“I just walked off. The Russians didn’t try to stop me. Their orders must have been about Theo and the truck, or maybe they were just worried because it was getting toward eleven-thirty and we had to be back by noon. The roads coming here were empty. Totally, completely empty. I wasn’t stopped once. I came straight here. There aren’t even any policemen down on the street in front of the market. Nobody.” She reached over, stopped Jake’s baffled gaze about the space in front of their truck, said, “Tell me you’re not mad.”
Hans stepped up beside them. “It’s just gone noon.” He looked around the area, demanded, “Where are the goods?”
“I was hoping you could tell me that,” Jake replied.
“Jake, please, would you look at me and—” Sally stopped with a little squeak. She hopped back a step and sat on the hood of the truck. “The ground just moved.”
A section of the dusty earth came up, pushed aside, and revealed the scraggly dark beard of the one-eyed man. He nodded at Jake, jerked at the sight of Sally, demanded quietly, “What is she doing here?”
“Long story.”
“No time. Come, quickly, all of you. And watch your step. There are rats.”
———
“Berlin has become a microcosm of all Europe,” the burly man was saying. “This was Stalin’s decision. What happens here will determine what will happen first in Germany, then France, then Italy. Then, my friend, it will be too late.”
“Too late for what?” Jake still had difficulty fitting together the jumbled pieces confronting him. This one-eyed man and his precise speech. The surroundings, the atmosphere, the urgency with which this man spoke.
“Too late to do what must be done,” he replied.
Before he could continue, Sally interrupted him with, “Where is everybody?”
He looked at her. Clearly he was unsure what to think of this woman and resented her presence. “We have sent everyone home until the emergency has stabilized. It is safer.”
“What emergency?”
“All in good time.” The man returned his attention to Jake. “You hold to the same error as most of your countrymen. I saw this coming, as did others. In order to fight the war with Stalin’s Russia on your side, you chose to overlook the kind of man with whom you dealt. Now it is hard for you to accept the truth.”
“And that is?”
“That this man is your enemy. And not just yours. He is the enemy of all freedom. And all faith.”
A bear, Jake decided. That was what this Karl Schreiner most resembled. A big hairy bear, scarred from countless battles and carrying the burden of things which Jake could only imagine. He ventured a guess, “You were on the Russian front?”
“I was. And walked home when it was over, seven months on the road through ice and snow and mud and rain, with hunger and pain as my only companions.” Karl started to scratch at his blind eye, caught himself and lowered his hand. “You think this is what has caused me to think the way I do? Listen, my friend. Stalin’s world has no room for faith in anything but Stalin. He may dress his lie up in other words, like brotherhood or Communism or Mother Russia. But in truth Stalin is the new Caesar, setting himself up to be worshiped and made a god on earth.”
Faith. This was the most jarring fragment of all. The man claimed to be not just a believer, but a lay minister as well. They sat together in a stone-lined office. Beyond the stout open door was what had become a meeting hall and before had been the wine cellar of a gracious manor. The manor was gone, the wine racks now stacked with Jake’s Bibles, as well as clothes and shoes and medicines and children’s toys.
Sally interrupted them again. Her voice was soft and tired, yet somehow stronger because of the effort it took to speak. “Jake and I are believers.”
Surprise registered on the broad-bearded features. Karl looked from one to the other. “This is truth?”
“It is,” Jake confirmed. Proud of her. So glad to be with her that for the moment, for this tiny sliver of time and safety and comfort, there was no room for worry or condemnation. She was here. It was enough.
Narrow windows lined one wall of both the office and the meeting hall, permitting in meager afternoon light. The ceiling in the hall was high and vaulted, rising in great stone arches which intersected before descending to sturdy pillars. The benches were hard and wooden and still bore the marks of vineyards which had supplied the crates from which they were made. The room was unadorned save for a single large cross, the timbers taken from the derelict manor, rough and scarred by war and bombs. Jake found his gaze repeatedly drawn through the office doorway and out to that war-scarred cross, as though there were a message being whispered to his heart, something he either could not hear or was frightened to accept.
Karl gathered himself and went on, “The West sits at the table and argues about border disputes and the fact that they can no longer move easily through the eastern sector of Berlin. But this is just a smokescreen. It is intended to keep you occupied while other, greater operations go unnoticed.”
“What operations?”
“This is what I shall have to show you.” He rose to his feet. “We leave in fifteen minutes.”
Sally waited until Karl had moved off before asking, “What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Jake looked at her. She had not released his hand since descending into the sewer and watching the burly man and his assistant slide the segment of false flooring back into place. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired,” she said, and showed it. Her face bore the finely etched lines of extreme fatigue and tension. “I don’t think I’ve really slept since this started.”
“Do you want to rest?”
“Later.” Her eyes rested calmly on Jake as she declared, “I trust him.”
He nodded, accepted the information, said, “You’ve changed since we’ve gotten here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were a frightened little mouse back at the truck,” he replied.
“I was afraid you were going to try and send me away,” she said, her fingers linking themselves more tightly with his. “I didn’t want to fight with you.”
He freed one hand to trace a feather-touch down the side of the frame made by her tousled hair. “I’m glad you came.”
The haunted look returned, flitting across her features like clouds across a windswept sky. “After you left England, I found myself lying there awake at night, facing changes. Some nights I felt like it was the only thing that kept me intact, feeling like I needed to use this time to make these realizations and build for the future. A future together. Otherwise I might have drowned in my fears that you wouldn’t . . .”
He stilled her words with a finger to her lips, or tried to, but she shook her head. Whatever it was, it needed to be said. Jake settled back, filled to bursting with the wonder of being so loved.
“I’ve always been independent, determined to go my own way and be my own person. I never thought being married would change this. But it has. Before, I thought it was going to be just fine, you’d go off on your own little adventures, and it would give me the space to be myself. But it won’t work, Jake. I’m too much a part of you.” Sally leaned over far enough to place her head on his shoulder. “We have to do something about this, Jake. I’m not asking you to change. I’m only asking for you to make it so whatever it is you need to do, I can do it with you.”
“I understand,” he murmured. He did.
A sharp knock sounded on the door. Karl pushed through, every action fueled by his impatient strength. He looked at Sally, said, “You and your husband may take my quarters. They lie beyond the kitchen and the dorm where your Hans Hechter has bunked down. I suggest you go rest.” His attention swiveled to Jake. “Time to move.”
———
“Anyone who lives by faith in the coming days will have to be a fighter.”
They were crouched in the same rabbit warren of sewer tunnels that had carried them from the market to the mano
r’s bombed-out hulk. Overhead rumbled a seemingly endless train of vehicles so heavy they caused the walls around Jake to tremble. The only light came from a kerosene lantern in Karl’s massive grip. The smell of burning oil helped to stave off the worst of the sewer’s stench.
“That’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?” the burly man pressed. “How one of Hitler’s soldiers came to be sitting here beside you, a spy for the West and a soldier for God.”
“There is a lot about this whole business,” Jake replied, “which I do not begin to understand.”
“God speaks to a man when he is ready and able to listen. For me, it happened on an icy field in the middle of nowhere, when death was as real to me as the cold that blistered my feet. He spoke to me then. I heard His voice, and I knew that I was to be saved.” He thumped his barrel chest. “Not saved in the sense of living longer in this pitiful body. For an instant of clarity I realized that if I lived or died, it was His choice, and I was going to be content with the decision.”
“I understand,” Jake said quietly.
“He called me back here,” the deep voice rumbled on. “Back to a city and a country as ruined by war as I was myself. Filled with needs which no human hand could answer. Desperate with hunger for the truth I had found and brought back with me.” The single dark eye glimmered in the lantern light. “But it will take a fighter to be a Christian in these coming times. Make no mistake. Stalin’s world has less room for true Christian faith than the Nazis did. Already the NKVD, the secret police, and their German minions called the People’s Police have started their sorties. Invading houses of worship, stripping them bare. One Bible per church.”
“What about the ones we brought?”
“We will not keep them long.” He pointed toward the gradually diminishing noise overhead. “As soon as this moment of crisis has passed, we will distribute them to those who have lost everything. There are many such among us. It is the struggle that keeps me busy, seeing to their needs.” Karl paused, squinted as he examined Jake, then went on, “At least, the external struggle. My internal struggle is far different.”
“So is mine,” Jake said quietly, the words coming out before he had realized he had spoken, as though the burly man’s own confession was an invitation he had been waiting for. Jake found the growing silence overhead pushing at him. Urging him to open doors that he vastly preferred to keep shut. He found himself struggling to speak, and at the same time to keep still, unwilling to discuss personal matters with this man who had once been his enemy. And then he could not remain silent any longer. “I feel like I’m going back over the same problems again and again inside myself.”
“I have sensed this struggle within you.” The burly man did not seem the least bit surprised to hear such things, seated there in the dank putrid darkness of a Berlin sewer. “Yours is a common trait among believers.”
“I thought I had left all this behind me,” Jake went on. “But here it still is, worse than before.”
“Not worse,” the man corrected. “Seen in the fullness of its proper time.” He set the lantern on the stone ledge beside him and rubbed two tired hands down the sides of his face. “Four months after I set up the Evangelische Keller, that is what we call our cellar church, I was approached by a group of neighbors. The rubble lot where once three blocks of apartments and an office building had stood was being taken over by black marketeers. There was liquor and fights and growing evil. Yet the people did not want the black marketeers to leave. They needed the goods. What they wanted was for me to control them. They knew I was a fighter, a former soldier, and most of those who remained were either women with children or too old or too infirm to do it themselves.”
Karl’s deep voice echoed gently up and down the concrete way. “I was terrified that I would revert to what I had been before. After all, I had only been a Christian for not even two years, and I had been a soldier three times that long. The only reason I ran the Keller at all was that none of the priests who had been carted off by the Nazis had returned from the concentration camps. None. Our little region of Berlin was without either church or minister. But my neighbors did not see me as a preacher. They saw me as a man. Someone who could be called on in their hour of need. My fears meant nothing to them. So what if I returned to my angry ways and fought and struggled and even perhaps killed again? They trusted me because I was a Christian, but they needed me because I was strong.”
The stare was inward directed, the coarse features twisted with the power of his struggle. “I did the only thing that made sense. I prayed. I prayed and I waited, and as I waited I watched the situation worsen. Prostitutes began collecting around the market area, drawing in more of the war’s refuse. So with my former comrade whom you have met, a man who has also now committed his life to the Lord, together we did what was needed. We cleared out the worst of the criminals and set out to control the others. We paid the bribes demanded by the Soviet soldiers and the German bureaucrats. We fought when we had to. We collected payments from all the traders, and with this money we financed the church. The only working church now in all this segment of Berlin.”
“You did right,” Jake said quietly.
“Yes? You are sure of this?” The fierce gaze turned outward again. “But what of the anger that is drawn out of me? What of this pleasure I feel for the battle and the struggle and the power in controlling this market?” When Jake did not answer, the gaze returned inward. “Then through church channels, through church channels, I was asked to send my assessment of the Communists’ attitude toward the faithful. This led to other questions, about the rebuilding, the economy, the attitude of the people, the police, the effects of the Soviets. And then to helping directly with problems such as yours. I did not hesitate to respond. Yet I knew great reluctance. Not about the actions, about myself. All these activities were drawing out things within myself which I did not wish to see. I was confronted time and again with my own anger, with my own unsolved problems, with battles that still raged far below the surface.”
Jake nodded slowly, his entire being rocking back and forth in time to the man’s words. His words and experiences were different, but the struggle was the same. He felt that in his bones.
“How could this be? I was a Christian, I felt in the very marrow of my being that I was saved. Then how could I still harbor all these vestiges of who I had been before? Had I not accepted the call to repentance? Had I not dedicated my life to the Master? Did I not feel that sense of solid rightness to my deeds? Then why was I still so plagued by all of these storms in my mind and heart and soul?”
“You’re not just talking about yourself,” Jake confessed. “You’re talking about me as well.”
“Listen to me. I am talking about every believer. I do not have all the reasons, my friend. And those I have found may be valid only for me. But one thing I will tell you now, for I have seen the same storm in your eyes that has raged in mine. There is a purpose to it all. In the moment of greatest confusion, when the gale hurtles you about and all your questions are riddles without answers, remember the One who walks upon the waters. He calls to you to join Him, to do the impossible. He reminds you that in His gracious hands lies the power to calm all tempests and bring light to the deepest dark.”
Karl picked up his lantern, lifted the glass face, and blew out the light. In the sudden darkness there was a grating overhead, followed by a sliver of light so brilliant that Jake had to shield his eyes. Karl waited for his own vision to clear, then poked his head up, inspected in both directions. “Come,” he said. “It is time for you to see the new foe at work.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Everything is so quiet,” Jake said. His voice was barely above a whisper, but still the sound rang loud in his ears.
“These people have long since learned when it is best to disappear,” Karl muttered, his basso rumble kept low. “Even so, we must be grateful. It covers your presence in the chapel, which is a risk to all. We must find a way to send you on befo
re people return to the streets and the sanctuary. Informers are everywhere.”
They rode bicycles taken from a tumbledown storage shed set beside their exit from the underground passage. They rode down narrow ways, moving ever farther from the city. The condensed feel of a bombed suburb had been left behind. Their way was now lined by garden walls and stone cottages and occasional glimpses of open countryside. Their tires scraped loud over the gritty surface. They had seen no one since emerging from the sewer.
Jake was hard pressed to keep up with Karl. Despite his bulk, the man cycled along at a surprising pace. “What exactly is going on?”
“Exactly,” the big man puffed. “Exactly, this afternoon Stalin sealed off Berlin.”
Jake faltered, stopped, then had to race to catch up. “What?”
“They have created an island,” the big man continued without slowing. “The western sector of Berlin is now surrounded by Soviet forces and is totally isolated. Cut off from all aid. Stalin has given the world an ultimatum. Relinquish Berlin, or face the consequences.”
The late afternoon sky was blue and cloud flecked and preparing for a glorious sunset. Jake caught the faintest hint of noise. Familiar, yet strange. The noise drifted away as a puff of wind slipped between two cottages, then returned, louder now. “What is that?”
“The sound of doom, if you are not careful. What you in the West do not understand,” Karl went on, the words punching out in time to his impatient strokes, “is that Stalin plays with men and power as others play with chess pieces. Berlin is nothing more than a pawn’s gambit, a test of your resolve and strength.”
The sound was now strong enough to raise the hair on the nape of Jake’s neck. He felt the sweat trickling down his spine coalesce and chill.
“Berlin is meant to occupy the West’s attention while Stalin prepares the bigger operation. It is intended to blind you, and it is succeeding.” Karl halted at the base of a tall hill, slipped to his feet, and started pushing his bicycle by foot. “Hurry.”
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