many nights of bombing had it taken? Near the truck, a family sat on suitcases, staring into the street. Maybe just arrived at Anhalter Station, waiting for a phantom bus, or too tired and disoriented to go on.
“You have to feel sorry for the poor bastards,” Ron said, “you really do.”
“Who, the Germans?” Liz said.
“Yeah, I know. Still.”
They turned up the Wilhelmstrasse. Goering’s new Air Ministry, or its shell, had survived, but the rest of the street, the long line of pompous government buildings, lay in sooty heaps, their bricks spilling into the street like running sores. Where it had all started.
There was a crowd near the Chancellery, an unexpected popping of flashbulbs. Scattered applause.
“Look, it’s Churchill,” Liz said, grabbing her camera. “Pull over.”
“Guess they all want the tour,” Ron said, pretending to be bored but staring nevertheless at the stairs, starstruck.
Jake got out. Just where Hitler had stood smiling. Now it was Churchill, in a light summer uniform, cigar clenched in his teeth, surrounded by reporters. Brian next to him. How did he get here so fast? But Brian’s corklike ability to bob up everywhere was legendary. Churchill was stopping on the stairs, disconcerted by the applause. He raised his fingers in a V sign, a reflex, then dropped them, confused, aware suddenly of where he was. Jake glanced at the crowd. It was British soldiers who were applauding. The Germans stood silently, then moved away, embarrassed perhaps by their own curiosity, like people at an accident. Churchill frowned and hurried to the car.
“Let’s take a look,” Jake said.
“You out of your mind? And leave a jeep full of cameras?” Churchill’s car was pulling away, the crowd following. Ron lit a cigarette and sat back.
“Go ahead. I’ll hold the fort. Bring me a souvenir, if there’s anything left.”
There were Russian guards at the entrance, squat Mongols armed with rifles, but they seemed to be no more than a show of force, since people went in and out at will and there was, in any case, nothing to guard. Jake led Liz past the entrance hall with its gaping roof, then down the long reception gallery. Soldiers roamed through the building, sifting through the wreckage for medals, something to carry away. The huge chandeliers lay in the middle of the floor, one of them still suspended a few feet above the litter. Nothing had been cleared away. It was somehow more shocking than the bomb damage outside, the visible fury of the final assault, a destructive madness. Furniture smashed to pieces, its upholstery ripped open by bayonets; paintings slashed. Drawers looted and then flung aside. In Hitler’s office, the giant marble desktop was overturned, its edges chipped away for keepsake fragments. Papers everywhere, stamped with muddy boot marks. All the disturbing evidence of a rampage. The Mongolian horde. He imagined the guards outside shouting as they raced through the halls, ripping and grabbing.
“What do you think these are?” Liz said, holding up a fistful of cards, blank pieces of stationery edged in gold, the Nazi eagle and swastika engraved at the top.
“Invitations.” He fingered one. The Fiihrer requests your presence. Tea. Boxes of them. Enough to last a thousand years.
“Just like Mrs. Astor,” Liz said, stuffing a few in her pocket. “That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Let’s go,” he said, unsettled by the mess.
“Just let me get a few shots,” she said, taking a picture of the room.
Two GIs, hearing English, came over to her and handed her a camera.
“Hey, how about it? Do you mind?”
Liz smiled. “Sure. Over there by the desk?”
“Can you get the swastika in?”
A massive ornamental swastika, lying face down on the floor. They each planted a leg on it, one slinging his arm over the other’s shoulders, and grinned at the camera. Kids.
“One more,” Liz said. “The light’s bad.” She clicked, then looked at their camera. “Where’d you get this, anyway? Haven’t seen one of these since the war.”
“You kidding? They’re practically giving them away. Try over by the Reichstag. Couple of bottles of Canadian Club should do it. You just got in, huh?”
“Just.”
“How about I buy you a drink? I could show you around.”
“Now, what would your mother say?”
“Hey.”
“Easy,” she said, then nodded toward Jake. “Besides, he gets mean.”
The GI glanced at Jake, then winked at her. “Maybe next time then, babe. Thanks for the picture.”
“There’s one for the books,” she said to Jake as the GIs moved away. “I never thought I’d get picked up in Hitler’s office.”
Jake looked at her, surprised. He had never thought of her being picked up at all. Now he saw that, scrubbed of combat dirt and bluff, she was attractive. “Babe,” he said, amused.
“Where’s the bunker?” ‹›“There, I guess.” He pointed through the window to the back courtyard, where a group of Russian soldiers stood guard. A small concrete blockhouse, a scarred, empty patch of ground. The two GIs were being turned away but offered cigarettes around until the guards stepped aside to let them take a picture. Jake thought of Egypt, the valley of bunkers where the pharaohs had gone to ground, in love with death. But even they hadn’t taken their city with them.
“They say he married her at the end,” Liz said.
While the Russians ran wild overhead, the very last hour.
“Let’s hope it meant something to her.”
“It always does,” she said lightly, then glanced at him. “I’ll come back. I can see you’re not in the mood.”
Everybody wants to see the bunker, Ron had said. The last act, right down to the ghoulish wedding and finally, too late, the one shot. Now a story for the magazines. Did Eva have flowers? A champagne toast, before they put the dog down and Magda murdered her children.
“It’s not a shrine,” Jake said, still looking out the window. “They should bulldoze it over.”
“After I get my picture,” Liz said.
They moved back into the gloom of the long gallery. There were the broken-up chairs again, stuffing bursting out of the bayonet slashes. Why had the Russians left it like this? Some kind of barbarous lesson? But who was here to learn it? GIs were taking pictures by the fallen chandeliers, oblivious tourists. Near the wall was a heap of medals, thrown out of drawers. Iron Crosses. When Jake bent over to pick one up, a souvenir for Ron, he felt like a gravedigger scavenging through remains.
The uneasy mood followed him up the street, the mountains of rubble no longer an impersonal landscape but the Berlin he’d known, a part of his life knocked out too. At the corner, Unter den Linden was gray with ash. Even the Adlon had been bombed.
“No,” Ron corrected him. “The Russians burned it, after the battle. No one knows why. Drunk, probably.” ‹›He looked away. But what was a building, compared to the rest of it? The hands you couldn’t shake off. Across the square, the Brandenburg Gate was standing, but the Quadriga had skidded off its mount, like a chariot overturned in a race. Red flags and posters of Lenin were draped on the columns, hiding some of the shell holes. As they passed into the Tiergarten he could see a large crowd milling in front of the Reichstag, GIs exchanging their bottles of Canadian Club, Russian soldiers examining wristwatches. Some of the Germans, like the two women near Tempelhof, wore overcoats in the hot afternoon, presumably to hide whatever they’d brought to sell. Cigarettes, tins of food, antique porcelain clocks. The new Wertheim’s. A few young girls in summer dresses were hanging on to soldiers’ arms. In front of the Reichstag, its charred walls covered with Cyrillic graffiti, soldiers were posing for pictures, another stop on the new tourist circuit.
At the park he hit bottom. Buildings, like soldiers, were expected casualties of war. But the trees were gone too, all of them. The dense forest of the Tiergarten, all the winding paths and silly, tucked-away statues, had burned down to a vast open field littered with dark charcoal stumps and the twisted metal of streetlamps. The jeep was heading west along the Axis, and in the far distance, over Charlottenburg, the last of the sun had turned the sky red, so that for a moment Jake could imagine the fires still burning, glowing all night to guide the bombers. A
