The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (33 page)

“So just come out again.”

Freya shifts her eyes between her daughter and the door. She does nothing to interfere.

He says, “That would be asking too much of me.”

This again, Lottie thinks.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to get used to it.”

Freya raises a hand from her lap to daub at her eye.

He asks, “Lottie?”

She can tell where his head is, near the doorjamb, opposite the knob.

“Yes?”

“We’re all frightened. You’re not alone in that.”

A minute passes without words. Now that he cannot be a gargoyle, Lottie is unable to build an image of Julius behind the door. She knows little about Jews, other than what she’s been told over a dozen years by the Nazi machinery. She’s seen them on the street and in their shops, and admitted privately that they did bear a resemblance to the overblown swarthy caricatures drawn in the papers and on posters. The stories of Jews selling their own children, of hatching a secret plot in Zion to rule the world, Jews as demons, these are bogeyman slanders no one can take seriously. But she has never had a Jewish friend. They’ve been excluded from all the circles she’s moved in, mostly musicians. Jewish music has been banned for half her life. Jews are different. They confuse her, so she has not thought about them. She was a child when the Jews’ troubles began. And they were not her troubles.

“Do you know what it’s like outside during the raids?”

An odd question. He’s nervous speaking to Lottie, like a young suitor calling for the first time.

“No.”

“First comes the lead plane. It flies faster and lower than the others. It drops four flares in a quadrangle, to mark the bombing zone for the night. The first wave is right behind him. They always drop incendiary bombs to start fires, so the next squadron can spot the targets better. The sky lights up and the ground shakes. You can see the bombs falling, like black eggs. Searchlights swing back and forth until they find a plane. The flak towers open up with tracers. It looks like a battle between gods, between light and dark. Do you know what I do?”

“No.”

“I cheer under my breath with every bomb that lands on Berlin.” He pauses. “I know that sounds awful.”

It does. But Freya answers him, “No, Julius, it doesn’t.”

“Lottie?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how long Jews have been in Berlin?’

Another strange question. Leaping from topic to topic. Lottie thinks, he doesn’t get to talk much, with months spent in the silence of the cellar. And how many other cellars and years before that?

“No. How long?”

“The oldest Jewish grave in Berlin is in Spandau. The headstone says 1244.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yes. When I was a boy.”

Another puzzle piece. Now Julius has a childhood. Lottie sees a boy in kneesocks and a cap, in a weedy old cemetery, some wizened hat-wearing elder holding his hand, a grandfather, telling him of the Jews’ long history in Berlin.

As though he can read this vision in her head, the Jew says, “When the war started, there were over a hundred and fifty thousand Jews here. By 1943 there were less than twenty-five thousand.”

He does not have to say it, the terrible math speaks for itself. He may be the last one left.

Lottie glances to Mutti’s profile. Her mother’s eyes are fixed on the flat yellow door. Lottie turns to see if she can read the images there, what Freya sees, what the Jew seems to cast like a film projector with his baritone voice, his halting, sad rambles.

Lottie’s memory surprises her with how it awaits her. Broken glass, crystals on the sidewalks, remains of windows from shops, synagogues, homes. Little Lottie walks through the glass shards, scared of the sharp anger in them, that she might cut her feet even through her shoes and the anger infect her. The glass crunches and she feels like a monster walking on bones, she runs through a patch of it home and stays inside for days, she pretends to be sick, not telling Mutti that she is afraid. Signs. Hateful slogans, cheap white paper and black paint, yellow cloth stars sewed on overcoats. Stories whispered about
Hausjuden,
the house Jews, the good ones; everyone seemed to know one or two Jewish families who didn’t deserve such and such. Laws. Race laws. Shopping laws. Work laws. Art laws. Trucks. Rumbling trucks in the early morning hours through damp streets. Lottie looks out through her curtains. Men, women, and children are crowded like cows in the open beds. They wear as many clothes as they can put on, even in summer, hats, overcoats, scarves, and gloves. Trains. From Anhalter station, boxcars rolling through the city headed east, jam-packed, pale fingers sticking out of holes in the sides. Names. Theresienstadt, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen.

Lottie knew all this. Of course. Every Berliner knew these things. Every Berliner had a butcher, a milliner, a doctor, a teacher, a bookkeeper, and had to find another one when they went missing. When their families were taken. When their houses were occupied by Nazi officials, or some displaced Aryan family. For the dozen years since the hatred was unleashed, Lottie has done what even the best Berliners have done: avoid adding to the Jews’ misery. Just leave it alone. It is a tradition here. Seven hundred years old.

Julius the Jew is speaking. He’s telling his story, apparently for Lottie’s benefit. Freya has asked him to do this. It’s a fearful story, certainly. Married to a Gentile woman. She was his protection. She dies in a bombing raid. He loses his shield. Loses his job in an armaments factory. He hides day and night, becomes a “U-boat,” a submarine, a skulker. He fights treachery, hunger, fear, failing hope. Goebbels looks for the last Jews, with a powerful will to make Berlin, the capital of the Reich, a
Judenfrei
city. Lottie listens with half an ear. Julius’s story is remarkable and tragic, almost beyond comprehension for her. She doesn’t know this kind of passion for life, to live in such pain just to live. The closest she has ever been to that flame is in the music of the masters. Julius’s voice is soaring Beethoven, heart-pounding Wagner, breathtaking Mozart. Julius’s tale of catastrophe and endurance is operatic, musical. And though it is a music Lottie can hear, she cannot play it, so the travails of Julius the Jew begin to lose their hold on her. She slides back on his voice into old, comfortable German thinking. For an entire people to suffer so, they must have deserved it somehow,
nicht wahr?

What is he asking of Lottie with his tale? That she change? That by hearing of his misfortune she will metamorphose into someone better? That she will from this point on think only of his safety and not her own? That she will become good like Mutti, brave and feral like him?

No. Lottie knew of all these things he has endured before she was ever aware of Julius the Jew. She has averted her eyes; yes, all right, that much is true, she has been callous to the plight of the Jews. But being reminded of it in her own home doesn’t mean that suddenly she will learn some lesson. If that was going to happen, it would have already happened.

Lottie just wants to survive. That is the only thing she’s learned about herself slouching here at Julius’s yellow door. She shares that much with him. But only that. She’s not willing to be so damned honorable and peaceful and strong about it. Lottie is a brilliant cellist; her life does not lack for higher purpose or value. The Jew stays in the basement because he doesn’t want to get used to the open. Such discipline. So admirable. Ugh. Lottie winces as if she has bitten into a candy that strikes a raw tooth.

She reaches into her pocket for the remaining cyanide pill. She pulls her other hand free of Freya’s sweaty palms, the backs of her mother’s fingers wet with her constant drying of tears.

Lottie puts the poison packet into Mutti’s hand.

“Here,” she says, standing to go off to bed. “Give this to Julius in case his life gets too much for even
him
to live it.”

~ * ~

March 9, 1945, 9:15
a.m.

With the Ninth U.S. Army

Krefeld, Germany

bandy drops to his bedroll, folding at the knees, collapsing in
stages like a camel. The flimsy mat barely eases the hard bakery shop floor to his shinbones, he aches and rolls to his fanny. He spreads his legs wide for balance and dips into his dozen pockets. He dumps film canisters and packets on the mat like a tired little boy emptying his pockets to survey hard-won prizes.

He arrived—hitchhiking—in Krefeld yesterday, one day behind a vanguard battalion of the Ninth. He found shelter in the basement of a ruined bakery in the outskirts of the town. The street outside is ruined to the same degree as the rest of the town; Bandy has noticed how destruction leavens itself over the German villages and cities, spreading evenly in the manner of heat through a skillet.

Krefeld, four miles west of the Rhine, like every other place the eastward-pushing Allies have entered in the past two weeks, put up a skirmish, emptying itself of bullets and willpower, until there came a sudden capitulation. There’s almost a tragicomic regularity to it. The local SS men shove into the fray crazy believing boys with
Panzerfausts
and old Home Guardsmen with antiquated carbines. Together they fight with a bewildering fervor. The Americans make Swiss cheese out of every building that issues even a puff of smoke. Tankers have been known to level any structure that displays a Nazi banner over a railing, and equally to try to preserve any buildings hanging out white flags. The soldiers stay back and let the artillery do as much of the work as it can. When the infantry moves in, they do their best to avoid the teenagers they see riding bikes from hot spot to hot spot, antitank weapons strapped across the handlebars, and armed old men in gardening gloves; but always after the battles the body count goes far past German military uniforms. At some point, long after the fight has become clearly futile, hands go up, weapons go down, and voices call,
“Nicht schiessen, nicht schiessen! Halten Sie, bitte!”
The women of the villages and towns, the inevitable survivors, start sweeping up under the boots of the Americans. They thank the
Amis
for coming before the Russians. They kiss goodbye their living sons and husbands and fathers even before the men can lower their hands to be marched to the rear. The women cover the bodies with the white sheets of surrender.

Bandy takes photos of beautiful blond lads and grizzled World War I vets, lying dead shoulder to shoulder with Hitler’s finest. He snaps shots of prisoners, their frightened wrinkled cheeks and wet fuzzy cheeks, old and young with the same relieved and cowed eyes. He wonders with the U.S. soldiers taking them away: Are these the faces that an hour before were set behind triggers? What were the looks on them then? Bandy wants to hate the Germans for this waste of their only remaining resource, their people, but he can’t find hate in himself. He’s too frazzled. Some days he looks inside and finds only an unplanted field in his gut, nothing seeded, not hatred, not anger, not even sorrow, he can find nothing but black-and-white images of these sensations on other people’s faces.

In those times when the warfare is loud and trying to kill him and the men he is with, he is moved by a medley of dread and exhilaration. But when it’s quiet, like this morning, Bandy views the carnage around him through a strange intellectual filter; he has fallen into the habit of seeing the war as if it were already in the past, already history. The photographs he takes are not of smashed beings and crumbling things present and immediate but rather objects reduced by his lenses to monochromatic visions, reproduced flat on some future page in a book or newspaper, and he is not here looking now, but there looking back.

History is always. Bandy senses that he is becoming always too.

He’s been told by Victoria that a man cannot be that. He must live in his own life and time, he must be only now. She says history will kidnap you.

He is too worn out at the moment to put any more thought into history or his wife. They live on the same shelf in his head, bookends around the war. He pushes the film off the bedroll and lays back his head. He draws a deep breath. The wooden racks lining the walls in the bakery basement exhale their scent of bread they’ve held for perhaps a century. Bandy is glad that something good has taken hold so firmly that it cannot be uprooted even by war. The smells of flour, rye, pumpernickel, yeast, the tinkle of coins spread on the broken tables upstairs, dusty white aprons still hung on hooks, lay quilted across his chest.