“They’re only under your arms,” I say softly. Will these fleas smell of us?

Gaining composure, he stands erect. His back is nearly straight, and I can’t see the hump. He’s assured the Allies are not without defeat. Haven’t they suffered? Look at all their dead. My Adi is reviving. He’s right. This corporal from World War I, who never attended a military academy, has given all to his country by wounding and killing so many of our enemies.

When he was sixteen, he baked his paintings in his mother’s oven so they’d look cracked and ancient like the old masters’. But his paints came from a grudge (against rich bankers), and he realized even then that you only know the end when you know the beginning.

Taking a light red freckle of a flea from his armpit, he longs for a microscope. In World War I, there were fleas and young doctors who would let him see the neckless creatures on a slide. Fleas always find their victim and smashing the insect between his fingers, he hates the Bunker dampness that has brought them on. But I know it’s Blondi. Beautiful Blondi has given us these idiotic creeping leaping things that are the deadliest varmints in the world.

“It sucked you.” I take his hand and press it to my cheek.

“A flea’s sexual parts are a third of its body.” A slight stain lingers on his fingers. “They copulate for eight hours.”

“If we can’t kill them all, we’ll mock them all. You and I will mate for eternity.”

“You must be certain.” This time there’s no softness in his voice. Those blue eyes I adore have grown dark gray from stress and are as cold and riveting as I’ve ever seen them (eyes that Lady Londonderry once called wonderful and far-seeing). He’s testing me as if to say, I dare you, I dare you. But I’ve made up my mind for there is only one decision. Without him, I can have no existence.

I’ve waited for him, waited until he left his quarters, waited until he finished with his generals, waited until he awakened each morning. I am fetched then sent away. There’s sorcery in that hollow of waiting that’s as much him as the very hours he’s present, as the very breath that hits my cheeks when he pushes close to me. In death, we’ll wait together in history.

The wedding. He’s ordered flowers from a shop that operates in the basement of its original store that was bombed above. Flowers do exist. They grow at the Berghof, and they’re still in Berlin.

Our forests can’t be taken from us, Adi says. And it was Bormann who always championed weeds and pristine growth, encouraging civilians to eat “wild food.” Crazy Bormann, thinking of civilians when they’re the very people who let Adi down. What good did Bormann’s nettles, dandelions, and sorrel do? Flour made from yarrow, lettuce from nettle, soup from goat’s-rue, and all for the war effort. Even my mother made tasteless butter from figworts.

“Yellow tulips,” Adi says. “Be like a puppy to them.”

Magda knew all along. Yellow tulips.

I’ll hold my tulips to the end.

“Magda and Josef will follow us,” Adi tells me. “They don’t want to live. After we’re dead, Bormann will see that our bodies are completely burned. There will be no Führer-skull on display.”

“And the children?” I ask.

“They as well.”

“Even… Helga?”

“They have no wish for her to survive in a desperate world.”

Helga. Dead along with us. For a moment I’m angry. But I know that she can never be me, never have Adi as her husband, never know his glorious secreting tip when I finally become his bride.

I’m eager to be burned with him, to die in his fire. Eva Braun Hitler bones will not rest in some American museum or Russian government display case.

“At midnight, we’ll marry, my precious grenade, my Evchen.” He urges me to rest.

“Adi, the guards by the stairs have smelly feet. They should bathe and powder them once a day. Certainly for our wedding.”

“I’ll report it to Bormann.”

I have a sudden urge to see the light, to go up into the air and celebrate my happiness. The Führer will soon be mine. Just look at me now, Berlin!

“I have one last thing to do. I’ll need your permission to go to an apartment close by. I must see about a dress. I loaned it to a friend. It’s the dress I wish to wear for my wedding.”

“What friend?”

“Renate. A girlhood friend. A good Nazi. She used to work with me at the photography shop. You remember her? She had red hair and was a college student with a greenish rope birthmark on her ankle. You said it looked like a sailor’s tattoo.”

Renate borrowed my white chiffon spring dress for her brother’s decoration ceremony a year ago. Her brother fought on the Russian front and was awarded ribbons though his chest was partially destroyed and what was left was so sensitive and painful that they had to hang the ribbons on his ears. But what I really want is to see her face in disbelief when I say, “I’ll soon be Frau Hitler.”

“It’s too dangerous!” At that moment, shells rattle the bunker. We’re not alarmed and used to it.

“Her area is still within our safety zone.” I have already assumed the firm confidence of a wife.

I don’t elaborate on the total destruction up above. I can’t give him pain. “If I can’t see my friend one last time, if the enemy prevents that, then surely they have won.”

“You will turn back immediately if there’s any problem getting through!”

“Of course,” I say firmly.

“Nevertheless, I’ll consult a clairvoyant to be certain.”

Sitting patiently on a stool by the map room door is Emil Schneider with a glass ball on his lap. He softly sings Silesian folk songs as he runs one hand though his shaggy thick hair that he cuts himself. One forgets his protruding forehead after a few minutes. Emil predicted that the Führer would occupy Czechoslovakia so Adi feels confident in asking him if I’ll be safe in the city for my trip to Renate’s. But Adi always knew he would occupy Czechoslovakia, so what makes Emil so special? How can anybody be more knowing that the Führer? But I realize Adi likes to be reinforced by whimsy. It’s a curious game he plays as others play cards. That silly ball Emil holds is a child’s toy that little Helmut should be tossing against the Bunker walls.

Studying the crystal ball as he moves it briskly from side to side, Emil suddenly becomes grim. “I must look again.”

He shakes the ball and angles it to the right, the left. Still sullen, he shakes it violently.

“What? What?” I ask impatiently.

Slowly, as if reading the words from the globe, he replies: “You will never be harmed by the enemy.”

“See,” I chirp happily. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll send Otto Jantsch with you. He’s trustworthy. A Golden pheasant,” Adi says.

I know Golden Pheasants have great authority and trust. “But Adi, I hate the bullion lace they wear on their brown uniforms. It’s so… vain.”

“Otto forgoes all that.” Then Adi stares at my right arm. He moves closer to examine it with that intense Austrian way of his.

“Adi, why are you staring at my arm?”

“It has a slight touch of flab. There’s no time to lose.” He pats a wedge of flesh and there is, indeed, a delicate sway of skin.

Bormann sends out a runner to bring Major Otto Jantsch to the Bunker.

When Major Otto Jantsch arrives, his hobnailed boots making sparks on the concrete, Adi instructs him to return immediately if there are serious obstacles on the way.

Otto towers above Adi. He’s over six feet tall with a bulging chin slash from the defense of Schweinfurt. He carries his authority with a casual easiness, walking up to the Führer in that effortless manner of a professional soldier and giving off an aura of luck and good humor.

A sudden blast brings powdery concrete from the ceiling onto Major Jantsch’s uniform. Ignoring this, he salutes Adi with great formality without dusting the concrete flakes from his epaulettes. Happily he reports destroying a consignment of consecrated hosts smuggled into Berlin by French priests.

With a slight bow, he presents Adi with 30 lipless chemical beakers he’s found. They make elegant dinner glasses.

“There’s a terrible lack of saluting up above, Mein Führer. When they salute, the arm’s not properly straight and stiff.”

Adi is only concerned about me. How I thrill at his devotion. I wish to stand forever in his glare of pure protection. Demanding that Otto’s only duty is getting me back safely, he hurries off to the map room.

Otto suggests that he alone should secure my dress. But he’ll never find Renate’s apartment that is a construction built by her parents when the bombing stated. More a tunnel than a flat, it would be impossible to find. I desperately want to see Renate and watch her whole body stiffen in disbelief when I tell her I’m going to be Frau Hitler. In those days when I never knew if he loved only me, it was Renate, not my mother, who said he would never marry me.

Not having a good girlfriend down here is difficult. It’s not the same with Adi’s secretaries who are so loyal to their Führer that even when they can no longer find typewriter ribbons, they continue to pound the keys to please him. I’m regarded as just another woman in his inner circle but the lucky one. All I ever wanted was to be connected to him in an official way. It’s all I ever dreamed about. Yet Renate knew me before Adi when I was dreamy Fräulein Eva who only fantasized that someday a prince would come into her life. Renate married a butcher and has a boy with crossed eyes who had to wear glasses at the age of three. For I believe the men who come into a woman’s life can be predicted by her body. A woman needs only to read herself. Poor Renate has a thick neck, her hair is drab brown, her eyes a flecked green. I encouraged her to exercise that neck in the pool, moving her head from right to left as she swims, but Renate has no talent for water. She struggled without moving her face. Hence her destiny with a butcher husband while looking like a bulldog even in my special chiffon dress.

Magda comes in to the dining room in a filmy batiste nightgown, her top uncovered because of Heidi who is really too old to be breast-fed. Breast-feeding, Magda feels, keeps her succulent. And wasn’t the Führer breast-fed until he was five?

There’s a shortage of rubber nipples for nursing bottles, Magda tells us, but that’s no worry for her. “Major, how is the war?”

Major Jantsch looks at her strong erect nipples in open admiration. “War is merely a continuation of policy by other means, Frau Goebbels.” Smiling, he shows side teeth filed to cannibal points.

“Would these two be acceptable as… other means?” Magda holds out her breasts.

“But of course, Frau Goebbels. The good German woman.”

“I’m one German woman, nicht? Please don’t lump me with all the others. No two women or two breasts are alike. Even my own two differ, one from the other. The right is slightly larger.”

“I only see perfection, Frau Goebbels.” The major points to her breasts. His index finger was destroyed in battle, and he uses his middle finger to fire.

Magda’s eager smile creases her brow as she stares at his firing finger while lifting up her breasts. “Both are frisch and munter.”

“Ja. Healthy and hardy.” His likewise hardy erection is visible as he adjusts his tunic, his legs slightly bowed.

“Major Jantsch has no time for that.” I’m determined not to let Magda get away with her tricks. “The major is on assignment. He’s taking me out for my wedding dress.”

I try to stand between them, but Magda moves in closer to the major.

“Some believe my Heidi is too old for mother’s milk. But sucking does good things for the tissues.” Magda purses a mouth smeared with Paris lipstick rumored to be made from sewer grease.

The major touches her right breast assuring her of good tissues.

When Magda’s dead, when she’s in her coffin and hunkered under grass and deep dirt, the spiky swastika over her grave will grab at the trousers of young men going by.

“This is a noncom’s war, Major, as Russians are near us in battalion strength.” Magda authoritatively assures him of her official connections. “Here in Berlin as well as everywhere, we in the Bunker are not so concerned with the delicacies of an officer’s war now that our retired lance corporal Adolf Hitler has taken complete command of the military.”

“Ja, Frau Goebbels.”

“The Führer has turned our great country into the raw sensuous beauty of a farmer’s dream.” Magda moves in close to the major’s chest dreaming of Germany as one huge estate. The swaying nude bulb above casts a freak golden glow on her hair, as if she had staged it that way.