The Nero Decree

by Greg Williams

  “I don’t go to school,” the boy said. He put his elbow on the wall and pressed his hand to his chin and gazed into the distance. Nadine drew closer and could see that he was older than she’d thought he was. His extremities—his hands, ears, nose—were disproportionately large. She wondered if he might have an ailment—it wasn’t unusual for Berliners to have dietary deficiencies now. Nadine looked at him shyly, not wanting Hans to think that he was being examined. There was something not quite right, as if he hadn’t developed properly.

  “My mother teaches me at home.” He cast his eyes down as if not sure of himself. “We have an agreement with the authorities.”

  Nadine realized at that moment that both of them were telling lies.

  “I see,” she said. “That must be nice.” She didn’t really feel that way.

  “It is,” Hans said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it.

  “I don’t go to school anymore anyway,” Nadine said. “All my books were at home when we lost our apartment. And my aunt says that it’s too dangerous—she doesn’t want me out of her sight until… well, you know.”

  The boy nodded. “That’s what my mom’s like,” he said. “Always worrying.” He lapsed into an impression of his mother: “Hans, be careful with your spoon when you eat your soup—you might slice your head off! Hans, don’t swallow that soap when you wash your hands!”

  Nadine laughed at the boy’s impression and he smiled broadly.

  “I wonder if it will still be like that when you are grown up?” she asked. “Your mother will be coming over to your house to make sure that you don’t cut your hand off when you’re slicing bread.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Hans said. “I daresay she’ll try and prevent me from even making a sandwich. That cucumber could explode!”

  “Why didn’t you leave Berlin?” Nadine asked.

  “We did,” the boy said. “After the first incendiaries were dropped in 1943, we went and lived out in the country for a few months. We moved around a little between guesthouses and lodging in people’s houses, but we missed the city. This is where we’re from. And people started saying that the bombing wasn’t so bad any longer, so we thought that it was safe to return.”

  “A lot of people came back,” Nadine said.

  “A lot of dead people,” Hans said, throwing a pebble toward a wall.

  “I’m Nadine,” the girl said, extending her hand. He took it. His grip was frail.

  Just as their hands parted they heard a voice inside the boy’s house.

  “Hans!” There was a pause and it repeated itself. “Hans! Where are you?”

  “Uh-oh,” the boy said, looking at the house sheepishly.

  “Hans!”

  He returned his gaze to Nadine.

  “I’m not supposed to be outside,” he explained.

  “The bombs?” Nadine asked.

  “No,” Hans said. “Volkssturm. All the boys my age are being forced into it. My mother swears that she would rather die than let me be rounded up.”

  The back door opened and a middle-aged woman in an apron stood with her hands on her hips in the entryway.

  “What did I tell you about going outside?” she asked.

  “I was just talking to—”

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Mom… I’m tired of sitting in the basement,” Hans said, trailing back toward the door.

  Nadine looked at the woman, thinking that she should introduce herself, but Hans’s mother didn’t even glance at the girl. She wanted only to get her son inside. Nothing else mattered to her.

  As he was led away Hans turned and waved meekly at Nadine.

  She smiled at him and waved back before continuing to examine the plants in the garden to see what had survived the onslaught from above.

  “Tante,” Nadine said, standing over Anja. “Tante Anja…”

  Anja began to surface from a vivid dream that she forgot the moment she regained consciousness.

  “I made you a cup of tea,” Nadine said, placing the cup and saucer on a nightstand next to the bed.

  “What time is it?” Anja asked. The blackout made it impossible to tell.

  “It’s past five o’clock,” Nadine said.

  “Goodness,” Anja said, sitting up with the mild dread of someone who fears that they might have slept through the day. “I wanted to have something ready for Otto when he came home. You know, to say thank you.”

  “It’s good that you slept,” Nadine said.

  “Well, don’t speak too soon,” Anja said. “The RAF are likely to be overhead in the next couple of hours.”

  “I met one of the neighbors,” Nadine said.

  “Who? When?” Anja was immediately concerned. The idea of Nadine talking to strangers filled her with fear.

  Nadine read her aunt’s concern. “Don’t worry,” she explained. “It was just a boy who lives next door. I met him this afternoon.”

  Anja sat up. “This afternoon? Where were you?”

  Nadine realized that she had crossed a line.

  “Just outside,” she said sheepishly. “In the backyard.”

  “Oh, Nadine…,” Anja said.

  “But I saw the sun shining outside,” Nadine protested, “and it just seemed so strange to be sitting inside in the darkness. I wanted to be outside in the world.”

  Anja reached out and stroked the girl’s face. How odd that she should be thinking this way when all her niece had done was wander into a garden.

  “Who is this boy then?” she asked.

  “His name is Hans,” Nadine said. “He’s funny; he made me laugh.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing,” Anja replied.

  “He looks awfully thin,” Nadine said. “I worry that maybe he hasn’t got enough food.”

  “Who’s looking after him?”

  “His mother,” Nadine said. “She made him go back inside.”

  Anja felt an odd sense of relief. She wasn’t the only one. She moved her legs over the side of the bed, then stood up and hugged her niece. Nadine held her tightly.

  “Tante…?”

  “Yes, my dear, what do you want?” Nadine had used the tone of voice that she reserved almost exclusively for making requests.

  “Well, I was thinking…,” she said. “Might we have just a little food for him?”

  Anja rested her chin on the girl’s shoulder. She and her niece had been the same height for two years now.

  “You think that he doesn’t have any?”

  “I don’t really know,” Nadine said. “But he looked so very thin. He’s pale too, but that’s because they’re living in the basement now.”

  “A city of basement dwellers, that’s what we are now,” sighed Anja. Many people had taken up permanent residence in whatever underground spaces they could find. It was easier to move beds down into the basement than traipse between living quarters and the only place it was safe to be when the Lancasters appeared overhead. Anja put her arms on Nadine’s shoulders.

  “Thank you for my tea,” she said, and kissed the girl on her forehead.

  “You should drink it while it’s warm,” Nadine said, laughing. She hadn’t wanted to use much of the wood, so she had only had enough to bring the water up to a certain degree of heat. Anja picked up the cup and saucer and took a sip.

  “Delicious,” she said.

  “Tante,” Nadine continued. “Might we have just a little something?”

  “My goodness.” Anja smiled. “You really are persistent, aren’t you?”

  “It’s just one of my qualities,” Nadine said goofily. She was being silly in the way that teenagers sometimes did when confronted with the personal. Anja was proud that the girl felt so strongly about taking care of this stranger who she had only encountered that day.

  “We will find something,” Anja said, and began to stretch. She needed to see if she could produce something to eat. The air raids were likely to start around seven-thirty, and she didn’t want to run the risk of be
ing halfway through a meal and wasting food.

  The two of them walked down to the kitchen, carrying Anja’s candle with them. Anja pulled a piece of black cardboard carefully from a window so that she could replace it and blew the flame out.

  “There,” she said. “Some light for us to cook with.”

  “But is there any food for us to cook with?” Nadine asked. She was joking, but Anja was stung by the remark; the girl had known only shortages for years. Nadine’s adolescence had been overshadowed by blight.

  “How about this?” Anja asked Nadine, holding up a jar of marmalade. Otto seemed to have at least a dozen of them. A gift from a Spanish doctor friend, apparently.

  “For what?” Nadine asked.

  “Have you forgotten your friend next door already?”

  “Oh, Hans,” Nadine said, looking at the jar of marmalade. “Are you sure that’s okay?”

  “Otto told me to take one,” Anja said. “He doesn’t even like marmalade, apparently.”

  “He doesn’t like marmalade?” Nadine said with a look of mock outrage. “He should be arrested for that.”

  “Here,” Anja said, holding out the jar. “Take it to him.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “But I…”

  Anja held it out insistently. Reluctantly Nadine took the dark orange object and moved toward the front door.

  “Do I have to?” she asked, pausing.

  “Why not?” Anja said, ushering her on her way. “It will be a nice gesture.”

  Anja walked to the door to encourage her niece and ushered her through the communal hallway and out the main door. She opened it and peered out to make sure that there wasn’t any danger before steering Nadine into the daylight. The girl walked to the building next door and headed down the steps to the basement. Anja listened as Nadine knocked. After about thirty seconds she heard her rap on the door again, this time a little more loudly. There was silence for about another minute.

  “Try one last time,” Anja called out of the crack in the door.

  Nadine rapped again. Almost immediately the door opened and Nadine was face-to-face with Hans’s mother.

  “Good day,” Nadine said politely.

  “Yes?” the woman replied. She looked quizzically at the girl as if she had never seen her before.

  “I was just in the garden.…”

  The woman stared at her impassively.

  “With your son,” Nadine continued, mildly flustered by the woman’s frosty reception. “I thought that he might enjoy some—”

  “I have no idea who you’re talking about,” the woman said, her eyebrows furrowing. “I lost my son in an air raid in forty-three.”

  Nadine held out the jar of marmalade. Surely this tangible object would make it clear that she meant no harm.

  “But I brought something for him,” Nadine persisted. “I brought something for Hans.”

  The woman looked beyond Nadine, casting her eyes around uneasily. She ignored Nadine’s hand, which was held up toward her.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she murmured. “There is no Hans here.”

  Nadine lowered her hand, but she kept staring at the woman, bewildered by what was happening.

  “Don’t you understand?” the woman continued, her eyes fevered. “There is no Hans here.”

  With that she closed the door. Nadine heard her shuffle away inside the basement. She looked down into the stairwell and then up at her mother, who was peeking from behind Otto’s door. Nadine turned and looked up and down the street, taking in her surroundings. She was just about to step back into the house when she noticed movement: a piece of blackout being held wide enough for someone to look out of a bay window on the first floor. Nadine put her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun and saw a bald middle-aged man wearing a gray shirt staring back at her. She turned and went into the house, feeling his eyes on her back until she had closed the door behind her.

  Anja knew that she and Nadine were unlikely to have a second untroubled evening in a row. The planes appeared, as they mostly did, around seven-thirty, by which time Anja had made a dish with potato and herring, which she and Nadine had wolfed down. There was enough for Otto to have when he returned from the hospital.

  The raid was brief. It seemed like the bombings now were more about harassment than breaking the workings of the regime. Anja thought that a glance from an airplane would have revealed the truth of the matter, that Berlin was a broken city. What was the point of smashing it even further? There were three waves, lasting around twenty minutes. When the siren started Anja had thought it better to head to the nearest bunker than to hide in Otto’s cellar, despite her wariness of being seen in public. She disguised them as best she could. She knew that she was taking a risk, but the shelters had served her and Nadine well enough, and they were far enough away from their apartment to feel that they were beyond the immediate reach of the authorities. To change things now seemed like an unnecessary complication. In the bunker was where they felt safest.

  It was twilight when the two of them emerged from the shelter and were relieved to see that no bombs had fallen nearby. The planes appeared to have been heading to the east of the city. Anja wondered whether this was maybe a warning to the Soviets, a message that the Allies were able to strike wherever they wanted.

  She and Anja arrived at Otto’s street and were hurrying home when a middle-aged man started walking in step with them, his hands thrust into a raincoat.

  “We got off easy tonight,” he said breezily, weaving between a burned-out car and a pile of rubble.

  Anja watched him carefully. He kept his eyes forward, not really looking at either her or Nadine.

  “I suppose so,” she replied. “Hopefully they won’t be back.”

  “No, not tonight,” he replied. “They won’t be back tonight.”

  The three of them continued to walk along the road. The wind whipped up dust from a pile of masonry, causing them to put their hands over their mouths and turn their faces away.

  “So I see that you’ve moved next door to my sister,” the man said. Nadine suddenly recognized him as the man who had been watching from the house opposite. That explained why he had been watching, she thought.

  “How is my nephew?” the man asked.

  Alarm bells went off in Anja’s mind, but before she could intervene Nadine had spoken.

  “Oh, he’s fine,” she said. “I saw him today.”

  Anja stopped to do up her shoelace, hoping that the man would continue ahead. He stood and waited for them.

  “I haven’t seen him for quite some time,” the man said. “I really must pay a visit, but you know how it is these days.”

  Just then there was the sound of footsteps.

  “Erika, Joana…” It was Otto. He had chosen to address them with phony names. He didn’t acknowledge the man. “We should be getting back home.”

  With that, Otto hurried Anja and Nadine along the street and into the apartment.

  “What’s wrong?” Anja asked him, her heart racing as they stood in the darkness still wearing their coats.

  “Never speak to that man again,” Otto said.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a Blockwart,” Otto explained. “He’s one of them.”

  17

  Johann wasn’t foolish enough to think that Reinhard had left the room to fetch a bottle of brandy. The second that he heard the Oberst’s footsteps receding outside the office he leapt up and rushed behind the colonel’s desk. He grabbed a pen and added a note at the end of the executive order by hand. He rummaged through the top drawer of the desk, seeking that which would make the document legal—Reinhard’s official seal. He rolled it in a pad of black ink and stamped it on the paperwork. Johann folded it crisply and put it inside his jacket pocket.

  He picked up the briefcase, then went to the door and opened it slightly. The secretary, Ursula, was no longer there. Either she was doing something elsewhere in th
e building or Reinhard had warned her of the danger. He walked over and pulled down some blackout and threw a window open, causing a gust of air to blow in. Looking around he saw that there was a roof nearby that was reachable if he walked to the end of the ledge. His pursuers would hopefully believe that he had fled this way.

  He left the office and hurried along the corridor. He tried to calm himself. He needed to hurry while remaining as inconspicuous as possible. He could see other functionaries through the frosted glass panels in office doors. Clearly Reinhard had not raised a general alarm; perhaps he thought that the resulting chaos would offer Johann the best chance of escape.

  He needed to find the communications center quickly. He estimated that he had perhaps a minute to get off the second floor. A door next to him opened unexpectedly; he whirled around, reaching for the pistol on his hip.

  “Forgive me, Fräulein,” Johann said to a young woman wearing spectacles. She had appeared next to him almost without warning and, seeing his reaction, had dropped the files she was carrying. Johann bent down to help her.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” he said, handing the paperwork back to the woman. “I have only recently returned from the east.…”

  “It’s quite all right, Sturmbannführer,” the secretary said, smoothing back her hair and swallowing. She was clearly scared. “I think everyone is currently on edge.”

  “Tell me,” Johann said—it was as much as he could do not to glance along the corridor in search of pursuers. “I have an urgent cable I need to send. Could you direct me to the communications center, please?”

  “It’s been set up in the basement,” the woman said.

  “And is there a quicker way to get there other than the main staircase?” Johann asked with as charming a smile as he could muster.

  “Us girls use the emergency staircase,” the secretary said, pointing down the corridor.

  Johann was already on his way by the time she had turned back to him.

  “Thank you,” he muttered over his shoulder.

  He reached the door and pushed it open, finding himself in a dark stairwell lit only by lightbulbs that had been strung up haphazardly. He rushed down the steep stairs as quickly as he could, keeping hold of the handrail to prevent himself from slipping.