“I have lice under my arms, sweet Evchen, my soup-love.” He sits on the bed, pulls me down to sit next to him.
I take my hand away from his and gently place my two palms upward under his arms. “Now I envy lice.”
“Eine Laus, der Tod. A louse means death.” Adi swallows one of Blondi’s worm pills without water.
“Lice can mean what you want.” I take my palms from his underarms and sniff them gently.
“Can you smell them?” he asks.
“I only smell you, sweet smells, your underarms like nougats.”
He smashes a louse grinding it into a tiny smear. “The end of it. Nil. No judgment. No after life. Like us.” He flicks the varmint off his fingers. “I must do everything before the end.”
But it’s my beginning, and I suck alternately the crook between each of his thumbs so he’ll know how I feel. The little black nest of hairs on his knuckles are tufts of women who want him and will never have him.
“You must leave the Reich capital with Hans.” He moves away, now a commanding Adi.
“Dr. Morell has his own pharmaceutical company and sells lice powder.”
“His stores are in Russian hands.”
“I won’t leave you, Adi.”
“The German people have let me down. I want our earth scorched.” The suspicious little slouching hump appears on his back as he stands. “The Allies must never capture and drag me through the streets like a monkey in a cage. Nor do I wish to be shackled in a St. Helena. Destruction is full of meaning. If one knows how to die well, Heldentod, a hero’s death, then one has eternal life.”
“How?” I ask calmly.
“I’ll take cyanide as I shoot myself.”
“Then I’ll die by your side.” I face him firmly.
“But with Hans, you can…” Adi doesn’t continue. He’s enormously touched knowing I’ve made up my mind for my hands cross over my chest in determination. Creases form around his eyes, and I wonder if he’ll finally weep. But there’s no moisture beneath his thick lashes. His weeping stopped when his mother died. As the Führer, he doesn’t have the water of common tears. Nothing falls from his lids or escapes. He blinks sorrow inwardly. Even saliva contains microscopic amounts of blood. Nothing from his marvelous body lets go.
“Don’t turn soft,” I urge gruffly. “You can’t let them do that to you.”
Slightly hunched, nearly trembling, the man before me is one I don’t recognize.
“Once you have lice, they stay. In war, there’s never enough time to get rid of them.” He scratches the graying hairs on his stomach.
“They’re only under your arms,” I say softly. Will these fleas smell of us?
Gaining composure, he stands erect. His back is nearly straight, and I can’t see the hump. He’s assured the Allies are not without defeat. Haven’t they suffered? Look at all their dead. My Adi is reviving. He’s right. This corporal from World War I, who never attended a military academy, has given all to his country by wounding and killing so many of our enemies.
When he was sixteen, he baked his paintings in his mother’s oven so they’d look cracked and ancient like the old masters’. But his paints came from a grudge (against rich bankers), and he realized even then that you only know the end when you know the beginning.
Taking a light red freckle of a flea from his armpit, he longs for a microscope. In World War I, there were fleas and young doctors who would let him see the neckless creatures on a slide. Fleas always find their victim and smashing the insect between his fingers, he hates the Bunker dampness that has brought them on. But I know it’s Blondi. Beautiful Blondi has given us these idiotic creeping leaping things that are the deadliest varmints in the world.
“It sucked you.” I take his hand and press it to my cheek.
“A flea’s sexual parts are a third of its body.” A slight stain lingers on his fingers. “They copulate for eight hours.”
“If we can’t kill them all, we’ll mock them all. You and I will mate for eternity.”
“You must be certain.” This time there’s no softness in his voice. Those blue eyes I adore have grown dark gray from stress and are as cold and riveting as I’ve ever seen them (eyes that Lady Londonderry once called wonderful and far-seeing). He’s testing me as if to say, I dare you, I dare you. But I’ve made up my mind for there is only one decision. Without him, I can have no existence.
I’ve waited for him, waited until he left his quarters, waited until he finished with his generals, waited until he awakened each morning. I am fetched then sent away. There’s sorcery in that hollow of waiting that’s as much him as the very hours he’s present, as the very breath that hits my cheeks when he pushes close to me. In death, we’ll wait together in history.
The wedding. He’s ordered flowers from a shop that operates in the basement of its original store that was bombed above. Flowers do exist. They grow at the Berghof, and they’re still in Berlin.
Our forests can’t be taken from us, Adi says. And it was Bormann who always championed weeds and pristine growth, encouraging civilians to eat “wild food.” Crazy Bormann, thinking of civilians when they’re the very people who let Adi down. What good did Bormann’s nettles, dandelions, and sorrel do? Flour made from yarrow, lettuce from nettle, soup from goat’s-rue, and all for the war effort. Even my mother made tasteless butter from figworts.
“Yellow tulips,” Adi says. “Be like a puppy to them.”
Magda knew all along. Yellow tulips.
I’ll hold my tulips to the end.
“Magda and Josef will follow us,” Adi tells me. “They don’t want to live. After we’re dead, Bormann will see that our bodies are completely burned. There will be no Führer-skull on display.”
“And the children?” I ask.
“They as well.”
“Even… Helga?”
“They have no wish for her to survive in a desperate world.”
Helga. Dead along with us. For a moment I’m angry. But I know that she can never be me, never have Adi as her husband, never know his glorious secreting tip when I finally become his bride.
I’m eager to be burned with him, to die in his fire. Eva Braun Hitler bones will not rest in some American museum or Russian government display case.
“At midnight, we’ll marry, my precious grenade, my Evchen.” He urges me to rest.
“Adi, the guards by the stairs have smelly feet. They should bathe and powder them once a day. Certainly for our wedding.”
“I’ll report it to Bormann.”
I have a sudden urge to see the light, to go up into the air and celebrate my happiness. The Führer will soon be mine. Just look at me now, Berlin!
“I have one last thing to do. I’ll need your permission to go to an apartment close by. I must see about a dress. I loaned it to a friend. It’s the dress I wish to wear for my wedding.”
“What friend?”
“Renate. A girlhood friend. A good Nazi. She used to work with me at the photography shop. You remember her? She had red hair and was a college student with a greenish rope birthmark on her ankle. You said it looked like a sailor’s tattoo.”
Renate borrowed my white chiffon spring dress for her brother’s decoration ceremony a year ago. Her brother fought on the Russian front and was awarded ribbons though his chest was partially destroyed and what was left was so sensitive and painful that they had to hang the ribbons on his ears. But what I really want is to see her face in disbelief when I say, “I’ll soon be Frau Hitler.”
“It’s too dangerous!” At that moment, shells rattle the bunker. We’re not alarmed and used to it.
“Her area is still within our safety zone.” I have already assumed the firm confidence of a wife.
I don’t elaborate on the total destruction up above. I can’t give him pain. “If I can’t see my friend one last time, if the enemy prevents that, then surely they have won.”