by K. W. Jeter
“Who are you?” Her words rang sharp and clear.
He shook his head. “No one… it’s not important…”
She let go of him, looking down at herself now. In wonderment, she touched her naked flesh, glowing as though the life within had become fire.
“Why?” Bitterness rose in her voice as she turned her gaze to him again. “Why did you bring me back here?”
TWENTY-FOUR
Von Behren had found for her a soldier’s winter coat, stripped of all its military emblems; the thick woolen fabric came down nearly to her ankles. Marte sat bundled up at the edge of the bench, sipping the cup of tea, lukewarm from an insulated flask, that her director had also managed to beg from a family clustered together in the shelter. She supposed they were all eager to help, having recognized her when she had been carried in, and having seen how close to death she must have looked then. A few of the braver ones had satisfied their curiosity by working their way through the crowded space, shoulders hunched against the battering noise of the bombardment in the streets above their heads, and peering around the tunnel’s angle at her. She could even hear them whispering of the miracle that had occurred, that she had somehow come back to the living.
The young man she had found kneeling beside where she lay – hardly more than a boy, but with an old man’s eyes in his starved-looking face – now sat on the shelter’s dirt floor, his hands clasped around his knees. She had seen him fall asleep from sheer exhaustion, his head nodding forward, but in a few minutes he had snapped back awake. He kept watching her as though she might disappear at any moment. His eyes of two colors, one blue and the other golden-brown – the sight of those, so like the eyes of the baby she had held in her arms so long ago, had stabbed her to the heart – had told her he was of the same blood as herself, that strange, inward-turned community that her father had abandoned. The fact that Pavli – he had told her his name at last – had taken the skin of death from her proved that he knew the ancient Lazarene secrets.
The memory of what he had done, the image, like a fading dream, of a ghostlike form with her face, floating above her…
She turned those things over in her thoughts and set them aside; they held no importance for her. If that dream had become real, it was no different – and no more real – than anything else. In this chamber in the earth, a tomb, sitting in darkness with all these others who believed themselves to be alive, she listened to the explosions and distant cries of the meaningless war overhead.
“You should have let me die.” She raised her head from the dented metal cup in her hands. “That was what I wanted.”
Pavli’s brow creased. “Why?”
She kept her voice low, to avoid von Behren hearing her. He had gone with a couple of the grips, to climb up the shelter’s stairs and see what was happening above, as though they might hold out the palms of their hands and find that it had stopped raining, the sun breaking through remnants of storm clouds. That had been during a few minutes reprieve in the bombardment; the ground-shaking explosions had started up again, and von Behren might already be around the concealing angle of the tunnel, come back to see if she were still all right. She didn’t need his fussing attention now.
“Why shouldn’t I want to die?” She let him gaze into the emptiness behind her own eyes. “I was dead already. And it was easier that way.” The brief smile faded from her lips. “They just thought I was alive. All of them… von Behren and Joseph… and David… they believed it because they wanted to. But they were lying to themselves, as much as they lied to me. I knew better, though. I knew all along… even before Joseph told me my little boy was lost…”
“No -” Pavli raised his head, eyes widening. “That’s not true. He’s not lost. He’s here, in Berlin.”
A wave of disgust moved through her; she could have reached out and slapped him, sent him sprawling across the dirt, stood over him and screamed in anger. “And now you’ll lie to me as well.” She shook her head. “About things of which you know nothing…”
“I do know.” His voice trembled with fervor. “ The prince is here . The raven told me. Your son isn’t lost, he’s alive, he’s here in the city – I know it.”
The other’s sudden passion confused her. “What do you mean…”
“Can’t you sense it? Can’t you hear him, feel him, close to you?” He was pleading with her. “That was what the dead skin kept you from knowing. But I took that away from you. Now you can tell for yourself.” He put his fingertips against the side of her face. “Close your eyes. Then you’ll know.”
She did as he instructed. Another darkness, even deeper, folded around her. She could still hear Pavli’s voice.
“It’s different when that skin has been taken away… from your eyes, your ears… all your senses. You were blind and deaf; you were wrapped in your own slow dying. But now you can see everything. Hear everything.” His voice became a whisper. “Everything… from the least to the most important. Listen…”
The sounds were no louder, the breathing and murmuring voices inside the shelter, the artillery shells and bursts of rifle fire up above. But now she felt herself moving among them, as though she were stepping between the rows of huddled people and out into the open. Each word, each noise, from the collapse of a building wall to the hissing of a cinder extinguished in a wet gutter, came sharp and clear to her.
And farther. She could imagine herself floating beneath a sky reddened by fire, as though she were the ghost that had been liberated from her flesh and risen through the dead earth. She could see the streets of Berlin laid out beneath her, the ranks of burning buildings pulling a stormwind of heated air through the open doorways and jagged windows. The flames silhouetted the tanks breaking through the outer ring of the city’s defenses, the soldiers moving from one block of flats or office building to the next. The smell of fire and explosives, the sudden stink of a German bullet ripping open a Russian’s intestine, the cry as his hands clasped his gut, blood streaming between his fingers… the smell of sweat acrid with fear and adrenaline and hastily swigged alcohol, bowels loosened by terror. And subtle traces, mixed in with the rest – Marte could hear a fourteen-year-old boy agreeing to the orders given him by his Volkssturm commander, to hold his position no matter how many of his enemy came rushing toward him; she could tell that the boy was lying, that as soon as the fool of a commander’s back was turned, the boy was going to throw away his antiquated, useless rifle and the two bullets he’d been issued, tear the Hitler Jugend insignia off his jacket, and run and hide in the deepest hole he could find until the battle was over. He didn’t care if it was right beneath the corpse of some deserter who had been hung from a lamppost days ago. Coward, read the signs around the necks of those corpses. I Was Afraid to Fight for My Country. Those things didn’t matter now. Everyone was afraid; the only thing to do was to find a way to survive until the shelling and the bullets stopped.
Marte breathed in the mingled odors of the dying city. Closer, in the other part of the shelter, a young woman was soothing the two frightened children clinging to her knees. At the same time – Marte could tell, without even seeing the woman, just from the tremble in her voice – she was getting ready to cut off all her long, dark hair, to dig open wounds in her face with her nails and rub dirt in them, to make herself appear so diseased that the Russian soldiers wouldn’t be interested in dragging her out and raping her. She would lie to them and tell them she had syphilis, from the last soldiers that had had her, and maybe that would stop them.
They were all lying. They had to; it was no sin. But for others…
She sat on a splintering wooden bench, deep in a shelter, the air stale and damp. And at the same time, with her eyes closed, she turned slowly in the night sky, her back to the fire-tinged clouds, her hand reaching across the broken city.
“You can sense him out there, can’t you?” Pavli’s whisper. “The young prince. The child.”
Lying… he had lied to her. Joseph…
She
cried out as her eyes flew open. Her hands clutched the shoulders of Pavli kneeling before her. “He is here! I can feel him… my baby! He’s here, he’s in Berlin!” She stood up, dragging Pavli with her by his arm. “We have to go find him!”
“Marte -” A man’s silhouette stood in front of her, blocking her way; she realized that it was von Behren. “What are you doing?”
“Get away from me.” A new strength welled up inside her limbs; she was easily able to push the director back. He fell sprawling against the angle of wall and floor. “I have to find him… my son…”
Von Behren scrabbled onto his knees and grabbed her hand. “Marte – stop it! You can’t go out there – the tanks and the soldiers are only a few blocks away -”
She could feel the faces in the shelter, the actors and crew from the studio, the others who had been here before them, turning toward her, listening open-mouthed. “You can’t stop me.” She pulled her hand from von Behren’s grasp and turned toward Pavli, now standing a few feet from her. “You must help me. You know it’s true, that my son is alive, that he’s here – you showed me. Now you must help me find him.”
Fright and doubt showed in Pavli’s eyes. “But how? In the whole city… he could be anywhere…”
“There is one who would know.” The one who had lied to her; a fury of hatred leapt in her heart. “And there’s only one place he would be. Come.” She turned and strode toward the steps leading out of the shelter, brushing past the close figures watching her. She looked over her shoulder and saw Pavli hesitate for a moment; then he nodded and followed behind.
Von Behren called desperately after her. “Marte – don’t…”
An explosion, louder than all the ones preceding, rocked the shelter. Women screamed as the dirt floor heaved, bricks from the ceiling’s arch cracking and raining down with mortar dust upon the cringing shoulders. The impact knocked Marte to one side of the stairwell; from the open doorway above, a blinding light washed over her, then darkness, as though the sun itself had surged against her face. Behind her, Pavli caught her by the waist and kept her from falling.
Her ears rang with the shell’s echo; through it, she could still hear the coughing rattle of nearby rifles, the shriek of artillery cutting open the sky. “Come on -” Her own voice sounded distant beneath the barrage of noise. She regained her balance and reached back to grasp Pavli’s arm, pulling him with her to the street.
Figures ran between the buildings, several blocks down. The rolling smoke obscured them and prevented any from spotting her and Pavli as they pressed themselves against the wall by the shelter’s doorway.
Beside her, Pavli leaned forward, his anxious glance searching in all directions. He held her back with a protective hand across the front of the soldier’s coat,
Impatiently, she pushed his arm away. She began running; in the center of the street, it was easier to dodge past the mounds of rubble and overturned vehicles. Behind her, she heard Pavli’s footsteps and his panting breath as he tried to keep up.
They were far from the center of the city. That would be where the Red Army tanks and soldiers would be pressing toward; the fighting would be heaviest in the blocks surrounding that area.
Underneath the fiery sky, she headed in that direction, ducking from the shelter of one crumbling wall to the next, and in the open between the scarred faces of the blocks. The eyes of both the living and the dead watched as she passed by.
***
It ended in a place he could recognize. Pavli had been there with his uncle, long ago, so long that it seemed as if it had happened in another life. When his uncle had first taken him out of the Bayerisches Viertel, the closed-in neighborhood that had been home to the Lazarene community, and on the way to the little camera shop had shown him Berlin’s great wide avenues, Wilhelmstra?e and Unter den Linden, and the massive buildings lining them. The centers of power, the Reich Chancellery, the Leopoldpalast and the others, that the old regime had handed over to the National Socialists, and that had been transformed even grander with stone eagles clutching swastikas in their talons, and flags snapping in the wind blowing across the land.
The flags were gone now, and the buildings were so battered and blackened by the storm passing over them, that he knew them only by their shapes, black, broken-windowed hulks outlined by the glow of fires in the distance.
He wondered where the angel was leading him. She had seemed to know where she was going, heading there with urgent purpose. Even when their progress had been halted by collapsed buildings or abandoned barricades, or they had circled blocks out of their way to avoid being seen by the few German military units or Volkssturm brigades milling chaotically about, Marte had kept on pressing toward the center of the dying city.
The bombardment had been interrupted, long enough for breaks to appear in the clouds overhead, stars and a pale wedge of moonlight silvering the rubble-strewn ground. Pavli caught up with Marte as she turned, gazing quickly across the streets pocked with craters. Her white-blond hair had come loose, lying tangled now across the collar of the heavy coat.
“There’s no one here.” Pavli took her arm, as though he might lead her away, back to safety. “There can’t be -”
“Not here.” She raised her hand toward the abandoned buildings, then pointed to the ground. “But below. That was what Joseph told me, that he’d never leave Berlin. He’d stay in the Fuhrerbunker with the rest of them, until the end. Hurry -” She pulled away from him, heading down one of the dark gaps between the crumbling stone facades.
“Ah, Fraulein, you’re too late -” A drunken voice called out of the darkness. “You’ve come too late for the party!” The voice broke into coarse laughter.
Pavli looked across the small open space behind what had been the Chancellery building. A garden of some kind, for the private enjoyment of the ministers and their staff. Little of that remained, though; the grounds were strewn with twisted metal and wooden planks, some still smoldering from where a shell’s impact had ripped them from a flat-roofed structure, a square of thick, rough-surfaced concrete.
A soldier lay in the doorway, his back against the slanted edge of the wall. The dim light glinted off the bottle he waved toward Marte. “All gone, they’re all gone… nobody left but me.” His voice turned to sodden self-pity. “And I would’ve gone, too, if I could have.” One leg of his uniform was in tatters, his exposed shin raw and bloodied; Pavli knew that there would be no point in trying to help him stand upright. The soldier took another drink, tilting the bottle nearly vertical. He started to laugh again, the alcohol bubbling out the corners of his mouth. “I’ll just have to do for you, then, won’t I?” He gazed blearily at Marte standing before him.
“There’s no one down below?” She pointed to the steps leading into the darkness. “You’re lying -”
The soldier had slumped onto one arm, the bottle falling from his grip and clinking against the broken cement. “See for yourself,” he mumbled, eyelids drifting shut. His stubbled face grew slack, mouth falling open.
A pocket flashlight lay near the soldier’s outstretched hand; Pavli bent down and scooped it up. It emitted a weak, yellow beam, the batteries close to dead. He pointed it down the steps. “I don’t see anyone.” He turned to Marte. “Maybe he’s right -”
She pushed past him. “Joseph!” Her voice echoed against the walls as she descended.
He followed her, trying to shine the light past her so she wouldn’t trip and fall. The bunker’s narrow corridors were littered with papers and other rubble; with each step, he seemed to kick away another empty bottle. The smell of spilled alcohol in the trapped air choked his breath in his throat.
“He was here…” Marte stopped and looked across the open doorways surrounding her. “I can still feel him…” She stepped closer to one. The flashlight beam revealed a table covered with maps, a few spilling onto the trash-strewn floor. She stepped back into the corridor and closed her eyes, raising a hand before himself.
Pavli felt his c
hest tightening, his lungs straining for whatever oxygen was left in the fetid air. The walls and ceiling pressed tighter around him than the shelter had. The human smells, and the shouting voices, the screams and hysterical laughter, now reduced to whispers embedded in the earth.
“There -” Marte pointed down the corridor. A spiralling set of stairs curved beyond the door to which she ran.
They were still underground when they stepped into the next level; Pavli could sense the weight of stone and concrete above his head. He followed Marte through a doorway on the left.
At first, he thought the flashlight, slowly growing weaker, had picked out a set of dolls on the beds against the room’s walls. Large ones, but still smaller than adult figures would have been. Six of them, the golden hair of the girls spilling across the pillows.
He tried to keep Marte from touching any of them, but she pushed away his arm. She leaned down, her fingertips brushing the cheek of the oldest girl’s corpse. The younger girls and the boys looked peaceful, but Pavli could see the dark bruises on the one’s shoulders and throat, showing the struggle she must have put up.
“Joseph did this.” Tenderly, she stroked the girl’s hair, a deeper, more sunlike golden than her own. The hair of all the dead children were the same blond shade; that was what had told Pavli that Marte’s child wasn’t among them. “He and Magda… they didn’t want to leave them behind…”
The sight of the small corpses made Pavli dizzy. He had seen so many worse things, in the war-torn streets of Berlin and on Ritter’s surgery table at the asylum, but the peaceful faces in this tomblike chamber, looking as if they were merely asleep, wrapped ice around his heart. Present time ebbed away; Marte was no longer there with him, and he could watch in silence as a woman in a dark blue dress, with hair as golden as that of the children, bent forward to wake each child in turn. The woman of the room’s past placed capsules in their mouths, one after another, telling them to be good and to bite down and swallow their medicine, that soon they would be getting ready to go on a long airplane ride, to go far away, to someplace much sunnier and prettier. Only the eldest girl woke before her mother reached her; she started sobbing in fear as she watched her brothers and sisters fall back into a sleep from which they would never waken. She had sobbed and cried out, her mother had slapped her, forced her mouth open and pressed in the capsule with her thumb, then pressed a hand over her face to make her swallow…
