His sister, Hilary, who was seven years older, wailed to her parents that she couldn’t bring friends home if Irving didn’t stop acting so crazy, but as long as Gruber could control his mother’s smiles he was able to control everyone else in the family.
And Gruber felt almost as if he were at home now, making comical faces and gulping down the sweet applesauce, flattered by Pierce and Spinelli’s anxious attention... “So we’ll start chow with some soup, all right?” he said. “Everybody likes soup, just give ’em a fork and let ’em go. Then we’ll have some lox and bagels and some blinny-tin-tins. You guys got any idea what blinny-tin-tins are?”
Pierce knew this was all wrong. Worse, it was dangerous horsing around like this in somebody’s home, with crucifixes and pictures of people in wedding clothes on the mantel and kids’ toys piled in a corner of the room — animals carved from wood with ears and tails made from tufts of braided rope. “I’m getting the hell out of here,” he said.
“Hey, don’t you want to know what blinny-tin-tins are? They’re pancakes with hotdogs in ’em, like rinny-tin-tin.” As he laughed at his own wit. Tubby was thinking about the kitchen at home when it was set with chicken soup and egg bread for supper and the way his father always washed his hands in the sink when he came home from his work as a barber at a chair rented from a cousin in a shop in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn. It was understood that he loved his only son, Irving, but it was also understood that since he worked nights as well as days — Hyman Gruber sold funeral insurance door-to-door at night — he was too tired to spend much time with Irving... as much as he’d like to, anyway.
Yet with all this mutual forbearance and understanding, Irving Gruber had not understood what his father told him outside the draft board in Brooklyn on that bitterly cold morning when he had been inducted into the United States Army... “Irvy, you’re getting into something serious, so I’ll tell you what it is. It’s life you’re getting into, so please don’t screw around. All right, Irving?” Hyman Gruber had dabbed at his leaking nose with a handkerchief. “Listen to me, Irvy. This is your father. So listen, please. Here’s the thing about life. The guy who screws around is the guy who screws up. Don’t laugh and make faces at me. This ain’t your bubala mama talking to you. Think about what your father is telling you. Don’t screw around...”
From somewhere down the street, they heard Larkin yelling for them.
“Damn it! Let’s go!” Pierce said.
They crowded into the living room, where Gruber, after a series of grunts and tugs, managed to strip off the big pink corset which he threw on a sofa under a tinted photograph of the Chancellor of the Third Reich.
“Achtung!” Gruber shouted, raising his arm in a stiff salute to the picture of Adolf Hitler. Then he made one of the rubbery faces that had always delighted his mother and in a lisping voice said, “I think Adolfums would make a real cute souvenir, don’t you, guys?”
“No, goddamn it, no,” Pierce screamed at him.
But the warning came too late. In the dim, fading light, their young faces were suddenly gray and they stood as if frozen to the old wooden floor.
Because when Tubby Gruber climbed on the sofa and jerked the picture from the wall, they all saw for one paralyzing instant the gleaming metal wires running down the faded wallpaper and into the basement.
The rush of air from the explosion demolished the house and the three men in it; then struck Larkin with massive, buffeting blows, knocking him sprawling backward over snowdrifts into the street. His body rolled along the slick cobblestones, arms and legs spinning in helpless cartwheels, the rising wind pounding his ears and stinging his face with showers of sleet and ice.
A second explosion blasted out two more homes and released pillars of smoke and flame that turned the falling snow into scarlet steam and ripped open the black skies above Werpen like angry knives of lightning.
And then the settling silence marked the end of the war for the young private soldiers Gruber, Pierce and Spinelli.
Chapter Eight
December 13, 1944. Dresden, Germany. Friday, 1500 Hours.
Karl Jaeger picked up his leather field case and slung it over his shoulder. His greatcoat and visored cap were in the hall but he still hesitated, glancing about the bedroom, remembering the soft impression of his wife’s head on the pillow and studying framed pictures of their children, Hannah and Rosa, and bending to look closer at a silver cup he had won in a cadet shooting contest a dozen years ago.
He’d put away the clothes he had worn on this precious leave, flannel trousers and fleece-lined house boots, a chamois hunting shirt and the cable-knit sweater that reminded him of ski slopes and hiking trips with British friends in Devon and Cornwall.
Hedy had taken the girls to visit a neighbor. It was as he wanted it. No tearful good-byes. He would be gone when they came back.
Jaeger poured himself a glass of schnapps from the decanter on a night table and sipped slowly, composing himself for what might well be the last meeting in his life with his father.
Hedy had spent the night in his arms, and he remembered especially now the strong beat of her heart. Hannah and Rosa joined them early in the morning, their round, blond heads bright against the muslin pillows, and their heartbeats had mingled with Hedy’s and his own, and the sound seemed lonely and courageous in the little bedroom, and in his fancy he had imagined the heartbeat of his father in his room off the kitchen, and around all of them the heartbeat of Germany, to mark this moment in their lives...
Jaeger went into the living room, where the windows faced a small roof garden with plantings protected by screens of isinglass. The wooden troughs his father had tended were empty now except for some carrot tops dark with frost and a few heads of stunted cabbage.
Stretching beyond was the fairy-tale beauty of Dresden, the rich expanse of spires and cupolas embraced by the great curve of the Elbe River flowing smoothly in thin winter light under the city’s arched bridges. It was a great comfort and solace for Karl Jaeger to have his family safe in Dresden. The old city had been bombed only once during the war and that was judged to have been a mistake, a result of faulty flight instructions.
It was widely known that an agreement had been reached by German and British leaders, guaranteeing that if this historic city were spared, then the Luftwaffe would in turn spare the university town of Oxford — an arrangement that had been made as Hitler and Neville Chamberlain spoke of “peace in our time” at Munich.
Jaeger placed his field case on his desk, unbuckled its flap and began to pack away the maps and reports of Operation Christrose, which he had checked and double-checked once again last night.
The start-line of Das Reich was on a north-south front east of the Losheim Gap. From there the division would strike west at dawn on December 16th with its infantry and tanks moving at maximum speed to smash the thin American line loosely held between the towns of St. Vith and Houffalize. Once behind the American lines, their columns would swing north to trap the enemy divisions caught between them and the Kampfgruppe commanded by Colonel Joachim Peiper.
Troops and supplies had been funneled to the twenty-three attacking divisions from Norway, Poland, East Prussia and Austria. The forests of the Ardennes concealed more than a thousand tanks and hundreds of battalions of artillery and assault troops. Steel ramps had been constructed across strategic sections of the Siegfried Line to give the armor faster access from their defensive positions into the valleys of the Ardennes. The onslaught would be masked and ferocious; V-1s flying toward Liège and Antwerp and London would create blankets of sound to smother the noise of motors and tank treads.