The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  No one moves. Eyes lock straight ahead or dart like spooked minnows. Freya knits her hands in her lap and closes her eyelids.

  There is a stranger among them tonight.

  Lottie sighs. She has already played all afternoon with her string quartet at one of the few undamaged homes on the Kurfürstendamm. Why did he have to come tonight?

  In every shelter, Lottie knows, there are taboos and good luck charms. There are regulars with preferred seats who bustle down the steps with the sirens blaring. There are special concerns: some residents fear fire most and have buckets of sand handy; others are preoccupied with the possible collapse of the building above and keep shovels and picks near their seats. There is also trust and sharing of meager foodstuffs with the faces one sees every day in the neighborhood, the gray heads and the children.

  And in this shelter beneath the Ludwig Church on Pariser Strasse, as in every other corner of Berlin, there lurks a palpable mistrust of anyone unfamiliar, and certainly any unknown men of military age. The unasked question: why is he in Berlin and not at the front? He must be Gestapo, a Nazi functionary, an informer, maybe a deserter. Whatever he is, he spells mischief and bad luck for your shelter.

  On those few occasions when there is in their midst an unknown for whom no one vouches, not one person in the shelter speaks. Even normal conversation, about potatoes, clothes, the Opera, is struck dumb, all words are vipers that can bite their handler in the presence of an unfamiliar face. The Berliner Blick, the quick, furtive glance over the shoulder to see who is listening, fills the hours of waiting, making them even more racking. Now that the Russian army is surely coming, Goebbels has made it a crime punishable by death to speak of anything that smacks of defeatism. The official term is Zweifel am Sieg, Doubt about Victory. Stories are rampant of innocent remarks that have led Berliners into unwitting oblivion. The man who joked that the Reds won’t attack Berlin, why would they come here when all the bigwigs will have taken off by then? He was shot in the street by the SS. A woman who hoarded bread and cheese for her family was punished for spreading lies that there was not enough food for Berlin under Goebbels’ leadership. She was stripped naked and forced to wear a placard reading i do not believe in hitler. Those elder folk who complain about the deaths of their sons, or housewives grumbling about the unavailability of shoes, at best are made to scrub police station floors. At worst, they’re beheaded. Last year, the Berlin People’s Court passed fifty-one death sentences against some who did no more than listen to a foreign radio broadcast and were denounced for it by a relative or neighbor. Children are encouraged to inform on their parents. A teacher, who likely is a Nazi, might ask, “What did your family have for Sunday dinner?” If the response is roast and sauerkraut and applesauce, not the economical casserole Eintopf ordained by the government, the mother could find herself reported.

  Tonight, when the air raid sirens wailed at 11:30, thousands of New Year’s Eve parties were ruined. Lottie was at one near her flat on Regensburger Strasse, with her mother. She ran home first to gather up her cello, as she always does when there is a raid and she is anywhere near her flat in Wilmersdorf. Freya met her at the church. Lottie was disappointed, the party was fun and there had been real coffee, not the lousy chicory ersatz. Still, a raid was not unexpected tonight. The English, whose Mosquito bombers handle the nighttime chores over Berlin, have a black sense of humor. Many of the Anglo attacks are calculated to aggravate as well as kill: bombs on Hitler’s birthday and German holidays, raids following notable Allied victories, and the like. The English relish civilian targets. That’s only tit for tat. Hitler tried to make a pyre of London. By comparison, the American B-17 morning raids are punctual and careful; they’re always at work in the skies by 9 A.M. and are aimed at factory districts, often in Spandau and the northern reaches of the city. The message from the Americans has no black hidden laughter, it is simply: “Berlin, stop the war.”

  This evening the church shelter filled in minutes. By law, Berliners in every part of the city are to be off the streets until the all-clear signal; anyone other than diplomats caught aboveground can be shot as a looter or spy. The raids have been a part of Berlin life for more than four years now, since September of 1940, when the first British bombs rained on Reinickendorf, Pankow, and Lichtenberg districts. In the intervening years, Eisenhower and “Bomber” Harris have teamed up to destroy forty percent of the city’s buildings, over half a million flats, displacing millions of Berliners, killing fifty thousand. But on nights like tonight, after enduring years of destruction and close escapes, when the neighborhood people of Pariser Strasse see a new face crowding on their bench, they are less afraid of bombs than they are of speaking to one another.

  At times like this, when there is a stranger in their shelter, when a single offhand comment, a grouse, even idle speculation about the war, can be lethal, Lottie plays the cello. With Lottie here, no one will forget themselves, grumble, and go missing tomorrow. Her music enforces silence.

  Lottie resents the new man’s presence. She takes his measure, crammed between two big-reared women who will not look at him. He has not spoken either, all night. He is balding, dark-haired, and fair-skinned, with a long neck and sunken cheeks stippled by a day’s growth of black beard. The man is bug-eyed, though that may be his distaste at being treated like a pariah. He seems to be between thirty-five and fifty. In Berlin nowadays, hunger makes everyone look older. His gray suit has some shine at the knees and sleeves, his brown tie is pulled up tight, the knot shows chafe, as does his white shirt collar. Lottie thinks he has worn this outfit for some time. There is a keenness to his glance, and something feral, as though he knows important and wild things the rest in the shelter do not.

  Of course, he does know one thing they do not: who he is.

  Lottie sees her mother lift her lids and make eye contact with him. Freya smiles. The man blinks.

  Freya clears her throat. Lottie’s chest squeezes.

  Her mother says to the man, “Did you enjoy my daughter’s playing?”

  Lottie licks her lips. The others in the shelter glare at Freya. One does not speak with a stranger.

  Lottie scoops her mother’s hand into her own. “Mutti, stop fishing for compliments for me.” Lottie flashes the man a quick and cheap smile.

  Freya pats Lottie’s wrist. “She plays beautifully. Doesn’t she?”

  The man’s face is graven. His eyes seem to look far past Freya and Lottie, even into the cold earthen walls. Lottie wants to look away from him there on the bench, the way all the others in the shelter have, but she cannot, the way one cannot look away from a ghost.

  Lottie tightens her grip on her mother’s hand. She mumbles, “Mutti.”

  The man’s lips part. Nothing of him moves, not his teeth, his lids, only his lips and tongue when he breathes, “Yes.”

  Freya nods. She has moved the stranger to speak, and smiles at him. Lottie glances between the two, sees that some business of Freya’s has been concluded, and lowers her head. Her blond hair curtains her eyes. She stares into her lap at her mother’s hand in hers. The hand is not old, still smooth. A man might still want Mutti—she’s only fifty-two—though Lottie is uncomfortable with the thought. Freya was Lottie’s age, twenty-six, when she gave birth to her only child, the musical daughter. Her father, Frederick, was killed in the final days of World War I. Freya says Lottie was conceived on her parents’ last night together. The daughter was named Charlotta after the Berlin district Charlottenburg, where her well-to-do mother and father grew up and met as children playing in the forested groves of the Tiergarten, where Freya still lives.

  Mutti is not flirting, Lottie thinks. She is not making eyes at this specter of a man in our shelter. She’s being nice, by her own lights. Mutti is often too nice; she can be led, even gullible. Lottie cannot imagine her mother with any man but her father, the handsome, winsome fellow in the old photographs, forever young and brave. Growing up, Lottie sent her mother on make-believe vacations with Frederi
ck to beautiful places. Frederick became her pretend playmate, her guardian and inner voice. He was Papa, wise and strong, and never was he absent. Mutti had male friends through the years, and Lottie always made it known that she was watching, and through her so was Papa, and the two of them did not approve of anything beyond innocent companionship with men. Why should Mutti need men? Lottie was a wonderful daughter, pretty and proper, wasn’t she? At age five she played her first cello concerto. By the time she was nine she could tune the family piano by herself. Wasn’t Mutti proud enough of her daughter? Papa was, certainly.

  The arguments began when Lottie became a teenager and Freya did not need to stay home with her every night. Freya began to go out, to dances and social functions. Lottie stayed in to practice. Other nights, Freya’s female friends dropped by they smoked cigarettes and sometimes smelled of drink. Mutti never brought men home to visit, but Lottie did not have to see with her eyes what she knew to be true. Lottie and Papa watched. Often they spoke out. In short time, Lottie’s talent with the cello grew to local renown. She joined a German national youth orchestra. She played first chair, and was taken from home more and more by performances and traveling concerts. While on the road, in Switzerland and Austria, Hungary and Italy, Lottie worried about Mutti. Who might be misguiding her while Lottie was away? The more her head was filled with notes and troubles and suspicion, the less clearly she heard Papa’s voice.

  At fifteen, Lottie was conscripted into the BdM, Bund deutscher Mädel, the girls’ equivalent to the Hitler Youth for boys. Because of her musical abilities, Lottie was allowed to stay in Berlin and continue her studies, while other Aryan girls were dispersed around the country to serve as nannies, farm helpers, tutors, and office workers. Lottie entered into two years of handicrafts, folk songs, and political rallies. She wore white flowing robes and waved flags while Wehrmacht soldiers and brown-shirted storm troopers goose-stepped down the Unter den Linden. She played patriotic and martial music on her cello at public shows while wearing the BdM uniform of black skirt, white blouse, and leather scarf holder. Mutti never spoke for or against the BdM to her daughter, but never once did she accompany Lottie to any of their events. Lottie didn’t mind, she saw it all as a sign of her increasing freedom of mind and body. Lottie was careful to make no judgments about the National Socialists or the war, or that Jews and other non-Aryans were excluded from not just the BdM but almost all of Berlin life. She was a musician, and music inhabited a higher plane than Hitler’s politics, shopkeepers’ busted windows, or ugly rumors. She only knew her Papa had been in the army. She liked being around the boys in uniform, they looked like him.

  When she turned eighteen, Lottie was accepted to Humboldt in Berlin to study music. She rebelled against Mutti, saying she wanted to move out and have her own flat. Freya agreed. For four years, living only eight U-bahn stops apart, the two did not see much of each other. Weeks, even a month or two, could pass without contact. Mutti arrived early for every concert at the university hall and sent flowers backstage for her daughter. Sometimes Lottie gave them away to other students. She knew her mother was in the dark seats of the theater. But she played—bowing with passion and a skill her teachers cherished—for Papa Frederick.

  At university, Lottie fell in love with a boy two years older than she. He was an economics student, and a secret admirer of the writings of Marx and Engels, two old alumni of Humboldt. He spoke of compassion for the masses, the redistribution of wealth across the broadest of human spectrums. He believed Hitler was doing this, that soon Germany would need Lebensraum, room for its people to grow, just the way the Führer said, and that the Reich should grow to the east, into the Balkans and Russia. There Germany would correct the mistakes made by the Bolsheviks in Marx and Engels’ names. He and Lottie became intimate, only for the final month before his graduation. When he left university, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht. He wrote Lottie three times. She answered, then his letters stopped. Lottie told herself he was killed in battle, in Spain or later in Poland perhaps. She did not try further to find out what had happened to him. She pressed his letters in a Bible. He is the only man Lottie has ever lain with. She sometimes thinks of him, imagining Papa and him in heaven together. She believes she is loyal.

  Just before Lottie’s graduation, the war broke out. At first, Berlin was jubilant. Hitler had eliminated unemployment with his Autobahn projects and rearmament industries. Military successes came fast on every front and with little German blood, in Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Romania, North Africa, Greece. Music was played everywhere in Berlin, at the extravagant Adlon Hotel near Hitler’s Chancellery, at Hörchner’s, fat Hermann Göring’s favorite restaurant, in the public parks, and at private functions thrown by Berlin society and the celebrant Nazis. Lottie tutored some students. Soon she was invited to join a well-known local string quartet—formed from members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra—after they lost their elderly cellist to a heart attack. Through their intervention, Lottie was granted subcontractor status with the all-male Philharmonic. She was allowed to play only until another suitable male cellist could be found. But with the war on, and Jews excluded from the BPO, Lottie has remained in her fourth chair. During Philharmonic concerts, at the request of the renowned conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, she wears a man’s tuxedo and puts her hair up under a black net.

  No one has complained, not even the strident young concertmaster Gerhard Taschner, for Lottie is a transcendent cellist. She has perfect pitch, honed as a child tuning her mother’s piano. She has broad hands, strong shoulders, and preternaturally long pinkies. She is a tall girl, so she can play a big cello, her Joseph and Antonio Galiano, made in Naples in 1750. The heavy Galiano cries out in dark tones; a lesser cellist might harness its somber voice but could not wring from it the brio and brightness Lottie’s fingers can. Her vibrato is wide and dizzying, ideal for the Romantic solos of Schumann, Haydn, and Schubert. The two violinists and the violist in her quartet marvel at her range, she sees it in their faces when they are at rest and she is soaring. The men of the BPO, all of them older, some ancient, accept her with nods. She will never be given a solo with the Philharmonic, but she has a chair with one of the world’s finest orchestras, and that is enough.

  Now the Adlon Hotel is a bombed-out shell. Hörchner’s is in ruins. The trees of the Tiergarten where Mutti and Papa played as children, where Mozart and Brahms flowed from bandstands only two years ago, is a scorched and bare scar on the belly of Berlin. To help Berliners keep faith and to normalize life as much as possible in a crumbling, dangerous city, Hitler has insisted that the Philharmonic continue its seasons, playing three or four times per week, always late in the afternoons to dodge the threat of the Americans’ morning bombings and the night raids of the RAF. The Allies’ planes have made the orchestra something of a wanderer around Berlin, from the Beethoven Hall to the Admirals Palace to the Titania Palace, switching venues to rehearse or perform while repairs are made to whichever was bombed last.

  Lottie has kept a few students, though her building on Regensburger Strasse has been hit twice, blowing in all her windows. She has had them reglazed. Her four-room flat is still sound, though others in the building have had great chunks bitten out of their apartments. There have been deaths on her block. But both she and Mutti have been fortunate. Neither has been displaced—Mutti’s large stone row house near the Savigny Platz is intact—nor have they been required to take in any of the host of homeless Berliners.

  Lottie raises her head from her reverie. Her mother’s eyes are still fixed on the ragged stranger on the bench across from them. The man looks down, pulling dark eyes away from her stare, embarrassed at her attention, and at the effort the others in the shelter make to ignore him. But Lottie catches his eyes lifting, stealing a glimpse of Freya’s interest in him. Again he casts his gaze down. Lottie shares his obvious wish, that he could be somewhere else.

  Outside, the all-clear siren sounds. No one in the shelter, not even th
e children, moves until the stranger has risen. He is stiff. The dirt shelter is cool and the benches hard. He does not look around or utter anything. He climbs the steps with heavy treads. The thick wooden door is shoved open and he goes out into the church alley.

  When the door closes overhead, someone sighs. Some others laugh, there is much weary head shaking. Three hours of tension are ended. The broken and angry world outside for a moment becomes a relief. The crowd rises to shuffle up to the remnants of this night, to the tattered beginnings of the new year in Berlin, where, one hopes, the stranger and all strangers have disappeared. Tonight was a long alert. A gentleman offers to help Lottie with her cello. She refuses and wrangles it up the steps herself. Freya is behind her on the steps and out to the street.

  The air is flecked with snow. Lottie turns a full circle, so does Freya. Wilmersdorf was not bombed tonight. The all-clear sirens quit. No other klaxons fall with the snow from the reaches of the city. It appears tonight was a false alarm. The English bombers as they often do may have crossed over Berlin on their way somewhere else, then flew back over the city returning to the Channel. Or they got here to find unexpected cloud cover and circled high waiting for a break. But the people of Berlin are kept underground until the bombers have all gone.

  The people from the shelter filter into the darkness. Down the block the sound of grumbling Berliners dodges through the flakes; other shelters and basements empty. The rubbled city is in complete blackout. Lottie does not need much light to know that half of the buildings here on Pariser Strasse have no roof. The cratered street might have been the sandbox of a demonic giant child with a toy shovel, who enjoys digging holes and knocking over his little castles. Freya bends to pick up a brick at her feet. Out of habit, she knocks the dried mortar from it and sets it down to rebuild Berlin later. A bit of life rumbles by: a U-bahn train on an elevated track with its windows papered over. Even though it’s after two in the morning, because of the alert the trains have restarted and will run for another hour. Lottie can walk to her flat from the church. Freya will ride back to Charlottenburg.