The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (62 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“But as I mentioned, there has been a change in our plan.”

Lottie licks her lips.

The manager says, “There was a vote.”

“What? When?”

Von Westermann lifts one finger, not to his lips, but it is still there to shush her.

“Yesterday. Only those who’ve been told about the plan were called in.”

“What about me?”

“You were not.”

Lottie’s hands wring in her lap.

“There was no reason to invite you, Lottie. It is clear how you would have voted.”

“On what?”

“The orchestra will not be leaving Berlin.”

Lottie is rammed into the chair. Her breath is taken away, her lungs claw for more air.

Von Westermann continues. “The vast majority have decided to stay. For family or sentiment. Many reasons. In light of the vote, I will be staying as well.”

Lottie’s mouth works. The shock owns a weight across her shoulders and legs. Her wrists feel strapped to the chair arms. Tears squeeze to her eyes.

The manager raises a lone finger again. This time he waggles it in the air, as though to erase something written there he did not intend.

“Lottie, dear, no, no, no. I should have said first. You may still leave.”

She gasps, yanked too fast in different directions.

“I can ... I ...”

“Yes, dear. After the concert tonight, Minister Speer’s adjutant will be waiting in a car outside the Beethoven Hall. Gerhard Taschner will be leaving in it with his wife and two children. Also the daughter of another violinist, Georg Diburtz. They will head southwest to Bayreuth, where last month we sent the instruments and tuxedos. The American army is already there. I have set out the Wagner piece just in case any of the musicians change their minds.”

Von Westermann purses his lips, recalling the meeting where it was determined by the musicians to stay and face the Russians. “Though I doubt any will.”

“There will be a car?”

“Yes. You and your cello may get in it when the concert is over.”

Lottie wants to ask several more simple questions. We will leave Berlin? It will be tonight? The Americans are already there? She wants to be certain this awkward von Westermann has not misstated or left anything else out.

The manager opens his hands. “Well.”

“They’re staying.”

“Yes, Lottie. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is staying.”

Lottie takes this thought into the hall with her cello. How can these old men do this? Speer has gotten them exemptions from the
Volkssturm,
yes. But there are no free passes from bombs and bullets and artillery shells. Or from the SS animals who’ll come looking for “volunteers.”

Young concertmaster Taschner knows he must escape. The others are staying, so there’s room for his family. And Diburtz sends his daughter away. They are both smart men. Not cowards at all. Realists.

Lottie thinks she could run home and grab Mutti. There is room in the car to Bayreuth. And if there is not, she can leave behind the cello. But Mutti will not go. There’s no point in imagining she will.

Lottie is late to the
Beethoven
Hall. Most of the orchestra has already assembled on stage when she enters. One hundred and five musicians handle their instruments. The tubas and basses wrangle into place, violins bow long tuning notes, French horns and trumpets warm their cold brass valves. Woodwinds play fast and flighty little solos. Lottie dances her cello through the forest of music stands, knees, and bells, careful not to knock anything over or dent the Galiano. She receives nods or nothing from the occupied, seated men.

Lottie does not know who among the orchestra is aware of the escape plot. Tuning her Galiano, she watches faces. Who complains about the change in program for today’s concert? Who smiles at her in a secretive, parting way? Who sits up straighter, sets his chin, knowing he plays his last concert before the fall of the city?

At five o’clock the concert begins. The baroque red-and-gold auditorium is filled. Minister Speer sits erect in his accustomed center seat of the first row. Von Westermann watches from a box with his wife. Everyone in the audience wears overcoats; the Beethoven Hall is not heated. The vast room is lit only by the ocher candescence of candles—normally at this time of day the electricity in Berlin is cut—but the lamps on the musicians’ stands glow. Speer must have worked some final magic for this concert.

Conductor Robert Heger walks on stage through applause. When he takes up his baton and mounts the riser, the house hushes. Lottie readies her bow with the other cellos. She prepares herself to play her finest, like Mutti wants.

Now, before Heger raises his hands to begin the concert, Lottie sees, almost as if they glow, who knows. Thirty, forty, almost half the orchestra, every man who voted to stay and share the fate of Berlin lifts his head, works his jaw even behind his mouthpiece, many of them sniff back tears, several let tears roll down their cheeks. Lottie breathes in the bouquet of emotion when Heger lifts the baton.

The drums begin, tragic and slow, a dirge. The tubas respond. The joined basses add their depth. With grand sweeps Heger brings the full orchestra alive to tell Wagner’s tale of the gods’ evildoing, the funeral of the hero Siegfried, the devotion of Brunhild who on horseback climbs her lover’s burning pyre to join him in death, the demise of the gods and the destruction of all Valhalla and the world.

Lottie plays with freedom and precision. For the first time she hears not her own notes but the whole, the passion of the orchestra. For stretches Lottie closes her eyes and bows, even during some passages she did not know she’d memorized. Her place in the music, in the moment, is so deep she is carried by it, her heart knows what to play.

The BPO pounds on
Die Gotterdammerung,
almost as though the piece were an actual signal, a giant bell to be rung in a steeple, an alarm. When they are finished, the applause from the house is the greatest Lottie has ever experienced. It takes five minutes to climax. Musicians on all sides of her exchange glances, some touch hands, there is the breathlessness of a feat accomplished.

The concert proceeds quickly, lacking the majesty of the Wagner. Twenty-three-year-old Taschner plays the solo in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto without his usual bravura. He seems distracted and worn. Perhaps the concertmaster’s departure with his family is not viewed by the other musicians as such a noble deed. In any event, the Beethoven symphony is acquitted as a matter of rote by the orchestra.

Heger waves the final note. The audience rewards the BPO with warmth but nothing like what followed the
Twilight of the Gods.
That performance was memorial, Lottie will recall it for the rest of her life. The director points his baton at Gerhard Taschner to accept his applause as soloist. Taschner takes a long, last bow. Then, violin in hand, the concertmaster departs the stage.

Is he leaving now? Isn’t Taschner staying until the end, for the Bruckner? The concertmaster is gone. Lottie looks into the front row, where Minister Speer stands clapping at the edge of the stage in a tan, belted overcoat. The Minister returns Lottie’s gaze. His lips form a silent word. Go.

Lottie’s eyes dart through the dim house to von Westermann’s box. The fat orchestra manager halts his own applause to hold out one hand, like a man ushering her to a seat. There, the gesture says, there is the way out. Take it. Now.

Heger turns his baton to the orchestra, to lift them from their seats for a bow. All the musicians stand. To Lottie’s left, a trim little cellist with magnificent veined hands, Herr Kleber, takes hold of her Galiano.

“That’ll slow you down, dear. I’ll watch it for you.”

On her right, another voice hones in under the applause.

“Start coughing. Start crying. Do something, girl. Run offstage.”

Heger keeps the orchestra standing. The applause begins to wane, he cannot leave them on their feet but for a few seconds more. Lottie must turn and exit.

Heads pivot. Faces glower at her. The director puffs out his cheeks.

Lottie looks into the hall lit in faint yellow tones. She thinks of Mutti. Did she sell the yellow star?

She takes a deep breath.

“Herr Kleber.”

“Yes, dear?”

“Thank you.”

Lottie reaches for her cello.

She sits.

~ * ~

April 16, 1945, 11:40
p.m.

Stalin’s office

the Kremlin

Moscow

he snatches the red phone the instant it rings.

“Yes. This is Stalin.”

“Comrade Stalin. This is Zhukov.”

“General. Report. Have you taken Seelow yet?”

Zhukov pauses.

“No, Comrade. Not yet.”

Stalin taps the bowl of his Dunhill pipe on the table.

“Why not, General?”

Stalin has given this hero of Moscow, Kursk, and Stalingrad every opportunity, every spare man and machine. Zhukov has the straightest path into Berlin. A ten-to-one advantage over the enemy in firepower. He has everything. And he cannot take one town on a hill.

At three this afternoon Zhukov called the Kremlin to report. His progress against the Heights is grinding. By midmorning the Red Air Force had shut up many of the guns on top of the Heights. Portions of Chuikov’s Eighth Guards penetrated the first two lines of German defense at the foot of the slope. But the third line, dug into the slope itself, has proven tough to crack. Chuikov can’t get tanks or self-propelled guns up the steep grade. The only way into Seelow itself is along the roads, and every meter of them is controlled by heavy fortifications plus the remaining artillery on the hill.

At noon Zhukov lost patience. Against the agreed battle plan, he committed his two tank armies, both of which were to be kept in reserve until the Heights was taken. Zhukov set loose almost fourteen hundred tanks and SP guns to charge ahead of Chuikov’s infantry columns. Zhukov would smash his way to Seelow.

This was the last Stalin heard. He waited all day for word.

Now he hears: No. Not yet.

“Tell me why not.”

“The German resistance has stiffened on the Heights. We are attacking through the night, Comrade.”

“You are attacking with your two tank armies?”

Again, Zhukov hesitates to respond. Stalin fills the gap.

“I remind you, General, that was not your instructions. You should not have sent the First Tank Army into the Eighth Guards sector instead of where and when you were ordered. Those tanks were to be held until Seelow is taken, then used on the plateau to Berlin. You’ve ordered them in too early. And now you report they have failed.”

In his mind Stalin pictures Zhukov lift his nose and swell his chest at that word,
fail.

“Comrade Marshal, we will take Seelow tomorrow.”

“Tell me how this happened today.”

Zhukov explains: The emergence of the tanks from the Küstrin bridgehead snarled movement all across the Oderbruch. Chuikov’s infantry and towed artillery were forced off the roads by the advancing tanks. The boggy ground and many streams slowed the momentum of the assault. There are still many uncleared minefields. Nothing moved fast. The enemy artillery on the commanding bluffs was particularly effective in this setting.