I “read” the Bunker. If the tables and chairs rattle, it’s a medium attack. If only the walls shake, it’s not nearly as bad as when the ground bucks in a maximum hit.
I “read” other things. Everyone coming in wears phosphorous buttons on their coats, tiny round lights to help them find their way around the streets at night. There are ten straight-back chairs placed Italian style along the wall outside the map room for those who wait to speak to Adi, people who have many different ways to show their anticipation. Diplomats look stern, facing each other in little groups. Newspaper people are casual with their legs sprawled. Flexing their arms nervously are civilians. All act similar in entering and leaving the Bunker, more hopeful when entering, more wary when leaving.
When I’m eager to learn more about the war, I choose an old officer like General Korseman. Since he has no need of promotion, he’s less guarded and talks more easily.
“Fräulein,” he would say, “how difficult it is when bombs go down 50 tons a minute for 45 minutes in Hamburg. Americans are also dropping leaflets that state, Das war Hamburg. Imagine: This was Hamburg! Now those papers floating down say, ‘this was Germany! We forbid anyone to touch the leaflets for they could be dusted with poison.’”
“We lost one-eighth of our industrial production. That’s 30 less U-boats a month from the destroyed Hamburg Howaldtswerke shipyards,” I add.
“Yes, Fräulein. You have a remarkable mind for important matters.”
“But the Führer has injected concrete into his staff’s morale after Hamburg with strong speeches to uplift us all. When he speaks and sways, you can see the people sway with him. If he leans forward, they lean forward,” I say proudly.
Besides talking to officers, I also deal with what I call “beseechers.” A distinguished looking civilian or courier will pull me aside and make a request. “Fräulein,” they will say, “I wish to talk to the Führer.” Taking out a piece of folded paper, they ask me to give it to Adi. It would be about pardoning a Jew, a suggestion for the war effort, or the invention of a new weapon. They look for any way that takes them into the inner circle. I smile and ignore their pleas.
The Wehrmacht has a system of proxy marriage for soldiers at the front, and two lieutenants came happily into the Bunker one day on their way to the northern sector to inform Goebbels that they were just married. Their intended wives back in Leipzig went to the local registrar and took the marriage vows with their hands upon a steel helmet. It was all very romantic. Goebbels rewards such soldiers with chocolates, an autographed copy of Mein Kampf, and a sturdy pat on the back. The grooms refused to eat dinner with us for a soldier is warned never to fill his belly before battle. Shot in an empty stomach is better for survival. And off they went singing,
Psychics come down to make Adi’s chart or read his cards. (It’s rumored that Churchill hired an astrologer to find out what Adi’s astrologers are predicting.) But I have no use for astrologers. Adi is my present and my future, and there is no need to consult anybody else. One psychic told me that when the Führer shuffled cards for a reading, it was the weakest shuffle ever seen. “He’s war weary,” I explain with irritation. “Can’t you even read that?”
I study the soldiers who come into the Bunker. They’re so easy with violence, scraping the mud from each other’s uniforms with their bayonets and often singing,
Goebbels gives us lectures on new things like psychiatry. I study paintings from his collection that he keeps in a metal fireproof box and learn about cities and countries from Adi’s generals. Each day I talk to diplomats and commanders. I decorate, plan lunches, look after my clothes, exercise, and play with the Goebbels children.
When there’s water on the Bunker floors, Magda and I make small paper boats for the children to float down our own little Spree. Goebbels brought in an old motor tire, and we roll the little ones inside it along the walls as they scream in excitement. We have to improvise games as Magda let the children take only one toy each to the Bunker.
I am carefully reading books on a list Goebbels gave me, but I was disturbed half way through War and Peace. The book torments me. It’s easy to see that the novel is about Napoleon’s conflict with Russia. When Napoleon retreats from Moscow, I cried. Not for Napoleon but for Adi.
I can’t read all the time. When Magda and the children are sleeping, when everybody’s in the map room and even the stove isn’t bubbling with meals, when I have absolutely nothing to do, I find other ways to fill the hours. I lie down in my room only I can’t sleep because I know the afternoon is Adi’s busiest time. I sometimes put on his fur-lined military goggles to feel a hint of his face. Listless and useless, unable to help him, I think of the unseen murderous blue sky above and that forces me to burn myself alive, like a sunflower yellows itself alive. Moving my hand slowly between my thighs, I linger, sink deeper to find that dark tribe smelling strongly of the earth. I rub slowly. I’m foamy. A sharp smell of wild apricots. Faster. I’m crusty in this imitation of a noble act that will be fulfilled on my wedding night. Ready to explode, my tender little knob that Adi calls the Old Silesian is forever primed, this grandeur and nobility of my body. Arab women Goebbels met had their Old Silesian surgically removed when they were little girls thus becoming wooden dolls and feeling hardly anything but able to continue love making in a mechanical way hour after hour with nothing but sandal oil to help them along. I can’t touch my “old silesian” too much as it will go off right away and then I’ll have nothing left for the remaining hours. Patience and control, like a good soldier. Never firing off at will. To spark at the right time. Let the “old silesian” stand at attention, let it quiver and be in amazing agony without rank. Think of things. Anything. Just to keep the “old silesian” simmering, never to boil until the afternoon dies. Time. Take up the slack of time. Thinking: Adi, when I first met him, his clean uniform showing the sharp creases so carefully ironed. Those military buttons, each one standing erect, refusing to lie flat against his firm chest. His straight proud body, unlike any other, complete, everything perfect. His form so honest, so intelligent, not only what the eye can see, but underneath, beyond the eye, toward purpose and mission. His great German objective in spite of generals who walk on maps not roads, harping on colonies and tanks. Once I saw Adi’s name scrawled on a stone wall, and I glowed with happiness and carved my initials beside it—E.B. Whenever Adi wrote me a note, I pinned it to a chain and wore it around my neck. Now thinking… silly Goebbels cured actress-lovers of snoring with drugs. The Duke of Windsor loving that woman who Goebbels said was like sticking it into a tree-crotch. My swimmer’s swagger Adi loves. Feather grass, moss, lichen at the Berghof. Singing,
I use an old church chalice as a vase and stopped making slash marks on the concrete walls to designate the days passing. That morning at the beauty shop when Adi was preparing for Barbarossa, an operation so big that even the people in Berlin knew, and the hairdresser who heard rumors of who I was wouldn’t curl my hair for fear he’d frizz me into reprisals. Awful pain of my second inoculation against typhus in the Bunker. Yesterday, roast hare for lunch, killed by a landmine, the fat juice from the hare’s breast spilling grease on my chin. Now I’m rubbing harder, urging a pattern of dew, tamping down. The wood orchids by the Berghof. First thing I remember in life, standing up in my baby bed waving my arms to be picked up, but mother’s in the next room scrubbing the floor. Tiny wooden slats hem me in, and I want out of the crib. Mutter’s wash bucket scrapes the floor. The milky white floor. Flinging my arms over and over to the empty air, I realize even then that I hate waiting. Short curls in a globe below my firm belly. This is the silky hair he feels. I ease in, stop at the crevice, glide back and forth. Strategy is nothing, of little importance now. There, there, so tender, so eager. And not even willing it, I pop. And the Bunker sinks into night. The afternoon is over.