The shelling had grown more sporadic by now, and the shells were falling some distance away. I got purposefully to my feet and said, “Come on, we’ve got work to do. Speak only German from now on, or else keep your mouth shut.”
“I know the drill.”
“And wipe that grin off your face.”
The Kid dropped the mangled remains of his cigarette. We crept out of the courtyard, through one of the adjoining ruins, and looked out through a gaping hole in a front wall upon one of Berlin’s great east-west thoroughfares. Pedestrians jammed it, and threaded through them was a haphazard sort of military caravan, a miscellany of vehicles—trucks, tanks, personnel carriers, self-propelled guns, automobiles, motorcycles. There were even some soldiers on horseback. There wasn’t much gasoline left in Berlin, however, and not many horses, either, so the great majority of soldiers were on foot, trudging along with the civilians. The civilian refugees looked the way refugees always look—ludicrous, until you consider how tired and frightened and deserving of pity they are. Some seemed to be trying to move entire households on bicycles, carts, and baby carriages. Others lugged items they evidently treasured above all others, such useful things as food or such unlikely ones as chairs, lamps, mirrors, birdcages, and rolls of carpet. Many had simply grabbed up children and set out with only the clothes on their backs. I had visited Auschwitz for a total of seventeen minutes; I’d seen, heard, and (God!) smelled too much else besides, and knew that in ways great and small, whether willingly and eagerly or through frightened acquiescence, the men and women before me had brought this calamity upon themselves. But their children excited only my pity. Some had walked here with their families all the way from Poland. None of them were guilty of crimes against humanity.
Upon beholding this same throng, The Kid said, simply, “I love a parade.”
“I thought I told you to speak only German, Wesley.” Wesley was his real name; he hated it.
We emerged from the building and took our places. Though the stream of people and vehicles passed within a few yards of us, sometimes within a few feet, no one paid us any attention. All The Kid and I had to do was wait where we were and look like two tired men who had paused to catch their breath, or given up. Our people were acting on strong posthypnotic commands—not that the commands had to be strong. Their hosts didn’t need any more inducement to flee west than the fact that the Russians were coming from the east. Our people’s hosts would head for the Spandau district. Shortly before they reached the bridge over the Havel River, they would slip out of the mass of Berliners to join The Kid and me in the ruins. A little later, relieved of their tagalongs, the hosts would make their individual ways back into the crowd and resume their flight. All of them, we knew, would survive long enough to get across the river and into Spandau.
Since I didn’t actually have to watch for my people’s hosts, I looked for little girls of a certain type and age—dark-haired, three years old. One of my lovers along about the end of the ’70s had been born in Berlin in December of 1941. Her father had died on the Eastern Front the following spring. She told me once as we lay together in a postcoital tangle that she remembered being bombed around the clock, and fleeing with her mother from the Russians. “I saw,” she said, “dead people lying in the streets. There was a dead man lying beside the curb in front of our house, and I stepped over him. My mother told me not to step in his brains.” What, I asked, had she made of air raids and human brains spilled out on the pavement? “The bombing terrified me,” she said, “but I didn’t make anything of it. And as for dead people—” She shrugged. “Every childhood is normal.”
I didn’t, of course, really expect to see her among the refugees now. If I’d wanted to find her in Berlin in 1945, I could have. But, as some historian or other once said, it’s very difficult to remember that events now in the past were once far in the future. It can be as difficult for a time traveler as it is for someone who’s embedded in linear time. What could I possibly say to a three-year-old girl who was thirty-some-odd years shy of becoming my lover? “I shall see you later, my dear, heh heh”? Christ, no. After the war, she and her mother had lived in a room in a partly bombed-out building. “Next door was a building that had taken a direct hit—only the walls still stood, and they were crumbling. I would lie in my bed late at night and hear pieces of brick hitting the ground right outside my window.” Things had got better in the 1950s. Wasn’t there, I asked, still resentment directed at Americans then? “Oh, no, everyone wanted to be like the Americans. Americans had money. No one else did.” She’d married an American serviceman and come to the United States in 1961. By the time she and I hooked up, she’d had two children and another husband or two. Sometimes she would awaken beside me, disturbed by a dream, not of falling bombs or dead people, but of bricks tumbling through darkness to strike near the bed.
The Kid spoke out of the corner of his mouth, in English, and snapped me from my reverie. “Looks like you got a customer.” A middle-aged man approached hesitantly. His face was screwed into a mask of perplexity.
I rose to meet him and extended a filthy hand. He looked at it as though he had never seen its like before. I said, “Greetings, Herr Junge. I am so happy that you have made it this far.”
“I—I—” He looked from my face to The Kid’s.
I said, “It’s all right,” I said, and in a lower voice, “Come.” He resisted weakly when he saw that I was drawing him toward a hole in the front of a building. I uttered the command that separated host and tagalong. A shudder coursed through him, and he almost fell. “Come with me.” The command also made him do as I said. I hauled him back into the building, out of sight of the street, pulled him around, and leaned him against the wall.
He gasped, “I must go!”
“Sit down,” I said, and he sat.
“But the Russians—”
“Don’t worry about the Russians.” I could have told him that he wasn’t going to fall into the Russians’ clutches, that he’d be part of the German economic miracle in twenty years, that most people would just sort of forget that he had ever been a member (granted, an obscure one) of the Nazi Party, much as he would just sort of forget that he had ever got to shake hands with one or two of the bigwigs.
He said, “I don’t understand…”
I didn’t try to explain matters then. I gently pushed Junge into a sitting position and left him looking around at the ruined, roofless shell of the building. Back outside, I settled onto a piece of cornice a few feet from The Kid, who sat scanning the crowd and looking hugely bored.
My other tagalong showed up right on schedule—Helena Weltlinger, a matronly sort in expensive clothes. The Kid scowled as we passed him. None of his people—Avery’s—had shown up yet.
In the shelter of the ruins, Junge watched dazedly as I repeated the routine with Weltlinger. She merely blinked once or twice, put her hand to her forehead, and regarded me wonderingly. Most people do snap right out of it. Just in case, though, I gave them the spiel. Sometimes they need a bit more nudging. I said, “You’re both going home in a little while. When we inserted you in this time period, we didn’t want you getting caught up in the passions of the moment and maybe changing history. So we suppressed your personalities. You—”