In his room, Max removed his boots and lay down on his bed, surrounded by the treasures of his childhood: ribbons won in the Marine Bund, pictures of ships clipped from magazines, a lithograph of Admiral Tirpitz, and his midshipman’s sword, still polished each week by his father. When he first brought the sword home, Max had tried to show his father how to polish it properly, but Johann just laughed. He said, “When a naval officer has to instruct a Prussian sergeant major how to polish a sword, then the world truly will be upside down.”
A watercolor Mareth had done of Graf Spee hung above the desk, and on the desk itself, a brass frame held a photograph of his mother. Max favored her with his fair hair and brilliant blue eyes. She was young in the picture—younger than Max now—not a classic beauty but pretty, with a slender nose and wary eyes, just like Max. Hannah had been her name. She had a proud look with high cheekbones and a strong jaw. Max could understand why his father had been drawn to her. “You are so much like her, Maximilian,” Johann often said. “You have her mind; she was so clever at sums and always had a book in her hand.”
Two days later, his father drove him back to the village rail station to catch the Berlin train. They said little on the way, or on the platform as they stood waiting for the train. When it finally arrived, his father wrapped him in a hug so fierce Max thought his ribs might break. “I will be fine, Papa,” he said, hugging his father back.
The old man smiled, pulling away and holding Max at arm’s length. “Ah, you don’t know that, Maximilian.”
“I believe it, though.”
“Do you? I hope so. It does you well to believe it.”
Max looked down at the dirty stone of the platform and didn’t say anything. He could feel his father’s hands trembling slightly where they held him.
“When you were a little boy at the end of the First War, I said to myself, ‘At least he will not have to go through what I went through. At least that much is sure.’”
Max looked up again. His father smiled but tears stood in his eyes. “Looks like you were wrong, Papa.”
“Hardly a first, Maximilian. Time makes fools of us all.”
“But you lived through that war and I’ll live through this one.”
“Yes, yes. I thought that when your mother went down so ill. I thought, ‘I didn’t survive Verdun to watch her die of the influenza.’ People were starving all around us, but I made sure we had all the food we needed, and if there had been medicine to cure her, I would have found a way to get that, too. But there was no medicine for the Spanish flu, no medicine but God Almighty.”
“You’re not making me feel much better, Papa.”
His father laughed. “Ach, what does it matter what we say? It’s just words. You know I love you, Maximilian. I love you more than anything in the world. I pray for you every morning at mass. I haven’t missed a day since the war began.”
They embraced again, not long this time. Max boarded the train, turned and waved to his father, who stood at attention on the platform, arm cocked in stiff salute, hand at his forehead, palm out—ramrod straight as only a Prussian sergeant major could be—as the whistle blew and the train moved slowly from the station.
CHAPTER NINE
BERLIN
CAPITAL OF THE GREATER GERMAN REICH
THE NEXT DAY
MAX DIDN’T REACH BERLIN UNTIL 0200. EVEN AT THAT HOUR THE Stettiner Bahnhof was crowded with soldiers from every branch of the Wehrmacht—changing trains, running for trains, kissing sweethearts hello or goodbye, Luftwaffe blue standing out against the field gray of the army, the black of the security police, and the khaki of the Organisation Todt.
Max left the underground platforms and moved into the larger station above, feeling the cold wind blowing into the building through gaps in the canvas roof. Before the war, the superstructure’s iron arches had supported a magnificent glass roof, but now it held up nothing more than a few layers of thin canvas tarps. Bomb concussions had blasted all the glass out, and the tarps did little to stop the wind. Max wondered if there would be a pane of glass left in the Reich when the war was over.
He scanned the crowd for Mareth, but the dim blue light of the station made it impossible to see for any distance. Leaning against a lamppost, he lit a cigarette and watched the swirling mass of people, all of them involved in the war somehow. It was everywhere; it was life. Nothing else happened in Germany now. At mass in Bad Wilhelm yesterday, the priest had quoted Saint Matthew: “And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” Max had briefly considered this verse on the train but stopped because he didn’t want to think about wars or rumors of wars. He was already in a war: if only it were a rumor. And “all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet”—would God simply allow this madness to go on and on? Would all the suffering continue till He got bored with it? Is that how it worked?
A hand reached out and pinched Max on the bum. He spun around and kissed Mareth before she could speak.
“Why, it could have been anyone,” she said when he finally let her go. “Do you automatically kiss any girl who pinches your rump?”
“Just the blond ones.” They kissed again. “I love you,” he said when they broke.
“I love you, Max.”
An elderly woman interrupted them, tapping Max on the shoulder. “Herr Stationmaster, pardon me. When does the express for Stuttgart leave?”
Mareth bit her lip to keep from laughing. Max felt the heat rising in his face. “Madam,” he said.
Mareth cut him off. “Madam, unfortunately I have just discovered this young man has only tonight been assigned to this station and knows nothing. But that gentleman over there”—she pointed to a naval captain a few meters away at the newspaper stand—“is the senior stationmaster and will be able to help you.”
The old woman flashed a pleasant smile. “Thank you, Fräulein.”
Mareth took Max by the hand and the two of them ran laughing from the station into the blacked-out city, so dark that Max almost lost his balance as they emerged onto the street. Not a ray of white light could be seen. Were they even in Berlin? It seemed more like the inside of a coal mine; Max couldn’t make out his hand in front of his face. He hefted his suitcase onto his shoulder and bumped Mareth in the darkness.
She laughed. “Watch yourself, sailor.”
“It’s black as pitch. I can’t even see you.”
She leaned against him and rubbed a hand across his back. “Welcome to Berlin.”
“We’ll be lucky if no one robs us out here.”
“Oh, no,” Mareth said, “there are never any robberies in the blackout.”
“There must be.”
“No, never. Anyone caught robbing someone in the blackout is shot the next day.”
Max nodded. That must cut down on crime. He said, “Let’s go to the Rio Rita for a drink.”
“It closes at two.”
“Johny’s?”
“Max! No respectable woman would go to Johny’s.”
“When Dieter and I used to go there to hear the Negro jazz band, we always saw many respectable women.”
“Without their clothes on.”
“That’s how we knew they were respectable. They couldn’t hide anything.”
Mareth gave him a light punch on the arm. “Unfortunately for you, Herr KapitänLeutnant, all the cabarets have been closed.”
“The Adlon?”
“They close the bar at midnight.”
“You Berlin girls certainly know your way around.” Max dropped his suitcase and put his arms around her, drawing her close in a gentle embrace. But then she locked her arms about him so fiercely that she almost squeezed the breath from him.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“Mareth, what is it?”
She had her head on his chest. Without looking at him she said, “I just hate the war, Max—the war
and the bombing and you being gone. Every night I think that I won’t be able to stand another day of it, but then I do. It goes on and on and I do stand it.”
He rocked her gently, kissing the top of her head as they kept their tight embrace. “We’ve made it this far,” he offered. “We just need to keep going. It’s the only choice we have.”
“Maybe.”
“Trust me.”
“I do trust you, Max. I do. You know that.”
Max broke their embrace and put his hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eyes. He whispered, “Mareth, I have something very important that I need to tell you.”
“What? What is it, Max?”
“I’m freezing.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “I have a room for us in a gasthaus at the Alexanderplatz.”
“Good,” Max said. “That sounds good. We can get warm.” She kissed him.
Mareth hung a phosphorescent button around her neck and put one around Max’s as well, which annoyed him and made him feel like a child. “Why do I need this? It doesn’t help me see.”
“It keeps other people from knocking you over. Just follow orders, sailor.”
They groped their way along the street, in a constellation of phosphorescent buttons, the true believers wearing ones shaped like swastikas. They found the U-Bahn and rode it to the Alexanderplatz, where Max almost took a header on the stairs as they surfaced once again into the inky dark. They walked the two blocks from there to the hotel; Max came close to getting into a fight with a streetlamp. He signed them in separately at the gasthaus. There was no use pretending to be husband and wife because both of them had to present their identity papers. That was the law. The security police reviewed every hotel register in the country every day.
Once inside the room Max tossed his cigarettes onto the end table, pulling off his heavy overcoat and tunic. He gave Mareth a hungry smile, pulled off her coat, and pitched it into the corner. Then he saw that she was also wearing a uniform.
“Mareth!”
She sat on the bed. “I was going to tell you, write you. It just never…”
“What are you doing? Aren’t you still working for your father?”
“Yes, yes—this is just two nights a week, a six-hour shift.”
“What? Doing what?”
“I… I’m in the flak auxiliary.”
“The flak auxiliary! What in the name of God… Mareth! The flak auxiliary! What are you thinking?” The flak auxiliary manned the anti-aircraft guns that ringed Berlin, most operated by young teenage boys—Kinderflak, the Berliners called them. Many of the gun positions were out in the open, near the massive ammunition dumps that supplied the countless shells pumped into the sky by the quick-firing guns. Dr. Goebbels claimed that a thousand batteries defended Berlin, not that many believed much of anything he said.
Mareth took his hand. “Max, it’s not dangerous.”
“Not dangerous? How can it not be dangerous? What the hell do you even know about it?”
She stood up and stepped away from him. “What do I know about it? Max, would you have me do nothing? Is that what you want?”
“Yes. I would have you do nothing.”
“Have you ever even been through an air raid?”
Max looked away.
“On nights when the British come, they fly over in a cloud with a noise like a thousand steam shovels and the bombs come down like rain—like rain, Max.” She spoke loudly, almost shouting. “Am I supposed to just sit back and take it like a dutiful German girl? Just watch my city be destroyed? Max, they’re blowing up everything—everything! I can’t put it all in my letters—it’s too dangerous, you don’t know who’s reading them. One of the wings of the Bendlerstrasse was blown up a month ago. Father told me twenty general staff officers at the Central Army Office were killed.”
“The Bendlerstrasse? That’s impossible. It’s built out of blocks of stone.”
“That doesn’t matter! Some of the bombs are two thousand kilos, they can blow up anything. The KaDeWe was practically blown to pieces; Kranzler’s was hit two weeks ago and completely destroyed. Remember the Gloria Palast, where we saw Sons of the Desert?”
Max did remember. Mareth loved Laurel and Hardy; she had walked around for the next three months saying, “Well, Max, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!”
“A bomb hit it last week. It’s just a pile of bricks and stone. Everything we knew is gone, Max. Everything. Max, people I know are being killed, friends I love buried in the rubble. Loremarie lost her house and her entire studio with all of her paintings last week. You remember my friends Sisi and Kurt? We had dinner with them before you went to Graf Spee. They were killed three weeks ago in a raid, with their two children. It was a direct hit on their building. Max, don’t you understand? Whole areas of Berlin simply no longer exist. Charlottenburg is gone! It’s nothing but rubble. I have to do something.” She was yelling now.
Max faltered. It had nearly killed him to be stuck in Argentina for those twelve months while others defended the Reich. But war wasn’t for women.
He nodded. “I forbid it.”
She let out a brief laugh and shook her head.
“I mean it.”
“Fine. Go ahead and mean it.”
“What are you saying, that you refuse to quit?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. You forbid it? Like some Prussian field marshal? You don’t even know what you’re talking about, Max. I’m not out in the open like the Luftwaffe flak units. It’s not dangerous. I worry about you day and night on your U-boat and I’m not even in a dangerous place. I’m working in the Zoo Tower.”
“The what?”
Mareth sat on the bed and took a cigarette from his pack on the nightstand. When they were together she always smoked his because a woman’s cigarette rations were only half of a man’s. “They’re building six flak towers around the city. Mine is the first to be finished. It’s over by the zoo, so they call it the Zoo Tower. It protects the government buildings around the Tiergarten—Father’s office and the High Command headquarters and the other ministries and the Chancellery offices. The tower walls are three meters thick, Max. It’s a fortress. And we have everything—a dining hall, a hospital, supplies to last for weeks. Everything is bombproof. The police president tells me it’s safer than the Führer bunker.”
Max did remember reading something about the Zoo Tower in Signal. He took a cigarette for himself and lit it. “What do you do?”
She ruffled his hair. “I don’t think you have this job on the U-boat.”
“What?”
“I work in the storeroom. I watch over all the paintings and sculptures and everything else emptied from the museums. You cannot imagine the treasures under my care. Kaiser Wilhelm’s coin collection, Gobelin tapestries from Sans Souci, paintings by every great master in Europe. We try and protect everything from damage caused by the concussions when the air raids are on. Max, I’m taking care of the treasures of Germany.”
He put his cigarette out half smoked. God knows a storeroom in a reinforced concrete tower was less dangerous than a U-boat on war patrol, and everyone had to help the war effort. They were up against the British, the Russians, the Americans, the Canadians, and anybody else the U.S. could bully into joining the Allies. Besides, Mareth would do what she wanted no matter what anyone said. That’s what he loved the most about her. He switched off the light and lay down beside her on the bed. “You will show me your Zoo Tower tomorrow, yes?”
_________
Late the next afternoon, arm in arm, they strolled down the Unter den Linden, bundled against the cold, leaning into each other. The lime trees that grew in the median were bare now, sticks against the gray sky, but the crowds on the sidewalks were bright in scarves and hats, the women elegant despite the war. Only the men looked different in their uniforms, and because this was close to the government district many wore the uniform of the Nazi Party. A good way to get out of fighting, shuffl
ing papers in some Berlin ministry. Meanwhile, some men thumped the sidewalks with crutches, an empty pant leg rolled up and pinned into place. Others had empty sleeves hanging limp at their sides. One man was missing an eye and a leg. Please God, he would rather die than end up like that.
They found a small restaurant and had a long dinner, lingering over their food, something Max hadn’t done in months. Most of the menu items weren’t subject to rationing, so they had to use ration coupons for only the bread and butter, and for the eggs and sugar that would go into a small cake for dessert. Max had been issued extra coupons with his leave papers, so Mareth didn’t need to spend any of hers. The waiter took Max’s large, multicolored coupon cards—the orange one for rolls, pink for butter and skim milk, green for eggs, white for sugar—and cut off the necessary squares with a pair of scissors. Every waiter in Germany now carried scissors alongside his bottle opener.
The meal might not have cost many coupons, but the price in reichsmarks was steep enough. Max’s pay had gone up by half with his promotion, but the already high income tax and war surcharge tax swallowed up most of his raise. Max didn’t worry. The money was well spent. Beef, pork, and chicken were impossible to get because all supplies were consigned to the Wehrmacht, so they started with a rabbit stew. This didn’t seem so strange to Max—he’d eaten rabbit all the time as a boy—but Mareth had never tried it before and was shocked to learn that he had. Their main course was two boiled lobsters from France. Deep-sea fish were unattainable because the fishing fleet had either been sunk by the British or commandeered by the Kriegsmarine for minesweeping, but French shellfish were still in good supply. French wine, too, was plentiful and cheap, unlike German beer, which had become expensive. So they drank wine and bitter acorn coffee. Mareth screwed her face up as she tasted the acorn brew. “I can’t drink this,” she said. “I try to, but I can’t.” Max poured all their skim milk into her cup and she tried it again, shaking her head. “Don’t tell me you drank this stuff as a boy.” They laughed.
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