The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (32 page)

She plays her cello, but she does not play for Mutti or the Jew. She doesn’t admit that she plays for anyone or any reason, it simply feels automatic to take the Galiano between her legs and spend her day. In her heart she expects to die, and there is so much music still in her that she gives in to a deep urgency to get it out before she is gone. She is discharging a responsibility. For hours she sits on the parlor sofa and plays. To her own ear she has never performed better, though she plays with disdain.

The BPO continues its schedule, three and four concerts per week, right through the end of April when the season will officially end. The men of the orchestra are restive, not knowing their fate. Rumor has it that the young violinist, concertmaster Taschner, went to Minister Albert Speer for help. Speer has promised to do something; already it’s whispered that he’s dispatched an officer on his staff to the draft board to secretly extract and destroy all the musicians’ papers. But this ploy won’t stop Reichschancellor Goebbels for long. If the little clubfoot sets his sights on an epic end for Berlin, he’ll see to it that all share in the fall.

Reaching Freya’s house, Lottie leaves the cello in the front hall. She hauls herself up the steps to her room. It’s after one in the morning. The house is chilly. Freya goes to the parlor to stir the fireplace ashes. Lottie hears her mother clanking the iron tools and shoveling on coal. Upstairs she takes off only her shoes and climbs under the covers.

Downstairs the front door opens. It closes with a quiet pressure. Footsteps trickle along the hallway. Freya says something to someone. Lottie springs up on the edge of the mattress.

The Jew.

He was outside! During the air raid alert!

Lottie rips away the blanket. She tears down the steps, swinging on the newel post at the bottom.

She flies past Freya.

The basement door closes.

“You!” She points at the yellow door as though the Jew could see the accusing finger. “You left the house!”

Freya drops the fireplace tool. She comes down the hall.

“Lottie.”

“No, no! This is unbearable.”

Lottie turns again to the basement door. These wooden panels, flat and wide and flimsy, have become the Jew’s face and body for her, they are all she sees of him.

Not looking away from the yellow boards, she addresses Mutti. “He went outside the house. That’s against the law. What if he’s caught? What if he’s seen? The Gestapo will follow him back here! Then what happens to us, Mutti, tell me that.”

Freya moves to stand close to her daughter. Lottie pulls away but her mother’s hands on her shoulders hold her in place.

She whispers, “Nothing happens to us,
Liebchen.
He went for a walk. He’s careful, he promises he’s careful, always. He doesn’t go far. Just outside, to sit in a dark spot and see the stars. He stays out of sight. No one can stay in that basement without ever breathing some fresh air. It’s asking too much. Too much.”

Lottie’s mouth goes slack. The notion shocks her.

“I’m asking too much of him?”

She speaks her first words in a month, since she demanded he go away, to the Jew behind the door.

“I’m asking too much
of
you?”

Lottie brushes her mother’s fingers from her shoulders.

He’s right there, on the top stair, just behind the yellow door, listening. He says nothing to explain or defend himself. He makes no sound, not even a creak.

During every air raid, he strolls in the night. He ducks the police and SS. He hurries to get back before Lottie returns. Does he understand the danger his walks could bring to the good women who hide him? If he did, he wouldn’t risk the stupid indulgence of stars and fresh air.

When the police or the SS spot him—and they will—he’ll lead them here.

This is unbearable.

Lottie grabs her mother’s forearm. She tows Freya away to the parlor, shutting the door to the hall.

“Mutti.”

“Yes?”

“Listen to me, and believe this. We are going to be caught. And when we are, we will be tortured. We’ll be humiliated. And then we are going to be killed.”

Her mother is sanguine, kind. “Lottie, darling. Don’t let those old ladies’ scare stories in the bunker tonight make you so upset. He’s told me he’s careful. He doesn’t take unnecessary risks.”

“Unnecessary for who? For him? I risk my life so he can stretch his legs? Don’t you get it? If he gets caught, we get caught. When he takes a risk, we take risks, unnecessary or not!”

Freya reaches for one of Lottie’s hands. Lottie leaves her mother’s overture dangling in the air. Freya retracts her arm, folding it with the other across her breast.

“We’ve lived this long through the war,
Liebchen.
It’s been almost six years. We’ll see it to the end.”

“It’s the end that scares me. The Jew is going to bring the Nazis down on us or the Russians will get us. One or the other will happen. I know it. I don’t care which. I don’t want to be here for either.”

“The
Amis
will come first. Everything will be all right.”

“No.”

“I’m not sending him away, Lottie. You know I won’t do that.”

“I know.”

“What do you mean you don’t want to be here? Where can you go?”

“I have a way ...”

Lottie puts her hand in her pocket.

“... we can go together.”

She holds out to her mother the cyanide pills.

Freya’s face and body lock. Lottie is prepared to snatch the pills away should Mutti react to seize them. But Freya stands rock-still.

“Where did you get those?”

“After a concert. The Nazis hand them out.”

“And people take them.”

Lottie lofts her eyebrows at her mother, so blind to reality.

“Yes.”

“And you expect that I, we, should take them?”

It’s a simple question, not unexpected. But with it finally in the air, left unanswered the way Lottie left Mutti’s offered hand untouched, the two pills become something for Lottie they have not been. They have been until now a fantasy, romantic and weightless as gossamer riding around in her pocket. With wishes, Lottie could make them into anything, a gleaming shield, a funeral bier, whatever she needed to fit her mood or circumstance. The pills have given her the means to reject the pitiful lot set aside for her, to be the master, not the beggar, to fate. If she so chooses she will swoon and die like Brunhild, her soul conducted away by Valkyries. She will put on her best dress and lie on the sofa, her Galiano in her arms. It could be beautiful. But now, the Jew has ruined everything. Now Lottie has to take the pill because he’s going to be caught sneaking around and if she doesn’t take the pill she’ll have her hair sheared, be paraded through Berlin on the back of a cart, they’ll throw garbage at her and she will be hung on a meat hook. The Jew chose this path, not Lottie. The Jew did it. He stole hope from her, all for a selfish walk under the stars. Now she has to take the pill and just die.

Freya lifts a hand, careful not to spook Lottie into clamping her fist shut around the pills.

“May I?”

Lottie holds out the poison.

Freya takes one with ginger fingertips.

She drops it to the floor. She grinds it under a heel, fixing her gaze on Lottie, no emotion in her eyes. When Freya removes her foot, she looks down. The clear plastic packet shows the pill’s powdered gore.

“You keep the other one,
Liebchen.
If you don’t have the strength, then take it.”

Lottie’s jaw works as though she’s suffered a blow there. Freya’s words are so cold. A mother tells her daughter to die alone. Lottie wasn’t going to do that to her; Lottie had secured escape for them both.

Freya says, ”Come with me.”

She pushes open the hallway door, holding it back for her daughter. Lottie balls her hand around the remaining pill.

“Come on.”

Lottie wants to make a show of defiance. Her pill is still with her, she maintains her path out of all this. Tear it open, bite down, and be finished.

In the silence of the parlor, Mutti stares hard at her daughter. Lottie hears a sigh in her mother’s throat. The sound is gentle, not steely like the look in her mother’s eyes. There are years stored inside Lottie, she can’t do anything about them. Stowed away in those years is an old place. Lottie thought she’d forgotten how to find it, when she stopped hearing Papa’s voice. But her mother’s glare sends her there. Papa is not in there the way he used to be, young and fetching. Only Mutti is in there now, with soup smells and giggles and songs sung beside a crib and a bed. The finger of a small girl taps inside Lottie’s rib cage. The voice of a child urges, “Go with her now. She is Mutti. She makes things all right.”

The cyanide is in Lottie’s hand. She is powerless in this world except for it. It’s her only weapon. She feels vengeful. She wants to throw the capsule into the night and poison Berlin, make it be the one to swallow and die and finish instead. She will live and laugh, and the Russians and Nazis can all go to hell. But no pill will halt the city’s fate. Berlin is to be butchered. And Lottie is to be ... what?

Freya waits, holding the hall door back like an usher.

Lottie puts the lone pill back in her pocket and follows Mutti to the basement door.

In the hall Freya takes Lottie’s hand. She puts her back against the wall and sinks slowly to the floor. She tugs Lottie down beside her. Freya lays her daughter’s hand in her lap and cradles it.

Shoulders touching, the two sit opposite the yellow door. Freya says nothing, Lottie mirrors her mother’s silence. Minutes pass like this. Lottie watches her mother’s face; Mutti’s sternness has ebbed. She is reverent here at the door, prayerful, as though the Jew behind it is some slumped oracle. She has brought Lottie here to ask something.

Freya speaks. “Julius?”

No answer.

So this is the Jew’s name. Like a puzzle, piece by piece, he emerges. Now the Jew is named Julius.

“Julius. Tell Lottie.”

Lottie wants to say no. She wants to go upstairs and go to sleep, it’s late and she is drained. She can’t carry anyone else’s tale of woe inside her. Lottie’s own is all the burden she can manage. But Freya strokes her hand, anticipating her, calming her like a horse. Freya mutters, “Sshhh.”

The Jew—Julius—still does not speak.

Lottie thinks this is silly, staring at a shut door in their own home, trying to talk to a man through it. She asks Mutti, “Why doesn’t he just open the door?”

“Because,” replies the door, “I’ve already been out tonight.”

Freya’s hands tighten over Lottie’s. The oracle answers.

He says, “I’m sorry if I’ve scared you.”

Yes, he scared her, and Lottie’s impatient with him for that, and for this ritualistic sitting at his door like a supplicant. He’s a Jew, he’s on the run. He can wander outside only when everyone else is underground. Why must Lottie sit on the cold floor and converse with him? She preferred it when she could pretend he didn’t exist, when she didn’t know his name.

His voice is low-pitched, quiet, with cracks in it. This is natural, he has only Freya to speak with rarely. He doesn’t sound young; mature, maybe Freya’s age. He squats in the dark on a step behind a door when he could sit with them in a civilized way and talk.