“One has to admire strong shoulders,” I mused. But Keitel had no reason to smile. He was rubbing his back against a beam. So even generals get infested with bugs.

“Their antlers sway along the road. It’s soothing for our infantry to watch while they’re enduring temperatures fifty below.”

“It’s something I can write to my mother about, Herr General.”

“There is much to write her about.”

“You mean… like the Tolstoy thing?”

“Whatever do you mean, my dear?”

“I was told we set up quarters at the estate of the late Count Tolstoy.”

“Yes. Yes. Infantry Regiment Gross-Deutschland. They were quartered there. Not in the main house but the museum. Commander Guderian’s men didn’t burn one stick of furniture from the estate. He only used wood from the nearby forest.”

“I think that shows great cultural respect.”

“My dear, do you know how we were rewarded? They laid mines around the grave of their greatest writer.”

“General, as far as I know, no German soldier was blown up by Tolstoy.”

“Quite right. Quite right. And that reminds me, there’s a joke among my soldiers: Adam and Eve were the original Communists. They had no clothes but fig leaves, had to steal apples to eat, and couldn’t leave the place where they lived. And thought it was all a perfect existence.”

“If they were in love, perhaps it was.”

“You give them too much credit, Fräulein. Love? Those filthy commissars? Who lack all the etcetera of strategy? It will take Germany years to get that country in good shape. But let’s think of some good news. I just made the Führer smile. Our soldiers found a statue of Stalin in a little village and beheaded him, then cut off his legs. He went from 9 meters to 3.” He chuckled. “A war isn’t worth it if you’re miserable. A struggle should not be unhappy. Enter combat with pleasure or why bother. I remind myself often of the Anschluss and our triumphal entry into Vienna… though I was against decorating our tanks and trucks with garlands. It’s enough that we entered Vienna without carnage.”

“It was a great day for all of us. The torchlight procession. Excited and happy people.”

“My dear, I was carried to my quarters by the Vienna division of the Austrian Army. My buttons were plucked from my greatcoat as souvenirs, an event equal to decapitating Stalin.”

In my next letter, I tell my mother what happened to Stalin’s statue to cheer her, but she’s not impressed.

“With the silk shortage I worry about your underwear,” Mother writes. “How can a woman keep a man like the Führer with cotton underwear?”

Before the war, I was fashionable. I used to wear silk panties, half-slips of watered satin, pink chiffon bed jackets. But the war took those away. Adi is stoic about this and eager that we conserve silk for parachutes. As he slips off my cottons in good spirits, he’ll remark, “What does it matter? The units of my elite Der Führer Regiment don’t own simple cotton undershorts. They go bare.”

“The big burly Der Führer Regiment that took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland?” I ask playfully.

“They are conserving cotton for bandages. I do worry as bare skin against wool trousers can chafe a soldier’s thighs.”

“Don’t you worry about my chafed thighs?”

Adi arched his eyebrows in surprise as I stood before him naked shielding with my hands all the ugly lines from the coarse material, especially the ridges stamped on my stomach. “See what cotton does to my skin.”

Taking my hands away, he admires the creases. “Ah, my precious Evchen, little pink tank tracks. My decisive weapon. Tanks! Once forbidden to me by that fiendish Versailles Treaty. Shall we wet them with honor?” He takes out his genius and sprays me. And I’m grateful that his very life’s necessity is running down my thighs. If I can’t have silk, there are sturdy fingers when he’s finished, thrumming his dankness into my pores as I say over and over… I love you. And he says over and over: “My darling weapon, my sweet grenade.”

He has seamless hands. His mother made him knead the bread when he was growing up. I think specks of dough are still in the creases of his knuckles plumping out the lines. What looks like dough is under his nails making white crescent shaped cuticles. Everything on him is matched and lined up as if marching in a shop-floor excellence. But I wonder, does the blood in his body know which hand or leg it belongs to?

His thumbs. They’re two little Fritzes. Wiggling. The left has entered me, a substitute for what I patiently wait for. And I think of Magda in her proud straw hat with poppies hopelessly longing for the Führer. Hats are not rationed, so she flaunts them… having no conscience about her many flashy rationed dresses.

Goebbels once told me that a conversation and a night out with the Führer was even better than an evening with a first class whore. So Josef looks at me in subtle envy for that special closeness he can never have with Adi, an intimacy that only I’m allowed.

Last night, when Adi cupped my face like a child, when I was every child he ever held like that, he asked me to marry him. This was a humble moment. I told my mother it was a “cotton” moment. He held the brush with “EB” that he had given me and rubbed off the “B” with a nail. Then he scratched on an “H.” I held the brush next to my heart.

I stripped to my coarse panties, and my bra hung unfastened from one breast. That he would take no notice of one breast exposed was just as usual as it would have been if two breasts were exposed. Looking at me with sweet coldness, as if I were a picture that had not come into proper focus, he motioned me to take those things off, as if my panties were cheap beer rags about to come in contact with his closest self. Fear nestled in my stomach. I sensed being a flank or hindquarter, a hide, a carcass broken down into cuts. But fear did not stay long for he smiled and leaned over me and put General Weidling’s monocle down there so that my tiny cave could look at him in wonder. I held the pose, the monocle perched in those moss udder lips between my thighs. And just at that moment, he cupped my face when it was the little face between fleshy posts that ached to be touched. “We’ll marry,” he said, the coldness gone. His voice fell on me like strings of sweet peas and other vine-flowers and I smiled, already a housewife in my contentment. I wanted him to say it again and again, but that was not his way. No, he wouldn’t say any more as Dr. Morell, the old Huguenot, had injected him with caffeine so that his whole body twitched though his face remained rigid with eye spasms. His balance was off from the damaged membrane in his ears, that terrible assassination explosion coming between us. Wrapping his twitching left arm around the bedpost, he lowered himself down to take the monocle out with his lips, spitting it on the floor before his tongue found me again.

Why am I chosen? Chosen for these last days to be constantly within his reach, to hear all his stories, over and over, a litany that is more dear than any I have heard as a child whispered about the saints in church. His mother waited for him with steaming tea each day after school. Klara would stare at the clock and know exactly when he was leaving the school door, each block at each minute, counting the seconds until he arrived. One day he was late. Having borrowed a book, he promised to return it that very day. His word was his honor, and he walked five miles to the lender’s house while it was raining. Cold, wet and sneezing, he arrived home explaining why he had deprived her of two hours of himself. She threw the teapot out the window into the backyard and smashed his cup. This from a sweet calm woman who rarely raised her voice. Then she composed herself and fitted all the pieces of his cup carefully together placing it in front of him. Adi said he wanted to write an opera about it.

13

KLARA LOVED HIM MORE THAN ANY HUMAN could or would love another human. His happiest years, he said, were spent in Linz at Humboldtstrasse 31. Klara was brave and good, and he learned compassion from her. He would catch slowworms that were chalk white and nice to touch, spongy like his mother’s legs. He never let his friends chop those worms into pieces insisting they use bread for bait as he was eager to save any life he could, especially a life of such prehistoric value. For killing worms would be like killing one’s ancestors.

He and his mother found joy together in simple things. They watched the Kaiser speeding by from Potsdam in his shining black automobile. When Adi was quarantined with scarlet fever and had to stay in the hospital for three months, Klara stood outside the building and could only wave to him at his window. She came every day, even in high winds and storms—all day long only going home at night to sleep. At age ten, he played with a Schnauzer dog that belonged to a girl named Inge who lived next door. When he was 15, he dressed the bust of Wagner with his only cap and his mother’s good wool scarf because he heard Parsifal for the first time. He and Klara walked the streets of Linz chilled without a hat or shawl. That didn’t stop him from sketching all the flowers held by maidens in Parsifal. Such flowers were vaulted and protected in a cathedral of sound.

I’m not jealous of his mother because it was Klara who gave him to me, struggling with the pain of birth when he was born on April 20th in the small town of Braunau on the River Inn that is the frontier between Austria and my beloved Bavaria.

His loving mother would board a crowded Linz bus clutching little Adi’s hand, glaring from one passenger to another shouting: “Can’t some one give this young child a seat!”

Klara was tough when it came to her son. He speaks of her proudly, and she makes me think of a shark that can still bite into your leg after being beached on dry land for many hours. It’s not that she’s stern, just wonderfully strong.

If Klara were still alive, she’d be down here in the Bunker with us the way I wish my mother could be.

The Bunker world is more mine than any up above… drinking coffee with officers as they beat out tunes on their cups with a spoon, talking to Adi when he first emerges from the map room, getting literature and painting lectures from Goebbels, exchanging ideas with the runners who come in and are out of breath and drop down on ammunition boxes waiting to talk to their Führer. Everybody is astonished at how much I know about the war and its strategy. “All depends on General Busse’s Ninth Army. He won’t permit all Berlin to be captured by the enemy,” I state.

I can say things to Goebbels that I would never say above ground: “Even if the Russians finally occupy Berlin, I’ll still be happy for I’ll have Him then forever and ever.” When I say this, Josef Goebbels frowns but somehow understands. The Bunker has made us all more sensitive. If you’re very close to war, as we are, you get overly tender. It’s like being wounded.

As she was boiling soup in the kitchen, I asked our cook if I could on occasion call her mother. She’s only five years older than me and from the silly Rahnsdorf district of Berlin, but it’s difficult to be down here without my mother. So for the last hour, I’ve said: “Mama, more coffee please. Mutter, are there any eggs left for lunch? Mutter, I want something special for my wedding dinner.” But she’s only Fräulein Manzialy who works on a wooden table chopping meat and vegetables, the table wobbly but as enduring as any soldier in the Bunker.

I ache to go up and flaunt myself through this once forbidden city of Berlin. I want to scream to every man, woman and child that I’m going to marry the Führer.

Underground, when there’s no sky above, you think of many things. Sunday is no different from any other day. A dreaminess is all around, but that doesn’t mean the atmosphere is less vital. There’s Adi’s family—his valet, cook, secretaries, doctors, adjutants. Making fun of Adi’s personal entourage, Goebbels calls them the “chauffeureska,” but they’re all necessary and I’m fond of them.

I “read” the Bunker. If the tables and chairs rattle, it’s a medium attack. If only the walls shake, it’s not nearly as bad as when the ground bucks in a maximum hit.

I “read” other things. Everyone coming in wears phosphorous buttons on their coats, tiny round lights to help them find their way around the streets at night. There are ten straight-back chairs placed Italian style along the wall outside the map room for those who wait to speak to Adi, people who have many different ways to show their anticipation. Diplomats look stern, facing each other in little groups. Newspaper people are casual with their legs sprawled. Flexing their arms nervously are civilians. All act similar in entering and leaving the Bunker, more hopeful when entering, more wary when leaving.