“It’s Negro music,” Schmidt says, half suspicious, half curious. “And Jew music.”
Dietrich feels like weeping for this boy and all he does not know, all he has never known. He takes a cigarette from his pocket and lights it, hands it to Schmidt. “Yes,” he says. “Enjoy it.”
He goes to Maetz at once, because he has frightened himself with this burst of audacity and decides it best to deal with it as quickly as possible. For who knows whether anyone will report him.
He gives Maetz one of Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer’s cigars.
“I want you to know,” he says, “I have broken a rule in the sick bay. Broken the law, to be precise. I have accidentally listened to the BBC. While trying to clear some interference on the radio. The infraction was mine alone.”
Maetz looks startled but says nothing.
“I wanted to say,” Dietrich continues, “that I think it does the men good. Not that they care for the BBC news broadcasts, which are of course pure propaganda. But there is music as well—it is quite lively although it is forbidden. I was thinking—”
He pauses.
“Yes?” Maetz says. He is still so surprised he hasn’t decided how to respond. The face of the eminent General Rüdiger Graf van der Goltz is floating before him.
“I was thinking,” Dietrich continues, “as the bombing comes closer. And it does. As the bombing comes closer and we sustain casualties and the sick bay fills, it might help.”
Dietrich ends with a shrug and looks around as though his mind is elsewhere. Maetz is also studying the ceiling. “If anyone learns of this, I know nothing of it,” he says at last.
“Of course,” Dietrich says. “You will hear nothing more about it.”
“I expect you to use good judgment.”
“Yes.”
Dietrich lets himself out of the office and Linke returns him to his cell.
AUTUMN. He remains appalled at his own rashness, since he is supposed to be circumspect, to avoid calling attention to himself. And yet he is relieved to learn that in Tegel things can be taken farther even than in the so-called freedom outside. Men in extremities are granted a few mistakes, a few risks. The very bars of his cell foster moments of extraordinary grace. Such as the day Linke enters and offers to smuggle Dietrich’s letters out of the prison.
It is not unusual for Linke to pause in his duties to pass the time of day. He finds Dietrich always ready to ask after his family and enjoys talking about them. He has begun to notice that when he arrives Dietrich is usually writing.
“You must have a large family to write to,” he says one day, for Dietrich has said little about his personal life.
“Parents, a brother and sisters, a fiancée. But I’m not just writing letters, Otto.”
He tells Linke about his failed attempts to write fiction and drama. “But I have done some poems I’m pleased with. And then there’s—” He starts to explain that he has once again been writing theology, especially a reflection on time based in part on his reading of Heidegger and his own renewed sense—thanks to his growing interaction with the other prisoners—that his stint in captivity is not time lost. But he can see the guard’s attention begin to wander, so he only says, “I also try to do my work here—I write philosophy and theology, you see, though it is difficult because I am only allowed a few books at a time. And I actually don’t send out many letters. One never knows what the censors will make of what I write, and I don’t like to waste precious paper on trivialities.”
Linke nods and thinks. On his next visit he asks, “Where do your parents live?”
“Just off the Heerstraße in the Marienburger Allee. North of the Grunewald.”
“Not so far.”
And again nothing more is said. But that night he talks to his wife. A risk, of course, but he will also be in contact with the Bonhoeffer parents, who are obviously better off than most. “You should see the packages he gets, Marta, cheese and sausage and even eggs. The father is a doctor and they know people in the country.”
Marta agrees, and the next night when Linke wheels his bicycle into the gathering gloom of a Berlin evening he has a letter from Bonhoeffer to his parents tucked inside his waistband. A letter in which, because the censors will not touch it, Dietrich can ask freely about Hans, and Uncle Rudi, and can at last share his thoughts about the ordeal he is undergoing.
He writes not only to his parents but to his former students now serving as chaplains at the front. Writes to Elisabeth, though the letters won’t be posted until war’s end. In these letters he feels he is once again doing theology. His real work. A useless pursuit, his fellow prisoners would think, quibbling about abstractions while the world comes apart. And yet it is in the midst of such a crumbling world that he is able once again to write. There is some essence of God he longs to get at, which can only be approached at a slow pace with shoes in hand and eyes cast down. In the past, he thinks, this has not been his way. He has always possessed too much pride in his own intellect. This will no longer work, perhaps has never worked. The more one makes such a search for God the more everything dissolves, like an Impressionist painting approached slowly and reverently and too closely.
He scribbles, runs out of paper, lies on his cot and burns.
DAY 211. Cold, end of November. Dietrich longing for Advent. Maria has sent a wreath, which he has propped upon the bench.
Outside the city waits. Waits not for the Christ child but for bombs. Waits for the familiar ritual of siren, silence, flak, explosion, whistling and howling of flame, weeping.
He sees it all from his window. Watches as Berlin is lit, quarter by quarter, like a diorama in a museum. Then disappears in fire and gray smoke. Closer and closer. Kreuzberg. Wilmersdorf. Charlottenburg. Moabit.
Linke comes to his cell, unlocks it. His face is haggard. Parts of Wedding are in flames. Two buildings in his block have been hit.
Linke says, “Your sister Suse came today on her bicycle. She brought a package—” hands over the parcel—“and a letter she says is very important.” He pulls his shirttail above his pants and removes the letter from his waistband.
Dietrich nods his thanks. He unwraps the parcel while Linke sets a bowl of soup on the bench. He gives the guard a wedge of cheese. Linke goes out, leaving the door unlocked behind him. By the waning light of the window Dietrich unfolds the paper, which has no envelope because of the paper shortages. The cell is cold and Dietrich holds the letter in gloved hands.
He reads, Dearest Dietrich, Hans has been seriously injured. His cellblock was hit during the last incendiary attack, and he was struck in the head by shrapnel. He is paralyzed on one side and cannot speak, but the doctors hold out some hope that he will at least partially recover. He has been taken under guard from the prison to the Charité for treatment. Try not to worry. He is in pain but is alert, and he will at last have comfortable quarters and decent food. He has been quite ill, you know, one thing after another. Perhaps if he recovers some good may come of this, for there is now no question of pursuing his case in the immediate future. This means your time in prison will be extended, but if you can hold out until the day we all await—Well, we must pray for this. Your loving Mother and Father.
Dietrich reads the letter twice, then lights it with a match, careful to keep the flame away from the curtainless window. When the paper is nearly burned, he drops it to the floor and grinds the ashes beneath his heel.
DAY 213. The planes come in such numbers he can hear their deep-throated engines through the silence after the sirens. The barking of flak. Antiaircraft guns open fire from the Grunewald.
The explosions begin in the heart of the city. The Tiergarten, he thinks. The zoo. Orange blossoms open and close in the blackness.
Something is different. There is no pause between blasts, no seconds of held breath and still air. The flares of light move in a line, like an advancing orange tidal wave. Engulfing everything. Closer and closer. Dietrich grips the bars of his window, unable to look away as the molten wall leaps the hill to
ward Tegel.
He is on the floor. Unsure how he got there. His forehead throbs and his arm is stiff.
Screaming. The cell trembles. His ears hurt. He is up and limping, running along the corridor. Arms clutch at him through the door slots. The floor rolls, air whips back and forth.
Through the smoke he finds the stairway and hurtles down it, reaches the sick bay in time to see the first bodies carried in from the east wing, which has taken a direct hit.
DAY 214. The boy Schmidt dies of a crushed chest. Dietrich sits with him until the end, wipes away the bubbles of blood which well at the corners of his mouth. Tries to offer comfort, but Schmidt is out of his head and knows nothing of it.
Pfifer occupies a palette on the floor, since the beds are all taken. One thing after another for Pfifer. His leg was shattered during the raid when a portion of the wall fell on it. He lies on his back and talks to the ceiling.
They are listening to the BBC. It is what everyone wants now, guards and orderlies and prisoners, for it is the only way to learn what is going on outside. Because they listen to the BBC they know how to name what has happened to them. Carpet bombing. Saturation bombing. Something new.
Berlin, anyone knows without listening to the BBC, is a smoldering ruin.
In the Tiergarten, a bomb has landed in the zoo aquarium, killing all the amphibians and fish. Many of the animals are dead, others wounded or dying. The cages are damaged and soldiers are dispatched to kill the survivors, lest they escape into what is left of the city. Thuringian farm boys armed with machine guns mow down polar bears and lions and the last zebra amid smoldering piles of concrete. The crocodiles have managed to escape the reptile house and slither their way to the Spree, but they are caught at the riverbank and shot, thrown up white bellies first in the cold brown water.
DAY 253. CHRISTMAS EVE. Maria arrives first, bringing with her a small Christmas tree from Pätzig for Dietrich’s cell. He is pleased to see her but upset. The air raids have continued sporadically, and he is frightened for her safety. But she promises him she will stay at Sacrow, at the Dohnanyi home on the lake, where his parents have also gone. It is too far from the city center, too sparsely populated, to be a target except by accident.
She tells him all this seated across from him at the table in the visitors’ room, clutching the top of the tree with one hand to hold it upright even though Dietrich tries to persuade her to lay it on its side. No, she says, she has fashioned homemade ornaments out of various objects—pine cones and thistles and eggshells—and tied them to the branches so they won’t come off easily. She is afraid they will be damaged if she lays the tree down. So Dietrich takes it from her, to spare her arm, and talks with her while one arm cradles the tree as tenderly as if it were Maria.
She gives him his present, wrapped in a handkerchief since paper is so dear, and watches with tearing eyes as he opens it. It is her father’s wristwatch, which he was wearing when he was killed. A thin crack mars the glass face but the watch still keeps time.
“It’s the only thing of his we got back,” she says. “Mother didn’t even receive his wedding ring. But she agreed I could give this to you. Because I begged her so very hard.”
She does not tell him what a scene her request caused, how her mother wept and accused Maria of dishonoring her father’s memory before giving in at last. Dietrich slips the gold band over his wrist.
“A perfect fit,” he says, and hands her the handkerchief.
“Of course.” She dabs at her eyes. “You’re just like him. Aren’t you?”
“A great deal,” he says, and of all his deceptions this one causes him the greatest pang of guilt.
Then to the sick bay, where those who are able to leave their beds draw their chairs close to the piano. Dietrich is playing on request, wincing inwardly when the more banal popular songs are suggested, refusing to play blatantly Nazi anthems by claiming not to know them, relaxing when he can volunteer some work by Bach or Gerhard. There are no regular religious services in Tegel, only a chaplain who sticks his head in now and then. Dietrich has not pushed for anything more. He knows he will be expected to be in charge, and if he leads the men in worship he will have to pray aloud for the Führer and the successful prosecution of the war. This he hopes to avoid if at all possible. Besides, he has been surprised by how little he misses attending church. But as the hymn-singing progresses, he finds himself longing to pray in communion with others of like mind. He recalls the days when he ran the seminary in Pomerania, the time spent at the monastery in Ettal. Perhaps in a different world he would have chosen to be a monk. Perhaps in the world he inhabits he has become a subversive one.
The singing is interrupted by a summons from the office of Commandant Maetz. When he arrives he finds to his surprise that SS Judge Advocate Bauer is there, feet propped on the desk, enjoying a glass of Uncle Rudi’s champagne.
Bauer doesn’t rise but motions Dietrich to a chair.
“I heard you playing the piano,” he says, raising his glass. “I stood in the sick-bay door for a time. Bach, it was. You’re very good.” He calls for another glass and offers it to Dietrich. “Tell me, Pastor Bonhoeffer, do you play Mozart?”
“Of course,” Dietrich says. “But Bach is my favorite.”
“Perhaps,” Bauer says, “I can change your mind.”
Dietrich is so taken aback by the tenor of the conversation that he doesn’t know what to say. He nods and sips the champagne.
“I am not in Berlin so often,” Bauer says. “The air raids have made it necessary to move many administrative offices out of Berlin. Impossible to carry on business as usual when buildings are coming down. In fact—” he coughs discreetly—“the War Court has taken a direct hit. Despite our precautions, thousands of folders, including the one holding the particulars of your own case, have been destroyed.”
Dietrich waits, uncertain if this news is good or bad.
“The Gestapo is furious,” Bauer continues. “I must tell you, Pastor Bonhoeffer, they want to go after you. Or I should say they’re storming the walls of the Abwehr and they think you are a tiny chink in the masonry. I myself am inclined to think it as big a waste of time as your own so-called service to the Reich. But I’m not inclined to release you until my colleagues in the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße are satisfied. I’m sure this delay must distress you.”
“Yes,” Dietrich says. “I am most disappointed. I had hoped to be home soon, and to set a wedding date. Thank you, by the way, for allowing my fiancée’s visits.”
“A very young fiancée,” Bauer observes, raising his glass. “When you are released, do you really expect this wedding to take place? Or is it simply an engagement of convenience? To impress me perhaps?”
“Of course we shall marry!” Dietrich says warmly. “We love each other very much!”
Bauer rubs his chin. “Funny, I would have thought not. Something in her eyes that day.”
Dietrich goes rigid with anger. “The poor child was frightened to death.”
“Yes.” Bauer smiles. “It was fear, no doubt. The poor child.” He shoves his empty glass over to Maetz, who has been listening with his usual obtuse expression on his face. “One more for the road, Herr Commandant. I am on my way to spend Christmas at my new quarters in the Thüringer Wald.”
“Ah, the forest. As pleasant a corner of the Reich as one can find in such times,” Maetz says as he pours the champagne.
“Yes,” Bauer agrees, “and I have a valued personal possession stored in the area. So though I miss Berlin, I can’t complain. By the way, Maetz, we have returned a verdict this morning against one of the men you’re holding, an Oberleutnant Pfifer. He’s been sentenced to death.”
“Death?” Maetz says. “I don’t think he expected that.”
“Perhaps not. But his superior officer claims Pfifer not only disobeyed orders but also tried to kill him, and the tribunal believed it. Well, he’ll be back in his cell by now. You should arrange a firing squad the day after Christmas.” Bau
er glances at Dietrich as though he has nearly forgotten him. “You may return to your piano playing, Pastor Bonhoeffer. Heil Hitler and Merry Christmas.”
Maria. Judge Advocate Bauer. And finally the bombs. A veritable Bethlehem of visitors, Dietrich thinks bitterly as he stares up at the night sky. The flares dropped by the lead airplanes are descending directly above the prison. “Christmas trees,” Berliners call them, because of their brightness and conical shape. As they drift down like holiday decorations Dietrich drops to his knees and prays. The nearness of the flares means the target will be Borsig, and the prison is once again in the way.
The guards are ready. Knobloch arrives to take him to the sick bay as the bombs begin to fall. (Linke is not on duty—he is one of the lucky ones who has Christmas off.) Just as they step into the hall the lights flicker and go out. A nearby explosion sends a shudder through the building, and up and down the row men begin to cry out. Dietrich and Knobloch feel their way slowly along the wall, hands splayed against the stone, searching for the door to the stairs. A blast knocks them to their feet, a door at the end of the hall bursts open, and bits of stone and shrapnel fly through the air. The screams rise and unite in a single shriek.
“Jesus, that one will be done for,” Knobloch says.
They make their way toward the damaged cell. Knobloch enters and drags a body by the leg into the hall. The flare from an explosion near Borsig shows the head is missing. Dietrich retches and turns away, and Knobloch drops the leg. Someone will tend later to the dead.
Two doors down a man screams that he is wounded. Pfifer. Dietrich starts forward, but Knobloch grabs his arm.
“Careful, he might be faking. He’s for it anyway.”
Dietrich stops. “He was near the blast,” he yells in Knobloch’s ear. “He sounds in great pain.”
“All right,” Knobloch yells back. “But let me go first.”
He fumbles with the key in the dark, misses the lock at first, but at last pulls the door open, and Pfifer lunges, stool held high, and brings it down hard. Knobloch just has time to raise his arm, which takes the brunt of the blow. Then Pfifer is on the hall floor crawling because of his shattered leg, trying to get up and crashing into Dietrich. They fall in a heap, and Pfifer struggles up. Dietrich has his arms around Pfifer’s waist, but he cannot bear to impede the escape of a doomed man. Instead in the dark he pushes himself up and drags Pfifer along with him, offering one last blessed second of hope, so entangled with the other that by the time Knobloch recovers and reaches them he cannot tell that Dietrich is aiding an escape. The guard ignores the pain in his arm and pries the condemned man away from Pastor Bonhoeffer, hits him over the head with a truncheon, and carries him half senseless back to his cell. Dietrich remains huddled on the floor sobbing for breath and grief.
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