The telephone rang. When would he be coming to the National Redoubt?
Out of the question, he explained. They might catch me through some trick. I have no desire to be exhibited in a Jewish museum.
The telephone rang. His chauffeur, Kempka, had delivered two hundred liters of petrol to the garden upstairs as ordered. The Russians were in the Tiergarten.
The telephone rang. British bombers had destroyed the National Redoubt.
You see? he remarked to his secretaries. I always know what’s right.
His bride, Eva, who was as rich and good as Holstein butter, had now swallowed a capsule on his instructions. She lay beside him on the sofa, with her big cowlike eyes filming over. He raised the Walther to his head, then hesitated, lowered it a trifle, and peered into the barrel, to see what he might see within the mountain. First it was dark, then dark, and then far inside shone a pale blue light which must have come all the way from Russia; he thought he could spy the Grand Salle de Fêtes of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna at Tsarkoie-Sélo, the carpet as vast and multiply monogrammed as a collective farm’s sugarbeet field, cartouches of angels dimly hovering on the ceiling, then a casement window opened onto vistas of other castles. Soon he’d take possession of all that.
Just then the telephone rang again, and he knew from the cadence of the ring that it would be bad news.
No regrets now! he said with a smile. ‣
DENAZIFICATION
A long line of wooden-faced men in steel helmets lowered their swastika standards to the cobblestones. They were the last coins in that hoard of soldiers now vanished like gold thrown into a river. That was where it ended, there in the Tiergarten.
A Werewolf pushed a button, and row upon row of antitank guns hidden in the grass exploded. They’d run out of shells. Then came a shot. The Werewolf had saved the last bullet for himself. He was no longer a factor.
Then they marched out of Berlin in a column, saying farewell to the ruined buildings which so few would see again; you see, they were going east. Soon they’d learn about the whitish secretions of tubercular lungs; they’d grow expert in observing the sharpening of a dying prisoner’s face. (They’d observed the deaths of Slavs, but that was different.)
Europe Central, burned clean, could now become as wide and white as Stalin-Allee in the new Berlin of our Soviet zone, whose tiny citizens recede between trees and massive apartment-cubes toward the future’s distant tower. With the arrival of the Red Army, Unter den Linden with its cubical buildings and sentinel-like roof-figures had instantaneously become almost perfect, but we wouldn’t stop there: Each new skyscraper would be taller and better than any artifacts of the capitalist world. And this really happened, or at least nearly happened, which is the most any offensive can hope for: I remember the new towers and bays of Moscow University, whose yellowish tinge (thanks to the ageing of the blueprints as I study them in 2001) gilded them with a monumentally Roman look. I remember Comrade Stalin pacing the shining wet catwalks of the Kremlin, safeguarding everything in our great Soviet land. (I wasn’t there, but Roman Karmen filmed it. I’ve seen all of his movies.) Sometimes Comrade Voroshilov joined him, bearing huge stars on his red epaulettes. They gazed down at the clean cool factories and apartment-blocks of Moscow, remaining alert, collected and resolute. Now toward them came the line of Fascist prisoners.
We journeyed for thousands of kilometers, sometimes in windowless train cars, the rest of the time on foot. Most of us remembered how it had been the first time, with Ivans and Natashas straggling ahead of our Panzers, carrying their belongings on their backs. The sleepwalker had said: Don’t forget who the masters are! and Field-Marshal von Manstein had walked beside us smiling and alert, his hands in his pockets. But all victories fell into the Rhine, even though our Pioneers blew up every building that still stood. We slipped west, then east again! Von Manstein was now squinting and craning at his trial…
Back in Germany where fog bleeds silver slime upon the willows, chestnut trees and maples, which is to say too far back to be imagined, our sisters were prostituting themselves for chocolate or chewing gum. The sleepwalker was gone—into the mountain, it was said—so we’d been decapitated, like the statue of Mars in the Zeughaus (a direct hit from a Russian gun took care of him). We limped east, and sometimes they clubbed us in the face or let loose a machine-gun burst into our ranks.
Well, they’re the victors, so they must be the master race.—This was how we tried to explain it to ourselves. We were wide-eyed corpses, trying to learn the first few lessons of the afterlife. First kilometer by kilometer, then verst by verst we weakened, receding into time, becoming denazified.—I was never a Nazi, we all said.
High on a hill of pines, the broken castle looked blindly down upon a landscape of red roofs and green fields. And here the Russians shot another straggler, who fell still dreaming of a Reichskreuz a thousand years old, of a Reichskreuz bulging with pearls and jewels. By then we knew how to keep our mouths shut.
The wind began to bite our faces. Mockingly, our captors quoted to us these lines of Akhmatova’s: I smile no more. A freezing wind numbs my lips.
They carried us east in boxcars; we rode railroad tracks as narrow in gauge as the strange note-strung segments which begin in measure ninety-six of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony; they’re for the instruments Piatti and Cassa. Most of us were bound for the mines, they said. The miners in our German fairytales were rich enough to have golden nails in their boot soles. Well, who knows? Maybe it would be like that. By train and by truck, we rode further east. Then we had to walk for twenty hours straight, without even a drink of dirty water. When they let us rest, which was sometimes just for the night, sometimes for weeks, we looked down at our clasped hands and wondered aloud whether we might have been saved by only one more Teller mine in the Hürtgen Forest.
Next was that parade in Moscow, that ordeal-by-disgrace before they subdivided us into long worms of prisoner columns to burrow into this or that hole in the Russian dirt and work to death; we marched down Red Square and people spat on us; but I’d discovered my trick; I pretended that I was still one of the heroes of the Condor Legion, marching past Franco’s swastika-hung reviewing stand in Madrid, with our right arms extended: Sieg Heil!
In the courtroom, our guards were replaced every two hours. The telephone screamed like an eagle. Then they sentenced us in batches. But once in the transit prison a Russian woman brought us a pail of hot milk.
After that came the camp, of course, which at first was nothing more than a ring of barbed wire enclosing barren ground; some of us, still bound, gazed exhaustedly down at the dirt; others gaped up at the sky; and still they packed more and more of us in until we were so crowded that we couldn’t do anything more than stand; we’d been turned into one of Käthe Kollwitz’s etchings of the Kaiser’s prisoners! One of us whispered: My wife was a national swimming champion…—As for me, I never mentioned my family, who for all I know are still living in their underground cave in Köln.