The convoy comes to a stop a quarter mile out. The driver rolls the throttle under his hand in impatience. He looks down at Bandy. He gets a nod.
The motorbike leaps out of formation and takes the shoulder of the road. Horns honk at them bouncing past. Bandy hears the objections through his own low grunts as the sidecar jars his sutures.
The Jersey driver twists the bike however he must through the parked vehicles to get Bandy into the village. In a minute they are in the center.
The motorbike is shut down. The Circus’s green fire truck has stopped in the square, behind it a hundred vehicles bunch up. No soldier has dismounted. No citizens are out to greet the Americans. The idling of the many motors sounds like an ill wind.
All around the square, white sheets hang over the banisters of verandas, out of second-story windows, they are draped across electric lines. The laundry and the iced silence give the hamlet a cool, snowy guise.
Bandy steps out of the sidecar. The Italian boy lifts his goggles but does not follow.
On both sides of the main street, outside a bakery, a lawyer’s office, a sweets shop, a leather tanner, are strung up bodies. There are twelve of them. They’ve been hung from lampposts and high iron railings. Five elderly men and five women. Two boys.
Around their necks, lapped over the nooses, are signs scrawled in a thick black hand: vaterlandverhãtor.
Traitor to the Fatherland.
Bandy stands in the middle of the empty street. Since he has walked forward, he hears at his back several coming bootsteps of soldiers and officers. The Americans will cut down these civilians, lay them out, and step back to let the townspeople cover them.
This is the work of retreating SS men. They will not allow surrender.
With the street filling now, the citizens of Bevern materialize in their doorways and on stoops. Bandy leans on his cane and walks forward through these decorations of the occasion of war, among the dangling bodies, among the sheets of surrender, and now the running women who drop and wail below the swinging feet of innocent loved ones.
The last body at the end of the street hangs from a flagpole. Bandy guesses the building behind the pole is the town hall. The corpse is dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes. A velvet sash stripes the chest. This was the burgomaster.
While Bandy stares, an old woman shuffles past him. She does not touch the rope that has killed the old man. She stands for a moment looking up at his heels as she might were he a flag. The woman contemplates something, what? That he was an old fool? That he should have stayed hidden and quiet like the rest of them who survived in Bevern?
She lowers her head. Below the bright black shoes, she folds to the ground. The woman lifts her open palms to her face like washing from a stream, and sobs into them.
Bandy takes her picture, the body hovering over her head. He thinks of a prayer he heard that Easter morning and composes a caption:
“Germany, brought to its knees.”
~ * ~
* * *
April 1, 1945, 7:20 p.m.
Grolman Strasse
Charlottenburg, Berlin
lottie grips the long knife carefully. she has it by the hilt, backward, laying the blade along the meat of her forearm.
She hurries behind her mother. Freya skitters close to the charred facades of the buildings, donning their darkness. Both she and Lottie are cloaked head to toe in black dresses with black shawls over their heads and shoulders. Freya’s wrap flutters around her striding form, she is a raven, like Lottie, ebon with the night and the sagging wreckage.
The knives stay hidden beneath the shawls. Freya spent an hour running the blades against a kitchen steel to bring out their sharpest edge. Once the foot of night was fully down over Berlin, she led her daughter out of the house.
Lottie has to walk fast to keep up. She is afraid of the cool blade in her hand, scared too of being out after dark against the law. Goebbels has issued another proclamation, to keep night looters from wandering the city. So far mother and daughter move unseen; no cars or trucks navigate the road, there’s no more gasoline in Berlin. What fuel there is gets reserved by the Party bosses and their families, funneled into their cushy cars and headed south out of Berlin to the mountains, or secretly west to throw up their hands in front of the Amis.
Mutti is obsessed, Lottie thinks. To be doing this, with knives and breaking the law and dragging me along to help. But the Jew must eat.
So must Lottie. Her hunger of late has shed pounds off her already slim frame. In the mirror her eyes have taken on the scooped look of birds’ nests. Her golden hair has gone brittle and her stamina, especially on the cello, is shriveling. There would be just enough food for mother and daughter without the Jew. But they are not without him. So Lottie has learned the trick of heading to bombed areas as soon as the all-clear sirens quit to snatch up emergency ration cards and a bowl of soup. Freya has become a marvel at securing black-market victuals, even without money or anything to barter. Lottie no longer leaves the house when Mutti takes the meager meals down the basement steps to Julius. She stays in the living room or in her bed. She has stopped playing the Galiano in the house. She saves her strength for the BPO concerts, which have gone unabated, three and four days a week. There’s been no talk among the musicians of the plot to escape, not even a rumor. Lottie is concerned that the plan may not have blossomed to a reality. But if there is a plot, it can’t be spoken of. She will have to wait and see and worry.
At home there is no thought of making the Jew leave. There is no more talk of suicide. Those issues are long settled. Sometime in the next few weeks, Lottie will go from Berlin with the orchestra. Until then she has resolved herself to helping Mutti find food because if she does not, she fears her mother will feed the Jew and her daughter and let herself starve.
Freya halts at the corner of Savigny Platz. Lottie moves beside her, still hugging the wall of the last building. In peacetime this little park is a green and pastel gem, brimming with umbrellas, tables, and vendors. All that is gone. Tonight there’s nothing in the plaza but a dead horse and children playing.
Three days ago the skies changed over Berlin. In the mornings, the Americans continue to arrive on time with their B-17s. At night—perhaps even tonight in another hour or so—the British and their Mosquito bombers return. The afternoons have always been calm, at least in those parts of town not on fire. But three days ago the Russians claimed the high sun as their own. They punish Berlin not with whistling bombs but with screaming, low-flying fighters, blasting wing-mounted machine guns onto streets and squares. There are no warnings before the Soviets whiz overhead, they come so fast and low, and from such a short distance away, that radar doesn’t catch them soon enough in advance. Berlin’s antiaircraft batteries must fire almost level with the ground to reach the fighters, spraying almost as many bullets on the city as the Reds. Lottie has seen the pilots in their cockpits, red stars painted on tails and wings, the ground ripping beneath them. After four years of bombings, this new and sudden plague rising from the east is hardest for Berliners to bear. These are the first armed Russians in the city.
This Easter afternoon the Soviets attacked Charlottenburg. They seemed to home in on Savigny Platz, just two blocks from Freya’s house. Again and again Red fighters dove to strafe this open common. Lottie; can figure no military reason for their selection of target. It was wanton. They just wanted to ruin a nice spot in Berlin.
One of the businesses surrounding the Savigny Platz was a carnival shop. Its windows and front have been demolished in the raid, an uncountable number of pockmarks spoil the walls. Tonight a pack of children have ransacked the busted shelves. These are Goebbels’ littlest looters gallivanting in the plaza. They dance, trailing colored paper streamers, they wear spangly hats and wave yellow and blue lanterns in their play. Some children slide down a fallen girder, just the right size for their tiny rumps.
The horse is what brings Freya here. With the dearth of gasoline in the city, all ammuni
tion is shuttled to the flak towers by horse-drawn carts. The animals are gaunt from too much work and not enough feed. This one was caught out and gunned down in the Soviet raid. Freya has come to butcher it.
Freya hands Lottie her knife.
“Stay here.”
“What? Why? Where are you going?”
“I don’t want the children to watch us.”
Lottie thinks these children see plenty in Berlin, they gambol in and out of the windows of a busted shop, they prance around a dead horse. They’ve certainly seen human bodies. Ach, she thinks, Mutti.
Freya puts both hands under her shawl. She cowls her face beneath the inky lace. She creeps into the plaza, ducking behind shattered tables and benches until she’s close to the kids. They do not see her until she raises her black-wrapped arms over her head and moans like a terrible ghost. Freya runs into the middle of their game keening and waving, and chases each of the children out of the square. The children squeal, some laugh, but none of them drop their stolen baubles and treasures running away home.
Freya stands over the fallen horse. Lottie approaches and hands over the knife. Freya smiles, breathing hard from her effort. She has been the children’s protector, herding them off even though Lottie thinks it was silly and needless to do that. Lottie just wants to do what they came for and go.
Freya catches the disapproval on her daughter’s face, for she says, “Ach, Lottie.” Her grin falters. She bends to the dead animal.
Not until she kneels too does Lottie see how miserable the horse is. The thing was starved, its frame evident everywhere. It is a dark animal, a cordovan color. Its rib cage strains to contain a bloated abdomen, bulging stupendously. Several bullet wounds are easy to see in the dark, marked by white gobs of maggots. Mature flies buzz in nuggets over these holes and the horse’s cloudy eyes and lolling, thick tongue. The smell is rotten but after a wince Lottie bears it. Freya runs a gentle hand over the carcass. Lottie touches a fingertip to the brown flank. The hide is cool and stiff like a rug. The two women kneel on a coating of black, crumbly blood.
On the ground Freya lays her knife and a cloth sack she has folded under her belt.
Lottie feels disgust cramping in her throat.
“Mutti, how can we eat this thing? It’s been dead since this afternoon. It’s covered in flies. I won’t touch it.”
Freya ignores this. She takes up the knife and moves to hunker behind the horse’s neck at the shoulder and backbone.
“I was told the best meat is along the spine. Lottie, we’ll just have to cook it until it’s fine to eat. Now help me. Please.”
Lottie draws a deep breath of reluctance and shuffles beside her mother. Freya makes several tries at gripping the knife’s haft until she is comfortable that she can handle it with strength. Lottie thinks her mother has no idea what she’s doing.
The blade goes in between the horse’s shoulders. Freya pulls it to her, the hide makes a rasping noise like cutting burlap. Lottie expects blood but there is none. The beast’s heart has long stopped, his blood has all dried or bled out. Freya’s incision is only a half inch deep, barely parting the flesh. Her hand shudders a little on the first pass. When she draws the knife again along the trough, this time deeper, her grip is firmer. Mutti digs her free hand into the incision and tugs. A flap of skin and meat peels outward. Lottie watches her mother grow bolder.
Now that the insides of the horse are exposed, the hidden smell rises. It is a putrid, pinching stink. Lottie leans away from the carcass but she will have to wash this odor away later. A cloud of flies is disturbed. They do a fast circlet above a wound in the leg where bone bits protrude. None of the flies land on Lottie nor do they switch to another gory hole, they seem to have their bounds on the horse and retake their spots.
“The rump.” Freya does not look up from her work. “Do it just like this. Cut and pull.”
The slab Mutti tugs from the horse is two inches thick. It is red and pliable, like steak. If it proves to be edible, they’ll have a gorging meal.
But if the SS or Gestapo happen by, the two will eat a few meals in prison, if they’re lucky. Carving up a horse on a public square under the sheath of night will be considered looting. At best it’ll be judged a display of poor morale. An admission that they are hungry and desperate. That they are defeated. Lottie worries also, what happens if they’re caught, stuffed in a cell for a week, and the BPO chooses that time to flee Berlin?
It’s clear Freya will not come away until she has enough meat. The faster they finish, the sooner they’ll return home. Lottie slides to the rear where a few pitiful cubes of manure were the horse’s last act.
There is no life in this horse, she thinks, only meat. Only food. Cut.
Lottie tips the blade into the flank near the hipbone. She pushes hard on the handle to puncture the hide. Her nose curls at a fresh waft of putrefaction. A fly investigates the new gash but swirls away to nibble elsewhere. The knife scribes a reddening line, tracing the hump of muscle in the horse’s rear. With her left-hand fingers Lottie claws into the cut and yanks, drawing the knife along the lifting meat. She has to go in again with the knife to fillet the flesh away from the white bone and network of clinging fibers.
In minutes Lottie has carved from the horse a round chunk of burgundy muscle, thick, cool, and heavy. The meat itself is not so awful, just a huge steak with a brown leather backing. The gaping hole in the horse’s flank is a wrenching sight. The animal’s hip joint and femur are laid bare; the strings and levers of all bodies are supposed to be hidden and they seem horribly wrong when exposed. Now the flies have discovered the ease of feeding in such a capacious crater. Lottie leaves the hunk on the horse’s bloated belly and stands to ease her knees from the pavement. She steps back. Freya is a black place, a congealed piece of night, bent and hacking at the spine. The white of ligaments and bones—growing with each pass of the blade and Mutti’s tugs—and of squirming larvae seem to usher the poor dead horse out of the night and away from this dark world. Lottie and Mutti wear black and bear knives and hunger. The horse, she thinks, is disappearing. The horse may be better off.
Lottie lapses into impatience now that she has cut the flank as instructed. Let’s go, she thinks. How much meat does Mutti need to take back, the whole horse? The stuff won’t last the night without refrigeration, and there’s neither ice nor dependable electricity. Mutti will be up all night cooking the flesh until all the bacteria is out and it’s palatable. She’ll put the meat into stews, sausage and dried jerky, patties and paste, she’ll feed the rest of the block if she can and we’ll be famished again in three days. Every second they stay in the plaza is another tick on the clock of danger, of being nabbed by the authorities.
“Mutti,” she hisses, “are you done?”
“Is there enough for us?”
This is not Freya’s voice. It seeps from the dark, from another unstaked shadow, moving across the plaza.
Freya looks up from her trenching knife. Four shadows step forward, more women clad all in black. They too have come for the horse.
“Yes,” Freya says, “of course.”
With no more words, shawls are swept back from arms and long knives appear. It’s too dark to recognize any of the women, Lottie does not know the voice. The women gather on their knees about the animal and now there are five slashing at it. A pair attack the front shoulder. Lottie observes no finesse or attempt to slice away just the meat, these two will drag away the entire leg. The third goes to the head. She nips off the tongue with one strong flick and drops it onto waxed paper. This woman twirls the knife edge beneath the eye to dig out the cheek muscle. The fourth woman takes Lottie’s place at the rump and proceeds to find the meat that is left.
Lottie stays back. The kneeling black five strip the rotten horse.
The women work competently. The front leg is severed and dragged away from the carcass. The rump is worked for whatever meat clings around Lottie’s pit. The horse’s face is ruined where one black woman di
gs for delicacies. Freya lifts long fillets from the spine and drops them into her cloth bag.
Lottie can do no more. She stands aside. She is repelled by the smell and the insects and the hacking knives and the wet sounds of plopping horse-meat, the risk of arrest, but mostly by the sheer degradation.
Within minutes of the arrival of the new butchers, the women must roll the horse over to get at the other side. Lottie stays back and does not help. Rolling over a stiff, dead, diced-up, three-legged horse is too wretched. No.
The five women arrange themselves by instinct around the carcass. Freya and two others each take a leg, the remaining two women lay their hands beneath the distended belly to push it over when the horse tips and rolls. The sac of the gut founders around in their arms like a water bag. The women shove all at once, the horse begins to revolve. The thing’s remaining legs are like iron bars, straight and frozen in rigor mortis. The belly does not roll with the horse but lies behind, cumbersome and reluctant, flopping out of their hands. One of the women stands away from it, considering what to do. Out of breath, she counts for the others. “One, two, three ...”
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 35