Magda then took out a curious can from a bag she held close to her side, an Oscar Meyer tin her husband found on a dead Russian soldier. No doubt American food packages had reached the Russians. It once held something called Spam. I tasted Spam once and hated it, but Americans are known to fry it up like pork sausages, smacking their lips. Göring said Spam tastes like human flesh and that’s why Americans like it.
“I plan to glue tissue paper around this can, fill it with pralines for your bedside table on your wedding night.”
“Or I can put in some flowers from my bridal bouquet,” I said happily. “Adi’s ordered something special, but he won’t tell me what.”
“I know,” Magda teased.
“You know?”
Magda’s response was a sly smile.
“Tell me. Tell me. I can’t wait.”
Magda wouldn’t give me a hint. As I chased her around my bed, we laughed and fell on the pillows, and it was then I knew why men were forever after Magda. Lying on her back, those bloated snow-pancakes of hers spread like lumpy batter from waist to neck. I was tempted to taste them scrambled, those pumped up Kaiserschmarren. But I remembered what Adi said about any old building on Potsdammerplatz being better than anatomy. You can’t walk through Magda’s breasts or pace the length of her nipples like floor plans. Even our Bunker is better than fatty tissue—for in looking up at concrete, I can see it’s white sweaty bones. How can you pick up scale under all Magda’s spongy skin and tissue? Scale is the distance between two sturdy trees not two doughy mounds. Adi says he’s afraid of feelings not meant for buildings.
Magda has broad shoulders. But not without help. With boxes full of shoulder pads, she uses them so often she looks deformed, perhaps to show up her husband’s club foot. As if this were a way to get revenge for his flaunting of mistresses. With three pads on each shoulder, she will look at Josef from head to toe as if he were a glob of green mold on a hunk of dying cheese.
Longing to be political as well as sensual, Magda spoke on the radio during the early years of the war, mostly on Mother’s Day. “Produce children,” she urged. “Kinder, Kirche, Kuche.” She called her speech “Babies, Mothers: Mothers, Babies” using this title because she didn’t know which of the two words should come first. Exalted in being a fine German mother, she hoped to inspire other German mothers. She also publicly announced to the world that she would never leave the Führer’s side.
She stops babbling about her past triumphs, realizing there will not be another radio broadcast to proclaim her loyalty. And she hasn’t delivered twins or certainly not many twins, something the Reich desires of all married women.
“On your wedding night, Eva, you will… will finally get what you want.”
“How do you know what I want?”
Magda has a way of projecting her own desires on me. But what else can she do? She’ll never have Adi the way I have him. I feel sorry for her from time to time.
“I know my Führer well enough to realize he can never fully give of himself. Except to the Reich.”
Magda learned the military way of speaking curtly, her head up, standing straight. That’s her method of keeping some of Adi to herself. Wasn’t she part of his official world?
“Oh, I’ll get his full self.”
She was startled by my confidence, maybe even fearful of it and changed the subject to politics. “This hell going on up there is only a test,” Magda pronounced as we both walked to the dining area for coffee to steady her large dose of Veronal. “A divine test. They’ll all know that in the future. The world will know he’s right. We will never lose for it cannot happen because it must not happen.” The generator was still and there wasn’t enough air to stir the blond tendrils of hair by Magda’s forehead. She looked like a woman in a wig. “What do people expect from peace when they will have to do everything? In wartime, we have a great Hitler to think for us.”
15
ON TOP OF THE BUNKER, Bormann receives Hans Baur who comes roaring up in a motorcycle sidecar wearing a leather coat and his Golden Badge of Honor to signify his early party membership. His camouflage cap brashly on one side over his ear, with a firm vulture beak of a nose, he struts into the room interrupting Magda and me for another of his breakout plans.
“Please convince the Führer that he must leave for the Berghof. Now! I can still fly all of you out.”
“Hardly the optimism our Führer demands,” I remind him.
“I can be optimistic only as a soldier. As a simple human being, I despair of what is being done to my country. I must fly him out.”
“He won’t go,” I say.
When Josef Goebbels comes in, Hans Baur starts on him. “Herr Goebbels, the enemy shoot children sleigh-riding. This is not a noble war. I can fly out your little ones.”
“Magda put them down for their nap. Come, have onion cake in the dining room. It’s from the Rheinpfalz.” Josef stares upward as if the city of Rheinpfalz is visible on the ceiling.
Hans Baur refuses onion cake from the Reinpfalz. He has sandwiches in his pocket. All the pilots I have known have sandwiches in their pocket. He wears a dignified black uniform of the foreign ministry that looks very much like the SS. His cousin got him the uniform. Better not to be identified as a pilot, especially the pilot of the Führer.
“Do you think I’m not careful with children?” Hans snorts.
“You’re the Führer’s pilot, what more is there to say.”
“There is quite a bit more,” Hans says more politely. “I’ve been flying since the age of sixteen, got my aerobatic license at seventeen. I’m the only soldier who reported to the Luftwaffe with my own aircraft.” I know he wants to make sure Goebbels realizes that a breakout would be in most experienced hands. Assuring us that he has good eyesight, Hans states he can see anything no matter how far away and can fire from the clouds down to the treetops if need be.
“You must be a good hunter as well. Have you been with the falcons lately?” Goebbels asks.
“I have no time for that,” Der Chef Pilot tells him.
Hans has no dueling scars. He carefully avoided them at the university because most dueling scars are rumored to be self-inflicted. But for Magda, these wounds—real or not—are attractive. As a child, she etched a line on her chin with a potato knife. Her mother took her to a Swiss plastic surgeon to get it erased. What man, her mother said, would marry a woman with a self-imposed scar on her face.
“And your girlfriends,” Goebbels asks smiling. “Are they all well?”
“Women are virgins till we fly them over the Reich.” When excited, he answers in broad Swabian.
Both men laugh loudly and slap each other on the back. Goebbels doesn’t know that der chef has flown Magda over Munich.
“So you have been very busy, no doubt,” Goebbels says. “One after the other Fräulein going over the Reich.”
A pheasant flew into his propellers yesterday. Bloody feathers smeared his leather helmet when he landed. He laughs, but I know those feathers made him think of Magda in her splendid hats. Everything makes him think of Magda.
Hans Baur is serious knowing there’s not much time left, not for him or for all the girlfriends he has carefully hidden in towns and villages. His country is drowning, and he has only one objective—to rescue his Führer. “Why won’t Mein Führer leave?” Hans moans to Goebbels over and over. Being so depressed, he has to go to the half-bombed Tippel Pub on Linienstrasse every night singing melancholy songs: “Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei. All of life goes by. All of life has its time. After one month comes another.” The pub musician pounds on a war-damaged harmonium with lost keys, and everyone has to hum the missing notes.