A Good German

by Joseph Kanon

  Take looked at him, forced to smile. A new Nanny Wendt, this time with gum and get-up-and-go.

  “Whatever happened to freedom of the press?”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get plenty of copy. We’ll have a briefing after every session. Besides, everybody talks.”

  “And what do we do between briefings?”

  “Drink, mostly. At least that’s what they’ve been doing.” He turned to Jake. “It’s not as if Stalin gives interviews, you know. Here we go,” he said, swinging through the doors. “I’ll get you out to your billet. You probably want to clean up.”

  “Hot water?” Liz said.

  “Sure. All the comforts of home.”

  In the driveway the congressman was being bundled into a requisitioned Horch with an American flag painted on the side, the others into open jeeps. Beyond them, at the end of the drive, were the first houses, not one of them intact. Jake stared, everything emptying out again. Not an aerial glimpse anymore; worse. A few standing walls, pitted by artillery shells. Mounds of debris, broken concrete and plumbing fixtures. One building had been sliced through, a strip of wallpaper hanging off an exposed room, scorch marks around the window holes. How would he ever find her in this? The same dust he’d seen from the plane, suspended in the air, making the afternoon light dull. And now the smell, sour wet masonry and open earth, like a raw building site, and something else, which he assumed was bodies, still lying somewhere under the rubble.

  “Welcome to Berlin,” Ron said.

  “Is it all like this?” Liz said quietly.

  “Most of it. If the roofs gone, it was bombs. Otherwise, the Russians. They say the shelling was worse. Just blew it all to hell.” He threw the bags into the jeep. “Hop in.”

  “You two go on ahead,” Jake said, still looking at the street. “Something I want to do first.”

  “Hop in,” Ron said, an order. “What do you think you’re going to do, get a taxi?”

  Liz looked at Jake’s face, then turned to Ron and smiled. “What’s the rush? Take him where he wants to go. You can give me a tour on the way.” She patted the camera slung around her neck, then put it up to her eye, crouching down. “Smile.” She snapped his picture, busy Tempelhof behind.

  Ron glanced at his watch, pretending not to pose. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “A little tour,” Liz said, wheedling, snapping a few more. “Isn’t that part of the service?”

  He sighed. “I suppose you want to see the bunker. Everyone wants to see the bunker, and there’s nothing to see. The Russians don’t let you in anyway, say it’s flooded. Maybe Adolf’s floating around down there, who knows? But it’s their sector and they can do what they want.” He smiled back at Liz. “You can get the Reichstag, though. Everybody wants a picture of that and the Russians don’t care.”

  “You’re on,” she said, lowering the camera.

  “If I can get us there. I know the way from Dahlem, but—”

  Liz jerked her thumb toward Jake. “He used to live here.”

  “You navigate then,” Ron said, shrugging, and motioned Liz into the jeep. “You can ride up front.” Another grin.

  “Lucky me. Just keep your hands on the wheel. The whole U.S. Army’s got this problem with their hands.” Jake paid no attention, the flirting a harmless buzz beside him. Some people had emerged from one of the piles of rubble, two women, and he watched them pick their way carefully over the bricks, listless, as if they were still shell-shocked. In the July heat they were wearing overcoats, afraid to leave them home in the basement of the ruined house, where everything, maybe even themselves, must be open for the taking. What had it been like these last few months? Carthage. Maybe she was like these two, burrowed in somewhere. But where? He realized for the first time, looking at the women, that he might not find her at all, that the bombs must have scattered people too, like bricks. But maybe not. He turned to the jeep, suddenly anxious to get there, a pointless urgency, as if everything that could have happened to her had not already happened.

  He lifted himself into the back, next to Liz’s cases.

  “Where first, the bunker?” Ron said to Liz, who nodded. He turned to Jake. “Which way?”

  Not where he wanted to go, but stuck with it now, a favor to Liz. “Turn right at the end.”

  Ron let out the clutch. “Don’t bother taking notes. Everybody says the same thing anyway. Lunar landscape. That’s the big one. And teeth. Rows of decayed teeth. AP had rotting molars. But maybe you’ll come up with something original. Be nice, something new.”

  “How would you describe it?”

  “Can’t,” Ron said, no longer flip. “Maybe nobody can. It’s-well, see for yourself.”

  Jake headed them north on the Mehringdamm, but they were forced to detour east and in minutes were lost, streets blocked off or impassable, the whole map redrawn by debris. Five minutes back and already lost. They threaded their way through the ruins, Ron glancing back at him as if he were a broken compass until, luckily, another detour put them on the Mehringdamm again. A cleared stretch this time, which would get them to the Landwehrkanal, an easier route to follow than the unpredictable roads. Only the major streets had passable lanes, the others reduced to winding footpaths, when they were visible at all. Berlin, a flat city, finally had contours, new hills of brick. There was no life. Once he spotted children skittering over the rubble like crickets, and a working detail of women reclaiming bricks, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs against the dust, but otherwise the streets were quiet. The silence unnerved him. Berlin had always been a noisy city, the elevated S-bahn trains roaring across their trestle bridges, radios crackling in the apartment block courtyards, cars screeching at red lights, drunks arguing. Now he could hear the motor of the jeep and the eerie creaking of a single bicycle ahead of them, nothing else. A cemetery quiet. At night it would be pitch dark, the other side of the moon. Ron had been right-the unavoidable cliche.

  At the Landwehrkanal there was more activity, but the smell was worse, raw sewage and corpses still floating on the water. The Russians had been here two months; had there been so many to fish out? But there they were, bodies stuck on the piles of the wrecked bridges or just suspended face down in the middle of the canal, held in place by nothing but the stagnant water. Liz had dropped her camera to hold a handkerchief over her mouth against the smell. No one said a word. Across the water, Hallesches Tor was gone.

  They followed the canal toward the Potsdamer bridge, which took traffic. At one of the footbridges he saw his first men, shuffling across in gray Wehrmacht uniforms, still in retreat. He thought, inevitably, of the night he’d seen the transports set out for Poland, a big public display down the Linden, square-jawed faces out of a newsreel. These were blank and unshaven and almost invisible; women simply walked around them, not looking up.

  There were landmarks now-the Reichstag in the far distance, and here in Potsdamerplatz the jagged remains of the department stores. Wertheim’s gone. A burned-out truck had been pushed to the side, but there was no traffic to block, just a few bicycles and some Russian soldiers leading a horse-drawn wagon. The old crowded intersection now had the feel of a silent movie, without the jerky rhythm. Instead, everything passed by in slow motion, even the bicycles, wary of punctures, and the wagon, plodding down a street as empty as the steppes. How many nights of bombing had it taken? Near the truck, a family sat on suitcases, staring into the street. Maybe just arrived at Anhalter Station, waiting for a phantom bus, or too tired and disoriented to go on.

  “You have to feel sorry for the poor bastards,” Ron said, “you really do.”

  “Who, the Germans?” Liz said.

  “Yeah, I know. Still.”

  They turned up the Wilhelmstrasse. Goering’s new Air Ministry, or its shell, had survived, but the rest of the street, the long line of pompous government buildings, lay in sooty heaps, their bricks spilling into the street like running sores. Where it had all started.

  There was a crowd near the Chanc
ellery, an unexpected popping of flashbulbs. Scattered applause.

  “Look, it’s Churchill,” Liz said, grabbing her camera. “Pull over.”

  “Guess they all want the tour,” Ron said, pretending to be bored but staring nevertheless at the stairs, starstruck.

  Jake got out. Just where Hitler had stood smiling. Now it was Churchill, in a light summer uniform, cigar clenched in his teeth, surrounded by reporters. Brian next to him. How did he get here so fast? But Brian’s corklike ability to bob up everywhere was legendary. Churchill was stopping on the stairs, disconcerted by the applause. He raised his fingers in a V sign, a reflex, then dropped them, confused, aware suddenly of where he was. Jake glanced at the crowd. It was British soldiers who were applauding. The Germans stood silently, then moved away, embarrassed perhaps by their own curiosity, like people at an accident. Churchill frowned and hurried to the car.

  “Let’s take a look,” Jake said.

  “You out of your mind? And leave a jeep full of cameras?” Churchill’s car was pulling away, the crowd following. Ron lit a cigarette and sat back.

  “Go ahead. I’ll hold the fort. Bring me a souvenir, if there’s anything left.”

  There were Russian guards at the entrance, squat Mongols armed with rifles, but they seemed to be no more than a show of force, since people went in and out at will and there was, in any case, nothing to guard. Jake led Liz past the entrance hall with its gaping roof, then down the long reception gallery. Soldiers roamed through the building, sifting through the wreckage for medals, something to carry away. The huge chandeliers lay in the middle of the floor, one of them still suspended a few feet above the litter. Nothing had been cleared away. It was somehow more shocking than the bomb damage outside, the visible fury of the final assault, a destructive madness. Furniture smashed to pieces, its upholstery ripped open by bayonets; paintings slashed. Drawers looted and then flung aside. In Hitler’s office, the giant marble desktop was overturned, its edges chipped away for keepsake fragments. Papers everywhere, stamped with muddy boot marks. All the disturbing evidence of a rampage. The Mongolian horde. He imagined the guards outside shouting as they raced through the halls, ripping and grabbing.

  “What do you think these are?” Liz said, holding up a fistful of cards, blank pieces of stationery edged in gold, the Nazi eagle and swastika engraved at the top.

  “Invitations.” He fingered one. The Fiihrer requests your presence. Tea. Boxes of them. Enough to last a thousand years.

  “Just like Mrs. Astor,” Liz said, stuffing a few in her pocket. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s go,” he said, unsettled by the mess.

  “Just let me get a few shots,” she said, taking a picture of the room.

  Two GIs, hearing English, came over to her and handed her a camera.

  “Hey, how about it? Do you mind?”

  Liz smiled. “Sure. Over there by the desk?”

  “Can you get the swastika in?”

  A massive ornamental swastika, lying face down on the floor. They each planted a leg on it, one slinging his arm over the other’s shoulders, and grinned at the camera. Kids.

  “One more,” Liz said. “The light’s bad.” She clicked, then looked at their camera. “Where’d you get this, anyway? Haven’t seen one of these since the war.”

  “You kidding? They’re practically giving them away. Try over by the Reichstag. Couple of bottles of Canadian Club should do it. You just got in, huh?”

  “Just.”

  “How about I buy you a drink? I could show you around.”

  “Now, what would your mother say?”

  “Hey.”

  “Easy,” she said, then nodded toward Jake. “Besides, he gets mean.”

  The GI glanced at Jake, then winked at her. “Maybe next time then, babe. Thanks for the picture.”

  “There’s one for the books,” she said to Jake as the GIs moved away. “I never thought I’d get picked up in Hitler’s office.”

  Jake looked at her, surprised. He had never thought of her being picked up at all. Now he saw that, scrubbed of combat dirt and bluff, she was attractive. “Babe,” he said, amused.

  “Where’s the bunker?” ‹›“There, I guess.” He pointed through the window to the back courtyard, where a group of Russian soldiers stood guard. A small concrete blockhouse, a scarred, empty patch of ground. The two GIs were being turned away but offered cigarettes around until the guards stepped aside to let them take a picture. Jake thought of Egypt, the valley of bunkers where the pharaohs had gone to ground, in love with death. But even they hadn’t taken their city with them.

  “They say he married her at the end,” Liz said.

  While the Russians ran wild overhead, the very last hour.

  “Let’s hope it meant something to her.”

  “It always does,” she said lightly, then glanced at him. “I’ll come back. I can see you’re not in the mood.”

  Everybody wants to see the bunker, Ron had said. The last act, right down to the ghoulish wedding and finally, too late, the one shot. Now a story for the magazines. Did Eva have flowers? A champagne toast, before they put the dog down and Magda murdered her children.

  “It’s not a shrine,” Jake said, still looking out the window. “They should bulldoze it over.”

  “After I get my picture,” Liz said.

  They moved back into the gloom of the long gallery. There were the broken-up chairs again, stuffing bursting out of the bayonet slashes. Why had the Russians left it like this? Some kind of barbarous lesson? But who was here to learn it? GIs were taking pictures by the fallen chandeliers, oblivious tourists. Near the wall was a heap of medals, thrown out of drawers. Iron Crosses. When Jake bent over to pick one up, a souvenir for Ron, he felt like a gravedigger scavenging through remains.

  The uneasy mood followed him up the street, the mountains of rubble no longer an impersonal landscape but the Berlin he’d known, a part of his life knocked out too. At the corner, Unter den Linden was gray with ash. Even the Adlon had been bombed.

  “No,” Ron corrected him. “The Russians burned it, after the battle. No one knows why. Drunk, probably.” ‹›He looked away. But what was a building, compared to the rest of it? The hands you couldn’t shake off. Across the square, the Brandenburg Gate was standing, but the Quadriga had skidded off its mount, like a chariot overturned in a race. Red flags and posters of Lenin were draped on the columns, hiding some of the shell holes. As they passed into the Tiergarten he could see a large crowd milling in front of the Reichstag, GIs exchanging their bottles of Canadian Club, Russian soldiers examining wristwatches. Some of the Germans, like the two women near Tempelhof, wore overcoats in the hot afternoon, presumably to hide whatever they’d brought to sell. Cigarettes, tins of food, antique porcelain clocks. The new Wertheim’s. A few young girls in summer dresses were hanging on to soldiers’ arms. In front of the Reichstag, its charred walls covered with Cyrillic graffiti, soldiers were posing for pictures, another stop on the new tourist circuit.

  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 famil
ies 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 Kurfiirstendamm 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.