The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  “Our best way to get up north and into Switzerland,” Moe said, “is along the Route Napoléon, to Grenoble.”

  “So we can only go as fast as the army pushes the Germans back.”

  “Right. You said something about having family near here?”

  Karl had waited until he saw the situation here before making his idea clear. “If we aren’t going anywhere for a day or two,” he said, “I’ll look up my in-laws.”

  Moe beamed. “Fine with me. I’d like to see some countryside.”

  Karl chuckled. “Ah yes, you’re my bodyguard.” Moe just nodded. A day in the rich green country would do them both some good, after months in cities or the rattling metal boxes of transports.

  Marthe’s parents, Eugene and Madeleine Malartre, had gotten back to France in June 1942. Eugene was a lieutenant colonel in the French army, who refused to leave his wife to fight with the Free French. This did not sit well with de Gaulle, so they had holed up at a farm inland from the French Riviera not far away. Madeleine, Marthe’s mother, had developed enteritis from the rough food. Mostly, they farmed vegetables and bought what else they could. Marthe had managed to get letters to her parents in Grasse, a small town now about ten kilometers away.

  Long lines of soldiers marched through the narrow streets, headed for the battle. There was little road traffic. The Germans had taken all the gasoline, leaving the locals with horses, bicycles, and odd vélo-taxis made by cutting a motorcar in half and pulling the passenger end with a bicycle. Karl thought they looked like part of a circus act.

  A skittish energy layered the soft summer air. Children down alleys played hopscotch and sang “La Marseillaise” and laughed a lot. People smiled at the passing troops.

  A woman on a street corner lounged against a brick wall and gave Karl a flat, challenging stare. She had long blonde hair, black at the roots, and maybe a quarter pound of makeup that looked like pasty flour. He realized he was not just another American, not a uniform or an obvious logistics guy. His clothes were not worn or ragged, and he was well fed. A clear step up as a customer, then. With a thin smile she swayed her hips, her eyes never leaving his. He looked away, thinking sad, bad thoughts.

  They got to a hotel that Moe somehow already knew, and there was a room for them—bare but livable. “Rest up,” Moe said. “We can’t move until the Route Napoléon is open, which could take days.”

  There were American officers in the hotel, but he and Moe ignored them, and they did likewise. Obvious OSS agents ducked in and out, probably making contacts with locals. Karl sat in the garden below and had a glass of local wine. The savor of France settled over him. War with style.

  Troops assembled and a chaplain came to conduct services. He was a captain attached to the amphibious engineers, a husky man who had been throwing a football around a half hour before. Karl did not want to go up to his stuffy room, so he stayed, having never heard a Christian service before. The captain took his text from Romans: “If God be for us, who can be against us?” He didn’t seem to want the men to get the idea that the cause was depending entirely on faith, however. “Give us that dynamic, that drive, which, coupled with our matchless supermodern weapons, will ensure victory,” he prayed.

  Karl found all this talk makeshift. So many seemed to believe people were each God-made, one-of-a-kind, with an immortal soul breathed in. Plus, some God or other—there were many brands—listened to prayers and might do some good for you. This view of the world—people as vehicles of grace, battlefields of good and evil, soldiers as even apprentice angels—seemed so far from the reality that smacked you in the face, cold and hard, that he could barely suppress his skeptical smile until the mercifully short service was over.

  His father had once said to him, after perhaps one glass of a decent red wine too many, that Jesus had been an addled though talented fraud, the afterlife was a sham, God a sadistic madman, and Christianity “bad, bloody, merciless, moneygrubbing, and predatory.” Karl felt much the same but had the sense not to say so within earshot here, or even very much to Marthe. Yet he was a Jew of sorts, a cultural Jew. He felt it from his family ties, not in some airy theology of chants and ceremony and odd dietary rules.

  Finally he had enough and got up, fetched Moe, and went for a walk. He strolled restlessly, feeling useless. Crowds were everywhere, noisy and smiling. For the moment, the French had lost the ironic nihilism they had flirted with at the best of times.

  Some units, mostly artillery, had leave to come into town. They carried five-franc notes printed in America and issued to the troops for use after they got ashore. It was the first time Karl had seen these, reminding him of old-time cigar-store coupons. There was nothing on them to indicate who authorized them or would pay off on them—just Emis en France on one side and on the other side the tricolor and Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

  An angry crowd was yelling and tearing down a billboard. Karl supposed the Germans had erected it when they fully occupied this region in January, making it officially held, subject to German law. They had known some kind of invasion was coming from the south. Now they apparently thought that the radioactive dust could hold their western front firm.

  JETZT GEHT’S UMS GANZE—WIR SCHAFFEN ES DOCH!

  “ ‘Now it’s all or nothing!—but we’ll make it!’ ” Moe translated. He had brushed up on his German on their flight here, and Karl was impressed at how quickly he acquired vocabulary.

  “Pretty desperate,” Karl said. The crowd yelled and smashed the wooden sign into chunks they could carry away. “At least they’re getting firewood out of it.”

  Then he saw a small French sign slapped up beside the German one: ECRASEZ L’INFME! “That one says, ‘Stamp out the abomination!’ ”

  Moe chuckled.

  They spent the evening eating, after preparing a meal of rations and some delicacies Moe had brought. Karl did not reveal the food he had brought ashore, thinking it better for later.

  The aromas and sounds of France clasped him in memories. His New York self had never consciously thought about doing anything other than mastering the piano, becoming a professional performer, or advancing into the thick swamp of theoretical chemistry. His father had wanted him to become “a doctor,” which meant a practicing physician, certainly not a PhD. Through early adolescence he had suffered from his father’s increasing references to how useful chemistry would be when Karl was practicing, or would help him understand the new disease treatments that were coming along, or how good grades in chemistry and mathematics would help in getting into the very best medical schools, maybe Harvard even.

  He had grown up in a close clutch of family and friends who all thought, quite properly in his view, that a man did serious work and brought home the money, so that a family could blossom from his labor, and from his love for a woman with whom he would spend his entire life. That was how the world worked. Karl had never been the kind of guy who felt bare female toes creeping up under his pants leg at a dinner party. He knew he would have to seek out and court a woman he wanted, that it might be a struggle to find her and win her, and then he could build the kind of life a man needed, the one he had seen working well enough in the families all around him in Brooklyn.

  Then France changed him in 1936. He met Marthe, and somehow their courting came as though in a warm, comfortable dream, all in the wonderland of Paris, where the next move forward was a slow glide through days of quick, bright moments between them, all effortless and deftly natural. All this had surprised him. Of course there had been dodgy moments of timidity, of awkward humility across the gulf of languages they both fumbled through, and even of alarm when Marthe misunderstood him, or he her. But those were mere bumps in the glide. Against the lumbering political dramas raging all around them in those years of 1936 to 1938, their gathering romance and then kindled passion was a small thing, of course, but everything to him—and then, blessedly, to her.

  The coastal towns around him now were harder than he remembered France being, an
d rougher. As soon as the Americans arrived, crowds cheering in the streets turned to mob some women who had been mistresses of Germans, mostly of officers. The mob shaved their heads but left the prostitutes alone, by common consent. “A prostitute is who she is by nature. So are Germans, it is their nature,” a French gendarme, who had stood aside as all this happened, explained to Karl, with a resigned sigh and a shrug.

  2.

  The next morning, trying to find “Eugene Malartre” without mentioning that he was a French army officer, in hiding, was difficult. Artillery boomed in the distance, but they heard no small-arms fire. The Germans, they heard, were falling back along the roads to the west. “As expected,” Moe said, and no more.

  Moe got a corporal to drive them to the town of Grasse, where Marthe sent her letters to a hotel, to be held for her parents. He found the Hôtel L’Oasis easily; not many hotels were open anymore. The desk clerk was surprised to see Americans. He told them excitedly that the Germans had just been driven out a few hours before. Karl could hear machine-gun bursts toward the north. No artillery landed in the town, and troop trucks were grinding through the main street, just outside the hotel.

  The clerk pretended to know nothing about any people named Malartre. Moe leaned across the desk and towered over the man. Karl told the clerk that Moe was authorized to use force to find the valuable Colonel Malartre. This had some small effect, and Moe made moves to go around the desk. Tense seconds passed.

  “Okay, how’s this?” Karl said as he fished out a pack of Lucky Strikes from his backpack. He explained about being a relative of the colonel, while the clerk’s eyes never left the Luckies. Soon enough the clerk allowed that perhaps in this exceptional case he could reveal the approximate location.

  The Jeep had gone, but Moe was sure he could get another from the troops moving along the main drag of Grasse, which was the Route Napoléon itself, when they needed it. They discussed directions to hike out of town to find the Malartre refuge. It was rumpled-looking country in the foothills of the Alps. The clerk had lit up his cigarette before they went out the front door.

  In the damp afternoon heat they sweated their way downhill, across a ravine ripe with smells, then uphill across a pasture and into the side yard of a farm. Sweaty work for Karl, easy for Moe. The moist aromas swarmed in the air as they approached the farmhouse from the side without windows. Birds sang their chorus among the fragrant, leafy trees. The long gables of the house bespoke several centuries of hard use, seldom repaired. It was thirty-five degrees Centigrade, and the damp air swarmed with happy insects and rich scents from the fields.

  They were walking uphill into an ample barnyard when a barking shot came, a splatt. A man in overalls toppled over, fifty meters away. The shot came from uphill, in the forest beyond a stone wall to their right.

  They were caught in the open. Karl and Moe sprinted forward and hid behind an outhouse. The smell was rank, disgusting. Karl darted his head around the corner to get a look. The sun was in his eyes, but scanning the trees, he glimpsed a bit of gray, moving uphill from them.

  Moe was watching around the other corner. He leaned back and said, “That farmer’s wife is dragging him off. The sniper seems to be holding fire for her to do it.”

  “Looks like a German uniform up there,” Karl said as he heard a woman’s voice, high-pitched, frantic.

  “Probably separated from his unit. Doesn’t know what to do.”

  “Stupid to shoot a farmer. What’s that lying beside him on the ground?”

  Moe said, “A pitchfork. The Kraut must’ve thought the farmer spotted him and would attack, or summon help. We can’t leave that German there.”

  “Why can’t we just go around him?”

  “He’s shooting civilians. Dunno why, maybe he’s crazy. And he can maneuver, so we won’t know where he is.” Moe eyed the nearby trees.

  Karl did not like the way this was going. “So what can we do?”

  “I’ll go around him. You stay here. Do nothing.”

  With that he was off, sprinting back across the barnyard about forty meters to reach a stand of trees. Moe was startlingly fast, showing his pro baseball years. Karl watched him turn left and run with high, long strides beyond view. He supposed Moe would run uphill for about a hundred meters, turn to his left, and come in behind the German.

  This was crazy indeed, crazy on stilts. They were supposed to stay out of the invasion chaos and keep moving. He sweated in the heat. Seconds trudged on. He heard the wife still calling frantically in high-pitched screams to someone from beyond the barn up ahead. In the strange stillness, he listened carefully. A distant crump came from back toward the west. He could not distinguish between bombs and artillery rounds coming in, but there came the rising burr of airplane engines, so he supposed it was bombing. An insect flitted around his face and he felt exposed here, hiding behind an outhouse and inhaling the shit odors that were always worse in the summer. The hardest thing to do is nothing, he thought.

  A rocky rattle came from toward the wall. It sounded like the stones of the fence banging together. Karl darted his head around the corner. Running toward him was a German in a light gray field uniform. He carried a nasty-looking rifle with a big clip. His head was turned to look at the barn, so he did not see Karl. But he was fifty meters away and headed this way.

  Karl drew back, knowing he had only seconds. He listened and heard now the man’s panting, then the pounding of his boots on the dried mud. The sun is behind him. . . .

  He crouched just behind the corner. A shadow fell into view. What—?

  Karl turned and thrust out his left leg, keeping low. The German’s right leg caught on Karl’s calf and the man toppled forward. He slammed into the dirt headfirst. His right arm jerked out with the rifle in it, and Karl snatched it up. The German rolled away, looking up in surprise. Karl juggled with the rifle and got the butt around in time to smash it into the man’s face.

  “Ahhh!” The German’s arms flailed.

  Karl stepped back. For good measure he kicked the man in the skull, a solid crunch. The body rolled away, stopped, didn’t move. He held the rifle gingerly and pointed it at the man.

  What next? Of course the German might not be alone. But there was no sign of any others in the trees, and an odd, pregnant silence fell across the barnyard.

  He felt every second passing. He moved to put his back to the outhouse, held the rifle, surveyed the yard, and the day ticked on. Then, faintly, came the sound of feet pounding, and coming from the trees was Moe. “Ah! You got him.”

  Moe was sweating and disheveled as he crouched beside the German. Blood ran from the man’s nose and across his cheek into the dirt. “You fetched him a good one, all right. Unconscious, breathing, nasty bang.”

  “He deserved it,” Karl said woodenly, the words hard to get out.

  “Agreed. I got around behind him, but he must’ve heard me. He ran downhill and climbed over that wall. Dunno where he thought he was going.”

  “Let’s tie him up.”

  “Yeah. Don’t let that wife get at him, though.”

  Karl turned. The wife was running toward them with a butcher knife in her hand, eyes wild.

  Without thinking, he raised the rifle and said, “Arrêtez!” The woman stopped, blinking. Startled, she looked at the knife in her hand.

  In French she said she was happy for their “assistance” in getting the German, and could she please kill him? Karl said no, and where was her husband? She pointed to the house. A pockety-pock sound of an engine running badly came, and around the far edge of the house a decrepit, rattling small truck rolled.

  Moe went to help the fallen farmer. Karl was jumpy with adrenaline and in quick order a short, alarmed farmer from next door arrived, saying he had heard the shot. There were rumors of German stragglers nearby, and he was proud to see someone had bagged one. The farmer’s name was Giles, and he had a medical kit in his truck. In short order Giles got a pressure wrap around the farmer’s wound. It was in his sid
e, bloody but not to any vital part. The wife breathed a happy sigh and kissed Moe, who had just finished tying the German’s hands behind his back. She ended with a frustrated laugh and cried, “Impossible!”

  Karl had to agree. The whole incident was a soup of happenstance and happy accident, and he felt fully alive, skin prickly and eyes dancing. Moe patted him on the back, and Karl embraced him.

  • • •

  They even got an early supper invitation. The farmwife offered bread and jam and a glass of milk. They ate some quickly as Karl asked for directions to the “place where the Malartres live,” and the wife nodded. “What do you want with them?”

  “I am their son-in-law.”

  Her mouth twisted in disbelief. “You are a relative? But you are American!”

  He took out his pocket photo of Marthe with her parents. The wife insisted they take some bread, which they refused. She waved her hands, describing directions to the “tiny plot” where “the officer in hiding” dwelled.

  Karl and Moe searched the German, still unconscious. Folded up in his backpack was a single sheet of stiff cardboard. Moe spread it on a table.

  IM NAMEN

  DES DEUTSCHEN VOLKES

  VERLEIHE ICH

  DEM

  KRIEGSVERDIENSTKREUZ

  2. KLASSE

  BERLIN

  DER FÜHRER

  “So this guy got a combat decoration that meant a railway pass. ‘In the name of the German people.’ Stamp-signed by Hitler, too.” Moe chuckled at the scrawl above Der Führer. “But you decked him without a weapon.”

  Giles rattled off in the truck with the farmer beside him and the German lying in the truck bed. Moe had dumped him in, still unconscious. As he turned away said, “You want odds he survives the trip?” with a twinkle in his eye.

  Payback time, maybe, Karl thought. He recalled how he had dealt with bullies in his Brooklyn grade school—by walking backward, watching them, so they couldn’t attack from behind. He had done it by instinct and was deeply surprised when it worked; they didn’t expect it. His instant decision to trip this soldier had been instinctive too. A fluke, but no reason not to beam with pride. He was actually fighting in the war.