“Jawohl,” he replies proudly.
Smoking tracer rounds streak ahead. The flaming tail of a rocket salvo bursts over the truck in front of us, and it rears up taking a direct hit. Exhaust gases blow in my face.
“Get down,” the major yells. “They’ve got observation slots on the roofs. We have to keep moving. I can’t stop and get involved. I’m on an order that has to be obeyed.” He takes his helmet off and puts it on my head, pushing the strap still warm from his skin firmly under my chin.
Cinders fly into my mouth and my nose is running. The ground lurches under us. Two black crows perch on the warm plates of a tank. A soldier aims his weapon and fires a long burst at the birds and they fall to the ground beside a brown-uniformed Ivan with his head half gone.
“Yesterday I shot two Russians who were dressed in German uniforms. It was awful, Fräulein. How I hate these Ivans for their trickery. Firing into our own uniforms was so… so… monstrously upsetting.” The major is shaken in this memory, his voice strained, his eyes twitching.
War reins you in, yet it brings such nobility, I scribble in my memoir.
“First the Communists set our Reichstag on fire. Then the Allies set fire to Berlin. And to think I have an American stove in my house. My wife has grown attached to it and won’t let me haul it away.” Gripping the wheel of the car firmly, his large mouth moves vigorously as he chews gum with dedication. At each chew he puts his jaw to one side with the air of a gourmet.
“Major, please, I request you spit out the gum for patriotic purposes.” Everyone in Germany considers gum chewing an example of America’s degradation.
“Yes, you’re quite right. I forget as it keeps me steady, an awful habit I picked up when taking a course at Harvard. In the U.S.”
“You went to school in America?”
“Made the crossing on the steamer S.S. Hamburg. Took ten days. A beautiful trip. And before I left, I got such sound advice from Goebbels—expert advice that I carefully followed.”
“What did Josef tell you?”
“Go out for rowing. Row your guts out. Harvard loves that. And though my grades weren’t the best, I was a great success.”
The major becomes visibly pained by all the smoldering beams in our path. There’s no thought of Harvard anymore. “I have family that goes back many years. Under the Duke of Brunswick. Gunners—all of them.”
I tell the major I’ll be united to the Führer in just a few hours. “We’ll be married as a war couple.”
“I have the good fortune of helping retrieve your wedding dress.”
My wedding dress is itself patriotic since Renate wore it when her brother was decorated for bravery.
“And what will you wear in your wedding bed?” The major loosens his grip on the wheel and I think, So, even an officer whose cousin is a count wants to know what the Führer is like in bed.
“Major, don’t you find that rather classified?”
“I deal with the classified as a Golden pheasant.”
I don’t answer, for I’m stifled by the stench of death. The streets are stacked with bodies. What looks like heads and skulls are covered with silver and red powder drifting from the collapsing buildings.
Two heavy draft horses struggle to get up on bleeding legs. The major swerves to avoid hitting them.
“Don’t we treat wounded animals, Major? The Führer would not like leaving them like this.”
“Let me give you my scarf to use as a mask,” he says to change the subject.
“It’s necessary to see and smell what’s left. I won’t be turned away as a squeamish woman. Not when our badly wounded continue to fire back.”
“Good. You follow our no withdrawal policy.”
“Wouldn’t you expect that from the Führer’s future wife?” As I push my face as far as I can outside the window, smoke from a recently exploded artillery shell burns my nostrils. SS troops dug in beside an office building pop their heads up to salute.
“Look at that,” he says with irritation. “We’re forced to use old trucks with wood-burning gas generators.”
A little girl comes toward us holding a flower. Shells explode, and she makes what looks like a curtsey as blood oozes down her legs and covers her bulky pink socks. I want to stop and help her, but the major insists we keep going.
“My battalion adjutant has informed me that the Russians have our Lichtenstein bridge.”
“I’m quite aware of that, Major. I’m as informed as you are.”
“Look at these kids dressed like soldiers, closing their eyes when they shoot with old World War I rifles.” He yells: “Shoot low!”
“I think they’re rather endearing,” I say.
A baby lies in the street. We don’t see it in time and our vehicle runs over it without the slightest jolt.
“It was probably already dead,” the major says to calm me as I shut my eyes in anguish. “War is war. Schnapps is schnapps.” He sings: “O Susanna, oh weine nicht um mich, denn ich komm von Alabama…”
“Don’t sing that. It’s defeatist.” I cover my ears, fearful that the song will bring bad luck.
“Beneath an old lamplight… waiting… waiting… for my sweetheart…”
“Now that’s romantic,” I say.
“And are you waiting, Fräulein?”
“I’m Eva of the lamplight. But I won’t be waiting long.”
The ground trembles as pavement bricks bounce against the tires. Litter bearers draped in tent squares run to help a bleeding soldier in a drainage ditch.
A body flattened by a tank is enlarged nine or ten times its size, the gun enlarged, too, and it’s like the cartoon movies Goebbels likes so much.
“The Red Army is shooting every German officer they capture.”
“I don’t have to tell you what they do to German women, Major?” If he thinks he’s taking chances as an officer, I’m taking more chances as a woman.
Entire neighborhoods have been demolished. I hardly know where we are. Bombs are worse now, worse than the first thousand-bomb raid, worse than the terror bombings of Cologne and Bremen. Incendiaries with liquid asphalt stick to wood and stone making it hard to put out the fire.
An old man sits on rubble and softly plays an ode to the Unknown Soldier, a white cloth attached to his bugle. Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden.
“This war didn’t start in Berlin. This war was born in Versailles. That damn treaty is destroying the poor volk and causing old people to pledge an oath to the emperor and the Weimar times,” the major says.
Otto was an altar boy when the Catholic Church was popular. He’s sad to think of St. Thomas Aquinas and the “tantum ergo” that he sang as a child. “Et antiquum documentum novo cedat ritui.” What is Thomas Aquinas now when even village priests are hoisting the papal ensign along with a white flag of surrender?
A child’s bike hangs by one handlebar from the eaves of an apartment building half demolished. Where is the child? Is he or she safe? A window frame falls on the bike and both go crashing to the ground. Is the whole world exploding around me, or is it only Berlin?
“I went to the War Academy at Danzig and later attended the General Staff College in order to lead a battalion on the front. And to think… to think I’m leading the Führer’s future wife to her wedding dress. I can tell this to my children and grandchildren someday.”
While exploding shells throw clouds of dirt around us, an organ grinder cranks out hopelessness from a hand organ. He bellows: “The brain depends on the bowels. On the bowels. On the bowels.” Yellow lamps burn in the ceiling of an empty bus. As an officer observes two firemen through a scissors telescope, as they dig in the collapsed rubble that was once a house.