My head began to pound. I didn't know where to go, how to get home. My breathing came quick and short. I'd always been able to worm my way through the ruins of Berlin, past Gestapo, past SS. I'd always been able to play war as it rained bombs. Until now. For the first time I was lost.
“Look around, Willi. Trust your senses, your intuition. Go on...”
I turned around. The man who had pulled me from ruins of the Schulenberg's building was standing there, his hands in the pockets of his long dark topcoat. His face was streaked with dirt, and in the light of burning Berlin, I could tell that he was staring at me. No. More than that. He was following me.
I took off. I was running as fast as I could. Over bricks and boards. Past a burning car, a tram that lay twisted on its side, and an abandoned military truck. Stumbling people all around me. I looked back at him, saw him charging after me.
“Halt!” he cried.
Had he seen me before the raid, looting the remains of that grocery, hunting as if for gold? Or had he seen me earlier trading my mother's cigarettes? It was better, I knew, not to find out. People like him only meant trouble. So I just had to get away, melt like rubber into the pavement. Disappear. I ran over the skeleton of another car, over other shattered pieces of Berlin. I turned down a street, crunched over glass. Was there a single unbroken window anywhere in Germany?
I slowed, looked back. The mysterious stranger was gone. I'd lost him. So who was he? What kind of official?
In the orange glow of the burning city, I turned right, right, right, until I saw him again, a big desperate figure heaving and sweating, less than thirty meters away. More frightened than ever, I spun and took off. But my legs weren't as long as his. I couldn't keep my distance, so I ducked around a corner, grabbed a board, pressed myself against a wall. He was just seconds behind me, his steps drawing quickly closer, and then he rushed around the corner and I swung out the board. Caught him right in the gut, I did, and he spit out every bit of air and collapsed on the cobblestone. I raised the board overhead, desperate as I was clever, and stared down at this odd man.
Lying on the ground, a single word blurted from his lips: “Willi…”
He was bingo-right, of course, and that sent a wave of fear over my young face. I stood motionless. Who was he? What did he want with me?
“You're Willi,” he gasped
Not sure whether to smack him again or run, I stared at him through clenched eyes.
“So?” I responded, my thick Berlin accent making it sound like “zo”
“I just wanted to tell you, Willi, that you have a hole in your pocket and the sugar's falling to the ground.”
My eyes dropped open, I grabbed at my pocket, felt the hole and the trickle of sugar. Quickly, I wadded up my coat, tried to stop the leak. So he had spied me earlier.
Obviously pleased that he'd stunned me, the stranger continued, saying, “Your little brother—what's his name, Erich? Well, he likes it, doesn't he when you bring him sugar?” He smirked. “But at the rate it's spilling there won't be much left by the time you make it home.”
“Our food coupons were registered at that store,” I barked. “I was just taking what was ours—what would've been rationed to us!”
“Sure,” he laughed, still on the ground. “You think you're so tough. I bet you've used that line a hundred times.”
I put both hands back on the board, lifted it high. There was something strange about the way he spoke. Even the way he looked.
“Who are you?”
He rolled on his back, looked… confused. And tired. Extremely tired.
“Tell me who you are!” I said, threatening this grown man with the board as if it were a saber.
He closed his eyes, just lay there. I don't know why he was so sure I wouldn't just whack him. I could, I was sure, strike him good and hard on the head, knock him into oblivion.
“I'm a friend. My name's Joe.”
I understood, of course, and relaxed my grip on the board. There were a lot of different types at our place, always had been. Although that didn't make him dangerous, at least for now, it did make him even more questionable.
“You know my mother, don't you?”
As if he were lost in memories, his head went slowly up and down. “But I haven't seen her for a long, long time. Years.”
He stared up at me and our eyes locked. All of a sudden I realized he was more scared than me. His was a matter-of-life-and-death kind of fright, and I knew I could do him far more harm than he could me.
“You're in trouble, aren't you?” I demanded with my new-found sense of superiority.
He nodded.
“So what did you do?” What was it? Smuggling? Desertion?
He flinched, then feigned coolness. “I need to see your mother. I went to that apartment building looking for her.”
My brow rose. The Schulenberg's building? Even though she still knew many of the people there, my mother hadn't lived in that house for years. Not since before the war, not since before I was born and her grandfather, Opa Wilhelm, was still alive. Of course, I thought. I get it.
“You're not German, are you?”
He shifted on the ground, sat up, shrugged, and leaned against a wall.
“That obvious, huh?”
“A foreigner! That's what you are. I knew it right away.”
“Bullshit,” he responded. “A lucky guess, that's all.”
“No, it wasn't!” I shouted. “You look German I guess, but your accent's kind of funny. So what are you then? Austrian? Or…or Dutch? You haven't been here since before the war, have you?”
Glancing up at me, he hesitated, then simply said, “I'm American.”
I gasped and jumped back, raised the board. This guy was the enemy! I had to call the police, I had to find some soldiers! I had to—
Suddenly a time bomb ripped the neighborhood. My heart made a fist, and suddenly I was tackled and pulled to the ground. This Joe from America grabbed me and threw himself over me as the earth heaved with a belch. PressureSuction. I heard distant screams, and little pieces of brick and mortar and glass showered down. But I was okay because this guy was my umbrella, and when I opened my eyes, his face was only inches from me. American?
He rolled off, and I pulled back. He didn't look so terrible, so mean. As a matter of fact, he didn't look so much different from any of us. So what was he? A spy?
“Mister,” I ventured, “how did you get here? How did you cross the lines? Did you parachute in or—”
“Listen, I need to speak to…”
“Meine Mutter?” I asked in Berlin dialect.
He said, “Can you take me to her, Willi?”
Of course I could. But should I? Was it safe? What would she say? What would she do?
A brass doorknob was just sitting on the ground, and I picked it up, rubbed its pockmark dents. Tomorrow morning I could go out, see what shops and houses had been hit in tonight's bombing. Maybe I'd find something incredible. Once I discovered a gold ring, which I later traded for two packs of cigarettes.
I said, “I don't think they'll ever find Klaus and Konrad.”
“I don't think so either.”
I shrugged. “I didn't like them that much anyway.”
Living through the war was a continual process of building walls. Something horrible happened and you put up a barrier to block out whatever you didn't want to believe.
I looked at Joe. “And if I leave you the SS will probably find you and kill you.”
“That's right.”
String him up from a lamppost, they would. So what should I do? I stood. After all, he'd pulled me from the cellar, probably saved my life.
“So, Mister,” I said, “it's not very far.”
He pushed himself up, his movements now slow and pained. No sooner was he on his feet than he began to sway. I hurried to his side, steadied him. He was trembling.
“Are you sick?”
He shook his head, but I didn't believe him.
; He asked, “Tell me, does she still sing?”
“Na klar, jeden Tag.” For sure, every day.
He smiled and we started off. I went slow because this Joe seemed no longer big and brave, but weak. And he talked as we went, told me how he hadn't seen her for eleven years. I understood, of course. It was the sad, dreamy way he told me that made me certain he was just another of my mother's lovers. Another in a long string that led all the way back before the war, back before my time.
Around us the air began to whip as if with fear. The fires in the area were growing and groaning, hungry for oxygen. Which way? How? Where to burn next, what block, building, corpse? In the distance roared a sound like a herd of locomotives.
“Willi, what's that noise? Tanks?” he asked.
“No,” I responded, quickening my step as if fleeing an impending rain shower. “That's a firestorm.”
Chapter 9
He started asking me questions, lots of them, and I told him how my father had not been killed by the Bolsheviks but by a pothole in Poland that had caught his motorcycle and flipped it atop him. Ever since it had been just me and Erich and my mother. Dieter, too, because he'd come back a couple of years ago. And even though we all lived together, I explained, Dieter wasn't a new father to me because he really wasn't involved with my mother. They were just good friends. Mine, too, for Dieter was my Nennonkel, my uncle by friendship.
“I met him before the war,” said Joe. “He owns that little hotel.”
Well, that was the very Pension where I was born and where we'd lived, I explained, until all eighteen rooms were destroyed, gobbled up by flames in one of the first bombings of Berlin in 1941. That was while Deiter was off at war and before he lost his leg. Mother had been taking care of the place, running it and not doing a very good job. Then came the raid, which gutted the building. And then my mother had this wonderful idea. She moved what little remained of the Kneipe, the tavern that had been on the ground floor, into the cellar behind the Pension. Surprisingly secure against the bombs, the underground space had once been a storage spot for beer and was more like a cave because it was down so deep, tucked under a thick layer of bedrock. Ever since that's how we had lived. Down there like trolls. In our very own bunker bar filled with song and booze and a vast number of Mother's acquaintances who just happened to be the looser, more questionable folk of Berlin. Dieter was back now, of course, bitter about his leg that had been blasted to bits, but relieved at least that it hadn't been his arm. He could still play the piano. Sometimes the accordion, too.
A siren began to rise in ominous pitch as I led Joe down yet another block of roofless, windowless, skeletonlike buildings. Joe tensed, stumbled, looked up at the fingers of light that picked over the night clouds. In the distance flak guns started to chatter.
“That's just the Brits checking the damage,” I said.
“Oh.”
I was right, of course. The ack-ack of the flak guns stopped as soon as the high-flying reconnaissance planes had disappeared, and then the all-clear siren whirled its high-toned blessing.
We came around a corner, and there up on the left was what remained of the Pension, its interior long ago burned away, its five-story facade only partially standing. All the windows were gone, as were the floors, the roof, all the furniture.
Joe froze as if he'd just bumped into someone from his past. Looking at him, I saw that his eyes were fixed on a single curving balcony that clung to what had been the big top floor room. Mother had hated the room that had stood up there, refusing to go in it, as if somehow the chamber were haunted.
“You were here before, Mister?”
He nodded, reached out for my shoulder for support.
I asked, “Are you all right?”
“I… I think so.”
Whatever Joe's story was, something had gone terribly wrong. That much was clear. I knew, too, that my mother was one of the few people in all of Nazi Germany who could now help him, if indeed, she so chose. She was fickle at best. With her connections, her acquaintances, though, she'd be able to shelter Joe, the enemy, perhaps even get him some sort of documentation. Anton could do that. And that might be good for us. Maybe my mother would help him now because he'd be able to help us then, later. That is, if we lost, if there really wasn't a secret weapon to deliver us.
With each step I bore more and more of Joe's weight. And only with my help did we make it down the narrow path cleared in the middle of the bombed street, past the charred walls, over rubble of brick, stone, iron, around and right into the remains of the inn's original Kneipe. Joe cried out at the sight. Shocked, I was sure. It had been an okay bar, dark brown and smoky and covered with hundreds of beer steins and lots of antlers, too. But all that was long burned away. Now all that was left was an empty cavity of brick and clumps of metal.
“Dear God,” he said as we passed through.
I led him out the back and into a little courtyard of ruins. We came to a big wooden door, available to only those who could pay my mother's price, and I sort of leaned Joe against the wall. I braced myself and pulled, for it was a heavy door that could be locked and braced against the bombs. Sealed tight like a cork. And now when I popped it open, Mama's voice rushed out like steamy champagne. Joe, who was fading each moment, perked up. So he wasn't lying. He really had once known my mother, been intoxicated by her and her song. He like so many others.
I pulled Joe through as my mother's voice curled upward and beckoned us with one of her favorites. “J'ai du Rythme.” She and Dieter loved what Goebbels called Americano nigger kike jungle music. They loved jazz and swing, the forbidden glories of Gershwin, Armstrong, Miller, and every other American composer. It was all entartete Musik, of course, the stuff that just wasn't all German and pure, and I don't know how they got away with it, all the wild stuff. Dieter loved to play it “hot”; he could get so carried away with “Flat Foot Floogie mit ein Floy Floy” that Erich and I would scream with laughter. And Mother sometimes even sang in English, which was very verboten.
We twisted our way down and down over the stone steps, and the deeper we went, the clearer became her voice. The melody charged along, scooped, slithered, twisted and wrapped. My mother could bathe minds, seduce souls. She did it every night, creating an atmosphere that wasn't very warlike and certainly not very Nazi. While Berlin got its daily lashings, Mother and Dieter were down here with schnapps and a crowd and a one hundred proof tune.
Behind me, Joe stumbled on the stairs, scraped along the gritty stone walls. I caught him, helped him down the last of the curving steps and into the rear of a long grottolike place, a low arched ceiling hovering above. My eyes swelled to suck light from a few scattered kerosene lanterns as well as fat drippy candles perched on a round oak chandelier. The tables, thick and crude and bolstered by benches, were filled by drunken men and buxom, laughing women not drinking Fusel—rotgut booze—but good, quality stuff of which Mother had a mysterious and seemingly endless supply.
Quickly I looked around, surmised that my little brother was in the makeshift kitchen behind the piano and that he was still the only one who knew I'd been gone. Promises of treats always kept him in confidence. I'd snuck out after my mother's second schnapps. All the ones after that ensured that she wouldn't wonder about me.
“Did she drink often, Willi?”
It was the same scene almost every night. Mother and her lyrics, Dieter at the piano, the two of them laughing and touching, occasionally smooching mid-song. Beer, schnapps, brandy, precious cognac, too, and a roomful of people trying to escape misery. It was kind of fun, I suppose. At ten I was my own boss.
I turned to where all the chairs, all the noses were pointed. To the woman up front who leaned against a tall stool as if it were a virile Luftwaffe major. To the woman who crooned a Gershwin tune next to the cranky old piano on which a cranky one-legged man was playing. To the woman who parted her lips and breathed out in song all that these people wanted yet knew was now gone.
Joe clutched m
y shoulder again. He was swaying, not with the music but struggling to keep his balance.
“You need to sit, Mister,” I said.
But he wouldn't move. He kept staring at my mother, her face full and sensuous as she sang. I watched as she brushed back her thick, dark blonde hair, then made a fist. She pinched shut her large painted eyes as her Lucky Strike voice, harsh and full of burned life, belted out of that exceedingly wide mouth. Her voice rolled along, beat with a happiness that seemed totally out of place, and then she finally opened those eyes.
At first I couldn't tell if she saw us standing there in the back. Then, however, the voice of my mother, the underground seductress, skipped like a gramophone needle. All at once her song lost its bounce and charm, fell to earth. I could see her grab at Joe with her eyes. The audience flinched, turned, expecting perhaps the Gestapo. I froze, expecting her unpredictable wrath.
She simply stopped singing.
Mid-sentence she cut herself off, slid away from her stool. Dieter lost a few beats in confusion, reached out and touched her on the waist, then continued playing as my mother lunged across the room. All at once I feared I shouldn't have brought this American here.
Joe started to fall. I caught him, struggled to hold him. He was on the edge of passing out. I glanced at my mother, saw her feet stutter, her hands reach out and desperately cling to the back of a chair. Oddly, her eyes were moist as she tried to ascertain the truth. Joe tried to call out, but only managed a few garbled words.
“It can't be!” said Eva, my mother, afraid to move any closer. “No, this is impossible!”
Joe mumbled: “I know I... I promised never to come back but… but I had no choice!”
He was crying, tears filling those big blue Yankee eyes, rolling down his cheeks. The Mister American infiltrator spy capitalist was now crumbling in my arms.
Mother came rushing at him, grabbed him from me, hugged him, and cried “Oh, mein Gott!”
Deadfall in Berlin Page 7
