Quartet for the End of Time (45 page)

They can if you take them, Sutton replied—to which Benelli laughed loudly.

All right, he said. Come on.

I
T WAS AMAZING
,
ONCE
they got some height, to look down from above and see how the pattern-bombing tracks, which always looked so chaotic from the ground, seemed as regular as though they had been drawn with a ruler and compass. As though there were some bigger picture in mind—and if they could only just pan out a little farther, they might at last be able to make out what it was.

Sutton took pictures until her hands went numb. Then she tucked them into her coat to warm them and asked Jenson how long it would be until they got to the front—and how they would know when they got there.

Oh, that's easy, Benelli said. It's when you stop seeing stars on things.

She looked below and saw that the jeeps and trucks and landed aircraft were all marked with a white star, clearly visible from the air.

The best way to tell, Jenson put in, is actually the bridges. When you see trestle bridges like those, he said, pointing, you know you're in friendly territory—those are bridges built by our own engineers. When you start seeing blown-out bridges, you're in no-man's-land: the last thing the Germans do is blow up their bridges. If they haven't been rebuilt yet it's because the territory's still too hot—gotta wait awhile. The first intact bridge you see after that? That's when you know you're in Jerry land.

T
HEY HAD JUST CRESTED
the hills surrounding the Cassino Valley. Below them, the highway wound its way through the mountains. Then, in another moment, the whole Cassino corridor opened up below them, the valley glistening with shell holes made by the guns of
both sides. It had recently rained and the holes had been filled with water; these glinted in the sun, nearly blinding them. Sutton leaned out again and looked back to where, from their own territory, the distant muzzle flashes of guns blinked on and off like fireflies. They dipped down toward the highway where wrecked tanks were strewn across a bend in the road; beyond that were the demolished bridges. Benelli phoned in the coordinates of these, and Sutton continued to take pictures.

Then—suddenly—the airplane seemed to buck under them, and there was a sound like a freight train passing. Benelli swore.

High explosives, he said.

Then he swore again.

Dammit. We've got troops down there.

Jenson pointed the nose of the airplane up, and they flew—leaving the turbulent air, and the men (impossible to imagine within it) behind. Ahead of them was an open stretch, split by a road with no one on it; then, at the far end of the road, was an arched bridge. It looked like no one had set foot on it in a hundred years.

Here we are, Benelli said. Jerry country.

Again, Jenson tipped the nose of the plane up and they rose higher.

Keep your eyes peeled, he said.

Once we spot that meemie, Benelli said, we can go home.

But just then they heard something: a faint crackling sound, like grease popping.

We're being shot at, Jenson said.

Spandau, said Benelli.

Again, Jenson tipped the nose of the plane, and they rose.

Spandau only has a range of twenty-four-hundred feet, Benelli explained to Sutton. He turned to Jenson. And we're at what?

Thirty-two hundred, Jenson said.

Sutton saw that his knuckles were white on the controls.

Benelli gave one of his laughs.
Hoo-hooo!
he yelled. You got that? he asked Sutton, turning around now to face her. D'ye get all that?

She leaned out again, but without really looking this time. The air
was numbingly cold. She could hardly feel her fingers and so didn't even know if she was taking pictures anymore. She pointed her camera back toward the earth and just held it there.

Hoo-hoooo!
yelled Belthat was for Sevastopolnli again.

When she couldn't bear it any longer, Sutton leaned back in, and tucked her hands into the pockets of her thin coat to warm them.

Shortly after, Jenson turned the aircraft around, and they headed home.

T
HE
A
LLIES TOOK
R
OME.
Then, beyond that, Florence—closing in on the Gothic Line. Then came Omaha Beach, and the U.S. invasion of Saipan in the Marianas. In July, the Soviets captured Minsk, and by August Paris was free.

Sutton spent the fall and winter of that year reporting from Rome; then, in March 1945, she was dispatched to western Poland to follow the Russian and American forces as they advanced, in a final push, on Berlin.

—

S
HE HERSELF DROVE INTO
B
ERLIN ON
F
RIDAY
, A
PRIL 27, 1945 (THE
same day, as they later learned, that Mussolini attempted to escape to Spain). In a Russian jeep, with the British journalist Walt Kinsey, their driver—an American, Sergeant Gene Dobbs—and another female journalist, Frieda Westin—from St. Paul, Minnesota—who had spent most of the war in the South Pacific, and couldn't believe she had found herself “right in the middle of it all,” and just in time.

It was a wonder they ever arrived. They lost their bearings as they approached the city and pretty soon it seemed like there were no longer any coordinates at all. Sergeant Dobbs, at the wheel, was as white as a sheet as, from behind, Kinsey shouted at him whatever conflicting thought or direction occurred to him in a nearly incomprehensible language all his own, as though speaking in tongues. Each moment a new emotion would occur to him—anger first, at being driven out into the middle of the German wilderness to die, then embarrassment at not
being personally able to deliver them from the situation, and finally the sudden inspiration that he might do so after all.

Sutton had never been to Berlin before but the extent to which she did not recognize it when, finally, they did arrive, went beyond the features of the city itself—or what, of the city, remained. The Russians had reached Berlin several days before; now they galloped through the streets with such mad and vengeant joy that it was as though the entire city were adrift, “run off the map.” It was not any longer even properly victory that was being celebrated, but something larger, more total. Everything had been overturned. Quite literally. German goods spilled from carts, which had been left abandoned in the streets when the Russians arrived. Russian tanks drove right over them and everything else in their path. Shop doors hung on their hinges, their contents spilled into the street—anything worth taking had already been taken, and long ago. Every woman had been raped; every building had been blasted or burned. Still, the Russians continued to bombard the city, and the air was thick with smoke. Because of this, even once they'd arrived they had an awful job finding their way. Also, the German signs had already been replaced with their Russian equivalents and, as they had not a single word of Russian between them, they were at a complete loss to decipher them. Finally, Frieda had the idea to take out their American flag, and that was how they got to the command post where the Russians were expecting them. Frieda and Sutton waved the flag out the vehicle and repeated to incredulous inquisitors who passed that yes, they were indeed “
Amerikanski
.” This at first caused even more trouble—the crowd closed in on them in a burst of such unconstrained excitement that they weren't able, after that, to budge a single inch, until Kinsey got out of the vehicle and physically cleared a path.

When, at last, they did manage to reach their destination, their reception was the same. Every time Sutton turned around there was a Russian officer who wanted to shake her hand, and once she had turned around enough times, they wanted to shake her hand again, so there never seemed to be any end to it. Then the toasts began, and there seemed to be no end to them, either. Sutton raised her glass with the rest, repeating
what she understood to be the Russian equivalent of “Cheers!” It was many hours before she realized she was simply mispronouncing—like everyone else—the name of the President of the United States.

“Trrrruman!” Again and again came the shout. There were toasts as well, of course, to the “late, great Rrrroosevelt,” to Stalin, to Churchill, to American women, to Russian women, to the Red Army, the American Army, the Soviet tank, and the American jeep. While Mussolini and his wife spent the night in Mezzegra awaiting execution, and Hitler awaited his own death, which would take place three days later, below the garden of
Reichskanzlei
, Sutton—along with Frieda Westin, Walt Kinsey, and Gene Dobbs—was entertained in Berlin to the sound of the continued bombing of the city's interior and the shouts of the Russians, who were exacting their revenge on the city with indescribable joy. This was for Stalingrad—that was for Sevastopol!

T
HE
G
ERMANS HAD DISAPPEARED.
It was as though there was not a German left in the city. Those who could manage it had indeed fled; otherwise, they hid indoors. No army was so feared as the Russians', and for precisely the reason that—as the guards-major announced with solemnity that evening—every single officer of his staff had lost his family to the Germans. That, he said, was the secret of their extraordinary success—and the fall of Berlin. And let us see if it is not true—the guards-major said—if, for this very reason, in fifty or one hundred years we are not still fighting this very same war.

T
HE NEXT DAY
H
ITLER
would learn that a surrender had been proposed and declined. He would order Himmler arrested and Fegelein shot. The Russians would fight on in the streets. It would, therefore, be nearly impossible for the jeep (Dobbs again at the wheel) to penetrate the city center—though by midafternoon they did manage, somehow, to get within fifteen blocks of Wilhelmstrasse.

There were snipers everywhere—on rooftops, firing up from the sewers. It was madness to try to get any closer, but Frieda was intent on it. Her eyes shone, and with her blond hair and fresh good looks she
looked like a midwestern Joan of Arc, ready to lead them, triumphantly, into certain death, and beyond. Sutton had learned to recognize it, by that time: the look she caught that afternoon in Frieda's eye. It was always surprising where it would come from and when, but one thing was sure, it was always terrifying when it did come. There was something rather than aggressive, defensive about it, as though parts of the brain were already shutting down. The eyes took on a dull glow, and death was suddenly not death as measured against life; the two blended and became one, as things do in a dream. So that there was no death any longer—even as you spoke the word; even as it reared its ugly head, and stood directly facing you. There they were, fifteen blocks from Wilhelmstrasse, being urged on by Frieda Westin as though in a dream.

At the wheel, Gene Dobbs was getting pale again—but even so, he didn't want, any more than the rest of them, to turn back. Perhaps because, as Sutton reflected later, when you are in the midst of a battle like that, every moment that you don't die is, in fact, a very ordinary moment. Nothing speeds up or slows down; time does not recoil, ready to spring, or stretch itself so thin as to come nearly to breaking. It just proceeds at its ordinary pace, and so the moment in which it becomes absolutely necessary to retreat never seems—until perhaps it is far too late—to actually arrive. Instead, it seems (just the opposite) even more urgently necessary to keep moving forward. Just as when, years before, Sutton had traveled down all those long empty highways through Oklahoma and West Texas with Louis and it would get to seem as though they were hardly traveling, or at least getting any nearer, to anyplace at all. As they sped along, her foot would get heavier and heavier on account of it, until finally Louis, beside her, would realize with a jolt and say, For Christ's sake, slow down. It was always hard to slow down; to recover a more moderate pace. And just so, it was nearly impossible for them on that day, fifteen blocks from Wilhelmstrasse, to turn back; to retrace their steps as nearly as they could, in order to avoid the battles they'd so recently skirted. Of course, by then new ones had broken out so it was the same thing coming as going—except this time Sutton noticed more Germans, dead or dying on the streets.

The Russians were clearing one block at a time, and they did so efficiently. Though it seemed, more often than not, as though no order existed at all: first one block would be cleared, then another—and the German dead continued to pile. Once, when they passed three Germans—a woman and two young boys—standing beside a row of dead German soldiers, the woman pointed at their flag, which, once again, they had stuck out the side of the window, and inquired in heavily accented English when they might be able to expect the Americans.

Coolly, Frieda replied in German: The Americans will not be arriving, she said. Berlin belongs to the Russians. The woman took a faltering step back, and they continued on—Frieda clenching her end of the flag a little tighter so that it became taut and flapped vigorously in the wind. Sutton could tell what a thrill it had given her to be able to say that a moment before—in her decent German—thinking all the while, no doubt, of the guards-major, who, it was obvious, she had fallen madly in love with the night before.

W
HEN THEY RETURNED TO
the command post there was a party in full swing, though it was barely noon. Once again, they were served cheese and fish on fine dark bread, and the vodka flowed. They danced, the guards-major and his handpicked staff of bereaved officers swinging Frieda and Sutton effortlessly around the room. “Love and Kisses” by Paul Whiteman played. Then Duke Ellington's “Take the ‘A' Train.” From time to time, Gene Dobbs cut in apologetically, while Kinsey in the corner started another round of toasts. To Trrrrruman! To Stalin! To Russian vodka and American jazz!

While the Russians advanced on Wilhelmstrasse; while Mussolini dangled by a meat hook in Milan; while the Scottish Division, preparing to cross the Elbe, piped “The Mist Covered Mountains” and “The Piper of Drummond”; and right there in Berlin, Eva Braun in the Führerbunker made the final preparations for her wedding day.