I had to sit through some boring dinners with Musso watching him eat a pear in that awful Italian manner with his knife making one long curling wreath of skin. I’m grateful that he provided a valuable hint, telling Adi to always jump from his car before it came to a complete stop and to spring immediately into the nearest shelter. The Duce learned this technique from his war in Abyssinia, and it saved the Führer’s life when crazy Commies or jealous Catholics waited with knives for his Mercedes to stop only to find there was nothing to kill but a driver (the driver’s life, of course, being worthless).

Other hints from the Duce were not practical like his suggestion that German women could lean from their windows and pour scalding oil over American and Russian tanks like the women of Eger Castle in northern Hungary did in an earlier time when the Turks stormed into their country.

Certainly Adi was loyal to Musso by rescuing him from that hotel in the highest peak of the Italian Apennines with SS commandos and the Fallschirmjaeger. Adi was repaying Musso for not being bought off by the French with food, iron, coal and petroleum. “For entering the war,” Musso stated honestly, “I need a few thousand dead so I can sit down at the peace table as a belligerent.”

But these days, it’s hard to make fun of Musso. First he was sent into exile on the Isle of Maddalena. And we think now he’s probably been captured maybe killed. Different messengers coming into the Bunker report a rumor that Musso was hanged upside down in a gas station by the partisans. Adi released two sterilized fortune-tellers from Ravensbrück to tell us if the Musso rumor is true. But they said without some personal knowledge of the Italian temperament, they couldn’t give a valid answer.

Adi declared he would never let himself be captured like Musso, put in a cage and dragged through the streets of Berlin, but the worthless gypsies should be.

I have never liked gypsy fortunetellers as they have coarse hair, knotted calves, and skinny calloused fingers. What could they possibly know that the Führer doesn’t know?

Latrine rumors grow in abundance, and it’s not healthy for me to concentrate on them. I try to turn my thoughts to more worthwhile things like making the Bunker more pleasing and trying to understand why so many soldiers here have different names in Munich.

Proving difficult are the floors. To give an old world stone look, I have Sergeant Scholz, with eyebrows like brambles, rub them with light gray paint so that only part of the concrete shows through. But with the Goebbels children biking and jumping all around, it’s useless. Tricycles make too many black streaks.

Nothing but dull duty rosters and smelly gas masks are on most of the walls except for that awful life size oil portrait of Frederick the Great that Adi has in his apartment, shipping it here on his private four engine Focke-Wulf Condor airplane, the old pasty king posed upright in a seat as the only passenger. Every night after dinner, Adi sits in front of that portrait, and I perch quietly beside them both, listening in on silent thoughts communicated between two great men. Then I read aloud from his favorite book, History of Frederick the Great, but only the chapter that tells about the turning point of the Seven Years War in 1700-and-something when a miracle happened and Prussia was saved at the last minute.

5

“ANYONE WHO SAYS THE WAR IS LOST WILL BE TREATED AS A TRAITOR,” Adi declares.

With a nervous outburst, he tells me in a very agitated tone that when he shaves with boiling water and a sharp razor, it’s as if he’s cutting his own throat. When I tell him to let his valet, Heinz, shave him, he screams: “Nobody comes near my throat. Nobody!” Heinz was required to shave a balloon over 100 times before ever touching the Führer. But I have access to that glorious neck. I secretly glow even in his enraged outbursts—me—Eva Braun from Simbach, Bavaria. I lie across his throat at night and do such unordinary wonderful things under his chin. I cheer him up by talking about the death of Roosevelt because it makes him remember that the death of Tsarina Elizabeth brought good luck to old Frederick. Adi attests that Franklin married his sister. Eleanor wasn’t really his cousin, and inbreeding caused his paralysis.

“FDR is bringing me the luck of Frederick,” he says.

It was some time before I knew that Franklin, FDR, and Roosevelt were one and the same person.

“Don’t you find it amusing that you and Roosevelt both came to power in the same year?”

“The year 1933 is essential to my destiny, not amusing. Roosevelt and I were meant to be opponents.”

“You and Roosevelt both come from difficult origins. You… from being poor. He… from being crippled.”

“Yes. There is that. Yet I was never really able to hate him for he was as mad as Wilson. But now at last crazy Franklin is gone.”

“Herr Roosevelt’s death hasn’t stopped the bombing above us,” I offer. Then I feel instantly sorry for having said it. But Adi is not angry. Pure honesty often makes him amorous.

“I can always count on you for the truth, little Evchen.” He pulls me to his chest. “We are soup souls.”

“You’re the only man I’ve ever loved.” I help him lift my skirt wishing he would forget the soup part and say we’re love souls.

6

ONE PERSON WHO REALLY UNDERSTOOD Adi’s magic was Göring, the Reich’s commissioner for aviation. “Hitler is explainable. It’s the explanations of him that are miraculous, my Eva.”

Göring could be sweet, like on one of Adi’s birthdays. As I planned a small party, I wanted to look special so Hermie told me to come to Karinhall, his country hunting lodge, and we’d paint our fingernails together. He picked Dreadful Sublime, his own name for the tango-ruby bottle of polish that he mixed and created himself. As Adi hates anything that’s not natural, I use clear gloss, though I do wear a little hint of lipstick.

Goebbels planned to place his usual annual speech in a gold frame for Adi, a speech that began with… “The Führer is within each of us and each of us is within him.” I hated that because I felt Adi was really only within me.

Göring grimaced. “Goebbels’ overworked huzza of a tribute.”

“Better than his awful slogan that… BUTTER MAKES YOU FAT, BULLETS MAKE YOU STRONG.”

“Ach! Guns before butter policy. Why not butter and guns.” Smearing his cheeks with liquid rouge, he almost looked like a chunky boy.

“Hermie Göring, why do you do this to yourself?” I couldn’t help laughing.

“I sing all the songs of my country, one song being pornography. I see no reason for having any kind of itch you cannot scratch.”

“Be serious, tell me, “I demanded.

“Somebody in the Reich has to be obvious. There’s little difference between flamboyance and adoration.” He began to rub his raw looking hands with thick lotion. His fingers are a strange purple-red, obviously the results of pills and shots that Dr. Morell gives him regularly. “Don’t you see, Evie, this throws them off. Have you heard people say that I drink schnapps through a straw at the Esplanade Hotel? And eat twenty lobsters at one time with the ladies from the Berlin Scala? My dear, I don’t drink anything as silly as schnapps, and I’m only capable of finishing off a dozen and a half lobsters in one sitting. Still, does such a febrile fancy make me an idiot?”

“How can you be an idiot… when there’s a Hermann Göring Strasse right across the street from Adi’s spectacular Chancellery?”

“Don’t tell me you like Speer’s barrack-Greek buildings?”

“They please the Führer.”

“Speer! If I see one more of his buildings with a golden spread-eagle a hundred feet high… really! Better a golden spread-crotch, male or female. And all his tall bronze doors up to the ceiling that dwarf us. But I have more important things in common with the Führer. We’ve always wanted to get rid of the old Bismarckian Reich. Military leadership, we agree, is Germany’s new elite.”

“But you never heard voices. Voices told the Führer to save Germany.”

“Dear girl, those voices were induced by the temporary blindness the Führer was afflicted with as a gassed corporal in the hospital during the Great War. They were good practical voices, and I’m able to hear them through him.”

“Is that why Adi gave you the Air force?”

Hermie made a fast tight frown. “I cannot afford to put all our air power on the front lines. We never have enough reserves. Those damn Americans always have supplies. Roosevelt calls for a production of four thousand airplanes a month. Bombing us is America’s way to lift up the morale of Russia.”

“Pfui. You’re the one who has the great pilots, Hermie.”

“I learned too late that piano players make the best pilots because they pound the keys, stamp pedals, flip over music sheets without losing a beat. Vons make the worse, single minded idiots who are pragmatic and slow.”

“Yes, intellectuals are dangerous for Germany. And for Adi’s genius,” I added.

“Aber! Aber! It’s the practical that wins. We drop balls of silver paper.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Silver muddles up their radar. And that is my idea. Though the terrifying sirens on our wing-tip Stuka dive-bombers are the Führer’s suggestion.”

“That’s why Charles Lindbergh said that the Luftwaffe was the strongest Air Force in the world?” Hermie had to know that I kept up with the news.

“But Lindbergh was skeptical in the beginning. He once asked me why a man who didn’t rise above a corporal could tell us how to fight. I replied to Herr Lindbergh that if Adolf Hitler had decided to become a career pilot, he—Lindbergh—would not have been the first to cross the Atlantic. And soon, of course, he realized our Führer was a great man, so we gave Charlie the German Cross of the German Eagle, higher than anything given to an auslander.” Hermie slapped his knee in anger. “But none of us knew it was the German factories that would let us down. No creative energy comes from the industrial sector. The results of our disarmament after the Versailles Treaty. For years we didn’t produce any war equipment. Thus our workers have no skill and no proper machines.”

“But that isn’t your fault,” I said.

“I’m aware that nothing is my fault. But who would have guessed that we’d have to use the Autobahn as a runway strip, even hotel ski runs and cattle paths? Our paratroopers are landing on the backs of heifers. But I’m happy to say they paint swastikas on those cows as soon as they land.”

“Can’t you be more cheerful?”

Hermie began to chant,

“There was a young girl from Berlin

Who peddled her sin, sin by sin

Inspired, I guess

By the obvious mess

Of Krebs, Rommel and Hess.”

“That’s not cheerful. Don’t talk like you can’t do anything more. You know Adi hates that.”

“I do everything I can to raise spirits. Taught my men about baseball, a game I hate. Told them all about that great home run hitter, Ted Williams, who is now a fighter pilot. I tell my men they’re flying against Ted Williams.”

“You and your pilots are still fighting this Ted.”

“You’re entirely too sweet. It will get you nowhere. Certainly not in politics. Such accommodations are perhaps acceptable in bed. Will you get a special romp tonight?”

“Just because it’s his birthday? What kind of philosophy is that?”

“My dear, there are more things in this world than are dreamed of in any philosophy. Remember that Roman Emperor who nailed laws at the very top of the town walls so that his citizens couldn’t read them?” Rubbing a palm to his cheek, Hermie’s aching jaw is so much a part of him that the gesture was automatic and his face didn’t twitch in pain. But he saw that I noticed.

“A stone in my salivary gland. My saliva’s too thick and I use a Chinese spoon to unplug myself.”

“Surely Dr. Morell can help that.”

“It’s entirely too uninteresting for Dr. Morell. On to more serious things. Do you know, there’s a museum in Mussolini’s Vatican that stockpiles phalluses from every statue ever created in Italy.”

“That’s somehow rather comforting.” Perhaps all the statues of Adi, his wondrous manhood tucked beneath his uniform, would be preserved forever, at least in Italy.

“Ach, there are times when I miss going to the movies,” Hermie said, trying to forget his longing for stored phalluses.