Rage of Battle

from. Three of them crashed out near Lubars. Can’t you see?” He was pointing north.

The older man in charge knew he was correct, but the thick, coal-brown smoke that was rising and flattening over Berlin was coming not from the Allied bombers that had crashed but from farther in than Lubars, from Tegel Airport and from around Schonefeld Airport to the east, where storage sheds, hit during the raid, were burning out of control.

“So,” pressed the crewman, “why do we waste our time dragging the river? Let the fishes have him, ja?”

The people’s captain, a thickset man with a game leg, was kneeling awkwardly on the deck, face showing the strain, untwisting one of the lines on the chain-weighted drag. When he looked up, his face was beet red from the effort. “If you don’t wish to be sent to the Fulda Gap, my young friend, you’ll help me and stop your complaining, ja?”

“They cannot send me,” answered the crewman insolently. “I have medical exemption.”

“Ah,” said the people’s captain, pushing himself up from the gunwale. “And if the Americans counterattack? If then-ships do come? What then, eh?” Before the crewman could answer, the people’s captain spat into the lake. “That is what your exemption will be worth, Comrade. Nothing.”

“Their ships will not come,” answered the other boy sharply. “And even if they do — where will they land them? We have all the ports. Bremen will fall in a few days. You’ll see.”

“They will use La Rochelle and Saint Nazaire,” said the captain. “They will not need Bremen or Hamburg if they land there. It will also save them two hundred kilometers.”

This gave the two boys food for thought, but the one who had started the argument was not deterred. “Paris will not permit them to use the French ports.”

The captain had straightened out the drag line. “If one of our bombs lands on French soil, France could be at war with us overnight,” he said, turning, suddenly hearing the drag tackle go taut. But it was only one line, the others still loose. He sat back on the seat behind the steering wheel of the plywood boat and put it on “idle,” letting the current push them — the way it would push anything else.

“You think the French capitalists are that stupid?” challenged the youth. “To let a stray bomb bring them to war? No, Comrade. The French are not idiots. If you bombed a whole French city, they would not come in — they would say it was a mistake. They are waiting like the giraffes, the French.”

“Giraffes?”

“Yes… scavengers… you know.”

“You mean hyenas!” laughed the old man. “Giraffes!”

“Whatever you call them,” the youth replied angrily.

“And what if we bombed Paris?” asked the old man. He saw the lines go taut. “Hey then, Comrade? What if Paris was bombed?”

“Paris is different,” conceded the younger man. “That’s quite another matter.”

When they finally found the dead pilot and pulled him aboard, they discovered the air bag, what the “terrorist fliers” called a “Mae West,” had a small tear in it. They delivered the Australian’s body to headquarters in the old Karl Marx Allee and were cheered by some former East Berliners, including several of the Turkish migrant workers unable to go back home but enraged nevertheless by the NATO bombing. The military commander, flanked by Volkspolizei, personally came out to congratulate the people’s patrol.

As they were leaving, the crewman who had been arguing with the people’s captain noticed a police corporal handing the older man what looked like a voucher of some kind. Now he understood why the people’s captain had been so determined to find the flier. Marx was right, he said to the boy. Money is a corrupting force. Nevertheless, if the party had offered a reward—

He went up to the captain and demanded his share, right there and then. And got it.

In Lubars, on the city’s northern outskirts, a gaping bomb crater thirty yards wide was still steaming with burning debris near the remains of the two four-story apartment blocks. The two elderly couples befriended by Leonhard Meir, who was out at the time, had been in one of the apartments when the six Canberra bombers struck.

With an efficiency they were famous for, the Berliners immediately began to clear the rubble, looking for survivors, moving as quickly as caution would allow around the debris, especially a staircase teetering near the edge of the crater, though it was quite clear they did not expect to find anyone who would be easily identifiable. The strangled horn siren of the Volkspolizei put an end to the clearance, however, as police arrived, quickly cordoned off the area for “investigation.”

“Investigation of what?” asked an elderly Berliner, his wife still shaking but with presence of mind enough to pull him away.

“Investigation of crimes against the state!” answered the policeman.

The old man Berliner threw his hands up in disgust. “Crimes against the state? Against those Russian pigs, you mean. Don’t forget Moscow in your investigations, Kamerad!”

“Silence!” shouted the policeman, and despite the death and destruction that had come upon them like a cyclone, several people began laughing, others joining in, mocking the official’s officiousness. Several small boys were playing war, running around the crater and the cordoned-off debris, one with a plane in his hand. It was an American F-15, ghost gray with U.S. Air Force insignia.

“Whose child is that?” demanded the policeman.

“Mine,” said a woman rather timidly.

“Stop him. It is not permitted.”

“What isn’t?” cut in the old man again.

“Antisocial behavior,” answered the Volkspolizei.

The old man spread his hands again, staring at the sky, his faded coat ballooning about him like a clown. “You talk of antisocial behavior!” He pointed angrily at the crater. “You are the cause of this! You — you fascist!”

The Volkspolizei took him away, his wife screaming as he was hustled inside the small Volga sedan.

In the second apartment that had been split open as if struck by an enormous ax, several suites were open to the air like a doll’s house, a body visible and still near the lip of the third floor. And, astonishingly to most of the onlookers, a radio was blaring with news reports of the “bruderlicher Hilfskrieg”—the “fraternal war of assistance”—the boys around the crater fighting now over who would be Bomber- mannschaft, “bomber crew,” and who AA-Flak, “AA battery commander.”

After a while another Volkspolizei returned and checked off names against those on record as having lived in the two apartment blocks. They managed to identify some by wedding rings, medical bands, odd podiatric shoes, and so forth. There were still eleven people unaccounted for, among them the temporary permit holder, Leonhard Meir.

By nightfall Meir had decided to try again to escape from Berlin. At first he felt somehow responsible for the old couples’ death, for not having been there with them, for having left, all of them in a bad temper. But soon guilt gave way to his determination to reach the west. He had hatched the plan on the way back from his work after having seen several dead Stasi-led AA battery crews near Tegel Forest. All that remained of one battery after a direct hit from one of the Canberras’ iron bombs was strips of flesh dangling from tree branches like sodden toilet paper. But nearby, the headless corpse of one man was still sitting upright in the sidecar of an army motorcycle, the dark blue boiler suit and AA armband the man had been wearing bloodied and lacerated by shrapnel. Meir also noticed that several other corpses nearby which were not burned and were dressed in the boiler suits looked as if they were in their fifties — about his age.

Racing against what he knew would be the imminent arrival of the ambulances, their Klaxons wailing in the distance, Meir quickly stripped a boiler suit from one of the corpses, snatched up one of the helmets strewn about the edge of the wood, and made his way over to the motorcycle. He kicked the starter pedal. Nothing. He kicked again and again until he was exhausted, then gave it what he told himself would be his last try. The bike coughed and promptly died. “Shit!”

Now he could hear a car, perhaps a hundred yards or so away down by the lake, and voices coming toward