Tim Powers - Declare

The man was half-crawling, half-hopping, back east toward the temple-like gate-until another rifle shot rang out, and a plume of dust sprang from the pavement in front of him; he began struggling away north, and then for several long seconds his tiny figure, dwarfed by the hulk of the Reichstag and the battered gray Brandenburg Gate columns, was the only moving thing in the gray stone world.

The distant toiling figure stopped at the broken edge of a wide shell-crater, perhaps considering hiding in it; but another shot hammered the air and he collapsed at the edge.

One of the soldiers now strode out across the square to the still-feebly-moving form, and with a handgun, carefully, fired one last shot. The figure on the ground was still.

Hale was acutely aware that there was one person less in the square now, and he thought of the Donne line, Every man’s death diminishes me -but the thought finished with the unwilled phrase, except when it enhances me; and for just a moment Hale was seeing a double exposure as he stared at the pillars of the Brandenburg Gate: he was seeing the gate from where he stood, nearly end-on and not able to see between the pillars, and at the same time he was seeing it from a perspective that allowed him to look through the pillars and down the Unter den Linden boulevard on the eastern side.

Hale’s forehead was suddenly damp. The intrusive thought and the apparent dislocation reminded him of the night when Elena and he had inadvertently walked to the end of the Île de la Cité, in Paris. He leaned against the broken stone wall now and rubbed his eyes until rainbows churned across his retinas, and when he blinked out at the pillars again, he was seeing them properly overlapped and receding in perspective. The storm clouds in the east had moved in to cover half the sky. A breeze sighed across the square, and Hale exhaled sharply at the oily metallic smell on it.

A couple of old men in homburg hats had shuffled up to the wall beside which Hale stood, and one of them now said sympathetically to him, in German, “Soviet diesel oil, that smell is.” Hale saw that he was wearing a necktie and a high, threadbare collar under his overcoat, and he knew that these must be native Berliners.

The other old man was staring out at the square. “Easy enough to bury that Slav-push him into that hole he’s on the edge of.” He snickered. “You could bury the Russian bear in that hole.”

His companion pointed at the crane on the western side of the square. “And there’s a crane to hoist the bear in with.”

“Easier to just shoot a dozen or so more immigrants,” said the first man, “and pile them in. Pave right over them.” He smiled at Hale. “Right?”

But Hale had had enough of Germans and Russians. He simply shook his head and blundered away, back toward the Western sectors.

By the end of the day Hale had seen actual excavations going on in only two places.

One was in the Soviet Sector. Before crossing the momentous lanes of the Koniggratzer Strasse he had nervously checked his pockets several times to make sure that he carried no money at all, but in fact the Soviet soldiers had not stopped him as he walked across; and at the end of a ruined block in that sector he had found Russian workmen digging a hole in front the shell-pocked neoclassical façade of what must have been a government building. Hale blinked curiously up at the four floors of glassless windows, and then noticed a tall, scarred brass plaque on the inset wall at the top of the steps-on it, below an eagle-and-swastika bas-relief, were the raised letters PRASIDIALKANZLE DES FÜHRERS UND REICHSKANZLERS. This gutted ruin was Hitler’s Chancellery.

No Soviet soldiers were in evidence, and dozens of people were wandering in and out of the doorless Chancellery portal and leaning out of the gaping upstairs windows to shout to companions, or crossing the sidewalk to climb up on the black cement roof of what Hale gathered was the very bunker where Hitler had reportedly killed himself less than two months earlier. Among the spectators, “rucksack” and native Berliners mingled with foreign soldiers and civilians who might have been foreign press correspondents.

The workmen had broken away the pavement and were spading up gravelly dirt at a spot halfway between the Chancellery steps and the bunker, and one of the native Berliners placidly told Hale that it was on that spot that the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun had been burned.

A slim, dark-eyed Arab-looking woman in a black sari appeared at first to be listening intently to the dignified old German, but when she caught Hale’s glance she made a clicking sound with her tongue and rocked her head toward the dark Chancellery doorway-and the breath stopped in Hale’s throat, for in that instant the motion had seemed to be an explicit sexual invitation. But the echoing halls of the building were full of sightseers, and Hale assured himself that he must have misread her gesture.

He had glanced away from her, awkwardly-and when after a few moments of listening to the old man’s droning he furtively looked at her again, she was still staring hungrily at him, and fingering her necklace. Hale stared at the necklace instead of into her eyes, and he registered the fact that the it was a string of dozens or even hundreds of gold rings.

He stumbled away from the crowd without speaking or looking at her again, back down the rubbled streets toward the American Sector, feeling tiny under the vast gray sky. And when he had got to the Koniggratzer Strasse and had strode halfway across the four broad lanes, two of the Soviet soldiers blocked his way and stopped him. They squinted hard at his passport and searched his pockets and even smelled his breath, as though suspecting that he might be drunk-but after they had grudgingly let him proceed to the western side he still felt trapped, and he kept remembering having glanced back at the dark woman, after having walked a good fifty paces up the street away from the bunker and the Chancellery and the morbid crowd: she had been staring after him, and she must even have followed him at least a little way, for she had appeared to be bigger, taller, than the other people back there.

The other digging site was in the French Sector, under the Column of Victory, which had been erected to commemorate the German invasion of France in 1871 and now served as an ornate flagpole for the tricolor French flag. French soldiers with pickaxes and shovels were ostensibly trying to get at the water mains. Several Red Army soldiers were observing the work, but they certainly weren’t advising.

There might well have been other excavations going on, but Hale saw no signs of any. The rubble-choked streets to the south were as empty of life as some Roman ruin, the only signs of recent human habitation being graffiti: KAPITULIEREN? NEIN! in red paint on a bullet-pocked wall, and chalked names and destinations and messages left on the entries of bombed apartment buildings; below some of the chalked family names he saw the underlined scrawl LEBEN ALLE, meaning that all had survived, but he saw many repetitions of the single word TOT, dead.

Hale suspected that the excavation by Hitler’s bunker was where the Russians were planning to install the stone, and he was dreading the thought of crossing back into the Soviet Sector late at night; but he trudged back to the fenced-in U.S. Sector HQ parking lot and showed the guard his travel order. When the guard had waved him in, Hale walked slowly down the rows of cars to Theodora’s Renault and unlocked it-and after tucking one of the cigarette cartons under the driver’s seat, he unclipped the holstered German pistol from under the passenger seat and with shaking hands shoved it into his coat pocket. He clamped his elbow against his ribs to keep that side of his jacket from swinging too heavily when he walked back out of the parking lot past the American guard.