The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (18 page)

Lottie is certain that each one in the cellar dwells on the same thought. Run away. But run where? It’s a lottery out there in the shattering morn. You might run towards death just as surely as away from it. Who knows? Best to sit still. This building has been hit twice before, it’s still standing, lightning never strikes thrice, yes? Take your chances here.

They picture particular deaths, the ones that can reach them down here in the flimsy cocoon of their basement, the types of death they’ve all witnessed in Berlin. The ghastly end from a direct hit on the cellar by a burrowing bomb, the shell that crashes right through the building’s roof and continues until it hits bottom. Death by a time-release bomb, exploding hours after you’ve ignored it as a dud. Death by phosphorus bombs, the white-hot spray that melts flesh to the bone. One dot will drill a hole into you inches deep and torch the building above your head. Death by crushing or suffocation when your building collapses over your cellar. By gas, when a bomb only partially explodes and instead of shrapnel releases a toxic, invisible seepage (these are the saddest-looking corpses, they are pristine, smothered, shocked to be dead). Or by concussion, where the pressure from a blast bursts every sac in your body, your ears, lungs, organs.

Thirteen people breathe and huddle. In Berlin, like a gavel announcing court, rumbles the first explosion.

Now the sounds of battle begin to unfurl. Antiaircraft gunnery chatters from the concrete flak towers around the city. Faraway thumps of bombs come in quick clusters,
foom foom foom foom!
A worse sign: Lottie hears the massed buzzing of American B-17 bombers. The
Amis
are dense over the city. This is a major raid.

The floorboards shudder. A shower of dust lands on their heads. The lightbulb flicks off. The women take sharp breaths. The bulb comes back. The women tuck their towels tighter. Mr. Preutzmann spits and does not uncross his arms. He mutters,
“Schweine.”

Behind Lottie the wall shakes, nudging her. She reaches down to her cello case. She lifts it and wraps it in her arms.

More explosions sound deep in the earth, closer on all sides of them. The sense is of being underwater, of being hunted by some sea monster that swims in the dark waters unseen, bearing down, tasting the ocean for you.

Foom, foom, foom, FOOM!
The last report comes from somewhere scarify near. Lottie jerks, rattling the handle on her cello case. Dust sifts out of the floorboards with every shiver of the ground. Eyes are pinched shut in the cellar. Hands in hands are veined with the effort of squeezing. Mr. Preutzmann uncrosses his arms now and finds the hand of his wife.

A moment of silence descends. Lottie in her mind enters the sky with the bomber pilots. The first wave of planes has passed the target. They’ve dropped their loads, taken their hits from the guns below, and banked for home. The second flight of planes follows close on their heels.

The bombardiers zero in on the fires already started beneath them in Wilmersdorf.

It’s easy.

In the cellar, Lottie wraps her legs and arms around the Galiano. She cannot protect it, she is not hard enough, only a soft human.

Another explosion somewhere in the depths. The monster closes.

Another.
Foom!

Another.

The lightbulb flashes and leaves them.

Mr. Preutzmann curses again.

Lottie licks her lips. There is the savor of real coffee there.

She thinks, That was the last of it.

She closes her eyes. The cello case is against her cheek, cool and dear.

The last of it.

FUH-WOOOM!!

Lottie’s eardrums are rammed inward. Her mouth flies open in a reflex of pain.

The world comes uprooted. The cellar jumps, spilling everyone onto the floor. The air is clotted with dust and smoke, splinters hail from the floorboards. Some sandbags have burst, grains bleed out.

Lottie lies deafened under a jumble of arms and legs and luggage. Her cello is still in her arms, she has saved it. There is dirt on her lips; the coffee is gone. The people in the ruck scramble as best they can to arrange themselves. In the confusion she notices there is light again. Did the bulb come back?

She looks up when a knee is taken from her head. No, there is no light-bulb anymore. There is a hole in the ceiling. Through the opening, the flat above is awash in flames.

Lottie’s heart sinks. Her building, her home, on fire.

She cannot rise from the floor, one person is still heavy across her back. She waits a second for whoever it is to gather herself and rise. When she does not move, Lottie kicks.

“No, no!” Lottie’s ears are stunned, the voice seems far off. It is Mr. Preutzmann, coated in white dust like a baker, blurting. The man scoops his beefy hands under the armpits of the woman on top, then lifts Lottie to her feet, and bends again for the cello. The woman who had splayed across Lottie’s back is on the floor, face up, but without a whole face. Beside her lies one of the floor joists, swooped from its place, bloody and guilty. The woman is not one known well to the rest in the cellar, she was a displaced person assigned last week to their building. Lottie cannot hear all the syllables when someone says the woman’s name, Frau Something.

Lottie wants to shudder at the sight of this stranger’s death, the proximity of it, but she can’t out of relief that it was not her own fate. She doesn’t reproach herself for this; she sees the thin gruel of horror and gladness in the others’ faces too, even the neighbor who knew the lady’s name.

The floorboards crackle. Lottie wants to see how bad the fire is. Maybe it hasn’t spread upstairs yet, maybe her flat is all right. She moves with Mr. Preutzmann beneath the hole and glances up. The entire first floor is being consumed. A wind whips through the rooms, the flames inhale through busted windows. The blaze splashes here and there as though on the tip of a painter’s brush. Upholstery ignites, carpets and white curtains drink flame like wicks. The Preutzmanns’ flat is volcanic; the conflagration takes only seconds to consume everything while Lottie and the owner watch. Sparks rain into the basement. Lottie stares in disbelief. Her flat. Her sanctuary.

Mr. Preutzmann pulls her away. The hole is the mouth of a furnace.

The building’s residents cluster around Mr. Preutzmann, the only man among them. The same expression sits on all their flickering faces. They are homeless. Shocked. The war has come knocking, hard. The woman’s body with the staved head reminds them that death—war’s mate—is here too.

Mr. Preutzmann looks at them, stymied. His building above is burning, it’s going to crash down on them. Or it will first consume all their oxygen. The wooden steps to the cellar are already on fire. Even if they weren’t, who would climb them into that?

Lottie says, “Mr. Preutzmann, we’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

The landlord stands mum, ghostly in his coating of white dust. He runs his hands over his face. His sweating palms wipe clean swaths, now he looks striped.

Another woman prods, “Mr. Preutzmann? What are we going to do?”

When he makes no reply, panic sends out shoots. The women bunch closer around the big landlord. The man backs away from them, until he is against a wall.

“Do something,” they insist. “We’re going to die down here. You see? Do something!” Lottie does not take her hands from her Galiano. She drags it with her toward Mr. Preutzmann. It too must get out.

She crowds the landlord with the other ladies. She resents them their presence in the basement, where they will die along with Lottie. Her life will end down here and people will say, “What a shame, thirteen people were killed in that building.” Instead, she wants them to cry out, “Oh! Lottie the cellist died there!” She’s afraid to be subsumed in their number, divided to one-thirteenth. Her life mustn’t be robbed of its singularity.

Mrs. Preutzmann shouts over the pressing women. “Hans!”

Lottie turns her attention when Mr. Preutzmann does. His wife stands at the far wall, behind the corpse. Mrs. Preutzmann holds the pickax.

She shouts to her husband, to all of them. “Next door! The building next door! It has a basement just like this. Right behind this wall!”

A bolt goes through Mr. Preutzmann. He stands firmer. The women step away to make room for him.”We can dig to it!” he calls to his wife, advancing. “We can get out that way!” He says this as though the idea is his. The landlady nods, yes, yes, yes! and waves him to come faster.

Several of the women hurry to the far wall with him, patting him on the back, uttering encouragement. They slide the dead woman out of his way, then stand aside while he takes the first whack with the pickax. Brick bits skitter across the floor. The dent Mr. Preutzmann made in the wall is no more than a chink.

Upstairs something heavy falls, a chandelier perhaps. A howl skates across the fiery opening, a splitting sound.

Mr. Preutzmann spits in his hands. He takes a full swing. The pick sticks in the wall. When he levers it out, several bricks tumble broken at his feet.

In one minute of intense labor the landlord has broken through a fist-sized aperture into the next cellar. The wall between basements is three layers thick. The pick droops in Mr. Preutzmann’s mitts. He is exhausted.

Lottie looks over her shoulder. The first five treads of the wooden staircase have caught fire. It’s as though the flames are walking down the steps to get to them. Lottie leans her cello case into the hands of the woman beside her. She strides forward and reaches for the pick from the landlord. He shakes his head, no, just give me a moment. Lottie takes the tool from him. She is a cellist, with athletic shoulders and long, strong hands. She is more than merely one of thirteen.

The pick is heavier than she imagined. But she is sturdier, less clumsy than she thought she would be with her first clout against the wall. Bricks spew under her onslaught. She attacks the wall ten, fifteen swings. Lottie descends into a mindless fury, banging, banging, twenty swings. She grunts. Mr. Preutzmann and the others watch. Then someone cheers. Lottie senses performance. Through the heat and smoke, the clang of the blade and bricks, this emboldens her. She’s the youngest one in the cellar, the most beautiful and talented. They will all live because they are with her. Lottie rescues them. That’s what they’ll say.

She reaches her limit. Her shoulders and back ache. She pauses to take a breather before she continues. In that still moment, the pain in her hands scales up her arms and overwhelms her. The pickax slips from her numb fingers. The handle is slick and red. Her knees are rubbery; Mrs. Preutzmann steps up and supports her. Blisters have burst in both of Lottie’s palms. She is disappointed to be so frail. A pick handle is not a cello, it seems. A rescue is not so simple a thing.

Behind them, the entire staircase smashes down, charred from its mooring. Everyone jerks and cringes. Now the fire, like death, lies close at their feet.

In desperation, the women as one assault the wall. They claw at it like trapped rats, with the shovel and pick, with blackened shards of the disintegrating building that drop through the hole at their backs, even ripping their own nails and hands. Beneath the hole a pyre of burning debris forms on the floor. Smoke begins to sour in Lottie’s lungs. A woman takes the damp towel from around her throat and swabs Lottie’s hands.

Mr. Preutzmann holds the cello case while the women tear at the wall. Within minutes the hole is made the size of a rain barrel. One woman crawls through, landing roughly on the floor in the adjacent basement. She rises, almost laughing. She reaches back for the next in line. Together the eleven remaining women help each other to safety. Lottie is last.

Once through, she unravels her hands from the towel and reaches back for her Galiano. Mr. Preutzmann is not there with it. Lottie cries out for him.

In a moment he fills the hole. It is not her cello the landlord pushes through the opening but the body of the poor woman. Mrs. Preutzmann muscles Lottie aside, screaming through the wall, “Hans! What are you doing? Come through! Put her down! Hans!”