Ernst leads me to the lookout tower Speer cleverly built that’s attached secretly to the upper bunker where there’s also a scissors telescope installed.
Ernst asks if I’m quite sure I want to see Berlin. He ran home to his Zoo Keeper’s House after this morning’s bombardment, racing up the stairs as fast as he could. Then the steps just stopped. Going nowhere. All the floors above had disappeared, wiped away like they were drawn in chalk. His mother was gone (the sweet mother whose name he has), and he found no trace of her except one pair of cork shoes that rested on the stunted railing as if she had placed them there for a moment and would shortly return. Demolished was the large room where every year they decorated the Christmas tree Bavarian style with apples, pears, cookies and little chimney sweeps made out of baked prunes. And now he understands another mother he saw: when a 10th story apartment building split in half from a bomb—her children falling below from the other side—she just ran out into the burning space after them.
He hopes to get “bombing leave” to stay home and help his father with rebuilding.
He begins to cry, the tears making thin furrows to his lips where he sucks them in and spits them out, a boyish angry gesture. I don’t know what to do because nothing gets me more addled than seeing a man cry. Adi would be disgusted to see Ernst weep in the Chancellery Garden, of all places, tears falling on the noisy wax paper covering the dumplings. Ernst lets weakness flaw his character, but I’m still sympathetic remembering what Goebbels said: “If you read the Iliad, you know soldiers cry.”
Looking at Ernst, I do the one thing I can do for a man from Bavaria, what any woman would do in my place. I undo the middle hooks on my blouse and put his hand on my bare right breast.
That stuns Ernst. His tears abruptly stop. Sucking in his breath and panting, his hand begins to move down and that’s when I push him away. I’ve made enough concessions in the name of pity. If he had only slid his hand upward instead of down, he could have roamed longer. Even if he claimed my nipple, I wouldn’t have cared. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping my breasts faithful. Adi doesn’t like breasts not only because his mother lost hers but also because they remind him of his father who sat at the kitchen table without an undershirt, that father who married his sweet mother, that father who made slurping noises with his stone false teeth and displayed chest orbs like rump cheeks. When the old man finally died, Adi said to his mother, “When a woman has a son like me, she has no right to remarry.”
But my vee is His. I wouldn’t let anyone but Adi touch it. I’m incapable of that kind of indiscretion, and I’m unable to lie which is good because a habitual liar thinks everybody else is lying all the time, too, and how can you live that way? Not that any of this really matters when you’re deeply in love.
“I’m not as young as you think. I’m certain to win the Sturmabzeichen, the hand-to-hand combat medal,” Ernst tells me.
“I’m quite aware of your superior hand work,” I answer coyly.
“I can pull a nail out of a board with my teeth.”
“Save your young teeth for nipping better things.”
“Please don’t think I’m just a messenger. I’m with a point company, too.”
Moving with serious steps to the lookout tower, I let him know that I’m once again the Führer’s future bride, and his eyes are moist with a different kind of sorrow. He’s tasted something marvelously forbidden, something beyond what he is entitled to, a gift that will stay with him forever, even beyond grief. And I think… they work! Having not been used all these years, my breasts still work!
Then I look out over Berlin.
20
BERLIN HAS NEVER BEEN MY FAVORITE CITY. Because it’s official, I was never able to be with Adi when he was meeting heads of state and diplomats and all the Reich’s parading troops. In Berlin, I was the most invisible. There were no strolls, arm in arm, on the Linden or romantic sailing on the Spree. I was alone, looking at night games illuminated by searchlights that filled the sky. Now, seeing the wounds of this great and historic city, I begin to be sad for the Berlin I’ve somehow failed to love, like the boyfriend who gets away—the boy who was handsome and rich and wasn’t properly cherished. Now that I belong here, the city is in ruins.
Napoleon had plaster models made of all the monuments he hoped to build, even modest statues for his smaller victories. He didn’t get to build them. Seeing all the smoking ruins before me, Adi will never realize all his monuments, either. Not that this lessens what he’s already accomplished.
Many feet above this city that is finally mine, smoke mixes with dim mangled beams, gutters, radio aerials, carpet pieces, clothes hangers, roof slates, nailed boards, sliced telephone poles. A flat truck with V.2 rockets stands in flames. Screech of sirens as the ground shakes. The main quarters of I.G. Farben is gone. Floating through the streets, thousands of marks, now worthless money, look like falling leaves one would never notice. A painted wooden sign—“Swing Prohibited”—sails into a ditch as a newspaper kiosk spills sheets of bad news into the street and cigarettes blast like confetti from a tobacconist’s stand. As if severed by the clean swing of an ax, stores and apartment buildings are cut in half and quartered. Everywhere is the thunderous crunching sound of roofs falling. In the Wilhelmplatz, where once trees were chopped down so Berliners could view the Führer’s head and shoulders from the high balcony of the old Chancellery, only flames and plumes of smoke are visible. The balcony hangs by a ribbon of iron.
How does Goebbels stand it, constantly surveying bombed cities to examine ruins?
Between broken gas pipes, tiles, window frames and smashed high-tension cables are twisted linden trees. In all Germany there is the saying that when the linden goes, so goes Berlin. I was a school child who warbled, “As long as the old trees still bloom on Unter den Linden, nothing can defeat us.”
Few birds are left in Berlin. Flying at crazy angles, sparrows and wrens twist their heads to one side. One drifts on its back through oily waves of black and yellow smoke as if it were leisurely bobbing along on water. I visualize floating on my back by its side, both of us in a different, calmer ocean.
I’m told that the zoo has been hit by 36 bombs. Smoke slowly fades, undressing the red pagoda entrance cluttered with wounded and dying animals that gasp and limp past gutted burnt trucks. Heading down the Linden, they quack, snarl, growl, howl, their vivid colors refusing to blend with debris.
A giraffe, his neck nearly severed in strings of bloody clots, pushes blindly into creatures covered in plaster and brick dust.
With a man’s leg in its mouth, an elephant plods onward with the fin of an unexploded shell sticking from its side.
“Poor elephant,” says Ernst, “I know him well. His trumpet woke me up every morning with the church bells. Now the poor thing has no idea that he wasn’t born to carry a human stump in his mouth.”
Peacocks, bobcats, a whitetail deer move by the heap of bricks once the Ufa-Palast Cinema.
Soaring wildly, an owl with wires sticking from its eyes aims for the blazing Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church before dropping into the fire.
“That owl was born on my birthday.” Ernst’s voice quivers in sadness.
Beavers breathe bubbles of blood from their noses. An antelope with its hindquarter gone. A seal—forelegs burning. A stampeding hippopotamus with swollen eyes rams a Biedermeier-like lamppost in agony, its rear full of shrapnel. As the warthog and its baby try to burrow in twisted ironwork, Tiger tanks and Panther tanks mingle with real tigers and real panthers.
I walk in the direction of the zoo knowing Adi will not be annoyed that I leave the Bunker entrance to assist animals. I instinctively follow behind Ernst, cowering the way I have done so many times in the past when I was afraid to be seen, feeling a former shame like an amputee feels a lost arm. But Ernst pulls me forward, and we walk boldly.