“And what’s your glory?” Dieter replied. “Stabbing a man with a syringe? Murder is murder. You can dress it up in other words or explanations but it’s always the same. One triumphs. The other ceases to exist. It’s the way it is.”
Johann thought back to Ostermann and Lehman. He was responsible for their deaths, but no remorse stirred within him. He would kill them both again if he needed to. He wondered what he had become. Had he been sunk so deep in the bloody mire for so long that he had lost all humanity? Were he and Dieter so very different? Their motivations might differ, but their actions were not unrelated. His perspective had changed utterly, but not unaccountably.
“Keep going east,” Dieter instructed him, slapping the dashboard with his palm.
Johann slowed. A group of Volkssturm had dragged a streetcar into the middle of the road and was filling it with rubble as a makeshift barricade against tanks.
“Put your foot down,” Dieter insisted as Johann pulled slowly around the obstacle. One of the old men gestured cordially at the SS car as part of it crept over a heap of brickwork to one side. “Come on,” Dieter demanded impatiently.
They encountered a clear stretch of road for the first time. “I told you to put your foot down,” Dieter insisted, striking Johann on the head. “Move!”
Johann angrily slammed the accelerator down and quickly ran through the gears from first to fourth. The engine screamed in complaint, racing to keep up with the demands. The jeep was at its outer limits. The vehicle shuddered forward as the needle hovered around seventy-five miles per hour. The passengers were thrown about as the engine reached full capacity and the vehicle hit debris that littered the road.
The road was coming at him too fast—bricks, lengths of wood, pieces of masonry—and Johann swerved to avoid what he could, but he was unable to miss much. He wondered that the tires hadn’t yet blown out. The boulevard in front of him had become imperceptible—he was simply too exhausted to be able to focus clearly. Berlin had broken down into a blur of debris.
Then he noticed something more distinct—a break in the roadway marked by a jagged dark line that they rushed toward ominously.
“Forward!” Dieter ordered him. “Forward!”
Johann realized what it was: an antitank ditch that had been dug by the Volkssturm to hold up the progress of the Soviets. If it was like the others he had seen, it would be nothing more than a pathetic hole in the ground—but it would be enough to kill them if the Kübelwagen tumbled inside.
Johann swerved wildly around the obstacle, dragging the car onto a pile of sand that had been left by the side of the roadway. The car shuddered and tilted at an extreme angle, throwing both Dieter and Johann violently to the left, but somehow the vehicle kept moving, and Johann pulled it back onto the roadway.
“I said forward!” Dieter shouted. “Don’t do that again.”
Johann was horrified.
He realized, finally, what his brother had in store for them: They would die together in a mangled piece of wreckage.
“Your letters and documents and the microfilm will go up in flames with us!” Dieter shouted at Johann over the noise. “Now drive!”
And, as they rounded a corner, they both saw what might be their destiny: another streetcar that had been left on its side in the middle of the road, like the carcass of an ancient beast. Johann wavered. He couldn’t imagine doing what he was being ordered to do.
“Now!” Dieter shrieked, jabbing the pistol into Johann.
Johann stared ahead, wondering whether he could accept that this really might be the end. He considered the streetcar. If he accelerated, he would be dead within a matter of seconds.
The moment of reflection made up his mind for him: If he was dead, Dieter would be too. Johann’s final act would be to remove this terrible blight upon humanity. He would take his brother with him.
Johann felt almost manic now, delirious with exhaustion and trauma. Anja and Nadine were safe—he had saved his wife and niece. That was all that mattered, and he had no right to expect more than that when there were so many millions perishing. What gave him a right to live? And if his death brought about the death of the loathsome killer who sat next to him in the jeep, then surely that was an accomplishment. Killing Dieter Schnell—his brother—was a service to all mankind.
Johann pressed the accelerator flat against the floor.
The car growled and lurched forward even faster, gathering speed. Johann thought about Anja and Nadine. He had no idea if they would be safe beyond Berlin, but to not have Dieter pursuing them would remove one more threat upon their lives. Taking Dieter with him would protect them.
The needle on the accelerator topped out again at seventy-five miles per hour. There was nothing Johann could do to increase the speed. The vehicle was not designed to go faster. Berlin flashed past, unrecognizable and unvarying: a ghostly city inhabited by the living dead, a ruined hulk adrift in a lifeless sea. They hurtled wildly toward the streetcar.
Ten seconds until impact.
Johann clung to the shuddering steering wheel and stared forward grimly. He felt grit and detritus of the city striking his skin. He tensed his body, awaiting the impact.
Nine seconds.
He tried to empty his consciousness, to erase all feeling, to flatten his emotions; he knew he had been dead the moment Dieter found him in Lehrter station.
Eight seconds.
No, he was dead before that; the second he had set eyes on Dieter in triage he knew that his hopes of surviving the horror around him were over.
Seven seconds.
Dieter never gave up.
Six seconds.
Dieter was resolute to the end.
Five seconds.
Dieter had won.
Boom!
Johann jumped. He had been expecting impact in a few seconds. What was happening?
There was a thud to his left.
He looked around, and Dieter’s head—bloody and lifeless—was slumped on the dashboard.
Three seconds.
Johann slammed his foot on the brake. The tires screeched like injured animals. The stench of burning rubber filled his nostrils. The clamor about him was as if the world had imploded.
Two seconds.
He steeled himself for impact as the streetcar loomed above him.
The hood of the Kübelwagen crumpled on contact, with an abrupt earsplitting screech. Johann’s body was slammed against the steering wheel, knocking the breath out of him. He felt the cavity where the car’s pedals were located fold around his legs. It took him a few moments to rouse himself from a daze, his head whirling with incomprehension.
What just happened?
He had stopped moving. Dieter’s body had been thrown forward and was now pressed against the windshield awkwardly. There was a ticking noise, and he realized that the liquid on his face was his brother’s blood. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his uniform and tried to move. By twisting his body he was able to lever himself from the seat. Blood was dripping into the bottom of the car, pooling on a rubber mat where Dieter’s boots still rested by the briefcase. His dirty blond hair was soaked crimson. His hand clung to the handgun that had been jabbed in Johann’s side only seconds ago. Johann prized his brother’s fingers away from the handle and put the weapon in his holster. Unbelievable, he thought. Not that he was alive, but that his first act of survival was to take a weapon from his dead brother’s hand.
But how had Dieter died? Had he decided to end it all before they hit the streetcar?
He heard a click behind him.
Johann froze.
There was silence. Johann began to look around slowly. There, in the back of the car, his nose streaming with blood, was a familiar face: Lukas.
Johann couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The boy was holding a handgun, the same one Johann had returned to him back in the boy’s quarters in the carpentry shop.
“Are you all right?” he asked Lukas. The boy nodded. His face was dispassion
ate. He showed no signs of the ordeal he had just endured other than that he was gingerly dabbing at his bleeding nose.
“I came to the station,” he said after a while, unfolding his body from the space behind the seat into which he had fallen. “I saw what happened with your family and then this SS officer led you outside. I knew he was going to kill you. I hid in the car. It took me a while to build the courage to, you know”—he looked at Dieter—“do it.”
The two of them leaned back in their seats, exhausted and stunned. Dieter had finally been brought low by someone who had little memory of life before the Nazis.
In the distance—perhaps only five miles away—there was an explosion. Then another, and another… and then a deluge; hundreds of shells roared pitilessly down on the city. The Soviets were pulverizing what was left of it before the infantry’s advance. The last remnants of the SS were hiding among the ruins ready for the final, unforgiving reckoning.
“We need to get moving,” Johann said. To be found in an SS uniform could mean immediate execution. Even the boy might be shot if he was discovered in possession of a weapon. Johann wrenched his way out of the passenger seat and lifted Lukas from the rear of the vehicle. The engine continued to make a ticking noise. Its hood had been crushed beyond recognition. Johann knew the T-34s that would roll down the street in the next few hours would not find it such a formidable object.
The rumble of artillery continued in the distance. Johann wiped the boy’s nose.
“It’s stopped bleeding already,” Johann said. “That’s a good sign.”
A group of civilians made their way along the street, hurrying away from the rolling thunder of the artillery. Johann reached into the car and pulled the briefcase from below Dieter’s feet.
“Come on,” he said, moving away from the car. “We need to be quick.”
“But where are we going?” asked the boy, trotting to keep up with him.
“Somewhere you will be safe,” Johann replied.
“Is that possible?” Lukas said dismissively.
Johann stopped and looked back.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.”
Johann did not turn and look back at Dieter’s body. For Johann, his brother had long since been dead.
“Not here,” the boy said when Johann knocked on the door.
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” Johann said. “You’ll see.”
They heard footsteps on the other side. The door swung open and Otto’s lumbering bulk filled the doorframe. The men said nothing. They stepped forward and embraced.
“Who is this?” Otto asked, seeing Lukas. He ushered them inside. “Quick, quick…”
“This is Lukas,” Johann said. “The bravest boy in Berlin.”
“Well, that’s saying something,” Otto replied. “Because I’ve met an awful lot of brave Berliner boys.”
Otto walked them down the corridor.
“Everyone is in the cellar,” he said, leading them down a staircase. There were about a dozen people in the dark subterranean room, most of them elderly. Three women played cards by candlelight. Two decrepit men slept on makeshift cots. Johann assumed that they were members of the Volkssturm, many of whom had abandoned their positions and sought sanctuary. They wanted nothing to do with what was to come. He looked around. Someone had propped joists to support the ceiling. There were buckets of water for drinking and to put out fires, and some supplies lined up on a table.
Lukas recognized one of the women—she was the mother of the boy who had been hung from the lamppost.
The woman reached her hand forward and touched the boy’s face.
“Come and sit next to me,” she said, pulling Lukas to sit on the bench beside her. She examined his face.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“I was in an accident,” Lukas said. Johann noticed a change—a fragment of Lukas’s toughness had slipped away. The woman stood up. She found a rag and dipped it in one of the buckets.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We don’t drink from that one.”
She dabbed at the boy’s face.
“I know that there’s someone else under here,” the woman said.
The boy smiled for the first time since Johann had met him. He looked up at Johann.
“I must go,” Johann said to him.
The boy stood up, his face once again creased with worry.
“Why? Where are you going? The Soviets will be here soon.”
“That’s why I can’t stay,” Johann said. The boy sat down without needing any further explanation. He knew that two able-bodied men of fighting age would only bring trouble to those sheltering in the cellar.
“I’ll be upstairs,” Johann said. “Frau…?”
“Breinbach,” the woman said.
“Frau Breinbach will look after you now.”
The boy considered this for a moment before nodding. Johann wanted to think that Lukas had made the decision willingly, but there was an awareness between them that there was no other choice. There was a crash of artillery in the distance. Johann and Otto began to walk back up the stairs to Otto’s apartment. Johann turned for a final look at the boy, but Lukas’s attention was now fully absorbed by Frau Breinbach.
The two men sat in Otto’s living room. Johann was slumped in his coat.
“You need to get rid of that,” Otto said to him, meaning the uniform. “I’ll get you something.”
He went into another room while Johann peeled off the filthy, still-damp uniform. He wanted dearly to bathe, but the fresh clothes that Otto gave him would have to do.
“They were my brother’s,” Otto said. His brother, a captain in the navy, had been killed in the North Sea in 1942. Otto took the clothes into the backyard, dug a hole, and buried the uniform.
Johann wanted nothing more than to sleep. He closed his eyes, but something was keeping him awake.
“Do you still have the piano in the back room?” he asked Otto.
“Of course,” Otto replied.
Johann stood up and walked slowly through the apartment and pushed open the door to what had once been Otto’s family’s living room. He looked at the photographs on the top of the piano. All those people, all gone. He flipped open the lid and hit middle C. It hadn’t been tuned recently, but it was playable. Johann sat down and pulled the stool forward. He reached forward to the keys to see if he was the right distance away. Once he was satisfied, he rested his fingertips on the ivory.
There was a crash of ordnance a few streets away, a percussive blast followed by the sounds of masonry falling.
He began to play, unevenly at first, thinking back to the night in 1934 when he had last felt Bach flow through him. He remembered playing a piece from the Goldberg Variations for Nicolas that night, remembered how his father would close his eyes and suck on his pipe, lost in the music. After a couple of minutes, Johann felt himself relaxing; his fingers moved over the keyboard more fluidly as he felt the melody pouring from him. It was as if he had no control over it. He was simply a conduit for the exquisite composition to find its way into the world. At that moment, it was just him and Bach. The Soviets and the Nazis be damned.
Johann finished playing and replaced the lid on the piano.
“I have a surprise for you,” Otto said. He left the room and returned with two bottles of pilsner. “I’m not sure what I was saving them for,” Otto said, flipping off the bottle tops with a metal opener.
“Thank you,” Johann said as Otto handed him the beer.
“Auf uns,” Otto said. They clinked the bottles.
Johann couldn’t quite believe the deliciousness of the beer. He drank quickly, forcing himself to stop before he finished it all.
“That’s the best beer… I’ve ever tasted,” Johann said.
“At least that’s one thing the Nazis didn’t fuck up,” Otto replied.
They sat in the house silently. They could hear small-arms fire and the desperate shouts of German soldiers in retreat. Boots thum
ped along the street. Next there was the growl and the squeaking of the T-34s. The snarling engines sounded amiss in a residential street.
Neither Johann nor Otto commented on what they could hear outside; instead, Johann told his friend about Anja and Nadine.
“They will find you,” Otto said confidently. “They know the address of this apartment. They know that you will be in contact with me. Once we have a postal service again, they will write. I know it.”
Johann nodded his thanks and took another sip of beer.
“We will just have to wait,” he said.
They could both hear the shouts of Russian voices now, the first wave of infantry—the soldiers who had injured the men whom Johann had spent years putting back together again.
“I am so damn tired,” Otto said.
“I can’t even remember what being rested is like,” Johann said. It felt like he’d lost the gear for sleep. He’d forgotten how to do it. When he closed his eyes they felt swollen and ached. There was nothing happening at the front of his mind, but he felt a vigorous hum somewhere in his head at all times that prevented him from sleeping. His entire body hurt.
“I have a little food, if you want to eat,” Otto said.
Johann shook his head. Like sleep, he had forgotten what hunger felt like. His being had become about existence. He had no need to thrive. If he was left alone he would continue to exist without the intervention of the outside world. He was peaceful in the chair. He wished only to be left alone. He would be content to remain sitting there for weeks until this whole mess had been sorted out.
Small-arms fire crackled through the air. Moments later they heard the front door of the building being kicked open. Johann and Otto stood up, walked toward the front door, and stood with their hands raised in the air. They could smell cordite.
Johann kicked the briefcase in front of him—the Soviets couldn’t miss it. They would trip over it when they entered the room.
The apartment door was kicked down. There was a burst of machine-gun fire.
Then silence.
AFTERWORD
This is a work of fiction, but some of the events in this book are based on fact. The Demolitions on Reich Territory was an executive order passed by Hitler on March 19, 1945, aimed at denying the Allies all German infrastructure. It became known colloquially as the Nero Decree. Acting under this order, the SS flooded Friedrichstraße U-Bahn station on April 25 by planting explosives on the ceiling of the north-south axis. The station was said to be full of injured soldiers and civilians. Due to the chaotic conditions in Berlin at the end of the war, there are no records of how many lives were lost. What is known is that the flooding affected sixty-three kilometers of tunnels and twenty-five stations—one-third of the Berlin U-Bahn system. A 1990 study by the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (the Armed Forces Military History Research Office) estimated that between 360,000 and 370,000 German civilians were killed by Allied strategic bombing during the Second World War during which sixteen square kilometers of Berlin were reduced to little more than rubble.
The Nero Decree Page 37
