The Nero Decree

by Greg Williams

  The Standartenführer stood up and strode over to the windows and stared onto the clear day. Workers had removed the blackout blinds. Keller was keen to enjoy the daylight while it lasted. He put his hands behind his back and clenched them tightly. Dieter saw one hand turn red as the Standartenführer squeezed blood into it.

  “Why would this Schultz do something like this?” he asked wistfully. “Why might he want to kill you?”

  Dieter remained still and silent, his eyes fixed on the back of Keller’s head.

  “It just seems so arbitrary,” the Standartenführer said. “A doctor at a field hospital. The pressure affects people in different ways, I suppose. Maybe he lost his mind.” Keller examined Dieter as if he didn’t quite believe what he had said himself. There was something missing.

  “It’s hard to tell…,” Dieter said.

  Keller turned, his boots squeaking on the wooden floor.

  “Do you know anything else about this Schultz character?”

  “I know nothing of Johann Schultz,” Dieter replied truthfully.

  What he did know was that he would find Johann Schultz—and he would kill both him and Thomas Meier.

  The Standartenführer regarded Dieter. There was something badly askew beyond the theft of the briefcase, but he couldn’t decipher what was making him uneasy.

  “Let me find him,” Dieter said.

  Keller considered the request.

  “Very well,” he said. “You will lead the investigation with full authority over all military and Staatspolizei officers. I will issue a document insisting full cooperation with your every wish from all ranks of the army.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I will have Gestapo resources secured for you as well as those of the Feldgendarmerie.”

  Dieter nodded. “One other thing, sir,” he said. “Will you authorize a driver to take me to the field hospital?”

  Keller picked up a pen. “When do you want to leave?”

  “Now,” Dieter replied, his eyes fixed on the Standartenführer.

  Minutes later he was in a staff car heading east.

  12

  The all clear sounded. Inside the bunker the air was rank, laden as it was with the smell of unwashed bodies and stale clothes. Anja was thirsty. She reached down for the bag that she had brought to the shelter, but before she could get to it Nadine handed her the water bottle.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” Nadine asked.

  “Yes, thanks,” Anja said, unscrewing the top. The water was lukewarm. The inside of her mouth tasted as if she was coming down with a fever. She looked at Nadine, who was standing and ready to go. The girl smiled at her aunt quickly, as if she was agitated, her mind elsewhere.

  “How are you?” Anja asked, rising from the bench.

  “I’m fine,” Nadine said, hoisting the canvas bag over her shoulder.

  Nadine nodded. She didn’t believe her niece. It would be an unusual adolescent who would be unaffected by spending the night in a shelter while high explosives rained down in the streets outside.

  “Did you sleep?” Anja asked.

  “Not really.” And then, as if she was concerned that she might be burdening her aunt, “I was worried about my math test.”

  “Do you think that you should go to school?” Anja asked. “You must be exhausted and it might be dangerous being out today—you know how unstable some buildings are after raids.”

  As they neared the exit their noses were filled with smoke. Anja quickly reached into her bag and produced two clean handkerchiefs. They held the cloths over their faces as they walked from the bunker. Flakes of ash lodged in their hair, carried from the fires started by the incendiaries. Sudden gusts of wind surged up the street, caused by the flames. Everywhere, it seemed, there were groups of firemen and members of the Todt—prisoners of war and so-called guest workers—pulling survivors from the cellars of collapsed buildings. In some parts of the road the smoke was so thick that they had to pause to wait for it to pass.

  Underfoot they trod on glass and rubble. Anja worried about Nadine’s feet—what leather was left on the soles of her shoes was thin and surely wouldn’t offer much protection against anything sharp. Walking down one block, they saw an old woman sitting in the street on some salvaged bedding while an old man pulled at a heap of masonry and wood to try and salvage their belongings. A black cat picked its way across what had once been a roof that was now partially lying in the road. On Schumannstraße they struggled past a blazing building, which a fire crew was struggling to control. In the distance there was a loud explosion.

  “That one must have had a timer on it,” Nadine said. It was not unusual for them to hear explosions going off for several hours after an attack had finished. On one corner they passed an emergency field kitchen, which had been set up for those fighting the fires but had been overwhelmed with civilians. In some places housewives clutching ration cards waited patiently outside food shops in the hope that their owners would make it to work.

  Anja and Nadine trudged drowsily through the streets. Much of the aftermath barely registered; they had seen it so many times. Anja looked up into what would once have been a bedroom—the room was completely intact but one side of the building had been sheared off. She saw a dusty limb protruding above some rubble. She hugged Nadine close to her. Some instances still had the power to shock. That was the end for school. She would get as much food as she could with her ration cards and then pack some essentials. She resolved that it was time to go.

  She thought about Johann. Was it possible that he would make it back to this miserable place from whatever hell he was currently enduring? Casting her eyes along the bombed street, taking short breaths through the cloth, she allowed a feeling that she had suppressed for months to sweep over her: She would not see Johann again. Even if he was still alive there was little chance of him surviving this final reckoning. It had all gone to hell. These city streets, for so long hives of trade and business and social activity, were ruined.

  She could barely remember what it was like not to be tired and scared and desperate. Her reserves of hope were exhausted. She had hung on to the possibility that Johann would come, but that now seemed absurd. Through her fear she felt annoyed with herself: Why hadn’t she moved her and Nadine out months ago? Surely Johann could have found them if they had fled to the countryside. She glanced over at Nadine, who was shielding her face from the heat of a burning building.

  Anja was suddenly distracted by something else: There was something in the air.

  She gasped as she saw a piece of charred, burning masonry fall toward her niece—she shoved Nadine to the ground a second before a piece of wood landed on the street where the girl had been standing. Small fragments of burning charcoal sprayed outward, onto their clothes. Nadine coughed as she brushed the burning embers from her coat, before returning the cloth to her face. Anja pulled the girl forward, toward their apartment. She could no longer jeopardize their slim chance of survival by waiting for Johann.

  They would leave Berlin tonight.

  The airborne debris remained thick, but they were almost home. They passed people trying to decipher where a particular building had once stood, their faces ghostly with ash. They turned the corner into Oranienburger Straße, and Anja felt as if she had been struck hard in her chest. She reached out, her hand grabbing at thin air as she surveyed their building. One side of it remained partially intact—the Schneiders’ apartment appeared undamaged—but the rest of the structure was a tangled mass of rubble and masonry. She felt her insides twist into an ugly, horrible lump.

  “Flöhchen!”

  Nadine’s cry pierced the noise of the rescuers calling to each other and the wail of a trapped survivor. The guest workers sifting through the rubble paused and looked over. Nadine pushed her way through them and up onto the pile of bricks and wood. She moved back and forth across it. At first Anja thought that the girl was simply overwhelmed by the volume of rubble; then she realized that her niec
e was approximating where their apartment had been. Nadine pulled frantically at the rubble, tossing lumps downward, causing some rescue workers to move out of the way. She was fevered, distraught.

  “Here, boy!” she shouted. “Don’t worry, I’m coming.”

  Anja pulled herself up onto the ruins and began to move toward her niece. She had to be careful—sharp pieces of wood and jagged edges to the masonry made it treacherous. She had heard stories of people falling into hollows created when the building fell and impaling themselves.

  Nadine was on her knees pulling at bits of debris and was covered in dust from the building. Blood ran through the layer of gray powder that had collected on her hands. She was talking to herself, to the dog in a low chatter, as if she were praying, or trying to hold on to something that, if she only kept talking to it, would remain with her. Water from a broken pipe cascaded nearby.

  Anja reached down, her back aching, and put her hands on her niece’s shoulders. She tried to lift Nadine.

  “Come on, my dear,” she said as soothingly as she could. “It will be all right.”

  The decision to leave the city was now less complicated. There were no longer any preparations to make. The procedure for those who had been bombed out was to register with the NSV, the Nazi Welfare Service. Anja had no intention of making the authorities aware of her location for the sake of housing vouchers and extra ration cards. She would find another way.

  “Come on, Auntie, dig,” Nadine said to her. “He was under the sofa. It might have protected him.”

  Anja stroked the girl’s hair. It was full of soot from the embers.

  “Please,” Nadine said, returning to pulling at the bricks and collapsed plaster speckled with horsehair. “Flöhchen!” she called again, quite softly.

  Anja stayed by the girl. She reached down and pulled at the heap of rubble. She had to give Nadine time. The two of them moved masonry from one small spot. For every piece they shifted there was another underneath. And another.

  “Aaaaarrgghhh!”

  Nadine’s scream halted the rescue work that was going on around them for a second time. All activity ceased. The foreign workers and civilian teams straightened their backs and looked up at the teenage girl on top of the mound of debris. She was on her knees, sobbing and beating at the collapsed building. The sun had risen but there was precious little light. The air was dense, loaded with debris. It was as if they had been disconnected from the earth itself, like they were caught in an indefinite limbo. What was this place they found themselves? It was all so strange, so distant, but so familiar as well.

  Anja pulled Nadine up gently. The girl allowed herself to be raised this time, falling onto her aunt’s shoulder, crying and repeating the dog’s name, over and again, as if this one word acted as a kind of mantra, an invocation of everything awful and hurtful and unjust that had befallen her and the city.

  “Flöhchen,” she repeated. Anja held the girl to her. There was nothing to say any longer.

  Eventually Nadine stopped crying. Anja took her handkerchief and climbed over to the burst water pipe and wet it. She returned to the girl and wiped the dirt and tears from her face.

  “That’s better,” Anja said, holding Nadine’s face in her hands. “I can see you now.”

  “What are we to do, Aunt?” Nadine asked eventually. She stared at the devastation as if she were seeing it for the first time. “Our home, our things…”

  “All gone,” Anja said. “All gone. And we must go too.…”

  “But what about Uncle Johann?” Nadine asked. “How will he find us?”

  Anja found that it was she who might sob now. She swallowed her tears. Not here, not now. She couldn’t afford this kind of indulgence.

  “He will find us eventually,” Anja said forcefully. “He will come for us. I have absolutely no doubt about that.”

  The prospect of certainty, no matter how hollow, seemed to buoy the two of them.

  Anja led Nadine down from the debris. She felt like there was something almost biblical about coming down from the mountain of rubble. Everything had become different in a few moments—they now had, quite literally, nothing. They had no ties, no reason to be held back. They could just go.

  They strayed back onto the road, which was littered with masonry and personal artifacts that been pulled from the wreckage. Anja could see that the guest workers had been detailed to pile bodies at the junction with Schlegelstraße. Anja steered Nadine away from the cart that had been sent to collect the cadavers. Women, children, and elderly people—the bombs didn’t differentiate.

  Anja knew that she had to say something that would distract the girl, would offer some kind of response to shift her mind. Anja could sense that she’d lost her, that the teenager now occupied another realm. She felt a small moment of panic—she had failed to protect the girl, to save her. She needed to redeem herself.

  “We must leave now,” Anja said, staring into Nadine’s eyes, trying to make a connection.

  The girl looked back up at the rubble where she imagined Flöhchen was lying. Anja reached out and held Nadine’s hand, which was filthy from digging.

  “Good,” Nadine said eventually.

  “I have ration cards in my pocket,” Anja said. “We can stock up on supplies for the journey.”

  “Where shall we go?” Nadine asked.

  Anja thought for a moment. She had no idea—they would go wherever a train might take them. But is seemed like it was important for the girl to have an objective in mind; a destination would give her something tangible to focus on.

  “Somewhere in the country north of Nuremberg,” Anja said confidently, as if she had been poring over maps late at night to mastermind their escape.

  “Oh, Aunt,” Nadine replied. “That sounds lovely.”

  The two stumbled across the rubble until they reached a passable thoroughfare. After a few minutes they came across a family who had managed to pull some furniture from their damaged home. They had arranged it in the street and were sitting in it as if they were drinking coffee in their parlor.

  “Wait, Aunt,” Nadine said urgently. “I thought that I saw the boy from the bakery, the one whose parents…”

  Anja stepped forward and looked up the street to where her niece was pointing.

  “You mean Lukas Balzer?” Anja said, looking around anxiously. “The delivery boy? Such a nice young man.”

  The two of them ran toward where Nadine thought she’d seen the boy.

  “Lukas!” Anja called. “Lukas!”

  Within moments the figure had disappeared and a cloud of thick smoke blew over them.

  “He’s gone…,” Nadine said. “I’m sure it was him.”

  “Maybe not,” Anja said. “It’s hard to tell.”

  They stood coughing for a moment before moving between the rubble and furniture again, heading west. In their haste, they didn’t notice a large man, who had followed them from their apartment, emerge from the shadow of a derelict bus shelter and continue to trail them.

  They picked their way along the street. Anja examined one of the messages chalked on bombed-out buildings by survivors to let their loved ones know that they were still alive. Anja heard a noise behind them—a can being kicked, perhaps—and looked around to see a well-built man picking his way along the cluttered street. He lurched as if he was stiff, negotiating one obstacle after another. Anja hurried after Nadine, who was slightly ahead of her, clambering over the hood of a burned-out car, its tires melted to the road. She glanced back again. The big man just kept coming. The edges of his large black trench coat were coated with gray dust. There was no doubt in Anja’s mind now: They were being followed.

  They came to a junction, and Anja pulled Nadine in one direction.

  “Quick,” she said. “This way.”

  Nadine immediately realized that something was wrong.

  “What is it, Aunt?”

  “Nothing,” Anja said, walking briskly. She had chosen a street where there were comparat
ively few obstacles. The buildings here had been hit a long time ago and were either back in use or had been left as empty relics.

  “Just follow me,” Anja instructed Nadine. She put her arm beneath her niece’s and darted up an alley. There she pushed the girl into a doorway and pressed both of them as close to the building as possible. She glanced down the passageway to see the man run past, continuing on his way. He was moving quickly now, as if in pursuit of someone.

  “Is he following us?” Nadine asked.

  “I think so,” Anja whispered.

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know. Gestapo maybe.”

  Anja and Nadine waited for a few moments before creeping back out onto the street. Anja peered around. People were hurrying about their business—women lined up for rations wearing helmets, bombed-out families hauled their belongings elsewhere, and there was even someone distributing Der Angriff, the Nazi free sheet that had become the only printed matter in the city.

  After checking again, Anja and Nadine darted from the alleyway and moved quickly in the opposite direction—back toward a road that would take them to the station.

  “I know that Andersen’s is supposed to be open today,” Anja told Nadine, trying to distract the girl, who was glancing anxiously behind them. “We can pick up some supplies there.”

  “Do you think the trains are still running?” Nadine asked.

  “I don’t know,” Anja replied. “It will depend on whether there was any damage to the tracks or the station last night.”

  The pair of them hurried onward. There were virtually no businesses open any longer. The driving school, coal merchant, and tobacconist on the street they were passing along were all closed. All that was open was a pharmacy—which had been emptied of anything useful—and a hardware store. Berlin was only days away from shutting down completely.

  Anja moved Nadine down the street as quickly as she could. She knew that if one Gestapo officer had come to their home, then the chances were that the search would continue throughout the neighborhood.

  “I think that we should get our supplies elsewhere,” she said to Nadine. “Let’s get out of here.”