Smoke cleared in one area and in the middle of the street we saw a large player-piano with a woman covered in lime plaster sitting before it and watching the keys go briskly and automatically up and down as she brayed: “Hörst du mein heimliches Rufen. Oh, will you listen to my hidden cry? Please listen.” It was a wine song, I was sure of that. Beer songs are rowdy. This one was soft and dreamy wine. “Will you listen to my hidden cry?” But we didn’t stay to hear the song’s end and drove around the piano and on to a street where Sturmgrenadiers shouted and cheered while they force-marched a line of captured Russians. A captain was filming the Russian prisoners, and Krebs stopped the car abruptly and grabbed the camera from him shouting: “For the Führer!”
“Are we going on Uncle Führer’s autobahn?” Helga asked as her mother wiped a stringy gout of gray puke from around her mouth.
“No dear. We can’t go that way.” I sat half-turned in my seat so I could talk to Magda as she shifted her ample hips even closer to Oberleutnant Bickisch who was elaborating on his days at the Army Artillery School in Juterbog in order to let her know he was well prepared and that she was adequately protected.
“Is this over dressed pipsqueak in the back seat with us a private?” Helga wanted to know.
“He did come late to the Party and is a mere September Recruit. But I assure you, General Krebs would never assign a private to any Nazikinder.”
“I’ve told you, Mutter, over and over, I’m not a child. I’m a Nazi woman.”
“Yes, dear. And Herr Bickisch is a lieutenant.”
“If he’s not a private, why does he have short stubby fingers like all the rest of them?“
“I wouldn’t know, sweetheart.” Magda looked wistfully at the Oberleutnant who flexed his short thick shafts.
Trying to cheer us up, the general spoke of Errol Flynn, how the American actor wrote wonderful pro-Hitler letters and hung out with our good Nazi friend, Herman Erben. Flynn once sported his German uniform in New York City’s Time Square.
I reminded the general that Flynn was also in anti-Nazi films like Dive Bomber.
“That’s how he stays in our support without being silenced,” Krebs answered.
A shell whammed the turret hatch of a German tank just in front of us, and the lumbering vehicle slid across a sidewalk on its side and burst apart—no soldiers climbed out. Greatly fearing for her daughter, Magda threw Helga to the floor shielding her child’s body with her own, but Helga was indignant and bounded up again. We swerved around a dead flame-thrower, and I couldn’t tell by his mangled body if he was German or Russian. Since there was no formal front, we could run into the enemy anywhere. I had heard all the stories of war, how thousands died at one time across a static front. But the war I was seeing and experiencing was a personal one. Shrapnel sprayed all around me, and I was in the open. One could be the target of anyone here. Was it possible that I was right this moment in the sights of a brutish Ivan who wished to rape me off the face of the earth with his scheming bullet? The luck of lust is like the luck of war.
“I don’t see any Russians, but I can smell them,” Helga said.
“What do you smell, dear?”
“Horse poop.”
“We have horses,” I told her.
“Not Commie ones.”
As we tussled and turned in the streets, Helga bounced upon her mother’s lap as if she were riding a bucking horse.
Occasionally women waved their scarves at us. There was shatter tape on many windows, some defiantly and creatively worked into swastikas. Soldiers tried to put smoke pots around to smog the city.
Sniping picked up, and we all had to jump out and take cover under a partially collapsed porch. We were alarmed to find an unexploded bomb lodged in the railing. But the general instantly saw that the bomb’s casing had cracked open and was packed with cardboard. A good German in America—now our savior—had done a masterful job of sabotage.
“Berlin is kaput,” Helga said without emotion as we got back into the car.
No one contradicted Helga. Was it wise to attempt our pistol practice in the city? But weren’t we safe with General Krebs, a most experienced officer?
We passed the Die Neue Welt Bierhalle with its mother-of-pearl coated windows that stood untouched beside the ruins. Its beautiful black hostess had once been the talk of Berlin. Now her club’s interior was nothing but a standing wall scorched and burning. At the corner of Weimarer, we arrived at the popular nightclub Groschenkeller. Many nightclubs were ordered closed for the war, but this one was still open because it also served as a shelter. Air-raid sirens suddenly screamed and then high pitched wailing turned into quick short sinister blasts. General Krebs made us all jump out of the car and run at a crouch to the shelter where men dressed as women hovered in fright, forbidden to enter. Unlucky-looking people are excluded as they give off an air of death.
Entering the shelter, we found drunken soldiers wearing the blue uniform of the Luftwaffe Field Division. I could see a garter tattoo on the arm of a blowzy woman holding up a lantern. Everybody was shouting and screaming and crowding against the wall in the dim light of candles and kerosene lamps. Thick wooden beams lined the ceiling.
“I hope there are no vermin in here,” Helga said primly. She feared insects as much as she feared rats.
“These scrappy people you see are the only vermin in this shelter,” Bickisch replied.
Getting a direct hit, the shelter shook violently.
“Don’t be afraid, little girl,” Oberleutnant Bickisch told Helga, “these walls are very thick.”
“But does God understand concrete?” Helga asked.
“More important, Helga, your Uncle Führer does,” I stated firmly.
“Just take deep breaths when you hear a bomb. That keeps your lungs from shattering,” Bickisch offered.
Candles flickered in the shelter making shadowy outlines of men and women as they huddled together. A soldier leaning against the wall was oiling the pistol he’d taken apart. Magda sat close to Oberleutnant Bickisch for protection. I sat on the same army blanket next to Magda. Exhausted from our exciting ride, Helga fell asleep, her blond head resting in Magda’s lap. Discreetly strolling to the furthest end of the room, General Krebs settled happily beside a woman called Lola-Lola who wore an off the shoulder blouse. Kissing her hand, he then went upward until he reached Lola-Lola’s bare shoulders whereby he slowly began working downward.
Oberleutnant Bickisch began to stroke Helga’s hair tenderly where it lay spread out in Magda’s lap, his fingers lingering in strategic places. His hand disappeared underneath Magda’s blue skirt with the three pink bands near the hem. It was not well lighted, but I could see the glow on Magda’s face. Her eyes were bright, the same kind of brightness I saw in her daughter’s eyes when the child had a fever. It didn’t take long. It never did with Magda. She had all that perpetual foreshadowing from Goebbels. A slight upward movement of Helga’s head from her mother’s lap, and Magda sighed loudly, thumping her Schiaparelli topknot hat against the brick wall. Feathers drifted down into Helga’s hair.
“Sprechen Verboten” was printed all along the walls, but frenzied loutish sounds rose from the haze, the lustful shrill of the beginnings and the churr of those getting there. General Krebs was thrusting himself wildly inside Lola-Lola—right through her gauzy skirt. I hate passionate yelps. Adi will never let me cry out in such demented happiness. For me, it’s a very controlled whimper for he respects Joshua Reynolds paintings of restrained color and quiet strokes.