Marte breathed in the mingled odors of the dying city. Closer, in the other part of the shelter, a young woman was soothing the two frightened children clinging to her knees. At the same time – Marte could tell, without even seeing the woman, just from the tremble in her voice – she was getting ready to cut off all her long, dark hair, to dig open wounds in her face with her nails and rub dirt in them, to make herself appear so diseased that the Russian soldiers wouldn’t be interested in dragging her out and raping her. She would lie to them and tell them she had syphilis, from the last soldiers that had had her, and maybe that would stop them.
They were all lying. They had to; it was no sin. But for others…
She sat on a splintering wooden bench, deep in a shelter, the air stale and damp. And at the same time, with her eyes closed, she turned slowly in the night sky, her back to the fire-tinged clouds, her hand reaching across the broken city.
“You can sense him out there, can’t you?” Pavli’s whisper. “The young prince. The child.”
Lying… he had lied to her. Joseph…
She cried out as her eyes flew open. Her hands clutched the shoulders of Pavli kneeling before her. “He is here! I can feel him… my baby! He’s here, he’s in Berlin!” She stood up, dragging Pavli with her by his arm. “We have to go find him!”
“Marte -” A man’s silhouette stood in front of her, blocking her way; she realized that it was von Behren. “What are you doing?”
“Get away from me.” A new strength welled up inside her limbs; she was easily able to push the director back. He fell sprawling against the angle of wall and floor. “I have to find him… my son…”
Von Behren scrabbled onto his knees and grabbed her hand. “Marte – stop it! You can’t go out there – the tanks and the soldiers are only a few blocks away -”
She could feel the faces in the shelter, the actors and crew from the studio, the others who had been here before them, turning toward her, listening open-mouthed. “You can’t stop me.” She pulled her hand from von Behren’s grasp and turned toward Pavli, now standing a few feet from her. “You must help me. You know it’s true, that my son is alive, that he’s here – you showed me. Now you must help me find him.”
Fright and doubt showed in Pavli’s eyes. “But how? In the whole city… he could be anywhere…”
“There is one who would know.” The one who had lied to her; a fury of hatred leapt in her heart. “And there’s only one place he would be. Come.” She turned and strode toward the steps leading out of the shelter, brushing past the close figures watching her. She looked over her shoulder and saw Pavli hesitate for a moment; then he nodded and followed behind.
Von Behren called desperately after her. “Marte – don’t…”
An explosion, louder than all the ones preceding, rocked the shelter. Women screamed as the dirt floor heaved, bricks from the ceiling’s arch cracking and raining down with mortar dust upon the cringing shoulders. The impact knocked Marte to one side of the stairwell; from the open doorway above, a blinding light washed over her, then darkness, as though the sun itself had surged against her face. Behind her, Pavli caught her by the waist and kept her from falling.
Her ears rang with the shell’s echo; through it, she could still hear the coughing rattle of nearby rifles, the shriek of artillery cutting open the sky. “Come on -” Her own voice sounded distant beneath the barrage of noise. She regained her balance and reached back to grasp Pavli’s arm, pulling him with her to the street.
Figures ran between the buildings, several blocks down. The rolling smoke obscured them and prevented any from spotting her and Pavli as they pressed themselves against the wall by the shelter’s doorway.
Beside her, Pavli leaned forward, his anxious glance searching in all directions. He held her back with a protective hand across the front of the soldier’s coat,
Impatiently, she pushed his arm away. She began running; in the center of the street, it was easier to dodge past the mounds of rubble and overturned vehicles. Behind her, she heard Pavli’s footsteps and his panting breath as he tried to keep up.
They were far from the center of the city. That would be where the Red Army tanks and soldiers would be pressing toward; the fighting would be heaviest in the blocks surrounding that area.
Underneath the fiery sky, she headed in that direction, ducking from the shelter of one crumbling wall to the next, and in the open between the scarred faces of the blocks. The eyes of both the living and the dead watched as she passed by.
It ended in a place he could recognize. Pavli had been there with his uncle, long ago, so long that it seemed as if it had happened in another life. When his uncle had first taken him out of the Bayerisches Viertel, the closed-in neighborhood that had been home to the Lazarene community, and on the way to the little camera shop had shown him Berlin’s great wide avenues, Wilhelmstra?e and Unter den Linden, and the massive buildings lining them. The centers of power, the Reich Chancellery, the Leopoldpalast and the others, that the old regime had handed over to the National Socialists, and that had been transformed even grander with stone eagles clutching swastikas in their talons, and flags snapping in the wind blowing across the land.
The flags were gone now, and the buildings were so battered and blackened by the storm passing over them, that he knew them only by their shapes, black, broken-windowed hulks outlined by the glow of fires in the distance.
He wondered where the angel was leading him. She had seemed to know where she was going, heading there with urgent purpose. Even when their progress had been halted by collapsed buildings or abandoned barricades, or they had circled blocks out of their way to avoid being seen by the few German military units or Volkssturm brigades milling chaotically about, Marte had kept on pressing toward the center of the dying city.
The bombardment had been interrupted, long enough for breaks to appear in the clouds overhead, stars and a pale wedge of moonlight silvering the rubble-strewn ground. Pavli caught up with Marte as she turned, gazing quickly across the streets pocked with craters. Her white-blond hair had come loose, lying tangled now across the collar of the heavy coat.
“There’s no one here.” Pavli took her arm, as though he might lead her away, back to safety. “There can’t be -”
“Not here.” She raised her hand toward the abandoned buildings, then pointed to the ground. “But below. That was what Joseph told me, that he’d never leave Berlin. He’d stay in the Fuhrerbunker with the rest of them, until the end. Hurry -” She pulled away from him, heading down one of the dark gaps between the crumbling stone facades.