And indeed Falk’s chubby soft features were more feminine than soldierly.
With a half-erect penis, Falk ran from the room, an unzipped Jurgen following close behind him.
“These inexperienced soldiers.” Hermie flapped his penis so that thick scented powder flew from it and coated the water. Then he spurted and slowly deflated. “They are not going to throw the Soviets out of Berlin. The Youth Battalion should be evacuated in the Kinderlandverschikung, wouldn’t you agree, my dear?”
Yes, Hermie Göring could be amusing—once getting Adi’s toilet rigged so it flushed in E flat on November first. (November is important, of course, the month when shameful Germans capitulated in 1918 as well as the month of the failed putsch of 1923.) Such playful things as musical toilets can keep you going in a stressful time. But now that Berlin has been invaded by the Russians, stupid Göring had to set up a command post at the Berghof. He sent Adi that horrible telegram saying if anything happened to the Führer, he would take over. As if anybody else could take over. Adi was right to strip him of his rank. Many people were stripped of their rank and vanquished from the Bunker. One day they didn’t show up and you’d read about them in Wehrmacht reports. It cuts down on my social life.
7
FOR A FEW HOURS, I NEVER THINK OF ADI and study patterns on the walls, geometries of fissures and cracks that Adi said trained him as an artist. He was especially engrossed with frost lines on the kitchen windows when he was a boy. But such pondering makes me a little light headed, even scared. The fear is pure because I think of nobody in Adi’s place.
Other times, I watch the clock above a row of guns, the minutes moving slowly. Tedium forces me to take the empty Dutch gin bottle Göring gave me and fill it with hot water to put on my stomach and lie in bed. Loneliness comes unexpectedly. Silence is the same thing over and over, and when this happens I don’t even want to think about whether it’s breakfast or lunch. Knowing what meal it is makes the time go slower, like looking at an empty chair. Chairs are the saddest things on earth, always waiting for someone to sit in them.
On occasion I help Dr. Morell package Perubalsam Ointment, and iodoform and prepare special bandages for the hospital. Two years ago, I visited his strange laboratory in the basement of a hospital in Wuppertal. Morell was trying to get Gerhard Domagk— who considered himself a good German—to share in his discovery for sulphanilamide, a cure for tuberculosis. At the time, Domagk was a hero of science and worked closely with the Bayer Research Laboratories of I. G. Farbenindustrie, and Morell felt neglected. So Dr. Morell set up his own shelves with hundreds of guinea pigs (later it was said he used undesirable people) and injected them with a stain of human tuberculosis under their skin. Then he treated the furry creatures with sulphanilamide hoping to discredit Domagk by proving that the drug did not work. They were sweet little rodents in a variety of colors with mouths curved in the shape of a smile. He would sometimes become attached to one and dampen the purring pig with warm water to bathe it before wrapping it in a thick towel. “There’s a bald spot behind each ear,” Morell would explain as he gently applied a drop of mineral oil to the ears of his favorite one that he named Azo (Azo being a chemical link in sulphanilamide). When the animals got better from the drug, Morell kept giving them more and more injections of TB while they licked his hand in affection and the disease spread to their tiny internal organs. When their groins became grossly swollen, the licking stopped. I can’t forget the languid eyes of these creatures, their trustful passiveness as their spleens—it was clinically explained to me—became a mass of abscesses. I could only hope that Dr. Morell used a different needle when injecting Adi with vitamins.
Morell comes into the Bunker each day with the dead guinea pig Azo in a sterile sealed case as evidence and support for the Reich’s decision to force Domagk to sign a declaration to the committee in Stockholm declining the Nobel Prize. Domagk was later put in prison temporarily for being too polite to the Swedes and for dwelling on the sanctity of life in wartime.
So many people come in and out of the Bunker frequently and they stare as if in judgment of me. Officers in shiny rimless helmets shake my hand overly familiar as if our being in the Bunker creates an accepting intimacy. But it does help to pass the time. When I least expect it, I find that a day is over and I don’t remember getting to the end of it. Goebbels thinks the mind is really in the heart, and I want to believe this. When I feel an emptiness, I think of love. Love takes into consideration at least two people.
Today three soldiers drenched in syrup provided a diversion. A molasses factory in Dessau got hit and molasses was all over the roads two centimeters deep. I was offered a bucket of the goo and couldn’t help but laugh in spite of the disaster. Was I really supposed to eat trampled molasses?
Before bedtime, I brush my hair for 50 strokes. Mother said a woman has her best thoughts when brushing her hair. Adi gave me this brush with my initials in red stones on the ivory handle… E.B. The bristles hold strands of my dark blond hair. My brush has been on my dresser at the Berghof, on end tables in Italian villas, on the bureau of such hotels as the Adlon, Vierjahreszeiten and Dreesen. Now it’s home.
8
MAGDA IS SOME HELP TO ME as she comes from elegant people and can swank in open Maybach cars smoking French cigarettes rolled in yellow paper. She sits in tasseled damask chairs or goes for a leisurely stroll in custom-made skis. Biedermeier chandeliers and yards of tulle on the windows decorate her houses. Family maids were born in her upstairs bedrooms that look out on a swimming pool covered with lilies. An authority on where to place a gravy bowl on the dining room table, she can also be helpful with clothes, teaching me to wear sequin gowns because they don’t wrinkle when you have to sit for hours listening to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung after dinner at the Berghof. Dresses with sleeves that can be zippered off are best to pack for trips as they can be worn for two days in a row and still look different. I did refuse to wear a girdle she advised for I’m quite firm enough.
Magda and Josef have a villa where they keep a chess set made out of wood with carved Wagner pawns. Magda ordered a set made for one of Adi’s birthday parties, but the artist was killed when his house took a direct hit from a bomb. Josef and Magda offered him their Wagners, but Adi refused. Though Magda was greatly disappointed, Josef merely gave a wry smile saying: “Greedy Alberich, evil Beckmesser, the tart Kundry and all the other Wagner operatic people follow the Führer around like pet dogs.”
Not that Magda doesn’t get on my nerves, sitting around all the time wrapped in a white ermine chasuble and using her fancy background as a way of telling me what to do even though she has crude moments when she catches coins between her legs at parties after Adi departs early and everybody gets drunk. And she had an affair with automobile racer Manfred von Brauchitsch who later was denounced for subversive remarks. I refuse to let her control me, even when she brags of dining with maharajas as well as Prince Friedrich Christian Zu Schaumburg-Lippe or Prince August Wilhelm von Hohenzollern.
Not even my mother influences me. Only Adi can tell me what to do. And that argument Magda and I had about wearing trousers! Being an athlete, I wear them often. Magda objects saying she can hardly let herself think of any woman in slacks strolling on streets or paths not even Marlene Dietrich before she became a traitor. As pants are better for getting around the hills at the Berghof, Adi says they’re practical. Even Goebbels said it was all right. But Magda is a prisoner of fashion—in the Black Splotch or up above. During the early war years, she wore outlandish shawl-jackets and coats with silver filigree and big brass buttons along with soft angora sweaters and dresses that emphasize her insinuating arms. But evening visits with various officers left telltale fuzzy angora signs on their uniforms, and she was forced to stick with clinging silk. And I have stayed with trousers at the Berghof.