As I walk by the trunk that serves as a table, I wonder who had it before me. Maybe a woman who lives in Riedlingen with her grocer husband. Maybe actress Zara Leander kept costumes inside. Zara, the actress with beautiful Aryan thighs in silk stockings.
I feel a quickening in my breathing. Fear? No. I mustn’t fear death. Goebbels told me about the philosopher Kierkegaard and his ideas on anxiety. Fear is just the dizziness of freedom. Because I’m now free, I can resist looking down into an unknown abyss. And if I do look down, my spirit supports itself, that glorious spirit that is Adi.
So this is how it ends?
On a table in the dining area is a large brown mushroom once moist but now dry and brittle. Ribbentrop on a hiking expedition brought a bag of them to cure Adi’s piles. Giant mushrooms didn’t work. Adi sat on them for months.
Outside are the enemy planes that come night after night, so fast there’s little time for warning sirens.
My house. Sneezes and coughs hang invisibly in the Bunker for days along with stretches of dead air so close and stifling I can feel the earth inside my skin.
The guard at the foot of the stairs is gone. At one time, I could gauge to the second his mailed boot paces. It’s strange how many feelings one can have in between the steps from one wall to the other.
So this is how it looks at the end? No bored officers sitting at the table beating out tunes on their water glasses, no constant sound of the clicking of cartridge clips in pistols. Listless sentries sit topside by the entrance, restless on sturdy wooden classroom chairs with nothing to do but catch ants and creepers with sticky raisins and gossip about the Bunker people. On the floor: mess kits, dossiers, Red Cross toilet paper, broken cups, footlockers, balloon whisk, rusty nails, moldy boots, twisted canteens, python bones, a flare pistol, steel Düsseldorf pincers, flashlights, bits of wire, an empty tin for Zyclon B, half opened jar of stewed fruit with chunks of glass mixed in, a baby shoe, toilet brush propped up against the wall, rat droppings. Little Helmut Goebbels’ scooter from a toy store in Nuremberg is now upside-down. Twisted around an empty bottle of Hennessy cognac is a banner from an ambulance train. Button polish, Blondi’s water dish filled with cigarette butts, a pair of Zeiss field glasses, a gas mask, an open tin of Heinz tomato soup, and Magda’s reading pillow of stitched bluebirds with moveable beaks. Draped across an empty chair is a flag with lightning SS. My once beautiful wedding canapés, drooping and half eaten, are scattered on the white tablecloth stained with Rhine wine. Mattresses are stacked on the floor where once SS units slept and defended the Bunker. The cheese box that always frustrated Fräulein Manzialy when its top would cave in still stands dented inward as ever.
Bunker soldiers—what’s left of them—are leaping over ammunition boxes in a frenzied game of stuffing a camera down their pants to take pictures of their genitals.
Lieutenant Kulker weeps in front of me. He will miss polishing all our furniture, the simple remains of a great Berlin. He’s an old soldier and when I first gave him instructions to polish Adi’s map table, he took off his jacket and threw it against the table legs. When a soldier does that, the furniture is his. “I’ll be of great help to you,” he told me that day, “as polish is always up to little tricks.”
“Lieutenant Kulker, we need another sentry at the top. We all perform our duties to the end. That’s an order.”
With a respectful salute, Lieutenant Kulker slowly climbs the iron stairs. When he’s out of sight, I take another lingering look at my home, this Bunker that will remain after us.
But there has to be a final inspection. I quickly run up the green slime steps, slipping and sliding. Kulker and two men sit lazily on the ground, their army kits beside them. Maybe they plan to flee. I have to let them know they’re still under orders. “You men must wash your feet and wear clean socks each day, bitte.”
They don’t answer. I know they plan to desert. Mess kits and spare clothing are tied in a bundle beside them.
Anger builds within me. I give it rein, letting it carry me into a wild uncontrollable rage. “You can’t desert your country. You must fight to the end. Your Führer went months eating only rice, He with his mountain climbing chest swelling in the uniform of an artist, avoiding ham sparkling in red blood, no companion but hunger. He ate dry bread on a bench in the Schonbrunn, digesting the sunshine into His empty stomach. For three Kronen a week, He had a bed and cabbage soup gaining cabbage logic. He painted broth into reality, sketched bread letting it escape from its own imagination. Holding His paintbrush like a torch, He marched proudly with factory workers, shoemakers, and bricklayers. The Führer understands conflict because He’s the center of life. By virtue of providence, He was thrown into a world struggle. There are rats that creep out in the last days of war. Das Volk steht auf, der Sturm bricht los!”
As the men stare at me silently, their faces show no emotion, and I go back down into the Bunker.
What is it like to die? Egyptian noblewomen, Goebbels said, were allowed to soften for days so that the embalmers would not find them beautiful. That will not be my worry. After Adi and I are truly joined in our marriage bed, after I take the capsule, my ovaries will ascend to the stars in a triumph of smoke. My death will be wanton before the flames, my bones stiffening in a blaze of elation—drunk on darkness. Will Adi’s supreme cadaver cooperate with the fire?
How lucky I am. There has never been a noble death in my family. Most relatives have died of gout and drooling senility, a few from uninspiring accidents. Everything I have is within Him now as we dream new dreams together. Afterward, we’ll have an enduring destiny.
The enemy, Adi assures me, have their terrible losses.
My Adi lies in bed, undressed and no longer timid about appearing naked, his mind still vivid and bright, that hidden masterpiece behind his forehead. Finally at rest, he’s Wagner lying on a sofa as Tristan, waiting beyond words or gestures or musical instruments in the helpless love for Isolde. I look down on Adi in the dark. As His body curls in a question mark, I place my hand on His head. For love of this man, I accept my fate. This is my gift, Vorsehung, providence. A little pillbox by the bed.
Yes, yes. I accept everything. I believe in His heart that includes all the bombs above and all the death and brokenness. I hold to His vision as those wildflowers at the Berghof hold to the earth. Without Him, I would die stupid.
“Louis IV said on the day he died, ‘Quand j’étais roi. When I was king.’”
“That was a silly Frenchman. You’re still the Führer. Now… say… I love you,” I urge.
“You know how I feel, my little soup-soul.”
“I want you to tell me.” I have a conjugal firmness in my voice.
“I married you didn’t I, sweet Evchen?”
He reaches for my arm, but I pull away. He lifts up on his side and looks down at me, surprised. Slowly he smiles. “I’m going to put you in for a decoration.”
But I don’t smile back.
Silence. Then he puts his fingers to his lips and moves them as he did Blondi’s lips when he wanted her to talk. “I… love… you.”
HE LOVES ME!
I do everything Magda says. Placing the worker’s cap over my hair, I sweat and rub the smell of Magda’s men between my legs, here in my Bierstuben, this smoky little cave just for him. I yodel, loud and clear, my mountain farmer’s voice of lushness and wildness that will define me.
All the following I have written so it lives forever on these pages:
My V-Volk is tossed against the wall now useless. He sniffs smelling Magda’s men and my worker’s sweat. His rutted beak, ruby red, striated, is bulging. With my factory hat still hiding my hair, I lean slowly over Him. Spending time with His fingers—he uses ALL of them (no longer needing to save his right ones for shaking hands)—he moistens his palms from the concrete walls to prepare my cleft, that tail of my heart, slithering in, sloughing. My blood increases by His probing. He expands, a slow steady slog, loamy, muzzy. He’s opening another map, this new road I have for Him, thrusting into a town, a field, a bridge. Swelling larger and larger, I think I’ll break. It’s dissection, being flayed, my earth frothing, abraiding. He’s my husband, guided by the heave of blood. Mein Gott. Ja! Ja! Everything begins to work inside, one strut after another in sickle movements, smooth ramparts of his hind part. His tip is Venice white, Munich cabbage pies slogging. Geli’s skin soaks me in formaldehyde. The smell of his mother’s illness. Blondi’s long canine uterus stretches me longer. Holding my organ in his hand, He divides skin flaps, frees up my ribs, strokes me, His giddy fingers deep, nicking away at my insulation, at my perfume of urine and stomach juices. I didn’t expect to feel so heavy, soaked with glorious connective tissues. He goes deeper into blood vessels more elegant than brocade, nerves and ducts like chiffon. I’m held within by the gravity of him as he loses his hands in my skin. Let it go, forget tender, forget. Ja… ja… ja… ja! Everywhere the back of His flinty tongue. Sehr beautiful. Ja. Sehr beautiful… ja… ja… osterblocken flowers roiled from His glans. Danka, danka… I love you, I love you I scream to my Adi who now lets me fill His eyes. My bulging under lips, faster… faster… shooting down stars in my satin purge. Me, opening his strength, racing to a gorge so glowing, phosphorous. I will shatter. Please shatter. I… am… splintering, light as spiders, breaching white peacocks, weedy, this Volkstrum agony. Nein, let me… nein, let me, let… me. Stilts of ecstasy as I bang, chug into myself, tearing apart the dark warmth of my brain.