Lavonne Mueller

THE PATIENT ECSTASY OF FRÄULEIN BRAUN

A NOVEL

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

JOSEPH GOEBBELS

“The world that comes after the Führer and national socialism is not any longer worth living… therefore I took the children with me.”

MAGDA GOEBBELS

(IN A LETTER SENT OUT OF THE BUNKER TO HER SON, HAROLD, APRIL 29, 1945)

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

DR. JOSEF MENGELE

1

THE BUNKER IS PART OF MY BEING. Out of love for him, I greedily seize this underground as mine. Through all its systems of vitality and power, the Bunker is a pulse, a throbbing that I know is His heart.

When I saw my first rat, I didn’t scream. Adi warned me there would be rats. It’s normal for them to hunker in with us. But I thought I’d only see one at night. This was early morning and it was brown, though I expected black. Chewing through the concrete with tiny hard incisors, its skeleton conveniently collapsed so it could worm inside a two-inch hole. I was fascinated and determined not to be afraid like Magda and the children who yell and have Papa Josef and his orderly run all over shooting at the beasts. No, I don’t scream for help. I observe them. That first time, I waited. The rat stood in front of its hole, his head angled to one side as if casually looking at me. He was after food, and I made certain from the very beginning that I would never have a crumb in my room. Eliminating food is the only way to control them. Because of the Goebbels’ children, we’re reluctant to put down poison traps. So this brown demon went back and forth in front of his hole, pacing. Another one came out and paced with him. Then a third. Goebbels’ war films have rats running across the screen for several minutes, then the rats gradually turn into Jews. But looking closely at these creatures, I could only find the sinister eyes of Bormann as he goes topside to find abandoned furniture and jewelry for his wife, Gerda.

Goebbels tried to lessen his children’s fear of rats by taping a dead one stained with its own blood in a picture book. But that didn’t stop their screaming, and the “rat book” was thrown away.

Rommel told Adi about desert rats, huge creatures that banged their tails on the sand to attract the female.

Often the bomb shuddering walls keep the vermin in their hole though Adi tells me rats can mate up to 20 times a day. I try not to think of rodents enjoying themselves and making thousands of awful babies.

I have learned to live with secretive rats. Most of the time, they’re no bother. Their chewing at night is not as bad as the screech-bombs above with their high piercing scream. My concern now is to make my home as pretty as possible.

I must set down every moment I’ve been with him. I once read that to destroy a man you have to destroy his past. I won’t let that happen to Adi. I will record everything, writing without vanity… only the truth and from my own experience. Because I can’t keep it in. I’ll mark him with sentences that are without prejudice and guile. Here in this memoir, my Adi will always be loved and never forgotten.

April 1945—The Führerbunker. The first time we were intimate, I knew it would be different. You have to expect that with a genius. But my sister, Gretl, says there’s just so many ways the “manhood” can be used—even with a genius. My sister is wrong.

Dr. Morell, blond and wearing a long white coat reaching down to his highly polished boots, positioned me in great modesty with sheets draped around my thighs and stomach so that only my pubes were visible. Pursing his very thin lips and clicking his iron-studded heels together, he inserted the exercise-bar in my womb without even removing the silver Goethe ring on his right hand. I didn’t startle as the thoughtful doctor had heated the bar beforehand in hot towels. I was told to clench… release. Clench… release. Already I was longing, with the flexible metal inside me, longing for the man who is the steel and chrome of Germany itself.

Dr. Morell calls the device he invented V-Volk. Vaginal Volk. It’s a yielding little rod for developing muscles to make me a superior German woman internally. There’s no question, the doctor tells me, that I’m superior on the outside. “You’re the daughter I never had,” he says as he pats my thigh. (It was nearly a year before I knew he already had a daughter.)

My loving Führer is masterful. I lie flat on the bed, knees bent, my lower body tilting upwards. Lubricating the 7-inch Krupp steel V-V with warm butter, he inserts it slowly and gently. I clench my pelvis muscles around it as Dr. Morell taught me to do. My sweet Führer chants: “Pull. It creates resistance. Pull. Work your muscles. Work.” He places an egg timer on top of the headboard. The V-Volk slips… slides ever so slightly. I’m in training. He breathes heavily. Not like a common man. No. His heavy breathing is lyrical for my beloved’s body is so finely tuned that his enormous capillaries must gather around his blood cells one at a time—careful to be unique even there.

Lying stiffly next to me, he talks about the perfect copulation he saw on the battlefield. Two seriously wounded men lay one on top of the other (he pulls me over him). The bottom man was a German soldier, the top one a French soldier. Both men were in great pain, their blood dripping to the ground. There were cries of agony, the German calling to the Frenchman on top, the Frenchman to the German on the bottom. Back and forth, (we rock), death rattling calls of utmost tenderness—enemy to enemy. Pain gripped each soldier with equal force. They were embraced in misery. (Suddenly, my lover’s voice now becomes high pitched and excited, his glorious part swelling). The German on the bottom began to slowly shift his arm toward something. His sleeve was drenched in sparkling red blood as he moved his arm inch by inch. The German finally stretched his fingers to reach a hand grenade to pull the pin—to end the pain for himself and his suffering enemy on top. Both exploded in shiny dark plugs of dust, varnishing in the air (as my love snakes his hand inside me and is soon released).

“My precious little grenade,” he moans.

For nearly an hour, we lie still, silent, thinking only of this love story, letting the memory of those two soldiers rub against our senses until I caress the frill of skin around his manhood and he shoves against the metal of the V-Volk, the tip of his hot full member ramming the Volk inside me. The phonograph plays and he adjusts his peak to Wagner’s climax. Even though his gift doesn’t touch me, I still feel a glorious blend of man, steel and music—a triumphant ménage a trois—as he explodes, dripping down my thighs like goat cheese brie, ripe and silty. Then he wipes his “genius” with a clean handkerchief he keeps by his bedside and later burns in a metal tray as there is the danger someone will use his specimen to create another Führer.

“You always make my badge live again,” he rumbles sweetly.

“No badge is less dead than yours. I love you,” I say softly.

“What would you like me to give you?”

“Three words: I… love… you.”

“Evchen, I’m wedded to Germany. You know that.”

“Is there no love left for me?”

“My little grenade, you are very special. Now, what can I give you?”

“A pink flamingo.”

“I’ll have one sent to the Berlin Zoo.”

“I want one on a scarf.”

“Done!” Instead of an SS salute with outstretched hand, he gives me a tender military salute from his forehead to mine that’s as soft and caressing as a love pat.

I’m not physically satisfied after these love sessions. It’s enough to see his neck relax and his shoulders go limp. Afterward, he slowly puts on his Schnurrbartbinde—the little bandage he wears at night to keep his mustache flat and straight. I can’t sleep because of passion cramps, but I’d never let him know he’s caused me pain.

After all these years we’ve been together, there are still only V-Volk nights. Even here in the Bunker. Though he doesn’t permit himself the full measure, the desire to do so is a great comfort to me. But I’m waiting patiently for that time soon when I’ll finally have all of Him.

When we first met, I was young and naïve and had no idea how important he was. He was introduced to me as Herr Wolf, an alias used during his early years. I knew he was considered up and coming in the government, but so were a lot of men who asked me out when I was working at Herr Hoffmann’s photo shop at 42 Wiedenmeyerstrasse in Munich. Herr Wolf would stop by now and then to buy film and look at the new cameras. Many books were behind glass along the store’s back wall and that’s where he told me most books belong—behind glass. I said that when I was bored and there were no customers, I would read the titles of the many volumes out loud to pass the time. I couldn’t know then that he was an author himself as he didn’t look like a man who ever hunched over stacks of papers but was someone with a certain upright vitality.

He would often talk to Albrecht, the parakeet in a cage by the door. When I asked him why he didn’t take a picture of Albrecht, he said: “Why photograph what is already alive.”

“Does that mean you would never photograph a woman… such as me, Herr Wolf?”

He smiled and said cryptically: “Perhaps if you were a building.”

“That sounds very Art deco,” I offered, proud to be able to spar with him. I took one of the empty boxes from behind the counter. One slat was gone from the side giving the appearance—if one had an imagination—of an open window. I pushed my head against the opening like a human frame and waved at him. “Now will you photograph me?”

He answered with a quizzing stare, his mustache slightly twitching upward, a mustache so perfectly even that one side was exactly the same thickness as the other side. But I could tell he was amused.

Just then Hoffmann arrived and quickly grabbed a camera to take a delightful picture. But Herr Wolf roughly snatched the camera from Hoffmann, yanked away the box that still covered my head and shouted: “I don’t allow impromptu shots.” Later, as the Führer, when he was continually photographed, he would carefully stage each and every pose and forbid any picture when he wore his reading glasses. “A photograph is a reflection with a past,” he announced preferring the colored postcards of himself painted by the famous W. Willrich.

Though his pale blue eyes were fetching, I didn’t find Herr Wolf particularly mysterious or superhuman. He seemed very ordinary except for an Austrian charm in regards to our parakeet bringing his rain cape to hang around the sides of the cage so that Albrecht wouldn’t get chilled. Telling Herr Hoffmann never to buy Albrecht a wife, he explained that a parakeet would ignore people and concentrate on his mate.

We had a fish bowl on the counter and when one of them gave birth, I delivered the baby to Hoffmann’s eight-year-old niece, Hertha, for her birthday. When Herr Wolf found out, he was angry saying it was wrong to separate a mother from her child. I had to put the baby fish back in the bowl, and poor Hertha went without a gift.

Herr Wolf would often talk to Hoffmann about Arnold Fanck who experimented with lenses, camera speeds, and film stocks. They considered him a great artist who used high-contrast images and backlighting and even went so far as to put cameras to his skis for daring downhill-racer shots. But I thought Fanck was rather silly as his pictures didn’t look normal.

For many days Herr Wolf deliberated over buying either a Minox or the new Leica II. Hoffmann talked endlessly about the importance of the Leica’s trigger operated shutter, flat range finder top, and lens with click locking apertures. One Saturday, Herr Wolf finally bought the Leica II realizing, he said, that a superior camera would free him from any prison-hours of idleness. Afterward he walked directly over to me as I was changing Albrecht’s water and said earnestly in his soft Austrian accent: “Do you enjoy watching elegant and important people?” At first I was a little annoyed because I did get to see certain famous persons who came by the shop to talk with Herr Hoffmann who himself is prominent and happens to be an outstanding photographer. And I had often attended quaint parties in Schwabing, Munich’s Latin Quarter. I like to be where the songs are sung. I didn’t consider myself a stupid country girl, even back then. But my mother always told me: “One can eat with a knife and fork and still lack gentlemanly common sense.”

Herr Wolf invited me to an event where we could see the best and finest of Munich. I knew Hoffmann regarded him highly, and I thought it might be good for business. Also, the banker I was seeing was in Hamburg visiting his sister. I hesitated but finally said “yes.” Running outside to catch a bus, Herr Wolf paused by our display window to write my name backwards in the moisture. Later, when the shop closed, he came by for me looking very ordinary in an unbelted trench coat, a black velour hat, his mustache neatly clipped. He said my name softly, his tongue sucking the sound.

On a rack in back of the shop was a maroon silk party dress with a pleated skirt, puff sleeves and a small peplum around the hips for emergencies such as this. I thought the dress might smell of printing chemicals, so I wore a fresh flower pinned at the neckline. The shop had peony bouquets on the counter. I could take a peony whenever I wanted. When I came out to meet Herr Wolf, he leaned over to smell the flower on my bodice. Having once been a painter, he was instantly drawn to the skin of a petal. Then he complimented me on the pleats in my dress saying he loves repetition in good cloth as such folds are an important part of sculptures and frescoes.

We went in a taxi speeding down Maximilianstrasse and turned off to the Don Carlos Music Café: leather chairs, dark bread soup, turnip stew, hominy pudding so rich and thick that the sauce stuck to my teeth. As we ate, I noticed him gesturing to someone behind me, lifting his head and angling it to one side in silent communication. Once he actually stood and gave a celebratory wave to whoever it was behind me. Curious and believing I would discover one of his friends, I turned around only to find a large oval mirror.

“Catching sight of a loyal friend?” I asked him coyly.

“Loyal, to be sure,” he answered followed by a careful little laugh. But he was not embarrassed, and that impressed me.

When dessert came, creamy walnut cake with pistachio ice cream, he took off his jacket and hung it over the chair, and there were delicate stains on his chest, like marks women have on their blouse when nursing. That’s when I first knew he was special. Perfume came from his nipples. (In the Bunker, it’s a great benefit for it helps us with all the acid dampness of our underworld.)

Before leaving the restaurant, he left a wildly generous tip.

“You’re going to make this place impossible for me to return to in the future,” I offered, smiling.

“So you must always come with me.”

Then he left a tip for a waiter who hadn’t even served us saying he could see pain in that waiter’s stooped shoulders.

I miss those leisurely times. When he’s busy with his generals and I ache for him, I wish he were still just an artist with only colors to capture. His tints and hues are captives, after all. If I tell him that, he scowls and says: “Pasteur could have held his own among painters. Are you sorry he chose a scientific career? Frederick the Great played the flute. Should he have been a musician?”

“Perhaps their wives would have wished it,” I say.

He hesitates for a brief moment, then goes on to talk as if he had not heard me. “Now El Greco should have painted houses. His faces are dumb and who wants to talk to them.”

“I’ve never seen any Greco. But I admire poor Monet who went blind and had to memorize where he put the colors on his palette.” I’m grateful to Sister Angelus in my convent school who had cataracts and spoke frequently about the painter.

He suddenly closes his eyes, in respect and sadness, remembering that time in the Great War when he temporarily lost his sight. Patting my hand, he thanks me for my sensitivity.

But I’m happy that our Führer tells painters in Germany not to use any tint that can’t be seen in nature by the naked eye and not to paint or draw repellent or revolting images. He ordered the Gestapo to conduct raids on artists to examine their brushes for forbidden colors.

But getting back to our first outing… we walked up the steps to this new hospital on Ludendorffstrasse. He stopped and squinted when he saw a lone biscuit wrapper on the stairs, picking it up and placing it firmly in a nearby trash container. Soon we stood in front of ugly steel doors with a thick red ribbon stretched across them. Funny little stick figures (that I later knew as swastikas) were stitched on a banner quivering in the breeze. People were packed together waiting, I didn’t know for what. We were ushered to a row of wooden chairs. Looking around, I didn’t see any cinema stars but just some shabbily dressed politicians and a few doctors and nurses in ugly unstarched uniforms. I was annoyed that I had come and ruined a good evening. More and more people arrived, and large six-wheeled black Mercedes with red leather upholstery screeched up, but there were no film stars that I could see, and I was getting more and more bored when suddenly… he just left me—all alone, sitting there! Left my side without a word! Had he run out on me? The next thing I knew, he was up front receiving a bouquet from a little girl, cupping the child’s face in his hands, smiling, then cutting the thick strip of red satin ribbon to officially open the new hospital. Doves were released in the air, and an orchestra that came out of nowhere played Wagner’s “March of homage.”

Little did I know that on the very street of this hospital, he had once shoveled snow for a few pfennigs when he was poor and a struggling artist. More amazing, one day those swastikas I didn’t even know the name of would fly over the Ritz in Paris.

After the opening of the hospital, he didn’t come by the shop or call me in over two weeks. I wondered if I had only been a last minute replacement as he had invited me just hours before the event and didn’t even so much as pat my cheek when the evening was over. Then… he suddenly appeared carrying a box of film for Herr Hoffmann to arrange in an elaborate political montage. Hoffmann gave him a warm “sieg heil,” something new to me. (I didn’t know that Hoffmann joined his party early with the number 59.)

“Think of it,” Hoffmann told me, “he’s an Austrian, a born politician who only recently became a German citizen. And he’s going to make Germany great. We need a genius of action—Taterperson, this shaker. Tater.”

As he used the store phone, I overheard Herr Wolf’s conversations in which he made arrangements for speaking engagements at various cities. Afterward, he casually asked me to lunch. I accepted eagerly remembering all the doves and music of our first extravagant encounter. But this time, we only walked across the black asphalt street, dodging the traffic as he told me that most of his friends dreamed of owning their own Leica, but his dream was to be the camera itself. We sat on the steps of an office building. He carried a bottle of tepid tomato soup in a brown paper bag, and we took turns drinking from it. Eating too much at lunch was bad for one’s productivity, he explained. Most of his party members wanted heaping plates of meat, something hard for him to witness. I took numerous sips, and he drank the last of it and finished by running his tongue slowly around the upturned rim so that I saw the jar’s murky bottom. He used to drink soup from the same bowl with his mother, he said.

Soon we were sharing a jar of soup two or three times a week with Hoffmann warning me pleasantly that Herr Wolf carried a “single bed” in his heart.

Herr Wolf instructed me to poke him from time to time as we sipped the broth so that even this liquid nourishment would not be automatic and escape his concentration. This made me realize that a man can communicate something before it’s understood. And I enjoyed tickling him from time to time, watching him laugh softly against his will. As the jars of soup became larger, I realized he wanted the lunches to last longer. We would sit on the same office step for two hours. Of interest to him was what it was like for me being a young working girl, and I told him how dandelions make a good salad for lunch when you’re short of money and how I toasted bread on an upturned electric iron in back of the shop. Soon he continued on about unemployment, the shame of Germany’s poor standing in the world, his hatred of the Communist Party. He recited the Versailles Treaty by heart, grimacing over certain words, his mustache twitching after sentences. Then he’d snarl: “Clemenceau… forbidding our soldiers between the French border and a fifty kilometer line east of the Rhine! What infamy at the Hotel Majestic in Paris—that heinous delegation called the Versailles Peace Conference.” He was continually upset about the ignominy of the Fatherland in that awful War Guilt Clause which erased the former wonders of the German army and reduced it to a mere 100,000 men. (Later, I’m glad to say, he introduced compulsory military service and further flouted the Treaty by announcing on the radio that he planned to raise troop strength to 550,000.)

He encouraged me to read The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl, a book that detailed the Zionist ideal, for he was absorbed by the political Jewish problem with its territorial solution. Herzl wanted Uganda as a possible Jewish homeland, but Herr Wolf felt the use of too many German ships to get them there was not a good idea. I admitted that I personally knew only one Jew who was my mother’s cook, and she was rather dull though dutiful.

There were stories of his being a young man and feeling restless and eagerly welcoming Stahlgewitter, the thunder of the Great War. Even Thomas Mann, he said, desired a steely conflict when he wrote: “This world of peace which has now collapsed with such shattering thunder—did we not all of us have enough of it? Was it not foul with all its comfort?”

Herr Wolf said a single fear was that he would reach the front too late. This fear gave him no rest, and he eventually wrote about it in Mein Kampf. I was lucky enough to hear it from his own lips.

Later he showed me his paintings of blood-drenched poppies from the Great War.

I was honored that he used army terms when speaking to me such as “pill boxes” which were not those little pearl cases on my dresser. I would become familiar with such language. Trusting me with personal sentiments wasted on party members with jowls full of beef, he spoke of his mother, the warm home she made for him, how he would cry as a child when they entered their house because then he couldn’t see it from the outside. Before he said his first word, he drew it, a round outline of his mother’s face. The sketch called out “mutti” as loud as any word. Thereafter, he was continually horrified when anyone showed less than reverence for maternal love.

If one of his associates walked by and I was near him, he would stand, clicking his heels, shake hands with the official and then turn and shake mine. I knew I wasn’t to be part of his political life, but I didn’t care because he told me his real name was Herr Hitler. Bending nearly double, his lips would brush my palm in the old Viennese manner that embarrassed me as I didn’t even know if he was spelled with two tees or one. But he wanted me to call him Adi, the name he went by with all his closest friends. Then he pulled out a membership application form that I eagerly signed.

When the political montage was completed, he traveled around the country but promised to see me as soon as he returned saying we would go to the lake as I had told him I loved swimming. He sent me a phonograph record from Berlin. I listened to one of his speeches made on a brittle disk, expounding to his comrades about the beauty of a sparse jar of soup for lunch. I smiled in complicity as I played the record over and over until his voice grew weaker and weaker and slowly disappeared.

I began reading in the paper all about him. Nietsche’s sister said Adi was a religious rather than a political leader. Somebody named Joachim Fest was taken in by his “obscene, copulatory character at mass meetings.” (I was upset by this, but Hoffmann said it was a compliment.) Von Hindenburg called him a “Bohemian corporal.” I thought “Bohemian” was romantic.

Returning from his journey of speeches, Adi took me to Grosser Wannsee and was happy to find I was strong and muscular in the water. Too many women, he felt, were flabby and pale like the underside of a sea urchin. Explaining that I use to model swimsuits, it was annoying to me that men noticed the style and material of the suit without realizing that the firmness beneath made the swimsuit attractive. But he knew. And we went to the lake often, and he even admired my purple lips so cold from the water. After several months, now yearning for him, I picked a deserted area and decided to swim in the nude.

“I need no equipment but my skin.” I stood proudly before him naked. “A suit creates drag in the water.”

“But you wear a cap.” He smiled. His teeth were better back then, less stress.

“My hair is not cooperative.”

“You mean your hair on top?” He wasn’t looking at my head. As I stood before him, I found it strange that he had no shadow, but I came to realize he allowed nothing to escape his body without permission.

“I do wear mittens,” I explained, “to make fists for good strong strokes, so I don’t over muscle the water.” Forcing myself to do physical things excited him.

His hand strayed between my legs, and he wondered what the ligaments of my clitoris were like—how firm they must be. Such ideal German ligaments deserved a strong man.

“I can’t do any freestyle with your hand there,” I teased.

“Then water-thrash.”

“You’ll have to take off your clothes, too,” I urged. The summer air lay heavily upon my shoulders. It would be months before I realized he took his clothes off for no one, not even his doctor.

On the collar of his tunic were the Iron Cross and the black ribbon of the wounded. Slung across gnarly branches on a tree above us was the Leica II camera that started it all.

“I like to dry swim. Fully dressed. Come now, create fluid motion for me. I’ve had enough today of the robotic action of politicians, my little Evchen.”

Taking his hand from my vee, he lay on the ground, face down and struck a perfect horizontal posture, his nose slightly slanted as he breathed to the side. Then he flutter kicked—small, fast and supple. Most beginners kick too big.

“I was gassed in the Kaiser’s War.” This he said without the slightest hint of pity. “I let air gently fall into my seared lungs when inhaling. I exhale through my mouth.”

“You’re so right,” I answered happily. “Weak swimmers tend to breathe only through their nose.”

Cupping the waves, he sucked on water from the deep darkness that most people fear.

I got on the grass next to him, and he moved me expertly onto his back as we both kept our bodies long, narrow and straight—he face down, me on the top. His tusk stiffened into the sand, and then I felt a slight arch.

“My pretty Evchen, we drink from the same bowl,” he said sweetly.

“Why don’t we do it the real way?” I asked.

“What way is that?”

“You enter my soil.”

“How much more real is that?”

Wanting another aperture, he reined me in digging into the crack of my bottom with his left hand (always saving his right for handshakes). After only moments, I think he was spent. One never knew with Adi. It took a while for me to learn that he stores passion like a special solitude, a sublime way of carrying the burning sun inside himself even as he writhes from his scorching juice.

I fell in love with his middle finger.

I’ve been on many beaches from the age of six. This particular shimmering swim let my body speed through swells and surges faster than any water I had ever know before. From that day, I knew I would always love him no matter what he did to me. For Adi carries magic even when he sleeps. He doesn’t snore, and there’s a soft glow about him when he’s unconscious as he breathes in little staccato puffs of air. I lie beside him thinking: “What is he dreaming? Who has taken him away from me into that other world?” It never leaves me, this fear of being left.

2

THERE WAS NOTHING IN MY CHILDHOOD that made me believe a famous man would want me. Oh, I had the usual dreams of marrying a prince like all young girls. In Bavaria, one heard of royalty and sometimes even saw them in parades. Pages from the Court of Wittelsbach, the Bavarian royal family, were sometimes enrolled in special classes at my school. Our priest, we were told repeatedly, was once a tutor to Prince Heinrich. But the nobility kept to themselves considering people like me as the bürgerliche—poor low life. Once I forgot and greeted one of the elite in the courtyard and was punished by the nuns with a rap on my knuckles. When I told Adi this, he smiled saying he ordered Heinz, his valet, to turn his back and bow when meeting a royal.

Prince von Hessen who survived World War I joined our Nazi Party. Prince Wilhelm became a member of the SS, and Prince Philip marched with the Storm Troopers every year at Nuremberg Party rallies. At first, Adi wanted the nobility in the Party in order to show a new people’s community—Volksgemeinschaft—the bringing together of all classes of society. But he was always suspicious of the Royals because their familes were international and thus a source of information for the enemy. Eventually Adi had most of those snobs thrown into prison for treason. Rommel, to his credit, put a good deal of blame of the World War I defeat on the aristocracy saying they used their privileges to no good end. But Adi was also suspicious of Rommel, a general who was arrogant enough to reprimand his students during their War College days that they need not concern themselves with a historical Clausewitz but with him.

My family is not stylish—just simple and honest. My mother, an ardent Catholic who displays her faith wearing a large red scapula, is a dressmaker who uses pillow feathers in her hat. My father is a teacher of crafts who has little interest in students and considerable interest in the principles of construction. As a child, my building blocks were discarded wood.

I was born on a rainy day and our roof leaked so the midwife delivered me wearing a rain hat and rubber boots. One hand came out first, and perhaps at that moment I was already reaching for Adi.

My sisters Ilse, Gretl, and I grew up in a small house with a wide yard, and we walked between rows of sunflowers taller than we were and went to a Catholic school and waited on the street corner to meet the nuns and carry their satchels. We were always told in our classes that we should be proud of Germany’s great art and literature. An deutschem Wesen soll die Welt genesen. The German spirit will heal the world. Any mention of imperial places like France or Spain would deform our character.

I was good in reading, poor in math, very athletic and was always chosen to be the leader of our exercises that we performed before church each morning.

So my life before Adi was very ordinary. But I wish those haughty Bavarian nobility could see me now.

3

THIS BUNKER IS MY FIRST REAL HOME. Like a ship, you’re born when you enter it. Here is my world of eighteen rooms where clammy air rises like part of the starkness of concrete.

Generals, officers, clerical staff acknowledge me. Before, I was hidden. Nobody was supposed to see me. Nobody was supposed to hear me. I was the secret woman.

In this Bunker, we’re staying put at last. In a sense, nesting. There’s bicycles sprawled along the floor and military furniture, horse blankets, field glasses, bull castration tongs, mess kits, tire rods, crowbars for me to contend with. I think of the Bunker as Michelangelo’s block of marble that can be turned into something wonderful even though Adi is against it. A bunker is a bunker. Probably it reflects his background as a corporal in World War I. Having seen conflict from the trenches, he’s down to earth. You don’t have to be born rich to get ahead. You can be a peasant and become a general at twenty-four and rule France at thirty. Little Bonaparte proved the common individual was able to triumph. I’m proud of Adi’s humble origins, but I worry, too, because now that the Allies have reached Berlin, they’ll shoot any corporal they find to make sure there’s never another Führer. Oh, I can’t let myself think about the bleak side of things. Not when ingredients for cakes are carefully saved in a tin box for Adi. They are modest cakes, but our cook, Fräulein Manzialy, who wears a swastika badge on her apron, has found just enough yogurt for icing. Adi’s favorite jellied pancakes are skillfully cooked in the shape of Napoleon’s hat. Yogurt is still unrationed and the beer supply is scarce even when it’s watered down though Adi never touches the stuff, and I only have a half bottle of schnapps now and then. Goebbels, our Propaganda Minister, found a raspberry liqueur that he and Magda drink each night before dinner with cakes in the Greek manner, and his First Adjutant, Lieutenant Wisch, (who wears the Medal of Blood from the beer hall putsch) brings them bottles of Juniper wine in hand painted bottles along with Eiercognac, and Samagonka (a Russian brandy made from beets). From Lieutenant Wisch (who is short and wiry and once was a jockey) we also get plenty of sugar and cheese. Lieutenant Wisch has five Opel Blitz trucks at his command and makes weekly runs to many of the big cities where he is liked by everyone and got to sign his name in the Golden Book of the city of Bonn even though he was born in Schuchten bei Treuberg.

Entering this stout old Bunker, Magda says, is like putting on a drab turtle’s shell. But after finding herself close to so many handsome soldiers, the turtle’s shell is more appealing. She moved a special end-table from her country home to the Bunker—a tiger-oak table with four naked men for legs, their genitals moving fuzzily into a complex of circles and cubes. When I complained it was unsightly, Magda huffed that furniture is the only way to “flower” the Bunker. When Adi accidentally toppled over this end-table breaking off a scrotum, Magda treasured it even more saying proudly to everyone that it was “broken by the Führer.”

I’m grateful for what we have in this damp shelter that groans and laughs depending on slurry bombs. There’s a little too much battleship gray and stark concrete for my taste. But many have less. Fräulein Manzialy never has the onions we crave for onions are used to make poison gas. But what can you do? It’s war. However, she mixes fried potato drippings to day old bread pudding, a succulent combination that leaves our lips moist and glistening.

Staying up late and watching for the first light used to be fun. Maybe it had rained and I could see blue lightning in the sky. Each morning I loved to watch Adi stand before his open window and do chest-expanding exercises that helped keep his right arm rigid for hours with the Nazi salute. But he’s given that up in the Bunker because he hardly salutes any more, and morning and night mean nothing. Every hour is like the last. That sameness leaves me time to realize how special it is to be here, how happy I am to finally be “visible.”

My first day in the Bunker, Adi didn’t come to my room that night as he was working straight through with Bormann, his adjutant, and Goebbels, his propaganda minister. He doesn’t go to bed until early in the morning and only sleeps a few hours, a habit he acquired as a messenger in the army. What little sleep he does get he fights as that awful thief of time. I was disappointed but too excited to be unhappy for long. My first night in our first home! Spreading an army blanket on the floor and leaving my pillow on the bed, I wanted to feel like a corporal on the front, one of Adi’s loyal soldiers. Wasn’t I at the nerve center of the most important command post in the world, in a place I was never allowed to be before, living among soldiers smelling of mud and sweat? Stretching long and straight on the blanket, I let my hands trail on the floor so I could feel the cold. I wouldn’t let myself go to sleep, even for a moment—not for the entire night. Shivering from intoxication, I whispered strange sounds, not out of fear but because of the restlessness you have in a new place. I didn’t use a blanket for I knew that would dull my bliss. I was throbbing with bursts of delight, as a shutter breathes on a window vibrating against the frame when there’s a delicious breeze. My eyes closed from time to time, content in the bowels of time, concrete around me like the Bunker’s own dream.

From the start, I keep my door slightly open during the day to hear life rushing by: gold-tasseled swords at a soldier’s side banging against stiff black boots, strutting captains, majors, and generals all working intimately with history. The bombs above slacken, then come hard rattling the lids on pots and pans, then slacken again. Sometimes a touchy guard at the top heaves a grenade outside the entrance at an imagined enemy. Life moves above, but this life swirling beside my room is a lofty heaven underneath. There’s no war, I decided that first night as I shook with rapture and anticipation, that’s too big or too destructive it can’t be held inside me.

A few feet away from me is Adi’s private apartment with sealed double doors that are gas proof and fireproof with an inner connecting door to my room. By his bed is a scale as he worries about his weight. To give himself the best advantage, he quickly exhales before weighing himself.

I’m happy when secret war talks with Goebbels are held in Adi’s private apartment. Sound carries easily in concrete rooms, and I can hear my love clear his throat or cough and feel him near.

My boudoir is pleasant with a flame-mahogany old sewing machine cabinet for a desk and a charred lampshade that I’ve painted blue and white, the colors of Bavaria where Adi had his first great political success. Draped around my mirror—which I dust with face powder to smooth my reflection—is a slightly tattered red velvet cloth and a scarf with the pink flamingo. My dressing table, a thick board over two ammunition boxes, is where I keep my ivory comb and brush that Adi gave me on my birthday after we’d been together for one year. For my next birthday, he gave me a twin lens Rolleiflex with shutter speed up to 1⁄500 of a second and trusted me to take private pictures of him at Berchtesgaden for our own personal album. But I must admit I’ve never felt much joy in celebrating my birthday. After meeting Adi my real birth is the day he came into my life.

I found an iron urn and had a captain with a twisted moustache like some old Kaiser and who smelled of a long night of drinking sand it with grit and paint it with copper crystals. It’s very Grecian and perfect for fruit and driftwood. I’m thankful for learning my mother’s thrifty Bavarian sense for ersatz.

B-B is the Blondi Bunker, wasted space for a mutt. The DogBunker would make a perfect tearoom. But Adi won’t hear of it. When I ask him why not, he tells me the same old story about Napoleon. During the Italian campaign, Napoleon saw a dog on the battlefield coming from his dead master howling, barking for help, growling revenge. Nothing moved the little Emperor more, and nothing moves Adi more except maybe when Nietzsche wept and put his arms around a horse being beaten.

The lower part of our shelter is called the Führerbunker—above, the old bunker. At the end of the hall is the telephone switchboard, the best in Berlin. We also have an army radio transmitter with a hidden outside aerial. Rumored to have gold bars buried in the floor, Adi’s Party Secretary, Bormann, has the smallest room without even one tiny shelf for books. Bormann, known as the “Grey eminence” because he likes to remain in the background, never reads a book or holds one in his hand except the Army Register. As a schoolboy, he would prop up a book on his desk and eat chocolates behind it. The teachers thought he was scholarly. But that doesn’t keep him from making Adi believe that he’s read Mein Kampf. They all say they’ve read Kampf though my mother says nobody gets beyond 20 pages. Everyone honors it, of course. And even when I ask Adi’s valet, Heinz, if he’s read Kampf, he only says: “The Führer’s words are a bit difficult for me.” But I’ve read it. Every page. When Adi is with me, he needs to relax so I try not to ask him too many questions though he’s happy I’m interested and knowledgeable about the war and pleased that I send copies of Kampf as gifts to my friends and relatives. And as a wedding gift, Adi mandates a copy to all newly married couples in the Reich. My mother says Kampf is so dense it reads like old wood. What would she know having spent her whole life sewing and cooking red sauerkraut in heavy raisin gravy? There are no earth shaking words in wool-scraps or gravy.

At a sharp left is the iron spiral staircase leading to the upper bunker with a sign telling people to climb the stairs three at a time to ensure robustness—an idea Adi got from Mussolini’s public buildings. At the top of the steps is Adi’s vegetarian kitchen with its huge wheel of cheese from Zurich. A smoked ham and ten-clawed meat hook hang there for the officers. The communal dining area at the top of the stairs always smells of tar, fish oil and sweat. Along with folding stools, there is one spectacular chair upholstered in jute that Adi brought from Paris saying educated people look to Paris rather than New York for creative brilliance. Nearby is an emergency exit to the Chancellery Garden. At the entrance to the Bunker is the sign: “No smoking.”

Adi doesn’t know it, but I’m a secret smoker. My sister said smoking helps headaches and when I’m worried over war news, I go to the stove in Fräulein Manzialy’s kitchen and puff behind the boiling potatoes. I do this when I’m desperate and afraid to go topside. I smoked regularly in those early days when I was jealous of photographs of Adi smiling at beautiful women on his rise to be the Führer. I was especially hurt to see him standing beside Winifred Wagner, daughter of the composer, knowing he frequently visited the Wagners’ home in Bayreuth. Winifred calls him Wolfchen, little wolf. But isn’t that business? Aren’t women essential to his career? It was German women who overwhelmingly voted him into power.

Sometimes my doubts torment me. Such a handsome, fascinating man will always attract beautiful women.

And then there’s my constant jealousy of his niece, Geli.

Not that I don’t sometimes feel sorry for Geli. The stupid 23-year-old girl simply couldn’t cope, shooting herself with Adi’s Walter 6.35 revolver on September 18, 1931, because she was too dense to understand a great man even though she was living in a luxurious apartment in Munich on 16 Prinzregentenplatz. Adi let her take singing lessons and attend Mass. But Göring said Adi was jealous and possessive and wouldn’t let Geli go out by herself or have her own friends. It’s probably true that a girl without much insight would be confused. Maybe even driven to despair by trying to keep up with a genius. But she was his niece, and somewhere in her bloodstream there must have been a speck of His blood. That had to make her smarter than an ordinary person.

I tried suicide. I wasn’t sure of Adi’s love at the beginning. My first attempt was serious. The second wasn’t.

I shot myself in the neck with my father’s army pistol while I was still working at Hoffmann’s photography shop. We were getting pictures to develop showing Adi posing with glamorous women. Smiling at their adoring faces, his lips parted, his eyes fixed with arched eyebrows, his chest leaning forward… I saw the smile all over his body.

Unfamiliar with guns and not as accurate as Geli, I missed my carotid artery. As I was losing blood, I could only think: “I’ll never see him again.” Being so weak, I was still able to call Dr. Plate, Hoffmann’s physician, because I knew Adi would immediately be informed.

Adi was very moved by such passionate devotion and wrote me a tender letter scrawled in pencil that I read in the hospital just before his visit. “Dear Evchen, in your eyes, you see me as unromantic. How can a serious politician deal with this label? If I were an office clerk with little ambition but sorting files, it would all be very simple. Think of the life we can have together in the pursuit of a great Germany, one long truth!” I kissed his signature.

On the second attempt, well, I heard Adi call out Geli’s name in his sleep and fearing I’d never be free of the hold she had on him, I shoved many sleeping pills in my mouth. The specter of never seeing him again and leaving behind “that one long truth” made my mouth so dry I couldn’t swallow them.

Geli’s suicide was caused by many things completely different from me. Goebbels told me the whole story, how Adi hated to take time to urinate so he seldom did when busy delivering speeches. This caused acute urine retention. Making himself into the Führer, and the crude act of urinating disagreed with the image of a super being. It took all of his concentration to be a leader. Geli never understood that.

The doctors, Magda informed me, prescribed a home catheter for Adi, and he became very skillful at inserting the flexible tube. In doing this, he experienced arousal and thought that if the beautiful Geli did the procedure for him, it would save time as he was busy with meetings. The catheter could relieve not only his urine but his spurt as well.

Geli told Bormann that Adi made her do the most terrible things, but Bormann, the insensitive gray eminence, had little patience with a silly squeamish girl. Why was the Führer attracted to a girl who was reluctant to enjoy the satisfaction she could give the future leader of the world?

Using a rubber catheter, Magda told me with excitement, caused Geli to get nauseated and she had rubber fumes on her fingers that wouldn’t wash off. She was unable to pick up a slice of bread to eat as food began to smell like rubber. They tried a variety of other catheters, one metal, one plaster, one with a wing tip, one with three prongs, one with an inflatable bag. But Geli couldn’t enter into the process with the kind of enthusiasm Adi needed. Finally, a party carpenter constructed a thin hollow reed that looked more attractive than rubber, had a forest scent, and was smooth and sanded to a soft golden tone. Though this contrivance looked and smelled appealing, Geli had to not only insert the reed but also blow mouthfuls of warm water into it. After several weeks of puffing into such an appliance each day, Geli committed suicide.

Adi was given the awful news of Geli’s death at the Deutscher Hof Hotel in Nuremberg and was so deeply disturbed that he couldn’t get up in the morning. Goebbels had to stay with him two days and two nights afraid he would take his own life. The Nazi Party was on the rise, but Adi was suddenly helpless and depressed. Why had she done this to him? Why? He gave her everything, all the money she wanted, all the clothes. Giving her gifts was like giving things to himself. And there were times he thought she had adjusted to the reed-catheter. Once he detected shudders similar to a delicate climax as she slowly withdrew the reed, warm water still in her mouth and dripping from her lips. But what was he to think now?

Could Geli have been ill? In some kind of physical pain? Trying to save him from distress?

Goebbels said Geli’s death made Adi more lonely than he had been since the death of his mother. Giving in to loneliness is a weakness a leader can’t afford to have. A woman is expected to provide a love that endures. Being the one constant female in his life now makes me happy.

Adi desperately needed something of Geli. Because she left him so suddenly, he couldn’t stand the thought of her simply disappearing. He sought the help of a very educated man, Dr. Mengele, who was working on important research regarding the Dionne quintuplets and other cases of dual births. When Adi asked the doctor if it were possible to extract something of Geli for him, the doctor readily agreed.

The doctor was eager to begin right away on Geli’s abdominal cavity as he had perfected the technique of lumbar punctures and was eager to dissect. Although preferring to work in vivo, Mengele had heard a speech Adi gave on the superior race and was so impressed he wanted to accommodate this brilliant leader.

The doctor found the mucus in Geli’s stomach inflamed and few gastric juices probably caused her pain and trouble in digestion. This, perhaps, was the reason she wished to end it all.

When the doctor held up Geli’s large intestines, Adi said they were a marvelous reddish-pink, a color he had often used in his painting of poppies. His precious niece’s intestines, he decided, would become a memorial streamer.

Geli’s intestines were floated in a pond of preservatives along with tiny carved ivory flowers and black metallic swans in Adi’s private garden in Munich. When he visited Geli’s glorious “streamer,” Magda overheard him talk to her sweetly about the latest fashions in Berlin and how he flushed out butterflies in the brush sending them fluttering like colorful confetti into the air. If a horrible storm caused by all the fire-bombings hadn’t torn the pond out of the ground and trampled its contents against the hills and gorges, the floating streamer would still be there. So Geli died a second time, this time not by her own hand.

Adi no longer has acute urine retention. His stress has shifted to his bowels. No doubt Geli would have hated that, too, as I often have to use a rectal syringe. You can actually pummel the bowels without hurting them since they have no pain nerves. I can be rough and please him without worry. When the war was going well, the muscles around his anus relaxed. Now those muscles are tense, and it’s a struggle to reach the rectum. Sometimes I have to dig out his stools with my fingers. As feces are mostly water, that sometimes makes it easier. While I gyrate the syringe, he moans in pleasure and reaches his peak. A cleaner bowel is cleaner blood, he always says. Blut und Ehre. Blood and honor.

4

IT’S A CONDITION OF THE BUNKER that important personnel come and go as if thick concrete and the deep underground encourage constant movement. For here below Berlin is a stockpile of great minds quarried from the German earth.

Hanging on the walls are army gas masks for Adi worries about gas since his injury in World War I and is always ordering an overabundance of new filters for them. The large isinglass goggles are frightening looking, and I hate the stinking smell of rubber.

Fire hoses and loose specks of stone on the floor are a nuisance. Dripping water from the wall nourishes tiny brave mushrooms. All this artificial light flickers. There’s the sour smell of wet concrete—when first poured it didn’t properly dry and now steams. At night I have to tuck my nightgown under my feet to protect my legs from water bugs. Getting a direct hit, the floor shakes and it’s like we’re being pounded down a mile deeper. But I’m used to that knowing it’s much worse outside. Adi’s personal aide, Heinz Linge, is afraid to leave the Bunker even when it’s all clear. We call him a Bunker Bug. Other staff members are Bunker Bugs, too, especially those functionaries from the Berlin Ministry who thought they were so brave exchanging their brown Party uniforms for the field-gray of the Wehrmacht and who are now Bunker cowards.

We have a 60-kilowatt diesel generator, but it’s shut off from time to time to keep out all the smoke and dirt. When it’s off, I tend to get coughing fits and headaches. Potassium cartridges were tried, the type used to purify air in a submarine, but these didn’t work… probably because of our cavernous space.

Magda Goebbels calls our Bunker the “black splotch,” but she’s very clever in helping with morale as she makes us both fashionable gauze masks with sequins—beautiful red sequins that she took from her taffeta Schiaparelli gown with its leg-of-mutton sleeves. Pink silk butterflies are pinned on the masks of her children. Though cheerful, they also protect us from the occasional thick black dust. Just a simple thing like that can lift your spirits.

I have a wrought-iron chair that was once piled on a huge stack of bricks and beams in Friedrichstrasse. Two young lieutenants rescued it while salvos whistled past them and white flashes seared into their eyes. It’s a daring bunker gift. Since good cloth is impossible to find, I’ll cover it with a large linen dinner napkin. I despise all those civilians in the city up above sewing white surrender flags out of flour sacks that could be put to better use. It’s more helpful to Germany to be like the patients confined to SS hospitals who have hand grenades under their pillows ready to pull the pin and take some Russians with them. As Adi says: “Every person to his duty—even the sick.”

It was Adi’s architect, Speer, who designed my initials into a lucky four-leaf clover design, and I’m having a hard time getting the napkin to fit around the chair with the “EB” showing. This morning I received a silver butter knife from Goebbels, one he took from the gutted shell of the Café Kaiserholf. Goebbels looked so funny wearing a huge camel-hair coat in April, bowing before me, holding out this little knife like a flower, suggesting I use the blade to push the linen into each crevice of the chair.

Oak doors were conveniently catapulted by a bomb explosion to the grass above our entrance. They will be good wall panels to cover up patches of ugly moisture, along with an Egyptian blue curtain with gilded detailing that I brought from the Berghof. Bright blue is a favorite of the Empire Style that Adi so admires. Magda moved in eight pieces of furniture which included her table of enameled iron, a gift from novelist Werner Beumelburg who was among the first artists to sign the appeal in support of the Führer’s decree against elite art. I was allowed to bring a cherry wood table with eight matching chairs and a cabinet by Herr Gruber, one of the most esteemed craftsmen in Vienna. But Adi likes it best when I use things like an old trunk for a table. Magda was reading Gulliver’s Travels to her children and the little midget people in the book found a weird object in Gulliver’s pocket. It was a comb that they used for a fence. I’m forced to use my imagination even being normal, like making a milk carton into a bench. The children place toothpicks alongside their bed like medieval spikes to protect them from the enemy.

When we had a surplus of flour, I use to sprinkle it over the walls, letting the flour seep in the cracks to blur the concrete and give it an antique look, a warm weathered surface you might see in Greece or Italy. Even Marie Antoinette had a taste for ancient Rome. I’ve never been to Greece, but I did go to Venice, and I met Musso at the Berghof. Could that man eat and drink. Adi came to admire him saying Mussolini was the only Roman among a whole pack of Italians. Musso would have been a lot more successful if he had some solid German snow now and then—to harden him up. He pampered himself too much. Comes from all that Italian sun. Comes from being waited on by his mother, sisters, and aunts in that silly peasant village of Predappio.

Musso was intimidated by the Italian monarchy and said the Führer ranted and raved like a gramophone with seven records even though he himself gave speeches that Adi felt were so much pasta from the International Lodge of Princes. Yet Adi had an affection for him.

Standing on the terrace at Berchtesgaden, his legs widespread, hands on his hips, Adi would imitate the silly ranting and raving of Musso for me and Goebbels: “Salata! Pesce fresca bel canto alfredo. Resotto spinaci! Minestrina biscotti branzino basta!”

Laughing until tears streamed down our cheeks, Goebbels would add: “The Italian Navy has wash flying from their mast.” Then we’d beg Adi to give more Musso speeches… more speeches… until Blondi came bounding in arching a blubbery lip at me and demanding one of her selfish walks.

Musso. Wearing white all the time, he showed poor people that he could afford to have his clothes constantly cleaned for he perspired through five shirts a day from all the food he ate. He sweated so much he had to be toweled by his aides at every available moment.

Adi once took Musso to a good Munich restaurant and even ordered an orchestra to play the Italian fascist anthem “Giovinezza” before dinner. An illiterate eater, the Duce consumed two eel pies for an appetizer, drank a dozen large foaming steins of Salvator Block, ordered the main dish of fish cakes in goose fat five times—two times eating three courses in reverse order. Once he plunged his fat hands into his favorite lamb stew scooping up the meaty liquid around his clunky nose, nearly rinsing his nostrils. He recited one canto of Dante after each course to aid digestion, though it was hard for him to stop at one. So he dispensed with his savagely boring recitation for the sake of a congenial conversation with the Führer. However, in his crude elementary German, he did mention a character named Tacitus who claimed ancient Germans were savage and crude.

“What kind of polite history is that?” I asked Adi.

Adi countered by reciting for him what Tacitus once said: “You don’t know what war is really like until you have fought the Germans.”

“Wonderful! Perfect response! Now if you want a happy vision,” I ventured, “imagine seeing obese Mussolini and Göring side by side in a tiny opera box at La Scala.”

Adi laughed, and it pleased me to see him amused and happy.

After dinner one night at the Berghof, Musso presented us with a gift of one hundred bottles of Olio Sasso, an Italian olive oil much prized in Germany. Then he announced: “I plan to deliver to your New National Museum at Linz the Plague in Florence. A valuable Makart, as you well know. Perhaps I will fly it there myself.”

No doubt this painting was truly authentic since Goebbels told me that Musso had the good taste to loot a fourth century obelisk from Ethiopia that’s now in Rome. Yet fat Musso flying a plane? His adjutant said he was a good pilot, but what else could a lowly adjutant say?

“Why do you hate Barlach’s sculptures so much?” Musso asked in a tone of forced innocence. “He’s not a Jew.”

“We have placed a great importance on art, and his work is too close to the edge of expressionism… though I was quite taken with his The Berserker,” Goebbels replied.

“It’s the brutal title that impresses you.” This from Adi.

“But I believe his woodcuts are often compared to primitive art, a relative of your German Gothic wood carvers,” Musso added.

“We don’t approve of his Animal people,” I put in, remembering the drawings Goebbels showed me… awful hairy charcoals.

“Yet you tolerate houses patterned after the Ringstrasse style—flaunting their elaborate, senseless Gothic baroque,” Musso offered.

“Merely the taste of scattered individuals,” I replied.

“Art is the measure of racial health,” Adi announced. “There is a great bond between art and politics, and we strive for that which declares our race and fatherland into a trusted Volksgemeinschaft. No society outlives the history of their culture.”

Musso, suddenly bored with banter on art, stood looking around for another fruit bowl while splitting open a melon and extracting two tubes of my lipstick from its juicy center. Smiling, he handed them to me all slimy with seeds. An accomplished pickpocket, he had taken them from my purse that was hanging over a chair. Soon he was flaunting a scarf he had stolen from my neck. He entertained us with his cleverness that surprisingly made Adi smile and even chuckle. Though I was happy to see Adi amused, I secretly found Musso superficial.

“Other works can possibly be sent to your Führerbauten in Munich,” Musso announced. “I have a few things in mind for your Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Easy for me to acquire, like a stroll on the Passo Romano. I only request, as a small favor that you secure for me a Shirley Temple doll for a dear lady friend.” He balanced a sprig of grapes in front of his puffy lips and passed me a swollen apple under his chin. “Tell me, Mein Dear Führer, what comes after the Third Reich? The Fourth? And so on?” He gave a sinister laugh.

Adi had long desired the Plague in Florence, so he made light of Musso’s quip. “It’s the Third that will get you Shirley temple.” He handed Musso three bananas and two oranges. To prove the extent of his good nature, Adi went to the kitchen himself and returned with a basket of plums, pears, peaches, apricots and seven different kinds of mustard. It was important that the Fascist State stay loyal to him.

“Are you bothered that the press calls you Germany’s Mussolini?” Musso asked.

“Not when you’re called Italy’s Hitler.”

Both men chuckled with an edge of mistrust.

With gravy sliding down his chin, Musso bowed and told me I must come to the German Embassy in Rome. He didn’t bend at the waist but all over like a cucumber. He put his plump sweaty hand on mine. “Von Mackensen, your Ambassador there, would be proud to display a beautiful German woman.”

“I’ve been to Venice. That’s all the Rome I need.” I took his hand away from mine and placed it firmly on a hairy peach. Didn’t Goebbels tell me that most Italian officers are still loyal to the King not the Dictator?

“Venice?” Musso asked. “How did I miss you? Was that during my launch on Greece?”

Adi had no intention of explaining my invisibility though the Duce was free to parade his mistress, Clara Petacci, all around. It was the Führer who projected no private life. Adi was more intent on why Musso didn’t come down hard on the Anglophiles and Americanophile tendencies in Italy. The whole Greece thing was a mistake with the Italians being pushed back into Albania. Adi had to get them out of that mess as he had a fondness for the “fat one,” meeting him for conferences at the Brenner Pass where both their trains were shunted into a specially made railway tunnel.

“Remember, Greece rose to great cultural glory by Aryan settlers,” Goebbels boasted.

Goebbels was dismissive of Musso saying the Duce was only a translation. I don’t quite know what that means. But since he and Musso have written novels—both worthless ones I’m told—perhaps Goebbels believed that Musso could only be read through another’s words.

“I have eight million bayonets. Eight million bayonets! Still, I appreciate your German parachute divisions for the Crete attack. How happy it is to see that Germany has left the Treaty of Versailles behind at last.” Placing his leg closer to mine beneath the table, Musso patted my ankle with the padded soles on his shoes. It was true. He had added several inches to his height. The Italians! No wonder their silly pianos have 12 pedals. Pulling away from his high heels, I excused myself to see about the after dinner tea and coffee.

I had to sit through some boring dinners with Musso watching him eat a pear in that awful Italian manner with his knife making one long curling wreath of skin. I’m grateful that he provided a valuable hint, telling Adi to always jump from his car before it came to a complete stop and to spring immediately into the nearest shelter. The Duce learned this technique from his war in Abyssinia, and it saved the Führer’s life when crazy Commies or jealous Catholics waited with knives for his Mercedes to stop only to find there was nothing to kill but a driver (the driver’s life, of course, being worthless).

Other hints from the Duce were not practical like his suggestion that German women could lean from their windows and pour scalding oil over American and Russian tanks like the women of Eger Castle in northern Hungary did in an earlier time when the Turks stormed into their country.

Certainly Adi was loyal to Musso by rescuing him from that hotel in the highest peak of the Italian Apennines with SS commandos and the Fallschirmjaeger. Adi was repaying Musso for not being bought off by the French with food, iron, coal and petroleum. “For entering the war,” Musso stated honestly, “I need a few thousand dead so I can sit down at the peace table as a belligerent.”

But these days, it’s hard to make fun of Musso. First he was sent into exile on the Isle of Maddalena. And we think now he’s probably been captured maybe killed. Different messengers coming into the Bunker report a rumor that Musso was hanged upside down in a gas station by the partisans. Adi released two sterilized fortune-tellers from Ravensbrück to tell us if the Musso rumor is true. But they said without some personal knowledge of the Italian temperament, they couldn’t give a valid answer.

Adi declared he would never let himself be captured like Musso, put in a cage and dragged through the streets of Berlin, but the worthless gypsies should be.

I have never liked gypsy fortunetellers as they have coarse hair, knotted calves, and skinny calloused fingers. What could they possibly know that the Führer doesn’t know?

Latrine rumors grow in abundance, and it’s not healthy for me to concentrate on them. I try to turn my thoughts to more worthwhile things like making the Bunker more pleasing and trying to understand why so many soldiers here have different names in Munich.

Proving difficult are the floors. To give an old world stone look, I have Sergeant Scholz, with eyebrows like brambles, rub them with light gray paint so that only part of the concrete shows through. But with the Goebbels children biking and jumping all around, it’s useless. Tricycles make too many black streaks.

Nothing but dull duty rosters and smelly gas masks are on most of the walls except for that awful life size oil portrait of Frederick the Great that Adi has in his apartment, shipping it here on his private four engine Focke-Wulf Condor airplane, the old pasty king posed upright in a seat as the only passenger. Every night after dinner, Adi sits in front of that portrait, and I perch quietly beside them both, listening in on silent thoughts communicated between two great men. Then I read aloud from his favorite book, History of Frederick the Great, but only the chapter that tells about the turning point of the Seven Years War in 1700-and-something when a miracle happened and Prussia was saved at the last minute.

5

“ANYONE WHO SAYS THE WAR IS LOST WILL BE TREATED AS A TRAITOR,” Adi declares.

With a nervous outburst, he tells me in a very agitated tone that when he shaves with boiling water and a sharp razor, it’s as if he’s cutting his own throat. When I tell him to let his valet, Heinz, shave him, he screams: “Nobody comes near my throat. Nobody!” Heinz was required to shave a balloon over 100 times before ever touching the Führer. But I have access to that glorious neck. I secretly glow even in his enraged outbursts—me—Eva Braun from Simbach, Bavaria. I lie across his throat at night and do such unordinary wonderful things under his chin. I cheer him up by talking about the death of Roosevelt because it makes him remember that the death of Tsarina Elizabeth brought good luck to old Frederick. Adi attests that Franklin married his sister. Eleanor wasn’t really his cousin, and inbreeding caused his paralysis.

“FDR is bringing me the luck of Frederick,” he says.

It was some time before I knew that Franklin, FDR, and Roosevelt were one and the same person.

“Don’t you find it amusing that you and Roosevelt both came to power in the same year?”

“The year 1933 is essential to my destiny, not amusing. Roosevelt and I were meant to be opponents.”

“You and Roosevelt both come from difficult origins. You… from being poor. He… from being crippled.”

“Yes. There is that. Yet I was never really able to hate him for he was as mad as Wilson. But now at last crazy Franklin is gone.”

“Herr Roosevelt’s death hasn’t stopped the bombing above us,” I offer. Then I feel instantly sorry for having said it. But Adi is not angry. Pure honesty often makes him amorous.

“I can always count on you for the truth, little Evchen.” He pulls me to his chest. “We are soup souls.”

“You’re the only man I’ve ever loved.” I help him lift my skirt wishing he would forget the soup part and say we’re love souls.

6

ONE PERSON WHO REALLY UNDERSTOOD Adi’s magic was Göring, the Reich’s commissioner for aviation. “Hitler is explainable. It’s the explanations of him that are miraculous, my Eva.”

Göring could be sweet, like on one of Adi’s birthdays. As I planned a small party, I wanted to look special so Hermie told me to come to Karinhall, his country hunting lodge, and we’d paint our fingernails together. He picked Dreadful Sublime, his own name for the tango-ruby bottle of polish that he mixed and created himself. As Adi hates anything that’s not natural, I use clear gloss, though I do wear a little hint of lipstick.

Goebbels planned to place his usual annual speech in a gold frame for Adi, a speech that began with… “The Führer is within each of us and each of us is within him.” I hated that because I felt Adi was really only within me.

Göring grimaced. “Goebbels’ overworked huzza of a tribute.”

“Better than his awful slogan that… BUTTER MAKES YOU FAT, BULLETS MAKE YOU STRONG.”

“Ach! Guns before butter policy. Why not butter and guns.” Smearing his cheeks with liquid rouge, he almost looked like a chunky boy.

“Hermie Göring, why do you do this to yourself?” I couldn’t help laughing.

“I sing all the songs of my country, one song being pornography. I see no reason for having any kind of itch you cannot scratch.”

“Be serious, tell me, “I demanded.

“Somebody in the Reich has to be obvious. There’s little difference between flamboyance and adoration.” He began to rub his raw looking hands with thick lotion. His fingers are a strange purple-red, obviously the results of pills and shots that Dr. Morell gives him regularly. “Don’t you see, Evie, this throws them off. Have you heard people say that I drink schnapps through a straw at the Esplanade Hotel? And eat twenty lobsters at one time with the ladies from the Berlin Scala? My dear, I don’t drink anything as silly as schnapps, and I’m only capable of finishing off a dozen and a half lobsters in one sitting. Still, does such a febrile fancy make me an idiot?”

“How can you be an idiot… when there’s a Hermann Göring Strasse right across the street from Adi’s spectacular Chancellery?”

“Don’t tell me you like Speer’s barrack-Greek buildings?”

“They please the Führer.”

“Speer! If I see one more of his buildings with a golden spread-eagle a hundred feet high… really! Better a golden spread-crotch, male or female. And all his tall bronze doors up to the ceiling that dwarf us. But I have more important things in common with the Führer. We’ve always wanted to get rid of the old Bismarckian Reich. Military leadership, we agree, is Germany’s new elite.”

“But you never heard voices. Voices told the Führer to save Germany.”

“Dear girl, those voices were induced by the temporary blindness the Führer was afflicted with as a gassed corporal in the hospital during the Great War. They were good practical voices, and I’m able to hear them through him.”

“Is that why Adi gave you the Air force?”

Hermie made a fast tight frown. “I cannot afford to put all our air power on the front lines. We never have enough reserves. Those damn Americans always have supplies. Roosevelt calls for a production of four thousand airplanes a month. Bombing us is America’s way to lift up the morale of Russia.”

“Pfui. You’re the one who has the great pilots, Hermie.”

“I learned too late that piano players make the best pilots because they pound the keys, stamp pedals, flip over music sheets without losing a beat. Vons make the worse, single minded idiots who are pragmatic and slow.”

“Yes, intellectuals are dangerous for Germany. And for Adi’s genius,” I added.

“Aber! Aber! It’s the practical that wins. We drop balls of silver paper.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Silver muddles up their radar. And that is my idea. Though the terrifying sirens on our wing-tip Stuka dive-bombers are the Führer’s suggestion.”

“That’s why Charles Lindbergh said that the Luftwaffe was the strongest Air Force in the world?” Hermie had to know that I kept up with the news.

“But Lindbergh was skeptical in the beginning. He once asked me why a man who didn’t rise above a corporal could tell us how to fight. I replied to Herr Lindbergh that if Adolf Hitler had decided to become a career pilot, he—Lindbergh—would not have been the first to cross the Atlantic. And soon, of course, he realized our Führer was a great man, so we gave Charlie the German Cross of the German Eagle, higher than anything given to an auslander.” Hermie slapped his knee in anger. “But none of us knew it was the German factories that would let us down. No creative energy comes from the industrial sector. The results of our disarmament after the Versailles Treaty. For years we didn’t produce any war equipment. Thus our workers have no skill and no proper machines.”

“But that isn’t your fault,” I said.

“I’m aware that nothing is my fault. But who would have guessed that we’d have to use the Autobahn as a runway strip, even hotel ski runs and cattle paths? Our paratroopers are landing on the backs of heifers. But I’m happy to say they paint swastikas on those cows as soon as they land.”

“Can’t you be more cheerful?”

Hermie began to chant,

“There was a young girl from Berlin

Who peddled her sin, sin by sin

Inspired, I guess

By the obvious mess

Of Krebs, Rommel and Hess.”

“That’s not cheerful. Don’t talk like you can’t do anything more. You know Adi hates that.”

“I do everything I can to raise spirits. Taught my men about baseball, a game I hate. Told them all about that great home run hitter, Ted Williams, who is now a fighter pilot. I tell my men they’re flying against Ted Williams.”

“You and your pilots are still fighting this Ted.”

“You’re entirely too sweet. It will get you nowhere. Certainly not in politics. Such accommodations are perhaps acceptable in bed. Will you get a special romp tonight?”

“Just because it’s his birthday? What kind of philosophy is that?”

“My dear, there are more things in this world than are dreamed of in any philosophy. Remember that Roman Emperor who nailed laws at the very top of the town walls so that his citizens couldn’t read them?” Rubbing a palm to his cheek, Hermie’s aching jaw is so much a part of him that the gesture was automatic and his face didn’t twitch in pain. But he saw that I noticed.

“A stone in my salivary gland. My saliva’s too thick and I use a Chinese spoon to unplug myself.”

“Surely Dr. Morell can help that.”

“It’s entirely too uninteresting for Dr. Morell. On to more serious things. Do you know, there’s a museum in Mussolini’s Vatican that stockpiles phalluses from every statue ever created in Italy.”

“That’s somehow rather comforting.” Perhaps all the statues of Adi, his wondrous manhood tucked beneath his uniform, would be preserved forever, at least in Italy.

“Ach, there are times when I miss going to the movies,” Hermie said, trying to forget his longing for stored phalluses.

“You miss those awful war films put out by Goebbels?”

“Not low artistic junk. Bomber Wing Lutzow. Goebbels emptied the theatres with that one… volkstümlich! I miss The Blue Angel which Hugenberg stupidly had to ban as un-German. What’s un-German about lust? It’s depressing to me that The Jazz Singer, that marvelous talkie, opened in US in 1927. Sound came slowly to Berlin… still we have Wiener Blut with all its glorious waltzes. And Der Gasmann is a pleasing comedy.”

“Comedies depress me, Hermie.”

“So, Evie, it’s tragedy you like. Well, what’s it going to be tonight on his birthday? He’s often reflective at this time, and there’s no worse depression for the Führer than when he returns to himself.”

“What do you mean?”

Hermie sang: “In der Nacht ist Mensch nicht gern allein… in the dark, a Führer has no wish to be by himself.”

“He’ll be with me in the dark.”

“So that perineum of yours is finally going to get it?”

“I don’t even know what a perineum is.”

“You’re reading too much Tolstoy. Tolstoy is a sedition manual.”

“For all your artistic sensibilities, you can sometimes be crude.” But I giggled. “You know, Hermie, as much as I want it, it can never leave him. Such citadels, his thighs, such columns.”

“Yes… yes. I’ve heard all that. But during war, he can partake what is common for once. Perhaps Dr. Kunz’s dentist chair with all its amusing adjustable heights.”

“You mustn’t speak like that.”

“Evie, enjoy the war. Because the peace will be horrific.”

“Peace with Adi will be just as enjoyable.”

“Do you really believe that, sweet girl?”

“As long as we all have the Führer.”

Hermie lit a Dutch Rittmeester cigar, determined to take his own advice and enjoy the war. It was an extra large cigar that was made for his importance and girth. “Victory” was written in ink on the cigar, and he told me that’s the only way he can smoke in the Führer’s presence. Smoke was mandated as bad for people as well as for Blondi and her pups. I’m furiously trying to quit.

(Adi says: “Napoleon hated smoking, too, and once ordered a smoking ban through out the country. My stupid generals think smoking is good for the war because it helps soldiers be steady in battle. Keitel keeps complaining that we need more cigarettes, more, infinitely more.”)

Hermie’s family goes back to the Carolingians, people who were mostly beheaded. He feels justified in wearing his black fur cap with plumes.

“You, the leader of the Luftwaffe, wearing a bullfighter’s cummerbund and plumes.”

“You think the supply sergeant will notice?”

“I notice. What are you trying to do?”

“Look like a soldier in the days of old Fred the Great, very orotund. At any rate, you know the Führer lets senior officers use their own judgment about such matters as personal detail.”

“But the Führer has simple tastes.”

“Evie, it takes a lot of money to keep the Führer humble.”

“You would do well to be so humble.”

“Don’t I pay five Reichsmarks to any one bringing me a new joke about myself?” He strutted for me in his enormous pants of soft leather, puffing out his chest under a hunting coat specially made by Stechbarth of Berlin with its green velvet collar and pleated back that allowed him to get even fatter. He spouted a German proverb: “Mitgegangen, mitgefangen, mitgehangen… fought together, captured together, hanged together.”

“You’re supposed to be cheering me up.”

Hermie went into his Roosevelt mimic, picking up the special phone that he ordered installed, a large telephone that he could dial with his mace instead of a pen. “Baw-lin? Washington calling. We don’t like waw. Eleanor and I say waw is Germany’s fawlt.”

Roosevelt didn’t sound so fearsome that way, and I laughed.

“There’s a delicious joke going around Berlin,” Hermie announced happily.

“Tell me! Tell me,” I pleaded.

“In the war room, Adolf Hitler asks his generals if it’s noon yet. General Mohnke answers by saying that if the Führer wants it to be noon, then it’s noon.”

I gave a wooly smile edged in uncertainty. It wasn’t something to laugh at, only to admire. What glorious powers Mein Führer has, even able to will time itself.

“Behind his back, they call him der Furor. Now that’s something to be proud of. Oh, I love him as much as you, Evie. He’s my conscience. But he’s not my body. Nor would he want to be. I bow to biology.” He patted the paunch between his legs and began to sing a little ditty:

“There are airplanes soaring

from our good Herr Göring.

The highest crate that flies

goes up between his thighs.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard that. It sounds defeatist,” I said.

“Not necessarily, my dear. It’s the only front-line knowledge we have. And women would do well to enjoy my each and every crate.”

“Perhaps, Hermie, perhaps it’s not in bed but on the way to bed that we learn the lessons of love.” Suddenly I became afraid that in just a few moments, I had revealed more of myself to Göring then I had ever revealed to Adi.

“Dearest, you mustn’t be profound. It’s unnecessary. And never over-sentimentalize. You know what happened to lovely Madame Bovary.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t get in to that. The Führer must get calmness from you; it makes the war easier to cope with. Don’t you know he’s constantly bombarded by reports? The only difference between the battle reports and you is that you should be completely believable.”

“I don’t see how I can have that much bearing on the war,” I said modestly.

“You may not see, but Clausewitz does.”

“And how does this Clause come to such conclusions?”

“You persevere. In your love for him.”

“A permanent love for him is always inside me.”

“Perseverance! That’s the warrior thing. Do you believe he’d let a mere woman persevere better than himself? Even an Eva Braun?”

“Are you trying to flatter me? Because I’d like that.”

“I’m only instructing you in Clausewitz who tells us that there’s a certain limitlessness in war because both sides continue to escalate in violence. Is that not so in love?”

“You mean something like Himmler’s order requiring all men to be shot in any house flying a white flag?”

“An order, no doubt, given in that awful Alsatian dialect he sometimes uses. That idiot pushes decisions down the chain of command trusting subordinates.”

“He also wants everything written on rice paper so it can be eaten if his men are captured,” I scoffed, displaying my studied insight.

“That fool. He should listen to Fats Waller. Now there’s a genius I’ve come to appreciate. Fats could probably win a war, too.”

“I always hope that generals might discuss important things with me. But like any discussions they’re likely to have with their wives, most of them won’t talk to me about anything of importance, either.”

“Be like Desdemona who tells her lover-general, Othello, that she understands a fury in his words but not the words.”

“Still, Hermie, it’s so delicious to understand and read what nobody wants you to.”

“What does such a pretty girl like you read?”

“Hemingway.”

“How did you come across Herr Hemingway?”

“Goebbels. He likes the fact that Hemingway ate monkey brains right out of monkey skulls when he was a reporter in China.”

“China? I had no idea China was Hemingway country.”

“Hemingway liked any place once he got there, Goebbels said.”

“Oh, Goebbels! And that awful wife of his! Vacuous breeders. Their libidinous energy whelping six kids while performing political arabesques.” Hermie threw his head back and laughed. “All those postcard images he cranks out for the war effort.”

“Hermie, when you drive down Unter den Linden on the way to speak at the Kroll Opera House, you toss those postcards out the car window to the crowds. You pass out those postcards of yourself at every dinner party.”

“At least they don’t contain Goebbels’ pulpit rhetoric and self-imposed idiotic nimbus. Ah, my pleasurable loathing.”

“But Hermie, Goebbels was smart enough to make Heil Hitler! the official greeting.”

“That was easy. It could have come from anyone.”

“And even with the Russians who are now our enemy, Goebbels talks about Tolstoy,” I said. “So lovingly does he talk about Tolstoy that I can’t stop reading War and Peace.”

“Your taste in reading is quite unbourgeois, Evie. But keep in mind the counterintuitive fact that it’s the number of wars that control the number of peaces.”

“Goebbels once tried to get Adi to reconsider Russia. Because of Tolstoy.”

“Evie, Goebbels never had the balls to talk the Führer out of anything. And certainly not Russia. Everyone knows that Tolstoy is more a Communist in his thinking than Lenin. Oh, Goebbels thinks of himself as an artist. He likes to hang out in literary places like Schwannecke where the men wear pencils behind their ears and have minds as small as the tables they sit behind. But he couldn’t get his book published. And he doesn’t pretend to read Proust. In the Proustian use of three adjectives, Goebbels is dull-duller-dullest.”

“I heard Proust was Jewish.”

“No excuse, my dear, for not reading Swann’s Way. Leave the undesirables to Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller and his PrinzAlbrecht Strasse thugs along with the hopelessly inept International Committee of the Red Cross.”

“I’ve seen lines of women and children waiting at the Berlin-Grunewald Station for a deportation train. Is it true what they say? They’re going to a concentration camp?”

“Geheime Reichssache. Secret matters of the Reich. One can go back as far as 1297 and read a Berlin decree that forbids weavers to buy yarn from Jews. Didn’t the British start camps in their colonies in the Boer War? Americans put their Indians on reservations. And don’t forget the Armenians. Their demise inspired us. We only copied these inventions. You must not say concentration camp, Eva. Think of resettlement. Besides, wounded Jewish veterans from the trenches of World War I are not sent east but instead to Theresienstadt. And I understand Eichmann’s office sometimes issues a collective passport for many of them. It’s an honor for Jews to wear the yellow star. The yellow patch is patterned after times and places in the Middle Ages. It’s nothing new.”

“And yellow park benches?”

“I’m so proud that we consider the smallest detail. Jews, my dear, are carriers of cancer.”

“Aren’t Jews some kind of nation?”

“A nation unified by money. Rassenfeinden. The enemy race. I’ll quote Nietzsche as the Führer approves of me talking to you about a philosopher so practical. Nietzsche, my dearest, questions morality itself. All our moral babbling comes from stupid Christian tradition. If the Führer were a Christian, he could never have written Mein Kampf, a book advocating salvation without the false consolation of religion. As a good Nazi woman, you know that God is dead. It’s the lamb, Nietzsche tells us, that decides the birds of prey are bad. Jews are afraid of us because they carry around a fear—a Jewish Mojre. Washed gloves hide muddy hands.”

“Didn’t a Jew reserve-officer recommend the Führer for his Iron Cross First Class in World War I?” I asked.

“I prefer to call that Jew an Israélite.” Hermie helped himself to his usual bowl of fig laxatives. “And isn’t resettlement not reward enough? For the Jews have the honor of contributing to the greater good. We must all submit to a genetic obedience. Repeat after me… destroy… vernichten.”

“Vernichten,” I said softly. “And will it always be that way for the Jews?”

“Dearest, you need to see the stone walls of Mauthausen. Those walls are extremely thick. Built to last for centuries. This is no passing theory; it’s essential to our New Order. Now, getting back to Proust.”

“I heard Proust was homosexual,” I said.

“They don’t breed. But that’s no excuse for Goebbels not to have tasted a Madeleine. And Proust did publish an article in France’s Nouvelle Revue saying Tristan and Die Meistersinge were great, and any angry nationalism was not to be used in matters of aesthetics.”

“I don’t think it’s disloyal to read remote literature. We’re not at war with Tolstoy or Hemingway. What harm can they do?”

“Literature is death, my sweet.”

“How do you know, Hermie?”

“Shakespeare says so. Though he says it in such a bland language. Romeo and Juliet. Gott! One has to learn English in German to find any beauty in their patter.”

“Romeo and Juliet killed themselves.”

“Ja. And we likewise burned them. But they rest together. Forever. Death is a paramour, dearest.”

Hermie unzipped his pants, undid his cummerbund and wire corset saying he knew I wasn’t squeamish, not about something as patriotic as his putsch. He loved to call his manhood “putsch” because doing so seemed heroic. He took out his small shining giblet rouged as bright as his ears. Pink powder, the color of forced roses, was thick all around the fat corded little neck down there. Rousseau, he said, once complained that the poor went without bread because face powder was made of wheat flour. In that sense, it was uncivilized. Now, powder comes from uneatable fluff.

Trying not to look between his legs, I was determined to be like Magda, worldly and amused. But my eyes would not be diverted from what he called his fleshy “council of war.”

“I wasn’t a child who played airplanes. Pilots were never my heroes. I didn’t run around with my arms out like fluttering wings. A large plane was a woman. Something I could fit into and control. Watch her speed. Knowing when to roll her over. A little one-seater was a boy jerking, skidding into turns, but finally coming to an end in a bounce and roll.“

Hermie took off his jodphur boots with silver spurs on the heels and threw them at the door. “Oh, where those little spurs have been,” he said as two young and very thin boys came in, their parachute harnesses clinking on the floor. “They’re from the Youth Battalion. Being a pilot, I like a couple of willowy sticks at my side. May I introduce Falk and Jurgen.”

The boys were perhaps thirteen or fourteen. Adult uniforms hung loosely over their shoulders, and their trousers were rolled at the bottom. Boots too big and without laces flapped noisily without holding in their feet. Boy pilots, they were trained on gliders. Their other job was the haphazard defense ring around big cities. Having a pistol each, they hid in any line of foxholes they could find, sleeping at night in burned out streetcars that lay sprawled with useless dangling electric wires trailing behind. Like civilians, they stood in line for bread.

“I like to push my boys briskly out of a plane, watch them dropping fast until that sudden fierce parachute jerk of sperm billows alive.”

Falk and Jurgen ignored Hermie’s putsch that had now become engorged as they entered.

“During the Weimar days, caning boys was forbidden. I’m glad the Führer reversed that, and these two come from a good school where they’ve bent down many times to receive five or six of the best.”

“They’re so young.”

“Didn’t Napoleon have the ‘Marie Louises’ in 1814, young boys in his cause. The Führer remembers.”

Hermie took out a bottle of wine from a drawer in his desk.

“Youth! Shall we drink to them? Snake wine from a good general in the Japanese army. I assure you the snakes at the bottom of the bottle are dead.”

“Our Führer doesn’t drink,” I replied, feeling loyalty suddenly flush my cheeks like desire.

“He’s quite lenient with the rest of us.” Hermie poured a glass of snake wine for himself and each boy. “I like that special foreplay I get from a plane when it stalls, stops in midair. At the peak of desire, I ache to let go as the plane falls, the nose down shuddering… falling… falling before I pull up quickly to recover. If I’m lucky, I blast an eardrum and have blood on my neck.”

Hermie smiled, pressing my hand for support. “With a multitude of duties to consider, I have to resort to ether in my whiskey. Boys are only one half of my complexity, but happily I offer my backside to all—what the knowing French call codette du legionnaire. I subscribe to Balzac’s philosophy… forgiving him for being French. Pleasure, Balzac averred, is like a drug. To keep getting the same results, you have to double the dose. Death or brutalization is the final one.” Swishing the wine on his swollen gums, he gulped it along with Sparacodeine pills from Dr. Stumpfegger.

The boys drank as well, each coughing in a different tone.

“Where is our bath? Must you gentlemen forget all the time, you silly creatures?”

Falk ran quickly out of the room and returned with a large pan of water.

“Both my boys did a year at Karlsruhe Cadet School in Baden. So they’re not without knowledge of our training manuals. They studied Schlieffen and know to go forward. Onward. So to prepare ourselves, we clean our pipes together. And we appreciate an audience.” Hermie stood and put his engorged putsch in the pan. Unzipping his pants, Falk observed Hermie’s floating sausage without emotion.

Anticipating how little boys might look, I was not impressed with what I saw—a glob of speckled dough hanging between skinny thighs. Nor was I embarrassed. Just intrigued.

“Come on, boys, I can’t last forever.” Biting his tongue in happy anguish, Hermie looked forward to their jerking and yawing.

Suddenly Falk began to cry, his head bent over the water. “I see my mother’s face,” he whimpered to his reflection. “I see my mother’s face.”

And indeed Falk’s chubby soft features were more feminine than soldierly.

With a half-erect penis, Falk ran from the room, an unzipped Jurgen following close behind him.

“These inexperienced soldiers.” Hermie flapped his penis so that thick scented powder flew from it and coated the water. Then he spurted and slowly deflated. “They are not going to throw the Soviets out of Berlin. The Youth Battalion should be evacuated in the Kinderlandverschikung, wouldn’t you agree, my dear?”

Yes, Hermie Göring could be amusing—once getting Adi’s toilet rigged so it flushed in E flat on November first. (November is important, of course, the month when shameful Germans capitulated in 1918 as well as the month of the failed putsch of 1923.) Such playful things as musical toilets can keep you going in a stressful time. But now that Berlin has been invaded by the Russians, stupid Göring had to set up a command post at the Berghof. He sent Adi that horrible telegram saying if anything happened to the Führer, he would take over. As if anybody else could take over. Adi was right to strip him of his rank. Many people were stripped of their rank and vanquished from the Bunker. One day they didn’t show up and you’d read about them in Wehrmacht reports. It cuts down on my social life.

7

FOR A FEW HOURS, I NEVER THINK OF ADI and study patterns on the walls, geometries of fissures and cracks that Adi said trained him as an artist. He was especially engrossed with frost lines on the kitchen windows when he was a boy. But such pondering makes me a little light headed, even scared. The fear is pure because I think of nobody in Adi’s place.

Other times, I watch the clock above a row of guns, the minutes moving slowly. Tedium forces me to take the empty Dutch gin bottle Göring gave me and fill it with hot water to put on my stomach and lie in bed. Loneliness comes unexpectedly. Silence is the same thing over and over, and when this happens I don’t even want to think about whether it’s breakfast or lunch. Knowing what meal it is makes the time go slower, like looking at an empty chair. Chairs are the saddest things on earth, always waiting for someone to sit in them.

On occasion I help Dr. Morell package Perubalsam Ointment, and iodoform and prepare special bandages for the hospital. Two years ago, I visited his strange laboratory in the basement of a hospital in Wuppertal. Morell was trying to get Gerhard Domagk— who considered himself a good German—to share in his discovery for sulphanilamide, a cure for tuberculosis. At the time, Domagk was a hero of science and worked closely with the Bayer Research Laboratories of I. G. Farbenindustrie, and Morell felt neglected. So Dr. Morell set up his own shelves with hundreds of guinea pigs (later it was said he used undesirable people) and injected them with a stain of human tuberculosis under their skin. Then he treated the furry creatures with sulphanilamide hoping to discredit Domagk by proving that the drug did not work. They were sweet little rodents in a variety of colors with mouths curved in the shape of a smile. He would sometimes become attached to one and dampen the purring pig with warm water to bathe it before wrapping it in a thick towel. “There’s a bald spot behind each ear,” Morell would explain as he gently applied a drop of mineral oil to the ears of his favorite one that he named Azo (Azo being a chemical link in sulphanilamide). When the animals got better from the drug, Morell kept giving them more and more injections of TB while they licked his hand in affection and the disease spread to their tiny internal organs. When their groins became grossly swollen, the licking stopped. I can’t forget the languid eyes of these creatures, their trustful passiveness as their spleens—it was clinically explained to me—became a mass of abscesses. I could only hope that Dr. Morell used a different needle when injecting Adi with vitamins.

Morell comes into the Bunker each day with the dead guinea pig Azo in a sterile sealed case as evidence and support for the Reich’s decision to force Domagk to sign a declaration to the committee in Stockholm declining the Nobel Prize. Domagk was later put in prison temporarily for being too polite to the Swedes and for dwelling on the sanctity of life in wartime.

So many people come in and out of the Bunker frequently and they stare as if in judgment of me. Officers in shiny rimless helmets shake my hand overly familiar as if our being in the Bunker creates an accepting intimacy. But it does help to pass the time. When I least expect it, I find that a day is over and I don’t remember getting to the end of it. Goebbels thinks the mind is really in the heart, and I want to believe this. When I feel an emptiness, I think of love. Love takes into consideration at least two people.

Today three soldiers drenched in syrup provided a diversion. A molasses factory in Dessau got hit and molasses was all over the roads two centimeters deep. I was offered a bucket of the goo and couldn’t help but laugh in spite of the disaster. Was I really supposed to eat trampled molasses?

Before bedtime, I brush my hair for 50 strokes. Mother said a woman has her best thoughts when brushing her hair. Adi gave me this brush with my initials in red stones on the ivory handle… E.B. The bristles hold strands of my dark blond hair. My brush has been on my dresser at the Berghof, on end tables in Italian villas, on the bureau of such hotels as the Adlon, Vierjahreszeiten and Dreesen. Now it’s home.

8

MAGDA IS SOME HELP TO ME as she comes from elegant people and can swank in open Maybach cars smoking French cigarettes rolled in yellow paper. She sits in tasseled damask chairs or goes for a leisurely stroll in custom-made skis. Biedermeier chandeliers and yards of tulle on the windows decorate her houses. Family maids were born in her upstairs bedrooms that look out on a swimming pool covered with lilies. An authority on where to place a gravy bowl on the dining room table, she can also be helpful with clothes, teaching me to wear sequin gowns because they don’t wrinkle when you have to sit for hours listening to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung after dinner at the Berghof. Dresses with sleeves that can be zippered off are best to pack for trips as they can be worn for two days in a row and still look different. I did refuse to wear a girdle she advised for I’m quite firm enough.

Magda and Josef have a villa where they keep a chess set made out of wood with carved Wagner pawns. Magda ordered a set made for one of Adi’s birthday parties, but the artist was killed when his house took a direct hit from a bomb. Josef and Magda offered him their Wagners, but Adi refused. Though Magda was greatly disappointed, Josef merely gave a wry smile saying: “Greedy Alberich, evil Beckmesser, the tart Kundry and all the other Wagner operatic people follow the Führer around like pet dogs.”

Not that Magda doesn’t get on my nerves, sitting around all the time wrapped in a white ermine chasuble and using her fancy background as a way of telling me what to do even though she has crude moments when she catches coins between her legs at parties after Adi departs early and everybody gets drunk. And she had an affair with automobile racer Manfred von Brauchitsch who later was denounced for subversive remarks. I refuse to let her control me, even when she brags of dining with maharajas as well as Prince Friedrich Christian Zu Schaumburg-Lippe or Prince August Wilhelm von Hohenzollern.

Not even my mother influences me. Only Adi can tell me what to do. And that argument Magda and I had about wearing trousers! Being an athlete, I wear them often. Magda objects saying she can hardly let herself think of any woman in slacks strolling on streets or paths not even Marlene Dietrich before she became a traitor. As pants are better for getting around the hills at the Berghof, Adi says they’re practical. Even Goebbels said it was all right. But Magda is a prisoner of fashion—in the Black Splotch or up above. During the early war years, she wore outlandish shawl-jackets and coats with silver filigree and big brass buttons along with soft angora sweaters and dresses that emphasize her insinuating arms. But evening visits with various officers left telltale fuzzy angora signs on their uniforms, and she was forced to stick with clinging silk. And I have stayed with trousers at the Berghof.

Magda may think she’s the only one who knows all about social graces, but I taught the Führer how to eat an artichoke. We were at the Berghof when Fräulein Manzialy decided to provide the Führer with a little variety in his stable of vegetables. When she placed the artichoke before him, Adi gave a loud “Achtung! How am I supposed to eat this thing?”

I quickly took a fold, dipped it in butter, and put it in his mouth. He loved the taste and I began plucking each flap one by one and placing it between his lips. Soon he continued on his own so passionately that I became jealous. I wanted to be an artichoke. Later, he would devour the layers of an artichoke to the spirited chords of Die Meistersinger on a record that Marshal Italo Balbo, the much-decorated flier and Italian minister of aviation, gave him.

It’s strongly rumored that Magda was first married to an “aryanized” Jew she met at the smoky Sterneckerbrau Beer Tavern in Munich shortly after she had bedded a Hohenzollern prince for six months. Being so impressed with uniforms, she was instantly dazzled by this Jew’s field gray jacket with the bronze lion of the Freikorps Epp. Even at the beginning, he was different. He had a great deal of money and had to have sex three times a day. Just like food. And sometimes snacks. It wore her out though she got used to it and after a while enjoyed such frequent romps. Being a Jew, he had a mysterious way about him, so she plucked all her pubic hair and buffed her vulva to a high shine for him. He just put it in and took it out. He didn’t pump. Slowly… in. Slowly… out. Then he gushed, usually on the floor. So there was no dripping, no lingering drool, regular as their meals and teatime. If he was fully satisfied, she didn’t know. That was no concern of hers. He was a busy man making money. And she had no mess sticking to her thighs, no contraceptives to worry about. They did have a “possible” child, so the “drool” could have gotten in at least once. But nobody thinks her first child was from this Jew, however, as she’s had so many lovers.

This man, Magda tells me referring to her present husband, Josef, wants hours of what he calls foreshadowing. Hours. After his breakfast soup, he smears jam on her breasts, licking them off—two breasts along with two toasts and two coffees. In between meetings, he gallops to her room, dips a finger in her, a toe, a shoehorn, what does it matter. Later, it’s those dangly ears of his, thick and crude like sandpaper, propaganda ears meant only to hear what he wants. “I have to listen to his jealous tirade about Luther, the first real and only Minister of Propaganda whose theses posted on the door at Wittenberg spread around the country in 10 days. Think of it, Magda, he whines—10 days. What have I done in 10 days?” Finally, at bedtime, he jumps on her. This time there’s his cream clotting her carefully trimmed small hairs. Magda’s shiny painted lips are tense as she sneers. Who would have thought it possible that a Jew could please her more than a Reichsminister?

What’s it like to be rammed all the time, so finely tuned? Of course Goebbels is far from being the Führer. “Josef does that all the time?” I asked.

“All the damn time. And you?”

“With the Führer?”

“Eva, who else would I mean?”

Magda longs for Adi, sleeping at night with Mein Kampf between her legs and telling me how she dreams about licking his mustache. She tried to be with him all the time at official dinners before the Bunker days, when I was invisible and the lucky nobody. She would sit next to him in one of her shimmery beaded dresses with glass buttons, her one eyelid tinted pink and the other light green. Not known to the people of Germany, I was bad publicity. But Magda is the correct one who looks like a woman who gets her hair done more than anybody else and represents what is good in the German housewife. She was the official hostess, everywhere but at the Berghof. Even there she tried to win Adi’s attention, charm him, be clever for him… once holding up a stamp with his picture saying she was sending it to Roosevelt for his stamp collection.

When Goebbels said he respects his wife so much that he and his officers always get up and stand when Magda walks by, Göring once said in my ear: “She’d rather have those men lie down for her.”

For Adi’s birthday two years ago, Magda asked Josef to compose a pageant about the bravery of German soldiers. After it was written, she discovered the scenes took place on the battlefield. Magda cast the play using real war wounded from our hospitals to portray the heroic sick and dying in the script. Didn’t Riefenstahl select peasants from villages for her movies?

The Goebbels’ gardener from her summer home cleared the early April grass for a massive outdoor performance. At SS hospitals, Magda sought theatrical examples of suffering. Doctors objected to their patients being moved, even for a one evening performance. When she promised them an invitation to the pageant with a chance to meet the Führer, they usually gave way and even helped her find the most damaged men. She discovered an old blind vet of World War I who continuously hallucinated and raved all day from his bed about the Turnip Winter when his parents starved to death. Josef wrote a special Greek-like chorus for him.

Magda got distracted by the handsome doctors in their black and silver uniforms with twin serpents on the shoulders. Stopping by a florist shop on the Potsdammerplatz, she’d send mauve orchids to some of them. One in particular was Dr. Egon Pfennig who stated that he was in no way to be considered a putschist and was merely a simple doctor-soldier of Germany who knew what was going on in his country but didn’t understand it. From the old Swabian nobility, he once belonged to a student dueling fraternity at the University of Berlin and could list the scar on his neck as an identifying mark on his passport. She imagined his strong muscular back to be striped in craters deep enough for her long sculpted fingernails to travel down. Dr. Pfennig’s father was a Pour le Merite pilot of World War I, and he and his son wrote letters to each other in Latin, and she dreamed of Latin love letters.

Dr. Pfennig, handsome in a bloodstained rubber apron over his uniform, was cooperative in allowing his patients to be actors for the pageant although he did refuse to let them walk in a procession Goebbels proposed before the performance. Dr. Pfennig thought the drama might be helpful in the recovery process as so much research in medicine was discovering that the mind is capable of healing the body. What better way to be healed than to lie sprawled before their Führer?

Fearful of deserters from the front, Magda would brutally rip the bandages off the wounded when the doctors and nurses were not around in order to make sure she was not casting malingerers—even though each man displayed a wounded receipt with dates stamped and fastened to his chest. It created a lot of re-bandaging for the nurses.

But Dr. Pfennig had one curious fault. He was faithful to his wife, Lilo. Magda had never come across such a thing before.

There were attractive wounded to choose from. I would accompany Magda and Dr. Pfennig on audition tours. We found a captain with one arm and half a lung who insisted on wearing a regulation Foreign Office parade uniform designed by Ribbentrop instead of the hospital gown. Then there were the dreary young boys in drab brown Party uniforms who sat listlessly in the clinic halls flapping their empty sleeves to pass the time. Magda dismissed these with a regal smile. But she was excited about a colonel with one leg who was in the Sixth SS Panzer Army and had seized at least two bridges and one crossroad and complained that his only regret was not being able to march in the future victory parade through Brandenburg Gate. Another good choice was the major from the Africa Corps who had fought with Rommel and claimed cooking breakfast eggs with him on sizzling tanks’ tops. Dr. Pfenning, ever the scientist, said such eggs could only be fried with a blowtorch.

All her tricks were tried on the Herr Doktor Pfennig, but Magda only succeeded in getting him to kiss her hand. And that “kiss” did not linger. It was a snappy sullen sweep of his upper lip. With a soft lilting lisp, she’d say: “Doctor, are you not without a spare minute so we can be alone with these matters?”

“As you can see, I do most of the things here. Even the Kaiser’s son, Friedrich Wilhelm, with all his staff helping can’t find spare moments in these times of war,” the doctor answered.

“You’re mistaken. Friedrich Wilhelm viewed my newly acquired Rembrandt, Man in a Golden Helmet. And we were quite alone.” The pouches under Magda’s eyes pulsed with hidden secrets.

When the play was finally cast, with over one hundred wounded to be carted by ambulances to the Goebbels’ summer estate, Magda was nearly an invalid herself so much was she suffering with longing for Dr. Pfennig. Who was this Lilo who had such a hold on him?

Having had a dull Weimar Republic upbringing, Lilo was taught by dubious Jewish teachers and probably even Jewish professors at the University of Würzburg, all of them with Anglophile tendencies. She had studied medicine herself, but gave it up when her first child was born. Tall and thin, she had no thighs to speak of and when the war started, she volunteered to operate the searchlights that spotted Allied planes in the night sky. When Magda asked Josef if this was an important duty, he only laughed saying: “The English fly way too high for any little girl’s flashlight.”

“Then why does the Führer bother giving such assignments?” Magda asked.

“The Führer refuses to draft women. In a spirit of bonhomie, he threw them a crumb. The rise of Germany is a male event. It’s not that we don’t respect women. We respect them too much to contaminate them in battle. In World War I, we shelled Paris from 70 miles away with huge guns called Big Bertha after Krupp’s wife. That’s the kind of respect I’m talking about.”

So this silly Lilo Flakwaffen-Helferin was some kind of heroine to her husband. Magda made sure that Josef’s remark reached the doctor’s ear.

On the night of the pageant, Josef ordered many torches to burn on the grounds of their estate. Hindenburg lanterns were placed in the trees to illuminate the stage. Swastika wreaths were spread in front of the grassy stage where chairs were set up in long even rows. Josef decided to call his masterpiece Turnip Winter, as the old “turnip vet” seemed to him a prime protagonist. Though Magda wore a very narrow skirt and a corselette waistband that pushed up her breasts, I was dressed simply in a pale blue suit with a white collar and pocket flaps of cotton gingham. While my hair was styled more natural and fell softly around my face, Magda’s was swept up in an oversized platter.

Ambulances arrived, and the wounded were placed on various black markers on the stage of grass. Magda had ordered dozens of white scarves for the actors feeling bare necks were inelegant. Cries of pain were heard which annoyed Josef who wanted “pain” only on cue. Bandages on arms and legs leaked ringlets of blood on the ground. Two soldiers held out both arms held rigid in plaster. The doctors called these patients “stukas” because their arms looked like the wings of a Stuka dive-bomber. Josef was delighted with the “stukas” who saluted him in the official way of the armless—by leaning back their heads with their chins held high.

Musicians were ordered to warm up loudly in order to drown out the incidental groaning noise.

Attempting to demonstrate a showy mercy, Magda put a cup of water to a soldier’s lips though Dr. Pfennig advised her not to as the man had been shot in the lungs and water would drown him. Magna was determined. The man drank from her cup and died, and his body was hurriedly carted away, his white scarf fluttering behind.

Wearing a new field gray tunic with a small SS eagle on the left sleeve, Adi arrived exactly on the second as he is never late because of the careful timing he learned from official appearances. He endured all the arms of the audience jutting up and returned their stiff salutes in his leisurely way—simply bending his elbow and raising his hand no higher than his right ear. Until he took his seat, everyone remained standing. Being invisible at the time—the lucky nobody—I was sitting in the back row. Magda pounced beside Adi in the prize position on his right. On the other side of Magda was Dr. Pfennig and Lilo. Much to Magda’s surprise, Lilo wore a stunning Schiaparelli topknot hat with soft feather trimming and a simple black and white herringbone suit looking beautifully unproletarian and very un-Nazi.

The doctor and Lilo were introduced to Adi, and the play began. A short burst of Wagner, and then the “turnip vet” was heard babbling. Adi leaned forward trying to understand the raving gibberish. Anguish echoed down stage when a captain without hands was flapping his arms in torment, screaming in a Bruennhilde-cry for morphine. Fortunately, most of the wounded were in a deep sedated sleep.

Deciding to act in his own drama, Josef delivered a monologue on hand-to-hand combat. Halfway through the oration, Adi leaned over and said to Magda: “The wounded look quite real.”

“They are, Mein Führer. For you, anything less than authentic would be profane.”

“How authentic?”

“From our SS hospitals,” she gushed.

Adi stood and the audience of more than a hundred military personnel stood as well—with Dr. Pfennig and Lilo also jumping to their feet. Lilo’s topknot hat towered in trembling attention.

“This is wonderful.” Walking briskly onto the stage, the Führer stepped in zigzag lines around the sedated and writhing wounded as Josef continued his monologue.

Then… it went terribly wrong.

“These are all vons,” the Führer yelled. And indeed they were. All were aristocratic officers who had impressed Magda. “Where are the noncoms?”

Josef stopped his oratory abruptly. Rushing to the Führer’s side, Magda looked at her authentic cast in horror. How could she have forgotten such a fundamental point?

“Here’s a private, at least.” A soldier with no ears and no arms who wore a pathetic paper surgery gown was one of Magda’s so-called “minor extras.” As Adi is able to stand aside and look at any situation in historical detachment, he observed this pathetic spectacle of a German warrior with no rank and no arms—a true common man—dressed in paper who saluted with his chin. “Decorate this soldier!”

“But Mein Führer… private Oels received his injuries in Bremen when he ran his jeep over his own gasoline can,” Dr. Pfennig said.

“A field decoration! Make him an Honorary Corporal in the German Army Reserves. Immediately.”

Huber Oels was grandly garnished.

Adi was then ushered to a large table of food set up on the summer porch. Taking a horrified look at the abundant and lavish dishes, he turned quickly and told Goebbels he could not allow himself to eat with his troops except when standing at a field kitchen.

The last time I saw Adi so angry is when that idiot American woman, Dorothy Thompson, wrote an offensive article about him saying Adi was “formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man who seems cartilaginous, without bones.” Such words are untrue, sacrilegious and outright propaganda just like those ugly anti-Nazi White Rose pamphlets published by ignorant students who were later found and patriotically executed.

Adi transferred Dr. Pfennig to the Eastern front, a perfect revenge Magda felt for the doctor’s indifference towards her. Though Magda was treated coolly by the Führer for many months, she gradually got back into favor by personally cooking and serving him egg pudding, kasekuchen, and schokoladetortes that coated his throat in cream and left sugary rime on his moustache. She even made cookies in the shape of a special garland that Adi believed signified the eternity of the German world. As a last grand gesture, she took a patch of Blondi’s hair and wove it into a medal for Adi’s uniform explaining that the giving of this hair was a symbol that Blondi would trust him with her life.

Lilo and the children, we heard, rushed to a Stuttgart castle to be sheltered by an old couple still loyal to the Italian king—with Lilo’s do-gooder flashlight career over with.

As a salve to her ego, Magda took a U-boat officer as a lover. They would make love submerged during the day, repeating their ardor as the boat glided on the water’s surface at night. Captain Erwin von Kappe was famous for sinking 250 ships in the Eastern shipping lanes, and he wore the usual U-Boat uniform of khaki pants, suspenders, a gray sweater and a cap with large earflaps. When she asked me what I thought of him, I said: “He looks like a seal hunter.”

“Remember the silly birthday pageant, Magda? Are you over the good Doctor Pfennig? A doctor is hardly a prince,” I said with a taint of sarcasm.

“What made you think of him?” Living in the Black Splotch makes the past seem far away to Magda.

“And your rival Lilo?” I ask.

“That overly marzipan piglet is receding under the trough of failure. But… isn’t it better to think about your own love rather than mine?” Magda taunts.

“My love with Adi is sacred.” With a self-conscious smile, I cross my legs. With Magda around, I try to wear my only pair of nylons despite the runs patched over many times with natural fingernail polish. Thick gauzy clumps aggravate my ankles, and I end up having small red welts. But I refuse to care. I pretend they’re bites from Adi, little intense bites from that one-jagged tooth on the left side of his smile.

“I can stare at him for hours,” I coo. “I love the way he looks in his uniform. It’s no wonder that at the Paris World Fair in 1900, Austria won first prize for the most beautiful uniform on earth.”

“I’ve heard that story a hundred times.” Magda studies her palms in boredom, flexing her finger over and over, an exercise she believes will give her slender hands.

“He more than satisfies me,” I say.

“Oh, tell that to Blondi.” Her voice suddenly blares like a bus entering a tunnel.

“He does. Really, Magda.”

I don’t think Magda ever got too close to Adi. I do know she wants that more than anything. And maybe she has to play games with me like believing I can’t fulfill Adi as she could, pleasuring herself one way or the other even if it’s second hand. How can I blame her? I’m the one who has a poem that Adi wrote in small vertical old German script that he gave me after our second year together.

“I suspect his is beautiful,” Magda says begrudgingly.

“Why should it be beautiful?” I snap. “He’s the Führer. Isn’t that enough?”

“I know he has three testicles.” Magda stands defiantly, legs apart and hands behind her back, like one of her stubborn children.

“How do you know that?”

“Hess.” Magda says his name as if it were the ultimate source.

“Is that why Hess flew off landing in an enemy field? He wanted to make a peace deal with the British behind our backs because of one extra testicle? Our Führer is full of extras.”

“I never liked Hess, Eva. Right from the beginning. Even when he was the Führer’s respected deputy.”

“Tell that to Blondi.”

“Pfui, pfui. The Führer is always too trusting. You know that, Eva, trusting and… wonderful. Sometimes, when the Führer’s talking to us, when his passionate words are rolling from his jaws, sometimes…”

“What? Sometimes what?”

“His rear quivers. It makes you realize that somewhere in Europe there are psychics who can tell the future by one’s bottom.”

“Magda, I find that very offensive.”

“The marvelous slight ripples underneath his trousers…”

“You shouldn’t take notice of things like that.”

“Evie, for proof that we’re going to win, look at the rumps of our soldiers. They have rears more robust than before the war.”

“But Adi’s is mine alone. You can have the others.” I give an aggrieving sneer.

Adi used to lounge on the floor, his arms around his knees. With this great man sitting on the ground, I felt awkward resting on a comfortable chair. But his heart is always on the battlefield, down on the earth—close to the trenches. When he became the Führer, he leaned against his desk, and I envied the sharp wooden edges sinking into his skin. I’d look up his nose straight to his nostrils, unlike any other nostrils, for there were little dark hunks of tillage and clotted soil that he had coveted and conquered even there.

“You must remember, Magda, your Germany is gone. I’m the woman of the house down here. In the Bunker, I’m official.”

“Jawohl. Jawohl. You hope to climax at last.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Everybody knows the Führer can’t be bothered with sauce, even his own Sauce.” Magda pats her dress, the last Chanel that her husband seized when leaving Paris. The bodice is altered so that there’s a reverse cleavage with the ends of her pendulous breasts showing through an opening of silk just above her waist while the neckline reaches up around her ears. It’s a dress she continues to wear as a statement. Part of Paris still belongs to Germany.

9

AS THE IVANS GET CLOSER AND CLOSER, General Krebs decided that Magda and I go topside to do pistol practice. He feels every German man or woman is honor bound to take a random shot at the enemy, even me, as well as the Reichsminister’s Frau. The Red Army is in our streets, are they not? Americans are not far behind. Our pistol lessons would be a “surprise gift” for the Führer. And one had only to look outside and see ladies walking by with pistol belts over their pinafores for Goebbels decreed shooting instructions for women.

I’m elated for I yearn to go outside. Even though I love my home here below, now that I’m official, I want to ride in full view in the streets of Berlin. The thrill of it. Being seen.

Krebs insisted that Magda’s oldest daughter, Helga, eleven years old, also learn to shoot. At first Magda violently disagreed until General Krebs said his baby sister was shooting at the age of eight. Did the Reichsminister’s Frau want her daughter to be helpless? Maybe raped?

At eleven I had learned to handle a horse and throw a javelin, but I had no experience with a gun.

General Krebs and his orderly would drive to a suitable spot. It was not wise to shoot around the top of the Bunker and call attention to the Führer’s headquarters. Assuring us that Germany’s barricades and street sentries were all in place, he promised to do the driving himself. There are more of us in Berlin than the Russians. We would admit defeat by being afraid to go out in our own city. Furthermore, the general felt women should be prepared for their own safety, and the only way to do that was to be in the true and real arena up above. Finally, Krebs presented us with a large Walther pistol 7.65. To Helga, he gave a smaller Walther 6.35 and tied a little pink bow around her gun. Inside the barrel he stuffed schokoladecreme as Fräulein Manzialy struggles so successfully to save chocolate soufflé and chocolate karamelsauce in abundance for her Führer. Krebs chuckled and whispered to Helga that the Walther’s chambers were full, ready to explode and when she got an Ivan, she would see chocolate splatter on a Russian heart. Was that not a delicious way to end things?

“Won’t Uncle Führer be pleased when he finds we’re soldiers, too.” Magna was trying hard to be festive. “You know he says—everyone to their duty.”

Having experienced her first menstruation, Helga was pleased to be treated as an adult. Dr. Morell donated cotton from the tops of his medicine bottles to reinforce her underwear. When the cotton ran out, he pulled soiled bandages from the wounded that the nurses then washed and folded in little pads for her.

Helga was Adi’s favorite as well as her father’s. Both men wanted every detail about Helga’s first monthly that arrived according to Dr. Morell at a very early age, a natural sign of superiority. This young blood, her German heritage, Blut Träger, came forth in shy little bursts as if she had been pricked between the legs. We had prepared her for this monthly event, so Helga was not frightened. It helped that she was not afflicted with cramps. Adi insisted on inspecting the first bloody pad, so I wrapped it in the pages of my favorite magazine, Illustrierte Beobachter, and put it on his desk. He screamed at me saying the wrapping was contaminating Helga’s blood. Anything that was not Goebbels’ paper, Das Reich, was filthy. Disgusting print had bled on the cotton and distorted his examination. I had never thought of this possibility and was sorry telling Adi I would save him Helga’s second menstrual pad in the Panzerbär, the combat newspaper Goebbels so lovingly edits. But it was the first smear that he wanted. Finally he decided that the original sample was not ruined after all and wrote his name with her scarlet smear saying Nietzsche declared that those who wrote with blood would learn that blood was spirit.

Blondi’s doggy-afterbirth was also saved, carefully dried and pressed in a glass bowl like a paperweight. But it was Adi’s clinical study of Helga’s menstrual blood that impressed Dr. Morell. The doctor watched Adi study the ruby streaks under a microscope. The tiny lumps fascinated Adi, those delicate jagged red knots that came from a child. Extracting clots from the pad carefully with a tweezers, he put them in the palm of his hand tasting the innocent blood as if he were confirming the fact that this was indeed a rare and precious substance. It affected him peculiarly, however, as he began to shiver. Klara had given him dripping blood pudding to eat as a child, and he was hit with a stab of pure and innocent memories—Helga connected with his beloved mother.

After a breakfast of fried duck eggs and horsemeat bacon in the Officers’ Mess at Panzer Division Munchenberg, General Krebs arrived at the Bunker. We tumbled into an armored Mercedes in late afternoon, ready for pistol practice. Krebs thought about having a squad of Hitler Youth to escort us, but he and General Heinrici and Oberleutnant von Roon had made enough early ground reconnaissance to be quite certain of our safety. Krebs was eager to take full credit for the “Führer’s surprise” and insisted his orderly not drive on such an important mission. Helga sat on her mother’s lap in the back seat, mother and child tucked in tightly next to orderly Oberleutnant Bickisch in his hussar’s jacket with frogging and gold epaulets, a bayonet slash across his cheek acquired from his military sports school at Wunstorf. I sat in the front seat next to General Krebs with his large mouth and square teeth, dressed in a simple overcoat with gray tin buttons and no rank insignia, a watch on each wrist, a map case and a Steyr army pistol strapped to his side. The dour general was trying to be casual, but I could see lines of sweat on his forehead. When we drove up a hill, Helga vomited on Bickisch’s shoes. Magda had failed to tell us that Helga got carsick. We snaked around a woman using scissors to hack at a dead horse, then continued driving by burnt tanks, partial buildings, slabs of street pavement, and scattered shoes, many with human feet or legs still in them. Some bodies in the street had boiled cabbage all over them. One dead soldier lay in the road, steam still rising up from the mug of coffee he clutched in his hand.

“Germans do not like to die in bed,” the General declared.

“Look at that,” Bickisch added in excitement, “a hollow cavity wound… the brains swept right out of the head. I’ve only read about that.”

“Enough! Not in front of the women,” Krebs ordered.

“Does the front of our car get in the war first?” Helga trilled.

“What do you mean, darling?” Magda asked patiently.

“If the Russians are in front of us… and none are in the back.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said Bickisch.

“Why not?”

“The First World War had a long, straight front. If we drove—at that time—the front seat would certainly have reached the war first.”

The general smiled, pleased that the child was receiving a first hand history lesson while under his supervision.

“And now?” Helga leaned forward.

“Modern war is elastic. It can reach up, down, forward, backward.”

“War is so silly.” Helga held a frown in a monotonous frozen way like a face held forever on some lacquered vase.

Civilians were digging trenches in yards and parks. Adi’s beloved Reich Chancellery had only two walls standing after a hollow charge had exploded on the roof. “A hollow charge,” Krebs explained without emotion, “is an explosive that burns through steel and concrete.”

People lay dead on the ground, face to face, some with gas bubble wounds bursting from pus. Slogan Squads had painted walls with: “We Will Never Give up” in bright white paint. The fancy jingles of Magda’s pompous husband had not helped Berlin. Barricades and trenches were of little defense. Helga looked at everything, but her mother often shielded her own eyes with a scarf. I was fascinated with the little wooden swastikas people planted everywhere on various piles of rubble, swastikas crudely made from pieces of scarred and jagged wood. Some had a cross attached. How beautiful that surviving family members had risked their lives to walk in all this chaos to honor and bury loved ones the only way they knew how. General Krebs was not impressed as idiot civilians and all their stupid practices were hindering important military operations needed for the war.

Our car moved slowly through smoke, the tires smeared with the paste of human remains. From the car’s half opened window, the smell of gasoline, mud and scorched iron blew into our faces as we drove by a bombed home for blind soldiers and allotment gardens filled with glass shards. Chimneys with no roofs spiked upward like steeples. What Krebs called bomb tramps, Bombenfrischler, were living in the open and cluttering our way.

Loaded with bottles, a milk truck’s tire exploded and the vehicle spun around crashing on a pile of roof tiles. In that brief stop it was being looted by two old men and some children. This fight for milk filled me with hope for if civilians were willing to struggle for milk, men and children alike, then we Germans were not defeated.

Staring at her own intestines on the ground, a girl tried to push them back into her gaping stomach. Stuck to a collapsed wall was the lower half of a horse, so many pieces of animal flesh in a torrid design. Surrounded by newspaper covered corpses, old men and women stood dazed and stiff as if planted in the ground. A boy looking no older than ten was shot by a sniper, and I heard the bullets make a harsh metallic sound and then thunk into his chest as dust flew off his shirt.

“Mothers and children should not leave Berlin. Soldiers fight harder to keep their women safe—though there’s been an increase in premature births,” General Krebs remarked as a tank slowly crawled over the hiding place of a woman and her infant. A body hung from the tank’s turret, charred white from phosphorus shells.

Smoke cleared in one area and in the middle of the street we saw a large player-piano with a woman covered in lime plaster sitting before it and watching the keys go briskly and automatically up and down as she brayed: “Hörst du mein heimliches Rufen. Oh, will you listen to my hidden cry? Please listen.” It was a wine song, I was sure of that. Beer songs are rowdy. This one was soft and dreamy wine. “Will you listen to my hidden cry?” But we didn’t stay to hear the song’s end and drove around the piano and on to a street where Sturmgrenadiers shouted and cheered while they force-marched a line of captured Russians. A captain was filming the Russian prisoners, and Krebs stopped the car abruptly and grabbed the camera from him shouting: “For the Führer!”

“Are we going on Uncle Führer’s autobahn?” Helga asked as her mother wiped a stringy gout of gray puke from around her mouth.

“No dear. We can’t go that way.” I sat half-turned in my seat so I could talk to Magda as she shifted her ample hips even closer to Oberleutnant Bickisch who was elaborating on his days at the Army Artillery School in Juterbog in order to let her know he was well prepared and that she was adequately protected.

“Is this over dressed pipsqueak in the back seat with us a private?” Helga wanted to know.

“He did come late to the Party and is a mere September Recruit. But I assure you, General Krebs would never assign a private to any Nazikinder.”

“I’ve told you, Mutter, over and over, I’m not a child. I’m a Nazi woman.”

“Yes, dear. And Herr Bickisch is a lieutenant.”

“If he’s not a private, why does he have short stubby fingers like all the rest of them?“

“I wouldn’t know, sweetheart.” Magda looked wistfully at the Oberleutnant who flexed his short thick shafts.

Trying to cheer us up, the general spoke of Errol Flynn, how the American actor wrote wonderful pro-Hitler letters and hung out with our good Nazi friend, Herman Erben. Flynn once sported his German uniform in New York City’s Time Square.

I reminded the general that Flynn was also in anti-Nazi films like Dive Bomber.

“That’s how he stays in our support without being silenced,” Krebs answered.

A shell whammed the turret hatch of a German tank just in front of us, and the lumbering vehicle slid across a sidewalk on its side and burst apart—no soldiers climbed out. Greatly fearing for her daughter, Magda threw Helga to the floor shielding her child’s body with her own, but Helga was indignant and bounded up again. We swerved around a dead flame-thrower, and I couldn’t tell by his mangled body if he was German or Russian. Since there was no formal front, we could run into the enemy anywhere. I had heard all the stories of war, how thousands died at one time across a static front. But the war I was seeing and experiencing was a personal one. Shrapnel sprayed all around me, and I was in the open. One could be the target of anyone here. Was it possible that I was right this moment in the sights of a brutish Ivan who wished to rape me off the face of the earth with his scheming bullet? The luck of lust is like the luck of war.

“I don’t see any Russians, but I can smell them,” Helga said.

“What do you smell, dear?”

“Horse poop.”

“We have horses,” I told her.

“Not Commie ones.”

As we tussled and turned in the streets, Helga bounced upon her mother’s lap as if she were riding a bucking horse.

Occasionally women waved their scarves at us. There was shatter tape on many windows, some defiantly and creatively worked into swastikas. Soldiers tried to put smoke pots around to smog the city.

Sniping picked up, and we all had to jump out and take cover under a partially collapsed porch. We were alarmed to find an unexploded bomb lodged in the railing. But the general instantly saw that the bomb’s casing had cracked open and was packed with cardboard. A good German in America—now our savior—had done a masterful job of sabotage.

“Berlin is kaput,” Helga said without emotion as we got back into the car.

No one contradicted Helga. Was it wise to attempt our pistol practice in the city? But weren’t we safe with General Krebs, a most experienced officer?

We passed the Die Neue Welt Bierhalle with its mother-of-pearl coated windows that stood untouched beside the ruins. Its beautiful black hostess had once been the talk of Berlin. Now her club’s interior was nothing but a standing wall scorched and burning. At the corner of Weimarer, we arrived at the popular nightclub Groschenkeller. Many nightclubs were ordered closed for the war, but this one was still open because it also served as a shelter. Air-raid sirens suddenly screamed and then high pitched wailing turned into quick short sinister blasts. General Krebs made us all jump out of the car and run at a crouch to the shelter where men dressed as women hovered in fright, forbidden to enter. Unlucky-looking people are excluded as they give off an air of death.

Entering the shelter, we found drunken soldiers wearing the blue uniform of the Luftwaffe Field Division. I could see a garter tattoo on the arm of a blowzy woman holding up a lantern. Everybody was shouting and screaming and crowding against the wall in the dim light of candles and kerosene lamps. Thick wooden beams lined the ceiling.

“I hope there are no vermin in here,” Helga said primly. She feared insects as much as she feared rats.

“These scrappy people you see are the only vermin in this shelter,” Bickisch replied.

Getting a direct hit, the shelter shook violently.

“Don’t be afraid, little girl,” Oberleutnant Bickisch told Helga, “these walls are very thick.”

“But does God understand concrete?” Helga asked.

“More important, Helga, your Uncle Führer does,” I stated firmly.

“Just take deep breaths when you hear a bomb. That keeps your lungs from shattering,” Bickisch offered.

Candles flickered in the shelter making shadowy outlines of men and women as they huddled together. A soldier leaning against the wall was oiling the pistol he’d taken apart. Magda sat close to Oberleutnant Bickisch for protection. I sat on the same army blanket next to Magda. Exhausted from our exciting ride, Helga fell asleep, her blond head resting in Magda’s lap. Discreetly strolling to the furthest end of the room, General Krebs settled happily beside a woman called Lola-Lola who wore an off the shoulder blouse. Kissing her hand, he then went upward until he reached Lola-Lola’s bare shoulders whereby he slowly began working downward.

Oberleutnant Bickisch began to stroke Helga’s hair tenderly where it lay spread out in Magda’s lap, his fingers lingering in strategic places. His hand disappeared underneath Magda’s blue skirt with the three pink bands near the hem. It was not well lighted, but I could see the glow on Magda’s face. Her eyes were bright, the same kind of brightness I saw in her daughter’s eyes when the child had a fever. It didn’t take long. It never did with Magda. She had all that perpetual foreshadowing from Goebbels. A slight upward movement of Helga’s head from her mother’s lap, and Magda sighed loudly, thumping her Schiaparelli topknot hat against the brick wall. Feathers drifted down into Helga’s hair.

“Sprechen Verboten” was printed all along the walls, but frenzied loutish sounds rose from the haze, the lustful shrill of the beginnings and the churr of those getting there. General Krebs was thrusting himself wildly inside Lola-Lola—right through her gauzy skirt. I hate passionate yelps. Adi will never let me cry out in such demented happiness. For me, it’s a very controlled whimper for he respects Joshua Reynolds paintings of restrained color and quiet strokes.

Oberleutnant Bickisch lifted little Helga up quickly, then gently put the sleeping girl in my arms. He blew out a candle near us and fell upon Magda. Moaning rose again. The French shoes in black suede and scarlet leather that Magda was so proud of were now locked around the neck of Oberleutnant Bickisch along with her rather plump legs. Helga was awakened by loud sighs, and I covered her innocent eyes with one hand. Helga kept taking my hand away. I put it back on her eyes. She pushed my hand away again. More shrieks of uncontrolled joy came from every corner of the shelter, cries scything into a heightened rhythm that crumpled in a surrender that almost screamed of death.

It was as if all this passion was the only way to defy the enemy. What better way to thumb your nose at the Russians? Let the Ivans fight in the streets. Down here the spirit of Germany could never be defeated. Yet, I did have some qualms. Didn’t they know a child was present? Could Helga recognize in the dimness her mother’s hefty legs? Magda should have had the decency to find another space far from her daughter or at least to have covered herself with a blanket. Feeling embarrassed for Helga, I also couldn’t help but feel an agonizing longing that I knew would linger for many hours.

We never had our pistol practice. On the way back to the Bunker, after vomiting twice, Helga splattered chocolate bullets at passing buildings, the steel of her pistol glowing in a soft bluish shine.

“The closer you get to the Bunker, the higher the rank,” Lieutenant Bickisch announced proudly, his one thigh tight against Magda’s leg.

“We’re going home. Wir fahren in die Heimat,” Magda said softly to her daughter with the roll of an ‘r’ as Adi does. (I was the only one in the car who knew “Wir fahren in die Heimat” was a line from the movie Menschen in Sturm, a famous film which starred her husband’s mistress.)

Lieutenant Bickisch adjusted a grenade on a loop of his black tightly buckled uniform. It was a “defensive grenade” that is used for protection if we had to quickly retreat, he told us. It would be thrown forward to shatter splinters and cause more turmoil than harm. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we will soon be in the splendid safety of the bunker.”

Speer said that the Bunker was sometimes a mask for people like Bickisch to hide behind.

When we returned, Adi was furious about his “surprise.” How dare the general take me, Magda, and precious Helga out in the streets where there were only vultures for the vultures to feed on. How dare the general make the Führer so upset and distract him from the war effort. It was treason, he bellowed in an Austrian accent that was impossible to conceal in his anger. I felt the vibration of his words run up and down my arms. Adi’s face was red, his mouth rigid over clenched teeth.

Snapping to attention, General Krebs clicked his heels, made a slight smart bow, stood at attention and referred to Goebbels’ orders to prepare women with pistol practice. And… did not Napoleon’s Josephine know how to shoot? “Much has been exaggerated about the destruction of Berlin. She still survives. She’s still resisting and alert. Do the enemy think we cannot traverse our own streets? I have brought you a film of many Russian prisoners who were just now captured in Berlin.” Krebs placed the camera on a table before Adi, bowed again but somewhat higher and continued to back his logic in and out of tunnels like the expert driver he was. “I’m in spirit an Austrian, Mein Führer. Nobody resents the awful loss of Austrian territory in South Tyrol after the First World War more than I. Such things make me daring for the cause and overly concerned about women. As you have always told us: Everyone to their task.”

Adi relaxed as his hands caressed the camera. This, indeed, was a tough general and no doubt his thinking was correct.

“Mein Führer, you will be glad to know that yesterday General Heinrici’s men captured and shot two American pilots after their planes went down just outside of Berlin.” He gave a shout and a stern salute.

Adi unexpectedly frowned. “Didn’t you read the classics at that fancy university you attended, General? Odysseus forbade his old nurse to rejoice over the death of the mendacious suitors saying, ‘old woman, rejoice in silence, restrain yourself, and don’t make any noise about it; it’s an unholy thing to vaunt over dead men.’”

“Of course, Mein Führer. One must respect any brave soldier.”

Later, Krebs confided to Goebbels that he had no idea if Josephine could shoot. He only knew that the Führer admired Napoleon’s empress as a woman who stuck by her husband and climbed with him to the highest position in the state. Napoleon made a mistake in casting her off.

10

THE PURPOSE OF THAT AFTERNOON WITH KREBS is important for I feel explosions from above rocking the Bunker. Like that one just now. I must learn any defense I can. Pieces of concrete are shifting and falling as the floor shudders. But I’d rather hear the whining of bombs because that means they’re not directly over us. Hearing nothing and feeling pressure in my ears means the bombs are close. And though other people are annoyed by “nuisance planes” which only fly over to scare us, I’d rather be kept awake all night with noise not bombs. When people complain about losing sleep, Goebbels calls their silly grumbling “the soul moving its bowels.”

What caliber guns are they’re firing at us? If Adi were beside me, he’d explain them as he lovingly did once by pointing to tracer beads in the sky as my own special string of pearls. 175 mm is heavy artillery whatever that is, but he assures me those shells won’t destroy a bunker over 30 feet under ground with 16 feet of concrete walls and ceiling. And we’re not under “army” concrete. It’s “speer” concrete, more trustworthy, Adi says. Since that July 20 assassination attempt, Adi’s no longer comfortable with anything but Speer’s construction—along with very select SS guards.

The assassination attempt was awful for Adi as well as for me though it had a glorious outcome. The villains were so sure of success that they took over the main radio station. But they didn’t succeed for long, and the radio was quickly taken back by the SS. I had some terrible moments when I heard the rumor of Adi’s death. I remember exactly what I was eating when a neighbor bounded into the room during dinner saying the Führer might be dead. My potato croquette fell automatically from my lips as if it, too, was shocked. But somehow I knew he was still alive as my heartbeat remained normal, my pulse calm. My body would have collapsed if He were no longer in existence. It would not have been possible for me to continue to breathe.

Goebbels said that when Adi was pulled from the wreckage, covered with dust and bleeding, the first thing he shouted was: “Send immediately for a salad of spinach and a spoonful of vinegar!” Diet was always his main concern for survival.

To assure people that he was alive, Adi gave a speech to the nation, his thrilling words spilling through their big wooden Siemens radio, splendid words spilling from the metallic threads of the radio’s fabric front. At one in the morning on July 21, he stated that criminally stupid officers had formed a plot to remove him. A bomb was planted by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg and exploded two meters away from him. Except for some minor bruises and burns, he was fine. This confirmation of Providence was the sign that he should continue his goal for the greatness of Germany.

Claus von Stauffenberg, his wife and four children were executed. Goebbels said it’s a very ancient custom that when a man is a traitor, his blood is bad, it contains treason and his entire family and remotest connections must be exterminated. I felt relieved knowing such evil people were gone.

11

WHEN I FIRST ARRIVED IN THE BUNKER, I called my mother every day. She’s in Munich with my sister, Gretl, who is pregnant. Shelling has become bad in Munich, even damaging the Excelsior Hotel. Mutti has her own chair in a nearby shelter and wears her platzkart on her sleeve to be allowed entrance. Desperate and down to a few cigarettes, she has to use them as money. Forced to sew one of father’s undershirts as the bodice of her dress, she also sleeps in a kitchen curtain. She has to wash in an old wine vat thirty years old when she can’t reach Cousin Gerda’s office to take a shower, hot water being available only in government buildings. She resorts to “black butchering” by having my cousin, Gottfried, kill a cow that’s not registered and has to cook it slowly and in small pieces on a spirit lamp full of eau-de-cologne. Even though she lives in the upper class neighborhood of Bogenhausen, Mutter says she’s one of the “snake women” who continually stands in snaking lines every day to get bread. When she lost all electricity, I sent her our Bunker candle stumps so she could remelt them. Even doing that is impossible now.

“Did not Adolf claim he would never make the same mistake as the Kaiser had in World War I by fighting on two fronts? He condemned two fronts in Mein Kampf. That much I’ve read. Now people say der Führer has declared war on us as well,” Mother writes. “Is this what our Messiah for the next two thousand years has given us?”

I have to remind Mother that America is fighting on two fronts, also. How can Roosevelt send enough ships to both the Pacific and the Atlantic? Her disrespectful prattle annoys me, and I insisted that she write me more patriotically.

I now rely on letters delivered by Adi’s officers as I can’t get through to Mother on the phone. Occasionally a runner or one of the generals brings me news. Mother is anxious for Adolf to work harder to bring about the solution to this war. “The poor Volk are being killed. Children in the streets are chewing their thumbs and fingers, biting out skin, cannibalizing themselves. Women eat the starch used for ironing. Your Aunt Irmela is called a “bombing wife” because she continues to live in the ruins that were once her home after the thousand-bomber attack on Cologne. And I’m using stalks of potatoes as writing paper.” Not that she doesn’t trust Adi. Like everybody else, she wants a quick solution and is panicky. Adi’s been very good to her. It would take pages to list the gifts he’s given her—flowers, silver, perfumed soap. And before the war, she would visit the beer hall where Adi had his putsch and got a bullet in his arm. She never passed that beer hall without tossing a flower at the door and whispering a tender “heil.” She used to make his favorite Schaumschnitten with two inches of whipped egg whites as well as cauliflower custard, and both were carefully packaged and promptly delivered by Adi’s private Ju 52 transport plane. But her last annoying message expressed dismay that Adi talks about the breeding of dogs at a time like this.

At dinner yesterday, as Adi drank his usual glass of Fachingen mineral water and banana milk, he told us it’s best for a female canine to breed two days after ovulation.

Josef Goebbels, who is certainly good at human breeding, slurped his red pepper soup while giving instructional glances to the orderly serving us. “How can you calculate that?”

“With patience,” Adi said, faint red trickles on his lips.

Magda, who always likes to impress the Führer, remarked that it’s best not to breed at the first heat.

Adi stood up and pushed his plate away in irritation. “What are you suggesting?”

“Nothing. Oh, nothing, Mein Führer.” Magda compulsively tapped her front teeth with a fork.

“I’m careful with Blondi.”

“Oh, yes, Mein Führer.” She twirled a curl of hair on her finger nervously.

“Blondi was nearly two years old when she had the pups. She was well into her second heat.”

Goebbels tried to change the subject. “The Russian colossus began at the Neisse River. That’s where they pushed us back, and we lost contact with our 8th Korps.”

“There were thousands of ova present in Blondi’s second heat,” Adi announced.

“I never in the world meant to imply disrespect for Blondi’s ovulation.” Bowing her head, Magda stood. She was so distressed that later she stayed up all night to copy a picture of Blondi in a petit point velvet book cover for Adi’s volume of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his favorite philosopher.

“Ja. Ja. Let us continue eating.” Moving his plate closer, erect and rigid on the edge of his chair, Adi coldly fixed his eyes on the dish of beets, eyes that were intense and circled with black by the monsters of duty. This was a red meal, apples, radishes, peppers, and ruby cabbage. Everything was blazing and vibrant.

“Then that stupid Göring let his Luftwaffe Fighter Wing desert the air strip at Lansdorf,” Goebbels continued.

Magda added: “Göring, wearing that silly felt hat with a white badge on it that looks like a price tag.”

“Yes, the very Göring who pointed his marshal’s baton at me and boasted I could call him Meier if even one little enemy plane bombed our capital.” Goebbels sniffed.

“We can now forget Meier Göring,” I said.

“I’ve dismissed the traitor,” Adi added, letting Goebbels continue with his bluster that would go on and on in a babble of self-indulgence but gave Adi time to eat radishes in a military 35 chews per bite.

“I believe airmen, as a rule, are idiots. Even more than sailors whose ships are only floating gun platforms.” Goebbels puckered, as if his lips couldn’t stand to part with such elegant wisdom, as though even words were as precious and guarded as the Bunker itself.

“Ships do not conform to the laws of nature. Look at the shape of a fish and the design of a ship. Has the Navy learned nothing?” Adi paused for he wanted to test the effect of his words.

“Yes, you’re so right. Still, pilots are the most idiotic people on earth. Who standing on firm ground can pity them,” Goebbels fretted.

“Pity? I admire them. No fighter pilot—ours or the enemy’s—will shoot a pilot who is bailing out. Such chivalry is glorious,” I said, not letting them know that I learned this from Göring.

“Mere dramatics,” Goebbels offered.

Adi, however, agreed with me.

“Now paratroopers are another matter,” Goebbels added. “Early in the war, they were helpful in surprise attacks.”

“I love their song.” Magda began singing. “Rot scheint die Sonne… the sun at dawn shines so red…”

“And what about our ramming squadrons?” I asked. “Ramming their planes into the enemy. To almost certain death?”

“Fanatics,” Magda said.

“My wife is right. Fanatics are high-strung killers and are often not accurate. We need the cool skilled soldier.”

Adi continued with his lecture. “All canine ovarian follicles release their ova at the same time.” He forked a large oval beet into his mouth. Food often had a faint layer of concrete dust, and I saw a hint of it now on Adi’s tongue. But it only made his breath beautifully misty.

“At the same time? How marvelous.” Magda poured more water into the Führer’s glass. The hand-painted pitcher with shiny black eagles had a broken spout.

“Spontaneous ovulation. It has a fertile life span of four days.”

“Four days. How marvelous,” Magda cooed with red lipstick bites of equally red cabbage.

“To hell with the Russians and all our generals who keep insisting that we go after Moscow,” Goebbels abruptly screeched. “Destroy the enemy first! Then go after their capital!”

“Generals are inept,” Adi shouted. “They know nothing about the economics of war. Nor are they brave. Were Frederick the Great’s grenadiers ready to die? They loved life as well as we do. But Frederick was correct in asking them to die for their country. Just as I am right asking Germans to do the same.”

“Oh yes! Richtig!” Magda screeched.

“I refuse to have another Rommel where everything depends on his personality as a leader. Rommel never discussed anything with officers of his rank,” Adi announced.

“Richtig,” Magda bellowed.

“He felt all that was necessary was to lead from the front. That way he and his men would be responsible for each other,” Goebbels snarled.

“Is that so bad?” I sounded prim, but that’s what I believe.

“It’s not enough,” Goebbels barked. “Do you know… He claimed a new word. ‘Rommeln.’ To Rommel. A verb meaning to stage a daring attack. He even encouraged his fans to change the Autobahn to the Rommelbahn.”

“And the only idea he ever had was filling up his units with silly dummy tanks,” Magda offered.

“Oh, yes,” Goebbels added. “His soldiers in Tripoli planted dummies on Volkswagen chassis.”

“I did hear it deceived the enemy about Rommel’s strength.” I was using the information I overheard from the map room.

“He had trucks drag tarpaulins to kick up desert sand and give the illusion of troop movement. He put propellers on trucks to do the same. He even placed straw dolls in observation towers for the enemy to shoot at. All the time crying that we didn’t give him enough equipment. Rommel! A true idiot. Good generals do not disappear at the head of their leading columns leaving subordinates to their own initiative. Then he complained Russia soaked up too many of our supplies. Russia! Don’t get me started on that. Where is the dignity in fighting those stupid Ivans sucking on sunflower seeds, spitting them out like damn birds,” Goebbels groused.

“You know the Führer doesn’t like that kind of language. And certainly not demeaning comments about birds.” Angling her head in a sharp little twist toward Josef, Magda’s smile once aimed at the Führer vanished quickly as she faced her husband.

“Russian tanks shoved us back to Zulz,” Goebbels continued. “Our generals should never have allowed the Russians near there.”

“The only good general is Russian. General Winter,” I said.

Adi smiled, what Goebbels called a DaVincian smile. “When asked what kind of generals he liked, Napoleon said… lucky ones,” Adi announced.

“Our Führer Directive Number 33 said Bolshevik officers are to be ‘shot out of hand.’ And rightfully so as even Blondi is much smarter than a Russian,” Magda offered.

But this made Goebbels angry for although Russia was primitive, it still was a vicious opponent and not to be dismissed so easily. Becoming flushed, even his nose reddening, he snapped that it was the Lhasa Apso that protected emperors. As if Magda or I cared about any insult directed toward Blondi.

Pleased that Magda remembered his Directive Number 33, the Lhasa Apso remark didn’t annoy Adi, his gaze a controlled neutral. Facts are facts. “Just fifteen days after mating, Blondi’s embryos were attached to her uterus.”

“Thank goodness it happened quickly,” I amended. “Who can stand loose embryos over fifteen days?”

“One can hardly believe such a miracle.” Magda picked at cabbages as if hearing about Blondi’s uterus was so momentous that the mere idea of sinking her fork into food would seem trifling.

“A dog was Wagner’s muse,” Adi declared. “Little Peps was the co-author of Tannhäuser.”

“Blondi is superior to all those pictures I’ve seen of Patton’s white and ugly bulldog, Willie,” Magda announced.

“Willie! That ridiculous bulldog! What would you expect from a bombast like Patton,” Goebbels added, eager to establish his loyalty back to Blondi.

“And how are Negus and Stasi doing?” Magda’s tone was challenging as she hoped to make me feel guilty for leaving my dogs behind. I didn’t want to bring them to the Bunker. Taking care of Blondi is enough, so I gave them to my Uncle Alois to watch.

“They are sweet little carpet-sweepers,” Adi said of my dogs because of their short legs. He was smiling.

“Negus and Stasi are running happily in Uncle Alois’ yard,” I announced proudly.

Adi suddenly froze for fifteen minutes—completely motionless, his spoon to his mouth. Goebbels stifled a yawn with a series of brisk pats to his cheeks as we all waited quietly for Adi to recover. Then Adi startled awake and began to talk about the American film The Ghost Goes West, a film with the kind of light humor he loves.

I wrote Mother about these conversations but never about the paralyzed silences. She wasn’t interested in Blondi as she knows only border collies with herding behavior that make friends with hills and cliffs not people.

I myself long for my Scotties who are at ease around water and love to swim and wait patiently for me.

“What about the war?” Mother writes. “I have a grandchild to think about. There’s been so much bombing here. How much more can we take? Loudspeakers on street corners tell us to leave. But how? Trains are full of soldiers and impossible to board. My neighbor, Dortchen, remember her? She had to break her son’s arm so he could go to the hospital and get some food. I heard on a British broadcast about the trauma of war on English children. What about our children? And can you ask the Führer about my cook, Thilde? She was sent to a camp two weeks ago. I heard there’s one 9 miles from me. We need such camps to rid ourselves of Communist subversion, and she’s probably close to Dachau that’s beautiful. But I’m at a loss for managing meals by myself. Bakers are prohibited from selling fresh bread because it won’t last as families are tempted to gobble it up. Therefore we get hard day-old rye. But Thilde can always find a baker who is willing to throw in a fresh slice or two.

“Thilde is only a Hausjude, a simple house Jew who never wears a fur collar or hat and who in no way resembles Moses and is so good at finding food. I could understand her being rounded up if she were like all the others with a Biblical profile and being what Himmler calls bacteria. I’m quite aware that she’s not entered in the Nazi Sippenbuch racial book as we are. I tried to get her to go to the anthropological institute for a consultation. I think it’s idiotic she’s Jewish with a skull that looks almost Aryan. And because she’s helped your family so much, couldn’t the Führer make her an honorary gentile? Oh, why did she have to be a Jew?”

When I asked Adi about Thilde, he grew impatient. He hears it all the time from his staff. Somebody has a Jewish barber who is not like a real Jew and should be overlooked. A concert violinist is so talented he couldn’t possibly be held to the same beast-like standards as the rest of them. A professor should be saved as he in no way acts like a Jew and has helped preserve German history. Now this Thilde who doesn’t cook like a Jew and prepares food like a good gentile and is needed to feed a Munich family. All selfish requests. Give in to one, Adi says, and others follow. Where does that leave the purity of the race? “We must sweep with an iron broom.”

“But Adi, you didn’t confine Dr. Bloch to a resettlement camp. You let him leave Germany. Because he treated your mother.”

“Of course.”

But… in Mein Kampf, you advocated no special treatment for any Jew.”

“Mein Kampf is a book, a polemic, an important one, of course, and essential to every soldier and citizen alike. I’m the only one who can sometimes deviate from it for responsible choices.”

“Then can you deviate for our cook, Thilde?”

“Impossible.”

“But why?”

“I decide who is a Jew.”

“But poor Thilde has an ulcer,” I inform Adi. “Mother says she talks of her ulcer as if it were another person: It is hungry. It needs hot soup. It wants some tea. Poor Thilde is in constant battle with her ulcer.”

“Ulcers are the Jewish disease,” he replies.

I know Adi hates diseases and has done everything possible to encourage good health. When he came to power, he urged regular exams and the eating of vegetables. Smokers were asked to quit, and he banned smoking in many public places. It was our friend Dr. Fritz Lickint who found evidence between cigarettes, ulcers and cancer, a fact that is encouraging me to quit. I’m down to eight cigarettes a week because our body belongs to the Führer… especially mine.

Adi was so strict about perfect health that before the war a man could not join the SS who even had a tooth filled.

Find another cook, I tell Mother. Thilde can’t be returned. Adi spends most of his time with maps and charts. What more can I tell Mother? But she only writes to me in desperation: “Sometimes I think anti-Semitism is nothing more than just a way to eliminate our servants.”

12

WITH GENERAL EPAULETTES on his immaculate pearl-gray uniform and booted up to the knees, Keitel limps from the map room and stops by the dining area for a canteen of schnapps. His limp, he claims, is from battle maneuvers, but often he forgets it and steps briskly. Goebbels says Keitel is as listless and weary as Goethe’s second Faust.

Some time after we invaded Russia, General Keitel, his white hair neatly parted, arrived at the Berghof to brief Adi. He found me on the terrace having tea. Unable to control his anger, he raged: “I tell you, Fräulein, my biggest problem in this war is dealing with the intolerable Corporal Götz Rupp.”

Adi insists that a corporal be present at meetings with his generals. It’s his safeguard against what he considers the awful “theory” of war. That’s why he chose Götz Rupp. Little Götz, only 5 feet 4 inches tall, has two lower teeth missing from Operation Gelb where he helped push the Allies back between Calais and Ostend. But even more important, he has a low narrow chin and cheekbones like a whippet and occasionally wears the uniform of the Kaiser’s War in honor of the Führer. Götz was “anointed” after Adi saw him sitting in the Die Neue Welt Bierhalle before a glass of tea when everybody else was drinking hot egg beer and walnut schnapps. A corporal who only drinks tea—though he did eat meat—was the ideal candidate. Meat was deleted soon enough when Bormann enrolled Götz in the snobbish Union Club in Berlin, and Adi ordered the chef to serve the little corporal asparagus, semolina noodles with eggs, and warm pears. So Götz Rupp continues to sit among the rich and the aristocratic who all own racing stables. Everyone assumed he was a guest of Göring who is amused by the weird and uneducated. But Götz, to Adi’s delight, was heard to say loudly over his plum soup: “Today, only grocers are impressed with vons.” Since Götz Rupp was given status that supersedes generals, even the vons of the diplomatic corps never dare to disagree with him. Fancy aristocrats in Mainz who don’t use their titles believing them to be an affectation defer to Götz. For a reward, Adi ordered two racing horses for Götz Rupp—horses housed and fed by the SS that Götz never rode and has never seen.

Adapting to the rich lifestyle, Götz is a proud example of the new worthy bourgeoisie created by the Third Reich from the devastation of a republic.

Magda considers Götz Rupp a eunuch. That’s the way he’s treated by the staff and by the secretaries here in the Bunker. We women talk about our monthlies in front of him, pluck our eyebrows while he sits stiffly by Adi’s door on a duffle bag waiting to be called. But Adi treats Götz with uniform courtesy and quotes him in great detail. Corporal Götz Rupp has no firm party ties and can act as a bridge between Adi and the common soldier. Götz’s wife once worked at the Blohm and Voss shipyard in Hamburg building U-boats that she and her coworkers completed ahead of schedule. This adds to Adi’s admiration of Götz.

Götz Rupp helps Adi bypass not only theorists but also those stagnant diplomats who quibble over things like Auschwitz Protocols. Equally important, Götz Rupp plays the piano having learned from his grandmother in Wiesbaden. Götz’s night blessings on the piano—So legt euch denn ihr Bruder—to bed, then, brothers—eases Adi’s insomnia.

“What has Corporal Rupp said now?” I asked Keitel.

“You want a soldier to be fearless, give him whiskey.”

“And what did you answer, Herr Generalmajor?”

“So those are the two fronts you would have us fight—hangovers and war! Then I told that sawed-off runt with his trench complex that his notion of horizontal warfare is flawed. Head on collision with the enemy? That’s not valid any more. Rommel and Montgomery keep on the move in tanks and caravans. Götz never listens. All he does is mutter, ‘the trench in a soldier’s soul is what concerns Germany.’”

“Götz Rupp can be peculiar at times.”

“He says he has no real party ties, but he’s driven around in an official Daimler-Benz limousine with the battle-flag of the Reich flying from the front fender.”

“General, he has a civilian chauffeur.”

“Nevertheless, Fräulein, I don’t like him in Mein Reich.”

“But you have to respect him for being in Germany’s Wer Ist Wer?”

“Any feckless idiot can get in Who’s Who,” Keitel snapped showing two front gold teeth and giving a slight brush to his medal from King Carol of Romania. “Rupp signs orders with ‘G.R. im Auftrage’ that allows him the authority of decision. And he had an appliance made for his sleeve to support his arm so he can hold a salute for hours when the Führer speaks.”

But I’m grateful to Götz, especially for making my Easter in the Bunker a happy one. Easter isn’t popular as a holiday any more, not the religious part of it. But this time it was festive because of that sweet dolt, Götz, who came down the stairwell with a sack of hard-to-find fresh farm eggs. He didn’t carry them himself as he has two aides appointed to him by Adi—Private Schnederut and Private Klimke. Schnederut lost part of his nose and both his ears and four fingers on his left hand during the winter campaign in 1942 and is relegated to staff work. Klimke was hit by a grenade, and a beard will not grow on his right side. He insists on a half-beard anyway, and I tried to ignore the bushy side of his face.

So these two aides emptied the sack on a table in the dining area with Götz saying they looked like Russia’s white egg-shaped hand grenades and we could practice patriotism by turning them into Easter eggs. He also gave me a small cake from the Osterhase, Easter hare, and I instantly wondered what I could make with the paper doily under it. (I use it as a little round cloth for my dressing table.)

“Herr Private Schnederut, you are to reconnoiter the kitchen and bring back a big pan for boiling these eggs,” Götz ordered.

“Jawohl, Herr Corporal.” With the smell of cordite coming off his dusty uniform, Private Schnederut did an about-face, his half-nose half sniffing above a Close Combat Clasp in silver.

Götz acquired some food coloring from a little store still standing in the Nollendorfplatz. When Private Schnederut came back with a large stew pot, we put in water and all the eggs to boil. After they cooled, we dipped each egg in little bowls of red, green and yellow with as much care and delicacy as an icon painter.

Coming in briefly, Goebbels quickly colored a red egg for each of his children. He was pale, carried a large bottle of laxatives in his pocket, and occasionally rubbed his stomach. Taking more time with what he termed an “organ-ment,” he hastily drew shorts on one egg and pasted a small carrot to stick out in an appropriate spot. Waving the virile edifice at us, he left to put it on the officers’ Easter table.

“Poor Goebbels,” I offered. “He’s been struggling with a tapeworm for weeks. The worm’s chain has been extracted, but Dr. Morell is unable to find and evacuate the hidden resistant head.”

“No doubt it’s the head of actress Lida Baarová,” Götz declared.

Just then Adi came in holding map boards. “Herr Rupp, where is that suitcase of Luger pistols?”

“By executive order—under your bed, Mein Führer.”

“And cartridges?”

“Yes, Mein Führer. Along with one old 8 mm Mauser rifle.” Nervously touching the plugs of scar tissue on his forehead and both wrists, Götz looked as if he were making a sign of the cross.

Adi was quiet for a moment. His fingers were bleeding—as usual—from pressing down so hard on his colored map-pencils. Suddenly he became agitated. “What could they have talked about at the Hotel Ana in Casablanca?”

“Who, Mein Führer?”

“That cripple. And Churchill.”

“Sir. Unconditional surrender is what they talked about.”

Adi cleared his throat and modestly looked down at his polished shoes. “Unconditional” was an Anglo blunder that gave the German people a solid defiance.

I put a cool egg into Adi’s hand. “This one is not colored,” I said softly. “This is your pure celebration.”

“My work is my only festival.” He handed it back to me.

The Bunker heaved and trembled, and we all looked up.

“Enemy planes are getting more daring. Flying lower.” As Götz dropped two eggs in the bowl of red coloring, they hit the bottom with a slight cracking sound. “I tried to get you a cashmere bathrobe, Mein Führer, but the Jewish dealer was taken to the courtyard of his house and shot in front of his servants.”

“The important thing is… are you getting enough rest, gentlemen,” Adi asked Rupp and his aides. “I’ve seen to it that you’ll be permanently housed in the Bismarck estate. Bismarck’s grandson is on the front, and I assume his wife and two-year-old son are no trouble.”

“No trouble at all, Mein Führer. Frau von Bismarck is a lovely hostess making sure that Reveille is always at five in the morning. Who can sleep more than five hours these days? But there’s a picture of America’s General Grant in her hall.” Private Klimke was standing at attention.

“Grant was a good general, but I am the one who annihilated the Polish state in eighteen days.” Adi’s lips drew away from his brown stained teeth. Waking up each morning with this smelly war in his throat, his mouth gave his life away. “But be careful you don’t drink infected milk,” he advised as he looked at the map boards he carried which were covered with red and green question marks. “What are these, Corporal Rupp?”

“Harmless. Our trenches are to the rear of them. I checked myself.”

“We must not repeat what happened in 1918 when the German Army was not defeated but simply gave up. As you know, Corporal Rupp, a good trench gives the soldier proper defiance. Rommel dynamited trenches in rocky soil in the desert and lined them with concrete. The Russians have round one-man trenches two metres deep and larger ones leading right down to the banks of the Volga where they get continual reinforcements. A trench covers a soldier, protects him, makes him important, holds him in intimacy as he regards the monumental experience of war.”

“You and I know that, Mein Führer.” Götz lifted a dazzling yellow egg from a bowl, the egg cupped in a spoon and dripping golden streaks.

“Monet painted eggs,” Adi announced.

“Monet’s eggs can’t be more lovely than these,” I said. “And didn’t you say your mother made beautiful colored eggs?”

Adi took the spoon with the golden egg.

“My mother, too,” I said. “And I miss her. Now. More than ever.”

“Then speak to her.” I’m so happy that Adi is extremely sympathetic where mothers are concerned.

“But most connections are down for nonmilitary communications. I don’t want any special treatment,” I said softly.

“Herr Rupp, I believe the sentry upstairs has a pigeon.”

“Mein Führer, one carrier pigeon is part of his backup communications system.”

“What’s his name?”

“Director of communications, Sergeant Olff.”

“Not the sentry. The pigeon!”

“Oberfeldwebel Jupp. We rhyme.”

“So the little fellow is Oberfeldwebel Jupp, Herr Rupp?”

“Yes, Mein Führer.”

Adi cracked the yellow egg placing golden shell fragments neatly in a pile on the table. “Speed?”

“Oberfeldwebel Jupp can fly nearly 38 miles an hour and cover over 300 miles. Returning in three days.”

“Pick!” Adi stared at Götz.

Götz fumbled in the basket of silverware for a fork.

“In 1840, Baron Reuter used pigeons that went faster than horseback riders.” As he dropped the fork on the table, Adi shouted: “Porcelain!”

Opening the Führer’s special dinner service drawer in the corrugated table, Götz retrieved a white knife and delivered it pompously as if it were a Germanic sword. Adi stabbed the egg, sucked it in whole, his teeth scraping the delicate blade. Shredded yellow yolk crumbs caked the corner of his mouth. “See that he’s treated with the utmost respect.”

“Private Olff?”

“Our little flyer, Oberfeldwebel Jupp!”

When Adi returned to the map room, Götz and I finished decorating eggs. We gave a red one to Private Olff along with bread scraps for Jupp. Private Olff dutifully sent off an Easter greeting to my mother by way of his loyal pigeon. But conditions above are every bit as serious for pigeons as they are for people, and for a long time I didn’t learn what happened to Jupp. The little Oberfeldwebel, I thought, probably died peacefully from exhaustion after delivering my message. Or he could have been captured as Götz had seen pigeon POWs in wire cages that were surrounded by mine belts in tundra villages in Russia. Box mine belts, Götz told me, are loved by the Russians and are hard to detect. I didn’t dare tell Adi as he would be grumpy with me for endangering an innocent animal over a silly Easter greeting.

“Enough about Corporal Rupp,” I said to General Keitel back then at the Berghof, a place where I could suck in the mountain air like the chilled dry brilliance of white wine. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of that ugly puff of hair between Rupp’s eyebrows like a tiny misplaced mustache.

Keitel looked around at the mountains trying to relax and began to hum the famous Viennese drinking song,

“Wien, Wien, nur du allein.

Ah, the glory of the early days.”

“General, you do know that song you’re humming was written by a Jew.”

“No matter, Fräulein. He must have had an Aryan moment.” But Keitel did switch to “Landsknechtlieder,” a folk song of German mercenaries in the middle ages. Then he stopped, grew rigid, and returned to the subject of Götz.

“Sometimes Götz wears desert goggles and a tartan scarf imitating Rommel. Other times it’s sunglasses and a field cap. And dubious hardware… like the bronze SA sports award.”

“I’m sure they’re proper medals, Generalmajor.”

“I understand one of Rupp’s aids has the specific job of fraying his caps so they look as if he just stepped out of the battlefield.”

“No harm in reminding everyone of his bravery.”

“He once took me to lunch. I know it was on purpose that he chose Eintopftag, one dish day. He did permit me to pay the bill.”

“Please, enough of Götz. What is happening with the war?” I was hoping the raw anger over Götz and the Berghof’s leisurely atmosphere would lead into a solid uncompromising conversation. Perhaps he would forget to speak to me as a mere woman in a patronizing manner.

“I was flown here by a peach-fuzz youth of 19,” the general grumbled. “A mere child. And we even have women shooting down planes as Flak Helpers using eighty-eight caliber antiaircraft guns. Women and children fighting—that’s a secret we must keep, Fräulein, from the world. What has this war come to?”

“And just what has it come to?” I asked.

“In Cologne, cathedral stained-glass windows are removed to underground safety. Citizens are encouraged to reinforce the basements of their houses and get rid of anything flammable in their attics. Still, more encouraging, word has arrived from Field Marshall Paulus at the Schweidnitzerhof Hotel. Our troops stood up well against Russia’s horse-mounted reconnaissance.”

Adi told me General Keitel never had a practical thought in his entire career. Keitel steers everybody’s thinking to the most impossible maneuvers in his worthless army cadet ways. But what can you expect from a von who cuts a sandwich with a knife and fork like a lamp chop?

“But why is Field Marshall Paulus at the Schweidnitz and not in Russia?”

“We’ve lost our fur coats, Fräulein.”

“How is that?”

“Seeing infantry soldiers shivering in cotton uniforms, the Führer told the general staff that the First Line can’t perform in cotton jackets and ordered all fur coats to the forward position. This order came in the form of a simple priority telephone message.”

“Understandable, Generalmajor. Our Führer is a retired corporal who once lanced the boils on his horse’s back.”

“I know he often becomes irritated with generals as myself. Yet the Führer has commented how grand it was to walk on one or two of the twelve avenues in Paris all named after Napoleon’s generals.”

“Yes, he does respect Napoleon.”

“And sometimes I think he listens to architects more than us. But the Russians tried conducting an army without rank at one time, and it was a disaster.”

“Of course, of course. He knows all that. But he stresses the humble quality.”

“Then how can he make that arrogant Ribbentrop ambassador to London? Why does he tolerate Ribbentrop dressing us up like something out of Lohengrin? And the Ribbentrop calling card has a swastika and a German eagle, along with seals from a Sturmführer, a Standartenführer, an Oberführer, a Brigadeführer, a Reichsführer SS, and Josef Goebbels. No wonder he’s called Ribbensnob.” Keitel sucked in his cheeks making a slight hiss in his officer’s club manner. “He places no chairs in front of his desk. I’m dealt with standing.”

“Perhaps you exaggerate.”

“Fräulein Braun, my cousin is an admiral who has to wear a fully braided uniform with a globe embroidered on each sleeve.”

“I see no harm in elegance, General.”

“Perhaps the toilet ladies in the Weapons Office Building should have braids and ribbons.”

“Who is to say they should not?”

“Such affectations are not visible at the troop level, my dear.”

“Anyway, much of that extravagance is the work of Frau von Ribbentrop.”

“So the old brandy merchant’s wife did it. That accounts for his saying the Benedicite before dinner in German which takes away all the beauty of the Latin. Well, I’m glad to say that being without rank, he and the wife are always seated in the lowest position at any table.”

“General, are you aware that Ribbentrop is missing a kidney?”

“It accounts for his watery eyes, no doubt. He’s ruined us by spending all his time with diplomats at the Romanisches Café while trying to pass as a real von, a title he’s only vaguely entitled to. He has no formal education. Imagine—ordering a family coat of arms and taking over Von Hindenburg’s old palace which he decorated for himself, whitewashing the windows as a precaution against snipers. He might as well call himself von Germany and be done with it.”

Adi told me that Keitel had private teachers while growing up and was coddled and spoiled. So why was he complaining about Ribby?

“I’m not complaining, Fräulein.” He showed me the scar on his left arm from a bomb splinter.

“Thank you for being so brave.”

“It’s in my blood.” Reaching dramatically into his pocket, he extracted a little piece of personal shrapnel as a gift. “Ministry records show that my ancestors fought with great bravery against the Tartars in Silesia in 1200. If you notice the coat of arms on my belt buckle, you’ll find a Tartar cap. In the library of my house in Munich on Zweibrucken Strasse, you’ll see a mention of von Keitel in a letter from Frederick the Great hanging on the wall.”

Keitel’s comments are like the orders he gives each day—cold, monotonous, a habit he’s formed that requires no effort in such weary times.

In these last stages of the war, vons are running from castle to castle clutching their velvet jackets, Meissen porcelain, and beaded bell pulls. Adi has no respect for vons who have not served on the battlefield for he is proud of being Germany’s Führer who never rose above the rank of corporal yet fought bravely. Older generals like Keitel in tidy lacquered helmets annoy him with their ego and set ways. If Adi can tolerate any generals at all, it’s the young ones like Manteuffel who have new and daring ideas and never wear a gold rosette in their lapel.

But with Frederick the Great on his wall, General Keitel has obtained some advantage.

“And are you keeping up with war news,” the general asked as he twisted his monocle with thin fingers.

“The Allies aren’t so clever. Recently, they hit a fertilizer plant,” I said proudly.

“Our fertilizer plants can be converted quickly into munitions factories, Fräulein.”

“We’re soon to have wonder weapons,” I announced to make up for my ignorance about fertilizers. “In Tegel, there’s a wonderful laboratory for experimenting with new explosives.”

“That is so. We now have a device that blows planes out of the air at certain altitudes.”

“And our techniques for sabotage? Are they not superior?”

“You have probably heard the Führer talk about funkspiele?”

“Our radio game,” I answered proudly. “We capture Allied operators and force them to deliver false radio message to lure the enemy into traps.”

“Yes. Very good. But of greatest importance is the rockets and extraordinary weapons we’re perfecting in Peenemunde.” Keitel squinted his knothole eyes protectively as if to keep secrets behind his gaze. “Streng geheim. Very top secret. And I tell myself, we resisted the Turks in 1683. We’ll resist again.”

“Bormann’s orderly found one of those big awkward Telefunken radios for me in a collapsed house in the Grunewald section. When there’s too much static on Radio Berlin, I listen to Major Glenn Miller’s Air Force Band broadcasting from London. “Deep Purple” is so lovely.”

“London!” he snarled. “That’s not permitted.”

“The Führer says you judge music by itself, not by the person who makes it.”

“That’s hard to do,” he countered. “In my youth I loved gypsy music, the sad thrilling strains of their czardas. But now…”

“When there’s nothing else, I listen to Radio Moscow.”

“Moscow! That’s forbidden, Fräulein.”

“I can’t understand what they say anyway. But please, Herr General, I long to know, will we take Moscow?”

“We’ll raze that blasted city and in its place build an artificial lake with central lighting. No one will hear the name Moscow again.”

“When? Oh, when?”

“We’re moving along the same road Napoleon took.” Useless information drooped from the general’s mouth like Blondi’s idiotic tongue.

But I’m alarmed. Admiration for Napoleon grew as Adi invaded Russia. Now he thinks Napoleon is a lion among decorative antelopes. Poor Napoleon, getting destroyed by the weather, never able to get his supply wagons through.

“I could never exactly understand just why… Why we invaded Russia?” I asked.

“Fräulein, even in the Middle Ages, our German knights always rode East. The Führer’s expansion plan has given officers a dignity more profound than during the Kaiser’s time. When we conquer Russia, we’ll go through Afghanistan and then into India.”

“But how exactly is it going in Russia?”

“Garrison tactics. The enemy ceaselessly moving from village to village.”

“Is that good?”

“You easily win over those peasants with a fist of salt. But Fräulein Braun, that country with its everlasting distance hates us. Ice. Snow.”

“We have ice, snow.”

“Not like Russia. It’s maddening how those Reds never go into assembly position. They attack from their infantry columns wearing white camouflage coats—coming at us wave after wave. They don’t even have enough military etiquette to use proper strategy. And hordes of them get by on so little—bread crusts, raw vegetables. Six soldiers to our one obeying without question in their hideous Slav-Asiatic manner, using wind and snow to their advantage by employing ammunition sleds. Though below zero weather turns itself on them, too, as many of their wounded freeze to death in Marxist hospital beds. Civilians leave Moscow on crowded trains—hanging on the outside frozen stiff.”

“They get the same frostbite we do,” I offered.

“But in their country, frostbite is a punishable offense—considered avoidable. Stupidity should be punished.”

“General, is not frostbite avoidable for us?”

Reverting to von ways, he took out a carved ivory pipe with the stem of a deer horn from his small sailcloth haversack of provisions that every general carries. “You might ask that question to our Führer. He’s much too kind hearted toward our troops.”

“But isn’t that good?”

“The Führer should not have let Heydrich—chief of concentration camps in conquered lands—continue to drive in an open, unarmored vehicle.”

“Heydrich disobeyed the Führer and thus was assassinated,” I said.

“But we lost a good man. And if we continue to be soft, we’ll lose more.”

“Still, don’t you think it’s best to be especially humane to our troops?”

The general prattled on, referring to the Führer’s Nacht und Nebel, cover of darkness. Germany, he stated, had to sometimes imitate the enemy’s undue brutality. Chivalry is a silly dream when a soldier faces the ruthless enemy. British Secret Service crime methods are alien to Germans. Nevertheless, Germans must learn from them. It is the duty of every soldier to remember the words of the Führer: Terrorism can only be defeated by Terrorism. “My dear, do you know how the Red Army clears away a mine field? By sending their men over it in tight formation. That’s how wars are won.”

“Won, you mean, by idiots?”

“Idiots who don’t know what decent thoroughfares are. All their primitive cobblestones injure our horses.”

“Cobblestones? For the main roads?” I asked.

He puffed on his ivory pipe with urgency. “Whatever those Ivans build are shoddy imbroglios. We can hardly do a decent 35 kilometers an hour. If they only had roads like France, an equally dreadful place except for roads. But carts have been found that can be pulled by Russian reindeers. Our men tried to ride reindeers, but those creatures have weak backs though they do possess strong shoulders.”

“One has to admire strong shoulders,” I mused. But Keitel had no reason to smile. He was rubbing his back against a beam. So even generals get infested with bugs.

“Their antlers sway along the road. It’s soothing for our infantry to watch while they’re enduring temperatures fifty below.”

“It’s something I can write to my mother about, Herr General.”

“There is much to write her about.”

“You mean… like the Tolstoy thing?”

“Whatever do you mean, my dear?”

“I was told we set up quarters at the estate of the late Count Tolstoy.”

“Yes. Yes. Infantry Regiment Gross-Deutschland. They were quartered there. Not in the main house but the museum. Commander Guderian’s men didn’t burn one stick of furniture from the estate. He only used wood from the nearby forest.”

“I think that shows great cultural respect.”

“My dear, do you know how we were rewarded? They laid mines around the grave of their greatest writer.”

“General, as far as I know, no German soldier was blown up by Tolstoy.”

“Quite right. Quite right. And that reminds me, there’s a joke among my soldiers: Adam and Eve were the original Communists. They had no clothes but fig leaves, had to steal apples to eat, and couldn’t leave the place where they lived. And thought it was all a perfect existence.”

“If they were in love, perhaps it was.”

“You give them too much credit, Fräulein. Love? Those filthy commissars? Who lack all the etcetera of strategy? It will take Germany years to get that country in good shape. But let’s think of some good news. I just made the Führer smile. Our soldiers found a statue of Stalin in a little village and beheaded him, then cut off his legs. He went from 9 meters to 3.” He chuckled. “A war isn’t worth it if you’re miserable. A struggle should not be unhappy. Enter combat with pleasure or why bother. I remind myself often of the Anschluss and our triumphal entry into Vienna… though I was against decorating our tanks and trucks with garlands. It’s enough that we entered Vienna without carnage.”

“It was a great day for all of us. The torchlight procession. Excited and happy people.”

“My dear, I was carried to my quarters by the Vienna division of the Austrian Army. My buttons were plucked from my greatcoat as souvenirs, an event equal to decapitating Stalin.”

In my next letter, I tell my mother what happened to Stalin’s statue to cheer her, but she’s not impressed.

“With the silk shortage I worry about your underwear,” Mother writes. “How can a woman keep a man like the Führer with cotton underwear?”

Before the war, I was fashionable. I used to wear silk panties, half-slips of watered satin, pink chiffon bed jackets. But the war took those away. Adi is stoic about this and eager that we conserve silk for parachutes. As he slips off my cottons in good spirits, he’ll remark, “What does it matter? The units of my elite Der Führer Regiment don’t own simple cotton undershorts. They go bare.”

“The big burly Der Führer Regiment that took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland?” I ask playfully.

“They are conserving cotton for bandages. I do worry as bare skin against wool trousers can chafe a soldier’s thighs.”

“Don’t you worry about my chafed thighs?”

Adi arched his eyebrows in surprise as I stood before him naked shielding with my hands all the ugly lines from the coarse material, especially the ridges stamped on my stomach. “See what cotton does to my skin.”

Taking my hands away, he admires the creases. “Ah, my precious Evchen, little pink tank tracks. My decisive weapon. Tanks! Once forbidden to me by that fiendish Versailles Treaty. Shall we wet them with honor?” He takes out his genius and sprays me. And I’m grateful that his very life’s necessity is running down my thighs. If I can’t have silk, there are sturdy fingers when he’s finished, thrumming his dankness into my pores as I say over and over… I love you. And he says over and over: “My darling weapon, my sweet grenade.”

He has seamless hands. His mother made him knead the bread when he was growing up. I think specks of dough are still in the creases of his knuckles plumping out the lines. What looks like dough is under his nails making white crescent shaped cuticles. Everything on him is matched and lined up as if marching in a shop-floor excellence. But I wonder, does the blood in his body know which hand or leg it belongs to?

His thumbs. They’re two little Fritzes. Wiggling. The left has entered me, a substitute for what I patiently wait for. And I think of Magda in her proud straw hat with poppies hopelessly longing for the Führer. Hats are not rationed, so she flaunts them… having no conscience about her many flashy rationed dresses.

Goebbels once told me that a conversation and a night out with the Führer was even better than an evening with a first class whore. So Josef looks at me in subtle envy for that special closeness he can never have with Adi, an intimacy that only I’m allowed.

Last night, when Adi cupped my face like a child, when I was every child he ever held like that, he asked me to marry him. This was a humble moment. I told my mother it was a “cotton” moment. He held the brush with “EB” that he had given me and rubbed off the “B” with a nail. Then he scratched on an “H.” I held the brush next to my heart.

I stripped to my coarse panties, and my bra hung unfastened from one breast. That he would take no notice of one breast exposed was just as usual as it would have been if two breasts were exposed. Looking at me with sweet coldness, as if I were a picture that had not come into proper focus, he motioned me to take those things off, as if my panties were cheap beer rags about to come in contact with his closest self. Fear nestled in my stomach. I sensed being a flank or hindquarter, a hide, a carcass broken down into cuts. But fear did not stay long for he smiled and leaned over me and put General Weidling’s monocle down there so that my tiny cave could look at him in wonder. I held the pose, the monocle perched in those moss udder lips between my thighs. And just at that moment, he cupped my face when it was the little face between fleshy posts that ached to be touched. “We’ll marry,” he said, the coldness gone. His voice fell on me like strings of sweet peas and other vine-flowers and I smiled, already a housewife in my contentment. I wanted him to say it again and again, but that was not his way. No, he wouldn’t say any more as Dr. Morell, the old Huguenot, had injected him with caffeine so that his whole body twitched though his face remained rigid with eye spasms. His balance was off from the damaged membrane in his ears, that terrible assassination explosion coming between us. Wrapping his twitching left arm around the bedpost, he lowered himself down to take the monocle out with his lips, spitting it on the floor before his tongue found me again.

Why am I chosen? Chosen for these last days to be constantly within his reach, to hear all his stories, over and over, a litany that is more dear than any I have heard as a child whispered about the saints in church. His mother waited for him with steaming tea each day after school. Klara would stare at the clock and know exactly when he was leaving the school door, each block at each minute, counting the seconds until he arrived. One day he was late. Having borrowed a book, he promised to return it that very day. His word was his honor, and he walked five miles to the lender’s house while it was raining. Cold, wet and sneezing, he arrived home explaining why he had deprived her of two hours of himself. She threw the teapot out the window into the backyard and smashed his cup. This from a sweet calm woman who rarely raised her voice. Then she composed herself and fitted all the pieces of his cup carefully together placing it in front of him. Adi said he wanted to write an opera about it.

13

KLARA LOVED HIM MORE THAN ANY HUMAN could or would love another human. His happiest years, he said, were spent in Linz at Humboldtstrasse 31. Klara was brave and good, and he learned compassion from her. He would catch slowworms that were chalk white and nice to touch, spongy like his mother’s legs. He never let his friends chop those worms into pieces insisting they use bread for bait as he was eager to save any life he could, especially a life of such prehistoric value. For killing worms would be like killing one’s ancestors.

He and his mother found joy together in simple things. They watched the Kaiser speeding by from Potsdam in his shining black automobile. When Adi was quarantined with scarlet fever and had to stay in the hospital for three months, Klara stood outside the building and could only wave to him at his window. She came every day, even in high winds and storms—all day long only going home at night to sleep. At age ten, he played with a Schnauzer dog that belonged to a girl named Inge who lived next door. When he was 15, he dressed the bust of Wagner with his only cap and his mother’s good wool scarf because he heard Parsifal for the first time. He and Klara walked the streets of Linz chilled without a hat or shawl. That didn’t stop him from sketching all the flowers held by maidens in Parsifal. Such flowers were vaulted and protected in a cathedral of sound.

I’m not jealous of his mother because it was Klara who gave him to me, struggling with the pain of birth when he was born on April 20th in the small town of Braunau on the River Inn that is the frontier between Austria and my beloved Bavaria.

His loving mother would board a crowded Linz bus clutching little Adi’s hand, glaring from one passenger to another shouting: “Can’t some one give this young child a seat!”

Klara was tough when it came to her son. He speaks of her proudly, and she makes me think of a shark that can still bite into your leg after being beached on dry land for many hours. It’s not that she’s stern, just wonderfully strong.

If Klara were still alive, she’d be down here in the Bunker with us the way I wish my mother could be.

The Bunker world is more mine than any up above… drinking coffee with officers as they beat out tunes on their cups with a spoon, talking to Adi when he first emerges from the map room, getting literature and painting lectures from Goebbels, exchanging ideas with the runners who come in and are out of breath and drop down on ammunition boxes waiting to talk to their Führer. Everybody is astonished at how much I know about the war and its strategy. “All depends on General Busse’s Ninth Army. He won’t permit all Berlin to be captured by the enemy,” I state.

I can say things to Goebbels that I would never say above ground: “Even if the Russians finally occupy Berlin, I’ll still be happy for I’ll have Him then forever and ever.” When I say this, Josef Goebbels frowns but somehow understands. The Bunker has made us all more sensitive. If you’re very close to war, as we are, you get overly tender. It’s like being wounded.

As she was boiling soup in the kitchen, I asked our cook if I could on occasion call her mother. She’s only five years older than me and from the silly Rahnsdorf district of Berlin, but it’s difficult to be down here without my mother. So for the last hour, I’ve said: “Mama, more coffee please. Mutter, are there any eggs left for lunch? Mutter, I want something special for my wedding dinner.” But she’s only Fräulein Manzialy who works on a wooden table chopping meat and vegetables, the table wobbly but as enduring as any soldier in the Bunker.

I ache to go up and flaunt myself through this once forbidden city of Berlin. I want to scream to every man, woman and child that I’m going to marry the Führer.

Underground, when there’s no sky above, you think of many things. Sunday is no different from any other day. A dreaminess is all around, but that doesn’t mean the atmosphere is less vital. There’s Adi’s family—his valet, cook, secretaries, doctors, adjutants. Making fun of Adi’s personal entourage, Goebbels calls them the “chauffeureska,” but they’re all necessary and I’m fond of them.

I “read” the Bunker. If the tables and chairs rattle, it’s a medium attack. If only the walls shake, it’s not nearly as bad as when the ground bucks in a maximum hit.

I “read” other things. Everyone coming in wears phosphorous buttons on their coats, tiny round lights to help them find their way around the streets at night. There are ten straight-back chairs placed Italian style along the wall outside the map room for those who wait to speak to Adi, people who have many different ways to show their anticipation. Diplomats look stern, facing each other in little groups. Newspaper people are casual with their legs sprawled. Flexing their arms nervously are civilians. All act similar in entering and leaving the Bunker, more hopeful when entering, more wary when leaving.

When I’m eager to learn more about the war, I choose an old officer like General Korseman. Since he has no need of promotion, he’s less guarded and talks more easily.

“Fräulein,” he would say, “how difficult it is when bombs go down 50 tons a minute for 45 minutes in Hamburg. Americans are also dropping leaflets that state, Das war Hamburg. Imagine: This was Hamburg! Now those papers floating down say, ‘this was Germany! We forbid anyone to touch the leaflets for they could be dusted with poison.’”

“We lost one-eighth of our industrial production. That’s 30 less U-boats a month from the destroyed Hamburg Howaldtswerke shipyards,” I add.

“Yes, Fräulein. You have a remarkable mind for important matters.”

“But the Führer has injected concrete into his staff’s morale after Hamburg with strong speeches to uplift us all. When he speaks and sways, you can see the people sway with him. If he leans forward, they lean forward,” I say proudly.

Besides talking to officers, I also deal with what I call “beseechers.” A distinguished looking civilian or courier will pull me aside and make a request. “Fräulein,” they will say, “I wish to talk to the Führer.” Taking out a piece of folded paper, they ask me to give it to Adi. It would be about pardoning a Jew, a suggestion for the war effort, or the invention of a new weapon. They look for any way that takes them into the inner circle. I smile and ignore their pleas.

The Wehrmacht has a system of proxy marriage for soldiers at the front, and two lieutenants came happily into the Bunker one day on their way to the northern sector to inform Goebbels that they were just married. Their intended wives back in Leipzig went to the local registrar and took the marriage vows with their hands upon a steel helmet. It was all very romantic. Goebbels rewards such soldiers with chocolates, an autographed copy of Mein Kampf, and a sturdy pat on the back. The grooms refused to eat dinner with us for a soldier is warned never to fill his belly before battle. Shot in an empty stomach is better for survival. And off they went singing,

“The sun shines red, get ready

Who knows if it will shine on us tomorrow

To the machines

To the machines

Comrades, there’s no going back.”

Psychics come down to make Adi’s chart or read his cards. (It’s rumored that Churchill hired an astrologer to find out what Adi’s astrologers are predicting.) But I have no use for astrologers. Adi is my present and my future, and there is no need to consult anybody else. One psychic told me that when the Führer shuffled cards for a reading, it was the weakest shuffle ever seen. “He’s war weary,” I explain with irritation. “Can’t you even read that?”

I study the soldiers who come into the Bunker. They’re so easy with violence, scraping the mud from each other’s uniforms with their bayonets and often singing,

“They say we shot our mothers

They say we shot our brothers

They say our cousins, too

For we are never through

Oh oh, die

Die you bastards, die.”

Goebbels gives us lectures on new things like psychiatry. I study paintings from his collection that he keeps in a metal fireproof box and learn about cities and countries from Adi’s generals. Each day I talk to diplomats and commanders. I decorate, plan lunches, look after my clothes, exercise, and play with the Goebbels children.

When there’s water on the Bunker floors, Magda and I make small paper boats for the children to float down our own little Spree. Goebbels brought in an old motor tire, and we roll the little ones inside it along the walls as they scream in excitement. We have to improvise games as Magda let the children take only one toy each to the Bunker.

I am carefully reading books on a list Goebbels gave me, but I was disturbed half way through War and Peace. The book torments me. It’s easy to see that the novel is about Napoleon’s conflict with Russia. When Napoleon retreats from Moscow, I cried. Not for Napoleon but for Adi.

I can’t read all the time. When Magda and the children are sleeping, when everybody’s in the map room and even the stove isn’t bubbling with meals, when I have absolutely nothing to do, I find other ways to fill the hours. I lie down in my room only I can’t sleep because I know the afternoon is Adi’s busiest time. I sometimes put on his fur-lined military goggles to feel a hint of his face. Listless and useless, unable to help him, I think of the unseen murderous blue sky above and that forces me to burn myself alive, like a sunflower yellows itself alive. Moving my hand slowly between my thighs, I linger, sink deeper to find that dark tribe smelling strongly of the earth. I rub slowly. I’m foamy. A sharp smell of wild apricots. Faster. I’m crusty in this imitation of a noble act that will be fulfilled on my wedding night. Ready to explode, my tender little knob that Adi calls the Old Silesian is forever primed, this grandeur and nobility of my body. Arab women Goebbels met had their Old Silesian surgically removed when they were little girls thus becoming wooden dolls and feeling hardly anything but able to continue love making in a mechanical way hour after hour with nothing but sandal oil to help them along. I can’t touch my “old silesian” too much as it will go off right away and then I’ll have nothing left for the remaining hours. Patience and control, like a good soldier. Never firing off at will. To spark at the right time. Let the “old silesian” stand at attention, let it quiver and be in amazing agony without rank. Think of things. Anything. Just to keep the “old silesian” simmering, never to boil until the afternoon dies. Time. Take up the slack of time. Thinking: Adi, when I first met him, his clean uniform showing the sharp creases so carefully ironed. Those military buttons, each one standing erect, refusing to lie flat against his firm chest. His straight proud body, unlike any other, complete, everything perfect. His form so honest, so intelligent, not only what the eye can see, but underneath, beyond the eye, toward purpose and mission. His great German objective in spite of generals who walk on maps not roads, harping on colonies and tanks. Once I saw Adi’s name scrawled on a stone wall, and I glowed with happiness and carved my initials beside it—E.B. Whenever Adi wrote me a note, I pinned it to a chain and wore it around my neck. Now thinking… silly Goebbels cured actress-lovers of snoring with drugs. The Duke of Windsor loving that woman who Goebbels said was like sticking it into a tree-crotch. My swimmer’s swagger Adi loves. Feather grass, moss, lichen at the Berghof. Singing,

“I’m a good loyal Nazi

A good loyal Nazi so keen

On my way

To Nazi Berlin

Where I can now be seen.”

I use an old church chalice as a vase and stopped making slash marks on the concrete walls to designate the days passing. That morning at the beauty shop when Adi was preparing for Barbarossa, an operation so big that even the people in Berlin knew, and the hairdresser who heard rumors of who I was wouldn’t curl my hair for fear he’d frizz me into reprisals. Awful pain of my second inoculation against typhus in the Bunker. Yesterday, roast hare for lunch, killed by a landmine, the fat juice from the hare’s breast spilling grease on my chin. Now I’m rubbing harder, urging a pattern of dew, tamping down. The wood orchids by the Berghof. First thing I remember in life, standing up in my baby bed waving my arms to be picked up, but mother’s in the next room scrubbing the floor. Tiny wooden slats hem me in, and I want out of the crib. Mutter’s wash bucket scrapes the floor. The milky white floor. Flinging my arms over and over to the empty air, I realize even then that I hate waiting. Short curls in a globe below my firm belly. This is the silky hair he feels. I ease in, stop at the crevice, glide back and forth. Strategy is nothing, of little importance now. There, there, so tender, so eager. And not even willing it, I pop. And the Bunker sinks into night. The afternoon is over.

I love being spontaneous, imagining he’s pleasuring me, never stopping to reason things out. Never avoiding my immediate impulses. That’s the way Ilse was.

I was once good friends with Ilse Hess who is much more down to earth than Magda. Ilse can laugh at herself. What makes me think of Ilse now? Maybe cracks in the walls that spiral out into cloud shapes. But clouds are only made of water and drip like concrete and are as much a false illusion as any fantasy, even the romantic memories I have of Ilse. Her handsome husband—in his blue-gray uniform, dark blue tie and insignia of a Hauptmann—liked Ilse to go with him when he was flying. They ate doughnuts with melted glazes and Kokosnussbonbons, their lips rimmed in chocolate, swooping over fields and gliding down low to scare the cows. Screaming as the plane dived and seeing her frightened made Rudi feel manly. We laughed at her acting in the sky. Ilse wasn’t afraid of flying saying, “It’s dead birds who never fall from their nests.”

Hess. Once the Führer’s deputy. I loved his thick Bavarian brogue. But what a terrible thing he did to Adi by going off secretly to make peace. What was he thinking? Adi was once so fond of him. Hadn’t they both been wounded in the First World War? Ilse told me Rudi still had little pieces from an exploding shell in his left hand and upper arm. She wanted him to have a surgeon remove all that, but he refused never wanting to forget the Battle of Verdun and how General Von Falkenhayn had been so glorious in leading him and the others along the River Maas. But Ilse couldn’t help but cry when she saw Rudi’s scars. They made love that way, she crying, he trying to comfort her. Soon he was the aviator and went up. As he made love like the Frontschweine, those still alive from the great bloody infantry, there was no comfort. It was trench-love, she said, not all together unpleasant, but it was rough. Not that he could help himself when he wore his black leather flight suit and kept on his parachute harness. Wearing fleece-lined flying boots, he used them to pry her open. She acquired plenty of bruising. Many were lavender over time, and now with him in some British prison, lavender blemishes are all she has left. So it was good that he gifted her in whatever way he could.

I have no contact with Ilse at present, but she must lead a dreary, lonely life.

When I mention to Adi the slightest thing about Ilse, or even Rudi, he naturally gets upset. I always have to remind him that Rudi was a corporal, too, in the infantry.

“He was never a corporal for long.”

“But Adi, Hess was with you in prison.”

When agitated, Adi bites his mustache. “Did he appreciate that!”

“Landsberg Prison. Cell 7,” I say proudly. “You were the admired one who got to keep a light on until midnight. The warden became a National Socialist because of you.”

“You never forget anything,” Adi says in admiration.

“And to think you once dictated Mein Kampf to Hess.”

“He added some lines of his own in Kampf. On the sly.”

“Even then he was a traitor,” I add.

“In spite of that, my book sold over a million and a half copies. And you, my Evchen, are probably the only one who has read every single word of it,” he says lovingly. He pauses for emphasis. “You could be a man. It would be a lot easier for me.”

His words make me deliriously happy.

“Regardless of Hess’ stupidity, I foolishly helped him all the time. Even got him to marry that fat wife of his.”

“She’s not fat, Adi.”

“She ate lunch every day at the Osteria Bavaria Restaurant which serves huge platters of beef.”

“In spite of the beef, you got him to marry Ilse?”

“She had spider veins on her legs, but she was the daughter of Oberstabsarzt Dr. Prohl.”

“She probably really fancied you,” I teased.

Adi gave a sultry smile. “She got as close to me as possible. I visited them often at 48 Harthauserstrasse.”

“Now he’s in prison,” I say gaily. But sometimes I can’t help but miss Ilse, especially her stories of trench-love and how she and Rudi use to scare the cows.

14

A SPANISH CAPTAIN LOPED THOUGH THE BUNKER. It’s amazing how international the Bunker can be. Rather short as Spanish men tend to be, he was nevertheless handsome in boots as soft and supple as Sunday gloves. Thick black hair curled up above sled-runner epaulets. He insisted that he see Adi. Bormann made him wait for two hours because the Führer was lunching with his secretaries. The captain waited patiently, all the time tapping the tip of his boots with his whip. If Spain hadn’t remained neutral, perhaps Bormann would have got the Führer to shorten his meal. Adi never eats much, some chilled asparagus and hardboiled eggs. Most of those desserts he craves come with his linden tea in the late afternoon. Spain did give us some volunteer troops because Adi helped them in the Spanish Civil War.

When the captain went topside for a quick smoke, I followed him, eager to sneak a few puffs myself. He offered me a hand rolled cigarette, but I refused for I knew the paper around this hand-rolled cigarette was sealed with the captain’s saliva. Who knows what foreign germs were hidden there.

Spain can do more than give us one little division, so when I let the captain privately join me in my quarters for lunch, I permitted him to clasp my two hands. His legs wandered if his hands could not. I pretended not to notice his superficial indiscretions because he talked endlessly about Chamberlain in the newsreels who pranced around with an umbrella while our Führer strutted like a powerful European player. Being a cavalry captain, his thighs could do things to me that his horses probably never had much interest in. With only one division, I couldn’t let myself be amused for long, so I abruptly pulled away as he grunted and happily released himself into his Spanish yak underwear.

As the captain made himself more presentable, I went to see if the Führer was ready to meet his Spanish envoy.

Adi and his secretaries, wearing matching aprons, were rolling chocolate bon bons over a platter of sugar.

As a rising politician, Adi thought it was unmanly to like sweets. Saving as much money as he could, he’d buy sugary treats that his followers never knew about and eat them secretly in his bedroom. He got jaundice from all the sugar. The whites of his eyes turned yellow, and he denied being sick to anyone who asked. These days he attempts to eat only two or three cakes in the afternoon, but with Fräulein Manzialy hovering around him with dishes of cookies and pudding, that’s hard to do.

“The Spanish captain has been waiting for many hours,” I announced. “He’s had to endure sitting at the commissary table and listening to all your generals do nothing but complain about the high cost of dress uniforms. And that major who is a ventriloquist is making the cups talk again.”

“The captain has earned a bonbon.” Adi held up a chocolate ball coated in white speckles, wrapped it in a torn page from an art book (a glossy self-portrait of Rembrandt) and placed it in my hand. “My wonderful ladies have typed everything. Everything. Then this! A full tray of homemade wonders.”

The three women laughed, each one delicately dusted with powdered sugar on their upper lip. Taking the clean handkerchief from his breast pocket, he patted clean first one puckered little mouth—lingering in the side crannies—then slowly moved on to the next one. I left a room of heavy sighs.

The captain never got to see Adi and was dismissed by Bormann until further notice. The captain didn’t get the bonbon, either, as I ate it in one gulp, the rich velvet chocolate melting on my tongue and made more delicious by Adi’s succulent touch. But the captain left a gift for the Führer—a pair of Spanish stirrups—and told me to advise the Führer to abandon the Clausewitz-Maginot Line as it was wrong to adhere to a fixed defense. “A great wall of China never works,” he said. But I saw no reason to bother Adi about a China Wall when he had so much to do.

The shelling up above has become closer and closer so Bormann asked all upper level German officers to remove rank on their uniforms for protection in case they’re taken prisoner. This is very hurtful as these officers are held in high esteem and have worked very hard for their superior status. Generals Tippelskirch and Sorpfeld, in their peaked caps with silver death’s head badges, who both had been bivouacked in Baden-Baden, had lunch with us two days ago and after their mushroom salad, asparagus and green potatoes, the two men slowly and painfully ripped the red stripes of a general staff officer off their trousers. After Adi left the table, they drowned their sorrow in mare’s milk alcohol (I later learned it was only brandy and milk and hardly exotic). It was hard on all of us. General Tippelskirch, whose grandfather once served in the Torgau Hussars, presented me with their red stripes, and I decided to use them as a border on my bed covers. I sew a little, thanks to what my mother patiently taught me, and just finished stitching a scarf. Gauze that cheese is packed in has been transformed into a wrap for my bridal bouquet. Adi ordered flowers, but he hasn’t told me what kind. It’s a surprise. I tried to get Bormann to tell me, but he wouldn’t even give a hint. Bormann and Goebbels will be the witnesses, and Magda is my maid of honor.

What does a woman think of before her wedding? I can’t help but remember the wonderful day when Adi became chancellor. I was so proud even though I feared he’d have even less time for me. But how could I ever possibly dream then that in the future I would be his wife? Oh, but it was a glorious milestone. Adi would rule Germany. After the official event, I couldn’t wait to see him, and all that day I kept biting my nails nervously. Finally he came to me in the late evening after celebrating with his staff. I thought he’d look different, but he didn’t. Perhaps a little more solemn. He carried a vanilla cream cake that had a smooth top with two little dots of walnuts looking like eyes, the cake strangely having the blank aimless gaze of an infant. Having talked himself out, he said nothing. His lips were dry, cracked and weeping little drops of blood as he cut me a slice of cake, then took a piece for himself. We ate in silence, slice after slice, until the cake was gone. Still saying nothing, he went to bed carrying the weight of the Fatherland in his throat. I knew I would have to be strong… Germany must come first, the one long truth.

All the girls in the world who get married, what do they dream about? Those brides probably wish for a sunny wedding day, but I’ll beg for a cloudy one so that the planes won’t come over us, and there will only be sniping and grenades. I know what other things are in my mind. How will I look when he’s finally my husband? For he’ll belong to me in a way that can’t be matched with any other official document in the Reich. That little piece of paper will say Frau Hitler. It’s something not even the German people can have of him. All those women who want him will be so envious of me.

Sometimes I wish for his child. It would be wonderful to see a part of him as a youth—like Klara did. But Adi feels there can be only one Adolf. And a genius is distracted from his important work by a baby. At any rate, I wonder if I would have any love left over from Adi to give to an infant—even his infant.

In our wedding bed, he’ll truly complete our love. Isn’t the work I did with Dr. Morell’s V-Volk exercises meant solely for this glorious day? I want all of Him in a Kaiserzeit embrace. I want to lick that false gold tooth in the back of his mouth, the one he paid for when he was poor and had to sell his overcoat and postcard paintings, the tooth he’s always afraid will loosen and choke him. Horses gallop so fast that at one point they have all four hooves off the ground—that’s how I’ll be when he’s rappelling up to my throat.

Tonight, I’ll wrap my legs around Adi’s chosen thighs and feel my feet slide on his skin like my heels did on the waxed stairs in the Karstadt Department Store. For he is Berlin—stone Berlin with its staunch temperament and architecture. But I’ll have Stone Berlin hot on my belly. I have done well to learn from dogs for I’ll slink along the walls of his body to know that every part of me is on his leash.

Magda was very sweet this morning, rare for her, coming to my bedroom after breakfast to bring me a gift for my wedding night. Since nightgowns are difficult to find these days, she gave me a Russian shirt for the purpose. As there’s no formal front between the Russians and us, we can run into the enemy anywhere. Her husband’s driver, Axel, captured a Russian last week and took the very shirt off his back after shooting him. Russian shirts are wonderful as they’re loose with no buttons. It’s hard to believe there are no buttons on Russian uniforms, and I understand how Adi sees such troops as being primitive. Ivans tie everything with little strings. I put on the white shirt made of linen, an officer’s shirt that hung to the top of my thighs. Magda added a violet scarf that she tied around my waist, and it did look fetching with trails of purple flowing down and fluttering against my legs. What bride could have a better nightdress than one from a slain enemy?

“You look very lovely,” Magda said. “The Führer will be pleased.” It took courage to tell me that. But she did contribute my nightgown so that put her in the position to take credit for my allure.

“Do thank Axel for me,” I said.

“Oh, that’s not a happy story.” Magda smoothed her coarse tinted hair with a nervous hand. Her nails had been done, and I wondered where she found the gold speckled polish. Such plunder is gifts from lovers, and I’m not told about every man she seduces. “Axel was captured by a woman Russian officer only this morning.”

“At least he’ll be treated well.”

“Quite the contrary. She castrated him with two shots. Then strung him up like beef. You can imagine how upset my husband is—having to be driven around all the burnt out boulders up there by his executive officer, Lieutenant Wievelhofe, until he finds another driver.”

“Adi says Russian women don’t look like women.”

“And to think when we were still friends with Russia, I let one of them give me Red Star Makhorka tobacco. It’s strong and pleasing in its own way, but I never guessed this gift came from such—such primeval roots. But here’s a gift from a more reliable country. It was given to me by a Japanese officer.” I could tell by the glow in her eyes that the officer gave her more than these pellets of colored pith that she dropped into a bowl of water. Hidden flowers opened in the water like a secret garden.

Magda then took out a curious can from a bag she held close to her side, an Oscar Meyer tin her husband found on a dead Russian soldier. No doubt American food packages had reached the Russians. It once held something called Spam. I tasted Spam once and hated it, but Americans are known to fry it up like pork sausages, smacking their lips. Göring said Spam tastes like human flesh and that’s why Americans like it.

“I plan to glue tissue paper around this can, fill it with pralines for your bedside table on your wedding night.”

“Or I can put in some flowers from my bridal bouquet,” I said happily. “Adi’s ordered something special, but he won’t tell me what.”

“I know,” Magda teased.

“You know?”

Magda’s response was a sly smile.

“Tell me. Tell me. I can’t wait.”

Magda wouldn’t give me a hint. As I chased her around my bed, we laughed and fell on the pillows, and it was then I knew why men were forever after Magda. Lying on her back, those bloated snow-pancakes of hers spread like lumpy batter from waist to neck. I was tempted to taste them scrambled, those pumped up Kaiserschmarren. But I remembered what Adi said about any old building on Potsdammerplatz being better than anatomy. You can’t walk through Magda’s breasts or pace the length of her nipples like floor plans. Even our Bunker is better than fatty tissue—for in looking up at concrete, I can see it’s white sweaty bones. How can you pick up scale under all Magda’s spongy skin and tissue? Scale is the distance between two sturdy trees not two doughy mounds. Adi says he’s afraid of feelings not meant for buildings.

Magda has broad shoulders. But not without help. With boxes full of shoulder pads, she uses them so often she looks deformed, perhaps to show up her husband’s club foot. As if this were a way to get revenge for his flaunting of mistresses. With three pads on each shoulder, she will look at Josef from head to toe as if he were a glob of green mold on a hunk of dying cheese.

Longing to be political as well as sensual, Magda spoke on the radio during the early years of the war, mostly on Mother’s Day. “Produce children,” she urged. “Kinder, Kirche, Kuche.” She called her speech “Babies, Mothers: Mothers, Babies” using this title because she didn’t know which of the two words should come first. Exalted in being a fine German mother, she hoped to inspire other German mothers. She also publicly announced to the world that she would never leave the Führer’s side.

She stops babbling about her past triumphs, realizing there will not be another radio broadcast to proclaim her loyalty. And she hasn’t delivered twins or certainly not many twins, something the Reich desires of all married women.

“On your wedding night, Eva, you will… will finally get what you want.”

“How do you know what I want?”

Magda has a way of projecting her own desires on me. But what else can she do? She’ll never have Adi the way I have him. I feel sorry for her from time to time.

“I know my Führer well enough to realize he can never fully give of himself. Except to the Reich.”

Magda learned the military way of speaking curtly, her head up, standing straight. That’s her method of keeping some of Adi to herself. Wasn’t she part of his official world?

“Oh, I’ll get his full self.”

She was startled by my confidence, maybe even fearful of it and changed the subject to politics. “This hell going on up there is only a test,” Magda pronounced as we both walked to the dining area for coffee to steady her large dose of Veronal. “A divine test. They’ll all know that in the future. The world will know he’s right. We will never lose for it cannot happen because it must not happen.” The generator was still and there wasn’t enough air to stir the blond tendrils of hair by Magda’s forehead. She looked like a woman in a wig. “What do people expect from peace when they will have to do everything? In wartime, we have a great Hitler to think for us.”

15

ON TOP OF THE BUNKER, Bormann receives Hans Baur who comes roaring up in a motorcycle sidecar wearing a leather coat and his Golden Badge of Honor to signify his early party membership. His camouflage cap brashly on one side over his ear, with a firm vulture beak of a nose, he struts into the room interrupting Magda and me for another of his breakout plans.

“Please convince the Führer that he must leave for the Berghof. Now! I can still fly all of you out.”

“Hardly the optimism our Führer demands,” I remind him.

“I can be optimistic only as a soldier. As a simple human being, I despair of what is being done to my country. I must fly him out.”

“He won’t go,” I say.

When Josef Goebbels comes in, Hans Baur starts on him. “Herr Goebbels, the enemy shoot children sleigh-riding. This is not a noble war. I can fly out your little ones.”

“Magda put them down for their nap. Come, have onion cake in the dining room. It’s from the Rheinpfalz.” Josef stares upward as if the city of Rheinpfalz is visible on the ceiling.

Hans Baur refuses onion cake from the Reinpfalz. He has sandwiches in his pocket. All the pilots I have known have sandwiches in their pocket. He wears a dignified black uniform of the foreign ministry that looks very much like the SS. His cousin got him the uniform. Better not to be identified as a pilot, especially the pilot of the Führer.

“Do you think I’m not careful with children?” Hans snorts.

“You’re the Führer’s pilot, what more is there to say.”

“There is quite a bit more,” Hans says more politely. “I’ve been flying since the age of sixteen, got my aerobatic license at seventeen. I’m the only soldier who reported to the Luftwaffe with my own aircraft.” I know he wants to make sure Goebbels realizes that a breakout would be in most experienced hands. Assuring us that he has good eyesight, Hans states he can see anything no matter how far away and can fire from the clouds down to the treetops if need be.

“You must be a good hunter as well. Have you been with the falcons lately?” Goebbels asks.

“I have no time for that,” Der Chef Pilot tells him.

Hans has no dueling scars. He carefully avoided them at the university because most dueling scars are rumored to be self-inflicted. But for Magda, these wounds—real or not—are attractive. As a child, she etched a line on her chin with a potato knife. Her mother took her to a Swiss plastic surgeon to get it erased. What man, her mother said, would marry a woman with a self-imposed scar on her face.

“And your girlfriends,” Goebbels asks smiling. “Are they all well?”

“Women are virgins till we fly them over the Reich.” When excited, he answers in broad Swabian.

Both men laugh loudly and slap each other on the back. Goebbels doesn’t know that der chef has flown Magda over Munich.

“So you have been very busy, no doubt,” Goebbels says. “One after the other Fräulein going over the Reich.”

A pheasant flew into his propellers yesterday. Bloody feathers smeared his leather helmet when he landed. He laughs, but I know those feathers made him think of Magda in her splendid hats. Everything makes him think of Magda.

Hans Baur is serious knowing there’s not much time left, not for him or for all the girlfriends he has carefully hidden in towns and villages. His country is drowning, and he has only one objective—to rescue his Führer. “Why won’t Mein Führer leave?” Hans moans to Goebbels over and over. Being so depressed, he has to go to the half-bombed Tippel Pub on Linienstrasse every night singing melancholy songs: “Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei. All of life goes by. All of life has its time. After one month comes another.” The pub musician pounds on a war-damaged harmonium with lost keys, and everyone has to hum the missing notes.

Since flying the wounded to hospitals, Hans plays Skat and 24, 40, 48 Grand Slam with other pilots at the now underground Kustler Eck, drinking too many stone mugs of beer. How is it possible for him to fly all of Germany out of Germany because that’s what he feels he must do. Last night he heard a soldier with no arms playing the Beer Barrel Polka on a little tin harmonica, a Manoli cigarette in his mouth. (Hans marched off to war one September morning in 1939 to that rousing polka.) A nurse placed the harmonica in that soldier’s mouth and he puckered in a special way to keep the harmonica and the cigarette both between his lips. But the tune now sounded mournful.

Magda saunters in smiling with that secret way she has, her eyes heavy lidded, the ends of her lips slightly dipping downward. Hans is happy to see her so casually dressed with one shoulder bare as the children no doubt tugged at her clothes as she put them to sleep. Quickly greeting us, she then goes back in the room to her children.

Bormann enters looking tired, raw, and resembling a fat line of ground beef from a very large meat grinder. “Hans, what’s the news?”

“What news?” Hans asks innocently.

“What is coming at us?”

“Mostly mortars, Herr Bormann. Though only yesterday, I emerged from cloud cover to go directly into a fierce rage with five enemy crates. I hosed them with shells, but got hit in my engine cowling panels. Luckily my plane flattened out and made a perfect landing on its belly in a cabbage field.”

“Keep track of the numbers. Record it in triplicate. The Führer likes numbers. By the way, I admire your part in the Rosarius Traveling Circus.”

“Yes, we learned a lot about the enemy as you know since our flights were comprised of all the airworthy captured planes we could find. I’ve become familiar with enemy techniques and now if the Führer will just let me…”

“Yes… the Führer appreciates your efforts.”

Bormann doesn’t acknowledge Goebbels’ presence or mine, quickly darting into the map room.

“He didn’t give me time to explain the breakout,” Hans says.

“It’s useless.” I pat his arm.

“She’s right,” agrees Goebbels.

“The breakout must come now. Now! What is the Führer thinking?”

“He’s thinking of the rotten Weimar government and still carries an old letter stamp in his pocket that cost tens of billions of marks. We drank Weimar coffee as it doubled in price while we drank it. He has a lump of coal on his desk. Can you forget that the Weimar government had to back up currency with coal! What else can he possibly be thinking? If you both will please excuse me, I must now commit map perjury for the Führer’s morale.” Goebbels enters the map room with an early-war flourish.

“I had no intention of offending the Reichsminister.” The chef pilot sits on a trunk that wobbles as I use it for a table not a bench. Two soldiers found the trunk outside the rubble of the Friedrichstrasse Train Station, and I had them make little legs that they attached with wooden screws. “What do you scribble all the time, Fräulein?”

“Memories. Delights. My life with a genius.”

“Why?”

“To mark my existence with the Führer. Who knows that truth better than I do… about how honorable and brave he is?”

“Little monk, little monk, you are taking a hard road,” Hans recites.

“Whatever does that mean?”

“That applies to our great leader—the famous words of Frundsberg to Dr. Martin Luther before the Diet of Worms in 1521.”

“You can compare Adolf to a monk?”

“Courage is courage, is it not?” Hans takes a sandwich from his pocket. “This bread may have come from a Berlin bakery on Kurfurstendamm. Just occupied. A Russian might have taken the pan from the oven, thrown the loaves on the table. Maybe that Ivan is now on his way to the Führerbunker.”

We both stare at the sandwich.

“Don’t eat it,” I say. “We have good potato noodles and orangen biskuit. I’ll have something to eat with you.”

Walking to the dining area, the chef pilot blusters on in minute detail about a possible breakout. Hans’ adjutant recently left through the collapsing subway tunnels and over Lake Wannsee to carry Mein Führer’s last will and testament out of Berlin. Is not the Führer himself more valuable, more important than a will?

“It’s useless to go on and on about the Weimar years. Everybody knows that decadence. All the crazy art with no logic, no top or bottom or margins. Not even frames. They even stole door knobs,” Hans adds sadly.

We don’t feel like eating. Glistening noodles and vegetable cutlets stare at us from the plate. I think about the armless soldier playing his little tin harmonica with a cigarette still in his mouth. What can it all mean? Why doesn’t the world understand? How can I possibly protect Adi in all this distress? Should I encourage him to take Hans’ suggestion for the breakout?

Magda joins us at the table. Her dress is back in order but one sleeve has a damp spot where the children fell asleep against her arm crying. Jumping up to get her a cup of coffee, she waves Hans away and pours herself a glass of Holzschnaps from the douche bag that she carries in her skirt pocket. Hans drinks from his sour army canteen. I gulp sweet grape juice from the tumbler that has little Nazi hooked cross flags stretched evenly all around the chipped rim.

“Let me take the children out.” Hans begins his campaign once again. “There’s an emergency air strip near the Brandenburg Gate.”

“I can’t let them go without me.” She lapses into her usual nostalgia. “I can remember when we never ate without a printed French menu in the ambassadorial fashion.”

“I can take you out. You and the children. If you stay behind…”

“My husband will not leave,” Magda says firmly. “He’ll perform his duties to the end.”

“They are only babies,” Hans says softly.

“Of course they are babies. They’re mine, after all.”

“I have no intention of forgetting that. For this reason I must save them. I’ve kept planes ready at my underground hangar at Tempelhof airport. I recently flew Prince Viktor zu Wied to safety.“

“My children remain with my husband and me. When the time comes, I’ll take my dress apart. Sleeves. Sash. Collar. Skirt. I’ll throw the pieces in every direction so I won’t leave a souvenir for the Russians.”

Magda tugs at her dress, demonstrating her anger at the enemy. “Mein Führer only claimed what was his. The Rhineland. The Sudetenland. The Polish Corridor. People of Austria gave him permission to annex them, didn’t they? Why do they cry over France? What was he suppose to do, not invade?”

The two of them forget I’m present.

Alarmed at Magda’s outburst, Hans reaches out and grabs her hands as if she were a child having a tantrum. He whispers soft reassuring sounds to calm her. I’m fascinated. It’s a tender moment, one I don’t often find in connection with Magda. As his hands are large and hairy with chappy fingers, I can see why he has control and skill with that airplane stick up in the sky. Before Hans can calm her, Magda’s right sleeve is half ripped from her dress. He whispers war courage to her, his own stories of heroes. Oberleutnant Hofmann, the true patriot we can never forget, flying over and over. Only one leg. Flying over and over. Never giving up.

“A British plane dropped a peg-leg over Munich. They even included a gift tag addressed to Hofmann,” I offer with sarcasm. But they don’t hear me.

Magda turns calm. “Oberleutnant Hofmann was finally drafted to the hereafter, as Rommel was. Though I think we helped Rommy along.”

“Rommel, that sly Swabian fox,” Hans bellows. “What’s this myth about him being a great general? He spent too much time sitting on his heels in camel thorns like a native and no time with his supply lines. He had his ears so close to the ground they were full of sand fleas. He didn’t know what was going on around him.”

“I rather like his ‘Panzer Song.’” Magda begins singing: “Panzer rollen in Afrika vor…”

“And he used planes. You don’t hear about that,” Hans states.

“I heard,” I say proudly. “He flew over the battlefields in a Storch light observation aircraft, landing around his tanks.”

“Who told you that?” Hans asks.

“Goebbels.” It was really Göring, but I don’t want to bring up Göring’s name at this time.

“Rommel was constantly in the front lines. We even bombed him a couple of time ourselves.”

“Didn’t he win the Blue Max?” Magda asks.

“Long before this war,” Hans says dismissively. “Africa was all a sport to him. Open terrain. No civilians. Sharpshooting into the vision slits of French tanks. A game.”

“I miss those wonderful boxes of Magenbrot he would send just to me… such delicious sweet Swabian cookies,” Magda gushes.

“But from the desert, Rommel learned that silence and loneliness are infinite,” I interject, repeating what General Keitel once told me, in order to counteract Magda’s remark about silly cookies. “Is that not valuable in wartime?”

“The real hero of the desert was the German 88 mm, the most effective field gun against tanks in Africa. Ladies, better to think only of hofmann,” Hans brays.

“Of course. Precious Hofmann,” Magda says.

Magda is more sad about Hofmann dying before she could get him in her arms than the fact that he had died so heroically.

Trying to put Magda’s ripped sleeve back where it belongs is an impossible gesture. But Hans tries, the back of his hand brushing across her breast. Though she has calmed from her war fury, she’s now agitated by lust.

“You must eat noodles,” I say to both of them. “A full stomach is comforting.”

They don’t hear me, see me, or know that I’m there. The room has become still. They stare at each other without moving. From the situation conference in the map room comes the faint chatter of Generals Krosigk, Keitel, and Ramcke along with Götz Rupp, Goebbels, and Bormann talking to their Führer. I see them all as the door has been flung wide open because Heinz Linge goes back and forth with trays of cups, tea, and platters of pflaumenkuchen, crullers, and egg pudding to pacify the raving sweet tooth of his Führer. The cakes smell of dampness. Adi doesn’t care, he happily nibbles and gestures with a cream puff, jabbing it into Bormann’s chest of medals and smearing yellow cream all along his top buttons.

“I absolutely oppose the machine gun because it makes close combat impossible. Jet propulsion is an obstacle to air combat. And developing an A-Bomb is so much Jewish pseudo-science,” Adi shouts. “Now a Panzer tank… that’s a superior weapon. One 25-ton Panzer IV has 39,000 kg of steel, 195 kg of copper, 238 kg of aluminum, 63 kg of lead, 66 kg of zinc, 116 kg of rubber.”

“How magnificent is your memory,” Krosigk proclaims, smiling. “You know everything about the Panzer down to its pistol ammunition.” I wonder if the rumor is true that the general still has all his original milk teeth.

“I also continue to read the railway timetable.” Adi begins reciting from memory complicated arrival and departure times.

How long will Hans and Magda stare at each other like two fascinated animals? Who will make the first move? I think about the insect world where sex results in death.

“There! Right there! A formation of tanks are crowded together,” Adi shouts, and he’s pointing to his detailed ground plans with black dots to show where mines are planted. “Can’t you see, Generals?” He says Generals and makes it sound like bums.

“Their white stars are clear to see,” Goebbels remarks.

Götz calls loudly for ordnung. Order! Gunfire suddenly erupts for Adi shoots into the concrete walls to establish himself in the real war. He does this exercise for Corporal Götz Rupp feels it’s important that Adi relive active battle. Corporal Rupp yells: “Grenade!” Adi holds a phantom grenade so real to him that his fingers move expertly to work the pin loose.

The generals back away from the action as Corporal Rupp tells them that warfare is determined by the quick thinking of the common soldier in battle. Animal instinct moves that soldier to decide whether to advance or whether to employ one form of artillery over another. It’s the unplanned, the spontaneous decisions that brings about historic consequences. Things get exciting only when things go wrong, Götz tells them. He gives an example: “Place a grenade on the helmet of a soldier. If the grenade is balanced, he can pull the pin and stand at attention. No damage if the soldier maintains absolute stillness as the explosion dissipates above his steel helmet. But if he becomes rattled and lets the grenade fall… you see, it’s all in the hands of the individual.”

General Keitel is enraged. “Are you saying we should not give orders?”

“You know the old saying: ‘Germans won’t fight without an order.’ However, we can’t rely only on generals. Not even the great German military,” Götz says.

“Can you please restate that in high German,” General Krosigk orders sarcastically.

“Come now,” Goebbels pleads, “we all wish to kill the same enemy.”

“I don’t consider the act of killing so difficult,” Ramcke adds. “One has only to pull the pin.” In his uniform pocket, Ramcke carries a tin of loose gold nuggets that he shuffles with his fingers like worry beads.

Corporal Rupp calmly leans his small frame against the wall near Adi and stares with coldness at General Keitel. “You read too many diplomatic correspondences, Herr General, such as all those papers detailing the glider assaults of the Witzig’s group. Nevertheless, your presence is necessary for the genius of inactivity.”

Moving close to Götz, General Ramcke mockingly whispers, “I tried to get you a cashmere bathrobe, Mein Führer.”

Götz ignores the malicious mockery.

General Keitel’s ears turn red and his jaw quivers. He murmurs unheard words in fury while flapping the field glasses around his neck.

“To have generals standing around does contribute to morale.” Corporal Rupp gives a half-smile, like Blondi’s half-wag, and his ropy lips hold the smirk for several minutes.

“Didn’t Wordsworth talk about wise passiveness?” adds Goebbels hoping to calm matters.

“You can quote an Anglo at a time like this?” General Ramcke shouts.

“Well, we’re fighting them, aren’t we?” Götz shouts.

“Rupp, your impertinence is outrageous,” Rancke slams back.

“Remember, General Ramcke, I’m not a Nazi. Strictly a soldier,” Götz declares.

Adi likes dissent. It’s what he calls expanding. It makes his officers accountable for what they plan. But he moves on to more important things. “Herr Rupp, as you know, I’m particularly interested in the concept of German instinct and its importance against whatever struggles befall us.”

“There’s only unreason in times of war, Mein Führer,” reports Götz. “My official statement on the matter. You can verify that in the SS Questionnaire of 1934 which I completed at the Brown House in Munich.”

“Doesn’t unreason have to be adequately reasoned?” asks Goebbels.

“Not if it’s spontaneous.” Corporal Rupp tosses written reports to the floor.

The generals scramble to pick up the scattered papers. All this heated bickering, Adi knows, is widening everyone’s thinking.

“Your official reports have nothing to do with what takes place on the front,” Corporal Götz Rupp says.

“Are you saying we lie?” General Ramcke screeches.

“Official reports contain meaningless details.” Corporal Rupp smashes a page on the floor with his foot. “The victor will be the country that no longer has any forms left. We have axed the Church, but we still honor Saint bureaucracy.”

“The front is getting thicker. Every day. We’ll be unable to even cover it with forms. 3,000 km and growing. Anywhere you look, it’s the front. Up. Down. Sideways. Length! Colossi!” As his nose swells wider, Ramcke could defeat Götz by sniffing him down.

“Generals. Let us calm down with a brandy. Courvoisier,” Goebbels blusters. “Mein Führer allows Courvoisier in his presence as it’s Napoleon’s favorite.”

The day the French armistice was signed, Adi spent one full hour at Napoleon’s Tomb in silent meditation. So of course they drink Courvoisier.

“It was wrong to put Napoleon’s Tomb down in a hole, Adi announces. “I wish to be placed high.”

“We must not think of such things regarding you, Mein Führer, our youthful, vigorous leader. Better to remember our Führer’s visit to the Paris Opera Building where you knew more about the architecture than the director and took over the guided tour yourself,” Keitel adds.

“Ah. The French occupation,” Ramcke sighs. “Those were the good days. We nailed the French that time… even getting our nasty hereditary enemy to sign the armistice in the very railroad car used for the surrender of imperial Germany on November 11, 1918.”

“And the glory of the Führer condemning General de Gaulle to death in absentia,” Goebbels offers proudly.

“It was the French military court who condemned him. They wanted Vichy to stay in control,” Götz corrects.

“It’s all the same,” Goebbels claims with arrogance.

“We conquered France for one reason,” Götz alleges. “To force England to be peaceful.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Keitel shouts.

“Are we forgetting the elegance of our Führer in this whole matter? He—not any Frenchman—was the one who arranged for the remains of Napoleon’s son to be moved to Paris to rest beside his father,” Krosigk declares.

“That so-called son was only the emperor of France for two weeks,” Götz sneers.

“Corporal Rupp, I must remind you, it was a carefully planned gesture to have my name associated forever with Napoleon,” Adi adds calmly.

“No need to dwell on France. That’s in the past,” Goebbels states curtly.

Outside the map room, Hans’ beautiful hairy hand is reaching for a bowl on the table, taking a banana and stripping it until the curved firm pulp is exposed. He extends the tip to Magda and her fleshy white arm, looking like the plump rounded stem of a vase, reaches for it. Hans moves her arm away and places two fingers gently on her front teeth, lowers her head and purses her lips so she can only suck.

As Heinz Linge walks by, he sees both fixated on one banana, puts down his tray of tea and sweets, and seizes another banana under peaches and apples in the fruit bowl. His white service gloves are off gray and hard to keep clean from the Bunker dust. He holds out the banana, and Hans bats it away like some enemy artillery directed at his aircraft.

“The German people have proved unworthy,” Adi says. “I could have accomplished something even with a Weimar constitution if it were not for the traitors in our midst.”

“Yes, yes,” I hear Goebbels agree as his wife’s sucking is down one third of the banana. Der Chef Pilot rolls his eyes feverishly as his hand supports the disappearing soft curve. I feel a surge of delight. Banana dramas are hard to find in the Bunker.

“My Führer, more speeches and more parades, more postcards,” General Ramcke offers in a rasping voice. “But no more films like Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. She ignored the professional military. There were only quick glimpses of a few officers. She favors, of all things, the Labor service.”

Goebbels’ voice booms from the map room in a personal shrill grievance. “The Poles flouted the Corridor and went right on wandering down to the sea. They have the audacity to say you lied. Didn’t you straighten up the Eastern border?”

“You can print that in Das Reich. See that civilians get the paper free at least once a week. Announce it on the radio,” Adi orders.

“Introduced with a few soft drums. Then Beethoven,” Goebbels adds.

“The ‘fifth,’” Adi says.

I continue to scribble down their words hurriedly as Heinz Linge steps briskly out of the map room carrying an empty tray while Magda sucks down the remains of the banana’s flesh. With Hans’ eyes closed, Magda licks the heel of his hand for the finish. Then a child is heard crying, and Magda rushes off, the ugly screech of her chair on the concrete an abrupt indignity.

“Did you convince her about the children?” I ask.

Limp and feeble, Hans is in no shape to answer.

Soon Adi will come from the map room for some last minutes notes about our wedding tonight. I watch and wait.

My wedding. I say the words softly. My wedding. This is the day women wish for, dream about, prepare for. When I was a girl of seventeen, my sister and I decided it was time to be women. We were very close then and decided to lose our virginity together. Older by a few years, it was my duty to plot our fate. Gretl was never as pretty or as firm as I was or still am. She hates to exercise. Even when she was just a girl, she would ride the bus everywhere, even to our school that was eight blocks from home. I walked. I could never get her to go swimming with me. Maybe she was self-conscious about her flabby thighs. She never had the good sense to realize that kind of thing can be overlooked in the heat of passion.

Gretl and I shared a bedroom as we were growing up, and when mother made us turn out the light, we talked about our breasts, how they inched bigger each day. I didn’t know then that Adi’s mother died of breast cancer and had both breasts taken off and he would someday, therefore, have nothing to do with mine.

We talked about hymens, all the different kinds—elastic, thick, delicate. Sticking our finger up inside ourselves, we’d touch ours. My sister felt mine—and I would touch hers—all the time evaluating and questioning who was best to break this important barrier. Gretl’s hymen was very delicate, and I had to be gentle when examining her. Mine was very thick, and Gretl could almost punch it.

We were just young girls without any knowledge of seduction, and there was also little money to buy fancy clothes. I saved the gold paper on my father’s cigars—Zigarrenbands—and pasted them around my nipples and Gretl’s. My nipples got hard instantly as I was older and more sensuous. With Gretl I had to rub them with oil until her buds popped out like ugly plugs. Gretl’s nipples have thin black hairs on the end that disgusted me at the time, but it’s one of the reasons General Fegelein married her and why she got pregnant. Recently, my unfortunate brother-in-law was arrested for treason and the first thing he asked for was a barber to cut his hair before he was shot. Goebbels said it was like the ancient Spartans who combed their hair even before a losing battle. That didn’t make Gretl feel any better.

But back in those youthful days, our only worry was what man could perform well on two inexperienced young girls at the same time. We needed technique and energetic tenderness and were jealous of men, who could go to prostitutes. We didn’t have anybody to pay. We thought about saving up enough money to go to Italy, but the language barrier would hinder any verbal enticements. Besides, the Italians, though overly romantic, are not subtle. How could such boisterous lovers ever know the vibrant deep strings of strong Bavarian women from Simbach?

Being a policeman in Munich, Horst Meyer wore carbines and a pistol at his side and lived in the suburb of Uffing with a wife and one child on the way so he was most likely potent. We met him at Café Heck where he paid for our tea and Linzer tortes and told us we were beautiful sisters. After that first meeting, we kept going back, and Horst insisted that such beautiful girls needed protection. (When we were older, we saw Peter Lorre in the movie M, where the actor played a child killer. Horst was right. Evil people can be charming.)

Munich at that time was not Adi’s Munich since after World War I the French pressed greedily for funds. The sidewalks, parks, the Odeonsplatz were mostly in disrepair. A great amount of money was paid in repartitions mandated by the Versailles Treaty. But my sister and I were too young and carefree to realize that.

Two months after meeting Horst, we decided to invite him to a rented room. We placed little paper dishes of nut brittle on the round table by our bed along with a prized tin of British condensed milk given to me by Aunt Mirdza on my birthday. The sticky milk was later used to lubricate our innocence. Having once taken a ski trip in the Sudeten Mountains, we taped photos of them along with glossy posters of the mountains of Thuringia on the wall to appear worldly. “When my rear turns rose-red to the sky, you know I long for you” was a song being sung in Berlin, and Gretl and I hummed it while we washed ourselves carefully. Braiding our hair together to connect us like twins, we would enter our first sexual union attached. We lay on the bed nude, side by side, our one thick braid as fat as a sailor’s rope binding us together. I couldn’t turn my head without Gretl turning with me. So we waited silently, our hands at our sides. When Horst entered the room, he became erect instantly. He was definitely potent.

Taking Gretl first was only right as she was the impatient younger one. Afterward, Horst made deep plunges to break through my mucus and blood. But Gretl liked to think that when Horst entered me, his sperm also entered the blood stream of our common braid so that technically he entered both of us at the same time—so she was both first and second. It annoyed me that he lingered a few minutes more with Gretl. And being attached, I had to endure her flaunting yells, the childish screams of joy that are so common in the young. He concluded by taking our communal braid, winding it around his hand, and lifting and lowering us on his pleasure. However, Horst did end up liking me the best as my stomach was marvelously firm from swimming and now that his wife was bloated with child, he couldn’t keep himself from kissing my taut skin and navel. Though he found Gretl appealing because of her tiny hands, it was me he wanted on a permanent basis. I had to refuse him from any second encounter as that would lessen the moment we had just experienced. One did not want to think of being a virgin with him over and over. Also, his wife would soon be in working order as she was eight and a half months along, and Horst took comfort in that.

16

MY DAYDREAMING ABOUT HORST ends as Der Chef Pilot gyrates, grunts and abruptly slumps over. In a loud sigh, he knocks a coffee cup to the floor. He bends over to pick up the cup, gaining composure while under the table. He straightens up and talks to me as if we were never interrupted.

“You must urge Mein Führer to stage a breakout.”

“I have no authority to do so,” I say.

“You have the authority of one who loves him.”

“Many people love him,” I say proudly.

“Yes. Yes,” he continues, “but your sensibilities extend to the bedroom.”

“Would you have me hum from Lehar by his pillow?”

“Is that what you do?” he asks, hoping his question will lead to information more intimate.

“It’s Parsifal he loves, and I surely can’t be expected to sing for the Holy Grail.”

“His grail! Who can doubt that it’s marvelous. As his humble pilot, I can only imagine…”

“Thankfully, the original grail was discovered in a castle not a cathedral,” I say.

“And our party doesn’t answer to the church or the castle,” Hans announces.

“I’m aware of that. But the Führer used to like the Pope, Herr Baur. Few people realize he pays church taxes to this day. He even had a cordial agreement with the Pope once. Until the sterilization law was passed advocating Gnadentod, merciful death. Then that Cardinal Clems Von Gallen in his sermon at Munster had to ask if we had the right to live only as long as we were productive. That silly sermon caused the Führer to suspend our T-4 Program. I ask you, what else could the Führer do to ensure racial purity that we will all benefit from, Catholics as well. But that’s in the past, and as the Führer says: The only von who lives like a von these days is the pope.”

“Ja. Our Führer is very right about that, Fräulein Braun. I used to be a devout Lutheran. And my Uncle Carl was a Catholic chaplain in World War I. He was a good German, blessing tanks and bombs, calling on God to help the struggle.”

“What could have made your uncle become a chaplain instead of a wonderful ordinary soldier?”

“History. Henry V heard Mass many times before Agincourt. Medieval French armies marched with legions of priests. Uncle Carl said there were chaplains during the Revolution and Civil War in America. But what is most distasteful to me… is the fact that Catholic missionary churches were built above the dungeons for slaves in slave-trading Ghana.”

“Slaves? Accepted by the church?”

“Yes. We are right to turn our back on the church. What could those clerics have been thinking? What went through their minds to see women and children sold like bushels of hay?”

“Such cowards,” I say. “Just as chaplains are cowards.”

“That is not necessarily true. Chaplains can be fierce. I’ve heard stories how some clerics joined in bloody battles. They had to be warned that they were not protected by the Geneva Convention unless they remained in their own category.”

“We don’t believe in that any more.”

“Clerics?”

“The Geneva Convention,” I say with authority. “The Führer discourages clerics, as well. In these advanced times, Hans, the Reich refuses to acknowledge all those holy and devout creatures that plagued my childhood and were thrust upon me. Like that imaginary bearded female Saint Thecla who was so very gracefully delivered from sex. When St. Thecla was thrown to the lions, do you know what she did?”

“Once being Lutheran, I have no idea, Fräulein.”

“St. Thecla leaned back languidly and offered her vulva to the fierce lion.”

Hans moves closer to me in eager anticipation. “Did the lion take her?”

“That silly beast was so overcome he only licked her feet.”

“Still, Fräulein, feet can be very provocative—even for a lion.”

“Ja, I know all about that. Göring showed me paintings. How in the eleventh century women in China bound their feet into little balls so they could put them in their husband’s mouth during passion. But I personally believe that such things are mere illusions. No doubt provocative illusions, Hans. And when there’s a war on, illusion is the last thing we need—though some people would disagree with that. Göring for one. And we know how untrustworthy he’s become. The Führer cured me of fantasy by painting hairy gewgaws on my dressing table. They looked like spiders and I tried to squash them.”

“He tried to trick you into knowing what is false.”

I grin at Hans for his insight. Yes. Adi tricks me into knowing what’s true so should I convince him that he needs to break out and survive in order to “trick” the crazy world into his supreme design? Didn’t he tell me that Napoleon said a general should be a trickster. Yet I hesitate. For Adi will soon be all mine, and I can’t let myself think of him belonging solely to Germany again.

“And have you met the Pope, Fräulein?“ Hans asks. “They say he has a long mouth with a good set of double teeth on top.”

“Who says that?”

“Lieutenant General Baron Van Voorst tot Voorst.”

“What does he know? I’m the one the Führer sent to help prepare the way.”

“You… his… his…”

“Do you want to say mistress? Now you can say fiancée.”

“I’ve always regarded you, Fräulein, as the Führer’s future wife.”

“I appreciate that, Hans.” He’s not telling the truth. No one thought of me as a future wife. It took moving into the Bunker for Adi to know.

“I’ve met many famous persons. General Maximino Comacho, brother of the Mexican president. The Duke and Duchess of Winsor. And I met the Pope in Venice,” I say proudly. “The Führer is grateful for the pontiff’s birthday prayers said for him each year. He’s also pleased that when Coventry and its ancient cathedral were bombed, the Pope didn’t denounce us.”

How impressed my mother was that her little girl met the Pope. It meant a lot to her as she was brought up a strict Catholic. My uncle Werner, her brother, who owns a shoe repair shop, has no use for Catholics who only wear their good pumps to Sunday Mass and seldom have them repaired. Uncle Werner loves Jewish businessmen who stand in their stores all day and wear down the heels of their shoes running back and forth to the bank.

Father works as a teacher and is happy to deal with anybody, even Catholic students and their parents. He never goes to church himself believing that it’s idiotic to trust in someone who is invisible. Perhaps that comes from being around very loud and demanding German housewives.

Adi gave me the temporary title of Assistant to the Administration Office of the German Embassy so I could meet the Pope. I also met a beautiful city called Venice. It’s hard to believe that Musso who is fat and uncouth is from the same country as that lovely, subtle city. I say subtle because of all the footbridges that I ran back and forth on each morning. As the people there are used to tourists, they didn’t even stare at me when I’d press my cheek against sunny old walls.

Venice. All those wispy violet cardinals praying in gondolas. Birds posing like ancient tapestry. Since the city is so rich in past splendor, I was surprised its pieces didn’t seem to fit together. Houses built on bridges, crooked streets running off without apparent form or reason, aimless canals. Even their tea tastes of arrowroot.

As Josef and Magda were reading Goethe’s account of Venice in the book Italian Journey, they wanted me to read it, too, but I preferred to read the city on my feet, following holy processions through the narrow paths beside the canals, buying mounds of green olives that I ate with my fingers from an oily paper cone.

That day we came into Venice on shiny black gondolas—our red and black swastika flags trailing over the water in a fan of triumph—we made Venice wonderfully Germanic. Swaying but standing erect, we sang while floating through canals: “So weit die braune Heide geht… gehort das alles wir…”

Italians gathered in the little squares and alleys smiling and waving at us. I had seen pictures of this city in schoolbooks, but the overripe buildings with narrow windows that smelled of fish were an exotic delight that I would write about in my next letter to Mother. My mutter said she would like to have her fortune told in Venice under the city’s ancient weight of so much richness. Her fortune would prove more prosperous under funny square lamps in wrought-iron brackets.

Josef and Magda bought opium pills coated in gold flakes. The light layered yellow glaze was able to slow down the effects of the pills so the results were dazzlingly timed. While the three of us sat on brocaded cushions in a hotel suite, a hooded young man and a girl in harlequin dress both played lutes and gave us massages using dominoes. Rhythmic dominoes were interchanged so that those prancing in all the orifices of Josef and Magda were also prancing in mine. We three were love gambling right in the middle of a city of old churches, cisterns, and gullibility. Having won over Musso politically, we were now trafficking in his pleasures.

Before we met the Pope, Josef prepared us for this splendor by giving Magda and me each a diamond studded live fish attached to a leash. Strolling along the canals, Magda and I walked our fish like puppies. Later, Josef had them dried, and they became delicate pins with little diamond chips along the fins. Adi hates me in baubles as his mother never could afford so much as a brooch, and he would be horrified that a fish was killed, so I could only wear it when I visited my mother and later I gave it to her as a birthday gift.

Since the Pope was not at the Vatican, we met him in a sumptuous villa along a muddy Venice canal that was the second home of a countess from Bologna. Above the entryway, the villa flew a huge papal white and yellow flag. In all the rooms were roses on the crosses, not the dying body of Jesus. This I found to be more in keeping with Adi’s demand for the removal of conventional crucifixes in Germany. Roses make things less religious. Adi said Bismarck was suspicious of the Catholic religion because of its Jewish foundation.

I wore a navy blue dress with large silver buttons. A Countess Bologna servant gave me a black veil. We were treated quite well by the priests as most of them favored us because we were against the Communists and Freemasons and had “Gott Mit Uns,” God With Us, on our standard infantryman’s belt buckle. When the Pope came in, we genuflected and kissed the ring on his thin and yellow hand as Josef snickered silently observing the satin vestments and enormous retinue of cardinals and prelates hovering around in a manner he claimed was an outrageous show of rubrics. He could smell the inquisition. But I was impressed because before the Pope met us, he only ate a simple lunch of boiled onions in cream sauce that was served to him from a Vatican cook on his knees.

With a flashy poisonous lime skirt and tight white sweater, Magda was dressed inappropriately. White above the waist was her pious concession, a mesh sweater with pointed steeples jutting out. She smelled of DDT powder from dusting her pubic hair to take care of crabs and was often in agony, the itching making her wildly distracted. Maybe that was why she addressed the head of the Catholic Church as Mein Herr Pope and referred to the Virgin Mary reverently as “Mamma Mia.” On her head she wore a simple creamy lace handkerchief over the black veil that was provided by a humpback nun who later sat in sulky silence on the step of a faldstool. In full diplomatic attire, Josef kept his chromium-plated Beretta pistol strapped to his leg, hidden under his trousers. Being ironic, he addressed the Pope as Eure Majestat.

Hoping to confirm the rumor of his double row of teeth, I tried to see the upper mouth of Pius XII. But he had a wart removed from his lip that morning and couldn’t smile and scrunched up his mouth in a menacing twist. Whether it was from pain or from his double row of teeth, I was never able to know.

Josef was grateful to the pontiff for many things—for being pro-Axis, for not being admired in England, for the Concordat, an agreement that ensured the Catholic schools would not teach anything against Nazi authority, and for not protesting Kristallnacht.

As Goebbels would tell us later, “Kristallnacht was a wonderful free shopping orgy. How can anyone possibly fault that?”

“And the Vatican Index forbidding books was an inspiration for us,” I offered.

“Oh, yes,” Goebbels agreed happily.

Still, Adi remained annoyed by His Holiness’ opposition to the mercy killing of the genetically insane, and in 1941 finally ordered the euthanasia program stopped because of pressure from religious leaders. It’s a mystery to me why the Church cares so strongly for people who have no brains. My father worked with a woman whose demented 15-year-old son used to regularly chase the family around the back yard with a hatchet. When the SS came to take the idiot boy away, the family was actually relieved.

H-H, as we came to call His Holiness, was serene and distant. Giving a blessing by passing his hand above us, he silently deliberated over each head as if it were a dish of food for him to judge as edible or not.

Josef gave H-H a gift box of fat beer sausages, two sporting rifles with silver inlay, and one Walther pistol decorated in gold that his cardinals took away silently but with smiling faces. Though Josef hated the Catholics, he was grateful for the Jesuit principles set down by Ignatius Loyola that he imitated when it came time to build the SS.

But when I looked into H-H’s eyes, I saw a dreaminess that had no focus on what Germany hoped to do.

H-H seemed more concerned with froufrou statues and altar cloths than any racial laws. Adi had worried unduly that the Church would show active resistance to him. But I could see the Pope would give us no trouble, and Josef and Magda agreed as we waited on our knees just to hear him say something. Anything. With both his hands held tightly to his stomach, H-H looked as if he were trying to keep the heavy-creamed onions he had for lunch down where they belonged.

Magda presented the Pope with a passionflower, placing it on the floor by his portable throne and saying piously that she would never give one to a Jew as the pistils and stamens resembled the Crucifixion.

Josef broke the silence by thanking the Pope for authorizing birthday greetings to the Führer each year on April 20th.

The Pope said nothing.

“We Germans thank you for the non-interference regarding our bombing of Coventry,” Josef said.

Silence.

“You must keep the Vatican illuminated after dark so that the enemy does not attack your churches.” Josef shifted his weight on one knee.

“We can’t supply light at night as the Führer has yet to occupy the moon,” I announced with a hint of sarcastic humor that made Josef grin.

Silence.

“There is a question, Eure Majestat, regarding that small something that was promised from the Uffizi Museum for the Führer’s Linz collection.”

Silence.

“The shelling in Florence besmirched the Madonna by Arnoldi. I want Eure Majestat to know our soldiers are patrolling the streets for her nose.”

Silence.

The German ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst Von Weizsäcker, announced that our special train was waiting, a train run by two steam locomotives and protected at front and rear by banks of 2-centimetre quick firing antiaircraft guns manned by 26 soldiers. Adi had given us his own Pullman number 10206 with its kitchen and bath car. As we gave our respectful good-byes and reached a door riddled with bullet holes, the Pope suddenly stood, put his red velvet slippers together and swayed, his body totally rigid in a huge sweeping circle. He performed this 180-degree turn in silence three times before stopping, then pranced in a flourish through a long arched hallway.

We never learned what H-H meant. However, being shy, perhaps he was telling us he was ordained to circle not only Venice and the Vatican but the globe as well.

For the journey home, Magda requested a separate train car and had it uncoupled and shunted onto a single track siding so that she and her husband could make noisy love inspired by the Pope. Magda claimed that she did 180 degree turns on Josef’s potency for several hours. When they were finished and rejoined us, the constant jolting of the train on the uneven Italian rails gave me no peace and I did not sleep until we wobbled to a heavily braked stop at the Anhalter Station in Berlin.

Now, all that seems so long ago.

With one child in her arms and four trailing behind, Magda sweeps with a regal grandness into the dining area. Walking noticeably apart is Helga who can’t stand the idea of being one of the brood. Hans stoops to the little ones playfully, moving their hands as he sings,

“Die Fahne hoch

Die Reihen fest geschlossen!

The flags held high,

The ranks stand firm together.”

The children chant, “The flags held high, the flags held high,” as they raise their chubby arms.

Wiping condensation from the metal doorknob with his handkerchief soaked in vinegar, straining to look calm, Adi leaves the map room. Veins on his forehead and temple bulge. His generals are behind him. General Krosigk, a whip hanging from his waist that drags on the floor and tangles between his legs, talks about a new plan for resistance in the lake region of Strausberg as he climbs the spiral iron staircase.

“My generals have undone me,” Adi says growling as he watches them go up the stairs. He gives a forced smile. “Like those silly obese generals in Napoleon’s army who were too fat to ride horses and led the troops in carriages. I should listen to Machiavelli: Guard against generals, do away with them, eliminate their esteem.”

Adi’s generals are skeptical of his military strategy. Generals, he reasons, are ungrateful, their minds on glittering guns, tanks, planes, bombs. They never listen to him. As for their quirks—when things go wrong, he hears from them but never when they get themselves and their troops slaughtered. It’s ridiculous for him to stand in front of such fools. You don’t have a bunch of kids in knee pants telling an experienced teacher like himself how to conduct class. Generals get too much praise that belongs to the trench soldier. Nevertheless, Adi ends his meetings with them asking sensitively about their wives and children and giving their families boxes of chocolates knowing that it’s prudent and off-setting to reward your enemies before your friends. That’s an important part of being the Führer.

He takes a few silent minutes to hate all of his generals, signaled by a series of tiny jerks inside his trouser legs.

Seeing the children, Adi smiles broadly and picks up a ball slick from Bunker dampness. He bounces the ball and sings softly to them: “Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen!… close ranks up tight…” Then he takes out his comb, puts a slip of paper on it and hums, the children humming with him.

As Helga puts her arms around Uncle Führer’s waist, he pats her hair. Taking a sugar cube from his pocket, he lifts Helga’s face, fondles her mouth, parts her lips lovingly to place a sugar cube on her tongue. Is he thinking of Geli?

“Sugar! Sugar! We want sugar,” chant the children, forgetting their humming, their waving fingers frantically clawing at Uncle Führer’s bulging pocket. As he hands out sugar cubes, he also gives one to Magda, Hans, and me. Loudly sucking, Hans speaks about a breakout as he rubs his Gold Wounded Badge (which he was awarded after five injuries) and flexes his chest so that his other medals jingle softly. He reminds me of a skilled piano player who never comes to the end of his keys, who leaves a vague hint of the final note.

“No talk of that in front of the children,” Adi says softly.

Magda hands the crying Heidi to Adi who cuddles the child gently saying: “Engelchen. Little angel. How well you cry.”

“Oh, my, oh, my,” says Hans to the children. “I’ve eaten the wrong end of my sugar cube first. To digest it, I have to get upside down.” He stands on his head and lets his legs slap loudly against the damp wall.

The children scream excitedly. Even Helga leaves Uncle Führer’s side to examine the rush of blood that turns Han’s face bright red. Adi moves the baby’s head to see Hans. Sitting on the floor, Magda smiles in glory as we adore and entertain her children. She uses them for her own vanity.

Adi used to play hopscotch with the children. One of his secretaries who visited New York taught him the game. When he found out hopscotch was once a religious game in which the final square is heaven, Adi forbade the children to ever play it again.

Once Adi was driven to a toy shop followed by scout cars and riflemen on motorcycles. He bought baby booties for Magda’s approaching delivery. Placing one bootie on each of his thumbs, he cooed to them much to the astonishment of the clerk. The next year he bought the children a rocking horse and when the tail was broken, he made one from his belt.

Adi leans down to little Helmut who has a constant running nose. “Now do you know what month it is?”

“April, Uncle Führer.”

“And what comes after April, Helmut?”

“May.”

“Very good. And what comes after May?”

“September, Uncle Führer.”

“Excellent. You’re a bright boy.” Adi straightens, then looks down with pleasure at Helmut’s curly blond hair.

“But Uncle Führer,” Helga says indignantly, “September does not come after May.”

“Helga, sometimes it does.”

Fräulein Manzialy trots in from the kitchen to ask her Führer if he wants the surprise now.

“Surprise! surprise!” the children scream. Falling gracefully to the floor, Hans is forgotten.

“Ja,” Adi says, handing the baby back to Magda. “Bring the surprise.”

As Adi goes to his bedroom, the children follow. But he closes his door on them, and they stand outside pounding and calling, “Uncle Führer. Uncle Führer.” After a few minutes, he opens the door dressed in lederhosen for he wants to be a common man especially with the little ones. Did not the Kaiser wear a gray uniform like an ordinary soldier?

Fräulein Manzialy rattles a saucepan for a dinner bell, then enters with a large glass of buttermilk for Adi, plum juice for the children, warm bread and a tray of corn on the cob, buttered and slippery.

“Corn on the cob. It’s wild food. The Red Skin natives of Canada eat it,” Adi tells us while adding three spoons of sugar to his buttermilk.

“But so do the Americans.” Magda is reluctant to touch a cob.

“Americans only eat from tin cans,” Helga corrects.

Adi forms a caricatured smile.

“It’s American Indians who eat it,” I add.

“We would do well to study such Indian skills of warfare.” Hans eats a slice of bread as he carefully eyes the corn. “I’ve researched how Americans killed their Indian inferiors. And how their plantation owners ghettoized black people.”

“American plantation owners? I’ve heard they were stupid,” Magda says.

“Plantation owners in antebellum South were known to conjugate Latin verbs.” Adi’s head is down isolating his face. A gentle man who wouldn’t even harm a dish, he moves his palm like a caress over the bowl and anyone seeing such a sweet gesture could not help but love corn.

“Latin has to be better than their awful American slang.” Looking intently at her corncob, Magda smiles.

“I hear their great hero, Frank Sinatra, didn’t weigh enough to make the draft, Mein Führer,” Hans offers.

“We have little to learn from Americans themselves.” Taking a napkin with faded beet marmalade stains, Adi puts it carefully by his plate. “The English are another matter. Their industrial leaders through the years have developed a superior base. And I am sorry that I have not managed to bring the English and German people together… though we started out with promise.”

“Didn’t Lloyd George give you a signed photograph of himself?” Hans asks.

“It read: ‘To Chancellor Hitler, in admiration of his courage, his determination and his leadership,’” I recite proudly.

Adi looks at me pleased.

Not to be outdone, Magda chirps: “Henry Ford admired you as well, Mein Führer.”

“Because I’ve always known that America’s outstanding achievement is technology.”

“Of course Ford was smart enough to be an anti-Semite,” Hans adds.

“Didn’t you once wish to make an alliance with America’s Ku Klux Klan?” Magda asks.

“The Klan was not political enough,” I tell her.

Helmut is making little soft balls of bread and using the crust to build a fort, his running nose snorting. The other children are restless and sip at their juice making loud smacking sounds. Helga looks at the Führer with adoration.

“I have no respect for U.S. troops. They like all the comforts of home at war. They’ve dishonored the influence of Baron von Steuben who was George Washington’s drillmaster. West Point used to have the spirit of von Steuben.” Adi finishes his buttermilk in one long gulp.

“I’m mostly interested in America’s Civil War, especially the details of Stonewall Jackson’s maneuvers in the Shenandoah Valley,” Hans says.

“Yes, yes. I have studied their Civil War.” Adi picks up a crust from Helmut’s bread-fort and chews it briskly.

“But look how idiotic they are now. FDR wants to drop thousand of bats over Tokyo to frighten the Japanese.” Hans hisses between his teeth in disgust.

“The bats died in transit.” Adi frowns for even an animal like a bat deserves respect.

“The Americans have so much space in their country, why do they want to come here?” I ask.

“A country never has enough space,” Hans answers.

“Anglo orchestras are not performing the great Wagner but play silly songs as… ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas.’” Magda begins singing in a throaty tone while looking knowingly at Hans.

“Nobody orders sauerkraut in the U.S.” I’m eager to show that I’m keeping up with the news. “And the Allies go around kicking dachshunds.”

Adi finds this hard to believe.

Picking up a cob, Hans asks, “You just bite at it, Mein Führer?”

“Do you have false teeth?”

“I’m twenty-eight, Mein Führer.” His face tenses in disbelief as he flexes his fingers anxiously.

Adi notices minor mannerisms in people. Looking at the pilot’s twitching hands he asks: “Are you impatient with me?”

“Oh, no, Mein Führer.”

“General Weidling can’t eat a corncob. Nubby bits of husk get under his upper plate. I had hoped he would give up meat as he has to use a spoon for every manner of eating. I try to keep his suffering in mind.”

“How unfortunate for Herr Weidling, a man so refined and appreciative of Wagner,” Magda says.

I report without thinking, “After his nephew’s plane went down, Göring was plagued with toothaches.”

“Toothaches? Even in a castle?” Magda asks slyly.

“He does like staying in medieval places. It was fun to visit him at Castle Veldenstein.”

“Göring is no longer my concern,” Adi interrupts without emotion.

Butter glows on the cobs as I realize I’ve said the wrong thing. How happy Magda must be.

“Those awful green elk-skin jerkins with leather yellow buttons that Göring wears. And his silly scarlet sword belt inlaid with gold.” Magda giggles. “He has more electric train sets than my children.”

“Not now,” I add. “Not since you only let the children take one toy with them.”

Magda’s face flushes in anger. “Something that awful Hermann would say.”

“Enough about Hermann Göring,” Adi snaps. “He’s not relevant.”

“Musical corn,” Hans says, chomping rhythmically and attempting to change the subject. He holds the cob respectfully.

“Corn and music are necessary opposites,” Adi says.

Adi puts a cob in each of the children’s hands, even the baby. Only able to suck the oil, the baby licks the grease as light yellow spit drips into runnels down her fat neck.

Two furry rats scurry along the wall, and I’m thankful Magda and the children can’t see them. To hear their infantile screams is aggravating.

Adi puts his teeth on the tender golden nubs to show the children how to eat it. They laugh, smearing the rare and hard-to-find creamy butter on their chins. Little wattles of yellow get wedged between their teeth. Helga looks like a squirrel munching and chewing. I smile. But Helga won’t be laughed at. Not since her monthlies began. She’s a woman. Throwing the cob down, she frowns at me. Adi puts his arm around Helga and lets her nibble from his own cob. Side by side, their lips move slowly along the yellow grist.

“Chew briskly,” Adi tells the children. “Chew manly. Teeth should chomp in d-major.” Taking exaggerated mouthfuls, I see his bleeding gums. As they make loud crunchy sounds, the children chuckle. He takes a napkin and with a magic touch folds it into a toy dog with jaws.

“You’re orchestrating the music of digestion. Make symphonies, my little ones.” His napkin-puppet slides the cob from Helga’s lips and tosses the yellow carcass on the table.

Helga hasn’t forgiven me for laughing at her. Sitting close to Adi, she refuses to glance in my direction. I don’t like her getting all Adi’s attention, not so close to my wedding day. I’ve been good to Helga, taking care of her when she got a sore throat last week, making a compress by stuffing oats in a wool stocking to lay on her throat, helping Fräulein Manzialy simmer soup for her like my mother used to make, hot milk with semolina. We added bits of horsemeat, but I would never tell Adi. Horses are very precious to him.

Magda triumphs in Helga’s hold on the Führer, placing the youngest on a blanket so they both can look up at him with admiration. Underneath her skirt, large thighs are folded in a hollow dip between her legs as she sits on the floor. It’s rumored that Dr. Morell enlarged her labium for she has the biggest crotch I’ve ever seen, and Hans’ eyes stare longingly at this hollow that Dr. Morell said was already so huge a baby could wiggle out feet first.

Magda also has rutty noises when she makes love, she confides, little belches due to her excessive vagina. Dr. Morell keeps her up to date with these medical side effects because of his research on the rabbits of Ravensbrück.

Göring tells me hundreds dip into Magda’s waters daily but not one has an idea. What does it matter when handsome men in heavy reindeer-skin coats gravitate to her? Long automatics in black leather sheaths send her into uncontrollable craving. Taught the pleasures of the body by hummingbirds, she imagines long spouts penetrating her flower.

Partial to our elite ski units, she reminds me that a ski trooper covers more ground in the winter than an infantry soldier in the summer. Magda likes men who cover large territories. Last winter, Captain Helwig Vielwerth came skiing to the Berghof wearing his sweater with a German Eagle and swastika on the front, an officer who uses adjutants to caddy his skis up the mountain. The first to greet him, Magda held out a mug of hot chocolate with whipped cream as she took the situation map from the Herr Captain that he’d been ordered to give Bormann. Soon Magda and Helwig were on the slopes together for hours, Magda using a pair of special white skis that her husband took from a shipment destined for our soldiers in Russia. She adored making love in the snow, but only when there wasn’t any wind chill. It was frigid enough without the howling gales and rustic enough being ravished by the swirl of careless white flaky snow. She didn’t like her eyes getting red rimmed from the cold, but it was worth it when she saw the captain trail-reading noiselessly for uncharted paths, his toe-binding making it easy to kick off his skis quickly as soon as he found a protected spot to lay her down. But keeping his skis on was her suggestion as that’s the way she liked it. Bending before her, he would crouch as before an inviting hill, and she’d open her long fur jacket so he could enter her vigorously—just as he would enter the pathless wilds. Helwig is an expert in terrain skills and knew all the ways of winding through a forest, moving through any woods as smoothly as in the open landscape. Her pubes would get little frozen skin patches, and he’d sweetly tap her frostbit mound to make a clinking sound… clink… clink… clink. This would inflame them with added desire, and they’d go on and on until his yank cramped and the slopes became dim from the setting sun. Magda was rewarded with hundreds of snow fleas jumping from one of her thighs to the other.

Magda teaches me much about lust, how desire sneaks up capturing the skin. On visiting a hospital a year after the war started, I was embraced by a major with no arms who had sulfanilamides dusted over his entire body along with greasy unguents. His doctor told him he could do anything any man could do… go down on a woman… stand shoulder to shoulder with the Luftwaffe… smoke a cigar. Having never met Adi, the major had been on the Führer’s Autobahnen so much he felt personally close to him. Looking at this poor wounded warrior, I remembered Adi telling me about Napoleon who placed his hand on the plague-stricken sick in a hospital at Jaffa. So I patted the major and put a single white carnation behind his ear so touched by how neatly his empty sleeves were folded. To thank me he used his shoulders as limbs and gave me a mystical clasp. It’s strange, but I suddenly felt the sensation of the scalpel that entered his wounds, wounds he said that were washed in wine on the battlefield because wine was all they had. In that mystical hug, I experienced his open flesh as it received the knife. That armless embrace was so spiritual and yet so full of appetite that I had to rush home to ease myself. Taking off the white “sulfur dress,” I rubbed it back and forth between my legs as I do with a Mauser. I have my own Mauser just like soldiers on leave are required to carry all the time (though it wasn’t until General Krebs’ pistol practice that I learned its proper use).

That “sulfur dress” reminds me of silly Saint Catherine of Sienna who the nuns talked about when I was in school, the saint who saved pus from the lesions of dying women and kept it in bowls all around her. To show humility, Catherine drank the drainage. Even as a child, I’ve always thought this really proved nothing as humility is of no value, certainly not in times of war. Rubbing against a dress drenched in sulphur makes more sense.

Springing up from the table, Adi tires of the children and returns to the map room. The baby cries for him as he leaves. General Krebs has just arrived, and there will soon be heated arguments. I will record everything carefully as I always do though Goebbels continually tells me that my scribblings are not my duty as he is recording everything in a journal that’s been photographed onto glass plates and carefully stored away.

“Are you writing in third person… like Caesar?” Goebbels asks.

“I’m writing in intimate person… like me.”

“You can’t achieve distance that way.”

“I achieve tenderness that way.”

I know my memoir has emotions in it as well as loving details. Only I can record all the many sensitive qualities of the Führer. But I do wonder… what will happen to these pages?

A small sandbox Magda made for the children is under the staircase. Nobody knows this, but when the children are sleeping, I go there and draw what I’ve heard to visualize rearguard movement, group formations, the taking of bridges, mountain attacks. Battle strategy doesn’t bore me at all. And I focus on Germany’s great victories. I wouldn’t want Adi to find out I wasn’t respectful of his triumphs.

Finally wrenching his eyes away from Magda’s crotch, Hans stands. “I have wounded to fly out. Please, consider this last chance when we’re still able to reach the Pichelsdorf bridge.”

Magda waves him off with her soft glossy hand. Drenched in cream, she’s taken time to moisten her hands sometime between Hans’ entrance and her children’s napping. With so much rationing, Magda never has trouble finding lotion. She directs Josef’s orderlies (she calls them coat-carriers) to go out and look for any line to stand in telling them it’s not important what might be at the other end. Hopefully there’s perfume. One captain brought in some gold dust he found, and Magda ate it with her morning bowl of millet. She expected golden stools. The gold dust only gave her diarrhea and stunk up the place. Circulation is not always good, and we in the Bunker are mad for perfume. I usually rub against a block of wild juniper for a more natural scent that Adi appreciates.

“I have five Fieseler-Storch airplanes,” Hans announces.

“Are those the ones with open cockpits? Josef would never approve. Not for the children.” Magda pulls the baby close to her breast.

“There’s room for two children on your lap. Me in front. Two on Fräulein Braun’s lap in another plane. Two with my aide Colonel Beetz in another. Three planes for the Führer, his clothing, paintings…”

“The Führer has given orders that high ranking personnel are only to fly in aircraft with at least three engines.” Hair frizzy from the Bunker dampness frames Magda’s face. Frizzy hair makes her cheeks look puffed. I notice thin little squint lines by her eyes.

“But my planes can take off and land in meadows, if need be.”

“How safe can that be?” Magda moves so that her large crotch no longer shows. Hans is bereft.

“My full concern is for Mein Führer, you, the children, Fräulein Braun…”

“My husband?” Her lips turn down in that taunting way she uses to be coy.

“Herr Bormann, too.”

“Herr Bormann?” Magda chuckles. “He can carry the Führer’s Iron Cross on his lap.”

“Talk to her,” Hans says to me in a desperate tone. The crotch that just disappeared could possibly disappear forever. He holds a list of all the Bunker people who will fly to the Berghof as soon as the Führer orders a breakout.

“The children will be quite safe here,” I answer, almost believing it.

“We’re surrounded. If the Ivans find such women as yourselves…”

“What will they do to me?” Magda teases.

Hans looks at her tenderly, his lust momentarily forgotten. “They will instruct beauty.”

“You’re such a silly poet. And just when I wanted something more… graphic.”

“At the Weisser Krug Inn, women were raped by the Russians and nailed through their breasts to the walls. At the Roter Krug Inn in Gumbinnen, the same thing. Frau Goebbels, I’ve ordered a barge near your island estate. With plenty of food. Go there and hide. I’ll come and fly you out to Switzerland.”

Helmut jumps up and down in a pair of German boots that have springs in the soles for leaping over trenches. Two children are naked and jumping in water wiggles seeping from the scabby walls. They begin to fight. Separating them, Hans bounces Heidi on his back galloping to Magda’s side.

“Do this horse a favor,” he pleads. “Let me fly you out.”

Magda pats his pony head. “You can trot the children to their room. It’s bath time.”

“All of you, on my back,” he calls. Giggling children squeeze on Der Chef Pilot’s back, one on his neck and little Helmut bouncing and holding the end of his uniform like a tail. Sitting in a corner staring in disgust is Helga.

As I help unbutton the children’s clothes, Hans carries water to a tub.

Helga sits on a chair with her legs tightly crossed.

“Is the half-wit pilot going to live here?” Helga asks.

“Of course not,” I say.

“Of course not,” Hans repeats, saluting the children playfully. “I have wounded to fly out of Berlin.”

“What kind of wounded,” Helga asks.

“Men who have fought bravely for their country.”

“What kind of wounds?”

“No need for that,” Magda says, straddling the baby on her ample hip.

“I want to know,” Helga says.

“No, dear. It’s unnecessary.” Magda puts the baby on a cot. The children have little cots just like soldiers.

“I have a right to know. I’m a woman now.”

“That you are,” Magda agrees proudly.

“Tell me, then!”

“What is it you wish to know, dear?”

“Do brains pop out when soldiers get shot?“

Magda signals for Hans to answer.

“Jawohl.”

“How far?”

“If a man is shot in the head…” Hans begins looking nervously at Magda.

“How do people look when they’re bombed,” Helga interrupts.

“They get roasted purple and shrink to half their size.” Hans is seized with an honesty sanctioned by truth. He hopes this morbid account will help his demands for a breakout.

“And little kids? Like my brother and sisters? How do they look when they’re bombed?”

“I saw a direct hit on a school, and the children were fried in water pouring from a blasted boiler.”

“Fried like sausages?“

“Often, that’s so.” Der Chef Pilot looks hesitantly at Magda, but she’s only smiling in complete acceptance.

“But the brains remain gooey?” Helga asks.

“How do you mean?”

“Like pudding. And don’t try to make things better.” Staring boldly, Helga only allows herself to blink in careful determination.

“Yes. It’s pudding,” Magda says in a patronizing voice. “But what else, dear, would you expect brains to be? Made of granite? Then how could you hold up your lovely head?”

“Or toss your pretty little curls back and forth,” Hans adds.

“That reminds me, I must fix your hair. It’s really out of control.” Magda moves towards her daughter.

“Only Uncle Führer knows how to fix my hair.”

“May your mother help, the mother who loves you so much?”

“A mother who is beautiful as well,” Hans adds.

“You’re both treating me like a baby. When does Uncle Führer get finished with his meeting?”

“You know he’s never really finished, Helga.” I place my arm on her thin shoulder.

“Can’t I help you, dear? Just this once?” asks Magda.

“Uncle Führer is the only one with any sense around here.”

“Is that the way to speak to your mother?” Hans asks.

“Stay out of this, please, Herr Baur.” Removing my arm from Helga’s shoulder, Magda brings the girl closer to her side.

“I don’t want to be babied, mother.” Helga pushes away and sits defiantly on her cot.

“Your mutter is only trying to assist you,” Hans offers.

“Der Chef Pilot should concern himself with propellers—not little girls.” Magda sits on the cot protectively next to her daughter.

“I’m not a little girl,” Helga shouts, jumping up. The children stop playing with a wooden car on the floor and gawk curiously at their sister.

“We know you’re not a little girl,” I say remembering how she took in everything at the shelter orgy.

“What do you know? You don’t even have any kids,” Helga shouts.

“Is that the way to speak to Fräulein Braun?” Hans asks.

“Der Chef Pilot should not be telling my daughter how and how not to speak.”

“I’m only attempting to help,” Hans offers. His tight lantern face lifts upward in authority.

“Help? You can’t even get my stupid mother on your silly airplane because my baby sister won’t eat her in your dumb contraption,” Helga says.

“Breast feeding is not eating your mother,” I correct.

“This little brat needs a spanking.” Hans is now angry.

“Don’t any of you touch me,” Helga screams. “Lay a hand on me, I’ll tell Uncle Führer.”

Suddenly, Adi is standing in the doorway. “What’s going on here?” he asks sternly.

“They’re a bunch of idiots.” Helga runs to Adi’s open arms.

“There, there,” Adi says, stroking her head and looking at the other children. He’s happy seeing his Nazikinder, his wonderful blond Nazi children.

“Morons. All of them.” Helga whines, her face buried in his tunic.

“There, there,” Adi whispers, looking at us with a knowing smile. “Perhaps you would like to take a little rest in Uncle Führer’s room, my schönheit. My beauty.”

“Can I?”

“Only during my situation briefing with General Krebs.”

“That old stink-pot!”

“Helga! Don’t talk like that in front of the Führer.” Magda is finally upset.

“She’s quite right. He’s a stink-pot,” says Adi.

“See. I told you so.”

“Still, you must wait until I finish with him,” Adi says.

“Will you come in and fix my hair? Like you always do?”

“Der Führer is much too busy for that,” I say.

“There are a few minutes here and there,” Adi offers. His patience and loving pats make me envious.

Holding Helga’s hand, Adi leaves. The hair net she wears to be grown up is tight and mashes down her golden curls so she appears bald. The little bald lady looks back at us smirking. Magda cherishes those smirks, her glory transparent as her daughter goes to the Führer’s room to lie on his bed and wait for him.

“Now there’s your answer,” Magda tells Der Chef Pilot. She picks up a popular children’s book titled Mama, Tell Me about Hitler to read to the children.

Hans looks sadly after his Führer who left without addressing the breakout. Saying nothing, he leaves the room for the iron staircase. I watch him slowly spiral to the top.

After Adi settles Helga in his bed, he’ll go to the bathroom and swab his buttocks with antiseptic lotion because he leaned against the map table. Who knows what his generals bring in from the war?

It’s disturbing to the Führer to think in terms of negotiating a truce. Hess’ maneuver in May of 1941, flying off to try and make peace, is a stupid act that has nothing to show for itself but the wreckage of a perfectly good Messerschmitt and his imprisonment. His wife influenced him, trying to make Hess a hero with his flying stunts and war record. She did it hoping he’d get special treatment after the war from the Allies.

Maybe Hans’ plan for a breakout from the Bunker is another crazy Hess idea.

The Russians are close and fighting on top is fierce. As a Catholic schoolgirl I was taught that St. Thomas Aquinas pronounced war perfectly acceptable when waged for the right reason. He seems the only smart saint. His wisdom soothes me though Adi hates religion and its false concepts.

Adi’s spirits go up and down so rapidly these days that I try to think of something other than battlefields. War hinders pleasant thoughts. Yet Adi is near me, and that’s what is important. I’m mistress of this Bunker and have furnished our home and done little things for him that would be impossible to do if we weren’t hunkered down below. Simple things that one might find silly. Like taking shells apart to decorate picture frames. Sometimes I imagine I smell new lumber and fresh varnish the way a bride might smell in her new house in another time. I look at white concrete and try to see golden pine and cushioned window seats of creamy velvet. That’s idle dreaming like those elegant patisserie shops I long for on Kurfürstendam or the Schlosscafe with plenty of schnapps and jolly waitresses. When will I ever see my Adi at the Berghof in his short leather pants and Bavarian hat with its saucy little feather? With the sound of stags rutting, we would amble with Blondi, Negus, and Stasi, pausing by the marsh marigolds, the daisies, and the pink sweet peas as trees exposed their crotches to us wantonly. Grasshoppers would snap their wings like a Nazi salute as we walked by. The dogs tried to catch the play of sunlight on the leaves of mountain maples, Stasi leaping like a greyhound. I’d pick purple asters and pin them in my hair while Adi told me Mozart was influenced by birdsongs. And in the winter months, Adi would kneel before “frost flowers” marveling in their petals of flat ice crystals. What happened to those times?

After several hours, Magda and I sneak into my room and peer through the half opened connecting door to see Adi and Helga on his bed. She calls him the “pigtail king” for only he can put five perfect pigtails in her hair. Removing her hairnet, he carefully parts the golden mop of curls into five sections and twists them into little braids. As she nuzzles her head in his lap, he tells her the story about finding an orphan puppy that he had to feed with a little tube of milk. She leaps up and sucks on Adi’s ear wanting to be fed like the doggy. After she slurps loudly for a full ten minutes, Adi mumbles Brahms’ “Lullaby”:

Guten Abend, gute Nacht,

Mit Roslein bedacht,

Mit Näglein besteckt.

Schlupf’ unter die Deck.

Adi leaves for the map room steering a sated Helga to her bedroom. As she goes happily to her cot, Magda follows and I’m left alone in the dining room thinking: Was I ever like Helga? Could I have ever been so awkward and childish? So skinny and silly?

I imagine myself as a little girl burying my face in Adi’s waist, my hands innocently around his thighs. My fingers find his pleasure, and I make him happy not even knowing it.

But who wants to be a child? It will soon be my wedding night. But I worry… is Hans right? Should we stage a breakout? Perhaps after we’re man and wife? But Adi tells me he has other plans.

Wearing riding breeches and carrying a whip under his arm, Josef Goebbels comes from the map room walking erect in his leather jacket with silver armbands that now look like the color of concrete. His face is bloated red with rage so that the pox scars on his cheeks are clearly visible. He has high blood pressure and when agitated, which is mostly every day, he becomes scarlet down to his scrawny neck. As the doctor has no patience with so ordinary an affliction, Dr. Morell injects him with a sterling silver syringe for everything but blood pressure.

It’s obviously not going well in the map room. It never goes well these days.

“Is he shouting?” I ask.

“That a man like the Führer has to shout after suffering the horrors of Dresden. Think of it, bombing a city that’s a showcase of historic treasures. Is that what Churchill calls civilization? Our children are singing,

“Mein vater ist in Krieg

My mother is in Dresden

Dresden ist abgebrannt

Dresden is burnt down.”

He rubs his sweaty forehead and then scratches his tense neck. He tells me his voice is strained as he just gulped undiluted adrenalin for energy.

I think of the Dresden vase in my bedroom at the Berghof falling and breaking into pieces, and the Rilke line Goebbels often quotes: “Be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.”

“Why are you smiling?” he asks.

“We Germans will ring as we shatter.”

“You remembered Rilke.”

“You’re the one who gave me my Rilke lessons.”

“Poets will remember our Führer. But will the common worker also realize how great he is?” Goebbels asks.

“Most German houses still have Führer niches in their bedrooms, little Führer-altars with paper roses and his portrait. Though badly damaged, the Wertheim Department Store sells glass frame photos of Hitler.”

“Ach ja! As they should,” he tells me.

“Remember how Magda always played gramophone records of the Führer’s monologues after dinner? At the Berghof?”

“Now those gramophone records lie smashed at our bombed Brown House in Munich,” he tells me. “Oh, Eva, there was a time I only worried about rectal bleeding. There was a time I thought only of making strong ties to England so that we could intimidate France.”

“How glorious when we put all our occupied countries on Berlin time. I’d sit on the grass at the Berghof thinking, ‘Paris is exactly now.’”

“Yes, my dear girl, the glorious days of the Berghof. Sometimes the Führer would talk to the village people… coming out the side door on an afternoon in his gray, chalk-striped suit… smiling, shaking hands… accepting flowers.”

The Berghof. Dürer’s The Violet in a simple silver frame on the wall. The plain Landhaus country style furniture Adi loves. Sitting on the terrace, the smell of wild morning glories, the sound of shuffling cards. Playing Ping-Pong as we sang Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy,” drinking, laughing, a canary in the cage, the wind a gentle comb to our hair. Mountain knapweed, thimbleberry shrubs, lanterns hanging in the trees. Paths scattered with moon spots and balsam fir. Nature bursting into color like a violent fire. I fought all the wrens for the best blueberries. Ilse Hess would take off her ruby rings one by one (each the size of a parrot’s perch) before playing Bach’s “D-Minor toccata” on the baby grand piano for the Reichstag deputies. Leaving the gold leaf dinner table, Adi would throw a flower to one of the ladies.

“We occupied Athens as the frightened women washed their icons in wine. Their prime minister committed suicide,” I announce proudly.

“Now they’re singing and tearing up occupation money in Athens, and I’m establishing a Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance. But let’s drink to good memories.”

There’s the smell of bland spit and damp leather in Goebbels’ office. He shoves aside papers he tells me were taken from American dispatch riders, papers that will never be evaluated. A bar of Lux soap is on top of a file cabinet stuffed with interviews of Germans repatriated from America. Pouring two drinks in glasses rimmed with specks of faded gold, he says the Americans are occupying Aachen where his mother is buried. He remembers the letter of condolence from Adi when she died, the most sensitive letter ever written about the death of a mother—telling him soon his agony would dissolve into the glorious despair of remembering.

Now… Josef’s hometown, Rheydt, with his dear childhood house on Dahlener Strasse, was handed over to the Americans without a fight.

The concrete seems to sweat more in this room, rivulets clinging and streaking the walls as if even concrete knows where the most important people gather. Goebbels takes a full gulp emptying his glass and pouring another. He talks about the old days, how he marched with workmen, side by side, holding up shining shovels that his adjutant polished like the brass buttons on his jacket, marching brother to brother. Oh, how he loved mingling with the masses, he, who came from their social class but was now a man of letters—a doctor from the University of Würzburg, his diploma with rite superato—singing with people who didn’t know the Mann brothers from any man. Then the Führer passed the Enabling Act dispensing with parliamentary government and in a single stroke brought the workers to prominence. But the trade unions ruined that. Unions getting money from Russia became enemies of the Reich. Moscow gold invaded us. Then we got saddled with too many stupid war generals… such as Rommel, who was like some old medieval manuscript full of errors, superstitions and silly customs. Montaigne’s words are a prediction from the past: “One ought to fear the generals more than the enemy.”

Tears are in Goebbels’ eyes as he tells me how he visited the grave of Adi’s mother two years ago. He arrived in Leonding not far from Linz and stood in that solemn village cemetery where the Führer’s mother rests for eternity. He was overcome with wonder at the humble tombstone that covered the mother of such a genius and recited John Donne’s poem before her grave:

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful

For thou art not so.”

Since then, he keeps a picture of her grave on his desk remembering her cancer and the words of Tolstoy that a woman who has never been ill is a monster. And that’s why he dislikes that American artist Whistler whose famous painting of his mother has the folds of her gown looking very sinister.

After visiting Klara’s grave, he went to the Führer’s boyhood home, picked leaves off the maple trees in the yard as the little Adolf might have done as a child, to make a bouquet to place before the house. Then he stood there inhaling the air of Linz before eating a haunch of wild boar at the Weinzinger Hotel.

Herr Doktor Goebbels waved a carpenter’s apron like a flag with his own hands in all the glory of the people. Those wonderful days when the German workers knew who loved them. He once backed a Communist up against the wall and gave him a bloody nose. He’d done it all for Germany and asked for nothing but poetry in return as he is “Kunstmensch”—a man of art. All those glorious meals at the Horcher restaurant where the Führer had talked to him of Linz. All those stirring chats about Napoleon who admired the silk weavers of Lyon, who built porcelain workshops, encouraged furniture designers, protected historical buildings. How was it possible that a Frenchman so full of pain and so squat and peculiar looking could be so marvelous? The Herr Doktor stops talking abruptly and stares at me. “Napoleon said he wanted to marry a womb. The Führer and I understand that’s the only way for a soldier. Yes, we know what it takes. Our Führer used to carry Schopenhauer in his greatcoat pocket all through the First War. Now he carries Nietzsche.”

Magda nearly divorced Josef embarrassed by the mistresses her husband flaunted on Baldur, his white motor yacht where he poured cheap wine into carefully dusted bottles of Chateau d’Yquem 1910 and gave the women perfume stockpiled from occupied Paris with strange names like Je Reviens. Magda got so angry she couldn’t endure Josef’s presence in the same café. So they divided Berlin’s restaurants between them. Adi put a stop to that and gave Josef a strong lecture on his obligations to the Reich. Off limits were the actresses Jenny Jugo, Luise Ullrich and Lida Baarová. Josef Goebbels had to meekly ask Madga’s forgiveness. Then he gave the Führer a gift of 18 Mickey Mouse films along with Der Schneemann, the cartoon Snowman by Hans Fischerkoesen, as they share a great love of cinematic art. In return, Adi gave Josef an armored Mercedes with bulletproof windows, especially pleased after Goebbels led Brownshirts to see the movie All Quiet on the Western Front and released white mice in the aisles. People ran out of the theatre screaming, and the film was suppressed.

“Where did you get the white mice?” I asked.

“Shipped direct from the old Knickerbocker Hotel off Times Square in New York.”

“Be serious.”

“Ratten hinaus! Donated by the science labs at Dachau where rats are kept.”

“Why Dachau?”

Goebbels has a policy of ignoring questions he doesn’t wish to answer. “I’ve always been careful with film. Enemies can easily hide there. I wrote to six American movie companies with offices in Berlin ordering an immediate dismissal of all Jews working for them—to stamp out that Friedrichstrasse crowd. I consider myself an advocate for natural culture.”

“Did you demand Proof of Descent from every film actress? Even the ones of a more personal interest?”

Again he ignores my question. “It’s always so pleasant to be with you, Eva.”

“I never congratulated you for getting an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau.”

“I get many honorary doctorates, my dear.”

“Is that why you insist on people calling you Herr Doktor?”

“Doktor G will do, though pretty girls can continue with Josef, of course.” His look is outright jaunty.

“You know what some of your men call you?”

“Gobbespierre. After Robespierre.” He smiles. “Though I’d never admit it, I find that dashing.”

“They say you spend your time with literary chauffeurs.”

“Who is they?”

“Bormann.”

“What do you expect from an illiterate?” He suddenly looks down at his feet. “Eva, tell me honestly. Have you secretly despised me?” Running his fingers through his thin hair, he touches my arm to show that he now wishes to be more personal.

“Never,” I lie.

“Even a little? For not serving in World War I? For this tedious lament I carry around for the humble Russian soul? The very country that wants to eat us up. Do you hate me for being a cripple?”

“I never think of that.” But I do.

“I like a little bitterness with everything. I’ve been with women in Africa who have tattooed breasts. Some with two toes. Split feet are admired in many tribes.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m the propaganda minister, am I not?”

I know that if Adi has only one man left, Josef will be the one.

“Let me show you.” Before I can demure, he unlaces his shoe, and I see the soft, pink deformed foot so sly and shifty it makes me think of that wobbly soft bunch inside his underwear. “Do you find it ugly?” he asks. He sees that I hesitate. “At what point do we declare something beautiful? Was all that scratching on cave walls deliberately made to be beautiful? You may prefer the normal or the regular, Evie, but Kant tells us that we instinctively look for form in whatever we behold. Even this. My foot is an aesthetic lesson.”

In between her lovers, Magda uses this “aesthetic” appendage often, claiming his deformity as a tool to pry her wider. That opening which issued six babies into the world hardly needs to be stretched.

Adi, who informs me repeatedly about the best and brightest future race, won’t acknowledge Goebbels’ deformed stem. “Look in any alley,” Adi says talking about everyday people who limp and lope through life, “good common Germans.” But must Goebbels be short as well? Is that why the Herr Doktor likes Russian literature so much? He can hide in the wide tall sweep of Russian characters.

“I was once temporarily impotent,” Goebbels confesses. “I went to a Buddhist temple and was told to have my penis bitten by a wasp. An old Buddhist custom. It did take care of the matter.”

“Was it painful?“

“On the contrary, though it did burst a blood vessel. But that’s all over with. Even my tapeworm is gone. Do you remember the party at the Sans Souci Hotel when I gave the Führer all those Donald Duck films?”

“But Josef, you told me yourself that silly Mr. Disney erased all the udders from cows in his cartoons.”

“He was quite right to do so. We must think of our children.”

“I would rather see films with real people. Real people don’t turn on their axis. Real people aren’t jumping mushrooms, spiderwood faces, purple cornflower horses, leaves with bloodless veins.”

“I adore fantasy, Eva. After all, I live in the country of the Brothers Grimm. I prefer the natural literature of the people, the Volkspoesie like the Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmärchen for the children. But remember, all those people in the Grimms’ tales acquired methods of thievery.”

“Only against monsters and witches.”

“Ah, then you do know the Grimms.”

“Adi loves fantasy and cartoons. So I have to be familiar with them. But those things are why he hates to dance, and I’m forced to waltz with doorknobs.”

“Das Lech is why he hates to dance, my dear.”

“I’d hold him so tightly not a drop of his essence would dare leak away.”

“Dancers are considered traitors.”

“Not unless they jitterbug.”

“Dance—and one forgets the war, Eva.”

“I would think it’s helpful to forget the war from time to time.”

“If it’s so helpful, waltz with me. Here. Now.” He gives off a forced Bohemian flair.

“There’s no music.”

“There’s imposed realism.” Goebbels takes my hand and begins to sing softly, “Es wird ein Wunder Geschehen.” It’s the popular inspirational song being sung these days… “A miracle will happen.”

“When will it happen?” I chant back.

“Miracles take time.”

17

SINCE ADI HATES TO DANCE, I see no reason to refuse Josef. We float around his office desk that is really a butcher-block table from the burnt out Rheingold Restaurant that once held dissected chickens and slippery ducks coated in oil. Now instead of hens, it holds cluttered requisitions for supplies that are nowhere to be found. I’m lighter on my feet than Magda, and he can move closer to me as my breasts are small, firm and resilient. He does lean against my orbs that become soft claws. Feeling a sense of modest revenge, I think of Magda and her little double, Helga, and beg him to tell me about his mistresses, all those actresses. He gave them up for a short while at the Führer’s insistence. But he couldn’t stay away from them, and Adi had to announce that a wife should not be annoyed over anyone as silly as an actress. If I were one, Goebbels might forget himself. But I’m Eva Braun.

“My actresses cry out in passion with a chaotic welter of so many voices and with such projection,” he brags. “Each has her own special nostrum.”

Josef wants to kiss me. It’s quite all right, we’re comrades, are we not? We love the same man. What is a simple moment in the eternal? He takes nothing from the Führer who never kisses.

Adi won’t kiss me on the mouth as he’s kissed no one on the mouth except his mother because the tongue can have a yellow coating indicating bacteria or cracks across the width revealing loss of nutrients—teeth marks along the edges mean bad digestion. My Adi can’t know what’s under the tongue, wet and hiding. As a boy, he saw a prostitute in Linz stooped in the shadows and shining a flashlight on her legs. Leering at him, she tried to get the few coins in his pocket that he thoughtlessly rattled as he walked. The prostitute then shined the light on her mouth and lifted her chunky tongue and he saw parasites there—tiny swarming parasites nesting in a cove of glistening pink. Two entire chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to the evils of such women.

Josef says I’m silly to think he’d desire anything but the mouth beneath my nose. He simply wants me to kiss back and is patient. He uses his two bony fingers to purse my lips, then gives me a quick peck.

Afterward, my lips droop. Positioning his thin lips against mine again, he tries for a longer press. Different rhythms and pressures will sort out the superior ones. It’s scientific selection. When he sticks his thick tongue into my mouth, wiggling it, nearly gagging me, the great selector finds the perfection he’s after. “Schmeckt gut. Tastes so good,” he says. He ends with what he calls a Florentine Kiss. Napoleon invented it: Squeezing a partner’s ear lobes as his lips pucker on the woman. Why this is so Napoleonic, I can’t say. Pushing me against the wall, one hand on his groin, he projects a cry of passion like the actresses he so admires. Pulling away abruptly, and smoothing down his spent cull, he stares at me. I can read his mind. Never has he been so physically close to his Führer. Before he rushes off to the map room, he tells me, “The one thing I really miss, Eva, is my couch at home. A couch as deep as the one in Baudelaire’s poem.” Heading back to the map room, he softly whistles the miracle song.

Adi can’t tell I’ve been hastily kissed. Nor would he care. He’s immensely happy because he just had a night without dreams. Dreams disturb him. He sleeps so little, two or three hours. He’s afraid some errant thought will enter his subconscious and to avoid any invasion of his mind, he sleeps as little as possible.

Adi begins the day hopefully predicting there will be a rivalry between the Russians and Western Allies. That happens in a coalition. “Do you think the English will permit all Germany to go to Russia? They’ll fight among themselves, and we’ll be triumphant.” This is a device Adi uses, never settling into the moment but living in the days ahead. Projecting the future, he remains calm in the present. He tells me his prediction so I’ll enjoy eating the poppy seed strudel that Fräulein Manzialy baked with ingredients she’s saved over many weeks. He holds out a covered butter dish and instructs me to lift the lid. Underneath is a gift of a new toothbrush so hard to get these days in Berlin as even the big department stores are depleted. “Today, we broadcast on the Volksempfanger to our civilians that thousands of English soldiers in our prison camps will prefer to fight with us rather than fall into the savage hands of the Russians.” And I eat a second piece of strudel.

He holds out an iron that was given to him by Bormann. A Berlin woman was pressing the uniform of her son when she was killed. Her face was blasted off, but her arms remained ever ready, the iron clenched in mangled fingers. The good German housewife, careful to first take out the wrinkles in her son’s clothes before leaving the Reich forever. Now the iron is a monument as Adi puts it on a shelf next to the picture of his mother.

Nothing is without purpose. Adi tells me this over and over. You learn that when you paint. What if there was no oxygen? Oil painting would be impossible. Air is needed to harden the linseed oil. That’s the science of painting. The science of war is about little things like the air a mother breathes and a simple iron or a common domestic object like the bathtub. Napoleon’s crucial decisions were made in a tub where he always soaked his scabby skin.

Generals cause him the most pain, trying to get around his orders and making up maneuvers of their own. With the Russians practically on top of us, they expect Germany to surrender. This makes him furious and irritates his already spastic colon. Adi is fond of recalling the artist John Singer Sergeant who would dart behind a special screen in his studio in the middle of a portrait painting to vent his anger at the sitter—glaring and making faces from this sanctuary. Adi ordered Bormann to find him a “sargeant screen” so he could stick out his tongue and wag his fist at General Krebs, General Weidling and all the others. Bormann wrote up a screen requisition, but so far none has materialized.

It would have helped to have a screen to dash behind when dealing with Wallis Simpson. She and her husband first came to visit us at Berghof in 1937. The duke had told everybody that a war between England and Germany was out of the question, so we all rather liked him for that even though Adi hated skinny Wallis for what he called her “fake-countess insignia.” Ribbentrop, whom Adi let be ambassador to England, adored Wallis and constantly sent her flowers using party money. Adi put a stop to that, and Ribby had to bring her apfelstrudels that the Chancellery cook made for the Reich staff. Ribby didn’t believe in spending his own money on official matters.

What did the duke see in her? I’m amazed at the preference of men, particularly men in high places. They’re the ones most easily won over by simple flirtation. I know that from my own experience observing men in Munich. Goebbels enjoyed telling me that Napoleon was easily won over by the ladies. Apparently, the emperor’s clever way with military things left him more vulnerable in the bedroom. Not that Mein Führer is easily under the spell of women. Never. He’s always in control. Even when he’s out of control. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Adi invited the duke to the Berghof, but beforehand I supervised a planting of rose bushes as there were too many urns of privets that made the entrance look like an old churchyard. I was to contend with Wally and relieve Adi of that odious duty. Before their arrival, there were weeks of negotiations between our housekeeper and the duke’s butler. Protocol was important.

After Wally lit a clove cigarette with little Turkish wax matches, she unpacked her Sivres snuffboxes and scattered them on every available space in the guest bedroom. The poor maid, Jutta, had to dust them each morning for a week. “No German woman would stoop to such possessions,” Adi fumed, adding, “she and that Duke are like two boys.”

I asked Wally how she got the duke interested in her, and she replied matter-of-factly that he was smitten by the rose-coated almonds that she served him at their first dinner party.

“Was it love at first sight?”

“For the duke, perhaps.”

“He was inspired by almonds?”

“He ate them in a wing chair. Even in the back seat of his black Bugatti. They were no ordinary almonds.”

“Rose-coated and rose-scented,” I added.

“Certainly worth the money.” Leaning back on an ebony chair in the dining room, the duchess’ moss crepe blouse pulled tightly against her flat chest. Her stick legs were spread apart. A full skirt—with a knife pleat in the front—bunched up around her knees. Slight bulging appeared at her crotch, a pouch mysteriously prominent. She smiled with thin lips. “Do you wear a support?” she asked.

“For what?”

“For this.” The duchess softly caressed the bulge between her thighs.

“I don’t believe I need one.”

“Surely a German woman today has liberated herself from any so-called ‘Versailles’ apparel.”

“So… when did you know you loved him?” I asked shyly trying to change the subject.

“Is there a precise moment for such things?”

“There was for me.”

“I find it hard to believe a German woman would be so impetuous.”

“The moment was exactly after he had dedicated a hospital and stooped to hold a child’s face in his hands.”

“I would naturally assume there are many hospitals in Germany.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Are you Germans not scientific people? Catching horse excrement for tomato plants. I think you call that pferdeapfel.” The duchess shook her head in emphasis, and her straight hair with its center part did not move. She lifted a hand heavy with rings to smooth away an invisible stray wisp from her forehead.

“What beautiful rings. I’d love to see your jewelry box someday.”

“My dear Fräulein, I keep my jewels in buckets.”

I began to pour her a cup of tea from a little side table set up with refreshments by some nameless adjutant when Wallis screamed: “Fräulein! One pours the milk in first!” Though she can ignore murderous royals, there is no forgiveness for a bad tea ritual.

In a grand flourish of adding milk first, I gave her a new cup of tea and a plate of yellow frosted cakes. She took a dainty bite, and I asked if I could photograph her. She murmured: “I don’t drink and masticate for film.”

Jumping up from the chair, she began to dance, agile and dainty. Even though the duke was in the study talking to Adi, she pretended to dance with him, singing his favorite tune: “Oh, love, love, loving again, no, never, never, never.” She stopped abruptly, as if reminded of her royal duties. Looking under the long table, she sniffed in rebuke. “A table should be sprayed underneath with Chanel.”

“And why is that?” I asked.

“One has to honor undersides just as a cucumber can never be served with a pip. At dinner tonight, Fräulein, all the candles on the table must be at the duke’s eye level. And I sincerely hope that the gold fruit bowl on the dining table will be removed. Platinum for evenings.”

“We use that bowl all the time.”

“Duties go beyond sentiment, just as I assume you will not be serving the duke something as mountainous and regionally common as roast porcupine, ragout of bear paws, and moose muzzle.”

“We are serving marinated beef as you requested and…”

Interrupting me, the duchess began an aria about the collection of China pugs and other possessions that she longed to display at her home. “I have Aubusson carpets, thousands of them that I would adore to spread on my floors. Hundreds of jersey dresses, many glitter swing jackets, fifty Petersham fan brim hats, twenty-five Chinese shawls after Stiebel, twenty-two lipstick-red topcoats from Nicoll of Regent Street, seven mannish felt hats, two dozen amusing looking clogs with thick wooden soles covered in rubber, a hundred pastel turbans, a half-dozen suits from Bon Marché, Liverpool. There’s simply not enough room in our five houses. One’s home should never be the Ufitsi Museum. Everything is stored in a warehouse in Zurich. One does worry about the safety of warehouses. Stealing is rampant. You wouldn’t believe my twenty-two-carat gold bathtub in Antibes was hacked at by a crook like some demented dentist pounding away on a gold tooth. How many carats the thief got away with is now up to the insurance people to determine.”

Having confided in me, I felt obligated to respond with equal candor. “I get an allowance from the Führer. But it’s handled by Bormann who makes me beg. He requests I list all my personal purchases. Should I be interrogated for what’s mine?”

“How awful.” The duchess clutched her thin muscular neck protectively, as if begging for money was like getting your throat slashed. “Surely you’ve mentioned this to Adolf.”

“Ja. Ja. He’s been known to rush into his office, open the safe, and stuff bills into my purse. But too often, he’s away. Or in conference. Then I have to account to Bormann for every lipstick. Pads for my monthlies are itemized on legal sheets. Once Bormann gave me some bills that had funny oriental marks stamped on the back. He did it on purpose to embarrass me, giving me money that had once been used in Japan and was now worthless.”

“Get rid of him!”

“Impossible. Most people complain that Bormann never contributed a single idea to our National Socialist World, but Adi likes him.”

“But why?”

“Duchess, he records every detail. And can be called at any hour. One night, at three in the morning, Adi telephoned him to find out the market price of an orange in 1905. Bormann called back with the answer in twenty minutes.”

The duchess reached into her black beaded purse for a small box. “Take it. You won’t have to account for this in front of that evil man.”

I had no idea what she was giving me, but she explained it was a box of perfumed pessaries. Snapping open the lid, she extracted one of the suppositories, lifted her skirt, shoved aside what I thought might be the fleshy pouch, and inserted the sweet smelling cylinder into her vagina. After I inserted one into myself, we walked to the terrace to join Adi and the duke for lunch.

Silently eating his afternoon vegetables, Adi stared at peas so intently they might have been the first peas he’d ever seen. The sun was bright, and Wally complained about the light in her eyes. Adi said: “Duchess, perhaps it’s the glare from the beef on your plate.”

After lunch the duke held a small flat wooden screen in which he did needlepoint, the needle moving rhythmically in and out of the material. “I learned from my nanny,” he announced to us as he stitched some little pugs. “Oh, I have a favor to ask. The duchess and I would like to visit your marvelous marmalade factory in Dresden?”

Finding her brittle and more of a man than her husband, Adi despised talking to Mrs. Simpson. Her lips were little calipers hiding a male tongue. That body was noisy, discreetly passing wind. I attributed her “combustion” to the 161 pieces of baggage that went with her everywhere. Steamer trunks are known to be gassy.

18

ADI NEVER GOT THEM TO THE MARMALADE FACTORY, and Magda said there was a strong rumor that the duchess was to divorce the duke and marry the Pope.

Perhaps if the duchess had brought all her dogs to Berchtesgaden, it would have been difficult for Adi to detest her.

There was a time Adi considered kidnapping the duke and restoring him to the throne in order to get rid of Churchill. But it was the duke’s wife that put an end to that plan. Wally was considered more of a nuisance than Winny.

After they departed, we learned Wallis told their hall-boy that the Berghof was lacking the simple basics of civility.

I hate to think what the duchess would think of the Führerbunker.

Following the progress of the enemy as his adjutants phone it in, Adi moves pins of battalions that are no longer in full strength on white greaseproof maps. He makes inroads with tanks, his magnifying glass and spectacles resting on truck convoys that are greatly depleted. Sometimes I think his maps are more appealing, even more sensuous than me. He fondles them, runs his hand along their spines, caresses each juncture, leans into towns and cities and beckoning country roads as if he were penetrating their forked curves and splayed mounds.

But maps aren’t my rival nor is Magda who loves him madly though I don’t believe she ever got physically close to him. With Adi, one never knows to what extent he lets himself get intimate. Sometimes he considers a cheerful hug as virtually fornication.

To have all of him concentrated on just me would be heaven. For when he touches me, he’s inwardly dealing with some logistical problem. When his eyes are focused directly on me, his hands are fidgeting with orders and code sheets. His heart beats so secretly when we embrace, I can’t feel the slightest pulse.

Thinking about his doubles, I fantasize they could fill this ache. But they’re merely substitutes for the real thing. Would they be better than nothing, the long nothing hours when he’s working and traveling?

Adi has four doubles. I can tell instantly they’re not Adi. In cars or planes or balconies, at a distance, the average person wouldn’t know. Sepp, Ewald, Jochen, Baldur. They’re Adi’s height with his same facial structure and a little mustache. They’re indeed handsome as my Adi is handsome. As close as they are to the original, they lack that fiery beauty of the real thing. Adi is not friends with these men. They’re only mannequins or what he calls “gestures of immolation.”

A driver tried to shoot Adi in the arm. The pilot Kummer wanted to take him up in a plane so he could push the Führer out. An idiotic potato farmer threw a hatchet at Adi’s Mercedes. Then there was the Munich banker who couldn’t shoot straight. Finally the awful bomb under his desk that didn’t kill him but caused his ears to ring, his arm to shake and persistent agony.

“Adi, let Dr. Morell give you something for your pain.”

“Pain is good.”

“How can you say that?”

“Don’t leprous people pray for pain?”

“You’re not a leper.”

“Some of my generals think I am.”

Then I tell Adi his arm would get better if he exercised it, but he only says: “Not until I get the injury out of my mind.” Adi can’t be destroyed. Never. Unless He himself chooses it.

When a young girl jumped up and kissed him, he nearly fainted as he felt her sharp wire metal glasses on his cheek and thought it was a knife. Later, he became apprehensive when people threw flowers at him fearing hidden grenades.

It was Magda who knew the four doubles, not me. At least on one occasion. I felt no jealousy as they were hardly the real thing, and if they helped her release that passion she has for Adi, then why not? Her longing for Adi is annoying. I understand how one must feel to want him, to yearn, knowing the impossibility of it. One day, holding a bag of fresh cherries that were bleeding through the paper bag, she confessed, “I have an appointment with the Führer’s four doubles at the Hotel Klomser.” Smiling in acceptance and maybe with a hint of superiority, I knew she had to settle for second best.

“They’re all coming at once. Arriving together at the Potsdamer station.” Magda had chosen one of her more conservative print dresses with a pink bow at the modest neckline. Being with four Hitler doubles demanded decorum. However, when the pink bow was removed—and it was arranged to be removed easily—there was ample cleavage ready for exposure. Magda creamed the sides of her breasts so that in the manner of a ski lift, one’s hand could glide easily to the summit house.

“Will it cause riots?” I wanted to know. “Four Führer doubles stepping off the train?”

“They’re in disguise,” Magda explained.

“Have they reverted back to the people they really are?”

“Nein. How ridiculous. What would be the sense of going backwards?” Magda is always annoyed at my Bavarian practicality.

“Who are they pretending to be when they get off the train? I asked.

“Announcers for Radio-Abwehr. With their hair and mustaches dyed red.”

“All four of them?”

“Each with a different shade. Two are wearing lifts in their shoes, two are wearing no shoes at all—just slippers to appear short. All this for me.” Magda lightly touched the bow at her neckline. I could tell she was anxious to be rid of it. “They will convert back to Führer doubles the moment we enter our hotel room.”

“Does the Führer know you’re entertaining his doubles?”

“He’s happy to have them rewarded with the company of a good German woman. But he reminded me they’re still on duty. I must be aware of that at all times. At any moment one could… could…” Her frown and sputtering words made clear that losing one of the four Führers at a particular summit moment would be devastating.

“Where were they when that awful farmer tossed a hatchet at our Führer?”

“They were not sent for at that time and are very remorseful about not being there.”

“Especially since the Führer survived, as a double would have,” I said. “And the cherries?”

“For them, the dear ones. Fresh fruit from my summer home.” Cherry juice stained her fingers making delicate ruby swirls.

Magda did meet Sepp, Ewald, Jochen, and Baldur at the Potsdamer Station. The train was on time. They went directly to the Hotel Klomser where to her horror Magda found all four men impotent.

They lined up before her in bed. Four naked bodies with their poor putsches hanging down like old soggy fruit. It was so distressing that at first Magda felt they should be dismissed from their honor. Gradually she realized that perhaps they were more valuable this way—without distractions. Not that they cared for men, either. They just didn’t seem to care for anything but being a Führer double.

She and the four men sat on the hotel bed and ate cherries, the pink bow at her neck never disturbed. She felt unduly deprived having prepared herself with no underwear. There’s something sad about a woman with no underwear reduced to eating cherries.

When she returned home, husband Josef was away in Dresden. There was nothing to do but rub against the pointed frame edges of 32 Dürer sketches Josef had obtained from Poland. Dürer, Magda said happily, was not impotent.

19

NO, MAGDA IS NOT MY RIVAL. Nor are all the fat wives of his generals who coo over him, bring him dishes of cookies and play the piano for him after dinner. And I understand and accept his passion for Germany. I’m mostly jealous of Blondi.

Bormann gave Blondi to Adi. Why, why didn’t I give Adi a dog, a polite dog that would know its place, a mutt that didn’t try to imitate Adi’s speeches by rolling her eyes in wonder and dilating her snout.

A mutt that didn’t put paws over her ears, especially when I’m talking. And she lounges on the map table and is so lazy that Adi has to pick her up like a brick and move her out of the way.

Journalists wrote about Blondi. Sonnets and poems were composed about her, letters from various kennels arrived, tributes from breeders. Philosophical notes on German shepherds appeared in the daily paper. Once a woman wrote to ask if she could baptize her daughter “Blondi.” Bormann replied to such correspondence by sending glossy pictures of the Führer walking with Blondi at his side.

Having my two adorable little Scotties, Negus and Stasi, I certainly don’t dislike dogs. I had pets as a child—lizards, cats, a bird. And I was fond of my uncle’s pony that he used for his cart to haul lumber. I get along fine with Blondi. I have to. She has no reason to be jealous of me. She has Adi whenever she wants even while sleeping and loudly hiccupping at the foot of his bed every night.

“Adi, why can’t I sleep at the foot of your bed?” I was teasing, but as strange as it sounds, I’d really love to.

“Blondi is not only my watchdog, her higher temperature keeps my feet warm.”

“I think I could achieve that myself.”

Adi looks at me annoyed. With Blondi, there is no sarcasm. “You would do well to study her discipline.”

“I’m disciplined. Don’t I cut your toenails once a week?”

“You are saving them?” he asks earnestly.

“In a bank. On your side table. You know that.”

“Yes. Yes. Make sure you don’t default.”

“I won’t. I’m faithful as an old dog.”

Arching an eyebrow, he looks at me to observe even the slightest sign of mockery. He won’t stand for that. Blondi is a friend more valuable to him now that his generals are so erratic.

“Make sure your hands are clean.”

“Ja.” I scrub my hands with soap and alcohol as he’s fearful of germs and even more concerned about an epidemic in the Bunker. Although we don’t have proper bathtubs, we have plenty of water.

“And be very sterile with Blondi’s pups, too.”

“Ja. I don’t wish to wear fleas.”

Adi just stared sternly at me, not wanting to speak and acknowledge my disrespect.

Blondi had five babies in March. After giving birth, she began licking her two closest tits and drinking her own milk along with the pups. I’m not looking forward to nurturing five more silly creatures.

Adi asked Magda and me to put the infant pups between our breasts as it’s the fastest and easiest way to keep the little ones warm after birth. Cradled in our bras, they nestled and nipped restlessly like moving jaws. When I was not available, Magda could accommodate all five. As the five sucked on her one night, the sight and sounds of this baby orgy got Josef amorous. He jumped in to join the pups and even extended other delights to them saying their coyote ancestry was very appealing.

Favorite of the litter, Wolf, lets no one touch him except Adi. Wolf could be my second rival. With the war coming to an end, with the Russians circling us, I know Wolf will probably never grow up and that’s some consolation. Wolfie was allowed to play one day up above at the Bunker entrance and was wounded by flying glass. Adi extracted each sliver himself with a tweezers. Afterward, he made everybody put resin on their shoes so we wouldn’t skid and slide on the floor and disturb Wolfie’s naps.

Blondi talks. Or so Adi says. After the Ardennes when he was so depressed, he turned to Blondi more and more. Adi moves her lips, opening and closing them with his fingers and rewarding her with sweet bits of butterkuchen and spinatpudding. She’d growl: “Grrrr… kl… grrrr… kl… ah… grrrrr.” As she now spoke Adi’s mother’s name, Blondi became two loves in one, Klara and Blondi—connected with one tail. Hanging by a thread from that tail is me.

As the war worsens, Adi talks more and more about dogs. Magda encourages this neutral subject especially at meals. Goebbels tells Adi about accidentally stepping on Blondi’s food dish and how she backed him threateningly up against the dripping concrete wall and wouldn’t let him move for ten minutes. Adi said: “You seriously offended her.”

I tried to make friends with Blondi since she was a pup. At the Berghof, I walked her for hours in the mountains while Adi conferenced with his officers. Her doggy rear was often rubbed bare and bleeding, and she insisted on coating her sides with bars of blood as she wagged her tail. Now Adi has her wear a little wooden splint on her tail. A chronic barker from the beginning, she likes to lie on her side and be dragged. My arms still ache from that.

Adi speaks of Odysseus’ dog that waited 20 years for him. He loves loyalty. Odysseus wept when the dog recognized him. One dog story leads to another. In World War I, when he was a corporal, he saw a war dog killed, its back and stomach torn away so that the dog’s still beating heart was exposed. Adi wanted to touch that little beating heart, but it seemed profane. He watched it reverently as it slowly came to a stop like an old pocket watch. Then he buried the heart. The body itself was unimportant.

There were some good times with Blondi, pre-Bunker times. Once the three of us climbed the hills taking a trail through the thick fir forest to come out on a stream-crossing still slippery after rain. We stopped, tasted the water, then Adi gave me a bath like my mother did when I was a child. He moved his hands tenderly over my body, then between my thighs, water cupped in his palms, cool water on my hairy lips that never drink. Adi took a soft leaf to dry me in what he called my hoary marmot, his mustache grazing me. Blondi licked my feet. I startled and suddenly peaked. And Adi rinsed me loose.

Adi and I are mountain people. Die von dem Berg. We love spotting mountain goats, bighorn sheep, and fresh bear tracks. I like to lie down and rest in sword lilies listening to the wild geese while deer and elk stare at us. We’d find a place with no trails where snow can block a path even in June. But September is the best time at the Berghof, especially strolling through the flowery basin where occasional hikers go by in their caps decorated with edelweiss. They are SS hikers as Adi wouldn’t let any unauthorized people in the area. These SS don’t salute. Among intimate German wilderness friends, it’s not necessary.

I loved the deep green grass, and I remember my childhood school nuns telling me that a saint would lean over each and every blade praying, “Grow… grow.” Though it’s an amusing story, Adi hates to hear such things as religion is idiotic to him.

Making me stay off the trails during my monthlies, Adi explains that animals are infuriated by such a scent though he adores my blood. With a “survivor’s bleed,” I can withstand any crisis. Women triumph by bleeding, Adi says. Now, even little Helga will possess this strength.

Yes, that’s what I miss the most, the Berghof. We’d walk holding each other’s baby finger as it was too distracting for Adi to hold hands. Grouse in the trees, an osprey or loon appearing, a golden eagle soaring over… they’re our wilderness pets. As the sun went down, we’d lie on wild roses and bear grass, in the Viennese manner, our legs stretched out in opposite directions, our heads touching—my head against miracles.

Adi would stop and watch the beavers, holding Blondi close to him on a leash, mule deer nibbling close by. It was half a mile to some huckleberry patches where we’d spend an hour berry picking. Adi was enraged when General Krebs told him he had woodpecker soup on this very spot, boiling the pathetic creature in spring water and adding some mountain lilies for flavoring. “There’s no need to kill animals,” Adi says, “no need to fish and hunt when there’s so many berries to pick.”

Adi announces, “This is it. This is the only wilderness we’ll ever have. There will be no more added to the earth.”

We follow closed-off logging roads and scramble up goat trails where lupine bloom with elderberry, fireweed and bluebells. Being strict about sanitary conditions in the wild, we bury our feces and Blondi’s stools at least 400 feet from any waterway and cover the mess with a foot of soil.

Walking in a cow-column along country roads was something he did as a schoolboy working on a farm one summer. Klara cooked for the workers. He and Klara were united in smells of the earth’s wonderful raw odor. In the winter, Klara would help him make snowshoes from thick hickory limbs and rawhide. In the evenings, he would draw and paint as she baked.

He never painted people. Nein. If he looked into their eyes, he’d have to persuade them and that would divert his mind from working. So he sketched bowls, chairs, the simple dross of life. Ebony paint was human enough. He killed color by using black. He learned from being an artist that the first thing you paint you make awkward. Those artists who follow can turn what you did into something more symmetrical because what they are making symmetrical you have already twisted. Daring! That’s what it’s all about. Every decision he makes is daring. Leaders deserve luck only if they accept the hazards of an action. These were the things he’d tell me on our hikes.

We once came across the body of a stray sheep in the woods. The starved animal lay on its side in bunch grass—bloated and out of recognition with its legs straight out. Adi was devastated by the death of this loyal working creature that gave its wool so willingly. Using our hands, fingers and a flat stone, we buried it in the softest dirt we could find. As Adi’s palms were blistered and raw, I licked the blood and dirt from his hands. Later, back at the Berghof, Adi sent an SS patrol to place a marker on the little sheep’s grave. I soaked Adi’s palms in warm salt water, jealous of the water drops that lingered in each dented vee of his hand.

Handing me a pansy, he’d say, “When I see a flower, my hand sees it first.” That’s how much he misses those painting days when he wouldn’t sketch people. He was right to concentrate on blossoms that could never betray him.

If we came across wildflowers he didn’t know, we’d give them names. I would start: “This is a Russian loser.” He’d add, “Rommelous Vainous.” And we’d laugh.

From painting, he learned about politics. The space around an object is there for the taking. Space. Untouched. Vulnerable. Brush in his hand, he could be anything. Paint couldn’t see him, but he could see paint. There was joy in sending one line running into the next—lines like soldiers, one depending on the other. He’d command strokes to look long when they were short, approach at one angle, then withdraw, make things brighter when they were dull. He moved trees from place to place. Those artist hands painted words even when he gave speeches, his gestures drawn so fully and colorfully. “Paintings are such splendid lies,” said this once poor artist who lived in an attic room on Schleissheimerstrasse.

Blondi’s bark would intercept any further thoughts on art. She’s always interrupting, something my two little Scotties never do. Smelling of dried urine, she oozes spittle on her jowls. She pivots in place like an idiot toy, turning around exactly seven times before lying down. Her mouth hangs open and her tongue droops to the side like a lecherous old prostitute. With a funny crate-nose, cold and wet, she also has wiry hair that makes her look bulky. She has chronic problems with irritated anal glands, a condition that gives off an awful oily smell. Because she’s always biting at imaginary insects like a horse chewing on its flank, the base of her tail is getting thin. Even when I divert her with a bone, she eats stones. Hot spots, areas of moist irritated skin, are on her back and hips—Adi calls them “Berghof sores” and treats them with iodine. Most irritating of all, she’s such a stupid pacifist she’ll sleep right next to a cow or cat if you let her.

The click of her toenails on the Bunker concrete drives me mad. She’s a poor sleeper and has nightmares, stomping her feet in her dreams. When they both emerge from Adi’s room, she half-wags her tail, a kind of salute that’s suppose to impress me. I’d be more impressed to see her tail out stiff and her body stuffed hanging on the wall next to Frederick the Great.

The three of us walk from room to room in this concrete—Blondi with her large tongue hanging out covered with dust. With Adi she neither snarls, snaps, whimpers nor splays her legs to spread ugly toes in a web when she walks as she does with me. Believing in sled dog rations, he feeds her fatty meat, forgiving a creature its inability to survive on vegetables. “That girl has stools that weigh almost two pounds,” he says triumphantly as I watch her squirm on the concrete rubbing worms out from her rear.

I dream about the old days—days above ground when the smell of dogs was not pungent. And that wonderful time Adi let me go to Berlin. Not to walk beside him. My visits were only “privately” official. I understood that. The fat housewives of Berlin know nothing about love outside their houses and chubby little brats. It was Goebbels who talked the Führer into including me, especially for that one great historic moment of cleansing German literature. “She can’t miss it,” Goebbels urged. Adi finally agreed, his consent influenced by the headaches I helped to lessen by rubbing warm oil on his forehead and placing liver slices over his eyes at night. Though grateful to me, he worried that a liver essence might have entered his retina.

He never insists that meat be verboten at his dinner table for a warrior who fights for Germany needs a belly full of bloody beef to attack. His generals eat like pigs. Adi reports to them, “Do we not have in common with Blondi a four-chambered heart? Don’t we both come from an egg? Don’t we both drink the same water?” Adi encourages women in every kitchen in Germany to mount a sign in runic script over the stove: “German Shepherds Divide Us from the French.”

At a staff meeting, he gave lessons to his officers who were fishermen on how to detach the hook without injuring the fish’s jaw so the creature could be released back into the water. He wanted no fish to be slaughtered.

That important day in Berlin, I carried a torch along with 30,000 students as we marched down Unter den Linden. Smart enough to tuck a pair of walking shoes in my bag, I wore them even though I desperately wanted to stroll in my laced black calf-high heels. This was fashionable Berlin. With sensible clogs, I’d be like a student. I’ve always looked young. Swimming and walking give me flawless skin. So I appeared quite youthful. With a wreath of heather on my head, I wore my full white dirndl skirt and blue sweater.

Before the main building of Berlin University, we sang patriotic songs as the SS threw books out the library windows and then dragged oxcarts of volumes like so many Joan of Arcs through the streets to be burned… 20,000 books to be incinerated not far from the statues of Alexander and Wilhelm Von Humboldt. A charming blond boy put a mangled book on Alexander’s stone head. How imaginative these young people were, how proud I was to be in their midst. If they only knew they were brushing up against the very woman who lives with their God.

In the square before the Opera House, “Gobbespierre” strolled proudly to the pyre. There was excited pushing and shoving but nothing out of control. For a small man, Goebbels’ hands are surprisingly broad and he angled them like a raft surfing through the thick slush of the common man. I couldn’t detect his limp. Maybe it was his posture or the handsome young men beside him in their SA plus-four knickers and brown shirts.

Goebbels likes to make important speeches at night when people aren’t quite so alert after a hard day’s work, when he can use blazing torchlights to whip them into a frenzied patriotism.

One student began to chant, “Optimus magister bonus liber.” Goebbels shouted along with him, “The best teacher is a good book. Get rid of slimy teachers.” I found it humorous that Josef Goebbels, who wrote a book that couldn’t get published, was now about to destroy all the published ones.

“Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun. Das Knaben Wunderhorn, old German folk songs that belong to our country, have no author’s name. That’s what we should honor.” Goebbels’ voice was shrill and pierced my ear like a stab. Nobody is more a lover of culture than Goebbels, but he was speaking for those who can’t handle words and ideas wisely, like people who can’t save money and are constantly in debt. Somebody has to make sure pennies as well as words are prudently parceled out.

“Better to turn a Nazi into a great artist than to turn a great artist into a Nazi,” Goebbels shouted. An open trailer rolled behind him carrying airplane wings marked with dark black crosses. There was cheering.

I felt the warmth of a young student pushing up against me. He wore an old postman’s jacket and began to rub his legs against mine, enjoying his own kind of camaraderie. He whispered his name in my ear: “Karl.”

“It’s necessary to execute devious books,” Karl told me. He had a high forehead and beady eyes without lashes.

“And the greatest book is Kampf.”

“You can hardly call that a book.” Karl’s hands, with the long tapering fingers of a good Aryan, were rubbing my back.

“Then what?” I asked indignantly.

“Experience. Didn’t all the medievalists turn from books to the earth itself? Like Copernicus—looking at the sun. The Führer’s book is the sun.”

I was happy I’d listened to Goebbels’ long-winded musings about Copernicus. “Ah, yes. The sun.”

“Like each of these.” Karl’s hands went under my sweater and squeezed my breasts as I leaned against his reedy chest.

“Do you mean—the life force?”

“The milk that is life’s knowledge,” he said. “A true Nietzsche thing unto itself.”

Göring explained to me that the Nietzchean Uberman was free from God. “To believe in nothing?” I asked proudly, showing off to Karl.

“To believe in prediction. Which comes from nothing. The Führer is at the center of experimental learning. He has used all technical application to predict the master race.” Karl took his hands away, and they hung long and lonely at his side.

“And just what laboratory is conducting these experiments for the Führer?” I asked shyly, knowing full well that unlike this young student, I could ask my question to the Führer himself.

“Ghettos.”

“Are you speaking of resettlement camps?” I asked.

“With a shaved head you can spot one instantly. Their skull gives them away. For science has provided the Führer a supreme view of the world. He’s dissecting inferiors for a brute understanding with the caveat of lösung. Solution.”

Karl’s thumbs moved to my armpit.

“Are they in discomfort?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The inferiors. Those being studied while resettled.” I was thinking of my mother’s Jewish cook who made cakes from a hand-printed recipe book when I came home from school as a child.

“Discomfort is subjective and cancels out a definition.” Karl’s ring began to rotate slowly in the moist hollow under my right arm. Then he giggled. “They say Freud has a phobia about riding trains; he calls it Reisefieber. He should stay in Germany. Our trains for his kind are short in duration. One way.”

“What do you mean?” My voice was weak. I was feeling slow radiating pleasure from my armpit.

“Jews have no political concerns. Our major objective is order. The Führer is the world authority. He knows what’s best for us, even what is best for the Jews and gypsies without any help from diplomats and their shabby compromises. He’s our mathematician.”

Grinding his ring in my underarm moss, Karl suddenly yanked his hand away pulling out hairs so that my skin smarted and a jolt of warmth traveled to the tips of my fingers. I was abruptly moved along by the crowd, and Karl was lost. As I stared at the volumes being torched, his words made me proud.

A student pointed to Erich Kastner who was watching his books burn. Nobody was attempting to harm a hair on his body, so why was Kastner so stricken? Was it because that silly Heinrich Heine once said that a country that burns books will burn people? How ridiculous.

Holding out a flask, a buxom girl with a pustular rash on her face offered it to me. I held it over my mouth and sipped dripping Scotch without touching my lips to the rim, then handed the flask to the young man next to me as I felt a searing warmth reach my stomach.

Goebbels lit the pyre. “Proust,” he yelled, and tossed him in.

“Proust,” screamed students who threw one Proust after another into the fire, the pages losing detail in the wrinkles and shrivels of darkening soot. Goebbels held up a bag of madeleines. “Filthy French pastry,” he yelled, opening the bag and tossing the soft cookies into the fire.

A schoolboy wearing leggings, a brown shirt and red armband with swastika grabbed a madeleine and stuffed the cake between his legs. “Let Proust taste this.”

Everyone cheered. A sickening sweet scent suddenly floated up. (I remembered those burning madeleines when I later smelled the strange scorched sweetness of decaying bodies in bombed streets.)

Leather and oilskin covers were burning in red gold smoke, the many authors Goebbels always bragged about knowing. I no longer had to be intimidated by any titles.

Opinions and arguments withered in flames smooth and silk as liquid. Where did words go? This splendid fire was on our side as it writhed with a strange life of eddies and swirls. Fire, that symbol of the sun, was now billowing and glowing in the spines of so many unhealthy writers. Streaks of raging blue-red grew higher. Pages began to stir—alert and twisting as though in glowing agony. Inferior sentences stood out—bulging from the page and resisting their fate with a miracle of sparks glinting from below. Blistering heat burst the ink bellies turning what was left of so many idiot thoughts into shiny white ash, the sturdy bindings left behind like flat hot skulls.

A housewife reached beside the flames to salvage thick half-burned covers for her cooking fire. Stokers punched the fire with long black poles adding fuel and holding up book-skeletons before slamming them down.

With his Kriegsverdienstkreuz Medal at his neck, Bormann looked on calmly. He already existed in a world without books and liked to quote Adi who said surviving these awful authors forever was a great deliverance.

“Zola,” someone shouted, and many Zolas flew into the flames.

“Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Dos Passos, Einstein, Margaret Sanger,” called a girl behind me.

“Gide, Helen Keller, Freud,” chanted a tall thin boy with a pockmarked nose. He angled the books like boomerangs, sailing them into the fire.

“Brecht,” a young professor announced shoving the books forward with careful dignity. I saw Goebbels wince. He would have let Brecht remain in Berlin unharmed as he wasn’t a Jew (but his musical partner was). The Nazis could have used Brecht as some needed proof of literary renown, but Brecht had already fled to Zurich.

Students began to sing,

“Proust. Ach, Proust

We’ll burn you as we please

We’re in Berlin after all

Where things are done with ease

We’re in Berlin

We’re in Berlin

Where things are done with ease.”

As this was an important historic moment, I didn’t want to be left out. Finding Hemingway, I tossed him into the fire. Goebbels has a soft spot for Hemingway because of the author’s manly adventures and courageous fighting spirit, and I like some of his short stories that Goebbels gave me. Nevertheless, Hemingway was on the list. Certainly Adi did not approve of Hemingway hunting animals.

Next I picked up Magic Mountain and walked close to the flames. The professor next to me proudly stated: “Paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.” Feeling the blaze warm my cheeks, I pulled out pages, one by one saying: “Eins, zwei, drei… he loves me… loves me not… loves me… loves me not” I kept on, chapter by chapter, until “he loves me” was the final reward and the cover of the book curled in a radiant red glare. (Little did I know then that I’d see Berlin curling in ashes, street by street, like so many of these awful pages.)

I talk to Adi’s secretaries about those 20,000 books burning and how exciting it was, but they’re more interested in sharpening pencils on the Bunker’s concrete floor, eating gummy vanilla crescents that slur their speech, and drinking coffee made from acorns. They used to drink tea, but that’s now considered Anglo. These are Adi’s devoted women who adore and praise him and wear cut-down army field coats to show a military support in their workplace. They sit calmly at their desks alongside bicycle pumps and ration cards for bike tires. Their typewriters have extra large keys so the Führer can read the pages.

Women find him so attractive, so handsome. It surprises me that Adi thinks his face is too chubby. When he’s alone, he does these little exercises puffing out his skin as he thinks this will thin out his cheeks. With all his Austrian stature, he still believes he has a hunched profile. I assure him that his profile is very commanding. When speaking in public, he feels self-conscious though no one would ever guess that. He hunted endlessly for just the right back brace that would not be obvious under his suit. And he found a man who expertly designed a perfect one in a shop that was subsequently destroyed in the famous Reichkristallnacht. Having to be totally measured again by an Aryan who botched everything, Adi went back to wearing a tight belt under his shirt that was moderately helpful.

When the heavy tapping of their Remington keys stops, the conversation of the secretaries turns to love. These ordinary workingwomen want to ask me that one big question. You can see it in their eyes, how they study my face and scrutinize my clothes. What’s it like to make love to a genius?

Everyone wants a part of him and not just the women. At political rallies, most of the men in the audience have little black mustaches on their upper lips.

I have made love before Adi. I come from Bavaria. There are glorious men in Das Bayern. You have only to sit in the cafés to see that. But when I met Adi, other men were quickly forgotten. Adi is unique. He surprises not only his followers but also his lovers. Oh, he’s had lovers before me. One was that niece, Geli. I don’t know what the attraction was. You could hardly call her stylish. But Goebbels told me that Cleopatra married one of her brothers, and it’s thought by some she might have married another. Maybe a niece is going along those historic lines.

I don’t begrudge him former amours that are over… though I still fear the memory of Geli.

Adi was fond of Marlene Dietrich. She was often seen with theatrical Jews, but he believed she’d get over that. And her legs! They were luminous, smooth and perfect. In all the parades he reviewed, the legs of his young soldiers strutting and goose-stepping were her legs. He begged her to stay in Berlin, but she went to Hollywood and became an American citizen. When that happened, he was finally cured. The parade legs of his soldiers returned to him, wholesome and hairy.

Every morning I hope for good news about the war so Adi will once again enjoy those “hairy” parades. Looking for Fräulein Manzialy before she puts out the breakfast dumplings stuffed with cottage cheese, I ask her for a reading. She’s much more reliable than crude gypsies with bushy hair and uneducated ways. My mother always said that a person who cooks your food is close to a saint. Adi’s predictions are the most important, of course, but Fräulein Manzialy has sturdy common sense. She spreads cards on the table and pours us both what coffee she can make from walnuts and herbs. As she turns over the first card, I ask: “Will the Führer win his war?”

“No wonder we’re losing,” Fräulein Manzialy snaps at me. “Civilians talk about his war. It’s our war.”

“You’re quite right,” I say. “Will he win our war?”

Fräulein Manzialy answers, no matter what card is face up: “You live or you die.”

I want her to tell me that the cards say he was born at 6:22 in the morning by all the clocks in the house. A lucky time with lucky numbers. When he entered this life, his mother planted a tree and squeezed her breast milk on the roots. I want the cards to say he had a marvelous time in Klara’s womb and now will have a victorious time in this life, a last minute miracle like Frederick the Great. But Fräulein Manzialy only replies: “You live or you die.”

Though Fräulein Manzialy’s cards are the same, the Bunker changes. People rush in and out. Many of the soldiers have rough weather lines so deep their mouths just look like more creases. Yesterday I heard loud laughing and a group of SS came down the staircase carrying a Russian soldier. Entering the dining area, they threw the captive on the table. I was drinking coffee while Goebbels was expounding on Chaucer. We moved back against the wall with our coffee cups to stare. The SS ignored us. The Russian on the table was a woman holding up a torn picture as she whimpered in German, “Mutter, meine Mutter.” A German Thiele watch was on her wrist that the men removed gently. Soon the SS men laughed as they roughly stripped her, greased her breasts with motor oil, and tied her up so she dangled over the table from a metal chain under her arms—another chain around her middle was attached to spikes on the concrete ceiling. The woman was stocky, her hips fleshy, her thighs thick and muscular. You could see the endless steppes of Russia in the rough ridges on her hands. Crumpled on the floor was her mother’s picture. The men stared silently at their prisoner who they referred to as a Flintenweiber, the most fanatical of Soviet soldiers. The Bunker was suddenly still. For once the Goebbels children were quiet. Adi and Bormann were busy over their maps. Moving the cup slowly to my lips, I sipped the now tepid coffee—coffee so watered down and so unlike real coffee that it tasted like old brown blood on my lips. Goebbels said the woman had hips that probably were like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. As the chains creaked, the Russian woman’s windmilling legs tried to reach the floor.

One SS jumped up to her body, his mouth open and angled to suck in a breast, his legs straddling her. The others followed. SS attached themselves to her like bees on a hive. Swinging, swinging… they were clustered together as Goebbels gawked with undisguised approval. The woman screamed, but the screams died away. Goebbels grew bored and went back to reading The Canterbury Tales as I quickly walked to my room where all I heard were distant grunts.

I know that our men died with frozen feet and hands on the Eastern front. German wives lost their husbands. German children lost fathers.

This morning, the chains were gone from the dining area. There was no trace of the Russian woman. When I start to tell Adi about the incident, he stops me. “When we’re winning, we can be humane. War simplifies morals, and bestiality is vital. Napoleon said at his coronation, ‘Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche! God has given it to me, let him beware who shall touch it.’”

“But you don’t believe in God, Adi.”

“My pretty little Evchen, I believe in Napoleon.” Then he reminds me that during the French Revolution, the women were the most ferocious. But he adds sympathetically, “That Russian female had no rank. I know what it’s like to be a noncom.”

“But she had a mother. You most certainly know what it’s like to have a mutter.”

“The ancient Roman army captured their enemy and brought them back to fight lions to the death. Would a mother prefer that?”

“No.”

“The old Greeks killed all the adult males of a conquered country.”

“Yes. You’re right. We’re more advanced.”

Leaning over suddenly, he clutches his stomach in pain. He’s gasping and falls to the floor rolling with his knees drawn up.

“Adi,” I say, having seen all this before, “let it go.”

He continues to squirm at my feet.

“Let it go!” I yell.

“Nein! Nein!” Hunched into an agonized ball, his thighs press against his chest as he tightens his back.

“It’s just stomach gas,” I shout

“Nein!”

“It’s only intestinal wind, Adi.”

More struggling and then he stands, calm now, reassured his body has not had its way. “I’ve mastered it.” Reaching for a map, he says with bitterness that he has to note the positions of his troops from foreign radio news since his own generals give inaccurate information or none at all.

A young company runner provides a happy distraction, tracking wet shoe prints on the concrete and shaking white dust from his uniform. Wearing a spiked helmet pushed down over his forehead, he arrives in a whirlwind exciting everybody including Blondi. His eyes behind thick goggles are inflamed with panic. He reports that the zoo was hit. Animals are running wild in the city. Shopkeepers are chopping down the two giant wooden elephants that support the zoo entrance carrying off trunks and spangled tusks like ordinary firewood. In a solitary cone of brightness, he saw a frightened bear cub curling up alongside women and children who were drinking from a horse trough.

The young private’s father is the zookeeper and he himself has lived all his life with his family in the Keeper’s House next to the pigmy elephants. Except for the last six months in the army, the zoo was his only home. People call him the Zoo Fritz or the Fritz with 5,000 pets. He goes by his mother’s name for after World War I, the government made a law that women who lost brothers during the war could legally give their maiden names to their children in order to perpetuate the family heritage.

“Mein Zoo Fritz, why is a private wearing white gloves?” A serious line of wrinkles appear on Adi’s forehead.

“A courtesy to the animals, Mein Führer.” Taking off his helmet reveals pimples on his forehead. Large pink ears lie flat against his head. He had to reinforce the top of his boots with the tread of an old truck tire.

Adi angrily shouts, “If we hold Berlin, our civilians will stand up and fight from their porches. From their front yards. Berlin is a porcupine to be defended to its last hair, its last quill, its last bristle and awn.”

He scolds the boy for wearing a World War I helmet and for missing hobnails on his boots, threatening to send him to a penal battalion for not wearing a proper uniform. A uniform is sacred. But Adi finally relents and lets the youth keep the helmet as that’s all the boy can find to shield his head. Adi admits to me later that the runner, though babbling and misinformed, made him nostalgic for when he was a young soldier himself in the List Regiment during the First World War when he won the Iron Cross. His war stories tend to get more detailed and longer with each telling, but I think a woman is able to appreciate repetition more than a man. I listen patiently to how he survived five years on the Western Front and was in 50 battles and got wounded. Those stories remind me why he has yellow teeth and awful breath so that being near him is very earthy. I pretend his heroic foxhole dust is in my hair, that his arms have blisters and there’s gore on his cheek. I want to kiss war scabs on his neck and hold his head with its battered bloody cap in my lap. When I was a little girl, I had nosebleeds and my papa would carry me on his shoulders all around the backyard to calm me, and I would see my blood dripping onto his hat. Bloody hats, to this day, make my thighs feel warm.

The company runner called the Zoo Fritz says his real name is Private Ernst Schmidt. I have a cousin named Ernst with blond hair and for that reason I feel close to this private. Adi reaches in his pocket, takes out three potato dumplings wrapped in paper that Fräulein Manzialy gave him for his afternoon snack and holds this gift out to the runner. Ernst takes the Führer’s gift gingerly and in awe. For the last year he has only seen a soldier’s “iron rations” of raisins, nuts, milk soup, an occasional can of headcheese and the dark hard Kommissbrot so different from his mother’s baked bread.

“Your Magnificence, is this for the bear cub?” Ernst asks.

“I like that, Private. Not thinking of yourself.” Adi’s lips relax in a smile.

“Thank you, Herr Führer.”

“A bear should not be measured by man. Bears are in their own superior rank, a rank that man aspires to in the world order.” Adi leans forward until his face is close to the boy’s cheeks. His nose twitches, and I can tell he smells the soot and oil on the youth’s skin.

“Before I joined up, I smelled of hyena paste as I had to clean the hyena cages every day though I didn’t have to clean the oxen as they hose themselves down with their own urine. But now, Mein Führer, I smell like a soldier.”

Adi smiles and pats his shoulder.

“My zoo keeper father calls animals our other Reich.”

Adi is pleased. “A zookeeper can have more capacity to understand his country than a general. And you never know what a cub can bring. It brought you.”

Adi has a sudden desire to confide in the boy as he says, “You have no idea how even a Führer needs to hear faith and courage from one who believes.”

“I believe. My father believes.”

Adi quotes from Ruskin: “All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever rose on earth but among a nation of soldiers.” Adi feels Ruskin is England’s wisest spokesman.

“When Napoleon was a young school boy, probably no older than you, Herr Fritz, his comrades would pull him out of the library to lead them in snowball fights.”

“Mein Führer, where can I find snow at this time of year?”

“In Ruskin,” Adi says softly.

The bicycle bell of little Helmut Goebbels tinkles softly as he rides in and out of the dining room while balancing a tin of pudding in his hand. Even when Napoleon was banished to St. Helena, Adi says, he took 72 porcelain dessert plates with him. There are no dessert plates in the Bunker.

Goebbels says the Führer is as obsessed by Napoleon as Napoleon was obsessed by Charlemagne.

A beef carcass over his shoulder, a soldier descends the stairs, eyes down, as he makes his way to Fräulein Manzialy’s chopping block. He unfastens the flap of his holster to show earnestness and grabs a butcher knife. Adi dreads the hacking sounds that will soon come from the kitchen. As a child, Klara read him Das Gespensterschiff, the story of a ghost ship and its captain nailed through the head to the topmast by his rebellious crew. With the sound of carrots, squash or carcass being chopped… ump… ump… ump, Adi hears the captain screaming.

After delivering a civil service report in orange ink (color denotes seniority), Ernst asks in his crisp Bavarian accent if we wish to go topside to see the zoo ruins. Adi gives his approval for me but says he has no desire to go as he must protect himself from fresh-air poisoning. I am to stay close to the Bunker entrance. He adds, “Goebbels finally got through to our Munich headquarters only to have his call answered by a Russian. Still, we must remember… Wagner portrayed the end of the world. ‘twilight of the Gods.’ Our ideas will continue after this necessity of destruction.”

I am eager to go up, to breathe in what Goebbels calls Berliner Luft, the city’s special air. The “visible me” can’t wait to “show” myself in Berlin. I’m going to be His wife, everyone!

As I help Ernst pull off his boots, we see large blisters seeping blood on the bottom of his feet. He apologizes for not having stronger feet. I help drain his blisters with a syringe, something I learned from Dr. Morell, and apply paper bandages.

Ernst can’t be more than 15 years old. He tells me how grateful he is for the Staatsjugentag, the state youth day Adi introduced so that there was no school every Saturday and he could enjoy the outdoors as a Hitler Youth and learn military commands.

Ernst is efficient making sure I see him adjust the pistol under his armpit. Then he gets permission to take a No. 42 rifle from the ammunition rack and firmly pats a bayonet on his belt. His shoes flap and clank on the concrete throwing out a sharp echo as he very gallantly escorts me past the sign on the wall that states “The Fürherbunker of Adolf Hitler” and up the 38 steep steps of the spiral staircase.

“Must you be so loud? You’re not clomping into Poland,” I say.

He softens his steps.

“Being with the Führer just now is the first time I’ve ever heard something personal and not an order from the high command,” Ernst says proudly.

“Our Führer is a retired corporal.”

“Think of it… I was just close to the court of last resort.” The Zoo Fritz smiles before attempting to light a cigarette over and over, but the war tobacco is bad, and he chews it dry.

As we enter the garden of the Chancellery, I’m startled by sunlight, my eyes blinking in blindness to remind me not to forget the dimness below. I never know what it’s like outside as weather forecasts are top secret because of military operations. A curious wasp dips near my neck. I focus clearly on the plot of dirt where the Goebbels children and I planted peas and carrots only a short time ago and now find that our little garden is pitted with bomb craters. The evergreen tree from which I cut sprigs for my flower arrangements is split and broken by shrapnel into a charred stump. The entire grounds surrounding the entrance are churned and chopped as if they were lumpy porridge. Never has the enemy been this close. I talk about my Bavarian childhood as Ernst helps me across the mud and chunks of stones. He tells me that his grandfather’s farm is not far from where I grew up. That eases me, and I visualize my mother in the kitchen of our little house, though I know she can’t be happy with so many bombs falling from the sky.

“These days, I hope for a full moon at night. So I won’t stumble into street holes.” He helps me over numerous craters. “The hungry have eaten the swans right off the lake.” He tries a lighter tone. “Is your uncle still in Simbach?”

“Yes. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t modern. He sent one of his sons to study in New York. In America.”

“Is New York like Berlin?”

“Nein. Nein. Uncle Werner said there are more streets in New York.”

“How is that possible?” Ernst stops and stares at me in disbelief, but I just smile. What is the use of trying to explain something to a child, this Sonnenkind—an innocent child of the sun. I’d love to see his golden body on the Wannsee beach.

“And how many times have we bombed New York?” he asks.

“Enough.”

“Did we hit Macy’s?”

“Surely.”

Ernst leads me to the lookout tower Speer cleverly built that’s attached secretly to the upper bunker where there’s also a scissors telescope installed.

Ernst asks if I’m quite sure I want to see Berlin. He ran home to his Zoo Keeper’s House after this morning’s bombardment, racing up the stairs as fast as he could. Then the steps just stopped. Going nowhere. All the floors above had disappeared, wiped away like they were drawn in chalk. His mother was gone (the sweet mother whose name he has), and he found no trace of her except one pair of cork shoes that rested on the stunted railing as if she had placed them there for a moment and would shortly return. Demolished was the large room where every year they decorated the Christmas tree Bavarian style with apples, pears, cookies and little chimney sweeps made out of baked prunes. And now he understands another mother he saw: when a 10th story apartment building split in half from a bomb—her children falling below from the other side—she just ran out into the burning space after them.

He hopes to get “bombing leave” to stay home and help his father with rebuilding.

He begins to cry, the tears making thin furrows to his lips where he sucks them in and spits them out, a boyish angry gesture. I don’t know what to do because nothing gets me more addled than seeing a man cry. Adi would be disgusted to see Ernst weep in the Chancellery Garden, of all places, tears falling on the noisy wax paper covering the dumplings. Ernst lets weakness flaw his character, but I’m still sympathetic remembering what Goebbels said: “If you read the Iliad, you know soldiers cry.”

Looking at Ernst, I do the one thing I can do for a man from Bavaria, what any woman would do in my place. I undo the middle hooks on my blouse and put his hand on my bare right breast.

That stuns Ernst. His tears abruptly stop. Sucking in his breath and panting, his hand begins to move down and that’s when I push him away. I’ve made enough concessions in the name of pity. If he had only slid his hand upward instead of down, he could have roamed longer. Even if he claimed my nipple, I wouldn’t have cared. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping my breasts faithful. Adi doesn’t like breasts not only because his mother lost hers but also because they remind him of his father who sat at the kitchen table without an undershirt, that father who married his sweet mother, that father who made slurping noises with his stone false teeth and displayed chest orbs like rump cheeks. When the old man finally died, Adi said to his mother, “When a woman has a son like me, she has no right to remarry.”

But my vee is His. I wouldn’t let anyone but Adi touch it. I’m incapable of that kind of indiscretion, and I’m unable to lie which is good because a habitual liar thinks everybody else is lying all the time, too, and how can you live that way? Not that any of this really matters when you’re deeply in love.

“I’m not as young as you think. I’m certain to win the Sturmabzeichen, the hand-to-hand combat medal,” Ernst tells me.

“I’m quite aware of your superior hand work,” I answer coyly.

“I can pull a nail out of a board with my teeth.”

“Save your young teeth for nipping better things.”

“Please don’t think I’m just a messenger. I’m with a point company, too.”

Moving with serious steps to the lookout tower, I let him know that I’m once again the Führer’s future bride, and his eyes are moist with a different kind of sorrow. He’s tasted something marvelously forbidden, something beyond what he is entitled to, a gift that will stay with him forever, even beyond grief. And I think… they work! Having not been used all these years, my breasts still work!

Then I look out over Berlin.

20

BERLIN HAS NEVER BEEN MY FAVORITE CITY. Because it’s official, I was never able to be with Adi when he was meeting heads of state and diplomats and all the Reich’s parading troops. In Berlin, I was the most invisible. There were no strolls, arm in arm, on the Linden or romantic sailing on the Spree. I was alone, looking at night games illuminated by searchlights that filled the sky. Now, seeing the wounds of this great and historic city, I begin to be sad for the Berlin I’ve somehow failed to love, like the boyfriend who gets away—the boy who was handsome and rich and wasn’t properly cherished. Now that I belong here, the city is in ruins.

Napoleon had plaster models made of all the monuments he hoped to build, even modest statues for his smaller victories. He didn’t get to build them. Seeing all the smoking ruins before me, Adi will never realize all his monuments, either. Not that this lessens what he’s already accomplished.

Many feet above this city that is finally mine, smoke mixes with dim mangled beams, gutters, radio aerials, carpet pieces, clothes hangers, roof slates, nailed boards, sliced telephone poles. A flat truck with V.2 rockets stands in flames. Screech of sirens as the ground shakes. The main quarters of I.G. Farben is gone. Floating through the streets, thousands of marks, now worthless money, look like falling leaves one would never notice. A painted wooden sign—“Swing Prohibited”—sails into a ditch as a newspaper kiosk spills sheets of bad news into the street and cigarettes blast like confetti from a tobacconist’s stand. As if severed by the clean swing of an ax, stores and apartment buildings are cut in half and quartered. Everywhere is the thunderous crunching sound of roofs falling. In the Wilhelmplatz, where once trees were chopped down so Berliners could view the Führer’s head and shoulders from the high balcony of the old Chancellery, only flames and plumes of smoke are visible. The balcony hangs by a ribbon of iron.

How does Goebbels stand it, constantly surveying bombed cities to examine ruins?

Between broken gas pipes, tiles, window frames and smashed high-tension cables are twisted linden trees. In all Germany there is the saying that when the linden goes, so goes Berlin. I was a school child who warbled, “As long as the old trees still bloom on Unter den Linden, nothing can defeat us.”

Few birds are left in Berlin. Flying at crazy angles, sparrows and wrens twist their heads to one side. One drifts on its back through oily waves of black and yellow smoke as if it were leisurely bobbing along on water. I visualize floating on my back by its side, both of us in a different, calmer ocean.

I’m told that the zoo has been hit by 36 bombs. Smoke slowly fades, undressing the red pagoda entrance cluttered with wounded and dying animals that gasp and limp past gutted burnt trucks. Heading down the Linden, they quack, snarl, growl, howl, their vivid colors refusing to blend with debris.

A giraffe, his neck nearly severed in strings of bloody clots, pushes blindly into creatures covered in plaster and brick dust.

With a man’s leg in its mouth, an elephant plods onward with the fin of an unexploded shell sticking from its side.

“Poor elephant,” says Ernst, “I know him well. His trumpet woke me up every morning with the church bells. Now the poor thing has no idea that he wasn’t born to carry a human stump in his mouth.”

Peacocks, bobcats, a whitetail deer move by the heap of bricks once the Ufa-Palast Cinema.

Soaring wildly, an owl with wires sticking from its eyes aims for the blazing Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church before dropping into the fire.

“That owl was born on my birthday.” Ernst’s voice quivers in sadness.

Beavers breathe bubbles of blood from their noses. An antelope with its hindquarter gone. A seal—forelegs burning. A stampeding hippopotamus with swollen eyes rams a Biedermeier-like lamppost in agony, its rear full of shrapnel. As the warthog and its baby try to burrow in twisted ironwork, Tiger tanks and Panther tanks mingle with real tigers and real panthers.

I walk in the direction of the zoo knowing Adi will not be annoyed that I leave the Bunker entrance to assist animals. I instinctively follow behind Ernst, cowering the way I have done so many times in the past when I was afraid to be seen, feeling a former shame like an amputee feels a lost arm. But Ernst pulls me forward, and we walk boldly.

“We shouldn’t go too far from the bunker.”

“Don’t worry. Some of the animals have wandered very close to here. And I’ll protect you.”

“Not too long.”

“I’ll have you back in no time.”

After just a few minutes, we stoop to sooth a pregnant deer. Dying, the creature heaves from a wounded head, liquid from her brain seeping through both nostrils. Ernst knows how to attend such births, this wonderful Zoo Fritz. When the mother suddenly dies, closing pale yellow eyes with a spastic jerking of her sharp bones, he isn’t delicate or careful as he pushes roughly with his foot on her belly to force the infant out. To show compassion, I put the Mutti’s head in my lap. I wonder what it’s like to have a child. Leaning over, I feel the warm speck of her nose on my cheek. The baby pulses from the mother’s womb, coming out in slow motion to rest motionless and wet in mud and glass.

Feeling the slippery dew of birth, I take the child in my arms. What would it be like if Adi and I were to create a new life? Perhaps this little infant is ours, as much a part of our union as any newborn human could be.

Taking the newborn from me, the Zoo Fritz lays it tenderly on the ground—then shoots it. This is the most merciful way.

“Perhaps there should be a bunker for animals,” I say softly.

Ernst holds my hand in this lost city, the Berlin I will never be able to love.

I know Adi has tried to evacuate the zoo animals. There’s so little time with all the work of the second Ardennes. His beloved creatures are in pain, suffering, starving, dying. Some are destined to be food for housewives as everything goes in their stew pots—goldfish, eggshells, shoelaces. Left over goat-grease thickens the hair of crafty Berlin women. Pets of Ernst-the-Zoo-Fritz will become bone meal or lard. It’s good that Adi can’t see this final indignity and arrived at the Bunker with the blinds pulled down over the windows of his Mercedes. It’s good the Führer rarely comes out of our cement submarine.

Returning to the Bunker area, we step over a dead German soldier in a slit trench dug so tight it fits him like a uniform. About to fall into total despair, I go to the lookout tower and see Bormann sitting on a merry-go-round horse. On the horse’s tail flies the Blood Flag, the banner carried in the Putsch. The weathered carousel is all that’s left of the zoo, a carousel with its gaudy colors swirling, its tune loud and clear. Proudly wearing the Frontkampfer Cross, Bormann’s beefy body is rigid, his thick neck stretched up as he goes round and round to a glockenspiel. Our German Reichstag secretary, who only comes to Adi’s nose, is waving to fleeing people and crippled animals—showing all Berlin that things are not over yet, letting us know the Reich is still alive.

Rushing from the Chancellery garden and crunching scattered glass under his boots, Lieutenant Conrad Henek Kerscher reports that the Führer wishes to see me in his quarters. The lieutenant has just returned from Frankfurt where the saturation bombing made even the asphalt burn. Many of his fellow officers who were marching in the streets are now incinerated inside the streets. He carefully adjusts his carbine with a small needle-type bayonet folded along the barrel.

Saluting Lieutenant Kerscher, Ernst puts his right toe behind his left heel, swivels briskly to an about face, then runs through an SS cordon of rubble to chase a hysterical flamingo charging toward Wilhelm Göringstrasse.

“Oh, Herr Lieutenant Kerscher,” I say, “look at Bormann.”

“Sehr gut. Sehr gut.” The lieutenant’s shoulders stiffen in pride as he watches the carousel. Taking a flask from his pocket, he rushes across a patch of debris to three dead German soldiers and pours whiskey down their mangled throats. “Everyone must celebrate.” He reaches into the pocket of each dead soldier to take out their soldat bunch.

Nearby, two old men from the civilian Freikorps dig communal graves with their helmets. The dead, some with open staring eyes, seem to watch their own burial.

“So many civilians killed,” I say when the lieutenant returns to my side with an empty flask and the identification books of the dead soldiers.

“Fräulein, dead soldiers were once civilians.” He doesn’t flinch the slightest when two flies crawl around his neck, their greasy little legs against his skin.

“But Lieutenant, these civilians aren’t in uniform. Yet they carry firearms. Goebbels himself told me they’re not protected by the Geneva Convention and if captured will be quickly executed.”

“Ja. But they realize the dangers they face.”

“My cousin is in the Freikorps Sauerland, lieutenant.”

“Our recruiting drive has been very successful. What an honor for him.” His voice becomes unsteady: “So many children dead.”

“Lieutenant, dead soldiers are the children of their own life?” I pat his gunner’s hand, rough with calloused palms.

As an old woman with scorched hair stoops in the street to separate good buckets from smashed ones, she screams, “The world has come to an end.” A little girl, her hair the color of a soldier’s uniform, carefully hunts for whole chairs among the shattered ones. On the ground in one orderly line—in the same line they had been standing to get bread—people lie dead.

Before Lieutenant Kerscher ushers me to the stairs, he tells me his father has been called up for service in a Volkssturmeinheit, the people’s Storm Unit. “And me… from the Brandenberg division. We both do our best.” He touches the medals on his jacket. “I’ve learned neither the Knight’s Cross with Swords nor the Iron Cross guarantees promotion. We are merely looked on as a soldier-hero. And when there’s enough of that, we’re sent back to the front because that’s where the war is the fiercest and where we can best be displayed. ” He looks at me sadly. “Goodbye. The Führer has presented me with a trench stove. I’m going to Russia. You don’t return from there.”

“Try to remember, Lieutenant, the future comes one day at a time.”

“Ja. Of course.”

“Let yourself think only of victory.”

“Victory exists for the sole purpose of making defeat possible.”

“You must not let yourself think like that, lieutenant.”

“I only think, Befehl ist Befehl. An order is an order.”

As I walk slowly toward the steep Bunker steps, it suddenly becomes very quiet, as if for just a moment the heart of the war has stopped beating. Silence. It’s like a wedding gift.

Dying Berlin makes me think of Geli. Both so loved by Adi. Both once had everything.

For no reason, Adi will cry out, “Germany became my bride after Geli.”

Geli is dead. Berlin is dead. Lieutenant Kerscher will soon be dead.

Will I finally be Adi’s true bride? Or will Geli always float above him, flagging her presence like dead Berlin?

21

COMING FROM THE MAP ROOM, Adi smiles. It’s not often I see him smiling. I take his hand, something he doesn’t often let me do without permission, not in the open, not when it’s daytime. But I’ll soon be his wife and there are plans to make for our wedding. Because he’s in good humor, I don’t even care if there’s bad news about the war. As his “Volk” fingers touch mine, I see a laborer’s face in his hands. I treasure that sweet hollow by his thumb, a place his mother loved, a place where he once cut himself and she washed the raw slit with her own saliva continuing to suck for hours like an animal, savoring the proud flesh saying, “This is where you can feel like a woman.”

“I have lice under my arms, sweet Evchen, my soup-love.” He sits on the bed, pulls me down to sit next to him.

I take my hand away from his and gently place my two palms upward under his arms. “Now I envy lice.”

“Eine Laus, der Tod. A louse means death.” Adi swallows one of Blondi’s worm pills without water.

“Lice can mean what you want.” I take my palms from his underarms and sniff them gently.

“Can you smell them?” he asks.

“I only smell you, sweet smells, your underarms like nougats.”

He smashes a louse grinding it into a tiny smear. “The end of it. Nil. No judgment. No after life. Like us.” He flicks the varmint off his fingers. “I must do everything before the end.”

But it’s my beginning, and I suck alternately the crook between each of his thumbs so he’ll know how I feel. The little black nest of hairs on his knuckles are tufts of women who want him and will never have him.

“You must leave the Reich capital with Hans.” He moves away, now a commanding Adi.

“Dr. Morell has his own pharmaceutical company and sells lice powder.”

“His stores are in Russian hands.”

“I won’t leave you, Adi.”

“The German people have let me down. I want our earth scorched.” The suspicious little slouching hump appears on his back as he stands. “The Allies must never capture and drag me through the streets like a monkey in a cage. Nor do I wish to be shackled in a St. Helena. Destruction is full of meaning. If one knows how to die well, Heldentod, a hero’s death, then one has eternal life.”

“How?” I ask calmly.

“I’ll take cyanide as I shoot myself.”

“Then I’ll die by your side.” I face him firmly.

“But with Hans, you can…” Adi doesn’t continue. He’s enormously touched knowing I’ve made up my mind for my hands cross over my chest in determination. Creases form around his eyes, and I wonder if he’ll finally weep. But there’s no moisture beneath his thick lashes. His weeping stopped when his mother died. As the Führer, he doesn’t have the water of common tears. Nothing falls from his lids or escapes. He blinks sorrow inwardly. Even saliva contains microscopic amounts of blood. Nothing from his marvelous body lets go.

“Don’t turn soft,” I urge gruffly. “You can’t let them do that to you.”

Slightly hunched, nearly trembling, the man before me is one I don’t recognize.

“Once you have lice, they stay. In war, there’s never enough time to get rid of them.” He scratches the graying hairs on his stomach.

“They’re only under your arms,” I say softly. Will these fleas smell of us?

Gaining composure, he stands erect. His back is nearly straight, and I can’t see the hump. He’s assured the Allies are not without defeat. Haven’t they suffered? Look at all their dead. My Adi is reviving. He’s right. This corporal from World War I, who never attended a military academy, has given all to his country by wounding and killing so many of our enemies.

When he was sixteen, he baked his paintings in his mother’s oven so they’d look cracked and ancient like the old masters’. But his paints came from a grudge (against rich bankers), and he realized even then that you only know the end when you know the beginning.

Taking a light red freckle of a flea from his armpit, he longs for a microscope. In World War I, there were fleas and young doctors who would let him see the neckless creatures on a slide. Fleas always find their victim and smashing the insect between his fingers, he hates the Bunker dampness that has brought them on. But I know it’s Blondi. Beautiful Blondi has given us these idiotic creeping leaping things that are the deadliest varmints in the world.

“It sucked you.” I take his hand and press it to my cheek.

“A flea’s sexual parts are a third of its body.” A slight stain lingers on his fingers. “They copulate for eight hours.”

“If we can’t kill them all, we’ll mock them all. You and I will mate for eternity.”

“You must be certain.” This time there’s no softness in his voice. Those blue eyes I adore have grown dark gray from stress and are as cold and riveting as I’ve ever seen them (eyes that Lady Londonderry once called wonderful and far-seeing). He’s testing me as if to say, I dare you, I dare you. But I’ve made up my mind for there is only one decision. Without him, I can have no existence.

I’ve waited for him, waited until he left his quarters, waited until he finished with his generals, waited until he awakened each morning. I am fetched then sent away. There’s sorcery in that hollow of waiting that’s as much him as the very hours he’s present, as the very breath that hits my cheeks when he pushes close to me. In death, we’ll wait together in history.

The wedding. He’s ordered flowers from a shop that operates in the basement of its original store that was bombed above. Flowers do exist. They grow at the Berghof, and they’re still in Berlin.

Our forests can’t be taken from us, Adi says. And it was Bormann who always championed weeds and pristine growth, encouraging civilians to eat “wild food.” Crazy Bormann, thinking of civilians when they’re the very people who let Adi down. What good did Bormann’s nettles, dandelions, and sorrel do? Flour made from yarrow, lettuce from nettle, soup from goat’s-rue, and all for the war effort. Even my mother made tasteless butter from figworts.

“Yellow tulips,” Adi says. “Be like a puppy to them.”

Magda knew all along. Yellow tulips.

I’ll hold my tulips to the end.

“Magda and Josef will follow us,” Adi tells me. “They don’t want to live. After we’re dead, Bormann will see that our bodies are completely burned. There will be no Führer-skull on display.”

“And the children?” I ask.

“They as well.”

“Even… Helga?”

“They have no wish for her to survive in a desperate world.”

Helga. Dead along with us. For a moment I’m angry. But I know that she can never be me, never have Adi as her husband, never know his glorious secreting tip when I finally become his bride.

I’m eager to be burned with him, to die in his fire. Eva Braun Hitler bones will not rest in some American museum or Russian government display case.

“At midnight, we’ll marry, my precious grenade, my Evchen.” He urges me to rest.

“Adi, the guards by the stairs have smelly feet. They should bathe and powder them once a day. Certainly for our wedding.”

“I’ll report it to Bormann.”

I have a sudden urge to see the light, to go up into the air and celebrate my happiness. The Führer will soon be mine. Just look at me now, Berlin!

“I have one last thing to do. I’ll need your permission to go to an apartment close by. I must see about a dress. I loaned it to a friend. It’s the dress I wish to wear for my wedding.”

“What friend?”

“Renate. A girlhood friend. A good Nazi. She used to work with me at the photography shop. You remember her? She had red hair and was a college student with a greenish rope birthmark on her ankle. You said it looked like a sailor’s tattoo.”

Renate borrowed my white chiffon spring dress for her brother’s decoration ceremony a year ago. Her brother fought on the Russian front and was awarded ribbons though his chest was partially destroyed and what was left was so sensitive and painful that they had to hang the ribbons on his ears. But what I really want is to see her face in disbelief when I say, “I’ll soon be Frau Hitler.”

“It’s too dangerous!” At that moment, shells rattle the bunker. We’re not alarmed and used to it.

“Her area is still within our safety zone.” I have already assumed the firm confidence of a wife.

I don’t elaborate on the total destruction up above. I can’t give him pain. “If I can’t see my friend one last time, if the enemy prevents that, then surely they have won.”

“You will turn back immediately if there’s any problem getting through!”

“Of course,” I say firmly.

“Nevertheless, I’ll consult a clairvoyant to be certain.”

Sitting patiently on a stool by the map room door is Emil Schneider with a glass ball on his lap. He softly sings Silesian folk songs as he runs one hand though his shaggy thick hair that he cuts himself. One forgets his protruding forehead after a few minutes. Emil predicted that the Führer would occupy Czechoslovakia so Adi feels confident in asking him if I’ll be safe in the city for my trip to Renate’s. But Adi always knew he would occupy Czechoslovakia, so what makes Emil so special? How can anybody be more knowing that the Führer? But I realize Adi likes to be reinforced by whimsy. It’s a curious game he plays as others play cards. That silly ball Emil holds is a child’s toy that little Helmut should be tossing against the Bunker walls.

Studying the crystal ball as he moves it briskly from side to side, Emil suddenly becomes grim. “I must look again.”

He shakes the ball and angles it to the right, the left. Still sullen, he shakes it violently.

“What? What?” I ask impatiently.

Slowly, as if reading the words from the globe, he replies: “You will never be harmed by the enemy.”

“See,” I chirp happily. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll send Otto Jantsch with you. He’s trustworthy. A Golden pheasant,” Adi says.

I know Golden Pheasants have great authority and trust. “But Adi, I hate the bullion lace they wear on their brown uniforms. It’s so… vain.”

“Otto forgoes all that.” Then Adi stares at my right arm. He moves closer to examine it with that intense Austrian way of his.

“Adi, why are you staring at my arm?”

“It has a slight touch of flab. There’s no time to lose.” He pats a wedge of flesh and there is, indeed, a delicate sway of skin.

Bormann sends out a runner to bring Major Otto Jantsch to the Bunker.

When Major Otto Jantsch arrives, his hobnailed boots making sparks on the concrete, Adi instructs him to return immediately if there are serious obstacles on the way.

Otto towers above Adi. He’s over six feet tall with a bulging chin slash from the defense of Schweinfurt. He carries his authority with a casual easiness, walking up to the Führer in that effortless manner of a professional soldier and giving off an aura of luck and good humor.

A sudden blast brings powdery concrete from the ceiling onto Major Jantsch’s uniform. Ignoring this, he salutes Adi with great formality without dusting the concrete flakes from his epaulettes. Happily he reports destroying a consignment of consecrated hosts smuggled into Berlin by French priests.

With a slight bow, he presents Adi with 30 lipless chemical beakers he’s found. They make elegant dinner glasses.

“There’s a terrible lack of saluting up above, Mein Führer. When they salute, the arm’s not properly straight and stiff.”

Adi is only concerned about me. How I thrill at his devotion. I wish to stand forever in his glare of pure protection. Demanding that Otto’s only duty is getting me back safely, he hurries off to the map room.

Otto suggests that he alone should secure my dress. But he’ll never find Renate’s apartment that is a construction built by her parents when the bombing stated. More a tunnel than a flat, it would be impossible to find. I desperately want to see Renate and watch her whole body stiffen in disbelief when I tell her I’m going to be Frau Hitler. In those days when I never knew if he loved only me, it was Renate, not my mother, who said he would never marry me.

Not having a good girlfriend down here is difficult. It’s not the same with Adi’s secretaries who are so loyal to their Führer that even when they can no longer find typewriter ribbons, they continue to pound the keys to please him. I’m regarded as just another woman in his inner circle but the lucky one. All I ever wanted was to be connected to him in an official way. It’s all I ever dreamed about. Yet Renate knew me before Adi when I was dreamy Fräulein Eva who only fantasized that someday a prince would come into her life. Renate married a butcher and has a boy with crossed eyes who had to wear glasses at the age of three. For I believe the men who come into a woman’s life can be predicted by her body. A woman needs only to read herself. Poor Renate has a thick neck, her hair is drab brown, her eyes a flecked green. I encouraged her to exercise that neck in the pool, moving her head from right to left as she swims, but Renate has no talent for water. She struggled without moving her face. Hence her destiny with a butcher husband while looking like a bulldog even in my special chiffon dress.

Magda comes in to the dining room in a filmy batiste nightgown, her top uncovered because of Heidi who is really too old to be breast-fed. Breast-feeding, Magda feels, keeps her succulent. And wasn’t the Führer breast-fed until he was five?

There’s a shortage of rubber nipples for nursing bottles, Magda tells us, but that’s no worry for her. “Major, how is the war?”

Major Jantsch looks at her strong erect nipples in open admiration. “War is merely a continuation of policy by other means, Frau Goebbels.” Smiling, he shows side teeth filed to cannibal points.

“Would these two be acceptable as… other means?” Magda holds out her breasts.

“But of course, Frau Goebbels. The good German woman.”

“I’m one German woman, nicht? Please don’t lump me with all the others. No two women or two breasts are alike. Even my own two differ, one from the other. The right is slightly larger.”

“I only see perfection, Frau Goebbels.” The major points to her breasts. His index finger was destroyed in battle, and he uses his middle finger to fire.

Magda’s eager smile creases her brow as she stares at his firing finger while lifting up her breasts. “Both are frisch and munter.”

“Ja. Healthy and hardy.” His likewise hardy erection is visible as he adjusts his tunic, his legs slightly bowed.

“Major Jantsch has no time for that.” I’m determined not to let Magda get away with her tricks. “The major is on assignment. He’s taking me out for my wedding dress.”

I try to stand between them, but Magda moves in closer to the major.

“Some believe my Heidi is too old for mother’s milk. But sucking does good things for the tissues.” Magda purses a mouth smeared with Paris lipstick rumored to be made from sewer grease.

The major touches her right breast assuring her of good tissues.

When Magda’s dead, when she’s in her coffin and hunkered under grass and deep dirt, the spiky swastika over her grave will grab at the trousers of young men going by.

“This is a noncom’s war, Major, as Russians are near us in battalion strength.” Magda authoritatively assures him of her official connections. “Here in Berlin as well as everywhere, we in the Bunker are not so concerned with the delicacies of an officer’s war now that our retired lance corporal Adolf Hitler has taken complete command of the military.”

“Ja, Frau Goebbels.”

“The Führer has turned our great country into the raw sensuous beauty of a farmer’s dream.” Magda moves in close to the major’s chest dreaming of Germany as one huge estate. The swaying nude bulb above casts a freak golden glow on her hair, as if she had staged it that way.

I tug at the major’s sleeve, but he ignores me, his eyes transfixed on Magda’s nipples that seem to grow larger and larger like dark seeping beer rings on a table. She tells him softly that German officers are beautifully educated, and that she admires. But they often have too narrow an outlook. Officers should consult psychology. But if they were psychologists, then perhaps they would be less soldiers. Such is the paradox of war. The Führer is the only one equipped with depth and first hand experience. He’s the only one with untainted understanding. He sees war as a checker game with live pieces. Chance inspires him. Taking suggestions from noncoms, he acknowledges those very soldiers who officers tend to believe are inconsequential. The Führer accepts ideas from anyone. Even a private. Especially a corporal. Even a fortune teller.

“Yes,” Otto says. “The Führer has a love for amateurs.”

Moving one nipple along the buttons of the major’s jacket, she knows that Our Leader understands mobile armored forces are a necessity, but they can’t replace the foot soldier. “Our Führer has special plans. Defeat is not possible.”

The major’s afraid to look down at Magda’s breasts against his chest for fear he’ll lose what little control he still has.

“Enough about the war,” I say. “The major knows all that and…”

“Do you believe, Major, as our Japanese friends do, that sex before battle makes a soldier more fierce?” Pulling away, Magda smiles at this man before her who is conquered and mesmerized.

“I know so little of the Japanese,” he says weakly.

“You would do well to study those who plan to help us. They did us a great favor with their surprise attack which caused panic in America. As you must know, our friend Japan has never been vanquished in three thousand years.”

“My comrades tell me those yellow people pick their nose with the baby finger because their nostrils are so small. And there’s Bushido, of course, Frau Goebbels.”

“Prime Minister Tojo stated in his declaration of war that the key to victory lies in a faith in victory. The Führer agrees.”

“Yes, yes, as I do,” the major says.

“All great countries learn their truth from war. Fed in war. Starved in peace. Wisdom from war. Deceit from peace. Delivered by war, abandoned by peace.”

“You know that, Frau Goebbels, but does every Heinz, Otto and Rolf know?”

“The Führer ordered the major to take me to Renate’s apartment. Time is important. We must go,” I snap.

“Leave in fifteen minutes,” Magda says. Her children are sleeping, and Josef is traveling to Hamburg—a city on fire where they say not even one rat has survived.

Magda will be a good German woman and help the troops. Taking the major’s hand, she leads him to my private bedroom to enjoy his shrapnel-dimples.

“But that’s my room.”

“Have a cup of coffee, Eva. The dining area is lively. We won’t be long.”

In a trance, the major follows. He doesn’t try to hide his erection in full bloom. He’s about to experience the Führer’s concept of a farmer’s battle. Classical rules and stratagems have given way to an earthy war.

No time to feel jealous for tonight I’ll have my own glory as Frau Hitler. As I hear their moaning, I open the door halfway to see the talents of Magda in action. She has a body most men want but not Adi. Though artists like a plump stomach and meaty thighs, Adi likes taut athletic flesh. I see Magda’s chunky arm deliver a wide flung stroking caress, a movement she learned from officers playing stylish tennis. Increasing like a constant drumbeat, their sighs grow louder. Under an armpit is the bright tattoo of the major’s blood group. His torso is bare, and a scar shows where he was sabered in the back. Magda’s beefy white thighs like spongy walls surround him as he pumps, his medals rattling.

The major guides her hand to an old grenade wound on his thigh that sometimes gapes opens.

“Yes,” she moans. “It’s opening.”

“I suppurate shrapnel. Is shrapnel leaking out?”

“Oh, yes.”

Defending Germany from all directions, the major advances loyally, his hands cupped under Magda’s large walrus rump.

“A Slav-Asiatic move, Major.” Magda arches under his weight. Flipping her over, he takes her from behind, scraping his cannibal teeth along her back.

“I can’t hold out much longer.” The major is obeying blindly, absolute and obedient, slewing hard and cutting all communications. There’s no lack in determination as he repeats his thrusts again and again, his soul indifferent to what’s beneath him. More formidable at the rear, he takes a series of very deliberate short pulls, putting his chest down heavily each time as Magda becomes a blur of teeth and hair. Then he blow-bursts through her highest command while they both yell as if poleaxed.

“Get to the front, Major,” Magda orders.

Turning over, she pulls him down so that he straddles the back of her hilly thighs. This is Magda’s end of the telescope. This is Magda’s offensive. Moving her rear up and down with incredible force, she lets the Major respond in only nominal ways. She forbids withdrawal and hammers a ruthless energy invading his reserves. The deeper they go, the deeper they lose rank, Magda becoming the infantry oberst. His incendiary unloads, squirting into her stronghold. Roaring together, they fall into ruin with a heaving rest.

They finish in fifteen minutes. Right on time. This is one more German victory.

The romp made her hairpiece and shoulder pads work loose and fall on the floor. Gallantly, the major picks one up, kissing it and tucking the glorious booty of a blissful skirmish in his pocket. Then he pats down his uniform tucking his genitals into the left pant leg telling her that he likes to “dress left.”

Finally, the major and I go up the iron stairs. He lingers behind to watch my slim legs. I ask him how the war is going. He answers, “Glanzend aber hoffnungslos.” Splendid but hopeless. We hurry through the emergency exit toward the garden of the Reich Chancellery. My shadow follows me out of the Bunker falling on the ruins of Berlin like a ghost in the brackish air. He tells me all about himself, how his mother regrets the loss of the monarchy no matter what he says to her. His wife wears silly braids that wind into huge earmuffs; she can’t be convinced to get a modern hair cut so he often thinks he’s better off having her as a sister. Maybe he’s going bald with all the hair that comes out in his comb. When he dines occasionally with the Führer, he goes hungry eating only awful raw carrots and tomatoes and has to dash home to devour his wife’s goulash. His father forgets to wear his party badge in his lapel.

“I have a law degree. So I’m outraged, Fräulein, to hear that General Fegelein was shot. Not because he was shot, of course. That was necessary. For we must not forget how Clemenceau dealt with internal traitors… rounding them up, having them shot to save France. General Fegelein was terminated without court of law first. Being an attorney, you must know what that means to me.”

All this rambling as we idle and curve in a Kubelwägen through the crumbled streets of Berlin that smell of chlorinated lime powder the soldiers use to cleanse the dead.

The major sees a Russian scout and fires, sending Ivan running behind a leaning wall. From a concealed pit, a gun rattles.

“Damn. They’re firing wild.” The major turns his head from side to side. “They’re using our knocked out tanks for shooting posts.” He pats the hand grenade stuck in his belt and then removes his Knight’s Cross hiding it in his pocket… wearing it makes him a desirable target. Twisting off the grenade’s porcelain knob, he throws it and the explosion silences the wild firing.

“You would do well to stop that scribbling, Fräulein. What can you be writing at a time like this?”

“All that I hear and see. In the world on these pages, I can be alone with the Führer.” I take a little theatrical pause to look around at the ruins. “Is it possible what they are saying… that the Leipzig Fair is still going on? Can that be true, Major?”

“Jawohl,” he replies proudly.

Smoking tracer rounds streak ahead. The flaming tail of a rocket salvo bursts over the truck in front of us, and it rears up taking a direct hit. Exhaust gases blow in my face.

“Get down,” the major yells. “They’ve got observation slots on the roofs. We have to keep moving. I can’t stop and get involved. I’m on an order that has to be obeyed.” He takes his helmet off and puts it on my head, pushing the strap still warm from his skin firmly under my chin.

Cinders fly into my mouth and my nose is running. The ground lurches under us. Two black crows perch on the warm plates of a tank. A soldier aims his weapon and fires a long burst at the birds and they fall to the ground beside a brown-uniformed Ivan with his head half gone.

“Yesterday I shot two Russians who were dressed in German uniforms. It was awful, Fräulein. How I hate these Ivans for their trickery. Firing into our own uniforms was so… so… monstrously upsetting.” The major is shaken in this memory, his voice strained, his eyes twitching.

War reins you in, yet it brings such nobility, I scribble in my memoir.

“First the Communists set our Reichstag on fire. Then the Allies set fire to Berlin. And to think I have an American stove in my house. My wife has grown attached to it and won’t let me haul it away.” Gripping the wheel of the car firmly, his large mouth moves vigorously as he chews gum with dedication. At each chew he puts his jaw to one side with the air of a gourmet.

“Major, please, I request you spit out the gum for patriotic purposes.” Everyone in Germany considers gum chewing an example of America’s degradation.

“Yes, you’re quite right. I forget as it keeps me steady, an awful habit I picked up when taking a course at Harvard. In the U.S.”

“You went to school in America?”

“Made the crossing on the steamer S.S. Hamburg. Took ten days. A beautiful trip. And before I left, I got such sound advice from Goebbels—expert advice that I carefully followed.”

“What did Josef tell you?”

“Go out for rowing. Row your guts out. Harvard loves that. And though my grades weren’t the best, I was a great success.”

The major becomes visibly pained by all the smoldering beams in our path. There’s no thought of Harvard anymore. “I have family that goes back many years. Under the Duke of Brunswick. Gunners—all of them.”

I tell the major I’ll be united to the Führer in just a few hours. “We’ll be married as a war couple.”

“I have the good fortune of helping retrieve your wedding dress.”

My wedding dress is itself patriotic since Renate wore it when her brother was decorated for bravery.

“And what will you wear in your wedding bed?” The major loosens his grip on the wheel and I think, So, even an officer whose cousin is a count wants to know what the Führer is like in bed.

“Major, don’t you find that rather classified?”

“I deal with the classified as a Golden pheasant.”

I don’t answer, for I’m stifled by the stench of death. The streets are stacked with bodies. What looks like heads and skulls are covered with silver and red powder drifting from the collapsing buildings.

Two heavy draft horses struggle to get up on bleeding legs. The major swerves to avoid hitting them.

“Don’t we treat wounded animals, Major? The Führer would not like leaving them like this.”

“Let me give you my scarf to use as a mask,” he says to change the subject.

“It’s necessary to see and smell what’s left. I won’t be turned away as a squeamish woman. Not when our badly wounded continue to fire back.”

“Good. You follow our no withdrawal policy.”

“Wouldn’t you expect that from the Führer’s future wife?” As I push my face as far as I can outside the window, smoke from a recently exploded artillery shell burns my nostrils. SS troops dug in beside an office building pop their heads up to salute.

“Look at that,” he says with irritation. “We’re forced to use old trucks with wood-burning gas generators.”

A little girl comes toward us holding a flower. Shells explode, and she makes what looks like a curtsey as blood oozes down her legs and covers her bulky pink socks. I want to stop and help her, but the major insists we keep going.

“My battalion adjutant has informed me that the Russians have our Lichtenstein bridge.”

“I’m quite aware of that, Major. I’m as informed as you are.”

“Look at these kids dressed like soldiers, closing their eyes when they shoot with old World War I rifles.” He yells: “Shoot low!”

“I think they’re rather endearing,” I say.

A baby lies in the street. We don’t see it in time and our vehicle runs over it without the slightest jolt.

“It was probably already dead,” the major says to calm me as I shut my eyes in anguish. “War is war. Schnapps is schnapps.” He sings: “O Susanna, oh weine nicht um mich, denn ich komm von Alabama…”

“Don’t sing that. It’s defeatist.” I cover my ears, fearful that the song will bring bad luck.

“Beneath an old lamplight… waiting… waiting… for my sweetheart…”

“Now that’s romantic,” I say.

“And are you waiting, Fräulein?”

“I’m Eva of the lamplight. But I won’t be waiting long.”

The ground trembles as pavement bricks bounce against the tires. Litter bearers draped in tent squares run to help a bleeding soldier in a drainage ditch.

A body flattened by a tank is enlarged nine or ten times its size, the gun enlarged, too, and it’s like the cartoon movies Goebbels likes so much.

“The Red Army is shooting every German officer they capture.”

“I don’t have to tell you what they do to German women, Major?” If he thinks he’s taking chances as an officer, I’m taking more chances as a woman.

Entire neighborhoods have been demolished. I hardly know where we are. Bombs are worse now, worse than the first thousand-bomb raid, worse than the terror bombings of Cologne and Bremen. Incendiaries with liquid asphalt stick to wood and stone making it hard to put out the fire.

An old man sits on rubble and softly plays an ode to the Unknown Soldier, a white cloth attached to his bugle. Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden.

“This war didn’t start in Berlin. This war was born in Versailles. That damn treaty is destroying the poor volk and causing old people to pledge an oath to the emperor and the Weimar times,” the major says.

Otto was an altar boy when the Catholic Church was popular. He’s sad to think of St. Thomas Aquinas and the “tantum ergo” that he sang as a child. “Et antiquum documentum novo cedat ritui.” What is Thomas Aquinas now when even village priests are hoisting the papal ensign along with a white flag of surrender?

A child’s bike hangs by one handlebar from the eaves of an apartment building half demolished. Where is the child? Is he or she safe? A window frame falls on the bike and both go crashing to the ground. Is the whole world exploding around me, or is it only Berlin?

“I went to the War Academy at Danzig and later attended the General Staff College in order to lead a battalion on the front. And to think… to think I’m leading the Führer’s future wife to her wedding dress. I can tell this to my children and grandchildren someday.”

While exploding shells throw clouds of dirt around us, an organ grinder cranks out hopelessness from a hand organ. He bellows: “The brain depends on the bowels. On the bowels. On the bowels.” Yellow lamps burn in the ceiling of an empty bus. As an officer observes two firemen through a scissors telescope, as they dig in the collapsed rubble that was once a house.

“Fräulein, only admirals have any luck in this war. Our Führer cares nothing about the sea or fishing out soldiers with German boathooks. He sees us as a land power. The navy has no regrets.”

“And are you suggesting, Major, that you have regrets?”

He doesn’t answer but continues to go carefully around two dead black colonial soldiers splayed on the street, their backs mashed smoothly into concrete.

“Think of it, Major, black men dying next to white ones.”

To a squad of soldiers moving meter by meter through ruins, the major shouts, “Shoot at their tank tracks.”

“It’s the Jews with their long beards pulling carts and crying: ‘old knives, old knives’ that did all this.” Squinting his eyes, he’s unable to grasp this landscape of hell. “My mother used to take me every year for Christmas stollen at the Kaiserhof. I’d see fat children eating plate after plate of stollen. When I asked who they were, Mother said they were little Jewish boys and girls who have diabetes and like cakes. The major sneers and says, “They’ve grown up to be Jews selling knives in the street.”

Our excellent cook, Thilde, is not like the Jews in Berlin. She cooks with my mother’s pans. In Simbach, Jews are poor.

Blondi hasn’t even seen a Jew. She’s dumb enough to probably lick a Jew’s hand like any other hand.

“I seldom can eat meat after I drive through the city these days,” Otto says. “I’ve given up stew altogether since seeing one of our soldiers in Russia trying to get a dead Ivan’s boots off. The Russian’s feet were frozen so our mess sergeant cut off his legs with a meat cleaver, then put the legs on the stove right next to his hen-stew until both human legs and chicken legs came warm and easy off the bone.” He pauses, considering his family. “The bread ration has been reduced to 200 grams a day. My sister is pregnant and anemic, eating only watery milk soup and crusts smeared with lard. What kind of child will she deliver? What will the next generation of Germans look like? Americans can hardly criticize us. All the Jews are safe in resettlement camps while our men, women and children are dying in the cities.”

“Since we went into Russia, they’ve continued to criticize us for everything,” I say.

When it’s three blocks to Renate’s apartment, I tell him where to turn.

Swerving, we nearly hit a huge bed that was blown into the street. Two men are on the bed, locked together, the one on top moving in rapturous plunges.

“What are they doing?”

“Spontaneity, Fräulein.”

“I’ve heard all about this men loving men thing.” They’re called “ein warmer Bruder” (a warm brother). Only half that way, Göring wants women as well. He wants everything, and once had to use a chicken when inspecting an outpost that was far from any brothel. The chicken, I’m told, did not survive his ardor, another casualty of war.

We stop abruptly and I fall forward, but the major catches me with an outstretched arm.

“Soldiers enjoying themselves, nicht?” The major jumps out and moves closer to the bed to observe, his freshly polished shoes in contrast to a dusty uniform. “One can hardly blame men who must find enjoyment in hell.”

Two SS Stallions, their uniforms carefully hanging from the bedpost, their lean bodies entwined, are indeed forgetting the war.

Beside the bed are old newspapers, tin cans, leaflets, rubber patches. As powdered dust floats down upon the naked lovers, it’s like a snow-globe I turned over as a child. Now exploded Berlin falls upon the tops of lust.

Sitting on the side of the bed, the major urges them on, though I don’t think the men can hear him in their rapture. Yes, the major is right. One can’t blame any form of pleasure in the midst of so much misery. Escalating groans of pleasure can block out shells bursting. “Der Eiserne Mann, oh iron man,” one calls to the other, and the Major turns slyly to hide his hand that reaches in his trousers for his own iron. All three pop at the same time.

In a friendly manner of a comrade in arms, the major slaps both young men on their bare buttocks.

“I have a shot left,” the one SS captain tells the major.

“Perhaps if you’re here tomorrow. I have an assignment,” the Major replies.

The naked SS captain in bed turns to me. “I have a wife, Fräulein, and I know a woman’s needs. Would you like to go behind that tree with me for a few minutes? If you don’t wish to go the full length, I have my swastika ring for a more gentle persuasion. This is wartime, and one shouldn’t be modest.”

To better hear my response, the other SS officer, a lieutenant, lifts up on one elbow.

“I’m to be married tonight. I’ll have contentment soon enough.” Smoothing down my skirt in emphasis, I feel the light touch of the material against my thighs. What difference would it make if I relieved myself behind that tree? The captain’s ring has a knobby swastika with polished points that I know would do a quick and elegant job. Adi wouldn’t care. Not with a swastika ring. Not without any human touch.

The two naked SS officers turn again to each other when they see me get back into the vehicle. Will pressing my legs together help me reach some kind of conclusion, softly, gently, so that the major won’t know? Would I be able to quickly push his hand away if he placed it in a gentlemanly fashion on my lap, moving his fingers into my skirt slowly, then more steadily, never touching my skin, only working the fabric like a merciful instrument?

But all I do is tell the major to go north and then turn and go two blocks to reach Renate’s apartment.

“I wouldn’t call what’s left blocks,” he says. “But at least there’s nothing more to destroy.”

“Just us,” I say calmly.

The major begins to sing softly, “Ich hat einen Kameraden, einen bessren findst Du nicht… I used to have a good friend, better than any you would find.”

We turn and approach two unharmed streets, one facing the other, each with a row of perfectly preserved lampposts and houses. Equally unharmed are Goebbels’ atrocity slogans: Hate we must. Revenge is just. Hate we trust. Revenge we must. Now Josef is hitting the last big pipe on his huge Wurlitzer organ by adding on the radio, Bombs give us strength! Sweat saves blood!

But have his slogans helped? A mere yard beyond these signs is a barrier of rubble. We can go no farther.

22

“I’M AFRAID YOUR FRIEND’S APARTMENT IS GONE.”

“I don’t give up so easily, Major.”

I get out and stand before the rubble, the major following me. Numerous dented pots and pans are scattered everywhere, and the major says they probably belong to Jews who have fled the city. One can see right away they’re not normal pots and pans, but ones that are used for all those silly dietary laws Jews have. “They’re not Unserer Leute, our kind of pots,” he says, holding out a large skillet.

Attempting humor, I ask, “Are pots why we resettle them, Major?”

“They crowded us. All their furniture, pans, houses. Jews made us go into Russia to get more space. Lebensraum. Nevertheless, Jews love Germany and are tolerant of us.”

“Don’t forget the ghetto uprisings,” I add.

“Anti-German slander. Many Jews want to send their children to be educated in resettlement camps. There are prisoners who don’t wish to be released. Jews from Dachau say it’s a resort compared to Polish camps.”

The major shoves me behind a mountain of debris as he sees a Russian tank in the distance. Nearby, our own tank-hunters look for the enemy with Panzerfausts. Shooting begins. I find myself kneeling on a human corpse. The major nudges the body away with one quick kick, and a thigh comes loose flying up and landing on my head. I scream, and the major pushes the disgusting remains back on the pile.

Humming without fear, an old man and woman emerge from a bombed out building with seemingly no awareness of war.

To pass the time as we’re hunkered down, the major explains the different weapons calmly, almost poetically, as if he’s looking up to the heavens on a peaceful night and pointing out the stars. “That’s a mortar. They all have a slow strung-out sound. Hear? Like one stroke on the violin. Now those are plain old artillery shells, and they go a little faster, a kind of bass fiddle. Heavy artillery? That’s a speedy sound, trumpeting. And detonation is the bassoon, the most glorious loud bash of all.”

Adi would like the major’s symphonic sense of war, and I’m grateful to him for calming me down. Breathing more calmly, I smell gasoline, urine and feces as I listen to bombardments as an orchestra. Perhaps it’s Wagner at work, even Strauss though Adi came to hate him for statements Strauss made against the Reich.

Crawling carefully on his belt buckle, the major moves ahead to make sure we’re safe before coming back for me. Suddenly we hear the click of a safety catch. I freeze. Tense. Fear grips me as it always does with the horrible notion that I will die without Adi at my side. But the major pats my arm in assurance. “Russian rifles don’t have safeties. It’s German.”

And indeed a German soldier wearing a leather hat with thick loose earflaps rises not far from us, salutes, and runs into a building firmly clutching his rifle.

The noise ceases and the major leads me from debris. “If you have any influence with the Führer,” he says, “you should tell him to order officers who are at the front to be stationed at Headquarters. General Staff Officers who are sitting on their same swivel chairs from World War I should go immediately to the front. The Great War Headquarters can’t help us understand… this.” He points around. “Any change, even at this late day, could only help.”

“Major, the Führer will not permit any of his personal staff to be removed.”

“Such devotion is admirable but perhaps not useful.”

“His personal staff is not responsible for all this destruction.”

“Göring is! We are suffering because of the Luftwaffe’s failure to put a roof over our fortress.”

“Let us not forget, Major, that Ribbentrop by his arrogance and lack of moderation alienated the neutral powers.”

“Perhaps that is so.”

We don’t speak for a few minutes and then he wants to know if I still wish to push ahead to search for Renate. I do. We’ve come this far. He takes my hand with his, a surprisingly soft hand, a Golden Pheasant’s hand, the hand of a man who deals not only with weapons but also with confidential papers, circulars and special reports. He tells me he started out wanting to be just a “gray easel” (what the old-timers call the handbook for the general staff officers). Desk work is all right, but he needs action, too.

Am I a special paper? Squeezing my fingers together as we walk, he slowly separates each finger,, lingering in between. Is this a gesture of comfort or desire? How many times does the major have to relieve himself? Twice since I’ve been with him and probably this morning with his wife, too.

“Where is your wife, Major?”

“I put her on the train to Pomerania this morning.”

As we come to a populated area, I’m sure it’s Renate’s street. The ground is churned and mixed so that there’s no level place to walk. We see a woman in mourning though wearing black mourning is verboten. “You should be happy your son or husband died for the fatherland,” the major shouts.

An old man from the People’s Militia stops us, and the major flashes his identification card. Apologizing for any inconvenience, the Militia man goes to a woman holding a hand to her bloody head. I call after him, “Do you know a Renate Müller? She lives around here.”

He says the people living here are all dead except for the woman with a bloody head.

The wounded woman is astonished to learn she’s the only one left in her neighborhood.

The major is particularly glad that this woman and other civilians aren’t directing any hostility toward a soldier who is still fighting.

“My parents were crushed a week ago in the night. But bombs came over this morning,” the woman says, rubbing her head and looking up. “My daughters were able to die today in the light.”

“It was Ajax in the Iliad who wished to die in sunlight,” the major says, eager to display his learning. “You must know homer.”

“No,” she says with a hoarse voice. “He doesn’t live around here.”

“Do you know Renate Muller?” I ask.

“I know no Renate.” She feels the bleeding and rips her blouse sleeve off to wrap around her head.

“You can get out of here if you find your way to the Pichelsdorf bridge,” the People’s Militia man tells us.

“You should get out,” the major says. “The Russians will be here in full force very soon.”

“I went to school in Moscow. I can deal with them,” he replies.

As we walk, the major scans the streets and tells me Russia’s heavy tanks are better than the Germans thought. But the Red Army has little artillery, so why didn’t we take advantage of that? The German soldier got over his fear of facing Russian soldiers in combat long ago. Dread of being captured is the problem. The fear of Siberia hangs over every German’s head. Siberia is the Russian bomb. German soldiers fight harder because of Siberia, but it also wears away their confidence.

“We have good tanks, too.” I sift through bricks and broken concrete for any sign of Renate’s apartment.

“Not as good as the Russian T.34 tank. Russians hate frills like wireless controls, and they concentrate on bare necessities. They’ve shattered us, and now they’re shattering our remains.”

Babies cry with little paper bandages on their faces, and mothers hush them with soft songs. If I can only find Renate sitting on the stubble next to her cross-eyed child with my dress in her arms.

“The Red Army didn’t fully use air power,” the major says looking at the bombed earth. “If I were one of the commanders in the Red Army, you can make sure I’d use parachute troops because who would expect that? It was not prudent that we use them. The Führer told us that Crete proved the days of the parachute are over. It’s a surprise tactic and the surprise element was gone. But our generals didn’t listen and German paratroopers bled on the Eastern Front. The Führer is always right.”

23

A TORN SCARF LOOKS FAMILIAR, but it’s only cotton. Renate would never wear anything so coarse, and since her husband the butcher was with the occupying forces in Paris as a company cook, I’m sure she has a store of good silk.

“Are Russian generals as bad as ours?”

“Zhukov is competent. He got his training in Germany. The Russians consider him an outsider.”

Maybe there would be less rape of German women if Zhukov were around.

A young German soldier on the ground is wheezing from blood-choked lungs. A sucking chest wound, it’s a continual problem on the front as ordinary gauze sticks to the skin when applied to this kind of injury. Recently, German doctors made Vaseline gauze that works wonders. Unfortunately, the major no longer has a sterilized can of the Vaseline gauze with him. The last container was used weeks ago. He pats the private on the forehead as glistening fresh blood sticks to his sleeve.

A strong sound of engines up above startles me. I crouch down.

“Sewing machines,” the major says. “That’s what we call Russian biplanes on harassing missions trying to buzz us to death.”

Crushed between mounds of mud is an old bell tower. The major is happy to see there’s no bell inside. We need iron, and all church bells in Germany are confiscated for the war effort. Is this just another clever way for Adi to strike back at the Church?

“Those dead German soldiers you see hanging,” the major says pointing, “are traitors we strung up on tram pylons. Executed as deserters.”

As the last two weeks were warm and dry, the firestorm raids have done more damage. Strong drafts create swirls of heat with smoke three or four miles high. Firemen can’t stop the flames, so they concentrate on freeing people trapped under debris. Searing heat shrinks and shrivels the dead and dying.

“Look at this!” The major points to the scorched remains of a soldier. The lower part of the body is naked, and his sex organ is mummified and grossly extended.

“General Keitel collects these things.” Taking out his handkerchief, he tugs the expanded penis away from the blasted groin. It breaks free as delicately as a lace border pulled from a tablecloth.

“What if it’s one of our soldiers?” I can’t look at this elongated distortion that the major carries on his handkerchief, one end sticking straight out like some awful beastly stump.

“All the better, don’t you think? We’re merely preserving German manhood.”

“What does Herr General do with these things?” Not even latrine gossip has learned of Keitel’s collection.

“He has a personal museum.“

Petrified body parts make me realize there’s no reason now to hunt anymore for Renate. If she was smart, she left weeks ago with her family. If she remained, then she’s dead in her tunnel apartment still holding fast to her kitchen table and her hand-painted dishes, maybe mummified herself. I’ll never get my dress back or be able to tell her that she was wrong. All those days she followed me around Munich laughing as I placed a passionate kiss in the armpit of every statue of the Führer. Well, Renate, I’m marrying Him!

Wrapping it carefully with the pages of a lengthy confidential report, the major puts the calcified organ carefully under his seat. This penis will get him whiskey from the general, maybe even a two-day pass.

“An SS doctor tells me that mummified parts are worse than cutting through stone.”

I don’t want to see such things, but that would be womanly, and he’d start patronizing me again.

Before we begin driving off, I write a note to Renate on a block of concrete that was blasted away from a storefront. I grab a piece of stone with a sharp edge and write, “Renate, I A M T F.”

“What is I A M T F?” Perplexed, his high forehead forms one large crease from side to side.

“I am marrying the Führer.” I proudly emphasize each word.

“Why didn’t you just write that?”

“You of all people ask me that?”

“Jews might read it? Surely there are no Jews left in Berlin.”

Jews like my mother’s cook, Thilde, never bother with gossip though Adi says poor Thilde and her kind could never understand Die Meistersinger. I mean officers’ wives. They’re the worse gossips, eager to look down on me because I don’t have a “von” before my name.

Tugging the strap of a box, an old woman stumbles and falls to the ground. A dead charred baby falls out. Stuffing it back in, she runs through a smoky path when her head is blown off—still holding the box, she continues a few more steps before falling.

Her flowery dress half eaten by fire, a young girl asks us where a first aid station is. Seeping sores line her legs. We can’t tell her where there’s a hospital that hasn’t been bombed, but we take her to a nearby shelter clinic. “I’m so hungry,” she moans, “I use vomit from the dying to trap rabbits and cats.”

A warped C ration can left by a soldier is in the street, and I tell her to take it.

“How can I? It’s American. The Germans will think I’m a spy.”

“Soon you and your friends can eat all the American food you want,” the major says. “Americans will be here shortly.”

On the street ahead, hot asphalt has melted an old man into its porous clutches—up to the neck.

“I should shoot the poor man and put him out of his misery.” The major touches the Luger at his side. “I can’t afford to waste ammunition.”

Untouched by smoke and black soot, a woman wearing a large hat with red poppies approaches the asphalt-planted man and places a gray fedora on his head to shield him from blowing plaster and gravel. Sitting on the ground next to him, she takes out bottles of water and little wedges of cheese.

“The good German Hausfrau to the end.” The major finds the true spirit of his homeland in the smallest detail. If only his brandy flask were not empty, for the asphalt-husband and his wife deserve a drink.

Moving toward us are wounded people crawling at our feet, begging for help—a young girl with torn arms, an old man with blood on his chest, crying children. Will they ever eat strudel again? Feel the weight of a parade flag on their shoulders? Brush their teeth again? I’m privileged by just breathing.

We jump in the vehicle ready to return to the Bunker through the ravaged roads. But a boulder in the street blocks our way after only a few minutes, as streetcar tracks were blown from their beds. The major tries to shove smoldering wood out of our path. To the side of the road, we hear a howl, a creature’s sound but perhaps human, too. Clearing away rubbish, the major lifts out a scrappy dog.

“See what I saved.” Holding up the mongrel proudly, he slaps dust from its brown fur. “Skinny but still alive. The Führer will reward me handsomely for saving a dog.” Giving the cur water from his canteen, he then walks ahead to a girl who is swaying aimlessly around a swirl of fire clutching a half loaf of bread. Stopping her with one broad thrust of his hand, he breaks the bread in half giving the girl a chunk and keeping the bigger part for himself. We get back in the jeep.

He feeds the dog bread as we drive, and it eats hungrily, scattering chunky crumbs up into the air and on my dress like the flecks of plaster and concrete falling outside.

“A survivor, this little bitch.” The major boldly swings around wagons, burning porch posts, and furniture wormed with bullet holes. “What shall we call her?”

“Renate.”

“We’ve found Renate, after all.” Laughing, he slaps me on one thigh. It’s a friendly slap, but what would it be like if he didn’t take his hand away? I blush and feel guilty. In just a few hours, I’ll be a married woman.

Renate puts her nose into the deepest corner of my lap. A stirring moves up to my stomach, and I’m embarrassed. A dog can do that to me? I push her snout away, and she stretches out to sleep, her head on the major’s lap, her hindquarters on mine.

Driving carefully and avoiding every pitfall, the major is silent. Destruction passes by as if it were a movie, as if this were some Goebbels’ newsreel showing the bombardment we’ve unleashed on enemy cities. It’s like the American novel I read about the destruction of the South during the civil war. Scarlett O’Hara. Am I like that? A woman who has to endure war but has a great love?

“Major, have you read Gone with the Wind?”

“You ask that when Clark Gable flies a bomber over Germany? ”

“Gable isn’t in the book. 300,000 copies were sold in Germany. Aren’t you even curious?”

“One is always curious, Fräulein. I own an American stove!”

As we drive over two heavy beer signs, Renate’s leg digs into my groin jolting that locus already so warm and vulnerable. We three bounce up in the air—me with a short climax of quick release—before falling back to our seats.

“Sorry,” the major says. “I’ve no control over all the devastation cluttering the streets, though our long wide boulevards are good fire breaks. We haven’t endured a firestorm. Not like Hamburg or Dresden.”

“But we have the same ruin.”

“Our ruins are excellent enemy barriers.”

“And you’re a good driver.” I remove Renate’s leg from my lap and place it carefully on my knee.

We’re flagged down by a man dressed as a clown. His costume is clean and sparkling. In all the grime, how is he able to stay unsoiled?

“Stoi!” the major orders. “We’re on duty for the Führer.”

“Sir.” The clown salutes. “We’re official as well. The Berlin Relief Ensemble validated by the Reich,” he says in a broad Baden dialect.

“Major, I believe he’s authentic. Goebbels convinced the Führer that Berlin is still our theatrical center.”

“Nevertheless, I’d prefer him to remain at hand-grenade distance.” Holding Renate tightly for fear his reward might get away from him, we climb out of the Kubelwägen.

“Why aren’t you in uniform? Defending Berlin?”

“Sir.” The clown’s voice is deep. “We’re here to uplift the German spirit.”

“Where are your fellow uplifters, Prince of Clowns?”

“Call me Dunce, Major. In the theatre world, titles don’t matter.”

“Mein Dunce, then.”

“Please follow me.” The clown steers us to a small tunnel that’s reinforced with bricks and concrete. It’s the worse section of the city—Mulackstrasse—the alleyways of prostitutes and criminals. Coming out of a tunnel, we enter a basement with seats and stage and sit in the front row, Renate secure on the major’s lap. Behind us is an audience of people with faces blackened from bombardment, some with arms and legs smeared in red brittle powder. A war audience. Nobody speaks. It’s weirdly quiet. A smudged mask of charred amber looks at me with eyes that show no reaction to my stare.

Taking off his billowing pants, the clown stands before us in black glass shorts and a polka-dotted shirt. He announces, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

“Shakespeare,” the major says.

“Julius Caesar,” the clown adds.

“Act IV, Scene 3.” The Major smiles proudly. “Our family tutor was an Englishman.”

The clown calls to a young woman in yellow leggings who comes on stage. Her hair is the same yellow as her tights. With no crotch in her tights, her light brown pubic hair bushes at the opening.

With gaudy fingers painted in stripes of yellow and green, the clown taps his glass underwear.

“Isn’t love a delicate matter?” the clown shouts.

The girl in yellow tights shouts as she runs offstage, “Where is the 1,000 pound Reich person?”

“Leading the dying Luftwaffe Air Force on his motorcycle.” The clown waves his hands like fluttering wings.

Doubling over in laughter, the major stamps his feet in approval. He hates Göring.

“Göring can sometimes be charming,” I whisper to the major.

“Charming loses wars.”

“And he lost a nephew. Peter Göring died in a dogfight over the Channel.”

“Peter Göring was a talented fighter pilot and liked in spite of having a dummi-dummi uncle. Now Peter is in Soldiers’ Cemetery at Abbeville where his other comrades of the Schlageter Squadron rest.” The major motions for the clown to continue.

The clown announces, “All women in the audience are to sit on the laps of men.”

Looking at me with a persuading smile, the major pushes his legs close together.

What can I do? I gently lower myself on his lap, and a thick warm bulge presses into me.

There’s no movement from the crowd behind me. Silence. Are they all women?

“Women, then, on women’s laps,” the clown orders. A rustling noise as the dusty mannequins sit upon each other. “When just a little boy, the Führer came to my school,” the clown says. “I told him I wanted to be a great soldier. What should I do? The Führer told me to unclog the kitchen zinc.”

The major and I laugh. That’s Adi, the practical man, the corporal.

The audience remains lifeless, only their eyelids moving in creases of soot.

“When I was older, I asked the Führer what he thought of black, and the Führer being a former artist thought I meant the color, telling me that black to him is the crack in the ass of Eva Braun.”

Startled, I suck in my breath. People are laughing so hard that sparks of red and black powder fly into the air. Is it possible this audience has heard the name Eva Braun? Do they finally know who I am? Would they ever believe that I sit beside them?

Quickly standing and letting Renate fall to the ground, the major takes out his pistol and wastes a bullet on the clown’s throat.

It’s a clean bullet hole in the rouged neck. Bright red streaks runs down the clown’s chest and on his belly before he slumps over. Behind me people are still laughing thinking this is part of the act. But the girl in yellow tights comes on stage to drag off the clown.

“Major, what have you done?“ I pick up Renate and stand facing him.

“The clown insulted you.”

“But he also recognized me.”

“Are you angry with me, Fräulein?”

“No. You believed you were defending me. Should we see if the clown is alive? Perhaps he needs help.”

“He’s only a dunce. We must get back.” With Renate between us, the major begins his arduous drive back to the Bunker.

Adi is waiting for us at the bottom of the circular stairs. It’s been over three hours, and he’s only upset because we’re late. The fortuneteller has assured him that we were safe. Standing next to him is Bormann who shifts nervously from one foot to the other.

“A gift for you, Mein Führer.”

Adi takes the dog, forgetting his anger.

“I’ve been shooting, Mein Führer,” the major announces formally.

“Not at animals, I hope.” The Führer’s body is suddenly rigid.

“Nein. Only people, Mein Führer.”

Petting Renate calms Adi. His mustache doesn’t quiver. Tight wrinkles by his eyes relax. Adi pushes Renate’s face against his jacket that has custard drippings. The dog licks the stains. Being stared at all these years has made Adi old. The eyes of people have diminished him. How spryly his legs moved when we first met. His hair fell across his smooth forehead when he leaned over me. Now he’s listless, his forehead lined in deep creases. As his wife, I vow to make him young again.

Bormann has arranged the wedding for midnight. The tulips have arrived.

I explain that my white dress is lost, and I’ll wear the black one with roses on each side of the neckline that Adi likes.

Nuzzling the dog, Adi listens to our adventures, how we rescued the dog and named her Renate, how we attended a theatre performance to see the brave people of Berlin struggling onward. We don’t mention the dead or dying or the amorous SS on the bed and certainly not the remark the clown made about me.

Bormann gets water and sets it on the ground, and Adi strokes Renate as she drinks loudly.

“You’ll be glad to know, Mein Führer, there are no Jews left in Berlin. Judenrein!” The major stands erect beside the drinking Renate. For emphasis, he bends stiffly to pat the dog’s head.

“And all their artworks?”

“Safe.”

“I have such a fondness for Dürer,” Adi says.

“I’m sure his works are carefully tucked away in one of our basement vaults. To be shipped to your private Linz Museum.”

“The Jews know art.” Adi picks up Renate who drips water from her mouth onto his jacket. “Surely you have some written statement, some Jewish validation of their worth?”

“Of course, Mein Führer.”

“With paintings, the Jew must be considered. The rich Catholics mostly covet gold chalices and statues. Protestants their racing stables. Who will remember the respect I’ve held for Jewish art collections?”

“The dog was rescued for you, Mein Führer.” The major steps closer to Adi.

Adi is pleased. It’s the best gift he could get, better than my wedding dress. A hint of sadness glistens at the sides of his eyes as he fears the dog has lived a terrible existence running frantically from one bombardment to another. An animal can’t know what the shells and fire mean. The poor creature is without national thoughts. The major deserves to be rewarded. What would he like? Boots? Special food?

“I wish to spend a weekend with my wife and children.”

The Führer calls for Bormann who writes up a special order from the stacks of endless forms on his desk.

Adi wishes to see a picture of the major’s family and out comes the photo from his pocket. Holding two blond children in her arms is a mother with blond braided earmuffs.

“Tell your children…” Adi begins.

“Yes, Mein Führer?”

“Tell your children…”

Adi suddenly turns and enters the map room holding Renate, closing the door softly so as not to startle her.

“I’ll always remember what he said.”

“Was is das?” I ask.

“That he thought of my children, even at the end.”

Kissing me on both cheeks, the major leaves with the wonderful pass clutched in his hand. And there’s still the mummified prize in the car.

I go to my room to smooth out my dress, wash my hair and savor each glorious minute before my wedding. If only Renate could witness me marrying the Führer.

My mother! If she could see the rapturous face of her daughter getting married to the Führer. Mother was impressed when I gave my fur coats to the military—for the freezing men on the Russian front. Even Adi was overwhelmed by my gesture, so much so that he had Bormann arrange to get me another fur coat. It was taken from a Jewish woman in the northern city of Kiel. I felt bad about it until Bormann told me that the woman went to a warmer climate. My new coat was delivered to me by ambulance.

24

BORMANN KNOCKS. I can tell his short official raps. If he’d just quickly push the door open! His hand lingering on the knob is distressing as I’ll feel his touch when I go out.

“Here is the agenda.” Bormann has a grating over-used voice and doesn’t smile. I’m wearing a robe and my feet are bare. His little squinting eyes look at my toes. “They’re painted.” he remarks.

“It’s my wedding day.”

“You know the Führer doesn’t like nail polish.”

“A woman must do as she wishes on her wedding day.”

Placing the agenda on my bed, he exits with quiet stiffness. I give a second coat of red polish to my toenails.

The wedding will take place after midnight with a justice of the peace, Walter Wagner, to marry us. Goebbels is the witness. A short party will follow, then the bride and groom retire to the Führer’s bedroom. In the early morning, Mr. and Mrs. Hitler will kill themselves.

Magda taps on my door three times in imitation of the three raps when the curtain rises at the Comédie Française (using sophistication gained from our Paris occupation). She appears in a long white towel. Her thick legs show. “Dr. Morell has given me my grape injections, and I feel wonderful.” Pins hold up her stiff blond hair. She’s wearing a red dress to the wedding assuring me it’s a soft red along with a hat of crimson ribbons. Magda may be able to buy “fashion” but she can’t buy “style.”

“Josef, the children, and I will follow you both,” she says pulling the towel closer to her body.

I have an instant fright that Magda and family wish to follow us into our wedding bed.

“In what way?”

“We’re done for.” The amber spots in Magda’s eyes are gleaming.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve told the Führer. We have his blessing. We don’t want to go on. Any of us.”

“Adi did tell me…”

“What did he tell you?” Magda faces me eagerly. Those puffy red lips pucker in anticipation. “What?”

“That… you would… would…”

“Die with him?”

“Not with him. That’s my place, Magda.”

“I know that, silly Eva. But we do intend to follow shortly afterward.”

“Why does it have to be this way?” I moan. “It would be better if thousands died rather than the Führer be lost to Germany.”

“Of course. But we must deal with now.” Her head is down and she is unable to look me in the eyes. “Six chocolates filled with the drug Finodin are prepared by SS Doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger. It puts the children to sleep and helps me ease my babies out of this life. Dr. Kunz will give the children morphine to deliver them gently into eternal sleep for they belong to the Third Reich and to the Führer.” She pauses, then stammers: “The only thing that worries me is that… I will weaken at the last minute. I fear a stupid acrobat of emotion.”

I stare at her pale hands that now look like claws.

“There are two glass cyanide capsules set aside for Josef and me,” she adds. She looks up at me sternly. “Eva, you must help me. I wish to see the Führer alone one last time. Just for a few minutes. But he refuses.”

Magda is asking me to intercede for her. I feel the power of becoming a wife.

“What is there to say?”

“There’s everything to say.”

“We have so much to do before the wedding.”

“Eva, I’m here to help you in any way I can.”

Magda is fawning. Magda is requesting a favor like a servant.

But she’s clever enough to know there is something she can do. I’m nervous. I need unusual experiences. I want to be special.

“I can’t believe a poor girl from Simbach in Bavaria would know much of love. Am I right?” Magda asks eagerly.

“There are men in Bavaria. Handsome men. I was never without one.”

“Eva, you’re with the Führer. A man who spins his marvelous cocoon and pupates.”

“Haven’t I been in his bed? But tonight—tonight is different, Magda. Tonight, he’s released from Germany. Tonight he’s my husband, all mine. What we do in bed will take me into ecstasy.”

“The important matter is a good rousing romp. With a crashing climax.” Magda touches my damp hair that I washed with the last piece of soap. “I must talk to him. If only for a minute. Alone,” Magda pleads.

I look at Magda’s towel. Behind it is the mystery I seek, all her men, all those ardent Berlin nights, all those SS Stallions. Even the ones who like men never refuse Magda.

I promise to arrange a five-minute meeting with Adi just before the wedding.

She opens the towel and draws me into her cave, into the familiar womanly bond of soft flesh. It’s breast against breast, furry mound against mound.

“It’s all so simple, my Bavarian Fräulein,” she whispers, “it’s all so simple.”

Magda begins to lick my neck.

“The tongue?” I say. “Is that it?”

“Quatsch. What rubbish.” She puts a fleshy finger in my ear.

“Fingers? Is that it?”

“Of course not.” She pulls her finger away.

Magda’s navel opens and closes as she moves. Her skin is not soft but elastic, a creature’s hide from a warm languorous climate. It’s a cruel and grimy skin that breathes me in, takes hold of me by all its greedy lynx pores, a pelt that throbs, billowing into every fold of my body.

“Listen closely,” she whispers in my ear, her tongue lingering there. “Throw away the Russian-shirt-nightdress we made. Get up a sweat and wear only your stinking skin. Put your hair up under a worker’s cap.” She rips a folded factory hat pinned to her towel, a souvenir from Josef’s marching days, and throws it dramatically on my bed. “Sprinkle dust under your arms. Make sure there’s vinegar on your breath. Don’t you know, Eva, the only thing he ever wanted was to gain the heart of the German workers.”

Magda is a silk snake. She slowly swallows me in tiny gulps, her mouth my center, her tongue a curling rosette of quests up and down then in between my thighs. I’m overcome by hulky magic as she dimishes me in a light as refined and sifted as white salt.

Magda pulls away abruptly as I gasp for air. “Do all the things I’ve shown you. Then one last final touch. Give off the smell of many men.” Leaving naked, she trails the thick long towel on the floor not bothering to look back at me.

I will take Magda’s advice. I won’t wash her lovers from my body but wear her frothy substance like perfume.

Bormann knocks, and I let him in. I have only a short time before the wedding. Everything is arranged, everything is in place. But he must tell the Führer to see Magda for just a few minutes. He says it’s impossible. I say it’s not impossible. Looking at me with a pinched mouth, he remains defiant. But I’m minutes away from being Adi’s wife. Soon he must learn to answer to me.

“Bormann, just do it. Am I understood?”

Bormann shakes his head in weak acceptance. But I also use diplomacy as Adi does. I show him my silver dress, the one I didn’t give to the War Relief, the one with fox trim that I selfishly kept because I couldn’t part with it. “Take this gift for your wife. I won’t be needing it.”

“The Führer gave you that.”

“It’s mine to give away to somebody who will be able to use it after the war.” That dress has memories attached to it, times and places that no longer exist.

Bormann holds the dress protectively in his arms as if it were one of Göring’s rare paintings that must be shielded from the air and light. Clothing is propaganda, Goebbels says, and Magda’s gowns won him as much obedience as his speeches.

“Make sure the Führer’s final schedule has five minutes alone for Magda. Five minutes. No more.”

Nodding his head, Bormann opens the door carefully, thrusting out his arms with the dress so that it will leave first. Because he rides in ambulances, he knows how to transport proper loot. He pauses to ask: “Do you still love him, even now?”

“I loved him in his good fortune. How is it possible to love him less now?”

My wedding night. My wedding dress makes my waist look small. Coming just below my knees, it shows off my firm trim legs. How I dreamed about this. Me, a girl from the deepest province in Bavaria. I touch the wooden model of Linz that Speer gave me on my last birthday, resting my hand on the house where Adi once lived with his mother in Linz at Humboldtstrasse 31. I’m jealous of every day and every moment I haven’t known him. I think of Klara, the mother he loved for so long. She called him her “leg son” because he’d help take off her long wood-wool socks, her tired limbs escaping and bursting from the elastic like white sausages. Then he’d massage her tired feet, over and over, his finger kneading that space between her toes until she gave a startled litany of: “Ja… ja… ja… ja… oh…. ja… ja… ja… ja… ja… ja… ja… ja!” A final “JA” left her limp and rested on the bed.

What a long life I’ve lived. People would say I’m young, yet what Adi and I have had together is more than one lifetime, and I feel old. That’s how it is when you love a hero. He’s been with me longer than with Klara and Geli and that elates me. If your life flashes before you at any time, it has to be when you marry. For marriage is even more important than death. Especially marriage to a genius. I think back to that first day when we met at the photo shop, how handsome he was without the tension of war creasing the skin around his eyes and mouth. We drank hot chocolate together in the back of the shop. I made it myself, thick and creamy. He declined coffee or strong stimulants but had an occasional cup of tea.

Adi enters handsome in his uniform with the Iron Cross on the left side of his tunic. He has a calm, accepting composure. My cousin once saw him for five minutes as he walked from an office building. She said he resembled no person she had ever seen before, appearing in no way human yet exceptional.

“It’s bad luck to see your bride before the wedding,” I tell him.

“Luck no longer applies.” He holds out capsules. “Pills we will take. They were given to me by Himmler. I can’t trust him so these have to be tested.”

Canine handler Sergeant Fritz Tornow meets us at the dog bunker. Blondi jumps up excitedly against Adi’s leg as he pats her, ignoring me as she always does when her beloved master is present. Her babies begin to yap. Lifting up Wolfie, his favorite, Adi looks carefully in the pup’s eyes before dropping him down.

Adi wrestles open Blondi’s mouth, but she’s persistent in clamping it shut and drooling on his hands. Grabbing a pliers from a nearby shelf, Sergeant Tornow pries her mouth open and crushes the cyanide tablet against her teeth. Blondi falls over dead, her body instantly relaxed from not having to please the Führer she loves, finally relieved of him.

Tornow takes out his pistol and shoots the puppies, then leaves abruptly fearful to show his tears.

Adi says softly, “You must be certain that you want to remain here. It’s still possible to leave.”

“I’m staying. With you.”

His eyes, though not bright, are still the most beautiful I have even seen and remind me of happiness and sweet cool breezes. He displays no sorrow and doesn’t look down at Blondi one last time or cup her limp head in his hands. I’m the one in grief. After all the times I’ve been annoyed by this silly creature, I suddenly miss her. That sloppy tongue licking my cheek was the same tongue licking his. Those walks in the mountains when I was lonely, Blondi was all I had of him. But the waiting deceived me. He never really left me. As long as my heartbeat went on without premeditation and without effort, He was present.

When I’m wed, I’ll be the only thing in the universe that can claim him. And when he dies, He’ll be with me in that one final way.

Adi jabs Blondi with the tip of his foot, her doggy legs twitch as if in memory of the Berghof—those long walks in the wildflowers. Lifting her up by one ear, I look into bulging eyes and say softly, “Remember the ladybug the Führer took from your mouth and put back on a blade of grass saying: Blondi, you must never forget to be tender.” I let her face fall back to the ground.

“The capsules work.” Adi puts a leather strap that holds the cyanide around my neck. “Cyanide. The ancient Egyptians called it death by peach.”

“I’ll wear it to our wedding.” My voice is strong without a hint of hesitation, my fingers stroking the small container in its leather holder that’s stitched in blue.

“There’s no need to swallow. Just bite down.”

The hand that touched flowers and mountain trees and threw a ball to Blondi, the hand that touched the thirty cameras of Leni Riefenstahl now gently pats my cheek.

“Sometimes, Adi, I think about death and…”

“You’re not to think about the trivial caprice of death,” he screeches angrily. “That’s my duty.”

“I’m not afraid, of course. You’ll be with me.”

“This final week,” he reports, “I’ve deliberately signed papers illegibly. So there’s no last minute autographs for the allies.”

“Goebbels told me about the sky-burials of Tibetans. Their bodies are cut up and fed to the birds.”

“Birds have better things to do.”

“But I sometimes wish you believed in heaven.”

“A genius,” he tells me, “can’t tolerate such tranquility.”

But I know that he hasn’t lived like an ordinary man, and he will not be dead like one.

Our black ashes will glow and sparkle like the Olympic torch he invented.

Adi leaves to receive the justice of peace. I look at Blondi who is no longer my rival, now unimportant, like a throw rug that was used in a back room, like something too inconsequential to have ever mattered.

A single shot. Tornow has killed Renate. I’m without any rival as I’ve wished though my selfishness has hurt him. Where did it go, those feelings he had for Blondi? One less living thing loves him.

Taking a handkerchief from my sleeve, I put it on Blondi’s head to mark a creature that truly loved him.

As I look in the mirror, I wonder how my face will change when I’m Frau Hitler? How will this wedding make my eyes look different? Though it will be a simple ceremony, I’m as excited as any bride.

Since the enemy’s advance guard is close, Adi leads me promptly to our wedding room. I take his arm above the elbow as I’ve seen so many women do when they walk with their husbands. When introduced to Walter Wagner, the city councilor greets me as “Mein Precious Eva.” Josef, Bormann and Magda are at our side. Götz Rupp stands in back of us wearing with devotion an army pompadour that makes him look like a sawed-off Hindenburg.

After Walter Wagner hears us declare that we’re third-generation Aryan, we’re united with a correctness and efficiency Adi loves. I start to sign the official paper “Eva Braun”—then laughingly correct myself to write “Eva Hitler” with pride. Bormann and Goebbels sign as witnesses before we walk to the dining area for the reception.

Magda whispers in my ear, “Thank you. Thank you,” as she displays the gold party badge the Führer took from his lapel to pin on her dress.

She doesn’t tell me what was said in her sacred five minutes with the Führer.

Bunker soldiers move in and out of the room, drinking syrupy champagne, congratulating us with gifts such as a statuette of Frederick the Great in white porcelain. Two captains practice their fencing techniques while chewing wedding cake.

Götz Rupp touches my arm, his hands engraved in dirt that comes from a scarcity of soap. “Mein Bride, I have most exciting news to deliver today at your wedding party.”

“What good news?” Adi asks hopefully.

“The pigeon was found in Prenzlauerberg.”

“Jupp?” I ask.

“Jupp delivered the Easter message to your mother, and I’ve sent him off with your wedding announcement. The Oberfeldwebel soared to the sky even though his wings are starting to rot.”

Adi was hoping for word of an Endsieg, a final victory however small.

Pushing herself between us, Magda tells Adi the children are asleep and now ready for us to view them.

On the way to the children’s room, Adi tells me what Magda requested in her five minutes alone with him.

“Something for her children?” I’m sarcastic, but since I’m now Frau Hitler, I have certain concessions.

“Helga.” Her name is said without emotion, as if she were someone he had never known.

“What about Helga?”

“She wants Helga to experience being a woman. Before she dies.”

So that was it. Adi should bed the girl in a glorious last living moment. I’m elated. My husband confides in me.

“I told Magda I’m no longer the husband of Germany,” Adi states.

“Though she bore Helga for you, that girl is no longer your concern.”

“Ein kind für den Führer! A child for the Führer! They all bore their children for me. Every German woman considered me her husband.”

“Helga should remain intact.”

“I told Magda you’d want it that way.”

Walking quickly ahead of me, Adi reaches the family room and stands beside Magda calmly. The six children are dressed in white nightgowns, a golden fan of hair on each pillow.

“Heidi has a bit of tonsillitis.” Magda takes a scarf from the drawer of an ink painted table by the bed, a table that was carefully transported from her country estate, a table that once cost three million Reichsmarks. As she tucks the elongated material around her child’s thin white neck, Heidi doesn’t move, so trusting in her sleep… not knowing she has to be watchful even in her bed.

“And Helga?” Adi moves to her side and stares down without emotion.

“As you can see, Mein Führer, I have loosened her hair. If you would only braid it this last time.”

“Magda, he has no time for that,” I say.

Adi stares silently at the sleeping Helga.

“They are so deeply under,” I whisper, looking at the children in one sweeping glance.

“This is a dress rehearsal. This is how it will look tomorrow. I’ve consulted Dr. Morell, Dr. Stumpfegger and Dr. Helmut Gustav Kunz agonizing over the final procedure for hours. The children were given a chocolate with Finodin. They’ll eagerly look forward to their more potent sweets tomorrow night, nicht? When they’re well into their merciful dreams, I’ll crush a cyanide capsule into each sweet little mouth.” Looking carefully at them one by one, she suddenly turns away. “Josef and I will follow. Father and mother will follow. Der Krieg ist aus. The war is over.” Scratches line her face where the children have fought against this dress rehearsal. “Josef and I keep our own cynide in a clean Upmann Havana cigar aluminum tube. We don’t trust a hollow tooth,” Magna says.

“Do not smoke or drink,” I order, my voice firm. “Leave in a tidy manner, as the Führer would wish it.”

“I’ll play one pure game of solitaire. Cards settle me.” Magda clutches at her blouse picking nervously at the sleeves. From my Bavarian lore, I realize this reflex action is known as “plucking”—the sign of a near and certain end.

How clever she is. I can never have his children. Never. If cards settle her, she’s played six aces. But I know that her little “aces” were helpful props Adi used for his health posters and family scenes. Like all good props after the run of a play, they’re discarded.

I see the children’s small inert faces as no more human than the concrete wall. “Remember what Frederick the Great said,” I announce, knowing this will please my husband. “‘No matter how important we may think such lives are in the events of the world, in the whole scheme of things, they are not significant.’”

Magda’s eyes bulge like pinches of clay sticking out from her pale face. “Frederick wasn’t a mother.”

“Death. That dark noun is masculine in the Teutonic languages but feminine in French,” Goebbels says softly as he reaches down and touches Helga’s head. “The French are right. Death is a girl.”

“The Earth will shake when we depart.” Goebbels adds.

Magda bends over the children crooning,

“Sleep, baby sleep

Die Sternlein sind die Lammerlein

Der Mond, der ist das Shäferlein

Away thou black dog fierce and wild

And do not harm my little child

Sleep, baby sleep

Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf.”

Adi listens for only a moment, then abruptly leaves.

I return to my room and sit on the bed knowing he’s waiting for me. He is waiting for me.

Wearing one cyanide capsule each on leather strings around their necks, Magda and Josef are sleeping beside their children, Magda, no doubt, snoring softly with her bronze and silver Mother’s Cross at her throat. Bormann is restless on a cot in his office, prepared for the final duty to burn our bodies after death. The last of the guards protect the top bunker while sniffing powder made of dried syphilis scabs to make them immune to syphilis after the war. And I take a final look around this, my home, where I’m the official Hausfrau.

As I walk by the trunk that serves as a table, I wonder who had it before me. Maybe a woman who lives in Riedlingen with her grocer husband. Maybe actress Zara Leander kept costumes inside. Zara, the actress with beautiful Aryan thighs in silk stockings.

I feel a quickening in my breathing. Fear? No. I mustn’t fear death. Goebbels told me about the philosopher Kierkegaard and his ideas on anxiety. Fear is just the dizziness of freedom. Because I’m now free, I can resist looking down into an unknown abyss. And if I do look down, my spirit supports itself, that glorious spirit that is Adi.

So this is how it ends?

On a table in the dining area is a large brown mushroom once moist but now dry and brittle. Ribbentrop on a hiking expedition brought a bag of them to cure Adi’s piles. Giant mushrooms didn’t work. Adi sat on them for months.

Outside are the enemy planes that come night after night, so fast there’s little time for warning sirens.

My house. Sneezes and coughs hang invisibly in the Bunker for days along with stretches of dead air so close and stifling I can feel the earth inside my skin.

The guard at the foot of the stairs is gone. At one time, I could gauge to the second his mailed boot paces. It’s strange how many feelings one can have in between the steps from one wall to the other.

So this is how it looks at the end? No bored officers sitting at the table beating out tunes on their water glasses, no constant sound of the clicking of cartridge clips in pistols. Listless sentries sit topside by the entrance, restless on sturdy wooden classroom chairs with nothing to do but catch ants and creepers with sticky raisins and gossip about the Bunker people. On the floor: mess kits, dossiers, Red Cross toilet paper, broken cups, footlockers, balloon whisk, rusty nails, moldy boots, twisted canteens, python bones, a flare pistol, steel Düsseldorf pincers, flashlights, bits of wire, an empty tin for Zyclon B, half opened jar of stewed fruit with chunks of glass mixed in, a baby shoe, toilet brush propped up against the wall, rat droppings. Little Helmut Goebbels’ scooter from a toy store in Nuremberg is now upside-down. Twisted around an empty bottle of Hennessy cognac is a banner from an ambulance train. Button polish, Blondi’s water dish filled with cigarette butts, a pair of Zeiss field glasses, a gas mask, an open tin of Heinz tomato soup, and Magda’s reading pillow of stitched bluebirds with moveable beaks. Draped across an empty chair is a flag with lightning SS. My once beautiful wedding canapés, drooping and half eaten, are scattered on the white tablecloth stained with Rhine wine. Mattresses are stacked on the floor where once SS units slept and defended the Bunker. The cheese box that always frustrated Fräulein Manzialy when its top would cave in still stands dented inward as ever.

Bunker soldiers—what’s left of them—are leaping over ammunition boxes in a frenzied game of stuffing a camera down their pants to take pictures of their genitals.

Lieutenant Kulker weeps in front of me. He will miss polishing all our furniture, the simple remains of a great Berlin. He’s an old soldier and when I first gave him instructions to polish Adi’s map table, he took off his jacket and threw it against the table legs. When a soldier does that, the furniture is his. “I’ll be of great help to you,” he told me that day, “as polish is always up to little tricks.”

“Lieutenant Kulker, we need another sentry at the top. We all perform our duties to the end. That’s an order.”

With a respectful salute, Lieutenant Kulker slowly climbs the iron stairs. When he’s out of sight, I take another lingering look at my home, this Bunker that will remain after us.

But there has to be a final inspection. I quickly run up the green slime steps, slipping and sliding. Kulker and two men sit lazily on the ground, their army kits beside them. Maybe they plan to flee. I have to let them know they’re still under orders. “You men must wash your feet and wear clean socks each day, bitte.”

They don’t answer. I know they plan to desert. Mess kits and spare clothing are tied in a bundle beside them.

Anger builds within me. I give it rein, letting it carry me into a wild uncontrollable rage. “You can’t desert your country. You must fight to the end. Your Führer went months eating only rice, He with his mountain climbing chest swelling in the uniform of an artist, avoiding ham sparkling in red blood, no companion but hunger. He ate dry bread on a bench in the Schonbrunn, digesting the sunshine into His empty stomach. For three Kronen a week, He had a bed and cabbage soup gaining cabbage logic. He painted broth into reality, sketched bread letting it escape from its own imagination. Holding His paintbrush like a torch, He marched proudly with factory workers, shoemakers, and bricklayers. The Führer understands conflict because He’s the center of life. By virtue of providence, He was thrown into a world struggle. There are rats that creep out in the last days of war. Das Volk steht auf, der Sturm bricht los!”

As the men stare at me silently, their faces show no emotion, and I go back down into the Bunker.

What is it like to die? Egyptian noblewomen, Goebbels said, were allowed to soften for days so that the embalmers would not find them beautiful. That will not be my worry. After Adi and I are truly joined in our marriage bed, after I take the capsule, my ovaries will ascend to the stars in a triumph of smoke. My death will be wanton before the flames, my bones stiffening in a blaze of elation—drunk on darkness. Will Adi’s supreme cadaver cooperate with the fire?

How lucky I am. There has never been a noble death in my family. Most relatives have died of gout and drooling senility, a few from uninspiring accidents. Everything I have is within Him now as we dream new dreams together. Afterward, we’ll have an enduring destiny.

The enemy, Adi assures me, have their terrible losses.

My Adi lies in bed, undressed and no longer timid about appearing naked, his mind still vivid and bright, that hidden masterpiece behind his forehead. Finally at rest, he’s Wagner lying on a sofa as Tristan, waiting beyond words or gestures or musical instruments in the helpless love for Isolde. I look down on Adi in the dark. As His body curls in a question mark, I place my hand on His head. For love of this man, I accept my fate. This is my gift, Vorsehung, providence. A little pillbox by the bed.

Yes, yes. I accept everything. I believe in His heart that includes all the bombs above and all the death and brokenness. I hold to His vision as those wildflowers at the Berghof hold to the earth. Without Him, I would die stupid.

“Louis IV said on the day he died, ‘Quand j’étais roi. When I was king.’”

“That was a silly Frenchman. You’re still the Führer. Now… say… I love you,” I urge.

“You know how I feel, my little soup-soul.”

“I want you to tell me.” I have a conjugal firmness in my voice.

“I married you didn’t I, sweet Evchen?”

He reaches for my arm, but I pull away. He lifts up on his side and looks down at me, surprised. Slowly he smiles. “I’m going to put you in for a decoration.”

But I don’t smile back.

Silence. Then he puts his fingers to his lips and moves them as he did Blondi’s lips when he wanted her to talk. “I… love… you.”

HE LOVES ME!

I do everything Magda says. Placing the worker’s cap over my hair, I sweat and rub the smell of Magda’s men between my legs, here in my Bierstuben, this smoky little cave just for him. I yodel, loud and clear, my mountain farmer’s voice of lushness and wildness that will define me.

All the following I have written so it lives forever on these pages:

My V-Volk is tossed against the wall now useless. He sniffs smelling Magda’s men and my worker’s sweat. His rutted beak, ruby red, striated, is bulging. With my factory hat still hiding my hair, I lean slowly over Him. Spending time with His fingers—he uses ALL of them (no longer needing to save his right ones for shaking hands)—he moistens his palms from the concrete walls to prepare my cleft, that tail of my heart, slithering in, sloughing. My blood increases by His probing. He expands, a slow steady slog, loamy, muzzy. He’s opening another map, this new road I have for Him, thrusting into a town, a field, a bridge. Swelling larger and larger, I think I’ll break. It’s dissection, being flayed, my earth frothing, abraiding. He’s my husband, guided by the heave of blood. Mein Gott. Ja! Ja! Everything begins to work inside, one strut after another in sickle movements, smooth ramparts of his hind part. His tip is Venice white, Munich cabbage pies slogging. Geli’s skin soaks me in formaldehyde. The smell of his mother’s illness. Blondi’s long canine uterus stretches me longer. Holding my organ in his hand, He divides skin flaps, frees up my ribs, strokes me, His giddy fingers deep, nicking away at my insulation, at my perfume of urine and stomach juices. I didn’t expect to feel so heavy, soaked with glorious connective tissues. He goes deeper into blood vessels more elegant than brocade, nerves and ducts like chiffon. I’m held within by the gravity of him as he loses his hands in my skin. Let it go, forget tender, forget. Ja… ja… ja… ja! Everywhere the back of His flinty tongue. Sehr beautiful. Ja. Sehr beautiful… ja… ja… osterblocken flowers roiled from His glans. Danka, danka… I love you, I love you I scream to my Adi who now lets me fill His eyes. My bulging under lips, faster… faster… shooting down stars in my satin purge. Me, opening his strength, racing to a gorge so glowing, phosphorous. I will shatter. Please shatter. I… am… splintering, light as spiders, breaching white peacocks, weedy, this Volkstrum agony. Nein, let me… nein, let me, let… me. Stilts of ecstasy as I bang, chug into myself, tearing apart the dark warmth of my brain.

We rise from the bed slowly, my body filled with soft ripples coming down from such exaltation. If we had time, I would press against him briefly. Being so charged, I could ignite us again. But this is selfish thinking. We have a stronger purpose, and he’s already begun to put on the common soldier’s uniform to place the Iron Cross on the left side of his tunic. He holds a picture of his mother tightly in his hand.

I put on the black dress with pink roses stitched near the neck, smooth the material down against my firm swimmer’s hips. I press a yellow tulip between my breasts.

He’s silent. It’s what Goebbels calls “Teutonic solemnity.” And I can only say Rilke’s words to comfort him:

Und wenn dich das Irdische vergass,

Zu dem stillen Erde sag: ich rinne.

Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin.

“And if the earth forgets us

tell the silent earth: I flow.

And to the rushing water say: I am.”

We arrange ourselves on Adi’s blue and white sofa where dots of blood linger from his piles. Soon more of his blood will crest the velvet. It’s early morning, but we only know that because of the small ticking clock on the table next to us. All the concrete blocks surrounding us seem closer than ever.

He’s brushing his hair with my “E.H.” brush, stroking so hard the bristles bend. When he holds the brush out to me, I drop it on the floor and calm down his hair with my hands.

Cyanide vials are held by his fingers so much shorter now. He’s withered wonderfully, thinned, relaxed. Wrinkles are gone from his face and he’s lost the unseen presence of conquest. Only his genius remains. He’s not what one will expect of a dead man. How beautiful will be the corpse of a man who doesn’t drink or smoke.

St. Perpetua, the strange saint we studied in school, was killed by a Roman pagan by guiding his sword to her throat. I put my hand on His and guide the capsule in his fingers to my lips.

We will die never knowing we are dead, side by side, a capsule soon on our tongues. We have only to bite down.

My notebook is on my lap, the pencil still in my hand. Adi is proud of me, proud that I’m happy to record each and every glorious moment till the end.

All I ever thought about down here, wished about, dreamed about was that I’d never be left behind. I hear the shells above. The Bunker shudders. The naked lights sway and flicker. Adi is beside me. When Bormann finally burns us, that trail of smoke we leave behind will be the “one long truth.”

I wish I could taste His ashes, my mouth pulpy with His power, destruction full of meaning, twilight of the Gods.

How much smoke will we make to taint the wind up above? Will my diary survive?

“Say something,” I implore Adi.

Holding his gun firmly, he’s silent.

“A genius always says something poetic on his deathbed.”

My husband leans the back of his head against the sofa carefully forming his words through the sifting dust. His lips slowly move.

“Mohnstrudel,” he says.

I know that nestled in our eternity, I will find this strudel for him no matter how hard it may be.

The shelter throbs and then moans in the seizure of a second tremor, the concrete gorging on us.

I will not let Him shoot the Führer. I take his gun. He doesn’t resist, and the sheer weight of the weapon reminds me I’m still alive. I lift the Walther 7.65 Caliber with my strong swimmer’s left hand, prop the barrel against His right temple while I hold tightly to my pen, ready to record every second to the end. The capsule on my tongue lightly touches my teeth.

Oh, history, you are mine now!

Pulling the trigger… I start to bite down as I… am… do… innnnnnnnnnnng…

Reader’s Guide

with

Author’s Note

and

Discussion Questions

Author’s Note

This book does not pretend to be the history of Hitler and the Third Reich. I wish to give a portrait of a madman in the eyes of his mistress, Eva, who does not see him as mad. Her point of view allows us to go beyond the “crazy/sick” understanding that according to Primo Levi is almost to justify his actions. Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews referred to his characters as “species,” something more than individuals and less than universal. That applies to my rendition of Hitler’s court.

We cannot indict only Hitler. His political sycophants were enamored and in awe of him as were many German citizens. Equally dangerous were the “common” men and women such as Eichmann, Hoss, Stangl, Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun.

It is tricky to write about a villain. Irwin Shaw attempted this in his novel The Young Lions, in which he portrays a psychological portrait of the Nazi soldier Christian Diestl. It would be easy to turn Diestl into a one-dimensional character. Yet Shaw makes him a tender lover and intellect, sensitive to black market dealings and the rough manners of his fellow soldiers. Yet Diestl accepts Nazism and the mass killing of Jews. Most critics believe that keeping Diestl from becoming only evil personified is the craft of true art.

Hitler is thus complex. Simplicity in marking the evil person—which Irwin Shaw avoided—would be a trap here as well. Hitler was capable of being brave, receiving the 2nd class Iron Cross in World War I, something rarely given to a corporal. He was a vegetarian who did not drink or smoke and was the first in advocating “no smoking” in a scientific move against cancer. He loved his mother, was thoughtful to his secretaries, always speaking to them kindly and bringing them chocolates. Yet… he masterminded machinery to kill men, women and children in a ruthless manner. There have always been wars, but none have ever included such organized assembly-line extermination, particularly of civilians.

I have taken Flaubert’s advice to keep a “singularity of vision” by placing Hitler in the primacy of Eva’s subjective reality. With my own imaginative interpretation, layered by archival documents, textbooks, memoirs, and news clips, I hope to render the intensity of a more complete vision to the reader in order that he or she may possibly learn from this operatic villainy.

I have been fortunate in being helped and inspired by such wonderful people as Barney Rosset, Howard Stein, and Glenn Young. And I have been enormously informed by historical information, mostly by the following books:

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore

Hitler’s Words, Gordon W. Prange

The Course of German History, A. P. Taylor

The Memoirs of Ernst Von Weizsaecke, Ernst Von Weizsaecke

Rommel—The Desert Fox, Desmond Young

War Diaries 1939–1945, Field Marshal Lord Abenbrooke

The Fall of Berlin 1945, Anthony Beevor

Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France, Ernest May

The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper

The Battle for Germany 1944–45, Max Hastings

Discussion Questions

1. What is it about Adolf Hitler that perpetually captures the public imagination decades after the end of World War II? What other historical figures from that period continue to be explored in popular books and movies today? When will the fascination with Hitler finally end? Will it ever?

2. What makes Lavonne Mueller’s novel different from other portrayals of Hitler in books, movies or documentaries?

3. Has Mueller’s approach changed your own perception of Hitler?

4. What effect does the claustrophobic setting in the bunker have on the action of the novel and the behavior of its characters?

5. How well does the old bromide “behind every great man is a woman” apply to Adolf and Eva?

6. Hitler, we are told, is married to Germany. How does this condition shape Eva’s destiny?

7. What if Hitler had won the war? How would a victorious Hitler deal with his realtionship with Eva? Would they ever have become man and wife?

8. How would you characterize their relationship? Is it similar to other relationships you know? Women sometimes feel they are in relationships with unbending monsters—dictators who control their every move. Or is Hitler forever in his own category of evil?

9. Is Hitler cruel toward Eva? How would you expect him to treat her?

10. On their first date, Hitler compliments Eva on “the pleats in my dress saying he loves repetition.” How is this love of repetition a symbol of his regime to come?

11. To what extent does the author expect us to know about the world outside the bunker? Are these offstage events important to understanding the full scope of the novel?

12. Where does history leave off and fiction begin in Mueller’s novel?

13. How does Eva’s status change once she moves into the bunker?

14. Life in the bunker meant everybody lived under stressful, unpleasant, and hazardous conditions. How did Eva cope?

15. Above the bunker the war is raging to its catastrophic end. How much do you think Eva knows or cares about what’s happening to Germany?

16. Until they moved into the bunker, Eva was more or less an invisible figure on the sidelines of Hitler’s life. Why?

17. Could Eva have been as innocent as she appears, or must she be judged an accomplice to Hitler’s barbarity?

18. Did Eva show any awareness or feeling about Hitler’s Jewish policy?

19. What does “patient” refer to in the title?

20. Hitler’s charisma—his magnetism—is legendary. To what extent is his charisma palpable in the novel?

21. During an intimate encounter between Hitler and Eva, he speaks of ideal love as a German and a French soldier atop each other in the trenches who blow themselves up with a grenade. There’s been speculation over the years that Hitler was a homosexual. Does this story suggest he was?

22. Did it surprise you that Hitler does not have sexual relations in a normal fashion? Mueller never actually explains what prompts their unorthodox sexual practice in the book. What’s your speculation? Psychological or physical?

23. Why do you think he calls Eva his grenade? Does this foreshadow their suicidal end? Or is it a sexual metaphor for the sexual act?

24. Eva’s attitude about Hitler is total acceptance, idealization, and obsession, totally sublimating her own needs. Do you know women who act similarly with powerful or controlling men? What do you make of this phenomenon?

25. Though Hitler was responsible for some of the most inhumane acts in history, he’s presented in this book with some positive qualities, such as love of animals, promotion of healthy living, etc. How do these descriptions affect your view of him?

26. Eva says when she first met Hitler in the camera shop, he struck her as being very “ordinary.” Were his ordinary qualities part of his extraordinary rise?

27. Does Hitler believe he is an ethical person?

28. Is it a moral or ethical mistake to humanize somebody as evil as Hitler ? Is there a danger we will begin to forgive his atrocities as a result?

29. By denying Hitler’s humanity, does a writer risk severing connection to the rest of us? Or by making Hitler a mythical monster, do we rule out the possibility we may find something of him in each of us ?

30. Why would an author want to enter a mind of such dehumanizing evil as Adolf Hitler’s?

31. What about the other residents of the bunker? Do they also have positive and negative qualities?

32. The philosopher Primo Levi warns, “More dangerous are the common men” in Nazi Germany. Do you agree? Who are the “common men” in the novel?

33. Did reading about Hitler’s days in the bunker remind you of Osama bin Laden and his entourage in hiding? Do you see any similarities between the two men in terms of their beliefs and lifestyles?

34. Magda has the chance to get her children out but chooses not to. What do you think about that decision? What does her character add to the overall atmosphere of the book?

35. How do you think you’d react faced with a brutal social injustice, especially one that might endanger your own life or your family’s if you were to take a stand against it?

36. What do you think about Hitler’s decision to commit suicide rather than face certain capture? Do you agree that his capture would have been certain?

37. How was the act of suicide portrayed? Was it an act of cowardice? Or was it more complex?

38. Did Eva die for a cause or for blind obedience or for love? Hitler urges her to escape. Why does she refuse?

39. What do you think would have become of Eva had she not committed suicide? Would she have been executed for war crimes? Placed in an asylum? Allowed to return to civilian life? What would the fate of “Hitler’s wife” have been post-World War II?

40. What questions would you have liked to ask Eva if she had lived to be fifty? Remember, she ended her life at a relatively young age.

41. To what extent do we see Hitler through a romantic lens? Can you imagine having a romantic fantasy about Hitler? Women in the Soviet Union were openly besotted by Stalin. Some women found Osama bin Laden attractive. What is it about sheer power that can act as an aphrodisiac?

42. What was the most difficult part of the novel to accept? Did you find the novel offensive in any way?

43. How do you think the child or grandchild of a Holocaust survivor might react to the novel? Would you give this novel to a Jewish friend?

44. Should the author have more openly condemned Eva’s attitudes or Hitler’s actions? If she had taken a more judgmental tone, how would that have altered your own interaction with the story and the life of its characters?

45. What about “stand by your man”? Is there a connection so deep between man and woman that nothing one can do will turn the other against him or her? What do you think about the women who turn in their men after discovering a serious wrongdoing? At what point, if any, can your mate cross a line that forces you to sever the relationship and expose the crime? Or is there no line when it comes to love?

46. Why does Eva sometimes wish Hitler were just an artist with “only colors to capture”?

47. If Hitler as a young man had been accepted as an artist, how might history have been different?

Copyright

NEW YORK

AN OPUS ORIGINAL

Copyright © 2013 by Lavonne Mueller

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

Mueller, Lavonne.

The patient ecstasy of Fräulein Braun : a novel / Lavonne Mueller.— New York : Opus, c2013.

ISBN: 978-1-62316-008-1 (cloth); 978-1-62316-009-8 (epub); 978-1-62316-010-4 (Kindle); 978-1-62316-011-1 (Adobe PDF)

Includes bibliography.

Summary: A disturbing, erotic novel about Hitler seen through the eyes of the woman who worshipped him, set in the claustrophobic and morally twisted underground world of the Führerbunker and the Third Reich’s last gasp.

1. Braun, Eva—Fiction. 2. Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945—Fiction. 3. Germany—History—1933-1945—Fiction. 4. World War, 1939-1945—Germany—Fiction. 5. Statesmen’s spouses—Fiction. 6. Mistresses—Fiction. 7. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 8. Biographical fiction. 9. Historical fiction. 10. Erotic fiction. 11. Love stories. I. Title.

PS3563.U346 P38 2013

813/.54—dc23 1304

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Content

Lavonne Mueller
THE PATIENT ECSTASY OF FRÄULEIN BRAUN
A NOVEL

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Reader’s Guide with Author’s Note and Discussion Questions

Author’s Note

Discussion Questions

Copyright