Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright

by Justine Saracen

  “What do you think?” a voice said, startling her so that she jumped.

  The Reichsminister had caught her off guard.

  “As always, it’s…uh, precise, intelligent.” She warmed to the lie. “I mean, given the magnitude of the issues you address. Yes, very dignified.” She exhaled slowly and, she hoped, discreetly.

  Goebbels smiled at the compliment then cleared his throat for an announcement. “Frederica, circumstances require that I relocate to the Reich Chancellery, and I want you to come with me. My work is more important than ever now and I need you by my side. Not to mention that I like having that pretty face around.”

  “Herr Reichsminister, I…I…” Frederica stammered. “But the chancellery has been badly shelled. I understood the offices have closed.”

  “They have, but the government is functioning from below ground. Everything is being controlled now from that center. Everything. I need you there and the Führer needs you. Please take the afternoon to pack a few things.”

  Frederica was speechless. Pack? That meant she wouldn’t be able to leave. She focused on the thought of being imprisoned with Goebbels and so was slow to grasp what the announcement implied. But then realization struck: the rumors were true. There was a bunker under the chancellery. And the Führer was directing the war from inside it.

  Did the Allies know that?

  “Are you sure I can’t assist you from here? I mean the telephones are still working. I can carry on—”

  “No, no. We will need you right at hand. There will be communiqués, any number of secretarial tasks, and I can’t do without you.” Obviously, it was a command, not a request.

  “Come, come.” He was losing patience. “I’ve got a car ready that will take you to your apartment and wait outside while you pack. Gather up some clothes for a few days, your toiletries, the things that women carry with them. You should leave right now so you can report to the chancellery before the evening air raids.”

  “Herr Goebbels, I…” He was already walking out of the room.

  She sat, paralyzed for a moment. How could she notify Katja? She’d have to leave a note in the apartment. They were supposed to drop a new message the next day, but she’d have no time to code it now. She was about to be cut off from Handel. Would he assume she had been captured? She sagged in resignation. In a way, she had.

  *

  Burly Dr. Carl von Eicken, head of Berlin University’s otolaryngology department, hurried along the corridor past Katja, obviously no longer recognizing her from the year before. She stifled a smile. He’d never know that his name had saved her from death in a concentration camp.

  Three weeks after her rescue from Ravensbrück, she had regained enough strength to resume work at the Charité. Most of her colleagues knew what had happened to her, but remained silent about it, out of embarrassment, either for her or for themselves. Only the white-haired Klara Klotzenburg had crossed the line of propriety and actually addressed the matter.

  “I’m so glad to see you back,” she said under her breath as they walked along the corridor together. “Thank God for that. I hear they shave people’s heads, but on you, the short hair looks good. Rather stylish.”

  “Concentration-camp chic, heh?” Katja had quipped, and they shared a moment of levity before dropping the subject for good.

  But Ravensbrück was seldom on her mind now. Least of all while she worked with the incoming wounded soldiers in a new section of the hospital. Here, everyone was busy treating battlefront trauma and no Nazi nurses monitored her behavior.

  She hurried down the steps of the hospital toward the train station and joined the orderlies and nurses unloading the last hospital train. They were shabby affairs now, though she remembered the first one she’d met, an impressive and efficient Lazarettzug. It had been sixteen cars long, the first ten of which were “ward” cars with beds for soldiers. Following them were a pharmacy, operating room, and the oven car for cooking and for burning septic bandages and materials. Somewhere at the end were the cars for supplies, staff sleeping quarters, and administration. She had been impressed at how well the whole procedure worked, the unloading of wounded according to degree of urgency, the level of cleanliness and care. The wounded were dispersed into the hospital as their injuries demanded, some to operating theaters for surgery or amputation. Others, with massive infections, were taken to wards for treatment with sulfa and other drugs. And always, one or two went to the morgue.

  Katja had learned how to inject morphine for the massively injured so they could endure being carried, to bandage limbs close to the body, to cushion bandaged heads, and in general to afford comfort as orderlies lifted the litters from the cars and bore them into the waiting ambulance busses.

  Now the entire German army was in full retreat and the trains no longer had to come long distances. They were fewer now, many of them damaged, and all manner of rolling stock had been adapted to carry wounded. And morphine had become scarce.

  Katja leaned over a soldier who clutched her hand like a vise. A bandage covered his head and one of his eyes, and most of his left leg was missing. “It’s all right, soldier. You’re safe now. We’ll patch you up,” she lied.

  “Please, Fräulein. Don’t leave me.” The soldier looked up at her through his one good eye. “My left leg feels really strange, like bugs are eating at it. Can you look at it?”

  All she could do was repeat the usual reassurances. Too many other soldiers needed her too. “The doctors will look at you as soon as possible. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. The ambulance will take you right to the hospital.” Gently, she withdrew her fingers from his grip. His hand clutched the air as she backed away.

  Katja made her way slowly to the end of the ward car, checking bandages, giving morphine only to the most desperate cases, then halted, not certain what she was seeing.

  The soldier looked back at her, equally uncertain.

  It can’t be, she thought. Fatigue and wishful thinking were giving her hallucinations. She turned away.

  “Katja? Is that you?”

  She spun around. “Rudi! It is you. I was afraid to believe it!” Unable to embrace him for the splint and bandage that held his elbow aloft, she kissed him on the cheek.

  “The last we heard you were sent to a penal regiment in the East. We were sure it was just another kind of death sentence.”

  “It was supposed to be,” he said weakly. She leaned closer to hear him. His once-beautiful eyes were sunken now and ringed by a sooty gray skin. His voice was hoarse. “I guess my number wasn’t up yet.” An orderly stood by her now, unfastening the bunk and preparing to carry it as a stretcher.

  Rudi looked up anxiously at Katja. “Peter. Is he all right?”

  Katja clasped his hand. “Peter’s fine. You’ll be proud of him. He’s been working very hard for the cause. I’ll go tell him where you are when I get off work.”

  Rudi fell back against his pillow. “Oh, thank God!” he whispered, then seemed to fade back into sleep.

  “Nurse, please give me a hand here,” a doctor called to Katja from the other end of the car.

  “I’ll find you later in the hospital, I promise.” She kissed him again and hurried to the next patient.

  *

  Peter slid the pan of horsemeat and flour through the slot of the tiger cage. The big male rumbled menacingly at him, then bolted down the mixture with one or two snaps of the jaw. Still ravenous, he lunged at the cage door.

  Regretfully, Peter stepped back and moved on to the tigress in the next cage. All the big cats had been on half rations for weeks and their hip and shoulder bones were visible under their sagging flesh. The zookeeper had been forced to add ever more grain to the diminishing supply of horsemeat, and even that was not enough to keep them from slowly starving.

  He scraped the last scrap of fat onto the pan for the ocelot just as the door at the end of the corridor opened. Riedel, his face drained of color, held a rifle in one hand and a cartridge belt in the other.
r />   “What’s wrong?” Peter asked, though he sensed the answer. It made him sick.

  “There’s no more food, and none coming. Nothing.”

  “But we can’t let them just starve to death,” Peter said, knowing full well the absurdity of the remark. Of course they wouldn’t let them starve. His eyes locked onto the rifle. “You’re going to shoot them.”

  “No. You are. I’ve done a dozen other animals this morning and can’t stand it any longer. You’ve got to shoot these.” Riedel pressed a Mauser into Peter’s hand. “It’s that or let them starve or be bombed, and I know you’re not that cruel.” He draped a cartridge belt over Peter’s shoulders. “God help us all,” he said, and walked away.

  Peter stood in the doorway, dumbfounded, holding the terrible objects. He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t. He felt as if he would vomit.

  With the rifle in hand, he left the Lion House and wandered toward the other animal houses. Some of the animals had been transferred the year before to zoos in the South where there was less bombing. Why hadn’t all of them been saved? Why had the zoo stayed open so long? Too late now to ask.

  He arrived at the hippo pen. The huge beast lay on her right side, her left legs protruding horizontally from a torso that had already begun to swell. Her calf lay next to her, its strange square mouth wide open, as if calling out at the last moment.

  The Gorilla House was not so gory. The chimpanzees and smaller monkeys had been relocated in time, and only the mountain gorilla lay curled in a ball in the corner of his cage. A circle of blood formed a halo around his head.

  Peter wandered around the zoo as if in a trance, seeing the cadavers of the animals. Curiously, the birds had been spared, whether out of a sense that they might feed on insects or simply a reluctance to kill such delicate, harmless things.

  But all the large mammals were dead, and flies already buzzed around them.

  As if in a trance, Peter returned to the Lion House and loaded the first five cartridges into the magazine. He began at the ocelot cage, sliding the barrel through the bars. One clean shot did the job, but the sound was deafening, and the kickback onto his shoulder surprised him. He braced himself better and shot the lynx and the cheetah. His ears rang from the concussion.

  He’d never been religious, but recalled a psalm he’d learned as a boy. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.” He realized bitterly that he sensed no one with him. No one comforted him and nothing guided his hand but the bitter exigencies of war. And he was the shadow of death.

  The leopard and the panther went down quickly, but he was beginning to lose his nerve. His jaw started to tremble, as well as his hand, as he loaded the clip with the next five rounds.

  Unsettled by the gunshots the bigger cats roared and arched their backs. Peter, standing in front of the cubs, broke into tears, then shot them, one after the other. They tipped over with a sort of growled whimper, their little paws twitching in muscular reflex. The lioness leapt toward him but he felled her in mid-leap. His shoulder hurt from the rifle’s recoil, for he held it too tight. His chest hurt more.

  The male lion simply stood panting before the bars as if he had decided to die with dignity, but Peter’s trembling made it hard to aim and the shot was a little off. The beast swung his heavy head, as if to rid itself of a ferocious headache, then dropped to the floor. His rib cage sank with his final exhalation.

  At the tigress’s cage, Peter braced himself against the bars to keep from trembling. The great beast paced rapidly back and forth across the narrow cage as if to foil his aim. He let her pace three or four times and on her last turn, in the instant she faced him, he fired. She spat at him, swiping the air with a wide, striped paw, then collapsed.

  In the last cage Sultan, the magnificent male Sumatran tiger, roared, seeming to sense that all around him was death.

  Weeping, Peter slid the rifle barrel between the bars and took aim. “Sultan, I’m sorry, forgive me, please.” He pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Peter sobbed out loud. The clip was empty. He had to reload, while Sultan retreated to the back of the cage. Both hands were shaking as he slipped the final clip into the magazine. His face swollen with tears and mucous, he fired into the tiger’s head. Once, twice, a third time, and each recoil against his shoulder was like a reproach, the pain almost a comfort.

  When Sultan lay still, Peter dropped the rifle and climbed up into the cage. He knelt beside the beast, stroking its still-warm carcass, then laid his head against the tiger’s skull, sobbing uncontrollably. He wept for the tiger, but also for Rudi and the Jews and all the others in the camps, and he wept for Germany.

  Finally all the sorrow drained from him and only hopelessness was left. He stood up, crept back to the storage room, leaving all the cage doors hanging open, and dropped onto his mattress. He lay awhile in a stupor, wondering if he had the courage to shoot himself.

  “Peter?”

  “Who’s there?” His voice was still tight from crying. Katja stepped cautiously into the storage room and stood over him. He held out his arm toward the cages of dead cats. “Look what we’ve done,” he said mournfully.

  Katja had walked along the corridor, and she knew. She sat down next to him and tenderly took off his blood-splattered glasses. He wept again and she held him for a few moments, then wiped the lenses clean with a handkerchief before putting them back on his face.

  “Look, you have to get past this, and you can’t stay here anyhow. Maybe you should stay with me. By now, the Gestapo all have better things to do than hunt down a half Jew.”

  “What’s the point? They’ve destroyed everything.” He did not specify who “they” were, but she understood. “I might just as well stay here and go down with the next bombing raid. I don’t care any longer. I really don’t.”

  “You have to care. Someone needs you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Peter grumbled, wiping his sleeve across his dripping nose.

  Katja smiled weakly. “Rudi’s made it back to Berlin. He’s wounded, but alive, at the Charité.”

  “Rudi alive?” Peter slumped against the wall, tossing back his head and inhaling deep gulps of air. The joy of the news couldn’t cancel the horror of the morning, and so both emotions tore at him at the same time, like two waves crashing from different directions.

  “Oh, Katja,” he said finally, embracing her again. She held him for a moment, then stood up out of his grip. “Look, we don’t have time for this. If you want to see him, you’ve got to go now. You’ll have to search through the wards, but start by asking for the ambulatory wounded from today’s transport. That should narrow it down. Then, with a little luck, you can make yourself useful there. They’re desperate for help, so just put on an orderly’s jacket and go to work. No one’s going to ask for identity papers in the middle of that chaos.”

  He drew a handkerchief from the pocket of his overalls and blew his nose. “Yes, yes. I can do that. I’ll leave right now. And I won’t come back. Just let me collect a few things.” He took a knapsack from a corner and crammed in a shirt, some underwear, and the remnants of some dried sausage. “What do you think I should do with this?” He lifted the mattress where he slept on the floor, revealing the Wehrmacht uniform. “This helped me do a little damage this year. Do you think there’s any point in taking it?”

  “I don’t think so. The Russians are almost here and it’s not a good time to be a Wehrmacht soldier.”

  Peter nodded agreement. “Good-bye, Lieutenant Kramer,” he murmured over the familiar tunic. He felt as if he were abandoning an old friend as he tucked the Soldbuch back into the pocket and let the mattress drop into place. “I’m taking the pistol, though,” he said, getting to his feet and dropping the holster into his rucksack. “Let’s go.”

  “Unfortunately, the Strassenbahn tracks are all torn up, but goods trucks are taking passengers along the main avenues. It’s how I got here. You can t
ry to wave one down and still get to the Charité tonight, or you can come to Frederica’s place with me.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I have a delivery bicycle, a big one, with a platform on the back for freight. It can carry a passenger too. I’ll take you to the Richterstrasse and then I’ll go on to the Charité.”

  Together they abandoned the storage room and marched along the corridor of carnage. Katja glanced once at the dead lion cubs, then looked away. It was unbearable.

  *

  With the streetlights cut to protect from night bombing, Frederica’s apartment building was dark, as were all the other buildings on the street. The lack of foot traffic at that late hour also added to the general gloom. Katja dismounted from Peter’s freight bike and gave him a quick hug. “Lock this bike up well. It’s going to be the only reliable transportation for a long while, I think. I’ll look for Rudi when I get to work in the morning, so I expect to see you then.”

  It was already eleven when she arrived at the door. Hopefully she could get a few hours’ sleep in Frederica’s arms with no air raids to disturb them.

  Alarmingly, the apartment was dark. Katja called out when she entered, but had no answer. She clicked on one of the lamps and went to the bedroom. The apartment was empty. Panicking, she rushed back to the living room. Had Frederica been arrested? Mercifully, she found a note on the dining table.

  No time for details. Driver waiting downstairs for me to pack change of clothes. I’m ordered to go with JG to command center in Führerbunker in the chancellery. Don’t know when I can get out again. I love you.

  Führerbunker? What was that? It took a moment for Katja to grasp the several facts contained in the word. Adolf Hitler was in Berlin, in a bunker near, or more likely under, the chancellery. He would direct the final battles from there, alongside his chosen men. That, of course, included Joseph Goebbels and some of his staff.