Max seized him by the shoulders. “Is she in there?”
Von Woller stared at him dumbly for a moment. Max wasn’t easy to recognize with his face covered in soot, uniform torn, boots cut in a dozen places by shards of glass. “The U-boat captain. Brekendorf.”
“Is she in there?” Max was shaking the old Nazi.
Von Woller nodded. “Yes. Under the rubble. The basement was fortified six months ago at the foreign minister’s insistence: steel, concrete, wooden beams. We received everything we needed, everything because of his priority order. They may have survived the hit. No incendiaries, just high explosives. But we have to get them out—they might be hurt, or running out of air.”
Max eased his grip on von Woller’s thin shoulders. He looked over at the mass of debris.
“We’re trying to dig a tunnel to the shelter. That’s why I sent for the Luftwaffe rescue men—they’re trained for this.”
Already the air force crew had relieved the office workers and passersby who’d begun the digging. Several of the men pulled long boards from the rubble and set about cutting them into tunnel supports. Others started in with pickaxes to uncover larger beams. Four men had long iron poles to pry the beams up so the supports could be placed underneath. In this way a small tunnel was gradually opened to the building’s first floor. Max fell in line and hauled out chunks of wood and stone being passed back from the face of the tunnel. He could hear the tunnel leader, flat on his belly, calling out to the people trapped below. “Hold on, we’re coming, we’re coming.”
For half an hour, then an hour, he called into the silence. No response. But finally a small voice answered. It said, “Vasser.”
“What?” The tunnel leader quieted the men at his back and listened.
“The water is up to our chests!”
The tunnel leader looked around at his crew. A main must have been shattered and begun pouring water into the bomb shelter through a crack. It happened—happened often. People survived an air raid but rubble blocked the shelter door and everyone inside drowned. Not in the ocean, not in the lake at Wannsee, but in the basement of their office building, in the middle of Berlin. “Hold fast,” the tunnel leader said, turning back around, shouting to whoever could hear him. “Just hold fast.”
They had to dig. “Raus! Raus!” The men fell in, moving twice as fast now, the blows of pickaxe blades ringing out against stone. They worked in a rotation, taking turns at the face of the tunnel, the lead man attacking the debris with all his strength until he was exhausted and the next man stepped in. Max waited in the queue, seizing the rubble as it was passed back down the line, flinging it between his legs, his hands bloody and torn, cut to ribbons by the chipped bricks and splintered boards.
“Mareth!” he shouted, moving into the tunnel face for his turn, hefting the leader’s small rock axe. “Mareth! Mareth!” Nothing. He swung the axe as hard as he could in the tight space, shattering a mass of bricks, part of an interior wall still covered with taped notices, one of them reading: FIGHT THE COAL THIEF!—an exhortation to save electricity. He hammered the wall again and again, the men behind raking out the shards of brick Max knocked loose. How fast was the water rising?
“Mareth!” he shouted again. “Mareth!”
“Max? Max!”
It was her. He swung with all his strength, breaking through the wall, pushing away some broken boards. Another blow and this time the axe hit wood—thin wood—and he felt the blade go clean through.
“Hurry, Max—the water’s coming in faster!”
He pried the axe free, pushed bricks between his legs to get more room to swing, then with a fury buried the axe into the wood again.
“Max! Hurry, please Max, hurry!”
The rock axe split the wood panel—opened a small hole—he wedged it larger, then swung again and then again with the power of desperation. An entire section of the door gave way and Max almost fell into the cellar. A hand came through—he grabbed it. Mareth. He yanked her out. She sobbed and clung to his tattered shirt. “Go!” he shouted, pushing her back.
There were four more women after her, young secretaries in the building. Max pulled them out one at a time, soaked and shivering, and they clawed past him into the daylight. As he pulled the last one of them out, his thighs were seized by such stabbing cramps that the Luftwaffe men had to drag him out of the tunnel and knead his legs before he could stand.
Wrapped in a thick blanket, Mareth leaned against her father, hugging him tightly, but she kissed von Woller and broke his embrace as Max limped over. They kissed, her lips so cold. Folding her in his arms, he rocked her gently as she shivered and wept against his chest. Through her crying and shivering she looked up and said, “Well, Max, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.” And he laughed with her, tears now streaming down his face as well.
Daniel, von Woller’s chauffeur, touched Max on the shoulder. “Herr KapitänLeutnant, I have the automobile three blocks from here. Shall I carry her?”
Max shook his head. He slid an arm under Mareth’s legs and lifted her like a child. Her clothes were entirely soaked through and still dripping cold water. Daniel led them away with von Woller following. Through careful maneuvering he’d managed to get the big Horch convertible within three short blocks before his path was barred by a pair of fallen lampposts sheared from their pedestals.
_________
Herr von Woller held the car door and Max slid onto the large backseat with Mareth on his lap. Her arms were still tight around his neck but her tears had slowed. She wiped her cheeks, pulled back to look at him, then reached out with one of her small hands and wiped the grime from his nose. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Von Woller sat in front with Daniel as they wound through the devastated streets, detouring left and right until they finally reached the apartment building on the Tiergartenstrasse. Before the war it had been one of Berlin’s finest addresses, with porters and maids in regimental strength, a starched doorman saluting at the curb, and three men in the garage to wash and park cars. It was different now. Most of the servants were gone, the men drafted into the army and killed on the Russian Front, the women drafted into munitions factories. Several guest workers from Belgium had replaced a handful of the prewar staff, and a few elderly housemaids from the old days were still about, Herr von Woller’s among them. But the doorman was gone—blown to the next world by a mortar shell at Stalingrad. His wife had taken over his duties, opening and closing the big doors—filled now with wood since the glass had been blown out—and reporting on the tenants to the Gestapo, just like her husband before her.
Max surveyed the outside of the building. Most of the windows were gone, though in the von Woller flat the missing panes had been replaced with new ones crafted from broken glass and glued together with industrial adhesive, a process fast becoming a cottage industry in Berlin. From Mareth’s letter he knew the back of the structure had collapsed, leaving only the front apartments habitable. He carried her to the fifth floor—the elevators had snapped their cables when the building was hit—and laid her on a couch in the drawing room. But after a moment she sat up on her own strength and patted the cushion beside her. Max dropped onto the couch, turned to her—and they simply looked at each other. There was nothing to say. This was something else the war did to you. Loved ones killed, drowned, blown to bits, burned to death: after a time, what could you say?
Herr von Woller went across the hall and returned with an old and feeble army doctor, who gave Mareth a shot of morphine—a hard item to come by in wartime Berlin. She hardly needed the morphine, she thought, but took it anyway, then snuggled herself in Max’s arms and nodded off. He could feel her stiff body going soft as she relaxed into sleep. Her warmth and slow breathing against him made him feel safe and warm and his muscles unknotted. His head fell slowly back on the couch cushions and he drifted away into his first calm sleep in months.
Herr von Woller left them alone that week and Max barely left Mareth’s room,
barely left the bed. They made love constantly, desperately, as if it were laughable to think that either of them might live to see 1944. The old man made no objection—what could he say? That they were ruining her reputation? That it was scandalous? With thousands of Germans dying every day, scandal had become quaint, like a postcard of the Kaiser. Von Woller could rarely be found in the flat anyway—he spent long hours in a temporary office at the Foreign Ministry. Each time Max saw him he looked even more pale and more drawn. Everything was going poorly. General Dittmar admitted in one of his nightly Wehrmacht communiqués that the situation on the Eastern Front was deteriorating, that the Volk should prepare themselves for very heavy losses. As if the losses hadn’t been heavy enough already. The government could prohibit public expressions of mourning—it was an honor for a son to give his life for the Führer, so mourning was unpatriotic—but the casualty lists spoke for themselves.
Max shut the war out for those few precious days with Mareth. With the drapes drawn, the gramophone playing, it was almost possible to pretend there was no war at all. The maid was a good cook and they dined well. Given his rank, von Woller had access to food and delicacies that had vanished years ago for everyone else. So they drank his whiskey and coffee and sherry and Max smoked his cigars. Von Woller even had some Coca-Cola from before the war, which Mareth drank, and something Max had rarely seen before: a television set. Max had been to public television parlors in Kiel and Berlin, but private sets were rare—only a few thousand could be found in all of Germany, reserved for the highest-ranking members of the government and the party, though it seemed a pointless curiosity. It broadcast only a few hours a day and the only time Max and Mareth turned it on, they discovered a program of buxom fräuleins exercising on a rooftop garden. They couldn’t stop laughing for the longest time and finally turned it off and went back to bed.
Because the city outside was in ruins, they didn’t go outside. They didn’t talk about Mareth’s dead mother or Max’s father sitting in the jailhouse in Kiel. Their agreement to ignore reality was unspoken, a mutual fantasy, and it bound them together more strongly than ever. Their vacation ended when the British aeroplanes returned.
German radar stations in Holland picked up the RAF bomber stream and Deutschlandsender began their running commentary on its direction. Max listened to the big Philco in the living room: “Enemy bomber formations at a high altitude now reported to be approaching Denmark in an easterly direction. Target unknown. Luftwaffe High Command predicts Berlin. Achtung! Achtung! Enemy bomber formations approaching Denmark in an easterly direction.”
Forty-five minutes later the early-warning siren went off, signaling the possibility of an air raid, cautioning everyone to take cover. By 2300 the British target had been established clearly enough and the earsplitting warble of the “immediate danger” siren pierced the darkness: “Achtung! Achtung! For Berlin. Danger fifteen! For Berlin. Danger fifteen!” Fifteen meant a raid of maximum severity. Already Max could hear the flak artillery on the far western outskirts of the city opening up. Herr von Woller came into the drawing room when the distant flak guns began to fire, holding an army helmet in one hand. “We must go across the street to the shelter.”
Mareth shook her head. She sat on the couch with her legs crossed. “I refuse to go anywhere.”
Von Woller tugged at her sleeve and pleaded. “Child, we must go! We must!”
Mareth kept shaking her head. “I will not climb into my own grave again. If they want to blow me up, they can blow me up here.”
Max took her arm and tried to smile. “Mareth, we’ll all go together. Come.”
“No.”
“We will all be killed!” von Woller shouted. Beads of sweat stood out on his creased forehead, his hands trembled as if he had palsy.
“So go, Father,” Mareth snapped. “Go then. I’m staying here.”
“I will go!” he shouted.
Mareth rose and pulled Max with her into the narrow archway leading to the kitchen. She sat on the floor and yanked him down. It was the safest place in the flat, but it would hardly protect them if the building suffered a direct hit. Von Woller was frantic. “I insist!” he screamed. “I demand that you both come to the shelter with me at once!”
Mareth looked up and stared at him, her face rigid but tears dripping down her cheeks. Max, holding her, felt her muscles trembling. Or perhaps it was his muscles trembling. He used to think of Mareth as fearless—then again, he had once thought himself fearless. Von Woller sat down beside them. He looked up when the first bombs hit somewhere out to the west, then put on his army helmet.
The explosions moved closer: five kilometers, then two, then one, the low roar of the detonations mixing with the bark of hundreds of anti-aircraft guns. The Kinderflak were hard at work, the faint patter of shrapnel from the flak shells raining down on the building.
Herr von Woller lit a cigar, stoic now, while Mareth shook violently. The bombs marched toward them. She squeezed Max’s arm until he thought she might rip it off. Her nails dug into his skin. The explosions sounded like someone throwing sticks of dynamite down a well. Plaster dust sifted onto them from the ceiling as the building rocked in the concussion waves of the exploding bombs. No one said a word. Max felt his knees getting weak, just as they did on the U-boat when he waited for the depth charges to explode.
It lasted fifteen minutes. As the bombs came closer the building shook as if in an earthquake. No more plaster dust falling but plaster chunks now, bombs going off all over the neighborhood, the drone of the aeroplanes audible above the falling shrapnel when the anti-aircraft guns fell into a quick lull. The gradual easing of the banging guns told Max the raid was ending. Von Woller stood and brushed himself off. Max stood, too, unsteadily. He tried to help Mareth up, but she collapsed back to the floor and he carried her to bed. She smiled when he laid her head on the pillow, but tears still slipped down the sides of her face as the long steady wail of the all-clear siren began to sound.
He kissed her softly and left the room. Von Woller was on the drawing room couch, vacantly puffing his cigar. “This cannot go on,” Max told him. “You must get her out of Berlin. You must use your influence to move her somewhere safe. Anywhere but here. If she stays, she’ll lose her mind unless she is killed first.”
Von Woller nodded. “I know.”
“You’re a golden pheasant, Herr von Woller. You can get to the Führer himself! You must use your influence now. Pull whatever strings you have to pull.”
The old man looked up. “I’ve already pulled the best strings I know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You should. My old friend Heinrich Schrempf has agreed to take her in. He lives in Mexico. We came into the Foreign Ministry at the same time and were in the Turkish Legation together years ago, but he left for private enterprise and made his fortune arranging for the importation of Mexican oil. He’s sitting out the war with his family in Mexico. I condemned him for it. I thought he was being a coward and I wrote him personally when the war began and told him so. But Heinrich is a gentleman. He has been gracious enough to forgive me. He has a compound in Mexico City with twenty servants—a hacienda, he calls it.” Von Woller drew on his cigar, creating a cloud of smoke around him.
“Mexico is against us now,” Max said. They had joined the Allied cause the summer before last after the Americans had put a pistol to their heads and suggested that joining was a good idea. “How will she get into the country?”
“That is not a concern,” said von Woller. “She may go there whenever she wishes. I have obtained a Finnish passport for her.”
“How… ?”
“How? I am a diplomat, Herr KapitänLeutnant. Could you have done it? I think not. I have been received at the very highest levels in Finland, the very highest levels, and I have influential friends there willing to help me.”
Max was impressed. Finland was fighting alongside Germany on the Eastern Front, but none of the Allied powers except Russia had declared
war on the Finns, who were widely admired for their independent resistance to the Soviets in the Winter War of ’39 and ’40. “Then she will go to Mexico at once.”
“I fear that is impossible, young man.”
Max stared at him. “I don’t believe you. You must get her the bloody hell out of here. She cannot go on this way.”
Von Woller shook his head. He rolled the cigar around on his fingers, examining its flaking ash. “She refuses to leave.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Of course, I agree, Herr KapitänLeutnant, but perhaps you should tell her so. She refuses to leave because of you. She’s afraid that if she leaves Germany, the two of you will never see each other again.”
Now it was Max who shook his head in dismay. “If she’s dead, Herr von Woller, then I’m quite certain we won’t see each other again.”
“Indeed.”
“You will ensure she stays in Mexico for the remainder of the war, yes? You will promise this to me on your honor as a German?”
“Yes. If you can prevail upon her to go, Herr KapitänLeutnant, I will do everything in my power to ensure she remains in Mexico City until Final Victory.”
They looked at each other in silence for a long moment while outside Berlin burned in the night like a vast beacon fire. “Yes,” Max said, “until Final Victory.
“Then I shall persuade her to go. I will insist. And I will insist she do so immediately. She will fly, yes?” It was hard to imagine such a thing.
Von Woller nodded. “Swedish Air to Lisbon. It’s perfectly safe, I assure you. They fly in bright orange planes, in specially marked air corridors negotiated for neutral airliners before the war. I negotiated them myself. If you’re able to convince her, she can leave in two days.”
Two days, then he would be left to face the war alone. And Mareth was right: they would never see each other again. Knowing he could come home to her after a war patrol was all that had kept him going. And now it was over. She would be safe in Mexico. And she would survive. And if she survived, then a small part of him might survive as well. At least he could try to think of it that way.
An Honorable German Page 28