Heroes

by David Hagberg

  Marti Zimmer, a young woman from Westphalia, with the pale look of the Dutch, whose husband had been shot as a deserter one year ago when he had been too sick to fight, appeared in the corridor. She stopped, doe-eyed, on the verge of scurrying away, but then she managed a very slight smile.

  “All but two went out early this morning,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

  “Was there any trouble?” Dannsiger asked.

  Marti cocked her head, as if she were trying to listen for some faint far-off sound, and then she shrugged. “There was shooting.

  But we don’t know what it was. Karl went out, but he said he saw nothing. He was gone for nearly an hour.”

  “I see,” Dannsiger said. “Where is Karl now?”

  Deland felt somewhat uncomfortable around the girl. There was no one else here in the shelter even remotely her own age, except for him and, of course, some of the fliers. She was very lonely. It made him nervous.

  “He is with the others.”

  “Are the new workbooks completed?”

  “They are just finishing them now,” the girl said.

  “I’ll go downstairs and check on their progress,” Dannsiger said. He turned to Deland. “In the meantime, find out what is needed in the way of supplies. We’ll have to take care of it this evening or first thing in the morning.”

  “Of course,” Deland said, and Dannsiger went down the corridor and down the stairs to the basement where most of the shelter’s work was done.

  The remaining two fliers were both Americans from a B17 shot down five days ago. They were bunked in the basement in a room adjacent to the opening into the sewer. If all else failed and the building did come under attack, they would at least have a chance of escape.

  Deland had talked at length to both of them, as he had with many of the Americans who came through, getting news from home.

  He could not identify himself, of course, or send messages back home. If the escapees were picked up and interrogated, it would give him away. For the same reason the downed airmen were brought into the shelter only in the middle of the night, and they were sent out in darkness as well. They’d never be able to find their way back—or lead their captors back here.

  Marti turned and started up the corridor. “Come,” she said.

  Deland followed her to her office-bedroom. She had become the requisitions and supply officer for the shelter. It was she who figured out what they needed to continue their work: everything from ink and pen-nibs to material for clothes and the sewing machines to make them with.

  The room smelled of lilacs. There were three large bunches of them in vases around the large room. Tall windows overlooked the river. From here the Spree was pretty.

  Deland went to one of the windows and looked outside. Several children were playing some game in a large bomb crater in the narrow strip of yard between the backs of the apartment building and the muddy river banks. A lot of debris was laying around.

  “I watch them often from here,” Marti said.

  Deland turned to her. She stood in front of her desk. The room was furnished with a bed and a small Schrank. A tattered old throw rug lay in the middle of the spotlessly clean wooden floor.

  A bullfight poster from Spain was tacked on the wall. On the opposite wall was the standard-issue photograph of Adolph Hitler.

  “For inspiration,” she always said. “He is what we are fighting against.”

  “It always make me nervous,” Deland said.

  “What, the children?” she asked in surprise.

  He nodded. “I’m afraid there will be an unexploded bomb. Or some glass, or something that they might hurt themselves on.”

  Marti laughed. “You Americans are all alike.”

  He smiled with her, although he wasn’t quite sure he understood, or even liked, the inflection of her remark.

  “You’re all little boys. The bombs are raining down every day and every night, and yet you are worried about the children playing in the leftovers.”

  She had been working with a German first aid unit outside of Paris until nine months ago when a group of French Resistance fighters had ambushed her one night. Five of them had raped her and had left her for dead.

  The German command had returned her home, and then she had come here to Berlin after she had recovered. Instead of turning her against the Resistance, it had opened her eyes to what war was doing to people. She was on a pension now for full disability. As far as the German military was concerned, she was above suspicion, although Dannsiger was her uncle.

  “It doesn’t make any sense, does it?” Deland said looking again down at the children. An overwhelming sense of frustration and sadness welled up inside of him.

  “It won’t last much longer, Helmut,” she said. “And then we will be able to begin rebuilding our lives. All of us will be able to pick up the threads that were torn from us.”

  “We’ll never be the same.”

  Marti laughed again, the sound light, almost musical. “No, of course not, but maybe we’ll be able to get sane again.”

  “In the meantime …“he began.

  “In the meantime we live our lives. At the moment we need India ink. Black and blue.”

  “India ink?”

  She nodded, then picked up a piece of paper and held it out to him. “Along with a few other things.”

  Deland took the list from her. It was long, and included everything from buttons (all sizes) to wallets, eyeglasses, and German Reich marks.

  Deland chuckled at the last. “We should have gold.”

  “That, too, if you can come up with it.”

  He looked up. She was smiling at him. Whereas Katrina was short and full-bodied, Marti was tall and somewhat willowy for a German. But her hair was blonde, her eyes blue and her manner very Nordic. She was definitely German or Dutch.

  She came around her desk, but stopped in the middle of the room. She was wearing wool trousers and a thick, long-sleeved flannel shirt. “We shouldn’t be fighting this war, you know.”

  It was his turn to smile. “No.”

  “It’s turned everything upside down.”

  “I’m sorry … about your husband.” Deland said. Dannsiger told him that she had loved her husband very much. She had been pregnant when he had been killed. She had had a miscarriage.

  “I’m sorry about your Katrina in Wolgast.”

  “What?” Deland asked, suddenly very frightened. “Has something happened to her? Have you heard?” Marti came a few steps closer. “No,” she said. “I meant I was sorry that you could not be together. You must miss her very much.”

  “Christ,” he said, his heart hammering. He went back to the window. The sun was setting. The haze was thickening across the city.

  Marti followed him. She touched his shoulder, and he jumped as if he had been shot. He turned.

  ” …” he sputtered.

  She looked up into his eyes. Then she put her arms around him and drew his lips down to hers. He had no resistance left.

  Marti was thin, and very bony after Katrina, and yet it was comforting to hold a woman. Boys began with their mothers and ended with their wives. In between were difficult lonely times.

  She led him to the bed where she pulled him down. Blindly he had her shirt off, and then her bra, and he was kissing her breasts, taking her nipples in his mouth, her back arching against him.

  For just a moment he pulled back, thinking about Katy, thinking about the way it had become for them in Maria’s apartment, thinking about all the hopes and desires he had had for them. For just a moment he thought about how it would be when the war was over and he came back to her. What would it be like, in Wolgast?

  What would it be like in Germany then, for an American? He shuddered to think about it.

  “Helmut,” Marti breathed. The name was foreign, as was the voice calling it, but God help him, he was lonely, and cold, and frightened.

  They parted, and he stood up and took off his clothes, while she pulled
off her shoes, then her slacks and her underpants. The tuft of hair at her pubis was very blonde and hardly visible.

  When they were in bed together, lying side by side, Marti propped herself up on her elbow and looked into Deland’s eyes.

  “I want to say something to you,” she said seriously.

  Deland was hard. He wanted her. “What?” he said.

  “I don’t want you to forget about your Katrina,” she said. “It may sound strange that I am saying this now, but after the war you must go to her. This between us now, it is just comfort.

  Nothing more.”

  Tears began to leak from her eyes. He tried to draw her to him, but she pushed him back, and kissed his chest, his stomach, the inside of his thighs, and then took his full length into her mouth.

  The sensation was amazing, wonderful, and yet he wanted more. He had her head in his hands, and finally he pushed her away, over on her back, and he rolled over on top of her, entering her with a great feeling of relief.

  “Oh … yes,” Marti cried at one point.

  He slid his hands under her hips and grasped her buttocks, pulling her up each time he thrust, pushing harder and deeper each time, until he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he could feel himself coming, everything draining from him, Marti shuddering beneath him as she too climaxed.

  They held each other for a long time, until Deland began to feel that his position was awkward and that he was probably too much weight on her. He moved aside.

  She clung to him, though, not allowing him to move too far.

  “It was wonderful, Helmut,” she said. “It was for me. Did you get pleasure?”

  “Yes, of course,” Deland said, the beginnings of embarrassment rising within him. He couldn’t believe they had done what they had just done.

  Marti sat up and looked at him. “You’re sorry,” she said.

  He sat up and pushed away from her, getting to his feet.

  “What was I, some sort of a leper?” she asked.

  Deland hurriedly got dressed. “I am sorry, Marti,” he mumbled.

  He felt like such a fool.

  “Sorry?” she shrieked. “Sorry for what? Sorry that we made love? Sorry that there was a little pleasure in the midst of all this death?”

  Deland stepped back. His face and ears felt very hot. He kept thinking about Katrina. He was glad that she wasn’t here.

  “I’m sorry, Marti, this should never have happened.”

  She jumped up and grabbed a small ceramic cat that stood on the floor at the foot of her bed, and she flung it at him.

  He easily ducked aside, although it surprised him. The figurine breezed past his head, striking the wall and shattering into a million tiny pieces.

  “You bastard!” she screamed.

  He backed away.

  “You miserable bastard,” she screamed again, and Deland, only half dressed, fumbled his way out of her room.

  The early morning was very hot and sticky. Deland, stripped to the waist, sweat dripping from his nose and running down his chest and from his armpits, stood in the upstairs corridor of his apartment building, his radio in hand, as he listened to the air raid sirens wailing across the city.

  It was late. After four A.M. This was the third raid this night.

  The weather had broken three days ago, and the Allies had been unmercifully pounding the city day and night.

  He went to the end of the corridor and looked out the rear window across the bombed-out courtyard and beyond, toward the Kurfurstendamm. Spotlights worked back and forth, their beams stabbing the black night sky.

  There were stars up there. Only he could not see them from here. It gave him a sense of claustrophobia. He thought about Wisconsin: the lakes and the woods, fishing and hunting with his father and his uncles, and then later, as a young man, with his high school friends. In college he had been too busy, but there for a while in high school he had really enjoyed himself in the outdoors. He missed it now for some reason.

  The first bombs began falling well to the southwest in Charlottenburg, which meant the raid had a fifty-fifty chance of either coming up here to the Tiergarten area or south to Schoneberg.

  Deland guessed he no longer gave a damn.

  He turned away from the window, went to the far end of the corridor, and entered what once had been a linen closet but now was a storeroom for buckets and mops.

  Slinging his radio over his shoulder, he carefully climbed up on the shelves until he reached the overhead trapdoor which led into the attic and from there up onto the roof.

  It was only slightly cooler outside, but from here he could see ‘ the bomb flashes and feel the rumbles shake the entire earth each time a big bomb struck.

  Deland had been through this before. A hundred times ‘ before—so the bombs, the sirens, the night did not bother him.

  He had aged a lot in the last months.

  Quickly he set about rigging his antenna between a pair of chimneys a hundred feet apart, then sat down, his back against a standpipe, and began transmitting his numbers.

  Now he used Morse code; the transmissions were more likely to be received and understood that way, and his encryption was a simple grid overlay of the city of Berlin.

  Whenever he had the data Bern was interested in, he would transmit numbers which amounted to nothing more than grid references for strategic military targets within the city. Troop billets, supply depots, small factories that had sprung up in mostly residential neighborhoods over the past six or eight months—a host of targets that Allied bombadiers could concentrate on. In effect he had become less of a spy and more of a forward spotter.

  In one respect he no longer minded. He had become all but immune to what he was doing, to what was happening here. It was a defense mechanism.

  Two days ago a half-dozen British fliers filtered in from the countryside. They had provided the men with food, clothing, money, and papers. Within twenty-four hours the six had escaped through the sewer tunnel. Within two miles down river of where they had been released, a German shore patrol had spotted them and had machine-gunned them. Karl Kornmeister, one of the men from the shelter, had watched the entire thing, had watched it frustrated and helpless.

  He and Marti had been making love on a more or less regular basis now every time he went to the shelter. It meant little or nothing to either of them, although Deland still felt guilty, and so did Marti, he supposed. She still clung to the belief that somehow the reports of her husband’s death were wrong, that once the war was over, he would be found in some field hospital somewhere, or perhaps in a prison.

  Deland would-never go back to Wolgast, and Marti’s husband would never return. They both knew that, and yet neither of them could give up the fiction.

  The bombs came closer, one striking less than a block away, and Deland shuddered, shrinking down.

  A second and a third bomb struck to the north, a block or so away, and then for a few minutes the city was quiet. Even the air . raid sirens had ceased. , Deland broke off his transmission, got up and went to the edge ‘ of the roof and looked out across the city. Fires burned here and there, and there was a great deal of smoke in the air. Smoke and plaster dust. Deland figured that when the war was long over, he | would remember it most by the smell of plaster dust which { seemed to forever hang in the air.

  The searchlights still swung over the city, and it seemed strange to him that no noise accompanied their sweeps.

  Then he heard the sounds of the B17’s very high up, coming in from the west. A moment or so later he could heard the engine sounds of one or two Messerschmitts, and then distant cannon fire.

  The air raid sirens began again, and soon the dull thumps of bomb explosions rolled down from Wedding, accompanied by the sharper crunch of the few antiaircraft guns still functioning in the city.

  He went back to his radio and finished transmitting his coordinates. When he had completed the last sequence, the Bern operator signaled him to stand by, which usually meant that they’d want h
im to send the coordinates of some military target within the city.

  The Berliner Zeitung was not much of a newspaper these days, but they still were using the old one-time code. The message came over and Deland copied down the numbers, one pair at a time, until Bern signed off.

  He pulled his antenna down, repacked his radio, and went again to the edge of the roof to watch the bombing of Berlin.

  There were a lot of fires now; far off to the northeast, perhaps as far as Mitte or even Prenzlauerberg, a great fire was raging high into the night sky. Most likely it was one of the fuel depots there. Either that or it was the asphalt production center. Both were targets Deland had pinpointed weeks ago.

  The other raids today had lasted less than ten minutes each.

  This one seemed to go on forever, although when the last bombs finally fell and Deland no longer could hear the drone of the bombers, he looked at his watch and was shocked to see that only nine minutes had passed since the first bomb had dropped. Nine minutes! Eternity.

  His apartment was two rooms, actually. It had once belonged to a dentist. The outer chamber had been his waiting room, the inner his office and operating theater combined. Some of the dentist’s equipment was still stored in the back. He and his family had lived one floor above. They were Jews and had been taken away long ago, according to the fearful neighbors.

  He lay down on his cot with the Berliner Zeitung and his message. He quickly translated it, his gut tieing in knots as each word emerged.

  HITLER SUSPECTED IN RESIDENCE IN BUNKER BENEATH REICH CHANCELLERY. WHAT ARE CHANCES OF UNDERGROUND GETTING TO HIM? ALL MEANS BUT SUICIDE MISSION APPROVED.

  BERN He had not written out the message. He had translated it in his head. He began to laugh. Bitterly.

  There had been plots against Hitler’s life since day one, although most of them had been amateurish. It would have been relatively easy to have killed him years ago. Now it would be impossible. They said the Fuhrer led a charmed life. There had been recent assassination attempts, but apparently none of them had even come close.

  Deland got up from his cot. He was very tired, his eyes burning, his throat raw from the smoke, and he was very hungry.