VIII Alla Marcia

Katherina huddled in her bathtub, brooding, trying to make some sense of what had happened two hours before. She was not a child, she told herself. She knew what sexual pleasure was; she had experienced brief moments of it with the boys at university. This was simply more intense—probably because it was more forbidden. If she was ashamed, it was only because she had let it be imposed on her. She had consented, of course, but only just. Sabine’s actions were somewhere between assault and seduction, and deeply unsettling. More than that, it was indecent to do such a thing scarcely two weeks after her father’s suicide. She was supposed to be in mourning.

At the same time, her body remembered Sabine’s prurient touch, the way the lascivious fingertips had brushed along her thigh, then slipped so easily inside her. Lewd though the whole experience had been, Katherina’s body craved the invasion again. She hated only that the conquest had been so simple and that she was the one conquered.

Was that the entire range of sexual intimacy? The fumblings of well-meaning young men that ended up in pregnancy and then marriage, or lascivious encounters that set her on fire but left her humiliated? If that’s all there was, she would rather give herself to singing. That at least gave her a sense of elevation.

She stepped out of the tub and dried herself. It was still early in the evening and she was restless, with no one to talk to. The afternoon’s event had added more questions to the ones already buzzing in her head. Her confusion about herself seemed of a piece with the enigma of her parents. So many mysteries, and they all weighed on her like a phantom on her shoulders.

She settled into bed. When it was certain that sleep would not come, she picked up the journal again. She could hardly bear to read more reports of battlefront wounded, concentration camps, or firebombings, so she jumped ahead to the spring of 1945, to the final Allied victories.

April 22, 1945—On the Brocken

You can feel it everywhere, exhilaration on one side and terror on the other. These are the final days. The Red Army is well inside Germany now and a race is on with the western Allies to see who will get to Berlin first. In the Harz Mountains, there are scattered American units as well as Russian. Both wanted to claim the Brocken Peak and its radio transmitter. The Soviets got here first.

I spent three days patching up wounded Russians for transport by truck to the evacuation station in the valley. The dead were buried, to prevent disease, the German wounded rounded up for the POW camps. My work is done now. Since the trucks are gone, the orderlies are bringing horses around for us to ride down into Wernigerode, where they’ll ship us back to Chuikov’s main force.

I asked myself if I should try to escape the Red Army now that I’m in Germany. Woods are all around and I could easily run. But then I realized that’s insane. The Russians are the victors; why would I want to join the defeated? Besides, I made a deal, after all, and this is where it got me. I’m at the Brocken Stone now, the highest rock on the highest mountain in Germany, writing this by first light. The air is crystal clear. Looking out over the hills in all directions, I have the sense I’m seeing the whole world. Unbeliever that I am, I can’t help but think of the Temptation of Christ. Except Christ refused the devil’s offer. Foolish man; it got him crucified. But this is a more pagan place, possibly even a place of sacrifice. They call the rock I’m sitting on the Witches’ Altar. Something about a mountaintop stirs the imagination—toward gods in the morning and demons at night.

I hear the horses they’ve got waiting. A bell is ringing, calling us to the canteen, and the sun is up.

April 25, 1945

The Red Army has linked up with the Americans on the Elbe River. Big celebration, back-slapping, photos, exchange of cigarettes. Berlin is encircled. It’s only a matter of days. Both armies are rushing from their respective positions; each one wants to be the first to take the city. I fervently hope it is the Americans. Doctors bring up the rear in the line of battle, but I still can’t bear the thought of following troops that storm through streets where I’ve lived, or shopped, or shared a beer. I dread to find my friends and family among the dead.

The army paper, The Red Star, is full of Ilya Ehrenburg’s articles fomenting rage in the troops, as if it needed fomenting. His propaganda is extreme these days, even for him. “Germany is a witch, ” he writes, and, “The Germans have no souls. Not only divisions and armies are advancing on Berlin. All the trenches, graves, and ravines filled with the corpses of the innocent are advancing on Berlin. All the cabbages of Majdanek and all the trees of Vitebsk on which the Germans hanged so many people. The boots and shoes and the babies’ slippers of those murdered and gassed are marching on Berlin. The dead are knocking on the doors in all the cursed streets of that cursed city. ”

May 2, 1945

Berlin has fallen to the Russians. Yesterday the city still thundered with desperate battle but now there’s an eerie stillness. I sit here on the front of a Russian tank and watch the Soviet flag flutter on the roof of the Reichstag and I feel nothing. I’m without allegiance, cold as the wind blowing through these streets. This is day zero, month zero.

This city was my home and now it’s a cadaver. Covered with soot that the slightest breeze stirs up. Streets full of craters. Broken pipes spew water or gas, which burns with a blue flame. The dead are everywhere: Wehrmacht, SS, the old men of the Home Guard who stood on their pathetic hills of dirt and shot at us. They lie in the streets and on the barricades.

And the suicides. In the parks, on the benches or the ground, like picknickers who fell asleep. In the houses, whole families of the dead sit poisoned around the table or they hang in their cellars. They hang by the neck on the lampposts too, but these are executions. One of them, only a boy, had a sign pinned to his shirt: Coward.

This is Germany’s payment for its devil’s pact.

Some of our troops are out of control. Stealing anything that shines. And raping any woman they find. Brutally. I’ve heard horrendous stories. They remember what the Germans did when they blasted their way east and are giving it back double.

I finally got a few hours’ leave and went to Babelsberg to see if my house was still standing. Everything was gone, the neighbors’ houses too. Elsewhere, walls and pillars are covered with chalk scribblings, desperate messages: “Looking for Karl Hartmann. Notify Red Cross—his brother Rudi, ” or “We are alive, Hr & Fr Stolz. ” But in the ruins of my street there are no walls left to write on.

I’ll search until I find out for certain, but I think my parents are gone. If they were killed, it was by Allied bombs, but in a war that Germans started. Yet if they had gone back to Russia, Stalin would have killed them too. There’s no side I want to take. I wash my hands of all of them.

It’s day zero for me too.

June 10, 1945

They are everywhere, the Trü mmerfrauen. Women in filthy dresses with woolen scarves or rags around their heads. Clearing the blockage from the streets, they labor for food coupons—only workers get a livable ration—or to collect the bricks for themselves. They knock off loose mortar with their rusty hammers, pile up the bricks in carts, and strain starving muscles to drag them away. Other diggers ferret in the hills of gravel looking for firewood, flooring or broken furniture. They crawl over the mountains of rubble, digesting them like microbes, carrying away the useful particles to live.

The city is quiet. All you hear is the clopping of wooden shoes, the ‘tok, tok’ of hammers, the rattle of handcarts. And everywhere ragged coughing.

I see practically no men. Only the old and a few pathetic, broken soldiers in the ragged remains of Wehrmacht uniforms. Everyone is hungry and everyone smells bad. Only the allies have soap. The Germans have Ersatzseife, crumbly stuff that smells carbolic and even that’s scarce.

How many years will pass before Germany recovers normalcy? Its dignity? Will children born tomorrow still suffer the guilt? Will mine? The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons…

Black market is everywhere and cigarettes have more exchange value than Reichsmarks. A pack of British or American cigarettes will get you sex for the night. The victors have everything, can get anything, and what they trade out—cigarettes, cans of Spam, marmalade—filters out into the population.

Commander Chuikov, who is in charge of Soviet occupation forces now, has not called on me for months, which makes it easier for me to lie low. I answer only to Dr. Tchelechev, who ignores me as long as I do my work. There are still sick and wounded to treat even while the division is reorganizing. It’s a good time to break away, but I can’t go back to being the felon that I was before the war, so I’ll stay on awhile with Chuikov’s army, for the regular meals, if for nothing else.

June 15, 1945

I tried again at the Red Cross to get information on Michael and Alma Marovsky, but found no record of them. Had an hour left on my leave so I walked around the Brandenburg Gate. In the Friedrichstrasse, only the faç ades of the national library and the opera are still standing. I watched two old men digging out a corpse. A woman, in an evening gown, of all things.

A man leaning against a lamppost called out to me. I thought he wanted to strike some kind of deal, but I had nothing to trade. He had pale eyes, a thin blond beard along the edge of his chin. Well fed, he wore clean, tailored clothing. He pointed toward the opera house. “Staatsoper. ” He spoke beautiful German, like an actor. “Strauss conducted here, and von Karajan. ” He smoked leisurely, not like a hungry man. “And the singers: Melchior, Lehmann, and Chaliapin. Unforgettable. ” He seemed to assume that I would know all the names and of course I did. “People poured in to listen, right up until ’45, when it was bombed. ” He smoothed his fine leather gloves. “But it will be back, ” he said, puffing on his cigarette. I could smell that it was good tobacco. Not like the trash the Red Army was issued. We watched the diggers heave the black corpse into the rubble cart. “It has a certain poetry, doesn’t it? Dying at the opera, I mean, ” he added.

“Not for me. ” I thought of Stalingrad.

“You seem like an intelligent man, an ambitious man, ” he said. “I collect things and have things people usually want. Try me. ” He offered his hand. “Peter Schalk. Businessman. ”

“I’m just a Russian soldier, ” I said. “With no money. ”

“A Russian soldier who speaks perfect German. As for payment, there are many ways to pay. Pledges, goods in kind, counter-favors. I prefer long-term clients. Loyalty has its own value, don’t you think? ”

“How could I find you? If I did want something? ”

“Around here, ” he said, sweeping his hand across the ruins. “If you don’t see me right away, just come back later. This is my terrain. ”

I walked away from the opera house and it struck me. There was something I wanted. I needed to kill Sergei Marovsky.

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