The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (37 page)

akov.”

“Yes, Father.”

“You are a traitor.”

“Yes, Father.”

“This is what happens. Look at you.”

The young man’s body is strewn against a barbed-wire fence, hanging like a spineless scarecrow, one arm reaching high, the other dangling loose, legs at impossible angles.

Stalin thinks he has seen very little actual death. He never attends the executions he orders with a flick of a blue pencil on the lists of enemies. He never ventures to the front, only once since the war began and that was so the history books will have a record of him mingling with the fighting men. He does not visit factories or villages where people work and live and die. What death he does see comes from the newsreels he watches often at the Kremlin. But they are so sanitized and colorless. Yakov here is quite real and well described. Years ago Stalin saw Lenin’s body lying in state, his hands folded for a long nap with flowers. Lenin was in a much better predicament than Yakov.

“What is this place? A prison camp?”

“Yes, Father.”

“I remember. Sachsenhausen. You died at Sachsenhausen. April 1943. You threw yourself against the barbed wire.”

“Yes, Father.”

“So they would shoot you.”

“Yes, Father.”

Stalin sits on the ground beside the suspended body of his son. The boy wears a Red Army uniform. His tunic is torn by the metal quills and by some bullets. A pipe appears in Stalin’s hand.

“You surrendered, Yasha. You were surrounded and you gave up your post. Do you know what that signified? The son of Stalin would rather save his own skin than die for the
Rodina.
The Germans made a lot of hay with that. Did you know? They circulated a photograph showing you in prison. It was quite a propaganda coup for them.”

Stalin takes a puff on the pipe, then points the stem at his son.

“What if they had made you talk? What if after torture and drugs, they had pried open the mouth of Stalin’s eldest son? That would have been disastrous.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Did you know the lousy Germans came to me with a deal, to negotiate with them for your release? I told them no! As if Stalin would trade with the Nazis. ‘No! War is war,’ I said.”

“Yes, Father.”

“I ask millions to die every day, Yasha. Every day they do it, for Russia, for the Party, for me. But you. I never liked you.”

“Yes, Father.”

“And your mother. Yekaterina. My first wife. I’ll tell you a secret, Yasha.”

“Yes, Father.”

“I loved her. She was a Georgian, like me. We were young together. When she died, I wept. Wept, like Stalin was a baby. But I did my weeping in private. That’s where a man suffers. Not like you, in photographs, in public. I’m sad to say it, but do you know what else? Nothing good ever came from your mother.”

Beside the body of Yakov Dzhugashvili, other figures appear, not stark as the boy, flimsy but visible to Stalin. Women and men, they wear dresses and three-piece suits with fobs. They too are embedded and tangled on the wire, hung like twisted laundry. Stalin knows by looking that they are ghosts and not really there, so he continues talking only to his son.

“Yekaterina’s brother, your uncle Alexander. Once he was a good friend to me, but he had to be shot as a spy. And Alexander’s wife and his son, both became enemies of the people, both sent to Siberia. She died there, I’ve heard.”

Yes. Stalin sees them. There they are, spiked in their finery.

“Some family I’ve been given. Do you hear me? My second wife, Nadezhda, the fucking suicide. Her sister Anna is a spy. Anna’s husband was shot ten years ago, an enemy of the people. His brother, another spy. Your brother, a drunkard. Your sister, a shrew. My family, a nest of spies and traitors and loudmouths.”

The lineup on the barbed wire is long now. Every one of them is flung against the fence like Yakov, torn and limp.

“Go away.”

All but Yakov disappear at his whim. Stalin drags on the pipe. It calms him. He watches the smoke curl, it does not drift away, but dances for him as long as he wants it to. He looks through the gray swirls to take in what he imagines of the prison camp.

“Sachsenhausen, eh?”

“Yes, Father.”

The boy is dead. He robbed the bastards of their prize Russian.

“Well, you did this to yourself, then. You knew you were weak. You knew you would break. So you ended it like a man, at least. Good for you.

Stalin nods. The boy’s body makes its only motion and nods also.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Yasha. Sachsenhausen is right outside Berlin, I believe. I’m going to take that damned city, I don’t give a shit what the little Americans and British think they have up their sleeves. After I do, I’ll string up a few Nazis for you right in their own camp. We’ll take over Sachsenhausen and turn it on its masters. Would you like that?”

“Yes, Father.”

“There then, it’s settled. Good for you, boy. You had me worried, but you did the right thing. I like you better now.”

Stalin decides to end the dream. It is within his power, certainly.

“Go away.”

Yakov and the Nazi camp and the web of barbed wire do not fade at Stalin’s wish. Yakov’s head continues to nod and hold his father’s gaze.

“I said go away.”

Blood burbles from Yakov’s lips. Stalin is taken aback. A wet warmth dribbles over Stalin’s lips, down his chin, mirroring his son.

“Go away!”

The blood builds from Stalin’s mouth and he is soaked in it. He thrashes his arms as if he can wipe it off him, but the blood is tacky and comes alive, it swarms on him like wasps in treacle. He is stung over and over.

Yakov is gone. It is Stalin who hangs on the wire.

Stalin snaps as though hit by a bullet. He hears a crackle, like very small bones breaking.

A
Pravda
newspaper is across his lap and belly. Stalin’s fists have crumpled the sheets like an accordion. Relaxing his arms, he spreads the paper out. Stalin blinks many times to clear his eyes, to bring his focus into this world.

Stalin’s house is small. A puny clock two rooms away is its heartbeat, a brittle sound.

One of the wrinkled newspaper pages bears a photograph of Winston Churchill standing before a sign somewhere on the Western Front in Germany. The town behind him is a wreck. At the bottom of the page is a wet spot where Stalin has drooled. His shirt is damp too. He wipes a palm across his chin and moustache, and curses.

He sits under a lamp. The shade is translucent, yellow. In the struggling light everything in the room bears a sallow tint, even the backs of Stalin’s hands.

Stalin closes the newspaper sloppily and releases it to the floor. Let the housekeeper get it.

He reaches for his pipe. This makes him recall the dream pipe. In a moment, he calls up the entire dream. Yakov and the others, strung up, dead dolls.

Then it was him meshed in the fence, captured. Dead.

Stalin feels scoured inside, as though the vision were a pipe cleaner run through his guts. Nothing happens by accident. Why did he dream of Yakov and the others?

He doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to discover at this hour of the morning. He is Stalin, the
vozhd,
and whatever he decides the dream means, it means.

This is the interpretation, then. It’s easy. If others do not throw themselves—or are not thrown—on the barbed wire, then it will be Stalin who will be lost. They must sacrifice, all of them. The blood in his mouth is theirs, it flows through Stalin.

The meaning of the dream: Stalin
is
the
Rodina.

It’s a good feeling to be decisive about things that might otherwise torment one. The dream was a rough one, it took a nasty turn there at the end. It’s left Stalin achy. But this is the kind of ache that makes a man not forget, that makes a man take action.

He likes Yakov better now.

Yes. Sachsenhausen.

Stalin made the boy a promise. Stalin remembers. He doesn’t care what the Allies have up their sleeves.

Yakov died outside Berlin.

Again, there it is.

Always Berlin.

~ * ~

March 18, 1945,
9:20 a.m.

Goethe Strasse

Charlottenburg, Berlin

for the first time in four years, lottie does not go under-
ground to a shelter.

The air raids over Berlin have become daily occurrences; in the last eleven weeks there have been eighty-five attacks. Freya insists that both she and Lottie always go to the public bunkers for every raid. This way, they’ll be seen and no one will suspect the two have a cellar below their house and come banging to use it in an emergency.

For some reason, this morning Lottie wants to stay aboveground and watch. She doesn’t know why she holds still when the flurry starts in the streets. But in a chamber of her heart she does know. The Jew watches the bombers. Lottie thinks she ought to see them too. He’s just a schoolteacher. Lottie is an artist, and this is just the sort of thing that drives art and passion. To stand close to the human flame, to take part in spectacle. Lottie will remember what she sees in the Berlin skies this morning, its brand will come out someday and somehow through her cello. All Berliners see the aftermath of the attacks when they climb out of their dungeons; Lottie will be one of the few who stood under the black rain.

She remains in her room on the second floor. She thinks to be cautious and pull the mattress from her bed to wrap it around the hard Galiano case. The cello is two centuries old, Lottie must not let it die while she owns it. But she leaves it standing in its corner. The instrument is safe, she knows. She slides open the window and arranges herself in the sill. It’s against the law to be up here during a raid but Lottie isn’t concerned. After the conversation with von Westermann last week, she understands she is to be preserved. Minister Speer’s plan to save her and the BPO has taken the place of the cyanide pill as the blueprint of Lottie’s future. Though she senses she ought to be very careful this close to the end, she is, without logic, pervaded by a sense of invulnerability. Lottie has always believed in fate; she believes hers—in the matter of rescue—has been settled.

So she lets the Galiano alone and sits in the window. Her mother was not home thirty minutes ago when the radio ticked and the sirens sounded. Mutti’s days are spent harvesting food and water from wherever she can scrape them. She’s in a shelter somewhere on the Ku’damm now, maybe in the giant flak bunker at the Zoo. The Jew will fend for himself, he always does. Up on the second floor Lottie hopes not to bump into him or even see him. Her sense is that during the daylight hours he remains a subterranean creature.

It is a lovely Sunday morning. The Americans have a gorgeous clear day to do their work. From her second-story window she sees the B-17s flocking high over the city center. The bombs tumbling from the planes’ midsections look like railroad tracks, they look like stitches. Lottie sits transfixed, her head bent back, her eyes skyward and squinty in the clarity of the light. There are a thousand American bombers, more than a thousand. Slicing above and around them are many hundreds of fighter planes, protecting the mission. It’s an evil sight, buzzing locusts, something god-sent and vengeful in their numbers. A plague.