The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (67 page)

Lottie crosses to Budapester Strasse and strolls another few blocks. She stops at a shop across the avenue from the Zoo. Along with the BPO, the Zoological Gardens has been the other important public institution that remained open for the entire course of the war. Now the gate between the two giant terra-cotta elephants is padlocked. The sign says
closed.
The shuttered Zoo is an unexpected dagger to Lottie’s gut. Of course it had to close, she thinks; even so, this was the absolute last bit of light in Berlin’s life, and now it too is extinguished.

She steps into line at a grocery. There are fifty or more women ahead of her. She was wrong; the lines are not shorter here, or anywhere up and down the street. But the walk helped use up a portion of the day.

Lottie waits. She takes a step forward every minute or so. She’ll be in this queue for at least an hour. She doesn’t care. She’s got to be somewhere.

She talks to no one in the line. The older women look at her and lower their gazes, returning to whispered gossip. A few others in the line are near Lottie’s age. These younger ones keep their eyes on the sidewalk. One pretty girl looks back at Lottie. She smiles. Lottie sees this girl wants some returned gesture, some piece of Lottie’s hope she can take for herself. Lottie gives her none, and looks away.

After a half hour, Lottie’s feet begin to tingle from standing on the hard concrete. She walks out of the line a few steps to stretch her legs. The woman behind her closes the gap fast, and argues when Lottie wants to reclaim her space. The nearer the line gets to the door and the food inside, the more tension Lottie senses among the women. She plants her feet on the sidewalk to make a statement to the woman behind her and all of them, that she is their equal, as resolute as they.

When she is less than a dozen spaces from the door, Lottie hears sharp voices inside the shop. A few women complain about the portions the shopkeeper doles out. “This can’t be right!” they say. “This is too small! I need more! You’re cheating!” The shopkeeper takes a barbed tone in return. “Get out,” he says, “if you’re not happy with what I give you. Go to another store and see what they put out for you. Go on!”

Lottie hears the shopkeeper yell, ”No you don’t!” In the next moment, the ten women in line in front of her push through the door, jamming themselves into the small shop. Lottie doesn’t know what they’ve heard or seen, but it was something to make them rush forward, and she bulls in at their backs.

The shopkeeper behind his counter flails a white towel at the grabbing hands of twenty women. They fill their bags with as much as they can clutch off the counter, sweeping into their arms anything edible within reach. One woman hurries behind the counter to gain access to the shelves back there. In seconds she is followed by others, and Lottie. The shopkeeper is a fat man; no one should be fat when so many are hungry. This angers the women too. It implies that he’s a hoarder. Lottie hears the women tell him to stand aside, fatty, while they denude his store.

Lottie shoves into her bag a loaf of bread and many tins of pressed meat. She digs her hand into a pile of dry beans and scoops them in, spilling too much on the floor. Another woman doing the same pauses to give Lottie a stern look, admonishing her to be more careful and waste less when looting.

The shopkeeper throws down his towel. “Damn it! All right!” he shouts. Lottie sees him cross his arms and stand aside.

Women pour in the front door, as many as can cram into the shop. The items in the window are snatched up. Lottie can’t get to the place behind the counter where the coffee is kept, this is what she really wants. Her bag is full now and heavy. She got more than her rations would have allowed, but less variety. She heaves against the shoulders and bosoms on all sides of her, grabbing anything she sees, but she lacks the leverage some of these old women have.

In a minute the frenzy subsides. Lottie knifes through and makes her way out the door. There are foodstuffs left to be stolen but Lottie has enough and she wants to get out. The many women in line who did not participate in the ransacking confront the first few to emerge. Share! they demand. Thief! Lottie has no thought of letting any of these others have what she fought for. She uses her youth and runs away at the first angry voices aimed at her.

She doesn’t run far, no one gives chase. She crosses to the Zoo side of the street. The sack weighs less than the cello, but she’s grabbed plenty. Mutti will be pleased at her daughter’s audacity.

She walks along the brick wall of the Zoo grounds. Between the big elephants, at the closed gate, she pauses to stick her chin between the bars. The ticket booth to the left is empty. The mature trees of the Zoo are mostly chewed up, but several have the buds of spring pushing out. The Zoo smell remains, vast and green, the intrigue of wild animals and exotic lands stained forever into the air here. Lottie hears a monkey hoot, something big trumpets. Lottie stands in the gateway, breathing in this sorrow of Berlin.

A noise makes her look into the sky. A bird, an impossibly large bird, must be flying past. It must have a huge wingspan, it makes a low, swooping sound like nothing Lottie has heard before.

There is no bird. Turning from the gate, her stomach seizes. The sky above whispers, then screams.

The ground sunders.

Lottie is heaved back into the grate, slamming her head to the iron. The weight of the sack drags her to the sidewalk, stunned. Her vision blurs. A detonation has gone off across the street. There were women there a moment ago, a hundred waiting in line. Lottie blinks to clear her eyes. The women in the middle of the line are gone. No, Lottie sees, they’re still there, in bits. A hole smokes in the street, decorated with confetti of cloth and human beings. The survivors stagger away from the crater, blood on their dresses and overcoats. Those who can, run.

The back of Lottie’s head sears. She knows she is bleeding. She can’t get to her feet.

She isn’t sure for a second if the sounds she hears are only inside her head. There’s more hissing in the sky, more giant and impossible birds.

The Budapester Strasse erupts with explosions. There are no airplanes, no falling bombs, no air raid warning.

Lottie’s confusion parts with the blasts.

Russian artillery. They’ve come close enough to Berlin to shoot their long guns into the city.

Havoc bursts with the shells. The thousands of people gathered on the avenues are caught out of their shelters by the attack. They thought it was safe for the moment. Now they flee in every direction, shrieking, panicked, tricked.

Lottie looks up and down the boulevard. Flames rage on all sides, even behind her in the Zoo. She can’t hear the animals cry but guesses they’re dying in their cages and pools, just like the people running to nowhere in the street. Some citizens drop their bags and bolt, ducking from doorway to doorway, others brave the shells to pick up the spilled goods. Shells plow the road and buildings from one end to the other, no one knows how to dodge them, bodies are cleaved. Cars get knocked over and set on fire. Roofs buckle. One building that was barely standing is finished off by a direct hit and collapses.

Lottie keeps her seat against the Zoo gate. Several people running past vault her legs sticking out on the sidewalk. The pain in her head settles to a throb and she decides she can bear it. She folds her legs under her to be less of an obstacle for the runners. Lottie wonders, They run where? There are no havens in Berlin. The Russians have announced they are coming and they will destroy everything. These shells are not aimed at shops and old women. They’re not aimed at all. The Russians are just shooting from miles away, with no thought or design at all except killing Berlin. The reports are true, after all. So must be the bunker stories. There will be no mercy for Berlin or its people.

Lottie could stand and make her way back home. Her legs will work, her head wound is not blinding her any longer. But she sits, deflated, without the air of hope any longer inside her. She watches the rest of the attack, waiting for one of these Russian shells to land between her legs and blow a hole, an empty spot, where she sits.

Where there is no mercy there is also no protection. For the first time, Lottie senses she is no different from anyone in this city, not even the dead ones.

She should have gone in Speer’s car when she had the chance. She was wrong to think she could be a hero, that she could stay and bear this.

Two horses gallop down the middle of Budapester Strasse. Their manes and tails are on fire. Both animals are wild, neighing in pain. Lottie knows why they run, it’s all they can do.

With every explosion, she turns more inward. She heads in the only direction she can find that leads away.

~ * ~

April 27, 1945, 10:30
a.m.

With the Second Armored Division, Ninth U.S. Army

Northwest of the Barby bridgehead

Leitzkau village, Germany

the people running out of the village arrive by age. the
first ones to reach the tanks are the young girls, followed by mothers carrying small fry. Last are the older folks making headway on canes and each others arms. Frail ones stay back on their stoops, close to their own doors.

The captain in the lead tank speaks German and Norwegian, he’s from Minneapolis. Bandy stands behind the wheel in his jeep, the Leica around his neck. He shoots the captain leaning out of his hatch to take a bunch of wildflowers from a pretty lady. A scarf wraps her brown hair, she has long white arms outside of her maiden’s smock. When she goes up on tiptoe, Bandy squeezes the picture.

He steps down from the jeep and walks around the two Hell on Wheels tanks, to get a picture of three codgers in World War I medals. These men stand arm in arm, as though to block Bandy’s passage, but they’re just old war comrades supporting each other. They look to be seventy or eighty, but when he gets closer Bandy sees the old soldiers are not that ancient. They’re just lean from hunger and illness. The other village men their age, the ones who’ve fared better in health, are gone, probably sucked into the Home Guard. These three glare at Bandy, the American who has not come to free them.

The Russians are coming. No amount of flowers and pretty ladies will change that. The two Second Division tanks are just patrolling the outer edge of the Barby bridgehead, with Bandy tagging along in his jeep scavenging for photos. The Red Army has already reached the Elbe across from U.S. positions. Just two days ago, at the town of Torgau, fifty miles south of Barby on the river, soldiers of the Sixty-ninth Division of Hodges’ First Army linked up with a unit of Koniev’s First Ukrainians. Germany’s been
cut in half. Berlin is surrounded. It will be
a great picture,
the Soviets
and Americans meeting up. Someone else got it, some photographer who bet on the Sixty-ninth, who ended up in the middle of nowhere, then got the break of his life when his unit was the first to meet the Reds.

Bandy takes what shots he can in the Barby bridgehead. He has no idea how the photos are being treated at home. It’s not big news, this dead end on the Elbe. He pans the Leica’s lens across the village.

The whole place is sheathed in white sheets, banners of surrender hang from every window and veranda. The villagers hope the American tanks have come to accept this surrender. The captain explains to the dozens pressed around his tank that he’s not here to liberate them.

“Die Russen kommen,”
he says.

Bandy puts on film the outstretched arms, pointing fingers, and shocked faces, which translate easily: How can this be? You Americans are here now! You are right across the river. How can you leave us to them?

Bandy is the only Yank who steps down from his vehicle. The twin tanks have their turrets aimed in different directions, their engines at an idling growl. The captain and his counterpart ride high, above the white arms and old medals. Bandy is circled by the civilians. They plead with him. They insist. He lowers his camera. He looks into their eyes and does not even shake his head to tell them “No.” Bandy stands dumb.

Someone pulls on his arm. He turns in the direction of the tug but can’t tell who did it, there are so many crowding him. These are farmers’ daughters and wives and parents. All their young men are missing, many won’t be coming back. Bandy recalls a quote from Cicero: In peace, sons bury fathers. In war, fathers bury sons. The village livestock have vanished, taken by the retreating German soldiers. Their fields aren’t planted. If the seeds don’t go in soon, if the Reds don’t finish this quickly and send the surviving men back to their homes, there’ll be nothing from the fields come winter. The women want to start living their lives again this minute, with the Americans here. They bark at Bandy: Tell us we can go on. He wants them to know this is the way the Big Shots want it. You’re the ones who pay when they draw lines on a map. But he looks at them and listens to what he understands beyond language. Another hand pokes him.