Berlin Encounter

by T. Davis Bunn

  Jake jogged alongside him up a heavily overgrown trail which paralleled the hillside. There was no longer any need for quiet caution. The rumbling was as loud as thunder. “But what does he want?”

  Impatiently Karl dumped his bicycle into a bush and started scrambling up the slope. Over his shoulder he tossed back the single word, “Everything.”

  The rise was steep, the ground loose. Jake grabbed handholds of grass and struggled to keep his footing. His breath came in punching gasps by the time he made the summit and collapsed beside Karl. Together they scrambled forward on hands and knees. Keeping his head low, Jake pushed through the final growth and saw a sight he had hoped was lost and gone forever.

  This was not a convoy. This was an army. A continuous line of vehicles stretched out in both directions as far as Jake could see. The trucks were full. With troops. And munitions. And they pulled heavy guns. And tanks. Hundreds of them.

  All headed west.

  He had seen enough military convoys to know what he was witnessing. The troops were dirty and battle weary, but they sat upright and held their guns calmly, like seasoned troops headed into battle. The tanks and big guns were blackened with powder and dust, but all were clearly in working order. And all rolling inexorably toward the West.

  But who was the enemy? And where was the war?

  A second line of trucks was pouring eastward, but these held a different cargo entirely. They were filled to the brim with loot. Cattle trucks piled with so much furniture they could scarcely move. Paintings stacked like plywood. Bathtubs and sinks and toilets and kitchen stoves jammed together so haphazardly that most or all would be destroyed long before they arrived. Jake saw three trucks loaded to the gills with radios.

  “The eastern sector of Berlin is being systematically emptied,” Karl murmured, following Jake’s gaze. “Telephones are loaded onto trucks with pitchforks. Away from prying Western eyes, Soviet soldiers wear watches from their wrists to their elbows and drape women’s jewelry around their neck. Some say their superiors accept it because it keeps them from having to find money for back pay. What the Soviets cannot take or have no use for, they burn. Our skies are often black with the smoke of burning books and archives. The Russians intend to wipe out every last vestige of our past, both good and bad, and replace it with their own version.”

  A series of perhaps two dozen trucks paraded by below them, carrying what appeared to be an entire factory—machines, spare parts, even doors and windows. Behind them trundled a series of troop carriers, but these were filled with civilians. Karl went on, “Thousands of our most skilled workers are being swallowed by the Soviet whale. Whole factories are disappearing overnight. Last week we watched them dismantle and load up one of Berlin’s telephone exchanges.”

  Jake returned his attention to the westbound flow as a series of massive eighty-eights rolled by. Some were being pulled by bulldozers, others by tanks, one by a series of farm tractors chained into tandem. There was no question about it. He was witnessing an army on the move.

  He slipped back until his head was covered, turned to the bearded man beside him, and demanded, “Where are they headed?”

  Karl fastened him with his good eye and replied, “That you and your Western allies must decide for yourselves.”

  ———

  Jake waited until they were back and preparing a meager supper before asking, “How do we get out?”

  He and Karl Schreiner were standing to one side of the main hall, which saw duty as dining room, meeting point, distribution center, and place of worship. The place remained empty, however. Only Karl’s stocky assistant and the heavyset woman, who also worked as chief cook, were present that evening. “I don’t know. All my normal channels are now closed. We will have to wait and see what develops.” The beard parted in a rare smile. “As you can imagine, we are learning to deal in impossibles. It is a part of working and living here in the east.”

  “That’s exactly how I would describe this situation,” Jake replied, looking around the stone-lined chamber. “Impossible.”

  “Hopeless,” Karl agreed. “Incapable of being dealt with. By us, that is.”

  Jake examined this immense man with his vastly disfigured face, wishing he could understand such a strength of faith. “I could not do it,” he said flatly. “Stay here and endure what you are open to.”

  Karl turned his good eye onto Jake and pinned him to the spot. “You could,” he rumbled softly, “if this was what God had called you to do.”

  Jake’s attention was caught by a block of wood nailed to the wall. The timber had been shattered by some awful force which had left one end splintered and the other charred black. A bomb, Jake guessed, destroying what probably had been the cross-tie to a roof of someone’s home. Upon the timber the following words had not been carved, but rather branded, “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too difficult for me?”

  “We are not a majority among believers,” Karl was saying. “We are a select few. We have chosen to accept the call, to embrace the injustice of this worldly fate. To face the impossibility of living as evangelists in a world where evangelism is a crime. To be there and share the darkness with those who remain trapped by the world.”

  Jake glanced at the chamber’s stone-lined windows. Carved in a continuous ring around one frame were the words: “For nothing will be impossible with God.” Around the other frame was another inscription: “Jesus said, the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.” Jake looked back to the hulking man, feeling the words’ silent impact resound deep within him.

  “God’s power is unlimited,” Karl went on, his voice too solid with confidence to brook doubt. “Let me tell you something about unlimited power. It means that whatever situation I face, I can do nothing better than to face it in utter emptiness.”

  Emptiness. Jake recalled his time in the Sahara, felt something of the same sense of strength he had felt in the desert. Yet there was something else. A whisper of distress disturbed the surface of his peace, like a wind blinding his vision with bitter desert sand. He confessed, “I have been thinking about the war. Not only that.” He struggled to make sense of the disturbed vision in his mind and heart. “I’m still angry about it.”

  Karl’s eyes searched out where Hans Hechter sat at the corner table, his hands cupped around a steaming mug, his shoulders sunk in what had come to be perpetual despair. The effects of Jake’s blow had healed to a plum-colored swelling under one eye. “You did that?”

  Jake nodded. Ashamed and yet defiant. Ready with a thousand arguments as to why it was right to have struck the man, yet filled with remorse. Not only for Hans Hechter. For something else.

  Karl’s gaze turned back to him. “You still carry the war in your heart.”

  Suddenly Jake had no wish to deny what he felt. “I thought I had left it behind, that I had prayed through it and found peace. But I guess I haven’t.”

  The single eye probed with surgical precision. “Have you ever thought that this has come upon you for a purpose?”

  Jake searched the massive bearded face. “No.”

  “Perhaps only you can reach that man over there. Perhaps your anger was returned to you as a means of carrying out God’s call.” He shrugged. “I do not profess to have all the answers. But I have often found that the Lord not only replaces the years the locusts have eaten, but also grants us opportunities to make gold from the lead of our lives. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Why not go and tell that man what is deepest in your heart,” Karl suggested.

  Jake took an involuntary step back. “Hans?”

  “Is that his name? For a moment I forgot.” The glittering eye gently mocked him. “For a moment I saw only another sinner who needed help to find his way.”

  Karl started to turn away, then stopped. “But of course, it would be impossible for you to give such help to a man like this. A sinner like this. An enemy like this
. Of course. Think of all the horror this man and his kind have done to the world. Just think. How could anyone come to help one like this, much less confess their own deepest failings and weaknesses as a way to show that they too are human and in constant need of help?”

  Jake wondered if the burly man could see how much his words had rocked him. “You don’t ask much, do you?”

  “Only the impossible,” Karl replied softly. “Only the completely and utterly impossible.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jake stirred in the night, eased his position on the lumpy straw mattress. Sally was instantly alert and looking at him. “What’s the matter?”

  “I can’t sleep,” he whispered.

  “I know you can’t sleep.” She shifted to her side, raised her head up so that she could look down on his face. “Your not sleeping has kept me awake all night.”

  He heard her words as an invitation, a gift. “I feel like I’m being torn in two,” he confessed.

  “Why?”

  Jake looked at his wife. Sally’s eyes were luminous mirrors in the soft light, showing him his soul’s recesses, secrets which had remained invisible throughout the days and the struggles. “Something inside of me keeps saying I need to talk to Hans Hechter. Not just talk. Share with him. Tell him about faith.”

  “Then you should.” Quiet. Definite.

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yes it is.”

  Jake shook his head, tried to put concrete form to his tumultuous thoughts. “I keep thinking about my brother. How he died fighting everything this man stands for.”

  “Stood for,” Sally corrected him quietly.

  “I wonder,” Jake said. “I really do. I mean, just look at the guy. Tell me you don’t see a Nazi.”

  Sally kept her eyes fastened upon him, her gaze softly penetrating. “You know what I see? A man who holds to the past because he hasn’t been offered anything to take its place. Yet.”

  The truth of her words raked across Jake’s soul, exposing much that he would have preferred to keep hidden. Even from himself. He sighed, his eyes closed, trying to hold back the tide of awareness that came flooding in.

  But Sally was not finished. “You know what else I see?”

  “What?” he said, the word a sigh without beginning or end. An admission that he needed to hear what she said, no matter that it stripped him bare.

  “I see a very great man given a very great gift.” She paused long enough to gentle his protest with a kiss. “I see you being granted an opportunity to work through something really important. I don’t know what it is that’s holding you back from sharing your faith with him, but I know in my heart it’s important. Not for him, Jake. Important for you. Something that is just begging to come out.”

  The power rose within him like a ball of flame, searing his very being as it lifted from the depths of his mind and heart, entering his mouth, ready to come out. Finally.

  But she stopped him with a finger to his lips. “Not to me,” she said, her words feather light. “I’m not the one who needs to hear this. Talk to Hans. Show him that you are human. That you have failings. But that something has come into your life that gives you the power and the wisdom to rise above them. And to heal.”

  ———

  Jake found Hechter in the same corner as before he had gone to bed. “Can’t sleep?”

  The man raised his eyes from the empty cup in his hands, his gaze a blue-clad void. “I have slept enough,” he replied slowly. “I feel as though I have slept through my entire life, building dream upon dream.”

  Jake walked over and sat down across the rough-hewn table from the blond scientist, wondered what he should say, how he should begin.

  “I feel,” Hechter said, then dropped his head in defeat. “I don’t know what I feel. My mind runs in circles, and it returns over and over to the war.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the war too,” Jake confessed. “A lot.”

  “Colonel Jake Burnes,” Hans said, the words taking a slow bitter cadence. “The hero. The victor.”

  Jake closed his eyes to the sudden rush of irritation, and in doing so had the wrenching sense of a turning. A small repentance. The words came to him as suddenly as the flood of peace, as though they had both been waiting, hovering just beyond reach, ready for him to make the turning. Away from anger, away from the past, away from all that was old and dead and dust. Repentance.

  “I never felt so alive as I did during the war,” Jake said quietly.

  The power of his admission broke through Hechter’s self-absorption. His chin lifted with a jerk. “What?”

  “War did that to me,” Jake said, and felt a hot ballooning rush of emotion flood his chest. He knew then that he was confessing not only to Hechter, not only to himself, but to God. Giving voice to the unspeakable. “I became a Christian about five months after the war ended. Part of me looked for faith because of what I did in the war and what I needed to release myself from. Memories, pains, burdens that I did not want to carry for the rest of my life. Experiences that had branded me, warped my mind and my heart and my spirit. Left me feeling crippled inside.”

  “This I understand,” Hans said, his voice so soft that the words were almost lost in the sputtering of the lantern overhead.

  “But another part,” Jake said, and had to stop. So much was filling his entire being that breath was hard to come by. He looked out over the shadowy hall to where the words had been inscribed around the second window. Everything is possible with God. The words flickered and danced in the lantern light, taking on a joyful life of their own. Everything.

  “Part of me was missing something,” Jake went on. “Not the war. But how the war made me feel. More than alive. Vital. In those moments of combat, there was something I never wanted to think about because I knew it was wrong. But not thinking about it did not make the feeling go away.”

  He stopped, his chest so tight he had to search the chamber for breath. There was nothing else within him except the need to see that part of himself for what it was, and understand. “It was,” he hesitated long, his voice raw from the effort. “It was almost ecstasy. Horrible, worse than death sometimes. But totally overwhelming. Totally now.”

  The silence lasted long enough to become a part of the night, like the shadows and the flickering lantern and the rough-hewn table and the burning pain of his confession. Finally Hechter strained against the night’s hold and asked quietly, “This faith of yours, has it offered you the same ecstasy?”

  “Not the same at all. So different it has been possible to pretend that the other never happened. But it did. And I see how some warriors come to think of battle and God together in their minds.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “They are opposites,” Jake said, and stopped to swallow. His throat felt sandblasted. Hans offered him a cup, Jake accepted and drank without looking, without realizing he was drinking. He set down the cup, went on, “The presence of God has given me at times what the word ecstasy is supposed to mean. In such moments, it is not something outside myself that forces the world to disappear. It is the Spirit of God himself, granting me one small instance of knowing what it means to be truly selfless. Without self. Open and exposed not by life-threatening horrors, but by life. Pure, complete, eternal life.”

  Slowly Jake raised himself to his feet, surrounded by the emptiness of unburdening. His soul felt ripped asunder. “In those moments,” he said quietly, his voice directed to the dark window, “everything seems so simple, and God feels so close. Then something like this happens, and God is a billion miles away, and I am trapped inside all my mistakes and my sins and my failings. And all I can do is try and remember that even though I am the most unworthy man who ever lived, still He has forgiven me and brought me back into the eternal fold.”

  Jake felt as though there were a hundred other things a better man could have said. But for him the time was over, his own weaknesses too overwhelming to continue. “Good-night,” he
said, and began shuffling away.

  He was almost to the hallway entrance when a quiet voice behind him said, “Colonel.”

  Reluctantly Jake turned back, and met Hans Hechter’s gaze for the first time since beginning his confession. The scientist watched him calmly, the blue eyes empty of both pride and shadows. He sat beneath the flickering lantern, nodded his head slowly, and said, “Thank you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was a totally different Hans Hechter who woke him. A frantic, frightened Hans. Shaking him roughly, hissing softly, “Up, get up! We must flee!”

  Sally was already out of bed and flinging clothes over her nightgown while Jake was still fighting off the fog of insufficient sleep. “What time—”

  But hands were already jerking him up and onto his feet. “They have found me,” an anxious voice whispered as Sally came around the bed and began tossing clothes at him.

  “Who?” Jake’s mind moved a half-step behind his fingers, which was why he buttoned his shirt up lopsided and tried to fit feet into the wrong shoes.

  Hans was bundling him toward the door when it exploded inward and the heavyset woman hurried in. Her nightshirt was as great as a sail, and it billowed out around her as she shouldered past. “Down the back,” she whispered. “Through the closet, into the sewers, hurry.” Then she slid into bed, pulled the covers up to her curlers, and commenced to wave them frantically out and away.

  With Hans pulling and Sally pushing, Jake had little choice but go with the flow. His mind remained sluggish, and his feet scuffled blindly until two steps into the hallway he heard the ice-chilling voice. “I asked you a simple question, Herr Schreiner. I suggest you not try my patience any further. Did you or did you not speak with a certain trader at what the locals call the chapel market?”

  The cadaver. Jake came awake with electric suddenness, recognizing the voice of the rocket plant’s political officer.