“Zola,” someone shouted, and many Zolas flew into the flames.

“Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Dos Passos, Einstein, Margaret Sanger,” called a girl behind me.

“Gide, Helen Keller, Freud,” chanted a tall thin boy with a pockmarked nose. He angled the books like boomerangs, sailing them into the fire.

“Brecht,” a young professor announced shoving the books forward with careful dignity. I saw Goebbels wince. He would have let Brecht remain in Berlin unharmed as he wasn’t a Jew (but his musical partner was). The Nazis could have used Brecht as some needed proof of literary renown, but Brecht had already fled to Zurich.

Students began to sing,

“Proust. Ach, Proust

We’ll burn you as we please

We’re in Berlin after all

Where things are done with ease

We’re in Berlin

We’re in Berlin

Where things are done with ease.”

As this was an important historic moment, I didn’t want to be left out. Finding Hemingway, I tossed him into the fire. Goebbels has a soft spot for Hemingway because of the author’s manly adventures and courageous fighting spirit, and I like some of his short stories that Goebbels gave me. Nevertheless, Hemingway was on the list. Certainly Adi did not approve of Hemingway hunting animals.

Next I picked up Magic Mountain and walked close to the flames. The professor next to me proudly stated: “Paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.” Feeling the blaze warm my cheeks, I pulled out pages, one by one saying: “Eins, zwei, drei… he loves me… loves me not… loves me… loves me not” I kept on, chapter by chapter, until “he loves me” was the final reward and the cover of the book curled in a radiant red glare. (Little did I know then that I’d see Berlin curling in ashes, street by street, like so many of these awful pages.)

I talk to Adi’s secretaries about those 20,000 books burning and how exciting it was, but they’re more interested in sharpening pencils on the Bunker’s concrete floor, eating gummy vanilla crescents that slur their speech, and drinking coffee made from acorns. They used to drink tea, but that’s now considered Anglo. These are Adi’s devoted women who adore and praise him and wear cut-down army field coats to show a military support in their workplace. They sit calmly at their desks alongside bicycle pumps and ration cards for bike tires. Their typewriters have extra large keys so the Führer can read the pages.

Women find him so attractive, so handsome. It surprises me that Adi thinks his face is too chubby. When he’s alone, he does these little exercises puffing out his skin as he thinks this will thin out his cheeks. With all his Austrian stature, he still believes he has a hunched profile. I assure him that his profile is very commanding. When speaking in public, he feels self-conscious though no one would ever guess that. He hunted endlessly for just the right back brace that would not be obvious under his suit. And he found a man who expertly designed a perfect one in a shop that was subsequently destroyed in the famous Reichkristallnacht. Having to be totally measured again by an Aryan who botched everything, Adi went back to wearing a tight belt under his shirt that was moderately helpful.

When the heavy tapping of their Remington keys stops, the conversation of the secretaries turns to love. These ordinary workingwomen want to ask me that one big question. You can see it in their eyes, how they study my face and scrutinize my clothes. What’s it like to make love to a genius?

Everyone wants a part of him and not just the women. At political rallies, most of the men in the audience have little black mustaches on their upper lips.

I have made love before Adi. I come from Bavaria. There are glorious men in Das Bayern. You have only to sit in the cafés to see that. But when I met Adi, other men were quickly forgotten. Adi is unique. He surprises not only his followers but also his lovers. Oh, he’s had lovers before me. One was that niece, Geli. I don’t know what the attraction was. You could hardly call her stylish. But Goebbels told me that Cleopatra married one of her brothers, and it’s thought by some she might have married another. Maybe a niece is going along those historic lines.

I don’t begrudge him former amours that are over… though I still fear the memory of Geli.

Adi was fond of Marlene Dietrich. She was often seen with theatrical Jews, but he believed she’d get over that. And her legs! They were luminous, smooth and perfect. In all the parades he reviewed, the legs of his young soldiers strutting and goose-stepping were her legs. He begged her to stay in Berlin, but she went to Hollywood and became an American citizen. When that happened, he was finally cured. The parade legs of his soldiers returned to him, wholesome and hairy.

Every morning I hope for good news about the war so Adi will once again enjoy those “hairy” parades. Looking for Fräulein Manzialy before she puts out the breakfast dumplings stuffed with cottage cheese, I ask her for a reading. She’s much more reliable than crude gypsies with bushy hair and uneducated ways. My mother always said that a person who cooks your food is close to a saint. Adi’s predictions are the most important, of course, but Fräulein Manzialy has sturdy common sense. She spreads cards on the table and pours us both what coffee she can make from walnuts and herbs. As she turns over the first card, I ask: “Will the Führer win his war?”

“No wonder we’re losing,” Fräulein Manzialy snaps at me. “Civilians talk about his war. It’s our war.”

“You’re quite right,” I say. “Will he win our war?”

Fräulein Manzialy answers, no matter what card is face up: “You live or you die.”

I want her to tell me that the cards say he was born at 6:22 in the morning by all the clocks in the house. A lucky time with lucky numbers. When he entered this life, his mother planted a tree and squeezed her breast milk on the roots. I want the cards to say he had a marvelous time in Klara’s womb and now will have a victorious time in this life, a last minute miracle like Frederick the Great. But Fräulein Manzialy only replies: “You live or you die.”

Though Fräulein Manzialy’s cards are the same, the Bunker changes. People rush in and out. Many of the soldiers have rough weather lines so deep their mouths just look like more creases. Yesterday I heard loud laughing and a group of SS came down the staircase carrying a Russian soldier. Entering the dining area, they threw the captive on the table. I was drinking coffee while Goebbels was expounding on Chaucer. We moved back against the wall with our coffee cups to stare. The SS ignored us. The Russian on the table was a woman holding up a torn picture as she whimpered in German, “Mutter, meine Mutter.” A German Thiele watch was on her wrist that the men removed gently. Soon the SS men laughed as they roughly stripped her, greased her breasts with motor oil, and tied her up so she dangled over the table from a metal chain under her arms—another chain around her middle was attached to spikes on the concrete ceiling. The woman was stocky, her hips fleshy, her thighs thick and muscular. You could see the endless steppes of Russia in the rough ridges on her hands. Crumpled on the floor was her mother’s picture. The men stared silently at their prisoner who they referred to as a Flintenweiber, the most fanatical of Soviet soldiers. The Bunker was suddenly still. For once the Goebbels children were quiet. Adi and Bormann were busy over their maps. Moving the cup slowly to my lips, I sipped the now tepid coffee—coffee so watered down and so unlike real coffee that it tasted like old brown blood on my lips. Goebbels said the woman had hips that probably were like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. As the chains creaked, the Russian woman’s windmilling legs tried to reach the floor.

One SS jumped up to her body, his mouth open and angled to suck in a breast, his legs straddling her. The others followed. SS attached themselves to her like bees on a hive. Swinging, swinging… they were clustered together as Goebbels gawked with undisguised approval. The woman screamed, but the screams died away. Goebbels grew bored and went back to reading The Canterbury Tales as I quickly walked to my room where all I heard were distant grunts.

I know that our men died with frozen feet and hands on the Eastern front. German wives lost their husbands. German children lost fathers.

This morning, the chains were gone from the dining area. There was no trace of the Russian woman. When I start to tell Adi about the incident, he stops me. “When we’re winning, we can be humane. War simplifies morals, and bestiality is vital. Napoleon said at his coronation, ‘Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche! God has given it to me, let him beware who shall touch it.’”

“But you don’t believe in God, Adi.”

“My pretty little Evchen, I believe in Napoleon.” Then he reminds me that during the French Revolution, the women were the most ferocious. But he adds sympathetically, “That Russian female had no rank. I know what it’s like to be a noncom.”

“But she had a mother. You most certainly know what it’s like to have a mutter.”

“The ancient Roman army captured their enemy and brought them back to fight lions to the death. Would a mother prefer that?”

“No.”

“The old Greeks killed all the adult males of a conquered country.”

“Yes. You’re right. We’re more advanced.”

Leaning over suddenly, he clutches his stomach in pain. He’s gasping and falls to the floor rolling with his knees drawn up.

“Adi,” I say, having seen all this before, “let it go.”

He continues to squirm at my feet.

“Let it go!” I yell.

“Nein! Nein!” Hunched into an agonized ball, his thighs press against his chest as he tightens his back.

“It’s just stomach gas,” I shout

“Nein!”

“It’s only intestinal wind, Adi.”

More struggling and then he stands, calm now, reassured his body has not had its way. “I’ve mastered it.” Reaching for a map, he says with bitterness that he has to note the positions of his troops from foreign radio news since his own generals give inaccurate information or none at all.

A young company runner provides a happy distraction, tracking wet shoe prints on the concrete and shaking white dust from his uniform. Wearing a spiked helmet pushed down over his forehead, he arrives in a whirlwind exciting everybody including Blondi. His eyes behind thick goggles are inflamed with panic. He reports that the zoo was hit. Animals are running wild in the city. Shopkeepers are chopping down the two giant wooden elephants that support the zoo entrance carrying off trunks and spangled tusks like ordinary firewood. In a solitary cone of brightness, he saw a frightened bear cub curling up alongside women and children who were drinking from a horse trough.

The young private’s father is the zookeeper and he himself has lived all his life with his family in the Keeper’s House next to the pigmy elephants. Except for the last six months in the army, the zoo was his only home. People call him the Zoo Fritz or the Fritz with 5,000 pets. He goes by his mother’s name for after World War I, the government made a law that women who lost brothers during the war could legally give their maiden names to their children in order to perpetuate the family heritage.

“Mein Zoo Fritz, why is a private wearing white gloves?” A serious line of wrinkles appear on Adi’s forehead.

“A courtesy to the animals, Mein Führer.” Taking off his helmet reveals pimples on his forehead. Large pink ears lie flat against his head. He had to reinforce the top of his boots with the tread of an old truck tire.

Adi angrily shouts, “If we hold Berlin, our civilians will stand up and fight from their porches. From their front yards. Berlin is a porcupine to be defended to its last hair, its last quill, its last bristle and awn.”

He scolds the boy for wearing a World War I helmet and for missing hobnails on his boots, threatening to send him to a penal battalion for not wearing a proper uniform. A uniform is sacred. But Adi finally relents and lets the youth keep the helmet as that’s all the boy can find to shield his head. Adi admits to me later that the runner, though babbling and misinformed, made him nostalgic for when he was a young soldier himself in the List Regiment during the First World War when he won the Iron Cross. His war stories tend to get more detailed and longer with each telling, but I think a woman is able to appreciate repetition more than a man. I listen patiently to how he survived five years on the Western Front and was in 50 battles and got wounded. Those stories remind me why he has yellow teeth and awful breath so that being near him is very earthy. I pretend his heroic foxhole dust is in my hair, that his arms have blisters and there’s gore on his cheek. I want to kiss war scabs on his neck and hold his head with its battered bloody cap in my lap. When I was a little girl, I had nosebleeds and my papa would carry me on his shoulders all around the backyard to calm me, and I would see my blood dripping onto his hat. Bloody hats, to this day, make my thighs feel warm.