The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (17 page)

Churchill speaks in smoke. “We have profound work ahead of us, Franklin.”

“Yes, we do.”

“It can be done without us, of course.”

The cloud released by the Prime Minister hovers over his head, shifting its coils in the breezeless stateroom. Under the haze, Churchill, pedestaled on his belly and short legs, looks to Roosevelt like a Buddha, some fortune-teller come with a grim message. He’s talking about dying. Roosevelt answers from a page out of Eleanor’s book, willpower.

“I’d rather it not be, Winston. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Churchill does not make the obligatory reply that Roosevelt expects, the quick assurance that of course all will be well. Churchill sits under his smoke, puffs another billow into it. Roosevelt wants him to speak; damn it, man, say something. The Prime Minister nods, as though he heard this thought. But the cigar glows and smolders in his grasp, and that is all he says. Roosevelt realizes, as he did this tender morning with his daughter; as he did the night of his birthday party on the Atlantic, alone in his rocking bed with the question mark like Damocles’ sword over his head; as he has guessed from the postures of his doctors, a suspicion that seeps out of their closed meetings the way a smell creeps out of a sickroom. Churchill tonight is saying goodbye.

Roosevelt looks at the fortunate man across from him, who will be here to witness and guide the end, and most important, the new beginning.

“Franklin.”

“Yes, Winston?”

Churchill rolls the cigar over on his lips. He takes a puff, then removes it; the cigar is so fat, his fingers are spread wide in an inadvertent V for Victory. He pokes out his lower lip and cocks his head. Churchill resembles a very thoughtful bulldog.

“Yes, Winston?”

The Prime Minister jumps to his feet. Roosevelt envies this too.

“I’m famished.”

~ * ~

February 2, 1945, 10:10
a.m.

Regensburger Strasse

Wilmersdorf, Berlin

the ticking stops.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lottie says aloud in her flat to no one, “leave us alone.”

She crosses the room slump-shouldered and folds into the chair beside the radio. The box is large, of polished brown wood, with black plastic knobs and a gold lamé mouth. The
Drahtfunk,
the constant, steady ticking on a special frequency that tells Berliners there are no enemy bombers over Germany, has stopped.

Lottie pulls her knees up on the chair, she wraps her arms around them and buries her face.

Where are the Americans headed this time? It’s been several weeks since there was a raid on Berlin. Lottie recalls what she has seen, what every German has seen by now.

It’s awful, she thinks. Too awful. She makes herself hum something in the little cave of her knees and wrists.

After seconds of silence, the radio emits a pinging sound, foretelling an imminent air raid.

Lottie’s forehead goes limp on her knees.

Leave us alone.

An announcer comes on the radio. The woman is calm, official in her tone. Air defense reports that a large formation of Allied bombers has crossed the frontier this morning and is headed in an easterly direction. The target is as yet unknown. Stay tuned.

“Ahhhh!” Lottie stands from the chair. She casts her eyes around her flat, her walls, an identity that has lasted this long. Here she is singular, not a refugee, not one of the unfortunates. In these rooms is where she maintains her hold on the young woman Lottie. In a war-ravaged city, with lunacy roaming the streets, sanity is the greatest challenge, after survival.

Her swinging gaze is growing edgy, jumping from thing to place like a bird frightened by the pinging radio. She puts out her hands as though to fend off a collision. She falls back into the chair, her balance stolen for the moment.

Her only companion, the radio, is rankling, pinging while the officials observe and calculate the American bombers’ course. Lottie’s breath speeds in her breast. Saliva cloys in her mouth. The walls, her guardians, seem to advance on her, bringing to her seat by the radio her framed pictures, her memories, the absorbed sounds of her solitary tears. The Galiano cello standing in its case, like Charlie Chaplin wide at the bottom, narrow to the top, waddles from its corner.

Lottie stands again. The walls and cello halt their march, they skitter back in place while she stares at them. She runs a hand through her hair.

“That’s enough,” she says. “Quite enough.”

She goes into the small kitchen and opens a cabinet. She takes out a tiny bundle wrapped in paper.

This is the last of it.

Lottie unties the string and pours the final grains of real ground coffee bean onto a filter.

This is the last filter too.

From a bucket on the counter she dips two cups of water. This morning, like every morning, she and her neighbors lugged their buckets up the stairs after filling them from a broken water main in a crater behind their building.

She tosses the emptied package into the wastebasket. She was given the coffee months ago, before a private performance of her string quartet at a big house out in Potsdam. The host, a Nazi colonel, presented her the parcel with a pinch on the cheek. Lottie saw the man surrounded by his family, lacy daughters and fat wife, his friends and fellow black-shirted officers. She did not wonder what the man’s hand squeezing her flesh might have done in the war. Lottie knows what little good choosing sides has done anyone. She took the impertinence and the coffee, and she played.

When the kettle is prepared, she lights her spirit lamp. The many little flames jet out in curves under the pot. The smell of the fuel flowers the entire room, it is the last of her eau de cologne.

Lottie sits by the lamp, cup in hand. She has no cream or sugar. She doesn’t even want a cup of coffee very much. What she does desire, and will have in another minute, is one tiny scene of normalcy. A hot drink in her flat. Why save the coffee, or the perfume? she asks. Save it all for when, tomorrow? Tomorrow—if there is one—she will only ask again, Why save it? For tomorrow?

The coffee boils beneath her gaze. She pours it steaming into the cup, then folds her palms around it. She breathes in the coffee smell, redolent of luxury, a proper place and time.

The radio pinging continues. Lottie snaps it off.

Enough.

She spreads her knees to straddle the burning lamp. She does not douse the lamp, but lets the flames live a while longer, lets them waste themselves into the cold air, sets them loose. Between her legs, between her palms, the warmth is fine.

Outside, sudden sirens surge across the city. Lottie takes a sip. Only a taste; she gasps behind the swallow, it is lovely.

Beyond her door in the hallway, frantic footsteps begin to scramble down the stairs. Lottie listens, seated, sipping. One of her neighbor women pauses long enough to bang on her door. “Are you in? Hello?”

Lottie makes no answer. The knocking goes one more round, then stops. The neighbor joins the noisy traffic to the cellar. Lottie hears suitcases bumping on the treads, babies handed ahead, children urged from behind to keep moving, let’s go,
schnell!

Another knock on the door. Lottie takes another sip. The coffee cools fast. The spirit lamp coughs in its hiss, the perfume is almost gone.

“Lottie!”

She recognizes the voice at the door, the landlady, old Mrs. Preutzmann from the first floor.

“Lottie! You must come,
Liebling!
I saw you go in, I know you’re home! Come on!”

Lottie rubs the ceramic mug against her cheek, flushing from it the last throb of warmth.

She says to the door, “I’m having coffee.”

The landlady shouts, ”Lottie, the cellar!”

Lottie holds the cup to her heart.

“Lottie! The radio says it’s
Luftgefahr
fifteen. Fifteen!”

This is the highest degree of danger. It means the radio has announced that Berlin is the target.

“Liebling!”

Lottie sets the mug on her lap. The lamp stutters.

She says in a voice sure to be heard in the hall, “Leave me alone.”

“Are you coming? Lottie?”

“I’m having coffee.”

“Ach!
What? That’s ridiculous. Get to the cellar.”

Lottie stands too fast. Some of the coffee spills on her shin.

She screeches,
“I’m having coffee!”

Lottie sinks back into the chair. The quiet radio gawks at her, golden open mouth.

Mrs. Preutzmann backs away from the door. Down the stairwell, Lottie hears her shout, “Hans! Hans! Come up here, bring the keys! Yes, up here now!”

Out in the city the air raid sirens caterwaul. Mrs. Preutzmann yelps for her old husband to fetch the keys to pry Lottie out of her flat. The radio wants to join in but Lottie has shut it up. The walls want to start their inch forward again but Lottie glares them rigid. Her cello says, Whatever you think best, Lottie.

“Oh, let’s go down to the damn cellar.”

She tows the big cello case to the door just as Mr. Preutzmann, jingling like a nervous Santa Claus, turns the lock and steps into the flat. His wife stands in the emptied hall, determined, fists on hips.

Lottie issues the old woman a wan smile. To the husband, she nods. “Thank you. I was sound asleep.”

“Let me help you with that,” he says, but Lottie handles the cello on her own down the steps to the cellar.

Mr. and Mrs. Preutzmann and Lottie are the last in the basement. The old landlord slams shut the wooden door behind him, then clomps down the oaken steps. He’s a burly man with an ample, chubby midsection. His hands and shoulders are thick from years spent maintaining this building and the one next door. The Nazis will come for him soon enough, thinks Lottie. He’ll be yanked into the
Volkssturm
and pissy little Mrs. Preutzmann will be left to the Russians.

Thirteen people fill the cellar; all but the landlord are women. Hungry war. The main course is men. Women are dessert. Children, a candy.

One naked electric bulb hangs cockeyed from the ceiling. The cellar’s roof is the bottom of the first-floor flat, heavy wooden beams and the rough undersides of floorboards. Mr. Preutzmann has brought down water buckets and a halved fifty-gallon drum for a privy. The walls are stacked with sandbags. He has shored up the beams with scrap metal scavenged from the rubble everywhere in the city. Beneath the bench where he and the landlady sit are a pickax and a shovel. All the women have wet towels tucked around their necks. In case of smoke or a gas explosion, they will pull them up over their noses like bandannas. Several of the women hold hands. Mr. Preutzmann crosses his arms over his meaty chest.

Precautions, Lottie thinks, chaff in the wind. Good luck charms are all they’ve gathered around themselves down here, not security.

“I didn’t hear the radio,” a second-floor woman says. “Are we sure it was fifteen?”

“I heard the radio,” Mrs. Preutzmann snipes. “It’s fifteen. It’s Berlin.”

Together they sit, tense and waiting, staring down at the floor as though a bomb were right there fizzling in the middle of their circle. Lottie’s cello case lies at her feet, the size of a small, extra person, someone who has fainted. They do their duty, these good Prussians, the duty Hitler has chosen for them. They sit beneath the Allies’ bombs.