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

by David L. Robbins

  Misha exults at the carnage of the city. All the men do. The drunk in the fight is on his knees, not yet facedown, and the less he hits back the harder they strike him, the more abuse they lavish on him. By laughing, cursing, stealing watches from citizens—even at the old folks staggering past him, Misha shouts, “Uri!” and points to his own wrist; under his coat he wears German watches up to his elbows, all of them set two hours ahead to Moscow time—Misha shapes the men’s attitudes with his actions the way Ilya does in combat. Ilya keeps his counsel on this. He kicks aside bricks, stays low, and surges forward.

  The children come closer. They’re within three blocks now. A runner hustles into the rubble behind Ilya and Misha.

  “Comrade Lieutenant, Comrade Sergeant.”

  Misha answers. “Yes?”

  “What do we do?”

  “About?”

  The soldier is flustered at this answer. The problem is clear.

  “These boys, Comrade. There are several hundred of them.”

  “I know.”

  “They’re armed, Comrade Sergeant.”

  “I know this too.”

  The soldier shuffles. The black boys come nearer every second.

  Misha asks, “What do you think they’ll do with their Panzerfausts?”

  “Comrade?”

  “When they see our tanks and artillery? What will they do? Do you think they’ll come up and bang on our tanks with them? Like sticks?”

  “They’ll ... I suppose they’ll fire on us, Comrade.”

  “Well, then.” Misha opens his hands like a sage explaining something simple. “It’s a good thing we saw them first, isn’t it?”

  Ilya reaches to Misha’s hand and takes the binoculars. He is going to override what Misha is about to say.

  But Misha grins at Ilya. He tells the soldier, “Find a way to disarm them. Fire flares to tell them our position. Send a few rounds over their heads. Let’s scare them out of it. They’re kids in knee pants. They ought to be spanked. That’s all.”

  The soldier is pleased with this order. He turns to rush out through the debris and spread the word before anyone can pull a trigger.

  Ilya stops the soldier. “Nikolai?”

  Misha makes a large, comic face. Ilya knows someone’s name?

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “If they don’t scare easily. Children or not.”

  The soldier takes in this bitter notion. Ilya is satisfied.

  “Go on.”

  The soldier hurries out.

  Little Misha says nothing. He moves to the opposite wall and slumps against it, sticking out one leg, raising a knee; he looks rakish. He pulls out his tobacco pouch to roll another cigarette. Ilya watches Misha’s hands; the man is deft, forging the cylinder tight and even. He tosses it on his lips with the cavalier flip of a seasoned smoker, some bigger man than he is. Ilya envies Misha’s chameleon abilities. He’s grown a scar. He smokes more than any of the men. Misha outswears them, drinks vodka swallow for swallow with the largest country boys. He affects a brave swagger, issues orders, spouts strategies in the middle of battle. The men enjoy, embrace, even follow him. He says what they want to hear, like that order to frighten the schoolboys. In five months, Misha’s transformed himself from a coward to a charismatic.

  In the street, the children have advanced close enough for Ilya to hear their tramping boots. They’ve come through the ruins looking for the Soviet front lines. Ilya wants to grasp why this is happening, how it’s come that four hundred children were given weapons and sent to die. What’s been put into their heads to make them come here? Who would do this to them? There isn’t time to figure it all out. Ilya takes up his submachine gun. He levels it at the advancing boys. This is crazy, Ilya thinks. Insanity aiming at insanity.

  Golden flares shoot into the morning sky. There’s a dozen of them, spread over several blocks. The flares demark the large Russian position in the wreckage ahead of the children. Many of those in the front ranks jump when the flares rear up. Ilya thinks, Run. But all that happens is sparks and crackle and little parachutes. The boys pack tighter in the street and continue to come. Panzerfausts are lowered from shoulders to hands, poised and ready.

  A cannon barks. The shell crashes into the side of a building behind, gouging another chunk out of it. Heads turn in the boys’ thick number. Run for it, Ilya thinks. Run.

  The boys do run, but not where Ilya would have them go. They break into a charge behind flashes and smoke trails of fired Panzerfausts. They’ve spotted the Russian artillery. Ten, now twenty of the children fire their loads, the rockets streak past Ilya’s position. The boys who have fired slow their dash forward, having done their duty for Fatherland and survived. The others push past them, closing on the Russians they’ve spotted.

  More Panzerfausts tear down the street. Ilya tenses on his trigger. Behind him, horses whinny from wounds, explosions erupt among the Russian lines. Now the boys begin to die. Bullets rip into the ones in front. Ilya bites his teeth and fires. He kills three children with the PPSh, could kill fifty, but he stops. The remaining boys falter in attack, not a one leaps over his fallen mates. The Russians stop shooting. Another flare goes up. With a golden pop, it sails, looking down on the boys. The survivors disperse, tossing their weapons, keeping their lives.

  Ilya lowers his gun. He knows which three of the many bodies in the street were the boys he shot. He wonders: Is it a battlefield—even when both sides bear arms—where children lie dead?

  He wants to figure this out. This, and so many other things. He harbors questions, hordes of them, one for every person he’s killed. While the gun barrel is still warm, with the smoke in his nostrils, now is the time to think.

  He lays his cheek against the stock of his weapon. He closes his eyes. Ilya knows the answers. They’re inside him, he’s sure of it. He takes a first step to them and is stopped. He feels a void, like a bridge down. He doesn’t know any other way across. Ilya senses too that what he seeks is close, just out of reach. This is maddening.

  He holds the questions out: Here, he calls into himself, I need these answered. But the part of him that can lead him onward is mute.

  Ilya begins to feel afraid. He hasn’t traveled this path since the war began; for four years he’s been on another, violent course where answers were not needed, just skill and duty. Now he wants to comprehend. He’s lost and at a standstill, holding out the questions into his dark and silent self with the weight of a corpse.

  Ilya fears this more than any danger he’s ever faced, the threat that he might never understand what he’s done.

  He turns away from the street. Misha has not moved from the wall. The little man exhales a cloud.

  ~ * ~

  * * *

  April 28, 1945, 9:40 a.m.

  In a C-46 heading west

  Above the Rhine River

  Germany

  bandy wants distance. as much as he can get, as fast as he can get it.

  He looks down through the window of the closed jump door. The benches are empty, the steel floor is level and quiet, this ride to London is loud and smooth. No flak outside, no sweaty scared soldiers inside. Just Charley Bandy alone, trying to remember nothing, and failing.

  The sun glints on the river Rhine below. The plane’s not high enough, Bandy can still see the rents and rips of warfare on the earth, a bridge is down in the river. Sooted tanks and craters spoil fields that ought to be green but are brown, dotted black, and fallow. Higher, Bandy thinks, fly higher. Get above some clouds. Shut this out. Bandy wants white between him and the black, brown, and red of Europe.

  He moves from the window. He takes a seat on a bench. He has no camera with him, no film. He has no pack at all, just the dirty clothes on his back. This plane flies empty, shuttling to London to bring forward press, some dignitaries, maybe more soldiers and supplies. No one is heading backward just yet. Everybody wants to go the other way, where the action is, where the war ends, to say they were there. Bandy isn’t sure
how long it will be before he will want to say that.

  When he lands in London, he’ll hitch the first ride he can find to the States. He wants a shower, he wants a meal, rest, a shave. Bandy’s body makes demands, and he begrudges himself those needs because they will slow him down getting to Tennessee.

  That’s where he’ll figure it all out. He’ll stand on his grandfather’s dirt, which became his father’s and now his. He’ll breathe the mountains and clean streams, suck the sweetness of his wife and the tobacco tar on his fingers. These are the ingredients, the conditions he requires. Home will be his darkroom.

  He works his sore right hand. The knuckles are raw from the Nazi’s face. Bandy bashed him as many times as he could. The Russians did nothing to pull the men apart. The Nazi got in some licks but Bandy swarmed him with blows. Bandy would die killing. He did not decide this. It just happened, it lay waiting inside him like some jack-in-the-box for the right time to spring out. Bandy didn’t stop himself. The Nazi knew Bandy would kill him if he could and the Reds would watch. The man rammed a knee into Bandy’s groin. He had to do it twice before Bandy let go. The Nazi staggered up and ran until a Russian clubbed him down with a rifle butt. Bandy lay dazed, shock dousing him. He was confused for minutes after he got up. He pulled the Leica from his pack and flung it against the firing squad wall, silver pieces landing on the bodies. He drove out of Brandenburg, all the way through the Barby bridgehead, across the Truman Bridge, not stopping until he was far to the rear, where he found an airstrip. He spent the night, and in the morning caught this flight to London.

  “Any of us,” he says aloud, but the engines drone out his words. He needs to hear himself, to use his voice instead of a camera. That’s why he hurries to Victoria, because she’ll ask and he’ll make himself answer.

  For now, he completes the sentence under the roar of the propellers.

  “Any one of us can kill.”

  It doesn’t matter a damn who you are and what you think you know about yourself.

  Any one of us.

  He’ll tell her. What he saw, what he did. What he became in the end, the hate that changed him and exiled him. The scar on his leg will get explained, the story of the jump and his close call and the German boys. He’ll show her the goodbye letter he kept for the war years wrapped in his breast pocket. The race for Berlin, the disappointment of having it taken from him. He’ll turn every horror he saw into tales the way he turned them into photographs. The bodies. The hangings. The prison. The broken cameras. His desire to take a man’s life, even that rotten man. He’ll bury the dead under tobacco and work, he’ll plant his rage in her furrows, and in time they’ll fertilize something better inside him.

  Bandy prays. He asks God to let it come true that something better will grow.

  The green inside of the plane is hard, there are no soft surfaces to cushion the engine noise and rushing winds. Bandy leaves the bench and lies flat on the floor. The vibrations under his back are more acute than they were under his boots. He closes his eyes, feeling Germany and France slide away far beneath him. He seems to hear every rivet in the plane creak.

  ~ * ~

  * * *

  April 29, 1945, 5:30 p.m.

  Savigny Platz bomb shelter

  Charlottenburg, Berlin

  “shhhh!”

  Mutti’s hand comes into Lottie’s lap. Her fingers tighten over Lottie’s wrist.

  One of the old women of the shelter continues to jabber. Everyone is nervous, but this one will not stop talking. She’s shushed again, this time by many lips.

  “All right!” the woman snaps. She shuts her coat around her as though she is cold.

  “Someone’s coming.” Several voices say this.

  In the dry goods store overhead, footfalls sound. There are three, four, it’s hard to tell; from below, they seem careful steps. No heels thud the floorboards, only toes, cautious treads.

  There is a knock on the door leading down to the shelter.

  Not a knock: a kick.

  Another kick. For five hours these thirty women have listened to explosions and fighting rock the streets above. The bare beams of the shelter have shuddered at each deep report reaching them through the earth and air. The women imagined the scene, the battleground that is their homes and shops. They’ve jumped in their seats and huddled against trickling dust. Nothing they’ve heard or envisioned frightens them like this sound of a boot against their last bulwark, the shelter door.

  The hinges creak. Freya’s arm shoots around Lottie’s shoulder. Every woman in the shelter pulls tighter some piece of her clothing, tugging on a sweater, a raincoat, a kerchief. A flashlight beam cuts down the steps, motes of dust dance in it. The light sweeps left and right, descending in a soldier’s hand.

  No one draws a breath. Mutti grips Lottie with both arms, pressing her daughter close.

  The talkative old woman speaks.

  “Drusya.”

  The flashlight stops in the stairwell, leaps across the faces searching for the one who spoke. The old woman says the word again, “Drusya.”

  The beam looks for her while she explains to the rest in the shelter, “I said we’re friends. I learned this word. He won’t hurt us if he thinks we re ...

  The soldier aims the beam at the woman’s face. This fastens her mouth.

  The spotlight stays on her for a moment, examining her wrinkles and rheumy eyes. The soldier comes the rest of the way to the last step, onto the shelter’s dirt floor. The light courses over every woman in the shelter. The beam is looking for men.

  The shaft settles on Freya and Lottie. It lingers. The hand holding the flashlight lets the beam be his eye and fingertips, there is a stroking in the light’s play over the two clutching women.

  The soldier turns the light into his own face. His eyes, set over dirty cheeks, are oblique, Mongol. He wears a hat with fur earflaps tied on top. In his other hand is a huge gun with a round magazine. He lowers the barrel of this weapon away from the women.

  “Drusya,” he says. “Da.”

  The soldier clicks off the flashlight. The room is darker in the first seconds. The Russian shouts something up the stairwell to his comrades in the shop. Their steps tell they are leaving.

  The soldier puts his big gun back in his hands. He lays his boot on the lowest tread to climb out of the shelter.

  He turns to the women and speaks a word in German.

  “Free.”

  In a few loud clomps he ascends the steps, joins the others, and they are gone.

  Disbelief hangs in the shelter. That was a Russian soldier standing in the middle of them, in the center of Berlin. Now he has left, was he really there? The stain of the flashlight stays on their pupils, the smell of the man is oily and piquant with battle and sweat. The women continue to stare at the place where he stood, until one by one their eyes fall, as though the weight of what they saw is too great.

  No one can speak. It seems an act of courage to comment and none of the women is up to it, not even the old mouthy one. The street above is shed of gunfire. Now the world sounds ordinary, crisp with traffic and voices.

  Freya stands. All the women’s chins lurch up as though they are tethered to Mutti. Only Lottie continues to gaze where the Red soldier stood.

  “Come on,” Freya says, gripping Lottie under the arm, “come on.”

  Lottie lets herself be towed up the steps. The women of the shelter stay put, there are no words of farewell, no wishes for luck.

  The two emerge into the dry goods store. Days ago the shop was looted for its last bits of cloth and thread. Lottie and Mutti walk fast through empty shelves and broken glass. Mutti pushes open the door to dusk falling on the Savigny Platz. She gets a solid grip on Lottie’s hand.

  The Soviet army is setting up camp in the plaza. Trucks come and go delivering men and supplies. Tents go up, stakes are driven between the cobblestones. A field kitchen already does a brisk business; a line of Russian soldiers waits with metal plates, smoke from a large
brazier films the whole plaza. Well-groomed horses in livery are tethered to lampposts. Moseying up Knesebeck Strasse into the square is a herd of sheep and lowing cattle accompanied by horse- and ox-drawn carts. The Savigny Platz becomes a Russian barnyard.

  Freya and Lottie stay close to the buildings, skirting the massing soldiers. The odors of the men and animals are tangs in Lottie’s nostrils. A Russian soldier strolls past them on the sidewalk carrying a pink summer parasol. He inclines his head.

  Lottie laughs.

  Freya hears this. Her squeeze on Lottie’s hand hardens. She quickens her pace until the two are at a trot out of the plaza. Lottie runs behind her mother, continuing to gawk at the conquerors of Berlin.