Deadfall in Berlin

by Robert Alexander

  Joe's eyes burst like an exploding dam, and I stepped back as the two of them clutched at one another, sobbing their disbelief and joy. Dieter stopped playing and everyone turned, stared. Who what where oh, well, they sighed, this is war, this is war, and that is someone who has returned from the dead.

  Then finally Joe stepped over the edge. He teetered back and forth, his head fell, and in a moment my mother was struggling to hold him up.

  “He's fainted!” shouted my mother. “Quick, Willi, this is Joe, my cousin. Help me lie him down!”

  Chapter 10

  I sat for hours by Joe's bed, a cot in the back room. My mother came and went, quite concerned, testing the warmth of his forehead with her palm. Joe didn't stir at all, however, and it seemed that he'd disappeared into a very deep sleep, his breathing regular and smooth. Finally, sometime well after midnight, Mother disappeared, and I curled up in a blanket and slumped over on the floor.

  But my rest was not comforting. In my dreams it was dark, very dark, and I felt as if I'd traveled much too far from home. I wanted to go back, but I couldn't. Not yet. I had to wait for the end of this dream, which I felt certain was about to melt into a nightmare.

  Then out of nowhere I heard an angellike voice beckon to me: “It's all right, Willi. Just go on. You have the strength to push on, to make it to the truth”

  I opened my eyes, and realized that I was still in the little room. There was no angel and there was no evening sky. Overhead a naked bulb hung dead at the end of a long shriveled wire. The ceiling was rough and rugged, carved from stone. Deep stone. Yes, I was deep in our private bunker. I heard water being squeezed into a bowl or something, and without moving I looked over. In the glow of a spirit lamp, I saw my mother, perched on a three-legged stool, reach over to the cot and place a damp rag on Joe's forehead.

  “Hallo” she whispered to him.

  I watched my mother sponge Joe's face, and I realized again how afraid I was for her. Looking at her made me think of a beautiful night sky filled with a big white orb. What, I wondered, was happening?

  “You have perceptions beyond this time and place, Willi. Go on, explain what you're seeing.”

  Huddled beneath my blanket, I feigned sleep and didn't move. Like a camera, I watched my mother and her cousin. I took it all in, recorded it.

  “I thought we might lose you,” she said to Joe, her large mouth stretched into a broad yet passionless smile.

  “Eva,” he gasped, not moving his large figure on the cot.

  She removed the wet rag, then lifted a slender cracked glass to his lips.

  “Brandy?”

  It bit Joe in the throat, shot through his nose, squeezed his face. He coughed, choked. She lifted the glass from his mouth to hers and took a long, appreciative drink. Eyes closed, tongue sucking. Spying her from the floor, I knew she loved brandy more than schnapps. Better yet: cognac. Victorious Hennessy cognac from defeated France.

  “What,” he begged, “happened?”

  Mother calmly set the glass down, lifted the rag, massaged out the water, placed the cloth again on his forehead.

  As if she were addressing a patient in a hospital, my mother said, “You had a fever and you've been asleep since last night.”

  “You're… you're all right?”

  “Ich bin wie ich bin.” I am how I am.

  Studying my mother as she sat alongside Joe, I couldn't help but see a haze of awkwardness hover over the two of them. Joe was our American cousin, of course. Mama had talked of him sometimes warmly, sometimes bitterly, but never at length. And gone now was my mother's eager joy at seeing him last night. They'd been close before the war, that much I'd figured out, but something had happened, driven them apart, and it wasn't related to Roosevelt or Hitler. No, it had to do with a night of excess long before the war.

  Joe said, “My plane was shot down.” He lifted his head, hastened to add, “They ordered me to fly some reconnaissance missions over the city. You know, to estimate the damage. But we were hit by artillery and…”

  Curled in my blanket, I listened in amazement as Joe recounted in detail how his plane had been yanked out of the skies by flak from our feared 8.8 anti-aircraft guns, and how his craft had brushed treetops, then skidded and cracked up in a field. He spoke of flames and blood and stumbling into a ruined farmhouse and listening in horror as the other two surviving Americans were captured and gunned to death.

  Then he took my mother's hand. I craned my neck to see. Yes, he was caressing it. My brow wrinkled. They were cousins, weren't they?

  “It was somewhere near Potsdam,” he said. “I hid there for days.”

  “Poor thing,” replied my mother, withdrawing her hand.

  “There was a trunk of clothes in the cellar. I changed into these,” he said, weakly tugging at his dark shirt. “Then I buried my uniform and started for Berlin.” His voice fell away. “I went to Opa Wilhelm's looking for you. There was a raid. Some little boys were killed.”

  Ja, my friend Klaus and his little brother Konrad. Gone. Or rather, simply buried on the spot. And now it made sense why Joe had gone to that building in particular. My mother had lived there with her Opa Wilhelm after her own father had been killed in the First War and her mother taken by the grippe epidemic of l918. That's who'd raised my mother, her Grossvater, my Urgrossvater, whom everyone except my mother spoke so lovingly of. And Joe, the grandson born in Berlin, then raised in America after his fortune-seeking parents had emigrated to Chicago, had visited them just as Hitler's eagle was ascending. I figured that must have been back in 1933 or 1934.

  Eva touched his forehead briefly. ”Ja, I think your fever's gone.”

  Joe reached out, caught her hand, pulled it close to his chest. He held it, I saw, just like any of the number of soldiers who'd lusted after my mother.

  Using the endearing form of my mother's name, he said, “Evchen—”

  I smashed my eyes shut just as my mother spun in my direction. Convinced that I still slept, she lowered her voice and snapped at him. I heard it all, though. I always had, always would.

  “Seeing you last night, Joe, was like an opium rush, quick and short-lived. I've forgotten. Please don't remind me.”

  I clutched myself in feigned rest, grappled. What had happened? I carefully, slowly opened my eyes, bobbed back to the surface. My mother was taking a long, slow slug of brandy.

  “It's a miracle you made it out of your plane, you weren't caught and… and you found us here,” she said, then forced a laugh. “I've been saving a bottle of the best—and I mean the best—French champagne, and—”

  “Eva,” said Joe, softly, “I've… I've been so worried about you.”

  I suppose it was amazing that my mother, Erich, and I were still alive, that we hadn't been lost under the bombs. Then again, I didn't think we'd die. Everyone else did. Not us. So many of Mama's friends were gone, her friends from before when she sang in the real cabarets. Most of that group, I'd heard whispered, had been slapped with yellow stars or pink triangles and hauled off years ago.

  Mother poured him more brandy. “Here, this is good for you. It's French as well and it's simply—”

  “Am I safe here?”

  “Liebchen” roared my mother, “no one's safe in Berlin!”

  “Of course.” His voice faint, he said, “Thank God for Willi. If he hadn't been in that cellar, if the Schulenbergs hadn't asked him about you, then I don't know what I would've done.”

  Mother's face melted.

  “Why?”

  He'd mentioned my name. Joe talked about me, and that upset my mother. I lay there, knowing but not knowing, a sick feeling swelling my stomach.

  Quickly, Mother downed the drink she'd poured for Joe, thereby drowning away any more of his questions. I studied her as the honey-colored liquid slithered out of the glass, into her mouth, into her body. I watched as a warm red glow enveloped her. Grown men loved her for her beauty and her voice. But why did I, her son?

  “Food!” she procla
imed like a Russian tsarina as she set down the glass. “That's what you need, Joe!”

  Mother spun on the stool, yelled at me. “Willi! Willi, wake up!”

  I bolted upright, faked a stretch or two. She didn't suspect that I'd overheard, let alone that I was beginning to understand. Then again, Mother never realized how much I truly saw.

  “Go get your big cousin some food. Something hot,” she ordered.

  I was up and running for bread or cheese or something.

  “Morjen, Mister,” I called as I darted past.

  He lifted an arm and waved. I grinned. I hadn't yet grasped it all, but I was happy he was here. Relieved. He wouldn't come and go like all the others. He was family. And we needed someone like him. I could do a lot but not everything simply because I was small.

  “No, Willi, that's not why. You couldn't do everything because you were just a boy. You might have been tall for your age, you might have seen a great deal, but you were still only ten.”

  That's why I thought I was going to like Joe. He towered over me, reminded me that adults had more power. Once he was rested and fed, I was sure he would assume some kind of control, perhaps even come up with a plan. Or at least so I hoped. We needed to escape Berlin.

  I dashed through the main room with its low ceiling and haphazard collection of glowing lanterns and candles. There was a handful of people already here, which meant there'd already been a raid this morning. Dieter, chewing on a cigarette, was up front on the piano, playing Django's “Nuages.” My eyes darted from him to his very elaborate Hohner accordian to a plate on a chair. Potatoes. Fried potatoes cooked on a spirit stove fed with eau de cologne. Brown and glistening with rich goose drippings that we'd been rationing out like caviar. Dieter hadn't taken more than a bite or two.

  Like a mongoose, I snuck up behind him and snatched the tin plate. I was out of there before he could cuff me on the head; all he could do then was scream. He'd never been able to catch me on his crutches.

  “Willi, du kleines Schwein!” Willi, you little pig, he shouted.

  But Dieter didn't even lift his fingers from the keyboard, and I tore back to the little room, weaving through the giggles of our patrons who'd witnessed the robbery. I could get away with so much.

  Just outside the room, I stopped and patched the holes where Dieter had eaten, mushing the potatoes around so that it looked like a full plate. Then I licked the fork, clasped it nicely in my other hand. I glanced around for Erich—I assumed he'd been bedded down in our makeshift kitchen—then proceeded like a waiter at the Adlon Hotel bearing the finest Schnitzel.

  Joe's rough-bearded face warmed with a smile as I entered. I would, I guessed, look something quite like him when I grew up.

  With a big grin, I said, “You didn't scare me at all yesterday, Mister.”

  “Hah!” responded Joe, propping himself up on his elbow. “You were scared to death.”

  “Nee!” I responded in my best Berlinese.

  My mother's eyes darted quickly from him to me to him to me. She grabbed the tin plate from me and rammed one of her fingers into the mound of potatoes. Frowning, she jabbed her finger in again. And again.

  “Willi, these are cold,” she said, glaring at me. “You were supposed to get him something hot.”

  Standing there clutching the fork, I said, “But—”

  “How can I serve a sick man cold potatoes? Honestly, Willi, you don't think all the time. Do you know that?” she said, her voice rough with disgust. “Sometimes you're smart, and sometimes you're just plain stupid. Now go—”

  It all happened in a matter of castrating moments. My face puffed, puckered. I became a kid again.

  Joe reached out and grabbed the plate. “These are fine, I'm sure.”

  “No, Willi has got to learn to do things right. He just can't go running around scrounging up things on the black market. The war's no excuse. He has to learn to obey.”

  As if I'd been slapped, I bit my lip.

  “Give me an insight beyond your ten-year-old self, Willi. What's really happening here?”

  What was she, the woman whose stardom had been squelched by the Nazis, doing talking about obedience? Horseshit. She wasn't mad at me. She was mad at Joe.

  He broke in, saying, “But I'm starved! I haven't eaten in two days!”

  As if he were one with the Mongol Hordes, Joe sunk his fingers into the gluttonous mass and started scooping.

  “Well, for God's sake, Willi,” snapped my mother, “give him the fork!”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I handed it to him, and he rolled on his side. Putting the plate on the bed, he lowered his head and stabbed the luscious chunks that were soft with fat, sweet with tenderness. He went crazy, spearing, barely chewing, practically inhaling the greasy, perfumed tubers. Joe looked up once, saw me smiling at him, grinned back, delighted at the potatoes from heaven.

  “What about your brother, Erich?”

  Behind me came a light dragging noise. Scrape. Pause. I turned, knowing that noise would forever remind me of him. A very short figure entered. A boy, resembling me but different (thinner face, narrower nose) because Mother had done a Fern-Trauung—a marriage by wireless—marrying Erich's claimed-to-be father while he was alive but encircled at Stalingrad. A perfect boy with the glow of an angel, soft and pure, simple and clean. He gazed at me, then Joe, with faint blue eyes that shimmered in the dim light. He wasn't even five, yet already he was a child that could be studied and painted, but never copied. Perfect skin, button nose, full cheeks of youth. And already a soul that was wise and gentle.

  “This is Joe,” I said to my half-brother.

  In his right hand he carried an enamel mug that smoked with hot coffee. In his left he clutched a tiny crutch, a wooden support he could not walk without.

  Joe quickly wiped his mouth and, his voice hushed with sadness, said, “Hello, Erich.”

  “Hallo, Mister Cousin.”

  Voice not from earth. Face too perfect. I glanced down and saw the brace that was always part of him. Metal brace, softened with deep brown leather. It hobbled his shrunken leg, gave him support. Held him. The perfect Aryan child. The classic case of polio.

  “I brought you some coffee,” he said, his voice far too soft for this time and place. “Real coffee.”

  “No muckefuck for you,” I added. No ersatz crud. “It's from Belgium.” Mother had sent me down to the rail yards to trade for that just last week.

  Eva chided, “And look at how steaming hot it is, Willi. Just look.”

  “Vielen Dank.” Thanks very much, Joe said, unable to take his eyes off the little one.

  Good step, drag, good step, drag. His movements rough and uneven, Erich struggled toward Joe, delivered the black, black coffee without spilling a single drop. He handed it to him, and I was overwhelmed with… with…

  “With what?”

  Sadness. My brother, who was younger than the war, should be gone. To a farm, to the mountains. I could manage here, but he should be anywhere but in ravaged Berlin.

  “This is mein kleine Erich.” My little Erich, said Mother, kissing him on the head.

  “Oh, Mutti!” Oh, Mommy, he replied, brushing her away.

  “You loved him, too. Why don't you show him?”

  I said, “This is mein kleines Affchen!” My little monkey.

  “What? I'll show you, you grosser, grosser Affe” You big, big ape.

  Erich's eyes sparked to life. Suddenly he was no longer the holy child as his eyes shot up, his mouth opened, and his arm punched into my stomach.

  “Auch!” I laughed, stumbling backward.

  Erich dropped his crutch, dove into me with a string of giggles. I let him pin me against the wall, let him drive punch after punch into my gut.

  “Oh, stop Erich!” I begged with a grin.

  “You're going to get it this time, Willi!”

  I brought my arms up, felt my body jiggle with laughter and a little pain because he did land a couple that kind of hurt.
r />   I shouted, “Nee, nee, stop!”

  But he only beat on me harder. And then the single bulb hanging from that wire burst with life. Electricity! Raid over. Bombers gone, everyone fine, all good. Berlin survived! The laughter snowballed from the other room, and I heard people shouting for beer, begging for schnapps. My heel caught in the blanket I'd been curled up in, and I tumbled back, pulling my little brother down on top of me.

  “Willi, stop it!” flared my mother. “You're going to hurt Erich. Now take him and get out of here! Go fetch beer for our customers!”

  Something struck me. Even as I was quieting Erich, handing him his crutch, leading him into the main room, I knew we were being sent out for quite another reason. My mother glared at me, then poured herself more brandy. She intended to tell Joe something. And it was obvious she didn't want me to hear.

  “But you need to hear it, don't you?”

  I'd already suspected it, of course. Deep inside, I'd felt the truth. It would have been better if I hadn't, though. Better yet if I hadn't snuck back and listened outside the closed door because I never did learn it for a fact. It was just something I've assumed ever since.

  “Keep following that, Willi.”

  I took Erich to the kitchen behind the piano, then crossed through the wild bar and Dieter's music, and snuck back to the little room. I glanced around, but no one noticed as I huddled next to the closed door, bent down, and listened to my mother blast Joe with tears.

  “Why did you have to keep pushing? Why?”

  “Eva, I'm sorry. I... I know once should have been enough, but—”

  “But it wasn't, was it? Mein Gott, and then you just ran away!” Finally, she spat, “I've hated you ever since!”

  Standing outside, I found it difficult to breath. An outline of a story flashed before me, a decadent outline set in the thirties. Dying nightlife. A young singer whose career was halted by the rising power of Hitler. A singer too wild for the times as well as her naive American cousin. And schnapps, lots of it. But just what had happened that one night my mother and her cousin had tumbled so deeply into Berlin's drunken spell?