“Did you convince her about the children?” I ask.

Limp and feeble, Hans is in no shape to answer.

Soon Adi will come from the map room for some last minutes notes about our wedding tonight. I watch and wait.

My wedding. I say the words softly. My wedding. This is the day women wish for, dream about, prepare for. When I was a girl of seventeen, my sister and I decided it was time to be women. We were very close then and decided to lose our virginity together. Older by a few years, it was my duty to plot our fate. Gretl was never as pretty or as firm as I was or still am. She hates to exercise. Even when she was just a girl, she would ride the bus everywhere, even to our school that was eight blocks from home. I walked. I could never get her to go swimming with me. Maybe she was self-conscious about her flabby thighs. She never had the good sense to realize that kind of thing can be overlooked in the heat of passion.

Gretl and I shared a bedroom as we were growing up, and when mother made us turn out the light, we talked about our breasts, how they inched bigger each day. I didn’t know then that Adi’s mother died of breast cancer and had both breasts taken off and he would someday, therefore, have nothing to do with mine.

We talked about hymens, all the different kinds—elastic, thick, delicate. Sticking our finger up inside ourselves, we’d touch ours. My sister felt mine—and I would touch hers—all the time evaluating and questioning who was best to break this important barrier. Gretl’s hymen was very delicate, and I had to be gentle when examining her. Mine was very thick, and Gretl could almost punch it.

We were just young girls without any knowledge of seduction, and there was also little money to buy fancy clothes. I saved the gold paper on my father’s cigars—Zigarrenbands—and pasted them around my nipples and Gretl’s. My nipples got hard instantly as I was older and more sensuous. With Gretl I had to rub them with oil until her buds popped out like ugly plugs. Gretl’s nipples have thin black hairs on the end that disgusted me at the time, but it’s one of the reasons General Fegelein married her and why she got pregnant. Recently, my unfortunate brother-in-law was arrested for treason and the first thing he asked for was a barber to cut his hair before he was shot. Goebbels said it was like the ancient Spartans who combed their hair even before a losing battle. That didn’t make Gretl feel any better.

But back in those youthful days, our only worry was what man could perform well on two inexperienced young girls at the same time. We needed technique and energetic tenderness and were jealous of men, who could go to prostitutes. We didn’t have anybody to pay. We thought about saving up enough money to go to Italy, but the language barrier would hinder any verbal enticements. Besides, the Italians, though overly romantic, are not subtle. How could such boisterous lovers ever know the vibrant deep strings of strong Bavarian women from Simbach?

Being a policeman in Munich, Horst Meyer wore carbines and a pistol at his side and lived in the suburb of Uffing with a wife and one child on the way so he was most likely potent. We met him at Café Heck where he paid for our tea and Linzer tortes and told us we were beautiful sisters. After that first meeting, we kept going back, and Horst insisted that such beautiful girls needed protection. (When we were older, we saw Peter Lorre in the movie M, where the actor played a child killer. Horst was right. Evil people can be charming.)

Munich at that time was not Adi’s Munich since after World War I the French pressed greedily for funds. The sidewalks, parks, the Odeonsplatz were mostly in disrepair. A great amount of money was paid in repartitions mandated by the Versailles Treaty. But my sister and I were too young and carefree to realize that.

Two months after meeting Horst, we decided to invite him to a rented room. We placed little paper dishes of nut brittle on the round table by our bed along with a prized tin of British condensed milk given to me by Aunt Mirdza on my birthday. The sticky milk was later used to lubricate our innocence. Having once taken a ski trip in the Sudeten Mountains, we taped photos of them along with glossy posters of the mountains of Thuringia on the wall to appear worldly. “When my rear turns rose-red to the sky, you know I long for you” was a song being sung in Berlin, and Gretl and I hummed it while we washed ourselves carefully. Braiding our hair together to connect us like twins, we would enter our first sexual union attached. We lay on the bed nude, side by side, our one thick braid as fat as a sailor’s rope binding us together. I couldn’t turn my head without Gretl turning with me. So we waited silently, our hands at our sides. When Horst entered the room, he became erect instantly. He was definitely potent.

Taking Gretl first was only right as she was the impatient younger one. Afterward, Horst made deep plunges to break through my mucus and blood. But Gretl liked to think that when Horst entered me, his sperm also entered the blood stream of our common braid so that technically he entered both of us at the same time—so she was both first and second. It annoyed me that he lingered a few minutes more with Gretl. And being attached, I had to endure her flaunting yells, the childish screams of joy that are so common in the young. He concluded by taking our communal braid, winding it around his hand, and lifting and lowering us on his pleasure. However, Horst did end up liking me the best as my stomach was marvelously firm from swimming and now that his wife was bloated with child, he couldn’t keep himself from kissing my taut skin and navel. Though he found Gretl appealing because of her tiny hands, it was me he wanted on a permanent basis. I had to refuse him from any second encounter as that would lessen the moment we had just experienced. One did not want to think of being a virgin with him over and over. Also, his wife would soon be in working order as she was eight and a half months along, and Horst took comfort in that.

16

MY DAYDREAMING ABOUT HORST ends as Der Chef Pilot gyrates, grunts and abruptly slumps over. In a loud sigh, he knocks a coffee cup to the floor. He bends over to pick up the cup, gaining composure while under the table. He straightens up and talks to me as if we were never interrupted.

“You must urge Mein Führer to stage a breakout.”

“I have no authority to do so,” I say.

“You have the authority of one who loves him.”

“Many people love him,” I say proudly.

“Yes. Yes,” he continues, “but your sensibilities extend to the bedroom.”

“Would you have me hum from Lehar by his pillow?”

“Is that what you do?” he asks, hoping his question will lead to information more intimate.

“It’s Parsifal he loves, and I surely can’t be expected to sing for the Holy Grail.”

“His grail! Who can doubt that it’s marvelous. As his humble pilot, I can only imagine…”

“Thankfully, the original grail was discovered in a castle not a cathedral,” I say.

“And our party doesn’t answer to the church or the castle,” Hans announces.

“I’m aware of that. But the Führer used to like the Pope, Herr Baur. Few people realize he pays church taxes to this day. He even had a cordial agreement with the Pope once. Until the sterilization law was passed advocating Gnadentod, merciful death. Then that Cardinal Clems Von Gallen in his sermon at Munster had to ask if we had the right to live only as long as we were productive. That silly sermon caused the Führer to suspend our T-4 Program. I ask you, what else could the Führer do to ensure racial purity that we will all benefit from, Catholics as well. But that’s in the past, and as the Führer says: The only von who lives like a von these days is the pope.”

“Ja. Our Führer is very right about that, Fräulein Braun. I used to be a devout Lutheran. And my Uncle Carl was a Catholic chaplain in World War I. He was a good German, blessing tanks and bombs, calling on God to help the struggle.”

“What could have made your uncle become a chaplain instead of a wonderful ordinary soldier?”

“History. Henry V heard Mass many times before Agincourt. Medieval French armies marched with legions of priests. Uncle Carl said there were chaplains during the Revolution and Civil War in America. But what is most distasteful to me… is the fact that Catholic missionary churches were built above the dungeons for slaves in slave-trading Ghana.”

“Slaves? Accepted by the church?”

“Yes. We are right to turn our back on the church. What could those clerics have been thinking? What went through their minds to see women and children sold like bushels of hay?”

“Such cowards,” I say. “Just as chaplains are cowards.”

“That is not necessarily true. Chaplains can be fierce. I’ve heard stories how some clerics joined in bloody battles. They had to be warned that they were not protected by the Geneva Convention unless they remained in their own category.”

“We don’t believe in that any more.”

“Clerics?”

“The Geneva Convention,” I say with authority. “The Führer discourages clerics, as well. In these advanced times, Hans, the Reich refuses to acknowledge all those holy and devout creatures that plagued my childhood and were thrust upon me. Like that imaginary bearded female Saint Thecla who was so very gracefully delivered from sex. When St. Thecla was thrown to the lions, do you know what she did?”

“Once being Lutheran, I have no idea, Fräulein.”

“St. Thecla leaned back languidly and offered her vulva to the fierce lion.”

Hans moves closer to me in eager anticipation. “Did the lion take her?”

“That silly beast was so overcome he only licked her feet.”

“Still, Fräulein, feet can be very provocative—even for a lion.”

“Ja, I know all about that. Göring showed me paintings. How in the eleventh century women in China bound their feet into little balls so they could put them in their husband’s mouth during passion. But I personally believe that such things are mere illusions. No doubt provocative illusions, Hans. And when there’s a war on, illusion is the last thing we need—though some people would disagree with that. Göring for one. And we know how untrustworthy he’s become. The Führer cured me of fantasy by painting hairy gewgaws on my dressing table. They looked like spiders and I tried to squash them.”

“He tried to trick you into knowing what is false.”

I grin at Hans for his insight. Yes. Adi tricks me into knowing what’s true so should I convince him that he needs to break out and survive in order to “trick” the crazy world into his supreme design? Didn’t he tell me that Napoleon said a general should be a trickster. Yet I hesitate. For Adi will soon be all mine, and I can’t let myself think of him belonging solely to Germany again.

“And have you met the Pope, Fräulein?“ Hans asks. “They say he has a long mouth with a good set of double teeth on top.”

“Who says that?”

“Lieutenant General Baron Van Voorst tot Voorst.”

“What does he know? I’m the one the Führer sent to help prepare the way.”

“You… his… his…”

“Do you want to say mistress? Now you can say fiancée.”

“I’ve always regarded you, Fräulein, as the Führer’s future wife.”

“I appreciate that, Hans.” He’s not telling the truth. No one thought of me as a future wife. It took moving into the Bunker for Adi to know.

“I’ve met many famous persons. General Maximino Comacho, brother of the Mexican president. The Duke and Duchess of Winsor. And I met the Pope in Venice,” I say proudly. “The Führer is grateful for the pontiff’s birthday prayers said for him each year. He’s also pleased that when Coventry and its ancient cathedral were bombed, the Pope didn’t denounce us.”

How impressed my mother was that her little girl met the Pope. It meant a lot to her as she was brought up a strict Catholic. My uncle Werner, her brother, who owns a shoe repair shop, has no use for Catholics who only wear their good pumps to Sunday Mass and seldom have them repaired. Uncle Werner loves Jewish businessmen who stand in their stores all day and wear down the heels of their shoes running back and forth to the bank.

Father works as a teacher and is happy to deal with anybody, even Catholic students and their parents. He never goes to church himself believing that it’s idiotic to trust in someone who is invisible. Perhaps that comes from being around very loud and demanding German housewives.