the boy answered, perking up a little. “I shot a rat last winter. It was eating my rations. Killed it with one shot.”

  “Just try and remember who you were before all this,” Johann said. He had resolved to remain on his feet to stop himself from falling asleep.

  The boy considered the question. “You know what happened to my parents?” he said. “I blame the National Socialists for it. I blame them for everything. My parents hated them, but they weren’t able to say anything. They just wanted to be left alone to get on with the bakery. And I know that there’s no way things are going to go back to the way they were, you know, before, but I often used to think about what it would be like if I could just get a gun and kill all of them. And I suppose, since I’ve had the gun, I’ve wondered what it would be like to get rid of one of them. And I saw you running from them and remembered that my parents liked you, and I thought to myself, well, here’s my chance. I wasn’t going to let them kill you.”

  “Thank you, Lukas,” Johann said.

  “It’s nothing.” The boy shrugged. “I’m sorry that…”

  “Don’t be silly,” Johann said, thinking back to the boy crying on the rooftop. “Killing is something a child should never have to think about.”

  The boy stood up and went over to the piece of bread and pulled off another hunk. He handed the piece to Johann.

  “So what did the Gestapo want with you?” Lukas asked, his mouth full of the food. Johann noticed that his hands were filthy.

  “I left the front,” Johann said.

  “So you’re a deserter?”

  Johann looked at the boy. Was he really a deserter?

  “They’re saying that all deserters found in the city will be executed,” Lukas said. “I heard it from some Party member on a megaphone. They were going about the streets in a car. And it was in the newspaper. Orders from the Führer himself.”

  Johann reached into his pocket and pulled out his worn and flattened wallet. He opened it up and pulled out a photograph.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to the boy, who took it with his grubby fingers and examined it using the candle.

  “Your wife and daughter,” he said, running his fingers over their faces as if touching their cheeks.

  “Niece,” Johann corrected him with a smile.

  The boy continued to examine the photo, apparently lost in the image.

  “That’s why I’m back,” Johann said.

  The boy nodded and returned the photo to him.

  “I saw them,” Lukas said. “Two days ago, I think.”

  Johann felt a kick of excitement. The thought of such proximity was almost more than he could bear.

  “Go on,” he said to the boy urgently.

  “They were like all the others who had been bombed out,” the boy said. “I had come to see what had happened during the bombing and they were there. They were covered in dust and ashes, but I knew it was them.”

  “They looked healthy, though?” Johann asked, desperate to know more but awa
re of the foolishness of his question.

  “Well, you know…,” the boy said.

  “Do you know where they were going?”

  “I tried to say hello to the girl, but they were both distracted,” Lukas said. “I don’t think that they saw me. Did you check the messages at your old building?”

  Johann nodded. “I think that they’re with a friend in Moabit.”

  “I see,” the boy replied. He set about tidying some blankets that were resting on a chair before walking over to the bookcase and reaching for the weapon.

  Johann stepped in front of Lukas before the boy could grasp the gun.

  The boy looked at him, an expression of confusion and alarm soon adjusting into determination: If Johann wouldn’t let him have the pistol, then he would take it.

  “It’s okay,” Johann said.

  “Give me my gun,” the boy demanded.

  “I have to find my family,” Johann said resolutely. “But I’m not going to leave you here.”

  “I’m fine…,” the boy said, his eyes blazing.

  “No, you’re not,” Johann told him. He used his greater size to emphasize his point, moving closer to Lukas. “I won’t have it; do you understand me?”

  The boy’s mouth softened.

  “I want you to come with me,” Johann said. “I want you to have a chance even if your parents are dead.”

  “What if your wife and niece aren’t in Moabit?” Lukas asked.

  “Then we go to Lehrter Bahnhof,” Johann said, trying to distract him from the gun. “It’s our fallback plan. We’ll escape west.”

  The boy stared past him.

  “I want the gun,” Lukas said.

  Johann sighed and turned so that the boy could reach past him. The boy tucked the metal object inside his coat and walked to the other side of his makeshift bed. Johann watched as Lukas reached down and pulled a backpack from behind an oil-stained workbench.

  “I have this packed so I can leave at a moment’s notice,” he explained.

  Johann nodded, a small smile playing at the side of his mouth.

  “What are we waiting for?” Lukas asked.

  23

  Anja could hear something that sounded like wailing, but she couldn’t detect the source. Perhaps her hearing had been damaged. Nadine sat beside her, leaning against a wall, her legs drawn up tightly to her chest. The girl had her arms wrapped around her shins and her chin on her knees. The girl noticed that her aunt had opened her eyes.

  “Auntie,” Nadine said, moving toward Anja. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay,” Anja said. “Just a little groggy.”

  She looked around the room. The walls were covered from top to bottom in cream-colored tiles. The floor was concrete and there was a small barred window high up behind them. Anja knew exactly where they were. She had heard about this place, dreamed about it, dreaded it. She heard the noise of vehicles on the street outside and assumed that the automobiles were passing along Prinz-Albrecht-Straße between the Air Ministry and Gestapo headquarters.

  “How long have we been here?”

  “Only a few hours,” Nadine replied.

  “I can’t really remember what happened…,” Anja started.

  Nadine scooped some water from a pail and gave it to her aunt.

  “They came for the boy,” Nadine said flatly. “Then they came for us. We were ready to go as well. I wonder if our things are still at his house.”

  Anja looked around the room in alarm.

  “Have you seen my coat?” she asked Nadine.

  “They took them,” the girl said. “All our other things are at Otto’s apartment.”

  Anja nodded but didn’t reply. They had no identity cards.

  There was another jolt of dread: The letter from Johann had been in her pocket as well.

  “They pushed you over,” Nadine said. “One of the guards shoved you so hard that you lost your footing and banged your head.”

  The two of them sat listening for a while. The trucks passed outside. Anhalter train station was nearby, but there was no noise from trains—the place had been flattened. Occasionally they heard a pair of boots in the corridor behind the metal door that confined them.

  “I’m sorry, Nadine,” Anja said.

  “What for, Auntie?” Nadine asked.

  “I shouldn’t have opened the door to the apartment,” Anja explained. “If we hadn’t gotten involved trying to help the boy and his mother we wouldn’t be sitting here. We would have been gone by the time they came for us.”

  Nadine shrugged.

  “We have all been involved for years,” she said eventually. “It’s really only a question of time before something dreadful happens.”

  Anja didn’t reply. Did the girl really believe what she had just said? Is that what growing up in Germany over the past fifteen years had taught her? A grim certainty that, sooner or later, the water would rise above her head?

  Anja searched for some words of comfort but couldn’t find any.

  “Perhaps the Soviets will come before too long,” Nadine said. “Or perhaps we will be put in a camp.”

  “Time is on our side,” Anja said, laying her hand on the girl’s arm. “If we can just survive in here until then, we will be freed. These people don’t have long. You can tell.”

  “Poor Hans,” Nadine said.

  Anja recalled her last, blurred memory of the boy strung up from the lamppost. She realized that the noise in her head wasn’t the result of an injury—it was something she had preserved—the boy’s mother’s wailing. It had pierced even the rumble of the truck that had spirited her and Nadine to this place.

  “We’ll be okay—you know that, don’t you?” Anja said, reaching out to Nadine. The girl rested her head on her aunt’s shoulder. It seemed to Anja that the teenager was too exhausted even to embrace her.

  Without warning there was a rattling of keys outside their cell. Anja pushed Nadine toward the corner of the room and stepped toward the entrance. The heavy metal door swung swiftly inward toward her. There was an older man on the other side, his face dented with scars. He looked at Anja and Nadine as if he was surprised to see them.

  “Anja Schultz?” he asked testily.

  “Yes.”

  The man stepped into the room and nodded to the corridor before coughing violently. Anja made to step forward, but before she could move she felt a hand on her shoulder. She was being pulled backward and turned around at the same time. It was Nadine. The girl hugged her. Anja let herself be held for a moment before pulling away. She turned to look at the girl as she reached the doorway and captured a mental image of her niece to cling to in the coming hours. Moments later she heard the door shut and the jailer’s key refasten the lock.

  Anja was led to an ancient freight elevator. The jailer—whom Anja recognized as one of the two men who had stepped from the staff car—closed two sets of sliding metal doors and threw a lever to one side. The contraption shunted shakily upward, the floors passing in front of them slowly. Anja wondered if she might find a way to overpower the man. He looked weak and disinterested—he was hardly the Gestapo man of the popular imagination—but she wondered what the real chances of escape were.

  She felt fearful knowing that they would confront her with the letter Johann had sent her, but Anja had little time to consider a possible strategy before the elevator came to a halt with a shudder as the man threw the lever the opposite way. The contraption smelled of oil, the kind that Anja had once used on her sewing machine. She was led along a corridor and into a dark office. The room was small; there were two desks. The door closed behind her, and the man who had brought her upstairs disappeared into a corner.

  As her eyes adjusted, Anja realized that the red-faced man she had seen with the soldiers who hanged Hans was seated behind one of the desks. He still had his coat on and was waiting with his elbows resting on his desk, his hands clasped together. Anja noticed that the man who had brought her here was now leaning back on a chair—
which was up on two legs—regarding her curiously, as if he had never seen her before.

  “We appear to have forgotten ourselves, Kuefer,” Dieter said. “There is a lady present, and both of us are lounging around without offering her a seat.”

  Neither of the men moved.

  “I will stand,” Anja said.

  Dieter got up.

  “How very modern of you,” he said, taking his chair and carrying it around his desk toward Anja. “But Kuefer here and myself are very old-fashioned, and we absolutely insist that a lady should be comfortable when she visits us.”

  She heard Dieter place a chair behind her.

  “Sit,” Dieter instructed her. Anja hesitated, wondering if there was even a chair behind her. Moments later she felt him press down on her shoulder, and she was forced into the wooden seat, which was still warm. There was a smell of damp wool from his coat and maybe boiled food. She had noticed that he had walked carefully toward her, as if exertion might cause him pain.

  “So,” Dieter said, “you are facing some serious charges.”

  An image of Hans flashed into her mind, and she could not control herself.

  “Why did they hang that boy? How can a fourteen-year-old be the enemy?” Anja blurted out.

  She cursed herself. She had vowed to remain quiet and compliant, yet within moments of entering the room she was admonishing the Gestapo officer.

  Anja heard Dieter move across the floor. He appeared in front of her.

  “Do you hear that, Kuefer?” he asked. “She wonders how a young man, who is perfectly physically capable, choosing not to defend the Reich, is not a traitor? Frau Schultz, apart from the boy’s cowardice, Gauleiter Goebbels has decreed that every able-bodied man should be willing to defend the capital of the Reich from the Soviet assault. What kind of weakling or coward chooses not to do his utmost in this struggle? Do we really want people like this in our society, or are we best rid of their weakness and defeatism?”

  Dieter left Anja an opportunity to say something, but she chose to remain silent. She had learned her lesson. The officer’s mood had shifted from calm to agitated. He looked around at his companion, who remained seated and regarded her with curiosity. It was as if he were studying the scene rather than participating. Anja noticed beads of sweat forming on her interrogator’s brow. As if acknowledging this, he began to take his coat off. His movements were slow and tentative. The man in the corner’s chair scraped as he stood up, intending to help.