Since flying the wounded to hospitals, Hans plays Skat and 24, 40, 48 Grand Slam with other pilots at the now underground Kustler Eck, drinking too many stone mugs of beer. How is it possible for him to fly all of Germany out of Germany because that’s what he feels he must do. Last night he heard a soldier with no arms playing the Beer Barrel Polka on a little tin harmonica, a Manoli cigarette in his mouth. (Hans marched off to war one September morning in 1939 to that rousing polka.) A nurse placed the harmonica in that soldier’s mouth and he puckered in a special way to keep the harmonica and the cigarette both between his lips. But the tune now sounded mournful.
Magda saunters in smiling with that secret way she has, her eyes heavy lidded, the ends of her lips slightly dipping downward. Hans is happy to see her so casually dressed with one shoulder bare as the children no doubt tugged at her clothes as she put them to sleep. Quickly greeting us, she then goes back in the room to her children.
Bormann enters looking tired, raw, and resembling a fat line of ground beef from a very large meat grinder. “Hans, what’s the news?”
“What news?” Hans asks innocently.
“What is coming at us?”
“Mostly mortars, Herr Bormann. Though only yesterday, I emerged from cloud cover to go directly into a fierce rage with five enemy crates. I hosed them with shells, but got hit in my engine cowling panels. Luckily my plane flattened out and made a perfect landing on its belly in a cabbage field.”
“Keep track of the numbers. Record it in triplicate. The Führer likes numbers. By the way, I admire your part in the Rosarius Traveling Circus.”
“Yes, we learned a lot about the enemy as you know since our flights were comprised of all the airworthy captured planes we could find. I’ve become familiar with enemy techniques and now if the Führer will just let me…”
“Yes… the Führer appreciates your efforts.”
Bormann doesn’t acknowledge Goebbels’ presence or mine, quickly darting into the map room.
“He didn’t give me time to explain the breakout,” Hans says.
“It’s useless.” I pat his arm.
“She’s right,” agrees Goebbels.
“The breakout must come now. Now! What is the Führer thinking?”
“He’s thinking of the rotten Weimar government and still carries an old letter stamp in his pocket that cost tens of billions of marks. We drank Weimar coffee as it doubled in price while we drank it. He has a lump of coal on his desk. Can you forget that the Weimar government had to back up currency with coal! What else can he possibly be thinking? If you both will please excuse me, I must now commit map perjury for the Führer’s morale.” Goebbels enters the map room with an early-war flourish.
“I had no intention of offending the Reichsminister.” The chef pilot sits on a trunk that wobbles as I use it for a table not a bench. Two soldiers found the trunk outside the rubble of the Friedrichstrasse Train Station, and I had them make little legs that they attached with wooden screws. “What do you scribble all the time, Fräulein?”
“Memories. Delights. My life with a genius.”
“Why?”
“To mark my existence with the Führer. Who knows that truth better than I do… about how honorable and brave he is?”
“Little monk, little monk, you are taking a hard road,” Hans recites.
“Whatever does that mean?”
“That applies to our great leader—the famous words of Frundsberg to Dr. Martin Luther before the Diet of Worms in 1521.”
“You can compare Adolf to a monk?”
“Courage is courage, is it not?” Hans takes a sandwich from his pocket. “This bread may have come from a Berlin bakery on Kurfurstendamm. Just occupied. A Russian might have taken the pan from the oven, thrown the loaves on the table. Maybe that Ivan is now on his way to the Führerbunker.”
We both stare at the sandwich.
“Don’t eat it,” I say. “We have good potato noodles and orangen biskuit. I’ll have something to eat with you.”
Walking to the dining area, the chef pilot blusters on in minute detail about a possible breakout. Hans’ adjutant recently left through the collapsing subway tunnels and over Lake Wannsee to carry Mein Führer’s last will and testament out of Berlin. Is not the Führer himself more valuable, more important than a will?
“It’s useless to go on and on about the Weimar years. Everybody knows that decadence. All the crazy art with no logic, no top or bottom or margins. Not even frames. They even stole door knobs,” Hans adds sadly.
We don’t feel like eating. Glistening noodles and vegetable cutlets stare at us from the plate. I think about the armless soldier playing his little tin harmonica with a cigarette still in his mouth. What can it all mean? Why doesn’t the world understand? How can I possibly protect Adi in all this distress? Should I encourage him to take Hans’ suggestion for the breakout?
Magda joins us at the table. Her dress is back in order but one sleeve has a damp spot where the children fell asleep against her arm crying. Jumping up to get her a cup of coffee, she waves Hans away and pours herself a glass of Holzschnaps from the douche bag that she carries in her skirt pocket. Hans drinks from his sour army canteen. I gulp sweet grape juice from the tumbler that has little Nazi hooked cross flags stretched evenly all around the chipped rim.
“Let me take the children out.” Hans begins his campaign once again. “There’s an emergency air strip near the Brandenburg Gate.”
“I can’t let them go without me.” She lapses into her usual nostalgia. “I can remember when we never ate without a printed French menu in the ambassadorial fashion.”
“I can take you out. You and the children. If you stay behind…”
“My husband will not leave,” Magda says firmly. “He’ll perform his duties to the end.”
“They are only babies,” Hans says softly.
“Of course they are babies. They’re mine, after all.”
“I have no intention of forgetting that. For this reason I must save them. I’ve kept planes ready at my underground hangar at Tempelhof airport. I recently flew Prince Viktor zu Wied to safety.“
“My children remain with my husband and me. When the time comes, I’ll take my dress apart. Sleeves. Sash. Collar. Skirt. I’ll throw the pieces in every direction so I won’t leave a souvenir for the Russians.”
Magda tugs at her dress, demonstrating her anger at the enemy. “Mein Führer only claimed what was his. The Rhineland. The Sudetenland. The Polish Corridor. People of Austria gave him permission to annex them, didn’t they? Why do they cry over France? What was he suppose to do, not invade?”
The two of them forget I’m present.
Alarmed at Magda’s outburst, Hans reaches out and grabs her hands as if she were a child having a tantrum. He whispers soft reassuring sounds to calm her. I’m fascinated. It’s a tender moment, one I don’t often find in connection with Magda. As his hands are large and hairy with chappy fingers, I can see why he has control and skill with that airplane stick up in the sky. Before Hans can calm her, Magda’s right sleeve is half ripped from her dress. He whispers war courage to her, his own stories of heroes. Oberleutnant Hofmann, the true patriot we can never forget, flying over and over. Only one leg. Flying over and over. Never giving up.
“A British plane dropped a peg-leg over Munich. They even included a gift tag addressed to Hofmann,” I offer with sarcasm. But they don’t hear me.
Magda turns calm. “Oberleutnant Hofmann was finally drafted to the hereafter, as Rommel was. Though I think we helped Rommy along.”
“Rommel, that sly Swabian fox,” Hans bellows. “What’s this myth about him being a great general? He spent too much time sitting on his heels in camel thorns like a native and no time with his supply lines. He had his ears so close to the ground they were full of sand fleas. He didn’t know what was going on around him.”