“Literature is death, my sweet.”

“How do you know, Hermie?”

“Shakespeare says so. Though he says it in such a bland language. Romeo and Juliet. Gott! One has to learn English in German to find any beauty in their patter.”

“Romeo and Juliet killed themselves.”

“Ja. And we likewise burned them. But they rest together. Forever. Death is a paramour, dearest.”


Hermie unzipped his pants, undid his cummerbund and wire corset saying he knew I wasn’t squeamish, not about something as patriotic as his putsch. He loved to call his manhood “putsch” because doing so seemed heroic. He took out his small shining giblet rouged as bright as his ears. Pink powder, the color of forced roses, was thick all around the fat corded little neck down there. Rousseau, he said, once complained that the poor went without bread because face powder was made of wheat flour. In that sense, it was uncivilized. Now, powder comes from uneatable fluff.

Trying not to look between his legs, I was determined to be like Magda, worldly and amused. But my eyes would not be diverted from what he called his fleshy “council of war.”

“I wasn’t a child who played airplanes. Pilots were never my heroes. I didn’t run around with my arms out like fluttering wings. A large plane was a woman. Something I could fit into and control. Watch her speed. Knowing when to roll her over. A little one-seater was a boy jerking, skidding into turns, but finally coming to an end in a bounce and roll.“

Hermie took off his jodphur boots with silver spurs on the heels and threw them at the door. “Oh, where those little spurs have been,” he said as two young and very thin boys came in, their parachute harnesses clinking on the floor. “They’re from the Youth Battalion. Being a pilot, I like a couple of willowy sticks at my side. May I introduce Falk and Jurgen.”

The boys were perhaps thirteen or fourteen. Adult uniforms hung loosely over their shoulders, and their trousers were rolled at the bottom. Boots too big and without laces flapped noisily without holding in their feet. Boy pilots, they were trained on gliders. Their other job was the haphazard defense ring around big cities. Having a pistol each, they hid in any line of foxholes they could find, sleeping at night in burned out streetcars that lay sprawled with useless dangling electric wires trailing behind. Like civilians, they stood in line for bread.

“I like to push my boys briskly out of a plane, watch them dropping fast until that sudden fierce parachute jerk of sperm billows alive.”

Falk and Jurgen ignored Hermie’s putsch that had now become engorged as they entered.

“During the Weimar days, caning boys was forbidden. I’m glad the Führer reversed that, and these two come from a good school where they’ve bent down many times to receive five or six of the best.”

“They’re so young.”

“Didn’t Napoleon have the ‘Marie Louises’ in 1814, young boys in his cause. The Führer remembers.”

Hermie took out a bottle of wine from a drawer in his desk.

“Youth! Shall we drink to them? Snake wine from a good general in the Japanese army. I assure you the snakes at the bottom of the bottle are dead.”

“Our Führer doesn’t drink,” I replied, feeling loyalty suddenly flush my cheeks like desire.

“He’s quite lenient with the rest of us.” Hermie poured a glass of snake wine for himself and each boy. “I like that special foreplay I get from a plane when it stalls, stops in midair. At the peak of desire, I ache to let go as the plane falls, the nose down shuddering… falling… falling before I pull up quickly to recover. If I’m lucky, I blast an eardrum and have blood on my neck.”

Hermie smiled, pressing my hand for support. “With a multitude of duties to consider, I have to resort to ether in my whiskey. Boys are only one half of my complexity, but happily I offer my backside to all—what the knowing French call codette du legionnaire. I subscribe to Balzac’s philosophy… forgiving him for being French. Pleasure, Balzac averred, is like a drug. To keep getting the same results, you have to double the dose. Death or brutalization is the final one.” Swishing the wine on his swollen gums, he gulped it along with Sparacodeine pills from Dr. Stumpfegger.

The boys drank as well, each coughing in a different tone.

“Where is our bath? Must you gentlemen forget all the time, you silly creatures?”

Falk ran quickly out of the room and returned with a large pan of water.

“Both my boys did a year at Karlsruhe Cadet School in Baden. So they’re not without knowledge of our training manuals. They studied Schlieffen and know to go forward. Onward. So to prepare ourselves, we clean our pipes together. And we appreciate an audience.” Hermie stood and put his engorged putsch in the pan. Unzipping his pants, Falk observed Hermie’s floating sausage without emotion.

Anticipating how little boys might look, I was not impressed with what I saw—a glob of speckled dough hanging between skinny thighs. Nor was I embarrassed. Just intrigued.

“Come on, boys, I can’t last forever.” Biting his tongue in happy anguish, Hermie looked forward to their jerking and yawing.

Suddenly Falk began to cry, his head bent over the water. “I see my mother’s face,” he whimpered to his reflection. “I see my mother’s face.”

And indeed Falk’s chubby soft features were more feminine than soldierly.

With a half-erect penis, Falk ran from the room, an unzipped Jurgen following close behind him.

“These inexperienced soldiers.” Hermie flapped his penis so that thick scented powder flew from it and coated the water. Then he spurted and slowly deflated. “They are not going to throw the Soviets out of Berlin. The Youth Battalion should be evacuated in the Kinderlandverschikung, wouldn’t you agree, my dear?”

Yes, Hermie Göring could be amusing—once getting Adi’s toilet rigged so it flushed in E flat on November first. (November is important, of course, the month when shameful Germans capitulated in 1918 as well as the month of the failed putsch of 1923.) Such playful things as musical toilets can keep you going in a stressful time. But now that Berlin has been invaded by the Russians, stupid Göring had to set up a command post at the Berghof. He sent Adi that horrible telegram saying if anything happened to the Führer, he would take over. As if anybody else could take over. Adi was right to strip him of his rank. Many people were stripped of their rank and vanquished from the Bunker. One day they didn’t show up and you’d read about them in Wehrmacht reports. It cuts down on my social life.

7

FOR A FEW HOURS, I NEVER THINK OF ADI and study patterns on the walls, geometries of fissures and cracks that Adi said trained him as an artist. He was especially engrossed with frost lines on the kitchen windows when he was a boy. But such pondering makes me a little light headed, even scared. The fear is pure because I think of nobody in Adi’s place.

Other times, I watch the clock above a row of guns, the minutes moving slowly. Tedium forces me to take the empty Dutch gin bottle Göring gave me and fill it with hot water to put on my stomach and lie in bed. Loneliness comes unexpectedly. Silence is the same thing over and over, and when this happens I don’t even want to think about whether it’s breakfast or lunch. Knowing what meal it is makes the time go slower, like looking at an empty chair. Chairs are the saddest things on earth, always waiting for someone to sit in them.

On occasion I help Dr. Morell package Perubalsam Ointment, and iodoform and prepare special bandages for the hospital. Two years ago, I visited his strange laboratory in the basement of a hospital in Wuppertal. Morell was trying to get Gerhard Domagk— who considered himself a good German—to share in his discovery for sulphanilamide, a cure for tuberculosis. At the time, Domagk was a hero of science and worked closely with the Bayer Research Laboratories of I. G. Farbenindustrie, and Morell felt neglected. So Dr. Morell set up his own shelves with hundreds of guinea pigs (later it was said he used undesirable people) and injected them with a stain of human tuberculosis under their skin. Then he treated the furry creatures with sulphanilamide hoping to discredit Domagk by proving that the drug did not work. They were sweet little rodents in a variety of colors with mouths curved in the shape of a smile. He would sometimes become attached to one and dampen the purring pig with warm water to bathe it before wrapping it in a thick towel. “There’s a bald spot behind each ear,” Morell would explain as he gently applied a drop of mineral oil to the ears of his favorite one that he named Azo (Azo being a chemical link in sulphanilamide). When the animals got better from the drug, Morell kept giving them more and more injections of TB while they licked his hand in affection and the disease spread to their tiny internal organs. When their groins became grossly swollen, the licking stopped. I can’t forget the languid eyes of these creatures, their trustful passiveness as their spleens—it was clinically explained to me—became a mass of abscesses. I could only hope that Dr. Morell used a different needle when injecting Adi with vitamins.

Morell comes into the Bunker each day with the dead guinea pig Azo in a sterile sealed case as evidence and support for the Reich’s decision to force Domagk to sign a declaration to the committee in Stockholm declining the Nobel Prize. Domagk was later put in prison temporarily for being too polite to the Swedes and for dwelling on the sanctity of life in wartime.

So many people come in and out of the Bunker frequently and they stare as if in judgment of me. Officers in shiny rimless helmets shake my hand overly familiar as if our being in the Bunker creates an accepting intimacy. But it does help to pass the time. When I least expect it, I find that a day is over and I don’t remember getting to the end of it. Goebbels thinks the mind is really in the heart, and I want to believe this. When I feel an emptiness, I think of love. Love takes into consideration at least two people.

Today three soldiers drenched in syrup provided a diversion. A molasses factory in Dessau got hit and molasses was all over the roads two centimeters deep. I was offered a bucket of the goo and couldn’t help but laugh in spite of the disaster. Was I really supposed to eat trampled molasses?

Before bedtime, I brush my hair for 50 strokes. Mother said a woman has her best thoughts when brushing her hair. Adi gave me this brush with my initials in red stones on the ivory handle… E.B. The bristles hold strands of my dark blond hair. My brush has been on my dresser at the Berghof, on end tables in Italian villas, on the bureau of such hotels as the Adlon, Vierjahreszeiten and Dreesen. Now it’s home.

8

MAGDA IS SOME HELP TO ME as she comes from elegant people and can swank in open Maybach cars smoking French cigarettes rolled in yellow paper. She sits in tasseled damask chairs or goes for a leisurely stroll in custom-made skis. Biedermeier chandeliers and yards of tulle on the windows decorate her houses. Family maids were born in her upstairs bedrooms that look out on a swimming pool covered with lilies. An authority on where to place a gravy bowl on the dining room table, she can also be helpful with clothes, teaching me to wear sequin gowns because they don’t wrinkle when you have to sit for hours listening to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung after dinner at the Berghof. Dresses with sleeves that can be zippered off are best to pack for trips as they can be worn for two days in a row and still look different. I did refuse to wear a girdle she advised for I’m quite firm enough.

Magda and Josef have a villa where they keep a chess set made out of wood with carved Wagner pawns. Magda ordered a set made for one of Adi’s birthday parties, but the artist was killed when his house took a direct hit from a bomb. Josef and Magda offered him their Wagners, but Adi refused. Though Magda was greatly disappointed, Josef merely gave a wry smile saying: “Greedy Alberich, evil Beckmesser, the tart Kundry and all the other Wagner operatic people follow the Führer around like pet dogs.”

Not that Magda doesn’t get on my nerves, sitting around all the time wrapped in a white ermine chasuble and using her fancy background as a way of telling me what to do even though she has crude moments when she catches coins between her legs at parties after Adi departs early and everybody gets drunk. And she had an affair with automobile racer Manfred von Brauchitsch who later was denounced for subversive remarks. I refuse to let her control me, even when she brags of dining with maharajas as well as Prince Friedrich Christian Zu Schaumburg-Lippe or Prince August Wilhelm von Hohenzollern.