Joseph Kanon - A Good German

She shook her head. “His father. He would go there. Like always.”

Jake sighed. “Then he’s not in Berlin.” He went over and righted the notice stick, wedging it in the bricks. “Well, we should do it for her, so her friends can find her.”

“Friends,” Lena said, almost snorting. “All the other Nazis.”

“Frau Dzuris?”

“Of course. During the war she always had the pin, you know, the swastika. Right here.” She touched her chest. “She loved the speeches. Better than the theater, she used to say. She’d turn the radio up loud so everyone in the building would hear too. If they complained, she’d say, ‘Don’t you want to hear the Fiihrer? I’ll report you.’ Always the busybody.” She looked away from the rubble. “Well, that’s finished too. At least no more speeches. You didn’t know?”

“No,” he said, disconcerted. A lover of poppyseed cakes.

A truck roared into the street, catching Lena in its headlights.

“Look out.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the bricks.

“Frau! Frau!” Guttural shouts, followed by laughs. In the open back of the truck, a group of Russian soldiers, holding bottles. “ Komme!” one of them shouted as the truck slowed.

Jake could feel her freeze beside him, her entire body rigid. He stepped into the street so that his uniform was visible in the light.

“Get lost,” he said, jerking his fingers at the truck.

“ Amerikanski,” one of them shouted back, but the uniform had its effect. The men who had started to get off the back stopped, one of them now raising a bottle to toast Lena, someone else’s property. A joke in Russian went around the truck. The men saluted Jake and laughed.

“Beat it,” he said, hoping his tone of voice would be the translation.

“ Amerikanski,” the soldier said again, taking a drink, then suddenly pointed behind Jake and shouted something in Russian. Jake turned. In the moonlight, a rat had stopped on the porcelain basin, nose up. Before he could move, the Russian took out a gun and fired, the noise exploding around them, making Jake’s stomach contract. He ducked. The rat scampered away, but now other guns were firing too, a spontaneous target practice, hitting the porcelain with a series of pings until it cracked, a whole piece of it lifting up and flying away like the rat. Behind him, he could feel Lena clutching his shirt. A few steps and they would be in the line of fire, as unpredictable as a drunken aim. And then, abruptly, it stopped and the men started laughing again. One of them banged the roof of the cab to get the truck moving and, looking at Jake, threw a vodka bottle to him as it drove off. Jake caught it with both hands, a football, and stood looking at it, then tossed it onto the bricks.

Lena was shaking all over now, as if the smash of the bottle had released everything her fear had kept still. “Pigs,” she said, holding on to him.

“They’re just drunk,” he said, but he was rattled. You could die here in a second, on a trigger-happy whim. What if he hadn’t been here? He imagined Lena running down the street, her own street, being chased into shadows. As his eyes followed the truck, he saw a basement light go on-someone waiting in the dark until the shooting passed. Only the rats could run fast enough.

“Let’s go back to the Ku’damm,” she said.

“It’s all right. They won’t come back,” he said, holding her. “We’re almost at the church.”

But in fact the street frightened him too, sinister now in the pale light, unnaturally still. When they passed a standing wall, the moon disappeared behind it for a minute and they were back in the early days of the blackout, when you picked your way home by the eerie glow of phosphorus strips. But at least there’d been noise, traffic and whistles and wardens barking orders. Now the silence was complete, not even disturbed by Frau Dzuris’ radio.

“They never change,” Lena said, her voice low. “When they first came, it was so terrible we thought, it’s the end. But it wasn’t. It’s still the same.”

“At least they’re not shooting people anymore,” he said easily, trying to move away from it. “They’re soldiers, that’s all. It’s just their way of having fun.”

“They had their fun then too,” she said, her voice bitter. “You know, in the hospital they took the new mothers, the pregnant women, they didn’t care. Anybody. They liked the screaming. They laughed. I think it excited them. I’ll never forget that. Everywhere in the building. Screams.“

“That’s over now,” he said, but she seemed not to hear.

“Then we had to live under them. Two months-forever. To know what they did and then see them in the street, wondering when it would start again. Every time I looked at one, I heard the screams. I thought, I can’t live like this. Not with them—”

“Ssh,” Jake said, reaching up to her hair the way a parent soothes a sick child, trying to make it all go away. “That’s over.”

But he could see in her face that it wasn’t. She turned away. “Let’s go home.”

He looked at her back. He wanted to say something more, but her shoulders were hunched away from him, waiting now for more soldiers in the shadowy street.

“They won’t come back,” he said, as if it made any difference. Contents — Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

Tommy Ottinger’s farewell party coincided with the end of the conference and so became, without his intending it, a Goodbye Potsdam bash. At least half the press corps were leaving Berlin too, as much in the dark about the actual negotiations as when they arrived, and after two weeks of bland releases and cramped billets, they were ready to celebrate. By the time Jake got to the press camp, it already had the deafening noise and littered bottles of a blowout. The typing tables had been pushed to one side for a jazz combo, and a sprinkling of WACs and Red Cross nurses took turns like prom queens on the makeshift dance floor. Everyone else just drank, sitting on desks or propped up against the wall, shouting over each other to be heard. In the far corner, the poker game that had begun weeks ago was still going on, oblivious to the rest of the room, cut off by its own curtain of stale smoke. Ron, looking pleased with himself, was circulating with a clipboard, signing up people for tours of the Cecilienhof and the Babelsberg compound, finally open to the press now that everyone was gone.

“See the conference site?” he said to Jake. “Of course, you’ve already been.”

“Not inside. What’s in Babelsberg?”

“See where Truman slept. Very nice.”

“I’ll pass. What are you so happy about?”

“We got through it, didn’t we? Harry’s gone back to Bess. Uncle Joe’s-well, who the fuck knows? And everybody behaved himself. Almost everybody, anyway,” he said, glancing at Jake, then grinning. “Seen the newsreel?”

“Yeah. I want to talk to you about that.”

“Just part of the service. I thought you looked pretty good.”

“Fuck.”

“The thanks you get. Anybody else’d be pleased. By the way, you ought to check your messages. I’ve been carrying this for days.” He pulled out a cable and handed it to Jake.

Jake unfolded it. “Newsreel everywhere. Where are you? Wire firsthand account rescue ASAP. Collier’s exclusive. Congrats. Some stunt.”

“Christ,” Jake said. “I ought to make you answer it.”

“Me? I’m just the errand boy.” He grinned again. “Use your imagination. Something will come to you.”

“I wonder what you’ll do after the war.”

“Hey, the movie star.” Tommy came over, putting his hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Where’s your drink?” The top of his bald head was already glistening with sweat.