by Joseph Kanon
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 Kurfürstendamm 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 façade 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 windowpanes 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 housecleaning.
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 Hütte,” 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 dream-boat. 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.”
CHAPTER 2
Dinner was surprisingly formal, served by the gray-haired woman and a man Jake took to be her husband in a large corner room on the ground floor. A starched white tablecloth was set with china and wine goblets, and even the food—standard B rations of pea soup, stewed meat, and canned pears—seemed dressed up for the occasion, ladled out of a porcelain tureen with ceremony and garnished with a sprig of parsley, the first green Jake had seen in weeks. He imagined the woman snipping off pieces in the muddy garden, determined even now to keep a good table. The company, all men, was a mix of visiting journalists and MG officers, who sat at one end with their own whiskey bottles, like regulars in a western boardinghouse. Jake arrived just as the soup was being served.