The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  “Yes?”

  “Listen to me, and believe this. We are going to be caught. And when we are, we will be tortured. We’ll be humiliated. And then we are going to be killed.”

  Her mother is sanguine, kind. “Lottie, darling. Don’t let those old ladies’ scare stories in the bunker tonight make you so upset. He’s told me he’s careful. He doesn’t take unnecessary risks.”

  “Unnecessary for who? For him? I risk my life so he can stretch his legs? Don’t you get it? If he gets caught, we get caught. When he takes a risk, we take risks, unnecessary or not!”

  Freya reaches for one of Lottie’s hands. Lottie leaves her mother’s overture dangling in the air. Freya retracts her arm, folding it with the other across her breast.

  “We’ve lived this long through the war, Liebchen. It’s been almost six years. We’ll see it to the end.”

  “It’s the end that scares me. The Jew is going to bring the Nazis down on us or the Russians will get us. One or the other will happen. I know it. I don’t care which. I don’t want to be here for either.”

  “The Amis will come first. Everything will be all right.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not sending him away, Lottie. You know I won’t do that.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t want to be here? Where can you go?”

  “I have a way ...”

  Lottie puts her hand in her pocket.

  “... we can go together.”

  She holds out to her mother the cyanide pills.

  Freya’s face and body lock. Lottie is prepared to snatch the pills away should Mutti react to seize them. But Freya stands rock-still.

  “Where did you get those?”

  “After a concert. The Nazis hand them out.”

  “And people take them.”

  Lottie lofts her eyebrows at her mother, so blind to reality.

  “Yes.”

  “And you expect that I, we, should take them?”

  It’s a simple question, not unexpected. But with it finally in the air, left unanswered the way Lottie left Mutti’s offered hand untouched, the two pills become something for Lottie they have not been. They have been until now a fantasy, romantic and weightless as gossamer riding around in her pocket. With wishes, Lottie could make them into anything, a gleaming shield, a funeral bier, whatever she needed to fit her mood or circumstance. The pills have given her the means to reject the pitiful lot set aside for her, to be the master, not the beggar, to fate. If she so chooses she will swoon and die like Brunhild, her soul conducted away by Valkyries. She will put on her best dress and lie on the sofa, her Galiano in her arms. It could be beautiful. But now, the Jew has ruined everything. Now Lottie has to take the pill because he’s going to be caught sneaking around and if she doesn’t take the pill she’ll have her hair sheared, be paraded through Berlin on the back of a cart, they’ll throw garbage at her and she will be hung on a meat hook. The Jew chose this path, not Lottie. The Jew did it. He stole hope from her, all for a selfish walk under the stars. Now she has to take the pill and just die.

  Freya lifts a hand, careful not to spook Lottie into clamping her fist shut around the pills.

  “May I?”

  Lottie holds out the poison.

  Freya takes one with ginger fingertips.

  She drops it to the floor. She grinds it under a heel, fixing her gaze on Lottie, no emotion in her eyes. When Freya removes her foot, she looks down. The clear plastic packet shows the pill’s powdered gore.

  “You keep the other one, Liebchen. If you don’t have the strength, then take it.”

  Lottie’s jaw works as though she’s suffered a blow there. Freya’s words are so cold. A mother tells her daughter to die alone. Lottie wasn’t going to do that to her; Lottie had secured escape for them both.

  Freya says, ”Come with me.”

  She pushes open the hallway door, holding it back for her daughter. Lottie balls her hand around the remaining pill.

  “Come on.”

  Lottie wants to make a show of defiance. Her pill is still with her, she maintains her path out of all this. Tear it open, bite down, and be finished.

  In the silence of the parlor, Mutti stares hard at her daughter. Lottie hears a sigh in her mother’s throat. The sound is gentle, not steely like the look in her mother’s eyes. There are years stored inside Lottie, she can’t do anything about them. Stowed away in those years is an old place. Lottie thought she’d forgotten how to find it, when she stopped hearing Papa’s voice. But her mother’s glare sends her there. Papa is not in there the way he used to be, young and fetching. Only Mutti is in there now, with soup smells and giggles and songs sung beside a crib and a bed. The finger of a small girl taps inside Lottie’s rib cage. The voice of a child urges, “Go with her now. She is Mutti. She makes things all right.”

  The cyanide is in Lottie’s hand. She is powerless in this world except for it. It’s her only weapon. She feels vengeful. She wants to throw the capsule into the night and poison Berlin, make it be the one to swallow and die and finish instead. She will live and laugh, and the Russians and Nazis can all go to hell. But no pill will halt the city’s fate. Berlin is to be butchered. And Lottie is to be ... what?

  Freya waits, holding the hall door back like an usher.

  Lottie puts the lone pill back in her pocket and follows Mutti to the basement door.

  In the hall Freya takes Lottie’s hand. She puts her back against the wall and sinks slowly to the floor. She tugs Lottie down beside her. Freya lays her daughter’s hand in her lap and cradles it.

  Shoulders touching, the two sit opposite the yellow door. Freya says nothing, Lottie mirrors her mother’s silence. Minutes pass like this. Lottie watches her mother’s face; Mutti’s sternness has ebbed. She is reverent here at the door, prayerful, as though the Jew behind it is some slumped oracle. She has brought Lottie here to ask something.

  Freya speaks. “Julius?”

  No answer.

  So this is the Jew’s name. Like a puzzle, piece by piece, he emerges. Now the Jew is named Julius.

  “Julius. Tell Lottie.”

  Lottie wants to say no. She wants to go upstairs and go to sleep, it’s late and she is drained. She can’t carry anyone else’s tale of woe inside her. Lottie’s own is all the burden she can manage. But Freya strokes her hand, anticipating her, calming her like a horse. Freya mutters, “Sshhh.”

  The Jew—Julius—still does not speak.

  Lottie thinks this is silly, staring at a shut door in their own home, trying to talk to a man through it. She asks Mutti, “Why doesn’t he just open the door?”

  “Because,” replies the door, “I’ve already been out tonight.”

  Freya’s hands tighten over Lottie’s. The oracle answers.

  He says, “I’m sorry if I’ve scared you.”

  Yes, he scared her, and Lottie’s impatient with him for that, and for this ritualistic sitting at his door like a supplicant. He’s a Jew, he’s on the run. He can wander outside only when everyone else is underground. Why must Lottie sit on the cold floor and converse with him? She preferred it when she could pretend he didn’t exist, when she didn’t know his name.

  His voice is low-pitched, quiet, with cracks in it. This is natural, he has only Freya to speak with rarely. He doesn’t sound young; mature, maybe Freya’s age. He squats in the dark on a step behind a door when he could sit with them in a civilized way and talk.

  “So just come out again.”

  Freya shifts her eyes between her daughter and the door. She does nothing to interfere.

  He says, “That would be asking too much of me.”

  This again, Lottie thinks.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to get used to it.”

  Freya raises a hand from her lap to daub at her eye.

  He asks, “Lottie?”

  She can tell where his head is, near the doorjamb, opposite the knob.

  “Yes?�
�

  “We’re all frightened. You’re not alone in that.”

  A minute passes without words. Now that he cannot be a gargoyle, Lottie is unable to build an image of Julius behind the door. She knows little about Jews, other than what she’s been told over a dozen years by the Nazi machinery. She’s seen them on the street and in their shops, and admitted privately that they did bear a resemblance to the overblown swarthy caricatures drawn in the papers and on posters. The stories of Jews selling their own children, of hatching a secret plot in Zion to rule the world, Jews as demons, these are bogeyman slanders no one can take seriously. But she has never had a Jewish friend. They’ve been excluded from all the circles she’s moved in, mostly musicians. Jewish music has been banned for half her life. Jews are different. They confuse her, so she has not thought about them. She was a child when the Jews’ troubles began. And they were not her troubles.

  “Do you know what it’s like outside during the raids?”

  An odd question. He’s nervous speaking to Lottie, like a young suitor calling for the first time.

  “No.”

  “First comes the lead plane. It flies faster and lower than the others. It drops four flares in a quadrangle, to mark the bombing zone for the night. The first wave is right behind him. They always drop incendiary bombs to start fires, so the next squadron can spot the targets better. The sky lights up and the ground shakes. You can see the bombs falling, like black eggs. Searchlights swing back and forth until they find a plane. The flak towers open up with tracers. It looks like a battle between gods, between light and dark. Do you know what I do?”

  “No.”

  “I cheer under my breath with every bomb that lands on Berlin.” He pauses. “I know that sounds awful.”

  It does. But Freya answers him, “No, Julius, it doesn’t.”

  “Lottie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how long Jews have been in Berlin?’

  Another strange question. Leaping from topic to topic. Lottie thinks, he doesn’t get to talk much, with months spent in the silence of the cellar. And how many other cellars and years before that?

  “No. How long?”

  “The oldest Jewish grave in Berlin is in Spandau. The headstone says 1244.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes. When I was a boy.”

  Another puzzle piece. Now Julius has a childhood. Lottie sees a boy in kneesocks and a cap, in a weedy old cemetery, some wizened hat-wearing elder holding his hand, a grandfather, telling him of the Jews’ long history in Berlin.

  As though he can read this vision in her head, the Jew says, “When the war started, there were over a hundred and fifty thousand Jews here. By 1943 there were less than twenty-five thousand.”

  He does not have to say it, the terrible math speaks for itself. He may be the last one left.

  Lottie glances to Mutti’s profile. Her mother’s eyes are fixed on the flat yellow door. Lottie turns to see if she can read the images there, what Freya sees, what the Jew seems to cast like a film projector with his baritone voice, his halting, sad rambles.

  Lottie’s memory surprises her with how it awaits her. Broken glass, crystals on the sidewalks, remains of windows from shops, synagogues, homes. Little Lottie walks through the glass shards, scared of the sharp anger in them, that she might cut her feet even through her shoes and the anger infect her. The glass crunches and she feels like a monster walking on bones, she runs through a patch of it home and stays inside for days, she pretends to be sick, not telling Mutti that she is afraid. Signs. Hateful slogans, cheap white paper and black paint, yellow cloth stars sewed on overcoats. Stories whispered about Hausjuden, the house Jews, the good ones; everyone seemed to know one or two Jewish families who didn’t deserve such and such. Laws. Race laws. Shopping laws. Work laws. Art laws. Trucks. Rumbling trucks in the early morning hours through damp streets. Lottie looks out through her curtains. Men, women, and children are crowded like cows in the open beds. They wear as many clothes as they can put on, even in summer, hats, overcoats, scarves, and gloves. Trains. From Anhalter station, boxcars rolling through the city headed east, jam-packed, pale fingers sticking out of holes in the sides. Names. Theresienstadt, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen.

  Lottie knew all this. Of course. Every Berliner knew these things. Every Berliner had a butcher, a milliner, a doctor, a teacher, a bookkeeper, and had to find another one when they went missing. When their families were taken. When their houses were occupied by Nazi officials, or some displaced Aryan family. For the dozen years since the hatred was unleashed, Lottie has done what even the best Berliners have done: avoid adding to the Jews’ misery. Just leave it alone. It is a tradition here. Seven hundred years old.

  Julius the Jew is speaking. He’s telling his story, apparently for Lottie’s benefit. Freya has asked him to do this. It’s a fearful story, certainly. Married to a Gentile woman. She was his protection. She dies in a bombing raid. He loses his shield. Loses his job in an armaments factory. He hides day and night, becomes a “U-boat,” a submarine, a skulker. He fights treachery, hunger, fear, failing hope. Goebbels looks for the last Jews, with a powerful will to make Berlin, the capital of the Reich, a Judenfrei city. Lottie listens with half an ear. Julius’s story is remarkable and tragic, almost beyond comprehension for her. She doesn’t know this kind of passion for life, to live in such pain just to live. The closest she has ever been to that flame is in the music of the masters. Julius’s voice is soaring Beethoven, heart-pounding Wagner, breathtaking Mozart. Julius’s tale of catastrophe and endurance is operatic, musical. And though it is a music Lottie can hear, she cannot play it, so the travails of Julius the Jew begin to lose their hold on her. She slides back on his voice into old, comfortable German thinking. For an entire people to suffer so, they must have deserved it somehow, nicht wahr?

  What is he asking of Lottie with his tale? That she change? That by hearing of his misfortune she will metamorphose into someone better? That she will from this point on think only of his safety and not her own? That she will become good like Mutti, brave and feral like him?

  No. Lottie knew of all these things he has endured before she was ever aware of Julius the Jew. She has averted her eyes; yes, all right, that much is true, she has been callous to the plight of the Jews. But being reminded of it in her own home doesn’t mean that suddenly she will learn some lesson. If that was going to happen, it would have already happened.

  Lottie just wants to survive. That is the only thing she’s learned about herself slouching here at Julius’s yellow door. She shares that much with him. But only that. She’s not willing to be so damned honorable and peaceful and strong about it. Lottie is a brilliant cellist; her life does not lack for higher purpose or value. The Jew stays in the basement because he doesn’t want to get used to the open. Such discipline. So admirable. Ugh. Lottie winces as if she has bitten into a candy that strikes a raw tooth.

  She reaches into her pocket for the remaining cyanide pill. She pulls her other hand free of Freya’s sweaty palms, the backs of her mother’s fingers wet with her constant drying of tears.

  Lottie puts the poison packet into Mutti’s hand.

  “Here,” she says, standing to go off to bed. “Give this to Julius in case his life gets too much for even him to live it.”

  ~ * ~

  * * *

  March 9, 1945, 9:15 a.m.

  With the Ninth U.S. Army

  Krefeld, Germany

  bandy drops to his bedroll, folding at the knees, collapsing in stages like a camel. The flimsy mat barely eases the hard bakery shop floor to his shinbones, he aches and rolls to his fanny. He spreads his legs wide for balance and dips into his dozen pockets. He dumps film canisters and packets on the mat like a tired little boy emptying his pockets to survey hard-won prizes.

  He arrived—hitchhiking—in Krefeld yesterday, one day behind a vanguard battalion of the Ninth. He found shelter in the basement of a ruined bakery in the outskirts of
the town. The street outside is ruined to the same degree as the rest of the town; Bandy has noticed how destruction leavens itself over the German villages and cities, spreading evenly in the manner of heat through a skillet.

  Krefeld, four miles west of the Rhine, like every other place the eastward-pushing Allies have entered in the past two weeks, put up a skirmish, emptying itself of bullets and willpower, until there came a sudden capitulation. There’s almost a tragicomic regularity to it. The local SS men shove into the fray crazy believing boys with Panzerfausts and old Home Guardsmen with antiquated carbines. Together they fight with a bewildering fervor. The Americans make Swiss cheese out of every building that issues even a puff of smoke. Tankers have been known to level any structure that displays a Nazi banner over a railing, and equally to try to preserve any buildings hanging out white flags. The soldiers stay back and let the artillery do as much of the work as it can. When the infantry moves in, they do their best to avoid the teenagers they see riding bikes from hot spot to hot spot, antitank weapons strapped across the handlebars, and armed old men in gardening gloves; but always after the battles the body count goes far past German military uniforms. At some point, long after the fight has become clearly futile, hands go up, weapons go down, and voices call, “Nicht schiessen, nicht schiessen! Halten Sie, bitte!” The women of the villages and towns, the inevitable survivors, start sweeping up under the boots of the Americans. They thank the Amis for coming before the Russians. They kiss goodbye their living sons and husbands and fathers even before the men can lower their hands to be marched to the rear. The women cover the bodies with the white sheets of surrender.